It is the dream of everyone to have a passive income, imagine for a moment having more financial freedom to enjoy traveling or a more leisurely lifestyle close to home. If this sounds like a pipe dream, it doesn’t have to be. You could land yourself in a spot just like this by earning affiliate income, even when you’re not actively working.
Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting another person’s (or company’s) product. You find a product you like, promote it to your audience, and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make.
It’s similar to a salesperson earning a commission, except you don’t work for the company. Instead, it’s like earning a reward for sending a new customer to the company.
In other words, when you help another company generate sales, you get a cut! The best part is that you don’t have to spend the time and money to create your own products because someone else has already done the hard work.
You can begin making money as an affiliate as soon as you have a place to recommend products, whether that’s a website you have, a podcast you’ve started, or even on social media. More on affiliate links in this article.
- Can you Make Passive Income With Affiliate Marketing?
- Can you Make Money With Affiliate Links?
- What are the Types of Affiliate Marketing?
- How Much do Affiliate Links Pay?
- What is the Highest Paying Affiliate Website?
- How Much Can a Beginner Make in Affiliate Marketing?
- How Much do Amazon Affiliates Pay?
- How Many Affiliate Links is Too Many?
- Where can I Post my Affiliate Links for Free?
- How do I Start Affiliate Marketing as a Beginner?
- Is Affiliate Marketing Easy?
- What are the Most Profitable Niches for Affiliate Marketing?
Can you Make Passive Income With Affiliate Marketing?
If done effectively, affiliate marketing can allow you to have a steady stream of passive income. You will find thousands of blogs online that promote affiliate marketing as an easy get-rich scheme – which is too far from the truth. Dedication and hard work are essential for attaining success in affiliate marketing. From finding the right products to maintaining blogs, there is a lot of work that goes in.
Your ability to earn profits as an affiliate depends a lot on the affiliate marketing program you chose to work with. Whether you’re going for something that’s one-time or recurring, your affiliate marketing success depends entirely on the program’s earnings schedule want the payout and how much time you’re willing to invest on promoting these programs.
Read Also: Content Monetization Strategies for 2023
You can’t just sit back and wait for the money to roll in. You have to build your audience and promote your affiliate products actively. You will have to work on your blog, website, YouTube channel, or other promotional platforms.
However, once you’ve set up your main promotional channel, you shouldn’t have to do too much work other than creating regular content and promoting that. Unlike other types of selling, you don’t have to worry about making or sourcing stock and ensuring that you have the proper stock levels.
Over time, you may even be able to rely on evergreen content, i.e., past content that is so good that people continue to come back to it over and over again, and you can re-promote it without having to create totally new material.
Can you Make Money With Affiliate Links?
Affiliate marketing is a process where publishers earn a commission by promoting a product or service made by another retailer or advertiser using an affiliate link. The affiliate partner is rewarded a payout for providing a specific result to the retailer or advertiser.
Typically, the result is a sale. But some affiliate marketing programs can reward you for leads, free-trial users clicks to a website, or getting downloads for an app.
Most affiliate programs are usually free to join, so you don’t have to worry about high startup costs. Done right, an effective affiliate marketing strategy can go from a side hustle to a profitable online business idea by netting you a healthy income.
Affiliate marketing involves referring a product or service by sharing it on a blog, social media platform, podcast, or website. The affiliate earns a commission each time someone makes a purchase through the unique affiliate link associated with their recommendation. The process is very simple:
- You show an ad or a link for Store Z on your website, blog, or social network.
- A customer clicks your unique affiliate link.
- The customer makes a purchase in Store Z.
- The affiliate network records the transaction.
- The purchase is confirmed by Store Z.
- You get paid a monetary commission.
Commission rates for affiliate sales vary depending on the company and the offer. On the low end, you’ll earn about 5% of the sale, but with some arrangements, you can earn as much as 50%, usually when promoting a class or event. There are also affiliate marketing programs that provide a flat rate per sale instead of a percentage.
