REVEALED: How She Makes $10K Per Month With Excel | How To Make Money Online

I was building a dashboard in Google Sheets for a client and went to YouTube to see how complicated it was. That search led me straight to a creator who had turned 20 years of Excel knowledge into a business pulling in roughly $10,000 per month. She was not talking about how to make money online. She was not selling a course on dropshipping or crypto. She was just talking about Excel. A topic most people write off as boring. A topic that turned out to have 450,000 email subscribers and millions of dollars in lifetime course revenue sitting behind it.

That discovery changed how I think about online income. In this post I am going to walk you through the exact business model she built, the math behind the revenue, the tools she used, a parallel TikTok path for shorter content, and the big idea that the skill you already have at work right now could be your ticket. This is not theory. These are real numbers from a real channel you can go look up today.

What You’ll Walk Out With

The three-step funnel the Excel creator used to turn free YouTube videos into a $6.2 million revenue opportunity
The exact math: optin rates, conversion rates, and price points broken down so you can run the same numbers for your skill
Two free tools for finding hundreds of content ideas around any boring topic
How the YouTube Partner Program adds a second revenue layer on top of email and courses
A TikTok shortcut for creators who do not want to shoot 10-minute videos
Why saturation is not actually the problem you think it is
How to apply this same system to whatever skill you already have, using finder.platformproof.com to identify the right starting point

Meet the Excel Creator Making $10K Per Month

The channel is called My Online Trading Hub. At the time I found it, she had 290 videos and 566,000 subscribers. She claims to be a solo creator, though she probably has a small team helping her at this scale. The one thing that stands out about her story is that she has 20 years of hands-on Excel experience. She did not go out and learn Excel to start a YouTube channel. She spent two decades working with it and then decided to put that knowledge on the internet.

Every single video on her channel is about Excel. Conditional formatting. Dashboards. Formulas. Power BI integrations. There is no pivot to lifestyle content, no random vlogs, no side trips into motivation. She picked a lane and stayed in it for 290 uploads. That discipline is a big part of why the business works.

Step 1: Create Content Around the Questions People Are Already Asking

The first move in her system is simple: find out what people are searching for related to your skill, then make videos answering those questions. She did not have to guess what Excel users needed help with. People go to YouTube every single day searching things like “how to create a dashboard in Excel,” “Excel conditional formatting,” and “how to write Roman numerals in Excel.” Each one of those searches is a potential video.

Two free tools that make this research fast are answerthepublic.com and the Ahrefs free keyword research tool. You type in your topic, and both tools hand you a list of questions real people are typing into search engines. When I searched “Excel” in the Ahrefs free tool, it returned dozens of specific queries. If you ever run out of ideas, go to YouTube, type “how to [your topic],” and start going through each letter of the alphabet. How to A in Excel, how to B in Excel. Alston showed in the video that you can go through the whole alphabet and come away with more video ideas than you could produce in a year.

There are new people getting started with Excel every single day. They hit a wall, they get frustrated, and they go to the internet. If you have solved that frustration before, you can make a video about it. That is the entire content strategy.

Step 2: Get Them Off YouTube and Onto Your Email List

Creating content is only step one. The second piece of the system is moving those viewers from YouTube onto a list you own. YouTube can change its algorithm any time. But an email list belongs to you. The Excel creator built hers to 450,000 subscribers by offering something free and useful in every video description.

Her lead magnet was a download called “100 Excel Tips and Tricks.” When someone clicked the link in her description, it took them to a landing page where they entered their name and email to get the free download. She also had a pop-up on her website offering the same thing for anyone who tried to leave. The result: 450,000 people who raised their hand and said they want more Excel help.

Think about what that opt-in rate implies. If she has 450,000 people on her list and the average opt-in rate for a landing page like this is around 40 to 50 percent, she has probably had somewhere close to a million unique visitors come through that page. One million people who wanted to learn Excel and ended up in her world.

People ask me all the time how to add people to their email list. The answer is always the same: give something away for free that is genuinely useful to the specific audience you are trying to reach. A PDF, a template, a checklist. Something they would have paid for. Make it so good they feel like they got away with something.

Step 3: Sell Courses to the People Who Want More

Once she has 450,000 people on her list who already know they want to get better at Excel, she can email them about her courses. She is not guessing what they want. They told her by downloading the Excel tips document. Her course lineup includes an Excel Formulas course at $69 and higher-tier courses at $138, plus Power BI courses and others. These are not luxury prices. They are accessible enough that someone who uses Excel for work does not think twice about pulling out a card.

The back-end email sequence is where the real money sits. She sends her list back to her sales pages, and a percentage of those 450,000 people buy. That is the system in full: content attracts searchers, a free offer pulls them onto the list, and emails sell them the course that solves the bigger problem.

The Math Behind the Revenue

Let me walk through the numbers the way Alston did in the video, because this is where most people’s jaws drop.

Start with the email list: 450,000 subscribers. Assume a 20 percent purchase rate over the lifetime of those subscribers. That gives you 90,000 people who buy something. Multiply 90,000 buyers by the $69 course price and you get $6.2 million in revenue. From Excel. From a topic people in comment sections call boring and saturated.

