OK, so I had never heard of the AdWords Change History Tool until today. Yeah, laugh if you want – but I bet there are a number of you out there that have never heard of it either, so this post is for you.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Change History Tool, it is a feature in AdWords that allows you to look back on the account changes you’ve made in since 2006. In doing so, the tool helps you remember what changes you made that could have caused a change in your accounts performance.

To access the tool, just login to your AdWords account and click on ‘Tools” under the “Campaign Management” tab. Once you have done this, click on “My Change History” and enter a date range.

The way I see it, this is an invaluable tool these days, especially for people who are managing large AdWords accounts that require constant tweaking to try to increase ad ranking and decrease cost-per-click. By utilizing something like the Change History Tool, a PPCer will be able to better interpret the effects of account changes on their quality score/ranking/etc.

Also exciting (and the way I learned about this tool), PPC Hero announced that Google will be adding some graphing features that will give advertisers a more graphical look at how the changes effect their accounts.

If you’ve got an AdWords account or 20, make sure you start taking advantage of the Change History Tool…it could help you answer some of the magical mysteries of AdWords.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

PPC Master, John Hasson found a way to increase his Google AdWords content network conversion rate by 35%, and decrease his cost for conversion by 46%..

How?

Dayparting.

For those of you not familiar, dayparting, or ad scheduling as Google calls it, is the process of setting different bids for your PPC keywords depending on the time of day the search is being conducted.

So for example, if you knew you got your highest conversion rate from 5 PM to 7 PM, but extremely low conversion from 11 PM to 8 AM, you could set your cost-per-click to a higher or lower number to make sure you get the higher converting traffic and you get less of the lower converting traffic.

The funny thing is, I don’t know if there are really a whole lot of people who bother to use dayparting features when they are available. To many people it seems like setting everything up might be a bit too complex and might not be worth the time.

But seriously - if you could increase your conversions by 35%, and your cost-per-conversion by 46%., wouldn’t you?

Check out John’s blog post to see how he determined what times to run various bids, and how he made dayparting boost the effectiveness of his AdWords content campaign.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of our PPC peeps, Brittany, found a very interesting article for all you PPC folks on Search Engine Journal today. The article, Google Leaks Quality Score Variable (Pscore, mCPC and thresh) in Search Results, show some screen shots of what one can only assume to be quality score data appearing in the search results.

The data is broken into 3 different variables, which are:

• Pscore – no one is totally sure what this is, but some believe it is a numerical value that represents the statistical significance of the match to the search term
• mCPC – thought to be maximum cost per click
• thresh - didn’t see any speculation on this variable

If this is accurate information, it’s terribly interesting to me that these three numbers would show up in the search results. The example shown in the SEJ article is for the term “warwick honda dealer” and shows that out of the two AdWords results, the corporate Honda website is likely bidding much higher than a non-official Honda site. The interesting thing is that the non-official site has a higher Pscore, which could mean it is considered more relevant that the corporate Honda site.

Of course, with anything like this, I’m left with more questions than answers. Namely, are these the only three scores that are used to determine placement? Also, why would something like this end up in the visible search results? Is it something that is normally visible to Google employees only? Finally, what the heck is “thresh”?!

Let me know your thoughts on the leak…and if you figure out what a thresh is.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Let’s face it. Google is in a tough position when it comes to user privacy. Google wants to give users the best possible experience and the most relevant search results and ads, but since everyone is different, they need personal user data to give the best results. However, most users don’t want Google to keep track of their online activities.

So what to do?

Well, if a Google patent application uncovered by Bill Slawski is any indication, Google has decided to use a lot of information to improve their ad serving through AdSense. And by a lot, I am talking everything from individual click activity, to your interest in certain topics, to mouse hover activity in certain regions of a webpage, and even your facial expressions.

When you pull the privacy element out of the mix, the solution would be fantastic for users and advertisers both. Users would get AdSense ads they may actually be interested in. Advertisers would get more targeted users, meaning higher click-to-conversions, and a better ROI on content matching through AdWords.

