Last week I showed you how to pick the perfect domain name for your affiliate website.
Today, I want to show you 5 methods on how to find affiliate programs in your niche (no matter what niche you’re in).
As you may know, affiliate programs are one of the many ways to “monetize” the content you’ve created on your website, social media channel, or any other medium you prefer to use.
They allow you to promote products in your content and you get paid commissions whenever someone buys a product through your affiliate links.
If you’re for some reason struggling to find these programs, I’m sure after reading my post you’ll have a good understanding of where to find them.
Let’s get started.
5 Ways To Find Affiliate Programs In Any Niche
01 – Google Search
Google is your best friend when it comes to finding affiliate programs.
The method is as simple as:
- Open Google (or some other search engine)
- Search for “your niche + affiliate program“
- Find online stores/services with affiliate programs
NB: You can type “brand name + affiliate program” to see if a specific company has an affiliate program.
Now let’s see how this method works in practice.
Here’s what comes up when I search for “vacuum cleaner + affiliate program“:
As you can see, there are many online stores related to vacuum cleaners with affiliate programs.
If you had a website about cleaning, you could join any of those programs and start promoting their products for commissions.
Although, I recommend doing some research first to figure out what would be the most reliable and trustworthy companies to affiliate with (this comes down to knowing your own niche).
How would you apply to join their affiliate program?
This happens through their “affiliate page”.
Most of the time, you can find it at the bottom of their website called the “footer” section.
Here you can find the affiliate page for most sites:
And here’s how the affiliate page looks like for one of the vacuum cleaner sites I found earlier:
On this page, you’d also see what commission rates they pay and if they have any requirements for their affiliates.
Some companies may require you to have an already established website with traffic before they accept you (& some do not care).
When you apply to join, you’ll also find out whether the company has:
- “In-house” affiliate program — or if they’re part of a;
- Third-party affiliate network.
The vacuum cleaner site example above is part of an affiliate network called ShareASale as you can see.
It means they let ShareASale handle payments, analytics, & tools, etc.
I’ll explain affiliate networks in more detail further below.
The applying process can also vary between companies, most of the time you have to fill a form where they ask for basic information about you (& possibly about your website).
Also, the approval process can be either automatic or manual.
02 – Analyzing Competitors
Another great way to find new ways to monetize your website is to look at your competitors and see what affiliate programs they’re promoting.
All you need to do is:
- Find 3-5 competitors in your niche (or as many as you want)
- See if they have “money” pages on their navigation menu (buyer’s guides, resources, recommended gear, etc)
- Look at what affiliate programs they’re promoting and apply to them.
Now, let’s see how this works in practice.
How do you find competitors in your niche?
Google is our best friend yet again.
There are a few ways to go about this, and I’d recommend doing a search using these queries:
- “Your niche + blog“
- “Your niche + review“
- “Best [product name] review“
You will very likely see some big authority sites (depending on your niche), and I would just ignore those because they rarely have dedicated “money” pages.
You want to find smaller affiliate websites (independent bloggers) because they often have these “money” pages.
Here’s an example of finding competitors:
Once you have found some competing affiliate websites, it’s time to look at what they are promoting.
You’ll want to look at their navigation menu and see if there are any buyer’s guides, recommendations, resources, etc.
For example, here’s one “money” page I found called “Popular Shoes”:
This guy is promoting a huge list of basketball shoes and one of the shoes has 7 affiliate links all pointing to different stores:
If you have a basketball site, you could join all of those 7 affiliate programs and start promoting their product selection on your website.
I hope you can now see how this can become a gold mine of finding affiliate programs.
03 – Join Affiliate Networks
In a nutshell, affiliate networks are middlemen between affiliates (you) and merchants (product creators).
These networks have many affiliate programs under one single platform, and affiliates like you can then join and find thousands of products to promote.
I’d say it’s hard to not find an affiliate program related to your niche in affiliate networks (whatever it may be).
Joining affiliate networks comes with many benefits too:
- Products to promote in almost every niche
- No need to apply for multiple affiliate programs
- Analytics & tools for best selling products
- Payment safety for affiliates
- & everything is simply in one place.
Most of these popular networks are also free to join, so you can join all of them and see if you can find something worthy of promoting.
Some popular affiliate networks are:
04 – Amazon Associates
This one is not really a way to find affiliate programs, but it’s a way for you to find products to promote.
Amazon Associates is the affiliate program of Amazon (the popular online store) and they have over 12 million products you could promote.
Needless to say, the sheer number of products cover almost every imaginable niche out there.
They don’t pay the highest commissions, but people trust buying from Amazon and you also get compensated for other items in the customer’s cart.
It’s a great place to start for aspiring new affiliates.
05 – Affiliate Program Search Tool
Now this one is a bit different and something you probably haven’t heard about.
It’s a free tool inside the WA platform that allows you to search affiliate programs around the web.
It can even search affiliate programs from all the popular affiliate networks, summarize all key details, and then others can give ratings and feedback regarding the affiliate program.
It’s a completely free tool, and only requires a WA account which you can register for free with an email address.
Do You Need Help With Your Affiliate Website?
There you go.
You should now have a good idea of how to find affiliate programs in your niche.
Before you go, I want to ask; do you need help with your affiliate website?
I know it can be tough to figure out things on your own, so I would like to invite you to try this free 10-day video training course on affiliate marketing.
It’s the same course I have used to build my small portfolio of affiliate websites since 2018 and I highly recommend it if that sounds interesting to you.
Thanks for reading my post and feel free to leave comments below.
Talk soon.
