If you want to grow a YouTube channel without investing thousands of dollars in expensive equipment and spending countless nights shooting and editing your content (and still worrying about how you look in the camera), we’ve got news for you.
With AI video creation tools, you can churn out high-quality YouTube videos within minutes, not hours or days. You don’t need cameras or professional lighting to shoot videos and don’t even have to show your face. See our list of the best AI video generators and editors for creators.
Imagine how that changes your content creation business.
In this article, we’ll show you how, using Pictory, one of the most robust AI video generators, you can create engaging YouTube videos and grow your channel much faster.
Let’s dive in.
Do AI YouTube Videos Even Work?
Before we talk about Pictory, let’s settle this debate about whether AI videos even work on YouTube.
You might find articles and online discussions saying YouTube doesn’t rank AI videos, demonetizes channels with AI content, and even bans users who publish such videos.
That isn’t true.
But instead of taking our word, let us show you examples of some of the most successful AI-powered faceless YouTube channels making hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“Day In Life” is a growing YouTube Channel that publishes faceless AI-generated videos covering the daily routines of well-known people worldwide. Its most popular video has nearly 4 million views and the one below about Apple CEO, Tim Cook, has close to 2 million views.
Movie Recaps has more than 3 million subscribers and is made up entirely of AI-generated videos. It shares quick movie summaries with AI background voices and gets hundreds of thousands of visitors to every video. Its most popular video has 15 million views.
These are just a couple of examples, but we can share dozens more.
The bottom line? AI videos work fine if you don’t violate YouTube’s copyright or content guidelines.
Types Of AI Content You Can Create With Pictory AI
Now that we’re clear about the potential of AI YouTube videos let’s see what Pictory can do for us.
There are three ways you can create AI videos with Pictory.
Text Script To Video: Give Pictory a text script, and it automatically generates a video from it.
Blog Post To Video: Have a detailed blog post or article? Just give Pictory the URL, and it automatically fetches the content into its text editor and turns it into an AI video.
Video Summaries: Pictory will find the best moments from your long videos and turn them into multiple YouTube Shorts.
Apart from these video types, Pictory also generates auto-captions and video transcripts and allows you to use a wide range of editing options to polish your videos before publishing them to YouTube.
Read our full Pictory review to learn more.
So, how can you use Pictory to grow your YouTube channel with AI videos? Let’s find out.
How To Create AI YouTube Videos With Pictory – Step By Step
Growing a YouTube channel with AI videos requires more than just the right tools. A tool like Pictory makes the whole thing much simpler, but you still have to choose the right video niches, types, and content combinations to attract subscribers and viewers.
Let’s discuss how to grow a YouTube channel with Pictory’s AI content generation features.
Step 1: Find A Profitable Faceless YouTube Channel Niche
Faceless YouTube channels publish videos without showing the creator’s face. Since the public launch of ChatGPT and other AI content-generation tools, the number of faceless YouTube channels has skyrocketed.
But they don’t work in every niche. So, before creating AI videos with Pictory, let’s discuss how to find the right niche for your AI-powered faceless YouTube channel.
Generally, from what we’ve seen over the last year, profitable AI video-based channels work best in niches with one or more of the following qualities.
– Entertaining, lightweight, or informative topics where the viewer doesn’t have to focus too much on the content
– Content with lists, tips, or processes broken into easy-to-understand steps
– Stories
– Visually appealing content where the viewer is more interested in seeing than listening
And since you also want your YouTube channel to make good money from advertising, choose a topic or niche with a high advertising Cost Per Click (CPC) rate. An increased CPC rate means advertisers must pay more for every click on their ads, resulting in a higher payout for your content.
So, what are some of the best niches for AI YouTube videos? Here’s a quick list (we’ll discuss more ideas later in the post).
- Travel guides and tourist destinations
- Money tips, wealth management, and personal finance
- Unusual facts
- Success stories
- Best lists on different topics
- Movie summaries
- Celebrity net worth
You can use tools like TubeBuddy or Keywords Everywhere to find YouTube video ideas with high search volume and CPC rates before starting a YouTube channel.
