10 Step Checklist to Start an Affiliate Program Confidently

Are you planning to launch an affiliate program but are not sure where to begin? An affiliate program checklist is all you need.

Starting an affiliate program is one of the smartest ways to grow your business without burning your pocket.

Whether you own an online eCommerce store, SaaS business, online course platform, or a membership site, a well-planned affiliate program can bring in traffic, leads, and sales. 

But the first step is always the hardest…. yet the most important step. Because the way you set things up in the beginning decides how fast (or slow) your program grows later.

That’s exactly why we write 10 step affiliate program checklist blog to guide you from planning to launch. Ready to kick it off? Let’s dive right in.

The Complete Affiliate Program Checklist for Beginners (2025)

1. Decide Your Goals and KPIs

First things first, you must be crystal clear on what to expect to achieve from your affiliate program. Having a clear and well defined goal is like a blueprint to a successful affiliate program. 

Ask yourself: 

• Are you aiming for more website traffic? 
• Are you looking for a way to boost sales and conversions?
• Is increasing brand awareness your goal?
• Do you want to get more leads?

No matter what your goal is, make sure it’s clear. 

This is important because your affiliate goals shape every decision that follows from here on. From the commission rates, creatives you give, and the affiliate you’ll recruit, everything is decided from here.

Once your goals are all set and clear, define your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

KPIs are the metrics that tell you whether your program is working or not. After all, what’s the meaning of having an affiliate program that doesn’t meet your business goals? To make it easier for you, here are some common KPIs to track: 

• Number of affiliate signups.
• Click through rate (CTR).
• Return on investment (ROI).
• Conversion rate.
• Average order value (AOV).
• Earnings per affiliate.

By clearly setting up your affiliate goals and tracking KPIs, you can make sure your affiliate program is on its way to reaching your business goals.

2. Research Your Business Competitors 

Before launching your own affiliate program, take a closer look at what others do in your industry. Do extensive research on your competitors’ affiliate programs and study what’s working for them, what’s missing and how you can stand out. 

Here’s what to look for when researching competitor affiliate programs:

• Commission Rates – What percentage or flat rate do they offer per sale?
• Payout – What is their minimum payout, or on what basis, such as Weekly, monthly, or on request?
• Program Requirements – Check if it’s open to all or limited to social media influencers and bloggers only? 
• Affiliate Perks – Are they offering more affiliate perks like lifetime commissions, signup bonuses, or performance bonuses to attract top-performing affiliates?
• Affiliate Resources – Do they also provide creatives such as banners, swipe emails, product tutorials, and ready-to-share social media posts?

With all these in mind, you can easily create a competitive affiliate program that instantly becomes the top choice for top-performing affiliate partners. 

3. Pick the Right Affiliate Model for Your Business

An affiliate model decides how your business will grow through affiliate marketing. For the best affiliate program setup, you’ve to choose the right affiliate model.

Because it is one of the most important parts of creating an affiliate program that actually accomplishes your goals. The model decides how your affiliates will get paid and how motivated they’ll be to promote your products.

There are a few popular affiliate models to keep in mind before moving forward:

• Pay-per-sale (PPS): You pay affiliates only when a sale happens. This is the most common model for eCommerce stores and digital product businesses. Because it takes zero risk for you. 
• Pay-per-lead (PPL): Affiliates earn a commission when they bring you qualified leads, such as form signups or trial users. It’s actually a great affiliate model for SaaS and service-based businesses.
• Pay-per-click (PPC): In this, you pay for every click an affiliate sends to your site, whether or not it converts. There’s no denying this model is riskier, but good if your goal is to increase brand awareness.
• Recurring commissions: This affiliate model is perfect for memberships or subscription based websites. In this, affiliates earn a percentage every time a customer renews.

4. Choose the Best Affiliate Plugin or Platform 

Picking the right affiliate plugin for a WordPress site is another important factor in creating affiliate programs that actually work. 

Wondering why choosing the best WordPress affiliate plugins or platform matters? A WordPress affiliate plugin helps manage your entire affiliate program from start to end.

With the best affiliate plugin, you can track referrals, manage payouts, and provide affiliates without any errors. If you own a WordPress site, we recommend trying AffiliatePress, the most reliable WordPress affiliate plugin.

It allows you to have unlimited affiliates, commissions, and payouts alongside powerful integrations like WooCommerce and 23+ other plugins, completely free. Plus, it comes with a set of robust features for easy affiliate management, tracking, and reporting. It offers smart fraud detection to prevent any kind of suspicious activities. 

However, before making any decision, make sure to tick the following features in this affiliate program checklist for choosing the best affiliate plugin: 

✅ Smooth affiliate onboarding.
✅ Easy affiliate management.
✅ Accurate real-time tracking.
✅ Multiple smart commission structures like recurring, multi-level, and lifetime.
✅ Unlimited creatives and a personalized landing page for affiliates.
✅ Integrations with other popular plugins and platforms.
✅ Automated bulk payouts.
✅ Built-in affiliate marketing report tools and more.

5. Draft Clear Affiliate Terms and Conditions

Before your first affiliate joins or your first referral rolls in, you need to set up one most vital foundations in place: A clear affiliate terms & conditions.

Why Affiliate Terms Matter More Than You Think? 

Before launching AffiliatePress, we spoke with countless businesses that struggled due to vague or missing affiliate terms. The result? Affiliates didn’t understand how they’d get paid. Programs fell apart. Trust was broken.

That’s why AffiliatePress lets you define, attach, and enforce your affiliate Terms & Conditions right inside your customized signup form for smooth affiliate onboarding.

Now, many may wonder,” Why do you need to draft terms & conditions for an affiliate program?” The reason is simple.

