Glory Borgeson

Glory Borgeson is a consultant, coach, author, and marketer. She has discovered how to make money part-time by producing helpful Youtube videos, selling books on Amazon, and selling How-To courses on Udemy.

On March 2, 2016, we had the opportunity to interview Glory on Skype and she was gracious enough to share her knowledge and strategies that help her produce a nice income on the side while continuing to work full-time.

Feel free to follow along with the transcript below as you listen.

Tell us about your background?

Sure, I’m from the Chicago area; I lived here all my life except when I was in college.

And actually my background going way back, I majored in accounting, double major in accounting and business in school and started out as accountant.

From there I got into software, from software I got into doing this role that’s between the users on one end and the technical people on the other end.

And I also experienced workplace bullying and I left the job in the mid-90’s and had a horrible boss who I didn’t expect him to be my boss. He wasn’t part of the deal in the interview and he was promoted right as I was hired.

So, I did my own consulting for 15 years and I was on a lot of software type projects, filling the role between users and the technical folks and getting the spirit teams to work together and all those kind of things. From there, I just had an interest in making money on my own.

I also got trained in doing coaching. So, I love coaching small business owners and I like coaching executives who are in the first two years of their new position. Those are my favorite people to coach.

So, I wrote a book for business owners in 2008 called “Catapult your Business to New Heights” and that’s you know so much has changed in Amazon since 2008 and it’s, you know, only been 8 years and they’ve just changed so much. They changed publishing a lot.

So, that book came out in paperback and in kindle.

Then I started writing a book on workplace bullying, but in the mean time, I wanted to speak to college students about them being smarter about their job search because I felt like they were putting it off to the last minute and not realizing that they are less likely to get a job by just sitting in front of the computer.

[They were] more likely they get a job through someone they knew like their parent’s friends. So, I wrote a book called Brand Yourself! For College Students on how to help.

Wait I got to look it up in the Amazon. [laughs]  “Brand Yourself! for College Students: How To Use Personal Branding to Get the Job You Want!”

And I speak at colleges and everybody gets a book, and I love speaking to college students, so if they come to my event that means they really want to know, “What can I can start doing now?”

And then the workplace bullying book came out last spring. I’ve had some interest in some people working with me on that bringing me in to do a seminar training on the subject, but so many HR people are afraid of it – which is really too bad.

Cause if they’re afraid of it, they probably need it to help people figure out what bullying is and what can be done and then I have a second training that I can do for managers just about how they are leading and how they are motivating people and how they can get the best productivity and engagement out of their people and not become the bully in the meantime.

How did you become a writer?

I had experience doing technical writing, so once I got involved in software and software projects, I was also – if I was doing training or connected in the training piece, I was also doing a lot of writing, but it was for users and it was steps.

You know: Step 1, step 2, step3, step4 with screenshots, so it wasn’t like writing a book, but it still had to be a good writing and I was often writing for an audience for whom English is the second language.

That was my experience writing, so I’ve probably written thousands and thousands of pages for different corporate companies that are for the users for some kind of system.

So, that was my extent of writing.

So, when I wrote the first book, I did use an editor. In fact I’ve used an editor for all of my longer books just because they’re so much better at reading something and they won’t be like your friend or your family.

[They’re] taking it apart, making it better and then at the end, of course, good proof reading.

But getting the subject flowing correctly and then the grammar and then the proof reading to make sure the books are actually good.

There are so many books out in Amazon today that are self-published that did not have an editor, much less a proof reader go through them and they are terrible.

If you ever read any, even if they’re free, you’re like “Oh, gosh it wasn’t even worth free.”

How did you get started earning money on Youtube?

Yeah, I am what I call an accidental YouTuber.

So, first I had a personal channel that I still have and there were videos of family parties and videos of the dog.

Then one day I – like you told me you were looking for a video showing you how to unclog your garbage disposal drain.

I moved in to a house where the former owner had put in low flush toilets and I couldn’t work the plunger well enough, so I bought myself an auger. It was $15 over at the hardware store and I called it a snake.

And I looked on YouTube and had the hardest time following people. It was all men teaching how to use them, but they were assuming too much: that I was stronger than I am and I knew what they’re talking about.

