Transcription
It took me 365 days to make $500,000 with this faceless YouTube channel. Yeah, so when I started this channel, I was a broke high school student with $120 to my name. Today, 365 days later, I make a full-time income from my faceless channels, travel the world, and work from absolutely anywhere in the world—all thanks to YouTube automation.
For this video, I've gathered all my YouTube knowledge into a full, in-depth, 1-hour-plus course that will teach you how to start your own monetizable faceless channel with AI. After watching this video, you'll have the entire blueprint I used to go from $0 to $150,000 a month. I will go through everything from how to find good topics, write engaging scripts, generate a voiceover, design your own character, create visuals, editing, and even how to monetize your channel. And no, I'm not talking about ad revenue; I'm talking about a brand new way to monetize faceless channels that I've never heard anyone talk about before.
To make things easy for you to follow, I will break down a niche that has gone absolutely viral in the last couple of months. Channels in this niche are, to this day, getting millions of views and make well over $10K a month. The craziest part is that their videos are created entirely with AI. The niche I'm talking about is the history niche. It's kind of a broad niche, I know. I want to leave some room for imagination so that you can implement what you'll learn in this video and start your own unique channel. Anyways, these channels are creating longer, documentary-style videos about historical events like the Roman Empire or World War II. This channel, for example, called Beginning to Now, is bringing in around $4,500 just from ad revenue, and in reality, it's a lot more than that when counting in all of their other income sources.
Before you get too excited, though, I just have to say that YouTube does require 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time to monetize your channel, which can be a real pain in the ass as you're starting out. If you want to skip the grind to 1,000 subscribers, where you initially won't earn a dollar back, there are websites like Tick Accounts where you can buy pre-monetized channels. They're all organic and have a Western audience, meaning their RPM is as high as it can get, so trust me, the accounts do work. Usually, it takes around 6 months to get a channel monetized, but with these, you can earn ad revenue on your first post. So if you're in the market for such accounts, feel free to use my code "how to aai," and they'll see that you came from my channel. It actually helps out more than you think.
Now, before we get into the tutorial, I just want to tell you that this is not one of those dopamine-hitting, high-pace videos you're used to. This will be a slower-paced video with full transparency. I'll show you absolutely everything from start to finish, every button I press to create these videos. I've studied all the most successful channels in this niche and created a 13-step blueprint that I'll break down step by step for you guys. If you follow all of these steps, you will go from being a beginner to a YouTube automation expert.
First, we're going to analyze our competition. I've picked out some of the most successful channels in the historical niche and done a full breakdown of their strategies and the main takeaways we can use when creating our own video. I'll also show you how much these channels are making and all their income sources, like ad revenue, affiliate marketing, communities, and all that stuff. Next, we'll find a viral topic with AI in literally just a couple of minutes. I've found this crazy AI software that analyzes other channel's most viral videos and provides you with similar topics, so stay tuned for that. Then we're going to use AI to generate a script and create a custom character. Next, we'll create and animate visuals in Leonardo AI. Then, before we get into the editing, I'll show you how to find monetizable music. After that, we'll put it all together in CapCut and turn it into a Netflix-style documentary. Once the video is ready, I'll show you my step-by-step blueprint I use to create all my thumbnails. Then I'll show you what upload settings I use and how to optimize your video for SEO. When we've posted the video, I'll show you how you can monetize your channel and actually make money from it.
To make things easy for you, I've created this document with all the steps and tools we'll be going through in this video. It's basically a step-by-step checklist with all the steps that go into creating these videos. So as we're creating this video, I'll check these boxes to make sure we're not missing any steps. I figured this would make it easier for you guys when creating these videos yourself. I really suggest you get it because there's quite a lot of steps that go into this, and it can get pretty confusing unless you have it all mapped out. It's in the first welcome channel in my free community. You can just join and grab it as you wish. It's super simple and will take you no more than a minute to do. However, this is really where you'll find the most value if you want to take this seriously. This is where me and my mentors are dropping the real sauce—the stuff I can't fit into these videos on YouTube. It's literally free value you won't find anywhere else for absolutely 0.
