Affiliate marketing has opened new doors for side hustles and solopreneurs. In short, these affiliate programs let you make money off of selling someone else’s product—usually between 5% and 20% of the sale price.
This is extremely popular amongst software companies and other subscription services and is usually embraced by bloggers and social media influencers with a large readership and follower counts.
Software affiliate marketing is especially profitable for bloggers because many companies will actually offer recurring commissions, meaning that you get paid for each month that a user is actively subscribed to a service.
So sell the software once, and you’ll receive monthly commissions for as long as the user sticks around—sounds pretty great, right? Not interested in software? No worries—you can promote other services like physical products or investment opportunities.
Interested in learning more? You’re in the right place because, in this article, we’ll show you the top affiliate marketing programs that offer recurring commissions for bloggers and social media influencers alike.
But before we get into the list, let’s take a look at how these affiliate programs work.
How To Make Money with Affiliate Commissions
There are two primary ways to become an affiliate:
- Most Common: You work with an affiliate network like FlexOffers, which is a company that acts as a middleman between companies and bloggers or publishers like you!
- Least Common: You can work directly with a company like Airbnb, or Quickbooks, but these “direct relationships” are often reserved for really popular bloggers or influencers who generate tons of revenue.
When you sign up for an affiliate marketing program, you’ll usually be given a personalized affiliate link. These links take users to the standard signup page for the software/service but give you credit for each new customer you bring in.
These programs are usually free to join, but you may need to be a current customer to participate. When you sign-up for an affiliate program with recurring commissions, you’ll often be given access to a member dashboard where you can generate affiliate links, track signups, and choose your payment method.
Most of the time, affiliate programs will pay you every 30 to 60 days via PayPal or bank transfer. Each company is different, though, so make sure that you clarify payment times with the software company.
75+ Legit Affiliate Programs To Get Paid In 2024
Below, we’ve listed the best affiliate programs for bloggers, social media influencers, email entrepreneurs, and more. The list is broken down by product type, so scan headers and find which is most applicable to your audience:
- Best Affiliate Marketing Networks
- Web Services
- Investing
- Travel Bookings
- Social Media Management
- E-Courses
- Phone and Live Chat Support Solutions
- Stock Graphics and Video
- Email Marketing and Email Service Providers
- Cloud Storage
- WordPress Themes
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Online Shopping
The Best Affiliate Marketing Networks
In short, affiliate marketing networks manage affiliate programs so that businesses don’t have the time or resources to run them on their own.
You can sign up directly with some of these networks, and get access to a huge library of affiliate marketing programs in one place. Think of them as one-stop-shops for affiliate commissions from a variety of services.
Our Favorites:
Commissions vary based on the product you’re selling, so we haven’t included them in this piece.
The Best Affiliate Programs for Web Services
Affiliate marketing is huge in the web hosting and web services space—and the commissions can be huge. After all, it’s an extremely competitive market and anyone that wants a website of their own needs a domain, hosting, and potentially a DNS server.
There are a ton of affiliate marketing programs on the market, and we can’t put all of them in this article.
Our Favorites:
- Bluehost: $65 per qualified sign-up
- A2 Hosting: $125 per new customer
- Cloudways: $150 per sale
- Liquid Web: $150+ per sale
- RoseHosting: up to $500 per sale
- iPage: $65 to $125 per sale
- JixHost: 20% recurring commission
- Nestify: $150 per referral
- PureVPN: 35% recurring commissions
- VirMach: 15% recurring commission on popular plans, 20% on gaming plans
- HostGator: $65 to $125 per sale
- Kinsta: $500 per referral, 10% recurring commission
- WPengine: $200+ per signup
- SiteGround: $50 to $100 per sale
Read how to make money with niche websites with affiliate marketing!
The Best Affiliate Marketing Programs for Investing
Here at Millennial Money, we’re all about investing for a better future. If you’re a financial expert, you can make real money by linking to investment websites on your blog or email newsletter.
And at the same time, you’re helping your readers invest in a better future for themselves—what’s not to love about that?
Our Favorites:
- Fundrise: Available through Impact
- Personal Capital: $100 for every sign-up if the referral has $100,000 or more in investable assets linked to the system. You can sign up as a Personal Capital affiliate here through Impact.
- Regal Assets: $100 per lead, 3% commission on investments
- eToro Partners
The Best Affiliate Marketing Programs for Travel Bookings
Love to travel? Some travel booking sites, hotel chains, and airlines offer commissions when you drive users to their sites. Link to these on your travel blog, newsletter, or social media when there’s a good fare deal or hotel price.
