TechLead Makes $$$ On YouTube, CAN YOU

Today I thought I would do pretty much an obvious video topic which is to talk about becoming a YouTuber, using TechLead as an example.

Should you become a YouTuber as a programmer as a software developer? Will it be beneficial to you can you make a lot of money?

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Transcript Of The Video

John Sonmez:

So today I thought I would do pretty much an obvious video topic that I haven’t done before, which is to talk about becoming a YouTuber. Should you become a YouTuber as a programmer, as a software developer? Will it be beneficial to you? Can you make a lot of money? If you guys are just joining me for the first time, I’m John from simpleprogrammer.com. On this channel, I teach you how to develop the soft skills that you need to improve your life in general, to get a better career, make more money as a software developer. I’ve written a couple of books on software development. I’ll just give you one of them here, my newest or re released book, the second edition of Soft Skills. Go check that out if you haven’t already. There’ll be a link in the cards in the description below.

And, I was a software developer for a good 15 years. Made a lot of money, built a pretty big reputation, following, and built businesses around it. And became a pretty big YouTuber. Which, I converted my channel over to, Bulldog Mindset is my other channel. That logo up in the background here. And I created a new Simple Programmer channel. Not necessarily the smartest way to do it, but that’s what I did. So, that’s where we are. We’re here now. So let’s talk about YouTube.

Before though, make sure you click the subscribe button and join all the developers that are learning to level up their lives and not just make more tap code, I guess. Money. Money’s good. Money’s good. Code is the gateway to money, I suppose. So, that’s what we’re going to talk about. So yeah, so YouTubing. Does it make sense? Does it make a lot of money? So let me tell you before I show you TechLeads, because TechLeads is a little extreme. But let me talk about how much money I was making when I had the Simple Programmer YouTube channel, before I converted the name over to about, I don’t know, a hundred, 100,000, 150,000 subscribers.

At that point I was doing about two to $3,000 a month in AdSense ad revenue. That’s not a lot. It’s not a huge amount. It’s not life-changing money. I mean, heck, some of you are thinking if I can make two to $3,000 a month, that’d be awesome, that’d be pretty cool. I could use that money to pay my mortgage. And sure, that’s true, that’s true. So I don’t think that’s too difficult to obtain as a YouTuber, but I would say that’s going to take you a couple of years to do that if you wanted to do that.

So it’s not something that’s super easy. You have to put out videos consistently. At one point I was doing two videos a day. That was a little bit extreme. But hey, I was willing to do what it took. Now, with that said, did I make $2000 or $3,000 a month off my YouTube channel? No. Actually, I paid a video editor who was about two to $3,000 a month. So I was making zero. But I wasn’t making money just off the YouTube channel.

See, this is the benefit of having a YouTube channel. I would say, for software developers, and really anyone could do that, is that I was having people that would watch my YouTube videos and then they would go and they would buy my books. And I’ve got my Complete Software Developer Career Guide and Soft Skills book, go check them out on Amazon if you haven’t already. And then I would have people that would go to my website on simpleprogrammer.com and they would sign up their email address to get one of my free courses. I have a really cool course on how to create a blog to boost your career. It’ll be a card up here or a link to the description, or you can just go to simpleprogrammer.com and sign up for it. And then I would sell my courses.

So I’ve got a course on how to market yourself as a software developer, that’s $300. I’ve got a course on 10 steps to learn anything quickly. That’s $99 now. I’m not really as focused on selling those courses anymore because I have my other business, but I would make a pretty good amount of money. In fact, at one point with the YouTube channel and the website, I was doing about 20 to $30,000 in course sales per month. And overall Simple Programmers revenue was about 50 K a month, and most of that is profit. So definitely, there’s some perks to creating a YouTube channel, because what you have to do though is you have to create a business out of it.

So let’s take a quick look at TechLead YouTube channel, as I promised. How much money that he’s making from ads. And then we’ll jump back over to this. So if we take a look here, you can see from his video here that he is doing about $158,000 a year off of 32.1 million views. So, that’s pretty decent. That’s about what? 12 K a month or so, somewhere around there. Over 10 K a month, you could say. Maybe 11 K, whatever it is. But yeah, so that’s not bad.

