How to Create an Affiliate Program in 2024 — A Step by Step Guide

Nowadays, shoppers all around the world are becoming more dependent on their favorite influencers, and simply having a good brand with good products and advertisements is not enough to make a lot of money out of your business or even gain popularity. People want to see the reviews and the feedback of people who used your product. There are so many products out there that without proper promotion, yours would just stay behind the trend.

The only way not to fall behind the trend is doing affiliate marketing and having affiliates promote your product for you. To do that, you should create an affiliate program, and invite influencers and affiliates. In this guide, we will take you through everything you need to know to launch a successful affiliate program that leads to lots of sales and success of your business.

What Is an Affiliate Program

Imagine you have a cookie business, and there are some teenagers around who don’t mind selling those cookies for you in their free time. They go in the neighborhood and knock on every door, telling the families about the cookies, how delicious they are, and maybe even offering a free trial. They sell your cookies in no time, and in return, you give them each some cash. This works for them very well, so they keep coming back to grab more cookies and sell them.

This is exactly what’s happening with an affiliate program. There is a reward system set in place that allows your affiliates, a.k.a people who sell your product for you, to earn money. However, they don’t earn all the money. They only earn a percentage, or basically, whatever you are willing to offer. If it seems like a good reward to them, they might take it. And if it’s not that good of a deal, they will just find another program.

You don’t want to lose these affiliates, because they have power and influence. Let’s have a quick recap of the process that an affiliate program goes through:

1. An affiliate posts an ad or a review of your product
2. Customer clicks on the product link that is tracking the journey
3. Customer buys something on your website
4. You track the affiliate link that the customer used to shop on your store
5. Affiliate gets paid a commission for the sale
6. You make profits

The affiliate marketing spending only in the US has reached more than $8 billion already this year, and more than 80% of brands use affiliate programs to have affiliates increase their brand awareness for them. Moreover, more than 90% of brands think affiliate marketing is essential to the survival of their business.

If these numbers aren’t enough to convince you to start thinking about affiliate marketing, try to think of the last time you saw someone buy something on their own and without seeing it on TikTok or Instagram. If you can’t name many occasions, then let’s set you up an affiliate program.

Should Your Business Have an Affiliate Program

Not every business necessarily needs an affiliate program. There are usually ways to find out whether your business needs it or not. Here are a couple of things to look out for:

• First and foremost, will you be able to offer your affiliates a good earning from your program? Will your business be able to afford that?
• Secondly, look for your competitor’s activity. Do they have an affiliate program? Are they doing affiliate marketing? You can always find that by searching the name of your competitor + affiliate program. If they have it, then you can easily find it. Even checking their website might quickly reveal the program.
• Look out for influencers in your niche or industry. Are they promoting businesses that are your potential competitors?

If these three cases are correct about your business, then you would definitely need an affiliate program.

How to Create an Affiliate Program Step by Step

Now that we have the beginning data all set, let’s go through the different steps of creating an affiliate program. Here’s a quick brief of the steps:

1. Choose the products you want to include in your affiliate program
2. Set your payout and commission rates
3. Choose a Management App
4. Find affiliates and get them to sign up on your program
5. Keep your eyes on the affiliate performance

Let’s go through each one by one.

Step 1: Choose the Products You Want to Include in Your Affiliate Program

First and foremost, you need to narrow down your affiliate program’s products to only the ones that will bring you more profit. You could include all of your products, but the smarter way is to have affiliates promote the ones that will bring both of you more money. For example, a 5% commission on a $100 product is better than 20% commission on a $10 product.

You should find the products that have the highest order values in your shop. You can also consider making your offers more attractive and make the job easier on your affiliates by offering a discount code, free shipping, first-time discount, scaled discounts, etc.

You should consider having products listed for the program that will be easier for your affiliates to sell as well. If your affiliates can’t sell your products, then your program won’t work.

Step 2: Set Your Payout and Commission Rates

This is one of the most important steps, because this will be an almost fixed rate for your affiliates from the beginning to the end. You might be thinking of having gift cards or that sort of reward planned for your affiliates. But that is very likely not to work in the long-term. Many affiliates expect money instead of rewards.

You should be setting your payment models at this stage. Think to yourself what would be profitable to you and fair to your affiliates. There are often different ways to set the model. Here are some of them:

• Percentage Commission per sale. Your affiliates will be paid a percentage of the sale every time a customer from their side purchases something from your shop.
• Flat-rate Commissions per sale. When you do it this way, you will be paying the affiliates a certain amount of money per sale, and the overall price won’t affect their earnings.

Usually, for affiliates, a percentage commission is more appealing than a flat-rate commission, because they can be selling thousands of dollars of your products, and they will only get a certain amount in return.

Usually, a good amount of percentages for commissions on affiliate programs is between 5% and 30%. There are some programs that do 1%, and you might be wondering why. These programs’ products can be very easy to sell, such as the AliExpress affiliate program. That’s why their affiliates don’t matter as much in the process of selling. On our side of the story, you want to go with something fair above 5%.

