Marketing my company's affiliate program

My company has tasked me with marketing our affiliate program, getting more people signed to generate traffic and leads.

I'm trying manual outreach to bloggers and influencers, but it's labour intense and time-consuming and bringing mixed results.

I've spent hours Googling my problem, but of course, the search results are just dominated by generic advice from HubSpot and Niel Patel.

I've realised that people who market the affiliate programs of e-commerce platforms like Shopify are also perfectly suited to market our programs, but I don't know how to find existing Shopify affiliate links or affiliate links of other e-commerce platforms. Can anyone show me how to identify an existing affiliate link, and then work backwards to reach out to that affiliate marketer?

Long story short, I'm a complete newbie to affiliate marketing, but all the advice out there about marketing an affiliate program is useless!

There are many influencers on YouTube, you can contact them. Also, check CPA networks as an advertiser. Another option is to post your job offer on Upwork and wait for proposals.

Just hire an agency that does this mate

Put yourself in the shoes of the people you want to promote for you.

What do they care about?

Create a case study / video tutorial showing how your product (affiliate program) will help them get what they want and how easy it is to use your program.

What are you selling?

IamNRE said:

Put yourself in the shoes of the people you want to promote for you.

What do they care about?

Create a case study / video tutorial showing how your product (affiliate program) will help them get what they want and how easy it is to use your program.

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But then how do I get people to see that? Creating that content is a great idea, I still have to get people to see it.

wormsmmc said:

What are you selling?

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Custom packaging supplies.

Phillis86 said:

My company has tasked me with marketing our affiliate program, getting more people signed to generate traffic and leads.

I'm trying manual outreach to bloggers and influencers, but it's labour intense and time-consuming and bringing mixed results.

I've spent hours Googling my problem, but of course, the search results are just dominated by generic advice from HubSpot and Niel Patel.

I've realised that people who market the affiliate programs of e-commerce platforms like Shopify are also perfectly suited to market our programs, but I don't know how to find existing Shopify affiliate links or affiliate links of other e-commerce platforms. Can anyone show me how to identify an existing affiliate link, and then work backwards to reach out to that affiliate marketer?

Long story short, I'm a complete newbie to affiliate marketing, but all the advice out there about marketing an affiliate program is useless!

Click to expand...

If you are interested to distribute your offers thru ad networks let me know. I can get you in no time.

Phillis86 said:

But then how do I get people to see that? Creating that content is a great idea, I still have to get people to see it.

Custom packaging supplies.

Click to expand...

There are places where you can post about your affiliate program... for example blackhatworld.com

You can also run ads on facebook, or Youtube or Reddit.

IamNRE said:

There are places where you can post about your affiliate program... for example blackhatworld.com

You can also run ads on facebook, or Youtube or Reddit.

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Yep, but I'm about 80 posts away from being able to post in that subforum

I unfortunately don't have a budget to run advertisements to my affiliate program, so I need most of this to be organic

If the program is good and the affiliated also have good share, then only it can be succesful.

Phillis86 said:

My company has tasked me with marketing our affiliate program, getting more people signed to generate traffic and leads.

I'm trying manual outreach to bloggers and influencers, but it's labour intense and time-consuming and bringing mixed results.

I've spent hours Googling my problem, but of course, the search results are just dominated by generic advice from HubSpot and Niel Patel.

I've realised that people who market the affiliate programs of e-commerce platforms like Shopify are also perfectly suited to market our programs, but I don't know how to find existing Shopify affiliate links or affiliate links of other e-commerce platforms. Can anyone show me how to identify an existing affiliate link, and then work backwards to reach out to that affiliate marketer?

Long story short, I'm a complete newbie to affiliate marketing, but all the advice out there about marketing an affiliate program is useless!

Click to expand...

The truth is that you will need to do a lot of research here to find the best fit for your outreach activities. Go through lists of all famous and popular networks and programs that are doing affiliate marketing, find their partners there and you will be able to find some affiliate links and sources that lead to them. When you do the outreach process, make sure that you really explain how the program of your company is working, which are the main benefits, what you offer, what you expect, and so on. Make your messages personalized and you will get a much higher response rate and a lot more opportunities.

VortexAlpha said:

The truth is that you will need to do a lot of research here to find the best fit for your outreach activities. Go through lists of all famous and popular networks and programs that are doing affiliate marketing, find their partners there and you will be able to find some affiliate links and sources that lead to them. When you do the outreach process, make sure that you really explain how the program of your company is working, which are the main benefits, what you offer, what you expect, and so on. Make your messages personalized and you will get a much higher response rate and a lot more opportunities.

Click to expand...

I've been trying this, and I'm just hitting a lot of resistance.

Our product is more B2B2C. We sell packaging supplies to small/medium businesses that then use their packaging as part of their business. Finding blogs or websites that are willing to sign up and become our affiliate is painful, as most people are more interested in a link exchange rather than becoming an affiliate and marketing our product.

I'd love to post our affiliate program in the subforum here, but my post count is under 100 so I can't. If anyone would like to know more, or has any ideas on what I can do to improve my method, I'm all ears!

First you need to ask yourself what you need for your channel. I have exp in starting up an affiliate channel in a big EU corporate. Here is a quick checklist that you can use to look for a suitable affiliate network.

1. What are you selling?
2. What GEO's are you selling?
3. What type of traffic do you need (content publishers, social, display, email, search etc)
4. What are you company branding guidelines (example, do the publishers need to follow strict promoting rules?) In my case, the publisher only could use carefully chosen banners, email content and strict keyword targeting.
5. What model are you going to use? Do you need leads, sales, traffic? CPA models work really well for an advertiser (no pay, no cure)
6. Once you know this, check what networks suits your business. You can check http://www.offervault.com what networks run what verticals. Also you can check with the big affiliate networks (AWIN, Partnerize, Daisycon (big in BeNeLux)) if they already promote offers of your competitors. I would choose those networks since they have the experience and the reach in your vertical.

Hope this works! Let me know if I can help you any further

I think you're doing the right thing by reaching out to bloggers and influencers.

If you find the whole thing tedious, repetitive, and boring, you don't have to do it yourself.

You can outsource it to somebody who will do it for little money.

I'm talking about outsourced virtual assistants.

You only need to use screen capture software to go through the steps of reaching out and sending information to bloggers and influencers.

When you shoot this type of video, the virtual assistant will be clear on the steps they need to follow to produce the results that you're looking for.

You can outsource VA work to places like Fiverr and Upwork.

The downside with these two platforms is they often charge by the hour.

So what will happen if somebody drags their feet?

The longer it takes for them to do the job, the more money you have to pay.

There is an alternative where you pay people based on quota.

It's simple: you don't have to pay them if they don't produce a certain amount of outreach they can prove.

Platforms like Cognoplus work this way.