I've Made $500K with faceless instagram Carousels using AI

0:00My faceless Instagram carousels have [music] made almost a million dollars over the last few years. I started uploading carousels in 2018 knowing almost nothing, and today I get over a hundred million views a month across my accounts. And the best part is I'm able to monetize them using three different methods that work almost entirely on autopilot. If you follow the blueprint that I share today, whether you're a personal [music] brand, a faceless page owner, or a complete beginner, there's no doubt in my mind that you'll get similar results. So, without further ado, let's get into it. The first step in this process is choosing a niche. And

0:31I want to be clear, this method works in almost every niche on Instagram. Now, some of you might already have an Instagram account, and that's okay. You can apply this method to whatever niche you're already in. But if you're starting from scratch, then you want to choose a niche that works on Instagram. But when it comes to choosing a niche of your own, you basically want to tie something that you're interested in along with something that [music] actually works well on Instagram. I put a list of emerging niches below this video so you can go and pick one yourself. I've made viral carousels for my own accounts in spaces like health,

1:00business, sports, and self-improvement. But I've also used the same tactics to build viral carousels for people like TJ Power and neuroscience, Star Network, and toxic relationships, and tons of other niches. Now, the crazy part is just a few years ago, these kinds of carousels would have taken me days to make, but recently, with the new AI tools and workflow that I'm showing you today, we can make these in a matter of minutes. And again, if you already have an Instagram account with a niche already, just stick with it. The strategy will work regardless of what niche you're in. Step two, download the

1:29softwares you'll need for this process. If you want to make viral carousels, you're going to need these three tools: Canva, Claude, and Higsfield. Canva is where we actually design the carousels. Claude is going to help us write the content and come up with good ideas. And Higsfield is going to be where we generate the images. Now, here's the good news for you. AI image generation

1:47is way cheaper than AI video generation. So, you're going to be able to pump out tons of these without burning through that many credits. Step three. Before we start making carousels, you need to understand why this actually works so well with the Instagram algorithm. And there's three main reasons for this. First off, a few years ago, Instagram saw the traction that Tik Tok was getting and came up with the real. Now, when they first introduced Instagram reels, they made it super easy to get views. And you probably [music] experienced this if you were creating content. Basically, if you posted an Instagram reel, you were almost guaranteed to get millions of views. But

2:20today, that is no longer the case. And that's because there is so much competition on Instagram reels. But the good news for you is that that's created a gap in the market for people uploading carousels. And again, these carousels get almost 100 million views a month for me across Instagram. But why does Instagram's algorithm love carousels so much? Well, there are three triggers on Instagram that are guaranteed to make you go viral if you know how to get them correctly. The first trigger is watch time. And most people think of Instagram reels when they think of watch time, but

2:50trust me, it applies to carousels, too. The reason that Instagram values watch time is because the more time a user spends on their app watching the content, the more ads they can then run to you, meaning the more revenue they're able to make. Now, with reals, it actually shows you the watch time in your insights below the video. But on carousels, it does not yet. So, we have to rely on other triggers. The two triggers that seem to make these carousels go the most viral are shares and saves. Look at this post that I posted last week, which is a major outlier for my page. In total, it got 3

3:21million views and 88,000 likes. But the reason it did so well was because we got 31,000 saves, which is almost 10% of the viewers. When it comes to saves, I've noticed that if you get at least 7% of your viewers saving the post, you're almost guaranteed to go viral. And then for shares on this post, we got 17,000 shares. That means someone sent it to a friend, shared it to their story, or sent it to themselves for later. I've noticed that for shares, if you're able to get more than 4% of your viewers sharing the post, that is almost a

3:49guaranteed trigger to go viral as well. Another reason that carousels are often better than reals is because for someone to watch a reel, they usually need to be able to hear it. So, if they're scrolling at work or [music] at school, they're not going to be able to watch that reel with full intent. But with a carousel, I can sit at school, at work, there's no music, and I'm still able to digest all the content without having to listen to it. So, that's my case for Instagram carousels. Take it or leave it. But now, let's move on to the fun stuff. Step four, coming up with a good

4:18idea. This is the one step that I see most people fail at, and they wonder why they didn't get any views. So, if you don't do this step right, you're probably going to fall flat on your face. But over the last 5 years, I've come up with a viral carousel system that is basically a factory of virality. This is my process. First, I go to Instagram, news, Pinterest, and X. Here, I'm basically going to be searching for outliers or hooks that have performed extremely well within my niche. Then I'm basically going to screenshot this and drag it over to Claude and give it this prompt. Then Claude is going to come up