Keep in mind that there are certain percentages suitable for different niches, so take a look at these as well.

So, make sure your rate is both appealing and fair to the affiliates. You don’t want affiliates rejecting you for your low price.

Step 3: Choose a Management App

In this step, we will finally answer the technical questions you might have. From the beginning of this article you have probably asked, “where can I do all of this?”. You have to create your affiliate program inside an affiliate management app. There are usually many ways to go about it, depending on what CMS you use. Some people use Shopify, some WordPress, and there are also some others. In this article, we will explain this step by the usual Shopify and WordPress management apps, but the general process should be the same in all the other CMS tools as well.

What is an Affiliate Management App

An affiliate management app is an app (or plugin on a CMS tool) that allows you to create, manage, and track affiliate programs. These apps allow you to see the metrics related to each affiliate, their earnings, who they promoted the product to, etc. You can see a lot of information on it and view all the information about your affiliates on it as well.

What are Some Affiliate Management Apps

As mentioned before, depending on the CMS tool, you can be using different apps. But let’s go through the usual Shopify apps and WordPress plugins.

• Easy Affiliate. This is a plugin on WordPress and you can easily find it by navigating through the WordPress plugin store. Once installed, all you have to do is launch the wizard and go through the process of creating your affiliate program. You can also connect your shop or WooCommerce and easily manage the purchases and affiliates. You can set data like how affiliates can sign up on the platform, what your commission type and commission rates are and what method you will use to pay out to the affiliates. You can also check the settings related to the affiliate performance.

• AffiliateWP is also another plugin for WordPress that should be easy to get. The settings are almost the same as Easy Affiliate, and you can set up all the same things. Their plugin is super simple and gives you a dashboard of your information as well.

If you’re planning to use, or use, Shopify. You can find some affiliate management apps. Here are some of the popular ones.

• LeadDyno. This can be connected to your Shopify account and show personalized stats about each one of your affiliates. You can reach out to more affiliates with it, and have access to many marketing tools.
• Refersion. Refersion is another app on Shopify. You can start with it pretty quickly. You can also set product-level commissions, activate promo codes, and customize your dashboard.
• UpPromote. This is one of the most popular affiliate management apps on Shopify, and you can have access to all of your information in one place. You can see influencers on it, track your traffic, etc.

These are just a few of the tools, and you can check the full list of affiliate trackers.

As you might imagine, the process of signing up and giving the management app information is pretty much the same process we explained above.

1. You sign up on the management app
2. You connect it to your shop (perhaps by default)
3. Set up program name and payout model
4. View affiliates, track their performances

Step 4: Find Affiliates and Get Them to Sign up on Your Program

When you have your affiliate program all set, you can think about the way you can recruit affiliates. There are several ways to do so, and we will go through each one by one.

You might be thinking, “won’t affiliates just accept my affiliate program, no matter what it is?” Not really. The competition between businesses is so tense nowadays, that even to get affiliates on your program you need to look appealing to them. Simply put, you need advertisement for this, to let your potential affiliates know what you’re offering and why it’s great to join you. Here are some of the places where you can find affiliates to invite to your program.

Social Media

This is definitely a good start to let people know you are looking for affiliates to join your program. Of course, if you have a good number of followers, you can simply just announce it as a new feature on your platform. For example, the shop Vianetic announced their affiliate program on their Instagram.

You can also treat your affiliate program as a full-on social media program. Take a look at this account from Ritual, which is an affiliate program, and this account, as a whole, is for their program.

You have probably come across different ads looking for affiliates on social media as well. It can be just as simple as this UberEats advertisement for referrers.

There are so many ways to promote your program on social media. All you have to do is focus on attracting the affiliates, giving them a fair offer, and inviting them to sign up on your program.

Email Marketing

This one is another widespread method of getting average people into affiliate marketing for your brand. You can always find these calls for affiliate ads on your emails. This is a great way for you to do this as well, simply using an email marketing service.

You can send your affiliate program offers as an email to users and tell them about the benefits of joining your affiliate program. Many businesses do it nowadays, and the more convincing it looks and the less scammy it feels, the more people will join your program to give it a try.

If you can offer them free material and reassure them that they won’t have to pay anything to sign up on your affiliate program, there is a good chance you might be able to appeal to them.

Business Website

One of the most obvious ways to find affiliates to join your program is by announcing it through your website or adding a page to your website that reflects the program, how to join it, more information about it, etc.

You can optimize it as well so affiliates looking for good programs can find it by searching on Google for an affiliate program in your niche. For example, you can write a page on your affiliate program, and if your niche is e-commerce, include the keyword “e-commerce affiliate program” on your page. You can narrow it down to more specific keywords too, like “e-commerce affiliate program for beginners in the field of computers” or “e-commerce affiliate program for brazilians”. You can target your own market’s affiliates, so they can find you easier.

Of course, even if you do it through all the other methods, you will still need to have a page on your website that explains your program to affiliates. It should be somewhere people can always refer to. So make sure you include it on your business website anyways.

Affiliate Networks

Last but not least, we have affiliate networks. This is a great way to get your program known to affiliates. Most affiliates are on at least one affiliate network, promoting offers and earning money.

