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Most times if you want visitors to your site to be able to view a video no matter what device they have, from desktop PC to mobile phone, your best bet will be to embed a YouTube upload. But what happens if you don’t want to trust your video to YouTube? There are many situations where hosting a video privately is preferable. Fortunately there are a couple of special methods you can use that will enable you to embed any video you like in a way that works for nearly every browser or device.

This first method uses Quicktime Pro to optimize and output a folder full of media files that you can upload to your server and then set your web page to use. A script will evaluate the visitor’s browser and device and deploy the best version of the video to match the situation. All this happens behind the scenes without alerting the visitor to the clever trick.

The video below shows a demonstration of the procedure and there are some notes further down to help summarize the process. The video is a fair-sized file, so give it a few seconds to buffer after you hit play. If your connection is a bit shaky it can help to pause the playback until the entire clip has loaded.

To check what version of Quicktime you have: Edit|Preferences|Register
Download link for Quicktime Pro upgrade (or update from within the software).

To process a video for embeding:

1. 1. Open video in Quicktime Pro
2. 2. Move playhead to a suitable frame to represent the video
3. 3. Choose View|Set Poster Frame
4. 4. Choose File|Export For Web
5. 5. Set desired options, paying close attention to the name you use, because this is the last chance to change it easily
6. 6. Set poster frame selection method
7. 7. Proceed with export
8. 8. Upload folder contents (except ReadMe.html) to an identically named folder on server
9. 9. open ReadMe.html
10. 10. copy header script code to head region of the page you plan to add video to
11. 11. edit the embed code (in the second box of ReadMe.html) to ensure that all 3 instances of the .mov and .jpg have the full, correct path
12. 12. add the embed code to the page in the position you want the embedded video to occupy
13. 13. Save, upload, and test

This procedure is not the most user-friendly in existence, but it works quite well and, aside from using a YouTube video, is one of the only methods that seamlessly fulfills the needs of both desktop and mobile video. If you have questions or run into trouble getting it to work leave a comment and I’ll try to help.

Next time, I’ll show another option involving an arcane mixture of Flash video and HTML5…

The many different formatting requirements of mobile browsers make it tough for someone new to mobile marketing to get started. In fact, optimizing your landing pages for mobile traffic is probably the number one trickiest task once you want to move beyond direct-linking mobile offers. It’s possible to limit some of this workload by focusing on just a few device types, but that nearly always means leaving money on the table. You can spend hours researching the various devices and their browsers, their resolutions and capabilities, but this is a very active area of technology. Keeping your finger on the pulse of the shifting flavors of formatting is tough and time-consuming. You can use tools like BeastMobi if you are a Mobile Monopoly member to help you build pages quickly and for short-term landers, that may be the best way to go. Another option is to use Adobe’s line of products to create flash media based sites using Device Central, but Flash is not supported by all devices; in particular, iPhones don’t like Flash.

WordPress Mobile Pack

For longer-term sites and to mobile-ize existing sites, there is a better approach though. Just use WordPress! Using the free WordPress Mobile Pack plug-in and perhaps some specialty themes you can set up your WordPress-based site so that desktop browsers see a full-sized theme and mobile visitors have access to the same posts, images, and other content using a different, custom theme. The plug-in includes a mobile ‘switcher’ that detects the type of device the visitor is using and serves up the content using the appropriate format. You can set a link to let users override this  and view the site using the other theme.

The Mobile Pack also pays attention to possible device-format conflicts and blocks content, such as video or flash files that a device can’t handle. Possibly the best feature, as I mentioned above, is that you can add the plug-in to an existing WordPress site to adapt it retroactively for mobile use.

Issues of Note

The plug-in is pretty fantastic, but it is not a magic wand. If a landing page relies on the visitor being able to view a video, bit of Flash media, or large background image you may still have some work ahead to optimize the site for your specific purposes. While the plug-in ships with several optional mobile themes, you must still configure these to your liking, or find a different mobile-optimized theme that meets your needs.

Many options means more stability for an affiliate marketer. From the offer end, I always seek at least one backup in case the offer I’m running gets scrubbed. A similar offer on the same network is good, but rotating two or three copies of an offer spread over several networks is even better. You may have to contend with different payouts and different network policies, but at least you can usually take off for a day or a weekend without worrying that you’ll be pouring traffic down an empty hole just because you hit some magic threshold and got switched off.

