Paid Traffic Sources that will skyrocket your business

There are some nice new advertising sources in this report for you to discover and some of them are huge. Others are smaller yet legit.

I'm talking about Solo Ads, PPC, PPV, as well as some untraditional types of advertising like paying for blog posts.

I hope you'll find many new ad networks and places to buy ads from that you didn't previously know about.

It's important to note that you're not going to need all of these sources. You could spend millions of dollars with just one or a handful of these select sources.

Think of this report as like a mini guide to the available ad inventory out there that you may have not known about. Crack it open whenever you're looking to buy some traffic.

Before we get started with these ad sources, I also wanted to tell you that you can get a worldclass education in buying traffic for free.

One way is to join a CPA network such as Wolf Storm Media and take their free trainings. Another way is to learn all you can from the actual ad network sites that you'll discover in this report.

It's also vital to get some ads running and track everything using a program such as

Prosper 202.

You honestly don't need a $2,000 course to learn about internet advertising because the best way to learn is to get out there and do it.

While you can learn the basics from someone else, the real learning comes from your experience.

When you're tweaking ads, when you're tweaking your bids, when you're crunching your numbers and looking at your metrics and adjusting... That's when you're REALLY learning!

So take everything you learn from others like a grain of salt.

Take these advertising sources, go out there, and generate all the traffic your little heart desires.

JV Rocket and "Tier 1 Solo Ads"

With JV Rocket you can buy a solo ad that will go out to a double opt-in list of 226,000 subscribers for the price of $2,500.

Your ad goes out to customers who have purchased ClickBank products in the Make

Money niche such as Get Google Ads Free, Health Biz in a Box, Forced Money, and Top Secret Magic Code.

You'll also reach affiliates for ClickBank products such as Get Google Ads Free, Health Biz in a Box, Forced Money, Top Secret Magic Code, Cash Making Power Sites, Top Secret

Fat Loss Secret, and Top Secret Car Secret.

Many of the top Internet Marketing and Make Money niche gurus are using JV Rocket to build their lists and also to directly mail to their hot offers.

$2,500 is a nice chunk of money to risk, so before testing a JV Rocket you'll want to make sure you have tested sales material.

You'll also want to be sure that your offer would be a good match for the type of customers who would buy the type of products I just mentioned above.

This doesn't mean that your offers must be similar, but it does mean that the same demographic would order your product.

The downside of this solo ad source is that there are no guaranteed amount of visitors you'll get. The upside is that if you have an offer that's on fire and would work well with these type of customers then JV Rocket can be a goldmine.

Just remember, as with all of these ad sources in this report, you're responsible for your business and the risks you take with buying advertising.

Profiting from paid advertising is simple, but not easy.

Here's what I mean. It would be easy to blow through $10,000 on JV Rockets. The inventory is there waiting for you to order anytime you want.

However, it would be wise to test your sales funnel out buying solo ads on a small scale at $30, $100, or $300 a pop from "Tier 2 Solo Ad" vendors such as the ones on Safe- Swaps.com, SoloAdDirectory.com, or Directory of Ezines.

After you have a tested and proven funnel that works well with the solo ads you've purchased on a small scale, then you may want to consider going big time and ordering what I call "Tier 1 Solo Ads" such as JV Rocket.

JV Rocket isn't the only Tier 1 Solo Advertising available. Here are some more in various niches: Arcamax (General Consumer List), Newsmax, Self Growth, and Nextmark.

LeadImpact and Top CPV Networks

Technically TrafficVance is a better quality CPV network than LeadImpact in my opinion, but the barrier to entry with TrafficVance is $1,000.

With LeadImpact, on the other hand, you only need $100 to get started using their massive network.

I find it much easier to generate mass targeted traffic with LeadImpact than the other major CPV networks with a low barrier to entry such as Direct CPV and Media Traffic.

LeadImpact allows you to buy traffic on a Per View basis. You're essentially buying something similar to popups.

Paying "Per View" means a small window will open on their screen and it will lead to your webpage.

Your webpage must fit inside that window. (To test whether your webpage will fit inside the window, use something like this free tool.)

You can bid on keywords or URLs using LeadImpact. When bidding on a keyword, website content will match your keyword and trigger your pop up. When bidding on a URL, visiting that URL will trigger your popup.

Depending on your Geo Targeting and the Category/Sub-Category of your offer, the lowest bid you can start with will be as low as .015 to .017.

The downside of LeadImpact is that I don't personally like how they have the minimum bidding set up. For some Sub-Categories you might have a minimum bid of .015 and for others it may be .025.

One cent may not seem like a big difference but when you multiply that 1,000+ times per day, it starts to add up.

Small squeeze pages seem to do very well with LeadImpact.

They can be your own squeeze pages or a Pay-Per-Lead (PPL) offer in a CPA network.

I find there's not as much inventory in the Make Money and Internet Marketing niches, but there's a ton in large markets that are multiple times bigger.

For example, you can generate a serious amount of traffic on a daily basis to Pay-Per-Lead online gaming offers.

Same goes for Weight Loss, Health, and Financial niches.

To find PPL offers to promote, try a CPA offers search engine such as Offer Vault.

Plenty of Fish Ads

With Plenty of Fish ads, you can reach 20,000,000 users on a CPM basis.

In case you're not familiar with "CPM," it simply means "Cost per 1,000 impressions of your ad."

You'll also be bidding for ad inventory on a CPM basis.

The minimum buy is just $25, so you can cheaply give POF Ads a nice test run for as low as $25.

It takes 24 hours or less for your ads to be approved.

Image ad sizes include 110x80px, 300x250px, 160x600px and 120x600.

Besides the insanely low point of entry at $25 minimum, there's something else about POF

Ads that makes your traffic highly targeted.

In-depth demographics targeting is available. You can target prospects based on: Country,

State/Province, Zipcode, Age, Gender, Education, Profession, Has Children, Games and Puzzles, Body Type, Drinking Habits, Looking to Marry Soon, Ethnicity, Height, Income,

Login Count, Marital Status, Religion, Search Type, Smoking Habits, Session Depth, Hair Color, and Has Car (or not).

Your ads are so ultra targeted that they're not even shown to POF visitors who aren't logged in.

Your ad is displayed above the fold as well.

With POF Ads you can really go to town with specific dating offers.

For instance, imagine targeting Christians who are looking to date. You can put a Christian Singles offer in front of them.

Do you see how powerful POF Ads can be?

Because you have access to so many demographics, your ads don't even have to be about dating. They can be about something totally unrelated, but targeted to the demographic you choose.

There are many CPA offers out there related to dating if that's what you want to explore.

Or this is a perfect time for you to start your Dating or Relationships niche empire by generating leads from Plenty Of Fish to your own subscriber list.

ClickBank products such as The Magic of Making Up may also do well with POF Ads.

7Search, Ad Hitz, and LinkedIn Ads

7Search is one of my favorite of the "Tier 2 PPC" networks, search engines, and the like. Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Facebook are considered "Tier 1 PPC" in my book.

Everything else is Tier 2 PPC the way I see it.

The great thing about 7Search is you don't have to worry about Quality Score or other headaches.

You set up a landing page, you bid on keywords, and you tweak your campaigns until they're profitable.

If you're looking to generate Biz Opp leads, then you may want to check out Ad Hitz.

With Ad Hitz, you can do Site Specific Targeting (recommended) on some biz opp sites that get serious traffic, such as MyBrowserCash.com that gets 23,1411 unique visitors per day and ClickSense.com that gets 281,360 unique visitors per day.

Now, if you're looking for serious Internet Marketing niche leads, then Ad Hitz may or may not be for you.

These leads you generate will be the type that hang out on pay to click sites and probably paid survey sites.

This doesn't necessarily mean that these prospects are "low quality" or not serious about business, but it does mean that they're clueless about what you and I know about.

So I think it's important to not take advantage of these clueless prospects.

Instead, you should show them the light.

For serious Internet Marketing leads who are already more advanced, you'll want to buy an ad at the top of WarriorForum.com or run Warrior Special Offers.

There are over 450,000 members on Warrior Forum and growing.

Another option for generating serious Business leads in general is by using LinkedIn Ads.

You won't necessarily generate all internet marketing leads there, but there are 130,000,000 business-minded members on LinkedIn to advertise to. 40,000,000 are US based.

With LinkedIn Ads you don't have to pay on a PPC basis because they also offer inventory on a CPM basis (cost per 1,000 impressions). It's your choice.

PayPerPost, Blog Ads, and ReviewMe

You may want to consider blog advertising.

This is where your website or your product is promoted on real blogs.

PayPerPost is one of them and they connect you with real bloggers out there who are willing to do a write up about your product or site for a fee.

Besides generating the direct traffic from your links, you'll also be building links, except you

won't be building links on fly-by-night blog networks that get de-indexed from the search engines in the blink of an eye.

You have complete control over how much you'll spend on a post when you create your listing called an "Opportunity."

You also get to select the categories and the Geo Targeting.

Blog Ads is another option for advertising on blogs, but it's not contextual like PayPerPost.

