Why People Over 50 Need to Start a YouTube Channel

If you're 50 or older, I want to discuss starting a YouTube channel. This blog post will be conversational; I may jump from topic to topic. But I want to ensure I get everything you need to consider.

If you've thought about starting a YouTube channel and you're 50 or older, this could be helpful for you. I started my channel when I was over 60 years old.

My YouTube Story

My channel has over 4895 subscribers, and I make a nice retirement side hustle income from a very small channel. This is why I want to encourage older people to consider YouTube as a potential viable side hustle.

The Advantage of Age and Experience

Older people like us have much to offer in this space. Demographically, people in their fifties or sixties only sometimes start a YouTube channel. However, one thing we have that younger people don't have is some life experience that we can share.

Over time, we've developed some skills that can help others. For example, maybe you're a skilled fly fisherman. Maybe you are someone who's been gardening for a long time and has lots of expertise in growing flowers. Maybe you've developed very specific skills in your professional life that could be beneficial to others.

You will have skills and abilities that somebody else may not have. The critical thing is that you can be someone other than the renowned expert in whatever niche you choose. You have to know a little more than the next person, and that's your core audience. Those are the people that you're going to try to help.

My YouTube Philosophy

When I think about my YouTube channel, the main thing is that in every video I make, I ask myself, can I help one person? That's my goal. And then everything else beyond that is gravy.

Why I Chose YouTube

When I decided to start my YouTube channel, it was an experiment. I knew I wanted to make some part-time income after I retired, and I thought, well, I'm really into cycling. I enjoy mountain biking. I'll work at a local bike shop, and I'll do that.

But the more I thought about that, the more I realized I would be on somebody else's schedule and may not have had the days off I wanted. I may miss activities with my grandkids that I want to go on. I just wanted my time to be my own. That's what YouTube offers you: the capability to build either a small business on the side or a more significant one if that's what you want.

My Background and Skills

My background is 34 years of experience working for a large corporation, mainly in the IT space. I was a user experience specialist. I did a lot with digital analytics, so I felt pretty comfortable with technology and that I'd be able to pull off this YouTube thing. But, you don't HAVE to have a ton of technical skills.

The Accessibility of YouTube for People Over 50 Years Old

A lot of people shy away from YouTube because they think it will be difficult to do. I just want to tell you that there are more and more tools that have come out in the last few years that make starting a YouTube channel much easier than it would have been ten years ago.

The Potential of Starting Early

My channel is 18 months old. I wish I had started YouTube when I was 50 years old; I think my income would have been a lot more. I can't guarantee that everybody who starts a YouTube channel is going to make money, but I think the possibilities are there for you to do that with some proper planning.

Choosing Your Niche

If you think about picking a niche, that is something that people would be interested in. When selecting a niche like mine, the critical thing is teaching people how to use software, specifically for blogging, YouTube, and content repurposing. So, it's around social media, those kinds of things.

I talk a lot about SEO optimization, so they're somewhat technical. I was also a technical writer for a long time, spending a lot of my early days writing and doing user documentation. So, I feel comfortable explaining fairly technical things in a simplified manner that people can understand.

Being over 50 Years Old is Not a Barrier

I think that's why people enjoy my tutorials. When we consider the demographics of YouTube, we mainly think of younger people that are engaging with this video content. I want you to remember that age isn't a barrier to getting involved with YouTube. It's a lot of fun. You'll build a community around your channel. You'll start to meet people. You could end up engaging with companies that ask you to do sponsored videos for them.

Opportunities Beyond YouTube

For example, I am skilled in one piece of software people enjoy using for search engine optimization for their blog posts. In a couple of weeks, I will be on a conference call with a company in Poland.

I'll be talking to people all around the world about this piece of software, how to use it, and also talking with their affiliates. I'll be teaching them some tips and tricks to make more sales of this software. This way affiliates can increase their revenue through their channels when they're sharing this software with other people.

Selecting a Profitable YouTube Niche

I want to talk to you first about picking a YouTube niche. You've got to have something that you're going to talk about. It needs to be focused. Although, you do want to pick a topic that would allow you to pivot in different directions if the business climate changed and you needed to do that. The thing to consider is there are "good" YouTube niches and "bad" YouTube niches. Let me elaborate.

