Why I Deleted Everything and Came Back
I'm starting over on YouTube, and here's my exact plan. Now, I've been on YouTube since 2011. I've created 20 YouTube channels, and last year I deleted all 15 of the channels I had at the time. I thought I was leaving YouTube forever. After hundreds of millions of impressions, tens of millions of views on all kinds of different subjects, getting recognized in person, traveling for conferences, I had the life as a YouTuber. I was burned out and I deleted everything. I didn't think I was ever coming back. So when I tell you I'm starting over on YouTube, I actually am. I started, deleted everything. Now I have five new channels for YouTube, and I'm going to show you my exact business plan for all these channels based on what I've learned uploading thousands and thousands of videos on YouTube, how I'm starting exactly from scratch, and my workflow.
In fact, what I've done today is I've dedicated this channel to being Jerry Banfield YouTube coach because I've got a lot of videos. I've got a lot of experience on YouTube, more than the vast majority of YouTubers out there, and I want to give it to you real and raw exactly what I'm doing today. If you want to build your own channels right alongside me, you can join me in Jerry Banfield Family, and I'll walk you through exactly how I'm running this whole rebuild.
My Business Model: Monetizing Through Calls
So let's start off with the bigger business approach and the channel strategy and to avoid burnout, which is really important. So this channel, this is at Jerry Banfield YouTube coach. This channel, the whole purpose of this channel is to teach you what I know about YouTube. I made this video as the, the first video I came back to. And then I'm showing things like how I've been using Google ads and how I research and plan my videos. What I'm going to do soon is put all kinds of videos into a complete YouTube course. And then I'm going to advertise that course on Google ads to bring more YouTubers into the channel.
I'm gathering everything I learn rebuilding these channels into my YouTube Coaching playlist, so you can follow the whole process step by step.
But for now, I need to lay a foundation and content. A new version of my website where the entire call to action is to schedule a call. I see a lot of YouTubers out there and I've made millions of dollars selling online courses and I've had programs and recurring income. To me, the main thing people really need is to talk with me one on one. And that's the main thing I value also is one on one coaching. I don't want your program, your thousand dollar a month program that comes with all this stuff. I want to talk to them, the YouTuber. That's what I want. If you'd like that kind of time with me, you can join Jerry Banfield Family and we'll talk through exactly where your channel is and what I'd do next in your shoes.
So I think one of the best ways to monetize across all of YouTube is to do calls. Because when you get people to watch you and they spend all this time with you, then it's a very clear value proposition like, hey, schedule a call and talk with me. Even if it is just to talk, it also has helped me really get to know my audience. So that's the main business model I'm using across all my channels. Why I made five channels right away is because I know I can't just do one type of content all the time. I can't stand to just do crypto videos, for example.
Now, so I know some of the people on YouTube are all about, you don't matter unless you have a whole bunch of views. And that's not true. Because if you monetize through calls, you can have a relatively small amount of views and make a full time income. That's the approach I'm going. So however, my main channel, so this is the video this channel is going on.
How My Crypto Channel Got Instant Organic Traffic
But my main thing I started back where I've got some traffic immediately is my Jerry Banfield ICP. So this is a crypto channel. And what I'm doing is, what you'll notice, this channel has got immediate organic traffic. So ideally, you do want to find some topic you can get organic traffic from. And if you'll notice, this brand new channel, which was literally the first video for this channel, was March 25th, 2026. And today it's April 8th, 2026. What you'll notice, this channel is nearly monetized already in just a couple of weeks. And all I did, was upload 14 videos. And I made these videos just talking off the top of my head.
And then if you look at the earn, it takes like a week to catch up, but I'm halfway in two weeks, even with the delay five days behind, I'm halfway to having full monetization on YouTube. And on this channel, I get traffic by organic reach. And that happens by videos being shown in the suggested feed. And that there's an already made audience on YouTube that loves videos about Internet Computer Protocol. Like almost anybody could just start making videos about Internet Computer Protocol, and you would have an audience with it. So if I look at the analytics here, you can see 34 000 views, 297 000 organic impressions, average watch time, five minutes.
So one thing I have no intention to ever do again on YouTube is shorts. I tried shorts. I went viral on TikTok and Facebook, and I got some YouTube shorts that got views, but YouTube shorts are just not my kind of traffic. I'm a long format video guy. So you'll notice where exactly I'm getting traffic from. I'm getting traffic from browse features. So these videos are going out to people who already want videos about Internet Computer Protocol. There's such a demand. And I did make a lot of videos before, so people already knew me. But this is a good sign that the YouTube algorithm is so good that if you make videos for a ready made audience, YouTube will crank your videos out immediately to that audience.
