The Biggest Faceless YouTube Beginner Mistakes (and What to Do Instead)

The biggest faceless YouTube beginner mistakes fall into four groups: research and strategy, content creation, consistency and commitment, and how you analyze results. The ones that take people out are taking too long to pick a niche, picking a niche nobody is making money in, changing too many variables at once, uploading inconsistently, and obsessing over CTR on videos with less than 1,000 views. I made this list after four years of coaching faceless YouTube, including one program with over 2,000 students.

Mistake 1: Taking Too Long to Pick a Niche

The number one thing I see that eliminates people from having success entirely is taking too long to do the research. Everyone's trying to find the perfect idea.

Faceless YouTube niches go in cycles. It seems like every quarter there's another opportunity. At one point it was Reddit channels. Then data channels. Then crime. When I recorded this, the explainer niche was the recent one.

If you're a complete beginner, I don't think it's a good idea to try to time a market. The goal is to get to where you're making 5, 10, 20 grand a month, and you can do that with pretty much any niche as long as other people are already doing it.

So if this is your first channel, pick something and go produce 10 videos. Go produce 20. Get used to all the components.

Does every student's first channel make 10 grand a month? Typically not. What I see is that within the first three channels, one of them typically has success. Even after running over 50 channels myself, maybe one in every five is a niche I just can't figure out while other people crush it. That's pretty normal.

Mistake 2: Picking a Niche Because You Like It

I see this a lot with the older people I work with (call it 35 plus). They have a bit of an ego around what they know. "I'm into this thing, so I bet it's a great niche." Then they start producing videos.

That's different from just picking a niche and going, because they aren't picking based on what's working in the market. Use ViewStats, Social Blade or vidIQ to see how many views channels are getting and roughly how much money they're making. Then pick from the channels that are making money and emulate them.

One example (hopefully he doesn't take it personally, and we did get him going in a better direction). He loved Jimmy Buffett, he wore Hawaiian shirts every single day, and he wanted to make a Jimmy Buffett channel. I went through the research with him and we couldn't pinpoint anything in that space that was having success.

I always ask what the priority is. Are you doing this for your passion, or are you trying to make money? If you're already a millionaire and you want a channel for fun, cool, let's do the passion project. Otherwise, let's get you to 5 grand a month, 10, 20, 30, 50 first. Then we can do the thing you're passionate about.

Don't build a Frankenstein idea

The other version of this mistake is coming up with some Frankenstein of an idea. Even as a professional YouTuber, I struggle with those. Emulate the strategy instead. If someone has a video on manipulation tactics in 10 minutes, do personality traits explained in 10 minutes. Both are psychology, and a good amount of people want to watch both.

If choosing is where you're stuck, I walk through it in how to pick a faceless YouTube niche.

Mistake 3: Not Doing Enough Research

Some people find two or three channels having success and say "okay, cool, I'm done." The students I see have the most success go 30 channels, 50 channels, 100 channels worth of research.

Obviously there usually aren't more than three to five channels in one niche. So research multiple niches that are similar. Once you've studied at least 30 channels, you start to pattern recognize why channels fail and why channels succeed.

Study the failures on purpose. It's important to know what to make, and it's also important to know what to avoid. For each competitor, look at their most viral videos and their flops, and ask why the flops didn't do so good.

I have a video in my program called becoming a niche nerd. You want to know your niche better than anybody else on YouTube. If a channel in your niche started a week ago, you know about it. If someone uploaded their first video and it has five views, you know about it.

Not regularly studying the competition

This is its own item on my list, and it's the same point. You should always be looking things up.

I started this list with research and strategy because it's the biggest difference I see between someone making 30, 40, 50 grand a month and someone who struggles to get past $100 a month or even get monetized. The people who crush it are really good at the idea, and then really good at producing the videos. The idea is the first part. The success I've had came from knowing it was a million view video before I even produced it.

Mistake 4: Taking Advice From Too Many Places

There are a lot of people talking about faceless YouTube channels. Some of them give really good advice. A lot of the information out there is not good. So be extremely skeptical of what you take in, and be careful about mixing sources, because it can confuse you and set you back a lot of time.

