Affiliate & Partnership Industry – Associates Certification Path

This course is all about finding and recruiting potential partners to empower a brand to reach and indirectly engage with its target audience. Discover and Recruit, the first stage of the Partnerships Life Cycle, involves figuring out the perfect partner mix for a given brand and striving to align partner and brand goals to cultivate productive partnerships.

This course explores the second stage of the Partnerships Life Cycle, Contract and Pay. After a successful Discover and Recruit stage, partnership managers would have made many connections with potential partners keen to join their program. Here, we’ll focus on defining a partnership's structure through a formal contract and payment terms. Different partnerships produce different levels of value, which means unique contracts are needed for each one.

This course covers Track, the third stage of the Partnerships Life Cycle. It introduces the foundations of tracking, including its four core components: linking, click redirect, cookies, and data capture. Finally, because being able to automate a system for reversals and action inquiries coming from partners is imperative to a brand’s success, we’ll jump into that in the final section of this course.

By this point of the Partnerships Life Cycle, you have recruited partners, contracted with them, and set up tracking to allow for meticulous reporting. So what’s next? Engage, stage four of the Partnerships Life Cycle! In this course, you’ll learn all about the strategies brands can use to build indestructible bonds in their partnerships.

This course takes a closer look at a central component of the Engage phase of the Partnerships Life Cycle, Media Buying! Media buying is, in a nutshell, the process of purchasing advertising space on a platform—the real meat and bones of affiliate and partnerships marketing. Here, you’ll dip your toes into the system and varieties of media buys, plus how advertisers pay publishers.

At this point in the Partnerships Life Cycle, partnerships are up and running, partners are set up to share data, and there’s active engagement in the partnership through always-on communication. The next step in the Partnerships Life Cycle—Protect and Monitor—is all about ensuring that a partnership program is free of partners that drive suspicious or unwanted activity.

In this course, you’ll reach the final stage of the Partnerships Life Cycle journey. You’ll learn about Optimize, which is where brands perform the continual optimization of their partnerships via advanced analytics to drive growth and increase efficiency. Those analytics help brands drive growth, boost efficiency, and ultimately expand into new, super-valuable partnerships, ready to begin the Partnerships Life Cycle all over again.

In this 50-minute assessment, you'll apply what you learned about the affiliate and partnerships industry. If you pass, you'll receive a certificate which you can share on LinkedIn to impress your network.