Online Marketing Lesson 4 - Make Money Online with Domain Parking

Domain parking is a way of making money online with undeveloped domain names. How does it work? Simple! Basically, when you own unused domains that are waiting to be developed into live sites, you can sign up to a domain parking service to display ads on them and make some cash from visitors that are landing on your pages.

Advantages: Domain parking requires a little less work and effort compared to building a fully functional website. You can almost instantly start making money online because you don't have to work on your domain. The only two things you need to do are: (1) register or buy a domain and (2) sign up to the right parking service.

Disadvantages: All parking services strictly prohibit generating traffic to your parked domains. In other words, you can't use online advertising to drive traffic to your pages. It has to come from direct navigation or natural traffic. For example, using backlinks is not allowed by parking companies.

Where to start

The first thing before buying a domain name that you will eventually park is to do a research. This is a very crucial step and will determine your success with domain parking. Why? Simply because you can only make money from pre-existing traffic. So it is in your interest to check if the available domain names you intend to purchase are already getting a considerable amount of natural traffic. The key is to buy domain names that are already getting what's known as type-in traffic

What's type-in traffic?

Type-in traffic is a term referring to visitors landing on a site by typing a keyword or phrase in a web browser address bar, adding .com (or .net, .org, .ca, etc) rather than following a hyperlink, using a bookmark, or search engines. In other words, it's a direct traffic.

For example, if I was interested in video marketing, instead of using Google search engine, I might want to enter “videomarketing.com” in the browser address bar to see if I can find a website of that address and that's about video marketing.

Note: You can use Alexa and Statbrain to check the type-in traffic a domain gets.

One of the tricks you can use to get some extra type-in traffic is to register typo domain names.

What's typo domain names?

Typo domain names are mis-spellings or mis-typings of popular domains. For example, if I was thinking about registering a typo domain name for Youtube, Youtub.com would be ideal for getting thousands of hits per day.

Typo domain name type generators:

webmaster-toolkit.com/domain-typo-generator.shtml

domaintools.com/domain-typo/

seochat.com/seo-tools/domain-typo-generator/

Here is a list of some domain parking services you might want to try

AdSense for Domains

Godaddy

Sedo

Domainspa

Parked

Hitfarm

Fabulous

19parking

iMonetize

Sendori

Domain parking is great way to make money online. If you want to start parking your undeveloped domains to earn some cash, I wish you the best of luck!

20 Internet Video Marketing Tips

Have you embraced the power of internet video marketing yet? The birth and proliferation of video sharing sites have opened doors to new perspectives for many. Nowadays more and more online marketers and companies are starting to see the advantages of promoting and advertising products and services with videos. Internet video marketing is indeed the future of online marketing and can constitute a trump card to whoever can master it. If you are looking for more efficient strategies to grow your business, you should definitely try the online video ad approach since it is an effective way to present your products and services better to a much larger audience.

20 video marketing tips to remember 

1. Upload videos that are relevant to your products/services
Your goal is to launch a successful marketing campaign using video ads. And since irrelevant videos are useless, the best way to do this is to find a target audience. In other words, you have to find a specific niche with a starving audience. This is a vital aspect of online video marketing. You have to figure out what exactly your viewers are looking for, focus on uploading relevant videos or video ads, and present whatever your audience is looking for in a way that appeals to them. It might take you some time mastering this, but it's worth the effort.

2. Optimize your metadata
Optimize your titles, description, and tags. For instance, one of the things that can help a video get more views and rank higher is a catchy, yet accurate title. You can also use the free Youtube keyword research tool for finding keyword ideas.

3. Focus on a specific topic
Videos you upload should be related and targeting a certain niche. This can help get a good amount of subscribers.

4. Chain-link your Youtube videos
You can use annotations to create networks of linked videos. For those who are not familiar with this, Youtube gives you the ability to create and display notes, spotlight, and links on the screen while a video is being played. One of the things I do, for example, is upload niche-targeted videos and link them to a single video that promotes particular products or services.

5. Promote your videos
There are simple things you can do to promote your videos. One of them, for example, is to use the button below the screen to share your videos (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, stumpleUpon, etc). However, if your marketing budget allows you, you can create video ads and promote them using Youtube and its video targeting tool.

6. Watermark Your Videos
Before uploading your videos, you might want to include some information such as your URL or logo containing your URL preferably on the lower left hand corner. This is good way to trigger the interest of your viewer to visit your site.

7. Link to Your Site
You can drive traffic to your site by including your link in the description area. Also, using the Youtube annotation interface, you can create and display notes telling your viewers where to click.

