How To Find a Good Affiliate Program

So we’ve already established that you need to believe in the product that you are promoting in your affiliate marketing endeavours. That is why we will start here in finding a program that you will be your first to promote.

Take out a sheet of paper, or open a Word doc and start jotting down your interests. Jot down your hobbies. Your skills. What you are good at. It can be career related or not. 

If you have some small kids, maybe jot down some toy brands and start a review blog for toys. Toys will then become a business expense and you can get a tax write-off buying your kids toys.

Same goes for electronics. If you like computers, start a computer review blog and computers and equipment will become a write-off. 

Or if you want to get nice things for your spouse, start a review blog in what they like, and then you can buy them things with your business money.

It’s not all about getting stuff either. You have to make a list of things that will keep you interested over the long run, but also have long-term potential to drive money to your business because they have enough demand from the market.

Make this list of companies or industries now, and later in this chapter we will explore how to use this list to find great affiliate offers in your industry.

One thing you should look into is, where are raving fans already spending their hard-earned money?

If people are spending money in a certain niche, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is overcrowded with too much competition and you should avoid that area.

What it means is that people have a problem that that area is solving, and already throwing money at it to fix their issue. You just need to find out how to tap into that stream of income with your own unique value proposition.

We talk about bonus offers a little later in the course, but for now know that you can add your own content and bonuses to products that already exist to make people want to buy what they are already buying through your link.

When you think about where the money is at, it’s probably already on the list you made in the last lesson. You made a list of things you loved, and my guess is that you likely spend money on these things. Odds are that you aren’t the only one. If your interests that you wrote down are very niche, and you know your audience will be small, it may be a good idea to rethink what affiliate offers you plan to go after, or to broaden your category of interest just a bit.

An example may be that your interest is playing The 13th Age tabletop game, but you know that market is small, maybe you want to broaden your category to all tabletop RPGs.

Maybe you really like fly fishing, but know that a more broad fishing affiliate business would hit a bigger audience.

While your niche can’t be too small, you still need to put a unique spin on things to build up your own brand and become a leader in your industry. Many marketers call this finding the blue ocean, which I discuss in the video for this lesson.

Find where the money is going and build a better or faster solution, and you will redirect the money to you by helping people.

That’s what affiliate marketing is all about.

While it is possible to join an affiliate program from a single business, sooner or later you will likely find yourself exploring affiliate marketplaces.

My first marketplace came from when we started to promote Noom. Their program was built on a platform called Impact Radius. We partnered with Noom, and Impact tracked sales for the company and dealt with collecting and distributing payments. 

Soon after joining the Noom program I saw that you could apply to be a part of the Impact Marketplace, where you were given access to other brands to be able to apply to their programs.

On Impact you aren’t allowed to promote whatever brands you see. You still have to find offers within your niche, submit a short application, and then businesses can view your profile and see if you are a good fit for their program. 

Noom is on a separate account than our marketplace account, and on the marketplace account we can see stats and payments from all businesses we’ve been accepted to through the marketplace.

It’s kind of like window-shopping for the best partnerships while being able to quickly apply. Marketplaces can make life easier for affiliate marketers.

Not all marketplaces operate in this way where you need approval from each individual brand, though. There are some, like Brandcycle, that make you apply to get accepted to the marketplace, but once you do, you can promote offers from any brand that agrees to be in that marketplace.

This leaves the door open for a wider variety of offers to promote from different companies. With BrandCycle you get mostly retail outlets in different categories, so if you are looking to sell physical products, like clothes and toys, this may be a good option for you.

A third marketplace that I’ve heard a lot about, but never used, is Clickbank. They have a wide range of offers to promote such as software and courses in the categories of E-business, families, games, and more. They have over 4,000 products and pay up to 90% commission rates. You can check that one out for yourself, or I will update this section if I ever enough people want me to explore it and get more details.

If you really want to sell on Amazon, I’ll give you the rundown in this video, but just know that I haven’t seen much good with this program.

The commission rates tend to be on the lower side, and you have to get a ton of traffic to generate any income at all.

Products you are promoting are on Amazon, and as such Amazon has a monster site and one of the best domain scores in the world since they are one of the top trafficked websites in existence. This means that their product pages will outrank you in search results every day, so unless you have some other means of driving traffic your stuff won’t get found.

Another reason I don’t like promoting Amazon products are that their cookie is only 1 day. They get so much traffic that they assume if someone comes back to the site 2 days after clicking your link, they got there through another source. Also the fact that they don’t really need help to drive traffic and push products means that great rates and cookie length aren’t their top priority. They really don’t need you to survive. 

Companies that need their affiliates to thrive and grow are a lot more generous in their offering and grateful for their affiliates. This is not Amazon.

There are some ways that you can work their products into your articles that aren’t direct reviews for the product, so if you do want to do so, think more along the lines of product comparison articles. 

We have a comparison article that ranks 3rd for the mom blog that we run, after 2 Amazon search results. Google “double strollers under $200” and mommybear.org is 3rd. These are the types of articles that can rank, but as you can see from that result, we are still after Amazon. 

My opinion stands that there are a lot better programs out there to promote, so give Amazon a shot if you want, but I’d pass.