So just having an affiliate programme isn’t enough, especially if you’re running your programme off your own website – so totally inhouse.
You need affiliates!
Affiliates are going to be the lifeblood of everything that you do within your programme and will make your programme successful.
Here are some ideas on where to look for affiliates – because they are hiding in plain sight.
Add an Affiliate Programme page to your site
You do need to do a little bit of work to find them so first thing I’d say is, make sure that your affiliate programme has its own page on your website.
Normally what you’ll find is most people have a link on their footer, or within a sort of small navigation system on their site, which will be easy to find.
Share it
Also, ensure that you’re sharing your affiliate page in as many places as possible – so in your email footers as well as an email linking to the website page.
Share it in your social media in your groups on your company pages. It doesn’t have to be a hard sell, but it could just be some kind of basic status update to say you now have an affiliate programme running.
And then that part of it is actually done – because then people are hopefully going to stumble across it and they’ll click and apply. This becomes an inbound affiliate thing.
Advertise it
The second thing to do is actually physically advertise your programme. So one of the things we like to do for clients to get them that initial boost of affiliates, is to do some promotion, usually on Facebook.
Facebook ads can work really, really well for this. You can segment by all kinds of different options, and then you can put your ad in front of people and again drive them to the signup page. That signup page needs to include information about the commissions, what the product is, and all that kind of stuff.
But yes, you do your social media ads can send people to that, so we tend to prefer initially to use Facebook. You can do some Google pay per click, but I wouldn’t really worry too much about that.
Look at the Competition
The next thing to do is look at other affiliate programmes in your niche. Or, have a look at your competition and see if they have affiliates and who they are. Then approach them directly.
Google Research
Use Google, do some keyword searches in Google. Search for your product, search for things related to your product, and make sure that you look through maybe the first three pages of the results so don’t just stick to who’s on page one.
Have a look at page two or page three because those guys can move quite quickly to page one, given the right circumstances so don’t ignore those. Basically, you’re looking for sites that will promote other brands – you’re not looking for brand owners necessarily, you’re looking for review sites, you’re looking for content sites.
Look to see if they’re already promoting other people’s affiliate offers and again then find the contact page. Get in touch with them and invite them to join your programme.
Your Customers
Finally, I’d say contact your existing customer base. You never know who your customers are in-depth, you may find that some of them might have a significant social media presence. Or, they might have a great website with a whole bunch of traffic that’s relevant to your marketplace.
So do make sure that you’re communicating with your current customer base to tell them about your affiliate programme and how they can sign up to join.
Publisher Discovery
There is a fantastic tool that can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you and help you find affiliates that are already working in your industry. Why not check them out and take advantage of a free 7 day trial.
