Best Affiliate Marketing Platforms – NEW 2020

Affiliate marketing is a very large industry and has become a key source of online income for many thousands of professional bloggers. With more and more online businesses becoming involved in affiliate marketing, more opportunities have arisen for bloggers, like you and I, to make money with their blog. and to ultimately create passive income streams.

With a wide variety of businesses who work direct with affiliates, most affiliate marketers will use an affiliate marketing network to search for offers for their blogs. Though these affiliate platforms will take a small cut of any fees generated, they do serve a valuable purpose in the affiliate marketing climate

1. Aggregating offers from different vendors
2. Create a directory or search engine for affiliate marketers to find offers
3. Handle the administrative duties of running an affiliate network

In this post I will go through some of the most popular affiliate marketing platforms.

Best Affiliate Networks – 2020

Affiliate Window – (AWIN)

Previously known as Affiliate Window but now officially referred to as “AWIN” after acquiring Zanox a few years ago, this network claims to work with over 13,000 active advertisers and 100,000 publishers (affiliates). Founded in Germany, AWIN’s merchants primarily hail from Europe (especially Great Britain) although the U.S. network is growing rapidly. AWIN is currently active in 11 countries.

Established in 2000, this company has since grown into one of the most well regarded affiliate networks in the UK, as well as the world. Currently, it boasts of over 1,600 brands across 77 sectors in 11 territories worldwide.

They also provide a simple, user friendly dashboard, as well as an array of useful tools that can definitely help you boost your affiliate marketing campaigns.

You can find a complete list of AWIN’s advertisers here, including some big names like Etsy.

Niche Information
AWIN is a very comprehensive affiliate network and works in all verticals. That being said, it is most heavily oriented towards financial, retail shopping (fashion), sports, beauty, home and garden, and travel products.

Product Types
AWIN works with both digital and physical products, including from some very big name merchants like Hyatt, Etsy, AliExpress, and HP (Hewlett-Packard).

Average Commission Rate
Everything depends on the campaign and the merchant/advertiser. Price information is only disclosed on the dashboard after the application to join AWIN is approved. AWIN offers aren’t tracked by Affscanner and OfferVault, so it’s really hard to gauge commission rates and earning potentials without being an approved publisher.

Cookie Duration
Cookie duration is set by the advertiser.

Who Is it for?
AWIN is probably best for experienced affiliates who can hit the ground running without a lot of guidance or feedback from the network. There is a $5 fee charged to apply to become an affiliate, but if you’re approved, the $5 will be added to your account. If your application is denied, however, you will lose the $5 fee. AWIN operates globally, but it is most heavily concentrated on British and EU merchants.

AWIN has a lot of powerful tools, including an “Opportunity Marketplace” where you can pitch merchants on unique one-off deals (like sponsored posts). AWIN also has its own WordPress plugin that makes it really easy to convert a link into your affiliate-specific link. There’s also a Google Chrome extension as well.

AWIN includes Etsy as one of its merchants, making AWIN an excellent choice for bloggers who want to promote Etsy products.

A quick round-up of the pros and cons of this program:

Pros of AWIN:

• Pays out twice per month ($20 minimum).
• Real-time reports.
• Publishers/advertisers are heavily vetted.
• Very easy to use dashboard and lots of plugins available.
• 900 staff in 15 offices around the globe.

Cons of AWIN:

• Sign-up requires paying $5 in advance.
• Accounts that do not get approved do not have $5 fee returned.

Shareasale  

ShareASale is one of the largest affiliate networks and is now apart of AWIN. The Shareasale platform has about 4,000 merchants listed, of which over one thousand of them are exclusive to them. ShareASale publishes a large amount of data on each of the offers they are running, these include:

• Earnings per Click
• Reversal Rates
• Average Sale Amount
• Average Commission

While these figures aren’t guarantees of payouts you can expect, they’re certainly very helpful in assessing a campaign.

