20+ Best Automobile Affiliate Programs and Networks [2024]

If you are interested in cars and autos in general, you might be able to earn some cash on the side by promoting the right affiliate offers to people who need car services and products. This market might not be a big one, and there might not be a lot of unique opportunities in it, but it is definitely a niche that has been proven to work because people will never run out of their need for new car parts and car services.

We can promote a lot of different offers in this niche, and the good thing about it is that you will never run out of things to talk about. Whether it is car insurance or car parts, you can always find your audience everywhere around on the Internet. You also need to pay attention to the fact that a lot of people in 2023 are shopping for car parts, car needs, and even cars themselves online. Business is a very thriving one and there’s a lot to talk about so let’s get into it and see how we can effectively promote cars affiliate programs and networks.

How Do Car Affiliate Programs Work

For car affiliate programs and networks, you need to refer your audience to a certain website where they can sign up or purchase something. After that, you can earn a commission from your referrals. Now, it might not always work like this, and you might have to ask your referrals to do certain things such as signing up and trying out a service, or just ordering a product online. Ordering a car product online is one of the most common ways to earn money in this niche because most car-related websites are just looking to sell their products. So you’re not really dealing with a lot of services in this sphere.

So now that we know how these programs work, let’s see some of the product and service types you’ll be promoting in this niche.

What Can You Promote in This Niche

There are several types of products and services you can promote when it comes to cars in the automobile industry. Let’s check some of them real quick. You need to pay attention to this section because if you plan to work in this industry, you need to choose a type of product or service you are more familiar with and stick to that.

• Car parts and equipment. This can include anything from the truck and car parts, compressors, air tanks, power, tools, safety, equipment, and other types of equipment. There are lots of businesses that work in the section because a lot of people in 2023 are searching for car parts. They need online and usually avoid going to a physical store for such needs. Plus, they can always get discounts and find the best deals online and if you are there to provide for them, they will always come back to you for more.
• Detailing and care services. For these types of services and detailing-related products, you are going to expect a higher average order value because detailing is a pretty sophisticated job and websites and companies that offer the service often charge their customers a lot of money. You can promote this if you want to have a source of traffic that is interested in washing, waxing, and generally detailing their cars.
• Accessories and clothing. These products have their own fans and they are everywhere. If you find an average YouTube channel that talks about accessories for motorcycles and cars, helmets, and clothing, you can see a lot of enthusiasts in the common sections, wishing they could buy the things promoted in those videos. You could be the person who promotes these products to these fans.
• Car insurance. These services are absolutely necessary to help people in situations where their cars get into an accident. A lot of people know the value of car insurance and will definitely be looking around online for those services. However, since it’s a little hard to trust websites that provide car insurance services, you need to build that trust by only promoting reputable brands.
• Cars and vehicles. Last but not least, trust us when we say that you are going to come across a lot of websites that sell cars from different dealerships or even individuals who list them on those websites themselves. If we don’t want to kid ourselves, in 2023 a lot of people are looking online for the best bids and deals on buying cars, and few people actually buy new cars at the main branches of companies. So you don’t want to lose the traffic that comes to these websites because they are huge. Plus there are a lot of these websites that buy and sell cars, so you want to be driving traffic only to the best ones.

Payment Models in Automobile Affiliate Programs and Networks

Now that we know what type of products and websites we can expect to see in this niche, let’s go ahead and see some of the payment models by which these websites pay you for your referrals.

Revenue Share

Revenue share is the most common payment model in this niche because as you know, lots of the programs out there, and other websites sell car parts or cars themselves online. So since the highest demand for correlated products online is the ones that people order to receive at the door, and the most common payment model is also the revenue share.

There are not many websites that require users to sign up on them or websites that want your referrals to activate a free trial, so you’ll be working with rev share for most of your activities in this niche. The commission rates in this industry can start from 5% to 75% depending on the type of service and how big or small the company is.

