How To Implement An Affiliate Program To Your Business: 8 Vital Steps To Success

Once you've given it your all to launch an affiliate system, it can be crushing when affiliates don't bother to sign up. This feeling can be so devastating that you might start thinking of raising the white flag and leaving the entire project behind.

Fortunately, with a few adjustments here and there, you can create a system that will have top affiliates flock to your business. The good news is that many of these adjustments are easy to implement and don't require a ton of work on your side — especially if you use a leading affiliate platform such as TheAffiliatePlatform by Smartico.ai.

In this article, we'll explore how you can create an affiliate system that high-ranking affiliates want to be part of to make your business stand out from the rest.

What Is An Affiliate Program?

An affiliate program is a partnership in which a digital business pays an affiliate (e.g., influencers, bloggers, or another website owner) a commission to direct traffic to their page.

The affiliate does this through social media content, product reviews, blog posts, etc. If he or she brings a customer to the business, the merchant pays the affiliate a sale-based commission.

Commissions are usually based on how many customers the affiliate directs to the business or the people who purchase something or perform a specific action. This could be anything from signing up for a free trial to downloading an application. Some programs also pay affiliates based on the number of visitors to the business site's banner advertisements.

In this article, we will go through 9 tried and tested methods you can implement in your business today to lift your program off the ground.

1. Study Examples In Your Market

Before you start your developmental journey, you might want to study your competition. What are they doing right, and what are they doing wrong? What strategies do they follow in your niche?

To come up with a winning marketing strategy, you'll need to know how other similar businesses are handling their marketing affairs.

You can, for example, establish friendly relationships with top-performing marketers because you can learn a lot from them about creating a successful affiliate marketing campaign.

To stand out from the crowd, you will need to study the techniques they employ so you can use that information to your advantage.

2. Recruit And Screen Affiliates

Once you've set up your affiliate program, you should start drawing the attention of influencers, vloggers, bloggers, and others.

The first thing you might want to do is to use an affiliate network (the network operates similarly to a recruiting agency). The network will find affiliates based on your preferences and give your affiliate program a head start.

You can also choose the path of the lone wolf, but it will take much more time and effort on your side. Announce what you're working on via social media to attract customers, but also don't forget to engage with and seek out popular and trustworthy affiliates directly.

Another popular technique you can implement to gain more popularity is lead generation quizzes to attract affiliates. Quizzes can also help to qualify an affiliate and get them motivated about the possibility of working with you.

Keep in mind, however, that this page will also need to be easily found by potential affiliate partners. Hence, you may want to look into partnering up with SEO specialists to bump your page up in search engines such as Google. For best results, you can also work with your PR group to contact the influencers of your choice.

Once you establish a relationship with an affiliate, explain what you expect from them and have them sign a contract.

3. Offer Attractive Incentives For Affiliates

It's important to understand that there is a crucial link between merchants and affiliates. And that is the main reason to incentivize them to work as hard as they can through an attractive commission system.

The affiliate receives a commission once a sale is made, which is also good news for the marketer, as the risk of losing money is non-existent. However, you must ensure that your affiliates are rewarded generously to keep them happy and loyal to your business.

4. Provide Extensive Marketing Resources

There are tons of resources focused exclusively on marketing tips and tricks, which is proof of its importance. Hence, a high-quality program should offer affiliates a plethora of various resources.

Some common examples are videos, e-books, informative articles, etc. To ensure maximum efficiency, you could also:

• Dedicate a resource page for your affiliates. This is how you can provide your mate instant access to every marketing resource you see as crucial.
• Set up an email course for new affiliates. An intensive email course will engage your affiliates while also providing them with valuable information they can return to whenever they feel the need to recap.
  
  

Your affiliates' performance will be highly dependent on the quality of your resources, so make sure you don't neglect this section of your affiliate system strategy.

5. Equip Your Affiliates With a Variety of Marketing Tools

After arming your affiliates' minds with high-quality industry knowledge, it's time to hand them the tools and the bullets they need to complete their mission.

This is crucial for several reasons, the most important one being that it gives them a head start in your product's promotion and sales process.

Affiliates have plenty of options to choose from — and that's why you need to make sure you stand out from the crowd and provide them with everything they need to attract high-end customers. They also need those resources to promote your product or service as smoothly as possible, so you can make money faster.

Some of the resources in question include:

• Referral link
• A good number of ad options, including graphic banners.
• Sales copy templates. These will allow your affiliates to personalize landing pages, emails, webinar scripts, and much more.
• Helpful articles
• Excerpts of your products
  
  

There are many more tools you can use to help your affiliates deliver the best results. However, the abovementioned examples will give them a solid foundation in the beginning while you look into incorporating more and more sophisticated solutions as your business evolves.

Don't forget — the more comfortable the affiliate feels working with you, the more sales you will generate.

