When & How to Use Affiliate Links as a Health Coach

Melissa, integrative nutrition health coach and founder, Four Wellness Co. // Four Wellness Co. for health coaches: business tips and resources for health and wellness coaches, fitness instructors, personal trainers and other wellness professionals

This post contains affiliate links, through which we may earn a small commission if you choose to purchase, at no additional cost to you. We only share products or services we personally use & recommend!

Affiliate programs are a relatively new (and already quite popular!) way to earn income for your online health coaching business.

If you’re not familiar, here’s how affiliate income works:

You sign up to join an affiliate program (some have requirements to join, and some are open to anyone interested).
You’re provided a unique “affiliate link” to share with your followers; the link is generally to a company’s homepage, though sometimes you can create specific links to products or other pages on their site.
When someone clicks on your affiliate link and makes a purchase, you earn a commission from that referral.

A wide range of companies offer affiliate programs—from Amazon (you can earn affiliate income from almost anything sold on Amazon!), to wellness companies, to small businesses that have set up their own affiliate program for a specific product or service they provide.

How much money can health coaches earn from affiliate links?

How much money health coaches can earn from promoting affiliate links really depends on what you’re promoting, how you’re promoting it, and (most importantly) the size and engagement of your audience.

What you’re promoting is a big piece of this equation: Is it a lower-priced item many people are likely to buy (but with a smaller commission) or a high-value item fewer people are likely to buy (but you’ll earn more commission for)? It also matters how relevant the item is to your health coaching audience, and how likely they are to be interested in it (we’ll chat more about that below).

But, one of the biggest variables in how much health coaches are able to earn from an affiliate program is the size of audience you’re promoting it to (in other words, your email list, your website traffic, etc.) and how engaged they are.

For example, let’s look at a $50 product you earn a 20% commission on.

That’s $10 per referral. If you refer one sale per month, that’s $10 in affiliate income (not much to write home about).
But, if you have enough traffic to refer 20 sales per month, that’s $200.
And, if the program pays recurring commission on a subscription product, then over time, as you accumulate 20 sales per month, you end up with 240 referral payments monthly by the end of the year (a monthly payout totaling $2,400).
In this theoretical year, starting from zero and adding 20 new sales per month, your annual income from the affiliate program is $15,600 (now that’s helpful!).

So, the amount of money health coaches can make from affiliate programs really depends on choosing the program wisely (setting yourself up for success with an affiliate program that is likely to pay well over time for your particular audience and their particular interests and needs), and then making an effort to promote the program through your health coaching services and other wellness resources.

When choosing which affiliate program(s) to join, and how to promote them on your website or to your health coaching clients, there are a few important considerations:

How to choose the best affiliate programs for your health coaching business

First, you want to very carefully choose the affiliate programs you’ll join and promote in your health coaching business.

A few helpful guidelines for doing this:

Do you already use & recommend the service or product?

In general, I don’t recommend joining any affiliate program for a product or service you don’t personally use and/or recommend to your health coaching clients.

I turn down affiliate offers all the time because I don’t actually use or recommend that product—so why would I try to make money off recommending it to others? That’s a quick way to diminish the trust of your audience. (And, trust is a major part of building an audience as a health coach, so be careful with that!)

So, the golden rule of affiliate programs in general (and for health coaches in particular!) is to only recommend products you would have recommended to your health coaching clients anyway, without the affiliate commission.

What are your health coaching audience’s needs & interests?

It’s important to strategically curate the types of affiliate programs you belong to based on what is actually relevant and useful to your health coaching audience.

It’s not a great idea to sign up for affiliate programs just because you can—if they’re not specifically part of your overall health coaching business strategy for helping your clients within your area of wellness expertise, then they’re not a very reasonable addition to your business model. In this case, an affiliate link is not likely to get you very far, and the trade-off between being a viable source of income and not coming across too sales-y is not in your favor.

So, in other words, just because you do use something and benefit from it doesn’t mean it’s worth promoting to your health coaching audience.

(For example, the business tools I use and promote here for health coaches are not something you’ll see promoted in the general Four Wellness Co. healthy living resources—because they’re just not relevant in that context, so it’s not reasonable to share and promote them there.)

What are the affiliate program commission terms?

Every affiliate program has specific commission terms—how much you make for each referral or sale, how that’s measured, when and how it’s payed out, etc.

It’s important to know the specifics of each affiliate program you’re interested in, as they can vary considerably and some are much more “worth your time,” so to speak. For example, some programs pay a one-time flat fee per each referral, while other pay a recurring percentage of a referral’s subscription.

It’s generally much more lucrative in the long-term to promote an affiliate program that pays you repeatedly for the same referral than a program that pays you just once for that referral. (Though, of course, this depends on the amount paid out in each scenario.)

Choosing authentic + lucrative affiliate programs for your health coaching business

So, choosing the affiliate program(s) that are best for your health coaching business is a mix of what you actually use and recommend, what’s relevant and of interest to your health coaching audience, and the best “bang for your buck” in commission terms.

While you could, in theory, belong to every and any affiliate program that’s relevant to your health coaching business and audience, there is some behind-the-scenes work involved in setting them up (and reporting them on your taxes!), hence why I recommend only committing to those that are most worth your time to put in that effort—and most worth it for your health coaching clients in the long-term.

The best affiliate programs for health coaches

Here is a brief list of some of the common affiliate programs in the wellness arena that tend to be a good fit for health coaches.

