Recent days, blogging became 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. The good part is that you can use traditional methods like email marketing combining with blogging to multiply your earnings. However, choosing the best programs is a difficult task for beginners. In order to help you, here is a list of top 10 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 the affiliate is promoting or a bounty payment to reward the affiliate for securing a new customer. Or it can be a recurring percentage of subscription payment. Some businesses pay both, but not both at the same time. 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 best affiliate programs for beginners are ones that offer support, selling tools, and an affiliate team to assist affiliates. Below is a list of the best free affiliate programs for beginners.
1. ShareASale
Share-a-Sale is an affiliate network that services small to medium businesses to share their affiliate programs. Commissions vary between merchants with some merchants paying higher commissions than others. Share-a-Sale’s network contains a mixture of physical and digital products.
2. Aweber
Aweber like Get Response is an autoresponder company servicing the small to medium business sector. Some people say that they have slightly better email deliverability. Aweber only offers a recurring subscription payment program. They offer 30% recurring referral payments and 365-day cookie duration.
Like Get Response they have an affiliate portal where affiliates can track customers and access affiliate tools. When it comes to selecting out of Get Response and Aweber it is probably best to choose both. Some people have heard good things about Aweber, others prefer Get Response. Both programs are free to join and there is no cost to become a member.
3. eBay Partner Network
Most people have heard of eBay. eBay is an auction website but now has expanded its business model to compete with Amazon. eBay was once very popular in the 90s and 2000s but prices have since increased. But it is still good to purchase some secondhand items. Although they are now competing with free sites like Gumtree and Facebook Marketplace which have zero fees.
eBay Partner Network is different to Aweber and Get Response, but this is expected as their business model is different. This is because eBay sells individual items. But affiliate payments are based on the revenue that eBay earns per item. eBay has a low threshold for payments and like most other affiliate programs they pay through PayPal. The affiliate commissions affiliates earn is surprisingly high with most items paying a 50% – 70% affiliate commission.
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. What you need to remember is that when a person sells something on eBay for $50, they get the sales price minus eBay fees. That is what you are earning from.
4. Get Response
Who is Get Response? Get Response is an email autoresponder service that services mainly 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 Get Response affiliate program you need to select whether you want to be paid a one-time bounty payment for each customer or recurring subscription payment.
The recurring subscription payment is hard to get if you are not driving much traffic. This is because they have a payment threshold. 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 than if you selected the bounty payment.
Get Response runs a portal for its affiliate program with essential stats displayed. You can all details of affiliate link hits, free accounts and paid accounts created, and pending earnings. All payments are in US dollars. Further analytics can be accessed from the statistics tab. 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.
5. Amazon Associates
Amazon Associates is one of the largest affiliate programs in the world. It is also known by many people as one of the best affiliate programs for beginners. This is because you only need to document your experience with a product. You don’t need to do any selling. You can choose from millions of products from Amazon’s marketplace. Most of the promotion of Amazon Associate’s products is done on blogs wanting to monetize their sites.
Amazon has many brands to promote apart from the brands of products. Its own brands include Amazon Prime, Amazon Prime Video, Audible, and others. 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.
6. Fiverr
Fiverr is a marketplace of services for businesses. Most of the services are simple service jobs that are completed quickly by workers who reside mostly in poorer countries. And it is for this reason you can get these services done for $5 or more. The services on Fiverr are called gigs.
Fiverr will pay its affiliates a bounty or cost per action (CPA) of $150 or a cost per action of $10. Fiverr reports that a gig is bought every 4 seconds. With a $150 payment for CPA, Fiverr is one business that many affiliates would not dismiss.
7. Shopify Affiliate Program
Shopify is an e-commerce store builder which makes it easy for anyone to build an online store. No coding knowledge is necessary. Most of the templates are free and help users create professional-looking stores. Shopify is used by 1 million businesses in 175 countries around the world and they have earned $200 billion USD.
As an affiliate, you can earn an average of $58 for each user who makes the transition from the free trial to a paid plan. Shopify has done the hard work for you by creating blog posts, webinars, video tutorials, tools, and automated funnels that you can link to and increase conversions.
8. ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels as the name says is a simple drag and drop sales funnel creation software designed to help you sell more products to your customers. Like Shopify, it will show you the right templates that are right for your business model. ClickFunnels to many would be one of the best affiliate programs on the net, and it’s free.
If a prospect becomes a paid customer of ClickFunnels you earn recurring commissions, and ClickFunnels uses their own funnels to upsell your customers. For the top earners, they are given dream cars which is a good incentive to any young person. You get access to an affiliate portal with statistics and analytics plus access to a Facebook community.
9. ClickBank
ClickBank is one of the biggest marketplaces for selling digital and physical products. As a beginner level affiliate, you have the opportunity to pick up products that you can promote well on your blog. Another advantage is that you can get recurring commission when someone purchase a subscription based product.
10. 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. There are plenty of companies like Bluehost, HostGator, SiteGround that offer cheap services. For example, HostGator is one of the first web hosts to offer low-cost hosting and still offers the same plans today. 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.
Wrap Up
These are the best affiliate programs for beginners as all programs are free to earn with, plus most have selling tools to help you promote their service. Some of these programs are software services which means if you are driving a good amount of targeted traffic you can earn a good reliable income. 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.
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