My friends, if you're a content creator, a YouTuber, a Twitch streamer, and you want to be more productive, you want to get more videos out there faster and stop wasting your time, you'll love to see the way I track my videos and my live streams and the exact system I use to produce so much in such a short period of time. I'm a full-time YouTuber. I have five channels, and I'm a Twitch streamer. I stream about three hours a day on Twitch playing Gods Unchained, which is a crypto NFT customizable card game. And then, on average, I upload three YouTube videos a day. This rarely takes me longer than about five hours in a single day. So this means I'm live for about three hours. In the other two hours, I crank out and upload two videos plus a recording of my live stream, including thumbnails, titles, and all of that.
Yes, my mind is obsessed with constantly coming up with title and thumbnail ideas for my channels, and I've got several different channels here. The key I've found over the years to being successful, especially as a content creator, but in any aspect of life, is to track it.
Track everything, every day
I have a scale every morning that I use to track my weight, which helps me stay in shape and never go back to being fat again. After being overweight most of my life, I'm tired of that, and my scale keeps me accountable. I can see exactly how much I weigh. I go to AA meetings, Alcoholics Anonymous, most days during the week to track my sobriety and to be accountable to other people. And for my work, I have a spreadsheet where I put down exactly what I do, and then I average this out.
This spreadsheet adds up and averages everything I'm doing. So you can see that in the last month I've been live about 100 hours and I put up about 112 videos. The number one mistake I see content creators make is doing it all on your own, not having anyone experienced who actually talks to you and looks at what you're doing. In my experience, the best way to fix that today is to stop working in isolation and get around other creators who are doing the same thing. If you'd like to work with me on this and see the exact system I use, the best way is to join the Jerry Banfield Family community, where I share the tracking spreadsheet and everything else I've learned.
My daily live stream on Twitch
What I do every day is I go live on my Twitch. I'm grateful I finally found a game on Twitch that I love playing and that people love watching. I just started playing this game again after taking a few months off. So if you look back to last month and the month before, I barely was even streaming on Twitch. I finally figured out exactly what I want to do with myself and what other people want to watch, and I've committed to a consistent time. I'm putting in a lot of time. I stream at the same time if I can, as many days a week as I can. And if I can't, well, I just stream whenever I can that day. So I'm usually live between about 9 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. during the weekdays, and then I try and hit that time on the weekends or in the afternoon as well.
So I do my live stream on Twitch playing Gods Unchained. Then I have a new gaming channel I just made a few months ago, and I record that entire live stream and upload it. The secret is that I actually start out each live stream by looking at the deck I'm playing that day. Gods Unchained is kind of like Magic: The Gathering or Hearthstone, and I've seen what other YouTubers are doing for those games. So I make the beginning of the video very watchable and very clickable, and a few people stick around and watch the whole thing. My average watch time is 10 plus minutes. It only takes me about five minutes to upload my live stream to YouTube, and yet I'm getting followers consistently going back and forth. People from YouTube come over and follow on Twitch.
Find synergy across platforms
If you really want to be successful as a content creator, you need to find a synergy among the different platforms. I have tested every different thing you could imagine in the last 12 years as a content creator. If you want to live stream, Twitch is the only place to stream. And the best place to create content is on YouTube, and the main thing to create on YouTube is long-form videos. Therefore, if you want to be a Twitch streamer and a YouTuber, stream on Twitch and pick a YouTube channel that you can upload all your Twitch streams to.
However, if I just did Gods Unchained and streaming on Twitch, this actually costs me more money by the time I buy the cards, give away gods, and so on. This is purely a loss. So I'm grateful I'm able to make thousands a month on a new crypto channel. I'll do a video soon showing my exact income from YouTube and my other income. But long story short, this crypto channel pays the bills. If you want to be a content creator, you do need to figure out something you're going to create that pays the bills, that you can create relatively quickly. These crypto videos don't take me that long to create. A lot of these crypto videos, I can make a 20-minute video like this in about an hour or so of work time.
My studio setup and why I don't edit
Up in the studio here I've got a very efficient setup with six monitors and two different computers, a streaming one and a gaming one. The gaming and recording is on those two, and I'm recording this on my other PC. I've got my setup very efficient, and the key for me is that I don't edit most of my videos. I'm able to achieve that by, well, setting my standards a little bit lower, which saves a ton of time, and by practice. I've done over 10,000 videos and live streams in the last 12 years. I'm practiced at talking with no script, just from the heart, because if you actually know this stuff, if your brain is already used to it, you can just say it. A script is for people who either don't really know things, or who aren't confident about what they do know, or who are into perfectionism.
Now, some of you would argue that a script and doing very edited videos is more considerate of your viewer's time. What I've found as a content creator is that it's more important, generally, to just grind out content consistently, ideally every day. If you really want something to grow, you want to put something out almost every day.
