How To Get Started With Affiliate Videos

Affiliate marketing has changed forever with the introduction of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and … These social networking sites have made it easy for folks to reach out to others. They have also changed the dynamics of affiliate marketing, opening new doors for marketers to take advantage of to promote products. Affiliate videos can not only help a lot of traffic, but they give you an additional promotional tool that you can use to make money online. A lot of affiliates are still not using videos to promote products. Whether they are afraid of the technology or don’t now where to start, nobody knows. But if you are an affiliate business owner and want to grow your business fast, you’ve got to make your own videos.

If you are interested in making money with affiliate videos but don’t know where to start, here are the tools you can use to take a crack at it:

Camcorder: you don’t have to spend a fortune to get a camcorder for your online videos. You can always manage with one of these mini camcorders. I personally use Flip Ultra. It doesn’t set the world on fire but gets the job done.

Software: having a cool video editor software to help you create your videos is a must. It could be the case that you want to capture your screen or maybe you want to build a hybrid video. Either way, you need a software such as Camtasia to get you started. I personally use Adobe Captivate and couldn’t be happier with it.

Accessories: to build professional looking videos, you are going to need lights and other accessories the get the lighting and background right. If you want to take high quality videos, you shouldn’t cut corners here.

Books: there are many affiliates among us who are technical enough to know how to create their own videos and go about editing them. If you are not, you are going to need to take a look at a book that teaches you what types of videos can work, and how you can build a following with your work. Here is a good book to get you started.

Services: creating your video is only one part of the equation. You are going to need to host it somewhere. You can always use YouTube or go a bit more advanced with Viddler.

Creating videos may sound daunting but believe or not, creating high quality ones is more challenging. The above tools help get started with your journey in video blogging. The list doesn’t contain everything but it’s enough to get you started with vlogging. Remember, the quality matters the most when it comes to making videos.

How To Use Twitter To Promote Affiliate Products

You don’t have to be a genius to realize the amazing opportunity that Twitter provides for businesses and online marketers to promote their offers and gain more exposure. Twitter is a fast growing community, and it’s only going to get bigger. While a lot of people used to underestimate the power of Twitter just a few months ago, you don’t see them doing it now. But a lot of people still use Twitter the wrong way for their business. Not only you can use Twitter to build new relationships, you can use it to come up with new product ideas and even drive leads directly to your affiliate offers. So if you are using Twitter to talk about what you are having for lunch, you are better off not using Twitter at all.

Promoting products on Twitter is not that hard. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how to get working on Twitter. You just have to get to the right audience and strike the right balance when it comes to providing value to others and promoting your affiliate offers. Here is how to do it:

• Identify Audience: find out who would be interested in products that you intend to promote. You wouldn’t promote gadgets to people who are looking for weight loss solutions, would you? They may buy those gadgets but your conversion rate would be atrocious.
• Track trends: find out what people are talking about and what affiliate products you can promote to address their needs.
• Right keywords: don’t just focus on the most obvious keywords. Do a bit of research to find those long-tail keywords as well.
• Follow The Right People: you should not only follow the superstars in your niche, but also people who are talking about your niche (product, market,…). And if you provide enough value, these folks may follow you back as well.
• Use hash tags (#): don’t forget to use the right hash tags to let others find out about your discussions. People who use hash tags have a better chance of getting more followers on Twitter. Just make sure you hashes are relevant.
• Your profile: make sure you profile explains what you do and what you are about. I know a lot of affiliates actually promote affiliate URLs as their profile URL. I am not a big fan of this approach, but it does work.
• Your welcome message: when people decide to follow you, you can send them a message welcoming them. You can easily automate it with TweetLater.
• Twitter Search: twitter search lets you find what people are talking about in your niche fast. Search for the right terms, and you’d be surprised how many prospects you can find for your offers.
• Promotion: you can tweet affiliate offers on Twitter but make sure it’s not too blatant. Let people know why they should try your product.

There you have it. There are many other ways to make money on Twitter. It just comes down to your creativity. The sky’s the limit with Twitter as long as you don’t get too greedy.

How To Promote An Affiliate Product - Part I

A lot of people often ask me, “how do you go about promoting an affiliate product?” We have all these affiliate training courses on the market that claim to teach people how to make millions online. But almost all these courses assume things and take shortcuts. That’s why the success rate of these courses hasn’t been as well as what people hoped they’d be. I am not talking about one or two affiliate courses. Almost all affiliate training packages give you a part of the whole picture. If you are a beginner to affiliate marketing, you want to take the proper time to get yourself familiar with all aspects of the game. You certainly don’t want to focus on only one network, one product, or one method to promote your products. It’s nice to be able to build a list or get a good PPC campaign going, but being well versed in various methods to promote affiliate products pays in the long run.