Pros Of ShareASale:

• Large Partner Network. The 4,000+ merchants include more than 1,000 that are exclusive.
• Easy to Compare Offers. When trying to choose from the various offers available, ShareASale make it very easy to evaluate the best ones based on the metrics.
• Quick Payment Cycle. ShareASale pay out on the 20th of every month, assuming your account balance is more than $50.

Flexoffers

Flexoffers is another huge affiliate marketing network. They pay you (the affiliate) a lot faster than others in the industry. It has more than 10 years of experience in the field. While they do not offer anything that is neither groundbreaking nor revolutionary, they do provide a solid array of tools and features that will surely aid you in your campaigns. In addition to the fast payouts, Flexoffers lets you choose from thousands of affiliate programs to promote, offers various content delivery formats, and more.

FlexOffers connects bloggers, content creators and other types of publishers with small, medium and large budget advertisers & brands.

They have tens of thousands of different affiliate programs to choose from. They have divided these affiliate programs into dozens of broad and hundreds of sub-categories, which makes the publisher’s life easier to find exactly what would fit into their niche.

Flexoffers also has their own affiliate program which is a licence to print money. If you refer someone to FlexOffers and they earn commission, you also earn commission. You can earn as much as 50% of any earnings generated by any affiliates referred by you. How cool is that!!!

Pros of FlexOffers:

• Revenue Share. As I just mentions, if you refer someone to FlexOffers and they generate income, you get a cut of what they earn.
• Dedicated Affiliate Manager. A lot of networks leave you to your own devices. Not FlexOffers. You get your own Affiliate Manager to help you get the most out of your affiliate marketing efforts.
• Vast Amounts Of Affiliate Programs. Well over 15k affiliate programs to choose from and apply for.

Cons of FlexOffers:

• Paypal the only payment option for those who are based internationally ( Outside US )

MaxBounty

Note: I have to include Maxbounty in this list as they are one of the biggest affiliate networks, but one I DO NOT recommend you sign up to. 

My personal experience with MaxBounty is one of frustration, annoyance and anger. I have sent tens of thousands of clicks through to Maxbounty over the years only for them to close my affiliate account. This came with no warning, no email, no nothing.

I sent several emails to them asking “WTF is going on??”. To this day I have not received any response.

So if you do sign up to MaxBounty, beware!

Here’s the lowdown on MaxBounty….

A relative newcomer to the affiliate space, MaxBounty was founded in 2004 in Ottawa, Canada. MaxBounty claims to be the only affiliate network built specifically for affiliates. MaxBounty is exclusively a CPA (Cost Per Action/Acquisition) company that doesn’t deal with ad banners or the like, just customer links that the publisher (blogger) chooses where to place on their website.

Niche Information
MaxBounty works in the business niche and claims to have more than 1,500 active campaigns.

Product Types
MaxBounty works exclusively with digital products, usually about giving one’s email or signing up for a newsletter. MaxBounty has CPA, Pay-per-call, and CPL campaigns that you can choose from. MaxBounty is involved in a large number of verticals, including market research, real estate, social games, finance, dating, and diet, but is primarily designed for marketers seeking to acquire new leads.

Average Commission Rate
The commission rate depends on the type of campaign. A glance at their website shows everything from $2.50 to $85 per CPA while other campaigns pay out a given percentage of a sale. The referral commission is five percent.

Cookie Duration
MaxBounty doesn’t use cookies in order to track CPAs. The way MaxBounty works is the affiliate sends a prospect to a designated landing page using an affiliate-specific link.

Who Is it for?
MaxBounty is attempting to get ahead of the pack by enforcing very strict anti-spam rules, sometimes onerously so. MaxBounty only works with digital products, not sales of physical items. MaxBounty does allow CPA action (and thus earning) via mobile devices.

As such, MaxBounty is probably best for mid-level to top-level internet marketers who are confident in managing and sending traffic. If you’re just starting out in the affiliate game, MaxBounty is probably not going to earn you much money.

MaxBounty is pretty easy to get around, and the dashboard is great as it clearly lists the best offers for your niche.