How To Help Your Kid Start A YouTube Channel

Hello, Facebook. Welcome. I'm Jen Obermeier. Welcome back to my page.

I have been doing daily broadcast for the past week about all kinds of online business topics and today, I am talking about something that's a little off the beaten path but it's something that is very dear to my heart personally.

I know I have friends and clients and family members who I often have this conversation with on a personal level.

It's about kids and YouTube.

I know this is really an emotional topic because right now, in fact, right this moment, your kids are probably being babysat by YouTube because what else are we going to do right now, right?

I know that there's a lot of layers of things to consider when you're thinking about your kids, possibly starting a YouTube channel, but this comes out of the fact that I have a son who is now nine years old.

He's in third grade.

He has been saying and being pretty dead serious about the fact that he wants to be a YouTuber as his full-time career when he grows up probably since he was in kindergarten.

It doesn't help or maybe it helps a little that I do have a YouTube channel for my business, and so he believes that his mom is a YouTuber and that is also a viable career for him.

If you have a child who is something like Ethan or this is just something you've thought to yourself, maybe this would be a cool side project to work on while the kids are out of school this summer.

Now, all of the sudden we have all this extra time.

This is a place where I am just going to share my own thoughts and things that I've learned on this topic, talk about some things to consider if you are going to be helping your kid start one.

Obviously, this will vary greatly depending on their age, but it do you have some tips and tricks because when I went looking for information on helping your kids start a YouTube channel or like what were the best practices, I could not find a lot of information about that and that was a couple of years ago.

There wasn't anybody who was blogging about that or had created other videos about it.

I pieced this together myself and I thought that this would be just something that can be a resource for parents or even kids, and if I have any kids who are watching this either live or possibly on the replay of this video, I would love to hear from you.

I'll try to be extra animated and engaging just to try to keep your attention and not be boring, but I really love talking about this and hopefully you get some ideas from this.

Let me know in the chat.

You don't necessarily have to say your name and age if you're a child, but who are you, where you from, what you thinking about doing?

Do you have a child who wants to start a YouTube channel?

How do you feel about it right now?

I'll check in with you at the end of the chat and see how you feel after, maybe you haven't changed your mind and you're still adamantly against it.

Totally understandable, but also I just want to say hello if you are a part of my friends and family network or some of my son's friends and family out there, I just want to say hello.

I tried to talk even into coming on to the video with me to talk a little bit about this topic but ironically, he didn't really want to.

That's part of the problem.

If you want to be a YouTuber, you've got to get comfortable creating content possibly on the spot and you've got to give your audience what they're asking, for so there you go.

It's always a work in progress.

I will share in advance that it's not like I'm talking about creating a channel that for my son, and in my particular situation is already monetized.

I mean, you hear a lot of stories about kids that are already making millions of dollars doing toy unboxing videos on YouTube or toy reviews on YouTube, and it does seem pretty infuriating when you think about it, because it's so basic and it's so simple - but when you think about who their audience is, which are other kids, that the more eyeballs you can get to your videos and if it's something that other kids are interested in, it doesn't really matter what adults think about it, right?

That's one of the big takeaways I want kids to hear from me is that if they are creating content that obviously is safe and okay for them to be making and they're sharing it with the world, if you know what you're doing, you can build a following on your channel.

That's where you get a lot of subscribers.

You hear all the YouTubers that say, "Like and subscribe and hit that bell so you get notified for new videos."

Dana says she's here with her 12-year-old son, Aiden.

Aiden and I am so excited to meet you, so excited to meet you.

I'll have to introduce you to Ethan after the show.

We are going to talk about how YouTubers grow a big subscription, a big following because that seems hard, right?

Because it seems really cool to have a YouTube channel, but how do you actually get people who watch your videos?

We'll talk about that.

We'll talk about, we'll go over at least lightly and briefly, how do YouTubers who that's their full-time job, how do they really make money and what all really goes into it.

Because I think that's the biggest thing with my son being nine and we've been talking about this since he was six that it was, there's an education process that is in place for him, which I am really the one who's educating him on what all actually goes into not only creating the video, you got to sit down and create the videos and that's the fun part, but then there's all the other things that have to happen in order to upload it to your channel, to make sure that people see it, and to have more than six followers that are your friends and family.

