How to Recruit Affiliates and Turn Your Customers into Brand Advocates

Affiliate marketing is an extremely popular method used to promote products and drive sales. However, for your affiliate marketing campaign to be successful, you need to find the right affiliates for the job.

Having lackluster affiliates won’t bring you enough benefits to make investing in affiliate marketing and starting an affiliate program worth it, which is why recruiting affiliates is one of the biggest challenges marketers face.

When it comes to affiliate marketing, quality is often more important than quantity. Good quality affiliates can be hard to come by, but here are our nine tips to help your affiliate recruitment strategy.

9 Tips for How to Recruit Affiliates

We feel as though it is important to preface these tips by pointing out that not all of them will work for everybody. Which recruitment strategy and tips work best for you depends on your business, its available resources, and its objectives.

That being said, let’s get stuck into the tips so that you can find out which one to implement in order to run a successful affiliate program.

1. Run an ad campaign

Running ad campaigns that advertise your affiliate program is an active and direct outreach technique for finding affiliates. Create a targeted email marketing campaign that targets people in your industry or people that have already been searching for affiliate programs to join.

Make sure to keep your ad copy clear and concise with targeted keywords. As for the visual aspects, make sure that your ad stands out against the website or social media platform it will be run on. However, don’t assault the senses. Taking a more natural approach to advertising often sees more results.

Don’t waste your time and money running ad campaigns that aren’t efficiently converting. To ensure that your ads are as effective as they possibly can be, it is a good idea to do A/B testing. A/B testing is a technique where you use multiple variants of an advertisement to see which one yields the best results.

Running ad campaigns with a link to your affiliate landing page (more on this later) not only increases your chances of growing your affiliate program, but it also increases the traffic to your website and your potential for making a sale.

This approach to recruiting affiliates can be expensive, but it can also offer you excellent results. If you’re looking for a more cost-effective advertising strategy, then go for pay-per-click adverts. With this type of advertising, you only pay when a person actually clicks on the advert.

2. Consider your customers

Your customers already know your product inside and out, and if they are loyal customers, then they already love your product (perhaps nearly as much as you). So then, who better to be your affiliates than your customers themselves?

The benefits of using customers as affiliates are that they can offer potential customers an inside look into your products, and they can provide them with more authentic content. You also already have their details in their database, so reaching out to them to see if they are interested shouldn’t be too much of an issue.

Creating an automated email campaign that targets satisfied customers and offers them a chance to become affiliates should be at the top of your to-do list when you’re thinking about how to recruit affiliates. Cold email outreach tools can be a time-saving option for you to expand your reach beyond your existing customer base. To work out who your satisfied customers are, you can either segment your contact list based on predetermined factors, or you can simply send out a feedback survey to everyone on your list.

Another method of turning customers into brand advocates is to include a link to your affiliate program in every single ‘welcome email’ or ‘confirmation email’ that you send out. Recruiting affiliates doesn’t need to be a time-consuming task, it can be as easy as simply adding a link to an email.

3. Reach out to opinion leads and influencers

The best thing about recruiting influencers and opinion leaders to be your affiliates is that they already have a lot of sway and respect within their community. This means that their audience is more likely to trust what they say when they talk about your business. Using people of authority in your campaigns is a basic principle of persuasion used by affiliate marketers worldwide.

This strategy can be difficult depending on the level of influencer you’re reaching out to. The more followers they have, the more they are being bombarded with affiliate offers and other potential partner offers every day, and the harder they may be to reach. However, sometimes the best influencers to partner with aren’t the ones with the highest follower count.

Micro-influencers offer the same benefits, just on a smaller scale with a more targeted niche. In fact, influencers with a smaller following often have closer relationships with their target market, and their opinions are therefore more trusted.

No matter the size of influencer you decide fits your objectives, you need to make your outreach message as personalized as possible so that it stands out to them. Include an offer in your message so that becoming an affiliate partner of yours offers more value to them than just the regular affiliate commission. Most companies offer a product in exchange for this kind of influencer and affiliate partnership.

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4. Have a dedicated affiliate landing page

Having an affiliate landing page is an easy way for people to have access to all the information they need about your affiliate program and to sign up to become one of your affiliates. Unlike the other tips we’ve outlined, this isn’t an outreach strategy but rather a strategy that supports your outreach. How?

You can share a link to your affiliate landing page via your email or social media marketing campaigns.

On your affiliate landing page, it is important to outline how your affiliate network and your affiliate program work, the affiliate commission they can expect to receive, and what you expect from your affiliates in return.

To make sure that your affiliate landing page is high-converting, it is important to optimize it to appear on search engines and for anyone who lands on it. Your landing page copy needs to be well-written and contain enough keywords that it is recognized by search engines.

Another element to be included when optimizing your landing page is a call to action. Without a call to action, visitors won’t know the next step you’re expecting them to take. This makes converting as easy as possible.
It is worth investing time and money into getting a top-class website developer to build you an effective landing page.

5. Stick in your niche

First things first, what is a niche? In this sense, ‘niche’ refers to a specific market segment that suits your product or service.

First things first, identify who you want your affiliates to be and what niche you want them to be operating within. It may be a good idea to draw up a persona of your ideal affiliate so that you can compare any potential to it and see if they would be a good match.

Once you’ve identified your perfect affiliate and the affiliate niche they are in, stick to it. It can be tempting to just allow anyone and everyone to be your affiliate, but this is not the best strategy when it comes to affiliate marketing.

If you have multiple niches, then market and outreach to these niches separately. This will help in keeping your message clear and reeling in the right affiliates to you.

6. Start a referral program

Affiliate marketing and referral marketing can go hand-in-hand. Referral marketing refers to the process of using word-of-mouth from previous customers to grow your business.

