Could having your own affiliate program be a surefire way for untapped riches??

I'll start this thread with the thing I wanted to show you guys the most. This is a sample of the search results for "affiliate", on the shoppify AppStore. I'm not sure if I'm bringing something new to this forum, but I don't see this idea mentioned here often.




Now for the important things:
Has anyone ever tried setting up a proper affiliate program for their product(s), and then persuade affiliates to join them, all throughout social media. And I'm not talking about Instagram. The very idea of equating influencer with Instagrammer seems increasingly wrong to me. You could contact relevant Facebook pages, or the owners of Facebook groups, make a proposal and have them pin your website/landing page. And the same could be done with the owners of medium-to-small Youtube channels, Pinterest board owners, Twitter accounds, heck even contacting the owners of a few relevant Tumblr blogs.

The reason why this seems like a good idea to me is because you'd be paying only for results. Instead of dealing with fake, overpriced instagram shoutouts, from accounts that could give less of a f**k about you, you'd be setting yourself up for a results-based approach. Which would of course, compel these social media figures to be a bit more careful when dealing with you. I've had numerous instagram influencers act all responsible and nice, and once they have the money on their paypal, they do a piss poor job, often forgetting to upload the exact image you told them to, sometimes posting with comments disabled, etc.

This is just an idea of course. Setting up your own affiliate program, and actually owning more of what you do, and being able to chose your terms in a fairer way.

Do post your experiences with your own affiliate programs. I don't have any yet, but I'm looking to start soon. Let's brainstorm the s**t out of this.

Possible? Yes. Are there people who manually convince influences to affiliate them? Sure. Easy? Absolutely not. Easier than SEO or PPC? Not unless you just love manual outreach.

-ThopHayt

Yeah, I do get the point of it not being as simple as it seems. After all we'd need to spend some time interacting with users, and whatnot. But what is part of the game! Remember the feat of @BassTrackerBoats where we used his social capital on FB and leveraged that into his favor in order to drive offers - and in a way, that's a form of soft marketing. Reading his blog is also telling of the importance of communication in both marketing and business. It's all about how we use it. More recently @William702 has also written a lot about the importance of quality communication in his pinterest thread.

All in all I agree with you at around 80%. The remaining 20% where I diverge are related with the quality of what you're doing. If you have a quality product, and an expertly designed website/landing page, that looks sleek and modern, as well as informative, then the probability of getting people on board with you will increase. And the best of all would be that this could almost be considered free marketing, as the payment would be performance based, and not just throwing your money out there.

Judging by what I've seen in the Shopify appstore, some woocommerce plugins, and even after googling a bit, it becomes very apparent that there are loads of businesses and people leveraging this to their advantage. And thus something worthy to brainstorm about in here.

Definitely possible, you just need to be talented at that skill set and willing to work hard; just like everything in IM. I'm guessing the details of your affiliate offer will be key here, the what/how of it. If you have a good idea and are excited I say why not try it.

-ThopHayt

Affiliates are a legitimate way to spread your offerings in areas where you normally would not but you have to educate them, and then educate them again, and education them again.

After that you need to educate them some more.

The name of the game is to make 100000% sure that they are representing you in a way that you would represent yourself as to results. How they market is up to them, how they communicate is up to them, what color hair they have is up to them but the end results need to be straight up accurate in terms of what they would get.

Having affiliates is work but if you work it right you could turn a little deal into a big deal.

Been there, done that and am doing that again.

Yeah very much agreed. The main point I was trying to convey was that having affiliates, as opposed to spending money with FB ads, shoutouts, board invites, google adwords, etc, could be a very effective way for beginners to test their sales, to check if their landing pages actually have a good sales copy (this point is so often forgotten about), collect a few emails, etc. Everybody wins, the beginner gets the startup money and the affiliate gets a decent commission. And in theory, a few sales could be landed in less than 24hrs, if you have the time to dedicate yourself to the cause.

For example, there was thread floating around here, about a marketer that convinced a bunch of instagram kids - with small-to-medium sized accounts - to do a bunch of shoutouts for cheap, promoting a CPA offer. And he made a very decent amount of money in a rather short amount of time. Those were real accounts that behaved organically and had real followers, and that resulted in profit.

And in theory, the same thing could be applied to dropshipping, affiliate marketing, sales of digital products (apps, courses), selling your own stuff/art under your own banner, your own affiliate program - convincing those same kids to market for you, and get their commission, if they performed well, that is. Idk, the sky seems to be the limit. Of course this is just brainstorming and putting ideas out there, but time has repeatedly demonstrated me how this may very well be the most important step.

I'll be honest and give the good and the bad.