If you are a beginner affiliate marketer, you want to make sure you spend the proper amount of time finding the right market and product. Once there, you want to focus on a multi-channel promotion strategy to maximize your earnings. Here are a few channels you should concentrate on:

• Search Engine Optimization: I know a lot of top affiliates tell you that you should start with PPC first. PPC is definitely a faster way to promote products. But search engine optimization takes a bit of time and the sooner you lay the foundations, the better off you will be in the long run. You simply can’t replace getting free leads from Google, Yahoo!, and Bing (Must read: SEOBook).
• SEA: search engine advertising is the fastest way to drive traffic to a website. But you don’t want to focus only on the search network (on Google). You want to focus on banner advertising, the content network, blog networks and more (Resource: CopyNProfit).
• Social Networking: building a large following on social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed can give you an additional channel to push your affiliate products. But do yourself a favor and avoid spamming others. You’ve got to work on building relationships.
• Blog Marketing: building a blog and reviewing affiliate products from time to time helps as well. Just make sure you focus on providing content and value to your readers. A blog full of affiliate reviews is not exactly going to be a hit with your readers (Resource: Wordpress). You can also join hands with other bloggers to join partnerships or promote your products on blog networks.
• Article Marketing: article marketing is another cheap way to promote affiliate products. It also helps with your SEO efforts as well. EzineArticles.com is a great place to start (this one too).
• Ezines: advertising on newsletters is another great way to drive targeted traffic to your website. It won’t be too costly and definitely worth a try.
• Email: creating an email list is another way to have a channel to push your products to through. You’ll need good content to get your e-mail list going. You can also use your e-mail signature to promote your products.
• Partnerships: if you have a product of your own, you can always use it to your advantage to promote other products that may be helpful to your customers.
• Offline Marketing: there are plenty of ways to promote a product offline. You can do it with your business cards, brochures, and … It’s definitely worth testing (here is a good course on this topic).

Affiliate marketing may not be rocket science but innovation certainly pays when it comes to finding ways to promote products. As long as you are testing all aspects of your affiliate business, there is no reason you can’t make a living online with affiliate marketing.

Stay tuned for the second part of this series which contains more advanced methods to promote affiliate products online.

Be Careful about What You Promote Online

If you have around on the Web for a while, you have probably heard that you should be very careful about what you put online. It’s not just about your Facebook status or your Twitter updates. It’s about your pages and every piece of content that you produce for others to read. In this day and age, you can be sued for anything. That includes linking to a P2P site or promoting an affiliate product that might contain some gray hat tactics. You may find it hard to believe, but you can get in a whole lot of trouble for promoting a product like that.You can not only get sued, but you can lose your site in the process.

A while ago, I decided to promote one of the best affiliate marketing products on ClickBank. I took time to test the product, and I was very impressed with the depth of knowledge that the product producer was sharing in his package. There were a whole lot of videos on cool tactics that you can use to drive lots of traffic to a website, so overall it was an excellent product to promote to the affiliate marketing community. Little did I know that some of those small little tactics had irked one of the major affiliate networks on the planet. You can probably guess what happened next. I was contacted by the company, and they pretty much told me that they will send a seize and desist letter unless I voluntarily take the story down. Since I did not want to open the Pandora’s box, I decided to cut my losses and promote another product. But I am sure those guys would’ve followed through with their threats had I not taken the story down.

The tactic that was dubious was using job boards to make money from affiliate marketing. That affiliate network did not want any part of that, so that’s why they were going after all the affiliates who were promoting that product. You may think it’d be better to go after the source and ask them to remove the objectionable content, so it was surprisingly for me to be contacted by a lawyer directly. This practice is very common in the affiliate marketing community. Credit card companies won’t hesitate to take your site down if they don’t like what you are promoting on it. In fact, some of them will sue you if you write a bad review about the product, and there is really nothing you can do about it unless you want to get into a nasty fight.

It’s always better to promote a product that does not come with a baggage. Some people like dealing with lawsuits, and they may even use them to gain more publicity. It really depends on how strong your business is and what your plan is exactly. For the rest of us, it’s always better to cut your losses and move on. Remember, you want to make money online not waste time.

Your thoughts: have you had a similar experience promoting products online? Please share.

4 Camcorders To Get Started With Affiliate Videos

Traditional affiliate marketing tactics may still work these days, but there is no question that the emergence of video marketing has opened new doors for online marketers. And unlike a few years ago, you don’t have to spend a fortune to get your hands on a camcorder that allows you to take videos whether you are at your office or on the go. HD mini camcorders are great to record affiliate training videos or product reviews online, and they are very convenient to take with you when you are on the go.