If the algorithm is so good today, if you make videos for a specific audience, the audience loves, you will get immediate traffic from the algorithm. Now you notice 13 of my, my results from YouTube search, which is awesome and suggested videos only a little bit from external. So you can see it's I'm getting real YouTube organic traffic here, not something where, some influencer pushed my account or something. And that's how, like I literally just cranked out videos and something people wanted. And it's that simple. And there's, it's not like any one video is really doing that either. If you notice it's just a straight up grind.
So my videos consistently getting like two to 3000 views, maybe 2000 and some views on, on average, this new video, this is what you want to see. Like this video has a very high like ratio. People really love this video, very high, like ratio, ready made audience. And there's nothing like click baby I'm doing either. I'm just making real down to earth, regular videos about internet computer protocol. So this is what I'm doing to immediately get organic traffic. And you do, ideally you want to have some audience on YouTube that you've got ready made organic traffic for, and or you can combine that with YouTube ads.
If you combine that with YouTube ads, then you can get a bunch. You can really funnel, get the YouTube ads to bring in new traffic. And that new traffic can bring in organic traffic. Let me show you what I'm doing. I have another channel called Jerry Banfield, crypto reviews. And what I want to highlight here is the importance of very specifically focusing your YouTube channels to a certain point in the past, I tried to put all my crypto content on one channel, and then I split it off to, to another channel. Then I put it all back on another and that doesn't work. So Jerry Banfield, ICP is just for people who want internet computer protocol, crypto videos.
That's the only audience I'm not going to talk about all these other points, but there's a ton of organic traffic and doing crypto reviews, especially if you watch mine and learn, like, see how I do them is pretty easy to do. At least I think it is because I've done it a lot, but here's another channel I did. I started this channel on the same, around, around the time, but I, I built, I bought a new camera. So the camera I'm using is a Sony FX 30 and one. That's why the picture on this is so beautiful.
The Gear I Use to Look Professional
So for filming your videos, there's two things that well, three areas you really need to do well to look like a professional one is to have a microphone. I have an re 20 microphone with a road caster duo that I plug it into. That's about a thousand dollar mic audio setup, but it makes my audio sound professional. Then I have a $2 000 Sony, FX 30 camera with the F two, eight lens. And then I plugged that into a cam link, 4k and Elgato. Then I have a $2 000 new gaming PC. I bought that tears through any editing or transcript processing and record the videos alive in OBS.
So that's how I'm able to crank out videos really fast. What I, my superpower is, is that I can crank out videos really fast. And when you can do that, then I can do this. So then I go into here. I've, I've only made, I've made five videos on this channel and only I've only made four actual crypto reviews. And what you can see, these are getting organic traffic, but these are not getting just ICP traffic. These are getting people on other cryptos. And then I'm funneling them back over to my ICP channel. Now, if you check the analytics and we see how we got views on this channel, you can see in a little more detail where exactly the views came from, because this is slightly, slightly different.
Now I've already got 500 watch hours with just four actual crypto reviews on here, which is a good sign. So if we, if we look over here in more detail, you can see more on the views and I'm consistently I'm getting views from YouTube search and from suggested videos again on these. And these are often people who are not even watching my ICP channel. So that's a really good sign in the average view duration, actually higher, the click through rates higher. So again, this is another example of the audience wanted the videos and YouTube's putting them out in browse features, suggested videos, and YouTube search is putting them out.
You can see, 81 of impressions from YouTube directly recommending my content, which is the same on the other channel. And this, these are really positive signals to Google. So at this rate in a month or two, I'm going to be making thousands of dollars in ad revenue on this channel and the other crypto channel by itself, strictly from organization. So I'm going to be making thousands of dollars a month in organic traffic. And it only takes me maybe an hour or two a day to film one video for each of these channels. So in an hour to a day and crank out a video on each of these channels, and that's good for thousands of dollars a month in baseline income.
So that's kind of my organic foundation where I know there's already traffic. And I just put videos in a place there's organic. Now, what you'll notice is I don't have to do anything like super difficult or viral. I don't have to research any ideas. Like it's literally, I just go into the comments. I see what kinds of what people are saying.
