Digital advertising spend in the US is set to reach $330 Billion. Web traffic affiliate programs are how you can take advantage of some of that revenue.
Most of the blogging space and video channels that teach traffic generation techniques focus on what people want and that’s always going to be free traffic. But, free is never free anyway.
To get hoards of traffic from search engines, a boatload of investment goes into search engine optimization. Growing a social channel organically is slow too and it’s rarely done manually. Paid tools are used and the recommendations are mostly sponsored.
Paid advertising speeds everything up but it needs to be planned, budgeted, and tracked to make sure campaigns run smoothly.
Affiliates can earn commissions by referring advertisers to some networks, but the bulk of affiliate commissions will be on sales of the various advertising tools and analytics software that give advertisers the data they need to see how each campaign is performing so they can fine-tune campaigns for the best returns.
The vast majority of advertising networks operate revenue share models. The more publishers they have, the wider their ad distribution. From the advertiser perspective, very few networks incentivize advertiser referrals.
If you want to find an affiliate program that pays for referring advertisers, look for a demand-side platform (DSP) affiliate program. The supply-side platforms (SSP) are for publishers. As an example of the largest, Google AdWords is the DSP and AdSense is the Supply-side for publishers.
When networks do pay for referrals, as Info Links recently did with their AdShop referral scheme, they don’t often pay cash. They pay credits to put towards advertising spend on the network.
For the purposes of this list of web traffic networks and tools advertisers use, the affiliate programs are paying for results. Not rewarding with credits.
To have the best chance of success with these web traffic affiliate programs, it’d be better to hone in one traffic generation technique because, despite the social networks not running referral programs, there is a vast amount of tools you can promote as an affiliate, letting you monetize content that helps your subscribers make the most of the tools you recommend.
Some types of digital advertising methods you could focus on include:
- PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising
- PPV (Pay-Per-View) advertising
- Solo Ads (mostly the make money online market because a lot of the sellers buy traffic through paid-to-click / PTC networks, which pay people peanuts to watch ads or read emails so they clearly want an extra income).
- Programmatic Native Advertising
- Video Advertising
- Push Notification services
The simplest that’s always recommended is to build an email list because an engaged list is traffic on demand and it’s owned so you can send that traffic anywhere, whether that’s for your own offers or a partner offer.
Even for email marketing though, there are more ways to earn than just using email marketing affiliate programs because to get the most mileage, there are various strategies that can use multiple tools to build a list…
- Funnel Builders
- Email Marketing Platforms
- Solo Ad Campaigns
- Landing Page Builders
- Video integration software to use in emails (instead of bouncing traffic over to YouTube).
- Webinars to build trust with new subscribers
Do a good job at partnering with either good networks or recommending the tools that help advertisers and marketers in general, or even marketing firms if you were to focus on the B2B market, you could get returns from either social media marketing or search marketing.
There is huge potential to generate a good return in the digital advertising space by recommending tools and services that help advertisers get bigger returns from their ad spend.
Web Traffic Website Ideas
- Include analytical software reviews on a marketing-focused website. Ideas to consider covering could include click fraud software, display advertising software, and media buying and planning tools businesses need so they can track the paid promotions of content distribution.
- Adult affiliates can focus on only promoting the networks that allow advertising adult content and then branch out to the different types such as banner ads, native ads, or mobile marketing with pop-unders.
- If you have the time and budget, test advertising campaigns, and give your readers or viewers case study material showing what you did and how and the results you achieved.
- Web designers and other service providers working with businesses in their early stages online could partner with a PPC marketing agency to get results rather than letting them struggle to win an uphill battle with SEO that’d likely take months to gain traction.
12 Web Traffic Affiliate Programs`
- Wordstream
- Outgrow
- Awario
- SEO Powersuite
- Tapfiliate
- TUNE
- Wave Video
- Quuu Promote
- SEM Rush
- Push Engage
- PPC Protect
- Adzooma
1. Wordstream
Wordstream is one of the few digital advertising platforms that provide tools to manage both PPC and social media advertising from one platform.
It’s useful for small businesses getting started with PPC advertising and there are upgrades that include consultation calls too. Depending on the business goals, a 1-on-1 consult every couple of weeks could be cheaper than working with a PPC agency.
The audience WordStream is suited to are businesses getting started with paid advertising and digital marketing agencies as the tools can save them time on client campaigns, which ultimately leads to more profits as the less time a team spends managing campaigns, the higher their profit margin becomes.
Wordstream is looking for channel partners rather than general affiliates so you will need a business audience.
Given the tools and services they have, suitable partners would be agencies and service providers such as web designers, logo designers, or business consultants that have clients that would benefit from using WordStream.
There aren’t specific details listed about how much is paid or cookie duration, however, they do state that partners can be paid a single payment or monthly revenue share.
For those with a client base of small business owners, the Wordstream partner program could be beneficial to you and your clients – or students if you teach beginners how to use PPC advertising.
Find out more here.
2. Outgrow
Outgrow is a subscription-based service that lets users create interactive content such as polls, quizzes, calculators, assessments, and surveys with ease.