So, depending on what your goals are, and that's where I want to start today is that your goal doesn't even have to be to have a lot of subscribers or to end up making money for this to be a really cool project to allow your child to do.

I'll slow myself down for a second and catch my breath, and then I'll start there.

Talk about what is, in our situation, what is my goal and what is it that I want Ethan to get out of creating his own channel?

Again, say hello if you're there so I know that you're there.

I can only see you if you comment.

Aiden, since you are here, I would love too, what are your favorite YouTube channels and what video content, if you could make anything, if you can make anything and put it out there, what would your channel be about?

Let me know.

Let me start by saying that my personal philosophy on screen time, technology, all of that stuff for kids, I am on the liberal side of things as far as feeling like they, kids should be allowed to use the technology that obviously is not going anywhere.

They are going to be using throughout their lives.

They need to be experts in it.

They were born with it or all around them.

So, to like constantly try to constrict that to only 30 minutes a day or what-have-you...

I mean, right.

I don't want my son or my daughter, either one, but my son's the one who's more into like wanting to be a YouTuber and what he believes that entails.

I don't want them sitting and watching YouTube content for six hours a day.

I do… Aiden said he'll have to think about it.

Awesome.

What I do want, and this is important to me, is I want...

For as interested as my kids and other kids are…

Oh, Susan's here. Hi, Susan. So glad that you guys joined in.

Where was I?

I'm just so excited that kids actually are tuning in because this is going to be so fun.

My goal is I don't want…

Oh, I was saying, as interested as kids are in YouTube, and there is so much out there, and I know as parents, we care a lot about them being safe and having privacy.

That is its own conversation, so I'm going to say it goes without saying that they're not watching things on YouTube that are bad or unsafe or inappropriate.

That being said, I still don't want my kids to watch six hours of YouTube content a day, but it is fascinating to me, fascinating to me the types of things that they watch and how even just a few years ago when my kids were a little younger, the things that they watch are different than now and a lot of it is not…

It's amateur content.

It's the kids that are helping make the videos.

Of course, you can tell that the parents are behind the scenes a lot helping make things happen, but often the family is involved in making the videos together and they are really assisting in helping pump out that content, but the videos themselves are not super professional, right?

They're not bringing in a professional camera crew.

They're just doing stuff on their phone or just a basic video camera and putting it out there.

So, as I'm watching what my kids are watching, I'm thinking, here's an opportunity for my kids to understand the bigger picture of the process of not just being a consumer of content on YouTube or anywhere else on social media or the Internet, but translating that into 1.) how do I create content that, one, is something that they're interested in and that they're proud of, 2.) and two, something that what, if they were to embark on that journey of growing a YouTube channel that people did subscribe to, and maybe one day you reached that goal of being a YouTuber that was making money through YouTube.

What would that require of you to learn?

I approached it from that point of view with Ethan.

I said to him, "I am fully supportive of your dreams." However, I am not able to fully devote myself, and you can tell for some of the parents of these kids who have these huge YouTube channels that they have to really commit to it as a part-time, and then a full-time job behind the scenes.

I have not made that pledge of my time to my child.

What I did say was, "Let's start learning how to make videos."

"Let's learn the process of making the videos, and then what goes into editing it into something short." If left to his own devices I believe my son would probably make like hour-long screen share videos where he's talking through like a video game that he's playing.

I know that those are super popular on YouTube, but there is so much of that content out there, and I'm not knocking it like kids are interested in it, kids watch it and they, he wants to make videos like that but he doesn't have yet or didn't have at the maturity level of seven and eight years old how to edit that down into something short to the point that people would actually watch.

Because I believe you guys have probably seen videos like that where the kids are talking, they're playing a video game together and they're talking like they're making it fun and engaging even though they are just sitting there and playing a game, if that makes sense?

I wanted Ethan to see that there was much more that went into it than simply sitting down and playing the game.

When I agreed to let this be a project for him, what our particular goals were, not to get subscribers and not to make money right now but just for him to dip his toe in the water and really, if we were going to make videos, I made him have to commit to every time that I sit and edit a video that he's created, he's going to be sitting with me.

There was not going to be any of like Mom managing YouTube content like while you're off at school.

