Building Your Affiliate Forces
Welcome to our monthly Come As You Are Teleconference! In my last posting, Going for The Gold! on TMGold Marketing, I outlined how to…Prepare Your Website For Affiliate Sales. Today we’re going to look at how to Recruit New Affiliates Into Your Program. First, you need to determine which Affiliates have what it takes to be active members on your team.
Question? The tall bald man in the long black trench coat and the sunglasses.
“Should we ask the Oracle?!”
Ahh……no. The first step is actually an easy one. We need to visit our competition’s website(s) to see who their affiliates are. If they are already making money promoting a comparable or even loosely related product. It seems only logical that they might want to double their earnings campaigning for yours, also. When we visit these sites, how can we distinguish who those Affiliates are?
Yes, the bearded man with the big buttons on his pajamas.
” I’m Michael Goldman, Affiliate Manager for Nitro Marketing. You can find out who is linking to the sites by using reciprocal links software such as Axandra’s Arelis. This type of tool can also search by keyword and provide other helpful features such as sending a customized email directly to their webmaster and keeping track of who you’ve already contacted“.
“Another way to find affiliates is to search popular keywords for your niche at Google, Yahoo & MSN. Just use a search term suggestion tool such as GoodKeywords to identify the most popular terms. Then search for those keywords to find the top ranking sites. Since they have such a good ranking for high traffic keywords you can assume they get a good number of visitors and may be good affiliates for you.”
“Finally, don’t stop at the first couple of pages of search results. Since these sites were returned for related keywords even the sites on page 10 could be helpful. Just because they don’t have a high search engine ranking does not mean they have no traffic.
Other ways to identify prospective affiliates are to see what sites are using paid advertising and which affiliate products your competition is promoting. Sites in your niche who are advertising either online or offline should be considered a bit more marketing savvy than most webmasters. It’s likely they know how to create traffic and may be good partners.”
A very enlightening answer, Michael. Could you possibly tell us about, The Different Types of Affiliates?
“There are basically 4 different types of affiliates: The first is a content rich website or blog with a loyal following. While most do not generate a significant amount of traffic individually, together they can produce a steady steam of sales. Plus, they are fairly easy to find and recruit.”
“The second type is commonly called super affiliates. They either have a large email list or a high traffic site. When a Super Affiliate promotes your site you’ll immediately see a dramatic increase in sales. For this reason they’re highly sought-after & difficult to recruit if you don’t know how to approach them properly.
Search engine optimization experts and pay-per-click professionals are the third type of affiliates. Instead of charging a fee they’ll use their skills in exchange for a sales commission.
Unless you get very lucky you’ll not be able to recruit them…they’ll find you if your site and products have enough profit potential. Finally, the fourth type of affiliates are services such as comparison shopping sites, coupon sites, and incentive sites. Each has different requirements and can effectively generate traffic on a pay-per-sale basis.”
Thank you, Michael.
“Should I go into contacting affiliates?”
We’ll cross that viaduct when we get to it! Yes, the gentleman in the funny hat sitting at his piano?
“What are we gonna cross?”
A viaduct.
“Why a duck? Why not a chicken?”
The duck works cheaper. All this discourse is making me hungry. Let’s take a break and raid our refrigerators. See you in 30…
By David Spangenburg
Tags:Affiliate Marketing,Affiliate Products,Affiliates,Nitro Marketing,TrafficRelated posts
Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Products, Affiliates, Nitro Marketing, Traffic
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