Any advice YouTube - Affiliate Funnel

[Smackhead]

Hello, First post be kind

Some years ago (2019) I decided after some reading on these forums that I was going to get my toes wet and upload some videos to YouTube. The videos that I uploaded were essentially adverts which I had taken from another website, I added my own intro slide and a water mark with my domain name and set up auto redirect on the domain to forward to products using my affiliate link.

After not seeing much traffic initially my interest moved to other things, I am now reviewing my analytics and thinking about giving it another go. Would love to know if any of you have any advice for how I could improve this strategy or pit falls that I might fall into.

2019 uploaded 8 videos between 2 YouTube accounts, neither account had previously uploaded any content. From these 8 videos I would receive on average 4 clicks per day through my affiliate link, over the course of 3 years I earned £744.00. I know this is not a lot but for the amount of effort I actually put in I'm quite pleased which is what's leading me to think about scaling this.

would you be encouraged by the below figures or do you think this is not worth the effort? ~£250 per year based on past performance ~£30 per video per year on average. aware that 2 videos make up 70% of my views so my figures might not scale accurately.

I have no experience with scaling so any direction would be much appreciated, I have listed my thoughts below. I have more but I'm trying not to bore you to death.

Content
Ok, so I think I have it nailed from a content standpoint I am currently scraping some public websites for images and adverts which include my products which I am downloading to my local storage. Once I've downloaded the content that's when it gets manual as I don't know of any automated way to watermark my videos with my website address (previously I used lightworks). as I am writing this I'm wondering is the watermark even necessary. right now I have no data on whether or not the water mark actually makes a difference (maybe I need to set this up and collect more data).

YouTube
Once I've prepped the videos and gotten the formatting correct I begin the manual process of uploading to YouTube, again this is probably something that could be automated. Does anyone has any experience with automated uploads to YouTube across multiple accounts?

How to accumulate accounts?
If I am going to scale this then I will need more accounts (I'm thinking x number of videos per account in case any of the accounts are taken down for copyright or w.e). over the past 3 years I did receive the odd copy right strike but never a ban.

How to manage the accounts?
This may come as part of the upload automation but still something I need to consider. If I am running multiple accounts lets say in excess of 10 I will need some way to manage all of the accounts at the same time, it would be great to see all of the analytics in one place... I know this can be done with google analytics across multiple channels but they must be on the same google account. if I have multiple channels on the same account I would be worried that I have them all taken down at the same time, anyone know if this would be correct?

Funnel to affiliate links
All of the uploaded videos would point to domains which then redirect to specific product pages using affiliate links, I did it this way so that I could switch the links as required without having to change each link individually on the videos and also to mask the sender address from YouTube to my own domain hopefully reducing my chances of a terms violation with the affiliate provider.

 

[richsb]

Hello, First post be kind

Some years ago (2019) I decided after some reading on these forums that I was going to get my toes wet and upload some videos to YouTube. The videos that I uploaded were essentially adverts which I had taken from another website, I added my own intro slide and a water mark with my domain name and set up auto redirect on the domain to forward to products using my affiliate link.

After not seeing much traffic initially my interest moved to other things, I am now reviewing my analytics and thinking about giving it another go. Would love to know if any of you have any advice for how I could improve this strategy or pit falls that I might fall into.

2019 uploaded 8 videos between 2 YouTube accounts, neither account had previously uploaded any content. From these 8 videos I would receive on average 4 clicks per day through my affiliate link, over the course of 3 years I earned £744.00. I know this is not a lot but for the amount of effort I actually put in I'm quite pleased which is what's leading me to think about scaling this.

would you be encouraged by the below figures or do you think this is not worth the effort? ~£250 per year based on past performance ~£30 per video per year on average. aware that 2 videos make up 70% of my views so my figures might not scale accurately.



View attachment 196207

I have no experience with scaling so any direction would be much appreciated, I have listed my thoughts below. I have more but I'm trying not to bore you to death.