I have a friend who rebuilds classic bamboo fly rods. He goes to garage sales, finds old bamboo fly rods, and revitalizes them. Now, that could be a really interesting YouTube niche—revitalizing vintage fishing equipment and showing people how to use it. The problem with a niche like that is going to be tough to monetize.

There are products that he could sell. For example, when he revitalizes a fly rod, he puts a new cork handle on it. He replaced the rod guides and reties the threads on these guides. He adds a new reel seat. However, none of those things are very expensive. So monetizing with affiliate sales wouldn't offer a great way to monetize this type of channel.

Understanding Affiliate Marketing

And when I say affiliate sales, it means you're working with a company, you help sell their product, they give you a kickback. For example, if he was an Amazon affiliate and promoted a certain kind of cork fly rod handle on Amazon.

Well, those fly rod handles are $10 or $15, and he will only get a two or 3% commission. So, even though it's an exciting topic, it won't monetize.

Comparing Niches: Gardening vs. Fly Rod Restoration

Well, if you take somebody in the gardening space, that could be easy to monetize, and you have a ton of things that you could talk about in that garden space that, you know, could run anywhere from $20 to a few hundred dollars.

And that's what I mean when you're thinking about your topic: you want to think about how you will make money from your channel. So, there are some specific ways that you can do this. There are affiliate programs like the one I mentioned; Amazon's probably the easiest to get into. So you talk about products people can find on Amazon, and you get a percentage of that sale.

Monetization Through YouTube Ads

Another way people make money is through YouTube ads. When you watch this particular video, an ad runs in the beginning. There will be ads throughout the video and ads at the end. So, to run YouTube ads, you need to remember that it's going to take a while before that happens because you have to have a thousand subscribers and 4000 watch hours, all within a twelve-month period.

When I started out with my channel, it took me six months to reach 1000 subscribers. Then, it took about eight months to reach 4000 hours of watch time, which allowed me to monetize with ads. I will tell you that ads are probably one of the smallest components of what I make off my channel.

Diversifying Income Streams

I make more money in the affiliate sales area. So, there are software subscriptions, sales, lifetime deals, and that kind of thing. And then, of course, there's always the opportunity for sponsorships. That would mean a company might reach out to you and say, hey, could you review our product? If you do a product review, we'll give you x dollars to do that review. And so sponsorships are attractive, right?

Personal Ethics in Promotions

I have this unwritten rule which has probably cost me, you know, a fair chunk of money that I typically don't promote things that I don't use. So that can be, that can be a little limiting from the standpoint of making money, but I just feel more comfortable talking about things that I actually use.

So when I talk about a piece of software, it's one that I typically use as part of my workflow, whether it's in blogging, YouTube, creating social media, or any content creation.

When I share software, it's worth using rather than something that somebody has contacted me and said, hey, I created this software; share it, and I'll give you a commission. Right. If it's not something that I'd use. Why? Why do I want to tell somebody else they should be using it? And that's the way I feel about things. How you'd handle something like that is entirely up to you.

Creating and Selling Courses

So, another way to make money on YouTube is to sell courses. You're a photographer and sound with a particular photo editing software. Not only could you do tutorials on YouTube, but you could sell tip sheets for that specific piece of software.

Finding Your Unique Angle

The key thing that I want to continue to emphasize about your niche is that you do need to think about it from the standpoint of what you can bring to that niche that's a little different from everybody else.

For instance, I talked about how I mountain bike, so I'm an older mountain biker. So maybe my niche is a YouTube channel on mountain biking for older riders and just talking about all of those topics that older riders face, you know, when do I stop riding my analog mountain bike and get an electric mountain bike to, you know, to help me with climbing those long, steep climbs, that kind of thing.

So you can see where I'm going with this. You just have to think about what you can share that might be a little different from what other people are sharing. That's what's going to grow your audience; that's what's going to get people interested in you. And that's where you would start with niche selection.

Equipment Basics

So, let's talk a little bit about equipment. I'm not going to go too deep into this. I know people are always interested in how much it will cost me to start a YouTube channel. Well, the YouTube platform, of course, is free.

So YouTube gives you an easy-to-use platform for uploading videos, uploading your thumbnails, putting your descriptions in, and all that. That's all baked in. That's easy to do. There are tons of tutorial videos on how to do it.

