64 Best Outdoor Affiliate Programs and Networks

Many of us like doing outdoor activities and spending some time in nature. But how many of us actually know that we can earn a lot of money by promoting the tools and accessories that help us have an easier time and a much more fun adventure outdoors? Of course, you can do that through affiliate marketing.

This article will focus on teaching you some methods for promoting outdoor offers and products. We will also go through some of the main traffic sources, how you can choose an outdoor affiliate program, and some more tips and tricks to make sure you’re successful and make a lot of money.

What Are Outdoor Affiliate Programs

Just like many other affiliate programs and affiliate networks, outdoor affiliate programs and networks help connect affiliates with businesses that sell outdoor-related products. As an affiliate working for these programs, you can promote lots of outdoor products and earn a commission whenever somebody purchases something through your referral. Most of the time they can click on your affiliate link and redirect to the program's website where they can learn more about the item and purchase it.

When people click on your link, the cookies that track the activity of the user get saved on the browser, and the website can track it. This way, if a user chooses to purchase something later, you will still earn your commission for that purchase.

There is no need for any user to sign up on any website, and since the items sold in this niche are mostly physical, users only have to purchase something, and in most cases, not refund it later on, so you can actually earn your commission.

What Type of Products Can You Promote

There are many different types of products you can promote in this niche. Let’s go through some of them together.

• Knives. It is interesting that knives are a common item sold both by outdoor affiliate programs and survival affiliate programs. Knives are not only used for hunting, and you can use them for cooking, cutting things, or generally helping you do different things as a tool. A lot of people are generally into knives, and you won’t only be able to sell them in the outdoor community, but also to knife enthusiasts.
• Outdoor tools. Outdoor tools can include a range of items that are either equivalent to household items or just items you need outdoors to help you survive or have a more fun adventure. This can include different tools for your car or for fixing and repairing things if necessary.
• Tools for different activities, such as fishing, climbing, hiking, etc. you don’t just go outside to stay outside. If you go outside to do an activity, such as fishing, climbing, hiking, camping, etc. Each of these activities have their own tools. Many businesses provide specific tools and accessories for each of these fields.
• Outdoor clothing. You will definitely need special clothing when you’re going to spend the night or two out. This is especially if you are spending some time in a cold or even a hot environment. There are many different brands that provide you with clothing, both dedicated to city life and outdoor life. Many of the brands you see on a daily basis are also programs that sell outdoor clothing so you can benefit a lot from promoting these prominent brands, such as The North Face, Columbia, etc.
• Camping accessories. When we go outdoors, we don’t only need to stay in our cars. We need to stay at a camp or a tent, so we can get proper rest and sleep. Nobody likes to have a bad camping experience, so camping accessories come to the rescue for the people who want to stay the night out.
• Flashlights and light systems. Flashlights are one of the most common categories of outdoor products because we cannot always rely on our phones when we go outside. We must need our phones for communication, and flashlights for lighting the way ahead of us.
• Heating systems. When we camp outside or stay at a cold place, we need some sort of heat that can help warm us up. A lot of businesses provide these products for heating food and sleeping space.
• Water and food-related products. Sometimes we need food-related products that can help us cook food or heat up our food. We might also need sources of hot or clean water that we can use while we’re staying outside. We do not have the fancy of taking a shower at a camp, but there are many businesses that provide search products.

Now that you’ve seen the type of products that are the most common in the outdoor niche, let’s continue to check out some more information about the programs themselves.

Payment Models in Outdoor Affiliate Programs

Unlike many other types of programs, outdoor affiliate programs use only one common payment model to pay their affiliates, which is revenue share. Revenue share means that the business chooses to share a percentage of the sale of the product with the affiliates. This means that you are basically partners in the sale you make. Obviously, the higher the price of the products, the more money you make. And also the higher the commission rate, the higher your chances of making more money.

Other payment models, such as CPA, CPL, and CPC are not that common in these programs. Some programs may pay you a small amount per lead or per sale, but that is only for Programs that have only one specific product with one specific price.

What to Consider When Choosing Outdoor Affiliate Programs

Out of all the programs we have shared with you, do you have to pay attention to a couple of factors that can help you choose the best program and avoid wasting your time with programs that won’t make you much cash. Let’s check out these factors one by one and see why they’re important in the first place.

