10 Best Skincare Affiliate Programs and Networks [2024]

There is nothing like beauty and beauty products when it comes to affiliate marketing. This stuff sells like magic, especially skincare products since lots of influencers talk about it these days.

There are luckily lots of ways to make money from these products and one of them is affiliate marketing. There are many affiliate programs that allow you to sell skincare products and earn money. In this article, we will go through how skincare affiliate programs work, how you can earn money from them, and if there are experts who do this and what their secrets are. So sit back and enjoy this guide.

What are Skincare Affiliate Programs and Networks

Skincare affiliate programs provide affiliates with the opportunity to sell skincare and beauty products from a certain brand or brands, and earn money. The skincare affiliate networks are the ones that provide a network of sellers or merchants and you can sell their products for them.

The way that these programs work is that you can recommend a product on your affiliate website or social media account, and your audience buys a product using your affiliate link. This can get more complicated sometimes. Sometimes at seasonal events or sales, you can give users promo codes or discount codes, and they can get some discount while you make money. Win-win for both you and the customers.

Payment Models in Skincare Affiliate Programs

In some affiliate programs and niches, you have the payment models of CPC (cost per click), CPL (cost per lead), CPA (cost per action), and CPM (cost per impression). While that can be true for some skincare affiliate programs that might be focused on getting their brand known to different people by paying influencers for views or clicks, the majority of cases are not like that.

These types of products are physical, so mostly the companies will pay you based on Revenue share in the form of commissions for sales. This amount can be different in different programs and working for different merchants. But generally, it can go from 1% to 30% depending on the product. So let’s say, you sell a product valued at $50. In that case, if the commission rate of the program is 10%, you will get $5 from that one sale.

The reason why Revenue share is the most common payment model among this type of programs and networks is that these are mostly in the field of e-commerce, and the most common payment model in e-commerce affiliate marketing is Revenue Share. As mentioned before, some websites may pay you based on clicks or visits, or sign-ups besides revenue share as well.

What to Consider When Choosing a Skincare Affiliate Program

There are quite a lot of affiliate programs out there with different conditions each. Let’s see what you should base your decisions on when you’re choosing programs to join.

Commission Rate

This is definitely an important detail when it comes to e-commerce programs. Because whatever this number shows is going to be your share from any sale. So obviously, the more the better. However, better not to judge fast. Some brands, even though their commission rate might not be the best, might actually be more credible and easier to sell. That is why choosing those programs is fine as long as the number makes sense.

On the other hand, there are some programs that offer low rates while not being that successful or popular. You need to keep all this in mind when making a decision on what commission rates are acceptable to you. Generally, anything above 5% to 10% and above is a good start.

Credibility

It’s important for the brand that you are promoting to be credible and trustworthy. If users have had bad experiences with it, or if there is not much information about them, you might want to avoid collaborating with them.

If the brand you are promoting is fairly new or has bad reviews, you will be putting your own reputation at risk, and your audience won’t appreciate and trust that.

Cookie Duration

Cookies are things that help save the data of the user on a website, so when a user visits a website, the owners can know where the user was from, how long they spent on the website, etc.

That is essential for affiliate marketing because when a user visits a website with your link, the website saves that and pays you based on it. If an affiliate program offers a long span of days for their cookies to last, say 60 days, it means that when a user visits a website using your link for the first time, for 60 days after that anything they purchase will be counted as your affiliate sale, and you will get paid for it.

Based on that, the longer the cookie duration the better. Some programs have cookie durations that last only the session that the user is on, and some others last up to 2 months. You need to filter those out because the shorter the duration of cookies, the harder it will be for you to make any money.

Payment Frequency

You can also pay attention to how long it takes for the affiliate program or network to pay you. You might think, well, they should pay monthly, right? But the truth is that they don’t necessarily. Some of them might pay you 2 months after the shipment of a purchased item, and some others may pay you weekly or biweekly. It really depends on each affiliate program, so you need to make sure you have your goals straight.

Traffic Sources for Skincare Products

There are still some questions remaining. How can I promote skincare affiliate products effectively and get the traffic I need? Here are some traffic resources that work best for skincare and beauty products.

Social Media

It takes you just one visit to Instagram to see thousands of influencers promoting skincare products on a daily basis. The market is thriving and it won’t stop soon. The best way to promote such products is by showing users what they are buying.

If we were to rate the social media best for driving traffic to skincare products, we would say the best would be Instagram and TikTok, and after that Facebook, and after that Twitter.

You need to create accounts on these social media and start with recording videos of you using skincare products or talking about their benefits. This is much like writing a product review, except you show the user the quality of the products in real-time.

Email Marketing

You could always have a newsletter going on or send user emails and introduce products to them or redirect them to your affiliate website. Email marketing is a great way to spark interest in users, especially ones who like seeing quality newsletters in their inbox, not just promotional ones.

