How to Choose the Best Affiliate Products for Your Blog

To be a successful affiliate marketer, you need to choose and promote the right products on your blog. 76% of new affiliate marketers fail to earn money from affiliate marketing simply because they do not choose the right product to promote.

Affiliate marketing has been the primary source of income for many existing content creators. Its has tried and tested methods and works well when you select the best affiliate products.

Finding success in affiliate marketing is not as complicated as you might think. You need to be persistent, consistent, and a great combination of right affiliate products and marketing channel to promote.

Marketing channels could be:

• A Blog
• A comparison of deals and discount website
• A YouTube channel
• A Podcast
• An email newsletter
• Social media platform
• Ad platforms

In this guide, I will share some tips I follow in choosing the right affiliate product to promote.

How to Choose the Best Products for Affiliate marketing:

When you start picking the affiliate products, you will find products in various categories and payout. For example, some of them would be paying about $1 per sale, and some of them would be paying about $200/sale. It’s a good idea to pick a product that pays more, even if you give 1-2 sales, it would be better than giving 100 sales to a product that pays only $1.

Here is simple math:

• $1 * 100 = $100 earned as commission
• $100 * 4 = $400 earned as commission

Now, think which is easier to sale: A product to 4 people or a product to 100 people.

Once you understand this simple maths, you would be working smart rather than hard. This is how most of the top affiliate marketers make more money than others.

There is another interesting concept to know:

• One time commission: The company pays you a one-time sale. It could be anywhere from 10%-100%.
• Recurring commission: The company pays you recurring payment. That means, whenever a user referred by you pays again or use the product, you earn a commission. Most of the SaaS products offer recurring commissions.  Learn more about recurring affiliate programs here.

The number of recurring affiliate products is way less than one-time commission products. You should have a healthy combo of both kinds of products to build a residual income.

Alright, so once you have understood above two basic yet most important secrets, now it’s time to move to the next section.

Start with scouting affiliate marketplaces:

An affiliate network (Also known as a marketplace) is the best place to find affiliate products.  On these networks, you will find various affiliate products in different categories. They also show vital stats like EPC, Avg, Sale, Avg. Commission and rating to help you understand how a particular product is working.

The terminology may vary based on different networks, but the fundamentals remain the same. Once you are accepted in once of these top affiliate networks, you will have a ton of options for affiliate products to select from.

ShareASale and Commission Junction should be your two starting points.

If you target any specific geo-location, then you should find a network that caters to your country.

For example, if you are from India, you can use something like vCommission. For U.K. traffic, you can use something like Awin.

Depending on your niche, you can find the best affiliate products to promote.

Here is a screenshot of ShareASale, and notice the stats like “EPC” “Per sale” and rank.

If you are using WordPress, you can use a plugin like ThirstyAffiliates to mask your links. For the web hosting niche, I would recommend that you read our previously published guide on getting started with web hosting affiliates.

Join affiliate programs individually:

Most of the online products have their in-house affiliate programs.  All you need to do is find the hottest selling products in your niche and take the opportunity to market these products. For example, if you run a blog about dogs, you can try to find an affiliate program related to dog food or dog care. Find the companies that are selling such products online, and on their website, you will find the links to the affiliate programs.

Alternatively, you can simply Google “site:domain.com affiliate” or “(product name) + affiliate program.” These are manual searches, of course, but this works in most cases, especially when you are in a niche where it is difficult to find an affiliate product. (An example of this might be something like tattoo designs.)

There is a free chrome addon called Affilitizer, which helps you to quickly find the marketplace where a website has its affiliate program. It has helped me many times to discover the affiliate program of products that I often talk about.

Now, following the above methods, you should be able to find the best products for affiliate marketing.

Before we move to our next chapter on promoting affiliate programs, let’s understand one more concept.

What is a niche affiliate product?

A niche affiliate product refers to any product that is related to your blog topics and would thus interest your readers. If, for example, you write a blog on topics within the health niche, you would want to promote a product related to the niche of your blog, that being the health niche.

My advice for you is to select the hottest selling products in your niche and start writing about them.

This will help you to boost your conversion rate. The difference between successful affiliate campaigns and those that fail are the conversion rates involved. If you’re getting 100 clicks on your affiliate campaign, for instance, but you have a low conversion rate, you need to reassess your strategy.

At times, the product may look good, but people are not buying it or cancel it soon. This way, even after sending traffic, you would end up making no money. If possible, do try products before recommending it.

This helps you not only understand the product better, but it also is time-saving for you and for your audience.

I have often seen bloggers recommending high-end products without even using them or knowing enough about the subject. I recommend that you do not do this. Your credibility as a reviewer would be adversely affected by this practice.  Giving an honest review of a product you have tried and used will increase your credibility and your reliability.

You can either sign up for a free trial of the product if one is available or ask the product owner to give you a review piece. Worst case scenario, you can buy and use the product to come up with an excellent review, either pro or con.

Note: 60% of my affiliate sales come from reviews and tutorials related to products I have used.

When you sign up for any affiliate program, here are some factors which you should consider:

• Available banners
• Promotional matters
• Affiliate control panel
• Minimum payout
• Payment method
• Tax form required or not

These factors will help you to decide if you are ready to promote this particular product. Suppose, for example, that you select a seasonal product, and its minimum payout is $1000. Are you sure you will be able to achieve that much in terms of conversions in that particular season?

Bonus tip: Associating with famous brands will be an added advantage to your affiliate marketing campaign.

Does this post help you to pick the Affiliate products?

How do you decide which products are right for your blog and which are not? Let us know using the comments section below.