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.