Most new channels have an Apply for YouTube Partner Program button in the channel status and features options.
If you do apply, chances are your channel will be rejected.
Dear Izzy Laif,
Thank you for your interest in the YouTube Partner Program. Applications are reviewed for a variety of criteria, including but not limited to the size of your audience, country of residence, quality of content, and compliance with our YouTube Community Guidelines and Terms of Use.
At this time, we are unable to accept your application. To continue building your channel, you may be interested in the following resources:
Promoted Videos: discover how to surface your videos to the YouTube community (Note: only available in certain countries)
Optimization tips: optimize your channel
Partnership Criteria for general qualifications
Thank you for understanding.
The YouTube Team
There are certain unknown criteria YouTube uses while evaluating new participants, most importantly – subscribers and view count. Even though one of my channels got invited to the program with only 300 views, you are mostly rejected with “continue building your channel” guidelines. Continue building usually means getting at least 1000 legitimate subscribers. For a young channel, this may take forever. But I will show you a trick to enable monetization on any channel, even with zero views and zero subscribers. Go to Advanced settings and change the country of your channel to USA. Save the new settings and go back to Status and options. Miraculously, the Apply button has now changed to Enable monetization! Click on it, click enable my account, confirm everything and follow the process to the end.
Congratulations Izzy Laif,
Your account is now enabled for monetization. To help you get started, we created the following resource to guide you through your account, our policies, and provide tips to growing your audience.
You can manage your videos and opt them into monetization from your Video Manager. Also, visit the Creator Hub to learn about the latest creator news and resources.
After you are through, monetize some of your videos. You may then change the country of the channel back to the desired one. To receive payments, you will also need to link an Adsense account to YouTube. You may find detailed instructions here.