How many affiliate programs do you need?

byAnaris

99 followers

5 years ago

So when I went through the lesson on affiliate programs and later went to explore what there was out there, it got me thinking: How many affiliate programs should I join? How many did I need? I thought that some of these would be a bit tricky to define so I put together answers to some considerations which I thought would help people out and also better order my thoughts.

How many affiliate programs should I join?

I think the long answer to this question is: It depends. This is a case where more isn't necessarily better. A lot of us are on Amazon and eBay and for the most part, it covers a plethora of products and services which we are blogging about.

For those who want to expand our coverage in the sense of comissions or variety in the case that Amazon does not carry a particular product, a few more affiliate programs would make sense. However, and even in the case of Amazon, we have to achieve a number of qualifying sales within the first 3 months or we risk getting dropped.

I think you can see where I am going with this. Join too many affiliate programs and we may not be able to sustain them all and might end up getting dropped for more than a few. Aside from that being a bit disheartening and slightly troublesome having to reapply, the existing affiliate links on your posts are now invalid in the sense that you no longer earn any commission from them.

To conclude, I would say to join as many as is necessary to cover what you wish to blog about. Awin is another good option as it has a very decent coverage. It's not the same as eBay or Amazon as it does not carry individual products but acts as a platform for organisations to work directly with affiliates. In my experience, account and marketing managers in charge of these organisations' presence on Awin are very friendly and approachable, being able to provide customised product feeds, individual product images and inform us publishers (that's what they call us) of new product launches.

Why was I was rejected from joining an affiliate program?

This is part speculation as I think only the account manager or company in charge of an organisation's affiliate program (I learned that many organisations often outsource their affiliate programs rather than manage them in-house) would be able to give an honest answer. I myself was rejected from etsy which was really unfortunate as I thought of a good way to feaure some handcrafted items.

If you did experience this, don't give up. There really are tons of affiliate programs out there and even if one does not work out, think about what you are blogging about or reviewing and there will be a different angle for you to approach it. Your new thoughts should point you in the direction of another organisation for which you can find an affiliate program.

In conclusion...

Give it some time and celebrate your little successes. I myself am only a month in and have yet to see any conversion. However, being a blogger and actually owning and writing for a website has opened other doors for me and hopefully opportunities in time to come. I'll leave it as that for now and many expand on that in another post.

Thank you for your time and I wish everyone all the best!

Jaron