My friends, I've made money in crypto nine years in a row, and I'm going to tell you a bunch of different ways you can earn money in crypto as well, and explain how I've consistently been profitable. I've made money every year that I've been in crypto except 2014, and yes, it's embarrassing that I managed to lose thousands of dollars just trading Bitcoin, but I learned a really valuable lesson that year: don't lose money in crypto. That lesson has stayed with me ever since. And what started my journey to consistently being profitable in crypto is having an open mind about how I can earn money, because what I see a lot of you have is a very closed mind. So this is going to dramatically help you expand your ideas of what's possible, and there's nothing more important than that.
Buy and Hold Is the Easiest Strategy
So how have I made money in crypto nine years in a row? Well, the absolute easiest strategy I've done is buy and hold, and you need to pick the right thing to buy and hold. I would say the easiest thing to pick is Bitcoin. Now, yes, if that is all I had done, in some years I would have lost money. I started buying and holding Bitcoin in 2015, it obviously continued going up, and then I unloaded almost all my profits going into the crypto of 2017 and 2018. That said, for many of you, if your life is very busy and you want to earn money in crypto and build your net worth without having time to do a whole bunch of other stuff, the easiest thing I see to do is buy and hold Bitcoin.
And if you want to try for bigger gains on stuff I've researched, then I'm also holding Internet Computer, Solana, and a few other altcoins, with Bitcoin as half my portfolio. But I don't think you wanted to watch a video to hear me say to dollar-cost-average into Bitcoin, because that's actually a very small amount of the money I've made in crypto.
Why I Don't Recommend Trading
Another way many of you are already aware of to make money in crypto is by trading, and that is one of the worst ways I see to make money in crypto. The only way I've actually earned a lot trading has been when I bought a crypto and then helped promote it and pump the price. And yes, that did work for me: I turned $11,000 into $87,000 in just a few months, making about $70,000 out of it. And that's exactly why I do not recommend trading. Most of you should not be trading, because there are much better ways to make money in crypto, and with a lot of the stuff I'm about to tell you, there's no risk. The beautiful thing is that, unlike even dollar-cost-averaging into Bitcoin, many of the things I'm about to share have no risk at all.
If you really want to consistently be profitable in crypto, it comes down to a combination of smart DCA, which is dollar cost averaging, consistently buying a little bit of Bitcoin and/or altcoins you have absolute certainty in, and then a whole bunch of other ways that generally all come down to one thing. The main way I've made money in crypto is by adding value to the crypto ecosystem, helping build crypto as a community, building the entire ecosystem, however you want to phrase that.
Creating Crypto Content Made Me the Most Money
For me, that has been creating a whole bunch of things. Creating educational videos on YouTube was one of, if not the very first way I actually made money in crypto, even before I started DCA-ing and holding Bitcoin. I started making videos on how to do things with crypto before almost anybody else was making them. And there are tons of opportunities today if you want to make money in crypto by making videos. Making crypto videos on YouTube is one of the easiest ways I see to make money, because I've tested it so many different ways.
If you don't have any following at all and you want to make hundreds and maybe even thousands of dollars a month within a few months, all you need to do is honest altcoin reviews, just like I've done on my crypto reviews channel. If you can make the videos quickly, and if you can make them where you're talking about the good, the bad, and the ugly, there's a huge desire for people to hear the good, the bad, and the ugly in crypto. Almost nobody actually covers the whole thing. Almost everybody just reviews the upside and the possibilities, the hundred-X's, but almost nobody goes through and reviews all of it. I guarantee you, if you put out an honest altcoin review every day on a brand new crypto reviews channel, you should be able to make hundreds of dollars a month in ad revenue pretty quickly and start getting things like sponsorship opportunities, be able to sell a membership program, do affiliate marketing, and so on.
I just laid a lot of things out there, but for me, nothing has made me more money in crypto than educating and creating crypto content, especially on YouTube. And especially with honest analysis, not just of altcoins but of all different parts of the ecosystem, from basic definitions like what is Web3, to wallet reviews, to exchange reviews. There are so many areas to create content in crypto, and so much demand, because there actually aren't a lot of people creating content to cover a lot of the things people really need to know about. Most people with an audience make more general crypto content, because if you don't, you tend not to get as good of traffic. So creating content on crypto, there are so many ways you can make money with it.
Affiliate Marketing, Done With Integrity
I've made money by affiliate marketing. I was one of the first people to link to sign up for Coinbase back when they gave you $10 in Bitcoin for getting somebody to sign up, and back in 2015, 2016, and 2017, almost nobody had a Coinbase account. I made several Bitcoin off of referring people to Coinbase. Now, the challenge with affiliate marketing is that today I make almost nothing on Coinbase's referral program. So some of the hottest things in affiliate marketing may not be directly related to crypto themselves, and this is why you want to think open-minded.
