Affiliate Program – Getting Started Guide
Thanks for being a rasa.io Affiliate partner. The goal of this program is to help you and rasa.io grow together. Affiliates can include consulting and training firms, marketing agencies, individuals who are bloggers, podcasters, authors, and many others. The common element amongst our affiliates is that they are actual users of our product and believers in what it can do to boost a brand’s trust and visibility.
This guide will get you started. It is intended to provide you a quick way to get going. The most important thing about being an affiliate is being consistent. You can’t expect to share something once and be done. You need to incorporate rasa.io into various aspects of your content strategy over time in a natural way to drive traffic and grow your audience. This guide is just a starting point. Think of it as a check-list to go over when you are first starting up as a rasa.io affiliate.
We will continue to update this guide with new ideas from time to time, so bookmark it and check back as you’re thinking about your program’s performance and ways to improve it. Our team is here to help, so shoot us a note if we can be of assistance!
IMPORTANT: Remember – use your affiliate link that you were provided when you signed up for the program. We cannot provide you with credit for traffic and conversions that occur from links other than your specific affiliate link. Read the section below on linking that will help you ensure that you get credit for all of the work you’re doing!
Spread the Word
- About Us Page – add a link to your website in the “About Us” or similar section that indicates we are one of your partners. You may use our logo from within our press kit.
- First Blog Post – write a short blog post that describes your partnership with rasa.io. Make sure to mention that it stemmed from your own successful use of the product. If you provide services that complement the rasa.io platform make sure to mention those.
- Content – content truly is king. Sharing great ideas, tips, case studies, and other useful information is a great way to build inbound traffic to your site. Your content might take the form of blog articles, podcast episodes, or videos. The common thread is to share great ideas to help people with marketing, writing, editing, newsletter tactics, emails, and many other topics. To get some ideas for your own content, we encourage you to stay tuned in to what we’re doing here at rasa.io. We publish multiple new blog posts per week and have a new podcast episode each week as well. We recommend you link to our blog posts and podcast episode pages from your site and write your own take on topics related to them. For example, using our Content Curation Guide as a destination to link to, you might write a blog post with content curation tips you’ve used in your own business.
- Testimonials – create a post or a short video about your own experience with the product. Here are some examples of testimonial videos we have published. We are happy to assist you in creating articles or videos to showcase your own use of the product.
- Podcasts or Videos – if you are a host on a podcast or a guest (same thing with videos) – you can mention your own site, and you can also mention links that you think are interesting. For these formats, make sure to use a branded URL shortener (see the Linking section below for tips) as people will have a hard time remembering a long URL they hear in a podcast.
- Guest Blog or Podcast Opportunities – ask your friends, colleagues, and others to allow you to guest post on their sites. If they are in related spaces where your content could be interesting to their audiences this could be an easy win-win. You can have links to post back to your site, or directly include links to the rasa.io site from these guest posts. Remember to use links that include your affiliate tracking code so that you get credit for the traffic.
- Web Events – Consider hosting a web event (webinar) where you talk about your own newsletter, one of your client’s newsletters, or perhaps a related topic such as content curation, email marketing, and so on. Market these events as thought leadership and learning opportunities for your audience on your website, social media, and of course in your own newsletter. We are happy to have one of our team members join you on web events if you’d like us to speak on a topic of our expertise from our blog or podcast, and of course to demonstrate the rasa.io product!
- Social Media – social media can be a great way to spread the word about rasa.io with your audience. You should consider posting links there about the product, but also consider joining conversations that others are having about topics that are related. For example, if you join a conversation about #newsletters on Twitter or LinkedIn you can mention rasa.io and include a link. In these instances, it is best to share a link to content rather than a link to the product directly so that you are engaging in a way that is helpful and informative rather than a “pitch”. That being said, if people are asking which products to use for newsletters, you can certainly share a direct link to our home page.
- Email Newsletter – you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t a happy user of rasa.io
Here are some simple ways to use your own newsletter to drive referral traffic: - There is a branded footer in your newsletter that has rasa.io information in it. If you are using a tier of our service where you are able to opt out of using the branded footer, consider turning it back on as these links will help drive traffic and automatically give you credit.
- Make sure the rasa.io blog is one of your content sources in your newsletter to consider articles we publish to be sent to your audience. Here is our RSS feed to make it easy to add to your newsletter. Make sure to append your affiliate code to each article you include, the RSS feed will not automatically have your affiliate codes on each link.
- Consider adding “Lead Text” in your newsletter from time to time, talk to about your use of the platform and include links there as well. You can find Lead Text options in the Design section of your dashboard.
- Other Emails – we think newsletters are great, but we also know there are lots of other opportunities to send great email. Take advantage of other emails you send to add a custom footer or other standard message that mentions rasa.io and includes your affiliate link.
Here are some simple How to link to rasa.io
Get to know your Affiliate Link
Your affiliate link, which will be sent to you after your application to the program is approved, has this structure:
https://www.rasa.io/?utm_source=ref&utm_campaign=123456789
Let’s break this down into parts:
https://www.rasa.io/
This is where you’re sending traffic. You can link to any page on our site. We recommend linking to our content as well as linking to our home page.
?
The question mark is the way to separate the page you are sending people to and the parameters you are passing to the site.
?utm_source=ref&utm_campaign=123456789
This last part is what the site uses to track your referral. You need to make sure to include it in every link. Please use the code we send you when your application is approved every time.
How do I get credit for traffic?
Whenever you send a new visitor to our site that has not already been to our site within the past 180 days, we set a cookie to track your affiliate code as the source of traffic to our site. After that, you will get credit for this affiliate for a period of up to 180 days after their first click.
During the period of time when your affiliate cookie is active, if that same person comes back on that same device/browser and converts, you will get credit. If the same person comes back during this time frame from another source but on the same device/browser, you will still get credit for their conversion since we have an active affiliate cookie with your code in it on that device and browser. If the user comes back on a different device or browser and doesn’t use your affiliate links, we won’t be able to give you credit as we will not know it was the same person.
Consider using a URL shortener
Consider using a URL shortening tool such as bit.ly or Rebrandly. These tools allow you to create short URLs that are easy for people to remember. This is particularly important when you mention rasa.io verbally on podcasts or other forms but can be helpful at other times. The other benefit of a URL shortener is these tools will often give you metrics on clicks over time from your various campaigns. The reporting we provide will only give you reporting on the visitors that actually end up on our site that we register to you. If visitors came to our site and already had a cookie on their device/browser, you will not be given any reporting on their visit.
Link to Content and Landing Pages
Don’t forget, link to our blog, our podcast, and landing pages such as our Content Curation Guide, not just our home page.
By sharing valuable resources on our site with your audience, you’ll show them more value than just pitching them on using the product directly.
Remember, you get credit for conversions that take place as long as people sign up for an account within 180 days from the date they first visited from your referral link.