HOW TO MAKE $10K+ PER MONTH ON YOUTUBE… WITHOUT MAKING VIDEOS | #THINKMEDIAPODCAST #187
Speaker 2 :
What if you could make ten thousand dollars a month working from home, quitting a job you hate and having freedom? In this episode of the Think Media Podcast, we’re going to be exploring the opportunity of not just creating content on YouTube, but actually being a YouTube channel manager for clients. And our special guest today is actually going to be teaching us about the opportunity of becoming a freelancer and really a service based business. But doing it from the angle of being able to control your own time and earn a lot of money doing it, she’s going to be sharing the mistakes and some tips for getting started. And this is kind of a little known way of basically becoming a fulltime YouTuber, even if you’re not in the videos yourself. And so Brandy Miles is a service based business owner that teaches simple strategies for generating consistent revenue fast. So you can have more freedom and be financially secure for your family and enjoy guilt free Target shopping sprees on the regular. One of the reasons I love Brandy is because she is a family first type person but also a world class entrepreneur helping service based business owners and I think the opportunity for our community. Is thinking outside of the box in terms of this opportunity of being a YouTube channel manager as well as many other things, websites, etcetera, Facebook ads. And so can you speak to us a little bit about where’d you come from, what you’re doing and the opportunity of being a freelancer this year?
Speaker 1 :
Yeah so I’ve never had like a regular job or a nine to five job. And so I went straight from college working in restaurants all the time and then to law school. And even from there I saw this reality that I didn’t want to work 60 hours, 70 hours a week and make 6 figures like that didn’t sound like freedom or flexibility to me. So I got into direct sales that was my first taste of really entrepreneurship. And I spent eight years in there growing a very successful business in focusing and marketing and doing things differently than other direct marketers were doing it but when I was eight months pregnant with my daughter, I was like, this is not the life I want to live. Left that behind. Had no idea what I was going to do when I stumbled upon freelancing. It was something that I could be my own boss, I could be at home with my daughter. She was five months when I started my business. But what I didn’t know is how big this could grow and the possibilities. I felt like a few extra thousand dollars. A month, diapers formula, that kind of stuff. Never in my water streams did I think it would turn into what it did, and I think a lot of people don’t realize. The true potential. And so I started doing marketing tasks for people. So email, marketing building sales funnels, and then I went all in on Facebook and Instagram ads as a marketer for running ads for people. And from there it just my business blew up. I learned a lot about what was working, what didn’t work. I brought a lot of skill for my previous eight years and I’m running my own business to this and change kind of what everyone else was doing when it came to freelancing. And now we’re here four years later. I only work with top dollar one-on-one consulting clients now and then I have two programs where I help freelancers really scaled their business so they can have that freedom and flexibility as well. And since then my husband and I, we live. In Florida we have, we just bought our dream house down here and then I have a daughter and we have another one on the way. So family is definitely like one of my top priorities in building my business around that.
Speaker 2 :
That’s amazing. And I’m curious, as we talk about the opportunity and maybe even the necessity of creating different income streams or seeing where the world is going, you know, there’s so much fear right now talking about a looming recession, in fact. All you’re hearing in the media entrepreneur.com literally called 2023 the Year of Fear. They like labeled the year fear, which I got my opinions about just that kind of message and I’ll find it very helpful. But the truth is you also don’t want to just be Pollyanna and positive you want to learn new skills. What would you say in light of, you know, there’s maybe layoffs or different job disruption or maybe people feel capped? What is the opportunity to diversify your income? Starting a side hustle or potentially actually completely changing your lifestyle in terms of not just being able to work from home but earn money? What are you seeing in the opportunity with freelancing?
