I've uploaded more than 5,000 videos to YouTube across more than 10 different channels, and I want to dump everything I've learned into a completely free course, right here on YouTube. My goal is to teach you everything I've picked up over the last 13 years so that this is easier for you than it was for me. You might not have 13 years to just burn learning all of this the hard way, and this will be really helpful whether you're a small streamer, a brand-new channel, or someone who has been doing YouTube a long time and finally wants to make a full-time income.
I've been making a full-time income as a content creator for 12 years, so I know what I'm doing. I've run so many different business models that I'm going to go straight to the absolute best ones. And the best one, in my experience, is exactly what I'm doing here: putting out free courses on YouTube, one video at a time, the way I do on my website at jerrybanfield.com. The most money I've ever made online came from teaching online classes. That money was made by selling those classes, but if I had simply put them up for free, I believe I would have made so much more in the long term. So now I'm putting all kinds of free courses on YouTube. This is the first video in my YouTube course, and I think you're going to be blown away by what you learn. I'll put out a video every day or two, each on one particular topic.
The real question: is this fun for you?
If you want to do well on YouTube, the first thing you need to ask is: is this fun for me? Doing YouTube is hard. It might look easy, and the camera and the filming and all of that is genuinely easy stuff you can learn to do. What's hard is the emotional roller coaster. What's hard is figuring all of this out: the amount you have to use your brain to put the data and the titles together, to figure out how to make it work, to handle the money, and to operate with integrity. You've seen some of the biggest YouTubers who don't worry about the integrity part, and in my experience that always comes back to haunt you.
So the journey for me has been this: how do I create on YouTube in a way that feels fun and joyful and also gives value to other people? I've done plenty of things in the past that were fun and joyful, and I've done plenty of things that gave value to other people, but it was often hard to combine the two. When you put all of that together, that's the sweet spot. I love teaching, and across this course I'll answer all the questions you have about YouTube. I keep that whole conversation going in my YouTube Coaching playlist.
The format that the algorithm rewards
Live streaming versus recording, long format versus short format: what seems to me to be the absolute sweet spot is to do roughly 15-minute videos. Ten minutes, 20 minutes, whatever works, but more of a longer format rather than a short. Then have a playlist or a series of videos where people watch them over and over again. What the YouTube algorithm loves the most is when you find some new channel, click on a video, and then binge a bunch of their other videos. That's what YouTube loves best.
That's why I'm setting this up as a course instead of just throwing random videos out about YouTube and then trying to sell you on something. If you really want to succeed on YouTube, you need to keep people on YouTube. You'll notice I'm keeping you on YouTube for this entire course. I'm never sending you off to my website to buy anything except time with me directly as a mentor. If you want to greatly accelerate your journey, getting a mentor helps, and I've used a YouTube coach myself. I would watch as much of the free courses first, and then add a mentor. You can get me directly inside the Jerry Banfield Family if you want that help.
Consistency has been my biggest challenge
My biggest challenge on YouTube has been consistency. Right now I upload four YouTube videos a day across four different channels, every single day, and I have eight YouTube channels. The top one has hundreds of thousands of subscribers; I've got the silver YouTube play button somewhere here in my office. I've blown up and gotten millions of views and gone viral, and I've also been destroyed and killed channels. I've deleted a whole bunch of channels, so I know the mistakes not to make.
One of those: you generally do not want to delete your videos. The only scenario I would delete a video in is if you're sure there's a policy violation or a copyright violation in it. If you're newer on YouTube, there are thousands of little things like that to learn, and you really need one place and one person to learn them from.
If you want to really do YouTube, get comfortable, because it is a grind. It is uploading video after video after video. Mr. Beast, who maybe isn't the YouTube teacher people want to learn from anymore, said that if you really want to do YouTube you just need to upload 100 videos. So I'd suggest exactly that: upload 100 videos as fast as you can make them. Take one video, upload it, make another, upload it, learn, and improve over and over again. After 5,000 videos, I'm able to film enough in an hour or two of real time to upload four videos a day. In a couple of hours I can film two 20-minute crypto course lectures and a YouTube lecture like this one. One thing that can really help you as a creator is to build a community somewhere outside of YouTube too, like on Twitch, because you don't want your whole community in one place. In my view, the ideal formula if you want to be a successful YouTube creator is to also have a website on your own .com. If for some reason you only ever watch this first video, I want to give you the major takeaways anyway.
