Are you ready for a look inside that solopreneur life here
with me Jerry Banfield and Jack Pittman?
We are YouTubers. We just did our first video together talking about life as a solopreneur which I imagine will be really helpful for you if you're wanting to work online and make money. Jack offers a great tip about just living somewhere where the cost of living is low. He lives in Nicaragua and only needs to make about $500 a month online to live really well in Nicaragua which is why he lives there.
Whereas, for me, I need to make about 10,000 a month online living in Florida, owning a home, and having a family. It's a lot easier as a solopreneur especially if you can control your cost of living and I enjoyed talking with Jack in this interview. He shares with us what happened to him. He got banned off of Skillshare, losing his main income source. He has lost his main income source 4 times online and you can see resiliency is the key skill you need to be a solopreneur online.
I encourage you if you'd like to watch some more videos with Jack, please go subscribe to Jack Pittman on YouTube. I just subscribed to him today. He's been watching videos with me for years and he just signed up, applied for a free call and had a call with me today.
If you'd like to join us and get a video like this of yourself out on my youtube channel, I trust you'll go and take a look at the partner program at jerry.tips/partner where we have one-on-one calls like this and weekly group coaching calls.
Without any further ado, let's start the interview between Jack Pitman and me, Jerry Banfield.
Jerry: All right here we go so what do you want to talk about today Jack?
Jack: What's up everybody? I’m really excited today to be here speaking with Jerry. This timing is perfect because Jerry I was focused on Skillshare for like 4 or 5 months. I saw one of your videos where you showed and then I've made 4 or 5 courses. One of them was about OBS doing pretty good and then I got auto Skillshare ban. They thought I was abusing their referral system and my accounts completely gone like a month ago but it was another lesson.
This is like the 4th time I've lost like almost all of my income overnight from a freaking email. I used to dropship. I did stuff on eBay, got banned on eBay. I was making money with eBay course and then eBay made a policy that made my course like a little bit irrelevant. So, it went from like $1600 a month in Nicaragua which is like great money here, to like $300. So, I've been asked by these platforms a couple of times.
I understand that it's important to not rely on the platforms but at the moment, before I can make my personal website, I need to earn like just a couple hundred more dollars from Udemy to cover my bills. I live here in Nicaragua. Cost of living is really cheap around $150. So, I'm really excited to have this conversation with you. I feel like you are probably the best person to help me out here.
Jerry: Well, how may I help here, Jack?
Jack: So, I already have some Udemy income. It's not that much and I'm trying to grow it just a little bit but I'm not too concerned about Udemy. What I'm trying to develop is a website for Spanish speakers teaching them how to earn money online but I have no experience like,
- How to make email lists?
- Should I use Teachable?
- Should I use my personal website?
- How do I deal with hosting?
I know nothing about any of this. So, anything you could share about that would be great. I've only ever taught on Skillshare, Udemy, and YouTube.
Jerry: What is your goal out of making the courses?
Jack: Online income information in the U.S. is pretty valuable right but in I live in Nicaragua by the way. I used to live in the United States but now I live in Nicaragua. What I see here is that there are so many people who have all the free time in the world and they only need like $400 or $500 a month to completely change their life. Like in Nicaragua, earning 500 bucks a month off of just a couple hours of work a day is insane. That is more money than you get from a college degree job here.
A reference college degree job in Nicaragua gets you like 4 bucks an hour pay and this is true for a lot of the Latin-American countries. So, I want to make a course in Spanish to bring awareness that these people can earn money online. A lot of my local Nicaraguan friends don't think it's possible even though it is completely possible for them and they have an advantage because they live here in Nicaragua. They need so much less money than someone in the United States you know but again I don't know anything about what platform do I host on.
I know a bit about Teachable and Uthena but I don’t know the details. Can you tell me more about these platforms?
Jerry: Well, my vision is to make a platform where that addresses exactly what you're talking about. Where anyone can just join the platform and have a good chance to make money online and then to be able to spend money on the same platform without having to withdraw it.
