17 Best Pay Per Click Affiliate Programs to Use to Make Money

Imagine this:

It’s noon, and you just woke up. You lazily pick up your phone to check Facebook for whatever reason, and you hear a text notification.

You rub your sleepy eyes, look at the screen of your phone, and it says: “You just made $50.”

You smile to yourself and think, “I should do this more often,” then you go back to sleep.

A few hours later, you wake up again and hear your phone notification sound go off, only this time it says: “You just made $100!”

That, my friend, is what affiliate marketing is all about.

So, What Exactly is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is when you promote other people’s products and services to make money from their sales.

You get paid a commission for any sales that you generate through your affiliate links.

It’s essentially a digital version of word-of-mouth marketing, but instead of talking to people in person, you talk to them on the internet and make a little money for it.

It’s also sometimes called performance marketing because you only get paid when you perform and generate sales from your marketing efforts.

Types of affiliate programs:

There are two types of affiliate programs you can promote:

1. Product affiliate programs – These are programs where you sell actual products for other businesses and companies. 
2. Program affiliate programs: These are service affiliate marketing programs that sell services instead of physical products. Examples include digital info products or webinars. 

Both types can be very profitable if done right. But if we were to recommend between the two options, we would suggest you go with program affiliates because they’re much easier to sell and are generally less competitive.

What’s a Pay Per Click (PPC) Affiliate Program, and What Difference Does It Have with Affiliate Program?

Affiliate marketing is where you’re paid a commission every time a visitor clicks on your affiliate link and buys the product or service you’re promoting.

For example, let’s say there’s a company called “Tacos R” that sells tacos. Affiliate marketing is where you’re paid a commission every time a visitor clicks on your affiliate link and buys the product or service you’re promoting.

For example, let’s say there’s a company called “Tacos R” that sells tacos.

You promote their tacos on your website and get a commission for every sale that you generate.

However, with a PPC affiliate program — instead of being paid a commission on every sale made — you’re paid a small fee whenever someone clicks on your affiliate link. No sale is necessary for you to make money.

Alternatives to Pay Per Click Affiliate Program?

Although PPC affiliate marketing is the most popular and widely used affiliate program, it’s not the only one.

There are several other ways to make money with affiliate programs. They include:

1. Pay Per Impression:  This is where you get paid every time someone views your ad/link, whether or not they click on it.
2. Pay Per Action: You get paid based on your site visitors’ actions after viewing your affiliate link. 
3. Pay Per Sale: This is similar to a product affiliate program. You’re paid a commission every time a visitor clicks on your affiliate link and buys the product or service you’re promoting.
4. Pay Per Call: You’ll get paid every time your visitor calls the number provided in your ad. 
5. Pay Per Lead: You will make money when someone fills out a form on your website or clicks on an affiliate link and provides their contact information, whether or not they end up buying something.
6. Pay Per Download: You get paid when someone downloads a file from your website, whether or not they buy anything.

So, Why Pay Per Click Affiliate Program?

Here are a few reasons we suggest you choose affiliate program over any other alternative:

1. No Selling Required: PPC programs are ideal if you find it hard to sell stuff. You don’t have to do any actual sales to make money from these types of programs.
2. Very Low Competition: PPC affiliate programs tend to be less competitive than product affiliate programs. That’s because only a few people are selling PPC services than products.
3. Easier to Grow: PPC affiliate programs are more scalable than product affiliate programs. You can easily set up multiple PPC campaigns and promote them to grow your business faster.
4. Better Conversion Rates: Studies show that the conversion rates for PPC programs are better than any other type of affiliate marketing, especially when you have optimized your landing pages properly.

So, how do you make the most money as a PPC affiliate?

Here are some proven strategies that can help you:

• Optimize your landing page properly to get more clicks and a better conversion rate.
• Pay attention to small details like ad placement and affiliate link length to get more clicks through your ads
• Don’t be afraid to test different landing page designs and ad copy, even if it costs you some money – as it stands, experimenting is the key to success.
• Be patient and understand that you will need a heavy traffic flow to your site to make a decent amount of money through PPC affiliate programs. It may take a while before you start making sales through your ads, so don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t happen right away.

