How To Get Monetized On YouTube Without 1000 Subscribers (10 Ways To Make $1,000/Month)

Most YouTube advice starts in the same place: get to 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours before you can earn anything. That bar is real, but here is what nobody tells you: it is not the only bar. You can start generating income from your channel today, whether you have 50 subscribers or 500, without waiting on YouTube’s partner program to give you permission.

In this breakdown of a video Alston Godbolt recorded on exactly this topic, you will get all 10 income streams in sequence, including the specific platforms, dollar amounts, and tradeoffs he shared. By the end you should be able to pick the method (or the stack of methods) that lines up with what you already know and the channel you already have.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A clear explanation of why the YouTube Partner Program is not the only path to revenue on the platform
All 10 monetization methods Alston covered, in order, with platforms named
The real tradeoffs between passive methods (courses, digital products) and active ones (coaching, services)
A working explanation of why email list building should come before everything else
Specific tools: Teespring, AWeber, Thinkific, LearnDash, and more
A suggested stacking sequence so you can layer income streams without burning out
Eight honest FAQ answers about starting with a small channel
A free tool at finder.platformproof.com to match your existing skills to the income stream most likely to pay you first

Why the YouTube Partner Program Is Not the Starting Line

The YouTube Partner Program requires 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 public watch hours before you become eligible for ad revenue. That sounds like a clear finish line until you realize two things. First, meeting those numbers does not guarantee approval. YouTube can still reject your application. Second, even creators who get approved often find that the resulting ad revenue is low, especially on channels with niche, evergreen, or tutorial-style content.

Alston’s point is not that partner program monetization is worthless. It is that anchoring your entire revenue strategy to it is a trap. Every one of the 10 methods below is available to you with zero subscribers. The faster you understand that, the faster you can stop waiting and start earning.

Method 1: Sell a Digital Product

A digital product is something you create once, package, and sell through a link in your video description. It can be an ebook, a step-by-step blueprint, a checklist, or an audio training. Alston gave a direct example from his own catalog: a 43-page blueprint he put together teaching people how to make money with short-format video: TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Reddit, and Instagram. He packaged it with a few bonuses and priced it at five dollars.

The entire product took him a weekend to create. The sales page took a weekend as well. He used a simple setup using either ClickFunnels or WordPress to explain what the product does and show a few examples. From that point, anyone watching his videos can click through to the description and buy.

The critical rule Alston emphasized: the product must be congruent with your channel’s topic. If your channel is about gardening, your digital product should be about gardening; a quick guide on growing tomatoes faster, for instance. Selling a basket-weaving guide to gardening viewers will not convert. Alignment is everything.

Method 2: Sell a Physical Product

Physical products follow the same congruence rule, but they add logistical layers: production costs, inventory, packing, and shipping. Alston used Russell Brunson’s book Expert Secrets as an example: a physical book that ships when someone buys. Brunson built a business teaching people how to monetize what they know, and the physical book is one vehicle for that.

Alston admitted he personally prefers digital products precisely because physical products cost money to ship. But he acknowledged that physical products can work well in certain niches. A basket-weaving channel can take custom orders. A gardening channel can sell seed packets. A crafting channel can sell handmade items. The channel itself becomes the distribution system, and you do not need a storefront if your video description is the shelf.

The ceiling is whatever you choose to charge. With physical products, the margin depends on your production costs, so price accordingly.

Method 3: Start a Patreon or Membership

Memberships let your most engaged viewers pay a recurring monthly fee in exchange for deeper access. Patreon is the most commonly used platform for this, but the same model works through Facebook Groups and similar tools.

Using the gardening channel example again: a Patreon page could offer live gardening sessions, behind-the-scenes footage, tips and tricks that you do not post publicly on YouTube, or Q&A calls. The channel attracts the audience; the membership converts the most loyal portion of that audience into recurring subscribers.

Alston noted that Patreon allows tiered pricing, with different packages at different price points. He mentioned a range of five to twenty-five dollars per month, though there is technically no ceiling. The key constraint is that your membership content must genuinely deliver more value than what is available for free on your channel. If the Patreon tier feels like a tax on content you would have posted publicly anyway, subscribers will churn.

Method 4: One-on-One Coaching

If you have expertise that helps people solve real problems, one-on-one coaching turns that expertise into a service. Your YouTube channel becomes a demonstration of your knowledge. Viewers watch your content, decide you understand their problem, and pay to work with you directly.