For example, someone in Nicaragua could work at $4 an hour if they wanted to and earn say $500. Then they could pay someone else in Nicaragua on the platform if the person working didn't have a bank account, a credit card or anything but they could earn that $500. They could pay someone else in Nicaragua that did have a bank account who could withdraw.
They could pay them to like buy their groceries, rent a house, etc. It’s one place where you can make and spend your money online anywhere in the world.
Jack: That sounds pretty cool. So, it's like course marketplace combined with a payment like PayPal.
Jerry: Yes, the idea is to allow you to publish content with controls on how much it costs to view it. So, you could publish a video course and charge a certain price to view it or you could publish a video that only published if it was sponsored. For example, you could do marketing for a brand. You could put stuff out for free just help people find you. Imagine if Facebook lets you put pricing on every single post.
Jack: Yeah interesting. That sounds pretty cool. That sounds like something that takes a while to set up properly though like years.
Jerry: Yes, getting the users would be really easy. The key I'm looking for now is the investor money to hire a development team to actually build the website.
Jack: That's the How to Find Angel and Alternative Investors video on your YouTube channel.
Jerry: Yes, that's my current project.
Jack: That's super cool. I really admire the way you work, man. I understand that to grow a Youtube channel, you need to have predictable content usually but I really love the way you just make content about anything. I'm the same way and it will help my youtube channel back a little bit because I have content about death and trauma and all these things.
Nobody wants to hear that shit except for the people who really really really love it because they're going through something hard. My channel got noticed. My whole youtube channel is basically about dropshipping back when I used to dropship on eBay and I was doing this thing called ‘Bulk Dropshipping’. I would just upload like entire stores with hundreds of thousands of items and I didn't earn that much money from it but it taught me about all the problems.
It made me able to produce like kind of prolific content on YouTube. So, I started to make videos like posting a hundred thousand items in eBay store in 20 minutes and like you know people want to watch that. Now, I'm in a position where I don't need my YouTube channel to get bigger but it's completely kind of stopped growing because I no longer drop ship.
Then I was starting to kind of try and establish myself as an instructor with Skillshare specifically because I love that on Skillshare, you can create a course even as a person with no YouTube influence or nothing else and like students are actually gonna watch that. Whereas on Udemy, if you create a course, you don't do any marketing and you can't share it with anybody, it's completely possible to have not a single sign up for your course in the first month or two and that's really frustrating for a lot of students.
So I thought Skillshare was amazing for that reason but then after I made like 12 really positive videos where they reviewed the video, allowed me to publish it and then they just auto-ban me. I was so frustrated.
Jerry: Man, that's rough. I actually had my whole Skillshare profile taken down. I have posted a video about that and it’s Skillshare Suspends My Profile from Mistaken DMCA. They took my whole profile down because a football team in Argentina included my Skillshare profile URL in with like hundreds of other URLs. My last name ‘Banfield’ matches one of their football teams. My Skillshare profile just got caught in the crossfire of them trying to bulk take down any Banfield football team videos and Skillshare took my whole profile down within 24 hours or so of receiving the DMCA notice.
I immediately submitted a counter-notification. Google put my URL back up and search within a week and it took Skillshare a month to put my profile back up and they withheld the royalties that I earned that they were going to pay me. They did pay the referrals out though.
Then they gave me a strike right after that for putting up a course where I wasn't the primary narrator even though in their terms it says, you can have a company account that can have different narrators. They didn't want to negotiate on that either. So I'm going to forget about Skillshare completely unless like I'm mentioning how to teach online but I'm not gonna put any more courses to do.
I'm just going to forget about Skillshare, just take whatever money they send me. I've been worried about them banning me too. I've talked to at least one other guy who got banned from Skillshare and I've seen things about people getting banned from Skillshare. It's actually profitable for them to ban people especially if you bring in subscribers and you have a course like people are watching. They ban you and you can't earn anything from people watching your courses but they get to keep the subscribers. They get to constantly just get rid of people. It doesn't cost them in the short-term anything.