Where the potential is for traffic increases is with social media marketing because interactive content is more widely shared.
The platform can be integrated with over 1,000 marketing tools such as Hubspot and Active Campaign. Where it’s most beneficial is increasing brand awareness by having more sharable content on social media and also for lead generation.
The affiliate program pays a 20% recurring commission but there’s no information on how long the cookies last.
Sign up here.
3. Awario
Awario is a social listening tool that can be used strategically by marketers to increase traffic. Examples include monitoring social media for mentions of your own brand or a competitor, or industry news and trends to identify bloggers, influencers, and journalists that would be worth reaching out to for guest posting.
The service includes a domain stats analysis too that can indicate the traffic potential from brand mentions on other social accounts or guest posts from the website’s blog.
Awario would be suited to both businesses needing to monitor brand mentions and for bloggers to identify partner blogs to guest post on or to ask about co-hosting a podcast or reach out for interview opportunities as examples.
The Awario affiliate program uses the Avangate network, pays a 30% recurring commission, and uses a 90-day cookie.
Sign up at Avangate.com
4. SEO Powersuite
SEO Powersuite is one of the more affordable SEO tools used by marketers of various experience levels as well as SEO agencies.
Whilst it can help anyone with a website to manage the SEO themselves, where you’re likely to see most success is in the small business space by marketing to in-house marketing managers with small teams.
The reason for this is the website audit can provide a checklist of things to work on for the entire month. Each issue identified is accompanied with the how-to instructions to fix the problem, saving loads of Googling, forum posts, or outsourcing small jobs to freelancers because of a lack of in-house knowledge.
As the month goes on, marketers can log into the software, check off the items that are done, then managers can print the reports at the month-end, and see the improvements that have been done.
And it’s not just one tool. It’s the Website Auditor, Rank Tracker, SpyGlass for competitor research, and LinkAssistant to help with link building campaigns.
The only reason it’s mentioned about focusing on the B2B marketing for SMBs is that the range of tasks needed to manage all the SEO chores is broad, often spanning hundreds of issues to fix. It’s why agencies use this type of software as there’s reporting functionality included.
The affiliate program is managed on the Avangate network, pays a 33% recurring commission on annual licenses and the cookies are set to 120-days.
5. Tapfiliate
Tapfiliate is an affiliate marketing network that focuses heavily on e-commerce. It’s one of the more affordable ways for new and existing retailers to get an affiliate program up and running with a small budget and zero transaction fees.
The affiliate program for the Tapfiliate network pays a 20% commission on the first 6-months payments from referrals. Qualifying referrals are those who continue their subscription after the 14-day free trial period.
Sign up at Tapfiliate.com
6. TUNE
The TUNE network evolved from HasOffers.com that started back in 2009 as an affiliate platform. The network has changed with the times, now focusing on providing a SaaS partner marketing platform.
In simple terms, it’s not just for managing an affiliate campaign. It now supports multi-channel tracking. For businesses paying for content distribution such as through Facebook ads, influencer marketing, sponsoring a podcast, and/or running paid advertorial content…. all campaigns can be individually managed on the TUNE network and that’s in addition to the affiliate tracking software.
In a nutshell, for businesses heavy on content marketing and content distribution through paid partnerships, that’s where the TUNE network could be a good fit.
Commissions are based on the type of plan your referral signs up for and this is based on a 12-month contract.
The types of accounts and fees are:
- $250 for referrals opening a Pro Network account
- $500 for referrals opening an Enterprise Network account
- $1,000 for referrals opening an Advertiser Account.
For commissions to be payable, referral accounts need to be in good standing for at least 3-months as commissions are not paid until up to 30-days after the close of the next fiscal quarter from your referral opening an account. That’s just from skimming their terms so read through that and understand it before you apply.
Read the terms here and apply to the TUNE Advocacy Program here.
7. Wave Video
Wave Video makes it easy to make, edit, upload, and share videos for a variety of purposes, and keeps them ad-free. The exception is the free plan as that’s branded for Wave Video. Paid plans remove the branding.
They provide the learning resources for free at “academy.wave.video” and a variety of tools to make branded videos to use for video advertising, and they can embed directly within emails (preventing sending traffic to a 3rd-party video hosting site), uploading webinars to the cloud, which could then be used as part of a sales funnel.
The ability to embed playable videos within an email is likely to be compelling for high-value sales funnels. As examples, following up with before and after photo shoots and explainers for cosmetic procedures that can sell for thousands of dollars. The same for real estate newsletters that could feature video presentations within emails.
The affiliate program runs on the Tapfiliate network, pays a 20% recurring commission for the first year, and uses a 60-day tracking cookie.
Sign up at Tapfiliate.com.
8. Quuu Promote
Quuu Promote takes the hassle out of content curation for sharing on social media. It’s something that has the potential to drive clicks from social media, but mainly, it’s beneficial for brand awareness by getting your blog posts shared.
But, that depends on the category you’re niche is. If it’s something mainstream like dieting, it’s more likely to get shared because it’s done manually by other users.