Speaker 1 :
Yeah, I think we’re on the same page with the fear messaging. That’s not my game, but I also want people to be prepared. I’m a big proponent of multiple income streams. And people ask me, like, what about, is this going to be like 2008 I’m like, I have no idea. I was like graduating high school in 2008 But what I do know is we saw during COVID a lot of people lose their jobs. And we saw a lot of people who maybe they were working with one type of client and that client could no longer support them because their business was shut down and they were able to pivot. And so one thing I do know going into 2023 is one of the best things you can do is invest in learning a skill. And that’s not like making sourdough like a lot of people are doing. And 2020 it’s like how can you learn a tangible skill? And what’s so amazing is now you don’t have to go get a college degree to do this. You there’s so many resources online, and I know that when you have those skills, you’re going to become much more valuable because what we’ve already seen is as businesses do layoffs. They need people to still work, and it’s much cheaper to hire a freelancer consultant, something that’s not an employee, to replace those people. And another thing we’re saying is like, people just aren’t working, or at least it doesn’t seem like it. Everyone’s hiring and there’s tons of opportunity and no one to fill these roles. So it’s opened up this amazing hole in the marketplace for freelancers and consultants. Just thrive right now. And so I would say the best thing you can do moving forward is learn a skill that’s going to serve you in your own business if you want it, but also serve in other people’s businesses. Because people are still going to be hiring freelancers and consultants no matter what the economy does, because it’s better to have them than employees.
Speaker 2 :
Yeah, that’s so powerful. And a little bit later on in our conversation, we’ll be talking about maybe how to get started, maybe some of the best skills. Some mistakes people make or even how to scale their revenue, but one of the biggest opportunities we talked about recently on your show that I’m seeing is this opportunity to be a YouTube channel manager and. A lot of people that listen to the think media podcasts is their goal is to be full time on YouTube. It could be hard to define that because we have many entrepreneurs and business owners that listen and they just want more leads and sales. And so maybe they’re trying to get some other top type of product or service off the ground using YouTube as marketing. But then many of our community actually want to do YouTube full time, but from ad revenue as a personal brand, as a content creator. And what I often times encourage people because I’ll get skeptics that say, do you think that everybody can be successful on YouTube? I actually say, yeah, I actually do. I don’t believe though that everyone’s going to be successful on YouTube by maybe being the charismatic front person. I think that the opportunity to be successful on YouTube could look in a lot of different ways. Maybe you’re on camera and you’re the charismatic front person. Maybe you create a faceless channel where you are using other people’s content via fair use and Creative Commons and royalty free content to build up income that way. Of course you could work for a creator on their staff, you could do video production and all kinds of different things. But this role of YouTube channel manager of being like a YouTube producer? You know, you and me are in a mastermind together and we’ve known each other for a couple years and I have found that not 80 %, not 90 %, a hundred like % it’s ninety nine point 9 besides, the one person that is a is kind of a peer in our business groups want a YouTube channel manager they’re saying I’m so busy. And I can shoot. I can turn on my phone, or I can record, turn on stream yard and record a video. But man, the thumbnail, the title, the description, keeping the channel updated, maybe editing the content down a little bit or repurposing it or putting it multiple places. That is the blocker for so many business owners that have money that want to pay somebody. And so I’m so passionate about having you come on the podcast because. You help people basically systematize that and productize that. And people in our community have that skill. What skill do they have? They have YouTube, and maybe they haven’t been able to get their own channel off the ground, but they understand titles, they understand thumbnails. And I think the opportunity here as well is maybe you end up being the graphic designer with Canva for the thumbnails and you be all of these different pieces. But even if you don’t know how to be a graphic designer, people just want to hire the producer. You could then basically subcontract that to fiver to someone else you could have. An account like design pickle where they’re maybe doing multiple designs and you use that account, you got to be the DJ the producer. And so this opportunity in 2023 of being a YouTube channel manager, starting a freelance service based business. There are. I’m telling you, there is a blue ocean because there’s not enough of them, they’re not marketing well, and that’s where you come in. And by the way, if you’re in a rush or whatever, I want to make sure you don’t miss out on brandy’s class if you want to learn how to consistently do 10K months. You could go to thinkbrandy.com and we’ll put a link. She has an hour long class that’ll get you a lot more tactical step by step startup information. Being a YouTube channel manager is a massive opportunity. My question for you is where do service providers break down? If that was their skill, but now they’re like. I wanna market it or they’re finding like I got that skill, but where do I get clients? What are some of the biggest mistakes the people you serve make in this area?
