What Are the Highest-Paying Affiliate Platforms for Bloggers?

When you consider all of the different ways you can make money from a blog, it eventually boils down to just a few options.

• You can sell yourself as a tutor, consultant, or expert.
• You can sell your own products by opening a shop or selling a service.
• You can sell your audience by using display ads and with sponsored content.
• You can sell someone else’s products through drop shipping or affiliate marketing.

Deciding on how you want to monetize is a matter of figuring out the right balance of personal effort, passive value, and resources. Not everyone has the charisma, expertise, or mindset to be a consultant; not everyone can develop a service that can scale; not everyone can promote a product. Display ads, the lowest effort option, are also the lowest returns.

For many bloggers – I might even say most – the answer usually settles on some form of affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a relatively low investment since you only need to sign up for a program, and you don’t need to worry about stocking items in a warehouse, managing fulfillment, or even your own personal involvement in each order.

The question then becomes, what affiliate programs or platforms should you use? You want a program that pays well but isn’t so hard to get into or so exclusive that you can’t really land any sales. Like, yeah, if you sell a mega-yacht, you’ll get a commission you can live off of for a year or more, but how many of those are you going to sell? The list price may be high, but the practical value is nil.

Every few years, I take a look at the overall field of affiliate marketing and look for a few stand-out platforms. Most of my clients don’t rely on affiliate marketing, and I’m more of a “sell my own services” kind of guy, so I don’t get super deep into the weeds using these platforms. But! I know enough to know how to evaluate them, and I know plenty of you reading this are interested in them, so I’ve put together my perspective.

Note: I’m going to skip all the filler you usually see in these posts, so there are no lectures about picking a platform based on niche, evaluating cookie durations or payout methods, and so on. If you want me to write guides on those topics, feel free to ask! I’ll do it if people want me to.

Let’s talk about the highest-paying affiliate platforms for bloggers and how you can make the most out of them to make your blog a success.

#1: Amazon Associates

Wait, before you go, this isn’t the same old basic list just because I put Amazon on it.

The truth is, Amazon’s affiliate program actually isn’t all that great, except for two big details.

The first is the international reach and trust they have. Amazon is a globally recognized platform for e-commerce, so you don’t have to spend a lot of time convincing your users that the service is trustworthy before selling them on it. You can just focus on the specific items and assume that people trust Amazon to sell and fulfill them.

However, this trust has been declining in recent years. The proliferation of shady companies with names like WIHOLL or other keyboard-smash names, the sharp increase in AI-written astroturfed reviews, the ongoing problems with exploitative labor practices, and all the rest adds up. There’s an increasing number of people who want to avoid using Amazon as much as they can. However, Amazon is still an incredibly massive platform, so it will take a long time to lose enough trust to really matter.

The second reason to use Amazon is that nearly anything can be found on the site. You can get affiliate payouts for selling cheese slicers, digital music, groceries, toys, tech, practically anything, in other words.

It’s also quite easy to apply since there are pretty much no minimum traffic requirements. They’ll cancel your account if you don’t make sales in the first six months after applying, but you are free to reapply until you make a couple of sales and lock it in. After all, Amazon is more invested in volume than in quality.

Of course, there are downsides. Commissions are small, so you really do need to make up for it in volume. Everyone and their mother uses the Amazon Associates program, so there’s a lot of competition, and it’s hard to stand out. It’s also a shorter affiliate cookie period than a lot of other affiliate programs, so you can lose commissions from people who delay their purchases.

Overall, though, it’s roundly one of the best options if you can ramp up the volume or if you’re just getting started and want to prove you can sell at all, even if it’s more to yourself than to anyone else.

#2: Other Big Platforms

Amazon may be the biggest e-commerce platform around, but it’s not the only big player with an affiliate program. Most of the others have the same sorts of benefits and drawbacks as Amazon, though: easy to get into, hard to succeed with lower commission rates.

First up, you have the eBay partner network. This has actually been getting a little better over time in my view, primarily because more businesses are using eBay just as a sales platform, so you’re not as reliant on just random auctions and estate sale junk. That said, they cap the maximum amount you can get in a payout from any one item, which means it’s less valuable to pursue sporadic high-value sales, while also having lower-than-Amazon commission rates to make volume less valuable as well. Still, if you operate in a niche that heavily uses eBay, like collectibles, it can be a great choice.

Another big-name option is Etsy. Again, much like eBay, they’ve shifted focus a little away from homemade and vintage items and have ended up more corporate. There are a ton of things you can sell from Etsy, and it’s nice if you want to help support local creators around you as well. A 30-day cookie is also very nice.