Why I Now Moderate Comments Strictly
Now I have changed my comment moderation. I used to go into the comments and I would tolerate all kinds of negative comments thinking that it would give my video better algorithm, but it also burned me out and left me with hurt feelings and all the time and made me not want to do my videos anymore. So now when I go into the community and I go look through the comments, I'm very quick to hide all. So I love, and I heart every single comment I liked that's positive like this. And I think it's, it's really important. It's really important to be engaged in the comments and that's because this is what to me successful channels are doing.
And what I do in the comments though, is if someone make, if someone makes a comment that I don't like, I, or even that I don't agree with. And if I, here, if I don't want, I'm trying to look, where's all right, here we go. So what I'm, as soon as I find a comment like this, I just go hide, use it from channel. And even that way, my comments are all supportive or respectfully disagree at least. So then in the comments, the comments are the community of people who love my video. And the people, when you go to hide all the user from channel, they've been shadow banned.
So they only know they've been shadow banned. If they check from another account and can't find their comment, or they wonder why nobody's ever responding to their comments. So what I do now is the very first time, somebody makes a comment that's, nasty. That's, that's, that's starting to make like, Oh, that's ridiculous. This guy's clearly somebody that's supportive and we'll just hide user from channel. So that is, that's all you need to do to make the comment section really nice. And I do tell people, if you think you're hitting on the comments, go to another one of my channels and ask nicely on another channel.
And I'm happy to put you back, but I will not tolerate all. I will not tolerate people coming in my comments and laying all this criticism or, just trying to bring people down or put scams in the comments. I used to do that. And that was a big mistake. So I'm not doing that anymore. My comment section is mine and I'm moderating it very strictly. You're high. All your comments are getting hit in first time. If I don't like them big change, I made this helped me out.
My Gaming Channel: A New Game Every Day
Now I'm also doing a Jerry Banfield gaming channel. So what's cool about this is a significantly different kind of channel. My content than the crypto and the YouTube coaching. And this, this is a different business model because most of the people watch my gaming videos. But this is a channel that's just more for fun. So the idea of this channel is to make gaming fun and to lead by example in gaming, because I love gaming and I figured out a strategy for this channel where what I can do on this channel is play a new video game new to me that I've never played before.
So it could be an old game, but I've never played it. So what I've it's taken me a couple of weeks to look through all I've done thousands and thousands of gaming videos I've done, thousands of hours of live streams on YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, Tik Tok, Twitter even. And I did a live stream for war zone, but I ultimately you generally need videos as your foundational content strategy. And live streams can be, can be good when you've got community, but if you just crank out live streams, you're often not going to grow and you're going to put a ton of effort. You need some kind of video strategy to build your initial viewers.
Then you can live stream to deepen the community. Like when I build these crypto channels up and I get them monetized, then I may do a live stream like once a week to build up with the community. But in the past, I got into doing too many live streams. And when you do too many live streams, you get burnt out. And the live streams don't tend to work as well in the algorithm as videos do, because who's going to watch the two hour war zone live stream compared to watching me try a video game for 10 minutes. So with this gaming channel, the strategy I'm doing here is I want to play a different game every single day.
So 365 days a year, that's 365 videos where I try a game for a minimum of 10 minutes. I can play it longer if I want to, but I got to try the game for at least 10 minutes. That strategy is designed to build a nice organic traffic and to find hidden gems because there are certain games on YouTube. They have a big amount of players, but there's not that many people that create content. I found this before on previous versions of my Jerry Banfield gaming channel, which have since been deleted. And some people re uploaded those videos on other channels. But I found, for example, when I played hearts of iron four, I did a live stream on that.
This is the same idea I dig into in One Video a Day: The Simple YouTube Strategy Nobody Wants to Hear — consistency beats chasing any single viral moment.
And that got thousands of organic views from people who just love hearts of iron and don't have that many hearts of iron creators to watch. Also, I think about longterm, one of the biggest mistakes I made on YouTube, was consistently just thinking short term only thinking, well, what am I going to do to get views today, tomorrow, this week, this month on this gaming channel, I'm thinking what will be awesome 10 years from now. If I started doing it today, what could build a huge community? If I just repeated doing it for 10 years and what would also be sustainable? Like I know I built a huge community on Facebook and a pretty big one on YouTube do at various points with different games.
For example, league of legends. I was one of the first league of legends, YouTubers, and I was one of the top league of legends, YouTubers in 2016. And I did not like playing the game. So I quit playing the game and I quit gaming altogether. But anytime I'd go live, I'd get hundreds of concurrent viewers, thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of views on my live streams. So I know that for me streaming the same game over and over again is not sustainable, but what's good for me is to try a new game. That's hard. And I want to lead by example, encourage gamers to play more games.
