Setting up an affiliate program

Your affiliate will be able to use the one log in and track multiple websites and multiple campaigns. And then fill out the details:. Get more information on issuing individual payments here and batch payments here. This article is just absolutely fabulous. I needed to setup an affiliate program and fast, and this assisted greatly in doing so.

The part about having to sign up separately in the Partner Center as an an affiliate to see the Referral links was missing in almost every other online source including the Infusionsoft website.

Keep it up. Great article. One quick question. We usually pay affiliates for sales up to 60 days prioor to the payout date to deal with customer returns.

How would one do this in Infusionsoft? Generating a report for the period up to 60 days prior not only only includes sales for that period, but also only payouts for that period. I was also getting stuck in the signing up separately in the Partner Center to see the referall links after reading several others guides. That is why I landed on ruizhidong.

Thanks for your help. How does this link impact SEO? I really appreciate you for taking the time to create and share this how to article. I am following along and setting up my affiliate program now using this article. I look forward to reading more of your blog posts that have to do with Infusionsoft and checking out some of your articles on Medium too. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

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Most affiliate platforms also offer step-by-step instructions or tech support to walk you through the implementation process. One exception is software products and apps, especially if you want to pay on the sale instead of a lead. Myth 2: An affiliate program sounds like a risky or expensive business investment In my experience, starting an affiliate program is the opposite of risky or expensive.

I spent an hour on it, including the tech set up, inviting a few affiliates and paying out commissions at the end. However, it started with 1 guy doing it part-time with a handful of affiliates. More resources were added only after it became profitable. The bottom line is you get to choose your own adventure when creating an affiliate program. Just be sure to complete an affiliate program competitive analysis before launching to develop a winning program structure affiliates will love.

Launch an affiliate program with Refersion Refersion is designed to help you quickly create and launch your own promotion network. They handle all the heavy lifting, allowing you to focus on growing your business through partnerships with bloggers, influencers, ambassadors, and promoters. Pros Refersion offers a free, day trial so you can test it out before you commit to a monthly package.

Thanks to their apps, Refersion can be integrated with a few clicks if your store is on Shopify or BigCommerce. The majority of customer reviews speak highly of the Refersion support team for offering exceptional customer support.

Some users find their UI outdated and confusing to navigate. Getting Started: Refersion offers a free day trial on both their Starter and Professional packages. Once signed up, you can use their Start Guide to get your affiliate program set up in a jiffy.

Who Can Use It: Wordpress. Pros You can develop an affiliate program with all the bells and whistles if you want! These include things like coupon codes, tiered affiliate commissions, and affiliate landing pages.

I recently got in touch with their support team about a bug and they issued a plugin update to fix it within a couple of days! Unlike large affiliate networks and smaller tracking platforms, AffiliateWP does not charge you for each individual affiliate transaction.

One of the reasons brands fail to implement a good affiliate marketing strategy is that they underestimate two key skills: negotiation and persuasion. A good affiliate manager knows how to convince an affiliate to promote his product and to demonstrate that affiliates can earn more money with a CPA deal rather than a CPM deal. Having an affiliate program, in essence, gives the opportunity just the opportunity for a brand to be in front of more people in places where they do their research.

Just because a brand got , impressions and 10, clicks from their affiliate campaign, it does not mean that the affiliate is productive. It does not even mean the person using the browser saw that impression. Another key aspect of having success with affiliate marketing is explained by Rae Hoffman, blogger at MarketingLand and affiliate marketing expert.

They identify a problem, solve the problem, and include an affiliate link to where the user can purchase the solution, when applicable. In other words, brands should try to recruit affiliates that match with their products.

In summary: Brands should not settle for a CPM deal with affiliates. They should convince affiliates that their program is the most rewarding and demonstrate this with high conversion rates.

Realizing your affiliate program is your product and affiliates your customers is the first step to success. You still have the problems of generating a sufficient volume of quality traffic, getting the commissions right, recruiting affiliates, and checking what your competitors are doing.

Understanding the competitive environment informs your decisions on how you will launch the program as well as your commissions, commercial arrangements, and targets. From what we have said above, I think you can see that successful affiliate marketing is not just about how high the commission is. You need to have a great converting product and this is how you can beat your competitors. A great converting product is the easy way to repeat conversions, which means more customers for you and higher paychecks for your affiliates.

Basically, within the whole customer conversion funnel, from awareness stage to purchase, there should be a strong match between your product and your audience. In the funnel, customers start with the awareness stage. And when the product has great conversion rates, it means that customers move quicker through the funnel down to the sale stage, where brands and affiliates make money. Your company might prefer a network or it might prefer to work directly with affiliates.

Besides these minimal requirements that networks can help you with, there are other things to consider. Sometimes networks have very useful relationships with big affiliates and can therefore help you grow your program very quickly.

And they have a publisher team that builds the relationship with the affiliate for you. Networks will also manage the payment side of the program, which is a big plus because affiliates want to be paid on time and want to have reporting live as it happens to be able to optimize their campaigns and reduce waste.

Depending on the network, you may also need to pay setup costs. This covers the cost of integrating you to the network and testing tracking etc. This cost is often negotiable when you discuss contracts with the network, but it is worth noting when considering the start-up costs.

The first thing to do is create a list of affiliates. Then you can start posting within the group your intention of recruiting new affiliates.

Normally, this method works very well because groups are composed of people that wait to be recruited. If you want to explore the LinkedIn option to recruit affiliates, I would suggest you approach like this:. One of the best practices when recruiting affiliates is to give a chance to everyone. You can use the affiliate selection tool, which I have summarized in one of my previous articles:. Commission Junction is the perfect example.

Another thing to consider when recruiting affiliates is the objective that you have for your business: Are you trying to increase sales? Do you want to have more leads?

Do you want people to just sign up to something? Every affiliate can help you with different objectives so understanding your goals is the first thing you have to do to determine your recruitment strategy, which is the topic we will talk about next.

Again, it is important to set objectives. This clarity allows you to select the right affiliates and define your commission. Once objectives are defined, you need to set up the strategy that helps to reach them.

This strategy is divided into 4 parts: terms and conditions, setting PPC rules, approach to validating sales, and recruiting the right affiliates. Within the terms and conditions of the program, you will focus on how affiliates can promote you. The terms and conditions can therefore play a big part in how you are represented online and how successful you will be at achieving your objectives. Within your terms and conditions, you need to define what can and cannot be promoted through PPC.

The most obvious restrictions are brand terms and misspellings. So one of your objectives could be to increase your visibility on search engine affiliates, and you can do this by targeting only long tail keywords. Other things to consider are whether affiliates can link PPC directly to your site and whether they can use your URL in the ad copy.

These are decisions you need to state in your terms and conditions. First of all, you need to define the cost per acquisition CPA. How much are you ready to spend to get a new customer?

The simple way of finding your commission is to calculate the CPA, which is to divide the total amount of marketing dollars by the amount of actual customers that come from those efforts:.

Now you can do a bit more math to find your commission. Now, depending on your business, this can be high or low. What matters is that you have these numbers and the costs associated with three areas: visitors, leads, and sales. If you are in business for a few years, you pay attention to your customer retention rate.

If not, you should, your business depends on it! Good for you! With such a high retention rate, you can get excited thinking about the commission you can offer your affiliates! But you are still one step away from the right commission offer. You need to calculate the customer lifetime value CLV. Here is a simple formula:.