I know too many ways to make money online — at least a hundred. And you would think, as a YouTuber, that would be a great asset. Awesome — I'll just use all of them. Well, here's what I've found over the last 15 years of uploading tens of thousands of videos and getting more than a billion views online: I got so burned out that I deleted everything. All of it. In 2025, I started six new YouTube channels. I've gotten four and a half million impressions, as I shared in one of my recent videos, over the 110 days since I started back again. And what I've found is that I've made the most money online — millions of dollars — by often focusing on one single thing that was most effective, and then doing everything around that.
I've been struggling to find that one thing lately, although it seems to have presented itself very clearly. Right now, it seems like Skool is one of the absolute best ways, as a YouTuber especially, to make money online today. Why is that? Well, let's look at the value you can provide in a Skool community. And what better way to demonstrate that than with my own community?
What Is Skool?
First off, with a Skool community, you need some kind of problem, and then a solution. But first, you might be saying: hold up, what is Skool? Skool is a membership platform. Imagine if you had Facebook groups, but you could also add online courses. It's similar to Kajabi, or Thinkific, or Teachable, or Udemy, but built directly to have community as the centerpiece.
Here's what Skool looks like on the inside, using my own group as the example — a group I just created in the last 30 days. You have posts. I have 13 members, which is awesome for starting something brand new. You can go live. You have a calendar where I schedule group calls. There's the classroom, where I'm going to be putting some of the online courses I filmed. You can look at each of the members, including their email addresses if you're the owner. You can look at a map to see where people are at all over the world. You can look at leaderboards to see where people have leveled up in the group. And then you have an about page where you can put your sales page.
If you want to see it on a bigger community, you get access to Skool's own community. You can see the events, the engagement they've got, and the status emojis they give you. You can look through the members, check the map, and direct message people — although in that community, you have to level up first. In my community, you can just direct message me if you join the Jerry Banfield Family.
In an Age of AI, People Are Missing Community
I was just telling a friend yesterday — he's been selling a lot of courses online, but he said all his course sales are going down. I said that makes sense, because today, in this age of AI, people are not paying for online courses nearly as much. Why would you go buy a course on Udemy, or on somebody's Thinkific or Kajabi, when you could just ask ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini about it? Why would you buy a course when people are competing, tripping over each other, to put out the best YouTube videos about that same subject — and they're using AI to make that even faster?
So what is worth selling, out of all the things online? You've got to think about how you can really solve someone's problems. What are people missing? Well, in an age of AI, what people are really missing is community. The more AI can do for you, the more you often don't need other human beings. I don't see why I'd hire a business coach today, when ChatGPT is capable of instantaneously giving me feedback. For example, I have so many threads going. Starting a few days ago, I went back and forth with ChatGPT for a crazy amount of time, trying to figure out the most effective way to make money in my business right now. I gave it a huge prompt packed with information. Does it give the best information out? No, but it inspires my thought. It talks about charging for stuff locally. And after this huge conversation with it, what I've come out to is this: I think the best opportunity is a Skool community. Because what people are missing is a sense of belonging. And what really helps is a group of people gathered for the same purpose.
Create a Life You Love
My purpose in gathering people is to help people create a life you love. Now, a lot of Skool communities — some of the top ones — are created around very niche things, like GTA 6 Profits, or Code with Claude, or Grow with Emily, or Master AI. Mine, because I have six different channels, is built around the one thing that brings everything I do together: I'm all about creating a life you love. That's what I'm here to help you do. And what really helps to monetize on YouTube, what really helps to dig into ways to earn money, is to figure out what problem you solve for people. I've zoomed out to the biggest problem I can solve for people: helping people create a life they love. I'm a living example of that. I've created a life I absolutely love, filled with all the stuff I love it being filled with. And I have a community created around that.
Then there are specific types of problems that attract people to the community originally. The idea is that people stick around, because there's also everything else you could want in the same community. For example, one reason to join my community: we had a new YouTuber join recently, Scouse Will, who I talked about in my last video. He joined because he wanted to be able to have group calls with me, and to ask and talk about YouTube. And I realized what problem I solve best for creators. I have so much experience that it doesn't make much sense for me to be pitching to brand new YouTubers. The problem I really help solve is this: if you are getting views on YouTube, but your income isn't going anywhere — especially if you're not monetized, or you're getting hardly anything out of ad revenue — I know a lot of ways to make money online. And I've given the most powerful information out of everything I've seen, out of all the stuff I've tested.
What Happened When I Launched
Within the first week or two of launching my Skool community, I made around a thousand dollars on it. And I've got a number of people signed up to pay $49 a month, so I'm going to continue to get recurring revenue. That's with being sloppy with my selling — not having things like watermarks clearly set up on my videos, and selling multiple things at once. What you generally don't want to do is have five different things you're selling at once. Join the Jerry Banfield Family. Join, get help every week. I have books — I've tried selling books, and I've sold tens of thousands of dollars in book royalties. I have one-on-one calls — I made tens of thousands of dollars selling one-on-one calls on Zoom. But what am I selling right now? I'm selling skool.com/jerrybanfield.
I've been down this road on somebody else's platform before. When they decided to ban my account — because they didn't like me, and I was making too much money, and I was telling everybody how I was doing it — I was making 10-plus times as much money as the people working on the trust and safety team. They get jealous. They make up policy violations. They banned me. I did all this work to promote their brand, and then they just take all that away.
