In the quest for effective traffic sources, many consider the potential of YouTube. Those unfamiliar with the video hosting platform might assume it is too complex for affiliate marketing. However, considering the platform's content delivery dynamics, tapping into quality organic traffic can be a lucrative endeavor. In this article, we’ll tell you how to create and promote a network of YouTube channels.
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YouTube Statistics for 2023: Videos Still Trending Worldwide
In 2023, the audience of this video hosting platform reached 2.51 billion active users, securing its second-place position among globally popular websites by subscriber activity. YouTube's application consistently maintains a top-five ranking on the App Store over the last three years.
Since 2006, the platform's audience has grown by 126 times. With an annual influx of new subscribers at 81.6%, the number of active users is projected to increase by 263 million people each year until 2028. Currently, India boasts the largest number of active YouTube users at 467 million, with T-SERIES, an Indian channel, holding the record with over 233 million subscribers.
Out of 51 million channels on the platform, only 700 have more than 10 million subscribers in 2023. Despite this, 72% of video channel owners receive revenue from content monetization.
In Russia, according to Mediascope, the daily average YouTube audience is 50.5 million people, solidifying its position as the second most popular platform in the Russian segment of the Internet. In the Russian context, users are primarily interested in music (19%), entertainment content (18%), children's videos (12%), video games (11%), and series (9%).
Why a YouTube Channel Network is Relevant for Affiliate Marketing
Statistics indicate that YouTube remains at the peak of its popularity and will continue growing in all aspects. Essentially, YouTube is a goldmine for those capable of producing quality content. Simultaneously, YouTube serves as an excellent source of organic traffic, benefiting affiliate marketing specialists who can effectively leverage the platform for lead generation.
One advantage of the video hosting platform is the ability to embed videos on landing pages and pre-landers, enhancing user engagement, displaying calls to action (CTA), and facilitating offer conversion. Video pre-landers, mimicking medical blog pages, for example, enhance trust among the target audience.
Moreover, YouTube itself is a powerful search engine, second only to Google in terms of visits. It delivers relevant results for numerous queries and supports live streaming, contributing to promotion through organic traffic.
In summary, YouTube can become a key traffic source, allowing promotion among audiences interested in specific offers. The use of specialized keyword research services tailored for YouTube can further streamline this process.
To maximize YouTube's potential, marketers recommend creating a network of channels united by similar themes. Multiple channels increase audience reach among those with similar or adjacent interests, boosting popularity with active subscriptions and views.
Furthermore, a channel network helps filter thematically similar content by presentation format, attracting subscribers. This, essentially, constitutes the primary life hack for the effectiveness of channel networks for affiliate marketing: format filtering accumulates diverse organic traffic, which, redirected to social networks or promo landing pages, can be tested for conversion. Subsequently, more attention can be devoted to content or specific channels showing the highest performance.
Creating a YouTube Channel Network: The Process
Let's outline the process of creating a channel network. Unlike before, when activating multiple channels required separate accounts linked to different email addresses, this has become more straightforward. Here's how:
- Click on your Google avatar and select "Settings" from the popup menu.
- In "Settings," choose "My Channel," then click on the "Manage Channels" menu.
- On the next page, click the "+Create Channel" button, and YouTube's system will guide you through registering a new video channel within your existing account.
- New Channel Creation Page in the General Account Settings Menu:
- After creating a new channel, you can verify its existence on the main account page.
- Switching between channels is as easy as clicking your avatar in the top right corner and selecting the desired channel from the dropdown list.
Warming Up YouTube Newbies: General Recommendations
Once the YouTube channel network is set up, the next step is to start populating the channels with content. It's crucial to understand several principles from the outset to avoid issues with video promotion or potential bans from the video hosting platform.
Since the affiliate marketer relies on organic traffic from YouTube, all preparatory work and marketing efforts are geared toward obtaining it. Acquiring traffic immediately from channels with few subscribers and views won't work, so initially, the focus should be on warming up the network.
Experienced marketers emphasize that during the warm-up phase, buying ads or deliberately engaging in artificial promotion is strictly forbidden. This direct violation of the platform's rules will likely lead to the suspension of the main account and the entire network of associated channels.
Additionally, it's not advisable to boost videos through mutual views and friendly likes, as YouTube algorithms swiftly detect such actions, leading to the optimization of channels by reducing views and recommendations.
