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The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner
How I Make $35k/Month With Other People's Content (Legally)⏐Ep. #269
00:24:07
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Here's something that I've never shared publicly before. I make between $10,000 and $35,000 a month of profit on Facebook sharing content that is mostly not my own. I do this legally, ethically, and it only takes me about three hours per week. Why have I never talked about this? Honestly, because I haven't wanted anyone to steal this from me. But then I thought, what the heck, Chris? That's not your brand. Law of abundance, right? Let's show people exactly how they can do this for themselves. And surely the universe will send me some good stuff in return. So. So this is gonna be very tactical. I'm gonna share my screen, show you exactly what I do, show you exactly how you can do it, and I'm gonna show you why this is even an opportunity in the first place. You don't need to be an influencer. You don't need to come up with original ideas. You just need to have a brain and to use it. The reason this is an opportunity is because Facebook has 2.1 billion daily active users, but they don't have enough creators publishing good content that these 2 billion people can actually consume on a daily basis. So the supply and demand is imbalanced. Therefore, they need to pay creators to make good content. Whereas on Instagram, there's plenty of creators and plenty of daily active users, so they don't need to pay creators. So we're not talking about Instagram today. We're talking about Facebook. Whether you're 5 years old or 500 years old, you can make money doing this. I promise you. And if you stick around to the end, I will show you how you can make way, way, way more money by driving that Facebook traffic off of Facebook. Because the real money in content creation is not in relying on other platforms that could shut you down without notice. It's in acquiring email addresses. That's the gold here. And Facebook is the best at this because. Let me show you the secret is right here. Facebook Reels is the only short form platform where you can link to your thing in the top of the comments. You can't on YouTube, you can't on Instagram, you can't on Snapchat, but yes, on Facebook, you can. I get over 500 email subscribers every single day just from this link on all of my Facebook reels. It is magic. It goes to my Beehive account. So I'm gonna show you exactly how all that works at the end as well. The last time you logged onto Facebook, you probably saw some dumb AI slop or some fake News or something. That's my point. The fact of the matter is, as humans, we no longer share our daily updates on Facebook with our friends. It's all algorithm driven. Most of those updates happen on Instagram now. But old habits die hard. That's why over a quarter of the planet is using Facebook every single day. But the people that used to post on Facebook are no longer posting. And Facebook being a trillion dollar company that sells ads, they need eyeballs. They need a reason for people to keep logging in every day. So they pay people like me and you to make sure that happens. But first, let me show you some receipts. This is my meta business suite and I'm just going to show you some examples of how much money my content has made over the last 90 days. You're going to look at the far right column over here. This video about burning bonfires in my backyard made me $2,000. Now that was an original video. I didn't repurpose anyone else's content there. But about 90% of this other content is mostly repurposed. I see a reel or a video on the Internet and I add value to it. This is called fair use and it is protected legally. If I am adding enough value or insight or adding commentary to make the video my own original. To me, in my case, you've probably seen these videos. I see an interesting concept, invention, business, and I give my spin on it. My take, how I would grow that business, how I would make it better, what businesses I've started that might be similar to this, how that business owner might be able to do a better job. This is protected under fair use doctrine. And if it weren't, then Facebook would shut me down and they would ban me. Now let me be very clear. I am absolutely not advocating that you go steal other creators content, download it and repurpose it. Because there's a lot of people doing that. Sometimes Facebook catches them, sometimes they don't. But we are not about that. Whoever you are, you have a unique insight in your brain that you can use to add value to this world. It doesn't have to be in the form of a video. It's. It can be a vertical video, a horizontal video, it could be a picture, it could be a carousel, it could be multiple pictures, it could just be text. Facebook will pay you for all of it. And I don't want you to think, oh, Chris, you have this unfair competitive advantage. You have all these followers. Guess what? I started all of these social accounts less than two years ago from zero. I did not Even use my personal Facebook or Instagram accounts. I literally started all of them from zero. All I had was a small Twitter account and I just started hitting publish on a bunch of stuff. And I saw what resonated and I saw what didn't