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As we’ve discussed in our previous article on how to choose a niche, the right niche for your affiliate marketing site is critical for your success.
Now, once you’ve got that covered, it’s just as important to make sure you’re picking the right affiliate offers in order to maximize your gains and add value to your audience.
In this article, we’ll be covering 10 tips on how to pick the best affiliate offers for your chosen marketing niche.
We’ll cover where to find the best affiliate offers (including places that are often forgotten by many affiliates), how to judge if they’re actually good, how to choose the right products to offer to your audience and other important considerations.
Let’s get started.
Table of Contents
So, why do you need a niche?
Let’s say you’re thinking about investing on crypto and you see two different affiliates promoting two different cryptocurrency exchanges.
The first one covers everything about crypto in their site and nothing more and seems to deeply understand everything about it. The second, however, doesn’t sound like an expert and also has “pet” and “travel” information on their site.
Whose advice would you trust more? Probably the first one.
To become successful in affiliate marketing, you must be seen as a subject matter expert by your audience, which requires you to learn as much as you can about a specific topic and consistently create high-quality content about it.
Spread your focus around to too many topics and you’ll not only be seen as someone who doesn’t understand any of them deeply, but you also won’t have time to build true expertise and great content.
10 Tips on How to Pick the Best Affiliate Offers for Your Chosen Niche
Tip #1: Browse affiliate networks
Affiliate networks are platforms where businesses can publish their affiliate programs so that they get found by affiliate marketers like you. They’re also the primary places where affiliates look for offers.
Some well-known affiliate networks include ClickBank, FlexOffers, CJ Affiliate, and Rakuten Advertising, but there are many others.
To find the best affiliate offers on them, browse products in your category using some of the many sorting and filtering options available to refine your search.
Take a look at ClickBank:
Check out our ClickBank Affiliate Marketing for Beginners guide
Most sites allow you to filter products by keywords, features, billing types (one-time, recurring, or trial), average commission, how well they’re selling, and more.
You can then find all that info about each product.
Tip #2: Search affiliate directories
Some of the best-known directories include offervault.com, affiliateseeking.com, Affiliate Cash Directory, 100 Best Affiliate Programs, and affiliateguide.com.
Check out offervault.com where you can search keywords and find affiliate programs related to that word:
Tip #3: Check companies’ sites directly
Many companies, especially larger and better-known ones, prefer to advertise their affiliate programs on their sites only.
They don’t always make a lot of effort to promote their affiliate programs, which is why you may have to look a little deeper to find them, often at the bottom of their sites.
Take a look at SEMrush’s site:
The biggest upside is that those companies tend to offer higher commission rates than you’d find in many affiliate networks since there is no middleman.
Since they come from already established brands, you’ll have an easier time getting people to buy or subscribe, will have your name associated with a reputable brand, and will have the peace of mind of knowing that your customers will be dealing with brands with solid reputations that provide a good experience.
Make a list of all the types of products you can think of that could serve your audience and the different brands that offer them, and visit their sites to look for affiliate programs.
If you do this, you’ll end up finding some of the best affiliate offers you could work with.
Tip #4: Look for affiliate programs from similar products
Found a particular product that’s relevant to your audience and provides a great affiliate program? Great, but don’t forget to check competitors’ offers as well.
This is not only a great way to find some of the best affiliate offers that you could work with, but also judge whether each offer’s terms are good or not in comparison to the ones from similar products.
One tool you can use to find another site’s competitors is SEMRush.
To find competitors, you can also google terms like “[product’s name] alternatives”, “best product for [your niche]”, or “[product’s name] vs” and see the suggestions.
A great way to save time when looking for affiliate programs is through Affilitizer. It’s a free Chrome extension that allows you to find affiliate programs associated with each site while searching Google and browsing the web without even having to enter the sites.
Now that you know where to find affiliate programs, let’s move to how to identify the best affiliate offers out there.
Tip #5: Make sure the product is actually relevant to your audience
This is perhaps the #1 tip for determining whether you should offer that product to your audience or not. And yet, many affiliate marketers make this mistake.