What are The Best Affiliate Programs (High Paying for Beginners)?

Here are the best PPC affiliate programs to join for a steady stream of income.

#1 PPC Affiliate Programs for Broad-topic Websites and Blogs

These PPC Affiliate programs can work with almost any type of website or blog:

• Google AdSense

The first PPC affiliate program that comes to mind when someone mentions “PPC programs” is Google AdSense.

Here, you can earn money by displaying ads on your website or blog and sharing the revenue with Google when someone clicks on one of your ads.

If your site enjoys decent traffic flow, Google AdSense makes an excellent choice of an affiliate program. 

It’s a great PPC affiliate program for any niche, as long as you have the traffic to make it work. 

Follow this link to sign up your site for Google AdSense: https://www.google.com/adsense/start/

Works Great With any website — that’s because it accommodates a huge range of topics and products. They’re a must-have if you produce video content.  

• Media.net

Media.net is another large PPC affiliate network that offers good rates for publishers — up to $3 per thousand impressions.

If you are willing to share revenue with ad networks, Media.net can be an excellent choice, especially since they have many advertisers and categories to choose from.

Follow the link below to sign up with Media.net: https://www.media.net

Works Great With virtually any website — it’s a high-paying ad network that provides high CPMs. They are an all-in-one PPC solution and offer users the option to choose a CPC, CPM, or CPV campaign. 

• MediaVine

MediaVine pays you per view, as opposed to AdSense and Media.net, which pay you for click. So, if someone watches a video for more than 30 seconds, that’s considered a “view” in this case.

MediaVine works with both desktop and mobile traffic, pretty useful if your site gets a decent amount of traffic from mobile devices.

Unlike AdSense and Media.net, MediaVine gives you more freedom in designing your ad units because they let you use HTML for your banners instead of just a plain image with some text on it. 

Follow this link to Sign up with Mediavine: https://www.mediavine.co/partners

Works Great With video blogs, gaming sites, and any site that can attract a lot of traffic from mobile viewers.

• AdThrive

AdThrive is a PPC affiliate network that can work for almost any website out there. Their terms are slightly different from MediaVine and AdSense:

For example, with AdThrive, you make money the moment your ads appear on someone’s screen, not when they click on it (much like an affiliate program.)

More about AdThrive:

AdThrive provides more options to choose from when creating your ad unit than any other PPC affiliate network on the list. 

Requirements for qualifications: 

They’re, however, very strict with regards to who they bring on board.  If they accept you, that should mean your site is really strong and relevant to its target audience.

Your site must at least drive 100, 000 visits per month for it to be accepted.

You can follow this link to create an account with AdThrive: https://www.adthrive.com/partners

Works Great With — any website that gets a lot of traffic per month, especially from the USA, UK, and Canada, since they only serve ads from advertisers in these countries.  

• Adsterra

Adsterra offers a variety of ad sizes, including skyscrapers, banners, text ads, and more.

There are a lot of advertisers in this network and lots of categories to choose from.  Adsterra pays you after 30 days instead of the typical 60-day payment cycle like other PPC affiliate networks. 

Requirements for joining: 

Adsterra boasts a 10-minutes approval. Compared to AdThrive, they’re less strict on approving publishers. 

However, your site must get at least 5,000 monthly visitors to be accepted.

Follow this link to Sign up with Adsterra: https://www.adsterra.com/partners

Works Great With sites that do a lot of real-estate or finance-related content because it has tons of advertisers and categories from these niches.  Plus, their minimum payout is only $20 – quite low compared to other networks on this list.

• Clickadu

Clickadu is a pay-per-click affiliate program with tons of advertisers and categories to choose from.

If your site enjoys a decent amount of traffic, you can trust this network to pay you up to $10 per thousand impressions.

Requirements for Joining:

Other than the usual requirements for joining a PPC affiliate network, Clickadu requires that your site drives at least 50, 000 visits per month.

Link to sign up with Clickadu: https://www.clickadu.com/publishers

Works Great For any site with a decent traffic flow from the USA and Western Europe because their advertisers are mostly from these regions.

• Infolinks

Infolinks is one of the largest pay-per-click affiliate programs out there, with a large selection of publishers.  

