The worst advice I keep hearing for small YouTubers
The worst advice I keep hearing given to small YouTubers is to make great videos, to do all this work planning and researching and scripting, to study what YouTube really needs, and to put a ton of effort into making a lot fewer videos. Yes, that can work for outliers. But I'm going to give you much better advice here that will work for most of you. If you're an outlier, if you're going to be the next MrBeast or whoever else is blowing up out there, then sure, maybe you should focus on making the best videos and make fewer of them. But I've been on YouTube as long as MrBeast has. I've made over 4,000 videos on YouTube. I've been successful and a total flop in so many different ways. I've gotten over a quarter million subscribers on one channel, and I've got three monetized channels. And what I see is that there's no substitute for just grinding.
In my experience, most small YouTubers would be much better off to just make the easiest videos you possibly can and get them out there. The more you try to put everything into making a great video, the bigger you're setting yourself up to flop when you put the video out there and no one watches it. And I'm going to back this up with data in a minute. That is going to be the outcome most of the time if you don't already have an audience. The more you try to dump all this effort into the perfect video that YouTube really needs, the harder that fall tends to be. What I've found actually works is to instead just grind out the easiest possible videos you can make, videos you want to make and that will help somebody.
Pick one repeatable format and chase search traffic
Here's an example. This is my third channel I've gotten monetized. The main mistake I made on YouTube was grinding all my videos onto one single channel. You don't want to do that. You always want to put specific videos on specific types of channels. You don't want to dump crypto and music and gaming and vlogs all on one channel, that's for sure. What you want to do is make a channel with a video format you can repeat over and over again, and where you can get YouTube search traffic. That works almost all the time for everybody. Making all these videos for browse features, you're rarely going to get that to work. But search will work for almost every small YouTuber.
What you'll notice is that I started a brand new channel less than three months ago, and all I did was grind videos out on it. Look how much I was growing just grinding videos out. Then I stopped putting videos out for a couple of weeks and tried to put all this effort into one of these great videos, which flopped. Then I went back to grinding out videos, and look at the growth. This is real, and here's the traffic: almost all YouTube search. That's why this is such good advice, because if you're a brand new YouTuber, you've got no following, you have nobody who's going to watch your videos. This will work for you.
The strategy is to make videos that, when you search for them, you can see they're needed. If you search and you're thinking, "man, the videos here suck, there's not a good video on this," then make a video specifically so that when people are searching, they will find it and it will benefit them. For small YouTubers, YouTube search traffic is where you are going to grow. Browse features are stupidly competitive, and almost none of you have the experience and skills to actually grow off browse features, because on browse features you're competing with the MrBeasts and everybody else for those same impressions. But on YouTube search, you can put up videos that are low quality, that you don't even edit. I'm not editing this video, and I'm not editing these crypto video channels either.
These simple videos have already earned real money
This channel and the other channel I'm about to show you are on the way to cranking. They've already made me tens of thousands of dollars selling online classes, and they're on the way to earning well just in YouTube ad revenue alone, like they did in the past, until I tried the stupid "make great videos" approach, and look what happened. If you look at the last 28 days, I've just been grinding videos out and doing some livestreams. If you can possibly livestream, that will help you too. You'll see YouTube search is the majority of the traffic. This channel has more traffic now, so I'm getting some browse features, and the ideal formula you can follow is to just grind out videos and publish a video every day if possible. You can start less often than that, you can make multiple channels and test them, but once you've found a channel like my crypto channel, the best way for me to grow is to make one video a day. I've found that two or three videos a day starts to get diminishing returns, but nothing beats one video a day, because people are "what have you done for me lately" kind of viewers.
Look what happened when I did an experiment. I did this twice on this crypto channel, listening to MrBeast video after MrBeast video and all these other big people on YouTube who are outliers. They're not normal YouTubers. They're not regular small channels like most of you are. They're people who, for one reason or another, because they've grinded and done a lot of stunts and gotten a ton of attention, have different advantages and skills than most small YouTubers do. The advice they share will usually not work for you.