So that's why I'm so excited about making Uthena. We will not ban anyone. We'll have account managers that work directly with people. We might force and edit on the title of your service if it's offering something illegal but we will work with everybody. Most of the places to make money online really stink for the majority of people in the world and I see as possible to do to make something that is really good for people and making money online. If you're doing good at that angle, it'll be good to spend money on the same website like Walmart. If you're Walmart and you have a new service you want to offer, how do you take your 10 million dollars and new service and turn that into people talking about it?
Realistically, you spend millions of dollars trying to make ads and even to get your message before your message gets out there. If you would have just taken your message straight to the people so to speak. If you'd have given 10 million people 10 dollars to make a video about your service, you'd have probably got a lot more than hiring an ad agency that charged a million dollars to then run Google ads and all that stuff.
Jack: Yeah, paying like 30 middlemen.
Jerry: Yes, it's hard if you have millions of dollars to actually do something as I could do. It's really easy for me with a $100 a day to advertise my YouTube channel but if you've got 10 million dollars you want to advertise then it's not as simple as just going in and setting up a Google AdWords account and putting a YouTube video up for it.
Jack: Yeah, if you want to be effective, it's not that simple.
Jerry: When really all the brand wants is for you to talk about and look at their service, there are a lot of people who for $10 would talk about and look at your service.
Jack: I got an email from PayPal saying they'd give me 10 bucks to fill out a 15-minute survey. I did that immediately. It took like 20-minutes but whatever and that was $10 incentivizing.
Jerry: There are a lot of things a lot of people do but there's no platform where you can take 10 million dollars and hire a million people very easy to do something for $10. So, that's what I'm intending to do with Uthena and use it as a case study.
We will lead by example. We'll do that with our platform taking like $500k from the investors, pay like 50,000 people 10 bucks, make a video about Uthena and you know we'll be able to show how it works on ourselves.
Jack: Yeah. Let’s go back to Skillshare. One of the things that were kind of frustrating for me is knowing that it would be so simple for them to,
- Just remove the ability for someone to refer people or
- Just remove the inauthentic referrals
The reason that I got banned was that a huge number of referrals came for same IP and device assigned to the same credit card information. So people were onboarding to Skillshare using the same credit card information with multiple different emails. So, I think what probably happened is that somebody in some group who like has a credit card information and they were giving away free trials were basically like, “Oh just use this like fake credit card number or whatever and then sign up with your email account and you can get the Skillshare stuff for free”.
I think that's what happened but I don't know because this also happened to one of my other YouTuber friends. His name's Chris Lynn. He runs a channel about eBay like eBay physical resale not dropshipping. He has like 40,000 subscribers and in his first month on Skillshare, he referred like 260 people. He didn't even get his first paycheck. At least, I got 3. They just banned him like that and also 3 of my students got banned with the exact same email.
I made all this positive content and then I had to make a video being like no, nevermind, sorry and ignore the positive stuff I was saying but that's a life you know. It's a learning lesson that ultimately if you're relying on other platforms, it's risky and short-term. The only thing new and long-run is to bring your traffic to your website. That you know is the key to everything.
Jerry: Yeah. So what you are saying is, all it takes is one platform to not be risky and short-term for making money and it might be the most valuable company in the world.
Jack: I feel like it but it's not that simple you know because there are a lot of reasons that these platforms are picky. Especially once you get big, anything that happens on your platform, you're often legally accountable for it. So, if somebody does some sketchy a** shit with your platform and you’re not careful then you're doing some sketchy a** shit you know. So, I kind of understand a little bit like with Skillshare, they do have to have some system to block these fake referrals but if they can see that it's the same credit card number, they could just do a tiny tiny tiny little programming algorithm tweet so you can't get paid for the same card numbers. There you have all that information you know.
A lot of people have told me that maybe Skillshare is having money problems. So they're banning people more easily. I don't know if that's true but it was super frustrating. I've talked so much about Skillshare recently.
