Pick a Topic You Would Happily Do for Free
If you want to pick the right topic, the right niche for your YouTube channel, I've been on YouTube 12 years now. I have six channels and a lot of great advice I can give you in a very short period of time. The first key thing is to make a channel that you can do indefinitely, one that you would just love to do so much that you would be willing to do it for free.
Let me show you my channels, because I have six different ones on YouTube, all on topics I love. There's my main Jerry Banfield channel for blogs. I have a crypto channel. I have a second channel just for crypto reviews, because the two are different: I like doing reviews on one, and then more general education on the other. I've got a gaming channel, a business channel, which this post comes from, and then a recovery channel for all things related to freedom from addiction, health, sobriety, and so on.
The Mistake of Not Picking a Topic
I made the mistake of not picking a topic when I started my YouTube channel. I started this channel, and I'm certain now that throwing a whole bunch of different kinds of videos onto one channel is a way to totally make a bad experience for yourself. The only exception I'd say is this: if you're brand new on YouTube, you've never done it before, and you have no idea what you want to do, you could just start a channel with your name and put up videos on any kind of topic. Then, when you get some traction on a certain video, or you can be sure you want to make a lot more videos on that topic, you go make a dedicated channel. You need channels where you can put the same kinds of videos up over and over again.
For example, I made the mistake of putting a bunch of my gaming videos up on my main channel, and gaming videos need their own channel. There's a certain audience that wants to watch gaming. The gaming videos and the crypto videos used to be on the same channel, and often the crypto people hated the gaming videos, and the gaming people hated the crypto videos. So it's important to make channels that you can stick with for a long time, that you could grind out a video for, and that you could keep making videos for over the long haul. I try to do videos on these two channels almost every day.
Make Something Other People Actually Want
When you're picking a topic, you also want to do something that other people want to consume. One of the toughest things with gaming is that there are so many gaming channels out there, it's tough sometimes to make a video that people will actually want to watch. The key is to pick topics you really care about. What you don't want to do is try to make a channel just because you think it can make money. If that's what you're doing, you're better off just having one main channel and testing a whole bunch of different things on it. What you really don't want to do is build a channel that's only there to make money, where the sole reason you want to do it is because you think you can get a good paycheck off of it.
If you're just in it for a paycheck, in my experience YouTube is a crappy way to earn a living. And I know this after being a full-time YouTuber, off and on, and all on lately. For years I went on and off of YouTube, and I can tell you it is not a consistent way to make a living for most people. Even for me, I sometimes struggle to make more than a few thousand in a month off of my YouTube channel, doing videos that I really care about and that are not just there to make money.
Why I Stopped Chasing the Money Methods
There are lots of great ways you can make a lot of money on YouTube, but I personally hate selling online courses. I hate doing affiliate marketing. I hate taking sponsorships. I hate having sponsors that I don't really believe in. Many of you are trying to work up to making money through methods you will not find fulfilling and enjoyable, including especially those three I just mentioned.
Selling a course can be very profitable. I've made millions of dollars selling courses. But I hate not just creating everything and having it out there for everybody to watch for free, because the fact is, most people on this planet cannot afford to buy a course from me. Even if it's just a $10 course, many people can't use their credit cards or pay for it. And if it's several hundred dollars, most people on the planet are not going to have access at all. I want my target audience to be everyone who speaks English on planet Earth.
I also hate selling for companies through commissions, because many times they're shady and they don't follow through. They change their affiliate program after you've got everything set up. And I hate taking sponsors that just want any kind of attention, or that aren't something I already use myself for my channel. I've wrecked my experience on YouTube for my audience many different times by doing these things.
Treat It Like Something You're Volunteering For
So the main thing you can do on YouTube is to pick a topic that you essentially feel like you're just volunteering for. It's something you care about so much that you feel somebody needs to make videos about it. That's what I'm doing on my channels. These are all passion channels. I love educating people about crypto. I love reviewing crypto altcoins to help investors make better decisions. I love gaming. I love vlogging. I love my videos for entrepreneurs. And I love helping people with recovery. I'm essentially just giving my time because I love to. I have channels where I love giving, and then I get income that's great some months and not as much other months, and it's a joy. There's nothing I'd rather do.
So I hope that's useful for you if you're wondering what the best topic to pick on YouTube is: pick a topic you really care about and could stick with even if you make no money and get no views. Look at how many videos I've made on YouTube. I can tell you that you're probably not going to get hardly any money or any views from your initial videos, so it's important to pick a topic you care about enough that even if nobody watches, you'll still keep making videos about it. If you want to go deeper on all of this, I've put together my whole approach in my YouTube Coaching playlist, and today the best way to hang out with me, keep learning this together, and build a community around it is to join the Jerry Banfield Family. I would love to get to know you there.
Pick the topic you'd keep showing up for no matter what, and keep making the videos. That's the whole secret, and it's the thing I'm still doing today.