The great thing about mobile PPC is that you can use the same idea on the traffic end of your campaign. With dozens of different competing platforms, scaling a campaign can be as easy as replicating it on more traffic sources. This tactic has the benefit of increasing the traffic you drive to your offers and hopefully it also insulates your campaign from the worst of the various glitches and “speed bumps” a traffic source can inflict. This works for ordinary, non-mobile PPC campaigns as well, but the search engines and other traffic platforms have had years to grow and evolve (some would say ‘mutate’) to the point where you can rarely count on a successful AdWords campaign working well on Bing without a major overhaul.

But where are all these new, relatively undifferentiated mobile traffic platforms? And what, really, are the important differences between them? Here is a list in no particular order. At first it will be just a series of links, but over time I’ll identify each with it’s own posts and share what I’ve learned about them all. This is a great spot for those community-minded readers out there to join in and share their experiences.

In many ways mobile traffic mirrors ‘ordinary’ net traffic, only the formatting of ads and other material is a lot more strict, the potential market size is a lot larger, and mobile users often have expectations that are quite different than those of desktop users. It is important to keep these and other differences in mind when advertising on mobile devices, but it is equally worth remembering the similarities. It might feel like a whole new world when you plan a mobile campaign, but don’t let that force any assumptions. Paid traffic is not the only way to reach mobile users. Properly tagged audio and video iTunes podcasts can be just as effective at driving mobile traffic as paid ads.

When marketers look into the potential of advertising on mobile devices they initially see a huge field of pay-per-click marks with lower competition and lower cost keywords. Working within a tiny screen real-estate is a small price to pay! But don’t forget the expectations of mobile users that align them with other advertising methods. Using a mobile device is often just as interactive and immediate an experience as sitting with a laptop or desktop can be. Consumer demand has driven the cell-phone market to provide larger, brighter screens, high quality audio, and reliable internet access and there are services that have developed along with these trends. To target these customers for free just make sure to give them what they want.

A five to fifteen minute podcast designed to outline a problem and offer a solution makes a great venue for a product advertisment. Offer something of genuine value that matches the interests of your target market and then refer them to your offer. Do you have an Italian cooking website or cookbook to advertise? Offer a recipe in the form of a simple video podcast, or if you are afraid you’ll cut off a finger in a fit of performance anxiety, create a video guide to shopping for the best produce using still images in a slideshow timed to demonstrate your points. Then send them to the offer. Of course audio-only podcasts can work well, too, but remember that mobile devices can go just about anywhere. It doesn’t hurt to echo your audio points on the video and vice versa. You just might catch that customer on the subway who couldn’t hear you properly.

iTunes is not the only place this technique works. Naturally, you can try YouTube as well; many mobile devices can display YouTube videos now. Depending on your content you may have to stick to one platform, however. I talked to another internet marketer who explained that many ad platforms terms of service prevented him advertising his poker training site, but his short instructional podcast video was a hit on iTunes, generating tens of thousands of hits per month for more than six months.

It is true that with this approach your target demographic will be a little less focused and you may get as many or more people on desktop systems viewing your creatives as on mobile devices, but aside from production costs, the traffic is free. What’s more, it will often be a different subset of traffic than can influence with your paid ads, so the two methods won’t interfere with one another.

For a more thorough coverage of specific mobile advertising topics I can recommend the short, intense video tutorial series at Mobile Monopoly. For lots of mobile marketing advice & support, plus loads and loads of other internet marketing techniques, there simply is no better place to learn to earn than the PPC-Coach forums.

This is not one of those silly fear-mongering posts moaning about how tough Google has made life for affiliate marketers. Google still makes it truly easy for diligent, clever people to earn a lot of money. But sticking with only one source of traffic or just a single method of putting advertisements in front of your target market is not a good bet. The motivational image above is there to remind you that the potential is greater than ever to sell to people online before they even sit down at the computer! Certainly some products are going to always sell better on a desktop or laptop, but there are also dozens of cases where you, the marketer, stand a better chance if you put a product in front of a cell-phone user.