So now that you have the document ready, let's get into creating the actual video. So as you can see, the first step is obviously to create a channel to begin with. You want to head over to YouTube and click on your profile picture. Then you want to hit "Switch account," and you'll see all your active channels. Since we want to create a new one, you want to click on "View all channels." You'll then be taken to this page where you want to press "Create new channel." Next, you want to fill in this box with your username. If you already have a name in mind, just type it in here and hit "Create." If not, we can use AI to come up with one. To do this, you first want to head over to ChatGPT. Then you want to copy this prompt that you'll find in the document and paste it into ChatGPT. I've already filled it in with my niche and competitors, but you can really use this prompt regardless of your niche; just switch the word "history" with your own niche and the names of the competitors. Next, you want to hit "Generate," and it'll give you 10 name suggestions to choose from. I thought "Legacy of Ages" sounded really good, so I'll just copy it and head back to YouTube and paste. Now you want to hit "Create," and your channel will be ready. But we can't really leave it like this, so the next step is to customize our channel with a description, profile picture, and all that stuff. Start off by clicking on "Customize channel." Then you want to press "Basic info" to the right, and you'll be taken to this page where you can change your username and add a description. First, you want to add a handle. This is basically your channel's unique username, and since it's unique, you can't have the same handle as any other channel. So chances are high your username will already be taken by someone else. In this case, you just want to go with something as close as possible, like adding an extra letter. In this case, I'll just add an extra "s." Once you found one, it's time to create a description with AI. Now you want to head back over to the document and copy this prompt and paste it into ChatGPT. We're basically telling it to generate an engaging description packed with keywords that will optimize our channel's SEO and to keep it between 100 to 150 words. So just hit "Enter," and it'll write the entire description for you. I'd recommend you read it through and make sure everything looks good. Then you just want to copy the entire thing and paste it into YouTube. Now you want to head over to the "Branding" section. Here you'll be able to upload a profile picture, which we're going to create right now. To do this, head back over to ChatGPT and paste in this prompt that you'll find in the document. If you're creating a channel in the history niche, you'll probably be able to use the same prompt I'm using; otherwise, just adjust it to whatever niche your channel is in. Now hit "Generate," and it'll give you a detailed description of the image, but we can't really do much with this, so ask it to turn the design idea into a text prompt. This way we'll get a detailed prompt we can use in any AI image generator you want. For this tutorial, I'll use Leonardo AI since they have some crazy features we're going to use later on in the video, and of course, it's free if you're starting out, but you can really go with any image generator out there, like Midjourney, which will probably give you a better result, but at the same time, it's expensive. So once you're in the image generator, make sure you have the aspect ratio set to 1:1. This will make the image be in a square shape, which is exactly what we want when creating a profile picture. I also like to set the number of images to four so I have a couple of them to choose from. Next, you want to copy the image prompt from ChatGPT that you generated earlier and paste it into Leonardo. Hit "Generate," and wait for the images to be created. Now pick the one you like best and download it, then head back over to YouTube and upload it. Now lastly, we need to optimize our channel's SEO with keywords. SEO stands for search engine optimization; it's basically a way to make it easier for people to find our channel through search keywords. Think about when you Google something; the website that appears at the top, or at least ranks high without paid ads, they have really good SEO. Google wants to show their page. In order for us to get the same results for our YouTube channel, click on "Settings" and go to the tab that says "Channel." Here you'll see a box where you can enter keywords related to your niche. To find keywords, I like to use ChatGPT and ask it to provide me with a list of keywords related to the history niche. Now just copy each keyword and paste it into YouTube. Once done with that, you want to hit "Save," and our channel is all set.
First, you got to find competitors. To do this, I like to open up YouTube in incognito mode—basically, without being logged into an account. Then you want to search up main keywords in your niche; in this case, words like "history" and "history documentary." Then you want to find the channels that get the most views. A good sign is that there are lots of smaller channels pushing a lot of views—let's say a channel with 20K subs that gets 100K+ views on multiple videos. This means YouTube's pushing their videos to audiences outside of the subscribers. So I found three channels that are creating videos in a similar niche. You'll find the link to all of them in the document. The first channel is called Voices of the Past. They have almost a million subscribers and 76 million views. They're creating these really long history documentaries that consist of basically just images, some text, and a voiceover. They don't have any character or anything like that, and they don't even animate the images, which is something I'll teach you how to do later on. The second channel is this one called Fire of Learning. They have quite a different style, with a bit more editing, but most of their videos are just images with a few transitions. As you can see, they're making a couple thousand a month from ad revenue. They also have this Patreon page where they're charging anywhere from $1 to $15 a month. Now lastly, we have this channel called Beginning to Now. They post these really long documentaries about historical events like the British and Persian Empire. It's literally just what looks to be AI-generated images and a voiceover. I really like the style of their videos, so we'll take some inspiration from this channel once we start creating the video. One thing they're really doing well is in their titles; they're starting each title with "The Entire History Of," followed by the event the video is about. This way they're branding their channel so that people know it's their video. I figured we'll do something similar with our own video, but more on that later. As you can see, some of their videos are up to 3 hours long, so it's safe to say they're making a good amount just from ad revenue. Social Blade says they're making $4K a month, but I'd guess it's a lot more since their videos are so long, and they're actually not monetizing their channel in any way outside of ad revenue. Later on in this video, I'll show you guys three ways you can monetize a channel like this outside of ad revenue.
