From Zero to Monetization: How Faceless YouTube Channels Can Make You Money

Join our Newsletter and visit http://TransformYourFuture.com where I write about reinvention, identity and entrepreneurship.

Duration: Approximately 51 minutes

Description: In this episode of Transform Your Future, Eddie Isin sits down with Tony Lysandrides, an expert in creating and monetizing faceless YouTube channels. Tony shares his remarkable journey from working a blue-collar job to building a successful online business during the COVID-19 lockdown. He discusses how he discovered the potential of faceless YouTube channels, the strategies he used to monetize them, and the challenges he faced along the way.

Whether you're a seasoned content creator or someone looking to start a side hustle, this episode is packed with actionable insights and practical advice. Tony's experience with identifying viral trends, outsourcing content creation, and leveraging AI tools can help you transform your own approach to YouTube and unlock new income streams.

Key Takeaways:

• [00:00] Introduction: Eddie introduces the concept of faceless YouTube channels and welcomes Tony Lysandrides.
• [04:21] Tony’s Journey: How the COVID-19 lockdown pushed Tony to explore online income opportunities, leading to his success with faceless YouTube channels.
• [06:55] Content Creation Process: Tony explains his approach to creating content, including identifying viral trends and outsourcing tasks to a global team.
• [08:42] Monetization Milestones: Tony shares his monetization timeline, discussing how he achieved a 5k month and eventually a 14k month through his channels.
• [12:28] Latest Projects: Tony talks about his most recent faceless channel, "Bible Brook," and how he monetized it within 30 days.
• [14:32] Increasing RPM: Tony provides tips on how to increase RPM (Revenue Per Mille) by targeting Western audiences and creating longer videos.
• [20:43] Data-Driven Decisions: Tony emphasizes the importance of using tools like vidIQ for making data-driven decisions in content creation.
• [24:28] Outsourcing Strategies: Tony discusses the benefits of outsourcing video production and how it has streamlined his operations.
• [46:59] Coaching Program: Tony talks about his coaching program, where he helps others create and monetize faceless YouTube channels.

Links and Resources:

• Visit Tony Lysandrides' Automated Income Academy for more information on his coaching program 
• Explore tools mentioned in the episode, including vidIQ, DALL-E, MidJourney, and 11 Labs.

Subscribe to Transform Your Future Newsletter Where Eddie writes about personal development, reinvent & identity: http://transformyourfuture.com