What are the Types of Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliates always carry a bit of mystery—you never know if the person has ever really used the product or if they are just promoting it for the money. Both cases still exist today.
It wasn’t until 2009 when renowned affiliate marketer Pat Flynn broke down the different types of affiliate marketers into three groups. Understanding these types of affiliate marketing can show you the different ways people make money online in this space, regardless of your moral compass.
Unattached affiliate marketing
The first type of affiliate marketing is referred to as “unattached,” or when you have no authority in the niche of the product you’re advertising. There is no connection between you and the customer. Often you are running pay-per-click advertising campaigns with your affiliate link and hoping people will click it, buy the product, and earn a commission.
Unattached affiliate marketing is attractive because you don’t need to do any legwork. Affiliate marketing businesses rely on reputation and trust with a target audience online. Some affiliate marketers don’t have the time or desire to build those relationships, so this type of marketing is their best option.
“Unattached affiliate marketing isn’t a genuine business model, it’s for people who just want to generate income,” explains Elise Dopson, founder of Sprocker Lovers. “Our focus for Sprocker Lovers is building community and providing free education around a particular niche first, which in our case is the sprocker spaniel dog breed, and selling second.”
Related affiliate marketing
Related affiliate marketing is the practice of promoting products and services you don’t use but that are related to your niche. An affiliate marketer in this case has an audience, whether it’s through blogging, YouTube, TikTok, or another channel. A related affiliate marketer also has influence, which makes them a trusted source for recommending products, even if they’ve never used them before.
While related affiliate marketing can generate more affiliate income, it comes with the risk of promoting something you’ve never tried before. It could be the worst product or service ever, and you wouldn’t even know. It only takes one bad recommendation to lose the trust of your audience. If you don’t have trust and transparency, it’ll be hard to build a sustainable affiliate marketing business.
Involved affiliate marketing
Involved affiliate marketing refers to only recommending products and services the affiliate marketer has used and truly believes in. “Involved affiliate marketing is the way forward,” says Elise. “It’s rooted in trust and authenticity, which is best for your audience and business.”
In this type of marketing, an affiliate marketer uses his or her influence to promote products and services that followers may actually need, instead of paying to get clicks on a banner ad. It takes more time to build this type of credibility with an audience, but it’s necessary for building a sustainable business.
Elise explains that the involved approach makes advertising much easier for affiliate marketing partners. “You don’t have to hide behind expensive PPC ads and hope for clicks and sales. An organic Instagram Story or blog post about your experience with a product will go a long way.” Elise prefers this method because it’s honest and is “the only genuine way to become a trusted source on any topic.”
How Much do Affiliate Links Pay?
Wondering what a typical affiliate marketing monthly income is? The stats vary, though affiliate marketers can make thousands of dollars a month. Some of the most successful are even earning six figures from passive income affiliate programs.
Here are some stats on the average income of affiliate marketers. According to PayScale, the average annual affiliate marketing passive income is $51,217. The bottom 10% of affiliate marketers earn $37,000, and the top 10% earn $71,000.
Glassdoor‘s affiliate marketing income statistics put potential earnings even higher. Average annual earnings for affiliate marketers are $65,800, with the range between $42,000 at the low end, and $83,000 at the top end.
ZipRecruiter has the highest forecast for affiliate marketing passive income, at $154,700 a year. ZipRecruiter forecasts average affiliate marketing monthly income at $12,892, and weekly average income at $2,975.
Whichever forecast you go with, it’s clear that some affiliate marketers are doing very well indeed.
What is the Highest Paying Affiliate Website?
If you are out to make money from affiliate marketing, you first need to find out the highest paying affiliate websites to help you succeed in this way of making passive income. Below we have researched the best options for you.
1. SEMRush
If you know anything about digital marketing, you’ll know about SEMrush.
It’s suite of more than 40 digital marketing tools — covering everything from keyword research and competitor analysis to social media management and content distribution — is used by over seven million marketers worldwide.
