The best affiliate software for Kajabi is a dedicated platform that installs on top of Kajabi rather than replacing it. Kajabi’s built-in affiliate feature tracks clicks and pays commissions well enough for a small roster. It has no activation sequences, no training tracking, and no contest engine, which is what a launch runs on.

Kajabi built an affiliate feature to solve one problem: paying somebody a percentage when they send you a sale. It solves that problem. I’ve watched dozens of course creators run their first promotion on it without a single tracking complaint.

Then they recruit affiliate number 20 and something changes. The feature that felt fine at six partners starts feeling like a spreadsheet with a login page. You can see who sold. You can’t see who’s stuck, who never grabbed their link, who watched half your training and wandered off, or who’s sitting two sales away from a prize they don’t know exists.

Does Kajabi have a built-in affiliate program?

Yes, and it works. Kajabi gives each affiliate a unique link, tracks clicks and sales against it, calculates commissions, and pays out. You can set a flat rate across the program, a different rate per offer, or a custom rate for one specific affiliate. That covers most commission structures a course creator needs.

Two limits are worth knowing before you build a launch plan around it. Kajabi gates the affiliate feature to the Growth and Pro tiers, so the Basic plan doesn’t include it at all. As of July 2026, Growth sits north of $200 a month. And if you run payments through your own Stripe account instead of Kajabi Payments, Kajabi adds a processing surcharge on top of Stripe’s fee, which as of mid-2026 runs 2 percent on Basic, 1 percent on Growth, and 0.5 percent on Pro.

So the honest framing is that Kajabi’s affiliate feature is a real feature on a paid tier, not a free bonus. Price it that way when you compare it to anything else.

What does Kajabi’s affiliate feature do well?

It keeps everything in one login. Your offers, your checkout, your emails, and your affiliate commissions all live in the same account, and the tracking fires on the same purchase Kajabi already recorded. Nothing to reconcile.

The commission flexibility is better than people give it credit for. Per-offer rates mean your $97 mini-course and your $1,997 flagship don’t have to pay the same percentage. Per-affiliate rates mean you can give a big partner 50 percent without renegotiating the whole program. Those two settings solve a surprising amount.

Payouts run automatically through PayPal, or you export the commission data and pay however you want. The affiliate dashboard shows clicks, sales, commissions earned, and form submissions, filterable by date range, which is enough for an affiliate to confirm you’re not shorting them.

If you’re still deciding whether a dedicated platform is worth the second monthly bill, the category comparison covers the tradeoffs without any Kajabi specifics. Read Best Affiliate Program Software: How to Choose the Right Platform before you shop.

Where does Kajabi’s affiliate feature fall short?

Four gaps show up during launch week, and they’re all on the management side rather than the tracking side.

Affiliates can’t see their leads. Kajabi shows an affiliate how many clicks they sent and how many sales closed. It doesn’t show them who raised a hand and didn’t buy yet. Your best partners want to know they generated 40 opt-ins on day two even though sales haven’t landed, because that’s the number that keeps them mailing through day three.

You can only email the whole roster at once. There’s no way to send one message to affiliates who signed up but never grabbed a link, and a different message to affiliates who sent clicks but no sales. Those are two completely different problems and they need two completely different emails. Broadcasting to all 84 people means 80 of them delete it.

Affiliate resources live in a different place than affiliate links. Your swipe copy, your images, your promo dates, your training video: all of that sits somewhere else in Kajabi, and you’re pasting URLs into emails hoping people find it.

Automatic payouts run through PayPal only. If you’ve got affiliates in countries where PayPal is a hassle, or partners who’d rather take a bank transfer, you’re paying them by hand.

Why do course creators outgrow it around affiliate number 20?

Under 20 affiliates, you’re the software. You know every partner by name. You can text the six who matter, jump on a call with the two who are nervous, and personally check whether Sarah got her links. Manual management beats any dashboard at that scale.

Past 20, you can’t hold the roster in your head anymore. And the failure mode is predictable: you recruit 60 people, 12 of them mail, and you find out on day four instead of day negative-ten. Sign-up rate looks great. Activation rate quietly sinks.

Across the programs I’ve run, the number that predicts launch revenue isn’t how many affiliates said yes. It’s how many finished the training and scheduled an email before cart open. Thirty affiliates who did both will outsell 200 who signed up and forgot. Kajabi can’t tell you which group somebody’s in, so you spend launch week guessing.

The gap between “signed up” and “promoted” is the single most expensive problem in affiliate management, and it’s solvable with email. Grab the Affiliate Activation Templates and send the ones that fit whichever group is stalling.

Does Kajabi affiliate tracking follow buyers off the platform?

No. Kajabi’s affiliate tracking covers Kajabi. If an affiliate sends someone to your Kajabi checkout, the sale credits correctly. If that same person lands on a webinar you host elsewhere, opts in through a form on your WordPress site, or buys a bundle through ThriveCart, Kajabi’s affiliate system has no record of it.

Most course businesses aren’t purely Kajabi. You’ve got a podcast page on WordPress, a summit registration on a different tool, maybe a Stripe checkout for a coaching offer. Every boundary between those systems is a place where affiliate credit disappears, and the affiliate who lost it will email you about it.

Dedicated affiliate software solves this by tracking at the visitor level across every domain you paste a snippet into, then attributing the conversion wherever it happens. If you want the mechanics behind why cross-platform attribution breaks, how affiliate tracking works walks through cookies, click IDs, and where the handoffs fail. Affiliate attribution models explained covers what happens when two affiliates touch the same buyer.

How do you install third-party affiliate software on Kajabi?

You paste snippets, the same way you’d install Google Analytics or a Meta pixel. Kajabi gives you three places to do it.

For checkout pages, open Settings, then Checkout Settings, and scroll to the Checkout Tracking Code section. Whatever you paste in Header Tracking Code loads in the head of every checkout page. This is where your sale-tracking snippet goes, and it’s the one that matters most.

For website and landing pages, open the page in the builder, click Settings, then Custom Code, and add your script under Header Page Scripts. Kajabi loads that on every page except checkout pages, which is why checkout gets its own field.

For a single page, add a Custom Code block inside any section. Useful for a thank-you page where you want a lead event to fire on that page and nowhere else.

Two things to plan for. Kajabi’s broader code editor access sits on the Growth and Pro tiers, and Pro is required if you want to touch theme templates. And Kajabi support does not troubleshoot custom code, so pick affiliate software whose team will get on a call with you if a snippet misfires.

Before you install anything, decide whether you’re running your own program or handing it to a network. Affiliate Network vs. In-House Program lays out the cost and control math on both sides.

What should affiliate software do that Kajabi doesn’t?

Four things, roughly in order of what they’re worth to a launch.

Activation sequences that trigger on affiliate behavior. Somebody signs up and doesn’t grab a link, they get one email. Somebody sends 200 clicks with zero sales, they get a different one about their offer positioning. This runs without you touching it, which is the entire point. Motivating affiliates who signed up but stopped promoting covers which message fits which stall.

Training you can track completion on. Hosting a video is easy. Knowing that 31 of your 84 affiliates finished it and 12 stopped at minute four is what tells you who to call.

Promo planning that gets commitments in writing. Asking an affiliate “are you promoting?” gets you a yes. Asking them to commit to three emails on specific dates gets you three emails. How to launch an affiliate program step by step covers the sequencing.

A contest engine that runs ranked and threshold prizes together. Ranked-only contests motivate your top five and lose everybody else by day two. Threshold prizes give the middle of your roster a target they can hit. Running an affiliate contest that motivates affiliates has the prize structures that work.

Is AffiliateHQ the best affiliate software for Kajabi?

I built it, so weigh that accordingly. I built it after 20 years of running programs and watching software nail the tracking and ignore the four things above.

On Kajabi, AffiliateHQ installs through three snippets: one for click, one for lead, one for sale. The click snippet goes in Header Page Scripts, the lead snippet on your opt-in confirmation page, and the sale snippet in Kajabi’s Checkout Tracking Code field. Setup runs about 15 minutes. Because those snippets drop into any platform that accepts a script tag, the same affiliate link keeps tracking when your buyer wanders to your WordPress site or a Stripe checkout.

The management side is what the built-in feature doesn’t have. The Training Hub shows you completion by affiliate rather than a raw view count. Commitment Plans turn “I’ll promote” into scheduled dates you can see on a calendar before cart open. The contest engine runs ranked and threshold prizes at the same time. Activation sequences fire on behavior. And affiliates see their leads, not only their sales, which keeps them mailing on day three when the sales haven’t landed yet.

Every feature in AffiliateHQ maps to a system in The Book on Affiliate Management, because I built the software around the process rather than the other way around. If you’d rather read the system before you buy the tool, start with The Book on Affiliate Management.

When should you stay with Kajabi’s built-in affiliate feature?

Stay if you’re under 20 affiliates, selling only through Kajabi, and running your first or second promotion. At that size you’re managing by relationship, and adding software adds a bill without removing work. Kajabi tracks the sale, you handle the humans, and that’s a fine arrangement.

Move when one of three things happens. Your roster passes the point where you can personally email every affiliate before a launch. You start selling anywhere outside Kajabi. Or you finish a promotion where more than half your affiliates never sent a single email, which means your bottleneck is activation and better tracking won’t touch it.

One more consideration: a program you run on your own software travels with you. Your roster, your commission history, and your affiliate relationships stay yours if you ever leave Kajabi. Starting an affiliate program as a course creator covers the setup order, and how to pay affiliates covers payout methods beyond PayPal.

Frequently asked questions

Which Kajabi plan includes the affiliate feature?

Growth and Pro. The Basic plan does not include affiliates at all. If you’re on Basic and want to run a program, you either upgrade to Growth or install third-party affiliate software, and the third-party route is usually cheaper than the tier jump plus gives you management features Kajabi doesn’t have.

Can you use affiliate software with Kajabi without breaking Kajabi’s checkout?

Yes. Third-party affiliate software installs as JavaScript snippets in Kajabi’s Header Page Scripts and Checkout Tracking Code fields. The snippets read the transaction and report it to your affiliate platform. Kajabi’s checkout keeps working exactly as it did, and buyers see no difference.

Does Kajabi track affiliate leads or only sales?

Sales and clicks, plus form submissions on Kajabi forms. Affiliates cannot see who clicked their link and opted in without buying. That visibility matters most during multi-day launches, when an affiliate’s opt-in count on day two is the only evidence their promotion is working before sales land.

How many affiliates before you need dedicated software for a Kajabi program?

Around 20 to 25, or earlier if you sell outside Kajabi. The trigger isn’t roster size by itself. It’s the moment you can no longer email every affiliate individually before a promotion. Past that point, activation has to run on automation, and Kajabi has no mechanism for it.

What does affiliate software cost compared to upgrading Kajabi?

Most dedicated affiliate platforms run between $50 and $150 a month for a program under a few hundred affiliates. Kajabi’s jump from Basic to Growth costs roughly $50 to $100 a month depending on billing, so the two are closer than people expect once you count what each one includes.

Should you track affiliate performance differently on Kajabi?

Track the same metrics you would anywhere: activation rate, average commission per active affiliate, and time from sign-up to first sale. Affiliate program KPIs covers the full list. Kajabi gives you sales and clicks, so you’ll calculate activation rate by hand until you move to software that reports it.

What to do next

Pull up your last Kajabi promotion. Count how many affiliates signed up and how many sent at least one email. Under 30 percent means your problem is activation, and no amount of better tracking fixes it.

If you’re under 20 affiliates and selling only through Kajabi, stay where you are and spend your energy recruiting. If you’re past that, install affiliate software that tracks across every platform you sell on and gives you activation sequences, training completion, and a contest engine.

Recruiting is the other half of this. I’ve pulled the exact strategies I used to sign 604 affiliates and build a program doing $1.1 million a month into a free report. Grab Your First 100 Affiliates and work the recruiting side while your tracking runs itself.

AffiliateHQ installs on Kajabi in about 15 minutes and handles the four things Kajabi’s built-in feature leaves to you. Take a look at AffiliateHQ and see whether it fits your next launch.

The post What is the Best Affiliate Software for Kajabi? appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

An affiliate marketing funnel is a repeatable path that turns a stranger into a subscriber, warms that subscriber up with helpful emails, and then points them to an affiliate offer at the moment they’re ready to buy. Most affiliates skip the funnel and send one link to cold traffic, which is why they earn a fraction of what they could. This guide shows you the pieces and how to assemble a simple one this week.

An affiliate marketing funnel fixes the biggest leak in most affiliate income: the one-time click. You post a link, someone clicks, they don’t buy, and you never hear from them again. A funnel captures that person first, builds a little trust, and gives you five or six chances to make the sale instead of one. I’ve watched affiliates with tiny lists outearn people with ten times the traffic for this one reason. They built a path. Everyone else built a link.

Let’s walk through what each piece does, then I’ll give you a three-step version a beginner can put up in a weekend.

What is an affiliate marketing funnel?

An affiliate marketing funnel is the sequence a person moves through from first contact to purchase, where every step is designed to earn a little more trust before you ask for a sale. Picture three stages. At the top, someone finds your content and trades their email for something useful. In the middle, you send a handful of emails that help them and build rapport. At the bottom, you recommend an affiliate offer that solves the exact problem they came to you for.

