Click HERE to go to YouTube and see my channel. Down below the article I also have a great little preview of my YouTube channel with some of my favorite videos.
On April 28th, 2021 I posted my first video of high quality bounce house content to Youtube. The response was GREAT, especially considering that I was learning the platform.
As I continued to make the highest quality videos that I could, something awesome was happening…my channel was growing FAST.
In order to monetize your channel, you have to get to 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time within 12 months. So, that became my goal, and I planned to hit it by by December.
It only took me 88 days to get there. Less than 3 months! It was July 25th when I hit 1000 subscribers, and since I post long videos, I had already LONG passed 4000 hours of watch time.
Now that I’m here, a real deal “YouTuber”, that makes money from people watching my videos, I have a few things to say about the experience of getting here, and where I hope to take things…
First, as I climbed in subscribers, learned the platform, and got better at creating content, I also made the decision to just totally put myself out there, and tell my followers that they could come to me for any help they needed…and boy oh boy did they ever reach out! I ended up taking a phone call with a gentleman named Josh from Florida who called The Jump Off number hoping to reach me with $17,000 worth of merchandise in his cart from TentandTable.com. I made some suggestions to change what was in that cart, and he did, and then he purchased and BOOM started his own company.
This happened MANY times over on a much smaller scale. Most were people sending me DMs on Instagram (@nick_o_glass) either asking questions about things that I hadn’t talked about in my videos yet, or asking my advice on how to solve a problem.
The impact that my videos were having on people was AMAZING and I was creating a community of like minded people around myself for the first time ever, and I did it by helping them as much as I could!
The next thing that I noticed in my YouTube journey was that I was selling a lot if things for other people. Most of the questions I got were about where to buy insurance or what rental software and website builder I used, and where to buy equipment and bounce houses.
So, I set out to see if I could get some affiliate deals with the manufactures, being as I was sending them business like crazy and becoming a key person in the industry.
Well, as it turns out, I suppose that no one has done what I am doing before? But none of the companies had affiliate programs. Inflatable Office quickly put one together for me, and Rollsall is working on one, but everyone else just said, no, were sorry.
So, I just continued on the path and kept referring them business anyways. “WHY?” you ask? I mean “You’re selling things for them for free Nick!” right?
Eh…not quite. While I am still selling things for them, and not making anything from it, the way I look at life, and especially this situation, is that it’s INCREDIBLY audacious for a big company that’s busy as hell to slow down for a second to listen to some tiny person that happens to start a YouTube channel.
Who the hell am I to “demand” something. No no, you see here is an important lesson for EVERYONE to grasp…
Everything in life is EARNED and your “rewards” come from your “merit”. A word that I love to use is “Meritocracy”. You are rewarded based on your merit.
So, as these big companies said NO to my affiliate pitches, it was clear to me that I had to garner more merit. Or to say it differently, I hadn’t earned shit yet.
You see, in order to GET value, you have to GIVE value first. You have to give LOTS of value before you have the “clout” to ask for something in return. Now, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t just ask first, because why not, what are they gonna say? No? But after you get those no’s, you have to remain humble and stay the course so you can prove your worth and build something that creates the opportunity for you to ask again in the future after you have dome some good stuff!
So, as of writing this, I’m still working on the “give lots of value” part, but rest assured, I am incredibly confident that I will do just that, and get much much more in retune down the line 🙂
The last thing that I noticed from creating bounce house content on YouTube is that sense of community that is created via video. It’s sort of cliche at this point, but every big YouTuber has “Merch” or merchandise, that they sell and the reason why, is because it’s such a natural progression!
As soon as you get any following at all, it becomes so clear that you can sell things very easily, so why not make you own things to sell?
This is the next step that I’m just dipping my toe into, but I most certainly have a lot larger plans than selling some shirts (yes I do plan to sell shirts too). There is an opportunity in front of me to really do something special, and create another business from putting out all my info for free on YouTube, and that in-and-of-itself