Segment your content by channel
I have five YouTube channels. On this old one, I made the mistake of constantly putting out videos on every topic on one channel, and that absolutely doesn't work because of the low click-through rate and the low watch time, which kills any recommendations you're going to get out of YouTube. What does work is carefully segmenting your content. So if I put crypto videos on my crypto channel, gaming videos on my gaming channel, business videos on my business channel, and recovery videos on my recovery channel, that works great for the algorithm. I generally get a video out every day on my crypto channel and every day on my gaming channel, and then I aim to get out a few a week on my business and recovery channels.
These are essentially bonus channels for me, where I can feel the joy of sharing my knowledge on how to be a content creator and entrepreneur online, and where I can share my knowledge about things like sobriety, health, and recovery on my recovery channel. You could argue that right now the crypto channel pays all the bills and these three I just do for fun at this point. However, the longer I keep grinding all these channels out, the more people from the crypto channel go over to the other ones, people from the other ones find the crypto channel, and it all feeds on itself. Someday, perhaps relatively soon, the crypto channel will have a hundred thousand subs and all these other channels will have thousands of subs and be monetized, and I won't have to do any more work. I just keep doing four or five hours a day of work, and I keep doing my spreadsheet.
Why long-form and live wins
I've done so much research, and to me this is the most efficient creative format. The live stream is the highest quality of what I create. You can come hang out on Twitch, which is just Jerry Banfield. I'm generally going to be doing a lot of work on my crypto channel, and I'll answer as many questions as I can. I give away crypto, I'm playing a video game, we're having fun, and we have a great community. For me, I love watching people live whenever I can. Then the videos allow me to get access to the YouTube algorithm, which is the best algorithm in the world for bringing high-quality, relevant traffic.
I've tried TikTok. I've gone viral on TikTok, I've got millions of views, I've got tens of thousands of followers relatively easily, and it sucks. They're worthless. What you really need, if you want to be successful as a content creator, is to make a meaningful connection with someone, and usually you need to do that in long-form videos. In most cases, you need five minutes to an hour of somebody's time to make a meaningful connection. That's why often starting a new channel can be a bit daunting, but if you have several channels and you live stream, you can bring people from one channel to another, from your live stream to your other channels, and then you can grow and build relationships with people over time. If you want to be a YouTuber and/or a Twitch streamer, this is the absolute best way to do it.
I love what I do. I'm able to crank out thumbnails really fast. If you get into the upper echelons of YouTube, like MrBeast, at his level he's paying other people to do his thumbnails, to research the thumbnails, to film the video topics. He has a huge staff that helps with everything under his guidance and direction. Well, most of you are going to be working by yourself, and I have optimized my system for doing it by yourself. I've optimized a system where I have no video editors that I pay and no graphic designers that I pay. If you want to do this as a YouTuber or a Twitch streamer, you really need at least five hours a day, seven days a week. And then you need to make your time worth it.
Why I Don't Edit or Script My Videos
If you're wondering how my videos can be pretty good quality when I don't edit them and I don't script anything beforehand, here's the honest answer: I literally just get the idea for a topic in my head, bring up whatever I need in the background, and start talking. Then I upload it straight from there. Some of these I've taken 10 or 20 minutes to put together a little presentation in the background, because sometimes that can greatly enhance the quality of what I'm showing you. But for something like entering into a spreadsheet, it's really just about showing up consistently and loving what I do. I'm genuinely grateful that I'm able to be so efficient every single day.
Part of that efficiency comes from what I do in the rest of my life. When I've got five hours here to crank these live streams and videos out, that requires me to have high energy. It requires me to be in good health. It requires me to be in a good emotional state. I can't do a good live stream or make good videos if my heart is closed or my mind is all screwed up. There's a lot of pressure being a content creator, because whatever I'm going to give you is based on where I'm at. The crypto channel has just done great, and these are all organic views. I don't run any paid ads. All I do is share my videos on Twitter, on a new Twitter account I made, and on my Facebook page. Almost all the traffic comes in straight from YouTube organic, from the browse features and from search.
How I Take Care of Myself Off Camera
I'm able to do this because I take great care of myself the rest of the day when I'm not on camera. I'm hanging out with my family. I'm cleaning up around the house. I'm at yoga about five days a week, an hour each time. I go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting for an hour. I spend about an hour every day with my mom, who lives across the street, and a few hours every day with the family. I eat a mostly whole plant vegan diet, mostly in the morning and around lunchtime after I get up. I get eight to nine hours in bed every night, with about seven to eight hours of actual sleep, because I go to bed and then rest and meditate. I'm in bed around 10 p.m. most nights and up at 7 a.m.
