Personally, I am a huge Adidas fan but I guess I’m ok with writing about Nike too. Joking aside… Nike is great. And you can make a buttload of money promoting their products. Besides Reebok, Adidas and Hoka, the Nike Affiliate Program is one of the most popular affiliate programs for athletes and fashionistas online. With top of mind brand identity Nike is popular not only among runners but even more so amongst trendsetters, celebrities and influencers making it the brand for people with a keen eye for fashion and quality. Where to join the Nike Affiliate ProgramThere are many affiliate networks that cooperate with Nike to bring Nike products to the world. Through connections with a vast amount of affiliates like me and you they can cut marketing costs. It’s a win-win. However, the commissions each of these networks offer differs and in the section below we show you where you can sign up for maximum commission payouts. Let’s start with Commission Junction (CJ). CJ is generally a great affiliate network, especially for physical products. Unfortunately, their commission payouts are typically quite low. The Nike affiliate program on their network is no exception. The commission rate is currently measly one percent which is horribly low. However, as of writing this, their reported earnings per hundred clicks on the network is close to $24 which is actually quite good. This shows that despite horribly low commission rates affiliates are making good money because of the strong brand. |
No wonder, most affiliates use the Amazon associates program. Their payout used to be seven percent for shoes. Nowadays, however, Amazon associates have cut back on affiliate commission and pay only four percent. Still 300% better than CJ but far from the glory days of the Amazon affiliate program. The main benefit of choosing Amazon associates over CJ is that when you refer someone to the Amazon marketplace you get commission on any other product the customer also purchases. That means more green for you, my friend. The absolutely best option is to join the Nike affiliate program directly from Nike’s official website (1). They do not accept everyone but if you have a solid fan base or a professional website you should get accepted. We tried to get accepted with one of our websites in the beauty niche. The site is not really related to sneakers or shoes at all, and has less than 3000 monthly visitors. It looks good, though. We got accepted. Hah. 🙂 The main perks of the Official Nike Affiliate Program are:
Why are these benefits important to you? Because they mean you will earn more cash. Speaking of which… How Much Money Can You Earn as a Nike Affiliate?If you follow the advice below and put in some effort we believe you can make $1000-1500 a month or more from the Nike affiliate program. Nike is a high in-demand brand and each month thousands upon thousands of people search for Nike related keywords online. If you build a website or publish a new blog post (if you already have a blog in a related niche), you could turn a nice profit with just a few thousand visitors a month. You would need to follow some basic SEO practices to get your website or blog post ranking well in the search engines but let’s assume you already know how to do that. Let’s have a look at the numbers:The search term “Nike Airforce 1” has a monthly search volume of 22.200 from the US alone. If you add all the other related search terms for Nike Airforce, the total search volume in the US is 126.500 per month. That’s for just keywords related to that one type of Nike sneakers. When you look at the total search volume for Nike you will see that it is in the 5 million range. |
If you can catch just a tiny bit of that traffic, let’s say 10.000 visits a month and convert only 1% into Nike buyers you will make approximately $1000-1500 per month. Can you do that?
Conclusion - Is it worth joining the Nike affiliate program?
Our conclusion is yes, it is.
However, the competition is fierce and if you plan on competing through search engine optimization you are up against some beasts that will require a lot of on-page optimization and tons of backlinks to be able to rank high enough in the search engines to make a profit.
Start with low competition, long-tail keywords and build your site steadily and you will make it. Keep in mind that you should join through the Nike official website if you can, because otherwise it will take a lot more visitors to make those $1500 a month.
