7 MAR 2024 · This episode is showing my journey at the beginning of my journey to monetize my four YouTube channels. What I thought might be interesting, is to do it in four different ways. With any luck, one of these strategies might be a similar category of content to what you are building. One is done iwth existing pet videos on tiktok. One is done with content I am creating - Safety Moments One is adding an RSS feed to YouTube's Podcast feature and the last one, is the video version of this podcast, sharing my journey to monetize digital assets. How long will it take to get the traffic and subscribers to qualify for the YouTube Partner Program? How often am I publishing to each channel? What else am I doing (or not doing) to promote this content? My ultimate goal is to create passive income with digital assets, and I know this is going to be a slow journey, and one of consistency, and NOT quitting. I also intend on following the data. If I am doing this four different ways, one of these strategies will do better than the others. I can then cross-pollinate those winning strategies to other channels. Time will tell. I had a similar journey when I was building a shopify store from scratch (Carrie's Closet) and I tracked my stats daily and weekly. When I found something that worked, I doubled down on it. When something didn't work, I made decisions to give it more time, or to change course. I am consuming content as I go to learn how to do this better. But I am also starting form where I am at and moving these four channels forward with care and feeding. Here is my update on YouTube for your learning or entertainment! YouTube Channel to visualize podcasts with stats: https://www.youtube.com/@CarriesDigitalCloset My other channels discussed in this podcast that I am actively monetizing My Personal Channel - Carrie Paxson - https://www.youtube.com/@cpaxson My Consulting Channel with Safety Moments - Accredentials Incorporated - https://www.youtube.com/@accredentialsinc My Podcast RSS Feeds - QuickLearn Quests - https://www.youtube.com/@QuickLearnQuests Here is the script: Monetizing YouTube – 4 approaches Hello everyone! Welcome to episode 2 where I am going to talk to you about monetizing your video assets using YouTube. My name is Carrie, and my podcast is sharing my journey of turning digital assets into passive income. Today, I am going to discuss my four existing YouTube channels and I will share my four different content approaches. I am curious which one gets accepted first into the YouTube Partner Program, so that I can monetize my views with royalties. Let’s get into it. Approach 1 – monetizing my personal YouTube account. My personal account before I started this monetization journey was simply a dumping ground for anything I wanted to share with others. Some videos were private and I would share the link. Some were public, and I shared video of items I was selling on ebay, as an example. Traffic was not a priority for me, it was simply a tool to distribute content outside of facebook, since not everyone in my life uses social media. Starting February 1st, I got intentional about monetizing this channel, and my choice of content was downloading my tiktoks, which consisted of funny videos of my cats, dogs and chickens. This is all existing content I have put on tiktok over a few years, and its also content I make ongoing, because my animals are always doing something funny and interesting to me. My strategy simply is to upload a few tiktoks a day, since I have a huge backlog, and to see if I can gain followers and watch hours. Without a doubt, this has so far been the most successful approach so far. After a month, I gained 8 followers which is fantastic, and my watch hours and views keep going up. People like their pet videos I suppose. I am a long way from qualifying a month into this, but I am going in the right direction. The majority of that success comes from Shorts, since the videos I created on tiktok are mostly shorts. Over a month, I uploaded 28 videos, and 5 were regular videos and the other 23 were shorts. That’s ok! Momentum is what I am looking for while I learn. Next up is my QuickLearn Quests YouTube Account. What I have done on this account, is duplicated my Podcasts that you are listening to today, to a YouTube RSS feed. I create around 3 podcasts a week across all my channels, and every podcast I add, automatically gets loaded up to YouTube Podcasts and increases my content count. At the time of creating this video, I was a month into duplicating my podcasts to YouTube, and I have gained 4 new followers. Not as impressive as the 8 followers I gained on my personal channel, but it is going in the right direction. My strategy today is to do very little with this channel, and just to see what happens as the content increases through YouTube podcasts. Based on my research, it sounds like YouTube podcasts gets a lot of traffic, but for me, it really hasn’t kicked in yet. However, I am not losing hope. When I first connected to Apple podcasts, I got no traffic for the first month. Once it kicked in, it is now my third highest traffic source. So in other words, I will keep an eye on it, and see what the data says. Next up, my consulting company Accredentials. I am a course writing consultant and have been for a little over 25 years. My Accredentials podcast prior to this monetization effort was a channel of hidden links to my portfolio if I was applying on contracts. I decided in this channel I would actually create some content that will hopefully ad value to the world. I wanted to create something that would be relatively fast and easy for me to build, but held value and was searchable by a wide audience. I chose Safety Moments. In meetings in the office, it is often a scramble to find a safety moment prior to a meeting, so I thought I would generate some that people may find for their meetings, and give permission right in the description for them to embed it or play it for their meeting. At the time of making this podcast, I was at this for two months and published 5 Safety Moments. I was getting some traffic which is great, but I did not gain or lose any followers. This is early days so I will keep at it. So my strategy is to create two safety moments a month and to post them with permission to use them for your meetings. I also promoted the videos Instagram to try and drive traffic, because I do have some followers there Last but not least, the last YouTube channel is Carrie’s Digital Closet. This is where I am creating a vlog of my journey from zero to monetization of my digital assets. So these are long form videos intended to inform and show my journey. I posted my first video on March 4, which is 3 days ago at the time of recording this podcast. It is pretty slow to