17 Best Diabetes Affiliate Programs and Networks [2024]

Diabetes is a real issue in this day and age, and there are more than 400 million people across the globe that suffer from it. And nowadays, many people with diabetes come online looking for solutions, devices, treatments, communities with similar condition, etc. If you think you have what it takes to help them with your traffic and also make some money from it on the side, get ready because, in this article, we will introduce some ways you can make money from promoting diabetics-related products, and how to excel at this niche.

What Are Diabetes Affiliate Programs

Diabetes affiliate programs are just like any other affiliate program, except with a very important niche that plays a huge role in many people’s lives. The process you will have to go through as an affiliate is almost the same here:

• Step 1: Get what you need to start your affiliate activity in the niche.
• Step 2: Sign up on some affiliate programs and networks.
• Step 3: Find the best affiliate offers.
• Step 4: Promote those affiliate offers using your traffic sources.
• Step 5: Get paid the commission for the sale of the items or on another basis.

While you can see that the process is the same, the requirements and prerequisites might not be all the same. For example, in this niche, before you can even think about doing affiliate marketing, you need to gain much more information about your audience than in any other niche. You need to know their problems, their struggles, what can help them, what can make them relate to you, etc. We will talk about all this in a later section, but for now, you just need to know that before joining a program, learning about what the program has to offer is definitely step 1.

For example, if you’re browsing the programs, you need to check what they are selling, whether they are certified, etc. Simply put, step 1 cannot be looking for the most profitable programs or networks, because that could lead to a lot of disasters later on.

What Types of Products Can You Promote

Interestingly, while many people might not actually be aware of it, you can sell so many types of products as an affiliate for diabetics products. The list we have gathered here of the items you can sell as an affiliate will blow your mind. Here are just some of the products.

• Supplements. This one has got to be the first one that comes to mind. You can sell all sorts of pills, remedies, and supplements to solve many problems for people with diabetes.
• Treatments. These can include a variety of products, from solutions to dry mouth all the way to care for the skin, etc.
• Creams. You can also sell creams that relieve pain or similar products that have more to do with outside the body.
• Digital products and diet plans. While this wouldn’t be something you imagine, there are many programs that sell digital diet plans and materials for people with diabetics to study or get more familiar with taking care of their body.
• Test strips. These are used for testing, and almost all people with diabetes would need them, so basically, it’s not something outrageous to sell.
• Glucose meters. Glucose meters are definitely the most common type of product you can sell to people with diabetes. They will all need one of these, so they can test their blood glucose right at home. Remember, the simpler and easier the device is to use, the more people will get attracted to them.
• Insulin pumps. Insulin pumps are a necessity to many people with diabetes, and if you can offer some good trustworthy brands that are easy to inject, many people will be super happy to find you in the first place.
• Guides and books. Guides and books can be either free or paid. In our case, we can sell guides and e-books or print books that help people with diabetes go through this journey, feeling good about themselves, living with the condition, and learning how to take care of themselves.
• Clothing and footwear. This is an interesting product to sell, and it includes a wide range of products. It can go from shirts to skirts, pants, and shoes. Clothing and dresses are a huge problem for many people with diabetes because they cannot wear shoes with laces, as example. So, selling them comfortable clothes or shoes without laces or with soft material will help them out a ton. Plus, they are easy to promote, and probably the safest.

Payment Models in Diabetes Affiliate Programs

Based on the products mentioned above, you can think of different types of payment models in these affiliate programs or networks. For example, the physical products can do revenue share, and the digital ones might do a flat rate. Anyhow, here are some of the models you can expect to get paid with for diabetes affiliate offers.

Revenue Share

The first type of payment model for diabetes affiliate products is revenue share. This type is great for physical products, like supplements, clothing, footwear, and different types of devices, as mentioned above. Some affiliate programs might choose to pay you a percentage of the sale of an item or a product. This can go from 5% to 50% or even more sometimes. The point with this model is that you might not sell anything for a long time before you can actually make a profit. So let’s say if a product is $40 and the program’s commission rate is 10%, you will only get $4 out of the sale. So the secret to this method is attracting as many customers as possible. Not just visitors.

