Top 10 Affiliate Marketing Programs Recommended for Beginners

If you are in affiliate marketing, particularly if you are a beginner, it is of absolute importance to carefully select affiliate marketing programs you’ll like to work with. Since every affiliate marketer is in the business to earn money by way of commissions, it is imperative to work with the right affiliate programs that are well positioned to help you earn the money. It helps therefore to work with an affiliate program that has the right features and commissions-structure that meets your needs. The following are the top 10 of such programs as recommended by experts.

1. Shopify

Shopify Affiliate Program is an affiliate program that enables affiliates to earn commissions when they refer customers to the Shopify platform. Its most notable features are customizable affiliate links, performance tracking, and promotional resources. These enable affiliates to earn recurring commissions, have free access to marketing materials and with dedicated affiliate support. On Shopify, affiliates can earn over 100% of the customer's first monthly subscription fee or a fixed commission per sale.

2. Amazon Associates

Amazon Associates being one of the largest affiliate marketing programs out there allows affiliates to promote millions of products available on the Amazon platform. Its most notable features are customizable linking options, free access to advertising tools, and performance-based bonuses. On the platform, affiliates have the direct benefits of extensive product selection, trusted brand, reliable tracking and reporting tools. Its commission rates vary depending on the product category, and it ranges from 1% to 10%. Its operating parameters are similar to Strong Future International, SFI, that has millions of affiliates in its network.

3. ShareASale

ShareASale is one very popular affiliate marketing network connecting affiliates with merchants across various industries. Its most notable features include advanced tracking technology, real-time reporting, and customizable affiliate links. As direct benefits to affiliates, ShareASale offers a wide range of merchants and products, easy-to-use platform, and timely payments. Its commission rates vary by merchant and can range from a few percent to over 50%. Its operating parameters are similar to Strong Future International, SFI, that has millions of affiliates in its network.

4. Rakuten Marketing

Rakuten Marketing is a global affiliate marketing network that connects affiliates with thousands of advertisers worldwide. Its most notable features include access to top brands, performance-based incentives, and multilingual support. It offers international reach, diverse advertiser base, reliable tracking and reporting as direct benefits to affiliates in its network. Its commission rates vary by advertiser and can range from 1% to 20% or even more. Its operating parameters are similar to Strong Future International, SFI, that has millions of affiliates in its network.

5. CJ Affiliate

CJ Affiliate program is a leading affiliate marketing network that offers a vast selection of advertisers and products. Its most notable features include deep linking capabilities, performance-based bonuses, and dedicated account managers. It offers to affiliates, direct benefits such as a trusted network, reliable tracking and reporting, access to top-tier advertisers. Its commission rates vary by advertiser and can range from 1% to 50% or more.

6. Awin

Awin is a global affiliate marketing network that connects affiliates with thousands of advertisers across various industries. Its most notable features include deep linking capabilities, performance-based incentives, and dedicated account management. Its main benefits to affiliates include a wide range of advertisers, reliable tracking and reporting, access to exclusive promotions. It offers commission rates that vary by advertiser and can range from 1% to 30% or more.

7. FlexOffers

FlexOffers is an affiliate marketing network that offers a diverse range of advertisers and products. Its most notable features include real-time tracking and reporting, customizable affiliate links, and promotional resources. Its direct benefits to affiliates include extensive product selection, easy-to-use platform, and timely payments. Its commission rates vary by advertiser and can range from 1% to 50% or more.

8. ClickBank

ClickBank is a digital marketplace that offers a wide range of digital products, including e-books, courses, and software. Its most notable features include affiliate marketplace, customizable storefronts, and recurring commission options. It directly benefits affiliates by way of high commission rates, extensive product selection, and user-friendly platform. Its commission rates usually range from 50% to 75% or even higher.

9. eBay Partner Network

eBay Partner Network is an affiliate marketing program that allows affiliates to earn commissions by promoting products listed on the eBay marketplace. Its most notable features include advanced tracking technology, promotional resources, and access to eBay's API. It benefits affiliates by way of extensive product selection, trusted brand and customizable affiliate tools. Its commission rates vary depending on the product category, and it ranges from 1% to 6%.

10. MaxBounty

MaxBounty is a performance-based affiliate marketing network that specializes in CPA (cost-per-action) offers. Its most notable features include CPA offers, dedicated account managers, and weekly payments. Direct benefits of MaxBounty include high payouts, a diverse range of offers, reliable tracking, and reporting. Its commission rates vary depending on the offer. You can have payouts ranging from a few dollars to over $100 per action

How to Choose a Good Email Marketing Service

To choose the best email marketing service that perfectly fits your needs, you must first decide which tasks you wish to tackle with it. The good news is that whichever email marketing service you choose will most likely provide you with a built-in email template builder. Many of the services support custom email templates. What that means is that you can on your own code your HTML, use a template engine or a third-party email template. The choice quite frankly depends on your preferences and your type of business. There are a variety of email management tools on the internet, but marketers have preferences for bulk email software tools, CRM and user management tools and full-fledged marketing automation tools.

  

Marketers greatly depend on some of these tools to help them with creating and setting email campaigns, managing subscribers and tracking marketing results. Many experienced marketers for a variety of reasons like to recommend Mailchimp, Sendgrid, Sendinblue and AWeber from among several of such services online. These services tend to have features that are fairly common with most others. Many of the services provide a similar set of functions for email marketing but each of them has a particular focus. If the service focus tallies with your marketing needs, it is advisable to settle for such service.

Mailchimp: This is an all-in-one marketing platform featuring such very powerful marketing tools like, email campaigns builder, email automation, real-time analytics, marketing CRM, digital ads, website builder and landing pages. It makes both free options and paid subscription options available to marketers.

 

Sendgrid: This service focuses on both email marketers and developers providing email marketing tools and email API. Its main features are, email automation, email design and templates, email statistics, web API and SMTP service, transactional emails and email validation. It features mostly paid options but with a free plan for very small marketing needs.

Sendinblue: This is a bulk email service that prioritizes the interests of both marketers and sales managers. It provides marketers with an advanced analytics dashboard and a robust range of templates for newsletters, transactional emails, and other types of content. Its main features are, email marketing automation, SMS campaigns, live chat features, in-build CRM, subscriber segmentation, in-built templates for newsletters, transactional emails, and other types of messages, sign-up form designer and lots more. It offers both paid and free options to marketers.

AWeber: AWeber is designed for and aims at helping small businesses with simple but powerful email marketing solutions. Its main features are drag and drop and HTML template editors, subscribers’ segmentation, email automation, split testing, sign-up forms, email tracking and analytics. They offer free trial periods and fully paid subscriptions thereafter. 

How to Effectively Grow Your Email List for Free

The dream of every digital marketer is to build a reliable email list. With time, this list becomes a very valuable asset for email marketing campaigns. The bigger the size of the list, the more valuable it is particularly for segmented email-marketing activities. To build this list, marketers must pay special attention to opt-in and opt-out rates. If the opt-in rate is higher than the opt-out rate, the list grows. This means marketers are getting more email subscribers than they are losing. Generally, many marketers always tend to get more subscribers than they are losing. To sustain this, they usually explore many ways to boost their opt-in rates. Many of these ways are simple, free and quite efficient to grow email lists. Here are some of such ways.

Happening Online Events/Activities

The internet is awake, active and alive 24/7. Meaning, there are important events happening online around the clock. You can take advantage of these online events to share your knowledge and better connect with your audience. Doing so presents excellent opportunities for you to invite subscribers to your email list. You can share valuable knowledge by way of eBooks, webinars, conferences, YouTube shows and podcasts. To get these values, you can invite email subscribers to your list as a direct channel to get the values across to them. Your email list grows freely from these efforts.

Regular Auditing of Email Subscribers Lists

The more credible an email list is, the more valuable it is. Even as you strive to get more subscribers, it is also essential to ensure that your older subscribers remain credible and valid. The reason there is a need for regular auditing of the list. That you have a large email list is not sufficient guarantee of email marketing success. A healthy, credible and reliable list is what guarantees that. Auditing your email list regularly helps to remove misspelled or risky email addresses, removes data decay, removes poor-quality contacts, and enhances the deliverability of your email messages.  Removing old and risky data this way, is the best way to ensure your emails are making it to the inbox of your subscribers. That greatly enhances the credibility and reliability of your email list as well as its value. Expert marketers recommend two main ways to handle email data decay and to enhance the credibility of your email list. It is EITHER:

You use an Email Verification Service, EVS, to validate your list in bulk. This helps to scrub bad emails periodically particularly when the list is growing very fast.

OR

You add an Application Programming Interface, API to your Signup Forms. The API helps to verify all of your new subscribers in real time and rejects addresses you don’t want on your list.

Pay Special Attention to Your Signup Forms

This is hugely important as a first very important step to build email list. Before embarking on promotions to get sign-ups on your email list, be sure the sign-up forms are in a very conspicuous place on your landing page where every visitor to your website can easily find them. Use a very attractive and inviting opt-in phrase on the forms. Sign-up forms perform very poorly when they are located in obscure places on your website or their messages are not enticing enough. You can do well to avoid these two scenarios. Sometimes, one sign-up form may not be enough. In that case, you can consider adding a few more, including at the bottom of every blog post you write. All told, always make sure you stick with your promises and send your very best marketing tips according to your schedule. That helps your email deliverability and fosters healthy marketing engagement.

Be Very Active on Social Media

This requires posting very valuable content consistently on social media. The huge popularity of social media is now like a marketing goldmine for digital marketers. If you post valuable content regularly, your friends/followers list grows rapidly. Generally, as organic reach on social media is declining, it is smart for marketers to create a strategy to get more friends/followers on their lists. One very simple and practical way to get that done is to post about your emails consistently on social media. Promise value and be sure to send it. If you do so, many of your friends/followers on social media will always be willing to send their emails to get this value. That’s how the email list grows. As an added tip, always be sure to place a link to your opt-in form on all of your social media profiles. Some of the most popular social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn allow you to do this in your account description on their sites. If you use the space wisely, many social media users can easily find their way onto your email list free.