But then there is privacy. The patent application lists some potential concepts of learning user interest and intention to creepy new levels – specifically “user eye direction relative to the document” and “user facial expressions.” Not sure how they plan to get that info outside of a controlled environment, or if it’s just in there to future-proof the patent. Either way, “watching” how the average user surfs the Internet and reacts to it outside of the browser window just seems to be a bit too intrusive to me…even more intrusive of tracking click and visited site activity.

Like the Google’s ideas or not, reading Bill’s analysis of Google patents is always interesting and usually gives some insight into the way Google views the world and its role in it. Head over to the post, have a read, and let me know what you think. Does the patent seem as creepy to you as it does to me, or does it seem like business as usual for the GOOG?

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week is keyword research week on the PPC Hero blog, so it’s needless to say that I’m looking forward to each new posts they do. Today’s PPC Hero post got me really excited since it covers one of my favorite things - free SEO/SEM tools.

The list cover 4 different keyword tools that can help you expand your keyword list, research keyword volume and trends, and even identify a general cost-per-click for different keywords. All important things to understand before you start a PPC or SEO effort for a particular product or service.

Out of all of the tools I think the one I like most is Spyfu.com. Specifically, I really like the data they give on the CPC range for keywords – something I’ve been missing since Yahoo! went all “black box” with their Panama platform.

Make sure you read the full post, Expand Your Keyword List For Free: 6 Keyword Tools You Should Be Using (but probably aren’t), for a full rundown on what each tool can do for you.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I ran across a post on the PPC Hero blog today that I thought I would share with you. The post, Un-Clutter & Optimize Your Account with Better Organization does a good job of laying out some of the basic guidelines to organizing a PPC account. While the post is a few months old, I don’t feel like any of the info is outdated.

The post does a good job of explaining what seems to be one of the more important aspects of AdWords success these days, account organization. It’s funny to me that account organization has become so important – and it really shows that there is, in fact, a fairly complex ranking algorithm running behind the scenes at AdWords.

I mean, I remember setting up InsureMe’s first PPC account and basically just tossing in keywords in whatever way made sense to me and my reporting needs at the time. Now we’ve got the fear of Google not liking the way our accounts are structured to worry about – and an accounts success or failure can depend upon the number and type of words you are putting in an AdGroup.

So if you are looking for some real world advice about PPC account structure, check out Amber’s PPC Hero article here.

BONUS: Aaron Wall recently gave a candid interview about the present and future of SEO to Marketmou. It’s certainly worth a read if you’ve got a few minutes.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of our affiliates was checking out the Google results last week and was surprised to see that Google was obviously in the process of testing out some new versions of the results page.

Here’s a screen grab, you can click it for a bigger view:

As you can see there are a number of things going on this Google results page, including:

• AdWords ads showing up with a bright yellow background on the top and the right
• A video results section is showing up under the AdSense ads on the right sidebar
• A news results section is showing up under the video results on the right sidebar
• A big “searches related to” section running at the bottom of the page

The affiliate also reported that he saw other iterations of these results showing up, including one where the video results section was running on top of the AdWords sidebar on the right side of the page.

Very interesting stuff. But why would Google do this?

Continue reading "Google Results Experimentation Seen Last Week – Possible Step Towards Video Ad Integration?" »

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was having lunch with one of our PPC affiliates this week and the topic of privacy policy came up. Specifically, the affiliate said that even if he’s running traffic through AdWords to a thin site “one page site”, the site will still have more than one page – and one of the main reasons is because the site will have a privacy policy page.

Coincidentally, Search Engine Land’s Bill Slawski posted an article that talks about the importance of a privacy policy when you are doing search engine marketing. Like any of Bill’s articles, this one is well thought out and researched and points to three reasons you’d want to make sure you include a privacy policy on your site (so make sure you read the full article here). They are:

1. Privacy policies give your site credibility and reassures your users
2. Whether your site has a privacy policy or not has an influence on your PPC Quality Score with Google
3. Some people think that having a machine readable privacy policy will affect everything for search rankings to the filtration of sites by toolbars and other tools

All this privacy policy talk made me realize that a lot of new affiliate marketers probably don’t even think to add a privacy policy to their affiliate site – which could be hurting their chances of success. If you fall into that boat, you should make it a goal to get a privacy policy added to your site(s) by the beginning of next week.

