You Don't Need Subscribers to Make Money on YouTube

You do not need subscribers to make money on YouTube. In fact, if you chase subscribers, you'll actually make a lot less. Subscribers and views are what I like to call vanity metrics. Yes, it's cool that when you get a million subscribers, you get a play button from YouTube like this, but play buttons do not pay the bills. And so if it's not subscribers, then most people immediately jump to thinking it must be views, because if I get views, I will make more ad revenue and ad revenue is how I make money on YouTube. That also could not be further from the truth. YouTube ad revenue pays out roughly for most channels $3 to $10 per 1,000 views, which means if you get a channel getting 10,000 views a month, you're making maybe $30 or $100. That is not going to change anybody's life. But if you sell something, even something incredibly simple like a $200 course or a $50 per month software, and just 0.4% of your viewers buy, that same 10,000 views turns into 50 to $200 per 1,000 views, which means potentially $2,000 a month from a tiny channel. 10,000 views a month is incredibly easy to get, and I would actually consider that a giant failure if I was going all in on a channel. I try to shoot for at least 100,000 views per month on new channels that I start within a couple months. Now, I personally had a faceless channel that was making $27,000 a month with just 100,000 views a month. And my personal channel that you're watching right now makes a lot more than that even, and all of it comes from selling. So why doesn't everybody just do this? If it's so clear that you're just gonna make so much more money if you sell something, why doesn't every channel on earth do this? Well, it's because you don't know what to sell and you don't know how to sell it. And let's say you do know what to sell. For example, it's really clear the best thing that I could possibly sell from this channel, which teaches about YouTube, is a YouTube program. But in the past, that meant setting up 5 or 6 different tools, having to manually create a sales page on something like ClickFunnels, host the course on Kajabi, try to figure out payments with multiple different providers, and then somehow try to connect them all together with Zapier. And this is what I had to do initially when I started selling courses. But what if you could skip all that and you could literally just tell AI exactly what you wanted to build and it builds you a complete revenue-ready business all deployed live on the internet? Well, it turns out this is That's actually possible right now, and I'm going to show you exactly how to do that in just a second. But first, I want to show you how to set up your channel so you'll actually make as much money as possible from it. So you're not just making random products and selling it from your channel and not getting any sales. I want you to get a ton of sales super easily, and here's how you're going to do it. You're going to create one long video called a pillar video. Now, if you've heard this from me a million times before, sorry about going over it again. It's just a long video on your channel that sells something at the end of it., and then you link all of your other videos to that video via end screen. So when someone gets to the end of any video on your channel, it brings them to this super long video that then sells whatever you're selling from it. And then you're going to put that pillar video link in the descriptions of all of your other videos and you're going to say free training as to whatever you're teaching about. If you're teaching about finance, you're going to say free finance training or free YouTube training. You can check out mine down at the link below. You can see exactly what I do. And next up, you're going to want something free that you give out to people. And you might be saying, Matt, why would I give something for free if I'm selling something from my channel and that's how I'm going to make money? Why in the world would I give anything for free? And the answer is that by giving something for free, you get somebody's email. So you offer something for free if they give you their email. And when you get that email, then you can market to this person for years and years into the future, building what is called an email list. And you can make around $1 per person on your list per month. That's at least what I've seen within my own business. So if you get thousands of people on your list, you're making thousands of dollars per month. So those are the 3 fundamentals: a long pillar video on your channel, something free that you give out as well that will also be linked on all of your videos, and then something paid from your channel. Those 3 fundamentals right there are the cornerstone of what makes me hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. So now, how do we use AI to do this incredibly easily for us? Well, let's say we were running this channel right here called Casual Finance. Now, this channel is getting 3 million views a month. They're likely making a lot of money from this channel, even just from ad revenue, because finance is a high CPM niche. And they're making these incredibly simple finance explainer videos. And actually, in the last video on this channel, I showed exactly how you can make videos that look exactly like this using AI. But that's just the first part of the equation. In this video, I'm going to show you