ten days or so ago, I wrote to you about Affiliate Video Brander
software, and gave you a few links to sample branded videos I’d
put up as a test.

Well today I’d like to continue with the online video theme. There’s
other stuff as well, of course.

1 Killer Video Creation

2 Stay away from Zango

3 Success Stories

4 A nice little Video Branding story

5 Killer Video Creation

We all know that video is slowly taking over the net, and
whether we like it or not, the Internet will eventually
end up much more TV like than in its current format.

So if we don’t learn video, and make it a part of our
online business, we’re going to be left behind and wishing
that we’d got in early on and mastered the necessary skills.

Many people prefer learning visually. They just love tutorials
where they’re ’shown’ how to do something, how to solve a
problem, or learn new skills. Right now, at least as far as
Internet marketing/selling stuff goes, Camtasia and similar
screen recording tools are king.

On the surface these screen cam tools seem simple enough
to use, and I guess they are for basic videos. It’s only
when you try to create something more powerful that the
tools get complicated - try blending Powerpoints, mixed
with screenshots and illustrations, plus drawings done
with whiteboard software, with added mindmaps, and all
presented in video format with a voiceover explaining
everything.

Complicated stuff like that isn’t easy to create.

I know because I’ve been trying to do it recently.

Straightforward screen recording is simple enough, but when
you start doing all the things it can soon go wrong.

It’s mainly the editing part that’s been getting at me, and
synching my voice to the video once I’ve made cuts. I’ve tried
narrating a video as I go along, and I’ve tried dubbing in my
voice later, and both are just as difficult.

A recent tutorial video I did to offer as a bonus to buyers
of a product took me hours and hours and around a dozen goes
to get correct.

So what’s the solution?

Professional help.

In the past I’ve bought a fair bit of low-end tutorial stuff,
but none has really helped me because it seems like the material
has just been quickly thrown together by marketers, rather than
true video/audio experts, because of the huge demand for it.

But now, at last, there’s some high end training available
inside a new low-cost membership site - and it’s not just
about Camtasia. It covers six different software programs
including free ones.

And it’s just packed with excellent tutorials.

http://www.philwiley.com/recommends/killervids

Over the past few years I’ve joined a lot of membership sites
and I’ve got to say that this one has amazed me with the sheer
volume, and quality, of material inside it.

There are almost 400 tutorials inside it. And seeing it’s only
just launching this weekend. That’s amazing.

But the site doesn’t just offer tutorials. As part of the
monthly membership you also get
script writing software
a huge audio library
software to automatically upload your videos to the top 35 video websites
and 2 products each month with full resale rights.
Inside there are also a bunch of bonus products with resell
rights and a few surprise bonuses.
But it’s the tutorials that are the important thing.
As far as I’m concerned all the rest of the stuff is just
an unnecessary distraction.

The tutorials are excellent and that’s why I joined.
Although the stated main aim of the site is to show you how
to quickly and easily make professional video infomercials
for your products and/or services there’s more to it than
that - because apart from making promo’s for your products
you can use the exact same techniques to ‘create’ products.

The videos you learn to do can ‘be’ your product.

Or you can do what I’ve been doing and create bonus tutorials
for affiliate programs I’ve been promoting.

Or you can become an expert and hire out your services and
skills as an online video expert.

Or you can - well I can’t think of anything else right now
- but I’m sure there’s several other things that online
video expertise will let you do.

Oh, and I nearly forgot this part. An important benefit
of joining is that the two video professionals behind the
site will critique your videos to help you improve your
skills.

It’s the best tutorial site I’ve ever seen. Give it a go.

http://www.philwiley.com/recommends/killervids

2 Stay away from Zango.

Last week I got a report written by a 16 year old who is making
some decent affiliate commissions. Only to find that his
commissions come from getting people to install the Zango
software/toolbar. His report tries to talk people into signing
people up for Zango so that you become his sub-affiliate, and
then goes onto some detail of how you can give away free
videos and ringtones and screensavers and earn money from it.

It’s a decent, well written report. And it’s great to see
a 16 year old making commissions. But as someone interested
in affiliate marketing it’s important that you stay away
from Zango (which used to be known as 180 Solutions).