If you’re not sure what an affiliate network is, it is basically a collection of affiliate programs, just like yours. All businesses who have an affiliate program join the network, post offers for affiliates promoting their business, along with the commission rate and cookie duration they are willing to offer, and affiliates can take them if they like them.

Joining an affiliate network isn’t complicated, and most affiliate networks have an easy sign up process. You can sign up on them as a merchant and post offers.

As you can see, they usually place a form in front of you with relevant information that you will have to complete. Usually, you’ll just give them some basic information, and then information about your business, such as what type of merchant you are.

After you enter your business information, some main keywords, and your business niche, and install tracking software on your shop, you can customize your affiliate campaign, and start accepting affiliates. You can review their applications, check their website, content, and accept only the ones you like.

Of course, this process of signing up can be different for different affiliate networks. But here, we have included some of the common information that you might have to provide.

The gist here is that these networks not only create a program for you, but they can also be a bridge between your program and affiliates.

What to Look for When Accepting Affiliates

You don’t accept all the applications that come to you. You need to review different information about the affiliate, such as their content, their audience, how much engagement they have, etc. You might also want to check whether they are reputable or not. If their audience has trust in them, it’s probably a good decision to work with them.

Nevertheless, if their content is irrelevant or they don’t have much engagement, it’s better not to let them affect your brand’s visibility and awareness in the eyes of the public. So, make sure you check every affiliate’s background, and only when you are sure you can trust them with your product, proceed with them.

Step 5: Keep Your Eyes on the Affiliate Performance

The moment you find your affiliates and make sure you want to continue with them, you will need to check their performance regularly. For this, you have the management apps, but how do you know what to look for exactly? You can contact them, of course, but that’s not the only way to check up on them.

You need to make sure your affiliates have the material they need. Only giving them the products and asking them to promote it for you won’t help you sell your products. You need to make it easier on them to make the sales because that would be pure profit for you. So you should include some articles for them, videos if you can, provide them with tutorials and courses, and allow them to ask their questions from you or a support member of your team.

Affiliates should be able to ask their questions and clarify their doubts. They are working for you in exchange for their time and money, so you should respect them and provide them with answers.

There are also a couple of default things that you can expect to track on your affiliate’s performance. Here are some examples of those.

• Total affiliate sales. This is especially important to see if they are effective in selling your product at all. You can then put the affiliates on a list based on how much they have managed to sell for you. This is great to know in case you want to reward them with bonuses later on.
• Sales per affiliate. You want to know how much your affiliates are selling on average. Obviously, if affiliates are selling a very low amount on average, then there should be something wrong with the effectiveness of your program. This insight can help you find the issue and fix it.
• Average order size. You should check what the average size of the orders placed by your customers are. What products do your customers buy most? What is the average price they are willing to pay for your products? What is the threshold of spending that your customers have when visiting your products? This information could be useful to know if you have to modify something or include different products on your affiliate program.
• Payout-to-sales ratio. Have you been paying your affiliates more than you’ve been earning? Has your profit been enough? Have you had unnecessary expenses?
• Total payout. How much have you been paying your affiliates? Is this the amount of money you were planning on?
• Total number of affiliates. Check how many affiliates are currently on your program.
• Number of new affiliates. How many new affiliates have you gained each month? Are affiliates getting less interested in your offer? What can you do to change it?
• Number of affiliates that left the program. How many affiliates left the program because it wasn’t suitable for them? Why wasn’t it suitable? What can you change?

You can always check these questions and answer them, and if you need to learn more, you can always check your competitors’ affiliate programs and see what they are including in their program, and whether they are successful with it.

Whether you are a part of an affiliate network or you just use the management app on Shopify, you can check this information and make conclusions.

Tips to Have a Successful Affiliate Program

Here are some tips to having a successful affiliate program that increases your sales and keeps your affiliates happy.

1. Provide your affiliate with the proper tools. They should have what they need to make you both money.
2. Give your affiliates bonuses. When your affiliates are doing great, and achieving milestones, give them bonuses. It can be literally anything.
3. Never break your promises on payment terms. You should have fixed payment terms and models. You should always pay your affiliates on time and follow the payment schedule.
4. Track your affiliates’ performance. Make sure you analyze all the data coming from your affiliates, to see if they are being effective.
5. Maintain communication and motivation with your affiliates. You should give your affiliates news about any updates or anything that can make their life easier. Giving them motivation for continuing can go a long way in them falling in love with your program.
6. Optimize your website and make it easy for affiliates to sell your product. No matter how great the affiliates are performing, if your website isn’t user-friendly, or if customers don’t end up purchasing anything, you won’t be making any profit. Don’t let the blame fall on you.

Conclusion

Affiliate programs are great ways to promote your business, increase your sales, and stay on top of the market. You can create your program directly on a CMS tool or e-commerce platform, add management apps, find affiliates, and begin making a profit. It just takes a little bit of dedication, fixed terms, solid services or products, and faith in your affiliates. You will be growing your business in no time.