A couple of weeks, I got a phone call from a good friend of mine, David Jenyns. It was on a Sunday morning. He said, “Gideon, YouTube has terminated my YouTube channel.”

He was very shocked. Of course, he had a bunch of videos on his channel. Really useful videos; he was helping his followers in a particular niche.

David was not the only person who got his account terminated. Another really successful blogger (you may know him), Darren Rowse, also got his account — can’t remember if it was terminated or suspended. In other words, he can’t use his account for six months.

This was a big deal! This was a very big deal because both of these people are very trustworthy and the kind of people that you would really take to war with you. It’s just so incredible that they lost their YouTube accounts. It was kind of unbelievable!

So what happened next was that Darren decided to create an open letter to YouTube. He wrote this wonderful letter to YouTube and posted it on his blog at ProBlogger.net. Within twelve hours, he got his YouTube account back together again.

David wasn’t so lucky. He had to do quite a bit more work. Eventually, he also did get his account back. It took him about 48 hours or maybe three days to get his account back.

For both of these accounts, as I said before, they are incredibly trustworthy people. They had really valuable content. They were definitely not breaking any community guidelines on YouTube.

So, why did their accounts get terminated? And do you have the risk of getting your account or your YouTube channel terminated as well?

This is a real risk. Unfortunately, with YouTube and other video sharing sites and things like Facebook — because you don’t own it, it can be taken away from you without notice.

That’s the other thing — both David and Darren’s accounts got terminated without much notice at all. Apparently, there was a message sent to them but very soon after, it was terminated. They didn’t even have the time or chance to correct anything that they might have done wrong.

As I said, this could happen to you as well. Inside this video, I want to share with you some things you can do to help you prevent that from happening. But if it does happen, I want to give you some tips for making sure that you’re going to be okay in the unlikely event that your YouTube account will get suspended.

The bottom line for me is that, on YouTube you need to make sure that you play YouTube’s game.

YouTube’s game is to provide valuable content to the people who come and visit the YouTube community. So that’s really important. You need to make sure that you provide high value content to the YouTube community.

This is little bit of a gray area because sometimes you might think you’re providing valuable content to the YouTube community but YouTube may not think that it’s above board.

There are some topics that YouTube and Google don’t particularly like. One that is a huge one that they don’t seem to like much is the whole “make money online” niche. There are other ones too but it’s really hard to get data on this or to get a real picture on this because YouTube and Google are not really forthcoming with this information.

If you’re watching this, YouTube, it would be wonderful to get feedback from you and to know exactly what it is that you want, or at least what you don’t want.

Inside YouTube’s guidelines, they do have some information on the kind of content that’s not allowed. But in both Darren and David’s cases, their accounts got terminated for reasons that seemed a little bit strange. For both of them, they had the keywords “how to make money online” or “make money online” in the title of their videos.

We can’t tell for sure, but those keyword phrases seem to be the thing that both those two accounts have in common why they got terminated. So I’m not sure; nobody, other than YouTube and Google, will be able to say why their accounts got terminated — whether it was the “make money online” keyword phrase that triggered something and got their accounts terminated.

This is a great thing that YouTube is doing. People are losing their accounts, sometimes unfairly. But in general, I think what YouTube is trying to do is do a bit of a cleanup process. There’s just so much junk on YouTube and Google so I think they’re actually doing a good thing here to try to clean up a bit.

And yes, there are “make money online” videos on YouTube that are actually scams. But both Darren and David are certainly not in that category.

It brings a question here: What do you need to do to make sure that your account does not get terminated?

I mentioned creating high value content.

I’ve mentioned the keyword phrase “make money online.” Stay away from that. Please do not use that in your title. We can’t tell a hundred percent for sure that that is the thing that got it triggered because when you do a search for “make money online” on YouTube, there are still a bunch of videos that are coming up.

Chances are that YouTube has gone through the process to get rid of those ones. So stay away from those keywords.

