The six steps that take an affiliate program from setup to a running channel.Setting the right incentives & budget
Incentives can have different structures to encourage partners to create high-quality content and build long-term relationships. Affiliates are typically rewarded with cash compensation, and generally have three different forms:
| Payout model | How the affiliate earns |
|---|
| Pay-per-click | The affiliate gets a reward for every successful unique click on a referral link |
| Pay-per-lead | The affiliates get a reward for an inbound lead or a specific event |
| Pay-per-sale | The affiliates get a percentage of the revenue generated by new paying customers |
Affiliates often receive a percentage of the sale (pay-per-sale) or a pay-per-click, but how high should the percentage be?
SaaS-based products tend to pay the highest commission fees for affiliates. The rate we see at Cello typically ranges from 15% to 30%. Remember that the higher your CLV, the higher the max payout can be, but the commission fee is lower:
Calculate the right affiliate budget
The method is the same one you would use for any paid channel: start from what a customer is worth to you over their lifetime, subtract the margin you need to keep, and pay affiliates out of what is left. Two inputs set the order of magnitude before anything else does.
| Input | Why it matters |
|---|
| Average Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) | Understand how much revenue the average customer brings in over their lifetime. This is the ceiling every other number sits under. |
| Profit margins | Consider your profit margins on the products or services being promoted. You'll want to ensure that you're still maintaining a healthy profit after paying out commissions. |
Everything after those two is calibration: what competitors already offer, what the program costs you to run, how many customers you realistically expect it to bring in, and how much you are willing to change once real data arrives. Treat the first number you pick as a hypothesis, not a policy, and run two variants against each other before you commit.
Structure matters as much as size. A two-sided reward pays the referee as well as the affiliate, so both parties have a reason to act. A recurring revenue share fits a subscription model better than a one-off bounty and doubles as fraud protection, because a fraudulent deal that churns after a month stops paying. Payout thresholds and reward tiers keep affiliates publishing after the first post.
The full set, every budget input, the structural variables, the commission ranges and the worked examples, lives in Resources.
You have defined your incentive scheme and affiliate budget. Great, now it’s time to build out your affiliate referral landing page.
Preparing your affiliate program landing page
Creating a landing page on your website is key for any affiliate program. It should describe the benefits and structure of your program, your reward model, and payout terms (e.g. referral-based, one-off, lifetime). For example, Fellow does a great job. Consider including:
An easy-to-understand value proposition
Point out what your product is about and include visuals and trust elements (e.g. customer logos, G2 rating).
Fellow leads with what the product does, then borrows credibility from named customers. An affiliate has to be able to explain you in one sentence before they will promote you.Visualize what’s in it for them
Let affiliates know how much they can earn with your program and provide some example calculations. Publishing the arithmetic, rather than a commission percentage, is what makes the offer legible to someone who does this for a living.
Fellow's affiliate payout calculation (Source: Fellow). Three worked deal sizes, so an affiliate can price the opportunity before applying.Describe the application process
Make sure to describe the application process in an easy, straightforward way and highlight its benefits.
You need to create a signup form where affiliates can apply. Each field in the signup form should be a criterion that helps you segment affiliates into relevance buckets (e.g. by audience size, vertical, posting frequency, and geolocation).
Every field on Fellow's form is a filter. Asking for audience and channels up front is what lets you sort applicants into tiers later.Provide an affiliate partner kit
Create an affiliate partner kit (see tl;dv) to reduce affiliates’ referral effort. Don’t give them simply a plain copy and visual assets, but go beyond that including also post theme ideas, posting frequency to vary their content, and specific dos/don'ts guidelines.
Some must-have assets to include in the kit are:
- Logos, brand colors, and fonts.
- Product screenshots and UI.
- Marketing infographics, one-pagers, or decks
tl;dv publishes its kit as a living document, so partners pull assets and post ideas themselves instead of emailing for them.When you see your affiliates as de facto members of your external marketing & sales team, you’ll realize you need to approach this as if you were empowering them with the tools to make great content for your brand.
