What is the number one trick for speeding up the learning process on any skill that many of us especially online don't do? Which skill might be most worth learning today for the opportunity to earn full time online? The secret is to find a mentor that is clearly established where we want to be. Meanwhile, the skill is live streaming because out of blogging, video production, podcasting, and live streaming, we see the best ratio of high demand and low competition in live streaming.
How do we go about getting a mentor for learning live streaming or any skill we know we want to master and need help? First, we want to picture how the mentor might help us and what methods this will happen through. Ideally we want to talk with the mentor every day or week, or at a bare minimum every two weeks or a month, to share with the mentor what you are doing. Our main benefit to working with a mentor is very specific suggestions related to meeting our most immediate learning needs and solving problems. The mentor is able to pull from their vast knowledge of a subject to laser focus on exactly what we are needing which otherwise might take us 10 times longer on our own to figure out.
Where is an example of active mentoring on a large scale that works? 12-step recovery programs collectively have millions of members with most featuring a sponsor which is like a mentor. A sponsor is someone who generally has been sober/clean or practicing the recovery program for at a minimum longer than the person they sponsor, and preferably for a long enough time to have a ton of valuable wisdom and experience to share with you, along with a willingness to listen to what you are going through and experiencing.
I know that for me, recovery is one of the few areas in my life where I actively participated in a mentoring program while in my business I almost completely ignored the value of a mentor or tried to passively follow people to learn without the full relationship forming. By comparison, in Alcoholics Anonymous I sought out a sponsor within the first few months and now for most of four years have actively worked with a mentor each day.
Sponsors have helped personalize a vast amount of knowledge to my situation and are able to look at everything that is available to a person who has been sober thirty plus years by saying this is what might help you to focus on right now. My sponsors have listened to all of my stories including all of my crap some days and all of my discoveries because when you have a mentor and you are learning with them, there is a lot of joy being a mentor to someone who is learning a new skill, who is getting better in life.
Now, let's make this specific to live streaming and I will show you some examples of where I did things in a way that you might be able to do better.
Here is the live streamer NoahJ456 who kind of acted as my free indirect mentor. This is what a lot of us do working online. I know because I've done it a lot and seen a lot of my friends and fellow entrepreneurs doing the same thing.
We do these things without any real commitment. We just kind of lurk on other people, and then try to follow their example without actually getting to know the person on a two-way relationship basis where there is mutual interaction.
I followed NoahJ456 online for years while I played video games. NoahJ456 was a big part of my inspiration to start live streaming, I watched his gaming live streams and I said I want to do gaming live streams like NoahJ456.
I learned a lot of things about how to do better videos and live streams from watching his, like one of the funniest live streams NoahJ456 ever did was the *"Gorod Krovi Call of Duty Black Ops 3 Zombies: The Third Expansion," where he started off his live stream, he was all pumped up and excited, and he had his mic muted for the first two and a half minutes.
You might think, "Well, wouldn't he want to just edit that and delete that and start over?" I waited for the moment when he realized what he did. That reaction that when he sees, "Oh, my God. I've had the mic muted the whole time."
That is funny. That's human. That's interesting.
I've applied that to a lot of the live streams I've done. I've made all kinds of just basic rookie mistakes. I did a live stream or live stream format at least where I just recorded something and uploaded it live with this Bittrex training tutorial.
I called it "How to make $100 a day trading cryptocurrencies" and I managed to lose close to a thousand dollars or something ridiculous trading within an hour, and I literally just renamed it. I thought about not uploading it, but I literally just renamed it "Epic Fail" at the end of my original title.
NoahJ456 helped me a lot by helping me learn from his live streams. The problem was that we have had almost no mutual interaction and this is a challenge a lot of us run into. The people who often inspire us have such a huge following already that there is no opportunity for back-and-forth.
What I found for learning a new skill from getting sober and AA, to live streaming, to starting off from zero making music in the last couple of years, it's essential to have an experienced mentor where there is a back and forth collaboration, where you can ask the mentor questions and the mentor can take their vast amount of knowledge in that specific field and apply it uniquely to your situation.
This often allows us to benefit from essentially the things we don't even know that we don't know that our mentor does know and can give us exactly what we need.
I've made this mentor mistake a lot of times online where I just try to do it all myself. I try to just figure things out for the lowest cost. I've seen so many people's coaching and I've never bought into any of that until very recently as I've been trying to learn how to play music.
I've realized that I could not afford to make the same mistake again with not having a mentor. It's just too easy to give up on something like making music because while it's fun, it doesn't provide the immediate validation or sales or opportunities that almost anything else I have access to does.