Speaker 1 :
Yeah and I just wanna talk really quick that there’s this huge gap and I don’t know why it is that no one is marketing themselves as. This channel manager, but it’s very similar to being a podcast producer and we have so many podcast producers. And so with that you’re pretty much a project manager that’s doing all the moving parts. And like Sean said you can outsource whatever you want. And but one thing we see is if you decide to go down this route is a few mistakes in the beginning, one that you think you have to charge hourly, which is like the worst thing you can do because it’s horrible experience for the. Client because they just want to know how much it’s going to cost them for you to manage their Youtube channel. And if that means that you know it’s different every single month, that’s not great for their bookkeeping. It’s not great for your bookkeeping, but just setting guidelines. So having a package instead of hourly. I think it’s one of the best things you can do and secondly to that is stay off up work and places like fiber and stuff when it comes to you deciding what your packages are because what they’re doing is different than the skills you’re bringing. And so we get, one thing I see is people get in this like right. Like oh, there’s people overseas that charge 5$ like how could I ever do that? But you’re setting yourself up for a client who doesn’t want the time difference. The time zone difference, they want someone who is closer to them, that can get this up. That’s part of their team, even if you’re a freelancer. And so you’re going to price yourself in a way that makes you desirable and because you know how much value you’re bringing. If you save a YouTuber 20 hours a month, which I don’t know how much time, but I would imagine Sean, your team’s like. It takes a lot of time to produce even 4 videos a month. Oh my gosh, if you’re saving them 20 hours, what can that visionary do? What can they go out and accomplish? And so pricing yourself based on the value you bring and not by the hour is going to be really important for your success in the business, but also creating a really great experience for the clients. And then when it comes to marketing, the biggest mistake I see people make is they’re just not doing it. It’s crazy to me that people think that they can post on Instagram and have like a flood of clients. And I call that passive marketing. That’s marketing where you’re throwing something up, crossing your fingers and hoping it works out. Kind of like if you just throw a YouTube video up without any SEO title, thumbnail, anything like that, and hoping you start to get viewers. Instead, what I encourage my service providers to do is what I call active marketing, and that’s for most of you. If you’re working with Youtubers, maybe it’s going into Sean’s group, not spamming it, but looking to answer questions for people. If someone’s like, hey, I’m like dying over here, how can I get all this done? Offering some advice and then making sure your profile is optimized so if they see what you’re doing. They’re like, oh, that’s what you do. Or I’m sure there’s people in there that are asking like, hey, I need help with my channel, how can you help me? Popping in there and showing like this is what I do. This is my specialty. That’s active marketing, not spamming groups, active marketing by providing value instead of just crossing your fingers and hoping or reaching out directly to Youtubers that you think would need your service. That’s going to get you a lot more clients than posting something on Instagram or Tiktok and hoping that a client comes your way, and having a goal of how many people you’re going to connect with each week. In my previous career, I would come home every day from law school and make 50 cold calls. To brides like 50 cold calls, that’s picking over the phone, calling people, being hung up on. And we’re so lucky now we live in a time where we can send emails or a DM or something like that. And how many of those do you need to do to get on a call? And so the third and final mistake I see people make is they just don’t have any systems set up and it creates a really bad experience from the get go. And so if someone says like, yes, this is what I need, how can I book a call to learn more? They’re like, oh, OK, I have this time and this time available. But instead of doing that, you can automate all this through systems like dubsato or honey book. That’s going to take care of your sales call. It’s going to take care of your contracts, your invoices. And too many times people think they don’t need that until they have a lot of clients. But The thing is, you’ll get a lot more clients if you start with that right off the get go because you want to seem like the professional, not the amateur.
Speaker 2 :
Let’s do the math on doing a 10K month and a huge unlock that you shared there was you’re right, podcast producers is a major service. That is provided there are many and it’s a big opportunity in freelancing. But again back to the classic book Blue Ocean strategy, you want to look where there’s opportunity and it’s perfectly aligned with who we’re talking to because many people listening to this are already a part of video ranking Academy which would be our proprietary process in YouTube optimization and all of the above and the YouTube skill set. So if you take the skill of I’m a YouTube channel manager and you start to do active marketing and you’ve got your systems, how many, what could the math be on a ten thousand dollar a month maybe, compared to what, you know, podcast producers are doing?
