There are a lot of different ways people find affiliates…lots of internet marketing strategies that revolve around finding people to promote your products for you. My thinking is that you should use several different ways. You can tap your existing customers and you can also find affiliates who aren’t customers. By tapping both these areas you have the best chance of getting good affiliates and making money online.
One great way to get affiliates is by having your customers promote your products without them really actively doing anything. You provide them with an affiliate link that they can put in their emails, sales letters, Social Networking sites like Facebook, their blogs and websites. So all they have to do is add that link to whatever ways they are connecting with people and they are then promoting your product.
Another way is to go out and actually recruit people to be your affiliates. This is a three step process.
Step 1 is to research potential affiliates
Research makes it sound fancy, but all you are doing is trying to find people to promote your product. You want to look for websites that offer similar products or services to yours…where your product would complement theirs.
You can type in keywords in Google and do some research that way.
You can also ClickBank to find affiliates. Start by searching through the ClickBank marketplace to find products and services that are related to yours.
Once you have found websites that look like they might be a good fit you look to see if they have their contact information right on their website. If not, then you do a “who is” search…or a search on GoDaddy.com and you get their contact information.
Step 2 is to recruit the affiliates
Now that you have identified potential affiliates it is time to contact them to join your affiliate program.
One of the easiest ways to get to someone is to be able to say, “Hey I bought your product and I think it is awesome…it might work really well for my customers and I think mine would work well with your customers.”
Better yet, buy their product and start promoting to your list before you contact them…then make 10 or 20 sales…or 10,000 sales, depending on how big you are. That is really the quickest way to get someone’s attention to help promote you-to become your affiliate-is to have already made them some money!
Another thing you can do is approach people who aren’t making money from their websites and let them know they can! So you can create basically a sales letter for your affiliate program and really gear it around how they can make money from their existing website. Lots of people don’t even know they can do that, so it can really get their attention. The key to this is to tailor to their website…it doesn’t work if you just send out a generic letter.
Step 3 is to teach them how to become affiliates.
Depending on your niche, you may contact a lot of people who either don’t have a product or don’t know how to become an affiliate-or both! So you tell them how to join your program and the steps that they will take to place the ads you give them on their website.
You can build your affiliate network by tapping into your customer base and finding new affiliates. By using both internet marketing strategies you will have more affiliates-and more success!
