Your affiliate program is failing…but WHY? Before you hit the panic button, let’s diagnose the problem. In today’s episode, I share the top 14 reasons why affiliate programs stumble and, more importantly, provide actionable solutions to get them back on track.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
How to Steal Your Competitors’ Affiliates
How to Create High-Converting Swipe Copy for Affiliates
How to Create an Affiliate Program Agreement
What are the Legal Requirements for an Affiliate Program?
How to Build Great Relationships with Affiliates
How Do Affiliate Managers Spend Their Day?
Top 14 Reasons Your Affiliate Program is Failing (And How to Fix It)
So you’ve started an affiliate program and it’s not going as you hoped. What do you do now? Well, first, identify why it’s failing and then fix the problems. Today I’ll share some of the most common reasons we’ve seen affiliate programs fail and what to do about it.
Hey, what’s up? And welcome back. We’re talking about a kind of a negative topic today. I like to keep things positive on the podcast, I really do.
But it’s important to address this topic of failure. I’ve heard from so many people that have attended our trainings, or maybe they become clients. So we diagnose like okay, why is their affiliate program failing? Why did they come to us?
And I keep seeing the same things over and over again. I’ve got 14 reasons today and typically I see probably three or four of these with every single person and it tends to be the same ones. Like in these 14, everybody’s got like three, four, maybe five of them and then the next one will have a couple of those and a couple of different ones and it’s the same things over and over. Honestly, I’ve never seen a 15th reason.
Thats why I have 14. I often joke like we want to get ten reasons, right? Well, theres not ten, theres 14. Or maybe we want to get seven or 13, a cool odd number.
Nope. Theres 14 reasons that have happened more than once with the people that weve worked with that weve seen over the years. Before I get into that, I just want to say this is kind of a weird thing to say. Were talking such a negative topic here in a sense.
But I love doing this. I really do. I love doing this podcast. I love sharing things like this.
I’ve been in this world now, this affiliate world for over 18 years now. Kind of crazy. I’m like a dinosaur in this industry. I’ve been in it for a long time.
I love talking about it. I say all the time, like if a high school guidance counselor even knew that what I do exists, they would tell me to do this. They probably don’t know those exist though, but this is what they would tell me to do. This is what I was meant to do.
I love it. I love talking about it. I love sharing with you. So seriously, if you ever have any questions or you just want to like, I don’t know, reach out to me and tell me, good job on the podcast, whatever.
Shoot me a text. And just the feedback that I get every week, people shooting me their biggest takeaways from the podcast. That’s the kind of stuff that keeps me going. So I just want to hear from you.
I just would love to hear from you. So shoot me a text. We’ll put that in the show notes. Just let me know what you’re getting from the podcast in general and also how I can serve you better.
Hit me up if you got some topics for some episodes. We’ve got the podcast planned out through like the end of the year, but we can always put something in. If you reach out and say, hey, I need you to talk about this. This episode will be our 547th episode of this podcast.
That’s insane. If you listen to an episode a day, it’s over ten years of content. Ten and a half years almost. Yeah, ten and a half years.
Exactly one, one over. Last episode was ten and a half years. If you listen to an episode a week, it’s crazy. So a lot of content.
We probably already talked about it, but text me, let me know your questions. So, all right. Why is your affiliate program failing? Well, one of the first distinctions we’ve got to get here is are you the one that’s running it or have you hired someone full time in house, or did you outsource it?
So some of these will apply to specific ones of those. Some of these will not apply if you’re running it yourself. Some of these will not apply if you hired someone full time in house or if you outsourced it. I talked about two months ago, I did an episode 15 biggest affiliate program challenges and how to fix them.
So there’s going to be a little bit of overlap with that. Some of the challenges are the reason why affiliate programs fail. But I want to share some specific reasons why your affiliate program might be failing, and I’m talking virtually no leverage whatsoever here. All right.
Again, these are the reasons that people have come to us. They’ve either written to us, they’ve become clients, and they’ve had a failing affiliate program for a year and want us to take over. And the first thing you got to do is check your expectations. You know, when a client comes to us, a potential client says, my affiliate program is a disaster.