Impressively, one in every four Fortune 500 companies uses SEMrush products. With that sort of pull, it’s no wonder the brand’s affiliate commissions are so attractive. Affiliates earn:
- $200 for every new subscription
- $10 for every new lead
- $0.01 for each new signup
Commissions are paid out 27 days after the end of the month.
2. Siteground
This is the first of several web hosting companies to make our list of high paying affiliate programs. With the web hosting industry predicted to be worth almost $100 billion by 2025, it’s no wonder so many of them made the cut.
More than two million domain owners rely on Siteground — and they seem to like it, because the brand touts a client happiness rate of 99.7%. Siteground offers a sliding scale of commissions based on the number of signups you drive. Refer 11 – 20 new customers a month to earn €75 per sale.
Anyone who signs up to the Siteground affiliate program also gets a month of free hosting so they can try the service for themselves.
3. Liquid Web
As with many of the affiliate marketing companies on this list, Liquid Web is a web hosting platform. Catering predominantly to SMB users, it manages more than 500,000 sites and has over 45,000 customers worldwide.
Its in-house affiliate program is powered by Impact Radius affiliate network and pays commissions worth 150% of the monthly hosting cost, with a minimum payout of $150.
In other words, if you refer a $29 Managed WordPress customer with one site, you’ll earn $150. Or if that customer chooses a $400 per month package, you’ll pocket $600. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s a 50% bonus for pre-paid plans.
Liquid Web affiliates also get advanced notice of exclusive sales and promotions, and a dedicated affiliate manager for personalized support.
4. Bluehost
Bluehost does WordPress hosting, with prices starting at just €3.23 a month. Its 750-strong team is on hand 24/7 to power more than two million websites across the world.
Despite its extremely affordable pricing structure, Bluehost’s affiliate program doesn’t skimp on commissions, paying $65 for every qualified hosting purchase you refer.
That’s clearly a pretty attractive prospect for the average affiliate marketer because it’s paid out more than $5 million in commissions in the last year alone. You can sign up through a simple form on the Bluehost site or via CJ Affiliate.
5. Hostinger
Like Bluehost, it’s a low-cost hosting provider, with its entry-level Single Shared Hosting package costing just $1.39 a month. To continue our game of web hosting Top Trumps, Hostinger serves 29 million users across 178 countries, 98% of whom rate its service as “excellent”.
As with Bluehost, Hostinger’s low prices aren’t reflected by stingy commission rates, with its affiliate program paying out at least 60% of every referred sale.
It also promises high conversion rates and offers a personal affiliate marketing account manager to help you maximize performance. Applications are made through a simple online form and take up to three business days to be reviewed.
6. HostGator
HostGator is practically prehistoric as web hosting companies go, having been in the business since 2002. At the time of writing, it hosts more than two million websites, guaranteeing its users 99.9% uptime and offering their first year of domain registration free of charge.
Powered by affiliate network Impact Radius, the HostGator affiliate program is based on sliding commission rates. Drive one to five sales in a month and you’ll earn $65 for each, while super affiliates who refer 21+ sales a month earn an impressive $125 per sale.
It has a payout turnaround of two months + 10 days. That might sound a little lengthy, but it’s designed to accommodate HostGator’s 45-day money-back guarantee, which should help drive plenty of clicks on your affiliate links.
7. Cloudways
Cloudways is — you guessed it — a web hosting company, this time targeting individuals, SMBs, and agencies. It boasts a portfolio of more than 250,000 successfully managed websites across over 60 data centers and has a customer happiness score of 94.7%. Impressive stuff!
As its name suggests, Cloudways is a cloud hosting platform with a choice of five industry-leading infrastructures, including Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Engine. Excitingly for affiliates, Cloudways’ affiliate program offers a choice of commission models.
Either earn per sale, at a rate of up to $125 for 46 – 80 sales a month (or even more for super affiliates driving more than 80 monthly sales), or take $30 plus 7% lifetime commission to unlock the joys of passive income.