8. Organize your videos
It is also a good idea to organize your videos into sub-topic playlists or create numerous channels for different topics

9. Keep your videos short and entertaining
Make your videos as short as possible and straight to the point. Long videos are boring. So try be a little entertaining as well.

10. Automated Software and Bot
You can use automated software such as Tube Toolbox to speed up some tasks and automate your internet video marketing (send hundreds of friend requests, upload and download videos, send a message to multiple users at once, etc.). For video marketers, it is one of the best ways to improve performance and convert views into sales or leads.

11. Build your contact list
Send friend requests to users that might be interested in your topic. What you can do, for example, is find a popular channel that is similar to yours or that has related content and send friend requests to users who subscribed to that channel. In that way, you're building a contact list that you will later use to share your videos and advertise.

Note: Tube Toolbox is a Youtube bot and friend adder that can help you build a list of targeted users.

12. Be consistent and active
Build a strategy and launch your marketing campaign according to certain marketing model principles. Upload videos on a regular basis, promote your channel, send friend requests, experiment etc.

13. Quality and quantity
Provide as many quality videos as possible.

14. Make changes and adopt new strategies or approaches according to your performance and progress
You can learn a lot by analyzing data that are available to you. For instance, Youtube Insight provides some useful information such as views (most viewed videos, most rated, etc), demographics (age ranges, genders, etc), discovery, etc.

15. Split-test your thumbnail
You should spend some time testing and choosing the right thumbnails for your videos.

16. Be informative
One of many things you can do, for example, is make tutorial videos since people are visual learners.

17. Comment on other videos and channels
The thing to remember when commenting on other videos and channels is to find the right combination of words that will lure viewers into visiting your channel. Don't just invite people to visit your channel. Instead, say something relevant to the video or channel, add something interesting, and then invite users to check out your videos.

18. Expand your marketing campaigns
Upload your videos to as many video sharing sites as possible (Metacafe, vimeo, Google Video, etc)

19. Upload response videos
Find popular videos within your niche and upload response videos.

20. Encourage people to subscribe to your channel, comment, share, rate and add your videos to their favorite lists

Note: The video marketing tips listed above are applicable to Youtube (the world's largest video sharing site and the second largest search engine on the web) and almost any other video sharing site.

Conclusion

The use of videos is an efficient way to promote websites, products, services, and reach potential costumers since people respond better with online video ads. So take advantage of this cheap, yet effective way to make money online.

Google AdSense Lesson 1 - How to Find the Highest Paying AdSense Keywords: Make More Money with AdSense

Have you ever wanted to earn more money with Google AdSense? If you write and publish content for online marketing, I'm sure you have! The question of course is “How does one effectively optimize and organize his/her website content in order to increase his/her AdSense earnings?” The answer to this question can easily be summed up in three main steps: (1) keyword research (targeting terms and keywords with high search volume, and with as little competition as possible), (2) search engine optimization for traffic, and (3) split-testing and implementation of ad layouts that are proven to result in the most conversions (clicks).

Choosing Keywords to Target

Keyword research is an important part of online marketing. Whether you want to write articles or run Google Adwords campaigns, you should always start by doing your keyword research to figure out which keyword phrases you should target the most.

In contrast to many other Adsense publishers, I don't target high paying Adsense keywords (well, at least not the highest paying keywords). What I usually do is target small niches and focus on getting high in the searches. Nonetheless, I must admit that optimizing your content with high paying Adsense keywords is certainly one of the best approaches to make more money with Google Adsense if of course you can overcome the competition and get a constant amount of traffic (higher Adsense paying keywords = higher Pay-per-click rates).

How to Find High Paying Adsense Keywords

Google Adwords provides a free keyword research tool to help publishers find keyword ideas and check out the highest paying Cost-Per-Click Keywords for Google Adsense, allowing them to run effective Google Adwords campaigns and write content with the highest paying keywords in mind.

If you already have a website, I would recommend that you check out your current keywords, and then optimize your content using related terms that have higher Cost-Per-Click rates.

Here is how you proceed:

1. First, go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. It should look like this.

2. Select Website content
3. Enter your website URL
4. Click the Get keyword ideas button
5. Click the dropdown list arrow below Choose columns to display (Group keywords terms by common terms' box should be checked)
6. Make sure that US dollars (USD $) is selected under Calculate estimates using different maximum CPC dib:7. Type 100 in the box next to the dropdown list box and click the recalculate button
8. Click Estimated Avg. PCP title one time to sort from lowest to highest and a second time to sort from highest to lowest.
10. Now you have a detailed list of high paying Adsense keywords that you can use to re-write your website content.

