Affiliate marketing is a key to online business success. And, if you’re like me, it seems like everyone understands what it is…except you.

I know that Kartra allows you to manage your affiliates and Joint Ventures (JVs) but, before I could even explore this feature, I wanted to get to the bottom of who an affiliate is and what a JV means.

An affiliate is like a middleman who promotes your product in exchange for a commission. Think of them as a broker—just like a real estate agent earns 3-6% of a home sale, an affiliate doesn’t own the product but earns a cut by bringing in leads and driving sales. You keep the majority of the revenue, while the affiliate gets a percentage for their efforts. This works for both physical products and services.

A JV, or Joint Venture, refers to a partnership between two or more businesses or individuals who collaborate on a specific project or goal. In the Kartra platform, JVs are partners who refer other affiliates to your program, earning a small percentage of any sales their referrals make. Offering an incentive for this type of partnership can be a great way to grow your network with qualified affiliates.

As I mentioned above, Kartra allows you to manage your affiliates by tracking their sales, returns, payouts, etc. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Kartra also allows you to become an affiliate for other products and brands and promote them for a profit.

Activate Affiliates

I decided to explore the Affiliate Manager first, as it’s most relevant to my sleep coaching business.

To allow affiliates to promote my services, I needed to give them permission within the product setup section of Kartra. This took me back to when I first set up my coaching services on Kartra. In the product settings, one of the sections is affiliates. Here, I could choose whether to activate affiliate programs at checkout or not.

By activating affiliate programs, I allow affiliates to earn commissions when they send someone to my services via a unique link, and that person makes a purchase. Once I selected “activate,” a payment commission form appeared. I could then set the percentage that my affiliates would earn. For example, if I offer a sleep consultation for $300, and someone refers a client who purchases it, the affiliate could earn a 10% commission (which would be $30).

This setup allows me to expand my reach and offer incentives to those who help promote my sleep coaching services.

I have the option to add commission tiers as well. This means that if an affiliate refers an exceptional amount of business, I can reward them for their hustle and add them to a sort of VIP tier where they make a higher commission percentage.

Next, there was the option to activate an affiliate program on opt-in. This means that if an affiliate sends someone my way and they don’t buy anything but they opt-in on one of my forms, such as a commission request or my email subscription, the affiliate will get a fixed flat fee for referring someone to my mailing list.

Note: You will need to go into each individual product and activate an affiliate program for each product you want affiliates to be able to promote. You can also specify if affiliates to promote one product, but not others.

Set your settings

Once I had allowed affiliates on all my products, it was time for me to set up my requirements for them. To go to the manager, navigate to “Sales” in the main left navigation, and click on “Affiliates.”

The Affiliates tab allows me to see everyone who has applied for my program, which affiliate referred what, how much they’ve earned, how much is due to them, and how much has been paid out already.

The Settings tab lets me decide how I will run my affiliate program. I can decide to automatically accept affiliates or manually approve them before their referral link becomes active. It lets me decide if I want to manually allow instant payments to certain, trusted affiliates or all affiliates. I was also able to decide if I wanted a minimum amount of referred sales before payment or not (I chose no minimum).

As I got further into my settings, I realized how important it was to fill this out before letting any new affiliate in. In fact, I recommend setting up your affiliate settings before you allow it on your product(s), which is something I didn’t do.

The Payment History tab is similar, except it gives dates of payments, how much each affiliate was paid, the payment method, etc. Think of it like your bank statement, only for your affiliates. At this point in time, I have no active affiliates so those two tabs were empty.

I got to decide whether an affiliate link gives credit for just the specific sleep training program they referred or for any purchase on the entire site. For my parenting sleep coaching business, this decision was important because if an affiliate refers someone to my “Gentle Sleep Coaching” program, but that person ends up purchasing my “Toddler Sleep Tips” guide, I needed to decide whether the affiliate would still receive credit for the sale.

I chose to give affiliates site-wide credit, meaning if someone clicks their unique link and buys anything on my site—even if it’s a different offer than the one they originally promoted—my affiliate would still receive the commission. This strategy encourages affiliates to promote my full range of sleep coaching resources, not just a specific program.

I also had to decide if I want to hold payments until an affiliate submits tax documents—a W9 or W8BEN form (I do)—and if they have to agree to mandatory terms and conditions. Even if you have all their forms, I’d recommend not paying out affiliate commissions until the money-back guarantee for a purchase is over, in case a customer requests a refund.

Note: It’s always helpful to have terms and conditions so you have a legal agreement between your company and your affiliates that outlines acceptable behavior and other guidelines. You can find generic terms and conditions forms online that you can then further customize for your brand.

Lastly, I was given the option to require affiliates to fill in a questionnaire before they could be approved. I thought this was important because it allows me to: 1) know if these affiliates are serious, and 2) decide if they know enough about my field to be promoting it.

Kartra allowed me to ask multiple-answer questions, single-answer questions, short answer questions and long-answer questions. You can have as many questions as you’d like but I went with two multiple choice and one short answer (I don’t want to spend ages reviewing each affiliate).

Once I finished this, my settings were complete. Now, I just had to wait for the affiliate applications to roll in.

Head to the Market, Promote, Get Paid and Analyze

The flip side of managing affiliates is becoming one yourself. Kartra gives you this option too. To get there, I clicked “Affiliate Section” at the very top underneath my profile picture.

From there, I was brought to a screen that gave me four options: Marketplace, Promotions, Analytics and Payments.

The first one, Marketplace, allows you to browse through the Kartra Marketplace, select your niche, compare commissions, earnings per click, conversion rates and sales funnels. I quickly browsed through the Marketplace and saw products for every niche possible, such as acne medication, tea, blog templates, image consultation and more. I realized I could sort these by category to narrow down to what I was interested in, which made finding a good fit for me much simpler.

Note: If you’ve chosen to list your product publicly in the Marketplace during your product setup, it will show up here.

The next tab is Promotions. Here you can view the products you’ve approved to promote as an affiliate, as well as the sales you’ve made and your commissions on those sales. For example, had I decided to apply to be an affiliate for the acne medication and got approved, that would now show up under my Promotions.

As an affiliate, you receive a link that sends people to the product you’re promoting. When someone checks out, you earn a commission. The link you will use to refer people to the products you’re promoting can be found under the Promotions tab.

The awesome thing about this link? It uses cookies for 30 days. This means if a prospect leaves, then returns and buys the product from a different link within those 30 days, you still get credit for the sale.

The next tab is Payments. Here I was able to set up my “payment settings,” such as the method I’d like the be paid (PayPal, check, bank wire), and upload my tax documentation. I also had the option to verify my profile through phone or Facebook. Due to security reasons, some vendors might only approve affiliate requests from users with verified profiles, so I went ahead and verified through my cell phone.

Under the Payments tab, you can also track your earnings. Kartra allows you to get month-by-month earning reports that you can download in CSV format. 

The last tab is Analytics. This section allows you to view various types of data related to being an affiliate, such as affiliate sales analytics, JV broker sales analytics and transaction analytics. Here you can track your sales, as well as information on your buyers. At this point in time, I hadn’t made any affiliate sales, so I didn’t have any analytics to track. However, once I have a few sales on my track record, the analytics can help me (or you) understand how I’m doing and that information can help me further target leads for products in the future.

Bring in the cha-ching:

Not only have I cracked the marketing jargon on what affiliates and JVs are, I also configured my affiliate settings, both from a managerial and personal affiliate viewpoint, enabled some of my products to be promoted, and found products I was interested in promoting myself.

I encourage you to utilize both these tools to increase sales on your current products and use your leads list to make commissions off of other products you find cool and unique. Before you know it, your income will be spiking without a spike in your workload.