We have all seen mentions about how video marketing could be useful in terms of making money online. But the issue with it is that few business owners use it, and many of them don’t really do it well. Can you use video sharing sites like YouTube and Daily Motion to attract some customers to your website? Definitely. Here are some tips that you will find helpful for this:

• Use public video sharing sites and not your own server

The obvious advantage of this is that you will be saving bandwidth, as the videos will be hosted on a site such as YouTube and not your own server. Another advantage of this is that more people will be able to see your videos if they search for their related keywords. If you host your videos on your own server, they can only be seen on the places where you put them, such as websites, blogs or social media pages.

• Put your website and business logo at the beginning and end of your video

Even though YouTube allows you to put links in the description (which you should do as well), you are better off putting your website in your video as well. This is because some people may see your video and choose to embed it on their own website or blog, or share it with social media. If your video goes viral and is seen by a lot of people, chances are it will be embedded on a lot of sites, so to get the most traffic from this effect, your website must be present in the video itself.

• Give useful content to your viewers

It is said time and time again, nobody comes online to watch commercials, there are enough of them on TV. The content of your videos therefore needs to be relevant to your products and niche, without looking like you are only promoting your website or goods. Instructional or informational videos are the best. For example, if your company sells replacement iPhone screens, then having a video which demonstrates how to open up the iPhone and change its screen without messing up the phone would be quite useful. It can also be used for intangible products such as guides and learning materials. So if you sell language courses, you can create a video which teaches some important phrases, pronunciation, words, in another language, then at the end refer the viewers to your website so they can check out the product and see if it is good for them.

• Don’t give up if you don’t get many views

It is a fact that most videos will not achieve millions of views, especially if your niche is very specific. The issue is quality and not quantity. You can make sales with just a handful of viewers that are truly interested in the content of your video and the product behind it, while uploading a video that gets thousands of views because it is “cute” or “funny” may not bring you any serious site visitors.

If you are going to design your online shop website, or any other kind of business website yourself, then there are a few important tips that you need to keep in mind. These will help you give your users a better browsing experience when they look at your site and it will also be helpful for SEO in certain cases.

• Use the right color scheme

There is a variety of backgrounds and templates that you can use for your website. Some are simple solid colors, while others feature intricate and creative design elements. The most important thing here is that the text of your website is clearly visible to your users. So if your website background is black, then you will need to make your text a bright color, such as white or gold, to stand out.

• Avoid using pre-fabricated templates

There are hundreds of free website templates that you can find online and use for your website. This is great, however you should know that if you were able to download that template for free and use it on your site, then so did hundreds of others webmasters on the internet. Therefore, there will probably be many sites that look just like yours. Don’t be afraid to modify the design to make it look more unique. You can easily do this with a graphics manipulation program such as Photoshop or GIMP. This would allow you to customize things like backgrounds, headers, buttons, etc. You can also pay for a custom template to be designed for you, however this can cost between $25 and $1000 depending on what you want done and how complex it is.

• Check to make sure your site works with all browsers

Test out your website in all browser, like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome to make sure that it works well and all elements appear correctly. This will provide a better user experience for your visitors. Also, it is a good idea to create a mobile version of your site as well. Since there is an increasing amount of visitors that use smart phones like the iPhone or Android phones to shop online, this can be very useful. There are many free tools and tutorials that are available online to webmasters which would allow you to accomplish this.

• Test all elements of your site before deploying it

This is an important part. Once you are done designing your website, make sure that everything works well and is bug free. Check to make sure that all your links work, for example. There are automated tools that can let you easily do that and can save you a lot of problems, as it often happens that a typo could make a link not working or an image not displaying correctly. Also, check your payment gateway to be sure that it sends your customers to the checkout page correctly and that the prices, minus any discount offers or promotions, are reflected in the right way on your site. Many payment gateways have a “Sandbox” mode for testing purposes.

One of the ways to earn money by using CPA networks is by using a content locker, also called a gateway on your website. This is something that can be used with incentive offers to increase conversions. Now what exactly does a gateway do? The principle is very simple. When a user gets to your page, a content gateway will pop up, asking them to complete a CPA offer before they get access to the content presented. These offers are usually short email submits or mobile offers that pay around $1 to $2 a lead.

Is this better than simply having CPA text ads or banners on your site? Well, the answer is usually yes. Many people are used to seeing ad banners, especially the cheesy “Shoot X to get an iPhone” type of ads and will usually ignore them. However, with a content gateway, they will actually have to complete one offer before they get access to the content that they want. Sure, some of them will simply walk away and go to another website. However, some of the visitors will complete the offer, especially if they are really looking forward to seeing the content that is presented on your website.

