Finding the Ideal Affiliate Program for Beginners

Published: 13.05.2025

What is an affiliate program is and how to start an affiliate program are common questions among people who search for additional income on the internet. An affiliate program, or CPA network, is a platform designed to facilitate interaction between advertisers and webmasters. It allows any arbitrageur, regardless of experience, to find an offer and promote it on favorable terms.

Currently, there is no single right answer to the question “Which affiliate program is better?” as more and more new players are entering the market, and competition is growing rapidly. Nevertheless, we offer a number of criteria that will help a newcomer to navigate the affiliate marketing industry, understand where to look for traffic arbitrage offers and how affiliate program works to gradually increase their profits. Here is a beginner affiliate guide with simple but useful affiliate marketing tips.

Where to Find Arbitrage Offers: Start Your Search

You need to decide on the following:

1.       Niche: If a webmaster has already analyzed various verticals and decided on a niche, we recommend paying attention to affiliate programs that focus on offers in the chosen niche. On our website, you can easily choose an affiliate program that focuses on the vertical you are interested in. For example, you can choose an offer from Nutra Vertical, which includes goods or services dedicated to beauty and health: products for weight loss, rejuvenation, potency, etc. An important advantage of working with a private label is support and guidance for arbitrageurs. As a rule, the level of expertise of affiliate managers in a specialized affiliate program is much higher than in one that accumulates offers from all areas. The choice of a niche also affects the characteristics of the target audience, the choice of traffic sources, the setup of an advertising campaign, and the potential profit. For example, some offers are better promoted through social media or search engines such as Facebook and Google, while for others, native advertising will show higher efficiency.

2.       Affiliate program rating: The more interested an affiliate is in scaling up its activities, the more it is present in the information space. Well-known affiliate programs are active in social networks, publish specialized materials in blogs, organize various events, i.e. actively develop the industry and look for new horizons. Such affiliate programs usually have a large number of offers from reliable advertisers and take care of their reputation. Therefore, even if you like a certain affiliate program, you should still search for reviews about it on Google, specialized websites, and forums before starting work.

Criteria for Choosing a Successful Affiliate Program

So, when the range of affiliate programs to choose from has narrowed down, we recommend registering with several of them simultaneously to be able to compare the conditions and services of each and choose the best one for further work in traffic arbitrage and the successful promotion of your clients' goods or services.

At this stage, the following criteria should be evaluated to make a successful choice of the best affiliate program:

Payout Systems

The main models offered by affiliate networks include the following:

1) cost-per-sale (CPS) – the calculation of the payment for the sale from the cost of goods;

2) cost-per-action (CPA) – for a certain action, usually filling out a registration form or subscribing;

3) cost-per-click (CPC) – per click on banners or advertising links, or in general, for each attracted customer;

4) cost-per-view (CPV) – per 1000 impressions;

5) cost-per-lead (CPL) – for obtaining user contacts;

6) cost-per-install (CPI) – for file downloads or software installations;

7) RevShare – at a set rate of net profit (used in gambling, betting, gaming, crypto, etc. verticals).

In addition to the terms of payout on offers, you need to find out about the allowed and prohibited sources for advertising goods or services, the possibility of raising bids, the hold, and the frequency of payments (usually once a week). It will be an additional advantage if the programmer is ready to show flexibility and adapt to webmasters to make payments more often or less often.

Hold is the withholding of the first payment while the advertiser checks the quality of traffic and the absence of fraud (gray schemes used by unscrupulous arbitrageurs). As a rule, the verification of traffic acquisition lasts from one to two weeks.

An additional point that is equally important for the convenience of a potential affiliate is how payments are withdrawn, i.e., which payment systems the affiliate works with.

User Interface

Convenience and simplicity are crucial for the effectiveness of traffic arbitrage as they make it much easier and save time for webmasters to launch and track business processes. A high-quality interface is:

1) statistics (detailed version);

2) offers and flows: before starting cooperation, you need to make sure that each offer contains details about the goods/services and the rules for working with them, including prohibited traffic sources for advertising. This information is necessary to formulate the unique selling proposition of the product correctly and not to waste the budget. If there is no detailed description of the product (GEO, average acquisition and payout level, rate, group), it raises doubts about the reliability of the affiliate advertising program. It is also worth giving preference to white affiliate offers, and as a last resort, you should work with gray offers and avoid black arbitration.