The level of demographic targeting one can achieve with mobile traffic is often far more precise than expected on a desktop ad platform, which seems strange, since your target audience is often busy moving about. The cost of similar techniques at this point is much lower for mobile than it is for standard Pay-Per-Click traffic for the same keywords and, depending on the offer you use, the rewards can often be much higher.

Unfortunately, marketing to mobile users is not nearly as simple as using a cell-phone is. There are important details to consider that are different than with run-of-the-mill PPC traffic. It’s important to seek out mobile-compatible offers that work even on the tiny screens of cell-phones. It is also important to know how to properly target the segment you want using cellular advertising platforms.

To learn how to profit from mobile campaigns and lots of other types of PPC traffic, PPC-Coach is always a reliable source for training. Another training option That is excellent, but strictly limited to mobile techniques is the Mobile Monopoly course. It includes step-by-step video training about which networks to join and what offers sell best with which techniques, but perhaps it’s best features are the special techniques, including one totally free method. Adam, the creator of the course also realizes that even with mobile, it is a silly risk to keep all your eggs in one basket.

For those looking for mobile-optimized offers in Western Europe, SponsorMob seems to be a great place to look. They have lots of offers in Switzerland, Germany, and the UK for a start.

Their offer interface is good, although you have to pay attention to what currency belongs to what value. Sometimes payouts are reported in USD right next to EPC values in Euros.

Also, the place to look for offers is under your Account at a link called ‘Codes’. Very mysterious, but also very simple once you know where to look. I am eager to run some of these offers to see what the results are like. Check out this snapshot to see what the interface is like and where the “Codes” link is.

It seems strange that something that’s only been around for three years can seem old and established, but with thousands of members and over a hundred thousand posts, dozens of instructional videos and a whole range of wisdom and experience PPC-Coach.com seems downright venerable.

Now, after a short hiatus, the site has been tidied up and updated. It is back in fighting form as the top spot for PPC-noobs.

Learn more about PPC-Coach.com here: http://billionscorp.com/ppc-coach-com-offers-solid-advice/

WolfStorm Media is a new affiliate network specializing mainly in CPA offers and focussed on assisting new internet marketers.

There are lots of different systems available to build and manage websites, but WordPress is head-and-shoulders above the field. The best feature  of the platform is based on it’s popularity. Because of WordPress’ free, open-source nature, it has been widely adopted and therefore you can normally be sure that any problem you run into with the software has already been encountered and solved (often in several different ways). If you can’t find a feature you want, chances are, there is a plugin that precisely fits your need.

I have often heard it said that WordPress is only good for blogs and “serious” websites always use something else. Sometimes the reasoning behind the argument  is based on how WordPress “can’t handle much traffic.” I find it interesting, if this is the case, that sites such as the New York Times and the entire Cheezburger network run successfully on the system. I think this false notion has developed because free / open-source software can work very well, but free / cheap web hosting services are normally pretty limited.

New York Times error page reveals WordPress sub-structure

Just about every theme that is available for WordPress has at least one spot for ads. Some even have elaborate adspace managers built right into the dashboard. Even so, it seems like every time I pick a spot to place a banner, that’s the one area that’s not set up for it. I have to go in and poke with the theme code to make sure it shows correctly and doesn’t get in the way of other theme functions. And that’s before I even try to add other features like ad rotation (for multiple offers or for split-testing).

Fortunately, there is a free plugin from MaxBlogPress that addresses these issues and more!

These are the same guys, working in a secret lair in Nepal, who developed the only paid plugin I recommend for every WordPress installation: Ninja Affiliate! Max Banner Ads is just as crafty as the Ninja plugin, but it is sort of free. It is “review ware”, so you agree to create a review of the product in order to use it.

Despite being ‘free’ the tool is feature-rich. It includes a tracking module and an ad rotation control so you can alternate banners and still tell which one works the best.

As long as you are checking the Banner Ads plugin out, make sure to grab (and use!) their Ping Optimizer plugin. This tool not only helps keep you up-to-date by managing WordPress’ ping function, it also lets you suspend pinging so you don’t accidentally get blocked for spamming the ping services!