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.

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:

If you don’t already understand the importance and the benefit of posting video responses, you probably need to read the Gaming YouTube Ebook.

On this page, I have a list of channels that regularly (or at least usually) allow video responses to be posted on their channels. Even some of these are now turning their backs on the video response feature. Why? Well, your guess is as good as mine. However, my personal theory/fear is that since the big companies (Universal, CBS, BBC, etc) NEVER allow video responses, the independent producers have adopted the belief that allowing video responses is amateurish? I don’t know…I certainly hope that’s not the case. Aside from media outlets, the channels of most notable figures (Barack Obama, Britney Spears) also usually disable the video response feature.

I’d like to point out that the video response feature is enabled by DEFAULT. This means that any channel that does not allow video responses to be posted had to manually disable that feature.
Edit: I’ve been getting reports that some new user accounts are set up so that video responses are actually disabled by default (and must be enabled manually).

So what do we do?

Well, luckily there is still a way to find the videos that are getting the most traffic that still allow video responses. It’s simple, really.

Simply go to YouTube and click the “videos” tab at the top. If you’re logged in, it may try to take you to “Recommended for You”, but usually it will show you the top viewed videos for the day. If you end up on “recommended for you”, simply click “all” in the left sidebar category to get to the day’s most viewed videos. In the menu bar above the displayed videos you’ll see several options: Featured, Rising Videos, Most Popular, Most Discussed, Top Favorited, and more. Of course, our most useful feature is hidden in the “more” sub-menu. Hover your mouse over “more” and you will see four sub-menu options: Recent Videos, Most Responded, Most Viewed, and Top Rated. Obviously, you’re looking for “most responded”.

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.

I get this question from time to time from disgruntled internet marketers that aren’t having much luck with YouTube. A lot of them are making the same mistakes that I made when I first started out.

Treat Video Production Like an Assembly Line

That’s the only analogy I can think of that demonstrates the mindset you need to have when scraping/creating (whichever route you prefer) videos. First of all, each video is just another piece of the empire you’re trying to build on YouTube. The only way to actually make decent money with YouTube marketing is with VOLUME. The guys that have hundreds if not thousands of dating-themed videos up with proper keywords are making a nice chunk of change. That is, the ones that have managed to get them to stick without them getting flagged.

I used to get way too caught up in making “perfect” videos. In the long run, however, nobody cares about the audio quality or the font you used in the watermark (okay, the font matters a teeny bit, but not enough to waste 30 minutes searching font sites. Oh wait, there is a fonts.com advertisement over there…um…I take it back).

My bread and butter is dating. Not in real life, because my girlfriend is so closed-minded, but in the affiliate marketing sense. That’s the only thing I really consistently promote on YouTube, mixed in with a little ringtone action and then random things here and there. So, the production value to actual $$$ value ratio might be debatable for some people who are promoting different niches, but in the case of dating, there are only two key factors: 1)How hot the girl in the video is, and 2)visibility/memorability of your link. That’s it and that’s all.

Now let’s critique a random video of this nature that I found on YouTube earlier. Hopefully it hasn’t been removed by the time you come upon this post. Now, this is all in the name of constructive criticism. I have no idea who uploaded this video and I hope they wouldn’t mind a little free promotion in this context.