Compare that to what most people do. They write a blog post, drop an affiliate link in paragraph four, and hope. A cold reader converts on a first-touch affiliate link at maybe 1 to 2 percent. The same reader, warmed up over a week of emails, might convert at 5 to 10 percent or higher on the same offer. Same person, same product. The difference is the path you built between the click and the checkout page.

The funnel also solves the timing problem. People rarely buy the first day they meet you. They buy on day 9, or after the third email, or when a deadline finally forces the decision. If your only asset is a link, you’re gone by then. If your asset is an email list, you’re still in the room.

Why one-time clicks leave money on the table

A one-time click gives you exactly one shot at a sale, and you’re taking that shot at the worst possible moment: before the person knows or trusts you. Say 1,000 people read your review post this month. At a 1.5 percent conversion rate, you get 15 sales. Everyone else, the other 985 people, leaves and never comes back. You paid for that traffic with your time, and you monetized 1.5 percent of it.

Now capture even 20 percent of those readers onto an email list. That’s 200 subscribers. Over the next two weeks you send them useful emails and recommend the offer a few times. Convert 6 percent of the 200 and you get 12 sales from the list, on top of your original 15. You nearly doubled your revenue from the same 1,000 visitors, and you kept 200 people you can promote to again next month, and the month after that.

That’s the math that changes affiliate marketing from a lottery into a system. The click is a one-night event. The list is an asset you own. For a full breakdown of whether you even need a list to start, read do you need an email list to succeed at affiliate marketing, but the short answer for anyone serious about income is yes.

The lead magnet that starts your funnel

The lead magnet is the free thing you give away to turn an anonymous visitor into a subscriber, and it works best when it solves one narrow problem the affiliate offer also touches. If you promote a course on Pinterest marketing, your lead magnet might be a one-page “10 pin templates that get clicks” download. The person who wants that download is the exact person who might buy the course later. You’re pre-qualifying buyers with a giveaway.

Keep it small and fast to consume. A checklist, a template, a short cheat sheet, or a five-minute video beats a 40-page ebook nobody finishes. The goal is a quick win that makes the reader think, “if the free thing is this good, the paid thing must be worth it.” A single well-matched lead magnet can build a list of a few hundred people in a couple of months without any paid ads.

Match the magnet to the offer and half your funnel is already working. Mismatch it, like giving away a weight-loss guide to sell a photography course, and you’ll collect emails from people who will never buy. For a deeper look at picking and positioning one, go through how to use a lead magnet to grow your affiliate income. And if you’re still building the list itself, how to build an email list for affiliate marketing covers the opt-in setup.

Not sure where to point people first or which offers to promote from day one? My free Affiliate Marketing QuickStart Guide walks you through the fastest way to start earning without creating your own product, and it includes copy and paste email templates you can drop straight into the funnel you’re building here.

The email sequence that warms people up

The email sequence is the four to six automated emails a new subscriber gets after they grab your lead magnet, and its whole job is to build trust before you ask for money. New subscribers are warm for about a week, then they cool off fast. So you want your sequence firing while they still remember who you are.

Here’s a sequence that works. Email 1 delivers the lead magnet and tells them what to expect. Email 2, a day later, shares a quick story or a lesson tied to their problem. Email 3 gives them a genuine win, some tip they can use today. Email 4 introduces the affiliate offer as the natural next step, with your honest take on why it helps. Emails 5 and 6 handle objections and add a reason to act now.

Notice you don’t pitch until email 4. The first three earn the right. I set my own autoresponder to send on days 1, 3, 5, 8, and 11, so the pitch lands after the person has gotten real value from me twice. For the mechanics of building this out, see how to set up an affiliate email follow-up sequence and how to use email marketing as an affiliate. Both go step by step.

Warming a list is a skill, and a lot of affiliates rush it. I broke down seven concrete moves for it in 7 ways to warm up your audience before an affiliate promotion. Read it before you write email 4, because a warm reader converts several times better than a cold one on the exact same offer.

Where the affiliate offer goes and how many times to promote it

The affiliate offer belongs at the bottom of the funnel, after the trust is built, and you should make the offer at least three times, not once. Most affiliates promote a single time, get a few sales, and assume the offer flopped. The offer didn’t flop. They quit after one ask.

People need repetition. Someone reads email 4, thinks “maybe later,” and moves on with their day. That’s not a no. That’s a not-yet. Email 5 catches them in a different mood, email 6 adds a deadline, and suddenly the person who ignored you twice buys. In real promotions, the second and third emails often pull as many sales as the first. Promoting once is like calling someone’s name a single time in a crowded room and giving up when they don’t turn around.

Pick offers you’d recommend to a friend, because your reputation is riding on every one. How to choose an affiliate offer worth promoting covers how to vet them. And if your list is small, don’t panic. How to promote affiliate offers to a small email list shows how a few hundred engaged subscribers can outsell a bloated list of strangers.

Once you’re promoting an offer more than once, you need a plan so nothing slips. My free Promotion Checklist Template lays out every email and social touch for a full promotion in one reusable sheet, so you never forget the second and third asks that bring in most of the money.

How to track what’s converting in your funnel

You track a funnel by watching three numbers: opt-in rate, email open rate, and sales per subscriber. Each one tells you which part of the path to fix. If few visitors opt in, the lead magnet or the opt-in page needs work. If people opt in but don’t open your emails, the subject lines or the sender reputation are the problem. If they open but don’t buy, the offer or your pitch needs another pass.

Use tracked affiliate links so you know which email drove which sale. Most affiliate programs let you add a sub-id or a campaign tag to your link, so email 4 and email 6 report separately. Then you can see, in plain numbers, that email 6 outsold email 4 two to one, and you write more emails like email 6 next time. How to track affiliate links shows how to set this up.

Check the numbers weekly, not hourly. A funnel needs a few hundred people through it before the data means anything. Fix one thing at a time, run it again, and compare. The affiliates who improve fastest treat the funnel like a set of dials, not a finished machine.

A simple three-step affiliate funnel you can build this week

A beginner funnel needs three things: one lead magnet, one opt-in page, and one five-email sequence that ends in an offer. That’s it. You can build all three between now and the weekend with free or cheap tools.

Step one, make the lead magnet. Open a doc, write a one-page checklist tied to the affiliate product you want to promote, and export it as a PDF. Spend an hour, not a week. Step two, put up a simple opt-in page with your email provider’s built-in landing page builder, or a free tool if you don’t have one yet. It needs a headline, one sentence on what they get, and an email field. Step three, write five emails in your autoresponder: deliver, story, tip, offer, and a final “last chance” nudge. Set them to send on days 1, 3, 5, 8, and 11.

Then send traffic to the opt-in page. Link it in your bio, mention it at the end of a blog post, or share it on social. Your first ten subscribers will tell you more than a month of planning. For traffic ideas that feed the top of this funnel, look at what types of content work best for affiliate marketing. And if you haven’t earned a commission yet, how to get your first affiliate sale pairs well with this build.

One page can do a surprising amount of funnel work on its own. I make five figures a month from a single one, and I show exactly how in The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Resources Page. It’s a free report on turning one page of recommendations into passive affiliate income that runs alongside your email funnel.

Where to start this week

Don’t build all of this at once. Start with two pieces: the lead magnet and the opt-in page. Those two turn your existing traffic into subscribers, which is the leak costing you the most money right now. Get them live, even ugly, and you’ll capture people you were losing yesterday.

Then write the five-email sequence, ending with the offer promoted at least three times. That’s your whole funnel. Track the opt-in rate, the open rate, and sales per subscriber, and fix one weak number at a time. Do that and you’ll stop renting one-time clicks and start owning an audience you can sell to again and again.

Learn How My Resources Page Makes Me $10,000+ Each Month… and How You Can Create One Easily!  Grab The Free Guide Here

The post How to Build an Affiliate Marketing Funnel appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

The best affiliate software for your first affiliate program is whichever one gets you from signup to a working affiliate link in a single sitting, without hiring a developer. For a first program, speed to live beats feature depth. You can add sophistication later. You can’t recruit affiliates into a program that doesn’t exist yet.

I’ve watched a lot of business owners decide to start an affiliate program in January and still not have one in April. The product was ready. The commission rate was decided. But the software sat half-configured because step four required a developer, and the developer was busy, and then it was spring.

So when someone asks me which platform they should pick for their first program, I don’t start with tracking accuracy or integration lists. Those matter enormously at year three. At week one, the only question that predicts whether you’ll have a program is how fast you can get a real affiliate a real link.

What makes affiliate software “best” for a first program?

Time to first working link. That’s the criterion that separates a program you launch from a program you talk about launching.

Most software comparisons rank platforms on tracking methods, integration count, and commission flexibility. Those are the right criteria for someone migrating an existing program with 400 affiliates. They’re the wrong criteria for you, because you don’t have 400 affiliates. You have zero, and the constraint on getting your first ten isn’t your platform’s cookie logic.

My full breakdown of affiliate program software categories covers the tracking and integration side in depth, and it’s worth reading before you commit to anything long-term. For a first program, though, I’d rank the criteria differently: can you configure it yourself in one session, does it give affiliates somewhere to sign up without you building a page, and does it do anything useful after they sign up.

That last one gets skipped constantly. Business owners evaluate affiliate software on how well it tracks a sale, which assumes a sale happens. For a new program, the harder problem is getting anyone to promote at all.

How long should it take to get your first affiliate link working?

One sitting. If you’re more than two hours in and you still don’t have a link you could hand to a partner, the platform is wrong for a first program.

Here’s what that setup should cover: connecting your payment processor, setting a commission rate, setting a cookie duration, publishing terms, turning on a signup page, and generating a test link you can click yourself to confirm the tracking fires. Six things. None of them require code.

The platforms that break this promise usually break it at the payment connection or the tracking install. You get to a screen that says “paste this script into your checkout template” and, if you don’t own your checkout template, you stop. That pause is where most first programs die, and it has nothing to do with your commitment level.

Before you start, decide your commission rate and cookie window. How to structure an affiliate program walks through both, and making those two decisions in advance turns the setup into data entry instead of deliberation.

Getting the software live is step one of a much longer first month, and the sequence matters more than the speed. I mapped out exactly what to do in each of the first four weeks in How to Start an Affiliate Program: The First 30 Days. Read it before you launch, not after.

What do first-time program owners underestimate about writing affiliate terms?

How long it takes and how much it costs to get wrong. Terms are the single most common reason a first program stalls between “I bought the software” and “I recruited anyone.”

You need terms before you accept a single affiliate, because your terms define what happens on a refund, whether affiliates can bid on your brand name in paid search, how long a cookie lasts, and when you pay. Without them, your first commission dispute becomes a negotiation instead of a lookup.

Business owners handle this one of three ways. They hire a lawyer and spend $500 to $1,500 and three weeks. They copy a competitor’s terms, which is both a legal risk and usually a bad fit for their refund policy. Or they skip it and promise themselves they’ll write terms once affiliates start joining, which is backwards, since the affiliates joining are the ones the terms protect you from.

I wrote a full guide on how to write an affiliate program agreement without hiring a lawyer that covers every section you need and why each one exists. Work through it once and you’ll have terms that hold up.

If you’d rather not start from a blank page, I’ve published the terms template I’ve used across dozens of programs. Grab the free Affiliate Terms & Conditions Template and edit the handful of fields that are specific to your business.

Why do affiliates sign up and then never promote?

Because signing up costs an affiliate nothing and promoting costs them a slot in their calendar. Roughly 95% of affiliates who join a program never make a single sale, and that number barely changes based on which platform you’re running.

This is the gap that surprises first-time program owners most. You picture recruitment as the hard part. You send fifty emails, twelve people join, and you feel like the program is working. Then nothing happens, because those twelve people joined the way you subscribe to a newsletter you never open.

The fix isn’t more recruiting. Affiliates who signed up but stopped promoting need a specific reason and a specific date, and somebody has to give it to them. For a first program, that somebody is you, and you’re already running the rest of the business.

Which is why activation is the feature category I’d weight highest for a beginner platform. Software that emails a new affiliate on day one, day three, and day seven with a promo idea and a deadline will outperform software with better tracking and no follow-up. I’ve seen structured activation sequences move a program’s active affiliate rate from 5% to north of 20% without a single new recruit.

What do you do when nothing happens for three weeks?

You diagnose which of four things broke: recruiting volume, activation, conversion, or commission competitiveness. Three silent weeks feels like one problem, but it’s always one of those four, and the fix for each is different.

Low recruiting volume means you don’t have enough affiliates for anyone to have promoted yet. Twelve affiliates is not a program. If you’re at that number, your problem is the top of the funnel, and a program page that actually recruits is a better use of the next week than tweaking your commission.

Low activation means people joined and didn’t move. Low conversion means affiliates sent traffic and your sales page didn’t close it, which shows up as clicks with no sales in your reporting. Uncompetitive commissions mean your partners chose someone else’s promo for that week.

Most first-time owners can’t tell which one they’re in, so they guess, and they usually guess “recruit more.” That’s the expensive guess. If your conversion rate is the problem, adding forty affiliates only means forty people watch you not convert.

Recruiting your first partners is the step that intimidates people most, and it’s the one with the clearest playbook. My free report Your First 100 Affiliates covers where to find your first partners, the outreach emails that get replies, and three affiliate sources most business owners never think to check.

