Do you have a blog or thinking about starting a blog? Well it’s about time to come up with a strategy to monetize that blog so here I’m going to walk you through the 20 surprising affiliate programs for bloggers.
Not sure what an affiliate program is?
Affiliate program sare agreements between online merchants and website owners (the affiliate). The online merchants pays the affiliate commission for sending traffic to their site, or based on their agreement. For example, in some cases an affiliate will get paid for the number of people or referrals from the affiliate that buy something from the merchants. While in other cases, the affiliate may get paid a commission just for sending a certain number of people (volume of traffic) to the merchant’s site. Affiliate arrangements are highly effective marketing strategies for merchants, and an excellent way for bloggers to monetize the traffic on their site.
Over the past few years, these affiliate programs have grown enormously in popularly. So today I’m going to distill it down for you so you can start cashing in on your hard work. And also, even if you’re just starting out, you don’t have to have a ton of traffic to earn some extra money with some of these referral programs, so follow along…
Clickfunnels Affiliate Program
Clickfunnels is online sales funnel builder that helps businesses and entrepreneurs market and sell their products. The founder of Clickfunnels, Russel Brunson, create the Clickfunnels Affiliate program to promote the Clickfunnels software as well as his training products. You can earn a substantial commission when your followers use your links or funnels to sign up a monthly member or purchase training products. If you’re not familiar with the program, I recommend getting started with the Affiliate Boot Camp.
The affiliate bootcamp is a 100-day training program for affiliate marketing. You will receive access to tools like an email (one-click-install) funnel with built in lead magnets to help you build a profitable email list. By implementing the strategies and tools offered through this program, I was able to earn a full-time income with ClickFunnels.
Bluehost Affiliate Program
If you are not familiar with Bluehost, it is a reputable and affordable hosting company. They have a great “hook” for new bloggers with hosting packages for as a little as $3 per month with plenty of room to scale as your business grows.
The great news is that as an affiliate you can collect $65 for every new customer sign up, but the average commissions range from $60-130! Web hosting platforms (including this one) pay out some of the highest affiliate commissions available.
You can also rest assured you are promoting a great platform as it is the top #1 recommended hosting provider by WordPress. I genuinely recommend this hosting provider for anyone looking to monetize a blog.
Click here to join the Bluehost affiliate program
Tailwind affiliate program
Tailwind is an Intstagram and Pinterest post scheduling tool. They can help you (and your audience) grow your online presence with marketing tools such as smart scheduling, content discovery, hastag suggestions, bulk image uploads, analytics and monitoring. They have a great product that is therefore a great product for you to promote to your followers to earn a sweet 15% recurring commission on all sales through your affiliate link!
If you’re not already using Tailwind yourself be sure to check it out using a free one-month trial here.
And after that, here you can get started as an affiliate!
Rakuten referral program
If you’re not already signed up for Rakuten, you should be, so start here and collect your first ten bucks!
Rakuten (formerly Ebates) lets you earn cashback for your online purchases. The Rakuten cashback button proactively finds online discounts to let you earn cash back. The best thing to do is add the browser extension for the Rakuten Cash Back button. When you visit a merchant’s website, you will see a notification of cash back offered from that store (most major online retailers are part of the network). All you need to do from there is click that drop down to start earning cash back. And if you prefer to do your shopping on mobile, there is also a Rakuten mobile app!
Back to the referral program.
Rakuten members are assigned a referral link which can be found on the “Refer and earn $25” link at the top of the page in your account.
Simply embed that link in your website, post it on social media, or share via email. Once your friends sign up using your link, they will earn $10 and you earn $25 after their first $25 purchase.
Sign up here and start referring your friends for money!
Legendary Marketer Affiliate Program
Legendary Marketer offers products and training program that can help you make money through commission sales.
Offers start at 30 dollars per month going all the way up to 30,000 dollars. Depending on the type of affiliate you will get different levels of commission. If you are a basic affiliate and you have someone purchase a high ticket item, you will get 10% commission versus 40% for a “pro” affiliate. Yes, you are reading this correct, it is possible to earn a $12,000 commission as a Legendary Marketer Affiliate. For these high ticket items, their sales team will close the leads, so the conversion is relatively high.
Sign up for their 15 day business challenge to get some insight into how it works. There will be training and assignments are intended to help you get started with affiliate marketing.
You can sign up for the legendary marketers club or you can sign up as affiliate once you complete the 15 day business challenge. Hot top: The application does not guarantee approval and it is much easier for you to become approval if you have done the program.
