How to Be A Youtuber and Quit Your Job in 2 Years with Denis Trufin

It is TOTALLY possible to become successfully unemployed being a Youtuber! Denis Trufin of Tru Financials learned how to be a Youtuber and then quit his job 2 years later.

Imagine being able to quit your Just Over Broke J.O.B. being a Youtuber. Learn as Denis Trufin of Tru Financials teaches us how to be a Youtuber to be Successfully Unemployed.

Article Contents show

How Denis Makes Money Without Having a Job As a Youtuber

Denis makes money through YouTube ads, affiliates, and sponsorships.

Denis has three core values: he helps people learn how to make more money, save more money, and invest more money.

This way, they can build wealth for their future.

People come to him to find what Denis can do for them in one of those three categories to further their financial situation and to be better off in the future.

What Denis Was Doing Before He Was a Successfully Unemployed Youtuber

Denis started his journey into personal finance around age sixteen. He started learning about money and then he got a job. When he got his first paycheck, he spent it on stupid stuff — he bought a Zoon.

He wasted his whole paycheck and realized that wasn’t what he wanted to do with his money.

Over the years, Denis kept learning how to manage his money. At the same time, he was working a regular nine-to-five job, but he didn’t feel fulfilled. He didn’t feel like he was doing what he was meant to be doing.

It was a Just Over Broke J.O.B.

The most he ever received in a pay increase was 5%. You can’t do much with a five percent increase — you are just keeping up with inflation.

He kept trying to think about what he could do to help other people in their lives. Money happened to be something he was very passionate about. He took it upon himself to start learning and growing the idea of making it work.

In the process, the biggest thing that took the longest for Denis to get over is the idea that he could make money by helping people save money.

The Point When Denis Realized How to Be A Youtuber

It is a lot of work going through the process. You need to put in a lot of time and work. Denis realized if he kept putting in the time, he had the potential of making more money.

Watch the How to Be A Youtuber Interview Here:

Denis met Dustin and Dustin gave him his book about quitting your job. It gave Denis the confidence that it really was possible. His parents also encouraged him, which is rare.

The moment he realized that quitting his job was a possibility was when he was putting in the effort and being intentional with what he was doing online, which was make it a business.

How to Become a YouTuber

Always do what you already love to do in your personal life. Make that a business.

It sounds crazy, but there are people online making money talking about basket weaving or talking about the most obscure things you can think of. They are the ones taking the action and making it something they can make money off of.

But it isn’t that they just want to make money off of it and not help anyone.

Most people who have a passion for something want to help other people. The same is true whether it is with personal finance or with someone who is trying to teach others how to skateboard.

You feel good, because you are accomplishing something, helping others, and because you are making money from it. Whatever you have a passion for, go for that.

Being A Youtuber Needs Passion

Denis would never go for something, because someone else is doing it and being successful. If you don’t do something you are passionate about, you will learn very quickly that you will not enjoy what you are doing.

There are young kids online who open toys and make millions of dollars doing it. It gets disheartening when you are trying to start a business and you see that happening. If you are not happy with where you are, figure out what makes you happy and share that passion with others.

Twenty people around you probably don’t care what you love, but there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people in this world that care about what you do.

Look on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram and you will find others that have the same passion.

If you can take that, curate it, and make it into a video online, you can start having a connection with people that is so much more than words on a blog post or the voice on a podcast.

You have a connection that is eye to eye on video that will help them relate to you even more and they will become followers of yours.

Those followers will be the ones to help you make money so you can live your life without having a J.O.B.

How to Know if You are Progressing on YouTube

Most people think the number of subscribers will be the thing that will help them gauge their standing the quickest. It is a number everyone can see, whether you are on the back end with your statistics or you are someone who is looking at that channel.

Believe it or not, subscribers are not what you should be going for. Most people have this misconception. What you should be caring about is:

How long people are watching your videos?
How engaged are they with your videos?
Are they finding information that you are sharing with them that they can’t find anywhere else?
Are you presenting the information in a way they can absorb it and appreciate it? Are they liking the videos?

These are the metrics that will actually dictate whether you are doing something in the right position or not. If not, you can always do something else or try a different medium.

How long someone is watching your videos is a huge indication. If someone is only watching 10% of your video, that isn’t so great.

If someone is watching 40%, 50%, 60% of your video, you are capturing their attention.

Get the right content in front of the right person at the right time.

The Most Important Thing for YouTubers is to Provide Value

A lot of times people think they need the best camera, the best microphone, the best lighting, etc. That is actually the second most important thing.

The most important thing is to find out how you can provide value to people. This is what people care about the most. It isn’t the quality of the video, it is the quality of the content in the video.

If you want to watch a video of how to tie a tie, when you watch that video, you need value coming from the content.

If the person is spewing out garbage and talking for 20 minutes and not showing you how to tie a tie, that video is not going to be shared or recommended and nobody is going to care about it.

What they care about is the content.