Oh yeah, one other thing, don’t just go and steal someone’s privacy policy off their site…that’s bad form. Instead use one of the helpful online tools out there like this privacy policy generator.

Posted by James Omdahl at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of our tech guys pointed out this article from The Register that talks about a new technology Google is looking to push out called “automatic matching.” In essence of the article is that automatic matching will deliver your AdWords ads to terms that you haven’t bid on, but Google deems relevant, in an attempt to use up your daily click budget.

The example in the article would be that the shoe company Adidas might start having their ads show up on terms like slippers, not because they bid on them, but because they are similar to words like shoes and sandals.

It sounds like the rollout of automatic matching will be in beta, and available to bigger advertisers only at first. But if this goes AdWords-wide, I think it might be a major concern for affiliates…especially for people who have set their daily budgets artificially high to ensure their ads are served 100% of the time.

I can see the reason why Google would do this (money) but I’m hoping they are extra careful when it comes to serving the ads, and that they provide accurate tools to show you what terms you’re showing up on.

Read the article and share your thoughts. Do you think this will be a good thing for anyone but Google?

Thanks to James H. for the tip.

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Right now, maybe nothing…but very soon, maybe a lot.

Barry Schwartz of SEL and SER ran across some chatter that Google AdWords is going to start using page load time as a factor for a landing page’s quality score.

The speculation started on the WebmasterWorld forums, but has spread to other outlets as people found this section of the About AdWords page:

Beginning in February 2008, you'll be able to see a grade for your website's load time in your AdWords account. 'Load time' refers to the amount of time it takes for a user to arrive at your functional landing page after clicking your ad.

Several weeks after your load time grade becomes visible, it will begin to impact your landing page quality and, therefore, your Quality Score. We recommend working to improve your load time during this interim if it's received a low score.

Now I know that watching costs is something that all affiliates try to do, but this change solidifies that affiliates should make sure their sites are hosted with a reliable, speedy hosting company. (Of course, you should be doing this for conversion and user experience reasons anyway).

I know that in my daily perusal of sites I run across a good number of affiliate sites that take way too long to load, especially if they are sites that are being hosted on a third party’s domain. So if that describes you, it might be time to start looking for a new host.

Luckily, there are a number of decent hosts out there that can get you quick load times without busting your budget. Personally I like Site5 and our developers tend to favor Westhost…but if I were you I’d shop around and find someplace that works for other affiliates.

If you have a personal hosting favorite, let us know in the comments…but don’t leave an affiliate link, ok? :)

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

PPC guru and affiliate marketer John Hasson has updated his list of PPC companies that work. If you're looking for some new places to spend your PPC dollars, you might want to explore some of the companies on his list.

With that said, I'd remind you that John does work in multiple verticals, and the smaller engines he lists could work for some verticals and not others...I know our company's experience differs from John's.

Also, never forget Vinny Lingham's principal of Return On Effort (ROE) - make sure you are spending your time in the places where you can get the biggest return...and in the PPC world, that often means the bigger search engines.

Thanks for updating the list John - keep up the great work!

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Check out this post on Search Engine Journal and then come back and let me know if you think the ad was PPC genius or short sighted marketing at best.

I tend to fall into the shortsighted camp...but who knows, it could have converted enough to be worth it (and I bet those clicks were CHEAP!).

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Big news from Google, starting yesterday Google started a very limited test of video ad units on their search engine results pages (SERPs). In doing so, Google is taking a step forward (for better or worse) in giving advertisers more options of how to advertise through Google search.

Here’s a quick list of details on the video ad test:

• The test will be very limited to begin, and so far no one has reported seeing any of the video ad units
• To start, the videos will not be visible on the search page, but there will be a plus sign symbol attached to the ad that you can click on to open the video
• In the future Google may consider adding a thumbnail photo of the ad instead of the plus box
• Advertisers will be charged when someone views the video, or if the video is not viewed, when someone clicks on the text of the ad.
• Advertisers will only billed once if clicks occur on the video and the text ad
• Google feels now is the right time to try out the video ads in the SERPs since the currently are showing video results through Universal Search
• Google’s thinks that the video ad units could be used for branding as well as click throughs to websites
• Google will continue to focus on ad relevance – so you can rest easy if you think major advertisers will run “branding” ads on unrelated keywords

I for one am very interested to see where this all leads. From an affiliate marketing standpoint, I think it is time to start figuring out how you could leverage video ads for your promotions now. That way, when this program opens up to everyone, you can be one of the first in your vertical with a video ad.

