The Basics
This article covers the essentials of affiliate recruiting including the basics of an affiliate program, meaning, this is for beginner’s. If you’re looking for more intensive information on running a successful affiliate program, and you already have a working knowledge of affiliate marketing, you may prefer the article on lessons learned from an expert affiliate program manager.
Now, let’s get to it!
When you sell products online, a great way to get the word out about your offerings is to have an army of people behind you.
These people will represent your brand, refer your brand, and encourage people to buy your brand. You can end up with loyal customers, who will eventually do that for free.
But, if you want to hurry it along, incentivizing people by recruiting affiliates who will make a percentage of sales to help you promote is the best way to accomplish that.
What Are Affiliates?
An affiliate is someone who is a sales person for you.
The great thing about an affiliate is that you do not have to pay them unless they make a sale.
The way it works is that by using specialized software, that keeps track of sales for each individual affiliate, the affiliate posts links to your sales pages, and when a sale is made via their link they get the percentage promised for that individual sale.
For example, if you’re selling a $250 product such as an information product, the seller (affiliate) will make commissions, which you’ve set up in your affiliate software to pay. Percentages range from 5% all the way to a full 100% depending on the goals of the campaign and the type of product you’re selling.
If you’re selling something that causes you to use personal time, like coaching, you may want to lower the percentage.
If you’re selling something that is a digital product that has already used time, you can give a larger percentage.
So in short, an affiliate is a salesperson who earns a percentage of the price from every single sale that they make using their special link.
Why You Need Affiliates
The best way to make a profit on anything is to sell a lot of it and being that you’re only one person you can only tell so many people about your offerings. But, imagine if you could double, triple, or quadruple yourself by getting other people to spread the word about your offerings? Wouldn’t you do it? The cost of having an affiliate program is minimal. It’s also less expensive than other types of marketing such as placing ads, and what’s most important, if you plan it right, it really works.
- Increase Your Reach – If you know there are other audience members out there who have not heard of your products and services, finding affiliates to help promote your products to their audience will definitely increase your reach and enable you to help more people.
- Make More Money with Less Effort – While it may seem expensive to pay for a sale when you’re dealing with digital products, remember that your costs do not go up with each additional sale, as they do with physical products. You can give a larger percentage of the price and still end up making more money, with less effort on your part.
- Grow Your List With No Financial Investment – Encouraging affiliates to promote you not only increases sales, but once someone buys from you, they’re now part of your audience and are on your list. Now that they’re on your list, you can market directly to them the rest of the items in your funnel.
- Build Relationships – Once your affiliate program gets momentum, you’re going to notice some true movers and shakers. These people make the most sales and the most noise about your products. When you notice that, reach out to that affiliate and offer them a special deal such doing a joint webinar, or offering them a larger percentage of sales to encourage them to do even better. You can become quite close to your affiliate people and even get ideas for new products from them if you’re open to it.
- Grow Beyond Your Own Capabilities – You’re only one person, working from your home office, or your kitchen table. But with affiliates, you can grow a literal army of sales people to promote your products and services, making your job one of management and creation rather than just sales. Eventually, you can grow a business that earns multiple six figures for yourself and others.
The main point to take away is that you can sell more products with other people doing the work for you than you can sell on your own.
While giving out a percentage of profits might seem painful at first, it’s really one of the least expensive options to improve sales.
How to Find Affiliates
Now that you know you want an affiliate program, you need to find affiliates. Finding affiliates is a combination of simply asking people and letting interested parties know about your program.
In addition, you can encourage people to be an affiliate by offering excellent products, top-notch customer service, and a by offering generous commission.
16 Ways To Find New Affiliates To Recruit For Your Program
- Direct Contact – Find competitors and others who market to your audience who do not offer exact products or services as you, and approach them directly. Work first to build relationships with these people in online groups, via joint ventures, events, and more, and you’ll be certain to get a percentage of these people to sign up for your affiliate program and promote your products and services.
- Customers – Your best affiliates can come from people who have purchased from you. Definitely, run an email series for your customers to encourage them to earn money by recommending your products to their friends and family. This is a great way to end up with a true fan as an affiliate.
