r/Affiliatemarketing

Been running a mid size affiliate network for 9 years now, mostly iGaming and forex offers, and for a long time we paid top affiliates through wire and PayPal, it's gotten worse every year: two of our biggest partners had their accs frozen last spring cause their bank flagged "high risk" transaction patterns, it took almost 3 weeks to fix, and that's like 3 weeks of them not gettin paid + me getting angry Skype messages at 11pm.

So we're moving the whole payout stack to stablecoins starting next month, rough plan so far:

1. KYC/AML for affiliates who opt in
2. Invoicing so partners can request payouts on their own schedule
3. Mass payout runs twice a month in USDT
4. A fiat off-ramp for the ones who still want their bank
5. Some kind of dashboard so my finance guy stops tracking wallet addresses in a spreadsheet
6. Tell me what's missing, or what's going to blow up once we actually switch.

Edit : I need to stress you shouldn’t underestimate how normal the freeze problem is getting on the network side, 3 other network owners told me the exact same story this year alone. We looked at CoinGate and NOWPayments first, both fine, just didn't have the invoicing flow we needed for recurring affiliate payouts, so we're testing Inxy for that part now, and we're rolling this out in 4 weeks either way, bank cooperation or not.

I built AffiliateOS. It connects your own Impact, CJ or Awin account and exposes it over an API and MCP, so an agent can mint tracked links without opening a dashboard. Your accounts, your commissions, no cut.

CJ works end to end. Search a program, mint a link, follow the redirect, and it lands on the merchant with a live cjevent on it.

I've never run the Impact path against a real Impact account, because I don't have one. The code calls Impact's TrackingLinks API and hands back what Impact returns, so it should work but I need real testing.

If you run Impact, connect it, mint a link for something you actually promote, and tell me what breaks. As mentioned I’m willing to offer a gift card for your help.

If you’re interested, comment or DM me

If you do then you obviously figured out where the ring lies.... Let's be honest... On TikTok and YouTube you see all these videos about ppl making thousands per month.... And then they recommend a script or a gpt plug-in for chatgpt to write the text for Pinterest... For how much? $30 and higher. Let's be honest, if you're making money and as you claim thousands of dollars and are making a 5 figure income then why the f do you need to sell a guide of a gpt plug-in? Obviously it doesn't work all the time.

Now for me I am working on Pinterest. Pinterest is a garbage platform to say the least. Anyone who likes it has been on it for a while. Pinterest wants you to pay to promote your pin so your chance of the pin being seen is now better otherwise you can pins all day long and guess what happens... They'll end up getting thrown into the abyss. The truth of the matter is no one is gonna give away their secret as to how to make your pins get seen by people....

Now, obviously this is a slow game... You won't make money fast.... Unless you promote your Pinterest pins which in itself costs money starting from $5 a day.

I'll quit my rant but honestly I am frustrated.... I was hoping for a quick turnaround but I just ain't seeing it. (been on this system for a month now... Pinterest + Amazon associate).

I’ve noticed more brands starting to use hyper-realistic AI-generated people in their social ads instead of hiring real models or influencers. While the cost-saving aspect is obvious, I’m starting to wonder if we are setting ourselves up for a major backlash.

If a customer finds out the "person" recommending a skincare product or clothing line doesn't actually exist, does that permanently damage the brand's credibility? I’m trying to find the balance between using these new efficiency tools and maintaining genuine human trust. Have any of you implemented internal rules about disclosing AI use, or are you just moving forward until someone complains?

Been refining this for about a year across two SaaS products. Sharing because email is still the highest ROI channel I use and most nurture sequences I see are terrible.

The setup: user signs up for a free trial or lead magnet. They enter a 7-email sequence over 30 days. Each email has one job.

Email 1 (Day 0, sent immediately): The welcome + quick win.

Don't make them wait. Deliver whatever they signed up for immediately. Then give them one small actionable thing they can do in 5 minutes that proves your product works. For my SaaS, it's setting up their first project. For a lead magnet, it's one tip from the PDF they can apply today.

Email 2 (Day 2): The problem reframing.

Don't pitch. Talk about the problem they're trying to solve from an angle they haven't considered. If they signed up for a project management tool, the reframe is "most teams don't have a tool problem; they have a visibility problem." This positions you as someone who understands the root cause, not just a vendor.

Email 3 (Day 5): The case study.

One specific customer. Their before and after. Real numbers. Not "Company X saw great results." Instead, Company X went from a 40% project completion rate to 87% in 3 months. " Specificity builds trust.

Email 4 (Day 9): The objection handler.

