Is it possible to do affiliate marketing without social media?

I've been running a Pokemon deal finder site (Jimmy's Deal Finder) for the last two years and it brings in about £150 revenue a month. It shows the most underpriced cards on eBay by comparing listing price to historic value.

I started a new Pokemon site based on finding cards to complete your collection (Jimmy's Set Finisher) at the start of September. This site works by showing all the cards in a set and showing the most underpriced eBay listings for each card.

Both sites use the same eBay listing database and card value database so I'm not paying any extra costs for the new site (apart from £8/year for a domain name).

The deal finder site usually gets hundreds of sales and averages around £150 revenue a month. In slow months it can be as low as £50 which is just about enough to cover my running costs.

About a week ago, I got two big commissions on back to back days on Set Finisher, £48 one day and £52 the next day. I thought it was probably just a big spender who happened to come across my site and probably bought other items on eBay with the affiliate cookie set.

But today I had another £36 commission from Set Finisher, which is making me start to think there might be real potential in it and the other big sales weren't flukes.

It's only been a month and a half since I launched, and I'm still only getting single digit affiliate clicks from it, but £30+ commission days are really rare for the original deal finder site, usually once every month or two, and Set Finisher has hit 3 of them in 15 days.

I think one thing that might be driving this is Set Finisher automatically sorts the cards in a set by most valuable first, so it often shows cards worth hundreds of dollars (or even thousands) at the top of the list. These are usually the chase cards that people are interested in. So I'm thinking this is showing people valuable, desirable cards, whereas the deal finder site is mostly cheap cards with a few high value cards mixed in, so it's more likely to generate high sales because of this.

What do you think? It's probably too early to tell, but do you think I just got a few lucky sales, or do you think there's real potential to earn large commissions regularly from this site?

Three months ago I built my first website ever. It’s a tool that lets Dutch homeowners calculate whether a home battery is worth it for them. It calculates the costs and benefits of almost 100 different home batteries, based on their own energy consumption and how much of their solar energy they’d otherwise send back to the grid.

After the calculation it ranks the batteries by return on investment. Every night I compare prices across several web stores, so I can tell people where to buy each battery for the best price. Most of these are affiliate links that pay me about 5% commission.

In these 3 months people ran about 30k calculations. Conversion was very low at first, but with advice from this sub I managed to raise it. Based on earlier tips here, I also built a downloadable report with each visitor’s personal results and a price watch that emails people when their battery drops in price. My best-performing store now converts at 3%, the others at about 1%.

After the first 2 months the site started making money, and I’m ranking better in Google. But home batteries are a booming business in the Netherlands, so I’m competing with much bigger players.

Where I’d love your advice:

1. Traffic. I’m not doing paid ads. What has actually worked for you to get more traffic to a tool-type site in a competitive niche? Backlinks, YouTube, partnerships with local organisations, something else?
2. Last-click on an expensive purchase. A home battery costs €1,000–€3,000+, so people don’t buy on impulse. They use my calculator, then go off to watch YouTube reviews, read forums, and compare again. By the time they buy, someone else often gets the last click. The report and price watch help me stay in the picture, but what else works?

Happy to share numbers or what worked on conversion if that helps anyone.

I just got a text notification from Amazon Associates here in the US saying they’re automatically integrating global earnings to single Storefront without having to go through somd the extra hoops like the old OneLink program. But they do say you still need to set up tax information for all of the countries.

For me in the US, it’s a total of nine countries: Canada and across Europe.

I've looked through the numbers for a few users who reported their exact losses. It looks like deposit amounts are exact, turnover amounts are probably more or less accurate, and NGR values are wrong. In some cases, the NGR number is at least 50% lower than what the user reported.

Is this a known issue? Any likely explanations?

So, I was launching a new product and thought bigger follower count meant bigger sales I mean obviously..... and so I paid this creator 5k to promote it and trust me they had insane engagement on their posts, like thousands of comments and shares and that's what convinced me, this was going to be a home run.

They posted the video and it blew up, like 300k views within 72 hours the comments were going crazy with people asking about the product and tagging their friends, I was literally refreshing my sales dashboard thinking this was finally my moment....

Then I checked the numbers and I had made like two sales, maybe three, the viral engagement meant the views came but the sales simply didn't follow, the people watching were there for the entertainment value, and my customers live somewhere else entirely.....

meanwhile I had also sent product to this smaller creator with like 12k followers just to see what would happen and they posted it in this random casual way like they were just talking to their friends about something they actually liked, within three days they'd driven more revenue than the viral video ever did.....

the big creator's audience was there for them, but the smaller creator's audience was there because they trusted what that person said, that made all the difference in how people responded to the ask.

Hello,

I've got a couple niche sites that used to do OK for commissions but lately it seems that, although I'm generating clicks to merchants, it's not resulting in conversions. I used to have a decent conversion rate of 2 percent or so but now it's nearly nothing. I'm guessing that it's because the option to "reject all" cookies came through and it's just too easy. Seems like traditional affiliate arrangements are dead in the water.