For example, I just found an AI program that can take a video and turn it into a blog post I can put on my website in about a minute for about a dollar per article. It's called Koala AI, and there's a link to it on my website in the stuff I use. Now, you might not immediately think a referral like that could tie directly into crypto. But if you're in the crypto ecosystem, there are always people looking for tools. If you know some crypto creators who make videos and don't turn them into blog posts they can put on their website to get additional search traffic, then you could send a direct message, write a tweet, or post something in Telegram saying, "Hey, this is a tool you should use." And they have 30% lifetime affiliate commissions. So affiliate marketing in crypto has made me lots of money.
The key I've found is to do it with integrity. Because if you're shilling something, and shilling for those of you who don't know means trying to sell or get people to sign up for an affiliate link on something you don't use and have never used, and you're just doing it to make money, it'll often come across as inauthentic, spammy, and inconsiderate. But if you become a person who knows a bunch of different resources and has a network of people, then you can have one person that you're able to refer several times over. If you're serious about learning to do this the right way, the best way to work with me on it today is to join my community and the Jerry Banfield Family — join the Jerry Banfield Family, where we can talk through it together as a whole.
DAOs, Blockchains, and Getting Paid to Contribute
Many DAOs are often controlled by a small group of people, but a lot of these DAOs have paid me. For example, in 2017 the Dash blockchain gave me something like 70 Dash to make videos about Dash and advertise it. On the Steem blockchain back in 2017 and 2018, I was able to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars as a content creator. I would make posts, people would upvote them, and you'd get Steem and Steem Dollars in exchange for having those posts upvoted. So there are many opportunities in crypto to make money in so many different areas, and you don't even take on the main risk. The main risk you're taking is time.
Now, if you're trying to grind out some decentralized social media platform, Steem sucks these days. I still make money on the Steem blockchain, and I made money on a platform called Hive, which is a fork of Steem. It's a total crap hole; I mean it's awful, it's worse than centralized social media in a lot of ways, but I still make money off of it every week just by automatically upvoting other people's posts with a bot. That is one of the ways I took a couple of years off of crypto in 2020 and 2021 and still kept cranking out money from that voting bot on Hive. Even though some weeks the price was almost nothing, during the bull market it pumped up, and some weeks I was making like a hundred dollars a week off of crypto I hadn't even meaningfully used in years.
So the key is to realize the abundance that's available in crypto. Many of these altcoins are looking for help marketing. Some of the people who are in my community are ambassadors for altcoins; they get given the opportunity to make money on crypto. They've actually been given coins by the altcoin they're an ambassador for, and then their job is to write content, to talk to people in Telegram, to constantly be doing grassroots-level marketing for that altcoin. There's a ton of opportunities like that, because almost all of these altcoin founders and teams have lots of coins they could give out to do marketing. What's difficult for them is to find someone who will actually be loyal to that altcoin and do a good job promoting it over time. So if you find an altcoin you really love, you should research the team and research any opportunities that may be there in terms of marketing.
And that's not even to mention crypto jobs. I met a guy at an AA meeting the other day.
I know a guy who gets paid to do coding and development work for different cryptocurrency projects. What's funny is that even the ones he's getting paid to develop, he doesn't trust at all. And he doesn't trust US dollars at all either. He holds one hundred percent of his wealth in Bitcoin. I asked him, like, really? He keeps small amounts of money in the bank and holds everything else in Bitcoin. As soon as a project pays him in their altcoin to develop on their coin, he immediately dumps it and turns it into Bitcoin. This is a guy who has comparable knowledge about crypto to what I have. He has no trust in the very, very few projects that are paying him. But if you actually do have trust in some of these projects, then you could do very well.
Earning money by gaming
There are also ways you can earn money gaming. Back when the Gods Unchained price wasn't in the absolute crapper, I was earning some days as high as a dollar or a few dollars just playing ten games of Gods Unchained every day. Now, in my experience crypto play-to-earn gaming is often a total crapshoot and a waste of time. But if you enjoy gaming, if you want to make money, and you're going to be playing something anyway, and you're already in crypto, trying some of these play-to-earn games can be a great way to earn money.
What you'll notice I've spent all this time on is all these ways you can build the crypto ecosystem up. And there are so many more than this. I've done many more than what I've described here. I've given away tens of thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency. I've done live streams where I would just send out ten Dash to people who were watching and commented. I sent out a bunch of Dash back when the price was like ten or twenty dollars each. I did the same thing on Steem. I gave away thousands of dollars of Steem in a single live stream. If you find somebody who's doing legit giveaways, that's real money. I gave out thousands of dollars of Gods Unchained cards when I was doing Gods Unchained streams on Twitch.