4:48with viral carousel ideas for me in my niche and it's going to be able to spit those out and I'm going to be able to choose the ones that I think are actually going to do well. And just to be transparent with you, you're not going to pick winners every time when you're first starting out, but you're going to get better at it over time. And since I'm making this video, I might as well do this for myself on one of my own accounts, and I'll show you the results at the end of this video so you can see how it actually performs. Step five is

5:10branding. And this is more important than you think. Before you go in and prompt or design anything, you need to have your fonts, your background color, your colors, your logo, and even a mascot if you're going that route. On Instagram, consistency is everything. So, when someone's scrolling and they see one of your carousels, you want them to automatically think of you or your page before they ever read a word. And unlike a lot of YouTubers on the internet, I'm not one to gatekeep. So, if you're getting value from this video, please subscribe and hit that like button. Color psychology is also very important. For example, this post is

5:41going to attract females, while a post like this is obviously going to attract more men. For example, these brands use the color green in their marketing because it conveys growth, healthiness, and balance. You can use purple to convey luxury, imagination, and royalty. You can use orange to convey creativity, fun, and enthusiasm. Black conveys

5:59luxury, sophistication, and exclusivity. Yellow conveys happiness, and brands like these use red to convey action, energy, and excitement. Brands use blue to convey trust, loyalty, and calmness. You can also use this free tool to come up with a color palette for your brand. The next thing you want to consider is your font. Now, depending on the kind of content you make, you want to have your font do two things. First, it needs to

6:20contrast well against the background. And second, you probably need a header font and then a paragraph font. The header font is meant to capture people's attention, while the paragraph font is meant to convey a lot of information in a small amount of space. For myself, I choose branding depending on the niche that I'm in. So, for this page that's all about healing from toxic

6:39relationships, we chose this branding. Meanwhile, on one of my business pages, we chose this branding. And that takes us to step six, which is one of the fun parts of this process. Prompting and packaging. This is going to be the visual DNA of your carousel, and it's going to determine whether it goes viral

6:54or not. Here's the formula that I use. The first slide almost always has a bold hook with an eye-catching visual image in the background. The body slides are going to have one point per slide and they're going to have a clean layout that are easy to read. And then slide 10 is the CTA and this is where the money is made and I promise I'll show you that in one of the later steps. Now to create the images that you're going to use in these slides, we're going to come over to Higsfield. Then I'm going to click image and you can use any of these image

7:18generators. I personally like using Nano Banana Pro, but GPT image 2 also works extremely well. Then all I'm going to do is describe the image that I want and then I'm going to feed it any references that it might need. So, people, logos, etc. For the one that I'm going to create now, this is for a client of mine, and we use a mascot on his account. So, I'm going to actually enter the mascot and tell it what I want the mascot to be doing. Then, you're going to select aspect ratio, and you have a few options here. You can either choose 1x one, which is a square, although I

7:46wouldn't recommend it. And the reason for that is that I want you to be using as much real estate as possible on your screen. If you have a 1x one slide, it's only going to take up a small amount of the screen. Better options are 3x4 or even 4x5, which they just released recently. Then for image quality, you can go all the way up to 4K, although you don't really need it. It's going to

8:04just cost you a little bit more credits. I usually just put it to one or 2K and it does the job perfectly. Finally, you're going to want to select the batch size. So, if you have a really good prompt, then you can just do one. I like to do two to four just to give me some variations and I can choose the right one. But if you want to save credits, you can just select one. Then, all I'm

8:21going to do is click generate. Great. So, these look awesome. And once you have one that you like, you're just going to download it. Now, this last step is optional. You can design all of these inside Higsfield without any additional steps. But if you want to add just a little bit more customization, I like to drag it over to Canva. Here, I'm

8:37going to upload my image from Higsfield. Then I'm going to select background remover. And now I can customize things a little more than before by adding text or other elements that I want inside my design. So I'm going to go ahead and build out the rest of this carousel using this exact same flow. Back over to Higsfield for the image generation. drag it over to Canva, customize it the way I want, and then I'm going to go ahead and click share, download as a PNG, and just click download here. Now, the crazy part is that's just one style of post inside Higsfield. I can create posts like

9:07these, posts like these, and so many of these viral carousels that you're seeing all over your feed are made inside Higsfield using a simple prompt. The secret to making these is knowing how to prompt it. And so in the description, I'm going to drop a list of prompts that you can use on Higsfield to make these

