AMA: Affiliate Marketing Answered

"Influencer marketing is the one channel where the channel can push back."

Dan Stevenson has spent years learning that the hard way. He ran the UK creator program at MyProtein, part of a global roster of 7,000+ creators. At Spacegoods, he grew the program to 1,000+ active creator partnerships with a team of two to three people. Now he runs his own agency, Gravitas, and he's as performance-minded as they come.

In this episode of AMA: Affiliate Marketing, Answered, Dan takes on questions from affiliate and influencer managers at ecommerce brands.

He opens with a hot take that'll start arguments in your next budget meeting: price creators on CPM and CPC, the same way you judge Meta or Google. If they can't compete with your other paid channels, why are they getting your money?

Here's what else he gets into:

✨ Gifting a pricey product?: Get pickier about who gets it, accept some wastage, and remember gifting is a volume game. Can't afford free product at scale? Sell it to creators at COGS and back it with a strong commission.

✨ Reply rates dropping?: Creators respond when they see people they already follow promoting you. Own one niche before you chase ten.

✨ Affiliates ghosting after one post?: Most stay active for three to six months. Dan keeps his best ones close with WhatsApp broadcast channels, competitions and early access, and cycles out the rest without guilt.

✨ How MyProtein kept thousands of affiliates motivated: a clear path from affiliate to paid athlete. Give people something to climb toward and they keep posting.

✨ Running lean? Automate outreach and codes, then give every person on the team one area to own.

🔗 Connect with Dan

Gravitas: https://www.gravitasinfluencer.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-stevenson/

📝 Got a question about your affiliate program? Send it in through our form (anonymous is fine) and we'll put it to our next guest: https://tally.so/r/NpRPrB

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Brought to you by SATHI.

SATHI is the affiliate platform built for Shopify brands with multi-touch cookieless attribution, an AI fraud engine working overtime, and built-in gamification for your affiliate partners.

👉 Request your free trial of SATHI at www.mysathi.io

#AffiliateMarketing #InfluencerMarketing #CreatorMarketing #Shopify #Ecommerce #DTC

This week on AMA: Affiliate Marketing, Answered, we sat down with Noël Breese, who led and scaled the affiliate and influencer program at Heart and Soil and now consults e-commerce brands on their affiliate and influencer strategy. If you manage affiliates, or your dashboard never seems to tell the whole story, this one's for you.

Here's what we covered:

👉 Why having fun with your creative brief decides whether affiliates have fun making the content

👉 The application tells that separate genuine fans from coupon hunters, and the one-line question that gets applicants to sell themselves

👉 How to keep relationships personal once your roster outgrows your memory

👉 How to report affiliate performance to leadership without losing them in the numbers

🔗 Noël's on LinkedIn and worth the follow: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noel-breese/

📝 Read her Substack piece, "I Used to Plan Parties for Billionaires": https://noelbreese.substack.com/p/i-used-to-plan-parties-for-billionaires?r=8bd5ss&triedRedirect=true

This is episode two of AMA: Affiliate Marketing, Answered, is presented by SATHI, the Shopify affiliate platform built around cookieless multi-touch attribution, fraud detection that catches what manual checks miss, and payouts that don't eat your week.

If you want me to show you around SATHI, book some time here: www.mysathi.io/demo.

📝 Have a question for the next guest? Drop it here: https://tally.so/r/9q4QE1.

This week on AMA: Affiliate Marketing, Answered, we sat down with Alaa Rhouma, CMO of GoStrategy, an agency that's run growth for 200+ DTC and ecommerce brands across Meta ads, Shopify CRO, TikTok Shop, and affiliate and influencer programs. If you manage affiliates, or you're the marketing head trying to figure out why your program stalls the second you try to scale it, this one's for you.

Here's what we covered:

✨ The four reasons affiliates go dormant, and how to reactivate them without just sending more free product

✨ What breaks first when a brand tries to 2x or 3x past 50 affiliates

✨ How high-ticket and luxury brands should run affiliate differently than low-ticket brands

✨ The TikTok Shop playbook: open collab vs. target collab, and the halo effect on Amazon sales

✨ Coupon code leaks and double dipping, the sneaky margin killer nobody budgets for

✨ How an expert would split a $50K affiliate budget from scratch across recruitment, flat fees, commission, and gamification

✨ Building community and gamification the right way, without turning it into your only acquisition lever

Connect with Alaa and his team:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alaa-rhouma/

GoStrategy: https://gostrategy.ca/en

Got a question for our next guest? Drop it here: https://tally.so/r/NpRPrB, and we'll answer it on the show.

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This series is powered by SATHI, the affiliate marketing platform built for Shopify brands. SATHI handles multi-touch attribution, automated payouts, fraud detection, and the full affiliate experience so your program runs without you babysitting it. Learn more at mysathi.io

#ecommerce #shopify #influencermarketing #d2c

Two and a half months into an affiliate program, the ROAS looks terrible, and everyone on the team wants to pull the plug. Sound familiar? That is where this episode starts.

