Your affiliates are the lifeblood of your program…but are you making them feel valued? If you want affiliates who promote harder, stay loyal, and genuinely love working with you, it’s time to CELEBRATE them! In this episode, I share nine powerful ways to recognize, motivate, and excite your affiliates so they stick around and sell more!
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
After Studying 8,000 Affiliate Programs, I Found This Surprising Truth
How to Beat the Dreaded Mid-Promo Slump in Affiliate Launches
How to Grow Your Affiliate Program (and Brand) with a Podcast
Marketing That Actually Works: Donald Miller on Storytelling, Sound Bites, and Selling More
Are Affiliates Just Lazy? How to Motivate and Get the Most from Your Affiliates
How to CELEBRATE Your Affiliates (And Make Them LOVE You)
Your affiliates are the lifeblood of your program, but are you making them feel valued? If you want affiliates who promote harder and stay loyal and genuinely love working with you, it’s time to celebrate them. So in today’s episode, I’m gonna share nine ways to recognize, motivate and excite your affiliates so they stick around and ultimately sell more. Let’s get started. So let’s be real.
Your affiliates aren’t just some nameless, faceless army of salespeople. We talked about this in the last episode where I shared the results of studying over 8,000 affiliate programs. And I talked about how your affiliates aren’t. They’re not employees, they’re partners. They’re real people with audiences that they’ve built. They’re real people with reputations they care about. And they have plenty of other things they could be promoting. Their own stuff, other affiliate products, all kinds of stuff. So why should they choose you? And ultimately, it comes down to a couple of things.
Number one, because they feel valued. And number two, because they feel that they’re part of something bigger. And the third thing, I said a couple of things, but the third thing, and it ties into the first one, is because they know that when they work hard to promote you, your product, whatever it is your service that you notice and you appreciate and you celebrate them. The truth is, affiliates, again, they have no shortage of programs they could join. There are dozens of other programs like yours, and if they’re not getting recognized, if they’re not getting rewarded in yours, they.
They will find one where they are, I promise you Think about it. When was the last time somebody genuinely celebrated you? You know, whether it was a boss, a spouse, a parent, a child, a friend who just took some time to acknowledge something you did. I mean, when was the last time that actually happened? And how did it make you feel? Did you feel energized? Did you feel motivated? Did you feel ready to do even more?
Did you feel like you wanted to be better? I mean, kids are instinctively good at this. And I don’t think that my kids are being manipulative. I really don’t. But when my one of my kids thanks me for doing something, it really makes me want to do more of it. You know, this is something I made it a rule with. I coach a kid’s futsal team. If you’re not familiar with futsal.
It’s basically indoor soccer and with a heavier ball and played on a basketball court. And you know, it’s great for footwork and all that stuff. And one of the things that we put into place, I told them very early in the season, I said, if you do nothing else when you leave here, I want you to thank your parents. Not because, again, I want them to be manipulative. It has nothing to do with that. It’s because I know what it means to me as a parent. And I said that kind of attitude, that attitude of you are privileged to do this in the perspective of saying thank you to your parents and not taking it for granted is so powerful.
But here’s what’s happened. The parents have become more invested. They have noticed that their kids are thanking them and they want to do it more. That’s human nature. And that’s exactly what happens when you celebrate your affiliates. An affiliate who feels seen and appreciated is more likely to stay engaged. They’re more likely to keep promoting. They’re more likely to go above and beyond to create more content.
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They’re more likely to choose your program over others when deciding what to focus their time and energy on. They’re more likely to build a long term partnership with you. Cause affiliates are human, like I said, this is human nature. Just like everyone else, they are driven by recognition. So a well timed shout out, some sort of a reward, something that’s thoughtful, just a personal thank you can be the difference between affiliate who stays active and one who disappears on you. And don’t forget, I’ve talked about this so many times, word spreads, affiliates talk. If you have a reputation as someone who appreciates and celebrates your affiliates, others will take notice.
