Youtube Affiliate Marketing

What we will Acheive 

Acheive Acheive Acheive Posting promotional videos which advertise eBooks, Software, and other e-Products on Youtube is a great way to generate a long term stream of passive income. Allow me to explain: Youtube is completely free to use, and your video (unless it violates the TOS) will be online forever, until you decide to take it down. 

Having a high ranking video (in either YouTube itself, or the Google Search engine) which is advertising a product with your affiliate link underneath means that even weeks, months, or YEARS from now, the sales can continue to roll in as you sit back and do nothing. All it takes is the time to upload a video, and write a description. Your video will be targeting people already curious about the product, and are searching for it, and your video will be the final "push" which convinces them to buy, and earns you an affiliate sale,

Selecting Selecting an Affiliate Network

Firstly, we must select an affiliate network to promote products from. As you should know by now, there are a huge selection of affiliate networks to choose to be a publisher for. The two I can recommend the most are ClickBank, and MaxBounty, MaxBounty MaxBounty MaxBounty MaxBounty MaxBounty can be a great network, since they have products which pay per sign-up. 

Some offers pay a couple of dollars to you simply by someone filling in their email address. (Before we get ahead of ourselves, they are VERY strict on this being legitimate, so do not try and "fake" any emails for commissions, you WILL get banned). The only downside to MaxBounty is that they require you to have a phone interview with them, in which you must prove you are an at least a mildly experienced affiliate marketer with a reasonable chance of success. Don't worry, the staff are very friendly. 

You will have to provide details of prior affiliate experiences, and a means by which you intend to advertise their products. I told them video advertising, and got through the interview with no troubles. If you make it through, congratulations, you can now start generating leads for an offer that pay very generously. For the average offer you can promote, you will earn $2.50 per person who even submits their email address to the site. A highly recommended affiliate. Even if you decide to use ClickBank as your primary affiliate, I HIGHLY recommend registering with MaxBounty aswell, and trial offers from both affiliates Maxbounty has the HIGHEST converting, and best Free affiliate products, which are much easier to distribute for commissions. Create a FREE account at www.maxbounty.com 

ClickBank 

is my choice for this guide, for several reasons. It has its pro's and con's as with any other affiliate network, which are as follows: Pro's: • Easy to sign up • Large variety of products from MANY different categories to promote • Physical AND eBook/Software products to sell • Some products are "recurring billing" (Which is VERY important for a long term income) • Option to use a "QR Code" as your affiliate link which may be printed out and scanned from any compatible mobile device, earning you a commission upon a sale conversion • It is possible to contact product vendors for a FREE version of their product for review purposes • Very high cut of any sale goes to you (most commonly 75% of the sale price) Easy to find reviews of most ClickBank products online

Con's: • Minimum earnings before cash-out (Can be set as low as $50) • First 2 payments MUST be delivered to a home address as Cheques (a small portion of earnings are deducted), and cashed in successfully before you can start using instant bank deposits, or other payment methods for your earnings. • Large base of users all trying to sell from the same pool of products I recommend making an account for both affiliates, a variety of offers is vital.

IMPORTANT! IMPORTANT! IMPORTANT! IMPORTANT! 

Before choosing a username, let me share with you a very sneaky, secret trick I have created which will help you convert sales at a much higher rate, and let me tell you, I have noticed the difference. You might first think that your username would be for logging in only, however what you might not find out until it is too late is that your "Affiliate ID" is actually displayed in the URL for hop-links of certain products you promote. That's right, that means that if you chose a ridiculous username such as "MoneyHustla123", people who view a product might see something like this in their browser: Productname.com/hop=MoneyHustla123 How off putting. 

Nobody is going to want to buy a product from someone with such a blatantly obvious incentive to sell it. Luckily, nowadays the majority of products on ClickBank automatically mask your affiliate ID in the URL, however it can't hurt to be safe. Since your "Affiliate ID" might be shown, the trick is choose a username which has or includes an arbitrary word which someone looking to buy may associate with general internet-related, or deal related words, which they may glance over and not be alerted that someone is gaining a commission from their purchase of the product. 

Some personal  suggestions  of sneaky word combo's combo's combo's combo's you might use: display, display, display, display, offer, bonus, deal, halfprice, html, special, gif, home, index, jpeg.I'm sure you can come up with something that doesn't give yourself away as an affiliate. (I have known people to choose a username specific to a certain product, so that it looks even more legitimate in the URL bar, however this is undesirable since you would have to create a new account and username for every different product to promote)

Choosing a Product 

Now that you have created a sneaky username to login with, we will start deciding on which product to start promoting. This will be written in terms of ClickBank, however it can be adapted to allow for MaxBounty. I recommend a careful criteria be met before selection of a product. Firstly, click on the "marketplace" link at the top of the ClickBank homepage, and then you should see a blank search box for you to start finding a product from.

Luckily, the Search function of ClickBank is very comprehensive, which allows us to filter their products by popularity, keyword relevance, average dollars per sale, average rebill total, average percentage of people who rebill (which means they sign up to a monthly subscription, which means you make another sale for each new month after they purchase), and product gravity. 

Many people question the relevance of gravity, and there is much confusion to its definition, so I will clarify. "Number of distinct distinct distinct distinct affiliates  commission by referring a paying customer to the vendor's vendor's vendor's vendor's products. 

