Complete Transcript – Episode 8

Affiliate Marketing Networks: Finding Affiliate Offers to Promote

Hi – and welcome to the Smart Affiliate Marketing Podcast.

I’m Paul and in this episode, we’re going to look at finding affiliate marketing networks with profitable offers for you to promote.

What are Affiliate marketing networks, and how can they help you to make money?

Well, basically, an affiliate marketing network is a place where lots of product creators can showcase their products for affiliates to be able to promote them.

This enables the vendor to make more sales. It enables affiliate marketers to create more sales. And the affiliate marketing network make their money by taking a small cut from each sale.

So the network is basically connecting publishers, such as affiliate marketers, with the merchants or the brands who are offering affiliate programs.

Some of the benefits of using the affiliate networks are that it gives affiliate marketers access to a vast selection of products and affiliate programs all in one place, saving us time that we could have spent searching for these products in online searches, for example.

They also offer technical factors such as tracking and reporting, which allows us to see how many people are clicking our links, and it enables us to monitor a campaign performance.

The networks handle the payment processing side of things, which leaves us more time to get on with the promotion, rather than worrying about technical issues on our website, and it can help streamline your affiliate marketing efforts. For example, if you are promoting a number of products from the same platform, you only have to log into one place to do all of your tracking and statistics.

There are many affiliate marketing networks. Some of the most popular are Clickbank for digital products, then there’s CJ affiliate by conversant, Awin, ShareASale, flexoffers, Rakuten marketing and many, many more.

For digital products. Clickbank is often the first stop for new affiliates, because the platform is quite easy to be accepted into, and they do have a wide selection of affiliate offers for you to choose from.

It’s impossible for me to cover all networks for all niches on this podcast, because there are simply too many. But a very fast way to find an affiliate program within your niche, all you need to do is go to Google and type in your niche followed by affiliate programs, and this should bring up a long list of programs within your niche. You can also amend your search accordingly, so you could sub niche, or you could even incorporate some of your ideal customer demographics into your search using the data you gained from the previous podcast.

This will bring up a multitude of programs, potentially depending on the niche of course, which you will need to look into and decide if they are right for your audience, if they are profitable for you, and if the platform has a good reputation good commission rates and a history of paying commissions on time.

The network you choose to go with initially will depend very much on the niche that you go into. You can also look at the fees, the payment terms, the tracking capabilities and their customer support. You could even test this out with a sample message to customer support to see how quickly they respond.

Another way to find networks and offers is to follow other marketers within your niche and see which programs they’re promoting. You can guarantee if you find more than one person promoting the same offer, it will hopefully be a good offer that converts well and is profitable for the marketer. So you may wish to consider promoting the same one yourself.

Some networks are going to be harder to get into than others. Some of them set certain criteria which make it more difficult for people to join. Don’t let this put you off if you don’t meet the criteria now.  You could potentially just make a note of them, and then, as you’re building your business, you could apply at a later point.

Some of the affiliate networks do this so that not every Tom Dick and Harry is able to promote their offers, and they prefer to deal with long term marketers rather than fly-by-night people who are just out to try and make a quick buck and who don’t necessarily care about the reputation of the platform. And that is exactly what they are trying to protect by introducing these criteria. So don’t let any criteria put you off joining, it’s there to protect them, and in turn, it actually protects us.

Most networks have search functionalities within them so that you can find suitable offers based on your niche, and it will show their commission rates, which category they’re in. There will usually be a brief outline of the product itself, and all of these factors can help you determine if the product is going to be suitable for your audience.

Again, depending upon your niche, there may be some big brands out there who have affiliate programs that you’re able to promote. They tend to be lower commission rates because they’re a big brand and they can afford to pay lower rates, but you will make up for this by making more sales, because they already have that customer reputation and being a big brand already, hopefully your customers will have already heard of them, making that sale so much easier.

Something else worth noting is that no matter what niche you are in, there is a high possibility that there are products you could promote from either Amazon or Ebay. Again, whilst the commissions may be low because Amazon and eBay already have brand reputation and a large following, the lower commissions could be made up for by the fact that you would make more sales based on their pre existing reputation. So don’t discount those too quickly.

Now I do understand that many of you will be listening to this podcast on the go, so you will find a list of all of the networks I’ve mentioned in the podcast notes below this podcast, so you can refer back to those at a later time if necessary.

So I’ve given you a brief overview of how to find and use affiliate marketing networks. Now it’s up to you to go out and find the one suitable for your niche and your target audience.

The next chance you get go online and find some affiliate networks and start researching suitable programs for you to promote, to start building your affiliate incomes.

If you’re finding this information useful, please Like follow or subscribe to this podcast.

It’s totally free to do so. You can even leave a positive review.

In the next episode, we’ll look at powering up your affiliate marketing journey using AI tools.

See you next time At the Smart affiliate Marketing Podcast. Goodbye!