In this article, we are going to talk about how my students are using Youtube to drive traffic in their affiliate marketing businesses.
This is the seventh module of my free course. Previously we looked at how to structure an affiliate marketing business without a website.
I showed you how to find the perfect niche, how to choose the right affiliate products and offers that you are certain will sell, how to find the right keywords so you get the most traffic out of them, and I showed you six of the best marketing channels to get more traffic.
Today we are going to take a deep dive into making money on YouTube with affiliate marketing.
Table of Contents:
Why Youtube For Affiliate Marketing?
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, right after Google, and the best thing about it is that it has no serious competitors; therefore, making money out of YouTube actually makes a lot of sense.
You can build a massive audience that is ready to use your affiliate links and will even promote them, for free.
To do this properly you will need to:
- Understand your target audience:
This is the first thing to do when using most marketing tools. You need to know what they want, need, their pain points and their aspirations.
Once you have this crucial data, the communication between the two of you will be effective; I will show you how to uncover some of this information using Amazon. - Keyword research:
When it comes to YouTube, we need to approach things in a slightly different way. I am going to show you a free tool that you can install in Chrome or Firefox, which is going to help you discover keyword opportunities. - Reverse engineer competition:
We need to reverse engineer the best performing videos for those keywords: when we take inspiration on videos that we know that work, when we make ours, then that will increase the chance that we get good results.
That will only happen if we create the right type of content. - Creating educational content:
This is crucial when it comes to driving traffic to affiliate links. In addition, I would encourage you to create evergreen content that is based on keywords that have consistent traffic levels all year round.
We touched upon this previously on the course, when we looked at Google Trends to see what kind of interest is happening all year round and from year to year. Therefore, I encourage you to go with educational content that is evergreen. - Use a call to action:
We need to have a very strong call to action at the end of our videos: this will direct people to the description where they can click a link and then hopefully go ahead and purchase the offer that you are promoting.
Understanding Your Affiliate Audience
Let’s talk about what most people do wrong.
Right now I am helping a friend start a wax melt business, so we will use that as an example.
If we are looking for our niche, or our industry, in this case, wax melt, the main thing is to validate the keywords that we want to use, we do so in a very simple way: by seeing the number of reviews that products similar to ours have.
Anyone can post something for sale on Amazon, but that does not mean they have buyers, which is what we are interested in. If you want to create educational contents, books are the way to go.
The next step is to determine the pain points. When your niche is wax melt, and you want to create educational content at the same time, a step-by-step guide to making scented wax candles is a good product with good information that sellers can provide for you.
If we see the reviews, it has 130 ratings, and with them, we can see what aspects of each product buyers are interested in, as well as the things that they dislike.
Now, you want to look for the products that are selling the most, the big brands. The trick is to use all the reviews of products respecting your niche and from there obtain all the valuable information from your audience, these people you are reading and their comments, will be your future source of income.
There is a very interesting and useful part of Amazon, where we find questions and answers from customers, where we can see their doubts and their problems regarding the products, and this can be a starting point for our keyword research.
Avoid guiding yourself with one-star reviews; they are usually people who are never happy with anything, so they are not entirely genuine.
Intermediate reviews, from 4 to 2 stars, are the most useful. For our example, we can see in this star range that people dislike it if the essence is not long lasting, so we already know that this is a problem to solve for our market.
Analyze, find patterns, and thus you will know your audience, you will find efficient keywords and you will have an idea to solve the market deficiencies and fulfill the expectations of the people regarding your products.
Affiliate Keyword Research
Now, let us go to YouTube. I need you to install a free software called TudeBuddy (affiliate). Is one of the most powerful tools that we can use for YouTube, I use it myself. Most of the successful YouTube creators use it, and they attribute their success to it.
Now, let us have a look at the pricing because even though it is free to use, it is a limited version, but they have premium options as well.
You do not really need to get it unless you are a heavy user. You are probably going to get away with using the free version if you want, because these premium options you can do them in YouTube itself anyway.
It installs as a Chrome browser.
Continuing with the example of wax melt, I place it in TudeBuddy as my focus keyword, and the software indicates a keyword score, an approximate search volume, for our example there is a volume of 1.43 million searches per month, therefore the niche has a low level of competition; in other words, it is an opportunity to make money.
Finally, it gives us the overall score of our keyword. I will show you how to improve these results for your benefit, with a specific strategy, but it should be noted that TudeBuddy also gives you related searches, so it will tell you what people are looking for and the most used tags.
In addition, if you enter any of the videos it shows you, it will give you their analytics. We can see the number of views, subscribers, the number of total videos, but it also includes an SEO score, social ranking and more extremely useful data. We can even copy video tags.
I recommend you go to Keyword Explorer and type your focus keyword here. Therefore, if we are going with wax melts, it is going to give us a weighted score here.
You are going to have different results depending on the nature of your channel. You can also see the unweighted score and sort the results by location clicking on “map”, so you know what people are searching all around the globe.
If we have a look at the historical option, we can see interest over time, that way we check if there is consistent interest.
If we have a look at results, it is going to show us the top channels for that key phrase. What I would do is have a look at the search results, have a look at other words related to your focus keyword, for example, “wax melts at home”, that way you can make a list of these additional keywords.
We want to improve our overall score, take it from poor to good or excellent, we need high search volume and low competition. The lower the number of videos, the easier it should be for us to achieve a good ranking for our keyphrase.
