All Partners Are Affiliates — But Not All Affiliates Are Partners

Affiliates promote you. Partners grow with you. Marie & Anne-Marie break down the difference — and why tracking everything changes the game.

Are "affiliate" and "partner" the same thing in your business? Not quite — and in this episode, Marie and Anne-Marie break down exactly why that distinction matters if you want to build a sustainable, revenue-generating referral program.

Marie and Anne-Marie walk through the core difference between affiliates (one-way promotions with a commission) and strategic partners (two-way relationships where both parties actively promote each other). They also dig into why tracking is the non-negotiable foundation of any partnership program — because without data, you're flying blind.

You'll learn about the top affiliate platforms (JVZoo, ClickBank, PartnerStack, GHL, Thrive Cart), how to use UTM links to track any URL, and how Marie and Anne-Marie use debrief calls to review data together and make partnerships stronger over time. Including a real example of a high-performing partner who had zero tracking in place.

Whether you're just starting your affiliate program or ready to take your partnership strategy to the next level, this episode gives you a clear, actionable framework for building something that lasts.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back everyone to partnerships on purpose. Of course, we have an amazing topic today. As Anne-Marie and I are always talking to people who are doing partnerships in their world, things just come up. And today's topic is all around how partners, okay, I'm gonna say this, all partners are affiliates, but not all affiliates are partners. So we're gonna break this down. We have to give you some information, some background, how we think about things. But this is a super important topic because if you guys have been listening to us for a while, you understand that we're all about long-term strategic partnerships. And we do that extremely intentionally when we're working with people. We want to build up their partnership program. We want people to promote them regularly, but I'm gonna make a statement that that only starts with an affiliate program. So, Anne-Marie, can you break down the difference between what you see as a partner and what you see as an affiliate? Because I think these definitions are gonna be the core of our conversation today.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Yeah, and this is my definition. So I'm not googling anything. So if you are an affiliate, you it is one way. So let's use me and Marie. Let's say we have Marie has her business, I have my business, I am an affiliate for Marie. I am going to promote Marie, and in exchange for promoting Marie, I will get a commission for promoting her products and services. Marie is not promoting me back. Very clear. One way I am an affiliate of Marie. Okay. Partnership is very different. Partnerships is a two-way street. So I will promote Marie. Marie will promote me in return. We both have affiliate programs, and we'll talk about why an affiliate program is important. Okay. It's not just a transaction. So we are promoting each other. That is a partnership. A partnership is a two-way street. It's between two people. Whatever it is we decide to do, we are promoting each other or we are doing something together. We are creating something. Okay. So affiliate one way, partnership, two-way. Let's just say that.

SPEAKER_00 2:16

That's that's a good way to think about it, right? Yeah. And people will hear different things, right? Referral partners, they'll hear JV, they'll hear all kinds of different things. But no matter what your definition is for today, we're just gonna talk about how affiliates is a one-way somebody's promoting with the expectation of some kind of monetary commission back. And a partner is two-way. We're having a conversation. Again, that goes back to increasing visibility. Like that's why people do partnerships. Okay. So we have this beautiful definition. Now we know that every good partnership program is built on some kind of foundation of tracking, right? Yes. So this is the biggest thing. And the reason this is coming up today is because Anne-Ray had this wonderful conversation with a really great partner, really great partner. She has an amazing business. She's very, very successful. She decided to promote one of our clients inside of his business. And at the end of the day, she was doing zero tracking to figure out how this partnership was actually going to be successful. And so Anne-Marie and I were like, holy moly, we have to talk about this because you can't do partnerships without some kind of tracking. Now, we love creating amazing, wonderful partnerships. It can be anything underneath the sun, right? How can you be on my podcast? How can I support you over here? How can we bring our audiences together and introduce each other? All kinds of beautiful, wonderful deals that we've created over the last five plus years, thousands of deals. None of them can be successful without the tracking because we talk about intuition based on data, right? And so the affiliate program gives us that. The affiliate program gives us the way to find the data. And I don't know, maybe you can share, Anne-Marie, a little bit, like what kind of affiliate programs are out there, and then let's talk about some affiliate platforms. So two different things, right? The tracking process, which is the program, and then the actual way to go find those deals, which is the platform. Does that make sense? Yeah. I yes, okay. Yes, and or go back.

