10+ Best Food Affiliate Programs and Networks [2024]
Let us admit everybody needs to make money, and money comes in a variety of ways. One of the best places to make money is the Internet. The way that we are going to introduce to you in this article is affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is the job of promoting someone else’s product and receiving a commission in return for a sale. Affiliates are the bridges between the seller and the customers. With affiliate marketing, you get to be your own boss and decide many things. Where to get your traffic from, what affiliate programs to use, what pricing model to work with, which niche, and many other things you will get to choose.
The first step when you get into the world of affiliate marketing is to choose a niche. Your niche will determine a lot of things such as, where you should get your traffic, what affiliate programs you will be working for, and your general affiliating platform. It is important to choose your niche carefully.
One of the most popular niches of affiliate marketing is about food because who does not like food? If you like food too, maybe you should start an affiliate business using it, but how? In this article, we will be showing everything you need to know about affiliate marketing with foods. We will show you the pricing models that you are going to be working with, where you should be getting your traffic from, and at the end, examples of some affiliate programs to help you have a clear mindset about how it works. Sit back and enjoy reading this article because, at the end of this article, you will know how you can make money from food online.
What Is Food Affiliate Marketing and How You Can Use It to Your Benefit
The food industry is full of different things you can create content from and start doing affiliate marketing. There are food delivery applications, meal preparation, chef preparing foods, and a lot of other things. Let us talk a bit about each category, so you can choose from whichever of them you feel is more suited for you. Later on in this article, we will give you examples of each of these categories, so you would know where to start.
Meal Preparation
Meal preparation also known as meal kit comes from its name. In this category, not only it is about food delivery, but there is more to discuss. The meal preparation companies in this industry offer menu and food suggestions to their customers, along with the recipes of the foods. After a customer chooses the food they want, the company will send them the raw ingredients of that food at the address of the customers, so that they can make the food they want. The recipes on the menus of these companies are often simple, and everyone can follow them.
This is a great idea for everyone because some people might not have enough time for cooking, and if you suggest these types of companies to your audiences, they can make the food they want without having to worry about time. This way, both your customers will be glad, and you are making money out of promoting these companies.
Chef Preparing
Chef preparation, which is also known as Heat and Eat Meals is another category that is about food and has a good amount of audience for food affiliate marketing. The companies who work with this business model, are unlike meal preparation ones, and they offer prepared and ready-to-eat foods for their customers. The products from the chef's preparation are usually made for the customers to store or freeze so they can heat them whenever they want to. This is why people call them heat and eat meals.
If your audience does not even have the time for male preparation, or they do not have the equipment to prepare a meal, this option is most suited for you to suggest to them. These foods are much healthier than fast foods such as pizza, so if I had a very busy life and did not have any time to cook, I would have used these opportunities.
And if you are wondering how you can not have a busy life and still make a lot of money, the answer is in affiliate marketing. The income is passive, so you can make money even when you are sleeping.
Food Delivery
This one, you can already guess from its name. Food delivery companies will deliver foods or whatever raw ingredients such as groceries, to their customers. These companies get what a customer wants from restaurants or stores in the area and deliver it to their customer’s doorstep. After the pandemic, most of these companies changed their business from delivering food from restaurants and fast foods to delivering groceries after the covid-19 global pandemic.
You can recommend these types of companies to your audiences and they are good for everyone. One important thing to note is that this type of advertising is more effective if you are suggesting it to the people who live in your area.
Traffic Source
What is the most important factor for a store or a shop that will determine the amount of their income? That would be the number of customers they get. The more customers you get, the more you are going to make.
The same thing is true about affiliate marketing. Traffic is the most crucial factor for an affiliate. The more traffic you get, the more customers. More traffic also means a higher conversion rate. Conversion rate is the rate at which you can turn your traffic into customers. When we say %20 conversion rate, that means %20 of the people who visit your page, will use the affiliate link and you will get a commission out of them.
The traffic comes from a traffic source to your landing page. There are a lot of traffic sources for affiliate marketers depending on the category you are using, and the platform you are using. Some of these traffic sources are generally good. Here are the traffic sources that are best for you, if you are affiliating in the food industry.
Search Engine
If you are a blogger or a website owner, the best type of traffic that you can get is search engine organic traffic. You can get this type of traffic by improving your SEO (search engine optimization.)
Social media
Social media accounts are necessary for any niche of affiliate marketing. Social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are must-have social media accounts. For affiliate marketing with foods, Instagram is one of the best places because you can post visual content as well as reviews. You can promote your social media accounts on your blog or website and vice-versa. It is also possible to do affiliate marketing on social media itself.
YouTube
Speaking of creating visual content, another platform that we always recommend affiliates to use is YouTube. YouTube has a lot of traffic, and making content for it is really easy. If you already have a website or a blog, you can easily convert all of your content into videos and upload them on YouTube. Contents such as food reviews or cooking videos are very popular on YouTube.
How Affiliate Programs Will Pay You
There are a lot of ways that affiliate programs can pay their affiliates. The one that is most common and food-related affiliate programs use is the CPA (cost-per-action) pricing model.
In the CPA pricing model, the affinities receive a commission every time a customer purchases. The return on investment (ROI) is %100 for the advertiser because the affiliate gets the commission only when the transaction is over, so the advertisers will get full value out of their advertising. The action that happens in CPA models is usually purchasing something.
As an example of affiliate marketing food, take a look at the NutriSystem affiliate program. NutriSystem is a website of type meal preparation.
They offer %3.2 to %5.2 commission per sale.
Usually, if you want to do food affiliate marketing, you must have a food blog. Here is how Jamie Silva, the most successful food affiliate marketer, and the owner of A Sassy Spoon, makes money in a year.
Conclusion
In this article, we showed you how you can make money out of food affiliate programming. The pricing model often used with these affiliate programs is CPA, which you can make a decent amount of money with. Foods are very popular across the internet and they always will be, so it will never be too late if you want to get into the industry and make some money.