Speaker 1 :
Yeah so I think the going the average, so there’s going to be people who charge less, there’s going to be people who charge more. But I work with a lot of podcast managers and what I see is an average of about 2000$ for full production, but that’s for four shows that are under 45 minutes. So editing those, that’s going to be like putting the show notes up on the website, creating the graphic and uploading it, so. With podcast management, they’re not like posting on social forum. They may create a graphic to post on social, maybe an audiogram, but it’s really like producing it. Some of them, for an additional fee will schedule guests and things like that. But for most beginners, we’re seeing about 2000$ so if you and I think YouTube channel management would actually probably be more than that based on like just knowing the different levels. And that’s the other thing. You have to decide what you’re going to offer and what you’re not going to offer. So if you’re not offering graphic design because maybe they already have someone, then maybe yours is a little more, but maybe you’re like, I’m fully optimizing this thing, then maybe you’re closer to 3000 But let’s just use this 2000 because it seems to be the number that gets thrown around a lot in the podcasting world. And so we’re looking at 5 clients. And that’s ten thousand dollars a month once you get your systems and depending on how much you’re out, like getting graphics done on five or things like that, then it doesn’t mean you’re working 40 hours a week by any means to hit those ten thousand dollars months.
Speaker 2 :
And then and really getting granular, give me an average of you definitely invest in some tools, maybe there’s some startup costs and putting that aside, but you’ve got the tools, the workstation to do the work you are outsourcing. Let’s just say an average amount. What do you think net profit, take home pay because you now are a small business owner, you’re an independent contractor, a sole proprietor, and so that would be your top line revenue. What do you think bottom line could be on average, just ballpark?
Speaker 1 :
So most of our service providers, so if you’re doing 10K months, it’s actually a hundred and twenty thousand a year. A lot of people think that that’s a hundred thousand for some, reason but it’s not it’s a hundred and twenty thousand. That’s why I like to focus on 10K months because it. Gives you this buffer room, but so most of our service providers run it between 80 and 70 % profit. Like if you’re lower than 70 %, you’re probably outsourcing a lot more or you’re hiring people that maybe are like your prices aren’t in alignment with what you should be outsourcing. So but for most part they run at 70 to 80 % profit. That’s why it’s like. I would say it’s the fastest path to cash online is a freelancer because you don’t have a ton of overhead and that’s pre taxes. So I mean because the tax brackets are going to change for everyone. So if you’re at 120 and then you are making 70 % profit, you’re taking home almost 6 figure income.
Speaker 2 :
Yeah, I if you were at the 80 % profit as you said, you’re making ten thousand dollars you’re spending. Two thousand dollars a month on outsourcing a few things in your software. Whatever other expenses, you’ll end up with ninety six thousand dollars a year, and to your point number one, that’s an incredible income number. Two you. Also you you’re saying once you get this thing optimized, you’re working less than 40 hours a week and you’re working from home. You have more freedom and flexibility, and so just better Peace of Mind, more value of family. But on top of that, you’ve also stepped into this opportunity of being a small business owner, as Robert Kiyosaki taught, taught us all in the rich debt, poor debt book years ago, the cash flow quadrant. When you’re a W2 income, you’re taxed. Not only do the tax is terrible, but you’re also taxed upfront as opposed to at the end of things. People go, oh, I’m getting a great tax return. No you aren’t. The government held your money hostage. They kept it for a year and then they gave it back to you could have had it the whole time. Not only could it have been working for you, but it’s above the line, below the line in the sense of you got ninety six thousand dollars left over, but now you got your write offs and so you’re being smart with your Home Office write offs. You’re being smart with your vehicle or your phone or your Internet connection and all these different things and so. It’s not even apples to apples. 96,000 thousand might be already better than the job you’re working right now and you could be a YouTube channel manager for others have enjoy everything more. But it is it’s almost like exponentially bigger because if you can start adding on your tax strategies and all the above, and then you also have much more financial flexibility and freedom because it can compound. That’s the tip of the iceberg would be 5 clients 2000 a month. You start getting better at team and systems, going deeper into your stuff, it’s pretty exciting. Maybe more clients, maybe build out a small team, but one of the cool things you help people do is do it without a team. Do it like in a, you know, in a really cool way so people can really lean on their values. And that’s one of the things that you if you do want more on this, Brandy does have a free class. So I highly recommend checking that out. That’ll be in the show notes you can go to think Brandy calm, but speak to that of the vision that is kind of like how to scale to consistent ten thousand dollars months without hiring A-Team What are some of the things you breakdown on that class?
