How to Build a 6-Figure Faceless YouTube Channel (Full Tutorial)

To build a six-figure faceless YouTube channel, I create the channel in a couple of minutes, find a niche where channels are already making $10K a month, pick one recent channel to emulate, turn its most popular videos into 5 to 10 ideas of my own, and hire a scriptwriter, voice actor, video editor and thumbnail designer on Upwork to make them. Then I manage the team on a Trello board, post one to three times a week, get monetized at 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time, and work up to the 1.5 to 2 million views a month it takes to reach $10K a month in most niches. I did every one of those steps live on a training call, and this is the written version.

What I Built Live in This Training

This video is a recording of a live training I ran with about 100 people on the call. That's a small group for us (usually these have 300 to 500 people, sometimes 1,000), so instead of my normal presentation I built a YouTube channel from scratch in front of everybody. At the end I gave the channel away to one of the people on the call.

It covers everything A to Z: picking the niche, finding the opportunity, coming up with video ideas, and getting freelancers to make the videos for you.

The whole thing took one call. In the span of about 30 minutes we had a channel, a niche, a channel to model, a list of video ideas and the first job post up.

Step 1: Create the YouTube Channel

Go to YouTube and create a new channel. That's step one, and that's all of step one.

For the training I felt like doing a health channel. I called it Health Guy for about a minute, then renamed it Lettuce Advice. It's kind of a stupid name and I actually like it. You can always change the name later. The point is that the channel exists.

People always ask about the logo and the banner. You don't need a banner. You don't even need a description. For the logo, set up something basic and move on.

On one of my bigger channels, I literally Googled the word "acorn" with "transparent," and the first image that came up is the logo. That channel has made $800,000. So for this one I searched for a transparent lettuce icon, saved the image, uploaded it and hit publish.

If you've been waiting this entire time to start a faceless YouTube channel, that's all you had to do. If the setup feels complicated to you, you've overcomplicated it.

Step 2: Pick a Niche by Finding Who's Making Money

The main trick is to find channels that are already making $10K a month. If you find those, that's really all you need for the foundation.

I think about it like the old line about chopping down a tree.

Sharpening the axe is seeing who is actually making money before you make a single video. The question I kept asking out loud on the call was "who's got my money?"

This is the process I ran live:

1. Search one main keyword in the niche. I typed "health." You can also have ChatGPT give you the common problem keywords for a niche. For health that's things like clogged arteries, burnout, diabetes and chronic inflammation.
2. Open the channels that come up and check what they make with a tool like ViewStats. I also use the vidIQ extension, which shows me stats right on the YouTube page.
3. Subscribe to every channel that fits, and like the videos. Your home page starts suggesting a lot more videos like them.
4. Click into one of their popular videos and look at the right side. YouTube recommends a ton of other channels just like that one.
5. Keep going until you find a channel making real money.

It is a bit of a process, I'll be honest. This is what came up while I was searching:

Somebody in the chat said $3K a month is still high paying. I told them you can't afford much on $3,000 a month, and I kept looking. A lot of what I found was making around a grand a month, and I don't like that. Sometimes it means the niche just isn't the right one to jump into.

It took about 10 minutes and five or six channels before I found one making six figures a year. When I land on a channel, this is what I'm checking:

• It's recent. The ones I liked had started 4 to 5 months ago.
• It has million-view videos.
• It's faceless. On these channels the faces in the thumbnails were obviously AI, and nobody was on camera. (One channel showed the creator's hands, which kind of breaks the rules.)
• It's long format. Not Shorts.
• It does at least a million views a month.
• It's still uploading. One channel looked good and then had quit uploading. I subscribed anyway, but I didn't like it.

One note on the tools. They're a little bit off sometimes. On the senior health channel, I'd say they definitely make a little more than what the tool shows.

Then I cheated a little. One of my buddies made a tool that finds channels similar to one you already like. I plugged in the first senior health channel and a bunch more came up, which told me senior health channels were the movement in that niche right then.