The critical thing is, what pieces of equipment do I need? Your audio is essential. If you're just going to be sitting and talking to the camera like I am right now, you can expect to pay anywhere from $80 to $250 for this kind of mic. As far as video editing goes, there are lots of tools out there, and quite a few are geared toward beginners.

Video Editing Tools

I use Camtasia to edit my videos, and I use another tool that's associated with Camtasia by this company called Techsmith, called Audiate. I simply do my video. My audio comes up and is transcribed into a document. And in that document, I go through and edit right within the document.

So if I say something where I make a mistake, which I do pretty frequently, I go in and delete that, which gets deleted from my video. So the two sync together. Descript is another tool. If you look up descript and at some of their tutorials, their video editor works very much in the same way.

You do a talking head video like this one. It automatically transcribes everything you say and puts it into this Word document format. You edit it, and it automatically syncs with the video. When you replay the video, all the pieces where mistakes are taken out are included.

The tool that I use, audiate, for example, takes out all the ums, and the ahs takes out all the long pauses. If I were to upload this video without using some of those tools, you'd see longer pauses, which would be excruciating. So, these tools make it a lot easier for you to use. Video editing is the most challenging hurdle to overcome from a technology standpoint.

But again, the tools to do this are much more accessible. And, of course, there are a ton of tutorials to help you work with those kinds of tools as well. Now, what kind of camera do you need? It is an expensive camera. You don't. So I started off this channel, recording my videos with this old iPhone, and I'm cheap. I need the latest iPhone. And I recorded a lot of videos on this at the beginning. Another camera that I use to record videos is this DJI action four.

Camera Options

It's just a little action cam, but it's a great camera that you can put on a little selfie tripod or handle and walk around and do walking and talking, vlogging style videos. And this was about $250, maybe $299. I can't remember now, but it's under 300.

And then, if you want to get a little more sophisticated, there's something that I enjoy using. It's called the DJI Osmo action three. Then you can just get a better webcam than you have built into your laptop. A lot of laptops and their webcams could be better. You can read some reviews, and a few are pretty decent. But I think an iPhone is a great place to start; you just don't have to spend a lot of equipment to do this.

Uploading Schedule and Time Investment

And, like I said, this was an experiment for me when I started my channel. I didn't know how long I was going to do it. I'm surprised when I look at the calendar that I'm heading into my 19th month on this channel and, you know, over 160 videos. So, let's start talking about how much time you will spend. The more you upload, the more the YouTube algorithm seems to like you, meaning at least a couple of videos a week. That's what I do. I try to do two videos a week if I can.

Occasionally, it's one. But you've got to remember that unless you really get viral, where all of your videos are getting tens of thousands of views, it's going to take a while to get your subscribers. So, try to do two videos a week; if you can, try to upload them in the morning. I follow a schedule where I'm either releasing videos on a Monday, Wednesday, and a Friday morning or a Tuesday and a Thursday morning.

I think when you upload makes a difference. I'll upload them ahead of time and schedule them to be released at six in the morning. I just think the main thing is consistency. And so to do a couple of videos a week, typically it's going to take me an hour to prepare a video.

It's going to take me another 45 minutes to shoot the video. It will take me another 45 minutes to an hour to edit the video, maybe a little longer. So you're looking at, if you get good at it, you could do, you know, about 2 hours of video. So that's about 4 hours a week. There's a lot more going on. Of course, you've got to make thumbnails. So, I use Canva to make my thumbnails. It's a good tool for that.

Content Planning

But you do have to create thumbnails for your video. So there's some time there that you have to take a. And then, of course, you really need to think about putting together a content planner. Mine is a simple Google Doc with a long list of video topics that I want to do.

Every time I sit watching TV in the evening, something pops into my head and that might make a good video; I write it down. Now, I don't do videos on everything I think about, but in general, I keep writing down all these ideas because there can be times when it can be tough to come up with new videos ideas. Now in the infancy of your channel, it won't be too tough. You don't have a lot of videos out. But when you're hitting 200 videos, you've got to get a little more creative about finding topics.

And that's why picking a good niche is important, right? You need the niche to be broad enough that, over a few years, you're going to be able to continue to come up with video ideas. And when I think of niches, I always think of being able to pivot because if you're in the technology sector like I am, this changes a lot.

