The Best 5 Affiliate Marketing Programs That Will Make You Money as a Blogger

Affiliate marketing if you do it right can be a pain and stress-free way to make money as a blogger. Once you have built up confidence with your captive audience you can offer affiliate products and in turn, each sale of the item will make you a good commission.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is the procedure by which an affiliate receives a commission for marketing another person’s or company’s goods. The affiliate simply hunts for a product they enjoy, then promotes that product and receives a piece of the profit from each sale they do. The sales are tracked via provided affiliate links from one website to another.

As an affiliate, you will be like a salesperson for the company. You promote to make a sale, the company rewards you.

Affiliate marketing involves 3 different parties

Seller and product creators – Who creates or selling the product

The affiliate or advertiser – who is promoting the product

The consumer – who is purchasing the product

Depending on your blogging niche there are several different affiliate marketing platforms you can select from. Some will want more information about you than others, some will require even a telephone interview.

This is all perfectly fine and the companies are just defending themselves from any potential offenders that they do not want on their program.

Throughout this post, I will give you five different platforms that will offer up the chance to make money through affiliate sales.

The obvious demand being you do not need to hold an inventory and you do not need to deal with any customer returns or issues.

Your work is to write or make videos about the products, post about them across social media, or sponsor them to your email list for example.

#1 Share A Sale

The Share A Sale affiliate marketing network has been about for 18 years and is still going strong. This site is very widespread among fashion and beauty bloggers as they have many retailers from that industry picking this as their affiliate partner. It doesn’t just offer beauty and fashion though, they also offer Home & Garden, Green, Business and much more.

They are one of the leaders of the pack in the affiliate marketing world.

Their support and customer service are at the top level, this is one of their key drivers for their business. They also have a team of very experienced people on board so any queries or questions you can be guaranteed will be answered.

They also pride themselves on their technology. With superb real-time tracking, deep linking, custom links, and clear reporting you’ll be able to track everything from the particular moment a banner was clicked to the time of sale.

Commissions are paid on the 20^th of each month provided that you have earned more than $50.

#2 Clickbank

Clickbank, Arguably the king of the digital affiliate platforms. Clickbank specializes in digital products such as eBooks, courses, software, and information products. A very reliable platform that offers a huge amount of products for you to promote.

Getting an account is very straightforward, simply sign up, create a unique username (which is also your affiliate ID) and you are good to go.

You can select different ways to receive your commissions such as direct deposit, check, or Payoneer. The default minimum payment threshold is set to $100 but you can change this to as low as $10. Payments are made every two weeks.

The commissions for some products on Clickbank are huge with very generous publishers offering up to 75% for their products. So your earnings can soon rack up if you are promoting one of the higher paying products.

The site did get some bad press due to some of the products being unethical or over-hyped in terms of the sales letters. This is not the platform’s fault really so they cannot be to blame here.

All products have to come with a refund policy so buyers do trust the platform and the support and range of products to promote are very good.

There are many tools and courses available to help you with promoting Clickbank products. But a great place to find tons of info for free on the products you are promoting such as conversion rates, upsells, etc is a site called cbengine.com/

#3 Amazon Associates

Did you know you can promote products as an affiliate from the biggest online marketplace in the world? Yes, Amazon Affiliate. Anything that is for sale on Amazon you can get an affiliate link for. The commissions are not very high but the product portfolio is second to none. On average I have found the commissions to be around 7% mark but for some categories, it can be higher.

So if you have a nursery blog for example and you wanted to review the “Top 10 Best Lawnmowers For under $300” the Amazon would be a fantastic affiliate network to use.

You need an Amazon account and you can use this as your login when applying for an affiliate marketing account with them.

Sign up is straightforward with a few questions about your business plans and the type of products you want to promote. Don’t worry about this, once you have been accepted you can promote whatever you like.

The good news is Amazon is a trusted site by millions of users all around the world so your links will not get removed or banned from anywhere if you wish to share the occasional link on social media platforms.

Payments are made 2 months behind. So for example commission totals earned in January will be paid in March.

This is because Amazon has a lengthy refund policy on all its products. You will need to upload your tax information before Amazon can pay you and you can choose direct bank transfer or to receive a check.

Many marketers make niche stores solely around Amazon products and do very well indeed from their affiliate program. If you can’t find anything on here to promote then you really must have an unclear niche!

#4 Peerfly

Peerfly is one of the fastest-growing affiliate networks in the world. They claim over 4000 offers on their site to choose from. The affiliate manager dashboard is great and you will find a very friendly and helpful support team at the end of the line should you need them.

A lot of Peerfly offers are CPA. This is Cost Per Action, so you do not even need people to buy something necessarily. Often the landing pages you will be sending people to will just require a simple form filling in or a lead capturing for you to earn your commission.

Another really good thing about Peerfly is they pretty much accept all types of traffic. Some networks will not pay out on conversions from certain types of traffic like social networks or email for example.

Although they are growing fast they are still not as huge as some of the really big networks, but this allows a more personal touch. They also pride themselves on giving the highest rates for the offers you can promote with a guarantee that they will match or indeed pay more than their competitor networks.

The payouts from Peerfly can be tailored to suit you too. You can get paid weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly – whichever you choose. Another great plus point is the ways you can get paid.

You can get paid in PayPal, Amazon Gift Cards, Payoneer, Bank Wire, or even Bitcoin!

#5 Magic Links

Magic links are different from the other networks in the sense that you don’t even need a blog to promote the products. You can promote magic links merchants directly to your social media accounts like Instagram, Youtube, Facebook, and more.

Influencers on these accounts do well with Magic Links. They offer a whole host of merchants with varying products from beauty, geek, fashion, and electronics. There is something for all niches here.

For some marketers, this is a really simple way to get started in affiliate marketing.

It’s really simple, they offer thousands of products all under one umbrella. You simply select your products you want to promote and they provide you with a unique link (a Magic Link) and you can use this link in your social media platforms and you’ll receive a commission for each sale from it.

A YouTuber for example with a nice following in the beauty niche would do well if they reviewed a product or showed some examples of how to use something with a Magic
 The link underneath the video to the product.

Pinterest is also really good for using Magic Links where the products have great pictures of the product in use. The fashion niche here works well with actual models wearing the clothes converting more than just the clothing on a plain background.

Payments are paid out after you reach the $50 threshold and retailers have released the funds to your account.

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing is the solution for those who looking to gain some revenue out of it apart from regular Ads programs on blogs. Even success in this job does depend on the affiliate’s marketing skills, either the main career or a money-making second job, it can prove to be a real way to meet your income goals.

You can do this affiliate marketing via online reviews, blogs, social media even with the webinar software. You can follow the tips mentioned in this blog to choose the right affiliate marketing platform based on your niche.