How to Avoid Low-Quality Affiliates in Your Affiliate Program

Tired of the grind of running an affiliate marketing program for very little in return? If you are putting in dozens of hours every month to manage your affiliates and your platform without seeing an equivalent increase in sales, something is wrong.

Are you thinking, “What do you mean? It’s an affiliate marketing program! Of course, it takes extra work!”

Well…

Maybe a little more work is involved in running an affiliate program. But, the program and your affiliate partners should be the ones doing the work for you.

If you are putting a lot of hours into outreach, marketing, fielding calls and emails, and creating custom content but not seeing the results…there is a problem.

It’s possible you have poor-quality affiliates dragging down the ROI of your platform and taking up all of your time.

Poor Quality Affiliates Increase Your Workload

You know the type of affiliates we’re talking about here. These are the partners who sign up for your program and ask for quick calls to chat about the product or make requests for custom copy and materials.

Or…

They set up an affiliate account and never log back in again or read any of the materials you send out.

Or…

They only make one or two sales. While selling is nice, if you are only getting one or two customers per affiliate, spread out over dozens of affiliates, that still leaves you with a lot of work for not a lot of return.

For instance, you’ll have to approve commission payments and track down tax paperwork for each affiliate at the end of the year. Not mention the quick chats with the affiliates who need handholding take up time that you could be putting into your actual income-earning business.

Don’t get us wrong!

An affiliate marketing platform that’s set up correctly and run with an eye for efficiency and quality partnerships can bring amazing results. After all, setting up easy to use affiliate programs is what we do at Siren. It’s just that developing the right process for running your program and finding those high-earning affiliates is the key to your success.

Bogged Down by the Unnecessary Elements of an Affiliate Program

One of the pitfalls that business owners fall into when first building an affiliate program is adding too many unnecessary elements. These extra features seem like a good idea for a well-rounded program, but they only create more work for you. Not only that, these features aren’t utilized as often as you would think by affiliates:

Affiliate Newsletter: Creating a bi-weekly or monthly newsletter with the latest updates about your products and affiliate platform is a good idea … if it’s being read. When you send out affiliate newsletters that don’t even get opened, there’s no reason to spend time creating them.

Excessive Promotional Materials: It’s important to have promo materials and documentation available for your affiliate partners to use. But, you don’t need to spend time creating lots of different banners, images, and documentation. Nor do you need to create custom banners for every affiliate.

Phone Calls: Do you have a thorough and easy to understand summary of your products on your website? Then, there shouldn’t be any need for clarifying chats with most of your affiliates.

Too Much Time Spent Chasing Down Affiliates!

Another pitfall of running an affiliate marketing program is the idea that you have to find and sign-up as many affiliate partners as possible. It’s way too easy to get caught up in the idea of growing your affiliate army to the dozens or hundreds in a short time.

A strong focus on growing quickly can lead you to take shortcuts, such as not properly vetting your affiliates. It also leaves you in the position of always chasing down new partners with ads and on forums, rather than focusing on your business or enjoying your free time.

Setting up an affiliate program is like running a second business. You can’t blast the internet with advertisements looking for anyone to sign up for your program. This will just be a lot of time and money invested in internet marketing, and it will leave you with poor quality affiliates.

So, how do you find good quality, high-value affiliate partners?

Well, let’s make this omelet by cracking one egg at a time.

Becoming an Affiliate Program Quality Partners Want to Join

Setting up a thriving, lean, and efficient affiliate program starts with a look at your business. To appeal to the best quality affiliates, you need to know your services and products inside and out. Experienced affiliates, content creators, and influencers receive lots of offers from affiliate programs. To ensure your program appeals to potential affiliate partners, you need to show them what you can bring to the table.

Research your products and your customers. If you know who is most likely to benefit from your products, you’ll be able to find content creators and other businesses with a built-in audience that fits your target market.

Analyze your sales metrics too. By knowing how much you sell across different segments of your customer base, you’ll be able to give potential affiliate partners an idea of what kinds of commissions they can expect.

Some questions you should be able to answer for potential affiliates include:

• What is your average customer value?
• What is your typical conversion rate?
• What kinds of customers get the best results?

Simply put, find out your sales metrics. Know your products, and the customers they appeal too.

Researching Potential Partners

Okay, so now you know your business metrics as well as you know the back of your hand. You are ready to begin searching for those quality affiliate partners.

The process of finding high-quality creators is less broad spectrum advertising and more background research and directly approaching creators you think will bring benefits to your platform.

Once you know more about your customer base, you’ll be able to find the kinds of influencers and creators who also appeal to those customers. This is something we mentioned earlier, but it is important to keep in mind.

Find these creators. Then, follow them. Watch their content or read their posts. Learn more about them beyond the number of subscribers. By learning a little about their content and services, you can:

• Find out more about their unique voice and approach to their audience.
• Learn about the kinds of services and solutions these creators like to promote.
• See how these creators deal with challenges, both for their audience and in their businesses.
• Understand what challenges their audience faces, and how your products may resolve these issues.

This process also allows you to become a part of their community, a familiar “face” who writes thoughtful comments and participates in discussions. Don’t worry. You don’t have to be an uber fan or always comment on every video or post. All it takes is a comment here or there about things that catch your interest. In other words, simply being a contributor.

Pitching Your Partnership Program to Potential Affiliates

You’ve zeroed in on a couple of high-quality creators that you think would be a good fit for your affiliate platform. Now is the time to approach them.

Prepare your pitch before reaching out to a potential affiliate partner. Don’t just send a generic template or a short email without any substance. Popular creators are approached by affiliate programs and other brands all the time. Many of these brands use generic emails that they send in bulk, which are easy to spot and equally as easy for creators to ignore.

You want your first email pitch to a potential partner to stand out.

Create a personalized pitch that shows how your products or services can not only bring commissions for the creator, but also solve a problem for their audience.

An example of how to phrase this comes directly from one of our podcasts about finding and securing better affiliates:

You’re not out there begging for affiliates. You’re not desperately trying to convince people to promote your product. Instead, you’re confidently presenting a proven opportunity.

Think about how different this feels: Instead of “Would you maybe want to promote our product?” You’re saying “I noticed 40% of your audience matches the profile of our most successful customers. Would you be open to discussing how we might be able to help them?”

Instead of “We offer great commissions!” You’re saying “Based on your typical promotion results and our conversion data, here’s exactly what this could look like for your business…”

See how these suggestions emphasize the metrics and show potential affiliates exactly how partnering with you could bring them financial benefits? You can give your new partners an immediate idea of what to expect from your affiliate program.

Scaling Your Program Up

It takes time to build your affiliate program when using this method, compared to simply advertising to lots of people. The effort is worth it. From the very beginning you’ll be bringing quality affiliates who can exponentially grow your sales with less work for you in the long run.

No more handholding.

No chasing down anyone whose willing to join the program.

No more eating into your marketing budget.

Just proven results from experienced high earners.

It’s our belief that an affiliate program only multiplies what already works. If you have a successful business and a reliable approach to bringing in quality affiliates, you’ll see results week over week.

All you need to do is repeat the process of finding and researching successful content creators. Their built-in audience can become a new customer base for your business right away.

Even better, the successes you have with each affiliate partner becomes a case study to show to other potential partners. You’ll have ‘social currency’ to point to when pitching to additional affiliates.

Your current affiliates can also help you connect with new affiliates through introductions to their network of fellow content creators.

Start slowly. Use these secrets to attract high-quality affiliates. You’ll see your platform multiplying what’s working more and more over time.