Fresh Faceless YouTube Channel: First 30 Days

[SEOMadHatter]

I did try and run a case study on faceless cash cow YouTube channels before but it hit a few stumbling blocks. Those channels are still running and still generating cash but they're so ingrained into the websites that the costs become blurred and they had established traffic to drive growth faster.

I was looking for a fresh niche to start a channel for so I could document things better and I stumbled onto something about a week ago.

This Case Study is a Little Different​

This case study isn't exactly the same as my other channels.

My other channels are outsourced. They’re mostly in info niches and need a budget to build and grow but I’ve no interest in doing it myself. For this case study, I stumbled into a trend that suits the faceless YouTube style, it’s potentially a pretty good RPM and the content is pretty easy to produce.

It isn't going to take a big budget to outsource or a lot of time to work with, the RPM could make it a profitable project and I'm starting it from complete scratch which might make for a more interesting case study than my other channels.

The (Potential) Good​

This kind of trend isn’t something I would normally look at. I like consistent growth so I know the niche isn’t going to vanish by the time I get established in it.

And that’s certainly a risk here, however, it could (potentially) become an evergreen niche and the majority of content producers in the niche are hobby bloggers. I can see a potential way in, I can see it becoming a good cash-flowing asset and (best of all) I can create a month’s worth of content in under an hour or two.

If we can get an established channel in the niche it should be an easy asset to manage. A few hours once in a while for a hands-free cash flow and the RPM might well be better than my existing cash cow channels.

There’s a potential problem, however.

The (Potential) Problem​

Normally, I like to start a channel in a niche I can get some traffic for. Usually, I’d like some organic search traffic, an email list or some social traffic so my channel gets a spike of views and subscribers early on.

The Digital Assets Lab channel is a fair example of this. It’s more of a hobby blog so I don’t exactly push it hard but you’ve probably found me from a forum or Reddit. For the ones that found me through YouTube – a good part of that is because I actually promoted the channel.

With this new channel, I can’t really do that. I don’t have anything established in the niche and it would be expensive and time-consuming to try and rush it.

Because the niche is growing so quickly at the moment, my plan is to just start. The majority of the competition are hobbyists so consistent publishing and following the popular trends might give me enough of a push. I do have a few ideas on how I might speed things along a bit.

The Start​

Everything I needed for the channel cost less than $100. Probably the cheapest channel I’ve ever started.

Spent about two hours skimming through the popular channels to see what seems to work. Another hour to get things set up and I was ready to start creating content. The videos themselves are easy to do and I can batch them together quickly.

With nothing but the algorithm to bring views, I didn’t really know what to expect but the first couple of days showed the first video doing well.

​

It’s not the fastest-growing channel I’ve ever seen but for just publishing easy content it’s hard to complain. The watch time is pretty good, and subscribe and engagement rate is looking good so far.

We’re being ranked for the main niche keywords. Not right at the top but on the top 10 or so, plus we are being suggested by related videos in the niche. That’s a good start especially considering we’re really relying on YouTube to push the channel.

You’ll see a little traffic from the short shelf on the traffic source – I posted one but I don’t know if I’ll continue that. It’s potentially a way into the niche as most of the competition isn’t doing it but I don’t want to screw with the watch time metrics for the longer videos.

Promotion​

I don’t have any existing traffic for this niche so I’m a little out of my element here. I have a couple of thoughts on growing the channel quicker:

• The first is consistent publishing. Most publishers are hobbyists and their schedule is all over the place. The content is easy enough to create so publishing more consistently might be enough to get rewarded by the algorithm.
• Maybe a shoutout or two. I’ll message a couple of the bigger channels and see what’d they’d charge for a shout-out. Again, most are hobbyists so I might get lucky and get a cheap boost to jumpstart the channel.
• Commenting. This is not something I would usually bother doing because it’ll be fairly time-consuming but I’m planning to spend a couple of hours just commenting on other related videos. The niche seems to have a community to it and early growth will help the channel get pushed out to a wider audience.

What Is a Cash Cow Channel?​

Let’s make sure we’re on the same page here. What is a faceless cash cow channel? Pretty straightforward, it’s a YouTube channel that doesn’t show your face and exists to generate some cash flow.

Usually, these channels are outsourced. You can outsource everything from scriptwriting, video creation and voiceover artists. I like to run channels like this to support existing websites and when they start generating more with ad revenue than they cost to outsource they’re just scaling themselves for free.

The Case Study​

The plan for this case study is pretty straightforward.

I’m going to publish a couple of videos a week for the first 30 days and try to speed things along with a little promotion and see how it goes. We want to see the growth trend continue so we can get some ads on the channel and I’ll update when interesting things happen.

