Recruiting Affiliates
[private].[/private]Affiliates are going to play a major part in your business if you’re going to be selling digital products such as info-products and software. Affiliates will be directly responsible for a large portion of your traffic and will have a huge impact on your sales.
A group of experienced and successful affiliates is worth more than their combined body weight in gold. You need to treat them that way too!
Give your affiliates absolutely everything they need to promote your product (more on this when you reach the “Tools For Affiliates” section) and reward them handsomely when they refer you cash-in-hand customers.
When it comes to digital products, affiliate commission rates of 50% and higher per sale are not at all out of the ordinary.
Recruiting affiliates will only get easier as you become more and more experienced in internet marketing and start to get a few products under your belt. However, for your first product or two you are going to need affiliates and this is how you can get started.
First, be sure you’re offering great commission rates of 50% or higher on your digital products. If you are working alone and do not have to share profits with any partners, I would even recommend paying out as high as 70% per sale to your affiliates. This lets potential affiliates know that you mean business and that their work will be appreciated and greatly rewarded. After all, once the product is created there is no additional overhead cost if it’s in a digital format. You can resell it an infinite number of times!
A great place to start recruiting affiliates is by shopping your site around and giving out complimentary copies of your product to select marketers. I also highly recommend making yourself known on some of the more popular discussion forums for internet marketers. Here is a list of a few great forums that I visit frequently myself:
There are many more, but these few will get you off to a great start.
In addition to participating in online discussion forums and making connections in that manner, you can also find affiliates by submitting your websites and products to affiliate networks and affiliate directories.
In order to have your product or site accepted in many of these directories it has to be of extremely high quality and content. Some of these networks and directories even require that your site already be up and running so that you can supply some statistics and conversion rates prior to being accepted.
My absolute favorite network for getting instant access to an army of veteran affiliates is called ROI Rocket.
ROI Rocket is a network where advertisers (affiliates) and publishers (product owners/creators) come together. Getting your offer/product added to ROI Rocket is not as difficult as you might think and the long term benefits are unreal. Imagine a network of many thousands of affiliates all seeing your offer and getting the chance to promote. It’s that powerful!
There are lots of similar networks like ROI Rocket, but none are as dedicated to seeing your product succeed. I have had the chance to meet and work with the owners and upper level employees of ROI Rocket (Matt Frary & Zac McGrath are awesome, friendly, and knowledgeable guys to work with!) and I know they take your success seriously and personally.
Using a network such as ROI Rocket is a top secret that even many of the IM guru’s are not yet onto and if you can leverage your offer against these types of networks properly, you’ll be setting yourself up for maximum exposure and conversion.
If you participate in a few forums, create a valuable and desirable product, submit your program to multiple directories, offer high payouts and rewards to successful affiliates, and are willing to do some real-world marketing by networking with other internet marketers and entrepreneurs there is absolutely no way you cannot attract great affiliates by the dozens.
Below I have also put together a short list of a few of the top affiliate directories online. Take a few minutes and skim through these directories and submit your own affiliate program wherever possible in attempts to get the word out to as many affiliates as you can!
Here is the rundown of top directories where you can find good affiliates and submit your own affiliate programs:
(In order by most popular sites according to Alexa rank as of 11/3/2007)
#1.) 5 Star Affiliate Programs
#2.) Affiliate Scout
#3.) Affiliate Seeking
#4.) Affiliates Directory
#5.) Affiliate First
#6.) Refer-IT
#8.) 2 Tier
#9.) Affiliate Guild
#10.) Affiliate Base
Working online as a full time affiliate marketer is great, but it’s darn near impossible to get started this way without some advanced training or the helping hand of an industry insider. Creating your own product and managing an affiliate program is much easier than learning the intricate art of actually becoming a super affiliate.
Plus, by creating your own product and running your own affiliate program you will be creating your own army of affiliates to be called upon for bigger and better product launches for your future projects. I hope you realize that you’re also doing something else covertly behind the scenes during this whole process. You are building a monstrous list by capturing leads on your squeeze pages and sales pages as we discussed in the copywriting section!
By taking this route, you’re earning money from your own product sales and making yourself a better and better affiliate by building a constantly growing and extremely valuable list of opt-in email subscribers! Rather than trying to start from scratch as an affiliate marketer, try to stay focused during this affiliate recruitment phase because you’ll begin to get sidetracked and clouded with ideas about running off and trying to become an affiliate marketer instead of a product creator.
Just remember, by doing the little bit of extra work this early in the game you’re getting started on the right foot and soon enough you’re not only going to have a product selling off the digital shelves, but also a list of email subscribers made up of BUYERS. This email list is going to enable you to successfully promote offers to your subscribers and become an affiliate marketer very soon!
If I lost it all and had to choose one thing and one thing only to take with me and use in a fresh start it would be my email lists. Once you start building a list of your own and start running some offers to your list you’ll see what I mean! There’s nothing easier than sending off an email promotion and then watching the commissions roll in and the route that I’m guiding you on, the route of creating your own product and building your own list from scratch, is the exact route that many of the top affiliate marketers have taken to get to their present day status.
The road map to success is right under your nose… stay on course!
