We Doubled our YouTube Revenue with ONE Tiny Tweak

Hello. So often in business, I’m continually surprised that the thing that leads to the most massive impact in outputs or outcomes is often a very slight tweak to the inputs. It’s very rarely the, the result of like a ten x of effort. And I think this is really interesting because it kind of flies contrary to what you see a lot of the times in social media landscape. People are talking about taking massive action. And I do believe that’s an important element of anything, is like increasing the reps and the volume of the thing that you do, but often success, if you’ve been putting in a sufficient amount of reps. The thing that often leads to this exponential growth curve isn’t the result of doing something new. And fandangle been crazy and innovative, and then it’s the result of a very slight small tweak.

And I saw this play out recently on the YouTube channel. I just wanted to share this with you because it’s a perfect example of what typically happens in a business for me, and growth and scaling is the result of systematically stacking small wins and small tweaks over time. And they pile up and they become like this really incredible thing. So in this instance, I read this tweet from this woman. I can’t remember her name. I think it’s April. Apriline. I don’t know how to pronounce that, but she has a YouTube channel where she talks about monetizing her YouTube channel and growing and all these things.

It’s a YouTube growth channel. And she shared this tweet that had been suggested to her by one of her friends, which was in the monetization window of YouTube changing how ads are placed within the video. Now, I had a weird feeling towards ads in the beginning when I started my YouTube channel, because I was like, oh man, I don’t know. I don’t want to run ads on my channel and have it disrupt people’s viewing experiences. And so I didn’t run ads for the first four or five months of the YouTube channel as it was really blowing up and we were getting millions of views. And that was a mistake. It was a mistake. As somebody pointed out to me, they go, you know, YouTube still runs ads on your right, like for people who don’t have YouTube premium or YouTube plus or whatever.
The thing is, YouTube is still running the ads. You’re just not making anything from them. I was like, really? Yeah. Okay, I’m stupid. So then I turned on my advertisation and sure enough, it had no effect whatsoever on view times or anything. Like the growth of the channel. I was like, oh, that’s pretty cool. And so over the last year, we make, typically for context, maybe $2500 to $3,000 just on Google AdSense.
And so this is the revenue that YouTube shares with creators based off of how long people watch the ads or how many ads are served up on your videos over the course of a period of time. And so for my channel, I think we get maybe depending on the month, maybe between 200,000 and a million views a month. So $2000 to $3,000 of revenue, that’s great. It’s not life changing sums of money. That’s not doing much for me in my lifestyle quality or anything like that. But it’s a nice thing to have because each video we spend probably about 25, $2,600 on. And so that Google Adsense, for no extra work, just turning on a button, is paying for one of those videos every month. And we try to do two to three videos a, you know, that’s not nothing.
Well, April. April. God, I don’t know how to say that name. I’m so sorry. We’ll call her April. She shared this tweet sharing about how you can change the monetization strategy on YouTube with instead of letting YouTube automatically place the ads, you just go in and manually place them yourself. And that one tweak led to, and I shit you not a doubling, a doubling in revenue for the channel over the last month, which is ridiculous. I was like, wait, that’s all it took? I spent 15 minutes.
And that 15 minutes has translated from usually doing 3000 in a month on a good month to doing around 6000 this month. 15 minutes, that’s it. Just a slight tweak. And so this is why you need to constantly be learning and grow, trying to figure out your craft and whatever you’re doing in business, because some of those small tweaks can have very, very big impacts. But the crazy thing was, it wasn’t like, oh, to double your revenue, you don’t need to go and do twice as many videos. You need to optimize the process that you’re currently employing. And so I just found that really interesting because I’ve seen this play out at escape. When we were going direct to consumer, we were doing a lot of sales on Amazon.
We made very small tweaks to the product, images that most people would never even be conscious of. And those small tweaks paid massive dividends. It wasn’t about launching a new product like when we grew from 300,000 in top line revenue in 2017 to 3 million by 2020. It wasn’t necessarily because we were launching new and crazy products and doing new crazy marketing schemes. It was because we were going and optimizing the products that we’re currently selling in small little iterative tweaks that started to compound into very big, meaningful shifts. And so I saw this play out again on the YouTube channel and I was like, that’s pretty interesting. I want to share that with you because you might have something right in front of you right now. I’m not saying this is like you should be go looking for the easy hacks or anything like that, but those do exist.

And you might just be missing some fundamental aspect of what you’re currently doing. You might just be doing it wrong. And so be open to the possibility of learning new information, learning a new process, and then refining that. And you might be surprised at what you unlock, at least. I was so wanted to share this with you guys so that you could get some value and grow your business even bigger and make it even better, more badass and awesome. And just like you, you’re an awesome person. So thanks for being here. We’ll catch you in the next episode.

As always, stay hyper focused, my friends.