I'm doing this straight off the top of my head, freestyling it and giving it to you straight from the heart to make the most authentic and honest presentation I can. So I'm excited to share this with you. Since 2011 I've made over $2 million online in revenue and about a million in profit, with most of that coming in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2021. And the number one activity that produced the majority of all the income I've made online in the last 11 years is selling online courses.
Number one: selling online courses
The main website I made that money on was Udemy. I'm not on there anymore because they banned me. I joined Udemy in January 2014, and I made more than $600,000 directly on Udemy. That's my portion of the sales, which means I sold over $2 million of online courses on there. In 2016 I was one of the top 10 instructors in terms of sales and students, and I was very vocal about it.
I got to be one of the top instructors on Udemy by doing whatever it took to make successful courses. That meant paying people to make courses on popular topics when I needed to, and it meant taking 12 hours in a day to create an online course when that's what it took. I ended up creating and being an instructor on over 70 courses. I was one of the first instructors to be very successful marketing my own courses, and I essentially ran my profile as an online course agency instead of just teaching what I personally knew.
There are a lot of different reasons and a lot of different levels to why they banned me. When I look at it from the highest level, being banned freed me up to go do other things online. As long as I was making as much as $90,000 a month on Udemy, I had very little motivation to do anything except Udemy. So today I'm grateful I was banned, because I've been able to do so many other things since. On the ground level, my co-instructors complained and sabotaged me. They were jealous, they were having a hard time, and they were looking for a reason to get rid of me anyway. So they used any little excuse, even though I was clearly following every single policy at the time. I was an expert on those policies and made sure I was compliant with all of them, and they banned me anyway.
What I've learned from that is that sometimes it doesn't matter if you're following all the rules. I read a book about a girl who was kidnapped and held captive for 18 years after being taken while walking to school. Sometimes horrible things just happen and you really didn't do anything to deserve it. In other cases, maybe you did. I certainly did things. But moving on from that.
Someone described it well when they said that on Udemy I was more than an instructor, I was infamous, a cult figure, and when I got banned the Facebook group went nuts over my departure. That's accurate, and I appreciate the description. I was larger than life on Udemy, and the platform couldn't handle my ego anymore. I'm glad we've gone down this new path since.
Unfortunately, selling online courses today is not nearly the same as it was. When I joined Udemy it was really small still. There was no good Facebook ads and marketing course when I got there. There was no really good hacking course. There were other specific technical subjects that had no good courses at all, so I paid people to make the first good course on them. Now Udemy has hundreds of thousands of courses, tons of instructors and tons of students. It can still be a great opportunity to teach a course, but there are so many courses and so many full-time instructors that it's not a very good opportunity for most people today. You're likely to put a bunch of time and energy into a course, probably have it rejected for one thing or another, go back and edit it, and then be lucky to make $10 or $20 a month on it.
That said, if you know very technical online skills and not a lot of people are teaching that particular subject, you're likely to be able to make a great course on Udemy and bring in a few hundred, maybe even a few thousand. If you can learn anything from this, it's that I jumped on a timely opportunity. You'll notice that over and over again: where I make big money online, I jumped on a timely opportunity. I also made hundreds of thousands more selling online courses on other websites, but I'm not going to name any of them, because Udemy is the main one and they all suck compared to Udemy, so Udemy is the only one worth talking about.
Number two: gaming streaming and crypto
The second and third spots are close, and it depends on how you measure. If you ask which I've made the most money on lately, it's playing games on Facebook. I made over $100,000 being a gaming streamer on Facebook in 2021. And just like Udemy, that was a timely opportunity. 2020 and 2021 were the best years to be a gaming streamer. 2022 was not such a good year, and we better not go down the rabbit hole of my thoughts on 2020 and 2021. People aren't spending their entire day locked down in their house watching gaming streams anymore, and Facebook isn't promoting gaming streams like it used to. Facebook kind of sucks for gaming streams now.
While it lasted, I figured out an amazing formula. I'd do a 30-minute to hour-long live stream playing retro games in a tube top, and then I'd get some of those games to go viral in the news feed after I was live. It was such a sick strategy that the Facebook research team actually contacted me and asked how I was getting so many views on my videos. That was another timely opportunity, and I came across it by relentless testing, just trying out every different thing on Facebook. I got so many different things to work really well on there.
