I’ll be going over my five-step criteria that you should be using to determine if an affiliate marketing program is actually a good fit. This is very important to know the best affiliate marketing programs. A lot of people will just go and join any random affiliate marketing program only to find out they never get paid because
it’s a shady company, or the products as part of that program are really not good and they never make any money. So if you follow these five-step criteria, you will drastically reduce the chances of that happening. After that, I’ll then be going through five different affiliate marketing programs.
Amazon’s Affiliate Program,
ClickBank
JVZoo,
CJ Affiliate,
and another one called AWIN as well.
These are some of the best affiliate Marketing programs out there.
: Affiliate Program Reviews – 5 Step Criteria:
Before we dive into the first affiliate marketing platform, I want to go through this quick high-level overview of my five-step criteria which I am going to use when reviewing the 10 best affiliate marketing platforms. Using this five-step criterion is going to make sure that you don’t spend
loads of time promoting your affiliate links never to get paid, or even worse, end up getting scammed by a shady affiliate platform.
What is my five-step criteria?
1.Well, the first thing I like to look at when reviewing an affiliate platform is the signup process. Now, believe it or not, some platforms have an absolutely convoluted complex signup process, you have to jump through so many hoops, so many hurdles before you even get access to your affiliate links. So reviewing the signup process is a very important aspect of any platform you decide to work with.
2.The second thing we’re going to be taking a look at is how easy the platform is to use. There’s no point in signing up to a platform no matter if it’s short or long, the signup process, only to find out when you get access to the platform it is really difficult to use: you can’t find any offers, you
can’t find your affiliate links, it’s really old and outdated. That’s also a really important thing to review.
3.The third thing we’re going to look at is going to be the range of products the platform actually has on offer; so, products you can actually promote. Some platforms literally have less than 100 products, and if you are working in one specific niche, then it might be unlikely that they have
the product you can promote. I’ll be going over all the product ranges for all of the 10 best platforms out there.
4. the fourth thing we are going to review is the commissions and the payments. Here we are going to review how much commissions each of these platforms actually pay, along with their payment terms, payment terms relating to how soon do they actually pay you for the money you’ve earned, as no one wants to spend months or months promoting someone else’s products to then wait more months just to receive the payment. And by the way, it’s pretty much standard to wait between 30 to 60 days to receive payment; however, there are a lot of platforms that will give you payment sooner than that, some even on a weekly or biweekly basis.
So that’s a very important thing to consider as well when determining what platform you want to go for.
5.The fifth and final thing we’re going to be taking a look at is essentially a high-level overview of the pros and cons of each platform. Once again, that is going to help you make the best decision and move forward with the best platform for your specific needs. And of course, finally,
at the end, it isn’t really part of my five-step criteria, but I’ll be giving you a summary and my verdict on what I think of the platform.
The Best affiliate Marketing programs in 2024
Program 1 – Amazon Affiliate:
Amazon is one of the most popular affiliates marketing programs out there by far. There are literally so many people promoting Amazon via affiliate links, especially people who own websites. By the way the Amazon Affiliate program is referred to as Amazon Associates.
They used to have a really bad reputation for being about as clear as mud on their policies. They are sometimes hard to understand and hard to deal with. There are lots of reports about Amazon randomly banning people’s accounts for literally no reason under the sun. However, in
recent years, they have seemed to got a lot better which is why they are still featured on this list, as one of the best affiliate marketing programs which by the way is not in any particular order. So let’s take a look at the signup process.
To sign up to Amazon Associates you need to go to this URL, Or alternatively, you can literally just go over to Google and carry out a search for Amazon Affiliate sign-up, and then the website you see at the top, once you click it, it will take you to the signup page.
Program 2 – ClickBank:
ClickBank has been around for a very, very long time. since 1998, which actually makes ClickBank one of the oldest affiliate marketing networks out there. It was actually set up by three friends and it was a garage startup, believe it or not, and now it’s doing over $1 million in revenue. So it’s done very, well.
ClickBank is a little bit different from most other affiliate programs, mainly because it focuses primarily on digital products. It’s predominantly a marketplace for digital content creators,
But essentially, if you want to promote digital products, courses, eBooks, that type of stuff, ClickBank is going to be a great option for you.
