The YouTube coaching business rewards a huge level of dishonesty, and it makes it really difficult to get honest advice from someone who actually knows what they're talking about. Instead, if you just tell people whatever you think they want to hear, take the most clickbait, sensational approach, and pay for as much traffic as possible to position yourself as an authority — then sell a course that gives people information that's often not even as good as what they could find for free — you can make a whole bunch of money.
I was in this business myself for the first half of 2016 and the years before that. Some of the people who are teaching you on YouTube right now took my YouTube course back in 2015 and 2016 on Udemy and watched my videos teaching all this stuff. Meanwhile, you're sitting there with 10 or 20 views on your videos, and that gets at the environment that is the problem on YouTube.
Why Someone on YouTube Since 2011 Has a Tiny Coaching Channel
You might wonder: why does somebody who has been on YouTube since 2011 have a tiny YouTube coaching channel? I deleted all my channels, across every platform. I've created more than twenty YouTube channels. I had a Facebook page with millions of followers, a TikTok with millions of views, an Instagram — and I deleted all of that stuff last year, because I got tired of the dishonesty consistently winning across almost every single part of content creation. I got tired of seeing that if I really wanted to reach the top, I needed to lie better. I needed to make big promises like other people and sell a YouTube course with exaggerated claims promising, oh, this will fix your channel.
I can't stand most of the YouTube videos I see that are supposedly out there trying to help people become better YouTube creators. Because of my experience on YouTube, I've come to believe that almost everyone in that space is selling you useless crap. In many cases, they don't even know enough to teach you anything better than to make the most sensational crap possible — which is generally junk — or to try to niche yourself down into being an authority and then authority-signal as much as possible, which is inauthentic and will burn you out.
My Satirical Strategy: Get 12 Views Fast
Meanwhile, I thought it would be kind of satire to put up a thumbnail saying you can get 12 views fast. The guaranteed strategy to do that? Go around in person and just ask twelve people to watch your video. Hell, maybe even have them get their phone out and watch the video right there. Look, you can just ask people you know. Text your friends. That's what I did to get my first twelve views — I literally texted my video to my friends, and that's what worked for me when I started out on YouTube.
I've been wondering how I want to help people with YouTube, and in my experience, I have the best help offer anywhere for YouTube, which is that I will actually talk with you once a week. I believe that's better than what anyone else is offering — more experience, for a lower cost, with a better actual deliverable than anybody else doing YouTube coaching. I know because I've looked and I've seen. Nobody would be crazy enough with my experience to charge what I do — I probably should charge thousands of dollars a month to talk with me once a week — but I just made a new Skool community, and I want to get into helping as many people as possible.
The big challenge for me has been the gap between the amount of experience I've had with YouTube and how small my YouTube coaching channel is compared to that experience. Even after I deleted everything, people kept telling me how good I am at this — I was literally coaching them on doing their channels after I deleted everything. So I thought, all right, this is what I'm good at.
Lying Is a Shortcut to Views and Money
But it's a frustrating environment, because right now, if you lie, say what you're supposed to say, and are dishonest, it's just a shortcut to getting more views and more money. And this is what you really need to know about YouTube: if you really want the most views and the most money, generally what people are doing to get there is saying anything they need to say to get clicks and packaging the video with anything at all — and the messages are generally junk.
I'm hesitant to watch a video with over 100,000 views on it today, because I automatically assume it's junk in most cases. Most of the consumption on YouTube is junk content — just like most of the eating people do is junk, most of the TV people watch is junk, and most of the books people read are junk. What I mean by junk is that it wastes your time, it doesn't nourish you, and it makes your life worse.
Now, I play video games. I'm not saying you shouldn't have any fun, or that everything you do should be perfectly optimized to achieve some result. I'm not saying that. And yes, there's nothing wrong with watching a Mr. Beast video and laughing as he gets people to do anything for money, all the while selling chocolate bars that don't seem much different from what was already on the market, or shilling some sponsor's ad in the middle of the video — that's fine. At the same time, does watching a Mr. Beast video really help me with some acute thing in my life, like dating or making money or health? No, it doesn't. If anything, it often leaves you feeling worse afterwards. I've noticed that when I watch Mr. Beast videos, I often feel worse afterwards, and I think, what the hell happened?
