How to start an affiliate program, step by step

An affiliate program is a way of buying customers where you only pay for the ones who actually arrive. That is the whole idea. Everything else, the software, the network, the terms page, exists to make that one deal trustworthy for both sides.

This guide goes through starting one in the order the decisions really come up: whether you are ready, where the program lives, what you pay, what you write down, and how you find the first people willing to promote you.

A word on where I stand. I used to think businesses that paid out big commissions were being careless, or that platforms taking them were simply greedy. I was confidently wrong. I had counted the servers and the software, and not the real cost, which is the marketing it takes to find each customer. An affiliate program is one honest way of paying that cost, and only when it works. It will not fix a product people do not want, and no commission rate will make it.

Check you are ready for one

Affiliates send traffic to a page and get paid when that page converts. If it does not convert for your own visitors, it will not convert for theirs, and good affiliates will notice within a few weeks and leave. Before you start, make sure of three things:

• People already buy without being pushed. Some sales come in from search, word of mouth or your own content. An affiliate program amplifies demand, it does not create it.
• You know what a customer is worth. Not a guess. You need it to set a rate, and setting an affiliate commission rate shows how to work it out.
• You can track a sale back to a click. Checkout, sign-up or booking has to fire a conversion the program can record, or nobody gets paid correctly.

Decide where the program lives

There are two ways to run one, and each has a real cost.

In-house. You run the program yourself with affiliate software on your own site. You keep the relationship with every affiliate, set your own rules and avoid a network's fees. You also do everything a network would: approve applications, check for fraud, and send every payment yourself.

On a network. A network handles tracking, payments and much of the screening, and puts your program in front of affiliates who already have accounts there. In exchange it charges fees and you follow its rules. What an affiliate network is explains how that arrangement works and who pays whom.

Neither is right for everyone. A small company with a few partners it already knows can start in-house. A brand that wants many affiliates it has never met, quickly, usually gets there faster on a network.

Set terms you can keep paying

The rate is the term people talk about, but affiliates compare whole programs. Decide each of these before launch:

• Commission type and rate. Percentage, fixed, recurring or per lead, matched to how you earn. Affiliate commission types walks through each one.
• Cookie window. Long enough to cover how long your customers take to decide. The cookie window guide explains why a short one quietly loses affiliates.
• Approval period. About as long as your refund window, so returns come through before a commission is approved.
• Payout terms. A schedule, a minimum balance and payment methods. Affiliate payout terms explained covers what affiliates check here.

Start at a level you can carry today. Raising a rate later is welcome. Cutting one after affiliates have built pages around it is how a program loses the people it most wanted.

Write the rules down

A lot of affiliate disputes come from a rule that was never written down. Put these in your terms before the first affiliate joins:

• Paid search. Whether affiliates may bid on your brand name, and on which terms. If you buy those ads yourself, you probably do not want to pay a commission on them as well.
• Coupon and cashback sites. Whether they are allowed. They can bring real sales, and they can also take credit for customers who were about to buy anyway.
• Claims. What affiliates may and may not say about your product, especially prices, results and anything to do with health or money.
• Disclosure. Affiliates must tell readers they earn a commission. Consumer-protection rules in most markets require it, and a program that ignores it carries some of that risk.
• Self-referrals. Whether an affiliate can earn on their own purchases.

Decide how you approve affiliates

A program that accepts anyone can fill up fast, and some of what comes in is low-quality traffic or outright fraud. Reviewing each application is slower and worth it at the start. Ask where they will promote you, look at the site or channel, and approve the ones whose audience could actually become your customers.

Then watch the first sales. Unusual patterns, a burst of sign-ups that never pay or orders that are all refunded, are easier to stop in month one than in month six.

Give affiliates what they need

An approved affiliate with nothing to work with will do nothing. Give them:

• the tracking link and a short guide to how it works;
• product facts they can trust, including current prices and what is in each plan;
• a few honest images or screenshots;
• a named person to answer questions, with a reply within a working day or two.

Keep it current. When your prices change, tell affiliates before their pages go out of date, not after a reader complains to them.

Find your first affiliates

The best first affiliates are usually already close to you: customers who recommend you anyway, newsletters and blogs that already write about your problem, and partners who sell something next to yours. A short personal note that explains the terms plainly does better than a mass mailing, and most people will say no. That is normal. How to recruit affiliates covers where to look and what to write in more detail.

Get listed where affiliates look

Affiliates search for programs, so make yours easy to find. Put the terms on a public page on your own site, in plain sentences, and link to it from your footer. That page is what affiliates read, and what directories like this one read too.

We list affiliate programs for free, with every term linked to the page it came from. If your program is already in the directory, you can claim the listing from its page at no cost and correct anything we got wrong. Then keep the terms page accurate and pay every commission on time. Affiliates talk to each other, and a program that pays late does not get a second chance from most of them.