Now that we've got a better understanding of the competition, it's time to get into the actual video creation. So the first thing we got to do is to come up with a viral topic. Here's one important thing for you to take away from this video: your topic is literally not 90% of the reason whether your video goes viral or not. No one cares if you have the greatest quality and editing if your topic sucks, and it goes the same way around. A video with a great topic can go viral with terrible quality and editing if the topic interests people. I see too many channels overlook this step and create videos on topics absolutely no one cares about, and they all end up with no views at all. Since we're creating videos in the history niche, which is quite an evergreen niche, there's not really any trends we got to take into account. Instead, we can take inspiration from our competitors and their best-performing videos. Let's take this channel we talked about earlier; all of their best-performing videos are about the entire history of human civilization, Egypt, the United Kingdom, and so on. Each one of them is getting millions of views, which tells us it's a proven concept. So there's actually an easier way to find video topics using AI. What you want to do is head over to this website called Tube Magic. You'll find the link to it in the document. We're going to use this tool not only to find a viral topic but also to generate our script. Once you've signed up for an account, you want to click on "Video Idea," and here we're going to paste the link of one of our competitors. So just copy the link from YouTube and paste it. The AI will then analyze all their most popular videos and give you a similar topic. Now hit "Generate," and it'll give you a couple of video topic suggestions. If you press "Generate" again, it'll come up with a new topic, so do this a couple of times until you get one you like. As you can see, it uses the exact same "The Entire History Of" structure as they do on their videos. Now once you picked a topic, you want to hit "Generate Script." I'll go with "The Entire History of Japan." You can also use this bar to choose how long you want the script to be. Since this is a tutorial and I don't want to bore you guys out, I'll set it to 800 words, but you can really go with any length you want. Just look at the channel I showed you earlier; all of their videos are anywhere from 1 to 3 hours long, so there's really no limit to it. Truth is, longer videos perform better on YouTube. Let me give you an example: you have two channels that post the exact same quality videos; they're the same length, topics—everything is identical. If one of them would actually post videos where everything is still the same, but the length of the content is way longer than the competitor, the channel posting the longer videos would win in the long run. This is a crucial concept to understand when looking at how to overtake a competitive niche. So yeah, click on "Generate," and in a couple of seconds, Tube Magic will write the entire script for you. I just want to make it clear before I show you the results from Tube Magic: if you have the time, write the scripts yourself. If you learn how a viral script is built, it will help you so much. I really mean it; just analyze how the competitors write their scripts and try to write them yourself. The first one's going to suck, but we're in this for the long run, anyways. Tube Magic scripts usually—you don't have to spend a lot of time editing them, but it's still recommended you read it through a couple of times just to make sure everything looks good. After reading it through, I thought the hook was a bit too formal and boring, so I'll make changes to this first paragraph. The hook is really what will make or break your video, so it needs to be engaging. Without a good hook, the viewer might leave your video early, resulting in YouTube thinking your video is just pure crap. But since we can't edit the script inside of Tube Magic, just copy and paste the script into a Google Doc. Just go to the Google Doc website and open up a new doc like this. Now copy the first paragraph and head over to ChatGPT. Then you want to paste in this prompt that you'll find in the checklist document, followed by the paragraph. It'll rewrite the paragraph and make it more engaging. Now copy it and paste it into the script document. Just make sure you delete the old first paragraph, and our script is done.
Chad: What's up next?
Hi Leo, good to be back. It's a big tutorial you're doing here, right?
Yeah, we're going through absolutely everything there is to know about this stuff. I see. So you've created your script; it's now time to generate a voiceover. I always use ElevenLabs for this since they have the most realistic voices and it's really cheap. If you don't already have an account, you can just sign up with your Gmail or Google account here on the homepage. It only takes a couple of seconds. Then you want to click on the tab that says "Voices." Here you've got two options: you can either go with one of their pre-made voices or you can create your own voice, which generally is a lot better. The thing is, most of their pre-made voices have already been used millions of times, and people will have heard it before. Instead, if you're looking to brand your channel and make people recognize it, you want to create something unique for your channel, and it's really super simple to do. Click on this button to the right that says "Add new voice," then press "Create new voice," and you'll be able to design it yourself. There's really no right or wrong here; you just want to create a voice that fits your niche. Since we're creating a history documentary, I feel like a male voice is a good choice. For age, I'll go with middle-aged, and the nationality to American. Now experiment with accent strength; try generating it a couple of times till you get one you like and hit "Use voice." Then you name it so you know which one it is and click on "Create voice." Now to actually use the voice for your content, go to the "Speech" tab and choose the voice you just created. The mistake I see a lot of people make is generating the entire script at once. Don't do this; it can make the voiceover you generate sound kind of robotic, and we'd want to avoid that if possible. Watching a video that sounds unnatural and weird to watch will throw off the viewer. Instead, you want to paste in one paragraph at a time. So start off by copying the first paragraph from the script document and paste it into ElevenLabs. I wouldn't recommend you change these settings here unless you know what you're doing; it can just end up making your voice sound kind of weird as well. Now hit "Generate speech," and wait a couple of seconds. Here you'll see that your voiceover has been generated, and you can click the little play button here to preview it. So listen through it so that it sounds natural. Sometimes the software is lagging and gives you really weird-sounding voiceovers. It'll be a pain in the ass if you realize that when you've already edited your whole video. Once you've confirmed it looks good, you want to click on this button to the right and download it. The rest is really simple; just repeat this process till you've generated the entire script. So I'll just speed up this process and get back to you when I'm done. So now that we have the entire voiceover ready—it took me no more than a minute—however, the AI-generated voiceovers often have these small unnatural pauses in them. So basically what we want to do is implement a little trick that I'll show you in a bit. It's actually really simple, so you...
Don't need any special knowledge. What you want to do is open up CapCut and create a new project. Now import all the voiceover files by pressing the upload tab here and just selecting the file of the voiceovers. Then add them to the timeline and make sure they're in the right order—nothing too crazy.
After that, you want to click on this button to the right and switch to split mode. Now make cuts like this every time there's a silent moment—one where the pause begins and one where it ends. Then just repeat this on the entire voiceover till you've cut out all the pauses. Next, select the silent moments you just cut out, hit the delete button, and drag the clips together like this. Now again, repeat this process on the entire voiceover till all the silent moments are deleted. By cutting out all the pauses, the video will get a higher pace and be more engaging to the viewer. Like, literally every single creator that's big and uses an AI voice does this; it's the biggest engagement hack and basically takes no time to do. Just listen to the difference. Japanese Society.
If you enjoyed this Journey Through Time, please subscribe, like, and share this video. Keep in mind though, if you are doing these historical videos that are, let's say, 3 hours in length, this isn't really necessary. This is because the pace of the video is usually super super slow, so it'll be just a big waste of time to do this, and to be honest, it's not really going to fit the niche's style either. This little hack is primarily for shorter videos.
