Shareasale launches "Affiliate Create a video"

It was a rumour and now it's fact. And rather than repeat what's already posted in the ShareaSale forum, click here and read about the great new tool that allows affiliates to create and generate their own video creatives, and link them to multiple merchants throughout the video through the use of cue points. Meaning an affiliate can create a niche focused video covering five related products and promote five different merchants all in one video, darned cool!

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Shareasale ads Video Support

While affiliates continue to look for ways to ad value to a merchants marketing campaign, they are often hampered by a networks limitations on what linking and tracking options are available. Most affiliates find they can only innovate as fast as their network partners allow. While video has been hot for a while and some merchants have had click trackable video available for a couple of years, it's still not easy to support directly within most networks. Most solutions to date have used a work around system to avoid the complications or added expense of using an affiliate networks options.

So it's great to see Shareasale once again step into the breach and release a video tool set to help merchants create and deploy videos for their affiliates to use.

The present system provides a way for merchants to set up videos in Shareasale, but it looks like there will be a system to support affiliate created videos too!

Check out a demo of the system on the SAS Blog.

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Dominating a Niche in Affiliate Marketing

David Wilson made a post over at Social Media Optimization (a blog I frequently visit now that AMWSO has started offering social media consulting services), talking about the approach used by one SEO for reputation management, I felt that many of the same principles can be applied to affiliate marketing toward dominating the search results for a particular niche. Why be satisfied with simply achieving a high search engine placement for particular keywords. Why not aim for owning 5, or 10 slots, and target that consumer from many angles to definitely make a purchase through your affiliate links.

If you have a site or page targeted toward particular key words within a niche, do you have a Squidoo page to compliment your main landing page?  Have you set-up a blog on a different domain, or a blog hosting service? How about a Myspace page, or Hubpage, or Wetpaint Wiki or PBWiki?

Build up some support pages, interlink them, and dominate the search results in a particular niche.

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Linkshare Awards a real blast

Well, just got back from the Linkshare Awards Dinner - Food was awesome at Cyprianis and the networking was even better - these events are far too much fun to be considered work!

2 AMWSO clients were nominated this year, Forzieri for International Merchant and Gaiam for Innovative Merchant, and unfortunately we only won one of them.So Forzieri is a bridesmaid for the second time - but I get the feeling a future Golden Link is on its way for this excellent merchant and its super AM Patrick Goodfellow.On a brighter note, Gaiam as expected won Innovative Merchant of the Year for the use of affiliate coded text links in video - very cool - and it was a thrill to go up with Bill Moran from Gaiam to accept the award on behalf of Pete and James Nardell (the AMWSO AMs for Gaiam). Nice job indeed guys!

Personally I think the Innovative Merchant Award is one of the best prizes to win - it's super to be recognized for creativity and ingenuity! Congrats to all the winners, and indeed all who were nominated - see ya all at the Symposium.

Cheers,

Will H-W

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