5 Steps to Picking a YouTube Niche That Can Make You Rich Using Claude AI

In the next few minutes, I'm gonna be giving you five steps to picking a YouTube niche that can actually make you rich, and I'm gonna be doing this using Cloud AI and a simple way to know if your niche can actually pay you the kind of money you wanna make before you waste a year of your life on it. And this is coming from someone who owns a YouTube channel with over 1.5 million subscribers, who's personally made over $10 million from YouTube, and whose clients have collectively generated over $100 million in results. So I'm not guessing here, and I've watched hundreds of people pick niches, and I can usually tell within about 30 seconds whether they just signed up for a gold mine or a dead end. And by the end of this video, you'll be able to make that call for yourself. So if you appreciate me doing these types of videos, you want me to make more of them in the future, let me know by gently tapping that Like button, and let's jump into it right now. All right, so step one is what I like to call the money filter, and this is the one that's going to make you reconsider your choice to follow your passion. Now, look, do not pick a niche that you hate, right? That is a recipe for quitting in three months. But picking a niche only because you're passionate about it, that is one of the most self-centered, fastest ways to go broke on this platform, okay? Think about the garbage man, right? Do you think that he wakes up passionate about picking up trash? Probably not. But you know what he might be passionate about? Providing for his family, and solving real problems for society, right? Making sure that your street isn't buried in garbage. That is value, and value is what gets paid. There is a reason that the phrase starving artist exists, and there's a reason that you've never heard the phrase starving accountant. The tiny, tiny percentage of people who have made a full-time living purely off of their passion in history, as well as modern times, are the exception, not the rule. So are you going to gamble your future on being the exception? And that is why I always point people to the idea of Ikigai, right? It's a Japanese concept, and the version that I care about is the overlap of four things. What you're good at, what you can actually stand doing for years, what the world needs, and the one that everyone skips, but it's probably the most important one, which is what people will actually pay you for, aka the market demand. So the money filter is very simple here. Before anything else, you ask, is there actually money in this niche? And by money, I mean two things. A high RPM is a really good sign, but also, can you actually sell stuff, right? Are there people actually buying stuff in your niche? Because if you have something that you're passionate about, but you can't get paid for it, just keep it as a hobby. It's amazing to have hobbies. I like playing video games once in a while. It's a great way for me to let off steam, relax, have a really good time. But I know that if I tried to do that for a living, it would be exceptionally difficult because there's probably hundreds of millions, if not billions of other people that would love to play video games for a living. And that creates a supply and demand imbalance. So if you are gonna try to do something like that for a living, you have to be in the top 99.99th percentile. But you know what doesn't have a supply and demand imbalance? Helping people get boring cybersecurity jobs like GRC, Governance, Risk, and Compliance. That's what one of my clients, Nicole, does when she started working with me, she had 85 subscribers and we got her all the way up to an $80,000 a month. Or how about my client Bill, the financial controller who helps accountants making 50 to $100,000 a year become financial controllers who can make up to $200,000 a year. Pretty freaking boring for most people, but he makes an absolute killing doing this. And I love this quote by Naval Ravikant. Do what feels like play to you, but seems like work to other people. And that is basically IKIGAI in a nutshell. So let me show you why this matters so much, right? Picking your niche is like picking which floor of a building you set up your shop on, right? It's the same effort to run your shop, but it's completely different money. Here's the value pyramid, and keep in mind, this is averages. So an example of the bottom of the value pyramid, which is entertainment content, would be Boogie2988. He's got nearly 4 million subscribers and he makes about $3,700 a month. That is less than the average income for an American. Meanwhile, my client Josh has an IT and cybersecurity business, and he uses YouTube to get clients for that business. And we helped him get to $185,000 in a single month. And he did this before he even hit 100,000 subscribers. Another client, Nicole, we helped her get to $80,000 in a single month. Now, Josh and Nicole are not special. They just pick niches that sit higher on that pyramid. And Boogie is stuck on the ground floor. So more subscribers on the wrong floor will never beat fewer subscribers on the right one. Because you're not just trying to get views on YouTube, you're trying to get the right views. Because if you get the right views, you don't even have to get that many views and subscribers to make money, right? If you pick the right niche, you don't have to get that many views and subscribers to make a full-time income. Just look at my client Carla, who recently started with us, and she closed a six-figure deal even though her channel only has 1,500 subscribers and her videos usually get 100 to 200 views each. So Carla is literally making more than Boogie2988, who has 4 million subscribers with 1,500 subscribers. That is the difference that choosing the right niche can make. And the truth is there's only so many eyeballs in the world and there's only so many people in the world and there's only so much time that they can watch content, right? And people are already spending over 10 hours a day on average looking at screens. And then they have a few extra hours where they're awake and then they're sleeping the rest of the time. So we've pretty much maxed out the amount of time that people can be spending watching content. So