Hey everyone, I wanted to share how I've made some money using video for affiliate marketing. This is something I'm going to be doing more of in 2009.
Here's a video that I made that's done extremely well:
YouTube - Broadcast Yourself...
It promotes an affiliate product at clickbank on how to start an office cleaning business. To date, I have never promoted in the Make Money on the Internet field, but starting a business offline is one of my favorite niches.
The first thing I did was read the sales page which can be found at
Office Cleaning EBook: Learn how to Start your Own Office Cleaning Business | Clean up the Profits
Once I decided that I was going to promote this product, I grabbed a catchy domain name. On other videos I've done, I've used subdomains. Unfortunately, this hasn't worked as well as having a main domain. This domain name (
Office Cleaning EBook: Learn how to Start your Own Office Cleaning Business | Clean up the Profits) is a dot.com. I haven't experimented with cheaper dot.infos for video purposes but it might be something to look into.
Now, I don't have any content on that site. It simply redirects to the sales page using my affiliate link. Pretty cool, huh?
By the way, if you use this strategy of buying a domain just for marketing a product, you can link directly to the product from Ezine Articles. You don't have to have a landing page if you use a domain.
Then I wrote a short script for a video. The script was about 500 words and it runs 4.5 minutes. If you talk more slowly than me (which is 99.9% of the population), you won't need to have so many words. Also, I think this video might have done even better if it had been shorter because as the video plays, I lose more visitors that it should. (One of the great things about YouTube videos is that they provide detailed information about viewership under the "Insight" Tab.)
After I wrote my script, I went to
stock.xchng - the leading free stock photography site to grab some photos for my presentation. I especially looked for pictures of office buildings and pictures of people cleaning. You'll notice that I also took some pictures from the product's sales page.
Next, I opened up my copy of Open Office which is a free version of Microsoft Office Suite. I have Word and Excel, but I don't have PowerPoint which is a costly upgrade. Open Office provides a free version of PowerPoint called Impress. It works great. You can get your copy here:
OpenOffice.org - The Free and Open Productivity Suite
So, I loaded some slides in Open Office Impress. You will notice that I put the web site down on every slide so it runs continuously throughout the presentation. There is a way to edit this in later, but I find that it is easier just to have the web address on the slides.
Then, I recorded the video using CamStudio. Camtasia is the standard screen capture video software that marketers promote and there is a 30 day free trial. But I figured that I wasn't going to pay the $300 to activate it at the end of the month and I'd rather just learn one program. The freeware version of Camtasia is CamStudio. It's available here:
CamStudio - Free Screen Recording Software
I then recorded my script using the slideshow with camstudio software. I would recommend that you leave 10 seconds of silence at the beginning so you can edit it where you want and then trail out a full minute at the end because this gives people time to write down the web address.
After that, I used Windows Movie Maker (which came with my computer. I believe it is a standard program for those who have windows) to edit the piece. Basically, I had to cut off a few seconds at the beginning so the presentation would start where I wanted it and then a few seconds at the end so that it would conclude where I wanted it. I didn't do any fancy editing. When you use camstudio, you will have to edit out the beginning and the end because the screen capture software "gets in the way" of the rpesentation.
Okay, then all I had to do was upload the video to YouTube. There are a variety of other video distribution sites to load it to, but the only one I used was YouTube. I'm going to be hitting the others in a bit.
There are a couple of important tips for what to do when you load onto YouTube. First of all, enter the full url in the description box first. That means enter everything -
cPanel®. and all. This way, you get a hyperlink to your site directly on the page. The reason you want to do this first before you enter any text is that YouTube only displays the first 50 or so characters of your description.
The other thing you might want to consider if you are interested in entering multiple niches is setting up a user name for each of them. This means that people won't be able to tell that you are an affiliate marketer who peddles anything and everything just by clicking on your user name. If you click on my user name (sfox1972), you'll see that all of my videos on this account have to do with ways to start offline businesses.
So, what was the time and results?
Because I'm fairly quick at making these videos, it took me about 1 hour and 15 minutes from start to finish to put up this video. I put it up 11 months ago. It has 1400 views and has made me 15 sales. I get a sale every 90 views almost like clockwork. Not every video does this well, of course. But I think that was an hour and fifteen minutes well spent!
Stacy
Using Video for Affiliate Marketing
