How I Plan to Make 6 Figures This Year

In this video, I break down 10 different sources I'm utilizing to keep my revenue diversified.

As an entrepreneur, it’s important to have a diversified stream of income so you aren’t relying too much on one specific source. Especially as someone who makes YouTube videos full-time, you never know if people will stop watching your videos, the algorithm will stop showing your videos, or your entire channel could get deleted out of nowhere.

So maybe these ideas will inspire you to try something similar, or at the very least give you insight into why I may not post every week. And a special thanks to Tradestation for sponsoring this video.

Selling a TV Show

My wife Rachel and I have been writing a TV show for the past 2 and a half years or so, and it’s gone through many iterations and consultations to get it honed where it feels we’ve put together a strong pilot with developed characters. We finally finished the script a few weeks ago and are currently working on developing our pitch to try and sell it. I’ve looked into how much show creators can get paid for selling their pilot script, and it seems to vary greatly and depends on a lot of factors like what network or platform it will live on, if you take on additional responsibilities throughout the show’s lifespan like showrunning or producing, and just how well the deal is negotiated. I believe 30 minute scripts are often bought for around $27,000 – sometimes less on cable networks or digital platforms, but if you have a lot of involvement and the show is a success, you could make millions – so let’s hope for the latter – but uhh, I’ll keep my expectations in check. We also have a second show we’ve started writing as well, so if one show isn’t right for one network, the other one may be a good fit. It just increases our chances of something working out.

Day Trading

So if you’ve been around my channel for awhile, this shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. I made a great return from day trading in 2020 and 2021, but this year, the market is completely different. It’s a lot easier to trade during a raging bull market and a much different story when there’s a lot of fear, news-driven price action, and a lack of trend follow-through. But I do spend about 40 hours a week studying, charting, journaling, and trading, and I hope this year will be a good one in the day trading department. I don’t currently have any profit goals – rather I am just trading what the market gives me and not forcing anything to reach any arbitrary profit goal since I don’t rely on this income to cover my living expenses.

Investment Portfolio

In a similar vein, I will continue adding to my long-term stock portfolio. This is something I’ve covered a few times on this channel already, so I won’t go into much detail, but the basic gist is I have a portfolio on M1 Finance that I contribute to on a monthly basis and just let it do it’s thing. If we do have a prolonged bear market, it’s certainly possible that it won’t actually make me money this year, but since it is for the long-term, I’m not concerned about short-term fluctuations. I also don’t have to worry about buying the dip or whatever, since I am continuing to make recurring deposits because over time, it will be better than having it sit in cash.

Flipping NFTs

Alright, I maybe should preface this with a trigger warning, but I am talking briefly about NFTs, and it’s kind of a polarizing topic, but oh well. Back in September I spent $10,000 on some jpegs and well, my plan was to eventually sell them for profit. I sold three this past weekend for about a 10x profit which was pretty cool, but a few others I won’t be able to sell for profit, but that kind of comes with the territory. Also, the price of these NFTS are in Ethereum, so as the value of Ethereum fluctuates, the value of these NFTs do as well, so that’s also a consideration at play. I will do a full video about these once I’ve sold the most valuable ones and talk about it in more detail, so be on the lookout for that video if that’s something you’re interested in.

Skillshare Course

Back in September of 2020, I mentioned I was thinking about making a music production course on Skillshare.

And well, I never got around to making that course, but I did start writing it and my goal for this year is to film and release it. Rachel and I did do a Skillshare Originals class with them, which was commissioned by Skillshare, which means they also promote it differently than normal classes, but you do get paid by how many minutes of your class are watched by premium members. So our originals class we did back in the fall of 2020 has over 9,000 students and has earned over $15,000 in royalties, which is pretty cool. So I want to release another course – probably not something commissioned by Skillshare, but just something I write and film and upload on my own like any other teacher on the platform would do and see how well that performs. I would hope for it to earn at least $300 per month. So if I get that course out, I will definitely share that process here on this channel and let you know how it goes.

