How to Choose the Right Affiliate Program? (7 Tips)
Affiliate marketing is the most profitable way to earn money from your website. You don’t need to create a product or service to sell. You are just earning by promoting someone else’s product. That makes affiliate marketing one of the intelligent ways to make money.
In fact, from 2015-2020, the affiliate marketing industry spending has a CAGR of 10.1%, which means brands are spending more money on affiliate marketing.
There are too many affiliate programs on the internet, but you shouldn’t join everything. So instead, we will tell you how to choose the right affiliate program. In affiliates as well, quality matters more than quantity.
You can join any program, but you won’t make money. Instead, you should focus on programs your audience will use; let’s begin without any further ado.
Table of Contents
What’s That Top Paying Affiliate Programs?
According to the statistics, there are 11,400 affiliate programs in the United States. But do you know the average conversion rate of affiliate marketing is around 1%.
That’s why when promoting a product or service, you must create good content, decent traffic, and a good sales pitch. And, if you choose a program that’s hard to sell and gives you $2 per sale, it’s not worth it.
That’s why it’s recommended to look for a high-paying affiliate program or a fair-paying affiliate program.
- You should join a high-paying affiliate program in your niche.
- Think of your target audience, and ask yourself what they will buy.
- For example, your channel or website,
These top-paying affiliate programs refer to the best high-paying programs available in each niche. As we already mentioned, there are too many affiliate programs on the internet, but it is not recommended to join all those affiliate programs.
You waste your precious time and resources if you join all those affiliate programs and promote everything. Because if you advertise everything randomly, then your readers will get confused. And it will lead to complete chaos.
You must pick your top-paying affiliate programs to make a reasonable sum quickly.
Recommended Read: We listed some of the best high paying recurring affiliate programs, you can check it out!
Best Recurring Affiliate Programs
How to Find Affiliate Programs?
Finding an affiliate program is quite simple these days. Almost every premium company started its affiliate programs and had more sales. If you are using any premium services and are happy with them, you need to consider joining and promoting their affiliate program.
For example, here, we are using Cloudways as the hosting partner. And we are pretty happy with the hosting. So, to find their affiliate program, a Google search like “Cloudways affiliate program” will do the job.
Step 1: Go to Google
Step 2: Type brand/website name + ‘affiliate program’ for example, if you want Amazon’s affiliate program search as ‘Amazon affiliate program.’ Here we will take Cloudways for example.
Results:
Usually, the first search result would be the affiliate program registration/log-in page. Now, search for the popular Amazon affiliate program. All you need to do is, remove Cloudways from the keyword and add Amazon instead.
So, the search keyword would look like “Amazon affiliate program.”
Like this, you can find affiliate programs and join them. You do not need a premium subscription to become an affiliate. You can become an affiliate and start promoting the products without paying.
In most cases, an email and password will do the job with some personal information.
How to Choose the Right Affiliate Program?
We will tell you 7 reasons you must pick your top affiliate programs. Of course, choosing these affiliate programs will depend upon your niche, commission per sale, etc. In this article, we will also explain to you what will be the impacts of these factors.
1) Check the Commission per Affiliate Sale Before Joining
The first and foremost thing that we will ask anyone to do before joining an affiliate program is to check their terms and conditions. You need to determine how much commission they will pay you for each sale and their cookie period. Because you always need to choose the one that pays you the maximum.
Consider an affiliate program that will pay you a 20% commission every time a sale gets generated. And, when you check the merchant’s website, you notice that all their products are priced at just $10.
Thus, 20% of $10 will be $2. So, for each sale, you will get only $2. So, to earn $100, you need to make 50 sales (50 x $2 = $100).
Do you think this is worth your promotion effort?
We won’t recommend you promote this stuff.
On the other hand, consider another affiliate program, which also pays you a 20% commission. But, all their products are ranged around $150.
Thus 20% of $150 will be $30. So, by making 4 sales, you can earn more than $100 ( 4 x $30 = $120).
Going with the second affiliate program is always better because you will put the same effort into promoting both products. So, why waste your income by promoting the former?
Some affiliate programs also offer a flat commission for each sale, like WPEngine offering a $200 commission for each affiliate sale.
