What is an Affiliate Network in 2023?
There is so much going on in the affiliate marketplace right now, with so many companies and businesses all searching for new routes to market their goods and services.
So what is an Affiliate Network, where do you find them, what do they do, how do they fit in and how do you make money from them?
There is a lot to discover if you are new to affiliate marketing, so in this article, I will lead you through the weeds of the affiliate marketplace and give you a top-level insight into Affiliate Networks and hopefully some of the answers you are looking for.
What is an Affiliate Network?
To try to explain this try to think of a market that you visit in your local town.
When you get there you see a large array of stall holders all selling different products, vegetables, meat, shoes, clothes, household goods and so on.
Some stall holders are selling the same thing for example shoes and boots, so those that are selling the same type of product are all vying for your attention with offers and promotions.
An Affiliate Network is the same except you find it online and not in your high street.
You search for and find an affiliate network online and (probably after you sign up) you are presented with a page where there can be literally hundreds of companies and businesses (like market stall holders) all trying to sell their products.
But this is where the market in your local town differs from an Affiliate Network.
Instead of you parting with money to buy a product the companies and businesses you see will offer you money, in the form of a commission in exchange for promoting or selling their products for them.
Reasons To Understand Affiliate Networks
There are many reasons why you should understand Affiliate Networks, the least of which is that they all exist for you to make money. So why are they so important to affiliate marketers?
Because they:-
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- Simplify Searching
- Have Many Offers in One Place
- Often Have Pre Made Marketing Materials
- Have a Wide Choice of Niches
- Are Usually Easy to Start Promoting a Product
The list above gives some of the main reasons why getting to grips with affiliate networks, is a great skill to acquire for yourself.
The simple fact is that if you had to go searching around to find offers you would probably never get a campaign started!!
Let’s look then at the steps to take in order to start getting the most out of an affiliate network.
Step-by-Step to Using Affiliate Networks
Before I take you through some of the basic steps on using affiliate networks, it is worth you taking a moment or two to consider what is your niche, what products do you want to promote within that niche and what is your goal.
This might be just a part-time thing you want to do, or it might be something you want to eventually replace your job with, either way, I want to tell you the truth.
There are shed loads of ‘gurus’ on the internet telling you how easy it is to make staggering sums of money on a daily, weekly or monthly basis and how easy it is to do using Affiliate Marketing. 
The reality is that you will need to find the time to do a lot of learning, plenty of research, have a good degree of patience and most likely some spare cash to achieve any form of success.
Sorry folks, there is no such thing as a free lunch, so if you have been told it only takes 5 minutes a day to earn $10,000 a month it just ain’t true, you will need to spend some serious time, especially when starting to reach those kind of numbers.
That said, the journey to becoming an affiliate marketer is a great way to earn some extra cash and a really fulfilling and enjoyable way to earn a living.
So, let’s get at it!
Here are the steps we are going to go through:-
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- What is Your Niche?
- What Products Would You Like to Promote?
- Do You Have Expertise In a Certain Area?
- What Leverage Do You Already Have?
- Finding the Right Network
- Picking a Product to Promote
- Preparing Your Campaign
- Starting Your Promotion/Campaign
- Analysing Your Results
- Scaling Up
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What is Your Niche?
I have to say first I am not a big fan of the word niche as It sometimes makes you think too narrowly, we all have skills and life experiences that we can use in our affiliate marketing efforts and we should make the most of all of them.
It might well be the case that you have the expertise or deep knowledge in a number of subjects, so when choosing what market you want to be in don’t necessarily think that you can only do one.
Don’t limit yourself to only thinking in one area, there are so many for you to go at that you might surprise yourself by thinking a little laterally.
What Products Would You Like to Promote?
As mentioned above some lateral thinking here might well be the order of the day. There are many folks online who would have you believe that you should only promote the things you like.
The thinking is that if you are interested in a topic then you will approach your work with more enthusiasm.
In my experience, this is not always the case, I have a number of failed websites and online shops to prove it too!!
So take your time to think through what you want to promote, and remember just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean that a product isn’t going to make money.
Do you Have Experience or Expertise in a Certain Area?
If you have previous experience working in a particular industry, or perhaps a long-time hobby where you have a lot of knowledge on a subject then this might be somewhere to start.
Ask yourself, can you turn your hobby or job experience into a business? If you don’t think that’s possible, don’t panic!
As you do your research on Affiliate Networks you will come across something that you can promote.
This may mean more learning but you will benefit hugely from learning all there is to know about the markets you choose to promote.
What Leverage Do You Already Have?
