How Lon Seidman used his tech YouTube channel to build a huge affiliate business

He specializes in reviewing non-sexy gadgets that sell in high volumes.

Lon Seidman doesn’t operate the largest gadget YouTube channel in the world — his Lon.TV account has about 365,000 subscribers — but that hasn’t stopped him from building a successful media business. He stays hyper focused on reviewing non-sexy products that sell in extremely high volumes, and this has allowed him to drive thousands of affiliate sales through both YouTube and Amazon Video.

In a recent interview, Lon explained his methodology for picking products to review, how he optimizes his affiliate links, and why he’s spending more time posting his content to decentralized platforms.

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Summary

Lon Seidman, a tech gadget reviewer since 2012, discussed his business strategy on his YouTube channel and Amazon affiliate program. He focuses on affordable tech products with high search volume and less competition, such as printers and modems. Seidman emphasizes the importance of providing honest reviews and demonstrations, which drive both views and affiliate commissions. He noted challenges with YouTube's new affiliate linking policies and the decline in certain product categories like laptops post-pandemic. Seidman also highlighted his efforts to diversify revenue streams, including the operations of both a blog and newsletter. He’s also putting more efforts into decentralized platforms like Mastodon and PeerTube to mitigate reliance on YouTube's algorithms.

Highlights from the interview

Overview of Lon Seidman's YouTube Channel

Simon asks Lon about the launch of his YouTube channel, which started in 2012. Lon mentions that his channel focuses on reviewing tech products, with a particular emphasis on affordable items. He explains that, while other topics sometimes get more views, these sorts of product reviews are the most revenue-generating. Lon also mentions that he posts reviews on Amazon, leveraging their affiliate program.

Simon inquires about Lon’s strategy for choosing products to review. Lon explains that he looks for high search volume and affordable products with less competition. He shares that he often reviews products that are not the latest or most popular but still relevant to his audience. He also emphasizes the importance of showing the product in action and providing honest reviews.

I learned early on that if you're a commodity content creator like I am, and people are not coming to you to begin with, then what you have to do for content is something that people might be looking for. So you have to talk about products that have a high search volume. A lot of times I look within a category of products to see what the search volume is. Over time, you develop an instinct for what people are looking for at the moment. And I'll give you a great example. For a long time, especially during the pandemic, laptops were my bread and butter, right? I knew if I put a laptop video up, it would not be my most viewed video, but it would sit right in the middle, right? It just was the glue that kept everything together. Post pandemic, where everybody has a laptop, the laptop traffic has dropped off. It's now my least viewed content, whereas just a year or two ago, it was my bread and butter. What's happened since is that some of these, like really weird Chinese mini PCs, have come into fashion again, right? So I'm seeing more interest in that area. So I'll go do a few more of those. And a lot of times that interest is gauged just by uploading a video and seeing how it performs. So that's one gauge. Another thing I look for, though, is whether or not the product is something that people are looking for. So for a lot of generic stuff, if it's not all that unique or different, what's going to get a viewer to come over to that? So a lot of times, it's looking for products that have a strong brand behind them, a brand that's marketed, a brand like a printer that's in every office supply store that you go to or Best Buy. Those are the sorts of things that I look for, unless it's got some really interesting, endearing, unique kind of quality to it. I am starting to see a lot of niche hardware from very specific verticals. So, like retro gaming has always got a lot of cool stuff. And there's an audience that circulates around that. But generally, for the consumer products, it's things that are well represented in the market.

Monetization Strategies and Diversification

Simon asks about Lon's monetization strategies beyond YouTube AdSense. He mentions sponsored walkthroughs, affiliate links, memberships, and merch sales as additional revenue streams. He explains that he uses a self-hosted e-commerce site for selling products and is transitioning to a new merch provider. Lon discusses the importance of providing value to viewers in sponsored content and maintaining trust with his audience.

Amazon has very specific requirements for their affiliate program. The big one is you can't say how much the product costs in the video, because it always changes. And it's difficult, because on the YouTube side, if you don't mention the price, your viewers will not be happy with you. So you have to grab the video and chop off the parts that are not acceptable. The approval process for videos has gotten much more automated. So I've been running into issues where if a barcode appears in the video anywhere, they'll take it down because they think it might be revealing personal information, like a mailing label. So I have to go in and blur out the barcodes and stuff. But Amazon's been so good that it's worth doing that extra amount of work to do it. Occasionally, I will put up an Amazon-only video, but generally, I'm sticking to cross posting on both platforms.

And generally they need to have watched the video for 30 seconds before converting. And what's neat about Amazon, though, is that it's not just specifically for that product. So occasionally, your video will get placed on a related product. So I'm often seeing things that I didn't review in my report at the end of the month because there were things that people bought with that video on a different product page.

