621: How to Make Money on YouTube with AI Video Tools

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1:16What's up? What's up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show, where we've been helping make day jobs optional since 2013. Last year, you met Tony Dissendrites on the show. It's episode 565 in your podcast feed. We did a really interesting episode on YouTube automation where the flow was kind of like this. It was come up with a hopefully viral video topic, send it off to a researcher slash script writer who then passes that script off to a voiceover artist who hands that off to a video editor who pulls in all these clips and makes the video all in the name of hitting that viral YouTube lottery, playing the game of really planting a bunch of digital assets in the form of these videos, little money seeds to go out there and hopefully work for you, and then banking that enough of them hit to turn a profit on all that labor costs in the form of ad income.

2:09Well, what a difference a year makes because now we've got AI tools to assist in just about every step of that production process. Tony's been on the front lines of these changes. So I wanted to have him back on to find out, first of all, is that a good thing for content creators, for YouTubers, but also side hustlers can make some money in this new AI powered YouTube landscape. Last year, we talked about his interesting flow channel where it earned as much as$14 ,000 in a month during a viral spike. He's since started several new channels, including Bible Blazing, a Bible themed channel, which was able to get monetized in just 30 days, making up to$100 a day built using AI.

2:50Now, we talked kind of about the video production process. Where is the human element? Where is like your value add as the entrepreneur here? What stages are you involved with? Yeah, thanks for having me back on, Nick. Yeah, a lot can happen in a year. And there was actually a huge spike of AI in the last quarter of 2023. There was a huge spike of AI. And now in 2024, it's just rolling out like very fast. So AI has made a significant change to the industry. And it's been good and bad in terms of good for the creators, but a bit bad for the freelancers, because a lot of the freelancers have pretty much been replaced with AI.

3:25There's someone I know who I've been talking to about AI, and he's been telling me that AI is going to completely take over the film industry, even to the point where we're going to have full-on movies and full-on videos, YouTube videos that are going to be completely made by AI 100%, because it's not 100 % there yet. We're close to there. But yeah, it's debatable as to whether there'll be zero human aspect. By the looks of how things are going, I think we're heading there. What's your role today? Or is it still kind of this idea generation process? I mean, I imagine you could probably cue ChatGPT, like, give me some viral video ideas on the topic of Bible verses or something, like for the case of this Bible channel.

4:03Yeah, so ChatGPT is really good for giving out video ideas. So you can just whack into ChatGPT, give me 10 video ideas of this, or give me 10 variations of this viral video that went viral. So let's say you had a viral video that was talking about where was Jesus during Satan's rebellion. Like, you can whack into ChatGPT and just put that title and just say, give me several different variations of that video that I can use as a benchmark to do more videos. So essentially what you'll do in youtube automation that you will still want to do now Is that you would want to pivot off of an already existing viral video So let's give that example So one of my viral videos on that channel was where was jesus during satan's rebellion?

4:45I created several different variations from that video that i've gone on to hit hundreds of thousands of views So instead of where was jesus during satan's rebellion? I just changed up the word jesus and I put the word god So I did another video that talked about where was God during Satan's Rebellion. Then another video, where was Angel Michael during Satan's Rebellion? And now we have a few more that's going to be where was Gabriel during Satan's Rebellion. So we change up that name. And yeah, we do use ChatGPT to help with the ideation. With YouTube, ideation is the most important facet of the YouTube game.

5:18Having a great idea is going to be the difference between you hitting like a million views and just like 10 ,000 views. That's how powerful ideation is. So I don't mess around with ideation. I make sure that even though AI comes up with suggestions, I always filter through that process. In terms of a lot of scripts that we do, AI has been a significant help. So a lot of script writers, the cheap script writers that did very basic scripts, they're pretty much out of the water now. They're pretty much out of the consideration to be hired because chat GPT has pretty much replaced them. If you do want a premium script with a higher level, then you're going to have to hire someone who's experienced in that area and is really good.

