Hey Affiliate Managers, show this one to your SEO and content people👇

Urszula Kamburov-Niepewna, our Content Marketing Manager, wrote about how brands end up named in ChatGPT answers and it's less mysterious than it sounds:
💡 AI tools take what already ranks, so solid SEO r your program this means your publishers do a second job now.

A partner's review that ranks well is how your brand ends up in a ChatGPT answer, right where people decide what to buy.

The article covers what makes AI cite a page and every step in it works for your own site too: linkedin.com/pulse/where-do…

@FirstPromoter That ranks first path is real but incomplete. Plenty of page one brands still never get named because the model lifts a third party explainer instead of the ranking page.

@acesley040618 That's true, ranking is the entry ticket and not the whole game. That’s why partner content matters so much here: the third party page the model lifts is often one your affiliates wrote.

Transylvania, the day before Halloween. FirstPromoter virtual headquarters 🦇

“Just because I can talk to the dead doesn’t make me crazy. It makes me unique.”
“He’s saying hi.” (about a dead man)
“I can walk in the daylight, not like you peasants.”
“I heard he said he’d rather it your studio.”
“From time to time, I’m thinking about killing you.”

Relax, HR, it was our Halloween murder mystery 🕵️

Other companies celebrate Christmas or Pizza Day. But with our Transylvanian origins, it only feels right to make Halloween OUR day. So we, the boring, everyday employees, finally have a chance to come out of the shadows and show our true selves 🌑

Eight of us played vampire suspects and five played investigators, hunting for whoever set the Elder of Grayston on fire in his own coffin ⚰️🔥

Do you want to know who did it? Well, you know him well. It was Louis, our Head of Customer Success, which explains a lot about how he closes tickets 🧛

Happy Halloween from the FirstPromoter team 🎃

Your Black Friday discount doesn’t matter.

Surprised? So think about it: is 50% off a tool no one knows about better for your finances than 30% off one that 100 people will see (and use)?

This year, buyers find deals in AI answers. And AI finds them on affiliate lists.

Next siliauskas and Kornelija Janutė from Trendos show how to get your deal on those lists.

🚨 Consider this the last call.
After Nov 4, you’ll have about three weeks to pitch, sign and get listed before Black Friday.

It’s a 45-minute live session. If you can’t make it, register anyway and we’ll send you the replay: watch.getcontrast.io/register/trend…

Say “coupon partner” to an affiliate manager and watch their face 😬

They’re the partners accused of jumping in at checkout and taking credit for sales someone else worked for.

Meanwhile in the UK, voucher partners delivered 24x ROI last year, against 15x for affiliate data).

So the code works fine. What usually breaks is knowing whose code it was.

Black Friday is coming, and your buyers will be hunting for codes.
Hand every partner their own, and you’ll see who did the work.

And since we just wrote 56 stats about coupons, it felt rude not to have one ourselves 👇
20% off your first month of FirstPromoter: firstpromoter.com/lp/prepare-for…

All 56 coupon stats with sources here: firstpromoter.com/blog/coupon-st…

@FirstPromoter Hey, but "cupon partners" highjack brand traffic with purchase intend. Those "partners" just cut margins from sales people already ready for.
Isn't it?

@oakuzmenkov Fair point, coupon sites can definitely just catch sales that were already happening. But a creator reading their code on a podcast is creating that demand. That’s why one code per partner helps - you see whose codes bring new customers and whose just show up at checkout

“Launch a partner program” has been on your to-do list since... April 📆

Well, there’s never a good moment to stop everyday work and start something new, right?

But the truth is, if you don’t start now, it won’t happen until 2027. At least.
And you’ll miss the Black Friday competitors won’t.

So if:
-> customers ask if you have a referral link
-> a creator offered to promote you and you had no way to track it
-> partner sales live in someone’s spreadsheet

you already have a partner program. It just isn’t set up yet.

We’re giving you 20% off your first month, so there are no excuses left: firstpromoter.com/lp/prepare-for…

Black Friday is 5 weeks away.

