How to attract affiliates and make them stay with you except commission increase?

[Tatiana]

Hello everyone!

My company is running 7 dating sites and it have recently started its own internal affiliate network to promote these sites. The main issue is to attract affiliates which would bring qualitative traffic.

From my experience I know that most of affiliates don`t "go steady" with one company, they are in constant search for more profitable programs. May be I`m wrong, please comment if your opinion differs from mine.

So the question is how to attract affiliates and make them stay with you?

What are your thoughts? I`ll be very thankful for your advices.

[cdorob]

One thing would be to give them special conditions based on performance. Not all the programs are the same, not all the affiliates are the same. The ones that make you most sales, should get special conditions and attention. Beside money I would say
- personal contact
- special offers
- call them on the phone.

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Tatiana,

Welcome to 5 Star and thanks for opening with a good questions.

Affiliates are definitely a fickle breed. But think about it, wouldn't you be???
Especially in competitive areas like dating. So many offers and just when you find what you think is a good program I'm sure ones that look better come along.

B]So think like an affiliate. If you were a dating affiliate and made you living online, what would attract you to one program over another and what would make you stay loyal to that program?[/b]

Cristian brings up some good points.

There are lots of things that go into attracting and keeping good affiliates
but I think everything can be lumped into 2 main categories.

MONEY & RELATIONSHIPS

MONEY - you need to try to offer better commissions and/or longer cookies
and/or highest conversions. One way as Cristian mentioned, to offer the perception of highest commission without loosing your shirt is by having a tiered commission structure. Base commission you are comfortable with, then offer higher and higher commissions for certain levels of performance.

RELATIONSHIPS - Many things fall into this category: support, communication, accessibility, personal contact, giving perks to top affiliates, even offering custom creatives. The more you can make affiliates feel that they are special and part of your team the better your loyalty will be.

There is MUCH more, but that's a start.

Anyone else???

[AffiliateGuild]

Those two definately play into it for me, but over realationships ... I look for longevity of the program.

I hate it when I sign-up, place links, drive traffic and then next thing I know the program is coming down or switching networks. So, I look for programs that are going to be there for the long haul.

[Roman]

I think communications is the mother of all advices. I definitely agree with Linda that we need to nurture our relationship with our affiliates. However, this is not going to be easy, this will entail a good deal of time, patience and expertise.

If I may put myself on the shoes of an affiliate, probably one of my wish lists to affiliate networks is express service. I want efficient, quick and no non-sense service!

[rifinder]

I tend to look for programs that are going to pay me for a long time. Some dating programs offer a high CPA for sign up and then that's it. I would rather earn a little every month for as long as someone is a subscriber.