It’s no news that grabbing your audience’s attention today has become more difficult than ever. All you have is 8 seconds (!) to capture their interest and communicate your message. This continuously shrinking attention span means that there will be more takers for a minute-long video as opposed to a 2-page-long article. So, if you’re looking to boost your affiliate conversions while still keeping your audience engaged, why not leverage affiliate marketing videos?
Incorporating video content into your affiliate marketing strategy can give you great results with affiliate sales, helping you maximize your earnings. But we get it. For the uninitiated, making affiliate marketing videos can seem daunting. Worry not, we’ve got you covered. In the upcoming sections, we’ll explain everything you need to know about creating video-based affiliate marketing campaigns. We’ll also take a deep dive into YouTube affiliate marketing, exploring tips and tricks to become a successful affiliate marketer on this platform.
Let’s begin.
YouTube Affiliate Marketing
YouTube has become synonymous with video streaming today. With more than 2 billion users, YouTube is the platform where people from around the world come to consume video content – almost 1 billion hours of it! This presents the perfect opportunity to double down on your affiliate marketing efforts.
YouTube affiliate marketing gives you a chance to position your affiliate marketing videos in a way that grabs the audience’s attention and directs it toward the affiliate product you are trying to promote. It is basically an affiliate marketing model in which you get to earn money by sharing affiliate links in your YouTube videos. These links can be shared through the video description, annotations, or even comments.
So, in a way, YouTube affiliate marketing is very much like the traditional form of affiliate marketing. You’d still be creating the same kind of affiliate content (product reviews, how-to guides, etc.), the only difference being that it will be in the form of videos. The monetization process will also remain the same. Whenever an affiliate sale is made through your referral link, you’ll get to earn a commission.
So, clearly, YouTube affiliate marketing can turn out to be a highly-profitable venture for you as an affiliate marketer. It all boils down to how you create affiliate marketing videos and promote affiliate products through these videos.
With that, let’s take a look at the type of affiliate marketing videos you can create in YouTube affiliate marketing.
YouTube Affiliate Marketing: Types of Affiliate Marketing Videos
- Product review videos: In a product review video, you provide your audiences with an in-depth review of the product, explaining its pros and cons, and how you’ve benefited from using it. Product review videos are widely known to be very effective for making affiliate sales, but the key lies in being honest with your audience during the review.
- Unboxing videos: As the name suggests, unboxing videos are those in which you give your audiences the first impression of a product after unwrapping it. It’s very different from a product review, which is made only after you’ve used the product for some time.
- How-to videos and tutorials: In these videos, you would walk your users through the steps of accomplishing a particular task, and strategically place the affiliate product as a solution for making the task easier. These types of affiliate marketing videos are valuable for building audience trust, since it gives you an opportunity to provide your audience with more value.
- ‘Best-of’ videos: This is basically the video equivalent of a blog post listicle. ‘Best-of’ videos are ranking videos in which you create a list of products to promote and talk about. These are probably the easiest affiliate marketing videos to create, and they are also known to get a lot of views from people.
- Vlogs: If you want to do something different with your YouTube affiliate marketing content, you can also consider creating vlogs. These are quite popular among viewers, so you are sure to get some clicks if you’re creating good vlog content. It also gives you a chance to place your affiliate links intelligently while engaging your viewers.
Tips for Creating Effective YouTube Affiliate Marketing Content
1. Keep the affiliate marketing videos short
If you want to cater to the viewers’ short attention span, you need to keep your affiliate marketing videos short too. Try to keep it fast-paced and make sure that you don’t compromise on the quality of content. When you’re just starting out, try to keep your videos less than 5 minutes long. Research what kind of videos are doing well with YouTube viewers and create a list of topics that you plan to create video content on. It is also a good idea to create a script before you start with the video production. AI video script generators could be of great help here. With some planning, you’ll find that creating short and engaging content is not as difficult as it seems.
