Transcription
When it comes to picking your YouTube niche, you would think that if you had 4 million subscribers, you'd be set for life, right? Well, not necessarily.
This guy, Boogie2988, for instance, has 4 million subscribers. And he recently went on a podcast and revealed something shocking. "I made about $44,000 in the last year, which gives us $3,724 a month on average." He only makes around $4 to $5,000 a month with 4 million subscribers. That's actually less than the average American.
Meanwhile, I know some channels with less than 10,000 subscribers that are making over a million dollars a year. Same platform, wildly different results. And it all comes down to one thing, the niche that you pick. And in this video, I'm going to walk you through the exact five-step process of picking a niche that can actually make you money.
Now, if you appreciate me making videos like this, let me know by gently tapping that like button. And let's jump into it right now. Quick note, while I'm going through these five steps, I am going to show you a bunch of different channels. Some of the channels don't have that many subscribers and they're making a lot of money. Some of them do have a lot of subscribers and they get millions of views and they're also making a lot of money. So, you can definitely make money either way with a small channel that doesn't get that many views or with a bigger channel that gets lots of views. I just like to use these small channels as an example to demonstrate what's possible when you pick the right niche.
All right, let's continue. Step one is to understand what makes a niche profitable. Here's the golden rule. Good niches solve real problems for real people with real money. That's it. If your niche doesn't check all three boxes, you're going to struggle.
Now, the first one is real people with real problems. And then the third one is real money. Some people get hung up on that third one. When I say real money, I don't mean you have to target rich people. But what I do mean is a first-world English-speaking audience, generally speaking, is going to have a lot more money than many other countries in the world, and it is going to be significantly more difficult to make money with certain languages out there, just as an example.
So, a friend of mine where I was helping him grow his channels a long time ago actually had an Arabic channel and an English channel, and he was teaching kind of the same thing on both channels. And I kind of warned him that the Arabic channel would be significantly more difficult to grow. Now, don't get me wrong, there are definitely people out there that speak Arabic that have a lot of money. But you really have to be careful and really dial in your targeting if you want to actually appeal to those people. And he wasn't. He was appealing to beginners. And he found it to be about 10 times more difficult to make money from his Arabic-speaking channel than his English-speaking channel. And he eventually pretty much just abandoned it.
But let's get back to the first two. First of all, what are you looking for? Number one, a valuable problem that people are actually trying to solve. Number two, an audience with money, aka employed adults, not kids. And number three, a clear way to monetize beyond just YouTube ads.
Now, don't get me wrong, you can make money from just YouTube AdSense alone, but if you do that, you're kind of putting all of your eggs in one basket, and you're leaving a ton of money on the table. Just as an example, on my second channel, Shane Hummus Content Growth Engine, last month, I made about $37,000. Now, that channel got around 10,000 views. So, I made about $3,700 per 1,000 views on that channel. The average entertainment channel out there makes about $5 per 1,000 views if they're lucky. So, I can easily make a full-time income even though I'm only getting around 10,000 views because of the fact that I'm targeting the right people. I'm solving painful problems with them, and they actually have money to spend.
Now, what should you avoid? Oversaturated niches like gaming and generic fitness, entertainment only content, and generally speaking, audiences without money. If you are selling something very cheap, you can go the mass market route and target audiences without money. But that route is kind of like an endless hamster wheel of content creation because you always have to get millions of views to make a decent amount of money. And if for whatever reason your channel falls off and you're only getting hundreds of thousands of views instead of millions, it's going to be significantly harder for you to actually make money from it.
But don't fear because if you are in a situation like that, right? If you're watching this right now and you have a channel like that, you can actually pivot to a more profitable audience. But here's the mindset shift. You don't need millions of subscribers. I do have over a million subscribers on my main channel, but you don't need millions of subscribers to make money. What you need is the right audience. A small audience with money beats a huge broke audience every single time.
Okay. Step two, look inward. I have seen people waste over five years picking their niche. In fact, we got a comment on the last live I did that someone wasted over 20 years picking their niche.
