TOP Makeup and Beauty Affiliate Programs — Best CPA Cosmetic and Beauty Networks and Offers of 2024 For Sites and Online Bloggers

If you want to start an online business and be your own boss, affiliate marketing is the best option to go for compared to others. Since you can be your own boss in this job, there are a lot of different things you can try or do. There are many niches to choose from and a lot of other things. One of the first steps that you need to take in your affiliate marketing journey is to choose a niche that you prefer to work on and make money. You can choose your favorite field you want to work in among many options. In this article, we decided to show you how you can make money if your niche is makeup and beauty, so sit back and learn how to make a lot of money from the internet, while writing about your favorite beauty products in your blog.


Payment Models

As we mentioned, there are a lot of things you can do differently. One thing that is different from one affiliate program to another is their pricing and business model. Here are the 4 commonly used pricing models across the online marketing business.

Cost-per-Thousand (CPM)

Usually, if people had an advertisement or they were affiliating a video, they would use the CPM pricing model. The way that this pricing model works is that the affiliate will get some money in return for every 1000 views they promote.

A notable fact is that affiliates who used this pricing model moved away from it because of its problem. The issue with this type of pricing is the amount of return on investment (ROI.) If you have an ad or a video that you gave someone to promote, you still have to pay for every 1000 views no matter if the users click on your ad or not.

Now you can see that the problem is there is no guarantee for any advertising you do, so if you are dealing with this pricing model at a point, you need to be careful about where you use it. When you use this model in the wrong place, there will be no return value for the money you spend. There are much more efficient pricing models that we will mention further in this article.

As an instance for the picture above, the advertisers pay $5 to $12 for each 1 000 views.

Cost-per-Click (CPC)

This model is an inclusive substitute for the CPM pricing model because it does not have the CPM's problem. How CPC works is that you will pay or get a commission for each click. Let us say you have an ad and you do not want to lose value like the way you do with CPM. You can use CPC to make sure that you are getting value and you are paying for the ones that are clicking on your advertising. Although CPC is a better pricing model than CPM, it is still far from being perfect. In-search advertising is more expensive than ever right now, and they are going even higher, so some keywords are very expensive.

Apart from having expensive keywords, CPC has another problem as well. Although CPC guarantees clicks, it does not guarantee a lead or an action from your customer. Based on that, you might get more ROI (Return On Invest) compared to CPM, but you are still far from receiving the absolute value. These types of problems and ROI will bring us to the following two pricing models.

This type of pricing is common for website advertising with banners, and popups. Hot Beauty Health is a beauty and cosmetics blog, and they made about $7000 from working with this pricing model.

Cost-per-Lead (CPL)

We can arguably say that the CPL pricing model is the most friendly-user pricing model for advertising. As you can guess from its name, in this pricing model, advertisers only pay for each qualified lead. How would an advertiser know if their ad is qualified? Sometimes, when you click on an ad, you also need to fill out a form on the link that the advertiser provided you with. The application usually asks for some contact information like email. When you fill out the form, you will be a qualified lead. This pricing model allows for a 100 percent ROI. Most of the advertisements you see on YouTube for courses are CPL models. This pricing model is the most cost-efficient so far.

In the year 2008, the Obama campaign used CPL advertising to make an email list, and people who would sign up for eNewsletter were the qualified ones.

The price of CPL advertising differs depending on the application and the information that the customer will have to give. The longer the application and the amount of information, the price of CPL would be higher. When the amount of data that customers have to put in is high, we say the lead is more qualified, and of course, more expensive.

You can usually find this type of marketing in online courses. One example is Onlinemakeupacademy.

Cost-per-Action (CPA)

Although we said that CPL is a perfect pricing model for advertising, it is not the best for general marketing and shopping. The best pricing model available for purchasing a product so far is the CPA model. The CPA model needs more specific action than any other pricing model. The affiliate only gets an amount of commission per action. The action can be different things, but when it comes to affiliate marketing, the response is usually purchasing a product. The CPA pricing model also allows for a full return on investment because the advertiser pays after the transaction. If you are an advertiser and want customers to buy a product immediately, CPA is the way to go.

An advantage of CPA is that advertisers do not pay for bad leads. The CPA pricing model also comes with a good amount of commission.

For example, Jasmine Alley made about $36 000 in the year 2020, with CPA marketing for beauty and cosmetics. Jasmine Alley is a blog focusing mainly on cosmetics and beauty.


The Pros and Cons

Like anything else, CPA affiliate marketing has its advantages and disadvantages. Here are some of them.

