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Gillian Perkins is an entrepreneur and YouTuber with over 700,000 subscribers. She shares how she balances running a big family and being the CEO of Startup Society.
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We talk about the challenges of growing a profitable online business and how she uses YouTube to attract high-quality leads.
Gillian tells her story of going from running a local music school to building a successful online business. She explains her approach to teaching and creating passive income. She also breaks down how structured sales funnels and evergreen content help her grow a sustainable business while managing family life.
Watch the next episode on YouTube, “The Power of YouTube Traffic: Step-by-Step Funnel Breakdown with Gillian Perkins“
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Gillian’s Links:
- Visit Gillian’s website
- Listen to her 10-episode podcast, “The 100k Method”
- Subscribe to her YouTube channel and Apple Podcasts
Speaker 1:
Three times on this podcast. I’ve had people as guests who have had a significant impact on me and my business journey, and Gillian Perkins is no exception. Many of you know that this is my second online business and my first online business, which was decimated by the pandemic, was teaching Chinese, and back in those days I was heavily invested in growing my YouTube channel. Now I made a mistake. I grew a great YouTube channel before I really had an offer, but once I got the offer down, I should say then the YouTube channel became a good source of leads for my offer, and Gillian can speak to this. Let me share with you a little bit about her. She is the CEO of Startup Society, a YouTuber who I would say a huge YouTuber. How many subscribers are you at right now?
Speaker 2:
Gillian, somewhere a little north of 700,000.
Speaker 1:
All right. And the host of the Work Less, earn More podcast. She teaches people how to start and build profitable online businesses that allow them to earn passive income and live a flexible lifestyle. And on the personal side of things, gillian is a Christian mom who homeschools her five kids. Oh my gosh, every time I meet somebody who has double the family size of mine well, yours is technically slightly more than double, because I only have two kids I’m like how are you running a successful business and running such a large family? Because I feel like I’m privileged to be up here in like my guest bedroom converted into an office, and my wife is downstairs and our two kids are trying to pull her brain apart actively on the daily. Did you go through that, gillian?
Speaker 2:
Oh for sure, and little secret that lots of people know, but not lots of people on the internet know, is I’m actually expecting my sixth right now, so it’s going to get even crazier. Congratulations, yeah, but I mean. The thing about having more kids is that it doesn’t increase exponentially. In fact it doesn’t even increase incrementally. It’s each child, you know, adds a little bit more work and a little bit more work, right? Having three kids isn’t a lot harder at all than having two kids, and having four kids is barely harder than having three. So parenting is hard. Parenting is hard, for sure, but parenting five kids is not a lot harder than parenting two kids.
Speaker 1:
I feel like what you just said is like textbook. What great parents say, you know, who have great systems that just are, overall, better than the rest of us at raising their kids. They’re like it’s not that hard. Yeah, number six will just be easy Like. I’ve seen families, though. Back when I was living in China and working there at an elementary school, at an international school, I remember seeing some families and one family had six, another had seven, and I was just like how are you doing it? But then I see their kids and I’m like okay, your kids are like not little tyrants, like they’re well behaved. I’m intrigued at like what you’re doing behind the scenes, but I see like the older kids helping the younger kids. I see like the younger kids kind of just falling in line, like I’ve had the privilege of like sharing meals, and I’m just in awe at like at these families. What are they doing that I’m not doing Like I need to learn.
Speaker 2:
So well, I will freely admit or maybe I’m bragging that my kids are like that, not to say that they’re never crazy. They bounce off the walls on a regular basis. For sure, you know, play tag in the house, and five kids playing tag in a house is craziness, but they are very well behaved and very obedient, and I think that part of that does. It’s not an absolute certainty of an outcome with having more kids, but having more kids, I do think, tends toward that, because they kind of learn their place in the family order and the older ones learn to model the, or the younger ones learn to model what they see the older ones doing. So if you train the first couple pretty well, then less training is required with the future ones, and so, yeah, I think that it’s great, though, that you look at those families and you wonder what they’re doing, because I feel like I get two reactions to my kids being well-behaved.
Speaker 2:
Some people are like well, you have it easy, you know. They’re like yeah, I would have five kids too if my kids were that well behaved. And other people have your reaction of like, what are you doing? And that’s not. I hope that doesn’t sound prideful, because I take it as that it was nature and nurture. You know that. I know some kids are more challenging than others and I, thankfully, have been blessed with a bunch of kids who, for the most part, are pretty easygoing and not very challenging. But I do think that there was a lot of kids who, for the most part, are pretty easygoing and not very challenging. But I do think that there was a lot of intention that went into it as well, you know, with how we trained them.