how to make a ton of money from your channel, no matter which type of channel that you run. And so what we're going to do is I'm going to copy the link to this channel, and then I'm going to head on over to a website called adams.dev. Now, Adams is actually the sponsor of this video, so I'd like to thank them for that. And I genuinely really love the tool, and I'm actually using it for several projects right now because of what I'm about to show you. And you can get started with Adams for completely free, but you may want to get a higher plan depending on how many channels you're running if you want to make multiple of these. And this is how many credits you get with each of these plans, and we're going to see how many credits that we use today. So within Adams then, we're going to click this plus button and do deep research. Then we're going to put in this prompt. Here is my YouTube channel. And then we'll paste the link to that channel. And this can be either a YouTube channel you already own, or it can be one similar to what you're thinking about starting. So if I was thinking of doing a finance channel, then I would show this one as an example. Then I'll say, help me figure out what to sell from this channel, and I'd like it to be a digital product, ideally video-based. But maybe also an AI component, and I'd like you to build the front end for that. And I want the offer to follow this blueprint. This is one of the most important things in this prompt, and this is why it's good you're watching this video, because you don't just want to let AI do everything for you. You want to follow a blueprint that will actually make people want to buy. There's a reason that I got that award back there for selling over $10 million worth of courses, and it's because those programs give a lot of value, but it's also because how I position and offer them. And the best offer formula you can do is how to get what you want without what they hate. For example, the offer for my current YouTube course is how to make lots of money with YouTube without having to get millions of views. And then we're going to separate this here, and below this we're going to ask it to also create a free resource. Also create a free resource that will make anyone who watches my channel want to opt in and give me their email in return for something super valuable that you can make. There we go. And then we'll click enter. And now what's really cool about Adams, as opposed to a lot of other tools out there, whether it's Lovable or Replit or a whole host of other tools, is the fact that Adams uses agents. So what an agent is, is essentially an AI designed for a very specific thing, and then all of these AIs will work together for you. Now, in the past, this would have meant that you'd have to go to Upwork, or you would have to hire somebody that you knew in order to do research, put together your sales pages for you, put together an application for you, put together all this stuff. You'd be spending tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries for all these people. But now tools like Adam's can just do this for us. So right now it's using this Iris Deep Researcher right here to dig into, analyze, and integrate massive amounts of information, provide you with accurate and comprehensive research reports. So It's going ahead and it's doing that for us right now. And now it created us this research plan right here that we can go through and it'll basically say that this is this person's YouTube channel, this is what it's about and everything else. And this is the research we're going to do is put together these digital product concepts and everything else. And if all looks good, then you can just click that button right there and it will start the research. And just like that, now we have our report. But honestly, this is just way too much text and I kind of don't feel like reading through all this. So I'm going to click this button right here that says present the report as slides. And just like that, now we have a slideshow that we can go through, which is pretty epic, to be honest. And so it broke down who is the channel for. Well, mostly it's for young adults, which would definitely correspond to that. That would be the type of people who would be likely to gravitate towards these types of graphics and everything right here. And then here's the blueprint framework of how to get what they want. And what do young people who want to be financially independent want? Well, they want freedom. They want wealth accumulation, investing, entrepreneurship, and side gigs without complex financial jargon, budgeting stress and restrictions, and high fees. That all makes sense. And then it broke down exactly what the audience wants, the pain points they hate in depth. And then it shows us the exact product that we should sell from our channel: how to get financial control without the stress of debt or confusing jargon. And it's called the Debt Freedom and Budgeting Blueprint. And it even shows an example of what it could look like right here. So that's pretty cool. Here's another product, which is the Confident Investor Launchpad, where it lets you build a portfolio and everything. And this would be more of a software product. And then here's the free resources we can make: a $1,000 Saved Challenge Workbook, which gives you daily microtasks to build the habit of saving money, a debt-free calculator, and a glossary. I think this first one