The aim is to get other website owners, with high traffic, or people with large email subscription lists and newsletters to promote your products and services to their visitors or subscribers.
Sounds easy? Not always. For one, most of these webmasters are already affiliated with other product owners or your competitors. They would be silly not to if they do in fact have good traffic or a large subscriber base.
Do not risk failure. Don’t start your affiliate recruitment until you have completed the following steps.
- A professional looking website including your company information, “about us” page, well written Home page copy, help and FAQ pages, privacy policy, software end-user licensing agreement, contact information (with telephone number if possible) and at least 8-15 500-word content pages related to your niche, offering valuable information.
- Research and monitor your competion.
- A professional affiliate program with a well known network(s)(discussed next)
- Affiliate content such as banners, text, links, e-mails etc to help affiliates easily promote your product.
- A good commission rate, depending on the competitiveness of your market and how high a rate your competition offers.
- QUALITY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
To recruit these super affiliates, as they are called, you need to be able to offer something with comparable or more value then what they are currently promoting. Consider the following strategy:
- First and most important, a good affiliate never promotes sub-standard products or services as they know risking the trust of their visitors and subscriber base is business suicide. Don’t think about recruiting the top affiliates until you offer products or services of similar or more value then your competitors.
- Second, tempt potential affiliates with high commissions per sale. As high as 75% may be needed to lure a top affiliate. This seems like a lot, but the resultant sales can far outreach your direct sales potential. Furthermore with these customers on your “list”, you can promote other products to them. People that have already bought from you are often 10 times more likely to buy from you again (compared to prospects who have not bought from you before) due to the trust that develops by offering a valuable product in the first purchase.
- Third, the most successful product and service-based businesses online are multi-faceted businesses that offer a low cost product or service initially, at very high commission payouts (to lure the affiliates), which in turn builds their customer list, which then allows them to promote higher priced products or “professional version” services on the back end. This is how companies manage to buy pay-per-click and other traffic at such ridiculously high prices at an initial loss, but still turn a big profit and annihilate their competition in the pay-per-click bidding wars.
As you can see, affiliate marketing involves monitoring and researching your competion. Nobody builds a successful LONG TERM business on the Internet without a good product and a trustworthy “expert individual” or company backing the product. If you can’t offer a product or service that is better then your competition, then you need to position your product uniquely by focusing on its benefits that differentiate your software from your completion. Find your USP!
Begin by signing up with as many affiliate networks appropriate to your product or service to get it out there and seen by thousands of potential affiliate marketers. Simply list it on as many networks as possible with the “hope” that affiliates will see and begin to promote your products.
Don’t miss this step. It’s easy and will contribute to your growth. More importantly, these networks offer payment processing and other services useful to your company, and also offer options to the affiliates you will try recruiting later on. Many of them will have a preference for a particular network, so you want to make sure you are available on their network of choice, to make the process as easy as possible for them. Once you have signed up on these networks, review each carefully and you will find different tools and options they offer that can help you promote your product or service successfully within each network.
Note: Due to most of them offering their own payment processing, it can sometimes be a pain to manage, and will require some effort, but the end result of all this visibility can be very rewarding.
Are you ready to start recruiting your super affiliates? If so, guess what? We are not going to tell you how!
This is because we are firm believers in getting experts to perform tasks that we do not perform. This is especially true with regards to affiliate recruitment since you most likely have only one chance to get those “top 10″ power affiliates, sometimes less in smaller niches. Don’t risk the possibility of instant success and hundreds of sales a month or day, by trying to do so yourself with minimal or no experience in affiliate recruitment. Do yourself a favor and speak to some experts in affiliate recruitment and management. Just like the PPC management firms, they are only successful if you are successful. Your time may be better spent training staff on other types of marketing within your niche.