Typefully does a great job at this by giving their affiliate partners not just writing prompts and branded assets for each product use case, but also a changelog listing ongoing product updates, so they can generate constant content ideas as well as examples of successful affiliate content to educate them on what good and great content look like.
Sourcing and acquiring affiliates: outbound first
Identifying the right affiliates for your product is crucial. Even though you end up running inbound and outbound in parallel, always start with outbound.
If you’re just starting and you (or your brand) don’t have an audience yet, you can search for your affiliates on dedicated discovery platforms. Tools like Passionfroot, Modash or Upfluence can help bootstrap an initial affiliate base.
You can filter by audience size, vertical of interest, and social channel they use, and keep track of all your outreach communications, from the first touch to follow-up, proposal, and spend, all in one neat dashboard.
Tools like Kleo, Taplio, or TweetHunter are also helpful for discovering new, larger affiliates with high engagement on LinkedIn and X beyond the aforementioned discovery platforms.
When you identify these affiliates, a great tactic to attract their attention is to create a listicle as an X or a LinkedIn post praising them for their work; this is a great tactic to grab their attention while showing that you’re also part of their niche, showcasing your thought leadership.
Wiz gets on the radar of the people it wants as affiliates by praising them in public first. The outreach that follows is a reply, not a cold email.If they do engage, reach out to them directly on the channels where they publish (LinkedIn, X, YouTube, TikTok) to ask if they’d be interested in a collaboration; keep it casual and aim to discuss in more detail on a call.
What’s next? Do I need a contract?
This highly depends on whether you run the program yourself or via a professional affiliate platform. Some of the larger affiliates might ask you to forward them a standard contract. If you do it yourself, it’s helpful to start from a template and customize based on your needs with your legal team. If you use a platform (like Cello), they usually take care of it.
Once you have bootstrapped your initial affiliate partners with outbound approaches and the initial traffic is kicking in, you can start productizing your inbound motion in parallel, which we will dive into more in the next section.
First affiliates have been acquired. Now it’s time to start your inbound motion. A few recommended tactics are:
- Run organic social, blog, and community announcements (e.g. Slack communities)
- Embed website top-of-the-page banner highlighting your new partner program
- Main navigation and footer backlinks should lead to your partner page
- Have some of your existing partners share their participation in your program on social media. Reward them for adding more affiliates to the program.
- Dedicated newsletter and/or inclusion in your nurture emails about the program
- Inclusion of your program in your user profiles (LinkedIn) and/or email signature
HubSpot treats the program launch as a campaign asset. One clear offer, sized for a social feed.Newoldstamp puts the program in every email it already sends. Zero incremental reach cost, and it runs continuously.As you usually nurture and engage with leads on an ongoing basis, don’t forget to keep your affiliates engaged in the program and regularly create content for them.
Scale and maintain
Managing multiple affiliates, incentive schemes and campaigns
When you set up your program, it’s key to add, manage, and incentivize partners with granular controls, and at scale. Whether you set up the affiliate referral program yourself or choose a third-party solution to support, take the following key considerations into account:
- Dedicated Affiliate Dashboard. When you find an affiliate, give them access to a dedicated, individual partner portal to track their payouts, earnings, affiliate links, and activity, and even have leaderboards to compare themselves to other affiliates. Create automated monthly activity update newsletters. This will help affiliates create a habit around sharing your product, access your partner kit for new content ideas, and encourage healthy competition within their community. See what a partner dashboard has to answer without a support ticket in .
- Multi-Campaign Support. Seek to create multiple campaigns for different affiliates, depending on their category, vertical of interest, or even audience size, each with a different reward structure and type, so you can best tailor the reward structure to appeal to different partners.
- Seamless, Multi-Currency Payouts. Offer various payout options (e.g. PayPal, bank transfer) in various currencies.
Legal, tax, and compliance
Affiliates must disclose their relationship with you clearly, and their promotions have to meet advertising standards: that disclosure obligation sits with the partner, not just with you.
Everything else here (tax documentation and reporting thresholds, KYC, payout intermediaries and Terms of Service) is covered in .