How I Choose Affiliate Programs for My Blog (Without Compromising My Morals)

Recently, I’ve been seeing a  lot of accounts on the ‘gram and TikTok talk about “monetizing your audience” through affiliate links. Honestly, that’s not bad advice. But what these accounts (as usual) don’t mention is the nuance behind it. You can’t—and shouldn’t—just choose affiliate programs willy-nilly to make a quick buck. If it was that simple, everyone would be doing it.

I mean, to be honest, some people are doing that. But like, that’s never sat with me. Not to be preachy about it, but I like to think of it as me attaching my name to a program. To me, it’s basically an endorsement. So, I really want the affiliate partners I choose meet my standards of conducting business.

I guess it’s because I work in the digital space and I know the kind of money that gets thrown around. And I do think that money is something you can’t mess around with. Especially when it’s other people’s money.

So, if you’re interested in learning how to choose the “right” affiliate program for your blog or social media account, this blog’s for you. We’ll look at what affiliate marketing is (won’t dwell on it too much so don’t worry), how to identify the right programs for your niche, and how to make the most of it so that both you and your audience get a product or service worth their while.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Before we get lost in the details, let’s look at its definition for a moment. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, affiliate marketing refers to:

an agreement in which a person or organization puts a link to a company’s product on their website, and the company pays them something every time they sell a product through this link.

It seems pretty simple at face value, and honestly, if you have a high traffic blog, you don’t really need to worry too much about the marketing part. You’ll literally just have the links on your posts (with a note up top that this is an affiliate link so people know; good financial disclosure practise) and you’re done. But if you’re a small or mid-traffic site, and you do want to make an income out of this, you’ll need to push these links a bit so your audience can see it and well, make a purchase. Before we look at that, let’s look at the process.

How Affiliate Marketing Works

• Apply to a program: The very first thing you’ll do is join an affiliate program, such as Kit or Namecheap, on an affiliate partner network such as PartnerStack.
• Get accepted into the program: The merchant (what they’re called) will then accept (or deny) your application and provide you with a custom tracking link. 
• Promote the product or service: Once you’ve gotten your link, you will share the link with your audience via a blog post, social media link, YouTube channel, or email list.
• Get traction: A member of your audience will click on your link, completing the desired action (sign up or purchase).
• Earn commission: The merchant will track this purchase/action via your link (referral) and you’ll receive your payout, usually a percentage of the sale or a flat fee (depending on your agreement).

Popular Payout Models

• Pay-per-sale (PPS): This is, by and large, the most common type of payout method. As mentioned, you get a percentage of the sale made. This can be as little as 3% to as big as 40%, depending on the product.
• Pay-per-lead (PPL): This isn’t that popular but basically, you’ll get paid based off how many people you were able to send to a landing page and carry out an action like signing up to a newsletter or trial, or even just filling up a contact form or downloading an e-book.
• Pay-per-click (PPC): This one allows you to get paid regardless of whether an action or sale was made and really just depends on how many people you were able to send to a particular website or landing page.

What Makes a Good Affiliate Program?

Now that we know what affiliate marketing is and how it works, let’s look at what makes an affiliate program good. I mentioned earlier that you apply to a program. And that’s something everyone does, even the most successful bloggers. Businesses will come to you sometimes but generally, the industry practice is to apply to an affiliate program.

This is where the responsibility of choosing an affiliate partner falls on your shoulders. Before you sign up for any affiliates, think about your audience and why they follow your page or visit your blog. Consider:

• What problems do your readers are hoping to solve?
• Are they mostly looking for how-to guides, or do they prefer broader inspiration?
• What have they responded to in the past: long guides, quick lists, personal recommendations?
• What price ranges are actually realistic for them?

If your audience is primarily early-career freelancers or students, a $2,000 luxury software suite probably isn’t going to resonate—no matter how generous the affiliate payout is. You’ll get more traction (and feel better) recommending something that feels accessible and necessary.

Sometimes it helps to look at your analytics and see which posts people spend time on, and what they click when they get there. It’s a small clue about what they trust you to help them with.

My Affiliate Selection Criteria

When I’m choosing an affiliate program, there’s a bunch of things I look into because again, as I mentioned, I’m basically endorsing these products. Here’s a bunch of questions I ask:

Would I recommend this without money? 

This one’s pretty obvious but you’d be surprised how many people (that I’ve heard of) that don’t think of this. I think we should all be recommending products we like regardless of whether we’re being paid for them. That’s why I have included both affiliate links and normal links in my Resources page. 

Does it actually solve a problem for my readers? 

Again, this is another one which I think goes back to knowing what your audience is looking for. I get approached by fashion and furniture a lot to be part of their affiliate networks but I turn them down, because as much as I’m into that stuff, I know no one’s on this blog for fashion advice so it’s not a product market fit for my audience.