8. Elementor
Unbelievably, Elementor isn’t a hosting platform. Instead, it’s a web development tool for WordPress websites. With over five million active installs, the software as a service tool is one of the top 15 most popular WordPress plugins and has racked up more than 3,000 five-star WordPress reviews.
That means it has a widely recognized brand name, which makes it a much easier “sell” for an affiliate marketer.
Just as Elementor’s page building tool is simple to learn and use, its affiliate program commission rates couldn’t be easier to explain — you earn 50% of the sales you drive. With prices climbing as high as $999 a year, there’s some serious earning potential here.
9. Sendinblue
Kind of like SEMrush, Sendinblue offers a whole suite of marketing software. More than 175,000 companies across the world use it to run their email marketing, manage customer relationships, build landing pages with strong conversion rates, and much more besides.
As a member of Sendinblue’s affiliate program, you can earn €5 commissions every time you refer a user who signs up for a Sendinblue account, plus an extra €100 if that user buys a subscription.
That’s a great deal, because it means you can lure potential customers in with a low-commitment offer, then let Sendinblue’s email service for itself!
One important point here — for your account to be validated, you’ll need to refer at least one new paid subscription, and you won’t earn any commissions until you’ve been validated.
10. HubSpot
HubSpot is such a big deal that its founders literally wrote the book on inbound marketing. Over 113,000 customers in 120+ countries use HubSpot’s marketing software to attract leads, nurture them through the buyer journey, and convert them into sales.
Anyone who’s ever used HubSpot will tell you it’s a fantastic tool, but it definitely isn’t cheap.
That means there’s big money to be made here, with a commission structure based on the customer’s first purchase and product tier:
- Starter/Basic: $250
- Professional/CMS: $500
- Enterprise: $1,000
There’s lots of scope for cross-selling products through this affiliate program, too. For instance, if you refer a consumer who buys Marketing Starter and Sales Professional at the same time, you’ll earn $250 + $500.
To help compel readers to hit their affiliate links, marketers get access to a bunch of free assets such as demo videos, banners, copy examples, and landing pages.
How Much Can a Beginner Make in Affiliate Marketing?
Most affiliates begin slowly earning affiliate income. Indeed, it may take some time before you make enough to meet a minimum payment threshold. For instance, you must earn $US100 (or approximately the equivalent in another currency) to receive a payout from Amazon Associates.
Unfortunately, this is what discourages many beginning affiliate marketers. They work hard creating a website and writing articles or making videos promoting affiliate products, only to receive nothing at the end of the month.
But persistence pays off. If you can get over the hiccup of reaching your first minimum payment threshold, it becomes much easier to visualize earning better affiliate income, giving you the incentive to continue.
Niall Roche of Authority Hacker splits affiliate marketers into four categories:
- Beginner – $0 to $1000/per month
- Intermediate $1000 to $10,000/per month
- Advanced – 10k to $100k/per month
- Super Affiliate – $100k+/per month
If you are a beginner affiliate marketer, you might consider $100k per month an impossible dream. But people do make that much. Just ask Pat Flynn. He is also an example of how you can start making good money relatively quickly if you have a pre-existing audience. Flynn had already created an audience for his website by writing and selling an eBook that helped people pass an exam in the architecture industry.
This meant that he already had some eyes on his posts when he started promoting affiliate products a little later. If you’re a total beginner, you will first need to allow for lead time to build an interest in your site before you can expect to make affiliate sales.
In a survey conducted in the Affiliate Marketing Benchmark Report 2022 it was discovered that 3.78% of the survey respondents made more than $150,000 annual affiliate income, 7.94% $100,000 – $150,000, 5.15% $50,000 – $100,000, 16.21% $10,000 – $50,000, and 57.55% below $10,000.
Although most clearly come into the bottom category and are still Beginners according to the Authority Hacker classifications, there are enough successful affiliate marketers to give hope to those not yet marking their mark.