Speaker 1:
There we go, there we go. I love what you said and we’re going to get back to. We’re going to talk about business in a quick moment and I would love for you to start off with a snapshot of your business as it is currently in the beginning of 2025. But first I will share, comically so I love what you said about how, with more kids, they figure out their order like in the family. I think that’s the biggest issue, like with my eldest right now. Like she thinks the order is her and then my wife and I. It should be my wife and I first and then her behind, and that’s where, like, the friction comes from. We just have to fall in line and realize that she was designed to run the show and let her run it.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I’m sure that is the solution.
Speaker 1:
So, gillian, please share about your business now and, dear listener, as Gillian shares, keep in mind that this is the first of two episodes. In the upcoming episode, we’re going to dive into why YouTube is the best way to get high quality leads, and Gillian is going to walk us through her funnel. It’s a YouTube powered funnel and I will share.
Speaker 1:
As a Facebook and Instagram ad manager, there is a certain kind of client who I enjoy working with but is very hard to serve, and that is the client that has the established YouTube channel, because it’s very hard to rival those leads that come from their YouTube channel, and many times it’s been quite transparently impossible to rival the quality of those leads with Facebook and Instagram ads. I always say that Jesus saves. Facebook and Instagram ads do not, and so more eyeballs on a bad offer does not a good business make. But the Facebook and Instagram ads beating system is definitely, in my experience, the YouTube one. So, gillian, tell us about your business now, and then we’ll dive into some of the challenges and successes that you’ve had growing your business.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, you mentioned that about successful YouTubers being the hardest clients when we recorded an episode on my podcast a few weeks ago and I hadn’t thought about it exactly that way as a whole category of a thing, but that was certainly my experience when I tried working with multiple Facebook ads managers that none of them could get me really satisfactory results because nothing could rival all these free, very warm leads that I get from YouTube. So we’ll get more into that in a few minutes, I’m sure, but for a snapshot of my business, so I run an online business where I teach regular people how to start online businesses and how to grow those businesses to become their full-time thing and replace their nine to five job. Most of the people who I work with and most of what I teach them is about how to build either digital product businesses or service-based businesses. I don’t really touch on e-commerce or anything like that and this might sound surprising since I’m a big YouTuber, but I don’t really do social media. Youtube is the one thing I do and I only kind of have considered social media because it really is long form content, so I think it’s more akin to a blog or a podcast or something like that. And, yeah, social media is not really my jam, so I mostly teach people how to build their businesses online without social media or with very minimal social media. So that’s basically what I teach people how to do. I’ve got about a half million or so dollar a year.
Speaker 2:
Business. Some of our main offers are a high ticket coaching program that we run, a low ticket membership that just teaches people like business basics, and then a YouTube course and those three different streams of income. They all bring in well significant percentages of our income. With the high ticket mastermind which, by the way, the mastermind works with people who already have their businesses and they have products. We build systems with them we call them evergreen sales funnels to get their products selling consistently without having to run launch after launch so that they can have consistent income in their business. Anyway, that mastermind and the low ticket membership those bring in the largest chunks of my income. I would say that each of them brings in about 20% of our gross revenue for the year.
Speaker 1:
Okay, all right. If you had to pick one, which would it be to stick with going forward?
Speaker 2:
The high ticket or the low ticket? Yeah, oh, it’s an ongoing question. I started my business with zero offers, as everyone does, and then I added an offer and an offer and an offer, trying to find, you know, the best offer, and I ended up with a lot of offers and then I thought this is big and messy and that’s not what I was trying to create anyway. So I paired them back and paired them back, and paired them back to the point that we’re at now where we basically have these three offers the mastermind slash coaching program, the membership and the YouTube course and I kind of would like to pare it back further and I’ve definitely thought about doing so many times. You know, maybe I should be a one product business. That sounds beautifully simple and there’s just too many like pros and cons of the different ones. You know they all serve their own unique purpose. I know if I say, cut the YouTube course because it’s less of our income, I would have emails in my inbox every day people asking me for that YouTube course.
Speaker 1:
You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:
And there’s nothing else quite like it out there on the market and we might as well keep offering it because people love it, right. And then, when it comes to the high ticket versus the low ticket, it’s amazing to work as closely as we can with people in the high ticket, you know, because they’re paying more so we can afford more of our resources, you know, be a lot higher touch with them and we can help them get a really big result, and so that’s really fun to see. But, at the same time, like one of the main reasons that I started this business, because this is, like my literally my 12th business that I’ve run over the last 20 something years and I’ve been running this business now for about six years. Anyway, one of the main reasons I started this business was because I was so frustrated when I was trying to start my first online businesses, with the lack of affordable and yet thorough education that was out there.
