The top, highest paid, living the life affiliate marketers always seem to stay 3 steps ahead of the trends to make serious money in this business.
There’s a super hot niche forming in the affiliate marketing industry that’s capable of making pioneering marketers extremely wealthy.
Local Lead Generation For Small Businesses Is HOT!
Every successful small business is fueled by a steady flow of new leads and customers. You might say, for a small business owner, it’s either find a strategy to get leads or make plans to close the doors.
And if you’ve been in affiliate marketing for any length of time, you probably already know enough to construct a lead generation strategy for these small business owners.
Even if you’re a newbie affiliate marketer, it wouldn’t take long to learn the foundational techniques needed to begin generating leads for clients.
Now if you happen to be completely new to affiliate marketing, you might want to sign up for the free affiliate marketing course My Online Startup. You’ll get access to over 50+ training videos, tools, forum, all for free.
I’m far from a super affiliate or expert on the matter, but I have helped many local clients come up with an effective lead generation strategy for their businesses.
So one day, while I was reading an article about the powerful benefits YouTube marketing can deliver to small businesses, I began to ponder about its full potential.
That’s why in this post I would like to go over how you can use affiliate marketing, paired with YouTube advertising, to build a lucrative local lead generation business.
Keep reading, because you’re not going to want to miss this “industry transforming” insight.
YouTube… Is It The Best Way To Advertise A Small Local Business?
With over 1.3 billion users worldwide YouTube is the second largest search engine behind Google. Both owned by Google.
According to the research department, YouTubers watch approximately 5 billion videos daily and of course that’s expected to increase year over year.
Also, people within the ages of 18 to 50 watch more YouTube than any cable network. And they spend an average of 40 minutes per day watching.
But small businesses couldn’t care less about what’s happening globally, they want to target customers in their local communities.
Well, as it turns out, YouTube’s targeting options can be optimized to hit your ideal customer perfectly.
With YouTube there are a few options available to hone in on your prime prospect.
1) Location Targeting –
You can reach viewers by filtering countries, cities or territories within a country. You can even set a radius around a specific location.
2) Channel Placements –
There might be a few established local YouTube channels, videos or sites within a specific city to place your ads on. If the viewing audience is a fit for the offered services you could have a rich source of new leads.
3) Demographic Targeting –
Along with geographic targeting you can opt to reach people by gender, age, household income, language, parental status and more.
Obviously, there are multiple options a small business can use to target their primary audience. I just wanted to cover a few that would be effective for local small businesses.
The point I’m trying to get across is that a small business can, for sure, use YouTube ads to reach local viewers from their community.
What REALLY opened my eyes to the power of YouTube is the fact that I’ve caught myself multiple times gazing at ads from businesses in my own local area.
Statistics are all good, but when it’s me who’s attempting to watch a video, and an advertisement from a local plumbing company pops up to capture my attention… I realized I had to take a deeper look into this.
And the more I research YouTube advertising for small businesses, the more I realize it’s a goldmine for affiliate marketers.
The ads are not expensive at all, at this point. One reason why now is the best time to get started.
From what I’ve seen online YouTube ads are only $0.10 to $0.30 per view and for those “bump ads” that popup right before a video, you pay only after the ads been shown 1000 times.
Additionally advertising on YouTube is measurable with in-depth analytics that report views, length of views, referring sources, clicks, likes and more.
Combine that with a well designed landing page and you’ll have all the data you need to fine-tune a campaign for optimal returns.
How To Start An Affiliate Marketing & YouTube Local Lead Generation Business
Since YouTube is the main platform for promotion, creating short videos will be an additional service that you can offer your clients.
Having to produce videos for your clients adds another lucrative revenue source to your lead generation business.
You might be saying, “I know absolutely nothing about creating professional videos.”
Actually that’s good because you don’t need professional high quality videos to be effective at video marketing on YouTube.
What you do need is entertaining videos!
This brings me to my first point…
1) Create A Themed Digital Event –
The very first thing you should do as an affiliate marketer lead generation specialist is to create the “packaged” product.
In affiliate marketing, the product you decide on selling is normally packaged and ready to go. All you have to do is to start promoting it.
But with local lead generation you’re dealing with small business owners who have no clue how to make their product/service digitally appealing. That’s YOUR Job!
This step will take the most research and work, but it’s simple if you know how.
I’m not going to spend a bunch if time on creating digital events here, but I’ve written a few articles that can help you come up with excellent digital event ideas for small businesses. You can click and read them below:
1. Get More Local Customers With Digital Event Marketing
2. 3 Profitable Ideas To Make Money Promoting Events Online
3. Generating The Best Qualified Local Leads For Small Businesses
Your goal in creating a digital event is to have a theme that connects with the target audience perfectly.
It should have a strong irresistible offer so you’ll have no problem getting subscribers when it’s time to ask for contact information. (Locals tend to be extra skeptical about giving out their name and email.)
2) Setup Your Lead Generation Funnel –
Again, if you know anything about affiliate marketing you’ll understand the basics of constructing a lead generation system.
I do this the easy way and use GetResponse to quickly design landing pages, email nurturing and to build a list.
If you’re unaware, GetResponse offers an easy to use marketing software that can deliver on just about anything you need for a client.
Beginner’s will find GetResponse to be an effortless tool to start generating local leads for small businesses.
Of course, if you prefer to use some other marketing software to setup your system, that’s totally up to you.
Mostly you just need to design a nice landing page that has a form to capture email addresses.
I also suggest having 7-10+ pre-written emails in an autoresponder for ongoing followup with upsells. (Another reason I use GetResponse!)
3) Shoot Entertaining Community-Focused Videos –
If you’re not comfortable with videos, this is something that can be outsourced to a local freelancer.
Taking the “theme” of your campaign into consideration, you’ll want to shoot 3-5 short 1 to 3 minute videos that will resonate with viewers from the targeted audience.
It’s best to completely plan out the stories your videos will tell and then schedule a day to knock’em out.
That way if you have local actors, performers or influencers participating you can round them up for a day and get the job done.
Remember… Freelancers, videographers, actors, etc. must be included in your clients fees. You don’t want to forget to charge for those “talent fees” and have to pay out of your own pocket.
When creating your YouTube videos think about the flow of the entire campaign.
How’s the video going to entertain? What’s value proposition? What are the main points to cover? Do you need a call to action on the video? Are the videos going to work together as a series?
4) Advertise On YouTube –
This is where it all comes together. Start running ads on YouTube and drive traffic to your lead generation system.
Use the audience targeting methods mentioned at the beginning of this post to tweak your campaign for ultimate conversions.
It may take making a few adjustments, but in time you’ll start receiving local leads for your client.
Don’t Ignore Other Social Media Networks
Although YouTube is the main topic here, you still want to leverage other social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Distribute the videos to as many worthwhile spots as possible to increase reach and viewers.
Starting a local lead generation service for small businesses can provide you a lucrative income.
Mixing in YouTube advertising, video production, and other affiliate marketing services could make you a six figure marketer.
