Blogging takes time and energy. You need to do a lot of research in order to be considered an expert in your field.

Once you’ve become an expert, you need to have a lot of creativity in order to present engaging contact that will build viewers and drive traffic. After that, you need to build a great website that encourages this traffic to interact with you. 

This much energy takes time and resources to produce. It can get costly to host a domain and build a website, especially for bloggers who don’t have ecommerce shops or services to sell. That’s why a lot of people have begun selling for major online marketers.

This partnership is called a affiliation. You are assigned an affiliate link and your users follow your personalized link when purchasing from the marketplace. You are rewarded for this with a commission on each sale made through your link.

If you are unfamiliar with affiliate marketing, we’ve provided a great guideline for beginners here, so feel free to take a look. Once you have familiarized yourself with the concept of affiliate marketing, come back to read this article.

The purpose of this article is to show you the best products for affiliate marketing. While the Internet has some major markets, it is nevertheless true that some products sell far easier than others. We won’t focus too much on Amazon marketing, because we’ve already devoted an entire article to the best products to sell with this giant.

What To Look For In A Good Affiliate Program

The biggest question people have when participating in this program is how to find affiliate products to promote. Let’s take a look at some of the things to look for when choosing the right affiliate programs for your blog.

Does It Fit Your Content?

The goal of affiliate advertising is to provide a seamless and natural integration with your site content.

If you’re a fashion and beauty blog, it will make sense to sell makeup, clothing, and accessories. It won’t make sense to sell banking products, outdoor sporting goods, and board games. The very first thing you need to look for is an affiliate program whose goods match your theme.

When your theme matches the products being sold, it will be much more naturally able to fold into your website. When you’re listing a bunch of makeup tips or posting a Vlog entry for a makeup tutorial, for example, you can easily mention the products you are using as you put the makeup on and direct users to an affiliate link found right on the page where they can go buy the products.

Would You Use It Yourself?

This flows perfectly into the second thing to evaluate with these products. Would you use it?

Remember, your reputation is at stake. If you sell products that you wouldn’t use and don’t really like, this will lead to disaster. Either your followers will lose their faith in your expertise and stop reading, or worse – they will think you are a fraud who sees them as dollar signs, and stop following you while also trashing your reputation to all of their other friends all over the Internet.

The flip side of that coin is that it is obvious when you love something. Think about the last time you loved something you bought. How many people did you tell about it? If you’re like most people, you were absolutely gushing. This can lead to incredible sales among your followers.

If you are transparent about your affiliation, and willing to stake your reputation on the products, they will see your sincerity and naturally ask where they can get one of their own! This makes for a very easy sale through your affiliate link.

Trustworthy Reputation

Speaking of reputation, you also need to make sure you trust the retailer. If your reputation is great, but your users have a terrible experience with the affiliated company, you will also lose followers and this will begin to work against you. It will end up costing you money in the long run, and worse, ruin your reputation.

Make sure the site is easy to use. A user-friendly site will go a long way with consumers, and a stressful buying experience will turn them away from a company. I can’t stand when I am sent in circles and screaming at my computer to just take my money already. Don’t let your users end up on that kind of site.

You also want to ensure that the website will deliver the products that are purchased reliably. You want a company with fair pricing and high-quality products, not a company that sells cheap knock offs that fall apart with minimal use. Knowing about the products makes it easier to sell them, and these days people value quality.

Tracking

Your affiliate program should have some sort of tracking program. When they allow you to track your earnings, it works for both of you. The website sees more sales over time, and you see which posts are gaining attention and which ones are not. You can adjust content accordingly to make your blog even more popular!

Payouts

Make sure you know the payment agreement before you sign up for any marketplace. Most of them have a minimum payout value to meet. Some are as low as $25 annually while others can be over $100. You have to make sure that your site’s traffic can generate the minimum revenue required for your payouts.

You also want to use a payment schedule that works for your budget. It is to your advantage to be paid at least once a month. Some companies pay out more frequently, or upon request. Others will automatically transfer your payment when a specified account balance is reached.

Knowing how much traffic your site generates will help you decide which payout schedules are best for you. If you are starting out small and don’t generate a ton of traffic, you will want to look into affiliate programs designed for beginners then evaluate again when your blog gains traction and popularity.  

The more engaged your followers are, and the higher your traffic count, the better your incentives will be. This is especially true if you can gain enough traction to be considered a social media influencer.