Address the #1 reason people don't buy. For my SaaS it's "we already use spreadsheets." I dedicate the entire email to why spreadsheets fail at scale, with examples. Don't mention your product until the P.S.

Email 5 (Day 14): The comparison.

Compare your product to alternatives honestly. Include the drawbacks of your own product. Honesty in this email does more for conversion than any feature list. I mention what my product doesn't do and who it's not for. This weeded out bad-fit customers and increased conversion among good-fit ones.

Email 6 (Day 21): The social proof round-up.

Aggregate testimonials, usage stats, and community signals. "2,000+ teams use X." "The average user saves 4 hours per week." Numbers and quotes from real users.

Email 7 (Day 28): The soft close.

No discount. No urgency hack. Just a clear summary of what the product does, who it's for, and what happens if they don't act. "If your team is still managing projects in spreadsheets by Q4, the cost isn't the subscription. It's the projects that slip through the cracks."

Results across both products: 8.3% conversion rate from signup to paid. The industry average for SaaS nurture sequences is 1-3%.

The key insight: every email provides value before asking for anything. The product is mentioned naturally, not forced. The sequence reads like a helpful guide, not a sales funnel that happens to use email.

What's your best-performing email sequence? Anyone seeing high conversion from nurture flows?

Context, we’re a small retail media platform that works with a good number of small to medium sized FMCG brands.

Recently, we’ve had media owners enquire if we would like to distribute the promotions we carry onto their websites and/or apps.

We don’t necessarily need the extra distribution although we see it as a growth opportunity for the business. Very much we anticipate the media owners wanting some form of CPA, however my boss wants us to charge for this service. If we go the CPA route, our net revenues decrease, hence thinking about charging this fee.

Why? Because these media owners want the extra demand, they want the content / promotions to keep their users engaged longer on their respective sites, and to offer their users more value.

I see both side and curious what people’s thoughts would be.

Hello all, I get a small trickle of income from Amazon affliate links. The US store pays me out in cash, but the Canadian store just sent me a $14 CAD gift card. I went into the settings but it looks like I can't change the Canadian store to pay out cash? Does this sound correct?

Edit: I'm in Australia so a Candian gift card is a bit useless.

ok so this is a weird one but bear with me

i have a pet blog. i don't own a pet. never have. probably never will as i travel too much. and yet every month amazon sends me enough to cover rent because people on the internet are buying stuff for their dogs and cats through my site.

bought my pet blog a few months ago from a marketplace called NicheBlogZone for $199. came already built, articles already up, amazon links already in there. i spent one afternoon doing interlinking basically just connecting related posts to each other so search engines understand the site structure and then closed my laptop and genuinely forgot about it for weeks.

here's what that's looked like:

• march: $710
• april: $995
• may: $1,461
• june: $1,647
• july: $1,461
• august so far: $1,545 (amazon pays 2 months delayed so this is june's money landing now)

march scared me. went from nearly $1k in february down to $710 and i was convinced something had broken. checked everything, found nothing wrong, did nothing. it just came back the next month on its own.

pet people spend insane amounts on their animals btw. like i knew this intellectually but seeing the commission data is something else. dog food subscriptions, orthopedic beds, grooming kits, vet supplements. and because of the 24 hour cookie i get a cut of everything in their cart not just whatever article they landed on.

i do literally nothing to maintain this. no new posts, no ads, no instagram for pets i don't have. i just own the thing and amazon does its thing.

my landlord has been getting paid every month and has no idea a pet blog is behind it. honestly sometimes i forget too until the deposit shows up.

anyone else running a niche they have zero personal connection to? curious if the detachment makes it easier or harder to care about growing it

Asking this from the affiliate side. I've promoted offers from maybe 15 different companies over the past 2 years and the gap between the good programs and the bad ones is massive. But it's rarely about the payout.

The companies I stick with and actively promote usually give me things that aren't in the standard media kit:

Landing page variants. One company gave me 4 different pre-sell pages to test. That alone doubled my conversion rate because I could match the landing page to the traffic source. Most companies give you one landing page and wonder why affiliates can't convert.

Real conversion data. One network shared their average EPC and conversion rate by traffic source. That let me benchmark my performance and know whether I was underperforming or the offer was just tough. Most companies won't share this data, which means affiliates are flying blind.

Responsive affiliate managers. I'm not talking about a weekly check-in email. I mean someone who responds within 24 hours when I have a tracking issue, can approve custom creatives, and can negotiate a payout bump when I'm driving volume. I've left programs that paid well because the AM took 5 days to respond to a broken tracking link.

