Youtube video transcript
Is your website or YouTube channel built 100% around another brand or company, wherever it is, you could be in danger of losing everything, but let’s talk about how you can stop that happening. Hello, YouTube, and a very special hello to all my subscribers. My name is Phil and welcome to my channel. So sorry that my video, this week’s out a little bit late, but there’s a lot of things that have been happening in my personal life at the moment.
And. Talk about those in just a moment, but if you haven’t checked your email recently, then you may not know that Amazon are making huge changes in their affiliate program. By April the 21st. Now, what they’ve chosen to do is to reduce the commission. Percentage on a number of categories of their products.
So for example, if you are someone who promotes outdoor products or pets or something like that at the moment, you are getting 8%, but after April 21st, 2020, you are only gonna get 3%. So that is a massive drop in the amount of commissions you get. And the. It’s gonna really affect the income for some people.
So this is going to affect people most who just build these Amazon affiliate websites, where they don’t diversify at all, either with ads or other products. And if you are one of those people, this is a wake up call. You can either go down with the sinking ship or you can make some changes. So that you don’t have to suffer later.
Okay. So how can your business be affected by another brand suddenly shutting you out of the income you’ve relied on for a long time? I think there are two main ways that you can do this. The first one is to be totally reliant on one affiliate program. For example, Amazon, the other way is in some way to get on the wrong side of a.
Through a trademark infringement. Now I’m talking from experience here because this channel is all about my journey, becoming an internet marketer, building my online income. And I’ve been following a very good program by income school, which is called project 24. This teaches you how to build an online store.
And it covers lots and lots of aspects of internet marketing. Now I am also an affiliate of project 24. So this is how I monetize this YouTube channel. And I’ve been an affiliate for them since about June or July, 2019. But at the end of March, I got an email from Nathan from income school saying they’re gonna make some changes and they’re gonna try and improve their fill.
And if I’d like to reapply, then I can go ahead and do that. So of course I wanted to stay working with them and becoming a future affiliate in the future of the fill program they have. So I applied and unfortunately I didn’t hear anything back for about three weeks. And then I got an email from Nathan about a week ago saying they would love to have me, but there’s a few little trademark infringements that I need to know about and I need to.
ASAP. Previously my YouTube channel had income school in the title. And as you can see now I’ve changed the name of this YouTube channel to passive income fill. Okay. Not the best name in the world, we can work with it. Nothing else is really gonna change. It’s just the name. I’m doing this because I am 100%.
On income school as a way of monetizing this YouTube channel. Now, if they choose not to accept me into the affiliate program. Okay. That means that I’m gonna have to really build up this channel and try and get ads on it. But to be honest, I’m doing this more for the fun of it to keep me focused. And I quite like reporting my updates and how I’m doing to you.
And it seems to be helping people out. But yeah, that is a way that I’ve become 100%, 100% reliant on another company. And because I made a very naive mistake months and months ago, I lost out on all the income for this month. Now some of you may be in the same boat and if you want to double check you can go over to the United.
Painted and trademark office, they have a website and you can check to see if there’s a trademark on the name of your website on the name of your YouTube channel, just to make sure you are not going to run a mark like I did because yeah, I should have really figured this out. Bit of a mess up of my pop, but to be honest income school, they’ve been pretty cool about it.
Jim, Ricky, Nathan, they just told me what the situation was. Told me what I needed to do to change it. I’m happy to change. And I don’t think we’re gonna have any future issues or if you watch their channel, they’re pretty laid back, although they are excellent businessmen and I wouldn’t cross them if I were you.
Okay. So that’s why I’ve rebranded this YouTube channel. And apart from that nothing was really going to change apart from, I’m gonna start releasing videos on Tuesdays instead of Monday. Just to help me with my schedule. Let’s get back to the current issue with Amazon. Okay. So what should we be doing with our websites?
If you watched the recent video from Jim and Ricky over at the Income School’s YouTube channel, they’re recommending that you should totally remove it. Every single Amazon link on your website. And to be honest, this I think is a bit of a knee-jerk reaction. They’re quite rightly annoyed that Amazon has done this.
