SOP 50 — Choose an affiliate integration model

1. Who your affiliate should be

An ideal affiliate is a business with a warm audience full of people just like your customers. That is the whole specification, and everything below is a way of finding businesses that fit it.

The route to them is warm outreach — the same method as SOP 17 and SOP 18, pointed at businesses rather than buyers. Start by making the list.

The questions that build the list. Answer them about your ideal customer, honestly, and then go and search for the businesses each answer names.

Ask about your ideal customer	And then ask
What do they buy?	Who provides that?
Where do they go?	What businesses sit around those places?
What do they like to do?	Who provides those services?
Where do they work?	What kinds of business employ them, and in what jobs?

The fourth row is the one most people miss. If you sell to consumers, the employers of those consumers make good affiliates — and that route is wildly underused.

1.1 The employer partnership, worked

A local studio wanting more customers might ask a large employer nearby how many people they take on in a month. The answer is roughly ten. The offer made back: could every new starter get a session free, plus — maybe — a lunchtime session for the staff, and once a month two of the studio's people come in and work on everybody?

Side	What it costs	What it gets
The employer	Nothing	Something to give new starters, who feel welcomed; a perk for existing staff
The studio	Staff time	The employer marketing on its behalf, every month, to a stream of new people

The free sessions are the lead magnet. The monthly visit is the delivery. The condition this rests on is a steady flow of new hires: it works as long as they have a regular number of new people — and most large employers run a standing onboarding process, so whatever you supply gets handed to every new starter every time, without anybody remembering to do it.

1.2 One talk through many partners

When you need customers fast and have little cash, one practice here starts from two questions: who already has the clients you want, which puts you one step from them, and how could you make it worth their while to help? A further pair goes with the first: how did they get those clients, and could you get more of them the same way? The route offered:

Build one 30-minute talk you could give to a room of your ideal buyers and leave them impressed.
Ask each owner of such an audience to host it with you as a joint webinar. Frame the ask around their people losing access to help, not around business you have lost.
Close it with one offer only: a free consultation, behind an application.
If you can, offer the partner a share of any revenue it brings; pricing a share is SOP 47.
Take the applicants to a call, and sell them your program from there.
Give the same talk through as many partners as you can; once it exists, that count is the work.

2. The three models

#	Model	What the affiliate does	Who pays whom
1	They give your lead magnet away	Includes your free thing when somebody buys their thing	You pay them a share of what you later sell
2	They sell your lead magnet	Upsells your paid entry offer after their own sale	They keep the money; you get the customer
3	They sell your core offer directly	Sells your actual offer, alone or bundled with theirs	You pay them a share; they may also charge more for the bundle

All three are worth showing, because businesses have scaled every one of them. The third is the simplest, and — explicitly — not necessarily the most effective.

3. Model one — they give your lead magnet away

The mechanism. Your lead magnet makes their offer more valuable than it would be on its own. That lets them charge more for their thing and get more leads with it than they could without it. You deliver the free thing, and then you upsell from it into your own offer.

The lead magnet kinds that work here are samples and trials, something that reveals a problem, and one step out of a multi-step process. Choosing and building one is SOP 13.

Worked case one. A business sets up company registrations for new owners, free. It partners with people who sell franchise and business opportunities to people starting out. A registration is one of the first things those buyers need — so the opportunity sellers can now bundle free company setup into their own offer, which makes their offer more valuable and lets them charge more. The registration business delivers the free setup, then sells the things that follow from having a company: bookkeeping, tax, filings. And it still pays a share of those later sales back to the partner who sent them.

Worked case two. A workshop that normally costs two hundred dollars is given free to everybody who signs up with a partner studio. The workshop runs weekly. The person running it sells the product the workshop is about. The partner's offer is more valuable for including it; the workshop owner gets customers without advertising for them.

What makes both cases work is the same thing. The affiliate does no delivery work at all. You deliver everything.

4. Model two — they sell your lead magnet

The mechanism. Anything of yours that turns one of their customers into one of yours is sellable by them: it could be a book, it could be something bundled into your service, or software, or a sample. They sell their own core offer first, then upsell your lead magnet on top of it.

How much of that money do they keep? The position taken — and it is stated as an opinion — is that you give them all of it. A hundred percent. The reason is incentive: you want them maximally motivated to bring people into your business, and the money from your lead magnet is not what you are there for.

Worked case. A clinic partners with local gyms. It runs a three-hour assessment workshop for people with shoulder pain who sit at a desk all day, on how they could get the most from their training without pain. A gym owner — or anybody who owns a community — could sell access for ninety-nine dollars and keep every cent. With a whole audience to sell to they maybe put thirty people in a room once a month, for around three thousand dollars, in return for writing some emails and posts. The clinic then converts a share of the room into its own services.

A context check on that figure. Thirty places at ninety-nine dollars is two thousand nine hundred and seventy, which is stated as three thousand. The rounding is not this page's, and three thousand is the figure carried, with the arithmetic printed here so the difference is visible.

Model one or model two for the same workshop? The same clinic could give the workshop away free — once a month, for the partner's customers — or you could let the partner sell it and keep the money. Both work. The instruction is to test which works better for you, and no rule is offered for choosing in advance.

5. Model three — they sell your core offer directly

The mechanism. Your offer and their offer become the same offer. The affiliate sells your thing straight to their customer, which adds a source of income to their business without adding work to it.

It takes two forms. They either sell your package alone or bundle their services with your paid services and charge more for the combination — so they take a share from you and the extra margin from their own price.

Inside the partner's onboarding. One integration point offered here: put your offer into the way the partner brings on their own new customers. The partner runs their usual first onboarding call; the second call, or a webinar for new customers, presents yours: this is all the ground they can cover by themselves, and help is there for anyone who wants it. Then show the partner, with numbers, that customers who take your offer are worth more to the partner's business, and the partner is paid as well. It rests on the same standing onboarding as the employer case in §1.1.

Who lives on this model. For some affiliates this is their entire income. Some businesses run exclusively on affiliates. A great many people with large followings work this way: they build the audience and push it to two or three offers they earn on.

6. Which combination to run, and one worked answer

One supplement operation has run several versions of each of the three models over time. What it settled on is models one and three.

Its model one, worked. Twice a year it runs a challenge. Partner businesses push their own customers to a free online session, which is the kickoff for a national competition with prizes for the best results — ten thousand and fifty thousand dollars are the prize figures named. To take part in the challenge you buy product. So the partners send emails and get paid; the selling is done for them.

Its model two, never tried — by one account. Charging for that session instead of giving it away is model two, and this operation is said not to have run it, though the same case opens by saying it has run versions of all three. This page does not settle which reading is right. Either way, that is not a verdict on the model — the clinic case in §4 shows it working. It is what one business settled on.

Its model three, worked. Partners meet their customers one to one and sell the product directly.

This page does not settle which model is right for you. What the case establishes is that one business kept models one and three, and that model two works elsewhere.

7. What an affiliate relationship actually is

Affiliates are not an advertising method. You do not "do" affiliates and you do not "do" referrals. They are people who advertise your stuff because it benefits both of you, and you get them by running the four methods at them — which is SOP 12.

If you want them to love you, treat them like customers, because they are. They are a different tier of customer, and the programs on SOP 47 and SOP 48 are built on that reading.

And the reason the relationship is worth the work. There are two ways to build a business that compounds: find more people who never stop buying from you, or find more people who never stop selling for you. Referrals are the first. Affiliates are the second. You need one of them to build something large, and this page is the second one.

8. What this page does not decide for you

These are gaps in the procedure, not omissions from this page.

Which model to start with. Three are given, one business's combination is given, and no rule matches a model to a business.
How to test model one against model two — what to measure, over how long, on what sample.
What share to pay under models one and three. Model two's share is stated as all of it; the other two are priced on SOP 47, and nothing connects the model chosen to the tier structure.
Whether an affiliate can run more than one model at once, beyond the fact that one business runs two.
How many employer partnerships one operation can service, given that each carries a standing delivery commitment.
What happens when a partner's audience and yours stop overlapping.

9. The checklist

Question	The answer
Who runs this	You, with each affiliate
What an ideal affiliate is	A business with a warm audience full of people like your customers
How you find them	Warm outreach, off a list you build
The list questions	What they buy, where they go, what they like to do, where they work
The underused one	Their employers
A fast route with little cash	One talk, hosted by many partners, ending in a free consultation behind an application
Model one	The affiliate gives your lead magnet away
Model two	The affiliate sells your lead magnet
Model three	The affiliate sells your core offer directly
Model three inside onboarding	Your offer at the partner's second onboarding call or new-customer webinar
Which is simplest	Model three
Is simplest best	Not necessarily
What you give the affiliate under model two	All of it — a hundred percent
The worked clinic figures	$99 a place, maybe thirty places a month, around $3,000
What one business settled on	Models one and three
Which it never tried	Model two, though the case also says all three were run — see §6
Does model two work	Yes elsewhere — the clinic case
How to choose between one and two	Test them
What affiliates are	Customers, of a different tier
The two compounding routes	People who never stop buying; people who never stop selling
Which model suits which business	Not established on this page
The share to pay under models one and three	This page gives no figure for it

10. What this page does not cover

Pricing the share is SOP 47 and the terms that gate it are SOP 48. The launch that precedes the integration is SOP 49. Putting your own lead magnet into a partner's hands under their branding is SOP 51. Choosing and building the lead magnet itself is SOP 13, and building the warm outreach list this page starts from is SOP 17 and SOP 18. Getting customers rather than businesses to send you people is SOP 16 and SOP 19.

Legal agreements, exclusivity and territory are not covered on this page.