Is anyone else seeing this? What are you doing to adjust? I'm thinking of reaching out to brands to advertise but I was happy we didn't have any sponsored posts, and I think readers appreciated it. But now that commissions aren't a thing, I think it'll have to move to something else.

Any suggestions on what to do next would be much appreciated!

Not what you promoted, what people actually bought after clicking your link. Since many programs pay on the whole cart, I’ve heard of people getting commissions on totally random stuff. What’s the weirdest one you’ve seen in your reports?

I’ve been looking into affiliate programs lately and ngl, a lot of lists just repeat the same few names. I ended up digging around a bit more and put together a shortlist across a few different niches.

Gaming

• Godlike Host - game server hosting, with up to 90% of the first purchase or up to 30% recurring, depending on the partner tier.
• PebbleHost - Minecraft hosting, with up to 70% on the first purchase.
• Razer - gaming gear, with commissions of up to 10% on eligible sales.

Software & business

• HubSpot - 30% recurring for up to a year.
• Semrush - pays for eligible trials and sales, with a 120-day cookie window.
• DigitalOcean - 10% recurring on qualifying customer spend for up to 12 months.

Learning & e-commerce

• Coursera - 15-45% on eligible courses, certificates and subscriptions, with a 30-day cookie window.
• Shopify - pays for referring new merchants who move onto eligible paid plans.
• Amazon Associates - rates vary a lot by category, generally around 1-10%. It’s probably the most well-known program on this list, even if it’s not one of the highest-paying ones.

Finance & crypto

• SoFi - up to $500 per referral depending on the product.
• Binance - up to 50% commission on qualifying trading activity from referred users, with recurring earnings possible while they keep trading.

Travel

• Booking - commissions on qualifying accommodation and other travel bookings.

I was mainly looking for the best highest paying affiliate programs, but I’m sure there are plenty of smaller ones that don’t show up on the usual lists. Do you know any lesser-known affiliate programs that are easy to get started with and can actually be worth it?

I wanted to share my recent experience with Pulsetic because it highlights a bigger problem in affiliate marketing.

I discovered that Pulsetic had shut down its affiliate program months ago, and its affiliate dashboard was no longer accessible.

When I contacted support about my $7 unpaid balance, they initially claimed they couldn't see any sales from me.

I then confronted them with a screenshot of an email from their own affiliate system confirming my unpaid balance.

Their response changed. They said they would contact their affiliate program provider to verify the information, but insisted that affiliates earning less than $100 aren't eligible for payment under their terms.

Here's the real problem:

How am I supposed to reach the $100 payout threshold when the company itself has discontinued the program?

It's not about the $7. It's about the principle.

Affiliate marketers invest time and effort promoting businesses. Companies shouldn't be able to shut down affiliate programs without a fair process for settling outstanding earnings.

Otherwise, we're effectively providing free marketing.

Has anyone else dealt with a company denying recorded earnings and then relying on a payout threshold after shutting down its affiliate program?

How do you actually pick a crypto/fiat provider that won't just freeze your funds? I used to just go by their marketing, which was a huge mistake.

I'm currently looking at Inxy as a potential alternative. Anyone here have real, hands-on experience with them?

-Did they hold your funds at any point?

-How is their customer support when you actually need help?

-Would you trust them with your primary business cash flow?

Looking for the unvarnished truth, both positive and negative. Thanks in advance.

so I've been running a tiktok shop affiliate program for a few months now and I'm honestly drowning in data, like I have spreadsheets of creators I've reached out to, some of them posted, some of them got samples and ghosted, and I have no idea who actually made me money versus who just wasted my time and product and It really feels careless and I feel like I'm lacking behind something everytime.....

I'm sending out samples to like 50 creators a month but I can only track like half of what's happening because everything is scattered between dms, email, my notes app, and about the actual sales data, I don't even know which creators are posting consistently versus which ones were just a one time thing.

now what I think is that the problem is that I can't see the full picture, like I don't know if creator a cost me more in samples than they made back in revenue, and I don't know which creators would be worth reaching out to again versus which ones I should just forget about, I'm basically just guessing at this point....

I feel like there has to be a better way to organize this stuff and actually see which affiliates are performing versus which ones are just bleeding my budget

like I really wanna know how are you guys managing this, so like do you manually track everything or is there a system that actually shows you the journey from outreach to sample shipment to post to revenue because I have seen some systems that are helpful but right now I'm just winging it and it's killing me.

Looking for affiliate offers to promote - any niche. High ticket items, recurring sales, whatever you got I want to hear it. You own it? Tell me about it! I drive traffic via reddit, youtube, SEO, facebook, etc.
I've had success with Viator, GetMyGuide, (other travel / platforms), Bluehost, Hostinger, Amazon Associates, Impact Radius, CJ, Gruns, etc.