start as expected, and I should have more to share in a week. My strategy is to create 1 – 2 videos per week, as I have a number of income streams I am building and testing, and I want to ensure that I don’t drop the ball on tracking the results. With tracking the results also comes sharing the results. I wanted to point out a few things that were said to me when sharing this journey with people in my life. I have been met primarily with support, but maybe this is something that some of you are thinking as well. Since I have just started this journey in the last two month, it seems baffling to some that I would take on four channels and start what could be a long road to monetize them in three different ways. Well, let’s just say that reason number 1 is that I already have 4 channels that I never started with the intention to monetize them. If I give each one some intentional care and feeding, and if I don’t go gangbusters and try and break my back and use all my spare time on this, then I have a better chance of staying consistent, not losing interest, and not creating tension in my personal relationships. I also feel with these four different strategies, I am going to learn what works and doesn’t work, and I can cross pollinate successes across all channels and measure the results. I also feel that many, many people that start this journey to monetize a YouYube channel all are in a similar position, where you are working full time hours, or have a full time commitment to raising kids or other responsibilities. We do not live and breathe our side hustle, because we have other things to do. So taking a realistic approach, rather than working around the clock to build this as fast as possible will not be sustainable for me. YouTube is a different beast, but I know with my podcast channel, which will be another episode, my results built quite quickly once I reached 1,000 downloads a month. It took me two months to get to 1,000 downloads, and then a week to get to 1,600 downloads. In podcast land, momentum breeds momentum. And I am curious if the same will be true in YouTube. Perhaps someone has the answer to that question, but right now, I am seeing it. This podcast also has a similar video version if you want to watch a demonstration of the stats in my youtube channel. I go into more detail there, since you have the benefit of a visual. This version is more listenable. In the episode description my YouTube channels are listed there if you have any interest in checking them out. That is it for today. Thank you for listening, and for those of you who are growing a Youtube Channel organicially, I hope you found this helpfulere is

5 MAR 2024 · Thank you for joining me on my first episode of Selling Digital Products. I am no stranger to ecommerce of physical products, but i am starting a journey of creating and selling digital products. I am pursuing a few different avenues to see what resonates with me, and of course, I am measuring the results. A very wise man named Chris Reck of Minnow Pond Tarot said in one of his YouTube videos, to do something 100x before you decide if it works or not. So in other words, 100 podcasts, 100 videos, 100 digital products. So many people quit too soon. If you are interested in seeing what the results are across a few different efforts to monetize digital products, stay tuned in. The first step was being brave enough to start this. Now he's hoping with a part-time effort that I can create some results. I am doing podcasts and I am also doing a video blog on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@CarriesDigitalCloset Here is the script for Podcast 1: So what the hell happened to Carrie’s Closet? For over ten years, I have been living and learning the world of eCommerce. For the first six years, I stood up Carrie’s Closet, an online retail shop. I also bought and sold BeautyGram, which was a giftbasket company. Both were rewarding experiences, full of learning. I learned a lot about generating income online with physical products using Shopify, Ebay and Amazon. I also worked full time hours as a contract course creator to make the investments necessary to stay viable. Where did I land? Extremely burned out. My spare time was filled with fulfilling orders, marketing efforts, inventory and listing. Even when I had some spare time, I couldn’t turn off my brain. I wound down Carrie’s Closet as it existed in 2019. Man, pulling the plug on that website came with tears and also some relief. I focused on my consulting business as a course creator, and took a break from side hustles. I was offered a full-time position at Shaw in 2020 and I took it. During COVID, my husband and I made the decision to leave Calgary and move to the Kootenays, and I was accustomed to living in the city with friends, networks, and a big to-do list. Moving here, everything stopped which gave me the time for a health crisis. No surprise. So what did I learn? - I did have a proven track record in eCommerce, even part-time. I didn’t like working around the clock, but I had some new skills to build on. - I still love content creation. I have been paid to build hundreds of courses over my 25 year career. I must be okay at it, because I keep getting hired to do it. - I do not like the money game – you know, the sales piece. Everything from my hourly rate as a content creator, to a pair of leggings on Carrie’s Closet, to reselling on eBay. People jump to buy a product, or bitch about the cost. The money game is important to life, but I do not want to negotiate my worth this time around. - I see people creating passive income online with digital products. People I know and trust are creating digital products and monetizing them. From where I am sitting, it looks a lot more peaceful than what I was doing with physical products. What I know to be true, is doing the work once to create a digital product, a podcast or a video, and letting people’s genuine interest dictate how much I make is a risk. However, when I look at my list of four learnings, it is a potential solution if I can figure it out. Hence, comes the rebranding. Carrie’s Closet will now be Carrie’s Digital Closet. This is where I will share my journey and my learnings in the space of monetizing digital assets. I am sure this will be a journey of what works and what doesn’t work for me. In my heart of hearts, I am someone who has been professionally teaching technology and many other things since 2006. Maybe there is something that you see here, that helps you decide whether this journey is also for you. Or maybe you are already exploring monetizing a youtube channel, a podcast, building courses or writing reviews for Amazon. I am dabbing in a few things, and I am happy to share my results here for those who want to know for themselves.