What are affiliate marketing networks, and which ones can you join?

By George C. Georgiou

Affiliate marketing networks are platforms that advertisers (merchants) and publishers (affiliates) share. Advertisers list their products and services that need to be promoted and create affiliate programs. Affiliate marketers sign up for these affiliate programs and receive a web link that contains their unique affiliate id, which in turn starts to promote through their different marketing channels and receive their commissions.

Some affiliate marketing networks, have strict requirements for affiliates to join, and if you don’t meet them, they reject your application. They may ask, for example, that you have your website and receive a minimum of 10,000 visits per month, or your website is more than two years old, and so on. For this reason, I have prepared two lists of affiliate marketing networks—one that doesn’t have these additional requirements and one that does.

Why bother then with the more demanding affiliate networks? Well, in most cases, big brands tend to use networks with these extra requirements. Perhaps they think that by having these additional requirements, they get better or more professional affiliates, which may be true to some degree.

When you click on the name of the affiliate marketing network given below, it will take you directly to their home page, and from there, you need to click where it says, ‘Join as a Publisher’; ‘publisher’ means affiliate 🙂

If you are new to affiliate marketing, try to sign up and get accepted to at least three affiliate marketing networks to have more choices about the products and services you want to promote.

For both lists, the top 5 entries are my personal recommendations.

It’s time to choose the Affiliate Networks that you Want to work with!