On thing that worries me is to think that a year or two down the line your Google click-through rate might be dramatically affected by the quality of the videos you are able to produce. Kind of makes we wonder if the “little guys” are going to be able to compete with major players who have ad agencies and are already producing video advertisements.

Check out Danny Sullivan’s take along with some mock-up shots at Search Engine Land.

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This may or may not matter to you depending on the level of craftiness you use on your AdWords accounts, but if you have been using different display and destination URLs on your ads, you’re going to have to rethink your strategy.

According to Barry Schwartz (hi Barry!), Google has decided to even the playing field for advertisers by tightening the destination and display URLs policies for AdWords advertisement. The good news is that this mainly has to do with redirecting and sending traffic to other sites, and not (as far as I understand) using display URLs that don’t perfectly match the destination URL.

For example, if we want to send traffic to our auto insurance landing page, which has a destination URL of https://www.insureme.com/landing.aspx?Type=auto, we can still use a cleaner display URL like www.InsureMe.com or InsureMe.com/Auto.

On the other hand, if we wanted to use a different site’s URL as the display, like www.InsureMeBlog.com, but we sent the click to a page on www.InsureMeBlog.com that redirects to www.InsureMe.com, that would not be acceptable. Also, we couldn’t send traffic to another URL if it had identical content to www.InsureMe.com, and we can’t promote InsureMe in the ad and then send traffic to a URL different from www.InsureMe.com.

I have a feeling this may be a reaction to some of the wild AdWords tactics that were pointed out on the Shoemoney blog recently – and it is unclear whether there will be algorithmic or manual enforcement of this policy.

From what I understand the changes will take place in August of this year, so if you’ve been getting creative with your display and destination URLs, it might be time to start coming up with a new plan.

Posted by James Omdahl at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This goes out to my homegirls Cassie "Qulity Score" Cizzle and Brittany "Keyword Bomber" Heidizzle...

You gotta love that guy.

Posted by James Omdahl at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of the questions I get more often than not from new affiliates is “how do they do it?” How is it that InsureMe has affiliates who are pulling in tens of thousand, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars each month? Is it PPC? SEO? Something else?

My honest answer? I’m not totally sure.

Yes, our top affiliates use both PPC and SEO. But beyond the generalized tactics of creating good content, great ads, and knowing how to optimize for natural and paid search, there is a little extra something that all of our top affiliates use to make it to the top of our affiliate rankings.

Creativity.

But what is creativity when it comes to PPC? I mean, isn’t it all about good bids, high quality score and good click-through? Not always. Top affiliates make it a point to think WAY outside the box when it comes to PPC.

The Shoemoney Blog has recently pointed out two of these “outside the box” tactics. While these examples might be a little borderline, they are a good example of creative thinking in competitive PPC verticals. Check them out:

• How to earn an awesome quality score by sending your ads to a Google redirect
• Creating new AdWords accounts every few minutes and paying for them with resold AdWords coupons

Again, there are just examples of creative AdWords strategies. I don’t think copying them will get you very far, since there’s a good chance someone is correcting these loopholes as we speak, but I do thing they show the kind of thinking that is implemented by top affiliates.

So next time you are strategizing about your AdWords accounts, try to think outside of the box. Actually, strike that, burn the box altogether.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The “one stop shop.” Based on research done by Phrases.org.uk, the term originated sometime in the 1920s or 1930s, with the oldest known usage coming from an auto shop advert in The Lincoln Star newspaper.

The concept of a one stop shop, a place where you can get all sorts of products and services in one place, has worked well for the mega retailers of the world like Wal-Mart, Tesco, and Target. We all know that the combination of a super retailer’s massive buying power, mixed with location based convenience creates a powerful draw on offline consumers looking to get what they need as quickly and cheaply as possible.

But as small scale marketers, we need to be careful when we assume that what works best for the biggest and brightest in the offline world is the right way to do things in the online world.