Challenges and Adaptations in Affiliate Marketing

Simon asks about the challenges Lon faces in affiliate marketing. Lon mentions the difficulty of acquiring products, whether by buying them himself or receiving them from companies. He explains the limitations of YouTube's affiliate program and the challenges of external linking in YouTube Shorts. He also discusses the impact of changing market trends and the decline in certain product categories on his business.

Here's the thing that really bugs me, is that when YouTube Shorts came out, you could link externally in the description for the video. So that was an opportunity to put affiliate links in. They rolled out YouTube Shopping, which is their version of the affiliate program, which they do allow you to use, but any external links you put in the description are no longer clickable, so the traffic just dropped. In fact, I had started a second channel of Shorts to do just that – things that didn't deserve a full 20 minute video, I could do  them in a minute and just kind of cover it. But all those affiliate links to Amazon no longer work in the description, because nobody can click on it.

Optimization for Search and Viewer Engagement

Simon inquires about Lon’s strategies for optimizing videos for search. He explains the importance of specific titles and chapter markers with timestamps for search engine optimization. He shares his experience with thumbnails and the challenges of creating effective ones. He also discusses the use of AI tools like ChatGPT for generating blog posts and the benefits of having a self-hosted blog.

I have Chat GPT actually take the transcript and write me out a blog post, and I'm not just posting it verbatim from what the AI generates. I'll go in and put it in my voice a little better, add some things, take some things out, but I take that text, embed the video, and I have a blog now where I put all of my content every time I upload a new video, and then I take the RSS feed from the blog and I push it out via an email newsletter that I send out daily to some people and weekly to others. So I try to put that out there as much as I can. And what's been neat about the blog, now that I’m in year two of writing it, is I'm getting about 15,000 to 20,000 clicks per month into the blog from Google search. Because people like to learn by reading too, right? So they'll hit the Google search, that link will show up. They'll go to the blog, the video’s there, they might go out from there. That’s an audience I would not have had if I hadn't generated the write up and the AI has helped, in the sense that it's made that process more efficient, so I don't have to spend as much time writing.

Exploring Alternative Platforms and Future Investments

Simon asks about Lon’ exploration of alternative platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Lon explains the limitations of these platforms in terms of external linking and monetization. Lon discusses the potential of decentralized platforms like Mastodon and PeerTube as alternatives to traditional social networks. Lon mentions the importance of staying updated with trends and exploring new technologies to maintain a competitive edge.

What makes YouTube work is the same thing that's made television work and radio work before that, which is that it's generally centered around a personality – and a connection between a host and the audience. And that I think is going to be very hard to replicate with a generative AI. So my optimistic prediction – maybe I'm being too optimistic about it – is that I don't think it's going to impact things as much as people think it might. You come to me if you want to know if this thing's good or not, right, I've built up trust with my audience, I hope, and when, say, a new TV model comes out, people will come to watch my review because they know I'll give it a straight shot. And I don't think an AI could provide that level of trust, even if it does provide efficient information. 

Building Direct Relationships with the Audience

Simon asks about Lon’s efforts to build direct relationships with his audience. Lon mentions the importance of email newsletters and the challenges of driving subscriptions. He discusses the potential of platforms like Substack for building a direct audience and owning the relationship, and shares his thoughts on the future of content creation and the importance of adapting to changing algorithms and market trends.

If we look at the emergence of the web in the first place, back in the early to late 90s, you had a bunch of websites, those coalesced into what we have today, which are platforms. But there's been a lot of pushback against the platforms, because there are times when the algorithms will decide they don't like a particular creator. They don't like a particular thing the creator is saying, and suddenly they're off the recommended list. I've been noticing just in the sense that if a viewer doesn't watch me religiously, it just takes me off their feed completely. And that wasn't, the case just a couple of years ago. And it's not that I'm saying anything offensive. It's just that because of how it works now versus how it used to work, I'm getting less traffic. So coming back to this concept of owning the content. The cost of bandwidth is reduced dramatically. The resources available to do your own hosting are much more affordable than they've been. And I've been experimenting – and I haven't really rolled this out yet, because it's not quite fully baked on the software side –  but there are platforms now that try to replicate how these social networks work, but on a distributed scale. So Mastodon is a great example of a Twitter alternative. It's not necessarily all that popular, but it's functional and people use it, and it's completely decentralized. There's another effort out there called PeerTube, which has largely replicated from the user side what it is like to use YouTube, except it's all decentralized, and they even created a really creative way to distribute the video peer to peer. So if you're watching the same video I am, we can share the bandwidth, so not all of it's coming out of my server, and I ran a PeerTube server for a short time, just to try to own something of it myself. And my hope for the future is that we do see a decentralized alternative that's easy for consumers to adopt, because ultimately, I think that might level the playing field a little bit more. Otherwise, you're at the beck and call of these algorithms, and trying to adjust for what they're looking for is kind of the name of the game.