2) Check The Payment Threshold of the Affiliate Program
Once the balance of your approved commissions (one-time and recurring is more than $$$, your commissions are eligible for payments and will be automatically included in the following amount round. Payments are made via PayPal between the 15th and 20th of each month.
You could notice a minimum payout whenever you join an affiliate program. What’s that?
A merchant will find it difficult to pay you for small affiliate commissions. Because they will have to consider the transaction charges too. So, to reduce these transaction charges, they have set a minimum payment threshold.
If you earn through low-paying affiliate programs, reaching this payout will take a massive amount of time. But, on the other hand, if you choose these top high-paying affiliate programs, you can quickly get this minimum payout every month.
And, if you are joining affiliate programs under affiliate networks like ShareASale, Cuelinks, VCommission, etc., you can join many affiliate programs. So, you can reach the payment threshold even faster.
Things to remember:
- Don’t join an affiliate program with a high threshold limit. For example, if an affiliate program gives you $15 per sale, but its threshold limit is $100, that means every time you get paid, you need to make 7+ sales.
- The minimum sales requirement should be reasonable, like 2-3 sales. Making affiliate sales require a lot of time and effort.
- The lower the threshold limit, the better.
3) Choose Micro-Niche Site for Promotion
Promoting niche products and services is much easier than promoting a site that offers many products and services.
You need to find the right high-paying affiliate programs for you. If you notice, these top-paying affiliate programs will be on a particular product. For example, if you consider, BlueHost, their main product is their hosting service.
See, now your focus has reduced to hosting alone. So, now a micro-niche site covering everything about hosting is sufficient to get you many affiliate sales every month for BlueHost.
This will save you time and effort, Because you can create a micro-niche site quickly, unlike high-authority sites, which will take years to establish themselves.
4) Choose Lifetime Recurring Commissions Programs
You’ll receive a monthly recurring commission for the lifetime of the customer. The affiliate program will stop paying the recurring commission if the customer cancels the subscription.
This is something special about affiliate programs. These affiliate programs actually promote memberships and subscriptions.
So, when you refer a customer to these membership programs, your earnings will not stop with just the initial sale commission alone. You will be paid a commission whenever this customer renews his membership or subscription.
This looks cool, right?
Just by referring a single user, you are earning lifetime commissions. Some affiliate programs will give you a lifetime recurring commission, whereas some will provide just for one or two years. You need to check these details in their terms and conditions.
You must focus on this affiliate program because it will help you build a steady monthly affiliate income.
5) Go for Better Brand Value
These top-paying affiliate programs usually have better brand value. So, when you promote such products to your users, you can easily maintain your reputation among them.
Referring services like Pixpa with good brand value can help you get referrals quickly.
You must think twice about promoting this product if you find something paying very high but has a poor brand value. A company that does not have good branding might offer the worst service.
What will be the impact of promoting such brand products?
When you recommend such a product to your readers, and if they try that service and learn about its worst quality, it will reflect on your own reputation.
6) Focus on Targeted Traffic
If you want to refer a sale, you don’t need a massive traffic volume like high authority websites to get. However, a considerable traffic volume will help you generate revenue from Google AdSense, not affiliate marketing.
Even if you get considerable traffic to your website, do you think everyone will click your link and buy products?
No, they won’t. A very few might. But not the majority.
To get these affiliate sales, you need those highly targeted traffic.
For example, a person browsing for the keyword “OnePlus 6” need not buy the product. But on the other hand, a person browsing for the keyword “OnePlus 6 Review” has a better probability of purchasing this product.
So, the keyword “OnePlus 6 Review” will become a targeted keyword. So, to make affiliate sales, you must focus on getting traffic from these targeted keywords and not generic keywords like “OnePlus 6“.
7) Go for Good Commission Structure Based on the Number of Sales
Specific top affiliate programs have a commission structure based on the number of sales rather than the sales value.
What does this kind of commission structure refer to?
Let us tell you an example.
GreenGeeks, one of the famous web hosting companies, offers this kind of commission structure for their affiliates. When the affiliates bring 1 sale a month, the commission would be $50. When they refer 2 people, the commission would be $60/sign-up for the month.