We are going with long tail key phrases here, as short tails are going to be difficult to use for YouTube, but they will be necessary inside our content. When your channel grows, so will your possibilities of succeeding with short tail keywords.
You need to explore all the related content so you can play with your keyphrases until your score is, at least, good. For example, according to TubeBuddy, if I made a video about wax melts for beginners, I would get a good ranking.
Sometimes, search volume will not be as high, but as long as the competition is low, that means that with optimized content you will rank in the top for that niche.
It is wiser to capitalize on that smaller amount of search traffic than try and compete with a more difficult keyphrase. With this one, there is guarantee we will see decent results, as we will among the top competitors.
Customer Pain Points
Once we have an idea of what type of content we are going to create, how do we actually structure that content? How do we do this in a way that leads our audience, to that logical conclusion that they need to invest in themselves in order to get more results?
- We create content that helps them to solve part of their problem: you can take two approaches to this, you can focus on giving them part of the solution or you can give them the entire solution and then move on to another problem
- You need to map out the steps they need to take; these are the steps that will lead your customers to success
- You also have to tease a greater solution: If you were focusing on helping them to solve part of the problem, then you would tease that there is something else that they are not aware of, something else that is going to help them to get better results faster. This is the formula that we know works
- Value + offer = profit, but in doing so, you really do help them. You want to engage the people who are actually into it, who are serious about solving their problem. You want to appeal to those people because they are going to invest and spend money on your offer.
Teasing a better solution works if you focus on helping them to solve part of the problem, now, if you want to help them solve their entire problem, you can do that as well. However, you must always maintain the formula intact. - Offer a solution to new problems created by their success. I know it is a strange concept, but it works. When they achieve success and they have solved their initial problem, what happens next in their journey is they are going to face another problem, so that success creates another issue.
Understanding The Customer Journey
Now I will show you the customer journey that absolutely works.
What you need to do is draw a line on your sheet of paper. At one end, we have a problem, and at the other end, we have a solution. Your audience wants to go from having this problem to arriving at the solution.
So in order to do that, the best way that you can help them is to think about the steps involved that will take them on that journey.
We think about step one, step two and step three, think about the big pillars, the big steps that they need to take in order to arrive at the solution, and then we drill down into each one of these steps.
We go further, let us think about step one, we think about the obstacles and the objections and the hurdles that prevent them from moving to step two; we make a list.
The obstacles could be that it is too expensive or it is too time consuming. Therefore, you address the obstacles that prevents them from moving forward. Then in step two, you think about the obstacles that prevent them from moving to step three, it could be that it is too technical or there is too much competition.
Lastly, it’s step three. We think about additional obstacles. It could be mindset or fear of failure.
Now, the great thing about this map is that not only can it apply to individual videos or blog posts or any type of content, you can absolutely use this structure to create whatever you like, but it can also work for channels. You can base channel entirely based around these three big steps.
If we have a look at how Apple does it, you will see that they employ this type of structure across their products, because each one leads into the other, they are all interconnected.
When you structure your content or your business or your channel in this way, you are giving people a reason to follow you. You are giving them a reason to return because they are getting what they need.
Easy Video Creation
Let’s move on to getting videos made. If you do not want to step in front of a camera, that is perfectly fine. If we head over to fiverr.com, there is many alternatives out there.
I am using Fiverr because it is probably the widest known, it is the easiest to use.
We go to the search bar, find services, if we type in explainer video, click search, what we’re going to get back is people who can create these really nice explainer videos that are animated. They are engaging and they deliver value to an audience. That is a fantastic approach.
In YouTube, like any other social media, consistency is key, so when you’re delivering three videos a week, and every video is $50, then your costs may spiral out of control.
That is $600 a month just on explainer videos. It is a lot of risk if you are just starting and there are no guarantees.
I am going to show you how to get them done cheaper, still using Fiverr. Set your budget; let us say $15 and click apply. That will give us many options for less than $10.
We want to avoid someone that will take a month or so to deliver the video, between a week and three days is reasonable. If we have to choose between video quality and audio quality, always choose audio, so invest in a good microphone.
Also, check for seller quality and reviews, opt for top sellers if possible and be careful about new sellers as they are kind of hit or miss. Some sellers on Fiverr are buying reviews, especially new ones.
What you want to do if someone is new, make sure that they have many reviews.
Now, something you have to be aware of when it comes to creating any type of content on the internet.
If you are having someone else, make the content for you, it is all about building up a good relationship. So of course, if you are happy with the work, leave a good review and then give them more work, build that relationship.
You should notice because you are giving them more work, the quality of work, their attention to detail for you should increase over time because they know that they can depend on you as a long-term income.
It is mutually beneficial and that is what you want to get here. Therefore, when I use Fiverr, which is not very often to be fair, but when I do use Fiverr, I always use it with the intention of building a relationship with these people who run gigs, and you really want to bring them into your team.
The biggest thing to learn from all of this is to be consistent. There is no point putting up a video just once and then expecting amazing results. It does not work like that.
The internet works on consistency. When you are consistent, you can achieve amazing results.
What’s Next?
My student Charles went full time online his first 180 days with affiliate marketing. He is the exception to the rule, but if you want to know the secret and you really are serious about making money online, I will give you the method for free. You can see how he did it when you go to profitcopilot.com/180.