For newsletters, you could always have a website and ask people to join your mailing list. If you don’t have a website, you can use services like MailChimp to find a huge number of users’ email addresses and send them some information about skincare products to pique their interest, and then invite them to visit the platform where you keep your affiliate promotions and reviews.

Influencers

Another great way to gather an audience for your affiliate products is paying influencers to promote it for you, and giving them some sponsorship money. Usually, they do it for you, and it’s what they earn money from. So, if you don’t feel like trying the products out yourself or getting in front of a camera, try working with influencers. You can always find influencers off TikTok or Instagram, and trust me, a good deal of them are willing to advertise it for you.

Website Content and Product Reviews

Another great source of organic traffic is writing on a website. This is what you want to do by default because all of the above will just have to lead down to your website where you keep your recommendations, promotions, discounts, and reviews. You could promote a product on Instagram and ask users to visit your website for a discount from your side. Then, you could ask them for their email. There are lots of things you can do to benefit your affiliate business with just a simple website.

For creating a website, you need to gather a bunch of skincare products, and basically create a product catalog but from different programs and brands. You can then name it “Reviews” or “List of Top Rated Products”, etc. When users search the name of the product on a search engine, they will come across your content if it’s good enough, and they might end up purchasing the product through your link.

How to Promote Skincare Affiliate Products Successfully

While we talked about traffic sources, there are a couple of things you want to apply when working on these skincare products to make sure that your content is going to convert. Keep in mind, not all content converts, and having a website or a social media account is just the beginning. You will need to optimize them and get ahead in the competition. So let’s go through each tip and trick one by one.

Create a Skincare Blog/Website

We have mentioned this before, but let’s see how we can make this effective. First and foremost, you need a landing page. This landing page needs to look very interesting to users. They need to get curious by just one look at it. On the landing, you can place your latest promo or discount to lure the users in. Once they get interested, you get to show them more content, like product reviews, experiments, blog-type of posts where you explain your experience with a product, etc.

Remember, your website needs to have good branding that suits that of a skincare niche. The colors usually used in this niche are bright warm colors, like creme, yellow, orange, red, pink, etc. Whatever you use, make sure it’s appealing to your audience, and make sure it’s consistent and will attract your users.

Write Product Reviews that Sell

This is the tricky part. We have explained that you need a website. On this website you have to write reviews, but how? Here’s a quick guideline on creating the most effective product reviews.

First, write honest reviews of the product, how it felt, and how the outcome of using it was. Don’t write too much about the general quality of the product, like “It feels amazing” but try to specify exactly how the product makes them feel afterward, and what good effects it has on their skin in the long term. Talk from your own experience, even if you have actually not had a substantial amount of experience with that product. Try to use the first person voice, and explain how it worked for you. You can also mention what type of skin the product is best for, who can use it, and what effects it leaves on the skin afterward.

Secondly, you need to include the list of ingredients in the product. People are always looking for what is in the product to see if it matches their preferences. Skin is especially a sensitive topic among people who are interested in purchasing something related to it. So you need to be very specific and list all the ingredients.

Finally, you need to add some data or proof of how other people liked the product or found it useful. Without that, it just feels like you are trying to sell users something without them knowing if anybody else tried it or not. Again, it goes without saying that this should be included even if you haven’t actually run a survey to see how many people liked that product.

Familiarize Yourself with your Audience

You can’t ever start working as an affiliate in a niche that you have no idea about. You need to be very familiar with skincare products, the skincare routines, the community, etc. Otherwise users will call you out on it. You should be familiar with what types of skin your audience has, what their struggles are, what their budget is, what they are looking for nowadays, what is trending, etc. All this information can come to your benefit, but if you don’t have them, better not start working in this niche at all. Since you will be writing product reviews, robotic and soulless reviews won’t have any effect, and they need to be generated by you yourself.

Balanced Keyword Targeting

This is an important topic. When you are writing articles about skin care products, you can’t just start doing it out of intuition. There needs to be some sort of strategy, and that strategy is for the keywords you will be focusing on throughout your text. Without those keywords, your website will likely not even get indexed by Google or other search engines, and you can’t see any traffic on your website.

What you need to do is find the keywords that users are most asking for. You can always use websites like AnswerThePublic to find out what users are searching regarding a certain topic.

Besides that, and after finding the main keywords, like hydrators, you need to come up with long-tail ones. Let’s open that up. Long-tail keywords are keywords that come from narrowing down a more general keyword. So, for example, in the case of hydrators, you can narrow it down to “hydrators without sugar for dry skins”. This helps you reach out to those users who are searching for this specific thing. If a user searches for “hydrators” you have almost no chance to appear in their search results. But if you have the long-tail keywords focused on your website for as many queries as you can think of, many users will end up finding you, because not all competitors work on the same long-tail keywords.