Transcript

0:00

It's like the algorithm seems to change every so often and sometimes, yeah, it's very common. And I speak to many YouTubers about this, where they just have a spike in a few videos and then eventually it just dies down and then a few months later it might spike up again. I've seen that a lot where videos would spike and then afterwards it would just die down, but then give it six months later and it'll just spike up again. So it is very sporadic in terms of the viewership and that just a challenge. But the good thing is you can start another channel and why write a different wave? So even though you are making money from your first channel, you can use the profits that you've made from that channel, invest it into another channel, and then get that monetized. And then once that's more profitable, you can then invest the profits to another channel. That's the good thing about faceless channels. It's like it's not subject to your face. So the traditional YouTuber is subject to him. He becomes a business. However, the problem with that is if something happens to you, then the business can go down. But if you are faceless, you can do multiple channels at the same time. And yeah, that's the main benefit. Papaya. Hello all. And welcome to another episode of Transform Your Future with me, Eddie Isin, where I sit down with entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and high achievers as they identify areas I can improve on and guide me to further my self-improvement practice. For more information and insights, join my newsletter@transformyourfuture.com where I write about reinvention, personal growth, and entrepreneurship. If you like the show, you'll love the content on my site. We want to hear from you. Let us know how we can improve your listening and viewing experience. Suggest upcoming topics or a great guest for the show. Please reach out to us through our website, your podcast app comment, or just text me directly at 3 7 2 2 1 4 1 7. We want to hear from you. Today we're diving into the fascinating world of faceless YouTube channels, a topic that's gaining momentum among aspiring content creators and entrepreneurs alike. If you've ever dreamed of making money on YouTube without ever showing your face, this episode is for you. Joining me is Tony Lysandrides, a seasoned expert in the art of creating and monetizing faceless YouTube channels. Tony's journey is nothing short of inspiring from discovering a whole new realm of online income during the COVID-19 lockdown, Tony has transitioned and transformed his life by leveraging YouTube in a and highly profitable way. What started as a necessity has now turned into a thriving business with multiple channels under his belt, each generating significant revenue. In this episode titled From Zero to Monetization, how Faceless YouTube Channels Can Make you money. Tony shares his secrets, strategies and challenges with me. He talks about what he had to overcome to build a successful portfolio of faceless YouTube channels. We'll explore everything from identifying viral trends, outsourcing content creation, and leveraging AI tools to the critical monetization strategies that have helped him turn views into dollars. Whether you're new to the YouTube scene or a seasoned creator looking to diversify your income streams, or if you're just looking for a side hustle, Tony's Insights will provide you with actionable steps to start or enhance your own faceless channel journey. Get ready to take notes. This episode is packed with valuable information that could transform your approach to YouTube and open new doors to Financial Freedom. Tony, thank you so much. Welcome to Transform Your Future Podcast. Thank you so much for coming in and spending some time with me. Today we are going to be talking about faceless YouTube channels, something I'm very interested and excited about. Let me just open it up and just tell me a little bit about how you ended up involved in faceless YouTube channels and found your success in there. What were you doing before that and what led you to think that you wanted to crack that nut? Thank you so much for having me on today, Eddie. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, so I have a bit of an interesting story when it comes to faceless YouTube channel. So it all started when we had the first lockdown, and I was installing alarm systems at the time that was, I was a blue collar worker installing alarm systems. It was sales and installations. And at the first lockdown when covid began to break out and everyone started to panic and businesses began to say, we have to work from home now, but my job, you couldn't do it from home. It was going into clients' houses, installing CCTV cameras for businesses, for residential homes. So I couldn't work from home. So instead, what they did in here in the UK is they put us on something called furlough where we were asked not to work, and we were told we will still get paid our salary, a percentage of our salary, but we were told we were not supposed to work. And so I was locked in my house. And so I was looking for other ways to make money online, well, ways to make money online without obviously, because that's where the world is going. So I first looked at Forex trading. I'm like, okay, I have a friend who's doing Forex trading. Let me ask him. So Forex trading, I had a bit of success in it. For the first two weeks, I made 500 pounds, which is around$7. But then two weeks after that, I lost it all. So I was like, okay. So as quick as I made it, as quick as I lost it, and then after a few, so I kind of eventually gave up on Forex because I was just like, it's not really for me analyzing graphs and charts and all that stuff. And so that's when a few weeks later, I believe a month later, I ran across an ad, which was a YouTube ad, which basically spoke about how you can get into YouTube investing, but in a different way, not investing in the stock market, but investing into YouTube videos. And you don't have to show your face, you don't have to make the videos yourself. Everything could be outsourced. And it was a course I bought online, I bought the course, and then I was kind of left pretty much on my own, even though there was a bit of customer support and a community there, I was kind of left on my own essentially to just go for my YouTube channel. So I created a YouTube channel, and the basic aspect of how it works is you have to look for viral trends and you have to look at what's trending and if you could do similar videos to the videos that are trending on those topics. So when I started, the topic that was trending was videos about Dubai. So I didn't even know what Dubai was. I mean, I knew it was a place where people would go, but I actually didn't know it was a city. I thought it was a country. And so that's how ignorant I was, but it was trending. I saw that they had a Dubai mall, they had Dubai manmade islands, they had a Ferris wheel, they had all these different touristic aspects. And so I just started doing videos on the Dubai Islands, the dark side of Dubai and different aspects to Dubai. And when I started doing that, well, first of all, it wasn't me who was doing the videos. My job essentially was to find the trends that was trending on YouTube. And when I would spot the trends, I basically hired a team to do the videos for me. So all I would do essentially was the ideation and quality control. Whilst I had four people doing the videos for me, four people doing the whole video process. So first you had a script. I had a script writer who would write the script of the video and then who would do the research and then write the script of the video. And