#Best Affiliate Programs on PartnerStack

[moneygos]

Best Affiliate Programs on PartnerStack

Looking for worthwhile best affiliate programs that can increase your earning potential? If you run any kind of ecommerce, blogging, or online business, including affiliate marketing into your mix can produce mutual benefits. On one hand, you are helping other small businesses attract new customers and expand their revenues. At the same time, it is an opportunity to increase the visibility of…

[haiderdaani]

Best affiliate marketing companies software for saas with a free demo

Quite possibly the most rewarding method for making automated revenue is member advertising. Basically, it permits organizations to publicize their items through a member in return for a commission. Contrasted with conventional promoting, this altogether increments crowd go after less expense and hazard.

So, making an effective partner showcasing program requires technique, and utilizing offshoot promoting programming is a major one. Here are the absolute best partner promoting stages to assist you with kicking off, regulate, and extend your offshoot showcasing drives.

1. Refersion 2. Post Affiliate Pro 3. Tapfiliate 4. LeadDyno 5. Everflow 6. Affiliatly 7. TUNE 8. PartnerStack 9. iDevAffiliate 10. FlexOffers

Read More...

[jcmarchi]

5 Best Affiliate Networks to Launch AI & SaaS Affiliate Programs

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/5-best-affiliate-networks-to-launch-ai-saas-affiliate-programs/

5 Best Affiliate Networks to Launch AI & SaaS Affiliate Programs

For AI and SaaS companies looking to expand their reach and boost revenue, leveraging an effective affiliate marketing program is essential. The right affiliate network can streamline partner recruitment, optimize management processes, and provide the insights needed to drive growth. We will explore top affiliate marketing platforms that offer robust solutions tailored to the unique needs of AI and SaaS businesses, and that feature a large existing base of affiliates to recruit from.

PartnerStack offers an all-in-one affiliate marketing platform designed to help SaaS and AI companies grow their revenue through robust partner ecosystems. By connecting businesses with a network of over 80,000 active partners and 300 leading SaaS partner programs, PartnerStack accelerates growth through simplified partner management, automated processes, and comprehensive tools for tracking and optimizing performance.

The platform supports various partnership types, including affiliate partners, referral partners, and reseller partners, enabling companies to diversify their channels and expand their market reach. PartnerStack’s intuitive interface allows businesses to recruit, onboard, and activate partners efficiently, providing custom onboarding journeys, training, and resources to ensure partners are set up for success.

With advanced features like automated partner payments, detailed reporting, and real-time performance tracking, PartnerStack simplifies ecosystem management. Businesses can gain insights into traffic flows, conversions, and partner contributions, ensuring accurate compensation and ongoing optimization.

Recognized as a top-rated partner ecosystem platform, PartnerStack helps companies achieve significant revenue growth. The platform’s automated solutions and integration capabilities with popular business tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Stripe make it a seamless addition to any tech stack, ensuring businesses can scale their partner programs effectively and efficiently.

This affiliate network specializes in SaaS companies and serves as a great hub to recruit affiliates marketing software and AI solutions.

Extensive Partner Network: Connect with over 80,000 active partners and 300 leading SaaS programs to accelerate growth and diversify channels.

Comprehensive Management Tools: Efficiently recruit, onboard, and activate partners with custom journeys, training, and resources for success.

Automated Processes: Simplify ecosystem management with automated partner payments, detailed reporting, and real-time performance tracking.

Diverse Partnership Types: Support for affiliate, referral, and reseller partners enables companies to expand market reach and grow revenue.

Seamless Integration: Integrates with popular business tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Stripe, ensuring smooth incorporation into existing tech stacks.

Visit Partnerstack →

Impact.com is quickly becoming the most popular affiliate network in the world. They offer a robust affiliate marketing platform designed to manage and optimize complex partnership programs for AI and SaaS companies. The platform enables seamless integration with various technology partners, allowing data to flow freely across different tools, which enhances user experiences and facilitates faster decision-making.

Impact.com provides a comprehensive Technology Partner Program that includes a dedicated partner manager, technical support, certification and training for employees, account mapping, co-marketing opportunities, and more. This program ensures that partners can effectively integrate with impact.com and build world-class solutions for brands, publishers, and agencies.

The affiliate marketing landscape has evolved to include not only traditional affiliates but also social media influencers, content creators, business development partners, and paid media partners. Impact.com addresses this by offering streamlined workflows for recruiting, onboarding, and managing partners on a single platform. It provides instant access to performance metrics, actionable insights, and tools to identify and block fraudulent partners, ensuring efficient and secure management of all partnerships.

Impact.com’s platform supports cross-device tracking, allowing companies to analyze customer interactions across desktops, mobile web, and mobile apps. This comprehensive tracking capability helps businesses gain a deeper understanding of customer journeys, recognize the true contributions of each partner, and reward them appropriately for conversions, installs, and in-app events.

Additionally, impact.com offers migration assistance, agency partnerships, and access to a vibrant marketplace where companies can discover and recruit high-performing media partners globally. The platform’s features, such as branded interfaces and fraud protection, further enhance its ability to manage, protect, and optimize partnerships, making it an essential tool for AI and SaaS companies looking to launch and grow their affiliate programs.

Seamless Integration: Impact.com ensures smooth data flow across various tools, enhancing user experiences and facilitating quicker decision-making.

Comprehensive Partner Program: Offers dedicated support, technical services, certification, co-marketing opportunities, and more for effective integration and growth.

Evolved Affiliate Landscape: Manages a diverse range of partners, including influencers, content creators, and business development partners, on a single platform.

Advanced Tracking: Provides cross-device tracking and detailed analysis of customer interactions to accurately reward partners for their contributions.

Global Recruitment and Protection: Features migration assistance, agency partnerships, and a marketplace for discovering high-performing partners, with built-in fraud protection and secure management.

Visit Impact →

Reditus offers an innovative affiliate marketing platform designed specifically for B2B SaaS companies, providing a streamlined solution to grow your Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR). The platform enables businesses to manage and optimize their affiliate programs efficiently, offering a user-friendly dashboard that consolidates all relevant data. This makes monitoring and improving affiliate performance straightforward.

The Reditus Marketplace is a hub where B2B SaaS companies can list their affiliate programs and connect with over 6,000 SaaS affiliates, driving growth and increasing visibility. The platform simplifies the payout process by accumulating commissions until a set threshold is reached, ensuring seamless financial management without losing control.

Setting up an affiliate program with Reditus is quick and straightforward, taking less than 30 minutes. The process includes technical installation, program details creation, and legal arrangements, supported by an in-app live chat for immediate assistance. Acquiring and managing affiliates is made easy through various tools that invite and track affiliates, with data integration into existing CRM systems for comprehensive management.

Optimization and growth are key focuses of Reditus. Once the program is up and running, it can be listed in the Reditus Marketplace, giving access to a vast network of affiliates. Proven success stories from companies like Expandi and Prospectss.com demonstrate significant affiliate-driven revenue and user sign-ups, showcasing the platform’s effectiveness.

Reditus offers a free setup plan to get you started without any initial costs. The platform becomes chargeable only after generating revenue or opting for a premium marketplace listing, starting at $59 per month. The platform is designed exclusively for B2B SaaS companies, ensuring features and metrics are tailored to this business model.

With Reditus, SaaS companies can effectively grow their affiliate programs, leveraging a comprehensive and intuitive platform to drive significant revenue growth. The platform supports businesses at every stage, from setup to optimization, making it an indispensable tool for those looking to enhance their affiliate marketing efforts.

User-Friendly Dashboard: Reditus consolidates all affiliate program data into an intuitive dashboard, simplifying performance monitoring and optimization.

Extensive Marketplace: Connect with over 6,000 SaaS affiliates through the Reditus Marketplace, amplifying your program’s visibility and growth potential.

Quick Setup: Launch your affiliate program in under 30 minutes, with comprehensive support for technical installation, program creation, and legal arrangements.

Optimized Payouts: Streamlined commission accumulation and payouts ensure efficient financial management and control.

Proven Success: Demonstrated effectiveness with companies like Expandi and Prospectss.com, achieving significant revenue and user sign-ups through affiliate-driven strategies.

Visit Reditus →

ShareASale is one of the oldest affiliate networks, it offers a versatile affiliate marketing platform that caters to AI and SaaS companies looking to launch and manage effective affiliate programs. The platform provides a low barrier to entry for startups, entrepreneurs, and small businesses, allowing them to quickly set up and run their affiliate programs. For larger enterprises, ShareASale delivers sophisticated attribution solutions and commission flexibility, enabling highly customized affiliate programs tailored to specific partnership needs.

The platform’s dynamic dashboard offers real-time notifications and insights, helping users optimize their affiliate partnerships. Innovative tools such as automated marketing emails and application rules enhance communication and save time. ShareASale also provides transparent and robust reporting with customizable reports and click stream graphs to monitor program success and gain deeper insights into affiliate performance.

ShareASale supports a diverse range of affiliate partners, from content bloggers and influencers to mass media publishers and loyalty sites. The network’s advanced tracking solutions, integrated with Awin MasterTag, offer durable and future-proof tracking for mobile, app, and web. The platform also features a user-friendly interface, making it easy to build creative inventory, recruit affiliates, and generate sales by rewarding partners for referred sales or leads.

The platform’s comprehensive suite of tools, including express sign-up pages, recruitment tools, and affiliate tagging and segmentation, allows businesses to efficiently manage and grow their affiliate programs. ShareASale’s customer-centric approach ensures reliable support and expert insights to help clients achieve their marketing goals.

With over 20 years of experience and a global network of publishers and advertisers, ShareASale, as part of the Awin Group, provides powerful technology and business intelligence to drive sustainable growth. The platform connects businesses with customers worldwide, generating significant revenue and fostering successful performance-based partnerships.

Low Barrier to Entry: ShareASale offers an accessible platform for startups and small businesses to quickly launch and manage their affiliate programs.

Advanced Customization for Enterprises: Provides sophisticated attribution solutions and flexible commissions, enabling tailored affiliate programs for large enterprises.

Dynamic Dashboard: Features real-time notifications, automated marketing tools, and customizable reports for optimizing affiliate partnerships and gaining performance insights.

Diverse Affiliate Network: Supports a wide range of partners, from bloggers and influencers to mass media publishers, with robust tracking solutions integrated with Awin MasterTag.

Comprehensive Support and Tools: Includes express sign-up pages, recruitment tools, and affiliate tagging, backed by expert support to help businesses grow and manage their affiliate programs effectively.

Visit ShareASale →

CJ is a name that most affiliates recognize, but it has fallen behind compared to our other recommendations. Nonetheless, it offers a comprehensive affiliate marketing platform ideal for AI and SaaS companies looking to scale their affiliate programs.

CJ’s platform provides a seamless global affiliate experience, leveraging meaningful data, cutting-edge technology, and industry expertise. This helps companies reach the right customers at the right time, fostering sustained growth through efficient publisher recruitment and in-platform tools.

CJ supports global growth by enabling businesses to identify international opportunities and reach consumers in over 240 countries. The platform offers localized support with over 150 payment currencies and a robust set of tools for comprehensive tracking across devices and channels, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations.

Advanced features like Situational Commissioning allow for customized commission structures based on various high-value order attributes, enhancing the effectiveness of affiliate strategies. The platform’s insights and analytics tools provide on-demand, customizable reports to help businesses understand customer journeys, affiliate incrementality, and competitive positioning.

CJ’s strong foundation of data-driven insights, strategic partnerships, and ongoing innovation ensures that AI and SaaS companies can efficiently onboard, discover new partnerships, engage with omni-channel strategies, and optimize their programs for maximum growth and success.

Proven Track Record: CJ consistently drives higher revenue and conversions, enabling brands to reward top publishers and achieve sustained growth through effective affiliate marketing.

Global Reach: The platform enables businesses to reach consumers in over 240 countries with localized support and over 150 payment currencies.

Advanced Features: Situational Commissioning allows for customized commission structures, enhancing the effectiveness of affiliate strategies.

Comprehensive Tracking: Offers robust tracking across devices and channels, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations and accurate performance measurement.

