6K MRR + huge affiliate marketing learning for you
by Yannick VeysWe hit another significant milestone this week. We reached $6,000 MRR after a little over six months of being in business.
Super proud so many people are finding our Twitter scheduling and automation tool super handy!
I decided to dedicate this milestone to an exciting learning all Indie Hackers can benefit from.
How affiliate marketing can accelerate the growth of your Indie Project
We’re running an affiliate marketing program that is very successful. With affiliate marketing, you’re outsourcing a considerable part of your marketing to people who can directly benefit from it. As an Indie Hacker who’s mostly into code, this gives you access to a worldwide marketing team.
You can learn a lot from what your affiliates are saying about your product. Most Indie Hackers are probably also too shy or too modest to appear on YouTube.
Below you'll find a small selection of videos created about our product on YouTube. (There are dozens)
Here I’m doing a Google search without including our domain to see how many other pages are talking about us. A big part of that is because of affiliate marketing.
Yes, we offer a significant part of our revenue to our affiliates, but a considerable gain in marketing effort is offsetting it. They are generating the awareness for our product, and we only pay a fraction we would otherwise pay if we did it all our selves.
Below you'll see the search volume and number of clicks on our branded keyword Hypefury (taken from Google Search Console).
Biggest takeaway up until here: affiliate marketing works great, and I suggest every Indie Hacker starts a program themselves. Most Indie Hackers are not that good in marketing. Luckily other people can do it for you!
The dark side of affiliate marketing.
Look back at the graph containing the brand name Google searches and clicks. Anything out of the ordinary? What’s weird about the chart? Look at April 20th and beyond. Our number of clicks drop. Not much, but you can definitely see it in the graph.
I decided to start digging in Google Analytics and found one traffic source that was sending a lot of traffic.
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’m okay with them running Google ads on keywords like Twitter scheduler, social media tool, etc. But that’s not what happened here.
I searched for our brand name in Google and lo and behold:
We were advertising on Google!! Complete with a nice Trademark icon. It looked legit. Just like the big guns!! :)
Except this wasn’t us. This was one of our affiliates stealing our traffic. Our branded traffic.
You can advertise on your own (Indie) brand name for a penny a click. So this person is having a laugh sending all that traffic that would otherwise still visit our website via its affiliate link.
If you have an affiliate program or are planning on starting one after this post, the number one rule you must add to your affiliate terms is that they can’t advertise on your brand name and misspellings.
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.
Affiliates who’re doing this kind of marketing aren’t delivering extra traffic. They’re leeching off of your existing traffic. It only costs you money, and it’s the lamest form of affiliate marketing.
Doubling down on our affiliate program has been one of the key drivers of our growth, and we suggest everyone to set it up yourself. Just be vigilant because even if you have clear rules (like we do) some affiliates still try to go for the quick buck.
Stay vigilant! Happy growing!
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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)
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Sounds interesting :) Thanks for reaching out on Twitter :)
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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?
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Thanks Shane!
We’re using Firstpromoter.com
Works pretty good. They’re also bootstrapped and very open to feedback! They implemented a couple of things based on our feedback.
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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.
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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!
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Hi Timothy,
We're using Firstpromoter :) It works pretty good.
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This is great advice. I would have never thought to look for people doing Google ads targeting our brand name.
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Thanks Dustin!
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Nice. Thinking of doing something similar. How much of the MRR goes to the affiliates?
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Send me a DM on Twitter :) I'll share some info.
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Thank you @YannickVeys, very helpful!
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Thanks Nathan!
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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?
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You have to that yourself :) we have it as part of our onboarding emails. We tell our users that “our affiliate is now open for you” to also give them a sense of exclusivity. Don’t forget to create a page that is dedicated to your own affiliate program. We have it on our twitter profile twitter.com/Hypefury too.
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Wow, well done! And thanks for the heads up :)
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You’re very welcome :)
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Super insightful post. We'll have to be careful when we launch our affiliate program. Congrats on the growth!
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Thanks Hassan! Good luck with your launch! If you have any questions just send me a message.
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That's an awesome post, really thank you for sharing your advice.
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Excellent marketing strategy and great way estimating its performance. A really good lesson in growth. Thanks
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Thanks Bio!
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@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?-
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Hey. The issue is not that they're running ads. The issue is that they're running ads for the term "hypefury" effectively hijacking search results and leeching off people who type our name on google.
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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.
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Thanks Brian! Happy to help :)
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Thanks for the post! How do you find affiliates in your niche?
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ABS Towfiq ;-)
Always Be Selling.
We offer it to our users in an onboarding sequence.
We mention the link on our Twitter profile.
Etc.
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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!
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Thanks Gabriel!
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Thanks @YannickVeys this was indeed very insightful
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You're welcome Naman!
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Very great! Keep up the good work
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Thanks Corentin!
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Thank you for this awesome post! :) when did you start your affiliate program? I mean...first, you should know the customer lifetime value, right?
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We pay a % of our revenue. We don't pay an amount per new user. The longer that referred user stays the more the affiliate gets paid.
You can guestimate your LTV early on. Just divide your (avg) monthly subscription price by your (expected) churn rate.
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I set up the affiliate program before the official release date.
I couldn't know the ltv back then (and even now it's too early to know it).
I just knew that I'd be having more users and making more money with an affiliate program as long as I don't give 80% of the revenue. :) One user is better than 0 user.
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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.
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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!
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Send me a dm on twitter
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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!
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I am replying as I set up the affiliate program before Yannick joined Hypefury.
The truth is that there isn't a simple formula to figure out the affiliate percentage you must give.
You must use intuition. It shouldn't be too high, it shouldn't too low, it should be fair in time (how long to give commission for?), it should be competitive with other affiliate programs in your niche, it should be comparable to what your affiliates are used to (in the twitter money niche, people are used to 50% on an ebook), etc. -
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Thanks Chomp!
We pay based on the revenue they bring in on a recurring base. As long as the user they referred stays they get paid.
We might not use different tiers next time.
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Thanks @YannickVeys
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Really great. I am an affiliate website publisher and reading this through your eyes gave me a valuable perspective!
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Thanks Steve! Great to be of value.
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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!
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You’re welcome Rod!
Ads on other keywords besides our brand name is fine of course but advertising on our brand name is just lame.
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Awesome Yannick, affiliate marketing is something I'm looking more and more into 🙌
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Thanks Maxime! If you have any questions just send me a msg!
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