ClickBank is a legitimate platform and it is indeed one of the best affiliate marketing programs
The signup process for ClickBank is very straightforward. It’s actually one of the easiest signup processes in comparison to the other affiliate platforms. You can literally see all you need to do is enter in the country your are from, first last name, phone number, email, create a password
for your account, and that is pretty much it. You literally just sign up, and then once you sign up you’ll get access to
your main ClickBank dashboard, which is this one right here.
So what is my final verdict on ClickBank? Well, it is a solid platform for beginners, especially if you want to focus on digital products.
Program 3 – JV Zoo:
JVZoo has been around since 2011. What’s actually interesting about this company is, that they claim that the reason why they launched their affiliate platform is that, at the time, in 2011, digital to marketing was, apparently, going downhill fast. Now, I will have to agree with them a little bit, because at that time, it was literally just ClickBank dominating the affiliate marketing scene. Literally, every time you saw an affiliate promote a platform or a product, it was a product or an offer that was on ClickBank. The whole market was absolutely spammed with ClickBank products. JVZoo entered the scene, and they planned to make a change. What did they do? They became one of ClickBank’s most direct competitors. Since
then, they have grown in size, and has become a really big platform. have over 800,000 active affiliates, What’s actually really interesting about JVZoo is, no one actually knows what JVZoo stands for. A lot of people have this theory of JV standing for joint venture, so, joint venture zoo.
The signup process on JVZoo is really straightforward. It’s definitely one of the simplest signup processes out there,
Essentially, all you need to do is put in your name, and email password, confirm your password, and select the country where you reside. Click register, an email will then be sent to your email address. You simply want to log into your email, and verify, that will take you back to step three on the JVZoo signup page, where you are going to select a method to get paid.
Program 4 – CJ Affiliate:
CJ Affiliate, they’re actually rebranded in 2014 to CJ Affiliate by Conversant. . The network was originally founded in 1998 and they work with some pretty, big companies. So if you’re looking to promote big offers from big companies, then it’s very likely you’re going to find a lot of good offers on this platform. So let’s take a look at the signup process. Well, I have to be honest, the signup process is not as straightforward as it
used to be. There is literally so many steps to it.
However, it is definitely worth investing the time to sign up. As I said, there are lots of big brands on this platform. So the first step of the signup process is just selecting your language, your country email, creating your password and you verify your email straight after, sounds
straightforward. And then once you do that, you then have to go through this seven-step checklist. So to give you an idea of what those seven steps are, the
first is validating your email. You then want to enter in your user information, your name, address, phone number, . And then after that, you need to complete your network profile. So essentially all you need to do here is let them know how you plan on promoting the Affiliate links. Is it SEO, or
email marketing, or maybe you’re going to do social media campaigns? You have to let them know that upfront before you apply to any of the offers or before you even get access to the platform, I should say. And then after that, you have to let them know you are promotional
property. So again, if you are promoting these Affiliate links via your website, and you have to let them know your website URL, after that, you then need to submit your company details and any tax forms that are applicable to your company. And then finally in step seven, you need to
provide them with your payment information.
Program 5 – AWIN:
Awin who is another solid affiliate marketing network. These guys have been around for over 20 years now, so they’re not any new company by any stretch of means. They are a small niche-focused platform. They don’t have offers in every single niche out there. The main niches are finance, insurance, retail, shopping, tele services, and travel. However, although they just focus in these specific niches, they work with some of the biggest brands in the world. Now, when I say biggest brands, I mean internationally. Awin actually have offices in 15 different countries worldwide. They have over 1,000 employees and they work with over 225,000 publishers so that would be affiliates. And they work with 16,500 different brands. So
this is a big, big platform. And to give all of those numbers some context, these guys generated 10.8 billion pounds in revenue in the most recent financial year.
And out of that 10.8 billion, well, 819 million pounds of that was for affiliates. So now we’ve got those numbers and the background out of the way, let’s go ahead and take a look at the signup process. So the first step of the signup process like pretty much every other affiliate platform is
to go ahead and give them your account details, company name, what country you reside in for your tax purposes, first name, last name, email, and just confirm your email. You want to then let them know how you planned on promoting any affiliate offers. So, is it search, or email marketing? That type of stuff. In step three, you then need to let them know where you are going to promote those offers, and then once you’ve done that, your account will be verified.