New Affiliate Onboarding

Research from Business Insider suggests that affiliate marketing is responsible for driving up to 16% of all U.S. eCommerce sales.

Skeptical? The Wirecutter (now owned by The New York Times) generated $150 million in online sales in just one year from affiliate referral links leading to the various products they were featuring.

Metrics are all well and good to read about, but to make a difference in your company's revenue and overall performance with affiliate marketing, you need a plan of attack to support high quality, high performing affiliate onboarding.

Ask yourself, who can access your affiliate program? Is there quality control? Recruiting new partners is not easy, and success rarely comes from quantity alone when it comes to affiliate marketing. Rather, the success of your affiliate program is built atop the quality of affiliates you enter into relationships with. 

That's why you need a solid process for onboarding the best affiliates to maximize your company's performance. To help you along the way, we've prepared this checklist that runs over some common considerations for picking out the affiliates that are the best fit for you.

Let's get started!

This task serves two purposes:

1. Streamline the decision-making process
2. Let's you know who's serious

Gathering everything together you need at the beginning of the onboarding process will save you time further down the line, and help you to make a quicker decision about whether or not the partnership is a good fit.

As well as this, asking for sample content up-front (ideally this will be a custom-crafted guest post or something similar) is a great way to weed out all of the non-serious applicants.

Record the information in the form fields below.

It should be clear to any potential affiliates exactly what kind of relationship they are getting into. They need to understand your perspective, including what it is you expected of them and what role they will be playing in your strategy.

Taking time to make sure this is clear early on in the process can prevent unnecessary complications and wasted time further down the line.

Talking to the applicant in an interview is a great way to build a more personal, direct relationship; when you talk to them, you want to make sure you do the following:

Don't forget to talk about the payment plan.

This should never be overlooked during the onboarding process as it is a crucial part of trust building and also prevents complications further down the line when one or more parties are less than satisfied with payment arrangements.

Some questions you might want to ask during the interview (if you can't otherwise find answers on the internet):

You should also consider, on behalf of your higher level business strategy:

Now that you've gathered the sample content, it's time to review all of the information you have on them and make a decision as to whether or not they are a good fit.

Check on all of the following elements and mark them complete as you do so:

The applicant's profile might look great, but in this day and age, you never know who's legitimate. You'll need to sniff out the suspicious or fraudulent profiles.

There are tools available for checking the validity of certain metrics, such as TwitterAudit for weeding out bot followers. 

There are some things that require a more personal level of investigation. So, ask yourself the following questions:

Consider everything thus far. Do they seem like a good fit? Make a decision, and record whether the applicant was successful or unsuccessful in the form field below.

You've got yourself a brand new affiliate, so go ahead and give them the news!

Below you will find an auto-filled email widget, with your new affiliate's email address and a template message congratulating them.

All you need to do is make sure the content of the email looks okay and then hit "Send".

Unfortunately, the applicant was not successful - best to let them know sooner rather than later.

Below is an email widget that has been auto-populated with the applicant's email address, alongside a template email notifying them of their unsuccessful application. 

Just check that everything in the email is as it should be and hit the "Send" button.

If the affiliate passes the interview and has been notified of their successful application, you can add their information to your affiliate management tool (such as Omnistar or Tapfiliate) or mark them as approved if they're already in the system.

This process can be automated by connecting Process Street to Zapier.

Zapier makes it easy to run checklists in Process Street and trigger customized actions in over 1,000 apps, including Slack, Evernote, Salesforce, Trello, and more, with new integrations being added all the time.

There is plenty of documentation for getting started with API integrations for Process Street. Just head on over to our knowledge base.

Your partnership terms should be a legal document, with information specific to the kind of affiliate partnership you are offering.

Biztree has a great template to use for getting started with drafting your contract if you don't already have a standard document on hand.

Make sure to cover the following:

Upload the finished document to the form field below.

Using the Members form field below, assign the individual who will approve the partnership terms document.

Then, ensure you have sent off and received back a signed copy of this document before proceeding.

You need to give instructions on how the new affiliate will identify themselves in relation to your brand; the relationship should be clear to their audience.

It's also important to make the distinction between affiliate and the brand they're promoting, so guidelines for disclaimers will have to be communicated up-front as well.

Make sure you tell the new affiliate what they need to do to identify as one of your affiliates.

Most of the heavy lifting is over and done with at this point. Right now, your priority for onboarding the new affiliate is to make sure they have everything they need to perform their responsibilities to the best of their ability.

This will include:

Edit this task to include a clear diagram displaying your logo and branding usage guidelines.

For example...

Announce and promote your new affiliate partnership across your own social media and email channels.

This exposure can help build your brand's reputation whilst also encouraging followers to learn more about your affiliate program and apply themselves.

Promoting your new affiliates highlights the benefits of being an affiliate in order to attract more interest.

Make announcements across the following channels:

• James Laws - Better Affiliate Onboarding
• Shopify - How to Set Up an Affiliate Program for your Shopify Store
• LP Action - Basic Checklist for Affiliates
• CleverBridge - Affiliate Recruitment Best Practices
• AuthorityHacker - Best Affiliate Marketing Tools of 2018
• ConversionXL - Guide to Setting Up your Own Affiliate Program
• CharliePage - Affiliate Success Checklist
• AffiliateMarketerTraining - A Beginning Affiliate Marketer's Checklist
• Internet Marketing Training Club - The Ultimate Affiliate Marketing Checklist
• Acquisio - Tips on How to Control your Affiliate Marketers from Destroying Your PPC Performance 

• On-Page SEO Checklist
• Technical SEO Audit
• Product Launch Checklist
• UX Audit
• Social Media Manager Daily Checklist
• Influencer Outreach Checklist
• Keyword Research Checklist
• Google Analytics Audit
• Advanced Content Promotion Checklist
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• Submitting Content to Social Bookmarking Sites
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• Scraping Broken Links with SEOSpider and Ahrefs
• SEO Checklist: The Keyword Research Process