Here are top 4 recent mini camcorders that affiliate marketers can use to start with their affiliate videos:

Sony Webbie HD: Sony Webbie MHS-PM1 HD Camcorder is a decent HD camcorder for vloggers and people on the go.

Flip UltraHD: the Flip needs no introduction. It has been around for years and is great for vlogging.

Kodak Zx1 HD: An affordable mini HD Camcorder for those constantly on the go.

Creative Labs Vado HD Camcorder: Creative Labs Vado HD 720p Pocket Video Camcorder with 8 GB Video Storage and 2x Digital Zoom is another pocket HD camcorder for those who live a mobile life.

You don’t have to a millionaire to get started with affiliate marketing or upgrade your old equipment. All you have to do is spend about $200 in your business. The quality of these camcorders may not be as high as a $20,000 professional camcorder, but they get the job done. These gadgets give you the most affordable way to take your affiliate business to the next level.

Clickbank Code Review

Clickbank is one of my favorite affiliate networks. It’s probably one of the best networks to get started with affiliate marketing and make some quick cash fast. In fact, a lot of super marketers still use top Clickbank products to make some money. Clickbank is a great network to be involved in as it provides you with a lot of information about the products available on the market. You can easily do your market research and find out what products are worth promoting. And let’s not forget that you get 50 to 75% commission checks, which is more than anything you get from CJ, LinkShare, or other traditional networks.

Clickbank Code is one of the most popular Clickbank training courses ever made (next to Affiliate Project X). Clickbank is a great marketplace to be involved in, but you’ve got to take time to know your way around and learn the tricks to make the most money from Clickbank. There are a whole lot of newbie affiliates who are leaving money on the table by promoting Clickbank products the wrong way. Clickbank Code is designed to helped newbies and advanced marketers get the most out of Clickbank.

Clickbank Code comes with a set of videos and tutorials to help you get started with your Clickbank market research and product discovery. You are going to learn how to:

• Choose the right products: going for high gravity Clickbank products is not exactly the best way to go. You are going to play your cards right to maximize your revenue with each product that you promote. You want to catch the right product at the right time.
• Drive free traffic: you can have the best landing page in the business, but if you are not driving traffic to it, you are going to struggle to make any real kind of money. Clickbank Code is going to show you some of those modern tactics that you can use to drive free traffic and bring down your CPA.
• Manage your paid advertising campaigns: Google cash still works, and so does Google Adwords marketing. You just have to set up your campaigns right and advertise in the right places. It’s more complicated than that, which is why Clickbank Code is a good course to consider.
• Set up highly converting landing pages fast: time is money in the affiliate marketing business. When a good product is released, you may only have a short time to take advantage and start accumulating big commissions. Once other top affiliates enter the market, you are all going to earn less. That’s why you need to be able to put up your landing pages as fast as possible. Clickbank Code shows you all the tools you need to set up your offer pages fast.
• Manage your business like a pro: you’ve got to treat your affiliate business as a business! It’s not a hobby but at the same time you shouldn’t slave yourself for 18 hours a day to make a decent living online. The more your work towards becoming more productive, the better you can use your time to make money online from affiliate marketing. And you can always outsource and hire people to do your job for you. Thankfully, it’s all covered here.

I was impressed with the coverage of SEO and Adwords in this course. You are going to learn a whole lot of small little tactics that can save you lots of money on Adwords and bring you a lot of free leads. I was also impressed with the resources discussed in ClickBank Code. It’s one thing to know what to do. It’s another thing to see someone do it in front of you. And knowing what tools to use always help too! Best of all, Clickbank Code is designed for Clickbank affiliates, so you don’t just get general affiliate marketing tips.  All in all, if you are looking for a comprehensive course on  Clickbank marketing, Clickbank Code is a must review product.

Opportunity.com Review

John Reese’s Opportunity.com is an affiliate training course for newbie to advanced affiliates who are looking to take their affiliate game to the next level.

Opportunity.com contains many modules that walk you through how to set up affiliate campaigns and create auto-pilot money making systems. List building is still one of the best ways to gain targeted followers that you can market affiliate products to. But not everyone knows how to set up a newsletter properly. You don’t want to go all in with your content, and you don’t want to spam your followers by constantly forwarding them affiliate products. Getting the right balance could take a lot of time, unless you go through training courses available on training sites such as Opportunity.com.

