How to Launch a Money-Making YouTube Channel in 2025 (Step-by-Step)16 min read

In this post, I’ll show you step-by-step everything you need to launch a YouTube Channel that makes money.

YouTube has completely changed my life, but I always thought the only way to make real money on YouTube was through advertising and sponsorships. Boy, was I wrong! 

After earning more money in 1 day with YouTube selling (yes, selling) my own products than the total of my first 3 years on YouTube combined, I felt lied to. And it didn’t require a team of 5 people, becoming a professional editor, or spending $1,000s of dollars on equipment. It just required two things: publishing 1 YouTube video a week and selling 1 product, that’s it!

So, I’ll show you how to:

• Find your Niche using the Zone of Leverage
• Generate 100s of video ideas in 10 minutes
• Create a product
• Accept Payments
• Setup an email list, website, and newsletter
• (Most Importantly) Convert YouTube viewers to customers

Niche Selection

The first thing, of course, is figuring out what you want to talk about. Now, I outline in my other post, “How I grew 100k subs in 3 months,” how I actually thought about deciding what I was going to talk about, developing my style, titles, thumbnails, and scripting so I would read that before this if you haven’t already. However, the one key thing from that video is using the zone of leverage to select your niche.

What do you care about? What do other people care about? What are you good at? If you can find an intersection of those three things, generally, those videos will do better on YouTube.

For example, my name is Zach, and while I was in medical school, my crossover was studying, personal improvement, and medical school. I was interested in those things, people cared about my advice on those things, and I had objective evidence of test scores to justify that I was “good enough” at those things. But it doesn’t need to be objective. Instead, just think about what you are “good” at.

In the beginning, it’s helpful to select three overall topic categories and then start making videos about one of these categories. Also, these can, of course, change! For example, my topics are still personal improvement, but I talk more about how to start a YouTube channel and evidence-based health advice now as my three topics. So, how do you come up with ideas for your niche?

Idea Generation: Inorganic and Organic

Organically is simply using your noggin and seeing what pops up, and inorganically is, for example, viewing the biggest YouTubers in your space’s channels and seeing what their most popular videos are, then using those videos as inspiration for your own videos.

So, organically, you could think of 5 major categories you want to talk about for one topic and five major categories of things people would want to hear from you about a topic.

So, for example, my topic was studying:

Step 1: Five general ideas I wanted to talk about with studying:

1. Studying motivation
2. Proper Study techniques
3. Optimizing your brain health when studying
4. The best gear/tech for studying
5. Organizing your life around studying (planning, etc.)

Step 2: Five general questions that people want to learn from me about studying:

• Time management techniques
• Avoiding procrastination
• Note-taking methods
• How to read things better
• How to improve memory

Then, if you were going to break each of these general ideas down into 10 steps, how would you do it? So, for example, for Proper study techniques, my steps would be:

• The worst study techniques
• Lectures vs textbooks vs online videos, what are the best resources to use?
• How to get the most out of lectures
• Why all-nighters never work… The best way to design flashcards… My favorite way to study before a test… And so on! I could talk about it forever, and this is just from one general idea!

That took me maybe 3 minutes to develop those ten steps for that one general idea for that one topic. Now I would just go through the rest of them, and, bam! There are 100 pieces of content or two years of content if you post once a week.

Then, simply write a script for one video. Record it using your iPhone with a tripod you buy on Amazon and a $30 Amazon microphone, edit it with the free software iMovie or DaVinci Resolve, and congratulations!! You are a YouTuber. Now, the exciting stuff begins.

Create Products

Now, products can be absolutely anything that you sell to people. Usually, for best results, the product you make should align with the content you are making on YouTube. For example, Binging with Babish sells pots and pans and cookbooks, Marques Brownlee sells phone cases and wallpapers (oof), and I sell books and courses on studying and making money with a YouTube channel.

For example, here are some ideas of things you could sell:

• Paid PDF guides (100 Bulletproof Cookie Recipes, using Microsoft Word)
• Monthly memberships to a newsletter (AI news, using ConvertKit)
• Physical Products (Jackets for Dogs, find someone on Thomasnet)
• Courses (How to play guitar, create a course on Kajabi)
• Digital Tools (a ToDo checklist application, code an application using Cursor.ai)

But how do you actually decide which product is best for you? Well, the absolute best way is to think about things you have bought in the past regarding your topics! Or, what have close friends or family members bought recently around your three topics?

For example, I’ve bought software and physical products that time Pomodoro study sessions for me, books on how to best do marketing on the Internet, and online courses on storytelling and cinematography. 

So, I thought a book that outlines how to launch a money-making YouTube channel (essentially this video but way more in-depth)and a course on studying better based on scientific evidence would be good and things I would buy, so I made those! And people love them because I designed them in a way that I would be willing to pay 10x the price to buy these products myself (which is a personal rule I have when selling anything on the internet). 

