My friends, today I'm going to share what I've learned making $2 million online since 2014. A lot of you ask me, "Jerry, I want to make some more money online. What do you recommend?" The number one thing is to get your mindset right. And by mindset, I mean think about asking this question: how can I do work I love every day that other people will happily pay me for? That's the ideal question. That is one of the biggest learnings I can possibly give you.
The first money I made online was difficult. It was a struggle. It was a grind. And it was because I was asking the wrong questions. I was asking, "How can I make money online?" There are a lot of answers to that, and some of those answers aren't much fun. One time I got a client in 2013 that paid me to get articles written about varicose veins. Yuck. I then paid somebody on Fiverr to write those articles out for me, and I edited those articles and gave them to the client. The client paid me a total of a few hundred dollars for a bunch of articles, and it cost me a few hundred dollars to pay the freelancer on Fiverr. I made almost no money. I was stressed. The client wasn't happy. And I spent a bunch of time earning almost nothing and providing poor quality work. That's what happens when you ask questions like, "How can I make money online?"
If you want to see the actual numbers, I've got a playlist called Income Reports for Jerry Banfield. I stopped doing income reports lately because I just didn't feel like it anymore, and maybe I'll get back to doing those one day. But for quite a while I was doing all kinds of these income reports, because to do them I have to track my earnings and expenses. What I prefer to do is a yearly income report, which leaves me realizing I need to do one for 2021. So maybe we'll do an income report soon since I finished that year. There's a whole playlist where I've got all kinds of income reports back to 2016, if you want to see the actual income and expenses, the profit, and how all that worked. If you don't care about that much, let's get back to the lessons.
Ask the right question
The main lesson is to ask the right questions. Let me give you the right question, the question I ask today: how can I do work that will bring me great joy and be fun to do, that others will love paying me for and greatly benefit from? Do you hear the power and the focus in that question? That's so much different than asking, "How do I make a couple extra bucks online?" That's an entirely different frequency. How do I make a couple bucks extra online? Just go to Upwork and apply for a job. It's that simple. But what kind of work would I love to do, and find great joy in doing, that other people would love to pay me for, and that will make a great positive difference in the world?
For me, the simple answer to that is to be a YouTuber. Be a YouTuber and make videos. Make everything you create available for free, and make videos that are really helpful for your viewers every day, that you really care about, that you're really passionate about making. I really care about the videos I make, because these videos can make a huge difference in your life if you just watch them every day. They can totally change the trajectory of your life, from "How do I make a few extra bucks?" to "How do I actually do something I really love and enjoy doing, that other people would love to pay me for?"
I've learned this the hard way. If I focus on "How do I make a lot of money online?" then I have to ask: do you care about making that money at the benefit of others, or are you willing to make money online in a way that just leaves others worse off? If you ask more generic questions like, "How do I make $100,000 online this year?", well, there are ways you could just go steal $100,000 online. Are you cool with that? No, I'd like to make $100,000 online honestly this year. Okay, well, you could buy one crypto, pitch it to your YouTube audience, run a bunch of ads for it, then sell it after they all buy it. That's legal. But is that something that really made a positive difference in the world? No.
There are all kinds of things I could do for work, but the question is: what would I actually enjoy and love to do? What you don't want to do is just show up and grind at something you hate doing, because you might as well have put your time and energy into learning something you could love. I focused a lot on making certain amounts of money, and I focused on having fun, but I learned that I need to make sure I love the work I'm doing, or I might as well not even do it. Because if I really love what I do, there's a natural progression that happens.
The most money came from work I loved
When I love doing YouTube videos, I want to do something for work that I can do now, and then do in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years from now, in basically the same format. What I've noticed is huge for how I've made $2 million: the places I've made the most money were when I was doing work I loved. Like on Udemy. I loved teaching those online courses. Students loved taking my online courses and loved buying them, and my students were learning a lot from them.
The issue there was that I aimed at making the most money for myself, even if it meant being obnoxious, even if it meant doing things that were in the gray area policy-wise. Like running searches on Udemy as the keyword in Google Ads, so if you searched "Udemy," you found a course on Udemy.com that looked official, called "How I Make $10,000 a Month" or "$1,000 a Day" or whatever the title ended up being. "How I Teach Full Time on Udemy." And then having a remarketing tag and bringing people back with a whole bunch of ads. I've since learned that I want to operate in a way that's very transparent and as simple as possible. Anything you want to do to make money online, you want to do in a way that's sustainable. If it's only going to work for me for a few months, it's better to build something you can do for the long term.