then after the script writer, I would hire a voiceover artist and the voiceover artist would speak the script and bring it to life. And after the voiceover artist, we then had a video editor who would find footage online and from the websites, put it together with background music and bringing the video to life. And once we've had those three aspects done, we will just need one more person to do the thumbnail for those who don't know what a thumbnail is, because I didn't know what a thumbnail was, thumbnail's the picture that you see before you click on a YouTube video. There's the title, the name of the video, and then there's the thumbnail, which is the picture that represents what the video is about. So we needed somebody to put that together as well on Photoshop. So those are the four people I hired to put the video creation process together. And for those who might think that's very expensive, it actually isn't because you can hire people overseas who will do it for much cheaper than they would in the US or in the UK because the currency we have in the US and the UK is much stronger than the Philippines or Bangladesh or Pakistan, all those kind of countries. So we can leverage that, the strength of the currency in that sense. So we started doing some videos and some videos went viral, and within eight months I got monetized. That's actually a long time to get monetized. So recently I monetized two other channels within the space of two months, and they were like one month each. So that was a long time to get monetized, but eventually that's when the video started to pick up. And then it was after a year and a half where we finally hit a 5K month, and then after the 5K month, we hit the 14 K month and it was very lucrative at that point. So that's pretty much how I got into it. Sorry. I know I kind of went on a bit of a run. So it started in 'em. Fantastic. So going back a second, you mentioned about it's not as expensive as people think. Also, we're only hiring somebody to do a small part of a small video. It is not like you're asking somebody to write warn piece. So that also makes it a reasonable budget to do these things. So the Dubai trend, you launched the channel, what was the name of the channel? Interesting flow. So I changed the channel, and that's another thing you can do on YouTube. You can change the name of the channel. At first, I named it interesting facts, but then I found out that there was a bunch of other channels called the Interesting Facts. So that's when I eventually changed it to Interesting Flow. So that channel's still up and running or it's ended? Nope, it's still up and running. And that's the beauty of YouTube. When a video is up on YouTube, as long as it's still getting clicks, you'll still get paid. And even if you don't do anything with that channel ever again, as long as it's still getting views, you'll still get paid. And. Which is why I think many people put the effort into YouTube because when you put something there, it lasts forever. It's not like Facebook or Instagram or TikTok where it's only in your feed for a short amount of time. And then after that 24 cycle, people are getting delivered other messaging. So that is definitely one of the great aspects of it. So, so that I understand was the focus of the channel Dubai or the focus of the channel was interesting flow, and you had maybe other trends that you capitalized on. So we were doing videos about anything and everything, but Dubai was the main thing that worked. My mistake was I didn't stick with the niche as much as I should have because I did a few other videos that were outside of the niche of Dubai, and that kind of damaged the channel a bit. And so that's why I teach people when they go into YouTube, I always say to them, stick to your niche and don't fluff around, don't do. One day you do a video about an animal channel, an animal video. Next day you do a video about cryptocurrency. Next day you do a video about Dubai, just keep it in one niche. So the most recent channel that you did, let's just assume that the most recent channel you did is informed with the most information and experience that you've had up to this point. What's the most recent faceless channel? So most faceless recent channel that I've started, and I got this one monetized within one month, 30 days. It's called Bible book. And it is a niche that was trending. It kind of spiked in March, but I was happy to go into it before then. So yeah, I got that monetized within 30 days, and I got another channel monetized within 30 days. And that was more of an explainer channel that explains every X, Y, z, explained in a certain amount of time. So Bible Brooke, what is the focus of that channel? So it's more about the Bible and different stories in the Bible, we bring it to life with AI visuals. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Stories from the Bible and different perspectives in the Christian niche. Yeah. Interesting, interesting. What kind of viewership, what kind of eyeballs do you reach with that? So at the moment, I think we've just crossed a million views of that with that channel. And one thing I learned throughout the years of being on YouTube you would want to do is you would want to pick a niche that has a high, what we call RPM. And this channel, I've learned how to increase the RPM, which is how much YouTube will pay you for a thousand views. So with my previous channels, I always had an issue of a low RPM and I didn't know why. And that's because basically for every a thousand views, I would only get like$3. But in this channel, with the Bible book channel, it's now around $5.50 for every a thousand views. And you might think that's not a big difference, but when you talk about hundreds or thousands of views, then it becomes a big difference. So if I was to hit a million views with a video in this niche, I would get $5,500. However, in my other niche, it'll only be around $3,000. So the niche is very important and increasing RPM is very important. A few ways that you can increase your RPM is making sure that your audience is a Western audience because there's a higher advertising budget in western countries such as the us, the uk, Canada, Australia, Europe, those countries are more economically developed. So advertisers have a higher advertising budget. So however, in places like India, Pakistan, the Philippines, I had a few videos go viral, but most of the audience, because you can actually see in YouTube analytics where your audience is watching from because YouTube has that data is because people log in with their Gmail accounts, so can see that the RRP M was much lower because there's a lower advertising budget. So that's one way you can increase your RPM, making sure that the audience is in a more economically developed country and also making longer videos. That's something we've been working on as well, making longer videos because if you have longer videos, you can put in more adverts within those videos. YouTube have a policy that if your video is over eight minutes long, then you can put in Instream ads, which means that at the moment, with a normal YouTube video, you can only put an advert at the beginning of the video and at the end, however, when you have an eight minute plus video, you can actually choose to put in adverts within the video in between. However, if your video is half an hour long, 30 minutes long, you can put in much more ads as opposed to just an eight minute long video. And so what we've been doing is we've been increasing the video length and we've been seeing a higher return on investment. And so yeah, that's another way you can increase your RPM. Took me some time to