The most important thing to do before joining an affiliate program is to email the affiliate manager. Commissions, the programs uptime or downtime, risk of being closed, cookie life, and parasites (end of sale touch points and cookie overwrites) do not matter without this.
When you’re evaluating an affiliate program, things are good and you’re trying to send a company money. If you email the affiliate manager and cannot get a response when things are good, you are less likely to get a response when things are bad. This includes tracking breaking, programs going offline, commissions being owed, and payments that are not being made on time.
In addition to getting responses in good and bad times, opening the lines of communication helps you build a bond with the manager. One of an affiliate manager’s largest obstacles is a lack of responses from partners. We need to enforce disclosures, have incorrect claims and branding violations fixed, as well as show we are actively trying to gain more exposure to our bosses and our clients. By being communicative from the start you show you’re a good partner who is accessible. This goes far with us!
There are benefits to you as an affiliate in starting the relationship by communicating from the get-go.
Access to High-Converting Topics
When you get a response, you can ask “where to start” so you have the best chances at making money. Share your platforms like a blog, YouTube channel, or social media presence and ask the affiliate manager:
- Can you give me three topics where at least two are low competition and see high conversion rates?
- I’m planning on creating content about X and Y, do you have a matching landing page and will this be on brand?
- Which hashtags, selling points, and calls to action are working for similar partners and what words or phrases should I avoid?
- Do you know of any products that get more sales on Instagram or TikTok compared to BlueSky or Facebook?
Please keep in mind a good affiliate manager will never share examples of what other affiliates are doing. If they send you other affiliates’ campaigns, this is a sign not to trust them with your strategies as they may put your revenue at risk.
Custom Commissions and Earning Potential
When you build the relationship from the start, you begin building trust and credibility. One thing that I used to do when I was an active affiliate was outline my plans to the affiliate manager.
I shared my goal, how I planned on growing and scaling my traffic independently of the brand’s own traffic, and I would ask for an increased commission if I reached the goal. The affiliate managers were normally surprised by this, but they’d either say yes or run it by their boss for approval.
It worked a lot of the time and the incentive for a higher payout would motivate me more. That doesn’t mean it will motivate everyone though. For the times I would not get a custom commission or tiered structure, I learned what my cap on earnings will be with that brand. By knowing the cap on earnings I could look at their competitors to see if I had more room for growth with them. If the conversion rates were equal and I can make more money, I would switch brands.
Early Access to New Releases
The other benefit of emailing was to find out if they do pre-releases and embargos with affiliate partners. By knowing what products, services, upgrades, etc… are in the pipeline I could prepare content around the benefits and be the first to market.
If your channels are able to get into Google news, have content indexed quickly, or you’re one of the first influencers to share it, you may:
- Get the first rounds of backlinks to build strength for your website
- Benefit from first exposure to the world which helps you gain traffic to your channels and:
- Get the first click so your commissions stay in tact if commission-attribution is set up properly
- Have the sales before the bigger influencers saturate the market on social media and your content disappears
- Index and dominate the SEO results first which could stick even when the larger publications take over
I did this heavily with infomercial products and my old blogs. I also did this with collectibles as new releases and editions would launch. It applies to cult toys like American Girl Dolls, holiday Barbie, or Beanie Babies years ago, and clothing, electronics, and every-day items that launch new lines.
Even when they’d launch on Amazon, retailers like Bed, Bath & Beyond or Target, etc… my blog posts with no authority would continue to rank because they were first to market and got the citations. I still see this happening, although the rankings may not stay for a year or longer like they used to.
One added SEO bonus is if the backlinks to your page are topically relevant to your website, you can pass that authority in an organic way via internal links.
Detect Their Level of Knowledge
Each affiliate manager will have different levels of knowledge and experience. It is not the affiliate manager’s job to know SEO, PPC, email, etc… It is their job to know how tracking works, how to test it, ways to access the right people to get answers about marketing channels, and to find solutions that work for you.
When they mention they have the best tracking or advanced tracking, ask them “how” and “why” and give some scenarios. Affiliates managers who are qualified for their jobs will be able to answer where the potential gaps are in the tracking systems, and how they can account for it. The best affiliate managers will admit when there is a flaw and simply tell you it is an unfortunate reality. I’ve had times where I didn’t know the answer so I told the partner I did not know.
The honesty went far with the partner and I told them I would ask the proper team and get back to them by a specific date. If they didn’t hear back from me they can follow up as I know this is important. I did find the answer and it turned out we were covered, and this open line of communication built their trust in me.
There’s more reasons why emailing the affiliate manager is the most important thing I recommend doing before joining an affiliate program, but you get the idea. When you take this first step you build a relationship, trust, and may be able to get custom commissions and first access to new releases.
