Attracting Affiliates Personal Use Ebook

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Making your affiliate program attractive to affiliates

Before you start actively recruiting affiliates, you need to make sure your affiliate program really is aJractive to them. Keep in mind that there are thousands of affiliate programs out there, and you need to give affiliates solid reasons why they should pick yours over all the others.

Make it easy to join and start promoting

The easier your affiliate program is to join and start sending traffic to, the more affiliates you'll get - simple as that. A lot of affiliates are impatient and don't like to wait around for days before they can try out a new affiliate program. If you approve affiliates manually you beJer make sure you're quick about it. Usually it's best to wait until they've actually earned some money with your program before asking for things like tax forms and bank account details. Just make sure it's clear in your terms that you can't pay out anything until those things are in order.

Provide banners, e-mail swipes, etc

Having high converting/click friendly creatives ready to use is a great way to reduce the friction for affiliates. Some affiliate programs go as far as offering to create custom creatives, even full landing pages, for their affiliates to use. If you're just starting out you probably don't have the resources to do that, but it's a good mindset to have nevertheless. The easier you make it for affiliates, the more aJractive your affiliate program will be.

Educate affiliates

If you run an open affiliate program you're bound to aJract at least some inexperienced affiliates who are just starting out. At their current skill level they may not be of much use to you, and the initial reaction may be to simply ignore them until they've learned the ropes. However, you may find that educating them is the beJer solution. Some of the most popular affiliate programs (and networks) are those that actively teach people how to become better affiliates, making everyone more money in the process.

Be generous with commissions

At the very least you'll have to pay commissions on par with what your compeftors are offering, preferably more. This is where it helps if you know the average lifefme value of your customers. One common strategy is aiming to break even on the first sale to a new customer referred by an affiliate, and then making your actual profit on subsequent sales to that customer. Usually affiliates prefer to make as much money as possible up front, but in some cases it could also make sense to share profits with them for the whole customer lifefme (as discussed in the Lifefme vs last cookie secfon of the previous chapter). If you're unsure, you could always ask around and see what people think would be best.

Don't be too strict with rules/terms

It goes without saying that you have to have some rules in place to prevent affiliates from using unethical, or even illegal, methods to promote your affiliate program. However, keep in mind that the stricter your rules are, the less "affiliate friendly" your program will be. Life as an affiliate is uncertain in many ways, and being afraid of breaking one rule or another and geRng banned from a moneymaking affiliate program adds unnecessary stress that a lot of affiliates just don't want to deal with. So, make the rules fair, simple to understand and leave as little room for misunderstandings as possible.

Participate on forums

Most affiliates frequent at least one markefng forum, free or paid. By spending some fme geRng to know the community and networking, you can pick up some real "super affiliates" this way, providing your affiliate program is interesfng to them.

It's worth nofng that on most free forums it will only be a small percentage of members who are actually successful affiliates. Generally you'll have better chances on the paid forums, but it doesn't hurt to try both types.

To actually find the affiliates, you usually can't just go start a thread advertising your affiliate program (unless there is a specific secton of the forum that allows you to do that, but those sectons generally aren't visited much by affiliates anyway). Instead, just try to be helpful and become a familiar face on the forum, along with puffing some informaton about your affiliate program in your signature. That should be enough to get at least some people curious about it.

Attend live events

Everyone who's been involved in the affiliate marketng world in some capacity knows how powerful live events can be to meet people and network. A lot of big-tme affiliates frequent industry events, and people are generally more open to doing business in person compared to online.

Of course, just like on forums you don't want to go around just trying to advertise your affiliate program. As always, the goal should be networking and focusing on striking mutually beneficial deals. You can bet that most high profile affiliates get a LOT of offers from merchants, so make sure you've got something real good to offer them.

Using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

Most high (and low) profile affiliates are on at least one of these social networks, and if you're smart about it you may be able to pitch your program to them without spam accusatons. By now you've probably already understood that you should focus more on networking and less on shoving your offer down people's throats, but it's worth saying it again: your goal should be to make friends in the industry, not to blindly push your affiliate program on anyone who'll listen.

You could start by, for example, following all the affiliates you can find on Twitter and partcipatng in the industry discussions. Sooner or later you'll be geffing some affiliate followers yourself, who may be interested in checking out your affiliate program.

On Facebook and LinkedIn you may want to focus on hiRng up a few groups where affiliates are known to hang, and start adding value yourself. Ideally you shouldn't even mention your affiliate program until later on when you've established yourself.

"Steal" your competitors' affiliates

This is a somewhat sneaky way to find new affiliates, but it could prove to be very effective in the right circumstances. All you need to do is dig up affiliates who are currently promoting your competitors, and make them an offer they cannot resist.

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