Coaching is time-intensive by design. You are trading hours for dollars in a way that courses and digital products are not. That is a real constraint. But one-on-one coaching also typically commands the highest per-transaction price of anything on this list, which means a small number of clients can hit the $1,000-per-month target faster than any other method.

Method 5: Group Coaching

Group coaching is what Alston runs for his own affiliate marketing students. Rather than working with people one at a time, he assembles groups, walks through their businesses together, and helps everyone build at once. The individual attention per client is lower than one-on-one, but the time efficiency is dramatically better. You can serve five or ten people in the time it would take to serve one.

Pricing for group coaching typically sits between a digital product and one-on-one coaching, below private work rates, higher than a standalone course. For creators who enjoy teaching in a community setting, it is often the preferred middle path.

Method 6: Affiliate Marketing

Alston described affiliate marketing as one of his favorite methods, and he backed it up with a concrete working example. He has a separate YouTube channel called Web Hosting Rewind with 700 subscribers at the time of filming. The channel teaches people how to start a blog. The videos are not pulling hundreds of thousands of views. But the viewers they do attract are highly targeted. These are people who have a specific problem (they want to start a blog) and are actively looking for a solution.

In the description of each video, Alston places an affiliate link to Bluehost, a web hosting platform. When a viewer clicks that link and purchases Bluehost, he earns a commission. He also links to premium WordPress themes and a course; additional affiliate placements that match what his viewers actually need at that stage of their journey.

The reason affiliate marketing works with a small channel is the same reason Alston’s web hosting channel can earn with 700 subscribers: view count matters less than intent. Highly targeted viewers with a specific problem are far more likely to click and buy than a broad audience browsing casually. Affiliate marketing also removes the obligations of customer service and inventory; you create content, you link, and the merchant handles the rest.

Alston mentioned that affiliate programs exist for virtually every niche. Gardening tools on Amazon, Home Depot, or Lowe’s. Camera gear, lighting, and microphones for YouTube channels. Seeds, nutrition products, software subscriptions; if your channel has a focused topic, there is almost certainly an affiliate program built for it.

Not sure which income stream fits your skills and channel right now?

Answer a few quick questions at finder.platformproof.com to find your fastest path to your first $1,000 online using what you already know.

Method 7: Sell Merchandise

Merchandise, including branded t-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, mugs, and similar items, is a real income stream for YouTube channels, and you do not need 10,000 subscribers to start. The YouTube merch shelf (the section that appears directly below a video) does require 10,000 subscribers before you can activate it. But nothing stops you from starting a merch store and linking to it from your description the day you upload your first video.

Alston specifically named Teespring as his recommended platform. The reason: Teespring handles payment processing, product creation, and shipping. You design the product (or just upload a logo, a phrase, or artwork), set your price, and place the link in your video description. When someone orders, Teespring manufactures, ships, and settles payment. Your only job is to attract viewers who want to wear or use something connected to your brand.

What sells on a merch store is usually something connected to the channel’s identity: a logo, a catchphrase, an inside joke the community shares, or the creator’s face if the audience has that kind of personal connection. Pricing is flexible; you set the margin.

Method 8: Build an Email List

Alston’s recommendation here was direct: start building your email list before you do anything else. He framed email marketing not as a revenue method by itself but as the infrastructure that makes every other method more effective.

When you upload a new video, you send an email. When you launch a new merch item, you send an email. When you want to test a digital product idea before building it, you ask your email list. When you start a Patreon, your list is the first audience you tell. Your email subscribers are your most engaged fans, people who opted in specifically because they want to hear from you.

Alston’s platform of choice is AWeber. He noted that AWeber’s free plan covers the first 500 subscribers with no monthly cost until you grow past that threshold. That means you can start building a list and mailing your audience before you spend a dollar on software.

From a purely strategic standpoint, email is the one channel you own. YouTube can change its algorithm, demonetize your content, or reduce your reach overnight. An email list cannot be taken away. Building it early, even slowly, creates an asset that compounds in value as the channel grows.

Method 9: Sell a Service

If you have a skill that people pay for, such as graphic design, writing, web development, video editing, consulting, landscaping, or cooking, you can position your YouTube channel as proof of that skill and offer the service directly to viewers.