Just like your business, your affiliate program also needs rules. These rules make sure everyone knows how your affiliate program works, what’s allowed, what’s not and how commissions are handled. And yes, this step alone can save you from disputes, fraud, or any future payment errors.

6. Build Your Affiliate Assets (Links, Banners)

The moment you approve a new affiliate, they shouldn’t be left wondering what to do next. The faster they start promoting, the faster you start earning. And that’s where affiliate assets come into play.

The high converting marketing materials you’ll give to your affiliates to promote your products. Your promotional assets can be anything, such as…

• Referral links
• Banners
• Social media graphics
• Videos

And whatever else that helps affiliates to deliver your brand message properly, the way you want. 

Note that you can now build and share unlimited affiliate assets, creatives using AffiliatePress. From text links, banners, images, to HTML creatives, AffiliatePress lets you offer unlimited creatives to boost your visibility and drive more conversions.

7. Design an Attractive Affiliate Commission Structure

Your commission structure is the main motivator for your affiliates.

Having an attractive affiliate commission structure is exactly what powers up your affiliates’ outreach, creativity, and sales performance.  A winning commission structure drives conversions for your business while rewarding affiliates fairly for their effort.

That’s the smart balance you must’ve to strike for. 

With AffiliatePress, you can go one step ahead and offer multiple commission types and models that suit your exact business needs. We, at AffiliatePress, understand different products, partners, and marketing strategies, and need different incentives to keep growing. 

That’s why we offer flexible commission structures that fit every business’s needs:

• Default sitewide commissions.
• User-specific commission.
• Product Wise Commission.
• Group Wise Affiliate Commission.
• Lifetime Commission.
• Tiered Based Commission.
• Multi-Level Affiliate Commission.
• Recurring Commission.
• Performance bonus.
• Sign up bonus.

These all are the types of smart commission structures AffiliatePress has got you. Still, have you ever thought about what actually makes a commission structure attractive? 

To keep it simple, here’s what makes a commission structure attractive: 

• Competitive Rates: Higher commissions = higher engagement.
• Flexible Rules:  Don’t stick to a one-size-fits-all. Let high performers earn more with mult-tiered commission structures.
• Recurring Commissions: Reward affiliates every time a customer renews. This way, your affiliates promote your service for the long term.
• Performance Bonuses: Reward top affiliates with milestone bonuses like $100 extra for 20+ sales in a month.
• Lifetime Commissions: Give affiliates long term earnings from customers they introduce, even if they buy something later.

Start with a simple flat commission, test it for 30 days, and then introduce performance tiers for high-converting affiliates.

8. Launch Your Affiliate Signup Page 

Always make sure your onboarding process is simple and easy for new joining affiliates. Your signup page is the doorway to your affiliate program. Here’s why, AffiliatePress allows you to create your own customized affiliate signup form for onboarding.

With a customized affiliate signup page, you can collect the exact info you need when a new affiliate joins your program.

Best of all, you can fully customize the signup page using your own branding, fields, and terms. Plus, every sign up triggers an automatic welcome email notification, so your affiliates feel supported right away.

9. Start Recruiting the Right Affiliates

Now that your goal and affiliate management software are both in the right place, it’s time to start getting affiliates.

Don’t wait for affiliates to find you! Go where they are. Top performing affiliates do not knock; they must be pursued. You can reach out to the following to ask them to promote your product: 

• Bloggers in your niche.
• YouTubers and social media influencers.
• Online communities and Facebook groups.
• Customers who already love your product.

For example, just like this reel on Instagram of a social media influencer @lisabreukels (Lifestyle + Eco-friendly Influencer). 

Here, you can see she’s clearly promoting Wild Refill products using promo code (coupon code) LISAFASHION for 20% OFF. 

Same way, you always have to reach out to small influencers in your niche to promote your products.

10. Track, Optimize & Scale Your Program

At last, when everything is set, Congrats!! You can finally launch your affiliate program! But this isn’t the end of the story. The real magic begins after launch. 

Now is the time for you to track every single detail as we discussed before. You have to keep track of all the clicks, conversions, top affiliates, and revenue. That way, you can use those insights to optimize your offers and commission rules for future growth.

AffiliatePress offers real time reporting, one click or automated payouts and advanced tracking with coupons and QR codes. So, you can scale confidently without burning hours on manual reporting.

With the right setup and consistent optimization, it’ll take no time for your affiliate program to go to the next level. 

Conclusion: Ready to Launch Your Affiliate Program?

Ultimately, these are all the things to keep in your affiliate program checklist for making a successful affiliate program. 

Here the AffiliatePress helps in so many things; it helps you build an entire affiliate system that can grow, automate, and convert. From real-time reporting and coupon tracking to branded dashboards and automated payouts, every part is built to help you attract better affiliates and turn them into long-term partners.

To keep things sorted here, here’s a quick recap of the affiliate program checklist.

✅ Set Clear Affiliate Goals and KPIs for Affiliate Program.
✅ Research Your Business Competitors.
✅ Pick the Right Affiliate Model for Your Business.
✅ Choose the Best Affiliate Plugin or Platform.
✅ Draft Clear Affiliate Terms and Conditions.
✅ Build Your Affiliate Assets (Links, Banners, Videos).
✅ Design an Attractive Affiliate Commission Structure.
✅ Launch Your Affiliate Signup Page.
✅ Start Recruiting Affiliates.
✅ Track, Optimize & Scale Your Program.

So what are you waiting for? Ready to turn this checklist into a real and revenue-generating affiliate program. Try AffiliatePress right now and launch your fully automated affiliate system right away!

Other Useful Blogs:

• 5 Proven Ways To Convert Customers Into Reliable Affiliates
• How to Start Affiliate Program for Digital Products (Guide)
• How To Set Up Affiliate Program On WordPress (For Beginners)