Have you ever wondered how accounts on Tiktok, Instagram, and Facebook make money without ever showing the account owner’s face?
You might have even bought a product (or two!) that you saw advertised as you were scrolling through your feed, not realizing that your purchase gave the post creator a commission.
If you’re reading this article on how to make money with faceless social posts, you clearly want a piece of the multi-billion dollar pie.
Without further ado, let’s dive in!
What is a faceless social account?
A faceless social account has posts with products being modelled, slideshows of product reviews, voiceovers on top of other videos, and a ton of other content dedicated toward their audience, all without showing the account owner’s face.
The goal of a faceless social account is to build an audience of people all interested in one category (also called a “niche”) such as pets or women’s beauty and to monetize that audience through various methods (more on this below).
Even better, you can also use AI avatars with an AI-generated script to quickly get your content created.
Why should you try to make money with faceless social accounts?
If you’re looking for a new side hustle to test out, you can make a ton of money with faceless social accounts.
This is one of my favorite side hustles for a few reasons:
- There are endless amounts of niches such as men’s health and outdoors
- There are endless amounts of sub-niches such as workouts for men (within the men’s health niche) and hiking enthusiasts (within the outdoors niche)
- Within each niche and sub-niche, there are thousands or even millions of people with those interests, ready to buy products for their wants and needs
- You can setup a bunch of accounts for each sub-niche, with each account running on auto-pilot once the posts have been created
- You only need to spend 15-20 minutes to create posts for each account
- All it takes is one post to make your whole account go viral, leading to commissions from your other posts
- You don’t need to have any product shipped to your house
- You don’t need to make any videos or social media posts (unless you want to)
I could go on but I think you get the idea as to why this is one of the most lucrative and easiest side hustles out there.
Looking for another of my favorite side hustles? Check out my guide for making thousands of dollars with social casino login bonuses!
Now, let’s dive into the full strategy for making money with faceless social accounts!
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How do you make money with faceless social accounts?
Alright, this is my full strategy to making money with faceless social accounts.
It may seem like a lot to manage at first, but once you get into the swing of things, you’ll be creating and posting content and making money in no time at all!
1. Setup your social accounts
Setting up your social account is one of the most important parts of this side hustle.
First, sign up for an account on either TikTok or Instagram as these platforms are the best to quickly gather engagement and they have their own built-in shops to help drive purchases, which give you commissions.
This can either just be your “research” account or the actual account you want to grow and monetize. I prefer to keep these accounts separate so you could do the same with one research account and infinite monetization accounts, one for each sub-niche.
For the research account, you should like at least the following hashtags so the algorithm will start to show you posts with new products and so you can potentially use the same products in your posts (more on this in the research phase below):
- tiktokmademebuyit
- instagrammademebuyit
- amazonfinds
- tiktokshop
- instagramshop
It also doesn’t really matter how the bio section looks for your research account since you’re only using this for research.
For the account you’re trying to monetize, I would recommend setting up your username with something that’s descriptive of your niche to help people find your account and so they can see exactly what sub-niche the account is dedicated towards.
For example, if you’re setting up a faceless social account in the women’s beauty niche, your username (and display name) could be “beautywithbelle” and you could have the following lines in your bio:
- Women’s Beauty Tips
- Health/Beauty
- Sharing my women’s beauty tips with the world
- Get my favorite <product> below
- <link to product>
Example bio:
2. Pick a monetization strategy
After you setup your account, you want to think about your monetization strategy, or how you want to make money from your faceless social media account.
I’ve included the four main strategies that I’ve seen and used below but don’t feel like you have to stick to them or even just pick one – feel free to mix and match and to find other strategies that other accounts are doing! Let us know in the comments if you find another strategy that’s working and we’ll add it here!
Monetization strategies:
- Post user generated content for brands in exchange for cheaper products or a portion of the revenue generated from your posts
- Affiliate marketing using TikTok Shop, Amazon Affiliate links, Instagram Shop (with your own products in your shop), or other affiliate programs
- Using ads from the TikTok Creativity Program, Amazon Associates program, or YouTube Shorts
- Using your shop from Shopify, Etsy, Gumroad, etc. with your own products
If you’re stuck on which monetization strategy to use, I’ve included a pros and cons table below so you can quickly see which one will best fit your skills and the resources you have available!
