Today I was asked by somebody that was relatively new to affiliate marketing if there are any good alternatives to ClickBank.
Now if you have any experience with affiliate marketing you’ll likely already know the answer – YES – of course. There are lots of good (and in my opinion better) alternatives to ClickBank.
However because of the fact that so many affiliate marketing training programs have been built around the ClickBank platform, many people actually assume that ClickBank is the ONLY affiliate network out there.
In short, it’s not – there are thousands upon thousands of others… Likely millions even.
Don’t get me wrong, ClickBank is a legitimate platform in itself, but it’s definitely gained a reputation for housing lots of scams & low-quality products/programs.
As a result I personally would actually advise finding an alternative.
In fact that’s actually the reason the person who approached me was asking for alternatives. In reference to the products found on ClickBank he said (and I quote) “Some of them are truly low quality and a bit scammy“…
My opinion? He’s right, they are.
I mean sure, there are likely a few good eggs in between the bad ones but the problem is that the trust score from a customers perspective is so low because of ClickBank’s reputation that your conversions will likely suffer, even if you manage to find & promote a high quality product.
So What Are The Alternatives?
Ultimately this depends entirely on what you’re promoting, or what you want to promote.
If you haven’t yet built a website or haven’t yet decided on a niche then you’ll be open to consider any affiliate program – you won’t be tied into promoting something specific.
So with that in mind, have you considered promoting products from Amazon?
Amazon have their own affiliate program which they call Amazon Associates & it enables you to promote almost any of the products that can be found on their website.
They even let you promote some of their services too, such as Amazon Music & Prime… And those have some pretty nice payouts.
There are a couple of reasons I always recommend Amazon to people that are just starting and those reasons are as follows:
- Amazon has AMAZING trust factor, so people will happily make a purchase without a second thought (and most people already have their card details saved in there for 1-click billing)
- It’s super easy to find great products because you can just run a search & look through the customer reviews
If there’s a reason you don’t want to promote products from Amazon though that’s fine, there are still plenty of other alternatives.
Some of the other big-players include:
And those are all affiliate networks, meaning they contain a bunch of programs from all sorts of different brands. The benefit of using a network is that there’s less chance you’ll get swindled out of commissions & you’ll more often than not also have better tracking/reporting options available.
Plus once you’ve signed up to a network you can access/apply to all of the programs listed inside without having to create separate new accounts for each.
Awin is a little annoying though as they require you to pay $5 to sign up. The fee is refunded if your application is successful, but you’ll lose it if it’s not (so I’d only apply there once your website is established).
They state that it’s to deter fraud, but it’s annoying either way & none of the other legit networks do it.
Affiliate Networks Like ClickBank
Are you simply looking for an alternative that houses similar products to ClickBank (digital products) & has high commission rates like ClickBank?
You’ll probably want JVZoo or WarriorPlus+ then…
Those sites are pretty similar to ClickBank but as a result they also suffer from similar problems.
There are certainly some legitimate products/programs to be found on the JVZoo & Warrior+ networks but again there are a lot of shady ones which bring their reputations down.
JVZoo is probably a little stricter out of them all, though.
As an alternative, if you have an idea of what you’d like to promote you could simply run a direct search for an affiliate program on Google. Often there are people that launch products/programs with their own affiliate programs.
This means they won’t show up on any of the networks, but if you run a search for them in Google like the one shown below you might find a page on their sites that outline how you can promote them.
A Little-Known Tool For Finding Affiliate Programs
Not many people are aware about this, but Wealthy Affiliate actually have an Affiliate Program Search Tool which allows you to search for affiliate programs across multiple different networks.
You can search by category, keywords & you can even view trending opportunities.
It instantly searches through networks like Rakuten, CJ, ClickBank & ShareASale & then produces the results. From there you can even order the results by the highest-paying commissions.
Sound useful? You can check it out here.
Plus on top of that you can even get real reviews from other affiliates which is something that isn’t available on the networks sites themselves. This means that you can get an idea as to whether something is worth promoting or not before you actually promote it.
Anyway, that’s a wrap for this particular question but hopefully that’s left you with enough alternatives. If you happen to have any other recommendations to add then feel free to leave them in the comments below.