The more that you help get Zango spread around the net the
less money you’ll make long term because you’ll lose affiliate
commissions.

Zango is bad news for anyone doing affiliate marketing, because
it overwrites affiliate cookies. When someone with Zango installed
follows an affiliate link, their click is often intercepted by
the Zango software and the cookie is overwritten with one from
a Zango Advertiser.

You can read more about this at

http://www.revenuetoday.com/story/A+Call+to+Action

http://affiliate-blogs.5staraffiliateprograms.com/2005/10/07/affiliates-money-trail/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zango

And detailed reports at

http://www.benedelman.org/spyware/180-affiliates/

and

http://affiliatefairplay.com/newsblog/2006/10/20/attention-merchants-affiliate-fraud-alert/

3 Success Stories.

I love success stories, especially when they revolve around
unusual business ideas. As an avid reader I often come across
them in newspapers. Here’s one from the property guide of
one of England’s upmarket newspapers, The Telegraph.

A woman in England is making a great living importing
classic 1950’s- 1960’s American Airstreams.

It seems that these vintage caravans - those iconic silver
bullets of riveted aluminium are hot property right now and
she can sell them almost as fast as she can import and
renovate them.

Her passion for them started over 10 years ago. She imported
one and then another from the USA, then she was forced to sell
one when she lost her job, and realized there was a huge
potential market in the UK.

“The phone rang off the hook,” she says. “I could have sold
it many times over.”

So she invested her redundancy money in importing two more
and hasn’t stopped selling them since.

“People have gone retro-crazy and Airstream-mad,” she says.
And she now sells two or three a week, many of them to
people who find her via her website.

http://www.american-caravans.co.uk/

With so many peoples lives devastated by being made redundant
it’s great to hear of someone it happened to succeeding.

An even bigger success story is Dogster.

In case you can’t guess from the name it’s a social networking
site for DOGS. And I’m sure that I’d have thought of it first
if I’d known that dogs could type.

It seems that over 290,000 dogs have the ability to use a
computer, because that’s how many they’ve signed up.

Together with its sister site Catster they have a community
of more than 500,000 members, and get this - in May alone
the company behind the two sites made over US$250 thousand
in advertising revenue from 22 million page views.

All I can say to that is I’m going to teach my cat to type
properly instead of just running over my keyboard.

If you like reading success stories - and find them as
inspirational as I do - there are some great one’s in
a book called Success Alert.

You might already have it because it was published a few
years ago (though recently updated) so dig it out of your
files and read it again. If you’ve never come across it
before it’s well worth studying.

The 10 very detailed interviews include:
- a man who makes over $200k a month with a site selling
baths and another selling kitchen sinks.
- someone making over $900k a year with a website
selling socks.
- and my favorite wacky idea, a truck spotting membership
site that pulls in over $300k a year.
4. A nice little Video Branding story.
My Internet connection has been down for the past 30 hours
(after the proxy computer that my wireless connection feeds
into died) and I’ve just got back online to find a great
email from Michael Nicholas, the creator of Affiliate Video
Brander.

Hey Phil,

You’ll love this as I forgot to mention it… (but I did
remember to mention it on an interview I did with Rick
Butts the other day)..

And that is… I followed your link to the video you
branded on Joe Vitale and I liked the video so much when
it took me to Amazon.com, I bought not only the DVD product
but also Joe’s new book too, Zero Limits, ALL through your
affiliate link of your branded video…

I mean… that comes full circle as I created VB and VPS
but I turned right into the customer in no time flat
because video branding just plain works.

That was a great experience as I sincerely had no idea I
would be buying anything at all… I just wanted to see
your branded video presentation - but ended up buying.

I just don’t know why Google didn’t come out with this as
it seems to be a viable video monetization model.

Hey… how about that?… I became one of your 1st branded
video customers as it got me right on the hook. I hope you
keep using it… What a great thing to have happened the
way it did.

Thanks again… And this is a true story I may have to tell
again sometime

Michael :>)
Affiliate Video Brander

———-

Just shows that it works, doesn’t it

Anyway, thanks for reading it all. See you next time.

Phil