Remember, you don’t have to select just one but it does help if you start with one and then branch into another one once you start to see success.
Monetization strategies pros and cons (scroll to the right if you’re on mobile):
| Strategy | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| Commissions | Easy to scale, most programs are free and don’t require sales | Harder to break into sub-niches and make money if you’re new to this side hustle |
| Ad Revenue | Easy to scale, easy to include ads in your posts | Ad networks have more strict requirements and it’s harder to continue to meet those requirements |
| Your Own Store | Easy to scale, easy to setup with shops built into social networks | Somewhat difficult to create and build product listings, some products are already too saturated |
| Making UGC For Brands | Easy to find brands, easy to create content | Harder to scale as brands usually have a set budget and you need to work harder to find quality brands |
In the next section, we’ll cover researching products that you can use in your posts and for your monetization strategy. Let’s jump over to it!
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3. Research products to use in your faceless social media account posts
While you were setting up your research account, you should have liked hashtags such as “tiktokmademebuyit” and “amazonfinds”.
Within about 30 minutes, your explore page or posts feed will show you a ton of product videos.
Start looking through these posts to find the hashtags they’re using that are related to shopping so you can also like those hashtags. You can follow those post creators as well.
Once you have your feed showing mainly product videos, note down the following items in a spreadsheet for the posts with the highest engagement (likes and comments):
- What hooks (the items you see at the very start of the video) do you see? Note things like people and what they’re wearing, sounds, objects in the scene, and text and its effects
- The link to the post
- The caption of the post
- The hashtags in the post
- The emojis being used
Make the above notes for 25-30 videos so you have a good amount of data in your spreadsheet. You can do more if you want, but this will give you a great start to our research.
If you already have an idea of what niche and sub-niche you want to target, you can only do this exercise for posts with content for those niches. Otherwise, I’ll cover choosing your sub-niche in the next section!
At this point, you should start to notice trends in the posts such as the same text effects being used and clothing being worn by the actors. Note these trends in another part of your spreadsheet.
There must be an easier way…
Don’t worry, there is! If you want to use a data-driven approach to finding products and posts that have proven sales and engagement, I would highly recommend checking out Kalodata. It will also help you come up with even more faceless social media account ideas!
When you sign up for the free 10 day trial (no payment card required), you can search for a niche (sub-niches not available on the trial) to find products that have a history of sales along with the most viral videos that you can then use in your posts (more on this below where I cover creating posts).
For example, if you do a category search for Pet Supplies, you’ll see a list of items that looks similar to this, which I’ve sorted by Revenue:
Looking at the fourth item in the list, this pet fur vacuum system has an average unit price of $47.13 USD with a 5% commission rate.
That means you get about $2.35 for each item you sell. It doesn’t seem like a lot but just one of your posts can sell potentially hundreds of units. Then, if you compound this effect by your other posts, you’re looking at a gold mine of posts, all working to deliver you commissions 24/7.
And that’s just for one account. Imagine if you get that account running smoothly and you’ve refined your process, then you setup another account, and another, until you have a snowball of commissions!
For another Kalodata example, check out this category filter for Women’s Beauty Products, with the Revenue sorted by highest first.
Taking the second item in the list, the average unit price is $59.99 with a commission rate of 20%, meaning you get about $12 from every sale your post generates.
Not bad once you compound that across multiple posts, products, and accounts!
The great part is that the above strategy also works if you have your own products or you’re creating UGC (User Generated Content) for a brand. Just find more generic videos in the same sub-niche, then talk about your product and include it in your video!
4. Pick a product and find materials
Now that you’ve gathered data from your research, either through Kalodata or browsing products on your social account, it’s time to pick a product and find materials for your social posts!
You want to pick a product that has proven sales and engagement with other creator’s posts. Having a product with these two factors will give you a huge leg up when you start promoting that product too.
Since your goal should be to create your posts as quickly as possible, you should choose a product that has enough supporting material to be able to use in your videos.