Data-Driven Insights: Provides on-demand, customizable reports to understand customer journeys, affiliate incrementality, and competitive positioning, supported by strategic partnerships and continuous innovation.

Visit CJ →

Summary

For AI and SaaS companies looking to recruit affiliates, choosing the right affiliate network is your most important decision in the journey to recruit top affiliates.

These affiliate networks offer a base of affiliates, and offer tools and  intuitive interfaces that streamline the recruitment, onboarding, and activation processes. With access to extensive networks of active partners, businesses can connect with a wide range of affiliates, including content creators, influencers, referral partners, and resellers.

By leveraging automated processes, these platforms ensure efficient management of partner relationships, automated payments, and detailed performance tracking. Advanced features like custom commissioning structures and real-time reporting enable companies to optimize their affiliate strategies, ensuring accurate compensation and improved ROI.

Comprehensive tracking capabilities allow businesses to monitor customer interactions across multiple channels and devices, providing deep insights into affiliate performance. This helps companies understand the contributions of each partner and adjust their strategies accordingly.

With support for global growth, these tools facilitate the expansion into new markets by connecting companies with international partners and offering localized solutions. This enables businesses to reach a broader audience and drive substantial revenue growth.

Overall, these affiliate marketing tools are designed to help AI and SaaS companies efficiently recruit, manage, and optimize affiliate partnerships, driving significant growth and enhancing their marketing efforts.

[future-sign]

What is affiliate marketing? What are some of the most popular affiliate marketing networks?

Affiliate marketing is one of the best online businesses and strategies today in the world.

Affiliate marketing is a promoting a product for someone else and you will earn commission when you sell a product for someone you will earn a commission for that sale. You can start totally from scratch start directly with affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing can be a win-win for both merchants and affiliates. Merchants benefit from increased exposure and sales without having to spend money on advertising upfront, while affiliates earn a commission for promoting products.

There are many amazing affiliate sites that you can start now. Here are the most popular affiliate marketing networks.

1. Amazon Associates: Amazon is one of the largest online retailers in the world, and their affiliate program, Amazon Associates, is one of the most popular affiliate programs. You can earn commissions by promoting any of the millions of products available on Amazon.

2. ClickBank: ClickBank is a popular affiliate network that specializes in digital products such as e-books, online courses, and software. ClickBank offers high commission rates and a large selection of products to promote.

3. ShareASale: It has been around for over 20 years and has a vast network of merchants and products to choose from.

4. Commission Junction: Commission Junction (CJ) is a popular affiliate network that offers a wide range of products and services to promote. CJ also provides advanced tracking and reporting tools to help you optimize your affiliate campaigns.

5. Rakuten Marketing: It offers a range of products to promote and has a user-friendly platform.

More top 5 legit affiliate marketing platforms to earn money:

1. Impact

2. Warrior Plus

3. PartnerStack

4. eBay Partner Network

5. Click Funnel

It is essential to choose an affiliate program that aligns with your niche and offers products your audience is interested in. Please join today and start making money. Have a nice journey.

[mkranjan]

What are the 10 legitimate platforms to earn from affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn money online by promoting other people's products or services. However, with so many different platforms available, it can be difficult to know which ones are legitimate and which ones are not. Here are 10 legitimate platforms that you can use to earn from affiliate marketing:

Amazon Associates: One of the most popular and well-known affiliate programs, Amazon Associates allows you to promote any product on Amazon and earn a commission on any resulting sales.

Commission Junction: Commission Junction (CJ) is one of the largest affiliate networks, with thousands of advertisers and millions of products to choose from.

ShareASale: ShareASale is another large affiliate network, with a wide variety of products and services to promote.

ClickBank: ClickBank is a digital marketplace that specializes in selling e-books, software, and other digital products.

Rakuten Marketing: Formerly known as LinkShare, Rakuten Marketing is a global affiliate network that offers a wide variety of products and services to promote.

Awin: Awin is a global affiliate network that offers a wide variety of products and services to promote and allows you to track your earnings and performance.

FlexOffers: FlexOffers is an affiliate network that provides access to a wide variety of products and services to promote.

PartnerStack: PartnerStack is a platform that helps businesses and individuals monetize their online presence by connecting them with relevant affiliate programs.

Skimlinks: Skimlinks is a platform that allows you to easily monetize your content by converting product links into affiliate links.

VigLink: VigLink is a platform that helps monetize your content by automatically converting product links into affiliate links.

These are some of the legitimate platforms that you can use to earn from affiliate marketing. It's important to research and compare the different options to find the one that best suits your needs and goals. Remember that in order to be successful in affiliate marketing, you will need to put in a lot of hard work and dedication.

Get a free consultancy at Meevit Technology

[aseyori]

Best Affiliate Programs

Affiliaxe DFO Global Amazon Associates eBay Partner Network ShareASale ClickBank CJ Affiliate PartnerStack Fiverr

As an affiliate marketer, you’ve got one thing on your mind: performance. To get the best performance for your affiliate campaigns, it’s worth trying out a few platforms to see what works for you. Whether you are a beginner just starting out, or more advanced with some experience behind you, here are some great affiliate marketing programs for you to check out. See what kind of offers are available on the most popular platforms to help you achieve your best conversions and even build a steady long-term income.So let’s dive in:

Affiliaxe

Affiliaxe is a top choice for marketers who want to access a whole lot of verticals. This translates to a wide variety of products and offers, so you get to choose and focus where you can get the best results. Plus, if accepted to the program, you have access to your very own Affiliate Manager to help you optimize your traffic and create a unique bonus program to max your earning potential. Top it off with an easy-to-use platform, it’s a favorite for global affiliate marketers.

DFO Global

If you’re looking for a high-quality affiliate network to work with, you won’t go wrong with DFO Global. You get access to a wide range of e-commerce products on a closed, safe, and brand-protected environment, with high covering offers and high payouts as a reward. For serious affiliate marketers who want a program that’s worth investing their time and effort, then DFO Global – with top-notch data analytics and responsive managers at your disposal – is the way to go.

Amazon Associates

For affiliate marketing beginners, Amazon is a great platform to kick off your new venture. The vast Amazon marketplace takes care of most of the sales process, warming up your leads for you. Your job is to bring new clients from external traffic sources to the Amazon site. There are millions of products you can pitch, with new ones being added every day. It’s a great way to make money without having yet built up a strong background in the art of affiliate marketing.

eBay Partner Network

Here’s a great way to tap into the enormous affiliate potential of the eBay market. Advertise eBay products on social media, your blog or website, and get commission from every product sold via your link. Signing up to the eBay Partner Network is simple, and there is a never-ending supply of interesting products to promote, including popular trending products and daily deals.

ShareASale

ShareASale is one of the largest affiliate networks out there, running for nearly two decades, so it’s built up a lot of trust in the affiliate industry. The network is well-loved by marketers and merchants because of its user-friendly interface, fast free sign up and support for affiliates running multiple websites. It has a huge variety of merchants to choose from in over 40 categories, including some big names.

ClickBank

With 6 million digital products in over 20 categories, reaching 200 million people worldwide, ClickBank is a popular choice among affiliate marketers. What’s more, this program offers very high commissions, as high as 75%, and ClickBank is known for its regular reliable payouts, which is a huge drawcard. There are plenty of products sold on a recurring basis, which means a great source of recurring income for you, as well as products with upsell options to help boost your income.

CJ Affiliate

CJ Affiliate is a great program for more experienced marketers, with 300 brands, including many of the world’s top brands. The program boasts 43% year-on-year growth in commissions, so it’s an attractive option. However you need a good amount of traffic to get accepted, and there are strict conditions for staying on as a publisher. The sophisticated toolbox may take some getting used to but has great features for more advanced affiliate marketers.

PartnerStack

PartnerStack is an affiliate program focusing on the promotion of software products and tools, including many well-known and popular software. The company claims that 30% of software sold actually comes through channel partners, so if your audience has a particular software interest, there’s great potential for you here. PartnerStack is big into building partnerships between affiliate marketers and product owners, so you’ll benefit from pinpointed analytics and high growth potential.

Fiverr Affiliates Program

Fiverr bills itself as the world’s largest digital services marketplace, with over 11 million users in 190 countries. Fiverr has a generous commission plan, with CPA of up to $150. Plus, there’s no referral limit and you get lifetime attribution. Another nice benefit of the Fiverr affiliates program is their user-friendly dashboard, as well as the portfolio of creative resources that you can use to promote Fiverr, so some of the heavy lifting is done for you already.

No two affiliate marketers are the same – and neither are affiliate programs. Depending on your audience, niche and personality, there are different affiliate networks that may be better suited to you. The affiliate programs featured here cover a range of possibilities from beginner affiliate marketers to advanced but they are just the tip of the affiliate iceberg. Start here as you warm up for your affiliate marketing journey. https://www.getresponse.com/?a=KRc6AaYAhC

[simplemlmsponsoring]

New Post has been published on https://simplemlmsponsoring.com/attraction-marketing-formula/affiliate-marketing/partnerstack-review-affiliate-marketplace-for-saas-products-and-growing-companies/

PartnerStack Review: Affiliate Marketplace For SAAS Products And Growing Companies

You may be somewhat like me. A busy person who is always juggling, getting everything done while also enjoying life. One mantra to achieve this is by doing things that are working for others.

Here at ShoutMeLoud, I only share stuff which works for me and others. And today is the day when you should learn about this not-so-new affiliate marketplace called PartnerStack.

I have talked about PartnerStack earlier in my mega post of top affiliate marketplaces and how to make money blogging. Today, I’m sharing this dedicated post about PartnerStack given they have now built a considerable amount of affiliate program in the SAAS and web app niche.

Moreover, my revenue has been growing slowly and steadily fromPartnerStack, which gives me more confidence to let you and other Shouters know about it. As I said, I only share stuff that works for me

Also, read:

Affiliate Link Cloaking: Importance & Benefits For Affiliate Marketers How to Choose the Best Affiliate Product for Your Blog What is PartnerStack?

PartnerStack is an affiliate marketplace which connects brands with affiliates/publishers. Brands like Evernote, Crowdfire, Freshbooks are usingPartnerStack to run their partner programs.

If you are an experienced affiliate marketer who has used a marketplace like ShareASale, CJ.com, Clickbank or something similar, you will be able to start usingPartnerStack in no time. The interface is different compared to others, more modern. In fact, I find it to be the fastest among the ones mentioned above and for someone like you and me who care about speed and a nice UI, you might fall in love the first time itself.

As a blogger, affiliate marketer, you have the option to quickly join the affiliate program offered by many of the companies listed there. You can start by creating an account for yourself using the below link.

Create Your free account

Once your account is created, you can click on Marketplace to start browsing the available brands and join their affiliate program.

Once you have joined a program, you can click on the top left to switch between various programs. Clicking on links will let you grab your exclusive affiliate link and you can also grab marketing material by clicking on the Assets section.

Payout: PayPal

Once you have accumulated enough payout, you can use Paypal to receive payment. This part is not automatic like others affiliate marketplaces; you have to request payout manually. Minimum payout is $25.

Pros and cons of PartnerStack

What I enjoy most aboutPartnerStack is the unique set of affiliate programs. Also, the intuitive interface gives a modern experience. Minimum payout of $25 is reasonable enough for entry-level affiliates to cash out with a just a few sales.

At the same time, I believe they could do much better in terms of getting more brands on board. I see a lot of brands become inactive which could be because of the lack of publishers. However, I believe they keep attracting new and also popular brands and more affiliates, this could be a thriving affiliate marketplace.

Join PartnerStack

Video Guide for PartnerStack

You can learn more  by watching this video guide aboutPartnerStack:

  Over to you

Alright, it’s your time to try out PartnerStack and let me know your first-hand experience of this marketplace. Also, if you know similar affiliate marketplaces that should feature on ShoutMeLoud, let me know in the comments below.

Here are a few other hand-picked guides for you to read next:

Must-Know Things Before Joining Any Affiliate Program The Extra Money I Earned By Growth Hacking Amazon Associate Program: A Case Study How to monetize a WordPress blog Subscribe on Youtube

PartnerStack Review: Affiliate Marketplace For SAAS Products And Growing Companies is a post from ShoutMeLoud – Shouters Who Inspires

Read more: shoutmeloud.com

[dorothydelgadillo]

"How to Build a Successful Channel Marketing Program Ft. Bryn Jones of PartnerStack" (Inbound Success Ep. 76)

How do companies with successful channel marketing programs increase customer lifetime value by 150% while decreasing the cost of customer acquisition by up to 75%?

