 Do you want to know how to monetize your YouTube channel early? Well, stick around, because I'm going to tell you how to do it. Hello, and welcome to Take One Tech. My name's Alec, and this video was inspired by a question that came up in the Content Marketers Cafe Facebook group this morning. I'll leave a link to that group in the description, because it's a great place for content creators, content marketers, to hang out, and there's lots of great people in there that are asking lots of great questions and giving lots of great answers too. So somebody in there asked this morning, how many subscribers do you need to get monetized on YouTube? Well, somebody pointed out quite rightly that the answer is you need 1,000 subscribers and you need 4,000 total watch hours of all of your videos within the previous 12 months. And that is indeed what you need to meet the criteria from Facebook in order to start running ads and get monetization on all of the catalog of videos you've got and any videos you make going forward. However, you don't actually have to wait to get there in order to start monetizing your channel. I, at the moment, have the grand total of 112 subscribers. So still quite far off from that target. And yet, I've still been able to monetize my channel, and that is within 40 days of starting it. And admittedly, I have been putting out just a little bit of content with on average a video a day over those 40 days, but as I said, I have been able to monetize it. And how have I done that? Well, it's through a thing called Buy Me a Coffee. Now, I should just as an aside say this is probably going to be part of a series of videos I do this week called Things I've Learned from Doc Rock. My content creation coach, because he is the one that turned me on to this. And it's because of him that I actually set it up in the first place. So thank you for that, Doc. And I'll leave a link to his channel down below as well as if he needs the support from my small number of subscribers. And I'm sure most of you know him anyway. But anyway, that is an aside. What is Buy Me a Coffee? Well, you may have heard of something just to go off at a slight tangent, something called Patreon. And that is something that's been around for, I don't know how many years, but quite a few years now. And it's a way for people to show support for content creators by subscribing to them on a monthly monetary basis. And as a content creator, you can set up a Patreon account and people can go and have a subscription to your content. And it's either maybe they're just showing support and they get nothing for it in return as such, apart from that warm feeling of knowing they've supported their favorite content creator. Or maybe you have members only deals and things like that and members only content that you share with people as well. And as the content creator with Patreon, you can set multiple different levels of membership. And you're also in control of obviously how much those membership levels are in terms of the financial commitment that people are making. But therein lies part of the issue really with Patreon in terms of it being a financial commitment. It is a system whereby people can sign up to a monthly payment to you basically. So some people maybe aren't in a position to financially donate to somebody like that on a monthly basis. Or maybe it's just a case of they've come across one of your videos, found it really useful, but they're not necessarily ready to start watching all of your other content or anything like that. There's a whole host of reasons why people would not want to sign up to a monthly subscription. Aside from that as well, they do actually have to go through a number of hoops in order to start to subscribe to your content, which is they've got to set up a Patreon account themselves. And so there is various different things that they have to go through in order to do that. And it is basically not an entirely frictionless system. And if you are a content creator and you want to look for ways that people can support you, then you basically need to make it as frictionless as possible so that it is as easy as possible so that they can take that action basically. And that is what Buy Me a Coffee does, because not only is it much slicker and smoother for people to actually go and sign up for those monthly subscriptions, but also it allows people to just go and make a one-off donation or a tip or buy you a coffee. So that is obviously hence the name. You can obviously change what you want to call it. Maybe you could have it Buy Me a Beer, Buy Me a Expensive Mineral Water or whatever it is. Buy Me a Pizza, you name it. You could call it what you want. But basically it allows people to go and make those simple one-off donations or one-off tips. And that is for, you know, if you've watched something, personally, if I've seen something that somebody has done something and I've found it useful, sometimes you feel like you just want to say, hey, great, that was great. Have a coffee on me. And that is exactly the point of Buy Me a Coffee. So I'll show you exactly how it works in terms of what I've got set upon Buy Me a Coffee so that hopefully anybody who's watching this or anybody who's in the Content Marketers Cafe group, who where I will also post this video, also finds this useful and you can set this up for yourself. So if I