With more than 2.6 billion monthly active users and counting, YouTube is one of the best places there is to promote affiliate offers. However, YouTube affiliate marketing has its own set of rules and challenges.
In this article, we’ll be covering what are the advantages of YouTube to promote your affiliate offers and will share each step you must take to create a successful affiliate marketing business on it.
If your goal is to generate $200 a day or more with YouTube affiliate marketing, stick with us for what’s coming.
Table of Contents
What are the pros & cons of YouTube affiliate marketing?
Generally speaking, it’s easier to rank high and attract organic visitors on YouTube than on Google and other search engines.
This means that, by creating a good channel, you’ll be able to generate a decent amount of search traffic faster than with blogging, for instance.
In addition, YouTube videos appear in Google’s search results as well, allowing you to attract viewers from both sites. Google even displays videos at the top of the first page. Written content, on the other hand, only appears in search engines.
Like social media, YouTube is also one of the best places to create engagement with your audience.
Because people access it often for different reasons, you’ll have the chance to get your content in front of them a lot more frequently than if they had to visit your site to see it.
And if they enjoy your videos, there’s a good chance they’ll subscribe to your channel and get notified when you upload new content. And, even if they don’t, YouTube will still suggest more videos from you after they’ve shown interest in your content.
The biggest downside of YouTube affiliate marketing is that creating quality videos takes more work and is harder to outsource than articles and blog posts.
But, while you ideally want to use a combination of more than one channel, you can certainly build a successful affiliate business with YouTube alone or make it your main pillar if you take the right steps.
How to make $200 a day with YouTube affiliate marketing
Creating a successful YouTube affiliate marketing business consists of four steps:
- Picking a niche
- Planning your content
- Creating your videos
- Growing your channel
But before we move forward, let’s establish one principle: to succeed in YouTube affiliate marketing or any form of affiliate marketing, you must build trust with your audience.
Trust is what will make them follow your advice, buy from you again in the future, and engage with your channel in ways that tell the YouTube algorithm that you produce valuable content and should get in front of more people.
If you follow all the steps below but don’t offer content that makes people want to hear more from you or give them poor advice, this won’t work.
Now that we have that clear, let’s get started.
Step 1: Pick a niche
Your YouTube affiliate marketing journey starts with picking a niche.
Focusing on a niche positions you as a subject matter expert and allows you to focus on one audience and create more and better content for it, increasing your chances for higher engagement.
Your channel can focus on a specific product, like smartphones and tablets, or a specific audience that you could sell more than one product to, like adrenaline-seeker travelers.
What is a good niche for Youtube Affiliate Marketing?
Ideally, you want to work with a niche that has a good balance between high demand and low competition, many high-paying affiliate products to promote, and a topic you have a genuine interest in and knowledge of.
To find the perfect niche for you, start by thinking of all your hobbies and things you’ve worked with in the past, and come up with a list of possible niches that you can think of that relate to them.
Then, browse through affiliate networks and brand sites to find out if they offer many high-paying affiliate offers to promote.
Finally, do some research to find out if there’s a good balance between supply and demand in your favor on them.
By doing that, you should find at least a couple of niches that fit those three requirements.
The more you narrow down, the easier it is to be seen as the #1 expert by a specific audience. But be careful to not go too deep and end up in a segment with very few customers.
And don’t forget to pick a niche that you’ll enjoy working with, because you’ll be spending a lot of time creating quality content if you want to create a successful YouTube affiliate marketing business.
To learn more about this read our blog post on how to pick a niche and find out what are the best niches.
Step 2: Plan your content
Start brainstorming potential topics by using your knowledge and by researching other similar channels and the news in your industry.
Once again, you’ll get the most success by exploring topics that a lot of people are searching for but that not many channels are covering. You can find that through keyword research, which is easy to do with the right tools, but more on that later.
To help you come up with headlines and outlines, think about the different content formats typically used.
Here’s a tip: don’t try to reinvent the wheel. There are video formats that are proven to work well across industries, no matter how cliché they might seem.
Let’s go over some of them.
Product reviews & comparisons
These are probably the most popular formats for YouTube affiliate marketing as they allow you to talk about the products you’re promoting without pitching them directly, positioning yourself as a subject matter expert who’s just sharing their personal impressions instead.
Not only that, but they allow you to highlight details of those products and what they can do for your audience in ways you aren’t able to do normally, making a more compelling point for people to buy them.
But don’t make your products look perfect. People are aware of affiliate marketing and talking openly about their downsides and saying good things about the competition will increase engagement and trust.
Here is an example of a review style video that has generated thousands in affiliate commissions:
‘How to’ videos
Think about the problems that the products solve and create videos addressing these problems.
Not all tutorials have to be aimed at promoting a product. Covering other issues that are relevant to your audience can help drive to your channel more people that could become buyers later.
Listicle videos
Let’s say you’re promoting an online Spanish course. You could create a video with the ‘Top 6 Online Spanish Courses in 2022’ and add yours in the middle.
This is another great way to highlight your product’s features and show how it stands out against competitors in a non-salesy manner.
Q&As
In your videos, ask viewers to leave their questions in the comments and tell them that you’ll be shooting a Q&A video answering some of them.
This will not only generate great content that strongly resonates with your audience by answering their direct questions but will also make your channel rank higher because of the comments, as YouTube likes channels that stimulate engagement in its platform.