With Infolinks, you make money by displaying an ad on your website or blog (similar to Adsense.)

It’s one of the easiest ad networks to use, and I recommend it for beginners looking for a quick start.

Requirements for joining Infolinks:

Your site needs at least 500 visitors per month, with at least 25% of those coming from mobile devices. 

Follow this link to Sign up with: Infolinks: https://www.infolinks.com/join

Works Great For any website that enjoys decent traffic from the USA and Western Europe because their advertisers are mostly from these regions.  

• Outbrain

Outbrain operates a little differently from the other PPC affiliate networks listed in this article.  They place a snippet of your content on top of another site’s page, but it still pays you for every click generated through this content (like how normal PPC affiliate programs work.)

Outbrain is one of the largest PPC affiliate networks with over 20 000 advertisers and 250 million monthly impressions.

Requirements for joining Outbrain:

When you’re signing up with Outbrain, you don’t need a specific amount of traffic to join their network since it works by showing ads on other sites. But your content must be good because the ads are shown on high-traffic sites.

Follow this link to Sign up with Outbrain: https://www.outbrain.com/publishers/join

Works Great For any blogs or websites with high-quality content.

#2 PPC Affiliate Programs for Travel Websites and Blogs

• Cheap Flights

CheapFlights is a travel comparison affiliate program that pays you to send traffic to their website.  The great thing is that you can choose from all kinds of affiliate marketing opportunities ranging from flight tracking, hotel booking or travel insurance, among others.

Requirements for signing up: 

The only requirement to join CheapFlights is that your site generates over 1 000 visitors per month.  

And it only takes $50 to cash out.  CheapFlights is arguably one of the best PPC affiliate programs for travel bloggers.

Link: https://www.cheapflights.com/affiliates

• Skyscanner Affiliate Program

Travel affiliate programs are great for generating income.  But when it comes to pay-per-click affiliate programs, the Skyscanner Affiliate program is one of the best because of its unique advertising model that focuses on quality traffic.

From flights to hotel reservations, this affiliate program covers all the needs of a travel blogger or site owner. It’s also easy to get started, and you get to choose from different types of ads (banners, display ads, and feeds.)

Requirements for joining Skyscanner Affiliate Program:

To be accepted by this program, you need a website that gets at least 1 000 visitors per month, of which 50% should come from mobile devices.  This affiliate program only accepts affiliates in the USA, Canada & Australia.

Link: https://www.partners.skyscanner.net/affiliates/affiliate-products

#3 PPC Affiliate Programs for Health and Lifestyle Websites and Blogs

• Dr. Cash

Dr.Cash is a cashback affiliate program for health and personal care products. They pay you for each of your referrals through PayPal or check.  

Their advertisers are mostly pharmaceutical companies, medical providers, makers of health merchandise, and others selling products online.  And they offer banner ads, text links, email links, and others to choose from.

Requirements for joining Dr. Cash:

You don’t need a website or blog to join this travel affiliate program, just an email address.  

Dr.Cash pays you for each referral that successfully makes a transaction on their site. Payments are made through PayPal.

Link: https://dr.cash/affiliates

#4 PPC Affiliate Programs for Business Websites and Blogs

PPC affiliate programs can also work for business websites and blogs.  But if your site isn’t high traffic, you might want to experiment with different PPC affiliate programs before settling on one that works with your website or blog.

• CBMINT

CBMint is a PPC affiliate platform that deals with metals. They have a network of affiliates that sell their products and get commissions for generated sales.  

Here are some of the metals you can promote on CBMint: copper, gold, silver, palladium, zinc, and platinum. Their PPC affiliate program allows you to choose from several types of ads, including text links, banners, feeds, and email ads.

They only have one tier of commission which is $2.00 per 1000 impressions on your site. And the best part about this PPC affiliate program is that you earn a recurring monthly commission as long as the user continues to be an active customer at CBMint.

Link: https://www.cbmint.com/affiliates/

Works best with: websites that write about special metals.

• TradeTracker

TradeTracker is a PPC affiliate program specializing in high-speed trading services.    If your website talks about high-speed trading, Forex trading, or binary options, then this might be the affiliate program for you. 

