Setting Up Your Instagram Account

The first step to getting started with Instagram affiliate marketing is to set up your account. You will want to choose a username that is simple and easy to remember and spell. Your username will be what people will see most, so you want it unique and recognizable.

On Instagram, YOU are the brand. You choose the colors, fonts, filters, and vibe to make your account uniquely yours. Your followers will come to love you, trust you, and go to you for tips and ideas related to your niche. Whatever you love and are passionate about, your audience will be too. This is what makes Instagram such a great platform for affiliates.

Depending on your niche and what you want to share, you can build your personal brand to make your account more recognizable across social media—even without your own website. You can use your colors and fonts on your posts, highlights, and reels, while using your filters and presets on your feed. Don’t overthink this—pick your favorites and roll with it! It is ok for your brand to evolve over time.

The next step is to choose which type of account you want to use. Instagram offers three types of accounts: Personal, Business, and Creator. Each type offers different benefits and drawbacks.

A personal account is just that—personal. This account option is for those who want to use Instagram for its most basic use, which is sharing content with friends and family. This is not recommended for affiliates because it does not offer any of the tools that are useful in growing an audience and income.

A business account offers analytics and insights into how your content is performing with your audience. Business accounts allow you to see information such as reach, audience metrics, and activity. In addition, with a Business Instagram Account, you can add links to your stories if you have over 10,000 followers* and have the ability to run ads.

A creator account is designed for influencer marketing and content creators. An Instagram creator account has many of the same insights and analytics that the business account does but also gives more flexibility to be creative with your profile and content. A creator account also allows you to choose a category for your profile, such as blogger, content creator, video creator, and more.

To choose which account is best for you:

1. Visit your profile page and tap on the three horizontal lines in the top right-hand corner.
2. From there choose Settings and then Account.
3. Scroll to the bottom where you will see “Switch Account Type” in blue.

Your Profile

Once your account is set up, you will want to create your profile. Your profile is where you will highlight what a potential follower can expect to see from you. Use this space to show off your personality and topics you love. Use emojis to help tell the story in a fun and creative way.

Your profile photo should be a clear and bright picture of you. Your audience will come to know you and follow you, not a brand or a logo or your pet.

The Name field can be up to 30 characters long, so use them as an opportunity to tell more of who you are. The Name Field is completely separate from your username, and is searchable, meaning if someone is looking for a “fitness expert,” and you have that term behind your name in the Name field, there is potential for you to show up in search. Use strategic keywords to help your ideal audience find you.

Your Username is what makes you unique on Instagram. This username determines your URL (ex: https://instagram.com/yourusername) and should be simple and easy to remember. Once you set your username, it should not be changed, as that would “break” any links you have to the original username. Your audience will see this username in their feed.

Your Bio is the next element on your profile and offers 150 characters to share WHO you are, WHAT you do, and WHY someone would want to follow your account. In the Bio, you want to show off your personality and what makes your account unique. Are you a #GirlMom or a Court Reporter? Will you be sharing Fitness Tips? Keto Recipes? Fashion Trends? Are you sharing your journey of something? Use this Bio to show why someone would love following your account.

Your Website is incredibly powerful as it is the only place you have a clickable link on your profile. There are several options for this link, and remember you can change it as often as you would like.

If you have a blog, you can use this link to go directly to your homepage or to a customized Instagram page just for your Instagram followers. You can also link to a specific post that you want to promote, like a giveaway or a sponsored post.

If you do not have a blog, you can choose to use tools such as LinkINBio, Milkshake, or LinkTree to design a customized landing page that features what you want your audience to see.

Regardless of whether you are linking to a blog or one of the Apps, here are some ideas of things to include:

• Your best content or blog post
• Your favorite affiliate products (using affiliate links and coupon codes if you have them)
• Email newsletter opt-in
• Other social media platforms (TikTok, Facebook, etc.)
• Your own products or your own affiliate program
• Amazon Associates storefront
• Facebook Business page

Remember, when you join a new affiliate program, make sure you add your new links!

