I am wondering what to focus on as a YouTuber. I see too many possibilities. And I wish more people would come on with YouTube channels and say, look, I don't know exactly what to do here — and then we could all give each other feedback. Instead of all of us as YouTube coaches trying to come out here and tell you what to do, what if I show up and say, here are all the ideas I have, and I'm not sure how to execute all of this successfully? I've got all these ideas in my head, and I'm wondering: where do I give the most value to people and make a solid six-figure income each year for myself while working a reasonable number of hours? I'm willing to work 40 or 50 hours a week, absolutely. And I want to make a real difference in people's lives, not just rip people off with useless crap like a lot of YouTube is. When I'm doing something, I want it to make a huge difference in your life.
I'm also going to give this transcript as a prompt to ChatGPT and see what it thinks and what its recommendations are. I may put it on pro mode, which you pretty much need to do — you need to give it a long time on pro mode sometimes. So I'm going to give this to the AI as a prompt and see what kind of answers it has. I'd love to see any comments that you have, and the best way to talk to me is to join the Jerry Banfield Family, especially if you're a YouTube creator. I have it set up right now where you can have a one-on-one call with me every week, which is something I would love if somebody else offered — I'd talk to somebody who had less experience on YouTube than me just to bounce ideas off of. That's what I love: there are a few YouTubers in the group who talk to me, and it makes a huge difference. I know if you're on YouTube, it can be lonely creating videos and looking at numbers, and you need other people to fill in.
Right now, what I'm trying to figure out is how to set my business system up for long-term viability, to give you what you're looking for, and to satisfy me creatively — all together. I've done things before where I gave people what they wanted, but I hated doing it. A lot of YouTubers are happy to do that: if they make money, they'll grind out the same crap all the time, even though they hate it, just to pay the bills. I won't do that. I've done that before, and I won't do it again. I've also sold people a bunch of stuff they didn't need, and now I want to deliver real value — not just get you to buy some digital product that supposedly will fix some problem. Buying a digital product almost never makes much of a meaningful impact in your life. I've listened to hundreds and hundreds of audiobooks, and those have had a big impact on my life — but they've had that impact because I've also talked out the ideas with other people.
Starting With the Money
I'm obviously focused on growing my YouTube channels, and I'm wondering the best way to do that — like, do I want to use Google ads? But let's start with the money, because the number one thing I want to figure out is money. For the first time in forever, the balance in my business bank account is going up automatically without me having to take money out of my personal checking account to support it. That's how it used to be: that business bank account used to be the paycheck for my whole family and support everything — I'd just take the money that came into that account and send it out everywhere. For the last year, it's been a liability, where I always had to put money in just to keep the account going and pay my basic business expenses. Now it pays the credit card bill. The business bank account has more than a thousand a month coming in, which I'm so grateful for, and that has come within the last three months. I'd love to get that over $10,000 a month. My question is: how do I do that in a way with integrity, that's good for you, and that's sustainable for the long term?
The Website, the Membership, and the One-on-One Calls
Here's what my website looks like right now: the whole website is geared to send people to my Skool community. If you look at the about page, it's $96 a month or $960 a year, and I'm currently offering one private 25-minute call with every new member that joins. How sustainable that is — I'm definitely either increasing the price or dropping that offer. But for now, I had a great call with a guy yesterday who joined. We exchanged phone numbers and I talked to him for 25 minutes, and we had a great conversation — we talked ICP, community building, and the state of the world. It's nice to talk to one of my followers like that.
I've sold this membership once this week, and two other people somehow scrounged my email up from the internet — I'm not sure that's the right way to do it — and asked, could they just pay $96 for a one-on-one call? I also have a calendar where you can pay for a one-on-one call with me: $96 for 30 minutes on Zoom. It's kind of baffling to me — why would you pay about $100 for a single one-on-one call when you could get four one-on-one calls a month plus access to direct message me and all the rest? But some people just hate recurring payments, and they'd rather go straight to my calendar, pick a time, and pay for the call. And if you wanted to book, say, a Saturday where you really wanted to go deep on something — record an entire podcast, or have a longer conversation — you could book one, two, three, four, five sessions in a row if you felt like it, and have one long call instead of the shorter calls.
So then I'm thinking: should my website sell one-on-one calls too? At one point, I had multiple calls to action, but then I started feeling like multiple calls to action are confusing. Now the page is repetitive — it's just the same thing every time. Most days I get around 100 to 150 visitors a day to my website, and most days there are no sales. But I sold two one-on-one calls for $96 this week, which is really good. So doesn't it make sense to offer the one-on-one calls also, alongside the membership? I tried for a while just doing one-on-one calls and only promoting those, and some people clearly really wanted just a call, not a membership. But then if I'm selling $96 calls for 30 minutes one-off, do I really want to offer four one-on-one calls for that same $96 inside my Skool?
