Affiliate marketing FAQ

A company pays a partner for the customers the partner brings: a sale, a sign-up, a lead or a deposit. The partner (the affiliate) finds the audience; the company pays for the result. Deals run through affiliate networks or through the company’s own affiliate program.

Yes. It is an ordinary marketing channel that large brands use every day. What can make it illegal is how it is done: misleading ads, fake reviews, hidden advertising, or offers that are banned where you run them. Follow the rules of the ad platform and the laws of the countries you target, and disclose your affiliate links.

This is general information, not legal advice. We cover affiliate marketing verticals only: no essays, forex, binary options, pharma, phishing or scams against users.

Buying paid traffic — social, search, push, native and other ad networks — and sending it to affiliate offers. It is testing and numbers: the buyer pays for the traffic and is paid by the network for the results it brings, so every campaign starts with a budget you can afford to test.

Start with a guide path under “Start here”: one article to begin with and the ones that answer what comes next, in reading order. Then check the networks and tools in our catalogs before you sign up anywhere, and use the free calculators in the toolkit to see your numbers before you spend.

Enough to lose the first test without it hurting. A realistic first test on cheap traffic is a few hundred dollars spread over several creatives and a week of data; below that you are reading noise. Cost per click, payout and conversion rate decide the rest — the toolkit calculators show what a payout has to convert at before you commit.

You can also start without a budget of your own: affiliate networks hire managers, and buying teams hire junior buyers who spend the team’s money.

The one you can read and afford. Verticals differ in payout size, in how long the money takes to arrive and in how strictly ad platforms treat them. Beginners usually get further on offers with small payouts and simple actions — a sign-up, an install, a lead — than on the ones with the biggest numbers, because the feedback comes faster and a mistake costs less.

We don’t name a “best vertical of the year”: what is crowded and expensive this month is not a strategy. Our case fact-checks show what public success stories leave out.

Read the card before the landing page. Every network in our catalog carries what it pays for, the minimum payout, the payment methods and two scores: ours from testing and the members’ from their own experience. Reviews with a rating come from registered members only, so a rating is harder to stuff.

Practical checks: how long the network has been around, whether payout terms are written down anywhere public, how it answers a direct question about holds and shaving, and what members say about the delay between a payout request and the money arriving.

Payout dates that keep sliding, a minimum that rises after you reach it, terms that change without notice, statistics you cannot export, and support that goes quiet once the balance grows. A network labelled “Caution: scam” on this site keeps its page and the evidence, but every link to it is switched off.

The score shown is the average of our editorial score and the members’ score, and neither is for sale. Catalogs carry no position numbers, paid placements are labelled “Sponsored” or “Ad”, and a paid placement never changes a score or a verdict. When a company pays to run its own card, the card says so and carries no editorial verdict.

In Case studies. We fact-check what a case claims: what the numbers cover, what is missing (spend, holds, refunds, the accounts that died), and whether the result is repeatable. A dashboard screenshot on its own is not proof, and we don’t publish it as one.

A tracker, an antidetect browser if you run many accounts, proxies, and a spy tool when you want to see what is already running. Our Tools catalog splits them by exactly those types, with pricing, what each one is for and reviews from members who pay for them.

On cloaking: it is a grey technique, and ad platforms treat it as a policy violation that costs accounts. We explain how it works and what it costs when it fails; we don’t publish setups for deceiving ad review.

Yes, on the Promo codes page: our own codes and the ones companies publish themselves, each with the date we last checked it. Expired codes disappear from the page, and we never trade a code for a good review.

Read the platform’s own rules first — they are public, and most bans are ordinary policy violations rather than bad luck. The guide paths in Traffic walk through account setup, what ad review looks at, what an appeal can and cannot fix, and how to prepare creatives that pass.

An independent English-language magazine about affiliate marketing and paid traffic: guides, analytics, fact-checked case studies, reviews of networks and tools, and open catalogs of companies, agencies, people and conferences.

aliencpa is run by the Lu Discover team. The public editor is Lu Discover, an affiliate media buying practitioner with more than 10 years of experience; authors with media buying experience write with the editor, and nothing is published without the editor’s approval. The magazine isn’t tied to any other media, network or company.

Through affiliate links on brands we tested and liked, and through clearly marked sponsored placements and ads. Sponsors can’t buy a rating, a verdict or a place in a top list. We sell nothing to readers.

Grey topics and the detailed parts of our guides: the introduction is open to everyone, the details and the schemes are for signed-in members. The account is free and also lets you rate companies and keep a wishlist.