Our Favorites:
- Agoda: 5% commission
- TripAdvisor: 50% commission
- Booking.com: commission varies
- British Airways: commission varies
- Kayak: 50% commission
- KLM Airlines: 1% on medium-haul tickets, 1.5% on long-haul tickets
- Skyscanner: commission varies
- Qatar Airways: commission varies
- Singapore Airlines: commission varies
- FlyDubai: commission varies
- Sandals Resorts: 4% per booking
- Cruise Direct: 3% commission
The Best Affiliate Programs for Social Media Management
Social media management tools are an essential tool for social media agencies, small businesses, and anyone else that marketers their products on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or any other social network.
These tools let social media managers pull in-depth reports, schedule content to multiple social networks at once, and even perform social media automation to speed up rudimentary tasks.
Many of these apps offer large commissions on selling their products, so you may want to consider selling them as value-adds to your marketing services.
Our Favorites:
- HootSuite: commission varies
- Tailor Brands: up to $500 for each qualified referral
- PromoRepublic: $20 – $415 for different plan sign-ups
- DrumUp: $5 for Pro plan sign-ups, $15 for Business plan sign-ups, and 25% of the monthly fee for Enterprise sign-ups
The Best Affiliate Marketing Programs for E-Courses
With college getting more and more expensive, e-courses and online learning are becoming more and more popular. Online courses give everyone access to low-cost, high-quality education on everything from software development to writing, to learning another language.
Our Favorites:
- Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing: I learned everything from this course! 40% commission!
- Thinkific: up to $1,700 per qualified referral
- Teachable: up to 30% recurring commission
- Pluralsight: $5 for free trials, 50% for monthly subscriptions, 15% for annual subscriptions
- Academy of Mine: commission varies
- Shaw Academy: $5 to $15 per registration
The Best Affiliate Marketing Programs for Phone and Live Chat Support Solutions
Live chat is absolutely essential for today’s software companies. After all, when something goes wrong with mission-critical software, your customers (and your customer’s customers) need immediate assistance.
Live chat software provides a solution for software companies to provide real-time support for their clients. Many of these solutions offer huge commissions on their services.
Our Favorites:
- LiveChat: up to 27% recurring commission
- Crisp: commission varies
- Ruby Raves: $150 per qualified referral
- Provide Support: 30% recurring commission
- JivoChat: 30% recurring commission
- LiveAgent: $5 signup bonus, 20% recurring commission
- Chatrify: up to 25% recurring commission
- Online Chat Centers: 50% of initial payment commission, 20% recurring commission
The Best Affiliate Marketing Programs for Stock Graphics and Video
Let’s be real: we’re not all photographers or videographers. But chances are, your business has needed graphics or videos at one point or another, whether it be for a website or other type of promotion.
And that’s why stock photo and video websites exist. Companies can buy the rights to an image, and use them as if they shot the photos themselves.
Our Favorites:
- Alamy: 10% commission
- DepositPhotos: 40% for every first-time purchase, and up to 15% recurring commission per each user
- ShutterStock: up to $300 per new customer purchase
- GettyImages/iStockPhoto: 10% for existing customers, 20% for new customer sales.
The Best Affiliate Marketing Programs for Email Marketing and Email Service Providers
Email marketing apps are essential for startups and businesses of any size. After all, you can’t send your email blast out using Gmail or iCloud. These apps let businesses build email lists, and design and send mass emails with ease.
Likewise, Email Service Providers—or ESPs—are important for software companies and websites with any kind of email autoresponders. This software is responsible for sending those emails and ensuring that said emails are compliant with local laws.
These are easy apps for marketing and software development companies to use as value-adds for their existing services.
Our Favorites:
- Aweber: up to 50% per qualified referral
- Benchmark: 25% recurring commission
- ConvertKit: 30% monthly recurring commission
- Getresponse: 33% recurring commission or $100 upfront commission
- MailerLite: 30% recurring commission
- Sendlane: 20% recurring commission
- Sendloop: 10% recurring commission
The Best Affiliate Marketing Programs for Cloud Storage
As we move to a world of mobile phones and tablets, cloud storage is getting more and more important. These services let you back up your files online and view them from all of your devices.
Get in while the market’s hot, and earn amazing commissions by selling cloud storage to your audience.
Our Favorites:
The Best Affiliate Marketing Programs for WordPress Themes
WordPress themes and plugins are a huge market for affiliate marketers. After all, WordPress is by far the largest content management system on the web, and it currently powers hundreds of millions of websites worldwide.
And while the WordPress software is free and open-source, most WordPress websites are actually powered by paid plugins and themes. These can be purchased from numerous markets and repositories around the web. Many of which offer hefty commissions to their affiliate partners.
