Online Affiliates Recruiting Process

This post is geared towards those of you who already have an affiliate program setup to promote your product or service via the internet but not getting the desired results. I will be writing a separate post on how to setup an affiliate program from scratch later on for those of you who don't have one or are not sold on the idea yet.

So you you took the time and setup an affiliate program for your business and you are now looking to get affiliates to sign up and start promoting your site. Unless you have a lot of brand recognition that will get people to your site and inquire about your affiliate program directly, you will need to go out there and start promoting it in order to make sure that potential affiliates know about your offer and potentially signup.

• Contact Website Owner / Potential Affiliate and explain the following key advantages of your Affiliate Program:
  
  

  i. What makes your product/ service unique and sets you apart from competitors

  ii. Discuss technical details of your website, any awards or key technologies that you use.

  iii. Make sure that you mention that you offer affiliate support staff that will always be available to assist

  iv. Mention details about the affiliate system you are using and how the back-office reporting system works

  v. Explain that they will be getting accurate statistics and full performance reports for the business they introduce to you

  vi. Offer to assist webmasters with optimizing their website to promote your product. Some people may have reservations about how well they can do this on their own.

  vii. Offer help on design including the creation of custom creative and marketing tools (banners, scripts, website design, text copyright, widgets) specially designed for the affiliate’s website or online marketing requirements. Free assistance and online support in website development

  viii. Most importantly make sure that you emphasize that they will receive their commission payments quickly and efficiently. Affiliates want to make sure that once they start generating business for you they will be getting paid quickly and efficiently.

• Discuss the commission calculation program that best fits their needs (Revenue Sharing, CPA, CPL)
• Assist them with signing up to the Affiliate program and guide them through the registration process
• Once approved, the Affiliate should receive an email with his login details for the affiliate system
• The Affiliate will now be able to log in and generate tracking links, access statistics, available creative material and other marketing tools.
• Any request for a customized creative material or other marketing tools must be sent via email to his account manager

The Affiliate is now ready to start promoting your business. Its important that you follow up and support him until you are sure that he is confident enough to do it on his own. Experienced website owners that may have dealt with affiliate programs before will need almost no support, but there are those who will be new to this and it will be your responsibility to guide them and assist them to be successful.

Don't forget that if your affiliates are successful it means that so are you. If they are generating commission it means that they are successfully sending business to you.