8 Ways to Recruit Affiliates For Your Affiliate Program

The affiliate program is also known as associate program and is increasingly becoming popular form of online marketing, where you pay a small commission to your affiliates for promoting your business. To make this affiliate program successful you have to recruit the right affiliates. If you run your own affiliate program you know that it's not very easy to find good and performing affiliates. However, there are some tips that will help you recruit much more active affiliates and keep them happy, so they will promote your products even more. Here are the 8 best ways to recruit affiliates:1) Use Article Marketing to Recruit AffiliatesOne of the very cost effective and simple ways to recruit affiliates is article marketing. You can either write the article by yourself or recruit someone to write attractive and promising article focusing on the product or service that you provide and post them on article submission sites like EzineArticles, SubmitYourArticle and much more. The main advantage of article marketing is that only those who are interested in your product or service will read those articles and if you have successfully attracted them then you have gained a right affiliate for your business. This method can even attract potential customers.2) Write Reviews about Products to Attract Potential AffiliatesWriting reviews is another very effective way to attract affiliates. All you have to do is write some reviews about the products you promote. You can generate a large traffic to your site by this way. While writing reviews try to make it unbiased i.e., you shouldn't advertise yourself too much. The review should be very interesting and it would be even better if you do some comparison between similar products. Finally you can post the link of your affiliate page at the end of the review. So, the interested candidates will follow it and become your affiliate.3) Post Comments in Related Forums to Signup AffiliatesAnother very easy way to attract affiliates is to post comments on public forums where people discuss about your product and/or are interested in your product. The public forums have discussion groups where they post ideas and their opinions on a thread. Usually these forums allow you to add your signature below your comment. You can use this portion for advertising your product or can link it to your website's affiliate page. If the comment that you post is interesting then you can expect more affiliates for your program. This method is very simple and less time consuming where you can attract the affiliates by just writing some three or four sentences.4) Empower Social Networking Websites to Grow Your Affiliate DatabaseSocial networking sites have great potential for attracting right affiliates for you. Today more or less who ever have access to internet has membership in any of the social networking site like Orkut, Yahoo groups, MySpace, etc. So, you can have large coverage by promoting your business on social networking sites and you can find the right affiliates for your affiliate program. On such social networking websites you can find friends of the similar interests, etc. This way you can even make business contacts and recruit affiliates for your online business.5) Social Bookmarking Websites Can Be Used to Your BenefitSocial bookmarking like Digg, del.ico.us and others are an excellent way for affiliate marketing. When a visitor visits your site and finds it interesting then he can bookmark it. Then others do the same and it creates an exponential amount of visits. In this large group of visitors there will be some right affiliates for your site. This way you can recruit a lot of affiliates easily.6) Make Your Affiliate Program Page Attractive and Appealing for AffiliatesNow you might have attracted potential affiliates to your site successfully using any of these methods but making them to sign up as your affiliate depends on the quality of your site. The site should be appealing and shouldn't make them feel that you may be a spammer. Otherwise you risk losing the potential affiliates hence, make your site more appealing and attractive. Keep the content well organized and make the sign up procedure simple and less time consuming. Try to explain them the benefits of your affiliate program in a polite manner, using bold letters or yellow background for the text nowadays are used mostly by spammers so, your affiliate may move away. If your website is good in all means then all the visits made by potential affiliates will increase your affiliates count. If you don't know how to properly design a good looking website, just hire a freelancer and he/she will do all the work for you really cheaply.7) Have You Considered a 2-Tier Affiliate Program?To make your affiliate program more successful you must at least use 2-tier affiliate program. Where an affiliate will get more benefit for recruiting another affiliate. This type of program will encourage your affiliates to great extent and you can get more affiliates without wasting any resource, it will be done by your affiliates themselves. Empower your affiliates to recruit even more affiliates for you!8) Find Out Your Competitors And Attract Their AffiliatesThe best affiliates for your affiliate program are the existing affiliates of your competitors or other successful sites. But unfortunately there is no secret technique which can help you to get them. Instead you can try to trace out the methods used by your competitor and there is a large probability that these affiliates may be even visiting those areas like articles or social bookmarking sites and others. Just try to pin point the areas like the thread used by your competitor on a forum and post your comment as a reply to his post, hence you can get the attention of those potential affiliates.These are some of the very potential and best ways of getting affiliates for your affiliate program. You may do some research based on your own experience on these methods to get even better results.