Hello and welcome back to Inside the Click. Monica here with your word of the week to add into your influencer dictionary. This week I’m breaking down sub-affiliate.
If you work behind the scenes on the technical side of influencer marking you may be familiar with the term sub-affiliate, otherwise this one might be new!
Let’s start with context. When you join a platform like Collective Voice, ShopMy or LTK, they have relationships with networks that help them track the orders and get them attributed to the correct creator. The benefits of partnering with affiliate networks include a team that works as a liaison between the platform and the retailer when it comes to technical integrations, ability to have advanced reporting as well as seamless payment structures.
When a platform joins one of these networks, they are the “publisher” since they “own” that account.
Now that we have the context on the purpose of an affiliate network, lets dive into the sub affiliate term
While the influencer marketing platforms are publishers to an affiliate network, The creators are then considered “sub affiliates”. A sub affiliate is represented by the publisher to the affiliate network. The benefits for a creator are that you as a creator don’t have to have 8 different log ins to 8 different networks, and get individual approval retailer by retailer to be able to link to them. Instead a platform like Collective Voice is going to take care of that piece so that as soon as you have a Collective Voice account, you can start linking to your retailers of choice.
What’s interesting about affiliate networks is that they have been around way longer than most influencer marketing platforms, because let’s not forget affiliate marketing at its core has been around for decades. Some OG bloggers may remember that in the first few years of blogging, you did have to sign up for various affiliate network accounts since different retailers used different networks.
It’s a good thing these influencer marking platforms swooped in because we already have enough logins and accounts to track. Can you imagine having to go into each network to link to just 5 things? It would take forever.
The one downside to being a sub-affiliate, not a publisher, is that if you ever have any tracking issues, you need to rely on the platform you use to escalate it to the network as sub-affiliates do not have dire relationships with the network. However, as someone who has worked on this side of platforms, don’t ever hesitate to reach out to the platform with any concerns. When creators flag these types of issues it often isn’t just you with the issue and can benefit the greater good!
Don’t forget to like, rate review share this episode and head over to IG to join our daily conversations about influencer marketing!