How Many Affiliate Programs Should You Join?

How many affiliate programs should I join? This is a common question beginner bloggers and affiliates ask me all the time. Here’s our answer to how many affiliate programs we recommend you join:

For beginners, it’s recommended to join a maximum of three affiliate programs, as it can become hard to manage too many. But for experienced affiliates, there’s no upper limit – as long as you have the processes in place to manage all these affiliate programs.

In this article, I’ll go into more detail about why joining multiple affiliate programs is a great idea and how to go about it the right way. If you’re ready to learn how many affiliate programs you should join, let’s dig in!

Table of Contents

Can You Join Multiple Affiliate Programs?
How Many Affiliate Programs Should I Join?
3 Reasons Not To Join Too Many Affiliate Programs
Factors To Consider When Joining an Affiliate Program
FAQs
How Many Affiliate Programs Should You Join? Final Thoughts

Can You Join Multiple Affiliate Programs?

Yes, you can join multiple affiliate programs in your niche, and promote them on your site. There is no limit to how many affiliate programs you can join, though it becomes much harder to track if you have too many.

How Many Affiliate Programs Can You Join?

You can join as many affiliate programs as you like. There are no rules stopping you from being part of more than one affiliate program, and you can even use multiple affiliate programs on one site, and even on the same page.

But, if you are part of too many affiliate programs, you may find it difficult to manage, and become less effective at promoting each affiliate offer.

Benefits of Joining Multiple Affiliate Programs

In fact, joining multiple affiliate programs is a great way to diversify your income, so your business isn’t too reliant on one retailer. In fact, the Google Reviews guidelines say that a high-quality product review should:

“Consider including links to multiple sellers to give the reader the option to purchase from their merchant of choice.”

So, giving your reader multiple options, with affiliate links for each, can actually be good for SEO.

Further Reading:

Best Affiliate Programs for Beginners Worth Joining Now

How Many Affiliate Programs Should I Join?

Stick to a maximum of three affiliate programs if you’re a beginner starting a new affiliate site.

Then, once you’ve grown larger, you can begin testing new programs and further diversifying your income.

The most important thing is how much money you make, not how many programs you scatter across your site.

So, test a few programs, see which works for you, and then push this program so you can start generating your first affiliate sales and revenue.

3 Reasons Not To Join Too Many Affiliate Programs

Here are some questions to ask yourself before looking for new affiliate programs to join:

1. Too many affiliate programs is a distraction

Sometimes joining more affiliate programs could distract you. Creating content requires time and effort. So, the sweet spot is joining as many programs as you can promote – without reducing your productivity.

2. More tracking is required

Sometimes you only need one affiliate program because it has all the necessary products. Typically, these are affiliate networks, not programs.

Joining an affiliate network reduces the mental bandwidth of needing to track every program you belong to because they’re housed under one roof.

Though, the Lasso link database makes this easier to track, as you get a central affiliate link database on your site.

Lasso also automatically scans every every link on your site, and alerts you if anything is out of stock, or if the links are broken.

This makes being part of more affiliate programs, and having more affiliate links, far more manageable – especially for beginners. Without a tool like Lasso, juggling multiple affiliate programs can be difficult.

3. Difficult for beginners to manage

If you’re a beginner, start small. It’s the best way to build relationships with your affiliate managers and familiarize yourself with their catalog.

For example, if your niche is online marketing, you could choose from:

SEO services
Email marketing tools
Web hosting providers

Select one from each.

Alternatively, experienced affiliate marketers will likely juggle multiple offers, and that’s ok. Your experience level will determine how many products you feel comfortable promoting.

Using our WordPress plugin Lasso, you can easily find affiliate programs inside your dashboard.

Head to Opportunities > Programs.

Lasso scans your site for potential programs you could join based on domains you already link to. This report displays:

Additional affiliate programs
Commission rates
Potential links

Pick the ones most relevant and sign up for them inside your dashboard.

Alternatively, if you’re a content creator, check out our affiliate database with thousands of affiliate programs categorized by niche.

Factors To Consider When Joining an Affiliate Program

Joining too many affiliate programs is difficult to manage, so here’s some factors to consider when choosing which affiliate programs to test.

1. Payouts

The key things to check are:

Scheduled payouts: how often will you get paid, and how long is the delay from making the sale. For example, Amazon operates on a NET60, so you are paid 60 days after the month ends.
Minimum payouts: is the minimum payout amount attainable for you, based on your current scale? For example, SurferSEO has a minimum payout of $250, which may be difficult to achieve.
Is the payout method supported in your region: always check whether you’ll be able to be paid from this merchant.

2. Examine any public data on the affiliate partner

Some affiliate networks such as Shareasale publicly display data such as:

EPC (to see if it is a high-earning affiliate program).
Downtime (if the program has a lot of time where they were low on funds, for example, you may want to avoid it).

Shareasale show how often in the last year each affiliate program has been online, and low on funds or offline.

You can use this data to save time by avoiding unreliable merchants, or low-earning programs.

3. Cookie length

Cookie length is how long from clicking on your affiliate link will the sale be credited to you. For example, Amazon has just a 24-hour cookie length, so you won’t be credited for any sales that happen after then.

Some other programs have much more favorable terms, crediting you with the affiliate referral up to 30 days later.

4. Are the products compatible with your audience

The most important factor is whether the products an affiliate merchant has are compatible with your niche, and your audience. No matter how good the EPC, cookie length, and how good the payout terms are, if the products are not a good match for your audience, it won’t be successful.

FAQs

What is the best way to promote multiple affiliate offers?

It’s important to test multiple affiliate offers, and then focus on promoting the offers that perform best. You can measure this from the earnings per click (EPC) from the affiliate links. Then, you can prioritize promoting the profitable affiliate offers, and avoid the low-earning offers.

Lasso Performance helps you compare the EPC and revenue for all your affiliate links instantly, and helps you test affiliate offers much faster to find the most profitable.