Do you need a separate signup page for affiliates?

You need somewhere for affiliates to apply, but you don’t need to build it. The best first platforms host that page for you.

Building a signup page yourself means writing copy, designing a form, connecting the form to your affiliate database, and handling approval emails. That’s a week of work for something every program needs and nobody differentiates on. Then you have to maintain it.

Hosted signup solves this by giving you a URL you can paste into a recruiting email on day one. You customize the copy and the branding, and the platform handles the form, the database write, and the approval flow. It’s the difference between recruiting this week and recruiting next month.

One caution: hosted or not, decide your approval policy before you open the page. Setting up an affiliate program properly means knowing whether you’re auto-approving everyone or reviewing applications, because auto-approval hands your brand to people you’ve never evaluated.

How does AffiliateHQ handle the first-program problem?

I built AffiliateHQ because I kept watching capable business owners fail at the setup stage of a program I knew they could run. I’ve managed programs from zero to a million a month and from fifteen million to three hundred twenty-five million a year, and the software always assumed I already had a program.

The setup wizard runs seven steps and gets you live in one session. Commission structure, cookie duration, payment connection, terms, signup page, approval rules, and a test link you click yourself to verify tracking. No developer, no script pasted into a checkout template you don’t control.

Your signup page comes hosted. You customize the copy and the branding, and you have a URL to put in your first recruiting email before you close the browser tab.

Activation sequences run without you. New affiliates get a structured series of emails with promo ideas and deadlines instead of one welcome message and silence, which addresses the 95% problem directly rather than assuming you’ll remember to follow up during launch week.

And the AI Program Analyzer tells you which of those four failure modes you’re in when nothing happens. It reads your recruiting numbers, activation rate, conversion data, and commission position, then tells you what to fix first. It replaces the guess.

Every feature in AffiliateHQ maps to something I teach in The Book on Affiliate Management, which covers the full system behind building a million-dollar-a-month program. The book explains the strategy. The software runs it.

What should you ignore when choosing your first platform?

Ignore multi-currency support, sub-affiliate tiers, API access, and anything described as enterprise-grade. You will not use them this year, and evaluating them costs you weeks.

Also ignore per-affiliate pricing tiers when you’re choosing. Every platform charges more as you grow, and the difference between plans at 500 affiliates shouldn’t drive a decision you’re making at zero. Starting an affiliate program costs less than most owners assume, and the software line item is rarely what makes or breaks the math.

What I would not ignore: whether you can export your affiliate list. Programs outgrow platforms. If you can’t take your affiliate roster and their performance history with you, you’ve rented your partner relationships instead of owning them.

And check who answers when something breaks during a launch. A tracking bug on a Tuesday is annoying. A tracking bug during your biggest promotion of the year, with twenty affiliates emailing their lists and nobody responding to your support ticket, will cost you relationships you spent months building. Launching an affiliate program puts more load on your software in four days than the previous four months combined.

Frequently asked questions

Can I start an affiliate program without any software?

You can, with two or three affiliates, using unique coupon codes and a spreadsheet. It stops working around affiliate number five, when you’re manually reconciling codes against orders and someone disputes a commission. Most owners who start manually spend more time on reconciliation in month two than setup would have taken in week one.

How much should I budget for affiliate software for a first program?

Most standalone platforms run $50 to $300 per month at the starting tier. For a first program, pick based on setup speed and activation features rather than price, since the difference between a $59 plan and a $99 plan is trivial compared to the cost of a program that never launches.

Should I use an affiliate network instead of my own software for my first program?

Networks give you access to affiliates already on the platform, which shortcuts recruiting. You pay a network fee on top of commissions and you don’t own the affiliate relationships. For a first program with a specific audience, running your own usually recruits better, because your best first affiliates are your existing customers and partners.

How many affiliates do I need before the program produces revenue?

Plan on 30 to 50 signed up before you see consistent monthly revenue, since only a small fraction promote actively. Ten highly engaged affiliates will outperform a hundred passive ones, so weight your first recruiting effort toward people who already buy from you and already have an audience.

What happens if I pick the wrong platform and want to switch?

You export your affiliate list, import it into the new platform, issue everyone new links, and email them explaining the change. It’s a real project, usually a week, and the affiliates who were inactive stay inactive. Confirm you can export your roster before you sign up anywhere.

Do I need a lawyer to write my affiliate terms?

For a standard program with straightforward commissions, no. You need terms that cover refunds, prohibited promotional methods, cookie duration, payment timing, and termination. Start from a proven template, adjust it to your refund policy and payment schedule, and have a lawyer review it later if your program gets complex.

What to do this week

Pick your commission rate and cookie duration today. Those two decisions block everything else, and they take twenty minutes if you stop researching and choose.

Then set a two-hour block this week and configure the platform end to end, including clicking your own test link to confirm the tracking fires. If you hit a step that requires a developer, that’s your answer about the platform.

Publish your terms before you accept anyone. Then send your first ten recruiting emails to existing customers, because they already know your product and they convert better than anyone you’ll find cold.

If you want the setup handled in one session, with the signup page hosted, activation running without you, and something that tells you what’s broken when the program goes quiet, take a look at AffiliateHQ. I built it for the program I wish I’d had when I started.

The post What is The Best Affiliate Software for Your First Affiliate Program? appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

Affiliate marketing pays you a commission when someone buys through your unique link, one transaction, one payout. MLM (multi-level marketing) pays you mainly for recruiting other people who buy in and then recruit more people under you. The FTC draws the line the same way: a legitimate business pays you for sales to real customers, not for building a downline of recruits.

People ask me this constantly, usually right after a friend invites them to a “business opportunity” presentation that turns out to be selling supplements or leggings.

So let’s get specific about where affiliate marketing and MLM actually split, because they get lumped together a lot and they really shouldn’t be.

Is affiliate marketing just MLM with a different name?

No. The mechanics don’t match. When you join an affiliate program, whether that’s Amazon Associates or a course creator’s own program, you earn a commission only on sales you personally drive, usually somewhere between 4% and 50% of that one sale depending on the product and the margin behind it. You don’t get a cut of what anyone else earns, and nobody above you takes a slice of your commission either.

I’ve made everything from a $0.52 Amazon commission to a $1,000 payout on a single course sale. Both came from the same thing: someone bought a product because I recommended it. Neither came from signing up a “team” underneath me.

MLM works the opposite way. Your income depends heavily on how many people you recruit and how much product they, and the people they recruit, buy, not on how much you personally sell to actual outside customers. That’s the FTC’s own distinction, not mine.

If you’re still hearing that affiliate marketing is dying or too crowded to bother with, that’s the same fear-based pitch MLM recruiters lean on to get you into their program instead. Read Does Affiliate Marketing Still Work In 2026? for the actual numbers before you believe either pitch.

How does the FTC actually tell a legit MLM from a pyramid scheme?

The FTC looks at where the money comes from. Straight from its consumer guidance: “If the MLM is not a pyramid scheme, it will pay you based on your sales to retail customers, without having to recruit new distributors.” A pyramid scheme, by contrast, pays you “based mostly on how many people you recruit, not how much product you sell.”

The agency has also said publicly there’s no percentage-based test, no magic number like “70% of sales must go to real customers,” that automatically clears a company. Instead it looks at the whole compensation structure: does the plan reward recruiting over retail sales, and are distributors buying more product than they could ever use or resell just to stay “active” or qualify for a bonus? The FTC calls that second pattern inventory loading, and it treats it as a warning sign on its own.

LuLaRoe is the example most people already half-remember. The clothing company paid $4.75 million in 2023 to settle a Washington state lawsuit alleging it operated as a pyramid scheme, on top of an earlier $1.5 million settlement with California. Affiliate programs don’t carry that risk, because there’s no recruitment layer for a regulator to examine in the first place.

Do you have to recruit anyone to earn as an affiliate marketer?

No. A standard, single-tier affiliate program pays you for sales, period. You don’t need a downline, a team, or anyone signed up under you to keep earning. You can run an entire affiliate business alone, writing reviews, building an email list, posting on social media, and never recruit a single person.

Compare that to how MLM plans are built. Most compensation plans pay you a percentage of what the people you personally recruited sell, and often a smaller percentage of what their recruits sell too, several levels deep. Stop recruiting and your income usually stalls, even if you’re still personally selling product. Stop recruiting as an affiliate marketer and nothing changes, your commission on each sale stays exactly the same.

If you want to get into affiliate marketing the normal way, you apply directly to a company’s program or a network, and most programs approve you in a day or two. I wrote up the exact process in How to Get Accepted Into Affiliate Programs, and none of the steps involve recruiting anyone else first.

Do you have to buy inventory to become an affiliate?

No, and this is one of the cleanest ways to tell the two apart. Joining almost every affiliate program costs nothing. You sign up, get an approval email, and get a tracking link. You never buy the product to qualify for commissions, and you never hold inventory in a garage.

MLM often works differently. Many plans require an initial purchase, sometimes called a starter kit, and then ongoing minimum purchases to stay “active” and eligible for commissions on your downline. That’s the inventory loading pattern the FTC flags as a red flag, because it means people can be buying product to satisfy the compensation plan rather than because a real customer wants it.

Picking a real niche, one with actual buyers searching for actual solutions, is still the first decision that determines whether affiliate marketing works for you. I go through how to choose one in What Are The Best Niches For Affiliate Marketing?, and buying inventory never comes up, because it isn’t part of the model.

Are two-tier affiliate programs secretly MLM?

No, though this is the one place the two models get genuinely close, and I understand the confusion. A two-tier affiliate program pays you a small override, often 5% to 10%, when someone you referred into the program makes their own sales. It sounds like MLM at a glance.

The difference is what that override is tied to. In a two-tier affiliate program, the override comes out of the company’s marketing budget on a completed retail sale to a real customer, and your own direct commissions never depend on recruiting anyone. You don’t have to buy anything to participate, and you don’t lose income if you stop referring new affiliates. In MLM, the whole compensation plan is usually built around the recruiting layer, often several tiers deep, and staying eligible frequently requires ongoing purchases.

Two-tier structures exist on both the affiliate side and the program-owner side, and the mechanics matter for how you evaluate an offer. If you run or manage a program and want to see how a legitimate two-tier structure gets built, How To Run a Two-Tier Affiliate Program walks through the actual setup.

How is affiliate commission structured differently than MLM compensation?

Affiliate commission ties directly to one transaction’s value. A $100 product with a 20% commission pays $20, full stop, no matter who bought it or how they found your link. You’re not going to pay a $200 commission on a $100 product, and you’re not earning anything if nobody buys.

MLM compensation plans usually pay across multiple levels of recruits at once, on top of your personal sales. A plan might pay you 5% on your own sales, 3% on what your direct recruits sell, and 1% on what their recruits sell. On paper that looks like more ways to earn. In practice, the FTC’s own research shows most participants in legitimate MLMs make little or no money, and some lose money once they account for what they spent to join and stay active. Affiliate marketing has no equivalent buy-in, so there’s no equivalent downside. Worst case, you spend time on content that doesn’t convert.

How can you tell if an “affiliate program” is actually a pyramid scheme in disguise?

Watch for four things. First, does the program require you to buy product before you can earn, or to keep buying to stay “qualified”? Second, does it pay you for recruiting other affiliates rather than for sales you generate? Third, does the pitch focus more on the income opportunity than on the product itself? Fourth, does it push you to sell to your personal network of friends and family rather than to a market that actually wants the product?

A real affiliate program answers no to all four. You join free, you earn on sales you personally generate, and the company wants you marketing to people who genuinely want the product, not your relatives who feel obligated to buy from you once.

Building real trust with an audience, instead of leaning on a personal network, is what makes affiliate income last. The Affiliate Review Post Guide shows how to write reviews that rank on Google and convert, which is the legitimate version of “selling” in this industry.

Why do people mix these two up so often?

Because both involve a commission, a link or code, and the phrase “be your own boss.” Someone burned by an MLM pitch, or by a relative who wouldn’t stop texting about their “opportunity,” understandably gets skeptical the moment commission-based income comes up at all.

The gap shows up the moment you look at where the money actually originates. Affiliate commission traces back to one sale to one real customer. MLM income traces back through a recruiting chain that may or may not end in a real customer at all. Once you know to ask “does this pay me for a sale or for a signup,” the two stop looking alike.

If you’re brand new to the model and want the free version of “how does this actually work,” start with the Affiliate Marketing QuickStart Guide or my rundown of 7 Affiliate Marketing Myths Destroyed, which covers this exact confusion along with the other myths that keep people from starting.

Do you have to disclose your affiliate links the same way MLM sellers disclose their status?

Yes, and this is one place the FTC treats both models the same way. If you earn a commission from a link, you have to tell your audience, clearly and before they click, not buried in a footer or an about page. That applies whether you’re an Amazon affiliate, a course promoter, or an MLM distributor posting about your “favorite new obsession.”

The disclosure rule exists because the FTC cares about consumers knowing when someone has a financial incentive to recommend something, regardless of which compensation model is behind it. I break down exactly how to word it in How To Disclose Affiliate Links, and my full conversation on the topic is in FTC Disclosure Tips for Affiliate Marketers.

