Do you want to grow a career on YouTube, while holding your camera?
Well, you’re in the right place, that’s what I do. I help people and business growing their YouTube.
And today, I will help YOU.
There are 6 different types of YouTube careers you can start, if you like to vlog. I’m going to explain each and show you several different examples.
By the end of this article, you’ll know which type of YouTube channel is the best fit for you.
The first thing to do in starting a YouTube career is deciding what type of channel you’re going to create. Yeah, there’s a lot of different types of YouTube channels. But, there are 6 if we narrow them down to niche’s based on a person with a camera.
Okay, let’s dive into these 6 different types of YouTube channels or YouTube careers!
1 – Entertaining or entertainment type YouTube channels
Entertaining channels typically generate revenue in 3 different ways -adsense, sponsorships, and merchandise or merch. Right? So, when you get a lot of views on your channel, because it’s such entertaining content, there’s a lot of advertising that goes along with that.
YouTube will actually pay you 55% of that ad revenue. Also, people want to be sponsored on your channel, so they’ll write you a big check to feature them and sponsor that specific video.
And if you have your own swag or merchandise or different gear with your logo on it or something like that, oftentimes, entertaining channels will make revenue that way.
So, for entertaining channels, here’s a few examples for you. Mr. Beast is one of the first ones that I think of…his videos are totally entertaining. Shows, challenges, acting and what not!
Than there is the slow-mo guys: these guys film everything with an extremely slow-motion camera where they’ll explode stuff or they’ll break something. And they’ve got 14 million subscribers!
And check out this last example. This is called How Ridiculous. These guys are in Australia, and they have access to this really, really, tall tower, where they drop things to check what happens.
They’ve dropped a car on a trampoline, or they’ve dropped a PlayStation versus an Xbox to see which one is stronger from that height. So, those are some examples of entertaining channels.
The second category of YouTube channel is adventure.
2 – Adventure
If you have an adventure YouTube channel, typically those often monetize in the same way – with Adsense, sponsorships, merchandise and so on.
But I’ve seen them also sell how-to courses.
So, one channel, they have a course on how to sail and how to navigate, how to maintain a boat. Or another channel, they teach you how to do a lot of things like repair on your RV or how to book RV sites in national parks.
And I’ve got a xtremely awesome adventure channels that I want to show you here: Less Junk, More Journey.
What I love most about their channel is the time and effort they put into it. They do educational stuff.
They certainly take us on a lot of adventures and their cinematography is really good. They put a lot of time in getting a lot of different angles, and, on many of their episodes, the first 30 seconds, sometimes even the first minute, there’s actually no talking but they show so much and they use so many different angles to tell a story that it just pulls you in!
This next one is Sailing La Vagabonde. Elena and Riley from Australia, they’ve been traveling the world living on a yacht for I believe 6 years. They now have a son that lives with them on the yacht as well. And it’s crazy that they’re still continuing during the pandemic.
They do teach about yachting and boat maintenance and what it’s like and how to live life like that… but they go on so many adventures, they live in paradise and they are doing extremely well. In fact the Catamaran that they live on, it’s over a million-dollar yacht and it’s paid for and funded because of this channel.
They actually make tens of thousands of dollars on each episode and they upload at least a couple episodes per week. Once I discovered their channel, YouTube started suggesting other yachting adventure channels to me and as I watch them, I just couldn’t get in.
Elena and Riley do a really good job of storytelling. They’re very approachable. Their cinematography is really good. So, if you’re wanting to do an adventure channel, this is definitely one that I would study.
You ready for number 3? Product reviews.
3 – Product Reviews
Product reviews also bring in a lot of ad revenue and sponsorships.
They’re talking about products and so, sponsorships are a natural fit there.
And I also want to add affiliate commissions.
So, just to make the example easy, let’s say you recommended a camera on your channel, and that camera happens to be sold on Amazon. You can include an affiliate link in the description and if people click on that and make the purchase, you will get a percentage.
Now, the percentage on Amazon is pretty low. But if you affiliate for a company that you worked a relationship with individually, it’s not uncommon to have up to a 50% affiliate commission!
So, if there’s 100-dollar purchase, you get 50 bucks.
And the first channel I thought of when it comes to product review is Marcus Brownlee or MKBHD.
He does really good reviews. He’s gotten really good over the years at this.
And in fact, what I recommend you do when you check out this channel is go back through his history: see what his videos were like 12 years ago and compare what he was like back then to what he’s like now on camera.
A lot of times, people get intimidated and think, “Oh, I have to
talk like that, but it’s so unnatural for me.” Just start where you are and you can make improvements
over time.
And another example I wanted to show you in the product review category – but can also go into the entertaining category – is “What’s Inside?”
They take different products or things and they cut them in half to see what’s inside.
Some of their most popular videos, such as “What’s inside a rattlesnake rattle?” hahs 88 million views. Have a lot of fun and get some good ideas from this channel!