What’s the last thing you bought around the topics that you loved? My guess is you could make a lite/mini version of it that could help others too!

Usually, digital products are easier to initially scale and make than physical products, but don’t sleep on physical products either! Because physical products have a higher barrier to entry and are more difficult, fewer YouTubers make them! Making it easier to stand out if you actually make something.

Now, at this stage, most people have analysis paralysis again. Just like your first video, your first product will not be amazing, but that’s ok! This is all a learning experience. You learn insane amounts from that first YouTube video, and you will learn insane amounts from the first thing you sell on the internet. I so badly wish I started making products as soon as I made YouTube videos instead of waiting 3 years to get started! Imagine the compound interest I would have in my knowledge and ability to make things!

Now, briefly, because some people are not aware of this, it is actually very simple to accept payments and deliver products to people. You could simply ask people to send you money on Paypal, or Venmo, or another digital payment tool, and then you would email them a link to the product that is stored on Google Drive or Dropbox. This is a good way to test out one of your products, but once you start getting more customers, you are going to want to automate sales and delivery through things like:

• Shopify
• Stripe
• Sellfy
• Gumroad
• Etsy
• Kajabi

These sites will let you automate the delivery of your product after you receive a purchase.

As you start to make more money, you could start considering things like:

• Setting up a business through your local government (Like an LLC in the USA)
• A business bank account to keep your personal money and business money separate
• An accountant to help you with taxes and bookkeeping

I’m not going to dive deep into this, as you can Google it all and this is actually not the important stuff, the next part is! The next part of this post is the most impactful things I’ve learned for my business during my entire 20 years trying to make it on the internet.

Converting Viewers to Customers

How do we actually get people to buy our products without individually reaching out to them or asking them to buy products on our YouTube channel? There is a lot of information I could potentially give you here; essentially, this is the entire marketing career. So I’ll tell you my story and give you the essentials. 

The term that changed my business permanently was “funnels.” I read a book, “Dotcom Secrets” by Russel Brunson, and it changed everything. Funnels, for our purposes, are how you convert viewers to customers. The “top” of the funnel is people who watch your YouTube videos, and the “bottom” of the funnel is people who buy your products. 

Every big YouTuber and every billion or even trillion-dollar company uses funnels. Have you ever signed up for a newsletter? Or clicked on the link in the description for something “free” but you had to put in your email address? Or has someone ever come up to you in the mall and asked you to try the smell of a new cologne or perfume? Those are all funnels! The goal of every single one of those things is, in some way, eventually, to convert you into a customer.

So, if you’re a BakeTuber (is that a thing?), someone might watch a YouTube video on your baking advice, and because they liked your video so much, they’ll want more of you! So, they might look in the website description where you have a link to your paid recipe PDF book and buy it. Yay! 

Essentially, as you move people down your funnel, you will charge more money and, most importantly, provide more value.

Now, my first funnel had five things.

• YouTube videos
• Lead Magnet (a free product you give in exchange for something like an email address)
• Automated Emails
• Email Newsletter
• Paid Product

Let’s take these step-by-step.

YouTube Videos

You know what to do now from the start of this video. If not, check out my other video or you can buy my book, where I go super in-depth on everything here, including my entire gear list.

Lead Magnet

A lead magnet also called a tripwire, is something that is given out for free or very cheaply to entice people to move down the funnel or give certain information.

Have you ever entered your email address for a PDF? Or free access to a website? There is no such thing as a free lunch! They want your email address so they can eventually sell you something, as we talked about before. So, how do you do it?

Very simply, you would create your product and then create a form on your website. The form might say, “Put your email here to download my free guide to learning the first four chords of the guitar!” Then the button would say “download” and would only be clickable after they put in their email address. This is straightforward with WordPress plugins, Kajabi, Convertkit, and a bazillion other online services.

Once they hit download, they should immediately be given exactly what they asked for. Maybe you send them to a page with a download link with a “Thank you!”

Then, you have someone’s email address on your list, and you have provided them with something valuable. This is a huge win-win!

Some great lead magnets are:

• Free PDF guide (Canva is a great free way to do this, not sponsored)
• Template or checklist
• Exclusive video

Now, if you deliver good value, you will start to have some people on your email list. Why does that matter? 

The most profitable asset on the internet is The Email List.

Justin Welsh, a creator on LinkedIn and Twitter, runs a multimillion-dollar business off his mailing lists. The model is very simple: He gives away great stuff on his Twitter and LinkedIn, collects emails, and then, when he has something remarkable to share or sell, he sends an email. You’d be amazed at how well the model works. Justin is on track to make 8-figures a year from his email list.

Some statistics:

• The number of people who click on links in emails is 2- 5 times higher than that of links on social media.
• The industry income from an email is about 4x that of social media (mine is about 20-50x).
• People open emails nearly 10x the amount than they like, comment, or do any action after watching a YouTube video.