Note: There are, of course, many, many more! This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but just a sampling of wellness-related affiliate programs that tend to work well for health coaches—and give an example of the range of affiliate program options and structures available for you to work with as a health coach.

Amazon Associates

Amazon Associates is (no surprise!) Amazon’s affiliate program—through which you can create an affiliate link for any Amazon product you recommend.

Even though the commission is very small, many health coaches belong to this program because it’s so convenient to share/link products on Amazon, which is more accessible to your entire online health coaching audience than smaller/local options (though those are important to promote too, as you can!).

This doesn’t tend to be a very significant source of income, unless you have major volume in website traffic. But, it’s a good idea to set up sooner rather than later, if you are looking to grow a wellness blog for your health coaching business.

Thrive Market

Thrive Market is a helpful online marketplace to refer clients for clean-eating pantry staples. They offer a $40 commission for each annual membership referral.

Healthy meal delivery services

Healthy meal delivery services like Sun Basket, Green Chef, and Splendid Spoon offer affiliate programs.

Sun Basket pays up to $30 per sale. Green Chef pays up to $15 per sale. Splendid Spoon pays $40 per order.

The Detox Market

The Detox Market offers a referral program for natural skincare and other wellness products. They do a custom commission on all sales and require an application to join.

Equilibria

There are many different affiliate programs for commercial CBD products. I prefer (and recommend) Equilibria, a women-owned company with quality and transparent sourcing and an emphasis on customer support (they provide a free “Dosage Specialist” with each purchase).

This affiliate program pays 15% for non-subscription purchases; and for subscription purchases, pays 20% of the first month, 30% of the second month, and 50% of the third month. (Of course, like most affiliate programs, those are for first-time orders only.)

As you can see with this referral structure, there’s an incentive to retain new subscribers. That means, if you’re looking to grow income from a program like this, you’ll want to consider how you continue to offer information, guidance and support on the particular wellness topic after you initially promote a product related to it.

23andMe

The popular 23andMe genetic testing service offers up to $10 per testing kit referral.

Vital Proteins

Vital Proteins offers a 15% commission on any purchase via their website. This is an example of a product that’s also available on Amazon… but the commission is significantly greater via their own program.

How to promote affiliate links as a health coach

Once you’ve chosen the affiliate program(s) that make sense to include in your health coaching business, the next part is promoting your affiliate links!

Here are some popular ways to use and promote affiliate links as a health coach—in ways that are natural and helpful (aka not pushy):

Blog posts: Writing a helpful blog post on a topic relevant to your affiliate link is a great way to explain the need for or the benefit of whatever you’re linking (and, of course, provide opportunities to add that link to your website). It’s also a convenient way to promote your content on Pinterest (part of our tried-and-true content marketing strategy!).
Email newsletters: Some affiliate programs do not allow sharing their affiliate links via email (more on that below); however, writing an email newsletter to your audience regarding the topic of your affiliate program is a great way to engage them, provide context and pique interest, whether you include the affiliate links in the body of your email, or simply link the email to your blog post or webpage on which you’ve added your affiliate link.
Client handouts: If you use client handouts, you can include hyperlinked affiliate links in your PDFs (just be sure to disclose them properly—see below!).
Resources webpage: Some health coaches find they recommend the same products or services over and over again, so it’s helpful to create a “Recommend Wellness Resources” page on your website to serve as a hub of the key, commonly recommend products and services for your clients’ wellness journey.
Social media: Social media is another opportunity for sharing affiliate links with your health coaching audience. They can be used on Instagram Story swipe-ups, Instagram post Linkin.bio links, Facebook posts, etc.

Create additional wellness content for your affiliate links

And, don’t forget to share multiple helpful resources for your affiliate links, if possible.

If your affiliate links are promoting relevant products or services that truly help your health coaching clients and audience live healthier, happier lifestyles, then this should not be hard to do.

For example, if you’ve joined the Equilibria affiliate program and are promoting the health benefits of CBD products, it can be helpful to create additional content and resources on this topic—how to properly source and use CBD products, how to use CBD for anxiety, etc.

How to properly disclose affiliate links in your health coaching business

And, finally, a very important legal note: As you promote affiliate links on your website or in any of your health coaching business materials, it’s important to understand the legal guidelines regarding the promotion of these links.

In general, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulations require that you add affiliate marketing disclaimers anywhere (and everywhere) you promote affiliate links. There are separate, specific rules for how to disclose sponsored or paid posts, but here we’re simply referring to affiliate links.

The guidelines require that your disclosure is “clear and conspicuous.” In other words, it needs to be placed on any page on which you include an affiliate link, and needs to be located somewhere readers would see it before happening upon your affiliate links. It also has to be reasonably visible (aka not in white, size 6 font).

You can see an example of our affiliate disclosure at the top of this post. We tend to put our disclosure statement at the top of each post, in part because it’s part of our blog post template and that’s the most consistent place to keep it across all posts, and because that ensures that it will always come before any affiliate link included in the blog post.

Some affiliate programs also have their own specific requirements, which it’s important to be familiar with as well. For example, Amazon Associates does not allow their affiliate links to be included in emails or PDFs.

Affiliate links can be an authentic and lucrative part of your health coaching business—but just keep in mind the tips above to only promote affiliate links that make good sense for your clients and audience, and always be sure to maintain transparency and disclose your use of affiliate links properly.