5:55Those guys can't get replaced because they're really good at what they do. In terms of voiceovers, there is a website called 11 Labs. And this website is phenomenal. You can have all these different variations of voices, and you would never tell that they're AI generated. You would think they're real voices. And we use them for our videos, and they work pretty fine. I've had comments people say, who is that voiceover? Like, no one questions if it's a real voice or if it's an AI. For 20 bucks a month, you can hire an AI voiceover, all these different variations of voices. You can even clone your own voice.

6:27So you can just get several minutes of your voice spoken, and then it will put together your voice and it'll clone your voice. That's another aspect to 11 Labs. And I recently had one of my voiceovers reach out to me. He used to charge like a ridiculous price for his voiceovers. Like I can't remember, but it was very, very expensive. But he recently reached out to me and he was offering to do work for me for a fraction of the price because I'm assuming he didn't tell me this, but I'm assuming AI has literally just wiped out that industry. Not fully, but yeah, it's been impacted heavily. Yeah, that's frightening for anybody in that space.

7:00That's frightening for me as a podcaster. Like, well, how long before my job is obsolete and where somebody else can come through and do this. But you're actually the second person to recommend 11 labs just in the past week or two. It was one of my initiatives is trying to build out a library of video content. But the bottleneck is taking an existing blog post, in my case, this evergreen piece of content or this evergreen article, and trying to create a video version of that to try and double dip in SEO and serve a video-first audience versus an article-first audience. But the bottleneck is scripting it for YouTube and then doing that voiceover, where it's like, okay, maybe I could clone my voice.

7:39And it would do the voiceover part or accelerate that part of the process, even if it's only a seven or eight minute video to narrate. But that was something that kind of was on my radar. I want to go back to the idea generating phase or even the channel idea generating phase. Was there some level of research that led you to the Bible niche? Because Interesting Flow was kind of in like the mega construction project niche. We were talking about Dubai's man-made islands and stuff like that. Yeah, so the way I got into the Bible Brook channel or the Bible Blazing channel, I was scrolling through YouTube and I found a lot of this Bible content that was just going viral.

8:15And the content that was going viral was this AI and Bible stuff. And it was very basic. And I knew that with the use of AI, I can blow that channel out of the water and just get more views than them. I knew that I can leverage the already existing videos that have gone viral. And yeah, that's pretty much what I did. I did similar videos and I used a lot of AI. We use an image generation tool called MidJourney AI, which is one of the most popular AI softwares that is used for image generation. We use MidJourney to generate the images and we put together the images with background music. It looks amazing.

8:51I mean, I was blown away when I first saw my video editor put it together. Yeah, it really looks good. So MidJourney is not just a thumbnail. It is creating internal images for the video itself. Yes. So you can use MidJourney AI not just to do thumbnails. You can use it for the video itself and you can use a tool called, I believe it's called Runaway AI and it has a motion brush effect where you can actually select parts of the image where there's motion. So for example, if you have like a man on a beach, you can use the motion brush tool to highlight only the sea to have a bit of motion. So in the image, it will look like a moving image because the sea is moving, the waves are moving, but the man is standing still.

9:32So AI has that effect as well. And you have literally zero chance of being copyright claimed or copyright striked with AI because you're generating the images. You're paying for a subscription that's generating the images. So no one can say, hey, you used my content. I want a copyright claim on your channel or copyright strike on your channel. There's none of that. That still seems like a lot of effort to create hundreds of different scenes in an eight minute video individually. Or is it just looking at your script and auto generating those? Yeah, that's exactly what I thought, Nick. but you can whack in your script into the AI.

10:05With Midjourney, you would have to do it individually, but there is another software that my editor is using. He uses Runaway, but he uses another one. I keep forgetting the name of it, but he just puts the whole script and it generates loads of images. He can pick and choose which image he wants to use and that's made it so much easier. I've been playing around with one called Pictory. There's a few of these. I think I have a referral discount code for Pictory and it will take your voiceover, it will take your script and it will pull together hundreds of stock footage type of clips related to what you're talking about.

