- Finding Products to Promote as An Affiliate:
A Unique Approach.
What I'm about to share with you,
if you're an affiliate in any shape or form,
is hopefully going to change
how you think about keyword research forever.
It's hopefully going to be a little bit like
when you get a new car
and you just start suddenly seeing that car everywhere
even though you didn't really notice it before.
Because what I'm about to teach you is already everywhere
and you probably use it a lot
but you just likely haven't looked at it in this way.
I hope that you haven't looked at it in this way.
So when it comes to finding products to promote
as an affiliate,
doing keyword research as an affiliate,
the idea here is not for me to tell you,
"Go and promote this specific product",
but instead to help you find those exact things for yourself
depending on your niche,
your industry
and what you want to promote.
After all, there are a lot of different niches out there
just far too many for me to cover
and it's not very smart to tell a lot of SEOs,
"Here's 10 things to go and promote"
because then it's instantly competitive
and you instantly have a lot more competition.
So with what I'm about to share with you,
I have never seen anyone else talk about this
and I have personally been monitoring it
for more than two months now.
Now, as a pretty honest disclaimer upfront:
I have not perfected this.
It is pretty new to me
and I had to go to some extremes,
basically testing a ton of industries,
rather than honing in on one thing.
So please accept this is version 0.1.
I am going to expand on this
and I am going to take it a lot further.
However, I do know
a lot of very smart people are watching this
who are going to figure out ways
that I haven't even thought of yet to take this further
than my original approach
and I'm really excited for that.
That's one of the reasons I'm really excited to share this.
This is actually one of two original concepts
or at least I like to think they're original concepts,
I believe so,
that I'm gonna be sharing on this idea
and I'm equally excited about both of them.
I should also note that as with many things in life,
to get the most out of this
you're really going to have to put in a bit of work,
though the payoffs can be absolutely huge.
After all, this is about promoting things in affiliate,
making money, getting commissions
getting top rankings in Google.
So there is a huge upside here
but there is a bit of work involved.
Just please keep in mind this is kind of an intermediate
to advanced approach.
If you're a total beginner to SEO,
you might find this a bit overwhelming
but this course is about taking you up to the next level.
So you will get to this stage, don't worry,
you will get to the stage
where you're understanding this kind of stuff.
So don't feel overwhelmed if you are just starting out
and watching this for the first time.
It's not that it's difficult to implement
or anything like that.
I'm gonna actually give you a tool to make this happen.
But you kind of have to understand freshness
and social networks and kind of how virality works
and all that kind of thing to really see the potential here.
Because if you don't see the potential,
you're likely not actually going to act on it whatsoever.
So if you skipped our freshness sections
in the on-site SEO module,
you might not know or you might not realize
that Google tends to have a propensity
to reward fresh results in a lot of cases.
So this doesn't apply to every single product
that people are searching for
but in a lot of cases, a lot of products,
when you go to the search results and you look for reviews,
you're gonna find really recent fresh dates
associated with the top rankings.
That's generally when they updated their articles
rather than when they publish something.
But that just tends to be the case for a ton of products
that you might want to promote as an affiliate.
And on the social network side of things,
as you may have seen, when one idea becomes popular,
a lot of people tend to mimic
or model that idea just to see similar success.
So one of the reasons the app TikTok
has become one of the most used in the world
is because you take one idea, one catchy video,
someone copies that somewhere else in the world,
other people didn't see the original
and it just kind of catches on, goes crazy.
To everyone, it's original the first time
and then it just, you know, goes super viral.
As a different kind of example of this.
Someone I follow, Anthony,
he created this website, Tier Maker,
which allows you to put people basically in tiers.
You get to define the tier,
drag and drop people where they should go
and kind of rank people whatever the topic may be.
And as soon as a few people started doing this,
they started doing this on the websites,
on Facebook and YouTube videos,
it just took off and everyone started doing it
and millions of people came to his website
to do the same thing.
So people see something that works well for one person,
they mimic and model that.
And on YouTube this is especially prevalent.
So a big name YouTuber, they cover a particular topic
and then suddenly those other channels,
they see that that person got a lot of views
and a lot of likes and maybe a lot of subscribers from that.
So they start covering the same angle.
So what starts as one person
doing a "1000 degree" knife video cutting through something,
ends up with a lot more channels taking that idea
and doing the same thing.
So people take an idea, mimic it, model it.
And the same is true when it comes to monetization.
People see someone promote something,
they get a lot of likes or shares or views
and they start promoting that same thing.
They kind of wanna get in on the meme train, the angle train
or in this case the cash train
before the next thing comes along.
So going back to the affiliate side of things,
let's just say
you build a number of affiliate websites, okay?
That's the situation you're in.
Or you have plans to build a number of affiliate websites
or grow an affiliate website
and you wanna rank for new products in Google.
