How to Successfully Automate a YouTube Channel — 3 Simple Steps from a Team of Professional Video Editors

You might have heard about home automation or email marketing automation. These days, we hear a lot about YouTube automation. But is this really automation? Let’s walk through what it really needs to “automate” your YouTube channel. As a team of professional editors, we have worked on some of these channels. Because we also work with large established creators, we can tell you what it takes to build a successful channel, whether it is automated or not.

First, you need to find the right niche topic. The topic will meet two conditions; interesting to a wide audience and friendly to advertisers. And these two conditions are somewhat contradictory. If something appeals to a wide audience, it instantly means that your audiences are spread out. Then, your channel is not appealing to advertisers who are looking for a targeted audience for the highest return on investment. Also, you will have to do some research about the topic to make a quality video.

This is where it gets interesting. Large established content creators that we work with are really experts in their topics. A fashion YouTuber can talk about this season’s fashion trend for 30 minutes non-stop. A basketball YouTuber delivers a thorough analysis of a player with over 100 clips to back up the analysis. Yes, there are some lifestyle vloggers too but it took them years to build their audience. Hence, you either need to spend hours researching the topic or find an expert on the topic to write a script for you.

Second, you need to find great video editors and thumbnail designers. While our team will be more than willing to help you, here are some tips to find great video editors and thumbnail designers. Ask them to send you the most complex work or most successful YouTube videos they worked on. And make sure to test them with sample projects. Many freelancers send you sample videos/images that are not actually done by them! We even had an incident where someone else took our portfolio and presented it to our client as if he/she has done it.

Working with a team of editors is certainly better than working with a freelancer. You can explore different editing styles in the early stage to see what works best for your channel. It can be even better than a full-time editor because there is little downtime. Once the team gets your style, you can really enhance your productivity. And if the team offers other services such as scripting or clip collection, it will save you so much time.

Third, you need some capital! And this is not sufficiently emphasized by the YouTube automation consultants. Established content creators built their channels over the course of 5–10 years. Although monetization could be achieved relatively soon, the amount of ad revenue will be modest in the beginning. In order for you to stay in the game, you need enough capital. Each video will require $100–200 to produce. You will have to upload at least once a week. If it would take 3 years for the channel to take off, the initial investment would be $15,000–30,000.

While the amount of investment may throw you off, YouTube automation could work beautifully. If you selected an attractive category with high revenue per mile, you can easily recoup the investment in three years. For instance, a finance channel with average views of 50,000 can make $500 per video at $10 Revenue Per Mile (RPM). It means that you can make $40,000 of profit ( = $50,000 ad revenue — $10,000 production cost) with 100 videos. Besides, when each video becomes even slightly profitable, any additional video will increase your profit.When you are starting a business, it is important to choose one that has unlimited upside. And YouTube automation can certainly be the one.

Hopefully, you can choose a topic that you are passionate about. Even if the process can be “automated”, it does not mean that your content should be generic. It has to be an outcome of creativity and expertise. Because it could take a while for the YouTube algorithm to pick up your video, it is better if you choose the topics that you would make videos on regardless of the amount of profit. It requires a team for automation to work. So the ability to collaborate with others will be critical. And the joy of working with others might keep you going even with little profit in the beginning.