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How I Make $35k/Month With Other People's Content (Legally)⏐Ep. #269

January 26, 20260 comments♥ 0
00:00Here'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?
00:24Let's show people exactly how they can do this for themselves.And surely the universe will send me some good stuff in return.So this is going to be very tactical. I'm going to share my screen, show you exactly what I do, show you exactly how you can do it, and I'm going to 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.
01:13We're talking about Facebook.Whether you're five 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 moneyby driving that Facebook traffic off of Facebook.because the real money and content creation is not in relying on other platforms that could shut you downwithout notice, it's in acquiring email addresses. That's the gold here. And Facebook is the bestat this because let me show you, the secret is right here. Facebook Reels is the only short form
01:44platform 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, Facebook you can. I get over 500 emailsubscribers every single day just from this link on all of my Facebook reels. It is magic. It goes tomy Beehive account. So I'm going to show you exactly how all that works at the end as well.The last time you logged on to Facebook, you probably saw some dumb AI slop or some fake news orsomething. That's my point. The fact of the matter is, as humans, we no longer share our daily updateson Facebook with our friends. It's all algorithmically driven. Most of those updates happen onInstagram now. But old habits die hard. That's why over a quarter of the planet is using Facebook
02:33every 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 peopleto 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 someexamples of how much money my content has made over the last 90 days. You're going to look at thefar 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 real or a video on the internet and I add
03:17value to it. This is called fair use and it is protected legally if I am adding enough value orinsight or adding commentary to make the video my own, original to me. In my case, you've probablyseen 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 startedthat might be similar to this, how that business owner might be able to do a better job. This isprotected under fair use doctrine. And if it weren't, then Facebook would shut me down and they wouldban me. Now let me be very clear. I am absolutely not advocating that you go steal other creatorscontent, download it, and repurpose it because there's a lot of people doing that. Sometimes
04:01Facebook catches them. Sometimes they don't. We are not about that. Whoever you are, you have a uniqueinsight in your brain that you can use to add value to this world. It doesn't have to be in the formof a video. It can be a vertical video, a horizontal video, it could be a pitcher, it could be acarousel, 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.
04:31I 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,
05:00150 bucks.This one about Costco, 110 bucks.This one about sober living housing, $102.Sport courts, $80.This was 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
05:29shorts and Snapchat Spotlight and Twitter and threads and LinkedIn and everywhere becauseif 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.It 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.
06:09Other people have tested this. You will get a lot more views on your content. Therefore, you willa lot more money on that content. Now, it's very important that you use an Instagram accountthat is fresh. Start a new account. Every single Instagram account can have four other subaccountsunder it. So just go to your Instagram account, your personal one, create a new one that nobodyknows about and just start searching for things in your niche. Maybe you're a mailman. Start searchingfor stuff about that. Maybe you love crocheting. Start searching for stuff about that. Start swipingreels 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.
06:47You have a very unique insight into something that other people in the world would findinteresting 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.
07:07I'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 seehere what I'm looking at. If you're listening to this, I'll describe it for you. It's a woman talkingabout how she grew her junk removal business to $150,000 in six months. Immediately, what I'm thinkingas I see this is I could do it better than that. I could start this business with less upfrontcost than this. So I'm going to do an overlay, a green screen video of me describingwhat I would do differently here. Now, we don't want to do just do lame reaction style videos.
07:44You've probably seen them where a video is 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'snot cool. Don't do that. You want to add some insights there. Also, I'm going to show you some AItools that will help generate ideas for you in case you're having a hard time coming up with themyourself. 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 theheart, but right on the number that shows you how many likes there are. Boom, right there. That's a
08:19ton for the business niche. You really never get over 12 to 15 million, and those are rare. A viralbusiness video is going to have 500,000 to 5 million typically. So I already know if I'm able to addvalue to this video and it's already proven to be viral, then that's going to give me an easierjob 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 andjust 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'snot profit. That's revenue. So I'm going to hit these three dots and I'm going to bookmark.
09:01market because if I'm not ready to make content about this right now, I want to have it in thebank so I can go make content about it later. Because here's the thing. I get in these creativemoods. Sometimes I'll start swiping looking for inspiration for 15, 20 minutes and I won't really,I just not, I'm just not feeling it. It's not there. Sometimes almost every single video inspiresme and I'm able to add some unique insight to it. But usually if the first video I see ends up beingthat, then the next one will and I'm in that mood. So thankfully, I'm in that mood. So thankfully,I'm in that mood right now.I'm going to use this mic,
09:34which is the DJI mic too.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,
09:45we can each wear one of these.So I would just clip this on my shirt,put this receiver in my iPhone.And then 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.
10:04Okay?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?
10:17I'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.look like that.I tap it.When you tap it,
10:32I 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 going to 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 $150,000 its first year.
