The business of making money with YouTube has changed drastically in the past year, and due to these changes I’ve since become more involved in other areas of making money online. I’m not certain what the future of this site will be (if any), but for now I’m going to let it collect dust (in fact I think it has already begun!).

Thank you to my loyal readers and everyone who has supported this blog. All posts will be left up for reference, even though many of the techniques have become outdated.

For those of you still advertising online dating via YouTube, I wish you the best of luck. Over the past two months I’ve had nearly all of my dating oriented channels nuked. Perhaps those of you more heavily promoting different types of products and services might be having better luck.

Feel free to leave comments below. As always, this post and all others on this site do not use the “nofollow” attribute in the comments.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to spam my own blog with this Local Sex Partners link. You understand. Gotta pay the bills somehow!

Goodbye for now!

Earlier as I was wandering around the internet I stumbled upon an auction offering the opportunity to buy YouTube subscribers. The seller doesn’t have a ton of feedback, but enough that you can see he is apparently delivering the product as described.

Of course, we can only assume that the subscribers you get aren’t actual human visitors but rather accounts created in bulk by the seller. However, this doesn’t make the service worthless. Depending on what your personal goals are with YouTube, it may serve you to have an additional 2,000 subscribers displayed on your channel, even if they aren’t real people that are actively watching your videos.

The reason for this is that a lot of YouTube users will attribute more credibility to a channel with a high number of subscribers. Even though it seems silly, it’s just the nature of the YouTube beast. Even if you only have a handful of videos, people will be more likely to watch just because they want to see what all the fuss is about.

Another benefit is that gaining a bunch of subscribers rapidly can help propel you into the “most subscribed” category for that week or month or whatever it may be, giving you further visibility and triggering the snowball effect similar to that which we’ve seen with videos that accumulate massive amounts of views quickly (even if they are artificially generated views).

If you decide to use this YT subscription service, please be sure to of course leave feedback on eBay but also come back here and post your experience as a comment.

Also, keep in mind that there is always a risk associated with using these paid services to game YouTube (or any other site, for that matter). If you were to purchase 50,000 subscribers, for example, you would most likely be very much “on the radar” and in all likelihood have your account terminated.

Good luck!

More and more YouTube has been cracking down lately on people uploading content containing copywritten music or people uploading entire films/tv shows. However, there is still very much that can be safely done below the radar.

One such trick I’ll tell you I’ve been using lately is to use rare interviews with celebrities and bands. Luckily for me, I have a local shop that sells rare bootlegs of such material where I can find all sorts of great stuff that isn’t yet on YouTube for only maybe $5-$10 per DVD.

Obviously you need a DVD drive and software such as Sony Vegas to import the footage. Then you can either watermark it with a domain you own or maybe just use Tiny URL to drop an affiliate link in the description. If you only use the affiliate link in the description, I recommend of course using annotations to increase your CTR.

How you monetize that traffic is up to you, but you can get a TON of clicks this way.

If you don’t have the convenience of a local dvd shop like mine, you’ll just have to be a little more resourceful. Rare bootlegs can be purchased and in many cases even downloaded for free online.

Time to start snooping around!

First of all, this whole site would be pretty pointless if you couldn’t still make money with YouTube. I personally know several individuals that are doing $x,xxx/month or more from YouTube marketing alone. Of course, for every one person that really applies themselves and achieves that sort of success, there will be several more that give up after not seeing any initial results or hitting a couple bumps in the road.

The number one reason that people fail at making money this way is because they simply don’t do enough. If you put up 5 videos and expect the dough to start pouring in, then you need a reality check. Some of us are uploading 100-200 videos a day or more. It doesn’t happen by accident. There is no real “luck” involved when you look at the big picture. It’s much more about persistence and doing the leg work than it is about spinning the roulette wheel.

If you’re just starting out, it’s unreasonable to expect you’ll be able to put up videos in that volume. At this point, I outsource a lot of the work, especially account creation. Just creating 30-40 YouTube accounts takes more time than most people think, but it’s part of the gig if you’re just starting out.