Content
Ok, so I think I have it nailed from a content standpoint I am currently scraping some public websites for images and adverts which include my products which I am downloading to my local storage. Once I've downloaded the content that's when it gets manual as I don't know of any automated way to watermark my videos with my website address (previously I used lightworks). as I am writing this I'm wondering is the watermark even necessary. right now I have no data on whether or not the water mark actually makes a difference (maybe I need to set this up and collect more data).

YouTube
Once I've prepped the videos and gotten the formatting correct I begin the manual process of uploading to YouTube, again this is probably something that could be automated. Does anyone has any experience with automated uploads to YouTube across multiple accounts?

How to accumulate accounts?
If I am going to scale this then I will need more accounts (I'm thinking x number of videos per account in case any of the accounts are taken down for copyright or w.e). over the past 3 years I did receive the odd copy right strike but never a ban.

How to manage the accounts?
This may come as part of the upload automation but still something I need to consider. If I am running multiple accounts lets say in excess of 10 I will need some way to manage all of the accounts at the same time, it would be great to see all of the analytics in one place... I know this can be done with google analytics across multiple channels but they must be on the same google account. if I have multiple channels on the same account I would be worried that I have them all taken down at the same time, anyone know if this would be correct?

Funnel to affiliate links
All of the uploaded videos would point to domains which then redirect to specific product pages using affiliate links, I did it this way so that I could switch the links as required without having to change each link individually on the videos and also to mask the sender address from YouTube to my own domain hopefully reducing my chances of a terms violation with the affiliate provider.

I know this is an old post but I had a similar experience where I set up some youtube videos around affiliate marketing and forgot all about them and later found I made a decent amount over time. I'm interested to see if you ever got going on this again and if so how it went. It sounds like you're one up on me with the scraping etc, I just manually did everything, so it took me a while ha ha.
Thanks in advance for any reply!

 

[Smackhead]

I know this is an old post but I had a similar experience where I set up some youtube videos around affiliate marketing and forgot all about them and later found I made a decent amount over time. I'm interested to see if you ever got going on this again and if so how it went. It sounds like you're one up on me with the scraping etc, I just manually did everything, so it took me a while ha ha.
Thanks in advance for any reply!

Hey dude, sorry for the delay in getting back to you. needed some time to pull the data together..

So, I've started to scale things and its been fun but nothing has taken off yet (I'm often impatient). As I mentioned in the previous post, I had the content sorted and have since managed to automate my video edits using FFmpeg and a small application I've created to handle the files and prepare them to be uploaded to YouTube. I still have a bottleneck with YouTube accounts as I have no automation to create them but I don't feel this is holding me back. right now I have 5 YouTube accounts 2 of which attract very small numbers. I've managed to automate the uploading of videos as well using the google v3 YouTube API which is great, I have 3 test subscriptions that can upload 5 videos per day for free. (above what I'm doing at the minute) .

Uploads
Since my last post I've uploaded 89 videos taking my total to 100. When I started off I was uploading one or two videos a day but have since scaled by as I don't want to look overly spammy and get banned.

	2019	2021	2022	Grand Total
Total Uploaded	8​	3​	89​	100​

Views and Impressions
I've managed to achieve more views and impressions in 3 months than I did in any of the previous years which I think is positive but still a large number of these views are coming from the older videos. I am hoping that as the age of the videos increases they may over time generate more views per day as they are indexed ( I know this to be true with websites but I have no idea if the same applies to videos)

	2019	2020	2021	2022
Sum of Views	4021​	3572​	2439​	4600​
Sum of Impressions	30200​	32936​	29870​	40083​

Money Money Money
So the money, initially I thought I was only a winner as earnings almost doubled from the first to second month but have since dropped in March and are on track to be even lower in April (not really enough data for April) I don't know if this is cause to be concerned as my videos and impressions continue to grow along with clicks per day but for some reason, I have fewer conversions.

