Best practices: recruiting and approving affiliates

Best practice

Recruit for audience fit, not follower count. Keep your registration form short but filtering. Treat the pending queue as a real gate.

A focused group of partners whose audience overlaps your customers usually out-earns a crowd of casual sign-ups.

Recruit for fit, not volume

A relevant partner with a small, engaged audience usually drives cleaner sales than a large but mismatched one. Before chasing reach, ask whether the candidate’s audience is likely to buy what you sell.

• Start with people who already love your products: past customers, creators who have mentioned you, and niche publishers in your category.
• Lead recruitment with the concrete benefit: your commission rate and what a partner can realistically earn.
• Keep your richer rates for proven performers, so there is a reason to keep promoting.

Make the registration form sell, then filter

The registration form is your first impression. It has to convince good partners that joining is worth their time, while collecting only what you need to vet and pay them.

• Keep it short. A long form puts off the creators and customers you most want.
• Lead with the benefit. Show the commission at the top, so applicants see the upside first.
• Filter with fixed fields. If you need to filter by niche, audience size or portfolio, use a single-choice or file-upload field instead of free text. Applications are then easy to compare.

Build and style the form in the affiliate registration form.

Use the pending queue as a gate

Self-registered affiliates arrive as pending, and they cannot earn until you approve them. See affiliate statuses.

Review applicants for fit, not just to clear the backlog. You can approve or reject several affiliates at once, and Bloop sends the matching email for each status change.

Two approval modes control this gate:

Mode	What happens	Use it when
Manually (default)	Each application waits for your review	Your offer and form are still being tested
Immediately	Applicants are approved when they register	Your offer and form already screen applicants well

Set the mode under Affiliate approval automation in affiliate settings.

Warning

With Immediately, the review step is gone. Every applicant is approved, and your form is the only filter.

• What happens: anyone who fills in the form can start earning.
• What it means: a weak applicant can join without you seeing them.
• What to do: keep Manually until your form screens applicants well, then switch.

Onboard so partners actually start

An approved affiliate who never promotes earns nothing. An affiliate you approve by hand has no campaign, and until they have one, their link tracks nothing. Self-registered affiliates approved automatically get the default campaign.

1. Open the affiliate’s record.
2. In the Affiliate campaign card, click the pencil and choose a campaign. See managing affiliates.
3. Check that they have their referral link, any discount coupon, and a clear idea of what to share.
4. Use Log in as affiliate to preview the portal and links as the affiliate sees them, before you launch.

Warning

With Immediately on, a manually added affiliate goes onto the default campaign, not the one you picked. Check the Affiliate campaign card after you add them.

Set it up in Bloop

1. Add, approve, reject and export affiliates in Managing affiliates.
2. Build the application form in the affiliate registration form.
3. Put your top performers on a higher-rate campaign. See a commission structure that scales.

Related

• Referral program vs affiliate program