How to find and get affiliates to promote your products

I think this is one of the most asked questions I see in affiliate marketing Subreddits.

“Where do I find affiliate marketers to promote my products?”

Just like in any business, it’s hard to find good talent. The best and most successful affiliate marketers are natural salespeople and experienced, competent digital marketers.

There are a number of ways to attract affiliate marketers and I will get to that but first, you need to make sure you have a good foundation if it’s going to work.

Your product and your program

Your product should be amazing

First and foremost, If your product is not good, no one will buy it, let alone want to promote it for you.

Affiliate marketers want products that sell themselves and provide real value to their audience.

If they’re going to represent and refer their audience, they want to make sure that their audience will get value for their dollars.

Offering attractive commission structure

The companies that get the most out of affiliates have a generous commission structure.

When you are generous and offer a high motivating commission for your affiliates they tend to work harder and invest more time and money in your product.

Avoid offering a low commission of 5-10% unless your products are very costly($200+). Try to get your commission as close as you can to 25-30%. Some programs offer 50% or even 100% of the first product in a sales funnel with multiple upsells.

Generally, the highest commission rates are offered on information products & software.

This is because you, as the owner of the product, can produce as many of them as you want at little or no additional cost after the initial development of the product, and also because you have no overhead in terms of maintaining stock or shipping – for a product like an ebook or other downloadable, you can just keep on selling as long as there is demand for it.

Because you only pay commission on actual sales made, the return on investment from this type of marketing is always good.

Your affiliate program is sales channel

The most successful affiliate programs are treated as their own partner sales channels. Some companies like Shopify, for example, have a very comprehensive partner program with dedicated community managers, a partner website with affiliate focused content, blogs, and other partner resources.

You don’t need to have all of this to get started but the more you put into your affiliate community, the more you will get out of it.

Create a dedicated Partner Program web page

The main objective of this page or site is to help them help you sell more products.

Your page should include the most important facts about your program and the clearly written terms of your program.

This page should include these main points:

Price of your product & the Commission – this is how much money the affiliate is going to get out of each sale of the product. This should also include who gets the commission (the first, the last or both referring affiliates)
Upsells & other products – Are there upsells or a sales funnel that includes other products. Clearly, state what the affiliate will get for each of these.
Cookie length details – how many days or months does the cookie stay active, Some programs are forever whereas some are for 24 hrs.
Commission payments – details how and when your affiliates get paid. Is it weekly, after so many days, weeks or months.
Link to the product landing page
Provide clear guidelines on regulatory compliance. This is especially important for certain niches, such as adult dating, credit companies, finance etc.

Make sure to include a link to your affiliate program on your homepage so that people can find your partner program. This will help you increase the chance that more people will notice your offer and sign up for it.

Help your affiliate partners with useful resources

Create graphics and banners they can use on their website or on social media. Create these in the formats that each social network likes. A Facebook image is different than a Twitter image and Pinterest image.

Write social media messages, case studies, blog posts, press releases, articles and promotional emails they can use. Provide screenshots of your application or product images they can use. If you can provide raw videos, this can separate you from a lot of the other programs out there that don’t.

The more tools and resources you can provide your affiliates the easier it will be for them to sell more product.

Finding, Attracting and signing up affiliates

If you don’t have the above setup, don’t bother trying to attract talent until you do. Like I mentioned above, you need to have a great product, and your affiliate program commissions and resources need to be set up before you start looking for partners.

Here’s where you can start to look for affiliate marketers to help promote and sell your product.

Networkers, bloggers, and influencers in your niche

Do your research and find people you think would make great partners that already have an audience that can benefit from your product. Send them personalized offers, ask them to promote your affiliate program. Visit websites that you think best complements your service or product and send them an email to encourage them to join your program. Send them brief stats on your program if you have them.

This can be a time-consuming but much more personal and effective approach to finding the right people.

This is all about building relationships one at a time. Bloggers in an industry tend to know each other, so it can be handy to build up a network of influencers in your niche.

Learn Tim Ferris’s 5 Tips for emailing busy people if you are new to cold emails.

Join Affiliate communities

This gives you the possibility to get in touch with your potential affiliates in an inexpensive way. Try to help them with their problems, write some tips and tricks for them and you can indirectly promote your own affiliate program as well.

Reddit groups

There are lots of Subreddit groups on Reddit that are supporting affiliate marketers. There are affiliate marketers asking all kinds of questions on how to get started, how to grow and also other affiliates engaging and helping out the community. This could be a source for finding affiliate marketers to help you sell your product.

Check out these groups

Facebook groups

There are many Facebook groups for affiliate marketers, bloggers, influencers, and entrepreneurs. Aside from just affiliate marketing focused groups, there are also groups for some of the more active products and affiliate teams.

For when you join the ClickFunnels affiliate program, you get invited to the ClickFunnels Avengers Facebook group.

