Need to recruit affiliates in a short space of time

[jakeTeemill]

Hello,

My company is pretty new to affiliate marketing. We're half way through building the tech for our in house program and we're looking to launch at the end of the month but we're really struggling to acquire affiliates.

The goal of the program is to increase sign ups to our print on demand platform. We have a good landing page, we offer a good reward per sign and we also offer rev share for each sale the store makes. The issue is locating affiliates who wants to promote our company. Most of the affiliate networks don't accept our program model, as they can't take commission as it's a free service. My current method is reaching out to potential affiliates in our niche, this is really time consuming and doesn't recruit the amount of affiliates we need before we launch.

Does anyone else have any tips or strategies? It would be a shame to build the technology required and then not be able to launch the program because we don't have any affiliates.

 

[T J Tutor]

We have access to over 100k affiliates here alone. There are a number of hubs like us.

Recruiting affiliates requires a good skill set for finding the affiliates, connecting with the affiliates, helping the affiliates, and then recruiting them based on relationship building.

You speak of rev share, but you have no "on ramp". You have to provide something in the way of an offer for a lead. Lead gen offers would get affiliates interested and also some networks.

 

[jakeTeemill]

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

My concern with forums is that they are quite expensive. I want to ensure if I'm spending over £1000 for a vendor account, I will see a good return of affiliates.

What is the best process for finding affiliates? Currently I find blogs, Instagram influencers, and reach out directly, personalising the email, but offering our program to them. This is quite time consuming and won't allow us to meet our targets

We offer £10 per successful sign up, for a free platform.

Our goal is to get 100 affiliates by the end of March. At our current rate we will be lucky to get 50...

 

[T J Tutor]

if I'm spending over £1000 for a vendor account

Why do you have to pay 1k pounds for a vendor account?

My concern with forums is that they are quite expensive.

Expensive in what way?

Currently I find blogs, Instagram influencers, and reach out directly, personalising the email, but offering our program to them. This is quite time consuming and won't allow us to meet our targets

While there are additional vital practices necessary for recruiting affiliates, those efforts you describe above are also vital efforts and your competitors do engage all of them. It is all part of successful recruiting. What you describe above is actually a part of every affiliate managers daily tasks.

Our goal is to get 100 affiliates by the end of March. At our current rate we will be lucky to get 50

You need to set a higher goal and you need to never stop recruiting affiliates. Once you implement an affiliate platform for lead gen in your company, you need to grow it like any other department in your company.

 

[jakeTeemill]

An upgrade to a company account is $1,497.00?

Okay -I'm consistently sending 50-60 outs a day. Would you suggest aiming for more or focus in on quality, rather than quantity?

So 1000 affiliates by the end of March. This would involve more than one affiliate manager or an extremely effective affiliate recruitment strategy.

 

[T J Tutor]

An upgrade to a company account is $1,497.00?

Our business listings are FREE! The Company User Upgrade is just that, an upgrade with additional features and benefits.

So 1000 affiliates by the end of March. This would involve more than one affiliate manager or an extremely effective affiliate recruitment strategy.

This is the right track in my mind. Remember, 10% of your recruited affiliates will produce 80% of your affiliate successes.

 

[anandsrinivasan]

You speak of rev share, but you have no "on ramp".

Hi, would you mind elaborating on what you mean by this?

 

[Graybeard]

So how may affiliates do you have already on 2023-03-07 (today)?

We're half way through building the tech for our in house program and we're looking to launch at the end of the month but we're really struggling to acquire affiliates.

If you want to do business here the process to get vetted as a resource is free --you haven't even tried that. Paid display advertising is available. The are many other boards/forums of affiliate marketing interest also. You could pay for a listing at offervault.com and there are more websites that will list your program out there.

In the past I have worked at building 2 affiliate programs, I am NOT looking for a job BTW, however; I know what the efforts are involved in recruiting 1000's of affiliates. Trade shows, constant paid advertising and offering the 'right' values in compensation.

You could start with a MMO campaign of network ads --just to brand your network or program. Spend a few thousand on that. You are new and have no credibility in the market --name recognition matters a lot. Experiment with some PPC and CPM native ads.

It could cost $100 an affiliate to recruit anyone that will produce and easily 10 times that for real productive affiliates. How much money you have banked for the recruitment project will determine the real results.

It took us (at both companies) almost about 1 year to add 1,000 new affiliates --and you want to do it in a month? If you have the right personnel and $300,000 to spend in the marketplace maybe it can be done that fast.

 

[T J Tutor]

Hi, would you mind elaborating on what you mean by this?

He didn't provide a path for affiliates to join an affiliate program.

 

[T J Tutor]

So how may affiliates do you have already on 2023-03-07 (today)?

If you want to do business here the process to get vetted as a resource is free --you haven't even tried that. Paid display advertising is available. The are many other boards/forums of affiliate marketing interest also. You could pay for a listing at offervault.com and there are more websites that will list your program out there.

In the past I have worked at building 2 affiliate programs, I am NOT looking for a job BTW, however; I know what the efforts are involved in recruiting 1000's of affiliates. Trade shows, constant paid advertising and offering the 'right' values in compensation.

You could start with a MMO campaign of network ads --just to brand your network or program. Spend a few thousand on that. You are new and have no credibility in the market --name recognition matters a lot. Experiment with some PPC and CPM native ads.

It could cost $100 an affiliate to recruit anyone that will produce and easily 10 times that for real productive affiliates. How much money you have banked for the recruitment project will determine the real results.

It took us (at both companies) almost about 1 year to add 1,000 new affiliates --and you want to do it in a month? If you have the right personnel and $300,000 to spend in the marketplace maybe it can be done that fast.

This is as accurate as can be. Like anywhere on the planet. If you want to jump to the head of the line, you better have a budget that can subsidize the expense.