The six-hour "masterpiece" that bombed
I was grinding and growing like crazy. I started this channel about seven months ago, and it was bumping, going straight up in views, up and up. It got so successful so fast that a bunch of bots reported it because they didn't like what I said, got my channel terminated for a week, then it got put back up. And then I tried an experiment. I was watching all this advice, and what did I do? I didn't put a video out for a couple of weeks, and I put a bunch, 10, 20, 30 hours, into filming one single video that I thought would be an absolute masterpiece that everyone would have to watch. And it freaking bombed. It's not even in my top 10 videos. It bombed hard. I researched it, I planned it, I scripted it, I wrote it all out. It was a complete crypto course, six hours and 40 minutes long.
And every single one of the videos that got more views than it did, I grinded out real fast. Some of them are live streams and others are videos like this one. Some of them I literally made in 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes of real time. I hit record just like this, started talking, hit record again, uploaded it, and quickly threw together a thumbnail. You can tell I didn't even try on some of these thumbnails. One of them literally said "why crypto YouTubers lied to you," and I put up a picture with a Canva background and simple text saying "we're lying." This video got 8,000 views. It got more views than a video I took two weeks filming that has a ton of great information. Why is that? Because if you've got an audience, your audience often wants to watch a video from you every day. A lot of the people I follow, I watch their videos every day. And if you're getting search traffic, there's often a ton of videos you could make for that search traffic.
For example, I have two crypto channels. Instead of putting out two videos a day on one channel, I made one channel for more general crypto stuff and then a crypto reviews channel, and I put one video out on both of those channels a day. Look what happens. This is where I put out that video I worked so hard on, one of the most effort I've ever put into a video. And then I go back to grinding videos out, and look at my views immediately, up, up. Almost all of them are videos I barely put any effort into, but they were things that were useful to people. If you look back at my content, I put out videos reviewing cryptos. I literally come up to the computer, go live, and review cryptos while I'm live, then take those clips and upload them as separate videos. This is super simple. I'm using that content twice, and it's getting more views than putting a ton of effort in. That's because I get views off YouTube search first, and then I get views off browse features from people who found me in YouTube search.
Do the minimum, do it every day
If you don't already have thousands of people watching you to get those initial views, then it's very unlikely, when you make a video with no audience, that the algorithm is going to pick it up and take it off. At this rate, you'll notice I had a lot of growth over the last year, and I had over a thousand dollars in revenue in a single month. Doing the all-in strategy on a single video was nearly as destructive to my channel and my growth as having my whole channel terminated. I've watched a lot of YouTubers over the years, and it's really simple. If you want to grow on YouTube, you need to make videos people will find when they're searching. Do the minimum you can to make a video that satisfies what they're looking for, take the least amount of time to make it, and see if you can do that every day. In most cases, this will work for you way better than trying to put all this time and effort in.
YouTube often feels stale now because you've got so many people creating the same kind of content. Everybody's talking about MrBeast and these handful of other YouTubers, and there are so many other interesting stories nobody is telling, because they don't figure they'll get any traffic for it. So I go out there and just make videos like this, because I want to get out information that's good, useful, and will actually work for you and help you each day. It obviously helps if there's no finance or time pressure, and if you just show up and grind out videos every day, some of them will get a ton of YouTube search traffic, and that will build you an audience. There's almost nothing that beats just grinding out a video every day.
If you've got six or seven channels like I do, yeah, I generally am not up for putting out a video on every single channel every day. But at a minimum, get a video or two out a week on every channel you've got. I was surprised to see a poll that one of the YouTube creators did: most people said they would prefer to get a video every week from their favorite creator at lower quality over a higher quality video once a month. Yes, there are exceptions, but what I'm telling you is the norm.
If you found this helpful, I've got lots of other videos just like it, and I take requests. If you want to go deeper on this with me, the best way to work with me today is to join the Jerry Banfield Family, where I share everything I know about building a business online and being an entrepreneur, and where you can ask me questions directly. I've got a lot of experience, and I'm available to help.
You can also dig into a whole lot more of this by heading over to my YouTube Coaching playlist, where I walk through the strategies I use to grow channels. Just remember the core lesson: make the easiest useful video you can, one that people are already searching for, and get it out there today. Then do it again tomorrow.