Hi Krish! Thank you for having me. And yes! I remember I had set a Google notification for anything on the web that mentioned Flodesk, and of course I’d never get any notifications. Then the week of the beta launch happened and I started getting a few a day of members writing blog posts about their Flodesk experience, publishing tutorials on YouTube, it was exciting! In full transparency, we didn’t orchestrate that, but we did go back to understand what caused it to continue encouraging it. Our hypothesis is that in big part it was launching in beta combined with our target audience being small business owners who are already super savvy about SEO. So when they found this new tool they loved that barely had any content out there (no help center even), they recognized the upside of being among the first to publish. This set the tone for the rest of the community.
Then what we did was optimize and encourage this behavior as much as we could by featuring their content instead of ours. If you go to our IG stories, for example (https://www.instagram.com/flodesk/?hl=en) you’ll notice that every single day we publish member content.
Another area you can see member featured content is Flodesk University: http://university.flodesk.com/. Same thing goes for our welcome series. The idea is to not create content that will compete with user generated content, but instead put their content at the center of all of our platforms.
Once we understood that our members naturally want to capture the SEO when they publish new content, we also started making it easier for them to recognize the content that will probably work best for them. You can see the email we sent about our Zapier release here: Your Early Access to Zapier! ⚡ | Flodesk. If you scroll, you’ll find the invitation to share on their blogs and a bit of guidance on what content to include.
As we started doing more of this ^, we started getting requests by our members to provide assets like images, logos, and other graphics and content to help make their posts about Flodesk more robust, so we created an Affiliate Success Kit: https://assets.flodesk.com/assets/Flodesk_Affiliate_Success_Kit.pdf.
Which brings me to the last, but probably the most important part. Affiliate & referral programs often limit themselves in two ways:
- They invite only influencers to share and earn.
- They focus on the benefit to the influencers.
Our biggest learning here has been that for users to share something, they need to be able to provide tangible value to their audience. So while our members do earn $19 when a new member joins, they are also able to offer 50% off Flodesk with their unique code. It’s this second part, the ability to give their audience value that is the real motivator. The second learning is that our market is very ad savvy and doesn’t always trust the recommendations of big influencers, since these are often sponsored. So instead of working with big names, we invited all members, whether they had a following or not, to be part of the program and get an affiliate code whenever they needed. This resulted in real members sharing their real experiences and 76% of our word of mouth wins coming from small voices.