figure that one out. But yeah, hope that answers that. It's interesting. So again, I just want to say we've been talking and my background, I have a real history with film and video production. I've had my YouTube channel for a long time. I've released a lot of content. Some of it, like I mentioned to you, some of the videos that I have released have gone kind of viral and got a lot of views, but I haven't really figured out the formula to be able to consistently do that in my channel. And my channel's gone through a few different changes that I've made that I've transformed into something else. Right now, my channel's all about my podcast and about personal development and self-development, but there was a time that my channel was actually more about sports and sports television, specifically MMAI had worked with, I had done like 27 mixed martial arts television shows that appeared worldwide, and I would release clips from these mixed martial arts television shows. And those clips had a life of its own and had people commenting and a lot of views on them. But that wasn't a trend that I was interested in exploiting in my channel, but in another channel and a faceless channel, I think that could be something that could be exploited. How talked about you find trends. And I also want to mention that I read YouTube Formula by Darl Ives, and it's great and it's so impactful. There's so much to think about. He doesn't specifically talk about faceless channels necessarily, but he just talks about YouTube in general and thumbnails and the art of thumbnails and the scripting and the trends out there wanting to create something that is going to be shareable, that people are going to want to share it. How do you pick your trends? You said that you were looking and you saw that there was a trend about the Bible, or you're looking and you saw there was a trend about Dubai. Where are these trends that you're looking at? That's a good question, Eddie. So I personally look at YouTube itself. Other people like to use different softwares, and in my experience, the only software that's actually worked out is something called Vid iq, which is a free software which you can install on your Chrome extension browser. It's like a browser extension that goes on. And you can see with the Vid IQ software, you can see the views per hour of a video of each video that is on there. It's like a lens that allows you to see something that the normal average viewer can't see when you have this software installed. So it enables you to see the views per hour of each video, so you can see what is actually trending as you're looking at the video. Because when you look at YouTube, just YouTube views itself when you can see what time, what day something was posted and how many views it has. You dunno if the trend has died down or you dunno if it's still trending. But with the Vid IQ software, you can actually see how many views per hour a video is getting, and it's an excellent software because it's free and enables you to see it. It's pretty accurate because I've seen how many views per hour from my Google Analytics, from my YouTube analytics, I can see what videos are getting, how many views per hour they're getting. And when I see the Vid IQ software, it's pretty much the same. It's very accurate, and yeah, it's free and it does wonder, so I use Vid IQ to see how many views per hour video's getting. Plus I just look at YouTube itself. I look at what videos have gone viral, what topics have gone viral in the past three months, and I just do similar videos. I just switch up the title a bit. So looking at other channels, seeing what other channels are doing, finding something in there, seeing how that has grown, how many views per hour, looking at those metrics and then using that to say, okay, well this is something that we can try. We can go work in this area and let's review that more and do more research. So really just looking at YouTube and I mean obviously there's search terms that are happening, there's people searching for videos on there. And iq, I have that. I actually have the paid version. It gives you a lot of statistics and data, and so you're really talking about data-driven decision making here. Yes, a hundred percent not emotional decision making because that leads to disappointment unfortunately. So yeah, vid IQ is very good. And yeah, the paid version's good as well. There's additional features with the paid version. Yeah, so I look at YouTube itself and I make my decision based on the data. That's pretty much, and avoid, make sure that the niche is more of a Western audience. Be careful because some niches, even though the videos are going viral, they're not making as much money simply because the audience is in a less economically developed country. And you can see that just by looking at the comments. Some comments just have English comments and then some have a bunch of different languages, and you can see that that's mainly led cs. My experience with YouTube and making money from YouTube advertising and being a partner, it has been sporadic at best. It's been up and down. I mean, there was a time, it took me six months to get a check because there just wasn't that much activity on the channel. They only cut a check for a hundred bucks. They won't cut it for less than that. So it took me six months to make a hundred dollars, which is really sucks. I'm just curious, with your experience and what you're doing with the faceless channels, it keeps growing when you hit the 5,000, it keeps growing, it stabilizes that debt, or does it have its peaks and flows? Does it go up, up and down? It has, it peaks. Yeah, it has its ups and downs. It has its peaks and flows, definitely. And that's very common, even with other YouTube watermaker I've met, even other YouTubers that I've spoken to. It's a seasonal, I wouldn't say a seasonal business, but it's like the algorithm seems to change every so often. And sometimes, yeah, it's very common. And I speak to many YouTubers about this where they just have a spike in a few videos and then eventually it just dies down and then a few months later it might spike up again. I've seen that a lot where videos would spike and then afterwards it'll just die down, but then give it six months later and it'll just spike up again. So it is very sporadic in terms of the viewership, and that just a challenge. But the good thing is you can start another channel and ride a different wave. Even though you are making money from your first channel, you can use the profits that you've made from that channel, invest it into another channel, and then get that monetized. And then once that's more profitable, you can then invest the profits to another channel. That's the good thing about faceless channels is that it's not subject to your face. So the traditional YouTuber is subject to him, he becomes a business. However, the problem of that is if something happens to you, then the business can go down. But if you're faceless, you can do multiple channels at the same time. And yeah, that's the main benefit is you can diversify the YouTube channels, which is really good. And going back to hiring, I know you've been in video production for many years, so this will probably be of interest to you, Eddie. We use different hiring platforms to get our video editors, and one thing I've realized is that when you learn how to outsource a lot of your work, life becomes so much more easy, especially when it's done cheaply and when it's done to people who are in a time zone that is with me here in the uk, in Pakistan, in the Philippines, their time zone is like five, six hours ahead of us. So what I would do is I would work

