This can vary depending upon the affiliate, the type of promotion they do, the assets and any extra integration steps they need to take (and that you may need to assist them with), and the time of year – don’t expect them to start onboarding on Black Friday!
Some affiliates that work in a more automated or straightforward way can go live immediately and begin their process of optimizing and generating traffic. This can be the case with programmatic publishers, and cashback and voucher sites that can upload simple profiles for your brand.
Others will take longer to set up and you will need to reach out to them: for example, some technology affiliates can take between a couple of hours to several weeks to get started, whilst affiliates who use product feeds will need to upload these from the platform to their sites and sometimes tinker with them to match their requirements.
For the latter reason, we recommend you see the platform as a means of developing long-term relationships and give adequate notice for when you want to change a given element of your program.