When you don't have a clue, ask for advice
If at first you're thinking, "Jerry, I don't have a freaking clue how I can do work I love online in a way that people would love to pay me for and experience a positive difference from — I don't even know how I'd start to answer that question," well, then start asking people for advice. Ask your mom if she's alive. Your dad if he's alive. Ask your brothers, your sisters, your friends, your family members, your children, your nieces and nephews. Ask people for advice. Probably a lot of the advice you're going to get will be crap, but that's good, because when you hear something that's crap, you'll know that's not right. Like, "Why don't you just go get a real job?" Alright, we're going to put that in the crap folder. "Why don't you just do your YouTube channel?" Oh, okay, now that sounds good. I would love to just do my YouTube channel. As you get advice that really resonates, when you hear it and you're like, "Yeah, I would love to do that," then do it. Just go ahead and do it. That's what I have done that has helped me a lot: I've asked for a lot of advice, and I've listened.
When you ask the right questions, my mind always works like this: my mind always works to give me whatever I've put in as a requirement. My mind is just a tool that's answering the questions and the queries I'm giving it. So if I ask, "Why is this person such a jerk?", my mind will pull reasons in. My mind is just like a dog that's doing what I want it to do. "Why is this person being such a jerk?" Well, this and that's why they're being a jerk. "What's wrong with me?" Well, this and that's what's wrong with you. If you stop asking questions you don't want the answers to — like "What's wrong with you?" — if you're tired of hearing what's wrong with you, stop asking the question.
Lean into the blank space
If you want to make some serious money online, then you've got to ask the right questions. If you ask, "How can I do work that I would love to do for free — the work is so fun I'd love to do it for free — and that people would love to pay me for, and it'll make a positive difference in the world?", when you ask a question like that, your mind initially may go into a scary place where it's blank. Your mind is like, "Whoa, you hit me with a good one right there. I did not see that one coming." There may be a moment of silence in your brain where you don't have a freaking clue, and some of us are scared of that. I'm telling you, if you're like me, lean into that. Let that empty space be there where you don't know, and ask it again. What can I do for work online that will be so much fun I would love to do it for free, and that it'll help people so much they'll demand that I get paid to do it, and they'll want me to do it every day?
Ask a question like that, and you might have to ask it 10, 20, 30 times before your mind actually starts getting some answers. You may hit a blank over and over again, but do it repeatedly, and here's what'll happen. When I ask questions like this, my mind acts like a vacuum. It just starts sucking the answers off the quantum field. Every little thing in life, all these synchronicities, my mind just pulls these answers from nowhere. A YouTube video will come up. Somebody will say something in conversation. This is how I've gotten to defining myself as a YouTuber again.
What's tricky is that when you ask this question, the answer can change over time. When I asked this question in 2020, it had some different answers. At first it was, "Why don't I do an in-person show?" Then it switched to, "I don't know. Why don't I ask for help?" Then it switched to, "Let's play video games." Then it switched to, "Let's be a Facebook partner." Then it switched to, "I don't know, maybe I'll stream on Twitch and start this new YouTube gaming channel." What I've noticed is that there are periods of transition, and I've learned to be okay with periods of transition.
Finally Finding What I Was Born to Do
These last four months have been a transition period for me. My previous income source, the one I was making ten grand a month from, disappeared instantaneously because they didn't like what I had to say. And I've been wondering what on earth to do with myself. Now I finally feel found. Being a YouTuber, that's it. I'm born for this. Everything I do makes me an awesome YouTuber, and I know it.
Sometimes you may have this calling, or this thing that you can do really well, but it's been screwed up along the way. When I look back, I believe the universe has been trying to guide me to be a YouTuber ever since 2016. I was doing it for a while, and then I asked a question: how do I make the most money online this year? How do I make a hundred thousand online this year? That question got me into doing crypto, and it got me off of doing YouTube.
Instead, I could have asked a question like: how do I make the most money over the course of my life, doing work that brings me the greatest joy, while helping other people the most on planet earth? And the answer to that question is YouTube. It's not streaming on Facebook, it's not putting videos up on TikTok. Answers can evolve day to day, so I've learned to be uncomfortable, and I've learned to fail fast.
A Hundred Ways to Fail, and Willing Every Time
I've had a lot of ideas that seemed great at the time and went downhill quickly. I had an idea to create a t-shirt shop in person. I had an idea to create an online work platform, similar to Upwork and Fiverr, before those were big things. And then there are the truly dumb ones. One of my worst ideas ever: I was going to put Google AdSense and a custom search engine link inside library computer browsers, so that when people searched on those and clicked on ads, I'd get a little bit of AdSense revenue. That was the plan, until I actually tried it. The computers wipe themselves every time you log off. So you go in, switch the browser default URL, log out, log back in, and it's reset. Apparently they'd already thought of people doing exactly that to library computers.
I'm grateful that I've been so willing to fail. I have failed, over and over. I've made money online more than a hundred different ways. And yet there's been one basic thing I've done that's accounted for almost all the money I've made online. One thing in common. All of the complexity and all the different things I've talked about can be boiled down into the simplest individual activity. The number one thing I've done to make money online is make videos and do live streams. But just generally, make videos. That's the number one thing.