Pros:

  • The niche of cosmetics and beauty is extremely rich. There is no limitation on the amount of money you can make.
  • You do not need to deal with any customer and you are free of customer services.
  • If you want to start your affiliate marketing, you do not need to have a lot of money for investment. The only thing you need is traffic, and you can even get it for free.
  • There is no need for expertise and a lot of knowledge to start affiliate marketing. You just need to know the products and know where and how to promote them.
  • Beauty and cosmetics are some of the largest fields in the world of affiliate marketing. There are a lot of affiliate programs to choose from, a lot of networks you can join, and a lot of ways you can bring traffic. Overall, there is a lot of flexibility and convenience.

There are not many disadvantages to affiliate marketing, but here are the ones that might cause you a problem.

Cons:

  • You are not in control over the affiliate programs you use. You have to respect and agree with their rules, and terms of service.
  • As we mentioned, makeup and beauty is a large and popular field among affiliates. This means there are a lot of opportunities, but also a lot of competition. Another bad thing about the competition field is that you do not have any control over your competitors and some of them are affiliates for a long time, so it will be hard to surpass them.
  • You cannot have a solid customer base. Usually, when a customer purchases a product from your affiliate link, they will not do the same for the second time, and they will refer to the affiliate vendor for the next time.

Traffic Sources

Traffic source is the most important part of any kind of online business. If you do not have traffic then you will have no user or customer.

We can divide traffic sources into two types. One type is the natural traffic source that you can get from Google, social media, or different sources, and the other type is the type that you can pay for and buy traffic from places such as Trusem. There are some other places where you can get some traffic for free as a free trial, but they are mostly premium traffic.

The topic of this article is makeup and beauty, but the fundamentals of traffic sources are the same for all the niches of affiliate marketing.

Organic Traffic (Search Engine Traffic)

Starting with the most valuable type of traffic that every website or blog must invest in.

Organic traffic or search engine traffic is the traffic you get from SERP (Search Engine Result Page.) You can get this type of traffic by simply improving your overall SEO (Search Engine Optimization,) and CTR (Click Through Rate.) If you get a good SEO rank and go on top of the search engine result page, you will automatically get more traffic and CTR. No need to mention that your conversion link will also go higher.

Make sure you invest in your blog or website's SEO.

Social Media Traffic and Video Contents

For cosmetics and beauty, social media are more important than other niches. The reason for this is that cosmetics and beauty can show their best potential when you show them visually. There are many YouTube channels or Instagram pages that focus on makeup and beauty or fashion. You can also use YouTube and Instagram to create high-quality content in both places.

Once you have enough traffic on any social media, you can promote your website or blog page. You can even start affiliating with them, so it is a win-win.

Native Ads, Mobile Traffic, and Push Notification

We listed all of these three other traffic sources together because they are as important as the other two traffic sources we mentioned.

Native ads: Native Ads are the type of advertising you see on most websites. Banners or header ads are of the type of native ads. It is the typical ad that one place sponsors another place with similar content. Every affiliate could use this type of traffic source. Of course, advertising is not free.

Mobile Traffic: There is a lot of traffic from mobile because right now, the majority of people on the internet are using their phones or tablets. Since the year 2016, the number of users from smartphones has increased more than desktop users, so affiliates must focus on mobile traffic.

For mobile traffic, you can do things such as banner ads, redirecting users, or push notification ads.

Push-notification: Another type of traffic source is push-notification. As it is assumable from its name, this type of traffic source is ads that are displayed as a pop-up notification. They were more common for mobile users, but now, they are available for both computers and mobiles. Push. House and TrafficStars are some of the noteworthy places you can get push notification ads.


The Amount of Income

The amount of money you can make out of being a cosmetics and beauty affiliate depends on you for the most part. The commission is diverse from the affiliate programs. The diversity comes from different average product values and conversion rates. Maybe you sell two $300 products and get a 10% commission for each, or maybe you sell twenty products with a value of $60 and get a 5% commission for it.

For example, if you go with the Design Essential affiliate program, you will get a 20 to 30 percent commission per sale. On the other hand, we have affiliate programs like Estée Lauder that give you a 4% commission.

There are a lot of ups and downs in terms of commission, but we can say that the average amount for commission in this niche is 10%. The amount of EPC (Earn Per Click) however, is very different.

The market for cosmetics And make-up is more than one trillion dollars right now.  With the EU on top of the consumers with 20% and the USA at the second spot with 13% consumers, this market is, without doubt, one of the biggest online markets that exist.

For instance, take a look at Xukkhini’s income through affiliate marketing on their health and beauty blog. They managed to earn around $900 through Bluehost sales by having only 4 blog posts. There are lots of newborn blogs that earn insane amounts of money in their first months just by having a good SEO strategy and using good affiliate programs.


Conclusion

In another article, we mentioned that cosmetics and beauty are among the top 10 niches for blogs. The same goes for affiliate marketing. In terms of the pricing model, the best model for affiliate marketing is CPA. This is now a great time to join the affiliate market and start making money. Select your niche, get traffic, get offers, and start making money.