That's just not where I am in my life or where I want to spend my time.

So, because of that and I think that this is something important with your kids, involve them at the level that they are willing to be involved because they have got to, they have to understand the time commitment is not just you make a video, and then you upload it, and then you suddenly have like millions of views.

They need to really see that whole process.

Susan's given me some YouTube user names and I will definitely ask him about that because I don't know a lot of these guys off the top of my head but, yes, I know that there are a lot of really good popular ones.

That's where I wanted to start by saying that I required, this is for me.

I required, step one, before I ever agreed to create the channel, I required him to be involved with the process the whole time.

Does that mean that he has learned it to be able to do it all himself?

Still at this point, no.

But if he's not willing to do the back end work, then we don't make new videos.

That's how that goes.

As your child is older, and if they've already learned some of video editing or any basic tools on the computer themselves at school and they can teach themselves as they go, I absolutely would recommend that.

That's just a side note for a kid who's younger.

Now, here's some of the things that I took into consideration before even really agreeing finally that I was going to allow him to do this.

Jim is there and he said Jonathan and he are watching together.

Hey, guys. I'm so excited that you're here!

A couple of things that I asked or that I really researched and thought about safety-wise that I think is worth bringing into this conversation.

I had a conversation with my kid's father, both of them, but my son was really the one who's more excited about it.

I said, "I've been thinking about helping the kids start their own YouTube channels. Here are my concerns that I have already researched." I talked about safety and privacy which were the main things.

I asked him what other concerns he had.

He, of course, was, "If this is something you guys want to do, totally fine."

I believe that he and their step mom talked about it and essentially came back with the same thing that I did, which is that if you're going to allow a kid to make their own videos, if they are going to be in the videos at all, to me, and I would say most kids want to make videos that they're in, their faces in somewhere, it's not just the screen share of the video game, it's them also on the corner talking where they would be saying, "Hey, guys. It's Ethan," or them running around with their friends even, that we have to make absolutely sure, absolutely sure that at no time the kids…

They have to understand they are never giving out their last names.

They are never talking about where they go to school.

Everything, my ground rules like period with Ethan are that he can't talk about those things in his video.

Of course, we do have the opportunity to go through and edit but it makes it a lot easier if he just remembers, he can't say where he lives or what my name is or where he goes to school because you always just want to maybe think about the worst-case scenario without being overly restrictive about it.

As long as the channel, the kid's YouTube channel is not connected in any way to your social media, maybe you have a business online like I do, I make sure that I'm never in the background if Ethan's videos… I'm sure, I think my voice has been in the background once or twice but that's just the voice of Ethan's mom.

It's not me.

It's not my face.

It's not my name or anything like that.

But I don't even publicly share, I will not publicly share today what the name of his channel is or the name of my daughter's channel is just for that reason of always making sure it's very separated and not ever connected back to who I am or who his dad is or any other family member because then someone could conceivably figure out who he is, what his last name is, where he lives, where he goes to school, all that stuff like you guys know how the Internet works.

That I think is probably the most essential privacy concern that I want to bring up.

This is important for teenagers too, even when you're talking about regular social media.

We're only going to be talking about YouTube.

Really remembering when you're commenting, you're talking to people online, you are always keeping it a first-name basis or even a pseudonym type of thing.

I know there was a family on YouTube that was really popular a few years ago where they all gave themselves like a nickname.

They never use their names.

Now, their faces were all in it.

But gosh.

What were their… I don't know.

I can't remember but there's baby frog and happy frog and mommy frog.

I don't know.

Anyway, they all had frog names.

That's something that you, guys, I think should agree to at the beginning.

Unless your child, unless there's a special circumstance.

Let's say your child is a world-class BMX bike rider and he's already well-known for that or that's already public information somewhere else and you want to have a second YouTube channel where you just share his bike rides and other things he likes.

If his personality and his name is part of your overall growth plan for a particular hobby that he's really into or something he's really already known for being good at, I would probably just say, "This is part of the ground rules.There's no identifiable information."

All right.

Trying to keep this fun and fast-paced for the kids who are watching me.

Next thing I want to talk about is types of content.

This is probably the most important piece of this as the parent.

