There are a lot of ways to learn affiliate marketing in 2020. You can join a paid affiliate marketing course, you can research the freely available resources, you can watch youtube tutorials, or join a community of affiliates and learn to run campaigns together.

Would you like to know what are the best affiliate marketing communities and what are the benefits of joining? Look below for an overview of our favorite choices!

What are the benefits of affiliate marketing forums and communities?

Some people prefer to work solo, while others love to share ideas, brainstorm, collaborate and consult with their colleagues. Regardless of which group you belong to, affiliate marketing forums and communities offer benefits to affiliates at any level of experience. Here’s what you can expect if you decided to become a part of one:

Advice for Beginners

If you’re a beginner affiliate marketer, you might face a lot of dilemmas while starting your first campaigns. It’s hard to decide what affiliate network, traffic source, or tracker to choose when starting without a proper experience. Affiliate marketing forums are filled with threads opened by beginners who ask for simple advice and receive even more than they hoped for. Such threads are filled with plenty of in-depth answers, fully covering the basics. 

Also, long-standing, prominent networks usually have some sort of reputation. Some are famous for sweepstake offers, some have a large dating offer inventory. Some traffic sources are perfect at the beginning and some are best for scaling. This sort of information is easily known to affiliates who have some experience, but obviously, not to complete beginners. Forums and communities are where you learn about these things!

Free resources

Affiliate marketing forums provide free resources such as: landing pages, additional landing page scripts, creatives, copy or CTA ideas, and useful custom tools for assessing the performance of campaign components. 

The kind of free resources you can find on the forums are not freely available outside of the communities. They can be incredibly useful, especially to complete beginners, as accessing some of these free resources would otherwise require costly spy tool subscriptions or hiring third-party experts. 

Real-time campaign support

If you decide to document your campaigns by creating a follow-along and updating it on a daily or weekly basis, you can get real-time support from the community members. Follow-alongs can be a great way of documenting your progress and the steps you take while optimizing your campaigns. You can look back at them later on, and review how the changes have affected your campaign’s performance and how you learn from them.

Also, there is nothing more comforting than to hear ‘hey, I’ve been in a situation just like yours! This is what I did and that’s how it helped.’ Altogether, the members of the community have immense knowledge and experience, and having access to it while you’re running your first campaign can be extremely beneficial.

Coupons and promo codes

Affiliate marketing tools, traffic, and resources all cost money. A major advantage of joining AM communities is the financial benefits in the form of bonuses and promo codes. Traffic sources often offer additional top-up bonuses connected with special holidays or promotional actions with affiliate networks, trackers, and other affiliate marketing tools. 

For anyone looking to change a traffic source, there is usually a universal first-time deposit bonus unique to each community. Who wouldn’t want some extra money to give their campaigns a boost, right?  

Directories of resources with reviews

While entering the world of affiliate marketing, there is an overwhelming amount of information related to different kinds of networks, trackers, sources, and tools. Community forums gather all these networks into their own directories where you can easily see how many choices you have.

Additionally, quite often these networks are rated and reviewed by affiliates who have used them for a significant amount of time. By reading the reviews you can get an idea of what everyone has to offer and what networks should work for you.  

Contact network representatives

Apart from getting quick, first-hand support from the community members, affiliate marketing forums allow you to reach out to networks and tracker representatives. Not only do you get special bonuses and promotions but also direct contact with people representing the products you use. It can be very useful when you think about trying out something new and the people who can explain the product to you are within arm’s reach. 

Additionally, when you have a problem with your campaign, you can solve it right there and then by tagging a network representative. Network representatives love sharing valuable information on the forum so that anyone else having a similar problem can find the thread and learn from it.

Competitions and custom deals

As mentioned above, forums and communities give you an additional point of contact with the people representing the products and services that you use. An additional benefit of that can be the possibility of striking unique and personalized deals. 

Also, who doesn’t love the chance to win something? Forums are the ideal environment for affiliate marketing contests. You have support and motivation from the community of affiliates who readily help one another in achieving their daily goals. The prizes range from free tools and resources, free testing periods for products or features to actual money prizes — just like in our last Zeropark x affLIFT follow-along contest, where we gave away $3,500 in prizes.

Step-by-step tutorials

The most experienced affiliates are often the community moderators. It’s in their best interest that the members of the community receive as much value as possible. Forums are filled with beginners who expect to learn the basics and start earning as soon as possible. That’s why, the experienced admins prepare lots of useful, beginner-friendly, step-by-step tutorials using and explaining a wide variety of affiliate marketing tools. 

If you join the forums having little to no experience, you will find yourself in the right place. Surrounded by tutorials, guides and newbie follow-alongs, you will find all the necessary knowledge to slowly but surely become a successful affiliate marketer!

Source of industry news 

Finally, where else to find the freshest industry news, if not in the center of the affiliate marketing community. Networks, traffic sources, and trackers all make sure to inform the community about what’s going on with their products. Ultimate guides, video tutorials, interface changes, whitelists, product updates, new features, improvements, and additions are all of the things you will be regularly notified about once you join a community. 

Forums gather all the industry news in one place. Quite often, forum members find out about planned updates before the rest of the affiliates do. Having that sort of exclusive insight into the market lets you make the best choices about who to work with and where to find the most advanced features.

Affiliate marketing forums — review.

Now that you know what are the benefits of joining an affiliate marketing community we can go on to present an overview of the best affiliate marketing forums. Zeropark is an active member of all of them so if you need a helping hand in running your campaigns, here’s where to find us: 

affLIFT

affLIFT, run by Luke Kling, is currently the most active affiliate marketing forum. It’s newbie friendly and has a ton of great content for both beginner and advanced affiliates. 

The forum is moderated by such prominent and experienced affiliates as Nick Lenihan or Servando Silva. Together with Luke, they are extremely active and reply to nearly every question asked by beginners in need of help. Also, they produce a lot of content, for example: an incremental bidding strategy for Zeropark, a chatbot for dating offers, and a complete guide to starting with pop traffic.

The forum brings together affiliates and network representatives and is filled with unique promotions and partnership opportunities. PPV and Push Sections are the most active, with SEO, social and native following a bit behind. Overall, it offers a ton of value at a monthly price of $20 or a lifetime subscription costing $350. 

affLIFT also offers a public section, so you can take a peek at the content before joining in.

STM (Stack That Money)

STM Forum is run by a group of affiliates with extensive experience in many branches of affiliate marketing. The forum has been on the market for a very long time and has seen the rise of many popular super affiliates, including the creator of Zeropark Rob Gryn. 

The community is huge and offers a lot of special discounts as well as exclusive Affiliate World Asia 2019 replays, extensive and detailed pop, push, Facebook, and Outbrain tutorials among other free resources. It’s so big that it even has localized sections for non-English speaking users and an off-topic subforum for taking a break from affiliate marketing. 

Overall, STM is big with a huge number of strictly organized threads. After recent changes to its forum policy guidelines, the vendors have been separated from affiliates and assigned their own subforum. The industry news and product updates are still accessible, of course, however, they need to be searched for in the right sections. 

STM’s most active sections are Facebook, adult and mobile traffic and the monthly subscription costs $99. 

iAmAffiliate

iAmAffiliate is run by none other than Attila Odri — an affiliate marketing influencer! The forum is fairly new and much smaller compared to the previous two but offers plenty of value. 

The forum owner himself often writes very detailed guides and tutorials for such types of traffic as push or native. But you can find much more in his community. Weekly spy sessions with the hottest landers and fact-checking affiliate marketing myths are only some of the things you can find in the forum. 

The forum’s interface has recently changed which made it more user-friendly and easier to use. The most active subforum is Facebook. Despite its size and moderate activity, it’s a good choice for beginners and intermediate affiliates.  

iAmAffiliate membership for individual members costs $49.95 paid monthly or $495 when paid yearly. 

AffiliateFix

AffiliateFix is the only free forum on the list. It’s been around for a very long time and offers almost unlimited access to its content free of any charges. 