Step 2: Choose Your AI Video Type
Once you’ve chosen a YouTube niche, you need to figure out the different AI video formats or types for your channel.
The best way to do it is to analyze your most successful competitors. So, search your niche, sort the results by views, and explore what the top channels are doing.
- Are they focusing on Shorts, long-form, or a mix?
- What’s the typical length of their most successful content?
- Do you see any recurring content themes or topics?
- Any specific angles they frequently apply to their videos?
- What’s the video quality like?
- Do they use highlighted captions?
- Any specific effects or filters they’ve used repeatedly?
Answering these questions would help you find the reasons behind your competitor’s success and identify any loopholes in their content. It will also help you list the core topics of your channel that you can expand as it grows.
Step 3: Create A Pictory Account
Now that you know what content to create on your channel, it’s time to use Pictory for video creation.
Setting up a Pictory account is pretty straightforward. Head to its website and sign up using your email address or Google account.
Pictory offers a free 14-day trial, allowing you to test its features without any limits. It asks for your credit card details on sign-up but doesn’t charge anything until the end of your trial period.
Once inside, you’ll see the different ways Pictory lets you create AI videos.
Depending on your YouTube video style, use any of these options to create your content.
Let’s discuss this in more detail.
Step 4: Write Your AI Video Script
Text script to video is the easiest way to generate your first AI video with Pictory.
There are two ways you can do this.
- Write a new script from scratch.
- Import an article to Pictory’s script editor.
Let’s start with the first method.
– Write or Generate a Video Script
Click the Proceed button under “Script to Video” to open Pictory’s text editor.
It’s a conventional text editor where you can write your script from scratch or copy/paste a document.
Let’s say you aren’t a fan of writing long scripts and want a quick solution.
So, instead of writing the script yourself, ask ChatGPT to do it for you.
Open ChatGPT in a separate tab and write a prompt to generate a unique, engaging, conversational video script on your topic.
For example, here’s the prompt I wrote to generate my script. Notice how I told ChatGPT everything about my audience and the script’s tone.
And just like that, ChatGPT gave me a pretty impressive video script.
This isn’t perfect, but it gives us a good starting point.
Now, we’ll edit and expand this script to make it more valuable for our audience and ensure it sounds natural.
Once you’re satisfied with the script, copy it into Pictory’s script editor.
Pictory’s AI voice will read everything from your script. So make sure you remove any numbers before headings or anything that makes your script sound robotic or unnatural.
Also, go to the Screen Settings tab at the top of your screen to enable auto visuals selection so that Pictory chooses relevant visuals from its library for every new scene.
You can choose whether Pictory creates a new scene for every new sentence, line breaks, or both.
That’s one way to create a script for your video.
– Import Script From An Article
The other way is to import your script from a published article. To do that, simply paste your article’s URL in the Article to Video section in your account dashboard and click Proceed.
Pictory will automatically fetch your article from its URL, import the text in its script editor, and break it down into individual scenes for you.
Instead of converting your whole article into a video script, Pictory uses AI to identify the most relevant parts of your content and turn them into individual scenes. It also highlights those parts in the Source article section.
But if you want to add more content from your article to the video script, simply click that part in the Source article section to add it to the scenes list.
From here, the video creation process is the same for both script generation methods.
Step 5: Generate Your AI Video With Pictory
After finalizing your script, you can proceed to video generation by choosing a video template.
Pictory has an extensive template library that offers dozens of video templates for different topics and niches.
Every template is available in different dimensions to fit your end use. Since we’re generating a video for YouTube, 16:9 is the ideal aspect ratio.
Now sit back while Pictory combines your script with its template to generate the storyboard of your AI video.
Depending on your script’s length, Pictory takes anywhere between 2-10 minutes to process your video.
There you go.
Pictory has automatically chosen relevant visuals for each scene of your video. You can view them one by one in the storyboard.