It’s failing. Okay, is it really failing or were your expectations too high? They come to me and say, yep, I tried this other company for three months. This is our competition.
And I say, whoa, you need to give them another three months. Unless they are showing zero results, im going to tell you right now, its going to take us four to six months just for you to break even. It takes time. I can go out today and I can bust my b*** working on your affiliate program and assuming that hypothetically everything was set up today, I didnt have to go in and change any settings, I didnt have to set up an email address.
I didnt have to do anything. I understood your program on day one. Takes us a week just to understand your offers and your just everything about your story and your program. Right.
Takes us like a week just to do that, to really craft a good narrative. But assuming I could do on day one today, if I shoot messages to my top 50 contacts, you know how many of them are going to promote you in the first 90 days? Zero. Every now and again we will get lucky.
This happened two, three months ago. I messaged a friend of mine who’s a great affiliate, one of the top, consistently top five, top seven on big launch leaderboards, and I said, hey, I’ve got this thing I’d love for you to promote. I think it’s perfect for your audience. I explained to him why we have that kind of relationship that I don’t need to beat around the bush.
I just say, got this thing for you. And he was like, can I promote it next week? I was like, what? That never happened.
Why did that happen? Dumb luck. Not because I’m good. I mean, I’m good, but that’s not why.
Normally he’s like, great. I’m recording this here in late May of 2023. He’d be like, awesome, let’s get that on the calendar for November. Let’s get that on the calendar for next February.
Something like that. But he’s like, can I promote next week? Why did that happen? Because he had another offer that he was going to promote and they canceled the promotion and he already had it on his calendar.
He didn’t want to come up with something else. And so he’s like, I’m looking for an affiliate promotion. Again, dumb luck. Really good timing, right?
But in all my years of doing this, that’s probably happened five times in 18 years, five times that’s ever happened. So again, check your expectations. Some people come to us and I told them, hey, I don’t recommend you hire us right now. I recommend you continue working with this other company.
I know the CEO of that company. They’re a good company. Don’t hire us yet. Now, if it doesn’t work with them in the next three months, maybe there’s something going on.
I don’t know. Then you can talk to us. Now, part of that is just to be honest, is I don’t want to work with a company that 90 days in, they’re like, well, screw it, I’m out. I don’t want to work with them.
And number two, I know how the game is played. I know how it works, and I know that they can deliver results. So that’s first, is it really failing? Or maybe your expectations were unreasonable.
You’re 47 days and you’re like, I don’t have any sales yet. Well, again, we’ve scheduled stuff in November. We’ve already scheduled stuff, maybe even sooner. August, September, we’ve got stuff lined up.
We’re doing what we’re supposed to do. Let’s be patient. The second reason why an affiliate program fails is the lack of variety, specifically on entry points. You’ve got one entry point.
We do webinars or we do PDF, we do a three video workshop, and that’s it. And I mentioned it many, many episodes ago. But the difference we found when we did a study of seven figure to eight figure launches, what separated a couple million dollar launch from a $10 million launch that had basically the same affiliates, the same price point, all the things lined up, lack of entry points. The bigger launches had more entry points, the bigger affiliate programs have more entry points.
So one of the reasons why it might be failing is you just don’t have enough entry points. You need a webinar and a workshop and a summit and a challenge and some written stuff. So PDF’s and a free trial and payment plans and all these things. So that lack of variety could be a big reason for failing.
Now, the counter to this, the third common reason I see is they just bounce around from idea to idea. Variety is great, but bouncing from shiny object to shiny object just doesn’t work. So you’re like, okay, we’re going to try a webinar this. Well, that webinar didn’t work, so we’re going to do, no, maybe you need the counter to that is you need to get the webinar down first, and then you can use that to create the workshop, and then you can use that to create the so on and so forth.
So when I say, number two, lack of variety is one of the reasons why it might be failing. It’s probably more not the reason why it’s failing. From the get go. You’re 60 days in and it’s not working.
That’s a reason why they fail long term. They become stagnant. First they plateau. You get to say, oh, we’re doing $100,000 a month, and then the plateaus at 100,000 for six months, and then next month it’s 95 and then 92 and then 85.
