From Wiki

So you've got your affiliate programme up and running, but how do you attract affiliates to promote your business? Obviously a competitive commission rate and healthy Programme Performance Indicator’s (PPIs) are a great way to get the interest of the affiliate community but what are the best ways to promote your programme to get the widest selection of affiliates on board?

Here at Affiliate Window (AW), we have made a simple guide which looks at all of the ways you can advertise your programme to affiliates, and will help you identify ways in which to find the most relevant affiliates for your business sector.

Direct Recruitment

Affiliate Window has a range of promotional tools available to merchants, all of which can be utilised for recruitment of affiliates already on the network. You can add a recruiter link to your communications, which takes new affiliates to your sign-up page. Simply copy and paste the format below, making sure you replace XXX with your unique AW merchant ID.

https://www.affiliatewindow.com/signup/index.php?merchant=XXX

Weekly Affiliate Newsletter

Published every Wednesday, this HTML newsletter is sent to every affiliate on the network and is therefore the perfect place to speak to potential partners. Content includes ‘Offer of the Week’, ‘Merchant of the Month’ and ‘Featured Promotions’ as well as a weekly merchant interview. To submit copy for inclusion, e-mail our web content manager at promotions@affiliatewindow.com.

Offers Blog

Available 24/7 to any merchant or affiliate with an AW account, the Offers Blog is a dedicated resource for AW affiliates giving them instant access to the latest deals, codes, sales and new product information. Subscribing affiliates can even receive automatic live updates on particular sections, including offers emerging from specific sectors, allowing your promotions to reach a much wider audience! It can be used by merchants to communicate incentives and at the same time attract new affiliates. For a step-by-step usage guide click on 'Offers Blog' under 'Communication Tools' in the merchant administration area.

There are also a number of other ways you can look to source and attract new affiliates to your programme which are additional to the methods offered by the network.

a4u Forum

An online community where affiliates, agencies, merchants and networks can all share ideas and opinions regarding the affiliate industry. The a4u Forum is the perfect place to promote new programme launches, upcoming promotional activity and any changes to your programme. It can also be used to recruit new affiliates by simply posting a wanted-style ad in any of the dedicated sub-forums.

Search Engines

An easy way to identify strong potential affiliates is to find those that appear on Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask under keywords relevant to your business.

Those that are not merchants and appear in the sponsored listings are most likely to be affiliates; there will even be affiliates in the natural listings too. If you are unsure as to whether a site is working as an affiliate or not then there are two simple ways in which you can find out.

The first is to use existing links on the site to determine whether or not the publisher uses affiliate tracking links. You should be able to right-click on any outgoing links and choose the option ‘properties’ from the menu that appears. You will then be shown the destination URL and here is where you will find the tracking, if there is any.

This diagram shows an Affiliate Window tracking link on an affiliate website

You can see in the example above that underneath the image is a link that looks like this:

http://www.awin1.com/awclick.php?awinmid=425&awinaffid=56192&p=http://www.post-a-rose.com/prod_cat/product_page_5148.html

The first part of the URL tells us which network the link is tracking through; in this case www.awin1.com tells us the affiliate is working with Affiliate Window. If the affiliate is not using AW links then here is a list of URLs you might see when researching affiliates in this way:

The second way to identify who runs a particular site is to use the free service Who Is which can provide you with details of the registered domain owner.

If you find a site you like and you cannot find a ‘contact us’ section then Who Is can often provide you with an e-mail address so that you can contact the owner of the website. You can then start up a dialogue and hopefully get them to join your programme.

Indirect Recruitment

Here we have listed a few quick and easy to implement ideas that could help you grab the attention of the passing affiliate.

Affiliate Recruitment Page

Firstly, add an affiliate information/recruiter page to your website. The affiliate visiting your site is more than likely already engaged with your products and is therefore more open to the idea of earning commissions on sales.

A perfect example is Prezzybox affiliate page which can be found here.

Affiliate Blog

If you are able to setup a blog for affiliates, complete with useful information and offers, then it is definitely worthwhile doing. This will attract affiliates that are keen to build strong relationships with their merchant partners, as well as pro-active affiliates who are keen to have all the latest promotional methods and information at their fingertips.

A great example of one is The Bathroom Affiliate blog (Big Bathroom Shop, Cheap Suites and Next Bathrooms).

Dedicated blogs are not only a great way to communicate effectively with your existing affiliate base; supplying your affiliates with the correct tools to promote you, as soon as possible, will result in stronger, better organised campaigns.

Twitter

Get a Twitter account purely for affiliate updates. You will be surprised by the number of affiliates who love to Tweet and the number of merchants already making the most of this social networking phenomenon.

Great examples are Dorothy Perkins, Kitbag and Wickes.

Remember you can follow us on Twitter too, just check out @AffWin to see what we’ve been tweeting.