Many of you may be thinking: sounds great! How do I set this up on my site? There are essentially two ways to do this: either you can sign up for a CPA network such as CPA Lead or Adscend Media, that offers CPA content locking gateways, or use a third party script with incentive offers from another network. Of course, the first would be much easier, as the script has already been designed by the CPA network and all you would need to do is to insert some pre formatted code on your website. If you do use a third party script with another network, make sure that you only do so with incentive offers. Also, discuss with your affiliate manager first to see if you are allowed to do so, to make sure that there are no restrictions on this type of marketing with the network that you are using.

One question that remains is: should you use this on your site at all? The answer here will vary. If you have a completely new website that you’ve just started sending traffic to, then this might be a good idea. However, on the other hand if you have an established site with plenty of regular visitors, you may want to think twice before using a content locker on it. This is because if you are already making a good amount of revenue from these visitors from “regular” CPA offers or pay per click ads, you might risk losing some of your regular traffic if these visitors don’t really like the idea of filling out a CPA offer to get to your content. But there is always a compromise, for example you can set up a “premium” section of your website that requires filling out a CPA offer to access. Or you could display the gateway only to random users, or after they have visited a certain amount of pages on your website.

If you are creating a blog, there are various ways that you can monetize it, which simply means to make money from it. Yesterday, we have seen the two easiest and most common ways of making some profit from your blog, which are inserting pay per click ads on it, as well as putting up a donation button. But there are two other options worth mentioning. While they may be a bit more complex, they are still being used by plenty of bloggers out there and can be extremely profitable.

• Putting up affiliate ads

The basic concept behind affiliate marketing is that you get paid a certain commission when someone clicks on an ad on your blog and either buys something, or performs a specific action such as signing up for a website. Unlike pay per click ads, you do not get paid for every click that the ad receives from a visitor.

When it comes to affiliate offers, in order to get the most success, you should use offers that are closely related to the theme of your blog. So if your blog talks about cars, for example, you could put ads for car insurance companies, which typically pay you whenever someone requests a quote from the insurance company. You can also participate in the Amazon Affiliate Program. Amazon.com is one of the world’s most popular online retailers and they sell hundreds of thousands of items in different categories. So if your blog talks about photography, you can put up some ads for photo cameras from Amazon. If someone clicks on the ad and makes a purchase, you will receive a commission based on the amount of the total sale. Remember that in order to make the highest amount of money possible, the affiliate offers that you promote on your blog should be related to its content.

The more “generic” ads such as the “shoot 3 ducks and get a free iPhone!!” banners are best avoided, since many of your readers have probably already seen them and will simply ignore them. While you can put some affiliate offers that aren’t really related to the niche of your blog, doing so is not recommended since your readers are far less likely to even click on these ads in the first place.

• Selling your own products

This can be a good monetization option if you produce your own products, or you simply own an e-commerce site that sells certain items that could be of interest to your readers. For example, if you have a blog about technology and at the same time, you sell video game consoles and computers on eBay, you can put an ad for your eBay page inviting users to visit your online shop. To make it even more attractive for them, you could even offer a special discount code for readers of your blog. This can be a very profitable monetization choice, but of course you would need to be already involved in some form of e-commerce for you to make use of it.

It is no secret that video marketing is an excellent way to bring in visitors to your website, and simply to promote your business on the internet. However, just like any other kinds of marketing activities, video marketing needs to be done well in order to bring you good results. While many online “gurus” claim that YouTube can bring you instant success, the reality of things is a bit more subdued. Yes, video sites such as YouTube are an excellent marketing platform, but they are not magical solutions where you can expect to get thousands of visitors to your website just because you have uploaded one video. Here are some quick tips that will help you get the most out of the time, money and effort that you spend on creating videos. You will see that by applying them, the returns that you get from your YouTube videos will probably increase.

And remember one thing, while many experts mention “YouTube” all the time because it is the most popular video sharing site, these tips will work on any other video sharing site that you can use as well.

• Keep current about recent news developments related to your industry

When something new comes out, or people hear about something that they are interested in happening, they increasingly turn to YouTube to watch some information about the issue. It is thus important that you upload a video as soon as something interesting happens in your niche. For example, if you sell mobile phones, this could be the release of a new model of the iPhone or BlackBerry.

• Give practical information (how to videos)

In addition to finding out about recent happenings, people use YouTube for video guides on how to accomplish something. If possible, provide some interesting content which tells the viewer how to do something that is related to your niche and don’t forget to include a link to your site for them to find more information and related products and services.