How Much do Amazon Affiliates Pay?
You can earn, on average, from $100 to $20,000 from the Amazon Affiliate program, depending on how many referrals you generate for Amazon. The Amazon Affiliate program operates on a commission basis, meaning you’ll make a percentage per sale.
The commission rate differs depending on the product category. For instance, if you run an automotive blog, you can earn 4.50% from each sale. If you sell three car parts at $1,000 each in one day, you’d make $135 from those three transactions. If you sell the same product 30 times per month, you’d make $1,350 every month.
In the beginning of your Amazon Associate journey, the numbers can skew on the low side, so be sure to have another form of income in addition to being an Amazon Associate.
Before signing up on the platform, it’s important to review the Amazon Affiliate program’s commission rate per product category. That way, you can calculate how much you can potentially earn depending on your website’s niche.
How Many Affiliate Links is Too Many?
The quick answer is that you should include around 1 affiliate link per 250 – 300 words, with around 8 links maximum in the whole piece of content.
Top affiliates work to achieve long-term success. The key is to not overdo affiliate marketing and insert links only when it makes sense. After you produce 200 or 300 pieces of content for your site, you will naturally get lots of affi-clicks. This is long-term thinking that requires a lot of hard work and dedication.
But once the domain authority of your page increases, you’ll naturally start getting more traffic, and this, in turn, will translate into more clicks.
What best affiliates are doing is that they interlink like crazy in all of their posts. By decreasing the bounce rate, and increasing time-on-page, they’re more likely to receive more clicks without being spammy. One technique that’s working extremely well is linking to your highest converting affiliate page from dozens of other posts.
Where can I Post my Affiliate Links for Free?
Here are the top 10 ways that you can promote your affiliate links online to make more money.
1. Blog Post
Starting us off is one of the easiest avenues to use to promote your affiliate links. Having a blog has several benefits that include making money. You can easily add an affiliate link throughout any of your blog posts.
Blog posts are also a cost-efficient way to promote your links. Let’s say you have a blog about home renovations. If you have an affiliate link for interior paint, you can easily add this link to any blog post that mentions painting your home. There is a lot that goes into blogging.
2. Facebook
There are millions of people who log onto Facebook every day. If you don’t have your own personal page, you may want to have a business page or group. This is an easy way to promote your affiliate link to thousands of people at once. On a Facebook business page, you can share just about anything about your brand that you’d like.
This can include posting photos, taking polls, and engaging with the audience. You can also have a Facebook group. These can be public or private online communities for specific topics. While your group can be specifically for your blog or brand, it may be more beneficial to have a Facebook group dedicated to the niche you’re in.
Continuing the theme of running a blog for home renovations, you could have a Facebook group dedicated to inexpensive interior design.
There you could easily share your affiliate link with the group members. If you see a post about someone asking for tips related to your affiliate link, feel free to share it, but do be sure to let them know that you might receive a commission, but it will not cost them a dime.
Before we talk about the next way to promote your affiliate link, you can also use your own personal Facebook page. Your friends and family would love to help you out if you are an affiliate for a product or service that they’re already considering purchasing.
3. Instagram
When it comes to social media, Instagram is easily one of the most popular platforms. Celebrities, business owners, fan accounts, and more exist on this platform. Instagram is best known for the amount of engagement that occurs on the platform. If you don’t already have one, create an Instagram account for your company or brand.
You can then post high-quality images or videos for your audience to see. This is a great way to stay relevant and gain more traffic.
How do you promote your affiliate link through Instagram? There are a couple of popular ways you can do so. For starters, you can make a post using a photo or video that promotes the product.
It can be the main focus or part of the bigger picture. You can tell your audience about how this product or service changes your life and that they can use your link to purchase it for themselves. The second way to do so is by utilizing Instagram stories. You can post a photo or video and it will last for 24 hours.