A third and good option for all-around blogs is CJ. Formerly Commission Junction, then CJ Affiliate, CJ isn’t just one affiliate program; it’s a platform that a lot of businesses use to run their own affiliate programs. It means you have one central space to use to manage affiliate connections with potentially hundreds of brands, ranging from small businesses to big names like TripAdvisor.

#3: Specialized Tech Services

As bloggers and marketers, we’re all always on the hunt for new plugins and apps that can help us succeed. That means getting to know some of the hundreds of tech services out there, finding the ones that work the best, and, usually, recommending those to others. We do tend to help uplift each other, after all. Fortunately, many of these tech services have affiliate programs of their own.

Unlike the big platforms, these are all one-note programs. If you sign up to be an affiliate for, say, Kit (formerly ConvertKit) or Canva, you’re selling that one thing. That means you have to do the legwork to convince users that the brand you’re recommending is trustworthy and that the product is worth using. Since the bar is higher, the payout is usually higher, too.

There are a ton of these, so I’ve listed the ones I think are the most valuable. Remember, the raw numbers might not be the best; you have to balance the ease of sales and the possible volume with the payout.

• Kit. Kit is an email and newsletter management platform, something every business needs when they reach a certain point of popularity to help separate their success from reliance purely on Google and social media. The affiliate program offers a 50% commission for a year for each customer (which is a baseline of about $150 per customer), plus various bonuses.
• BuzzSprout. This is a podcast hosting, promotion, and tracking platform. Podcasts are still immensely popular, though we’re past the Covid-era “everyone starts a podcast” surge. Their affiliate program is a referral code with a flat $20 per customer payout.
• Web Hosts. There are a bunch of different web hosts with affiliate programs you can join, and most of them are pretty similar in terms and payments. Bluehost, IONOS, NameCheap, and Dreamhost are all typical options.
• HubSpot. I have my gripes with HubSpot, but they’re still very powerful and useful as an enterprise-grade tool, and when you hear the words “enterprise-grade,” the dollar signs start to light up. They have a nice long cookie and a good payout if you can get people on board with their services.
• VPNs. People around the world are increasingly concerned with the privacy and security of their online activity, and while things like GDPR try to help protect people, it’s often up to us to do it ourselves if we want protection we can trust. Using a VPN is one of the baseline privacy options you can invest in, and there are a lot of them out there. Finding a trustworthy one to recommend and enrolling in their affiliate program is a good option. Unfortunately, “most private VPN” and “best affiliate program” aren’t always aligned, so while there are plenty of choices, make sure you trust what you’re selling.

All of the above is really just to give you an idea of what’s out there. You can also easily just look at the products, services, apps, and plugins you use and check to see if they have affiliate programs you can use. After all, anyone who recognizes you as an authority in your niche will also likely trust your recommendations.

#4: Courses

They say that the most profitable place to be in a gold rush isn’t the claims, but the stores selling the shovels; in the online space, that’s the places selling the skills others use to succeed or fail on their own merits. Fortunately, most course-selling platforms use affiliate marketing to get the name of their own platform out there and convince people to subscribe or enroll in classes.

One of the nice things about course affiliates is that you can find creators you personally love on these platforms. A bunch of interesting and educational YouTube creators have courses, for example, as do legions of high-level bloggers and industry experts. So, you don’t even have to shill something you’re iffy on just to make a sale; you can legitimately promote people you like and want to succeed. That genuine connection helps a lot.

MasterClass, Teachable, Coursera, Thinkific, and SkillShare all have affiliate programs you can use to promote content from creators you like and get paid to do it.

Making the Most of an Affiliate Program

One universal truth of affiliate marketing is that it doesn’t really matter what program you join; what matters is how well you can promote it. You really need to be able to write great content, and great content starts with great topics.

One of the nice things about Topicfinder, the app I made, is that you can use it for pretty much any topic you can think of. It’s great for competitive research, excellent for top-level and granular views of a niche, and powerful when you focus it on something narrow like a product.

Now, obviously, it’s not hard to come up with “a review of X product” as a topic. But there’s a lot of nuance to great affiliate marketing and a lot of ways you can take a tertiary topic and make it relevant for an affiliate. After all, if all you’re doing is writing reviews, you’re going to be spending more time finding products and signing up for accounts than you are actually promoting them and making money. I find it a lot more effective to lean into a few affiliates more heavily, and Topicfinder is a great way to keep that ball rolling.

If you’re interested in what Topicfinder can do for you, I have a free trial you can use and see it firsthand. Give it a try!

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