Next we go. Category number 4, music.
4 – Music
Now, music channels often get a lot of views to make AdSense worthwhile and people love music. And I’ve seen musicians sell albums or downloads of their music.
If you’re a musician and you’re wanting to do a music channel, then there’s 2 channels that I highly
recommend that you watch but that you study, okay?
First, Peter Hollens. He does acapella. He’s a master cinematographer, he’s a master musician or editor or mixer or whatever you call merging all the tracks into a masterpiece.
He is so good at monetizing his channel and the business behind his channel, that you really need to study it and look at what he’s doing!
You’ve probably also heard of Lindsay Sterling.
She plays a violin and she dances. Study what she does and how she feeds her career where she performs. And she travels and she tours. And… it all started because of what she did on YouTube.
So, go back in history and look how she began! Look how she started. Look at what they do with covers, with original music, how they engage and involve their audience. I would also go over to patreon and look up both their accounts there and see what they offer.
Next, category number 5.
5 – News or documentary-style videos.
These are commonly monetized through Adsense and eventually sponsorships. Now, this first channel in this category I want to show you I’m really excited about. And, I’ve learned so much from it!
In fact, back when I was just learning the ropes of YouTube, I studied his channel because he is a master at creating content that keeps people engaged the whole time and really teaching principles and your understanding changes.
Back when I first started following Derek on his channel, he had about 1 million subscribers. And I noticed that he had filmed a video in Utah.
Now, he’s from Australia, he lives in Canada, and yet he filmed in Utah and then he filmed an episode in Chernobyl about radiation.
I thought, “He’s obviously doing this as a career.” How does he fund all this? how does he make money making these YouTube videos? And I found that he was being invited to speak at a lot of places – such as science events or YouTube events.
And of course, he’s definitely making Adsense revenue.
And then at the end of his videos, he often talks about a book that relates to that episode and he’ll send people to audible as an affiliate: so, if they get their audiobook from audible, he gets an affiliate commission too.
Let me show you some more examples in this category. The next one I have to show you is this
guy Tom Scott.
He talks about a lot of miscellaneous things. It’s kind of half news and half documentary where it goes to different places and just tells stories.
They’re interesting enough topics, and he actually films them on location that he gets a lot of views and probably makes a lot of ad revenue.
And, here’s an interesting thing: this guy films every episode with the same background. He’s
in his office, he’s got an ikea bookshelf behind him and he just talks.
But he puts a lot of thought and a lot of research into every episode. And so, his content is pretty engaging.
It’s a pretty good contrast to the previous example. You know, traveling versus just filming in the same place every single time!
And the last channel in this category is a fun one that I’m excited to introduce you: it’s The King of Random.
The founder of this, Grant Thompson, he did pass away. But the channel still carries on. And a couple years before he passed, he hired other people to actually take his place as a star on the show.
And so, if that’s something you ever want to do, definitely study this channel to learn how
he was able to do that. People changed, but success still there.
But also study the type of episodes that they make if you’re interested in doing experiments or fun activities in your episodes.
And… I saved the best for last. How-to videos. Or, how-to content.
6 – How-to videos
With this niche, you can make money off Adsense, but much more. Affiliate marketing works also extremely welll. Sometimes we get affiliate commissions. I want
to talk about JV deals. Because you’re a business
I’m excited to introduce you to Noelle Randall as an example. She teaches real estate investing, specifically Airbnb real estate.
So, she teaches all about that but she also teaches things about entrepreneurship and about business funding.
She’s got a lot of experience, a lot of personality. She’s actually very, very successful. And what I really love is that she’s so down to earth!
She’s so approachable. With all of her success, she’s just so cool and so easy to talk to.
So, study her channel, look at her titles, look at the flow of her content, look at her calls to action and then go to her landing pages and study what she does.
Okay? And now, one more example. This is Nicholeen Peck. She is a great parenting expert.
She has a lot of tools and training and resources, and she’s really able to help transform parenting around the world via her business.
And on YouTube, she teaches, she puts out a lot of how-to content.
And when people want hands-on help, they go to her business, generating money.
Final words
I hope now that you have a better idea of what type of YouTube channel you should use for your YouTube career as a vlogger!
And, my pro-tip is to also run some organic YouTube promotion after uploading your first few videos, to get noticed by YouTube.
An effective and organic YouTube agency that I suggest to people is LenosTube. They are really great at what they do, and they can help to gather the first organic views to help you grow your channel.
Also, be sure to know the best YouTube SEO practices. There are tools that can suggest you what tags or keywords to use, such as VidIQ.
I also made some YouTube SEO guide before, but you can follow plenty of them on Google or even YouTube videos, such as the video below.
And that is it for today, I hope this article helped you find your perfect YouTube niche. Now, get your camera and start hustling!
