Tips for Using YouTube for Affiliate Marketing from Econsultantcy’s “The Innovation Report” #TG2009

by on July 14, 2009 at 1:43 pm

As a Traveling Geek in London, I participated in a Round Table Discussion event with some of Econsultancy’s clients.

Econsultancy Traveling Geeks Econsultancy Round Table Discussions at the Globe Theatre

Traveling Geeks Econsultancy Round Table Discussions at the Globe Theatre

See the TG2009 Econsultancy Flickr Set Here

As a follow up to the event, I was given a copy of their very well done Innovation Report.

Econsultancy Innovation Report for Digital Marketing

Econsultancy Innovation Report for Digital Marketing

If you want a high level overview of some of the hottest technology companies in the digital media and marketing space, this report does a great job with highlighting best practices in the following disciplines:

  • Affiliate marketing
  • Email marketing
  • Online advertising
  • Multichannel marketing
  • Online customer service
  • Online PR
  • Social media and communities
  • Search marketing
  • Usability and user experience
  • Web analytics and optimization

One of the most interesting sections to me was on using video to drive affiliate traffic, written by Shawn Collins of Affiliate Summit. (Most of the companies featured are European, but this example of a “best practice” was from Shawn, a US affiliate champion.)

For more free and in-depth coverage on video, I interview Bruce Clay about Video SEO on DishyMix airing today:

Bruce Clay on Video SEO, Page Rank Sculpting and Search Siloing Strategies

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From Econsultancy’s Innovation Report

Video as a channel to drive direct traffic to affiliate links
Category: Affiliate Marketing
Company: http://blog.affiliatetip.com/
Many affiliates use video as a channel to drive traffic, but one innovative tactic to drive through higher volumes is to include the URL of the affiliate site and embed it within the video itself.  According to Shawn Collins, few affiliates are making use of video to either drive traffic to their
own sites or to affiliate links directly. Shawn Collins tested various online video engagement strategies, trialling videos through a number of popular sites, including YouTube, MySpace, Revver and Yahoo Video.
Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkX7xHvTIe0

http://blog.affiliatetip.com/

http://blog.affiliatetip.com/

Per Shawn Collins, co-founder, Affiliate Summit

?I have tested various methods over the past year… and found that the following format works best:
http://www.affiliatesite.com/product-name – I then create a redirect via an .htaccess file, so that /product-name
points to the affiliate link. The URL is featured for the duration of the video uploaded to the video sites.


?Conventional wisdom may be that people do not type in URLs in videos – I‘d like to share a secret that the
conventional wisdom is incorrect!