They will want to be a part of a program that values them, not just uses them so they can make a few extra sales. And the thing is, you know, before we get into it, celebration doesn’t have to mean over the top fanfare. You don’t need to pull out the trumpets, you don’t need to give them expensive prizes. Sometimes the most effective forms of recognition, the ones that I found over the years, they’re the simplest. And that’s what we’re talking about today.
So the bottom line here is that if you want a thriving affiliate program, celebrating your affiliates is not an optional part of being a good affiliate manager. It is absolutely critical. Show them that they matter and they will show up for you again and again. So in order to talk about Celebration Day, we’re going to use an acronym for those of you who are new to the podcast, you don’t know that. I love acronyms. Makes them easy to remember. So we’re going to use the acronym celebrate. And so we’re going to spell it out, you know, C, E, L, E, B, R, A, T, E. And that’s going to be our acronym to remember what you need to do in order to celebrate your affiliates.
So it all starts with the C, and that is communicate regularly. Regularly. That’s such a hard word for me to say. I don’t know why. You know, affiliates need to get constant updates and encouragement and support. They need to be in the loop on what’s going on with your promos, your launches, best practices, things like that. And so it’s hard to do the recognition part that we’ll talk about later if they don’t feel like you are consistently communicating.
So make sure that you are doing the basics of communication and as much as possible, personalize the communication. Don’t make every email sound like it’s just an email blast. We’ll talk about this as we go on. But those little individual emails, the small recognitions, are often the most powerful. The second one is, you know, equip them for success. Give them everything they need. Give them the right swipe copy, give them the right graphics, Give them the links that they need. Give them clear instructions on what to do to succeed.
Make sure, again, it goes back to what we just talked about. Make sure they know when there’s a promo. Give them training, give them tutorials. Show them examples of successful promotions of other affiliates so they can model after those, but equip them. So think about, like, one thing you could do today to really equip your affiliates. If you want to celebrate their success, they got to be successful in the first place, and that’s on you. And part of that is equipping them for that success. The L is listen to them. Listen to them. Listen to them. What? Well, how do we get affiliates to talk? How do we get them to actually give us feedback? Very simple. Ask them. Ask for feedback and then actually use it. What do they need? What’s working? What’s not working?
Don’t assume that you know best. Your affiliates, they’re in the proverbial trenches with their audience. So ask them for feedback. Going back to the thing I just said, equip them for success. Give them everything they need. How do you know what they need? Yeah, there’s basics. I mentioned those swipe copy graphics. I’ve talked about that on previous podcast episodes. How to give Your affiliates what they need to succeed. I think that was like 10 episodes ago, give or take. But ask them because it’s changing, you know. Did you need an Instagram image 10 years ago? No. Do you need one now? Maybe.
Depends on your niche. What about one that’s perfect size for LinkedIn? What about different lengths of copy? Just all these things that you don’t necessarily know what they need unless you ask them. Are there some weird things or just different things or new things that they need that they didn’t need just a few months ago? Or is there something Maybe your number three biggest affiliate needs that none of your other top 20 need, but they need it, so get it to them. But you don’t know what those things are until you ask. So ask for feedback, ask for what they need and then actually use it.
If one of your top affiliates says they need something, get it to them. Here’s the deal. Like this is something I see a lot is the affiliate manager. That’s a great idea. And then that’s all they say and they never get it to the affiliate or it’s four months later. Here’s the deal. It might take four months, especially if there’s development. We had a situation like this with an affiliate recently.
This happened about 30ish days ago. And I knew at that time it was gonna be probably about 45 to 60 days from now. So about 90 days from when the request was made, before it would be in place, there’s some dev that needs to be intuit, et cetera, et cetera. So here’s what I did. I went to our dev team, I got a estimate on the dev time. They said it’d be about 75 days. So I added an additional 50% to that and basically just told them it’d be about, I think I ended up saying about a hundred. I think I just said it’d be four months.
I think I went a little bit overboard, you know, and said it would be about four months. And I told them that I would update them periodically, like every 30 days and let them know how it was going and are we still on track? And I actually just heard yesterday that we’re pretty much on track for somewhere in that 65 to 75 day range. The dev team actually overshot with me.