- Colleagues – Even if you work from home, you are likely part of a group of like-minded individuals online and / or offline. Ensure that you let these people know that you have an affiliate program so that they can choose to join if they want to. You can also, if you’ve used the right type of software, give special commission amounts to people you know.
- Movers & Shakers – You’ve seen them on Twitter, Facebook groups, and probably on numerous webinars and other places. These big earners shake things up. They’re names and they have big lists! Work toward building a relationship with them, then make it super simple for them to promote by giving them a free copy, graphics, and more. Offer to set it all up for them so that all they have to do is collect the money when they make sales.
- Conferences – You can also meet potential affiliates at live events and conferences. Whether you’re a speaker or an attendee, you may meet people who need to offer your products to their audience. Make it worth their while to promote you, by also promoting them.
- Print Publications – Print is not dead! You can place ads in relevant print publications such as work at home magazines and other magazines devoted to people who are interested in this type of income opportunity.
- Social Media – If you join groups and friend people online, ensure that you also connect with potential affiliates. Take the time to get to know them. When it’s appropriate, let them know about your affiliate program. You can also use social media to talk about how excited you are about your affiliate program. The more enthusiastic you are about the program, the more they will want to join to earn money.
- Blogging – Use your blog, part of the time, to speak to potential affiliates. Your blog provides your audience with solutions to their problems. But, once you have an affiliate program, you can also mention how you want to help as many people as possible and your readers can help by becoming an affiliate.
- Forums/Groups – Any groups you’re part of, online or offline, can be great places to find affiliates. The best thing to do is to build relationships with people you think would like and promote your products. Offer to do things for them, make your program so inviting that they can’t resist.
- Online Ads – Another way to attract affiliates is to advertise the program and its benefits. You can use Facebook, Twitter, or even Ad Words to market the program. This works very well, if you have a good product funnel, offer excellent commissions, and a wide range of products for your niche.
- Your Website – Don’t forget that your website is the hub of your business. Keep reminder info and an affiliate program link in a prominent place on your site. This can be short and link to further information about the program details.
- Word-of-Mouth – People like to talk, so if you do a good job taking care of your affiliates plus offering really great products, then super affiliates will notice you and talk about you. Plus, when they start promoting your products, other people in their circle will notice and join too.
- Cold Calls – If you know people already that promote other people’s products, and you’re sure that your product fits in with their niche, go ahead and drop them an email, or even get them on the phone. Be ready to explain what is so great about your product and how it benefits their audience. Plus, explain how you’re going to make it super easy for them to be part of your program.
- Hire an Affiliate Manager – Even if you’re just starting your program, hiring an affiliate manager can help you grow your affiliate program faster. Hire someone who is familiar with your niche, who has connections to promote to super affiliates, and who understands the software you use.
- Directories – There are directories, such as affiliateseeking.com, where you can list your affiliate program. They do require a link back, but it’s free. More than likely, you won’t find as many affiliates this way, since building relationships is very important. However, it does help direct potential affiliates to your opportunity.
- Affiliate Networks – Another great way to find affiliates is to list your products in affiliate networks such as Clickbank.com or JVZOO.com. Marketers who are looking for a product to promote often go there to search for products. Make sure you offer a great program, and a lucrative commission. Include tools to make promoting easy such as videos, articles, graphics, emails, full swipe files, etc.
Finding and recruiting affiliates is only part of starting an affiliate program. Now you need to make your affiliate offer worthy, appealing and timely. Plus, the more unique your offer is, the more affiliates you’ll recruit.
Making Affiliate Worthy Offers
If you really want to get the best affiliates, then you need to make affiliate worthy offers. Make smart affiliates want to promote everything you have because they know that you provide a great product, good customer service, and amazing creatives for them to use to market your programs.
In order to attract the right affiliates, it’s important to share certain types of stats with them so that they know what to expect with your program. Keep in mind, you will not have any stats to show, but as time progresses, you will. As soon as you have this information, start sharing it.