Interviews
Use this to borrow someone else’s credibility and audience and generate great content for your channel.
You can also use this format to collaborate with other youtubers, which can be a great strategy as we’ll see forward.
Here is an example of collaboration:
Once you’ve brainstormed some ideas, create a content calendar to keep track of what to create and when to upload it.
And one final tip: YouTube likes consistency. So, instead of uploading five videos at once and then disappearing for a month, schedule one video every Tuesday for the next five weeks.
Step 3: Create your Videos
If you don’t want to be the face of your videos check out our post on Synthesia AI.
Once you have a niche and a content calendar and your YouTube affiliate marketing strategy is planned, it’s time to start creating your videos.
When doing so, make sure to follow these best practices:
Optimize for organic search
To optimize your videos to rank higher, run keyword research to identify keywords and phrases with high search volume and low competition levels. We’ll talk about some free tools that you can use for that down below.
Once you know which keywords to use, make sure to add them to your titles and descriptions.
Finally, YouTube tends to rank longer videos higher as they provide more content and make people stay longer on its platform. I usually aim for 10 – 20 mins. These videos can then be cut into YouTube shorts.
Add Great Thumbnails
Thumbnails are those images that you see attached to each video, and they might make the difference in whether someone decides to watch them or not.
You can create them easily using a free thumbnail maker like FotoJet, Adobe, or Canva. I use Adobe Express.
Thumbnails drive attention and make your videos more appealing to click on. Besides, you can add some text with spoilers to make people even more interested in watching them without having to write long titles.
When creating thumbnails, make sure to include large headings, cool images, and attractive colors.
Divide your videos into chapters
You’ll make it a lot easier for viewers to find what they’re looking for in your videos by dividing them into chapters or use timestamps. These allow people to see what each part of the video covers by hovering over the navigation bar.
Remember that people have a short attention span. Making it easier for them to find what they’re looking for will enhance their experience and increase their chances of viewing more content from you.
Besides, people can often see in the search results whether each video has chapters or not and what subtopics they cover.
Showing them that your videos cover exactly what they’re looking for and that they’ll be able to easily find it sharply will increase their chances of watching them.
Add captions
Captions allow people to watch your videos when they can’t hear them, like when they’re out in public places and don’t have earbuds with them.
Not only that, but you can also add captions in other languages, giving you access to a global audience.
You can add them easily by entering your YouTube Studio account, clicking on Subtitles on the left menu, clicking in Add Language, selecting your language, and, under subtitles, clicking Add. You can also edit them if you need.
Add end screens
End screens are an opportunity to promote other videos from you and ask your audience to share, like, subscribe, and follow you on social media.
Besides, they make your channel seem more professional.
Here’s an example:
Like thumbnails, they’re easy to create with free tools like Adobe Spark, Canva, and Shappa, which usually come with pre-built templates.
Step 4: Grow Your Channel
Once you’re constantly uploading great videos to your channel following the best practices, it’s time to focus on growing your channel.
This is done in two ways: by attracting and retaining viewers.
Besides optimizing for organic search as we talked, here’s how else you can do that:
Get your audience to engage somehow
That includes subscribing to your channel, liking, sharing, or commenting on your videos.
When people engage a lot with your channel, it tells YouTube two things:
- You’re producing valuable content
- Your content makes people more active on their platform, generating more revenue for them
Besides, when people subscribe to your channel, they’ll get notified whenever you release a new video, increasing engagement even more.
Blogs
If you have a blog, you can embed your videos in your posts and use them to enhance its content.
To embed a video on WordPress, all you have to do is copy the video’s URL and paste it to the WordPress editor. It’ll then automatically embed the video.
Social media
If you use social media to promote your business (which you should), don’t forget to share your videos there.
By posting your videos on social media platforms, people are also more likely to share them with their followers, putting them in front of more eyes.
Partner with other YouTube channels
Why not leverage another channel in your favor?
By partnering with someone else’s channel, you can gain more followers without losing your own.
Ideally, you should partner with channels that provide complimentary content to yours. That means that, if your niche is flight and accommodation bookings, you could partner with a channel that promotes guided tours at popular destinations.
You can co-host videos together or tell your followers to check their channel in exchange for them doing the same for you.
Want to make that all easier? Use YouTube Marketing Tools
If all this sounds overwhelming to you, don’t worry. There is a solution.
We’re talking about YouTube marketing tools.
They allow you to increase productivity, grab real-time data from your audience and competitors, get insights on how to improve your channel’s performance, and more.
After trying different tools and learning what the market had to say, we’ve found that VidIQ and TubeBuddy are two amazing choices.
They provide all the features you need to do nearly everything we talked about better and faster and offer excellent value for money on their premium plans.
The best part? They both have free plans as well so you can try them and get value without spending anything.
To learn more about what these tools can do for you and your channel, and how they compare to alternatives, go check our VidIQ and TubeBuddy reviews.
Final thoughts
If you follow these steps and strategies and create honest content that adds value to your audience, you’ll start growing your channel and converting viewers into buyers.
But remember that creating a loyal audience that trusts you and buys from you over and over again takes time and consistency.
So, stick to the plan, and you’ll eventually succeed widely at YouTube affiliate marketing.
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