I should be monetized within the next month, and this new channel should be making 500 to 1,000 a month in ad revenue. This is something that you could absolutely replicate yourself, which is why I'm showing it to you. I appreciate you being here, and I'll show you the exact videos inside my analytics. If you want to go deeper on all of this with me, the best way to work with me on it is to join my community, the Jerry Banfield Family, where I share what's working for anyone who wants to be a millionaire.
Now, let's look at how many views I'm getting. I'm getting 4,000 views, so about 2,000 views a day right now on a brand new channel. These are the exact videos I've made on this channel. You can see I've done different types of thumbnails. I even tested a short.
Why I Stick With Long-Format Videos
Here's the verdict I have on shorts: shorts suck, TikTok sucks, Instagram reels suck. All of these are crappy because they don't give you meaningful relationships and followers that stick around for a long time, unless you go really viral, unless you get out there to tens of millions of people at a minimum. These long-format videos tend to do really well. I've sold online courses by making these long-format videos. They make lots of ad revenue. They generate true fans. So my first suggestion is to stick with long-format videos. Feel free to test shorts, but it's easier for me to make a long-format video than it is to make a short.
If I sort by popular, you'll notice my top video so far has 5,900 views from two weeks ago. I made this thumbnail myself. I literally took a screenshot.
Pick a Topic With Demand and Low Competition
The first thing you want to consider when you're making a new channel is the topic. With crypto, you have to think about your situation for that particular topic. When I do a video in my studio on crypto, that means there are a lot of people who want crypto videos, and there aren't that many crypto YouTubers. I've also got a gaming channel. If you look, I've got several different channels. My brand new channel gets more views than my main channel, and this is why I switched over to this new channel.
On my gaming channel, I put up gaming videos that I know people like and enjoy watching, but the gaming videos just don't have the same kind of demand. There are tons of people making gaming videos. There are a lot of people who watch gaming, but for the amount of people who make gaming videos versus the amount of people who watch, a gaming channel is generally going to be a lot harder. I've still got some decent views on my gaming channel, and I've put up about twice as many videos there. That's the big difference. On my crypto channel, I've put up videos that come up in YouTube search.
Click-Through Rate, Watch Time, and Making Videos People Truly Enjoy
You're going to want to know how people are finding videos off of this brand new channel. If you're doing regular videos and not shorts, two of the biggest things are click-through rate and average view duration. Wrapped up in this is whether somebody actually enjoyed the video. If you get somebody to click and they watch some of it, but they didn't like the video and they don't respond positively to surveys or they don't come back, then this will only work in the short term. So you need to make videos people truly enjoy.
If you look at the likes and dislikes ratio, you can get an idea of whether people actually liked the video and are going to come back. On my crypto channel, you can see we've got over 90 likes on some videos, close to 95 or 96, and some a little bit lower, like 85%. So you want to be making videos that people actually like, click on, and watch. That comes first. It doesn't matter what you're making if you're making stuff that isn't useful to people, that people don't need to watch, that isn't enticing to click on. If you make something that actually gives value to somebody, that's the whole game.
Find the Simple Idea Other Creators Are Missing
On my crypto channel, I looked at what other people were making and I asked myself: what aren't other people doing that I would like as a viewer? When I went through, I thought, I wish these people would just tell me what they bought. So if you're going to make videos, look at what other people are doing and what you wish you could get as a viewer. I looked at crypto YouTube and I thought, why isn't anybody just telling me what they bought and why they bought it? It's stupid simple. You want simple ideas, and this is a stupid simple idea. I bought 0.03 Ethereum today. I bought 132 Cardano today. I bought 538 Stellar today.
I've tried some other things. This one was more of a viral title and I put a lot more effort into that video. I tried a short right here, and while it got a thousand views, that short was basically a waste of my time, because it would be almost nothing in ad revenue once the channel is monetized. I found a formula on my crypto channel that works great: I bought this, I bought that, and now watch what happens. Your video idea is critical. I watched a lot of Mr. Beast, and if I got anything out of him, it's this: think about your video idea. What are you going to create that's actually going to help people?
Where a New Channel's Traffic Really Comes From
What you probably really want to see is how people are finding these videos. If you're a new channel, your best source of traffic a lot of the time is going to be YouTube search, because browse features generally need more data for your channel and are generally a lot more competitive. With YouTube search, you can shoot straight in with a brand new video. If you make a video people actually want to watch, that they'll click on, and that has what they're looking for in search, you can get there.
