DIY Affiliate Program for Beginners

In 2023, affiliate publishers are one of the most lucrative marketing avenues for brands to generate revenue. Since there are all different types of affiliates – major content publishers, influencers, shopping sites, and browser extensions to name a few – incorporating a diverse affiliate program into your brand’s marketing lets you pinpoint your target audience at different points of their purchase decision or guide them the entire way. Choosing the right affiliates is make or break for your campaign though, because if the affiliate’s audience doesn’t coalign with your target or if their engagement is low you won’t see the performance you can have with a strategic portfolio of affiliates. Partnering with the right affiliates will  bring you in front of new audiences that have articulated their interest in brands like yours and will grow your revenue at an affordable rate. For all the affiliate newbies – fear not – for we’ve put together a little guide to help you on your way.

1. Define Your Goals
   Why do you want to start an affiliate campaign and what are you trying to achieve from it? Do you want affiliate as a little side hustle to bring in some extra cash or are you trying to eventually expand your program to be a top conversion driver for your company? Then again, what are you looking for as “conversions” – only at sales? Or do you also want to increase engagement on social media and organic brand mentions, drive traffic to your website, and get customer’s emails and phone numbers for future marketing potential?  By defining your goals, you can create a program that accounts for your specific objectives and resources.
2. Choose the Right Affiliate Platform
   There are lots of affiliate networks you can choose from and here’s a secret people won’t tell you – most of the affiliates you’re going to want to work with are in a lot of the networks, so this is one of the smaller decision factors. Brands, however, only get to choose one network so it’s important you choose the best one for your company. Each network has different features – what it can tell you about the affiliates, how you can sort through them, etc. – and pricing, but they all generally do the same thing: let affiliates grab your affiliate link so that you can make money pretty passively once you get set up in the network. Some of the most popular are ShareASale, CJ Affiliate, and Rakuten Marketing.
3. Reaching out to Affiliates
   Before you go pull Buzzfeed’s email and ask them to include your product on their Must Haves for the Beach this Summer shopping guide, you have to think through the strategy of your entire program. While it’s easy to partner with random publishers and see some good performance here and there, if you want affiliates to be a huge revenue source then you need each piece working together to circulate customers through the funnel. Think about which content publishers, which shopping sites, which influencers your target audience are likely to follow and interact with. Choosing to work with the affiliates that have a lot of overlap in their audiences will increase the frequency of brand messages from many outlets which generally increases their perception of the brand and chances that they decide to buy your product. Once you build your list, it’s a matter of sourcing contacts and reaching out via email offering a competitive commission rate.
4. Provide high-quality marketing materials
   To attract great affiliates through your affiliate network, your profile needs to have high-quality marketing materials. Affiliates will often pull the images, banners, product descriptions, from your profile so make sure that content is up to par so they can create even better content based on the marketing materials you give them. You want to have visually appealing content while making sure to convey your brand’s style and messaging.
5. Track your affiliates’ performance
   To ensure the success of your program, you need to monitor its performance regularly. See which affiliates are continuing to drive revenue MoM and which are seeing a decline in performance. Take care to reach out to your best (and worst) affiliates each month trying to optimize with the top performers and plan how to help those at the bottom. Look at your sales, click-through and conversion rates, traffic and engagement and compare it to your initial goals. Are you making progress month to month? And where can you improve? 

There is definitely a bit of a learning curve starting out with your first affiliate program because you don’t see returns right away and there is a lot of effort in the forefront to get a program up and running. But once you get past the initial hurdles you can sprint for miles on end. You’ll encounter some obstacles along the way but when you get in the groove, it’s only a matter of figuring out what adjustments need to be made to get back on track.