3 Affiliate Recruiting Tips to Start Using NOW

In my previous article about finding high-quality affiliate marketers, I wrote about six down and dirty tips that would allow you to start putting another revenue-generating plan to use.

Now, I’m giving you three more tips that are so easy to implement, you can start right away.

After all, the faster you can connect with efficient, eager, independent brand marketers, the faster you can start boosting your revenue for the rest of the year.

Let’s dig into the three tips, along with why it’s important to take a proactive stance in recruiting high-quality affiliates:

1. Advertise Inside Industry Publications

Let’s face it: No one will know that your company offers an affiliate program if you don’t let them know! Don’t make the mistake of believing that the microscopic affiliates script at the bottom of your website is doing a good enough job at generating the type of marketers you want.

For one thing, your marketing team has no way of knowing what type of affiliates are being generated from the affiliates link located at the bottom of your site’s footer. Second, finding high-quality affiliates is a lot like finding a high-quality rental home: You’ve got to begin your search in an exclusive neighborhood.

When it comes to finding a figurative affiliate marketing neighborhood, your marketing team’s best bet is to start focusing on affiliate marketing and e-retailer industry trade publications. These include titles such as:

• Feed Font
• Electronic Retailer
• Stores
• Target Marketing

…and plenty of others.

You can use these platforms to advertise and stress the benefits of your performance marketing program. Quality marketers will want to know that signing up with your program is worth their time, so don’t be stingy with your words when you’re producing your advertising creative.

Even better, you can advertise your performance marketing program by submitting useful and informative content that assists prospective marketers in reaching their goals. Think of titles that help them to consider what to look for in a marketing program. Help them with other aspects of their business such as:

• Content topics
• How to engage blog followers
• Best practices for a review site

…etc.

2. Avoid Using Slick, Over-The-Top Advertising Verbage

While you start making a nice list of strategies you can start implementing, here’s something that you can stop doing: Don’t advertise your performance program in a manner that will only attract cash-seeking bottom feeders who make your brand look bad, kill revenue, and waste your software resource cost.

Examples of what you want to avoid includes:

• Turn your computer into an ATM machine!
• Best Affiliate Payouts Ever!
• Buy A New Car In X Days!
• Easy money
• Start earning now!

Not only will these phrases attract all the wrong types of marketers, these are the type of phrases that high-quality affiliates run away from. Experienced, educated performance marketers have read all of the cliched recruiting phrases, and they’ve read all of the horror stories about marketing network scams.

Don’t set your brand’s performance program up for failure before it’s given a chance to thrive.

3. Specified Affiliate Marketing Forums

A quick Google search under the term affiliate marketing forums pulls up over 2 million results, with 8 keyword phrase references at the bottom of page one. So, the good news is that there is no shortage of affiliate marketing forums dedicated to helping marketers of all levels learn about new programs, and other sorts of information.

But, here’s the bad news: Not all forums are created alike, and there are some forums that no reputable brand should recruit on or have anything to do with! So, it’s important for your affiliate manager or your marketing team to perform research and identify reputable, high-level forums which contain a host of high-level, high-quality performance marketers.

More Reasons Why It’s Worth Your While To Recruit Premium Performance Publishers

If you’re still not convinced that recruiting high-quality marketers out of the gate is a better time investment than encouraging an open-door marketing policy, then consider these:

Premium Marketers Deliver On Measurable Results

Independent marketers are only paid after they’ve delivered a qualified sale to your retail platform. At the very least, they’ll want a return on their marketing resource investments. So, they’ll often hustle harder, making sure that the time they’ve invested in helping to create sales translates into dollars.

They Promote With Passion

Independent marketers understand that if they’re going to invest much of their free time promoting a product or service, they should at least like what they’re promoting, or they’ll experience burn-out very quickly. So, they often work with brands they like and care about. This enables them to promote with passion.

Branded Marketers Have A Built-In Following

Savvy marketers and performance publishers think about long-term sales. Therefore, they’ll brand themselves and create a strong, demographic-based following at the grass-roots level. In turn, this will increase your advertising reach, organically.

They Help To Close Revenue Gaps

Since performance publishers direct money into retail companies by using all of their own resources, they help to close a company’s revenue gaps, and they create a fortified wall of money during unforeseen and inevitable financial lags.

They Market With Agility

Performance publishers can immediately implement creative marketing strategies that a retailer’s marketing team often can’t. This allows for them to market faster, since they often don’t have anyone to answer to. They’ve also come to understand what types of marketing messages work with their core audience, along with what doesn’t work.

It’s always great to be able to generate revenue without draining your marketing resources. However, it’s in the best interest of your brand and your long-term revenue strategy to form partnerships with high-quality affiliate marketers right from the start.

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