So me going another 45 days over was definitely way overkill. So hopefully here in the next 30 days I’m going to be give them an update that, hey, we’re only two weeks away from this being done. But my point is when they made the request, I went ahead and decided to put it into practice to use that request and to get the ball rolling on that. Just communicate on that. Show them that you’re listening. And I love to point out that especially when I get private feedback, private suggestions that I announce publicly. Hey, a lot of you have been asking. This is a relative number.
Out of a thousand affiliates, though. But a lot of you have been asking and we delivered. And what that signals to the other 999 is we listen. We take your feedback, your suggestions, your advice seriously, and we put it into practice so they’re more likely to give feedback. So listen to them. Communicate regularly. Equip them for success. Listen to them. The next E is engage with them beyond just promotions. Don’t just show up in their inbox or in their DMs when you want them to promote. No, no, no. You should engage with them year round.
I make sure to follow as many affiliates as possible. I make sure to comment. Sometimes it’s just a simple congratulations, sometimes it’s awesome. Love it. But if they ask a question, I like to give a thoughtful answer. I like to share their content. I like to be genuinely involved in their success. This is all a part of what we talked about before, building real relationships.
So they feel valued not just as an affiliate, but as a person. They should feel valued as people, as individuals. That’s what a real relationship is. So engage with them. Way beyond just promotions. I don’t remember when it was sometime mid last year, I did an episode about building authentic relationships with your affiliates. And I talked about things like knowing, like, where’d they go to college? Who are they a fan of if their team won the super bowl, then celebrating with them. And so I did that. I don’t remember when. It was a year ago or so the team won the super bowl. And I was like, oh, I know he’s a fan. And I texted him and we ended up having a conversation.
Now, that was not the reason why I did it, but the very next day he texted me and said, hey man, you know, I had a promo cancel on me kind of at the last minute. Do you have anything coming up that might be like in this date range? And I said, I don’t, but, you know, we’ve got this evergreen promo and boom, boom. It’s not a launch, but it’s an evergreen promo. What do you think about plugging this in? It was for a client and he plugged it in for his client and he did like 8,000 in sales. And I’ve had similar things like that happen where we did one where Essel ended up being like, over $120,000 in sales.
You know, it was an $8,000 promo, and our agency made a few hundred bucks. Not a huge deal. But all of that started because I sent a text to him congratulating him on the fact his team won the Super Bowl. Like, it took two seconds. And I’m not saying that I go out of my way looking for opportunities like that, but I go out of my way looking for opportunities like that because I intentionally spend five to ten minutes a day dialoguing with people on social media not to get attention. I don’t do it because I enjoy it. Because the truth is, I don’t particularly enjoy it.
I do it with the intention of having seven, eight people a day that I interact with. And if I do that with a couple hundred people, you know, it takes me a couple of weeks, and everybody’s hearing from me every couple of weeks. That’s intentionality. So engage with them beyond just those promotions. The B. Bonuses, bonuses, bonuses. And I’m not talking about them putting together bonus packages. I’m talking about rewarding your top affiliates with. This is the key. Unexpected bonuses. Not the expected bonuses. Not.
We have a $50,000 affiliate contest. Not. Hey, guys, we’re doing a double commission month on all sales of this planner. We just did one of those with one of our clients, and that was an expected bonus. The unexpected bonus was at the end of the month when I said, you had your best month ever. And I just wanted to say, great job. Here’s an extra $500. So unexpected bonuses, unexpected extra commissions or gifts, or, you know, an exclusive perk of some sort.
Hey, I didn’t announce this, but next year, everybody who this year made this many sales, you’re going to get the first batch of all of these planners next year. That’s pretty cool. So they could be performance based. They could be milestones, they could be, you know, extra commissions, extra incentives. Got gift card, an event invite, you know, like I said, merchandise, product, things like that. But the key is for them to occasionally be unexpected. Can you do an unexpected bonus every week? Of course not.