Another big factor in having success in this industry is your ability to follow trends and find profitable niches before everybody else. That’s exactly what you will learn in Opportunity.com. Finding profitable products are not that simple, which is why you should be testing and analyze your campaigns to optimize your conversion rates. Opportunity.com covers everything you need to set up profitable campaign and extract more money from them.

Here is what’s covered in Opportunity.com:

• Market Research: selecting the right affiliate market to enter to is a big part of the whole equation. You certainly don’t want to enter a market that doesn’t provide you with enough revenue or is not broad enough to let you take your business to the next level. The easiest way to fail in affiliate marketing is by choosing the wrong market to be a part of. Opportunity.com teaches you how to:
  • select a profitable market.
  • use multiple channels to push your affiliate promotions and make money online.
  • cross-promote products and make more money online.
• Trend Analysis: knowing where your market is heading to is the best way to develop new campaigns and even find new products to promote. You can’t expect to promote the same products and keep making money. Each product goes through a cycle. You want to make sure you catch products in their introduction or growth phases. By watching out for the trends, you can save yourself a lot of headaches and keep on the top of your industry.
• Niche Discovery: knowing what market to enter is only one part of the equation. You then need to define your own niche. You want to make sure your niche is not too broad, but at the same not too narrow to leave you struggling to make decent money. Believe it or not, there is a lot of money to be earned in micro-niches. But you’ve got to find the right ones.
• Campaign Management: knowing marketing well is one thing. Being able to manage your campaigns and business effectively is a whole other thing. Not many affiliates know what they are getting themselves into when they start an affiliate business. Running a business is not that easy, and you need to plan to avoid any major surprise. Thankfully, Opportunity.com has you covered. It comes with various models that teach you how to run every aspect of your business. Opportunity.com shows you how to:
  • track your affiliate campaigns and maximize your results.
  • build an e-mail list to push your affiliate products.
  • automate many aspects of your business.
  • drive lots of cheap but targeted traffic to your websites.
  • outsource and grow your business more effectively.
  • scale your business to handle growth.
  • learn from your competitors and use their knowledge to grow your business.

Opportunity.com is a modern affiliate marketing training course that is designed to help affiliates from all walks of life increase their commission checks and grow their business. If you are looking to master the art of market research and niche discovery and drive more traffic to your affiliate offers for less, you should give Opportunity.com a try. The course comes with a 30-day money back guarantee.

Make Money with EzineArticles

Many newbie affiliates ask me about the foolproof way that you can make money online from affiliate marketing. In reality, there is no foolproof way to make money online. You have to work hard to earn a decent living in the affiliate marketing. I know a lot of us want to believe that you can just work an hour a day and make a million dollars a year online. But you’ve got to plan, find products, do market research, conduct segmentation and demographics analysis, create landing pages, optimize, and promote. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like hard work to me.

A lot of affiliates go through all the work only to fall to the ground when it comes to driving traffic to their affiliate pages. There may be no foolproof way to make money online, but there is certainly a foolproof way to drive traffic to your affiliate pages — article marketing. EzineArticles can drive you hundreds or even thousands of visitors if you play your cards right. Writing articles for EzineArticles is more than just providing valuable content to your readers. The devil is really in the details here. You need to use the tools available on EzineArticles to do your keyword research, tagging, and even choose the right titles for your articles. And knowing what makes people click on your links helps you get the biggest bang from each of your articles.

EzineArticles Manifesto is a course that shows you how to write traffic-building articles effectively. And we are talking about hundreds or thousands of views per each article. I still remember when I got started with EzineArticles. I didn’t know you could promote affiliate links in the footer. After all, if you read their guidelines, you get the assumption that affiliate links are not allowed at all in your article. But they have a loophole for those who are willing to use a top level domain for each new offer. After writing 30 or so articles, I realized my mistake and started using affiliate links the right way in my articles. EzineArticles Manifesto is full of tips and hidden facts that you can use to dominate EzineArticles and make a lot of money online.

Here is what’s covered in this course:

• Complete hands on video tips to help you get the best out of EzineArticles.
• SEO tactics that you can use to get your articles to the first page of Google.
• How to write magnetic titles and resource boxes that get you those precious clicks.
• How to start generating leads like a pro from your articles.
• Find niches and markets and write articles on topics that people can’t get enough.
• A set of well-researched niches that you can start writing articles about right away.
• How to get more profile views and leads than those who have written thousands of articles.

A lot of folks are skeptical about article marketing , but no matter which camp you belong to, you should know that EzineArticles has worked well in the past and still works great for affiliate offers. If you don’t believe me, just check the front-page and click on the articles to find out about products that people are promoting. Do you believe people would be using EzineArticles if it wasn’t working? Nobody likes to waste time, and as long as you play your cards right on EzineArticles, you won’t be either. I would love to tell you that the more articles you write, the more traffic you get, but in reality you are going to get more traffic for less articles as long as you pay attention to the details. That’s what sets apart people who are making lots of money on EzineArticles than those who are slaving themselves for free.

