How to Create an Effective Affiliate Program for Your Membership Site

While membership sites often grow into a lucrative source of income, you may find that yours has gotten off to a slow start. This can be frustrating – especially considering the time and effort you’ve put in – but it’s not impossible to fix.

In short, creating an affiliate program may help to speed up your site’s growth. It can encourage interest in your membership site and motivate others to promote it to their own networks. This increased reach and interest can lead to improved conversions and increased memberships.

In this post, we’ll talk about why you should consider creating an affiliate program for your membership site. Then we’ll offer you three tips for creating one, and explain how to implement each tip seamlessly. Let’s get started!

Why You Should Consider Creating an Affiliate Program for Your Membership Site

Affiliate programs exist to promote and sell products or services. In this case, you'll use one to promote and sell subscriptions to your membership site. Affiliate programs have many potential benefits, including:

• Expanded brand reach: With dedicated individuals promoting your membership site, your brand (and service offerings) can reach new audiences.
• Improved subscription sales: The more eyes on your program, the higher your potential sales. A dedicated affiliate program can promote your membership site, and this can result in an income boost.
• Increased website visibility and brand credibility: The greater the number of affiliates promoting your program, the more your website visibility and brand credibility can increase.

Fortunately, creating an affiliate program doesn’t have to be difficult. Let's look at how to create your own and start benefiting.

How to Create an Effective Affiliate Program for Your Membership Site (3 Tips)

These three tips will help you create streamlined management, find great recruits, and see higher conversions for your effective affiliate program. Let’s take a look!

1. Combine Your Membership Site and Affiliate Program Activities

Running a membership site takes time and money, and the same is true for running an affiliate program. To make your job easier, combine your activities. Doing so lets you spend less time managing the details, and more time recruiting quality affiliates. You'll also ensure that changes in your membership site are communicated to your affiliate site automatically (and vice versa), helping you avoid mistakes due to overlooked information.

With the right tools, combining your site and program isn’t difficult. MemberPress is a membership site management plugin for creating a simple and user-friendly membership site with a variety of add-ons:

You also get a version of Easy Affiliate, our popular affiliate management plugin, which provides you with an all-in-one solution to create a seamless affiliate program for your membership site.

Of course, there's more than just the tools you choose – the affiliates you pick are also important. Let's take a look at that aspect now.

2. Look to Site Members for Potential Affiliate Recruits

If you have enough members (more on this later), you can look to your membership as a bank of potential affiliates. There are numerous benefits to doing this. For a start, affiliates will already be knowledgeable about the program, and you'll save time on scouting and training, which can be spent working on other aspects of your program.

Affiliates, of course, don’t work for free. To recruit site members you should offer competitive commission rates. Make the offer even more enticing by providing a membership site discount in addition to commission.

If your program is so new that you don’t have many members to recruit, try these two tactics:

1. Work out partnerships with other membership or affiliate sites. By creating combined offers or discounts, you multiply the benefits for your new affiliates. Partnerships also help you reach a wider network of potential affiliates.
2. Use guest posting to gain exposure. If you can, include a link to a targeted landing page (see the next tip) as a great way to gain members and affiliate recruits. Even without a landing page link, guest posting will expand your reach and increase site traffic.

Additionally, you can offer a membership discount to site members who may not want to be marketers themselves, but who can recruit some of their friends or family to the program. This will further expand the scope of your recruitment efforts.

3. Build a High-Conversion Landing Page for Affiliate Signups

A landing page is one built with a primary goal in mind. In this case, it's recruiting affiliates for your new program. Your page has to be more than just a placeholder, though – it needs to engage visitors and encourage signups.

Building a landing page gives your affiliate program a ‘home' that is easy for others to share. More sharing can lead to additional signups. To build a landing page that converts:

1. Focus on the benefits of your affiliate program: Highlight your competitive commission rates, membership site discounts (for those interested), and other benefits.
2. Use a strong Call To Action (CTA): Direct, specific CTAs create a sense of urgency and promote signups.
3. Use the Easy Affiliate plugin to create a dedicated signup page: Setup is simple, and you can configure the page as you would any other WordPress page (with the addition of a signup form).

Overall, it’s most important to focus on quality. Take the time to build a high-quality landing page for your affiliate program, and you’ll be off to an excellent start!

Conclusion

It can be disheartening when your membership site doesn’t take off immediately. The creation of an affiliate program can help promote interest in your site, expand your reach, and increase conversions.

In this post, we’ve offered you three tips for creating an affiliate program for your membership site. To quickly recap, they are:

1. Combine your membership site and affiliate program operations.
2. Look to site members for potential affiliate recruits.
3. Build a high-conversion landing page for affiliate signups.

Do you have questions about how to start an affiliate program for your membership site? Let us know in the comments section below!

If you liked this post, be sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn! And don't forget to subscribe in the box below.

Affiliate Link Disclosure