2. Optimize the affiliate marketing videos for SEO
Publishing video after video on YouTube will not give you the results you want. If you want your affiliate marketing videos to be found by the right audience, you need to optimize them for search engines (both YouTube and Google). Since YouTube is a part of Google, some of your videos can feature in Google search results too if properly optimized for SEO. For optimizing your YouTube affiliate marketing videos, make sure to use the keywords in the video titles, tags, and descriptions. Researching the keywords should be simple. Just use a tool like Narrato or Google Keyword Planner to find topic-specific keywords for your affiliate marketing videos.
3. Placement of affiliate links
The whole purpose of creating Youtube affiliate marketing videos is to promote your affiliate product, so the placement of affiliate links is very important. There are several places to include affiliate links in your YouTube video. You can add them to the video as annotations or pin them as a comment in the comment section. However, the easiest place to add the affiliate link is in the video description. And more often than not, this is where the audience goes to find any product links they’re interested in.
When you’re adding affiliate links to your YouTube affiliate marketing videos, it’s good practice to do an affiliate link disclosure. This is crucial if you want to build the audience’s trust in your content.
4. Add a clear CTA
To direct the audience’s attention in the right direction, you need to include a clear call to action (CTA) in your affiliate marketing videos too. These CTAs are usually placed at the end of the video, but you can also place them at different points for maximum effect. Just make sure that you don’t overdo the CTAs.
Here are a few other important points to keep in mind –
- Don’t use clickbait techniques
- Customize your thumbnails to create a brand identity
- Group similar types of videos into playlists
- Transcribe the videos (if possible)
- Add chapters to videos
- Keep the content within the context
- Make the YouTube channel more attractive
Affiliate Marketing Videos on Instagram
When it comes to short-form video content, Instagram always emerges as the clear favorite. It is especially popular among millennials and Gen Zers, largely because of this visually pleasing interface that provides them with content at their fingertips. This presents a unique opportunity for affiliate marketers to promote their affiliate links through Instagram videos.
Video content on Instagram can be found in the form of Reels and IGTV. With Instagram Reels, you can make 60-second affiliate marketing videos, while IGTV is more suitable for longer videos (less than 10 minutes). This means that if you want to do something like a how-to video, explained video, or an in-depth product review, IGTV is the way to go. Reels, on the other hand, give you an opportunity to get creative with the content, since you will have a short time frame to catch the viewers’ attention. But if done right, it can help you boost your affiliate conversions.
For effective affiliate marketing videos on Instagram, here are a few things to keep in mind –
- On Instagram, you can’t add clickable links in the description. So make sure to add a ‘link in bio’ with every post
- Make sure that the image and video quality is excellent
- Stick to your affiliate marketing niche while creating videos
- Use hashtags intelligently to increase the visibility of your post on Instagram
Affiliate Marketing Videos on Facebook
Facebook is another social media platform you can use to enhance the reach of your affiliate marketing campaigns. You can add affiliate marketing videos just as you would add regular Facebook posts, along with the affiliate link to the caption. But rather than spamming your followers with affiliate links through your personal account, it is better to create a business page or a group to share affiliate marketing content.
If you want to have real-time conversations with your Facebook page followers/group members to promote an affiliate product, you can broadcast your affiliate marketing videos through the Facebook Live feature. This is a great way to improve your reach on the platform and gain useful feedback about your content. It also gives you an opportunity to build a strong relationship with your audience.
Both of these methods of affiliate marketing would work if you’ve already built a substantial audience on the platform. If you’re just starting out on Facebook, it would be useful to invest in the paid advertising feature – Facebook Ads. With a few targeted affiliate marketing videos through Facebook Ads, you’ll be able to build an engaged audience in just a few weeks’ time.
Wrapping Up
This covers all you need to know about leveraging affiliate marketing videos to maximize your affiliate sales and earnings. The tips uncovered in this article will hopefully guide you in entering this new field of affiliate marketing. While it may seem overwhelming at first, investing in affiliate marketing videos will certainly be worth the effort in the long run.