Independent Merchant Advice?

[gowithabc]

Hi all!

I am looking for advice on how to find affiliates or individual websites that want to place banner ads on their pages.

What are the most important things an affiliate looks for in a banner ad or company they sell for?

Are there specific requirements I might be missing that cause an experienced affiliate to not want to sign up for my companies program?

Our goal is to provide everything an affiliate will need to be successful. We need to know what we might not be offering that would help increase our signup rate.

I have posted on different forums, and dabbled a little with the googleadwords, with minimal results.

I can get a decent level of traffic, but not much conversation for the affiliate signup page.

My budget doesn't call for an upfront investment at the moment, so joining a share a sale to list our program, isn't an option.

Calling individual websites to list banners has been effective, but time consuming.

Maybe the landing page that gives information about the affiliate program needs to be a different color?

Any advice would be great!

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Tim,

We've talked in detail so I know a little more about your program. 1st off recruiting good affiliates is hard no matter how you cut it. The good ones, as I mentioned on the phone, are already partnered with lots of merchant they are already getting checks from. They don't know you or your program.

So lets start with 1st impressions. If you want affiliates you need to learn how they think and talk on their level. You keep talking about placing banners. From your end that may be your job but from an affiliate viewpoint it turns them off.

If an affiliate runs banner ads it normally pays a very low per impression commission. You're offering PER SALE you are not paying for impressions therefore need to careful about talking banners. To affiliates it's like you are saying you want to use them for free for branding when you keep talking about placing banners. (Plus like I said text links convert better, so just don't mention banners.)

Then next most affiliates are into this for the money. Other things come into play but money talks and gets their impression. You offer a VERY healthy $100 commission. But it's not even on your main affiliate page and it's also not mentioned in your sig.

"Click Here To Apply For ABC's Affiliate Program!" Tells affiliates nothing. No reason for them to even want to click through. So put Earn $100 per sale in your sig and put $100 per sale in big red letters on top of all your affiliate pages - at least the 1st one.

So read more, learn to think like an affiliate and package your program in a way that answers the question "what's in it for me?" Even with all that, like I explained by phone, there may be resistance to joining from affiliates who don't trust internally developed tracking scripts - for good reason too.

Hope this helps and best of luck!

[JAmieF]

Recruitment is a fun activity. My advice is to get your know your competitors and complete a detailed search on them. Set up a Google alert for your competitors.

After listening to a few talks at the Affiliate Summit, affiliates want non-predatory T&C's, Good EPC and transparency from an affiliate program. Every affiliate is different and different metrics matter to them

[James Spinosa]

Well you are currently doing the same things that I am trying to do. The way that I typically find affiliate programs is by finding products or programs that I like, and then seeing if I can arrange some sort of deal to be an affiliate. My best suggestion would be to market your product/service/etc. and let them come to you, then keep them happy with bonus features, etc.

For actual promotion I would recommend also adding articles, classifieds, and press releases to your list (this is where I plan to find the majority of my affiliates once I start active promotions).