BEST AFFILIATE GUIDELINES TEMPLATE IN 2019

Find below the best tips when writing your Affiliate Guidelines Document in 2019. We also offer a fantastic Affiliate Guidelines Template, you can download today.

WHAT IS AN AFFILIATE GUIDELINES DOCUMENT?

An Affiliate Guidelines document is written by Affiliate Managers or Marketing Managers and provides a standard of acceptable professional online behaviour for affiliates when promoting your company’s products and services. A professional Affiliate Guidelines document also offers affiliates insights on how to communicate your products’ functionality and benefits to the general public and how to disclosure their “Affiliate” relationship with your company.

An Affiliate Guidelines document can be both a public document accessed via the internet on your public company website or privately via an Affiliate network or via a link sent to your affiliates.

An Affiliate Guidelines document should be of easy access by any of your affiliates at any given time. This Affiliate Guidelines document is the “true” source when an affiliate is not sure what, when, how they can talk about your company, your products, your employees and services via their websites, events and social media accounts.

BEFORE CREATING AN AFFILIATE GUIDELINES DOCUMENT

• No “one size fits all” Affiliate Policy/Guidelines. Drafting Affiliate Guidelines can be different from business to business. This largely depends on the company‘s culture and strategy towards Affiliate programs. However, all companies using affiliates want to protect against the risk of damage to their reputation. An affiliate guidelines document needs to be individually tailored.
• Involve your Marketing, Sales and Product teams. Do proper consultation with your department managers as different departments might have different levels of risk on what and how to allow affiliates to talk about your brand, functionality, benefits, etc.
• Research the ways that different affiliates talk about other companies they promote. Audit what sort of conversations are happening among your most important affiliates and provide examples on what’s acceptable and not. You may have some affiliates using social media to attract leads while others might be focused on in-depth product reviews. Check for their voice and tone and how it aligns to your brand’s values.
• Track via alerts any Affiliate negative commentary or bad sentiment when mentioning your company name or brand names. You can do this by freely using “Google Alerts” service or paid social media tools such as Brandwatch and others. You should pick up patterns from this and take action and fix any problems. Affiliates are talking about your company and your brands for a reason.
• Use past negative sentiment and commentary as examples when drafting your Affiliates Guidelines document. This way, it is easy and clear for affiliates to understand social media talk, voice and tone they should avoid.
• Consider and predict problems that could arise in the future, especially for an up-coming new product, services or advertising campaigns that might create some level of controversy.
• Consultation is key. Understand affiliates key objectives when talking about your company. This will help you gain trust and get buy when training your affiliates about the benefits you offer to end customers. In some cases, affiliates often know more about your industry commentary (what customers are actually demanding) than your marketing team who are trying to regulate them.
• Your Affiliate Terms and Conditions and disclosure guidelines. Your affiliate Terms and Conditions and Disclosure Guidelines should stipulate that your business has an Affiliate Guidelines document that will be updated from time to time. Your Affiliate Terms and Conditions and Affiliate Guidelines should also set out potential consequences resulting from an Affiliate’s failure to adhere to your Guidelines – for example, that serious or repeated breaches of your Affiliates Terms and Conditions and Affiliates Guidelines may result in Affiliates Program termination.

“This Affiliate Guidelines Template saved me so much time!” Thank you!” Karen

Best Affiliate Guidelines template download

BENEFITS OF A WELL DRAFTED AFFILIATE GUIDELINES DOCUMENT

By adopting and implementing a well-drafted and communicated Affiliates Guidelines document, your company can enjoy the advantages of Affiliate marketing while mitigating the associated risks. Below are some key factors when drafting your Affiliates Guidelines:

• Acceptable level of Social Media Engagement– Encouraging social media promotion about your products/services from Affiliates is acceptable with the right rules in place. Make sure you have appropriate Affiliates Guidelines in place to ensure that all affiliates are made fully aware of the acceptable social media promotion.
• Avoid negative social media commentary from Affiliates – Failing to have the appropriate guidelines inserted into your Affiliates Guidelines document can result in affiliates inadvertently or purposefully publishing bad commentary about your products or services. It is on the affiliates best interest to promote the benefits of your services to increase their likelihood of earning an Affiliate commission. However, in some cases, you are not the only brand they promote on your category and they might find the not-so-good factors of your products and services to give them more chances of sending users to other Affiliate products that might offer them better commission payments. This can hugely damage to your brands’ reputation. A well-structured Affiliate Guidelines should account to avoid this kind of behaviour.
• Guide Affiliates  – with practical and real best examples on how best to promote your business products and services. This will clear up any doubts affiliates might have.
• Minimise negative publicity from a comment made by an affiliate who might not be happy with your product or commission levels.
• Ensures what sort of topics should be avoided when commenting about your products and services.
• Clarifies who is the official public spoke person and/or brand ambassador. The ones talking to different media outlets.
• Ensures Affiliates understand their role when they are promoting your business products and services on their website, social media or other channels.