all night, midnight, 1: 24:31

00 AM,

2: 24:33

00 AM I would just be writing up scripts for them to finish, and then when I would wake up in the morning after six hours sleep, seven hours sleep, I would wake up in the morning, it would already be done because they were just waking up whilst I was finishing my work. And I would go to sleep, and whilst I was sleeping, they were working and I wake up to a full video done, which was really good. But yeah, we use websites such as Upwork, Fiverr, online jobs, pH, and works really well. And yeah, if anyone is listening that wants to learn how to outsource go on Fiverr, it's an amazing place to just outsource pretty much anything. Me personally, I use it obviously for video editing software, not software, video editing and thumbnails. So it's a really good place to outsource. Yes. Very good. So do you have a release pattern that you use? So let's just say the Bible Brooke channel. Do you have a release pattern of the new videos that come out? Do you do it weekly, monthly? Yeah, we do. So we are aiming for three videos per week. So three videos per week is what we aim for. Sometimes it's not easy to achieve that. I'm still looking to hire more people for that, but it becomes a bit of a challenge sometimes when you're hiring people, you want good people, you don't want average video editors, you don't want average scripts. So sometimes it could be a challenge to actually find the right people for it. So we do have a team right now who are working on three videos a week, but yeah, we need a bigger team to do that consistently because videos and then the next week we'll do three, and then the next week we'll do two. So it's a bit sporadic. But yeah, three videos per week is what we aim for. I avoid scheduling. I've not had good experiences for some reason. I dunno if YouTube just doesn't like it when you schedule a video, but every time I would schedule a video, it wouldn't really do anything. So I just avoid scheduling. I know some YouTubers they do it, they just schedule a video for next week or whatever, but I just don't do that because every time I've done it, the video doesn't seem to do anything special, so I just avoid it. I can't really prove a hundred percent it feels the scheduling that was the case or feels the video. But yeah, I just avoid scheduling. But I manually upload videos from YouTube studio, but quality is definitely more important than quantity, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't have a bunch of videos that you're pushing out every month. So what I'm curious about is I have been very interested in faceless channels for obvious reasons. You're talking about, it's like an investing in something, so you invest a little bit of time, resources, and energy. You subcontractor do it yourself, it really doesn't matter. It's better obviously the subcontract because this is an investment. This is not like your full-time gig. It's something you do on the side, you release that stuff. So I am very interested in that, especially since there are areas that I want to work in, but I don't want it to be attached to me and my face and my identity online. I want it to just be something else. So I think it's great and I'm attracted to it and I've been following it and researching it, and I've actually seen a lot of stories and read a lot of stories and watched a bunch of YouTube videos about people who have been very successful with faceless channels. I think recently the one that I've been most impressed with are these two young guys that developed several channels, but the one guy has been able now to refine his process that he was able to scale very quickly to doing$50,000 a month or something like that from it. And he talked about trends as well, but his trends were a little bit more overarching kind of themes, for example, people liking sports and a lot of activity of people interested in sports and sports content online. And then building a channel somehow on the niche of some area of sports, whether that be a particular sport or a particular angle on the sports, maybe profiling athletes or something. And then one channel that he went into a little bit deeper was around court. So something like the idea of channels about courts and court cases and the stories about the people in there and their crazy dramas and whatnot were trend. So he opened up a court channel. So I find it very interesting, and I am going to take the time to start doing this, so that's why I was so excited to talk to you, to hear about your views and your experience so that I could learn. So I'm so glad that you're teaching other people this and showing them how to do that so they can develop at least a side hustle to make some extra money in their lives, even if all they did was make an extra thousand dollars a month, this would impact somebody's life seriously. Yeah, exactly. It's very exciting. It is. It's really exciting. And yeah, you mentioned you have a channel, so yeah, like we mentioned earlier, you can always have several channels and have it completely outsourced and have it faceless. And I think you have a bit of an advantage here, Eddie, because you've been in video production for the past 30 plus years. So it's always important to use your unfair advantage advantage in your case. Yeah, I believe you'll do really well. I believe your experience is rare, and I think the people who you'll be going up against in terms of other channels or other people who just start out, you have what most people don't have. You have something that not even, I have 30 plus years of video production experience. So essentially what will be, not a challenge, but something you would have to figure out is how you can use your years of experience and translate that into YouTube and in order for you to have that edge over everybody else who's on YouTube. And I think it won't be that hard to figure that out. Yeah, well, definitely managing a team is something that I'm very familiar with over the years. I mean, I had 32 people working for