Stop editing and start shipping
I have not scripted this video at all. I didn't even know exactly what I was going to say to start it. But if you really know what you're talking about, you can just put videos out there, and the best thing you can do is not edit them. I know there are all these cute little viral edited videos, but people are desperate for raw, real, authentic content, and they will love you and trust you and interact with you much better when you don't edit. Not editing will also force you to get better.
Don't sit there and record video after video and delete it. You get an idea for a video, you show up, you hit record, you film it, and you upload it. Then you do another one, and another one, and another one. If you don't have 100 videos on YouTube, in my opinion you have no business even thinking about getting views, no business thinking about what the algorithm can do for you, and no business feeling like you even deserve an audience yet. If you've done fewer than 100 videos, you've barely tried once. Once you get 100 videos up, you might be at a level of skill and value where you can start to think about the algorithm and analytics. You can see how I think about that over the long haul in my simple growth formula after 10,000 videos.
When I started out, the best thing I did was just film the worst videos. My very first video was literally me saying the f-word in different intonations and ridiculous ways. It was so bad, and my next 20 videos were just as bad. That's part of why they're deleted now. I actually deleted my first several thousand videos off of YouTube, because there were so many undetected policy violations and it was just a disorganized pile of trash.
One channel for everything was my biggest mistake
I had one channel with gaming videos, crypto videos, music videos, inspirational videos, technical tutorials, how to use Adobe Audition. I just dumped all of it onto one channel: live streams, shorts, longs, mediums, everything. Don't do that. To start off, you could do a vlogs channel and experiment, but don't mix technical tutorials and vlogs and everything else on one channel. The algorithm, unfortunately, is not smart enough to understand how to push all those different videos to the right people.
For a long time I thought the YouTube algorithm was much smarter than it really is. In my opinion, the algorithm is pretty basic. It's magical sometimes, and maybe there are other forces at work, like your dead grandmother wanting you to see a video and then manipulating your cell phone and the algorithm to stick it in front of you even though it never should have shown up based on how the engineers coded it. That kind of thing definitely seems to happen on YouTube. But the algorithm itself is shockingly basic. You really need to make channels that have the same kinds of videos on them. Don't make music videos and then crypto videos on the same channel. That was one of the biggest mistakes I made.
If I could go back, I would have started a Jerry Banfield Gaming, a Jerry Banfield Music, a Jerry Banfield Crypto, and a Jerry Banfield Thoughts or Life Coaching channel years ago. That's basically what I've got now: eight channels covering all the major things I love, and I've written about how to use niche channels to promote each other. I have a music channel, and music is one of the things I'm having the most fun learning and producing right now. I crank out a music video every day, because in an hour or two I can film 12 videos. On my music production channel I recorded myself making 12 songs in 100 minutes, and then I made myself some controversy, because instead of learning something, people like to get defensive and butthurt.
Start with an autobiography channel
You'll come to know I'm your YouTube teacher, the teacher you've been desperate for, while a lot of these other people are just circling you for your money and your time without giving you any real value. That's why I unsubscribe from their channels. I'm tempted to name them, but that's rude and I don't want to promote them. If you feel offended that I'm giving it to you this straight, that's a sign you found your teacher.
If you don't know where to start on YouTube, start with an autobiography channel. This is a channel I would love for everyone in the world to have. It's where you just do vlogs and tell stories about your life. Look at it this way: if you were to die within the next year, which stories from your life would you really want people to know? For me, I'll put my whole life story out there. I'll talk about how I got sober through Alcoholics Anonymous, how I met my wife, how I lost 75 pounds and have kept it off since 2014, how I became a top 10 instructor on Udemy and then got banned, how I was a police officer and what that was like, and how I was a professional gamer. I'll give you a tour of my studio, talk about my alcoholism, talk about the night my daughter was born. My fifth video on YouTube is one I can look back on 13 years later.
I talk about all these big experiences, and some of them we revisit repeatedly and in more detail. I talk about the hard stuff too. I stopped talking to my mother for a few months, and then I put up a video where I said I'm sorry to my mother, and I took the trip to Michigan. I've set this channel up so that if I pass at any time, my autobiography is being written as it actually happens. This is the number one channel idea I have. There are people with $6,000 YouTube courses that don't give you information this good. Doing an autobiography YouTube channel, telling your entire life story and breaking it into smaller parts, is the best channel idea for pretty much anyone in the world.
In some cases you could do one long-format video, but those often don't work as well; it's generally better to do little consistent entries. It can be difficult, especially starting out, to talk straight for an hour. I've tended to do most of my videos in 10- to 20-minute increments, although I once did a speaker meeting for two and a half hours straight, uninterrupted. It takes no experience to tell the stories from your own life and to be real and raw and authentic.
