Recruiting affiliates and affiliate marketers for your business can be one of the most difficult tasks to undertake. However, if you have a really great strategy to accomplish this goal you can build up your affiliate program with tons of great affiliate marketers and web publishers that can make all the difference in your website's traffic and revenue. Over the years, I have worked on growing more than 100 affiliate programs for companies, implementing many of the techniques listed below. I hope you benefit from these affiliate recruitment strategies and let me know if you have any questions about how to carry out these strategies.?
- Proactive Site Contacting - reaching our to websites, blogs, and other web publishers with a well-written "outreach email" or affiliate recruitment email is a great way to prospect and bring on new affiliates for your company. There are some great tools out there like PublisherFinders.com
, which can identify affiliates and bloggers in specific niches, so you can reach out to them and ask them very nicely if they would like to become your company's affiliate. This is a task your affiliate manager should be doing on a monthly basis to grow your affiliate program. Or you can hire an agency like Experience Advertising
, to methodically conduct the email outreach process. If you want it to be done effectively with a great response rate you have to send them one by one and personalize them. Yes it takes a lot of effort and you do have to do it in volume to get what you want out of it. You can also run basic Google searches for keyword phrases in your niche, see what sites or blogs come up in the search results and then send them a nice invite email to join your program. It's a very tedious process, but a very effective process to grow your affiliate channel.?
- PPC Search Ads - every day there are people search for various types of affiliate programs in the search engines, such as: dating affiliate programs, health affiliate programs, insurance affiliate programs, etc. If you run an affiliate program in a niche it only makes sense to run PPC ads in Google Ads and Microsoft/Bing Ads targeting people searching these types of phrases. You can gauge the effectiveness by assigning a tracking link to the campaign, send the traffic to your affiliate sign-up page, see who signs up, and then see how productive those affiliate referrals?then become. This is how you can see the ROI of your PPC advertising for affiliate program and affiliate network related keyword phrases. It's a tried and true strategy to recruit targeted webmasters, companies, and bloggers looking for companies to affiliate with in their niche.?
- SEO Optimized Content - piggy-backing on the same concept, when people are searching for specific niche affiliate programs, you need to have an SEO optimized page on your website that ranks well in Google, Bing and Yahoo, so those individuals will find that page ranking organically and sign-up for your program. You can also do online press releases promoting your affiliate program and LinkedIn posts about your affiliate program. All of which can gain organic rankings for search phrases related to your company and affiliate niche. This is a great way to get more affiliate sign-ups and build your affiliate base with targeted affiliates.?Over time, if you do enough posting on various sites you can build up a great amount of organic saturation for you affiliate program niche keywords.
- Facebook Ads - one of the best ways to bring on new affiliates and partners is to run Facebook ads targeting people into affiliate marketing, blogging, and trade shows like Affiliate Summit. You can also target the people that have shown interest in affiliate networks on Facebook. You can target blogger communities like the Blogher network, and drive them to your affiliate information page to learn more. Make sure your affiliate info page is a good one. I would recommend including a video on this page to explain the affiliate program so people that aren't as familiar with affiliate programs can better grasp the benefits of participating in your affiliate program, i.e. how much money they can make. This is a great way to inexpensive run advertising to increase the traffic to your affiliate information page.?You can also do the same type of thing with Twitter advertising to gain new affiliates.??
- Big Affiliate Networks - one of the best ways to recruit a bunch of affiliates quickly is by launching on the big affiliate networks like CJ, Rakuten/Linkshare, Impact, and?Shareasale. Using their recruiting tools to send pending offers then email follow-ups is a great way to build the program up with affiliates in your niche and also some of the other types of affiliates, which I referenced in my last post. I do believe in screening the affiliates that apply to your program on any network, simply because there will be all types of individuals applying and you may want to pick and choose who is appropriate for your company. In my opinion, CJ's recruiting tools are the best at sending "offers" to prospective affiliates by country, category, and even a word contained in their url, for instance anyone with the work dating in their url is a likely good dating niche affiliate.?If you are interested in growing your program as quickly as possible, there is nothing out there that rivals CJ's recruiting tools. Once the pending offer is made, you have to send them a follow-up email to accept the offer because they aren't notified by email automatically. It takes a lot of work, but this is exactly what your affiliate manager or OPM agency should be doing to leverage the network. If they aren't utilizing this process they are squandering the opportunity in my opinion.?
- CPA Affiliate Networks - there are many other affiliate networks that have great affiliates and publishers. It can be a hit or miss type of situation though because you never know if these networks have affiliates that can be productive for you. You have to give them a chance and see what they can do. Cost-per-acquisition affiliate networks usually prefer cost-per-lead or cost-per-sale offers with flat rate payouts, so ecommerce websites on a % of sales isn't usually appropriate. So if you have a CPA or CPL offer, look to launch your "offer" on a few CPA networks and then when it's working well, find some more launch on. I would recommend keeping an eye on the sales or leads coming through from these types of networks because you never know who their affiliates are and there are issues with fraud in the affiliate channel. So make sure you have a good "order reconciliation" process in place so you don't payout on any bad orders or leads.?
