Building an affiliate programme - use a network or run it in-house?

[SammyGlick]

Hello everyone, I am hoping you can give me some advice about building an affiliate programme for my business.

I see two options for making this happen. One is to use an affiliate network such as ClickBank or Commission Junction. The other is to run the affiliate programme in house, using software such as iDevAffiliate to deal with the tracking of affiliate sales.

I've done a lot of reading about this and there seem to be two main arguments for using a network:

1. A network has a large, ready-made audience of affiliate marketers who will, in theory, sign-up to promote your product/service
2. A network can remove the headaches of dealing with payments to affiliates and other administrative work

It sounds great but on the other hand...

1. Everything I've read indicates that listing a product on ClickBank (or any other network) is extremely unlikely to lead to affiliate marketers rushing to sell your product. You still need to put in the work to go and recruit affiliates
2. With the payment tools that are available now, it doesn't seem like managing payments to affiliates is really going to take that much work. Furthermore, if making payments actually becomes burdensome, it likely means an in-house programme is working so the additional work will be worthwhile.

Yet, while I've read around this topic, I still don't know what I don't know and that's where I would love to hear from anyone on this forum who has some experience.

I am hoping this thread will be useful to others, so I've kept my comments above fairly broad. However, here are a few details about my business that might be relevant...

- My business sells a physical product in the prepper/outdoor niche
- Several competitors have affiliate schemes with commission rates ranging from 5-10%
- Our typical basket size is $100

Thanks in advance for your answers. Looking forward to hearing your perspectives.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[SEBASTlAN]

I plan on using an in-house solution like Omnistar or iDev in the near future. I've used affiliate networks like Clickbank/Paydotcom/Shareasale in the past, with zero success. That might have been due to the products I was offering, but that's been my experience.

 

[SammyGlick]

I plan on using an in-house solution like Omnistar or iDev in the near future. I've used affiliate networks like Clickbank/Paydotcom/Shareasale in the past, with zero success. That might have been due to the products I was offering, but that's been my experience.

Hey SEOguy, thanks for your reply. I've spoken to several entrepreneurs who have had similar experiences. My impression is that the networks are great if your product already has a lot of momentum but less effective if you are just getting started out. For physical products, I also think the lower commission percentage is probably a bit less appealling to would-be affiliates. I know that for many digital products commission rates are often north of 50% and I understand why affiliates would gravitate towards that.

As you can tell, I'm leaning towards running a programme in-house but still wonder if there time or out-of-pocket costs that will make me regret it. At the moment I'm likely to use iDev as it has an existing integration with my shopping cart software. Do you have any views on the merits of the various in-house solutions?

 

[Marigold]

Hello everyone, I am hoping you can give me some advice about building an affiliate programme for my business.

I see two options for making this happen. One is to use an affiliate network such as ClickBank or Commission Junction. The other is to run the affiliate programme in house, using software such as iDevAffiliate to deal with the tracking of affiliate sales.

I've done a lot of reading about this and there seem to be two main arguments for using a network:

1. A network has a large, ready-made audience of affiliate marketers who will, in theory, sign-up to promote your product/service
2. A network can remove the headaches of dealing with payments to affiliates and other administrative work

It sounds great but on the other hand...

1. Everything I've read indicates that listing a product on ClickBank (or any other network) is extremely unlikely to lead to affiliate marketers rushing to sell your product. You still need to put in the work to go and recruit affiliates
2. With the payment tools that are available now, it doesn't seem like managing payments to affiliates is really going to take that much work. Furthermore, if making payments actually becomes burdensome, it likely means an in-house programme is working so the additional work will be worthwhile.

Yet, while I've read around this topic, I still don't know what I don't know and that's where I would love to hear from anyone on this forum who has some experience.

I am hoping this thread will be useful to others, so I've kept my comments above fairly broad. However, here are a few details about my business that might be relevant...

- My business sells a physical product in the prepper/outdoor niche
- Several competitors have affiliate schemes with commission rates ranging from 5-10%
- Our typical basket size is $100

Thanks in advance for your answers. Looking forward to hearing your perspectives.

I personally found ClickBank and the like an utter ballache.

I have a very different business to yours in that my products are online training products. I also have to personally vet all my affiliates and so I have that process and I run my affiliate program through my Payhip store. It's a basic system but it works.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Marigold]

I personally found ClickBank and the like an utter ballache.

I have a very different business to yours in that my products are online training products. I also have to personally vet all my affiliates and so I have that process and I run my affiliate program through my Payhip store. It's a basic system but it works.

I should add you can sell physical products on Payhip too.

 

[SammyGlick]

I personally found ClickBank and the like an utter ballache.

I have a very different business to yours in that my products are online training products. I also have to personally vet all my affiliates and so I have that process and I run my affiliate program through my Payhip store. It's a basic system but it works.

Vetting affiliates is definitely part of my plan - I've been told by many people that affiliate quality is way more important than affiliate quantity. The fact that this manual effort seems to be a necessary would seem to be another argument in favour of running a programme in house.

I hadn't heard of Payhip but it looks like a good solution. I'm hoping to build my programme using my existing tech stack but this is one to keep in mind if I ever move to creating digital products.

Out of interest how do you go about finding your affiliates? I'm focussed on approaching relevant content creators and working to have them create reviews of the product. I figure that even if they aren't particularly effective as affiliates, the content will be good for SEO.

 

[Marigold]

Vetting affiliates is definitely part of my plan - I've been told by many people that affiliate quality is way more important than affiliate quantity. The fact that this manual effort seems to be a necessary would seem to be another argument in favour of running a programme in house.