If you have 10,000 followers or more, you can incorporate a link in your story and people can easily swipe up and be directed with your affiliate link. If you don’t have 10,000 followers or more, you can add your affiliate link to your Instagram bio and lead people to your bio with your posts.
4. Online Event
Hosting an online event is a great way to get a lot of people together from multiple locations at once. Not everyone has the time or resources to attend in-person events. This will help you to create one-on-one relationships and talk with your audience about their thoughts and suggestions.
You can easily put your affiliate link in the online chat of the event and talk with your audience a little bit about what being an affiliate is like. This may not only help you get people to use your affiliate link, but it may inspire others to start their journey of becoming an affiliate.
5. YouTube
We can’t talk about promoting affiliate links without mentioning YouTube. Because it is increasingly difficult to gain an audience on YouTube, affiliate links help creators be able to afford to post the videos.
If you’re one of the fortunate people who has a large following on YouTube, you will likely have no problem getting people to use your affiliate link. Put it in the description of every video you have and mention it in your videos as well. It’s important to note that you shouldn’t talk about it for too long and for each video.
This can turn people off, make them stop watching the video, or even make them unsubscribe. Take 15 seconds at the beginning and end of your video to mention your affiliate link. You could also make a single video dedicated to talking all about it.
6. Twitter
On the topic of social media, Twitter is another great option. Did you know that there are roughly 6,000 tweets per second on Twitter? That is more than 500,000,000 tweets per day. Those numbers are astronomical and to not use that to your advantage would be silly. Create a Twitter account for your brand and follow similar accounts or their followers to let them know your company exists.
You can also cross-promote your social media accounts with each other. For example, if you already have an Instagram account and you just created a Twitter, it will be beneficial to you to let your followers on Instagram know about your newly created Twitter account.
This is an easy way to gain a following across multiple platforms. You can put your affiliate link in your Twitter bio or a simple tweet. You can also use hashtags that are related to the product or service you are an affiliate for.
7. Tutorials
A natural way to promote your affiliate link is to use tutorials to your advantage. If you have an affiliate link for a specific power tool, make a video or blog post showing users how it works.
This not only allows them to see the product in action, but it shows them that you use it and that it is capable of doing what you claim it does. One of the most searched-for things on YouTube is tutorials. This is a great way to increase your audience and lead people to your affiliate link.
8. Emails
Emails are a very versatile way to promote your affiliate link. There are multiple ways that you can use email marketing to do just that. Email marketing has a return of investment of around 4,000%. Every time someone invests $10, they average a return of $100. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like something worth checking out.
One way that you can use email marketing to promote your affiliate link is a welcome newsletter. When someone visits your blog, you can give them the option of signing up for an email list. If they opt-in, you can send a welcome email and tie your affiliate link into that email. When doing this, it’s important to do it sparingly.
You don’t want your audience to only think you’re there to make money. If you promote too heavily, you can lose the vast majority of your audience. There are so many creators out there that there is someone else they can go to. Do what you can to prevent that from happening.
9. Podcast
Podcasts are becoming more and more popular. People are listening to their favorite podcasts more than they’re listening to the radio. There is a podcast out there for just about any topic. Some of the more popular podcasts are from celebrities or about topics such as love or true crime.
You can either start your podcast or become a guest on one. It will be much easier to promote your affiliate link if you have your podcast. Something great about this form of media is that it is very easy to grow quickly.
With something like YouTube, that can take much longer to gain a following. If you’ve ever listened to a podcast, you’re probably used to hearing advertisements for sponsored products.
This is the main way that podcasts get funded. Whether you have sponsored advertisements to read off or not, you may want to mention your affiliate link and put it in the episode description.
10. Advertising
Many people promote their affiliate links by using ads. Whether these ads are on Facebook, Instagram, or your blog, it is a common way to advertise your affiliate link.
When talking about advertising, it is crucial to mention that you should never run ads that directly use your affiliate link. This can get you banned from several websites, including Facebook. You can use ads to link people to landing pages that talk more about your affiliate link.
How do I Start Affiliate Marketing as a Beginner?
