I'm going to show you a super cool way to make money on YouTube with affiliate marketing as well as three pro tips on how you can make a lot more money that you do with Adsense and monetization.
Hey whats up guys, Sean here with video influencers helping you build your influence income and impact with online video.
So you probably already know that if you're not getting hundreds of thousands or millions of views on YouTube that turning on the ads on your videos just not making you that much money. Well I've got good news for you; it's called affiliate marketing.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people's or company's products - you find a product you like, promote it to others and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make.
My personal favorite example of this is Amazon.com. Here's what you do:
- Sign up for the Amazon associate program.
- Once you are approved you can create a link to any product that you like, love and use, and then that link will be unique to you.
- You can create a review video or a tutorial video of that product and post it on YouTube.
- Then you take your unique Amazon link and put it in the YouTube description of the review or tutorial video you just posted then when someone clicks on that link and purchases the product you earn a commission between 4 and 10 percent. So if the product was a hundred dollars you would make 4 to 10 dollars. But it gets even better - if after clicking on you link they purchase anything for the next 24 hours you get a commission for that as well.
So, as you can see affiliate marketing can be a super powerful way to earn extra income especially where there's so many YouTube videos about tutorials, reviews and products, and there's literally an affiliate program for everything, almost everything.
Here's how you can check. Just Google the brand name or product name with the words affiliate program next to it hit enter and the affiliate program should pop up at the top. And seriously, Amazon, eBay, all the different beauty lines, Nordstrom, lots of big affiliate programs that have a lot of different stores included in them, places like society 6 for like cool art work and coffee mugs and stuff.
There's an affiliate program for almost every site online so I promised you three pro tips and I'll get to those in just a second. But first here are the most common mistakes that I see video influencers making when it comes to affiliate marketing.
Three YouTube Affiliate Marketing Mistakes
I'm amazed by how many reviews and kind of unboxing videos that I see with no affiliate links in the description and that's probably because they haven't seen this video. So if you are getting any value from this video please share it with somebody that needs to see it. But it's like, dude, you are seriously leaving money on the table like if someone is going to pay a hundred bucks on Amazon for a product which is not more expensive if you promote it as an affiliate. So the brand is just keeping more money and the video creator is not getting any compensation for all the hard work that went into making that video. So don't make that mistake.
I literally would go looking for a watch that I'm thinking about buying and I want to see a YouTube video about it and I'll watch somebody doing all the work of reviewing it and showing some stuff and then no affiliate link! I could've reciprocated to the fact that they showed me all that cool stuff by clicking on their affiliate link and buying that watch through them but they are not doing it.
The second thing some people thinks is that it's like sketchy or weird, and affiliate marketing is not at all. Like I said, you did all the work to make the video, to buy the cameras, to get all the gear, your expertise, your research, the amount of hours you spend using the product, has all got into the fact that you are just kinda recommending it and there's a way for people to reciprocate all the value you added to them, and it's not adding any money to the price.
So that person who's finding a product that could add value to their life and potentially the thing that they were looking for, has gotten value so that's like a win win win win win for everybody. The only reason it could get weird is if you are weird. Authenticity is everything, so don't be salesy, sketchy or stupid.
The third mistake a lot of video influencers make is that they don't disclose anywhere that the links are affiliated, and it is actually require by the FTC that you do disclose. I'm confident that 99 percent of people just don't realize that they need to disclose, but it's something that you know now so I'm not a lawyer and this isn't official legal advice, but basically you should put something in the description like, "this this video contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I'll receive a small commission".
Three Tips for Making Money With Affiliate Marketing On YouTube
Ok so here are three pro tips for how to make money on YouTube with affiliate marketing.
Tip number one: Make sure that you verbally let your audience know that they can check things out in the description. If you never get that call to action they may never know it exists and never go check it out. Thus you putting the link there is not going to do a whole lot a good
Secondly, if you don't specifically have a product to link to and it's just a normal video or a vlog and it wasn't a review or something, you can always link to the gear that you created the video with. This is a question that your audience a lot of times wants to know - what lights are you using, or just what's your vlogging camera, or those type of questions. And all of those are relevant affiliate opportunities.
And then the third tip is make sure that you take the time to optimize your videos with good titles tags and descriptions. And then show them in other social media platforms so they get found, because it's does no good to do affiliate marketing if you aren't getting views and subscribers and your channel isn't growing. You ultimately have to be reaching people.
Be Honest With Your Affiliate Marketing
Pat Flynn from smart passive income on honest affiliate marketing says you should never recommend a product that you aren't extremely familiar with, that you haven't you know put the time in, that you are not an expert on, and you don't have have some actual relationship with it, and you're not just like seltzer water buy it and you hate it. I happen to love seltzer water but I'm not sponsored by a them and there's no affiliate link.
Pat says never directly tell somebody to buy something, you simply bring awareness to the fact that hey if you want to learn about more information about this, and this is something I use and I'm using, and here's my info about it so you can check it out if you want. It's not about being pushy or weird, it's about helping others in an honest way and giving your audience a way to support you with things they're going to buy anyway. And also being able to build your income, support your family and find your passion.
Question of the day: I'm curious, did you know much about affiliate marketing before this video? And or do you have any tips on affiliate marketing let's connect in the comments below and remember that some of the best conversation and tips happen from the video influencers community in the comments section. So thank you so much for checking out this video and until next time keep crushing it and we'll talk soon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65g5v7EcwJ4