me at one time, and half were in production and the other half were in sales. But hold on a second, sorry. The skills that I have are obviously something I'll bring to the table, but it's the trends that I feel is my a shortcoming, if you will, is really understand the trends and I don't know any other way to do it than to do it by trying. And so by starting picking and doing it and letting that inform me and then doing it again and doing it again until I get to that sweet spot where I'm actually in something that has an interest that people are sharing. Yeah, definitely. Have you thought about a niche you want to target at the moment, or is it just. Well, I have, I've been looking at sports and when I do something with sports, also because of my experience that on my channel in the past, the clips that I released of MMA fights that I had were the things that got traction. And over a long period of time, people kept wanting to look at those knockouts or look at the bloody mess that was caused or whatever. So I'm thinking about that because I have some experience with it and understand it. And I also have my own library of 27 shows that are 90 minutes long of content that I could exploit as well. One area though that you mentioned earlier, well that's what I'm thinking anyway. Maybe I can't get traction, I don't know, but that's what my idea was. And I was talking to my son and he was talking about profiling. He loves soccer. I mean, absolutely loves soccer. He is a sports enthusiast. I have to talk to him about it. I'm not really big on sports. So if I going to talk about anything in sports, I always talk to my oldest son because he could be a sports commentator, bro. He loves sports, he knows the stats, he knows the info, he knows his shit, and he loves soccer right now, he's the last few years, he's just totally into soccer. And he said to profile soccer players that he thought was a good idea. So we were talking about things and seeing it do things. I would love to do something with him, but this is definitely an area where I want to start being informed in and mess with. But one thing you mentioned earlier, I was just curious, when you're picking these niches and you're working towards that, how do you start out? How do you start out that process? Do you just drop a 10 minute video or 30 minute video, or do you just drop a five minute video? How do you start the process? I would always do, I would first list out 10 video ideas. So once I've found my golden niche, I would look at their most viral videos, and from their most viral videos, I would, from those viral videos, I would extract or derive 10 viral video ideas. So let's say for argument's sake, the viral video is 10 foods in the health niche, 10 foods that will help your gut. So let's say that got 10 million views in three months for argument's sake, 10 foods that will help your gut. What you can then do is you can do 10 foods that will help your liver. You just change that last word or 10 foods that will help your brain or 10 foods that will help your muscles grow. So you will, I'll just change the last word of the most viral video, you won't do the same video. You won't do 10 foods that helps your gut because that's already been done. People have already seen it. What you can do is you can do, just change out out the words or even you can do 10 drinks that will help your gut. You'll just change that one word. So essentially what you'd want to do is look at the titles that have gone viral and do similar titles, but just change up one word. Once you change up one word, as long as it's still in relation to health, you have your viral video idea. So I'll do 10 different video ideas, even 20 if possible from that one viral video idea. And I'll do a similar thumbnail, same color codes, very similar thumbnail, but I'll just change up one word in the title. And I would have 10 different variations. So after those 10 different variations, I would always look at the channels that are doing well in that niche. So in this case, if it's the health niche, I'd subscribe to all of the health channels that are doing really well in a sense they got millions of views in the past three months. I'll subscribe to all of those channels and I'll study the hell out of my competition. What I'll then do in terms of video length, because the length of the video is very important as well, because YouTube is promoting longer videos because they want people to stay on their platform as long as possible. The reason why they introduced shorts was because they're competing with TikTok. But apparently very soon TikTok will be banned in the west, and that will actually be good news for us YouTubers, because we're going to have an influx of views coming to us and we're going to make all the money from them. It sounds weird, but it sounds evil, but. No, it doesn't sound evil. So if TikTok gets shut down, then we'll take all the views and take all the money from that. Where was I? So yeah, YouTube is promoting longer form videos. So if you do want your video to be pushed out, produce a longer video. It does cost a bit more because there's more labor in terms of video editing and scripting, so there's more labor involved in that. So it will cost a bit more money to put the video out there, but it's more likely to go viral because YouTube are promoting longer videos. They want people to stay on the platform for longer. And in that case, you can actually put in more Instream ads into the videos, so you have more adverts playing in between segments so it becomes more lucrative. So if your videos in your niche are doing 10 minute videos, I would suggest to do slightly longer. So even 15 minutes or 20 minutes, not dramatically longer. If it's a 10 minute video that went viral, I wouldn't suggest to do a one hour long video. I would suggest to it slightly longer so that YouTube will push your video a bit more because of its length. So yeah, do slightly longer videos than your competition because YouTube will actually favor that. Interesting, interesting. So