10:49Is 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 and
10:59the end. You got to have a good hook and you got to 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 youtens of thousands of dollars. Step one would be find a paying customer. That's not so hard. You couldprobably post your personal Facebook account and find two or three customers right off the bat. What aregoing to charge? Well, you don't know at first. You don't know how long it's going to take and you'regoing 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.
11:33That'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 back.These guys right here, they started a junk removal business at age 17 while still in high school.
11:55Today they're making over a million bucks a year.I interviewed them.After you do your first couple 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.
12:14Most people are never going to want to do it.They're going to want to build the next AI app.Can you row 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.
12:30Now, 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 Cap-Cut.Cap-Cut is a Chinese company, and their permissions are very strict or they're very liberal
12:48for 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.
13:27Whereas 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
13:49reasons 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 slash Chris.That's B-E-E-H-I-I-V dot com slash Chris.I want to edit my foreground videobefore I add it as an overlayover the background video.So I'm going to go to a new video,
14:11add 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 thatand then it'll automatically tie it together.
14:23I'm going to 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.
14:44So I'm doing this very manually right now.So 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, et cetera.
15:09Boom.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 have 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 inmy camera roll, and I add the pictures to the overlay, just like these pictures right here.And then I export.
15:37I 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 postingabout, like, unboxing videos or gaming or something, less value.or to an audience that frankly doesn't have as much money, it's going to be less. So I get paidabout 25 cents per thousand views on my short form videos, which is pretty high. And it's about the
16:05same 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 othercontent on any short form platform, but I really feel like Instagram is the best at like lockingyou into the right algorithm. TikTok probably second. Now, we want to attribute the original artwork orcontent to the original creator. So on Facebook, I'm going to go search for them manually and findthem 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
16:50that 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, GROC, chat GPT,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.there to keep people watching to the end and I don't want it to be any more than 60 seconds. So
17:25make 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 teleprompterapp, you just take a selfie video and you read the words as they scroll across your screen. It'sthat 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 screwup, if you like stumble over your words, just take a new video. It's much faster to start overfrom scratch than to go edit out that pause even. I didn't even know how to edit out pauses forlike my first 50 or 100 videos. So I just kept retaking videos until I got it all right in one take.
18:06And that was before I had any scripts or any teleprompter app. I was just kind of coming up withit 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 youwant 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 contentin your niche in Twitter. In my case, it's business content and I'm just going to start looking.I'm looking for content that would be easily screenshotable and preferably something that isalready viral because if it's viral on Twitter, it'll probably be viral on Facebook.
18:48I'm going to go look at it by 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 making20 grand a month teaching divorce 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 needed to be viral, proven. I need to beable to fit it into one screenshot. Okay. So I really like this one. I'm 27. I deeply regretspending so much 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.
19:28And 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 likesix figures plus. So I'm just going to screenshot it. And then I'm going to go to my Facebookaccount 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.
20:08I might need to follow him first. So it doesn't look like he's very active on Twitter and or onFacebook. 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
20:38have to lie.It just means that the hard stances or the hot takes that you actually have are the things thatyou 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 quitedifficult to make a good living on YouTube. Now, after years of testing and you have a good formula inplace, it becomes formulaic. You can make good money on YouTube, that it takes a lot of time and a lot oftesting. So I'm going to take a hard stance on this and just elaborate on it. So I said,
21:08hard 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 thatworks for you, YouTube can be very profitable, but it is a ton of work to get there. Michael is actuallya friend of mine and I tag him if his settings allowed for it here. So I'm posting about this becauseI have a unique insight into it. I do make money on YouTube and I have a hard stance that I can sayin good conscience is true. Now keep in mind, if you have zero followers on Facebook, you start a brandnew account, this is going to be shown to very few people, a 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,
21:47the more profitable it becomes over time. And you can use that income to create more income in your life,hopefully with ideas that you learn from me and on this channel. So how do you become monetized onFacebook? You just have to wait. You've got to wait for an invite. They don't really publish definedmetrics 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 so it qualifies as fair use and not just stolen content, then you'll get an email fromFacebook that says, hey, apply to our monetization program. And you can see some of my most recent content
22:28was 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 onlygetting 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 Beehiveto make a simple landing page that looks like this, and you're going to link to it in the top of yourcomment 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
23:12$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 Facebookis paying me to take their users off of Facebook. Oh, and by the way, I published an entire fulltutorial 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 theiremail address so you can do whatever you want with it. I mean, just look at how much my newsletterhas grown over the last 12 months. From 96,000 subscribers.to 250,000.
23:48And almost all of that was organic growth.And most of that organic growthall came from that one linkunder every single Facebook post.So you have all the tools you needand then some.If you like this,if you appreciate this,
24:00especially how tactical it was,please say things in the commentsor by liking it or by sharing itor by watching the whole thingor just by being you.Thanks for hanging outon the Kerner office.