Speaker 2:
You know you could find cheap little courses, but they just taught you a random tip or trick.
Speaker 2:
Basically, you know they didn’t really teach you a system for starting and building a successful online business at all. And then you had these really expensive like coaching programs or $2,000 online courses, of which I bought a few and was honestly still disappointed by the quality and the results I was able to get with them. But they were also so expensive and when you’re starting a business and especially you’re bootstrapping it, I definitely put at least one of those really expensive courses on a credit card and then had to pay it off and that sort of thing, and I wanted to solve that problem for people and these people who they just want to learn the basics of like what do I need to do to start making money online? And so that was why I created Startup Society, my membership, and so, even though, like, there’s some disadvantages with you know, when people only pay a little bit, a lot of the time they’re not very personally invested and it can be tougher to get them results, and, of course, we can’t spend as much time with each individual member unless they like.
Speaker 2:
Like they add on coaching to their package, you know, or upgrade or something like that, that sort of thing, you know, but as long as they’re only paying $49 a month. You know we can’t afford to spend that much time as a team on each person, but we still do, you know, offer them all the support we can, and we do coworking sessions every week and group coaching sessions, and we’ve got not a Facebook group where we have a Slack group where we support them, just, you know, just as much as we can. But so I love that I can provide that at that really low cost to them and we can make it fantastic, like there’s two dozen online business courses inside that membership, because that’s what you can do with the scale of memberships. Right, the people are only paying $49 each, but we’ve got hundreds of members and so it’s worth it to us to create a course for them, you know, because we know that it’s bringing in 10,000 plus dollars a month.
Speaker 2:
So that would be not answering your question. By the way you know, you just told me to pick and I said sorry, I can’t.
Speaker 1:
I’ve just learned not to force it. I wasn’t clear to answer my question, but that’s all right, that’s absolutely all right. I’m intrigued, though, but that’s all right, that’s absolutely all right. I’m intrigued, though, along the way to your current mix the YouTube course, the monthly membership and the mastermind you said that you got rid of a lot of other courses that you sold. Which was the course that you were most happy to get rid of in the past and which was the one that you have those, I don’t know over the dinner well, maybe not over the dinner table intimate talks, because you got five kids, let’s say, when you’re laying in bed about to fall asleep, talk to your husband and you’re like you know, I kind of miss that course. Can you tell me about those two?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, well, there’s one course that I wouldn’t say I miss it exactly, but it’s one that people kept asking us for and they ask us for to this day. So it’s a course called Launch Like a Boss and it’s about how to launch a course online, and I retired it because, in short, the production quality wasn’t up to my current standards. You know, it was one of the earlier courses I made with this version of my business and so, yeah, the production quality just wasn’t quite there and I changed my thinking on some of the strategies and whatnot. And I could have rerecorded the whole thing, of course, and I’ve done that with some courses, but in that case, I chose to not do that because, you know, I want to sell courses and products and programs that I like really believe in and like am very confident that can get people results. And that course, it just wasn’t tested as much as I wanted it to be tested. I had created it out of, based on what had worked for me, you know, which is where we generally start, of course, but what had worked for me and related theory, and but it wasn’t something that I tested with a lot of clients, and so I just didn’t have nearly as much confidence as I do with some other things that I teach that it was the best strategy, if that makes sense. You know I knew it was a good strategy, worked. But yeah, was it the best strategy?
Speaker 2:
I didn’t know, and I found that in my business and this is like to my detriment to some degree but I have the best energy and I enjoy the most when I’m making new things, thus lots of courses and other products. You know that I had to cull from my collection and and other struggles. You know it’s hard to like kind of stay in my lane if you will, you know, and not go too broad and too big, but to stay focused and stay focused on kind of that. You know that one thing. And to when you sell a product over and over and over again, you can often take it to new heights, which is fine.
Speaker 2:
But again, I found I just have the best energy around a new product, whether that is around the launch of a new product, so like writing the emails to sell it, I’ll have the best energy and inspiration and enjoy the process, or with creating a new product. And so when I consider sometimes re-recording a course, it has to be really worth it for multiple reasons. Right To be worth it because I know it’s going to be not very fun for me and it might show that it’s not very fun for me. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:
And I don’t want that, I don’t want to go to all the work to re-record a course, only to have Gillian look bored throughout the whole thing, right? That’s not going to be helpful to anyone, and so in that case, you know, yes, it was something that people liked and wanted, but again, it wasn’t something that I felt the best about selling. So I decided let’s focus on these other things that I’m very confident with the strategies that I teach and feel very authentic and good about selling because I know they work for people.