Commission

First and foremost, do you want to make sure that you are making a fair percentage of the product sales. Some programs do not share a high commission with you, and considering the product prices, you can decide whether the commission rate is fair or not. In most outdoor affiliate programs, the commission rate is anything between 5 to 10% and sometimes more. In many other affiliate programs, a common commission can be anything from 5% to 70%. Based on that, decide whether you want to work with programs that offer anything lower than the minimum commission rate in the niche.

You can also pay attention to the price of an average product and decide whether the commission rate will make you a lot of money, or whether the product prices are so low that even with a high commission, you won’t make a lot of money. Simply put, high commission rates don’t always mean the program is great, but little ones can say otherwise.

Brand Recognition

It is important whether the brand you are hoping to cooperate with is a prominent one or if it’s a brand with low-quality products, that could possibly cost you your own reputation in the future. You should make sure of the brand quality and recognition by doing a quick search online for their reviews or how customers perceive them.

Cookie Duration

As mentioned before, cookies are important in affiliate marketing, because they keep the data of the customer activity on the browser, and help you earn your commission. If the customer decides to purchase something later. Cookies are also great if the customer decides to purchase something once again later on, which will earn you a commission in many programs. The only way that you have to maximize your chances of making a sale and earning a commission is if the cookie has a long duration.

So, for example, if the cookie duration is only one hour, you basically do not have a chance of earning any commission if the customer returns the next day to purchase something. So you should always try to aim for programs with the longest cookie duration. Many outdoor affiliate programs provide you with a 30-day cookie duration, but occasionally some of them give you a lifetime or 365-day cookie activity.

Affiliate Trackers

Affiliate trackers are great tools for giving insights about your performance, referrals, sales, and earn commissions as an affiliate. Most of the programs work with a network that provides you with the ability to view your affiliate activity report on your dashboard. Some programs might provide you with this dashboard themselves. And some other programs might just give you a monthly report of your performance. On rare occasions, some programs might not give you access to affiliate trackers at all. In that case, you can use a third-party affiliate tracker to track your performance and optimize your marketing campaigns if necessary. That is if you really want to work with the affiliate program

Marketing Assets and Resources

Mini affiliate programs, you don’t actually have to provide the visuals and banner ads yourself. Many programs provide you with various marketing assets and resources that you can use to make your job and marketing much smoother. Many programs provide you with ready copies of emails and newsletters that you can use to quickly send out to your mailing list. Some other programs provide you with updated product feeds that you can place on your website so customers can click on them and drive traffic to the affiliate program.

While many programs provide you with banner ads and text links, some others in my provide more, and some others less. You want to look for programs that give you such resources because that means they want to support their affiliates in their journey of making more money.

Average Order Value

As mentioned before, the commission rate is not the only thing that matters when it comes to the factors that affect your earning. If the commission rate is really high when the average order values are low, you might earn much less than you would, if the commission rate was lower, and the average order value was high.

Consider this case. The commission rate of the program is 1% but the average order value is $2000, you’ll be making $20 per order. However, if the average order value is $10 and the commission rate is 90%, you’ll be making only $9. So you should really pay attention to the average order value of an outdoor athlete program especially since they’re only physical products sold in this niche.

Average Estimated Earning per Click

The average estimated earning per click shows how much money you can earn per every click referring to the affiliate program, regardless of whether that click ended up in a purchase or not. The average earning per click is usually counted in a period of at least 30 days and at most three months. The number of clicks earned and the amount of commission made during this period are measured and divided accordingly to get a number that corresponds to the average earning per click. So an average earning per click of $3, means that you are likely to make $3 per every click that you gain from your traffic source to the affiliate program's website.

Payout Frequency and Minimum Payout

Some programs have a rule to only pay their affiliates when they reach a certain minimum balance. This amount can be anything between $20-$500 in more luxurious programs. Some other programs might not have any minimum payout threshold so you can take your money out, no matter how much you’ve made.

On the other hand, many programs set up your payments to be sent out every month. This is wow some others might pay out only every two months or a certain number of days after a customer has purchased something. They might do this to make sure they don’t pay you until they make sure the customer won’t refund their order. You want to look out for programs that have less strict terms for sending you your payout.