10:38And I would say it's 90%, 95 % good and accurate. And occasionally it's something like, well, that was a different meaning of that word or something like it just looks a little bit off or random. But the time savings versus having somebody go and source all of those different clips and worry about the licenses for all that is like, oh, shoot, this is all taken care of. really, really accelerated a lot of videos that we've been trying to make where I'm doing the voiceover. It's not AI yet, but then we are using Pictori, the AI tool to build out the rest of that video and hopefully make it something that's like visually compelling versus just me talking head and have maybe a couple of graphics fly in or something like that.

11:19Yeah. Pictori is really good and other AI softwares that we use. So we have chat GPT for the script. Then we have the voiceover 11 labs and you can pick male or female and it sounds real you can even clone your own voice image generation yes mid-journey but we also use dali which is if you have the paid version of chat gpt you can use dali as well so now you don't even need to go on dali you can just write to chat gpt if you have the paid version just write a prompt and it will come up with the image sometimes chat gpt ai the dali is actually more accurate than mid-journey in terms of the thumbnail we use either chat gbt dali or mid journey and then you can just whack it into canva to just add an arrow or add some text into it traditional faceless youtube channels you would need to have a script writer video editor thumbnail designer and then a voiceover but now chat gbt is your script writer 11 labs is your voiceover you can have the editing with mid journey with different to be honest i haven't fully outsourced that to AI.

12:24That's one thing that AI has helped video editors to achieve better videos. However, it hasn't fully taken over yet. Me personally, I don't know how to video edit. So for me, I'll be like clueless. So that hasn't been fully outsourced. I still pay a video editor for that. So that's not in the hands of AI fully, even though they use AI to help them. So AI can either help you or it can take away your job. So you choose in a sense where you want AI to take your life because I've had people who can't really work anymore due to AI in their field, whether it be voiceover or script writing. But then I have my editor who has made so much money in the past few months of me paying him.

13:05I told him, I said, get rid of all your clients. I want you. He does a phenomenal job. And yeah, I've paid him so much money in the past few months And it's helped him dramatically. So someone like him, someone like a video editor who knows how to utilize AI, for them, they're going to benefit. But someone who pretty much does basic stuff, then yeah, AI is sadly coming for a lot of jobs that don't require a lot of effort, if you know what I mean. Yeah, it's similar to a Fiverr or an Upwork situation where everybody was kind of concerned about it's a race to the bottom on pricing. And it's like at the very bottom of the market.

13:41Yes. but at people want a higher touch point or a higher level of service, like there's still room for humans, but the bar is getting higher and higher, unfortunately. Or fortunately, like you said, on the content creator side, it reduces that barrier. But on the service provider side, it just like, okay, I got to level up my game to be able to compete in this AI world. More with Tony in just a moment, including how he picks trending topics to create videos for and how you might stand out as the cost of production gets lower and lower right after this. As a business owner, you worked hard to make that phone ring, but missing a business call?

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16:12This Black Friday, join the thousands of new entrepreneurs hearing for the first time with Shopify. Sign up for your free trial today at shopify.com slash side hustle. That's shopify.com slash side hustle. Go to shopify.com slash side hustle and make this Black Friday one to remember. So the name of the game is still like trying to find a trending topic or a topic that's gone viral and like try and draft behind it or write on its coattails or piggyback on that popularity a little bit. It's not necessarily like search and discovery where I'm, oh, the keyword tool said there was a search volume of 5 ,000 a month.

16:49So I'm going to go after that. It's like, I really need hundreds of thousands of views for this to pay off. In a sense, yes, there is vidIQ that you can use to see the search volume on certain keywords. vidIQ hasn't been my best friend in terms of the keyword research side of things. The vidIQ have a really good aspect to their software, which is called a views per hour feature. I think this can work even if you have the free version of vidIQ. It works like an extension, like a Chrome browser, and it can actually show you how many views per hour a video is getting. So if you're scrolling through YouTube and you want to know which video is popping off, sometimes the data alone with youtube is not enough so when you see like a video has gone viral in the past three weeks yeah that's pretty much telling if it got like a million views in three weeks then you know it's in the algorithm then you can model after that video but sometimes you don't know when a video has fully died down so if a video has got a million views in three weeks but that video has died down in terms of views per hour but you don't know it you're just looking out what YouTube's giving you.

