How to Find & Recruit Affiliates to promote your products and/or services

1. Give A Fair Slice Of The Pie

The more generous you are with your affiliate payout the more interest you’ll attract. Think about affiliates like partners and make sure you’re making it worth their while to promote your business by giving them a fair slice of the pie.

Thanks to Michael Zipursky of Business Consulting Buzz

2.  Attract Affiliates With Great Graphics

If you want to get affiliates, you have to have great looking banner ads. Have these professionally designed.

Affiliates are also going to want high converting offers, so you need to invest a little time and money into testing your banner ads before you put them out there. Get a free $100 Adwords credit and test out your banners on Google’s Display Network.

You want to use ads with a good Click Through Rate, or no one will be vising your site.

Thanks to Chris Chong of Link Building Service

3.  Get Affiliates from Professional Associations and Trade Shows

Oftentimes your professional association has a listing of agents that are seeking new lines that do not compete with those that they already sell. Attend a trade show in your industry. You may find agents/affiliates interested in representing your product.
Know what you want them to do and compensate them accordingly!

Thanks to Denise Beeson of BaySierra Financial, Inc

4.  Your Customers As Affiliates

What we’ve found is that the simplest and easiest affiliates are our existing customer base. Happy customers tend to be best referral source and are the cornerstone of our business. When a customer signs up for our services, we institute a drip campaign, ending with the ability to become a partner with our organization. This way our clients end up getting their subscription for free while adding an additional perpetual revenue stream for all their referrals.

Thanks to Rick Hymanson of Shugo

5.  Use Rewards and Gifts to Make Every Customer An Affiliate

We have two versions of the affiliate program. 1) if a customer refers a friend, customer and friend both get a free cartridge. An e-mail which says “I found this great site for ink cartridges. Mention my name and get a free cartridge.” is very effective. 2) A customer can apply for a unique code. They can email their friends with the same email except the link also contains that code. Referrals get a free cartridge. The affiliate gets 10%.

Thanks to Izzy Goodman of Complete Computer Services

6.  Build a Solid Reputation with your current Affiliates the word will spread Fast!

Half of the battle in affiliate marketing is recruiting affiliates. The number one way to attract quality affiliates is to build a solid reputation as an honestly run program with high conversions. Affiliates talk amongst themselves and news travels fast. They don’t want opportunity to pass them by so if they hear about a good thing, they jump on it.
In some networks, it takes manual labor to find the right affiliates but in others, the tools exist to at least reach out to top performers and let them know your program exists. Find out what recruiting options are available in the network of your choice.
The old fashioned way isn’t necessarily the best way in the eyes of affiliates because they get bombarded by so many requests. But if you have no other options, do a search for your main keywords and start combing through the search engines page by page to find sites that have potential. Managers will find this as time consuming and tedious but it will eventually yield results.

Contacting affiliates through their “Contact Us” forms is probably the most unobtrusive way but many of them still won’t like it. This is where tact and professionalism will be tested. If you find a site that is perfect but it has no contact information, you could look up their information on whois.net but remember, you didn’t find any contact information on their site for a reason, they probably don’t want to hear from you.
One of the better ways for recruiting is to start building a community of prospective affiliates through social media. Give them a personal touch and relevant information about your program. At the least you should have a company Twitter account and a Facebook Fan Page. You will learn that your customers could turn out to be some of your best affiliates. Spread the news about your program EVERYWHERE!

Look in the network for advertising opportunities. All networks have options for display advertising or email blasts. Also, look for the same in the affiliate forums. If you cannot start your own forum, at least you can advertise where the affiliates live online. Anything the merchant does for branding or publicity away from the affiliate program is the frosting on the cake. Explore all other online and offline marketing channels to help the reputation of the company and the visibility of the product to the consumer.
If you don’t already use Google Alerts, you should. Setting up a daily scan of your brand name, top keywords or personal name will give you instant access to who is talking about you and what you care about. This is a huge benefit to affiliate managers monitoring for affiliate sites and to keep track of how affiliates are promoting your brand.

Thanks to Greg Hoffman of Greg Hoffman Consulting

7.  Create Personal Videos to do your Recruiting!

We use virtual assistants to find a list of potential affiliate partners based on criteria we are looking for. We like to go after bloggers and social media rock stars when we are starting a promotion to get the buzz out. From here we like to make short individualized videos for each person we are connecting with. We talk about something we may have done in the past together and then talk to them about the promotion. It works wonders and only takes an afternoon of shooting. Well worth it.

Thanks to Greg Rollett of Radically Ambitious