Underrated: Health Affiliate Marketing

One niche that many people are overlooking right now is health affiliate marketing. This is too bad because there is revenue to be had in this space if you have the right marketing plan.

However, there is also a big-time pitfall that you must deal with if you want to make money as an affiliate marketer of health products.

Shining Example: Market Health Affiliate Program

The 800-pound gorilla of the health affiliate marketing industry is MarketHealth.com. Basically this company is an aggregator of product offers that then contracts out with publishers (affiliates) to market those offers through third-party affiliate websites.

We encourage you to read our review of the MarketHealth affiliate program so you can see if this is an option worth pursuing.

Certainly the commissions for MarketHealth products are ripe and healthy, with numerous commissions paid of $100 per sale. The site has an Earnings Per Click (EPC) of $9.85, which is one of the best of any affiliate program on the Internet today.

EPC is such a crucial measure, especially if you are planning to draw traffic to your website through pay-per-click programs like Google AdWords.
MarketHealth is able to offer these kinds of high commissions because most of their products are based on a repeat customer model, and this is one of the main things to realize about the affiliate marketing of health products:

Recurring commissions, month after month, are a big part of the business model.

Big Possibilities on the Horizon

In the game of poker you have to consider, when you're thinking about betting, something called "implied odds." Implied odds dictate that you can't just consider the current size of the pot, but the likelihood that the pot will grow in size as more cards come and more players bet.

This can be compared to the current state of health affiliate marketing: the pot, meaning the money to be had by being in the game, is in danger of BLOWING UP HUGE.

Here are a few simple but compelling reasons as to why the pot could grow:

-- Baby Boomers getting older and thus they'll be more in need of health care

-- Changes to health care coverage to force/allow insurance companies to cover "non-standard" treatment such as herbal remedies
-- The emergence and meteoric rise of new "hot" products (think Acai berry)

-- Increasing willingness of people to buy "sensitive" products online

-- Electronic medical records: more data equals more marketing opportunities

Take any one of these factors in isolation and you'd have a good opportunity, but when you consider that all of them are happening in concert, then that means this pot could get very big, very quickly.

Lots of people are sleeping on these trends. Are you one of them?

To Lie or Not to Lie, That Is the Question

If all this sounds good to you, possibly even too good to be true, we would caution you that there is one big problem with the health affiliate marketing industry and that is the shocking amount of over-promising, under-delivering, and outright lying that occurs within this industry.

People will tell you that taking one pill per day cures your baldness, but it doesn't.

People will tell you that this and that soy-based oil will increase your libido, but it won't.

People will tell you that your teeth can be bleached permanently white, but they can't.

As an affiliate, you really need to decide how you will approach non-truthful claims. Will you advertise products that don't work as advertised? Because you will have much chance to do that, if you stick around the health affiliate marketing industry for any amount of time.

In our opinion, the best way to handle this is to only promote health products that you have personally used and/or tested and know to be worth their cost.

Yes, there is some money to be made by selling snake oil, but there's more money to be made by marketing health products that do what they say they do, or at least come close to it.