HARSH Business Advice for Content Creators. As insane as it sounds you want about 5-7 income sources… And ideally no one income source should be more than 15-25% or it is holding your life hostage. That would be real diversification. Don’t SPEND more than 20-35% a month back into business operations. If you want to take a BIG Swing or throw money at a “banger video” it should come out of profit reserves, not cash flow. You want to operate on 20-35% of incoming cash, set aside 30% for taxes… This leaves 35-50% profit… you can now put away reserves for the business and pay yourself the rest to live comfortably As for your income sources: - Platform Revenue (Ad Revenue multiple platforms) - Sponsorship (3-5 recurring sponsors) - Affiliate Links (built into brand deals or in place of) - UGC - (great source of cash flow) - Product Sales and Merch (great source of cash flow) - Memberships/Subscriptions (strong monthly recurring revenue baseline) - Donations/Fan Funding (great for investing back into content) Most creators are not prioritizing growing these revenue streams enough individually and rely on inconsistent Ad Revenue, Sporadic Sponsorship… and Donations that Dwindle in a Recession. You need to be filling your pipeline with UGC opportunities often as possible… Promoting your products regularly (not when you feel like it)… And commit to selling 30-50% of your inventory per year of long form videos to sponsors and fill that pipeline as well. You also need to be building towards 100/500/1000 memberships for solid and sustained recurring revenue, Live stream 1-2 times a month (minimum) on a platform where donations exist so that your audience and directly support you and you can go deeper with them. Don’t ignore the value of Short Form content out of stubbornness… if you don’t want it to interfere with the feed or aesthetic or your main YouTube channel, run a clips channel and clip your live streams or make original short form there. Ideally you publish short form and monetize the other social media platforms while growing brand awareness. Subscriber growth may favor a quality over quantity approach and your peers may praise you for it… But from a pure business sense if you know deep down you’re not going to be a 1M-10M subscriber channel, you should from a CASH perspective be making 100-150 long form videos a year not counting live streaming. This would let you work with 3-5 consistent brand partners, or put another way… you can sell 30-75Ad Reads if you do… If you sell 30-75 Ad reads at $1500-$5000 … You would be earning $45,000-$375,000 Some creators sell 2x Ad Reads Per Video… so actually your earning potential on sponsors could be $90,000-$700,000 without you having to be a mega creator getting millions of views per upload. You’d just have to willing to have to some immature people say mean things on the intent and call you a sell out for not working a 9-5 job you hate as much as they do… But you’d be able to change your life and the life your family by treating content like a business, and not a hobby or art project or venting session.