How to Start an Affiliate Program: A Novice's Guide 1
Affiliate marketing is an incredible way for you to make your business thrive with the support of third parties via reward performance. This type of marketing allows companies to promote their products with a small amount of money، time، and effort while ensuring a high return on their investment، boosting brand awareness، and rocketing their businesses’ growth.
That sounds pretty simple، but starting and running an affiliate program can be tough. You need to look for the right affiliates، determine the proper commission structure، and set a plan to monitor their success.
There are a lot of things to prepare but don’t worry، we’re here to help you. In this article today، we’ll walk you through the guide to start an affiliate program from scratch.
[[system-code:ad:autoads]]
Are you ready to start? Let’s dive right in!
What Does Affiliate Marketing Mean?
At its core، affiliate marketing is a relation between a company and a marketer. The company rewards the affiliate marketers when they bring new customers to the company. Some companies will pay per lead، and others will pay per customer that registers and purchases products.
Most businesses make it easy to register as an affiliate and market their products. For some، it’s as easy as visiting their website and signing up in a couple of minutes. Others may require an approval process so they can check who is
---
partnering with their business.
When the affiliate is accepted، the company gives them a special link that monitors customers as they click and buy products. And then، the company pays affiliates according to the data collected from the link.
The Guide to Start an Affiliate Program for Beginners
Starting an affiliate program can boost your revenue، but some businesses are hesitant to get started. Whether it’s because of lack of time، expertise، or fear of making mistakes، this means they are missing out.
Affiliate marketing is an incredible way to enhance brand awareness، create leads، boost sales with less risk than traditional channels like advertising.
1. Select your affiliate platform
Affiliate platforms enable you to control every aspect of your program from one location. You can recruit affiliates، upload banner advertisements، implement tracking analytics، and handle commission pay-outs. These platforms make the whole process more cohesive so that your affiliate program runs smoothly.
[[system-code:ad:autoads]]
There are some major affiliate platforms that you can select from، along with several smaller operations that are quickly achieving traction. Choosing the most suitable one will depend on the particular requirements of your business. While some platforms have a wider reach in the USA and Canada، others are larger worldwide. Many have publishers in certain industries، so you need to pick one that matches your target audience. Some of the most well-known affiliate platforms include:
- CJ Affiliate (formerly called Commission Junction) - one of the biggest and longest-working platforms with a tremendous read across 285،000 publishers.
- Rakuten (formerly known as Linkshare) - a major international affiliate network run by the Japanese music giant
---
- of the same name.
- Share A Sale - a huge network with a central focus on the US and Canada
2. Recruit your affiliates
Finding new affiliates is one of the most time-wasting tasks when starting an affiliate program. That’s why you should draw a clear strategy.
You want to find expert affiliates in your niche، but there is nothing ensuring who will drive sales. Therefore، you need to concentrate on the number of marketers you recruit. Here are four great strategies to recruit affiliates:
Access your customers
Approaching your existing customers is one of the simplest ways to recruit new affiliates.
The good thing is، existing customers are already familiar with your products، so you can
[[system-code:ad:autoads]]
skip the product introduction part.
Your clients already understand the value of your goods. And if they are satisfied with your solution، suggesting your brand to others might be obvious. As they have a good understanding of your products، they can explain your products to others with ease.
To select potential affiliates from your customer base، a Net Promoter Score survey comes in handy. The survey is created to assess how happy your customers are with your goods and if they are willing to suggest your goods to others.
Implement the survey and find out the highest-scoring customers.
---
Look for competitors’ affiliates
Do any of your competitors run an affiliate program? If yes، you might want to find out who their affiliates are.
Backlink research helps you have a peek into your competitors’ connections and affiliates. You can take advantage of a tool like Ahrefs، Mangools، and SEMrush to run a backlink analysis of your competitors’ website.
Download a backlink report and begin sorting the links on domain authority and the amount of backlinks provided to the competitors’ websites. Check the links and see whether there are proper partners for your program.
Contact influencers، experts، and educators
Influencers in your niches can allow you to access new audiences that have an interest in your products or services.
Let’s dive into social media groups، forums، communities، and educational platforms. Then، search for the experts your target audience often listens to and check their follower base and what type of content they produce.
Next، you send a personalised message to invite them to your affiliate program، explain your products and why you think they would be beneficial in a partnership. Remember to send follow-up emails to those who haven’t replied.
-->>When you can communicate with a potential affiliate، you can provide extras like a free
[[system-code:ad:autoads]]
item or a coupon to get them on board.
Use paid advertising
Paid advertising can be a perfect strategy to raise sign-ups on your affiliate page.
You can try experimenting with search ads on Google and social ads on platforms like Instagram or Twitter. Select platforms where your affiliates often visit and link your ads to your social accounts. Besides، it’s essential to monitor what
type
of affiliates sign up via the ad campaigns.