All right, quick break. This Tuesday at 9:00 p.m. Eastern time, I'm hosting a free live workshop called the YouTube Content Advantage for making money and getting leads and sales. And it's happening live on November 18th, 2025. So, make sure to mark that date down right now. And if you've been struggling to find your YouTube niche or you're worried about spending months or even years creating videos in a niche that doesn't actually make money, then this workshop is for you because for everyone who shows up live, I'll be giving away my niche validator 2.3. This is the latest and most optimized version of my AI powered niche validation tool. And it helps you instantly test and uncover profitable YouTube niches before you waste time creating content that doesn't bring in leads or sales. And it's smarter, faster, and it's trained on even more data from real profitable channels. And I'll be giving it away completely free. but only at this live workshop. And just a heads up, there's a good chance this could be one of the last few times I'm giving a version of my niche validator away for free. So, if you've been sitting on the fence, this is definitely the time to grab it. So, attend the free live workshop by clicking that link down in the description in the pin comment below to grab it and I'll see you there. Oh, and by the way, you'll also be able to ask me questions live. So, I look forward to meeting you. See you this Tuesday, 9:00 p.m. Eastern time.
Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming. But anyways, the last time I did a free training, someone literally commented that they took 20 years to pick their niche. Now, the funny thing is the reason people take so long to pick their niche is because they think their niche is outside of them. Over 90% of the people I help, it turns out that their niche is already inside of them. It's already in your past. All you have to do is look at your past behavior because you are the niche. You are a living, breathing human. And you have to center your niche about what you've achieved or overcome.
So use these three filters to find your niche. And by the end, you'll have three to five ideas. Write them down. Filter one, what have you overcome? Because the best content comes from real experience. What problems did you solve? What did you struggle with? What would people pay to solve faster or better or with less effort? Some examples, lost weight, fitness niche, switched careers, career niche, started a side hustle, make money niche, rescued a marriage where you were about to get divorced. You could help other people rescue their marriages as well. Was there a time in your life where you were an alcoholic and you overcame it? You can help other people overcome alcoholism. And by the way, all these niches that I just talked about are real niches from people that I've either met or worked directly with. But the point is, you are proof that it's possible.
Filter number two, what do you already consume? Check your YouTube watch history. What do you binge watch and go back a long time? What are you naturally curious about? Because you're going to probably make 50 to 100 videos in that niche. So, you need to pick something that you won't hate in 6 months. And yes, you should probably pick something that you are somewhat passionate about. Now, I'm not giving you the generic advice of following your passion. However, with that being said, I also don't want you to pick something that you hate, right? Something that bores you to death. So, if you're intrigued enough about something to watch tons of different videos on it and basically binge watch content on it, then you'd probably be intrigued enough about that thing to also make content yourself.
Filter number three, what are you naturally good at? What do people ask you for help with? What comes easy to you, but it's hard to others? And remember, write down five things at least for each one of these. Now, I recommend you literally pause the video and write these down if you haven't already.
With that being said, I'm going to give you a couple frameworks for looking at this to help you out. One, if you had a time machine and you could go back in time and you had 15 minutes to tell the younger version of yourself something that would save you a massive amount of time, effort, and money, what would you tell them? Maybe there's several different things that you would tell them. Write all of them down. And guess what? Those things, there's a good chance that that's going to be your niche. Just as an example with myself, I did this exact same exercise and it was very apparent what I would have told myself. I would have gone back in time and I would have told myself to be very careful about which college degree I would get and which career path I would go down. And if you notice my earlier videos on this channel were all about that, right? They were all about picking the right college degree, avoiding the wrong college degrees, and then going down the right career path. So that is how I started off the Shane Hummus channel.
A second framework to look at this and I stole this from Naval Rabicant. I think he's a very smart guy and I really enjoy his work. But he says the best way to pick a niche is to pick something where it feels like play to you but it seems like work to other people. Right? Let me repeat that. It feels like play to you but it seems like work to other people. If you can find something like that where it feels like play to you but it seems like work to other people, there's a very good chance that's a winning niche. So try to think of some things like that.