If you guys can go ahead and figure out what is the overall goal of this for you?

Is this just a fun project for you guys to learn how to create videos, learn the back end of editing, uploading, the business behind YouTube because every, even a free channel is like a business that you're putting time into, you're not necessarily monetizing?

But for me and for Ethan, that's what our goal is.

We don't worry too much about making content that is designed to go viral, to get lots and lots of views or lots of shares.

If that is a goal for you, so here a couple of things that I would really recommend if that's what you want to do.

Be strategic about the types of content that you're making, and this by far is what I believe that most kids are not going to be willing to do because they want it to just be fun or they want to just really make content about something that they like.

In terms of just setting up expectations so that they're saying, "Why am I not famous and what am I not a millionaire yet?" It's because of this one thing.

If you really have a goal of growing the subscriber list and monetizing eventually to where you are making money from your YouTube channel.

Then, you're not just making any old content, you really have to research what is out there.

Again, this is something I would sit down and do together, parent and child, no matter how old they are.

Researching what is the current content on YouTube in the niche area that your child is interested in and able to make videos about, what are the things that are the most viewed in the last week, the most viewed in the last 30 days?

You can find all that just in YouTube's search, regular search abilities.

You don't have to have any additional search software or ways to like hack the algorithm.

You can literally just put a search term in YouTube, and then filter your results based on date of upload, how many uploads, relevance, content, channels that are in that niche that are consistently putting out content.

When you look, if you look at some of those more popular, and when I say popular, I mean, yes, they have lots of followers and they're… But I also mean that the videos themselves have a lot of views.

If your child is interested and just to put this out there, how YouTube will pay you eventually one day is not based on how many subscribers you have.

Sad fact.

You can have five subscribers but if you have five million actual people watching your channel, it doesn't matter whether they subscribe to your channel ever.

The views themselves are how YouTube pays or gives you a cut of their ad revenue on YouTube videos.

Understanding that you have to have a channel that gets lots and lots of views in order to directly monetize from YouTube is part of understanding the strategy from the beginning.

So, that if that is part of your goal, then you are looking at content that is about the hot topics - like what's trending.

You want to not copycat in the sense that you're making the exact same content, but you want to make stuff that is similar in nature.

Maybe you're doing a toy channel where you're doing toy reviews.

You want to look at what are the new exciting toys that only a few people, it just came out, only a few people have made videos.

You want to stay on the leading edge of like whatever that content niche is so that you're always putting out relevant content that there's not a lot of competition over - because that itself will have more people that are searching for those types of videos on YouTube versus making a video that's actually 10 millionth video of a kid playing Minecraft on the computer.

I know that hurts because so many kids are just, "I want to just make Minecraft videos because I love watching Minecraft videos." Again, like I said.

That's fine.

If you're like Ethan where you just want to have the channel and you want to have the experience, but if you want to get growth, then the content strategy would involve you, as the parent, sitting down and making a list of what are the topics that we are focusing on, what are we going to do over the next few weeks and months?

Then, who are we going to watch?

Not as competitors, but watch to see what they're putting out all the time.

The biggest channels, they do put out content really consistently.

Again, the more that you are serious about growing it, the more you got to be serious about sitting down and doing, not only creating it, but editing, uploading, sharing, all that stuff.

That also is a big conversation that you've got to have with your child in advance saying, "Are you willing to do this because here is what goes into it and mom or dad doesn't necessarily, isn't ready to take on a part-time job to make you famous?"

Unless you just happen to have that type of child that you think you can do that, be the stage mom.

Maybe that is your goal.

But anyway, that wasn't my goal.

Ethan's cute but he's not that cute.

All right.

That's just a really, fast overview about being strategic about your content strategy.

I want to share one easy way to get started with that, even if you have… If you have a child who is interested in a content niche that doesn't necessarily have a lot of viral videos or this hot trending content that you can be saying, "Okay. We're just going to stay up to speed with them."

Maybe if you're like my daughter, for example, I mean she loves art.

She loves watching calligraphy videos on YouTube.

That's not necessarily a trending thing.

Here's what I would suggest, if you have a child who wants to strike a happy balance, where it's saying, "Yes. They want to learn how to make the channel and they want to create the videos, but they also want to get followers and not just be putting out videos to crickets."