So my content strategy is I do. I play a new game every single day. That guarantees my content stays fresh because people will get bored watching war zone over and over again. And then you can see if I think it's fun or not. And then I picture 10 years from now, having 3 652 different videos and me playing different games. How incredible would that be? How much organic traffic would I get? How big would my live streams get, et cetera. So what you can see I'm building on YouTube is I'm building a ton of different ways to win. I can win off gaming videos, getting organic traffic, crypto videos with organic traffic.
I can advertise YouTube videos. And I, I tried advertising this video, but it didn't work that well in ads. So what seems to me to be the ideal ad strategy is to run a short little in feed ad, or I'm going to test the other one in stream ads. But you can see on this channel, I will share my journey as I go along testing these different ad formats. So this video shows how I set up ads for that gaming video. And you're usually not going to build a brand new channel from scratch. In my experience, the, what I showed you on my crypto reviews channel, this is unusual.
Just starting out and getting immediate organic traffic on every video. That's unusual. Most things you are going to need to build from scratch. Like on this ICP channel, every single video, thousands of views straight from scratch. That's not normal. What's normal is like this YouTube coach channel. This one, I tried to advertise this, but it got limited because of my clickbait title. And I didn't actually run any ads. So these are all organic views on this video too. I've went back and forth on how long I want videos to be. And it seems that doing videos, people can finish and then watch another video. YouTube seems to like that better.
And it seems to be more sustainable. So right now I'm going for videos that are like 10 to 30 minutes long. And then what I'm going to do is put multiple videos into entire courses.
The Self-Help Channel and My Master Brand
The last channel I'll show you here is my new Jerry Banfield channel. This is going to rebrand to Jerry Banfield coach at some point, but I took the handle from my other one right now. It's Jerry Banfield and it's at Jerry Banfield life. Now I'm this channel. I originally was thinking about doing a vlog channel, but vlog channels are not very sustainable over the long term because people get bored with you. They're, they're not going to care about your day to day existence every day. So this is my now master brand self help personal development channel, where I'm going to put courses up on dating weight, loss, personal transformation, sobriety, energy career.
I can put courses up on whatever I want, as long as there are broadly general relevant subjects. So I was thinking about combining like YouTube videos, but this, this channel putting videos up that are technical about YouTube, it does not go very well with more of a broad personal coaching brand. So you can see now I have a very well rounded presence on YouTube. This is a very broad audience channel where this channel could reach people all over the world on all kinds of different subjects. Whereas these other channels are pretty niche. Like the YouTube coach is very specific. So, the gaming, the gaming is only for gamers and then two crypto channels.
But the advantage is I have a well rounded business now that any of these channels could go off and make full time income by itself. And then all these channels can feed each other. And if I get fellow content creators and I can create ads aimed very specifically at you, because I know how to find, I know what websites, like if you're using vid IQ or two buddy or things like that, I can target you in Google ads and then send you to this channel in ads. So this is a very nice channel to build with ads. This is a nice channel where I can test out different ads, like for weight loss or for dating, and then send them to a YouTube course playlist where they might watch 10 different videos.
And then if they watch 10 different videos, they're going to see more videos organically going forward. Then, then the crypto channels can both funnel people over to all the other ones. Like, Hey, if you enjoyed this, get, check out my gaming channel. If you are a gamer, check out this. If you want to see behind the scenes in my daily life and my coaching. And if you're a YouTuber, check out this channel, because I noticed in my crypto channel, my ICP channel, I have YouTubers that follow me. This way I'm well rounded. I'm not burnt out. And crypto is very, very seasonal. So sometimes crypto will pump and go crazy and all my view videos will go off.
And other times like right now, crypto isn't kind of a down cycle. So these are actually down cycle views here. If we were in an up cycle, these videos would be getting five or 10 times as many views and printing thousands and thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue and five, five to $10 000 a month and calls off my website. So when crypto goes off, these channels are crazy profitable. But when crypto, which is most of the time often for like three years, then these channels don't make much money, but you need to have them in position and ready for the up season.
So these are like up seasons, income spike channels and consistent regular viewership for people who hold the coins that want a video about it every day. Then the gaming channel is a fun channel. I need to have some fun that doesn't have to make money or anything. It's just there for my own fun. And then this personal brand channel could be a very consistent channel that is feels like I'm fulfilling my life's purpose with important topics. I got really burnt out doing crypto before feeling like just talking about ICP and doing crypto reviews every day wasn't really meaningful that I wasn't really doing something valuable that all I was doing is just grinding out content to make money.