The community focuses mostly on industry news and the business side of affiliate marketing. It’s a place for vendors to share their updates and useful resources, for affiliate networks to share the newest or most converting programs, and for affiliates to find exactly the sort of offers they are looking for.

Overall, the community is business oriented. There are, of course, plenty of follow-alongs, case studies, and regular threads asking simple questions, but the real value comes from the networking and business side of things. 

You can upgrade your account to gain some extra features, such as being able to delete your threads or set a personal banner cover, but it still costs only $67 per year.

Other useful affiliate marketing communities

Affiliate marketing forums aren’t everything. They are surely the biggest and most interactive communities out there, but a forum isn’t the only way in which affiliates come together to share their experience. These are some of the other kinds of affiliate marketing communities: 

Newsletters for affiliate advertisers

Experienced affiliate marketers love to share their knowledge with others. Apart from creating personal blogs and websites they also offer newsletters with periodic industry updates delivered straight to your mailbox. 

The most popular affiliate marketing newsletter is Stacked Marketer, formerly known as What the Aff. 

The newsletter offers daily updates on the world of affiliate marketing. The mails are general and include an extremely broad range of subjects, encompassing pretty much every branch of affiliate marketing you can think of. 

If you are a beginner who is just getting your feet wet, it’s the perfect newsletter for you. It will introduce you to whatever is happening in the world of social media marketing, SEO, Google, Tik Tok, Pinterest, Twitter… you name it. This newsletter has everything… but the campaign optimization tips.

Stacker Marketer covers the whole industry but it doesn’t go into detail about how to actually run the campaigns. If detailed insights are what you’re after, you should consider traffic network, forum, or affiliate network newsletters. 

For example, our Zeropark Traffic Insights Newsletter is tailored to fit the needs of Zeropark advertisers. We offer fresh whitelists, campaign optimization tips and examples of well performing creatives and landers exclusive to our platform. 

It’s best not to limit yourself to one newsletter only. Subscribe to the newsletter relevant to what kind of ads you’re running and don’t forget to keep up with the rest of the industry – just in case you decide to switch your niche on day!

Facebook groups for affiliate marketers

If Facebook is your preferred way of networking you have nothing to worry about! There are plenty of Facebook groups for affiliate marketers. Just like with newsletters, the groups are often for the clients of a particular network. 

Other groups are extensions of forums started by the same person, for example, Affiliate CPA Marketing for Beginners with Colin Dijs or the I Am Affiliate Facebook group. They offer some unique insight but mostly highlight the most important threads started on forums. Joining a group like that can be quite helpful when you want to keep up with what’s going on but you don’t have enough time to browse forums on a daily basis. Let’s face it… who doesn’t have time for Facebook, though?

Besides groups for trackers, traffic sources, and other affiliate marketing related softwares, you can find more general groups like for example Do You Even Affiliate. The group focuses mostly on industry news and networking events so it can be very helpful if you’re trying to expand your contact network.

Other useful affiliate marketing groups 

Affiliate marketers can find their place pretty much anywhere. Telegram is one of other popular habitats for masterminds and chats about affiliate marketing. Our friends from Voluum have a telegram group where people can get real-time support in case of any tracking problems. 

Ian Fernando has a private Slack group, called Affiliate Business Club, with industry news, tools and software recommendations, and discussions on various types of traffic.

Once again, it’s important to join the groups suggested by representatives of the networks and tools that you use. They offer a lot of additional value and technical expertise in case you stumble upon some difficulties. 

Conclusions

Any kind of affiliate marketing community is definitely worth joining. Whether you’re an experienced affiliate wanting to share your success story or a complete newbie looking for help turning your first campaign profitable – you will find something for yourself. 

Forums and other communities offer industry news, free resources, precious information and a ton of shared experience and it can all be extremely beneficial to your campaigns. 

So, don’t think about it too much, pick your favorite and join an affiliate marketing community to get that extra bit of motivation and support.

Found your inspiration in the community?
Join Zeropark and launch your campaigns now!

Magdalena Bober