Where the Money Actually Came From
Now, where's the number one place I've made money online making videos? It's not actually Udemy. I made over 600,000 on Udemy, but a lot of that Udemy money came off the back of YouTube. The number one place I've actually made money online is on YouTube. I made great money on Facebook too, close to a hundred grand over the last year and a half, but that's dwarfed by what I've made because of YouTube.
There were hundreds of thousands I made on Udemy that I made because of YouTube. There were hundreds of thousands I made in crypto, and I made that because of the videos I made on YouTube. I made tens of thousands coaching people, and that was because of my videos on YouTube. I made tens of thousands in affiliate marketing, and that was because of my videos on YouTube. I made hundreds of thousands selling online courses on websites besides Udemy, and that was because of my videos, specifically my videos on YouTube.
What's cool is that I've learned I can do all of this. When you ask a question like, how can I do work I love every day that brings me so much joy I would happily do it for free, and that brings others so much joy and prosperity that they demand I get a great income doing it, a question like that might seem really overwhelming at first. But for me it's utterly stupid simple. Just make videos on YouTube. Literally that simple. If you want to work alongside me on figuring out your own version of this, the best way to do it today is to join the Jerry Banfield Family, where I share exactly how I approach all of it.
Two Videos a Day, and Nothing More Complicated
So here's what I've got now. I just set up an Excel spreadsheet. I did this for Udemy before, and when I started that Udemy spreadsheet I was making like a hundred or two hundred dollars on a day. I committed to doing Udemy full time and putting the majority of my energy into it, and by the end, when I got banned a year and a half later, I was up to one to three thousand a day. I boiled all of it down into the simplest possible format.
My goal now is to make two videos a day for YouTube, including live streams. So if I go live and do a video, that's two videos. On average, two videos a day. Why two videos a day? Because that's what I did on Udemy. And it's really quick and easy for me to crank two videos out. I can live stream a video game and I can crank out a little short video. That gives me the ability to put a video out in the morning and a video out in the evening, which gives me seven hundred and something chances a year to be successful in the algorithm. If I can do more than that, I get more chances. Right now I'm about to go on a week-and-a-half-long trip, so I'm filming some extra videos ahead of time to spread it out during my trip.
What I'm getting at is that I've learned to ask the right questions for making my money online, and to put what I'm doing into a bigger picture. Not just me making a little bit of money, but the picture of my whole life, and the picture of the whole world, and what all people need. Zoom out into this massive view of the whole world and where I fit in, and then zoom it back in into a really simple activity. It's kind of like offering myself up to God, to the collective: hey, how can I serve in a way that's joyous, that makes a big difference in people's lives? And then break it down into something so stupid simple that even I can't complicate it. Make two videos a day on YouTube.
Simple, Sustainable, Consistent
You might ask, why not one video a day? Well, it's very quick and easy for me to make videos. I have this really laid-back style where I just don't edit my videos. I just record. To me, two videos a day allows me to do one gaming stream and then make one video about anything else I want. I've tried to complicate it more, put all these specific conditions on it, get fancy. On Udemy I got super fancy and built all these systems. But what I've learned from making two million dollars online is that simple is best, sustainable is best, consistency is best.
Simple meaning two videos a day on YouTube. Stupid simple. Anyone can understand it. What do you do, Jerry? I make two videos a day on YouTube. Are you sure? If I start explaining something more complicated, I'll lose you. But Jerry, what do you do? I make two videos a day on YouTube. God, that's simple, isn't it? And it's simple for me too, because all I need to think is: two videos. On average, if I do a day with zero videos, then I do a day with four to make up for it.
Sustainable meaning this: if I'm putting in 60, 80 hours a week, pushing myself and missing time from my family, that's not sustainable. So I demand that everything I do needs to be sustainable. When I was on Udemy, I was hustling and pushing too hard, and that led to me getting banned. I've watched friends who at the time were making nothing compared to what I was making on Udemy. But they've stayed on Udemy for a long time, making much less than I was, and now they've made way more, because they made it over consistently.
For making money online, you want it to be consistent. What you don't want is that irregularity where you made 50,000 here and then didn't make anything for six months. Now, I realize YouTube is going to be irregular. But what I've also noticed is that YouTube is one of the most consistent platforms I've used. Even when I've done nothing on YouTube, when I've contributed almost nothing, I've still earned hundreds of dollars a month in ad revenue, plus affiliate commissions and other things. YouTube has paid me very consistently over a long period of time. I want to show up in a place that's consistent, and I want to be consistent myself.