Flat Rate

Flat rate is a model that some affiliate programs in this niche use to pay affiliates. Basically, per every sale you make, you can get a flat rate, from $50 to $100 or more. So if you sell a product for $1 000, you can only get $50, and if you sell a product for $200, again, you will get $50. Seems like both a win and a loss at the same time. But you can mostly expect this for digital products or subscription-based services, so they can be easier to sell.

Among these two common models, the first one is more common in this niche. So let’s just consider the commission rate model in this article.

What to Consider When Choosing a Diabetes Affiliate Program

Of course, there are many programs out there in the diabetes niche, but should you choose all of them? Should you choose one? How can you know which one is the right one for you? It’s not just about the money or the interest you have in selling those specific products. Oftentimes, it’s about other criteria, which we have collected here in this section.

Your Familiarity with the Products

If you remember from before, this is the first step in the process of affiliate marketing for this niche. You need to become familiar with the products in this category and field.

You might have some sort of a related experience with diabetes or people with diabetes. You might be a doctor knowing a lot about diabetes, and you might want to start affiliate marketing. You can be a person who doesn’t know much about the niche, but wants to get started, help people, and earn some cash on the side. In any case, getting familiar with diabetes, and the problems that people have to face when living with diabetes can help you a lot in knowing what types of products you should be promoting, or in other words, what type of products you ‘can’ promote.

You can learn more about the community of people with diabetes, watch some content online, check forums, and read some blogs or books, just to get started and get serious with this niche, because focusing on niche is the first tip that we give to any affiliate marketer.

So the first criteria here would be whether you know anything about the products or not. Do you know more about clothing and footwear, devices and glucose meters, supplements and treatments, or guides and digital products? Which one are you more confident you have more information on and you can sell? You should narrow your list down those ones.

Commission Rate

Of course, commission rate is an important aspect in choosing the affiliate program. The higher the commission rate, the better. The lower the rate, the lower the priority of the program should be. Simple as that.

Credibility

This is an important factor. Some affiliates might make the mistake of promoting any product, but that’s a huge mistake that can lead to total failure of your affiliate journey. You must do a lot of research on the company or the program that you are promoting. This niche especially requires that. You are dealing with people with harsh conditions, and they won’t be happy if something bad happened to them because of your promotions.

Your reputation can be at risk. So, before you go on and decide to work with an affiliate offer, do all the research you can on the company, its history, how reputable or credible they are in the market of people with diabetes, and whether there are any reviews on them. If the company is trustworthy, you can go on. Sometimes, you can even request some of their products and check them yourself, or other times, you can buy them and test them. Either way, be sure of the product you are promoting.

Cookie Duration

Cookies are the data that get saved on the browser about a user’s visit to that website. So every time a user visits a website, let’s say the shop that you are promoting, the website saves the data and later on uses it to track your affiliate link and therefore, make sure you get paid for it.

Now, cookies can be very short, meaning the website can forget a user who ever used your link to visit their shop within an hour of a user’s visit. Or they can save the data for up to 90 days. Meaning, if a potential customer uses your link to visit the affiliate offer webpage, they visit it back again up to 90 days, and their shopping can get counted towards your affiliate revenue share.

So, the longer the cookie duration, the better. Mostly, programs have a cookie duration of a week to 60 days. Some can go longer or shorter, however.

Payment Frequency

This is an important aspect if you want to get paid quickly and not have to wait. Some programs might pay every two months, and some others pay you every month. If this is an important criteria to you, you might want to make sure you get compensated quicker.

EPC

EPC stands for Earning per click and refers to the earning an affiliate can expect to have from each click on average. Meaning that if the customers were to end up buying the products on that affiliate product shop, the sum of their shopping would end up earning the affiliate a certain amount of money. The higher this amount, the better, which means that you can expect a higher earning on average per customer click on that website.

Ability to Track Performance

Sometimes, affiliate programs can give you the ability to check your performance. This is often called a management app or a tracker. You can see how many users you redirected to that program or network, and you can see your performance over the span of time. You can also see some tools or guides on how to improve your activity so you can sell more. If the program/network doesn’t offer this to you, better give them real low priorities. This is usually a very useful feature, and you can achieve many great things with them.