Speaker 1:
Okay, all right, so that was the one where people still request it, but you’re not going to come out with it again. But maybe you’re like, could I, should I have?
Speaker 2:
Oh yeah, and you know I might recreate it in the future. You know it’s been years now since I retired that course and especially since I created the first version of it, and so at this point it wouldn’t be a re-record. If I created it, it would be rebirthing it. You know brand new. I wouldn’t, even probably go back and look at the old course. I would just create a course about the same topic, probably with the same name, yeah, but I wouldn’t rerecord.
Speaker 1:
And then you also asked about a course that I was happy to get rid of.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, that one’s a little bit harder. I mean to some degree that that same one I was just talking about, that’s a great example. I was happy to get rid of it because I didn’t feel amazing about selling it, and that’s probably been the case with maybe not quite any products that I’ve retired, because there have been a few that got retired for some other reason, I guess. But for the ones that come to mind that I was happy to get rid of, it was because while I knew the strategy had worked for me, I had not tested it enough and so I didn’t feel great about continuing to sell it, and so I was happy to retire it and not kind of have that liability and I don’t mean a legal liability, but kind of more like a moral liability, if that makes sense of like worrying that. You know, maybe I’m teaching something that worked for me but won’t work for everyone.
Speaker 1:
I mean, we want to bring a level of excellence to the courses that we have, because I absolutely believe that we were given our gifts and desires and passions to help other people and serve them with excellence. And so if we can’t do that, then, yeah, it is kind of a moral obligation to either shore up the thing or look at some different way to serve folks. For sure.
Speaker 1:
So, seven years on, into your current business, half a million dollars in revenue a year, which congrats. That’s quite the nice business revenue. When was the point where the going got tough and you almost gave it all up?
Speaker 2:
When was the point that it wasn’t? I mean seriously there have been a few periods of time when it wasn’t, but for the most part I would say it’s always been tough and at the same time, like always, in certain ways, easy, if that can make any sense.
Speaker 1:
Like so I remember it in the beginning, make it make sense.
Speaker 2:
I’ll try. I remember in the beginning, those first, probably two. Well, I’ll first say the first year or two I wasn’t making any money, right. That’s tough, you know. You’re working, working, working and it’s like how do I get this thing to make money, how do I get people to pay attention and, to, you know, be interested in what I have to offer? So that was really tough, right.
Speaker 2:
But something that’s easy about that is it’s still just a hobby, so it’s not. You know the toughness of running a business, yet it still is like I hope this works, I hope this works and you’re really like engaged and determined and it can be frustrating, but you have a lot of like motivation because you want to solve the puzzle, Right, and then we get into the okay, now it’s starting to work. But I’m working so much right now because there’s so much I don’t know. So I’m constantly Googling everything, I’m constantly reaching out to people for help and support, I’m creating new products, so it was just like a lot. So that was tough. But something that was easy about that was that the growth was happening. Finally people were buying things. So that was exciting and fun, you know, and there’s lots of growth and it’s all up. Those expressions are confusing it’s all uphill, it’s all downhill. We don’t know which one is the good one and which one is the bad one, but anyway hill.
Speaker 2:
We don’t know which one is the good one, which one is the bad one, but anyway it’s all forward progress in that point, right, you know, sure, this launch might have not been quite as a different launch or something like that, but every normally, every month, you’re making more money than the last month, and certainly every year for those first few years, right. And then I’d say, maybe it got to a place where it kind of wasn’t tough for a little while. You know, we’re coasting uphill in a good way. Right, you’re coasting and things are growing, but you have mastered at least all the basics and so you’re not having to constantly google.
Speaker 1:
That was nice for a little while right, yeah rewind to those first two years that you told me where you felt like it was a hobby but you were not making money. What were you doing to make money then? Like were you still working?
Speaker 2:
Oh, you mean, what was I doing? That was actually making money.
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
So I was running a different business, but it was a local business. So I ran a local music school where we had about 200 students or so and we’d teach like piano and guitar, and I had a bunch of teachers who worked under me and yeah, so that was my day job and my day job was working for myself. But there were things that I didn’t like. You know, I didn’t like that I had to show up there and you know it wasn’t something I could do on my own time at all. Right, and I also didn’t like that liability of running a local business with rent and that sort of thing.
