The Best Affiliate Marketing Partnerships: Join these Networks and Profit

Even the largest online retailers love affiliate marketing partnerships because it gives them the ability to bring in more customers thanks to recruited affiliates. The companies benefit from these marketing partnerships through direct customer referrals brought to them by thousands of small partner websites which in turn receive affiliate commissions for their efforts. Plus, the retailers only pay for the “outsourced advertising” when the customer makes a purchase.

These partnerships are made available through an affiliate marketing network, a system that pools merchants and partners together. Networks do all the tracking of sales and commissions, provide links, and coordinate payments. You can join these provider networks for free and get in on this incredible internet income stream.

A Look at the Top Affiliate Marketing Networks

There are dozens of programs you can join that participate in performance marketing, but the best ones are Shareasale, Commission Junction, Clickbank, ShareResults, Linkshare and OneNetworkDirect to name a few. At each network you’ll find hundreds of merchants looking for affiliate marketing partnerships, each with different types of products. It’s your choice to decide which merchants to promote and how you’ll promote them on your site(s) to make money with affiliate marketing.

Currently, these are the top networks offering affiliate marketing partnerships:

Commission Junction

Commission Junction is the big dog in the affiliate marketing network field. Ebay was their largest client until the online auction marketplace decided to pull their marketing program in-house in April 2008, but CJ offers hundreds of other merchants to choose from. CJ is noted as being very reliable because it pays all affiliates itself (other networks like Linkshare work differently: they provide programming for merchants to issue checks directly to partners). This is important because, in doing so, CJ takes on the liability for the merchant and issues checks on their behalf. So if the merchant doesn’t pay, they deal with CJ and thousands of affiliate marketers in these partnerships are protected from the potential loss of commissions.

Shareasale

Shareasale.com is a well-respected affiliate marketing network that rates high among partners and merchants for reliability, honesty, program selection, and usability. As with other networks offering affiliate marketing partnerships, many of the merchants on Shareasale reserve the right to approve their online agents in advance so participation with some merchants is not automatic. But most others are! Once you are signed up, you can begin showing text and banner ads on your website immediately when you find products you’d like to promote.

Clickbank

Clickbank.com is the best network to go for digital products. Whether you have eBooks to sell, or want to sell these products for other people, Clickbank is the easiest to use of the affiliate marketing partnerships -- just cut and paste their “hoplink” code into your webpage. The company has an incredibly fast and accurate tracking system and pays on time. They’ve got 10,000 products which pay commissions as high as 75%. This year, they are going global with a currency converter and they’ve started offering Spanish language products.

Too Many Networks to List

There are dozens of other networking companies, too many to list here, but affiliate marketers should consider the well known ones as the first place to establish partnerships with merchants. I can’t tell you which of these marketing networks is right for you as that will take some trial and error on your part. Depending on the niche and the promotion, everyone has different results. Just because one affiliate didn’t make money at one of these three highlighted above, doesn’t mean you won’t because there are simply too many variables.

Linkshare

For example, Linkshare.com is another affiliate network offering partnerships and it deals exclusively with brand retailers such as Wal-mart, Overstock.com, Lands End, Office Depot, and many others. I suggest you visit this list of the “best” and take a look around to see what they have to offer. You can join one or join all of these affiliate marketing partnerships, the choice is yours.

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