Practically everyone interested in entrepreneurship and making a passive income has heard about the lucrative opportunities available with affiliate marketing, but not everyone knows how to make it work for them.
The most common path for most newcomers is fairly straightforward:
- Start a blog
- Create awesome content
- Generate lots of traffic to the blog
- Make tons of money off that traffic
But given that the blogosphere is such a saturated market with countless content creators competing for everyone’s attention, few aspiring affiliate marketers make it past step 2.
So the question on many people’s minds is: how do you get past that bottleneck? Do you write better content? Do you network to take advantage of other people’s audiences?
Both of those are potentially good alternatives, but what I did was different while still being just as lucrative.
I started a YouTube channel.
Why Starting a YouTube Channel Helped Grow My Affiliate Sales
Starting a blog is a great way for getting lots of traffic, especially if you understand how to utilize search engine optimization (SEO) to bring users to your website, but it’s absolutely not the only way to grow your business.
One way or another, you’ll need to get traffic if you want to make commissions on the products you promote on your site.
Although there are ways to design your site that makes it easy for visitors to like what they see, no amount of wix tutorials is going to help you attract new users.
You should understand that Google owns YouTube, and this is partly why their search engines work in fairly similar ways. If you use SEO tools like Ahrefs, you’ll notice that their keyword tools give you the option to study keywords from Google and keywords from YouTube.
Most people who have blogs take advantage of Google’s traffic of approximately 5.6 billion searches a day. However, there’s still a surprisingly small number of bloggers who create YouTube channels to make use of YouTube’s billions of searches and views per day.
I’m glad to say that I’m among the few who jumped on the YouTube bandwagon and reaped the rewards of doing so. But having a YouTube channel isn’t enough. To help you replicate my success, take these 4 tips on how to grow your affiliate sales with your own YouTube channel.
Tip #1: Make Your Recording Space Stand Out
Make videos that include you and your recording space in the background. It should be a priority for you to make your studio space look amazing things like cool lights, artwork, and decorative soundproofing materials.
People will want to return to you because they’ll think, “Wow, ok, this YouTuber is actually putting their all into this.” They’ll see that you take your channel seriously and that visible effort will, in turn, help them take you seriously.
A key thing to pay attention to when setting up your recording space is lighting and sound. Great lighting will help make you look stunning, and taking the care to soundproof your recording space will help keep your voice crystal clear.
Tip #2: YouTube SEO
Get ahead of your competition by taking the time to understand YouTube SEO. This will help you become discoverable to users. Even something as simple as looking at the keywords you want to target before you begin recording will have a significant impact on discoverability.
The best keyword tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and KW Finder all cost money. If you’re short on cash, you can use free tools like Keywords Everywhere, Google’s Keyword Finder, and even Niel Patel’s UberSuggest.
Tip #3: Get Your Thumbnails Right
Having good YouTube video thumbnails is a huge one. You should make sure they’re interesting enough to catch the eye. You also want to consider what types of images are going to get the most reactions from people—human faces in images are good for that.
Having a human face in your video thumbnails is especially important if you’re an educational brand because your audience wants to learn from a real person, and graphics just don’t quite cut it in that regard.
Tip #4: Call-to-Action
Your fans want your channel to grow, but oftentimes they just don’t realize how to do it. Liking your videos is a plus, but even better than that is subscribing.
Give your viewers a call-to-action to subscribe to your channel, either in the beginning, end, or both. Sometimes I mention it in the first minute of the video before jumping into the topic they came to learn about.
If you get enough subscribers, YouTube will actually put your video on their trending page, which can have a serious impact on your channel. One of my videos got put on trending and I got 50,000 subscribers in a single day from it!
You don’t want to annoy your listeners with too many CTAs, but it’s important that you make them aware of how they can support you. You can also use CTAs to promote products you affiliate with.
I mentioned before that getting a subscribe is better than getting alike, but I don’t want to downplay the importance of getting alike. Youtube’s algorithm loves when people like a video or comment within the first 24 hours of the video’s release.
Get On YouTube Before It Becomes a Saturated Platform
Part of my success with getting affiliate sales from YouTube can be attributed to my understanding of SEO, of presentation, and from the valuable content I give to my viewers, but it was more than that.
It was also because I was taking advantage of a platform that hasn’t yet become saturated. If you’ve been paying attention, however, you’ll have noticed that more and more content creators are joining the platform every single day, and it’s getting harder to stand out from the crowd.
If you want to replicate the success I had in affiliate sales, you’ll need to get on the platform sooner than later.
What stops many content creators from getting on the platform is that they don’t know how to make videos. While that may be true, it’s also true that they can learn how to make awesome videos that attract thousands of likes and subscribers, and you can learn that too.
