The complete guide to working with YouTubers in affiliate marketing

Priyanka Okidi | Posted on August 8, 2024 |

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Thinking about working with YouTube affiliates? Or wondering how to make your existing YouTube affiliate partnerships more effective? This guide has your back.

In this ultimate YouTube affiliate marketing guide for online businesses, we’ll walk you through the following:

What YouTube affiliate marketing is.
The benefits of partnering with YouTube affiliates.
YouTube affiliate marketing ideas.
How to create an effective YouTube affiliate marketing strategy.
Best practices for YouTube affiliate marketing.

Ready? Let’s dive right in.

What is YouTube affiliate marketing?

YouTube affiliate marketing is the practice of partnering with YouTube creators to feature your products or services in their videos in exchange for a reward.

YouTube affiliates promote your offerings by including unique referral links or codes within videos and/or video descriptions. When viewers click their affiliate links and make a purchase, the affiliates earn commissions.

Did you know? 💡: YouTube is the world’s largest video-focused search engine slash social media platform. It boasts more than 2.70 billion active users per month, over 113.9 million active channels, and 1 billion hours of daily content watch time. (Source).

Benefits of working with YouTube affiliates

Partnering with YouTube affiliates comes with a host of benefits that make it worth the investment. To name a few:

Expanded reach: Partnering with established YouTubers enables you to tap into their audience and grow your business’s visibility online. And considering that many YouTube channels focus on specific niches, it puts your products and services in front of a warm audience.
Visual demonstrations: YouTube videos allow for in-depth product reviews, demonstrations, and walkthroughs. For instance, a YouTube channel that shares beauty content can create videos showing exactly how specific makeup products look on different skin tones. This makes it easier for potential customers to envision your products in action. In addition, affiliate videos are a form of user-generated content. They serve as testimonials and provide social proof for your products.
Enhanced SEO: YouTube videos often occupy a prime spot on SERPs. Top-ranking affiliates’ videos about your products and services can reach people outside of their core audience and improve your business’s visibility in organic search.
Cost-effective: Like with other affiliate marketing channels, commission payouts are usually only on actual sales. You only pay for successful orders (of course, you can also offer signup bonuses, exclusive offers, and other perks if it works for your business). Not to mention, YouTube videos remain online indefinitely. This means that product reviews from today can generate sales for the next three years and provide continuous value in the long term.

YouTube affiliate marketing ideas

Here are six popular types of YouTube videos affiliates can feature your products and services in.

Keep in mind that each of these video types serve different purposes in the buyer’s journey. To maximize the impact of your YouTube affiliate marketing efforts, feel free to mix and match idea suggestions to affiliates.

Unboxing videos: These videos showcase the product unboxing experience. They give viewers a real-life look at the product, its packaging, and the creators’ initial impressions. For example, tech channels usually create videos unboxing the latest smartphones and their accessories.
Review videos: Review videos cover an in-depth examination of a product or service, including the features, benefits, and potential drawbacks. For example, beauty influencers reviewing a new foundation would typically demonstrate how to apply it and conduct wear tests over a couple of hours.
Roundup videos: Roundups feature multiple products or services from a specific category. They’re great for showcasing your offerings alongside complementary or competing items. For example, a food channel can create a “10 most-useful kitchen gadgets” video featuring high-end blenders and other appliances.
Tutorial videos: Also called “how-to guides”, tutorial videos show viewers how to use your product effectively. They help demonstrate your product’s value. For example, a DIY channel can create tutorials showing step-by-step how to use power tools to build a bookshelf.
Comparison videos: Direct product-to-product comparison videos help viewers understand how your product stacks up against alternatives. For example, a web developer can create a video comparing WordPress versus Wix as a CMS platform.
Themed videos: Themed videos tie your product to evergreen or current trends to make them relevant and desirable to your target viewers. For example, “What I eat in a day” or “What’s in my bag?” videos.

How to create a YouTube affiliate marketing strategy (step-by-step)

Let’s get into the five steps to craft an effective YouTube affiliate marketing strategy that drives successful sales to your online business.

Note: We assume that you have a working affiliate program. If not, you can create one for free with the Coupon Affiliates plugin — no credit card required. Check out our guide on how to create your affiliate program in ten minutes or less for a step-by-step walkthrough.

Now, here’s an overview of the steps to create a successful YouTube affiliate marketing strategy:

Establish your goals and KPIs.
Connect with the right YouTube affiliates.
Agree on collaboration details.
Provide resources and support.
Monitor results and optimize your strategy.

1. Establish your goals and KPIs

The first step to working with affiliates across any channel is to define what you want to achieve with the partnership. This will vary depending on key factors like the size of your business, the types of products and services you offer, previous marketing efforts, and available resources.

