Recruiting Affiliates with Accuracy and Organization

Dealing with pages upon pages of possible affiliates for your marketing campaign can be overwhelming, but with the help of organization and consistency, the process can be rather sufficient.

Recruiting begins with a simple Google search of a particular product that is relevant your market. For example, a search on the O’Neill Psycho II Wetsuit creates search results like, O’Neill, Swell, Amazon.com, Wetsuit Warehouse, and much more. In fact, about 24,5000 more. Obviously, a lot of those pages are repeats, but specifically looking through each of the results is beneficial to your campaign process.picture-37

Up through the first ten pages of the Google search, I began noting each of the websites that were given to me as possible affiliates. Entering each website, I began browsing around, investigating the style and services of each website. A website like Jack’s Surfboards for example, wouldn’t necessarily be of my interest because they are an actual store apart from their online site, and would not be considered a possible affiliate for my website. Easily enough, I would label them as “store” and move on to my next search result.

A website like Wetsuit Review is interesting because it describes and promotes a lot of products on their pages and could even help promote the products on my website. However, because Wetsuit Review does not include any purchasing services or links to other stores for purchase of the products, I cannot utilize them to my advantage. These websites would be frankly labeled as “review”.

picture-22Other websites that might come up would be sites for magazines, marketplaces like eBay, and competitor websites like Hostel Board Co., Sierra Trading, Tactics Surf Shop, etc. Magazines and competing online stores are not helpful affiliates for my website because they are already expanded to a point where they are looking for affiliates as well. I would most likely label these websites as “magazine”, “marketplace”, and “competitor”.

The type of websites that I’m looking for include those who are marketing online stores by including their products on the affiliate’s page, creating some type of review, and allowing the consumer to travel from the affiliate’s site over to the store’s site for direct purchase. The purpose of the affiliate is to expand the market of a store’s products, by allowing the search of a particular product to be expanded over search engines, and not just through the store’s main site.

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The data including website name and URL, category of product search, (i.e. wetsuits), type of website (affiliate, competitor, store, review, etc.), and contact information allows you to have easy access to data that will guide you towards an efficient step in affiliated marketing. At the tip of your fingertips, you have all the information you need in your search for possible affiliates to contact and initiate a possible affiliate-company relationship.
After completing this task, I not only learned a lot about affiliated marketing, but also the types of products that big name companies sell. It’s a great opportunity to learn about the advantages of affiliates and the additional promoting and marketing that is being done through affiliated relationships.

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