you can't make more money by getting more views. That is a race to the bottom. There's only one other way to make more money and that is to get the right views and monetize them correctly, aka solve problems for the right audience. Because if you solve their problems, you're gonna be giving them value and either directly or indirectly, you are gonna get that value in return in the form of money. Hey, quick break. I'm gonna be doing a live training this week on how to start a YouTube channel step-by-step for beginners. This is going to be for people who want to start a channel but they don't know what niche to pick, what videos to make or how to actually get started the right way. And it's a completely free training, no strings attached. In fact, I'm giving away even more bonuses at the training. So just as an example, I'm gonna be giving away my Niche Validator. This is gonna be available both for ChatGBT as well as Clod, which is a super valuable piece of software where you can finally figure out what the best niche for you is. So do not miss out on this training. Make sure you sign up for it down in the description and the pinned comment below because you only get it if you join the training. So if you don't join now, you might miss it. But that being said, in the workshop, you'll get to meet me and you'll get to ask me questions directly. So I look forward to seeing you in there. So click the link in the description and the pinned comment below, put it in your calendar. And if for whatever reason you missed out on or you weren't able to attend, make sure you still click that link because we might be having workshops in the future as well and you'll be the first to know about it. So yeah, hope to see you there. And now back to your regularly scheduled content. Okay, so here's exactly how you run the money filter today. I'm gonna be giving you this step-by-step because I see way too many people watch a video like this and then do absolutely nothing with it, right? So if you want the best possible version of this, grab my Clod Skills, right? The link's gonna be in the description and the pinned comment below. Now, this is as good as you're gonna get without actually working one-on-one with an expert because the Clod Skills are designed to literally interview you like as if they were a coach. But if you'd rather just get moving right now, here's a prompt that you can copy straight off the screen. So you can literally just copy and paste this and put it into Clod. And it's not gonna be as good as what we have in our community, but it'll definitely get you pointed in the right direction. It's gonna be a heck of a lot better than you just guessing. And one of the biggest tricks here, and this is something that I never hear anybody talk about, but it's so powerful, is literally just let Clod interview you. Tell it the outcome that you want and then just let it interview you and ask you for the information it needs to give you that outcome. So we copy and pasted this. I'm gonna let it interview me back and forth a little bit. I'm just gonna pretend to be a client. So I'm actually just gonna pretend to be my brother here. And if you didn't know, I basically started my 50-year-old brother on YouTube and got him to a full-time income within one month of starting on YouTube. Literally his very first video blew up. And this is the exact process that we took him through. So here's how to get started step-by-step. One, brain dump every niche idea you have, your skills, your hobbies, your jobs, problems you solved, adversity that you faced in your life, et cetera, et cetera. Run them through Clod with a prompt above or even better yet, the skill which we'll provide below. And it's gonna score each idea for RPM and high ticket potential. And then throw out anything that scores low on money. Passion alone does not pass this filter. Now, by the way, you don't have to do something high ticket, but I just like to go for niches where you can sell high ticket because those are niches where you can be pretty certain that they actually have money. All right, step two is the trifecta filter because a niche having money isn't enough. It also has to pass the trifecta. And the trifecta is three things that every rich niche has. A specific audience, AKA a who, a result that that audience desperately wants, which is typically gonna be a problem that they're gonna try to overcome, and a method that you can actually deliver to them to get there. So I also like to call this a niche hypothesis statement. I help X do Y by Z. Now, the Z isn't as important in this case. The Z is something you can figure out later on. In some cases, you don't even need the Z, but you absolutely need to know who you're helping and what you're helping them overcome because you don't want to be a choice. You want to be the choice for one specific person with one specific problem. Think about it like a doctor. Let's say you get hit with some rare condition and you need brain surgery, right? Do you go to your general practitioner to get that done? Of course not. You are gonna be looking for a world-class specialist who has done that exact surgery at least 300 times. That's the person that you're gonna want to do the surgery for. And the crazy thing here is, is that specialist doesn't need to be famous. He doesn't need 4 million subscribers. He just needs to be the guy for that specific painful problem. So just as an example, if you had some rare disease where you had to get brain surgery, are you gonna choose Dr. Oz, who might be the most famous doctor in the entire world, or Dr. Phil? Or are you gonna choose that specialist that almost nobody knows about, but they've done the surgery 300 times and they're number one in the world? Of course, you're gonna choose the specialist every single time to solve your problem. And it's the same exact thing on YouTube. So a good example of this is my client, Bill, that I mentioned before. So Bill didn't make generic finance videos. He built his entire channel around one razor-specific idea, which is I help accountants become financial controllers. That's it, right? He's talking to accountants who are stuck, watching people in other fields out earn them, and who are in real professional pain, people who will gladly pay to fix it. And in the