Alston illustrated this with his own reseller hosting setup. Rather than simply referring viewers to Bluehost through an affiliate link, he had the option to start his own web hosting company, charge a competitive rate, and retain the customer relationship himself. That is software as a service, and the channel becomes the acquisition engine that feeds it.

He also cited NameHero as a real-world example: a web hosting company that built a YouTube channel to attract customers, pulling 315 highly targeted views that directly feed their business. The view count looks unimpressive on the surface. But those 315 viewers are not casual watchers; they are people considering purchasing web hosting. The conversion rate from a video like that beats any mass-audience content by a wide margin.

The tradeoff Alston acknowledged plainly: selling a service makes you the CEO of that service. You take on customer expectations, support questions, and delivery responsibility. That is manageable for many creators, but it is worth naming upfront so you are not surprised by it.

Method 10: Create and Sell an Online Course

An online course is what Alston described as one of his top three or four favorite ways to make money online. The reason: you create it once and it sells indefinitely. Unlike a digital product (which is often a quick-read guide or checklist), a course goes deeper, covering multiple modules, video lessons, worksheets, or a structured curriculum.

Alston has courses on Udemy, including an Affiliate Marketing for Beginners Masterclass. He used his own experience to highlight a critical pricing distinction. When you sell through Udemy’s marketplace, you split the revenue with Udemy. His course priced at $29.99 only returned between $9.99 and $15 per sale under Udemy’s revenue-sharing model.

His recommendation: host the course yourself. Platforms he named include Thinkific, Corsair, and LearnDash (a WordPress plugin). When you sell directly, you keep the full sale price. A $29.99 course sold through your own hosted platform returns $29.99 minus payment processing fees, with no platform rev-share cut in the middle.

Udemy is not useless. Its marketplace drives organic discovery, and some creators use it to attract new students who would not have found them otherwise. But if your YouTube channel is already functioning as your discovery engine, you likely do not need Udemy’s marketplace. Host your course, link to it from your videos, and keep the margin.

How to Stack These Methods Without Burning Out

Ten income streams can sound like ten jobs. They are not. Rolling them out at once is a reliable path to doing all of them badly. Here is a sensible stacking sequence that builds on each prior layer.

Start with email. Before you build a product or set up a store, get AWeber running and add a call to action in every video and description. The free tier handles your first 500 subscribers. This is the foundation everything else sits on.
Add affiliate marketing in week one. Find one or two affiliate programs that match your channel topic. Place those links in existing video descriptions and in every new video you post. This costs nothing to set up and earns passively from content you have already made.
Build a digital product in month one. Use a weekend to write a guide, checklist, or short blueprint on your channel’s core topic. Price it low enough to sell without a long sales conversation; Alston priced his short-video blueprint at five dollars. Add the link to your most-viewed videos first.
Open a merch store in month two. Set up a Teespring store once you have enough channel identity that something feels worth wearing or using. Link it from your description. You do not need volume to start; you need brand coherence.
Add a membership or Patreon once you have a community signal. If your comment section has regulars who engage consistently, that is your signal. A small, engaged community that pays five to twenty-five dollars per month adds up quickly.
Build the course once you know what your audience actually needs. Your email list and the questions in your comments will tell you exactly what to teach. Build the course after you have that signal, not before.
Add coaching only if you want to. One-on-one and group coaching require your time. If you enjoy working directly with people and your channel is attracting viewers who want that depth of help, offer it. If you prefer the passive model, skip it and double down on courses and digital products instead.

The Honest Drawbacks Worth Naming

Every method on this list has a constraint the video touched on but is worth stating plainly.

Digital and physical products require you to build a sales funnel, even a simple one. The link in the description is not enough if the page it leads to does not explain the product clearly. A few hours of copywriting work on your sales page will outperform any amount of video uploads if the product itself is solid.

Affiliate marketing with a small channel earns small commissions at first. The income from 700 targeted subscribers and a handful of affiliate links is not a living wage, but it is real money, and it scales linearly with the channel. More relevant videos, more targeted viewers, more clicks, more commissions.

Coaching and services trade time for income. That ceiling is real. If you want income that scales beyond the hours you can work, the course and digital product routes are the better long-term bets. Coaching can fund the early months while you build those assets.

Memberships churn. People who sign up for a Patreon in month one will cancel in month three if the content inside stops feeling worth the subscription. Plan to produce consistently for your members before you open a tier.