You wanna be on the top rankings quickly
when someone is starting to search for something
and you wanna collect those commissions,
you want those affiliate commissions.
When people are looking for reviews,
you send people to Barnes & Noble,
to Builders warehouse to Amazon, whatever it may be,
and you collect those commissions.
So if that is your situation
or if that is the situation you want to be in,
the dream scenario I imagine is that a manufacturer,
they send you an item
a few weeks before anyone else gets their hands on it.
They send it to you first before it's launched.
They'll let you play with it, review it,
take photos, take videos
and they tell you, okay we've given you this first,
but here's the release date.
Here's when you're allowed to share this with the world,
the exact day, the exact minute, have fun.
And thanks to this you can have your review
and your affiliate links just ready
for when everyone starts going to Google
and starts looking for more reviews
of that specific product.
So I'm pretty sure, I might be missing something,
but I'm pretty sure that's the dream situation
for a product that's about to be huge and very popular.
But I can safely assume
that's probably not the position you are in.
You probably don't have manufacturers doing that for you
'cause it's certainly not the position I am in.
However, that is the case for a lot of big name YouTubers.
Many of them actually get items well in advance
and on launch day their affiliate links are right there
in their video description
ready for them to collect commissions
on this brand new hot item.
And that's where our journey takes a slight turn
with the social media powerhouse, that is YouTube.
Now, just as a little side fact.
This doesn't really have anything to do with the video
but just in case you didn't know,
YouTube is actually
the second most popular search engine in the world
right after Google.
So spending some time thinking about this
and this whole concept of YouTubers reviewing things
and getting products early, I had a theory
that if you could find YouTubers promoting a product
on the exact day or even the exact minute
or hour that they go live,
you could quickly get your article
and your affiliate links ready
for a ton of incoming searches on Google.
And I also imagine
that not everyone talks about everything on release days.
Sometimes products just don't really get a big launch
and then people discover them later,
some big name talks about it
and then suddenly everyone is searching for that thing
all over again.
And in many cases, as we'll dive into,
Google just tends to start rewarding really fresh stuff
when suddenly everyone is talking about something
and searching for it for the first time.
So as I said, I've been tracking this theory
for a few months now
and I've just found that YouTubers
actually even tend to talk about products
quite a few days before the big websites
that might get reviews and products in advance.
Before you'd expect that, they talk about something.
So as an example, in the very competitive tech space,
this is probably the hardest industry to pull this off
just 'cause it's so popular.
We can look at
the Razer Huntsman Tournament Edition keyboard.
If you have no idea what that is, don't worry.
I didn't until very recently.
So just before I give this example
just remember this space is insanely competitive
and YouTube channels thrive in this industry,
channels rather, they thrive in this space.
They get a lot of subscribers, the gadgets market is huge
and Razer are a big brand in gaming
so there's a lot of interest in this kind of thing.
So on the launch day of this item,
and perhaps the launch minute, as we're going to get to,
quite a few YouTubers started talking about this.
We have this YouTuber got a lot of views
for his review of the keyboard
and this one going live on the same day,
also getting a lot of views.
And these went live on September 12th, 2019.
And out of curiosity, I went ahead
and went to Google Trends
just to see the kind of popularity.
And it turns out that the week of September 15th
to September 21,
search traffic was at an all time high.
If you look at that spike there, the two dots,
that is when that date is representative.
Or that top blue line is that week,
September 15th to September 21.
Just a few days after these YouTubers
shared something with the world.
Now I should be honest, this data is not perfect.
You can't exactly trust the spikes and the dates.
Google Trends is actually pretty difficult to figure out.
There's actually a quite a lot more to it
than meets the eye.
If you really want to dive into this
and learn more about it,
AHREFS put together a great article on this exact topic.
So I have many examples like this
and I accept that the numbers aren't perfect.
But what was really interesting to me,
and this didn't apply to every website
but did apply to a lot of big names,
is that those two specific YouTubers they talked about
and they reviewed this keyboard five days before PC MAG,
five days before Toms Guide,
six days before Digital Trends
and a lot earlier than a lot of other big name websites.
So I should probably pause for a second
and kind of cover an open secret in the affiliate SEO world.
And that open secret is this.
A lot of people review products they never ever see.
Actually, scratch that.
A lot of people make a ton of money
and dominate top rankings reviewing products
they've never been within a thousand miles of.
That is just the reality of it.
So they review a product, they talk about it
but they've never actually seen it
or touched it or used it or done anything with it.
Now of course, I'm not here to be the kind of quote unquote
'morality police'.
What you want to do with your affiliate website
is just totally up to you.
Actually, the main reason I bring that up is because
one of the reasons those websites
take a while to actually talk about something
is because they are actually waiting until they get it,
until they use it before they talk about it.
