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

Chris Koerner (0:00)

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, 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, 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 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 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 algorithmically 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 real 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. 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 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 dollars. Sport Courts, 80 dollars. This is about posting about the donuts that I ate in Alabama, 70 dollars. 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. 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, 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. 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. 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 cost 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 is going on and one person 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'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, 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, 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 light's 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 line's 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. 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 gonna 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 gonna charge? Well, you don't know at first. You don't know how long it's gonna take and you're gonna 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 gonna go to U-Haul. You're gonna rent a 26 footer just like this. It's gonna 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. Today they're making over a million bucks a year. I interviewed them. After you do your first couple jobs, you're gonna understand, you're gonna 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 gonna want to do it. They're gonna 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 CapCut. 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 CapCut 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 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.