This almost goes without saying, but don’t upload dodgy stuff onto YouTube. Upload things that the YouTube community would want to watch. That’s why it’s important for you to get involved and to get to know the YouTube community.

Anything that is of some black hat strategies; dodgy scammy sort of stuff; and spammy sort of things . Just uploading a bunch of videos and putting links on your description just so that you can get a link back to your website like spamming kind of way — not the way we normally provide a really great content and then have a link back to your site, that’s fine.

Doing dodgy stuff on YouTube, keyword stuffing your tags, getting fake views, using software to automate friend-adding — all these sort of automatic things - stay away from them. I’ve made it a point to stay away from those things on my channel. I’ve done my best to keep it as clean as I can and to always provide value.

So, provide value, watch your titles, don’t use spammy things, don’t use any automated software to try to beat the system. Play by the rules of YouTube. That is really the bottom line - play by the rules of YouTube.

There are some things you can do. There’s probably a few other things you need to watch out for. I recommend you Google a little bit and research for yourself. It’s hard to find clear answers because as I say YouTube and Google are unfortunately not forthcoming with that information. So do a bit of your own research, do your own due diligence.

The other thing I want to quickly mention is, what do you do in the case that you do get terminated? What should you do now to help you make sure that you’re prepared for something, in case it does happen?

Something that I recommend and I’ve been recommending for a couple of years is to always back up your videos on a service like Amazon S3. There are other services as well. I’ll reveal something to you within the next few months that I’m working on, I can’t say too much more. But Amazon S3 is currently what I’m using for backing up all my videos.

If in the case that my account might get terminated or suspended, I can go back to those videos and quickly get them back onto my site again without too much hassle. So have a back up strategy.

The other thing you can do is to always, when you upload your video to YouTube, to also upload that same video to another video sharing sites like Viddler, Vimeo, Daily Motion; there’s a whole bunch. So that if your YouTube account goes down, you could quickly grab the embed code from these other video sharing sites and just get the onto your own site without any hassle.

In saying that though, once again, even for the other video sharing sites, most of them will have the same standards as YouTube, maybe even tighter. For example, site like blip.tv, they’re incredibly tight. You can’t upload any kind of commercial content, anything that is promoting anything. As soon as you do that, they’ll just delete your account without notice. And really, there’s no way of getting it back.

This happened to me. I accidentally uploaded what i thought was a good high quality, good value video but I had a little bit of a pitch at the end and they deemed that as a commercial video. My whole account got deleted; my account of three to four years I think it was.

So watch out even for the other channels. Once again, it just comes back to making sure that you provide value and that you stick to the guidelines for this video-sharing sites.

Let’s face it, they’re giving it to us for free. It’s a privilege to be able to use it. We can’t complain so we need to really stick to the rules of these services that we use. Don’t try to beat the system.

I still think the best marketing approach is just to play the game and play by the rules. Provide massive value and then value will be returned to you in some way or form.

There you go… I’ve also had an interview with Dave Jenyns to sort of run over what actually happened and to go in bit more detail what you can do to stay safe on YouTube. It’s almost like a bit of a survival guide on YouTube.

I’ll list that interview below the video in my blog at GideonShalwick.com. If you’re watching this from YouTube, just go to my blog, there’ll be a link to that interview below this video. Go and watch it; listen to it; it’s about an hour long.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’d love to hear a little bit of a discussion about this because obviously it’s going to affect you likely. It may not, but it could. I’d love to hear your thoughts about using YouTube and about using other services; about the future of using YouTube and what we should do to make sure we stay within the guidelines of YouTube.

Please leave your comment below, whether on YouTube, on my blog or on Facebook, it doesn’t matter. Spread this video. I’d love to open this up for more discussion… Get the discussion going so that we can all learn from this experience.

That’s all I wanted to say. Go ahead and leave your comment. I’d love to hear from you. Talk to you soon. Bye.