“I was looking for a template to draft our Affiliate Guidelines and this template was really useful” Mark

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Best Affiliate Guidelines template download

TOP REASONS FOR DRAFTING A SUCCESSFUL AFFILIATE GUIDELINES

We work with more than 50 brands as their affiliate partners and the reality is that most of them do not offer a consistent and clear Affiliate Guidelines document. This means a lot of emails and conversation to try to figure out how we should be promoting their brands and/or how to properly disclose our affiliation to them. Some of the top benefits are:

• Your business can make the most out of Affiliate Programs. Offering best practices and examples of how your Affiliates should promote your brands can result in more brand trust.
• This development highlights the importance of incorporating an Affiliate Guidelines into your Affiliates on-boarding process.
• Offering clear guidelines and best practices on How to Promote your brands” to your Affiliates are extremely valuable in the long run and will minimise bad commentary.
• Affiliate commentary in most cases is positive but can also be dangerous and can backfire to your company’s good reputation and trust levels. Affiliate’s comments, notes and photos posted on social media sites and online forums are usually constructive and positive. But negative comments, criticism, confrontational remarks can be dangerous and harmful to the well being and reputation of your company and its brands.
• It is imperative to offer your affiliates the “most appropriate”examples for commentary and guidelines about your business products and services.
• Once an Affiliate comment is posted on the internet and it is being picked up by the media; it will be almost impossible to delete it. It is important that your Affiliates are trained on best Affiliate promotional tactics and practices to help them earn a commission.
• Decreases the chances of a negative comment becoming unfavourable negative publicity for your company.
• Ensures all Affiliates are aware of the risks of making a public comment about your company.
• Minimise the use of penalties and warnings to Affiliates because of their not acceptable commentary.
• With the popularity of “Best of List” articles, “product review” and “unboxing” articles; it is important to offer clear guidelines to Affiliates on how to best create these type of articles.

BEST TIPS WHEN COMMUNICATING YOUR AFFILIATE GUIDELINES

• Have a clear record that all your Affiliate are aware of your Affiliate Program Terms and Conditions and Affiliates Guidelines. If possible, each affiliate should be asked to read an sign an acknowledgement that they have read your Affiliate Guideline document.
• Updates. Ensure you regularly update your Affiliate Guidelines to deal with new risky behaviour and/or new technologies.
• Be clear on what not to do. Your Affiliate Guidelines document might state, for example, that affiliates should not:
  • mention mired disputes in public forums or social media;
  • claim to speak on behalf of your business; or
  • use your company logo, trademarks, IP, customers details without your company permission.
• Ensure that all your affiliates are aware of the existence and current terms of your Affiliate Guidelines and Affiliates Terms and Conditions. Send affiliates regular email reminders about your Affiliate Guidelines. If you conduct “Best Affiliate Awards” events, these are an excellent forum for discussion of existing Affiliate Guidelines and great opportunity to ask for feedback.
• Integration with other Policies. It’s also important to ensure different Affiliate’s policies are not viewed in isolation of each other. For example, there should be clear interaction between your Affiliate Program Terms and Conditions and your Affiliate Guidelines document. Each of these should refer to each other.
• Consistent support. Having a great Affiliate Guidelines is one thing, but failing to support Affiliates who might not adhere to the guidelines is another. You need to properly identify and investigate potential Guidelines breaches before speaking with the affiliate. If other affiliates notice that some affiliates are getting away with the not appropriate promotion of your brand, they might feel you do not care and they can do the same.
• Clearly outline your expectations. Clearly and unambiguously outline the best practices expected of your affiliates by setting out what constitutes great ways to promote your brands. Including examples where appropriate.
• Reflect duties imposed by law. Your company has a variety of legal obligations. Related to affiliate marketing, it is important to let your affiliates know about your obligations with the Federal Trade Commission, in particular to disclosure so that your affiliates know how to disclose the relation they have with your business when promoting your business and creating links to your website.
• Intellectual Property. Your business’ name, logo and slogan all constitute your intellectual property, which can be damaged and de-valued if misused. Your Affiliate Guidelines document should remind affiliates that your intellectual property is valuable and confidential. You should avoid giving Affiliates intellectual property information. But – if for some reason – you have decided to share IP information with an affiliate; you should confirm that the Affiliate’s unauthorised use of your IP would likely result in real damage, including financial damage. You might want to clear up any misinterpretations about what it is considered IP (Intellectual Property) and what it is not.
• Set out the consequences of non-compliance. To avoid the costly and time-consuming nature of legal action, it is vital that you clearly set out the consequences of failure to comply with your Affiliate Program Terms and Conditions and your Affiliate Guidelines. Consequences can range from requiring an affiliate to attend an Affiliate training webinar or similar.
• Offer clear “unacceptable” behaviour examples in your Affiliate Guidelines according to the likely consequences, so that your affiliates understand the severity of the behaviour and the corresponding consequence. Clarifying the consequences from the outset will assist you to effectively enforce your Affiliate Program Terms and Conditions if breaches occur. Your Affiliate Guidelines might also state that multiple minor breaches of your Guidelines, taken together, can lead to Affiliate Program termination. Affiliates should be made aware that some behaviour may have consequences that extend beyond termination of the Affiliate Program. For example, misuse of your business’ intellectual property or specific instances of defamation may give rise to a claim for damages with financial repercussions for the Affiliate.

HOW TO USE THIS BEST AFFILIATE GUIDELINES TEMPLATE

• This Affiliate Guidelines template has been designed for easy editing on Microsoft Word so it is easy for you to modify it as you wish.
• Ensure your final Affiliate Guidelines document is saved as a PDF and compressed so when sending it to your affiliates it does not take much storage space.

HOW TO GET YOUR AFFILIATES “BUY IN” ON YOUR AFFILIATE GUIDELINES

• Having an Affiliate Guidelines document is only the first step. You need then to find the most appropriate way to explain and remind your affiliates about your company expectations when promoting your brands.
• For new affiliates, it is important to send them a copy as part of your Affiliate onboarding process. Also offering a pre-recorded webinar is a great way to ensure they can see tangible and practical “best practice” examples of how to promote your brands.
• For current affiliates, especially the ones with massive audiences bringing top commission payments, you can offer them custom training on Best Affiliate promotion practices (product reviews, “best of the list” articles, etc).

YOUR AFFILIATE GUIDELINES SHOULD EMPOWER AFFILIATE ADVOCACY

You want your affiliates to promote your brand enthusiastically and professionally. Guide them! A great Affiliate Guidelines document instills confidence and helps to avoid messy mistakes. Here are some top tips to ensure you empower affiliates:

• Call out the type of messaging affiliates are encouraged to share. Let them know how valuable their voice is to the business and your customers. Encourage them to share their unique perspective and insight, to find the brand-boosting stories only they can tell. Encourage them to promote their co-workers as well, sharing congratulations on each other’s achievements and fostering community.
• Encourage affiliates to disclose their Affiliate relationship when promoting your brands. Affiliates should never represent themselves as officially speaking for your company, and should make it clear their opinions are their own.
• Reinforce your Company Culture. Offer a brief introduction about your company’s values and culture to your affiliates. In general, it’s good to promote transparency, honesty and respect to individuals. That means affiliates being truthful about your brand and its competitors, never trashing other companies.
• Set Expectations of Privacy and Appropriate Behaviour. Remind affiliates of their public promotion of your products are reflective of them and your brand by proxy. Encourage mindfulness and professionalism in choosing how to talk about your brands.
• Addressing angry customers and/trollers. Angry customers might leave comments on your affiliates media properties. Encourage affiliates to alert your Customer service team about these issues.

WHY ANNUAL AFFILIATE GUIDELINES REVIEWS ARE NECESSARY

With new communications channels and social media platforms, Affiliate Guidelines must go beyond simply offering affiliates best practices when promoting your products and/or services. Ask yourself this: When was the last time you reviewed your Affiliate Guidelines? And if you don’t have an Affiliate Guidelines in place, what’s holding you back?

• Make it clear what type of promotion is and isn’t allowed. While it might be obvious that posting illicit, offensive or insensitive material is a not a great idea, it still happens. Make it easy to understand how affiliates should promote your brand and what tools you can offer to help them achieve great commission payments. Be specific as possible in your Affiliate Guidelines.

You should also review your Affiliate Guidelines when:

• There have been several breaches to your Affiliate Guidelines by many affiliates, you need to find out whether your Affiliate Guidelines were not clear enough.
• When there is a new way of marketing or sales communication or when there is a new popular social media platform businesses can promote services.

Ideally, effective Affiliate Guidelines should be fluid and responsive to the fast-paced digital world. But at the very least, taking the time to perform a yearly review can check the validity of your Affiliate Guidelines, save your affiliates a lot of confusion — and help your marketing team avoid potential affiliate mistakes.

WHAT TO AVOID IN YOUR AFFILIATE GUIDELINES 

• Avoid requirements that are onerous and unreasonable. Example: suggesting affiliates add great product reviews when they in fact had a poor experience with your product or services.
• Avoid threatening Affiliates who decided to talk about the not-so-good functionality of your products or services.

CONCLUSION AND KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Crafting the best Affiliate Guidelines can be tricky, since it has to include legal considerations, brand guidelines, and your affiliates’ needs. Keep in mind the goal is not to restrict their sharing to a handful of approved corporate messages. Rather, your guardrails should give them the freedom and encouragement to hit the road for your Marketing and Sales goals. When your affiliates advocate for your company using best practices, they bring humanity to your brand.
• You need to accept that not all Affiliate comments and reviews about your brands are going to always be totally satisfactory. Use affiliate reviews as feedback for your product and marketing team and feed affiliates with your latest improved features.
• Mastering your business’ Affiliate Guidelines implementation and Affiliate Marketing best practices will ensure that your business maintains a strong and positive Affiliate program.

Best Affiliate Guidelines template download

NEXT

• Do not have time to draft your Affiliate Guidelines? eDigital can help you draft the best Affiliate Guidelines for your company. Contact eDigital today!
• eDigital can also produce pre-recorded webinars to ensure your affiliates understand your Affiliate Guidelines.

Happy writing!

HOW TO WRITE THE BEST AFFILIATE GUIDELINES TEMPLATE

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