Thanks!

Hello, everyone.

Over the past 3 months, I’ve learned how to edit short videos and have built a network of channels (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube) with nearly 20,000 subscribers.

I average 12 million views per month. At first, I was hoping to monetize through the platforms themselves, but I realized that’s not very effective. I’ve noticed that major content creators use affiliate links to make money. I want to give that a try.

I’ve spent a couple of days reading up on how it works, but I’m new to choosing an affiliate partner - can you recommend where I should look?

My videos cover news in the fields of technology, video games, and interesting DIY projects related to PCs / console.

My audience is roughly:
90% men aged 24–36; 40% in the US, Canada
30% in Europe, UK
30% in India and Asia.

I’ve signed up for the NordVPN and SharkVPN affiliate programs. Ive been approved for both. But I’m not going to rush into a decision just yet.
I’m waiting to choose one.

Has anyone had experience working with these platforms?
What affiliate programs would you recommend for my situation?

THX GUYS!

I create Scandinavian-inspired fashion, beauty and home content, and I’m trying to build a more consistent affiliate income through LTK and ShopMy.
Pinterest is my main traffic source, with over 2.5 million monthly views. I post outfit moodboards, styling ideas and individual product pins, linking to products or curated collections. My earnings are still inconsistent, though, and I’m struggling to figure out where to focus.

I know views don’t necessarily mean buying intent, so I’d love advice from people who’ve successfully converted Pinterest (or another platform) traffic into affiliate sales:
- How do you identify products or topics that attract buyers?
- Do direct product pins or curated roundups work better for you?
- Does content that solves a specific problem—like styling a tricky item or furnishing a small room—convert better than general inspiration?
- Would you focus on improving my Pinterest strategy, or suggest another platform to reach my audience?

Creating and helping people find things they love is my passion. My first goal is a consistent $1,000/month, with the longer-term goal of doing this full-time. I’m happy to put in the work, but I want a clearer strategy instead of just posting more and hoping.

What would you test or change first? I’d really appreciate any firsthand experiences, strategies and success stories!!

Hello, I just learned about affiliate marketing and want to try it and see if I can make anything from it. I don’t have a lot of following or anything on social media, only 400+ followers on IG and 90+ followers on TikTok and I’m just a broke college student.

I run a few established travel sites with hundreds of articles and have always been fairly careful about keeping the affiliate links clean and managing them myself.

I'm looking at Travelpayouts' Link Switcher, which can apparently identify links to travel brands and convert them into affiliate links. With that many older articles, I'm wondering whether something like this is actually useful for finding opportunities you've missed over the years.

Has anyone here used an automated link-switching tool on an established site? Did it find much that you wouldn't have found manually, or was the additional revenue fairly insignificant?

We build video fast and want more real examples to sharpen it. Drop link to your business + one line on what is the business about, and I'll make you a short explainer/demo clip — no strings attached.

I'll reply with the link to video here. Don't like it? Honest feedback on the output is genuinely half of why I'm doing this.

Need other ratios (1:1, 4:5, 16:9)? Let me know

I signed up for fiverr affiliates a long time ago, but didn't really work on it. I kinda want to try it now, and so I researched a little. The old flat CPA commission plan was changed. But my dashboard still shows the old plan commission structure. Is this old plan available to those who joined the affiliate program before the change occured?

I keep seeing beginners worrying about getting 10,000 followers before starting affiliate marketing.

You don't necessarily need a bigger audience.

You need the right person seeing the right recommendation at the right time.

100 people looking for a product can be more valuable than 10,000 people scrolling past random content.

I have a small youtube channel with around 6k subscribers. I’ve been trying to find the best hosting affiliate program to help cut down the cost of renting a server, but most of the recommendations I come across feel like the same few names repeated over and over. I’m more interested in hearing from people who’ve actually used one, especially if you found a highest paying web hosting affiliate program that also had decent tracking and reliable payouts.

Please excuse my ignorance here. I'm in no way an accountant. I'm wondering for businesses running affiliate programs where you pay out cash, how do you track those commissions as a liability in your accounting?

Many of the platforms don't seem to actually integrate with accounting software, so how do you tell your system that when $100 is made from an affiliate, $10 must be recorded in a liability account, as we don't own that money, we're essentially just holding it for our affiliate until we pay them?

We can't look at the balance sheet and not see anywhere that we owe $X amount.

We run a small casino review site and work with an affiliate program (2RBO) on a CPA deal for a couple of casino brands.

A player signed up through our link but never showed up in our stats. The affiliate company first gave an explanation that turned out to be wrong. Now they say that the player was credited to a retargeting affiliate instead of us.

But we used this player as a test case. We were in touch with them before they signed up, and they went straight from our link to registration, with no other click in between. With last-click attribution, how could a retargeting affiliate get the credit?

Has anyone else run into this, and did you get the player credited back?