Now, that you already know what are the most efficient avenues to announce your affiliate program, you can start to focus on onboarding. In other words, you’ll have to outline your overall recruitment strategy.

No matter how strong your brand is, how many or which affiliate networks are you going to use, or how efficient your creatives are, your recruitment strategy will always be the most important factor in determining whether or not your program succeeds. I will say that again: if you want to make money with an online affiliate program and you want to successfully marketing an online affiliate program, you need to develop a well-balanced, sustainable recruitment strategy!

There are two different recruitment methods: active recruitment and passive recruitment. Let’s take a closer look at each one!

8 proven active recruitment strategies for affiliate marketing advertisers

As you probably figured out, we are talking about active recruitment when the potential prospects sign up because you reached out to them. I am talking about a continuous never-ending process based on iterative activities that have one and only one goal: to identify and to engage new affiliates, while you are focusing on the quality of affiliates rather than the quantity.

Let’s see what are the 8 best active strategies for discovering new prospective affiliates:

1. Email marketing

It’s a well-known fact: email marketing is extremely efficient. If you have a nice email list, this should be your very first step.

I don’t want to make this course even longer than it is, so I won’t discuss here any email marketing strategies, but I am going to give you a few basic tips that will help you to craft better recruitment emails:

• Short introduction; tell them who you are and explain the reason for your email; don’t forget, they didn’t ask for your email, so keep it brief and don’t get carried away.

• The details of your affiliate program; outline the most important things (cookie life, payouts, payment models, conversion rates, bonuses, etc) furnishing the prospect with concrete data.

• Competitive advantages; say a few words about what makes your affiliate program stand out from the rest (tools, APIs, creatives, co-branding opportunities, etc); underscore the unique features, but don’t abuse their time.

2. Social media

Obviously, the first thing you want to do, is to reach out your own fans and followers to let them know about your newly launched affiliate program, but if you want to unleash the real power of the social beast, you’ll have to make a bigger leap trying to locate, to reach and to leverage some other niche-specific influencers with a loyal following.

3. Keywords

With so many awesome tools out there we can easily forget the most obvious and most simple solutions … the search engines. All you have to do is to perform some smart searches to locate websites that rank high in the keywords that are relevant and important to your business.

Obviously, you’ll have to exclude the competitors from the search results, but trust me, you are going to find a ton of good prospects including review sites, bloggers, comparison shopping engines, data feed websites, niche communities, affiliate marketers, etc.

Another great way to produce more prospects is by setting up ongoing monitoring processes for relevant keywords and key phrases. This method will allow you to receive alerts every time when new, relevant content has been published somewhere.

4. Similar websites

Once you have found relevant websites using your most valuable keywords, you can go further to find even more similar websites to the ones you have already discovered.

5. Affiliate networks

If you’ll follow my advice, you are going to use some affiliate networks too. Many of them offer free or paid in-built recruitment opportunities, such as featured blog posts, email newsletters, social media announcements, invitations for other advertisers, etc. These are excellent options to find and engage new prospective advertisers. ShareASale for example has a great recruitment tool.

6. Symbiotic recruitment

Symbiosis is a cooperative relationship. You know, if you scratch my back i’ll scratch yours …

If you can find good and reliable affiliate platforms that sell products or serviced related to your niche, but not directly competing with you, a reciprocal promotion tactic might be useful for both sides.

7. Your customers

If your affiliates are doing their job efficiently, you are going to get more sales, and that means more satisfied customers. These customers are representing a new valuable opportunity for you, one that is often overlooked by site owners and affiliate program managers. If you don’t want to make the same mistake, you should always keep in mind, that you can promote your affiliate program in your sales receipts, on your thank you pages, in your transactional emails or post-purchase notices, etc in order to transform your existing customers into new affiliates or brand advocates.

8. Software tools

Fortunately, there are many useful software-based solutions that can help you to find affiliates who are strong in your niche, or better yet, those who drive business to your competitors.

OK. Now let’s see the passive recruitment …

And I have to warn you: the term “passive” could have a negative connotation, but I can tell you from my own experience: these factors are literally crucial if you want to make money with an online affiliate program and if you want to successfully marketing an online affiliate program! So let’s see …

5 vital factors and tactics that will influence your passive recruitment results

Passive recruitment. Another quite straightforward term. It happens when the affiliates apply into your affiliate program because they have found you. In this case we are talking about strategies in which you set up avenues, funnels and processes one time, trying to make your affiliate program easily findable, truly transparent and more attractive. Basically, you have two main goals: to increase the visibility, the exposure of your affiliate program and to help to encourage the prospects in becoming actual affiliates.

Let’s see what are the most important 5 factors and components that can help you in your passive recruitment efforts:

1. Findability

Obviously, this is the most important factor, and you’ll have to leverage any available method or communication channel to create a powerful online presence for your affiliate website:

• Search engines; it’s a well-known fact, affiliates actively use search engines to find new advertisers. Needless to say, SEO is crucial for your success and if you want good rankings you’ll have to make serious and constant efforts to indulge the search engines. Additionally, you should always use keyword-based SEM strategies (paid search campaigns) to promote your affiliate program.

• Social media; you’ll have to create and to maintain a constant social media presence dedicated to your affiliate program; You are going to need outstanding program support accounts on every major social platform (in addition to your brands main social media accounts!). You are going to need a Facebook business page, a Facebook group, a Google Plus community, a LinkedIn group, a Pinterest business page, Twitter business cards, Twitter customer support, etc.

• Paid advertisements; PPC campaigns, paid social media ads, printed advertisements, traditional offline advertising channels, etc.

2. Transparency

It’s important to provide clear and detailed information about your affiliate program to those prospects who – in one way or another – have finally arrived to your website.

The most important informational element is the affiliate program description. You’ll have to place on your homepage a well-labeled, clearly visible and easily accessible link pointing to a detailed description page. While many experts will say that you should put this link in the footer of your website, I am going to give you a different advice: use two links, one above the fold and one in the footer. Also, don’t forget to make your description page really “descriptive”! Provide detailed information about every single important element: cookies, payment models, competitive advantages, creatives, tools, payouts, restrictions, etc.

3. Provided value

OK. They have found you and they have read the super-detailed, easy-to-digest description page. This is the point, where you need to stimulate them to actually become your affiliates, and the easiest way to do that, is by offering them … extra value.

The only limitation is your imagination, but here are some proven methods and tested ideas for you: online resource center, exhaustive FAQ section, your own blog dedicated to the affiliate program, a wide variety of astonishing creatives, co-branding opportunities, downloadable free stuff, valuable educational materials about affiliate marketing, user created content, etc.

4. Second tier

Adding a second tier to your affiliate program is another excellent and extremely efficient method to make your platform even more attractive. Basically, it allows you to compensate affiliates that refer other affiliates to you, and believe me, it’s an incredibly efficient incentive. If you’ll do it, you’ll have to choose between recurring payouts and one-time payments. In my opinion a flat-rate one-time bounty is the best solution for second tier functions.

5. Newsletter

Fact is: not everyone touched by your recruitment efforts will apply into your affiliate program right away. This is why you’ll need to create an engageable contact point for further communications, and the best way to do this, is by offering a subscription opportunity to your affiliate program newsletter. So, make sure, that you have a nice call-to-action on your homepage, somewhere above the fold …

And that's it my friends!

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