Music is something I love and is coming from the heart, and therefore, I need a lot of help in order to do it and stick with it because I love doing it so much. My rational mind gives me all these reasons why I should be doing things like filming video courses because I can probably make $10,000 a month from filming video courses, I've already done lots and more than that.
At what point do I get to stop and just do what I love. A mentor is so much more than we can even comprehend because we think we just need to know stuff, but what we really need is relationships, we need feedback.
I'm very grateful "Digital Music Masters" with my friend Tomas George is the first time I've ever just fully wrapped my arms around and went for it with coaching.
Ironically this started out because 
Now, this isn't a coincidence it happened this way. Tomas signed up to be one of my partners in my partner program and have a monthly call with me. He did that a year and a half ago and I watched his business teaching online go from about $600 or so a month to now more than ten times that.
A year and a half later he's got an amazing amount of music courses out, he's got tons of students, lots of great reviews, popular tutorials on YouTube. I've been able to help him to take all of my experience, and then optimize that into exactly what helps him specifically with his business because I've got thousands of hours of experience now teaching online.
Tomas doesn't need thousands of hours of experience, he needs exactly relevant things and tips and consistent motivation and accountability, and I need that exact same thing for music production.
I've signed up on Tomas's website for his Digital Music Master's mentorship, which is six hundred and forty-nine dollars a month.
Now, you might think, "That's insane, Jerry. Why would you sign up and pay six hundred and fifty dollars a month to get mentoring on your music production setup that makes you almost no money?"
In fact, you could say that playing music costs me money. I've spent thousands of dollars to buy my equipment, to get everything set up, to record my music, to get synthesizers, sound packs, and then spent more money on video courses and now spend more money on a mentorship program with Tomas.
You could say at this point that my music is a total loss financially and that's accurate, even though technically I've made good money posting my music on Steem and some more money on YouTube Ads.
Let's just look at the overall numbers.
You could say that my music, if I had done something else like filmed video courses or expanded my coaching, if I'd have done something else, the opportunity cost of making this music is probably fifty to a hundred thousand dollars difference what I've spent versus what I've earned.
The key is life is not all about money and in fact money does not buy happiness, and even worse having more money once you are comfortable often leads to unhappiness.
The poor man suffers because of his poverty. The rich man suffers because of his wealth. The key is to do what we love and to enjoy life and to have relationships with other people and mentorship helps this.
Now, it might be easy to look back when I think someday my following, the biggest following I have will be for music, which you might call a total fantasy at this point.
However, I just got accepted with Awal, a music distributor that will be able to start putting my music on iTunes, on Amazon Music, and on Spotify. That's legitimate musician stuff.
I've got 44 songs I've published since I've started doing music. I absolutely would have given up and would not have kept advancing if it weren't for my mentorship with Tomas.
I'm going to guess that given where you are at today, the same thing may exist for you and live streaming or with whatever similar skill you are hoping to learn and struggling with today. It's one of those things that sounds good. You might like to do it on a sunny day where everything went smoothly and the followers just poured in and you were able to make some money right away.
Live streaming is one of those things where there are huge opportunities. It can be brutal not only to get started with, but then to continue to do every day or to scale up or to turn a live streaming audience into consistent income. It can be extremely difficult.
That's why I'm saying for my secret to success get a live streaming mentor. Work with people who have already done or are doing or who are very good at live streaming. What you want is an ideal combination of someone who is available with experience because here's the thing, I am not aware of a way to get NoahJ456 to mentor me on live streaming.
He has three million subscribers on YouTube and he gets all kinds of business opportunities. I'm sure I've seen him, I've tipped him myself. I've seen him pulling hundreds of dollars on several live streams while he is live in tips.
I'm not sure how I could get a mentorship with NoahJ456 and if I could I would guess it would be perhaps even out of my absurd price range.
The trick is to find someone who has got the experience, someone who is available to help.
Right now, I am available to help on my partner program. I have a Discord chat channel. My partner program is $49 a month or $1,000 for life.
I'm available and so are most of the other partners. I'm available to help out answer questions. I'm available to provide that ongoing motivation. I'm available to share my experience. I'm available to take a look at your live streams.
That said, I continue as I keep doing this just like with NoahJ456.
He didn't start out with earning hundreds of dollars in tips on every live stream he does. He didn't start out getting, it looks like if I do the math, hundreds if not thousands of dollars a day in ad revenue on his videos.
He didn't start out with three million subscribers on YouTube, and then a huge audience on Twitch. He didn't start out with all this stuff.
Doing these things repeatedly tends to snowball, and build and build on itself. Even for me I'm continuing my availability is continuing to get more and more focused every day at least as of May 2018, I have outstanding availability in my partner program.
There are about 40 or 50 partners at this point and I can afford to give each partner some individual attention every week. We have a weekly partner call where all of us get to participate in voice chat.
