 Beginner's Guide to Using Affiliate Networks Pro Hacks. Hey, so you started a blog and you want to make some money? Well, in this video, I'm going to show you how to do it. At the end of this video, you're going to be shocked at how many ways you can actually make money off that blog or that YouTube channel or whatever you got going on. And don't forget to subscribe right below there. There's a big button. If it's red, you need to turn it gray by clicking it and then a bell is going to pop up. It's going to look like this right here. You want to bring it, turn on all bell notifications so you're notified every time I upload a video or every time I go live. And if you like this video, do me a favor, throw a thumbs up in there. Just give me a thumbs. You just click it. Give it a click thumbs up. I would really appreciate it. So you're going to be super educated in just a couple of minutes. I mean, it's not only going to take you a few minutes to go through all these things. I'm going to give you the locations where you can go and get this information where you can sign up and you can start making money. So when you first started your blog or YouTube channel or whatever it was, you wanted to make some money. But did you really know how much money you could make through affiliate networks? I had no clue. I had no clue how much money I could make. And now that I make it, I'm like, wow, I missed out on the beginning, but you don't have to because you're here now and you've got this video. So let's get into it and let me show you a way so you can make some money off affiliate networks and platforms. Let's jump over to one of my favorites and it's share a sale. Let's go over there right now. I want to show you a screen of it and talk to you a little bit about it. I use share a sale. It's one of the most popular affiliate networks out there. Amazon is focused entirely on Amazon. Okay. But share a sale actually has affiliate programs for 4500 merchants, both big and small. From one spot, the share a sale dashboard, you can sign up to these merchants to generate links and view your statistics. Now you'll need to be individually applying to the merchants and be approved by each merchant, which is pretty standard approach for any affiliate network like this. Overall though, it's a great option. I've made thousands of thousands of dollars off share a sale. For example, on the digital side, you'll find plenty of WordPress themes and plug-in shops, hosting providers, that type of stuff. On the physical side, you'll find stuff like my products. I have survival food. You'll find plenty of big and small merchants. There's everything from Warby Parker sunglasses to Sunbasket to Wayfair to Reebok, NFL shop. Plus, there's thousands of other small and large merchants. Basically, no matter what niche your website or blog is in, you're probably going to have some offers that's going to be worth promoting. Okay. So let's look at some of the pros of share a sale and the cons because there's pro and cons to everything. First thing here, thousands of merchants for both physical and digital products, including lots of well-known merchants, trustworthy. They've been around for many years and work with lots of big brands, lots of exclusive merchants. Over 1000 of the merchants at share a sale only work with share a sale. They have a bookmark that makes it easy to generate custom links. Now cons, well, not much really. The dashboard's a little clunky. That's about it. It's a really good network. I suggest you join it. The next one I want to talk about is a win, which is formally affiliate window. Let's go check it out right now. It's really a shorter rebrand of the original affiliate window. It's another popular affiliate network that gives you access to over 13,000 different merchants. A win actually acquired share a sale back in 2017 though the two are still run as separate entities and have different merchants with 13,000 merchants. So you're going to find lots of options, both physical and digital. They've got everything in there from let's say Etsy, Aliexpress, HP, Etsy, Money Transfer, Stubhub, Under Armour, Gym Shark. So they've got some pretty darn big brands there. Now let's look also at their pros and cons real quick. The pros are they got a lot of merchants to choose from. That's always good. Dedicated WordPress plugin to help you import your products and a low minimum payout only 20 bucks. Now here's the cons. There's always some cons. There's a $5 sign up fee. That's not so bad. But the thing is it's refunded to you once you're approved. So yeah, there's that. So it's probably not even a con. Amazon Associates is the next one I want to tell you about. That's number three. Let's go check it out real quick. If you want to promote any physical product on your website, Amazon Associates is a good option. You can earn commissions pretty much on anything sold at Amazon. There's a few things that aren't allowed, but for the most part they are. You don't get paid that much. I will tell you that. So if you link to say a $5 toothbrush but the person ends up buying a $500 TV, here's the cool thing. You still get the commission. As long as it's within the cookie duration of course, also the product can't have already been in that person's cart. In the past, Amazon Associates paid you a commission rate based on how much revenue or sales you drove. However, since 2017, Amazon has moved to a flat rate commission structure where you're paid a flat percentage based on the category of each of the products that they're in. Now what I'd like to do real quick is I want to put up on the screen the percentages you'll get in those different categories. So check this out. You see it ranges anywhere from 10% for Amazon fashion, women's, men's, and kids private label luxury blend. Then it's 8% on furniture, 7% on apparel, got headphones, 6%. Gift cards go down to zero, so I wouldn't be promoting those. And then other categories, 