I've been a YouTuber, or I've had a YouTube channel at least, since 2011. I've uploaded over 4,000 videos. If you're a YouTuber or a content creator, these will be really valuable insights for you. Here it is. I made less than $5,000 last year, which I was really pissed off about. I was feeling very frustrated with the performance of my videos. I felt like my videos deserved more views. Here's an example. I was feeling very frustrated with this channel, only getting 2,000 views.
The biggest mistake I made
One of the worst things I did last year is I mass updated all my descriptions. That resulted in almost an instantaneous drop in traffic. So never do that. You need to write good descriptions for YouTube videos, that definitely helps. But I mass updated my descriptions all at once, and I set videos to private and stuff, or unlisted, to try and focus my channel. That just destroyed my views right there in the middle of the year. If I can tell you anything on YouTube, it's what not to do. And from that, what you want, and therefore what actually works.
So what works, what works really well on YouTube, is to make channels that have very focused topics. Here's my main channel. And the number one thing I've done wrong on my main channel is I've made a bunch of different, drastically different topics. You can see some of my top videos: I've got crypto videos, I've got gaming videos, I've got live game streams. For example, this League of Legends stream got 800,000 views. I've got Facebook ads tutorials, a bunch of League of Legends videos, business videos, crypto videos. I've done a bunch of different shorts, and short story on that, they suck. Don't waste your time on shorts. Long videos is what you want. I've done music on my channel, I've run ads, I've reviewed books. Don't do that. What you want to do is focus your videos in a very specific category.
Why a focused channel wins
This is a great example of it. When I was putting crypto videos up on this channel, my crypto videos were doing better than average. This was one of my best crypto videos, 787 views on my main channel. And my other crypto videos were doing decent and getting more views than usual. But I had this feeling I was getting held back. I was getting really frustrated and annoyed with YouTube. And my fellow YouTubers kept telling me, start a new channel.
So I started a brand new crypto channel from scratch. All organic traffic, look at this. I literally put the exact same kind of video that I would have put on my main channel onto a brand new crypto channel. It immediately gets way more search traffic than I was getting on my main channel. Look at this one, two days ago: 2,600 views, most from YouTube search and browse features. And this one, four days ago: 3,400 views. And these, thousands of views, organic search and browse features, which was just not happening on my main channel. Because my main channel was all garbaged up, the algorithm was all screwed up.
Here's what happens. If you put out a gaming video to a crypto audience, the crypto people get annoyed and scroll past it. That lowers your click-through rate, and they click "not interested." If they do watch the video, they end up responding poorly to the surveys. So I started four new channels, and every single channel immediately started doing better. A gaming video on a brand new channel got 132 views. It would have got about the same on my main channel with 700,000 subs. That's more views on this gaming video, and on these gaming videos, than on my main channel.
What I'm doing now
So what I'm doing now. I've looked at and tried to figure out what's the best thing for me to do with YouTube. Where I shine is real, raw, unedited, authentic videos that I can just grind out. I grind videos out in my studio. I can rip out five videos, one for all five of my channels, in a few hours. Maybe three or four hours. I can just knock a video out for every channel. And then look at the business channel. So I basically instantly 5x'd, if not soon 10x'd, my views by splitting into five channels and uploading five different videos. Wow.
This was a really hard lesson that took me a long time to learn. If you look back at the lifetime, my channel did really well in 2015, 2016, 2017, when my videos were all over the place. But the YouTube algorithm wasn't punishing me as much yet for my variety content. And as they changed the algorithm up, the variety content just killed my channel. You can see my views basically went down, steadily down, for years. It's been a long, slow, annoying process.
So I'm super grateful today. I've got these new channels. If I earn at this rate, I should earn at least 10x this much this month. Once my new channels get monetized, especially that crypto channel, I should earn about 10x this much in 2023 with five channels instead of one, and by putting out five videos a day on different channels instead of one or two videos on this main channel.
Earning off YouTube
I felt really down and annoyed with my channel for a long time, because I was having some big success on YouTube at one point. And it's funny, a lot of people would be really happy to earn this much off of YouTube. To me, this has just been a bitter disappointment, earning this much on YouTube. And I'm ready this year to earn the most ad revenue I've ever earned in a year off of YouTube by segmenting my content.
This is my business channel right here that I made this video for. And if you're interested in any of the other topics on my main channel, it's just like a kitchen sink. Anything that doesn't go on the other four goes in there. In my experience, the fastest way to learn all of this is to be in a room with people chasing the same thing you are. I read the book Think and Grow Rich, and a mastermind, a group of people all with the same objective working together and helping each other, is one of the best things you can do to achieve success in any field. That's exactly why the best way to work with me on this today is to join the Jerry Banfield Family community. We have group video calls every week, a private space to share what's working, and everybody in there is intending to build the life and income they want. We share what's working to earn money online, which cryptos we're investing in, and what we can do to get what we want without spending so much money.
I've also taught thousands of videos over the years, and if you want to go back and see the ones that helped me the most, dig into my YouTube Coaching playlist. I appreciate you watching all the way to the end. I love you, you're awesome, and I'll see you on the next one.