Frequently asked questions about affiliate marketing and MLM

Is affiliate marketing legal?
Yes. Affiliate marketing is a standard, legal marketing arrangement where a company pays a commission for sales generated through your unique link. It’s used by Amazon, most software companies, and thousands of course creators. The only legal requirement on your end is disclosing the relationship to your audience under FTC endorsement guidelines.

Can affiliate marketing turn into a pyramid scheme?
A standard single-tier or two-tier affiliate program can’t, because your commission always ties to a real sale rather than to recruiting. It could only start to resemble a pyramid scheme if a company required you to pay to join, buy inventory to stay active, or earn primarily by signing up other affiliates rather than by selling. Those are the four warning signs to check before joining any program.

Do affiliate marketers get paid for recruiting other affiliates?
Not in a normal single-tier program, no. Some programs offer a two-tier structure that pays a small override when someone you referred makes a sale, but that override comes from the company’s marketing budget on a completed transaction, not from a fee the new affiliate paid to join.

What’s the difference between affiliate marketing and network marketing?
Network marketing is another name for MLM. Both terms describe a model where distributors earn largely by recruiting and building a team, with commissions flowing through multiple levels of that team’s sales. Affiliate marketing has no team structure. You earn on your own sales only, and there’s no requirement to recruit anyone.

Is Amazon Associates an MLM?
No. Amazon Associates pays a commission, typically 1% to 20% depending on the product category, on purchases made through your link within a short cookie window. There’s no recruiting component, no fee to join, and no way to earn from anyone else’s sales. It’s a straightforward single-tier affiliate program.

How do you know if an affiliate program is legit before you join?
Check whether joining is free, whether you earn only on sales you personally generate, and whether the program requires you to purchase anything to qualify for commissions. If a “program” asks for money upfront or pays you to recruit other marketers instead of to sell product, treat that as a red flag regardless of what it calls itself.

Once you know a program pays on real sales and not on recruiting, the next question is how to actually plan a promotion that gets those sales. The Promotion Checklist Template is a free, reusable plan for running an affiliate promotion across email and social media without guessing at what comes next.

The post Affiliate Marketing vs. MLM: What’s the Difference? appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

If your audience is soccer parents, coaches, or anyone in the youth sports world, Train Daily might be the most promotable app you’ll come across. It solves a real problem, explains itself in one sentence, and pays 25% recurring commissions for the lifetime of every customer you refer.

What is Train Daily?

Train Daily is a soccer training app built around one idea: players who get more touches get better. The gap is what makes it interesting to promote. Coaches can’t be there every day. Parents don’t want to spend their evenings nagging kids to practice. And most kids, left to their own devices, will choose anything over going outside to do ball work.

Train Daily closes that gap by turning daily practice into a game. Players open the app, complete a short set of daily reps, earn points, protect their streaks, and compete on leaderboards against teammates. The same mechanics that keep kids glued to Duolingo are pointed at soccer development instead. Kids who resisted being asked to practice start doing it without being asked, because now there’s a streak to protect and a leaderboard to climb.

For parents, setup takes two minutes. The app delivers age-appropriate training automatically with video demonstrations, so a kid can practice at home with a ball and a phone. For coaches, it fills the gap between sessions. They can use a ready-made drill library, add their own content, reinforce coaching concepts with questions, and see exactly which players are putting in reps between practices.

Click here to request more information about the Train Daily affiliate program

How it Started

I built Train Daily because I kept watching the same thing happen with my own players and my own kids. They improved when they trained, and between practices, the ball just sat there.

The mechanic I kept coming back to was gamification. Kids will spend an hour protecting a Duolingo streak. I wanted them spending 15 minutes on touches with the same intensity. So that’s what Train Daily became: the streaks, the points, the badges, the leaderboards, all of it pointed at soccer development instead of vocabulary drills.

Who This Fits

This program is for you if your audience includes soccer coaches, club directors, or coaching educators, soccer parents, youth sports creators and YouTubers, soccer bloggers and newsletter writers, sports performance accounts, or parenting creators with a youth sports audience.

One detail worth knowing for your promotions: coaches can get started free. That removes a real barrier when you’re pitching to a coach or club director, because they can try Train Daily with their team before committing to a paid plan. Your recurring commission kicks in when they convert.

The Commission Structure

25% recurring commissions, for the lifetime of every customer you refer.

A customer isn’t a one-time payout. Families that use Train Daily through one season tend to stay through the next. Coaches who build it into their training culture keep paying for it. Your commission follows them the whole time.

25% on a subscription product with lifetime attribution puts Train Daily well above what most programs offer. For context, recurring commissions in the 20-30% range are what competitive subscription programs pay, and Train Daily sits at the high end of that. There’s no cap on how many customers you refer, and no expiration on your commission window.

Want a free guide that shows you exactly how I make $10,000+ per month in passive affiliate income from a single page? Grab The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Resources Page. Subscription products with strong retention are exactly what a resources page is built for, and Train Daily is a natural fit on any resources page for soccer families or coaches.

Click here to request more information about the Train Daily affiliate program

Why it Converts

The pitch is one sentence: kids need more touches, coaches can’t be there every day, and parents don’t want to nag. Train Daily solves all three problems at once.

And there’s real proof behind it. One club logged more than 100 hours of drills in a single week from 47 players. A coach reported his team came back from a two-week break sharper than when they left. Parents say their kids practice without being asked, which, if you’ve coached or parented a youth athlete, you know how rare that is.

That kind of result makes a review post easy to write. You lead with the problem every soccer family has, show the outcome one club got in a week, and the offer closes itself. A well-structured review post for Train Daily can rank for searches like “youth soccer training app” or “how to get kids to practice soccer more,” and because families sign up year-round, that traffic keeps producing commissions long after you publish.

If you want help writing a review post that actually ranks and converts, Review Post Pro is worth a look. It’s an AI tool trained on 300+ top-ranked product reviews. It cuts the time to write an SEO-optimized review from several hours to under 30 minutes. $39/month, 30-day money-back guarantee, requires ChatGPT Plus.

Train Daily is also a strong evergreen offer. Youth soccer doesn’t have an off-season for most families. Coaches are always looking for ways to keep players developing between sessions. Content you publish today can earn commissions two years from now, which makes any upfront effort worth it.

How to Get Started

If you have a soccer, youth sports, or parenting audience, the signup process is straightforward.

Click here to request more information about the Train Daily affiliate program

One more thing: if you want a repeatable system for doubling your affiliate commissions, grab the free on-demand training: How I Currently Make $3,874 a Week Without Creating a Single Product. Two hours, free, covers how to monetize from day one.

Click Here to Learn More About Our Recommended Affiliate Programs

Want to feature your affiliate program to more than 10,000 potential affiliates? Click here to learn how you can do so!

The post Affiliate Program: Train Daily Soccer Training App appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

Ad blockers break affiliate tracking when they block the third-party script or pixel that records a sale, not the affiliate link itself. Around 27% of US internet users run one, so a slice of your affiliate sales never reaches your reports. Server-side postbacks and first-party domain tracking close most of that gap.

An affiliate promotes your offer, sends real buyers, and then opens a dashboard showing fewer sales than she drove. She assumes you’re shorting her. You assume she’s exaggerating. Neither of you is lying. An ad blocker quietly ate the tracking event on some of those orders, and the sale landed in your order system with no affiliate attached to it.

This is a narrow, mechanical problem with a mechanical fix. I’ll show you what ad blockers intercept, why that turns real sales into invisible ones, and the two changes that recover most of the lost data. If you also want the wider picture of how clicks turn into commissions, How Affiliate Tracking Works covers the full chain.

Around 27% of US internet users run an ad blocker

Roughly 27% of US internet users run an ad blocker, and worldwide the figure sits closer to a third of all users. That share climbs higher among younger, more technical audiences and among people who found your offer through paid ads, because ad blockers are more common in exactly those groups.

The popular tools are uBlock Origin, AdBlock Plus, and Ghostery, plus the Brave browser, which blocks ads and trackers by default with nothing installed. Privacy Badger, made by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, learns and blocks trackers on its own as you browse.

So if a quarter of your traffic runs one of these tools, a quarter of your affiliate clicks are moving through a browser that’s actively trying to stop tracking. Not all of those clicks lose their attribution. But enough do to matter, and the higher your paid-traffic mix, the worse it gets.

Ad blockers match requests against filter lists like EasyList and EasyPrivacy

Ad blockers work by matching every network request your browser makes against filter lists, then blocking any request that matches a rule. EasyList is the community-maintained list that targets ad content. EasyPrivacy is the companion list that targets tracking scripts and known analytics and attribution domains.

When your page loads, the browser tries to fetch dozens of resources: images, scripts, pixels. The ad blocker checks each request’s domain and path against thousands of filter rules before it fires. A request to a domain on EasyPrivacy gets killed before it ever reaches the server. The rest of your page loads fine.

The rule is the domain, not the intent. Affiliate tracking pixels and conversion scripts often live on the same shared tracking domains that also serve ad networks. When a filter list adds that domain, every request to it dies, including the legitimate affiliate conversion event you need to pay a partner.

Ad blockers block the tracking script, not the affiliate link

Ad blockers rarely touch the affiliate link itself, because the click-through is a normal redirect your visitor chose to follow. Someone clicks a partner’s link, the redirect passes through your platform, sets attribution, and lands them on your product page. That first hop usually survives.

The part that dies is the conversion tracking that fires later, on your thank-you page, after the purchase. That’s a client-side script or a tracking pixel loaded from a domain the ad blocker recognizes. The click gets recorded. The sale that should close the loop does not.

This is the split most program managers miss. Your click counts can look healthy while your conversion counts run short, because the two events use different delivery methods and ad blockers hit them differently. Affiliate Attribution Models Explained gets into how that final credit gets assigned once the pixel does fire.

A blocked conversion pixel is one of a handful of reasons your numbers stop adding up, alongside cross-device buyers and self-referred orders. How Affiliate Tracking Works walks through each failure point and how to tell them apart before an affiliate accuses you of cheating.

Blocked pixels erase affiliate sales from your reports

A blocked conversion pixel produces a sale in your order system with no affiliate credited, which shows up as a discrepancy between your revenue and your affiliate platform’s reported revenue. The money is real. The attribution is gone. Nobody gets paid for a sale they earned.

A 10 to 20% gap between your order system and your affiliate platform is common and mostly harmless, since some of it comes from direct buyers and analytics quirks. A gap wider than that, especially on paid-traffic promotions, points at blocked tracking eating attribution you should be recording.

The damage compounds past the missed payout. An affiliate who drives 40 sales and sees 30 in her dashboard concludes your program steals from partners. She won’t send you an angry email. She’ll pull your offer from her next promotion and warn two friends. I’ve watched a tracking gap cost a client three partners who each would have produced six figures the following year.

If you want to separate honest tracking loss from actual bad actors gaming your numbers, Affiliate Fraud Prevention Tools covers the difference. Undercounting and overcounting are separate problems with separate fixes.

Server-side postback tracking records sales without the browser

Server-side postback tracking records a sale by sending the conversion straight from your server to your affiliate platform, so no browser and no ad blocker ever sit in the path. When a transaction completes, your server posts the order data server-to-server. There’s no script for a filter list to block.

This is the single most effective fix for ad-blocker loss, because it removes the browser from the recording step entirely. A postback (sometimes called a server-to-server or S2S callback) fires from code you control, using a click ID captured at the moment of the click, then matched to the order at checkout.

The tradeoff is setup work. Somebody has to wire the conversion event into your order processing or billing code, which usually means a developer touches your checkout once. For a program running heavy paid traffic or seeing consistent wide discrepancies, that hour of dev time pays for itself fast. How To Track Affiliate Performance covers which numbers to watch to decide whether you’ve crossed that threshold.

Tracking is one piece of a much larger build, and getting it wrong early costs you trust you can’t buy back. The Book on Affiliate Management is 300+ pages on the system I used to build a $1 million per month affiliate program in under two years, from recruiting through payouts.

First-party domain tracking hides your tracking from filter lists

First-party domain tracking routes your tracking through a subdomain of your own site, so requests go to a domain that filter lists like EasyPrivacy don’t recognize as a tracker. Instead of loading a pixel from a shared tracking domain flagged on EasyPrivacy, the browser loads it from something like go.yourbrand.com, set up with a CNAME record.

The mechanism is simple. Filter lists block by domain. A request to a well-known third-party tracking domain matches a rule. A request to your own subdomain does not, because no filter list has your custom domain on it. The tracking event survives the ad blocker because, from the browser’s view, it’s a first-party request to the site the visitor is already on.

First-party domain tracking and server-side postbacks solve the problem from two angles, and strong setups use both. The postback removes the browser from the sale-recording step. The first-party domain protects the browser-side events that remain, like the initial click log. Together they recover most attribution that a script-only setup on a shared domain loses.

Dedicated affiliate software with first-party tracking beats a script-only setup

Dedicated affiliate software with first-party tracking and server-side postbacks built in recovers attribution that a generic script-and-pixel setup loses to ad blockers, without asking your program manager to configure CNAMEs or write postback code by hand. The tracking method is the product’s job, not a project you assemble.

I’ve run affiliate programs for more than 20 years and won four Affiliate Manager of the Year awards, and every off-the-shelf platform I tried let me down on exactly this kind of detail. Whoever built the software had never run a program for a living. So I built AffiliateHQ, and yes, I own it, which is why I’ll tell you plainly where it fits and where it doesn’t.