Bryn Jones

This week onThe Inbound Success Podcast I'm joined by Bryn Jones, the CEO of PartnerStack - a SaaS platform that enables companies to build and manage partner channel marketing programs. 

PartnerStack's clients range from startups to publicly traded companies like Intuit and Shopify. What they all have in common is channel marketing, and the insights that Bryn has gained by working with them have made him an authority on what it takes to build a successful partner channel.

In this week's episode, he talks about the types of companies that are a good fit for channel marketing (TL;DR - it's just about everybody), when to start a channel, what it takes to build a successful channel, how much it costs, and what kinds of results you should expect.

This week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, IMPACT Live,  the most immersive and high energy learning experience for marketers and business leaders. IMPACT Live takes place August 6-7, 2019 in Hartford Connecticut and is headlined by Marcus Sheridan along with keynote speakers including world-renowned Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith and Drift CEO and Co-Founder David Cancel.

Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets with the code "SUCCESS". 

Click here to learn more or purchase tickets for IMPACT Live

Some highlights from my conversation with Bryn include:

PartnerStack helps companies grow through partnerships by providing the technology layer that enables them to build a partner channel marketing program.

Approximately 30% of the software sold every year is sold through channel programs.

Partner channels are the best way to get in front of the late adopters and laggards in the market, which is the majority of the market.

Bryn believes that partner channels can work for any type of business.

The best way to start a partner channel is to identify four different potential types of partners, and the work with ten companies in each category (so 40 total). From that initial 40, you will be able to identify which category is the best fit for your business.

Companies with partner channels, on average, have customer lifetime values that are 1.5 times higher than those without channel programs.

When it comes to partner incentives, start with basic recognition (ex. thank you notes). When you're ready to scale up, cash rewards tend to work better than coupons or gift cards.

HubSpot, Shopify and Intuit are all companies with best-in-class partner programs.

Bryn says that companies that have partner programs aren't selling an opportunity to earn a commission. They're selling an opportunity to do business.

The most successful partner channels aren't selling incentives, they are selling value that the company (that offers the partner program) can go through and then provide to the partner.

When creating a new partner channel program, start by building out a portal and automating communication with partners. Make sure to create case studies about your partners' successes.

Companies with $3 to $5 million in annual revenues are generally a good fit for starting a partner channel. 

If you're serious about doing this, and doing it well, be prepared to hire a dedicated full time person to work on your partner channel and give them at least six months to become successful.

The typical partner channel program can increase customer lifetime value by 150% and decrease the cost of customer acquisition by up to 75%.

Resources from this episode:

Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS"

Visit the PartnerStack website

Email Bryn at bryn@partnerstack.com 

Bryn Jones on Twitter

Connect with Bryn on LinkedIn

Listen to the podcast to learn more about what types of companies are a good fit for channel marketing, when to start one, and what the specific characteristics are of the most successful partner channel marketing programs.

Transcript

Kathleen Booth (Host):Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth, and today my guess is Bryn Jones who's the co-founder and CEO of PartnerStack. Welcome Bryn. Bryn Jones (Guest): Hey how are you? Kathleen, how are you?

Bryn and Kathleen recording this episode

Kathleen: I'm great, thanks. How are you doing?

Bryn: Good, good. I'm in California today, so doing some last minute travel right before the year ends, getting in front of customers.

Kathleen: Nice. The last minute hustle. Hopefully you get to wrap that up soon and have a little down time for the holidays.

Bryn: Yeah, yeah. No, it's ... I mean, that's the great thing about enterprise software is it's pedal to the metal, but the holidays does leave a little bit of time for people to rest and recuperate, so looking forward to getting back into the office next week and putting a solid plan together for next year.

Kathleen: Yeah, it sure beats being in retail this time of year.

Bryn: Absolutely.

About PartnerStack

Kathleen: So before we jump into our conversation for today, tell our audience a little bit about yourself, and about PartnerStack, and what it does.

Bryn: Yeah, perfect. Yeah so PartnerStack, we're a three year old company.

Three years ago we got into a business incubator called Y Combinator. We went in as an idea, and we came out as a semi-functioning product.

But what it is that we do is we let companies grow through partnerships. What that means is we're the technology layer that lets companies go and build partner or channel programs.

So an example of this would be Intuit. They drive about 20% of their revenue through accountants, bookkeepers, and financial institutions. Except this whole process is incredibly challenging to 1) manage, and 2) actually ensure that it's in fact successful.

We're the layer of technology that lets marketers get back to being marketers, and get away from being administrators.

Kathleen: I definitely feel like it shows that you went through Y Combinator, because you have your value prop and pitch completely nailed down, which I know that gets drilled into you when you go through these incubators and accelerators, that being one of the, obviously the most famous ones.

So what led you to wanting to create the solution? Was it something from your background or experience? Did you see that pain point?

Bryn: Super interesting. So my other founders and I, we actually built another company while I was in graduate school. The company was like Slack, except it was pretty much worse in every other way in that the product wasn't as good, we certainly didn't have the revenue growth, and we definitely weren't able to go fundraise.

But what we realized is we could instead innovate on business model. I don't think enough technology companies go through and do this, and so we started working with a network of agencies.

These networks of agencies, they would send us business, and we'd simply send them a commission. This was incredibly interesting, because people started reaching out to us saying, "Hey, how are you managing your channel program? How are you managing your partner program?" Quite frankly, we just said, "What's that?"

It took us down this big path where we realized, there's a ton of software sold each year, and 30% of the is coming through channel partners.

This is kind of like the last fossil inside of a technology company, that technology hasn't had to go through it and understand distribution. But really it's the best way to get in front of the late adopters and laggards in the market, which is the majority of the market.

Kathleen: Yeah, that's really interesting. I have been a participant in channel programs. I've been a value-added reseller, a partner, whatever you want to call it, for quite a few years, with several different technology companies. But I have never been in a company that had a partner or reseller program.

So if somebody is listening and they're the in-house marketer, what would you say are the questions they should be asking themselves to understand better whether a channel program is right for their business?

How To Know If A Channel Marketing Program Is Right For Your Business

Bryn: Gotcha. We firmly believe that channel works for everyone's business. The reason why we believe that, is because we can see that is in fact true. Specifically in software, it works really well.

What it really it comes down to is: Who are your channel partners? Is it more of an affiliate? Is it a larger partnership with a bank? Is it a partnership through accountants and bookkeepers?

Everyone has a specific channel partner that will work for them, and you might not get it right the first time. So really it's a process about running experiments where you're first off, trying to determine the channel partner profile.

You do this by finding 10 channel partners and making them successful, and then replicating it over, and over, and over. Now the best way that we recommend for companies to go on and do this, is to write down four different channel partners they believe will work, and go and try to backfill it. So it ends up resulting in you actually getting 40 channel partners onboard.

The reality is, is one of those groups will work really well. One of those groups will work sort of well. The other two groups will in fact fail, so that's the starting point of a channel program.

It does work for everyone. It depends on what your goals are.

This isn't a marketing channel that you turn on overnight and it immediately starts pumping out lots of revenue. But the reason why people need to go through and invest in it early, is because the lifetime value, sorry, the cost to acquire customers through channel is actually less expense than through any other means.

Then the lifetime value of those customers is significantly more. We're seeing in our customers it's up to 1.5 times more, and so it's an investment worth making early days, because it's the only thing that's going to let you go through it in scale.

Kathleen: Now you said when you were talking about that this, that channel can work for everyone. Do you mean everyone in software, or everyone period?

Bryn: Well, it's interesting. I think everyone period. Technology companies are the ones where we've gone through it and focused, but most other sectors are using channel in some way, shape, or form today.

The best example would be the way Toyota sells their cars through a network of dealerships. They don't think of that as channel, but certainly it is channel. Those dealerships are owned by independent business people, and that relationship is always challenging.

So nontraditional sectors have done a very good job at understanding channel. It just hasn't been formally called that, and so what we're seeing in the space is actually some of the most innovative stuff, is really coming out of agencies, in the way that they go through and manage their referrals, because it drives so much of their business.

Kathleen: Yeah, it's funny when you say that these other industries are doing it without calling it channel, because what first came to my mind was specialist physicians.

For example, I've worked for years with a client that does laser eye surgery. They get all of their business through referrals. I had a call the other day with a company that just does medical imaging, so MRIs, all of their business. Nobody goes in the phone book to pick out where they're going to get their MRI. It all comes through a referring physician.

So in the medical field, it's incredibly common. I think we as consumers experience channels all the time. I think a lot of people just don't know that there's a name for that.

Bryn: Yeah, it's the infrastructure underneath of the way that those referrals go through and work, and so our thesis is that this is actually much more scientific than it has been.

There is a way to go through and do it. You can optimize that process, and when you optimize that process, you just get a better ROI.

How To Start A Channel Marketing Program

Kathleen: Yeah, so if somebody is listening and they think a channel could work for them, you mentioned that the first step is to figure out four, let's call it buckets, of types of channel partners, and to backfill those buckets, 10 partners in each bucket, so you've got 40 partners.

Then it sounded like what you were saying is to do almost an A/B test, only I guess in this case it would be an A/B/C/D test, and figure out which of those is working the best. Is that accurate?

Bryn: That's 100% accurate. You create the buckets, and you're trying to build a persona behind it.

Where is this person located? What is their age demographic? What is their occupation? Maybe most importantly, what is the reason they are sending me business?

You go through and you run those A/B tests, and you try to figure out who's going to most effectively send you the business. When you do, you have to figure out what's the incentive you will then go through and provide them. Is it a discount? Is it a coupon? Is it a reward? Is it cash?

We've seen companies go through it and work through this. It could just be as simple as co-marketing material, writing a blog post, or featuring people.

People like to be recognized for the work that they do. I mean, it could quite frankly be as simple as sending a thank you letter.

But no one has enough process, we believe, behind the way that you go through it and recognize, and incentivize people to help you grow your business.

Structuring The Right Incentives For Channel Partners

Kathleen: Have you seen any evidence of what types of incentives tend to produce the best outcomes in channel programs?

Bryn: It depends on what the goal of the channel program is.

We find, as funny as it sounds, very basic things work, so just general recognition; thank you letters, acknowledging that you did in fact receive benefit, and that you appreciate that.

Most people drop the ball there, and so that's a very basic step that can be done. "Hey, you know what, thank you for sending me Sally over. Got her all setup and it was really great. You really helped me out here." That's the most basic version of that.

Then it can go all the way up to cash rewards. Though some people sometimes think, "Oh cash, that doesn't feel very good, maybe that's not what I want to go through it and do," the reality is, it works more often than gift cards.

From the data that we've seen on our platform, cash works more in building a program that can infinitely scale, than just coupons, because what ends up happening, or gift cards, what ends up happening is you just bring in people to your program that just want to get gift cards. There's a very small segment of the population that only wants that, and so it's a very misleading idea.

I mean, we always tell people, "If you were to go through and partner with Amazon, you couldn't pay them in Amazon gift cards, so why do you think that you can build a longterm scalable program where it's like this?"

Kathleen: Yeah, I would tend to agree with that, having been on the partner side. I would think that gift cards could potentially work if your ideal partner is an individual, truly an individual person, because then their incentive is, "Sure this is money I can spend on myself."

But if your partner is any kind of a company, gift cards have to be used by somebody. I think what's attractive about it ...

I used to own my own marketing agency, and we were partners with a lot of different organizations, probably the most prominent of which was HubSpot, which has a very good partner program, 20% in perpetuity of any monthly recurring revenue that you sell.

What was attractive about it for me was that I was in a business where there wasn't a lot of - what's the word I'm looking for? - residual income, if you will. You're selling your hours, your time, it's not super scalable.

But a partner commission changes the game a little bit, if you can accumulate enough to make it meaningful, so I would agree with that.

