Step Two—Building Your List

There are three prime ways to recruit affiliates. The first is to use the affiliate solution providers, the second is to register with the affiliate directories, and the third is to do it yourself.

But before you launch your affiliate recruitment program, there are some key points to remember. When looking at building your list of affiliate candidates, focus on three types of sites.

• Sites with their own domain name

• Sites that draw high traffic

• Sites that draw consistent or targeted traffic

Sites with their own domain name are far preferable to the free Web pages, such as Yahoo! GeoCities Pages That Pay (geocities.yahoo.com/home) and Lycos Tripod Commission Central (www.tripod.lycos.com). With the proliferation of low-cost domain registrars, a domain can be purchased for less than $20 per year. If a Webmaster is not serious enough to have his own domain, don’t count on him to produce results for your program.

If your business has an established name on the Net and you are offering a product or service that appeals to a desirable demographic, you could have a decent chance of attracting Web sites with high traffic to your affiliate program. These are the Top 500 sites listed in Media Metrix (see Figure 6.3).

Unlike the high -traffic site that may draw one-time visitors, some sites draw a consistent number of repeat visitors because they fill a special or targeted need for the visitor. These are good potential candidates for your network for two reasons. First, they give the affiliate Web site a chance to continuously promote your offer to the same visitors and make a sale. And second, you can choose sites that can offer your product or service in-context, thus making a sale more possible.

Start with a list of 100 potential sites (10 dream affiliates and 90 likely to join your program) that you would like to form a profitable relationship with. Contact them, preferably by phone, but use e-mail if you can’t find a phone number, and create a win-win strategy with them. Rather than aiming for tens of thousands of affiliates, which may look good on paper, focus on establishing business partnerships with highly targeted, segmented sites. After all, an affiliate is not just a place to advertise your business, but a business partner.

Keep in mind that while finding affiliate partners isn’t as impossible as it seems, it does require an incredible amount of work.

Finding Affiliates

To find affiliates, start with your own site. You can promote your program to your current customer and site visitors who just may a have Web site that would fit with your program. The words “Join our Affiliate Program”—are being seen more and more on Web sites today. At the very least, you should do the same for your company’s Web site. You should post your invitation to join your affiliate program on your home page and every navigational bar elsewhere on your site. This simple act alone can be a valuable medium for reaching Webmasters.

And don’t stop there. Plug your program in your e-mail signature, company newsletter, printed collateral, and even your invoices, e-mail signature, business cards, voice mail, and your signature in online forums and discussion lists.

Your next step is to use the search engines and Web directories to find potential candidates. How? By thinking like your customer. Find out where your customers like to go and you’ll find your best affiliates. Here’s how.

The bane of most search engines on the Net is that they return hundreds, even thousands of results that may have little to do with what you are specifically looking for. For example, search for the latest Madonna CD, type in the word Madonna, and a search engine will return a list of sites about Madonna, Madonna fan clubs, Madonna fashion, Madonna posters—and of course, the names of Madonna CDs. You might get lucky and even see a site in the listing where you can actually buy the Madonna CD you are looking for.

You can use this inefficiency of the search engines to find sites that would be good candidates for selling your particular product or service. Let’s take the Madonna CD example. Suppose you had an online store that sells CDs—Madonna CDs included. And suppose you wanted to recruit affiliate sites to sell your CDs. You can use the search results to target potential affiliate sites that could sell Madonna music from their site to their “Material Girl” visitors.

If you enter the name of a Madonna CD in the search engines and get the same results as before, you have a ready-made list of affiliate site candidates. Some good search engines to use for this recruiting strategy are Goto.com (www.goto.com), DirectHit.com (www.directhit.com), and Google.com (www.google.com). You can use this strategy for any key words that you have placed on the pages of your own Web site. The sites that index well for your own keywords are the sites you want to target.

Another trick is to use AltaVista.com (www.altavista.com) to find targeted affiliate sites. Let’s say you’re selling pet supplies and are looking for sites that target pet owners. Spend some time thinking about who your competitors are in your market space. Let’s say it’s Petsmart.com (www.petsmart.com). In the AltaVista search bar, type link:petsmart.com. You’ll get a list of hundreds of sites that link to Petsmart.com. From there, you can quickly compile a list of sites to e-mail about joining your pet supplies affiliate program.

If you are adding to your affiliate program, simply visit your best affiliates and see to whom they are linking. Sometimes they link to other great sites that would be a perfect match for your program.

Contacting Affiliates

Once you find and build your list of affiliate candidates, it’s time to contact them. As you first identify potential affiliates, enter their site name, URL, e-mail, phone, and a short description into a database. Then write a brief e-mail to send to each site. This is how ClubMom writes its:

“I just reviewed [their site name], and I really liked [write a couple of complimentary sentences about their site]. You’ve done a great job.”

Then attach to the e-mail a short version of the message you crafted in Step One. Make sure you personalize the e-mail with a name if you can, and if not, with the name of the Web site. Start with 100 e-mails at first, and then add about 50–100 per month. If possible, make a phone call to all the potential affiliates—this is far more effective than sending an e-mail. In order to determine the most desirable sites, rank them according to the 3 T’s (Top Sites for High Traffic, Targeted Traffic from Search Engines, and Top Level Domains (TLDs) for Niche Traffic) (see Table 6.1).

Table 6.1. The 3 T’s of Affiliate Recruitment

Top Sites for High Traffic	Media Metrix Top 500 sites
Targeted Traffic from Search Engines	Sites that place at the top in search engines for your keywords
TLDs for Niche Traffic	Content and community sites with a good domain name