What Is an Affiliate Program?

An affiliate program is a business arrangement where a company pays someone a commission for driving sales to its website. Instead of buying ads, you recruit people who already believe in your product and pay them only when their efforts produce a sale. It’s a pay-for-performance model that turns your network into a distributed sales force.

In Siren, an affiliate program is one specific shape of a more general concept called a program. A program defines what someone has to do to earn a reward and how much they earn. An affiliate program is the version where the action is “refer a customer who buys something” and the reward is a commission on that sale.

How it works

Affiliates promote your products through their own channels (blogs, social media, newsletters, podcasts) using a unique referral link or coupon code. When one of their referrals makes a purchase, Siren attributes the sale and records what you owe.

Click A visitor arrives through an affiliate's link or coupon

Engagement Siren ties the visit to the affiliate

Purchase The visitor buys something and a transaction is created

Conversion Siren records the commission the affiliate has earned

Payout You approve the fulfillment and pay the affiliate

The whole pipeline runs automatically. Your only manual touch points are reviewing conversions and triggering the payout when you’re ready.

Why it works

Traditional advertising costs money whether or not it produces sales. An affiliate program flips that. You pay nothing until a referral converts, and the commission comes out of revenue you wouldn’t have earned otherwise. It scales with your collaborators’ effort, not your ad budget.

It also taps into trust. When a creator recommends a product to their audience, that recommendation carries more weight than a banner ad ever will.

Setting one up

The fastest way to stand up your first affiliate program in Siren is to start from a working template. The basic affiliate program recipe creates a percentage-based commission program with sensible defaults that you can tune from there. If you want to dig into the underlying pieces first, read What Are Programs? for the full breakdown of how programs are structured.

For developers: Siren is built on a typed event system. See the events reference to understand how the framework processes the concepts described here.