Get Affiliates to Join and Generate Sales

[00:00:49] JB: Hello, this is Jamie with the Profitable Performance Marketing Podcast. I am your host and CEO and Founder of JEBCommerce, your award-winning affiliate management agency. Recently, one of our staff, Jake Fuller, our Director of New Business Development, did a webinar with Affiliate Window, now Awin. There was a bunch of questions at the end. Jake was talking about what’s coming in affiliate marketing. There were a bunch of questions at the end. These were really a great list of frequently asked questions. I thought I would expand a little bit on those questions and use them for a solo episode. Because if one person had that question, I bet a lot of others did, too.

Before we start, I want to let you know, if you need help with your affiliate program, if you need to figure out what your strategy is, how to recruit affiliates; this is what we’re going to be talking about today. I had optimized affiliates. Really, whatever you need to do to reach your goals, but you don’t know what to do, you can get help. You can get free help, you can email us at gethelp@jebcommerce.com. We would love to spend some time with you, to hear what’s going on. Email us there. Pretty simple. We’ll get back to you really fast.

You can also put time on my calendar, Jamie, or calendly.com/jamiebirch, and put 15 minutes, half hour, or even an hour on my calendar and we’ll spend some time together going over your issues. We also have a service we call our audit and roadmap, where we go through your entire program, every single aspect of it. From commission levels, to network, to banners, to partners, to strategy, to offers, to merchandise, everything. We go over that and we give you a roadmap for what you need to do to achieve your goals that is easy to understand, comprehensive and allows you to just go and execute it. If you’d like any of those things, just email us at gethelp@jebcommerce.com.

Now, here’s the question. This user said, “How do I recruit more affiliates and help them to convert more? We get maybe one affiliate sales a month with 700 registered affiliates.” The first thing here is you want to make sure you get the basics down. Before you go out and start doing another recruiting push, you want to make sure that your network profile is clear and up to date. Does it focus on what is in it for affiliates? A lot of times, your network profile, people focus on what’s important to them, but not what’s important to the person reading it, the person you’re trying to get to convert to an affiliate, that really it should show how much they can earn, what your top products are, top converters. That’s really your first step.

Making sure when they come to see you, they come to learn more. You have those things really up to date and written about them. I would also look at your baseline commission rate. Is it competitive? Affiliates are getting sophisticated. I’ve talked about this in a bunch of other podcasts. They’re getting really sophisticated about what they can earn in any given spot. If your commission structure isn’t competitive, it doesn’t matter how good your recruitment email is, or anything else. They’re just going to move on. That is some of the first things I do. You have 700 affiliates. You have 1,000 affiliates. You have 500 affiliates. Here’s my question to you. How many of those have you reached out to? You’re only getting one sale a month, so how many are you actually working with? Are you just setting up the program?

We just did a solo podcast episode about why affiliate marketing isn’t a set it and forget it. How many of those have you reached out individually? How many are top performers across the network? Do you even know? Here’s what I do. I think what you need to do is maybe not go out and hunt more affiliates. You need to farm the ones that you had. Here’s what I would do. This person isn’t looking to get more affiliates. Because if you could have four affiliates and you reached all your goals, would you be happy with that amount? It probably wouldn’t matter.

I’d be a little concerned about diversification and that’s a small amount of affiliates. You have 700 affiliates. These have joined your program. At one point they had high hopes, or hopes to do something with you. Here’s what I would do is instead of focusing on recruitment, I want to know why those 700 aren’t doing anything. I would identify five of those affiliates first thing every single morning. This is what one of my mentors, he does in his sales, he does seven calls before 7 am. First thing you get in, don’t check email. Don’t look at the news. Don’t go into all those areas that will get your day off track. Go and identify five affiliates first thing every morning, look at their sites. Really spend time. Identify where you would put your product and company brand information. Then identify text links, banners and product links that you think would be best for each and every one of those affiliates, then contact that affiliate with all that information.

It’s easy for them to take it, and run with it, and offer to jump on a call to meet each other and to run with it. Jump on a call with those top five. You’re going to learn about ways you guys can work together and what you need to be successful. You’re going to start having a lot of conversations. If you do five every morning, you’re going to get one response a day. At the end of the week, you’ve had five conversations you didn’t have before. It’s an old sales tactic. It works really, really well. Affiliate marketing is about relationships. You can learn a ton from sales professionals about how to do that. You will increase your active affiliates greatly. Then after that, then you can focus on recruitment.

I would really use the recruitment tools available at your network and the same process above to recruit each one individually. Identify five, go to their website, identify the ways that they’re marketing, other brands, similar brands, look at your inventory of resources for the affiliate, and send them an email saying, “Hey, I think we’d be great together. Here’s where I promote it. Here’s the banners, the products, the conversion rate. Here’s what you could earn. I’d love to jump on a call with you and talk about ways we can help each other be successful.”

Then again, I always recommend building your personal network of other affiliate managers. There, if you have a lot of affiliates, you’re trying to figure out what to do and having these 700, these 500, these 1,500 they’re not doing anything, I need new affiliates. You may need new affiliates, but you may need a better plan and execute that plan consistently. Maybe you don’t need more affiliates. You just need to do the right things with the ones that you had.

The universe, the world rewards consistent effort. If you do that every day, I guarantee, you’ll have a different result. There’s my answer. What do I do if I have all these affiliates? I’m only getting one sale a month. I hope this was helpful. This is a short one today, but just wanted to drop something real short and impactful for you. I hope it was.

If you found this episode to be impactful, please share it on Twitter, Facebook, wherever you interact socially. Leave us a five-star review on Stitcher, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whatever podcast player you make. That goes a long way to help get the word out about this podcast. As I mentioned earlier, if you need any assistance, you just email us at gethelp@jebcommerce.com and we’ll jump on the phone and help you with any affiliate issues, especially an issue like today, what do I do? Anyway, thank you for stopping by the Profitable Performance Marketing Podcast. Have a wonderful day.

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