Let’s face it, affiliate marketing is one of the most popular- not to mention the cheapest and easiest – money making options for anyone looking to the Internet to supplement their income. And yet, most affiliates fail spectacularly, the vast majority failing to ever earn a commission check or even refer a sale.

If you’re an affiliate marketer struggling to eke out a living on the Net, no doubt you’re doubly frustrated by the near daily bombardment of affiliate money making “opportunities” – all seemingly sent by some recently penniless college drop out who now earns millions working a couple of hours a day from an idyllic beachfront mansion.

Truth is, if you’re not making money in affiliate marketing, there’s probably a good reason for it.

Back when I started promoting affiliate products, I failed miserably too.

And I continued to do so until I discovered the key to earning referral income on a regular basis, as well as the trick to a high conversion ratio.

Before I continue, let me put one thing into perspective; while earning income – even making a living from referral programs – is well within your powers, only a select few marketers are going to get to enjoy those huge 4 and 5 figure Clickbank checks featured so prominently on the sales pages of the affiliate marketing gurus.

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Today I’m back to talking about creating videos for your web site – this time using Animoto, an online service that promises to great looking videos quickly and easily.

As you may know, this is something I’ve been looking at fairly intensely over the last few months. In my last post, I showed you the “PRESelling” video commercial I created using the Camtasia software. Today, I am going to take a closer look at a really slick online service that you can use to make professional-looking videos in a matter of minutes.

That service is called Animoto.

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Over the last several months I’ve been talking a lot about video, and how I think it has real potential for small businesses trying to eke out a living on the Net. We know people love videos – heck, eMarketer is reporting 144 million online video viewers in the U.S. ALONE this year. And even better, Google really seems to like them, featuring them prominently in their search results.

One of the issues I’ve been wrestling with is figuring out how to use video efficiently; the videos I’ve created to date (see the “5-7 Day Free Scam” video and the “hCG” video) have been fairly time intensive. Since I wear “many hats” over at UltimateFatBurner.com, I can’t devote huge blocks of time to creating long and fairly complex videos.

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If you haven’t heard, Google has been working on a serious revamping of its search infrastructure (it may have officially launched by the time you read this) which it is calling Caffeine. In webmaster’s circles, this has upcoming revision has caused some major consternation and hand wringing; what happens if Google significantly changes its algorithym and rankings fall? What if they begin to penalize in-pointing links? What if this, and what if that?

Yawn.

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