Not only that they have chosen to reduce the commission rate because they’ve done that in the past, but particularly they’re doing it at this moment in history. We’ve got this massive pandemic around the world. Many of you are suffering from this. I have to admit that here in Taiwan, they’ve done an excellent job.
And we are not suffering as much as elsewhere in the world, but still it’s pretty serious. So they’ve chosen to do this where everyone is losing out on money. Me personally. I have absolutely no work this month from my school because there are no students. This is one of those critical moments.
So should we be removing all the links? I don’t know. I don’t think we should do it straight away. It is clear that Amazon is going to be closing down their affiliate program in the future. All the writings on the wall are coming. It’s very. To sink. However, should we jump ship now? Or should we just ride that ship into its sinks?
I think Amazon is free money, basically. It’s free money. Amazon is a brand that everyone recognizes they convert really well. The best thing about Amazon is if the user doesn’t actually buy the product you recommend and they buy something else, you still get credit. So in the last seven days, I’ve managed to sell 30 items.
Only one of which was something I recommended all the other 29 were just random things. Some of them connected to my niche. Most of them weren’t and I still get commissions for that. Now would I rather have 1% of something than 0% of nothing? I think I’d go through the 1%. However, I do not recommend that we all stick with Amazon.
Yes. We need to diversify. We need to find other affiliate programs. I know for a fact that for one product that I can find on Amazon, which until recently was giving about 4%, which in the future will probably give me about one or three. Commission the same product on the actual manufacturer’s website, which does have an affiliate program.
They will give me 10, 15, 20% of that product. Now why am I not pushing that manufacturer? You ask? It’s because they don’t convert so well. But how could we get our users to buy from a manufacturer let’s say, or the main distributor of that. Rather than Amazon. I think it’s all down to how we sell the links.
So this is what I’m gonna do. This is what I’m thinking about doing. I’m not gonna totally remove the Amazon links because to be honest, Amazon doesn’t care about me. if I don’t send them the traffic. So what it’s, they don’t care. They’re not gonna fill anything for me, not recommending their product.
Of course, if a million people stop doing that, they might, but I don’t think that’s the case. So I’m gonna keep the Amazon links on my website for the time being, because like I said, it’s pretty much free. If I get something I can reinvest it back into the business. But what I’m gonna start doing is I’m gonna start recommending Amazon and alternatives.
Now I think that people would like to have a choice. So if you say you can buy this on Amazon, but also you can buy it directly from the manufacturer directly from the company, the brand. I think people might be a little bit interested. They might have never thought, oh, I can buy a Tesla car directly from Tesla rather than on Amazon.
Now. I’m not sure if you can buy a Tesla car on Amazon, I haven’t checked, but you get the picture. Now, the other thing I think you need to do is to start really selling those links, especially. Because we’re targeting traffic. If you can find companies that have a similar product and it’s made in the USA, I think a lot of people will find that attractive.
I think a lot of people will be willing to pay a little bit more money, a little bit more money, or maybe a little bit more in delivery. To support local companies to support American companies. So this is what I’m gonna do. I’m going to keep my Amazon links. I’m going to try and find an alternative to recommend those users to, and I’m also going to try and sell those links.
By saying, come on, support the local company, stop supporting these big manufacturing factories in China, which to be honest, they don’t always produce the best quality items. So the main thing is don’t panic, things in internet marketing do change, and the thing is just gotta change with them. Amazon is stopping their fill program.
It’s gonna hurt. But it’s not the end. There are alternatives. And I think it’s really actually a good thing because a lot of those kinds of spammy content creators that just build these affiliate Amazon affiliate websites, and don’t actually offer any decent content or value to the users.
They’re gonna fall by the wayside. And if you persevere, if you can find a way to overcome this setback, then you’re gonna be even more successful in the future. And I hope to be there alongside you. So thanks very much for watching this video. If you are new, don’t forget to subscribe now to passive income fill where I’ll be sharing all my victories and some of my.
Over the next couple of months and years. Thanks for watching and seeing you next.