That isn't the case
for a lot, perhaps, most of top ranking affiliate websites.
So if your website that you plan to or you tend to,
if you tend to promote things
that you don't actually see and use yourself,
then you might have a field day
with what I'm about to cover.
Though, even if you do use products
and take time with them first,
I like to think this is gonna be very useful
for people in lots of different scenarios.
So we've got the idea that YouTubers tend to get their hands
on physical products that they then promote as an affiliate
before anyone else in the world.
They're just very, very early when that product goes live.
And typically on launch day, they can talk about that thing
before many websites, before any websites at all
in some cases, as I've researched, that can be the case.
And very soon after that,
the number of people searching for that thing in Google
just massively spikes.
People searching for more information about that product,
looking for reviews of that product, just go crazy.
Of course, it's not just because of the YouTubers,
as I will get to,
but you know, there's a pretty clear trend
of that happening.
So with all of this said, with all of this in mind,
I put together a tool that allows me to track YouTubers
in any country
and in any language reviewing a product.
And I'm going to be giving you that tool as well
so I can find the exact day, the exact hour
the exact minute that YouTubers go live
with reviewing a product, any country, any language
no matter what product it is or what niche it is in.
So I built a tool to find that
and I took it a step further by only pulling back YouTubers
with a certain subscriber count
or only pulling back videos with a certain view count.
So I might check for YouTubers with 50,000 subscribers
or videos that only get a hundred thousand views.
I only pull them back once they've reached that milestone.
And what this allows me to do
just because there's so much content
going out there on YouTube,
it just helps make sure there's little to no junk
in the data that I'm pulling back.
And I took it one step further again
by only pulling back videos
with an Amazon affiliate link in their description.
So pulling back products that myself
or you could then be inspired to write about
and promote ourselves as an affiliate.
So the end result is that I can find
what pretty much any popular YouTuber
is promoting as an affiliate any day of the week
and in any industry.
So the reason I gave you that example earlier
about that keyboard.
I know nothing about it,
I've never heard of it before I was doing this research,
I pulled that back with the tool I'm going to give you.
I pulled back those two specific videos.
So not only did I pull back the titles,
but I got the actual links to the videos as well.
And on the right hand side here,
we can see the subscriber count of their channels
when I pulled back their data.
What was really interesting to me,
I don't know how accurate or perfect this is
just because of using the YouTube API,
but I'm also pretty sure that those two videos went live
within one minute of each other.
What more than likely happened is that Razer,
who sent them those products, they said,
"Okay, you're allowed to use it for a few weeks
but please don't share it until this date and this time."
And that is when they got their videos ready for.
And on the affiliate side of things,
we can look at the video description.
This is why I pulled the videos back
I pulled them back or the tool pulled them back
because this person has an Amazon affiliate link
in their video description.
So the way the tool works is that
I can pick words from video titles to look for
and the channel/view count criteria as well.
So you can be very broad
and literally just pull back every YouTube video ever
with the word review in the title
or you can start being a bit more specific
and look for things like 'electric'
and 'review' in the title as well.
So here's something I think is really cool.
Because the tool is looking for Amazon affiliate links,
you don't actually have to write the word 'review'.
All you have to do
is search for anything related to your industry
and it will pull back videos with Amazon affiliate links.
I may be slightly biased
but I think that's pretty damn cool.
So when you get the tool,
it's gonna look something like this.
And just please keep in mind
it is not the most attractive, of course.
I've been playing with this for a few months now.
I've never needed it to look pretty
so I'm just gonna keep it really simple, really easy to use.
You put in your YouTube API key,
you look at how many days you wanna look back in the past.
Do you wanna look back past week,
the past day, the past month?
How many minimum subscribers
do you want the YouTubers to have?
What is the maximum number of subscribers
you want them to have?
And what do you actually wanna search for?
So in this example, I put in my API key,
I looked at videos in the past month.
They must have at least 5,000 subscribers
on their YouTube channel,
preferably no more than 50,000.
And I wanna see people talking about electric scooters.
And within a couple of minutes,
you will have to wait a few minutes
for the tool to pull back the data,
I start getting results like this.
So I can see people talking about
the Tianrun electric scooter,
the Voro Orca, the Dualtron X, the Kaabo Mantis.
I have no idea how I pronounce these, by the way.
I know nothing about this industry
and I didn't change these results.
I literally just ran this.
These were the exact first results
that the tool pulled back.
And not only are all of these videos
promoting something as an affiliate,
but how cool is this for keyword research?
Let's just say I'm building a brand new
Amazon affiliate website.
I want to promote electric scooters.
Maybe I just don't know the market whatsoever.
I want to know what people are talking about,
what people are talking about so much
that they're actually taking the time to review.
I can find that in seconds with this approach,
with this YouTube angle.
