FYI, I put these tips in action for valentine’s day.

Guess what? I got 10 times more response than usual (normal things I promote brings me 25% results, the valentine’s day special brings me 180%!!!)

So don’t miss next opportunity.

Also, with the “object not found”, did you check if you received the confirmation email anyway? And did you use a proxy?

I tried it out with XAMPP as well, and while the first page loads the captcha, once I submit that I get an Object not found! page. Guess I keep looking for free hosts that work for now.

To convert videos, there is Mediacoder which is FREE and really great.

If you’re having problems with some videos, convert them in AVI/MPEG1 with Mediacoder, they will work better with Windows Movie Maker

Oh yeah and Windows movie maker comes bundled with Windows, so unless you’re on Mac Os X or Linux, you already have it on your computer.

BTW I just found a promo for cyberlink powerdirector
Save $20 on PowerDirector 7 Ultra Valid 2/6-2/28.
If you can buy it, it’s worth its price.

Just one thing before I answer, I receive many emails from people who want to make money, so if you’re in this case, DO try this post, it doesn’t take much time to set up and even if you fail at it, you’ll have learnt things, and it will give you the kick in the ass you need to get started.

Anyway, my first point here:
Youtube video converts badly… True, most of the time youtube traffic doesn’t compare to organic SE traffic,
BUT it is source of INSTANT visitors AND the traffic is so huge that even with poor conversion, it’s worth exploiting it. For instance, I got 30000 views in 3 days on one of my videos. But of course it is not enough. Your success depends on how you sell it, what you write and how you write it.

E.g.
Find the best insurance for your car.
vs
Your car insurance could be cheaper, with a better coverage. When you have an accident, it will be too late, so check it here NOW. It just takes 5 minutes!

see what I mean?

Also, like anything, just do a little research before you try to sell anything. If you try to sell something that is hard to sell, don’t expect to get “magic” results.
There are sponsors paying for people voting if they prefer pepsi or coca cola. This kind of stuff is stupid and works even on shitty traffic. I don’t even tell you what it gives when you couple that to pepsi/coke commercials.

My second point, setting up some website to sell something, and growing it up slowly by adding interesting content, with a goal to make it valuable enough so people will come to it naturally. That’s called whitehat. And yes, that’s a way of doing things.
It’s harder to make money, it takes time (often years), but once it is working, the revenue is more stable.

Blackhat is more about finding shortcuts to make money, knowing that whatever shit you’ll throw, it’s not gonna stick, and you’ll have to repeat.

These are two different ways of making it. Can’t say that one is better than another, I guess it depends on your tastes.

Personally I’m more in the middle, trying to find shortcuts, without going too much over the line, I guess that’s how I still have my adsense account.

But at the end, black, gray or white, it’s always the same story. It’s work, work and work. The web is magic, you can make money out of thin air, still you can’t be successful without effort.

START -> LOOK FOR AN IDEA IDEA -> TEST IT
-> IT WORKS -> REPEAT TO THE MAX / MEANWHILE LOOK FOR ANOTHER IDEA
-> IT DOESN’T WORK -> LOOK FOR ANOTHER IDEA
-> GOTO START

I’m not even talking about selling to somebody who’s not even interested (i.e. people searching for Obama stuff are not really trying to find a new insurance contract for themselves). I’ve even been trying it for people who are actually interested (i.e. redirecting people to my website and trying to plug packs of videos related to a specific kind of craft for people who were searching for that craft’s videos) and it blows.
The conversions were less than 0.002%. And I tried different copies, products and prices.

Those people are just not interested.

I suggest you do something that adds value and stick to it so that you don’t have to keep searching for new lame ideas for your whole life.

Say, take the guys who started japanesepod101.com. They have a podcast and they subscriptions for some extra content.
They just keep growing their site and providing value. Do you think they keep on searching for new sites to make every week? Hell no.

That’s my take.
Cheers.