If you want to be a content creator, you need to create no matter what. Amateurs wait for inspiration, but I'm a professional. Some of you have asked about this, because I did some of these crying videos on my @JerryBanfield channel — and I'm grateful we just hit 500 subscribers there. I did these videos where I met this woman. I was so excited. I was crying. I was feeling great. And then it started to go downhill and it got bad and I was miserable. I sent messages I shouldn't have sent. And some of you have asked — in the Jerry Banfield Family, which is the only place I read comments, the perfect place to join if you're a content creator to have a two-way relationship with me, and in my opinion the best opportunity for mentorship in the content creator space — how do you keep doing these videos when you feel so bad?
Because I'm a professional. I don't care how I feel. I go to work. If you're a professional at something — whether that's a professional football player, a professional public speaker, an author, or in my case a YouTuber — you don't care how you feel. You go to work. These videos are me going to work. A lot of content creators who are amateurs think, well, I've got to wait for inspiration, and if I'm not feeling inspired, it means I shouldn't do anything. Do you think some of these football players feel inspired when they're ready to go out on the field and play? Some of them probably feel awful beforehand — injured, tired, sick — and they get out on the field and play anyway. That's what being a professional means to me: you do it no matter how you feel. Yet with content creation, for some reason, we think we need to be in this perfect euphoria zone to create.
My Best Content Came on My Worst Days
I've noticed sometimes the best content I create is when I feel bad. There was the day I recorded the vlog called The Queen Goes Cold. I was so miserable that day — honestly, that's the lowest, the worst I've felt in a long time. And those two vlogs came out of it. I was so excited about this woman, and I just didn't play the dating game. I don't know how you can be a YouTuber and not tell her about your videos, but she probably shouldn't have watched my videos. Even though she's a content creator herself, she decided — based on my videos and on me just wanting to see her and not giving her space — that we weren't right for each other. It was miserable unwinding all of that, but at the same time, it made for some great material. This whole story with this woman is on my channel.
If you look at some of my older videos, before I started doing these vlogs, sometimes people weren't that interested in them. Then I started this whole series talking about dating, and it made things more interesting. Some of these — The Queen Goes Cold, this story about the woman I was dating — I was miserable making them, and yet they pulled two to three times as many views, and the watch time on some of these videos is nuts. One of them had something like a 15-minute average watch time. So some of the days I felt horrible helped me create my best content.
Your Job Is to Add Numbers to the Spreadsheet
Today, I was sitting around after I played tennis and took the kids over to their mom's house, and I thought, I'm not really in the mood to create. These are the thoughts that come up. And the answer is: it doesn't matter whether you're in the mood or not. This is your job. Your job is to add numbers to the spreadsheet. That's what it is being a content creator. This is your publishing schedule — six long videos a day — and I'm going to try to crank it up to do six plus shorts a day too. I'm still figuring that out; I tested that workflow before.
Here's where the numbers stand: I've published 418 videos since May. That's 418 videos in the last 79 days — 5.3 videos a day, 75 minutes of content a day, 99 hours of content total, and it'll be a hundred hours after today. I'm averaging over an hour of content a day. Some of those days I felt miserable and didn't want to create. But if you want to be a content creator, you've got to step up every single day, drop all the excuses, and actually use your bad feelings to motivate additional creation. Sometimes the days I felt bad have inspired me to create in a way that people appreciate and relate to a lot more than when I'm having a great day and everything's going awesome. Sometimes people can't relate to that stuff as much.
As a content creator, if you want to be successful, you've got to have such a strong inner drive and discipline that you show up every day. Now, do I have to upload videos every single day, strictly, without ever missing one? No. What I try to do is get videos scheduled. Ideally, I'd like to get them scheduled a week or more in advance so that I could take a week-long trip. I'd still film vlog videos on the trip, but I want my videos scheduled so I can take a few days off to travel, or handle a special occasion or something unexpected that comes up, and just keep cranking out content.
Quality Is Subjective. Quantity Is Not.
What I've found in uploading 10,000-plus videos online is that if you want views, it's just numbers. Quality is subjective, but quantity is not. This Gary Vee video really got me lately — he said, "I published 378 pieces of content yesterday." That's content creation. Now, I'm doing all my videos myself, using AI to help speed up various processes. But technically, I publish six videos a day, I publish a blog post every day, and I publish them out on X. So you're looking at probably close to 20 pieces of content a day that I post myself. And I don't even bother spreading thin beyond that — it's better to just pick one platform, your best platform, and dominate it until you've got people who can help with other platforms. Then you can potentially expand to others when you can afford to pay people to outsource that, so you don't have to do it all yourself.
Create Alongside Other Creators
If you want the best experience as a content creator, though, one of the best things you can do is be a part of a community of other people creating. I've got YouTubers and people from across all my channels in my brand-new Jerry Banfield Family, which I created in the last month. People there love watching the vlogs, my dating videos, my gaming videos, my YouTube coaching, and my crypto videos. So I invite you, if you want to be a part of that community, to join the Jerry Banfield Family. You can ask me questions. You can share your YouTube channel and I'll review it — you can ask me to take a look and film an entire video going over your YouTube channel. You can ask me to collaborate, and if you have questions, we could film a video together. You can build a two-way relationship with me. And if you want to do better as a content creator, what you really need is someone who's been there and done that.
I've done over 10,000 videos online, and I've gotten over a billion impressions on everything I've created. I've deleted everything. I've been so burned out. I beat MrBeast every year until 2016, which is when he passed me — I started in 2011. So I've got deep experience on YouTube, and even starting fresh, I've gotten over half a million views organically in the last four months. If you want more of what I've learned about growing a channel, you can watch my YouTube Coaching playlist. I'm a fantastic person to talk to about YouTube.