Finding New High Paying Adsense Keywords

You can increase your Adsense earnings even higher by adding new keywords to your current ones. Just follow the steps listed below:

1. Go to Google Adwords Keyword Tool 2. Select Descriptives words or phrases
3. Click the Use synonyms checkbox to select it if necessary
4. Type a keyword in the textbox
5. After typing in the characters in the picture, click the Get keyword ideas button
6. Click the Choose columns to display arrow and select show all in the dropdown list
7. Select US dollars (USD $) under Calculate estimates using different maximum CPC dib:8. Type 100 in the box next to the dropdown list box and click the recalculate button
9. Click Estimated Avg. PCP title one time to sort from lowest to highest and a second time to sort from highest to lowest.
10. Collect the highest paying keyword phrases, and use them when you write new content for your website.

Here are some high Cost-Per-Click keywords I've found using the method explained above:

school loan consolidation
school loans consolidation: $39.39
consolidate school loans: $35.02
consolidating school loan: $34.40

Domain nameavailable domain names: $24.60
buying a domain name: $22.25
buy domain name: $19.06

Note: Cost-Per-Click (different from Pay-Per-Click) is the amount of money an advertiser pays every time one of his/her ads is clicked. The publisher (that would be you) doesn't get more than 60% of that amount.

Online Marketing Lesson 3 - Make Money with ClickBank (Avoid Sneaky Vendors who Might Steal your Commissions)

This is one thing all ClickBank affiliates should know before promoting any Clickbank product. This might be one of the reasons you can't make money with ClickBank. It appears that some vendors have found ways to steal commissions from affiliates. Yes, you read it right. Keep on reading and you will find out how.

Note: Keep in mind that this is not the only way you can get your ClickBank commissions stolen.

How I found out about it

I promote between 5 to 10 ClickBank products at once, and usually I get pretty good conversion rate for each of them. However, recently I noticed that one of the products I was promoting didn't convert as well as the others (no sale). I didn't quite understand why considering the amount of hops the product was getting. So I searched the internet for some help. After browsing through numerous articles and forum posts, I started having a better understanding of what was really happening to my hops. I suspected that someone was stealing my commissions! So I went back to the vendor's page, and that's when everything was clear to me.

I realized that some of the visitors I was sending to the vendor's page were actually buying the product, but not through my hoplink. How? Every time a visitor was sent to the vendor's page, an opt-in form offering a discount or free stuff would pop up. The visitor would type in his/her email, and submit the form. The vendor would then send the visitor an email with a link [directing the visitor] to a payment process without my ClickBank code.

So what have we learned from this?

In the first part of my tutorial, make money with ClickBank, I've outlined tips on how to choose ClickBank Products. So, this is a great opportunity to add one more tip to the list: Test products that have opt-in options to make sure you will get the commission when you promote them. But how? There's a simple way to do this. Let's say for example that you find a potential money making product that you want to promote, but the page has an opt-in option. All you have to do is find a promotional article for that product, follow the hoplink (or just follow your own hoplink), and enter the required information preferably using a secondary email address (not your main one). Now open your inbox and check if the vendor has sent you any link to a payment process other than ClickBank. And if it is a ClickBank order page, make sure that the name of the affiliate who directed you to the vendor's page is at the bottom of the page.

I hope this was helpful...Have a great day

Online Marketing Lesson 2 - Make Money with ClickBank Part 2 (The Beginner's Guide)

In the previous part [make money with ClickBank part 1] I introduced ClickBank and outlined tips on how to choose the best products to promote. In this second lesson--which will hopefully gives you a better understand of what I’m trying to share with you--I will provide advices on a strategic level and talk about some of the best promotion tactics.

If your goal is to make money with ClickBank, you will have to do some research and plan your strategy. The key [or should I say the real “secret”] to making money with ClickBank is a good strategy backed with actions, determination and a bit of dedication. Indeed, it takes some time and effort to successfully market with ClickBank. This, however, does not mean you need to be a full-time affiliate in order to earn with ClickBank. There is a lot of people who have full-time jobs and still find the time to do some online marketing. So it all depends on your willingness to devote some of your spare time to attaining this goal. And since your way to earning with ClickBank is a process of trial and error, I would recommend you test different marketing strategies (not just the ones listed here), and proceed to selecting and combining the most effective ones so that you may develop a better approach to ClickBank Marketing and build an effective strategy. This said, let’s begin.

Conversion rate
This is something you need to keep in mind before and while running your marketing campaign. Conversion rate is the percentage of hops or visitors that convert into sales. In other words, if you promote a ClickBank product that converts at approximately 1%, you will need at least 100 hops to make a sale. The conversion rate of a product can help you estimate how much you can earn depending on the number of hops you receive for that product (my highest converting product right now is about 1.8%).