Sounds like a long time, but your partners plan their Black Friday posts in October.
That’s now 🫣

The good news is that there’s still time to get them selling for you.

You can launch your partner program in one afternoon. Setup takes 15 minutes ner has a tracked link and their own coupon code.

Then the next few weeks are simple:
-> Late October: invite partners.
-> Early November: send codes and assets.
-> Black Friday: every sale lands with the partner who drove it.

To give you an extra push, here’s 20% off your first month.

Check the details: firstpromoter.com/lp/prepare-for…

Your boss asks which creator brought in the sales.
Is a coupon code all you’ve got to go on?

For a lot of brands, it is. Here’s what our influencer marketing stats roundup shows:
-> 45.9% of brands measure creator results with promo codes
-> Only 26.0% use affiliate links
-> 79% of enggle to measure creator ROI
-> 48% say attribution is their biggest gap
-> And 87.49% expect bigger influencer budgets in 2026

So budgets are growing and the answer to your boss still depends on a buyer remembering a code.

If you give each creator a code and a link, a forgotten code doesn’t have to mean a lost sale (that’s how creator tracking works in FirstPromoter).

Check all the stats with sources: firstpromoter.com/blog/influence…

Your top affiliates are about to get very popular 📩

At the end of the year, every SaaS in your space starts sending them deals and “quick partnership ideas.”
And in a surprisingly large number of programs, a tiny group of affiliates brings in nearly all the revenue. Which f them hurts, especially in Q4.

So:
1. Check in with them before the rush.
2. Make sure your offer is worth sharing.
3. Make sure your payouts land on time.

Tautvydas Vasiliauskas, our Head of Marketing, talked about this on the SourceForge podcast with Beau Hamilton, along with why subscription tracking needs a direct connection to your billing.

Full episode here: youtube.com/watch?v=FAg2Yz…

Where does affiliate sit in your budget? If it's "whatever is left after paid," you'd better read on.

Brands get 11 to 30% of their revenue from affiliate. And not just a few of them. 74% of them 🤯

And the return is from $11 to $21 for every $1. Do you remember any paid ?

Still, in many companies affiliate gets the budget leftovers. Often because its ROAS never lands in the same table as paid, SEO and other channels.

But before you walk into that budget talk: 80% of programs still measure on last-click. Know which model made your number before you defend it.

Here are all the 2026 numbers, with sources and more info: firstpromoter.com/blog/affiliate…

We're 100% sure you're not using 100% of your potential to get more affiliates.

Well, ok, maybe 90% sure 😅 but that's based on what we've seen in thousands of programs over the years, so we're pretty confident.

And it's usually the easy stuff, the places you already have but your own website: people visiting it already know your product and like it, so a lot of them would happily promote you.
They just can't join a program they don't even know about.

Louis Anghel, our Head of Customer Success, goes back to the basics in the new video and shows the places where your first affiliates come from: youtu.be/l-ij_GxLwP0?si…

Some of them are so obvious you'll wonder how you missed them.

You need your affiliate program to grow fast. Everybody does, or at least thinks they do and fraudsters love you for it.

Tautvydas Vasiliauskas said it straight on the Affiliate Marketing Podcast: new affiliate managers feel so much pressure to grow that they stop checking who y" ones lose a few months and reach the (often mistaken) conclusion that affiliate marketing isn't for them 👎
The less fortunate end up with legal trouble and commissions paid to fake partners, with no way to get the money back 👎 👎

Lee-Ann Johnstone suggests a smarter way: save free trials for partners you've actually checked, and give everyone else a discount to start.

Black Friday season brings more partner applications than any other time of year. Watch the full episode before your next "approve all" moment: youtu.be/IAhV-cFoSik?si…

#AffiliateMarketing #AffiliateFraud #PartnerMarketing #AI

Want to stop paying for fake views?
Then look at how the numbers grew and not just how big they are.

A fake publisher costs you commissions + all the hours you spend on someone who was never going to sell anything.