I also got really sick of gaming on Facebook, because it was a very toxic community with so many nasty comments no matter what I did. Eventually I got demonetized on Facebook after I changed my race. In my experience they were the only platform to take that and turn it into a really negative, nasty narrative, while every other platform was very supportive and followed the logical argument and the law that your race is your choice regardless of how you look, just like your gender is your choice, although I know there's a lot of debate on all sides of that. So I'm not streaming games on Facebook anymore, but that was the second biggest way I've made money online recently.
Now, if you go back further than that, there's crypto. Not trading crypto so much, but buying crypto, going all in, telling everybody about it, and then selling it. If you add up all my earnings from crypto, it would be much more than from Facebook gaming. This is where perspective helps so much. Teaching online courses was by far the way I made the most money with the least amount of effort. Playing video games on Facebook was worth absolutely nothing in 2016, 2018 and 2019. It was a total loss until 2020 and 2021 came along. So if you count dollars per hour, which to me is a better way to measure than overall income, gaming wouldn't be number two, because most people playing video games on Facebook are going to lose a lot of money. But it's worth mentioning because it was recent.
If you count dollars per hour, the number two way I've made money online is buying crypto, promoting that crypto, and then selling it after I promoted it. I bought Bitcoin and actually managed to lose a bunch of money buying it, trading it and selling it early on. But eventually I started buying Bitcoin when it was in the hundreds of dollars. I continued to talk it up, pump it up, and pump altcoins up. Putting in $20, $30, $50, sometimes $100 a day, I turned that into $10,000 worth of Bitcoin. Then I put $10,000 to $11,000 of Bitcoin into Dash and sold that for $87,000. I put close to $50,000 into Steem, all deposits included, and I made something like $150,000 to $200,000 profit out of Steem, at least $150,000, plus the $50,000 I put in. So I ended up pulling at least $200,000 out of buying into Steem and working it every day and promoting it all over the place.
The easiest money I've made was in the last year. I bought $300 of a brand-new crypto directly from its founder, with no idea what it was even going to do, and I sold that for $15,000. It took almost no time and energy, and I'm looking for another one of those opportunities. Where can I put $300 in today and sell for $20,000-plus in a few years? Just put a little bit in today and have a whole lot in the future. So buying and selling crypto has been second place in terms of both total income and dollars per hour. But that goes all the way back to when I started buying crypto in 2014, so it's been a much longer process.
And technically this year, while I made $15,000 on that one crypto, I lost like $9,000. If you throw Gods Unchained in there, I lost another $3,000. I managed to lose almost all of that $15,000 fooling around with other cryptocurrencies, so that's a much longer process. In this bear market we're in, recently trading crypto has not been that great for me overall, because I spent a bunch of time and energy trading crypto, buying here, selling there, only to make a relatively small profit. I learned a lot, but I'm thinking a lot harder before I make any more moves in crypto.
The Third Way: Coaching and Services
So the last way, the number three way. If you look at the entire history of what I've done online, teaching courses is number one, buying and selling crypto is number two, and number three, much more than the gaming, number three is coaching. I've made lots of money coaching and doing paid calls. What's been great with that is there have been almost no expenses.
Coaching, paid calls, and then similar things like people paying me for services all kind of fall in one category. The first thing I ever got to work well online was selling Facebook ads campaigns, so in some respects it was kind of like coaching, and in other respects it was more like a service. People would pay me like a thousand dollars and I'd get them 10,000 likes on their Facebook page using Facebook ads. As far as I know, I was the very first person ever online to think of offering guaranteed Facebook likes delivered with Facebook ads, not using bot accounts on Fiverr or something, but getting real likes directly through Facebook ads. As far as I can see, I was the first one ever to offer that service, so I started off offering that and I started racking up tens of thousands of dollars selling it.
Then I started doing Facebook ad campaigns for people to sell products. Lots of times I was pretty terrible at it, but occasionally I set some Facebook ads up that really cleaned up for my clients, and in that capacity it was more coaching. They'd buy an ad campaign, I'd set it up and show them how it worked, and from there they would go to their ads, make slight adjustments, and I'd teach them how I did what I did. They would then go on to do it themselves lots of times. So selling services and coaching, I've made as much as a thousand dollars per hour.
What I've Learned Charging for My Time
These days I've gotten a little more reasonable with my rates. After being demonetized on Facebook and essentially losing money playing games every month, I decided to set my rates as low as I can stand, and then when I'm fully booked up I'll just take more. If you want to work with me directly on any of this today, the best way to do it is to join the Jerry Banfield Family, where I show up and help people every day.
