Hey guys, if you are anything like me you might prefer to promote software products instead of ebooks or various schemes and services.
You can much more easily review software, provide support and make tutorials on software than you can with an ebook or online service.
So I compared 2 of the best(in my opinion) Affiliate Networks dedicated to software products.
Avangate
Pros
They have A LOT of offers available, I checked and there is currently 26013 products from 1502 vendors, and new ones is added every day!
The commissions you get on some of the offers are often up in the 40-70% range
You can create custom discounts, I recently did a review on IOBit Advanced System Care over on my software review site(WiP) and I created a custom 50% discount code with the site name as the coupon code, although this will be subtracted off of your affiliate commission it can help you increase your affiliate sales.
You can customize where your affiliate link will point to, for example you could have a “buy now” button on your site that leads the user directly to the shopping cart to purchase a piece of software instantly, or you can point the link to the product page(what I do) to give the user more information.
The user interface is very user-friendly and you can find the information you need pretty easily.
Most of the vendors have enabled “automatic approval” of partnership requests, this means that you can find a product, request partnership, write your review and publish it in the matter of an hour or so depending on your writing speed, in contrast to CJ which can take you up to a week to get approved.
Cons
The product filtering could be better, there is no way to hide all products from a vendor you are not interested in, for example, there was a vendor named wondersoft(or something like that) which had tons of these video conversion products which I was not interested in at all, and had to click through 10~pages to get past these products.
I don’t really have a lot of cons to give to Avangate, it have treated me nicely, and I find their service easy, fast and very powerful, I totally recommend them if you are planning on promoting software or offering software coupon codes.
Screenshot
BlueSnap(Plimus)
Pros
Their product search list gives you a nice overview of the product title, average earnings per sale, the commission rate, how many active affiliates there are promoting the product, a short description and a marketplace score
Their “Product Links” page gives you a great overview of the affiliate links of the products you are currently promoting, and gives you the ability to export the list of “BuyNow”, “Trial Download” and “Product Information” Links to Excel or a CSV file, this is an excellent feature to have!
The dashboard gives you a nice overview of the sales you have generated, and when the last payment was sent, as well as a list of the products you are promoting with a nice list of sales and revenue.
Cons
Their dashboard and product search can be quite slow at times, searching is particularly slow sometimes.
They don’t have as many products to promote as Avangate, currently there is around 1300 products.
This might be nitpicking on my part, but their strict password policy prohibits you from using a previous password going all they way back to 10 last passwords used… I mean seriously.. Punish me more will ya?
Screenshots
Conclusion
If you are looking for ways to monetize your software review site, coupon site or whatever you are doing related to software I would suggest checking out both of them, they are both free to join, and you don’t have to do anything fancy to get accepted into the programs, most of the vendors/publishers have automatic approval enabled so you can quickly go through their product database and find the ones you want to promote, and get your links and coupons almost instantly.
A Slight repost from my blog, but i though you guys could benefit from it as well 
Original Post