You will earn a $25 flat rate per referral. It also pays for all confirmed referral conversions. You can choose to receive your commissions through PayPal or check (min $100).    

Link: https://www.tradetracker.com/partnership

• Entireweb

Entireweb is an alternate search engine. It also offers an AdMarketplace that features several PPC affiliate programs. Their advertisers are mainly businesses that need leads and sales for their products or services.

Advertiser Program – This program was created to find high-quality clicks for its advertisers. They accept advertisers from all industries. 

As an affiliate marketer, you’ll earn up to $0.02 per click and $0.01 per impression.

Link: https://www.entireweb.com/partners

• Ezoic

Ezoic is a premium ad network approved by Google Publisher Partners. 

Their affiliate program lets you promote the Ezoic platform on your website or blog and get paid whenever someone converts. 

After you join the program, you’ll be provided with a unique tracking link to promote.  When someone clicks on that link and signs up for Ezoic, you earn a commission.

Note that you’ll continue to earn a commission from new customers as long they remain active.  

Link: https://affiliates.ezoic.com/signup/

• Commission Junction

Commission junction is an affiliate network that features numerous PPC affiliate programs from different merchants selling all sorts of products and services through online marketing channels such as pay-per-click, social media ads, display ads, etc.

You can choose any program you like and promote that product or service on your site or make a blog post about it.  The merchants at Commission Junction will send you their ads and pay you when someone clicks on those ads to visit their website or link.  

Link: https://signup.cj.com/member/signup/publisher/

• LINQIA

Linqia is a PPC affiliate marketing platform that’s in the business of connecting bloggers and influencers to advertisers.  They help advertisers get traffic to their site through online marketing channels such as pay-per-click, social media ads, display ads, etc.

For bloggers and influencers who are looking for extra income from advertising networks or affiliates programs, Linqia has an affiliate program you can join

Requirements for joining:

• At least 2500 social followers
• Based in the US or Canada.
• Makes at least one social media post in a month

Link: https://www.linqia.com/affiliates

5 Common Challenges in PPC Affiliate Marketing

PPC affiliate marketing is not without its share of common challenges.  They are:

• Not Enough Leads

For PPC affiliate marketing to be profitable, your site first needs to drive a significant amount of traffic.

Without enough traffic, you’ll be promoting to a smaller pool of potential customers.  That means lower conversion rates.

You need to figure out how to drive huge amounts of high-quality traffic to your site to fix this. 

• Poor Conversion Rates

When you’re promoting PPC affiliate programs, keep in mind that not all your visitors are going to convert.  Given that fact, it is important to calculate your conversion rates and know whether you’re getting enough conversions to be profitable.

Conversion rate is calculated as the total number of conversions divided by the total number of your site visitors. 

For example, if you had 20 sessions on your site and 2 out of those 20 visitors converted, then your conversion rate would be 10%. 

2/20 *100 = 10%

You can also use Google Analytics tools to track your conversion rate through the Funnel Visualization report.

• Low Profitability

It is good to get visitors who convert, but it doesn’t matter if you can’t make money from those conversions.

To determine your profitability, try dividing your total income by the number of sessions (traffic).  Doing so gives you the average profit per session.

Note that this doesn’t account for the cost incurred, such as the cost of running PPC ads, SEO, or any other form of digital marketing. 

That’s also an inflexible metric to use if you’re not getting enough traffic.  Therefore, it may be better to see how much profit you are making with each visitor type (Facebook Ads vs. Google Ads, for example) and see what type of traffic you need to generate or what affiliate programs you need to make more money.

• Dead or Slow PPC Affiliate Programs

While it may be tempting to join every PPC affiliate program out there because it’s easy money, you need to be picky. 

If they don’t convert visitors into customers well or the pay-out isn’t worth it, you should probably avoid them.  There are better options out there where you can get higher pay-outs.

• Competition is Heating Up

If your PPC affiliate marketing strategy relies mainly on ad keywords and you’re not getting enough results, you may need to optimize for new search terms.  If you are a beginner or have a small website with low traffic, it might not be easy to compete with the other advertisers targeting the same keywords as you.  If you can’t find any new keyword opportunities, it may be time to rethink your overall PPC affiliate marketing strategy.