Important Stats, Information & Figures to Share
Some statistics are more important to share than others. If you just consider what’s important to you about your affiliate program, it’ll be easy to see what you need to share.
- Conversion Rate: They like to know how often a visitor to the sales page converts to a buyer.
- Commissions: They want to know how much they’ll make per product and whether there is potential to make more due to your deep funnel.
- Upsell: Let them know if you offer an upsell or not and what the commission is on that as well as the conversion rate for that too.
- Recurring Commissions: If any of your products offer recurring commissions, make sure you highly publicize that, as affiliates LOVE consistent income.
- Incentives: Let them know what type of enticements you offer for successful sales.
- Product Reviews: Do you allow affiliates to review your product free? Hint: Once you have stand-out affiliates, it’ll pay off to let them have a free copy.
- Visitor Value: Let them know the target market for the product and the value it offers.
- Training: While affiliates aren’t your employees and aren’t on your staff, you can still offer a lot of training to help them make more money promoting your products.
- Collateral: Ensure that you have plenty of professional graphics, copy, and information that enable your affiliates to promote your product.
- Program Description: Ensure that you’re very succinct and inclusive in the description for your program.
Anything you can let them know at a glance is important to share. You can offer more in-depth information as well, but the information right up front should include what they need to know to figure out if your product is what they want to promote to their audience.
Keeping Affiliates Happy
Once you recruit affiliates, it’s also important to keep them happy. Happy affiliates will be more likely to promote your products.
They may even tell other people about you too.
That’s why developing relationships, communicating, and following up with your affiliates is so important.
Developing Relationships
In business, one of the most important things you’re going to do, aside from creating amazing products that your audience needs, is building mutually beneficial relationships with other people.
In order to build relationships with affiliates, you need to understand them as a separate audience.
They have different needs from the people that buy or get your products.
To help you build your affiliate relationships, here are a few things you want to do.
- Communicate – Use email, webinars, teleseminars, and other forms of communication with your affiliates. Some of them will prefer email and others will like the one-on-one feel of webinars. When you keep your affiliates abreast of new products to come, changes in old products, sales, and other information, they’re going to be that much more likely to stick with you and promote you because of the trust that you develop.
- Listen – Communication is a two-way street. Therefore, it’s imperative that you also open the lines of communication in reverse. Ask them questions, conduct surveys, and connect one on one with your highest sellers. For example, you can have a trigger number of sales that elevates your affiliates to your affiliate inner circle, where you can help them with all kinds of things.
- Ask for Feedback – When you send out new products to your affiliates, ask for feedback, so you can make the product better before launch. You don’t have to send it to everyone who signs up for your program. Choose a few affiliates for feedback, based on your knowledge of them and their reputation in the business.
- Show Your Personality – People do business with those that they like, know and trust. The more you can connect with your affiliates and find ways to show your character, the more you can enhance this effect. Add a little personal information in your emails, webinars, and live videos, and live events. Seeing and hearing you can make a huge impression.
- Be a Helpful Resource – When you really want to have a real relationship with someone, you seek to be helpful. Even if the assistance has nothing to do with your business, being helpful and pointing people in the right direction will go far in helping you solidify your relationships. While you may not be able to pay as close attention as you’d like to each individual affiliate, you can use the information and tools at your disposal to build relationships that will stand the test of time and encourage even more sales if you’re open to it. Use email automation, set up training series, host live webinars to talk about your new products and to get ideas, and otherwise be open to new ways to connect with your affiliates.
- Keeping Track of People You Talk To – When you are seeking to impress people, one way to do that is to remember who you’ve talked to and what you talked about. A good way to do this is to use some sort of customer relationship software or help ticket software. This is true even if you aren’t really providing customer service to your affiliates due to a product they bought. The help desk software will keep track of all your conversations so that you can easily stick to your promises.
- Hosting Contests – A good way to kick off some relationship building is to plan and host a contest for your affiliates. Give away some iPads, cash, and depending upon your price range, perhaps a free trip. The more outrageous you can be with your contest, the more attention it’ll get.