Products like SamCart also have a Facebook group for Joint Ventures and Affiliates. These groups are generally focused on promoting the one product and are a support community for affiliates that are promoting the product.

That being said these groups are full of affiliate marketers and could be a place that you network and find affiliates that might want to promote your product. Be careful and don’t spam as you will likely get kicked out if you do.

Here are a few of the more active and larger marketing-related groups on Facebook with entrepreneurs looking for new opportunities.

Badass Marketers and Founders by Josh Fechter
Millennial Entrepreneur Community by Arne Giske
The Rich20 Something Community by Daniel DiPiazza
Traffic & Copy by Vin Clancy & Charlie Price
Entrepreneur Parents by Craig Cherlet
Humans of Online Business by Regina Anaejionu
Screw the Nine to Five Community by Jill Stanton
Content Marketing Lounge by Nathan Collier
The Front Row by Jennifer Lehner

Top-Tier Affiliate Forums

There are loads of affiliate forums out there with people looking for good offers. Most forums are free, and attract freebie seekers. When it comes to forums, it’s probably best to stick to places like STM forum and Warrior forum.

Protip: All of these groups get a lot of spammers trying to sell and drop links all over the place. Don’t be this person. Affiliate marketers can spot a salesy spammer from a mile away and you will get called out or banned. Engage in the groups. Be humble and ask questions.

Affiliate marketing niche directories

List your affiliate program page on these affiliate marketing directories.

Who’s promoting your competitors?

If you know who your top competitors are do some research to find out how is promoting them. Use this trick to see who is linking to your competitor websites. Put “link:” in front of your competitors websites and see who links to them like this.

link:craigcherlet.com

Then ask if those people are willing to promote your product as well. Give them extra incentives to if you can.

Recruit affiliates by doing Pay Per Click campaigns

If you have some money to invest, consider using Google Adwords, Yahoo! or Facebook ads to recruit new affiliates. You can target certain niches and recruit a large number of affiliates.

Create a sales funnel to make sure your PPC campaign captures your leads so you build a good list of affiliates.

Join one of the many Affiliate Networks.

There’s a lot of Affiliates that sign up for these networks so it’s not from think there are affiliate leads Within These companies. The only way you get access to these Affiliates though is if you’re selling a product using this network.

There are many of them, here is a list of the top 30 affiliate networks.

Attend Affiliate Marketing Events

There are special affiliate marketing events held all over the world. Some big ones and some smaller ones.

The most important is probably the Affiliate Summit, where you can find a lot of high profile successful affiliates to meet, network with and learn from.

At these events you have the opportunity to network with potential affiliates and present your program in a more intimate one-on-one way.

Here is a list of the top affiliate marketing events to attend.

How to screen Affiliates to Get the best results

Now that you have attracted affiliate marketers to your partner page and have them sign up, you may want to consider screening your affiliate applicants.

You want quality over quantity every time but that can be hard to do.

Here are some tips to follow:

If you’re selling a product on CPS (cost per sale), your vetting process doesn’t need to be as strict. You only pay them when they put money in your own pocket. Unless you want to control your brand (for example you don’t want it on adult affiliate sites), you can let them do whatever they please.
Ask for earning reports if they make you suspicious. Affiliates that can push volume without getting pulled from offers will send a screenshot of something they’ve run before.
Ask how they’ll promote offers (i.e search, email, PPV, social, mobile, etc.). This helps you weed out affiliates that plan on promoting offers with adult traffic, incentive traffic etc. (unless of course, you don’t care).
Ask to see an example landing page. You need to make sure the lander isn’t misleading in any way (for example, claiming your product is 100% free when they’re compensated for a free 7-day trial).
Provide clear guidelines on regulatory compliance. This is especially important for certain niches, such as adult dating, credit companies, finance etc. It will only get more important as your offer becomes more popular.
Ask for referrals if they lack strong earnings and you’re unsure of them.

In closing

I hope these tips help you find and get affiliates to promote your products. There’s a lot of money to be made as an advertiser/ product owner working with affiliate marketers. Find the right ones and you could get access to massive audiences and a whole bunch of new customers.

Keep in mind though that the sad reality is that most affiliates won’t meet your expectations.

If your product is great and your offers convert then you’ll have no trouble finding and recruiting affiliates.

One last thing…

I want to make sure this guide is as helpful as it can be. If there is anything I’m missing in here or you have a question I didn’t answer, please leave a comment below so I can answer it and make this post better.

2 Comments

These Successful Affiliate Marketers explain Why so many People fail at Affiliate Marketing. - Craig Cherlet on June 14, 2019 at 9:30 am

[…] How to find and get affiliates to promote your products […]

Taking the Affiliate Bootcamp and the One Funnel Away Challenge! - Craig Cherlet on June 14, 2019 at 11:42 pm

[…] How to find and get affiliates to promote your products […]

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