Identifying affiliates that you’d like to join forces with is only one part of the challenge. You also need to convince them that you’re a worthy partner. And in a world where there are so many other affiliate programs, they’ll go elsewhere if you don’t grab their attention.
But how do you turn that affiliate crush you have into the real thing? We’ll identify three ways in this blog post.
Address their problems
Affiliates should be joining your program for a mutually-beneficial partnership. So, you need to treat it as such. One of the biggest ways you can do this is by identifying their problems and striving to solve them. That means listening and understanding, not just responding. We discussed the importance of this in a recent video, which you can check out here.
The mark of a bad salesperson is trying to force a product into someone’s shopping cart, without knowing their needs and wishes. But when you find out what your target affiliates are looking for, you’ll give them a reason to join your program and not someone else’s.
Offer value
It’s quite possible that you’ve heard of Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook – a book written by Gary Vaynerchuk. In effect, you’re supposed to provide significant value before asking somebody to buy your product. And this is applicable to affiliate marketing, too. Asking affiliates to promote you, when you’ve not offered them anything in return, is wishful thinking mixed with a bit of arrogance.
Offering value builds trust and deepens the relationship. This could be provided through a mixture of useful content and tempting commission structures. It’s like a relationship – somebody won’t want to be your significant other if you don’t add something extra to their lives. Work on building more meaningful connections and more affiliates will want to partner with you.
Simplify the early stages
Once you’ve on-boarded an affiliate, run a test campaign before taking things further. Analyse whether or not it was successful, and then discuss next steps. If it didn’t go well, then think about how you re-angle future ones to improve clickthrough and engagement rates.
You should also make sure that they know all of the functionalities they’ve got access to. Consider developing a PDF document which explains all of these in further detail. And you can go the extra mile by helping new affiliates with planning content and the like. By creating a more seamless on-boarding process (and being there for them thereafter), you’ll have a fruitful relationship with the partners you want to be with.
Final thoughts
Yes, it’s true that there are hundreds of affiliate programs out there. But that shouldn’t stop you from going out to get the ones you really want. You do, however, need to think about why they should join your program instead of somebody else’s. By identifying their problems and acting on these, offering plenty of value and making every stage of the partnership easy for them, you’ll attract your desired affiliates to your program.
We’re hosting an affiliate marketing fundamentals masterclass to help you become better-rounded in this area. Find out more here.
