101 Best Affiliate Programs for Bloggers

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Are you a blogger who wants to earn passive income on the side? If so, it’s time to get into affiliate marketing! In this post, I’m sharing the best affiliate programs for bloggers.

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How to Choose the Best Affiliate Programs for Bloggers

When you’re just starting out as an affiliate marketer, you might feel a bit of overwhelm just trying to determine which products you should be promoting. You want to cater to the needs of your audience, and you also don’t want to waste time promoting things that won’t pay off for you.

There are several ways to go about choosing the best affiliate marketing program so that both consumers and you, as an affiliate, will feel as if your needs are being met. Financially, you want the best return possible for every review that you create.

But you never want to gain that money as a result of misleading or disappointing your followers. Choosing a reliable, high quality affiliate program will not only ensure that your promotions convert into sales, but it will prevent refunds that can take your commissions back as quickly as you earned them.

Pick Affiliate Programs That Have the Right Types of Products

If you are new to affiliate marketing, you have probably been instructed or instinctively believe that you need to pick an affiliate marketing program that will earn you the most money.

That is definitely an important aspect of being an affiliate marketer, but it’s not the most important one. If you fail to serve the needs of your followers, you will either not generate any commissions whatsoever – or the sales that you do convert will quickly be refunded for a lack of quality and relevancy.

You need to focus initially on finding the affiliate programs that have the right kinds of products for your target audience. Think about what pain points or obstacles they have in their life, and what products you feel can help them overcome those.

Another angle that you can focus on are the benefits or improvements that people want to enjoy in their lives. If you can find products that will give them better quality of life in some way, it’s a good sign that you can earn from your promotions.

Some marketers will oddly enough promote products that don’t have much to do with their target audience or their needs, just because they see it converting well in another niche.

There are many ways you can find crossover niche topics, if you are struggling to find many affiliate marketing programs in the overall broad niche that you chose. For example, if you are in the stress niche, you can find products for sleep, exercise, and other topics that tie in nicely with your original one.

Evaluate the Quality of the Product

Once you find the programs that have the types of products your target audience will find useful and relevant to their lives, you want to take some time to evaluate the quality of the products you are considering promoting.

Even though someone else has created and is selling the product, you will be acting as the middleman that connects a trusting audience with the vendor. So you will share the responsibility of whether or not this product is a viable option to spend money on.

As an affiliate, you need to think about how your loyal followers will feel after they have purchased a particular product and used it. If you are sending them offers for low-quality products, they will no longer trust your recommendations, and you will ultimately sabotage yourself and lose money.

If you are promoting info products, you can ask for a review copy that will allow you to go through the product and make a genuine recommendation or review about it. If it’s a tangible product, you may have to purchase it yourself, so that you can report on things like durability, ease of use, and so on.

Look Into the Reputation of the Vendor

Something that you may overlook, especially if you see a product on a bestseller list, is the reputation of the vendor. Many online entrepreneurs are awarded accolades and make hundreds, if not thousands of sales, regardless of the fact that their product fails to deliver in terms of quality.

Sometimes, it may not even be the quality of the product, but other reputation issues that you want to be aware of. Keep in mind that when you recommend a product to someone, you’re not just recommending the product itself.

That customer, the one you sent to this individual, is going to be put on their list and manipulated over the course of time. Sometimes, they are treated very well and they will appreciate that you connected them with a new resource.

But if the reputation of the vendor is one where they mistreat their subscribers, such as scamming them out of their money or making poor recommendations to them, you will need to shoulder some of that blame.

Not only do you have to look at the reputation of the vendor, but you need to look at whether or not they have had any problems in paying commissions to top-performing affiliates.

You want to make sure that you will be paid what you are owed, and that may include the prizes you have won in a contest. Sometimes, people will discuss this type of bad behavior on social media platforms, and sometimes they will name these unreputable vendors in forums.

Analyze the Type of Experience Your Customer Will Have

While product quality and reputation are both important, you also want to think about what the experience will be for your customer after they purchase a product from a specific individual.

Customer experience includes a wide range of things. It starts with their ability to see and navigate the sales page. You want to make sure that the sites and programs you are sending people to are mobile-friendly and that they load quickly for your subscribers.

The next part of the process will be the purchasing experience. Ideally, you want to go through this process yourself so that you can see if there are any obstacles to purchasing or downloading the product.

After they buy it, are they shown the one-time offer upgrade? Are they sent to a download page or are they emailed a download link? If any of these steps are skipped, you may want to reach out to the vendor and ask them to remedy the situation before you mail out your promo for it.

Another thing you want to consider is what the post-purchase experiences are like for the people that you are sending to this vendor. For example, is this vendor someone who is responsive to customer service questions?

What kind of emails are they going to be sent by the vendor after they purchase a product? You want to know if you are setting your followers up to be spammed incessantly or if they will be treated well by the new vendor.

You can’t micromanage every vendor on a regular basis. Predicting the future of how they will conduct themselves is out of your hands. But what you can do is look at previous behavior to see if there are any complaints about the experience others have had with this vendor, and go through the process yourself to see what you think.

Choose an Affiliate Program That Offers You the Best Compensation Opportunities

Now we get to the part that you are probably most interested in. Once you have ensured that your customer will have the best possible experience from start to finish, you can consider selecting an affiliate program that is based on your financial needs.

After all, you are becoming an affiliate marketer so that you can earn extra money online, whether it is from digital or tangible products. The first thing you want to look at is the percentage you will be paid by the vendor as an affiliate whenever you make a sale.

Most vendors will split the profits with you 50/50. You will usually see a 50% commission that you can earn across the board, which includes not only the front end but also the one-time offer upgrades and any downsells, too.

From time to time, you will have a vendor set your commission at 100% for a front-end product. They plan on offering a low ticket, front-end item so that they can get many sales and affiliates promoting for it.

They make their profits through the rest of the funnel, on higher priced upsells and downsells – not to mention future promotions that will go out to this buyer, who is now on a list as a subscriber.

In addition to considering the commissions you will be earning, you want to look and see how many items are in their funnel, and what you could be earning as a whole with each promotion.

Next, you have to look at the amount that the product is selling for. If the price point is $7, and you are earning 50%, that’s only $3.50. But if the product is $27, you stand to earn much more.

A lower price point is definitely okay if you are just starting out and want to gain some good statistics for your username on a specific platform. Or, if the vendor is willing to offer 100% commission for a lower price point, you might want to consider that as well.

Sometimes, neither of those are true, and you simply promote a low ticket, 50% commission product because you know it’s a perfect fit for your audience and you want them to be aware of it.

Another way you can analyze an affiliate program to see if you will make money through your promotions is by looking to see if they have one of two things: a cash prize contest, or some type of residual payment option that will pay you month after month, such as a membership.

Select Vendors Who Offer Support for Their Affiliates

Lastly, you want to choose affiliate marketing programs that will support you as a beginner affiliate. There are many vendors who will provide you with many resources that can help you hit the ground running.

Look for a JV (joint venture) page that includes demo videos or screenshots, swipe files that you can use in your emails, banner ads that you can place on your blog or in your e-mail when you write a review, and most importantly – their contact information so that you can reach out and get the support that you need.

By paying attention to these six factors when you are choosing an affiliate program to promote as a new marketer, you will increase the odds that you will have a profitable and successful career reviewing and promoting products to your target audience.