Our winner is Jonathan Jacques, creator of a popular FIFA 12 video game guide sold through ClickBank. Selling his guide on ClickBank has enabled Jonathan to fund his college education, as he explains in his great video.

Watch Jonathan’s winning video here!

For his winning submission, Jonathan will receive a $5000 cash prize along with a private coaching session with online marketing guru and ClickBank Premier client Allen Baler.

We’d also like to thank our second and third place winners, Theresa Stevens and Jacob Hiller. Choosing a winner was very tough, as they and many other people submitted creative, inspiring videos showing how ClickBank contributed to their online success.

Watch Theresa’s video here!

Watch Jacob’s video here!

Thanks to everyone who entered! We are proud to have been part of your digital dreams, and look forward to making many more come true for you in the future.

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1. The Nuts and Bolts Guide to Great Online Video
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Today, customers are rejecting overproduced video content. Why? Because they realize that it’s usually an advertisement. Nowadays customers prefer authenticity above ads. That’s why video has become such a strong tool in our marketing tool belt.

Whether you’re an affiliate or a vendor, you need to be using video to help you accomplish your goals. Here’s a video put together by online video expert Jim Kukral that will give you some insight and inspiration for making your own videos.

You can check out Jim’s Online Video Toolkit 2.0 product here, and you can become an affiliate for it here. Yes, powered by ClickBank.

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We’ve talked a lot recently about the emergence of online video in affiliate marketing, and how powerful it can be for selling or promoting digital products. It seems like everyone’s using it and having great success, but we’re aware that a lot of people still don’t know where to get started with creating, filming, editing, and uploading online video to their Pitch Page or affiliate page.

To help make online video marketing easy and accessible for everyone, we asked long-time ClickBank vendor and web video expert Gideon Shalwick to make a series of videos for ClickBank affiliates and vendors who need help getting started, or want to make their videos more professional and effective.

He created 3 easy-to-follow videos, each under 10 minutes, that cover extremely important topics like what camera, software, and equipment to use, how to plan and write the content for your video, how to make it look professional, and much more! If you’ve wanted to get into the profitable world of online video but don’t know where to start, these videos will show you exactly what you need to know.

Video 1 – Equipment you need for creating high quality online videos quickly

Video 2 – Preparing for the recording and planning out your content

Video 3 – Recording & editing your video, and uploading it to your site or Pitch Page

These videos contain lots of great information and detail, so be sure to check them out! Gideon regularly updates his online video marketing blog with the tips, tricks, and techniques he’s used to succeed in Internet marketing, so it’s a great resource for anyone looking to make a splash with online video. He also encouraged anyone who still has questions to leave comments on the videos and he’ll help answer them. You can also leave comments here with any additional video-related topics you’d like to see in the future.

Thanks Gideon!

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Many years ago when I started marketing online with the usual web-page sales letters, I was living in fear that one day everything would move to video. If that happened, would the little guy still be able to compete with big companies and their video budgets?

Fast forward to 2010, and the answer is an emphatic YES.

There’s an explosion of homemade videos online. YouTube has become the 3^rd most-visited website in the world. Video gets higher conversion rates and builds a deeper relationship than print ads. But the really exciting news is that it’s easier than ever to make videos at home.

Cameras are cheap. You can buy a Flip or Kodak Zi8 for under $200 and record great HD videos at home. Keynote and PowerPoint make it easier than ever to create beautiful screen-casts. Tools like Camtasia and Screenflow make it easy to capture your videos and put them online in the cloud using a service like Amazon S3. You can then play them back with tools like Flowplayer or JW Player.

There are more sources of great content than ever before, including royalty-free music, photographs, and videos on sites like iStockPhoto.com.

But even with all of these tools, not all videos are created equal, and not all videos convert. So what are the keys that will guarantee your video is a success? To achieve big video profits, I recommend the following:

1. Great Script: Take time to sit down and write a script for your video. You might be a great narrator, but you need to think of your video as your spoken sales letter or sales presentation. A great script with a killer intro makes a huge difference in whether your video converts into sales.

2. Interesting Hooks: Make interesting promises and deliver on them, or have nice visual effects and/or music. Anything that can hold people’s attention is worth its weight in gold in these times of multitasking and short attention spans.