Here you're buying actual ad space on a time basis.

What I mean is you're not buying on a PPC or CPM basis like some of the other sources we've talked about.

You're buying ads based on the amount of time they'll run on the blog.

It's just like buying ad space direct from a webmaster at a fixed rate, only you're doing it through the Blog Ads network.

The pricing is set up similar to Text-Link-Ads.

Price doesn't go up or down based on the amount of impressions or click throughs on your ad.

ReviewMe is another option with blog advertising and it can work well to create buzz for your new product or service.

You can browse the different blogs at ReviewMe.com and purchase a review of your product or service.

You'll also get the link back to your site, but just keep in mind that these bloggers will do an honest review for you and that review will be permanent.

You can also create a listing for what you're looking for if you're looking to be found by bloggers who are looking to review products or services similar to your own.

AbestWeb, CB, JV Zoo, W+, PDC, DigiResults

If you're advertising to get affiliates, then you'll want to run some ads on AbestWeb, the world's largest affiliate marketing forum.

Super affiliates galore hang out on this forum and have their eyes open for hot offers to promote all the time.

They can generate traffic all day long, but they don't always have offers that convert, so if your offer is appealing enough to them, then just one super affiliate you get from running

an ad can be worth much more than what you paid for the ad.

To read about the different advertising options at AbestWeb, check out this page.

They have all kinds of inventory from banner ads to e-mail blasts to their members.

Getting your digital product listed in the ClickBank Marketplace is also a great way to pick up affiliates who can drive traffic to your site all day and night on a commission basis.

With ClickBank, you're technically buying traffic, but it's no risk because you're only paying when someone makes a sale.

Other options have emerged as well including JV Zoo, WSO Pro, PayDotCom, and

DigiResults.

Honestly, I'm a fan of all those programs just listed.

Instead of being paid by ClickBank, you're paid directly upon each sale with PayPal.

However, the marketplaces aren't even close to as old or as big as ClickBank.

So there are a lot more affiliates waiting in the ClickBank marketplace to see your offer to promote than the others, but you don't get instant PayPal payments.

You can also pick up some affiliates by listing your product in the Warrior Forum Affiliate

Programs Database for a small fee.

There are more ways to get super affiliates to promote for you.

One is by busting your butt putting together a massive product launch and getting listed on sites like JV Notify Pro and Warrior JV.

Another way is to simply get the attention of super affiliates by running your offer on networks.

If you throw $10,000 at advertising your offer, then chances are super affiliates are going to see it, and they are always looking for one thing: offers that convert.

StumbleUpon Ads, PR Web, and Direct CPV

If you know how StumbleUpon works, it's where users click the "Stumble" button and they

are sent from webpage to webpage checking out pages that have been "Stumbled" by other users and are related to their favorite topics.

With StumbleUpon Paid Discovery, your webpage becomes part of that Stumbling process.

Users land on your landing page while Stumbling through websites and you pay per view.

My opinion is it's a bit pricey at this point, but I also think it's a great way for companies to spread brand awareness and it's also potentially good for viral marketing.

Using PR Web is another way to launch a viral marketing or brand awareness campaign.

To tell you the truth, it's also possible to generate a lot of direct traffic as well.

Not to mention you can get some serious offline traffic if your press release gets picked up by a newspaper.

PR Web allows you to distribute a press release to the far corners of the internet, depending on the package you choose.

The important thing to remember when writing the press release is making it newsworthy, so you could technically do a press release for virtually anything that's happening with your website, product, or business.

Whenever you launch a new website, for example, you can create a press release and submit it to PR Web. Same goes when you put out a new product.

Although Direct CPV was already briefly mentioned in the CPV section, I never pointed out that you can use their Run of Network (normally refered to as RON) traffic for brand awareness and getting viral marketing campaigns off the ground.

Run of Network traffic is untargeted and it runs to all available inventory on the network, so it's an insanely high amount of traffic.

You could blow through thousands of dollars very fast, so be careful with it.

Don't expect to get any good measurable results with Run of Network traffic on Direct CPV.

But it is possible to use to get thousands of views on a YouTube video in one day, for instance.

Just don't expect to use this type of traffic as you would other types.

More Advertising Networks and Ad Sources

• Bravenet Media
• MyAds
• Her Agency
• Indie Click
• Batanga
•  24/7 Media
•  BuySellAds
•  Adfish
•  Crisp Ads
•  ExoClick
•  Adtegrity
• Intermarkets
•  HIRO
•  Casale Media
•  Banner Space
•  Ad On Network
•  Advertising.com
•  Yahoo Media Services
•  AdBuyer.com
•  Kitara Media
•  Advertise.com
•  Flux Advertising
•  Burst Media
•  Kontera
•  Clicksor
•  Pepperjam
•  TrafficJunky
•  Opt-Media
•  Mirago
•  Miva
•  Ad Magnet
•  AdBlade
•  Tribal Fusion
•  Pulse360
•  Marchex
•  PAYPOPUP
•  Domain Gateway
•  AdMarketplace
•  AdEngage
•  Chitika
•  Traffic Taxi
•  Yes Mail
•  AdReady
•  Bidvertizer
•  Zedo
•  WeatherBug
•  Epic Advertising
•  PCH Games
•  Popup Traffic
•  Bardzo Media
•  ADXDirect
•  Contextweb
•  AdBrite

Video Effects Can Improve Sales

The days of boring websites are gone forever.  In the past, the technical limitations of HTML coding and the slowness of most Internet connections made it impractical to provide web users with any serious audio-visual experience.  A page might feature an interesting table-based layout, an animated gif or two, a link to a RealAudio file for background streaming, or a few stray flashes of Java.  For the most part, audio-visual techniques were used as novelties, signs to the browsing public that the site coder was technically savvy and that the site was cutting-edge.

Audio-visual techniques still indicate that your site is cutting-edge and that your coders know what they’re doing.  But it’s no longer possible even to argue that audio-visual content is a novelty.  With modern connection speeds, coding options, software packages and plug-ins, it’s now possible to record sophisticated video and audio presentations, to show them to your site’s audience without breaking up their browsing experience, and to do all of this without incurring prohibitive bandwidth or hosting space costs.  The technology has become sophisticated enough, in other words, to let you use audio-visual techniques for their traditional purpose.  You can let your customers hear your product, see your product, and form emotional connections to your product.  The result?  You’ll not only impress your customers, but you’ll sell more products.

Planning is the Key to Success

As nice (and as necessary) as good audio-visual techniques are for a modern web page, they still cost money to produce and to implement.  So you’ll want to save yourself as much money and time as possible by planning out your site well in advance of doing any filming, recording, or page coding.  With careful planning, you can not only avoid unnecessary costs and reduce the overall time from design to implementation, but you’ll have a much stronger page and a much higher conversion rate as a result.

Design Before You Budget

Yes, audio-visual solutions cost money.  But don’t let that cost scare you away from designing the page of your dreams—at least not at first.  When you’re doing any kind of creative project—and you’d better believe that designing a web page is a creative project—there’s nothing worse than dealing with an internal censor over your shoulder, telling you what to spend and what’s going to cost a lot of money.  If you start restricting your ideas to what you can afford before you even really start generating your sales concepts, you’re going to lose some of your most promising and creative ideas before you get started.
Suppose you’ve developed a new wireless protocol that allows easier interconnection between international networks, and you decide to promote that protocol with a grand concept Flash presentation showing people all over the world watching the same viral video.  No, whispers your internal censor: think of the cost of filming people all over the world, all the different locations you’d need to film, the nightmare of editing everything down to something that’s easy to stream without boring customers or costing thousands in bandwidth alone.  No, don’t even think about that concept any more.
But it’s always easy to scale down an existing concept without losing the essence of the concept.  Maybe you don’t need to film people all over the world–maybe you could just show your product’s logo, with the names of different countries flashing behind it in time with a simple public domain song.  It’s the same basic concept, really, but much more economical.
If you hadn’t had the more expensive idea first, you wouldn’t have ever gotten to the more streamlined, economical, and interesting concept that you actually can afford.  Instead, you might have gone with a talking-head speech or simply a picture of the product logo–both very cheap, but not nearly as exciting or distinctive.
So relax and don’t be afraid to spend money–on paper, at least.  Remember: you can always find a way to communicate a concept for less money, whereas no amount of spending can make a bad concept interesting.

What Is A Good Direct Sales Concept?

