Affiliate marketing is one of the best organic methods for businesses to grow their revenue. With a robust affiliate program, you can reduce your paid advertising and pay affiliates commissions to promote your business’ products and services. Many businesses, specifically online businesses, have leveraged a channel sales strategy like affiliate marketing to grow their brand and incentivize others to promote their offerings. Although affiliate programs are great, you need to be able to effectively promote them to attract your first batch of affiliates. Once you’ve established your affiliate program, other affiliates will organically sign up for your program and promote your products.
Since affiliate programs are fairly competitive currently, you need to be able to use different tactics to stand out from the competition. Luckily, there are several strategies that can help you promote affiliate programs and get more affiliate sign-ups. The following three strategies can help you generate affiliate signups and grow your affiliate program.
1. Reaching Out To Prominent Affiliates In Your Niche
When starting your affiliate program, it’s extremely advantageous to leverage the audience of others to promote your brand. One of the best ways to do this is to partner with a prominent affiliate in your niche. These affiliates are often known as “super affiliates” since they make significant revenue from promoting affiliate products in your niche. If you can work with affiliate publishers in your niche to promote affiliate offers, you’ll likely get in front of their large audiences at a very cost-effective rate.
Some of the best benefits of working with prominent affiliates include:
- Big affiliates have already captured the market and have regular visitors to their websites. As a result, your product, brand, or service will be seen by increased viewers if it gets listed on their website. This is an easy way to get started with building a big brand.
- Affiliate is not all about earning money. To create public awareness, you need someone with a massive audience reach. Big affiliate players can help you do this and save you significant money that would’ve otherwise been spent on paid advertising.
- Research suggests that more than 75% of brands benefit from affiliate marketing. Also, nearly 15% of e-commerce sales are affiliate marketing-driven in North America. These statistics prove that North Americans truly trust affiliate marketing and you can leverage this to benefit your brand.
- Immediate sales for your business: You can work out an agreement between you and the affiliate regarding the commissions that will be paid. When a prominent affiliate promotes your product, you can immediately get thousands of dollars in revenue. This capital can be reinvested in growing your affiliate program and ultimately your bottom line
You can reach out to affiliates to start working with them on your affiliate program. Reaching out via direct messages (through Instagram, Facebook, or other social media pages) is probably the easiest way to do so since there’s less pitches to them on those platforms. Other ways to reach out to them include emails and their contact pages. It’s important to personalize your outreach because these affiliates receive hundreds of pitches per week. You can also find them by searching for the keyword that’s relevant to your niche. For example, if your primary keyword is appointment scheduling software, you can see who’s in the top rankings on Google and directly reach out to them.
2. Highlight Your Affiliate’s Success Stories
Affiliate marketing is a very network-effect type of marketing. If affiliates cannot see someone else being compensated well, they are unlikely to apply to a program. Typically, affiliates want to work alongside a growing brand. If they see a growing company that is paying affiliates well, they are likely to join the affiliate program and promote the brand also. The issue with many affiliate programs is that there needs to be at least a few visible affiliate success stories before many affiliates sign up.
A great way to highlight success stories is by having them visible on the landing page of your affiliate program. Showing a real person who’s making money promoting your brand is one of the best things you can do to gain the trust of your affiliates. In addition, you can add testimonials of your affiliates to your landing page. This will add even further trust, especially if you have anyone who’s recognized in your niche or industry.
3. Compensate Affiliates Better
Affiliates enjoy promoting programs that compensate them better. After all, they’re in the market to earn money. Oftentimes, you will see the affiliate programs that are promoted the most are the ones that compensate affiliates the best. Even though another company may have a better product or service, affiliates will always prioritize promoting high-paying affiliate programs and recurring affiliate programs. If you’re a company in your niche that compensates affiliates well, you will likely have no shortage of affiliate promotions for your business.
Companies compensate their affiliates better in different ways. Some companies offer higher commissions, bonuses and even recurring affiliate commissions. These different strategies offer affiliates ample opportunities to get paid for promoting your business. You can experiment with different compensation strategies to see which one is the most cost-effective for your business.
How Does Better Compensation Help?
Compensating your affiliates better is the single most important factor in promoting your affiliate program. Word of mouth is very effective in the affiliate marketing industry and if affiliates know your company pays well for promotions, they’ll promote your business every chance they get. Better affiliate compensation is a surefire way to get more affiliate conversions.
These are some of the strategies that you can start deploying today to get more signups for your affiliate program. To learn more about affiliate marketing, explore the trends that will dominate the industry in 2022 here.