So the version I'm going to be giving you
is kind of you enter the search,
it brings back the results,
you enter another search
and it brings back the results.
In my version, I have been running this off database
so it does update automatically every couple of hours,
every few minutes in some cases.
And as I say, I've just been in total testing mode,
trying to figure out how far this thing can be taken.
I wasn't sure whether I should only share this
in the database mode.
I just don't want it to get too complex
with people setting up databases and pulling this back.
But maybe I'll release that version as well
if that's something you want
or you have a programmer on your team
or something like that.
Or of course if you are a developer,
you can just take the script,
take it to the next level.
Please don't share it.
I kind of want it to be cool
of what we have going on here in SEO Blueprint.
But yeah, certainly make modifications to it if you want.
In fact, I would love to see you do that.
I'd love to see people taking this to the next level.
Just please don't go and share this with like hundreds
of thousands of people or anything like that.
I at least want it to be exclusive
for SEO Blueprint in the first iteration of this.
While we get it kind of figured out
and we take it to the next level altogether.
Please be kind of respectful about that.
But certainly for your own stuff, for your own usage,
please feel free to do of course, whatever you want.
So I've been testing this in a lot of industries,
in a lot of different ways
and I found really popular YouTubers reviewing things
like cameras, bar stools, perfume, drones,
makeup, investment funds,
just so many different things.
I've been looking into so many different industries.
And again, keep in mind,
I'm only looking at what popular YouTubers are promoting.
So it's what they think is best for their audience,
it's what they think their audience will care about.
So it gives you so many ideas
of things that you might want to put on your website
write about on your website
and promote as an affiliate.
Now by the way,
not every single product does come with an affiliate link.
So for example, in the perfume,
they might actually have an affiliate link
to some foundation or something like that
in their description.
So it's not always perfect
but I have found that 90, 95% of cases,
the thing that they are talking about
is the thing that they have the affiliate link for.
So we're not totally done just yet,
but I really hope you like this angle
'cause I've just been completely fascinated by it.
I just love going through niches
I had little knowledge of before.
See what people are talking about,
see what they're reviewing, see what they're promoting
and just finding new products.
So I've looked at so many industries
and then I started looking at Google Trends
and the Google search results
and whether people are talking about that product
in the press.
And I've just seen so many examples
where websites are really slow to share something
compared to a big name YouTuber.
And I just see, while this data isn't always perfect,
YouTubers just go crazy promoting something.
And they tend to do it just incredibly early
on the first day of doing something
that people could then end up promoting as a product.
And this data isn't always a hundred percent perfect,
a hundred percent accurate,
but I've just seen so many examples
where people promote something literally on the first day
just before searches really start to spike.
So you can kind of use it
as an alert to get ideas for products.
By the way, this one is not an Amazon affiliate product
but you can actually be an affiliate for it on the website.
I can't remember now.
It's an American website, American big name,
department store,
where you can actually be an affiliate for them on VIG link,
that is the website.
So not have I only seen just random, interesting,
really just countless examples like this,
but I've also seen interesting examples where YouTubers,
they cover a product months after it's launch month,
months after it's release date
and search traffic spikes again.
'Cause what I've seen happening, and not every case,
but some cases is that a YouTuber big name
will talk about something months later.
Maybe the product just wasn't really interesting.
Maybe it had no marketing budget when it went live.
Someone discovers it,
big name YouTuber talks about it, it goes viral,
a lot of other people buy that product,
promote it, talk about it
and searches just start spiking that way.
And of course, like I said
YouTubers are not the only reason why searches spike.
Many people wait for products, it does pick a press
but it can just be so good for keyword research.
So if you are not always monitoring
what is the new thing coming out
in the industry that you have an affiliate website for,
this can kind of be the signal.
So you constantly find new products,
you constantly find what people are talking about,
what products have just came out
because of this angle.
So I really, really hope you like this approach.
What I'm gonna do now
is I'm gonna gather all of the feedback.
I'm gonna gather all of the additional sites
people wanna check.
So maybe you don't just wanna look at
Amazon affiliate links,
maybe it's Barnes and Noble
or different websites.
I'm gonna take all of these feedback
and I'm gonna take this tool to the next level for you.
This is version 0.1 of the concept
that is one of two approaches in this kind of angle
I'm gonna be covering.
I'm very excited about the second one,
so I really hope you like this one as well.
And I plan to have the next one out here first
on SEO Blueprint, Detailed Blueprint,
within the next few weeks.
Putting together this video,
it just feels so nice for me to have a platform
where I can just share these ideas
with people who I know are gonna run with them
and take them to the next level
but it's not necessarily public
for the whole world or something like that.
I have probably a dozen of these weird, quirky,
interesting things that I'm doing in the background.
I am going to be sharing all of them
here in this program
and I can't wait for that.
So stay tuned.
Thank you for watching.