Setting up Your Own Videos

Why use Videos?

Videos are THE hot item right now, and regardless of your niche, you should be thinking of how you can cash in on this market. Regardless of what you sell, there is room for at least one good video to sell or give away as a promotion. You will be amazed at how your customers will respond to a video. You can offer a single video, or a series of videos that become a course or courses.

These videos are usually offered in multiple, short segments to keep your clients or potential interested in the topic. I have seen videos over an hour in length, but this takes a lot of experience to produce and you must give away a lot of information. Whether you use a short or long video, this type of advertising can be quite powerful and if done correctly, many of the participants will not even realize they are being subjected to a marketing campaign. I have used video courses a number of times. This article will discuss creating and distributing a video course for the purposes of advertising your business, or for selling through a membership site.

Create Your Video

The creation of a video should begin with a solid idea for a series of videos which pertain to your business and will be of interest to your potential customers. Video courses, if sufficiently rich in content, can frequently be sold for profit themselves, either individually, or through a membership site. If you are interested in using the video as a marketing tool you will most likely be offering the video free of charge in an effort to entice potential customers to purchase your other products or services. Sometimes the sole objective of the video is to get readers to surrender their email addresses for the entrepreneur’s email list.

What Topic Would I Use?

Determining the topic of your video is very important because it can dictate the success of your marketing effort. Consider an on-line retailer of health food products. This business owner may want to develop a series of videos on subjects such as proper nutrition, creating a weekly menu, introduction to new foods, proper food preparation, the value of certain health foods, etc. Each of these videos may contain a few segments which offer different perspectives on the subject. These videos are ideal for this business because they are on subjects which are likely to be of interest to the customers of the business.

Distribution of Your Videos

The distribution list for your videos should mostly include members of your target audience. This can be achieved by offering the video as a download on your site or somewhere on-line where only interested Internet users will be likely to find the videos. Another way to deliver the videos is by emailing a link to the videos to recipients who have specifically expressed an interest in receiving more information about your products and services by submitting their email address for this purpose.

Once you decide on a subject for your video, you will need to prepare an outline for your video. You could just gather a bunch of Private Label articles and create a script based on the content of these articles. You could even find PLR videos on your subjects and rebrand them. We will be allowing this on our new site. You must be careful with PLR videos though, as many do not allow you to give them away for free.

Professional Writer

If you cannot write a script yourself, seek out a qualified writer to create the content for your videos. Using one writer for the entire series will help to give your copy a more coherent and professional appearance. The writer can assist you by creating copy which is informative and useful to your readers but is also well written, clear, concise and easy to understand.

If your niche topic is highly specialized you might have to provide the writer with product information as well as research materials to ensure the content is informative and accurate. Additionally, you should review the content once it is completed to verify the accuracy and ensure it sounds like you. You can find writers on a number of “writers for hire” sites on the web.

Once you have the content, you can record your videos using a video camera or digital camera with a video option. If you are interested in doing fancy effects, you can purchase a blue screen cloth quite cheaply on eBay. Camtasia is a wonderful tool to use for assembling your video and publishing it as a Windows or Flash video.

Professional Production
If you do not feel comfortable producing your own videos, you can hire a professional to do it for you. It will not be cheap, but it is better than not having any videos at all. You could also buy PLR videos that allow you to rebrand them with your name and website, but if you are giving them away, make sure that it is permitted by the vendor of the videos.
Feedback

When distributing your videos, you would be wise to request feedback from the users at the conclusion of the video. This should be completely voluntary. You may wish to give a free gift to those that respond. The users that respond can provide you with useful feedback which will be extremely helpful. You can use it to improve your video, or in the launch of a similar video campaign in the future. We are planning to make a special offer to potential customers who will give us feedback on our plans for our video site. I'll let you know here when we make the offer.

P.S. Have you seen my new site Mr Idea's Ebookstore. As the name implies it is stocked with ebooks, scripts, websites and more.

The Importance of an Affiliate Program to Membership Sites

Join Affiliate Programs

An affiliate program isn't really a program. It's a business arrangement.

Affiliate programs are also known as associate programs, associates programs, referral programs and even bounty programs. Most affiliate programs are free to join. Affiliate programs are important to membership sites for a number of good reasons. Mainly, because they are a way to earn money without producing your own product.

Affiliate programs allow your membership website to generate additional (other than the membership subscription) income by advertising products that are relevant to your site’s theme. For example, let’s say the theme of your membership website is golf. You would recommend products that you like yourself such as golf books, golf magazines, golf videos and golfing gear.

When you have an affiliate agreement with the merchants selling those products, they provide you with affiliate links which you paste into your site. Then when members click on those links and buy those products, you earn a commission. Affiliates programs can earn you commissions in three ways: per click, per sale and per lead.

The members of your membership website are helped by the affiliate programs as well. They are given easy access to products that they would otherwise have to search the Internet to find.

Run an Affiliate Program

On the other side of the aisle, you can let other companies post your ad on their sites and pay commissions for sales of your product or memberships. Sure, you may give away 50 percent of your profit to an affiliate; but 50 percent of something is better than 100 percent of nothing. If you have several affiliates, you’ll undoubtedly make up the lost percentage in sales quantity. One hundred percent of $1,000 is a lot less than 50% of $5,000. It’s quite worthwhile in the long run.

Beware of Affiliate Spamming!

Since your affiliate marketer earns compensation based on a percentage of each sale, you can see where an affiliate marketer would be sorely tempted to send out email advertising the products he makes money for promoting. At one time, this resulted in so much SPAM being generated that anti-spam laws were enacted. Spammers are severely fined and the newest twist in the anti-spam laws are that the merchants, like you, whose affiliates spam are being held responsible for the spamming as well. So you are well advised to exercise caution when you choose affiliates, and then to supervise them closely.

If you are considering adding an affiliate strategy to your online sales channel you should research the different technological solutions available to you. As affiliate marketing has matured many affiliate merchants have refined their terms and conditions to prohibit affiliates from spamming. Some types of affiliate management solutions that help to deal with this problem include: standalone software, hosted services, shopping carts with affiliate features, and third party affiliate networks.

Spamdexing

Search engine spamming or Spamdexing is the practice of deliberately creating web pages which will be indexed by search engines in order to increase the chance of a website or page being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned.

Right now there is a lot of debate about the affiliate practice of Spamdexing. Many affiliates have converted from sending email spam to creating large volumes of automatically generated web pages each devoted to different niche keywords as a way of optimizing their sites for the search engines. This type of Spam is the biggest threat to organic search engines whose goal is to provide quality search results for keywords or phrases entered by their users.