That said of my availability, I already stopped offering my one-on-one coaching program. I may consider it on an individual basis with certain partners who have been members for a while and want to have a one-on-one call each week or every other week, and even my partner program at this rate there will be five hundred or a thousand partners someday, and then I won't be available to help each individual partner.
While I've presented how I do it here, I encourage each of us to find the best person for us. I may not be the best mentor for you in terms of live streaming because you might want someone who is available more.
My sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous is retired, he is 76 years old. He has a full life with going to the gym, going to AA meetings and he is also consistently available for me. I used to see my sponsor almost every day for an hour or two a day.
When people have tried to ask me to sponsor them in Alcoholics Anonymous, I give them the low down. I say, "Look, here's my availability. I go to my AA meeting every day. I'm available a few minutes after the meeting every day. I'm not available to go out to lunch with you every day or to take you to other meetings because I've got a lot of service work with my business, with my family. I have a full life already and I think it's ideal to have a mentor who has time for you."
Therefore, I'm essentially arguing against in a lot of cases having me as a mentor. In fact, having a mentor who is slightly ahead in at least from a relative perception can be really valuable. You might have to look for this person or if you have known someone, you know one of your friends who does live streaming and they might be just a few months ahead of you, they might have been live-streaming video games, and they could be a good mentor.
Alternatively, my partner program can help you find some other people like me who have more availability who do live streaming, who have experience and who might be willing to coach you for less than a thousand dollars a month or whatever crazy rate I will come up with.
What I hope is the value my partner program is to attract people like me who may be more available that as they become five hundred or a thousand partners, you would be able to find a partner in the program who would be an ideal mentor and you would also be able to get some individual attention from me on a consistent basis.
Therefore, the secret is to get a mentor. If you want to do anything well, get a mentor for it. If you wanted to be a knight in medieval times, you started out as a page, you worked with the knight and you learned from the knight, then you practiced and became a knight.
Just doing it freestyle the way I've done it can work. I've found, like with my music and Tomas George and Digital Music Masters, it is a lot more effective to go all in on a mentor. I talk with Tomas every week and it keeps me accountable, it keeps me learning music every week, even when right now I'm finishing up filming this "Complete Live Streaming Video Course."
It might be very attractive to just say, "You know what? Let me just not do any music at all until I finish this course."
I've done that already too and if I hadn't been talking with Tomas about his business I wouldn't have stuck with my music. Regardless of whether my music becomes anything in the future, I love doing it. At least a few people love listening to it and that's the thing.
If you love and want to live stream, you feel the calling to live stream, go for it and get a mentor. Get the mentor who's right for you wherever they are. If you'd like to join my partner program and you haven't already, or you'd like to learn more, will you please go to Jerrybanfield.com/partners because I've got much more about the it there.
You can learn how it works, you get access to all my video courses as a partner. You have got multiple sign up options from a monthly payment to lifetime payments, to even options on Steem and you can get a look at the existing partners on this page to help see who else is in the program because the other partners might help you more than I do.
The idea is to provide a place where we can essentially find mentors without getting scammed out of, you know, several thousands of dollars on some sketchy forum post about some guy who has supposedly done something.
In the partner program, you know you have got people willing to pay $49 a month or a thousand dollars for a lifetime membership. These are people who are serious about having a full-time business online and several of them do live streaming. I expect there is going to be several more soon that do live streaming as well.
Thank you very much for watching or reading and I hope this is helpful!
Love,
Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk on the transcript from @deniskj
Shared on:
- Facebook page with 2,260,298 likes.
- YouTube channel with 234,900 subscribers.
- Twitter to 101,630 followers.
Let's stay together?
- If you want to stay updated via email, will you sign up either to get new emails daily at http://jerry.tips/steemposts or join at http://jerry.tips/emaillist1017 to get an email once a week with highlights?
- If you would like to build a relationship with me online, would you please visit https://jerrybanfield.com/contact/ because I would like a chance to get to know you?
Our Most Important Votes on Steem are for Witness!
- If you do not know what a witness is on Steem, will you please read https://steemit.com/steemit/@gmichelbkk/what-is-a-steem-witness-how-to-vote-and-why because our votes for witnesses determine our future together here on Steem?
- If you want to fully participate in witness voting and have never made a vote before, will you please set me as a proxy at https://steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-proxy?proxy=jerrybanfield&approve=1 because this help me to make all witness votes on your behalf and keep them updated?
- If you already have voted for witnesses and prefer to update your own witness votes, will you please place your vote using https://steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=jerrybanfield&approve=1 because you will feel good knowing your witness vote is helping fund projects that grow Steem as explained here?
My video is at DLive