Chasing the dream… and finding out exactly what that means
Archive for May, 2006
How to host your videos for free
May 31st
Bandwidth costs money. It’s a fact of life. If you need bandwidth, you’re going to have to shell out for it.
Servers also cost money. If you have a video that you’d like to show to a lot of people, you need a good hosting service for it. If you expect a lot of people to be viewing your video at the same time, you may need a dedicated server.
I came across this problem when I revisited my Keyword Transformer sales page. I had edited a 10-minute demonstration video, and the file was about five megabytes in size. With my hosting plan, I have 10,500Mb of bandwidth per month, which would mean that a maximum of 2,100 people would be able to view it. This would tend to eat up bandwidth like nobody’s business!
The other problem was that the bit rate was such that people with dial-up modems would not really be able to view the video.
Getting the video hosted with Google Video solved these problems for me! My Keyword Transformer Demonstration Video is hosted by Google Video for free. I also get a back-link to my site. This basically means that I have a free ad for my product, hosted by Google. It’s compressed more, and hence has a lower quality, than the video I produced, but that should mean that people with dial-up modems will be able to see it!
The best part is that the video can be incorporated into your own web page, as you can see here!
I know there’s a link to Google on that video, and that constitutes a minor leak which is a bad thing for a sales page, but I believe that people will only be clicking through that link if they are bored, and just browsing the net. These people would not have purchased the product anyway.
I’ve put links to pages that contain the full-quality demonstration video on my pages, so anybody who wishes to view the 10-minute video in full size and quality can do so. Typically, these will only be people that are really interested in what they see on the Google-hosted video but wish to see it at a higher-quality level, and these are the prospects that are likely to spend money!
I used Windows Media Encoder to produce the video, and that was quite a decent tool for the job, especially being a free download from Microsoft.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
Breaking News: AdSense Firesale 2 begins
May 27th
Today saw the launch of Jean-Philippe Schoeffel’s second AdSense Firesale. AdSense Firesale is a collection of high-quality websites that contain prewritten articles and are monetised by serving AdSense ads, Yahoo! Publisher Network ads, Amazon affiliate ads, Chikita ads, SearchFeed and ClickBank affiliate ads.
The offer price at launch is $67. It is set to rise to $97 on 1st June, to $147 on 2nd June, and to $297 on 5th June.
The first AdSense Firesale offered sites that were well-optimised for generating revenue, but were not attractive to repeat visitors. The main focus of these sites is that they are attractive sites in their own right. The sites have far more features than previous sites have had, including integrated reciprocal linking capabilities, article-editing features, article submission features, serving of appropriate articles for specific keywords and article permalinks. Furthermore, a new set of distinct bonuses is offered with this product, one of which is my own Keyword Transformer Personal Edition.
See the details of the offer here:
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
Open Source Web Design
May 21st
If you’re after good-looking, freely-available web page templates, you could do far worse than visiting Open Source Web Design.
It’s possibly a way of getting free backlinks, too! If you design a web template that gets used, you could add a link to your site at the very top or the very bottom of the page. This won’t always work, but sometimes, people using templates in this way leave the credit intact. For example, at the time of writing I am using the Semiologic CMS theme for this blog, and I have left the author’s link intact to thank them for writing the theme. (Note that Open Source Web Design does not give you WordPress themes; it gives you standard web-page templates instead.)
If you offer a web page template design service, this could be a good way to get free advertising. Place your ad in the comments of the web page template in some location where you can be certain they will be read by the person who wishes to use your template in a sample of your work that you offer for free.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
Meta tags are out?
May 11th
If you produce your own web pages, you’ve probably read time and time again that meta tags in the header are not used by search engines any more, especially Google.
This is not true!
For example, take a look at the Google search engine results for “Keyword Transformer”. My website Keyword Transformer is ranked at position nine at the time of writing.
Google’s description of the content of my web page is as follows:
“Find out how professional Internet marketers save time and money by building their keyword lists automatically, and how you can do the same.”
It’s quite a nice description, I’m sure you’ll agree, especially when compared to the generic descriptions that Google usually comes up with for web pages.
Where does this description appear on my web page? You’ve guessed it. It’s in the meta description header!
The title, “Keyword Transformer by David Thomas,” is the title of the home page.
Now, if you’re creative, you will want to set up your description to attract clicks just as you would for a Google AdWords campaign, except that in this case you’ve got more room to play with; probably up to about 25 words or so. Also, you should bear in mind that the description you put in your meta tag may not be used by search engines, especially if your page appears as a result for a phrase that you did not target. Does it matter? No! After all, this is a listing that you haven’t paid for. What you are doing is just providing a guide to the search engines as to the possible description that they can use for your web page.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
Can you trust ClickBank Marketplace rankings?
May 10th
ClickBank Marketplace rankings. How trustworthy are they?
ClickBank Marketplace products are ranked by a productivity score that is a function of the money earned per sale, the percentage earned by the affiliate, the percentage of affiliate sales as opposed to natural sales, and the gravity, so it is a system that is heavily weighted in favour of affiliate sales.
Now, consider somebody who has a new product that is not in the ClickBank Marketplace. How does their product get into the marketplace? An affiliate sale has to be made before their product can get into the marketplace.
How many affiliate accounts can you have? As many as you like! Some people use this ability to have as many ClickBank affiliate accounts as you like to track advertising campaigns, by having one account per campaign, for example.
Now, let’s say you are a new product vendor with five ClickBank accounts. You can buy your own product from yourself four times through each of your other accounts, and you’ve got yourself into the marketplace without getting any affiliate to promote you, and probably at a fairly decent rank to boot! It’s not ethical, but there’s nothing stopping it from happening.
What about products targeted at Internet marketers? Most Internet marketers know all about ClickBank. If they buy a product, chances are good that they will buy that product through their own link. This has to be how many of the products attract such huge gravity figures; people are buying the product through their own affiliate links.
My advice is to keep this in mind whenever you look at ClickBank Marketplace rankings. They represent a system that can be easily subverted, so take them with a pinch of salt.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
Spam Karma 2
May 9th
I have just started getting plagued by a content spammer. Content spamming is a bad thing; it means that all comments have to be approved, and a lot of the comments that I have had recently have been of the type: “Great site! Go here for information on (insert random pharmaceutical product here).” They do not add any value at all to the site.
The trouble is that as a minimum, they take up time that would be better spent doing other things.
I asked some of my friends who run WordPress blogs what they use to deal with comment spam. One tool that came recommended was Spam Karma. I’ve just installed it on this blog, so I’ll see how well it works! Certainly it seemed very sophisticated; it was a drop-in-and-go solution; and it was free.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
How to get ebooks for free!
May 5th
Wouldn’t you like to know how to get not just ebooks, but software and other downloadable products, for free?
How many people are there that do that? They buy a product, download it, and then ask for a refund? Perhaps not many, and certainly I’ve not encountered any yet, but there are sure to be some people that fall into this category.
Visit this page, take a look at the offer, and tell me what you think of it! Add your comments to this article, please.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer