6K MRR + huge affiliate marketing learning for you

If anyone is having problems with bad Affiliates bidding on your brand, send me a message! I have a prototype for a monitoring service that keeps track of Bing & Google in any combination of country/ad target that might be relevant for you so you don't need to waste time doing manual work on that. (it works and I'm working on the website for it, so I could give you a sneak peak)

Congrats! This is awesome, I think this is a channel a lot of Indie Hackers overlook. This is a great write up, I’m planning on doing something similar with my SaaS.

I’m curious what software you are using to track all of this?

And... This:
"You can’t completely stop people from advertising on your branded searches. You can, however, prevent them from using your brand name in their ad (except for the visible URL). You have to file your trademark (as a Word, not an image). Once you receive your Trademark number, you can apply for brand name protection with Google. "

doesn't really work with many cases because that only applies to when it is a domain other than the one your brand lives in (imagine Amazon selling adidas shoes). It's pretty common, for example, in the travel vertical to bid on competitors and add a display url that has their trademark as a subdomain to yours.

Affiliates can bypass this rule because for Google, it is you and him both bidding on "hypefury" and sending people to the official/canonical domain for that brand. This only works in practice when the affiliate link drops the user first in Awin, tradedoubler, etc before redirecting the user to your website.

Hey @YannickVeys,

Awesome post, congrats on the milestone.
Are you using any third-party software to handle all of your affiliate onboarding, commission payments, and management?

Thanks in advance!

This is great advice. I would have never thought to look for people doing Google ads targeting our brand name.

Nice. Thinking of doing something similar. How much of the MRR goes to the affiliates?

Thank you @YannickVeys, very helpful!

Great post. As someone who has dabbled with affiliate marketing in the past, yeah, it's very uncommon for a brand to not have the PPC restrictions in place in their affiliate program.

How did you recruit your affiliates though? Did FirstPromoter handle that entirely, or did you reach out to potential affiliates yourself?

Wow, well done! And thanks for the heads up :)

Super insightful post. We'll have to be careful when we launch our affiliate program. Congrats on the growth!

That's an awesome post, really thank you for sharing your advice.

Excellent marketing strategy and great way estimating its performance. A really good lesson in growth. Thanks

@YannickVeys Wow so basically you are running your own affiliate program and someone created a Google Ad that leads to your landing pages but with their affiliate id?
So they pay for the ad but earn commission from your affiliate program?

Super insightful post, Yannick. My biggest takeaways were:

Most Indie Hackers are not that good in marketing. Luckily other people can do it for you!

So true. I’m great at hacking, not great at marketing. Affiliate could be a way to solve that.

Someone was sending a bunch of traffic to our website… Hmm, 🤔 who could it be?? :) If you’re running an affiliate program, the answer is usually simple—your affiliate.

I never thought about the fact that affiliate marketing could cause a misalignment of interests.

Thanks for the post! How do you find affiliates in your niche?

Thanks for sharing this! I'm working at a b2b company and this is helpful! Also, huge congrats on that milestone, Yannick. You're only climbing up and up!

Thanks @YannickVeys this was indeed very insightful

Very great! Keep up the good work

Thank you for this awesome post! :) when did you start your affiliate program? I mean...first, you should know the customer lifetime value, right?

Thanks for sharing @YannickVeys. At least it is great that you caught this when you did. A lesson learned no doubt, but better to learn it now than further down the line.

Awesome learnings here, @YannickVeys! Thanks for sharing.

I'm curious, are you open to sharing your CAC on the affiliate side? How much are you left with out of your 6k in MRR once you've paid your affiliates?

We've been considering this for a new product we are launching and it would be helpful to gain a couple more data points!

Great post thanks Yannick.

On the affiliate commission front, wondering how you calculated what amount you were prepared to offer affiliates?

How would you change commission rates the next time you work with affiliates?

Thanks again!

Really great. I am an affiliate website publisher and reading this through your eyes gave me a valuable perspective!

That was one thing I was always wondered about affiliate marketing. I figured that why wouldn't someone just advertise on the company name and/or build other PPC ads? I guess you proved that point but also gave good guidance on how to avoid that happening to yourself. Thanks for the lesson!

Awesome Yannick, affiliate marketing is something I'm looking more and more into 🙌