One element of creating Tommy’s Piano Corner is – even so late in life – to try to migrate my remaining working life into something more musical. Clearly, I’ve left it a little late to aim to be a concert pianist (and, in any event, I was never at a level to aspire to be a traditional classical artist). Music though, was always one of my first loves from being very young and having rediscovered it these last few years has been a wonderful reunion.
A career in music can mean many things … performing, teaching, writing, composing. In the modern age there are online opportunities for all of these things and more that can be leveraged. So, how can I turn sharing my love of all things piano into something that generates an income?
Of course, we all know that when you watch a video on YouTube, there are frequently adverts that play both before and sometimes during the video. Some you can skip and some (shorter ones) that you can’t. As you might guess, the creator of the video then gets a small payment from YouTube whenever the ad plays. However, there are many other means of using YouTube videos to derive an income – one of them being Affiliate Marketing. This is basically where you suggest products and/or services provided by other companies and then receive a small commission whenever someone you refer to that company makes a purchase.
Regular followers of my blog and YouTube channel will know that I created a series of videos about how to record yourself playing piano – from basic ‘point and shoot’ to some slightly more involved (yet simple to accomplish) audio and video editing. These videos centred around using the things we already have (smartphone and laptop), however, there was one other piece of essential equipment that was required to be able to properly record at home – a proper microphone. Simply put, the built in microphone on any smartphone currently really just isn’t up to the job of recording decent audio – and especially not from something as powerful and diverse as a piano.
This then, is now a perfect example of where Affiliate Marketing can kick in. If someone watches my videos and then decides to go ahead and purchase either the microphone that I use or something similar, then I can reap a small financial benefit from my recommendation. This is done by simply providing a link to the item on a site like Amazon. Naturally, there is a lot of set up to be done in the background, accounts to open and things to configure, however once done, then providing such links becomes relatively simple (such as the link below).
The next trick of course is getting people to first watch your video and then click on the Affiliate link – and here’s where advertising becomes an option worth investigating.
So, after another round of account opening (Google Adsense) and fairly involved setting up, I have decided to try a basic advert that will ‘suggest’ my video to people either searching for videos about ‘piano’ or watching videos on other piano related channels and who live in the UK (my affiliate link is to amazon.co.uk so no point showing the video to people who will get redirected to amazon.com where my link isn’t valid).
The advert is set to run for a week from 30th September. Let’s see how well this performs – I’ll provide an update once it has finished running.
