Affiliate marketing is big business and has become one of the most powerful strategies for generating leads, sales, and ecommerce revenue.  How can you tap into this highly-lucrative industry to get a slice of its ever-growing pie? Here are five proven strategies that can help you find and recruit affiliates to your marketing program. 

PublisherFinders.com offers affiliate programs the support they need with specialized tools designed by experts in the field to locate web publishers and influencers and enable them to take the next step to recruit affiliates as ambassadors and influencers for their marketing programs.

It’s hard to overstate how important it is to recruit quality affiliates. Obviously, without quality affiliates, you don’t have a worthwhile affiliate marketing program. However, recruitment can be one of the most time-consuming and labor-intensive tasks for an affiliate manager. Between identification of prospects, outreach, and follow-ups, you can end up spending most of your time on recruitment-related activities.  

Additionally, there are different ways to find and recruit affiliates, but some strategies have been more effective than others. Let’s look at five common ones;

1. Poaching– Identify affiliates that are providing excellent results for your competitors or are prominent in your niche. Reach out to them and pitch the reasons they should hook up with your affiliate program.

2. Identify Influencers– Who in your target market would have the strength to direct their audience toward your business? Let them know why their followers would appreciate your products and services. Be prepared to discuss pay-for-performance models and what’s in it for them.

3. Cross-Program Recruitment– Partner with affiliate managers who steer affiliate programs for brands that sell products and services related to yours, and cross-promote your programs to each other’s affiliate bases. Certainly, care must be taken to prevent any conflicts. Your products and services may actually fit nicely into their existing mix, or even replace a poor performer.

4. Related But Different– Don’t limit yourself to reaching out only to affiliates and influencers in your immediate niche. Your competitors may not have thought to do this and as a result, your competitor will have no presence in this space. Creative thinking and brainstorming for this strategy will go a long way. Example: you sell coolers directed to beach goers. In the medical profession, both patients and professionals need coolers, road trippers need coolers, and so on.  

5. Affiliate Program Directories– Saving the best for last. Studies confirm over 20% of marketing professionals use affiliate program directories or databases to find new web publishers for their affiliate programs. It’s necessary to have a reliable source that will furnish you with a solid, up-to-date directory of publishers, influencers, and affiliates. You need a source that can offer you thousands of potential affiliates using your heuristics. PublisherFinders.com is that very source! This software platform is positioned to provide customized affiliate search lists and optimized results.

The mission at Publisher Finders is to be a quality source of affiliates, web publishers, content creators, and influencers. They provide their users with the information they need to connect with and recruit vetted affiliates to join their affiliate programs.

PublisheFinders.com gets its strength from its creators who come from ecommerce, digital marketing, and affiliate marketing industries. Their experience and knowledge has consolidated over two decades of expertise in the field! Content creators are added to the Publisher Finders database regularly, and users can receive notifications when a new affiliate matches their search criteria.

To summarize the five proven strategies that work in finding and recruiting affiliates to your marketing program, the best approach might be to start with number five and touch base with PublisheFinders.com.  Currently, there’s a promo, 14-day free trial, and no credit card is needed. Reach out today while it lasts!