Step Five—Using PR and Advertising
Up to now, you’ve seen ways of promoting your program that are free or of little cost. But if you have money to spend, you can advertise your program on the affiliate program directories, affiliate marketing sites, in eZines, and sponsoring newsletters. The directories will sell banner ads to merchants to advertise their programs. Associate-it.com, AssociatePrograms.com, CashPile, and Refer-it.com sell a variety of advertising packages on their sites as well as e-mail blasts and newsletter spots.
Another source for paid advertising to attract affiliates are the free Web page or homesteading sites like Yahoo! GeoCities Pages That Pay (geocities.yahoo.com/home) and Lycos Tripod Commission Central (www.tripod.lycos.com) (see Figure 6.16). While these services will give you access to millions of Web site owners in their network for a fee, the kinds of affiliates that you may recruit can fall far below the quality of affiliates you need to make your program a success.
Figure 6.16. Lycos’ Commission Central will present your affiliate program to the hundreds of thousands of Web sites they host for a fee.
Do
| DO promote your affiliate contest or sweepstakes free on CashPile’s Merchant Special Promotions Page (www.cashpile.com/active/announce.cfm). Simply fill out a short form and submit your special promotion to be considered for display. |
Another promotion strategy that has a cost—but one less than advertising—is Public Relations, especially press releases. Done right, you can get thousands of dollars worth of free advertising for the cost of sending out the right kind of press release to the right media outlets. The cost can be a little as a hundred dollars to send the release over the news wires, and some are even free (see Table 6.4).
| PRWeb www.prWeb.com | Free press release distribution service that distributes your news through the Web and e-mail. |
| Internet News Bureau www.newsbureau.com | Send your release to 4,500 journalists. Single releases are $250 each. |
| IMEDIAFAX www.imediafax.com/ | An Internet-to-media fax news distribution service that allows you to customize your own target lists and fax press releases anywhere in the world 24 hours a day for 25 cents a page. |
| BusinessWire www.bizwire.com | Distributes your news with photos and graphics for as little as $300. |
The secret to PR is relevance. If you want your press release to be picked up by the media that’s announcing your new affiliate programs or any new developments that take place, like how many affiliates you have, how successful they are, or how fast your program is growing, you must make it timely and relevant. Announcing just another affiliate program these days is no news at all. But if you can show that your program is different in some way, then you have a chance of seeing it promoted both online and off line, which can attract potential candidates to your program.
Good PR requires cultivating a relationship with the press. Cry wolf too many times with releases that are not relevant or deemed important, and when you do have a good story to tell the press will ignore you.
Another tip is to make your press releases short and to the point, no more than one page long. Make your ground-shaking announcement, send it to the right media outlets, and don’t pester them with follow-up phone calls. If they feel it’s worth doing a story on, they will.
Follow these five steps of program promotion and you should have a large stable of affiliate candidates to choose from. The next step, of course, is the actual choosing.