Tips & Guides — 01 Jul 2022
Guide to Promoting Partner Programs and Affiliate Links
Brands spent nearly 7 billion dollars on affiliate marketing in 2020, and this number will continue to grow in the following years. Adding this channel to the digital marketing strategy helps merchants boost their brand awareness, get a transparent customer acquisition source and generate additional revenue.
Yet, to reap the benefits of affiliate marketing, advertisers need to find the right partners, as they are the ones who do the heavy lifting generating affiliate sales. Meanwhile, beginners often overlook the need to promote affiliate links for potential affiliates. Thus, their attempts to develop successful affiliate marketing falls flat, and companies end up losing money.
Well thought-through promotional activities for your affiliate links will help you avoid this sad ending. To spread the word about your affiliate products and attract top affiliate partners, you need to take the following steps:
Before kicking things off with affiliate links promotional activities, you need to make sure you’re fully prepared for the influx of potential affiliate partners. This can’t be the case if your affiliate program isn’t’ framed well.
Here is the list of all the boxes you need to tick for your affiliate program:
If you find some of the elements listed above are missing, consider finalizing your affiliate program before starting the promotion. Follow our step-by-step guide on building an affiliate program from scratch.
What is the staple of a successful promotional campaign? A high-quality product, of course; great things sell themselves. Thus, all your partners need to do is spreading the word to potential customers and reap the benefits.
To convince publishers that your affiliate products are worth their attention and hard work, learn how to frame offers — propositions to advertise something in exchange for a commission. Learning it once will help you attract top affiliates without breaking the bank on promotion.
Though setting up affiliate offers isn’t rocket science, you need certain expertise for it. Knowing how publishers evaluate affiliate offers, using marketing and psychological tricks to make offers attractive, and having a nice set of examples to get inspiration from will come in handy.
Every promotional activity starts with creating a landing page, and affiliate links and programs promotion is not an exception. Building a landing page is a great tactic to clarify your own affiliate program terms and conditions off the bat, define the types of partners you’re looking for, and speak your benefits for them.
Best-performing affiliate landing pages contain the following elements:
The headline is the first thing your potential affiliates see when visiting your affiliate program landing page. Thus, it should be attention-grabbing and enunciating the benefits you offer. Depending on your target audience preferences, you may opt for a short sound bite or more precise phrasing in the headline. Here are a couple of examples for your inspiration:
To back up the headline, you may add your company’s achievements and rewards, the number of customers, the maximum payout, the number of offers, and so on. Consider running split tests to find the best-performing options.
Affiliate program benefits reinforce and clarify the message in the headline. To be persuasive, they should reflect the actual value for potential affiliates and show your partners how you’ll help them succeed. In these terms, high commissions, dedicated tech support, and reliable marketing tools for performance tracking are equally important.
Social proofs work wonders when it comes to increasing conversions, so make time to collect your partner testimonials and place them on your landing page. This tactic may not be the option for aspiring brands. Thus, these brands may place logos of their partners and customers on their website or show off the number of partners and customers. Quotes and links to the press may work as well.
There is no well-performing landing page without a strong call to action. Try to place several CTA points along your landing page, especially when it’s long. They may appear as buttons or registration forms. The point is they should provoke a potential partner to make a desirable action — sign up with your affiliate program.
An affiliate program landing page doesn’t boil down to simply alluring potential affiliates. Its primary function is to clarify the partnership conditions and answer the questions publishers may have. The option here is to add the FAQ section to the bottom of the landing page. In most cases, it includes information about the rewarded actions, program terms and conditions, and the right partners.
Apart from sticking to the FAQ section, you may address the questions from affiliates as separate parts of the landing page. For example, you may come up with a list of demands for potential partners, logos of the payment systems you use, diagrams illustrating the payment process, and so on.
So, your affiliate program is set up, offers are polished, and landing pages are optimized for conversions. Now it’s time to define the ways of delivering your affiliate links to your potential partners — bloggers, influencers, and customers eager to spread the word about your business. To nail it, test various promotional channels and employ tactics that perform the best.
One of the most cost-effective ways to drive traffic to your affiliate links and program is placing them on your own website. Potential partners interested in your brand will check your homepage anyway to see what you’ve got to offer.
The most popular tactic is to place the link to your affiliate program on the top or the bottom menus of your main website page. Still, you may go the extra mile and employ the same tactics as you do to convert new customers. For instance, you may place promotional banners or pop-ups on various pages of your website.
Search engine optimization is a surefire way to get your affiliate links or programs noticed by a dedicated audience. Affiliate marketers eager to increase their passive income often search for new offers and programs to join online. To reach them, optimize your affiliate website or landing page for industry-related keywords coupled with “affiliate program,” “affiliate offers,” and “affiliate links.”
On average, it takes months for SEO to start bringing you tangible results. If you want to reap the benefits and attract affiliates sooner, explore the opportunities of Google Adwords and paid search advertising. This tactic resembles SEO but lets you reach your target audience instantly and get additional traffic to your affiliate landing page.
Pay-per-click advertising and banner ads are one more effective tactic to get you offers and programs in front of your potential affiliates. The best thing is that you can use them across various platforms, from third-party websites to popular social networks. PPC is great to draw attention from first-time viewers and retarget and convert the potential partners aware of your brand.
Tips and tricks on increasing the effectiveness of this promotion channel deserve a separate comprehensive guide. Here are the main rules you need to follow:
The content your company shares may be a great promotional opportunity for your affiliate links. Revise your blog posts, video content, podcasts and see if you can incorporate links to affiliate products or programs into these pieces. Even the most minor actions, such as adding a link to your Youtube video description, can have a significant impact.