A few I trust, off the top of my head. Noah Morris gives really good advice. Derral Eves isn't really faceless YouTube, but he gives good YouTube advice and he works with MrBeast. (I named a few friends in the video too.)

I'd be especially careful with anybody talking about making rain sound videos or meditation videos, or about doing Shorts. When I recorded this, Shorts was paying a lot better than it had been, but you still have to get a ton of views to make money with it. I've found long-form content is significantly better for people.

Mistake 5: Not Knowing Who Is Watching

Developing a viewer avatar is more of an intermediate tactic. The easy beginner version is this: know exactly who you're talking to.

If the content is for Gen Z, you can talk about rizz and doom scrolling. If you're older and thinking "what the hell are these," that's good. It means the content is made for that demo and not for you. If the audience is older, make pop culture references for people born in the '70s, '80s or '90s.

If this sounds complex, just read the comments and ask yourself who is watching these videos. The better you understand the main viewer, the easier the videos get, because you know what else they watch. Go watch what they watch and bring that to your videos.

Mistake 6: Trying Too Many Things at Once

This is one of the biggest ones in content creation. People never clearly define a niche, an audience or a content strategy, and every single video is different.

They'll pick seven different title structures. One video is explainer style, the next is b-roll, the next is a compilation. Each one talks to a different segment of the audience with a different thumbnail style. It's a complete mess, and then they come to me and say "Devon, my channel isn't getting results."

Pick one content strategy and one segment of the audience. If you're in the health niche, talk to the cancer audience, or the liver disease audience, or the heart health audience. Each of those is a great audience. Pick one.

Change one variable at a time

There are a thousand different variables on a video. Subtitles, music, the font, the colors, the tone, the hook, the title, the thumbnail style. So find what's already working, emulate it, and change one variable at a time. The easiest variable to test is the topic.

If someone does a video on how Elon Musk spends his billions, do how Jeff Bezos spends his billions, and bring every aspect of their production over to the Bezos subject. If their intro says "in this video we're going to talk about how Elon Musk spends billions on yachts and parties," yours says the same thing about Bezos. If they cover Elon's houses, you cover Bezos's houses. One to one.

We're not going to do this forever. When you're getting 1,000 views a video, 10,000 views a video, 100,000 views a video, then you can adapt and do things your own way. Until then, doing everything differently makes it a living nightmare to diagnose what the issue is.

Mistake 7: Tolerating Bad Production, Audio and Packaging

Poor video production

You don't need Grammy-style production. My philosophy is to make a video that isn't bad enough for people to leave. They leave because the audio is scratchy, the points don't make sense, or the visuals are too confusing.

I've seen really poor production get millions of views over and over because it nails the basics.

My test: watch the competitor's video that got a million views, then watch yours. It should be indistinguishable that you're a different channel, at least at the beginning. Once the systems and processes are down, about 95% of what you're doing is already proven and you're only tweaking a few small things.

Poor audio quality

Audio is bar none more important than anything else in the video. If the voiceover sounds bad or it's hard to listen to, that's a big issue.

Packaging that's hard to click

I'm not trying to be rude here, but even some of my better students struggle with packaging. The idea isn't clear and the thumbnail is hard to click on. That sets the video up to be hard to click, let alone watch.

Whatever the market is doing with thumbnails, do that. I'm not saying copy and paste their thumbnail onto your channel. I'm saying match the style. In the anime niche, one of the big styles was a guy leaning against a wall with a girl pressed up against him. If that's what's working and your topic is similar, make a thumbnail just like it and change the hair colors to fit the show you're covering. If someone uses a big, bold yellow font in the top left, you use a big, bold yellow font in the top left.

Applying a style that's already working is what MrBeast does, and it's what all the big creators are doing. There's more in my faceless YouTube thumbnail guide.

Bonus: hiring a full service agency

Don't work with a full service agency (the ones that make the video fully done: script, voiceover, editing and thumbnail). My question is, if they can do the entire production and all they need from you is the ideas and the payment, why don't they go start their own channels?