How to Know the Conversion Rate
The conversion rate depends on many different factors. For instance, two affiliates promoting the same product, but with different approaches are unlikely to have the same conversion rate, and consequently won't get the same result. Therefore, a product that worked for me won't necessarily work the same way for you since it's difficult to know its conversion rate with accuracy. This is why, in general, the best way to know how a product converts is to test it yourself and analyze the data using ClickBank Analytics. Nonetheless, You can get a good conversion rate if (1) the sale page of the product is good, (2) you get a laser-targeted traffic, (3) and your presell is good.

Now what do I mean by “laser-targeted traffic”? One of the most important things in online marketing is to figure out what exactly people are looking for and then provide it for them. For example, if there’s a huge demand for a particular product, all you have to do is find what and where the starving audience (target traffic or target audience) is. Once you know that, the next step is to capitalize on that specific opportunity by sending the traffic to where you can market the product to them.

How to Promote ClickBank Products 

There are paid methods and free ones. I usually don’t pay for promotion or advertising. My hops are generated purely from free traffic. Nonetheless, I have to admit that paid advertising is more efficient, much faster and requires less work. So If you’re a noob or have a small budget, I would recommend that you start with free methods and progressively work your way up to the top.

I. Promote ClickBank Products with Adwords 

This is without a doubt one of the fastest ways to make money with ClickBank. The idea is to create a domain with a landing page, and then pay Adwords to send some target traffic. The purpose of the landing page is to convince the customer to buy the product by getting him/her excited or emotionally involved. Your domain should include (but should not be limited to) a promotional review, your encrypted hoplink, and of course, proof that the product actually works.

One of the advantages of advertising with Adwords is that you don’t have to worry about your rankings since your ad positioning entirely depends on the terms or keywords you target. So If you are familiar with online marketing, you should know by now you will have to do your keyword research as well using the Adwords keyword tool.

Steps:

1. Choose the right product
2. Do a keyword research to estimate how much you can possibly spend for the promotion on a daily basis
3. Set up your landing page
4. Run a good Adwords campaign
5. Monitor your progress, test different landing page designs, and opt for the one that converts the best

II. Email Marketing 

With this method you can promote products to hundreds and thousands of customers at once by sending out tons of emails using an email marketing service or an email autoresponder service. This is what’s known as email marketing or email promotion and internet marketing automation. I’m sure most of you receive promotional emails every once in while. So you pretty much have an idea of what I’m talking about.

Before launching an email marketing campaign, it’s crucial to first build an email list. In other words, You need to collect as many emails as you can. There are many ways of doing it. For example, You can use pop up ads on your site that promote your free ebook. This would require the visitors to enter their emails before downloading a copy of the ebook. Having an idea of what the visitors may be interested in since they’ve downloaded your ebook (remember what I’ve said earlier about target audience), You can then promote products by sending them promotional emails.

Below are some paid email marketing services:

Aweber.com



Getresponse.com



1shoppingcart.com


You can also try these two free email marketing services:

Freeautobot.com

Sendfree.com

III. Promote Clickbank Products with free blogs (article marketing)

Free methods usually mean that you have to invest more time and effort working. For this method, the idea is to (1) select 5 to 10 ClickBank products, (2) do a keyword research, (3) write 2 or more articles for each product, and (4) post them on multiple free blogs (using Blogger or Wordpress). The ideal is to target small niches and focus on getting high in the searches.

IV. Promote ClickBank Products with article directories 

This is another type of article marketing. It requires a lot of patience and months of solid work.

Steps:

1. Choose 5 or more ClickBank products
2. Do a keyword research
3. Write as many articles as you can for each product every day
4. Publish your articles on as many article directories as possible
5. Re-direct your readers to either the vendor’s page or your landing page

Here is a list of some article directories:

ezinearticles.com
goarticles.com
ideamarketers.com
marketing-seek.com
workoninternet.com/Submit_Article.html
pubs.acs.org/hotartclarticle-hangout.com
webarticles.com
articlecube.com
articles4content.com
article-emporium.com
buzzle.com
impactarticles.com
articlesfactory.com
articlecity.comcertificate.net/
niche-article-directory.com
jogena.com/articles/articleform.htm
news.collectors.orgarticle-niche.com
blogtelecast.comsuperpublisher.com
articletogo.com
articleworld.net
impactarticles.com
articlealley.com
article-buzz.com
free-articles-zone.com
newarticlesonline.com
directorygold.com
dir.salon.com
articlefever.com
content-articles.com
softwaremarketingresource.com/
marketing-article-directory.html
articlecentral.com
article-directory.net
article-emporium.com
ebooksnbytes.com
ideamarketers.com
internethomebusinessarticles.com
site-reference.com
stickysauce.com

V. Promote ClickBank Products with ebooks 

You can write little ebooks in which you provide useful information and promote products at the same time. You can then submit them to as many ebook directories as possible.