Jerry: That’s good. I need to do a video and I will add a video to my list about Skillshare to talk about my ban and then account restorations. Also, to suggest how easy it is to get banned from Skillshare. I have a partner group that you've probably seen in some of my videos. One of my partners is investing heavily like they're sending all their YouTube traffic to Skillshare and they're kind of doing their business based on Skillshare. I'll let them know that “Hey, all it takes is a little bit of sketchy stuff with your referral link by one person or one group and your whole account will get a ban.
Jack: One person who knows what they're doing with an email address and the ability to use other email addresses and one credit card that may not even be real like it just has to be able to sign the free charge to that.
Jerry: I could probably get anyone I wanted to ban from Skillshare just using several different emails and signing up for a bunch of free trials off of their referral link.
Jack: Theoretically, Yes and which is just ridiculous. Skillshare doesn't even send out a message saying like, “Hey, you know, we've noticed some suspicious activity and we'd like to pick your brain before we ban you. eBay calls you when they ban you.
Jerry: Do they?
Jack: Yeah, they call you and then you can't do anything about it. They call you and say, “Hey, you got your last strike. Your account is over” and as soon as they hang up the phone, BOOM.
Jerry: Well, that's why I'm so excited to build Uthena. A platform where you don't just get banned like where someone will actually work with you and collaborate in fixing whatever issues you're causing. You know, maybe have some account restrictions if you're straight up offering illegal services on there. You might have to get approval to post or something. Like a platform that just has love and tolerance.
Well, that's why I've gone all-in on YouTube and Uthena. What I've noticed is, YouTube actually does have a lot of love and tolerance compared to Skillshare. I've put up some pretty bad videos on YouTube which I've taken down. I've put up thousands of videos on YouTube and they've been really nice about it so to speak. I put the same number of videos up on Udemy, they ended up banning me. Facebook is generally pretty nice about things too. I have blatantly violated all kinds of terms and conditions on Facebook and they never banned my account.
I look at some of the top creators who have done some pretty things that you would have absolutely got banned off of Udemy or Skillshare or some of these other platforms and yes they've got demonetized on YouTube. It's reasonable you might not want to let advertisers show ads on that channel after what they did but they still have huge amounts of traffic. They haven't lost their core audience.
Jack: Ad revenue usually represents a small fraction of the potential income from YouTube channel. It's always more effective to have your product of some kind and use that with your YouTube traffic because then even if you only have like 1,000 or 2,000 subscribers, that could be a couple of grand a month in a lot of situations as long as you have a good product that's relevant to your subscribers interests.
Jerry: Yes. So, what I'm doing is, I'm using my partner membership that is kind of my main thing to monetize my YouTube channel. The partner membership is for people who want like coaching, one-on-one calls, and group calls. That way just one out of 10,000 people watching and becoming a partner, it pays more than all the other ad revenue combined.
Jack: Yeah. That's awesome that you have the service. I really admire that. This is something that I've offered to my YouTube audience for a while. Basically, I tell them, you can either pay me to talk to you or you can let me record it and publish it on YouTube and it's completely free.
So, what's pretty cool about that is that most people who are interesting, they are okay, whereas, most people who are really lame and boring, they are not. They're too scared to show their face. So, I don't get any free calls that I don't find interesting because of that reason. If the person is courageous enough to show their face on a YouTube channel then typically they're kind of interesting to talk to.
So, even though it's free, I feel like they are giving their face and their voice. So, when did you start offering this kind of services?
Jerry: Well, I started offering the partner program at the beginning of 2017 after the Udemy ban and after doing YouTube kind of as my main thing for a few months, looking how to monetize and I've been offering to partner ever since. There have been about a 100 or so total partners that have come and gone with about 30 that paid for a lifetime or that are active right now.
The partner program has helped me a lot which is really cool make. The partner program helped inspire me to start Uthena cuz I listen to partners talking about what's going on online and like we had a partner get banned from Fiverr. They had a full-time income off of Fiverr and just one client reported them for giving their email address in a message.