Either do some of the components yourself or hire individual people for the different tasks. Your video editor should be a different person than your scriptwriter. It's okay if voice acting and editing are together, or the script and voice acting are together. If one shop does everything and it isn't a business partnership, stay away.

Mistake 8: Treating It Like Overnight Money

Expecting to be rich right away

If you come into this expecting to make a ton of money right away, good luck. It's probably going to be way harder than you think it will be.

Have I made $7,000 in the first week of starting a channel? Yeah. Have I had students make 10 grand in the first 10 days? Yeah. But we had done YouTube before. We already knew what we were doing.

What this is really made for is building a strong income stream over probably 3 to 6 months (maybe sooner if you move quick). After that, it's a consistent income stream you can scale up, or add digital products, newsletters, affiliate deals and sponsorships to. Focus on the journey, not the destination.

One foot in, one foot out

I see a lot of people who don't go all in. If you break down the word decide, it means to cut off all other options. They never decide.

I'm not saying you need an ungodly amount of hours. I'm saying 30 minutes to an hour a day, consistently.

An inconsistent upload schedule

One video this week, three the next, none the week after, then five. Upload consistently at whatever your production can allow for. If you can do one video a week, do one video a week.

There are two reasons. You want the feedback from each individual video (so don't batch up 30 videos and upload them all at once either). And YouTube typically wants to see some consistency in your uploads before it starts promoting you.

I typically recommend uploading around 9:00 a.m. Pacific. Once you get more views, you can see the best time of day for your own channel.

Forgetting YouTube is a momentum platform

When you're getting views, you're getting lots of views. When things are slow, things are really slow. So as soon as momentum picks up, put more into the production, the quality and the ideas.

We have a metric we call view velocity, which is how many views you're getting per minute, per hour or per day. What trips up view velocity more than anything is the on and off upload schedule. So commit ahead of time. Then when it's hard, you're thinking "whatever happens, I've got to get at least two videos up this week."

Mistake 9: Analyzing the Wrong Things

Obsessing over CTR and average view duration

There are two terms I hate hearing from someone who's getting a new channel started: CTR and average view duration. If you have videos with less than 1,000 views, neither of those metrics matters.

CTR is relative. Videos I've produced that got millions of views have some of the worst CTR and AVD out there. As a video gets more impressions, it's served to a wider and wider audience, and the bar goes down significantly. My most viral videos typically have around a 3% CTR and a 30% AVD on a 10-minute video, which is pretty poor on paper.

I focus more on views, and on viewer satisfaction (how people feel after watching, and whether they want to watch more of your videos).

Pivoting after every video

Some of my most viral videos took a good amount of time to get real traction. Sometimes a month, sometimes three months, sometimes six. One video I pulled up in the recording was uploaded on October 12 and didn't pick up until January of the next year.

So stick with a content strategy for 10 or 20 videos and then pivot. Don't pivot every single video because the last one flopped. Sometimes you hit the wrong part of the algorithm, or the video couldn't find the right audience.

The model I give people is to think in batches of 5 or 10 videos. Say Conor McGregor videos are popping in your niche. A batch of 10 could look like this:

Use two or three production formats across them. As the results come in, you pivot the strategy for the next batch. That way, when you're at upload number six and something goes crazy (or nothing is working), you're not emotionally reacting. You see through what's in production and iterate on the next batch.

If views are the specific problem, I go deeper in why you're not getting views on YouTube.

Video Chapters

• 0:00Where this list comes from
• 1:02Taking too long to research a niche
• 4:14Picking a niche because you like it
• 8:21Not doing enough research
• 11:27Taking advice from too many places
• 13:32Not understanding your audience
• 15:34Trying too many things at once
• 18:06Change one variable at a time
• 20:41Tolerating poor production and audio
• 22:45Packaging that's hard to click
• 24:46Full service agencies
• 26:19Expecting overnight money and going half in
• 29:25Inconsistent uploads and momentum
• 32:32CTR, average view duration and pivoting too fast

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