The end goal of every affiliate marketing campaign is to generate sales. To make sure YouTube is an effective affiliate channel for your business, you need to map your affiliate marketing strategy to drive sales to:

Individual products
Specific product categories
Your entire product catalog

Building YouTube affiliate marketing campaigns around defined goals influences the type of YouTube channels to reach out to, the type of video content you propose that they create, marketing banners, metrics to track, and all the other steps down the line.

2. Connect with the right YouTube affiliates

Find YouTube channels that create videos your ideal customers like to consume. You can use a tool like Social Blade to estimate the average reach and engagement level of each video uploaded.

Here are the core criteria to assess each YouTube channel before reaching out to them about joining your affiliate program:

Niche: Their content and overall style should align with your business.
Engagement levels: High engagement (views, likes, quality comments) indicates an active audience.
Subscriber count: Although not as important as engagement levels, a larger subscriber base can translate to more eyeballs on your videos.

Once you’ve compiled a list of potential affiliates, reach out and invite them to join your affiliate program. Be sure to mention the benefits of partnering with your business, such as baseline commission rates and special deals for their viewers.

While you don’t have to include every detail in your initial email, make sure you convey what they’ll gain by promoting your products on their YouTube channel.

3. Agree on collaboration details

YouTube videos typically require more effort and resources to create compared to blog posts and social media content. So it might be a good idea to revamp your affiliate program’s rewards and perks to ensure your YouTube affiliates are properly compensated.

YouTube affiliate compensation can include:

Affiliate rewards: Affiliate commission rates vary widely and can range from 5% to 30%. Of course, higher rates are essential to attract top YouTubers.
Special offers: You can provide unique discounts for the YouTuber’s audience to nudge them to try out your offerings.

You’ll also want to agree on content guidelines, usage rights, and other legal regulations for YouTube affiliates.

4. Provide resources and support

Once you’ve onboarded the right-fit affiliates, the next step is to equip them with the resources and support they need to succeed, such as:

Product samples: Send them products (if you offer physical products) or provide them access to your offerings (if you sell virtual products, services, or software) so they can review and feature them in their videos.
Affiliate links and codes: Approve their affiliate accounts and guide them to access their unique affiliate links and codes.
Marketing materials: Share high-quality marketing creatives and banners along with images, videos, and other information about your products and services.

5. Optimize your YouTube affiliate strategy

Regularly analyzing your YouTube affiliates’ performance data is the best way to identify if your strategy is working and what adjustments are required — whether that be commission rates, promotional strategies, content, or something else.

Coupon Affiliates automatically tracks and presents key metrics, such as sales, commission, referral URLs, products, and others, to site admins and affiliates (affiliates can only see their own data).

Also, you can connect your Google Analytics and WooCommerce Analytics to get a fuller picture of performance data, including traffic, sales, conversions, etc., for each YouTube affiliate.

YouTube affiliate marketing best practices

YouTube affiliate marketing works — when done right. Here are some best practices to make sure your YouTube affiliate partnerships are effective and profitable.

Focus on YouTube SEO. At its core, YouTube is a search engine. Use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to research high-volume, low-competition keywords related to your products. Share them with your affiliates to use these keywords in their video titles, descriptions, and tags. Also, encourage affiliates to transcribe their videos for closed captions, as YouTube can index this text.
Engage with comments/community. Active engagement boosts video performance and builds trust. Encourage affiliates to respond to comments promptly and create community posts that complement their videos. You can also join the conversation and interact with viewers in the comments section.
Leverage YouTube Shorts. YouTube shorts are bite-sized vertical videos that can be up to 60 seconds. Shorts are known to drive massive reach. Encouraging YouTube affiliates to create Shorts can boost the ROI on each video.
Supplement YouTube with other affiliate channels. While YouTube is a powerful channel to drive affiliate sales, it works best when paired with other marketing activities. For example, you can embed YouTube videos into blog posts to increase their organic rankings or clip portions of affiliate videos for product showcases or customer testimonials (with their creators’ consent).

Get started with YouTube affiliate marketing today!

It’s never too late to start working with YouTube affiliates.

There’s an abundance of YouTube channels with huge audiences you can easily tap into. As the largest video-focused search engine slash social media platform in the world, YouTube is an excellent source of organic leads.

Follow the steps mentioned in this guide to kick off your YouTube affiliate marketing efforts today!

PS: Not yet created your affiliate marketing program? Coupon Affiliates helps WooCommerce stores of all sizes create and manage their affiliate programs. More than 4,700 WooCommerce stores trust Coupon Affiliates and have given it a rating of 4.9 out of 5. It automatically tracks your program’s analytics and lets you access the vital KPIs and metrics for your affiliate program. Check out the free version or get the pro version (with a 7-day free trial).

Priyanka Okidi

Priyanka is a writer for WordPress and eCommerce companies. She loves breaking down complex ideas into simple concepts.