Wake up at an ungodly hour. Drive to the office through total gridlock, streets jammed with other half-asleep commuters. Slog through email after mind-numbing email until the sweet release at five o’clock.

Sound terrible?

What if, instead of dealing with the monotony and stupor of the rat race to earn a few bucks, you could make money at any time, from anywhere — even while you sleep?

That’s the concept behind affiliate marketing.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a type of marketing where a business rewards one or more affiliates for each customer or visitor brought to the business through the affiliate’s marketing efforts. In other words, an affiliate promotes a product or service on behalf of a business and earns a commission for each sale or conversion that results from their marketing efforts.

Affiliates typically promote products or services through a unique referral link provided by the business. When a visitor clicks on the referral link and makes a purchase or completes a desired action (such as signing up for a newsletter or filling out a form), the affiliate earns a commission.

Affiliate marketing can be a win-win situation for both the business and the affiliate. The business can increase its sales and customer base with minimal investment in marketing, while the affiliate can earn a commission without having to create or sell their own products.

Affiliate marketing is used by many businesses in various industries, including e-commerce, digital products, and services. There are also many affiliate marketing networks and platforms that connect businesses with affiliates and facilitate the tracking and payment of commissions.

How does affiliate marketing work?

To participate in an affiliate marketing program, you’ll need to take these five simple steps:

Find and join an affiliate program
Choose which offers to promote
Obtain a unique affiliate link for each offer
Share those links on your blog, social media platforms, or website
Collect a commission anytime someone uses your links to make a purchase

9 Best Affiliate Programs

As an affiliate marketer, you’ve got one thing on your mind: performance. To get the best performance for your affiliate campaigns, it’s worth trying out a few platforms to see what works for you. Whether you are a beginner just starting out, or more advanced with some experience behind you, here are some great affiliate marketing programs for you to check out. See what kind of offers are available on the most popular platforms to help you achieve your best conversions and even build a steady long-term income.

So let’s dive in:

Affiliaxe

Affiliaxe is a top choice for marketers who want to access a whole lot of verticals. This translates to a wide variety of products and offers, so you get to choose and focus where you can get the best results. Plus, if accepted to the program, you have access to your very own Affiliate Manager to help you optimize your traffic and create a unique bonus program to max your earning potential. Top it off with an easy-to-use platform, it’s a favorite for global affiliate marketers.

DFO Global

If you’re looking for a high-quality affiliate network to work with, you won’t go wrong with DFO Global. You get access to a wide range of e-commerce products on a closed, safe, and brand-protected environment, with high covering offers and high payouts as a reward. For serious affiliate marketers who want a program that’s worth investing their time and effort, then DFO Global – with top-notch data analytics and responsive managers at your disposal – is the way to go.

Amazon Associates

For affiliate marketing beginners, Amazon is a great platform to kick off your new venture. The vast Amazon marketplace takes care of most of the sales process, warming up your leads for you. Your job is to bring new clients from external traffic sources to the Amazon site. There are millions of products you can pitch, with new ones being added every day. It’s a great way to make money without having yet built up a strong background in the art of affiliate marketing.

eBay Partner Network

Here’s a great way to tap into the enormous affiliate potential of the eBay market. Advertise eBay products on social media, your blog or website, and get commission from every product sold via your link. Signing up to the eBay Partner Network is simple, and there is a never-ending supply of interesting products to promote, including popular trending products and daily deals.

ShareASale

ShareASale is one of the largest affiliate networks out there, running for nearly two decades, so it’s built up a lot of trust in the affiliate industry. The network is well-loved by marketers and merchants because of its user-friendly interface, fast free sign up and support for affiliates running multiple websites. It has a huge variety of merchants to choose from in over 40 categories, including some big names.

ClickBank

With 6 million digital products in over 20 categories, reaching 200 million people worldwide, ClickBank is a popular choice among affiliate marketers. What’s more, this program offers very high commissions, as high as 75%, and ClickBank is known for its regular reliable payouts, which is a huge drawcard. There are plenty of products sold on a recurring basis, which means a great source of recurring income for you, as well as products with upsell options to help boost your income.

CJ Affiliate

CJ Affiliate is a great program for more experienced marketers, with 300 brands, including many of the world’s top brands. The program boasts 43% year-on-year growth in commissions, so it’s an attractive option. However you need a good amount of traffic to get accepted, and there are strict conditions for staying on as a publisher. The sophisticated toolbox may take some getting used to but has great features for more advanced affiliate marketers.

PartnerStack

PartnerStack is an affiliate program focusing on the promotion of software products and tools, including many well-known and popular software. The company claims that 30% of software sold actually comes through channel partners, so if your audience has a particular software interest, there’s great potential for you here. PartnerStack is big into building partnerships between affiliate marketers and product owners, so you’ll benefit from pinpointed analytics and high growth potential.

Fiverr Affiliates Program

Fiverr bills itself as the world’s largest digital services marketplace, with over 11 million users in 190 countries. Fiverr has a generous commission plan, with CPA of up to $150. Plus, there’s no referral limit and you get lifetime attribution. Another nice benefit of the Fiverr affiliates program is their user-friendly dashboard, as well as the portfolio of creative resources that you can use to promote Fiverr, so some of the heavy liftings is done for you already.