There are two reasons why you should consider doing affiliate marketing as a beginner:
1. Low-cost and low-risk
Starting a business means incurring upfront costs for products, employees, equipment, rent, and so on. This makes it risky and expensive. With affiliate marketing, all you need is a website. Even if it doesn’t work out, all you’ve wasted is time and a little bit of money.
2. Easy to scale
A typical salesperson only sells products from one company. As an affiliate marketer, you can promote products from many different companies and earn commissions from all of them.
If you have decided to go into affiliate marketing as a beginner, here is how to get started.
- Step 1: Create a Website or A Blog
- Step 2: Choose an Industry, and then Niche Down
- Step 3: Research Products in Your Niche that You Can Review
- Step 4: Sign Up for the Amazon Affiliate Program
- Step 5: Find affiliate programs for the other products you want to review
- Step 6: Create content in the form of tutorials, review posts, resource pages, or emails and use your affiliate link
- Step 7: Optimize the page and track your rankings in Google
- Step 8: Rinse and Repeat!
Is Affiliate Marketing Easy?
Being an affiliate marketer requires skill, experience, and work. It is not a quick or easy road to success, but when done properly, it can generate impressive income.
Here are some of the qualities you will need to be a successful affiliate marketer:
- An interest or expertise in a certain niche
- Internet and consumer research skills
- Website building/graphics/ SEO/ PPC/ analytic skills
- Ability to write appealing content or outsource to someone who can
- Organized & methodical
- Patience and strategic skills
- Networking skills
As you can see, becoming an affiliate marketer is not a free ride. To succeed, you’ll need a significant skill set in some or most of the above.
There is no hard and fast rule. How quickly affiliate marketers manage to make money, or even grow their business to something resembling a more full-time career, is highly individual. For instance, Tom Dupuis blogged about how he managed to jump from $20K to $80K to $150K annual income in two years.
The answers vary wildly, with one affiliate going from $0 to $7K in revenue in 6 months, and another describing how it took three months to make their first affiliate sale (a modest $310!).
There is no need for a fancy, expensive website to get started with affiliate marketing. As long as it looks attractive and professional, is easy to navigate and has interesting content and compelling sales copy, that is more than enough to encourage conversions. Of course, you’ll need to buy a domain and create a basic website layout, but this is easy with website building and hosting platforms like WordPress, Wix and Weebly.
What are the Most Profitable Niches for Affiliate Marketing?
Let’s check out a list of the best niches for affiliate marketing.
1. Technology – the top niche for affiliate marketing
People love using the latest apps and gadgets. So, here you can focus on promoting everything from VPNs and Webhosting to smoke detectors or productivity apps. By the way, many Webhosting affiliate programs belong to the high-paying and pay referral fees of up to $500 per sale. The same applies to VPN, which helps visitors surf the web anonymously while also protecting themselves from identity theft and other online security threats.
You can make videos about the latest technology and product trends or share reviews via your site. You could also choose to work with a software technology provider.
Plus, tech is constantly growing and never going out of style, so this is a somewhat evergreen niche. For example, mobile app revenues are expected to be worth more than $935 billion by 2023.
One more sub-niche to consider is No-code tools. Learning to code is hard, and no-code movement helps build amazing applications without huge costs, multiple developers, or long timelines. It helps build new startups or businesses and creates workflow automation with ease, improving business processes, operations, and development.
For example, Coupler.io automates data integrations, allowing users to sync 20+ apps, including Airtable, Pipedrive, Clockify, and Facebook Ads, with Google Sheets, Excel, or BigQuery.
You can share or embed the affiliate link to invite your clients, users, colleagues, or friends to use Coupler.io and get a 50% commission when someone signs up for a paid Coupler.io plan. For every next subscription renewal, you can earn a 20% commission.
And the program welcomes everyone who wants to get the most out of Coupler.io and is interested in seamless data integration.