SPEAKER_01 4:37

Yes, yes, no, no, yes, and okay. So let's go back to the i I just want to build on something you just said. So when we're talking about an affiliate program, so in our business, so Marie Top has an affiliate program. We are set up in GHL.

SPEAKER_00 4:55

GHL. Yes. I was like, this is a question I'm answering. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 4:59

Okay. We're set up in GHL as well. But we've worked with clients that are set up in other programs, and maybe just list a couple of other programs that some of our clients.

SPEAKER_00 5:10

Yeah. So we have stuff like Thrivecart. There's some people, some old school stuff that's in keep. People have used all keep, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

All kinds of different stuff. There, if you're talking about a really big program, there are people who have like Salesforce and like big, big programs. We usually work with people who Thrivecart's a popular one. GHL has become a very popular one too. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:32

So what's really important is Marie said, so I don't want people to think that, oh my God, I only need an affiliate program if we're promoting each other through email. So Marie talked about podcasts. Marie talked about different ways to partner together. So if I'm on somebody's podcast and I say, for example, hey, I have this offer, right? You can, you're always going to use your affiliate link wherever it is you're going to be in order to track basically your numbers, right? So that's really important. And that's the reason why we set up these affiliate programs and you have these affiliate links, right? So I just want people to understand that it goes above and beyond just like that email transactional, you promote me, I promote you thing. It's anywhere, right? It's I could be on a call with somebody and say, hey Marie, you I'm gonna send you a link. Now that link is gonna be my affiliate link for somebody, right? Because I'm promoting them. So that is really, really important. So those are add on to that too. Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_00 6:32

Okay, I'm gonna get technical. This is not Anne Marie's strong suit, but she loves to learn about it, right? I know you do. Tracking links can be created out of anything, and that's a UTM link. Okay, just look it up. Anne Marie's not excited about it. No. Here's the reason. Like, I'm just gonna send this to people because it's so important that you look this up. Obviously, reach out, make a comment if you want us to get an expert on here. Obviously, we'll bring somebody on and talk about UTMs and affiliate programs. We know how to set them up. We use them regularly. However, this is not our expertise, but you can set up tracking links for anything and everything. And I suggest to do what makes sense for your business and what you're actually going to use because you can get a little crazy with tracking links. So UTMs means that you can take any URL and you can add a little UTM code on there, and then you can check inside of the UTM program to see how many clicks it has happened. So often people will use this in social media. They'll say, Oh, I got this reference because somebody saw a post on LinkedIn, for example, which could happen for us. We haven't set that up yet, but by the way, we could. So now we it's kind of like a way to track where data is coming from. What we're talking about inside an affiliate program is we want to attribute a lead and hopefully a purchase back to a partner or an affiliate. And that's the big thing. So just know like tracking is huge and it's wonderful, and you can do it in so many different ways. I would I'm gonna be bold in my business strategy statement here. You would be dumb not to track. It'd be dumb. It would be dumb not to track a free link. It would be dumb not to track something that obviously is paid because how are you gonna go back to it? And setting up a tracking link is super, super easy. Right? It can be it can be kind of bare bones. You can say, hey, I'm gonna create a special page, even if you say in your website, I'm gonna clone this page and I'm gonna put Marie at the end, and then I know every time a lead comes through there that it's from Marie, like you can do it manually. But I think that it's just you have to be able to track in some way. And that was what you asked this partner, right? You asked them about a tracking link.

