EPISODE 051 | Things to Think About Before Entering Into an Affiliate Relationship

Have you ever thought about being an affiliate for another entrepreneur, where you're promoting their offer in exchange for a commission payment? Or maybe you've thought about taking on affiliate partners for one of your programs or offers? 

Well, before you take this idea much further, I want you to tune into this episode where I break down eight things to consider before entering into an affiliate relationship. 

In this episode you’re going to hear me talk about: 

• The importance of getting clarity on the fundamentals of your offer before expecting someone else to market and sell it
• How your offer goes through stages of development -- and why this matters for affiliate marketing
• Things to consider when deciding on the commission payment
• Understanding what your affiliates need in order to be successful

If you need any help in setting up a successful affiliate system for your offer -- or if you want help in further developing your offer so that you're ready for affiliates, please reach out!

And if you have any questions or if you resonate with any of my shares in today’s episode, I would love to hear from you. You can find me on Instagram @otsgonerogue, through our Facebook page @otsgonerogue or by going to our contact form, https://www.otsgonerogue.com/podcast-contact. 

Transcript

Melissa LaPointe [00:00:00]:
Have you ever thought about being an affiliate for another entrepreneur, where you're promoting their offer in exchange for a commission payment? Or maybe you've thought about taking on affiliate partners for 1 of your own programs or offers? Well, before you take this idea much further, I want you to tune into today's episode, where I break down 8 things to consider before entering into an affiliate relationship. Ready? Let's do this. You're listening to the OTs Gone Rogue podcast, where we inspire therapists to think outside the box and do things differently. I'm your host, Melissa Lapointe. My passion is in helping OT entrepreneurs have a bigger impact on the world while building a life they love and doing transformative work that lights them up. On each episode of the show, I'm gonna share tools and tricks to help you flex your entrepreneurial muscles and grow your business from the inside out. I wanna see more OTs step up as visionary leaders, change makers, and influential CEOs. So let's get started.

Melissa LaPointe [00:01:16]:
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to the OTs Gone Rogue podcast. Now if you tuned into last week's episode, I switched gears a little bit. So last week I was talking about my in person services. So sharing a little bit more about my return to working back in my community as a consultant. And it's really interesting because after doing more reflection, I don't think I've talked much about in person services since the very first episode when I was talking more about my journey of going rogue. So here we are coming full circle. But today we're going to go back to talking about the online space because as much as I'm enjoying my in person services, it is still a small fraction of my work week. And so the majority of my time is spent in the online space, and I love what I do.

Melissa LaPointe [00:02:15]:
So more specifically today, I wanna talk to you about affiliate marketing or affiliate relationships and what it means to be an affiliate for someone. Because I'm seeing a lot of people jump into this, especially in the online space where it's them. So it could be them signing up to be an affiliate for someone else or it's them looking for affiliates for their own offers.

Speaker B [00:02:45]:
And in my opinion, I'm seeing a lot of people do this before they're ready. They're thinking it's going

Melissa LaPointe [00:02:52]:
to be an easy form of passive revenue. Sometimes I suspect that they're thinking it's an easy way to avoid sales and marketing. So today, I wanna help you to better understand this process so that if you do decide to venture into an affiliate relationship, you're better prepared and more likely to experience success instead of disappointment. So we're gonna start by talking about what exactly is an affiliate. So an affiliate and I go back and forth between affiliate marketing and affiliate partnerships and affiliate relationships. So an affiliate is someone who is sharing about you. So someone who is promoting your work, your program, your services, they are promoting your offer to their audience or within their community. In exchange for this, so in exchange for sharing your info, in exchange for promoting your offer to their community, your affiliate is going to receive a certain commission payment for anyone who signs up.

Melissa LaPointe [00:04:06]:
For any of the sales that are made through your affiliate It could be through their specific links depending on how you have this set up, but essentially any of these sales your affiliate will then get a commission payment. Now, of course, we can flip that around. So that's if you have someone coming on as an affiliate for you, but there's also the situation where you're the affiliate for someone else. So again, you're sharing their info, you're promoting them, you're promoting their work, their program, their services to your audience. And in exchange for this, any of the sales that you make, you then receive a commission payment. Sounds like a win win. Right? Now I know that some of you may be thinking about how much you dislike marketing or how uncomfortable you are with self promotion. And if you can have someone else doing this work for you, why the heck wouldn't you do it? Or you might realize that it's actually easier to promote someone else rather than promote yourself.

