Train affiliates once a month if your program is evergreen, plus one extra session before any big promotion. Monthly keeps the information current and gives affiliates a reason to show up on a predictable day. A session before a launch or holiday push covers what’s different about that specific promotion. Skip the schedule and attendance drops along with it.
Why a fixed date beats whatever date is convenient
At Shutterfly, I ran affiliate training on the second Tuesday of every month. Not “sometime mid-month when things slow down.” The second Tuesday, every time, whether I had something big to announce or not.
That fixed slot did more for attendance than any of the content I put inside it. Affiliates stopped checking email to find out when training was. They knew. A few of them told me they put it on their own calendar as a recurring event, the same way they’d block off a standing meeting at their day job.
Shutterfly’s affiliate program eventually grew from about $15 million to $325 million a year, with 60,000 affiliates on the books. You don’t get affiliates to show up for a call every month at that scale by picking a date that felt convenient that week. You get them to show up because the date never moves. The same logic holds for how you contact affiliates between calls: how often to email affiliates depends on the stage of a launch, but training works best on a rhythm that never changes at all.
If you haven’t built the training itself yet, start with How to Train Affiliates. That post covers what to put in the training. This one covers how often to run it and what turnout to expect once you do.
What do you teach every month?
I rotated topics so the call never turned into the same lecture with a new date on it. Some months I walked through how to warm up an audience before a promotion. Other months I covered what makes an affiliate webinar convert rather than only pull in registrations. And a few months a year, I built a bonus package live on the call, using my own worksheet, so affiliates could copy the process for whatever they were promoting that month.
None of that is a one-time lesson. An affiliate who joined in month three needs the warm-up walkthrough as much as the affiliate who’s been on every call since month one. Rotating topics on a schedule means a new affiliate eventually hears everything, and a veteran affiliate gets a refresher instead of sitting through a rerun.
Building bonus packages is its own skill, and it’s worth a deeper look than one section can give it. How to Build an Affiliate Bonus Stack That Closes the Sale walks through the exact structure I used on those calls.
Why did the Q&A months outdraw the teaching months?
About a year in, I started alternating: one month of structured training, the next month of open Q&A. The Q&A calls consistently drew more people than the training calls did.
That told me something I didn’t expect going in. Affiliates didn’t come back every month because they needed another lesson. A lot of them came back because they had a specific question about their own promotion and wanted a direct answer instead of guessing. Open Q&A gave them that in a way a prepared training never could, because the agenda was whatever they brought to it.
Training and support end up overlapping more than most managers plan for. Affiliate Program Support: 5 Things Your Partners Need covers the rest of what affiliates expect from you between calls.
If you’re deciding between a teaching format and an open format, don’t pick one. Alternate them. The teaching months keep the baseline knowledge current across the whole list. The Q&A months keep the regulars coming back, and the regulars are the ones who end up driving most of your volume anyway.
What does a 5 percent attendance rate mean?
Live attendance on those Shutterfly calls ran 2,500 to 3,000 people out of 60,000 affiliates on the list. That’s about 5 percent showing up live, month after month. If you’re picturing that number and thinking it sounds low, you’re measuring the wrong thing.
Five percent of a list that size is still a packed room. And it wasn’t a different 5 percent every month. Some affiliates showed up 30 or more times in a row, the kind who treated the call as part of how they ran their business rather than an optional webinar they might catch if nothing else came up.
They’re the same group most programs would call their super affiliates. How to Recruit Super Affiliates (and What Makes Them Say Yes) gets into what makes them stick around in the first place.
The attendance rate isn’t the metric that matters. The repeat rate is. A program that gets 5 percent live attendance with mostly new faces every time has a marketing problem. A program that gets 5 percent live attendance with the same core group coming back has a retention engine, and that’s a very different thing to have built.
The regulars who show up call after call are usually the same affiliates worth building a deeper relationship with outside the call too. Should You Build a Community for Your Affiliates? looks at what that relationship can turn into.