What Should the Skool Community Cost?
Then on my Skool, I'm wondering: how much do I want to charge? Right now it's $96 a month or $960 a year, but that's too high for most people to want to join. I imagine if I dropped it down to something like $9 a month or $19 a month, I'd have a lot more people join. It would be an easier case for somebody to join at $9 a month when I start putting out things like this Ethereum bear case research document from ChatGPT. It's awesome — a 56-page document about the serious issues every Ethereum holder should have in mind, with all kinds of resources and graphs. I produced it to do a video, but everyone in my Skool community can just download the whole thing. I can crank out all these resources with AI and stick them in my community. For that, I'd really like to have a $9 a month tier, where people could DM me and I could schedule one-on-one calls from there. But I already have members paying $49 a month and $96 a month who get all the calls. So do I want to make the Family something more accessible to everyone at $9 or $19 a month?
At $49 a month, I tried having some group calls, but the problem is group calls don't work as well if the group is too small. You really need to be able to get five or ten people in a call to have some nice group energy. I had a nice call with Scouse Will and Blockchain Pill, but the next call was just Scouse Will — and if you're expecting a group call and there's one person there, that's a one-on-one call. We should have just scheduled a one-on-one call instead of a group call that turned into one. So it seems like I might want to make the group bigger.
The Numbers Inside Skool
One cool thing in my settings: you can see how much traffic you're getting and how much revenue you're making. Right now it says I have $455 a month in monthly recurring revenue, which is awesome. So far nobody has canceled yet, although I think one person stopped the renewal on the $49 a month. There have been 497 visitors — almost all of them straight from my own website, but 42 from the Skool network, which is cool, 20 from Google, and 16 from affiliate. I did drop the affiliate membership, because if I want to offer one-on-one coaching, the affiliate membership gets complicated. I also know that with affiliate links, unless someone gets manually joined — through a text message or something — there's a chance the affiliate doesn't get properly credited. I don't want people promoting my program expecting they're going to get something, and then somebody signs up, the link doesn't credit it, and they get nothing.
At the same time, I know affiliate promotions can really make a group large. But then if I make the group large, I'm looking at getting a lot of direct messages and having more admin work. So I'm wondering what to put the price at — and what's cool is I can set this up in tiers.
Thinking Through the Pricing Tiers
Instead of doing $49, I could set it up to do $9 a month, or say $88 a year — something like that. Then I could basically delete all the basic benefits from the higher tiers and bump up the membership so that the coaching level, at something like $96 a month, has the one-on-one call available weekly. I could also have an option at $49 a month with group calls — group calls each week by topic. Then I could turn on a VIP level: group calls plus the one-on-one call available weekly, at $96 a month or $960 a year. So I could have three different tiers, and get more quantity of people in there who just want access to the documents and the community, and to be able to DM me. At the next level up I could also add archived courses and videos — I'm adding those — which would be available at all the higher tiers too. So it could be: $9 a month with archived courses and videos, $49 a month or $390 a year including group calls each week, and the $96 a month tier getting the one-on-one calls available weekly. Maybe somebody joins for $9 a month and says, hey, I want to join the group calls, and they upgrade. And somebody might join for $9 a month and want to go straight up to the top tier.
But it probably should cost more to have a one-on-one call available every week. That should probably be more like $196 a month — because I could just sell one-on-one calls at $96 per call, and a weekly-call membership would essentially be half off having a call every week. So it might make more sense to lay the pricing out like this: $9 a month where you can DM me, post in the community, connect with others, and look at all the documents; upgrade to group calls for $49 a month; and then the VIP tier with a one-on-one call every week at $196 a month, which is essentially 50% off scheduling one-off calls. And the people who join for $9 a month and DM me would be in a perfect position for an upsell — hey, why don't you schedule a one-off call? If I set the Skool pricing up like this, I'd probably put everybody who has already paid on the VIP tier as a thank-you. And I invited five friends to join for free as founding members, like Blockchain Pill — I could put them on whatever tier makes sense.
