“Youtube revenue with ads is by far the smallest part of my online earnings” – almost every Youtuber I know, and I’ve worked with the biggest creators out there, would agree with this statement. You’d have to gather an insane amount of views to make a reasonable amount of money with Youtube ads alone. Therefore you’ll have to monetize that traffic with other tools, such as affiliate marketing. I’ll give you a head start and tell you step-by-step how it works.
200.000 Dollars a month! – Are you serious?
When talking about Youtube earnings most people instantly refer to the biggest Youtuber worldwide PewDiPie with over 57 million subscribers. And with an estimated view count of over 200 million (!) a month, he’s probably making a great amount of money with Youtube ads alone. If you do the math and for the sake of simplicity we’re calculating with 1$ per 1000 views, PewDiePie is making around 200.000 Dollars …. a month! Sounds great, right?
Well, the problem with this example is, there is only one PewDiePie worldwide. Only a hand full of creators do have millions of views. If you have a “regular” youtube channel, let’s say 10.000 subscribers you are definitely far away from making a full living with Youtube ad money. Of course, you’ll quickly start looking at other options to monetize your hard built reach. That’s where affiliate marketing comes into play.
Affiliate Marketing – the core of Influencer Marketing
Affiliate Marketing – making money with Youtube means you are basically recommending a product to your viewers or readers, providing a custom (personalized) link to an online shop platform like Amazon, and if the viewer is purchasing something you will get a commission of that sale. The shop will be able to track down the link and assign that purchase to you. This is how many Influencers are making most of their money. Placing their affiliate links right within the description of their videos. In case of Instagram, which was almost impossible to monetize with outbound links because links in the post description are not clickable, you can now place a link in a story. Learn how to export vertical video with Adobe Premiere Pro in this article. You will also get a free preset.
Of course, Influencers are taking this chance to promote products and ask their followers to swipe up, follow the link, and ideally buy something. With the recent launch of the Amazon Influencers program, you are not just limited to promoting one single product. Now you can link to your very own unique vanity URL Amazon Influencer page with your own selection of products.
Am I limited to Amazon with Affiliate Marketing?
We will take a closer look at how Amazon Associates works below. But you can work with affiliate marketing links with any online shop that provides the functionality of ‘personalized’ allocatable links. The shop will recognize that it is your specific link that has been clicked and sent the visitor to their website and follow them until they complete a purchase process. Then you will get a certain percentage of the profit that the shop has made with the visitor that you had sent over via that link. There are several affiliate networks where you can sign up just like Amazon Associates and start working with their custom links by placing them within your content.
Amazon Associates – the Affiliate Marketing Behemoth
The easiest way to start with affiliate marketing is to sign up with Amazon Associates, which is Amazon’s affiliate marketing program.
Even if you do have an Amazon account you will have to sign up here separately. Once you have provided your information and selected your categories you will have to provide a URL on which you are planning to place the Amazon affiliate links to promote the products. Once the account has been created you can use the links for your Youtube channel as well. It’s just mandatory to name a dedicated website or app as your main hub for the Amazon Affiliate Links. When you signed up you can generate product links there directly. On top of that while you are logged into Amazon Associates you will see a little menu called “Site Stripe” on your regular Amazon page from where you can generate affiliate links for any product available on Amazon. Just click text or image and you will be presented with your custom affiliate link. Just paste that into the description of your Youtube video and you’re done. Of course, this works with any other video platform as well as long as you can place clickable links around the video. Or in case of an Instagram story within the video (swipe up remember?).
One Link to monetize them all – Introducing Amazon One Link
There are 11 different Amazon Marketplaces on 3 continents worldwide (Nort America, Europe, and Asia), for which you’d have to sign up separately. There are third-party services, who provide one custom link once you signed up with all your amazon marketplace accounts, redirecting the visitor to the according marketplace, depending on where he or she is located. But for 3 marketplaces Amazon just launched a new service named “One Link” to bundle the traffic from 3 English language areas (USA, Canada, and the UK).
Amazon will allow the visitors to buy from their local Amazon storefront without having to worry about to which Amazon site they are being directed.
If you have a landing page here is another advice for you
Many creators do have a website for their ‘brand’. Beauty Youtubers for instance do have Blogs with fashion and make-up stories. This environment of course is just perfect to promote products with affiliate links. One nice thing about Amazon is, not only you can generate static text/image Links. You can also generate ‘native shopping ads‘. You should see related products based on your recent Amazon activity below.
Other than links that are being generated by yourself these ads are dynamic. Your visitor will be presented with product recommendations perfectly customized for them, depending on their search behavior prior to Amazon. So if you are running a website along with your Youtube channel (or even standalone) this is something you might want to look into.
The Power of Live Videos – creator tipping
This doesn’t fall into the affiliate marketing category per se. But it’s a great way of monetizing video traffic and since live video has become more and more important across all major social media platforms it should be mentioned here quickly. Basically, the viewers are donating a small amount of money to support while the creator is live. Of course, creators are not exposing any specific numbers, but given the fact, some of them are receiving “tips” every other minute on platforms like Twitch we are talking about 5-digit earnings with one live video session only! That’s a very powerful way to monetize the traffic once a creator has built a community around his online presence.
