As everyone discussed the upcoming year in affiliate marketing at Affiliate Summit West 2009, there was a few recurring themes that everyone seemed to agree on in terms of what would be some of the biggest trends in affiliate marketing in 2009. With video increasing conversions by 49% and 10 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube every minute, it’s no surprise that one of the trends that everyone seemed to have their eye on was affiliate video.

Well, in a panel moderated by Marty M. Fahncke, President, FawnKey & Associates, some experts came together to discuss how and where videos are performing best, and offered both affiliates and merchants some insight into how they could both use video to suggested drive better click through and conversions. The panel included:

• Michael Jenkins, CEO/Founder, MarketLeverage
• Melissa Salas, Director of Marketing, Buy.com
• Jonathan Stefansky, EVP Sales and Marketing, Qoof

Each of these panel members offered some great insight into the advantages of video, as well as the strategies and tactics for leveraging it.

Affiliate Video DOs & DON’Ts
Whether you’re an affiliate or a merchant, there are some basic how-to features of an affiliate video that you should know so that you can either product effective video content yourself, or choose wisely what video content to syndicate.First, a video should never exceed 3 minutes. User behavior has demonstrated time-and-time again that attention spans online are low, so you should keep your videos short.

Which brings us to the second tip: entertainment is not the same as selling. If affiliate videos are made to sell, they shouldn’t be entertaining the user for hours on end. That being said, they should be entertaining, but you mustn’t lose site of relating a value-proposition to the viewer and then converting them to click-through and/or buy.

In fact, the third tip is that that value-proposition should be presented to the viewer in the first 15-30 seconds. If the user isn’t enticed to either keep watching or click-through in that time, you will lose them.

As for featuring content on actual pages, you should avoid auto-play with sound. Part of the interactive allure of rich media is that the user is partly in control. You can better engage users, then, by giving them that control. While having videos set to auto-play might help attract the user’s eyeballs, having it muted will both entice them to actually interact with the content and prevent them from being annoyed — especially if they’re at work.

All this being said, just as affiliates and merchants have their respective roles in the sales process, there are also a few additional aspect to online video that are relevant to either only affiliates or only merchants.

Video Lessons for Affiliates
Of course, one of the most important lessons for affiliates is that they should be considering how they can incorporate video into their sites. As Melissa pointed out, Buy.com has seen video increase click-through-rates (CTR) threefold .

While banner blindness is nearly pandemic, users have also acquired a taste for rich media that they can interact with. When they see a video on a page, then, they’re rather likely to click-to-play it.

This doesn’t, however, mean that affiliates need to become video producers. Rather, they should be asking their affiliates for video creatives. This way they don’t have to worry about production costs or bandwidth hosting.

Also, while some affiliates have had positive results by leveraging user-generated-content (UGC) by building communities where users upload their own video product reviews, there are two things that affiliates should be aware of:

1. Merchants are sensitive to UGC for branding and legal purposes: while they can’t punish users on YouTube, it can strain your relationship with them as an affiliate.
2. One negative review can undo the work of many positive reviews: so while affiliates should consider moderating the content that they publish, they should also know that over-moderating UGC can compromise the integrity of the community they built.

Video Lessons for Merchants
Now, if affiliates are going to rely on merchants for video, there are a few things merchants should. The first, of course, is that their software should allow them to both upload video creative and track them. The tracking itself, moreover, isn’t rocket science, and is really just a question of including affiliate, program, and campaign IDs in the video embed code.

It’s important to offer video content, however, because the less time an affiliate spends on creatives, the more time they can put toward generating traffic and promoting the program — i.e. what they do best. Like all things creative, it’s best to offer your affiliate pre-made content. By building up an archive of video content that affiliates can peruse, then, merchants really support their affiliates in targeting consumers with the interactive content that they want.

On the production level, the shelf-life a video is also important. If you are investing in video, you should consider how long that investment is going to yield a return. While some products are updated more frequently, product demos and reviews will need to updated as well. So producing video content with a longer shelf-life not only maximizes the ROI of that content, but reduces production costs by freeing up resources to produce other, additional content.

Merchants should also consider registering their own .tv domain. The web is overwhelmingly text-based today, but that’s slate to change very quickly over the years as users come to expect more and more rich media. Just as user navigate directly to .com URLs today, in the near future, they will start typing in the .tv counterpart just to see if they can find any video content related to your brand. It would be prudent, then, to make sure that you at least have your .tv domain — and redirect it somewhere if you don’t yet have video content.

Affiliate Video in 2009
As Melissa point out during this panel, while 59% of American watched online video in 2007, that number grew to 77% in 2008. So there is clearly a growing demand for online video content.

If the (near) future of the web is going to feature that much more rich media, then it’s essential that the affiliate marketing industry incorporate such content into its strategies. There are considerable incentives for both affiliates and merchant to adopt video, but there are also some best-practices that they should keep in mind while doing so. Video can be an extremely powerful tool in converting users into customers, but if it’s not done right, it can actually deter them from interacting with a site and its products.

Credit: