How to Choose Profitable Affiliate Programs to Make Money Online

There are several ways to make money online, affiliate marketing is one of the good ways too. Promoting profitable affiliate programs is a good source of online income for Nigerians. Many Nigerians are using this method to make money weekly. You too can. Usually, the main challenge is finding good information about the programs to promote as an affiliate and whether the programs will work for you or not as a Nigerian.

 
In this post, I will examine how you can choose profitable affiliate programs or affiliate products to promote. You should know by now that it is not every affiliate program or product that is worth the time and effort you will put in. In the offline world, it is advised that you first find potential customers and identify their needs then look for products to satisfy their needs. With affiliate marketing, it’s the other way round, you look for profitable, useful, quality, popular products and then you look for who needs them and who can buy the affiliate products you promote. The products you promote should be those related to your blog content. This usually attracts more sales.

 
Let’s look at some of the ways to choose profitable products to promote:

1. Online stores are a good place to start. Almost every online store has an affiliate program that rewards you for marketing their products. To find profitable products to promote, visit these online stores (Jumia, Konga, Amazon, etc), browse through the categories; choose one, then filter by “Best Sellers” or “Popular.” That’s where you want to be looking. You want to be looking at products that people are buying at the moment. Such products usually don’t need much marketing.

 
On the “Best Sellers” page, make sure you look at the review rating and what people are saying about the product. The higher the rating, the better. You will need to click first on the product, then on the review to see what people think about it. Do you need to consider the competition – how many blogs are already promoting the product you want to promote? Type in the product or the general category into Google.com and see the number that will come up. If it is a population you think you’ll be easily found in, then go ahead, if not, start the whole process again until you find a bestseller that has good reviews, pays good commission and has low competition. Don’t forget to signup as an affiliate on the online store and get your affiliate links. You won’t get paid if you promote the products without your own affiliate links.

2. The products/services you use are good to promote. As you progress on your online journey, at several points, you will have to purchase things online – hosting account, domain name, themes, plugins, training, etc. Almost all of these companies that sell the things you need for your online journey have affiliate programs. Most of them pay higher affiliate commissions compared to online stores. Leverage on that.

 

3. Another easy way to help you decide on what affiliate program/product to choose is to look at the blogs of your competitors. They have been around for a while and have been promoting some products for a while. Take a look at their “Sponsors” or “Resources” page to see which products they are affiliating for. An example is the MMONigeria’s partners page. Check out the programs’ site and register as an affiliate for the products.

4. How much commission do they pay? You should choose programs/products that pay a good percentage of commission. The higher the price of a product, the higher the percentage commission is likely to be.

 

5. How long does their site cookie last before a sale is assigned to you? The longer the range (30 days, 60 days etc) the better. This means that if you send a visitor to the product with your affiliate link, the visitor needs to buy the product within 30 days so that the commission can be assigned to you. If the visitor buys several days after the 30 days, you won’t get any commission on that sale.

 

6. Do they have a good support system for affiliates? Don’t sign up for an affiliate program with a bad reputation. If you do, it will just be like you are pouring water into an empty basket.

 
After choosing the affiliate products to promote and you get your affiliate links, don’t spam people with it. Don’t just spread your affiliate links everywhere. You need to market your affiliate products strategically. Get banners to use on your blog, write blog posts about them, recommend the products to those who you know need the product you are affiliating for. And at some point, make sure you run paid adverts for your affiliate links.