Melissa LaPointe [00:05:19]:
Meaning you like the idea of getting behind them of selling their product, their program instead of selling your own stuff. You might be asking,

Speaker B [00:05:28]:
you know, what could go wrong? What's the what's the downfall to this? Well, like anything else my friends it's not always rainbows and sparkles.

Melissa LaPointe [00:05:42]:
Now it's not so much that there's a downside to affiliate programming. It's more that

Speaker B [00:05:49]:
there's it's more complex. There's more to it than most people realize. Like anything else, it's an investment that requires time, energy, and resources. It is

Melissa LaPointe [00:06:02]:
a revenue stream that often can have

Speaker B [00:06:05]:
a lot of moving parts. So

Melissa LaPointe [00:06:09]:
when people come into it thinking, this will be a win win, this is passive revenue. That's my pet peeve by the way, passive revenue. I have yet to encounter a situation where it exists. But essentially, people come into it thinking, yes, this is it. And then they have a negative experience that ends in frustration, disappointment, and is a huge waste of time. Or worse, it can be an experience that unnecessarily puts strain on a relationship. So a part of my goal with this podcast episode is to help you go into this with your eyes wide open. So that, first of all, you're not rushing into it.

Melissa LaPointe [00:06:52]:
You're not using it to escape or as an avoidance technique because if you're in business, 80% of it is sales and marketing. We'll talk about shifting our relationship with sales and marketing in another episode. But, essentially, I want you to go into this with your eyes wide open, And when you do enter into an affiliate relationship or an affiliate partnership, I want you to experience success. So what I want to talk about today, I'm going to share 8 things, so 8 considerations before entering into an affiliate relationship. Are you ready? So consideration number 1, get clear on the fundamentals of the offer.

Speaker B [00:07:40]:
Kind of sounds like common sense, doesn't it? But a lot

Melissa LaPointe [00:07:44]:
of people, again, rush into this. They're not clear on their own offer or they're not clear on the offer that they're an affiliate for. So you have

Speaker B [00:07:54]:
to get really clear on the promise. What are you promising in terms of the delivery, in terms of the results, the outcome? What are the pain points that you're addressing? What is the transformation that you're promising? What are

Melissa LaPointe [00:08:10]:
they going to get from this? And what is the process that you're going to use to deliver that transformation, to deliver those results? You also want to get clear on the price.

Speaker B [00:08:26]:
Is it a payment plan? Is it a monthly recurring subscription?

Melissa LaPointe [00:08:31]:
Is it a 1 time payment? Is it in US dollars? Is it in Canadian dollars? Is it in Australian dollars? What is the price? And what is the launch mechanism? So what I mean by the launch mechanism, essentially with a launch, a launch is simply a way of extending an offer. So we are putting an offer out with a deadline. How we may be extending that offer could be through email, it could be through social media posts, it could be through a webinar or a challenge, a virtual summit, a workshop series, a video series. There are a number of different ways that we can be extending that offer. So you can think of it as an event, but again, even an email where you're sharing information, so you're putting an offer out, you're sharing information, you're inviting them to sign up, and ideally there's some type of a deadline. So we are getting into a launch mechanism because we want to be moving towards finding a launch that works where we can then rinse and repeat, so where we can create a process behind it. So these are some of the fundamentals to your offer and you wanna get really clear on this before you enter into an affiliate partnership.

Speaker B [00:10:00]:
Consideration number 2. Speaking of the fundamentals of an offer,

Melissa LaPointe [00:10:07]:
I want you to think of where this offer is in terms of stages of development. So, if this is a beta program or a pilot program and you are still figuring out the promise, you're still figuring out your messaging, you're still figuring out the process, you have an idea, you have a hypothesis, but you're not certain that this is the right 1 yet. You have an idea on the pricing, you're going to give it a shot, and you haven't figured out that launch mechanism. If you're still figuring out your systems, if you're still figuring out if there's even a demand for this offer in the marketplace, you are not ready to take on affiliates. Don't do it. Don't waste your time. Don't waste the time of potential affiliate partners. If this is you, if you are at the beginning stages of development with your offer, I want you to put your head down, put your blinders on, and focus on developing this offer beyond a beta.

Melissa LaPointe [00:11:09]:
Even if you're past the beta stage, it still might not be the best time to take on an affiliate partner yet. So some other things that I

Speaker B [00:11:20]:
want you to think about. Do you have your automations sorted out? Do you

Melissa LaPointe [00:11:26]:
have a developed onboarding process? Do you have your hosting platform?

