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Making Money with YouTube Shorts

March 5, 2023
Personal Finance

I’ve been all over the place lately with finding ways of making extra money on the side, due to my brain loving to start a new project – only to drop it the next few days because another idea came to mind. But my mind is now settled on YouTube shorts for a couple of reasons.

Before we start with the reasoning, here is the index for the post.

Why YouTube Shorts
The idea
Starting the YouTube Channel
Making the YouTube Shorts video
Information after the first few days
What’s next

Why YouTube Shorts

My mind is now settled on YouTube shorts for a couple of reasons.

I’ve already started a YouTube channel where I’ve done some streaming and I want to continue doing that. Learning to make shorts will help me grow my channel.
You don’t have to show your face or use your voice
Shorts are quick to make, are incredibly popular on YouTube and can give a nice side income without having to work on it day in, day out.

The idea

Before I started thinking about what kind of shorts I wanted to make, I went to research what makes shorts get picked up by the algorithm and become popular. The most important rules to keep in mind are..

The content must be engaging. Having your viewers like and comment, gets your content to be pushed to a bigger audience.
Try get a watch time of over 100%. A watch time of over 100% means that viewers watch the short multiple times in a loop. When people keep looking at a short, the YouTube algorithm thinks it is an interesting video, also possibly pushing it out to a bigger audience.

I’ve had multiple ideas before I settled on the final idea.

This idea is to start a new channel that is solely based around short videos that has the viewer listen to a short sample of a song and ask them to put the song name in the comments. Why this idea?

The content is engaging as the viewers listen to a soundbite of a song and are asked to put their guess in the comments.
The short is only ~7 seconds long, so getting a watch time of over 100% can be achieved quite easy – especially as people go to the comments to type in their guess while the short keeps playing (going easy over 100% watch time).
These are incredibly easy to make.
It will never run out of content as there are billions of songs and many, many songs are released daily.

Why not use my main channel? The idea is a niche that has nothing to do with the content on my main channel, so I want it to be separate. Besides, this will be a channel to try and learn before applying that knowledge.

Starting the Shorts Channel.

So I started the channel GuessTheSong on YouTube.

I made the logo and banner on Canva with a pro account and uploaded them to YouTube. I also added some information in the about section of the channel, which is important for YouTube to find out what your channel is about. Using the right keywords here is key.

Making the YouTube Shorts Videos

The video consists of two parts: video and audio. Both need to be pretty much perfect to get and keep the attention of the viewer.

The video

I decided to make the visuals with Canva as they have countless templates and great elements that I can add in the video. After some playing around I got a video that I was very fond of. I then made several versions with different colors to have some variety.

The audio

To make the soundbites I listened to the songs I wanted to use and recorded a part that didn’t have the title in the lyrics.

Putting video and audio together

To put both elements together I used CapCut as it was the easiest.

Information after the first few days

I uploaded the first 2 shorts in the evening. When I woke up the next day I was surprised to see that the first uploaded video had 1.600 views. Apparently the video got pushed quite hard around 3 o’clock during the night. The 2nd video only had around ~20 views, which was also surprising.

What’s next

I’m going to be posting 2 shorts a day at 12 in the afternoon and 8 in the evening. Also I’ll start

The results will show themselves.

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