That’s a lack of variety. Failure, never getting to 100,000 could be the complete opposite. You’re trying so many new things that nothing sticks. The fourth thing I want you to look at, if things are failing is your terms and conditions.
All right, here’s the question to ask. If you were an affiliate, would your terms and conditions scare you? Would they scare you? Are they too restrictive.
Are you prohibiting affiliates from doing the things they need to do to succeed? You can’t use these things and you can’t do this and you can’t do this. And it’s like, oh, my gosh, what can I do? And if you keep saying you can’t do this, this, this and this and this and this, eventually you’re just like, well, I don’t even want to try to figure out what I can do.
Screw it, I’m out. So take a look at your terms. Use your terms to protect you. Of course, use your terms to make sure you don’t get people doing really bad things like pretending to be you or I promote.
Like, we don’t allow you to use the word scam in your marketing. You can’t create a blog post that says, is such and such product a scam. It’s clickbait, right? We don’t allow that.
We don’t allow negative marketing, but that’s okay. We just don’t want that. That’s not prohibiting 99. 9%
of affiliates from marketing us. So take a look at your terms and just, I mean, read through them. Is there anything in here that’s scaring you as a potential affiliate? The fifth reason your affiliate program might be failing is bad onboarding.
All right? Getting an affiliate is a lot of hard work. We might spend 30, 40, 50 minutes, sometimes hours to get one affiliate. They finally sign up, they agree to promote, and then we onboard them incorrectly.
Now, I don’t see, we do that, but I’m saying these are the things that I see a lot of times we see these affiliate programs that they’re like, Matt, I’ve got great relationships and we just don’t know how to, onboard them. We know how to, we don’t know how to handle them once they sign up and we come on and really help them with those, and we can take an affiliate program from, say 75,000 a month to 250 a month, 250,000 like that, just by proper onboarding. Then we’ll go out and we’ll get more affiliates, of course. But that’s one of the, you know, that’s one of the biggest things we see is just nothing onboarding them properly.
I talked about this a few episodes ago. You know how to onboard your affiliate so you can go listen to that. But literally, it’s making sure they have everything they need from the get go. All right.
If you have a purely evergreen program, make sure they have all their proper links. They have a login. If there’s a login they have their swipe copy and then follow up to make sure they actually get those, you know, that information. A lot of times our onboarding email, it’s an automated email and it goes out and it has five, six links and it’s got three of their affiliate links and a link to the swipe copy and a link to the graphics and their login information.
And it’s this big email with a lot of information. So a lot of times it gets stuck in, maybe not spam filters, but gets put in the promo tab in Gmail. And so we’ll then send a private email, a one on one email that’s very short, no links in it, that just says, hey, so and so. Just want to make sure you got my email.
Here’s the subject line. Let me know if you didn’t get it. And when people write back and say, I didn’t get it, then we’ll say, hey, make sure you check your promo tip. Found it.
Found in the promo tab or nope, I really didn’t get it. Then we’ll manually send it to them. Did you get it now? Sure did.
So we want to make sure they have all that information. And then we’re going to run incentives to get them to promote, of course, which we talked about in that episode about onboarding your affiliate. So make sure you go check that out because this is one of the biggest reasons we see affiliate programs failing, because they do all the hard work and they just drop the ball. Number six.
All right, this one’s an easy one. Your commissions are just non competitive. Your commissions are not competitive in your market. You’re paying 20% when the market’s paying 30.
You’re paying 30 when the market’s paying 40. You’re paying ten when the market’s at 25. So here’s the deal. Go check the competition.
You need to be playing in the same ballpark as them. If your number one competitor is at 50%, can you pay 40? Absolutely. But you can’t pay 30.
It’s a good rule of thumb. You need to be within 20%, 25 on the high end. So if somebody’s paying 40, I think 30% technically would be 25% lower or whatever. You can probably get away with that if you’ve got some other stuff going for you.
But you need to be competitive. You can’t be half of what your competition is. You can’t be at 20% when they’re at 40. You just can’t have.
So check the competition. And if you need to cut some costs to have a better, more competitive affiliate program. Or maybe you just need to make a little bit less money per transaction, but you’re going to quadruple the number of transactions because instead of 20 affiliates sending $10,000 in sales, you now have 100 affiliates sending $100,000 in sales. Well, yeah, you might go from making a 50% profit margin to a 30% profit margin.