go over to my Buy Me a Coffee link, which I should probably really put up at this point, it is buymeacoffee.com slash takeonetech, the name of the channel, obviously. Now if I go over to my Buy Me a Coffee page, here we are at the top, buymeacoffee.com slash takeonetech, you can see you can fully brand it. So you can add a header image, things like that. You've got your profile image down there as well. And then you can either follow or support the creator, in this case me, obviously. And then down below we've got a number of different options. So we've got support. So if you just want to buy a coffee, then you can see that the support level is at basically $5 for a coffee. And when people come to your page as a creator, they can just easily click down here and say, yeah, buy you a coffee, three coffees, five coffees, or they could even, if they were feeling like they really wanted to caffeine you up, they could make it 25 coffees. So you can basically put in any value in here and it's just basically multiples of $5. So it makes it really quick and simple for somebody to go in, click on a value, add in their name and click support. And that will then take them through to a very simple payment window where they can pay by either credit card, Apple Pay or PayPal as well. And one of the other benefits, by the way, of buying me a coffee as the content creator is that with Patreon, there's often quite a delay in getting payouts. So the funds that are received by Patreon often aren't accrued until the end of the month and then the payout can take a month after that. So it could be up to 60 days between somebody actually making a payment and it reaching your bank account. Whereas with buying me a coffee, the beauty of that is for the content creator is once the payment is made, it goes straight into whichever account you have designated. So I do my payment processing with Stripe. So it goes into my Stripe account and then in Stripe, you can select whether you wanna get paid out daily, weekly, monthly or whatever the frequency you want. But basically, as the content creator, you are in control. So that is where somebody can just simply go and make a donation. But then also there is other options which is to sort of emulate the Patreon model. People can also sign up to be an ongoing supporter. And this is fully customizable. You can set it as you want. So you can have different levels. So I have a couple of levels here for monthly subscriptions and one is just ongoing support and access to, I have a consultation call that people can take and this gives them the option of having a discount on those consultation calls. Or then there is another level which is slightly more at $10 a month. But for that, they get also get access to all future digital downloads that I make available on my website as well. So I do things like icon packs. I've only got icon packs on there at the moment actually for my stream deck. But I have got a number of things that I'm planning to add into there such as one for social media profile templates for all different image sizes and things like that. So there's a number of different things that I'll be building out my store with which I'll add into there as well. And then also I've got another level which is really only for very specific people where they actually want to have a one-on-one consultation every week going forward to help with their business. And that is basically something where we'd have to have an agreement to make sure I can add significantly more value than the value of the membership. But yeah, this has been live now for since I've had my channel. I've only had my channel for around about just coming up to 40 days I think. But in 40 days I've added up 40 videos. I've added 40 videos rather uploaded. And so yeah, it's been really nice to see that I've had people come there and just show their support. And it's really been really been lovely that people have found what I've done of value and have gone there to do that. And yeah, it's a way that you can monetize your channel early. And I should say that it's called Buy Me a Coffee and it really does go on coffee. I've filmed these videos as I've said in a number of videos before at around about four in the morning. And so yeah, that's where it tends to go. The liter of coffee that I have before making a video. So if you were not aware of it and you're looking for a way to monetize your YouTube channel, then this is a way to allow people to give them the option of supporting you if they feel like it. And obviously if they don't feel like it, that's fine too. So I hope you have found this useful. If you have found this useful, then don't forget to go and like and subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications so that you get notified whenever I make a new video. And if you really found it useful, then there's always my Buy Me a Coffee link as well. And now you know what exactly that is because I've mentioned it a few times. It pops up with my little, my lower third sometimes, but I don't think I've ever explicitly explained exactly what it is. So as I say, I hope you found that useful. He says, searching for his little overlay to switch it off and get it out of the way. I will see you in another video. And speaking of which, I've got a number of good videos coming up right now. See you next time. Have a great day.