Depending on the type of Instagram Account you choose, you may have additional options to add to your profile, such as contact information, your own Shop Page, and more.

Your Instagram Feed

Your Instagram Feed is where you will show chosen photos and videos to your audience. These are mostly permanent posts that your followers will see in their feed scroll. The feed is where you will put more “curated” content, while Stories gives the opportunity to show more of a behind-the-scenes, off-the-cuff look at your life.

In previous years a popular way to grow your Instagram following was to have a very curated aesthetic to your Feed. Recently, showing a more authentic, less filtered feed has grown more popular. That being said, you still want to choose for your feed the best photos to show off your content. New followers will often visit your profile, and you want your most recent Instagram Posts to be engaging and entertaining, giving even more encouragement to follow your account.

According to Instagram, you should post content to your newsfeed 3-5 times per week for the best engagement rates.

The Great Hashtag Debate

Hashtags are an important part of Instagram, but there is much debate on how many and which ones to use. Common advice in the past suggested using up to 30 hashtags on every single post, but more recently, Instagram came out and said that 7–15 is better. The one thing that stayed the same is that the hashtag relevance is most important – and that using more hashtags just for the sake of hitting 30 is not advised.

When determining the best hashtags to use for your post, there are a couple of strategies to make the most out of each one. It may take some trial and error to find out what works best and resonates most with your existing audience while helping you grow and reach new fans.

Instagram users can follow hashtags, so using good relevant hashtags that have reasonable competition is best. When you begin to type in a hashtag to your caption, let Instagram auto-populate and scroll to see the suggested hashtags and their usage. Look for hashtags that have more than 50,000 but fewer than 500,000 posts. This gives you a greater opportunity to show up in the “Recent” section of that hashtag and to be chosen for one of the featured feed posts for that hashtag.

The Power Of Instagram Stories for Affiliate Marketing

Instagram Stories are the most lucrative aspect of using Instagram for Affiliate Marketing. You want to think of Stories as your very own reality show. While you want your Instagram Feed to be somewhat curated, your Stories should be the “raw” you. Since Instagram Stories disappear after 24 hours, you want to make sure you are showing up consistently and sharing often.

Instagram Stories are where your audience will really get to know you. They will come back day after day to see what you are up to and to engage with you by leaving comments, participating in polls, answering questions, and more. You can build strong relationships with your followers by sharing Stories regularly and engaging in conversation daily.

For affiliate marketing, Instagram Stories are a great way to expand brand awareness, show off new products, and encourage your followers to click through and buy or use your code to purchase.

Instagram recommends that you share 8–10 Stories per day.

Best Practices For Instagram Highlights

Instagram Highlights is a great extension of your Bio and should include your best content from Instagram Stories. If you share recipes, consider creating a Highlight for each of your top favorite recipes. If you are on a fitness journey, consider a highlight of your progress. If you are in fashion, maybe create a highlight showing off your favorite looks for each of your favorite stores.

Instagram Highlights is an easy way to save your best Instagram Stories and keep all of your favorite affiliate product features together. Saving your affiliate products to your Instagram Highlights and encouraging your followers to check them out is a great way to grow passive income.

Instagram Highlights are featured on your Instagram profile in chronological order, so it is important to add to your Highlights to keep the content fresh. You can add up to 100 stories to a Highlight and can have an unlimited number of Highlights.

The Deal With Reels

Instagram Reels are the hottest new tool for the social platform and have been shown to reach a large audience quickly, putting you in front of potential customers for your affiliate products. Instagram Reels are similar to TikTok and allow you to piece together 15–30 second clips that you can then share to your Instagram Feed, Stories, or Reels tab. Reels are now also being shown on the Explore page.

Reels let you show off your personality, your favorite products, tips and “life hacks” to help others, favorite locations, funny pet antics… anything, really. The great thing about Reels is there are no limits to what you can share, which means there is no limit to what may come from them—a new audience, new opportunities, and of course, a new affiliate marketing strategy.

