Here’s a little trick I’ve been implementing recently to improve the conversion ratios of YouTube traffic that I send to affiliate offers via URL redirects.

Many of you already implement the method of using URL forwarding to forward traffic from your domain to an appropriate affiliate offer. For example, you might own LocalGirlsOnline.com, which you watermark all over your provocative YouTube videos and add to the description box,  and then redirect that domain to a popular dating site like AmateurMatch or AdultFriendFinder (using your affiliate link, of course). However, there is one more step you can take to improve your conversions using this method.

The main problem with the above method is that some visitors to the affiliate site are put off by the fact that they clicked on something like “LocalGirlsOnline.com” and ended up at a dating site with a completely different name. Even though some visitors will not care or notice (the best kind of visitor), others will bounce because of it. Using subdomains, you can improve the chances of them sticking around.

If you’re not already familiar, a subdomain is a separate area of your domain. Unlike a sub-folder, a subdomain appears before your domain name. For example, if there were a forum on this site (which there is not), I might have it located at http://forum.gamingyoutube.com, instead of http://gamingyoutube.com/forum. There are different reasons for using each, but we won’t get into that here. Check out this article for more information about when to use subdomains vs subfolders for SEO purposes.

For our intended purpose, the subdomain is simply used to increase the perceived legitimacy of your link. For example, if you are running the Amatuer Match affiliate program, you could set up a subdomain on “LocalGirlsOnline.com” such as “http://AmateurMatch.LocalGirlsOnline.com”, and then redirect that subdomain to your Amateur Match affiliate link (which is an offer carried by Dating Gold as well as Ads4Dough, if you’re interested).

Now, there are a few pros and only one real con that come along with this method.

Pros:

• The description box will only show the first 27 characters of your domain, including the “http” protocol and all punctuation (colon, slashes, periods). The user must click “more info” to see the full domain, but can still click the URL without expanding the info box. This means they might never even see or notice that they’re actually clicking on a subdomain of your site (especially if it’s a rather long subdomain).
• Conversion ratios will likely increase due to the trust factor.
• One domain can be used in conjunction with multiple subdomains to promote several related offers, instead of having to register a bunch of new domains for each one.

Con:

• It is much more difficult to brand a subdomain. As far as watermarking purposes go (especially for videos that you plan to embed in multiple external locations), you’re probably better off using your basic domain. Most visitors won’t be able to remember the whole subdomain address or will simply be too lazy to manually type in the whole thing.

As you can see, this method is best suited if you’re planning on driving internal YouTube traffic, as you’ll be wanting to provoke clicks to your URL in the description box. Don’t forget to use annotations to increase the call-to-action factor.

Subdomain versatility may vary depending on where your domain is registered. GoDaddy currently offers up to 100 subdomains for each domain registered with them, which can all be used for redirecting (without the need to purchase hosting).