Traffic Sources for Diabetes Offers

There are multiple ways to gain traffic for these diabetes-related affiliate offers. In this section, we will go through some of the most important ones.

Social Media

The first and most important place you can promote your offers is social media. This is the best place for a couple of reasons. First of all, nowadays many people with similar conditions to diabetes will go on social media to find communities of people with similar conditions to try and get as much advice or tips as they can. So, if you start a social media page to talk about diabetes, lots of people will find you and end up relating to you if you can make some good, useful, and relatable content.

Among all social media, TikTok and Instagram are two of the best ones for this niche. Mainly, because these two social media allow you to paint a picture of how great life can be even with this condition. You can gain the attention of many people, by teaching them about it or producing wholesome content.

The next social media for this can be Facebook. You can definitely benefit from Facebook ads, guide people using Facebook, especially since older generations are on Facebook. You can either run ad campaigns or gain followers and then guide them to your affiliate website where you promote these offers.

Email Marketing

The next type of traffic source is email marketing, because why not? Newsletters are a great way to gain an audience and send traffic to your affiliate website. Besides that, you can always use email marketing platforms to send emails to a large number of people.

You can also gather subscribers for your mailing list, send them weekly newsletters about diabetes, or give them some offers about products that you are promoting.

Forums and Communities

There are many people in communities talking about diabetes and similar conditions, so this is the best place to promote your affiliate website, gain the trust of people, talk to different users, answer their questions, or guide them. People always appreciate honest responses, and you can gain lots of friends doing this as well.

Influencers

A great way that might cost you some money is hiring influencers to talk about your affiliate website. Keep in mind, this isn’t to talk about your affiliate offer, but specifically your website. You don’t want to make it too obvious or do something illegal. So you can instead pay an influencer to talk about your diabetes-related affiliate website and guide people to it.

Website Content and Product Reviews

All the traffic methods above come down to the website content or product reviews, but this can also be a traffic source of its own. Organic traffic or traffic that comes from search results is the best type of traffic. It’s free and ever-green, and you can always update it.

The type of content that you post on your website can be product reviews, guides, and all types of things even besides promoting affiliate products. First and foremost, you need to build a ground that you can improve on. This ground will be the content you upload on the general knowledge of diabetes. People can find these on search results and find your website. When they see that you have a great website with content that educates them or answers their question, they can check out some other parts of your website, such as product reviews.

The product reviews can be from the affiliate offers or programs that you are signed up for. You can write articles with topics like “Best glucose meters for people with diabetes” and introduce the products from the affiliate program.

Your website content should grab the attention of the visitors. It should be convincing, look legit and not like a scam, and be reputable. Your content needs to be factual as well.

Remember to include the right keywords on your content, because this is the way that people will find you. In the next sections, we have introduced some of the good target keywords that you can focus on in this niche.

How to Promote Diabetes Affiliate Offers Successfully

Even after knowing all the information above, there are still a lot of things you can do to improve your profit and income, even faster.

Create a Diabetes Blog/Website

It’s fine if you don’t have a website, but it’s definitely something that could improve your image a lot. You can also write content on websites like Medium just to have some articles on the internet and do product reviews. Anyhow, the point is to try to get some organic traffic, guide people to your website, and provide them with great information on diabetes.

Create a Social Media Influencer Page

This is not a must, but it’s definitely a good option to keep in mind. If you are the type of person who doesn’t have a problem with going all out for their career and income, you can become an influencer and a content creator on social media and talk about diabetes. On the side, you can tell people to visit your website, and there, they can shop for the things you recommend. Of course, more people will be listening to the influencer's recommendations than before.

Nowadays, more than 50% of people on TikTok are making purchases mainly because of their favorite influencers. Based on this, you might want to consider this option if you have the ability to do so.

Familiarize Yourself with your Audience

We have mentioned this before, but it’s super important to familiarize yourself with your audience. Understand your audience’s pain points or things that they need help with. Find out what most of your audience is interested in. Is it supplements or treatments they are more interested in, or is it clothing or books? It’s your audience, so you can definitely find out more about them. This data helps you find better content to create, suggest better products, and overall, keep your audience happy.

