Can you get MORE money from your channel with YouTube MEMBERSHIPS?

Thought of unlocking a new YouTube revenue stream with your channel?

Here's how to set up YouTube memberships and start earning money from your channel with me. This step-by-step guide walks you through the entire process - in real time on my actual channel - from exploring membership perks to launching your offer and engaging with your inner circle of paying subscribers. I'll show how to create exclusive content, build a community, and maybe just maybe take our YouTube earnings to the next level.

Can you get MORE money from your channel with YouTube MEMBERSHIPS?



TRANSCRIPT: (CLICK PLAY ON THE VIDEO ABOVE)

THIS IS THE TRANSCRIPT - CLICK PLAY ON THE VIDEO ABOVE!

If you're thinking of earning money here on YouTube, or are already earning money on YouTube, you've probably seen this: it's the join button. It's usually next to the subscribe button, and you might know this already, but that is something called YouTube memberships. It's a way for us YouTube creators to be supported by viewers who pay a subscription fee every month. We can charge however much we like per month, and viewers can stop and leave the membership at any time. How cool is that?

We're about to find out because there are things that we can offer in return for that membership fee, like early access to videos — that's releasing videos before they're seen by non-members. Members-only videos, where the videos can only be seen by the fee-paying, subscribing members. There's also stupid stuff like emojis and badges that members can use on their comments. It's like an inner circle of subscribers who pay us every month, and it's one of the many overwhelming ways we can earn money here on YouTube.

Now, I'm going to sign my channel up to YouTube memberships right now so you can follow along with me, and we will see how easy or difficult this process is. You're obviously watching this in the future, so I don't know if you can do this on the Studio app, the YouTube Studio app. I've got it on screen now. There's a tab at the bottom marked "Earn." I'm going to click on "Earn," and you can see the different... if you're a YouTube Partner already, you can see all the different options for earning money on YouTube. I'm going to click on "Memberships," and here it says, "Grow your community and earn monthly." Here are the benefits on screen now, and then at the bottom there's a button marked, "Explore next steps." Click on that. So, it looks like you can do this on mobile. I'm going to do this on desktop because I find it a lot easier to show you what's going on, and also it's a lot easier for me to click on the right thing.

On the YouTube Studio dashboard on desktop, on the left-hand side, you can see these menu items or tabs. If you can't see these, there's a little hamburger icon that opens and closes them at the top. And if you scroll down near the bottom of the list, is this tab here marked "Earn." So, we're going to click on that, and this is the overwhelming list of all the ways we can earn money on YouTube at time of recording. Let me put my glasses on. Let's click on "Memberships." "Grow your community and earn monthly." "Earn 70% of net revenue when you offer perks." "Explore next steps." And here is a window to set up the memberships offer. "Choose a template to work with." You can use a template or you can create your memberships from scratch.

Now, because I'm in the UK, it's offering my tiers in British pounds, but I think viewers from around the world will be offered these tiers in local currencies. There's a template for four levels that goes up to £44.99, that's about $55-$60. And then I can start from scratch. I might do that. Should we start from scratch? So, I'll just go for one simple level to start with. I think I can add levels later on if I want to, but you can't change the levels that you create. You have to create new levels. So, we're going to customize our offer. If I click on "Edit level name," "Cup of Coffee Tier." Now, this is probably the hardest part of this: is choosing how much to charge your members. I know you're going to be feeling the same things that I'm feeling, which is you don't want to charge too much, you don't want to be too ostentatious. This is just an experiment, and I would recommend to you that you treat this as an experiment and just make something up. You're not going to destroy your YouTube channel doing this.

So, I can choose the monthly price, and you can set it in whatever currency you like, and it's going to be converted and adjusted for each viewer. So, let's do it for U.S. because I think I've quite a number of viewers in the U.S. Hello, you're most welcome. Select a price. Yeah, $2.99 is popular. I like the sound of $2.99, not that you can get a cup of coffee these days for $2.99. And then we've got perks. So, you can add loyalty badges. You can also upload your own. I'm going to do that later. I'm assuming that I can do this later. So, you come with the default loyalty badges for however long you are a subscriber. And then there are emoji. And I think for these you do have to upload them, and it gives you the specifications for the icons that you can use. And down here we've got the button, "Add perk." So, these are the other perks that you can add. There's a pull-down menu for all the different things that you can offer. I'm going to go for early access to new videos, and I'll click on "Add perk." Bring the pull-down menu again. I will issue some members-only videos, but you can see these other perks that YouTube is suggesting. We've got members-only shorts, members-only live chats, and live streams. Got member shout-outs. I could do that. So, this will be a monthly shout-out to all my members with a mention of the YouTube channel name.

