this guy right here is one of the smartest youtubers on the platform but not for the reason you might think graeme stefan has gone from a real estate agent making videos on his iphone to the king of finance youtube bringing in millions of views each month now anyone that grows to be the biggest channel in their niche knows a thing or two about the algorithm with youtube or really with with anything business in general is like playing a game of chess you could make a move and like the algorithm will shift this way and you're
like how could i adapt to that or like what are people clicking on let me do more of that and if it doesn't work i'll shift it up a little bit i'd like to test titles and thumbnails and i love every aspect of that but when it comes to youtube the algorithm is only one half of the picture youtubers today are just as much entrepreneurs as they are creators and graeme stefan has a strategy that makes him more money per viewer than virtually anyone else he's discovered a few things about youtube that even the biggest
channels are missing out on it might seem like a controversial statement but most youtubers actually underperform financially when you consider the audience that top creators have built i think money is often left on the table you have to remember that these channels are getting more views than entire tv networks so what happens when you bring a traditional entrepreneur into the equation before even starting youtube graham was heavily involved in the business world and as you'll see he found a way to use these skills to his advantage i've closely studied graham's strategy and have figured out
the three main steps he has taken to build his empire let's get to the bottom of this a little later we'll watch a video from graham and i'll show you some of the tactics he uses but first we need to do some quick maths graeme brings in about 10 million views per month on average this would equate to 30 to 50 000 for most channels when you consider ad revenue sponsorships and maybe some merch sales not bad but can you guess how much grey makes each month with the same views four hundred thousand yes you
heard that right now some of you might already know that the finance niche is very lucrative but there's a lot more to this than meets the eye which takes us on to our first step graham leverages his ad revenue so for those who don't know different channels get different rpms which is the amount youtube pays you per 1000 views it's affected by a lot of things but basically it boils down to how valuable your viewers are to advertisers and also how ad friendly the content is so prank videos with profanity get a very poor rpm
but finance videos which stay away from controversy are a gold mine but for graham it's not just as simple as having a high rpm you see when he realized just how much youtube could pay him for views he made a plan to maximize this revenue he's done this in a couple of interesting ways first of all let's look at his three latest videos graham has a very intentional upload strategy the majority of his videos are topical like these two but he combines them with much more evergreen personal finance videos if you look at the three
videos previous you'll see the same pattern again the reason this is so powerful is it gives graham active and passive ad revenue the topic of videos get a lot of views very quickly and spike is revenue up while the evergreen videos don't perform as well at the start but then grow over time building what can be described as an income floor for the channel essentially graham's revenue each month will look something like this spikes when he uploads with a consistent income floor the powerful thing is this floor will grow over time as more evergreen videos
are made graeme also leverages his ad revenue by branching into other channels but he does this in a different way to most instead of just catering to the same people as his main channel he actually captures new audiences he's making content in four completely different verticals informative videos reaction videos podcasts and now vlogs a lot of people would do all this on one channel but graham realized that by keeping them separate he could reach a lot more people by casting his net wider he captures a broader audience while still being able to keep each channel
hyper focused the beautiful thing is though he ties all these different formats under the finance niche and still avails of those juicy rpms even if it's a vlog but ad revenue is only one half of the story the real magic is in the actual content let's break down some of graham's videos to show you what i mean but first i want to thank today's video sponsor morningbrew one of my big goals this year was to learn more about business and investing but my problem has always been there's too much information from too many different places
which is why i love morningbrew it's a free newsletter that summarizes all the major business news in five minutes each morning i'm sure a lot of people will relate to this but i've got a very bad habit of waking up and just scrolling through social media however since subscribing to morning brew i've got something actually productive to read first thing instead just this morning i learned about tesla's bitcoin strategy which is a lot more valuable to me than watching endless cat videos and the thing is there's no real reason not to join it's free it
takes literally 15 seconds to sign up and by doing so you help support my channel so click the link in the description below to subscribe to morning brew today so with that done let's get straight into step two graham understands how to sell on youtube when people think about the most important skills for creators they'll often say editing photoshop or talking on camera but one of the most underrated skills is finding a way to sell in a genuine but effective way the truth is most youtubers don't really know what they're doing they're either too pushy