Make sure you understand that there are a lot of metrics you can get better at and there is a lot of equipment that can make your content better, but until you learn how to provide the value in the videos, you are not going to go far.

To Copy or to be Creative With Your Youtube Channel

Always learning is important. You are not going to get better if you don’t put in the time and effort to get better. Many people will start a YouTube channel and will give up in three months, because they are not improving.

Usually, it is because they are not improving themselves.

That is a big key to success.

Following other people’s behaviors and modifying them to your style is good.

Avoid trying to follow the big YouTubers — the ones with 100,000 or 2,000,000 followers. They are doing things the algorithm is differentiating between you and someone else.

Find the smaller YouTubers who have a lot of views on videos and imitate those. Don’t do a carbon copy, though, because you want to have your own style or your own take on it.

If you find a channel that has 2,000 subscribers, but they have a 20,000 viewed video, that is your golden nugget. They clearly had something of value for people and regardless of subscribers, people still wanted to watch that video.

You can’t go to a 50,000 subscriber channel and find a 20,000 viewed video, because it isn’t going to tell you a lot.

Affiliates are Important When it Comes to Making Money as a YouTuber

As much as it is great to earn money with ads, it takes a little while to get through the process to make money with ads, because there is some criteria you need to hit. With affiliates, you can start on day one with your very first video.

Affiliates are a better process to go through and work with to generate revenue. There are a couple of different networks you can work with and, depending on your niche, what you want to do first is find out services that you already use and see if you can offer those.

Second, if you are looking at opportunities to work with affiliates, you have to do the research and make sure they align with your values before you recommend them.

The last thing you want to do is recommend a product and then find out it doesn’t align with what you believe in. This could be in how something is processed or how something is run.

Whatever the case may be, you want to make sure that their view and your view are the same, because this is a reflection on you.

Audio Quality is Important In Your Youtube Videos

The value you provide in your videos is number one. After that, audio is number two in importance. Before video quality, before lighting, people can deal with that stuff being a little choppy.

Audio is one thing you need to get down as quickly as possible.

When Denis first started, he was not the best when it came to audio in his videos. He had terrible audio and there was bad sync up. He learned over time that audio is important, so he made it a priority.

Listen to the How to Be A Youtuber Podcast Interview Here:

He didn’t buy the fanciest microphones, he bought basic microphones that did the job and improved his quality tenfold. When he could, with the business income, he was able to reinvest and buy better quality equipment.

Audio is important, but don’t think you need to buy a $500 microphone to start your channel. Have a proof of concept first. You can buy a $20 lapel mic and then move on from there. Poor audio is distracting and it is very easy for people to turn off.

Growing Quickly is Not a Good Thing

We all expect to grow quickly, but that is not always a good thing.

For a lot of people, they want to have thousands of subscribers right away, but the quality of content, at that point, is not going to be on par with having that many subscribers.

For Denis, having consistency is first and foremost a priority at the beginning.

Later down the road you can change it up, but having consistency at the beginning is important, because it is going to build your skillset, when it comes to building the content, editing the content, post production, etc.

There are a lot of hats you wear as a content creator that most people don’t pay attention to.

Your first 100 videos are going to be your worst 100 videos. You are not going to be the best yet.

If you watch most YouTubers, bloggers, podcasters, etc., and look at the first content they published, it will have improved over time, because they have mastered the craft and they have tweaked and tinkered with everything they are doing.

When you make 100 videos, two things will happen:

Your quality is going to improve immensely
You are going to find growth during that time without having to try very hard
There are a lot of different tips and tools you can use to try to increase your views
First and foremost is getting your message across properly in how you voice your message in your video

Day 1, you will not be great, Day 5, you will not be great, Day 100, you are going to be better.

Make sure you are consistent in providing quality content over time by practicing with your first 100 videos. It sounds like a lot, but at the point where you want to grow, 100 videos is going to seem like nothing.

You will be shocked at where you were and where you are. You will get better and better.

Finding the Right Number of Videos to Post On Your Youtube Channel

You don’t want to burn yourself out. If you post eight videos a week, you will burn out very quickly. Denis recommends two videos a week, because you will be practicing and trying to get better.

If you do three to five video a week, your quality will diminish. Doing this every week will improve your algorithm and your skillset.

Denis is a talking head in most of his financial videos. There are others that do a lot more with their videos like vlogging or walking around. Denis is not about that. He does what works best for him.

If someone gets a better growth trajectory because they are doing more in their videos, Denis is okay with that, because his quality and consistency keeps him focused on where he wants to go with his content.

His main goal is to produce value in how viewers can improve their finances, more so than the cool graphics and entertainment pieces that people include in their videos.

Those aren’t bad, it just isn’t his forte. Denis has learned that his audience really doesn’t care about that.

YouTube analytics will give you good insight over time. Once you start building a lot of videos, you will have a lot of data points you can look at to determine if you should do something to increase your watch time.