SPEAKER_01 8:50

Yeah, absolutely. And yes, and one of the things, sorry, because at the beginning we said we talked about commissions, right? And most of the time your affiliate links will lead to obviously how much commission you're paying out, but it could also be leads, right? You want to know how many leads somebody's bringing into your business. So there's I'm gonna answer the second part of your question because I think I answered the first part. The second one is the affiliate platform. So let's talk about that. And then I want to go into setting up an affiliate program, what the difference is when you set up an affiliate program in your business and a partnership or a JV strategy or program in your business and what the difference is because sometimes people get mixed up and they use those words very loosely. It's like, oh, I have an affiliate program. And then you start talking partnerships, and they're like, no, I don't do that, right? So we can talk about that. So, in terms of affiliate programs, the platforms, there's a lot of them out there, and I encourage all of you obviously to Google them. But some of them that come up very often in our world are JV Zoo, Bit Bank, um, partner stack. I think those are the three top ones. And what that means is you can actually sign up for those platforms. So if you have an email list, let's say, for example, you have a really good, nurtured, warm email list, and you're like, hey, you know what? I'm gonna go look for partners on the platform that are in this sector because you want to promote a specific product, you can actually go in there and promote these people and make money off of that, right? So you're going in, you sign up for their programs, you go in and you know, you promote those people and then they'll send you some money, which is really, really great. But one of the things that we do in our business is if we're married or we love a platform and we love ClickUp, for example, right? So anytime we're talking to somebody and we refer them to ClickUp, we actually use our affiliate link. So we're like, hey, you know what, here's our affiliate link. So we make a commission on that, right? So it is a great way, and I encourage everybody to do that, like as much as possible. So check out those affiliate platforms, but just know that by doing that, those people are not promoting you back.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

So that's a that's the one-way street, right?

SPEAKER_01 11:06

Exactly. It's the one-way street, right? So yeah, does that answer both your questions, Marie?

SPEAKER_00 11:12

Yeah, I love this. So we have platforms where you actually build to track how your partners and and what they're promoting. This is super important because usually when you're creating some kind of partnership deal, you have a conversation with somebody, you decide that you're gonna promote and support each other. You want to have that debrief call. I know we've talked about debrief calls. Okay, so we'll we'll totally link to it. It's gonna be perfect and wonderful. Debrief calls are a secret sauce, just so you guys know, it is magic. You want to go to that debrief call with some numbers, and you're only gonna get that if you're tracking the right deal. And you shouldn't be promoting anybody else unless you have some kind of tracking link and we're talking about an affiliate program there. So take the time, set it up, and do yourself a favor to know what kind of leads are going well and whatnot. This also helps you, and I'm just gonna take this another step because as partnerships grow, as you are making new deals with somebody, you want to have the right data to know is this just the offer that was wrong? Is it because the the community that I'm promoting to is not quite right? So I'm gonna give you an example. So if Anne-Marie and I have created a partnership deal and I've sent her a link of mine and she's gonna promote it, and then I do the same to her. We're gonna take our data, our stats, and we're gonna get on a debrief call. And my program, of course, did really, really well for her list because it is amazing and wonderful. And we can see it in the data, right? I had so many clicks, I had so many leads that transferred over into sales. Amazing, wonderful, as expected. And then maybe on the opposite side, Anne-Marie had really great clicks, but she didn't have any conversions to sale, right? I'm looking at my list. I'm like, this isn't quite right. So what I can do is I can say something is right, but we need to tweak it a little bit. And now we can have a conversation in our debrief call to say, how should we do this differently? So instead of an offer that I sent to her list, maybe it's that I tweak it, maybe I do a live training or do something else. We use these numbers to make decisions on how to make that deal better next time because we want that partnership to work. And we want this to be long-term and strategic, right? I've already developed a relationship. We've got all the way to the point to where we're promoting each other. Why would I allow all that energy and all that focus in developing this really amazing conversation just to be like, oh, your numbers didn't do as well as I thought they would. Thanks so much. Bye. Like, no, let's make a choice around it. And again, this goes back to how the tracking is. Anything you want to add on that?

SPEAKER_01 13:59

Oh my God, there's so much as you talk. I'm like, I want to say this, I want to say this, and then I forget.

SPEAKER_00 14:03

No, write it down and then we can come back to it. We can do this.