I haven’t fully decided if we’ll be revealing the channel or not but I don’t want to see the metrics getting screwed with by you guys to start with so I’ll hold off on that for now at least. Considering how cheap and easy the content is to produce it's not like I'd be risking a lot by revealing it once we're a bit established.

TL;DR​

Making a new cash cow channel. Super easy content, a little bit of promotion and a good RPM. Low budget compared to my other projects and we'll see where I can get it.

 

[yesofcourse]

Good luck with your journey. I've followed your previous ones.

A question that is more related to your other journeys but still: How do you decide if it's worth it to create a faceless Youtube channel for a website you own?

I have a website that I've thought about creating a Youtube channel for but I wonder how to see if it's a good idea. What's your opinion on this?

 

[SEOMadHatter]

Good luck with your journey. I've followed your previous ones.

A question that is more related to your other journeys but still: How do you decide if it's worth it to create a faceless Youtube channel for a website you own?

I have a website that I've thought about creating a Youtube channel for but I wonder how to see if it's a good idea. What's your opinion on this?

Potential profit vs the cost of doing so. Pure and simple.

If I think it's going to be an uphill slog - I'll only do it further down the line if the site does well.

If I think the content will be easy and the channel could perform well I might start it day 1.

Some channels are cheaper or take less time to produce than others. Some RPM's are higher making it worthwhile to push on YouTube. Some niches just don't have a market on YouTube or they're far too saturated with competition. If I like the site enough and I think the site is going to make a good return from organic search traffic I'm also more likely to do a channel for it because it can't hurt.

I often won't do a channel for a new site unless I have a reason to think that site will do especially well or the niche has an opening on YouTube that maybe isn't being served.

 

[lazouille]

Nice, I’ll follow your story, I’ve always wanted to start a youtube channel.

 

[meddi83]

Following too!

You mentioned: "I can create a month’s worth of content in under an hour or two"

Can you advise how you can create so much video content so easily? The production method/apps you use?

Thank you

 

[Hamoudi34]

Goodluck!

What process do you use to find niches that would be good for cashcow channels?

 

[Matta28]

Looking forward to follow this journey.

 

[SEOMadHatter]

Nice, I’ll follow your story, I’ve always wanted to start a youtube channel.

It can definitely be worth it. I think SEOs miss a trick for not putting a channel together for their sites sometimes.

Following too!

You mentioned: "I can create a month’s worth of content in under an hour or two"

Can you advise how you can create so much video content so easily? The production method/apps you use?

Thank you

It's entirely down to the niche. My other channels take time and/or money to create content for. This one just happens to be easy to produce just because of its nature.

Goodluck!

What process do you use to find niches that would be good for cashcow channels?

Normally I start a channel for a niche I have a site for. Somewhere I see a demand for YouTube traffic, ideally a half-decent RPM and somewhere not completely saturated by competition.

I'm way bigger into content sites than YouTube channels at the moment just because I've been doing them so much longer but if I was starting from scratch I'd be tempted to just cast wide nets and start a bunch of different channels and scale the ones that get traction.

 

[meddi83]

Thanks for the response @SEOMadHatter

"It's entirely down to the niche. My other channels take time and/or money to create content for. This one just happens to be easy to produce just because of its nature."

Can you share what kind of equipment do you use for your videos? i.e. are they created using a camera/phone? Or is it videos using apps like Vidnami etc?
Thank you

 

[SEOMadHatter]

Thanks for the response @SEOMadHatter

"It's entirely down to the niche. My other channels take time and/or money to create content for. This one just happens to be easy to produce just because of its nature."

Can you share what kind of equipment do you use for your videos? i.e. are they created using a camera/phone? Or is it videos using apps like Vidnami etc?
Thank you

Some channels are just Adobe Premiere, others are on Whiteboard software like Doodly, my IM/SEO one is a webcam. It just depends on the niche.

You could start a YouTube channel for a lot of niches with just your cellphone camera. If you want to keep your face off the screen then you need something to show them and that usually means whiteboards, animations or stock images.

This is not mine but it's an example I used a while ago. You can get into all sorts of niches with just stock video:

 

[lotsofmoney]

How are you keeping the cost of launch of channel so low?

 

[brest]

subscribed. keep it going!

have you thought about automating some of your work by code and not freelancers?

 

[SEOMadHatter]

How are you keeping the cost of launch of channel so low?

It's because of the niche. It requires so little and the content is so easy. I have channels that require outsourcing costs and you can see my SEO/IM channel which requires my own time to create content and case studies.