By now, you have three to five niche ideas. So, make sure you keep them handy. And by the way, if you need more help picking your niche, that's one of the main things we help people with cuz this is something that gets people stuck for years, sometimes even decades. So, absolutely make sure to attend the live training this Tuesday, 9:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, because that is exactly what we're going to help you do. Make sure you pick your right niche. And also, you can ask me any questions that you have as well, and I will answer any question, even if I have to stay an extra hour or 2 hours, I'll answer every single question you have.
All right, step three, see it in action. So, let me show you what works. The winners, small to medium-sized channels making big money. This is one of my clients, Felix and Friends. At 155,000 subscribers, he was making over $700,000 a month. And he basically makes stock market content and specifically he talks about options trading. And a lot of the people that follow his channel are older people that want to learn how to invest their money in an intelligent way. So, he solves expensive problems for people that actually have money.
Here's another channel. I thought this story was quite interesting because he actually went on a podcast. This is Thomas Frank. Now, he has a channel with millions of subscribers and he was making pretty good money with the channel, but it wasn't really steady and stable. It would go up and down. And so, he started a second channel, which is Thomas Frank's Notion channel. He got it to over 200,000 subscribers at the time of him doing this podcast that I'm talking about. And very quickly, that channel got to hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. Why? Because his second channel was hyper specific. it was just notion tutorials and he sells digital products specifically notion templates. So he was targeting people who want to optimize their productivity specifically using notion templates. And so he was solving a specific problem for specific people that actually had money.
Another extreme example, now this guy is not one of my clients, but basically he has a solar installation business. So he basically installs solar systems for big businesses. Now, each time he installs a solar system, he's making tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars. So, these are some big contracts. And he has a tiny channel with less than a thousand subscribers. And his videos get almost no views. And he barely ever posts videos in the first place. But he made over $500,000 from YouTube. This is an extreme example, obviously, but it just goes to demonstrate what I'm talking about.
Step four, understand the money. So, there's two ways to make money on YouTube. Way one is the passive way, which is YouTube ads. And then maybe you have like affiliate links in the description or something like that. Way two is the non-passive way, which is pretty much every other way of making money. But one of the main ways is to sell your own stuff. And in many cases, you can make 10 times or even a hundred times more than what you'd be making if you were only doing ads.
So just as an example, digital products, things you create once and sell repeatedly, you could sell them for $50. Online courses, you could sell anywhere from $200 to $2,000. Templates you could sell for $10 to $100, ebooks for $20 to $100, coaching for $500 to $5,000, and memberships for $20 to $200 per month.
Now, how does it work? You make free YouTube videos solving small problems for people. Viewers know, like, and trust you, and then you offer a product that solves their problem completely or more quickly or with more support or with less hassle. And that way, they buy from you. The example here is Thomas Frank's Notion channel. There's free tutorials on how to make really good notions for different people in different situations that will help them with their productivity. But then he also sells templates for $50 to $200. And he's making more money with his tiny channel than he was with his 3 million subscriber channel.
So for a niche to make you rich, you need three things. Your experience, aka did you overcome this problem? Your interest. Will you enjoy it long term? And money potential. Does the audience actually have money? And is the niche sustainable? Right? Because if you're doing something and you're not making money from it, it's a hobby. Don't get me wrong, hobbies can be great, but they're not sustainable. Cuz it is work to make videos. And if you're not making money from the work that you're doing, that's just not sustainable. And when all three of these things overlap, that is your gold mine.
So, let's talk about generally speaking some of the best money niches. Personal finance, make money online, career advice, software tutorials, business, marketing, specific fitness, dating, self-improvement, specific hobbies, etc. Some of the niches you want to avoid unless you are okay with getting like tens of millions of views to make good money would be gaming, entertainment, vlogs, and basically anything with an under 18 audience. And generally speaking, you want to pick a niche that relates to wealth, health, or relationships. Those are the three big money niches because everyone in the world has probably a problem with one or more of those three things. Either their health, their wealth, or their relationships. And they want to watch content to help them solve those problems.
