The most important thing in having an affiliate program is knowing how to find the right affiliates and actually getting them. This is the key to the success of the program.
Do you know how to do it?
There are several ways to find affiliates and recruit them. In this article, we will talk about the best ways, how you can apply and develop them, and you can find a tool that will help you in the process.
Who will be your affiliates?
Affiliate marketing is ideal for promoting a product or service through another person, gaining both of you in the process.
It is important to know who the people who will become affiliates of your program will be. There are different types of affiliates, and they can all work in other areas.
Affiliates can range from bloggers, website owners, social media influencers, and even existing customers. They are all potential affiliates for your program, whether new or not.
Ways to find affiliates
After knowing who your future affiliates may be, it is crucial to find and recruit them. Here we will explain the best ways to find them.
1. Use niche blogs
Bloggers are the ultimate affiliates. They have already built their community and have a loyal and trusted audience. Recommending a product or service on your website is extremely beneficial because it will attract customers who are within your audience and who trust the person and what they recommend.
For this type of affiliate, it is advisable to look for a blogger who has a target audience, and who has a niche very similar to yours.
In this way, the relationship between the content and what is being promoted is much more direct, and it is more likely that there will be a positive response from the audience.
Finding niche bloggers is not difficult. To do this, you can follow the following recommendations:
- Start a search with keywords of the industry to which your product or service belongs. Then, you can perform a niche keyword search, which will be much more specific and will help you narrow down the group.
- Search for bloggers who answer questions related to your niche of interest.
- Search for reviews, and therefore bloggers, about the niche of interest. An example might be lists of the best products or services. This option is ideal for getting bloggers who can add affiliate links to your site or who can feature the product.
- Use a combination of keywords plus the word “blog”, “review” or “expert”. This increases the chances of finding a blog in your search.
After you find a niche blogger, provided you already did some research on your niche, you can measure the data and track it.
This way, you will know how well they could work as an affiliate for your program.
2. Connect with social media influencers
Influencers or social media personalities are another affiliate par excellence. Like bloggers, influencers create communities of people and followers who are loyal to their content, what they share, and what they recommend.
Many content creators make their platforms a business, so they will see profit by becoming affiliates of a product or service.
Selecting influencers as affiliates is not just a matter of numbers and followers. In doing so, it is ideal to monitor the response they have within and outside their community. In this way, the product or service is more likely to be associated with something highly trusted and reputable.
It is of utmost importance that these personalities have an audience that matches what you are offering. In addition, make sure that the voice of these people is authentic, that they offer value to their communities, and that they are actively involved in them.
3. Search for similar websites
A good affiliate can be a website that is similar to what you offer, without becoming a competitor. With this search strategy, you ensure that the audience of this website is much more targeted and relates even more to what is offered.
This strategy is excellent for B2B and B2C marketing. When performing it, it is important to remind potential affiliates of the benefits that can be gained by both parties, as that is the goal of becoming an affiliate.
4. Partnering with experts
For this form of strategy, you should partner with influencers and experts in the industry to which you belong.
This goes hand in hand, in the same way, with bloggers and influencers, but also with people who, although they do not have digital platforms, do have high visibility in the media.
These can be speakers, opinion leaders, and experts.
An influencer or expert is trustworthy, so it is easier for other people to use or buy what they recommend or use.
It is always important to be sure of how influential these people may be, their reputation, and the response of others to them.
5. Use social networking groups and forums
This strategy is similar to blog search, except that you will have to join different social networking groups to recruit affiliates.
These groups can include the forums of different industry sites, Facebook or LinkedIn groups, Reddit pages, Quora, and even Twitter spaces.
In addition, time can be spent searching and finding groups related to active affiliates.
One thing that is recommended when joining groups is to first create a trusted presence in the group instead of going straight to the recruiting phase.
In this way, the trust of the people in the group will be greater, and recruitment is more likely to be successful.
6. Invite existing customers
If you have existing customers who are satisfied with your product or service, it pays to add them to your affiliate ranks. They can become great salespeople, while receiving a benefit from you.
These affiliates already know all about the product or service, and already trust it, which is why they are the best choice to sell it. If a “salesperson” inspires confidence in a customer, it is very likely that the customer will end up buying.
7. Affiliate search tools
Although these tools require another type of monetary investment, they are ideal for finding the ideal affiliates for the niche of interest, even better than using SEO Tools.
They do a faster and more efficient job added to gathering user data, and statistics on the affiliates you find.
There are several tools that find affiliates. AffiliateTrack is a tool that finds affiliates in the iGaming industry.
It’s currently in beta version and incorporates different functions that support communication with affiliates, identification of pages with good traffic, and making complete lists of contact information of affiliate sites.
These tools are ideal for optimizing the search for affiliates, speeding up the process, and obtaining good results.
8. Visibility
Something extremely important is to promote your affiliate program. There are several ways to do this, considering the many types of Affiliate Links available for your strategy; here are some of them:
- Add a link to the affiliate program page in the menu of your web page.
- Advertise your affiliate program on social networks
- Place the affiliate program link in your social media bios
- Promote via email, including all the necessary links
It is important to know what type of affiliates go best with what you offer or with your program. In this way, you can choose the most effective search strategies.