Speaker 1:
Gotcha. Yeah, but you were doing it with two kids at the time I’m trying to do the math. You didn’t say how old your eldest was, but I’m like if you’re expecting number six.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, he was 11. Yeah, so I had two kids. Yeah, I was doing that before I had any kids. I had two kids and then, when I was pregnant with the third was when I sold that business and I went full time with my current business.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, Okay, what a journey.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, kind of feels like my little lifetime sometimes, anyway. So after that, so there was this easy period where it was like I’ve mastered the basics Things are growing, everything is good, this is amazing, you know, like doubling revenue every year, sort of thing, or or better, yeah. And then it got to a point where, of course, you know, for one reason or another, covid might have had something to do with it, when you know, somehow things plateaued, you know, and they weren’t growing.
Speaker 1:
They plateaued For you.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and I don’t mean necessarily when COVID happened, because I know a lot of people said, oh, that’ll be really good for business and for online business and in fact it was.
Speaker 2:
So I don’t mean COVID had something to do with it, like COVID happened and it shut down my business, not like that at all. 2020 was a good year for me. In fact, it was my one of my best years ever Not quite my best year We’ve had a better year since then but yeah, that was when we got up to half a million. And then the next year was the plateau year and we could get into this more, but, in short, I think that there was a lot more competition in the online space then because so many people had gone online. I think that was probably the main thing and the people were also short on money after being locked down, you know, with COVID and not being able to work and that sort of thing, so it was bad for the economy, anyway. So we had a couple of years of a plateau 2021, 2022.
Speaker 2:
And that was hard, because I’m the sort of person and I don’t know, you know what makes me this way exactly but where I tend to just kind of see where things are going, and I don’t know what makes me this way exactly, but where I tend to just kind of see where things are going and I don’t mean I have incredible foresight, but I think about where things are going. You know, if this continues this way, then it will be really good. If this continues this way, it will be really bad. So, when my business was growing, it was like, wow, you know word half a million now and clearly in just a few years we’ll be at multiple millions. And then, as soon as, just as soon as things plateaued even and I don’t mean they were going down, but they plateaued I was like, well, now we’re not growing, so now we’re dying, so now everything is going to be ruined, you know, very soon, basically, and this won’t be sustainable at all. So the thing that was hardest about 21 and 22, and being in that plateau was that was the emotional side of things. You know, I was also on a practical level, working and trying to figure out, you know, how can we break out of this plateau, but mostly it was just really stressful for me.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so yeah, and then 2023, we came out of the plateau. I think that was our best year to date. So so that’s awesome. And we had like to be clear. We’d plateaued it right around that half a million mark. We didn’t really dip below that, but so best year was like 650,000. And then I was like, okay, seems like things are growing. Let’s kind of test the waters scale back. And so last year 24, we tried just going a lot. You know, we were talking earlier about cutting back on different programs and simplifying things and that sort of thing, and so I was like maybe we should just, you know, do fewer launches and sell fewer products. And I’m sure you’ve probably noticed that there are some of the biggest names online. They sell like one course, you know, and they do one huge lunch a year. Like I think the OG of that was probably Marie Forleo with B school, which I know she’s not as much of a main player now, but for years one B school lunch a year and she had multimillion dollar business.
Speaker 2:
You know, and so I was like maybe I’m making things way too hard for myself, maybe I’m doing way too much, and if I just scaled back, then I could do fewer launches. There’d be higher demand for my products, you know, like I’ve got the audience for it, sort of thing. And so I tried that last year and that was hard and easy at the same time, because we did work less and we did have a better like average revenue per launch, if that makes sense. So like our launches on average did bring in more, but not enough more to compensate for the revenue we lost from the launches and promos and things we didn’t do. Um, so that was yeah, so it dipped back down a little bit the revenue did. So that was, you know, challenging, but also a learning experience, right?
Speaker 1:
so now, but hold on a second. You just described a that was, you know, challenging, but also a learning experience. Right so now, but hold on a second. You just described a huge change. Like you, basically, what I’m interpreting on this side of the screen is that you retooled your business because to go to a one like one, one, one one time a year launch. We didn’t do one.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so what we did specifically was we had been launching and this is another discussion, because like why?
Speaker 2:
are you launching if you have evergreen funnels?
Speaker 2:
I like to do both. I found that doing both brings in the most revenue because you get a lot of like energy and hype with the live launches and I personally love the energy of the live launch, but then having the evergreen funnels running in the background it creates this great stability in the business, which is why we’re able to just quote plateau at half a million dollars a year, anyway. But we were doing some sort of promo almost every month of the year, normally about 10 launches or promos a year for the previous several years before that, and to some people that might sound like a lot or exhausting or whatnot, but I’m good at keeping the launches pretty simple and we’ve done it so many times that it’s kind of rinse and repeat in terms of launch strategy and I’ve got a small team that supports me really well, so it’s actually very doable. But what we scaled back to was each of those three products I mentioned, and there’s actually one more that’s kind of a sister product to one of them. Anyway, there’s four products. We did one of them.
