How to Make $30K a Month With a Faceless YouTube Channel

To make $30K a month with a faceless YouTube channel, pick a niche where another channel is already earning $30K a month, find one to three proven video formats, remake those formats with tested keywords, hire a human team (scriptwriters, voice actor, editors, thumbnail designer), copy winning packaging, push videos to 30 minutes or longer once they get views, and hold a hard quality standard before you add volume. That is the process I run on my own channel, which did $33,990 in August alone and has been at $30K a month for over a year.

Step 1: Pick a Niche That Already Makes $30K a Month

I talk about niche more than anything else, on X and on YouTube, because it decides the ceiling before you upload anything. If you want $30K a month, you need a niche that can pay $30K a month.

I see people try to build a channel about walking dogs, dog shelters, or how to play guitar. Those are niches. The question is whether another channel in that niche is already making the money you want.

You want to be in the later majority jumping onto a niche, not the pioneer. To check what a channel earns, go to a tool like ViewStats, look up any channel you see on your home feed, and you'll see roughly what it makes.

The rule is simple:

• Want $10K a month? Find channels making $10K a month.
• Want $30K a month? Find channels making $30K a month.
• Want $100,000 a month? Find channels making $100,000 a month before you even try.

If this is your first channel, I recommend aiming at $30K a month channels. A channel doing $400,000 a month is a little unrealistic for somebody getting started. And $10K a month is a little too small as a target, because if you can make $30K you can obviously make $10K, but not every $10K a month niche can reach $30K.

If you want help choosing, start with my breakdown of the best faceless YouTube niches.

Step 2: Find One to Three Proven Formats

Once you have the niche, find one to three formats that are already making money and copy them.

A format is basically a video series. Look at MrBeast. He rotates about three to five formats. "Last to leave the mansion keeps it." "Last to leave the grocery store wins $250,000." "Last to leave the circle wins $500,000." Then the survival ones: "I survived the five deadliest places on Earth," "I survived 100 hours in a temple." He isn't remaking one video. He's reusing the same themes over and over.

That's exactly what we do. One of our top series, which probably made us $200,000 to $300,000, was this:

"50 [blank] geography facts you never knew."

We took that title and remade it a ton of times. Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Virginia, Europe. I think we ended up doing around 80 of them. We basically made the same video 70 times.

Picking a format and running with it helps the titles, helps the thumbnails, and makes producing content significantly easier. The channels that win find one or two formats that really work and keep doing them.

Step 3: Put Proven Keywords Into the Format

After the format, you need the keywords that go inside it.

For geography facts it was simple. US geography did really well, partly because Americans watching means a higher RPM than an international audience. So we did every single US state.

We started with the ones we thought were most popular: New York, California, Texas. Then it turned out the random states did really well too. Indiana, Louisiana, South Carolina. I grew up in Colorado, which is not as famous as Florida, and the Colorado video did twice as well as the Florida one.

For harder topics I use Google Trends:

1. Type in a topic (say Michael Jordan, if you're in the basketball niche).
2. Set it to worldwide.
3. Change "web search" to "YouTube search" so you see popularity on YouTube specifically.
4. Compare it against other names in the niche.

When I ran that comparison in the video, LeBron James was the stronger topic overall, but in May a newer player (Victor Wembanyama) spiked and was the one to cover. That's how I think about keywords: take what's hot, put it into the formats you already picked.

Step 4: Hire a Real Team (and What Each Role Costs)

I always say the same thing here: go to Upwork and hire people. You want four roles.

Those are rough numbers. I'm not super involved in production anymore, because I hire a channel manager to run the day-to-day and I focus on the bigger picture. At the beginning I managed all of it myself, then got it off my plate as soon as I could.

Can you do scripts, voiceovers, editing and thumbnails with AI? You can. I use AI pretty much every day. But when I look at channels making $30K a month, I don't see many of them using AI for those jobs. It takes an eye and an understanding of content to write a good script, do a good voiceover, or cut a good edit.

So have your writers use Claude or ChatGPT or whatever the best model is that month, as a tool. Humans still make the content.

I have students who are super nerdy AI tech guys, the smartest of the smartest, and they struggle to get to $30K a month doing it all with AI. $5,000 to $10,000 a month that way is pretty realistic. $30K a month needs a team.

More on the hiring process itself: how to hire YouTube editors.

Step 5: Packaging, Packaging, Packaging

The 80/20 of going viral on YouTube is packaging, which is the title and the thumbnail. Idea is always alpha. Once the idea is right (that's the format and keyword work above), packaging is what gets the click.

A lot of the packaging is already done once you pick the format. The title is set. The thumbnail is mostly set, with small adjustments per video. Georgia and Montana obviously need different images.

Two things I see beginners get wrong:

• Their thumbnails look nothing like the competitor's. Copy the font style, the colors and the layout until you look like that channel. On ours there's a little drop shadow under the state. Details like that. Even our style came from other channels.
• They get creative too early. Find what's working and do that. Try new things after you've had a lot of success.

We also test. YouTube lets you test thumbnails, and eventually titles and thumbnails together. On one of our tests the three versions came back at 31%, 37% and 31.6% watch time share. Over the years you'll see our thumbnail style change, because we keep experimenting on the same format.

Step 6: Make the Videos Longer

Order of operations matters here. At first you'll probably make 10 to 20 minute videos. Our oldest uploads were around 10 minutes, sometimes less.

Once we started going viral, the next move was making videos longer. We didn't do this for a few years. We only started more recently. Now 30 minutes is the bare minimum for us, and we go to 45.

The reason is you get paid more for the same views:

The other reason is that most of our views come from television. TV is the top device type on a lot of our videos. So you want to build your content for a TV audience, which is also why I push for a real team and real quality.

If RPM is your bottleneck, read how to increase your YouTube RPM.

Step 7: Hold the Standard, Then Add Volume

This one isn't in the original outline for the video, but it's the real answer. If you ask me how I, the person who owns the channel, make $30K a month, it's this: I set the standards and I hold them.

If one of our videos gets less than about 100,000 views in the first month, we sit there and go over what went wrong. If it really flops, we take the video down. Two reasons:

1. I don't want the team or freelancers thinking it's fine for weak videos to go up on the channel.
2. I don't want viewers deciding that our videos are lower quality now. Views are social proof. A 265,000 view video looks better to the average person than a 20,000 view video, even if the smaller one had better information.

If performance is bad for longer than a couple of weeks or a month, I get on a call with the team, ask what's going on, and we build a plan to course correct. That's most of my job. It's also why I hire people. You can't hold AI to a standard like that. It just says "you're right, boss." I want somebody with a real plan and a reason.

Then the last piece: increase quantity to the edge of quality. Get the quality to where videos reliably get views. Push it until it can't go higher without spending a lot more money. Then hire more people per role and build the system so you put out three to five videos a week instead of one.

The part that's hard for people to accept is that the biggest lever is subjective. It's qualitative, not quantitative. But being good at setting a high standard and making everyone meet it is the whole thing.

Video Chapters

• 0:00What this video covers
• 0:31Step 1: pick a niche that already makes $30K a month
• 3:08Step 2: find one to three proven formats
• 6:15The "50 geography facts" series
• 7:49Step 3: put proven keywords into the format
• 8:49Checking topics with Google Trends (YouTube search)
• 10:22Step 4: hire a team on Upwork
• 12:24What each role costs per video
• 14:27Step 5: packaging (title and thumbnail)
• 16:30Step 6: make the videos longer
• 18:34Brand and standards
• 21:11Step 7: increase quantity to the edge of quality

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