When Coach Dino launched his 120-Day Sales Challenge on August 1st, he became the first merchant to test Selar’s new Affiliate Challenge feature. 

Two months later, his top 10 affiliates alone had generated over 3,500 sales, a testament to what’s possible when you combine the right incentives with the right tools.

For course creators wondering whether affiliate marketing can truly scale their business, Coach Dino’s story offers a compelling answer: yes, but only if you have the systems to support it.

What is the Selar Affiliate Challenge?

The Selar Affiliate Challenge is a feature that allows merchants to run time-bound sales competitions for their affiliates. Unlike traditional affiliate programs that only offer commission-based compensation, the Affiliate Challenge adds an extra layer of motivation: cash prizes for top performers.

Here’s how it works: merchants set up a challenge with a specific duration (like Coach Dino’s 120-day campaign) and define prizes for the top positions—typically the top 5 or 10 affiliates. As affiliates make sales, their progress is automatically tracked and displayed on a real-time leaderboard visible to all participants. This creates a competitive environment where affiliates can see exactly where they stand and what they need to do to climb the rankings.

The feature eliminates the manual work of tracking individual affiliate performance while tapping into the psychological power of gamification and peer competition. For affiliates, it means not just earning commissions on every sale, but also having a shot at substantial cash rewards. For merchants, it means higher engagement, more motivated promoters, and ultimately, more sales.

Before the Challenge: Success with Limitations

Coach Dino joined Selar in 2022 after migrating from another platform, seeking independence and the ability to build his own affiliate community. As a digital creator who trains people to become affiliate marketers, he’d already found significant success, racking up over ₦450 million in sales since joining the platform.

But success came with its own set of challenges.

Before Selar’s Affiliate Challenge feature, Coach Dino was already running sales competitions to motivate his affiliates. The principle was sound: affiliates need incentives beyond commissions to push harder. 

“Affiliates always need something that will push them to go out there and get a better result,” he explains. “Some of them want to get a fridge, they want to get this one or that one. You know, something they can use for themselves.”

However, his previous approach had critical limitations. The biggest pain point was tracking. To monitor an affiliate’s performance, he had to manually locate their email, navigate to the affiliate link section, and count their sales for the month. With dozens of active affiliates, this process was time-consuming and inefficient.

The second challenge was motivation. Without visible progress indicators, affiliates had little to reference except Coach Dino’s occasional updates. There was no competitive element, no way for them to see how they stacked up against their peers in real-time.

Designing the Affiliate Challenge

When Selar introduced the Affiliate Challenge feature with its built-in leaderboard, Coach Dino saw an opportunity to solve both problems at once. But launching a successful challenge required more than just turning on a feature. It demanded strategic thinking about rewards and recruitment. Here’s how Coach Dino approached it —

The Psychology of Prizes

Coach Dino’s approach to prize allocation is refreshingly practical. 

Rather than picking arbitrary numbers, he runs specific calculations: he tallies the commissions from affiliate sales, subtracts his team’s compensation, then allocates a percentage of the remaining balance to the top five winners based on total sales volume.

“I don’t do it based on how I feel,” he notes. “I do it based on the money available. If we split it like this, this is what can go around.”

This ensures the challenge is sustainable, rewarding high performers without jeopardizing the business’s financial health.

Building an Army of Trained Affiliates

Perhaps the most surprising element of Coach Dino’s success is his recruitment strategy or rather, his deliberate decision not to recruit at all.

“Everybody that you see selling my course, they are all my students,” he reveals. “I trained them. I did not get any affiliate from anywhere.”

He trains his affiliates from scratch, instilling them with his values of honesty and integrity. Currently, he’s working on training 300 people to make at least one sale per day, powered by AI tools to reduce the learning curve around content creation and copywriting.

His testing methodology is equally meticulous. Before launching any product publicly, he experiments with a smaller community of 20 – 30 serious students for around 50 days, refines what works, then has his top performers train the next batch. Only after replicating results he aims to achieve with the product does he launch at scale, a process that ensures every product he sells has been proven to deliver value.

The Numbers Don’t Lie: How Selar’s Affiliate Challenge Helped Him Win

Yes, he got over 3,500 sales from his top 10 affiliates alone within the first two months of the challenge. But what specifically did the Affiliate Challenge contribute to this success?

Real-Time Visibility

The leaderboard became what Coach Dino calls a “game-changer.” 

Instead of manually tracking sales or waiting for his updates, affiliates could now see their performance in real-time.”Sometimes some of them will go and check and say, ‘Ah, I am lagging behind, I need to do something.'”

This visibility created organic competition and self-motivation. Affiliates no longer needed constant encouragement from Coach Dino. The numbers themselves became the motivator.

Platform Trust and Reliability

Beyond the feature itself, Coach Dino credits Selar’s overall reliability as crucial to his success. After experiencing issues in earlier years, the stability and support he now receives has restored confidence in his affiliate community. 

When affiliates encounter any problems, he can quickly resolve them through Selar’s support team. This assurance means his affiliates trust that they’ll be paid for their efforts with no hiccups, a critical factor in sustaining long-term motivation.

“Without Selar, I don’t think I would be here.”

Benefits Beyond the Bottom Line

While the sales numbers are impressive, Coach Dino has seen other valuable outcomes from running the Affiliate Challenge:

Referral Energy: Because Coach Dino trains affiliate marketers who go on to teach others, he’s built a referral network. Students from his students’ programs often join his challenges, creating a compounding effect.

Re-engagement: The leaderboard notification system brought back affiliates who had left to pursue other opportunities. When they received alerts about the challenge, many returned, saying they wanted to “come back to their first love.”

Community Strength: The visible competition and tangible rewards have helped Coach Dino maintain a family-like relationship with his affiliates. He stays close to them, offering financial support during personal difficulties and business advice when needed, a bond strengthened by the structured nature of the challenge.

Why Every Creator Should Consider the Affiliate Challenge

When asked what he loves most about the feature, Coach Dino doesn’t hesitate: it’s the simplicity and the competitive element.

“The leaderboard is a game-changer,” he emphasized. “It’s helped people push the challenge.”

For creators wondering whether to try it, he’s clear about the value proposition. The Affiliate Challenge removes the manual burden of tracking sales, creates automatic motivation through visible competition, and provides affiliates with rewards beyond commissions. All while being simple enough for anyone to set up and manage.

His broader advice to creators mirrors his approach to business: specialize, build systems, and don’t try to do everything alone. The Affiliate Challenge is one such system, a tool that handles the mechanics of running a competition so you can focus on what matters most: creating value for your students and supporting your affiliate community.

Your Challenge Starts Now

Coach Dino’s story demonstrates that with the right incentives, proper training, and effective tools, affiliate marketing can drive substantial results for digital creators. The Affiliate Challenge isn’t just a feature, it’s a framework for turning your community into a motivated sales force.

Whether you’re managing 10 affiliates or 300, the principle remains the same: people perform better when they can see their progress, compete fairly, and earn meaningful rewards for their efforts.

Ready to replicate Coach Dino’s success?