AffiliateHQ uses first-party tracking and server-side recording so ad blockers and browser privacy tools have far less to intercept, and it maps to what I teach in The Book on Affiliate Management. If you’re comparing options, Best Affiliate Program Software and 14 Questions To Ask Before You Buy Affiliate Software lay out the criteria that matter, and how tracking is handled belongs near the top of that list.

Blocked tracking is one of the quiet ways an affiliate program bleeds money you never see. Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes is a free report on the errors that nearly wrecked my program, including the tracking gaps that make partners walk, plus how to solve each one.

How to tell if ad blockers are costing you sales

You can spot ad-blocker loss by comparing your order system’s total sales against your affiliate platform’s recorded sales for the same window, then watching whether the gap widens on paid-traffic promotions. A stable 10 to 20% gap is background noise. A gap that jumps to 30% or more during a paid push is blocked tracking.

Pull both numbers for your last three promotions and line them up. If the discrepancy tracks with how much paid or younger-audience traffic each promotion carried, ad blockers are the likely cause, since those groups block at higher rates. What Reports Should Your Affiliate Software Give You? covers which views make this comparison easy to run each month.

The other tell is a formerly strong affiliate whose recorded numbers quietly drop while her audience and effort stay the same. Before you assume she cooled off, check whether her audience skews technical. A privacy-heavy audience blocks more tracking, which drags her recorded conversions down even when her real sales hold steady. Affiliate Program ROI shows how these gaps distort the return math if you don’t account for them.

What to do next

Three moves, in order.

First, run the discrepancy check above on your last few promotions so you know whether ad blockers are costing you enough to bother fixing. If your gap sits inside 10 to 20% and holds steady, leave it alone and spend your time elsewhere.

Second, if the gap runs wide on paid traffic, add server-side postback tracking so the sale records without the browser, and set up first-party domain tracking so the browser-side events that remain stop matching filter lists. Most platforms that support both make this a settings change, not a rebuild.

Third, if you’re choosing or replacing your platform, put tracking method at the top of your checklist. First-party tracking and server-side recording built into the software beats bolting scripts onto a setup that ad blockers were designed to stop. The sales you recover are ones your partners already earned, and paying them correctly is the fastest way to keep them promoting.

The post Do Ad Blockers Break Affiliate Tracking? appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

Something is going to go wrong in your affiliate program eventually. A launch gets delayed. A tracking issue pops up. A commission changes. A promo doesn’t go the way you expected. The mistake most people make is waiting too long, saying too little, or trying to make the problem sound better than it is. In this episode, I’m showing you how to tell affiliates when something goes wrong so you can be honest, protect trust, manage expectations, and keep your partners confident even when the update isn’t the one they wanted to hear.

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Links Mentioned in this Episode

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How to 10X Your Sales WITHOUT Spending All Day on Social Media or Expensive Paid Ads

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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy

How to Plan Your Day as an Affiliate Manager

How to Fix the Biggest Problems Holding Back Your Affiliate Program

Affiliate Fraud: Red Flags Every Program Should Watch

How to Make Affiliate Webinars Convert Better

How to Find What’s Wrong with Your Affiliate Program and Fix It

Affiliate Program Support: 5 Things Your Partners Need

How to Tell Affiliates When Something Goes Wrong

Breaking bad news is never easy, especially when it involves your affiliates. But sooner or later, something is going to go wrong, something’s going to break, and we all need to know how to deal with these challenging situations in our affiliate program. So in this episode, I’m going to share how to master the delicate art of delivering less than ideal updates to your affiliates. You will learn how to maintain trust, how to manage expectations, how to and how to turn challenging situations into opportunities for growth. Now, this may not be the most fun episode I’ve ever done, but it is a must.

So what happens when things go wrong? It’s going to happen. As I said in the intro, things will happen, things will break, something’s going to go wrong. You’re going to have issues in your affiliate program. We’ll talk about some of the different types of things that can go wrong.But what do we do when those things go wrong? How do we react? What are the steps that we need to take to not only mitigate the bad news, but actually take advantage of it? I want this episode to offer up an opportunity to you that bad news, problems, mistakes, things breaking, all those kinds of things can actually be good news for your affiliate program. They can cause your affiliate program to grow.

And that sounds crazy, but that’s how we operate as humans. There’s a term called post traumatic growth, right? All these things, we would never wish upon anyone, we would never wish that somebody has to go through those life experiences, but they’re always better for it, or they’re usually better for it. If they use it as an opportunity, well, it’s to a much lesser degree and much lesser severity here. It’s the same thing.These are things we don’t want to happen. But there one of these things is going to happen to you. I’m going to list a few examples here of things that could go wrong. One of these is going to happen to you in the next three to five years. I guarantee it, they’re going to happen.Maybe multiples, maybe one thing is going to happen twice. I don’t know. Something is going to happen and you’re going to need to know how to react. You’re going to need to know how to make it less bad but also make it a, positive. So what are examples of some bad news that you Would have to communicate.

You know, the first one, the most obvious one for affiliate programs is the tracking is down. This is something that will happen to every affiliate program roughly every five to 10 years. It has happened to me multiple times with multiple programs, whether I was on a network or an in house program. The mechanism that controlled the tracking, not the website. But that’s another one, you know, unexpected downtime on your website.The tracking is down and this affects everyone. This affects all of your affiliates and it affects you. You know, you’re not able to pull up reports or anything like that. A lot of times if you’re on a network and the whole network goes down, that affects everyone. So let’s talk about the next one that the website downtime, specifically when it’s unexpected.

It is not bad news. If every few years you reach out to your affiliates, say hey, our website is undergoing regular maintenance on Tuesday night between 2am and 6am Eastern Time. That is not bad news. That’s a completely different thing. I’ve talked about how to communicate just in general with your affiliates.That’s something where you communicate in advance. You remind them, you remind them and you remind them that hey, if you know, keep your links up. But I probably wouldn’t send out a promo email that night. Don’t send out a promo email at 9 o’ clock that night. Don’t plan on sending one first thing the next morning just in case 6am does turn into 9am that would kind of be bad news.

Like hey, the downtime’s longer than we thought. But if you plan those in advance, they don’t have to be a problem at all. So unexpected downtime, your website crashes, your database goes down and orders aren’t processing. Something like that. Credit card processor doesn’t work.All those types of things something happened to impact conversions or the average order size. A part of your website went down or you can’t take orders from outside the United States or a funnel piece broke, split tests had a negative impact. Those types of things. Product is out of stock and it wasn’t anticipated. I’ll talk about that example later.That’s happened to me. Product recall, never had that one happen. Payment delays, that’s happened. You know, I had to pay late, reducing commissions due to increased cost or other factors where this wasn’t anticipated. And all of those have happened to me except the product recall.

I’ve had to deal with every single one of those at least one time. I’ve probably had to deal with tracking being down a dozen to 15 times I’ve had to deal with conversions or average order size, things like that. A couple dozen times, I’ve had a product go out of stock a couple of times I’ve never had a product recall. I’ve had payment delays probably five, six times over the last two decades. I’ve had to reduce commissions once.And I’ve had unexpected website downtime. I haven’t had it in almost a decade. Knock on wood, right? But I mean, I had it pretty frequently in the late 2000s, 2005 to 2010. We probably had it happen eight to 10 times.

We put a heavy load. the company that I started back then, we put a heavy, heavy load in our server and we never had enough firepower. And we had these ebbs and flows where we would have spikes in traffic and it wasn’t bot traffic, but it was like good traffic. And our site would just go down for like 15 minutes. And it was always frustrating.So all of these things have happened and it sucks. But how you deal with it. And it’s not like some great life lesson, right? You know, life sucks and things go wrong. But how you deal with it, by God, gosh, no.

But that is what matters. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, issues like this, if they’re dealt with properly, could actually be a huge plus for your program. Bouncing back from what seems like a devastating problem. It can strengthen your relationships with your affiliates. It can even make them trust you more.So how do we do that? How do we deal with these situations? So when the proverbial stuff hits the fan, right, what’s the first thing that we do? Well, the first thing you gotta do is stay calm, you know, especially when it’s something that is out of your control and it’s wreaking havoc like downtime. I’m assuming you’re not also your sysadmin for your server, right?

The network tracking goes down. When that happens, you got to stay calm. Like these are out of your control. Things like products running out, you usually at least have a little lead time to prepare. They you don’t run out of product, you don’t go from having a full shelves, we got enough product to last months to oh, we’re out of product.That doesn’t happen in a matter of seconds. Downtime and tracking issues can happen immediately. You can have tracking 1 second. You can have a website at 12:42am, M or PM and at 12:43 you don’t have a website, you don’t have tracking. But stay calm, take a deep breath.

Just take A deep breath if you have time. If it’s looking like your product is going to run out or that there’s going to be something, it’s again, usually you have a heads up. Product recalls typically don’t happen in a matter of seconds either. Never had that happen, but they don’t usually happen overnight. Usually there is some sort of heads up, like okay, we’re three days away from might you might have a product recall or payments being delayed.You don’t go from payments are being made today typically to oh, they’re not going to be made for a while. Although actually I have had one instance where that happened. So again, stay calm, take some deep breaths. You don’t have a lot of time because number two is be fast. That seems contradictory, but it’s not like I’m not saying take 500 deep breaths and go for an hour long walk.

Again, if you have to communicate bad news and you’ve got weeks of lead time, like okay, you know that the product is going to run out in three days, taking a half hour walk is going to be fine, but otherwise you got to be fast. The faster you acknowledge the issues, the better they must learn. Meaning the affiliates, your affiliates must learn about issues from you, not from other sources. So if you’ve got an affiliate Facebook group, and I recommend you do because it’s good for so many things, one of the problems is if they find out about it from other people, that’s a problem. Now I get it.

If, ah, 1242, your website’s up and you go to the bathroom and the website goes down right away and at 12:51 you come back from a bat from the bathroom or from lunch and your website’s down and you find out about it on Facebook from, that’s understandable. But again, don’t just ignore it, don’t just reply or start a new thread and acknowledge it. Right? So this initial contact should be short and should cover three main things. Number one, acknowledgment of the problem.

Just be clear about it. Here is the problem. I’m going to walk you through an email in a second. Here’s the problem. Number two, we’re working on it.Number three, I’ll keep you updated. So acknowledge the problem, state that you’re working on it. State that you’ll keep them updated. You don’t need a 10 point plan, you don’t need a link to email, just let them know you’re working on it. That’s it.It’s three sentences. Three sentences. That’s it so, number one, stay calm, take a deep breath. Number two, be fast. Number three, don’t sugarcoat.Don’t do the whole feedback sandwich thing where it’s like, you know, good news, bad news. Good news is the promo is going great. Bad news is our server’s down. Good news is once it’s back up, the promo will be great again. No, just cut to the chase.

Skip the good news part. There is no good news right now. The server is down, tracking is down, the product is about to be out or whatever. So be honest and direct. That’s the key here.Be honest and direct. I’m going to share some emails that I’ve sent in the past. All right? Now, I’m going to read these to you. If you want, just send me a text at 2602-1746-1926-0217-4619.I’m happy to send these to you. It’s not like an automated thing. So just text me, say, hey, can you send me the bad news emails? Or something like that. All, right.So here’s a couple of examples. The first one is just one that we used when tracking went down. And the subject line was tracking down for Shutterfly. Again, subject line, not bad news. Not heads up or make sure you read this or hey, John, no tracking down for Shutterfly.

If I don’t read the email, here’s what I know. The tracking is down for Shutterfly. That’s what we want. And I just said, hey, you know, first name, quick heads up. The affiliate tracking for Shutterfly is down.It has been for the roughly the past 15 minutes since 3:35 Eastern and gives them a specific time. We’re doing everything we can to get it back up and working properly and I’ll update you as frequently as possible. I’ve also created an update thread here and that linked to a Twitter thread. This was like 2013. It linked to a Twitter thread where I announced it and then I updated it every, you know, 10 minutes with just a quick, like, no word yet.

Haven’t heard back. Just talk to the network. They set an ETA of an hour. Boom. So I update there.If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. So again, quick heads up. Affiliate tracking’s down. I gave them the time. 15 minutes, 3:35pm we’re doing everything we can to get it back up.I’ll update you. Here’s where to find updates. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. That’s the email. That’s it.It covers those three things. Right. Acknowledgement of the problem. We’re working on it. I’ll keep you updated.That was probably one of the longest ones I’ve sent for a tracking issue, and it was five sentences long. All right, Another one. Product is about to run out. Okay. This was an unexpected product that we were going to run out of.

And the subject line was out of stock. Name a product. I’m not going to name this company here. Right. And just said, hey, first name.Just want to let you know so you’ll notice this one’s a longer one. Why? Because this is not like there’s a problem right now. And we’re working on it. Bye.You know, just want to let you know that we’re just about to run out of name of product. This is a bit of a surprise to us as a shipment from China is significantly delayed and we’re not sure when it will be back in stock. As of now, it looks like we will run out in approximately two to three days, but definitely by this upcoming weekend. This was sent on a Monday. If you planned any promotions for a name of product, I recommend pulling them until at least April 17 to be safe.