Custom payout terms. The best program I work with lets me choose between CPA and rev-share mid-campaign based on performance data. Most programs lock you into one model, and you're stuck.

Offer a feedback loop. One company actually asked me what search terms were converting for my traffic. They used that data to improve their own landing pages. Felt like a partnership instead of a one-way extraction.

What I'm wondering: from the company side, what stops you from providing these things? Is it a resource issue, a trust issue, or just not knowing what affiliates need?

And from the affiliate side, what would make you promote a company's offer more actively? What's missing from most programs?

It took me longer than I want to admit to figure this out.
I was obsessing over CTR. Every creative decision, every targeting tweak, every copy change was in service of getting that number up. And it kept going up. Felt like progress.
Then I actually looked at what was happening downstream. High CTR campaigns were producing lower quality leads that converted at half the rate of campaigns with mediocre CTR. The metric I had been treating as North Star was actively pointing me in the wrong direction.
The problem is CTR is easy to measure and immediately visible. Downstream conversion quality takes longer to see and requires more work to track properly. So I optimised for what was easy to see instead of what actually mattered.
This pattern shows up everywhere in affiliate marketing. We chase the metric that is most visible rather than the one that is most connected to actual outcomes.
What metric did you spend too long optimising before realising it was the wrong one?

Im doing an impact.com review for a platform shortlist, and migration seems like one of those things that is difficult to judge from demos. What actually changed after you moved?

Did partner onboarding get easier? Did tracking or reporting improve? Were payouts and reconciliation less painful and were there any unexpected headaches with integrations, historical data or getting partners comfortable with the new setup?

I also be interested in what got worse like every platform comparison tends to focus on what you gain but the tradeoffs are probably more useful when you are deciding whether to move an established program.

Hey everyone!

Ive been working in e-commerce for quite a while, but recently Ive started making more connections in the gray area of the industry. So I figured Id give it a try myself.

I can see that the market is pretty big and activ e, and there are a ton of affiliate programs out there. But im curious to hear from people with experience, is it generally better to work with a CPA network, or go directly to advertisers?

Would love to hear your thoughts and experiences

After spending some time working with the melbet affiliate programme, i wanted to share some feedback on it. Overall, I have had a fairly positive experience, particularly with regard to the working conditions. There are several cooperation options, and the terms can be discussed with an affiliate manager depending on the traffic and geographical location (GEO).What i appreciate most is the support. When I first joined, I had a few questions about tracking and the platform, and the manager was able to help without making the process complicated. The reporting is also useful for monitoring performance. So far, I haven’t encountered any significant problems, and the experience has been straightforward. Obviously, results depend on the traffic you generate, but the working conditions have been reasonable from my side.

I recently started exploring Tiktok affiliate marketing as a side hustle, and honestly, I thought you could just post products and eventually people would buy. 🥲 Turns out, It's not that simple lol.

One thing I am figuring out now is how smaller content creators actually find brand deals. I tried looking for brands and campaigns manually, but it can be pretty time-consuming to search for them and reach out one by one.

Lately, I've been checking out creator communities and affiliate marketplaces too. I came across ShopSlayer while looking for campaigns, and it caught my attention since it has opportunities specifically for Tiktok affiliates instead of relying entirely on cold outreach.

I am also exploring Shopee affiliate marketing and focusing on improving my Tiktok content, especially hooks, product demos, and choosing products that actually fit my niche.

For those who have been doing Tiktok/Shopee affiliate marketing for a while, what worked better when you were starting out?

Focusing on one niche or testing different products first? 🤔

I already have a supplement brand that I'm selling. How should I find IG influencers to promote the brand? I see my competition; they have like 1000+ influencers posting about their stuff.

What is the best way to approach this?

I've had review sites for a while in a variety of niches. While I know about content creation, I struggle to find good (preferrably free) backlinks that don't require tons of outreach.

How are you building backlinks to your review sites?

I’ve been thinking about this after switching sources a few times and realising the switching cost is always higher than it looks upfront…
The obvious reasons to stay are rates and volume but those are also the easiest things for any network to match or beat short term.
What actually keeps me somewhere long term is consistency of traffic quality over time, how the network responds when something goes wrong and whether the account manager relationship actually adds value or is just a support ticket system with a human face on it.
The networks that earn long term relationships tend to be the ones where you feel like your spend matters to them. Not just during onboarding but six months in when you are not a new account anymore.
What are the specific things that have made you stick with a network beyond the initial test phase?

We are recently been approved by AWIN as advertiser, we are software company providing VPN apps and already more than 5 years in niche.

Looking for some tips from publishers if you are interested promoting such product Or what’s kind of product are good fit in affiliate right now?