Also, I’m sorry for generalizing a bit in this post. I know not everyone has the exact same approach to marketing on YT and I know that there are other successful methods than mass uploading of watermarked videos. However, for myself and the people I work with, that is what’s working for us right now, and I’m just here to share that with you. If you find another avenue of success on YT, by all means, please share it here by leaving a comment (if you want to).

Sorry this was more of a rant than it was a helpful post. The next will be of more substance. Until then, check out this YouTube account creation software. It’s not free, but there is a free trial available. If you’re not ready to start outsourcing account creation and all that, this might be a helpful tool to help you start building your business.

Keep on trucking!

Of course, just because this works today, does not necessarily mean it will work tomorrow. Also, you will need to be prepared to sacrficie a bit of audio quality (or at least the integrity of the original audio).

The Solution?

Reverb. That’s right. After all my tweaking of EQ trying to find the right way to skew a track enough to make it unidentifiable, I discovered that getting around the filter was as easy as adding a little bit of reverb. I’m no audio expert, but I’m guessing the reason that it works so well is because adding a healthy amount of reverb seriously alters the digital footprint of the audio file. You can see how different a wav looks after reverb is applied. Basically there is just a bunch of sound data where there wasn’t before, creating a uniqe file. For the user, it just sounds like the song is being played in a large room (depending on the amount of reverb).

My software of choice, Sony Vegas, has this effect built in. I’d imagine that most video editing software packages probably have some sort of default reverb effect, as it is a  pretty common one.

I have so far tested this on three different videos, all of which originally had their audio track disabled. All three have been successfully uploaded and are still live with the reverb-tweaked audio files still in tact.

In some cases, the new sound of the audio will actually complement the video. Personally, I think it sounds pretty cool. I haven’t yet determined the exact amount of reverb that needs to be applied to safely evade the filter, but it’s safe to say that the more you apply, the less chance you’ll have of having any problems.

I know this has been a very frustrating problem for many of you, so hopefully this will make your lives a bit easier! I don’t expect this method to work forever, but until it becomes obsolete, enjoy!

Final Note

In some cases, having your audio match third party content will not cause it to be removed, but rather YouTube will display advertisments on the video that will benefit the rightful copyright holder. This may or may not be a problem for you (the advertisement makes it difficult to use annotations as we’ve talked about here before).

A while back I removed the no-follow attribute from all comments posted on this site. That means if you leave your commentary with a linkback to your site, you will receive the benefit of a “do-followed” inbound link to your site. If you have a look around this site, you’ll find that while some pages have no rank, others are PR0, PR1, and PR2.

Regardless of how much spam bombards me, I will still continue to regularly moderate each and every single comment that comes in. I’ve actually got pretty good at it (despite a slip up the other day where I accidentally marked a legitimate comment as spam).

If you’d like to leave comments on this site, please feel free to do so! But please don’t waste your time if you’re not planning to add anything of value and just want to drop a link to your lame poker/acai berry/forex site that gets zero traffic anyway.

I don’t really care much about the content of the site you link to, just as long as you’re a real human being leaving an honest comment about the article in question.

By the way, if you’re having trouble finding other blogs that follow their comments, here’s a quick and easy tip: Just do a Google search for “U Comment I Follow” and “(keyword)”, to find sites that follow comments that have content related to whatever it is that you’re trying to promote.

Am I Crazy?

Some of my peers have brought my sanity into question when I told them I decided to remove the no-follow attribute from comments left on this site. Well, as far as I know, I am still sane. I think the whole no-follow concept is pretty lame, to be honest. If you already moderate your comments as it is, why not give back to the people that are taking the time to read your posts and leave their comments? I think it’s for the greater good of the whole blogging industry. If you have a blog of your own, I strongly suggest you consider taking part in the “U Comment, I Follow” revolution!

First of all, this is not a seminar on how to sell things on eBay. If you’re looking for one of those, check out the late night infomercials on TV!