So, I started out talking about blogging. Now, is blogging going to be something that people will continue to do two years from now? I don't know. So I started talking about AI and AI prompts, pivoting around and finding out what people are interested in and what they like. And anytime you can pick a niche where you can teach people, that's a real advantage for you.

Most of my audience would probably be in the older demographic, maybe forties, fifties, or sixties because I talk a little slower, I take my time, and they feel maybe more comfortable learning about software from somebody closer to their own age. So another step in running a YouTube channel will be just your community.

Building a Community

And when I say community, I mean you'll have people that will comment. And so when they comment, it's really good to always try and answer if you can and just say, if somebody says, hey, that was a helpful tutorial, just say, hey, thanks for watching. I appreciate you taking the time to check out my channel. People appreciate that. Now, if your channel gets really big, let

Handling Comments and Criticism

Now, if your channel gets really big, let's say you're at 15 or 20 or 25,000 subscribers, that might be difficult to do, to answer all the comments every time you do a video. But when you are a smaller channel, that's the way you build community, that's the way you build engagement, and I think people really appreciate it. Now are there negative comments? Occasionally there are, but the positive outweighs the negative quite a bit. And so that's never been a real issue for me.

We'll see with this video how many negative comments I get. Who knows? But you know, I just sort of let anything that's negative run off my back. I just keep doing what I'm doing and I'm not too concerned about it.

I try to look at it as constructive criticism because I can always make a video better than the last one, and that's what I try to do if I can. Now, here's the one thing that I will say. Your early videos will be cringe-worthy if you look at them six months later. It just takes time getting used to being in front of a camera. It takes time talking into a camera.

Overcoming Camera Shyness

I still get nervous when I do it. I still make a lot of mistakes when I do it. You'll see some jump cuts here and there. This video where I've just flubbed up a sentence and I have to start all over again. You're going to do that, too. You can't be perfect. I guess if you have a photographic memory, you could now, you could use a teleprompter if you wanted to. And you can get teleprompters and use them with a smartphone if you want to and write out your whole script.

But you got to realize, while that's nice, you can just read off the teleprompter. It is a real skill to reading off a teleprompter and it is a real skill to write a script that doesn't sound like you're just reading something out of a book. I'm just not sure if you're going to make a great connection between yourself and your audience if you go down that path.

I've resisted buying a teleprompter. I bought two and then I never set them up. I just thought, you know, I'm just going to do it this way. I'll just cut out the stuff where I make the mistakes and try to make it more on a conversational level between you and between me. Now, I talked a little bit earlier about honesty, transparency.

Building Trust with Your Audience

I think that's key, that builds a great community. People begin to trust you. They come to you, they ask questions about your topic. They look to you as somebody who has knowledge in an area that where they're still learning. And so because of that, I think there's a responsibility to, you know, share tools, to share software, to share products that you truly feel are useful to your viewers. That's just me.

I could do many more sponsored videos than I do. But I look at the product and I go, you know, I just don't think that's what my audience is looking for.

Or I look at a product and I go, you know, this just isn't a great piece of software. I don't want to share it with other people and have them spend their hard earned money on something that I wouldn't purchase myself. But again, everybody needs to make those kinds of decisions on their own. I just think that you can really damage a channel.

People start to think that you're selling things that you really don't believe in. So that's all I'll say about that. So one more piece of the technology area is lighting. I really think you need to have some space where you can sort of leave stuff set up so you can come in and do your videos.

Setting Up Your Recording Space

Makes it easier on yourself. I have this little tiny home office. I have a couple of little panel lights that are on right now. I have the youtuber led light tube behind me and a few blue lights behind me just to add a little, you know, I guess, ambience to the studio. You don't have to do any of this.

I mean, you can do a lot of shooting of your videos if you just have maybe a window next to you with some nice outside lighting coming in. You don't have to do what I've done. It just happens to be the way I wanted to set up my studio.

Starting Simple

And again, when I first started out, I had a very simple ring light, and that was it. I had none of the led lights behind me, nothing like that. I was using, again, just my smartphone sitting on a little tripod. I mean, it was a very, very simple setup.

I didn't have this microphone. I had a much cheaper microphone, and I was able to get my channel started that way. And truthfully, I wouldn't want anybody to just run out and buy a bunch of expensive gear until they test this for themselves and see if this is something that they want to do longer term.

