YouTube, MeTube, and Viral Affiliate Marketing, a True Story
A friend i know for years, doesn’t believe in “viral” marketing, as in when something just spontaneously proliferates out of control because it stumbled onto the right people who sent it out to the whole world who then sent it out to the rest of the solar system and so the entire alpha quadrant of the Milky Way ended up hearing about it.
He thinks that these things are planned meticulously, invested in heavily, and released by marketing engineers who know exactly what they’re doing. In many cases I’m sure he’s right. But I wasn’t so sure if he was 100% correct. I still thought you could just throw something out there and if it was original enough, it would catch fire, without one having to shoot himself in the head online to get attention.
So it was that last week, I was at work as I often am, managing accounts and listening with one ear to online news reports about the immanent federal government shutdown and such, and I came across something quite odd. I knew it was a mistake and that it would be taken off the site in a matter of minutes, if not seconds, so I whipped out my trusty Snagit and captured the video, using my headset as a microphone in a devilishly amateurish attempt at my first YouTube video. When I got home I uploaded it to YouTube.
The response totally blew me away. YouTube emails started flooding my inbox like there was no tomorrow. Hundreds favorited it in minutes. Comment after comment of people yelling at one another about my video, pissing each other off and cursing, the occasional constructive response…and then the spammers came. Joining my YouTube “channel” even though there was only one video, throwing video responses at me to try and piggy back off the popularity of my video, sending me comments on my profile telling me that I should join such and such a video network, friending me on YouTube. YouTube itself emailing me several times about applying to be a YouTube partner and do a rev share off my “popular video”.
When the effect wore off 3 days later, the burst resulted in nearly 130,000 views and over 500 comments.
What does this have to do with affiliate marketing? Viral marketing is out there. It’s possible. You just have to find something original and amazing and put it up and then attack Facebook and Twitter to get the ball rolling. Attach your site to the video so the 100,000 plus people see that you have a site and that it can sell them things. Put an affiliate link in your YouTube channel. Do whatever you can to make the people who watch your video know that you want them as a customer.
(If you want to know what video it is, email me and I’ll give you the link. 
)
Rafi F.
