Kyle Vallans

What I Look for in a Great Referral Program

I run a few online marketplaces where we offer the best deals on top trading tools and services. Most of our revenue comes through referrals and affiliate partnerships with fintech companies.

Over time, I’ve learned what separates a good referral partner from a great one and if you're in the space or thinking about building your own affiliate engine, here's what actually matters.

Let’s start with cookies.

The cookie window is the amount of time you’ll get credit for a referral after someone clicks your link. A minimum of 60 days is good. Anything shorter means you’re leaving money on the table, especially for products with longer sales cycles.

Most fintech affiliate programs use last-click attribution, meaning whoever got the final click before a sign-up gets the commission. So if you were the first to get them interested but someone else sealed the deal later… tough sh*t.

As you grow, you can negotiate longer windows such as 90 days, even 180 days. It’s worth asking.

2. Offer the Best Deal to Your Audience

This one’s obvious, but overlooked. If you’re not giving people the best deal on a product, why would they go through you?

Let’s say everyone else is offering 15% off and you’re offering 5%. You’re just helping someone price shop and click elsewhere. But if your audience knows you have the best deal available, they'll use your link and they'll bookmark your site in their head and their browser for future deals.

Better discounts = better SEO rankings, better click-throughs, better conversion.

3. Solid Commission Structure

You can’t waste a bunch of time promoting products that don’t pay. A $20/month tool that pays you 5%? Not worth your time.

But if they’re paying:

Now, that's compelling (dependent on price of product)!

As your traffic and influence grow, you’ll earn the right to negotiate better terms. Don’t be shy about asking for higher percentages or milestone bonuses.

4. The Product Has to Be Good

This one’s simple: If the product sucks, no one’s going to buy it no matter how good your deal is.

The best products already have traction. Use tools like Similarweb Extension to check monthly traffic. If the company is getting millions of visits, you can reasonably assume there are hundreds if not thousands of sign ups coming in each month, likely.

Your job becomes owning a slice of that funnel. Even just 2–5% of their total sign-ups can become a meaningful income stream if you're driving value.

Of course, there’s also room for undiscovered gems which are tools that no one’s talking about but should be. If you can be the one who brings a good product to the surface, you become the trusted source. Additionally, it is easier to rank #1 or #2 on Google for these since nobody else is talking about them.

5. Low Competition (Optional, But Powerful)

Not every tool has a massive affiliate army behind it.

If you can be one of the only referral partners, you’re not competing for last-click credit. If your link is the only one they ever see, chances are you get the sale even if it takes them weeks to convert.

It’s not mandatory, but being early and exclusive never hurts.

6. The Fintech Company Knows How to Sell

Once someone clicks your link and lands on the tool’s website, the job shifts to the company’s onboarding flow.

The best partners:

Your job isn’t to hard-sell, rather just get people over the line with the right offer. After that, the company should do the rest.

At the end of the day, great affiliate relationships come down to alignment:

And if they do that well, everybody wins.

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