Here’s the thing, if you are an affiliate marketer, and you are aiming to be successful and build a business, the one stop shop concept is of no use to you. To begin with, half of the draw of an offline one stop shop is the ability to get a lot of different purchases made the same physical location. But in the virtual world, physical location really isn’t a concern since every product or service is just a Google search away.

But even taking the physical location aspect of the one stop shop strategy out of the mix, some affiliate would still argue that it is very convenient to get all of your online shopping done in one place. Naturally, whey would offer up Amazon or eBay as an example of one stop shop success. What they are forgetting is that Amazon didn’t start as a one stop shop, it started as an online book store. And eBay, a place to buy and sell Pez dispensers. You see, these companies grew and matured into a one stop shop of sorts, but they started and originally succeeded because they weren’t trying to be everything to everyone right out of the gate.

Continue reading "No One Needs Your “One Stop Shop” Online" »

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’ve written a bit in the past about how affiliates who are not terribly tech savvy should consider using a content management system to build their affiliate websites. I’ve also suggested that affiliates consider using the WordPress blogging platform to get their sites up and running. Today, I cam across a free e-book that tells you how to do just that.

The book is called How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress and was written by Caroline Middlebrook. The e-book does a fantastic job of outlining how take a domain, get it hosted, and how to install and configure WordPress to build a site that is capable of driving traffic to your AdSense or affiliate links.

While the e-book is a little AdSense heavy, it does a really good job pointing out the various things you will need to do to tweak a WordPress site to turn it into a viable ecommerce site.

Download the book here and enjoy!

Thanks to Shoemoney for pointing this one out.

Posted by James Omdahl at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week I pointed you to 7 SEO tactics you might want to reconsider heading into the New Year – today I found a post that points out 6 questions that you should ask yourself about your pay-per-click campaigns at the start of each year.

The post is really a template for giving your PPC accounts an annual audit, which can be very important if you’re running multiple or complex PPC campaigns.

The six big questions are:

1. Have your goals changed?
2. Are you using the correct keywords?
3. Do your ads point to existing landing pages?
4. Does your ad copy change over time?
5. Do you still have old tests running?
6. What do you want to learn about PPC this year?

By asking yourself these questions and taking action at least once a year you’ll end up with more organized, efficient and optimized pay-per-click accounts. Read the entire post called New Year’s Resolutions for Your PPC Campaigns at Search Engine Land.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s a new year, and if you’re one of the few affiliates out there who are still trying to make money online without having a website of your own, it’s time to get off your backside and build something.

And no, I don’t mean setting up a spam blog on Blogger.

Building a professional website will not only give you a lot more control over your business, but lets you control your online destiny as the future seems to be increasingly bleak for spammy hosted pages and “thin” doorway page websites.

The good news is that getting a professional site put together is really not all that hard, and in most cases it can be done in a couple of hours (this doesn’t really include time for creating content for the site, which should be your next priority). In a world where having an online presence is no longer optional; a whole industry of easy and inexpensive (if not free) website creation platforms has cropped up.

One good example is Weebly – a site that lets you create and download entire websites for the low, low price of free. Weebly gives you a number of attractive templates to choose from, the ability to add all sorts of page elements, and even options to add Google maps, videos and blogs to your site. The great thing is that you don’t have to know HTML to use Weebly - but if you do you can do some customization to your site as well.

Once you have your site built, Weebly will either host your site for free or will let you download everything you created into a .zip file so you can upload it to your server (if you are doing PPC or SEO, make sure you host the site yourself, ok?). It’s easy as that!

If you are still one of those affiliates who relies on framing, redirects or just plain old direct linking to merchants, make a resolution to get a site of your own up by then end of January. It’s not hard to do and it will help you future-proof your business.

[Big thanks to Web Worker Daily for pointing out Weebly. Also check out their other two recommendations SiteKreator and SynthaSite. And if you are looking for more of a content management system, make sure you read my posts about WordPress and Web Site Baker.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Julie Mason put together a great article that outlines the importance of using landing pages for the online marketing of both products and services. Since I know affiliates tend to have little time for reading this time of year, I figured the article may be more appealing and easy to scan as a list, so I took the liberty of converting it.