time that I worked with Bill, he got all the way up to $70,000 in a single month in that one specific niche. And he's not special. He just refused to be vague. So here's how to run the trifecta filter. Same deal. Grab the Claude skill in the description in the pinned comment for the best version, or just copy this prompt on the screen directly into Claude to get started. So once you do that, you're gonna follow these three steps, right? One, write your niche as a sentence. I help who achieve result using method. Now again, the method isn't as important here. That is optional. You can do it later, but it's nice to have. Two is run the prompt above and let Claude interview you, then force you to get more specific at least three times. And then three, if you can't name a specific who and a specific result that they pay for, it fails the filter. So you need to narrow it down. Now, by the way, I have an entire live training that is mostly dedicated to this exact subject, helping you pick the right niche, helping you actually monetize that niche correctly, and a step-by-step guide to actually getting started the right way on YouTube. And that live training is actually happening this week. So click the link in the description and the pinned comment below, and I look forward to seeing you there. Oh, and at the very end, you literally get to interview me and ask me any questions that you have. All right, so step three is the demand filter. And this is where a lot of smart people still mess up. You can find a niche with money in it that passes the trifecta, and it can still be a dead end. Why? Because there's no real demand, right? Nobody's actually searching for it. Nobody's watching. And a niche with no demand isn't a niche, it's a hobby with extra steps. Now, you might be thinking, but Shane, I wanna do something unique, something that nobody else is doing. Please stop, okay? If nobody else is doing it, that is usually a giant red flag that there's no money or no audience there. Not always, but usually. Think about it like fishing. If you go to a lake and you see that there's absolutely nobody else fishing there, does that mean that the lake has a lot of fish? Probably not. But if you go to a lake and there's other people fishing there, is that a bad sign? Also probably not. It's a good sign if other people are fishing. That means there's actually fish there. So other people fishing isn't competition, it's proof that the fish exists. So a perfect example of this is my client Felix and Friends, right? Now, he's in the investing and stock analysis niche, and this is one of the most competitive niches on YouTube. And when we started working with him, he had a smaller channel, and today he is number one in his niche. He's literally the fastest growing channel in his specific niche within finance and investing, and he is doing eight figures a year from a YouTube channel, right? And a huge reason is demand. Because in finance, the news breaks every single day and the demand literally never runs dry. So before you commit to any niche, you need to validate the demand, and Claude makes this stupid easy. So grab the skill in the description in the pinned comment below, or copy this prompt and put it on the screen. So the way you get started here is step one, you find the top three to five channels already winning in your niche. Two, copy their best performing video titles and view counts into Claude using the prompt above, and then let Claude show you proven demand patterns. And if there's no repeatable demand, the niche fails and you need to pick a stock pond. Now, by the way, with this particular part, I really do recommend using the Claude skill, and you also might wanna use either Claude Cowork or Claude Code, because it's gonna be a lot easier for actually scraping stuff and finding data for you. All right, step four is the ceiling filter. So the first three filters ask, can this niche make money? This one asks the bigger question, which is how high can it actually go? Because most people stop at AdSense. They think the YouTube money is ad money. And that's like opening a sandwich shop where you just sell bread, right? AdSense is the floor of your income, it's not the ceiling. And a great niche lets you stack income streams on top of each other. So you start with ad revenue, of course, that's great. You're basically getting paid to market your products and services, which, hey, that's awesome. I've made over $1.5 million from AdSense alone, but then you can add affiliates and sponsorships and then your own products and then high-ticket offers and services on top of it if you want to, right? YouTube is incredible for getting high-ticket clients. But the ceiling of your niche is the tallest stack that it can support. So my client, Sean, is a perfect example of this. Sean went from around $30,000 a month to doing over $500,000 in a single month working with us. And he didn't 16X his view count. He 16Xed his monetization. So he picked a niche with a sky-high ceiling and then he stacked more offers on top of what he was already doing. And that is the difference between a niche that pays your rent and a niche that changes your entire life. So here's how you map your ceiling before you commit. Again, CloudSkills in the description in the pinned comment below, or you can just copy and paste this prompt off of the screen to start. So copy and paste it into Cloud. And then the way you start is one, run the prompt above so that Cloud maps out every income stream that your niche can support. Two, look for at least one high-ticket option at the top of the stack. No high-ticket potential equals low ceiling. And then three, pick the niche with the tallest stack that you'd actually enjoy building. All right, step five is the freedom filter. And this is the one that's gonna take all the pressure off your shoulders because here's the fear that keeps people frozen for years. What if I picked the wrong niche? What if I get bored of it? What if my niche dies? So the last filter is simple, right? Does this niche trap you or does it set you free? Well, if you use the hybrid personal brand method, then you're never gonna be trapped in a niche. And the secret is don't marry a topic. Build the brand around you because when you are the brand, the niche is just