2. Wealth Building – the most profitable niche for affiliate marketing
Everybody wants to be rich. Many people would like to earn on an investment, hate being in debt, and try to save for retirement, but not everyone knows how to do it right, so they are constantly looking for solutions. They can seek proper advice from trading services, financial newsletters, on-topic webinars, etc.
And you don’t need to be Warren Buffet to publish content in the investment niche. Except for stock portfolios, there are also real estate, precious metals, peer-to-peer crypto loans, etc.
As for cryptocurrencies, with the rise of Web 3.0 and blockchain technologies, the Bitcoin ‘craze’ is far from over, so you can still be an early adopter and yield significant revenue from this niche.
Long story short, there’s a huge market for wealth-building products and services where if you combine a unique angle with hard work, success is guaranteed.
3. Health and Fitness
As well as being rich, everyone would like to be fit and healthy. And for that, people are ready to pay unhealthy amounts of money, which makes the niche lucrative and evergreen.
With more awareness of health issues, which even doubled during the coronavirus pandemic, people take action and buy healthy costly products. Once the user uses a product and likes it, they are sure to keep buying it again and again to maintain results.
Personal care, nutrition, preventative medicine, alternative medicine, aging/anti-aging, fitness, mental health, weight loss, and pregnancy are just a few sub-niches that can potentially interest you.
Another thing to note here is that the global population is getting older. And an aging population has a high need for medical care and products, which leads to the growth of the medical market. Additionally, many people get obsessed with anti-aging activities, aiming to look younger and reverse aging. They keep trying different treatments and approaches.
In addition to aging, also gets fatter, and helping people lose weight is one of the best ways to fetch profits. This or another way, consumers spend US$60 billion each year in this category.
Closely connected to getting fitter are sports fitness, gym at home, and yoga. From yoga mats, training sneakers, sports equipment, and energetic drinks, this niche offers good profit and genuinely passive income feel if approached wisely or by traveling the road less followed in this affiliate niche.
4. Fashion and Beauty
“Oddly” enough, but regardless of the economic situation, beauty and fashion are the verticals that will always flourish. That’s because people want to look at their best even if the rest of their life has gone to the dogs. Humans are vain creatures, let’s admit it:).
And with so many brands and products available, people need advice on what to buy and how to apply the products effectively. That creates an excellent opportunity for beauty bloggers and other affiliates to monetize their content by promoting their favorite brands. You can, for instance, start YouTube videos that show beauty tips, explains style trends and advise fashion products, etc.
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This is also one of the niches where repeat purchases for popular products are guaranteed.
Also, many fashion and beauty affiliate programs pay their affiliates beautiful commission rates for every sale they trigger. To give you heads-up, the global skincare market alone is expected to be worth nearly $190 billion by 2025, and the forecast for the cosmetics market is $750 billion by the same year.
Besides, this sector is not limited to females alone; nowadays, more and more males are conscious of their looks. This is what makes the fashion and beauty niche so attractive for affiliate marketing.
5. Lifestyle
Lifestyle is a massive niche in terms of sub-niches as all people want to improve their lifestyle and constantly look for ways to do so. This extensive domain includes many evergreen and seasonal sub-domains, like Education, Self-development, Productivity, Marriage, Pregnancy, Home Decor, Digital nomads, Van life, Tiny houses, Ecological products, Sustainable living, etc.
For example, there has never been a more significant demand for online education. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, self-isolated people began to bring the focus to education, seeking online opportunities. Thre are available online courses for any preference and interest, in different languages and levels of complexity. The online education market is forecasted to reach $53.13 billion by 2027.
Lifestyle and self-improvement blogs are also getting more popular nowadays. The niche also includes a myriad of online programs, courses, training, books, videos, etc., which help increase confidence and self-esteem, achieve goals, succeed in their career, overcome obstacles, etc.
Home décor is also one of those evergreen niches severe worth consideration.
People are constantly decorating their homes to sell or renovate a newly bought apartment and spend between $500 and $5,000 on each room.
