Advice Wanted - Building an Affiliate Program

Hi, software engineer here. I'm looking for some general advice around structuring and promoting an affiliate program for my website/business.

A bit of background, without going into too much detail: My website is focused around a casino-style game of chance. It's totally free -- so no gambling or betting, and is legal within sweepstakes laws established in the US and many other countries. Players can create an account, play some games, and when they earn enough coins they can cash them out for gift cards. It's funded primarily by strategically-placed rewarded surveys, where players might be asked to (optionally) complete a 2-10 minute survey in exchange for more coins. Do note that I'm not directly selling any products or services on this website, nor do I integrate with advertisers at this time.

I've built out a simple affiliate program that sits on top of everything. My intention is to reward affiliates for referring active players. I have the capability of giving cash commissions to affiliates when:

- A referred player verifies their email address (+Flat cash bonus)
- A referred player successfully completes a rewarded survey (+Percentage of survey CPA, limited to 1 year. Does not count screen-outs.)
- A referred player refers a friend that verifies their email (+Flat cash bonus. A bit complicated here, would ideally like to exclude this for simplicity's sake.)

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My hope here is to design something fair for affiliates, but also sustainable for myself as a business owner. I'd like to think that potential affiliates will be attracted to the concept of earning recurring revenue whenever one of their referrals completes a rewarded survey (or other rewarded actions in the future). For reference: existing players heavily engaged in surveys take around 20 surveys successfully each month.


So, at this point, there are a couple of questions I'd like to ask:

• Does it seem fair to only pay commissions after a referral verifies their email, instead of paying immediately on sign up?
  • I heavily incentivize players to verify their email by locking certain features until they do so.
• What sort of cash values/percentages seem fair for the above rewarded actions?
  • Mainly interested in email verification flat rate and survey CPA percentages. (The surveys generally offer ~$0.30 to ~$0.60 for completion. Some of that goes to the player, some to the business, and some to the affiliate, if there is one.)
  • I already have values for these set and based upon comparable free sign-up programs. I'm reasonably confident in them, but I'd like an unbiased sanity check from people who have experience with affiliate programs like this.
• Are there other obvious opportunities to reward affiliates that I'm missing?

And lastly, perhaps the biggest can of worms:

• What are some strategies to build legitimacy for a website and affiliate program like this?

The problem with building legitimacy in the eyes of possible affiliates is that it's sort of circular: without a sizable pool of users, there aren't people publicly vouching for the website's ability to let them cash out their rewards. And without that, there's little reason for affiliates to put their reputation on the line vouching for my unvetted website. I'm worried I may have put the cart before the horse (meaning, a worthwhile affiliate program simply won't work before taking the time to build traffic and legitimacy beforehand), which is fine -- I don't regret building out the infrastructure for it. But any brutal honesty here is appreciated -- I'm much more comfortable with writing the software than actually figuring out how to get it into the hands of real users.

Thanks for reading, any advice or thoughts are appreciated!