But, do we just blast the people on the email list with something like, “Hey, I made this cool thing, want to buy it?” Well, sometimes, maybe in certain situations, that would work, but statistically, most people don’t buy until many more emails later, like we are talking 7+ emails later. Don’t worry. I was blown away when I learned this, but this is a huge game-changer when it comes to selling your products. Why? Because #1 people these days have insanely tuned up BS detectors, so, even if you are providing something of real value and not BS (which should be a baseline), it will take some time to email “dating” them before they feel comfortable with you. 

This is why automated emails are so amazingly powerful. They let you time and send specific emails automatically to certain people who have joined your email list, let you build comfort with the person on the other end, and dramatically increase your chances of actually making a sale.

Automated Emails

Ok, what are automated emails? Essentially, they are timed emails that are sent automatically after a person interacts with your content in a certain way.

Top email marketers like Gary Vaynerchuk, Brendon Burchard, Justin Welsh, and Ali Abdaal all have the same strategy: deliver value and then sell.

Gary Vaynerchuck calls it “Jab, jab, jab, hook!” or giving great value over and over and over before you actually sell anything.

On the platforms we talked about earlier, what you might do is as soon as someone signs up for your email using your lead magnet, you have an email that immediately automatically sends the delivery of the product. 

Then, maybe 1 day later, you would automatically send some valuable information. For example, if we are on the baking YouTube channel example, maybe you send them an email that teaches them about the best cooking supplies to buy. On day 2, maybe you guide them on how to use an oven properly, and then, finally, on day 3, you tell them about your paid PDF and see if people want to buy it! 

Now, this is very basic. For example, when I sell my SoloTuber Pro course (essentially guiding people through all this in a very detailed way, the extreme level up of my book), I send them 12 emails after my specific lead magnet for the course:

12-day email sequence:

1. Value content: it might be a nice email, some great videos to download, or another resource I love. (day 1)
2. Another value email + case study (social proof) (day 2)
3. Another value email + FAQs people have (day 3)
4. Actionable tips and another free resource (day 4)
5. Personal story: how did this stuff transform my life (day 5)
6. Pain points, common challenges, and tease the solution (“Tomorrow I’ll show you how to fix everything”) (day 6)
7. Introduce the offer softly with different bonuses/discounts (Day 7)
8. Full sales offer (day 8)
9. 72-hour warning (day 9)
10. 48-hour warning (day 10)
11. 24-hour warning and personal plea (day 11)
12. Last email: There is 1 hour left. This is the last email! (day 11)

This is powerful stuff! This one email sequence changed my life! I must thank Brendon Burchard and Russel Brunson, as their materials have guided me heavily.

Paid Product

Then, as we talked about before, you need a paid product that people can pay for, so you can plug that into the sequence above.

Email Newsletter

Finally, the email newsletter is a great way to build a connection with your fans. If you give away great information regularly for free, people will want to subscribe to your newsletter and join your list to receive that information. Also, you never know who might be reading this that could change your life!

I’ve received job offers, visited people around the world, and hired people to work with me, all from my newsletter, which has only 5,000 weekly readers!

Alright, so, if that was helpful, there is this great free book, the 99 YT Secrets Black Book, that if you click the link below, will take you through the foundations of YT success, content creation secrets, growth hacks, monetization strategies, how to scale, marketing and promotion, and mindsets for success. I get emails all the time about how this simple e-book has changed people’s YouTube careers forever! Some really cool guy wrote it I think…

Wait… can you tell what I did there!? What do you think this 99 YT Secrets Black Book is??? Can you name it?

Summary

Ok, so, overall, what do you need to do?

1. Find your niche, generate ideas, and publish a YouTube video every week
2. Create one paid product
3. Create one free lead magnet
4. Create an email list and a newsletter
5. Create one automated email sequence that you send after people join your email list, which ends in you selling the product (your first funnel!).

If you do this, and your goal on YouTube is in some way to make money, you are ahead of 99% of other YouTubers immediately.

All in all, starting a YouTube channel and building a business around it isn’t about just making videos or selling products—it’s about creating a life of freedom where your passion meets purpose. It’s taking control of your time, creativity, and future. These seemingly small steps, like finding your niche, creating valuable content, and building funnels, can result in big impacts for yourself and the people you help.

YouTube is this amazing unique thing that we are so lucky to have access to. It’s changed my life. Importantly, everything I just talked about is not about perfection. It’s about starting, experimenting, and consistently showing up. In the bigger picture, this journey is more than earning money or gaining followers—it’s about designing a life that feels authentic and meaningful and having a blast the whole time. Be inspired by yourself, seriously! The world needs what only you can offer, so please just start! I mean I hinted like 50 times, and still no one has sent me good cookie recipes… why do my cookies always taste bitter? I can’t live off of Oreos forever…

Thanks for reading!

Zach