YouTube traffic for affiliate marketing offers

Today, video is arguably the most effective way of reaching an audience interested in affiliate marketing. The audience on YouTube is by far more active. Recent studies have shown that up to a third more consumers are more likely to comment on and share videos than articles and most other content formats.

The Ultimate Guide to YouTube Lead Generation fo Affiliate Marketing

When it comes to lead generation for affiliate marketing programs or any other purpose, Youtube is the second biggest search engine. It’s only surpassed by Google itself in terms of the number of searches people conduct on it daily. A large proportion of people consider it an ideal platform for getting news, learning skills and getting entertained.

The implication of that for any marketer that YouTube is a goldmine of lead generation if you’re able to position your brand and videos well enough to get people to watch them. You’ll also need to provide quality content that’ll make them favorably disposed toward you and then convince them to follow your call to action. Here are the steps to follow to build an optimized and high-converting YouTube marketing strategy:

Conduct Keyword Research

This is the first and possibly the most important step. After all, there’s no point spending so much time creating awesome content if no one ever finds your videos. If you get keyword research right, your videos will appear high up when people search for specific terms. Use a dedicated tool like VidIQ or TubeBuddy to find the best keywords in the affiliate marketing niche.

Thankfully, the process for optimizing your videos is similar to the approach you’duse for general content SEO. There are many YouTube SEO tools available, free and paid, and you should definitely get one with which you can draw up a comprehensive keyword optimization strategy.

Another approach you can take is to check videos on subjects similar to what you intend to post. Check their titles and descriptions to see which keywords they’re using and use those as a guide in your research. Long tail keywords are as important on YouTube as they are on Google, since many people search the same way or could get to youtube from the initial Google search page.

Produce Quality Content

Content is king is a cliché nowadays, but it’s still accurate. And it’s especially important in the affiliate marketing niche, where there are a lot of spammers. The quality of your content is going to be the major driver of how many viewers and subscribers you’re able to attract. More importantly, it’ll determine if the viewers will have a good enough impression of your brand to want to take you up on your affiliate offer.

‘Quality content’ covers what’s in the video as well as how it is presented. For the information in the video, your approach should be to conduct in-depth research into the subject matter. They operative word is in-depth, meaning that you should go above and beyond, considering that the videos you’ll be competing with will have also researched before making their videos so if you want to stand out, you’ll need to produce content that’s not easily accessible elsewhere, especially on YouTube.

The viewing quality of your videos is also crucial, and now that high-def shooting and production equipment and software are affordable, there’s really no excuse for posting grainy, washed out videos. The camera you use is important, but the lighting is as important, if not more so. Work with a professional or take some time to learn the skills you need to shoot and edit attractive footage.

Get the Description Right

Your video descriptions are crucial to visibility and engagement. You should write detailed descriptions that integrate the keywords you identified in the first step, but you’ll need to place them appropriately for optimal effect.

Put the first most important keywords in the first part of the description (the part that appears before the “show more” link and be sure to use an attention-grabbing introduction and hashtag that’ll pique your viewers’interests and also plug into any hashtag trend so you can get extra traffic that way. It is also a place for you to put a link to your affiliate marketing offer.

Integrate Clickable Buttons

YouTube allows you to create annotations in the form of clickable buttons that subscribe a viewer to your channel or takes them to another webpage, such as another video or a landing page off YouTube. The trick to getting the most from this function is to have the buttons apply at the times when they are most relevant and are likely to be clicked. Also, space them out reasonably. If there are too many of them, they’ll likely just get ignored, and that’s the best-case scenario, with the more likely result being that the viewer will click away.

For redirection to your website or landing page to work, you’ll have to tweak your settings a bit to turn on external linking.

Use a Call to Action

At the end of your videos, you have a high chance of converting the viewer since the fact that they watched the video to the end is evidence of high interest in its content. The major determinant of whether you’ll be able to convert them is whether you include a call to action and how you craft it.

You can use an annotation at the end of the video, a spoken call to action as you round off or a full-screen message. Ultimately, apply copywriting principles to make it as persuasive as possible and you can increase your conversion rate significantly.

Optimize Landing Pages

Regardless of which call to action format you adopt, you’ll probably be sending viewers to a landing page with your affiliate marketing offer where they can sign up, enter their details or make a purchase. To maximize conversions, make the copy persuasive and wherever possible, make it clear that it’s specific for people coming from YouTube. That would automatically increase the relevance of the offer in the minds of your audience and boost the chances of them going ahead with your offer.

You might need to spend a bit more time preparing source specific landing pages, but the ROI will be worth it across all the channels. The more people believe an offer is tailored for them, the more likely they are to want to take it.

Socialize on other channels

A good way to make your channel visible to a wider audience is to go to other channels from your niche and comment on videos. But don’t make just any comment. It’s important to make valuable comments. Only then will people be interested in clicking on your profile and seeing that you have your channel with interesting content. Provide value for others and it will pay off.

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