The document provides tips and best practices for affiliate recruitment. It recommends recruiting relevant affiliates, reviewing their sites, and following up. It lists major affiliate forums, conferences, and directories. It also discusses paid search, retargeting, cross-program recruitment, and automating recruitment through AffiliateRecruitment.com. The presentation ends with contact information for questions.
Don ’t forget to use the #AffRecruit hash tag if you’re on live tweeting this.
Be prepared to speak about specifics of the affiliate ’s website. Yes, affiliates have sites in different verticals, but keep your recruitment effort focused on the program at hand, don ’t overwhelm and distract. If they’re interested in the red corvette, don’t show them the blue Tahoe. Nobody likes a phone call out of the blue. Always email first. Be persistent. We ’re ALL busy, and emails fall through the cracks.
Remember, this is a mutually beneficial relationship. Affiliates want to find you, help them!
Affiliates are people too. They use search engines when looking for something too. Optimize your “Affiliate Program Page” for
Similarly, if you ’d like to achieve better page saturation (more links leading to you on a search result page), you can also buy paid search placement for keywords relevant to your program. This is also useful if you’re finding it difficult for your program to rank in the natural results.
Keep your program top of mind by retargeting affiliates that visit your affiliate program page. Don ’t bombard them, set the frequency to be minimal. Send me a note at the end of this email if you need retargeting company suggestions.
So many of us get stuck in the mindset of online and email only. While obviously that is the easiest way to track the success of each program, we believe when the world zigs, we ’ll zag. Be sure to keep a list of affiliate addresses within your program and send high potential prospects physical mail pieces. I remember when Affiliate Summit use a company to send bouncy balls through the mail a couple years ago. Obviously, that stuck with me.
Here are some major affiliate forums. Please be careful with WickedFire if you ’re access from a company computer or are around children.
Similar to optimizing your on site affiliate program page, you should also optimize your announcement posts. Also, be careful with private messages, there should be good reason to private message.
With new mediums of communication come new opportunities to market. Using Tweetdeck, you can conduct searches for affiliate network domains and keywords to identify and then recruit affiliates promoting items similar to yours.
There is nothing like face to face recruitment, and no venue offers the opportunity for recruitment like trade shows and conferences. We ’d recommend setting up appointments to meet well in advance. If you have a booth, have affiliates meet you there. If not, it’s important to determine a location prior to meeting up. Call the hotel if you’re unsure where you should meet. The show we’ve found most productive for exhibiting is Affiliate Summit, of course. But there is an extra benefit, IF you are an exhibitor, you can buy a list of all attendees who have opted in to receiving promotional materials. Again, this is for exhibitors (booths and meet market) only. Going back to the “snail mail” slide, this is a great opportunity for you to stand out from the crowd. It’s also extremely important that you follow up quickly with affiliates who you meet and expect correspondence. Carry a pen at the show and take notes on the cards they hand you so you can recap the conversation.
Be careful with this one as it approaches the “irrelevant irritation diagonal” If there is a program similar but not competitive to yours, you may want to approach them about doing a cross promotion. Please note that some networks do not allow this to occur within their newsletter system, so it’s best to handle outside of your network. Also, you’ll want to make sure your cross promotion partner has a similar sized active affiliate base to prevent an uneven exchange. Take for example CFB and Working Persons, both our clients, both in apparel, but one sells pajamas and the other sells uniforms.
Similar to trade shows, but smaller and more intimate. Affiliate Summit hosts these across the US, and I ’ve provided the links here. If you don’t find one, even better, you can start one. But don’t stop there, find other relevant meet ups in your area. Speak at the events to show your expertise, and network as much as possible without being overbearing.
Get listed in affiliate directories. As discussed with the SEO slide, affiliates look in many places to find programs to promote. Further, if these links are followed, point them to your affiliate program sign up page to boost your SEO efforts.
Two tier programs rarely work on a broad scale, as affiliates generally do not want to recruit competition. Further, affiliates feel if you can pay out a two tier, they ’d rather you just pay them the commission you’ve set aside for that second tier. However, two tier programs can work on a private basis with those that have a large affiliate following. These have worked well with some lead programs and with satellite tv programs however.
Most of you listening are part of a large network such as Commission Junction, Shareasale, Linkshare, Google Affiliate Network or others. Each of these offers some version of recruiting within the network. CJ, for example, allows you to purchase email blasts on a per affiliate basis targeted to affiliates within a certain category. Shareasale on the other hand, does not offer an emailing service, but you can purchase banners in lucrative places such as the dashboard and merchant search pages.
Fish where the fish are. Any site ranking well in serps for generic keywords such as “batman pajamas” are going to have traffic. Keep your end goal in mind and focus on the sites that are going to bring you traffic.
Affiliates absolutely need tools to make their life easier. I ’ve listed some of the major tools here. By getting your program listed, you increase the times affiliates are exposed to your program and make the promotion of your program easier than your competitors. Contact us after the webinar if you’d like assistance getting set up with any of these tools, we’ll be glad to help you out.