Being a seller on eBay is not the only way to make money with the site. Did you know that eBay also has an affiliate program? Ebay Partner Network (aka EPN) allows you to earn money by sending traffic to eBay auctions and search results. Depending on which site you’re sending traffic to (eBay US, eBay UK, eBay AU, etc), the commission structure will be different. For US, the bottom tier is 50% commission on the final value fee of any auction won by someone you referred to the site. The tracking cookie lasts for 7 days, as far as the window of time in which your referrals can make a purchase and you will still receive a credit. There is also a commission structure for referring new members to eBay. If one of your referrals happens to be new to eBay and they sign up and make a winning bid (or execute a “buy it now”), then it is called an ACRU. The value of the ACRU will vary, and I’m not going to get into all that right now! But it can be anywhere between $1-$50. ACRU tracking lasts for a whole 30 days.

Getting Approved
Not everyone will be approved for eBay Partner Network, since they’re a bit selective about who they approve. If you have an established website and you detail how you’re going to drive traffic to their site in your application, you’ll have a better chance of being approved. I definitely do NOT recommend you mention that you’re planning to use YouTube (although it may not be expressly against their terms, it’s not something they would look favorably upon in an application).

Get Ready to Redirect
Since we’re being selective about how much we reveal about our traffic methods, obviously we’re going to want to disguise the YouTube traffic. You could do this with a service like Tiny URL, but that alone isn’t the cleanest way to go about it. Your best bet is to use your own domain for redirects. If you have hosting for your domain, even better. Some domain registrars will allow you to redirect domains you have registered with them without the need to purchase hosting, but then you’re limited to just one URL you can redirect to. If you have hosting setup, then you could have several portals for redirects. For instance, if your site was “items.com”, you could redirect different things by using sub-directories: “items.com/coffeemugs”, “items.com/mp3players”, etc. If you’re planning on promoting a few different things, this way will be much cheaper than buying a new domain for every product you want to sell!

Note: If you want to take an extra step to be super cautious, you could always use Tiny URL to redirect to your redirect, or vice versa, but that may get a bit complicated.

Promote Something!
This is where your creativeness comes into play. You’re going to need to think of a physical product that you can promote (something for sale on eBay). You don’t need to go and make a whole elaborate video on your own. If you’ve read the other articles on this site you know how to rip videos and edit them, to some degree. Find a video that can be used to promote whatever it is you want to promote. Tweak it if necessary with music or text, drop your redirecting link in the description box, add an annotation that points to that link, and you’re good to go!

The video is obviously a crucial element. If it doesn’t get views, you don’t get clicks, and you won’t make any $. The best way to go about it is to look at which videos are currently very popular or rising to popularity and think of how you could use that video to promote something. If it’s a popular music video, that’s easy. Let’s say Green Day just released a new video. You could link to “Green Day Autographs!” If you click that link you’ll see you’re taken to a list of search results for autographed green day memorabilia (note the redirect). Your customized links can be created from within your EPN account. Think outside the box and see what you can come up with.

A Little Proof
I know that you guys like to see proof of results, so I took a screenshot for you. I’m not going to reveal the video or even the nature of the video, as it is still a growing niche for me. But rest assured, there are still countless ways to game YouTube, and this one has all sorts of possibilities.

The stats you see below are for this month, the campaign that is not blurred out is the one in question. It’s not a ton of money just yet, but the link has only been there for a little over a week. Of course, the video it’s on is doing very well, getting around 8,000 views a day at the moment. We can’t expect every video to perform that well, but if you follow the trends closely and keep at it then you’ll see it’s not that hard to pull off.

Not bad for a video that only took a couple hours to create. If my current ACRU payout was higher, it would obviously be better. The views will of course slow down and taper off soon enough, but I don’t think this particular one has reached its full potential yet. Keep in mind that every time someone clicks through, a cookie is placed in their browser that lasts for 30 days (7 days for auction commissions, 30 days for ACRU’s).

Hopefully you can see the potential. Now get those creative juices flowing and make some money!