Does it fit ATITW’s content style? 

This one’s a tricky one. I’m into a lot of tech tools that I think solopreneurs, freelancers and SEOs should be using. But I understand that those require a level of technical expertise that not many people will have or are interested in. So, I’ve been holding back on those. I plan on doing more technical, niche guides in the future and then I’ll probably recommend them. Until then, I think the stuff on this blog is fine.

Is the payout structure fair (not “highest”, just fair)?

This one is also something I look at because I do think that regardless of what your job is, you deserve to be paid fairly. So, when I’m looking at affiliate programs, I have a base bare minimum percent or number in mind and I usually don’t think twice about companies paying more unless it’s dramatically more. Since I have to work closely with marketing at work, and we also have a wildly successful affiliate program, I’m aware of standard industry numbers. 

I’ll only stop to investigate further if the payout is too good to be true because that’s pretty shady and also, usually it’s not the case. I think this has happened once where I liked a product, looked at the affiliate program and then saw the numbers and emailed them. The people got back to me and told me what their margins were and that’s why I agreed to it. I’m not advertising that service on this blog anymore since I think the product’s been sold to another company. I’m not sure. I’ll have to email the woman who made the plugin to check.

 Is the company stable/reputable? 

This one’s a tricky one. I mean, on the surface, it’s pretty simple right? Don’t accept partnerships from scammy sites and companies. But it’s not, unfortunately. Moral dilemmas, am I right?

I don’t know how many of you remember this, but I used to work in blockchain infrastructure back in the day and I’m big on crypto. Yeah, I don’t think it’s obvious, but I’m a full on old school Bitcoin person. I have a lot of my savings on cold wallets and I do know people who work in big crypto companies so I’m aware of how good and trustworthy (or not) they are.

So, given my insider knowledge, you would think I’d have an entire section dedicated to crypto and blockchain like I have for AI (though that’s negative mostly) but I don’t. Because crypto has a problem right now and that problem is something called corruption. 

In spite of that, I’d argue that you can still make great money in crypto. But it would be incredibly irresponsible for me to push poorly regulated exchanges on to you, when I know for a fact that this speculation and we’re kind of also in a bubble with crypto right now, mostly because Donald Trump has decided to be crypto-friendly. 

The minute the orange is out of office, global attitudes towards crypto is going to change again and it will help the industry as a whole, it’s going to be painful for a lot of people. And I don’t want that burden on myself because I write about books and the art of writing. Not the merits of cryptocurrency and blockchain. As much as I think it’s GOAT and Big Banking is trying (and succeeding) to harm crypto. Anyway, back to the rest of this section.

What I Look For Before Joining an Affiliate Program

Okay, so now you have an idea of my criteria for affiliate programs, let’s look at what I look for before joining an affiliate program. The stuff above is more of my moral argument really and yeah, that’s the kind of stuff that keeps me up at night. This is what I think everyone who isn’t a wannabe philosopher consumed by existential dread should look at when choosing an affiliate program.

Commission Type (flat vs %)

This one completely depends on you. Personally, given my morality issues, I’m not comfortable with a flat fee because in my mind I’m thinking: what if the product’s quality goes south but I took all this money and now my audience thinks I’m a grifter?

Normal people would assess this based on what’s more sustainable. If you’re noticing a consistent interest from your audience, you might want to consider a percentage of the sale because financially, that might make sense for you. Flat fee may also make sense depending on the type of product, the type of interest and how people respond to it. If you’re selling say, something that’s seasonal like Christmas ornaments or something, going down the flat fee route might make more sense since the interest there is only for a very specific period of time.

The commission type completely depends on what your financial goals are and you should really do the math before deciding which one works for you.

Cookie Duration

This one’s pretty hotly contested. Depending on the type of product and industry of said product, cookie duration can last anywhere from 30 to 90 days. This one really depends on how quickly you think your audience is going to convert when you put up that affiliate link on your site or social media account.

The general rule to keep in mind though, is that the higher the price of the ticket item, the more the cookie duration is. 

If you’re wondering why we’re talking about cookies, I don’t mean the delicious snack I’m cheating on my diet with right now, I’m talking about internet cookies.

In tech, a cookie is a small text file that’s generated by a web server and lives on your web browser so think Chrome, Safari etc. Websites use this to remember information about you so that they can customise your experience through things like special promotions.

Cookies are used in affiliate marketing to track if customers made a purchase by clicking on your link. So, for example, if you’re using my affiliate link for some writing software. Your customer behaviour is going to be one of two ways:

• You’re going to click on the link and buy immediately—in this case, I immediately get the credit and commission for the sale, or
• You’re going to click on the link, think about it, maybe come back twenty days later (either by Googling it, or by clicking my link again). In this case, if the cookie duration of my affiliate contract was 30 days, I get the credit for the purchase even though you used Google to go back to it.