Well, last time I checked out just went from $5000 to $70,000 or what? I’m not sure the math on that. But you went 5000 to 30,000. You know, you’re making a lot more money making six times more money by having a competitive commission.
So check those commissions against the competition. All right. The 7th reason why your affiliate program might be failing is you’ve hired the wrong affiliate manager. And typically this is being too cheap hiring.
You hired a VA and you’re expecting to run a million dollar a month affiliate program. That’s just probably not going to happen. Now, if you are an expert affiliate manager, like I have hired Vas and train them, do they run a million dollar a month affiliate programs? No, but they can run six figure programs, no doubt.
But being too cheap in the hiring process, hiring the wrong person, nepotism, hiring somebody because they’re related to you, it doesn’t work most of the time unless they’ve got the right training. Now, we do work with people, I jokingly call myself the brother in law trainer because I work with a lot of people who are related to the owner and they become the affiliate manager and then I train them on how to become an affiliate manager and how to do the right thing. So it works sometimes. Absolutely.
But it goes back to the first thing that’s not going to happen if you hire us. We’re one of the best agencies in the world. There’s a reason why we’ve runded so many huge affiliate programs and why we’ve worked with the people that we’ve worked with. It’s why Kevin Harrington hired us to run his affiliate program, why Michael Hyatt hired us, it’s why Ryan Levesque hired us, why Stu McLaren hired us.
So I, Shutterfly hired us. It’s why we worked with Adidas and Jeff Walker and Tony Robbins. Why? Because we’re, if not the best or one of the best in the world.
Right. I’m not going to go out and say like we were absolutely the best because I don’t know. I really don’t. But even if we take four to six months, how long is your in law going to take?
How long is that va going to take? So don’t be cheap. In hiring an affiliate manager, you get what you pay for. So be willing to spend a little bit of money and hire the right person or hire the right agency number.
A reason your affiliate program might be failing is it’s just not standing out. You know, we talked a little bit about this in the last episode. I talked about how to steal your competitors affiliates. And I talk about how I stood out by that personalization, right, by giving them my cell phone number, by treating them like a person, not a number.
And I talked about how we stood out at a time when we couldn’t stand out on commissions, we couldn’t stand out on conversions, we couldn’t stand out on brand reputation, we couldn’t stand out on 900 other things. But we stood out on me and my personality and me giving my cell phone number and saying, text me anytime if you need something. That’s how we stood out. So how can you stand out?
What are some of the ways you stand out? Do you need to offer a car for your top affiliate? Probably not, but it doesn’t hurt. Do you need to stand out by having a great personality with your affiliate manager?
You don’t have to, but it doesn’t hurt. Do you need to stand out by having a killer affiliate page? Yeah, that helps. You should have a good affiliate page.
Do you need to stand out by offering generous commissions? Absolutely. Do you need to stand out by writing articles and appearing in affiliate trade publications? Yes, absolutely.
Do you need to stand out by just getting out there more in front of these affiliates, showing up in their inbox once every two weeks rather than once every six months? Absolutely. Those are the things you got to do. So if you’re not standing out, your affiliate program is probably going to fail.
That’ll tie in with number twelve just not having enough affiliates. The 9th reason your affiliate program fails, you screw up the basics. This is the one we see the most of bad affiliate tracking. So affiliates don’t trust you, so they leave.
Can you work so hard to get them and then your tracking doesn’t work. Usually this cause you’re cheap. With your tracking, you go and get the dollar 37 a month tracking instead of spending a couple hundred bucks. It doesn’t have to be expensive.
Just to be clear, most of the good ones are either $300 upfront or $50 to $100 a month. They’re affordable. Think about how important this is. People ask me all the time like what do you look for in an affiliate system?
They’re like, well, the number one thing is tracking. Yes. I want the reports and I want to be able to do all the cool things that we want to do as an affiliate agency. But if it doesn’t get the tracking right, nothing else matters.
So the basics like tracking, paying on time, good communication. We talked about this a few episodes ago, how to communicate with your affiliates. Following the template that we have. Right.
