If you’re not already familiar, adsense is a popular monetization tool for web publishers (that’s you!). You’ve probably noticed “ads by Google” on several other websites. Basically, the owner of that site is paid a small fee every time someone clicks one of those ads. In large volume, you can make a nice chunk of change with adsense.

Blogger is behind the countless “blogspot” blogs that are published on the web. These blogs are free to register, and blogger goes ahead and hosts them for you also. The benefit to running a blog this way is that it is 100% free. The downside is that you’re a bit limited in what you can do with it, and of course you don’t technically own the blog, it’s just made available to you through blogger. But don’t get me wrong, blogspot blogs are definitely useful!

The method we’re going to talk about today is actually very easy and lots of folks are already using it to drive traffic to their blogspot pages in the hopes of generating adsense clicks.

Basically, you’re going to want to grab a breaking video. Music videos are getting insanely difficult to re-upload because of the advanced duplicate content filters YouTube has been using. I’d suggest something sports related. UFC fights can work WONDERS, but the UFC has a tendency to have their videos removed. They will stick for a little while, though (your own results may vary).

Once you find your hot video, use Zamzar to download it from YouTube. If the thumbnail could be better, consider improving it. I also recommend that you watermark the video with your new URL, both to increase the video’s “uniqueness”, and to help drive additional traffic to the new blogspot page you’re promoting. Don’t have a relevant blogspot blog? Well, that’s fine! In fact, it’s better that you do this with a new blog. Create a blogger blog with a relevant name. For instance, if you were going to do this with a video of the recent Randy Couture Vs Brock Lesnar fight (UFC), you could try to get “LesnarVsCouture.blogspot.com”. Of course, that name may very well be taken, but you can use your imagination.

For best results, you should add some original content to the blog. It doesn’t have to be a whole lot, maybe 300-400 words about the fight. This will increase the chance of your adsense units actually displaying (Google’s quality filters might prevent them from showing up on a site that they feel has no value). Maybe you might also want to embed the fight video or a couple pictures from the event. Blogger makes it really easy to add adsense units to your blog. If you don’t already have an adsense account, you can sign up here (it may take a couple days for you to get approved).

Now, take the video and upload it to your own YouTube channel (you may want to create a new account for this as well). Include a link to your new blog in the description, and use annotations to accentuate the link.

The faster you get this done, the better. Others will likely be uploading the same video, so you want yours to be uploaded sooner in order to boost its chances of ranking higher in YouTube search results. Also, don’t forget to post your video as a response to other relevant videos.

That’s about it! Of course, the more of these mini-systems you set up, the greater your chances of success. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket!

In a previous post, I went into detail about how you can use annotations to significantly boost the CTR (click-through rate) of your videos. Your #1 priority should be getting people to your videos, but your #2 priority is to get them to click to your site!

Now, the trouble here is that YouTube decided to place a little advertisement above (what appears to be) every single non-content partner video on YouTube. So, this applies to the general public and most likely every single YouTube marketer.

For those of us that had hundreds of videos up with annotations pointing perfectly at the URL in the description, this is bad news. Now all of our convenient little annotations point at the completely wrong place. I will show you an example:

Google Adwords provides a powerful keyword research tool that allows you to see the approximate monthly search volume for any given keyword, along with the search volume of related keywords. Of course, this data only reflects what people are searching on Google. How do you effectively do keyword research specifically for YouTube? Well, my method definitely does not give you the same detailed information that you can get doing keyword research for search engines, but it is still a very effective one.

When you type into the search field on YouTube, you’ll notice that you are given suggestions based on the characters you enter. For instance, if you just type the letter “T”, a drop down of suggested search terms will appear. Since they are not listed alphabetically, it makes sense to assume that they are probably listed in order of highest search volume/popularity.

(example)

Many of you already implement the method of using URL forwarding to forward traffic from your domain to an appropriate affiliate offer. For example, you might own LocalGirlsOnline.com, which you watermark all over your provocative YouTube videos and add to the description box,  and then redirect that domain to a popular dating site like AmateurMatch or AdultFriendFinder (using your affiliate link, of course). However, there is one more step you can take to improve your conversions using this method.

The main problem with the above method is that some visitors to the affiliate site are put off by the fact that they clicked on something like “LocalGirlsOnline.com” and ended up at a dating site with a completely different name. Even though some visitors will not care or notice (the best kind of visitor), others will bounce because of it. Using subdomains, you can improve the chances of them sticking around.

If you’re not already familiar, a subdomain is a separate area of your domain. Unlike a sub-folder, a subdomain appears before your domain name. For example, if there were a forum on this site (which there is not), I might have it located at http://forum.gamingyoutube.com, instead of http://gamingyoutube.com/forum. There are different reasons for using each, but we won’t get into that here. Check out this article for more information about when to use subdomains vs subfolders for SEO purposes.