Read more: --> Best Affiliate Marketing Programs for Beginners
3. Build your commission structures
Regarding paying your affiliates، there are some commission structures to select from، including:
- A flat fee
- A percentage of the sale
- Product credits
- Recurring commissions
You can offer a flat fee for each purchase made or trial started. Or you can get the purchase amount of the referral and send a percentage of this as commission to the affiliates.
---
In case you have an established product or service، you can also choose to provide your affiliates with product credits. This may work if you want to recruit our own clients as affiliates.
Another choice is to pay your affiliates a recurring commission for each referral they obtain. In other words، provided that the referral stays a customer (or in a specific time frame)، the affiliate gains another commission when they repurchase an item or renew their licenses.
A proper commission structure should be selected based on the types of activities and results you expect to get from your affiliates. This relation is close with what type of traffic sources you let the affiliates use.
Take a look at some popular affiliate commission structures.
[[system-code:ad:autoads]]
Temporary incentives
When your affiliate program is launched، you can rocket your sales by giving temporary rewards to your affiliates. Temporary incentives can be implemented in the form of a contest among your excellent affiliates. For example:
- Holiday-related higher commissions
- Rewards for producing content
- Rewards for selling new items
Scaling payouts
Scaling payouts help encourage partners to gain more referrals by raising the commission for a specific amount of sales.
For example، partners who gain less than 30 referrals per month earn a 15% commission. Meanwhile، partners who achieve 30 referrals or more will receive a 25% commission.
This gives extra momentum for affiliates to effort and acquire a higher commission percentage.
Two-tier payouts
In addition to building structures to reward affiliates for sales، you can decide to reward them for getting new affiliates.
This two-tier structure means you provide the affiliate a share of the new partners’ sales.
For instance، partner A introduces partner B to the program. Parner A receives a 10% commission on his own referrals
---
but now can get another 5% commission for referrals from partner B.
A two-tier structure can be a clever move to expand your affiliate program and get more and more partners on board. It’s usually applied to less established affiliate programs to help drive new affiliates.
Categorized-tier payouts
This commission structure enables you to divide your affiliates in multiple groups.
For this structure، you decide the payout per category. For instance، you can divide your partners by the quality of referrals they get، the type of marketing activity they use، or the product category they promote.
This structure’s advantage is that you can segment and reward your affiliates based on their
[[system-code:ad:autoads]]
performance. This means you can give higher payouts to better-performing affiliates.
4. Maintain program compliance and fraud detection
Holding a successful affiliate program means that regulations and policies need to be strictly complied with. The policies will help protect your business and align the expectations between your brand and your partners.
Generate and update partnership policies
Make every effort for thorough and clear policies regarding both your affiliates and your company responsibilities.
Your agreements should cover some topics like:
- Accepted and forbidden traffic sources
- The usage of the brand’s trademarks and materials
- The usage of discount codes
- Offering potential customers precise information on prices، the use of affiliate marketing، etc.
Some common policies and agreements include:
---
- Terms and conditions
- Privacy policy
- Cookie policy
- Data processing agreement
- Paid and organic search policies
It is important that your privacy policy and terms of conditions should cover your legal issues and the matters mentioned earlier. Your cookie policy is to provide insight into cookie tracking and affiliate attribution.
The data processing agreement is a legal one to make sure that you as a business can process data. Plus، paid and organic search policies are to guarantee that the affiliates drive traffic in a fair and transparent manner.
Paid and organic search
Companies and affiliates often compete for the same traffic، and you would specify what counts as valid traffic for
conversions.
After determining whether you enable paid traffic or not، it’s necessary to figure out what exactly you enable. Your policy might contain limitations on using brand keywords، trademarks، direct links in the ad text.
For organic search، you might want to limit the use of back hat techniques to bring more
[[system-code:ad:autoads]]
traffic to your site; for instance،
“cloaking”
is the use of misleading URLs to clients.
Moreover، you can remind your affiliates of your brand’s terms of service and other agreements. Discuss updates clearly and timely and ensure your partners can find out your policies.
Resolving fraud
Protect your program from unwanted activities and invalid referrals by proactively dealing with fraud.
To save your brand and company، you need to have processes in place to recognize possible fraud and own the data to prove it.
Common practices are to identify abnormalities in traffic amount، conversion rates، and other metrics.
Additionally، you also want to keep transparency on the traffic sources utilized by the partners. Any strange metrics or activities can indicate a non-compliant affiliate.
There are also some external tools to support you in detecting fraud. These often work with a mix of ad and search engine technology and the fraud criteria and information you give.
Non-compliant partners will look for new ways to earn fraudulent commissions، so fraud detection should be updated on a regular basis.