To really use audio-visual solutions to their best advantage in a direct sales website, you need to play to the strengths of audio-visual solutions.
Those strengths are:
Showing, not telling
Providing an emotional experience to influence sales
Not overstaying anyone’s welcome
What does this mean in practice?  Imagine two direct sales concepts using audio-visual techniques.  They’re both selling the same product: a lawnmower attachment, we’ll say.  In one concept, the company’s owner sits at a desk and talks to you about the advantages of the attachment in terms of durability, effectiveness, and price.  In another concept, we see a young boy mowing the lawn.  In a series of quick cuts, we see a young man, then an older man, then a senior citizen, then a venerable grandfather–smiling as he watches a young grandchild mow the same lawn, in each case using the product.
It’s just obvious that the second concept is better, but why?
First: it shows rather than tells.  The first concept tries to communicate the idea of durability, effectiveness, and price by giving you sales statistics and slogans.  Fine–but the rest of your direct sales site should do the same, and to give this kind of information in your audio-visual solution isn’t really playing to the strengths of the medium.  The second concept shows you the same ideas: the product is obviously durable if the same man can use it for his entire life, it’s obviously effective if he never switches products, and it’s obvious (although admittedly less so) that it’s a good deal since it doesn’t seem to require a lot of maintenance or replacement.
Second: it provides an emotional experience.  In the first concept, the owner of the company is trying to convince you to buy a product.  In the second concept, we have images of contentment and family, as well as a meditative sense of reflection about the cycles of life.  It’s much easier to emotionally relate to the second concept: we’ve all been young, we all will be old, and we can all see ourselves in the video.  We’ve also provided the product with some crucial branding indicators without having to waste any time doing so through words or slogans.

Third: it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome.  The first concept would need to be at least two minutes long in order to really touch on all of the advantages of the product.  The second concept, with some careful editing, could make its point in roughly twenty seconds.  When your customer goes to your page, they’re probably going to look at your audio-visual components before they look at anything else.  (We’ll talk about why this is true later.)  If you make them watch a two minute video, they’re going to get bored and leave your page more often than not.  If you make them watch a twenty second video–and moreover, one that’s engaging and emotionally charged–they’re not only going to stay on your page and buy your product, but they’ll be happy to do so.
Video is a quick medium: it makes its point and then moves on.  Don’t bore your viewer and lose your sale in the process.  Show them what your product does, get at their emotions, and then don’t waste any of their time: take them immediately to your sales letter and your ordering page.

What About Other Types of Sales?

Not every Internet marketer is doing direct sales. Some are selling memberships to websites, some are selling non-tangible products like software and some are marketing completely different needs like affiliate websites etc. Just because showing is more effective than JUST telling doesn’t mean they can’t work well together. The product, service or site you may be advertising won’t always make sense with a visual-only sales letter. You can still use visual effects to greatly spice up your text-based sales letters.
Instead of just black text on a white background you can incorporate a logo into your background or make the text look like a certain material (wooden text while advertising furniture is a good example). You can also have your text fly in or fade out, there are a number of great effects that can be used.
We’ll discuss programs in more detail later in the book but I’ll tell you right now, one of the easiest ways to make videos that are above average is to use Camtasia (very affordable) and PowerPoint (part of Microsoft Office). PowerPoint allows you to create some basic effects that are less boring than just black and white text and Camtasia lets you turn it into a movie.

The Price of Audio-Visual Solutions

Once you have your big concept, it’s time to ask yourself this: what are the costs of audio-visual solutions for your sales website?  If you play it smart you can make good visual and audio effects for dirt cheap. The simpler you do it the better.
Video Recording Equipment
How much you’ll need to spend on video recording equipment depends on what you need to record. Do you really need recording? Make sure that it’s something that will benefit you before you run out and buy a camera.  If your page concept requires nothing more demanding than a few video testimonials from satisfied customers or a sales pitch from a company insider, you can probably get away with a high-end USB webcam and some careful attention paid to lighting and sound.  If you want to film some footage of your product being tested or used in the field, you’ll want to invest some more money in a more elaborate and powerful camera, something that gives you more interesting lighting options, or that allows you to save video information in a variety of formats. If you do decide that you need a camera (hint: unless you want to film PEOPLE talking specifically about your product, you don’t need one!) the general rule of thumb is to just go with a name brand.

Audio Recording Equipment

Any good camera probably comes with a microphone.  Whether that microphone is something you want to use or not is another question.  (Also if you didn’t buy a camera then you don’t even have that.) Most on-board camera microphones don’t provide you with ideal sound recording conditions and they make it more difficult for you to polish your final product.  The camera microphone is usually too close to the moving parts of the camera to get a clear, uninterrupted signal, which leads to distracting audio hum and an overall aura of amateurism.  So going for the cheap solution in terms of audio recording isn’t a good idea.
On the other hand, there’s no real need to go for the most expensive solution in terms of audio recording.  There are plenty of microphones out there designed for professional film work and for professional audio recording.  These microphones are designed to eliminate all background noise, to capture audio signals in full fidelity, and to generally provide the viewer with a beautiful and captivating audio experience.  But here’s the difference: movies and musical recordings are themselves the products they’re trying to sell.
You’re not making a music CD for people to specifically enjoy the sound of. The only audio  you’ll have will be for slight special effect and primarily to be informational. Even with the advent of commonplace high-speed Internet, most people wouldn’t think twice about sub-par audio quality from an online video; it’s far from uncommon.

So the key is to get audio recording equipment that provides you with enough fidelity so that you can hear all of your dialogue or music clearly, but that doesn’t break your bank by giving you lots of useless flourishes and “icing.”  A good directional microphone can usually do the trick and won’t cost you more than about twenty to forty dollars, depending on how complicated it is to connect your microphone to your computer, camera, or other recording device.  With some careful attention paid to good sound recording practices (as we’ll cover in a later chapter), you shouldn’t need more than this unless your product really focuses on audio as a key component, or unless you’re doing something very elaborate with your sales presentation (something which you can probably scale down without any problem.)

Getting Stock Material Online

If you’re like me you want to save money wherever you can and avoid being in front of a camera! Chances are you won’t be shooting excellent footage anyway unless you take a few cinematography classes. A good alternative is to get stock footage online. There are tons and tons of collections of footage that range from pre-made visual effects like dazzling lights and explosions to simple stock footage of people walking or clouds passing by. www.footagefirm.com is a particularly good and relatively inexpensive resource for stock footage.

Just as with video, there are a ton of online resources where you can get stock audio online. This could include background music or even sound effects. Obviously you won’t be able to get scripted dialogue as stock (though you’re free to hire a voiceover artist, you can usually find them on www.odesk.com, www.elancer.com or just by Googling it) but a lot of the background sounds that you might want in your videos can be found. A good website for stock music and sounds is http://www.freesoundtrackmusic.com which actually offers most of its music for free. Pull up Google or your favorite search engine and look for “Stock Sounds” and you’ll be surprised how many resources come up.

Free vs. Royalty Free: Know The Difference!

A lot of people don’t know the difference between Royalty Free and Actually Free. First, let’s explain what a Royalty is. A royalty is basically a payment that you give to the copyright holder of a work for using that work; it’s a constant payment that lasts as long as you use the work or as long as the work is making money. Musical artists get paid royalties on their songs most of the time; they might get 20% of the profit that each sold CD makes as a royalty.
So Royalty Free ONLY means that you can use the material without having to pay a constant fee to the original artist. It does NOT mean that the material does not cost you any money. Usually royalty free material is actually quite expensive because of the fact you’re being able to use it without paying royalties. That being said, it’s a better solution than royalties because you can purchase it once and you don’t have to worry about the copyrights ever again (check the terms to be certain).
Internet marketing is a fast-paced business and you don’t have time to worry about royalties or licenses. Avoid getting any audio or video that requires a license or royalties to be paid.
Video Editing Software

All the well-filmed video footage in the world does you no good without a powerful video editing software solution.  The specific product you use is going to depend on your needs, of course, and on your budget.  But it’s a good idea to know something about how all of the different products on the market work, what value you’ll get for your price, what kind of options you’ll have for compressing and distributing your video–and what certain video editing products won’t do for you.
Chances are you are going to want an extremely simple video editor. You can certainly pay $1000 for Adobe Premiere if you like but quite frankly by the time you figured out how to use it to its full potential it would be obsolete. We’re all about making money and to make money you have to make good investments. Spending the most on the best software will not turn you into a professional editor or magically make your footage look good. Pick an EASY program to use and you will be able to make footage that looks better than what you would have created with software you couldn’t figure out how to use. (Honestly most of the time you can achieve a professional look with any software, you just have to go about it different ways for different programs.)

Some General Features to Watch For

If you’re recording on camera then you want video editing software that makes it easy for you to capture video from your camera and painlessly import it into a form that you can work with.  Bad video editing software will make you download extra codecs, configure hardware in your operating system, or use extra third-party utilities to let your camera interface with your editing software.  Good video editing software should be as easy as plugging in your camera or your mini-DV tape, waiting for the footage to download automatically, and then it’s right there for you in the editing room to do with what you will.

You want video editing software that makes it easy for you to cut out footage and splice in footage wherever you need.  A drag-and-drop interface is the perfect tool for this.  Drag-and-drop video editing is intuitive, gives you precise control over exactly when cuts should happen, lets you visualize the finished product, and sidesteps the need for a lot of tedious timecoding, storyboarding, and other processes that give professional editors more control at the cost of time and money.  There’s no excuse to use an editing package that doesn’t feature drag-and-drop editing, considering how easy and time-effective it is.  If you want to make Citizen Kane, make Citizen Kane.  If you want to sell products effectively and quickly, use a drag-and-drop solution.

