Don’t want to outsource your affiliate program to a CPA network? Want to market it yourself online? Here are some tips to get the word out and recruit affiliates:
1) Affiliate Publications
Advertise your affiliate program where the affiliates flock for industry information. You should advertise in magazines and blogs that affiliates read. FeedFront and Revenue magazines are two great resources, as well as many affiliate marketing blogs.
2) Industry Friends
Whether you’re involved in search marketing, SEO, social media, etc, you must know someone in the affiliate marketing space. Let them know about your affiliate program and give them an incentive to give it a shot. Affiliate marketers always seem to focus on what is already working for them so you have to pitch them with someone very interesting for them to pay attention to you.
3) Find Quality Affiliates
As you’ll find, it’s not the amount of affiliates you need to focus on, it’s the quality of affiliates. If you are having a hard time, do your research and find people in the industry by reading blogs, articles and more. Hit them up by email or find them in a social network and tell them you’re interested in forming a relationship with them.
4) Referrals
Make sure your affiliate platform is capable of paying out referral fees for current affiliates who refer other affiliates. Who wouldn’t want to make an extra 2-5% for referring another affiliate? Let other affiliates do the recruiting for you.
5) Related Websites & Blogs
Find related websites and blogs in your niche and contact them to promote your program. Most content sites are created to be monetized. Let them know you have banners and text links for them to make money related to their content.
6) Network. Network. Network.
This ties in all the steps. Marketing your own affiliate program is all about networking and reaching out to the right crowd and the “related” crowd. Go to conferences, join forums in the industry and let people know about your program!
Pablo Palatnik is Managing Partner of eTrend Media Group and Author of PalatnikFactor.com.
Download the entire FeedFront issue 3 here – http://feedfront.com/feedfront-issue3.pdf
FeedFront issue 3 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/category/issue-3/