17:49The vidIQ software allows you to see the views per hour videos getting. So when I'm looking at trending topics, I always want to look at the views per hour that video is getting. So I know that the trend is still alive and I can do similar videos and benchmark off of that wave. And then when I've spotted a trend, I just double down on that trend and eventually it works. It's not as hard as people make it out to be. What's very important as well is understanding your audience and chat gpt can help a lot with understanding your audience i was on the call with a youtuber a few weeks ago and he had like an ev channel which was about electric vehicles and he said that his income went from like three grand a month from his channel to like he went to hit his first 11 grand month only when he started to understand who his audience was did that change happen so basically his channel was about electric cars he was getting views and it was popping off and he was making like three grand a month.

18:45He thought that his audience loved electric cars. But until he started looking at the comments and he started to see that his audience, they don't love electric cars. The reason why they're watching the videos is because they hate electric cars and they're saying how it's a scam, how it's not efficient. It's a big scam from the government. He understood, hold on, my audience, they hate electric cars. So then he started doing videos against electric cars saying how it's a scam, how it's an agenda from the government. And then his views just skyrocketed. And then I was just like, damn, when you understand who your audience is, then you can just leverage that and just take your channel to the moon.

19:20And so that's what I've been doing recently. I've been analyzing the data and the YouTube analytics enables you to see who your audience are, how old they are, if they're male or female, what percentage are male, what percentage are female, which country they're watching from. And what you can do is you can go on your most viral video or the most viral video in your niche. There is a section on the right hand side with vidIQ where you can copy and paste the script of the video and you can whack that into chat GPT and then ask chat GPT to give you a customer avatar or a audience avatar of the people who would watch that kind of video and it will come up with an avatar of your audience and that's the person you want to speak to dang okay that's fascinating and then the next phase would be to kind of include that audience profile or customer avatar type of persona into your script prompt Like, hey, I want to make a video about the next topic that you have in mind, but write the script for this type of person.

20:16Like, is that kind of how you're leading the tool to give you the script that that audience would like? I've never thought of it that way. I might start doing that, Nick. Thanks for suggesting that. Actually asking ChatGPT to say, write me a script for this kind of avatar. That will actually work, I believe. I'll give that a shot, but I didn't specifically do that. I'll look at the customer avatar and I'll look for things like Bible stories that fit to that avatar. That's what I was doing before. Yeah, just tailoring to their needs and what they want to feel. Some people want to feel joy. Some people want to feel that their beliefs are being reassured.

20:52They want to feel smart. They want to feel like, yeah, I like this content. This is making me feel that I'm right, that I'm in the right, kind of stroking the ego kind of thing. so you can just leverage that yeah and even if one video already went viral on that same topic doesn't mean that ship has sailed it means hey there's clearly a hungry audience for this type of stuff so how can we feed into that now how do you make your video on that same topic better different unique in some way especially as everybody starts to use the same tool hey give me a script on this topic. And after a while, like the barrier to entry, the cost of production goes so low that it's just got to be flooded with almost identical videos.

21:37What you need to do is you need to be the person in your niche who knows the most or who's the most knowledgeable, or at least be perceived as that person who's the most expertise in your niche. I've studied the Bible and I'm pretty much passionate about my niche, which I'm in right now. So I just apply the knowledge I know and I just make sure it's perfect. Like every script, I don't care if AI has generated most of it. I don't even care if I've had a script writer do the script for me. I fact check everything. I look at it. I mull it down. I pretty much rewrite it. I'm very fussy when it comes to this niche and this and the scripts that I'm doing right now.