Speaker B [00:11:32]:
Do you have consistent traffic sources? Do you

Melissa LaPointe [00:11:36]:
have a launch mechanism figured out that you can rinse and repeat? And last but not least, is your program profitable? If you're not answering yes to all of those questions, I strongly encourage you to hold off a bit longer before venturing into an affiliate relationship. Once you've developed your launch mechanism, once you have more predictable revenue and you have strong messaging, you are in a much better position to consider working with an affiliate. Now let's talk about consideration number 3, deciding on an affiliate commission. So when we're deciding on what we're going to be paying out, there's some things we wanna keep in mind. So we wanna think about acquisition. So acquisition, the so the acquiring of the client, so the the sales and marketing where you're converting into a sale, that is the hardest work. Then we have the methodology, and then we have the delivery. So when you are considering your offer, some things you wanna think about when deciding on the affiliate commission payout.

Melissa LaPointe [00:13:04]:
So what is involved in delivering the program the product or the service? So if there, you know, if it is a coaching methodology and it is an intimate coaching program where once someone comes into the program, there are a lot of touch points. There's still a lot involved in customer

Speaker B [00:13:28]:
fulfillment. You want to take that in mind, take that into consideration

Melissa LaPointe [00:13:34]:
for the payout versus if this is a self paced online program where once they sign up it is all automated and off they go. Perhaps there's a student community, but generally it's self paced they're

Speaker B [00:13:50]:
on their own. There's not as much involvement

Melissa LaPointe [00:13:55]:
in terms of the delivery. So that may affect what you're paying out in terms of the commission. You also want to think about how you're handling payment plans. So if you have, let's say, 6 monthly payments of $300 a month and you're paying your affiliate partner 40%. Is it 40% of the money you're gathering each month? Are you paying your affiliate partner upfront based on the overall price tag, the overall investment? If it is a monthly recurring subscription, are you paying your affiliate, say, 50% off the 1st month, but then any recurring months from that point on, the work is the onus is on you to keep them. So your affiliate brought them to you, but now your the onus is on you to keep them in your membership, to keep that recurring subscription going. So perhaps the affiliate payment only is for

Speaker B [00:15:04]:
the 1st month, but then or maybe it's I

Melissa LaPointe [00:15:09]:
was gonna say maybe it's 50% the 1st month and then 20%, but, again, don't make it complicated. But these are some things you wanna keep in mind. You also wanna take into consideration the refund policy. So if they can apply for a refund within the 1st 30 days, do you wait for the 1st 30 days to be over before you start paying out your affiliates? Now with that commission payment, I also wanna speak for a moment about discounts. So I see in the OT world specifically, I see a lot of people offering or extending discount codes to their affiliate partners. And I'm gonna push back on this for

Speaker B [00:15:50]:
a moment because I see often what's happening is there is some

Melissa LaPointe [00:15:55]:
confusion in terms of the audience, and they're then just waiting around for a discount code because they see all these different discount codes floating around. And we have to ask ourselves why, why do we feel the need to extend a discount code to our affiliates, Why should someone get 10% off from my affiliate when if they come to me directly, they have to pay full price? It doesn't really make sense to me. What I suspect is happening and I have proven this theory a couple of times by asking people, why are you feeling the need to offer a discount to your affiliate partners? And the answer is, well, that will help my affiliate to then get more people to buy. And where I'm saying I'm pushing back on this is no. What will help your affiliate to get more people to buy is you creating an irresistible offer and then working with your affiliate to make sure that you have strong messaging and that it is very clear that you are delivering results for your people. And if your affiliate partner can convey that information, can convey that you have an irresistible offer and your messaging is on point and you're delivering results for your people, they should have no problem selling to their audience. So rethink those discount codes. Alright.

Melissa LaPointe [00:17:22]:
Let's go on to consideration number 4, choosing the affiliate platform. So what do I mean by an affiliate platform? Well, this could be something very simple and it could be something complex. You have to think about what you need before you go shopping for platforms. So you have to think about what are your options, What features do you need? What information do you need to track? How are you going to handle and track commission payments?