- Do What Needs to Be Done – Affiliate’s needs depend on their audience too. Suppose an affiliate contacts you and asks you to do a live webinar with them. It is to be played “live” multiple times. This is a good promotional item to offer your top affiliates. It will help you develop relationships as you get to know each other as you work together on the webinar and get other people involved.
Finally, the most important thing of all is to follow up. Even if affiliates contact you infrequently, make sure that you do contact them. Connect, encourage, and connect more. Always deliver top-notch services, products, and tools.
Affiliate Software & Tools
A variety of tools and software can be used to recruit affiliates. Consider all the things you need to do – keep track of people, your products, affiliates’ commissions, and payouts. You also need to be able to give them marketing materials easily. Try these tools and you’ll do great.
- Website Building Software – The best website building software right now, hands down, is self-hosted WordPress. You can use a page builder like Elementor to help you build out professional quality pages in minutes, or look for premium WordPress themes (or use a free one to start).
- Website Hosting – There are many different website hosts, but you need a good host that offers security, safety, and great customer service. I strongly recommend you choose a business class host to guarantee your site speed is always fast (Google, and users, prefer fast loading pages).
- Landing Pages – While you can use your regular WordPress installation to make a perfectly legitimate landing page, if you want the bells and whistles consider signing up for a service such as Leadpages, or GetResponse. Note: Elementor Pro for WordPress includes professionally-designed landing page templates for a low annual fee, or get it included with your professional web host.
- File Storage & Delivery – The best file storage and delivery software is, in my opinion, Google Drive. It’s free, widely used, and very flexible. It enables you to deliver your products easily and quickly.
- Email Marketing Software – There are some standard programs, as well as newer options that look great. Try Aweber.com, MailerLite, ConvertKit.com, or GetDrip.com. It depends on what you think you need.
- Affiliate Shopping Cart Software – Different programs have various features, but a few have everything you need. Try Amember.com if you want to be in complete charge of your products and affiliates. Try one of the networks like JVZOO.com if you don’t want to host or run the software yourself.
- Automation – If you want to connect your apps together and create some amazing automation, Zapier.com is great software to try.
- Paying People – Right now, PayPal.com is the standard. However, there are other options like Stripe.com. Most shoppers on the net are used to using PayPal now. PayPal lets you set up “mass pay” so that you can pay more than one affiliate at a time by uploading a spreadsheet.
- Communication – There are many ways to communicate information to your affiliates. You can invite them to a private Facebook group, or you can create a sign in using software like Amember.com. This software has an affiliate area, which can house messages, graphics, and other promotional materials. Keep in mind, a central place works better than using regular email.
- Help Desk – There is also software that you can set up that both your customers and your affiliates can use to get help. Software like Manage Engine’s Service Desk Plus, Freshdesk, Zendesk and osTicket are some strong options to consider.
- Graphics – You’re going to need plenty of graphics to help promote your products and make affiliates happy. Try using Canva.com to help you. What’s great is that if you get Canva for Work you can save your branding and upload new fonts.
- Promotions – You will want to use different types of software to promote your business, such as HootSuite.com to help you automate much of the work of promoting on social media.
- People – While people aren’t often thought of as tools, they are. They’re part of your resources that you need to consider. Think of hiring an affiliate manager who understands software and how everything works so that you can focus on product creation.
Finding tools that will help you run your affiliate program will give you more time to create products that your affiliates can promote. Much of the work that you put in up front will pay off later when your affiliate program seems to run itself, and you’re raking in the money.
What to Do Now
The best things to do are to figure out what affiliate software to use, get it setup, and then build relationships.
Build relations with your own audience and with potential super affiliates.
Make your affiliate program the best you can.
Offer great commissions, excellent marketing resources, and deliver an amazing product to become successful.
You can also start by using one of the affiliate networks instead, such as Clickbank.net and JVZOO.com.
But, consider building your own affiliate program using software that helps you build relationships with a self-hosted program or software.
The reason is that you own that, someone else owns the networks.
But, they are a good place to begin while you build up your affiliate army.
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