How to Get a YouTube Play Button Without Recording Videos

You can get a YouTube play button without filming anything or showing your face by running a simple seven-step loop: come up with one to three proven content strategies, write titles from them, design the thumbnail, write the script, record a voiceover, edit it together with clips and b-roll, and upload. Then you repeat the loop. I recommend making around 30 videos that way, looking at the results, and changing the content based on what you see. The content strategy is the most important part, and everything else falls into place behind it.

The 7-Step Process

This is the process I laid out when I recorded this video. There's no camera involved anywhere in it.

1. Start with the content strategy
2. Create titles around the content strategy
3. Create the thumbnail
4. Write the script
5. Record the voiceover
6. Edit the video
7. Upload

Then you repeat steps two through seven over and over again.

The content strategy is the most important part. If yours is bad, you can delete everything else on that list, because none of it will matter. Get that right and everything else kind of just falls into place.

One thing to know up front. You can hire other people to do most of these steps for you, so the only part you have to do yourself is come up with the video ideas. When I recorded this I walked through doing each step yourself. For the outsourced version, read my full tutorial on building a 6-figure faceless channel.

Step 1: Come Up With One to Three Content Strategies

A content strategy is a way of making videos. It's a repeatable idea you can pull many videos from, so you don't have to come up with something brilliant every single time.

What I look for:

• You can make 10 or more videos from it.
• It's as simple as possible for you to run.
• Preferably it comes from another niche, so you can copy it over to yours.

Sometimes I come up with content strategies where I can make literally thousands of video ideas in about 10 seconds.

Example 1: "What if." There's a channel called What If. They come up with weird, crazy scenarios (a lot of them have to do with science) and explore what would happen. What if we drained the Mediterranean? What if the Sahara Desert was covered with solar panels?

Instead of science, you take "what if" and apply it to whatever your niche is:

You could do the same thing with basketball, football or makeup. It applies to literally any niche.

Example 2: replace the words. Say you're doing a golf channel. Go look at a sports channel's videos (I usually go to the most viral ones) and build a strategy around one. They have "Banned touchdown celebrations in the NFL." For golf that becomes "Banned hole-in-one celebrations in the PGA," or banned something else in the PGA. You just replace the words, and you have a content strategy.

Come up with one to three of these and you've got something to work with. There's more on finding ideas like this in how to find viral YouTube video ideas.

Steps 2 and 3: Titles First, Then a Thumbnail You Can Make

Next, create titles from the content strategies. I recommend creating tons of them.

What I do personally is write 10 or so titles and then pick the one to three that are the best. When I recorded this I had been spending hours coming up with video ideas for my channels, and then only picking one or two of them. Not all of them work. You try a bunch of different stuff and go with the best.

Then the thumbnail. When I pick a title, I already have the thumbnail in mind, and I try to keep it really simple.

My three rules for the thumbnail:

1. Keep it simple. One to three things, max.
2. Make it clickable when it's small. A lot of the people looking at your thumbnails are seeing them on mobile, so it has to read well at that size.
3. Take inspiration from other successful thumbnails. Look at other niches too. If I was in the basketball niche, I'd look at a channel in a different niche and apply their approach to mine.

The longer version of this step is in the faceless YouTube thumbnail guide.

Step 4: Write the Script for the Ear

The script is one of the most important parts of making a video that goes viral. Three things matter.

Fulfill the title in the intro. Whatever the title promises, talk about it right away.

Only talk about the most interesting things. If the video is "Banned touchdown celebrations in the NFL," don't include the guy who just slammed the football down and walked away. That wasn't that interesting. I look for the ones that are controversial or crazy, where it makes sense why it got banned and the viewer didn't already know about it.

Write for an auditory experience, not a reading experience. Something written to be read is mostly simple bullet points. A script has to sound good coming out of someone's mouth.

That's how I get a good flow in the script. More on this in how to write viral YouTube scripts.

Step 5: Record the Voiceover on Your Phone

You don't need anything fancy here. You don't need a microphone. If you have an iPhone, open the Voice Memos app, hit record, and that's all you need.

What matters is how you read it. Pour your heart and soul into it and have fun. Match the tone of your voice to the video:

Go watch creators with a lot of energy. SSSniperWolf is a good example of high energy. Old Jake Paul videos are another. He poured a lot of emotion and energy into his content, because he understood his demographic and who watches his videos.

Step 6: Edit With Whatever You Have

Editing is finding clips, memes and b-roll footage on the internet and putting it all together in a video editor.

When I recorded this, these were the options I talked about:

• iMovie, which comes free on a MacBook
• Your phone (you don't even need a computer to edit)
• Premiere Pro, which is what I personally used
• Final Cut Pro
• Windows Movie Maker, which I tried once and found kind of hard to use

I used Premiere because I'd been editing videos for a while and I use Photoshop a lot too, so I was okay paying around $50 a month for the Adobe software. You don't need it. As long as you can do the basics, the script and the voiceover carry a lot of the video.

Then, before you go live, watch your video.

Show it to a friend. Show it to your sister, your mom, your cousin. And look for emotion. If you're not laughing, or sad, or a little scared watching it (whichever one the video is going for), you need to go redo it. Same if your friend isn't feeling it. If your content gets emotion out of people, it's going to get results on YouTube.

You should be proud of the product you put together.

Step 7: Upload, Then Repeat for 30 Videos

Upload the video and move on as soon as possible. There are all these extra little functions, and I'd skip them. Upload the video, upload the thumbnail, add the title.

This is how I handled the rest when I recorded this:

• Description. It doesn't really matter. I literally copied and pasted the title into the description.
• Keywords. Keep it simple. If the video is "Top 10 fish in the world" and the channel is called Fish World, the keywords are things like "top 10 fish," "fish world," and "fish world top 10 fish." I usually only did five to ten, and they were basically the title repeated. No random keywords.

Then repeat the process. I recommend creating 30 videos or so. Create and upload as many as you can, as soon as you can, and look at the result you get from each video. Then change your content based on that.

Get as much feedback as humanly possible along the way. Show the videos to friends, to family, and to the target demographic the content is made for.

Video Chapters

• 0:00Intro
• 1:00The 7-step process
• 2:14Content strategy
• 4:38Titles
• 5:25Thumbnails
• 6:05Script
• 7:25Recording the voiceover
• 8:58Editing
• 9:53Editing tips
• 10:48Watch it back and look for emotion
• 11:19Upload and keep the keywords simple
• 12:20Repeat the process for 30 videos

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