Your Promotion Channel and Familiarity with the Products

Outdoor affiliate programs have certain products from various categories. Each of these categories corresponds with a different target audience. For example, you cannot promote hiking, and outdoor tools if your audience mainly consists of people with an interest in fishing. You should always consider your niche and the type of products your audience is more likely to buy before you promote something they don’t expect of them. This will only ruin your reputation in their eyes. Plus, if you really want to be successful, you should make sure the type of products the program sells is the type you can promote through your own promotion channels, and that you know enough about the type of product.

Target Market

In the same way, you should pay attention to your promotion channel, you should pay attention to your target market. Many programs specify that they want their customers to be either in US or Canada. Some programs have lower commission rates for people in other countries or they won’t expect to pay you commissions for sales in other countries. So if you do not have the ability to focus on a certain target market that the program specifies, you should not go for that program.

Top Traffic Sources for Promoting Outdoor Affiliate Programs

Now that we know how to choose between the affiliate programs mentioned here to find the best one, let’s check some of the top traffic sources for promoting outdoor affiliate offers.

Affiliate Website or Blog

The first and most important traffic source for promoting outdoor offers is your own website or blog. This is where you collect the first-hand audience. You can have your own blog or website where you write about outdoor tools, your own experience, outdoors, different outdoor accessories, and how you felt like using them, etc. Your affiliate website also provides organic and free traffic, which is the best type of traffic in the affiliate world. Plus says it provides an everlasting source of the traffic to the affiliate program, and you can earn an amazing passive income. On your blog, you want to have three different types of articles: list articles, product reviews, and guides.

In the first type of article, you should include a list of products in a certain category, and compare them by writing a brief description of each. These articles will include your affiliate links on every product.

In the second type of article, you should take a famous or trendy product and write a review of your own first-hand experience, or the information available on the Internet, mixed with a little bit of your own insight. The visuals and resources some programs provide you with can really help you to fill out the images in these articles. Especially in the outdoor niche, people are literally really looking for visuals and images, so you should fill these articles with them.

The third type of articles should mainly be about the niche itself. You should try to provide valuable information to the readers, so they wouldn’t stick to your website and not your competitors. Especially in the outdoor niche, people are always looking for information on many topics. You can simply find out what questions people ask by looking up a keyword on the website answerthepublic.com, or just by monitoring what your competitors write about.

You can optimize your articles by following SEO rules to make sure your articles get indexed on Google and people can easily find them.

Social Media and Content Sharing Platforms

The second source of traffic for outdoor products is without a doubt social media, and content-sharing platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. These platforms are great because they allow you to connect with your audience and share some quick facts or videos about outdoor activities. They can really get people interested so they would click on your affiliate website link where you present your affiliate links and products.

Of course, you can use trends on YouTube and TikTok to quickly catch up to the rest of your competitors and promote a product. You don’t really need to be an influencer to do so, and simply benefiting from hashtags or trendy topics can quickly earn you lots of commission. A lot of people shop through TikTok, so it is a better platform if you want to get a lot of traffic very quickly.

Luckily, many programs will send you newsletters and updates regarding their latest trendy products. So as soon as you figure out about a new product, you can post about it on any of these platforms and let your audience know.

Outdoor Forums and Communities

Luckily, the outdoor niche is one of the fields that has a lot of communities on the Internet, talking and sharing information. You can just find one of these forums and start talking to people and interacting with them to gain points. As soon as you do so, you can start fitting your affiliate links in your answers to other people’s questions. Most of the time people will ask for great deals on certain outdoor items, if you have any, you can just send a link to your affiliate website where you review the product or just your direct affiliate link.

However, when you’re doing so, you need to be careful because many forums have rules against spamming your deleted links. So before you post any of your likes, make sure you have a lot of reputation on the forum and then try posting them.

Paid Ads

A great way to gain lots of traffic very quickly is to run paid ad campaigns. The return on investment in this method is great, because in many cases, depending on your target location, you’ll be paying only up to $4 per click in very expensive locations but earning at least $10 per click for many outdoor affiliate programs.

You can run your paid ad campaigns and platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads. Google Ads is great if you want to promote your own affiliate website for certain keywords on Google. Facebook Ads, on the other hand, are great if you want to gain engagements or clicks for your affiliate website by promoting a certain deal.

People who click on your ad will end up on a pre-landing page where you will post about the latest promotion or deal they can grab instantly. You do not need to send them to your landing page or your blog, and if you are promoting a great deal or a coupon code, a simple pre-landing page that will pop up before the visitors reach the landing page can really improve your conversion rates.