Speaker 1:
They’re growing like your family.
Speaker 2:
So, anyway, so it was four launches for the year, but only one for each product, instead of two or three for each product.
Speaker 1:
Okay, all right, all right. I think the listener and me are like super curious. I know this is a pretty standard question that you probably get all the time, but what percentage of your business revenue comes from AdSense for your YouTube channel?
Speaker 2:
Oh, that’s a great question. So that’s definitely something that’s fluctuated throughout the years, obviously, you know, how could it not?
Speaker 1:
Give us a little ask. Give us a little bit of inspiration. Here you know three quarters of a million subscribers well, I mean, first thing, everyone should know.
Speaker 2:
If you don’t realize this already, it has nothing to do with how many subscribers do you have, and everything to do, literally everything to do with how many views you get on your videos each month, and then we want it the vanity metric.
Speaker 2:
And also depending on the niche you’re in. So what you talk about in your videos, it greatly affects your AdSense rates. So how much you get paid for every click that someone does on an ad on your videos. So of course I started a zero. It took me about well, in the first year I got 55,000 subscribers and about nine months into that year I got 55,000 subscribers and about nine months into that year I don’t know exactly how many subscribers that was it was probably like around 30,000 or so, 25,000. It was growing quite exponentially at that point. Anyway, so about 25,000 subscribers nine months in. That was when I was earning a couple thousand dollars a month from AdSense, was when I was earning a couple thousand dollars a month from AdSense and I was able to. That was a big part of why I was able to sell my other business and go full time with this business was because I had that stability of income. You know, before I even had any evergreen funnel set up. So that was really cool and it kept growing from there very substantially.
Speaker 2:
Now something that’s interesting is that, like what was fueling my exponential subscriber growth with my videos was that I, my videos, were like popping off. I had a lot of videos that were going viral to at least a small extent. So I don’t mean millions of views, but certainly, you know, for my small channel, hundreds of thousands of views was going viral and I would have a video, probably about once a month, that would take off like that and get a couple hundred thousand, even though I only had 25,000 subscribers, and so that was fueling subscriber growth and it was also fueling that revenue, adsense revenue. So you could look at that channel, you know, or that point in time, 25,000 subscribers and earning, you know, maybe $1,500, $2,000 a month and not too long later, having maybe 150,000 subscribers and earning 5,000 plus dollars in ad revenue. Okay, but what might surprise people and the reason that I’m pointing out that it has everything to do with the views and nothing to do with the subscribers is that today my channel gets a similar number of views as it got back then.
Speaker 2:
Okay, because I get views from my subscribers and I get views from search and suggested, but my videos don’t pop off the same way they used to, and that’s okay. You know, we go through these different cycles and phases in business and can’t expect to be just like famous and going viral every day, right, anyway? And so my channel brings in a similar amount of revenue today, you know it can vary anywhere between 2000 up to about $7,000 in a month, and it just depends on whether or not there is a video that went viral that month or how many videos I have that are currently going viral because or currently at least, continuing to rack up what I’ve called maybe like evergreen views. So I normally have like a few older videos that are always getting views and then one of them will drop off and another one will pick up.
Speaker 2:
And just depending on how many of them are doing really well like that, we’ll make the difference between 2,000 all the way up to 7,000. But yeah, so my YouTube revenue has. While it has grown and fluctuated over time, it’s been surprisingly consistent, from the point of a small channel 25,000 subscribers all the way up to a big channel 700,000 plus subscribers.
Speaker 1:
You seem like a lady who has a good grasp on the metrics in your business. Would that statement be accurate?
Speaker 2:
Yes, at least in a big picture sense. You know I can speak in generalities and I know I do think a lot about the metrics. I’m not very much like a details person and or very good at staying organized, so I’ve got people in my business who help me with that. You know. Help me track everything and keep track of it, right?
Speaker 1:
Gotcha, I’m, it just occurred to me. Do you have a metric, like for nowadays, given that your funnels, the leads in your funnels, are people who watch your YouTube videos and then eventually opt in? Do you have a metric, like an estimated metric, about how much a video is worth to you, apart from adsense, because it’s your videos, yeah you provide the leads right so yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:
So of course it depends on the video, because some videos bring in a lot more leads than others. For example, my like classic sort of case study of a video that was like just a perfect case study, if you will, of bringing in leads was I did this video one time about and not one time actually. I repeated it a couple of times because it worked so well. How?