Speaker 1 :
Yeah so one of the things that’s when I came into the freelance world, I’d hit 6000$ a month, but I was like exhausted, overwhelmed. It was too much. And so I knew if I wanted to go any further, I was going to have to change something. And the online space pretty much gave me two options. One, you can grow an agency, or two, you can create a course. At that time, I didn’t want any. Like I didn’t want to have a course. I didn’t want anything like that. I just wanted to serve people. And then the other one, the agency as a mom, a wife, I was like, I’m already managing like a house, a husband and a baby. There is no way I want to manage people as well. And so that’s when I was like, how can I do this? And i dropped some clients, learned some new skills, implemented a lot of my business that I learned before, and within my first ten months of business I’d already created over a six figure year. In my very first full year in business, I’d done 250,000 thousand as a solopreneur. Now some people think I’m against teams, I’m not against teams. I think there’s a time and place to hire, but one of the things you can do is that doesn’t mean you can’t get on to five or and have someone do your graphics for you. There’s very different than having someone do that and having a team that you’re responsible for. You have to pay each and every single month, even if you’re not getting paid. And so I created this class to help people, show them that you don’t have to create a course, you don’t have to have an agency model. You can scale a freelance business to consistent 10K plus months. And we do that through like the first thing I said is really getting strategic on your packaging and your pricing. This is one of the biggest misses I see in the freelancing world. Two systems, no one talks about this. It’s like, let’s grab this free software and duct tape it all together when really you can run your entire business for less than 50$ a month and everything works seamlessly together. So I teach people how to create this really beautiful streamless process that excites the client. Helps you become a referral machine and automates a lot of the back end. I love systems. I think we should be using them more. And so I teach our freelances how to do that. And then I always say I have a servant’s heart, a marketer’s brain. So then of course the third thing we’re going to talk about is like, how do you market your services? How do you stand out in the crowd? And the great thing for channel managers, there’s not much of A crowd for y’all, but. It’s still like how do we market our business consistently to land clients and then once we get them on a call, how do we close them on that call. And then the fourth thing we’re going to chat about is when is the right time to elevate your brand or your business. So maybe in that four step, that’s when you decide like I want to have my own YouTube channel to bring people into my world. That would be one of the time to do that or maybe you want to have a website or something like that. But we focus on all of that after you’ve already been making money. You have systems set up and people are already hiring you. Then we focus on all this stuff that people usually worry about in the beginning, before they ever even get started.
Speaker 2 :
Brandy, you put in the time and you’ve made the mistakes, and you’ve gone through the pain so that you can help other people go further, faster. And I know this is all pretty probably pretty overwhelming, so I highly recommend if you’re at all seeing the opportunity here, check out Brandy’s class. Think brandy.com or the links in the show notes. At the end of it too, she’ll tell you more about her products and her programs, which I highly recommend. It’s actually a deep conviction of mind that video ranking Academy learning the skill of YouTube meets freelancing, and learning brandy’s skills that she teaches through her company is a massive opportunity to build 10K months and beyond. And to really begin to serve people at a higher level, so think Brandy, by the way, Brandy is with an I, that’s BR andi.com Think brandy.com That’ll get you there. And one of the things that’s fascinating is not just that you could go through Brandy stuff and do a million things. There’s so much opportunity. You could do websites, podcasts, Facebook ads, but what’s wild about. This channel manager opportunity is there’s new numbers that came out from Adobe that said 165 million people joined the creator economy since 2020 Previous to that, signal fire revealed that there was already 50 million content creators, so that means there’s over 200000000 content creators that are active. And some are just beginning, some are in the middle of their journey, many are professionals. There’s 22,000 thousand channels that have a million subscribers and so there’s big money coming into those channels. The middle class, if you will, of content creators that are on camera, building personal brands that are at this high five six, multiple 6 figure type of income and needing help. This is a massive market. And a lot of people are overwhelmed. You know, you’re listening to this, you might feel overwhelmed because you’re like, I’m trying to run my channel and whatnot. I just think this is an interest, not only an interesting opportunity. The opportunity is off the charts. It’s a supply and demand thing, no demand of. Or no supply of YouTube channel managers and massive demand for help. Especially if you can help people not just save time and get their time back. But if you also can help them scale by your ability to write good titles and make good thumbnails, and maybe provide them some feedback and you know, there’s so much. It’s just really exciting. So Brandy, fine. As we land the plane today, what are some ways to scale this if we just keep on the same case study? You had mentioned keeping it simple, 5 clients, 2000$ but you alluded to maybe you have a couple extra services, maybe you have a couple extra this or that. What are some of those power ups that you’ve seen specifically that maybe you do serve 5 clients of 2000 So maybe there’s like a whale client that wants you to do some heavier lifting. What are some of the opportunities of how that can scale the numbers with, if you will, upsells or different packages that you teach your community?