They got an instant ban with no other violations like thousands of orders. They held their money for 90 days before they could go in and withdraw it. I keep thinking like these platforms keep banning people. We just need one place for all of us to get together where we kind of feel safe and we can focus on making money and serving people.
Jack: I feel safe on YouTube. I know that you can get banned on YouTube but it's genuinely hard unless you're stealing people's content. If you're copyright-infringing and you're literally stealing people's videos then you can get banned that way fairly easily. If you do that too much, they're gonna take your videos down a bunch of times before they ban you. They have systems. It's really hard to get Auto banned overnight on YouTube, whereas, on eBay, it's completely possible.
All these platforms have like 3 or 4 strike policies which are great but then they also have the option to just completely ignore those policies which are like, what's the point of having the strike policies then you know.
Jerry: I'd been on Udemy, had hundreds of thousands of students. I was one of the top 10 instructors on the site and they just abandon me. I had no active strikes on my account. I'd only ever had one strike in the whole time. They had the discipline system which after six months they take the strikes out for your account and then they just sent me an email out of nowhere and they cited 2 like minor and policy violation which there was no credibility in either of them.
They said I had improper co-instructor relationships because other instructors added me on to their courses and then I put videos in the courses and sent promotional emails with them which I don't know if anyone else has ever actually got in trouble for that in that scenario. It's common for instructors to add other instructors to try and you know boost circuit. They said I had reviews from sketchy sources 70 out of 10,000 reviews looked questionable.
Well yes, I shared 40,000 free coupons. They're like, “Well alright. Your point about the reviews is good but we're banning you anyway” which is good though that it happened. It’s because if I wouldn't have got banned from Udemy, I wouldn't have been able to understand the huge need for a place where people can reliably make money online for the long-term. On Facebook, you can make money after you know shuffle people off of Facebook to go purchase somewhere else. The same thing on YouTube, you always have to get them off of YouTube to go buy somewhere else.
If you could really make money and have your profile, do you networking all in one place, I mean it'd be ridiculous.
Jack: Yeah, that sounds amazing. Sounds super tricky to set up.
Jerry: Yes, I can see the way to set it up. It's like all in my head. I'm working on translating it all in reality. That's kind of artwork, isn't it?
Jack: Yeah and that's what they say about creating anything. I studied video game development. That's like my long-term interest. One of the reasons I'm living in Nicaragua is so that like the biggest problem with video game devs is that they have problems with money and deadlines, they produce shitty games. So, if you fix money problems and you can fix free time problems, put yourself in a position to have a huge competitive advantage trading video games but that is tricky right.
So, that's one of the reasons I'm here in Nicaragua, 500 bucks a month life-changing amount of money. If you earn $3,000 every month here in Nicaragua, you can live like a king. Not like be that great at saving money and still be frivolous and like buy things you don't need and still be saving 70% of your income. It's insane and I’ll agree as well that I'm glad that I got banned on the platforms that I did because like all of those experiences put me in the position I'm in now and they put me in a position where I don't need to know exactly what's gonna happen to me to be happy.
I can just know I'm gonna figure it out. Sometimes, I lose track of that vision. I get weak and nervous but most of the time, I'm able to be like I don't know what's gonna happen and I'm okay with that because I'm gonna do the work that's necessary to figure it out.
Jerry: Yes I had days where I'm like I hate my business. This is stupid. I'm just going to delete my channels and do something else. I'm not really helping anybody.
Jack: it's crazy too because you have thousands of videos giving like really valuable information that a lot of people would have to pay for it typically. So, for you to think that you're not helping is not logical at all but I understand like it's funny how as you grow, you almost become blind to what you are. Because it's all based on where you are now and where you were like a month or two ago, not what you actually are to all people in the world you know what I mean?
Jerry: Yes, I had a little realization of that. I was doing a tutorial on Upwork yesterday like how to pick out a good job to apply for find a good client. I'm scrolling through them like this job sucks, this client sucks, I wouldn't work for them like man you can tell. I haven't had a job in a while, this one sucks and after like 30 jobs I said all right. I'm glad I don't need to apply for these jobs. I think I'd rather be homeless than apply to some of these jobs.