Now compare that to what happens if you skip email marketing. Say you have a million visitors but no email list. You would be relying on someone seeing your content, finding your sales page on their own, and buying on that first visit. Using the same math, 20 percent of a million is 200,000 potential page visitors. Then maybe 5 to 10 percent of those visitors buy. That is still real money, but it is a fraction of what you get when you own the list. Without email, Alston estimated you might be leaving 85 percent of your opportunities on the table.

The numbers also compound over time. She built this business across multiple years, not overnight. The 450,000 subscribers did not appear after her first ten videos. They accumulated as she kept publishing, kept giving away value, and kept showing up in Excel search results. The math looks dramatic when you see it all at once, but it was built one video and one opt-in at a time.

The YouTube Partner Program: A Second Revenue Layer

On top of the email and course revenue, she is also monetized through the YouTube Partner Program. Every video she posts runs pre-roll ads, mid-roll ads, and end-screen ads placed by YouTube. When someone watches those ads or clicks on them, she gets a cut.

According to Social Blade, which Alston acknowledged often underestimates creator earnings, she is making approximately $27,000 per year just from YouTube ad revenue. That number is almost certainly higher in reality because the Excel audience skews professional, and advertisers pay more per click to reach people who work in offices and use spreadsheets. The YouTube CPM (cost per thousand views) for a professional skill niche like Excel tends to run higher than for general entertainment content.

This is a passive income layer that requires no extra work. She makes the video once. YouTube runs ads on it for years. The ad checks keep coming without her doing anything additional.

Website Display Ads: A Third Revenue Stream

When you land on her website, you will also see display ads running in the sidebar and between content sections. These come from ad networks that pay her based on page views. It is not the biggest slice of her revenue pie, but it is another layer that stacks on top of everything else. Someone who comes to her site to download the free Excel tips document also generates an ad impression. The same visitor who was already going to land on her list also contributes a tiny amount to ad revenue without any extra action on her part.

The point is that each piece of the business model supports and amplifies the others. Content drives traffic. Traffic feeds the email list. The email list sells courses. The traffic also generates YouTube ad revenue. The website traffic generates display ad revenue. None of these streams required a separate audience. They all run on the same pool of people who wanted to learn Excel.

Not sure which skill you should be turning into content right now?

Answer a few quick questions at finder.platformproof.com and get a clear starting point matched to what you already know how to do.

The TikTok Path: Shorter Videos, Same Funnel

If 10-minute YouTube tutorials feel like too big a commitment to start with, TikTok offers the same audience with shorter content requirements. Alston searched Excel on TikTok during the video and the top result had 1.4 million views. People are absolutely watching Excel tips on short-form video platforms.

He also found a creator called excel.with_grant who has 887,000 TikTok followers. Click his link in bio and it goes straight to a landing page built on ConvertKit, where he is collecting email addresses. The funnel is identical to what the YouTube creator built. The only difference is the content format: one-minute clips instead of ten-minute tutorials. The back-end is the same email list, the same course or affiliate offer, the same ability to sell to people you already know want more Excel help.

ConvertKit has a free plan that lets you start collecting emails and sending broadcasts without paying anything until you grow past a certain threshold. Grant is using a free landing page builder inside ConvertKit. That means his entire front-end setup cost him nothing but time.

Why Boring Skills Are a Bigger Opportunity Than Trendy Topics

Here is the argument Alston made in the video, and it is worth sitting with for a minute. There is a persistent belief that the only way to make money online is to teach people how to make money online. The implication is that normal skills, practical skills, the things you learned on the job over years of actual work, are somehow less valuable or less monetizable than flashy business content.

The Excel creator is direct proof that this belief is wrong. She spent 20 years becoming genuinely expert at Excel. She did not pivot to drop shipping or start a financial newsletter. She just documented what she already knew in video form. And because Excel is a tool that millions of office workers, students, analysts, and business owners use every single day, there is an inexhaustible supply of people searching for help with it. New people get hired and have to learn Excel every month. Existing users hit a formula they have never seen before. Someone gets tasked with building a dashboard and does not know where to start.

Every one of those moments is a search. And every search is a potential viewer. The boring skill you have been doing for years is not a liability. It is a content library that almost nobody else can replicate as well as you can.

How to Apply This System Step by Step

Here is the process broken down into a repeatable order you can follow regardless of what your skill is:

Identify your skill. What do you know how to do that other people struggle with? It does not have to be exotic. Excel, QuickBooks, Google Sheets, Canva, Notion, project management, bookkeeping, video editing. Write it down.
Research the questions. Go to answerthepublic.com or the Ahrefs free keyword tool and type in your skill. Get a list of the specific questions people are searching for. Pick the ones you can answer confidently.
Create content. Make a video, write a post, or record a short clip that answers one question completely. Publish it on YouTube, TikTok, or both.
Build a lead magnet. Create one free resource that is useful to anyone who watches your content. A template, a checklist, a cheat sheet. Something they would pay for if they had to.
Set up a landing page. Use ConvertKit, Beehiiv, or another email tool to create a simple page where visitors enter their name and email to get the free resource. Put the link in every piece of content you publish.
Grow your list. Every new video, short, or post should point people to that landing page. Over time the list grows. Each subscriber is someone who already told you they want more help with your topic.
Create or find a product to sell. Once your list has a few hundred people, you have enough of an audience to validate a paid product. A $69 course, a $97 template pack, a $49/month coaching group. Send an email to your list about it and watch what happens.
Repeat. Keep publishing content. Keep sending people to the landing page. Keep emailing your list. The compounding effect is real, but it takes consistent output over time.

