Affiliate Marketing Guide: Best Affiliate Programs & Tools

As an affiliate marketer, your success is to a large extent, dependent upon the affiliate program you choose. Although there is no standard way to find out the best programs, but the main thing is to check the commission rate and the program’s policies. There are also some other factors you need to consider when choosing a profitable affiliate program, which I discussed in this article. After considering these factors, I recommended some affiliate programs of various categories in this article. You will also learn some free and paid affiliate marketing tools and other marketing resources.

Things to Consider when Choosing an Affiliate Program

The following are some of the vital things to consider when selecting a profitable niche.

1. Market Value

It is important to enter a niche with substantial market data. This allows you to be able to estimate your earning potential. Generally, you want to stick with niches with a high market value. When the market value is high, it shows that the customers are responsive to the products, and this allows you to make more money.

2. Past and Current Trends

By studying past and current trends, you are giving yourself the chance to predict what could happen in the future. Studying past and current niche trends allow you to be comfortable in your decisions and to forecast what may happen. Analyzing the past and current trends promote your creativity and empower you to make the most of the situation.

3. Understand the Problems of your Niche

It is important to accurately understand the problem that is going on in your niche. When you have a clear understanding of the problem, you have a decent chance of turning things to your favor. But when you don’t understand the problem thoroughly, you are more likely to lose out.

4. Audience Passion

Passion is one factor that pushes us into taking certain actions. You want to ask yourself whether your audience is passionate enough to convert into customers. You have to pick an affiliate program that will be received well. This allows you to make money. However, if your target audience has little to zero passion for your product, obviously, your earning potential will be greatly compromised.

5. Target Audience Spending Power

You also need to understand that promoting a niche isn’t enough, but your target audience should have the means to buy whatever you are promoting. Passion alone is not enough. Thus, if you are promoting a product which price tag is beyond the ability of the target audience, it doesn’t matter that they need the product, but still, they won’t have the capacity to buy.

6. Nature of the Products

As an affiliate marketer, you will be promoting products of a different nature. You want to select a niche whose products can be handled well by your audience. For instance, if you are promoting products to an audience in a third world country, it is far more profitable to sell informational products, as opposed to tangible products because the infrastructure to receive these goods might be lacking.

7. Competition

Some niches tend to be particularly competitive. Do you have the potential to withstand this competition? Ensure that you are adequately prepared; otherwise, look for a niche where there’s less competition. This is especially so if you don’t have the budget to sustain a powerful campaign. But also ensure that you develop your strength so that you won’t always have to shun competition. It is important that you develop your content and strengthen your marketing game so that you may increase your profits and establish your presence as a thought leader.

Best Recommended Affiliate Programs

eCommerce Affiliate Programs

BigCommerce
Weebly
3DCART
Shopify
Wix
CJ Affiliate
ShareSale
Amazon Associates
eBay Partner Network
ClickBank

Travel Affiliate Programs

TripAdvisor
TravelPayouts
Expedia
SkyScanner
Agoda
Booking.com
Airbnb

Dating Affiliate Programs

Cupid Media
People Media
Match.com
EHarmony
Elite Singles

Web Hosting Affiliate Programs

WP Engine
Liquid Web
Cloudways
SiteGround
Kinsta

Educational Affiliate Programs

Coursera
Udemy
Skillshare
DIY.org
Teachable

Gaming Affiliate Programs

Razer
LogiTech
Alienware
Nvidia
Microsoft

See:

15 Best Free & Paid Affiliate Marketing Tools

1. Click Trackers

You can track your ad clicks with a click tracker. A good click tracker helps you to collect data in order to scale your campaigns quicker. It enables you to keep count of the percentage of people that saw your ads and clicked on it and probably the percentage that actually purchased the product you are promoting. If you are running multiple ads on the same or different ad platforms, click trackers provide a great way to find out which ad or landing page performs the best, so as to know which ad to concentrate on.

Some of the recommended click trackers include:

Clickmagick
Voluum
Clickmeter
Cpvlab

If you are serious about getting started with affiliate marketing, a link tracker is a great tool. It can help you make the best financial decision faster.

An autoresponder is a program that allows you to setup messages that go out automatically to people who have subscribed to your email list. These messages are sent depending on the order that the subscribers signed up, but you are can control how frequent these messages go out to your list. I usually set my autoresponders to send one email a day from Sunday through Thursday. For an autoresponder to work, you must provide an email list beforehand. Autoresponders are very necessary if you wish to automate your communication with your subscribers and probably make money while you sleep.

There are thousands of autoresponder programs available for business marketing, but unfortunately, most of them are not very reliable. You need to choose an efficient one. The first autoresponder I personally recommend is Getresponse – very beginner friendly and has active and reliable support team. Other good autoresponders are Aweber and MailChimp.

2. MailChimp

Email marketing is one of the best marketing channels. Marketing through an email list is up to four times more profitable than display ads. But then email marketing software doesn’t come cheap, especially if you are a newbie. But thank goodness, you can sign up to MailChimp and build your email list for free up to 2000 subscribers. Beyond that mark, you will start paying, but more often than not, you will be making some decent money.

3. Google Ads Display Network

If you are into buying ads, you want to be aware of your ads’ performance. Failure to study the performance of your ads can very well lead to tremendous losses. But when you are aware of what is taking place, you are in a position to keep changing your ads and ensuring that your campaign is profitable. Engaging in media buying is one of the best ways to scale your campaign profitability. However, if you do it poorly, you are bound to suffer major losses.