SPEAKER_01 14:06

I know, I know, but I'm so focused on what you're saying, friend, that I don't write anything. I'm just focused on you. No, so the one thing that does come to mind is yes, the tracking is so, so important. When we when I get on a debrief call, I am looking at numbers. And those numbers are not the only thing we look at. We have conversations like Marie said, why didn't it work? Right? Is it because you promoted me last month and the promotions were too close together? Or it's, you know, uh, one of the conversations I was having with one of our clients is we're not going to do a promotion around the 4th of July because everybody's off, right? So don't promote me during that time, right? So there's a there's a whole bunch of different factors that you need to consider when you're looking at numbers and having that debrief conversation to eventually decide does this partnership make sense? Are we on this journey of creating a strategic long-term partnership? Or do we end it here because it doesn't make sense? Or we do we try it one more time, right? So I do think, Marie, there is an episode for us to do another segment outside of like I think it's a it's a follow-up to this conversation in the debrief call, but what are the types of questions and what should you think about when you're thinking about the partnership, right? So, anyways, for thought I'm gonna write that down on my piece of paper here.

SPEAKER_00 15:25

Write that down.

unknown 15:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

So yes, so let's talk about let's talk about affiliate strategy and partnership strategies in your business. Okay. And what the difference is because, like I said, oftentimes when we're working with new clients, or sometimes even we're working with existing clients, this notion of, hey, I want more affiliates, or hey, uh, you know, I want more partners. And you know, I tell them a lot of times, well, where do you want me to go get affiliates? You know, we haven't done anything with affiliates. We don't have a strategy around affiliates. And I think between you and me, Marie, you're you're really strong in creating that strategy around affiliates. So can you maybe just share a little bit about what that looks like and what people should be thinking about in their business when they when we talk about affiliate?

SPEAKER_00 16:15

Yeah, absolutely. So Anne-Marie said this a little bit earlier, but I'm gonna think two different things about affiliate programs. First, you should be asking people for affiliate links when you consistently promote and support other businesses. Like she said, we do it with clickup, we do it with any of the programs that we're using inside of our business because people ask us. And if you are in a business, somebody's gonna ask you, right? If something is working well for you, they want to know, hey, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? And we just have it on our little click-up list, all of our different affiliate links, and we can pull from them whenever somebody asks. So it's a stream of revenue inside of our business to promote other people, which we have already vetted, we know we use, it works out really, really well. Now, these are big companies, but we also have specific partners. So we have partners who do ancillary things to what we do, right? They're complementary, and maybe this is a whole another conversation, but these complementary partners of ours, we also have affiliate programs for. And so that's listed. That's a stream of revenue for us. Now, those we are created a partnership deal, which is completely fine. That's how we've developed everything. But in an affiliate program, you can, and you I think everybody should have some kind of affiliate program set up inside of their business where somebody can promote you, right? If somebody loves what you're doing and they just want to send it into a newsletter, I'll have an example. So Valerie Del Grosso was with us. She's in one of our past podcast episodes. Amazing, wonderful human. I absolutely love her. Shout out to Val. So Valerie and I had a reconnection call months and months and months ago, and she said, Hey, I've got a newsletter. I just need somebody to put in there. Can you send me an affiliate link? And I was like, Absolutely, yes, friend. No ask on the other side. We wanted to have her on our podcast. We ended up having her there. But that comes up often. And so we created an affiliate link for her and she put that into her newsletter, and we ended up getting a couple people to come to our collaboration room because of it. But you can only do that if you have a program set up and it's easy to add people into it and then send them some promotional material so they're they're comfortable sending it out.

SPEAKER_01 18:31

And we were able to see who from the signups of the collaboration room who came from Valerie's newsletter.

SPEAKER_00 18:39

Yes, absolutely. Um, so setting those up, how and what you need to do just depends on what program you're in. Like I could talk specifics, but it won't do you any good. Like if you're in ThriCard, it's one way. If you're in GHL, it's something else. Um, truly talk to Google, talk to Claude, talk to whatever AI you've got going on right now, and just ask them how to set it up. It should be just fine. Um, but do set it up the right way. Take the time to do that. Yeah. I think that that's the important part is you don't want to be on a partnership call creating a really great deal with somebody and then say, oh, I guess I should start setting up my program because it's just like setting up your business. If you're talking to somebody, oh, I have this amazing business, and they're like, Great, send me your website. And you're like, oh, I don't have a website yet. So you just want to have your stuff prepared. And we've talked about that before. Come to your come to your calls prepared. Um, and the affiliate program is one of those things. I think when you're setting up a partnership program, an affiliate program should be a part of that. Um, so all of our partners, everybody we talk to, they have an affiliate program first. And if they don't, we ask them to go set that up first before we're actually going to promote them because it protects them and it protects us. We want to know that when we're promoting somebody, that it's going to go well. We don't know that if we don't have the tracking. Yeah. And then vice versa, we want to make sure that that partner is something that our list wants to know about. And we'll see that through the clicks and stuff we can see on our side. And so tracking goes on both sides, but it gives you all the data you need to have a really good conversation. And I don't think that you can do it without some kind of tracking.