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But occasionally throw in a little extra perk that nobody was expecting? The R. And I sort of touched on this earlier with. I talked about when people request something privately and then I grant it to them publicly. This one here, the R, is to recognize their success publicly. So when an affiliate wins, whether it’s big or small, people love recognition. So recognize them publicly. One of the easiest ways to do this is something like an affiliate of the month.
You know, maybe you feature them in a newsletter, you feature them on social media, you feature them during live events. But monthly or bi weekly, you know, every two weeks is a good cadence to do something like this. And that’s why I say if you don’t have to call it affiliate of the month, but if you find something, and again, it’s intentionality, because you’ve got to be looking for things like this. So it could be different things every month. One month it could be the most sales and you congratulate them and they’re the winner of the most sales that month. Those are pretty normal. But what about just like most creative campaign or coolest endorsement, things like that?
Best Instagram post of the month. The more specific you can make these, the better. Because if you do best social media post, well, then you might have to do that like five times a year. But if you do best Instagram, best X, best Facebook, best Pinterest, best TikTok, best LinkedIn, you know, that’s six right there, right? Maybe not all of those are relevant to you, maybe only four of them are, but still that gives you four different ones. And you do them kind of randomly in the sense of I just wanted to call out like so. And so did this amazing TikTok video featuring this product. This email that somebody sent was so awesome.
Two, three times a year I will quote, unquote, forward an email. The reason I say quote unquote is I’m not literally clicking on forward and then individually forwarding it or bcc ing all of our affiliates. I’m copying the text, but I keep the subject line in and, you know, fw colon and then the original subject line. And I just say something like, hey, got this email yesterday from Tony Smith, one of our affiliates. And oh my gosh, Tony, this email is amazing. Great job. So, and so you can. I would not say guys, I would say like, Jimmy, because I’d use their first name, merge field.
Jimmy, you can learn a lot from this. And I get Tony’s permission before I send that, of course, but that’s recognizing Tony. And then a couple of things happen. If it’s a social media post and I share it on, in like a Facebook group or in an email, they pick up social media followers. We, we have seen this happen where they immediately pick up 50 to 60 social media followers like that, and then they’re more likely to highlight those people to their audiences and they pick up even more. So it helps them grow. And then a lot of times they’ll connect that way.
You start creating partnerships and collaborations where they grow each other’s audiences. And it really does start this chain reaction which ultimately comes back to helping the affiliate program. That’s not why I did it, but I know that that’s one of the benefits. The other thing, of course, it just makes them feel amazing. It makes them feel amazing. So as much as possible, recognize their success publicly. All right, the last three here the A is appreciate them personally. A little personal appreciation goes a long way.
Don’t just send generic thank you messages or generic congratulation messages. Like we do congratulate people when they make their first sale or depending upon how big they are, their tenth sale or their hundred sale or their first thousand dollars or first ten thousand dollars, whatever it might be. They had a record month last month. We send those. But as much as possible, make them personalized, notice something that they did. Like, oh my gosh, your conversion rate last month was amazing. I went and looked at your Instagram profile and you know, I saw that that post, it looked like that generated a lot of buzz.
Things like handwritten notes and personalized gifts, quick voice, you know, or video message. I don’t personally like voice texts unless they’re 20 seconds or shorter. So little thing like that can go a long way. I did one where I sent, you know, a text text, but it included a we’re all on zoom. We had a team meeting and we just all like yelled congratulations, you know, $10,000 a month or something for an affiliate. And I got it on my phone and that was it. Like that was the extent of it. It wasn’t a huge deal.
It was like a seven second audio. That’s acceptable to me if you send a two minute message. I don’t have the attention span for that, you know, but me personally, I don’t like those. But just things like that. A handwritten note, I mean, comes in the mail and it costs you. What is postage? I don’t even know what postage is now. Like a dollar, probably not even a dollar. Know we have the forever stamps we bought. Like I think my wife, I thought she maybe thought we got like a prize if we bought like 5,000 of them a few years ago. But I do remember we had like a USP credit card charge that was literally like over $3,000, I think. And so we have all these.