It was fairly easy for me to get affiliates as the products I was promoting were cosmetics and there is already a huge pool of potential affiliates for these sorts of things as well as lots of info, techniques and prior examples to work from. Avon is a good example, most of the big MLM companies have huge cosmetics lines as they are a big part of the industry. Other companies go the home party route so there was a lot of valuable info to be learned from that too. It meant we had an existing base of potentials to reach out to who were already receptive to being affiliates of products. If you check out any beauty blogger video practically all of them are apart of companies like this already like Sigma Beauty or companies like Motives Cosmetics. What @ThopHayt said above is true its not easy and the manual outreach is not for everyone as well as all the customer service stuff and trying to convert people. I worked for 7 years in sales and customer service in call centers taking calls, emails and live chat dealing with either pissed off people or people who were on the fence about buying something so I had a lot of experience in dealing with that sort of thing which I probably take for granted.

Our program started out small and was mainly made up of our top customers or some of the influencers we had worked with so I could manage it on an excel spreadsheet but at its height we had over 400 affiliates of which about 25 of them made regular sales and did things like home parties and took it seriously. We moved from me managing it by myself to using Shareasale. I probably would not recommend Shareasale though as we really only had bots and people join who blatantly cheated the system and used PPC ads when told not to. If we had been more proactive in managing it once we moved it to Shareasale then maybe things would have been better.

I agree that affiliate marketing is better in terms of paying for results but there are a lot of regulations depending on what you are selling and what state it is in, so many regulations in fact. If you have the time to manage it and can find the right people its very rewarding and lucrative. You have to be able to commit yourself. We have all seen the threads here with people bitching about their affiliate networks if their questions had not been answered in a timely manner. Respecting the affiliates you have and treating them right is key. Don't let any of them bully you into doing things that you don't want to however, many of them tried that and wanted to deviate from the terms we laid out. Be stern but fair, if they have a good proposal at least listen to it. There is nothing worse than someone giving me the impression that they are not listening and think they know everything so I hate to give that impression to others.

If you have great products, with a decent enough margin that you can offer a good commission on sales like 30% - 60% then you could be on to a winner. If you have time to manage the affiliates and work in a niche that there are already established affiliates in then it could be done no problem. Its a LOT of work managing a program and affiliates though so you have to be able to commit to them and provide them with fair terms and also provide them with education and tools if needs be, there is a lot of hand holding in the beginning if you want them to do it right. What @BassTrackerBoats said about making sure they are representing you properly is very important. We had a crazy that we had to distance ourselves from so ask for social media links if they are willing to give them check them out because i had wished i did with that person. If I had seen her Facebook page I would have run a mile from the beginning and not approved her on Shareasale. You also need to make sure they are following all applicable laws and that you have a water tight terms of service so you dont get caught up in any legal action.

If you are thinking of doing it i would say go for it you will learn a lot either way.

Very insightful @William702. However, regarding the regulations part, I have my reservations: If the scale of operations with affiliates is kept to a controlled level the risks should be minimized. With this I'm mostly looking at those newbie dropshipper success stories, where they find a bunch of powerful influencer in various social networks, stick by them and make a profit in their first week.

And similarly to common droppshipping practices, beginners could very well start a limited partnership - via an affiliate program admined by themselves. It could be communicated to each new affiliate that the partnership would be based on results, and would last for 1 week or so - this should be more than enough to test the waters.

This affiliate model would be a bit of a twist, compared to what so many companies do with their thousands of affiliates. Similarly to dropshippers, we'd know exactly who we were approaching, and we'd be able to conduct "pre-audits" to the quantity and quality of their audience, as opposed to big affiliate programs, where managing hundreds or thousands of affiliates, with different approaches to marketing becomes very difficult.

In instagram, for example, a quick affiliate partnership could be established, where the affiliate would do a shout out + bio link for free, benefiting from the generated sales instead. If no sales were generated, the partnership would end. And just as with shoutouts, the partnerships would be kept to a relatively low number at a time. Like 10 or 20, which would make things easier to manage. Above all, one point I'd like to highlight - and correct me if I'm wrong, or misleading myself - but I've never read about any store owner having problems with regulations and the law, after using shoutouts, or paying big FB pages to have featured posts. It does seem to me that, if things are kept to a controlled level, risks will be minimized. After all, so many people start dropshipping without even having an LLC - only creating it after having made decent profits.


This is just me theorizing. I've spent this whole day reading about plugins that can be used to create affiliate programs, and there are quite a few that makes things easier than I thought.

This is just me theorizing. I'll apply this idea of mine in the next couple of days, and see how it goes. I'll try a bunch of different social networks, there's no reason why one should limit himself to just insta. Like you mentioned, I'll probably start a spreadsheet to annotate the performance of diffferent affiliates and social networks.

@JigenD It would be great if you could come back here and post your experience and what tips you have learned so far reading about and using these affiliate plugins as I'm sure a lot of people here would love to get a better idea of what they do. If you think you found one with some great feature please share so I can check it out. I'm in the middle of making a site now that could benefit from a simple affiliate program managed by an app.