3.  Keep It Clean: Make sure to remove the noise from your audio recordings and use image enhancing effects for your photos. You want clear sound and sharp contrasts. It doesn’t cost any money to do this, just a bit of time. It will really separate your video from the mass of videos out there and give you that professional edge.

4. Easy to Read Text: Make your text high-contrast, so it stands out against the background of your video. Big, black, bold text is a good rule of thumb, unless black won’t show up against your background.

5. Reasonable File Size: Resize your video to be between 500×300 and 800×600. Any less than that and the video is too small; more and it’s too big. When compressing your video, use the H.264 compression codec with the compression settings set to “best” to ensure a good file size.

6. Promote Other Video Products: As obvious as this may sound, it’s best to use video to promote an offer that uses video on its sales page too. Having a nice video presell as an affiliate and sending people to a non-video offer can kill conversions. The feeling of continuity and flow is important.

7. Always Be Testing: This is true of any selling or promotional techniques, and it holds for video too. Don’t get complacent, and always fine tune your scripts and videos. You can always improve your conversion rate and make more profits.

About the Author

Benjamin Ravaru is a ClickBank vendor who has used video to sell and promote ClickBank products, including his own product Xocoslim. For an example of his video tips in action, click here.

Take a look at these related posts:

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ClickBank vendor Jeff Mulligan has created a very useful video showing how he increased sales for one of his ClickBank products over 22% by using a simple technique that only takes a few minutes to put in place. There are no tricks or gimmicks here: Jeff’s technique just increases customers’ willingness to buy by increasing their level of trust and making sure they know what to expect throughout the sales process.

This is especially important when you send customers to an order form that looks different from your main website. Although this video is specifically geared toward ClickBank vendors, there’s no reason affiliates who have their own website couldn’t try it too, by showing a screenshot of the landing page they’re sending customers to next. As Jeff states, you should always be testing. So if you’re an affiliate, give this technique a try and leave a comment to let us know if it helped your sales.

How to Boost ClickBank Sales Video

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We’ve just released a new “how to” video for ClickBank publishers, which shows how to create a customer-facing ad that will be used in our forthcoming ad platform and will soon be included in our XML feed. This video walks through the process of creating an ad step-by-step, and also includes information on our quality and content guidelines, plus some tips on writing effective ad copy. Check it out!

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In the spirit of our earlier blog post about using video to promote your business, we’ve taken our own advice and plan to regularly release new videos on topics such as how to get started with ClickBank, how to take advantage of advanced ClickBank features and techniques, and much more!

Our first video walks beginners through signing up for a ClickBank account. We plan to translate this video into other languages soon, to help recruit more ClickBank publishers and affiliates in other countries. Feel free to share and embed this video wherever you’d like, since helping people join ClickBank is good for all of us!

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Posted by: Michael Poston, Product Manager

Now more than ever, users are accessing the Internet with high speed connections, which invites the use of rich media. SOHO (Small Office Home Office) businesses have discovered the following sure-fire ways Internet video can improve their customer experience:

Product Demonstration
For years, publishers have looked for ways to clearly demonstrate their product and articulate its value proposition. This exciting new media allows you to quickly go through the whole process, screen-by-screen, showing the product “in action,” overcoming some of the limitations of words and pictures. Creating a video to demonstrate your product can be the tipping point that convinces a visitor to buy. For example, if you can show a technology-averse visitor that your product is easy enough for even a beginner to use, you’ll overcome one of their biggest objections to buying.

Confidence Building
Since the early days, when Internet purchasing was a new idea, customers have sided with companies they trust when making their purchases. Much of this decision is based on confidence, credibility, and being able to identify with the creator of the product/service. Video allows you to remove barriers by inspiring confidence and putting a personable face on the product, ultimately winning customer trust and closing more sales.

Problem Solving
Not only is it a good idea to use video to sell your product, but it will also pay dividends with customer service. For example, creating a video that walks customers through resolving a very common customer service request could save your organization money and time. Things that are difficult to describe with words and pictures are much easier to express in video format!

Marketing Materials
Lastly, if you upload product demonstration videos to YouTube or other video sites, affiliate marketers can use them to help promote your products by embedding them in their site, which will save you money on marketing. Publishers with products that can be easily demonstrated by video should start making videos available to their affiliate partners!

The time to wonder if video will change your business has passed; it is time to leverage this powerful new media!

Happy selling, friends!

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