Last updated on February 25th, 2023 at 08:10 am

We all have that dream life we crave dearly!
To wake up in the morning flip your laptop open and see alerts…
It’s simple – passive income!
Simply making money while you roll on your bed.
99% of people living in this life started out with affiliate marketing.

Probably you have heard of Affiliate Marketing in Nigeria and it’s something you have not been able to wrap your head around.
You have heard or seen some big boys on the internet or business space telling you how huge they have earned through Affiliate Marketing in Nigeria and you have envied them and you also wonder which affiliate programs in Nigeria can you also get started with.

Funny enough majority of these big boys earn money from the comfort of their own homes.
It looks as though it’s impossible to get this done, relax buddy! It’s as easy as slicing a cake neatly.

In this article, I am going to explain exactly what is Affiliate Marketing, how it works, some existing programs that you can take immediate advantage of and how to go about it like a pro.

Why You Should Take This Guide Seriously

I have not been in the business of affiliate marketing in Nigeria for so long,

I am not also a billionaire!

But I earn something substantial enough for me to quit my job, rent a modest apartment, have a car and provide for my beautiful wife, son and daughters.

I do not like to paste my earnings online, people can easily interpret it as a show-off. I am not here to intimidate anyone but to encourage people that the online world is real and people are making money.

Here is a snip from one of my last affiliate earnings in 2019:

As received directly from PayPal.

Well, some say affiliate marketing doesn’t work in Nigeria, PayPal doesn’t work, bla bla bla…

Here is a screenshot from inside my PayPal:

This is not a joke!

Making $1k monthly from affiliate marketing alone can be a good start for you to launch deeper and start making more thousands in dollars.

Please take this article seriously.

Without wasting so much time, let’s get started immediately to see exactly how affiliate marketing works.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

One of the best definitions of Affiliate Marketing I found is from Patt Flynn’s Smart Passive Income:

Affiliate Marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people’s (or company’s) products. You find a product you like, promote it to others and earn a piece of the profit for each sale you make.

To simplify it in bullets:

• Find a product/service you like,
• Promote it to your audience and,
• You earn a profit or commission from the product owner for every sale you make.

According to Wikipedia

Affiliate Marketing is a type of performance-based marketing, in which a business rewards one or more Affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. The industry has four core players: the Merchant (also known as ‘retailer’ or ‘brand’), the Network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments), the Publisher (also known as ‘the Affiliate’), and the Customer.

Simplifying this for better understanding:

Wikipedia talks about 4 different parties that are involved: the Merchant, the Network, the Publisher, and the Customer:

Merchant:

This is the owner or the creator of the product/service. This could be any product ranging from physical products like (Jewelry) or even digital products (eBook). Anyone offering a product online for sale is a Merchant and most serious Merchants will likely be open to getting Affiliates on their blog or website.

Publisher:

This is someone always called an Affiliate, he simply takes a product link from a merchant and promotes it to his own audience, thereby sending traffic (Leads) to the Merchant’s website – to make sales and earn commission/profits.

Network:

This is a platform where both Merchants and Affiliates co-exist. Merchants signup to list all their products in their affiliate program and Affiliates see these, pick-up offers to appeal to them. These platforms always stand as a third party between the Merchant and Affiliate especially in ensuring due payments and satisfaction of both parties.

Customer:

Anyone who makes a purchase from the Merchant through the Affiliate is known to be a Customer. I always call them the most important party because, without them, there isn’t any commission or revenue to be made.

Affiliate Marketing Disclosure

Personally, I feel it is expected that every Affiliate should disclose the relationship they have with a Merchant and let customers know they are part of an affiliate marketing system, but sincerely most Affiliates don’t. Affiliate Marketing in Nigeria is getting big and we must handle it professionally in every honesty.

What Affiliate Marketers do is keep the tracking system in the background, so a customer can follow the purchase process like his own. For example, I can advertise a product on Jumia to you, promote it as though I own it and I give you a link to buy and I earn a commission without you knowing. It’s not much of a big deal anyway, but I think transparency keeps relationships that can close more deals in the future.

Personally, I will simply advise Affiliate Marketers to be transparent to potential customers and I will let you know why I strongly hold on to this in the cause of this article.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Let’s assume you have a website where you drive traffic through your marketing efforts online to make sales. It could be through Google, organic traffic, social media, etc.

What happens is that marketers usually get exhausted. They may exhaust sales on generated traffic, or run out of ideas on how to keep the marketing campaign going.

In this scenario, the best thing these companies do is to outsource sales to other affiliate members who have potential buyers of the products. And of course, share the revenue. In this case, it is usually a win-win for both parties. Both the Merchant and Affiliate make sales in passive income.

This is what Merchants do to sort sales:
They will give Affiliates a “unique link” through which Customer visits.

Usually, the format for affiliate links looks like this:
www.anywebsite.com?affiliate=1 (Affiliate 1)
www.anywebsite.com?affiliate=2 (Affiliate 2)

The part after the “?” in the URL is a unique ID and this is what the Merchant uses to track which Affiliate sends him the sale and then he makes the necessary commission as agreed.