So, finally I played with it and played with it and finally figured out how to use it which meant I now knew a better way to teach it, so I created a video put it up there and suddenly it went – I’ll call it viral just because as of today it has over 700,000 views – and if you just Google, “How to snake a toilet,” in Google not even in YouTube, it comes right up.

And a lot of women have really appreciated it because it really helps them understand how to use the auger appropriately without even needing a lot of strength.

So, then at the same time, I created a bunch of videos that were going on a DVD and it wasn’t going well and the videos were all about how to make handmade bows and gift packages that look great and gift baskets and things like that and I thought “You know what, I’m just going to start another year to YouTube channel and put them up there.”

And I did that. At the same time, the toilet video was going like crazy  and I thought, “Gosh, I should put that video on here, too.”

So, I put that video (YouTube doesn’t know), but it’s the same video in two different places. I just called it something else.

And then I thought, “Well, you know I like to cook, why don’t I just video those, so pretty soon my channel – I [wanted] to call it “How To Do Stuff” but somebody had taken that, so I put some other words on the end.

I had to create playlists just because it was so divergent just everything that I have on there falls into so many different categories.

I started recently, maybe a year ago, doing skin care and make up videos just because in my age category there aren’t a whole lot of women doing it. Most of the women doing that are in their 20’s and 30’s and even in their 40’s.

So, that was an interesting thing to try.

And then I started having more and more people saying to me, “How do you make money on YouTube?” And I thought, “You know I don’t have time to tell these people, so I’m just going to create a course on udemy.com that shows people how to do it.

Then I put together a few videos that are on my main channel right now in a playlist called “Make Money on YouTube,” and at the end of those in the description box I should say there’s a link to the course on Udemy that offers a significant discount to the course.

How much are you making from you Udemy courses?

So, people are starting to find that and hindsight being perfect sight, in the Udemy course I probably should have broken that up to 2 different courses one that’s very much for a beginner, taking them through getting it monetized.

And then a second course from once you have it monetized, now how do you do all the work to get more subscribers, get more views, get more watch times (now they pay on watch time), but it’s all one big course, so…..

Each of the videos is anywhere from 2 minutes to 10 minutes, so they can watch a little bit at a time, but it is 80 lectures. But it’s how I learned.

And it’s, “How do you start a channel without spending a ton of money on a camera and on other equipment,” and it is really possible.

The way they make iphones today and ipods, they take pretty good videos. I don’t have an iphone myself, but I show what I started out with.

And then I actually use my miles on my mileage plus account to get a new camera, because I had a lot of miles.

So, I didn’t even spend money to do that, but I wanted to show people how I was able to get my three channels.

Actually I have a business channel, too that I haven’t done much with, but … at the point I had a lot of videos on the main channel, I thought, “Okay now it’s time to go in there and request that they be monetized.

And then I was reading up on what people were writing about their experience asking YouTube to monetize their channel and a lot of them were being turned down or being told, “Well, not now, reapply in about 5 months,” and I thought, “Gee, I wonder what’s that about.”

Well, I applied, you put it in a request through your channel and it was approved for monetization within a day.

And I thought, “Ha, let me try it on another channel!”

So I put in a request for the second channel and that was approved and then I thought, “Well, how about my personal channel – Yeah, they’re all family parties and doggy videos – but that’s where one of the toilet videos was getting the most attention and being easily found in Google.”

So, I requested that one to be monetized and sure enough, within a day it was monetized and I don’t even have that many subscribers on that one.

So, I think I figured out why and I put that in the course and part of the reason was is that I already had an AdSense account and I already had a website and – Are you familiar with how AdSense works or should I say how it works?

Please explain how Google Adsense works and how to make money from it.

Okay, yeah so even before, I don’t remember what year Google bought YouTube.

They used their AdSense program so if somebody had their website or blog, you could get an AdSense account for free and pull in an ad code and then put that ad code on to your website.

So you could have a banner, you could have the sidebar ads and then the people come to the website and click the ad you share the revenue.

Well, that’s how Google pays their YouTube channel creators – through an AdSense account.