So here's what to check:
👉 Bought views grow in neat and even then 200, then 300. Real people just don't watch things like that.
👉 Real growth is messy. It jumps around and some days it even drops (and that's fine).
👉 The channel page only shows you totals, so you have to check the daily numbers over time.

Tautvydas Vasiliauskas explains it all in the clip.
And if you want more tips like this, our free AI guide for affiliate managers is here to download for free: firstpromoter.com/landing/affili…

51% of B2B software buyers now start their research in an AI chatbot more often than Google. A year ago it was 29%.

Everyone reads this as a job for SEO and content teams. It lands on affiliate programs just as hard.

AI answers are built on agreement between websites, so a r judged by the backlink alone. The mention itself does work now, even without a link.

That changes the partner brief. We ask partner writers to include three things an AI can quote: the brand name next to the category, one clear number, and a plain description of what the product does.

Ten partner articles repeating the same true claim will do more for AI visibility than one great post on your own blog.

All 2026 affiliate marketing stats, with every source: firstpromoter.com/blog/affiliate…

#AffiliateMarketing #AISearch

When you see it once, you start seeing it everywhere.

Affiliate managers already have a good eye for fake publishers. The thing is, they learned to spot them on blogs and websites, and the fakes moved somewhere else.

Right now they gather on two platforms and in two niches. Short video hides mistakes, small screens hide details and there's enough money there to make faking worth it.

We cover where they hide, the red flags to watch for and how to vet publishers in the AI era in our free guide: firstpromoter.com/resources/affi…

Fraud used to take skill, but now all it takes is a prompt.

One person can build dozens of real-looking websites, fill them with content and run AI personas that comment and engage. All without coding, big budget or a team.
That's the scale affiliate managers are up against now.

Lee-Ann Johnstone talked it through Tautvydas Vasiliauskas on the Affiliate Marketing Podcast.

A few things you'll hear from them:
-> why old fraud tactics like fake sites and bot traffic are coming back stronger,
-> which red flags to check before approving a partner,
-> why mass recruitment stopped being a safe strategy,
-> and why a real relationship with partners is the strongest anti-fraud tool right now.

Watch the full episode here: youtube.com/watch?v=IAhV-c…

The best advice about cold emailing affiliates is actually quite simple: don't do it until you're ready.

And here's why 👇️
A good affiliate opens your program, sees a low commission and nothing to work with. So it's no surprise they leave.
You did all the work to find them he door.

Louis Anghel, our Head of Customer Success, spent years helping companies launch affiliate programs. In his recruiting process, outreach is step 8 out of 9. The steps before it get the program ready:
-> a commission people actually want
-> a signup page that filters out the junk
-> assets they can grab and post the same day
-> a welcome email so you don't onboard everyone by hand

He shows the whole thing in the new video and approves the first real applications on camera. Full walkthrough here: youtu.be/l-ij_GxLwP0?si…

10 x 100 = 1,000. Dollars.

That's what it costs when you pay 100 influencer commissions of 10 dollars each for customers who didn't stay.

And it's not some impossible scenario.
A customer signs up through a coupon code, cancels two weeks later, and the commission still gets ped tracking after the first payment, so it never even noticed the customer left.

That's ok for online stores, where you sell something once and that's it. But definitely not for SaaS and subscription businesses, where customers cancel, refund and change plans all the time.

We compared 5 influencer marketing platforms with this in mind.
Here are the most important things to check before buying a tool and full comparison: firstpromoter.com/blog/best-infl…

⏰ Last call to sign up and hear what fraudsters hope you skip.

Tomorrow at 11:00 AM GMT+1, Tautvydas Vasiliauskas and Lee-Ann Johnstone from Affiverse sit down to talk AI and affiliate fraud.

They'll spend an hour on a technology that works both ways. Here is what you can rs use AI to bring back old tricks in new disguises,
-> why fake influencers and AI-generated partners are a growing problem,
-> the warning signs to check before you approve a new partner,
-> why recruiting fewer affiliates might be the smartest move this year.

The webinar is free and if you work with partners in any way, it's a good hour to invest.

You can still book your sit here: linkedin.com/events/ai-affi…