Now, I would offer all of this, but I find it so hard just to reply to the comments anyway and to make videos anyway. So, this is a bit of a stretch for me, and potentially it could only be for a few dollars a month. It's here to build, but it is quite a commitment. I feel joining my channel as a member really helps me to keep this channel going, so thank you. And on the instructions, I put, "It's much appreciated." We'll see if they allow that. But I want to let someone joining my channel as a member know that they can help me to keep this channel going by paying me a few dollars every month. So, I want to let them know that that is a perk. So, that's the "Cup of Coffee Tier." So, that looks pretty good, I think. I hope the emoji works, 'cause I really like the little cup of coffee there. And then I'm going to hit "Next."

So, this is my draft for review. Oh, it's going to be reviewed. So, I understand that once my offer is reviewed and approved, I'm unable to change prices. And this is really important: this tier will exist forevermore unless... and you can delete tiers and create new ones, but when you delete a tier, you lose all of the members who are on that tier. So, I'll now hit "Submit for review." I guess because of the custom tier and because of the instructions you write in, it has to be checked for community guidelines. So, I'm going to submit or hope coffee is okay, not seen as a bad substance.

So, that's it. "Your perks were successfully sent for review." I have a video ready to go for my members only. So, this is how I assign it to only appear to the paying members. You can do it in two places, but actually in the video details on YouTube Studio, you can see a pull-down menu on the right-hand side here: Visibility. If I click on that, you can see I have four options. It can either be private, so nobody gets to see it but me. It could be unlisted, which means that you can watch the video if you have the link, so it's not publicly searchable. And I could just make it go public to all my subscribers and anyone that finds it on YouTube. But there's this option here: members only. Yes, we've got members only. So, I'm going to hit "Done," and you can see it's got little rosettes there, which is lovely. This could be really nice, actually. It's quite a moment when you release a video, and I like the idea of just releasing videos to members only, and in that time, I could probably tweak the description and the subtitles and the, you know, all the other things like the cards and the end screen. I like the idea that I could kind of soft-release my videos to the members first and then make them go public.

And I have received this email from YouTube: "Your perks are in review. YouTube reviews all perks for compliance with Channel Memberships Policy, Terms of Service, and Community Guidelines. It usually takes up to 24 hours." It's now not even 1 hour later, 57 minutes later, I've received this email from YouTube: "Congratulations, you're one step closer to launching memberships. Head to your YouTube Studio to finish setting up your channel memberships today." So, this is a really important step. I didn't realize. I thought I'd done everything I need to do to enable memberships. So, I'm going to now go back to YouTube Studio, and there's nothing here. If I hit refresh, I wonder if there's any kind of banner or anything. No. So, what I'll do is I'll go over to the other tabs on the left-hand side of the screen, scroll down to this tab here, "Earn," which has the dollar icon. Dollar. There's "Finished setup" here, but if I click on the "Memberships" tab along the top here, "You're ready to launch." I was hoping there'd be like some kind of banner or something on the Studio, but you have to really root around the menus to get there or click on the link in the email. Let's click on the launch button. Come on, YouTube. "Congratulations, yes, you've launched memberships. A join button will appear on your videos and channel page so that viewers can access your memberships offer." So, I'll click on "Got it," and that opens up this new dashboard for me on YouTube Studio that shows the income from my zero members, and it looks like my income is $0 right now. But it gives you the revenue per 30 days — interesting, it's last 30 days rather than 28 days like all the other analytics — total members, members gained, and cancellations. Oh, it's something else to stress about on the YouTube channel as well as making more videos, but I'm grateful. This is good.

I've now changed channel to view one of my videos on this channel, and it doesn't look as if the join button has appeared yet. Maybe I'm just being too quick. Maybe it takes a while to happen. I'm going to have to... Oh, there it is! It's... it's appeared! Took a few minutes, but the join button has appeared, and there's a... there's a big, ugly, big old ugly arrow here saying, "Join this channel and unlock members-only perks" Oh, do I like that? I'm not sure. Let's open another video, see how it looks. Yeah, there you go, "Join." And then when you click the join button, it brings up this membership box: "Join this channel. Get access to membership perks" and there's my "Cup of Coffee Tier," "Loyalty badges," "Early access," and then my little thank you on the bottom, you know, just giving me money is just that's that's a perk. It really keeps this channel going. And if you hit the join button, it then invites you to set up payment details on your Google account. So, I am really, really pleased with this. It's been something I've been putting off for ages.

So, what do you think? Is this something that you might do for your YouTube channel or something you're looking forward to if you are aiming to become monetized here on YouTube? Let me know down in the comments below. It'd be really lovely to hear your experiences of the YouTube memberships as a viewer and as a channel creator. And thank you for hitting the join button. I can get to say that now. It really does mean a lot to me. You don't have to, because you can also help me by clicking the thumbs up or the subscribe button. That really helps me to keep this channel going. And right here is what YouTube knows you want to be watching next.

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