To keep your audience engaged, it’s critical to only send offers that are aligned with what they’re looking for and that can solve real problems they have.
If you waste their time by offering something that has no use for them just for the hope that one or two people in your audience will buy and make you a few quick bucks, you’ll piss the rest of your audience off.
Instead, figure out who your buyer persona is and what are the best products for them based on what they need.
Try to address everyone’s needs, and you’ll address no one’s.
Tip #6: Research the reputation of the product and the company
Quoting Warren Buffett’s right-arm Charlie Munger, don’t sell anything that you wouldn’t buy yourself.
In order to succeed in affiliate marketing, you must create loyalty and build a great reputation. And to do that, you must promote products that make people glad they followed your advice.
Imagine if someone trusts your advice on a product and ends up having a terrible experience with it. Do you think they’ll ever trust you again? Probably not.
Successful affiliates know the importance of building a reputation that generates repeat buyers who say great things about you around, attracting organic traffic.
While selling a bad product might even make you some money in the short term, that’s not how you build a sustainable affiliate business that prospers over the long term.
Remember: it’s a lot harder to build a great reputation than ruin it.
Tip #7: Check the cookie life
The cookie life is the time window in which, if a person buys the offer you’re promoting within that period after clicking on your affiliate link, you’ll get the commission.
Some programs have cookies that only last for a few days while others last for months. As a general rule, you should look for programs with cookies that last for at least 30 days.
Tip #8: Pay attention to all the terms
What might seem like one of the best affiliate offers you’ve ever seen when it comes to its commission rates, might also have some hidden terms that could harm your gains.
Make sure to understand all the terms and policies so you won’t end up with a bad surprise later.
Understand things like what happens to your commission if the buyer refunds, or purchases from a country you are not allowed targeting and pay close attention to all the terms related to the commission structure.
It’s also important to pay attention to other rules you must follow, like not using their sales material for any purposes besides promoting their products. If you don’t, you might end up breaking a clause and could potentially get banned from their program or worse.
Finally, you also want to check all the terms for buyers as well to make sure you’re not sharing wrong information with your audience or leading them into a trap.
Tip #9: Research their sales funnel
Imagine the following scenario: you’ve done all your job right. You’ve picked the perfect niche, managed to build an audience with the perfect customers, got them to trust you, and they decided to give a chance to the product you’re promoting.
But right after clicking your affiliate link, they end up on a site filled with technical issues, second-class copy, and poor design. They leave the site and go buy a competitor product that was being promoted by another affiliate.
Pretty frustrating, right? After all, you only get paid when the people complete the purchase.
A huge mistake many affiliate marketers make is working with brands that haven’t done their part in the sales process well. You ALWAYS want to work with products that have optimized sales funnels that actually convert the people you take there.
To identify the best affiliate offers to promote, go through the whole sales funnel and pay attention to the sales page’s design, copy, the site’s loading speed, and the number and difficulty of the steps that buyers have to go through to complete the purchase.
If that offer doesn’t include a great experience for buyers, you might want to check other products to promote. After all, the last thing you need is to have all your work wasted because someone else didn’t do their job right.
Tip #10: Research their affiliate program’s reputation
Like making sure that the product and the company have a good reputation among consumers, it’s also important to make sure they have a good reputation among affiliates as well.
Common issues that affiliates might face include technical issues, bad support, not getting paid on time, hidden or confusing terms, and more.
You can try to find reviews and other comments from other affiliates on Google and YouTube.
Finally, if the program is new or from a small company and you can’t find any reviews about it from other affiliates, you can still try to figure out whether that program is reliable or not.
Send an email and see how fast they respond. Check their site for signs of technical issues. See if their terms are clear and easy to understand.
Those things should give you an idea of whether or not you should take the risk.
Final thoughts
If you follow these tips, you should end up with a very decent list of affiliate programs that you could work with.
And by doing so, you’ll make sure that the products you’re promoting to your audience match what they need and provide them a great experience, leading them to increase their trust in you and turning them into repeat customers.
Better yet, you’ll also make sure that those products offer you a great experience as an affiliate as well and pay what you deserve from your hard work.
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