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!

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!

While technically I am bound by the YouTube Partner agreement to not discuss the details, I can give you some clues that may help you to come to a conclusion on your own.

The buzz surrounding this issue was first really created when young hip-hop star Soulja Boy decided to make the following announcement in the form of a vlog:

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 case you don’t already know, your video’s default thumbnail image is created from the exact middle frame of your video. You also have the option of selecting the frames found at the 1/4 and 3/4 mark.

For the SUPER noobs: When a visitor is searching YouTube for a video, they see little image previews of videos (thumbnails) that match their search in the search results. When they are viewing videos, they see thumbnails of related videos on the side. When video responses are allowed, they will see thumbnails of those video responses below the video. The thumbnail is the single most influential factor in whether or not they will click through to your video.

Let’s have a look at a couple examples. Neither of the two thumbnails highlighted below are bad, but one is clearly more effective than the other one. Luckily, both videos were uploaded on the same day and on the same channel (which means they probably get an even amount of promotion), so we can trust that it’s an accurate comparison of the effectiveness of each respective thumbnail.

Those who are less hip with this whole internet marketing thing may have a different (yet still correct) idea of what a watermark is. The most common use of the word I’ve heard offline in my lifetime is when describing the fancy pattern or logo impressed into currency or paper checks to prevent fraud. However, as far as online marketing goes, watermarking has a different, yet similar purpose.

Basically, when you create a video that you intend to use to promote your website, you are going to want to display your URL (or logo that should contain your URL) within the video. Some sites use watermarks to brand their video and prevent it from being redistributed. For us independent internet marketers, the watermark is simply a way to drive the URL of your site deeper into the minds of your viewers and hopefully provoke their interest enough for them to type it into the address bar of their browser.

Now, Sony Vegas is by far my favorite video editing application. I use it for just about everything when it comes to creating/editing videos (I do use Adobe Audition for some advanced sound tweaking on rare occasions). However, you don’t necessarily need it. Windows Movie Maker usually comes bundled with Vista (as well as XP) and can be used to effectively watermark your videos. If you don’t have it, you can download the Vista version for free here, and the XP version here. For Mac users, iMovie will also do the job. However, if you don’t mind paying for a much more advanced program, you can pick up a copy of Sony Vegas here.

At the risk of coming off as lazy, here is an excellent video tutorial by YouTube member badenglish1984 demonstrating how to add a watermark using Windows Movie Maker for Vista. (XP Movie Maker watermark tutorial can be found here).

One VERY important thing I’d like to add is that the positioning of your watermark for your YouTube videos is key.  Many video creators make the mistake of putting their watermark in the lower right hand corner. Why is this a bad thing? Take the above tutorial video for example. What do you see in the lower right hand corner of the screen when you play that video? That’s right, YouTube automatically watermarks all embedded videos (those placed on external sites like this one) with their very own watermark. This means that if your watermark is in the same place, it will be partially eclipsed by YouTube’s own watermark when your video is embedded, potentially rendering your watermark useless.

For this reason, your watermark should be placed in either the top left, top right, or lower left hand corner. Personally, I prefer the lower left hand corner.

Another trick that I implement is removing the watermark shortly prior to the frame that I know I will be using as my thumbnail images. Thumbnails of your video are created from the 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 frames of your video, and you can choose which of those three to use. So, let’s say you have a video that is 2:00 in length, and you want to use the frame at 1:00 as your thumbnail. You would then end the watermark (I prefer to fade it out) around 0:58, so that it isn’t present in the thumbnail image. You can then bring it back shortly after (1:02 or so).

The reason I do this is because people naturally don’t like advertisements, and some YouTubers will stray away from clicking videos that appear to have an obvious advertisement placed in them. By removing your watermark at the correct time, your video will not appear to be promotional, and therefore likely receive more views.

That’s all for today! Good luck!