Recruiting Affiliates

One of the most time consuming element of affiliate marketing is recruiting new affiliates. The marketplace for merchants has become far more competitive and recruiting new affiliate is vital.

• Draw up a list . Create yourself a list of sites that you want your adverts to appear. Use your industry knowledge to start the list.

The second place to start looking is on the search engines. Search for your competition you'll see lots of sites linking to them.

Use the search engine link tools such as link to find out more people that links to them.

link:http://www.the-uk-shop.co.uk

Start to use some clever thinking to find angles into your visitors. If you sell MP3 players search for mp3 players, cheapest mp3 players, best mp3 players, discount mp3 players. The list goes on.

If your selling mp3 players to males who are aged between 18-30 then you want to try some of their hobbies, football sites, gadget guides. Search for many of the content sites.

If your able to then you can target some of the competition or freebie sites. The conversions aren't always the best but they deal with big volumes of people.

• Contact Affiliates . You need to tell these affiliates or potential affiliates that you have your programme. The easiest way is to drop them an email or go through the sites contact us form.

Send them an email about who you are and what you have to offer. Make sure that your email has something that stands out in the subject line.

Don't mass mail all your target list in one go as you may find that there are issues that you need to resolve for affiliates to promote.

• Feedback . You will start to get responses from the affiliates so make sure you keep an organised list of who you've contacted and when. Also what they replied to you and if there are any action points.

You will get responses that come back and say yes I'll promote you if you can give me a feed of all your products. Or I need a special offer for it to be featured on my site. Try and deal with as many of these as you can and be as responsive and helpful as possible..

• Re-contacting Merchants . Webmaster, sales, and marketing departments can be very busy and yes they do forget to answer emails. There is no harm resubmitting your first contact to them asking if they received it.

• Offers . So you offer 10% to your affiliates and so do all your competitors. Is an affiliate really going to swap his links from what he knows is working? Probably not. Give the affiliate something special like 3 months at a higher commission rate. Even beat that commission on a permanent deal. Maybe the affiliates needs an offer to feature on his most visited pages. Give them an exclusive voucher code.

• The Snow Ball Effect. The one thing about attracting affiliates is that as soon as one person starts to promote you then the other affiliates will see you. Affiliates are a close community and if they start making money then other affiliates will know about it.

• Affiliate Link. You will naturally attract affiliates to your site via a number of methods so make sure you have a page telling them about your affiliate programme.

When attracting affiliates there is one thing to remember and that there isn't thousands and thousands of sites out there who will promote you and drive sales. On average you will find that there a couple of hundred affiliates in each industry capable of driving sales and of those affiliates you'll find that less than 10% will traffic the largest proportion.