To create Reels, choose trending sounds and music to reacher a broader audience, and create your own voiceovers and funny clips that others can use as well. Best practices also suggest you create Reels “Covers” that tell what your Reel is about so that users can easily scan your Reels tab for the content they find interesting. You can take this one step further and include your favorite colors on every Reel for additional branding.

Best practices suggest posting four to seven Reels per week.

IG Live for Affiliate Marketing

The last tool for Instagram is IG Live, the ability to go “live” on your account for up to four hours. IG Live is great for showing lengthy product reviews and tutorials, sharing live events like concerts or conferences, teaching, sharing a DIY, or other special things that you want your followers to tune in live to watch.

Live videos have priority in the newsfeed, so when your audience logs in, they will see your live video first in the top lefthand corner where Stories are displayed. In the settings, you can set your IG Lives to save directly to your Stories, allow your IG Live to be shared, and even automatically save your IG Live to your camera roll (which is great for sharing on other social channels). Additionally, you can choose to only show your IG Live to certain followers, which is great if you want to limit who sees your Live video.

You can also include others in IG Lives by using the “Add A Friend” feature. This is perfect for live interviews and discussions, as it’s shown to both your audience and the audience of the “friends” that you add to your Live.

Every IG Live should have a purpose and give value to your audience. If you are teaching or showing how to do something, make sure you have thought out the steps you plan to show ahead of time. Place your phone on a tripod or stand to avoid constant movement. Make sure your area is well lit and that you can close enough to your phone that you can be heard. Engage with your audience comments, ask questions, and have fun!

Final Thoughts

The world of Instagram is an incredible opportunity to build your brand and share your favorite things while offering the opportunity to make a significant income from product promotion and affiliate marketing. By being consistent, authentic, and providing value to your audience every single day, you can use this free platform as a money-making tool just by being you.

The Public Relations world has been abuzz with the addition of the phrase “commerce content” over the last few years, specifically through a company called Skimlinks. PR professionals pitch editorial content to reporters, but those pitches are now often referred over to other employees that assist with monetization for the publications. These commerce editors want to make sure the content will make money for the media companies they represent.

This is not how PR worked in the past, and it’s a gray area for traditionalists. In years past, respectable agencies were able to gain editorial placements based on a story’s relevance or the relationships they had built with reporters. While that still happens on occasion, it now often involves a pay-to-play model and adding product links through affiliate networks that are paid based on performance. If the user clicks through the affiliate link and purchases, the publication will earn a piece of that transaction from the brand.

Why Use Skimlinks?

Media corporations do not have the personnel to monetize each relevant keyword and link them to established financial relationships with brands. It would require them to join individual affiliate programs, which is time-consuming. Each one is usually managed separately, wait through the approval process, then create and implement the trackable codes. Skimlinks automation makes sense for companies with limited resources and rapidly expanding content as merchant links can be easily added to new and existing content.

Skimlinks is a sub-affiliate network. Skimlinks takes a cut of the commissions for themselves when a transaction happens and shares the rest with its sub-affiliates. By installing code, website owners can monetize brand names, brand mentions, popular products, and other product-related information written about in their articles or blog posts. It’s as simple as adding and configuring the Skimlinks Plugin, which, according to their website, enables more than $5.5 million worth of transactions each day. Brands need to understand how to optimize the opportunity because the reward is substantial.

For the sake of this article, let’s define some of the terms. A brand is an advertiser, an eCommerce company that sells products or provides services. A publisher (or affiliate) sends traffic to advertisers through specially-coded trackable links. Publishers could be media companies like Good Housekeeping magazine or lifestyle bloggers with thousands of followers on social media. Size matters not. Even new bloggers with a simple WordPress site are content creators and can play an important role in the e-commerce ecosystem. Publishers can use Skimlinks to monetize the content they post, creating a revenue stream.

