Definition first:

Affiliate recruitment — the process of finding new affiliates, and convincing them into joining your affiliate marketing program.

So how do you do this? There are numerous ways, and I’ve discussed some of them nearly 3 years ago in my Tools & Techniques post here. Also, Mark Welch has a good post on the topic here.

But today, I’d like us to turn to one of the most effective — though at times quite time-consuming — ways, and that is by employment of tools that are being traditionally used for link building.

5 Robust Link-Building Tools for Affiliate Recruitment

• Internet Business Promoter — I’ve been using IBP’s Arelis for over six years, and still love it. They have a free/trial version too.
  ☛ Pricing: $249.95 for Standard edition, and $499.95 for Business.

• SEO Quake — Famous browser plugin and toolbar used by millions. Available for Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari.
  ☛ Pricing: free.

• Raven SEO Tools — By pulling data from SEMRush, SEOmoz and Majestic SEO, these give you deep insights into who is really the best to approach. 30-day free trial available.
  ☛ Pricing: $99/mo for Pro version, $249/mo for Agency one.

• Citation Labs — They have a number of tools suitable for affiliate recruitment as well.
  ☛ Pricing: varies. Here’s how the company’s founder put it: “depends on how many lists you’re scraping and – even more – how many contacts you’re trying to find (ie: how many URLs you input for contact discovery). For 500-1000 prospects I think folks should be prepared to spend around $20 or so.”

• BuzzStream — Their tools essentially make up a CRM system for link building, helping streamline the routine processes of search, pulling data, communication, and much more. 14-day free trial.
  ☛ Pricing: $29/mo for Basic package, $99/mo for Plus, $249/mo for Premium.

Have I missed a good link building tool that can be effectively used for affiliate recruitment? If so, please do post about it in the “Comments” field below.

Affiliate recruitment — or the process of finding affiliates to join your program and promote your product/service — is arguably the most important affiliate program management element. After all, they are the driving force of any affiliate program, and while I also always say that a recruited affiliate is no good until they become active structured and intelligent recruitment is the #1 task for every affiliate program manager.

Among the most popular ways to recruit new affiliates we observe (a) reaching out to relevant content producers, (b) going after competitors’ affiliates, (c) active participation in forums, conferences and other places where affiliates gather… basically, all the things I have written about 2.5 years ago. But today I’d like to turn to some pretty effective, yet underused, ways to recruit good affiliates. There are at least 5 of these, and they are:

1) Guest blogging and article writing — As Marty M. Fahncke puts it “write, and be written about”. It attracts attention, builds authority and credibility, and really helps in building bridges to those really good affiliates that you want to work with.

2) Keyword search — As you’re setting your program up, especially on an affiliate network, you can specify the key words and phrases by which you want to be found. Spend your time on this one, making sure you cover all key phrases (including competitors’ names, when permitted).

3) Paid search — Very few are doing this, but it does yield fruit, especially when you run closely targeted PPC campaigns (around the precise words that affiliates use when looking for affiliate programs in your niche… don’t forget competitors’ affiliate programs too); and not only on Google, Bing and Yahoo, but also on Facebook, and LinkedIn.

4) Snail mail — Affiliates generally experience no deficit of supply when it comes to affiliate programs. To attract their attention you want to do something that makes you shine and helps you stand out from the crowd. Experiment with postcards! They do catch attention. Especially, when they come with a gift card or something of the kind attached to it.

5) Reaching out to your customer database — …at least, the happy shoppers. :] Chances are they will be happy to market you to their friends for a commission.

Are you utilizing these yet? If not, give ‘em a try. They do work!

Also, if there are other underused methods that have worked for you, I would really appreciate you sharing them through the “Comments” function below.