6. Set Up Your Affiliate Program Policy And Structure

For your affiliate system to succeed, you will need to create an in-depth guide and include affiliate performance requirements. Lay out what you expect from them in terms of base-level commissionable transactions per affiliate per quarter.

Also, be aware of which tools and marketing channels new entries plan on using in the following areas:

• Webinars.
• Their email list for email marketing.
• Social media posts.
  
  

Think about how your affiliates should promote and distribute links and for what period their cookies will stay active or how long they will be able to earn commissions after a customer clicks their link.

To ensure all the terms and conditions are abided by, use performance marketing templates.

When drafting the policy and rulebook for your affiliate program, you should focus on the following:

• How and when you pay your affiliates;
• Which marketing channels and promotional techniques are permissible, and which are prohibited;
• Which keywords should be used;
• What physical products and product categories are not included in your program (e.g., discounted or lower-priced products)
• Other instances when certain affiliate actions will be banned.

7. Choose A Powerful Affiliate Platform For Your Network

Implementing your affiliate system begins with a choice between starting in-house or putting your trust in a network specially created to help businesses like yours find dream-like success.

If you have plenty of time on your hands, you can always start from scratch. But the good news is that you don't have to — and that's where affiliate platforms come in.

Many platforms can offer you solid tools in that respect, and the money is more than worth it.

Furthermore, as your program expands, you will have many more things on your hands to manage. An affiliate platform worth it's salt can take care of all the busywork and headaches so you can focus on what you do best.

To take your business to the next level, you will also need an affiliate marketing platform with a proven track record of driving revenue sky-high.

Powered by Smartico.ai, TheAffiliatePlatform is a comprehensive software solution that allows for multi-brand campaign creation and tracking while keeping each brand's affiliate registrations and access separate.

With this affiliate system tailor-made for online casinos and sports betting, you can build strong partner relationships and expand your affiliate network on your terms. Its flexible tools can also help you optimize your affiliate marketing spending with surprising efficiency.

This white-label platform is designed specifically for casino, poker, sportsbook, and fintech operators but can also be implemented in any other industry as well.

In addition, TheAffiliatePlatform offers the following features and benefits:

• Collaboration With Partners — Dedicated Account Manager is part of the service via any of the instant messaging apps (Slack, Skype, Teams) and Jira.
• Convenient Pricing — We don't charge by your results, clicks, or conversion — one price for all.
• Ease of Use — Allows your team total control over your entire affiliate operation, including overseeing your team of affiliate managers, affiliate management, real-time reporting, payments, and comprehensive BI reporting.
• Total Control In One Customizable Platform — Tap into the power of a fully customizable affiliate management solution designed to manage your affiliate marketing campaigns, payouts, creative assets, and more. Upload, update and manage all your creatives across your entire affiliate network.
• Track Everything In One Place, Build The Partnership You Want — TheAffiliatePlatform can make your next campaign the most successful one yet. It is a powerful affiliate software platform bringing casino and betting operators advanced solutions for creating, running, and tracking multi-brand affiliate marketing campaigns.
• Comprehensive Feature-Rich Tracking — TheAffiliatePlatform provides real-time and accurate conversion tracking and records via API integration, FTP solutions, traffic sources, and media placements. It also features broadly advanced no cookie dependencies methods like Server 2 Server (S2S/Postback), Image pixel, iFrame, Client JS Block and Facebook pixel, which are ideal for advanced affiliate marketers.
• Multi-Product & Multi-Brand System — TheAffiliatePlatform allows for multi-brand campaign creation and tracking and keeps the affiliate registrations and access separate for each brand. Different commission plans can be assigned per product and brand. Unite your iGaming brands into one affiliate program and manage them from one admin panel.
  
  

TheAffiliatePlatform offers many more tools, and, driven by customer requests, new features and functionalities are monthly months. To book your free in-depth demo, please click the "Request a demo" button.

8. Evaluate Your Affiliate Marketing Program Regularly

Creating a successful affiliate marketing program isn't an easy task. Building a profitable program that draws a loyal customer base takes time and effort. Furthermore, it also requires continuous tweaking and updating.

Your program should be evaluated regularly to ensure maximum efficiency. Monitor your affiliates' performance levels, the general performance of your program, and what it costs you to acquire new affiliates and customers.

Always work on improving your program, keep your affiliates happy, and give them all they need to do their best work because their success is your success.

Final Words

Armed with the knowledge in this article, you should now be able to start working on a lucrative affiliate marketing program.

Just like any other business, affiliate marketing demands a lot of time and dedication to elevate it to pride-worthy status.

The most important advice you should always follow is to be persistent and never stop learning and growing. This way, sooner or later, your affiliate program will help your business become what you've always dreamed of.

TheAffiliatePlatform team wishes you the best of luck!