Last updated on May 23rd, 2025 at 07:41 am
You’re ready to launch your product or promote a new version of your product. You’ve organised your sales funnel, sales letters, emails and you’ve got a great landing page. The next step is to get that traffic into your funnel and get those sales. There are many ways to get that traffic and convert it into sales. There are also a lot of creative ideas that won’t cost you much, but will get you your desired goal and more.
One of the ways to boost your sales, increase affiliates, or drive traffic to your sales funnel is by hosting an Affiliate Competition.
Affiliate competitions are great for:
- Product launches
- To increase the number of affiliates
- To increase sales
Hitting their competitive streak and offering incentives and rewards for a job well done is a good motivation to encourage your affiliates into promoting your product or service better.
What Competitions You Can Run
A Sales Leaderboard and Reward the Top Sales After a Period
A sales leaderboard is essentially a contest to see who’s the top performing affiliate. In short, the affiliate who brings home the most sales.
- It inspires other affiliates to close more sales
- It motivates them to see their names in the board
- The competition to best all the others in sales will encourage affiliates to perform better
How to do it:
- Decide whether you want the sales leaderboards to be a weekly, monthly, quarterly or an annual affair. Relying on this foundation will help you decide on the prizes to offer for the winning participants.
- Decide whether you want this contest to reward affiliates when they reach a certain amount of sales. The bigger the sales are, the bigger the prizes the affiliates receive.
- Use a reliable affiliate management system to enable you to track sales in real time
- Update your leaderboard regularly
- Offer incentives to affiliates who are the most active during the competition
Why it Works:
With a sales leaderboard, you don’t have to worry about affiliates driving fraudulent traffic during the competition.
Actionetics is a great management system for such types of competitions as it lets you view each affiliate profile with real-time data for up-to-date leaderboard information.
A Affiliate Referral Contest
An affiliate referral contest is a competition to see which affiliate has the most number of recruits in the affiliate program.
How to do it:
- Decide whether it’s a program to reward the affiliate with the most recruits. This type of contest can be made to reward 1 or the top 3.
- Decide whether this contest aims to reward affiliates by tiers. This means that there is a corresponding reward when a affiliate reaches x number of recruits and even bigger rewards as the affiliate’s number of recruits rises.
Why it Works:
It works because eligible referrals are only counted when they make sales. That makes it traceable and you won’t have to worry about affiliates driving spam traffic to the competition.
How to Decide On Prizes
Decide what prizes are at stake by reviewing your contest mechanics and aligning that with your budget. If the contest aims to reward an indefinite amount of affiliates, you can allot your budget to accommodate it. If the contest, however, aims to reward just one grand prize, you can opt to go big and reward them with generous prizes.
Things to Watch Out for
There are tools you can use to manage your competitions, but they can only do so much. It still falls on you, the organiser, to ensure that competitions runs without any hitch. In order to do that, keep in mind the following key points to watch out for:
Paying Affiliates On Time
Making sure you pay your affiliates on time is one of the most important things to remember when managing an affiliate program. Not only does it encourage your affiliates to promote your products or services, but it the sense of security will reflect in how they promote you.
Handling Refunds Before Paying Out Affiliates
Remember to process refunds first before paying out affiliates. Implement a clearing period in order for refunds to reflect and adjust your pay-out amounts accordingly.
Affiliates Who Send Fraudulent Traffic
Winning affiliate competitions can be tempting, especially if what’s at stake is a huge prize. This may tempt affiliates into driving fraudulent traffic into the competition just to win. In order to avoid this, make sure that the goal of the competition is measurable and easy to monitor.
Make it Work
The best thing to do to make sure that your Affiliate Competitions run smoothly is to use a reliable affiliate management system that let’s you see real-time performance of your affiliates. With a reliable affiliate manager, a sales leaderboard or a referral contest will be easy to manage.
ClickFunnel’s affiliate manager, Backpack, lets you do just that. With Backpack, you’ll have an overview of affiliate sales, commissions, referrals, payment dues and a lot more! Managing your affiliate competition is going to be a breeze.
Bonus
For competitions done weekly, monthly, or annually, add a timer to your competition page to add a sense of urgency to your contest or just to show your affiliates how much time they have left while in the running to boost their sales or refer more affiliates to your program. Doing this will compel them into taking action quickly to get that sales done or to sign up a new affiliate to your program in order to meet the deadline.
ClickFunnels lets you add the Timer element to your pages. Simply choose the Timer Evergreen Element and add it to your page.
ClickFunnels Action Steps
Just to show you how easy it is to use Backpack as your affiliate manager, check out this walkthrough of the Backpack dashboard.
Step 1: Log in to your ClickFunnels account
Step 2: On the top menu, click Backpack
Step 3: The first thing you will see is your dashboard. Here you will see your affiliate sales, referral rate, total sales, total commissions, etc.
Step 4: The next is your Affiliates page. Here, you will see your individual affiliates and their profiles. You can also add new affiliates by clicking Add New Affiliate and entering the affiliate’s information.
Step 5: The Commissions page is where you review affiliate commissions.
Step 6: The Payments page lets you view payments due, the payments you have made and future commissions.
Further down the menu, you will see the Setup pages:
Step 7: Commission Plans section lets you create and manage commission plans and add affiliate types and tiers. Simply click Add Commission Plan add the information asked and edit accordingly.
Step 8: Affiliate Types lets you create affiliate types which you can add to commission plans. Click Affiliate Type to create a new affiliate type.
Step 9: Affiliate Funnels is where you can view the affiliate programs from your funnels.
What affiliate competition have you joined or organised so far?
Do you have affiliate competition ideas you want to share?
Comment below and tell us!