Increase Your Income With YouTube Affiliate Marketing

YouTube is obviously a global platform, right? When you dig into your audience analytics, chances are, your viewers aren’t just coming from one country.

Well, here’s what you might not know: If you’re using Amazon affiliate links, you could be missing out on revenue generated in other countries. Amazon has 18 public storefronts it uses for its affiliate programs (with plans for more). For instance, in the U.S. there’s Amazon.com. In the UK, it’s Amazon.co.uk.

Why does that matter? If you set up an Amazon affiliate account in the U.S. but someone in India clicks your link, there’s a disconnect because they can't or won't purchase from that store. This means they don't buy and you won’t earn your cut of the commission. (I’m not using super technical language here, but you get the point.)

“Fundamentally, know what your international traffic is — make sure your affiliate links work for that international audience — because if you're not doing that, you're leaving money on the table,” Jesse says.

And that’s where a tool like Geniuslink comes in handy. It allows you to localize your international traffic by routing them to their local store, so you’ll make money no matter where your viewers convert.

Consumers like choices. We all know that, but Amazon’s affiliate links don’t really allow for that. It’s Amazon or bust, and some people are tired of contributing money to Jeff Bezos’ bank account.

That’s why Geniuslink made a feature called Choice Pages. When someone clicks a link, they aren’t just shoved over to Amazon. They can instead take a look at where the product is available, compare prices and read reviews.

“When you're asking someone to buy a $100 product or a $1,000 product, if they can look at two or three or four other retailers and see that they're going to get the best price, see that it's in stock, see what the reviews are across a couple of different stores, it seems that really helps them be more comfortable clicking that final buy,” Jesse explains.

So although they may have to click a few more times, giving consumers a choice empowers them and ultimately makes them more inclined to actually purchase a product.

When you include affiliate links in your content, you have to properly disclose them. Otherwise, you’re being sneaky, and no one (especially Amazon and the FTC) likes sneakiness.

If you don’t properly disclose your affiliate links, there’s a good chance your account (whether that’s through Amazon or another affiliate marketing platform) could get shut down — meaning you’ve just lost all chances of maximizing your affiliate revenue.

If you’d prefer not to dig through your old YouTube videos and affiliate links, again, Geniuslinks has your back. It has a feature called YLO (YouTube Link Optimizer) that’ll find and convert all your old Amazon links into affiliate links. In the process, it adds the appropriate disclaimers. 

I’ve harped on the importance of video descriptions when it comes to YouTube SEO and retrospective YouTube optimization, and Jesse offers another layer of advice here: Be consistent with linking in your video descriptions.

With affiliate marketing, there are active recommendations and passive recommendations. Active recommendations are typically products featured or showcased in a video. (At this point, we’ve all seen plenty of FabFitFun unboxing videos.)

Passive recommendations are more, well, passive. This could be the brand of makeup you wore in your video or the lens on your camera. Fun fact: Jesse also runs Kit.co which exists just for this purpose. YouTubers can create “kits” of their go-to gear that people can shop.

Jesse suggests listing those active recommendations in your video description first and then the passive ones — but having both is fine. And then the key is to be consistent in the way you present these links across all your videos.

If there’s a product you’re constantly recommending, I’d suggest creating a vanity link for it. That way, folks can find it more easily.

For instance, I’m constantly promoting my book (have you checked it out yet?!), and when I go on a podcast or write a blog post, I don’t want to share the traditional affiliate link, which looks like this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075775DYG or even the geniuslink that can be customized. Instead, for a little more pizazz (and for ease of memory) I created a vanity URL, optimizationebook.com, which redirects to my Geniuslink which in turn redirects to the local Amazon page.

This can work well in your YouTube descriptions. If you’re always promoting a specific product, create a vanity link so people will actually remember it — versus that junky-looking Amazon URL.