Back when I was on Udemy, before and after I got banned, people knew what I did was so effective that it actually contributed to me getting banned. People were dropping $300 an hour and as much as a thousand dollars an hour at the height of my crypto popularity in 2017 just to talk to me. Some days I'd have multiple coaching calls scheduled back to back for like $300 an hour, and my crypto popularity was so high that I kept cranking the price higher and higher, up to as high as a thousand dollars an hour, because people just kept booking them and kept buying them. Finally I'd put so much time and energy into crypto that I stopped even accepting coaching calls, because at one point I was making a thousand dollars per post on Steemit, so I figured, why bother taking coaching calls when I can pull that much money out of the blockchain? So I quit offering my coaching a bunch of times.
Coaching and offering services online is the third biggest way I've made money, and what's been beautiful about it is there's been almost no expense. Whereas with teaching Udemy courses I poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into Google ads, into Facebook ads, into freelancers making courses. I dumped a ton of money into making my courses successful on Udemy. With gaming it wasn't hundreds of thousands, but I spent tens of thousands of dollars on games and ads for my page, and giving other people stars and tips and stuff. I put a ton of energy into gaming and got relatively low returns. So teaching classes, crypto, and coaching have all been very high return for the activity. That said, the crypto was another very time-consuming path. To me, coaching is something I can continue doing indefinitely regardless of what's going on, which is really nice.
If I Started From Scratch, Which Would Be Fastest?
Someone asked me: if you were to start from scratch on all three of these methods, which do you think would take the shortest time to be successful? That's a great question. Teaching online classes, the market is so crowded today that it's definitely not generally going to be something that's fast. I would say if I started over again and went all in on something, crypto would probably be the fastest, because you can trade crypto and make crypto videos, and especially with these shorts, I think crypto would be the fastest.
But it would also be more high risk in terms of you might get an account banned doing it, especially on platforms like TikTok that censor really hard. You might also give some really poor advice and end up pissing people off, which anyone who's been in crypto a while has certainly done some of. And it might end up being a total loss instead of making a profit. So crypto, to me, I think would have the most potential to rocket up quickly and make lots of money again, especially when there's the next bull market, but it's also the highest risk. You might put a bunch of time and money in and lose repeatedly with nothing to show for it.
If I started over from zero, teaching online classes is very crowded and difficult, and coaching from scratch is difficult too. Most of the people who schedule calls with me at this point, or come to my coaching streams, have been following me for a long time. So coaching, I'd say, is the absolute slowest out of these. You can really pop off in crypto hard pretty quickly. Superman Crypto has been growing fast on Twitch, and I've watched people build up personally. You created one channel, it got taken down, you made another channel and built that one back up. Joe Parys, in the last couple of years, I've watched him build a huge crypto channel up.
If everything I did online was erased, I personally wouldn't do anything else online. All my stuff online kind of owns me in some ways. It'd honestly be a relief for me to get completely banned and eliminated online, because then I could feel fully justified in not doing anything online.
Am I done with YouTube? No, this is going on YouTube. I quit YouTube before to focus on Gods Unchained, but as soon as I quit Gods Unchained, it went right back to YouTube.
Why These Markets Are So Crowded
Somebody suggested you can also sell printable digital products like calendars. Yeah, the challenge is that all of these markets are so crowded now. If you want to teach on Udemy, there's a ton of people teaching, many of them with so much more experience, so many more existing students, that you've got almost no chance of hardly getting in. I've coached some of the instructors themselves, so if you try to teach on Udemy against people who have already been through my coaching, who have already built YouTube followings and email lists, every time they release a new course on a new topic or new software it goes straight to the best seller. You've got no chance against them, which makes teaching online difficult because now there are so many established online instructors doing it full time. Trying to teach online is just too crowded.
Crypto is so wide open though. There are lots of opportunities in crypto, but there could be devastating things, hopefully not regulation or hacks, but there could be some very unexpected events. Teaching online is kind of secure in a sense. If you make online courses, that's probably the safest thing to do. If you've got some extra time, that's a safe way to go. There's not much risk and you could get some real passive income out of it. Whereas you could put a bunch of time into crypto and it could all fall through, and you could put a bunch of time into trying to get coaching going and that could all fall through too.
