3 Ways to Make Money with YouTube as an Affiliate

Hello and welcome to Affiliate Resource Centre. In this post I want to cover 3 ways in which you as an affiliate marketer can make money with YouTube. We’ll also look at some specific advantages that come with video content marketing.

YouTube is close to being the biggest platform on the internet. It is certainly the biggest video platform by far, with a monthly active user count of 2.1 billion.

So, how can you leverage it to the full as an affiliate marketer?

There are many ways to do this but in this tutorial I’ll be talking about 3 successful methods I use to make money as an affiliate with YouTube.

By the way, if you need any brushing up on what exactly affiliate marketing is all about, you can read about it here.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• How to utilise your video description and pined comment
• How to turn viewers into leads for email marketing
• How to run an effective YouTube ad campaign

These are the 3 ways we will be using to make money as affiliate marketers with YouTube!

Using Affiliate Links with your Videos

Never miss the opportunity to promote something using affiliate links when you are ready to upload a video to YouTube.

It doesn’t really matter which niche your channel is focused on, there will always be relevant products that you can promote as an affiliate.

For example, let’s say your niche is fragrances. You can leave affiliate links to the fragrances you are mentioning in your video and perhaps an expensive one that you call your “top recommendation.” You can then make your viewers aware of these links in your video in case anyone wants to check them out.

Below are two images showing a YouTuber who reviews fragrances and down below in her description box, you can see many links to fragrance related products.

Anyone who follows one of these links and makes a purchase will enable the video creator to earn an affiliate commission.

Or perhaps your niche is puppy training. You can always leave a link in your video description box and in your pinned comment to a digital program on dog training, such as Brain Training for Dogs, which is a product from Clickbank.

Use a Pinned Comment with Affiliate Link

Sometimes people just won’t click into your video description box which can cost you a potential customer or lead. Luckily however, you also have the opportunity to leave a pinned comment which can also direct people to an affiliate link.

There will be times when people will see your pinned comment sooner than they will read what’s in your video description box.

Leaving a pinned comment under each video you upload is a great little strategy to make use of.

Blow is an example of a recent video from one of my channels. The channel name is Affiliate Knowledge Base. You will be able to notice a pinned comment that includes a link. That link is an affiliate link:

Use Lead Magnets for Email Marketing

While using direct affiliate links or links to a website that contains the affiliate link(s) is one strategy, it is also a smart idea to use a lead magnet to generate leads for an email list.

As they say, “the money is in the list!”

Note: you should have an autoresponder to do this.

Firstly, a lead magnet is simply something that you offer people usually for free as a means of attracting them. The idea is to get them to take action which in this case is give you their email.

So, you offer them a freebie and they give you their email so that you can send them what you’re offering via email. It could be some valuable information in the form of a PDF document for example. Or an ebook.

An autoresponder is a tool used for email marketing. It allows you to do things like gather emails for the purpose of sending advertisement/promotional emails to your prospects. It also provides features such as automations, lading pages, sign up forms and integrations.

It is a lot more sophisticated and professional than using a personal email.

Here are some examples of autoresponders:

• Aweber
• Mailchimp
• GetResponse

Here is a list of steps you could follow to implement this strategy:

1. Create your lead magnet
2. Head over to your autoresponder (or sign up for one if you don’t already have one. They usually have a free version).
3. Get the link for the sign up form.
4. Mention what they are going to get for free by providing their email via the sign up form
5. Send them the freebie
6. Send them promotional emails via your autoresponder as a means of generating sales in the future

Run YouTube Ad Campaigns

Let’s say you’ve created a high quality video review of a product with an affiliate link in the video description. You can boost this video by running a YouTube ad.

Here’s what to do:

Head over to YouTube Advertising. You’ll come to a page that looks like this:

Just click on Start Advertising and follow the steps provided. You’ll need to use your Google account to get access.

You will then have to fill out the information needed to run your ad efficiently.

Set a budget and be careful not to start too high unless you don’t make sales and so lose your ad spend.

Test the video first and see how it preforms. If it does well, that’s great. You might even want to invest more in the same ad.

If the video doesn’t convert well, try tweaking it or even redoing it altogether.

Remember that you can also use a video ad to get people on to your email list.

An ad is simply a quick way to get a decent volume of traffic, all depending on your budget of course.

The Efficiency of Using YouTube as an Affiliate

Probably the fastest way to make money for free as an affiliate is simply by using YouTube.

For example, let’s say you already have a great camera and you decide you’ll do a review of it for YouTube. Now let’s imagine that your video happens to be a hit and goes viral.

In the description box and pinned comment, you left your viewers a link to the product.

Because your link is an affiliate link, you make money just like that every time someone clicks through and makes a purchase.

It is also a perfectly ethical way to make money because you are providing value and giving your viewers an honest recommendation.

They do say it’s best if you use a product that you actually own or have personally tested. But with digital products and some physical products there are some ways around that such as demonstrating your competence by the experience you have with similar products etc.

I hope you have found these 3 ways of making money with YouTube as an affiliate marketer to be useful and informative.

Let me know your own thoughts down in the comments below.

Wishing you the best.