The question with Skool first is that not everybody wants to sign up for a monthly recurring payment. I loved how big the open chat community was before — I loved that we had hundreds of people in there and great discussions — and the current setup of my Skool community kind of makes that difficult. I'd love to say: just join the Family for $9 a month. I feel like there are probably 100 people who would join the Family for $9 a month or $88 a year, and then some might upgrade to $49 a month, or occasionally somebody upgrades to $196 a month. I feel like this is probably a much better system to get a quantity of people to join and build the community — and then just give one-on-one calls whenever people need them for $96. I could even give an exclusive coupon: if you're in the Skool, you get $10 off a one-on-one call or something like that. But then do I want to sell this across my entire website, and have the one-on-one calls there for people who aren't in the Skool, then offer the Skool too?
Comedy, Games, and Paid Traffic
On top of that, I also want to do comedy. I have probably five to ten-plus hours of raw, crazy comedy material, and I can host that on ICP. And thank you to Corey Chambers and an anonymous supporter who actually sent money to this when you don't even get anything from it at this point — they just wanted to be on the leaderboard. I've created a site that right now has my games on it — jerrybanfield.net — and I'd rather have the games on their own site, because they'll have specific requirements, so I can send paid traffic.
Right now I'm thinking I want to help people with gaming vlogs. On a gaming vlog, I could get a view for a tenth of a cent — so I could pay a dollar and get a thousand views. I could spend $20 a day and just dump tens of thousands of people all over the world into my gaming videos on my gaming YouTube channel. Those videos will have a really inspirational message in them that is appropriate for Google ads. And then I could offer microtransactions: I could put all the games out for free initially to get people playing, and then with ICP, people could pay ICP to buy upgraded versions of the games or unlock a new game early. Older games would be out there for free, and newer games would be a microtransaction — a dollar or a couple dollars to unlock early.
Local Studio Setups and No Free Leads
I'm real handy with anything to do with live streaming, video production, OBS, audio, setting up a podcast, AI, building a live studio, and solving difficult technical problems. There have got to be people locally who'd pay me $100-plus an hour to help with some of this stuff. I'm wondering how to advertise that, so that someone locally in St. Petersburg, Florida could just book a call with me and say, hey, I want to set up a live streaming studio in St. Pete and my budget's $10,000 — could you help me do that? And I'd say sure: you pay me the ten grand, I'll charge maybe $2,500 for my work, I'll buy all the equipment you need, and I'll set everything up. All you have to do is step into the studio. You can see my studio setup right here that I've been using as a background for my vlogs — I literally just step into the studio and push record to start a video and push record to end it. That's an incredible setup.
What I will not do is screw around with free leads. I'm absolutely against messing around with free phone calls trying to sell somebody on working with me. No — I put too many videos out, I put too much stuff online, to fool around and see if you want to work with me. You can see what I do, what I'm good at, and what I can help with.
Landing Pages and a Custom AI Trained on Everything I've Made
So then it seems ideal to me — I could also route my videos to different URLs, and those could sell my Skool membership. I'm wondering: do I want to use all these different landing pages? Should this one have calls linked to it? Should this one have games linked to it? I have a gigantic page written with a custom AI built off a 2-million-token training document, plus about another 2 million tokens trained from all my books. I trained it on what has to be close to 100 hours of video, in a custom GPT, and told it exactly what I wanted — and the AI cranked out an absolutely incredibly deep landing page. It tells you all the stuff I can do: I've published 35 books — you want to write a book? I've got 35 of them. I've got 20-something audiobooks on Audible. The page makes a very clear case. Oh, and if you want to use that custom AI model, it's available in the Skool community. I'm not going to put my custom AI model out for free, because it's trained on so much of my stuff — I want to minimize it getting misused, and putting it out for free would make it easy for people to start generating weird stuff with it, which is a bit of a liability. Plus, that's something you should pay for. That's worth paying for.
So I'm wondering: do I want to send everybody to one single URL and have all my offerings there? And do I want to expand my offerings? Some people might be willing to just pay $50 or $100 and they don't want to talk — they just want me to make a video. Like, Jerry, I'll pay you to review this one coin I'm thinking about buying, do a deep review on it like you do your other ones. Some people want to pay to sponsor a video or a podcast or a live stream with me.
I want to be open for all those other opportunities. But I don't want to fool around with a contact form and have a bunch of people submit all kinds of stuff, and then spend all this time chasing around free leads. So I think the Skool works as a nice gatekeeping thing. If I put it at $9 a month, somebody who pretty casually wanted to work with me could just join. Once you join on Skool, you can direct message me very easily with the message button, and the notifications go straight to my phone. At $9 a month, just being able to DM me would probably be worth it. But if I'm going to charge $9 a month, maybe I do want to affiliate-sell it. Then again, if I'm doing coaching, I don't know if I want an affiliate selling something I take a 40% hit on. Although if an affiliate sells somebody who upgrades to a $196 a month coaching membership, maybe that's worth it — that's essentially what I'm already charging right now.
