How to Recruit the Best Affiliates for Your Brand

By Shawn Collins

Said on the Web

“You should not sell on Facebook just because there are 800,000,000 people there. Sell there because you genuinely solve a customer problem.”
Tweeted by @minethatdata, Oct. 4

“Email marketing is a little like marriage, you need to put in a lot of work to get something out of it #emailmarketing”
Tweeted by @andrewkordek, Oct. 3

“What IS great content? What makes it great? How do you define that? Is it great because the author thinks so? Or because the content was retweeted 700 times and shared 150 times on Facebook? Was it great because there were 70 comments? Those are all things most marketers would feel satisfaction from in regard to content they created and published.”
Lee Odden, TopRank Marketing Blog, Oct. 3

“How have you prepared for the holiday season and the use of mobile for making purchases? Hopefully you haven’t treated your planning like many treat their holiday shopping by waiting until the last minute. If that’s the case you shouldn’t be reading this you should be running around in a panic because you are WAY behind the 8 ball.”
Frank Reed, Marketing Pilgrim blog, Oct. 10

Q: “Hello, I’m the co-founder of a new e-cigarette company and new to affiliate marketing. I’m wondering if you could offer some advice and guidance around where to find the best affiliates to promote my product line. Currently I’m running an in-house affiliate program using HasOffers. Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks!” — Michael Hazard, co-founder and chief marketing officer, Revolution Vapor

A: The best way to recruit affiliates to promote your product is to make it easy for relevant affiliates to find you. Affiliates come across affiliate programs to promote in a variety of ways. The 2011 AffStat Report polled over 1,400 affiliates earlier this year and discovered that affiliates find their programs via affiliate forums, conferences, blogs, search engines and a variety of other resources.

I recommend you put in place a comprehensive plan for affiliate recruitment that includes the following:

Affiliate Forums
There are a number of ways to gain exposure and recruit through affiliate forums. Consider ad placements and/or co-branded forums to share information, tips, resources and affiliate program announcements. Also make it a point to be active in forums yourself.

Affiliate Conferences
Have a presence at industry conferences, whether it’s just you shaking hands and chatting with affiliates or a bigger impact such as buying a booth or other sponsorship opportunities. That face time cannot be replicated online. Put yourself out there as a conference speaker for even more exposure.

Affiliate Blogs
There are many blogs on affiliate marketing that offer retailers the opportunity to purchase advertising as well as write guest posts.

Search Engines
Google AdWords is an effective tool for recruiting affiliates. Whether you want to broadly target people searching for B-to-B affiliate programs or those using keywords more specific to your business, you can reach people as they’re trying to find affiliate programs. In addition to using paid search to target affiliates, I also suggest recruiting through search engine optimization by creating a resource site for your affiliate program.

1 2 All Next »

0 Comments

View Comments

Shawn Collins Author's page

Shop Talk: How to Recruit the Best Affiliates for Your Brand