When you’re trying to monetize your online business, you can never have too many opportunities. One opportunity that you may have heard of is the Rakuten Advertising network. Is the Rakuten network a good option for your online business? In this Rakuten Affiliate Network review, we’ll look at whether you should try to work with Rakuten or find opportunities elsewhere.
What is the Rakuten Advertising Affiliate Network?
The Rakuten Affiliate Network, also known as Rakuten Advertising, is a website with many different affiliate offers from many companies. The site allows content creators to apply for these various affiliate offers and manages payments for affiliates.
How Does Rakuten Advertising Work?
Rakuten Advertising works by allowing you, as a webmaster or content creator, to apply for many different affiliate programs and manage affiliate payments for those programs.
It’s important that you know that Rakuten Advertising doesn’t approve you for the individual affiliate programs. The companies behind the offers have the final say as to whether they will allow you to promote their offer to your audience. Each offer has different requirements like monthly site visitors and how you plan to promote the offer.
The great part about doing this on the Rakuten network is that you don’t have to fill out all the information about your online business every single time you want to apply for a program. Since you provided that information to Rakuten when you signed up, it carries over when you apply for individual promotion opportunities. This makes applying for individual affiliate offers much easier than it would be if you had to enter all your information each time.
How Do You Find Offers on Rakuten?
Another great thing about Rakuten is that finding offers are much more straightforward than other networks. They allow you to do this in a couple of different ways.
First, if you know exactly what company you’re looking for, you can search for their name and see if they have any offers on Rakuten. If you’re not quite sure exactly what offers you’re looking for, you can browse the network by categories and see what offers are available for your niche.
The good news is they have many different categories available on the site, with thousands of affiliate offers inside the network. It can almost be guaranteed that regardless of what niche you’re in, you’ll be able to find a quality affiliate offer on the platform. As you can see in the image below, they have quite a few different niche categories to choose from.
What Kind of Offers Can You Find on Rakuten?
One of the most frustrating things to deal with when creating an affiliate marketing business is to apply for networks and find that the brands inside of the network are nowhere near as prestigious as you thought they were when you were first applying. Thankfully, this isn’t the case at Rakuten.
As mentioned above, there are thousands of different affiliate programs inside of the network, and you’ll find quite a few companies you’re probably familiar with like:
- 1-800-PetMeds
- Adidas
- Champion
- Just My Size
- Macy’s
- Microsoft
- Omaha Steaks
- Pacsun
- Plow & Hearth
- Sephora
- And Many More…
It’s safe to say that no matter what niche you’re in, there is a reputable company with an affiliate offer on Rakuten that you can apply for. Best of all, many of these programs offer much higher commission rates than what you may find with affiliate programs like eBay or Amazon.
Pros and Cons of the Rakuten Affiliate Network
As with any affiliate network, there are a few pros and cons that you need to be aware of before you apply to work with Rakuten.
PROS
Thousands of Affiliate Program Offers –Regardless of your niche, it’s almost guaranteed that there will be a program that will pique your interest.
Reputable Brands – Unlike many other networks, Rakuten has many programs by well-known companies like Macy’s, Microsoft, Sephora, and more. Choosing to work with brands that customers are familiar with means more frequent link clicks and ultimately more money for you as customers feel comfortable making purchases from brands they know.
Higher Than Average Commissions – While several programs pay lower commission percentages, around 1% to 3%, many offers on the site pay 10% commissions or more.
Long Cookie Durations – Many times, customers will not make a purchase on the first visit to a website. Often, people will quickly check an offer and then decide to make a purchase later. With many of the offers on Rakuten, this is nothing to worry about. Thanks to many offers giving up to 30-day tracking cookies, if people click your link and then return a week later to make a purchase, you still get a commission.
Excellent Affiliate Support – One major thing that sets Rakuten apart from many other affiliate networks is offering support and training to affiliates to help them earn more commissions. Once approved to work with the network, training is included inside the platform. If you run into problems, chat support is available 24/7.
CONS
Overwhelming Number of Offers – As mentioned above, you can choose from thousands of offers inside the Rakuten network. If you’re new to affiliate marketing, this can be very overwhelming. Because of this, it’s important that you know what niche you’re working in and what offers you may be interested in before you really dig your heels into the network.
Challenging Approval Process – It can be very difficult to be approved for some offers inside of the network. If you find that you don’t get approved the first time, don’t become disheartened. Many advertisers on Rakuten have higher requirements than they do on other networks. You can often reapply later and be approved for the offer.
Confusing Commission Rates – Some affiliate programs within the network can be very confusing as they offer multiple commission rates depending on individual product categories, offers, and more. Because of this, you must pay close attention to the individual product offers to know what commission percentage your links will fall into.
Challenging Link Creation – If you’re new to Html and web publishing, you may find the link creation process at Rakuten to be complicated. The support team at Rakuten is more than happy to help if you find yourself struggling with link creation.
Rakuten Affiliate Network Review – It’s Definitely Worth Your Time
All in all, the Rakuten Advertising affiliate network is worth your time to check out. However, if you’re new to affiliate marketing, you may want to wait before signing up until you’re a bit more familiar with how affiliate marketing works and have already established a bit of a base audience on your website or the platform to which you’re publishing content.
Rakuten offers thousands of different affiliate programs from a lot of different, highly reputable brands. In general, the platform is not very beginner-friendly. It can quickly become overwhelming for those who are new to affiliate marketing.
Getting approved by the Rakuten platform will be challenging if you don’t have a huge audience. If this is the case, don’t lose hope. Simply come back after you have a little bit of an audience and reapply to the network once more.
Working with the Rakuten network is worth it as many of the offers inside of it pay much higher commissions than you will likely find on other platforms.
