As our regular readers will know here at the World Wide Web Gurus we are very excited about the possibilities offered by videos if you are trying to start an internet business with very little money, or indeed no money whatsoever.  Up until now we have been concentrating on video hosting services supported by TubeMogul, particularly YouTube and Revver.

However earlier this week Viddler announced the release of their WordPress video plugin .  Since Viddler also offer a revenue sharing model similar to Revver we thought we would take a much closer look at what the Viddler service has to offer.  To find out what we discovered take a look at this video: 

To summarise our first impressions are that the Viddler service is worthy of a lot of further investigation.  Since we recommend beginner internet marketers join the Amazon associate program, the fact that Viddler have partnered with Amazon to offer revenue sharing to their video publishers is of great interest to us.

As mentioned in the video, the Viddler plugin for WordPress is supposed to allow you to record a video comment to this post direct to your webcam, as long as you already have a Viddler account.  Feel free to experiment with this new service, and let us know how well it works for you.

P.S. The following day (February 29th - most auspicious) Viddler suddenly appeared on my TubeMogul dashboard.  Here is TubeMogul's take on the occasion, and here is Viddler's.  We get a bit closer to Video Heaven!

P.P.S. If you do venture over to Viddler and you're a long time follower of the Open Source movement like me you might like to check out their video conversation with Jonathan Schwartz (CEO of Sun) and Mårten Mickos (now ex CEO of MySQL) about Sun's acquisition of MySQL.

As our regular readers will know, here at WWW Gurus we like to keep close tabs on our position in the natural search rankings.  In the course of this research I stumbled upon a wonderful blog post entitled Affiliate Video Brander - What a piece of …

Since reading it I've been wondering what Dave had in mind for those dots in his title.  Maybe you've been asking yourself that question too?  To try and settle the issue once and for all I've set up our very own Affiliate Video Brander poll, which you can see over to the right of this post.  Please cast your vote and let us know your opinion on this contentious matter.  We'll keep you updated as the voting progresses.

Unfortunately the Internet Marketers Anonymous web site seems to be having some connectivity issues at the moment.  Who knows, maybe another marketer with the same host is having a big launch today?  Nonetheless I urge you to keep on trying if you can't get through at first.  The post is the best thing I've read on the internet for a very long time.  In case you have problems accessing the site, here is the video from YouTube that led me there:

On to the results of my natural search research.  Currently our YouTube video about Affiliate Video Brander has moved up to number 5 on a Google Video search for affiliate video brander.  YouTube limits videos to 10 minutes duration, so we have uploaded a longer version of the video to Google Video itself.  After being processed at Google the quality is less than wonderful, but nevertheless it is ranked at number 7.  Dave's video is ranked at 8.

This may be slightly outside our current remit,  but in another capacity I just bought the recently relaunched Affiliate Video Brander (Wealth Warning! - That is an affiliate link). Imagine, if you will, that our reviews are admired throughout the Internet Marketing fraternity for their honesty and thoroughness, and that we were offered a review copy free of charge by Eric Holmlund and Michael Nicholas.  Here is our verdict:

Affiliate Video Brander Sucks

We created a video to demonstrate why we say this so bluntly.  Filmed partly on location at the Traffic Heaven Secret Headquarters, and partly screen capture, here is the first rush:

I don't know about you, but for the last few days my inbox has been bombarded by people promoting Affiliate Video Brander. I wonder if any of them have actually tried using it? Now I'm also getting emails from marketers enticing me with all the wonderful extra bonuses I'll get if I buy from them, as long as I can wait until January 30th, when everyone who has bought resale rights is allowed to start selling their own version of the product. 

The resale rights licence states that "WHILE THIS SOFTWARE HAS BEEN TESTED AND PROVEN TO RUN ACCURATELY, IN THE UNLIKELY EVENT OF ANY USER OR COMPUTER INCOMPATIBILITY ISSUES, THE RESELLER ASSUMES COMPLETE LIABILITY" so I guess that means the buck doesn't stop on Eric or Michael's desk after January 29th.  It will be very interesting, not to mention entertaining, to see how this one develops over the next few days and weeks.

P.S. I clicked the "Publish" button about 10 minutes ago.  This page is currently ranked 114 in the Google natural search rankings for the keyphrase affiliate video brander and is at number 20 for affiliate video brander review.  Our new YouTube video is ranked at number 6 on a Google Video search for affiliate video brander

The sequel to our Traffic Heaven video is now available on YouTube (or just scroll down a bit to see it!).  We have given it the title "Traffic Heaven is in Your Mind".

There are a couple of reasons for this.  In our efforts to be on the first page of Google for our own brand name we find ourselves competing with lots of sites selling the 1968 first album by the British "psychedelic rock" group Traffic - Heaven in is Your Mind.  This came as something of a surprise to me because in Britain the LP was entitled Mr. Fantasy on its UK release in December 1967!  The album only achieved cult status in the US at the time, but the original Rolling Stone review was prescient in declaring the album "one of the best from any contemporary group".

The second reason is that, as regular readers of our blog will know, in our view success at internet marketing is largely in your mind.

The video includes more musings from the Traffic Heaven secret headquarters on how Frank Kern managed to get a completely free trial to Traffic Geyser to promote the relaunch of his Mass Control marketing system, and a plea for Michael Koenigs to give us one too. After all, our need is much greater than Frank's! We also entertained a completely unexpected visitor. Take a look:

Many thanks to Liz for allowing us to include the conversation we had about the absurdities of starting a business with no cash on top of a hill at Christmas.

We have now left a vast quantity of largely inaudible footage on our cutting room floor.  (Sign up on the right if you'd like to see some of it).  The video is now definitely entitled "Traffic Heaven", and you can see the first cut below.  One or two more edits still need to be made and we need to add music,  maybe also a few more English subtitles for the hard of hearing!  Hopefully you can now get the basic idea though.  Feel free to let us know what you think by adding your comments at the bottom of this page.

On the traffic front we are starting to get a trickle from the Google natural search results. For example somewhat unexpectedly, since we are not explicity targeting the term, we are already at number 2 in the Google rankings for the keyphrase handycam connection.  For the terms we are targeting we have now risen to 9 for traffic geyser michael koenigs (ahead of both Eric Holmlund and Joel Comm ), and 61 for just traffic geyser.  We are still at number 1 for traffic geyser heaven and after starting at 60 four days ago we are now ranked 37 for the title of the video: Traffic Heaven.  For Secret Classroom we have had a slight setback.  Google has got a bit confused and now has us ranked at 147 for a Russian translation of our blog which no longer exists!

I arrived in Amsterdam with the mini DV tape in my Sony Handycam full of exciting stuff, only to discover that I couldn't get the footage off the tape and on to a computer!  Here is a YouTube video entitled "Windmills from Amsterdam" which shows you our adventures whilst trying to get hold of the correct sort of firewire cable.

Monday dawned much brighter than the afternoon before.  Unfortunately there was no way to reshoot the "Secret Headquarters" episode of Traffic Heaven (we've decided to drop the Geyser from the title) because I had to jump on a plane to Amsterdam, the capital of Holland.  I took my trusty Sony Handycam with me, and you will find below the edited highlights of my journey from Bristol to Schiphol Airport.

Many thanks to Tom and Lauren for letting us include the conversation we had about the internet and viral marketing on the video, and to Dawn for operating the Handycam for one sequence..