• Negative Impacts on Your SEO

Another major problem with PPC affiliate marketing is that your SEO campaign can be negatively affected if you’re not careful.  It happens when the links to your site are just clicked through and then left behind. That means they don’t help further boost your rankings in the search engines. It also hurts your credibility as well because you aren’t building a relationship with your customers.

• Low Margins

As with any online marketing opportunity, PPC affiliate marketing has low margins compared to offline businesses.  That can be especially problematic when your traffic declines or conversion rate drops.

• Unsustainable Marketing Strategy

It is important to have a sustainable strategy for promoting PPC affiliate programs.  That means having multiple sources of traffic that are continuously bringing in new visitors and more sales over time.

7 Strategies for a PPC Affiliate Marketing Campaign

So, how do you ensure profitability when running a PPC affiliate marketing campaign?

Here are some strategies you can use:

• Develop a strong reputation in your niche 

With the rise of blogs and social media, anyone can grow an audience.  If you do it right, that audience can become a tool that you can easily leverage for profitability.

Your customers will be more willing to buy from you than they would from a random product site.  

So, how do you develop that audience? Find topics in your niche that are not being covered extensively on the internet already and provide quality content around these topics.  

Your target customer should find it valuable enough to share with their social network (readers on their blog, followers on Facebook, etc.)

• Choose an Affiliate Program that allows you to Use Paid Ads 

The best PPC affiliate programs will allow you to use Google AdWords as part of your affiliate promotion strategy.  That means that you can source traffic from various sources (social media, search engines, blogs, etc.) and convert it into sales for the Affiliate Program. That’s because you have more control over the quality and quantity of the traffic.  

So, how can you find PPC Affiliate Programs That Let You Use Google AdWords?

Some great ways to get started are:

Join Your Niche’s Facebook Group(s) and start asking questions such as “what affiliate programs allow pay-per-click advertising?” or “are there any high converting offers to promote?” In addition to that, you can also check out some of the top affiliate networks such as Amazon and Share-A-Sale for PPC affiliate programs.

• Link to Your Own Affiliate Landing Page and Not Directly to Your Merchant’s Website

By linking directly to your merchant’s website, you run the risk that other affiliates will get credit for a sale even if they didn’t refer it.  

On the other hand, by not linking directly to your merchant’s site and, instead, linking to a landing page that contains affiliate links (your own), you can increase your conversion rates as well as take credit for every sale even without sending targeted traffic.

• Create a Landing Page that Offers Additional Value to the User

Your landing page should do more than just list a product.  For example, if you’re promoting a product on your landing page, offer some useful information about your target audience’s pains and how the product can help solve them. 

Offer a detailed guide, reviews, testimonials, comparison tables, etc.  The point is to give more value than your target customer can resist.

• Attach Your Affiliate Links to Product Reviews on High Authority Sites 

Normally when you read a good product review, you’ll want to go straight to the merchant’s site and purchase it right away, right? If you can get a product review written by someone with lots of authority in your target niche, there’s as much chance that your audience will do the same thing.

So, find top authority sites in your niche and approach them about writing a product review for you. You’ll need to provide them with a free copy of the product (with your affiliate links attached to it) and link back to your landing page if you have one.

• Choose an Ad Platform (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc.) 

How are you planning to drive traffic to your site? SEO might help, but it’s not enough.  

It would be best if you had paid ads, and part of that is choosing the right platform to advertise on. 

Here are some of the options you have:

• Google AdWords
• Facebook Ads
• LinkedIn Ads 
• Yahoo Search Marketing 
• Bing Search Marketing 
• Reddit Ads App Installs (such as from an iOS or Android app) 
• Display advertising (such as AdSense for example)

• Never use branded keywords when creating your ads. 

For example, if you’re promoting a weight loss-related product on Google AdWords, do not include the term “Weight Loss” in your ad copy.  That’s because Google will pick up on that and put you with other competing products from all over the web instead of offering you some exclusively from your merchant’s website.

Another strategy you can try is targeting your ad towards people searching for a specific product that can solve their pain without using the keyword itself.  For example, if I were promoting an offer from my merchant’s website that related to “cleanse tea,” I might target people searching for “herbal detox tea” or simply “detox tea” to increase my conversion rates.