More on this step: how to pick a faceless YouTube niche.

Step 3: Find Your Emulation Channel

Out of everything you find, you pick one channel to use as the example. I call it the emulation channel.

The one I picked was the second senior health channel. It had 31 videos up. In 5 months it did 9 million views. The tools were broken on it, so I estimated it myself, and in two months alone that channel made at least $20,000. It was a new channel and it was making money. That's the one.

Once you have the emulation channel, the rest of the steps are built off of it. You're going to break down what they're doing and make your own videos from it.

Step 4: Come Up With 5 to 10 Video Ideas

Go to the emulation channel's most popular videos. On the channel I picked, it looked like they just keep taking the same videos and doing them over and over again.

Two of their titles:

• "Over 50? 6 movements Japanese elders do every day. No gym, just results."
• "Over 50? Do these 5 exercises for leg circulation."

They always start with "Over 50," so I copied that. Then I swapped the parts that can change.

Swap the place. I looked up places with the oldest living populations. Japan is on that list (Okinawa), and so are Italy and Greece. I liked "Italian," so that became "Over 50? 6 movements Italian elders do every day."

Swap the problem. For "Over 50? Do these 5 exercises for (common problem)," I had ChatGPT list the problems. It gave me things like preventing falls, low back pain, weak legs and blood flow.

Pick the exercises you know get views. Part of this is that I just have a lot of information. Deep squat holds are a classic. Shin boxes, planks and squats are the ones I liked the most. Single leg stance actually did go viral for a little while. I take the ones I think are going to be viral and leave the rest.

The tip was 5 to 10 ideas. We ended up with 12.

This is how I think about what that list is worth. Say the average video gets around 200,000 views if we do it correctly. Twelve videos at that level, at around $7 per 1,000 views, is about $17,000. So the average video is worth roughly $1,300 to $1,500 to us. If everything goes to plan, those 12 ideas should be worth at least $10,000, and probably $20,000 to $30,000, if the videos are good and we produce them well.

So the job now is simple. Make a video as good as theirs.

Because I'd set the channel up as a nutrition channel, I also did a nutrition version of the list: eggs, olive oil, Greek yogurt, sardines, blueberries. That's the gamble. Fitness is what's obviously working for that channel right now, but the audience has similar pain points, and nutrition is a bit of an easier channel to model. If those average 100,000 views a video, I put that list at around $20,000 to $25,000 worth of videos.

Two questions came up in the chat here.

Do you do long-format videos? Always. You never want to do short form, because Shorts just don't pay. I saw a guy get a billion views and only make $200,000. If I got a billion views with long-form videos, I would make at least $5 million.

Won't YouTube think you're copying? For one, we're not copying somebody else's channel. We make our own videos. The step is "find 5 to 10 ideas based off of the emulation channel." That's it. I never put "worry about whether YouTube thinks you're copying" on the list. The channels I make money with, I don't come up with the ideas. Nobody comes up with their own thing.

More on the idea side: how to find viral YouTube video ideas.

Step 5: Make the Videos by Outsourcing Them

There are two ways to do this. You can fully outsource it, or you can do part of the work and outsource the other parts.

I don't ever make the videos. I always outsource. If you want to make the videos yourself you can, but in my opinion it's a complete waste of time. Even if you're good at it, a video takes so much time to make when you could pay somebody to do it.

You need four people:

• Scriptwriter
• Voice actor
• Video editor
• Thumbnail designer

All in all, you can get a video for around $80 to $130.

If you have at least $1,000 to throw into making videos, you're good. Go the outsourced route. If you're on a $50K a year salary or more, outsource. One person on the call said $25K is what they make in two years, and in that spot you might have to get creative and figure out making the videos yourself.

People on the call were also already asking how YouTube pays you. We hadn't even made a video yet. If you haven't put anything out in the marketplace, don't worry about getting paid. Give value to people first, then get paid.