Bryn: Yeah. No, and that's what we're seeing. I mean ultimately if you go through and invest in the channel, what you want to do is you want to enable people to be able to earn a living, build a career, build a business off of the channel program that you go through and build.

If you accomplish that, then you will have an incredibly successful channel program.

That is an optimal end state that I think that everybody can go through it and work to, as long as people understand that it's doing the basics really well. But you have to be working towards, "How is this a longterm sustainable channel that runs and operates completely on its own?"

There's many different touchpoints that get you there to that.

Bryn: It's interesting that you mentioned HubSpot. I mean, we always point to them as the leader in understanding channel at a very early day. Peter Caputa, and the work that he did to really create a community around it, it's not just about money. It's teaching people how to build services around software, and that had never been done before.

Yeah, it was incredibly impressive the way that that's happened.

Kathleen: Yeah, Pete Caputa, he's an amazing guy. He's also who introduced us, so shout-out to Pete.

I have to underscore what you just said, because it's kind of blown me away. I mean, becoming a part of that partner program was a major game changer for my business and therefore as a result, for my life. I've said that to him. In fact, I said that to him on his birthday this year.

But the thing that amazed me about it was how almost religious people got as part of that partner program. I mean, I always saw a ton of value in it, but there were partners ...

It was incredibly common to hear people say, "I bleed orange, or I drink the orange Kool-Aid," because HubSpot's logo is orange, which are pretty extreme statements if you really think about the meaning behind them.

People who would paint their office walls orange, buy orange clothes, I mean it really was this incredibly evangelical approach to being a part of a partner program. You don't see that very often, so I think that that's to me the clearest manifestation of the value that Pete delivered to the partners that joined in the HubSpot partner program.

Bryn: Yeah, and you know what, there are other programs that are like this that work well, specifically in SaaS I can point to Shopify.

Shopify has built thousands of agencies in this point in time that help people go through and service Shopify stores. Excuse me. It all comes down to the fact that they know they aren't selling an opportunity to earn a commission. They're selling an opportunity to do business.

"They aren't selling an opportunity to earn a commission. They're selling an opportunity to do business."

~Bryn Jones   Click to Tweet this

Though it sounds very different, you're selling a partnership. What are you bringing to the table when you're setting that partnership up? It starts very low in the funnel, all the way from the thank you letter, to the coupon, to the recognition and the co-marketing stuff, and then all the way up to cash.

So there is a step by step process in which you go through and built this. But it's just having a key, like, treat your partners the same way you would treat your employees.

Bryn: If you come at it with that type of approach, and though it sounds very soft, you can unpack it, and they are very, very, very specific things that you can go through, to do to make that work.

What Makes For a Successful Channel Program?

Kathleen: Yeah. Now in my experience, as I mentioned, I've been a member of quite a few partner programs.

What's really interesting to me anecdotally, is that, I think in every case the platform that I was a partner for, and I'm thinking of SAS software partnerships right now, in every case the platform was a great platform that delivered plenty of value.

But the degree of value that I would say I derived and the platform did out of the partnership really varies. So there would be some companies like HubSpot, where my company, myself, the company I'm with now, we're very invested in that relationship.

Then there's others where it's just like a failure to launch. It never really gets off the ground.

At least in my experience, very little of that has to do with the actual incentives. You might have comparable incentives across five partnership programs, and have five very, very different results.

So can you talk a little bit about ... For a company that wants to start a channel program, once they put that incentive in place, what are the other building blocks that are necessary to set partners up for success, and to have a longterm, really thriving partner relationship?

Bryn: Yeah, so I mean the first and most important thing is that you aren't selling incentives, you are selling value that you can go through and then provide to the partner. That's not some abstract thing. You actually need to teach and train the partner how to go through and sell your product, or make the recommendation for you. You need to invest heavily, heavily in training and education materials that partners can through and access, so that they can understand how to sell your product.

"You aren't selling incentives, you are selling value that you can go through and then provide to the partner."

~ Bryn Jones   Click to Tweet this

Bryn: It's not like selling to a customer. It's again, selling a relationship. It's the same way as you would onboard an employee, so that's the first step that needs to occur.

You need to understand that there needs to be an investment into understanding the value. For you as a company, you need to understand what the partner wants out of the relationship, because again, it's not just money, and so you need to spend some time to go through and do that investigation.

They may not tell you. In fact, they probably won't, because they even know. But often what we find it is, is you as a company understand the value of your product, but I need to be trained the same way as an employee would be. That takes a lot of hand holding, beyond ...

Specific things, you could put a learning management system in place, invest in technology. If you're going to invest in technology to employees that you bring on, whether that be through Slack, your CRM, many of the marketing automation tools that are in fact out there, you need to invest in technology to go through and then support your partner ecosystem.

That technology starts with a learning management system. You should probably go through and create a basic portal. I'm not going to go through and hawk our platform, but then there are other things you need to go through and consider.

You need to be building email campaigns to ensure that partners, once they come on board, they are in fact getting engaged.

You need to think of it like a pipeline. Top of funnel is opening up and bringing new partners in, and then mid funnel is really how do you ensure that partners are moving through that pipeline.

You need to determine when you should go through and reach out to them. If you can go through and do it, you're not going to make everyone successful all the time, but there's at least a lifeline. You're building a lifeline for them to reach out to you when they need help.

That's why channel is a longterm investment. But those are some of the specific things we can think through.

Then there's even more granular stuff. Build case studies, not where you talk about your product, but where you talk about your partner, and their company, and their clients, and the way that they're going through and selling, and the struggles that they're going through and facing.

If you can build those case studies, and you can work alongside the partners to actually promote them inside of your blog, that's how you quickly build a community.

Kathleen: Absolutely. That's been my experience, is that a lot of, especially if you're working with agencies for example, well, and I would think that this is true of most partner relationships, that that agency, that company, that is your partner is running their own business, they have a lot going on, their number one focus is not the partnership generally. So the easier you can make it for them to be successful, it's almost like, "Can you spoon feed success to them?"

This is what HubSpot did really well. It had phenomenal partner onboarding. The partner success managers are great. They gave us a ton of content that we could white label and use in own marketing.

I mean, that's making it easy. We needed to get leads as an agency, and HubSpot would just give us all this content, whether it was eBooks, or infographics, or what have you, that we could put our logo on and send out, and even change, customize copy.

Making it that easy made it easy for us to invest in the partnership, so I would definitely agree with what you said there.

Bryn: Yeah, just treat your partners like they're employees. For the people that are the marketers really driving these initiatives inside of organizations, I recognize one of the hardest challenges that everyone has is actually getting buy-in from executives.

The best way to go through and communicate this to executives when this comes up, is to walk them through that. If these people are going to provide us a lower cost to acquire customers, a higher lifetime value, why aren't we willing to treat them the same way as we would any salesperson, or any other marketer that were to come on here?

If you really push that and understand how aggressively you can go through and push it, it's very surprising how quickly finance comes in and says, "That makes sense."

It's also important to understand that this isn't something that gets turned on and works overnight, but is the only way that you will truly continue to scale up longterm in the business.

Then the other thing where we see people fail often is when they think there's one partnership that will work. "Oh, this one partnership is going to change the direction of our company." That's where you see a lot of scar tissue, you know? People have learned their lessons.

Lots of scars have come from thinking through this one partnership with this one big company, that's going to change everything. Where reality is, those partnerships, to be frank, I have never seen them lead to anything, and so don't do that.

That's certainly not the place that you want to go through and start with, because it costs so many resources, it takes so much time, and the likelihood of the payoff actually happening is actually very low.

Kathleen: It's also incredibly risky. When I hear that, I think about a portfolio investment strategy. If you went to your financial advisor, they would never say to put all of your money into one stock. It could be an incredibly well performing stock, but they would never say put everything into that one stock, because you would have all your eggs in one basket.

If that thing disappears, if that partner disappears, even if it is a successful relationship that does bear fruit, if all of the sudden in year two something happens and it goes away, what are you left with? Nothing, you have nothing.

Bryn: I feel so bad. I'll tell you from our experience. One of the most challenging things for use when we first started PartnerStack in 2015 was customer development. The reason being is, we would go out and talk to partner, or channel, or community managers.

No joke, we tracked it in our CRM, and 30% of the time, they would end up losing their job within six months of a conversation happening. We went back and looked at why they were losing their job, and very often, very high percentage of the time, it was because the pursuit of one single partnership.

To this day, we've never seen that payoff. It's something that we always, always, always warn people about.

You cannot under invest in this channel. It takes time, and there is no silver bullets, there's just a lot of lead.

If you get that buy-in, and you communicate that across the company, it ultimately will be something that's successful.

I mean, look at HubSpot. 40% of the revenue comes through channel.

You can go through and look at companies like Shopify. When they IPO'd, 25% of their revenue was coming through channel, and so it's a huge, huge, huge opportunity. It's the only way you'll go through it and hit scale. It's just making sure you have buy-in.

When Should You Start A Channel Program?

Kathleen: So is there a certain point in a company's maturity when starting a channel program makes sense? It sounds like it's somewhat resource intensive to do it well, so is this something that you've seen companies do right out of the gate successfully? Or do they need to have a little time, and experience, and track record underneath them before they should move to starting a channel?

Bryn: It's my belief that channel, when you make the investment, you can do it very early.

The way you can do it is, it's very important to collect the data required to build those personas that we discussed, those four different buckets. The sooner you can start collecting that data, the better those personas become.

We think that starting early is good. But when you start, you have to think of it as an experiment. All you're doing when you put a channel program in place, is you're putting a sign on the door that says, we're open for business. You should expect nothing to come through. You should just track it, and collect the data on it.

Where we see it start to really work is when companies hit that three to five million inflection point, and it's because, simply put, companies have it figured out. They know where to collect payment information.

We've seen people, and have had instances where people got really upset where channel programs didn't work. We've gone through, dug into their program and realized, they actually forgot to collect payment information.

This doesn't fix a broken product or a broken process. But it will accelerate growth once you hit those inflection points, so I say three to five million is typically when you want to ... you know you ... If you're in a three to five million dollar revenue run rate, in order for you to hit 15 to 20, you're going to need to invest in channel in some way, shape, or form.

The sooner you do it, the better.

But that being said, we've worked with companies who have had less than 250,000 dollars in revenue, and have now grown revenues upwards and over three million dollars in revenue, because they really invested and understood channel. So there's no wrong time, but there's certainly an optimum time.

What Does It Cost To Start And Run A Channel Marketing Program?

Kathleen: Yeah. From a resource standpoint, walk me through what a company should be prepared to invest, in terms of staff to support this; level of effort, budget. I know you can't give me specifics, but give me a general sense of it they want to go in with their eyes wide open, what does it take to do this well?

Bryn: You need a dedicated person on this program at the very least - one person where their job is to figure out channel partners. That is what their job is. You can't pull them off and having them do case studies. Or you can't pull them off and doing smaller tasks that go through and then pop up.

You need to give one person a responsibility. You need to make one person responsible for channel. That one person can, within a six month period, should be able to generate significant revenue. I don't mean cover the cost of their salary by any means, but we've seen it go through and happen. But it will be a substantial amount of revenue, and you can see the path of growth going forward.

If you interrupt that person, if you put them on different projects, if you say, "Okay, not only are you managing channel, but you're going to manage community too" very, very clear and concise in what their role was.

Their goal needs to be, first to recruit partners, then to take those partners and turn them into people that actually engaged. Once they are in fact engaged -  engagement looks like training, day to day communication, opening and reading emails - once they are in fact engaged, they are actually starting to send you business or have ideas of how they will go through and send you business.

But you need at least one person dedicated to it. I cannot stress that enough.

Then after the fact, you hit a point where you decide, do you want to solve this with people, or do you want to solve this with technology?

That's typically where PartnerStack comes in. We've seen companies, you would be very surprised at how big companies can become, just managing this with people. Though it's a really good thing, because they're figured this thing out, it's also very expensive.

So there are companies where there are several hundred people working on channel alone, manually at the end of each month calling people and asking, "Hey, did you close this account? Did you close that account?"

Oh, there's a channel conflict. That being where a partner sends business, and then a sales rep goes and closes it. Who are you paying the commission to? That's why it's important, once you hit that one to three mark, that you need to put technology in behind it.

