Legally Hijack YouTube Traffic From Videos

People click YouTube description links millions of times daily. A lot of those clicks are wasted on expired sites. That makes sense since stats say 50% of all small businesses close within 5 years.^[1] Most of, if not all, those businesses had some sort of website. Some of them tried to use YouTube to market that business. In fact, it’s very possible you are reading this post right now because you clicked on a link in a YouTube description.

It’s possible to get traffic to your site using closed businesses’ videos.

If you don’t care about video marketing and you actually were looking for free music downloads, or how to get free YouTube subscribers, I apologize, but there is none of that here. I did find this really cool video about the all time best “fails” from YouTube though. If you have 10 minutes, I would love for you to stick around and enjoy it. You may find the rest of this interesting as well, but if not, enjoy the rest of your internet perusal!

For the rest of you who are here to learn about video marketing, and more specifically are curious as to how random YouTube video links have lead you here, jump below.

If you are here, you know YouTube is nuts, right? It’s estimated there are 5 hours of video uploaded every single second ^[2]. You hit this page 0 seconds ago. So that means there has been 0 HOURS of video uploaded just since you got here. That is both impressive and scary if you are looking to jump into video marketing.

In my time marketing on YouTube I have figured something out. When people choose to let a website die, they walk away from the media they created for that site. Few are going to go back into their social media accounts to handle digital cleanup. Hell, some of these sites make it damn near impossible to delete the stuff you have uploaded, so most don’t even bother. Also it’s a stresssful time to close a business, deleting YouTube videos is the last thing on anyone’s mind. Let them fade into obscurity with the rest of the unused internet, right?

Wrong

Thanks to their hard work, there are now hundreds of thousands of aged videos with links to expired domains on them, that still show up in the top 3 for long tail search results in Google. If you are in the SEO world and that doesn’t make you giddy, check your pulse. The best part? I’m happy to show you how to find these videos and websites and how to capitalize on the links that they no longer have use for.

As they say:

Part 1: The Hunt

Tools Needed

• A Landing Page to Redirect To
• A functioning internet connection
• Spreadsheet software

This is the bare bones conceptual level of this traffic method. You can go this route if you are trying for ultra specific keywords or you have some aversion to using tools. It's OK no one is judging you.

Let’s get right into it shall we?

Step 1 Identify your niche and relative keywords.

This is pretty simple on its face, but can get as complicated as you want it to be. If you are doing this manually then I would pick the most important key phrase for your niche and go for that.

For this example, we are going to say you are a tax accountant in Texas.

“best” because it’s a superlative adjective^[3] most beginning marketers overuse.
“Texas” because, texas accountant.
“Accountant” because, texas accountant….
“http”> because we only want videos that have links in them.
site:youtube.com because we want to search YouTube

so that all together is "best" "texas" "accountant" "http" & site:youtube.com

Once you have your search string, run it on the Google home page and the hover over ‘more’ and select ‘video’. You can then see all the videos on YouTube that are relevant to your keyword and have a link in the description. Then you run through the list one by one and copy/paste each link you can see into a new tab, looking for a 404 error. If you get any sort of website or custom error or redirect, this is not what we want. You want only 404.

This quick video will give you an overview:

Part Two: The Takeover

The length and amount of effort in verifying that the 404 link was not spammed to death or has a Google penalty is up to you, but I would suggest you dive as deep as you can into the history of the domain. There are a couple of free quick checks you can get a snapshot of a domain.

1. Check the whois history.
2. Check the wayback machine.
3. Check google images for domain exact match (this is gold for finding older spam sites who didn’t scrub the servers)
4. Check SemRush for links to the domain.

Once you are satisfied with the results of your domain background search, go ahead and purchase it from whichever provider your prefer. I would recommend you put privacy on the domain, as it’s just being used for traffic you don’t want to be spammed from it.

Now you create a piece of content on your site that explains the redirection in a manner that matches your brand message and you direct the visitor to the correct part of the funnel they should be in. This has to be dazzling content, you can’t slap something together and expect a person to get past the redirect with shit. Don’t make shit.

After that you simply put a 301 redirect onto the exact link URL in the video to the content you created.

That’s it! I’m serious, that is all you have to do. If you continue to do this and you grab all the videos that are related to your long tail niche, you will be getting targeted viewers that click on links for very specific products or services. If you can fulfill those customers, who cares if its 10 or 20 a day, they are hand fed hot leads to whatever funnel you bring them to.

At the top of the post I told you that there are automated ways to figure this out, and there 100% are. I am working on a tool right now that will semi-automate the process, you will just have to check the domains yourself. Check the Tools Listing page to see status on where our tool is.

For more information on automated tools for this join our YouTube Success Program+

What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments! or hit us up on the twitter @weknowyoutube

^{Ref:
[1] quoted from: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140915223641-170128193-what-are-the-real-small-business-survival-rates
[2] extrapolated from YouTube Statistics
[3] superlative adjective list http://www.easypacelearning.com/all-lessons/grammar/1436-comparative-superlative-adjectives-list-from-a-to-z
[4] search operators https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en}