with their promotion and end up losing the audience's trust or they just aren't convincing enough and miss out on a lot of potential revenue for graham though this is where he shines let's go through the tactics he uses in almost every upload first here's an old video i found where graham points out just how important selling is in one way or another almost everything you do at its core when you really get down to it is sales whether you're actually selling a physical product whether you're selling a house a car whether you're selling yourself during
an interview trying to get a job or whether or not it's just to get you guys to smash that like button and comment down below almost everything at its core is sales i think we can learn a lot about graham's sales technique just from how he asks for a like there's so much to talk about there's so little time but before we do that i need to tell you about brad he jokingly said that he would smash the like button if i paid him five dollars i mean seriously who does he think he is that
i would actually pay him five dollars to hit the like button so i asked for his venmo i sent them five dollars and he annihilated that like button as promised that is how seriously i take the like button so if you wouldn't mind destroying it for the youtube algorithm it would help me out a ton plus my birthday is coming up on thursday so if you wouldn't mind just giving it a quick tap as an early birthday present that would mean the world to me so thank you guys so much with that said let's begin
now what just happened there might seem basic but it's actually the key to any form of selling on youtube graham is hyper aware of the audience's attention spans so whenever he plugs something it needs to be its own bespoke moment in the video he almost uses a parody sales technique where every pitch is a comedy skit it might be just a joke but by nature it's keeping you more engaged into what he's saying likes aren't even that important but asking for small favors has been proven to build up a relationship between a customer and a
seller i think grain realizes that most viewers tune out the minute someone tries to push something on them graeme's whole strategy revolves around stopping this from happening even with his sponsored videos before starting he'll give you a reason to keep watching it's almost like a promise of what's to come afterwards but before we go into my own thoughts on this and the implications this could have for both real estate investors homeowners in the entire housing market in general i do want to say a huge thank you to our video sponsor today wealthfront this helps his
video retention because people aren't just going to click off when they see the ad we know we're going to get some great information after the sponsor so we're willing to sit through it and not just leave the video if you actually go back to the sponsor section in this video you'll see i use this same technique graham also spreads out his call to actions for example in this video he asks you for a like one minute in he has a sponsor at four minutes and then he plugs a trading app at the end a lot
of people try to clump their ctas together but by spreading them out it makes for a better viewing experience and also will convert a lot better i've found viewers are a lot more responsive to plugs when asked to do just one thing at a time the reason this all works though is because it feels natural everything from his presentation the style the studio and the language he uses makes the viewer trust him however there's still an unanswered question from earlier graham makes 400k a month but he's confirmed that only half of this is ad revenue
which introduces step number three graham sells things that scale the absolute best way to monetize a large audience is through revenue streams that don't require extra work for each sale a lot of youtubers do very well in merchandise but it is harder to scale you have to process each order ship and then have to deal with returns and other problems more people should do things they can build once and sell forever graham executes this principle through two main additional streams digital products and affiliate marketing the latter of which i think is seriously underrated his courses
are the perfect example of effective digital products he made his youtube program in one month and two years later he's still making thousands of dollars each day from it graham has also stated that he makes over 1 million a year from affiliate marketing a lot of people have a negative association with this term but it's actually a huge revenue stream when done correctly a large proportion of my own income each month is from affiliate commissions graham will mainly partner up with a trading platform like weeble and get what's called a referral bonus it's the ultimate
form of monetization because both graham and the user who signs up will get this bonus it's pretty easy to convince people to sign up for something that's not only free but will also make them money when this is done at scale it can be mind-blowing for example if we were to say that the average referral bonus worked out to be 20 and just one percent of the viewers of this video signed up that would be 60 000 in commissions you'd be surprised with how many companies offer these referral bonuses every niche has their own line
of products with great affiliate schemes i've left the companies i partner with in the description below to give you an idea i think it's safe to say that graham has built an empire and so much of this can be attributed to one phrase respect the audience so thank you for watching this video and as a reward for getting this far hit subscribe and i'll pick one person to paypal 250 dollars to for now though i'll see you in the next one