CPL or Cost per Lead

Cost per lead in the niche happens when the program requires your referrals to register on their website and purchase something or activate a service online. This mostly works for car insurance companies because they don’t have physical products. Plus, they have certain plans that people can purchase so the revenue share model wouldn’t really help them or you in this case.

CPS or Cost per Sale

The cost-for-sale model works for more programs than the cost-per-lead one. In this model, you can see companies pay a fixed rate for every referral or sale that you close. It is very similar to revenue share, but the only difference between them is that in revenue share, you will get a percentage of the sale, while in CPS, you will get a fixed amount per sale. This model mostly works with companies that don’t have a range of products, or their products have certain prices.

How to Choose an Automobile Affiliate Program

There are many different programs in the core niche and choosing one of them can be hard if you’re not fully familiar with how an affiliate program works and what parameters you should take a look at. In this section, we are going to see some of the criteria you should consider before you start collaborating with an affiliate program. Nobody wants to waste their time on something they’re not going to get paid for, so choose a program that is going to compensate for your efforts.

Your Familiarity with the Products

First and foremost, you need to see if the products in that affiliate program are things you are familiar with. For example, if you don’t know anything about car parts, you should not join a program that mainly focuses on car parts and detailing. The car industry is heavily detailed and even professionals can get lost in the amount of information that is shared in it. So, if you really want to gain the trust of your audience, you need to know a lot about cars, and you need to share your knowledge with them.

Of course, they’re going to ask you a lot of technical questions, and if you don’t know the answer to those questions, they’re going to lose their trust in you and they won’t follow the affiliate links you are sharing with them. So it’s best to make sure you know about the products and can answer most of the possible questions that come your way from your audience, and only then proceed with an affiliate program.

Brand Recognition

No, the second most important thing you need to pay attention to in automobile affiliate programs is brand recognition. There are many businesses out there, trying to make some money by selling car parts, or other car-related products, but many of those businesses could be of low quality, to say the least.

You need to search about the program you were looking to promote online and read the reviews of their customers to see if they are a reputable brand with satisfied customers or if they are a low-quality business. Remember that you should never affiliate yourself with businesses that will ruin your image in the eyes of your audience. Even if it is possible, you should give their products a try or ask them for a free trial to review the products before you start promoting them.

Commission Rate

This is something that we shouldn’t really be telling you, because who doesn’t want money? Obviously, the higher the commission rate of the program, the better. However, high commission rates don’t mean that you are going to earn a lot of money by promoting their products. Sometimes the average order value (AOV) of that company is low and some other times their brand is not reputable enough, so not a lot of customers will end up purchasing anything from them. So if you’re looking at high commissions, make sure the program is also reputable and easy to promote.

Cookie Duration

What if the user you refer to a website clicks on your link, but then gets busy with something else and comes back to the same website again after a few days, you should be able to earn the commission for any purchases they make. Most affiliate programs offer cookies that track the activity of the users you referred to and share the revenue with you in case your user has visited their website with your affiliate link, at least once in a certain period.

Simply put, cookies save the data related to the user's visit to the browser. If the cookies last for 30 days when users return after 30 days from visiting the website for the first time through your affiliate link and purchasing something, their purchase ends up making you some cash.

The longer the cookie duration, the better. Sometimes programs can offer considerations up to 365 days, and some other times they can offer it for only one day. You have a higher chance of making more money if the cookie duration is longer.

Minimum Payout or Payment Frequency

Hey, when you’re working hard to promote the automobile affiliate offers, you’re really looking forward to getting that payment at the end of the month. If the affiliate program decides to withhold some of your money until it reaches a certain balance before they pay out, you really want to think twice about cooperating with her. Even though this is not a bad thing, You need to get your preferences straight. If you want your money right away, go for the programs that don’t require a minimum payout threshold.

You should also be aware that in the automobile industry, a lot of people can close some sales and then request refunds. Businesses cannot always decline refunds, and if they have to bear the problems of the return or refund, you will also not be paid anything. That is why some programs might decide to hold your money for some time, such as 30 days until they make sure the order is cleared out and the customer is not going to request any refunds.