One and one last thing…this site has been getting hit pretty hard with spam comments lately. I moderate everything by hand, so sometims I goof up. Earlier I accidentally marked a legitimate comment as spam, and I have no idea who it was from. For all I know there is a way to retreive it but I can’t figure it out…my expertise remains on YouTube! But if you know who you are, please don’t be offended. And please feel free to comment once again!

Instead of having to go into your account and to the page specifically for annotations editing, the new editor is built right into the videos main page. While your viewers will see your video as normal, you’ll see yours with two little arrows in the bottom left corner, and when you hover your mouse over the video content, you’ll see that it changes into a little targeting icon. Pretty nifty!

There is also an option to turn the new annotations editor off, if it bugs you.

Just thought this was worth mentioning, especially since it seems like I’ve only been posting negative stuff around here lately. This is good news!

Oh, I almost forgot. Another YouTube change! For those of you who like to troll comment boards and then later regret your ridiculous comments, you’ll be glad to know that YouTube has made it now possible to delete your own comments. Previously, only the owner of the video was allowed to delete any comments.

Many YouTube marketers have been experiencing problems with their videos being removed within minutes after uploading. In some cases, the video will go live for 20-30 minutes, and then get removed once again. Why is this?

With the normal routine process of elimination, you can try different things, different video editing techniques, different content, but you may find you’re still having the same problem.

Occasionally, I correspond with Liam Bowers, a very knowledgeable internet marketer, about these very challenges. In a recent email, Liam shared with me his latest insight on the problem of videos being removed after a brief run, and he agreed to let me share it with you:

YouTube seems to be detecting a pattern in frequently used combinations of description / title / tags, regardless of what the video content actually contains. For example, I have a very reliable set of tags I can use that gets me good, sustained traffic immediately for a particular niche. But I suppose I’ve now uploaded so many videos with these tags and my URL, that YT has detected a pattern and is automatically deleting the account (how they justify this, I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything about this documented and don’t know how it relates to the TOS, because it really doesn’t seem to be related to the video content)

Anyway, I can still use the old faithful tags, but I can’t put a URL ANYWHERE in the description (at first) or it will get deleted within 20 to 30 minutes. The video starts getting traffic as usual…However, after I check back an hour later or so, if the video is still alive, I can alter the description to re-include the URL and it stays up with no problem. Apparently, whatever algorithm is looking for a pattern only does it once when the video is uploaded.

Well, there you have it. It seems title text, description, and keyword tags may very well be getting your videos flagged shortly after processing. This means you’ll have to get creative with the way you tag your videos, since the YouTube traffic you receive still depends heavily on your keyword usage.

Take Liam’s advice. Apply it and see if it improves the success rate of your uploads. Please feel free to share your own results here!

The idea of being able to buy bulk video views is very attractive, but unfortunately there are mostly only scammers offering this service. When you find a random person on an internet marketing forum, you really have very little information about them and thus the transaction can be very risky. So, how do you find someone legitimate to boost your view count?

Well, today I stumbled upon someone selling 100k YouTube views on Ebay. The beauty of this is that as you can see, the service is being offered by a seller with over 300 positive feedback. You won’t likely find that degree of credibility on a forum.

Now, I don’t know the details of this service (I don’t know the seller), but I’d be willing to bet that the views are auto-generated, and not from actual human users. Views from real humans would actually be worth a lot more, and therefore cost a lot more. But make no mistake, even auto-generated views can be extremely valuable. When your video receives 100,000 views in just a couple days, it will likely be catapulted to the most viewed in its category (if not in all categories). This creates somewhat of a snowball effect, as your video will get more and more views as long as it holds that highly visible position. Think of it as an artificial way to jumpstart a real viral video outbreak.

So how much is it gonna cost you? Well, for the 100k view package, the seller is offering a buy-it-now price of just $25.00. Unfortunately I haven’t ordered the service just yet, so I can’t give you an in-depth review of the service, but I will be ordering from this seller and reporting later.

If you don’t want to commit to a whole 100k order, the seller is also offering smaller view packages of 1k (only $1), 5k, and 10k views.

I reccomend you take advantage of this offer while it lasts! And please feel free to share your experiences with me and I’ll try to include them in my future post about this service.