Because there's definitely something to be said for getting followers and having people comment on your video and saying, "That was so cool." I mean, you guys know because the kids, you guys watch and you like to comment and laugh and share, and you feel like you know these people because you watch them all the time.

Here's a happy medium that I would suggest.

If you have a channel that is more just lifestyle saying, "Hey, I'm really into this right now," or whatever.

It's not like a specialty niche channel.

What I look for is look for bloggers in this and this needs to be age-appropriate.

Look for bloggers, and this can be family blogs or any types of tutorials that people put together themselves and put out there.

We did this a few, a couple of years ago actually.

I can't believe it's been that long already, but on my daughter's channel, we found a tutorial for rainbow unicorn poop slime.

It looked really, cool but we found a tutorial for that.

I was strategic about this.

I specifically chose a tutorial from a family DIY blogger.

She had made the recipe for it herself and created a blog post about it and posted pictures and everything.

I chose her tutorial and what we did, I chose that because she has lots and lots and lots of followers.

We chose her tutorial and we mentioned and basically promoted her and her blog and her blog tutorial in the video.

We didn't say, "Hey, we made this up ourselves." Because we didn't.

We're just saying, "Hey, what's up, guys?" I mean, why do I say we?

Allison was the one in front of the camera.

I was just behind the camera filming.

She's saying, "Hey, guys. We found this recipe from blah-blah-blah blog and you can find the link to this exact tutorial we use in the description below." Then, that way the hope is because what you're doing is you're, first of all, isn't it nice like you can imagine being a blogger where you are just pumping out blog posts all the time and it feels sometimes like nobody's listening.

It's saying, "Did you guys even try this out?

Did you make this recipe?

Did you do this craft project?"

To reach out to that blogger and say, "Hey, we love this so much. We made a video about doing it at our house and here it is."

You can say, "Aiden is a brand new YouTuber and he would love it if you would share your video with your followers." What that does is that it's almost like you created promo content for that blogger or that other YouTuber that had already come up with the topic.

You just created a video about their topic and gave them the credit.

Then, that way they can share it with their hundred thousand people that are on their email list or on their Instagram, their YouTube channel and say, "Shout out to Aiden! He followed that really popular blog post from last month that we did about this or that, and you can see his video here and see his results here."

That would be a great way to just build your following just by making the content, and then making connections with other families who do YouTube, other kids who do YouTube, and it makes them look good, it makes them feel good, it makes them feel great.

Then, also you're not sitting there trying to figure out, "What are we going to make?"

"What are we possibly going to make a YouTube video about?" It's like they're giving it to you.

They're giving you the script or they're giving you the step by step.

Let me know, the parents who are listening, is that making sense how you use other people's audiences in order to drive views back to the child's YouTube channel and you guys who made that content?

Because if my daughter had wanted to continue being really serious with her channel or if she wanted to start doing more, we've talked in theory.

But I'm not the one making this decision ultimately.

I require my kids, they've got to be just as committed to it as me.

I will match their effort, I will not exceed their effort.

But if she wanted to get serious about doing her calligraphy videos, she just enjoys doing calligraphy on her own, but if she wanted to build a following around that, her art, that is exactly the strategy that I would use in order to get it off the ground and makes you, the child, makes you guys feel great because you got recognized for the hard work that you did.

All right.

Let me take another sip of coffee, and then I'm going to jump into tools.

Tools that we use, tools that you use to get started.

Tools that you can use to get started, and hopefully, not start out by spending a bunch of money on stuff you obviously don't need.

The video, I mentioned this already at the beginning.

The video itself does not have to be super professional.

Honestly, the greatest source of content about making YouTube videos is on YouTube itself.

If you take whatever phone that you have, that you're willing to allow your child to use or you'll be the one to use it maybe to film them, look on YouTube, how to create a YouTube video using an iPhone X?

That's what I have.

People have posted how-to videos that are all free on YouTube, and that's another great thing to allow your child to sit and watch and ask them take notes.

Again, this depends on their age.

Once they're at a certain age group, which I feel like most of you guys who are here probably are at that age group, middle school.

You can sit and watch a YouTube video and be saying, "Yes.

I understood what the guy was talking about.