Dan Albert is the co-founder and CEO of 456 Growth, an agency that runs performance campaigns for brands, manages a roster of hundreds of affiliates, and invests in consumer brands. He sees affiliate marketing from the brand side, the affiliate side, and the investor side at once. In this episode he answers questions submitted by brands who are stuck on decisions they can't find straight answers to.

We get into:

✨ How long you should commit to a new affiliate program before deciding it doesn't work, and the signals to watch while you wait

✨ When a lean team should hire a dedicated affiliate manager, and why an agency can be the smarter first move

✨ Whether a tight roster of affiliates caps your potential compared to going wide with hundreds

✨ How to diagnose why affiliates with the right niche and decent followings still bring zero sales

✨ What changed on TikTok Shop in the last few months, and how to qualify partners before sending free samples into a black hole

✨ The Amazon Prime Day halo effect, including affiliate content that lifted foot traffic at big box retailers by 20%

Dan gives specific timelines, benchmarks, and frameworks throughout.

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Connect with Dan: / danalbert

456 Growth: https://456growth.com

Book time with Dan: https://calendar.app.google/QESJ8HwP1...

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Got a question about your affiliate program that you can't find a straight answer to? Submit it here and it might get covered in a future episode: mysathi.io/ask

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This series is powered by SATHI, the affiliate marketing platform built for Shopify brands. SATHI handles multi-touch attribution, automated payouts, fraud detection, and the full affiliate experience so your program runs without you babysitting it. Learn more at mysathi.io

If your affiliate program is generating views but not revenue, the problem is usually the expectation going in, rather than the channel itself.

Rabii Babou, CEO of Livano Agency, has built multi-million dollar creator and affiliate pipelines for DTC brands across TikTok Shop, Meta, and beyond. In this episode, he answers the questions affiliate managers are actually sitting with: how to structure deals, when to pay flat fees, how to scale top performers, and how to build a program from scratch without burning your budget before you have a single data point.

In this episode:

👉 Why treating affiliate as a direct revenue driver sets your program up to disappoint, and what to measure instead

👉 TikTok Shop views that don't convert: what the halo effect actually means for your other sales channels, and the content type most brands skip entirely

👉 The micro influencer case for not paying $4,000 for a single reel, and why smaller creators are outperforming larger accounts right now

👉 How to get affiliates comfortable with whitelisting their content, what a fair deal structure looks like, and how Rabii's clients are seeing up to 36% reduction in customer acquisition cost from whitelisted creatives

👉 Why commission-only structures don't retain your best affiliates, and how hybrid retainer deals create consistent output on both sides

👉 How to build from scratch: why the first move isn't spending anything, and how enrollment data tells you exactly who's worth investing in

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Connect with Rabii and the Livano team: https://livanoagency.com/

Rabii on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rabii-babou/

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Got a question about your affiliate program that you can't find a straight answer to? Submit it here and it might get covered in a future episode: https://tally.so/r/9q4QE1

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This series is powered by SATHI, the affiliate marketing platform built for Shopify brands. SATHI handles multi-touch attribution, automated payouts, fraud detection, and the full affiliate experience so your program runs without you babysitting it. Learn more at https://www.mysathi.io

Over the last decade of building and scaling affiliate programs, Andreea (founder of Hype Maven), has had brands ask her to replicate results from companies like Comfrt and poppi - brands sitting on years of recognition and millions of customers already, without accounting for the fact that those brands aren't starting from zero. In this episode, she breaks down:

👉 What a realistic affiliate program looks like when nobody's heard of you yet

👉 The difference between seeding and going affiliate first

👉 Why constantly raising incentives isn't the answer to keeping affiliates engaged

🔗 Andreea's on LinkedIn and worth the follow: www.linkedin.com/in/moiseandreea/

This is episode two of AMA: Affiliate Marketing, Answered, is presented by SATHI, the Shopify affiliate platform built around cookieless multi-touch attribution, fraud detection that catches what manual checks miss, and payouts that don't eat your week.

If you want me to show you around SATHI, book some time here: www.mysathi.io/demo.

📝 Have a question for the next guest? Drop it here: https://tally.so/r/9q4QE1.

In our first episode of AMA: Affiliate Marketing, Answered, Kim Biddle, Co-founder of Clutch Affiliate and 20-year industry veteran, shares her unfiltered takes.

We cover best content formats, why great content sometimes doesn't convert, putting ad spend behind organic affiliate content, attribution chaos, and the discount code vs link debate.

Tune in!

Got more questions? Send them here : https://tally.so/r/9q4QE1.

See you in the next one!

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AMA is brought to you by SATHI: the affiliate infrastructure built for Shopify brands that want clean data, fraud protection, and a best-in-class experience their affiliates love. Learn more at