This niche just happens to be an easy one which is part of the reason I got involved with it. I don't expect it to make me thousands of dollars a day but it could be a potentially good return for very little effort.

subscribed. keep it going!

have you thought about automating some of your work by code and not freelancers?

This is all I ever think about.

I've had case studies in the past where I've automated... basically everything. Including video content.

I build custom-made automation for all sorts of projects but it's just not part of my strategy for this one.

 

[SEOMadHatter]

The first couple of weeks of this channel has been a little mixed. I didn’t manage to keep up with the content production plans but the engagement was through the roof compared to my other channels.

Month	Videos Published	Total Posts	Subs	Watch Time
Jan	7	7	190ish	350 hours-ish
Feb (first week)	3	10	260ish	400 hours-ish

In this case study, I’m building a channel from scratch in a different way than I would with most faceless YouTube channels. No external traffic or outsourcing, just producing easy videos and (mostly) relying on the algorithm to push it.

The Stats So Far​

I’ve had channels get monetization within weeks and others that took the better part of a year. In the first couple of weeks, we reached about 10% of the requirement which isn’t bad considering how easy the content is to produce but it’s not what I was hoping for.

The goal to promote the channel was:

• Consistent content of several videos a week.
• Outreach to established content producers in the niche.
• Commenting on other videos in the niche.

All things I don’t really do for my other channels but I was curious to see what would happen.

Content Production​

A 10-minute video in this niche would take no more than 11 minutes to create. 12 minutes if I include the upload time and making a coffee.

I’ve no excuse for not hitting my target on this front except I was busy with other projects and just didn’t make enough time for it. Consistency with a YouTube channel matters more than a niche site in my experience and I really don’t like to publish that slowly on a new channel if I want to see it grow.

I’ve got ahead of the content production now and have a couple of videos scheduled. I’ve been looking through the top-performing videos in the niche to get an idea of what topics work the best.

Outreach​

The plan was to pay a few of the more established creators to shout out my channel to get the ball rolling. Problem was, there just wasn’t a whole lot of established content creators in the niche so I reached out to about 15 and didn’t hear a thing back.

Normally I would follow up and reach out to more people but there’s a limited pool to work with and it’s just not a shoutout-friendly niche. The majority of them probably thought it was some kind of scam.

Commenting​

This is not something I would normally take the time to do. Gary Vaynerchuk said he used to reply to comments constantly on Twitter when he started Wine Library TV and I get where he’s coming from but damn… the time commitment for the return is pretty harsh.

These were not automated comments or generic stuff like ‘Nice video’ but actually engaged with the content which means it was time-consuming and I couldn’t do a lot of it. Given how easy the video content is to produce and the (potentially) high RPM for the niche – it might be worth doing more of.

Especially when I saw this:

A decent chunk of the views came from the channel page and combined with the engagement I get on those comments – I think at least some of that is people coming in and checking out the channel because of these comments.

It won’t account for all 19.4% but it is something I’m planning on pushing a little harder so we can see what happens there.

Future Scaling​

Given how easy the content is to produce, I’m happy enough with the channel growth. It would take a while for ads but most channels don’t get there right away and I’d at least post for another month or two to see if the growth rate picked up.

My one concern is looking at the returning viewers vs new viewers. The returning viewers and retention is higher than I see in any of my other channels so the format works and people engage with the content. However, for whatever reason, YouTube is pushing it to fewer new people.

This (potentially) means growth is going to become too slow for this to be worth chasing further.

That might be because of the lul in content consistency and a lot of channels seem to stagnate for a couple of weeks before the algorithm just picks one video to push for whatever reason. I’ll keep going for a while longer and see if the growth rate picks up.

The current plan is to produce more consistent content by batching it up and scheduling it ahead of time, focusing on the top-performing content in the niche and trying to push the commenting a bit more to see if that attracts more new viewers.

If the channel growth doesn’t pick up over the next couple of weeks I’ll probably not chase it too much further. It’ll eventually get ads but I’m not looking for a long hard slog with this project.

 

[SEOMadHatter]

I've completely fallen behind on keeping my journals up to date. Been away from BHW for a while.

I'll be honest, I completely forgot about this channel. Without outsourcing, I just wasn't able to keep up with the content production. It was relatively easy to do, but I managed to fuck up a bunch of videos I had stored up, and I went on holiday for two weeks. When I couldn't publish those... it just wasn't worth bothering with.

YouTube is big on consistency, especially in some niches. The moment a channel falls off it's just that much harder to come back.

The RPM for the niche was decent, but the demographics were just too limited compared to other projects. I've been focusing elsewhere and scaling my YouTube efforts, but... this channel just didn't make the cut. Maybe I'll find a way to make it happen again properly but for now it's definitely on the back burner.