• Integrate your social media efforts

This simply means that you can include a link to your Twitter or Facebook profiles in your videos or in the video description. The more people you have that follow you on social networks, the more effective your efforts will be and using video sharing sites to gain more followers is definitely a great idea.

• Give something for free or another type of special offer

People always like to feel special and to have something given to them for free. The possibilities are endless with video marketing. For example, if you promote IM related products on your site, you could offer a free report on how to make money online and include a link to it in the video description.

If you don’t have anything to give away, why not instead give a special discount for viewers of your video who click on your link and proceed to your website? It is much more effective than simply linking to your site with no special offer for your viewers.



If you are doing search engine optimization or search engine marketing, it is possible that you have seen some advice pertaining to long tail keywords. It is quite possible that you may have asked yourself: what exactly is a long tail keyword? And what benefit does it bring to my site exactly?

To give you a quick answer, long tail keywords are those which have more than 2 words in the main keyword phrase. What makes them so powerful is that these keywords are often what people search for when they are ready to purchase a certain product or service online. By making your site rank high for these keywords, you increase the chance that a buyer will see your site and therefore make a purchase from you.

Targeting long tail keywords during your online marketing efforts has a lot of advantages. Here are some of them:

These keywords convert better than general ones

Traffic that comes from long tail keywords is more likely to convert than traffic which comes from general ones. This is a known fact throughout the internet marketing industry. The reason behind this is because these keywords are a lot more targeted and specific than general ones. People who are searching for more detailed keywords such as “buy iphone” or “iphone discount” or “used iphone New York” are more likely to buy a product rather than someone who is just seeking for “iphone”.

You can put in your product name in them

Basically, people who are looking for a specific product online can be in two categories. They either have already made a decision to buy a certain product or they are seriously considering to buy it but they are seeking more information about it. In both cases, what you need to do is to target the necessary keywords and have a landing page that will be able to convince visitors that your product is exactly what they have been looking for.

Don’t require as much efforts to rank higher

In the internet marketing world there is plenty of competition. Unless you have a product or service that is extremely unique with no competition (highly unlikely… chances are somebody will copy you sooner or later) or is in a very obscure and specific niche, you will see others online promoting the same product or service that you are.

If you are in the dog training niche, you will see, for example that keywords such as “dog training” or “dogs” are already dominated by your competitors. The problem is that many of these competitors are large businesses which have a large budget and staff that is making sure that they stay on top of search engine results. Therefore, going against them is not the best idea. However, if you target a more specific, long tail keyword, such as “make your dog stop barking”, you will find that there are far fewer pages with that keyword phrase. This means that you will not have to do as much SEO work if you want to rank high for it.

A dog wearing the iPhone as a dogs outfit

The perfect app on the iPhone to get into your house without the need for a real key.

The ultimate video conference using the Apple   iPhone

DIY inflight movie with a sick bag onboard an airplane

Poormans version of the iphone.

Cool ibeer app for that first pint refreshment

The biggest growing segment on the internet for traffic is mobile web browsers. Every smartphone (minus BlackBerry until BB 6.0, at least) has a very capable web browser able to display rich content just like you are used to on your computer.

The problem is, it isn’t always fluid. What does that mean? When you are viewing your website on the web browser, and you have an iPhone or Android phone (without Flash) your header image might not be there because it was Adobe Flash based instead of HTML. That ruins the experience for the viewer, and with more and more people that will be viewing your website on their phone you need to do something about it.

First thing first, no Flash. I don’t care if Android just announced they would be getting Flash today, you are still segmenting a huge piece of the market if you continue to use Flash on your website. It simply isn’t worth the hassle.

Another thing to be conscience of is your navigation. I have a Motorola Milestone and it doesn’t have the best touch screen (actually, it is horrendous). The inability to click on tiny links is very frustrating to me and ruins my experience (and wastes my time) on may of my favorite sites.

By making navigation bigger and easier to select (and not select the wrong one) you will improve your user experience both on computer and mobile browsers. Drop down menus are a great example, Android phones can click the first link fine, but any links in the drop down menu can be easily mis-clicked while on a mobile device, breaking the experience.

You can have a great website for a computer, but make sure you also consider the mobile device. Having your designer code for the mobile version as well is really important. Keep the mobile market in mind when doing anything, or have a complete mobile version. WordPress and many other platforms have great mobile plugins that allow you to easily transform your design into a mobile version, or create your own.