How to Promote Affiliate Links on YouTube (3 Key Tips)

When most people think about affiliate marketing, blogging immediately comes to mind. Affiliate blogs can be incredibly profitable, but they’re not the only channel you can use to market offers. If you’re able to create or record videos, YouTube can be a fantastic way to promote affiliate links.

With YouTube, you can reach an audience that might not like to read blog posts, but will be happy to watch an entire video. If you can convince those viewers that the products or services you’re promoting are worth their time, you can encourage a lot of conversions.

In this article, we’ll talk about why YouTube is such a great platform for affiliate marketing. Then we’ll go over several ways you can use it to promote affiliate links. Let’s get to it!

Why You Should Consider YouTube for Affiliate Marketing

YouTube is among the most popular social media platforms in the world. It has an audience of over two billion users who log in every month, and plenty more who watch content regularly without registering.

In the US, most of those users are between 15 and 25 years old. If that’s the core audience for the products and services you promote, then YouTube can be an affiliate goldmine.

When you create blog posts, most of your audience will end up skipping large segments of your content. That’s just the way people tend to read online. When it comes to videos, however, users are more likely to watch the whole thing. In other words, you get more chances to promote your affiliate offers.

If you’re already using a WordPress blog to promote affiliate links, a YouTube channel can be a fantastic complement. That’s particularly true for content such as reviews, tutorials, product comparisons, and more:

When someone is trying to find the best product in a particular category or needs help solving a problem, they can almost always find YouTube videos that will help. If one of those videos happens to be yours, you’ll have the perfect chance to promote an affiliate link.

How to Promote Affiliate Links on YouTube (3 Key Tips)

Since you’ll be using a third-party platform to promote affiliate offers, you need to adhere to YouTube’s rules. That means not spamming links in your videos, or stuffing your descriptions full of them. Here’s how we recommend that you approach affiliate link marketing on this platform.

1. Be Upfront About Your Promotions

Most people who watch YouTube videos will know when you’re trying to sell them on a product. More importantly, they understand that YouTube creators are probably getting a cut of each sale they help make.

That’s why popular YouTube channels are usually upfront about the fact that the links they share are affiliate offers. You’ll often see cloaked links in video descriptions:

This is the best place to include affiliate links for your own videos. You can also link to offers using video annotations, but we only recommend that if you want to include a single link.

For videos that compare, review, or promote multiple affiliate products, you’ll want to place all the relevant links within the description. You can include your disclaimer there as well, and for bonus points mention it directly within the video’s content.

2. Understand the Basics of YouTube SEO

Just as with your blog, helping viewers find your YouTube videos involves good old-fashioned search engine optimization (SEO). In other words, you’ll need to optimize the content that goes alongside your videos. That way users can locate them using the platform’s internal search feature. In some cases, your videos might even appear in Google’s search results as well.

Fortunately, YouTube SEO is simpler than working with an entire website. Here are the elements you’ll want to focus on, to make sure that your videos get the attention they deserve:

• Title and thumbnail. Keyword research should guide your title decisions. Moreover, your video thumbnails should be eye-catching, to help differentiate your content from that of the competition.
• Video descriptions. You can include comprehensive annotations alongside each video. That gives you the opportunity to include links, calls to action (CTAs), complementary information, and more.
• Tags. For each video, make sure to add any relevant tags. This helps YouTube categorize your content appropriately.

Just as with an affiliate website, your earnings will depend on how many visitors you get. The more traffic you can drive to your videos, the more likely you are to get conversions.

3. Repurpose Blog Content as YouTube Videos

If you already have a WordPress blog that you use for affiliate marketing, it probably includes content you can repurpose for your YouTube audience.

Some examples of blog content that translates well to a video format include:

• Tutorials
• Product reviews and comparisons
• Lists of commonly asked questions for specific products or services
• “Who should use this?” content

With a blog post, you already have a breakdown of all the points you want your video to include. In most cases, you’ll need to adapt that content to ensure it works in video format. It will have to be cut down to an appropriate length, and you’ll want to talk directly to viewers.

Another advantage of repurposing blog content is that you’ll already know what affiliate links you want to promote. That means each video you create has a specific purpose, making it more engaging and effective.

Conclusion

YouTube can be a fantastic platform to promote your affiliate links if you’re comfortable recording yourself, your screen, or even using voice-overs. Billions of users flock to YouTube every month, and if you can get the attention of even a few of them, you can increase your conversions significantly.

If you want to create affiliate content for YouTube, here are three tips to get you started:

1. Be upfront about your promotions.
2. Understand the basics of YouTube SEO.
3. Repurpose blog content as YouTube videos.

Do you have any questions about how to promote affiliate links on YouTube? Let’s go over them in the comments section below!

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