Jack: At least you have the free time to then do what you're gonna do. That's one of the things that I talk to people a lot. Some of my friends in my personal life they view me as this individual who's like really smart and can just do anything and that's why I have this life. They don't understand that they are literally a human as well and it's not about like how smart or dumb you are, it's about the environment that you create for yourself.
For example, if you are working in a retail job and you're always around problems that you can't fix, that makes you dumb. You have to be in an environment where you can do something about the problems around you. That's what grows an intellect right. For me, I'm spoiled just like you are in the sense that I quit my job 2 years ago and before that I got really sick and I had a salary job and I couldn't do the job anymore. So, I had to quit and get a job at Starbucks.
Even though I've only been like fully self-employed for two years, I was just working a little bit like part-time at Starbucks cuz the glory of Starbucks says you can work full-time when you need money but then be like hey I want to do other stuff I want to be 20 hours now instead of 40 and as long as you do a good job they'll be like, “Cool. We'll do whatever you want, just show up on time”. So, that was really good for me but I agree that I'm also spoiled.
I'm used to being able to create something in a week or two that like makes me money in the future and the course creation hourly rate is in the hundreds of dollars. I don't even know what it is for you, that's with me with one like kind of successful dropshipping course to earn me like $18,000 and like even with that, I can't do anything else if there are any hundreds of dollars an hour like no way. At least not at the moment.
Jerry: Well that's guided me that kind of thinking and realization. I've actually stopped making new video courses because while the video courses can make money and they've been the thing that's making the most money online. What I’m seeing is the very highest level business system is to put everything out for free. You get the largest possible audience and then I don't have to sell anything anymore except like I just now pitched a partner program in every single video or almost all of them.
I can have something that costs a lot more that I like doing. Tim Ferriss has a podcast with 400 million downloads. He's able to just put all the stuff he creates out for free to get the largest possible audience and that's what everyone kind of creating courses is stopping themselves from going to the top so to speak of the free business system. I looked at my youtube channel like, man the one time I actually focused on doing a great job on my youtube channel for six months. I got a lot of YouTube growth out of that and there were so many opportunities to make money.
The whole rest of the time I've kind of used my YouTube channel as a means to an end always you know get off of YouTube and go somewhere else when their whole algorithm seems to be based on, do you keep people coming back on YouTube?
Jack: So, could you share real quick you just mentioned that there's a six month period of time where you were more focused on Udemy and I know this is a 30-minute call that we got to end this soon but could you share like what were you doing? Were you making more videos? Were you using a different style of videos during those 6 months? Why do you say that you were doing it differently?
Jerry: What I had done up until 2016 in June when Udemy laid down the suspension, I had always used my YouTube channel as a means to get someone somewhere else. For years I'd been putting stuff up on my Youtube channel. I get people over to Udemy in the sell courses which was working really good but once Udemy suspended me, I started making things for YouTube and I just started showing and teaching anything I was doing.
I made some of my really boring tutorials. I literally just showed myself trading cryptocurrencies on Poloniex because I want to do that anyway. So I just recorded it and put that up on YouTube. People started watching it so I thought, okay. So, I made several more cryptocurrency tutorials and tutorials in a bunch of other areas like that were just for YouTube and not to get people somewhere else.
My whole channel started blowing up after that at which point I thought, “Well, this is going so well. I should stop”. Let me just now go back to using my YouTube channel as it means to an end. And then my growth just went down and flatlined right after that. I tried to get everyone to go over one cryptocurrency or another and I didn't think about what can I make that would just be a great YouTube video that people want to keep watching on YouTube.
Jack: That's some really good insight. That's kind of what happened with my dropshipping course. The reason it did well is that I was making videos on YouTube. Now, there's a bunch of YouTubers who are drop shippers but back when I was doing this, there were only a couple big channels that occasionally did videos about dropshipping. There weren't that many like individuals just sharing dropshipping information for free and that's what I was doing just over and over again.