You want video editing software that makes it easy for you to add whatever audio effects, music tracks, or other bells and whistles (sometimes literally) that you need to achieve your design concept.  This should also be a drag-and-drop situation.  Unfortunately it can be difficult to find an editing package that gives you as much control over your audio tracks as it does over your video tracks.  One good solution in a pinch is to try out Audacity, a free, open source drag-and-drop audio editor for a variety of operating systems.  (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ )  Audacity will let you take your raw audio track, tweak it however you might want, then re-import it as an mp3 or other appropriately-formatted file into your video editing package.  If you can find a package that gives you good integrated audio editing as well as video editing, by all means use it, but if you can’t find a package that works for you, try this free solution.

You want video editing software that makes it easy to preserve your raw footage while still experimenting with different cuts, arrangements, and music mixes.  Traditional film editing is destructive, requiring an editor to physically cut the film and splice it into different arrangements.
There’s just no reason to accept this restriction when you’re dealing with digital video, which after all is just data and which can be easily manipulated and rearranged.  Most commercial video editing software is non-destructive, so this isn’t a huge thing to worry about.  But if you see any video editing software that emphasizes memory conservation, speed, or similar features, you should double-check to make sure that the software is non-destructive.

Non-destructive solutions preserve your raw footage by making a backup copy and allowing you to edit and manipulate that copy without touching the original footage.  This is safer, but means that you have two gigantic movie files in your computer’s memory.  Accept the tradeoff in terms of speed and memory and pick an editing solution that preserves your original data: you don’t want to have to reshoot anything just because you tried to get a little bit creative with your editing.

You want video editing software that makes it easy to tweak and polish your footage to ensure that it looks as good as possible.  Color correction, precise timing, control over the speed that footage plays, and the ability to hand-edit individual frames to fix minor problems are all nice features to have, are generally easy to use, and translate into a much tighter and better product in the end.  The ability to color-correct shouldn’t be the major determining factor in which video editing package you choose, but if you can get it without spending a significantly higher amount of money, get it.

You want video editing software that makes it easy for you to export your edited, finished footage to a variety of file formats.  At a bare minimum, you want to be able to export your footage to Flash files, RealPlayer-capable files, Windows Media Player files, and QuickTime .mov files.  These are by far the most common formats for viewing video footage on the web, and the more formats you can provide, the wider your potential viewer base will be.  In practice, you may not need to use all of these formats for every page.  But say you’re designing a site that leans heavily on Flash video effects and DHTML coding in order to achieve your concepts.

You can create a great page with lots of interesting, unique presentation effects–but your potential customers who don’t use Flash can’t appreciate any of it!  You might want to provide some alternate format downloads, then, just so that everyone’s on the same page.  It might not be as seamlessly integrated into your page as your primary solution, but at least it doesn’t exclude potential customers.  Your video editing software should give you the chance to do this if you need to.

You want video editing software that makes it easy for you to achieve chroma-key effects.  You may not need to use these now, but you’ll most likely want to experiment with them in the future.  Chroma-key effects are also crucial to creating transparent video files, which are one of the newest and most arresting audio-visual solutions currently on the web and something that you may want to look into integrating with your next direct sales site.

What’s the common denominator here?  You want video editing software that makes it easy–to do everything.  Programs like Final Cut Pro provide you with a high level of control over every frame of the finished product, but they can be extremely time-consuming to learn and use, and if you’re on a tight development cycle you might have to resort to paying a freelance editor to get your video editing done.  Save some money by doing it yourself–find an editing solution that you can pick up quickly, use effectively, and that won’t burst your budget.

Specific Video Editing Packages

First of all, let this page become your bible: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_editing_software   This provides you with a mostly exhaustive list of video editing packages out there, compares each package in terms of price, license options, features, date of last update, and supported file formats, and places you no more than a few clicks away from actual download/purchase pages.  Assuming that Wikipedia editors do their job in a timely fashion (usually the case when dealing with pages that deal with software packages), you can expect accurate, up-to-the-minute data that takes into account any new packages that come out.  As far as one-stop solutions for quick information about video editing software, it’s hard to do better than this.

Windows Movie Maker

If you’re running a modern Windows computer, you’re on a serious budget, and you don’t need much control over your final product, you can always lean on Windows Movie Maker.  WMM is bundled with Windows Vista and some versions of XP, interfaces easily with most cameras, is non-destructive, and provides final output to a variety of file formats.  For many short video projects–a reel of testimonials, a series of shots of a product, or a quick demonstration of product features–it can be a good stopgap solution.

But for more elaborate projects, WMM falls seriously short.  The “storyboard” style editor is a drag-and-drop solution, yes, but it doesn’t allow you to manipulate the actual video “track” directly.  The best you can do is assemble “scenes” in a specific order, add some audio information, export it and call it a wrap.  There’s no possibility for color-correction, for tight cropping at the beginning and end of individual scenes, or advanced effects like chroma-keying or transparency.  If you’ve got a simple project, try this.  If you want to really stand out, though, try something else.
(For a hostile but probably honest review of this program by a CNET editor, go here: http://www.download.com/Windows-Movie-Maker-Windows-XP-/3000-13631_4-10165075.html.)

Sony Vegas
Sony Vegas (currently at version 8) is the gold standard by which video editing solutions are measured.  It fits most of the criteria on the list which started this chapter: it’s intuitive, it’s drag-and-drop, it features a high-end audio mixer, and it gives no end of options for optimizing video quality.  You’ve even got a comprehensive package of effects, transitions, and software for creating titles, credits, or flyover graphics.  All of this saves you both money and time by letting you do all the work you need to do to achieve your design concept within a single software package (rather than editing your video in one suite, then transferring it to another suite in order to add in effects or animations.)  Add to all of this a good variety of export formats and some extra compatibility features with Sony camcorder products and you’ve got yourself a reliable, powerful, and ultimately simple solution.
What’s the drawback?  It’s a professional piece of software with a professional price of around $500-600, depending on where you go.  If you plan on creating plenty of audio-visual content for your current direct sales project and for direct sales projects in the future, that initial investment will probably pay for itself in a reasonably short time.  But if you don’t have grand ambitions and you don’t plan to do much video or audio editing in the future, you can probably use something else.
(For a glowing review of Vegas Pro 8 and the probably cheaper Vegas Pro 7, take a look at http://www.geek.com/review-sony-vegas-pro-8/.  Some of the information here won’t be useful to you–it’s not likely that you need good DVD authoring tools, for example–but this is a very in-depth third-party account of how it feels to use this program with some good screen shots and other information.)

Adobe Premiere Elements
You may know Adobe Premiere as one of the high-end professional video editors. With a $900 price tag I should definitely hope it’s high end! Luckily you can get all the core features that would ever be relevant to you in the form of Adobe Premiere Elements! Currently, Adobe Premiere Elements 9.0 is only $80 and it’s probably one of the more powerful video editors on this list.
Video Editing
Finding a good video editing software package is only half of the battle.  No matter how easy it is to transfer footage from your camera to your editing program, no matter how easy it is to get the chroma-key effects you want, and no matter how intuitive your drag-and-drop interface is, you’re just not going to end up with a good audio-visual project without a grasp on how to professionally edit video.  This sounds a lot more frightening than it is.  Editing isn’t actually hard, and once you learn the basics it can be one of the most rewarding parts of building an audio-visually enhanced direct sales site.  But you’ve got to learn the basics first.

Fundamentals of Good Editing

These rules for editing apply across all video projects, whether it’s a three-film epic fantasy or a ten-second product demonstration on a website.  There are some special conditions for the latter type of project, which probably resembles most closely what you want to do with your direct sales site.  But it’s still important to know the general rules first.
An editor, believe it or not, is the most important person in the production and assembly of any footage.  A writer, director, or cameraman can decide what needs to be shot, decide how to shoot it, and make the actual raw footage look good, respectively.  But an editor determines how you’ll experience that footage.  Should you see the product for two seconds, or ten?  How tightly does the flow of shots need to be tied to the music you’ve chosen?  The editor looks at this footage, determines how one shot flows into the next, and controls exactly what the viewer sees and when he or she sees it.

Anyone with marketing experience knows that small changes have huge subliminal effects.  It only takes one shot running long, one strange transition between shots, or one botched sound effect synchronization to knock your viewer out of experiencing your tight, professional project.
Some Basic Rules for Editing

Don’t leave gaps of silence at the beginning or end of any individual scene.  These gaps are invariably going to be in your raw footage, just because it takes a moment for the camera operator to start recording, to let the performers know that the recording is happening, and for the performers to start performing.  Snip those little silences off, every time, or you’ll break up the experience and seriously bore your customer.

In fact, don’t use silence at all unless there’s a very good reason for it.  An example of a very good reason: you’re promoting a soundproofing product and you want to demonstrate how it completely cancels all sound.  If your reason for using silence is any less critical than that, don’t leave any silent moments.  You could be using that time and bandwidth to talk about your product instead.
Don’t overuse wipes, fades, or other fancy screen transitions to get from one shot or scene to another.  If you’ve sat through a lot of amateur PowerPoint presentations in the past, you understand exactly why this rule is here.  Transitions are extremely obtrusive, break your viewer’s experience, and above all take the focus away from your product and put it onto your fancy transition.

