Publisher Outreach: Finding Affiliates
An affiliate program is only as good as the people running it. At Consorte Marketing, we’re committed to helping you develop a program that does amazing things for your bottom line. Not only will we engage the publishers in your program, but we’ll identify and reach out to relevant niche and high-traffic websites who are not familiar with your brand and entice them to promote you. In order to build a successful program, it’s important to develop excellent, communicative relationships with these partners. Here’s a little about what we do to achieve that.
Affiliate Program Launch
When you’re ready for kickoff, we’re there to help you with every step of your affiliate program launch. Typically we will send out an engaging newsletter introducing affiliates to your program as a starting point. This sets the stage for more personalized follow-up with websites that we identify as top performers.
Niche Publisher Outreach
We’re always excited to dive in and get building—but we do it intelligently, one step at a time. In our experience, affiliate programs seldom launch without a hitch. Often times there are tracking issues, minor bugs, problems with the data feed, or web design, merchandising and usability issues that affect conversion. Because of this, we like to test the waters with smaller niche affiliates first on a very personal level, to identify any holes in the program or the technology behind it. Our affiliate program managers put time into researching and identifying relevant blogs and other websites that would be a good fit for your product or service. We reach out to these niche affiliates that generate quality traffic for your site, but aren’t the major players in your industry. Our initial goal is to entice these smaller affiliates to sign on to partner with you, so that we can work closely with them to tease out any bugs or conversion issues that could cause hiccups for anyone involved. If they come up, we have the opportunity to rectify them so that your program is completely optimized by the time we put it in front of top-tier affiliates. Sometimes you only get one shot to make an impression, and if the program doesn’t perform well, it may be difficult to garner placement with the same website in the future when the program is ready.
The beauty of targeting niche affiliates as part of our strategy is that even though they may not be the primary drivers of traffic and sales, the traffic very relevant and in aggregate you will see growth for your program as a whole.
Leading Publisher Outreach
We’re proud to have developed great relationships with top affiliates over the years, and we will leverage those connections to take your business to the next level. We reach out to the highest-traffic publishers on the web and use our established rapport with them to get you fast, premium placement on their sites whenever we can. We generally discuss multiple programs at once when engaging a whale of an affiliate and are able to use that to your advantage by grouping your company with other popular brands as part of the negotiation process.
Monthly Newsletters
Part of maintaining a flourishing affiliate program is staying in constant contact with your publishers. It would be great to speak with every single affiliate on an individual basis every month, but that would consume too many resources to deliver ROI. So, we supplement the customized emails, phone calls and other personalized communications with monthly newsletters that contain special offers (like commission bonuses) and customer promotions (coupons, sales, and other deals) that they can use to promote your site to their users. It’s a way to keep these business partners thinking good things about your company—all the time.
Trade Show Attendance
We’re always interested in branching out, meeting new partners, and strengthening our existing relationships. To that end, we participate in some major trade shows where affiliates are in high attendance, including Affiliate Summit, Linkshare Symposium, and CJU.
Now that you know a little more about our highly effective publisher outreach strategy, let’s talk. We want to make your affiliate program the absolute best it can be—starting today!