The affiliate marketing industry earns billions of dollars each year, and this amount continues to grow all the time. As more and more companies are joining in, the industry is expanding and becoming more diverse than ever. The model is simple at its core as the business works together with the advertiser to a mutual benefit.
In this blog, we will discuss the advantages, and disadvantages of YouTube Affiliate that you would come across. These pros and cons will help you set up your own YouTube Affiliate.
So let’s discuss the best advantages and significant disadvantages of YouTube Affiliate Marketing.
Top 10 Pros And Cons Of YouTube Affiliate Marketing
YouTube Affiliate Marketing is a way to make money online by promoting products and services through videos. Other than YouTube, you can share your content on other video-sharing platforms such as Facebook, Vimeo, Twitch, Daily Motion, etc.
What is YouTube Affiliate Marketing?
YouTube affiliate marketing is an online business model where you generate revenue by adding affiliate links for products or services you recommend to videos you create and upload.
YouTube affiliate marketing is an intelligent approach to give your viewers more value while also generating income. Affiliate marketing gives you direct control over what you promote and allows you to see more of the resulting income.
YouTube affiliate marketing is simply the process of promoting products or services on YouTube by creating videos around them and earning a commission whenever someone makes a purchase through your affiliate link.
What You Need to Be a YouTube Affiliate Marketer:
- A Google account – you’ll easily set up your YouTube account and this is necessary for setting up a channel.
- A YouTube channel – in your YouTube account you’ll click on “settings” and then “create custom channel”.
- Traffic will be viewing your videos, clicking your links, and making purchases to earn you commissions.
- A niche or vertical that your channel and offers will focus on. Make sure you pick a lucrative vertical that will stay relevant.
- Quality videos that you will be posting regularly.
Tips to Improve Your YouTube Affiliate Marketing
YouTube includes the second largest search engine on the internet, only bettered by that of its owner, Google. Therefore, if you want to succeed with YouTube affiliate marketing, you need to ensure your videos rank in YouTube searches.
1. Create Relevant and Engaging Content
Your affiliate links to non-existent viewers, after all. This is obviously easier said than done. However, a vital factor in any affiliate marketing campaign is making sure you can provide top-notch content.
The quality of your videos is what will encourage viewers to visit your channel and trust your advice.
2. Identify the Best Keywords
Keyword research is essentially about identifying the best terms to help people find your videos on YouTube. You will find various tools on the internet that can help you with this. Some of the best are TubeBuddy, VidIQ, Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer, and Google Trends.
3. Be Honest and Disclose Your Affiliate Links
Transparency is vitally important in affiliate marketing. It ensures that your audience can trust you without feeling tricked, and it enables you to market honestly.
This makes the benefits of clicking on your links – both to yourself and to your viewers – readily apparent. Being honest about your opinions and goals will serve you and your audience well in the long term, as it establishes trust and loyalty.
5 Things That You Must Avoid in YouTube Affiliate Marketing
- Don’t promote a product you don’t like or have a bad experience with. It will not only diminish your credibility but also drive your audience away.
- Don’t over-advertise by bombarding your videos with ads and pop-ups. It’s very distracting and decreases audience engagement.
- Avoid advertising unrelated products that are not related to your niche—for example, advertising beauty products while promoting a gaming console.
- Don’t hide your affiliate arrangements. Let your fans know about the agreement to build more trust.
- Beware of frauds trying to hijack your affiliate links and steal your commission.
Top 10 Pros And Cons Of YouTube Affiliate Marketing
Pros
1. Billion-dollar business
As I’ve already mentioned in the introduction of this post, affiliate marketing is a billion-dollar industry that is lately prospering pretty well, and this seems to be its primary advantage of it.
2. Lower Competition
Unlike the web, there’s not a lot of competition outside of a few niches. There is still space for you to operate in most niches and build a massive following.
3. Highly Flexible
Affiliate marketers have tons of freedom when it comes to choosing what they promote and when they promote it. You can post affiliate marketing content as often, or as little, as you like. In most programs, you also have a wide range of options to choose from when selecting products.
4. Freedom to choose offers
Outside of a few no-go niches, you have pretty much all the freedom in the world to plug whatever affiliate links you want.
5. No expertise is needed
You don’t need to be a marketing expert immediately to become an affiliate. The great thing about affiliate marketing is that you can learn along the way, testing various organic or paid campaigns. Also, many ways exist to run and manage affiliate marketing programs.
6. Can build a loyal following
People who like your output can “subscribe” to your channel. This means that viewers will get your new videos in their “Subscribed” feed even if you don’t do any promotion.
7. Performance-based income
This can be perceived either as a benefit or a disadvantage. Joining the affiliate program will verify if you are good at online marketing and, specifically what campaigns. You are more successful at writing articles or recording videos for YouTube Or paid campaigns to bring you more revenue.
8. You don’t have to worry about customer service
Retaining customers and managing customer service-related issues get problematic at times. All you care about is your commission, so anytime you get a post-sale query, you pass such requests on to the merchant’s customer service team and wash your hands clean of the entire matter.
Which can significantly boost your SEO, you should comprehensively reply to product-related questions that appear under your posts.
9. Secondary source of income
Starting up as an affiliate marketer doesn’t require you to leave your current job. You can do it as a side project and see what you can squeeze out of it over the first few months.
10. Not Much Work Required
The work required for affiliate marketing is often minimal compared to revenue. It’s as simple as providing a link to a product. It’s better to provide promotional content to persuade your audience that the product is worth their time or money. It’s a small amount of work for a good payout.
Affiliate Marketing: The Ultimate List of Pros and Cons
Cons
1. Video creation
You can’t just hire a $10 writer and build a bunch of pages. You actually have to create interesting, compelling videos to get any viewers. It also doesn’t help that most people are camera-shy.
2. You don’t control your competition
Competition varies depending on the industry. Affiliate businesses, such as low costs of investments, high-profit opportunities, and no expertise needed, many people try their hand at affiliate marketing. Practically anyone can join and be successful.
3. Niche-specific challenges
It’s relatively easy to create content for the “tech how-to” niche – you just need screencasting software and a microphone. For niches like DIY plumbing.
4. Income is Not Immediate
Affiliate marketing earnings can vary and take time to kick in. Before you can start making money with affiliate marketing, you must establish a following and a good reputation. Without an audience to market to you, you cannot be a successful affiliate marketer.
5. No guarantee of revenue
Pay-per-performance can be a tremendous opportunity as well as a significant risk. No one promises that working as an affiliate marketer will be easy and that you will earn the expected revenue immediately.
6. Some niches are swamped
A growing number of topics are flooded with cookie-cutter videos e.g. “How to set up a website” because of the commissions paid by hosting companies. You need to think tangentially to get “easy” traffic.
7. You don’t have control over the rules
As an affiliate, you entirely depend on your merchant’s rules and must respect their conditions. A program that may look appealing at times later can become less and less competitive, All you can do is communicate the need for further adjustments regarding discounts on the given products, etc.
8. You don’t own the platform
A ban can result in your channel being deleted, along with everything you uploaded to it. You only ever “lease” your channel from YouTube. This isn’t a problem you experience with “independent” websites.
9. Limited Content Creation Freedom
Affiliate marketers have plenty of flexibility in several ways. But one way in which they are limited is in their promotional content. Most companies provide rules or guidelines about how their products should be presented and marketed.
10. Linking restrictions
According to Google: “If the main purpose of your content is to drive people off of YouTube and onto another website, it will likely violate our spam policies”.
