If you know three adult Americans, statistically two of them are on dietary supplements. The question is, how to make the remaining one to get interested in those as well? The answer lies in the supplements and vitamins affiliate programs.
Such programs are run by manufacturers as an additional sales channel. You only need to make people buy or sign up for the subscription offered by the manufacturer and that’s it. You don’t need to worry about making the product, shipping or returns. It’s that easy.
Or is it?
It is actually quite difficult to make people on the Internet do what you want them to do. But with the help of this article your chances will increase.
What Exactly Are Affiliate Programs?
An affiliate program is a way to advertise products by delegating marketing efforts to affiliates. Once they sign up to the program, they get a special link. An affiliate’s job is to convince people to click such a link and purchase a product or perform any other action that the program owner requires.
For example, affiliate program owner may want people to:
- Purchase their product
- Sign up for a subscription service
- Provide contact details
Affiliates can put this link in a blog post, under a banner, on a search engine result page and so on. Each visitor’s click on this link is counted. And you, as an affiliate, get paid for each purchase or other action a visitor performs.
Who Can Advertise Supplements and Vitamins Affiliate Programs?
Anyone that wants to take a chance in making money online in this field. It helps if you already are familiar with the market and feel comfortable writing and designing ads for such products. Or if you are a seasoned online marketer that wants to jump to a different vertical.
Advertising affiliate programs is no different than advertising any other offer on the Internet. It requires:
- No prior education, only your acquired expertise
- No initial investment, apart from a few tools and traffic
No matter your background, you can always dive into the world of supplements and vitamins affiliate programs.
Is advertising Supplements and Vitamins Affiliate Programs a viable option in 2021?
People got accustomed to buying things online. And the market for supplements and vitamins is growing. Additionally, most companies in this industry, or in fact in any other industry, use affiliate programs because they work.
Having affiliates on your side does not mean that the company can disband their internal marketing teams. Their offers hit different tones and different audiences than affiliates’, so they are complementary, not opposite forces.
What do I need to promote affiliate programs?
The first and foremost thing you need to have is access to the program itself. Find one and sign up – the vetting process is usually quite loose if not non-existent.
If you don’t know which one to pick up, keep reading this article. There’s a list of promising affiliate programs that sell vitamins and supplements below.
The second thing you need is a place to advertise the product. If you are a blog owner that thematically revolves around this subject, you’re already set. Just create an article or a set of articles and weave the link into the text.
If you’re not in such a lucky position, you can think about creating a source of organic traffic, such as a blog or a YouTube channel or, for quicker and easier results, buy traffic.
You can get traffic from platforms such as ad networks, social media platforms or search engines. These platforms provide you with a steady stream of visitors that meet your targeting criteria (for example, they are from a given country and/or use a specific device type).
The key to success is balancing costs and earnings. More on that below.
The third thing you need to have is a web page of your own and some ad assets. This page, a ‘landing page’ as it is called in the industry, provides more information and more incentives than a standard ad. Don’t worry if you are not a coder or designer – there are plenty of tools that can provide you with a beautiful landing page in minutes and put it on the Internet.
Along with the landing page, you need to have an ad and/or headlines, depending on the ad format you chose. In many cases, affiliate program owners will supply you with some marketing materials, so you’re not on your own.
How to Be Successful When Advertising Affiliate Programs?
The secret lies in numbers.
If you have a source of free organic traffic, such as a blog that you control, each payout from the program owner is your profit. But if you pay for traffic, you have to be careful not to pay more for it than you earn in return.
Affiliate program platforms usually have rudimentary reporting systems that can tell you how much you have earned, and you can do some calculations of your own in Excel. However, to really unlock the real potential of your traffic, you have to analyze it in more detail.
Here come ad trackers like Volume.
They are easy to use analytical tools that go between your ad and the concrete offer you promote. Because of their position in the campaign funnel, they can record each click on the ad or on the Call-To-Action button on the landing page along with accompanying traffic characteristics, such as:
- Country
- Language
- Device type and model
- Ad placement
- Website ID
- + 30 other characteristics
This gives you insights into what’s working and for whom. For example, nootropics may work better for iPhone users from bigger cities that primarily speak Spanish. Or for another group. Maybe one ad position (for example, top banner) will have an outstanding performance, while the side banner will barely get any clicks.
You never know what works until you test it.
Put it on your wall, that’s the online marketing credo.
Affiliate ad trackers like Voluum add much more to the mix. Voluum offers automatic A/B testing that allows you to choose a better landing page, or an offer, or a whole path. It integrates with many popular traffic sources to synchronize cost info and allow you to control your campaign from one interface. Its rule-based path feature allows you to create a complex path, where visitors with different characteristics go to different destinations.
Isn’t Ad Tracking Difficult?
Setting up tracking in Voluum has been designed to be as easy as possible. Voluum balances ease-of-use with giving you a lot of useful options.
In short, it looks like this:
Without a tracker, you put your referral link that you’ve got from your affiliate program in your traffic source platform, so it will appear under an ad. Or, if you use a landing page that goes between an ad and an offer, you put a link to this page in your traffic source and then link from a landing page to the offer.
With tracker, you add an offer in Voluum and put your referral there. Optionally you also add a lander and submit your landing page link. Then you create a campaign, set up how the traffic should flow (directly to the offer or through the landing page, with a rule based path governed by AI) and then you will get a campaign URL. And this link will go to your traffic source to appear under an ad.