I think this was sent around April 1 ish. But I’ll keep you updated and let you know if anything changes. But there is almost no chance right now that we’ll be back in stock by April 3rd. But name of company is already working with another vendor to get a rush shipment in by April 13th. So the 17th gives us a little wiggle room.If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. And then I sent out another email a couple days later. Hey, we are definitely within 24 hours of running out. I would pull all of your links, et cetera, et cetera. At that point.I didn’t know for sure. And then I sent one like three or four days later. We will definitely have shipment on April 12, and they will be sellable on the 13th. So there we go for payment delay again, direct and to the point. Subject line commissions late by two to three days.

You know exactly what you’re getting out of this. The cool thing is if you don’t really care, you know, you’re. So you’re earning 30 bucks a month, and it’s not really like you’re active. You’re just kind of making. Who cares?You don’t even need to read it. you know, there’s two thirds of the affiliate programs. I’m. I’m in. I don’t care if the payments are late.By three days. I don’t even know when they’re due half the time. So it’s not a big deal. Now there’s a few where, like we got, a $24,812 payment coming. I kind of would like that on time.That’d be nice. But most of the time I don’t really care. So subject line commission is late by two to three days. Hey, first name. Just want to let you know in advance.

And it looks like affiliate commissions will be late by two to three days for October. Again, this is one where we found out last second it was an urgent thing. This was not like we knew, five days in advance, but it is a little bit longer of an email because it’s not one of those emails where it’s like, we already have the solution. So it’s a company name, just had, you know, name of their payment processor account shut down, and it’s doing everything they can to get it back up. Trust me, this sucks.And I hate that we’re going to be late. Since we don’t know when it will be back up. We’re going to use an alternative payment platform which we are setting up right now. Again, acknowledge the problem. We’re working on the issue.

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Sometime tomorrow, hopefully first thing in the morning, I’ll send a link to set up your payment information there. It then takes two business days to verify your information and two more to pay you, which puts us right at two days late. If for some reason everything is fixed with the other payment processor, we’ll issue those payments as soon as possible. If you have any questions, let me know. Notice I didn’t fill it with a bunch of gobbledygook about valuing them and we value your partnership and blah, blah, blah, blah.Right? No, I cut to the chase. I apologize. If it makes sense, I tell them we’re working on it and they will update them. That’s it.

Now I tell them I’m going to update them. Well, number four, remember, number one, stay calm, take a deep breath. Number two, be fast. Number three, don’t sugarcoat. Number four, you actually need to update them frequently, but not too frequently, because that gets annoying.So the best way to do this for things like downtime, tracking issues, all those things, create a blog post. Now, if your site’s down, that might not be doable because your site’s down. That’s why I actually usually host our affiliate blogs on a separate domain on a separate server. Usually our affiliate blog doesn’t get enough traffic. Few hundred visits a Day, if we’re lucky.

So I don’t even mind hosting that. Usually I host that on like the $20 a month WordPress hosting. That’s one of the reasons is like that way if the server goes down, I’ve still got the blog server up. So you put up a blog post and then you update that post and it just becomes like a running update, right. With the most frequent thing newest.you could do a Twitter, you know, X thread, you could do a Facebook post, you could do it in the affiliate Facebook group, whatever it is, just start a thread update with comments with any relevant updates. And then once it’s updated, then you put like final, hey, this is fixed, problem solved, yada yada. For big issues, you know, every two to three hours is a good mix between frequency and annoying. Even if it’s just to say no new updates, the team is working on it. If there are big updates, like the product is out of stock, then update them.

So in that example before, I think I said, you know, we’ll have the product around the 13th, so plan on the 17th. But I just found out that it’s moved up to the 12th. I told them it’s moved up to the 12th. That’s worth a post and maybe even an email, which is what I did. So number four, update them frequently, but not too frequently.Number five, when it’s fixed, communicate that quickly. So this is something you have to prepare for in advance. Okay, you know that it’s going to be fixed. You have time. If it’s the product out of stock, things like that, you got a lot of time, you got days probably.

But even if it’s the sites down, tracking’s down, you know it’s going to be fixed. So work on the email communicating that it’s fixed while it’s being fixed. And if that’s not practical, then just send out a quick it’s fixed and I’ll follow up later. So I’m going to give you two emails that I’ve sent. The first one is when I ran a big affiliate promo with a huge team and I didn’t have to be involved in fixing the problem.So I had time to craft a message to send in advance. It was a, product out of stock and now it’s back in stock. The second email is actually one where I was literally helping to reboot the server. We were bootstrapping this and I was the cto, the cso, chief sales officer and I ran customer service and I ran the affiliate program. I did a ton And I was also basically the, head of SEO.I mean, we were a small company. We had like 10 of us. We were running a almost a million dollar a month affiliate program. And I was doing all these things. So I was involved in all this.So it’s a different vibe, right? All right, so the first one. I’ve got time. I wrote this email. The subject line was, name of product back in stock.Hey, first name. It’s official. Name of product is back in stock. Yeah, baby. I can’t do a British accent apparently.I don’t know what that was. I’m just gonna keep that in. I should probably just insert. I think it’s a copyright violation. I should insert Austin Powers saying yeah baby there anyway.

And I had an image of Austin Powers saying yeah, baby. You know. I said, I know. It was a rough 11 days and I’m super grateful to our whole team for getting us back on track here. To make up for this problem, we’re running a huge promo on name a Product.Not only will customers save 20%, but we’re also paying you some huge bonuses. I then go on to explain the promotion, the bonuses, et cetera. I explain how we’re able to do that because the shipment from China will be there in five days. It’s actually been cleared through customs. So now we’re expecting all this extra product.Plus we have a local distributor. So I explain. You may be thinking like, hey, well, you just ran out of this product. Now you’re going to run a promo on it and offer us huge commissions. You’re crazy.

No, I explain why that, why able to do that. I give them their link, some new creative. We refreshed it during the out of stock period. So that’s the thing. Hey, here’s this nice thing we’re doing.We have brand new creative because we ran out of product. So we had time to update the creatives, created some new leaderboards, and it was a huge hit. Huge hit. This ended up being massive. We sold more of that product.I’ve got the numbers here. We sold more of that product in the second half of April of 2014 than we did in the entire first quarter of 2014. And it was not a seasonal product. It’s not like. Well, it’s cause summer.No, it was not a seasonal product. We sold more product in two weeks than we sold in 13 weeks before this happened. That’s how you can turn these into a positive. So the second one again, this is when we’re back to normal, right? I didn’t have time.

I didn’t have time to write a message. While I was helping to reboot servers and figure out what was going on. We had been down for about an hour and a half or so and I was busy that whole time. So I’m like, as soon as it was fixed, I’ve sat down and wrote the email and it just said subject line, we’re back up. If I had to do all over again, I probably would have put back online or something or servers back up or something.But again, I was trying to be fast, Said, hey, first name real quick. We’re back up and running. Total downtime was less than 90 minutes and we found the issue in the back end. I’ll, share more details later and we’ll make sure you’re compensated for the downtime. For now we’re going to keep an eye on things and probably take a quick nap.

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Smiley face. Thanks for your patience on this. Yeah, straight to the point, we’re back up and running. I don’t have time to get into the problem because that would be too long and I don’t, I don’t need to explain it. And take 10 minutes to write this and that’s 10 minutes longer.You think we’re down. But I shared exactly what was wrong. Less than 90 minutes and then we’re going to fix it. That’s what we put in that message. So number six, remember, number one, we gotta stay calm.Number two, we gotta be fast. Number three, do not sugarcoat it. Number four, update them frequently. Number five, when it’s fixed, communicate that quickly. And then number six, in the end, follow up with a debrief after you send the email saying things are fixed.

Want to follow up again with another email that’s got more details? So on that example where I said, you know, we’re back up, hey, boom, boom, boom, quickly, we’re back up and running. I would send up a follow up email. Depends on the time of day. Maybe later that day, first thing the next morning.Hey, as you remember, we were down. Remember earlier I said less than 90 minutes. I want to find out the exact amount m of time. We were down for 83 minutes. We’re down for 83 minutes yesterday.So I know that cost some of you some money. So we looked at the numbers. We, we still could see traffic coming in. There were no conversions. And basically we’re going to take your normal conversion rate and this is me not explaining here, but explaining to you.

And let’s say the day before you sent a hundred clicks and converted 10. That’s a 10% conversion. And during that 83 minutes of downtime, you sent 10 clicks. We’re going to pay you for a conversion. You would normally have made $20.We’re going to just give you $20 to make up for this. A lot of companies don’t do that. I do. It just makes sense. It’s the right thing to do and it makes them love you.Again, we want to use this as a positive. So we explain how we’re going to make it up to them. Not just that we’re going to, but we explain it in detail. And then I’ll say something like, I’m going to send one more email where I outline your exact numbers, blah, blah, blah. So this is a little bit longer email with details, right?

Sometimes they want to know the journey too, like how’d you solve the problem and how are you addressing it going forward? Those types of things. And then as I mentioned just now. So number six, follow up with a debrief. Number seven, make it up to them.Make it up to them. Pay those commissions for lost sales. We did the promo for the out of stock stuff. We knew far enough in advance that we didn’t need to make up for it per se, but I wanted to do something to make up for it. You know, they didn’t lose anything.We give them plenty of heads up. But afterwards when we were back up and running, like, hey, let’s do something to make this up to you. Let’s run this out of stock sale. If it’s tracking is down, you pay them for the lost commissions. If tracking is down and you have no concept of how much was lost, then, you know, you kind of got to make it up.

Well, you know, your average daily commissions earned over the past three weeks is $500. So you know, we were down for 1/10 of the day. So we’re going to pay you 50 bucks, you know, something like that. And you make it up, it will come back tenfold over the next year or two. So there you have it, how to communicate bad news to your affiliates.Number one, stay calm. Number two, be fast. Number three, don’t sugarcoat it. I’ve shared some examples. Use those as guides, like just get to the point.Like, man, I just cannot say it. Five sentences at a max on this initial email. Unless, again, unless it is a longer one where you got days in advance. Number four, keep them updated frequently, but not too frequently. Number five, communicate any kind of a fix as quickly as possible.

Update the blog post, update the thread update the group, update them via email, et cetera. And number six, make sure you follow up with the debrief. And of course, seventh, make it up to them. Fix it. Make it right.So there you have it. That is how you communicate bad news to your affiliates. I hope you never have to do it. But you know what? You’re going to, you’re going to have to do it.So make sure if you haven’t yet. I mentioned earlier, if you never texted me, shoot me a text. I’m happy to send you these emails. Like I said earlier, shoot me a text at 260-217-4619. That’s my favorite way to communicate.

I just love communicating with people via text and it’s real time and more personal than you know, sending me an email. So Text me anytime. 260-217-4619. I’m happy to send you the text of those emails. I’ve got links in the show notes to everything we talked about as well.And lastly, make sure if you haven’t yet hit subscribe so you do not miss the next episode. We’ll be talking about how affiliate managers spend their day. If you just want to see what’s a day in the life of an affiliate manager like it’s not as exciting as you might think it is. That’s a terrible sales way to sell this episode. No, it’s good.

You’re going to like it. So you want to know how we spend our days? Go check it out. Go check out this episode. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss it.I’ll see you then. Thank you so much for listening today. Remember to check out all of our deep dives into affiliate marketing at TheAffiliateGuide TV. And if you have a question, ask it at AskTheAffiliateGuide.com who knows, maybe you even be featured on an upcoming episode.And lastly, if you haven’t yet, make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you’re listening to this episode.

The post How to Tell Affiliates When Something Goes Wrong appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

Going full-time as an affiliate marketer comes down to two numbers: how much stable monthly commission you’re pulling, and how many months of expenses you have sitting in the bank. Hit both and you can quit with a real safety net instead of a prayer. Below is the runway math, the income floor to aim for, and how to keep one dead program from sending you back to a cubicle.

Most people quit their job too early or too late. Too early, and they burn through savings while a promising side income is still one bad month from zero. Too late, and they spend three extra years miserable at a desk while their affiliate income already covers rent twice over. The trick is knowing exactly which side of that line you’re on, and the answer is math, not a gut feeling.

I’ve watched hundreds of affiliates make this jump. The ones who make it stick almost never got there on a single lucky launch. They built stable income across a few programs, saved a runway, and treated the decision like a business owner instead of a dreamer. Let’s walk through how to do the same.

How much affiliate income do you need before you quit your job?

You need affiliate income that covers your full monthly expenses for at least three straight months before you quit, and ideally covers them 1.5 times over. Not one good month. Three in a row, because a single big month can be a fluke and three months is a trend.

Say your household runs on $4,000 a month. Your target isn’t $4,000 in affiliate commissions once. It’s $4,000 or more, three months running, with $6,000 as the number that lets you sleep. That buffer covers the months a promotion flops, a program pauses, or your best offer changes its terms.

Averages hide the danger here. If you earned $2,000, then $9,000, then $1,500 over three months, you averaged $4,167. On paper you hit the target. In practice you have one great month propping up two months that wouldn’t pay your mortgage. Look at your floor, not your average. Your floor is the lowest of your recent months, and your floor is what you live on.

For a broader picture of what affiliates at different stages pull in, I broke down the real ranges in how much do affiliate marketers make? Read that for the earnings expectations. This post assumes you already have income coming in and want to know when it’s safe to depend on it.

