How To Make Money With Youtube

A few years ago YouTube.com was all the rage for internet marketers and hundreds of eBooks with titles like “How To Make Money From YouTube Today!” and “How I Make Literally Millions Just From Posting Videos On YouTube!!” were everywhere. Like most things in Internet Marketing these claims were mostly exaggerated garbage. However, like most things in Internet Marketing they were also rooted in fact. You can make money from YouTube and in most cases it’s excessively easy to boot.

Here are a few of the methods you can use to make income from YouTube, how to apply them and how much you’re likely to make.

1. Affiliate Marketing

First up is affiliate marketing. This is a common internet marketing technique where you promote someones product with an affiliate ID in your link. Whenever someone clicks through and buys the product, you earn a commission. The best platform for this is blogging since you can hide the affiliate link (which potential customers are often put off by) and promote it in whichever way you like (through image links, text links, etc). However, YouTube, when used correctly, is also an excellent format for affiliate marketing.

The basic steps to making money via affiliate marketing on YouTube are to:

A. Sign up to ClickBank.com or another affiliate network.
B. Chose a suitable product in a specific niche or category.
C. Find or create a video that revolves as much as possible around that niche or category.
D. Upload your video and create a compelling video description (more info field) so that viewers natural want to click through.

Assuming a commission of $10 per sale and a typical yearly count of 30,000 viewers per video, this would mean that even if only 1% of the viewers for a given video click through and buy your affiliate product then you’d still make $3,000 per year from a single video. While the click through rates for YouTube will be significantly lower than other affiliate marketing mediums, the effort involved is usually much lower. You’ll also find that most of the techniques mentioned for article marketing (making a compelling bio box, etc) also apply to video marketing.

2. Promote Your Own Products

Another extremely popular method of use for YouTube is promoting your own products. There are a number of different approaches to this but the basic idea is to feature a product or service you are selling and show an example of it in use with a link to your sales page in the description field.

This can work with electronic products like eBooks. For example if you are promoting a weight loss eBook then why not tape a few testimonials. Or offer a copy of your book for free if someone agrees to take a quick video of themselves before and after using your product.

The real benefit though, comes when you create videos of your product in use. If you were marketing a physical product this would be easy, you would just show someone playing with your remote control car or your train set or whatever. For electronic products it’s slightly more complicated but still pretty easy. Let’s say, for example, that you’ve created an automatic Social Bookmarking Submission software package (a piece of software that lets people submit to Digg.com, StumbleUpon, etc at the click of a button). Using a free piece of software like CamStudio you can record yourself opening up your software from the desktop, submitting your site, and then opening up the results in your browser. This shows potential customers exactly what your product does, and exactly how to use it.

This is very useful and people do actively search for people using something they are interested in buying before making a purchase. By showing testimonials or the product in action you allow people to see your product in action and what people are saying about it as well as generating additional traffic towards your sales page.

3. Video Ads

Not so long ago YouTube and AdSense (both of which are owned by Google) teamed up and developed Video Ads. These allow you to embed videos in your blog or website using a custom embed code which adds adverts to the video. Just like with AdSense, you earn a small commission each time someone clicks through.

This is especially useful for websites with large amounts of traffic and/or videos. If you embed large numbers of videos on your site already you may see a large jump in your income using video ads.

One disadvantage of using this system though, is that you can’t chose specific videos to display on your site, instead YouTube choses which videos it thinks are relevant to your page from a list of channels and categories which are signed up to Video Ads (kind of like AdWords for YouTube). This is unfortunate and means that many different video content sites are experimenting with alternative ways to make money, some of whom share this income with their users.

4. Revver

Revver.com, while not specific to YouTube, is worth mentioning in this article too. Revver is very similar to YouTube, Daily Motion and other video sharing websites in that it’s simply a place where people can upload and share videos. The difference being that they automatically add ads to each video you upload and give you 50% of the income generated from these ads. These PPC ads work almost identically to AdSense and give you a tiny commission each time they are viewed and a larger commission each time they are clicked.

If you are creative and enjoy making videos online then Revver is definitely worth your time. They should also be checked out for those of us just looking to create some additional income online however, since they also offer 20% of the ad revenue for people who promote videos. This means that if you have an outlet for video content (a blog or website, etc) then you can make some extra pocket money by putting videos in front of peoples eyes. Since the ads are pretty unobtrusive nobody loses out.

Revver isn’t going to make you a fortune but if you have a few videos sitting doing nothing or a YouTube account you want to put to better use then it’s a great way to make a few pennies. Since you can just upload your videos and forget about them, there really is virtually no effort involved at all and it will probably earn you the price of a pizza or two each month.

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