One day, while creating a video where I mentioned an affiliate product, I thought… how do I make this affiliate recommendation stronger? How can I encourage people to click through to my affiliate link?

Photo credit: Rodolfo Clix

Well, one way is to make your video automatically jump to the affiliate URL after it finishes playing. If you use Camtasia, this can be done very easily. But this is not always ideal either because I don’t want to piss people off by automatically sending them to another site and sometimes, I want them to stay here on my blog.

Then I started to add a clickable hot spot at the end. Again, very easily done in Camtasia but I’d have to wait till they finish watching which may never happen. Then, while watching TV one night, I noticed the promos they use now a days that are at the bottom of the screen or at the corner. That’s what I want. How do I do that?

Here are some possible solutions. Not quite as slick as the mini commercials you see on TV but better than nothing.

FLV Hosting’s Free Ads Player – Yes it’s free, but don’t expect support. There’s none. It looks pretty straight forward but I couldn’t get the ad to come up. It’s possible because I don’t have a flash server which I believe is required for this to work.

Mini FLV Player with ad system – I found this on FlashDen (great site by the way) and it looks promising. Not sure how easy it is to set up but will put it on my short list to try.

LongTail Video – This is one way to monetize your video, not with your own ads unfortunately. Think Adsense for videos. Not what I’m looking for but am listing here in case that’s what you want.

Tic Tac Ti – Much like LongTail Video. Don’t think you can put your own ads which is what I prefer for affiliate recommendations.

Revver – You publish the videos there, allow ads if you want, ad revenue is split between you and Revver. Easy to use but no ability to put your own ads and very little control over the ads.

Ripe Web FLV Player – Stumbled on this on a forum and a bit weary. But it looks promising and at the moment pretty affordable too. Add your own ads before, in the middle or after video runs.