Check out this months featured money maker. 
This post is simple... Just watch this video to find out how videos can be used for your advantage in affiliate marketing.
Ok... so... have you gone crazy trying to click that video yet?
Well, don't worry! You're not crazy... it's fake. It's not an actual video (well it is but not a link to an actual video), just a simple screenshot of one. 
What I did was take a screenshot of what looks to be a video that might interest my visitors (something tech driven) and linked it to saying how it could help them. Instant desire to play the video to see what gems might be hidden inside...
In this case, I linked to nothing at all but in other cases (IE Affiliate landing pages), you could link directly to your affiliate link of a product or service. This works specially well when the landing page you're promoting has a video on it as well (which is a bit rare still).
Sometimes in affiliate marketing tricks like this can help increase your CTR just that much more from your landing page to the offer.
It's simple and yet you'd be surprised how many people are going to click that image because they want to watch video.
BUT, that brings in another point. If your marketing the product or service that needs a bit more explanation (pretty much most things people are going to have to actually spend money to purchase), then this type of tactic might not be for your site.
This is mostly for those sites where you simply want to get the visitor from your page to the affiliate page ASAP. The type of offers you should check for are... lead generation, zip submits, email submits, etc.
It's all about being creative when you are marketing. This type of tactic is certainly not new, but still very effective.
I actually got the idea from TechCrunch. You can see the post where they do this here.
Whenever you see a bigger website doing something, it's generally because it works. So enjoy.
Oh you cheeky little devil.
I’ve seen this used for adsense/adword banner ads. Fake movies that take you to someones lander. Having a banner that looks like a movie will definitely boost your CTR
That coffee shop in the actual vid is pretty freakin kool!
Yeah, but if the user is expecting a video to load when they click the image…and then a video doesn’t load and they’re taken to a sign up form or whatever…I would think this would just piss many people off and actually decrease conversions…
so basically - bait and switch?
Or am I looking at this wrong?
Nice, I thought it worked really well, there was this “click, click” mentality that came over, but then had to read the whole post just to get the effect.
Manipulating the user? Sure that should piss them off enough to not come back or bookmark you. I prefer to create the page for the user and not trick them.
Interesting tactic, I don’t know how well this would work with many offers. I guess some would work nicely but others would have poor conversions. Good idea though.
Remember it doesn’t need to work well for every campaign… just one.
That’s all it takes.
Jonathan, now I can explain to my 12-year old, why the video won’t play!! Cool little trick for specific sites and promotions. Respectfully, Nicholas
cool vid Jonathon. You got me twice : p
Wow, I clicked on that video about 5 times before reading the post. Good information, thanks.
I clicked twice on the image. Yeah, it increases CTR but is also misleading. Whether the visitor is upset enough to not visit your site again, not sure. You’ll just have to test it. Maybe the higher CTR will make the upset users a non-issue. This is something I’m willing to test. I’ve seen a few creative ads promoted via the image ads feature of Google content network. One of those was a download button, another was just a plain ad which looked like a giant button with the words “Click Here to ….”
Great post….
- Gary
a very clever trick, stealing that idea