Meanwhile, my own sales page has been created by training AI on millions of words of my content, including all of my research, thousands of recent videos, and books I published in the past. AI wrote this entire long-form sales page, which is incredibly specific, based on my exact experience and my exact words. And then I have blog posts that I crank out from all of that as well.
Recurring Income Through Community
So what I'm finding today is that the best opportunity to make money on YouTube especially is to have a Skool community, because of the recurring income. Here's what's really nice versus selling a course: if you sign up on my Skool because you're tired of hustling for views all the time and not making money, and you want to turn your views into money, then you can join my family. You can see how I do that, exactly, for yourself. You can get direct help and ask me all the questions. You can post your channel and we'll take a look at it. You can find hidden revenue opportunities.
This is not the same for everybody. A Skool community is not appropriate for everyone — some of you might do better just having one-on-one calls. But one of the best ways I see, that I'm personally going all in on right now on YouTube, is monetizing through building community. Community has so much value because it's not just me in the community. It's all the other people attracted to also join, who you can then connect with. You can direct message each other. You can give each other help. You can give each other feedback. In an age of AI, community is getting more and more important, while information is getting less and less important.
Skool seems to me to be the top community-building platform right now — at least the top paid community-building platform. And I recommend against doing things like free groups: free Skool groups, free Facebook groups. What happens with those is you get a lot of junk data. It's not focused. It's spread all over. And that means your posts don't go out to people on your Facebook group reliably. If you have a free Skool community, it can end up being really spammy. A paid Skool community creates a mutual investment of people who are there for a reason, for a purpose.
I've created communities in the past, and they were awesome. They were really helpful for me, and they gave a ton of value to the members. I think Skool's the best place today because it seems like the hot, up-and-coming place. If you build a Skool community that gets some traffic and makes some money, it seems like — according to what they're saying in their videos — they'll try to advertise your community and bring even more people into it. That feedback loop is really important. But you never want to lose control of your brand. And you always want to promote your brand.
While Skool themselves say the most effective thing to do is send people straight to your Skool URL, I'm not doing that. Because what if I want to move my community somewhere else? Which you can do, because you have all the email addresses on Skool. If my Skool got taken down, I could sit there and email everyone that was a part of the community. Whereas I couldn't do that on Udemy.
And what happens when you find a video, but you don't really understand — okay, I got that, but then what? My long-form sales page goes much deeper. Because my problem with everybody else's Skool communities is they're too shallow. I want something that offers more depth — more depth than just "you're going to help me with YouTube." Because what I'm going to do there is join, maybe find something useful, maybe not, and probably cancel pretty soon, as soon as I fix whatever acute struggle I'm having. Whereas to me, what's really valuable is to build a community that lasts the test of time, and to build a community you're a part of for a long time.
Deeper Than One Niche
I used to have this community called Jerry Banfield Partners. What was really powerful was having people be part of the community for a year or two, where they really got to know other people and would meet up in person. That was back when Jerry Banfield Partners was all about just making money online. But I want something that's more expansive, because my help is not limited to making money online. I know how to use AI — I'm often using two or three AI programs at once. I'm using Claude Fable to turn a video into blog posts and metadata. I'm using ChatGPT at the same time to generate thumbnails. And I'm putting my transcript through Gemini to make sure it's YouTube Community Guidelines compliant before I even upload it. So I'm on that AI stuff. But if you want to lose weight, I've done that. If you want a happy relationship, I have the exact same call to action and community for my dating channel. Because when you bring people together with diverse interests, you get diverse perspectives.
Right now the group calls have 13 members — still one or two people, so it's no big deal if there are different topics. But as the group grows, I'll have dating calls, YouTube calls, crypto calls, and AI calls. I could easily do a group call every single day as the group grows. And the beauty is, where else are you going to get that? If you're single, stuck, or starting over — bam, Jerry Banfield Family. You're getting views on YouTube, but your income's not going up? Jerry Banfield Family. And then I figured out crypto. I've got a gaming channel. And a main channel. Everybody goes to the same place, and it all goes to Skool. I could build all this myself now, but it's just easier to use Skool.
Why I'm All In on Skool
I like Skool because if you're already a member of somebody else's community from their YouTube channel, it's going to be so much easier to get you to join mine. Especially in a YouTube coaching niche — the same subject I dig into across my YouTube Coaching playlist — if you've already joined some other YouTube or Skool community, the friction to get you to join mine is very little. You've already joined theirs. You've already got your payment info set up. It's just a couple of clicks to join mine. Versus getting somebody to sign up on a cold website they've never been to before. Which is why I don't recommend using your own URL and then having a Kajabi or a Thinkific or a Teachable. It's more effective to use a platform like Skool and just maintain control of your brand.
So with everything I've done, I am committing to this. I'm all in on Skool. I know I just made a video talking about one-on-one calls, and those are good. But the ideal model is ongoing commitment — one single offer. And a community is just so much better of an offer, and so much deeper, than a one-off call with somebody. What I do now is, if you want a one-on-one call with me, you can just join my Skool community and then DM me and ask for a call. That is much better than trying to sell one-off calls.
I appreciate you reading this. I've shared all of this if you want your views on YouTube to turn into income. I'm living as an example of that. This is all I do. And it has literally only taken me three months to get to over a thousand dollars a month with brand new channels on YouTube, because I know this stuff — because I'm living it.
So if you want more income from the views you're getting on YouTube, join the Jerry Banfield Family and see how all this works for yourself. Let's find you some more money on YouTube.