Go over the scene list and remove or combine any scenes, add a title to your video, or change the sequence of scenes.
If you don’t like the visuals of a particular scene, just head over to the Visuals section and use its search filters to find a more relevant visual.
All good? Let’s move to the next step.
Step 6: Choose A Background Soundtrack
Pictory automatically chooses a background soundtrack for your video, depending on its theme. However, you can disable background music or choose a different track from Pictory’s extensive library.
You can use the filters under the search bar to find soundtracks matching your content’s mood and length. Plus, you can adjust its volume so it doesn’t get too loud and make the speech inaudible.
Step 7: Create An AI Voice For Your Video
Let’s move to the second most crucial part of AI video creation: generating an AI voice.
Pictory gives you a long list of male and female AI voices that you can use for different scenes in your video.
You can search for them by accent, age, and purpose (tone). Plus, you can set their volume level and narration speed to ensure they match your visuals.
Alternatively, you can upload a narration in your own voice. Simply record the script in your voice in an MP3 file using a professional mic and upload it to Pictory.
Pictory automatically syncs your audio with the video’s pace to ensure it doesn’t feel out of place.
Compared to other AI video generators, Pictory offers a wide range of AI voices in different styles. Plus, it recently partnered with Eleven Labs to create hyper-realistic voices, making it even better.
Step 8: Edit And Finetune Your AI Video
We’re almost done here.
But before finalizing our video, let’s use different enhancements to make it more engaging.
For example, add transition effects between scenes to instantly make your video more professional.
Next, explore the Elements library to add emojis, stickers, or GIFs matching your content’s mood.
In the Styles section, you can change your caption style or create a custom color combination for your video’s subtitles.
To give your video a branded look, you can upload custom intro and outro scenes and also add a logo to your video.
Collectively, these options help you transform your text script into a professionally designed video you can confidently share on your YouTube channel.
Step 9: Export Your AI YouTube Video
Once you’ve made all the edits and enhancements, click play in the preview section to ensure your videos look and sound exactly how you want.
If everything looks OK, click Download to export the video from Pictory to your desktop in mp4 format.
Pictory processes your video’s audio and video separately and takes 3-5 minutes to complete to get it ready, depending on its size.
After the processing is complete, Pictory gives you three ways to export your content.
- It gives you a public link to the video where anyone can watch it, along with its transcript.
- You can download the audio version of your video.
- Export the transcript in a dedicated file.
- Download the entire video file with audio narration.
You can watch the video we created while writing this article on the link below.
This is a public link, so anyone can watch your video by clicking it. However, viewers cannot delete or edit your videos.
Step 10: Upload Your AI Video On YouTube
You’re finally ready to upload your AI-generated video to your YouTube channel. If you don’t have a channel yet, read our detailed YouTube guide to set it up.
Once your video is online, actively promote it to your audience on different platforms and drive traffic so that YouTube’s algorithms recommend it to similar audiences.
And just in case you’re wondering how to make money from your YouTube content, we have an extensive YouTube monetization guide just for you.
Tips For Creating Amazing YouTube AI Videos
You’ve seen how Pictory can create stunningly realistic AI videos for your YouTube channel. But to make it work in the long run, you must keep the following tips in mind.
AI Video Creation Tip #1: Stay Consistent
If you want to grow your audience and income with AI content, you must consistently publish high-quality content for at least 6-10 months.
Why? Because when you publish more videos, YouTube has a bigger sample size to analyze your content type and find relevant audiences for it.
As more people watch your content, YouTube evaluates their interests and matches your content with the right audiences using its recommendation engine, resulting in faster growth.
AI Video Creation Tip #2: Short Form Content Is King
AI content is still evolving, and despite being more realistic than ever, it still lacks the human touch. This is why longer AI videos often struggle to keep viewers engaged.
So, the best strategy is to use AI videos for YouTube Shorts instead of long-form content.