I hadn't heard of Payhip but it looks like a good solution. I'm hoping to build my programme using my existing tech stack but this is one to keep in mind if I ever move to creating digital products.

Out of interest how do you go about finding your affiliates? I'm focussed on approaching relevant content creators and working to have them create reviews of the product. I figure that even if they aren't particularly effective as affiliates, the content will be good for SEO.

I absolutely agree with quality over quantity. I've been burned before by an affiliate so I put together terms of service that they have to agree to.

I have an 'Affiliate' page on my website. I also have as part of an automation campaign three weeks after purchase of a product and invitation to become an affiliate - only those who have purchased! I also have an advert inside my members area and I occasionally mention it on my podcast. I also have an advert inside my discord group.

It's actually very low-key and I have a small number of core affiliates. The rest don't have much of an audience to make it worth their while.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[SEBASTlAN]

Do you have any views on the merits of the various in-house solutions?

I typically gravitate to those with some SEO benefits. Last I checked, PostAffiliatePro and Omnistar have the technology to allow affiliate links to pass as any normal link, meaning it helps with rankings even if they never make a sale for you.

 

[SammyGlick]

I absolutely agree with quality over quantity. I've been burned before by an affiliate so I put together terms of service that they have to agree to.

I have an 'Affiliate' page on my website. I also have as part of an automation campaign three weeks after purchase of a product and invitation to become an affiliate - only those who have purchased! I also have an advert inside my members area and I occasionally mention it on my podcast. I also have an advert inside my discord group.

It's actually very low-key and I have a small number of core affiliates. The rest don't have much of an audience to make it worth their while.

@Calvert79 - I've considered sending all customers an offer to become affiliates but like you, I'm assuming that most people won't have a significant audience that they can drive to our website. Thank you for sharing your insights - it's really useful to understand how your affiliate program fits into your business.

I typically gravitate to those with some SEO benefits. Last I checked, PostAffiliatePro and Omnistar have the technology to allow affiliate links to pass as any normal link, meaning it helps with rankings even if they never make a sale for you.

@SEOguy - this is an excellent insight. I hadn't even considered the SEO benefits of the links but clearly that's a huge potential upside, particularly for the 'long tail' of affiliates who may generate few/zero sales. I had been leaning towards iDev but both Omnistar and PostAffiliatePro have ready made integrations with the shopping cart software I use (FoxyCart).

 

[SammyGlick]

Just posting an update on what I decided to do and what I have learned.

As you can tell from my original post, I was always leaning towards an in-house solution and ultimately that's what I decided to set up.

However, I did speak to someone who had previously worked at an affiliate network and highlighted an argument in favour of using a network that I hadn't considered: trust. Apparently a lot of potential affiliates are wary of in-house affiliate schemes because they appear less transparent. Would-be affiliates (perhaps understandably) worry about whether a business will honour all of the conversions that they generate.

Regardless - for reasons outlined earlier in the thread, I still think that in-house was the right choice for me. So what have I learned?

Pleasingly, a couple of weeks after opening the affiliate scheme, a couple of people have actually signed up and started driving traffic to our website. Encouragingly, these are not affiliates I had actively recruited but owners of websites in related niches.

Yet, my interaction with these early affiliates has already led to a change of platform. I started out using iDevAffiliate as...

1. It was cheap ($59 per month) and
2. They had a ready made integration with my shopping cart software (FoxyCart)

My first affiliates were not thrilled with the platform as the affiliate links it generates are pretty ugly. Something like this:

https://[your business name].idevaffiliate.com/[unique affiliate id]

I am in the process of migrating to a new platform called Post Affiliate Pro, which offers lots of different link formats, including some that are much more subtle/elegant. In fact, my favourite feature is that if an affiliate can prove they own a website, Post Affiliate Pro can assign conversions to an affiliate based solely on the referral source - no special links required.

It's a bit more expensive ($99 per month) but the strong signal from my first affiliates leads me to believe this will be a good investment.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Marigold]

Just posting an update on what I decided to do and what I have learned.

As you can tell from my original post, I was always leaning towards an in-house solution and ultimately that's what I decided to set up.

However, I did speak to someone who had previously worked at an affiliate network and highlighted an argument in favour of using a network that I hadn't considered: trust. Apparently a lot of potential affiliates are wary of in-house affiliate schemes because they appear less transparent. Would-be affiliates (perhaps understandably) worry about whether a business will honour all of the conversions that they generate.

Regardless - for reasons outlined earlier in the thread, I still think that in-house was the right choice for me. So what have I learned?

Pleasingly, a couple of weeks after opening the affiliate scheme, a couple of people have actually signed up and started driving traffic to our website. Encouragingly, these are not affiliates I had actively recruited but owners of websites in related niches.

Yet, my interaction with these early affiliates has already led to a change of platform. I started out using iDevAffiliate as...

1. It was cheap ($59 per month) and
2. They had a ready made integration with my shopping cart software (FoxyCart)

My first affiliates were not thrilled with the platform as the affiliate links it generates are pretty ugly. Something like this:

https://[your business name].idevaffiliate.com/[unique affiliate id]

I am in the process of migrating to a new platform called Post Affiliate Pro, which offers lots of different link formats, including some that are much more subtle/elegant. In fact, my favourite feature is that if an affiliate can prove they own a website, Post Affiliate Pro can assign conversions to an affiliate based solely on the referral source - no special links required.

It's a bit more expensive ($99 per month) but the strong signal from my first affiliates leads me to believe this will be a good investment.

Glad it's working out for you.

I will say that my affiliates trust me more because I am the one administering and running the process rather than a faceless org