Most affiliate programs lose their first 60 days to setup. Waiting on assets, figuring out who to recruit, getting up to speed on the product.
We try to eliminate that. Here's what we do before a program officially kicks off.
Step 1: We add them to AffiliateFinder.ai on day one
The moment a brand moves down our pipeline, we set them up in AffiliateFinder. We drop in their markets, core keywords, competitors, angles... everything the tool needs to start collecting data.
Take a client targeting multiple geo’s. We add all geo’s separately, meaning the tool builds a dedicated partner list for each market.
We give it two weeks to run.
By the time we officially kick off, we're not staring at a blank sheet. We have a longlist of relevant partners per geo, ready for outreach. Day one of the program, we're already moving.
1 week later, my inbox looks like this.
(They also released a new feature that allows you to filter on geo and other parameters)
Step 2: We fill out the onboarding document
This one sounds obvious. It's not.
Our onboarding doc goes deep: competitors, messaging angles, use cases, USPs, target audience, landing pages, what objections the product faces, what makes someone actually convert.
Because you cannot run a good affiliate program if you don't have all the information you need to pitch. And your affiliates definitely can't pitch a product they don't understand.
Bonus tip: Once your onboarding document is filled out, feed it directly into your AI tools. Use it to populate system prompts or memory with the client's USPs, angles, target audience and competitive landscape.
From that point on, every piece of output your AI generates, whether that's outreach emails, publisher briefs or content angles, is grounded in the actual brand context. It's one of the easiest ways to get immediately useful output instead of generic fluff.
(I advice to read the previous issue of Affiliate Snacks where I go deeper into this topic, incase you haven’t)
These are two steps out of a much longer process. But they're the ones that set the tone for everything that follows.
Are you building or scaling an affiliate program this year?
Hit reply, I read every one of them.
And if you missed any previous issues, you can find the full archive here.
More next week.
-Jani
(This e-mail contains affiliate links. I only recommend tools I use myself on a weekly basis.)