Would you like to make money editing videos?
There are different ways to do that! Audiovisual production is a market that has grown a lot in recent years and only tends to grow more and more with the popularity of the Internet in general, the popularity of video platforms like YouTube and the popularity of social networks like Instagram, TikTok and others.
This brought up multiple opportunities of making a full-time income editing videos that wasn’t possible a few decades ago. Even if you haven’t started editing videos yet, it’s good to know what are the opportunities for making money with video editing!
And that’s what we’re gonna cover in this post! You will not only discover how to make money with video editing, you also discover a technique for charging more for your editing jobs while delivering more content to your clients!
Let’s get started!
Work as a freelance video editor
The first way to earn money editing videos is to edit videos as a freelancer, that is a type of self-employment. Freelancers don’t have a formal employment contract with any company or with any institution, they work on a sporadic basis for companies or for individual clients. Another common type of work for video editing freelancers is editing videos for YouTubers or for influencers who post a lot of content on social media.
Being a freelancer is a great way to get started with video editing because you have many opportunities to practice your editing and gain more experience. The good thing about being a freelancer is that you can set up your working schedule as you like, you can define at what hours of the day you will work, how you will charge for each job, everything is decided by you.
One thing to keep in mind is that when you’re a freelancer, you kind of become a one-person video producer company because freelancers have to take care of everything, from customer service to job delivery. That includes possible revisions after client feedback of a finished job. Remember that you may end up feeling overwhelmed by this dynamic if you feel that this type of work wouldn’t be ideal for you.
Another important thing to remember is that, as a freelancer, you will have to go look for video editing jobs on your own, you need to look for clients on online platforms that offer individual jobs for freelancers, through a portfolio website as a portfolio, on your social networks or in any other way that you find interesting.
You can discover how to charge more for your freelancing editing jobs while delivering more content to your clients with a technique explained at the end of the post.
Work on a formal video editing job
The second way to earn money with video editing is through a formal job that has an employment contract and a defined working schedule. Some examples of companies that hire video editing professionals are TV channels, video production companies, Internet content production companies, corporate content producers, movie producing companies, companies that have an in-house production function videos and companies that need video content about the company itself and hire video editors for that.
A formal job can offer you contractual guarantees that vary from country to country. Also, you will not need to look for jobs because there will always be work demand in the position you are responsible for. Usually, video editing professionals have specific functions in formal jobs, so you can specialize in a part of the video production process depending on the company that hires you.
Create stock footage and video templates to sell online
A third way to make money with video editing involves creativity and your editing techniques. You may not know about this, but you can create and sell stock footage and video templates online!
Stock footage are short videos you record and make available for sale, they can be about anything at all. Video templates are videos that you edit and make available for sale not as a watchable video, but as a project that can be opened and edited by whoever buys it.
People who buy your video templates are searching for a pre-made video of any type to create their own projects faster. You can create motion graphics templates, video intro templates, Visual Effects templates and multiple other types!. That’s a great way of making money with video content!
There are online platforms called content marketplaces that are creative communities where you can sell your stock footage and video content to be purchased by those who need it. Some usual types of stock footage video clips are everyday scenes, like the sunrise or a city view from the point of view of a car passing on the road. It’s just like photographers work when they sell their photos on online photo banks, the difference is that you will be selling stock footage clips and video templates.
This way of making money with videos is similar to freelancing, there will be no deadlines to meet as you only need to upload your video clips to the content marketplaces one single time. From there on, it can be purchased and downloaded by thousands of people. So do a search on this subject if you are interested in this way of earning money income to find the content marketplace that works better for you.
You can also see our post 7 Methods to Always Have Ideas for Videos to help you find ideas for recording your own stock footage videos. Remember that, in most cases, stock footage videos are muted (no sound), so it would be ideal to remove the audio from your stock footage videos before making them available for sale.
Also, the more information there is on the Internet about a topic, the more trustworthy the topic becomes. So, the more content you make available for sale, the more your work will become popular!
How to charge more for video editing jobs and deliver more content to your clients at the same time
One thing you can do with your freelance jobs is to offer editing packages to your clients, like editing 5 videos in one job, for example. This is good because not only can you charge more for the job (since you’ll be editing more videos), there are also advantages from the customer’s point of view because, in most cases, a video package can deliver the result that the client expects much faster than if you only edit one single video. To apply this technique in all your editing jobs, you need to search for content that your client may need and turn it into proposals for creating video that you will offer as a video editing package.
The Theory: your client is a company that hired you to edit a marketing video for promoting one of their products. Instead of creating one single video, you can edit 5 or more videos. This way, the product can become known faster and reach more potential customers.
How would this be in practice? Let’s see.
Real Life Example
Imagine that you are going to do a video editing freelance job for a pet grooming service that includes bathing, nail clipping and brushing pet animals. The pet grooming service hires you and demands one single marketing video to promote the brand. Instead, you can offer a pack of 5 videos:
1) The first video would be about the pet grooming service in general with a list of services offered and what makes the service unique. If possible, the company owner and the employees can appear in the video working on a daily basis to illustrate the services offered.
2) The second video would be about how the service offers pet grooming. The purpose of this video is to exemplify the quality of the service, so it’s a narrative video with a list of services offered and some illustrative video clips as B-Rolls (secondary footage).
3) The third video would be a compilation of short 10-second interviews of recurring clients of the grooming service explaining why they chose that company as their unique grooming service.
4) The fourth video would be a pet care professional who works at the grooming company explaining how to take care of pets on a day-to-day basis and also promoting the pet grooming service as the best place to take care of the pet of whoever watches the video.
5) The fifth video would be a short video between 30 seconds and 1 minute with a compilation of previous videos to be shared on social media.
Cool, right?! What could be a long video about the pet grooming service, or worse, a short video with little information, becomes a series of 5 videos that will promote the company in a more detailed and comprehensive way!
You don’t simply charge more, you actually deliver much more content! That is the strategy!
Conclusion!
Great! Now you know three great ways of making money with video editing! You also know a strategy for charging more for video editing jobs while delivering more content! So don’t hesitate to put what you’ve learned into practice!
You can also share your thoughts in the comments below!
