Everyone knows about YouTube. It gets millions of hits a day. So scoring some of that traffic and making money from it seems like a pretty good idea. Now before you read on be aware that this method might be considered unethical by some. So if you are easily offended by online marketing ideas, maybe now is a good time to stop reading…

Make Money with YouTube - The Method

The method I used was to upload popular music videos. I would then place a hyperlink in the description of the video to a page on one of my web sites (you can use a blogspot blog also if you like), which would re direct to a CPA offer that gives away complimentary ring tones. The offer I used would require people to enter their cell phone number, and subscribe to a monthly service, and only accepted US traffic, but there are plenty of different offers. If you are looking for the best paying CPA affiliate program for ring tones and other CPA offers, the site I use is Max Bounty. For the offer I am using with Max Bounty you get $14 for each person that signs up to get the complementary ring tones. So I am sure you can see the potential to make money when you see videos on Youtube with well over a millions views.

For the hyperlink from YouTube you can’t use html, so you hyperlink just by typing the full address of your re direct page starting with the http part. Another method is to watermark videos with your URL. This requires a little extra effort, and you need to own a very basic easily remembered domain name.

To make a page redirect from your page to the CPA offer you can use:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;
url=http://affiliateURL">

Where affiliateURL is the url you get from your CPA affiliate program.

Extra stuff

Personally I find uploading videos to YouTube very slow, and unreliable. I found it easier to use 3rd party software to do the uploading. This software will do the trick. If you want to try the watermark method you will need watermark software.

Results

I found that uploading videos and adding a link wasn’t enough to make money. Ideally you need content that has the potential to go viral, so a very new video that isn’t already on YouTube 200 times, controversial content, that has possibly been removed from YouTube because of copyright breeches for example. A great site to gauge what’s popular on YouTube is The Viral Video Chart. It is also very important to use as many relevant tags as you can think of when uploading the video.

I don’t won’t to quote how much I made using them method, but lets just say, with in 3 days and 5 videos I had made more money than I had from blogging in the last 4 months of last year.

The Ethics

I know some people are going to read this and think it is a little evil. I just want to put in a statement to suggest that although it may be a little unethical, the only real losers are the original copyright owners of the content you upload. YouTube is making a killing by sharing tones of copyrighted material, why can’t we get in on the action?

*this site is in no way associated to Youtube - images used in this post are copyright to their original owners.