Should you keep training once you’ve run out of new material?
I had nothing new to teach after about 18 months. I’d covered every angle of warming up an audience, every webinar format, every bonus structure I knew. I kept the calls going anyway.
Affiliates started teaching each other. Someone would ask a question, and instead of waiting for me to answer, another affiliate on the call would jump in with what worked for them. I estimate that training, on top of everything else we were doing, took the program from roughly $80 million to $140 million a year.
Not because I kept inventing new lessons. Because I kept the room open and let the affiliates who’d been there longest train the ones who hadn’t.
That’s the part most owners miss when they ask how long to keep a training series running. The content has a shelf life. The room doesn’t. Once the content stops changing, the value moves from what you say to who’s in the room, and that’s the point where most managers quit a series they should have kept.
Do you need an extra session before a big push?
Yes, and the math on why is straightforward. Somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of Shutterfly’s yearly sales landed inside a single 7 to 8 week window around the holidays. A program that only ever trains on the second Tuesday of the month is betting its biggest stretch of the year on whatever happened to get covered on whichever Tuesday landed closest to it.
Add a session in the weeks before that window opens. Cover what’s different about the offer, the promotional assets, and the deadline pressure that a holiday push has and a random Tuesday in March doesn’t. It doesn’t replace the monthly rhythm. It sits on top of it, timed to the one stretch of the year where getting it right matters most.
Full disclosure: I own AffiliateHQ. Its Starter plan, which starts at $99 a month, includes a Training Hub for running and tracking sessions like these without stitching together a separate webinar tool and a separate way to see who showed up.
What if you don’t have 60,000 affiliates?
The scale changes, the principles don’t. A program with 500 affiliates isn’t going to pull 25 live attendees from a 5 percent rate and call it a win, but the same fixed-date rhythm, the same topic rotation, and the same decision to keep going after you run out of new material all still apply. A smaller list means your regulars are even easier to spot by name. If you’re still building your promotion calendar around those sessions, How to Build Your Affiliate Promotion Calendar for the Year shows where training fits next to everything else on it.
If you want to see what one of these calls looks like before you run your first one, Sample Affiliate Training gives you free access to a real training webinar from a client program, slides included.
Frequently asked questions
How often should you train affiliates in an evergreen program?
Once a month, on a fixed date that never moves, plus one extra session before any major promotion or seasonal push. The fixed date matters more than the day you pick. Affiliates build the call into their own routine once they trust it’ll happen on schedule, and that trust is what turns a one-time attendee into a regular.
Is a recorded training as good as a live call?
A recording works for the content, but it can’t replicate what happens when affiliates start answering each other’s questions live. The Q&A format in particular loses most of its value on a recording, since the value comes from someone getting a direct answer to their specific situation in real time, not from the general information.
What’s a reasonable live attendance rate to expect?
Around 5 percent of your affiliate list showing up live is a workable benchmark, based on what a 60,000-affiliate program saw month after month. Watch whether it’s the same core group returning rather than a different 5 percent each time. A repeat crowd means the training is doing its job.
Should new affiliates and veteran affiliates get separate trainings?
Not necessarily separate calls, but a rotation that cycles back through the fundamentals every few months covers both without extra work. A new affiliate eventually hears the full rotation. A veteran gets a refresher instead of sitting through the exact same lecture on repeat.
What happens once you’ve taught everything you know?
Keep running the calls. Once the content runs out, the value moves to the room itself, where affiliates start answering each other’s questions and teaching each other what’s working. That change is what kept one program’s calls going for years after the lessons stopped changing.
What to do next
Pick a fixed date, the same day each month, and commit to it even on months when you don’t have much new to say. Build a simple rotation of three or four recurring topics so you’re never starting from a blank page. And once a year, add one extra session timed to whatever 7 to 8 week window drives the biggest share of your own sales.
