If you’re brand new to affiliate marketing & looking to promote products or services in return for commissions, there are likely a few pressing questions on your mind.
Those few questions are probably; how do you join an affiliate program, where can you actually find programs to join & what makes a good affiliate program?
So, to help you out, we’ve put this blog post together outlining the exact steps for joining your very first affiliate program & getting your affiliate links to promote.
Plus, as a bonus, we’re also going to be explaining the best way to promote affiliate links online.
So let’s dive in & get to it, shall we?
Where To Find Affiliate Programs
Before you can go through the process of applying to join an affiliate program, the first thing you need to do is actually find an affiliate program to join.
Thankfully, this is pretty darn easy & as you’ll soon see, we’ve been it even easier.
So, to find an affiliate program, all you need to do is simply head to Google & type in a keyword related to your niche, along with “+ affiliate program”.
As an example, if your niche was weight lifting, you could type “weight lifting + affiliate program”, as shown in the screenshot below:
Then, hit search & the results would bring up a bunch of relevant affiliate programs that you could join.
Alternatively, if you know the name of a specific company that you wish to affiliate with (such as Amazon), you could simply type “Amazon + affiliate program”.
But it also gets even easier than that because here at Commission Academy, we’ve done the hard work for you & listed the best affiliate program for almost every niche imaginable.
So, by searching through our blog, you can find lists of the best affiliate programs, such as:
- Best Paintballing Affiliate Programs
- Best Alcohol Affiliate Programs
- Best Affiliate Marketing Affiliate Programs
- Best Dropshipping Affiliate Programs
- Best High-Ticket Affiliate Programs
- …and many, many more.
But when you start discovering multiple affiliate programs, you then get faced with another question & that question is, which one do you pick?
So let’s take a look below.
What Makes A Good Affiliate Program?
When looking for a good affiliate program, there are 5 main things to consider. Those things are:
- The quality of the products/services offered
- The relevance of the products/services offered to your audience’s interests
- The conversion rate of the website
- The commission rates of the affiliate program
- The cookie duration
The conversion rate of the website and the relevance/quality of the products pretty much go hand-in-hand.
If you recommend high-quality products or services that are relevant to your audience’s interests, the chances are your promotions are going to convert well.
Outside of that, though, the commission rates & cookie durations are the determining factors as to how much you’ll earn from your conversions.
The commission rate is simple. The higher this is, the more you’ll be paid per sale… So obviously, it’s ideal to look for programs that offer as high a commission rate as possible (whilst still maintaining a good conversion rate).
The cookie duration, on the other hand, is a factor many people overlook.
This basically refers to the length of time after somebody clicks on your affiliate link that a sale will be attributed to you (providing the tracking “cookie” is still active on their device when they come back to make a purchase).
So, for example, if an affiliate program offered a 30-day tracking cookie, you could still earn a commission even if somebody clicked on your link but didn’t actually make a purchase until 30 days later.
Again, ideally, this should be as high as possible. 30-day cookie durations are pretty much the standard, but some programs, such as our affiliate program here at Commission Academy, offer lifetime cookie durations.
Anyway, now that you understand how to find affiliate programs & how to choose a good one, let’s take a look at how you actually go about joining one.
How To Join An Affiliate Program
To join any reputable affiliate program, you’ll generally be required to have 1 of either of these 2 things:
- Your own website
- A large social media following
And the reason you’ll be required to have those is that without them, you won’t really have any means of effectively promoting your links.
This means that, even though there are places you can post affiliate links for free, it’s not worth the time of the affiliate program owners accepting you into their program because your volume will be too low.
The good news, however, is that you can still do affiliate marketing without a following by simply joining our free training course & learning how to launch your own website.
Anyway, once you’ve got yourself a platform to promote your links on, you’ll be able to apply & expect approval. And here’s how to do it:
1. Choose An Affiliate Program To Join
The first step, of course, is to choose an affiliate program to join. Then, once you’ve got one sorted, head to their website & hit “Apply” on their affiliate program page to start the application process.
Note: Some affiliate programs will automatically approve you into their programs & you’ll be able to grab your affiliate links & start promoting right away. Though, most worth their salt require an application.
2. Submit The Details About Your Traffic Source(s)
As an affiliate, you’re essentially going to be representing a company’s brand. For this reason, they will want to ensure you’re using legitimate traffic sources & not just spamming your affiliate links online.
So, if you plan to promote via social media, choose that option. If you plan to build a website & leverage SEO (search engines) to generate traffic, choose that option.
Whichever way you intend to promote, be upfront & honest about it.
3. Provide Your Business Information
This is the step many people get a little bit “stuck” on because if they’re at the beginning of their journey, they may not have an official business set up yet.
If not, don’t worry – in most countries, you will simply input that you’re “self-employed” or similar.
But if you do get stuck or struggle with this step, simply reach out to the affiliate program manager & ask them for help.
They’ll always be more than happy to help you because affiliate managers love to get new affiliates coming on board their programs.
4. Submit Your Application & Await Approval
After filling in your information along with the details of your traffic sources & your business information, it’ll be time to submit your application.
Then, once you submit it, you simply need to wait to hear back. Usually, they’ll get back to you in 1-3 days, but some programs, like Amazon Associates, may take longer.
If approved, you’ll be able to log into your affiliate account & grab your affiliate links to promote.
As mentioned earlier, the best place to promote affiliate links is on a website, but there are also some other places where you can promote affiliate links for free.
We’ll discuss this more below.
Best Way To Promote Affiliate Links
After getting successfully approved into an affiliate program, you’ll be ready to grab your affiliate links & start promoting products or services in return for commissions.
But what’s the best way to promote affiliate links?
The answer is yes, you can… But those methods aren’t the best methods for promoting because they require direct input of your time.
For example, to promote affiliate links on Instagram, you would have to keep on publishing new posts or engaging with new people to generate traffic.
This means you will struggle to ever build a truly passive income with affiliate marketing.
So what you want to do instead is leverage a passive income method that enables you to do something once and continue to get paid again & again & again, all from that one-time effort.
And our best recommendation for this is to create content on a website, like this page that you’re reading here right now.
You see, when you create content on a website, search engines like Google, Yahoo & Bing automatically discover it & they list it within their search results as an option for people to click on.
This means that with a one-time effort of creating content, you could get people clicking through & reading your page for many years to come.
More importantly, those people could also be clicking on your affiliate links, making purchases & earning you an entirely passive income.
So that, in our opinion, is the best way to promote affiliate links & the good news is that it’s the exact method we teach in our free affiliate marketing course.
Therefore, if you haven’t yet signed up for our free training, we highly recommend you do.
The Bottom Line
As you can likely now see, finding affiliate programs is pretty easy & the process of joining an affiliate program is super straightforward.
The reality is you may face rejection, especially if your website is only new or if you don’t yet have a large source of traffic, but don’t let that set you back.
You can still continue to build out your business in the meantime & then simply come back and apply again once you have a larger audience to promote to.
Heck, it happens to the best of us. Sometimes, even we get rejected from affiliate programs after doing affiliate marketing for 10+ years simply because we applied too early.
So don’t rush into joining affiliate programs too quickly. Focus on building up your traffic first, then apply once you’ve established a foundation.
But if you’d like to continue learning and discover how you can easily generate unlimited traffic for any affiliate niche & convert the most amount of your clicks into sales, be sure to sign up for our free affiliate marketing training course before you leave.
And, of course, if you happen to have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below.