22:17Because like you said, Nick, YouTube keeps increasing. So I'm not too worried about things being oversaturated with YouTube because YouTube has just overthrown Netflix right now. There's a statistic that just came out that there's more consumers on YouTube than on Netflix. And it's been constantly increasing. So there's always going to be more consumers than producers. But in terms of different niches, yeah, you have to be good at what you do. So gone are the days of doing crappy videos and them going viral and you get in a way with it. right now you have to have quality over quantity and really make sure that the content that you're producing is good is edited well but in my opinion and from my experience the most important thing is ideation so you have to master ideation and scripting so those are the two most important things i found out in my youtube journey that if you have a brilliant idea and then you have a brilliant script that goes with it and if you're really really fussy with the script and say fussy I mean, like you redo the intro like three or four times and you just want to perfect it and you're up all night and you're working hours on it.

23:22That's the kind of fussiness I apply to my scripts. That's actually helpful to hear because it makes for a nice sounding, hey, I came up with this idea and then AI did everything else. It's like, well, no, I still had to apply my expertise here. I helped massage that script to use my own firsthand experience and expertise. And I think that's how creators can still stand out and win in an AI world is your firsthand experience. No machine is going to be able to replicate that. And then creating primary source material, even if the machines are going to eventually rip that off and use it to train their models, like at least you came up with it first.

23:57It's got to be worth something, hopefully, knock on wood down the road. but that's kind of how we're trying to play the game. Like, oh, we're going to actually go out and test these different apps and websites that we talk about rather than just regurgitating what else has been said about it online. Anybody can do that, but it doesn't add any unique value. So what unique value you have to the table? Hey, in your case, I'm bringing my own Bible experience to these scripts and trying to make something that is better and unique compared to whatever else is out there. And six months from now, that other AI tool is going to crawl that, but at least you came out with it first.

24:31Yeah, that's good. And going back to the whole competitive advantage aspect, it's very important to identify whoever you are. So you might not have the best knowledge in your niche, but you might have a competitive advantage. And I believe everybody is unique and everyone has some sort of competitive advantage in their hands, whether they know it or not, especially when it comes to YouTube. So someone might not have a lot of knowledge in their niche like I do. However, they might have a lot of money to burn and they can just hire somebody who has a lot of knowledge in their niche and they can hire a better editor or your competitive advantage might not be money it might be time some people have more time than others if you're in high school and you have a lot of time in your hands you don't have responsibilities you can just learn editing you can just become the best editor and you have all this time you can just become the best video editor like in your city or pretty much aim for the best in the world if you have time then that's your competitive advantage if you have a lot of money, that's your competitive advantage.

25:29If you have a lot of knowledge, that's your competitive advantage. So you have to discover what your gift is, what your competitive advantage is, and just double down on that because that's what's going to make you unique. Otherwise, anyone and everyone can be successful in that field. But once you understand that, no, I have the gift, I'm gifted to write great scripts. I'm a writer. I love writing. I love copywriting. So use that. If you're visual, if you're good at designing and you have an eye for things, then just use that for thumbnails and for videos. Or if you have a lot of knowledge in a specific niche, like electric cars or whatever, just use that and apply that to your YouTube or your business journey.

26:06Even if you're not going into YouTube, you could apply into any journey. Or you've probably gone through certain experiences like horse riding or fishing. You probably have an expertise, an expertise that most people don't have. And you just think it's, oh, it's just me. But I've always done horse riding. It's nothing special. But little do you know that most people in the world don't know how to do it. Yeah, the curse of knowledge. Like it's hard to imagine not knowing that thing. Yeah, exactly. So that's the thing I would advise because that thought does run through my mind and I believe it runs through everyone's mind who's in business or who's in YouTube where they think, okay, what's stopping a bunch of people from doing what I'm doing?

26:40But when you understand that you have a competitive advantage and you have a lot of knowledge in this niche or you have a lot of money in your hands or a lot of time on your hands, then you can use that for your advantage. I asked chat GPT to give me some viral video ideas, the side hustle niche, and came up with some pretty good ones. It said the top 10 most profitable side hustles for 2024, passive income side hustles, earn money while you sleep, how I made 500 bucks in a week, flipping thrift store fines. I feel like some of these titles are almost word for word ripped off from blog content titles or podcast titles from side hustle to full time, how I quit my nine to five side hustle mistakes.