I thought of kicking off an affiliate program for a small app of mine which does around 1 sale every 10 visits.
I thought that was pretty good conversion, but not sure if I'm being naive, what do you think?
Here's the app: https://thoughttrain.cc
1) Who do you expect to be your affiliates? Is this more of a refer-a-friend program a la Dropbox, or are you looking to have businesses refer you traffic en masse?
2) If the former, I believe it's going to be easier. You can offer non-cash rewards, like free months of service. If the latter, really think about what type of affiliate you want and how to properly incentivize them.
3) re: incentization above: let's assume you go for a 20% revenge share model (fairly standard). Consider how many referrals someone needs to make the payout worthwhile. My current affiliate program is for a SaaS that costs $19/month – affiliates have the refer 260 customers before they hit $100/month in payouts, which is a lot.
4) Buckets: I broadly lump my affiliates in to two buckets: "value added" traffic and "dumb traffic". Value added traffic are affiliates who have an existing relationship with their referrals – think a web design agency who refers their customers to a web design tool. "Dumb traffic" is my slightly pejorative term for bloggers, etc. who just send leads my way with no expectation of helping them set up the tool, etc. Dumb traffic can drive a lot more leads, but Value Added traffic has higher LTV.
5) Finding affiliates: think of who is blogging in your space, or who else might be interested in your tool. If you can't think of this, don't start an affiliate program.
6) Don't make your affiliate program super visible and easy to join. One or the other. Otherwise, you're going to spend a lot of time chasing down shitty affiliates who spam your links across dummy pages and coupon sharing sites, and it will never amount to anything and will make your app look bad.
A great point about the path-to-$100 which for my affiliates would be referring 100 sales or about 45% of the current volume.
That said, from a Lifehacker post and Product Hunt feature, the conversion of paid users was very high, almost 10% so I think its not impossible for the right affiliate to make decent revenue.
I'll hit up some blogs in the space, see if they're willing to take a punt, it makes sense to keep the traffic as geniun as possible.
Thanks!