Music Licensing

Speaking of music production, I realized in all of 2021 I did not upload any new music for licensing, which was a shame. I am a contributor to Artlist where members can download my tracks for use in videos or podcasts or whatever, and this usually amounts to about $1500 per month. And obviously, the more music I have available, the more money I will make… and the kicker is I have had about 20 tracks just about ready to be uploaded and never found the time to actually doing it. Once I finish production, I usually send it out to a friend to mix and master, and then I create cover art, fill out a spreadsheet of metadata, and then Artlist will process it and eventually publish it on their site. The slowdowns happen when I start second-guessing if a song is good enough to be released or if I am 100% done with production or if I should go back and punch it up. And sometimes I just don’t know… so I procrastinate and come back months later with fresh ears. I also try and make sure I have vocal and instrumental versions of each track because you never know what a customer will need, and oftentimes you don’t want vocals to get in the way of dialogue in a video.

But I finally finished up a synthwavey pop album that I’m excited about releasing called “Endless Nights” and I believe that should do well on Artlist. I also teamed up with a subscriber named Lil’ Miss Beats for a track on my next lofi chill album that I’m really excited about releasing – I just need to find the time to get it mixed first.

Music Streaming

I don’t want to waste your time talking too much more about music, but in order for it to continue being a nice little piece of revenue, I need to release more music. Since I went a whole year without anything new, my streaming revenue has dropped from three to five hundred dollars a month to somewhere between $150 and $200. So more music, more revenue.

YouTube AdSense

So this is a pretty big one. On our photography channel, Mango Street, this was never really something we thought about because it just didn’t account for much, but on this channel, it’s pretty significant. I’ve done several videos breaking down how much we make per thousand views across three different channels and everything so I don’t want to bore you to death. This year, this channel has generated about $12,000 in Adsense revenue, down from the previous year, but all good. I don’t want to burn out or make videos I don’t really care about – and I’ve got a lot of other stuff going on, but I would love to continue growing this channel because I genuinely do enjoy making these videos.

Brand Deals

Alright, so again – YouTube-related, but this time it’s from brands paying us to do ad reads or sponsored videos or things like that. And most often this is for our photography channel, Mango Street, but I do do some here and have just brought on a new sponsor which I’m excited about, and you’ll be hearing from very soon.

And I know as a viewer of YouTube channels, these ads can be annoying. You’re being sold to all day every day by everyone and everything, so that’s why we try and only do ads from brands and services we genuinely like – we turn down a lot of things that just aren’t a good fit – and we try to have some fun when we do them. And while you probably aren’t interested in hearing about Squarespace’s award-winning whatever right now, they have allowed us to have some peace of mind with reliable income for our business and without companies like that, we just wouldn’t be able to make the videos we do.

I am projecting about $200,000 in revenue this year from brand deals across our three channels.

Photo Presets

Last but not least, we have editing presets for photographers. We’ve released three collections over the last four years and are finishing up our next collection now. Since it’s a digital product that customers download, some photographers may slap some presets together for a quick cash grab, but we really spend a lot of time making them as good as they can possibly be.

If they aren’t something we would happily use on our own photography, we don’t release them.

For this collection, we wanted to emulate the look of different film stocks, so we shot 7 different film stocks with a digital photo of the same subject so we could really craft the look we wanted in Adobe Lightroom. But it turned out it was pretty difficult to get the edits to work well across photos of different subject matter in different lighting conditions, so it’s taken us a year and a half to develop.

Now where some YouTube channels sell tens of thousands of dollars of t-shirts and hoodies, or cooking knives and pans, for us – it’s photo presets. I anticipate $40,000 in sales this year, but of course, we’ll have to wait and see.

Final Thoughts

That just about wraps everything up. Of course, I’m mostly just calculating top-line revenue and not taking into account any expenses or hours of work involved, but as always, the goal here is to be as transparent as possible and keep you up to date with my various ventures. If you would hit the thumbs up button on this video, that’ll really help this channel out and of course, consider subscribing if you haven’t already. I’ll see you in the next one.