I mean, we've talked with companies where they've overpaid channel partners millions of dollars each year, because it wasn't gone through and tracked correctly.

So there does need to be technology at some point in time. You do need to convince finance that it's worth an investment. But it's very easy to go through and point to.

Kathleen: I can definitely speak from the user standpoint about why that is important, because I remember ... Again, we're part of several channel partner programs.

I would say HubSpot is, again, is the most professional in terms of how it's run. But it's also evolved a lot over the years. When I first joined that partner program, we were still entering our leads into a dedicated Salesforce portal. Now they've got lead registration seamlessly a part of their CRM, which is genius. You don't have to leave the environment you're working in.

To me, lead registration is one of the biggest pain points. I'm part of other partner programs where there is no good system. You have to email your partner rep. It's so imperfect.

Then once you've done that, you don't know how to track it, because there isn't a portal that you can look in. So it's messy, and if that's messy, then I think that slows things down quite a bit for the use.

I know for myself, if you don't have a clear sense of, "Alright, what am I working on? What is closed? What's in the pipeline?" it's hard to be effective. It's hard to get excited about it too.

Bryn: Yeah, I think that this is all about optimizing for the partner's experience, and so everything that we do, every investment that we make is to try to enable that.

So we try to automate programs as much as possible, as much as you possibly can, because that improves the partner experience.

If you can improve, build the perfect partner experience, those partners will more likely than not be successful on your platform.

But the reality is, is where partnerships and channel, today in 2018, is where sales operations was in 2000, where is didn't exist before things like Salesforce and HubSpot.

Where marketing automation was in 2005 to 2008, that's the state of things today. So if you go back and compare to sales operation and marking automation, and you see the structure, the infrastructure, the requirements, and ultimately the returns that the investments in fact made, it's easy to go through and justify something further up front.

Fortunately today, there are ... We're not certainly the only people in this space. We see other people do a really great job of stuff, and there's a lot of options for when that comes up.

But at the end of the day, you have to optimize for partner experience. Your partners are going to tell you. Quite frankly, if they're not telling you, they're telling you. Silence is negative feedback, and I don't think people quite realize that too often.

PartnerStack's Partner Channel

Kathleen: Now, does PartnerStack have a partner channel?

Bryn: Yes we do. We do have a partner channel. We've had a partner channel since day one. Since year one in our business, it's driven revenue for us.

Certainly like everybody, you can through ... There are improvements for it to go through and be made. But for us, working with agencies has been, it's so much fun, because all the sudden, we're training people how to add another service line to their business. We're training them that they can go to their clients, and they can differentiate themselves on the market and say, "Hey, not only can we do email marketing, can we manage your website, can we do PR, but also we can know how to go through and manage the channel."

When we walk agencies and our partners through that, the level of excitement that they have is unbelievable, because quite frankly, there are only so many new services that can be launched. This is something that's unique. We've seen agencies be very successful and generate a lot of new business of it.

What Kinds of Results Can You Expect With A Partner Channel Marketing Program?

Kathleen: Yeah. Walk me through the results. You have your own partner program. You work with companies. Obviously by definition, everyone that is a client of yours has a partner program.

Can you tell me a little bit about the kinds of results you're seeing, either for yourselves, or for the companies that are using your platform?

Bryn: Yeah, so I won't use specific customer names, but I will talk about some of the results that we've seen. We've seen early stage companies go from 250,000 dollars in revenue, to over a million five in revenue, in less than 16 months.

This is completely bootstrapped, a team of four people moving upwards of a team of 10. We're driving upwards of 50% of their revenue, and it's awesome to see.

We work with larger companies where people have hit annual milestones for their partner program within 24 hours of launching with our platform, because all of a sudden there was a way to go through and track stuff. Those people go through and get promotions because of it, which is incredibly exciting.

I think that there are over 100,000 partners that are on our platform, that companies go through and work with today. What's unique about us is we believe very firmly, again, in partner experience. For us, that actually means enabling partners to join a broader network, where they can go through and pick other packages, and services that they can go through and promote. Companies go through a buy-in to this, so it's worked really well.

It's been fun to watch. It's so fun to watch people go through it and be successful in their jobs, whether they be partners or companies that we've gone through and worked with.

I mean for us, it accounts for 30% of our revenue, and drives 40% of our leads. We have a unique system in that there's a tiered version of it where you're dropped in. We give you an opportunity. We train you, and if you are in fact successful, we can move you to the next tier, and so I know that my customer success and sales teams love our partners. It's just fun to work with them.

Kathleen: Now you started out talking about how prevalent channel programs are for software companies. I know for that particular vertical, two of the most important business metrics that they track are cost of customer acquisition, and lifetime value of a customer. In fact that ratio of LTV to CAC also is very important.

You mentioned in the beginning that partner programs can really help optimize that. What have you seen, as far as how much does having a partner program enable you to bring that CAC, or cost of customer acquisition, down? How much does it extend the lifetime value?

Bryn: Yeah, so we're seeing lifetime value for some of our customers to be over 200%. Median is about 150%, more than what they're currently used to. Anything over what they have now, everyone is happy with. But median returns, 150%. But we're seeing people as much as over 200%.

The CAC is the thing that is incredibly interesting. We enable companies to go through and experiment with different incentives. Today you could go through and launch a bonus program where you pay an extra hundred dollars. Next month, maybe that that's not what you're going to go through and do, so we've been able to go through and test that.

We've decreased CAC upwards of 75% in some companies.

Kathleen: Wow.

Bryn: Yeah. Some companies get really aggressive with their programs in the beginning and over invest, and actually try to not do that, because they're looking to improve engagement so much. But it's a result of not only are you unloading the cost of sales, I mean, this is the thing that people don't talk about enough, it's actually the cost of support after the fact. It's very hard to go through and quite frankly quantify that.

But with our big customers that have those resources, those massive, massive finance teams, they've gone through and done it. That alone is enough for their finance teams to go through and invest in the tech to through it and support it.

Kathleen: Wow, those are some impressive numbers. Well, so interesting, and this has really been the first time we've talked a lot of about channel programs on this podcast, so I'm really glad we had an opportunity to chat about it.

Kathleen's Two Questions

Kathleen: I want to switch gears, because I want to make sure we have time for the two questions that I always ask all of my guests.

My loyal listeners will have heard me say this time and time again, but I would love to know from your standpoint, we're all about inbound marketing on this podcast, so company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now?

Bryn: That's really interesting. One of the companies that we see that has been doing a really great job of this, and that have been actually using their partner network to go through it and do it, is Intuit.

Intuit has turned to their community to build content, and it's working really well. It's been very cool to see such a big company go through it and move so quickly, to go through it and take advantage of the opportunity.

There's of course smaller companies that we've seen do a good job on this. But Intuit is the best example. Of course, I'm going to be biased with it. Intuit is the best example because they've leveraged their channel, their partners to actually create the content required to drive those advanced sales.

Kathleen: Yeah, that's interesting, especially because they're such traditional industry, that a lot of people think of as very stodgy, so knowing that they're at the forefront of that is really fascinating.

Now I'm going to have to take a look at Intuit's content, which I would normally not look at, now that I'm not a business owner anymore. But I did used to be in and out of QuickBooks every single day of my life for 11 years, so maybe I'll pay it a visit again.

Kathleen: Second question, the world of digital marketing is changing at a lightning pace. How do you personally stay up to date and on top of all the new developments?

Bryn: It's so tricky. One of the things that I've been doing lately is actually cutting the number of tools and technologies that I use way down. So instead of being spread out across all these social media platforms, I just focus on one.

Kathleen: Which one?

Bryn: Oddly enough, I go through and focus on LinkedIn. That's where I get most of my value from. I'm also following things on Twitter. That's certainly an area.

But at the end of the day, with all this extra noise in the environment, I actually listen to people. I'm going through referrals more. I'm talking with my peers and asking them what works.

I actually have a number of people through Y Combinator that I have biweekly calls with them still, that we've been continuing for three years now. We talk about it, what are the best things that we're seeing in the market.

We also ask our customers when we're in the middle of doing any type of sale. We say, "Hey, just out of curiosity, do you have any new tools or technology that you're using?"

As much as it's going through, researching and seeing what's out there, it still goes back to the basics.

For me, it's limiting my consumption of technology, and going to the source, going to people, because I think with this influx of tools that are on the market, it's so hard to know which one is the best one to go through and pick. You have to go through and use referrals the way that you've always had to.

So it's interesting, it's this weird thing that kind of through it and happened.

Kathleen: Yeah, for me it's my podcast. I call or email people like you, because I'm interested in learning more. I interview you, and that's how I learn. If other people listen too, great, but I always say I would do it even if nobody listened, because it's-

Bryn: Yeah, that's such a ... Maybe we'll have to start doing one, because that sounds like a really great idea to go through and learn how to, to go through it and talk with people. Talking with people is very underrated.

Kathleen: Yeah, I would so agree. I've learned more doing this than I have doing anything else honestly. Well if you start a podcast, let me know how it goes. I'd love to hear about that.

Bryn: I'll be calling you and we'll get you on there, first thing.

Kathleen: There you go.

How Reach Bryn Jones

Kathleen: Well, so much fun talking with you. I've learned a lot about channel marketing, and I'm sure there are people listening that want to learn more, might have questions.

What is the best way for them to learn more about PartnerStack, as well as connect with you as an individual online?

Bryn: Yeah, so I mean, reach out to me on LinkedIn. I spend a lot of time on there. Connect with me, message me. I usually get back within 24 to 48 hours.

People can reach out to me through email. It's first Bryn, B-R-Y-N @PartnerStack.com.

You should check out PartnerStack or PartnerStack.com. Message one of our support or sales reps. We'll get you on the phone, and mostly walk you through what the potential is.

One of the biggest things we push on people is like, "Hey, maybe now isn't the right time to go through it and invest in technology. Maybe you need to figure out your four buckets before you come through it and buy the platform." We love talking about this. We don't think enough people are talking about this, and so if you're interested, feel free to reach out any time, happy to always have a conversation about this.

Kathleen: That is the mark of a great salesperson by the way - the salesperson who tells you, "You're not ready for us," and tells you what to do in order to get ready.

Awesome, well thank you so much Bryn.

If you are listening and you found value out of this or you learned something new, you know what to do. Please leave the podcast a review on Apple Podcasts, or on the platform of your choice.

As always, if you know someone else that's doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork because I would love for them to be my next interview.

That's it for this week. Thanks Bryn.

Bryn: Thank you so much. 

Want to stay updated when the podcast is released?