The reason my course did well is that technically all the information was actually available on my Youtube channel but you had to find it. You had to shuffle through hundreds of videos. You have to search for it. You have to know that even though the title of that 30-minute video is about that at minute 22, I reveal all this shit for 8 minutes. That led people to have a lot of trust in me because I was just giving them the information without directing them somewhere else but once I did launch the course, they were like” Oh, a more organized way to interact with your content which we already love” and they loved it but then I got banned. But anyway man, I don't want to waste too much of your time. I know that this is just a 30 minutes call.
Jerry: Well, I'm enjoying this call, Jack. I have seen your YouTube channel here and I have joined your channel as a subscriber. If you're interested at some point, you will fit right in our partner program.
Jack: I would love to. Unfortunately, when I lost Skillshare, I was focused on that for 4 months and it represented like 80% of my income. So, right now, I need to get a couple hundred more dollars a month from Udemy and then I can focus on other things and then I'll have some spending money but right now I'm earning like $200 more than my bills.
Jerry: I've spent $90,000 more than I've made this year and I've applied for credit cards business loans. I got rejected for at least 20 business loans but I got 4 or 5 of them for a $100,000 total. So, I've gotta keep spending money to make money. Right now, I'm literally taking credit card cash advances to pay the bills at the same time I'm spending $100 a day on YouTube ads and the YouTube ads are working. For the first time ever, I'm seeing the YouTube ads are actually working to get new subscribers, to get likes on videos, comments and I imagine shares.
The YouTube ads are getting some valuable traffic on the channel. This is the same thing I did before my Udemy blew up. I literally grabbed all the money I could borrow, personal loans, and anything I could get. I spent almost every single bit of it where I could barely pay my bills. When that happened, the income turned around and within 2 years, all the loans and debt I borrowed were all paid off and I had made the most money I've ever made online.
My philosophy is, I gotta spend my way into my next success. That's how I look at it.
Jack: I think that works for you cuz you're a very well-informed individual who understands what the internet is. Whereas, most people in the world, if they think that they need to spend their way to success, they're gonna pay thousands of dollars of information that they could get for free.
Jerry: Yes, I bought a video course for $250 two days ago and that's rare. Almost all the spending I do is I pay other people to do things and I pay for ads. Those are the main things. I've paid people $70,000 or $80,000 to make video courses this year. So far, I've made less than $20,000 back but they're on a path to make a profit and get good content.
Jack: All it takes is one course to get really big you know. You've mentioned that.
Jerry: Yes and I aimed at hot topics. I mean one of the courses could pay for all of them but it consistently and uncomfortably takes spending the money beforehand and then waiting and then waiting 3 times as long as you think you should have to and then by the time you're about giving up, often something will work.
I'm about to start hitting some influencer marketplaces now. This is my newest thing. I'm hiring one of the guys in a Partner Program to use my profiles and like I will do shout outs in my youtube videos. For a hundred bucks, I'll do a shout out for you on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and put a link in my Blog. The strategy gonna have him do is to apply every brand on there. Just try all of them. I don't care if it's a hair product or nails or you know.
Whoever wants to pay a hundred bucks to have a shout out can have a shout out. And then people seeing the shout outs, I'll sell them directly myself on the videos after that and I'm thinking if I pay him $1,000 for the time to do this, can we make $2,000 back you know without like a whole bunch of work?
Jack: Yeah even if you make like $1,300 bucks back if it doesn't take you that much time, its profit.
Jerry: Yeah, it's an example so that I can say after every show like, “Hey, if you want your shout out, go to jerry.tips/shoutout and you can get in the next video. mm-hmm.
Jack: If you send me a link to your partner program, I'll put a link in the YouTube video that I make out of this.
Jerry: Excellent. It’s jerry.tips/partner. You might be able to do some of those influencer marketing marketplaces like just offer a shout-out or a dedicated upload. Have you tried any of those?
