How to Start Affiliate Program for Digital Products (Guide)

Affiliate programs are a true gem for driving more purchases of your e-books, software, courses, or other digital products with minimum money involved.

If you can give people a platform and promo materials accessible via user friendly digital tools, the sky is the limit. And you know what? You can easily give that to people with modern affiliate marketing plugins or software.

We’ll talk more about it later in the post.

But starting a successful marketing program is not just that. So, let’s guide you by highlighting the most crucial steps and what preparation they require to start a successful affiliate program for digital products.

Understand your strategy and goals

Planning and strategy should always come first.

Decide on your strategy by asking yourself, What do I actually want from my affiliates (new users, subscriptions, upsells)? What is the best way to promote my digital product? Where do I normally ‘meet’ the target audience of my digital product?

Since affiliate marketing is about predicting revenue, create a mockup and template with key metrics like:

• Number of affiliates.
• Target sales volume.
• Acceptable cost per acquisition.

Then, think about who your target affiliates are, for example, bloggers, influencers, agencies, customers. Think of your daily experience and these three things:

• How people find you.
• What your outreach channels are.
• Your daily/monthly affiliate recruitment plan.

You need to understand who is most likely to promote your digital product, what type of people they are, and what incentives they might be looking for.

Then get ready for the next steps!

Decide how to shape commission types

Affiliate software can help you set and get the most out of your commissions, but the reason for that commission is totally under your control.

Research the market and competitors, test commission types, and listen to feedback, etc.

• You can offer a percentage of sales, a flat fee, or recurring commission for subscriptions to your digital product or services.
• Consider performance bonuses for top performers.
• Create tiered rates.
• Create a multi structure affiliate program.

That should be strictly based on your digital product type, user type, and more.

Create an affiliate agreement

Affiliates are a legal thing. Once you have your information ready, you need to establish the affiliate’s policies page. An affiliate agreement usually includes:

• Cookie duration.
• Approved promotional methods.
• Payment terms.
• Prohibited practices.
• Taxes, invoicing, and compliance obligations.

Those should be stated on the Affiliates page on your site, as well as probably visible in the affiliate dashboard. FAQ pages and direct contacts can also help.

Add and test such a page to your site once the program is launched.

Choose and configure affiliate management software

Affiliate management software or a plugin is a must to keep everything organized and digital so that you can analyze and retrieve any data at any moment.

It sort of brings all your data and strategy into just one place.

Affiliate management software normally handles registration, tracking, reporting, and payouts with your settings in place. If you are using or considering WordPress, AffiliatePress is definitely worth taking a look at because:

• It works with your plugins for digital sales, be it WooCommerce or any other.
• Multiple commission structures and bonuses that you can create.
• Online payments to all affiliates, optionally at once (Stripe and PayPal).
• Individual affiliate accounts.
• Super accurate tracking and spam protection.
• Multiple ways to promote, from tracking backlinks to QR codes and entire site landing pages.

Made to significantly boost sales, AffiliatePress has a jam-packed dashboard for users with all skill levels.

Test & Demo

Create promotional assets

To simplify work for your affiliates, prepare branded assets that you think can best promote your digital product. For example:

• Social media banners (covers for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn).
• Product mockups (laptop and phone visuals).
• Email templates (pre-written copy with calls to action).

By the way, using AffiliatePress, you can easily upload images for direct access by your affiliates.

You can also include guidelines for messaging and approved brand usage with those materials.

Create onboarding and support process

You don’t want to manually approve each affiliate; use software for the signup process, getting links, getting paid, etc.

Test the workflow and onboarding to see obstacles or moments that might not be clear to your users.

Make sure that you have a sort of FAQs and tutorials, as well as instant contact channels like email or similar.

Reach out to potential affiliates

It makes no sense to sit and expect people will find your site just because it’s there on the internet.

Make sure to reach out to them, like today! Here is a quick plan of what you can do:

1. Build a list of relevance, audience size, and contact info.
2. Engage with their content for a few days.
3. Send a personalized pitch highlighting your value.
4. Follow up 2-3 times, offering more incentives like personal bonuses.

With some consistency and creativity, the results won’t make you wait!

Launch and promote the program

A big launch day is here! The launch day should be advertised on your website, social media, email list, and relevant communities.

Got beta affiliates? Help them provide testimonials about ease of use and earnings. Make sure you can get the most out of the start day and feedback.

Have a plan to optimize and motivate

The action plan is most clear after you’ve got some experience with your affiliates. However, you need to have it on your mind: a few optimization and motivation ideas.

For this, don’t forget to autopilot things like:

• Monitor performance by affiliate, channel, and creative asset.
• Rotate new creatives, run contests, or provide performance bonuses.
• Regularly refine commissions, landing pages, and messaging based on data.

Sum up on starting a successful affiliate program for digital products

Running an affiliate program for a digital product versus a physical one feels quite different. With digital products like software or courses, considering there is no inventory cost, you may pay affiliates a much higher commission, even on a recurring basis, which creates a more attractive setup for prospects. So you can win them more easily. 

Moreover, affiliate registration, commissions, and tracking can all be automated with an affiliate marketing plugin or software like AffiliatePress. Recruitment, on the other hand, is always part of the manual thing.

However, there is a long process behind all these steps, so make sure you have the right tools and a solid plan at hand.

Read also:

• Affiliate Marketing vs. Referral Marketing: See The Difference
• A Complete Guide to Setting Affiliate Commission Rate
• Top 7 Free WooCommerce Affiliate Plugins to Grow Sales