Here a list of some ebook directories:

wisdomebooks.com
jogena.com/ebookdir/ebookdata.htm
brandable-ebooks.com
ebookdirectory.com
ebookgiveaways.com
free-ebooks.net
ecourseweb.com
mindlikewater.com
ebooksearchengine.com
ebookpalace.com
e-bookdirectory.com

VI. Promote ClickBank products with Youtube videos and others (internet video marketing)

I’ve covered this topic before in some of my previous posts. Promoting with Youtube is without a doubt a good way of making money online; however, it’s little harder to find a target audience since most people on youtube are just casual viewers. I’ve experienced ups and downs with this strategy. One of the advantages of video marketing is that you don’t really have to create your own videos. For instance, it’s possible to download any Youtube Video, edit it and re-upload it on multiple accounts.

Steps: 

1. Find a niche that you can market on Youtube
2. Find a related ClickBank product
3. Search for videos that you can use to promote that product and download them
4. Re-upload re-edited versions of those videos or upload review videos
5.Include your hoplink in the descriptions of each video and disguise it using tinyurl
6. Create annotations with little messages to show viewers where to click

Other methods:

• Promote with forums
• Promote with Google groups
• Promote with Hugpages, squidoo, etc.

Note: For those of you who have signed up to ClickBank and haven’t noticed yet, it’s now possible to change your ClickBank password. Also, you can now know how many people actually click your Hoplinks using the recently-introduced ClickBank analytics!
ClickBank Dormant Account (Important) 

If you haven’t made your first sale yet, your account is considered dormant. After 90 days of no earning, your account will subject to a charge of $1 per day. So my advice would be to do your best to at least make your first sale because you will be charged more after a longer period of time ($5 per day after 180 days, and $50 after 360 days).

I will finish this post by encouraging you to experiment and wishing you a good day. Thanks for reading…
Read part 3

Online Marketing Lesson 1 - Make Money with ClickBank (The Beginner's Guide)

First off, I would like to apologize to my readers for not updating this blog more often. I was a little busy working on a new blog which will be revealed pretty soon. Also, I've been experimenting with new stuff. Every once in a while I try new ideas and sometimes it takes a lot more time than I may expect. Consequently, it's hard for me to write more articles for this blog.

This post is mainly based on what I've been doing for the past few months. I spent a lot of my time searching for the best ways to make money online. My main focus was building an effective strategy for marketing with ClickBank.

In the least likelihood of your not knowing what ClickBank is, let me explain for newbies. ClickBank is an electronic marketplace where people sell digital products. In other words, it's simply a bunch of authors selling ebooks, videos, software etc.

You can register as an affiliate and make money promoting other people's products. It's indeed very profitable and requires little work. The best part is that you don't have to create and sell your own products, or even handle payments. Basically, all you have to do is send traffic to a vendor's site. And every time a referred customer buys a product, you get paid a commission or a certain percentage depending on an arrangement. This is exactly what affiliate marketing is.

Can You Make a Decent Income Promoting ClickBank Products?
Yes, Absolutely! You can earn pretty big commissions (50-75%), sometimes even more than 100$ per sale. It's maybe not as easy as most affiliate marketers and gurus claim (especially when they want you to buy their products or their magic bullet ebooks), but it's certainly possible to make thousands of dollars on a weekly basis by simply building an effective strategy. I'm sure some of you have already seen those screenshots with massive ClickBank earnings, haven't you?

Getting Started
Not a Clickbank Affiliate yet? Well, ClickBank is extremely easy to use for both affiliates and vendors, and signing up is far from being a complicated process. As an affiliate, you're not required to have your own website and can instantly start promoting products of your choice.

Note: You can find an article about how to sign up here.

ClickBank Marketplace

Marketplace is a section of ClickBank website where affiliate can find thousands of vendors' products to promote. They are classified under 9 different categories (Marketing & Ads, business to business, etc). It is also possible to narrow searches by using the sub-categories box, the keywords' box, the sort by box, etc.

ClickBank Hoplink


Hoplink is your affiliate link provided by ClickBank. It is in the following format:

http://affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net/

The link takes the customer to the vendor's site where he or she can purchase one or more products, and the affiliate automatically gets credit for the referral.

Note: Hoplinks generated from the marketplace do not show the affiliates and the vendors' nicknames. These hoplinks are an encrypted version of the older format.