Share-A-Sale Affiliate Program
Share a sale is an affiliate network with over 4000 affiliate programs and over 7000,000 affiliate promoting them. The goal again is for you to get paid on traffic sent to merchant’s sites that convert to sales.
To sign up, click here, and then click on “affiliate sign up” on the top right-hand-side of the page.
Be sure to sign up for affiliate programs that you intend to promote now. The risk in applying to a bunch of programs is that you could be dropped by the merchant if there is no activity or traffic sent for a significant period of time. Once you’re approved by a program, you will be able to create custom links using the “custom link generator” that will be used to refer your followers to the merchant’s site. Regardless of what you’re into from outdoor sports, to cooking, to fashion there is a program for you (and your audience).
Maxbounty Affiliate Program
Maxbounty affiliate program has been around for over 15 years and they also have a great range of products for you to promote. The registration process as an affiliate is slightly more involved than other programs, mainly because it requires a very brief phone-call but don’t let that scare you away. Once you’re in, you will have to apply to different programs for approval. As you start making sales it’s very easy to get approval to all programs. If you’re just getting started with blogging and/or affiliate marketing a great place to start by promoting the various survey sites on Maxbounty.
I also like to search by top campaigns or trending campaigns to get some insight into what programs are paying out the highest commissions and where other affiliates are having success.
Amazon Associates Program
Why not become an affiliate for the world’s largest internet retailer? Bloggers love promoting Amazon products because people love buying from Amazon—it’s simple! As an Amazon affiliate you can earn up to 10% in advertising fees.
Once you direct a follower to an Amazon product using your affiliate link, they are cookied in for that browser session. This can work to your advantage considering many people often keep quite a bit in their Amazon cart for later. For example, I once promoted a $2 baking product and one of my followers used my affiliate link to purchase a $200 dog bed for which I was able to earn the referral commission!
Click here to become an amazon affiliate and start earning some dough.
Shopify affiliate program
Shopify is online platform to build your own online store and sell products. You can set up any type of store, selling any type of products.
The affiliate program allows you to become an affiliate marketer for Shopify. You do the promoting and marketing for Shopify to earn a commission for your referrals. Join the program to get a unique link, URL. When the friend purchases Shopify products using your referral link, you get paid.
It is one of the highest paying affiliate programs! If you are buying the Shopify products and building your own store, you will pay a monthly fee to Shopify with the basic fee at twenty-nine dollars per month. If you are in the affiliate marketing program, you get 200% of that monthly plan. So if you refer someone to the Shopify program (for $29/mo) you get $58 just for the most basic plan. The earnin potential is huge once we start looking at some of the higher ticket monthly plans at $299. Anyone can join the Shopify affiliate program. You also get paid on theme or app purchases.
Rakuten Affiliate Network
We covered the Rakuten referral program, but there is also an affiliate network worth exploring.
Like other affiliate networks, it connect advertisers to publishers to drive traffic that convert to sales. The program is a very simple to join. You will just need to go to the their sign up page. Once you’re approved you will have access to all the affiliate programs available in their network that includes major online retailers like Macy’s and Best Buy.
Start promoting offers for Rakuten here!
Shopstyle Collective Affiliate Program
Separate from the Shopstyle affiliate program previously mentioned the Shopstyle Collective program allows you to be part of a pay-per-click affiliate program. If you are just getting started this is a very easy to way to get paid anytime your followers simply click the product links (versus converted sales). You don’t even need a website to start earning! There are plenty of people that are participating in the Shopstyle Collective program using social media like Instagram.
Swagbucks Affiliate Program
I’ve talked about Swagbucks in previous posts for how to make money online, but here I want to mention their affiliate program. First, Swagbacks is a get-paid-to website that allows you to earn money for different tasks from taking survey to watching videos. Try it out here and get a free $5 sign up bonus!
The great news is that once you start referring friends an followers, you get to start collecting rewards from their points earned. You get 10% of all points earned for your referrals. These points can be redeemed for cash or gift cards.
If you refer people to Swagbucks and they starting earning points, you’ll get 10% of all those points. How cool is that?
Sign up, tell your friends, and start getting paid!
ConvertKit Affiliate Program
Convertkid an an email service provider that pays big (30% recurring commission) for referrals. Your commission is relative to their account level. So if your referral upgrades to a more expensive plan, your commission goes up!
Click here to get started with ConvertKit
Creative Market Affiliate Program
Become a Creative Market Affiliate to collect 10% on every purchase made by new customers for a full year. Creative Market, as the name suggests is a marketplace for products like photos and fonts.
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