Now click export in the top right, check the box that says audio, and uncheck the one that says video. This way it'll be exported as an MP3 file, which will make things a lot easier moving forward. So just name it and hit export.
Now the next step. Good job so far, Leo. You've learned a lot since last time.
Yeah, I know, but you know I want to create something really unique here, something none of the competitors are doing. Have any ideas, Chad?
So I looked through your character analysis, and something I noticed was that neither of them have a character, which is something that has been proven to work for lots of faceless channels. So your advice is you should create a unique character for each video. That's all I can tell you; the rest you got to figure out yourself. Faceless YouTube channels with a character have been proven to perform really well. I mean, just look at mine. Also, I noticed that almost no other channels in our niche are doing this, so it'll absolutely give us a competitive advantage. It's also a really big thing if you want to brand your channel more, at least in my opinion. You should always brand your channel. If your audience recognizes your channel through a character, it'll be much easier later on to build an actual brand and sell products once your channel is established.
Now this is just in general. For the example here, I will only generate a character that we'll use in this specific video, cuz it's more engaging to watch. I'll do this part in Leonardo AI. So to start off, you want to head over to ChatGPT and use yet another prompt I've already prepared it. You'll find it in the Google Doc. We're basically asking ChatGPT to generate a design idea for an older Japanese character since the topic is the entire history of Japan. This prompt probably won't be useful for you unless you're creating a Japan-related video, but it's good to have some inspiration when you write your own. Basically, you just want to create a character with a connection to your topic. When you get your prompt ready, hit generate and ask it to turn the design idea into a text prompt that can be used in Leonardo AI. Now copy the prompt and head over to Leonardo AI. Before we generate it, you want to make sure you've set the image dimensions to 16:9. I also recommend you set the number of images to four so you have a couple to choose from. Now hit generate and wait a couple of seconds for the images to load. They're all looking really cool, but I think this one is the best since the person is looking straight into the camera, which will make it a lot easier to animate. So once you found one you like, you want to hover over the image and press the button that says download image.
Now the next step is to animate our character so that it looks like it's talking, which is actually really easy to do. Basically, we're going to insert the voiceover into an AI software along with the picture we just generated, and the software will then animate our image so that it looks like our character is the one saying it. To do this, you want to head over to this website called D-ID. And if you want your character to be talking, you'll need to invest some money into getting a subscription here. They have a free plan, but when you try to export it, they'll throw watermarks all over the screen, which just looks really terrible. I'm on their light plan, which has worked well for me, but if you're looking to create longer videos, you might need to consider getting the pro or advanced plan. Also, there's other websites like HeyGen, but for this example, I'm going to use D-ID. So once you've created your account, you want to click on create video. As you can see, they have tons of pre-made characters to choose from, but we want to use our own, so click on upload and upload the character we created in Leonardo. You'll then be able to choose what emotions and movements you want. I'd recommend you stick with natural as emotion since we're creating a historical documentary. Next, click on script to the right here. You'll be able to either paste in your script or upload an audio file. Their voiceovers are pretty bad though, and since we've already created our own high-quality voiceover in ElevenLabs, that's the one we're going to use. So click on audio and then upload audio. Now choose the ElevenLabs file and wait a couple of seconds so that it can be uploaded or processed or whatever. Then you want to click on generate video, and it'll automatically animate the image into a talking character. After waiting a couple of minutes, this is the result, and as you can see, it looks really good. Now just hit download, and our character is done.
The next step now is to generate all of the images that will show along with the character, cuz if the whole video is the character just sitting there and talking, it's going to be boring; then you might as well not upload anything at all, honestly. We have to stimulate and paint up the picture of our story more, and images are often a good way to do it. So the first thing you want to do is generate text prompts again. For this, I've actually prepared a prompt in the document for you to copy that you can use for pretty much anything. As you can see, we're telling ChatGPT that we're going to play a game where ChatGPT is my prompt generator. Then we tell it to turn each paragraph of our script into five different text prompts that match the storyline. So first you want to copy this prompt, paste it into ChatGPT, and generate it. Next, you want to open up the script document, copy the first paragraph, and paste it into ChatGPT. It'll then give you five detailed prompts we can use in Leonardo. But before we start generating them in Leonardo, you want to repeat this process till you have a full conversation like this with prompts for the entire script. So I'll just speed up this process and get back to you when I'm [Music] done.
Okay, so I've generated prompts for the entire script. This means we can actually head over to Leonardo again and start generating. I'm on their $12 a month plan, which is really cheap, and it's been enough for me, but again, if you're looking to create these longer, 1-hour-plus videos, you might need to get a package with more credits. Once you're ready on the website, you want to click on image creation. Before we start generating though, we have to change the settings a bit to fit the vibe of the video. I'll use one of their presets called Cinematic Kino and set the image dimensions to 16:9. When it comes to the number of images, you can really go with whatever you like. I'll go with one, but if you have some credits to spend, it might be a good idea to set it to two so you have a couple to choose from. Now what you want to do is head back over to ChatGPT, copy the first prompt, and paste it to Leonardo. Then you want to add the words ultra realistic at the end since that will make the result even better. Now you want to hit generate and wait a couple of seconds for it to be created. As you can see, it looks good and has that Japanese vibe we're looking for. This is actually a good example because now that we only want images in the same style, there's a really good feature we can use to do this. You want to hover over it and click on this button that says image guidance. Now click on image to image and then confirm. As you can see, the image will now pop up under the prompt box as a reference image. What this means is that whatever image we generate will have the same characteristics as that one, which really helps when you want to keep the same style throughout the entire video. Now place the mouse over the image and set the strength to 0.1. The strength you set will tell the software how much guidance it should take from the reference image. Let's say we set it to 0.9; Leonardo will then try to make it as alike as possible, while 0.1 will allow it to be a bit more creative while still considering the reference image. So yeah, now that you know that, it's time to get to work. Head back over to ChatGPT, copy the second prompt, and paste it into Leonardo. Once again, we just want to repeat this process until all prompts are generated. This will probably take a while, so I'll speed this part up slightly and get back to you when I'm done.
