What Makes a Good Affiliate Program? Things To Look For In 2024

If you’ve taken the plunge to get started with affiliate marketing, then you’ve probably become aware that there are a lot of different affiliate programs to choose from.

So, which one should you choose? What makes a good affiliate program? And what are the things you should look for when comparing?

These are all very common questions that we get asked here at Commission Academy, so to help you out, we’ve put this in-depth guide together to show you how you can find the best programs to promote.

Without further ado, then, let’s dive in & get to it.

What Makes a Good Affiliate Program?

Being able to find good affiliate programs is crucial for your success as an affiliate marketer.

After all, if you’re working hard to generate traffic to send to your affiliate links, you want to position yourself to earn as much money as possible back.

And the difference between a good affiliate program & a bad affiliate program could be thousands of dollars extra in commissions in your pocket each month.

So when looking for a new affiliate program, here are the things you need to look out for:

Commission Rates

Commission rates are typically one of the first things people look at when looking at an affiliate program & it’s easy to see why.

The commission rate of a program determines how much you’ll earn per sale. So, the higher the commission percentage, the more money you’ll earn from each sale you make.

It goes without saying, then, that you want the commission rate of an affiliate program to be as high as possible. The higher, the better.

But whilst a higher commission rate means you’ll earn more sales, it doesn’t mean you’ll earn more overall & you’ll see why that’s the case when we discuss conversion rates next.

Conversion Rate

The conversion rate of an affiliate program is one of the most important things to consider when choosing the best affiliate program to promote.

Basically, the conversion rate of an affiliate program is the percentage of people that click through the program’s affiliate links & actually make a purchase.

So, for example, if 100 people clicked on the affiliate link but only 10 people actually made a purchase, the conversion rate would be 10%.

Now, with many programs, finding out the true conversion rate requires testing. This means you’ll need to send traffic & see how it performs.

However, there are some affiliate networks, such as ClickBank, that display the “network-wide” conversion rates (or EPCs) for programs in their network.

This can be a helpful indicator to determine whether or not the program will be good to promote before sending traffic to it yourself.

But what you must remember is that not all traffic is equal. So, the network-wide conversion rate could be low, but your traffic (if it is more targeted) could generate a much higher conversion rate or vice versa.

Overall, though, you want a happy medium of a good conversion rate & a good commission rate. You won’t succeed if you have one without the other.

And then leading on from that, there’s another important factor which greatly determines how many conversions you’ll get, which is…

Cookie Duration

As an affiliate, you need to know what cookie duration means, as this can be vital in determining how many conversions you’re able to generate.

So, in short, cookie duration refers to the period of time that you’ll be eligible to collect a commission from when somebody clicks your affiliate link & makes a purchase.

For example, if somebody clicks your affiliate link but doesn’t make a purchase until 7 days later, you could still stand to earn a commission if the program offers a cookie duration of over 7 days.

Most programs tend to offer 30-day cookie durations, but some, such as Amazon Associates, only offer a mere 24-hour cookie duration.

The longer the cookie duration, the better.

However, what you also need to know is that the cookie will only track the purchase if they use the same device to make the purchase as the one on which they clicked the link.

And the user can manually clear their cookies at any point if they wish.

So whilst cookie durations are great to help you make more sales, there are still some sales that can slip through, which is why it’s always best to try & encourage people to buy right there & then.

Payment Methods & Frequency

Commission rates, conversion rates & cookie durations are all good, but if an affiliate program doesn’t offer a suitable payment method, then you won’t be able to cash out a penny.

So, for that reason, it’s always wise to check the payment methods offered by the affiliate programs you’re looking to join to make sure that you’ll be able to get paid.

Typically, programs pay via PayPal, bank transfer, cheque & a lot more are now also starting to offer cryptocurrency as a means of payment too.

Then, alongside the payment methods, you may also wish to check how frequently you’ll be paid.

Most programs pay monthly. Many pay weekly or bi-weekly, but some affiliate programs even pay daily.

Reporting

To achieve massive success as an affiliate, it’s important to track your clicks & make adjustments to increase your conversion rates & scale your business.

So, for that reason, you want an affiliate program with good reporting.

Affiliate networks typically win when it comes to offering the best reporting, so if you can, try to sign up for the program via a network rather than joining it directly.

But don’t let that suggest all affiliate programs have bad tracking, as there are some in-house affiliate programs (like the Commission Academy affiliate program) that have great tracking through which you can generate all the reports you need.

Promotional Methods

Some affiliate programs restrict you from using certain promotion methods, such as paid advertising, so always check this before joining.

For example, suppose you’re trying to promote your affiliate links from social media pages as an influencer. In that case, you would need to find a program that accepts social media as a promotional method.

Nowadays, companies are less strict on this as it’s becoming more common for people to use a variety of different promotional methods but do consider it all the same.

Affiliate Links Available

Some affiliate programs are great and allow you to link to any page on the company’s website as an affiliate & stand to earn commissions.

Some even provide banners & other creatives for you to use.

But then there are also affiliate programs that give you the bare minimum & provide you with one affiliate link that simply takes visitors to the website’s homepage.

The issue with this is that it can lower your conversions because, for example, let’s say that you’re trying to promote a specific type of cordless drill.

If you sent the visitor directly to the product page, you’d be quite likely to convert them to a sale. But if they have to go via the homepage & find it themselves, then, as you can imagine, the chance of converting them becomes much slimmer.

So keep this in mind when looking for an affiliate program because having lots of affiliate links & different pages to promote can really help you increase your conversions & earn more money as an affiliate.

Support

Some affiliate programs offer absolutely great support & have amazing affiliate program managers that are there to help you out, whilst others offer absolutely none at all.

And this is quite an important one because this support can really help you to succeed.

For example, if you’re having trouble grabbing a link or getting an affiliate link to work, it can be really handy to have somebody to call on & help you out.

Plus, once you start generating commissions, a good affiliate program manager will typically look to work with you to help you generate even more.

So have a look for reviews of the affiliate program before joining & see what people say about their support & program managers.

Bonuses & Incentives

When affiliate programs list their commission rates, this is generally their base commission rate for new affiliates that they onboard.

As a high-performing affiliate, you will generally be able to unlock performance bonuses & potentially even secure heightened commission rates.

Lots of affiliate programs advertise their bonuses & incentives on their sign-up page & it’s always a good idea to factor these in when comparing which affiliate program will help you earn the most money.

How To Find Good Affiliate Programs To Promote

The good news is that finding good affiliate programs to promote is really easy, thanks to the help of Google & of course, our own website, Commission Academy.

Here at Commission Academy, we’ve listed the best affiliate programs for almost every affiliate niche you could possibly think of, such as:

But alongside our lists, you can also leverage Google & to do so, all you need to do is simply run a search for your chosen affiliate niche & the words “affiliate program” like so:

Then, simply hit “search”, and the results will bring up all of the available affiliate programs related to that particular niche & from there, you can easily compare & find the program that’s right for you.

Earn More As An Affiliate Marketer

Finding a good affiliate program is a good start, but to really begin earning good money with affiliate marketing, you need to know how to generate traffic.

More importantly, you need to know how to generate targeted traffic that actually converts into sales & commissions on a consistent basis.

And the good news is that in our free step-by-step course, we teach you exactly how to do it.

So if you’d like to earn more as an affiliate marketer & skyrocket your success by learning how to generate traffic effectively, we recommend signing up for our free training before you leave.

But overall, we hope that this post has helped you learn how to find a good affiliate program & of course, if you happen to have any questions, feel free to leave them below.

What Makes a Good Affiliate Program? Things To Look For In 2024