Recent years, blogging become more popular due to the handsome income publishers can make through affiliate promotions. Affiliate marketing is one of the best and most lucrative ways to earn online if you are driving targeted traffic to your blog. Many people mistake that affiliate marketing needs to have a blog with thousands of daily visitors from search engines. Yes, that’s good. But you can also use traditional methods like email marketing along with social sharing to multiply your earnings instead of only relying on organic traffic. However, choosing the best programs is the difficult task for beginners who want to start with affiliate marketing. In order to help you, here is a list of top 9 affiliate programs that you can quickly get through.
What is an Affiliate Program?
An affiliate program is an agreement a business sets up to encourage affiliates to promote their business in return for payment. The payment can be a percentage of a product’s price or a bounty payment to reward the affiliate for securing a new customer. Or it can also be a recurring percentage of subscription payment. As a beginner, you can start with affiliate marketing because there are no overheads, no customer support to take care of, and no product creation to do.
The below listed programs for beginners are ones that offer support, selling tools, large number of popular products and a team to assist affiliates. You can also check our article on how to choose the best affiliate programs for your needs.
1. Impact
At this point, Impact is one of the largest marketplaces for starting your affiliate marketing business. You can find thousands of popular products available for promoting under various categories. You can get notifications on whenever a new campaign is started by the owner and invitations to join new programs.
Exhaustive reporting is also available to track your earnings based on brands and daily basis. You can simply schedule a report with custom parameters to get the details right in your email inbox. Many popular companies moved from other platforms to Impact due to easiness to reach marketers (for example – Semrush from Shareasale). So, Impact should your first option for starting your journey as an affiliate marketer. The only problem is that PayPal is not available for all countries. You can receive money through electronic transfer or make sure to choose the correct payment method for receiving your payment.
2. ShareASale
ShareASale is an affiliate network that allows small to medium businesses to share their affiliate programs. This platform was established on year 2000 with more that 30K product owners are part of it. You can search and find the merchants category wise that suits your blog or selling preferences. Once the amount is locked, the accrued payment will be sent through the payment method you have setup in your account. You can even refer ShareASale network to your friends / followers to earn commission when they join the program and start making money.
3. eBay Partner Network
Most people have heard of eBay – an auction website, now expanded its business model to compete with Amazon. eBay was once very popular in the 90s and 2000s and overtaken by many other marketplaces. But you can still try the eBay Partner Network program to make decent earnings. But the commission is not on the item’s price, you are earning a percentage of what eBay’s revenue is on the item. For example, someone sells a PS4 and eBay makes $10 in revenue from the sale or auction of this item. If your commission rate is 50%, then you will earn $5.
eBay also has a low threshold for payments and like most other affiliate programs they pay through PayPal. Good part is that you can earn high with most items paying a 50% to 70% affiliate commission.
4. Amazon Associates
Amazon Associates is one of the largest and most popular affiliate programs in the world for beginners. You can choose from millions of products from Amazon’s marketplace and promote them through your blog or social handles. In addition to other brands, Amazon has also their own brands to promote like Amazon Prime, Amazon Prime Video, Audible, etc. When promoting products, you can earn up to 10% commission with most products paying between 4% and 6%.
What’s good about Amazon Associate’s program is that affiliates earn a commission on everything the customer buys on Amazon, not just the product that you were promoting. This means that affiliate commissions can be higher than expected. With products like Audible, customers don’t need to buy a product for you to earn a commission, they just need to sign up for a free trial. Learn more on how to increase your earnings from Amazon Associates program.
5. GetResponse
GetResponse is an email autoresponder service that primarily serves small and medium businesses. It’s one of the leading autoresponder companies online because of its intuitive interface, excellent email deliverability, and tools. When you sign up for the GetResponse affiliate program, you need to select whether you want to be paid a one-time bounty payment for each customer or recurring subscription payment.
- 33% recurring commission per month.
- $100 per sale as one-time bounty.
You can apply for one or both programs and each program has a minimum payment threshold of $50. We would advise you to take the bounty payment as you would receive payment straight away. The other thing to consider is customers may cancel their accounts and you end up getting paid less with recurring commission. GetResponse runs a portal for its affiliate program with essential stats displayed. You are given access to selling tools which include banners, email ads, text ads, infographics, videos, signatures, logos, plus a free eBook to give away. All are worth exploring and they will aid you in promoting.
6. Aweber
Aweber is also an autoresponder company servicing the small to medium business sectors. Unlike GetResponse, Aweber only offers a recurring subscription payment program. They offer up to 50% recurring referral payments and 365-days cookie duration.
Like GetResponse, they have an affiliate portal where affiliates can track customers and access promotion tools. If you are focusing on email marketing, choose both GetResponse and Aweber as both programs are free to join.
7. Fiverr
Fiverr is a marketplace for freelancers to offer various services called gigs. There are three affiliate programs available to promote the services:
- Marketplace Gigs – get 25% of initial purchase price and then 10% on further orders till 12 months.
- Pro Services – 70% of first order and then 10% on each order up to 12 months.
- Logo Maker – $30 for first order and then 10% on further orders till 12 months.
8. ClickBank
ClickBank is one of the oldest and biggest marketplaces for selling digital and physical products. As a beginner level affiliate, you have the opportunity to pick up popular products that you can easily promote on social platforms as well as on your blog. You can either get a recurring revenue sharing as a percentage of each sale or get a fixed amount per action. With the huge amount of learning resources, you can quickly become a pro affiliate with Clickbank.
9. Affiliate Programs from Web Hosting Companies
Web hosting companies are businesses that sell multiple services for hosting, domains, emails and website building. Promoting web hosts is the best option if you have a blog related to website building or web tutorials like our site. There are plenty of companies like SiteGround and Kinsta that offer best services. For example, SiteGround is one of the first web hosts to offer low-cost managed WordPress hosting with good customer support. It is well known for helping beginner bloggers to get a blog started, with help from its support team.
Unlike other affiliate programs, many hosting companies run affiliate programs with their own portal. Within the portal, they display analytics that affiliates are interested in, which includes available balance, approved payments, clicks, conversion rate, and earnings per click. However, some companies offer affiliate program through other marketplaces like WPEngine affiliate program through ShareASale portal.
You can get professionally designed banners in various sizes, and link creation tools for promoting on your blog and social media. The basic commission ranges from $50 to $200 per sale depending upon the popularity of your blog. You can also earn higher commission by referring more customers.
Note: If you are running WordPress related blog, then you have plenty of other options for promoting themes and plugins. For example, Astra theme offers 30% commission rate which is a good way to make money from their Business Toolkit plan.
Final Words
These are the best affiliate programs for beginners as all programs are free to join. In addition, these programs also offer banners and other selling tools to help you promoting the services/products. Though having a blog is not necessary, it is an easy way to get approval. Most of these affiliate programs are best promoted on a blog as you need to explain to your readers the pros and cons of what you are promoting to give them a good understanding of the product.