I asked a veteran PR Agency owner what they know about Skimlinks. Here is the direct quote, “I know nothing except that reporters are constantly asking me for them.” When a PR representative is told their client or brand needs to work with Skimlinks, they can’t just sign up with Skimlinks directly. The advertiser needs to launch an affiliate program on a network or platform such as ShareASale, Impact, or Refersion. Skimlinks is a publisher—affiliate—in these networks, and so publishers in the Skimlinks system are sub-affiliates.

Affiliate Program Launch

The process to launch an affiliate program is a multi-step endeavor. First, it requires a functioning e-commerce website. Then the company needs to sign contracts with the networks, pay integration fees, and schedule IT development time to install necessary tracking code. Most importantly, the advertiser needs to understand how to manage an affiliate program for long-term growth. In the end, it could cost thousands of dollars to set up and several weeks of integration before the program is ready for publishers to join. It may be weeks before any get active with promotions. This can frustrate everyone involved if a PR pitch is time-sensitive and budgets are already allocated for different initiatives. Furthermore, there’s still no guarantee a particular publisher will be interested in writing about the product or brand, or that the publisher’s audience will be interested in buying.

Affiliate marketing does work, and it can help a brand grow, but it’s not a frontline battle channel. It is best used as one of the layers in an overall online marketing strategy. Customer service and brand recognition take priority. Paid search and paid social should be tested before affiliate, and social communities should be built with an eye toward the brand’s ideal demographics. When it’s time to expand and hire a PR team, make sure they understand that affiliate marketing should be part of a hybrid strategy. An affiliate program that exists just so one media publication will link to the brand one time is a waste of time, resources, and potential. Affiliate marketing is much bigger than that and with the right approach, the affiliate channel can grow a brand’s e-commerce revenue by an average of 15% over 12-18 months as affiliate partners share their referral links.

Once an affiliate program is driving traffic, a PR team can use published articles to prove to other publications that robust commissions are possible, and that they should have their commerce team run the numbers. Affiliates drive traffic that commerce editors can look at as a metric to decide whether or not the opportunity to make money exists. If a brand’s Similar Web numbers aren’t impressive yet, they could very well reject the entire pitch. A robust strategy is a must.

Traffic should ideally flow to the brand’s DTC website. Publishers who see a brand’s products on Amazon may prefer to use Amazon Associates links because they can convert at a higher percentage or can include products from multiple brands in a single commissionable transaction. Where is the ideal growth? Is it better for the Chicago Tribune to link to a brand’s site or to an Amazon listing? Amazon might help sell the product but the brand website tells the story and captures a customer for post-purchase loyalty building opportunities. If a PR hit yields great coverage, make sure the links go to the right place.

A hybrid PR and affiliate approach is a winning combination when considering the legacy of trying to figure out the effectiveness of traditional PR efforts. There are many tools to measure PR value, but with the added layer of affiliate links, online sales can finally be tied to the overall strategy.

Common Pitfalls

Skimlinks works with 60,000 publishers and 48,500 affiliate programs, and those numbers are growing every day. Apogee has worked with Skimlinks since our inception in 2009. Managing this relationship requires weekly maintenance from our team. The benefits are spectacular when optimized and done right, but here’s a vital point about the service: Some of those 60,000 publishers are coupon sites. Brands are typically scared of coupon sites and when it comes to Skimlinks, they should be. Apogee works with Skimlinks to remove sub-affiliates that are not content-related and we do not allow coupon sites, cashback sites, loyalty, reward, or paid search publishers to utilize services like Skimlinks.

When an affiliate program launches, the application vetting process is the single most important thing. Brands should only work with the affiliates with whom they feel comfortable as representatives of the brand’s products. Brands that decline a coupon site but approve a sub-affiliate network leave open a back door. Most new affiliate managers, whether they are PR reps or brand owners, don’t see the details until it’s too late. Right next to a sale from Buzzfeed could be a coupon site with fake codes and misinformation about the brand. The ultimate goal is to manage the customer’s experience with the brand, and that is much harder to do within a sub-affiliate relationship.

On a positive note, Skimlinks offers the opportunity to create custom incentives and custom commission rates within the network to maximize the content monetization network. Brands can choose to offer a higher commission to specific publishers, while only giving a small commission to others. This does require management and monitoring but should be a part of the affiliate marketing process for any brand looking for maximum publisher coverage.

As a result of Apogee’s sub-affiliate strategy with brands, we get to send reports showing the coverage results and the corresponding sales. Here’s an example from a recent month: 33 pieces of coverage; 697m online readership; 1.27m estimated coverage views; 10.2k social shares; 79 average domain authority; 87 orders; $15,248 in sales; 5,991 clicks; 1.47% conversion rate.

We’ve been studying the evolution of mass media’s use of affiliate marketing to enhance revenue for the last few years, and it led us to change the way we do business as an agency. Read more about how Apogee reintroduced our brand and expertise based on this new hybrid approach.

Here is my sales pitch to the public relations professionals and brands reading this. Contact us right now and let us help you launch an affiliate program the right way, including managing your Skimlinks relationship, for maximum benefit and return. We can work with you on a project basis to launch a new program or revamp a unoptimized one. We also offer long-term management solutions. Use our best practices and resources privately or through a white label solution. We can help you succeed.

If management isn’t right for you just now, if you have a tight budget and you need to do it on your own, perhaps make your affiliate program private.

To Recap

Skimlinks offers an incredibly lucrative opportunity that is mutually beneficial to brands and publishers. It offers an easy way for publishers to monetize old content which is still generating traffic by automatically switching ordinary links with a Skimlinks affiliate link. With an understanding of how to properly manage the relationship, this tool can be a game-changer for a brand’s e-commerce efforts.

“Southside Market has exceptional sausage and barbequed meat products that follow the same authentic methods from founder, William Moon, that consists of smoking low and slow over real Texas post oak wood. Their well-loved beef sausage, sausage slammers and signature Elgin Hot Sausage has quickly grown from an Austin staple to dinner tables around the country.”

The new Southside Market & Barbeque Affiliate Program offers an impressive 7% commission with a 90 day tracking gap. Additional incentives and bonuses are available, as well as product review opportunities for select partners. 

The Southside Market & Barbeque Affiliate Program is proudly managed by the Apogee Agency team. 

Please join the Southside Market & Barbeque affiliate program here:  http://www.shareasale.com/join/112232

“Great Jones is a modern one-stop-shop for your kitchen, here to help you feel prepared and proud to cook at home. All of their designs move from stove to oven to table to ease, proving that you can marry style with function. They take a fresh and colorful approach to design and are best known for their enameled cast-iron Dutch oven (The Dutchess), their non-stick but nontoxic frying pans, and their best-selling, colorful sheet pans and bakeware. Plus, Great Jones will help you build confidence in the kitchen with their editorial platform, Digest, and free cooking hotline, Potline.”

The new Great Jones Affiliate Program offers an impressive 8% commission with a 90-day tracking gap. Additional incentives and bonuses are available, as well as product review opportunities for select partners.

The Great Jones Affiliate Program is proudly managed by the Apogee Agency team.

Please join the Great Jones affiliate program here: http://www.shareasale.com/join/bGreatJones

Apogee is ever observant of trends in the digital marketing space. One such that we started to see over the last few years is the rapid proliferation of curious major media representatives scouting out affiliate marketing at industry events. They slowly began experimenting with the performance marketing model as a way to explore new revenue streams. Some of them dove straight into the deep end; others are still learning. We’ve watched, and worked with, major media and the results we’ve seen prove that affiliate, influencer, public relations, and digital advertising have merged. We track all of these efforts for our clients on platforms like ShareASale, Impact, and Refersion.

Some major media publications are easy to work with and are always looking for high-converting content with good brands and mass appeal. They study the niche, assign the writers and join the affiliate programs upfront. It’s a very transparent relationship. Others are still requiring media buys using the pay-to-play model, but with the right calendar and frequency, the exposure could lead to increased interest in the brand from other publications. Visibility is the goal and everyone needs to be prepared for a mixture of these hybrid models.

While this was happening, thousands of small to mid-sized merchants launched programs on affiliate networks and waited for Forbes and Newsweek to show up with feature articles that brought infinite revenue. Instead, they were shocked to find a flood of affiliate applications from couponers, paid search bidders, and the lowest forms of partners in the networks. It was not what they expected because no one was there to give them a solid strategy on how this works. This is embarrassing for veterans of affiliate management because the merchants were only told about one small piece of the affiliate universe and they ended up seeing the dumpster. They had no idea the affiliate channel requires expertise in recruitment, education, and activation. You can’t just turn on the affiliate channel and expect magic. It takes years of relationship building, brand recognition, competitive commissions, strong onsite conversions, and expert personnel to build sales through affiliates. One hit from a mass media site does not make a sustainable affiliate program so a strategy, like those Apogee implements, needs to be in place for future growth.

That’s why Apogee offers a blended mix of services. We work to ensure that our clients reap the benefits of a more strategic approach to finding new customers.

With new areas of expertise and new challenges in digital marketing comes a rethinking of the team management dynamic. Every Apogee client is assigned to a pod: Alpha, Polaris, or Zenith. Each pod is made up of a dedicated affiliate manager and account manager supported by coordinators, analysts, and our leadership team. At any given point, ten people can be brainstorming one client solution. We’ve trained and empowered the pods to advocate for themselves, their clients, and their affiliates. Advocacy is a core tenet going back to the beginning of this company in 2009.

Contact us when you are ready for new customers. We stand ready to work for you.

I don’t like coupon sites.
Why aren’t affiliates promoting my products?
Where are the sales?
Why aren’t we getting 4x ROAS from this channel?

I think we can address some of them with an easy fix. Talk to your network representatives and make your affiliate program private. Lock down the application process and make it invite-only. Stop the madness!

During our sales process, we ask a series of detailed questions about our prospect’s overall health and strategy. Of the programs launched on their own, all but a few do so before they are ready for the full impact of what the affiliate channel can do for them. They don’t have enough brand recognition or margins to support the channel. Affiliates need proof of conversion. They need coupons, discounts, and deals to convince customers to click their links or use their codes. If you consider your brand “premium” or “elite” and you don’t want to discount, walk away from affiliate marketing or keep it private.

In a closed program, you can still find influencers, content creators, or mass media publishers that will link to your products through the affiliate channel. You can have fast growth this way, but it isn’t sustainable. This strategy isn’t going to get you year-over-year growth. The best case studies from Apogee are from programs that utilize all the available models of performance marketing and grow significantly over a 3-5 year period.

Professional affiliates want high conversion, high commission, and the best offers available. They want to work with brands that help them make money both quickly and for the next 10 years. These are the partners that brands need for growth, but they aren’t looking for you. They need an invitation from a reputable affiliate manager or a promising brand with good statistics.

If you aren’t ready for the onslaught of hundreds of non-relevant affiliates applying to your brand, just keep it private. Build your program slowly and then expand as your numbers become attractive. My team would be happy to walk into a private program that represents 5–10% of a brand’s overall online sales and build it toward the 15% range. This would be so much better than us tearing down an existing program with auto-approved affiliates and no content affiliates with sales.

Who manages a private affiliate program? You do. In-house. Whether you are the owner of the company or the eCommerce director, managing a private program for the first 18 months will be a slow but relatively easy process. Once you are ready for sustainable growth, find an agency like ours that offers you reasonable expectations and costs.

The feedback from the sessions is always valuable, but last Friday’s was the best ever. The 90-minute lesson centered on mock client meetings. Carolyn drew on her vast experience in management to ask direct questions in the role of a client. Each role catered to a different personality and different reporting results. As a result, everyone on the team witnessed the good and the bad—how the meeting can be great or how it could go downhill rapidly.