Jack: Yeah. So, it's only recently. I used to have a really hard time charging people for money because I thought I was insecure basically. I didn't realize that wow I have a really valuable traffic and information for them you know I should charge them. So now I'm open to charging people but I used to do a lot of tutorials for dropshipping software and that kind of thing and so people would pay me.
I've never taken a direct payment to make a video. I've always preferred to get affiliate links and that kind of thing but I've had situations where people are like, “Hey, if you make this video, we'll give you $500” and it's like, sounds great. At the time I didn't do it which was dumb because it was a little piece of software and I knew that they weren't gonna get $500 worth of value from my channel about it because it wasn't really relevant but I should have just done it anyway.
Jerry: Well you never know. Someone might pay $100 for a shout-out on my channel and it might not look like it does anything but if one person sees the product and buys it for 10 years, they might am I getting thousand dollars out of one person seeing one shout-out.
Jack: Yeah I think you just touched on one of my weaknesses. I act like life is everything that happened right now and I'm gonna die tomorrow. Everything that happened has taught me and I'm probably gonna be okay for a couple of years. So, in my head whenever someone makes an offer like that, I'm like you're not gonna earn that money back in a month or two but the reality is in ten years, different story right completely different story. I have to grow that part of myself to think more kind of long-term and not be scared of like you know everything going to shit.
Jerry: Yeah that's what I do. When I'm spending money I'm like, I've got the money to spend today. I'm certain that something will work out in the future as long as I keep investing in building things today and even if it means screwing something up. Why no not do that now?
Jack: Lesson learned. People drop hundreds of thousands of dollars on college degrees. What's wrong with making a couple thousand dollar business mistakes, you know?
Jerry: Yes, I spent probably that much on college and it got me several jobs. I didn't enjoy that much, that didn't pay very well, that put my life in danger like corrections officer and policing. I thought well I might as well just work at home. I think I'd rather lose money in my business and go in and do something I didn't like.
Jack: Yeah absolutely. At least it's like you learn something from it. It's not like you just lost the money you paid for education.
Jerry: Yes, I paid for some valuable education in my business online. Well, Jack, I've enjoyed this call with you and I think this might be a post other people enjoy reading as well. I'm not sure what a good title for it would be though. I guess I could research that. Do you use Tube Buddy?
Jack: I love Tube Buddy. It's amazing.
Jerry: I just started using that. I can’t believe I didn't use that before.
Jack: Yeah, it makes it super easy. It's really easy to have a Youtube channel where you just post the video and then all that stuff just happens. Usually you would want to do some keyword research ahead of time because ideally you know for an effective YouTube video, you don't start with pressing record, you start with you know looking for keywords to make a topic.
I always tell people you should just press record because the reality is, most people don't even get to the point where they need to learn how to monetize stuff because they are too insecure to actually start creating content in the first place and that has to happen for you to get to the point where you can actually start applying yourself monetizing things.
So, in general, I'm always like, JUST DO IT but in the reality, you can't just make videos. You also have to like apply some strategies and some other things but can't get to that point, if you don't make the videos in the first place, right?
Jerry: That's right. My first video on YouTube was different ways to say the F-word. It wasn't in different languages either and was just literally me saying F-this and F-that. That was my first video. It got age-restricted too. That is another great thing for YouTube like it's a pretty bad video and they didn't like ban my account or anything. They just asked that people be 18 to watch that which is pretty understandable.
Jack: Yeah definitely. Alright, Jerry. It's been a pleasure talking to you. I would love to do some kind of collaboration in the future if you want ever want to make some kind of video or call. I’ve a decent amount of experience with dropshipping in e-commerce. Though, not so much with course creation but I've been in course creation for like 2 years now. So more than like people who don't do course creation but you know.
Jerry: Well, I do all my collaborations in the Partner Program. So, I imagine you'll manifest the income and join that and we we can figure something out.
Jack: Yeah sounds good man. All right. Ciao
Jerry: Take it easy Jack. Thanks for the call today.
Jack: Thank you
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