I see in the description the list of what we would need.

Mom, let me borrow your phone so I can see if it works with what we have, and test our lighting."

You can let them watch and teach themselves to an extent, and then tell them, "Ask me, let me know what questions you have or where we might not have enough of what you need in order to get started."

Then, that way it allows them to take ownership of the process I think, and then, of course, keeps you from having to sit there and watch and educate yourself when really your end goal is for your child to learn to do most of these things themselves.

That's another good tip is to look for the free content on how to do all this on YouTube itself.

There are so many good YouTubers that have iPhone videography tips, and there are some incredible apps that you can buy for just an iPhone or an Android I'm sure too, but I'm not real familiar with what all is on there.

Professional video editing apps that people who use iPhones like a second camera - like we're even talking about professional videographers sometimes use this stuff in a pinch, as a backup.

When you're seeing these really cool videos on YouTube with, let's say kids skateboarding and stuff, they look really professional and sometimes they are using nicer equipment and cameras, which obviously you wouldn't invest in that stuff until you are serious about it or maybe you guys just already have that stuff as a hobby, but just to get started, sometimes they are using iPhones with specialty apps that they use to have the shot look really smooth.

I don't know.

Then, you can sometimes just edit directly in the app on your phone.

Like I said your mileage is going to vary based on your child's interest in this part and your own ability in this part.

I don't want, it takes a lot of time to sit and edit videos to make them look super smooth and put together.

If my kids can shoot something that's more or less like one continuous thing.

I don't mind chopping it up, but if you have to do almost a short movie where you film one scene here, film one scene here, film one scene here.

I said, "All right. You, guys, are going to have to like figure this out on your own or be old enough to figure this out on your own before we're making that type of content."

That's another thing that you got to think about with the type of content that you guys are generally making.

Let me know if you have questions about that because I feel like I just made very broad strokes statement considering that there are so many different types of content out there on YouTube that you could be doing.

But one reason, let me go back to me and my son.

One reason why I allow him to make the videos that he's sitting and just talking and like playing a game is because, for us, that is a very easy content type.

I have asked him no less than a hundred times over the past several years like if he's doing something cool with his friends or we're on vacation with our family and I don't know, he's doing back flips into the pool.

I said, "Hey, do you want me to record a video of you telling that story real quick or doing that?"

"No. I don't want to be on that video."

He didn't want to come and sit in here and talk to me today.

So, despite the fact he wants to be a YouTuber, that's just his, he doesn't want to be the main character of his content if that makes sense.

That's another thing that's you weigh the pros and cons, who your child is, who you are, how much behind the scenes you're willing to do and how much they want to be the star of the show.

I think, at this point, my daughter if we were doing calligraphy videos, there are some really cool… What do you call these things?

They're like tripods that are flexible, and so I could take my iPhone and set it up so it was filming like an overhead video of her doing her calligraphy.

You would make sure you have the lighting and stuff.

She could be talking during it if she wanted to or maybe she wouldn't even do that.

She's just doing the calligraphy, and then you edit it together with music and that's the whole video.

She probably would enjoy that type of thing too because it doesn't involve her having to be in front of the camera and feeling like she's an actress.

Some of you guys have little actors and actresses I'm sure.

So, another thing to think about, who's the main character?

What type of content do you want to do and how much time you're willing to spend editing it?

All right.

We have covered strategy.

We have covered how YouTubers make money.

We have covered your basic tools and ways to get set up.

What other questions do you have?

I'm going to do a quick shout out.

This is not by any means officially sponsored but I'm going to pretend like it is.

I'm going to do a quick shout out to Code Ninjas.

Code Ninjas is a really cool place that my son has been going for a little over a year.

They have locations all over the US, but lucky for us, we live very close to one that is absolutely fabulous.

Ethan is as into computers… He's into the computer side of things.

He's into the… He wants to know how to do things on the computer.

At Code Ninjas, he goes after school.

We are on the max level package where you go five hours per week.

But he started off going two hours per week, and it's just like karate ninja belts.

They work their way up from white belt to yellow belt, orange belt.

They work their way up through tasks and projects and reach levels in coding.

They're learning literally how to code through games like Roblox and Minecraft and things that kids already enjoy doing.