Here is what it should look like:

In the picture above. Affiliate 1 and Affiliate 2 both sent traffic to the website www.anywebsite.com but for some reason the only sale made was through Affiliate 1

The website owner will be able to track the unique ID through the tag; “affiliate=1”.

He then sends a commission to the Affiliate through pre-arranged payment methods.

What we must note again is that most affiliate programs do not pay based on a “per-click” but a “per sale” basis.

Few Affiliate Programs That Work In Nigeria.

Before now, Affiliate Marketing in Nigeria seems to be a hard knot to crack because of the “trust issues” most foreign affiliate network programs have with Nigerians.

Affiliate marketers in Nigeria suffered complete omission of Nigeria from the list of accepted countries for most Affiliate Programs. Clickbank still will not accept Nigerians today, even if using PayPal is a war.

The Inability to find a suitable payment method for Nigerians, made it look impossible to do Affiliate business beyond the shores of the country.

Now?

The story is different, thanks to services like Payoneer, Skrill, etc. Nigerians can now receive earnings easily from these Affiliate Programs. This is the simple reason why the majority of Affiliate Marketers make a huge profit from this online model.

The challenge with most Nigerians is the ability to find good Affiliate Programs. Here are a little few you should consider:

Affiliate Programs In Nigeria

There are quite a handful of Affiliate programs in Nigeria today with amazing commissions, I know quite a few people who are basically Affiliate members with Jumia and Konga and they make millions in sales.

Jumia Affiliate program:

Jumia affiliate program can be everything a blogger or website owner needs to make it big if he/she knows how to go about it. In fact, you can turn your website or blog into a money-making machine. All that is required of you is to drive traffic to Jumia online store by choosing from their thousands of products to advertise to customers and make money when your visitors buy from them.

Konga affiliate program:

With over a hundred thousand available products waiting to be promoted, the Konga affiliate program is actually one affiliate program that should be considered.

Reputed for paying, its 9% commission on every product is capable of earning you some fortune.

Interestingly, you actually don’t need anything to get started with the Konga affiliate.

Wakanow affiliate program:

Wakanow.com Limited is Africa’s leading online travel company. And its affiliate program is designed to enable travel agencies and individuals who engage in selling travel products to make big profits by selling highly discounted Wakanow travel products (flights, hotels, airport pick-ups, tour packages, etc) to their customers.

Web4africa Affiliate Program:

Web4africa has a headquarter based in Ghana, and deals with professional reseller and shared web hosting on Linux and Windows platforms.

They offer affordable domain name registration and e-commerce solutions for Africans and the world at large.

DomainKing Affiliate Program:

DomainKing Affiliate program is another program to consider in Nigeria, someone like me who is into web design and development will find their program fascinating. Because every now and then I have the need to buy a web hosting account and also a domain name.

Buying with my affiliate link gives me a commission in passive income. I must say Domain King has one of the cheapest web hosting services in Nigeria and you do not need to be a customer to become an affiliate. You can check out that program.

VoguePay Affiliate Program:

VoguePay’s Affiliate Program ensures that affiliates earn as the company grows. A flat 10% commission is offered when a user refers VougePay to someone and it just does not end there. The referrer keeps earning a 10% commission on all transaction fees for 2 years. This has made affiliate marketing in Nigeria bigger in my opinion!

Check out their affiliate program and also the guidelines to get that done. VoguePay is one of the leading platforms to receive cash online and I use the service on my store on dapsdiary.com

TravelStart Affiliate Program:

Travel Start is one of the leading online travel agencies in Africa, their ability to give a good flight ticket at a very cheap rate has distinguished them over time. TravelStart has offices in most African countries and headquarters in South Africa.
If you have a travel website or you are a travel blogger or even a lifestyle blogger, then you can easily monetize your traffic by placing their banner on your site. Even if you are not any of those, if you have connections with people that travel a lot, then you can recommend them.
Because travel is expensive, the commission in percentage will also be on the high side. Take advantage of this program today.

There are still a number of Affiliate Programs you can take advantage of in Nigeria, programs like:

Travelbeta Affiliate program

Whogohost Affiliate Program

Foreign Affiliate Marketing Programs & Networks

Apart from the local affiliates program, there are lots of foreign networks you can affiliate with to make sales.

Amazon Affiliate Program:

We all know Amazon of course! They have been around for too long for them not to be noticed, hundreds of thousands of affiliate marketers are taking advantage of the credibility of this platform to rip huge fortunes for themselves
Amazon affiliate program pays 4% per sale, it gets better with sales above $100

Commission Junction:

Commission Junction (CJ) is known to have a huge affiliate network of different affiliate programs of different companies such as insurance, healthcare, travel, tourism, etc. Depending on the niche, the commission can range from 3%-40%.

Envato Affiliate Program

Envato Market is the world’s largest creative marketplace, selling millions of digital assets every year.  With a 30% affiliate commission, earning money has never been easier!

I have found this program very useful for me, I use Envato a lot because I will need to buy themes, plugins, effects, videos, etc for clients and using my affiliate link just make it easy to earn some commission.