For this, a custom rate will be applied if an affiliate can refer 10+ people to their platform.
So, look for affiliate programs with this kind of commission structure because you can multiply your earnings quickly by promoting one product alone.
These are the 7 tips we want to share on choosing the right affiliate program.
Tips to Earn More Using Affiliate Marketing
Choosing the right affiliate program is essential, but do you know what’s more critical – actually earning from affiliate marketing. Not many affiliate marketers make money; selling on the internet is tough.
However, you’ll also get people who have made six-figure incomes using affiliate marketing. Below we share some of the common tips of successful affiliate marketers you can follow.
1. Get Traffic Before Sales
Many bloggers and first-time affiliate marketers make such mistakes, which is – focusing more on money. Money is essential, but you can’t make sales without traffic.
Once you get the traffic, you can add affiliate links and make sales. But if the foundation of your website is weak, then adding affiliate links or content won’t make anything.
This is the most common mistake beginners make.
2. Learn SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a way for you to promote your website organically and get traffic. You require three things for a good website: Great Content, Niche Audience, and SEO.
3. Perfect Pitch
Carefully write the pitch that increases your conversion rates. It is helpful for you in writing affiliate content but also helps you in the future if you launch your product or service.
How to Write Perfect Pitch –
- Write things from the Reader’s point of view
- Try to be clear, simple, and concise
- Target Niche Audience
- Think before writing – who needs this?
4. Optimize your Website
SEO is essential for getting traffic; your site won’t be visible by only writing great content. To get traffic, you must work on your website’s SEO. SEO is a bridge that will help your content to reach its audience.
You can optimize your site manually also, but some tools can help you to automate this process. Some of them are free, and some of them are paid. Here are some tools that can help you automate this journey.
- Grammarly – For fixing grammatical mistakes
- Ubersuggest – For keyword research, backlinks, site audit, etc.
- ThirstyAffiliates – Best for easily linking Affiliate products
- YoastSEO – Best for On-Page SEO Optimize
Similarly, there are many tools.
Hosting also plays an important role here; your page loading speed and uptime depend on the hosting server. Hosting servers are mostly paid. However, there are some free hosting servers, but they aren’t reliable.
There are many hosting servers from which you can choose.
However, if you are a business or an agency looking for a premium hosting service. We recommend Kinsta; they offer custom plans according to your need. Also, Kinsta uses top-tier Google Cloud Infrastructure, the same network that Google trusts for YouTube, Gmail, and other applications.
From an SEO point of view, this hosting is best. Their pricing is in mid-range; their starter plan will cost you $35/Month.
$This is an affiliate link
Wrapping Up
If you check the internet, you will see hundreds of thousands of affiliate programs. Joining them all will never give you a good income. Instead, when you plan on joining an affiliate program, keep these seven tips in your mind.
Join the best ones, and start investing time in the promotion. It will probably give you more returns.
If you have questions about affiliate marketing, let us know in the comments section.
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BALACHANDAR I says
Your blog post looks great. Some of my opinions:
1. I got confused with your permalink because it is slightly different from title and contents. Based on permalink, I thought that you are going to explain different affiliate programs. I feel that you may change the permalink as
www.onlinerockershub.com/7-things-that-make-you-love-top-paying-affiliate-programs
2. Under sub-heading”Better brand value”, the image you have added looks attractive to readers like me.
Thank you for sharing this article.
Nirmal Kumar says
Great to see your comment here Balachandar.
I actually started writing this blog post with the view of listing out all top paying affiliate programs in the Blogging niche. But, just after I completed till this content level, I realized, that the post has already crossed 1000 words. If I list and explain all those affiliate programs, then I will be so hard for readers to follow up.
So, I decided to split the posts. But, I didn’t notice the permalink. I am not changing this permalink, because changing permalinks after publishing the article is not recommended. Because it will lead all traffic coming from search engines to 404 error.
As of Now, I have shared all high paying email marketing affiliate programs here. So, I will share many more high paying affiliate programs.
And, Thanks for the compliment. This image was taken from Flickr. Soon, I will try to post all image sources as captions. As of now, I have all image credits in image description of each image. But now, I got to know it’s not possible to display image description with my theme. So, I will manually change them all over my website.