But again, if you look at him, he’s got almost a million subscribers. And so that’s not your usual. That’s not typically what you’re going to get. And his channel is definitely more like my channel in the soft skills area than rather just a technical channel. But, if you create a channel and you focus on a specific niche, you can really do well. I’ve seen some channels blow up. I’ve got one of my coaching clients, Gregory from DAP University. If we go over to his channel. And when he started with me he had nothing. No subscribers. He didn’t even have a channel.

So he started doing coaching with me and we came up with the idea of teaching blockchain development. And look, he’s got 84,000 subscribers here, and he’s getting some pretty decent views on his videos. But he’s making about as much as I was making with Simple Programmer. I don’t want to give out his exact numbers here, but let’s say that it’s well over $20,000 a month. Mostly with his YouTube channel. Everything’s coming from YouTube. So it is definitely something that’s viable if you’re willing to put in the work.

I’ve got other coaching clients that I’ve worked with to create YouTube channels, and they’re doing really well as well, but it’s just taken some time. So the key though is to have something specific. So, Gregory is a great example because he’s teaching blockchain for developers, and specifically focusing on Ethereum and teaching them how to write apps. And that’s what he builds. He sells a course on that, which you can buy, an excellent course. I’d highly recommend it. That will teach you how to become a blockchain developer. So that’s the strategy.

So if you’re going to do this, and I think there’s plenty of opportunities. There’s so many niches that you could pick out and totally worth doing, but if you’re going to do it, what you need to do is you need to focus step one on just building a lot of content and building an audience. Once you have an audience, then you want to create an email list. So you want to have some kind of offer giveaway that you’re going to offer to them. And then the third thing that you’re going to do is create a product and then you can sell that product. And that’s the key thing. Don’t try and make money from YouTube Ads. It’s just not a good idea.

I mean, some people obviously make a lot of money, TechLead does, but even if we went to TechLead, and so let’s look at TechLead. I happen to know TechLead personally, and I know a little bit about what he does besides the YouTube videos. But if we just look at one of his YouTube videos, like this YouTube video. And if we look at the description here, learn how I build a million dollar plus business on YouTube. So he has this YouTube Backstage. It’s a product that he’s selling. I’m actually, I bought it. I’m enrolled in it. It was good. I would recommend it. It’s really good. Let me see how much he’s charging for it.

Now, he probably upped the price. 297, that’s not bad at all. I would take that for 297. Definitely a good… He’s got a coupon code in here, I guess. So even full price, it’s totally worth it. I don’t know if you’d go there and you see full price. I would. I’d recommend it. He’s got, what else does he have here? And we look at Tech Interview Pro deal. He’s got this, this Tech Interview Pro course. We can look here, join now, 497. So we look at coderpro.com. See, this guy knows what he’s doing. Look at this. Let’s see, $67. And I don’t know if it’s a monthly. It doesn’t look like it’s a monthly, recurring. He probably has some kind of membership. And if we look at Weeble, he’s got an affiliate link here. And he’s got his shop and stuff.

And so, anyway, my point is this. You make money not by creating YouTube videos and getting ads, since that’s not how you become what you do. If you’re planning on doing that, that’s not a good plan. There are some people that make a lot of money doing that, but you can take your existing programming skills and there’s plenty of room, there’s plenty of opportunity to do that. And you can build a YouTube channel. You could build an audience. And you can go ahead and start making money. Sell courses, do things like that. So it’s totally viable. Totally possible.

I did it myself. I did it with Simple Programmer initially. I created a new business called Bulldog Mindset. That’s not in programming space, but I did it with that. And I’ve helped a lot of people. A lot of my coaching clients to be able to do that. I’m helping people do it all the time. And it takes some time, but it’s totally worth doing. If you guys didn’t subscribe already, click the subscribe button and let me know what type of videos that you’d like me to do on this channel.