What Are the Best Affiliate Networks?
Now that you know what to look for when choosing a network, here are our picks for the best affiliate networks to join this year.
1. Shareasale
Shareasale is a massive affiliate network with over 3,900 merchants and 1 million+ affiliates. They’ve been in business for 19 years and are a leader in the industry. Some of their top verticals to promote include fashion, home and garden, food and drink, and B2B. But there are plenty more.
Additionally, they provide great features, including affiliate marketing classes, training webinars, merchant recommendations, and marketing tools to help you grow your revenue.
Their platform is also reliable on the technology front. Specifically, the Shareasale platform provides easy access to affiliate links, reporting tools, and pride themselves on transparency, speed, efficiency, and accuracy.
If you’re starting and want to get your toes wet in affiliate marketing, we recommend you join Shareasale as an affiliate first.
And if you’re a merchant looking for affiliates to promote your products, you can sign up as a merchant.
2. CJ by Conversant
CJ by Conversant (formerly Commission Junction) is an affiliate network that has been in the industry for 20 years. They process an incredible $15 billion in annual sales through their platform, with $1.8 billion paid out annually to their affiliates.
If you’re looking to partner with some of the world’s biggest brands, becoming a CJ affiliate is a great choice. Brands like Overstock, Priceline, GoPro, Lowes, and Office Depot are just some of the merchants you can partner with on CJ.
On the publisher’s side, they partner with huge brands like CNN, Time, Digg, and Buzzfeed. With this stiff competition, one drawback is that it can be difficult for new affiliates to get approved to work with larger merchants. You’ll have to get creative with your email outreach to work with them.
However, with their free and easy set-up, excellent real-time reporting, and reliable monthly payments, CJ is a great platform to join.
If you are a seasoned affiliate and want to work with some of the world’s largest brands, join CJ by Conversant (formerly Commission Junction).
3. PartnerStack
If you’re promoting digital softwares, especially in the B2B space, you’ll surely love PartnerStack.
Once you get your affiliate account you can promote software products across different categories like sales, marketing, accounting, development, productivity, social media, etc.
As an affiliate of PartnerStack, we can tell that it has the most enjoyable interface that we’ve ever encountered with any affiliate marketplace. There is a threshold of $25.00 for you to withdraw the commissions you have earned on the platform and the money can be transferred either via PayPal or Stripe directly to your bank account.
The only downside of PartnerStack we’ve noticed so far is a fairly limited number of software providers on their platform but we’re sure that it will grow significantly over time.
4. Impact
Impact is one of the younger affiliate networks on this list. The company was founded in 2008 by former employees of Commission Junction, Savings.com, and Leadpoint.
At the time of writing, there are more than 1,000 merchants in Impact’s network. As with Commission Junction, there’s a diverse array of merchants that should fit most verticals.
The application process to join Impact can be a little bit harder than it is for CJ, but once in, I’ve found it easier to get accepted by the merchants.
I think Impact’s reporting and postback options are much more flexible than those with the other affiliate programs. If a merchant uses multiple affiliate networks (which is common), I always use Impact first.
5. Skimlinks
Some affiliates want to just monetize content with little effort and that’s where Skimlinks comes in.
Skimlinks will insert affiliate links automatically on your blog posts either via a WordPress plugin or with an additional script placed in Google Tag Manager.
If you’re looking for an effortless way to monetize with affiliate links, Skimlinks is the way to do it. For content that’s created without your involvement (such as a forum), this might be a truly interesting option.
It’s also worth mentioning that you can also insert links manually if you wish so. Skimlinks currently works with more than 24,000 merchants in a wide range of niche markets. We recommend you sign up for this one if you’ve already signed up for the major networks mentioned above.
Some other notable mentions are Awin, Impact, Avangate, Viglink, Pepperjam, and Clickbank. If you’re in the B2C consumer product niche, Clickbank provides a marketplace to promote products from a wide range of industries like food, health, fitness, nutrition, home and garden, and more.
0 Comments