The runway math: months of expenses saved plus stable monthly commissions

Save six months of full expenses in cash before you hand in your notice. That’s your runway, and it exists so that a slow quarter doesn’t force you back into job applications the moment things dip.

The math is simple. Take your monthly expenses, multiply by six. At $4,000 a month, that’s $24,000 sitting in a boring savings account you don’t touch. If that number feels impossible, it’s telling you something useful: you’re not ready yet, and quitting now would trade a steady paycheck for a countdown clock.

Here’s why six months and not one or two. Affiliate income lags your effort. You publish content in January that ranks and earns in April. You build an email list for months before it converts at scale. When you go full-time and pour more hours in, the payoff shows up 60 to 90 days later, not next week. Your runway covers that gap between doing the work and seeing the money. Most affiliates underestimate the lag, which I get into in how long does it take to make money with affiliate marketing.

Combine the two rules and you get a clean go signal. Three months of commissions covering your expenses, plus six months of expenses in savings. Hit both and quitting isn’t a gamble. It’s a calculated step with a net under it.

Before you build a runway, you need to know what your income can reach without your own product to sell. In my free masterclass, How I Currently Make $3,874 a Week Without Creating a Single Product, I walk through how I earn consistent weekly commissions promoting other people’s stuff, which is the exact kind of predictable income you want stacked up before you quit.

Why relying on one affiliate program is the fastest way back to a job

One program paying most of your bills is the single biggest risk to your full-time plan, because you don’t control that program and the people who run it can change the deal overnight. I’ve seen affiliates lose 60% of their income in a week when a merchant cut commissions, and there was nothing the affiliate could do about it.

The ways a single program can wreck you are boring and common. A merchant drops the commission rate from 40% to 20%. A program shortens its cookie window from 60 days to 24 hours. A company gets acquired and shuts the affiliate program down entirely. A product you’ve built your whole business around gets discontinued. None of these are rare. All of them have ended full-time affiliate careers that leaned on one horse.

This is why depending on one program feels like freedom right up until it feels like unemployment. You quit your job to stop having a single boss who controls your income, then you accidentally recreate the same setup with a merchant who never even hired you. Spreading your income out is the fix, and it’s the difference between a program change being an annoying dip versus a five-alarm fire. A few more of these traps show up in affiliate marketing mistakes that kill your commissions.

If you’re wondering whether the whole model is stable enough to build a career on, that’s a fair question, and I answered it with current numbers in does affiliate marketing still work in 2026? Short version: the channel is healthy. The risk isn’t the industry. It’s putting all your eggs under one merchant.

How to diversify across programs and niches

Aim for no single affiliate program making up more than 40% of your income, spread across three to five programs minimum. That way, losing your biggest earner hurts but doesn’t end you. You take a punch, not a knockout.

Start with programs, since that’s the faster fix. If one product pays for 80% of your life right now, your job over the next few months is finding two or three more offers your audience already wants. They don’t have to match your top earner dollar for dollar. Three programs each covering 25 to 30% of your income beats one covering 80%. Picking those extra offers well is its own skill, which I cover in how to choose an affiliate program to promote.

Diversifying across niches is the slower, sturdier move. If your entire income depends on the weight-loss space and Google changes how it treats health content, your whole business feels it at once. A second niche, even a small one, gives you ground to stand on when one market gets rocky. You don’t need five niches. Two solid ones your audience already cares about beat scattering yourself thin across markets you barely understand. If you’re picking a second lane, start with the best niches for affiliate marketing.

Recurring commissions deserve a spot in your mix too. A software tool that pays you every month a customer stays subscribed builds a baseline of income that shows up whether or not you publish anything that week. Ten recurring programs each paying $200 a month is $2,000 landing in your account before you lift a finger. That baseline is what turns a scary full-time leap into a manageable one.

One of the sturdiest income sources I’ve built is a single resources page that quietly earns from products my audience already uses. I explain exactly how I make over $10,000 a month from one page in The Ultimate Guide To Creating A Resources Page, a free report that shows you the setup and the five keys to making it convert.

What a realistic full-time affiliate income floor looks like

Set your income floor at your current take-home pay plus roughly 30%, because as a full-time affiliate you’re now covering your own taxes, health insurance, and the months without a promotion. If your day job pays you $60,000 after taxes, your affiliate business needs to clear closer to $78,000 to leave you in the same spot.

That 30% surprises people. As an employee, your company hides a lot of costs from you. They pay part of your taxes, they often subsidize your health insurance, they give you paid time off. Go full-time on your own and every one of those becomes your bill. Quit for the exact dollar amount of your salary and you’ll feel poorer, because you are, once the hidden costs land on you.

So aim higher than a straight swap. A useful floor is enough monthly commission to cover your expenses, plus a third again on top for taxes and the slow months. Once you clear that consistently, you’re not replacing your income, you’re improving it. Two levers raise that floor faster than anything else. First, negotiate better rates on the programs you already promote hard, which works more often than affiliates expect, and I show how in how to negotiate higher affiliate commissions. Second, grow the audience you own instead of renting attention, because a bigger email list compounds every promotion you run. A simple lead magnet is the on-ramp, covered in how to use a lead magnet to grow your affiliate income.

Hitting a full-time income floor isn’t about the size of your following. Some of the highest earners I know have modest audiences and still out-earn people with ten times the reach. I broke down how they do it in The 7 Secrets of Overachieving Affiliates, a short report on why small affiliates consistently punch above their list size.

Your first 90 days as a full-time affiliate marketer

Treat your first 90 days full-time like a job you’d be embarrassed to get fired from, because the freedom that makes affiliate marketing appealing is also what sinks people who suddenly have no boss. Set work hours. Keep them. The people who fail at going full-time usually don’t fail at marketing. They fail at showing up when nobody’s making them.

Spend the first month building systems, not chasing quick wins. Block your content production into fixed windows. Batch your emails. Pick two or three programs to focus on hard instead of dabbling in ten. A full-time schedule with no structure turns into a part-time result with full-time anxiety, and you’ll be checking your commission dashboard 40 times a day instead of doing the work that fills it.

Put most of that new time into the assets you own. Publishing more content and growing your email list are the two moves that pay off for years, not days. A list of engaged subscribers is the closest thing to a stable paycheck an affiliate gets, since you can promote to it on demand instead of praying the algorithm smiles on you. How big that list needs to be depends on your niche and offers, which I work through in how many email subscribers do you need to make money.

Keep watching your floor, not your ceiling, through this whole stretch. A $15,000 month feels amazing and means little if the next two months drop to $2,000. You’re not trying to hit a home run in your first 90 days. You’re proving you can produce a steady, boring, reliable income without a manager standing over you. Do that for a quarter and you’ve got a real business.

If you want a plug-and-play system for getting started and staying consistent in those first weeks, grab my free Affiliate Marketing QuickStart Guide. It lays out the step-by-step method for building income without your own product, plus copy-and-paste email templates you can use the day you go full-time.

What to lock in before you hand in your notice

Three things need to be true before you tell your boss you’re done. Lock these in and the leap stops being scary.

First, hit three straight months of affiliate commissions that cover your full expenses, and ideally cover them 1.5 times. Judge yourself by your lowest month, not your average, because your lowest month is what you’ll live on when a promotion underperforms.

Second, save six months of expenses in cash you won’t touch. That runway covers the 60 to 90 day lag between the extra work you’ll pour in full-time and the commissions that work produces. Without it, one slow quarter drags you back to job listings.

Third, spread your income so no single program makes up more than 40% of it, across at least three programs. Add recurring commissions where you can, so a baseline lands every month whether or not you publish. That spread is what keeps a merchant’s decision from becoming your unemployment notice.

Do those three, then hand in your notice. You won’t be quitting on hope. You’ll be quitting on numbers you already proved, which is the only kind of quitting that tends to stick.

Learn How My Resources Page Makes Me $10,000+ Each Month… and How You Can Create One Easily!  Grab The Free Guide Here

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AffiliateHQ is the best affiliate software for authors and book launches because it solves the problem authors have, which is getting busy people to promote. Book commissions are too small to motivate anyone on their own, so the software has to run contests with threshold prizes, lock in dated mailing commitments, and hand partners ready-to-send copy.

I’ve run something like 16 affiliate book launches. Jeff Goins, Lewis Howes, Brian Tracy, my own two books. And I can tell you the thing that kills author launches has almost nothing to do with click tracking.

It’s that 40 people said yes and 9 of them mailed.

What is the best affiliate software for authors and book launches?

AffiliateHQ is the best affiliate software for authors because it’s built around partner motivation instead of partner tracking. For a book launch, the software has to answer one question well: what makes a promotional partner who owes you nothing send an email on Tuesday morning?

Most affiliate platforms answer a different question. They tell you how many clicks came from Sarah’s newsletter and what her conversion rate was. Useful after the fact. Worthless on day three of a five-day launch when Sarah hasn’t mailed and you have no idea whether she forgot, lost the swipe copy, or never intended to promote at all.

AffiliateHQ handles the recruiting-through-launch-week part of the job. Commitment Plans turn “yeah, I’ll promote” into a dated schedule you can both see. The contest engine runs ranked and threshold prizes at the same time, so a partner who sells 20 copies still wins something. And the Training Hub holds swipe copy, graphics, and links in one place with completion tracking, so you know who opened the materials before launch week starts.

Before you pick software, get the launch mechanics right. I walked through the full timeline, what to send partners and when, on The Affiliate Book Launch Blueprint. It covers the exact sequence we’ve used on more than 10 bestsellers, including the mistakes that nearly cost us on my own launch.

What makes a book launch different from a normal affiliate promotion?

Three things separate a book launch from a course or software promotion: the commission is tiny, the window is short, and your partners are peers doing you a favor rather than professionals chasing revenue.

Start with the money. A $20 book paying 10 percent earns a partner $2 a copy. Sell 50 copies and they’ve made $100. For someone with a 30,000-person list, $100 doesn’t justify writing an email, let alone three. Compare that to a $997 course at 40 percent, where a single sale pays $399, and you can see why the playbooks don’t transfer.

Then the window. Course launches run five to seven days of open cart, but the first week of book sales is what publishers watch, what drives list placement, and what determines whether bookstores reorder. If a partner mails on day nine, you got a sale but you lost the launch impact.

And the partners themselves. Professional affiliates promote what pays. Your book partners are other authors, podcasters, and friends in your niche who said yes because they like you. That’s a completely different motivational problem, and it’s the one your software either helps with or ignores.

Why does commission math fail for book launches?

Commission math fails because you can’t pay enough per copy to motivate anyone, and raising the rate doesn’t fix it. Doubling a $2 commission to $4 turns a $100 payday into a $200 payday. Neither number moves a busy person’s calendar.

Authors try to solve this by adding a bonus package or a companion course with a real commission attached, and that helps. But the underlying issue stays. Your partners aren’t optimizing for income when they promote your book. They’re promoting because they believe in you, because you promoted them last year, or because they want their name attached to something that hits a list.

So stop trying to win on payout and start competing on everything else. Make it easy. Make it fun. Make it visible. That’s where running an affiliate contest that motivates people earns back far more than a commission bump ever would.

How do contests motivate partners when the commission is tiny?

Contests work because a $300 prize for selling 25 copies is worth 15 times the commission on those same 25 copies. You’ve changed the reward from $50 to $350 without changing your commission rate at all.

The mistake I see constantly: authors run a ranked-only leaderboard. Top 3 win. Which tells partner number 12 on day two that she can’t catch the podcaster with the 200,000-person list, so she stops trying. You just deactivated most of your roster with a prize structure.

Run both at once. Ranked prizes at the top for the big partners who want to compete, and threshold prizes underneath so that anyone who sells 10, 25, or 50 copies wins something specific. AffiliateHQ runs both structures simultaneously and shows each partner their live progress toward the next threshold, which is the part that keeps them mailing on day four.

Prizes don’t have to be expensive. A signed first-edition box for everyone who sells 25 copies costs you very little and means more to another author than a check would. I broke down the selection process in picking prizes for your affiliate launch.

If you’re staring at a launch date with no partners lined up yet, start with recruiting. Your First 100 Affiliates is my free report on the strategies I used to recruit 604 affiliates and build a $1.1M per month program in 18 months, including the email templates and three partner sources most authors never think to check.

How do you turn a vague yes into a dated mailing schedule?

You ask for specific dates in writing before launch week, and you put that answer somewhere both of you can see it. A partner who has written down “Tuesday morning, Thursday afternoon, Friday final call” mails roughly five times more than one who said “sure, count me in.”

This is the highest-return thing I do on a book launch, and most authors skip it because it feels pushy. It isn’t. Your partners are managing eight other things, and a vague commitment loses to whatever has a date attached.

Commitment Plans in AffiliateHQ handle this. The partner picks their send dates during onboarding, the plan shows up in their dashboard, and you can see at a glance which of your 40 partners have committed to what. On day two of launch week, you know exactly who’s behind schedule instead of guessing.

Then you can send a targeted note to the eight people who committed to Tuesday and haven’t mailed, rather than blasting all 40 with a reminder that annoys the ones who already did their job. Segmented broadcasts with merge tags pulling each partner’s live numbers make that a two-minute task instead of an afternoon.

What should you give partners so they never ask what to send?