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr
Earnings (£)	15​	28.12​	10.51​	0.05​
Clicks	105​	170​	211​	18​
Clicks Per Day	3.387097​	6.071429​	6.806452​	3​

What's next
I will continue to upload on a regular basis and have started to play around manually tweaking descriptions and tags on one channel so that I can compare the results against some of the fully automated stuff. I need more time to understand if videos will generate a more consistent stream of views as they age or if I am missing something in the early days that is causing me to receive fewer views.. it's in the back of my mind to experiment with SMM pannels or Bots to maybe increase my interactions to see if that has a positive impact on long-term views and CTR. I'd also like to apply my automation to a completely different niche to compare results.. lots to think about.

 

[richsb]

Wow that's a lot of info, thanks for the update! I'm ramping up right now myself. I am way less technically savvy than you it sounds. I only know how to grind out content manually. I feel like there is a full time income in this if done right and fully optimized. I am like you I'm going to keep going with this testing different tweaks to see if I can wring something out of it. Good luck to you on your quest....You'll have to update me if you crack the code....I'll keep you in mind if I hit the big time with this in some way also! I looked back on the stuff I did that made money in the past with this for any info I could share with you. About 18 months or so ago I jammed out 13 pretty bad videos on one channel in a weird niche in like a week (brand new channel).....it sat there doing nothing...later I learned that over a years time I had made around $1000 US from an affiliate link I had put in the description and comments section (clicbank). When I check the history of that setup it seems that after around 6 months it took off and at one point was averaging 1600 views per month....it has since died down to around 600 views per month but I made about $50 last month on it....So...I'm looking into duplicating that a million times and retiring ha ha....Let me know if you find the secret missing piece to it all and thanks for your reply sir!

 

[infomen]

Hey dude, sorry for the delay in getting back to you. needed some time to pull the data together..

So, I've started to scale things and its been fun but nothing has taken off yet (I'm often impatient). As I mentioned in the previous post, I had the content sorted and have since managed to automate my video edits using FFmpeg and a small application I've created to handle the files and prepare them to be uploaded to YouTube. I still have a bottleneck with YouTube accounts as I have no automation to create them but I don't feel this is holding me back. right now I have 5 YouTube accounts 2 of which attract very small numbers. I've managed to automate the uploading of videos as well using the google v3 YouTube API which is great, I have 3 test subscriptions that can upload 5 videos per day for free. (above what I'm doing at the minute) .

Uploads
Since my last post I've uploaded 89 videos taking my total to 100. When I started off I was uploading one or two videos a day but have since scaled by as I don't want to look overly spammy and get banned.

	2019	2021	2022	Grand Total
Total Uploaded	8​	3​	89​	100​

Views and Impressions
I've managed to achieve more views and impressions in 3 months than I did in any of the previous years which I think is positive but still a large number of these views are coming from the older videos. I am hoping that as the age of the videos increases they may over time generate more views per day as they are indexed ( I know this to be true with websites but I have no idea if the same applies to videos)

	2019	2020	2021	2022
Sum of Views	4021​	3572​	2439​	4600​
Sum of Impressions	30200​	32936​	29870​	40083​

Money Money Money
So the money, initially I thought I was only a winner as earnings almost doubled from the first to second month but have since dropped in March and are on track to be even lower in April (not really enough data for April) I don't know if this is cause to be concerned as my videos and impressions continue to grow along with clicks per day but for some reason, I have fewer conversions.

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr
Earnings (£)	15​	28.12​	10.51​	0.05​
Clicks	105​	170​	211​	18​
Clicks Per Day	3.387097​	6.071429​	6.806452​	3​

What's next
I will continue to upload on a regular basis and have started to play around manually tweaking descriptions and tags on one channel so that I can compare the results against some of the fully automated stuff. I need more time to understand if videos will generate a more consistent stream of views as they age or if I am missing something in the early days that is causing me to receive fewer views.. it's in the back of my mind to experiment with SMM pannels or Bots to maybe increase my interactions to see if that has a positive impact on long-term views and CTR. I'd also like to apply my automation to a completely different niche to compare results.. lots to think about.

Bro, it's not as hard as you thought)

 

[Ateporos]

What is the name of the bot that you used for scraping?