Well, I already had that,  so it’s possible that because I already had that account and when I applied for monetization on the first YouTube channel,  I told them, “Here is my AdSense account.”

In other words, some people applied for monetization, they don’t have the AdSense accounts yet, so perhaps that’s why they approved it so quickly.

I don’t know but I’ve been making money on YouTube ever since that time.

It’s easy. It’s worldwide. People watch these things 24 hours a day. It’s a great way for people to make money and create a channel doing whatever they’re interested in.

How did you setup your Youtube videos to make money?

On each video after I – cause there’s a channel, overall channel setting – so that’s set that every video is going to be monetized.

So if I have some video and it’s got some copyrighted thing, I’ll just turn off monetization, but within that, I want to tell you exactly what its called and so I’m clicking in something here cause they change it.

Every 6 months or so they change these things so if I go in. when the video is in edit mode, there’s below the video there’s actually a tab called monetization.

So, besides the on/off switch, there’s check boxes for overlay ads. Those are those little ads that appear in a rectangle toward the bottom.

There is skippable video ads so I always checked that. If the videos are over 10 minutes then I also have a choice to put in a second ad at the end of the video or somewhere in the middle.

Now, if you ever watch a video and a commercial type ad pops up and it’s not skippable, have you ever noticed that?

It doesn’t pop up? Well, we as a channel creator – we don’t have a choice of skippable or not skippable – they are just called skippable.

So, I think that when those come up while we were watching a video and it’s not skippable, I think that advertiser is paying more money for that.

There’s no standard amount that an ad delivers to YouTube and then splits with the channel creator. It’s kind of fuzzy how much that is.

It is based more on views, how they share their ad revenue but the other thing they are looking at is who watches these videos.

When you look at the analytics and look at the demographics; is it heavily women between the ages 16 and 25 or is more spread out?

Mine is more spread out. My topics and my genders are more spread out.

One of my channels is 60% female and 40% male watching it and I’ve had a much higher ratio of people between 25 and 35 watching my videos which kind of surprised me, I thought it would skew older.

I think I am making less than someone else. Say its someone who’s 20 years old and all of her videos are fashion, makeup, and hair; everybody watching her videos is basically in her age category and female.

It’s easier for an advertiser to say, well that’s my product so I’ll pay more for that person’s video watch time than say mine. That’s what I’ve read anyway, about how it works.

So somebody else who has a channel with the same amount of watch time and views in a month that I do could be making more than I am or less than I am depending on what the demographic is, who watches their videos and what their videos are about.

How much are you earning from your Youtube videos?

My experience is that typically I’m making somewhere between 200 and 700 per month right now and I have just under 5,000 subscribers.

Do you have statistics for your videos?

I do and everybody who has a channel and post videos does.

It’s all in the analytics section and you could go in there and you can look by video.

You can see what videos are really doing well.

The watch time reports are really interesting as well as the audience retention because you can see how long people tend to watch a certain video.

For me, it has motivated me to make shorter videos. If the video is 8 minutes long they’re dropping off at around 4-5 minutes.

So yeah, “How to Unclog the Garbage Disposal,” the average view is 4 minutes and 12 seconds. So, I’d rather do more shorter videos than a few long ones.

Do you have a feel for what makes particular Youtube video popular?

You know what the interesting thing is, for some of these things there is no rhyme or reason why one gets more views than the other.

My most viewed, on my main channel is “How to Make a Double Ribbon Bow”.

Well, I’ve got 2 videos on my channel on how to make a double ribbon bow and the title is slightly different, but why someone can find one on Google itself and not the other one doesn’t make any sense to me.

Pretty much their description and their tags are all the same. It’s kind of interesting on why that is.

When did you launch your Youtube channel and start making videos?

2012, I believe.

How often do you make a new video?

I haven’t been as disciplined as some people who have channels and upload a video every Friday.

I’ll be doing something and think, I should record this because otherwise the next time I do this it’s going to be months from now.Most of the women doing the skincare and makeup tend to be a lot more disciplined with the schedule.

They’ll even mention on their channel that they upload videos every Wednesday and Friday. I upload videos whenever I feel like it so probably it isn’t the best strategy.