If you do live streams, you could stream on Twitch. Some of these crypto games have really strong communities like Gods Unchained. If you stream like any other game on Twitch, no one will watch. If you stream some of these crypto games, you'll get a bunch of people that come through, because people are hungry to learn how to play the game.
The secret that makes all of this easier
Now, if all of this is sounding a bit overwhelming to you, there's a secret that makes it easier. And that's to get help from someone who can help you take inventory of what your unique skills are. Because I've thrown a lot of things out here, and many of these may not be right for you. If you've got no following online, you probably don't want to try to jump into affiliate marketing right away. If you've got no experience doing marketing, then you're probably not going to hop into marketing. But some of the things you have no experience doing, you might be able to learn how to do. If you've never made a video before, you might be able to learn how to make crypto videos.
What will really make things easier for you to consistently be profitable in crypto is to talk to someone who can help you figure out where your skills are. That's what has helped me be consistently profitable in crypto: talking to other people who've always helped me identify where my skills are. Because when I started working online in 2011, I had no idea what my skills were. I was selling t-shirts. One of the funniest ways I've made money online is a girl paid me to do an email intervention on her boyfriend who was struggling with video game addiction. I think I charged ten or twenty dollars for it. That was when I first started out. I was doing Facebook ads for clients. For the first several years I spent all this time trying to make money online, I had no idea that one of the very best skills and talents I could share online was creating educational content.
I knew that in the classroom I could teach a class people found really interesting, that wouldn't put them to sleep. People would come up to me after my lectures and say, man, you're the first instructor that didn't put me to sleep, I loved what you said. I gave guest lectures, sometimes to rooms full of hundreds of people. In the one case I'm thinking of, that class had a bunch of politicians and police officers, people with public speaking experience come through, and the best response anyone got was me up there sharing. It took me years to realize that speaking was one of my talents, and more specifically, educating, teaching people how to do things, and especially making YouTube videos. Can you believe that for years I didn't realize making YouTube videos was something where I have a bunch of potential? Other people finally helped me figure it out.
I made hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits and millions of dollars in sales on a website called Udemy, and somebody told me that I should sign up on there. Somebody who knew about it, and I didn't, came to me and said, you should start teaching on Udemy, after seeing my YouTube videos.
Follow your talent, not the short-term money
In my experience, if you want to make money consistently in crypto, the way to do it is to find somebody to mentor you and help you get an understanding of what you could do and what you would love to do. Because where I've failed in crypto has been trying to do things I thought I should do. For example, when I was on Steem, I stopped making YouTube videos. I stopped educating on my YouTube channel and became a blogger mostly. While that made me money in the short term, as soon as the Steemit.com platform went bust in the bear market, I made nothing. I had not been following my talent, and my audience had faded away. I lost a lot of what I'd built up for years, and it took years to get an audience built back up again. That's what happens when you lose track of what your skills are and you just start trying to focus on short-term money.
One of the best ways I've been building wealth in crypto recently has been helping other people do the same. Because yes, you hear me talking a lot here, but what I do a lot more of is listen. I've found that learning from each of you, what each of you is doing in crypto, gives me a lot of insight. You could think of me like ChatGPT in some ways. If you give me a bunch of input, I can intelligently crank out a very nice response that you might not think of. The best way to work with me on all of this today is to join the Jerry Banfield Family community, tell me everything you're doing and all the experience you've got, and let me crank out a response based on what I hear.
I remember talking with a guy a couple days ago that was so much fun. He wants to make money in crypto. I told him I think he's wasting his time trading, because like me, he's talented with educating, and he could easily be making way more money doing videos on YouTube about crypto than he ever will trading. There are a lot of things you don't know about in crypto, and almost all the people who talk and do crypto videos tell you the same kinds of things, and they're more focused on making themselves money. I'm more focused on helping you build wealth in crypto. Because if I just wanted to build as much for myself as possible, I would just shill altcoins and shill different exchanges and get you to copy trade me. I'd make way more than I do now, but that would end up ripping you off. And I don't like living in a world where people have gotten ripped off by others who preyed on them.
What I love is a world full of wealthy people who understand their own talents, and I want you to help build this cryptocurrency ecosystem. I want you to be able to do marketing, or coding, or critiquing and reviewing. I want you to be able to participate in building a world where we have cryptocurrencies instead of fiat currencies, or alongside fiat currencies, where crypto is maybe an equal instead of a tiny fraction of the equation. When you come in, you get to indefinitely work with me and the rest of the community of people building alongside you. If you want to go deeper on the money side of all this, I put a lot of these lessons together in my Crypto Reviews playlist.
One way I've earned money in crypto is having blog posts about crypto that lead straight into affiliate marketing. There are so many ways that you can earn money in crypto, and I'm excited to help you figure out what will work best for you.