On top of higher commission rates, Rakuten also offers affiliate support that is designed to help you earn more commissions and increase the traffic to your site.
They also give you the ability to choose from multiple link types. You can promote affiliate offers via text, email, on your site, social media platforms, and many other avenues. This is great as many other affiliate networks do not provide multiple link types, and some even ban you from promoting offers via email or social media.
At the end of the day, Rakuten is a great network with amazing potential for marketers who already have a base understanding of affiliate marketing, basic coding, and link creation.
Are You Ready to Take Your Affiliate Marketing Business to the Next Level?
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If you’d like to follow a method that has been proven to work for thousands of people for more than a decade, please take a moment to check out my top recommended resource.
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So glad I came across your article. As I want to know more about the Rakuten Affiliate Network. I am almost a month in affiliate marketing. Is it easy to sign up with Rakuten? Also, is it available for anyone around the world? I am from South Africa and would love to register with Rakuten.
Please let me know if I can join or not. Thank you for your detailed article.
First off, welcome to the affiliate marketing space!
It could be challenging to sign up for the Rakuten Affiliate network if you are a newbie in the affiliate marketing space.
I would strongly suggest that you first build up your website by publishing quality content to get good traffic to your site. If you want to learn more, check out my post about finding an affiliate marketing niche. After a few months, and once you have traffic going to your site, you can try to join the Rakuten Affiliate Network.
Here are the different Rakuten Affiliate Networks available worldwide: USA, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Brazil, Germany, and Australia. The good news is when you sign up for the Rakuten Affiliate Network, you are joining all of these networks at once.
Even though you are from South Africa, you can sign up for the Rakuten Affiliate Network. What is important here is the origin of the traffic to your site. Take a look at where your traffic is coming from. Next, sign up for an affiliate program in that country.
For instance, if most of your traffic comes from the USA, find an affiliate program within the Rakuten network available in the USA, and sign up for that program.
I hope that I have answered all your questions. If not, drop me a line below, and I will get back to you promptly.
I had heard of the Rakuten affiliate network before and wanted to join and see, but I still haven’t done it. I joined the Awin network, and so, far, so good.
Thanks for giving a review on this affiliate network. It can help us decide whether we should join it or not. A question I have is, do they accept everyone?
How many affiliate programs do they offer? If you have heard of the Awin network. Which of these is better? Thanks.
To answer the first question about acceptance into the Rakuten network, they pretty much accept everyone who applies as long as you are not brand new in affiliate marketing and have a website. If you get rejected, don’t despair. Wait a while, continue to build up your site, get more traffic, and reapply at a later time.
As far as the number of affiliate programs, the Rakuten Affiliate Network has over 150,000 programs worldwide in a wide range of categories. So I am sure that you be able to find affiliate programs to join in your niche.
Lastly, to answer your last question, which affiliate network, Rakuten or Awin, is better? Well, they are both good!
The way you should go about it is within your niche, first find affiliate programs. It would be best to look out for affiliate programs that pay a good commission, with a decent cookie duration, a good history for commission payment, as well as low refund frequency for the product you want to promote. Next, apply for the affiliate program. If the program happens to be in an affiliate network, then join the network. It could be Rakuten or Awin or even ClickBank. It doesn’t matter. What is important is that you find a good affiliate program to promote and grow your online business.
I hope I have answered all your questions. If not, let me know below, and I will gladly assist you further. Thanks for stopping by.
Hello, this is really an insightful review of the Rakuten Advertising network. I came across the Rakuten platform some time ago, and it really interested me and thought of doing more research on it to know how it works.
Anyways I must say that all the pieces of information I was seeking to know more about the Rakuten platform are in this article.
It’s indeed an excellent platform. However, since I am a newbie when it comes to affiliate marketing, I am just going to stick to your advice of waiting to be more familiar with how affiliate marketing works signing up for the Rakuten Advertising network.
In the meantime, I will continue to create quality content for my website, which will attract a bit of a base audience. By doing so, I will, for sure, be approved for the Rakuten affiliate program on my first trial!
If you are new to the affiliate space and would like to learn more about affiliate marketing, take a look at my post called: What is affiliate marketing, and does it work? I explained in this post the basics of affiliate marketing. Good read!
Thanks for sharing this excellent review of the Rakuten affiliate program. I was just about to choose an affiliate program for my marketing campaign, and I realized having just read through this review that the Rakuten affiliate network is what I have been looking for in terms of commission.
It is good to note these points: that it’s safe to say that no matter what niche you’re in, there is a very reputable company that has an affiliate offer on Rakuten that you can apply for. Best of all.
And the fact that they offer support and training to affiliates to help them earn more commissions is an advantage for any affiliate to understand the system better and hence be able to utilize it more. I will definitely try it out.
Well, you should sign up for the Rakuten affiliate program! If you have been around the affiliate space for a while and your website gets traffic, you will be approved for sure.
As you pointed out, no matter in which niche you are in, you will be able to find a reputable, prestigious company within the Rakuten Advertising platform offering products suitable for your niche and, most certainly, at a higher commission rate than eBay or Amazon would.
I am a Rakuten affiliate and have to say the commission is way better than what Amazon has to offer. The only issue I have is with people building trust, which is coming along, and I have been making sales.
It’s amazing how many merchants they have. It has worked really well for me. I would definitely recommend it to others.
I recently signed for the Rakuten Affiliate program, and one of the things that made me choose this network over others is the impressive number of merchants. Also, the merchants inside the Rakuten platform offer a higher commission rate than Amazon, for instance.
Since Amazon went ahead and slashed its commission rates on many products, it has become less of an incentive to promote products via Amazon, especially when you can find on the Raketen platform the same products offering higher commission percentages, so it as a no brainer.