You have to offer something unusual
We don't need any more fake people handing out money, running illegal lotteries, doing whatever it takes to get as many subscribers and followers as possible. They don't care if they rip their subscribers off, steal money, waste people's time, or make people sick. We don't need any more YouTubers like that. We need real, authentic, raw people who give somebody a unique, special experience.
Some of you might be taken aback and think, well, I don't know if that's me, I'm just a regular person, I don't know if I'm special. If you're going to do YouTube, you're going to need to offer something unusual, not just the regular. And what's unusual is to be your unfiltered self. Sometimes you may get demonetized over that, as I did on Facebook. But YouTube has been the most supportive platform for me. I've uploaded thousands of videos and only ever had one single detected community guidelines violation, and I'm vigilant about following the guidelines.
Follow the guidelines and play the long game
Make sure you actually read all of the community guidelines. If you don't want to follow them, then post somewhere else; this is unfortunately the world we live in. You can use Rumble, you can post videos on X, but it's better to focus your energy and think long term. Riding dirty on YouTube's terms will leave you paranoid and afraid of getting your channel banned, and you don't want that.
Don't use other people's stuff for copyright, either. That's one thing I've done really well. Every single copyright strike that's been filed against me, I've filed a counter-notification and said take it to trial, because I know I'm in fair use. That's because I've never done reaction videos, just sitting there watching other people's videos. So don't shortcut. Be raw, be authentic, and the more you practice, the better you'll get. Watch someone who has what you want. I've been a full-time creator for 12 years; I have a personality that engages and entertains people, and I love what I do. I don't need a script. Drop your script.
Drop the script, drop the editing
You'll get better by being faster and more consistent and cutting out all the waste. When I first started, I made sucky videos and then tried to edit them. I say sucky because they're kind of funny now. I'd have a dolphin shower curtain in the background while I talked about dating, the audio was crappy, and some of the tips were pretty funny, like, if you don't kiss on the first date, then don't even bother with a third date. I'd try to clean up the awkward pauses and make it sound better, and I hated the editing process. I had a crappy laptop that could hardly handle the editing and rendering, and it slowed me down.
I eventually got to the point where I needed a process where I could just hit record, talk, hit stop, and upload. The setup I've got now is one of the most efficient I've ever seen anywhere: four videos a day, in only two or three hours of real time. The easiest way to film is to use OBS and a stream deck with a camera set up so you can hit record, talk, and upload immediately. Take a video idea and make a minimum viable thumbnail, not a viral, clickbait, 100-million-views thumbnail, just a simple thumbnail that gets the idea across.
You don't need 16 hours a day
Some of these people out there putting 12 to 16 hours a day into YouTube, uploading a video, going for clickbait titles, changing the title after it comes out, optimizing constantly, those people are failures in my view. I can support myself, be a full-time creator, and really help people in two or three hours a day. If you're putting 12 to 16 hours a day into YouTube, to me you're failing, because you're giving up too much of your life. Eventually all the videos on your channel are going to be deleted, so you need to have fun while you make them and take the least amount of time to do them, because you have other things to do.
I have a family. I play tennis, I go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, I go to yoga, I have friends, I walk my dog, I play basketball. I don't have 12 to 16 hours a day to sit in an office compromising my sleep and my health. In my opinion, a lot of the people with YouTube courses getting tons of views are sick, burned-out people you should not learn from. That's why I made this course. I have the kind of life you'd want to have as a YouTuber: I work two or three hours a day, take maybe a day off a week, don't stress most of the time, have fun, and talk about what I want to talk about. The most dedicated people come hang out with me while I'm live, and it's awesome. This is also the foundation for how you only need one view a day to go full-time on YouTube.
Why I give it all away for free
Watch every single video in this course, because there's so much I want to teach you. If you want more, I have a coaching package, and I've helped a bunch of people build massive YouTube channels with it; some of them now have more followers and more views than I do. I know how to do YouTube, I'm really good at it, and I hold myself to high ethics and integrity.
Right now I could sell a high-priced YouTube course, but that disgusts me, and to me that's failure. If you can't put your whole course out there for free, then in my view you're not doing the best you could for everybody. So I'm putting this course out completely for free, and I'm cranking out a whole bunch of other free courses on a whole bunch of other channels too. If you want my help directly, the best place to find me is inside the Jerry Banfield Family.