It's evident that placing affiliate promo links under the first videos uploaded to YouTube channels is futile — without traffic, there are no leads. Moreover, the algorithms of the video hosting platform may view such placements on new channels with suspicion, potentially affecting recommendations within the platform or even cutting down on views.
YouTube appreciates links under videos, particularly favoring trusted domains, messengers/social networks (such as Telegram), or applications (excluding spammy ones). Therefore, in the channel network, especially in the initial stages, it's necessary to place links to some reputable pre-landers with a good track record.
Additionally, the content of the videos itself influences the effective warming up of the channel network. Videos created solely for promotional purposes don't gain traction. It takes time to learn to create videos quickly and without compromising quality for the chosen niche.
To expedite the warming-up process, several effective hacks can be employed. For instance, when uploading videos to new channels, visual links to other videos from the same channel or any other channel in the network can be embedded at the end of each video. These should thematically complement the content or contribute to expanding the viewer's perspective.
During the warm-up of the channel network, it's also advisable to study the statistics of key queries and performance indicators of direct competitors in the niche. Working with affiliate marketing offers is pointless for older channels with hundreds of thousands of views, as algorithms may recommend videos to a diverse audience. However, new channels can experiment with similar offers. YouTube tends to favor more recent videos in recommendations, assuming similar video quality.
Grabbing Traffic in Bunches: Current Video Content Formats on YouTube
For effective utilization of YouTube in affiliate marketing, it's advisable to filter the created channel network by video format from the outset. Each channel should exclusively use a distinct presentation style without mixing it with any other. Let's explore the most successful and cost-effective video content formats for affiliate marketing.
Living in the Shorts Style
The specificity of video hosting dictates that users respond best to creatively delivered content using storytelling or humorous scenarios. The Shorts video format fits perfectly into this stylistic preference, attracting billions of daily viewers on YouTube.
Video hosting actively supports and promotes Shorts creators on the platform. These short videos appear in user recommendations, taking into account their interests and viewing history.
The advantage of Shorts for traffic acquisition lies in the fact that through short creative videos, one can work with almost any vertical: dating, nutra, betting, installs, finance, and so on.
A clear example of traffic acquisition for a nutra offer was demonstrated by the YouTube channel "Teeth Talk Girl," featuring a video promoting the fastest teeth whitener. The video garnered over 10 million views, and later, the channel owners slightly reformatted the video and re-uploaded it as a regular video, gaining an additional 9 million views. Affiliate links for the teeth whitening product were placed under each video.
YouTube moderators are not equally lenient with all nutra offers; for instance, questions may arise regarding the promotion of dietary supplements. Therefore, experienced affiliate marketers recommend adding pre-landers when using Shorts videos for traffic acquisition. The channel "Fit For Life" attaches a link to a pre-lander to the description of its short videos, directing interested users to dietary supplement offers through it.
A significant advantage of Shorts is the relative ease of creating videos. Essentially, one can create small thematic clips quickly, with a loosely outlined script as commentary, posting 3-5 shorts daily, including through scheduled publication. The visual content can be composed of images gathered from various sources — search engines, stock photos, personal screenshots, and so on.
However, if relatively high-quality organic traffic is still required for acquisition, even with Shorts, careful planning of a content strategy is necessary. This involves creating a thoughtful content plan tailored to the thematic vertical, focusing on informativeness and providing value to viewers. Such an approach justifies itself, especially when dealing with nutra, which can be used for traffic acquisition related to products associated with weight loss, rejuvenation, skincare, or teeth/skin whitening.
The video content from a Shorts beauty blogger with several hundred thousand subscribers looks like this:
Many people believe that Shorts primarily appeal to a younger audience, assuming that acquiring traffic from them doesn’t work for affiliate marketing. This is not entirely accurate. In recent years, marketers have noted an increase in the number of financially capable users aged 40 to 45, actively engaging with Shorts. This demographic, due to age-related factors, becomes interested in pharmaceutical products that help maintain a vibrant appearance.
In the nutra niche, Shorts can be used to promote beauty and health tips, share results of using hygiene products and medications, and conduct unboxings. Traffic can be directed either directly to a landing page with an offer or to pre-landers designed as theme-specific social media pages.
Vlogs: Traffic Acquisition through Personal Narratives
Full-length horizontal videos featuring personal stories, life experiences, and products/items/services regularly used continue to enjoy significant popularity on YouTube. Therefore, a thematic vlog can form the basis of another channel within the created network.