SPEAKER_01 20:17

And there's some people who, you know, when they look at their business, they will put more focus on an affiliate strategy and an affiliate program, right? Yeah. And everything will be around that. Like I remember dealing with a partner and they just were doing affiliates. They weren't looking for partners. So they didn't want to recipt. They wanted basically just people to promote their programs. And what they did is they had a whole strategy around that. They had monthly calls where they would invite their affiliates to come on and they would answer any questions they had. They made sure all their affiliates had all of the links. So it really depends on what you want to do in your business, but be very mindful when you're talking about affiliates and when you're talking about partnerships, because they are two different things. And I think they are really, really important.

SPEAKER_00 21:11

So I'll say too, and you just kind of brought this back to mind, is like in my experience, now this is not for everywhere, but in my experience, if you have 10 really amazing partners, you'll get the same kind of traction as if you have a hundred affiliates. Yes. It it just that's the way that things are, right? Affiliates want to promote what's going to convert for their list because they're looking for the paycheck at the end, which is completely fine. It's a business model, right? Like you can't hate on it. It works out for them. They don't have to worry about fulfillment, they don't have to worry about customer service, they don't have to worry about any of that. They can just promote something to a list and it works well, or social media, if they have a platform, whatever it is. For us, we know that when you have really amazing relationships with people, you can have far less of those people to maintain as far as partners go. And you it's just nurture them differently. Now, I do think that everybody should have both programs. Like I we've already said that. So I don't I don't want to like discount that process, but we choose in our business not to go out there and just have everybody blasting out all of our you know affiliate links out there. We want to be intentional with who is putting our link on their out to their audience, and we vet everybody coming in too. Yeah, so we've, I mean, I know we've done episodes about vetting. Vetting is so, so important. And even all of our partners that come in, even though we love that partner and it's wonderful, and Valerie's a really good example of this. She sent a bunch of wonderful people our way. Several of them didn't make the cut to actually join us inside the collaboration room, which I think is great as well, because vetting is how we keep all of the things peaceful inside of our environment and how we keep our business the way it is because of that space. So I think I got on a little bit of a tangent with vetting.

SPEAKER_01 23:09

That's okay. But you know what? So I think if there's one thing that I'm going to point out about what you just said is the importance of having a strategy, right? Yes. Regardless of what you want to do, and we do that in our community. We, you know, we create strategic long-term roadmaps for the people that are in our community. Now, and Marie said it before, like you can have both, but make sure that you're very intentional and you have a strategy that supports your affiliate program and your partnership program because there's some people who don't want to promote to their list. There's but there's different ways to do partnerships, right? But at the end of the day, you still need an affiliate link. Right. If I'm gonna go on somebody's podcast and I'm gonna promote something and I'm gonna talk about something, I still want that affiliate link. Make sense.

SPEAKER_00 24:03

Totally. All right.

SPEAKER_01 24:05

I think in this conversation, we we we came up with three additional podcasts that we can do just by just by this conversation here.

SPEAKER_00 24:14

Which is good. So at the end of the day, friends, all partners are affiliates, but not all of our affiliates are partners. And I think that that is okay. Make sure you have a really great program that is set up, make sure that you are researching and planning before you start having partnership conversations and know what your process is. Anne Marie is huge on the whole process or process, depending on which country you're in. And I think it's great because for us, we want to make sure that our team can help us as much as possible because we want to get on calls with people and create deals. So anything else that you want to add?

SPEAKER_01 24:50

No, no, I think you said it, but I think we're just gonna end on it. All good partnership programs start with an affiliate program.

SPEAKER_00 24:58

Yes, I do.

SPEAKER_01 24:59

All right, friends, see you next time. Absolutely. Have a good one, everyone.