Affiliate Tracker

Affiliate trackers are tools that allow for reviewing the number of referrals and sales an affiliate makes. They also allow you to view the traffic and analyze your performance or progress. A lot of programs nowadays offer the service, and it has been a huge part of many affiliate programs. Therefore, it is important to check whether the affiliate program you are hoping to collaborate with offers an affiliate tracker for you on your dashboard. If they don’t, and you still want to cooperate with them, you may have to use third-party affiliate trackers.

Resources and Marketing Materials

You need to make your job of marketing easier, a lot of affiliate programs might provide you with marketing materials, such as banner ads, text ads, image ads, etc. These resources are great, and they maximize your efficiency without you having to prepare any visuals. Sometimes the banner ads are dynamic and they will be updated with all the latest deals and offers of a company. So if you see that a program provides you with resources, you should know that they really care about their affiliates.

EPC

Earning per click refers to the estimated amount of money you can be earning from each person clicking on your affiliate links on average in a certain period of time, say one month. This does not mean that the program will be paying you this amount per click but means that somebody tried out their program and estimated that from each click, they earned that certain amount in a month. So if the EPC of a program is $10, it means that if a thousand people click on your affiliate link in a month, you will be making $10,000 that month.

How to Promote Automobile Affiliate Programs

Now that we know how we can choose an affiliate program, and how automobile affiliate programs work, let’s see some of the most common ways to promote these programs, and some of the best traffic sources you can utilize.

Social Media and Content Creation

Social media and content-creating platforms are the first and most important sources of traffic you should be focusing on if you want quick and easy traffic. There are a lot of rules for promoting car-related content on social media, and a lot of them are related to people using aesthetics or edits of cars to gather attention. There are also a lot of people mentioning some facts about cars on their social media channels, which gets a lot of attention from people and makes people interested in the content.

In 2023, with the production of new electric and powerful cars, people are still learning a lot about cars, and the more you try to teach them about the market and provide them with some tips and tricks on buying cars or car parts, the more they will appreciate you. This is because the market is saturated with low-quality content, and whoever makes high-quality content gets the recognition they deserve.

For starters, you can post some short videos on Instagram and TikTok showing some car parts or mentioning how you bought a car through a website. Even though this might get some people interested, the real hit is when you share some high-quality video with info that gives people knowledge instead of introducing a service or a product to them.

Remember that people might not like it when you ask them to pay you money, but if you give them some information and tell them where they can find more about that in return, they will appreciate it much more.

Instagram Reels and TikTok are great places to start, and if you want to be extra fancy and actually create content, you can always try YouTube or YouTube shorts. Make sure to place your affiliate links either in the YouTube video descriptions or on your TikTok and Instagram bios.

Website and Blog Content

The second type of free and organic content you can get is by writing articles and content on your blog or website. A lot of people will be searching online for the best car parts or websites to find the best deals on cars, and if you target the right keywords, you might be able to get some of that attention to your own website, and from there get even more attention through lead magnets and email marketing. We will explain that in the next section, but for now, let’s focus on the content you should be posting on your website.

There are generally three types of content you want to post on an automobile-related website: “best of” articles, product reviews, and guides. The “best of” articles attract the eye in Google search results and increase your conversions by listing a bunch of different products on just one webpage.

The product reviews are for people who search for a certain product on Google and want to read more about it. So you need to be there and give them honest experiences or reviews of that product.

The third type of content is the knowledge base or guide section, which provides all the information your audience needs on cars. This helps your audience find the answers to the questions on your website and not on the competitor's websites. This is important and you want to suggest some of the guide articles to them when they are visiting your website for product reviews or other types of articles. Not everything on your blog should be about buying products, and some of it should actually be useful information for your audience.

Paid Ads

The third type of traffic you can get is through paid advertisements on Google Adwords or Facebook ads. Even though you cannot directly send traffic to most affiliate programs, you can advertise your own affiliate website, which includes your affiliate links. Many websites don’t like you to use PPC marketing or paid ads with their brand names either, so make sure you don’t do any of that stuff.

