Tips for advertisers on how to attract more publishers

It is never too late to remind that affiliate networks don’t do magic and don’t secretly provide a special button having pressed which you will get millions $US. It would be pretty silly if a publisher placed a banner on his website and was expecting to get thousands $US for that. Likewise, it is strange when advertisers include in the program review only unattractive financial terms and wait that the top-5 publishers will join their programs and start attracting traffic to their offers.

Those who have been working with affiliate networks for a good many years know that not all publishers can attract equal numbers of orders. They are ranked and they are assigned the levels based on how much traffic they attract. You can work with all publishers who join your program or you can select each manually.  But firstly, you have to attract publishers to your offer to have an opportunity to select them. You should make such a proposal for publishers, that they couldn’t refuse. Let’s take a look at how you can do it.

Start

If you want to get high profit, pay attention to elaborating your offer. Try to think about all information that publishers will need to promote your products and include it and all terms in your program review.

      Start fast and on the maximum. What does it mean? Provide all information which we have included in the checklist for advertisers in our article “How to make your offer wanted”.  If you say about your offer “It is not the best, but it is ok for now, let’s launch it and then we will add something”, you are potentially losing good publishers and their traffic. The thing is that as soon as a new offer appears in the catalogue of programs, publishers receive the email with it. And if a publisher doesn’t find your offer interesting when he sees it for the first time, it is almost impossible that he will look at it later. It is much more likely that he will choose other offers in the same category which will be more attractive. Don’t forget that it is impossible to make the first impression twice so make your offer the best from the beginning.

      Check the list of traffic types allowed in the affiliate network and choose which you will allow and which you will forbid. Don’t be too strict: instead of forbidding contextual advertising, indicate the stop words which publishers cannot use. The publishers can come up with some new ideas and try seldom queries (what can attract much traffic). If you are not sure about such types as teasers, pop-ups, click-unders, allow them only upon the approval. If you don’t want to be associated with spam, ask your publishers where they get the contacts for emails and to which target audience they will send the emails. Make the decision about allowing or forbidding some sources based on statistics which you get when you start working with publishers. Having launched your offer you will be able to judge if some traffic sources are ineffective, and if so, you can forbid them.

      When you launch the offer, you can share this news with your audience in social networks, in email and on your website. But why do you need it?  First of all, you will attract your loyal buyers to your offer, there is a possibility that they will start doing reviews and will be happy to promote your brand on the internet. You kinda become a publisher turning your loyal customers into loyal publishers. To do so you need to paste an affiliate link of the network on your website. It is beneficial for companies as the publishers attracted by the company become their affiliates, so the company will not pay Admitad the commission for actions attracted by these affiliates, the company will pay only the reward to the affiliates. Moreover, some publisher could have missed the email with your news, so you can inform one more time.

While working

Alright, you have launched the offer and you have analyzed first results. What’s next? Now you need to develop it and to encourage new publishers to join it.

      Offer a bonus scale: for example, a dynamic rate which will change when a publisher reaches some turnover level. We mean that if a publisher attracts orders for the sum up to $US 1.500, his rate will be 5% for each order, if he attracts for the sum from $US 1.500 to $US 5.000 the rate will be 6%, if from US$ 3.000, the rate will be 7%. If you don’t like this type of bonuses, you can pay once some fixed reward for reaching certain sum. For instance, if a publisher has attracted orders for the sum of $US 5.000, you can pay him once $US 200. It can be a single-time special bonus or permanent bonus system.

      Provide bonuses for certain categories or tools. For instance, «ALL May increased rate for shoes — 50% and higher », «increased cashback till the end of July», «coupons for decorations till Christmas». This will help you: а) to increase traffic to those categories which are not so well sold, b) to give publishers a reason to use certain tools more effectively.

      Hold competitions — some activities when publishers can compete with each other. The rewards shouldn’t be extremely high like a car or a trip to Cancun, you can offer some gadgets (sport watches, smartphones, tablets) or some money.

      Let your publishers know about new products, deals or sales. All these attractive deals for customers can be very effective when a skilled publisher use them. So the sooner he will find out about the updates, the sooner he will start using them for promoting your offer. It is good if you initiate sending emails to the publishers who have joined your program so that they stayed informed.

      You can offer some personal partnership terms to your top publishers. For instance, financial bonuses or special tools: you can come up with a special promo-code with the publisher’s name (it works well with bloggers) or a customized design of advertising materials (banners, widgets, landing pages). When you give some special terms to a certain publishers, you help him.

      Use additional opportunities provided by the affiliate network: initiate to send emails to the additional base of publishers and to place banners with special deals on publishers profiles. You should advertise yourself in the affiliate network, not your products. Your products will be advertised by your publishers.

      Be fast: conduct the reconciliation fast (in the ideal world you’d better set up automatic reconciliation), moderate publishers and their ad spaces promptly, update important information about your offer in advance and add funds to your account in time. This will help your publishers to plan their promotion campaign and increase the effectiveness.

      Stay loyal: don’t reject the orders without a steady reason and always indicate the reason for rejection. The publishers will see the problem and will do their best to improve the quality of their traffic. Keep in mind that if you reject the orders without a reason, it will be taken as shave what is a huge harm to the reputation of your offer in the affiliate network.

Don’t forget that now there are 15000 advertisers including your competitors in the affiliate network. If you start slowly, take your program review as something unimportant, provide no information or promotion materials, it will be a huge advantage to your competitors.