Going live in January sounds clever until you notice the demand arrives before your partners do. Month three went backwards. Month four found the lever — and the programme was handed back nine months later at $92.4k a month.
No programme, no partners, no tracking. The brief was to build a US affiliate channel from zero, run full management across recruitment, activation, content and creators, then hand the whole thing back in-house without the revenue dipping on the way through.
Nine months, and the numbers below are the managed period only.
One creator with a thousand followers outsold every paid influencer this brand had ever hired.
Both declining months are the category, not the programme.
Figures cover the managed period only; the programme moved in-house at the end of September 2026. US supplement demand peaks in January and dips through the summer holidays, which accounts for both declining months.
The first quarter is recruitment and diagnosis and it looks unimpressive because it is. What we were doing in those months was working out which single constraint was holding the account down. Here it was link destination, and it was worth more than every recruitment week combined.
We activated a broad base of content and review publishers with content-monetisation sub-networks behind them for scale. Then in April every generic homepage link was replaced with a product-level deep link, so a reader who came for magnesium landed on magnesium. Conversion moved 45% in a fortnight.
Rather than trawling influencer marketplaces, we searched the niche itself for accounts between 250 and 2,500 followers already posting about supplements. Passionate users, not professionals. No rate cards, no negotiation, commission only — and reply rates of 60-70% against the 10-15% a marketplace approach returns.
Share of tracked sales across the managed period, by partner type
Our deal with every client is the same. We grow the programme, and when you're ready to bring it back in-house we give you the tools, the software and the support to run it yourself — without any drop in revenue. And we stay available, whenever your new account manager needs us.
How we find accounts before a marketplace does — the search criteria, the outreach that gets 60-70% replies, and the gifting terms that avoid rate cards.
The link architecture behind the 45% conversion gain, written down so new SKUs inherit it automatically.
We stayed reachable for the first three months in-house, which covered the team through their first seasonal dip.
$453,700 in sales · 5,817 orders · 1.1M clicks · 35% active partners
We would not launch a supplement brand in January again. It worked anyway, but it cost us a quarter.
I've spent 28 years in affiliate, and almost every program leaks in the same places. I'll audit yours and hand you a plain, prioritised task list: exactly what to fix first and grow next. Free, and yours to keep forever. No card, no catch. Brands who work the list week to week see up to a 20% lift in traffic in 6 to 8 weeks. Imagine where that puts you in six months.
Free forever · yours to keep whether you hire me or not · about two minutes to start