Activate your affiliates
After this track you can
Approved affiliates actually publish: the first ask prepared for them, onboarding emails on, one campaign paying for the first action, the quick wins taken, and the movers identified before you recruit anyone else.
Approval is not activation. An affiliate who has been accepted into your program has agreed to consider you. Whether they ever publish anything is decided in the two weeks after that, and it is decided by you, not by them. Programs that die do it here, quietly, with a healthy-looking list of affiliates who never sent a click.
The mindset for this track is one question: how can I help my affiliates make money? Treat them the way you treated your first customers, hands-on and slightly over-prepared, because an affiliate who earns from you keeps promoting you and one who does not stops. Five lessons: prepare the first step for them, switch on the emails, pay for the first action, take the quick wins, then measure who moved and learn from them before you recruit anyone else.
Syllabus
Lessons in this track
- 1Assume your affiliates are busy, and do their first step for themTreat the two weeks after approval as the window that decides whether an affiliate ever publishes, and make the first ask so small and so prepared that saying yes is easier than ignoring it. 7 min read Video coming soon
- 2Turn on the onboarding emails and put your affiliate offer in the first oneEnable the automated onboarding sequence, put the offer for the affiliate's audience (a discount or a coupon code) in the first email, and use the sequence to ask for the first action rather than to say welcome. 6 min read Video coming soon
- 3Pay for the first action with a campaign, and check the work before you payCreate a campaign that pays a bonus for the one action you want first (an article, a video, a newsletter mention), set the bonus by the value of the placement, verify the affiliate owns the site on submission, and send fully AI-written drafts back for a human pass. 8 min read Video coming soon
- 4Take the quick wins: newsletter placements, a paid-ads partner and hybrid dealsFind the affiliates who can send traffic this month rather than this quarter (a newsletter to your ICP, a paid-ads partner who wants a call first, an agency with a client list), and structure hybrid deals that trade a lower upfront fee for commission. 8 min read Video coming soon
- 5Measure activation, learn from the affiliates who moved, and fix it before you recruit morePull two lists from your reports, who published and who sent a click in the last 30 days, work out what the movers had in common, and apply that to the silent majority before adding anyone new. 8 min read Video coming soon
What "in trouble" looks like at this stage
Every academy teaches the happy path. These are the signals we see in programs that are going quietly wrong at this exact point, and the lesson that deals with each one.
Affiliates accepted, nothing published after three weeks
Nobody asked them for one specific thing with the material attached. Approval is not activation.
Fix it: Assume your affiliates are busy, and do their first step for themNew affiliates get no email from you after approval
The onboarding emails are off until you save them. Everyone approved so far got silence.
Fix it: Turn on the onboarding emails and put your affiliate offer in the first oneAffiliates reply that they want money upfront
That is the market now, not a red flag. Answer with a campaign or a hybrid deal on your terms.
Fix it: Take the quick wins: newsletter placements, a paid-ads partner and hybrid dealsYou are recruiting more while fewer than one in ten are active
Recruiting into an activation problem multiplies it. Find what moved the active ones first.
Fix it: Measure activation, learn from the affiliates who moved, and fix it before you recruit more