How to Choose ClickBank Products

In order to be successful with ClickBank, it's vital to promote profitable products. And there are few factors that can help you select the best ones.

Gravity, $/sale, %/refd
You should be able to understand and interpret these stats before deciding on which product(s) you want to promote.

Gravity (grav): This number gives you an idea on how popular and competitive the product is. The higher the number, the more affiliates promote that product and the more competition you have to deal with.

$/sale: This is the value you earn as an affiliate every time a sale is made through your link.

%/refd: This is the percentage of sales made through affiliates.

Now how can these three elements help you choose a product?
One of the things most marketers or gurus would tell you is to go for the first product or the one that has the highest gravity (and I know I've also said the latter in this blog). This, however, doesn't work all the time because overcoming the competition can be very hard. So unless you are an experienced affiliate marketer, I suggest you choose a product with a gravity between 20 and 100. Also, you want it to be at least $20 per sale (minimum 50% commission per sale). Finally, the percentage of referred should be less than 80%. See example below

Only Promote Quality Products

It is always important to know the product you want to promote. In some cases, you will have to buy the product yourself in order to be sure about its quality. If, for example, a site makes promises that sound too good to be true, it's advised to purchase the product, test it, and write a objective review before endorsing it. Doing this will give you more credibility, especially if you want to build a long-lasting relationship with costumers. Always remember that a satisfied consumer is more likely to buy another product through one of your links again.

Look at the sales pageThis is extremely important. The sales page should be appealing to the eye. Always choose the sites that are professionally designed or at least the ones that grab the attention of the customer for better conversion rates (more on this later). Also, you have to make sure that the page shows proof that the product really works (testimonials) and offers a money back guarantee.

Avoid “Make Money Online” Niche
Internet marketing products are very hard to sell. This is simply because there is too much competition. The internet is over saturated by moneymaking products. I suggest you stay out of that niche and take advantage of the wide variety of products ClickBank offers.

This is the end of the first part. The next part will be about how to build your strategy ;)

Video Marketing Lesson 2 - Introduction to Making Money with ClickBank and Video Sharing Sites Part 2

This is the second part of make money with ClickBank and video sharing sites. You can find the first part here. This short video marketing tutorial will teach how to promote ClickBank products on video sharing sites. I would also recommend that you read my other tutorials so that you may learn the basics for making money with ClickBank.


Note: Since Youtube is the largest video sharing site on the web, I will use as a default example for this tutorial.

Let's begin!

The first thing you need to learn before launching your promotion campaign is to find a target audience. You can't just upload random videos and expect to make a lot of money. Sometimes it's even better to find a target audience before choosing which products to promote. Any experienced online marketer would tell you that you must target a particular niche (or at least find a way to drive a target traffic to the vendor's page). This is a very crucial step in this whole video marketing thing – Finding a target audience.

How to find a target audience

This can be as simple as reading comments and adding to your friend list users who may want to buy your products. And if you've already uploaded videos, you can use Youtube insight to learn a little about who is watching your videos (age, gender, etc). This can help you monetize your videos by promoting products that are more appealing to your audience.

Another thing you might want to do is build a friend list by sending out hundreds or even thousands of friend requests. Why? Because you will be able to promote products by sharing your videos with them. This is not an easy task and can be very boring. So you might want to use bots such as Tube Toolbox to automate your Youtube marketing.

Where to find videos

You can create and edit your own videos using Camtasia and Sony Vegas or just download videos from different video sharing sites like many already do (You can download any Youtube video with Tube Toolbox). However, if you can't afford arming yourself with these marketing tools, you can always use Windows Movie Maker and Jing. Jing is free software similar to Camtasia that you can use to snap pictures and record videos of your computer screen.

Putting all the pieces together

The next step is to upload your videos. One of the reasons many fail at making money with Clickbank this way is because they forget another important aspect of video marketing – Optimization. You must optimize your titles, descriptions, thumbnails, and tags. For keyword ideas, you can use Youtube keyword research tool. This can help you target a particular niche. I recommend you use at least 15 related tags for each of your videos to help Youtube categorize them. Also, Videos that have good thumbnails usually get the most views. So test each of your thumbnails for a period of time to know the ones that are the most effective.

The last step is to put your link in the description of each video. This can be either your hoplink or a link to your promotional page. It is also advised to use Tinyurl to disguise your affiliate link.

In general, if you want to make money online, you must be persistent. Many find it very hard to make money with Youtube because of the time and work it takes to create, and upload videos. And that is only a small part of video marketing. If you can get more than 1000 hops per day with your videos, you can earn a good amount of money depending on how targeted the traffic is.