Tips for Effectively Promoting Outdoor Affiliate Programs

Best traffic sources for promoting outdoor affiliate programs and networks, let’s see some final tips and tricks to pay attention to when promoting these offers.

Use Long-tail Keywords

As mentioned before, you need to utilize many different keywords on your website to make sure your website is indexed by Google and users can easily find it by searching certain terms. Obviously, when you just enter a niche, there are many competitors out there and you have to consider that before you start writing your blog posts. First of all, you should aim for keywords with low difficulties and high search volumes.

Secondly, you should come up with long-tail keyboards that narrow down the topic of your articles to the exact type of product certain users with commercial intent are looking for. A commercial intent means the user is looking for something to buy when searching on Google. To find these keywords, you should think of all the details attached to a certain keyword.

For example, instead of writing about “the best outdoor heaters” you should write about “the best outdoor heaters under $50 for a family trip”. This long-tail keyphrase denotes both the price range and the target audience. Of course, you can find these long-tail keywords by searching on Google Trends or Google Keyword Planner as two free tools. You can also monitor your own competitors and check what you can write about.

Write Good Product Reviews or List Articles

How to really grab the attention of the audience, you should write product reviews that manage to sell the products. Here are a few tips on how to do so.

First of all, you should include the first and most important details about the product, such as its pricing, some highlights, sizing or dimensions, etc. These details are basically the most important things the reader should know about. Next, you have to include some pros and cons of the product, capturing all the good and bad things about it so the audience knows that you are being honest with them, by not just including the benefits.

Next, you have to write several paragraphs of your own first-hand experience with the product or the experience you’ve seen online with it. Some programs will provide you with free test samples to review the products. In case you actually get your hands on the product or if the program provides you with visuals and photos, make sure to put a bunch of them in the article to ensure the audience that you have tried the product. This will help establish trust.

Finally, you can include your own affiliate link and motivate people to purchase it if they like it. But do not be too pushy.

Benefit from Email Marketing and Lead Magnets

When you actually have some traffic coming to you, you can benefit from email marketing a lot. Using elite magnets on your website, you can get the email address of your audience and send them newsletters or emails about promotions or deals. This will also help people always be aware of the existence of your blog or website and come back to you For more information or deals.

You can do email marketing in a different way as well. You can use a service like MailChimp to find a list of email addresses that you can send out promotions. However, remember that if their readers mark your emails as spam, some programs might not like it. So remember to always check the program's terms regarding their email marketing strategy.

Focus on Quality Rather than Quantity

Many affiliates start instantly allocating their blog with lots of low-quality articles. Remember that in this niche and many other niches, the quality of your content is much more important than the quantity. You can make 50 TikTok videos, promoting the product, but if the quality is low, you might not get any clicks. So you want to optimize your videos and your website content and actually add some values or creatives so you can get more attention and traffic driven to the affiliate website.

Familiarize Yourself with Your Audience

It is always important for you to know what is going on in the outdoor industry. You should know exactly what your audience is interested in and how they would like to receive information. In different times, people are interested in different things based on the world around them. So make sure you know enough about your target market and promote the right products and programs to them. You don’t know we have to stick with one program, and you can promote whatever you think your audience might be interested in after you make sure the product is useful to them.

Consider Paying an Influencer or Becoming an Influencer

Last, but not least, you can always try to grow your social media activity further than just your affiliate account or website. You can always make high-quality videos or write high-quality articles and have your own influencer branding. As an alternate traffic source, you can also pay an influencer to advertise your affiliate website for you. Usually, influencers on TikTok get anything between $1000-$3000 for several million views, and only $100 for a couple of hundred thousand views, which is really not a lot. If you think about the amount of profit, you will be making from that many views.

Conclusion

The outdoor affiliate niche is a great sphere for you to make a lot of money because the audience in this niche is truly interested in almost anything you have to present to them. Once a person gets interested in outdoor activity, it’s hard to forget about all the different tools and gadgets they can use to have a better time outside the house. So instead of your audience coming to you to learn about a product that is a niche, they are eager to learn what you have to offer to them. Using the right affiliate program, you can have the resources and assets to quickly promote the latest products to your audience and be the first to let them know about it.