Drop us your name and email address below and we’ll send you the show notes every Monday!  

from Web Developers World https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/how-to-build-channel-marketing-program-bryn-jones-partnerstack

[makemoneyonlineprofit-blog]

How To Make Money Blogging (The Practical Guide for 2019)

https://120profit.com/?p=2428&utm_source=SocialAutoPoster&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Tumblr Can you make money blogging? What are the various ways to make money from blogging? How much can I earn? Can I talk about my life and make money? What should I blog about to make money? These are just some of the most common question bloggers at various level (Beginners, Intermediate) have and in this exclusive guide, I’m helping you to answer all these questions. I will also show you some of the best ways to make money blogging that you can use in 2019 and years to come. These methods are based on my 10 years of experience and information that I have gathered attending various blogging conferences and having many pro-blogger as my friends. I have also shared screenshots of payments of a few methods to give you a wider perspective. You may find the income to be low or high, depending on the lens from which you are viewing. If this is your first time here at ShoutMeLoud, I recommend you to start with our about page (Opens in a new tab). Back to the topic, A few years back, blogging was just another hobby that some people did in addition to working full-time jobs. Today, blogging still functions in that way, but a lot has changed. In 2019,  blogging has become one of the more profitable online professions. I started as a blogger in 2008, and in the last 11 years, blogging has gifted me a new house, a new car, and travel to destinations like Antarctica, Africa, Bali, Russia which I might not have achieved without blogging. Gone are the days when we bloggers were only dependent on AdSense to earn money online. Now we have many more ad networks and monetization methods available which we can implement to earn huge amounts of money from our blogs. If you have been using these traditional methods of making money from your blog, it’s time to revise your blogging business plan. Make some new tweaks, change the design, and optimize the marketing aspects of your blog. In this post, I’ll be sharing some ways of how to earn money from your blog. Try a few of them out and see which works best for you. Modern Ways To Make Money from Your Blog: There are various methods that you can use to monetize your blog. Depending upon your level of blogging and the kind of blog, you could pick the method that matches with your style. Do check the end of this article to get the answers to many important questions asked by bloggers like you. Ad Networks like AdSense, Media.net Direct Advertisements Affiliate marketing Paid reviews Sell your eBook Launch an Online Course Offer Online consulting Offer Services based on your skills Apart from the traditional forms of advertising, you can work on other monetization tricks. Instead of just adding ads, work on adding value for your advertiser. It’s better to have 1 high paying ad than 4 low paying ads. Ad networks: (Beginners) There are ad networks which are the simplest and most used method for monetizing a blog. The two Ad networks which are most popular are: You need to have a blog to get an approval on these ad networks. They show ads automatically based on the context of your article and also based on user interest. Most of the new blogs use these methods to monetize as it gives recurring income. Since the ads shown are of high quality, they don’t affect the user experience. If your blog is having less than 100 views/day, then there are other ad networks which are listed here that you can use. However, your goal should be getting AdSense or Media.net approval as soon as you could. The below screenshot is from my AdSense account to give you a clear picture of earning: If you are using contextual advertisements and are not making enough that way, you should try moving to direct advertisements or affiliate advertisements. Affiliate Marketing: (Most profitable method): Intermedia + Advanced Affiliate advertisements are one of the best ways to make money since a single sale will make you a lot more money than a single click on a contextual ad. It’s something most of the bloggers are using these days and one of the most profitable avenues to make money from a blog. In below screenshot you could see affiliate income from one of the program in one month period: I have already covered affiliate marketing in depth: And of course, ShoutMeLoud’s affiliate marketing eBook. Here are some of the popular Affiliate marketing marketplace that you could join: Amazon Affiliate program ShareASale PartnerStack ImpactRadius Awin Commission Junction Another great thing about Affiliate marketing is, you can use this technique on any blogging platforms such as Wix, Squarespace, Medium, Tumblr or even Facebook. All you need to do is, share your unique affiliate link of the product you are recommending, and when someone makes a purchase, you will end up earning a huge commission of the sale amount. Affiliate marketing is the way, how a lot of bloggers are making millions of dollars every year from their blog. If you are wondering how much money you can make from affiliate marketing, below is my first 5-year earning report of affiliate earnings: Sell your own eBooks: (Intermediate) If you notice, the business model of most top bloggers has to do with selling their own products such as an eBook. All you need to do is pick a topic, compile an eBook on that topic, and put it on sale on your blog or on Amazon. Once you are used to this process, you can earn a decent amount of money by selling eBooks online. Moreover, having your own product to sell is the best thing that you can do to generate passive income. You can compile your articles into a well-structured book and sell it on your blog or on other platforms such as kdp.Amazon.com to earn money. This will also give you the credibility of becoming an author. I have created three such books and have been selling them on various platforms.  Here at ShoutMeLoud, I use EDD WordPress plugin to sell books and you can see the listing here. One of my most popular book “Affiliate marketing Book” is also being sold on Amazon and this is adding recurring income. You can use freelancing network like Fiverr to get someone to design a book cover. Here are 3 guides that you can refer to learn more about launching your book: Launch online course (Membership site): Advanced Can you convert your textbook into video format?  Can you add the checklist, downloadable templates? Can you create a 1-2 hour video course? If your answer is yes, then this method is definitely for you. Thanks to technology, now launching an online course is easy for anyone and if you are giving the unique course, your chances of reaching to $ 1 million goal is really high. To sell your online course. Here is a screenshot of ShoutUniversity, where you can learn WordPress, Affiliate marketing and AdSense by just watching videos. You can use platforms like: To create and sell your online course. Direct Advertisements (Intermediate) There’s no question that AdSense is the best advertisement program for bloggers, but it has some limitations. The biggest limitation is the amount you get paid per click. If you manage to grab direct advertisements, replace those AdSense units with direct ads instead. You can try AdClerks or use a plugin like WPAdvancedAds to secure some direct advertisements. For me, this kind of ad is the best, most stable, and highest paying. You should also have a detailed advertisement page for your blog. Here are a few articles to check out: Paid Reviews (All level) Paid reviews are a great way to boost your monthly income. You can quickly make $10 or more from a small review post. I personally make a minimum of $1200 from every review at ShoutMeLoud. When doing paid reviews, there are a few things which you need to take care of: Here are few websites to find paid reviews/sponsored review opportunities: Run campaign for brands: (Intermediate and advanced) This one is perfect for any type of blog with an established audience base. You could help brands reach the target audience by running the campaign for them. For this, you will be doing the brand collaboration, running webinars, even paid Ads or making videos. You will see an increased number of blogs doing it with various brands. Keep an eye on this type as its already becoming one of the hottest way to monetize a blog. Services Based on your skills, you can offer various services.  Depending on what are you good at, you can offer content writing, logo creation, SEO, and so on. In the past, I used to offer WordPress, SEO and hosting related services. Offering services not only help you to make money but also gives you more use cases which help you hone your skills. I have had time when I was earning more than $2000/month only by offering services. In fact, launching your own services is pretty easy. All you need to do is create a page on your blog and list the services that you are offering. Make sure to place the link of that page in your blog navbar and prominent space for the maximum visibility. Make it easier for your audience to contact you and inquire more about your services. As you deal with your first 2-3 clients, you will have ample ideas to improve the sales process of your services. In fact, you will be able to automate some of the things like payment and follow-up. FAQ’s about How to Make Money Blogging Can you actually make money blogging? I’m living proof of someone who can make a handsome living with the blogging. A lot depends on how consistent and persistent you are. In my case, I was working almost 14 hours every day for 4 years to reach this stage where I’m earning more than $20K/month from blogging. As the online space has matured, now there are more opportunities to make money via blogging. The only thing is, you need to be consistent for almost a year before you start making decent money to quit your job or to plan your life on blogging income. How much money can you make money blogging? There are bloggers who are earning more than $1 million/year with blogging and then there are bloggers who are making only $500-1000/year from their blog as they are working without the strategy. By working on your content strategy and driving targeted traffic, you will be closer to A-lister bloggers who are minting millions of dollars. The numbers of such A-list bloggers are increasing as a lot of bloggers have started treating their blog as a serious business. You can check the ShoutMeLoud income reports here. Can I blog about my life and make money? This is another growing form of blogging where a lot of people talk about their day to day life and create a community around it. You may have seen a lot of them on YouTube as Video blogger and you can do the same on the blog or even on YouTube. Some of the popular topic for this kind of blogging is: Lifestyle Fashion Travel Motivation Entertainment The key here is to keep it entertaining, add value and create a community around your brand. Depending upon your style and consistency, you could mint a lot of money with this strategy. A lot of beginners also ask is, should I focus on blogging or vBlogging? Well, it’s a good idea to have a mix of both. Producing video content (Recording, editing, and publishing) is time and money intensive, whereas creating text content takes lesser time. Having a good blend of both the technique will help you to grow faster and start significant earning sooner. What should I blog about to make money? In case if you don’t want to blog about your life and wondering about the best topic from the blog monetization perspective, here are 4 factors that you should consider. Passion: Things that you are already passionate about or have interest in. This thing doesn’t have to be something you are learning at an academy or at your job, but it could be as simple as something that your friends, family, and others call you to take your opinion. For example, Cars, Food, Finance, Travel.  Take a pen paper, and label it as “Passion list”. Now, list down every topic that you think you have an interest and you could blog about. Traffic and trend: You would want to ensure that there are decent traffic and interest in the topic that you have discovered by creating your passion list. Trends will give you an idea if this topic is growing or dying. Trends.google.com is a free tool that let you gauge the traffic trend of any topic. Monetization: The 3rd factor that will help you to find profitable blogging idea is an option for monetization. You need to see how you planning to monetize your blog. Is it going to be Ad network such as AdSense or is it going to be Affiliate marketing?. To give you a perspective, “Whatsapp” as a topic is growing really fast and you may be passionate about it, but the monetization sucks. Even with high traffic, making money is negligible. Competition: This is the last but not the least factor. If you are getting into a competitive niche, you will find it hard to stand out and also outrank existing big players. I don’t mean to demotivate you but if you have a choice between 2-3 topics, pick the one with medium or low competition. If you end up picking a broader niche, for example, fashion, in a competitive niche, it would just take few extra months to ace it. So, you need to keep this in mind when looking at the competition. I suggest you browse more articles of ShoutMeLoud to get a clear understanding of picking up a niche. How will I receive Blogging payment? Your advertisers could be sitting at the different part of the world and there are 5 popular ways by which you can receive payment from all over the world. These are also popular ways by which these companies pay. Once you start making money, it’s a good idea to have an account on all the above website which let you receive payments. They are all free to join and easy to use. You can also use these above services to pay freelancers or virtual assistant in the future. There are a lot of services you can offer, but I would recommend not overwhelming yourself and instead implementing them one by one. All the above ideas work great, and you should find out what works best for your specific blogging niche. Here are a few more articles which will help you to make money from your blog: What strategy do you use to earn money from your blog? Let me know in the comments below. Like this article? Don’t forget to share it! Like this: Like Loading… !function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s){if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n; n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0';n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,'script','https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); var aepc_pixel = {"pixel_id":"801823183238237","user":[],"enable_advanced_events":"yes","fire_delay":"5","enable_viewcontent":"yes","enable_addtocart":"yes","enable_addtowishlist":"no","enable_initiatecheckout":"yes","enable_addpaymentinfo":"yes","enable_purchase":"yes","allowed_params":{"AddToCart":["value","currency","content_category","content_name","content_type","content_ids"],"AddToWishlist":["value","currency","content_category","content_name","content_type","content_ids"]}}, aepc_pixel_args = [], aepc_extend_args = function( args ) { if ( typeof args === 'undefined' ) { args = {}; } for(var key in aepc_pixel_args) args[key] = aepc_pixel_args[key]; return args; }; // Extend args if ( 'yes' === aepc_pixel.enable_advanced_events ) { aepc_pixel_args.userAgent = navigator.userAgent; aepc_pixel_args.language = navigator.language; if ( document.referrer.indexOf( document.domain )

[justinjslone]

6 Partner Marketing Strategies to Help You Scale Your Business

From startup to enterprise, every B2B business can benefit from building a robust and strategic partner ecosystem — but only if you execute it properly.

Partner programs such as HubSpot's have proven to be massively successful for generating demand; by partnering with a company whose solution or service complements yours and speaks to a similar customer base, you can take advantage of each other's audience, credibility and social presence for mutual value.

Here are our top B2B partner marketing strategies to help you scale your business.

1. Mutual Goals

As with any marketing initiative, the first step in successfully executing a partner marketing strategy is to articulate your goals and define the key metrics you need to track to understand whether or not you're hitting those goals.

The goals you set should be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. For smaller startup companies, your goal might be as simple as increased brand awareness, but as your business scales, your partner marketing activities might develop into shared lead generation and revenue streams. What's important is that both partners are aligned on marketing goals; when you're both working toward the same thing, your strategies will be that much more effective.

2. Careful Reporting

Once you've defined your goals and identified the key metrics to track, you need to make sure you have the reporting system in place to understand which leads can be attributed to which partner — this is especially important if you're offering any kind of monetary incentives. For example, in a lead sharing model, you'll need to know exactly how many leads your partner generated for you, and in a revenue share model, you need to know how much their actions influenced revenue gains down to the dollar.

Make sure you have the tools and processes in place to differentiate referral-sourced contacts from contacts generated by your company. Use tracking URLs with custom UTM parameters to understand which contacts are coming from your partners, which channels those partner referrals are coming from and which co-marketing initiatives they're converting on.

Some partner management software like PartnerStack will auto-generate custom tracking URLs for you, so you don't have to set up each individual URL yourself. Software that automates some of the development and organization of reporting features is key if you have a huge partner ecosystem.