and I just kept doing more of what did resonate. But it took a long time for me to make my first dollar on Facebook. But after you watch this video, you will be able to skip the line. So if you look at my pieces of content here that are photos, you'll see this one, 150 bucks. This one about Costco, 110 bucks. This one about sober living housing, $102. Sport courts, $80. This is about posting about the donuts that I ate in Alabama, $70. And it adds up to tens of thousands of dollars a month. But the vast, vast majority of this content was found while scrolling Instagram. So I use Instagram for my inspiration and I publish my videos on Instagram and Facebook and YouTube shorts and Snapchat, Spotlight and Twitter and threads and LinkedIn and everywhere. Because if you make content, why not share it everywhere? Now, here are some tactics that you really, really want to remember. Never, ever, ever cross post. Okay, even when you post to Instagram or Facebook, there's going to be a little toggle button that looks just like this, says, do you want to post to Facebook? Do you want to post to Instagram? No, you don't. I promise you, your reach, AKA your potential virality for that piece of content will be significantly diminished. You need to do the harder thing, the more manual thing, and upload it natively to every single platform. Because I promise you, I've tested this. Other people have tested this. You will get a lot more views on your content. Therefore, you will make a lot more money on that content. Now, it's very important that you use an Instagram account that is fresh. Start a new account. Every single Instagram account can have four other sub accounts under it. So just go to your Instagram account, your personal one, create a new one that nobody knows about, and just start searching for things in your niche. You, maybe you're a mailman, start searching for stuff about that. Maybe you love crocheting, start searching for stuff about that. Start swiping reels and engaging with content that you find interesting that you might be able to speak to. I don't care who you are or where you live, you have a very unique insight into something that other people in the world would find interesting. Because there's 8 billion of us and almost all of us are connected by the Internet. So I don't care how weird or funky or niche it is, it's not too niche. There are people that care about it. So I'm going to show you a recording of my screen and show you exactly how I would do this process. Okay, so I'm going to go to Instagram, I'm going to go to the account that I use for my research, for sourcing inspiration, and I'm just going to go to the Reels tab and I'm just going to start looking. Perfect. This is the first one I found. So you can probably see here what I'm looking at. If you're listening to this, I'll describe it for you. It's a woman talking about how she grew her junk removal business to $150,000 in six months. Immediately. What I'm thinking as I see this is I could do it better than that. I could start this business with less upfront costs than this. So I'm going to do an overlay, a green screen video of me describing what I would do differently here. Now, we don't want to do just do lame reaction style videos. You've probably seen them where a video's going on and one person's just going, oh, they're just watching it. That's not protected under fair use. If you see it in your algorithm, it's because it didn't get flagged for some reason. That's not helpful, that's not innovative, that's not cool. Don't do that. You want to add some insights there. Also, I'm going to show you some AI tools that will help generate ideas for you in case you're having a hard time coming up with them yourself. But back to this video. If you want to see how many views an Instagram reel has, you're going to click right on the number of likes. Not on the like button itself, not on the heart, but right on the number that shows you how many likes there are. Boom, right there. That's a ton. For the business niche, you really never get over 12 to 15 million. And those are rare. A viral business video is going to have 500,000 to 5 million, typically. So I already know if I'm able to add value to this video and it's already proven to be viral, then that's going to give me an easier job of going viral because the background video. And I'll show you how to edit these. Exactly. Is already viral. So I just need to not screw it up. So I might watch this one to three times and just see kind of what I come up with. So three jobs a day, five days a week, 150,000 in six months. Buy a dump truck. First of all, this is misleading. The screenshot shows it's 150,000 in profit, but that's not profit, that's revenue. So I'm going to hit these three dots and I'm going to bookmark it. Because if I'm not ready to make content about this right now, I want to have it in the bank so I can go make content about it later. Because here's the thing. I get in these creative moods sometimes. I'll start swiping, looking for inspiration for 15, 20 minutes and I won't really. I, I just not, I'm just not feeling it. It's not there Sometimes. Almost every single video inspires me and I'm able to add some unique insight to it. But usually if the first video I see ends up being that, then the next one will. And I'm in that mood. So