So I was a bit surprised when I had an email this morning saying I had a check for $116 on it’s way to me from Google.  It is payment for the ads that run on some of my videos on YouTube.

I know I had monetization turned on for my YouTube account ages ago but to be honest I never thought much about it since I have never seen a single penny up until this point.  Well evidently part of that is because it seems they only will start paying out once you hit $100 in revenue.  Well I just passed that number last month.  It took me something like 4 years to make my first 100 bucks.

However a quick look at my account showed that my monthly income has been accelerating at a rapid pace.  I am now making somewhere close to 20 bucks a month.

I posted this on Facebook and several of my bar buddies asked how they could start making money as well.  Well the first step is you have to get an invite from YouTube to monetize your videos.  This only happens once your the videos on your channel have something like a total of 10,000 views.  (right now I am close to 300,000)

So if you are new to YT you have some work to do, namely putting some content up there that will get you enough views to get the invite.  Once the invite is sent there is a web form you have to fill out to enable your account for monetization.  I did mine a long time ago obviously so I don’t recall the details but it wasn’t hard to do.

Once you do that a couple days later if all goes well you will be notified that your account is now enabled for monetization.  Once that happens your videos will have the option to display ads.  Display ads on a video that takes off and you can have a pretty decent pay day.

There are restrictions on what sort of video you can monetize.  If you have a music track more than likely you can not monetize it. If it has commercial content of any type it will get red flagged as well.

So anyway getting this check made me go back through my videos and turn on monetization on a bunch of them.  I have some older videos that actually have become relatively popular much to my surprise.  That was all missed money opportunities. Did you know over 10,000 people have watched me shave my head?  It’s pretty funny how stupid content can actually generate a lot of views.

Anyway, now that I know the potential is there, I will be trying to monetize whatever I can.  My YouTube library is 300+ videos and counting.  There is a lot of potential there.

The YouTube bar community has COUNTLESS videos out there with a ton of views.  We are all missing out by not monetizing wherever we can.

Today at the gym I was limited on what I could do because of my tweaked left shoulder.  I decided to do two things that didn’t hurt, push ups and air squats.  I alternated between sets of 10 push ups and 10 squats.  It seemed pretty easy early on.  By the time I finished my 300th push up and air squat I was soaked in sweat. It got very tough.

My push up form was real solid with good depth and extension.  With the air squats I went as deep as my creaky knees will allow me to go.  I am sure I will be quite sore tomorrow.

Any ideas that my shoulder is significantly better were dashed when I raised my ass up in pike position, transferring my weight across the shoulder in a different way.  It instantly gave me a nice little stab of pain, sigh….