3. Guest Blogging 

Guest blogging is a great way to boost SEO ratings, increase web traffic, establish credibility and add additional value for your prospects and customers. Subject matter experts from each partner can leverage each other's audience to expand their company's reach and educate their prospects with fresh, relevant content.

Depending on the expectations and quotas you set for your partnership, you may want to make room for a guest blog in your editorial calendar once every week, month or quarter. Remember, it's not just about promoting your brand — the blogs shared between partners should be as relevant and informational for prospects as possible.

4. Co-Hosted Events 

Events are one of the best and most fruitful strategies you can use in partner marketing initiatives. By leveraging each other's database to market the event, you can double attendance and engagement rates. If you're throwing a big, in-person event, your company and your partner's company can split the cost, making them more cost-effective than if you were to host them on your own.

Additionally, events are a great way to re-enforce the partner relationship and establish credibility in the market. For example, when New Breed attends HubSpot events, our expertise with the HubSpot platform is solidified for the prospects who see us there.

5. Branded Content 

We all know by now that content is king of inbound marketing. Developing co-branded content, such as ebooks, white papers or webinars, with your partner companies is a great way to amplify the value and reach of that content.

Boost brand awareness and potentially enter new markets by collaborating with your partners to create content that will be valuable to both of your ideal customer segments. Remember, the content you create should offer real value for your audience, so take some time to plan out a killer co-branded content initiative, not just develop content for the sake of it.

6. Tiered Partnerships 

Different types of partnerships will be more effective for different types of companies, goals and customer bases. Partner types come in five different tiers and require varying levels of effort from each team: Affiliate partnerships, co-marketing partnerships, referral partnerships, co-sell partnerships and resell partnerships.

If you're a smaller company or you're new to partner marketing, test the waters with affiliate or co-marketing models, and use non-monetary incentives like lead sharing. Without the pressure of revenue attribution, these models require lower involvement from your team and give you the chance to decide whether or not the partnership is working for you. If you're a larger company looking to scale, co-sell and re-sell partnerships with specific revenue quotas will give you the results you need.

Partner Marketing: Done Right, It's A Win-Win

We love partner marketing — not just because it helps boost brand awareness and scale businesses, but also because it's a great way to develop and maintain genuine relationships with other leaders in your market. Customers love authenticity, and when two companies get together to create fresh, valuable content that speaks to them in a holistic way, everyone sees the results they need.

[future-sign]

What is affiliate marketing? How does it work? What are the top 10 legit affiliate marketing platforms to earn money online?

Affiliate marketing is a promoting a product for someone else and you will earn commission when you sell a product for someone you will earn a commission for that sale. And affiliate marketing is one of the best online businesses and strategies today in the world. Because, starting with affiliate marketing you don’t need any investments, any website, any skills without anything you can start totally from scratch start directly with affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards its affiliates for each customer or sale they bring to the business through their marketing efforts. Here's how it typically works:

A business (merchant) creates an affiliate program and invites people (affiliates) to sign up for it.

Affiliates promote the merchant's products or services to their audience through various channels such as blogs, social media, email marketing, and paid advertising.

If a customer clicks on an affiliate's unique tracking link and makes a purchase on the merchant's website, the affiliate earns a commission on the sale.

The commission rate varies depending on the merchant and the product, but it typically ranges from 5% to 20% of the sale price.

The merchant tracks all the clicks and sales generated by each affiliate through a tracking system, which ensures that the affiliates are credited for their referrals.

Affiliate marketing can be a win-win for both merchants and affiliates. Merchants benefit from increased exposure and sales without having to spend money on advertising upfront, while affiliates earn a commission for promoting products.

There are many amazing affiliate sites that you can join now. Here are the best websites for affiliate marketing.

1. Amazon Associates: Amazon is one of the largest online retailers in the world, and their affiliate program, Amazon Associates, is one of the most popular affiliate programs. You can earn commissions by promoting any of the millions of products available on Amazon.

2. ClickBank: ClickBank is a popular affiliate network that specializes in digital products such as e-books, online courses, and software. ClickBank offers high commission rates and a large selection of products to promote.

3. Commission Junction: Commission Junction (CJ) is a popular affiliate network that offers a wide range of products and services to promote. CJ also provides advanced tracking and reporting tools to help you optimize your affiliate campaigns.

4. ShareASale: It has been around for over 20 years and has a vast network of merchants and products to choose from.

5. Rakuten Marketing: It offers a range of products to promote and has a user-friendly platform.

More top 10 legit affiliate marketing platforms to earn money from online:

1. Impact

2. Warrior Plus

3. eBay Partner Network

4. MoreNiche

5. Avangate Affiliate Network

6. PartnerStack

7. Impact Radius

8. Awin

9. Click Funnel

10. Partnerize

These are the top affiliate network company in the world. It is essential to choose an affiliate program that aligns with your niche and offers products your audience is interested in. Please don’t be late to join today and start make money from home. Have a great journey.

[simplemlmsponsoring]

New Post has been published on http://simplemlmsponsoring.com/attraction-marketing-formula/copywriting/how-to-make-money-blogging-the-practical-guide-for-2019/

How To Make Money Blogging (The Practical Guide for 2019)

Can you make money blogging?

What are the various ways to make money from blogging?

How much can I earn?

Can I talk about my life and make money?

What should I blog about to make money?

These are just some of the most common question bloggers at various level (Beginners, Intermediate) have and in this exclusive guide, I’m helping you to answer all these questions. I will also show you some of the best ways to make money blogging that you can use in 2019 and years to come.

These methods are based on my 10 years of experience and information that I gather attending various blogging conferences and having many pro-blogger as my friends. I have also shared screenshots of payments of a few methods to give you a wider perspective. You may find those income to be low or high, depending on the lens from which you are viewing.

If this is your first time here at ShoutMeLoud, I recommend you to start with our about page (Opens in a new tab).

Back to the topic,

A few years back, blogging was just another hobby that some people did in addition to working full-time jobs. Today, blogging still functions in that way, but a lot has changed.

In 2019,  blogging has become one of the more profitable online professions. I started as a blogger in 2008, and in the last 11 years, blogging has gifted me a new house, a new car, and travel to destinations like Antarctica, Africa, Bali, Russia which I might not have achieved without blogging.

Gone are the days when we bloggers were only dependent on AdSense to earn money online. Now we have many more ad networks and monetization methods available which we can implement to earn huge amounts of money from our blogs.

If you have been using these traditional methods of making money from your blog, it’s time to revise your blogging business plan. Make some new tweaks, change the design, and optimize the marketing aspects of your blog.

In this post, I’ll be sharing some ways of how to earn money from your blog. Try a few of them out and see which works best for you.

Modern Ways To Make Money from Your Blog:

There are various methods that you can use to monetize your blog. Depending upon your level of blogging and the kind of blog, you could pick the method that matches with your style. Do check the end of this article to get the answers to many important questions asked by bloggers like you.

Ad Networks like AdSense, Media.net

Direct Advertisements Affiliate marketing Paid reviews Sell your eBook Launch an Online Course Offer Online consulting Offer Services based on your skills

Apart from the traditional forms of advertising, you can work on other monetization tricks. Instead of just adding ads, work on adding value for your advertiser.

It’s better to have 1 high paying ad than 4 low paying ads.

Ad networks: (Beginners)

There are ad networks which are the simplest and most used method for monetizing a blog.

The two Ad networks which are most popular are:

Google AdSense (Offered by Google) Media.net

You need to have a blog to get an approval on these ad networks. They show ads automatically based on the context of your article and also based on user interest. Most of the new blogs use these methods to monetize as it gives recurring income. Since the ads shown are of high quality, they don’t affect the user experience.

If your blog is having less than 100 views/day, then there are other ad networks which are listed here that you can use. However, your goal should be getting AdSense or Media.net approval as soon as you could.

The below screenshot is from my AdSense account to give you a clear picture of earning:

If you are using contextual advertisements and are not making enough that way, you should try moving to direct advertisements or affiliate advertisements.

Affiliate Marketing: (Most profitable method): Intermedia + Advanced

Affiliate advertisements are one of the best ways to make money since a single sale will make you a lot more money than a single click on a contextual ad. It’s something most of the bloggers are using these days and one of the most profitable avenues to make money from a blog.

In below screenshot you could see affiliate income from one of the program in one month period:

I have already covered affiliate marketing in depth:

What Is Affiliate Marketing? How To Start With Affiliate Marketing How To Select The Right Affiliate Program

And of course, ShoutMeLoud’s affiliate marketing eBook.

Here are some of the popular Affiliate marketing marketplace that you could join:

Amazon Affiliate program ShareASale PartnerStack ImpactRadius Awin Commission Junction

Another great thing about Affiliate marketing is, you can use this technique on any blogging platforms such as Wix, Squarespace, Medium, Tumblr or even Facebook. All you need to do is, share your unique affiliate link of the product you are recommending, and when someone makes a purchase, you will end up earning a huge commission of the sale amount.

Affiliate marketing is the way, how a lot of bloggers are making millions of dollars every year from their blog. If you are wondering how much money you can make from affiliate marketing, below is my first 5-year earning report of affiliate earnings:

My 5-Year Affiliate Earnings

Sell your own eBooks: (Intermediate)

If you notice, the business model of most top bloggers has to do with selling their own products such as an eBook..

All you need to do is pick a topic, compile an eBook on that topic, and put it on sale on your blog or on Amazon. Once you are used to this process, you can earn a decent amount of money by selling eBooks online. Moreover, having your own product to sell is the best thing that you can do to generate passive income.

You can compile your articles into a well-structured book and sell it on your blog or on other platforms such as kdp.Amazon.com to earn money. This will also give you the credibility of becoming an author.

I have created three such books and have been selling them on various platforms.  Here at ShoutMeLoud, I use EDD WordPress plugin to sell books and you can see the listing here.

One of my most popular book “Affiliate marketing Book” is also being sold on Amazon and this is adding recurring income.

You can use freelancing network like Fiverr to get someone to design a book cover.

Here are 3 guides that you can refer to learn more about launching your book:

13 Useful Software’s Help You to Create Your First E-book An Easy Guide to Naming your E-book For More Sales The 7 Most Popular Platforms To Self-Publish Your Ebook & Make Money

Launch online course (Membership site): Advanced

Can you convert your textbook into video format?  Can you add the checklist, downloadable templates? Can you create 1-2 hour video course?

If your answer is yes, then this method is definitely for you. Thanks to technology, now launching an online course is easy for anyone and if you are giving the unique course, your chances of reaching to $ 1 million goal is really high.

To sell your online course. Here is a screenshot of ShoutUniversity, where you can learn WordPress, Affiliate marketing and AdSense by just watching videos.

You can use platforms like:

Thinkific New Kajabi

To create and sell your online course.

Direct Advertisements (Intermediate)

There’s no question that AdSense is the best advertisement program for bloggers, but it has some limitations. The biggest limitation is the amount you get paid per click.

If you manage to grab direct advertisements, replace those AdSense units with direct ads instead.

You can try AdClerks or use a plugin like WPAdvancedAds to secure some direct advertisements.

For me, this kind of ad is the best, most stable, and highest paying. You should also have a detailed advertisement page for your blog.

Here are a few articles to check out:

5 Best Tips To Find Direct Advertisements For Your Blog What Advertisers Look For In A Blog

Paid Reviews (All level)

Paid reviews are a great way to boost your monthly income. You can quickly make $10 or more from a small review post. I personally make a minimum of $1200 from every review at ShoutMeLoud.

When doing paid reviews, there are a few things which you need to take care of:

Paid Review: Good, Bad or Ugly Should You Do A Paid Review Or A Free Review?

Here are few websites to find paid reviews/sponsored review opportunities:

Famebit (For YouTube channels) Izea Pay per post Tomoson Revcontent

Run campaign for brands: (Intermediate and advanced)

This one is perfect for any type of blog with an established audience base. You could help brands reach the target audience by running the campaign for them. For this, you will be doing the brand collaboration, running webinars, even paid Ads or making videos. You will see an increased number of blogs doing it with various brands. Keep an eye on this type as its already becoming one of the hottest way to monetize a blog.