thankfully I'm in that mood right now. I'm going to use this mic, which is the DJI Mic 2. This is not sponsored. It's a great mic. This is the receiver. I plug this into the bottom of my iPhone. You can see it like this. And then it comes with two mics. So if I'm interviewing someone, we can each wear one of these. So I would just clip this on my shirt and put this receiver in my iPhone and then I'm. I'm just going to open my front facing camera app. Now if I want to make a script, like have AI watch this video and make a script, I'm going to use this app right here, this teleprompter app. And I can just paste the script right there. Okay. So, but I'm not doing that here. Usually I don't use a script. I'm just kind of going off the dome. So this was not planned. This was not like this is all very real. So front facing camera. Okay? And you know what? I'm actually going to use this video. So I'm going to put my mic in, make sure the lights on. I'm going to clip it right there. I'm going to plug it into my phone, like so looks like that. I tap it. When you tap it, I can see the lines moving. So it's good, the mic's good. And I'm just going to look at myself like this, okay. And I'm just gonna take a look at this freaking guy right here. Video. Look at this freaking guy right here. They started a junk removal business that made 150 grand its first year. Is it hype? Is it real? Is this too hard? Is this not hard enough? Is there too much competition? Let me break it down for you real quick. Every video needs a retention hack. There needs to be a reason for the person to stay until the end. You gotta have a good hook and you gotta have a reason for them to stay until the end. First of all, they said, step one, buy a dump truck. Absolutely not. No. That's going to cost you tens of thousands of dollars. Step one would be find a paying customer. That's not so hard. You could probably post to your personal Facebook account and find two or three customers right off the bat. What are you going to charge? Well, you don't know at first. You don't know how long it's going to take. And you're going to have no bearing on what a full garage full of crap looks like as far as workload is concerned. So start low and work your way up from there. Call it 50 bucks an hour per person. That's about what a mover would charge as well. And at 40 hours a week, that's $100,000 a year. So not bad. Once you have your first paying customer, you're going to go to U Haul. You're going to rent a 26 footer just like this. It's going to cost you about 40 bucks a day plus 75 cents per mile. There is no reason to buy a dump truck right off the bat. These guys right here, they started a junk removal business at age 17 while still in high school. Today they're making over a million bucks a year. I interviewed them. After you do your first couple of jobs, you're going to understand. You're going to know, is this something I even like to do or not? And I wouldn't buy my first truck until I'm at about $20,000 a month in revenue. But the profit margins on this business can range between 10 and 35%. I love it because it's very unsexy, it's sweaty. Most people are never going to want to do it. They're going to want to build the next AI app. Can you grow this with Facebook ads and Google Ads? Absolutely. SEO? Yes. It's all on the table here. Not an S tier business for me, but I'll call it an A tier. Get the full business plan here. So that's exactly what it looks like. Now, how do I edit this? One of two Apps you can use Edits, which is right here. It's by Instagram. It's very good, very user friendly. But their green screen effect is not as good as cap cuts. So I'm going to use Capcut. Capcut is a Chinese company and their permissions are very strict or they're very liberal for them. They keep a lot of your data. So I try to avoid cap cut as much as possible, but because of the fact I'm doing a green screen video, I'm going to use it right now. So I'm starting to run paid ads directly to my newsletter because right now it's where I'm seeing the most potential. Because here's the thing, social platforms don't let you own anything. The algorithm changes and your reach disappears. Email is the only channel where you actually own your audience. And Beehive is built for people who are ready to grow bigger than ever. It's got a built in ad network. Sponsors come to you directly through the platform. You approve, you get paid. You pay no platform fees on paid subscriptions, whereas substack takes 10%. Beehive takes nothing. And now you can sell coaches and coaching directly to your list. You don't need to stitch five tools together. Beehive lets you do everything in one place and you pay zero commission forever. Name another newsletter platform that can do all that. I've been on Beehive for over two years and it is without a doubt one of the biggest reasons that my newsletter is growing like wildfire. So go move your email list over to Beehive now and get 30% off your first three months at beehive.com Chris. That's B E-E-H-I-I V.com Chris I want to edit my foreground video before I add it as an overlay over the background video. So I'm going to go to new video, add this, Boom. Okay, I've got some dead space. I'm going to cut that out. Every millisecond counts. Cut out the dead space. Okay, cut that dead space. Okay, I'm