Honest Drawbacks to Know Before You Start

This model works, but it is worth being straight about what is hard. First, 290 videos is not a weekend project. The Excel creator built her channel over years of consistent publishing. If you start today expecting results in 30 days, you will be disappointed. The math looks incredible when the list is at 450,000. It is much less exciting when it is at 47.

Second, the income is not immediate. YouTube ad revenue only kicks in after you hit 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours. Course sales require a list large enough to generate conversions. Most creators are 6 to 18 months into consistent posting before they see meaningful income. That is not a reason to avoid starting. It is a reason to start now rather than later.

Third, the saturation objection is real but overstated. Yes, there are other Excel channels. Yes, there are other people teaching the same formulas. But the Excel creator at My Online Trading Hub built 566,000 subscribers anyway. New learners arrive constantly. And if YouTube long-form feels crowded, TikTok short-form is still wide open for most skill niches. Find the angle that suits your style and commit to it.

Find Your X

The Excel creator knew Excel was her X. Grant on TikTok knew Excel was his X. The hardest part for most people is not the funnel or the tools or the content format. It is figuring out what boring, practical, underestimated skill they already have that could anchor a real online business. If you are not sure what yours is, that is exactly what finder.platformproof.com is built to help you figure out. Answer a few questions about what you know and what you do at work and it will point you toward a starting place.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need 20 years of experience before I can teach something online?

No. The Excel creator’s 20 years made her extremely deep in her subject, but you do not need that level to start. You only need to know more than the person asking the question. A beginner who just learned a skill can teach other beginners. As you grow, your content gets more advanced alongside your audience.

What if my skill is not Excel or a software tool?

The same model applies to almost any teachable skill. Bookkeeping, cooking techniques, sewing patterns, project management, home repair, customer service training, public speaking. If people struggle with it and search for help with it, there is an audience. The key is that the skill must produce a repeatable result that you can demonstrate on camera or explain clearly in writing.

Is TikTok or YouTube better for starting a skill-based content business?

Both work. YouTube tends to have longer-form content with higher intent viewers who are more likely to opt into an email list. TikTok gets faster initial growth and the short format is easier to produce at volume. Many creators start on TikTok for reach and use YouTube for depth. If you can only do one, pick the platform where you feel comfortable watching and creating the kind of content you would make.

How do I pick a good lead magnet?

The best lead magnets solve a specific, immediate problem for your audience. The Excel creator offered 100 Excel Tips and Tricks, which is immediately useful to anyone who works with spreadsheets. Think about the thing your audience would bookmark and come back to, not the thing they would download and ignore. Templates, cheat sheets, and step-by-step checklists tend to outperform general ebooks.

What email tool should I use when starting out?

Grant on TikTok uses ConvertKit, which has a free plan for getting started. Beehiiv is another strong option with a free tier. Both let you build a landing page, collect subscribers, and send email broadcasts without paying anything until your list grows. Start with whatever you will actually use rather than spending time comparing every option.

How long does it take to get to 450,000 email subscribers?

The Excel creator built her list over years of consistent video production and promotion. There is no shortcut to that number. What you can control is the rate: the more useful your content, the stronger your lead magnet, and the more consistently you publish, the faster your list grows. Alston’s point in the video is not to chase 450,000 from day one. It is to understand the math so you know why building the list is worth the work.

What price point should I charge for my first course?

The Excel creator’s courses sit between $69 and $138. That range is accessible enough that someone who uses the skill at work does not overthink the purchase but high enough that you do not need enormous volume to generate meaningful income. For a first course, starting in the $47 to $97 range is a common and reasonable choice. You can raise prices later once you have testimonials and reviews.

What if someone says my topic is too saturated?

Alston addressed this directly in the video. Yes, there are other Excel channels. There are also 566,000 subscribers on just one of them. Saturation is a signal that an audience exists, not that the opportunity is gone. If long-form YouTube feels crowded, try short-form TikTok. If TikTok feels crowded, try a niche angle or a different format within the same topic. The audience keeps renewing itself as new people enter the workforce and hit the same problems you already know how to solve.

Sources

My Online Trading Hub YouTube channel (referenced in Alston’s original video)
answerthepublic.com: free keyword research and question discovery tool
Ahrefs free keyword research tool, available at ahrefs.com/keyword-generator
Social Blade: YouTube channel analytics and earnings estimates (socialblade.com)
ConvertKit: email marketing and landing page platform used by excel.with_grant
Revenue math and subscriber counts sourced from Alston’s walkthrough in the video

Helping 1 million working adults make their first $3,000 online with the skills they already have. Alston Godbolt, Platform Proof.