All right, so I've generated all the images, and as you can see, our lineup looks pretty solid. If we just keep the images still like this, it's going to be a bit boring though. Don't get me wrong, it can work, but Leonardo actually has an animation feature so we can make them a bit more engaging to watch. So now we can actually move on to the next step, which is to animate the images, and this is really the reason why I'm using Leonardo instead of Midjourney. I don't think Midjourney even has this option. To use it, what you want to do is click on personal feed and find the first image you generated. Press on it, and you'll see this button that says image to motion. You'll then be able to choose how strong you want the animation to be by setting the motion strength. If you set it to 10, it'll create a really strong movement that I'll show you in a moment, but basically, it'll just look really weird and unnatural. On the other hand, if you set it to one, it's not going to do anything at all. So what I like to do is set it to anywhere between 3 to 5. For this video, I'll go with four. So to make it easier for you guys to understand what this feature does, I'll generate this image three times with motion strength 10, 5, and 1. Here's motion strength 10. Then I'll do the same, but this time set it to five, and lastly one where I set the strength to one. Now click on image creation to the left, and you'll see them being generated right here. These motion generations can take a couple of minutes, so I'll just jump straight into when they're done.
All right, cool. All of them are now generated. So this is the one where I set the strength to 10, and as you can see, it just looks really saturated and unnatural, so avoid having it this high. This is the one where I set it to one, and yeah, there's almost no movement at all. Now this is the one I put to five, which is what I'd recommend you do too. It adds this slight movement that just looks really cool. So repeat this process till you've animated all the images. I'll, for example, go back to personal feed and do the same thing with the second image. The rest is pretty self-explanatory, so I'll just speed up the process and get back when I'm done.
When you're done animating all the images, you just want to download all of them. To do this, go to your personal feed again and click on the first image you animated. You'll then see this button that lets you download the small video straight to your computer. You can click on this left arrow here and just download it that way to streamline the process.
Now that I have all the animations downloaded, we can move on to the next step of creating the video, which is to find some music. There are two ways you can go about this: first one being that you have great music skills and find music yourself; second one being you have no clue and use the prompt I've put into the document. What you want to do is copy it and paste it into ChatGPT. We're basically describing the kind of video we're creating and then ask it to give us suggestions of music that would fit. So hit generate, and it'll give you a long list like this of music genres. Now to find the actual music you want to use some copyright-free music website like Pixabay. Once you've opened it up, you want to copy the genre from ChatGPT and paste it into Pixabay. Then you want to listen through the songs till you have enough to cover the entire video, and please, dear God, do not repeat any soundtracks in your video; it just hurts to see when people actually do this. Your viewers will catch on and just be annoyed overall. If you want to download them when you found something on Pixabay, you just want to click on this button to the right, and voila, you now have the background music to use in your videos. Once you have them downloaded, we can move on to the final boss of editing.
Of course, it's time we put all of this together and actually create our documentary video. Now I'll do this part in CapCut, but if you're used to using another editing software like Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro, that works just as fine. The reason I'm using CapCut is mostly because it's free, but it also has tons of pre-made features that make the editing process a whole lot easier. What we want to do here is have the animated images go on through the entire video. Then we want to crop out the character and put him on the side of the screen so he's always visible. So once you've opened up CapCut, click on import and upload all the footage. I'll start off by importing the character video followed by all the visuals. Then you want to select all the visuals and drag them to the timeline like this. Again, as with the voiceover, make sure they're in the right order. Leaving it like this with a sharp cut between the clips makes it a bit annoying to look at. So to make it smoother, we can add some transitions. What you want to do is click on the button that says transitions in the top left. CapCut literally has hundreds of pre-made transitions you can choose from, but you really want to go with something smooth that's easy for the eye to look at—in other words, not some crazy transition where the entire screen is spinning around. In the document, I've included my favorite transitions, which are basically the only three ones I use when creating videos like this. The first one's called blur; just search for it in this bar right here to find it. Then you want to click on it and drag it between the first two clips, and as you can see, it adds this really smooth transition that makes the clips blend together really well. The second one's called mix, which you don't even need to search up; you'll find it right under the trending transitions. Same here, just click on it and drag it between the first two clips. If you want to, you can add the speed of the transition under the text that says duration to the right. I usually set it to around 0.3, which I think looks pretty good, so I'll use this one throughout the entire video. The last one, however, is called fade, and you can just search for it if you want to use it. Now adding each transition between each clip would literally take forever, so what you want to do is select the transition and click on the button to the right that says apply to all. This way the same transition will be added automatically between all the clips, which saves you lots of time. Pro tip from me to you. Next, you want to drag the character video to the timeline and place it above the visuals. As you can see, the character video and the voiceover is longer than the visuals. To fix this, we'll need to duplicate some of the visuals to fill it out. I really wouldn't recommend you to do this; instead, go back to Leonardo and generate more images until you have enough to cover the entire voiceover. But if you have to, you want to highlight all the visuals, right-click, and hit create compound clip. This will turn all the visuals into one clip that we can then duplicate. So just hit copy, paste, adjust it so that it starts right after the first clips, and trim it down so that it ends at the same time as the voiceover.