Keyword Targeting

This is an important factor if you want to be successful with organic traffic. The diabetes niche has some specific keywords. You need to learn to use long-tail keywords. If you’re not sure what they are, let’s compare these two examples: “low-carb diet” and “low-carb diet for pregnant women with diabetes”. The first one is just the main keywords in the niche, and the second one is the long-tail one, which is more specific and narrows down the search to specific people. This gives you better chances to appear in search results, so make sure to focus on long-tail keywords. Here, we have listed the top 12 keywords in this niche.

Of course, you can find many others with each other's main topics in mind. You can even search for some other keywords related to other things like diets.

Engage with the Community

Something that can help you grow very fast is being involved with your community. Answer your community's messages, talk to them, have conversations with them on forums, have live streams for Q&A or just hang out. Your community seeing that you’re involved with them makes you so much more advantageous in this niche.

Focus on SEO

SEO or search engine optimization is super important if you want to have a blog or a website. Without it, all your effort can remain unseen. Make sure you use your keywords naturally in your content, including images, great headlines, and readable text for your content. Only then can you see organic traffic flow on your website.

Create Polls

Last but not least, if you don’t know what else to talk about, you can always create polls on social media and ask for your audience’s opinion on what to cover next. Mostly, they’d be happy to ask you what to talk about (that is if they are not already asking you to cover some content or answer their questions). Your audience really likes you asking their opinion, and this will bring you better popularity as well.

Case Studies

Let’s talk about some cases of affiliates promoting diabetes affiliate programs.

Case #1: DiabeticFoodie

DiabeticFoodie is a wholesome little blog of a couple who post all types of recipes for people with diabetes. Their website includes affiliate links to product reviews, as well as diet solutions. For example, here you can see an example of their type of content, where they wrote the disclosure for having affiliate products reviewed.

They also have a lot of ads placed on their website, but that would be another topic. As it is apparent, even though they have only about 30K views a month, their annual revenue is equal to $1M-$2M a year, which is great for this amount of traffic. They have hundreds of guides on diets and food for people with diabetes, so their quality content has sealed the deal for them.

Case #2: DiabetesStrong

The second case here is the DiabetesStrong blog. They have a higher variety of products on their blog, from food and diet-related content to insulin and devices and similar products. They have affiliate links on their content as well, so they are making money from these products.

Take a look at this blog post where they introduce some Insulin Coolers and Travel Cases for people with diabetes.

As you can see on their website, they have many different types of content for all types of diabetes-related products, from devices and medications to diets, exercises, recipes, and plans. This helps them have content for different people and different needs.

They have more than 500K monthly views on their website and generate about $2M to $5M a year from affiliate links (and of course ads). But compared to the previous case. They actually have more authority on the niche, as they have more content on different areas, while the previous case focused on only the diets.

Case #3: Johnny Bailey

A great case of an influencer on social media who talks about diabetes is Johnny Bailey. He has all types of content related to diabetes and conducts lots of research on it. He is probably one of the most active ones in the niche on TikTok.

He has a Linktree which includes some links to products related to diabetes as well. He also has a website on this linktree attached that guides people to read more.

Footwear is a big issue that people with diabetes might have, so Johnny is promoting some products that are comfortable for this condition. In this case, they’re comfortable socks.

Conclusion

Diabetes is a niche that can both help people with their journey through this condition and make some cash for affiliates. If you are an affiliate who knows a lot about diabetes or has some experience with it, you can get started with affiliate marketing. There are many resources for you out there, and you can definitely make a living if you provide your audience with good and honest content.

You can either do it through forums and blogs, getting organic traffic, or you can have a website with all types of content for every type of person with diabetes and run ad campaigns. The point is to stay honest, promote only products that you know well, stay away from scams, and give the audience some valuable information on how to deal with the condition, be it diets, guides, or tools that can help them. This article has provided you with everything you need to know about this niche, so don’t hesitate to get started, and good luck!