How I Made A Dollar From Everyone Who Watched My YouTube Video
February 26th, 2007 by Mike Reining Read more about Blog Marketing, Copywriting, Using Audio, Viral MarketingIn this post, I’m going to share with you a pleasant discovery I made about Youtube, posting videos and earning quick bucks online. I earned almost a buck for every SINGLE person who watched my video. I was quite amazed at how well this worked — and you might be too.
Here’s how it started:
Burt Goldman, an author in Los Angeles who I do online markering for sent me a collection of all videos of some his lectures. I own a mailing list of people interested in meditation. I wanted to share the video with them. To save money and cost — I decided to just upload a clip of the video to Youtube.
Since it’s owned by Google — I know that YouTube would be reliable, free and easy to use. It made a heck of a lot more sense than attempting to host the video myself.
But there’s another really neat thing about YouTube.
YouTube does not insist that you need to host the video only on their site. After you upload your video — you can grab a piece of code to embed the video into your own website or blog.
In the screen shot below.…I’ve pointed to the Embed Link using a red arrow. You just need to copy and paste this link in the HTML of your blog or site and the YouTube video will now run off your site.
So using this Embed link, I pasted the YouTube video on one of our personal development blogs, MindHacks.org.
You can see how the video shows on our blog by visiting this page.
I then included a link to the video as part of my regular monthly mailing to my meditation list.
Now Here’s Where the Magic Happened
From my list, about 500 people watched the video. This in turn caused the video’s popularity on YouTube to go up.
You see…YouTube has millions of videos. Most only get a few dozen views. When you have just 500 people view your video…this boosts your videos ranking sufficiently enough that it get’s pushed to the top of the video charts in it’s category.
It does not take a lot of views to push your video above the 95% of average videos populating YouTube.
With just a few thousand views, the video we uploaded received 3 honors. It became one of the top watched “How To” videos of the day. This in turn caused other people in YouTube to start watching it. Within days, we received another 4000 views from general browsers on YouTube.
Of course, we also mentioned our site in our blog post and on YouTube page showing the video. Of the 4500 viewers, around a 300 visited the site.
On the site, we managed to sell 17 sets of Burt’s home meditation product — the Goldman Mind Box. Each sold for $200. Out total takings — $3400 in revenue.
So we essentially made 76 cents for every person who watched our YouTube video.
The Lesson Learned
YouTube is becoming a viable marketing tool. It’s developing an audience that is interested in niche areas.
Rather than hosting videos on your own site using tools like Wimpy Player or InstantVideoGenerator — consider hosting you videos on YouTube.
In addition to being free and highly reliable (since Google owns them). YouTube can easily get you tons of free viewers and thus traffic to your site.
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About the Author
Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype.
Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.
Check out other posts by Mike Reining
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Vishen Lakhiani
That is great!!!
Niche marketing is the way to go.. I have a few ideas I will be working on in the coming months and MindValleylabs.com is always helping me to expand my efforts.
Thanks,
–Mark Gormley
It’s definitely a viable marketing tool — or else major blogs wouldn’t be trying it. I“m not sure that I’m excited about this latest surge in “guerilla marketing” — it seems marketers may over-run the free-exchange of the internet, flooding us with subtle ads for anything and everything.
- Matthew
It’s definitely a viable marketing tool — or else major blogs wouldn’t be trying it:
http://advancedmediacommittee.typepad.com/emmyadvancedmedia/2007/02/bootlegging_boo.html
I’m not sure that I’m excited about this latest surge in “guerilla marketing” — it seems marketers may over-run the free-exchange of the internet, flooding us with subtle ads for anything and everything.
- Matthew
Great advice. I am always looking for ways I can market my sites. I also have superaffiliateshandbooks.com and wantitneeditgetit.com and I am new to internet marketing. I have found some great mentors. It’s nice that you are willing to share secrets when most others only want to sell their secrets. thanks!
[…] Vishen of MindValleyLabs has a post up where he shares how he discovered a way to make quick bucks using YouTube. […]
This is really helpful. i posted a few videos of my own to the youtube..but i forgot the linkback to my blog. now i realized how much i have lost on the viewers to my blog. thanks so much.
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Excellent Find.I will try to work on this month ob you tubes,I just need to find some good one that fits my niche
[…] Also — don’t forgot YouTube. See my earlier article on drawing traffic with YouTube videos. Powered by BlinkList […]
Great article — so simple, but so useful. I’m gonna add this to my thesis as an example for how Youtube’s network effects can help content producers to earn money.
[…] How I Made A Dollar From Everyone Who Viewed My YouTube Video» Powered by BlinkList […]
[…] How I made 1 Dollar from Everyone Who Viewed my YouTube Video […]
Some great advice here. I will take advantage of youtube myself in the future.
Hi Mate,
Great article…I’m just about to
start using video blogging and
a few other sites other than
youtube.
So, this info helped me out heaps!
Take Care,
Michael Silvester
Good idea, I’ll have to start doing this, plus it does open up the op for not having to host your own vids so good.
great..
Great idea. Thanks alot for sharing.….…
[…] 7. How I Made A Dollar From Everyone Who Watched My YouTube Video […]
Great advice,simple,and useful. I’m gonna try it soon.
Thanks!
I agree that Youtube is a fantastic marketing tool. We are now offering a video creation service for our owners on Ideal Vacation Rentals and then we will be embedding the videos into the owners listings.