Promoting an Affiliate Product.

Free Advertising.

1) SEO: Search Engine Optimization.

SEO is the best way to promote affiliate services and products and to turn this online business into almost 99% Passive Income.

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of optimizing a website or webpage to increase the quantity and quality of its traffic from a search engine’s organic results. In other words, it is simply a method, or a technique used to rank your websites and articles on Top of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

There are three steps to go through in the process of ranking your articles:

Know what people are searching for (Keyword Research)
Optimize your article for these keywords (On-Page SEO)
Off-Page SEO (Building Trust, Social Signals, and Link Building)

#1 — Implement Good Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Today, if you don’t understand SEO, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Discover the nuances about SEO so that you’re engaging in the right type of traffic delivery strategies. You don’t want to bend or break the rules. Plus, by really having an understanding of SEO, you could quite literally supercharge your results. Find a good course or audiobook about SEO and learn like the wind.

#2 — Write Insatiable Content

Content is king. As long as you create insatiable content on your site or blog, you’ll keep the visitors coming back for more and more. Also, the better your content is, the more engaged your visitors will be. They will share your content for you, helping to promote your site on autopilot.

#3 — Answer Questions on Quora

Quora is a great medium for driving traffic to your site. Answer questions on this platform and link the right keywords to anchor content on your site or blog. However, don’t use this platform to spam. Ensure that your answers are detailed and that you know what you’re talking about

#4 — Create YouTube Video Tutorials

YouTube is a great resource for driving free organic traffic to your website. Maybe it’s because Google loves YouTube, and considering that it’s the second most popular search engine in the world, gaining exposure on YouTube could be huge. Create useful tutorials and videos that add an immense amount of value and be sure to link to your content through the description.

#5 — Get Social On Instagram

Everyone knows that Instagram is a wildly-popular platform for sharing photos and connecting with others from around the world. Yet, few people know how to leverage Instagram to drive traffic to their website. However, many people have built multi-million dollar businesses solely by using Instagram as their main method for driving traffic.

#6 — Leverage LinkedIn’s Publishing Platform

LinkedIn’s publishing platform is a great method for marketing the content that’s already on your website. Publish a unique, high-quality post on LinkedIn that delivers an enormous amount of value and ensure that you link that content to anchor content on your blog or website to gain that all-important authority bridge to your primary post.

#7 — Post On Medium.com

Medium is one of my go-to platforms for marketing my content and provides another authority-site domain that gives you the versatility of link-dropping the way that you normally would through any blog post on a CMS like WordPress. Leverage Medium to create intuitive content marketing posts that also link back to your primary posts on your site or blog.

#8 — Utilize Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to drive traffic to your site or your blog, and to promote any offers, but it also means that you need a list to market to. Create a lead magnet and build a sales funnel immediately if you haven’t already done so, in order to build up a list that you can eventually market (not spam) any of your offers to.

Let’s start with free promotion and see how we can promote affiliate products and services.

2. Paid Advertising.

When It comes to paid advertising, we have several networks and places to market on like:

Facebook Ads.
Google Ads
Native Ads
Quora Ads

Going through all these requires a 300-page book each! So I will go over each one, in brief, to put you in the right direction.

Promote Affiliate Products with Facebook and Google Ads

If you are looking to promote affiliate products with Facebook or Google Ads, Keep in mind the following:

First: Don’t run ads directly to your affiliate link. Facebook and Google are generally not a huge fan of affiliate links, and doing so too much could end up getting your ad account shut down.

Instead, you want to send them to your landing page in between the Ad and the Affiliate product page.

Secondly: make sure that all of your landing pages are compliant with Facebook and Google GuideLines.

Create Your Landing Page.

Now, what you have to do is to create your landing page. This could be a simple page where you pre-sell whatever it is you’re promoting…whether it’s a piece of pre-launch content or the sales page…and invite them to click through to download it.

Or, even better, you can use this as an opportunity to grow your list by turning these people into subscribers to YOUR list, and then sending them onto the content or offer you are promoting.

Run your Campaign.

A small note to consider is whenever you start your campaign, be sure to select the correct audience and narrow down as much as you can to target specific people. You can also use AD retargeting, which is a great weapon when running paid Ads.

Promote Affiliate Products with Native Ads.

For affiliate marketers, native ad networks like Outbrain, Taboola, Mgid, and others are an ideal platform, proven to bring great results.

Ads on search results (like Google) and social media (Like Facebook) are not the same as ads on native networks. Why?

Simply Because there’s a big difference between scrolling a social feed, searching for something specific on Google, or browsing a favorite news site (where Native ads are shown). With the latter, users are in “discovery mode.”

They are primed to discover content that interests them.

Check out this case study I made like a year ago with Outbrain network promoting my own product and not an affiliate, but I think it will give you an idea of how things work:

Promote Affiliate Products with Quora Ads.

Even though, I recommend starting with Quora as a free source of traffic by answering and sharing your knowledge as I explained before.

Affiliate Marketing Ultimate Guide