On gaming and a lot of other areas, it can be tough to get the YouTube search traffic because everybody already knows exactly what the search traffic is and they're already targeting it. In crypto, when I target the search traffic directly, my videos get clicked on because the title says "I bought." Almost nobody actually buys something and tells you that; almost everybody else tells you what you should buy, what's good, what's bad. "I bought" immediately catches somebody's attention. Then whatever I bought catches the algorithm's attention, because people are searching in crypto for specific updates about specific currencies. Then I add "and I'll be a millionaire soon," because that's my vision. That's my hook, that I'm buying this with the intention to be a millionaire, and that gets people interested. So I found titles that consistently work and catch different kinds of search traffic. Based on the kind of video and the subject, there's different search traffic, but all of these videos are getting a lot of impressions.
Thumbnails That Give People Hope
The key thing I did with the thumbnail is give people hope, and it's simply based on what I'm expecting myself. I bought 132 Cardano yesterday and I paid like 37 cents each, and I expect that one day I'll be able to sell it for more than seven dollars and 44 cents. So my thumbnail and my title go perfectly together. My thumbnail has big text, is very clickable, and is easy to see. Anyone who's already a Cardano fan or searching for Cardano sees on my thumbnail "Cardano $7.44," and then they see that I actually bought some Cardano and I'm planning on being a millionaire soon. The title and the thumbnail catch people's attention in search results, and this is why my channel has been blowing up, catching people in search results.
How Search Traffic Builds Into Browse Features
You might be wondering: okay, when I upload my first few videos, how am I going to get search traffic? When I first started uploading my videos, I was getting a little bit of search traffic. YouTube gets an idea from your first few videos of what your channel is, and then, about a week after I started uploading, my videos got picked up in search traffic and browse features. Since then, my videos have continuously been picked up in search traffic and browse features, but where we really blew up was after I tested a few different ways of putting videos out, tested a few different titles, and found a formula that works with the thumbnail and title I just showed you. Now the search traffic on my channel is blowing up.
You'll notice the browse features are pretty stable, not really going up and down that much, along with suggested videos and channel pages. The search traffic is what's getting people to discover me for the first time. If you want to actually get into somebody's YouTube browse feed, you often need to have gotten them to watch a video before. I've watched so many videos on how to do YouTube, and I've put up over 4,000 videos on my main channel. YouTube relies on what viewers have watched previously, and you'll notice a lot of the people you see in your own browse features are someone you've already seen before.
The more people watch my videos, the better position I'm in to get more traffic in the future from browse features. The more search keeps feeding people into my channel, the more potential I'm going to have everywhere else across YouTube. That's the magic formula: if you can get into that search traffic and lay a foundation, then when people keep coming onto YouTube, they've got a chance to see one of my videos in the browse features.
Now, browse features are often tricky, and if you ever get a video to go off in the browse features, it's just like magic. This is why you want to make videos that can go off consistently over time, because if you make videos that are only good for today or tomorrow, then your browse features aren't going to be there. I've made videos where any of these could get kicked out in browse features at any time, so that when someone watches one video from YouTube search, the videos I've made nearby are relevant. I've been putting out a video almost every day, except I did not put out a video for about a week while I watched a bunch of Mr. Beast.
Every creator has a unique situation
I tried to make the best video I possibly could, and the long story short is that every different type of creator has a unique situation. What works on crypto for a new channel is to just grind out videos that people are actually going to click on and get into YouTube search, because in crypto people are searching for brand new videos all the time with the latest content and the latest updates. In other areas things are not necessarily so time sensitive. You can watch one of Mr. Beast's videos and it doesn't matter whether you see it today or a year from now or two years from now, it's still a very similar experience.
That's why I've made my videos so that some of these might actually get better over time. Imagine in a year, when the Cardano price pumps up to $2, and here I've made a video saying it's going to go to $7 when I recorded it at 37 cents. So I've thought into the future. I've thought about both how I can combine getting search traffic now, and how I can get my videos up so that when somebody a year from now finds them, they'll get pulled into the browse features and be worth watching. For me, cranking out about a video a day is working really well.
