Want to make money on YouTube but don't know what to make videos about? Then click on the button below to get some ideas for which YouTube niches you could make videos about. Each YouTube niche is colour coded for easy reference: green niches should be much less competitive than the orange or red niches. Don't let a niche's apparent competition put you off though - through my research in building YouTube channel directory FindAChannel.Net I have uncovered thousands of YouTube channels that are less than three years old but have already acquired tens of thousands of subscribers and millions of video views! Scroll down for my top tips on making popular content on this booming video platform. You can also visit this list of difficult, easy, recently updated and trending YouTube niches.

Need even more business ideas? Our Niche Laboratory SEO tool can research your niche for you, and Blog Spy analyzes your online competitors. There's also our Clickbait Article Title Generator that will come up with some catchy clickbait style titles for your blog post articles. Finally our sister site FindABlog can show you what your competitors are blogging about.

My YouTube Success Tips

I have four YouTube channels launched between 2012 and 2021. In March 2021 I also started building the internet's most useful directory of YouTube channels at FindAChannel.Net.

YouTube is first and foremost an entertainment medium. People go to YouTube to be entertained. Sure, there is a place for serious business-focussed content on there, but you will not rack up billions of views with this kind of stuff. To give you an example, in our first month Niche Laboratory's mascot Saki acquired 10x more subscribers to her channel than the UK based company I used to work for achieved in over 7 years!

Listen up - I'm going to tell you a story... Actually I'm not, but you're going to tell me YOUR story. People of all countries and cultures LOVE stories. They're one of the biggest YouTube niches right now, and they're also one of the easiest. The big difference between blogging and making content on YouTube is that people will often only visit a single blog on a particular subject. On YouTube they will watch 100's or even 1000's of videos on a particular niche. Right now in 2024 people are absolutely loving stories. If you use the tool above you might get some suggestions. Some good keywords to get started on include: stories for toddlers, vampire stories, funny stories, dream stories and Barbie stories.

Another awesome niche is tutorials/how to's and walk-throughs. Many people are put off by high education costs, so they're increasingly turning to the University of YouTube. You don't need to show people how to do complex stuff like how to write code in Python or how to calculate a company's tax rate. There are many niches where showing people how to do things is straightforward. You might also find you get a lot more views due to there being less competition. For example, the fashion unboxing niche is quite competitive these days, so why not show people how to actually make clothes rather than just ordering them online. More examples: how to draw a tiger, how to choose milk for coffee, Photoshop manipulation tutorials.

I would say that the most important thing on YouTube is to make sure you deliver on what your thumbnail promises. I don't know about anyone else but I always downvote videos where the content doesn't match the thumbnail EXACTLY. I will even downvote videos where the funny cat on the thumbnail doesn't actually appear in the person's video. And speaking of thumbnails, making good quality thumbnails will give you more views. I have found this especially so when people have watched one video and they're given a list of related videos. If you want to see some nice thumnails, check out Niche Laboratory's mascot Saki's unboxing and clothing haul channel. I made these thumbnails using the free Canva digital media platform.

Speaking of unboxings - these are VERY popular on YouTube and unboxings are a great way to get started. I opened a new unboxings channel in 2021 and the first month's statistics were very encouraging. You can unbox practically anything, although it is better if your channel has a particular focus. For example you might choose to unbox Elf on the Shelf toys, or Legos or just clothing. You could also have a particlar theme, such as weird unboxings or kawaii unboxings. Mystery boxes are popular too, although it's probably best not to overdo these as their peak popularity might have pased.

Content curation has become more popular with bloggers, and YouTubers are catching on too. This means that you make videos about other peoples' content, in many cases including photos or video footage from other sources. This is perfectly legal (in most countries) but make sure you are familiar with YouTube's fair use policies. Although there are a lot of channels that exist solely to show other peoples' copyrighted content, I'm not sure how they get away with it to be honest. I received two copyright takedown notices in 2021, and my channels are tiny (none have 4,000 watch hours or more than 1,000 subscribers)! My first warning was because I made a video by stitching parts of other peoples' videos together. While this would in theory count as 'fair use', I wasn't going to fight YouTube and the copyright holder over a video that I made for fun and made me absolutely no money. I think the lesson from this incident is that you should avoid using videos where the other channel owner makes a big thing of copyright in their channel description. The other incident I had was when I got angry after losing a job interview because the organisation had set a tremendously difficult and time consuming test as part of the interview. I leaked the test onto my YouTube channel. In a court of law I could probably successfully argue for fair use (you can't generally copyright tests unless the test is an officially registered examination). Again I'm not going to fight a copyright claim with bullying corporations.

If you want to make money on YouTube then you'll need to reach 1000 subscribers and 4000 watch hours in a 12 month period. The subscribers part is easy - if you're consistently putting out good content then you'll get there eventually. The watch hours thing is rather more complex (you can see my not entirely successful at building a Watch Hours Calculator here. One really good way to shift that monetization dial up beyond 4000 hours is by live streaming. People will gladly watch people live stream practically anything. You don't even need that many people watching you in order to rack up those all important watch hours. Just 6 people watching you live stream for 2 hours a week will give you 624 total watch hours per year - a huge chunk of those required 4000 watch hours.

More Online Tools

Make Some Catchy Blog Post Titles

A really easy change you can make to your site in order to get a lot more traffic from search engines is to simply tune up your post titles. Use our Catchy Article Title Generator to help you write much more interesting article titles.

Analyze Your Competitors

Niche Laboratory has a new sister product called Blog Spy. You can use it to quickly, easily and cheaply spy on your closest online competitors.

Blog Spy ranks each of the Wordpress or Blogger blogs you're competing with on a colour coded scale according to how easy it is likely to be to outrank them. Use this invaluable information to steal traffic from sites ranked lower than your own. Reach out to the influencers running blogs that are more highly ranked than your own. Get links from their blogs, and see what they're obviously doing right.

For example, when I ran Blog Spy on my own site I found out my major competitor Income School don't actually actually blog anymore - they've turned to video blogging (vlogging). Well that was a smart move because video is absolutely massive these days, and I'm pleased with my own results with NicheLaboratory.TV.

If you don't want to download Blog Spy then check out our sister site FindABlog. This site lists tens of thousands of blogs in a huge number of niches. Use it to get niche ideas, or browse the categories to see what successful bloggers are blogging about in your niche.

Find Awesome Long Tail Keywords

There are so many keyword tools to choose from these days. But how do you find keywords you can ACTUALLY rank for? Simple - use Keyword Researcher Pro. This tool automatically searches Google, Amazon and eBay and finds you thousands of long tail and LSI themed keywords that desparate buyers are searching for right now. It will easily pay for itself with one or two good keywords found. Get started with the Keyword Researcher Pro free trial.