Additionally, you may create dedicated pieces of content to back up your affiliate program and spread the word about it. If you decide to double down on this strategy, make sure you create valuable content for your audience. For instance, you may host a webinar on making money online and natively promote your affiliate program during it.
Don’t stick to blogging only; try experimenting with various formats, such as webinars, guest posting, downloadable materials, and so on. To get the most out of your content marketing efforts, create content according to the marketing funnel stages.
The email marketing channel is too good to leave it on the table. First of all, it lets you interact with the loyal audience — your customers and partners. Second, emails may be more trustworthy than other channels, as, on average, people do not share their email addresses with the next men. Finally, this channel lets you employ loads of promotional techniques:
Referral marketing works wonders for brand promotion and customer acquisition. This channel allows companies to get higher-quality and dedicated leads, improve the retention rate and LTV, and boost credibility. Why not apply this channel to affiliate program promotion?
Encourage your publishers to share your affiliate links with their partners or customers with a compelling bonus. Try various incentives to find out which works best for you. They might be a gift, dollar credit, unique opportunities, or even special treatment. Remember to offer a reward for invitees as well; thus, your conversion rates will skyrocket.
TThink about the progressive reward system to make new affiliates stay with your brand longer. For example, the user behavior tracking system, Hotjar, changes the referrer’s bonus according to the longevity of the contract a referred friend has signed. The longer the span, the higher the reward.
To leverage this channel, get more inspiration and valuable tactics from our article Referral Program Examples and Strategies to Boost Your Customer Acquisition.
One of the easiest and most effective ways to get affiliate links promoted is partner recruitment platforms, such as Affise Reach. This service allows you to connect with publishers and influencers, launch promotional campaigns in a couple of clicks, and foster meaningful relationships with partners.
In contrast with traditional affiliate networks and agencies, Affise Reach gives you full ownership over partner marketing. You have full access to potential partners, can connect with them directly, and get the data about their performance. It gives the unprecedented freedom in managing and streamlining partnerships.
Affise Reach is backed with robust technology for tracking partner marketing performance. It includes multi-channel attribution, advanced analytics, forecasting and other tools for managing, analyzing and optimizing campaigns. All the data about your partnerships is centralized, safely stored and belongs to you.
One more place where seasoned affiliates look for links to promote is affiliate directories — lists of affiliate programs sorted out by niche or industry. The downside of this promotional method is that you cannot personalize the pitch. But adding your affiliate program to directories is a low-effort way to promote it.
Another promotional method is adding your affiliate program to an affiliate network — an intermediary between advertisers and publishers. Aside from promoting your affiliate links, networks allow you to streamline routine processes, prevent affiliate marketing fraud, and more. In return, they charge fees and commissions. Find out more about affiliate networks conditions in our article 9 Common Questions about Affiliate Networks.
Joining an affiliate network may be an arduous and time-consuming process with lots of things involved. Follow our ultimate guide on how to manage an affiliate program to go through all the steps easily.
Seasoned and aspiring affiliate marketing professionals gather to chat about industry-related topics or find new opportunities to fuel their online business. These communities may be perfect promotion channels for your affiliate links.
The straightforward way to employ this strategy is searching for Facebook pages where you can put your affiliate links directly. The more subtle approach is joining LinkedIn and Facebook groups dedicated to mastering affiliate marketing. They are perfect to prove your expertise and build your brand awareness.
Apart from communities on social media platforms, you may take advantage of the good old affiliate marketing forums. To help you out, we’ve collected the most useful and active affiliate marketing forums and communities in the world.
Whether eCommerce, Saas, or others, the industry you develop a business in probably has many related forums and groups. Make these professional communities your go-to place if you want to spread the word about your affiliate program and links.
Get off the ground by creating a buzz around the initial launch of your affiliate program. You may start a couple of months in advance to warm up the interest by provoking discussions about whether it is effective or not to launch a program, where to find affiliates, and how to engage them. Be sure your promotion is gentle, don’t spam the forum or group with ads for your program.
Aside from it, you may employ professional communities to handpick the potential affiliates among the active and dedicated professionals. To increase the chances of success, show interest and build strong relationships with these professionals before directly inviting them to your affiliate program.
Influencer marketing is an efficient tool that can be applied to almost any type of business as long as it has niche influencers. The latter make top-performing affiliates you may want to partner up with.
To get the ball rolling, you need to handpick the opinion leaders. Opt for those who work in your vertical and share the same values as your brand does. Check their effectiveness: make sure their followers are real people who are engaged and loyal. Beware of account duplicates.
Once you come up with the best candidates, reach them offering to test your product. Make your pitch persuasive and personalized — appreciate their work sincerely, don’t be afraid to get into detail.
After a while, ask your potential affiliates’ impressions about your product. If they like it, offer to become your partner. Highlight the benefits of this role and provide special partnership conditions if needed.
Though affiliate marketing’s claim to fame is its simplicity and transparency, you can’t start an affiliate program and let it slide. To squeeze every bit of value out of this digital marketing strategy, you need to put a lot of work into promoting your affiliate links.
Start with making sure you’re offering a great product both for your customers and affiliates, optimize your affiliate program and offers for promotion, and test various channels to find the most effective ones.
To streamline your affiliate links promotion, try Affise Reach. Our platform will help you connect with potential partners, manage relationships with them, and track performance.
Written by
Affise Academy
Affise is a partner marketing platform for brands, advertisers and agencies to scale via all possible performance marketing channels. Synergy of technology and our long standing experience lets you expand your partnerships, automate every step of the campaign lifecycle and make data-driven decisions.
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