An Event, Comedy MP3s, and Keeping Things Separate
On top of all that, I'd like to have an in-person event in St. Petersburg, Florida. And I'd like to sell comedy MP3s. The comedy MP3s are pretty dark, graphic, and raw, so that's something that should probably be separated from everything else — and yet it's something I enjoy doing. It's like Anthony Jeselnik, but less censored — more crazy than Anthony Jeselnik. I've got five to ten hours of that already, and I'd easily put it up on a separate site. I don't think I want to combine the games and the comedy on the one website.
What's Already Working on YouTube
Now here's what I know: if I put this together the right way, it works — because on top of everything, I'm filming as many videos as I can. I'm getting 30 to 50 or 60 thousand organic impressions every day on YouTube, which is turning into five to ten thousand views a day across all my channels. That's incredible, since I just started back up in March, about four months ago. Right now I'm just grinding out videos. I've published 330 videos and live streams since May 18th, when I set my tracking sheet up. That's five videos and live streams a day — 76 minutes a day of raw video and live streams. I did the math on camera and had to check myself, but it works out: in the last 60 days, I've done 76 hours of content. So I'm already cranking out a lot on YouTube.
My YouTube ad revenue is about $500 a month, and if the other channels get monetized, they can make some money too. Right now the Jerry Banfield ICP channel is making the most income on YouTube — and that's when crypto is absolutely in the crapper. Whenever ICP shoots up, this revenue could go up to $1,000 to $3,000 a month off that one channel, and all the views would rip like they did before. This is at the bottom, when everybody is miserable in crypto, and that channel is still getting about $300 a month — more when I do live streams, and less when I haven't done any for a couple of weeks. My Crypto Reviews channel is monetized too and it's on the way up — these new crypto reviews I've been doing have been even better, and that one's up to $168 in the last 28 days. So we're close to $500 paychecks every month from YouTube already, which is awesome and which I'm really grateful for. The live streams and the videos have kicked the revenue up nicely.
1,133 Blog Posts on a Blockchain
So I'm wondering, how do I put all this together? Here's basically all the raw data of what I'm doing. It seems like I should be able to send this video to some YouTube coach somewhere and say, all right — what I'm doing is pretty amazing on YouTube. I have 1,133 blog posts. As soon as I do a video, I drop it over into Claude, run the video workflow, and upload it to ICP, and it cranks it out on a blockchain. A lot of the videos I deleted before are now up as blog posts. Back when I was married, I had videos — I took the transcripts from those old diary entries and put them up. I did some of the old reviews — my going-to-zero crypto reviews, some of those are up as blog posts. They go all the way back to my Officer Banfield days — I took excerpts from those and put them up there. And I found one of my old classic gaming inspirational videos from 2016 — those are up on my website now too, and that's what I want to do a lot more of on my gaming channel. I loved those videos. I did all of this with AI, and it's incredible.
The Most Beautiful Puzzle
I have a lot of value to offer, and I know that. At this point, it's about how I bring it all together and let everybody choose. Do I make the Skool membership more broadly accessible to everyone at $9 a month, and then upgrade the people who want more than that? Somebody who's willing to pay $96 a month might pay $196 a month for the one-on-one calls. Somebody who wouldn't pay $96 a month might pay $9 a month just to join the group. I'd love to get the group as big as possible too — but I'm not going to make it free, because the admin cost of that is too high with the DMs and all the posts. You can set a free community up nicely, but I've heard a lot of negative experiences with free Skool communities, and I wouldn't be making any money either. I like pay-gating things, because I already put out YouTube videos for free, and you can comment on those for free — so if you're going to go outside YouTube with me, it should be paid.
I'm going to put all of this into ChatGPT and see what it thinks. Some of you might think I think too much — well, this is me synthesizing all of it. Someday it's going to come out to $10,000-plus a month doing work I love, making a positive difference in the world for as many people as possible, having deep, real connections with my audience, and bringing together community. The only question is how I put all this together into the most beautiful puzzle. If you want to follow along as I figure it out — or you're building your own channel — the rest of my videos on growing on YouTube are on my YouTube Coaching playlist.
I'd love your feedback. And I hope more people on YouTube will put honest videos up asking, hey, what do I do in this situation — and look to get advice from others instead of only giving advice.