Well, that's why I deleted everything — I got tired of this BS system that promotes the most sensational crap you can imagine without even considering whether it's actually good for people to watch. Inauthentic content that cuts out a lot of the humanity and makes things into the most extreme, craziest examples you can think of. Which, again, makes sense a little bit. But does it make sense for that to be the majority of the content you're watching?
The View-Count Trap
So on YouTube, I think I might start running Google ads, because in the YouTube coaching business, if you're just trying to make videos and get organic traffic, my organic traffic is not going anywhere on my YouTube coaching channel. I made my last video with fantastic information — in my opinion, better than what almost anybody else is teaching — and it's buried. There's almost no hope for it most of the time. In it, I talked about how I got 1.2 million organic impressions on brand new channels. But because I'm not authority-signaling people, and because a lot of the people seeing it in the feed haven't seen my videos before, YouTube did its job and put it out to 625 people. People see my content, look at the views on it, and assume it sucks and that I don't know what I'm talking about.
And that's the trap: when you see people's content and assume that because they have a lot of views, they know what they're talking about. You should dig deeper into what exactly it is they know about.
Crypto Is the Exact Same Environment
Crypto is the exact same environment. In crypto, the way I see it, the truth is extremely simple: there's Internet Computer Protocol, which I've come to believe is the one real thing in crypto with the best technology, and almost anything else is useless. And naturally, hardly anybody talks about it, because there's a ton of money to be made in lying, cheating, being dishonest, and ripping people off with all these other coins that I consider fundamentally worthless. You create one, you pretend it's great, you get people to buy it, and you dump on them. Whereas if you just talked about the best technology in crypto — technology that could change the world — there's not a bunch of money to be made in that. So almost nobody creating content prioritizes what's good for the people they're talking to over their own personal profits.
It's the same thing in the YouTube coaching niche. I see person after person, channel after channel, and I could tell you how some of them built their channels up: by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on coaching, spending a whole bunch of money to get themselves on podcasts, paying anybody they could to talk about them, and then spending millions of dollars on YouTube ads, Instagram ads, TikTok ads, and Facebook ads to get all that traffic to their channel. And then they sell a course that basically tells you to do the same crap they're doing. But you probably don't have the millions of dollars to spend up front to get all that attention, to authority-signal, and to get that initial organic-seeming traffic. And then you would also have to build some exploitative course that sells somebody basically worthless information you could easily get out of AI these days. That's the YouTube coaching niche: one person after another offering what I've found to be a fundamentally useless program, because the truth is simple.
The Two Paths — and the Funnel Waiting at the End
Let me explain that simple truth about all you need to do on YouTube, if I haven't already. First, if you're willing to do anything to get views, you need to make the most sensational content possible — the biggest promises, the most outrageous things you can come up with. But most of you are not going to be able to do that, because you don't know enough about YouTube to pull it off, and the YouTube coaching niche is one of the worst niches to even try it in. There are other places where you can try to make the most sensational content, and there you might have a chance.
Then there's the approach of trying to be an authority in something, which is much easier. You can just try to be an authority, prove how smart you are, show off your credentials — this certification or that license — and try to signal to people why they should listen to you. But then you're going to need to sell them on something, often a course, and then you're always going to need to withhold your best information. Then you get sucked into saying the same basic thing every day, which makes your content boring and makes it hard for people to stick with you over time. The only way you can sustain that is constant flywheel marketing, often paid traffic, pushing more and more people into your funnel all the time — because you usually can't keep people in your funnel when you're not giving them that much useful information. And the ones you do keep get suckered into paying more and more money. First you pay a few hundred for the course — or twenty for this other course — then you get upsold to the community, then you get upsold to group calls, and then you get upsold finally to the person themselves, where you might be paying thousands, if not tens of thousands, just to talk to them. And at the top of all that, they'll be telling you the same basic stuff I'm telling you right now for free — and that other people are telling you for free, too.
