Simon Gorges is a full time airline pilot with a Youtube Channel that has 26,000 subscribers. He’s also a client of ours and we recently interviewed him about his affiliate marketing business on our daily show Wake Up Legendary to hear how exactly he does it.
Simon has been filming tutorials, reviews, step by step guides, amongst other types of videos for his Youtube channel Metics Media for two years. “I actually started to look for different ways to make money online when I was studying aviation, I had a lot of free time so I was looking for a way to make some money on the side,” Simon said. He started creating Instagram accounts and building them up to sell them to other people as well as using E-Commerce. This wasn’t stable enough income from him and he found it mentally exhausting. He had to deal with a lot of customer support and a lot of customers had unrealistic expectations.
Simon wanted to do something online for a second income and found his way to Youtube affiliate marketing. His channel that started with a few videos that didn’t even show his face now has 26,000 subscribers. His videos get anywhere between 19,000-20,000 views per video on average. “I realized Youtube is pretty cool because you can teach people and you get very cool feedback because people comment on your videos and you see how you help them,” Simon said. The reason he likes affiliate marketing as much as he does is because he is able to bring in a more stable amount of income and you don’t have to have your own product or customer support. He feels that having a blog or Youtube channel is “crazily passive”.
The aviation industry got hit very hard during Covid and Simon hasn’t been piloting since March. Luckily, his Youtube affiliate business brings him in just about as much money as he normally would make as a pilot. “Especially in this time right now I realize how important it is to have a second income stream or multiple income streams in case something happens. For me it gives me a lot of security and also a way to now spend my free time and increase my online business to kind of grow that on the side,” Simon said. He first kept building his Youtube channel until he had a couple hundred subscribers. Those couple hundred soon turned to a couple thousand.
Some of the videos that Simon first uploaded to his channel still occasionally bring him money. He tries to make sure his videos will still be relevant in a few months or even a few years when he makes them so that they will still gain views. “I see (Youtube) as you being a teacher that is teaching 24/7, but you don’t physically have to be there, and if you combine that with affiliate marketing you can make a good amount of money,” Simon said. However, his videos didn’t build traction and get views right away.
When Youtube recognizes that a video a channel uploads is a video that people are searching for often, they rank the video according to the keywords mentioned in the title and description. The more his videos showed up in a search, the more views they started to get. He said that every week a couple hundred people would be searching for the same keywords he was using in his videos. They would find his videos, click on them, and find the result they were looking for. “You can’t go in with expectations that your videos will get tons of views from the beginning. What I think is very important (is that) you, from the beginning, have a strategy that is working for your niche or your Youtube channel,” Simon said. For most niches the best strategy is to do keyword research and try and find long tail keywords people are searching for.
Long tailed keywords are more than just one word, and more like a question or phrase that people are searching for. Simon’s strategy is to find keywords that aren’t as competitive. These keywords are the ones that don’t have as many good videos linked to them. When coming up with ideas for videos and doing his keyword research, he says to think about what the person will be typing into the Youtube search bar. Then it becomes his job to create that video.
When uploading videos to a channel, Youtube will test the videos, put them on the search engine, and once those videos have received a certain amount of views Youtube then determines where the videos will be ranked during a keyword search. “You have to trust youtube to be able to do that and give youtube time to gather the data to be able to rank your video and to show the video to the people that are looking for it,” Simon said. This takes time and if a channel doesn’t have any videos on it, it takes time for the channel to grow and get subscribers.
Simon says that it’s important to really focus on targeting the right keywords so that his channel can deliver what people are looking for. “What I would think is the most important thing is don’t create one video a day. If you can create one quality video a day, okay, but the thing is you have to do a better video than your competition,” Simon said. It’s better to have one video that does very well compared to 10 videos that don’t gain any views. It’s all about quality over quantity.
On Simon’s Youtube channel he has a total of 47 videos, which averages out to him uploading about 2 videos a month. Simon says that buying a good camera first is not the most important part of the video making process. Viewers have a problem they are looking to solve by viewing a video, and that having fancy gear isn’t necessary in doing that. The more important part of creating Youtube videos is the content being put out. Avoiding rambling and getting to the point as quickly as possible is major because the viewer wants to know the end result and what exactly is going to be covered in a video.
When creating a video, Simon advises that the things to remember are to have a good title, have the main keyword in the title, and that the thumbnail should have the same words as the title. Have a high quality thumbnail for the video that is not only colorful but also stands out to the viewer. Look for what videos are performing well and get inspiration from those videos. According to Simon, engagement is important. Ask for likes and comments. Give people a reason to comment on your video. The more likes and comments on a video, the more it will come up in a search.
It is important to put a call to action at the end of a video. “At the beginning of the video it’s important to get right to the point and suck them in to let them know that what they were looking for they can find in your video,” Simon said. Attention spans are so short that if every video started off spending thirty seconds to a minute to get to the point, viewers will be lost in the first minute. Youtube will see that and track how many people actually watch the video the entire way through and that’s how Youtube will base the ranking on a video. If viewers are clicking out a video in the first minute, Youtube won’t show it first.
When filming, Simon stays on track by scripting his videos. “I try to not make it too robotic but I want to script my sentences so that I don’t veer off and ramble on,” Simon said. Simon says that he has a lot more respect for actors because of the difficulty of scripting a video, but even actors have bloopers. The important part is to be authentic and sound natural. Viewers knowing that they are watching real people is important to them because there are so many scams nowadays, people find themselves skeptical. “Any natural stuff that happens is funner than when people try to be funny, Simon said.” Everybody needs to think of themselves as a media or advertising firm. If someone is insecure about filming themselves, a great way to accept themself is to do a few live streams until they are more comfortable filming. In an industry where people want to get results out of videos, people need to create high quality, authentic videos.
If you’d like to learn more of the strategies Simon applies to his affiliate marketing business, including how to make multiple high-ticket affiliate commissions each month to supercharge your earnings, watch our brand new free webclass while access is still free.