Think of it as a modern take of the old-school social bookmarking shares. You’d pay for other accounts to repost. Quuu does that on real accounts, however, the core benefit is the content moderation.
Before any content goes live to be shared on other users’ accounts, it goes through a manual content moderation process. The purpose is to make sure the content doesn’t sell, is beneficial to readers, and isn’t biased because other people could be sharing with opposing viewpoints not knowing what your content mentions.
For that reason, it’s best for sharing helpful content like tips articles, and how-to guides. Not review posts or any money pages selling a product or service.
The Quuu affiliate program pays a 25% recurring commission and uses the getwardful.com platform to track your referrals.
New customers need to sign up for a paid plan and maintain it for 30-days, after which you’ll be paid 25% of their service fee, which is currently $75 for their team to handle the curation and scheduling or $50 for customers to use their platform and set their campaigns up manually.
Sign up here.
9. SEM Rush
SEM Rush is a premium research tool used by digital marketing agencies as it’s a complete suite of tools that can be used to analyze website traffic, perform competitive research on competing websites, identify link building opportunities, research competitors using PPC advertising, see the keywords they’re advertising under, view the live preview of their ads and what it’s costing to run these.
For companies paying for advertising, this is actionable data, but even for those focused only on organic, it can identify potentially profitable keyword terms to target with SEO.
SEM Rush is best known as an SEO tool but it has morphed into a Swiss army knife of digital marketing tools because of the data customers can get on their competitors to use to improve SEO, analyze paid advertising in real-time, perform competitive research, and get insights into social media to improve content marketing with targeted distribution.
The SEM Rush affiliate program pays up to 40% recurring commissions for as long as your referrals maintain an active subscription. The cookie duration is 10-years, but that’s using 1st click attribution, meaning you need to be the first person to introduce a new visitor to the service.
Sign up at BeRush.com
10. Push Engage
Web browser push notifications can drive a tremendous amount of traffic. They’re used in a variety of blogs, but they’re particularly useful for e-commerce store owners because they can drive revenue-generating traffic.
The key to getting push notifications to work is to be providing value. That’s easier done on an e-commerce store as businesses can announce flash sales, coupon codes, new arrivals, or pre-order specials (as examples) to customers’ browsers and smartphones. Push Engage works on mobile browsers too.
The affiliate program runs on the Refersion platform, pays a 50% recurring commission, and the cookies are set to track for 60-days.
Sign up at Refersion.com
11. PPC Protect
Digital advertising is fraught with fraudulent activity due to fake bot traffic mimicking human behavior. It’s been estimated that 90% of advertisers are impacted by either click fraud or ad fraud.
The more competitive the industry, the higher the bid cost (CPC: Cost Per Click), and those are the ones most affected by ad fraud.
Industries like finance, insurance, and local trade keywords with the word “emergency”, such as an emergency plumber in (city name), emergency locksmith in (city name), etc. areas are the rifest for ad fraud because they have high buyer intent driving the CPC up.
Since networks operate revenue share with supply-side platforms, there is scope for ad fraud to be profitable – against the network terms of service.
The problem PPC Protect solves is making sure the money advertisers spend goes towards ads served to human viewers. By default in the pay-per-click advertising industry, networks charge by the click but it’s been estimated that between 20% to 25% of those clicks could be bot traffic.
One of the largest fraud operations was in 2016 that became known as the Methbot Operation. At its peak, the bot farm…
- used over 850,000 dedicated IP addresses
- spread across over 800 dedicated servers
- Spoofed over 6,000 domains,
- falsified over a quarter-million URLs per day,
- Serving 200 to 400 million ads daily…
The cost: Between $3 million and $5 million every day siphoned by tech-savvy cybercriminals!
PPC Protect is a SaaS program designed to detect fraudulent traffic ensuring advertisers are only paying for human traffic and not fake or fraudulent views.
The same advertising budget can drive more web traffic by eliminating inaccurate and fraudulent clicks.
The affiliate program for PPC Protect is privately run, pays a 25% recurring commission for the first year, and uses a 90-day cookie.
Sign up at PPCProtect.com
12. Adzooma
Adzooma is an online ad-tech platform used by small businesses and advertising agencies to manage Google ads, Facebook ads, and Microsoft ads from one dashboard.
The platform started out as a software solution to be compatible with Google AdWords to implement custom rules making it easier to manage PPC campaigns.
They became Google Partners in 2015, but in 2019, they saw larger growth after being invited to collaborate with Google through the Accelerator Program.
That same year, they became Facebook Partners and are now a Select Channel Partner with Microsoft Advertising too.
Adzooma started with a team of 12 and now have 80 staff operating in three offices in the UK and the next stage is expansion into the US advertising industry.
The target audience is similar to Wordstream but they’re not the best for businesses with zero PPC experience because of a lack of learning resources.
Who they would be best suited to are those familiar with advertising and using omnichannel PPC advertising for Google, Microsoft, and Facebook PPC campaigns.
The Adzooma affiliate program is privately run, uses a 30-day cookie, and pays up to $100 per referral.
Sign up here.