Giving the Same Amount Every Day
I've found that when I push too hard, then I give nothing at all. What tends to work better is like what I do in my marriage and in my parenting. I give about the same amount every single day. I give an amount that satisfies my wife and my children. Since I'm not pushing too hard, I'm not expecting all these things in return. I give just enough that everybody's happy, and I'm happy, and then I'm good. Some days I need to give a bit more, some days a bit less, but consistency over time really helps out. Because I want my next million to be the easiest, most joyful, most fun million I've made online.
I used to stress a lot about my Udemy earnings. I was really afraid of getting banned. I figured it was coming, even though I wasn't violating any of the policies. I was in lots of gray areas, in the spotlight all the time, so I wasn't too surprised when it happened. And I wasn't too surprised about getting demonetized on Facebook either. What I find is that when my focus is on doing work that I love and enjoy, that others love receiving, it's easy for me. It's hard sometimes, but it's easy for me to be flexible and say, okay, I'm done being a Facebook partner, I'm done being a Facebook streamer, I'm going to be a YouTuber now.
It's easy, when I focus on asking the right question, to adjust and to dance around and to move my approach. Okay, I'll go over here and be on Facebook. Now I'm going to go over here, I'm on Udemy, I'm doing great on Udemy, got banned from there. Let's go over to YouTube. Let's move over to crypto. Let's try making music. Let's try launching a course platform. How about an in-person show. I've found that flexibility really helps, because the collective has changing needs.
The power of focus
Sometimes I need to change to suit that, and I'm ready to settle down now. I'm ready to keep creating in the same place for a long period of time, and to actually focus. So the last thing I'll leave you with is the power of focus. Where I've struggled a lot in making this two million online has been trying to be too many places, and be too many things to too many people.
For a while, I was uploading three shorts a day and doing a live stream, and it was just too much. I'm making all these little short vertical videos and uploading them on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. I'm checking the analytics on all of them. I'm getting excited when things go well on one platform, then getting frustrated because the same video didn't perform on another platform. Then I'm trying to do my live stream, and I'm just scattered all over the place. My attention was everywhere and I'm feeling stressed, getting up first thing in the morning, uploading videos, and missing out on time with my family. I was giving too much. And then other times I'd pull back, and there'd be a week where I didn't even stream or upload a video or do anything. Then I gave too little.
So I've learned that focus really makes a big difference. A lot of us are hesitant to focus, because, well, what if we focus in an area that doesn't work? What I've found is that if you do something purely for the love and joy of doing it, other people love and enjoy it too. Sure, sometimes if you're a new YouTuber, for example, you might need to make a few videos before you get much positive feedback on them. You might need to share the videos you do make with your friends and with your family, so that you can get some feedback on them.
When I'm fully focused and zoomed in, for example by just setting the intention that I'm going to create on YouTube and I'm not going to pay attention to these other platforms, it allows me to really zoom in and laser focus on just doing well on YouTube. And that gives me a huge opportunity to succeed. Just yesterday morning, I was thinking about my live streams and telling myself, well, I need to do something that's viable on Facebook, YouTube and Twitch. I need to give in a way that has potential on Facebook, YouTube and Twitch. And that was sabotaging my YouTube potential, and it was sabotaging my Facebook potential, and my Twitch, because I was essentially performing at less than full capacity on any platform.
All in on one platform
What I found in making my two million online is that performing to your absolute best on one platform, and really focusing on your top platform, will often produce more than a ton of work on other platforms combined. If I had to do it all over again, I'd go all in on YouTube from day one. And I guarantee you, I would have made twenty million if I would have focused in just on YouTube ten years ago. Not into Udemy, not even messed with trying to bring people off of YouTube onto all these other places. If I would have just done a great job on my YouTube channel and just focused on that from the beginning, we'd probably have twenty million online today.
But it doesn't matter, because it's the learning that counts. I've got enough money today. I'm wealthy today. I'm very happy with what I do have. And I've got the learning now, and from that learning I've got teaching. I can see that when you can ask the right questions, a question that is considerate of yourself and your talents and your gifts, not just throwing yourself out there for money, but saying, well, how can I give in a way that's really satisfying and meaningful to me, and to whoever's receiving it, everything changes. And it might, for you, be a specific job you could do online. My wife works online, and she's very satisfied with that, and she makes very consistent money with it. So you don't have to be a YouTuber or a creator. I invite you to let your answer come intuitively, and enjoy the ride.
Thank you for enjoying this ride with me, and thank you for making it to the end. If you want to keep going deeper on all of this, I've pulled a lot of these lessons together in my YouTube Coaching playlist, where I share what has actually worked for me building a channel and a business online.
I'd genuinely love to know your feedback, and I would love to see you on a live stream sometime. If you want to get connected with me and everyone else on this journey, the best way to do that today is to join the Jerry Banfield Family, where we talk through all of this together. I hope this was useful, and I'll see you on the next video.