let's talk about content a minute. There's a lot of conversations about creating the content and writing the scripting and doing the thumbnails, that whole process and the length and everything, and the algorithm and the trends. Let's talk about the content for a minute. Where are you getting the content? Is it mostly just longer YouTube videos that you're clipping from this YouTube and that YouTube and this YouTube to create your content? Is that mainly what we're doing? So you can use other people's videos on YouTube and you can give them credit in the bottom left corner. Most of the times those YouTube videos, they got it from somewhere else that is not even there. So you can take videos from other YouTube channels and give them, I usually give them credit in the bottom left corner, put the name of their channel. In the bottom left corner, there is a website called Invato Elements where you can have copyright free stock footage, B roll, or you can take videos from other streaming platforms like Vimeo, Facebook. And so forth. Content. We're talking about content and we're talking about using where we get the actual footage from that we use. And you mentioned stock footage sources that you can buy stock footage, you can get royalty free footage, you maybe have footage. I have the great luxury that I have thousands of hours of footage that I've already created that I could use and pull from. But I think a real popular thing is people pull it from other YouTube videos. So you have some, and it doesn't necessarily have to be related or anything like that, it's just if you need a scene that is somebody walking out the door and jumping in the water, that could be from just some other video. It doesn't matter what it is, as long as there's a scene of somebody getting out and and jumping in the water. So it's interesting. The area that I'm concerned about in all of that is, for example, when we talk about sports, if for some reason you're doing files of NFL players and there's footage that the NFL has released for some reason, if I clip that and put that in my video, am I going to get flagged because of that? Is that going to be some kind of copyright infringement? So there are ways to go around copyright. As long as you give the channel credit, it should be fine. But when it comes to sports outlets and media outlets, usually it's fine. I haven't had any issues. I do know somebody who's in the basketball niche and he does documentaries about basketball players, and he does show footage from basketball games. I believe there's a five second rule where you can just show five seconds of a clip. If it is copyright, then you should be fine, and then you just move on to the document, somebody explaining. But yeah, I thought it would be a big of a problem when I started. Never been in the sports niche, but I do know somebody who isn't. I know two people, one person's in the tennis and someone's in the basketball niche and their channels are monetized and they're making decent money every month, and I've not heard any issues from them. Maybe they had a few copyright claims here and there, but there's always ways to go around it. You can crop it out, crop out the part that is copyright, and then just add something else there. So in that case, it's fine. In the bible niche that I'm in, we use AI generated images. So there's an AI. Tool. I wanted to go into that. Let's go there now. So what are you guys using for that? Which software? So we use Dali, which is in chat GPT. So if you have the paid version of chat, GPT, there is different GPTs that they have that you can use for different things. And Dali is one of them, which is a very good image, text to image generator. We also use Midjourney ai, which seems to be very effective and very good. Midjourney ai, which is on the Discord platform. So Midjourney AI is really good. You generate your own images and they come out very well, and you can use that and it's copyright free because you generated it. Yeah. I messed around with Midjourney. It was annoying the way that it works within Discord to me, and I had to do it over and over again to try to get what I want. And sometimes the AI is annoying. It seems to go further away from what I'm trying to do. The more I try to focus it to do it. Yeah, tell me about it. Yeah, we've had those issues as well with midjourney, and sometimes what I've found out is with Dali, it seems to be more accurate with chat GT's version, but sometimes Midjourney is actually better, so, so we use Dali and midjourney, and with the videos, because these are still images, you would want to add some motion to it. So we use another software called Runaway, runaway ai, which is a software, and it has a feature called the Motion Brush. And with the motion brush, you can select a specific part of the image that you want to move. So if you have, for example, a man on the beach and you want the waves to be moving, but you want him to be standing still, you can just select the motion brush and just they're only on where the sea is, and then it'll be moving whilst the person's stationary. So yeah, mid journey AI is really good. Dali's good runaway with the motion brush features very good as well. There's also other AI tools which we used, such as Leix, stable diffusion. Yeah, so ai, there was a huge boom of AI in the last quarter of 2023. We just saw a massive spike in AI and things changing. Especially around film and video. And yes. Yes, it was big. And I believe a lot of voiceover artists lost their jobs because of a website called 11 Labs. Now we don't use human voiceovers anymore. We use something called 11 Labs that sounds so human. You would never think it's a AI voiceover, but it is, and sounds so fluent. So you would think it's a human and you can actually clone your own voice, but it didn't work out when I tried to clone my own voice. So we just use other voices and it works so well. I mean, I had one guy who was a voiceover artist for me two, three years ago who charged a lot of money for his