Some affiliate networks offer ways to advertise your affiliate program to their affiliate base. ShareASale is one of the networks I have most experience with, especially when it comes to these internal affiliate recruitment options. I’ve tried different ShareASale options in the past, and have found two to be of most effectiveness: Featured Program of the Week Option (FPOW), which is currently priced at $450/week, and Holiday Center, which currently costs $75-$100/year depending on how many categories (see your options below) you place your ad in. The latter one is a hugely underused, but a highly effective option which I encourage all ShareASale-based merchants to look into.

We are currently running both some FPOW, and some Holiday Center campaigns for our clients. So, I thought it’d be interesting to analyze how they convert side-by-side.

Featured Program of the Week ads
(conversion range: 25% – 38%)

Holiday Center ads
(conversion range: 55% – 58%)

Conclusions:

1. Do not miss out on the opportunity with the Holiday Center, which yields highly targeted affiliate traffic, resulting in extremely high click-to-signup conversions.
2. When budget allows, do play with the FPOW option too, but make sure there is a time-sensitive incentive interwoven into the copy/idea that goes with your one-week ad. Then your conversions will be higher.

When running an affiliate program on a tight budget you inevitably face a challenging reality: good tools normally cost good money. You, on the other hand, may not necessarily have enough to invest into all of the paid tools you may need. Do not despair! There is a number of great tools out there that are available for your use at no cost. Of course, you do not want to depend only on the free ones (and have a number of robust ones that you do pay for), but it is useful to know which good ones are free.

Here’s my alphabetical list of 10 such tools (all of which I myself use on a daily basis):

1. Facebook — if you haven’t done so already, create a fan page for your affiliate program (and use it as a part of your affiliate communication channel)

2. Forums — use affiliate marketing forums (like ABestWeb and Affiliate Summit’s forum in the US, or affiliates4u in the UK) to participate in the community and gently get the word about your affiliate program out

3. Google — yes, the search engine! you can use it to find potential affiliates (when there’s no contact info on the prospect’s site, use Who.is to pull it up)

4. Google Alerts — use it to monitor what competing affiliate programs are doing, as well as for recruitment of new affiliates

5. Google Website Optimizer — use it for testing and optimization of your affiliate landing pages

6. iTrademarkBidding — monitor affiliate violations of your paid search rules and restrictions

7. Omgili — use it to monitor what’s being said about you affiliate program, your brand(s) and your competitors in forums and other online communities

8. Quantcast — analyze the volume and type traffic your prospective affiliates get (for a better picture always use it together with Compete.com‘s data)

9. Twitter — monitor it to spot prospective affiliates (use both Twitter Search, and tools like TweetDeck for streamlining the monitoring process)

10. WordPress — if you don’t already have it, start an affiliate program support blog on it (I personally prefer the self-hosted solution; hence, the link to the .org site)

Have fun exploring these free tools, and if I haven’t mentioned a great tool that can help affiliate program managers in their day-to-day tasks of affiliate recruitment and monitoring, competitive intelligence and program optimization, please do chime in with your suggestions using the “Comments” field below. ↓

It isn’t unusual to see affiliate recruitment emails, newsletters or other pieces of merchant-affiliate correspondence come from email addresses dissociated from the actual merchant on whose behalf they are being sent out.

This often happens when the program is being managed by an OPM (outsourced program management) agency, and at times also when the merchant doesn’t really understand the value of having a dedicated, properly-set-up email address for their affiliate program.

I believe this subject to be of extreme importance. Hence, this post.

Here’s my 3-point advice regarding email addresses:

1. Set up a dedicated affiliate program support email address, a generic address to which affiliates can always turn to.

2. Have it follow affiliates@[merchantURL] pattern, also setting up a forwarder from an affiliate@ (singular form) address to your main one. Flee from AffiliateMgr@[merchantURL] or any other non-conventional ways to word your email address.

3. Stay away from free email services when corresponding with your affiliates. Trust me, those don’t add credibility.

In my past experience, I have seen email addresses help improve affiliate engagement and increase response rates, and every time I registered such improvements it was because I was following the above-quoted 3 principles.

