There is a simple yet clearly defined way to make money through YouTube affiliate marketing. If you don’t know the proper steps, chances are, you will produce videos that are not likely to get a lot of views.
If you want to become successful as an affiliate marketer with YouTube, you have to know the key steps and factors that ensures your success. With the right tactics, you can drive a lot of traffic to the videos on your channel and, in turn, to your website.
YouTube is one of the top traffic websites on the internet. It is constantly in the top 5 of the most popular online destinations. This should not be a big mystery because a lot of people go to YouTube to upload or watch videos about all sorts of subjects.
The subjects range from basket weaving to learning how to build a house to the latest music videos, as well as political commentary. You can pretty much find all these materials and more on YouTube.
Not surprisingly, it gets a huge amount of traffic that tends to circulate within the website. This is what makes it a traffic goldmine. It doesn’t just attract traffic to specific videos. People also click on recommended videos, as well as look for videos that fit their interests.
This is where you come in.
You can upload videos on YouTube to target niche-specific, high-interest traffic and then direct that traffic to your affiliate links. This involves posting up a video and including affiliate links in the description.
If you play this right, you will get highly interested and highly targeted and qualified traffic to your videos. The key is to offer a lot of value.
Please understand that YouTube has an algorithm that directly impacts how visible your videos are on that platform. If your videos don’t get enough likes, comments, or other user engagement, your video is going to be buried.
For example, if you offer videos on Chihuahuas and your videos are very boring, flat, and are otherwise, just glorified slideshows, don’t expect your Chihuahua video to attract a lot of eyeballs. That’s simply not going to happen because there are other more interesting Chihuahua videos out there.
How To Do It
How exactly do you set-up affiliate marketing with YouTube?
The first thing that you need to do is to select the right niche. This is the tricky part. You have to understand that everybody, and his dog it seems, has a YouTube video trying to make money off that video. That’s how bad the competition is on YouTube.
If you are clueless regarding this fact, you’re probably going to set-up the wrong channel, there will be too much competition, and you’re going to fail. The key here is to find a niche that has decent search volume according to Google Keyword Planner Tool.
Use that tool to find keywords that get decent monthly searches. Chances are the people that are plugging these keywords into Google search engine are also looking for videos on these topics on YouTube.
Once you find topics with a decent search volume, the next step is to look at how competitive they are on YouTube. If it turns out that the niche you had your high hopes on already has thousands of videos on YouTube. You’re probably not going to do all that well if you try to target that niche. Look for something that has a lower level of competition.
Finally, your niche has to have affiliate programs offering all sorts of offers for that niche. It doesn’t really help you if you find a niche that has decent search volume and a manageable competition on YouTube, but nobody’s offering any affiliate products for it. There’s nothing for you to advertise on your channel.
You need to nail all 3 of these factors down.
Once you get a clear idea, you then look for existing videos as well as text content in your niche. Figure out what they all have in common and come up with a video that blows away the competition.
Maybe your videos could be longer. Perhaps your videos would have a higher production quality. Maybe you have better descriptions. Whatever the case may be, your material must blow away the competition. There must be a good reason for people to check out your videos instead of your competitors’.
Once you’ve created such a video, you upload it to YouTube and you then target specific keywords in the title of your video, the file name, as well as the description. In your description, include a link to either the affiliate product you’re offering or better yet, your mailing list’s squeeze page.
Give people an incentive to click on the link. Maybe they can get a free booklet or some sort of free video course in exchange for their email. Once you have their email on your mailing list, you can then send the affiliate marketing materials.
The Pros Of YouTube Affiliate Marketing
The great thing about YouTube affiliate marketing is that video is very engaging. It is direct. You can communicate a lot more information through video than through the written work.
Let’s face it. People don’t have very long attention spans. They want to get to the point quickly and it’s much easier to get and retain people’s attentions through videos. You’ll be able to persuade them better and build trust, which can lead them to clicking on the link in your video’s description.
The Cons Of YouTube Affiliate Marketing
The big drawback to YouTube affiliate marketing is niche selection. As I’ve mentioned above, YouTube is very popular so you can bet that there lots of people in the niches that you’re thinking of targeting. You really have to spend a tremendous amount of time and effort picking the right niche with the right completion level and commercial value to make this all work.
Assuming that you’re able to do that, the next step is to come up with high quality videos. This is very hard to do on your own. Everybody’s got all sorts of “hot ideas” and most of these fall flat. The best way is to reverse engineer what other people have done.
If you notice that somebody’s blog post in your niche is very popular according to social media engagement like Facebook likes or Twitter retweets, you might want to use that same topic and come up with an original video for that.
Finally, another drawback to YouTube affiliate marketing is that it costs money to produce high quality videos. Thankfully, by using freelance platforms like Fiverr, you can drastically cut down on your production costs. It’s still not going to be free, but you can at least manage your video production costs.