Step 6: Hire Freelancers on Upwork

Go create an Upwork account. (Somebody suggested Fiverr. I said don't use Fiverr.) Then post a job. This is what I did on the call:

1. Hit "post a job" and type one line: "I am hiring a script writer for my nutrition YouTube channel." Upwork's AI writes the post for you.
2. Clean it up. It looked a little too AI, so I edited it. I set the scripts at 10 to 20 minutes long, which is 1,500 to 4,000 words. I added "research and incorporate nutrition facts for elders" and "collaborate with the voice actor and video editor."
3. Set the English level to fluent or native.
4. Set the price.
5. Post it. It's free.

There are a couple of ways to do the pricing. You can put something like $30 a script and test three different job posts at different prices.

Or do what I like to do. I say I'm paying $500, and in the post I tell them I'm paying $50 a script and I have 10 scripts a month. I'm never going to pay the $500 all at once. I pay it in $50 increments. But it looks like a bigger number and it attracts a much bigger crowd, because people don't want to write one script and be done. They'd rather have repeat work.

Then hit "reuse posting" and do the same thing for the voice actor and the video editor. You can leave the same pricing on all of them for now. We had three job posts up in about 5 minutes. You can steal my job post, it's good enough.

Somebody asked if you should wait to hire people until the channel is making money. No.

Otherwise you have to learn the skill of writing scripts yourself, and that could take you a year. If money is the issue, go do Uber Eats or DoorDash and use that to pay someone who already has the skill.

The first proposal came in while we were still on the call. She had written three full-length romance novels, she's a high school and college essay writer, she's in the US, and her proposal said pricing was negotiable and she wanted an ongoing project. Do you think you can write better than somebody who does this full time? Probably not. By the end of the call five people had applied.

From there, you go through the proposals, check that their scripts are good, and get the best ones on a Zoom call to work out the terms.

More on hiring: how I hire YouTube editors who go viral.

Step 7: Run the Team in Trello and Post

Set up a Trello board for the channel. I made one on the call with these columns:

1. Ideas
2. Script
3. Voiceover
4. Video editor
5. Thumbnail
6. Done

Put your video ideas in as cards. I added three to start. Once the team is hired, you invite them to the board.

On one of my real channels the board looks like this: video ideas, the "hell yeah" videos, script, script revision, voiceover, editing. A card like "50 facts about Minnesota you never knew" or "Why Bolivia has a navy without an ocean" moves across the board as each person finishes their part. When the script is written, it moves over. When the voice actor records the voiceover, you can listen to it right inside the card. Then it goes to editing, and you're done.

That's the entire production process. From there the goal is to post one, two or three times a week, with videos that are 10 to 20 minutes long.

Step 8: Get Monetized, Then Get to $10K a Month

To get monetized you need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time. Really, you just need one viral video. A video with around 50,000 views can get you monetized.

One of my students did an art channel. She had never done this before. The fifth video she uploaded got 55,000 views, and she's monetized. Within her first five videos she had already generated about $300.

After that, the target is $10K a month. In most niches that means getting to about 1.5 to 2 million views a month.

What I showed on this call is literally what we did for my geography channel. It's just a different niche. That channel did $107,000 in 90 days.

If you want the same process in a shorter version with my usual rates per role, read the stupid simple faceless YouTube method.

Video Chapters

• 0:00Introduction
• 0:54Step 1: Create a YouTube channel
• 3:12Step 2: Pick a niche
• 10:52Finding a six-figure channel in the niche
• 16:48Step 3: Find your emulation channel
• 17:30Step 4: Come up with 5 to 10 video ideas
• 22:49What 12 video ideas are worth
• 26:16Step 5: Make the videos (outsourcing)
• 32:52Step 6: Hire freelancers on Upwork
• 37:21Setting up the Trello board
• 39:52Step 7: Fully outsource and post
• 41:18Step 8: Get monetized
• 42:18Get to $10K a month

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