4%. Physical, I guess what is it? Physical video games and video game consoles are only 1%. But you can see basically what you're going to get there. It's not going to be one of the highest paying things out there. But people trust it and they like it and they do buy there. More frequently they do other sites. So it is kind of advantageous to use. Let's look at some of the pros and cons though. The average rate is only 1% to 10%. And your cookie duration is only 24 hours. However, if you have people directly add a product to their cart, you'll get a 90-day cookie, but only for the specific product that's in their carts. The minimum payout is 10 bucks. Let's see here. The pros. Massive selection of products. Universal cookie. So you get credit for everything people buy within the cookie duration. Amazon is by far the biggest name in e-commerce. Very low payout threshold, only 10 bucks. Now they've got more cons than anybody else because in any time there's pluses, there's a lot of minuses. So the universal cookie only lasts for 24 hours. That's a pretty short window. Some categories like video games have very low commissions, only 1%. You need to register for each country individually. And Amazon has been known to slash commissions every so often. Now I don't know how they could slash it much more than they already did because they're pretty low, but they can do that. So the next one I want to tell you about is CJ Affiliate. It's formerly commissioned junction. Let's run over there real quick and check it out. Along with share or sale, CJ is one of the biggest affiliate networks out there, which means that you'll be able to connect with thousands of both big and small merchants. Currently the exact number is 2,696. Some of the big physical ones that CJ use are Lowe's, Overstock, Office Depot, Priceline, GoPro, IHG Hotels, Grammarly. So it has a lot of big ones out there. Like share or sale, you're probably going to have to apply to these merchants in the CJ dashboard. Then you'll be able to generate links and view statistics. I think CJ's Affiliate dashboard has a bit of a higher learning curve than share or sale, but I prefer it to share or sale once you figure out how everything works. Let's go ahead now and let's check out some of the pros and cons of it. Let's see. There's a huge range of big and small merchants to choose from. Nice back-end dashboard to help you manage your affiliate marketing efforts, has a deep link generator bookmark that makes it really easy to generate links. And I guess the cons not much. They're the dashboards a little complicated just when you're getting started. But once you got started, you learn it really not that hard. So it's a pretty good site to be on. The next one I want to talk to you about, which is number five, is Rucaton Marketing. It was formerly link share, but let's run over there and take a look at that real quick. Here it is, Rucaton formerly known as link share. And I mean, they got big people in there. They got Walmart, Best Buy, Macy's, Papa John's. They have smaller retails on there too, just like Share a Sale does or CJ or A-Win. Now they've only got about a thousand merchants on there. So if you want to access to a huge variety of merchants that you may want to be better off by using something else, but Rucaton is a good option for getting access to big guns. They also have nice features like the ability to rotate ads without the need for external solution like a WordPress advertising manager plug-in. Let's look at some of the pros and cons. It gives you access to big-name merchants like Walmart and Best Buy. It's a trusted name. Rucaton is a billion-dollar company. It's nice to have features like easy ad rotation. Now the cons, they all have cons, right? The back-end dashboard actually looks dated in my opinion, but that's just my opinion. It doesn't mean it is, so it may not even be a con for you. Next one I want to tell you about is Avangate Affiliate Network. Let's check it out. It's an affiliate network that's focused on digital goods and software rather than physical products. You get access to merchants like Bitdefender and Casperly and HideMyAss and Awario. Avangate Affiliate Network gives you access to 22,000 pieces of software. So if your site promotes a lot of digital products, you're definitely going to check it out. It's a pretty good one. Let's look at the pros real quick to this. You can opt to be paid via PayPal, which is nice. There's a lot of unique software products to choose from. Most merchants offer pretty high commission. It's not uncommon to see 50%. The only con I would say is it has a high threshold for payout. You have to have earned at least $100 before you're going to get paid. I see a lot of small people join some of these affiliate networks and they'll work to get some sales and they get some sales, but they never reach the $100. I guess they just keep that money. You just never get it. So that's something you want to be aware of. Number seven is ClickBank. I use ClickBank. I've used ClickBank since 2015. Quite a long time. I've sold products there. I've also marketed other people's products from there. It's a great network. They've been around since the 90s. I like them a whole lot, but let's look at their pros and cons real quick too. They have everything that's a share sale and a-win does and actually a little bit more. They're big on selling memberships, online courses, e-books, that type of thing. They do have a downside though. ClickBank products just aren't very high quality products and I'm not including mine. Mine's very high quality, but some of them aren't. And while ClickBank has gotten better with its review process to filter out bad merchants, you still want to be careful about which merchants you have to promote with because I've seen some bad ones and I've been ripped off on there too. I will tell you that. Let's look at the pros of ClickBank. Lots of smaller niche offers and you won't