If something increases your watch time by 10% or 20%, you should look at doing that, because that is a big increase. If it stays the same, do what works best for your audience that takes the least work.

How to Scale Your YouTube Channel and How to Be A Youtuber

Once you get past 100 videos, what is going to become important to you is to really fine tune your craft. You start finding your voice and it is all about where can you find the opportunities to bring in income and how to scale the business to become sustainable.

After 100 videos, Denis started looking at opportunities for affiliate marketing, increasing his ad revenue, and working with sponsorships.

If you try to look for sponsorships early on, you are going to fail, because you haven’t built up your quality of content yet. Focus on the ability to bring value and what people are looking for day in and day out.

Denis goes on Google trends and what people are searching for when it comes to personal finance. Start working toward that and start SEOing on YouTube, because that is a thing too.

Most people don’t realize that SEO (search engine optimization) needs to be there as well. You need to have keywords, know what people are looking for, and get better at titling your videos and thumbnails. Thumbnails are the entrance to the videos.

Starting on Your Own vs Hiring Other People To Be A Youtuber

Sometimes you won’t feel like you have the best quality in every area, which you won’t.

However, most YouTubers will be able to start off on their own and do all of these things. It isn’t that much work, if you learn how to preset things. There are templates you can have set up so when you put your photos in there, there are things that are already in place.

The same thing goes for video editing. You can have things in place and ready to go to make it easier for you.

As you continue to do editing and thumbnails, you will get better at those things, so the time spent shrinks significantly over time. You won’t want someone doing that stuff for you, because the cost will not return a significant ROI.

Maybe down the road look at that if you want to scale the business.

Software You Should Use to Edit Your Youtube Videos

Depending on where you are financially, you have some options for editing software. A couple free options include Windows Editor and iMovies. If you want to take this seriously, you can start investing in software like Adobe Premier Pro, which is a fantastic option.

You can also use Photoshop, which is another great option.

There are free options like canva.com that will go through an edit your thumbnails without having to pay for it. There are free options, but if you want the higher quality, you need to pay.

For SEO software, there is TubeBuddy. This is a great software to do a lot of SEO work, and see what people are searching for and curate your content based on those searches.

As a smaller channel, it is easier to be in search results rather than being on someone’s home page, so if you find out what people are searching for and make those videos, you are more likely to be found easily and grow your channel.

Ads are an Important Piece to the Youtuber Puzzle

If you have ads in front of your video, it doesn’t hurt you. People are getting used to ads always being in front of videos. For a lot of YouTubers, as you grow, your videos get more priority, because that helps YouTube earn an income and keep the platform running smoothly.

As of right now, you cannot pick what ads are shown on your videos. There are some things coming in the future where you will be able to auction off certain ads for different companies, depending on what you prefer.

Right now, it is based off what type of content you create and YouTube will target it for you.

With YouTube, they aren’t going to put skateboarding ads in front of a basket weaving site, because it doesn’t make sense.

But if you have a basket weaving channel, YouTube may choose a Michaels or Joann’s ad, because it will curate toward the people who are watching your content anyway and it is relevant.

Sometimes, YouTube will choose bank ads or investing ads for Denis’s videos. YouTube does a good job making sure it ads are curated toward your channel.

Denis started his channel in May 2017, and he was able to leave his job in April 2019. It didn’t take as long as he thought it would, but it did take more work than he expected.

How to Scaling the Youtuber Business

After you make 100 videos and you are at the 2,500 subscriber mark, your next goal is to figure out how to improve yourself. This could mean getting coaching, paying for courses, etc. It is okay to say that you have been doing this for a while and you want to get better.

Denis doesn’t grow very fast in comparison to other YouTubers, but his growth doesn’t dictate his ability to bring in income. The YouTube subscriber count doesn’t really play a factor into how much he is making.

It is the amount of views he is getting that he cares about. He cares more about bringing in more views this month than last month, not necessarily if he is bringing in more subscribers.

If you are around 2,500, don’t worry that much. After you get 1,000 subscribers you are solidified, because that is a really hard number to hit. Once you do that, your growth will happen naturally and build over time.

For most channels, about 70% of their views come from non-subscribers. If you realize that it isn’t about your subscribers, but your views, then you can really succeed.

Those views are going to get you clicks on the ads, affiliates, and sponsorships to bring in the revenue.

Should You Have Your Podcasts on YouTube

Podcasts in a static form don’t really do too well on YouTube. Denis has seen where people take the audio wave and put that on the screen to keep people somewhat entertained.

Most people go on YouTube to watch videos and connect with the person. If you have them, you can leave them there while you build your content and then take them off later.

The Successfully Unemployed Rapid Fire Round

How Denis is Making the World a Better Place

Denis and his wife love donating blood. It made it tough when he was working full time, working on his YouTube business, and helping his wife. Now he has more time to donate blood more often.

He also has more opportunities to help people without the need to charge money, and he is able to coach people for free.

Giving back is being able to do what he does, without having to charge someone for a 20- or 30-minute conversation.