right here is honestly really good, so I'm going to copy that. And then I'm going to go to this chat box right here, and I'm going to paste it in and then say, please build me this $1,000 Saved Workbook challenge and make the opt-in page for it, along with an email collecting box, as well as the workbook itself and the page they go to after they enter their email. And then I'm going to take a screenshot of this YouTube channel right here, go back to Adams, paste it in as well as take a screenshot of some of these videos right here and then paste that in. And then I'm going to ask it and make it in the style of the my YouTube channel images attached. This way it'll match the actual branding of the channel. So everything is coherent. And then we will click enter. And now, as you can see, we have another AI agent. This one's name is Mike. So the guy who created the slideshow, that was Alex right here, who's the engineer. Mike now is the team leader, so he's coordinating the team now to handle all the tasks. So he's now pinging this over to Alex, who's now going to start putting this together here. And so we basically have a team working for us right now. I mean, how insane is this that we live in a time when you can do this? And like, especially if you're watching this video right here, I read a survey recently that said that only a tiny percentage of the world's population is using AI for business. The people who are using AI, they're using it for entertainment and other things, but if you use it for business like I'm showing you how to do on this channel right here, you're going to make so much money because you're going to be ahead of 99% of people who are in business right now. And then it's just asking us to approve a couple of things right here. All this looks great. So we're just going to click approve. And now Alex, the engineer right here, is building a backend. So it's even building an email collection database. It's doing the actual coding for us right now. This is so crazy that we can just do this this easily. And just like that, it is finished. And here's what we have. As you can see, it used this style of the actual channel, Save Your First $1,000 in 30 Days, the free step-by-step challenge that makes saving money actually fun. And it just asks for an email. And once you put in the email, then it brings you to this page right here where it says you're in, start the challenge now. And then here's the actual challenge. Now, this is really cool. It gives you checkboxes that you can complete while also showing you how much money that you've saved. So if you cancel subscription, that's worth $15. If you pack your lunch instead of buying it, that's worth $12. And people can go through this entire 4-week challenge right here. And at the bottom it even says made by Casual Finance. And there's a channel that actually links to the channel right there as well. And now you might be wondering, where do these emails go once people sign up for this? Well, by default, they'll be saved within your Adams Cloud right here. However, you can actually hook this up and you can just tell it, I would like to connect this with the email marketing software of my choice. So for example, I use Kajabi for my email marketing. I would just tell it and actually set up a site before this where I used Kajabi and I told it send the emails to Kajabi and it works perfectly. I didn't even have to set up Zapier or anything else to connect this. It did it all automatically for me and I just had to follow these simple prompts that it gave me. And then what we can do is click this button to publish this right here. And then if you're on a paid plan, you can remove the Adams badge right there so it won't say made with Adams. And then you can actually add your own domain right here to make this look really professional. And just to show you an example of what this can look like, you can really customize this to your liking. So for example, I built this site right here, tubeaccelerator.com, which is my program site using AI, and I have it on my custom domain, and it looks really good. It looks beautiful. And in the past, I was literally paying a designer $4,000 a month to make sites that didn't look nearly this good, and that was just a couple of months ago. And so then we connect this to our YouTube channel by putting the link to it in the description of all of our videos people go to it, they opt in, they give us their email, and then every time we upload a new video, we send out an email to the list. And we can literally just have Claude write the emails and tell it to write the emails. This will get us more views and it allows us to build a business off of YouTube. But now it's time to actually start making money from this and it's time to build the product. So we'll go here and we'll now say make a course sales page for a course called the Complete Financial Freedom course and have it be a very in-depth course with an outline that is expandable, as well as everything people would want to learn about building wealth and financial Freedom according to the type of people who watch my channel. And then we'll go ahead and paste the channel link in there again and make it in the style of my channel as well with 2D cartoons and such, and have a link to buy. Also even help me integrate payments into this and build a page that people go to after they buy. And now it's working on that. And that took a couple minutes, but it's done