How to Find an Affiliate Program in Your Niche

Intro

As an affiliate marketer, you’ll understand that you don’t always have to stick to affiliate marketing techniques. There’s always other opportunities to earn a few dollars like Google Adsense adverts, or Mediavine ads.

But our bread and butter is still affiliate programs, and placing affiliate links throughout your content will bring in the majority of your earnings. With thousands of niches to build your website around, how do you know where to search to find the best affiliate programs in your niche.

I’m going to explain where, and how to find an affiliate program, that will be suitable for your blog.

Affiliate Programs Are Everywhere You Look

What can you possibly expect with the explosion of online shopping. Billions of dollars are being made from online sales, both from merchants and affiliate marketers.

Every niche you could imagine has multiple affiliate programs aligned to it. From pets to weight loss, apparel to sports equipment, online services to financial institutions. There is an affiliate program for whichever niche your blog is dedicated to.

Many of these affiliate programs are looked after by an affiliate network. For instance, ShareASale looks after hundreds of merchants affiliate programs for them. To sign up to these affiliate programs, you’ll first be required to join the affiliate network. In this instance, ShareASale.

Then it’s just a matter of searching for the category of niche you’re in, and decide on the affiliate program you’d like to join. Once you know the program that you’d like to promote, simply apply to their affiliate program.

In the following days, the merchant will either approve or disapprove your website. There’s several reasons why you’re site may be declined. Some of the more common reasons are lack of content or not enough traffic.

Don’t worry about the lack of traffic to your blog. Early on, there’s not much you can do about this. But content is something you can improve on. Make sure your blog looks visually appealing and has a decent amount of content, at least 10-15 posts. This will help with your approval rate.

Some merchants like to go it alone, and run their own affiliate program. Amazon is one such company that does exactly this. Signing up to these programs are just as easy as joining an affiliate network. Just remember that you’ll have more accounts and passwords if you sign up to individual merchants. This is where a password manager is an ideal solution.

Finding Niche Relevant Affiliate Programs

Searching for affiliate programs via search engines is also an easy process. Simply just type into Google, the merchant or niche you’re after, and type ‘+ affiliate program’ at the rear.

You’ll be presented with pages upon pages of affiliate programs that you could potentially sign up with, and create a partnership to make sales. The potential here is endless and you’ll also find fringe niches that you could also use.

Something to be aware of, is that some affiliate programs are country based. If you’re searching through your country’s version of Google (I’m in Australia, so my default is google.com.au), global listings will be presented, along with a number of affiliate programs from my country.

Just make sure you don’t join up to a local affiliate program if you don’t intend promoting locally.

Covering All Niche’s – Amazon

The daddy of them all, the king of affiliate programs, Amazon!

The commission rates vary at Amazon depending on which item is bought by the purchaser. The following is a fixed standard rate for product type.

If you’re in a niche where you’ll be promoting physical products of any kind, Amazon will have the products you can promote. They are the go-to program for many affiliate marketers, as they stock the largest range covering all niche’s, bar none.

To sign up to the Amazon affiliate program, you’ll have to visit Amazon Associates. This is Amazon’s linked affiliate program site. Another reason so many people join the Amazon Associates program, is they have a vast array of tools that are at your disposal.

Easy to use tools like the ‘Site Stripe’ facility. This allows you to simply browse the Amazon store until you find the product you’d like to place on your blog, then choose the type of link you’d prefer. As you can see below, there’s the option to just show the text link, just show the image link, or both together. You can also choose to show a native advert by clicking on ‘Custom’.

All that’s required when you click on one of these options, is to copy the highlighted code and place it on your website.

You can also pick the image size between small, medium and large. This is so much more varied than other affiliate programs, where some programs will only offer you banners to place on your blog.

There are also multiple other ways you can use the Amazon Associates site to create various types of images, adverts, banners etc, that all link back to your Amazon ID. That brings me to the next point.

How Your Links Will Earn You Commissions

Without going into too much detail, the simple explanation on how your links will earn you a commission, is that each link has your affiliate ID attached to it.

For instance, a simple affiliate link to a website service could look something like this:

http://www.aweber.com/easy-email.htm?id=448599

This would be an affiliate link to the autoresponder service that at I use called Aweber. As you can see at the rear of the link, there’s my affiliate ID.

I’ll generally highlight the text I want to link to Aweber, then attach this link to the text. Now if you click on the text link, you’ll be taken to Aweber. Here’s an example of a text link > ‘Aweber’.

This link ID will be recognised by Aweber, and each time someone clicks on it, and is taken to the Aweber service website, what’s known as a ‘cookie’ is stored on the visitors website.

Cookies will last for a certain number of days, meaning if that person decides to sign up to Aweber within the allocated period, I would be rewarded with any commissions when that person makes a payment.

Are Affiliate Links Ugly

Some people think that affiliate links are unsightly, which is probably true. To get around this, there is a popular plugin called ‘Pretty Links’ that allows you to replace the affiliate link with a name that looks so much nicer.

For example, I could change the link ‘http://www.aweber.com/easy-email.htm?id=448599’ to ‘JoinAweber’. So, in the top browser bar, you’ll see ‘JoinAweber’ instead of the gobbledegook affiliate link.

These pretty links are also better for SEO, as they can possibly help with backlinks by bypassing the ‘nofollow’ attribute which can be placed in some links provided by the affiliate program.

Wrapping Up

Affiliate programs are literally everywhere, and finding them is a fairly straightforward process.

Just another thing to keep in mind. As an affiliate marketer, you don’t want to leave money on the table. I’ve been asked whether affiliate links should be placed on every post.

I believe affiliate links can be placed on every page. It’s totally up to you if this is your strategy, but it won’t be frowned upon by Google.

However, having said that. Don’t place the same affiliate link to the same product or service on every post. This WILL be frowned upon.

If you have a major service that is your bread and butter affiliate income stream, you’re best to direct internal links on each post to a landing page promoting this service.

You’ll learn all the best affiliate marketing practices like this, by reading below and taking action.