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Every day, users on YouTube consume more than 1 billion hours watching videos. To put things into perspective, YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine after Google (which has owned the video streaming service since 2006).
As an affiliate marketer then, it would be unwise to ignore this channel, especially considering just how many visits it gets and the searches it processes. For instance, according to the Hootsuite Global State of Digital 2022 report, the platform attracts 1.7 billion unique monthly visitors, which is higher than the likes of Instagram, Facebook, and even Wikipedia!
Needless to say, YouTube offers a great opportunity for adding affiliate links and promoting your content. In this guide, we’ll discuss how to add Amazon affiliate links to YouTube.
Where Can You Add Affiliate Links on YouTube?
If you’re a content creator on YouTube, there are a number of opportunities for you to add affiliate links to your videos. Here are just some of the many places where you can add affiliate links on YouTube:
Description
The description of your video is one of the most common places where you can add Amazon affiliate links. Make sure you use the direct link that Amazon provides, as cloaking links is prohibited.
Ideally, you should make a video demonstrating the various products and then include an affiliate link in the description, convincing people to buy.
YouTube doesn’t have a problem if you add naked links, as shown above, but keep it between 5-10. Adding 20+ links, for instance, might be overwhelming and will affect the way the description appears.
Pinned Comment
Another excellent spot where you can add Amazon affiliate links is the pinned comment. It’s the one that appears right at the top of the comment section, so it’s definitely going to get a lot of views.
The Community Tab
Most content creators often forget about this one, but the Community tab is a great location to add some Amazon affiliate links.
In the example above, you can see that the creator has added a link to the product, a promotional code to drive conversions, and a link to the video with a full review.
It’s likely that people will comment on your posts, so it’s important that you engage with them. For instance, if someone asks a particular question, make sure you respond!
Comment Replies
In the same vein, you can add affiliate links when answering a question left by a viewer. It’s a neat placement opportunity, as long as you don’t come off as too pushy.
Make sure the link placement actually makes sense when you add it. It should be directly relevant to the original comment.
Don’t Cloak Your Amazon Affiliate Links!
Amazon strictly prohibits affiliates from cloaking their affiliate links. This interferes with tracking. And remember to make sure that you add a disclaimer explaining that you stand to make a commission for every sale made through that link.
How to Add Amazon Affiliate Links to Your YouTube Videos
Now that you know where to add Amazon affiliate links, it’s also important to focus on how to drive conversions and generate more revenue through your links.
Adding the links is the easy part. You can get affiliate links from your Amazon Associates account and just use any of the link placement opportunities to add them in.
But it’s critically important to know exactly how to maximize the effectiveness of these links. Here are a few tips that will help.
Create Relevant Content
YouTube is all about content. If you want people to click on your affiliate links, you need to first hook them with good-quality content. This mainly starts with the niche you’re targeting.
For instance, if you’re making content about “coffee grinders”, make sure your videos are actually interesting. Low-effort videos, such as stitching together a bunch of photos and adding a voiceover, are unlikely to drive conversions.
If you provide a comprehensive review of the “Top 5 Coffee Grinders” instead while showing your audience each of the products and explaining their pros and cons, it’s definitely going to boost conversions.
Engage your Audience
How do you stand out from the hundreds of other affiliate marketers who are also using YouTube as a promotional playground? By responding to comments and answering questions!
Keep an active check on the comments, and the most common questions that people ask, and try to respond as quickly as possible.
Over time, you’ll build a loyal, dedicated following of people who’ll subscribe to your videos and will take your word for granted. It’s both simple and very effective.
Create Content Regularly
If you’re only uploading videos once a month or so, you’re doing it wrong, especially if you’re in the early stages of your affiliate marketing career.
There are a few YouTubers who make a handful of videos throughout the year, but they usually have a highly dedicated following, and YouTube is just one of many channels that they use.
They also work incredibly hard to reach that level of exclusivity, where each video generates millions of views within the first few days of going live.
As an affiliate marketer, you need to create and stick with your publishing schedule. Ideally, at the start of the month, you should plan all the videos you’re going to create, the topics you’ll focus on, and when you intend to publish them.
The more content you post, the more your content will resonate with your audience. There are several types of videos that you can create that offer a great opportunity for adding Amazon affiliate links:
- “Top X” listicle videos
- Tutorial videos
- Videos answering common questions
- Buying guide videos (How to choose…)
Optimize Your Videos
Now that you know the basics, there’s one more thing to cover: optimization. You want your videos to appear in the top results, and that’s only possible if your content is properly optimized.
For instance, make sure that the description, the tags, and the title of your video are all optimized for the keyword you’re targeting.
Always add an interesting thumbnail, and make sure you divide the video into different chapters to make it easier for audiences to skip certain parts. Here’s an example:
Including named chapters in your videos doesn’t just help people skip ahead to the section most relevant to them or jump back to a particular point – it also helps massively with optimization. If your video is reviewing the 5 best espresso machines, you could have one chapter on each machine.
But rather than naming each of these chapters after the machine name, you could name the chapter something like “Review of the ACME Espresso 1000”. This often means that people searching for that keyphrase will see your video in the main search results page of Google as well as in YouTube. Perhaps you have noticed videos being included in search results? Often these will jump straight to the most relevant chapter.
It also helps if you include a transcript of your video, as not only will this help those viewers who may be hard of hearing or who simply prefer to watch videos with the volume down and captions on, but it helps a huge amount with SEO. This is because YouTube and Google, for all their power, are really bad at analyzing the content of videos for relevance. If a transcript is included, the search engines can easily identify the complete content of the video and determine its relevance to certain searches, promoting your video more often.
When it comes to descriptions, instead of just dropping the affiliate links in the description, don’t forget to add a proper description explaining what the video is about. This also presents an interesting opportunity to add a few keywords.
Link Your YouTube Channel with Your Affiliate Website
If you already have an affiliate site where you post reviews, make sure you link your videos with them. In the description, you can encourage people to visit your site or add a link in the End Cards that appear just before a video ends.
It’s a good way to generate free traffic. You can use a reliable WordPress plugin like AAWP to manage all Amazon affiliate links on your WordPress site. It automatically pulls product data from Amazon and lets you create engaging bestseller lists and eye-turning product boxes to maximize affiliate conversions!