Give them three emails written and ready to paste, five social posts, two graphics sized for Instagram and one for a newsletter header, their affiliate link, and the launch dates. Anything a partner has to write themselves is a reason to postpone.

I’ve watched authors lose half their launch to this. The partner meant to promote. She sat down Tuesday morning, opened the email you sent three weeks ago, found a link to a Google Drive folder, couldn’t remember the password, and moved on to the next thing on her list. That’s not a motivation failure. That’s a friction failure, and it’s entirely preventable.

AffiliateHQ’s Training Hub holds all of it in one place with module completion tracking, so you can see which partners opened the materials and which haven’t logged in since they signed up. That second list is your call list. Two weeks out, not two days out.

Training your affiliates properly and warming up your partners before the launch both go deeper on what to include and when to send it.

Selling books through partners is a specific skill, and it works whether you’re traditionally published or self-published. How to Sell 10,000 Copies of Your Book is my free training on doing it without major media or paid ads. It’s the same approach we used on my own launch.

Do you need affiliate software for a book launch, or is a spreadsheet fine?

A spreadsheet works up to about 10 partners. Past that, you’ll spend launch week doing manual math instead of talking to the people who could still mail.

Here’s what the spreadsheet approach costs you. You can’t show partners their live sales count, so they can’t see they’re four copies from a prize. You can’t tell who opened the swipe copy. You can’t segment a reminder to the six people who committed to Wednesday. And you’re calculating contest standings by hand at 11pm during the exact week you should be doing podcast interviews.

Most authors I work with cross that line faster than they expect. You start planning for 15 partners, three of them introduce you to two more each, and by launch week you’re managing 38 people. If you’re running a real affiliate book launch rather than asking a few friends to share a link, you want software.

What should authors look for when comparing affiliate software?

Ask every platform one question during the demo: what does your software do, on its own, to make a partner who hasn’t promoted go promote? Watch how quickly they change the subject back to dashboards and attribution windows.

Beyond that, four things matter for a book launch specifically. Contest support that includes thresholds and not only rankings. A way to record and display partner commitments. A hosted place for training materials that doesn’t require you to build a page. And Amazon-aware tracking expectations, since most book sales happen on a retailer site you don’t control and no platform can attribute those perfectly.

That last point deserves honesty. If your book sells through Amazon, you cannot track individual affiliate sales the way you would on your own checkout. Authors handle this by running the contest on a separate action, usually receipt submissions on a bonus page, and treating that as the sales record. Good software lets you feed those numbers in and run the contest off them. I covered the broader platform comparison in choosing the right affiliate program software.

What to do next

Pull up your last launch, or your planned partner list if this is your first book. Count how many people said yes. Then count how many of those you could name a send date for right now.

If that second number is under half, your problem is commitment, and no amount of better tracking fixes it. Fix that first by asking every partner for dates in writing.

Then look at your prize structure. If you only reward the top three, go find where partner number 14 stopped. It was day two. Add thresholds at 10, 25, and 50 copies and watch what happens to the middle of your roster.

Then look at your materials. If a partner can’t promote in under 10 minutes without emailing you a question, you’re going to lose sends to friction during the only week that counts. Finding partners for your book is step one, and using affiliate marketing as an author covers the longer-term revenue side. AffiliateHQ is where I put the launch-week pieces into one platform so authors stop rebuilding this by hand every book.

Every feature in the software maps to something I teach, because I built it after 20 years of watching other platforms miss the point. The Book on Affiliate Management covers the full system across 300 pages, and AffiliateHQ runs it for you.

Frequently asked questions

Can I track Amazon book sales through affiliate software?

Not individually. Amazon doesn’t pass affiliate attribution back to third-party platforms for your book. Authors work around this by running the promotion through a bonus page where readers submit their receipt, then using those submissions as the sales record for commissions and contests. Your software should let you import or log those numbers and run standings off them.

How much should I pay affiliates for a book?

If you sell direct, 20 to 40 percent of the book price is normal, though that’s only $4 to $8 on a $20 book. Most authors add value elsewhere: a commission on a companion course, a paid bonus bundle, or contest prizes worth far more than the per-copy payout. The prize budget usually does more work than the commission rate.

How many affiliates do I need for a book launch?

Twenty committed partners beat 100 who signed up and vanished. On the launches I’ve run, roughly a quarter of recruited partners do the majority of the sales. Aim to recruit 40 to 60 for a first book, expect 15 to 20 to promote seriously, and spend your effort on making those 20 successful rather than chasing the rest.

When should I start recruiting partners for my book?

Six months out at minimum, and a year is better. Podcasters book guests two to three months ahead, and newsletter writers plan their calendars weeks in advance. Authors who start recruiting eight weeks before pub date end up asking busy people to rearrange schedules that are already full, and most of them say no politely.

Do I need affiliate software if my publisher is handling the launch?

Yes, because your publisher isn’t running your partner program. Publishers handle retail placement, publicity, and distribution. The author almost always owns partner recruiting and management, and I’ve never seen a publisher provide software for it. Assume that piece is on you.

Does affiliate software work for self-published authors?

It works better, because self-published authors usually sell direct from their own site alongside retail, which means real tracking on at least part of the sales. If you sell a bundle or course version directly, you can attribute those cleanly and run the whole contest off verified numbers instead of receipt submissions.

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The affiliate marketing experts most worth following split into two camps: people who build and run affiliate programs, like AM Navigator founder Geno Prussakov and Pepperjam founder Kristopher Jones, and people who make a living promoting other companies’ products, like Pat Flynn and Michelle Schroeder-Gardner.

Type “best affiliate marketing experts” into ChatGPT right now and you’ll probably get a handful of names, a lot of hedging, and maybe a dead link or two. Almost nobody in this industry has published a clean, specific answer to that question. This is one. Twelve people, split between the ones who run affiliate programs for a living and the ones who make a living promoting other people’s products, each with a real number attached to what they’ve actually built. No vague “affiliate marketing guru” credit here. If a name is on this list, there’s a dollar figure, a company, or a book behind it, and you can go verify it yourself.

Business owners building a program need both camps. The management side teaches you how to structure, recruit, and pay affiliates without wrecking your margins. The marketer side teaches you how the affiliates you recruit actually think, because most of them started exactly where these people did: broke, unknown, and willing to promote a product they believed in for a commission check.

Affiliate management and agency experts worth following

This group runs affiliate programs and agencies for a living. If you’re not sure what that job even covers, read What Does an Affiliate Manager Do? (Complete Job Description) first, since each person below either does that job or built a company around doing it for other people.

I’m on this list because leaving myself off it would be dishonest. In 20+ years of running affiliate programs, I’ve recruited over 330,000 affiliates, and the ones I recruited have generated more than $1 billion in sales for my clients and me. I built one program from $0 to $1 million a month in under two years, and recruited 604 affiliates to hit $1.1 million a month in 18 months at another. I’ve published over 700 episodes of my podcast, The Affiliate Guy, written more than 500 articles on affiliate management, and written two books: The Book on Affiliate Management, which covers the program side, and Turn Your Passions into Profits, which covers what to do before you have a program worth managing.

Geno Prussakov founded AM Navigator, an affiliate management agency, and has written six books on affiliate program management since 2007, including Affiliate Program Management: An Hour a Day. He also founded AM Days, a conference dedicated entirely to affiliate management, and teaches as a lecturer at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. He’s given more than 60 documented interviews since 2007 and served as a judge for the Performance Marketing Awards. If you want the systems-first, academic side of this industry, Geno’s the name that shows up first.

Kristopher Jones founded the affiliate network and agency Pepperjam in 1999 and sold it to eBay Enterprise in 2009. His SEO book has sold more than 100,000 copies across three editions. Pepperjam is still a network program owners consider today, which makes Jones a rare example of someone who built the infrastructure the rest of the industry runs on, not just advice about it. Since then he’s founded several other companies, including the SEO agency LSEO.com and the investment fund KBJ Capital, which has raised nearly $40 million across its portfolio companies.

Lee-Ann Johnstone runs KonverJ, an affiliate management agency previously known as Affiliate Insider, that has driven more than £55 million in client revenue across 75+ brands through a network of 5,000+ affiliates. She’s spent two decades building affiliate programs internationally, and it shows up in her client list: brands like Semrush, Deel, and Sage, plus 30+ technology and network partnerships that smaller, single-country agencies typically skip.

Rae Hoffman, known online as Sugarrae, co-founded the SEO and affiliate agency PushFire in 2012 and built a reputation for blunt, no-nonsense advice about link building and search-driven traffic. She stepped down as PushFire’s CEO in 2018 to move into real estate, but her older interviews and posts are still some of the most-referenced material from affiliate marketing’s SEO-heavy era.

I built The Affiliate Guy brand by accident, not by plan, and I explain how that actually happened in I Didn’t Want to be the Affiliate Guy. It’s the more honest version of how most of the names on this list ended up where they are.

Numbers like $1 million a month in under two years don’t happen by accident, and I get asked constantly how I actually did it. The full system is in The Book on Affiliate Management, my 300+ page book with more than $1,000 in bonuses included.

Independent affiliate marketers who built real income from commissions

The next four built their income from the other side of the table: promoting products instead of managing the affiliates who promote them. If you’re building a program, these are exactly the kind of people you want to recruit as super affiliates, because they already know how to sell.

Michelle Schroeder-Gardner runs the blog Making Sense of Cents and has earned more than $5 million since 2011, roughly half of it from affiliate marketing. She hit $10,000 a month by year two, $50,000 a month by year four and a half, and $100,000 a month by year five, built on a mix of affiliate links, sponsored posts, and two courses she created teaching other people to do the same thing.

Pat Flynn made $3 million in passive income over six years, mostly through affiliate commissions from niche sites built around unlikely topics: a LEED exam study guide, a security guard training site, a food truck resource hub. His first affiliate product, an ebook and practice exam bundle for architects, made him over $7,000 in its first month back in October 2008. He turned that into Smart Passive Income, one of the longest-running names in the space.

John Chow grew his blog, johnchow.com, to more than $40,000 a month in affiliate and ad income within two years of starting it, pulling in $360,000 in 2008 and $500,000 in 2009. He published those numbers publicly every month, which was unusual at the time and made him one of the first bloggers people trusted specifically because he showed his math.

Zac Johnson has been making money online since 1995, and his blog readers alone have referred more than $5 million in revenue to affiliate networks over the course of his career. He’s one of the few people from affiliate marketing’s earliest era still actively publishing and speaking about it today.

The next generation of affiliate marketers to watch

These three came up more recently, and they’re still active, which makes them worth following in real time instead of just studying secondhand.

Matthew Woodward published monthly income reports for nearly six years, documenting his blog’s growth from zero to $1 million and building an audience of more than 180,000 subscribers along the way. He’s won eight awards for the blog and now runs the SEO agency Search Logistics, where most of his current affiliate and SEO work lives.

Ian Fernando has spent more than 15 years as a media buyer and affiliate marketer, and by 2013 he’d scaled his campaigns to roughly $100,000 a day in ad spend, enough that his team had to split payments across multiple credit cards just to keep cash flow moving. He’s since shifted toward pay-per-call lead generation in health, wealth, and relationship niches, and published his own book, The Incomplete Guide to Affiliate Marketing.

Spencer Haws built Niche Pursuits into one of the most-read sites on niche websites and SEO, then sold his software company, Long Tail Pro, in February 2016. He kept a 20 percent ownership stake with two years of seller financing built into the deal, a structure that let him stay invested without staying in day-to-day operations.

I ran programs on generic affiliate software for years before I hit the same wall most of the people in this post eventually run into: it wasn’t built by anyone who’d actually run a program for a living. I explain why that pushed me to build my own in What is AffiliateHQ?

How to actually learn from any of them

Following these people is step one. Turning what they know into your own program is step two.

If you’re still deciding whether to run your program yourself or bring in help, start with What Kind of Affiliate Manager Is Best: In-House or Outsourced? Prussakov, Johnstone, and Hoffman all built agencies because plenty of business owners land on “hire it out,” and if that’s you, How to Hire an Affiliate Manager and How to Find and Hire the Right Affiliate Manager: The Ultimate Guide cover the actual hiring process, not just the decision to do it.

If you’re keeping the job in-house, spend time on the thing that separates people like Schroeder-Gardner and Flynn from affiliates who quit after one bad month: trust. How to Build Trust and Credibility with Your Affiliates covers that directly. And if you want a distribution channel that works the way Woodward’s and Fernando’s content does, without needing their fifteen years of head start, How to Grow Your Affiliate Program (and Brand) with a Podcast is the fastest version of that playbook I’ve got.

None of the twelve people on this list started with a list of affiliates. They built one, one relationship at a time. My free report, Your First 100 Affiliates, breaks down exactly how I recruited my first 604 and built a program most brands would kill for.

Pick two names from this list who are doing something close to what you’re trying to build, whether that’s a program on the management side or a following on the marketing side, and go read everything they’ve published in the last year. Then do the boring part they all did before anyone knew their name: show up consistently long enough for the numbers to catch up to the effort.

Most of the names above built their reputation before “affiliate marketing expert” was a title anyone handed out. Prussakov wrote his first book in 2007. Chow published income numbers in 2008 when almost nobody did. I started running programs more than 20 years ago, long before anyone was searching for a list like this one. The credibility came first, and the recognition showed up later, usually a lot later than any of us expected.

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