Do, on the other hand, use unobtrusive transitions.  If you’re switching from a clip of a spokesman talking about product features to a clip of the product itself, have the spokesman end by mentioning the product, or just have him point off screen toward where the product presumably is.  Using no transitions at all makes your presentation look too choppy and pieced-together.  If you can’t think of anything else, at least announce the next scene in the previous scene, as unobtrusively as possible.
Don’t try to cram too much material into too short a time.  If you think of your project as a TV commercial where everything you say needs to bring up a new idea or product feature, you’ll end up coming on too strongly and you won’t give your viewer any time to think about your product or build any emotional interest in it.  For every line of hard factual information, give at least one or two lines of commentary, emphasis, or illustration.  If you space out your ideas a little bit (without leaving silences, of course), they’ll not only register more deeply in your viewer’s mind, but they’ll seem more convincing and his interest will be much more piqued.

Be careful about how you use sound effects and audio.  If you’re using sound effects to emphasize a point (for example, having a chime sound play when your presenter points to the product), you need to make sure that the effect is very precisely timed to play exactly when it feels natural to play it.  In our example, if the chime plays even a second before your presenter’s finger is pointing, it’ll seem very jarring.  Audio tracks playing in the background are a little bit more forgiving, but you should still try to match the pace of your music to the pace of your scene–don’t play a slow ballad over footage of a car speeding through a series of breakneck turns, for example.  Don’t overuse audio and sound effects either, unless your design concept is wordless.  If someone is speaking about your product (as will be the case in probably 95% of presentation concepts), let the focus remain on what they’re saying, not on your cool background music.

As a rule, don’t let your presentation run on for more than a minute.  If your product has a lot of features that need very precise explanation, this rule can be relaxed.  But for the majority of products, letting your video go on for more than a minute–or even half a minute–won’t add much information to help your viewer make a decision, needlessly distracts him or her from looking at your actual sales letter and ordering page, and just leaves a bad impression all around.  Even if you’ve got a ton of footage, don’t be compelled to use all of it: use only what makes the strongest impression, and try to fit everything into the space of a minute.  If you can’t fit a shot or a scene into that space of time, consider cutting the shot or frame.

Don’t move directly from the editing room to posting your video on your site.  Once you think you have a good final cut, leave the editing room and give yourself at least a day.  After a long time spent editing video and paying attention to every tiny cut, you lose some of your critical ability and you lose your sense of “seeing things for the first time.”  If you take a day between making your final cut and checking out your completed video, you’ll notice technical problems or slow patches more easily than you could before.  It’s also a good idea to let friends or family members look at your work and give you feedback on it–if they’re bored or confused by your editing choices at any point, it’s certain that your customers will be too.

Bottom line: don’t waste your viewer’s time, and don’t confuse him.  Make your points without leaving any silences, make sure there’s a clear progression of thought from one scene to the next, and make sure you don’t overwhelm your viewer with information.
More Editing Tips from The Web

Editing is a subject far too complex to cover here in as much detail as the subject deserves.  For some specific, free information on how to achieve certain effects in certain software packages, try this site: http://videoediting.digitalmedianet.com.  The articles are professionally done, they cover a wide variety of editing software solutions and a wide variety of situations, and there are plenty of video tutorials to give you a really good grasp on exactly what you’ll need to do in order to achieve the effects you want to achieve.  It’s not film school, but in a quick development cycle and on a tight budget, it’s hard to do better than comprehensive and free. Another good resource is www.creativecow.net. There is a TON of useful information on that website but be warned, it’s one of the less organized websites out there. Check it out when you feel you’re at an “intermediate” level.

Advanced Effects And When To Use Them

Advanced editing effects—menus, bullet points, scene titles, and elaborate backgrounds—are an excellent way to spice up your presentation, to make it give off an air of professionalism, and to let it stand out from the rest of the direct sales sites out there.  Advanced effects are also cheap to produce (depending on the editing software you’re using, of course) and don’t take much of your time either.  They also don’t take up much of your viewer’s time, since an effect, once it’s placed into a sequence of footage, can just stay on the screen, letting your viewer look at it at his or her own pace.  It’s a nice way to get the best of both worlds: the time-independent advantages of text, plus the drama and impact of video.

Because of all of their advantages, there’s a tendency on the part of first-time editors to use too many effects in a single presentation.  Avoid this temptation, for the reasons we addressed earlier in the chapter.  Too many effects start to get confusing for your viewer and make your presentation seem either crass or incomprehensible.
When should you use advanced effects?  One rule: Use them where they’re needed, not “just because.”
What does this mean in practice?  Say your product is a new piece of graphics software with an innovative GUI (Graphic User Interface).  Your presentation shows a screen shot of the GUI in use.  It’s easy to make overlay menus and effects, so you fill up the entire screen with them, labeling every interesting new button and feature all at once.  Then you let this complicated overlay play in the background while your presenter is talking about all of the great features in this new program.
The problem here has to do with the advantages of advanced effects that we just talked about.  Advanced effects, especially overlay graphics, give your viewer something information-dense to look at and to read while your presenter is talking.  That’s all well and good.  But if your viewer is spending too much time reading and deciphering your overlay graphics–figuring out exactly what each label on each button in our GUI says, in the example—then that viewer isn’t paying attention to what your audio track is saying.  You spent a lot of time on that audio track; it’s key to your design concept, and you want them to pay attention to it.  So don’t give your viewer other things to pay attention to!

Here’s a good way to use overlay graphics.  Take the same GUI example.  Your presenter is talking about the advanced features it gives you.  As he talks about each feature, add the overlay graphic for that feature and that feature alone to the footage.  The viewer’s attention will go to the feature; he’ll read the information in the graphic, and his mind will be back on what the presenter is saying before you know it.  It’s elegant and it actually heightens what the presenter is saying, visually emphasizing his points.  And once the information is on the screen anyway, you can leave it there for the rest of the speech or take it off, depending on what your concept is.
Overlay special effects can be fun, but should also be used carefully.  Say your presenter is talking about a new hypnotherapy CD that you’re trying to sell.  The presenter throws up his hands when talking about the “power of hypnosis”, and you use your editing software to add a quick animated lightning flash.  It’s definitely funny, cheesy (in an endearing way), and dramatic, but it can also get distracting if used too much.  If you plan to do this kind of thing, try to avoid doing it more than once or twice per video.

Chroma-key effects are a different story, since in order to include them you have to be planning to film chroma-key footage from the concept stage onward.  In other words, it doesn’t make sense to say “use chroma-key effects sparingly” if all of your footage is filmed against a green screen.  What you can do, however, is make sure that your chroma-key effects look as seamless as possible.  When possible, try to use existing photographic backgrounds, large, crisp images of your product, or anything that doesn’t look blurry, stretched or visually distracting.  And above all, make sure that you can make out your presenter or your product against a chroma-key background.  There’s little worse than having your presenter’s red shirt disappear against a sunset background, or similar color mishaps.

The Creation Process

How you create your advanced effects is going to depend on how complicated your software package is and how much time you have to learn how to use it to its fullest potential.  If you’ve spent money on an elaborate package, you probably have some nice options for adding overlays and titles, as well as some options for chroma-key effects.  If you’re using a freeware editing package, you may need to download some additional programs in order to get the effects you want.  Fortunately, some of the best advanced effects editing programs are freeware–so in some cases, two wrongs do make a right.
Consider Using ZS4

ZS4 is a newer, freeware video editing package designed specifically for letting you add interesting effects to your footage.  It can be downloaded at http://www.zs4.net/.  The site features plenty of video tutorials on how to use the software to get certain effects, all of them thoughtfully arranged in ascending order of difficulty–you can either go straight through from the easiest projects to the hardest in order to learn everything about the software, or you can pick and choose from tutorials for specific effects that you want to include in your project.  It’s a very nice package, will let you do plenty of effects from chroma-keying to audio synchronizing and overlay effects, and it’s very difficult to beat the price.

Transparent Video Effects

A good tutorial on how to achieve good transparent video effects can be found here: http://www.totalwebvideo.com/hacktrap/effect/index.html  There’s an excellent video tutorial that takes you step by step through the process of achieving transparent effects, from filming to software to implementation on the page.  The tutorial focuses on some specific software packages that you may not have, but the same basic principles for getting the effect should apply in whatever software you use.
Using transparent video effects is another story.  Transparent effects are usually used to create “pop-in” advertisements that hover over the text of a page, requiring you to finish viewing the advertisement before you can go on reading your content.  There’s no reason you’d want to use this on your own page: why do you want to prevent your viewers from reading your text content, which is, after all, your sales letter?  In addition, pop-in ads have a very bad reputation online, irritate users, and are more often than not automatically blocked by modern browsers.  So unless you have a very good, conceptual reason for using transparent pop-in video effects, it’s best to leave well enough alone.  Apply the same principles to chroma-keying or place your transparent video someplace unobtrusive on your page and let yourself have the technically impressive solution without irritating your customers.