How To Find a Killer Affiliate Program

When it comes to promoting products online, we have various types of affiliate programs. We have good affiliate programs that make you a lot of money but leave a lot of work to you. We have great affiliate programs that give you bonuses and take care of you if you perform well. Then we have killer affiliate programs that not only make you a lot of money but provide you with tracking functionality, tools, and content you need to make more money online. Some of these programs even give you money for sending others to their affiliate program. So how can you tell a killer affiliate program from a regular one?

It’s simple really. Once you decide on what niche you want to enter, you should look for affiliate programs that not only perform well but give you the tools you need to optimize your campaigns to make a lot of money. After all, you don’t want to settle for any specific conversion rate, no matter how high it is. You should keep testing and testing until you improve your numbers. And you wouldn’t be able to do that if you can’t track your sales. That’s why you should first focus on affiliate programs that let you enter your conversion rates and track them through Google Adwords or Google Analytics.

Content is also important when dealing with an affiliate program. I am not suggesting that you should grab articles written by your merchant and promote them as yours. But, having pre-written content helps you find new angles and create your own easier. Some merchants provide you with landing pages as well. that’s very useful if you don’t have your own coder and want to go live fast!

Affiliate videos are also very important these days. While video marketing is just taking off, a lot of people still don’t feel comfortable enough to make their own affiliate videos fast. A great affiliate program provides you with video reviews or at least audio clips that you can use to promote your products better.

Finally, a killer affiliate program doesn’t assume that you are a super affiliate already. I have personally learned a lot from affiliate programs that discuss ways that you can promote their products. Not all these methods are viable, but I have found new ways to promote products by reading some of these instructions. Everybody knows about PPC, Ezines, article marketing, and so forth. But those little nuggets here and there makes promoting killer affiliate program worth while.

If I were to start an affiliate program today, I would probably model it after one of these killer programs (e.g. Earth4Energy). Not only you can make more money by providing your affiliates with more tools to promote your products, you can recruit the tops affiliates easier by going beyond what traditional affiliate programs offer.

Your take: what’s your favorite affiliate program?

Affiliate Marketing Industry Under Attack!

The times are tough and many businesses are struggling to stay afloat. A lot of affiliate marketers are hurting these days as well. Many companies have already been forced to close their affiliate programs. But the threat to the affiliate marketing industry is not coming from the recession but rather the lawmakers around this country. Many states are looking for ways to boost their revenue in these tough times, and what a better way to do that than by imposing a sales tax on online retailers?

Have you noticed that you won’t have to pay a sales tax to Amazon when you purchase a book? That’s going to change if and when the lawmakers get their way. The introduction of sales tax can effectively wipe up a significant portion of the affiliate marketing industry. We all remember what happened with Overstock and its affiliates in the state of New York. Thousands of websites had their agreements with Overstock terminated as a piece of legislation was put into place to enforce online sales tax in NY.

Things are not as bad as they seem. They are worse. According to Businessweek, more taxes are on the way:

Minnesota’s House of Representatives is due to consider a bill introduced by Representative Jim Davnie that would levy a sales tax on digital downloads of e-books, music, movies, and even ringtones.

The affiliate marketing industry doesn’t seem to get a break these days. There will always be products and services to promote that are not affected by these tax laws. But think about what happens if eBay, Amazon, and big online retailers terminate their agreements with their affiliates. That would simply cripple a lot of smaller affiliates.

I don’t have a problem with paying taxes. But increasing taxes in these tough economic conditions is just not an smart way to go. I am not saying that as a Republican or a Democrat. The affiliate marketing industry is neutral politically. But I wouldn’t hesitate to favor the party that will protect smaller affiliates from these tax hikes. It’s true that affiliates are not directly getting taxed here, but if these tax hikes lead to a lot of affiliates losing some of their income, that is wrong to do. Affiliates pay taxes as well and the less they make, the less tax they’ll pay. You don’t go around taxing people in an economic recession. We should all hope that Quill v. North Dakota is not overturned, but at this point the local and federal government seem to be more concerned about taxing than helping small businesses, and that is truly sad to see. I do believe that the government will find a way to impose online sales tax. That doesn’t mean we affiliates shouldn’t up a fight against it.

Don’t forget to check the tips put out by ShareASale on how to fight this new wave of attacks on affiliate marketing industry. This fight is not about paying less taxes. It’s about giving small businesses around this country a chance to stay in business and grow.