You can start a referral program for your current affiliates in which you offer them compensation for every person they refer back to you that successfully makes it into your affiliate program.

Perhaps you offer them an additional bonus, or you raise their commission rate slightly for every referral. Either way, this is a great way to recruit affiliates. Your affiliates will know people that are in the same industry as them, the same relevant industry that you’re already targeting.
Just make sure that you vet any potential referred candidates and make sure that they fit your outlined criteria for an affiliate.

7. Network within your industry

No matter the industry you’re in, there will be a wide range of events and conferences worth going to. Going to these kinds of events is beneficial for a number of reasons, but namely, you get the chance to network and make connections with like-minded individuals, and you can gather important information and insights.

Networking gives you, or your employees, the chance to interact directly with people in the industry and, if the time is right, to talk about your company and your products or services. Your affiliate manager can explain the exact value your products bring to consumers as well as the benefits that joining your affiliate program can bring to them.

You can also use these events to strengthen your pre-existing affiliate relationships. The stronger your relationships, the more inclined your affiliates will be to market your products. They’ll be more invested in your success.

Most of these events and conferences aren’t for free, so make sure to only attended relevant events that will provide you with the most affiliate opportunities. Weigh up the pros and cons before you buy yourself a ticket.

8. Talk about your affiliate program

This may seem obvious, but if you, your employees, and your company don’t talk about your affiliate program, then the word won’t get out. This is something you should be doing on a regular basis.

You can announce your affiliate program on your website, via your emails, through your email newsletter, and on your social media channels. Social media is a great channel to inform, engage and interact with potential affiliates directly, and it is an excellent source of affiliates. It also doesn’t hurt that it’s a relatively cheap channel to use too.

Keep reminding your audience every so often about your affiliate program. Just make sure that you don’t spam them unnecessarily. If you overdo it, you risk annoying your target audience and alienating them. This will deter them from joining your affiliate program and from even being repeat customers in the future.

9. Take a peek at your competition

This strategy works best if you’re a company with a smaller market share and have the ability to learn from your larger, more dominating company. Over and above affiliate marketing and recruiting affiliates purposes, it’s important to keep an eye on your competition. Taking a peek at your competition allows you to see what they are doing so that you can implement their successful strategies within your own business.

But how can you use this to your advantage when it comes to affiliate recruitment?

Pick a partner that you already know has an affiliate program, then look at their backlinks. If they have multiple backlinks from the same website, then chances are that website is one of their affiliate partners. Now that you know that website is open to having affiliate links in its content, you can reach out to them with your own affiliate program offering.

Just make sure that your offer is better, if not the same as your competitor.

Feature Spotlight: Affiliate Recruitment at Tapfiliate

As you can tell from what we’ve outlined above, finding great referral and affiliate partners isn’t always easy – but Tapfiliate is on a mission to change that.

The Affiliate Recruitment feature makes it easier than ever to run a referral program.

These three simple steps make it a hassle-free experience for you and your future potential partners:

1. Easily connect your ecommerce or payment tool to Tapfiliate, and invite your clients into your affiliate program on the fly.
2. Tapfiliate will automatically send them a ready-to-use referral link that they can use to promote your business.
3. That’s it! The clients who are interested in helping to spread the word can start sharing their love of your brand, and get rewarded for any new clients they refer.
   

Read the full Affiliate Recruitment feature guide or go right to your Tapfiliate account to start recruiting affiliates automatically.

If you’re already using the Affiliate Recruitment feature, you might want to check if it’s possible to connect new affiliate prospect sources.

Don’t have a Tapfiliate account yet? Sign up here

Why should I use Affiliate Recruitment?

By automatically harnessing your customers’ existing interests, you can effortlessly accelerate the growth of your business. And who better to promote your product or brand than those who are personally acquainted with it?

With Affiliate Recruitment, you will quickly invite your happy customers to share word-of-mouth and refer new sales. They don’t even need to register for your affiliate program. With the link they’ll get, they can share recommendations of your brand with their network right away.

A powerful marketing tool

In a nutshell, you get a marketing solution that’s perfect for a number of reasons:

Grows your affiliate program automatically: save time for more complicated or pressing tasks

Zero setup is needed on the affiliate side: they just get a link that’s ready to be shared

The most efficient PR for your brand: word-of-mouth is a marketing channel that comes with high conversion rates – use it!

Use the feature “as is” or create a wealth of enhancements with multiple integrations, including Mailchimp for emails and Make for no-code integrations with hundreds of apps and services.

Who can benefit from our Affiliate Recruitment feature?

We already see the benefits of using Affiliate Recruitment for Ecommerce, B2B/SaaS, education and online courses, books, info products, and subscription boxes. Will your business be next?

Leverage the power of word-of-mouth marketing to create a sustainable engine of growth.

One last word on affiliate recruitment

When working out how to find affiliates, you can try out one of the strategies above, and you’ll undoubtedly see results come in. You can turn to your customer base, your competition, or industry influencers to look for potential affiliates, or you can run ad campaigns and refresh your affiliate landing page so that they come to you.

We may be slightly biased, but we believe the best way to recruit affiliates is to use our ‘Affiliate Recruitment’ feature. This feature has been tailor-made by affiliate marketing professionals to provide you with everything you need to get your hands on the best affiliate candidates.

Our final tip? In order to make sure that you’re getting the most out of your affiliate marketing program efforts, it’s important to believe in your product 100%. Having this confidence will come across in all your communications, and it will translate to your potential affiliates.

Start using Affiliate Recruitment in Tapfiliate:

Already a Tapfiliate user? Just go right to the ?Affiliate Recruitment featureinside your app.

Never tried Tapfiliate? Try all the features: ?get a 14-day free trial.

Used it before but cancelled? Get your Tapfiliate back: ?restart your account