If you’re into affiliate marketing, there is a good chance that you’re focused on a single geographical location. Many people only promote products to their own country or the United States, but limiting yourself like this can really hurt your profits. This article discusses the benefits and implementations of being an affiliate in various global markets.

Why You Should Market To Other Countries

Lets start with the reasons why you may be marketing to only one country. The only two that I can really think of are:

  1. Because it is your country and you know it well. There is nothing wrong with working within a market that you know, but what if you could expand your success by also marketing to another country?
  2. Because it is the largest online market and you want a piece of it. I am talking about the United States here. One could argue that there are countries with higher sales, but most of the online affiliate programs are geared towards the United States. Because of this, it is also the most competitive market. By exploring options in other countries, you have the potential to greatly reduce your competition and make affiliate marketing look like child’s play.

For those of us residing in the United States, both of those reasons can attribute to our lack of global diversification. The problem with this is that the PPC arena in the United States has become very fierce. Bid prices are continually rising, companies are getting smarter, and other affiliate marketers are getting smarter. However, most of them are also only working within one geographical market.

What if, instead of promoting affiliate programs in the United States, you simply started buying traffic from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or the United Kingdom? If you have had any kind of success in the US, you will probably find many niches in other countries to be relatively easier. But how do you find affiliate programs for these specific countries?

Finding Affiliate Programs For International Markets

The easiest place to find products to promote to the global economy is ClickBank. They accept payment from every major country and much of what is available has global appeal. These products aren’t really country-specific though. Any moderately experienced affiliate marketer will know to buy traffic from all English speaking countries for ClickBank products. Because of this, you won’t be escaping the competition.

Instead of promoting global offers, look for country-specific affiliate networks. A great way to do this is to visit these different versions of Google when searching for new affiliate programs or networks:

To make your searches even more “true”, you may want to use a proxy server with an IP address that is located within the country you are targeting. You probably wont see the actual search results and AdWords ads if your IP address resolves to the United States.

By doing this, and searching for terms like “[niche] affiliate program” or “affiliate network”, you are going to find companies who are based in other countries and specialize in offers for other countries. Then, you can create country-specific PPC campaigns to promote these products without worrying about US affiliate marketers including them in their US campaigns.

Proof of Concept

One example of a PPC affiliate marketer who is doing very well for himself is Kieron of Here.org.uk. There is no doubt that he is a great affiliate marketer, but from what I can tell, he pretty much works within the UK exclusively. Don’t you want a piece of those profits too?

Here is a section on ABestWeb Affiliate Forums that is dedicated to non US based affiliate programs. And then there is the ever popular Affiliates4U forum that deals mainly with UK affiliate marketing.

Finally, I have been promoting products and offers in all of those English-speaking countries above for just under 2 years now. Some of them have been variations of offers that I was already promoting to the United States while others have been offers that are targeted exclusively to other countries.

Give Other Countries A Try

If you’re having success in affiliate marketing, try increasing your success by promoting the same or different products to consumers in other countries. Similarly, if you’re not having success in affiliate marketing, try promoting offers to countries with less competition instead.

To really separate yourself from the competition, you might also want to try marketing in non-English countries (as long as you can write fluently or can hire someone to translate). If done correctly, you can make a killing. If done incorrectly (like trying to use your high school Spanish knowledge or translation software) you will probably just get laughed at.

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