Find Your X

Every income stream on this list works. The question is which one fits your channel, your schedule, and what you already know. If you are not sure where to start, the Finder tool at finder.platformproof.com asks you a few questions about your skills, your audience, and how much time you have, then points you to the method most likely to pay you first.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I really need zero subscribers to start earning from my YouTube channel?

For most of the methods on this list, yes. Affiliate links, digital product links, and merch store links can go in your video descriptions before you hit ten subscribers. You will earn very little at first simply because you have very few viewers, but the mechanisms are available from day one. The YouTube Partner Program is the only method that requires a subscriber and watch-hour threshold before you can activate it.

Which method earns money the fastest for a brand-new channel?

Affiliate marketing and digital products are typically the fastest to activate because setup costs are low and they do not require you to show up live or deliver a service. That said, the honest answer depends on whether your niche has strong buyer intent. A channel about web hosting attracts people ready to purchase hosting. A channel about mindfulness attracts people looking for ideas, not products. Know your audience’s intent before deciding which method to prioritize.

Is Teespring still a good platform for YouTube merch?

Teespring rebranded to Spring after the original recording. The core model remains the same: you upload designs, set prices, link to your store, and Spring handles production, payment, and fulfillment. There are competitors in the print-on-demand space (Printful, Printify, Redbubble) that offer similar functionality. The main thing to evaluate is profit margin; compare what you keep per sale across platforms before committing.

Why does Alston recommend AWeber over other email platforms?

Alston named AWeber specifically because of its free tier for the first 500 subscribers. That is the reason it appeared in the video: cost to entry is zero, which matters when you are starting out. Other email platforms (Mailchimp, ConvertKit, MailerLite) also offer free tiers. The specific platform matters less than the habit: start collecting emails early and mail your list consistently.

Should I sell my course on Udemy or host it myself?

Alston’s position was clear: host it yourself if you can. Udemy’s marketplace splits your revenue. His $29.99 course returned between $9.99 and $15 per sale. Hosting on Thinkific, LearnDash, or a similar platform means keeping the full sale price minus payment processing. The tradeoff is that Udemy provides organic discovery within its marketplace, which can be valuable if your YouTube channel is not yet driving traffic. Once your channel is your main discovery engine, self-hosting almost always wins on margin.

What does “congruent with your channel” actually mean in practice?

It means the product you are selling should solve the same problem your channel’s videos address. If your videos teach people how to start a blog, your affiliate links should be to hosting platforms, WordPress themes, and writing tools, not kitchen appliances or fashion. Alston used the basket weaving versus gardening example: selling a basket-weaving product on a gardening channel fails because the audience came for gardening solutions. Congruence is just another word for relevance, and relevance is what drives conversions.

Can a channel with only a few hundred views actually earn $1,000 per month?

Yes, with the right method and the right niche. Alston’s Web Hosting Rewind channel had 700 subscribers and low view counts, but the viewers it attracted were people actively researching web hosting. A single Bluehost affiliate commission from that niche can be worth more than ad revenue from a thousand general-interest views. A coaching client from a 200-view video can be worth hundreds of dollars. View count is a lagging indicator of channel health. Viewer intent is the variable that determines whether those views convert.

What is the biggest mistake new YouTubers make when trying to monetize early?

Waiting. The belief that you need to hit a subscriber threshold before you start earning leads creators to delay setting up affiliate links, building email lists, and creating products, sometimes for months or years. Every video you have already published is an asset that could have a monetization mechanism attached to it right now. Update your old descriptions with affiliate links. Add a digital product link. Set up AWeber. The audience you already have is smaller than it will eventually be, but it is real, and it can start generating income before it grows any larger.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “How To Get Monetized On YouTube Without 1000 Subscribers 2022 (10 Ways To Make $1,000/Month)”, original YouTube video at youtu.be/rEbMtuC8-tA
YouTube Partner Program eligibility requirements: 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 public watch hours
Teespring (now Spring) print-on-demand platform that handles merch production, payment, and fulfillment
AWeber email marketing, free tier available for the first 500 subscribers
Thinkific, LearnDash (WordPress plugin), and Udemy, course hosting platforms referenced in the video
NameHero, a web hosting company Alston named as an example of a business using YouTube for customer acquisition
Web Hosting Rewind, Alston’s affiliate marketing demonstration channel with 700 subscribers (referenced in the video)