find other platforms. Pretty high commissions for most merchants. $10 minimum payout makes it easy to get paid and offers weekly payments. Now the cons, they're a little bit more cons to ClickBank. ClickBank's generous refund policy means you might lose commissions after the fact. I have been experiencing that in many occasions. Even though I say no refunds, they still refund the money. I don't understand why, but they do. You have to wade through some pretty low quality products too. I don't like their interface, their dashboard. I don't like that much, but they've been around a long time and I've made money off them so I do use ClickBank too. Next one I want to tell you about is Flex Offers. It's a great site. Let's run over there real quick. It's a long-standing popular affiliate platform that gets you access to 12,000 different advertisers and merchants. It has one of the better-looking dashboards. It's got that going for it. It has lots of offers from both small brands and big brands, including names like Priceline.com, Macy's, Skechers, Lenovo, Computers, all kinds of stuff. Flex Offers has been around for years so you can actually trust that you're going to get paid and they're not going anywhere. Let's look at some of the pros of Flex Offers also. It has a huge selection. Like I said in the beginning, 12,000 different merchants nicely designed back in dashboard and you get a dedicated affiliate manager. Now the cons to this one here is if you're out of the country and you're not in the USA, the only payment option is PayPal unless the payment exceeds $5,000 and then you can use a wire transfer. Next one I want to tell you about is Purefly. Let's run over there and take a look at that one. Purefly is rapidly growing network, gets you access to 3,300 merchants. The selection isn't as big as A-Win or Flex Offers, but 3,000 merchants means you still have probably a lot of stuff to sell on there. It has smaller merchants but it also has larger names like Target and Uber and Agoda. All those are on there and the cookie duration depends on the merchant you sign up with. Minimum payout is $50. Let's look at some of the pros on there real quick. Well designed dashboard. It has a good mix of big and small merchants. Weekly payments, if you hit $5,000, earnings per week and a cash flow lets you get faster payments for a fee. They're going to charge you a fee though. If you want to be paid faster, why would I have to pay a fee? How does that work? I don't understand that. But the con is the application process takes about three days, so you can't immediately sell stuff out of there. It's okay. This is the big one I told you about at the very end. Walmart. Walmart. Did you hear what I said Walmart? That's number 10 Walmart. Let's check it out. They're technically part of Rucaton Marketing, but it's really got its own section because I think it makes a valuable contrast to Amazon Associates. If you're selling physical products, Amazon Associates is definitely the biggest name in the affiliate game. There's a reason for that. Amazon holds about 50% of the US e-commerce market. Compared to that, Walmart has just 3.7% of the entire retail online market. That's really small. eBay, which you'll see next, is actually in the second place at 6.6%. However, when Amazon Associates switch from its old commission structure to its new category-based approach, the Walmart affiliate program became a little more attractive because it offers higher commissions than Amazon in some categories. For example, Walmart will give you a 4% commission on toys, while Amazon only gives you a 3% commission. Okay, it's only a percentage point. It's only one, but it is one point, and that adds up. Let's look at some of the pros real quick. Huge product selection, higher commissions in Amazon in some categories, well-known trusted brand, longer cookie duration than Amazon. I mean, that's pretty good. They actually last for three days on Walmart as opposed to only 24 hours on Amazon. The cons are it's a $50 minimum payout, which is higher than Amazon. While the product selection is bigger than almost every other store, it still doesn't come close to Amazon. I mean, Amazon is still going to be the bohemat, the biggest, the big. Okay, you got them. You got them now. You have the top 10 Amazon places and networks that you can join. Go out there and join them, man. Get started. Don't put this stuff off. The sooner you do it, the better off you are. Get some links on your site. I know you're thinking, oh my gosh, I don't have much traffic yet. It doesn't really matter. I'm going to wait until I get a lot of traffic. No, do it now. Get them there now, and the traffic comes later. You never know who's going to buy. It could be when you have 30 people coming to your website, somebody makes a $10,000 purchase. You don't know. But one thing you do know, this is what you do know. You know that if you don't have the links there, they can't click on it, and you can't make any money, and that's silliness. You got to stop that, okay? You got to make sure you have them there. I hope you enjoyed this video, okay? If you have any questions about starting, running, and growing online businesses, feel free to put it below. If you have any questions about affiliates or affiliate marketing, put those below. If you've had some good experiences, I want to hear about it. Put it in the comments below. If you've had some bad experiences, okay, I'll listen to that, too. Put that in the comments below. Maybe I can help you out with that. Thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button below. If it's red, you need to click it. Turn it gray. You need to ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified every single time I do a new video. So important that you do that, okay? Really important. Give me a thumbs up. I really appreciate those thumbs up. Thanks for watching this video, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.