For my son, this was the most no-brainer decision I have ever made in my life because this is part of me supporting his overall long-term dream.

I said, "If you want to be a YouTuber, you've got to know, one, not only how to… For example, if you really want to be a YouTuber that makes Minecraft videos and YouTube videos, you've got to know how to do cool stuff inside Minecraft and Roblox. You can't just run around with your character, right?"

We talked about that.

We talked about him eventually knowing how to build his own website.

We talked about him just in case, the full-time YouTube career doesn't pan out that he could still do it part-time and be a YouTuber part-time, and he could have a job doing coding.

He could be in the IT world, what-have-you.

That would be a great second choice, right?

When I send my son to Code Ninjas, I basically feel like I am in getting him… I mean, he's in third grade.

He's been going since he's in second grade.

I feel like he's already working on high school curriculum or at least getting to the point where he'll be able to do advanced computer technology, computer science stuff by the time he gets to high school, by the time he gets to college, and then hit the ground running when he graduates and has a job.

Of course, the YouTube dream will still be there I'm sure for years.

But, at least, he'll have hard skills to land on.

This was another compromise for me in terms of who I am as a parent, and I think that this is a big part of this conversation is I absolutely want him to know how to do all this stuff.

I do not want to be the one who sits and teaches him.

I don't have the patience, and I don't frankly have the time.

I looked into several online kid's coding options.

There are some that you can do from home, and for him, it was just a slightly too advanced at that point in time where he needed to ask me a lot of questions.

What I like about Code Ninjas is I bring him there and he's working on his projects.

They have high school, college adult kids who… Not adult kids, but high school and college kids, and then even some adults who work there full-time.

I mean, that are there to assist them as they're going through their projects.

Assist them as they're going through the projects and just generally be the expert resource support so that I don't have to be.

Jim has a comment.

He said, "Jonathan wants to know what belt Ethan is." Ethan got up to orange belt just before his ninth birthday in January.

He absolutely loves it.

Jim, just to answer your question on that.

He even had been going about a year at that point, and we bumped him up to five hours per week from two hours a week as his Christmas present.

Since he started, since he got back from Christmas break in January, he's been going five hours a week.

We're there all the time.

We absolutely love it and he's been making very, fast progress.

It is definitely his happy place.

It is definitely not where he's necessarily learning how to become a YouTuber but he is like gaining all of those skills that go into knowing how to do all these things.

Because, ultimately, for me, whether it's Code Ninjas or whether it's YouTube, that exact technology may not be there 10 years from now, maybe it'll be something totally different, but the process of learning and the process of teaching yourself the breakdown of the skills that go into knowing how to use any of these programs, knowing how to create the content, knowing how to share it, knowing how to make it engaging and asking people to like your channel and share your channel, all of those skills, I think personally, I'm convinced these kid's generation.

I guess they're what?

Generation Z.

I'm like an elderly millennial myself.

The oldest millennial that there can be.

They're Generation Z.

They're going to need to know all these things.

It's not going to be just for social media influencers.

It's going to be a part of their life, whether they're doing coding for different things at work or whether they're creating content and creating videos for any company that they ever work with, or in my case, I hope that my kids feel super comfortable in the entrepreneurial world because that is my background and my passion, and so much of what I feel goes into having a business and starting a business and putting things out there, a lot of tech skills are involved with that, and you can learn as you go, but if you already know a lot of these things, then as soon as you have an idea you can essentially create it and launch it.

You don't have to find somebody else to make a website for you, don't have to pay somebody else to tweak your website every time, you don't have to pay somebody else to edit your videos and upload them on your YouTube channel.

If you know how to do all that stuff, that is so much of the battle.

I don't even know how much, 50% at least.

You got to have a great idea of it and the execution is everything.

What I feel like I'm helping Ethan with at Code Ninjas with this YouTube project is learning how to execute on ideas, take things from your head and make them into real things.

That is my super, fast overview.

Super fast overview about YouTube.

I think I forgot to say one thing, which is that a lot… I think one buzz word or comment that my kids make about me and my YouTube channel is they're, "Hey, mom, do you have merch?"