4. Bing Ad Center

For some reason, when people talk about media buying, the only platform that seems to hit them is Google. Most people forget that even Bing is a powerful tool that could help you run profitable campaigns. Using the Bing ad center, you are in a position to determine the performance of your ads, and this allows you to run profitable campaigns.

5. PPC Web Spy

As an affiliate marketer, you have to keep your opponents close. You have to find out what they are up to. When you are aware of the keywords that your competitors are bidding for, it gives you the inspiration to benefit from competition. The PPC web spy allows you to track the keywords your competitors are using.

6. Google Alerts

In order to optimize your campaigns, you need to know what your target audience is up to. One of the ways to understand what your audience is up to is through setting up Google alerts. First, come up with phrases that you are targeting and set up the alerts. For instance, you might target blogs and forums, and once your target audience uses those phrases, you get notified and engage them.

7. BackTweets

As an affiliate marketer, you want to keep tabs on everyone who is talking about you. You cannot afford to ignore it. If they are saying nice things, appreciate them, but if they are tarnishing your name, you might want to seek clarification and correct their misjudgment. One of the best platforms that allow people to manage their reputation is Twitter. But then you cannot view all the tweets about you at random. With the help of a back tweet, you are in a position to view every last tweet about you and get to make quick decisions.

8. BrandWatch

As an affiliate marketer, your key interest is working with the best brands. But then you cannot understand what brand is the best without the proper understanding of what they are like. Thus, you need to be in a position to understand what is being said about all these brands. Brandwatch will help you to keep track of what people are saying about various brands. Through brand watch, you are in a position to decide the best brands to partner with.

9. Pinterest Business Analytics

Pinterest is one of the most used marketing tools. Customers have been found to be responsive to high-quality images. Thus, ensure you are using a Pinterest account to push your marketing message. The Pinterest business analytics should help you keep track of the traffic you are receiving and how your customers interact with your products.

10. SocialMention

You also want to be aware of the trends. When you are aware of the trends, you are in a position to take advantage of these trends and develop a campaign to your advantage. SocialMention will help you keep tabs of the various trends that have emerged, and you will be in a position to maximize your earning capacity.

11. On-page Optimization Tool

In order to attract the largest crowd of targeted customers, you need to have a strong on-page optimization game. When your website is very well optimized, it means that the search engines will give it top rank, and as a result, people will easily discover the website, and with more visibility, the sales conversions shoot through the roof.

12. YouTube Keyword Tool

Video marketing is the in-thing nowadays. In actual fact, it is projected to take center stage in the coming years. Thus, it is incredibly important that you create awesome videos and seed them with relevant keywords so that you may maximize your earning potential. Using the YouTube keyword tool, you are in a position to determine the best keywords for your videos.

13. Image SEO Tool

You also need to understand that images play a key role in boosting the performance of your marketing. Customers seem to respond greatly to marketing messages that feature high-quality images. The Image SEO tool helps with improving image quality and thus promoting the profitability of your marketing campaign.

14. Alexa

This tool by Amazon is awesome for analyzing how you are faring against your competition. It allows you to gauge your traffic and also the tendencies of your visitors. The free version is limited, but once you become a paying customer, you have the opportunity to see powerful metrics.

15. Canva

This tool helps marketers create awesome images and design powerful templates. With Canva, there’s no limit to your creativity; you have semi-finished templates to work with, and the outcome is nothing short of spectacular.

Check:

How to Discover Good Products to Promote

As an affiliate marketer, you want to promote the best products so that you might maximize your profits. In the world of affiliate marketing, identifying great products is not as easy as one might think, because they are subjective. In other words, what might strike you as difficult to promote could very well be easy to promote for another person. But with that stated, here are some of the factors you must consider when selecting the best product to promote.

1. Utility

At the end of the day, people won’t be merely spending money for the heck of it. They are spending money on products and services to serve a certain function. Thus, ensure you well understand the functionality of the product or service you are promoting. The more usable a product or service, the more receptive the market is going to be. You don’t want to promote products and services that no one has used for. To determine the utility of a product, ensure that you look at your target audience, and gauge how your product and service could help solve their problems.

2. Maintainability

Everything fashioned by the human mind is subject to flaws. Nothing created by a human being is ever immortal. But in the same breath, there is a need for creating something with a considerable shelf-life, and that is easy to maintain. Products that require easy maintenance are more resourceful than products that require high maintenance.

3. Price

At the end of the day, people must part with their money in order to grant them the service or product. This means, if you are poor at matching up your target audience with the appropriate offer, you could very well incur untold losses. Always go for the products and services that are appropriately priced. This should boost your marketing and help you enjoy more sales.

4. Ease of Use

Also, ensure that you are working with products that are easy to use. People are looking for simplicity. Their day to day lives are already complex. Thus, the simpler you make your products and services, the easier it becomes to attract customers and increase your profits. But if something is difficult to use, then more people are repelled.

5. Mass Appeal

Some brands have mass appeal as opposed to other brands even though they handle products and services in a similar niche. Thus, you have got to use this to your advantage. Ensure that you are promoting products and services that most people are happy to associate with. This makes easy work on the promotion part. However, if you start marketing products and services that most people don’t like, then you are obviously going to have a hard time making a profit.

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Conclusion

You have learnt some profitable affiliate programs to signup with, affiliate marketing tools, and how to know the best affiliate product to select in this tutorial article. Feel free to apply these tips revealed here. You can drop your questions in the comment section below. Enjoy!