What do I mean by leverage? Well, if you have tried any form of online marketing or retailing before, you might have a good email list that you can ‘leverage’ to your advantage.
You also might have some good contacts in the industry, consider if you can reach out to them for any advice or help you need. 
In other words, use all the tools that are available to you.
If you don’t have any of these things, don’t worry.
We all have to start somewhere and you can build your marketing tools and email portfolios as you go along.
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Finding the Right Network
Affiliate networks can be, at first, extremely confusing and cluttered places to understand.
You just need to take your time looking around them, click on a few offers, and get to understand how offers work and what they offer in terms of payouts and marketing tools.
It is probably true to say that there is no right answer to finding the right Affiliate Network and I don’t mean that in a negative sense.
Rather, you are looking for one that has good quality offers in your chosen product area, that you feel you can promote and make some money from.
Also, one that you are comfortable with as far as things like payment frequency and type that fit your personal requirements.
In no particular order here are some affiliate networks for you to look up and maybe get started with.
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- ClickBank
- OfferVault
- Share a Sale
- FlexOffers
- MaxBounty
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Picking a Product to Promote
Ok, so you have spent a few hours searching out an affiliate network that you feel you can work with. So now it’s time to choose a product, but there are so many which one do I choose?
Tricky question! There are a lot of variables that you might want to consider before taking the plunge with your first product.
Will you be using Free/Organic traffic or paid traffic, or a mixture of both? Is the payout right for you? (just because a product has a huge payout, doesn’t make it easy to promote).
Does the product have some ready-made marketing materials, like landing pages and email templates? (these can be really helpful when you are starting out).
Suffice it to say, take your time do some research on the competitiveness of the product you are considering.
Use social media and Google and try to find out how your potential competitors are promoting the product.
Better still pick a product with early potential and not too much competition!!
Preparing Your Campaign
Next then on the list then is getting ready to launch your campaign. Sorry to say that this, when you are new to affiliate marketing may take a while.
It is vitally important that during your preparations you know where, how and to whom you will be promoting your product.
For example, there is no point in spending hours creating a fabulous-looking advert if it appeals to the under 25’s and your product market is primarily for people aged 50+.
This might seem obvious, but I have seen many great ads that simply don’t work or gain any traction in sales because they simply don’t have the right audience attention.
So, once again research is the key here, take time to understand the market you are entering and how it is best accessed.
Also, consider where you are promoting your product.
Certain GEOs (Geographical Areas/Countries/States) just won’t be right for your product, so don’t waste time, energy and money trying to promote in an area that has no relevance to your product.
You will need to prepare adverts if the product does not supply them for you, or you might just prefer to create your own.
When doing this make sure they comply with the conditions of the offer you are promoting.
Which types of advert you make will depend on where you are marketing your product.
If you just need static text, pictures and graphics then consider using something like Canva to design and save your ads.
If you are considering places like YouTube or TikTok, then clearly you will need to think about how you will put your videos together.
Do the best you can to make them as professional as possible, shoot the video with appropriate backgrounds and pay attention to the script details.
For Facebook and Twitter, you can use both static and video ads.
Whichever method or platform you use, remember that on all these platforms there are rules surrounding adverts.
Be sure to post only stuff that won’t be taken down five minutes later, or rejected outright in the first place!
If you are not great or have a flair for the design you can use something like Fiverr.
Fiverr is a great place for you to get videos, ads, scripts and all sorts of stuff done for you for as little as a few bucks.
Starting Your Campaign/Promotion
Having chosen your product, researched the competition, and made a rocking advert it’s time to start your campaign/promotion.
Where do I start? Fair point.
Earlier in this piece I referred to organic or paid traffic. Where you start your campaign will largely be determined by your choice of organic or paid.
I won’t beat about the bush here. If you choose to start with just organic traffic (mostly because it is free), then it is going to take some time for any truly measurable results to manifest themselves.
If you have picked your product well and your ad copy is good then organic traffic is always worthwhile for long-term goals.
Organic traffic sources could be:- Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, Linkedin, Search Engines, Email, Reddit and others.
As you can see there is a lot to go at, and all these accounts need to be managed to check progress and change your ads if the one you posted isn’t bringing in any traffic or results.
The effort you put in here is well worth it.
Free traffic to your website or landing pages is worth a lot, as it builds confidence and trust from your visitors, who, with a bit of luck will keep returning to check out your new offers.
If you want to get instant traffic to you your website to promote your product then you will need to turn to paid traffic and probably use an Ad Network.
You will need to consider though, how much cash you are willing to part with if you use this route.
Paid traffic is mostly delivered in the form of push notifications to desktops, mobiles and tablets, but can also be bought as static ads that are placed on relevant websites that accept such adverts.