The videos that actually help can be difficult to find, because of all the junk, all the authority signaling, and all the people who are essentially zombies just running on autopilot. A lot of these channels put out this crap all the time: the YouTube algorithm changed, you need to fix this setting, YouTube's over now — just one junk video after another. And then they're selling some product that you supposedly need to have and pay for every month, which most of the time is not going to be useful either.
What You Really Need: A Human Who Sees Your Unique Situation
What you really need is personal accountability to somebody else. You need to talk to someone who can actually look at your channel from a human point of view. You can already have AI look over your channel — you can take screenshots and send them over, and Gemini is connected to YouTube, so you can send Gemini all your stuff and talk to it, and that can help. But what really helps is having a human appreciate the unique situation in your life and your unique channel within that life, then talk with you from that frame and point of view and figure out where you uniquely have an opportunity to do something special. I'm doing pretty well with that on some of my channels.
But this YouTube coach channel is the most frustrating channel, because my videos are just siloed here, unable to go almost anywhere — even when people do find them. The watch time and engagement are often decent: three minutes on a twelve-minute video is decent, and four minutes on a seventeen-minute video is decent. But it's hard, because my click-through rate is low for my topic. People automatically assume that when a video has low views, you don't know anything. Normally, people get around this by building as big a following as they can and doing paid traffic.
Why I'm Going the Paid Traffic Route
So I'm thinking: I know how to do paid traffic, and I know how to do Google ads. But then I really need to commit my channel to being a paid-traffic channel, because paid traffic can kind of sabotage your organic traffic. Paid traffic at least means I can guarantee that I get my message out to more people. I think I'm going to go the paid traffic route on this YouTube coach channel, because I believe the information I have and the offer I have are better than anyone else's by far. I can say that because I've looked at what other people are doing. In my experience, they barely know anything — or maybe they know 50 or 60 percent of the stuff I do — but their advice is so generic, and it's so geared toward selling their products instead of really helping you.
If I use paid ads and put out better information, I believe I'll get rewarded for that. Paid ads mean I can guarantee I reach people who are actually looking for YouTube help, and the ads will give me a ton of extra impressions. Then a small percentage of people from those ads will start having calls with me. And if you have a call with me, we can even collaborate and film a video together easily — I've got it all set up.
Betting Everything on YouTube
So this is my frustration right now with the state of YouTube. I did a video on my vlog yesterday asking, should I even spend my time here? Is there anything better for me to do? I made a video saying I'm betting everything on YouTube — what if it doesn't work? Because at this point, YouTube is kind of a shit show. There's so much dishonesty and lying, bots pushing certain narratives, and so many influencers who are just useless, wasting people's time and constantly fueling drama.
At the same time, YouTube is so big that there is a chance to really help people and for authentic content to succeed. I want to show how authentic content can succeed on YouTube. That's my dream: that I can put heartfelt, off-the-top-of-my-head content on YouTube and show people how to do that and how to monetize it. And that's something that doesn't have to get big amounts of views, because if you put out authentic, heartfelt content that helps people, people are more likely to want to build a community with you, more likely to want to talk to you, and more likely to be willing to pay for something.
A Customer for Ten Years, Not a Funnel
That's how I think about the Jerry Banfield Family: in my head, you sign up, you might stay a member for ten years, and you might have a call with me every week for ten years. That could be a hugely valuable part of your life. So I'm thinking in terms of how I get a customer now who will stick with me for ten years — not just how I sell some program and fake scarcity by putting limited seats and all that crap on it, but how I sell something where I can transform somebody's life over the next decade. And I would love to talk with you about your YouTube channel. Then I will be free from the algorithm. I won't have to be a slave to the algorithm, to clickbait, and to coaching.
So I think I'm going to start doing paid ads on this channel. That will blow all my views up, give me a little artificial authority signaling, and get my message out there to the people who want it. I'm interested in your feedback, and if you want more of my honest take on growing a channel, you can watch my YouTube Coaching playlist. I think I've gone on long enough.