- Hiring an Agency/OPM - working with an affiliate agency
or "OPM" can be a great idea if you use the right one since OPM's have existing relationships with affiliates and know how to work the networks well. Since my own agency has an OPM division I'm biased towards thinking that the way we recruit and manage is the best way. But do your due diligence before working with any agency. I will tell you that no other OPM recruits affiliates in volume like my agency or manages as well as my agency (again I'm biased. but I know how they all operate). Just take a look at our affiliate newsletters?versus the other agencies. But like I said, do you due diligence and hire whomever you feel is best going to handle the job. When you outsource your affiliate program management you need an agency that really delivers on recruiting aspect and the management aspect as well. Anything less than excellent is unacceptable in my opinion. As I often say, "you have to always be recruiting and managing at the same time."?
- Trade shows - trade shows and conferences like Affiliate Summit, CJU, Adtech, amd PubCon are great places to meet affiliates and companies that can be partnered with as affiliates. Every time I attend a trade show with the intention of meeting some affiliates and partners it works out well. Exhibiting can be a great idea as well because then the affiliates will come to you instead of you having to hunt them down, so getting a booth or meet market table at Affiliate Summit can be a great idea.?
- Affiliate Forums - affiliate forums and webmaster forums in general can be great places to meet and network with affiliate marketers of various types. Forums can be a good place for affiliate managers to meet affiliates and interact with them in a fairly informal way. In fact, forums of all types, in various niches, can be great places to find webmasters and bloggers and ask them if they would like to become an affiliate of your company. For instance, if you have a gardening website and are looking for people with gardening blogs to be your affiliate, you would join some gardening forums and become active. Most forums allow you to have a link in your forum signature which gets posted at the bottom of every comment you make, so it's another place to have people see and click to view info about your affiliate program. The more you post the more exposure your signature links will get, so it's definitely something that builds up over time.?
- LinkedIn - LinkedIn is a great place to meet people and network in general. There are plenty of LinkedIn groups in the affiliate industry and even blogger groups. You can post discussions, participate in discussions, and connect with people that may be interested in becoming your affiliate. You have to do it in a fairly subtle way in my opinion to be effective at it though. It's also something that's an indirect benefit of networking on LinkedIn, although plenty of people will just use it for that purpose. In my opinion you have to interact with people and then they will see where you work and that you're an affiliate manager, and possibly become interested. So more of a soft approach is a best practice in my opinion, although sometimes you just have come out and say, "would you be interested in joining our affiliate program and making a great commission?"
- Twitter - on Twitter, you can find influencers and convert them into affiliates for your company. By searching on Twitter for various keywords you can see who is talking about phrases related to your niche and follow them. Then you can start commenting, re-tweeting, and interacting with their tweets. They may follow you back if you post valuable content of you own. They may then see you are an affiliate manager and get interested. After you know them decently well you can send them a direct message and ask them if they participate in affiliate programs.?
- Customer Base -?a lot of people don't realize that their customer base can be converted into affiliate marketers for the company. You have to make it really simple for them to participate and share the links though or you will run into a lot of support issues. You may want to consider launching a "customer referral program" with tools like FriendBuy
or ReferralCandy
, which basically function the same way as an affiliate program without the banner ads. So you can look to leverage your customers and turn them into referrers with either your affiliate program or a customer referral program. Some companies get as much as 25% of their revenue from these types of referral programs. It's all in how well you expose people to it, basically everywhere possible and keep reinforcing it over time.?
- Link on Your Website -?when you place a link in your footer to you affiliate program page you are allowing your customers and website visitors the opportunity to sign-up for your affiliate program. This is a great way to capitalize on your traffic and turn some of them into affiliate partners. Same goes for your customer referral program, you should have a button in the header to refer a friend, so people see it and act on it. Some companies will incentivize users to refer on their social networks for a discount on their own purchase or future purchases?which I think is a great idea to boost social sharing and referring.?
- Reciprocal Partnerships - one of my favorite ways to get your affiliate referrals increased is to partner with other companies with a similar audience (non-competitive of course). You can promote their offer and they can promote yours, and you pay each other on a revenue share. It's basically an affiliate program for companies. A lot of times companies don't like to consider themselves as participating in affiliate programs, but if you refer to it as a "rev share partnership" they will be more receptive to it. Some of the best affiliates are other companies that can promote your offer to their email list, website traffic, on their thank you page, and on their social networks. This can be a really powerful type of affiliate partnership. I have put together many of these types of partnerships over the years and they always drive in a ton of sales.?
Well, there you had it...14 great ways to recruit new affiliates and partners to drive in sales for your company. Now that you know how to do it, you have to put the effort behind it. One of the main reasons I launched my agency 8 years ago was to address the need for affiliate recruiting for companies. I still take a lot of pride in delivering effective affiliate recruiting strategies. If you need a great affiliate recruiting and managing agency let me know we can discuss working together.?
I look forward to hearing from you!
great man
Registered Dietitian, entrepreneur, mother of 4.
5 年Super helpful, thanks!!