Picking search terms that aren't too competitive
This last Ethereum one is probably not an area you want to try to compete in. You want to find areas in YouTube search that are not too competitive like that one, because Ethereum is a massively competitive search term. So this one probably hasn't gone out in search as much, because searching Ethereum is so much more competitive. But if you go over to Cardano, I've got a strong click-through rate and view duration, and I've probably gotten toward the top of Cardano searches with that video.
On another one I wanted a different angle, so I had Joe Parys on my channel, and now I'm showing up on Joe Parys search terms and some other crypto terms. That one I haven't put in as high of a search traffic area. Then this XLM Stellar one is a high traffic search area, and it's not quite as competitive there, with lots of searching right now. With that one I made more of a generic video that's set up for browse features success, but there are also lots of other people who end up making similar videos. On another I tried a different format, and again that one is not going to show up in search as much as some of these others. And then the short, an 18 second short, is almost worthless to my channel, and yet it's still pulling hundreds of views a day in search results.
So this is a snowballing effect. The more of these I keep doing, the more search results I keep pulling, and it's really exciting to see where this feedback loop goes.
You have to give your channel a foundation
I'm grateful you've read all the way to the end of this, and I hope sharing my experience is helpful, because I know how challenging it can be to do YouTube. I've learned it for free, and I want to pass it on for free. I put this on my Jerry Banfield business channel, because honestly most of the people who watch my crypto channel don't care about how I grew my channel.
There's one more thing I need to mention. The one thing I did right at the very beginning of my channel was that I shared my videos out. If you look at the traffic now, it doesn't look that significant, but it gave my channel a foundation. It's unreasonable to expect your videos to just go into search results if you don't put some of your own traffic in first. If you look at all the views on my channel, I've driven about 1,900 views from external sources and a few from other YouTube features like my own channel page.
So one thing I've done, if you look on my Jerry Banfield main channel, is that I'm consistently driving traffic from my main channel over to my crypto channel. There's not a lot of engagement and not a lot of people seeing these, but especially when I started my new channel, I posted these up. Even if you only get 5, 10, or 20 views at a time, that adds up. I've driven more than a hundred views from outside, from people actually loving and enjoying the channel. That's the foundation you need to lay.
Where that early traffic comes from
If you're starting a new channel, you need to already have, I'd say, about a hundred people you think would like to watch whatever you're creating. So I share these out on my Facebook page, and I'm consistently using my Facebook page to bring people over to my YouTube channel, along with my other channels and my gaming. I tested uploading a video directly to Facebook and linking it, but that didn't work nearly as well, so I put these videos up over and over again. I've only gotten about 2,000 views total out of all those posts.
If you don't have that many people following you, what you want to do is direct message people. The amount of views you'll get per message will be a lot higher. You can also try sharing your videos in communities like Reddit, or you can put them on your own Twitter. You don't have to have a lot of people or a lot of followers to get started with this. The key is that you should aim for at least about 1,000 views from your own traffic sources on your initial videos, because if you don't get any traffic at all on your channel, the algorithm has no data and no audience to start with.
This is what I'm trying to do. I did get traffic from my own external sources at the very beginning of my channel, and consistently since then, every new video, I just keep bringing everybody I can back to YouTube. That's given YouTube enough data of an existing audience who have watched the videos to then start putting my videos up in search results. The beauty of YouTube is that if I send somebody from Facebook or Twitter over to watch one of these, then when they log back on to YouTube, there's a chance they'll see another one of my videos.
The main reason my browse features got disrupted right in one stretch is because I quit uploading for a week while trying to make the highest quality videos. By the time it got down to that point, I didn't have any new videos for my existing viewers. As soon as I started uploading again, the browse features kicked back up. We've got a lot of potential on this channel.
Working together to grow
One of the main weaknesses I've had as a content creator is not having a group of peers around me, and one of the best things I've done right is building a mastermind of people on a similar path, all of us working together. Mr. Beast had a mastermind that he started, where he would just hang out all day and talk with other people doing YouTube, and that's how they learned so much. In my experience, if you want to advance and earn more online, surrounding yourself with people on the same journey is what moves the needle. Today, the best way for us to work together on this is to join the Jerry Banfield Family community, where we can share what's working and grow alongside each other.
If you're trying to make money online, if you're buying crypto, or if you're a YouTuber, I've collected everything I've learned about growing a channel into my YouTube Coaching playlist, and I hope it helps you build the same snowball I've been building here. Thank you so much for reading all the way to the end.