So my point being, if you get into the channel and you start to see some small successes, then go ahead and think about maybe investing a little bit more money.

Understanding YouTube Income

So back to the money issue, because I know everybody is always interested in understanding how much can you make. And here's what I'll say. It's going to vary from niche to niche. Like I said, some niches can monetize better than others.

The one I'm in monetizes. Okay. It monetizes fairly well, and it's a nice little side income in retirement. What does that mean? Well, it varies, right? So I hesitate to give any figures because what I make from month to month varies based on the amount of affiliate sales that I make and where I really make the most of my affiliate sales is during the fall because there's the Black Friday sales.

Seasonal Fluctuations in Income

A lot of software companies are offering great deals on their software. And so I make a bunch of sales then, and then that tapers off in January and February. People are buying less because they've spent money during the holidays. And then summer is a little flatter again because people are on vacation.

And you know, I think there's a little seasonality to these YouTube channels and you need to think about that, right? If you're a gardening channel, there will be some, there will be a seasonality aspect to your channel. If you're a sports oriented channel, same thing, there will be some seasonality there.

So picking channels that have less seasonality means you can plan the income that you'll make from your channel a little bit better. But the real key is, is there enough monetization opportunity in a channel? You see a lot of videos about getting to a thousand subscribers and getting to 4000 watch hours.

Reality of YouTube Ad Revenue

Now for my channel, YouTube ads is a very small part of my monthly income because right now, even with 4400 subscribers and uploading a couple times a week, I'm only getting twelve to 16,000 views in a month. That's not large.

So if you wanted to make really big money with YouTube ads only, you have to really have a channel where you're getting hundreds of thousands of views a month because for every thousand views you get paid x amount of money from YouTube depending on what ads are being run.

So for my channel, for example, for every thousand views I get paid anywhere from five to $9. So you know, it would take 100,000 views for me to make $500 a month from YouTube ads. These huge YouTube channels that go viral with every single video. And again, I love seeing that and I know they're making a lot of money. I know my channel is probably never going to be in that position.

Importance of Multiple Income Streams

So that's the thing I want to make you aware of. You have to have more monetization than just YouTube ads. And that's why, you know, the very first thing you want to look at is affiliate programs because you can have affiliate links in your description for your video from day one.

And the first check I got for affiliate sales came three months after my channel started. And I think I only had 200 subscribers three months after my channel started. Or maybe it was four or 500. But what I'm getting at is you can make money from affiliate sales much earlier in the process than waiting for that thousand subscribers, 4000 watch hours. One thing that you're going to have to get used to is giving up your anonymity.

Dealing with Loss of Anonymity

Some people really have a difficult time with that. Now, I named my channel, you know, just my name. Now, should you do that? That's up to you. You have to do, you know, whatever feels comfortable. But you probably will have to at least share your first name and you are going to have to show your face. There are faceless YouTube channels. I don't want to talk about those. I don't really know a lot about those.

But that's the one key thing with a YouTube channel is getting used to just knowing people are seeing you. But the cool thing is if you make a video and a thousand people watch that video, that's like you standing in a room with a thousand people and talking to them. That that's a pretty neat experience to have.

So the key thing about running your YouTube channel is just think about being open, honest, transparent and trying to help people. And my goal with every video that I do is, can I help one person? If I do that, then I think I'm successful. So what I plan to do is I'm going to do a whole series of videos about YouTube.

Like, I'm going to talk more about finding a niche, more about picking a name, more about when to upload and when not to upload. This is just sort of this big, broad, overreaching video that I'm doing today to try to encourage you to just sort of step off the ledge.

Conclusion and Encouragement: Starting a YouTube Channel over 50

Try the YouTube thing. It's going to be uncomfortable. And when you watch that first video, you're going to go, oh, I can't post this thing. Post it. Every YouTube channel journey starts with the first post and you've just got to do it. And so I hope this has been encouraging to you. If you're 50 or older, I start that channel. I just wish I would have started at 50, but I started at a little over 60 years old.

So that's how I did it. I think you can do it too. In fact, I don't think you can do it. I'm certain that you can do it. So if you have any questions, any comments, please leave them below, subscribe and check in. I'm going to start doing more YouTube videos for getting a channel started and all those things I just talked about a couple seconds ago. So thanks for watching and until next time, take care of.