Next, we're going to mask out our character. This basically means to cut out a segment of the whole video, which in this case is the face of our character. To do this, you want to select the clip of the character and click on the tab that says mask to the right. As you can see, you have these shapes to choose from. I like to use the circular shape, so I'll just click on that, and it'll change the shape of the video into a circle. Now you just want to adjust the size of the video and place it in one of the corners. To change the size, just select the video, click on basic, and change the scale. I'll set it to around 60 to 70% and place it in the upper left corner.
The next step is to add zoom-ins to the visuals, which I'd say is optional since the animation is pretty much doing this for us. But if you want to add some extra zoom-ins, you first need to select the visuals, right-click, and hit undo compound clip, which will basically just reverse it into multiple clips. Then you want to select the clip you want to add the zoom into and click on basic to the right. Next, press this little square next to the scale and set it to 100%. Now drag the marker to the end of the clip and set the scale to 140%. We've now added what's called keyframes that'll make the video go from scale 100 to 140. I don't really think this is necessary since the animations look so good on their own, but feel free to do this on all the clips if you want to.
The next step is to add some effects or filters, if you want to call it that. To do this, you want to click on effects in the top left and search for one called noise 2. Once you found it, click on it and drag it to the timeline. Extend it so that it covers the entire video and place it underneath the character. As you can see, it adds this kind of retro filter that I think looks really good on history-related videos. Feel free to experiment around and add some other effects if you like to, but I'll just leave it like this for now.
Next, we got to do some color grading, and no, we're not going to do some insane color grading, so while you editors out there watching this, come at me some slack, okay? But click on adjustment in the top left and then custom adjustment layer. This is basically a layer that allows you to edit the tones and colors of all the layers underneath the adjustment layer. Start off by extending it so that it covers the entire screen. Then you want to move the character above the adjustment layer since we only want to change the colors of the visuals. Select the adjustment layer, click on basic to the right, and scroll all the way down to vignette. Set it at 20, which adds this darkness to the corners and puts much more focus on the center of the screen. Now scroll up a bit and set sharpen to around 20 to make it a bit more crispy.
And this is really all the color correction I like to do. If you know what you're doing, feel free to add some other adjustments, but otherwise, I'd recommend you just leave it like this.
Next, you want to add some captions, which is really easy to do. Just click on captions on this bar right here and hit generate. CapCut will then automatically transcribe the video and captions. This is also one of my favorite CapCut features. I don't even know how many times I've used this. Usually, it's really good at getting it correct, but I'd still recommend you read them through to make sure there's no mistakes.
Once you've read them through, we want to animate them to make them look a bit more engaging. So click on templates to the right, and you'll have hundreds of pre-made animations to choose from. Many of them you'll only be able to access if you buy CapCut's pro version, but there's still a few you can get with a free plan. So look through them and pick a template you like. Since we're creating a long-form video, I'd recommend you go with the template that shows more than one word at a time, like this one. These single-word templates are made for higher-paced short-form content. Once you found one, just click on it, and it'll be applied throughout the entire video.
I liked the animation of this one, but I think we can make the text look a bit better. If you click on this button that says "basic," you'll be able to edit the look of the text. The first thing I'll do is change the color of the text from yellow to white. I think that looks a bit more professional. Then I'll go on and add this glow effect and decrease the stroke a little bit. Lastly, click on this button next to the text that says "case" and turn all the captions into capital letters. This also just looks a bit more professional for a history video. Done.
If you've been paying attention, you probably realize that we haven't made any use of the music we downloaded earlier, so let's add that while we're at it. I think these soundtracks should be enough to cover the entire video, so let's just add them one by one to make it sound more smooth. Drag this little dot to the right to make it fade in; the number you see here is how long the fade-in will take. I usually set it to around 2 seconds—nothing too crazy. Then, once again, click "basic" to the right and adjust the volume. It's super important to do this; otherwise, the viewer won't hear the voice. So I'll drag it down to around minus 25. Now add the second track, create a fade-in, and adjust the volume—basically the exact same thing as we did on the first one. Then just repeat this process again on the last track, and that's pretty much all the editing we got to do. Pretty simple, huh?
So the next step is to export the actual video to our computer. Click on "export" in the top right, and you'll be able to choose all of these settings. Since the video will be uploaded on YouTube, you want to set the resolution to 4K and frame rate to 60 frames per second to get the best quality. Hit "generate" and wait a couple of minutes for the video to get exported. The longer the video is, the longer the export will actually take. If it's a super long video, click "export" and go eat dinner or whatever, take a shower. When it's done, just save it to your computer.
And now it's time for the front-end kind of stuff—the thumbnail. Creating viral thumbnails is a video topic in itself, but I'll show you my entire blueprint on how to create thumbnails that actually get clicks. I'll go through everything from coming up with ideas, thumbnail types, branding, and testing—literally everything that goes into it. Nine months ago, I created this video; today, this thumbnail has been clicked on almost a million times and has been replicated by hundreds of channels.
When it comes to coming up with ideas, you do not want—want—to try to reinvent the wheel. The odds of you coming up with a new viral thumbnail design that has never been done before are pretty slim, and just going with a proven concept will increase the chances you hit the gold mine. So just copy what already works. Try to find patterns in viral thumbnails and replicate them. Remember what Pablo Picasso said: "Good artists copy, but great artists steal."
