How to Start a 6-Figure Faceless YouTube Channel: My 4-Step Process

If I were starting a faceless YouTube channel over from nothing, I'd follow four steps: pick a niche that's already validated, find outlier videos in that niche and remake them, outsource production to people who have already made those videos, and then monetize with AdSense, brand deals, affiliate links and products. Past that, two things separate the channels making $20,000 to $100,000 a month from the ones barely making $100: how good you are at ideation, and the team you have making the videos.

Who This Process Comes From

When I recorded this I was a week away from turning 26. By 25 I had generated over $4 million, and I'd say over $2 million of that (maybe $2.5 million) came from building faceless YouTube channels specifically. I had run over 50 different YouTube channels and helped over 400 people start a profitable faceless channel.

I'd also worked with YouTubers with over 10 million subscribers and helped entrepreneurs build a content strategy for their own channels.

So this is the process I'd use if I had to start all over. Four steps first, then the two things that matter most.

Step 1: Pick a Niche That's Already Validated

The niche is by far the most important part of the whole thing. If you're doing something new that hasn't been done before, you can have success with it, but a complete beginner is going to really struggle.

I look for three things in a niche:

1. A lot of attention. People are already watching this subject.
2. A gap in the market. Viewers are hungry for more content than the channels in the niche are making.
3. Easy to produce. The videos aren't hard to make.

When a niche has those three, the money can come fast. I see it all the time with students. One was 18 years old in Nigeria (I think he was still in high school). He started his channel in December and had a $40,000 month the month before I recorded this. Another is a busy executive who had never done YouTube before, and she was making $10,000 a month. That happened because we helped her find a gap in the marketplace and figure out which videos that market wanted to see.

How do you find the gap? You want the niche validated first. That means other channels are making $10,000 a month with it, and they got there recently. Then you want one of these two to be true:

• There isn't an insane amount of competition.
• Or there's a large audience.

Sports is a good example of the second one. There are a lot of channels making sports videos, but the demand for more content is always there. I don't think those niches can get too saturated unless there are literally 10,000 channels in one, and I don't see that happening.

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

Step 2: Find Outlier Videos and Remake Them

"What videos should I make?" is one of the most common questions I get. The answer is to find videos that are already successful.

An outlier is a video that got way more views than the channel has subscribers, and preferably way more than the channel's other videos. If a channel normally gets 10,000 views a video and then one video gets 3 million views in 2 weeks, that's a great video to model. It's even better if it lines up with your audience.

Recency matters too. The best ones to model went viral in the last 3 months, meaning over a million views inside that window. You can go back 6 months, maybe a year, but the older the video is, the less likely it is to go viral when you emulate it.

These are the formats I've seen do well, and the ones I'd skip as a beginner:

You can make tons of money with ASMR or music. They're just not the best place to start.

People also always ask if they can do Shorts. You can make a ton of money with Shorts, but I've found long-format videos are way easier. Yes, it's a longer video to make. But when I recorded this, you only had to get about a million views on a long video to make around $6,000. To make that with a Short you'd need something like 100 million views, which is 100 times more. Getting one video to 100 million views is way harder than getting a slightly longer video to a million. So I always recommend long-format content.

Step 3: Outsource to People Who Already Made These Videos

To be honest with you, the strategy I use is that I hire people who have already made these videos, and I put them on my team.

People tell me hiring is hard and that it's a whole skill set in itself.

It's not that hard. The issue is people are afraid of doing the reps. If you do a lot of interviews and a lot of ideation, that's most of my success.

The play buttons behind me in the video are a good example. I wasn't the person making those videos.

One idea I came up with made us hundreds of thousands of dollars. We built a system around it and reproduced that video about 40 times, plugging in a new keyword each time. Every single one got at least 100,000 views, and some got millions.

You can also use AI tools. You can do everything with them except the video editing. We have some channels that use Midjourney or DALL-E images and those work pretty well. But I've found it's best to hire inexpensive freelancers online. You can spend a couple hundred a month on people to make videos for you. One student was paying (I think) $40 or $50 a video, and his channel was making around $40,000 a month.

If you want to see me do the hiring live, job posts and all, it's in my full tutorial on building a 6-figure faceless channel.

Step 4: How the Channel Gets Monetized

A good 50% to 60% of the revenue I'd made at the time I recorded this was purely YouTube AdSense. AdSense is Google's ad platform. It's what the ads run on, and it's what pays you out.

To be eligible you need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time, which is about 40,000 views. That's not much. A lot of the time one video that blows up gets you monetized.

After that, YouTube plays ads on your videos and pays you 55% of the revenue. These were the numbers I gave in the video:

Almost every company has an affiliate program. If you made a video about the Rubik's Cube, you could get an Amazon affiliate link and earn a commission every time someone buys one through it. You put the link in the description and mention it in the video.

I've also made a couple million dollars from digital products.

And once you're getting millions of views a month, you can make more on the views you already have. You can play more ads. You can stick to specific keywords in your videos so you get paid more per 1,000 views.

More on the income side: how to monetize your YouTube channel.

The First Thing That Matters Most: Ideation

Here's what separates someone making $20,000, $50,000, $80,000 or $100,000 a month on YouTube from someone who barely makes $100 in a month. It's two things. The people I see making the most money focus heavily on ideation first, and second on the team helping them make the videos.

Ideation is finding the best niches and the videos the marketplace is missing right now. There are two ways to play it.

The explosive opportunities. Typically every year there are one to three opportunities that are killer. The year I recorded this, I had friends who made $250,000 to $300,000 in a single month from niches that had been really explosive, like drama channels and geopolitical topics. Which opportunities those are changes every year, so you have to watch for them.

The evergreen niches. These are videos you make today that earn for years. I have videos I made back in 2018 that still paid me $500 a month when I recorded this, close to seven years later. They pay out every single month, basically like a car payment.

It works even in the most competitive niches. I'll still make videos that get millions of views there, because it comes down to timing the market and knowing what it wants to see.

The Second Thing: The Team

I think the first hundred grand I made was pretty much myself. The majority of the success after that came through other people: scriptwriters, voice actors, video editors, channel managers, and consultants and strategists who helped me make the right decisions at the right time.

A lot of times you can hire your competitors' scriptwriters, voice actors and video editors. There are a few reasons they'll move:

• They don't get enough work over there.
• They don't get enough praise from the company.
• They're not getting paid well.
• They're burned out and want a good opportunity to be part of.

For a newer version of the same method with my per-role rates, see the stupid simple faceless YouTube method.

Video Chapters

• 0:00Intro and background
• 1:29Step 1: Pick a niche
• 3:44Step 2: Find outlier videos
• 5:31Step 3: Outsourcing
• 7:01Step 4: Monetization with AdSense
• 7:50Brand deals, affiliate links and products
• 9:22Recap of the four steps
• 10:55The two things that matter most: ideation
• 12:51The team

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