going to delete that and then it'll automatically tie it together and cut this dead space. So this is me talking to you. I don't want this to be in my short, so I'm going to cut this out. Okay, split delete. Now, Capcut does have a pause removal feature where whenever someone is not speaking it will remove those, but it's not very accurate. I usually end up having to fix it. So I'm doing this very manually right now that's it. So then I'm going to export it. Okay, Now I'm going to go new video. I'm going to upload the background video first. Then I'm going to go overlay, add overlay and then add this edited version that I just made. And then I'm going to go here and I'm going to go remove BG, as in remove background, auto removal, etc. Boom. I'm going to remove the volume from the background video because I don't want to hear that. And then I'm going to pinch to shrink it down, put myself in the corner. Let's add some captions. And then if I want to add pictures of the 17 year olds that I interviewed that I reference or the picture of the U haul, I simply go to Google Images and I go to overlay and I put them in my camera roll and I add the pictures to the overlay just like these pictures right here. And then I export, I just hit the export button and I upload to all short form platforms. That's it. Now how much does Facebook pay per view? Well, it depends on your niche. The business or the finance niche will be a little more profitable. But if you're posting about like unboxing videos or gaming or something less valuable or to an audience that frankly doesn't have as much money, it's going to be less. So I get paid about 25 cents per thousand views on my short form videos, which is pretty high. And it's about the same as what I make on YouTube for my short form videos. Now for my long form videos on YouTube I make about 60 times that. I make about $17 net to me per thousand long form views on YouTube. So Reels is probably the best way to monetize on Facebook and you can get inspiration of other content on any short form platform. But I really feel like Instagram is the best at like locking you into the right algorithm. TikTok probably second. Now we want to attribute the original artwork or content to the original creator. So on Facebook I'm going to go search for them manually and find them if they have a profile. Most of the times they do, sometimes they don't. And then I will tag them. Now I don't legally have to do that, but I think it's the right thing to do because it's their content that I'm repurposing. Now if you don't really have any ideas on what you can say about the content, you can use any of the AI tools out there, Claude Gemini, Grok, ChatGPT. But I really feel like when it comes to watching and analyzing videos, Gemini has the best tool out there. So what do you do? You download it, you upload it to Gemini and say, give me some ideas on some value I can add to this video and it'll watch it and it'll give you a whole bullet point full of ideas. And then you can say, make me a script. Give it a good hook. I need a retention hack in there to keep people watching to the end, and I don't want it to be any more than 60 seconds. So make it however many words required to make it about 60 seconds. Then you'll take the transcript, you'll download any number of teleprompter apps, you paste it in there, and then on the teleprompter app, you just take a selfie video and you read the words as they scroll across your screen. It's that simple. And honestly, if you're using a script like that, you really don't have to edit it at all. Just hit record. Don't let there be a pause in the beginning or at the end. And if you screw up, if you, like, stumble over your words, just take a new video. It's much faster to start over from scratch than to go edit out that pause. Even I didn't even know how to edit out pauses for, like, my first 50 or 100 videos. So I just kept retaking videos until I got it all right in one take. And that was before I had any scripts or any teleprompter app. I was just kind of coming up with it off the top of the dome and just spouting it all out at once. And as silly as that sounds, it actually was really good practice for taking better videos in the future. But if you want to repurpose other types of content, like pictures or text, use Twitter for that. Twitter has a great algorithm. So another thing you can do is start searching for content in your niche. And Twitter, in my case, it's business content. And I'm just going to start looking. So I'm looking for content that would be easily screenshottable and preferably something that is already viral, because if it's viral on Twitter, it'll probably be viral on Facebook. I'm going to go look at buying bookmarks because a lot of this stuff is probably viral. And let's see. See, this is a very interesting piece of content. There's a woman making 20 grand a month teaching divorced dads how to communicate with their daughters. I like that. But it's so long that I can't easily screenshot that I would have to be in multiple pictures, which doesn't typically perform very well on Facebook. So I need it to be viral proven. I need to be able to fit it into one screenshot. Okay, so I really like this one. I'm 27. I deeply regret spending so much of my younger years playing games and watching anime. Yada, yada