Whether you’re reading this as an affiliate program manager, or as an affiliate, your feedback is appreciated (as always). So, if you’ve got something to add to this, do not hesitate to use the “Comments” area under this post for this.

While there are multiple ways to define cliché in light of our context here I personally prefer the following one: “A trite expression, often a figure of speech whose effectiveness has been worn out through overuse and excessive familiarity.” [source]

I’ve added the emphasis/underlining to the above definition on purpose.

Someone said that you never get a second chance to make the first impression. It is in your affiliate program descriptions and outgoing affiliate recruitment emails that you’re making that first impression; and you certainly don’t want to clog your language with clichés there.

Upon an analysis of some 40 different affiliate recruitment emails, and affiliate program descriptions, I have found out that the majority of them are so full of clichés, it isn’t even funny.

Here is my list of the top 10 ones to avoid:

1. “instantly”

2. “ultimate”

3. “easy”

4. “unparalleled”

5. “perfect match”

6. earn/get/make “$X in X days/months”

7. “highest payouts”

8. “impressive conversion rate(s)”

9. “best affiliate program”

10. “number one” merchant/offer/program

You want to flee from using words and phrases like the above ones. They don’t help you, but actually do quite the opposite — making you sound cheesy and unconvincing.

Also, avoid spelling words in uppercase, excessive underlining, and drop those exclamation marks.

A new affiliate program manager has emailed me the following question (about corresponding with affiliates):

How often should I follow up? I don’t want to seem like a stalker.

It’s a very good (and an important) question, as affiliates will frequently not reply to your very first email, and follow-ups really are extremely important.

I try to follow up 5 times:

1. A week from original email
2. One more week down the road
3. Two months
4. Half a year
5. A year

The above pattern allows for persistence, but doesn’t make these follow-up attempts too annoying.

Yesterday I’ve learned of BlogDash, a system which provides you with “the tools to find the bloggers who will actually care about your story, company, product” as well as with “all the information … to make a personalized and educated pitch”.

BlogDash was actually announced by David Spinks (one of the company’s Co-Founders) at BlogWorld in October 2010 [more here] and it is now functioning in alpha. As it is clear from their own above-quoted description, the basic idea behind the service is to help businesses find the right bloggers to work with. “Perfect for affiliate recruitment!” — was my first thought.

So, I reached out to David, he has set up me up with an account, and after playing with the tool for some time, I’d like to give you a quick snapshot of it in my today’s post.

At the time of this writing, BlogDash is profiling 27,918 bloggers.

Without narrowing things down by category I’ve set my filters to show me blogs with Google PageRank of 5 or higher, and a Klout score of 50 or higher. One of the 132 bloggers BlogDash has found was that of Chris Brogan, and I thought you may find it interesting if we use his profile as an example, as we see how a typical blogger profile looks at BlogDash (highlighting mine; showing only a part of all information displayed):

As marked above, in each profile you will see:

• Data on blog’s focus, target audience and type of content
• Blogger’s receptiveness to “gifts/products for review”, paid posts, “sponsored giveaways”, and guest posts on other business’ sites
• …and we also see a counter of how many invitations we can send out

The first two of the above three bullet points are actually extremely useful for affiliate program managers looking to recruit thematic bloggers. Also, since the goal of every affiliate recruitment campaign is to find online partners to market your product/service, I can certainly see how BlogDash can be used effectively outside of affiliate recruitment too.

The tool also allows you to put information on tweets, posts and comments, and more. The video on this page is helpful to get a basic feel of it. Off to play with it some more…

A couple of years ago (at Affiliate Summit West 2009) I did a presentation on the topic of advanced affiliate program management, where together with Heather Paulson of Paulson Management Group we provided our perspectives on such topics as affiliate recruitment, support and training.

A week ago Shawn Collins has uploaded our entire 54 min presentation to YouTube, which you may now watch in full absolutely free of charge:

The full slide-deck from this session may be found at SlideShare.net here. It is easier to follow the presentation if you have the slides in front of you.