Final Advice & Tips

So we’ve talked about planning, budgeting, finding materials, buying programs and using effects. What’s left? The rest is up to you. How you use special effects in your videos is entirely dependent on your skill level and the product, service or website you’re advertising for.
Your Investment Should Be LESS Than Your Profit
You don’t necessarily have to go all out and have a TV-quality commercial just for some Internet marketing material. The general rule you want to follow is this: don’t put more time into it than it’s worth. The reason that TV Studios can afford to make $1,000,000 commercials is because they’ll make $2,000,000 in profits. The effort you put into your commercial is relative to the profits it might gain you—and maybe put in just 10% more for the sake of professionalism.
Time is money, and the time you put into creating and editing your videos is a serious investment. You should never spend more than 1 hour of editing for every minute of footage you have, and that’s stretching it quite a bit. Ideally a 1-minute video would only take about 20 minutes to spice up, including the time it takes to save the file to its final form (rendering).

Keep Video length In Mind

The other thing you always need to remember is the LENGTH of your video. How long is your video going to be? If you have a 3-minute video then doing some really awesome effects will be effective and won’t be completely backbreaking (though 3 minutes is quite a bit when you realize how long advanced effects can take). But if your video is 10 minutes or 20 minutes (not uncommon with a video sales letter) then you need to consider a simpler approach with your special effects spread out throughout the video to retain reader attention.
For example, you have a 10-minute sales letter. Make the majority of the sales letter black or red text on a white background (possibly with your company logo somewhere) and then only use special effects for the headlines. Every time there’s a new, important headline you could have text fly in and lights flashing. It’s a neat effect that keeps the viewer interested but it’s only used at key points in the presentation so you don’t have to sit and edit the video for hours.

Rendering & File Types

You might remember just a few paragraphs ago I mentioned rendering. Rendering is the act of outputting the file to its final format that you’re going to embed into a web page or let people download. When you use video editing software you will usually be saving in a special file format for that particular software that has all of your changes and edits saved so that you can stop and continue at a later date. When you’re ready to actually make your movie you will be rendering the file to its destination format. Depending on the program this could be called exporting, publishing, rendering or sometimes it’s simply a part of the “Save As” command wherein you can select the file type you want.

The most common types of files for videos are QuickTime Movie Files (.MOV), Windows Video Files (.AVI), Flash Movie Files (.FLV) MPEG Video (.MPG) and MPEG-4 (.MP4). Which you use depends entirely on what exactly you’re planning to do with the file. QuickTime Movie Files with the “.mov” extension can easily be embedded into a web page but they do require that the viewer have Apple QuickTime installed. Many people do these days but, nonetheless, you could be alienating some customers who don’t. Embedding Flash Video with the “.flv” file extension is a lot more common since most people with a modern Internet browser have Adobe Flash installed; it’s required for many popular websites like Youtube.com. Windows Video, Mpeg Video and Mpeg-4 Video are best suited for letting your users download. AVI Files have a wide variety of settings but are usually used for high-quality video while mpg and mp4 files are more compressed and use less space.
There are a lot more specific factors to consider when talking about file types but it definitely goes beyond the scope of this book so make sure to do some research first.

Good Luck!

Hopefully you know have the skills required to start editing your videos and incorporating more advanced effects that gives you videos an edge over some of those other, simpler videos. Effects can be a great way to spice up your videos and keep your viewers interested. The longer your viewer stays for the video the more likely they are to buy, sign up or interact with whatever your advertising for! Go out there, have some fun and start making excellent advertising videos!

On-Page SEO with YouTube

Of course, when you get your YouTube channel started, you will want to try and create an optimal experience for your viewers.  The first thing that you will want to do, before you upload your first video, you want to check and make sure that you file name makes sense.  In other words, when you upload a video from your phone or something like that, the file name will be something like ‘mov7764’ or some other random number like that.  So, you will want to rename so that it has a file name that makes sense for the video.  It should also contain at least on keyword that people would search for.

It is not crucial that you rename your video, but it gives you the right mindset when it comes to uploading these videos.  Plus, it also makes these videos easier to locate on your hard drive later on.  Once you have given your video a name that makes sense, go ahead and upload it.  While your video is uploading, you will want to look at a couple of different things.

First, take a look at your title.  This is key because your title is the first thing that YouTube and your viewers are going to see.  This is what is going to show up in the search results.  This is also going to become the title for your video’s page.  So, it will show up in bold at the top of the page, right above your video.  You will want to put keywords in your title, but you also want it to make sense and you want it to describe the video.

It is recommended that you use your title as your video name, or at least a shorter version of it.  When you upload the video, your file name will automatically be inserted as the video’s title.  You can, of course, edit this if you need to.  Then, after you create your title, you will need to add a description.

Keep in mind that the description is the only other text on your video’s page that you have any control over.  Everything else, YouTube takes control of.  So, what you will want to do is place keywords within your description.  The reason why it is important that you do this is because if these keywords match what a viewer is searching for, they will show up in bold within the user’s search results.  So, for example, you could say something like ‘How to create good quality video’ in your description, and if someone searched for ‘good quality video’, then the keywords in your description will show up in bold in their search.

You will want to put 300-500 words in this description.  This doesn’t need to be a transcription of your video; it just needs to be a short description of your video.  Probably only 20% of the people on YouTube will read this, but this is a very powerful tool when it comes to SEO and your video’s ranking.

You can also put links in your description.  Links are very good because they allow you to ask for user interaction when the video is complete.  If you use a link, it needs to be relevant to what the video is, however.  You want to make sure these links add to your video.

You also have the ability to use tags to promote your video.  These tags are keywords that you want to relate your video to, and you will want to include at least 10 of them.  As you come to the end of each keyword, you can divide them by a comma or you can hit ‘Enter’ at the end of each one.  Keep in mind that it makes a difference whether these are plural or not.  So, if you want your video to come up when people search for the term ‘video’, than you might want it to come up for the word ‘videos’ as well.  Therefore, you would want to use both tags.

These tags, of course, need to be relevant to your video.  Hopefully, you have done some research to know exactly who your ideal viewer is, what they will be looking for, and what they will be searching for.  That is the best way to target your ideal viewer.  You are not trying to get everyone who is searching on YouTube to view your video.  You are trying to ring in the people that are searching for things that are related to your video.

Service: Be Top 1 on Google Website/YouTube Video SEO 

Even if you are making a how-to video, you wouldn’t want to use ‘how to’ as a tag.  That is because this will bring about a lot of unrelated searches.  For example, if you were making a video on how to make a good quality video, you wouldn’t want it to come up when people search for things like ‘how to build a bicycle’.  So, you won’t be reaching your target audience.   Therefore, you want to use specific tags that make sense for your video and that will draw in people that are looking for information related to what your video is about.

Next, you will want to set up your privacy settings.  In this case, you will want to make sure that this is set to ‘Public’.  That way, people can publically search for it.  After that, you will want to make sure and select the appropriate category for your video.  For example, if you were going to make a video on how to make good quality videos, you might want to choose ‘Howto & Style’.  Again, you are trying to get targeted viewers so choose the category that will work best for your particular video.

Down at the bottom of your set up page, there will be a number of thumbnails to choose from.  Once you have a few videos uploaded and people begin viewing them, an option will be added that allows you to upload thumbnails of your own.  A couple of other extra features will be added to your channel as well.  You have to show that you are going to be actively involved with the site before any advanced features are provided by the site.  You will want to choose the thumbnail that will most likely grab people’s attention.  If possible, you want to use the one with bright colors and contrast and/or something that will spark the user’s interest.

Your changes should save automatically, but if they do not, there will be a ‘Save’ button at the bottom of the screen that you can click on to save them.  In any case, you will want to make sure that your changes are saved before leaving this page.  When you are done, go ahead and load up your video’s page by clicking the link that is right underneath the title of this set up page.

In the picture above, you can see the video page for the test video that was created for this presentation.  Underneath this video, there are a number of different tools available for your use.  One of the tools that you will find is a ‘Captions’ tool.  When you use this tool, your video will be scanned and some voice-to-text recognition software will be used to create a transcription and add in text for people who can’t hear.  This does something else as well.  You see, YouTube uses the captions to better index your video.

Since YouTube uses these captions to index your video means that you will want to include them in your video.  The only problem with this is that the transcription isn’t very accurate.  However, you don’t have to rely on YouTube’s software to create these captions.  You can create them yourself, you can hire someone to transcribe your video, or you can have a service online do it.  There are all sorts of services that you can use.  Just perform a search for ‘Transcription’ on Google or something like that to find them.  Fiverr.com is one place that you can go to get something like this done.

The reason why it is so beneficial for you to do this is because YouTube will use the words in the captions as keywords.  In other words, every word that is said in your video will become a keyword.  This can be very valuable, and it is something that a lot of people do not know about.