Commission

Something that helps payouts is higher commission. When you are just getting started, the higher commissions may be harder to achieve, but they aren’t impossible.

Choose affiliate programs that offer a good commission. After all, they wouldn’t have those sales if not for you. If you have a choice between 10% and 30%, why settle for the lower number?

Conversion Rate

This one gets a little technical, so if math is not your forte, you may want to pretend this section doesn’t exist or ask for help from a mathematically inclined friend. This is the exception to the higher commission rule. There are times when a site’s price and reputation outweigh the lower commission.

Essentially, trust factors into the decision to purchase, as does price. If a smaller affiliate is offering you 20% commission and a larger one is offering 10%, the obvious preference would be to take the 20% commission. Where this gets tricky is in purchasing likelihood.

Smaller companies are often higher priced or less familiar to buyers, and thus they prefer buying from giants. This means that if you’re offering a handbag from a smaller business, but only 5% of your people will buy from this retailer, you will make 50 sales for every 1,000 visitors.

Now, let’s say the larger company is offering the same product or a comparable one. Because they have an established reputation, 15% of people are likely to buy from the store, making it 150 sales for every 1,000 visitors.

Supposing the product is $100, let’s look at the numbers.

With 20% commission from the small retailer, you will receive $20 for each sale. At 50 sales, your earnings are $1,000.

With 10% commission from the larger retailer, you will receive $10 for each sale. At 150 sales, your earnings will be $1,500.

Despite only making half of the commission as the smaller affiliate, the reputation of the larger one makes it easier to get each individual sales. This allows you to make more money from the smaller commission.

How To Find Affiliate Programs With Big Payouts

Strategy is everything in the affiliate marketing game. With over 100 affiliate programs out there, it can be difficult to choose which ones will work the best for you. Here are some strategies the most successful marketers use for finding the best affiliate products to sell online for large payouts.

High Ticket Product Commission

The higher the cost of your product, the more money you can make.  It doesn’t matter if your commission is 60% on an item if the item’s cost is only $5! That rate leaves you busting your butt for chump change. To earn even a measly $100 from that product, you need to have at least 30 people buy that item through your link. That’s insane.

On the flip side, if you’re selling a high-end luxury good that costs $5,000 but you only make 10% commission, you make $500 for each item sold. This is less work for a much higher profit, and most of the time, the lowest commission payouts are 30%.

Work smarter, not harder. Right? One great sales tip I learned is not to judge how expensive something is based off your income.

If you are cultivating a high-end blog with fantastic advice, and your affiliate product is in line with the theme of your blog, don’t assume that your readers know you don’t have as much money as them. Treat it like a given that this is a product they will enjoy and be able to afford. Chances are, they have a larger budget than you do and are willing to pay for quality.

Recurring Commission

This is one of your most powerful tools. If you refer someone once, and take a commission, then you are paid once. On the other hand, if you can continue making commission off of future sales without having to do as much work as you did for the initial sale, you can start to build an empire.

A very popular trend these days is subscription boxing. There are subscription services for medicines, toys, board games, fashion (in all sorts of niche markets), tee shirts, collectibles, and more. Every niche market has some form of subscription box. For examples of some of the most successful ones, look at Loot Crate, Board Game Bento, and Blue Apron.

These boxes involve a monthly subscription fee that can be billed monthly or annually. While many of them allow you to purchase a single month, most of them will sign you up to continue receiving them until you call to cancel your subscription.

The price of these subscriptions varies anywhere from $20 to $100 or more per month. Let’s take the average cost of $50 per month for a subscription service at a conservative 20% commission fee. You make an initial sale through your affiliate link. That requires a single post advertising it and some research and work for the post.

Let’s say that you refer 50 people in a given month. You would earn $500 that month. That isn’t a lot, but here’s the kicker.

You continue earning commission for every month they stay subscribed to the service, without having to devote any extra time or energy. This becomes $500 each month as a passive income where you don’t have to do any work to earn it.

Conclusion

Now that you have seen some of the things to look for, you need to know where to find affiliate products, right? We found a comprehensive list of the best affiliate programs out there for nearly any type of blog, whether you’re a beginner, a blogger, or an established marketer.

Remember that the key to success is knowing the best products for affiliate marketing depend on your brand. Use these guidelines when looking for affiliate programs, but make sure to select products you would personally endorse and that fit your brand.