Our standard is to manage expectations and boundaries while showing value and proving our expertise. Our teams—pods—are built for maximum impact on achieving goals set forth at the beginning of our relationships. We want the pods to be confident, knowledgeable, helpful, and in charge of the flow of the meetings. Most importantly, we want them to listen and read the room. We are the experts at affiliate program management, but our clients are the experts on their branding and products. Together, we facilitate growth in the affiliate channel.

We’re fortunate to have a veteran leader like Carolyn available to us. The conversations have been inspiring and brilliant, and I’m excited to see how the rest of this year unfolds for our clients.

I tell each new advertiser that the first thing they need to do is concentrate on their website conversion. We can be aggressive with our recruiting and the commissions offered to affiliates, but if the service or product isn’t known or wanted, customers won’t click and buy.

When a program is launched, our job as an affiliate program management company is to find relevant affiliates to join and start promoting the products or services. The competition is every known affiliate program on every tracking platform. The best affiliates are busy. So we need to convince them they will earn money with the new brand. We need to show them the proof that the site will convert for them and that they will earn healthy commissions.

Finding affiliate marketers is easy when you have access to your own database or have the right tools such as Impact’s Media Rails, GroupHigh or a network marketplace. Apogee sends hundreds of targeted pitches each month, but it takes more than one blast to get them to join newer brands. It takes continued effort and education.

Smart affiliates have their own systems to evaluate new brands. They would start with Semrush or Similar Web and look at keywords and traffic volume. Some still use the Alexa Traffic Rank extension. Others will research the brand’s social media and see how active they are and the type of content they produce.

Once they’ve done that research, they will look at the affiliate program statistics. They will want to know the conversion rate, average order value, average commission, and available creatives. They’ll start to research what types of affiliate models are already promoting the products. What are the reviews like? What coupon and cashback affiliates are in the program? Does the program have advanced attribution that protects content affiliates from losing commissions?

A little-known secret about comparison/review sites: unless it’s Consumer Reports, review sites monetize the products on their lists through affiliate marketing. Fortunately for affiliate managers, that number one ranked product probably isn’t the objective winner based on merit; it’s most likely the one that best crosses the intersection of commission and conversion. This is where affiliates live and where they introduce new customers to a brand.

Would you like to know more about how Apogee can help you find the best affiliates for your brand? Contact us and schedule a meeting.

As part of our senior leadership team this year, Anne has helped Apogee clients, and most importantly our affiliates, increase revenue. She is passionate about teaching bloggers and influencers the benefits of thinking like an affiliate.

Anne and Lynsey Kmetz have gone live in our private Facebook group for affiliates and taught best practices for specific promotions. You’ll find five archived conversations on our YouTube channel ranging from topics like getting ready for Q4 and top tips for bloggers. Expect to see much more content from these two next year.

Anne is currently responsible for corporate partnerships with coupon, cashback and major media publications.

Everyone loves Anne. If you are reading this, you’ll agree. I first met Anne at an Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas. She’ll remember the year. But I remember the time. It was 2 a.m. Our group decided we needed food. Therefore, we found Tequila Taqueria at Bally’s and ate 2 a.m. tacos. They were the best. The entire Apogee team is very happy to be on this journey with Anne, please congratulate her on a job well done this year.

Anna curates lists in our internal affiliate database and several recruitment tools and organizes those lists for outreach efforts. The affiliate services team is always looking for the most relevant content creators and builds customized strategies for each client.

She’s been a blogger since June 2013 and has a background in customer service. Apogee is well known for finding talented bloggers to make the transition into affiliate management.

“Recruiting the right affiliates is a major part of our strategy for affiliate program success and Anna has quickly adopted our high standards and best practices,” Lynsey said. “She’s a fast learner and I’m excited to work with her each day.”