We call this the first click principle at work and I built an entire workflow around this to make sure our affiliates were credited properly.

Payout Threshold

This one also depends on your financial situation and your audience size. Usually companies have payout thresholds anywhere between $30 and $100 and it comes down to the minimum amount of commission you’re getting on a sale. Think of it this way:

If you’re promoting say, an SEO software that costs $200 a month and you get 30% of that. That’s $60 per sale. In this particular case, having a payout threshold of $100 seems reasonable because you need two sales a month to meet that threshold.

But if you’re from a country that’s not the States, Canada, UK,, chances are, $60 is a decent amount of money in your local currency. For context, $60 in Turkey is around 2,000 liras which is also my weekly grocery budget. It’s generally considered a good chunk of change, even with the inflation we’re experiencing. In my home country, that’s how much some blue collar workers make in a month. My mother pays our gardener less than that. I know, this is why I am the way I am. My privilege and luck terrifies me a lot.

Depending on your financial situation, it’s best to consider affiliates that have a reasonable threshold according to your needs. Don’t fall into the trap of only selling expensive software because of the commission percentage because these programs generally have a higher threshold and that can impact how much actual money you have in your bank account at the end of each month.

Support Quality

A lot of affiliate programs have dedicated teams that offer you support during the marketing process. They’ll email you things like promotions, sales and more—honestly, it’s great. My experience with them has been great so far and I don’t really market my stuff beyond the Resources page. 

Side Note: Shoutout to everyone who has been buying stuff from there. I literally just paid for my domain and hosting server costs from it. As always, the point of affiliate links is to just keep the lights on here. This isn’t my full-time job so don't feel obligated to do that. But if you’re going to purchase a product, always look at your favourite creators and see if they have a link or coupon code and use those. It means the world to them even if they don’t express it outwardly.

The last thing you want is to be stuck with a question about a product, especially if you’re writing a blog post about it, and support isn’t responding. Earlier this year, I wanted to know if I could use my affiliate links in my newsletters because I know some companies have different programs for those and I reached out to my affiliates and they all got back to me in under 24 hours.

Good support quality is essential to making sure things work fine.

Brand Reputation

This one’s tricky and requires you to do your research. I’m not sure if you guys know about the BetterHelp scandal from 2018. A lot of people didn’t like the fact that mental health was being commodified and promoted via affiliate links and sponsorships. 

The thing is, I use BetterHelp. It has been really good for me. But I’m not comfortable with advertising it. It messes up with my moral compass. 

You need to define what brand reputation means to you. To me, it means promoting good products that don’t have controversies or questionable moral implications.

This is why I removed Grammarly from my Resources page. Until recently, I’d used Grammarly since 2017. And when Grammarly did its AI pivot and started the whole AI Expert Review thing, I couldn’t in good conscious support that. Furthermore, as someone who has to work closely with AI, I kind of freaked out because if you’ve been following this industry for a bit, you’ll know that these companies use our data without our consent.

That’s how ChatGPT and Claude have been trained. They scrapped the entire internet and didn’t ask for permission. So, I freaked out, because to my knowledge, Grammarly’s AI had not done that—at least, I couldn’t find information about that and the AI Expert Review explicitly implies that they trained their models from real people’s work. So, I reached out to them and asked them if their AI was trained on the stuff I’d been using Grammarly on. Which includes all my work and my f***ing manuscript whose IP I am very particular about. It took them two months of me harassing them on LinkedIn and email to confirm they weren’t doing that. Why would I recommend something like this? I won’t and you shouldn’t either.

Conversion

Another thing which you definitely need to keep in mind when choosing an affiliate program is how well the product will convert. This is important because—again—you’re making a financial decision for yourself which impacts your earnings. Just because you like a product, doesn’t mean it’ll sell with your audience. 

Make sure you’re promoting tools that sell easily. A lot of affiliate programs have a minimum sale requirement and they will boot you if you don’t bring in a sale. Don’t let that happen to you and think about this before hitting the “APPLY” button.

Red Flags I Avoid

As I sort of explained in the Grammarly example, there’s a bunch of red flags that show up when you’re looking at affiliate programs. Personally, I classify companies like BetterHelp and Grammarly in the tier-2 of the moral dilemma of selling products to people. I think you should care about stuff like the ethics of mental health promotion and stealing people’s IP but the chances of that happening all the time is quite low. I mean, it’ll be low once the AI bubble and this grift economy we’re in right now finally corrects itself. 