Kalodata will give you the highest performing videos, but if you don’t want to use those videos or can’t budget for Kalodata yet, you can still find videos on TikTok or Instagram that have the product or related items.
For example, if you decide to go with the pet fur vacuum product in the previous section, you can use the videos provided in Kalodata as well as any related pet videos that show things like pets shedding fur and their owners getting frustrated.
When you have five or more videos, you can download them using one of the following free services:
When you get more familiar with the process for making money with faceless social accounts, I would recommend making your own videos showcasing products and various scenes.
For now though, once you have the videos, let’s move to creating your script!
5. Create your script
If you’re using MakeUGC to create your AI avatar video as we’ll dive into in the next section, you don’t need to create a script separately since MakeUGC will do that for you.
However, if you want more control of the script generation or you find another AI avatar service that you want to use, you’ll need to create a script for the AI avatar.
You can use a free ChatGPT account where you request at least the following items for your script:
- The product page link of your chosen product
- Customer reviews
- Ad and video scripts
- FOMO and urgency
- Winning hooks
All of these combined into one video should follow the Attention Interest Desire Action (AIDA) marketing model to help keep people watching and engaging with your videos.
This will help the algorithm show your videos to more people, which should lead to more sales as well!
6. Create your AI avatar
The biggest part of making money with a faceless social media account is to have an AI avatar reading out your script while the videos you gather in the previous sections play in the background. Hence why it’s called a “faceless” social media account – you never have to show your face!
I would recommend using MakeUGC to create your AI avatar but Captions is another great service as well.
When you sign up for the service, you should create a new video and then either paste in the script from the last section or write a prompt for the service to generate you a script.
You should also select an avatar that aligns with your niche and the videos from your research. If you created a faceless social account for women’s beauty, you would want to select an avatar that is a woman and you can even go deeper into ethnicity and age if you like.
Once you have your AI avatar video, it’s time to combine it and the other videos and materials that you gathered previously!
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7. Edit your materials to create your final video
This is my favorite part of the process because at the end of this section, you’ll have a polished video that’s ready to post on your faceless social account!
In your final edited video, you want to make sure you have at least the following pieces:
- Your cut-out AI avatar reading your script with the material videos playing in the background
- The sound removed from the videos playing in the background
- Captions with your script, including emojis
- Sound effects (especially at the start of your video)
I would recommend watching this YouTube video which goes through the full editing process. If you don’t like that walkthrough video, there are tons of other similar videos on editing your AI avatar videos as well!
8. Post your content
With your content created, you can now post it to your faceless social account!
While it’s unlikely that you’ll go viral and hit millions of views overnight, all it takes is one post to drive thousands of dollars in sales, which will then lead to more exposure from other brands and accounts.
Repeat the previous steps to create and post your content and remember to only post content that fits the sub-niche for your account.
Next, I’ll go over ways to automate your accounts and to continue to build this side hustle into a business!
9. Next steps to building your faceless social media account empire
In your first faceless social account, you can continue to post and build your audience and relationships with brands, marketplaces, and more. The possibilities are endless!
Once you have your process from researching to posting mostly automated, you can pay a Virtual Assistant (VA) to manage part or all of the process for you.
There are also a bunch of great automated social media posting tools like Buffer and SocialBee. Just upload your posts, set a time and date, the post caption, and hashtags, then the posts will be sent to your accounts!
This will free you to start another faceless social account in a different sub-niche, build it out, and get to the stage where you pay a VA to manage it for you. Rinse and repeat and enjoy those cash-outs from the monetization methods you’ve chosen!
Once you start seeing decent sales coming in (over $5k USD in total or so), I would recommend setting up a corporation with its own bank account through your state or local jurisdiction. This will help you protect your assets legally but will also allow you to take advantage of things like Solo 401(k) accounts and business tax deductions.
Conclusion
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, making money with faceless social media accounts is a great way to develop income streams that are semi to fully passive.
Once you decide to branch out to other side hustles, I would recommend checking out our full (and still growing!) list of over 200 side hustles. Even if you don’t find one you want to pursue in there, they might give you inspiration to develop your own side hustle!
Lastly, if you have any thoughts, comments, tips, or tricks, let me know in the comments below!