Sometimes I’m just doing stuff and I realize I have the, how to do stuff channel, I got to show how to do whatever I’m doing here.

How are you promoting your book sales on Amazon?

I haven’t done a whole lot other than writing books and put them up there, unfortunately.

Amazon has a  program through the kindle site and we call it, we authors and publishers call it KDP and that stands for Kindle Direct Publishing.  And they have a program within that called Kindle Select which we can enroll our books in by just clicking a check box and when we do that, first of all, we agree that that eBook (whether in Kindle or PDF or whatever form), they will not be available for sale anywhere else, not even on our website.

We can sell the paperback anywhere, but not the eBook. Once we’re in Select, two things can happen: First of all, it can go into the Kindle Lending Library and 2 groups of customers can access and borrow books from Amazon. One is Prime Members and the second is the people who enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. You probably heard Kindle Unlimited, the 9.95 per month [program].

There’s a pot of money that every month they split among all the people who’s books are enrolled in KDP Select based on how many times your – well you used to be how many times your book has borrowed and now they switched it to page views which means a certain segment of people are very happy – and made a certain segment of authors unhappy depending on whether they tend to write short books or long books.

A lot of times they’ll borrow a long book and only read some of it and go, “Eh, I ran out of time. It’s time for the book to go back.”

And then the other thing that we can do with the book that is enrolled in Kindle Select – we can enroll it in certain promotions. So, one of the promotions they have is during a certain time frame, we can do up to five days free and what happens when you allow your kindle book to be free for these five days is that it escalates itself onto the best seller list if you’re lucky.

So, I had not done this at all until just this last Saturday. I put my very first book, “Catapult your Business to New Heights” and enrolled it in the program and I followed two people, one was the course that I took to Udemy and one was in eBook that I bought.

The first guy, he’s done almost exclusively non-fiction, the second one was from a woman whose written all fiction and their experiences with enrolling their book in KDP Select and then these doing free promotion. So, because the thought is, “Why would you let your book be free?” A lot of them were successful fiction writers who were independent publishers, they got their eBooks on iBooks and Google books and all these other places. Well then you cant be in Kindle Select.

So this fiction writer, she decided to take her books off of  all those other outlets put them in Select and run free promotional one book and she was just shocked at what happened because what happens is it makes the book more visible so when your free promotion is over  and its back on paid, people can easily find that book and plus she had like seven fiction books so once people download their free book, oh I really like this author’s work so let me check and she start making tons of money.

So my book, today’s the last day that Catapult is free so be a good day and Saturday it went free, I took a screenshot of it before  and because my pc rebooted  let me just open it now tell you where it was before the promo started so before the promo started the book is in two what we call genres or categories within Amazon.

The small business category and the entrepreneurship category so before I started this it was number like 5800 in small business and 12500 in entrepreneurship  and Saturday morning is when Amazon kicked this off and by 9:30 it was number 32 in small business and 75 in entrepreneurship  and by let’s see (I had to tell you this because it is just so much fun) by 1:30 in the afternoon it as number 1 in small business which it remains no.1 in small business and the Kindle free book.

So when you’re looking at a book, actually I did a little video on this and I uploaded that  2 days ago coz I thought you know before I knew how to  do this I didn’t know how to find these  list. So when you’re looking at a book at a category and your scroll down to the product detail section  and at the end of the Product Detail Section, there’s something called Amazon Best Sellers Rank  and then they have the rank overall in Kindle Store free for me because it’s in the free promo then  under that it will have the categories that’s its in  and the number and then you can click that  so if you click small business, it opens up the small business list and defaults  to the paid  but right next to it the paid  is a toggle for free, and if you click free it will show you all  the books that for free right now at that moment and it’s the top 100.

And my book has been no.1 ever since the promo started and then the entrepreneurship its wavered between 1 and 7 maybe today it was 8 and at one point I took the screenshot I was so excited so I decided so hopefully something will happen from this and it will help it be more visible. The other thing that will happen and is when someone’s looking at the book in a similar genre after the book is at paid which will be tomorrow and you know how when you’re looking at the book and then you scroll down and then they’ll say the customer bought these books so my book will have them higher into the beam in that section.