yada. 16 million views. Very viral. I sent this to my son, actually. But it's not my niche, it's not business. And so it won't resonate as well because the Facebook algorithm knows that my stuff is business. People want to consume my content with regards to starting business and growing businesses. And so it's not likely to do well if I go outside of my lane, so to speak. All right, so I think I'm going to roll with this one. We're talking about content anyway. This is actually my friend Michael. We text on a weekly basis. He says it's shockingly easy to make a very nice living creating long form YouTube videos, like Six Figures Plus. So I'm just going to screenshot it and then I'm going to go to my Facebook account and I'm going to go here and I'm just going to post it and I'm going to see if I can tag him. I might need to follow him first so it doesn't look like he's very active on Twitter and or on Facebook. So I can't tag him even if I wanted to. It won't even let me follow him. So sometimes that's the case and you can't attribute it to them. But whatever, we make our best efforts. So if you want something to go viral, you have to take a hard stance. You don't want to say I think or there's really no room for nuance. So if you want to post content honestly and to feel good about yourself, it doesn't mean you have to lie. It just means that the hard stances or the hot takes that you actually have are the things that you should post. And if you have a nuanced take or something, you can still post it. Just don't expect it to do as well. So I do disagree with this post because it's actually quite difficult to make a good living on YouTube now after years of testing, testing, and you have a good formula in place, it becomes formulaic. You can make good money on YouTube, but it takes a lot of time and a lot of testing. So I'm going to take a hard stance on this and just elaborate on it. So I said hard. Disagree. Have you ever heard the phrase he's an overnight success, 10 years in the making? That's what this tweet reminds me of. After months or years of testing and you find the format that works for you, YouTube can be very profitable, but it is a ton of work to get there. Michael is actually a friend of mine and I tag him if his settings allowed for it here. So I'm posting about this because I have a unique insight into it. I do make money on YouTube and I have a hard stance that I can say in good conscience is true. Now, keep in mind, if you have 0 followers on Facebook, you started a brand new account. This is going to be shown to very few people, couple hundred people. It takes time. It's not passive income, it's active income. But the more you do it, the more consistent you are, the more profitable it becomes over time. And you can use that income to create more income in your life, hopefully with ideas that you learned from me and on this channel. So how do you become monetized on Facebook? You just have to wait. You gotta wait for an invite. They don't really publish defined metrics that you have to hit like YouTube does. Their monetization program is honestly quite new. But once your content starts getting picked up by more people and they see that you're consistent, you're not getting flags or strikes on your account, you're tagging people you're adding enough value to so it qualifies as fair use and not just stolen content. Then you'll get an email from Facebook that says, hey, apply to our monetization program. And you can see some of my most recent content was very profitable. It took me five to 10 minutes to make. I paid an editor about $10 to edit it and they made me 500 to $2,000 each. So forget about YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, all that. The money's on Facebook. I'm telling you, it's still new, it's still young, but it's only getting better. So how do you acquire email addresses from these? Well, you're going to use Card C A R R D to make a simple landing page that looks like this. Or you're going to use Beehive to make a simple landing page that looks like this and you're going to link to it in the top of your comment on every single post, every reel. Everything you post to Facebook, you're going to link to it. And then you can use a tool called Sparkloop right here. And Sparkloop will pay you between $0.50 and $5 for every single email. Look at these earnings every single day. This is totally unrelated to my Facebook earnings. This is a bonus. So Facebook is paying me to take their users off of Facebook. Oh, and by the way, I published an entire full tutorial on everything newsletters. You can watch it right here or at the link in the description. Remember, you want to own your audience. It's even cooler to own your audience to have their email address so you can do whatever you want with it. I mean, just look at how much my newsletter has grown over the last 12 months, from 96,000 subscribers to 250,000. And almost all of that was organic growth. And most of that organic growth all came from that one link under every single Facebook post. So you have all the tools you need and then some. If you like this, if you appreciate this, especially how tactical it was, please say things in the comments or by liking it, or by sharing it, or by watching the whole thing, or just by being you. Thanks for hanging out on the Kerner office.