3) Tools (postbacks, APIs);

4) Finance;

5) FAQ;

6) Contact information.

Traffic Sources

The arbitrageur's earnings also depend on the number of traffic sources allowed by the network, as it can directly affect ROI, conversion, cost of advertising campaigns, and other indicators. 

The more options an affiliate offers, the better, but the ideal option is when the affiliate program does not exclude any source, and webmasters can work with teasers, push notifications, search engines, native advertising, and other promotion methods.

The same statement applies to GEO. The advantage is on the side of the CPA network that covers more countries and regions. Such a combination of GEO and source allows webmasters to experiment with offers, changing the usual GEOs to regions that are just coming into the field of view of arbitrageurs.

Additional Services

The ability of an affiliate program management to provide additional useful tools to affiliates is one of the key features that you should pay attention to. It can be additional software, manuals, cloaks, and creatives. It is great if these bonuses include:

1) help with the launch;

2) a step-by-step manual on how to attract traffic;

3) a personal mobile call center;

4) apps developed for offers;

5) setting up online conferences and chats;

6) a cloaca built into the personal account;

7) a service that helps to track analytics on product promotion, application customization, and integrations.

Customer Support

A serious affiliate network is highly interested in successful cooperation with an arbitrage provider because the network's earnings depend on its efficiency. As a rule, an affiliate network has a whole staff of specialists who are ready to provide consultative assistance to webmasters around the clock.

Before starting work, you can test the quality of support by contacting the manager. The speed of feedback and the detail of the answer are an indicator of how interested the program is in affiliates.

As a rule, at the very beginning, the arbitrageur is provided with a personal manager who will help him or her to decide on the offer. He or she is also responsible for opening and approving the offer. The longer this process takes, the worse the partner's support rate is. This happens when an affiliate attracts too many partners and does not care much about the quality of traffic; such a network is unlikely to have high-quality affiliate offers and high payout rates.

Transparent Communication

Traffic arbitrage is a fairly close-knit community where reputation plays a huge role. It is worth finding out all the details of offers and payment terms from the manager in advance. Clear answers, without evasions and assumptions, give you hope that the webmaster will not face shaving by the affiliate program. In this way, some networks significantly reduce the earnings of arbitrageurs when leads are not credited in case of good conversion.

You also need to understand that a reputable affiliate advertising program provides additional bonuses, but not to everyone and not immediately. This is one of the ways to encourage efficient and responsible arbitrageurs in whom the affiliate is interested in cooperation.

Building Loyalty

In general, a reputable affiliate program understands the key role of a webmaster and how well he can promote offers, so its goal is to create the right conditions for the partner. The functionality of the program and its support are, by and large, customized to the needs of the arbitrageur.

The network is equally responsible for guaranteeing its payments and resolving disputes with the advertiser. If an arbitrator demonstrates conscientiousness in work, regular feedback, and high-quality traffic, it will eventually be included in the CPA network's rating of reliability and efficiency. For a webmaster, this means:

– access to the best offers;

– free use of applications and creatives;

– discounts on third-party services and fast integration;

– bid increases;

– bonus programs and sweepstakes;

– invitations to various specialized events and conferences.

Offers

You should make sure that the CPA networks you are going to choose from regularly update the catalog of offers for advertising and constantly expand the advertiser base. This is important for webmasters' earnings because, over time, offers lose their relevance for users or are distributed across many affiliate programs. This leads to a drop in conversion rates – such offers are called “squeezed”, i.e. unpromising.

Reliable Advertisers

The problem that is a headache for a webmaster “in free float” in the case of cooperation with affiliate program is solved by the network. We mean that, ideally, an affiliate program should check the reliability of each new partner and its offers before placing them in the advertisement. The automatic upsell of offers is a sign that the affiliate does not care about protecting its affiliate. Such a policy can cost the arbitrator a lot of money, as it increases the likelihood of low conversion and unjustified cheating from an unscrupulous advertiser.

To summarize, the choice of an affiliate network is based on many components, but the main criteria are reliability and care for the webmaster. In our opinion, it is worth giving preference to a network that is interested not only in the partner's efficiency but also in its scaling. After all, ideal partners should be equally interested in each other.

Last edit: 13.05.2025