Let me give you an example. Lately, I've seen this channel getting hundreds of thousands of views per video with these types of thumbnails. Fast forward, I started seeing multiple other channels using the exact same structure: split the thumbnail into three images and put text over it, and then I knew it was a proven concept. Here's another one. This is Daniel Dalen. A couple of months ago, he started posting vlogs about work and lifestyle. Since then, he's gained 100,000 subscribers and millions of views, but his channel really popped off when he started using this thumbnail style—basically just an image of him with text that says "POV" in the background. And now I see channels all over YouTube copying this style, and again, a proven concept. So I thought I'd use the exact same style on the thumbnail we're about to create for our own video.
The first thing you want to do is head over to Leonardo AI again and click on "personal feed." You want to look through all of the images we generated and pick out your three favorites. The reason why you want to go with three images is because YouTube recently released a split-testing function that lets you test multiple thumbnails to see which one performs best, but more on that later. Now you want to download these three images by clicking on them and pressing this button right here. Then open up whatever design software of your choice. I'll do this part in Canva since it's free and really intuitive, but Photoshop or anything like that will work fine as well if you have some experience already.
So when you're logged in on Canva, you want to click on this button that says "create design." Here you'll be able to find templates for pretty much anything social media related, but you want to click on the search bar and type in "YouTube thumbnail." Once it pops up, click on it, and it'll set the right dimensions for you. If you look to the right, you'll see they have these pre-made templates, but we're going to create our own from scratch. We're original, remember? First things first, go to the left here and click on "uploads." Now press this button that says "upload files" and find the three images we downloaded in Leonardo. Once you can see them in this bar to the left, you want to click on the first image and drag it onto the screen like this. As you can see, it doesn't cover the entire screen, so just drag out the corner like this till it does. Since we're creating three different thumbnails, you want to click on "add page" and do the same thing with the other two images. Later on in Canva, we'll actually save each page as a separate file; it's just more convenient.
Let's add the text first. To do this, you want to click on "text" in this bar to the left and then on "heading." The thumbnail I mentioned earlier that we're going to replicate has this text that says "POV" behind a person or an object. It might seem complicated at first, but it's actually really easy to do. Start off by clicking on the text box and type in "POV." The idea here is that we're going to make the text really big and put it behind the Samurai warrior. To put the text behind him, we'll first have to remove the image background. What you want to do is click "edit image" and then on "BG remover," then let it load for a couple of seconds, and as you can see, it'll remove everything except for the Samurai warrior. Now you want to click on "uploads" and add the exact same image with the background and put it behind the cropped image. You can make sure it's behind it by right-clicking on it, go down to "layer," and press "send to back." Then adjust the size so that it covers the entire screen. As you can see, you don't even notice the cropped-out version is there. To put the text behind the cropped image, you again want to right-click on it, go to "layer," and hit "send backward." This way the text will be placed between the cropped image and the background image, and as you can see, the text will now appear behind him. Now I'll just adjust the sides of it and make it really big by dragging out the corners like this. To make it clear what the video is about, I think it would be a good idea to add another text saying "History of Japan" or something like that. So I'll again click on "text" and add another heading. Then I'll write "History of Japan" and click on this button above it to turn it into capital letters. Now adjust the size so that it has the same width as the "POV" text box. To make the text pop a bit more, let's add some kind of effect. To do this, you want to select the text box, click on "effects," and you'll have a few styles to choose from. I really like the neon effect, so I'll just click on it, and it'll be added to the text. Now just repeat this process on the other text box. I think it turned out really good like this, so we can just repeat the exact same process on the other two images, and we'll have three different thumbnails to split test like a true YouTube pro.
Okay, so I've designed the three versions of it, and as you can see, they look really good. But before we download them, I thought it'd be a good idea to add another color to the "POV" text. To do this, you want to select the "POV" text and click on this button that'll let you change the text to any color you want. I'll change it to some unique color like pink to make it really stand out. Repeat this process on the other two thumbnails, and we're ready to export them. If you want, you can use different colors for all the thumbnails to see which performs the best, but it's up to you. To download them, just click on "share" in the top right and then on "download." I'd recommend you export it as a PNG file to make sure you get the best quality, but sometimes YouTube requires smaller files as the thumbnail, so you might be needing to export it as a JPEG. Now click on "download" and repeat the same process on the other two images.
Our video is created, thumbnails are done, and all that's left to do is upload the video. A lot of channels just upload the video without knowing what they're doing and miss out on a ton of views. I'll show you the exact strategy I'm using when uploading my videos to come up with titles, descriptions, keywords, and even what settings to use.