Our Favorites:
- SuperbThemes: 60% commission for every commission & yearly recurring commission
- CSSIgniter Themes and Plugins: 40% of all sales
- Envato Marketplace: Earn up to $120 for eligible annual subscribers and up to $60 for eligible monthly subscribers
- Thrive Themes: 35% commission new sales, 25% recurring commission
- Elegant Themes: 50% commission on new and recurring commission
- Premium Coding Themes: 40% — 50% recurring commission
The Best Affiliate Marketing Program for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization is the art and science of optimizing websites and content to rank on search engines. On Google, the world’s most popular search engine, there are over 6 billion searches done every day, and search results are based on matching the searcher’s query to the most relevant website.
If you can get your website or your client’s website to rank on Google you can turn free traffic into leads, sales, or money. But Google and other search engines don’t release how their search algorithms work and they’re always being updated, which makes search engine optimization challenges.
However, there are a number of great tools you can use to analyze the keywords your competitors are ranking for, as well as what people are searching for, and how easy it might be to rank for that keyword. The best SEO tool with an affiliate program is SEMRush.
Our Favorite:
- SemRush – $200 for every new sale, $10 for every new trial, and $0.01 for every new sign up
The Best Affiliate Program for Online Shopping
The Amazon Affiliate Program, of course!
Our Favorite:
Promoting Affiliate Links is Surprisingly Simple
As discussed earlier, you can promote your links via your blog or social media following. But that’s not all— here are some of our favorite ways to promote affiliate links for maximum return.
Blog Posts
On your blog, consider writing software reviews or putting together a listicle of the best software for X industry. You can also write how-to articles that help your readers solve a specific problem by using affiliate-linked software.
Haven’t started your blog yet? Check out our Free Email Course: Launch A Million Dollar Blog in 7 Days!
Social Media
Social media influencers can simply tweet or share links to their favorite pieces of software. Make sure to preface why you like it though, otherwise, your tweets may look like spam.
Paid Advertisements
In some cases, it may actually be beneficial to pay to promote your affiliate links. If the affiliate pays enough, consider boosting your blog posts on Facebook, or working with another social media influencer to promote your posts.
Email Lists
Have a successful email list? Don’t be afraid to write up a blurb about related software, and include it in your next edition. After all, your audience already trusts your opinions (hence why they’re subscribed), so why not recommend some great products and make a few bucks?
The most important asset you have as a blogger is your email list. This is your crew, your audience, your tribe. The million-dollar bloggers out there are able to make between $1-$5 in revenue per email subscriber each month!! If you have a list of 10,000 subscribers you can make up to $50,000 in revenue off that list per month! It’s crazy.
5 Tips to Help Build an Email List:
- Start ASAP (Like yesterday)
- Pick A Good Email Platform. I’ve tried a bunch of email marketing platforms (MailChimp, AWebber, MailMunch, ConvertKit) and the one I recommend is Constant Contact. (Constant Contact also offers a 60-day free trial without needing to input a credit card, which is awesome.)
- Create A Sign Up Incentive. Always give something of value to someone who subscribes to your list – but make sure it’s something that your audience will actually want. A lot of the “Download my Free PDF” incentives no longer work as well because everyone does it.
- Use a Pop-Up, sidebar, and end of post form. If you want to maximize your subscribers, you need to make it as easy as possible to subscribe to your blog. This means you need to put forms in the right places. The most effective form locations are in a pop-up, on the side bar, and at the end of posts.
- Use Single Opt-In Forms. There are two ways you can set up your forms – to automatically confirm a subscriber when they sign up, or require them to confirm.
Case Studies
If you have a favorite piece of software that has an amazing affiliate program, write a case study about it. Not only will this help your audience find a new software solution, but it will also easily drive traffic to your affiliate links.
You also get an SEO advantage, as your independent case study will act as a testimonial when people search for software reviews.
Word of Mouth
If you’re a consultant, make sure that your clients sign-up for new software solutions and buy new products via your affiliate links. Just make sure the affiliate program doesn’t have any rules against this.
You can even make this software or service an “add-on” to your existing services.
A Quick Word of Warning
One word of advice before you start promoting software and services: make sure you actually use the software before you start promoting it. If you have never used the software, your content is likely to miss key points and features that may be huge selling points.
And to be frank: it’s painfully obvious to spot software reviews and recommendations that are based on assumptions. Spending an hour with the free trial will make a world of difference in your content, and will help you make more money.
What Do You Think?
Those are the best affiliate marketing programs for making extra income in 2024 and beyond.
When promoted properly, these companies can provide huge passive returns for your business—especially if you focus on recurring returns.
But enough from us, what do you think? Have a favorite affiliate marketing program? Let us know in the comments, we’ll be sure to check them out.
Haven’t started your blog yet? Don’t forget to check out our Free Email Course: Launch A Million Dollar Blog in 7 Days!
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