 This is a weighted  sum and not an actual total. For each affiliate paid in the last 8 weeks we add an amount between 0.1 and 1.0 to the total. The more recent the last referral, referral, referral, referral, the higher the value added." It is a common misconception that just because a product has a high gravity, that it is an easy product to sell, but in fact the case can be quite the opposite. 

It often occurs that many affiliate newcomers will start trying to promote a chosen product, and regardless of how well it sells, they keep investing time and money in advertising until a sale finally IS made, at which point the gravity count is increased, and the more people looking for a product to sell find it, and the process spirals out of control. So I advise that gravity not be taken too seriously. 

You may also choose on the left hand side of the page to adjust the slider for a minimum Average Sales %, other slider criteria, or to tick a box to display ONLY products which have a "rebill" under the billing type, or a $1 trial. 

I have found that the $1 trial is a good bonus for products to sell, because often as a potential buyer attempts to leave the sales page because it seems to expensive, they are prompted with an "Are you sure? Do not leave this page to receive a special discount" pop-up, which I have known to convert buyers into a full recurring billing cycle. 

Non-recurring billing products often have a higher payment as a "once off sale", where as the ones which do continue to bill each month may have a lower initial payout, and then continue to draw money and overtake the previous option in the long run (Assuming the buyer does not cancel their subscription.) 

I have also found that simply pressing the space bar into the search field before clicking the search icon will reveal ALL products, which you can then filter without having to target products related to a certain keyword. This is great for finding the very best in a certain criteria, such as average rebill total.

We are looking for a product which we can rank highly in the YouTube and Google search engine, to generate traffic without having to do anything. My trick is to find a product with a decent sale price (Preferably over $20 to make it worth your trouble promoting), and then to scout YouTube for competing videos. (Some ClickBank products already have several high ranking videos, such as Six Pack Shortcuts). Sometimes using a "recently added" ClickBank product will help you rank faster, and easier, since there will be almost zero competition. 

The idea is that people searching for information on the product you have chosen will stumble across your video, and then click on the link in your video description, and potentially earn you an affiliate sale. To increase the chances of this, you want your video to be ranking higher than other results so that people choose to click on your video. A good way to check the competition of a product is to do a Google search: Is there any results 

on the first page that are YouTube  videos? ? (If not, this is a good sign that there is little competition. If yes, can you outrank them?) Do they have many views? (Under 20 thousand views is optimal, otherwise it may be hard to outrank them.) Does the video have a high ratio of ""Thumbs up" in the video rating?  (The amount of Positive thumbs is proven to influence the position of a videos ranking in the search results)

Choosing a  Video 

You will need to choose a video to post on YouTube to start promoting your product of choice. Remember, this is the video that everyone will see that has to convince them to buy. There are 4 main options to do this.

Make your own review video It is possible contact the vendor of a ClickBank product to request a review copy of their eBook/Software. Once you have the product, using your own original content, whether it be of yourself talking, or a screen capture of the product in action, make a video to convince the viewers that the product you are promoting is worth buying, and that you recommend it. Be honest, and don't make any claims that the product can't deliver. If they end up buying the product thinking it is better than it is, they may get a refund through ClickBank and you will not earn a commission.

Download  a sales video off the Product homepage  If you are lucky, the sales page for the product you are linking to might just have the perfect video for you to use which you can download and use as your promotion video. One thing to consider with this option, is that if you are using the exact same video as the one on the home page, people will have no new video content on the vendors homepage once they click your hop-link to leave YouTube to check out the product. 

Also, some product landing pages do NOT display, or allow you to click a "Get this Product Now!" button until you finish watching the mandatory video. If they have already seen this video, they may be turned off by having to wait, and get frustrated that they cannot find a "Buy" button easily, which may cost you a sale. It really depends on the page, I advise you to check it out. Download 

a video created  by another User This is by far the easiest, and least time consuming method, however this option really comes down to morals. I highly recommend using one of the other 2 options to create the highest quality sales pitch video.

 However, since this is a strategy that DOES get used, I will include it as an option. Are you willing to use the hard work of someone else and reuse their video for your own personal gain? If your answer is yes, then you will want search YouTube for the product, and watch a few videos until you decide which one made the product seem most appealing. Be careful to use a program such as Windows Movie Maker or equivalent to edit out any specific mentions of the username, or specific link of the uploader. Also, by choosing this method, you are risking that they will file a copyright claim against the video. 

(It isn't as serious as it sounds, and is unlikely, however the video may get taken down, and you will receive a copyright strike against your YouTube account, accumulating 3 of these infringements will get your account banned). If you still wish to proceed, copy the URL of the YouTube video you wish to promote.

Uploading your Video to YouTube Once you have decided on a video creation strategy, we must upload the final product. It is VERY important that we fill in the fields for the upload with the goal of optimizing the video for being searched for your products keyword. For the fields provided, we will use "Awesome Fat Loss Product" as the example product. 

Raw Filename  This one is an SEO secret of which few people are aware. If your product is for example called "Awesome Fat Loss Product", it will actually help you rank higher for your keyword if you change the filename of the video before you upload it to correspond as the product itself rather than a less relevant filename. This sneaky technique has been proven to increase search standings, even though nobody can see the filename once it is uploaded. Example:

 "AwesomeFatLossProduct.mp4" Title To maximize search rankings, the title should begin with the product name itself, followed by a related few words, not too long, and another variation of the word.