9:24kinds of posts. Step seven is captions. Now, there is an art to building viral captions on Instagram. Your caption should basically do three things. It should reinforce the hook. It should be stacked with keywords that help Instagram find the audience that you're trying to get in front of. And this is a cheat code. You're basically trying to train Instagram and teach Instagram who

9:44the ideal viewer is for your carousel. And then third is to include a call to action. and I'm going to cover that with the monetization section later in this video. Now, another thing you can do is just upload the slides into Claude and give it this prompt that I made that generates viral captions and it's going to come up with one for [music] you. So, you can just copy that from the description below. Step eight is uploading. And this is also very important. You want to be posting when your audience is online. So, you can just come into your insights and see when your audience is most active. And

10:10then the biggest thing that I've noticed with carousels is using a trending audio. If you look on my accounts, I always use a trending song that kind of matches the vibe of the carousel. A song can literally make or break the way that a viewer perceives a carousel. So, you want to pick something that matches the vibe. For this one that I'm uploading on my client's accounts, I'm going to choose this song cuz it matches the vibe. And I'm just going to go ahead and click upload. And I'm going to be sharing the results with you in about a week to show you how this actually

10:36performs. But first, you're probably wondering about monetization. How do you actually make money from all this? And that brings us to step nine, which is monetization. And this is the part that everyone wants to know. Now, there are typically three ways that you can make money from carousels. You can sell a product. So, that could be a physical product like this, or a digital product like this. For example, I was able to get almost 25,000 users onto an app that

10:59I made using carousel CTAs like this. The second way you can monetize carousels is with brand deals. So, once you have reach on your carousels, brands are going to reach out to you to pay per post. Like for example, this is a carousel brand deal that I ran for a client of mine and we were able to generate a ton of views and clicks for them. The third way you can monetize these is through a service. So maybe your business sells some type of a service. You can market that service using carousels and there are tons of businesses out there using carousels very effectively to get views and

11:29there's a reason that they're posting them. But you're probably saying to yourself, "Okay, great. But once people are interested, does that mean that I have to message them and go back and forth?" OH, HELL [screaming] NO. Instead of wasting time messaging them, you can build out a DM automation that automatically DMs people every time they comment a specific word. And you've probably seen these all over your Instagram feed. The tool that I like to use for this is called Manyhat. And all you're going to do is set up an account,

11:53then click comment to DM automation. You're going to select a keyword, and then you're going to add the link that you want to send people when they comment that word. This is nice because it also adds comments to your carousel, which Instagram's algorithm does care about. So, it's another algorithm trigger inside of your carousel. So, for the carousel that I made on this account, this is the Many Chat CTA that we used and it runs forever. And as you can see, it got a ton of comments for people asking for the link. But we're not done yet. Perhaps the most important step is step 10, which is learning from

12:21the data. Like I said at the beginning of this video, you are probably going to suck the first time that you post a carousel. The first carousels I ever made on Instagram literally looked like this. And I'm not proud of it, but I'm man enough to say it. But over time, you're going to learn from the data. You're going to understand what works, and you're going to start to be able to predict what is actually going to go viral on your page. So, every carousel that you post, I want you to go into insights, and I want you to study the analytic. Did it get at least 4% of the

12:47viewers to share? Did it get at least 7% of the viewers to save? And I was actually saving one of the most important Instagram triggers for this last bit. So, if you're still watching, you're about to get some extra sauce that other people might have missed earlier in this video. One of the most important Instagram triggers to go viral is that new viewers decide to follow you from a piece of content. So, the last question you should ask yourself is, are new viewers deciding to follow me based on this piece of content? And you can usually see it in your insights right here. Look, I want you to become an

13:15expert on carousels so you can get more views and ultimately make more money on Instagram. So, what were the results of the carousel that we posted for my client? Well, we were able to get 2,000 likes, 1,200 saves, and almost 400 shares. that ended up getting 66,000 views. And the best part is the CTA slide at the end brought people to their service. And if we go into the comments, you can see that a bunch of people were actually commenting star on this, meaning they actually went and used their service. And that's the entire blueprint. If you follow this, I can almost guarantee that those are going to

13:46be your results. It goes choosing a niche, using the right tools, understanding the algorithm, coming up with good ideas, choosing the right branding, prompting and packaging with Higsfield and Canva, writing good captions, uploading using the best settings, CTAs that actually monetize, and of course, learning and repeating over and over because that is the game of social media. This is the exact process that I've used to grow multiple pages to millions of followers. And I can't wait to see what you guys do with it. So with that I will see you on the other