No one will know that they bought it for free during the five day promo but it’ll just hopefully it will bring it up more often so this has been interesting experience. I’ll put my other books  to the five day free promo  is well and so I don’t know make much money from my books  right now just because people  you know if you can’t find them  with the simple search.

When I was writing, the book about workplace bullying and there was a point that I was looking for endorsements, I came to Amazon, I typed in the topic and I was looking for other authors.

Authors more often endorse each other’s books and you know I found what I found and then the book came out. I sometimes if I see an article online that’s on workplace bullying  there’s a place where I can write a comment and a woman reach out to me because she also wrote a book in a similar topic that came out 2 years  before mine.

But when I searched before when I was looking for endorsements, her book never came up and it was on almost exactly it was the book workplace bullying  and I thought that was too bad and I  definitely would have reach out to her  to see if she wanted to endorse it.

So, Amazon searches is as good as it is and you don’t know if your book is coming up or not so it doesn’t know it’s  me so probably it doesn’t more often and see if  my book if it comes up  in the first couple of pages and each of my topics  so maybe by doing these promos, it will help Amazon  just a fact that it hit number 1  or at least in the top 20 maybe they’ll make it, their algorithms will make it come up more often  and just do searches  on the topic. I can cross my fingers.

Are you planning to write more books?

I am optimistic about the future so I’ve got more than just those so I’ve got I had to look myself up in the Amazon these days coz I ended up coming up in the short books Catapult and Brand Yourselves a and bullies book are all full length books  and those are on paperback. But then I also decided to write about my diet and health just because in my family we are what we eat in my family and we’ve had a lot of early disease and early duff and all those kinds of things.

So I came up with the book on “How I Change my Diet and Lost Weight and Gained Health  and then a second book called “20 Fat Triggers: How to Stop Them and Take Back your Health” and those are in kindle and they are shorter, they’re cheaper not as expensive and then when I was coming out with a course in Udemy.

I thought,”Oh okay, the course is long. Maybe some people just want to dip their toe in to find out on how they can make money from their videos in YouTube.” So, I wrote a kindle book called “You can make money from YouTube” actually it’s got  a longer title and I didn’t put it in the cover.

Probably, “You can Make Money from YouTube! A YouTube Guide for Curious Beginners” and Its 99 cents and at the end, toward at the end of the book there’s a link to the course in Udemy that offers a really nice discount before you’ve taken the course it’s like people find my videos on how to make money on YouTube, there’s also a link to Udemy course and that offers a big discount to take the course.

How much are you making from your Udemy courses?

It’s nothing to write home about right now. I’m trying to think how I made it. It’s just maybe about a hundred dollars or so a month. It’s not much. And the people who are making money in Udemy have multiple courses have similar and a similar topic so people who buy one.

Oh that one was really good, I like that let me buy another one. So thus that’s why I realized, I should have should have created 2 separate YouTube  courses that would have been you know if one was maybe 50  lectures and the other was  35 something like that so 85 all together. People may have been more likely to buy the beginner one for single. Okay I learned all and now I want to learn the other one but Yeah, it is what it is.

So, you’re making about $1,000 per month from your videos, books, and courses?

Yeah about, it can be at the high end.

Is internet marketing all you do for work?

This is part time so I’m actually consulting and doing my coaching work and sometimes I get involved in system implementation type of work as well.

What advice do you have for others interested in trying to make money from Youtube?

If you want to do a YouTube channel, it’s totally possible, it’s not too late and you don’t have to spend a lot of money upfront, what you need to do is study the videos that are in the genre that you want to do and watched the ones that are pretty well done not the people who are making a million dollars a year and you can look that up and go okay who are the top earners in YouTube. They are hiring somebody to do their work but people who have subscribers between a thousand subscribers and a hundred thousand.

They all do in their own and watch what they are doing. If you enjoy their videos you want to sit and watched them all the way through. Why is that? You know what’s the point in quality what are they doing. They probably not saying umm a lot, for example: somehow they’re keeping your attention so watch those and evaluate them then try to mimic so that yours are the best quality you can make with the equipment you have.

Find Glory on Amazon at: http://amazon.com/author/gloryborgeson.