There are several different types of push adverts like pop-ups or pop-unders, as well as other styles for your ads.
Ad Networks are available in abundance online, and all have a different minimum deposit to get your account with them opened.
The deposit will usually range from $50 to $200, once that is used up you will need to add to your balance to keep the traffic flowing!
Learning how Ad Networks work can be an expensive business, so be sure to read my post here to familiarise yourself with how they work.
Analysing Your Results
When you are running a campaign or promotion for a product it is vital that you are able to see what is happening with the traffic to your website, track page visits, conversions and so on.
If you use organic traffic to get going then you will need a platform like Google Analytics to track what is happening with your website.
There are other choices to track traffic but Google is free to use and they are in the process of migrating to GA4, their new analytics platform.
There is a lot of data for you to view and it might be a bit confusing at first but there are plenty of video and blog tutorials out there to help you understand it all.
If you have chosen the paid traffic route then the ad network you signed up with will have in-depth reporting features that help you to analyse what’s going on with your ads.
It will tell you for instance which of your ads is performing best which tells you which one to scale up and which ones to stop and not waste any more money on.
However you track your data it’s a really important part of Affiliate Marketing, and should definitely be a skill you acquire as soon as possible, it will save you truckloads of time and ultimately money to do so.
Scaling Up
It may well take a few products and some incredibly steep learning curves to get your first product promotion to really gain traction and start to produce real results.
But, once you have mastered the basics and you are starting to see some sales or sign-ups or whatever you are driving your traffic to, then you need to get busy scaling up your promotion.
So what is Scaling Up?
Scaling up is the phrase most often used to describe the action of really pushing your promotion to its maximum potential.
In the organic traffic space, this means fresh ads and more exposure on the platforms you are using to drive traffic to your website.
Stronger calls to action and plenty of offer variations will entice more people to visit your offer page.
For paid traffic Scaling Up essentially means spending more money.
Once you have identified your best-performing ads using the data you get, you shut down the least profitable and direct your money and efforts into the one(s) that are really working well.
Other Considerations
There are some other things that you will definitely want to consider and take action on as part of your affiliate journey.
They are, Registering a Domain Name, Web Hosting, Website Builders, Website Themes, Landing Pages, Ad Networks, Data Trackers, Mailing Lists, and last but by no means least a little creative thinking!
All of the above items are what you might describe as the basic tool kit or tech stack required for you to become an affiliate marketer in 2023. click the links to see my other posts for more information.
Taking it to the Next Level
As mentioned at the top of this post, this has been a top-level view of Affiliate Networks, a base on which you can gain some confidence in what it takes to get started. 
Cranking it up a notch or two will need further time and research to explore how best to increase traffic, get more clicks on your ads and ultimately more sales and money.
Building your mailing list is a must-do, as is getting creative with your ads and not being afraid to try different approaches.
Alternatives Approaches
I have just shown you how it is possible with a deal of effort and time to get started with Affiliate Networks, but it must be said it’s not the only way to get involved.
With so many companies and businesses now running affiliate programs, there are opportunities everywhere.
Particularly if you have an in-depth knowledge of a market.
For example, if you are an avid sports fan you can find companies such as Under Armour, Enigma Fishing, and Go Pro to name but a few who all have their own affiliate programs that you can join directly without the use of an Affiliate Network.
Once you have completed an application and been accepted to the program you can promote the company’s products (within the bounds of their contract terms and conditions) and get paid a commission for each sale or referral whichever is applicable.
Essentially if you want to concentrate on just one or two companies and not get swamped with too many offers on Affiliate Networks then this could be the game for you.
Wrapping Up Affiliate Networks
It has only been a relatively short timeframe that Affiliate Marketing has really come to the fore of what is achievable in online sales and marketing.
Although the format has been around for over 20 years and Affiliate Networks like ClickBank appeared around 1998, it is really only in the last 10 years that it has really established itself as a lead contender in online earnings.
In all, I would say that it has the potential to grow exponentially over the next ten years. According to research by demandsage.com the estimated global spend from Affiliate Marketing will be $13 Billion, yes BILLION in 2023.
This tells me that the industry is in a strong position to accommodate you and anyone else who wishes to get involved and certainly make some money if you are prepared to put in the time and effort.
So please don’t be put off if you think all this is just too involved, with a little effort and time you can learn the ropes and become decently efficient enough to earn a few bucks.
So, take the bull by the horns and get stuck in.
I wish you well on your Affiliate Marketing journey, thanks for reading, and you can sign up for my newsletter below.
James