The Affiliate Branding Kit: What Partners Need to Promote You Well
Partners will describe your product with or without your help — the kit decides how accurately. What belongs in an affiliate media kit, where to host it, and the assets nobody ever uses.
The moment a partner decides to promote you, a countdown starts. They have your product page open in one tab and their draft in the other, and they need a logo, a product shot, and a price — right now. If those are easy to find, your brand appears in their post the way you'd want. If not, they screenshot your homepage, compress it into mud, guess the price from memory, and misspell your product name. The audience never knows the difference. Their picture of you is whatever the partner shipped.
A branding kit is how you win that moment in absentia. It's an afternoon of work, done once.
What actually belongs in the kit
Logos that survive other people's backgrounds. Full-color and single-color versions, on transparent backgrounds, in PNG and SVG. Include a dark-background variant — half of the internet runs dark mode, and a black wordmark on a dark blog theme simply vanishes.
Product photography in the crops partners need. Landscape for blog heroes, square for feeds, vertical for stories/shorts. Real photos beat renders; photos with context (the product in use) beat white-background packshots for editorial placements. Eight great images beat eighty mediocre ones — partners choose fast, and choice paralysis is real.
The facts sheet. One page, plain text: exact product names (with the capitalization you want), current prices, three-sentence product descriptions, your three differentiators phrased as facts rather than slogans, shipping/guarantee basics. This is the piece that prevents the misquotes — partners don't invent wrong details out of malice, they invent them because the right ones were buried in marketing prose.
The boring-but-vital paragraph. Your approved disclosure line, what partners may and may not do (brand bidding, "official" claims, coupon-site posting — whatever your terms restrict), and who to email with questions. Placing the rules inside the kit means every partner who downloads assets has passed the policy on the way in.
A short "about" boilerplate. Two sentences partners can paste for context. They'll edit it; that's fine. You're supplying the accurate starting point.
What nobody ever uses
Skip the 30-page brand guidelines PDF — partners need answers, not doctrine. Skip pre-written review posts; any audience can smell them, and the partners good enough to matter won't touch them. Skip banner-ad sets in fourteen sizes unless your partners specifically run display placements; content affiliates haven't used a 468×60 in a decade. Every unused asset makes the useful ones harder to find.
Hosting: a folder link beats a portal
The kit's only job is zero friction, so resist anything with a login. A public folder (Drive, Dropbox, or a /partners/assets page on your own site) linked from your program page and your welcome email covers it. Structure it shallow: /logos, /product-photos, facts.txt, guidelines.txt. A partner arriving from the welcome email should reach any file in two clicks.
Version by replacement, not accumulation. When the logo updates, the old file disappears — a folder containing logo-final-v2-NEW.png next to three older siblings guarantees the wrong one gets used somewhere permanent.
The kit is also a recruiting signal
Serious creators evaluate programs before applying, and an orderly, current media kit reads as "this program is run by adults" — the same way fast payouts and clear terms do. Some programs put the kit behind approval; consider doing the opposite. A public kit lets a prospective partner mock up their post before applying, which converts fence-sitters into applicants. Your assets aren't secrets. They're marketing that other people volunteer to distribute.
Refresh it on a calendar — quarterly is plenty — and whenever prices or packaging change, the same day. The kit only works while partners trust it; the first time someone publishes an outdated price they pulled from your own facts sheet, they go back to screenshotting your homepage. Keep the kit true, and it keeps your brand true everywhere you're not in the room.