It is fairly easy to promote your own affiliate landing page on Facebook ads with some simple creative that can grab the attention of the audience. The moment your audience lands on your affiliate website, you can show them some pop-ups and let them know about the latest offers that are ongoing on some of the programs you are affiliated with. For example, if a car part is on sale right now, you can create a pre-landing page and post that product on it so people can immediately learn about that deal and grab it when they can.

Forums and Communities

At least, you can go around on car-related forums and participate in their discussions while including some links to your own affiliate website. If your information is interesting enough, a lot of people will end up clicking on your links and finding a deal on your website. Again, it is forbidden to post direct links on some forums, because if you do that, then it means everybody can do it and that will be chaos.

The respectful way to do it is to provide people on forms in communities with some valuable information. And only then paste your affiliate link on the forum or have it on your profile.

Tips for Increasing Traffic to Automobile Affiliate Programs

Oh, we know the traffic sources and the general ways to promote automobile-related programs, but now it’s time to learn some of the tips and tricks that will help you reach out to more people.

Keyword Research and SEO

You might not know that you need good keyword research, but you cannot perform as well on Google if your keyword research is not good enough. To make your content reach out to people on search results, you need to follow SEO standards and use the keywords you have found through keyword research in your texts evenly.

A good keyword is a keyword that narrows down everything to details, which is also called a long-tail keyword. To find these keywords, you can come up with the details of the products you were hoping to promote. For example, “car parts” he’s not really a good keyword for you when starting out but “wheels and rims for a jeep wrangler” is a good keyword because it narrows everything down to the exact product people will be searching for on Google.

Use Lead Magnets on the Website

If you already have a website and it’s performing well, but you still want more people and more channels with your audience, you can always utilize lead magnets to generate leads. Lead Magnets can be anything like a pop-up that asks for the email address of the visitor or even a chatbot that talks to people. After you get the email of your users, you can do email marketing and get to them through more channels not just through your website.

Email Marketing

So now you have a lot of people on your mailing list and you have the opportunity to send them weekly, daily, or monthly newsletters and updates with the latest deals and offers they can catch. You can also send them helpful guides or articles you release on your blog so they won’t miss out on anything. Email marketing is one of the most important traffic sources for an affiliate. And sometimes bulk email providers like MailChimp can get your affiliate account suspended if a lot of people start marking your emails as spam. So you want to do it naturally and ask them for consent to give their email.

Write Good Product Reviews

The last step for you when you’re trying to promote car affiliate content on your blog is writing good product reviews. Let’s go through the characteristics of a good product review that is related to car parts and equipment.

First off, you need to use that product or at least learn more about it on the Internet, so you can really capture its characteristics and retell it for your audience.

Secondly, you need to post all the details of the product like its price, its category, tags, color, highlights, usages, etc. right on the top so people can know everything about it from the beginning.

After that, you want to start paragraphs explaining your own honest experience with the product or how you think it will perform. You want to use sentences in the first person so you establish trust with the audience, making them feel like you’ve tried it, and you’re promoting it to them with your own opinion, and not just because you are getting paid to do so. If the program gives you a sample of the product, you can even take pictures of yourself trying it out or explaining how it works in a quick video. These are all details that your readers will appreciate.

You need to be very honest in your reviews, and at least explain some of the advantages and disadvantages of the product. Remember that your disadvantages shouldn’t outweigh the advantages, because you’re still trying to sell the product. But if you write the disadvantages, the audience will feel like you are being very honest with them, and you’re not acting in a biased way. All in all, you need to make sure you make your content looks unique and sounds like a word of your own mouth.

Conclusion

If you’re a car enthusiast and watch a lot of videos about cars or deal with cars on a daily basis, you might be able to earn a lot of money. Just by following the tips mentioned in this article, getting creative with your content, posting on several channels, and focusing on your audience, you can make a lot of money on car affiliate programs. Just remember that you need to be very accurate in industries like this because people's expectations are quite high. Still, this is an everlasting niche and in 2023 there will be a lot of new opportunities for newer car models coming out. So get ready and get started right away.