Here they are, Julie Mason’s 9 tips for better converting landing pages:

1. Every time you create a landing page, consider its purpose


2. Every landing page should give your prospect a reason to convert, enable them to do so, and resolve any concerns a prospect may have


3. Landing pages should provide relevant, focused, and detailed information above the fold (no need to scroll to see it)


4. Always consider who your landing page’s audience is – create multiple pages for different demographics if necessary


5. Include a prominent call to action on every page


6. Design is important – make sure look and feel is consistent across all marketing channels


7. Promote trust by building professional looking sites


8. Remember that your headline and page title are two of the most important elements of a landing page


9. Never be satisfied – always be testing new and improved versions of your landing page’s headline, call to action, and design

To read Julie’s full article which includes some interesting research findings, go here.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the video below, Google spam Czar Matt Cutts give a breakdown of what is included in the Google search results page, and how Google chooses what to display there. While some of this video might be old news to most of you, there are some helpful tidbits that helped clarify some things for me. Here’s the video:

Something interesting from the video was that Matt mentioned that Google knows that the word “car” and the word “automobile” are the same thing. While this isn’t too hard to fathom, it is something interesting to ponder this concept when doing PPC and SEO for terms like “car insurance.”

Also, Matt mentions the Google Experimental page in the video, which I never knew about. If you want to see some of the search concepts that Google is working on, check it out.

Posted by James Omdahl at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One thing that super affiliates do well is optimizing. When it comes to PPC, super affiliates spend a lot of time collecting and analyzing data that might seem mundane to most people, but to them it is the key to maximizing profit.

One metric that PPC marketers can use to optimize their accounts is time of week and time of day. Both Google AdWords and MSN AdCenter provide tools to modify bids based on time of day and week, but I don’t think a whole lot of people use them since it takes a lot to figure out when to increase and decrease your bids.

Search Engine Land’s Brad Geddes sheds some light on time based bid modification in his post Optimizing Bids By Day & Time Can Dramatically Increase Your ROI. If you’re willing to invest the time to do the research, this might be a new optimization avenue for you to explore.

Check out the article to see if day-part optimization is right for you.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We’ve all heard the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, but if you’ve ever tried to buy stock photos to use on an affiliate site, you might want to revise that saying to “a picture is worth a thousand bucks.” 99 times out of 100, affiliates don’t have a thousand bucks to spend on a single image, so what to do?

Regardless of what an image-free Craigslist has managed to do, images are extremely important to most websites. Use the wrong images, you are going to drive away visitors in seconds, use the right images and you’ll see the conversion numbers you’ve been dreaming about.

But where can you get quality photos to use for your affiliate site without breaking the bank? Loren Baker knows, and is willing to tell you in his post 10 Places to Find Free Images Online and Make Your Content More Linkable.

Read up my friends, and if you site’s images leave something to be desired, it might be time for a photo-facelift.

[Big thanks to April for finding this gem.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Video ads. Just typing it leaves me with a feeling of opportunity and skepticism all at once. If you read the research, experts link that online video advertising will be the next big ad platform on the Web – and I bet they’re right. But I also bet that current video ad channels are ineffective in driving direct conversions and are more a branding tool. Not an ideal thing for your average affiliate marketer.

Even with my trepidation in this area, I think forward looking marketers need to start experimenting with this channel sooner rather than later. But getting started means doing something that may be a little outside of most online marketer’s comfort zone – creating a video advertisement.

Even though InsureMe has produced a number of videos in the past, the idea of creating a short video advertisement kind of freaks me out. I mean, what should an ad say? Should we use live action or screen grabs? Should we have music? If so, where can we find something that will sound right but doesn’t have royalties? Is our ad going to look so low-budget that it will scare people off?

Luckily, there are companies sprouting up that are addressing the video creation dilemma. One company of this type that caught my eye today was AdItAll. AdItAll allows you to put together videos using pre-made video clips, audio clips and text effects. The end result is a video ad you have the rights to use for $80.00 to around $400, depending on which elements you use. Here’s their video about how AdItAll works.

Continue reading "Want to Get into Online Video Ads? AdItAll Can Help" »