When you are ready to add your transcription, you can click on the ‘Captions’ tool and you will be brought to a new page.  Now, to the right of the video, you will see an ‘+ Add captions’ button.  Click on this and a couple of different options for doing this will appear.  First, you can choose to ‘Transcribe and Sync’.  This takes a little while, but YouTube will do this for you.  Then, you can go through the transcription and edit it.  You can also choose to upload a transcription that you have had created for your video.

If you remember, ‘user engagement’ was previously discussed in this training.  Unfortunately, user engagement is something that you have no control over.  You have no control over which videos are listed on the right side of your page.  YouTube puts these up, and you have no control over which are chosen.  You don’t have any control over your comments or ‘Likes’ that your video gets either.  You can have some influence over this, however.  For example, you can place an annotation in your video.  Down below your video, beside the ‘Captions’ tool, there is an ‘Annotations’ tool that you can click on to do so.

When you click on the ‘Annotations’ tool, a new page will open up.  You will see that there is a video timeline down at the bottom which will allow you to move through the video frame by frame.  When you reach this page, the video will begin playing automatically, so it is best to go ahead and pause it.  Then, you can load it out almost to the end in order to place your annotation.

To the right of the video, you will see an ‘+ Add annotation’ button.  Click on this and a dropdown menu will open up.  Within this dropdown menu, there are several different types of annotations to choose from.  Click on one of them to select it, and now you can enter in any message that you like.  You can see that there is an annotation placed in the video pictured above.  It says ‘If you liked this video please add it to your favorites!’  Now, do you see how you can use this feature to influence your user engagement?

You can click and drag this ‘Speech Bubble’ in order to better position this annotations.  There are some options over to the right that you can use to better position it’s time placement as well.  Since you have put this annotation in right before the end of the video, you can see it pop up at the end of the video and fade out right before the video ends.  Again, you can set this to appear for a short amount of time or a longer one.  Make sure that you allow enough time for people to notice this and finish reading it.  Again, you have all sorts of settings available to the right of the video that will help you make this message more noticeable and better placed if needed.

As you can see, you can use these annotations to influence your viewers to become more engaged.  In other words, you can use this feature to ask your viewers to do something for you, whether it is to subscribe to your channel, add it to your favorites, share the video, etc.  You can even ask for video comments.  For instance, if there is something in the video that would warrant a comment or a response, YouTube allows your viewers to be able to do that.

One thing to keep in mind, when asking for comments, is that you will need to respond to every single one of these comments.  That shows your viewers that if they have a question or comment, you are always there and always responding.  You can also ask for a video response.  If somebody responds, YouTube sees that as very, very valuable.  Think about it.  When someone responds to your video like that, it means that it is powerful enough to provoke action.  It also shows someone liked it enough to take the time to make their video response, which is far more difficult than making a regular text response.

The biggest thing to keep in mind is that if you do not ask your audience for their involvement, they will not get involved 99% of the time.  Even if they like the video, viewers generally will not take action unless you request it.  If you ask for them to take action in some way, however, then you exponentially increase the chances that they will do so.  So, whether you want them to ‘Like’ the video, adding it to the video to their favorites, or leave a comment, let your audience know.

Service: Youtube video with our SEO Guranteed or get refund

The Tools You Need to Get Started in Video Marketing

The basic tools you need to start video marketing are very simple. You need something with which to record and something with which to edit.

Your computer might have a built-in camera that can be used for recording. This may be suitable for recording vlogs, but otherwise it's quite limited. You can also buy a simple, inexpensive camera that you can attach to your computer for more flexibility and better quality in picture and sound.

To produce more complex videos, you need better gear. Small digital cameras, which can quickly and easily dump recorded data onto your computer are cheap and easy to operate.

You can actually make videos without using a camera at all. There are tools (some of which are discussed below) that can be used to make slideshows, cartoons or screen capture videos. These offer easy, all-in-one video production. It all depends on the types of videos you want to make.

For editing, you need a video editing software program. These range in complexity and quality, as well as in price. There are free programs and premium programs that offer more features and better quality.

Advanced Video Production Tools

Investing in more advanced tools can allow you to make much better videos. You can have much more power over the content of these videos.

There are advanced editing tools, for example, that automatically edit or brush up your videos, saving you time and possibly producing better videos that you could've produced on your own.

Other tools automate steps in the video production process or automate your SEO.

By investing in more advanced tools, you can produce better videos, reach a wider audience, and streamline the production process.

However, you should be careful to only invest in tools you need and will actually use.

When shopping for advanced tools, look for:

•  Something that you can use; in other words, it'll produce

•  Tools that have the features you need or extra features

•  Products that get good reviews and recommendations

•  Products that offer at least a free trial. It's nice to give a the types of videos that will help you achieve your goals that you can use online. Take the time to read some reviews and seek out recommendations program a test drive before you purchase to make sure it does what you want.

Top Picks for Video Production Tools

Wideo

Wideo is a free tool that allows you to create cartoons. It has its own design elements or you can add your own music and graphics.

GoAnimate

GoAnimate is similar to Wideo but is higher quality and there's more that you can do with it. It's also a premium program, not free.

Viewbix

Viewbix is a premium tool that enhances your videos in various ways to help you with branding. It offers analytics and tools for driving traffic.

Powtoon

You can use Powtoon to create videos that are a cross between cartoons and PowerPoint presentation. You can plug in your content and it will create explainer videos. Powtoon is free but there is also a premium version that has more features.

Prezi

Prezi creates dynamic presentation videos on a 'virtual canvas.' You create the presentation and then can zoom, pan and move around it, explaining its various parts. There are free and premium versions.

Camtasia

Camtasia is the leader in screencast programs. It allows you to film your screen, making a video out of whatever you're doing on your computer. Camtasia is very simple and easy to use, and offers full editing capabilities. It's a paid software program.

YouTube Editor

The YouTube Editor is free and already integrated into YouTube’s editing interface. It helps you with various aspects of posting videos to YouTube, while giving you basic editing capabilities like captions, customer thumbnails, and calls-to-action.

Magisto

Magisto is a program that takes your amateur videos or images and touches them up to make them look more professional. It analyzes videos to find the highlights and essentially does your editing for
you. There are free and premium versions.

PowerPoint

You can use Microsoft Office’s PowerPoint to create videos just by recording a presentation. For many people who own PowerPoint 2010 or above, this is one of the easiest ways to create quick videos and post them to Youtube.

Windows Movie Maker

Windows Movie Maker is a great tool for those with Windows machines that want to start out with video editing. It’s easy to use, comes as a free program and has a variety of great features.

iMovie (Mac)

iMovie is the Mac equivalent of Windows Movie Maker. Again, easy to use and with some fantastic features; as well as being a free program for Mac users, iMovie is a fantastic place to start.

Animoto

Animoto is a highly-rated, easy to use and feature-rich online app that you can use to create and edit some great videos. The Lite version is free, but it is somewhat limited. It does however give you some idea of the capabilities of the software before you buy the full product.

There are many more tools available beyond the ones listed above, but this gives you an idea of how tools can help you. Start by deciding what specific kind of help you need and look for the tools you need to do that.

The Power of Video for Your Business

Video marketing is a highly effective strategy for achieving a variety of your business goals online. It also happens to be one of the methods that many marketers hesitate to use, simply because they don’t know the ins and outs of making and promoting video on the web. So, why should you care? Why should you make sure that video is part of your marketing tactics?

“ 52% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI.”

Web users love videos. They're fun and easy to digest. Plus, they give you a connection directly to the brands you love. For marketers, another great advantage of video is that video content is among the most shared content on social media.

If you're just getting started with video marketing or toying with the idea of incorporating it into your overall strategy, then this course is for you. In it, you'll learn:

•  The very basics of video marketing and why it works

•  How to take advantage of psychological factors to fine-tune your video marketing

• What separates good from bad online videos

• The many different types of videos you can make for various goals

• How to clearly define your goals in video marketing so that you get the best results possible

• The tools you'll need to get started and to make the entire process easier on yourself

•  Where to get started in producing your first videos

• Tips and tricks for making your videos as slick and professional as possible

•  How to get your videos to the public and seen by as many people as possible

• The importance of monitoring your video marketing and some direction on how to do that.

If you’ve been confused by video or have been putting off including video in your marketing, now’s the time to get started. This course will guide you in the right direction, so that you can get over those first hurdles. In no time, you’ll be tapping into that huge part of your target market who love  watching and learning from video.

Market research on warrior forum and warrior plus

When it comes to do a market research it’s really chewing my brain and I was trying to find a simple way which would help me to save my time and also get me the required information which are only two:
i. What is the current high demand in the market, the problem that people are looking for a solution to it?
ii. Where I can find those hungry buyers and throw my hook. And after long research I came across this awesome please "Warrior Forum" and it saves my time and money as well. The power of the forum is really great as you can:

•  Find out what is the highest demanded market.
•  Exchanging experiences with many marketers.
• Come up with an idea for your product.
• Sell in your product and make a fortune.