I’m going to put a link in the show notes. We have a template you can just download. It’s a PDF that shows you exactly what to put in your affiliate emails. How to communicate with your affiliates.
That’s a basic, that is a basic thing in paying on time, making sure that your affiliates are getting their money. You tell them that you’re going to pay the first week of the month, pay in the first week of the month, and by gosh, if you don’t. And we had to do this recently with a client. Their PayPal account got shut down.
No reason whatsoever. Their PayPal account got shut down and we had to email the affiliates, but we knew about it. It was like the 29th of the previous month. So on the 30th.
Actually, it was the 31st because of the weekend. We emailed them and said, we are so sorry. We want to let you know payments will be delayed. We’re working on an alternative payment solution and thankfully their account was back up and running.
I think we ended up still paying in the first week of the month. I think we paid on like the fifth. We normally pay on the second or third. Wasn’t that big of a deal.
But make sure you’re doing those things. Just get the basics right. Most of the rest of the stuff’s easy. All right.
The 10th reason why your affiliate program might be failing is this lack of training for your affiliates. Making the assumption that your affiliates know what the heck they’re doing, that they are experts at affiliate marketing, that they are experts at your program, they are experts on your product and not educating them, not giving them tips for how to promote, not making sure they understand the program and the offer and the bonuses and the sales messaging and all that. Just not training them.
If you want to know how to train your affiliates, go get our training. We have a training on training. So we’ll show you how to train your affiliates totally free. We’ll show you how to train your affiliates.
We’ll even give you some of the slides that you can literally, if you use keynote, download them. If you use PowerPoint, download them. You can grab the slides and use those. Let me show you a sample training how we train affiliates.
So go grab that. There’s no reason not to. And use that to train your affiliates. Number eleven, you just don’t have a clear strategy.
You just don’t have a clear strategy. Kind of goes back to what I said before, bouncing around from idea to idea. What is the strategy? What is the plan?
What are the goals around like, that can get you just to be able to get some traction going, right. So a good goal typically is to be able 45 days into an affiliate program. This is what we tell our clients. So typically this will be a small webinar, maybe 150 people, and we have our small and mid sized affiliates promoting.
It might be a small workshop or a small challenge. And we’re stress testing. We’re telling the client like, no, we want this to be small. This is usually somewhere between, depending on the price point, between a, that could be low as $3,000, like a $3,000 to upwards of a $20,000 promo, very small.
But we’re stress testing it and we do this 45 days in. So that honestly so that, number one, they get some revenue and they see that, you know, it kind of goes back to where you talk about like the expectations thing, like, no, I can get a few small affiliates to promote 45 days in. So we get proof of concept. And number two, we work through any problems because here’s the deal.
You’re going to mess something up. We’re going to mess something up. That’s what we tell our clients. You’re going to mess something up.
We had a client first webinar. We did. Oh, man, it was awesome. And they forgot to set up their payment plans.
None of the payment plans worked. So it cost us a lot of money. Cost everybody a lot of money. Oops.
So we worked through that. Well, we learned that when it was small, it probably, I say a lot of money, probably cost $5,000, $6,000 instead of costing 50 or 60,000 or $100,000 like some of the later promotions. So we do these small promotions about 45 days in. And our goal, again, depending upon the client, but our goal is really small.
But we usually hit it nine times out of ten we hit it. So we’ve gained that traction. So what’s the clear strategy that you have in the clear plan, the clear goals again, if you don’t have a target, you’re going to miss it every time. Number twelve, reason you might be failing, and it’s one of the most obvious ones, you just don’t have enough affiliates.
Duh. You know, don’t have enough affiliates. Only got two affiliates. Hard to gain any traction, right?
Well, maybe it’s cause you’re not tapping into your customers or some of the non traditional affiliate sources. Maybe you’re only trying to get people who promote your competition like we talked about in the last episode. Maybe that’s your only source and it’s just not working. Cause you don’t have that way to stand out.
So you gotta go get some customers to be affiliates. You gotta go get some non traditional affiliates. You got to look at other places for affiliates. So go grab our report.
Your 1st 100 affiliates. Mammaquames. com first 100, first 10 zero.
