What I want to write about now is the affiliate programs, or the referral programs offered by most major exchanges. These range from simple one-time commissions to monthly commissions to commissions each time your referral makes a purchase on said exchange. Almost all exchanges have one, and they are often underused.
I made nearly a full-time income on Bitcoin referral programs between 2017 and 2018 using the exact strategy I am writing about.
The strategy is simply helping people. That’s it. Just helping people that are new to the world of crypto figure it out and get started. It involves creating videos, so if that isn’t your thing it may not work for you, but it works incredibly well.
Step 1 – Figure out what they are looking for
If you are familiar with SEO, this is also known as keyword research. Essentially we are going to figure out what people that are new to the crypto world are searching YouTube for each day. You can use free tools like keywordtool.io or paid tools like Ahrefs to do this. Both tools are easy and work well, though obviously paid tools will usually have more data.
You’ll find people searching for hundreds of things ranging from a simple “how to buy Bitcoin,” which is how I made most of my money in 2017, to “what is crypto”, to “best cryptos to buy”. In fact, you’ll find hundreds of more things people are searching for.
Step 2 – Help them
Yep, it’s that easy. Just answer their questions! Don’t waste time with a bunch of fluff or selling, just answer their question in well-explained, short-as-possible, video.
You will find that for most questions, an exchange is almost always brought up. For example when I teach how to buy Ripple for beginners, I teach them to get a Coinbase account and then a Binance account. Both of these exchanges have referral programs. I don’t have to push the sell, I just have to explain how I bought my Ripple, and then point them to my links in the description.
I talk a lot about this method in my article on how to get started as an affiliate. There are some huge advantages to promoting affiliate programs through search engines like Google and YouTube. The primary one is that one YouTube video can make money every day for years. Contrast that with advertising or social media where you constantly have to feed the beast.
*Please note you are required to divulge somewhere that you have a relationship with the exchanges.
Step 3 – SEO
Now I can’t explain all the facets of SEO but I’ll break it down into two easy concepts and point you in the right directions. For those that don’t know, SEO is simply what we do to make the video rank for certain search terms after it has been created.
SEO is all about two things. The first is making sure that YouTube understands exactly what your video is about, or what you want to rank for. This is done through all kinds of things. Your title, description, tags, the words you say, the playlist the video is in, etc. If you use the words you want to rank for liberally throughout these, then YouTube knows what your video is about.
The next part is helping YouTube see why your video should show up as opposed to someone else’s video that has done a similarly good job with their on-page SEO. YouTube will choose the video based on things that demonstrate people like it. Is it shared on different social media pages? Do the people that watch it watch most of it, or do they leave after 30 seconds? Do they click thumbs up or thumbs down? All of these things help Youtube understand which of all the videos that COULD rank for a search term SHOULD rank for that term.
Backlink .io has the best guide I’ve seen on making your videos actually show up when people search for phrases you want to rank for.
People often tell me things like, “It can’t be that easy” and “Sounds too good to be true.”
These phrases are what keep people from achieving extraordinary results in life. If you have even a basic knowledge of crypto you are far ahead of most of the world that knows nothing. You now have an opportunity to teach and help others while simultaneously making profits.