Speaker 2:
to write a business plan and I put even on the thumbnail it said plus free template OK, and so in this video I’m filling out the business plan and I’m talking through how to do it and they can click the link in the description to download a cop you know a copy of this business plan template and use it for themselves. And that video it had about a 13 conversion rate, meaning that 13 of the people who watched the video and I don’t mean watched it all the way through, I mean who, like, clicked on it and watched more than three seconds I’ve had 13 of those people went on to sign up for my email list and it was a quite popular video. We got a couple hundred thousand views. So, yeah, I added thousands of people to my email list with that one video and of course, you know, a bunch of those people turned into customers. So, like I know that that video was worth at least tens of thousands of dollars to me, that one video.
Speaker 2:
And then I had another video. You know you’re asking about how much a video is worth to me, so I’m telling you about a couple high points, right? Another high point would be I generally have not done sponsorships. You know where companies pay you to advertise in your videos. But in 2023, I did. I decided to try it out for a year, see how it went, see how much it brought in and whatnot.
Speaker 2:
And 2023 was our highest grossing year, so there, was some good about it, right, but ultimately I decided to, at least for now, not do it anymore because I didn’t enjoy it very much and kind of going back to like the joy that comes from being authentic and really believing in what you are selling and that sort of thing. And of course, you know any respectable if you will content creator is going to make sure that they are only promoting a product that they believe in. But still, when it’s not your own product, most of the time you can’t believe in it as much as you would believe in a product that you created.
Speaker 2:
You know, and there’s always this kind of conflict of interest between the product that would pay you the most might not be the product that you love the most. So even if the product that would pay you the most you know that you feel good about is a good product, maybe it’s not the thing that you would like to tell people is the best thing, right? So it’s just a lot of gray area that I didn’t love and also a lot of work working with sponsors. There’s a lot of back and forth communication and definitely some just frustration that comes along with it. You know where sometimes they’re not happy with the video you made, and it’s like I put all this time and effort into this video but they are not happy with it, or that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:
So for the most part, I would say it’s a great amount of revenue per hour, but I wasn’t. It didn’t feel like a great amount of revenue for the amount of like emotion, like the emotional labor that went into it or the frustration that went into it and that sort of thing.
Speaker 1:
Great revenue per hour, but the amount of life energy you had to invest into those hours was much higher than.
Speaker 2:
Exactly, yeah, yeah, but great revenue per hour. It really was great revenue per hour, anyhow. So I had this video, actually a couple of videos that I did with a sponsor, and I think I won’t name them just because yeah, anyway, but you probably shouldn’t name them.
Speaker 1:
It’s probably violating some contract. Yeah, I don’t know. It’s probably fine. But anyway.
Speaker 2:
So they paid me first of all a very good rate for that sponsorship because I was not sure I wanted to do it. And so they emailed me about doing a sponsorship and I was like, well, I could, like I didn’t have a moral objection to it or anything you know, but it was like I’m not really that excited about this, so I’ll just like name a price, you know. And I named a way higher price than I normally did and I was like, if they want to do it for this price, it’s worth it, but I’m sure they won’t want to.
Speaker 2:
And they emailed me back and they said yes, and I was very surprised and you might think well, Gillian, you should just normally ask for more. But this wasn’t my first sponsorship by any means, and plenty of other people had said no to much lower rates than that. So you know anyway, but they happen to say yes to this much higher rate. So I said yes to that. So immediately you know this video is going to earn me X number of thousand dollars. That’s good. So I make the video and they agreed and this is very unusual for a sponsorship but they agreed to also pay me affiliate commissions on the product sales from this video. Very unusual, Normally companies do one or the other anyway.
Speaker 2:
But they said affiliate commissions. I was commissions, I was like, okay, great, but I didn’t expect it to amount to very much. It ended up amounting to just even in the first I don’t know, three, three to six months, twenty thousand dollars of affiliate commissions on top of the amount they’d pay me as a sponsorship. And I was like and that video also was pretty popular, so I also got several thousand dollars of ad revenue, AdSense revenue from it as well. So it was a very lucrative video and so of course I was like sure we can do this again. So we did a couple more and they weren’t quite as profitable as that very first one, but still brought in thousands of dollars.
