Affiliates are salesmen. Webmasters that carry the knowledge to promote your product or service, and have been given the right incentives to do so. They might own a related site, a user database, or just have a utilized media space they put ads in.
Recruiting affiliates
Recruiting affiliates is a semi-complex job… at first, you should search your related keywords in the search engines, and checkout the advertisers and first results in the organic lists. Usually the ones in the first places are either competitors, or good affiliates’ sites. As you have search for one of your own related keywords, it is most likely that these affiliates will be relevant to you.
After entering the site, we suggest you evaluate its’ quality. Read a little, navigate through the pages, and sense the business model too. If everything smells “kosher” – find the “contact us” page and initiate contact via mail, or preferably by phone. It is a definite fact; a phone call will close a deal in a much higher ratio than email!
If you fail to find a contact page, try to search whois.org for the owner’s profile.
Various other ways are available, but if these two did not work for you, you might want to drop this specific site, as they do not want to do business…
After initial contact has been established, ask the owner about the traffic, origins, user profile, etc’. If the traffic feels good to you, ask for a test campaign in order to see what your conversion rates are with this traffic, how much a user actually costs you and so on. Upon results of that test – you decide if and how to continue this campaign.
In short:
- Search for sites.
- Explore the results.
- Contact the owner.
- Close a test deal.
- Analyze the test.
- Optimize and continue to a full scale campaign OR decide to drop it.
Recruiting Affiliates Via affiliate networks
We have a long list of affiliate networks here.
However, the main steps are as follows:
- Go through the list of affiliates’ networks here.
- Search for related products and competition, and see what they offer (you might need to sign up as affiliate yourself to do so – do it…)
- Prepare an offer of your product, graphics for them to use, marketing texts and so on.
- Use the platform’s mailing system to spread the word of your new campaign amongst the affiliates.
Important – be ready to back up your site, product, and payments! Affiliates will try to sense your credibility and quality of service, and you do not want to burn out at that stage…also – the whole point of the network when it comes to the affiliates side, is to give them a safety net regarding payments. If you fail there, the network itself will exclude you…
Affiliate program Platforms
In time, and as your business grows, you will need an in-house affiliate platform, in order to recruit, subscribe and service affiliates of your own.
Today’s leading affiliate platforms provide a full scale service:
- Affiliate sign up procedure.
- Subscription approval / decline procedure.
- Affiliate login and access to :
- Reports.
- Banner farms.
- Payment details.
- Helpdesk / ticket system to back them up.