When someone clicks your ad, the redirections will be handled by Voluum. The visitor will not see a thing and you will get precious statistical data.
That really doesn’t sound too complicated, does it? And once you add an offer and lander to Voluum, you can juggle them and use them in your future campaigns.
What category of supplements and vitamins should I promote?
Great question! You shouldn’t promote general, ‘healthy-for-all’ vitamins. Nowadays, there are different categories of vitamins and supplements for various lifestyles, activities, needs, sexes, body types, and so on. Some products are focused on specific goals, like reducing body fat or giving your brain a boost.
The popular categories include:
- Brain boost and mental health
- Bodybuilding supplements
- Supplements for vegans
- Prenatal vitamins and baby food supplements
- Vitamin D supplements for people in lockdown
The novelties are subscription-based services that can deliver packages of personalized health products right to customer doors. The customer pre-fills a health form and a trained person or an algorithm selects the best set of vitamins and supplements for a given person or condition.
Find a profitable niche by researching current trends a bit. Check Google Trends, popular sites in Alexa, questions asked in Quora.
To add the additional value and set yourself apart from the competition, you should also look for products that are, for example:
- Ecological and made with sustainability in mind
- Halal-friendly
- Fair-trade supplements
This will allow you to market your products using unique and attractive angles.
How to Recognize a Good Affiliate Program?
A good affiliate program, no matter if it markets vitamins and supplements or other products, needs to tick the following boxes:
- Good commission rates – this is what interests you the most. It’s usually a percentage value of what a visitor pays. The higher the better. 25% is the industry’s average..
- Long cookie duration. Cookie duration or cookie lifetime describes the period of time when a tracking cookie, created when a visitor clicks your referral link, exists and can record a purchase. Cookies die out after a specified time (or after a user deletes them manually). A visitor may not be inclined to buy the product straight away, they may do that after some time. The longer the cookie duration is, the higher chances are of you getting paid. 30 days is the industry’s standard.
- Support and marketing materials. Left on your own, you will have to take care of marketing and ad design. It would be better if you could focus on one task only and get proper content from their marketing team.
- Low return rate. Product returns can kill your profitability. Look for programs that boast a low return rate.
The Best Supplements And Vitamins Affiliate Programs
The ranking includes programs from various categories, so anyone can find the best fit.
1. Tropical Oasis
Tropical Oasis is a company that puts an emphasis on vitamins and supplements in a liquid form. This form is more digestible than a traditional pill. Such a distinguishing feature makes Tropical Oasis a bit easier to market.
The numbers behind the Tropical Oasis affiliate program are solid: up to 20% commission rate, 90-day cookie lifetime, constant support from their marketing team and a return rate of less than 2%.
You can find this affiliate program on ShareASale platform.
2. Seed
Seed offers a different approach to affiliate marketing. Its website looks more like a science portal and that’s the first clue that it treats its products and its customers way more seriously than other manufacturers.
You don’t just sign up to their program and get a tracking link, you need to learn about the product first. The partnership program requires each prospect affiliate to pass Seed’s university class. This is to ensure that you will use the right arguments and cite proper science when advertising Seed’s probiotics.
If you like this different approach and are not afraid of committing some time into learning the product, Seed has a great program for you. Getting certification is a stamp of quality – Seed will take care of their verified affiliates and provide them with support, and also, good commission rates. A 30-day affiliate cookie lifetime is the industry’s standard.
3. Rootine
Rootine proposes a personalized set of vitamins delivered to your door each month. A customer has to fill up a lifestyle quiz plus optionally get DNA and blood tests and the company will compose products best suited for their body and needs.
For each order that came from your referral link you will get $50. The cookie lifetime is above-standard 45 days.
Rootine’s subscription is on the pricey side, so you have to be ready to advertise to a specific audience.
4. Onnit
Onnit is focused on enabling its customers to reach their peak performance in sports. Fitness is the key word.
The company offers nutrition, supplements, along with fitness gear, all gathered under the message of becoming a better version of yourself.
For its affiliates, Onnit offers a 15% commission rate coupled with a 45-day cookie lifetime.
4. brainMD
BrainMD helps its customers to improve focus, energy, mood, while reducing stress and anxiety. These doctor-developed products almost market themselves!
The company also boasts an ethical and environmentally friendly manufacturing process.
Its affiliates go through a basic vetting process but it grants them access to 15% – 25% commission rates with an average order value of over $100 and a conversion rate of just above 10%. The vetting process doesn’t sound so bad right now, does it?
Marketing Supplements and Vitamins Affiliate Programs is a Serious Moneymaker
Unlike in many other niches and verticals, you don’t have to convince them that they need vitamins. You would have to spend a lot of time telling people that they need some financial products or a cheap electronic gadget – but not vitamins. Everyone knows that they need them, they simply don’t acknowledge that fact usually.
Yet running all affiliate programs require a dedicated tracker to gather and analyse data. Think of it this way:
- If you work without a tracker and you are successful, what’s your next move? Buying more traffic, running another offer or optimizing your traffic?
- If you work without a tracker and you are unprofitable, again, what’s your next move? Should you optimize or try something else?
With an affiliate ad tracker such as Voluum you will know what the reasons behind success or failure are. It will guide you to your next move until you can successfully scale up and beyond.