I'm not out here grinding like some of the YouTubers and content creators I see burning themselves out, working a job and cranking videos out on top of it. I'm not doing that. In my experience, keeping everything balanced in my life is exactly what lets me keep producing. And I keep track of what I put out right here, because I've tested it. I've tested trying to create fewer things that are higher quality, and for most of us it just doesn't work. Most of us simply need to grind.
Grind First, Hire Help Later
If I grind enough to get my YouTube channel making tens of thousands of dollars a month, which I've done in the past on this channel, back when I was teaching courses, and originally on crypto here, then I can afford to pay a video editor to go through and clean everything up. I could pay somebody to do a whole bunch of crypto research for me and then just read a presentation. Sure, I may consider taking the quality of my videos up one day. But I don't want to do that until I have way, way more money than I need to make it happen.
What I've done in the past is I've been too quick to hire video editors. I was making tens of thousands a month live streaming on Facebook, and I did hire. The problem was that by the time I hired a video editor, told him what I wanted, and trained him to edit the videos, in a lot of cases I could have just clipped it and done the work myself. So if you're a content creator, in my experience you realistically need to plan on doing everything yourself. That can seem like a daunting task, but what I've found is all I needed to do was learn a few key skills.
The Equipment and Workflow That Keep Me Fast
I use Adobe Photoshop to make some of these thumbnails. The thumbnail I made yesterday is a good enough thumbnail. I've got a green screen right behind me in my studio, and I keep a whole list of all the equipment I use. The main place you do want to invest money as a creator is on equipment that makes your workflow faster. This camera is a Canon XA11 that I got used for a thousand dollars, and the picture quality is very nice. I plug it into a Cam Link 4K into my computer and it looks great. Then I use OBS to record everything, and I have a Stream Deck.
When I first started as a YouTuber, I was on a laptop with a crappy camera and a crappy mic, and my filming process was really slow. I could crank out a video about like I do today, but then it took so long to take my microphone audio, put it in with the camera, render the video, and edit it. My computer was slow, and I hated that it took 10 minutes to film a video and about an hour to upload it. Now it takes me about 20 minutes to film a 20 minute video. I hit record to start, talk, hit record again, and immediately upload. That is what allows me to do so much in such a short period of time.
Yes, sometimes I foul up the very beginning of a video. But I've gotten to a place where either the video is useful and helpful to somebody or it's not. Don't worry so much about whether you got every word right. If you're Mr. Beast trying to get 100 million views, sure, you should probably scrutinize every single frame to make the video as good as it can be. But most of you are never going to get there, and that's fine. Mr. Beast grinded like crazy on YouTube until he was making enough money and had a big enough following to pay all those people to optimize every single minute of his videos. I watched a lot of his earlier videos, and they were as bad as some of my early videos. This workflow is ideal for getting to a place where, if you do make a ton of money and get a ton of followers, you can always pay for help. But I'd prefer to never have to pay for help and to just be able to do everything with the workflow I've got.
Why a Mentor Beats Figuring It Out Alone
The main thing with content creation is that people just get used to and comfortable watching the same people over and over again. That's why I've got these other channels. If you found me on my crypto channel and you're also a content creator, you'd probably rather listen to me talk about creating than somebody else. If you've been watching my gaming videos and you're also into crypto or recovery, you automatically have a much higher chance of wanting to hear me on those subjects, just because I'm familiar.
If you're brand new at this, one of the worst things you can do is try to watch all these videos and figure it all out for free. That's exactly why a mentor is so helpful. If you want to be successful in something, get somebody who has been in it and done the very thing you think would be amazing to achieve. The best way to do that with me today is to join my community, where you can drop all your questions and I can give you answers that took me a lot of time and energy to figure out, like what's the best camera to use. Come work with me directly over at the Jerry Banfield Family.
I love helping creators, and I've helped a lot of creators be successful over the years. Joe Paris has done coaching with me and had a bunch of video calls with me. I was talking to him before he set his crypto channel up, and I helped him get the idea, follow through, and stay accountable on getting it going. I hang out with other successful content creators and YouTubers, and that community is where I can pass all of that along. I'm a full time YouTuber and Twitch streamer, and I make great money. At this rate I should easily earn about $100,000 this year. Last year was kind of rough. I only made $30,000, did a lot of trial and error, and got demonetized on Facebook while I was making $10,000 a month. It was a rough year as a creator, but we're right back in the game this year, and if anything I expect to see new all time highs with my income over the next couple of years.
While I know all of this may look amazing to you, it's just normal to me, because I've been doing it so long. If you want to go deeper on all of this, you can watch my YouTube Coaching playlist and check out those other channels too. So whether you're a YouTuber, a Twitch streamer, or any kind of content creator online, I hope this has been helpful for you. I would truly love to get to know you better and see what you go on to build.