The PAST:

I remember when someone sent me an email with a very harsh tone because I had dared to use a background image on the ScamFreeZone homepage. Why were they annoyed? Well, it turns out that the graphic I used was a bit on the large side, and this guy was mad at me because I was forcing him to use bandwidth he was paying for to download my background image.

Sound crazy? Well, this was in the 1990’s when most people were on dial-up modems and a lot of people were on “pay as you go” plans. The fact is, I was costing that guy money with my “fancy” background graphic, and I took it down pretty fast. Most of the web was text based, and graphics had to be crunched through special software to shrink them to their absolute smallest size possible.

The PRESENT:

Nowadays, people are happily “surfing” at Megabit speeds on “all you can eat” bandwidth plans and paying about the same for the service as we were back in the Internet “stone age”.

The revolution in access speeds and bandwidth usage was directly responsible for the success of Youtube. I’m certain that many, many people had thought of using video online, but the bandwidth costs were just too high. People on dial-up modems wouldn’t even be able to watch movies in real-time anyway, so no-one bothered to create a Youtube. Basically, YouTube was mainly successful because of the timing. It wasn’t WHAT they did, but WHEN they did it.

Now you can see many successful marketers using video. Heck, I used it with my wife during our recent product launch. But I know that video can be used much more professionally, and look a lot better… I just didn’t know how to make “professional” videos.

Fortunately, a guy called Dave Kaminski let me know about his Web Video University and let me take a look at the movies. Wow. My jaw hit the floor. Dave absolutely knows this web-video stuff inside out. In just a few short movies he had explained to me the “ins and outs” of professional lighting, audio, using green-screen and how to make your own teleprompter in under an hour.

It’s been a long time since watching a few short movies has given me such a huge amount of quality information. I strongly suggest that you sign up for Dave’s movie-based course. Even if you don’t want to present movies, you can use the information he gives you about adding special effects, music and voice-overs to create movies that you don’t even appear in… and you can use those movies to make money… which I’m getting to…

The FUTURE:

Video has moved into the mainstream.

Video is a wave that you can ride to the bank… and I’ll explain how…

If you take Dave’s course, you’ll be able to create professional-looking movies. That’s important because amateur movies were acceptable while everyone was fooling around with the concept of creating movies for the Internet. But, just as that guy got annoyed with my large background image back in the 1990’s, people will start getting annoyed with amateur movies… the time of bad audio and no special effects is ending.

My other strong suggestion is that you go directly to Customer Review Videos and sign up. There is a $20 per month discount if you sign up during April 2008 and use the coupon code “april2008″. At Customer Review Videos you can build webpages around your videos… add Adsense, eBay, Digg, Amazon, Google Search and many other links to your pages with just a few mouse clicks. The movies that you make will be embedded in the pages that you build, and you can monetize those pages in many different ways.

Can you see the power of this system?

You can make a quick *professional-looking* video using the information from Dave’s course, upload your movie and then log in to your Customer Review Videos account and with a few clicks create a webpage around your movie complete with many different monetization methods.

Using the two strategies in concert… both the professional video creation and the service that Customer Review Videos provides to wrap web-pages around your videos is an excellent way to break into the affiliate marketing business.

Although I don’t like hype, I do need to let you know that the $20/month discount at Customer Review Videos is only good until the end of April, and Dave’s course runs monthly, so if you haven’t grabbed a place by the end of the first week of May, you’ll have to wait until June before the doors open again.

What do you think? Do you like the idea of making and monetizing videos? Do you see the power of bringing together professional movie creation with a simple “point and click” system for monetizing movies? What about the idea that the biggest profits are made when you see and act upon a new opportunity? Is Future Marketing Profits the way to go?

There’s also an interesting interview you can listen to, or read the transcript, here and part two is here.

Today I jumped to the Pajama’s Media homepage and saw an article about the future of computers, especially how it relates to Moore’s Law (that computing power doubles every two years).

And what does the author mention, amongst other things? The Kindle, as representative of Moore’s Law.

Thinking about the future, and what’s “coming down the line”, will enable you to position your online business’ marketing efforts to maximize your profits… which is what this blog is all about… Future Marketing Profits.

Keeping an eye on the discussions happening online now that predict what could happen in the future is the key to your “first mover” advantage.

Amazon launched the Kindle, their “wireless, portable reading device” and are promoting it heavily on their website homepage. Not only that, but they also have a searchable database of products available to purchase and download to a Kindle wirelessly.

Marlon has jumped on this potential revenue source and has listed some of his product in the database, with very little other competition (that’s your “future profits advantage” right there!)

Not only that, but Marlon has created a report explaining how fellow merchants can get their own products listed in the Kindle database and is selling that report.

As an interesting marketing angle, Marlon has got his new assistant, Santos, to create videos explaining about the Kindle marketing opportunity in two different videos and is hosting a competition at his blog asking people what the main difference between the two videos is. Marlon says, “The first, the 21st, and the 54th person who correctly posts the glaring difference between the 2 videos on my blog wins a free copy of the Info-Product Dashboard.” So far there are 39 comments.

Update: Marlon is now giving away the Kindle report as a bonus with any of his other products.

Shrewd move, Marlon.