Video Marketing Lesson 1 - Introduction to Making Money with ClickBank and Video Sharing Sites

If you are new to the world of affiliate marketing, it's essential to first have a basic understanding of what affiliate programs are. My previous post was just an introduction to making money with affiliate programs. In this article (which I consider as a second part) I will focus on a very lucrative source of income, Pay Per Sale (Also known as Cost Per Action). Today I will share with you how to make money with a very well known online retail outlet—ClickBank.

What's ClickBank?

ClickBank is an online marketplace where people sell digital products (ebooks, services, memberships, etc). It's probably one of the most popular affiliate networks and the best choice for a beginner.

It's easy to understand the way it works. The website has a large inventory of products from which a registered affiliate can choose to promote. Once you sign up, you can earn between 50 to 70% commission (sometimes even more) for every referred visitor who buys a vendor's product through your link. According to their published stats, they make a sale every three seconds, serve over 200 countries, and their clients have made over 1 billion dollars! You're probably now wondering where to click to get a piece of that pie, aren't you?

Update: ClickBank has re-designed their website, which means the screenshots below may not be the exactly the same when you sign up.

How To Sign Up

It's easy, fast, and free. I will guide you through the process. Go to the ClickBank homepage and click on “Sign up” at the top of the page. The form that appears should look like this.

After you're done filling out all the required boxes, read the client contract and check the box next to “I have read and agree to the terms and conditions” if you wish to continue. Then click "Submit". A confirmation link and a password will be emailed to you. So log in to your email account and complete the process. Remember that you will use the provided password to access your ClickBank account, so make sure not to loose it or let anybody else know it.

Now log in to your account. Your page should look like this.

How to Find Products

Update: The ClickBank marketplace has also been re-designed. However, the principles for finding good products is still the same. 

The next thing you need to do is to find some products to promote. Click “Marketplace” at the top. You should see this:

You can browse through 9 categories (Business to Business, Marketing & Ads, etc). The interface also enables you to search with keywords. But here I would like to show you how to get the best products. For every category, sort by “High Gravity.” The products that will show up are the top promoted or best sellers. You can even narrow your search by using specific keywords.

You have to find things that are related to site or that you are familiar with. Once you see the ones you want to promote, you can visit the seller's site. If you're interested, click “create hopLink.” A page will pop up where you can enter your nickname and your tracking ID if you have one. 

Click “create” below the two boxes and the next page will give you a code that you're supposed to copy and paste  wherever you wish in order to send customers to the vendor's site.

It's very important to know what you will be advertising. In some cases you will have to buy the product yourself and write a critical review (negative and positive). There is a lot of good stuff at ClickBank, but there is also a lot of junk. So be careful what you recommend to people. You might loose your credibility for convincing your readers to buy something that is not worth the price.

How to Promote Clickbank Products With Youtube

You can promote ClickBank products with video sharing sites (such as Youtube) using simple, but effective video marketing techniques. Not taking advantage of the traffic popular video sharing sites  get everyday would be a waste. You have to consider those viewers as potential prospects. If you make a real good review video on a product, they will probably buy it and you will be paid a commission. All you have to do is to upload a video that promotes an item and put your hoplink (your affiliate link) in the description area. Soon enough people will start visiting your pages if they are interested.

I hope this helped you. Post a comment if you want share anything (As long as it's relevant)

Introduction to Affiliate Marketing and Video Marketing

These days, it's really easy to build your own blog or website. This, however, cannot be said for getting traffic. Needless to remind you that a highly trafficked website is potentially a gold mine. But I won't go over that subject in this article.

If you are an experienced website owner, you certainly know that it is very important to have multiple streams of income to monetize your site at its fullest potential. You may start with Google Adsense which is a Pay Per Click affiliate program, but if you want to earn more from your site, you will have to experiment and explore more options. For most website owner and bloggers, Adsense is probably the biggest source of profit. Some sites, however, seem to work better with other types of affiliate marketing.

What's an Affiliate Program?

An affiliate Program is simply an arrangement or agreement in which an online merchant pays publishers or affiliate websites a determined commission to promote products or send some traffic to one or more websites.

Advantages

Most people find it easier to work at home, making a living off the Internet. Some have even quit their jobs to become full time affiliates. This just tells you how lucrative this business is. Vendors (or online companies) consider affiliate marketing as one of the easiest methods to sell products and services because it does not cost much and can help generate a consistent flow of online cash. On the other hand, affiliates, whose only job is the promotion of products or websites, benefit from this by receiving a percentage of the sale revenues or based on a particular agreement.

Joining affiliate programs to promote products is literally one of best ways to make money online. They are free, you don't spend much effort, and most importantly, you can make thousands of dollars a month by only promoting other people's products.