For our intended purpose, the subdomain is simply used to increase the perceived legitimacy of your link. For example, if you are running the Amatuer Match affiliate program, you could set up a subdomain on “LocalGirlsOnline.com” such as “http://AmateurMatch.LocalGirlsOnline.com”, and then redirect that subdomain to your Amateur Match affiliate link (which is an offer carried by Dating Gold as well as Ads4Dough, if you’re interested).

Now, there are a few pros and only one real con that come along with this method.

Pros:

• The description box will only show the first 27 characters of your domain, including the “http” protocol and all punctuation (colon, slashes, periods). The user must click “more info” to see the full domain, but can still click the URL without expanding the info box. This means they might never even see or notice that they’re actually clicking on a subdomain of your site (especially if it’s a rather long subdomain).
• Conversion ratios will likely increase due to the trust factor.
• One domain can be used in conjunction with multiple subdomains to promote several related offers, instead of having to register a bunch of new domains for each one.

Con:

• It is much more difficult to brand a subdomain. As far as watermarking purposes go (especially for videos that you plan to embed in multiple external locations), you’re probably better off using your basic domain. Most visitors won’t be able to remember the whole subdomain address or will simply be too lazy to manually type in the whole thing.

As you can see, this method is best suited if you’re planning on driving internal YouTube traffic, as you’ll be wanting to provoke clicks to your URL in the description box. Don’t forget to use annotations to increase the call-to-action factor.

Subdomain versatility may vary depending on where your domain is registered. GoDaddy currently offers up to 100 subdomains for each domain registered with them, which can all be used for redirecting (without the need to purchase hosting).

If you’ve attempted to upload a video with someone elses content on it lately (and if you’re an avid reader of this blog, I’m sure you have!), you may have noticed that YouTube has become very sophisticated and efficient in their process of detecting content that is owned by a 3rd party. In some cases, the content is deleted virtually immediately. However, some companies have realized the potential that the free distribution of their content holds, and have decided to allow it…to an extent.

Basically, YouTube is now giving an option to users to who have uploaded content owned by one of these reasonable media giants. Instead of having their video removed, it can remain, under the condition that YouTube reserves the right to collect and deliver specific stats about your video’s performance to the copyright owner, as well as display ads on/in your video (and not share any of the revenue with you). MySpace is now planning on taking the same route, according to the article.

This is a good thing for you dilligent video marketers. Especially those of you that are constantly uploading music videos and promoting your ringtone sites/offers. Ringtone promotion on YouTube is right up there in profitability with dating, so if you haven’t already tried it, maybe it’s time you gave it a shot.

Universal Music is another of the progressive-minded companies that is on board with this new system, so their artists/videos might be of interest to you, if you’re looking to get into ringtone promotion.

In a day and age where “illegal” sharing of audio/video content is a simple, routine fact of life for so many people, it’s nice to see the big companies finally being more objective about the situation and finding new ways to work things out and find more realistic solutions. Although, it certainly took them long enough…

If you’re the type of YouTuber who puts up videos of yourself playing your favorite Beatles songs on your old guitar, then you probably don’t welcome the above mentioned types of comments. However, if you’re a skilled YouTube marketer, then you should embrace them.

It’s quite simple really. Negative comments get negative attention. Not just from you, but also from others who view your video. Over-the-top negative comments are the ones most likely to be responded to, and in many cases, they can spark a mini textual battle between two or more YouTube members. Why is this valuable?

Every time someone has their comment responded to, they are notified. Whether it be via email or in their YouTube inbox, they get an alert telling them that someone responded to their comment. In order to view that response, what do they have to do? View your video! Every time that hopping mad YouTuber returns with smoke coming out of his ears to leave his next rebuttal comment, you get another view.

That’s not all. Videos that receive high volumes of comments get awarded “Most Discussed” awards. Receiving honors can help your videos get additional exposure as well as improve their YouTube search result rankings.

Now that you see the benefit of having a war of words take place on your comment board, how do you go about igniting that sort of fire?

Cast the First Stone!

That’s right. If there is no drama, simply create it. By now, you should already have several YouTube accounts. Use one of them to leave a couple nasty comments on your videos. No replies? No problem. Simply use another account to reply, and open a dialogue with yourself. As mentally unstable as it might sound, arguing with yourself on a YouTube comment board is perfectly safe.

Now get out there and make some waves. While you’re at it, make some money too.

However, as of recently, autoplay views from external websites no longer count towards a video’s total view count. It appears the good folks at YouTube finally wised up to the method and put a stop to it.

To the best of my knowledge, user-initiated views from externally embedded videos (without autoplay) are still counted, but I’m not positive that each and ever view is counted. It can be difficult to gather accurate information because of the sluggish way YouTube video views update (I’ve seen view count freezes as long as 72 hours).

If you’re not already familiar with how to view what sites have your content embedded, simply go to your video’s page, and click the “Statistics & Data” tab (next to the “Commentary” tab). The top 5 linking sites will be shown beneath any honors the video might currently hold. Some video owners choose to disable the viewing of linking sites (a feature that was popular when the method of autoplaying embedded videos was still effective).