If you are an Amazon influencer who wants to repost your content over to YouTube, there are a few things you need to understand before you start. For some of you, cross-posting is going to be a waste of time, because it will not work out the way you are hoping.
I have been in the Amazon Influencer Program for 5 years and have been a Platinum creator since the creator star system rolled out. This is pretty much all I do, so let me save you some frustration.
- The Mistake Most Amazon Influencers Make
- Why YouTube Channels Actually Work
- The Problem With a Channel With No Identity
- The Missing Call to Action
- How to Do YouTube the Right Way
The Mistake Most Amazon Influencers Make
The most common plan I hear is: “I will just take my videos from my storefront and throw them all over onto YouTube.” That is fine, except if you do that, you are missing the reason YouTube channels work at all. You have to understand a platform and why it works to get the most out of it.
Why YouTube Channels Actually Work
On YouTube, if you want people to follow and subscribe, you have to give them a reason to buy into something. Usually it is one of two things:
- You as a person, which is usually the strongest option.
- A specific category or niche, like gardening, fitness, or decor.
The Problem With a Channel With No Identity
Most influencers take all of their videos, a mishmash of different products, and dump them on a channel. That is a party foul. The channel has no identity, no look, no person to buy into, and no niche. It is just a bunch of random stuff.
What happens next? You will get some views because YouTube search picks up something, like someone looking for a specific vacuum, and they find your video. But most of them will not subscribe, because they look at your other videos and think, why do I care about a remote control car and a flashlight? They take what they wanted and leave. You can still build it this way, but it will be much, much slower than working with the way YouTube wants you to do it.
The Missing Call to Action
The second problem is even bigger. When you move videos from your Amazon storefront to YouTube, you lose one of the most important parts of YouTube affiliate marketing: the call to action. Most viewers are not thinking about looking for a link. They are just watching like regular people, and the only reason they think about it is that someone says it out loud.
Amazon influencer videos do not allow calls to action. So if you simply repost from your storefront, you end up with two massive problems:
- A pile of videos with no call to action, so most people miss your link.
- A channel people do not want to subscribe to, because it is just random stuff with no point of view.
It can scale, but very slowly, because you are not respecting the platform or why people use it.
How to Do YouTube the Right Way
If you want a successful YouTube channel, pay attention to what makes people successful on YouTube:
- Give viewers something to buy into: you as a person, a category, or a niche.
- Put a call to action in or on every video so people know there is a link in the description.
- Do not treat YouTube like the Amazon Influencer Program and expect to win.
You will be disappointed if you do. But if you do YouTube right and put the extra work in, it works.
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