Speaker B [00:17:55]:
Do you need a resource portal for your affiliates? These are all things that you want to consider ahead of time and

Melissa LaPointe [00:18:04]:
it may influence the program or the platform that you ultimately decide to use. In the beginning, you may keep it really simple, but you may discover soon enough all the time and energy that goes into managing your affiliates. And if we don't manage the affiliates, often we don't see the success that we are expecting. We'll get into that here in a moment. So for right now, choose your platform. And just like stages of development for an offer, I wanna reiterate that there are stages of development that there are natural progressions in an affiliate relationship. Meaning you don't have to have this all figured out your first kick at the can with an affiliate. It will develop and evolve over time.

Melissa LaPointe [00:18:55]:
Alright. On that note, let's talk about consideration number 5. You want to get clear on the customer journey experience. You want to understand, so is your affiliate partner sharing your lead magnets? Are they sharing links to your landing pages? Are they trying to get people onto your email list? Or are they trying to generate interest to build their own audience? So are they trying to get people onto their own email list? Are they building their own lead magnets? Are they creating their own landing pages? Maybe it's both. But you wanna make sure you're not competing against 1 another. You wanna make sure you're supporting 1 another, that you're staying on track with your messaging, so that there's no confusion of your audience. You don't want to be offering a free training and then to find out your affiliate partner is offering a free training on the same day, or you don't wanna have a pop up Facebook group and you're driving everyone on your email list to this pop up Facebook group to discover that your affiliate is also driving people to a separate pop up Facebook group. Right? So you're not competing against each other for sales, you're on the same team.

Melissa LaPointe [00:20:20]:
So take a moment and get clear on that customer journey experience.

Speaker B [00:20:25]:
Consideration number 6. What do

Melissa LaPointe [00:20:28]:
your affiliates need to be successful? So they may need marketing materials. So do you want them to be marketing where it's using your brand colors, your font, your imaging, or do you want them to go and do their own thing? This is where we really test our control issues, isn't it? You want to also, so do they need images? Do they need images of your product? Do they need images of you? Do they have a clear understanding? Is it written down? Is there a calendar where they know the important dates? Where they know if there is an early bird offer or if there is, you know, in terms of cart open, cart closed, or if there is a free training. So making sure that they know those dates. Any links? So what affiliate what links do your affiliate partners need?

Speaker B [00:21:29]:
There are links to sales pages, links to landing pages to sign up for things. And with all of this, you also have customer support and tech support. Your affiliate partners are going to get questions. My link is broken.

Melissa LaPointe [00:21:48]:
I didn't get the resource package. I didn't get the Zoom link. I didn't get the email confirmation. I tried to sign up. It looks like my purchase didn't go through. Where are these questions? Who's answering them? And are you supporting your affiliate? Do they have the information to provide that level of customer support? Do they know how to answer those questions? Your affiliates may need customer support as well. So it may not be members of their audience who can't they can't find the links, they can't find the dates, things get broken, things get lost. It may be your affiliates themselves that need that assistance, that need that extra, you know, those extra touch points.

Melissa LaPointe [00:22:32]:
And are there swipe files? Is there copy that you want your affiliates to have? So what do they need to be successful? Now you can take it a step further. You can actually offer training for your affiliate partners. So I've been an affiliate before where there was a series of trainings. So the person, you know, I was the affiliate partner and I was going to these trainings where they were helping us, first of all, to set goals. So it was really neat to go through the goal setting experience, helping to generate excitement. They were going through different options for opting in, taking us through the resource portal, going through important dates, but really helping us to understand the messaging and the different spins that we could put on the messaging and how we were introducing it to our own audience, to our own people. So this may be something you want to consider offering at some point is a training for your affiliate partners. So with all of this, taking all of the information, we've gone through 6 considerations so far.

Melissa LaPointe [00:23:40]:
Consideration number 7, how many affiliate partners do you want? As you can see from some of the info I've been sharing, more isn't necessarily better. So I want you to be strategic with what audiences you're wanting to tap into and with who you're inviting into this launch process. So making sure you're inviting affiliate partners that light you up, that aren't sucking your energy away, that aren't bringing this negative energy, complaining, hard to manage, you know, zapping you of all the fun stuff that can come with launching a program or a product or an offer that you absolutely love. So more affiliates isn't always better. It's time and energy to manage your affiliates, especially in the beginning when you're still developing your processes in your systems.