What's happening guys? In the editing process of this video and I have an opportunity for a select group of people. So these are people who are serious about growing their personal brand on YouTube. So basically we figured out recently how to grow a personal brand and combine all the upsides of a personal brand with the upsides of automation, right? Using AI, using things like this to basically grow your personal brand 10 times faster, which in the past used to take decades to do. And now you can do it significantly faster. And you can do this to get a better job. You know, we work with beginners that just want to get a better job with their personal brand. You can do this to make money as a side hustle. We work with a lot of people like that. We can do this to make more money if you already have a side hustle or a small business. Or if you're already crushing it on YouTube, we can help you crush it 10 times more. We've worked with people like that as well. I mean, I literally can show clients at each level. People that we've gotten from zero to over 10K, zero to like over 30K, uh, from like 1K per month, all the way up to 185K per month, from around 30K per month all the way up to over 500K per month. So literally at every single level and it works for everyone in every situation. With that being said, we are only working with three to five people and they have to be people who are very serious, right? People who are dedicated to making this work. So if you think you're that type of person, go ahead and apply down in the description and the pin comment below and you can be part of our group of three five that we help. So see you there. Have a good one.
Step five, evaluate your niches. So take those three to five ideas from step two and you can either just take action right away and start making content on those things. That's actually what I did on my main channel. Just as an example, I made content on career stuff, college degree stuff, grant writing because I wrote grants before, personal finance like saving money or investing money and several other topics. And then the one that took off was the college degree and the career stuff. So I just went with those.
And one thing you must understand, this is the important thing that you absolutely must understand is that you are the niche. So yes, I am having you pick kind of specific niches, but you need to understand the overlying principle that you are the niche. I have pivoted niches so many different times. My channel has evolved while I evolve. And you are a breathing, growing, living human being that evolves and changes over time. And the beautiful thing about having a YouTube channel is your YouTube channel can evolve and change with you. So yes, you should pick a specific niche when you start out or several of them and then go with the one that is basically the best one for you. Usually going with the one that takes off, but know that later on down the line, you can pivot to other types of content, right? Once you grow an audience big enough, they'll start watching you for you instead of watching you for the specific type of content.
Now, typically what will happen with someone when they pick a specific niche is usually it'll either be too specific or too broad. Now, it's more common for it to be too broad. This is the most common mistake that I see people make. With that being said, I have seen some people that pick niches that are too specific as well. So, you're always going to have to adjust a little bit and change things up a little bit here and there. And that's where you should really just attend my live training this Tuesday, 9:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, cuz I can definitely help you with that process. But with that being said, whether or not you have me to help you with the process, you'll likely need to tinker with the niche. You know, talk about different ideas within it. And then eventually you'll find that sweet spot where you're not too niche, but you're also not too broad.
But here's the bottom line. You don't need millions of subscribers to get rich. You need three things. The right problem to solve, an audience with money, and a way to sell them solutions. Your experience plus a specific focus plus an audience that actually has money equals wealth. So remember the lessons. Specific beats general most of the time. Money audience beats big audience. Your experience is your advantage. And most importantly, action beats perfection. I promise you that if you just make a bunch of videos, your niche will find you. So, the last thing you should do is waste 5 years or 10 years or 20 years trying to pick your niche. Just start making videos and you'll basically figure out pretty quickly if it's a good fit for you or not.
Now, speaking of niche, I know that 99% of you, maybe even 99.9% of you that watch this video are never going to work with me or my team one-on-one with our coaching. With that being said, there's 1% or 0.1% of you out there that would be interested in that because you want to work closely with someone and you want to achieve the result faster with less stress and have more certainty that you're doing the right thing. If that is you, go ahead and book a call down in the description in the pin comment below and it'll be the second link down there. On this call, we'll figure out where you are right now, where you want to be. We'll make a plan to get there, and we'll see if we're a good fit to work together or not. We are very limited with the amount of people that we work with when it comes to coaching. So only apply if you are very serious about growing and making money on YouTube quickly, right? So don't apply if you're thinking about doing it 6 months from now or anything like that. Only apply if you want to do it right away and if you're very serious about it. And also check out this story of one of the clients that we worked with and we helped them scale to tens of thousands of dollars a month by clicking right here.