Here is a list of top keywords for the skincare niche that you can target for products of this category. We have listed both long-tail and general keywords.

As you can see, the volume of the searches in long-tail keywords are more than the general keywords as they go to higher rankings. This means that traffic is balanced all across the long-tail keywords. So you definitely want to focus on those.

Engage with the Community

This is an important aspect of your success, even though it might not seem like it. You need to create a community, engage with them, talk to them, respond to their comments, and make positive interactions with them so they would come to you for any questions.

This is important because it’s a huge part of establishing trust. Sometimes, when a customer buys your product, you can ask them to post it on Instagram and tag you so you can feature them on a Story. This helps your reputation a lot and makes other people want to do the same. So definitely remember to engage with your community as much as possible.

Perfect your Content

You really need to put lots of effort into your content. We are living in the age of content, and whether you want to make video content or blog post content, you need to perfect it. You need to be sure about every single word you use, and invest time in it.

It has been proven by many affiliate bloggers that quality affiliate reviews and posts are more effective than a large number of articles with low quality. So your main focus should be on quality and not necessarily quantity. You can definitely focus on quality more and more as time passes by, but for the time being, you can hire writers if needed, to make sure you are using all the expert knowledge you can get.

Focus on SEO

SEO is an important part of content marketing. Without SEO, you cannot get ranked on Google for the keywords you are targeting. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it means following some rules when creating your content on your website that helps the search engine crawlers understand your content and decide whether it’s useful for the users who search on Google.

Here are some standards of SEO that you need to apply on your blog posts or content, in general.

• Add Focus Keywords in Text: If your focus keyword is “moisturizer for dry skin”, and your article is around 1 000 words, then you need to use the keyword in it about 5 times. The density of the keyword (meaning number of times the keyword is used in relation to the number of words in the text), can be around 0.25% to 0.5% as a good density. So in a 2 000 word article, you can use the keyword 10 times.  
• Add Focus Keyword in Title: The focus keyword needs to also appear in the SEO title or the title of your post. It better be in the beginning, but it can be anywhere else too.
• Add Keyword in Meta Description: Meta description refers to the meta tag that exists on your website’s code. The meta description is used to tell the search engine and the user a brief about your article, and this description needs to include the keyword.
• Add Keyword in URL: You need to add the keyword in the slug or the address of the article as well. So, let’s say your article is about the “moisturizers for dry skin” keyword, then your URL should be something like example.com/moisturizers-for-dry-skin.
• Add Keyword in Image Alt Descriptions: Alt descriptions for images are texts that explain what an image is showing, and if an image fails to load, the browser will show that alt text. That text also needs to have the keyword in it.
• Add Keyword in Headings and Subheadings: Your content needs to have balanced headings and subheadings, and the keyword needs to be equally used among them.
• Add FAQ section: This is a bonus tip and many websites who do product reviews have this section on their blog posts. This section gathers up all the common questions that users ask and puts them together with their answer, so that search engines will find them and show the whole article to the user.

By following these SEO tips, you can ensure more organic traffic.

Create Polls

This last tip is a good one if you need some ideas for what you should be promoting next. You could always ask your audience on your social media what you should be trying out or introducing next, using a simple Instagram poll. Most of the time, they audience will be more than happy to help you with it, so you will create even more engagements between you and your audience.

Case Studies

Let’s check some of the successful people of this niche.

Case #1: Miyaeva Renae — TikToker

The first case here is Miyaeva, who is a successful TikToker for skincare. Her biggest source of income is her affiliate income, which she herself highlights on her profile.

What got her famous is doing skincare routines on her boyfriends, which is counted as creative on a platform like TikTok. When you click on her LinkTree on her bio, you can see that she has a couple of items, and as you can see, most of them are affiliate products or promotions.

The first 4 links are essentially just affiliate links to different websites, including Amazon, Origins, and a brand website. She also does affiliate marketing for her outfit, which shows how amazing the opportunities for you are if you do even one niche. You could always promote other related niches as well.

Case #2: Jenni Raincloud — Blogger

This second one is interesting because her content is super honest, she includes photos of herself trying out different products, and she posts the affiliate links and promo codes in a natural way. Even more interesting, she has an average monthly visit of 40K, and her average visit duration is 2 minutes. This means that her content is actually liked by most people.

She actually mentioned that she uses affiliate marketing to earn money as well.

Here’s an example of how she promotes affiliate products. She actually tried them, put pictures on, and then she posted her affiliate link like below, using a converting sentence.

She has mentioned how this affiliate blog helped them transform into a 1 income family, and that she has made enough money to consider this a full-time job.

Conclusion

There are many good skincare and beauty affiliate programs out there, and many of them are ideal for social media, and you can easily gain social media traffic by talking about them. Focusing on the target keywords can help a lot and gains you lots of organic views. Make sure you perfect your content, post often, keep engaging with your audience, and introduce only credible products.