Updated on: February 2020
Finding the best offers for your audience is 50% of your affiliate’s job. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as typing “high paying affiliate offers” into Google. On the other hand, it is not as hard as finding a gold-filled pot at the end of a rainbow. With some clear sense of what you are doing, you can find promising offers with just a few clicks and get that passive income.
No banner with provided ID foundIn a nutshell: how to get the best affiliate offers
- Identify a marketing niche
- Sign-up for various affiliate networks that host offers in that niche
- Track the performance of your offers
1. How to choose a niche for affiliate marketing
Before signing up to any affiliate network, before comparing offer payouts and all that stuff, you need to find your marketing niche. This is a segment of the whole mainstream market that you will focus on and discover your audience.
In the perfect scenario, the selected niche is already your area of expertise. You know everything there is to know about fly-fishing? Promote some fishing-related products. This way you will be able to do this honestly and convincingly. Remember the Joker’s motto: “If you’re good at something, never do it for free”.
But for most people, the way to go is to find a promising niche and then master it in terms of your marketing skills. Sticking with one niche is usually better than targeting general categories because:
- Competition is lower in specialized niches
- You can learn your audience and your affiliate offers
- You can gather valuable leads for future remarketing purposes
What makes a good niche
A good niche is one where you can achieve passive income. So it should be related to areas where people are willing to spend money (i.e. sports, health, pets). People that are into origami usually are not big spenders. Find big spenders and help them spend their money.
Your niche should be narrow. Specialized. Full of passionate people with problems that your offer will help solve.
Affiliate marketing niches
How to find a good one
Let’s reiterate: if you already have knowledge about a certain area, you can try to find a niche on your own. You can also read +1 million tips and articles about the hottest trends that often repeat the same information or contradict each other. Or you can do some small research and get accurate data.
Always trust your data the most.
To get a hint of what is popular right now, go to Quantcast and sign up for a free account. Once you have done so, click the “search top-ranked websites”. And go immediately to the second result page, because the first 100 results will be mostly Internet giants that always get tons of traffic.
On the second result page or the third or fourth one (yes, they DO exist!) locate web pages that are clearly related to a particular niche. Do you see a popular clothing store ranking high? Maybe that’s what on people’s minds right now? Or maybe there are a couple of travel agencies and airline websites clustered together suggesting that people think about vacations? It’s for you to discover.
But this is not a niche yet. ‘Clothes’ or ‘travel’ are broad terms. You need to narrow this category into a more marketable one. Go to places where people talk and ask questions, such as Quora and research your niche by looking into your search results. Find what people are asking about, what are their problems or desired products. Turn the ‘clothes’ category into the ‘women leather handbag’ niche, the ‘travel’ category into the ‘travel insurance’ niche.
Now, once you have discovered your playground, find good affiliate offers in this niche that you will promote.
- Search Google for the ‘your niche + affiliate program’ term to find offer owners directly
or
- Go to affiliate networks that gather offers from offer owners
2. Sign up for an affiliate network or program
Affiliate networks match people that have offers with people that are looking for offers to promote. Some affiliate networks specialize in concrete verticals (in marketing terms: broad categories, such as ‘travel’), while others have everything. Checking the affiliate networks’ content will be the first confirmation of your theory.
An alternative place to find offers to promote is an affiliate program. They are run by bigger companies as an additional sales channel. For every sale you facilitate, you will get a commission. The biggest affiliate programs are:
Basically an affiliate program is like a brand’s affiliate network. Read our carefully selected and reviewed list of the best affiliate programs to make sure you get the best one in a given category.
Affiliate network list
Select an affiliate network
There are many qualities that, put together, constitute a good affiliate network, from payout times to friendliness of their account managers and support. But for a beginner affiliate, there are some which can be recommended over others because of the type of offers they have and level of support they provide:
Go to one of these networks and try to find affiliate offers in the selected niche. Look for the following information in offer details:
- Offer description: Get to know your offer and find one that you yourself would consider buying.
- Offer payout: This tells you how much money you will get for a single conversion. Generally speaking, a higher payout means more money but a tougher conversion.
- Conversion cap: This is a limit put on the number of conversions you can get per day. It is usually lower for beginner affiliates.
- Conversion flow: This describes what the user has to actually do to convert. People are lazy, more complex flow means fewer conversions.
Compare different offers with each other or compare the same offers from different affiliate networks. In the latter case, there might be some differences in payouts or conversion caps.
Your earnings
The money flow in the affiliate network industry is based on commissions from offer owners. Remember the Joker’s motto from the beginning of this article about doing things for free? Don’t do them for free, do them for an affiliate commission. But when you will be rewarded with a commission?
Depending on an offer type, you will be rewarded when the user:
- Signs up for a newsletter
- Purchases a product
- Installs an app
- Performs any other activity deemed valuable by an offer owner (information about it will be included in an offer description).
For each of these actions, collectively referred to as ‘conversions’, you will get a fixed payout. Get a lot of payouts and you will achieve passive income.
And how will the affiliate network or affiliate program know that it was you who directed users to this offer? They will identify you by the tracking link you have used. Each offer comes with its unique tracking link that will identify you as the offer promoter.
3. Track your affiliate offers
When an affiliate network approves you for an offer, you will get a tracking link, which after just one click you can use to track offer performance in Voluum. This is where the plot thickens.
The trick, the core, the craftsmanship of affiliate marketing is matching right offers with the right audience. An offer’s quality does not exist outside the audience it is aimed for; very few offers are good for everyone. And you have selected a specialized niche. So in order to make sure that you are targeting the right people, you need to learn about them, their characteristics, devices, and so on. You need a tracker. Only then you will know what you are doing right and what you can improve.
Voluum can provide you with such information. With it, you can learn:
- What devices are used by people that generated the most conversions?
- Where do those people come from, what cities/regions/countries bring you more profit?
- How does the relationship of the money invested vs money earned look like?
- At what time of a day most conversions occur?
- What OS is the most popular among people that have visited your offer page?
- What… When… Where…
If you have a question, there is a high chance that Voluum has the answer for you.
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