The first step you ought to do is to sign up with the Warrior Forum, it is FREE but the free membership is limited. But for the time being it is okay to be on free status because we want to go and do our market research homework.
Assuming that you have already signed up with the Warrior Forum, here is an important section (Warrior Special Offer Forum) In-fact I would call it the treasure section. In this section people are listing their products for sale, and make crazy cash out of it. You see, by the time I am writing these lines there are over 6000 people who are browsing this section and 90% of them are hungry
buyers . Those 6000 members are not the same who is coming on a daily basis, as this forum has got over 500,000 active members. Can you imagine the amount of people where your product is going to stand in-front of!

Just go through the section and see what are the most popular services that have got lots of buyers and you can measure that by looking to the amount of replies to their thread.
I have gathered for you a few examples of some of the winning products I would  say, have a look on the below screen shots please.

Based on my experience with the first test product I have launched on this forum, despite of the few replies or comments I have got on my thread, still it does not tell the amount of sales I’ve made ; as the number of buyers who have purchased my product was higher than the amount of replies/comments on my thread.
Before I give you the short list of the hottest market that you can jump on it immediately, let me show you another connected place to the "Warrior Forum"
where you can find who the top sellers are and what they are selling. Warrior Plus is a management website as it helps those people who are intending to launch their products through the Warrior Forum and Warrior Plus site will manage their listing such as:

•  Price increment: if they want to increase their products' price after a certain amount of copies.

•  Affiliates Commissions: also it helps the product owner to determine their affiliates' commission payouts, which they are going to pay to their affiliates from 0-100%. So when those affiliates promote those publishers’ products they get paid as per the affiliate commission agreement which set by the product author

•  Product Statistics: you will be able to check the number of clicks and the number of sales.

And much more features you will come to know about it later. What you have to do now is sign up with Warrior Plus and use your username which you have chosen earlier to sign-up with Warrior Forum.

When you are done with your registration with Warrior Plus, hit over [my account] and update your information. Please note this website will redirect your buyers in the future to pay for your product using PayPal as a payment processor.
Well, now I want to show you how you find that best seller through "Warrior Plus" site. If you wonder why we should do that! It's because we want to sell what is hot and what is really people in need of it.

Click on "WSO Alerts" and WSO stands for "Warrior Special Offers". Add an alert and this is really powerful as you will be notified with the WSO of the day, and WSO of the day will be selected based on many criteria’s one of those criteria’s is the amount of sales your product has achieved.
If you are an affiliate you will be able to copy, paste the emails which you are receiving through your emails via "Warrior Plus" site and all you have to do withthat email just amend it with your own affiliate link and promote the same offer after you get an approval from the author to promote his product so you will be getting your own unique affiliate id. We’ll come in to this later. And much more powerful stuff you will come to know when you involve more in using "Warrior Plus" alert feature.
If you check on your right hand on the same page where you suppose to add your email alert you will
find those two tables…

I believe it’s pretty clear to you on the first table you see, it shows the top sellers and below it shows the most popular keywords. Those keywords are searched by buyers. Let's have a quick brief about some of those keywords.

Wordpress: most of the people are looking for Plugins which it could automate their process and make their life easier, and just to give you an idea about what are the most plugins have recorded high demands:

•  SEO "Search Engine Optimization"
•  Backlinks
•  Social Bookmarking
•  Viral Traffic

And the list goes on. I don't want to limit your thoughts by giving you specific list to focus on, but I am just giving you an idea about the most famous plugins in the market. The main idea behind creating a WordPress plugin is, to automate the process for the user and save their time and efforts and brings to them the expected results which at least meeting their expectations.

PLR: it stands for "Private Label Rights" and it means that you can buy the license for using a PLR product and you can re-word it even claim it is yours but, you will have to follow the license which you can find it on the page where PLR is available before you buy and if you didn't, then you will have to ask the author before you buy it.
Lots of people are really making big bucks by creating their own PLR and sell it and the buyers they can reuse it in many ways like divide it in articles, emails, reports even products after they add their own tweak and cash out.

Offline: recently this niche has become one of the best un-tapped markets and the idea is to show people some tips and tricks or even share a success story of yours or your friend which it could help them with their offline business.
You can login into your Warrior Forum account and then click on search then advanced search…

Then type PLR and then select Warrior Special Forum then hit search now…

Go through the results and have an idea about the products how it looks like. You know it is a ready-made business you can just buy and resell it again for example if it is a blog you can sell it on Flippa.com. I know this e-book is about Warrior Forum only but still if I found that I can add more cream while I am writing I will do
Repeat the steps and choose one of the above highly researched keywords and use the search tactic which I have showed you earlier to have more information about it and while browsing the search results, I would recommend you keep a piece of paper near to you because sometimes your brain will alarm you with an idea which you might use it later.
Now you became to know how to do your market research by using Warrior Plus and Warrior Forum since this course depends on these two sites, but there are umpteen ways to do a marketing research; it is a bit complicated in my point of view and it’s time consuming. Maybe if I came up with a new discovery I will be sharing it with you.

•  It's time now for the product creation stage. To summarize the top topics, based on our keywords researches people are interested to invest on:-
•  SEO "search engine optimization".
•  WordPress Plugins.
•  PLR.
•  Software.
•  Offline.

Do not limit your thoughts, as I told you before, if you’ve noticed on the above keyword researches the "Make Money" keyword is not listed though if you do a simple research on Warrior Forum you will find thousands of products are selling pretty well. No need to be smart in-order to do this research all you have to do is just try to think out of the box and use your common sense.

Understanding key domain metrics

When you are looking to buy a new domain for your private nework, there are a few metrics that you
need to check to ensure you are going to get as much bang for buck as possible.
You don't want to splash money on a domain only later to realise that it's not as powerful
as you thought.
So before you buy any domain, always use your due diligence and check everything I am about
outline bellow not just the key metrics.

Domain Authority (DA)

This is a metric that was developed by Moz as part of their OpenSiteExploder tool
It takes a range of metrics into account to give an authority score measuring between 0 to 100. You
can learn how it is caculated.

I generally look for domains that have a DA of 15 or above.

Page Authority (PA)

This is another Moz metric that comes straight out of OpenSiteExploder.
It also works on a 0-100 point scale

Like with DA, I always look for domain with a PA of 15 or above

Majestic Trust Flow (TF)

Majestic launched the Trust Flow metric to great fanfare and it is a solid indication of how trustworthy the websites that link to you are.
Again this works on a 0-100 scale, the higher the number - the better the Trust Flow.

When it comes to TF, I always seek out domains with 15 or above. However there is another metric to consider along side TF

Majestic Citation Flow (CF)

Another metric that was launched at the same time as Majestic Trust Flow was Majestic Citation Flow
This is based on the strength of the links pointing to your website rather that their trust worthiness

Again I always seek out domains that have a CF of 15 or above. But it is critial that you combine TF with CF to come up with

Majestic Trust Ratio (TR)

This is the ration between Majestic's Trust Flow and Citation Flow figures. Majestic analysed the top
1 million domain on the internet and found the top 25% domains had an average CF/TF ratio of 1.09
They found that the median average site had a ratio of 1.81 and spammy domains had ratios upto 9.87
So with that said you want to make sure that the domains you buy for your network have a trust ratio
between 0 and 1.81

To caculate this just follow this simple formula
Citation Flow /Trust flow = Trust Ratio
Essentially the closer to zero it is, the less spammed it is.

Any domain that is within the 0-1.81 trust ratio range is good to go. Any domain that falls outside of
that range should be avoided

The Domain Expiration Process

On the surface you might think that when a domain name reaches it's expiration date, if it's not renewed anyone can snap it up.
Although it does work like that in some manner, it is actually a bit more complicated than that. In general owners have around 1-75 days to renew a domain once it expires but mostly towards the higher end of that range.

Interestingly around 120,000 domains expire every single day with around 50,000 of those eventually coming up for anyone to register.
It is also worth noting that .com domains get deleted/made available to renew every day between 11am and 2pm pacific time in batches.
The Life Cycle Of A Domain
There are five stages to a domain's life cycle-

It is important that you understand each phase.

Stage 1- Active 

This means the domain is currently registered and active. You cannot register a domain that is active.
It possible to register domains from 1-10 years and then many domain owners have them set to auto renew at the end of their expiration period.

Stage 2 - Expired Holding 

Period Once a domain reaches it's expiration date it is held by the registrar for anywhere between 1-45 days. At this point any associated website stops working, but the domain is still available to renew to the original
owner.

Stage 3 - Expired Redemption Grace Period 

The next stage of the expiration process is the renewal grace period which typically lasts for around 30 days. At this point any Whois data is deleted.
This gives the original owner a last chance to register the domain before it gets moved into the pending deletion queue.

Stage 4 - Pending Delete 

Once a domain reaches the pending delete phase it can no longer be renewed by the original owner or anyone else.
During this period the domain is erased entirely from the ICANN database.

Stage 5 - Available 

To Buy After the pending delete phase the domain drops entirely and is released back into the general pool. At this point anyone can register the domain through any registrar.