your starting line. It's not a prison that you're locked in forever. And if you think pivoting is some kind of failure, let me blow your mind. Almost none of the biggest companies on earth ended up where they started, right? Their original plan is almost never what their eventual plan ended up being that actually made them successful. So I'm not joking here. YouTube literally launched as a dating site, right? The original slogan was tune in and hook up. That's hilarious, right? But nobody used it, so they opened it up to any video. Slack started as a failed video game. Instagram was a cluttered check-in app and Twitter was a podcasting company. And then Shopify was an online snowboard shop. But the point is every single one of them pivoted and the pivot is what made them billions. And it's the same with channels. And a good example of this is my own channel. I started off just making videos about college degrees because I was frustrated with the college system where I went to school for a very long time, went $300,000 in student loan debt to get my doctorate and become a pharmacist just to end up in a job that I hated and was so stressful that it was causing me health problems. And then I realized that a bunch of my friends were having the same exact experience. And so I started making videos about college degrees and telling people what I wish I knew when I was 18 years old and I was thinking about going to college. And then I pivoted the niche of my channel probably about 15 times. And the reason I did that is because I started my channel with the hybrid personal brand method because YouTube might change, the market might change, you might change, right? You're a growing, breathing, evolving human being and you should start a business that can grow and change as you do. So here's how you run the freedom filter. Grab the Claude skills in the description or just go ahead and copy and paste this and put it into Claude. Then run the prompt above so that Claude helps you build a brand around you, not just one topic. Make sure your channel name and positioning leaves room to expand later on. And then three, if a niche locks you into one tiny box forever, reframe it so that you are the brand and the niche is just the entry point. And if you wanna stay with that niche, you can, right? You have the choice to do that. But if you don't, you can easily pivot to something else later on down the line. Because newsflash, the majority of businesses fail, right? If you start a restaurant, for instance, typically you have to take out a loan or you have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to start a restaurant. And if that restaurant doesn't work out, you're screwed. You can't pivot it to something else. But the great thing about YouTube is you can actually just start a personal brand. And if your first idea doesn't work out for a multitude of different reasons, one of them might just be that you just don't like doing it. You can easily then pivot to something else. So why wouldn't you use that advantage? So let's bring it all home. To pick a niche that actually makes you rich, run it through the five filters, the money filter, the trifecta filter, the demand filter, the ceiling filter, and the freedom filter. Survive all five and you don't have a hobby anymore, you have a business. And remember the big picture here. Your niche is just the floor. You, your personal brand, documented on YouTube, that is the ceiling. The niche gets you in the door, but the brand is what makes you rich. Just look at Dave Ramsey. That man has been talking about the same stuff for almost 40 years now. And he is literally a billionaire because of his personal brand. And then use Claude for the strategy and the research and to be an amazing tool to help you out. But the way you wanna think about Claude and AI is that it's kind of like an airplane. Airplanes these days have autopilot, but would you feel safe if you went into an airplane after going to the airport and there was no pilot? Of course not. You wanna pilot there for takeoff, for landing, and just in case something goes wrong while you're in the air. It's the same exact thing with AI. If you use it correctly, it can be an incredible tool and it can help you do 10 times more work, 10 times faster and 10 times better, but it can't do everything on its own. And if you try to make it do everything on its own, it's going to produce AI slop, which is not good for you, it's not good for the audience, and it's not good for YouTube. So YouTube is likely going to ban you if you do that. So don't do that. Now, if you've watched this far, you're clearly serious. So let me tell you about something that we do that's a little bit different. I've got a team and we basically do most of the heavy lifting with you. And in the case of business owners, we actually just do the work for you. So we help you nail the niche, build a channel, and turn it into actual income. So you're not out here guessing for the next three years. Now, this is gonna be for business owners who wanna get clients from YouTube. We have hundreds of examples of successful business owners that we've worked with, but it's also for YouTubers who are getting views, but they're struggling with monetization. Or it's for YouTubers who are crushing it, but they wanna crush it even harder. Or it's for people who are professionals, right? You might have a nine to five job, but you're a very serious professional, right? You have experience, you're an expert at something, you've overcome a lot of problems, and you have value to give to the world, and you want to treat YouTube like a business, right? You wanna treat it seriously like a professional. So if that sounds like you, you can go ahead and schedule a call with us by clicking the link in the description and the pinned comment below. Right now, we're only accepting about three to five people, and we only accept about 18% of the people overall that apply. So only do it if you're very serious about growing and making money on YouTube. If not, that's totally fine. Just enjoy the free content, enjoy the live training. All of it is completely free. With that being said, check out this video right here where we go over exactly how we help the client make a full-time income from their YouTube channel.