Speaker B [00:24:42]:
Now, again, all of the information I've gone through, you can look

Melissa LaPointe [00:24:46]:
at it from 2 different sides of the equation. So it can be you as the affiliate for someone else's offer for someone else's program. So you now have a much better idea of what you may need from them in order to be successful at being an affiliate. And this is also going to empower you to decide, to see, going into this with eyes wide open, do they or are they ready to have an affiliate partner? Maybe they're rushing into this as well. And the same information applies. So this is for you to be taking on affiliates for your program for your offer. Right? So either situation, this info will apply. Okay.

Melissa LaPointe [00:25:35]:
So the final consideration before entering into an affiliate relationship is I want you to ask yourself why. I've learned so much from my experiences as an affiliate partner. I've generated up to $30, 000 at a time as an affiliate partner. So for someone else's program, I was able to generate $30, 000 in 1 year from being an affiliate. But this was not easy money by any means, and that's why I did it. I knew it would be a learning experience. There were a lot of moving parts, so I invested money into advertising. I paid my own team, so I had contractors.

Melissa LaPointe [00:26:23]:
We were working, you know, doing our own stuff, creating our own sales pages, writing our own email sequences. So I say 30, 000, but then there were some expenses coming off of that. I put in a ton of time into training, so they had regular office hours and different training opportunities that I participated in, and I had to treat this like my own launch. I also, after the fact, had a lot of responsibility in terms of customer fulfillment. So it was a program launch where there were a lot of bonuses involved. And this particular program that

Speaker B [00:27:04]:
I was an affiliate for was in many ways in competition with some of my offerings. Meaning,

Melissa LaPointe [00:27:13]:
it took a lot out of me and it took a lot of time and energy away from my business and away from my audience or rather how I was serving my audience because this particular offer, it wasn't the right fit for a

Speaker B [00:27:28]:
lot of my people, but

Melissa LaPointe [00:27:29]:
I didn't have the time, I didn't have the capacity to be selling or promoting this program in addition to my programs. And again, there's no wrong or right. But that year, I committed to going all in for that learning experience, and that's what I got. I then decided to prioritize my business, my core values, and my audience. So the next year, I took a step back from that affiliate experience. So I want you to get clear on why you're doing this. So some other things that I discovered, again running Facebook ads showing up I was able to promote that program promote that offer in a way that I hadn't been able to do for myself. So I

Speaker B [00:28:23]:
had to do some soul searching on that. Why was I able to promote that program and yet I couldn't show up for myself, for my own business, for my own offers in that way? So this

Melissa LaPointe [00:28:38]:
is a few years ago. There's a lot of learning, but I was able to take that and pivot and apply it to my own business. So if you think that going into this is a form of passive revenue or if it's easy money, if you're going into this because you're thinking that as an affiliate, you can avoid sales and marketing,

Speaker B [00:29:00]:
well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that's just not how it works. Right. So consideration number 8, before you enter into an affiliate relationship, I want you to ask yourself why. Make sure you have the right reasons for going into this. Okay.

Melissa LaPointe [00:29:22]:
So in summary, let's wrap this up. When it comes to affiliate relationships, here are the things that I want you to think about. Number 1, get clear on the fundamentals of the offer. You have to know what you're selling and who you're selling to. Number 2, think of where this offer is in terms of stages of development.

Speaker B [00:29:45]:
It is in the early stages of development, just not ready for an affiliate. Number 3, decide on an affiliate commission. Number 4, choose the affiliate platform. Number 5, get clear on the customer journey experience. Number 6, get clear on what your affiliates need to be successful. Number 7,

Melissa LaPointe [00:30:12]:
get clear on how many affiliate partners you want. And last but not least, number 8, get clear on your why. Recognize that this isn't the easy way out. Affiliate partnerships, affiliate relationships, they're a form of business progression. It's an arm of your business that requires time, energy, and resources to develop. Alright. I hope you found this information to be helpful and I hope it didn't turn you off from being in an affiliate relationship, especially if it's for an

Speaker B [00:30:52]:
offer or a product you really believe in. Being an affiliate partner, again, there are a

Melissa LaPointe [00:31:00]:
lot of great learning opportunities, there are a lot of ways you can generate revenue, you can add to your business. I simply want you to go into this with your eyes wide open so that you can experience success. As always, if you have any questions or feedback on today's episode, you can find me on Instagram at OTs Gone Rogue or you can go to otsgonerogue.com and use our contact form to get in touch. If you're feeling extra supportive, you can share this episode with an OT friend or colleague, or better yet, you can leave us a review on the podcast. Alright. Have a beautiful week, everyone. Talk to you soon. Take care.