First thing you want to do is open up your YouTube channel and click on "create" in the top right. Then click on "upload video" and choose the file you downloaded from CapCut. Coming up with titles, descriptions, and all that stuff by yourself is really hard, so I like to use VidIQ. It's basically an AI software that creates all these things for you in a couple of seconds. It's pretty convenient, so head over to VidIQ and sign up for an account. It's free, of course. Then you want to click on "Coach" to the left. In this prompt box right here, you want to describe your video topic and ask it to give you a description filled with keywords related to your niche. Hit "generate," and it'll give you a topic, description, and keywords. Now just copy it and paste it into YouTube. Disclaimer though, I would always recommend you do look at competitors and if they have any specific proven title format and just go with that. But if not, and you're satisfied with the VidIQ title and description, just copy them, go back to YouTube, and paste it in the different fields. Since we used the word "POV" in our thumbnail, I thought it'd be a good idea to do the same thing in the title. Then, once that's done, scroll down a bit till you find this text that says "playlist." You always want to have your videos inside of a playlist to make it easier for the viewer to find your other videos. In this case, if we created more videos in the same niche, for example, "The History of the United States," it'll make it a lot easier for the viewer to find it if it's in the same playlist. It actually makes a bigger difference than you think because if you find a video you like, often times—times—you just continue watching the same stuff, and having a playlist will make it easy for the viewer to just kind of continue watching. To create one, click on "create playlist" and give it a name. I'll give this one "The Entire History of." Click on "create," and it'll be added to our new playlist. Then you want to press "no" under "altered content." I know we're using AI, but we're not doing anything like making it look like a real person is saying something they aren't. Then you want to scroll down to "tags," and here we can actually just use the keywords from VidIQ. So go back to the VidIQ website, copy the keywords, and paste them into YouTube. By adding these to our video, we'll get better SEO and show up when people are searching for any of these words, both on Google and the YouTube search feature.
It's also time to actually prepare for the split test of the thumbnails. To do this, scroll back up here in YouTube and press the "test and compare" feature. Here you want to upload the three thumbnails we created in Canva, and YouTube will test which one that performs best for us automatically. This didn't exist a couple of months ago, so we might as well utilize it as much as possible while others don't know what it is. So click on these plus buttons and upload each thumbnail one by one. Let them load for a bit and click "done" once you've posted a couple of videos. You want to start adding end screens, which are basically recommendations at the end to watch one of your other videos. To do this, you want to click on "end screen," and you'll be able to link your other videos so that the viewer can easily move from one to the next one. Now click on the tab that says "visibility" and make sure it's set to "public." Lastly, you want to hit "upload," and that's pretty much all that goes into it. So now all you got to do is repeat the same process and find yourself a posting schedule you can stay consistent with, too. There's really no right amount of times you need to post every week; you just got to find what works for you. I try to stick to one video a week, but if you can do more than that, that's also great. The important thing is you always prioritize quality before quantity. Don't stress the process only to post more; focus on improving the quality of each video, and you'll see much better results in the long run.
But now on to the last part of this free course. By the way, guys, if you found this little video helpful so far, feel free to join my free community. It doesn't cost anything, and I can actually help you guys out a lot more in there since it's easier to chat and stuff. Also, once again, if you're interested in getting pre-monetized YouTube channels, just check out Tick Accounts in the description. If you actually use my discount code, it supports me a lot and helps me make longer, more in-depth videos like this.
So how do you actually make money from this [Music] channel? There are mainly four ways you can monetize your channel. First, obviously being ad revenue—the money you make from advertisers showing their ads before and during your video. The way this works is that YouTube will pay you an RPM—Revenue Per Mille. This is basically the amount of money YouTube is paying you per thousand views, and this number can vary anywhere between 1 cent to $100 depending on your niche. What you'll make is hard to know beforehand, but it all has to do with your niche and where your audience is from. If all your viewers are from third-world countries like India, you'll have a pretty low RPM, but if your viewers are from first-world countries, let's say the United States, you're more likely to have a higher RPM. Normally, you'd have to reach 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time to even be able to make money from this, but honestly, if you do this correctly, ad revenue should be your least profitable income source. Since I started my channel 18 months ago, only 5% of my combined revenue is from ad revenue. Instead, you should focus on monetizing your audience in other ways.
One of the most common ways channels are making money outside of ad revenue is from affiliate marketing. These are links in the description that lead to some kind of product page, and if someone buys something through their link, that channel gets a commission for that sale. For example, the links you see under this video are affiliate links. So let's say you get a subscription on any of the software used in this video; I'll make a small commission. I try to only hook you guys up with free websites, but some do require subscriptions. So affiliate marketing is a great way for your viewers to support the channel while they're buying something they would buy either way. It's a win-win. Now let's say we wanted to affiliate a product for the channel we've created in this video; that could be something like a history book about Japanese history or literally anything in that style. Usually, it's really easy to sign up for affiliate programs; most companies even have a way to do it right on their website. It's not harder than that.
A third way you can monetize your audience though is through private communities. This is basically a private group you set up through softwares like Circle or Patreon. Your viewers will then pay you to be a part of this private group, usually on a monthly basis, and in exchange, they get access to stuff like courses, exclusive knowledge, video lessons, and giveaways. In this case, with our history channel, we could create a private community where the members get early access to videos, some kind of YouTube automation course, or literally a super-niched group of people very interested in history. Nine times out of 10, there is always a group of people that would be interested in buying the most random things like access to a private history group.
Now the last and probably most profitable way to monetize your audience is through digital products—basically a product you create once and can sell unlimited amounts of times. Some examples of digital products are editing templates, courses, ebooks, and stuff like that. Maybe for this channel we could create some kind of history course where we really, really dive deep into a specific historical event. It might be a bad product itself, but I'm trying to give you the right way to think. You want to create a product that meets your audience's demand—something that saves them time or solves some kind of problem they have. What you can do is look at the comments of your videos and figure out what your viewers really care about. That way—and yeah—that's the entire blueprint from start to finish on how I create monetizable faceless YouTube automation channels. We've gone through everything from coming up with topics, creating the actual videos, thumbnail design, search engine optimization, and finally, how to monetize your channel. If you got any value from this video, drop me a comment letting me know what you want to see next and, of course, press the subscribe button. Anyways, that's it for this video. See you.