My YouTube channel for my business, it does not make money directly from YouTube, which I said at the beginning, kids need to understand that the big YouTubers that do make money directly from YouTube, they have millions of views on like every video.

I'm not saying it's hard or impossible, but it takes extreme commitment.

My YouTube channel for my business is only a part of my business.

It helps people who are looking for content to find me and to come into my world and find my resources.

I've made other videos about that over the past week on this page, Jen Kilbourne Obermeier.

As a parent, if you're interested in that aspect, I have more on that story elsewhere.

My kids probably don't understand that I don't make money DIRECTLY from YouTube.

In fact, I was saying the other day... I think I've made $200 total ever after putting out content for three and a half years.

That in itself is not a money maker.

I do have merch.

I do have a represent.com store.

Again, this is not a money maker either.

For me, this is a community building thing that we have t-shirts and tank tops and sweatshirts that have funny sayings on them.

If your child is interested, because there are YouTubers who have million subscribers and sometimes that's how they monetize or it's the second way that they monetize their channel is to have t-shirts, to have swag.

That's how they do that.

Represent.com is just a website, and all you do is upload your designs, and you can put it on t-shirts.

I don't know.

Sweatshirts, obviously, hoodies.

I think there are other websites that you can do things like coffee mugs or calendars or whatever it is that people do, but Represent is the one that we use for clothing and apparel.

If your child has ever wondered how that works, it's not something super complicated.

It's not only for famous people.

The kids that are out there that have merch and stores and shops, they just had probably a graphic designer whip up their design or their logo and upload it to something like represent.com, and then their subscribers can visit their store shop link, and they can order the t-shirts through there.

You, as the YouTuber or the content creator or obviously, as the parent, don't have to do a single thing except… Like Represent prints the shirts and sends it for you and manages all merchandise returns and that thing.

You never have to touch, creating an actual product and shipping it to people.

I just want to illuminate that area of online business that is not nearly as complicated as it looks to be from the outside if you don't know that those resources exist.

I just hope that helps somebody or is a little bit mind-blowing, you don't have to have somebody come along and tell you, "Oh, you're ready for a shop now." You can just make it.

You can just make it.

So, if you guys have any other questions or think about it for a few days, I would love to know what your kids, what types of videos they're interested in making or maybe I've convinced you that this is too much work or your child just wants to go back to watching content, hopefully that's not true because every time I talk to one of my children's friends parents about this, they're, "Oh, you let him do that?"

I said, "Yeah." It's not as hard.

It's certainly not glamorous but it's not as hard as it seems like it is because anybody can create their YouTube channel.

I'll definitely direct you to YouTube itself to get the tutorials on how to just, you just create the channel, you upload some artwork, like your icon and your logo and your banner.

Then, you just start uploading your videos and make sure that you're putting in titles that tell people what it's about so that when they search in YouTube for like let's say they want to see that newest toy, whatever, drone that just came out.

Make sure that in the title you're super specific and you don't just say, "Hey, here's my new cool drone."

You want to say, "This is the Drone 3000." I have no idea what the names of drones are.

But put it in the product name, put the specific so that people can find it really easily and your videos will start being recommended next to other popular drone videos and YouTube, the algorithm of YouTube will start to promote your content if people are able to find it and watch it and engage with it.

Then, YouTube will see that that's good content that they want to show next to other similar videos to it.

It's pretty exciting.

I think it's a really fun journey to be on with your child, especially as you guys do the research and you get more excited about ideas and figure out things that you can do, even if it's just one video every month.

I think it's certainly a worthwhile thing to do.

I hope you guys are all hanging in there in quarantine land.

Where we are, where we live, we're on week two of probably what is about to be extended into six more weeks.

So, maybe, just maybe if you are just feeling super ambitious and have nothing else on your plate, this could be something fun that you guys do together over the next several months, and your child will look back at this time in their life and be, "That's when I started my YouTube channel, and it was so weird, we didn't have school the whole rest of the year."

Honestly, my kids are certainly living their best life right now.

I think they're going to look back and say, "That was honestly really fun." Because they had no clue what was going on in the outside world.

So, maybe this can be just a cool diversion or a cool project to work on together.

I would love to hear what your results are!

Thank you, everybody, for tuning in today.

I'll be back tomorrow with another topic. Bye for now!