How do I promote my affiliate program?

[Kidtimer]

This is my first post, HELLO :)
I see some great info here on the site. Nice to see you all.
I’m Daniel, the owner and webmaster of <a site>.

I have been working on making a bigger deal of my affiliate program, and am continuing to work to make the program better as I go.
The software that the affiliate program is promoting does very well in offline sales, but I find it very hard to bring in enough traffic to make it worth a while online.
So I thought making affiliate program would be a smart move, webmasters with parents traffic could put up banners to my site and get 50% for each sale. This would make them money and also be good for their site reputation because this is very good for the kids safety. At least that has been the experience I got from the stores selling the product.
But then again bringing in webmasters is not an easy task.

Are there any way’s that you can recommend me to get attention of more webmasters, offering contests, better deals, better banners etc..?

//I removed the links, thanks for the hint knowles

I don’t have much budget at the moment to spend on banners on Boards like this, most of my budget went into developing the software.

Any advice? I'd really appreciate some help on this.

Best regards,
Daniel.

[edited by: rcjordan at 2:54 am (utc) on Aug. 14, 2002]

[Knowles]

Kidtimer welcome to WWM! Just a helpful hint you might want to remove all the links in your post they are frowned apon here.

The first things I would try to do to get it out there more is make sure you are in directories (ie DMOZ Yahoo) also make sure you are hitting the search engines. You might try some Adwords for awhile what you are selling is probably searched for alot, thats just a guess. Hope this helps.

[eljefe3]

The absolute best way is to do a search for your key phrases and see who comes up in the search engines/directories. Then spend some time looking at each site to find out what their site is about, how they are currently selling (or who they are selling for) and then contact them. I usually send an email first and then do a follow-up call if they have their contact info listed.

Next step is to make sure you get listed in as many affiliate program directories that rank high when you do a search for "affiliate program directories" at your favorite high trafficked search engine.

Also hit up some affiliate program forums where there are a lot of affiliates who are looking for something new to promote that makes them money. You'll need to spend some time at these forums and build up credibility before anyone will take you seriously and want to join your program, but this will pay dividends in the long run.

Good luck with your program!

[Robber]

The other guys have pretty much got this covered. If you want to run your program in house then you have to do the leg work to get the affiliates - the networks cost money to join but they have the affiliates ready to run instantly.

One thing about affiliate marketing, an attraction of being an affiliate merchant is that you can build yourself a virtual sales force, getting thousands of webmasters to sell for you, that does have some truth in it - but its not the whole story. Its true that you can get loads of affiliates, but what you need to appreciate is that very few of these will generate many sales. You really need to find those that will actually sell your products.

Checking out the affiliate forums is a good start, but be careful - don't start dropping your URL asking people to sign up - you might just end up putting off the best affiliates. Make sure you find the right discussion board - probably something like: "Merchant" or "independent Programs", you might be best just introducing yourself first, then give full details about your program, explain what sets apart from other programs, but dont just drop a url!

This should help to inform the active affiliates of you existence. If you still don't have much interest having done this it might be because they dont like something about your program - theres no harm in asking them for feedback, in fact affiliates like a merchant who listens.

Hope that helps, good luck in promoting your program.

[rcjordan]

Though many of the old affiliate program directories are showing signs of little or no maintenance, they still have their "submit your affiliate program [google.com]" function intact and the lists are building (though, again, current reviews are relatively rare). While I won't mention any of them specifically, there are a few that are worth digging through every month or so from an affiliate's perspective --we're always looking for new programs.

[Robber]

And Iguess being included in some of those directories might hep with your inbound links!