Affiliate Success Tips Part #4: An interview with Malte Helmhold

We’ve come to the end of yet another interesting and empowering project that we have undertaken for our affiliates. Today we feature the fourth and final interview from the Affiliate Success Tips series. One of our aims was to introduce affiliates with different profiles in order to show the variety of ways to promote and/or integrate hosting to a service. We chose Malte Helmhold because he has successfully mastered the video tutorials niche and we wanted him to share the benefits and opportunity he saw in it.

Even though this is the final interview from the series, we are not going to rest but start working on another inspiring affiliate project right away. Stay tuned for future announcements in our blog and affiliate newsletter.

You are among the few affiliates who recommend us via YouTube. How did you decide to go this path, what opportunity did you see in it?

I noticed that most of the website tutorials on YouTube do not follow established video standards. There are many videos with bad sound quality, badly organized screens, but most importantly poor and outdated content. So I saw a big opportunity in showing up-to-date relevant video content in my “niche” – the German market. If there are many people in your country interested in starting a website and craving for high-quality video content on YouTube you might consider following my steps.

I offer my tutorials for free and YouTube suits me well. However, if you want to start a paid course and build your own community I would recommend that you host your private videos on Vimeo and embed them on your website, or go with Udemy.

I’ve been in touch with you since the beginning when you started recommending SiteGround and I know that it took a while before you started generating sales for us. It seems it takes a lot of work and patience to build a successful YouTube channel. Can you share with us some tips on what it takes and what are the main challenges?

You definitely have to be patient, create plenty of quality video content and optimize it just like you would optimize your normal written content to start ranking well in YouTube SERPs.

I would say you have to be careful with the keyword optimization though – Google wants to deliver high quality content marked by relevant keywords. Some people get to the extremes and cram keywords inside tags, which are so irrelevant and that actually hurts their rankings.

Another thing I learned the hard way is that you can’t rely on social shares and backlinks in the beginning, especially not in Germany in the context of WordPress video tutorials. People here would rather share funny videos than educational, website-building tutorials.

Another big challenge is technology and hardware that you use for the video recording itself. In the beginning I used Camtasia for Mac and it crashed so often, that I had to rethink. When I ran into Screenflow I luckily got rid of all these problems.

Finally, the biggest challenge is actually how time-consuming the process of video recording is. People tend to think that recording a 2-hour video takes 2 hours. But actually it takes 1-2 weeks when you include planning, preparation, recording and editing. But this is the long term investment you do in order to deliver quality content. And it pays off!

Many affiliates today are targeting the increasing demand from beginners to start a website. These affiliates usually provide personal assistance or a tutorial on the initial website setup bundled with a hosting purchase.  However, when left alone, many beginners abandon their websites, which in result impacts the affiliate performance with high cancellation rates. What do you do to engage your users and help them stick to managing their websites in the long-run?

First of all, I don’t just post a video online and that’s it. I make myself easy to reach on social media. I reply to comments under my videos and messages in Facebook. I also collect questions and make Q&A videos. If I see there is a big problem many people are facing, then I record a video about that alone. So, my first advice here is to be proactive.

Second thing is that I don’t settle with just 1 WordPress installation video but cover a bunch of other topics as well, such as how to use the SiteGround SuperCacher or staging tool for example. You just have to be there for your users all the time.

I also cover other topics different from WordPress and SiteGround that drive traffic to my channel and engage users with my content such as SEO tutorials.

Have you considered recommending multiple providers instead of just one and why did you decide to have SiteGround as your exclusive partner?

When I started the WordPress video tutorials I only planned to promote and recommend a single provider – SiteGround. The simple reason is that SiteGround offers the best WordPress support I have ever seen and I believe SiteGround is the best choice for my viewers.

The level of customer service with the local providers is just much lower and I think this should be changed and the market should be educated. To an extend I only recommend SiteGround currently in an effort to educate my viewers that there is a huge difference between the local offerings and SiteGround.

However, over time I realized that the more suitable way to educate the users would be by offering a comparison, which is why I am soon going to start a comparison website. With the website I will also try to offer an alternative to people who need support in German language which unfortunately SiteGround currently does not offer.

In short, recommending a single provider worked for me and is still working, but I believe that by educating your viewers with fair and objective comparisons, you will not only increase your viewers trust and loyalty but also reinforce why you recommend your top choice host and thus increase your conversion rates.