YouTube Shorts drive higher engagement, are much more likely to go viral, and keep your audience engaged because of their short duration.
When using AI for conventional YouTube videos, try to keep them under 5 minutes unless you’re in a niche like movie or game reviews (inherently engaging)
AI Video Creation Tip #3: Frequently Change Scenes
Talking of movies, you can learn a lot from successful AI-powered faceless YouTube channels publishing movie recaps.
These channels publish long videos, often 10+ minutes, but still drive insane engagement.
Why? Because their videos are visually engaging, tell stories, and have lots of scenes.
So, even when you create an AI video in a dry niche, change scenes (visuals) every few seconds to keep your audience engaged till the end.
AI Video Creation Tip #4: Use Multiple Voice Tones
Pictory allows you to use the same AI voice in different tones. By changing the narrator’s tone after every few scenes, you can make your content dynamic and hold your audience’s attention longer.
AI Video Creation Tip #5: Use Highlighted Captions
Want your viewers to pay attention to every word of your video? Use short, highlighted captions with contrasting colors.
Instead of using long sentences in captions, break them down into 2-3 words per slide so that they change quickly and hold the viewer’s attention.
AI Video Creation Tip #6: Avoid Complex Topics
AI videos are improving. But as we said earlier, they still lack the human touch. This is why they’re still more suited to simple and straightforward content that doesn’t require the viewer to think too hard.
For example, AI videos are perfect for covering a topic like “top 10 richest people in the world”. But using them for teaching SEO, copywriting, programming or any other technical skill won’t work.
So, choose your topics and niches wisely.
5 AI Video Creation Ideas For Faceless YouTube Channels
We talked about AI-powered faceless YouTube channels earlier in the post. Let’s discuss a few AI video creation ideas with examples of successful YouTube channels.
AI YouTube Channel Idea #1: Celebrity Net Worth
Luxury Zone is a faceless YouTube channel with almost 100% AI-generated videos covering the net worth and luxury lifestyle of different celebrities. Despite using the same voice-over for all videos, its content is engaging because of high-quality and relevant visuals and background soundtracks.
Here’s one of its most popular videos.
AI YouTube Channel Idea #2: Tourism
Travel Global is a growing travel and tourism channel that publishes AI-generated videos about the top destinations for tourists in different countries.
You can easily create such videos by using ChatGPT for script generation and Pictory for videos.
AI YouTube Channel Idea #3: Unusual Facts
Frugal Facts is a fast-growing YouTube channel that publishes AI-generated videos about weird facts, scientific discoveries, and other unusual things people find interesting.
AI YouTube Channel Idea #4: Motivational Quotes And Wisdom
This is one of the best niches to start an AI-powered faceless YouTube channel because you can simply copy/paste quotes on a topic (or generate them with ChatGPT) and create a video with Pictory.
Wisdom Of The Ages is a classic example. With more than 200K subscribers and millions of views, it is a fast-growing AI YouTube channel you can easily replicate.
AI YouTube Channel Idea #5: History
There are millions of history enthusiasts worldwide who frequently search YouTube to learn about different past events and personalities.
Solaris, an AI-powered history channel, uses this angle perfectly to drive hundreds of thousands of views every month.
Ready To Grow Your YouTube Channel With Pictory’s AI Videos?
As we’ve shown in this article, Pictory makes it ridiculously simple to create highly engaging and realistic AI videos for your YouTube channel.
With such features, it has bever been easier to become a full-time content creator and grow your YouTube audience.
So, if you haven’t used Pictory yet, what are you waiting for? Click the sign-up button below to start your free trial and turn your simple text script into a high-quality video.
Jeff Cobb, Founder of Learning Revolution
Jeff Cobb is an expert in online education and the business of adult lifelong learning. Over the past 20+ years he has built a thriving career based on that expertise – as an entrepreneur, a consultant, an author, and a speaker. Learning Revolution is a place where Jeff curates tips, insights, and resources to help you build a thriving expertise-based business. Learn more about Jeff Cobb here.
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