How To Find Affiliate Programs That Are Relevant To You?

76% of affiliate marketers fail to generate passive income from affiliate marketing just because they cannot identify the right product and brand to promote. Finding legit affiliate programs that are relevant to you is important, not just because you don’t want to fail at it in the first place, but also because the market is fiercely competitive.

Less than 10% of affiliate marketers drive almost 90% of all the conversions and sales! Isn’t that overwhelming?

If you want to get somewhere with affiliate marketing, you need to find affiliate programs that are relevant to you first. You need to filter programs based on verticals, and niches.

Verticals in the affiliate marketing world are narrow market segments encompassing a group of businesses and their target customers who are all interrelated around a very specific niche. Read more about Affiliate Marketing Verticals here.

Why Should You Choose A Program That’s Relevant To You?

If you want to make money with affiliate marketing, there’s no point in spinning the wheels without any proper purpose or direction.

If you have a blog or website, or a YouTube channel, it means you have a very specific group of followers with common interests, unless it is a very BIG website like Amazon. Your audience might consist of people who share a hobby (e.g. gardening), root for a specific sports team or are sports fans of diverse teams and nations or even people who have a taste for music.

Unless you are creating relevant content and sending recommendations based on their interest, you cannot own your audience and generate passive income from your website.

This might result in three things.

1. Your followers will lose interest in your site.

2. You will lose traffic, both fresh and repeat visits included.

3. You will gradually lose interest in affiliate marketing.

However, if you can promote the right brands and products and bring a lot of verticalized experience to the table, you will be able to get a slice of the BIG pie named affiliate marketing.

Here on Affko.com, you can browse and choose from thousands of affiliate programs. You can easily search and sort affiliate programs based on affiliate verticals, payment models, and even affiliate marketing platforms. Simply use our drop-down lists to narrow down your search by vertical.

Or by payment model

Alternatively, you can also do your own research to find affiliate programs that are relevant to you by following these tips:

Start With A Google Search

The easiest and most straightforward way to find affiliate programs that are relevant to you is to look up the biggest search site in the world – Google. You can simply search with ‘your vertical+affiliate programs’ or ‘brand name+affiliate program’ and Google will show you the top relevant results for your search within a second.

Affiliate Networks And Directories

Affiliate networks or platforms are affiliate marketplaces that bridge the gap between merchants and publishers or affiliate marketers. You need to sign up with a network/platform as a publisher and browse the merchants. You can narrow down your search and find the best merchants which are relevant to you.

You don’t need to sign up with affiliate directories like ours, as you can browse the complete list of programs and filter your search as a guest. The biggest advantage of using an affiliate directory is that you can read more about each affiliate program, compare commission rates, commission models, minimum payment thresholds and much more without signing up and without paying a single penny.

Affiliates Advertisements

Another easy way to find affiliate programs that are relevant to you is through advertisements placed by websites similar to yours. You can use the Competitor Analysis tools of Ahrefs or SEMRush to get a direct list of top websites you can use.

What Do You Need To Check Before Joining An Affiliate Program Relevant To You?

Finding relevant and legit affiliate programs starts with evaluating affiliate programs. Whether an affiliate program is right for you or not is determined by its commission rates, the payment threshold, merchant’s reputation and market share, quality of affiliate support, plus a lot many other factors. You need to check a couple of things before signing up for a program that’s relevant to you. Here’s how you can evaluate affiliate programs that seem relevant to you.

What Products Or Services Do They Offer?

This will give you a clear idea of whether the brand or the website is relevant to yours. If they are selling musical instruments, and your blog is all about music, it’s a natural choice for you as your audience will find it easy to locate and compare products that are closer to their interest.

Secondly, you need to check whether the brand offers more than a few products. If the company or the merchant sells a lot of products that are related to each other, you can create various pieces of relevant content for your audience.

How Old Is The Company?

If the company has been around for quite a few years, it simply means that a lot of people have either heard about the company or have used their products and services before. This makes it easier for you to tell people about the company as your recommendations resonate with their personal, and even collective experiences.

The Affiliate Program Details

Lastly but most importantly, you need to know the finer details of the affiliate programs – the commission rates offered by different merchants, the commission models they follow, their affiliate support details and how to sign up for each of the programs. You can find an extensive list of affiliate programs here and compare all these factors.

How To Narrow Down Your Search Results?

Finding relevant brands and affiliate programs is undoubtedly the most challenging aspect of market research for most affiliate marketers.

You may be able to find programs under a broad vertical easily, but finding programs that precisely matches your niche is a different ballgame altogether.

If you want to find a brand that’s relevant to your niche, you need to do some serious research to get audience insights. You may use a site like Quantcast to get audience insights.

Simply ‘Explore’ the top Top 100 sites on the internet using Quantcast. Of course, the list would comprise of some of the biggest names like Google and Facebook. But if you take a deeper dive and go to the third or fourth page of search results, you will be able to find brands that are relevant to your niche.

You can also use Quora and social media networking sites to find brands that are relevant to you.

Final Thoughts

When people talk about affiliate marketing, they generally describe it as earning money for jam. You might get the impression that making tons of money with affiliate marketing is as easy as falling off a log, which is NOT TRUE AT ALL.

Making a living solely on affiliate marketing is anything but easy.

You can’t just earn money while sleeping like Warren Buffett. Start your journey as an affiliate marketer by brainstorming and researching. First, find programs that are relevant to you by using Affko.com search filters. Next, take a deeper dive and find programs that exactly match your niche. After that, compare commission rates, merchant reputation, know more about the programs and make a decision.

If you can find programs that are relevant to you and give your time and effort, you can gradually work your way to the top and Be A Super Affiliate!