When you begin your affiliate search and recruit efforts, which ones will you choose? How will you know which publishers will be best for your brand? Regardless of your niche or industry, no matter the size of your affiliate program, there’s one thing you’ll want all of your publishers to have in common: quality.

What does that mean? First, let’s look at what affiliates can do when working with a brand. Partnering with publishers such as social media influencers and bloggers can help reach several advertising objectives. When working with your affiliate program, publishers can:

• Improve Brand Awareness. You want to get the word out about what your company has to offer, of course. But getting that word out to the right viewers is key. Affiliate publishers can promote your brand to the people who have shown interest in your niche or industry, who like similar products, and who may become your future customers.
• Drive More Targeted Traffic. Affiliate marketers not only advertise to a target audience (those who are likely to want your products), they are great at sending those targeted viewers back to a site. Whether you want more views, sign-ups, subscribers, or purchases, affiliates excel at motivating their audience members to take action.
• Save Time and Money. There are numerous ways to advertise online. All have their benefits. But working with a team of motivated, promotion-ready affiliates can save you time when you’re getting your program going – and may cost less and yield a greater ROI than some other forms of online advertising.

There is no doubt that a good affiliate program can make the life of a marketing manager a lot easier. Affiliate marketing can be a slam dunk for brands and companies who want to advertise more effectively. But affiliate programs are all about quality. When putting your program together or adding a few new affiliates, you want to make sure that they have certain characteristics that make them quality affiliates for your brand. So, let’s take a look at some of the traits a high-quality affiliate will have:

• They’re team players. Good affiliates will see themselves as a brand partner. Great affiliates will see themselves as part of your team. The best affiliates not only strive for their own goals but have an interest in doing what they can to help you reach yours.
• They’re dependable. Quality affiliates post on a regular schedule, post content that’s consistently strong, regularly engage with their audience, and work to grow that engagement.
• They’re creative. Audiences love content that’s fresh and interesting. A great affiliate has a knack for coming up with creative and original ways to promote to their audience, and can interact with future customers in a way that’s valuable to them.

Finding quality affiliates is important. And that’s why we’ve created the Publisher Finders tool. As one of the largest publisher databases available, you can use this easy online tool to search for and evaluate potential affiliates for your program. Let us know how we can help you get started, or try a free 14 days on us. Get the quality affiliates you’re looking for when you use Publisher Finders.