How To Recruit and Retain The Best Affiliates

Launching a business and building a customer base is no mean feat. Nor is beginning to expand your business's reach and learning more about how to recruit and retain the best affiliates but all are crucial elements to consider.

Without the other, it can become easy to feel stagnant but it doesn’t have to be a near-impossible task to undertake. In fact, with our help, we can ensure you cultivate a loyal customer relationship and reap the benefits of a successful affiliate program.?

Then it becomes a question of how do you begin executing this well?

When it comes to successfully recruiting and retaining affiliates there are countless approaches to try and test but where’s a good place to start?...

1. The first is by doing competitive research, this means having a look at your competitors and seeing who they're working with by using certain keyword terms in Google. Staying in the loop is crucial and can provide the clarity and understanding needed.

Another way to obtain new affiliates is by looking at backlinks by using tools like SEMrush, or H reps, to enable you to see where your competitors are getting traffic from and then filtering out those backlinks and URLs to see how many of those are affiliates. Again keeping you up to date and clear on how you can be leveling yourself up from the competition.

2. Next, it’s a case of looking at your customer base and how you can look to capitalise on the big movements at the moment for customers becoming ambassadors of brands, and programmes and referring friends.?

That’s why having a look internally to see are there any clients or customers that can potentially become affiliates in your programme and start to earn an additional commission can be beneficial.

3. Expanding on that, the next stage is being able to reach out to influencers. We all know and interact with a variety of social media channels, that has in turn given us a plethora of information. That allows us to go forth and research, to get new traffic sources and new communities involved in our products and services.?

Social media is something that should be valued and looked into. Especially if want to get niche markets or niche customers to build awareness around your product or brand.

4. Now you’re well on your way and hopefully feeling more confident you can begin to optimise your affiliate website or at least optimise it up to a certain point that ensures that it has the links needed and a website that feels user-friendly.

If an affiliate likes your product or your service, your website will be the first stop in the quest to find out more about you and what you offer. From that point forward they need to be easily led towards your affiliate programme, to ensure they can sign up and join with ease.

You can also recruit affiliates through paid media ads and doing a small PPC campaign can make the world of difference. It doesn’t need to be overly costly either, spending $100 a month just on certain keyword terms that are relevant for your affiliate programme to help build awareness about the programme that you're building can be just the ticket needed.

5. It’s one thing having the tools but without a strong network of like-minded people around you, it can be rendered nearly useless. That’s why utilising Facebook and the hundreds of social groups and communities on the platform can really pay off.

It’s fast become a mecca for affiliates to gather and learn from one another. Whether that’s more from fellow affiliates or how to build websites better, there are countless ways to use the free tools readily available to you.

Depending on what product and service you're selling, this could be a great way of actually finding startup affiliates that you can nurture and grow. Before bringing them into your programme from the early stages and building a brand affinity.

6. The final stages consist of ensuring you know how to build out your email marketing campaigns. Long gone are the days of cold calling email marketing but building a? list of customers or potential websites that you want to promote and then finding those partner's details remains a key aspect.?

That’s why you need to ensure that you’re building and then sending them engaging communication, to tell and educate them more about your product.

Whilst you're completing this you also need to be thinking about what promotions you're putting in place to attract affiliates to your affiliate programme.

Affiliates generally tend to market between 10 and 20 brands, so how are you placing your affiliate programme out in the marketplace??

What events are you attending? What forums are you visiting? How are you actually engaging the publisher community that you want to bring onboard to your affiliate programme and start promoting your products and services to drive more sales??

All of these are crucial questions you need to be asking and answering in your quest to recruit and retain the best affiliates.

Final Thoughts…

Completing these steps and maintaining them can take time and effort to get right but ultimately it’s needed to create a good retention program for your potential and existing affiliates. You also need to be confident you have creative content that converts frequently because that increases their earning potential within your affiliate programme.

However, if you continue to keep your best affiliates engaged, through strong promotions and ensure you have fresh content to promote to their customer and audience base you’ll be on to a winner and will no doubt see and reap the rewards.