Other Affiliate programs you can also consider include:

Udemy Affiliate Program

Bluehost Affiliate Program

Ipage Affiliate Program

You can easily get paid through both platforms by direct deposit into a U.S Checking Account which you can create for free with Payoneer.

Payoneer ships a free Mastercard to you which you can withdraw using an ATM machine in Nigeria.

NB: Ensure that any program you are registering with has a payment platform that is friendly with Nigeria. A lot of the platforms online payout using PayPal alone. You want to be sure you can receive your commissions.

There are a lot of niched affiliate networks and programs in Nigeria or outside that you can search on google and find. When you find them, check out their terms and conditions, commission per sale and which appeals to you, go ahead and sign up and complete the process of onboarding with them including payment info and basic details. Once you get started, you will start seeing your affiliate commissions grow as your audience starts making sales.

3 Tips on How to Start Affiliate Marketing in Nigeria

You are so eager to start Affiliate marketing in Nigeria? Then you are making the right decision. Affiliate marketing is getting bigger in Nigeria and also on a global scale.

Consider these few tips to help you get started immediately:

Search for the top affiliate programs and networks and then get on board.

This requires a process of Signing up and adhering to some technical policies by uploading some forms. The approval process might be tricky and will be based on how good your online record is. This will be a piece of cake if you are a well-known blogger. Make sure you are being compliant with all the steps required in the signing-up process by the network.

Start a niche website to get approvals in place (email a request for approval)

Most of the time most affiliate networks do not give approval because a lot of fraudulent activities are happening these days, reasons why many international networks restrict Nigerians. People try to sign up using their own affiliate links and sometimes send fraudulent orders as well, this is not a good one for Affiliate Marketing in Nigeria. So, to get approval, you need to have a good reputation and follow online. Many Affiliate programs would require you to provide this information:

How are you going to promote their products, and
What are the channels you are going to use to promote, etc?
This will make them gain trust in you and your approval will be easy.

It is better to have a niche website (like I have dapsdigital.com) and show them the funnel for your website to get approval easily.

Fortunately, creating a website is now as easy as a 5 mins drag and drop process. You do not need to pay a web developer like us hundreds of thousands of Naira to have one, as a matter of fact, you can begin to earn six figures in passive income monthly with this skill. I am currently giving out a 5k coupon code, click the link below to claim this coupon.

NB: The coupon has a countdown timer, it’s for a short time, Claim it now.

Make your first sale!

After you are approved for a few affiliate programs, go ahead and use all the Digital Marketing efforts to promote your links.

4 ways to start affiliate marketing in Nigeria with a blog

Review products:

You need to start reviewing products in your niche. Write a blog post giving an honest review about a product(s), you can even use a YouTube Channel. We have not seen a lot of this in Affiliate Marketing in Nigeria.

Click here to see an example of a review product using a blog post, this guy made thousands of dollars with this single post.

Grow A-List:

You have to collect emails so that you can connect with your audience at any time you want and don’t have to hope for them to always see your content. As they say, the money is on the list – growing a list is the easiest way to make money with Affiliate Marketing in Nigeria.

Offer Lead-Magnet:

Collect emails and also make sales through lead-magnet. What this means is that you offer an incentive for people to give you their email and also offer a bonus when people buy through your affiliate link. That was why I initially said earlier it is best that affiliate marketers are sincere enough to disclose their business relationship with a merchant. This will go a long way to influence Affiliate Marketing in Nigeria.

Click here to see an example of a lead magnet I created on this landing page.

Scale Your Business:

When you start making sales, you must treat it as a business, you have to scale your sales through advertising either through social media or pay-per-click. This is the biggest problem Affiliate Marketing in Nigeria is facing. Treat it like a business for it to grow.

5 Mistakes to Avoid in Affiliate Marketing in Nigeria

Over Selling:

Too much promotion is a bummer, it distracts and irritates your audience. You should rather help people with useful products that are relevant to them and let them buy as per their needs.

No Blog/Website:

Starting an Affiliate Business without a blog or any website to establish trust and build credibility. This is always a recipe for failure and the best waste of time.

Sugar Coating:

Don’t sugarcoat the product too much – be genuine about the products you are promoting. If your customer does not find the product useful as described by you, you can lose your own audience. The secret is for you to always leave an honest review.

Too many Products:

Avoid selling too many products – choose only those products that will be relevant to your target audience. It takes time to set up a regularly paying affiliate system for yourself but it is fruitful when started small. I always advise affiliate marketers to stick to a particular niche.

No Product Comparisons and Reviews:

Make use of your promotion space by including the comparison between 2-3 other similar products also in your reviews/promotions. Coming out with product reviews and comparisons and updating them with time will make sense for your audience and will make them buy more of those products from your affiliate link.

Conclusion

I hope this guide will help you to get started with your dreams of  Affiliate Marketing in Nigeria. If you find this article worth the read, be kind enough to let me know in the comment section and also use the share icon, be free also to drop a comment below in case you have any questions.
Cheers.