now. And check this out. It made us this course sales page right here and it priced it at $97, which is actually what I would probably recommend for a course like this, given the people who are watching this are likely not super wealthy since it skews to a younger audience. And it looks amazing. This is really good. And it's even got the different modules right here in the lessons. And of course, when you change this and you go in and actually make this product, maybe the lessons will change. Then you just simply go into Adams and you tell it, okay, change this and boom, it'll change it. And of course, you'll only want to put real testimonials here. These are just placeholders. And right here, you can't really read this. So I'm going to actually take a screenshot of this real quick and then go to Adams and say, you can't read the text here. And then Adams will go ahead and fix that for us. And you see we've got an FAQ, which is incredible. And then when they click this button to enroll, enroll, then it'll bring them to the checkout page. And then once they buy, it brings them to this page right here, which says that it was a success and they're going to get access to all this. They can check their email and everything else. And if you want to go ahead then and build out the actual portal that students will use, you can also do that all directly within Adams. You can say make a course portal where I can simply upload videos to it and it'll do that for you. Or you can use an external platform of your choice as well. Like I personally built a platform called Moon, which you can feel free to check out. That's Moon with two N's, or something like Kajabi or Skool or tons of other options. And boom, now this text is fixed and you can literally just chat with this and fix anything that you want and make it perfect. And then right here you can also enable Stripe authorization in order to start accepting payments directly with this. And you just chat with it like you would be chatting with a teammate. And so you can just tell it, hey, I would like to connect this to my Moon or my Kajabi and I would like to deliver the product there. Or you tell it, I'd like to build it directly within here. And Adam's can do all of that. And another thing I want to call out real quick is that if you click this plus button, there is an option called race mode and you can do this. And essentially what this will do is have multiple different agents all working at the same time. It'll give you a faster and potentially even better result. But do keep in mind it will use more credits. And speaking of credits, let's go ahead and see how many credits that we spent in order to make all of this. So I started with 1,000 credits. Now I have 954. So if we do the math there, we spent 46 credits, which you can get with the free plan. You get 20 daily credits, so that'd be 2 days worth of them right there. But if you just want to start building immediately and don't have any limits, and you'd likely want to set up some other additional things as well, then you can get one of these higher plans, which are well worth it because you're also going to be getting the Addams Cloud as well as custom domains, which are incredibly essential, and removing the Addams badge. And you'll be able to make real apps and websites that you can sell from your channel. And that is how you can monetize your channel fast. And that's exactly how I've made my course sales page right here as well. You can customize it to your liking, and this site looks beautiful and amazing. There's awesome animations even here and everything, and I have it connected right now since the course is sold out where people can put in their name and email and then opt into it when I do reopen the course. And if you want to try Adams yourself, the link will be down in the description. Even if you just want to play around with it and see what it can build for you, it will probably blow you away like it blew me away, because once you realize how fast you can go from having an idea to having a finished product that's actually being sold from YouTube, it changes the way that you look at monetizing on YouTube completely. That way you stop worrying about vanity metrics like views and subscribers, and instead you start focusing on what really matters, which is helping people and therefore collecting revenue. And just to give you a checklist of exactly what to do if you want to do this, you basically pick a niche, you start a channel, and before you even upload your first video, you use Adam's or some AI to build a simple digital product to sell in addition to a free resource You link these in the description of all of your videos. You create one long pillar video that you link all of your videos to. And now every view that you get on your channel, whether you have 100 subscribers or 100,000, is driving people towards something that's going to make you real money. You don't need to know how to code. You don't need to hire anybody. You just describe what you want and a full AI team will do everything for you. And if you wanna see my pillar video and see exactly what I'm doing, you can check it out next to me right here where I show you the best niches to do this in, how to get set up, how to generate content super fast as well to feed this system and how to take this monetization even a step further. This video right here is going to give you so much value. Check it out and I'll see you there.