Speaker 2:
So, that’s what a video that, like, you’re strategic about your kind of, your sales strategy. Behind it you know what you’re going to sell, what the, what the opt-in offer, the free offer, is, and how you’re going to funnel those people into a paid sale. And then the video pops off. That’s what that can do, right, tens of thousands of dollars. And then, on the flip side, I have videos that I am sure have earned me $0 because they didn’t get enough views, that they maybe I shouldn’t say $0, maybe a couple hundred dollars maybe. But if you have a video that doesn’t get very many views, then it’s going to result in a very small amount of ad revenue. We’re talking tens of dollars, maybe a couple hundreds, depending on how many views you get exactly. But especially if it happens to be low CPM, so low cost per click, you get on those ads and you don’t get very many views. And then if I’m not very strategic about my product strategy or my monetization strategy just doesn’t pan out maybe I tried to be strategic, but it was a poor strategy, right, then I might only get that ad revenue.
Speaker 2:
And it’s not like the odd video that that’s happened to. It’s happened to dozens and dozens of videos. So I would say the average video brings in a few thousand dollars into my business because we will either make one big sale for our high ticket mastermind or we’ll make several sales of one of our lower ticket products. So yeah, a couple $3,000 or so, and sorry, that’s not the great metric you were looking for, but I hope that that gives everyone an idea of kind of what’s possible. You know, if you have a video that gets a few thousand views, that’s what’s possible. You know is a few thousand dollars if you are strategic about your monetization, and it can be worth tens of thousands, you know, up to like a hundred thousand dollars or possibly more, you know, just depending on how high the views go, and it can also be worth practically nothing okay, whenever we record the next episode which I guess is not going to happen right now not today, but but when we do we are going well.
Speaker 1:
I am going to happen right now Not today, but when we do we are going well. I am going to ask you specifically about YouTube why YouTube? Why you would say it’s worth it for the online course creator, and then diving straight into just how YouTube brings leads into your automated sales funnels. And I would love to go further, as in like, this is the first step and this is the next touch point, and this is the first time that somebody gets an offer to buy something, basically kind of like a breakdown of a YouTube powered funnel.
Speaker 1:
But, before that, right now, where can the listener go to learn from you more and find that first step into your funnel, so that it makes great sense to them as you kind of get behind the scenes on how that funnel works?
Speaker 2:
For sure, okay, so are you looking for that specific resource?
Speaker 1:
Sure.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, okay, so I’m pretty easy to find. In general I have a relatively unique name Gillian Perkins. If you Google me, if you go to GillianPerkinscom, if you search Gillian Perkins on YouTube, you will find me. Like I said, I’m not really on social media, so it’s my website, it’s YouTube, that’s where you will find me. And then, as far as a couple specific resources go, you mentioned, I host a podcast called Work Less, earn More. So that’s another place you can find me. And right now, you know listener is listening to podcast, right, so you might go in your podcast player and just search Work Less, earn More.
Speaker 2:
But I also have this other podcast that is just this limited podcast series. It’s a 10 episode podcast, so very consumable, and it’s called the 100K Method or the 100K Method. Okay, if you search for my name, gillian Perkins, you’ll probably find both of them. But anyway, the 100k method it teaches my funnel strategy for how we build 100k funnels is what we call them. So funnels that can bring in $10,000 plus a month or about $100,000 a year, and we teach in that.
Speaker 2:
Well, in the program that goes along with that podcast, we teach not only how to structure your sales funnel but also that very important question of how do you fuel it with leads, because you can have the most strategic, powerful funnel in the world, but if you have no leads coming into it, it’s still not going to make you any money, as I know you well know as a Facebook ads manager, right? So we get into that part as well. First we build, well, first we test your product offer and we make sure we know how to sell it effectively right, because we got to have the messaging right and everything. Then we build this strategic funnel for it and then we double down on what I call evergreen lead generation systems. So things like creating evergreen content that can just live there on the internet and continually bring new leads into your business, because that’s where the income really gets passive right.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, nice, that’s called the 100K method, right.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, that’s right. 10 episode podcast.
Speaker 1:
Okay, I’m going to link that up in the show notes below and thank you for sharing kind of what has gone into bringing your business to this point and I can’t wait until the next time we get to talk, for the next episode where we get to look behind the scenes on that funnel that’s powered by YouTube.
Speaker 2:
For sure. Yeah, this was really fun. I feel like we scratched the surface. We just kind of told like the story and gave people perspective. This time, but next time I’m excited to get really tactical about how yeah, like you’re saying how funnels like this work. So I’m looking forward to that.
Speaker 1:
Well, right on. Thank you very much and, dear listener, until the next time that you see me or hear from me, take care, be blessed, and I’ll see you in the next one. Goodbye.