I will say I've got some friends who do really well with coaching and selling expensive courses just to their followers on Facebook and Instagram, and I'm pretty impressed with them. For some reason, the only courses I was able to sell successfully for like $300-plus was my course telling which crypto I was going to buy before I bought it, essentially letting my followers buy at a lower price than everybody else.
Superman Crypto asked: knowing what you know about marketing and social media, don't you think you'd easily be back on top teaching on Udemy? I don't think so, because if we look at Udemy today, take Facebook marketing for example. When I started on Udemy, it was easy to become the top Facebook marketing course, and some of these titles are the exact same formats I used to put my titles in. None of these courses existed back then. If I wanted to start out on Udemy now, you've got courses with 31,000 reviews, this one with 4,673 reviews, a 12-hour course, a 22-hour course with 157,000 reviews. In my experience, those numbers tell you exactly how much the ground has shifted.
Why crowded platforms are the wrong place to start today
Look at someone like Alex. He has a thousand reviews, and I've talked with Alex a bunch of times, so I know this firsthand. He has a course on just about everything, and every time he comes out with a new course he already has all his existing followers to sell it through. When I was on Udemy, their email marketing was enormous, and Alex had something like 636,000 students. So if I make a course, my course does not just come up against Alex's courses. It comes up against a whole bunch of other experienced Udemy instructors too. That is why, in my experience, Udemy is not a good opportunity in a lot of cases today. It has become too crowded.
This is why I am always looking around online for where the real opening is right now. What I see is that shorts are a really good opportunity today. Putting out short videos seems to be genuinely hot at the moment. We are in the middle of a pandemic as I record this, and I am actively looking for where shorts are the hottest area.
If I were starting over from scratch
If I wanted to start over and really go off, I might do crypto shorts and just hit crypto shorts hard, then bring people over to Twitch and do crypto streams on Twitch. I cannot start from scratch now, but if I could, knowing what I know, I might follow something like the Joe Paris model. Joe Paris has crushed all these crypto shorts and then brought people over to YouTube, and he has sold a whole bunch of courses on crypto.
Now is not a good time to sell courses on crypto, but it is a great time to do crypto education. So the play would be hammering out a bunch of crypto shorts and reels, bringing people over to Twitch, doing Twitch streams about crypto, buying and trading the cryptos yourself along the way. If all I cared about was making money and getting views online, that might be exactly how I would do it. Honestly, though, I do not know if I would sell a crypto course knowing what I know now.
What I actually care about
What I really care about is changing lives. Yes, I want to make sure I have enough money so that I do not have to do anything else, and I have that. I have at least six months of any foreseeable expenses in the bank right now. If something unexpected happens that costs ten grand, I have that covered, and my wife has a job too. But what is just as important to me is that I change lives. I have gotten 60 million views on stuff online, and I will be honest, a lot of what I have put up has not been life changing.
Somebody asked, if I were still on Udemy, what newer courses do I think would have been my best sellers. I would have crushed the TikTok category on Udemy. I definitely would have hit the TikTok category. In fact, I did make another account on Udemy. I told two people about it, and one of them ratted me out and got it banned. I was actually making some organic sales. I made a course on TikTok and it was climbing on its own with no marketing, because I know how to teach courses and I had pumped up my own TikTok pretty easily.
How I run shorts across every platform
Someone else asked whether I mean shorts on YouTube or Facebook. What I am doing is putting one short up once a day on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube. I put the exact same video up on all five platforms. If you really want to be a try-hard, you could add LinkedIn and maybe some other platforms as well, but nobody seems to do anything with my LinkedIn stuff. So that is where I am, and I am always on the lookout for anything more interesting or more vibrant. I am curious to see whether there is anything better than shorts, because shorts right now seem to be hot, but I keep wondering what the next thing is and where creators are needed most.
Somebody asked if I could do a video on how to do shorts. I think I have done some of those already, but I certainly could do a new one about how I film my shorts today. That might be a nice chatting session too. If you want to go deeper on the coaching side of all this, a lot of what I have shared over the years lives in my YouTube Coaching playlist, and the best way to keep working through it with me is to join the Jerry Banfield Family.
We have been on this subject for about 30 minutes now, so I think this is a good place to wrap up the discussion. Thank you very much to each of you who was here for it, and thank you to everyone enjoying this later on the replay and on the Jerry Banfield Show podcast.