Well, this channel is here for really useful, meaningful work, helping people lose weight, change their diet, have a successful dating life relationships. When I'm doing videos like that, I feel like I'm doing a lot of work. I'm really accomplishing my purpose on this planet and I'm really making a difference. Thus, this is the channel like this and the gaming are real passion channels. And then I need this YouTube coach channel too, because I see so many people who know much less about YouTube than I do giving what I think is bad advice about YouTube, telling people to make these viral clickbait videos and to always think very broad and try and get as many views as possible, impress people.
And I'm like, I just want to give people the realest, best, best day to day information about YouTube right now. And that's what's happening. And I don't want to try and get anybody to pay for a course or some program. It's like, look, if you want help, you can go to my website and just talk with me and show me your channel. And I'll look at the analytics and I'll listen to what you're doing. So this to me is like an accountability channel. Like I need to just post videos on this channel just to share about what I'm doing. And this channel can end up being a case study of like, Hey, I deleted everything on YouTube.
I started over, and each video each day on this channel will document the process as I build five YouTube channels up into what I imagine will be tens of thousands of dollars a month off YouTube with thousands of dollars a month in what you'd call passive income from ads. And then we're with this channel. This is a great channel for sponsorships. This channel, probably not as much for sponsorships, but this could drive a lot of calls. This channel could drive a lot of calls. All these channels could have good ad revenue. The gaming channel is a great channel for, sponsorships where I could start getting paid hundreds of dollars to play a new game for 10 minutes.
These channels, this one's not good for sponsorships since it's only an ICP channel. And this one's not good for sponsorships either, but both of these channels are really good for ad revenue and paid calls, especially in high times. So this, you'll notice. If you want help mapping out which channels and business systems actually fit your situation, you can bring it to Jerry Banfield Family and we'll plan it out together for your own setup.
Why I'm Focusing Only on YouTube
I also haven't mentioned other platforms. There's no links to Instagram or Tik TOK or Twitch or Facebook. What I'm doing big this time is I'm only focusing on YouTube. If I could isolate one mistake, one area where I wasted so much of my time over the last decade, it was always bringing people off of YouTube and then focusing off of YouTube. YouTube to me seems to be the go to content platform. It has the, you did as Google behind it with AI and the future. Google is pulling information and recommending YouTube videos in its AI search. I've seen chats. You BT recommend the videos and it's search as well.
So to me, YouTube, YouTube is the ideal content platform in the future. It's definitely not Twitch is definitely not Facebook. I know a lot of people are on Instagram, but Instagram does not do well for long videos. And it does very well for, if you can run Instagram ads, but they don't have nearly as much data and as much organic traffic potentials. I see that YouTube has YouTube is ideal for education, for learning and for building a full time business. And the beautiful thing is the more I get some organic traffic and the more I match, that with paid traffic, the more money I get coming in from my business, I can afford to spend more on ads.
And then I can really do a flywheel where I have a month where I make like $20 000 combined from ad revenue and sponsorships and paid calls. Then I can afford to invest, 5 000 in ads for the next month and then build up my channels like that. I could try advertising one of the games if I want to, I can't advertise the crypto, but I can make sure every YouTuber has seen, this channel, I could crank out heavy ads for things like, my weight loss courses and dating courses. I could build the hell out of these channels. I could use the organic traffic from crypto and the money from crypto to build these other channels up.
And then I've got a really well rounded, very satisfying for me as a creator experience on YouTube. So I've made this video to show a, to give the best information you've seen before about YouTube and that it's extremely current. If you want to see, see my exact workflow right now for Google ads, watch the video, how I use Google ads to grow my YouTube channel. If you want to see my process for researching and planning YouTube videos, which is really cool. I actually use chat GPT and Gemini both to rapidly speed up my videos. This shows you the details how I crank videos like this out.
I deleted a billion views in 15 YouTube channels. You know about this channel. If you're in the middle of dating, you might want to watch some of my dating videos and see where I'm at with that right now. If you love games, like you see how this one video just got you into a whole ecosystem and all of its branded Jerry Banfield. So if you see this Jerry Banfield channel, Jerry Banfield Gaming, Jerry Banfield ICP, Jerry Banfield Crypto Reviews, Jerry Banfield YouTube Coach, my branding is consistent across all my channels. So that Jerry Banfield YouTube Coach pushes my branding for all my other channels. So I hope this video is leading by example and I'm responding and I'm reading all the comments on all my channels and I'll keep doing that as long as I can would love to have any questions or see your feedback.