Speaker 1 :
Yeah and so I think going in and getting retainer clients is always the best way to get started because it creates that consistent revenue. And then you start to get known in the industry when you’re only providing one service, like a YouTube channel manager. And that’s when, like you said, the big fish start looking at you and saying like, wait, who are you using, who are, and they start talking and then you start landing more clients. And what I always teach is referral clients should be more than what you like your first client. If they’re 2000 and a referral comes in and you’re getting all and you’re almost full, they should be twenty hundred to be. A three thousand dollar, because you should always be raising your prices as your skill level raises, you’re bringing more value. Like Sean said, maybe you give some strategy behind it and then strategy people pay more for than management, but then you get really good at this. And one of the things I love for our service providers to offer is intensives. I always say add intensives for added revenue and what that means is you’re sitting down with someone maybe for. You know, two hours, three hours and mapping out what their channel strategy should be. Maybe you do YouTube channel audits forum where you get in the back end and you’re like, here’s all the things that I see that can be fixed. And so that’s more of a strategy standpoint than an implementation. And so maybe you book three of those a month. And you know, you’re charging fifteen hundred dollars for those and then they have someone on their team go and implement that. That’s a really great way to work with people. And then also people need to. A lot of people have been burned by freelancer service providers or employees, and so they’re not as trusting. So maybe they’re not ready to hand you over 2000 three, thousand dollars for a monthly retainer. But they’ll do this one intensive with you and they fall in love with you. Find out how much work it is. They’re going to already have that no like and trust and they’re going to be more apt to hire you. The other way that you can do this is also by one we talked about adding your raising your prices as you go, the added intensives and then bringing on. Just people to take off some things. Because after you get to 10K months, if you want to continue to add clients, you may not be able to have more than five retainer clients, but you could bring in other people. So maybe you have people that are just as subcontractors to do the thumbnails or maybe bring in an editor. That’s what our podcast managers usually do. That’s the first person they bring on is someone just to edit for them. So then that takes off a massive one. But the thing with that is you have to make sure your prices. Our price well enough in order for you to still take home what you want because now you have these other people. So there’s several ways that you can do this. And then of course, affiliate marketing is huge. As someone who is coming in and saying like, hey, I think we should use 2 Buddy, 2 buddy or bit IQ you should have affiliate links for these. To be like giving them and they should be going through yours or maybe they want to go live and you stream yard, you should be able to be throwing those to them and making affiliate on the back end. And then the last way you could do it is I’m sure when people, it’s the same thing with podcast management, people are on a launch their YouTube channel and I don’t know if most people only start with one, but I know with podcast management you start with four episodes when you launch a podcast. So you could only work with those clients for four weeks, six weeks to launch their YouTube channel, and then they find out how much work it is and then they’re like, OK, I need you on going, but you have different packages based on how long they want to work with you, what they think they need. And there’s so many cool ways that you can structure this.
Speaker 2 :
Man, that’s beautiful. A lot of wisdom there. You truly are the service provider Sherpa, the Freelancer phenom. The client services queen and I’m super grateful for all of that and obviously it opens up a million questions and logistics of setting it all up and that’s your expertise and that’s why people should definitely follow you and check out that class will link all that up in the show notes. But for people who do want to connect with you, where can they connect with you on social media Brandy?
Speaker 1 :
Yeah, I’m at Brandy miles everywhere. I’m not like super active on Instagram like posting, but I am super active in my DMS and you’re always getting me in there. So I love. To make connections and meet you. So if you have any questions pop in there on Instagram, let me know and I’ll be sure to respond. And then of course we have the surf scale sort podcast. Always forget about my podcast. I’m like, wait, I have one of those. That’s the best way to learn more about freelancing for free yeah so check out all of the above and Brandy, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2 :
Thanks so much.