I’ll put that in the show notes. Go grab that. Go get more affiliates. That’s a great way to grow your program.
The 13th reason for failure is you just don’t nurture those relationships. So yeah, you go out and you get them. We talked about this a few episodes ago, how to build those strong relationships. Go check out that episode.
Don’t treat your affiliates like a number. Treat them like people, we talked about that in the last episode. And build those relationships, you have to make a commitment. I don’t know if I made this clear in the episode I did on how to build strong relationships with your affiliates, but the key word is intentionality.
You have to be intentional. You have to set aside 15 minutes a day or 30 minutes a day, three days a week, something like that. You have to make that commitment to building those strong relationships with your current affiliates and spending a little bit of time with potential affiliates. Typically what I do, I’ve reached the point where now it’s 80 20.
I spend 80% of my time developing and nurturing my current relationships, people that I’ve already have a relationship with, on nurturing those, and I spend 20% developing new ones just because I have such a huge network now. Ten years ago, it was 80 20. The other way. I spent 20% of my time nurturing the current relationships because I only had, like, 50 and I spent the entire rest of my time developing new ones.
But if you don’t nurture these relationships, it’s kind of what I said earlier. You’ll stagnate over time and you’ll notice that you start to decline very slowly. Rome wasn’t built in a day. It also didn’t decline in a day, and neither is an affiliate program.
It’s not built in a day and it will not decline in a day. You should be growing every month, barring, you know, of course, if you have a huge promo in January and then, you know, it’s not until April that you have another one where you may not grow every month, but every launch should be bigger than the last. Every month should be bigger than the last. Every quarter at least should be bigger than last.
Every year should be bigger than last. And if that’s not the case, it usually comes down to, again, you’re not nurturing relationships, you’re not adding new affiliates. You don’t have that variety. So you start to stagnate.
Those are the reasons why you start to decline and why your affiliate program goes from success to failure. And then the last reason for failure, very simple one, you’re not listening to your affiliates. I mean, what are they asking for? What are they asking you for?
What graphics are they asking you for? What types of promotions are they coming to you and saying, I need you to do a challenge? Challenges are killing it with my audience right now. We do a challenge, or, hey, man, I really, you know, could you take that same webinar you’re already doing, but do it specifically for blank.
That’s how we did. We have a training that we do for authors, how to sell books using an affiliate program. It’s the same basic presentation that I do already about how to start and grow an affiliate program with 20% of a tweet. The cool thing was it only took me about 3 hours to put together the whole presentation because I had 80 90% of it already done.
Well, where did that come from? It came from affiliates asking us to do it. And I said, well, enough of them are asking, I’m going to do it. I listened to them.
I listened to them. And that’s what allowed us to have that killer webinar that’s now actually become our number one webinar. We just recently did our biggest webinar ever, and it was that one because I listened to my affiliates. So here’s the simple thing.
What are they asking for? Give it to them. Very simple. Whatever they’re asking for, give it to them.
That will address some of the stuff that we talked about. If you are listening to them, that’s what will dictate some of your variety that’s what will dictate some of the variety that will dictate your strategy and some of the other stuff that we talked about. So now you know why your affiliate program might be failing and how to fix it. Yeah, 14 reasons.
I’d love to know. I mentioned earlier, which one’s yours? What are your two or three or four or five or six? Hopefully not six.
Why is your affiliate program failing? Text me at 260-217-4619 I’d love to hear from you and there might be a little bit more nuance to yours and you could tell me in that text and I can help you out there. Also make sure that you hit subscribe. Next episode is gonna be a good one.
I hope this was a good one too. We’re gonna roll here. Actually had some really good ones lately. I’m gonna share with the number one trait of great affiliate managers is this is something that came up from a conversation with our team, our affiliate managers, and I told them like, guys, this is the number one trait of a great affiliate manager.
And I shared it. And so as soon as I was done sharing it with the team, our operations manager texted me. He’s like, dude, that has to be a podcast. You have to talk.
You’ve never talked about that. I’ve never heard you say that. You have to talk about it. Let’s do a podcast on that.
So next episode, I’m going to share the number one trait of great affiliate managers. So hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. I’ll see you then.
Questions?
Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.
Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
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