How Does It Work?

There are three parties involved in this transaction.

The merchant or vendor owns a website where he sells his own products. In some cases, he or she signs up to a service which can promote his or her website (Google Adword, for example).

The affiliate or the publisher also has a website where he or she posts links that redirect his or her visitors to the merchant website.

The customer, you guessed it, is the person who visits, buys, or even signs up to a service through the affiliate link, resulting in some generated revenues which will be shared between the merchant and the affiliate according to their agreement.

There are countless affiliate programs on the Internet, but they can be classified under three basic types.

1. Pay Per Sale: The merchant or company pays the affiliate only when a referred customer makes a purchase.
2. Pay Per Lead (Both PPS and PPL are sometimes called Pay Per Performance): The merchant pays the affiliate when the referred visitor signs up to a service or fills out some requested information.
3. Pay Per Click (The most popular and the easiest): The affiliate gets paid every time a visitor clicks on the link to the merchant's website.

There is also a variation:
Residual Programs: The affiliate not only receives a commission for every sale, but also gets paid every time the referred visitor goes back to the site and buys again.

Combination with Video Marketing
If you want to earn some extra cash as an affiliate, the only thing you will need is a website or find some other means for promoting websites and products, which means you can improve your strategy by combining it with video marketing using video sharing sites as a source of targeted traffic. How? All you have to do is to make good videos promoting products of your choice, upload them on different video sharing sites, and put your affiliate link or a link to your landing page in the description boxes. I tried this technique with a ringtone company, and the result was quite good.
I will stop here today. I will write more later. Have a nice day...:)

6 Effective Ways to Make Money With Video Sharing Sites Using Video Marketing Strategies

There are actually many ways of making money with video sharing sites. I know many are still wondering whether or not it is even possible making money online marketing with videos23. This article is an overview of all the methods I know. I will explore and write more detailed articles for each option mentioned here. If you want to share something, please leave a comment :).

1. Video units
This is an easy way of making money online for both Adsense publishers and independent video producers (or partners). How does it work? Publishers customize Youtube players with specific video content owned by partners. Once the players are embedded on sites/blogs, little ads, which can be texts as well as graphic banners, are displayed both above and below the video. The video units’ player has an interface that enables a viewer to scroll and browse through numerous videos as well as ads. At the end, both Adsense publishers and Youtube partners will receive a share of the ad revenue. So you can be either a publisher or a partner. This brings me to introduce the second method.


Update: Video Units is no longer available.

2. Become a Youtube partner (provide good video content)
If you create original videos suitable for online streaming, you upload videos that are watched by thousands of Youtubers on a regular basis, and you own the copyrights of all video and audio content you upload, or at least have permission to use and monetize somebody else’s materials, maybe you should start thinking about joining the Youtube partnership program. The size of your audience (subscribers) is also an important element when your channel is being reviewed for acceptance. As a Youtube partner, you will be able to share revenue generated from relevant InVideo ads on your videos and banner ads displayed next to your videos. Please understand that getting accepted is not easy. How much do partners get paid? As I’m not a partner, I can’t really tell with certainty the exact amount. However, I’ve read on the net that it’s between 2 and 5 US dollars per 1k views, which may seem like not much for some, especially if you get 2,000 views everyday. But it all changes when it’s “millions of views” that we are talking about. Some partners have even quit their jobs to work full time on their channels. This gives you a little idea on how much they make.

3. Run affiliate ads on videos
You can either watermark your videos with your site promoting an affiliate offer or redirect your viewers to your affiliate page by including the link in the description areas of your videos. For example, if you have music videos, you can sign up to an affiliate program that sells ringtones. I’m sure you’ve already seen those videos that have little annotations that show you a link where you can download the ringtone for the video.

4. Start a video blog
You can start a site or blog that features Youtube videos, and write review articles commenting on videos you embed on your pages. This is probably a good way of creating content without really spending much time and effort. You can then monetize the blog by running Google ads (Adsense) or promoting the affiliate program of your choice.

5. Advertise or promote your own products
How does the idea of promoting your own products or items on Youtube or other video sharing sites sound? You can reach potential buyers on Youtube. So all you need to do is to upload advertising videos and link them to your site.

6. Drive viewers to your blog/website
Basically, the idea is to drive some of your viewers to your blog or site by watermarking your videos and including your link in the descriptions. Your source of income would be Google Adsense or other affiliate programs.

CONTACT ME

If you have any questions about Video Marketing or any other related topic (online marketing, viral marketing, etc.), please feel free to contact me by email: TheStrategistsBlog@yahoo.com

I'll try to answer as soon as I can.

Thanks