In addition to first-person narratives, vlogs can be used to showcase expertise and experience in a specific professional field, particularly one related to affiliate marketing. This helps establish a closer connection with the audience, increasing loyalty. However, such videos require more meticulous preparation and the development of a comprehensive, detailed content plan.
To effectively use vlogs for traffic acquisition, it's crucial to consider the current specifics of the format. The energy of the channel's creator is particularly important. It's not necessary to stage extravagant action shows — capturing the viewer's attention can be achieved by emphasizing features related to the promoted product or service.
Charisma often relies on building tense dramaturgy both within individual vlog episodes and across several releases. Essentially, with proper attention to detail and good content planning, an entire "series" can be created, tailored to funnel traffic towards specific offers in certain niches. For example, vlogs about using dating services to invite selected partners can be created for traffic toward dating affiliate programs.
The advantage of vlogs for traffic acquisition lies in the fact that each episode somehow addresses a specific issue, and solutions can always be demonstrated by native highlighting of products, services, or offers from affiliate programs.
Offer-Only Streams
Streaming releases are a complementary form of content that can be posted on a separate channel within your YouTube network. The particular feature of this format is its enhanced engaging function. Psychologists have long noted that people often watch streams because of their liking for a particular individual, based on the trust that arises towards them. Consequently, streaming broadcasts contribute to increased loyalty not only to the content creator but also to what they are natively promoting through it.
Streaming broadcasts work particularly well for nutra verticals, product offers, and installs. Through them, one can organize self-care tutorials, expert consultations for promoting courses or online webinars, reviews and comparisons, as well as special episodes answering questions about the use of a specific product.
As an example of using streaming for traffic acquisition from YouTube, consider a stream from a blogger explaining how to play a mobile game using a computer from a single account. Interest in the stream is fueled by advice for beginners, and the emotional experience during gameplay increases viewing time and likes on the video. As a result, views of the saved stream on the account can continue for years and clicks on the advertised offer for installing a program turn into a long-lasting passive income source.
Grey Schemes for Quick Content Production
The question arises: where to get significant volumes of content for shorts so that constant traffic does not dry up? Experienced and risk-taking video creators do not shy away from grey schemes — they take others' videos from TikTok or Instagram Reels, make them unique, and launch them into their network. These methods are suitable for any vertical, even for risky gambling and dating, but work best for nutra.
Previously, YouTube would easily run downloaded TikTok videos without watermarks with CTA overlays applied via Photoshop. However, algorithms have now significantly tightened, and taking off with such videos is no longer possible. Now, before posting "grey" content, it needs to be made unique — this also requires time.
Radial uniqueness is done in any convenient video editor. The general process looks like this:
- Trim everything unnecessary and irrelevant from the source that does not work for a specific offer.
- Detach the original track from the video and remove the video.
- Uniquify the audio by increasing the sound speed by 10-15%. You can also use audio from the YouTube audio library.
- Use 10 to 20 stock images or screenshots as the basis for the video, making the images dynamic through effects and overlays.
- Create a unique title for the video and save it in good quality.
In some cases, you can try to partially differentiate the sources. In this case, experienced video bloggers recommend using a 1% change in the video tilt degree, a 50%-70% increase in volume, changes in tone, frame overlays, or blurring. To increase the chances of passing moderation, the content itself can be poured from sources where it has not yet been uploaded. For example, from the Chinese segment of TikTok or Reels — from accounts with 50 000 to 100 000 followers, no more.
Conclusions
Using YouTube as a source of conditionally free traffic is still profitable. Since the video hosting platform represents an enormous organic base with diverse interests, it can be monetized through offers from thematic affiliate programs.
It's better to drive traffic from several channels (a specially created network) geared towards either one vertical or several related ones, with an intersection of thematic content. The channels themselves are better filtered by the format of the posted videos, using simple-to-produce video formats such as shorts, expert streams, and vlog reports.
For novice YouTube bloggers, it's easiest to start with white goods, applications, games, and tutorials. If there is minimal expertise in the field of medicine or sports and fitness, you can immediately delve into nutra offers.
It's important to remember that you can work on YouTube with almost all verticals. And although many internal rules must be followed for nutra, gambling, betting, and finance, the video hosting platform can become a source of passive income for many years.