Services

Based on your skills, you can offer various services.  Depending on what are you good at, you can offer content writing, logo creation, SEO, and so on.

In the past, I used to offer WordPress, SEO and hosting related services. Offering services not only help you to make money but also gives you more use cases which help you hone your skills. I have had time when I was earning more than $2000/month only by offering services.

In fact, launching your own services is pretty easy. All you need to do is create a page on your blog and list the services that you are offering. Make sure to place the link of that page in your blog navbar and prominent space for the maximum visibility.

Make it easier for your audience to contact you and inquire more about your services. As you deal with your first 2-3 clients, you will have ample ideas to improve the sales process of your services. In fact, you will be able to automate some of the things like payment and follow-up.

FAQ’s about How to Make Money Blogging

Can you actually make money blogging?

I’m living proof of someone who can make a handsome living with the blogging. A lot depends on how consistent and persistent you are. In my case, I was working almost 14 hours every day for 4 years to reach at this stage where I’m earning more than $20K/month from blogging.

As the online space has matured, now there are more opportunities to make money via blogging. The only thing is, you need to be consistent for almost a year before you start making decent money to quit your job or to plan your life on blogging income.

How much money can you make money blogging?

There are bloggers who are earning more than $1 million/year with blogging and then there are bloggers who are making only $500-1000/year from their blog as they are working without the strategy.

By working on your content strategy and driving targeted traffic, you will be closer to A-lister bloggers who are minting millions of dollars. The numbers of such A-list bloggers are increasing as a lot of bloggers have started treating their blog as a serious business. You can check the ShoutMeLoud income reports here.

Can I blog about my life and make money?

This is another growing form of blogging where a lot of people talk about their day to day life and create a community around it. You may have seen a lot of them on YouTube as Video blogger and you can do the same on blog or even on YouTube.

Some of the popular topic for this kind of blogging is:

Lifestyle Fashion Travel Motivation Entertainment

The key here is to keep it entertaining, add value and create a community around your brand. Depending upon your style and consistency, you could mint a lot of money with this strategy.

A lot of beginners also ask is, should I focus on blogging or vBlogging?

Well, it’s a good idea to have a mix of both. Producing video content (Recording, editing, and publishing) is time and money intensive, whereas creating text content takes lesser time. Having a good blend of both the technique will help you to grow faster and start significant earning sooner.

What should I blog about to make money?

In case if you don’t want to blog about your life and wondering about the best topic from the blog monetization perspective, here are 4 factors that you should consider.

Passion: Things that you are already passionate about or have interest in. This thing doesn’t have to be something you are learning at an academy or at your job, but it could be as simple as something that your friends, family, and others call you to take your opinion. For example, Cars, Food, Finance, Travel.  Take a pen paper, and label it as “Passion list”. Now, list down every topic that you think you have an interest and you could blog about.

Traffic and trend: You would want to ensure that there are decent traffic and interest in the topic that you have discovered by creating your passion list. Trends will give you an idea if this topic is growing or dying. Trends.google.com is a free tool that let you gauge the traffic trend of any topic.

Monetization: The 3rd factor that will help you to find profitable blogging idea is an option for monetization. You need to see how you planning to monetize your blog. Is it going to be Ad network such as AdSense or is it going to be Affiliate marketing?. To give you a perspective, “Whatsapp” as a topic is growing really fast and you may be passionate about it, but the monetization sucks. Even with high traffic, making money is negligible.

Competition: This is the last but not the least factor. If you are getting into a competitive niche, you will find it hard to stand out and also outrank existing big players. I don’t mean to demotivate you but if you have a choice between 2-3 topics, pick the one with medium or low competition. If you end up picking a broader niche, for example, fashion, in a competitive niche, it would just take few extra months to ace it. So, you need to keep this in mind when looking at the competition.

I suggest you browse more articles of ShoutMeLoud to get a clear understanding of picking up a niche.

How will I receive Blogging payment?

Your advertisers could be sitting at the different part of the world and there are 5 popular ways by which you can receive payment from all over the world. These are also popular ways by which these companies pay.

PayPal Payoneer Transferwise Wire transfer (Your bank)

CoinBase (Crypto payment)

Once you start making money, it’s a good idea to have an account on all the above website which let you receive payments. They are all free to join and easy to use. You can also use these above services to pay freelancers or virtual assistant in the future.

There are a lot of services you can offer, but I would recommend not overwhelming yourself and instead implementing them one by one.

All the above ideas work great, and you should find out what works best for your specific blogging niche.

Here are a few more articles which will help you to make money from your blog:

How To Make Money Without Google AdSense

What strategy do you use to earn money from your blog? Let me know in the comments below.

Like this article? Don’t forget to share it!

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How To Make Money Blogging (The Practical Guide for 2019) is a post from ShoutMeLoud – Shouters Who Inspires

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Top Affiliate Networks To Find Affiliate Programs [Mega List]: 2019 Edition

Are you looking to promote the best affiliate programs that offer high commission and also pay in time?

Today, you will be learning about the affiliate marketplaces which top affiliates use to earn millions of dollars a month. I have shared some of the popular affiliate programs for WordPress niche and also a post on the recurring affiliate programs that you can join.

I am sharing an exclusive list of top affiliate marketplaces which you can join immediately and once you are part of it, you can browse through countless affiliate programs and pick the one that suits your requirements.

Note: I will be using the term Direct affiliate program and in-house affiliate program. Both the terms mean the same thing.

Many of you might know about the benefits of affiliate networks and also refer to it as an affiliate marketplace. Those who don’t, I’m highlighting the benefit of joining an affiliate marketplace.

Affiliate program for all: One of the major problems we face as an affiliate is to find the affiliate program that aligns with our niche. In any affiliate network, you can find the affiliate program in various categories and pick the ones that suit your requirements.

Easy to reach minimum payout: When you sign up for an affiliate program directly (in-house affiliate program), the challenge is to reach the minimum payout. In an Affiliate marketplace, your minimum payout is the sum of all the affiliate programs that you promote. For a beginner, it’s easier to reach the minimum payout.

Fewer chances of affiliate sale frauds: When I joined the Hostgator affiliate program with their in-house affiliate software, it was a complete disaster. I have written about it here and have also made a video on the same. Hostgator people might not have liked me for it but eventually, they understood the problem and moved their program to ImpactRadius which offers better tracking.

There are times when the direct affiliate program can’t track the sales due to improper configuration of an affiliate software or a new affiliate manager but then there are times when some of them simply don’t want to pay you.

With an Affiliate marketplace (Network) you don’t have to worry about this problem. Their tracking mechanism is par excellence and you will be paid for your hard, as well as the not-so-hard work you put in.

I believe now you have understood the benefits of joining an affiliate marketplace. Let’s look at the best affiliate networks that you can join and start making money.

In the next section, you can read a brief about all the best affiliate network marketplaces. However, if you don’t intend to read and just sign up for the affiliate marketplaces, here you go:

ShareASale Commission Junction Clickbank ImpactRadius Partnerstack Refersion marketplace Awin  Avangate Rakuten Amazon Affiliate Program

Top Affiliate networks to help you make money from Affiliate marketing

These networks are in order of my personal preference and the ones that are working out for me. Some of them have limited affiliate programs to promote but don’t discard any based on that. That is because you just need one great product to promote and earn thousands of dollars, if not millions.

Clickbank

Clickbank is a popular place for marketers to discover new affiliate programs. If you don’t have a Clickbank account, I suggest you create one right away. It’s free. In the future, if you discover a good affiliate product to promote that is managed using Clickbank, you can join it instantly.

I love this marketplace. In the last 5 years of using Clickbank, I have never faced any issues with the payment. The only challenge for a new user will be the UX.  Here is what the dashboard looks like:

You can do a lot of things with Clickbank. I suggest being patient when you are learning everything about using Clickbank initially. Use the image below as a reference for finding affiliate programs.

For those monetizing their web property using affiliate marketing, this is a place you must join.

Join Clickbank

ShareASale

If you have attended an Affiliate summit or watched affiliate summit videos, you might already know about them.

ShareASale was founded in 2000. Ever since it has paid millions of dollars to their affiliates. They have a great list of affiliate programs for the various niche. Even though their interface is not as modern as we would like it to be, you will have no problem understanding it. ShareASale makes it easier for you to get started with affiliate marketing. If you wish to know how a company offers an affiliate program on ShareASale, you should read this guide. This will give you a backstage view of the other side.

You can join ShareASale program now. It usually takes 2-3 working days to get approval for the network. You can then follow my instructions in the video above and find the top 100 affiliate products on the  ShareASale network.

Join ShareAsale Affiliate network

Commission Junction

Commission Junction is one of the most reputed and popular affiliate marketplaces for bloggers and affiliate marketers. They have been in business since 1998 and this is a place where you will find a ton of affiliate programs.

They are one of the first few that you should join. Like other affiliate networks, Commission Junction connects marketers with brands. Do fill up your profile details before you join an affiliate program under the Commission Junction network.

I have had a great experience with Commission Junction over the past 7 years and no issues with getting paid. This is a must join affiliate marketplace for any blogger.

Join CJ

Impact Radius

Impact Radius is another fast-growing affiliate marketplace where you can find many fashion, web app, hosting, and antiviruses related affiliate programs. Lately, I have noticed a lot of brands moving their affiliate programs to Impact Radius. They are one of the first to take advantage of the fingerprint technique to count the sales, which is a big advantage for marketers and also for the brands.

Join Impact Radius

PartnerStack

Many of you might not have heard of PartnerStack, given it’s a relatively new affiliate marketplace. I have been using it since 2016 and found many great affiliate programs here. On PartnerStack, you can find products related to entrepreneurs, small businesses, hosting and few others.

What I really enjoy about PartnerStack is the simplicity to join the program. The interface offered by PartnerStack is one of the best and also very easy to use. They currently support only PayPal as the payment method. The minimum payout is $50 only.

Join Partnerstack

Refersion marketplace

Refersion is a popular affiliate marketplace with a good number of brands. Here, you can find affiliate program in various categories. Once you are signed up, you can search affiliate programs based on various filters.

Do remember, every affiliate program is managed by the brand itself, so you will be paid for the individual programs. They also have their own rules.

You can see important details about like “Tracking Compatability”, Marketing Materials Provided and Payout method. You can also configure options to receive email notifications for the new affiliate program in any particular category.

Don’t mistake this marketplace for ShareASale or CJ. Here, you will find the details of all affiliate programs that use Refersion software to manage their affiliate programs. The marketplace looks like it is work in progress, given a lot can be done to improve the user experience. For example, the search button is missing. However, it’s good to have another resource that lets us find and discover new affiliate programs.

Join Refersion Marketplace

Amazon Affiliate Program

A list of top Affiliate network will always be incomplete without listing the Amazon Associate Program. This is a program that works in every niche and you have a huge opportunity to make money from it.

Here at ShoutMeLoud, we have covered about Amazon Affiliate Program a lot of time and something you should definitely read. Here are a few hand-picked guides to help you get started:

The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide To Mastering Amazon Affiliate Marketing How to make money with Amazon affiliate (Practical tips) The Extra Money I Earned By Growth Hacking Amazon Associate Program: A Case Study

Once you have gone through it, the next step is to sign up and start utilizing one of the biggest catalogs of products in the world to make money for you.

Over to you: Share your best affiliate network

These are the top Affiliate networks that any blogger, marketer, or influencer should join in to start making money from Affiliate marketing.

As the affiliate industry is growing, we can expect more cutting edge affiliate network to surface. However, you should always consider working with reputed companies as they are more customer-centricc and you will get paid.

I will keep updating the list as I discover new affiliate networks worth adding to the list.

You could also help me by recommending a network that I should add here. I will look forward to your suggestions in the comment section below.

Go ahead and make some money for yourself.

Also, here are a few hand-picked guides for you to read next:

100+ Blogging Tools For 2019, Categorized (+ Expert Tips) How To Earn Millions From Your Blog with John Chow – Pro Affiliate Marketer Must-Know Things Before Joining Any Affiliate Program

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Top Affiliate Networks To Find Affiliate Programs [Mega List]: 2019 Edition is a post from ShoutMeLoud – Shouters Who Inspires

Read more: shoutmeloud.com