Q: What is your #1 strategy for finding, attracting and enrolling new quality affiliates into your program?
A: Over the years, I’ve come to find that there is no single method that is effective across the board for recruiting affiliates.
Each program has certain attributes and value propositions that can be highlighted in the affiliate recruiting process, but the way you go about things will depend on a handful of variables.
You must determine which types of affiliates are the best performers in your affiliate program. Go through your roster of current affiliates and identify them by the way they market you: email, PPC search engines, content sites, data feeds, blogs, etc.
Then, pull together aggregate numbers for the performance by each method. This will help to guide you as to which types of affliates you should target.
When you have done this, test a variety of methods to gain insight as to which efforts yield the best results: phone calls, banner ads, direct mail, etc.
It’s essential to educate yourself on which affiliates perform best for your program and the types of solicitations that are most welcomed by them.
The shotgun approach of mailing large lists of Webmasters is not only illegal (unless you follow all of the CAN-SPAM provisions), but it aggravates lots of affiliates, and generally as a weak return.