voiceover. He reached out to me recently and he was asking me if I have any work for him. And he told me a ridiculous discount for his service. And I was just thinking, I think I didn't ask him, but I think AI has caused him to lose a lot of jobs. So that's one thing. AI has really changed the YouTube game. So it has made it easier for us creators because we can cut down costs. So it has improved it, but it also has affected other people on the freelancer side. So we've talked a lot. I've really enjoyed our time together. I really appreciate you. I'm grateful you take your time and share your insights with me about what you're doing. And before we wrap everything up though, can you talk a little bit about your coaching program develop faceless channels and maybe what kind of results you've had helping some people? Yeah, sure. I'd love to. I do have a paid coaching program where I teach people how they can monetize YouTube without having to show their face or make the videos themselves. And recently one of my students has monetized his first channel, and that was done within, I believe, 35 days, just over a month. And he was super excited after he got his channel monetized. He was like, this is surreal. I never thought it would happen this quick. Yeah. And that all came through. I pretty much told him, and I don't like telling people exactly how to do it. I want them to kind of figure it out for themselves because I don't want to be a crutch to them. But I kind of told him what niche I saw that was popping off, and I told him, David, go into this niche. If I had the time, I would go into this niche, but I haven't got the time. I'm focusing on my channels or my niches. If I had the time, I'll go into this niche. And I told him and he did, and it popped off. And so yeah, we do have a coaching program. If anyone is interested, I can send over a link to my website and then they can get in touch. With me through that. Yeah, definitely, definitely. I'll drop it in the show notes for sure. Yeah. That would be perfect. When you say monetize the channel, what kind of income stream revenue stream do we are talking. About? So to get monetized on YouTube, you need a thousand subscribers and 4,000 hours of public watch time. The downside of YouTube is that you don't get paid on the views that you got before getting monetized. So you need to get at least around a hundred thousand views in order to hit that thousand subscriber mark and 4,000 hours of watch time. That's, in my experience, around a hundred thousand views before you start making any money. I mean, it's been a while since I spoke to David. I think last time I spoke to him, I think he made, he's at $120 or something since he got monetized, but I haven't spoke to him for the past few weeks, so I'd have to get in contact. But yeah, it was in his first few days he made like a hundred and something dollars, which is a good start. I mean, essentially. Yeah, and especially if you go back and you just look at what his investment was. I mean, if he spent a thousand dollars to create something and he's making $200 a month,$500 a month off of it, that's not a bad investment at all. Exactly, exactly. And it will pay him, as long as that video is getting traction, it'll pay him for the rest of his life. And that's essentially what you want. Do you think there's more room in the, because what I like about the Bible book, I got to tell you, is that a lot of what I see in faceless channels is somewhat negative. It's like negative content that we're going to talk about extreme things and negative things, and somebody went on a rampage and killed somebody, and this is what our story's going to be about. Yeah, I mean, this happens in life all the time, but more positive channels are actually more interesting to me. So do you think there's more room for another Bible book channel? Oh yeah, a hundred percent. Really. I mean, there are what, 2.5 billion Christians in the world, and it's growing. So it is a big market, and I believe pretty much most niches, there's always going to be more consumers than producers. And because if you look at how many people actually use YouTube, it's the largest, second largest search engine in the whole world, and it's owned by the largest search engine in the whole So Google actually recommends YouTube videos. So maybe if you've noticed, when you type in it something on Google, it recommends a YouTube video because Google, sure. This. Is the quickest way to get your video to start ranking, is answering specific questions. So when somebody goes on search and they say, how do I mop the floor? There's a video that pops up. This is how you mop the floor. Yep, exactly that. And there's channels that are just dedicated just how to x, y, z, and they just have a bunch of videos on how to x, y, Z, because when people type that stuff on either Google or YouTube, their video is going to pop up. So people have how to channels. There's a lot of how-to channels out there that just rely solely on search, not even on algorithm, just solely on what people are searching for. Yeah. So YouTube has been growing every year on year on, it's just been growing. The consumers, the viewers have just been growing and growing and growing. So YouTube is not going anywhere, at least for the next 10 years, a hundred percent. But yeah, so even if it does, if there's another platform that arises, you can use your videos went viral on YouTube, just put on another platform, people would always want to be entertained. People We are visual as humans. A picture paints a thousand words, so there will always be a demand for it. Yeah. Well, listen, I've really enjoyed my time with you. I know that we can go on talking now for another hour, but I'm going to get back in touch with you. We'll communicate and then we maybe can regroup and come back on the show again and talk some more. Perfect. I would love to do so, Eddie, thank you so much for having me. And yeah, I appreciate the opportunity. 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