If you’re a creator on YouTube looking to generate some extra income, you’re probably already using affiliate links to recommend your favorite products. (And if you’re not, you should be!)

However, these links can start to add up quickly, and before long you may find yourself with hundreds—or thousands—of links throughout your channel, all of which are still leaving valuable international commissions on the table! Even worse, this makes it feel like a huge commitment to adopt an intelligent link management service like Geniuslink to start earning those commissions—particularly when you need to go back and replace hundred of affiliate links across dozens of videos.

Our YouTube Link Optimizer—now with improved functionality—is here to help!

Do your descriptions look like this?

We know how much of a pain it can be to replace all of these affiliate links manually, so we’ve created a service that handles the heavy lifting for you! Our YouTube Link Optimizer automatically generates geni.us links in your account that match the existing amzn.to (or bit.ly/bhpho.to) links in your video descriptions, and replaces them all in one bulk update!

We can process your entire channel at once, or just a few playlists to start. Our YouTube Link Optimizer will detect any amzn.to (or bit.ly/bhpho.to) short links you’ve previously shared. We’ll then generate these links in your Geniuslink account, and automatically swap them out within each video description!

Since being released in 2018, our YouTube Link Optimizer has definitely been put through its paces. We’ve hotfixed bugs, made quality-of-life improvements, and even launched a hefty improvement (detailed below). During that time, we’ve run our service on about 81 YouTube channels, updating the descriptions of 8,199 total videos and generating 25,145 new geni.us links!

If you’re interested in taking advantage of this service, the first step is to simply authorize our app to make changes to your video descriptions. This is handled on the Tools page of the Geniuslink dashboard.

Simply click this button and select the Google account associated with your YouTube channel** and your work is done. From here, reach out to our support team directly and request the conversion. You can easily contact us using the Intercom chat bubble located in the bottom right corner of our dashboard or email us at help@geni.us.

When we run the tool, we’ll contact the YouTube API to grab the descriptions from whichever videos you specify, then we’ll scan through the descriptions looking for amzn.to (or bit.ly/bhpho.to) links to convert the links.

*Note: This is just a one-time update, so we will not need ongoing access to your Google account. Once your video descriptions have been updated, you're welcome to revoke Geniuslink's access to your Google account.
​
To revoke Geniuslink's access to your Google account, go to https://myaccount.google.com/ to manage your Google account settings and follow these steps:
​
​

2. Scroll down to 'Your connections to third-party apps and services' to manage access
​

3. Navigate to the Geniuslink connection settings, and click 'Delete all connections you have to Geniuslink' at the bottom of the page
​

You're all set! We will no longer have access to your Google account or Youtube channel without your permission.
​
​

Another benefit of migrating the Amazon affiliate links from your YouTube channel into our dashboard is our Link Health Monitoring. Once we’ve converted your channel, in a matter of hours you’ll begin to see link health reports for any broken or out-of-stock links across all your videos. With just a few clicks you can repair any issues that come up and ensure your audience is being redirected appropriately!

There’s no easier way to perform an audit of every link on your channel than running our Optimizer and addressing any resulting link errors! And thanks to our standard intelligent link management support, you can make updates to a single link within our dashboard and see those changes reflected across your entire channel in minutes.

As of April 2020, our YouTube Link Optimizer has some additional functionality!

We take the Amazon Associates program’s Operating Agreement very seriously, and we do what we can to pass along our understanding of the terms. Whenever you’re replacing amzn.to links with geni.us links, you must understand what else is required.

If you’re not including a conspicuous mention of ‘Amazon’ near shortened affiliate links posted to social media, Amazon may consider your links as ‘cloaked’. This is one of the most common reasons to get your Associates account banned! When your affiliate commissions are on the line, it’s incredibly important that you’re operating within the bounds of Amazon’s terms.

Until recently, when we used our YouTube Link Optimizer to convert all the links on your channel, the work wasn’t completely finished. The task of getting ‘Amazon’ disclosures added next to those geni.us links remained, and when you’re managing a channel with hundreds of videos, this left our clients looking for a separate bulk solution.

TubeBuddy’s Bulk Find/Append/Replace is a versatile tool that can be used to solve this exact kind of problem, but we always dreamed of the day that our YouTube Link Optimizer could provide a comprehensive solution.

Our dreams have come true and that day has come!

Now, this functionality is built right into the service. For each amzn.to link that we replace with a geni.us link, we can also include a string of text, either before or after the link. Here are a few examples of disclosures we have added to our clients’ links leveraging this added flexibility:

Note: due to the FTC’s requirements around sharing affiliate links on Social Media, we recommend that you opt to include “paid link”, “#ad”, or “commissions earned” with your link disclosures.

At the very least, you’ll want to include ‘Amazon’ so you’re not breaking Amazon’s rules on ‘link cloaking’, which could lead to getting your Amazon Associates account shut down. We won’t ever force you to adopt these disclosures, but we strongly recommend that you allow us to include them when we run the conversion on your channel.

Making bulk changes to your channel can feel a little scary, but you can rest easy knowing this process is reversible. We have a method for rolling back these updates if for some reason you don’t like the results or decide to leave the service at a later date.

Before making any changes, we’ll generate a backup JSON text file that contains the original video descriptions at the time of conversion. This allows us to easily revert your video descriptions to their original state without any extra work from your side should things not work out to your satisfaction.

That’s all there is to it! With the addition of our per-link disclosures support, our YouTube Link Optimizer can just about handle it all at this point.

We built this out to provide greater value to our YouTube clientele, and we hope this proves useful whether you’re just getting started with Geniuslink or a seasoned veteran who just hasn’t gotten around to updating their time-honored videos.

Let us know if you have any questions about how to get started and we’ll be happy to help!