Your comments are warmly welcomed! Feel free to post them below.

A couple of days ago  (September  21, 2010) LinkShare affiliate network has announced its completely new advertiser dashboard. To find out a merchant opinion on it, and get a little in-depth here, we chatted with one of LinkShare’s top advertisers — that also made the 2009 Internet Retailer’s 2009 Hot 100 Best Retail Websites and got listed among the top 300 online retailers on the 2010 Top 500 list — Gaiam, Inc.

Kristen Fox (KF), Gaiam‘s Manager of New Business Development has replied to my questions:

GP: First off, what was your very first reaction to the new interface?

KF: My first reaction was absolute glee over the new look and feel. We’ve been an advertiser with LinkShare for many years and in that time they’ve added new functionality to their advertiser interface but they’ve keep the same look and feel. The refreshed UI is a very welcome change.

GP: Out of the new functionalities that you have the time to play with, which do you like best, and why?

KF: We were part of the beta launch so we’ve had a little time to play around with the new interface. The Dashboard or Performance Overview report is a key piece of functionality we use to quickly gain insight into the program’s performance. The dashboard provides top level KPIs including sales, orders, conversion rates, AOV and commissions that are trended for year-over-year (YOY) performance analysis.  The dashboard’s sales trending charts are also helpful to visually represent YOY sales. Prior to the release of the new Advertiser interface we were creating these reports manually — we’ve already seen a reduction in time spent generating reports and we’re now able to spend that time recruiting new publishers and deepening our relationships with existing publishers. The new design is wonderful, but I’m glad that the new features are enabling us to respond more quickly to changes and continue to grow our program.

I’m also a big fan of the export functions for all reports, publisher queries, and creative schedules. We’re also just starting to take advantage of the publisher notes feature which allows us to document meeting notes and action items per publisher and export notes on the fly.

GP: I’m hearing that finding new affiliates has become easier, as the newly-introduced filters now allow merchants to look at parameters they haven’t had access to before? What do you think of this affiliate recruitment function (pros, cons), and does it cost merchants anything to use it?

KF: You’ve heard right; it’s much easier to find qualified publishers with the newly introduced filters. We can now pre-select publishers for the types of campaigns we’re launching. For example, we’ve had tremendous success selling the new Mari Winsor Slimming Pilates Kit and now we can model those publishers that are doing well with the product and filter to find similar publishers within the network. It doesn’t cost us anything additional which is great because I know some networks charge extra.

GP: This sounds great. You’ve already touched on the reports, but what are the major reporting changes that you believe deserve highlighting?

KF: In the new interface nearly all reports are more actionable and having access to actionable data is one of the key drivers to a successful program. The old advertiser interface provided great data but most of it was still in a raw format — we were always exporting reports and overlaying it with additional data. But now all the data we were appending is included in the reports. I can quickly see YOY comparisons and % change data right in the interface. It’s been a tremendous time savings and we can quickly identify which publishers, offers, links or products need attention.

GP: Are there any things that LinkShare hasn’t yet covered, which you would love to see in the next update of their advertiser dashboard?

KF: In the future, (1) I would like the ability to find new publishers based on third-party data rather than publisher’s self reported data. For example, filtering by keywords driving traffic to the publisher or visitor profile data including; age, gender, and state. (2) Creative reporting still needs a little TLC. I’m hoping that as they continue to tweak functionality they will enable a roll up report for all creative by campaign and comparison data across multiple campaigns. (3) The notes attached to publishers would be more actionable if we could assign deadlines and then have reminders display on the Dashboard under ‘Things-to do’.

GP: Thank you for your time, Kristen. All of this has been very insightful. I highly appreciate you taking the time to give us a better sneak peak into LinkShare’s new advertiser dashboard. All the best to you, and Gaiam’s affiliate program.

I wish I could show my readers some screenshots to illustrate the above points and tools, but “for competitive reasons” LinkShare couldn’t approve my usage of any. Oh, well… Still sounds like good improvements.