But I use them. But even if you have to go buy stamps, they can’t even be a dollar these days, I don’t think. I think they’re probably still under a buck, you know, and you mail this thing and it’s so cheap and it’s such a great way because people open mail versus if you send an email, eh, may never see it. If you send a text, like I’ll see it and I’ll remember it for five seconds. I have cards on my refrigerator. I have cards. I got one right here on my desk. All this card says is thank you for making this a great place to work. I love working with you. Thank you for the opportunity. That’s it.
Three sentences. It’s sitting on my desk from one of our team members. That’s it. If they had sent a the most heartfelt 500 word email, I wouldn’t be talking about it right now because I wouldn’t remember it even if they recognized me publicly in the most heartfelt, thoughtful, sappy, best written Facebook post of all time, I’d remember it for a month or two. This card has been here, I think since pre Covid, Pretty certain of that. It’s definitely been there for at least four years because it’s physical. So acknowledge them and let them know that you see their effort and value their work and do it in creative ways on a personal level.
But t I started off the episode talking about this. Treat them like partners. Not just promoters. Affiliates are not salespeople. They are partners. How do you treat partners? Well, number one, we talked about it a moment ago. Build real relationships. Genuinely care about their business, their lives, their family, their success, their wins, their. Their struggles. Care about them. Build those relationships. And secondly, if you have a partner, you involve them in decisions if at all possible. So get their thoughts. I talked about earlier. Ask for feedback.
Get their thoughts on new products, new promotions. Ask them to test things out and be a part of the process. That’s how you treat partners. Promoters. You just say, well, here’s your link. Bada boom, bada bingo. That’s it. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about partners. And then the final e is to excite them about the Future. Get them excited about what’s coming. Keep your affiliates engaged by giving them a sneak peek of what’s coming next.
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Whether it be early access to new products or exclusive promo opportunities, behind the scenes updates. Whatever it is, keep them engaged because if they know something big is coming, they’re going to stay motivated and eager to promote. So get them excited about the future. It’s like I said earlier, even if it’s four months down the road, six months down the road, guys, we have something amazing coming later this year.
You can send that in February or March. I can’t wait to share with you what we’re doing in a couple of months and you start teasing it. And it’s not just marketing, it’s just like, hey, maybe you don’t know as much as you need to to give them the full details, but you’re just letting them know this is something cool that’s coming.
So get them excited about the future. So again, to recap. C Communicate regularly. E equip them for success. L listen to them. E engage with them beyond promos. B Bonuses, Bonuses. Bonuses Bonuses. Unexpected being the key word there. R recognize their success publicly. A appreciate them personally. T treat them like partners, not just promoters. And E excite them about the future. So here’s the thing. I want you to start with one thing.
I don’t care what it is, start with one thing. It could be going and following your top 50 affiliates, your top 20 affiliates. And like we said, engage with them beyond promotions. It could be asking your affiliates for feedback or ideas that would be listening to them. You’re going to do a better job of equipping them for success by doing one thing. A training or swipe copy, Better swipe copy. Something like that. It could be, you know what, this month I’m going to do some unexpected bonuses or I’m going to recognize one affiliate for their success publicly.
I don’t know what it is. Just pick one thing and do it. Then come back to the episode and pick another thing and another thing and start building your repertoire of ways to celebrate your affiliates. But start with one thing. That’s your action item for this episode. Start with one thing that you heard today. So I hope this has been helpful for you.
If you’ve got questions about this or anything else, text me anytime at 260-217-4619. Again, 260-217-4619. I’d love to hear from you and just let me know what you’re thinking about this episode or what you’re putting into practice as a result. Last thing, if you haven’t yet, make sure that you hit subscribe Got some awesome content coming up. Next week we’re going to be talking about the biggest challenges to scaling your affiliate program.
Scaling may or may not be an acronym, actually. Really don’t know. I haven’t written the outline for the episode so but it probably will be and then how to solve those problems. So we’re going to talk about those challenges and how to solve them next week. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. I’ll see you then.
See you soon.