Anyway, GENERALLY, when you’re looking at affiliate programs, be wary of the following:

Get-Rich-Quick Marketing

This is a straight up scam. There is no guarantee that you will make any sort of money quickly via affiliate marketing. It completely depends on your audience and how you promote. A lot of affiliate marketers don’t make a lot of money in the start. It’s a volume, numbers and market fit game. I started affiliate marketing earlier this year and I made enough to pay for hosting. Anyone telling you that you’ll make $500 a month is lying or hiding something. 

Lack of Transparency or Support

Again, be aware of programs like this. It’s industry practice to have transparency around payouts and if they’re dancing around this, there’s a huge chance they’re messing with your commissions. And you don’t want that.  Honey is currently under fire for messing with people’s commissions. What can I say? For a billionaire, Anti-Christ-hater Thiel sure supports scummy companies. 

As I mentioned, corporations want you to succeed so if you’ve got a product whose developers don’t care, you’re probably going to experience payout issues.

Aggressive Upselling

This is another lesson in standard industry practice. While companies would like you to sell their most expensive tiers, they’re never going to ask you to upsell. They’ll have sales and coupon codes, but this is for all product tiers. If someone’s encouraging you to upsell a lot, check if this is an MLM scheme and tap out.

Vague ‘Lifestyle SaaS’ Products

These are things you should avoid because these basically make you come off as money hungry and less trustworthy. Products like a subscription for an alarm app or pomodoro-whatever it’s called. Now,, if you’re advertising a product that includes these two things but has actual real-value stuff—maybe it’s a Notion dashboard which includes these, that’s fine. It’s just straight up disrespectful to expect your audience to pay $10 for something that’s not worth it. Might be smarter to find a software that costs $20 but has real utility.

Poor Audience Fit

I’d be very skeptical of companies who reach out to you even when they know your brand doesn’t have their audience. That just shows that they don’t care and you’re going to run into some of the other red flags I’ve mentioned. I use PartnerStack for all my affiliate networking and they had me submit a brand kit and information about my audience. Even Impact and CJ need those so be skeptical. Again, the point is to maintain trust but still monetize your audience and make money.

Your Long-Term Affiliate Strategy

So, hopefully in this blog post, you were able to understand how to choose affiliate programs that work for your brand. I think the most important thing to remember here is that affiliate income builds up slowly. There is no instantaneous, overnight success here. 

Start Small and Observe

Try adding a single affiliate link to a post that already gets steady traffic. See what happens over a few weeks. Pay attention to:

• How many clicks you’re getting
• If people ask you questions or share feedback
• If any unsubscribes or complaints come in

Use whatever tracking tools your affiliate program provides, but also rely on your gut sense of whether the product feels like a natural fit. When you treat it like a series of small experiments, you’ll make clearer decisions about what belongs in your content.

Disclose Transparently (and Confidently)

There’s no polite way to say this: burying disclosures is both legally dubious and a fast track to eroding trust. Clear disclosure doesn’t cheapen your recommendations—it makes them credible. A simple statement is usually enough. It can be like this:

“This post contains affiliate links, which means I may earn a commission if you make a purchase.”

Your readers appreciate knowing the context. It shows you respect their ability to make informed choices. I’ve noticed that transparency often improves conversions over time. People trust you more when you don’t pretend everything you recommend is purely altruistic.

Prioritize Fit Over Payout

It’s easy to fall for the allure of higher commissions. But in the long run, the most sustainable affiliate relationships are the ones that feel like a natural extension of what you already do. Ask yourself:

• Would I recommend this even if I didn’t earn anything?
• Does this product genuinely help my readers?
• Will I feel comfortable answering questions about it honestly?

If the answer to any of these is no, you’ll probably regret including it later—especially if a reader has a bad experience. Remember, your credibility isn’t renewable. Once you lose it, it’s hard to get back.

Be Prepared to Reassess

Sometimes, an affiliate partnership feels promising at first but doesn’t pan out. Or maybe the company changes policies, gets acquired, or quietly shifts how they operate. It’s fine to step away.

One of the advantages of being an independent creator is that you’re not locked into someone else’s agenda. If something stops working for you or your readers, you can revise your approach.

Think of it like pruning a plant. Occasionally, you need to cut back what isn’t thriving to make space for something that might.

Think Long-Term

Sustainable affiliate income is showing up consistently, recommending products that feel aligned with your work, and giving your audience time to trust you. When you demonstrate that you care about their experience—not just your own revenue—people notice. Over time, a good affiliate strategy feels less like selling and more like sharing.

In the End, Do It Your Way

Choosing affiliates is part strategy, part instinct. You don’t have to get it perfect the first time. You don’t have to vet every company as though your life depends on it. But you do owe it to yourself—and your audience—to pick partnerships that feel aligned with the work you’re already proud to share. If you start there, the rest usually falls into place. And if it doesn’t? You can always adjust.