Affiliate networks that were built three to five years ago and managed to survive are doing relatively fine with their affiliate base these days. We all know how it was back then: less competition, greener grass, and an exchange rate that wasn’t nearly as scary.
Just a couple of years back, affiliate networks competed mostly on the number of offers and the size of the payouts. Those things still matter today, but they’re no longer enough. With the insane number of networks out there, all the scam stories, and a market that moves at a brutal pace, 99% of networks shut down within their first six months. No media presence, no decent marketing, and as a result — no affiliates. So how do you actually get affiliates to come to you?
Things You Need to Understand First
Before we get into specific methods, let me plant a bit of my own experience in your heads:
- An experienced affiliate has run so many campaigns that they’ve developed built-in ad blindness and a deep distrust of ads and promises. Just imagine how many of those same empty promises they’ve written themselves, every single day.
- Hunting for affiliates looks a lot more like B2B than B2C, and it calls for the same kind of promotion methods.
- There are two basic ways to attract affiliates. The first is to shoot blind: cheap and at scale. The second is to build a reputation around your brand — loyalty, trust, or at the very least a vague awareness among affiliates that your network exists and apparently hasn’t scammed anyone yet.
Social Media Ads
Any affiliate network ad placed on social media or in industry media needs some kind of hook. Most network ads boil down to: “Come run traffic with us — top offers, sky-high payouts, free apps, pre-landers…” Or: “Come run traffic with us, we’ll teach you everything!”
Ads of the first kind are mostly placed by networks whose payouts are anything but top and whose offers are anything but exclusive. Every affiliate has clicked one of those once or twice, checked the terms, gone “meh”, and left. And they’ll never click one again. So who will? A newbie.
The training hook is a sad story too. Newbies will bite, and teaching them is hell, pain and suffering. The only network that can handle it is one with a strong in-house media buying team that’s ready to spend the lion’s share of its time and energy on training new affiliates. Otherwise, the network gets newbies it spends time and resources on. But it doesn’t get anywhere near the traffic volume that would pay all that back.
The conclusion is simple. Advertising an affiliate network on social media brings in mostly newbies. If your infrastructure is built to train new affiliates, good for you. But I know maybe a couple of success stories like that. Usually, networks run ads, get a wave of newbies, the affiliate managers are tearing their hair out, support is tearing their hair out, the experienced affiliates suffer from lack of attention, and traffic volume only goes down.
There are exceptions. Sometimes experienced affiliates do come in from ads like that. It doesn’t happen often. And let’s not forget that the ads cost real money, and a crowd of newbies tags along for the ride.
Spam
Everybody frowns on this one. Plenty of people think it stopped working ages ago. But for the affiliate market, spam is roughly the same thing as social media ads. Only cheaper. And it often works better.
Conversion through spam will be terrible, but there’s a chance you’ll land in the DMs of a proper affiliate who happens to be looking for somewhere to send traffic right now. And if you’ve already resorted to this desperate method of promotion, at least write a unique message that will actually interest an affiliate. Ideas, tools, information — hook your mailing on useful stuff that will bring you clients down the line. Whereas “Hello, my name is Alina, I’m an affiliate manager at network X, we have top offers” gets deleted by the affiliate at the word “Hello”.
And here I can already hear the reader’s unspoken question: “Reznik! Is there a normal way for a network to promote itself? One where you don’t pour thousands of bucks into the void and don’t have to spam?” There is. The next section could have been about it. But no. It’s about the exact opposite. The worst thing a network can do.
Referral Program
Many network founders, especially during the roughest stretches (the first months of operation, the first cash-flow gaps), come up with a brilliant idea: attract affiliates through a referral program. Let’s do the math on why a referral system is genuine servitude for an affiliate network.
Any user can create a referral link for the network in their dashboard. Once it’s created, the link gets sent to friends, dropped into chats, and baked into content. In effect, you’ve created a way for people to earn money by bringing affiliates into your network.
Right after launching a referral program, the results often look fantastic: rapid growth in the number of affiliates, rapid growth in volume and turnover.
But a couple of months in, once there’s data to analyze, exactly two problems show up. And they’re shockingly awful:
- At a minimum referral rate of 1% and a ballpark-average traffic volume of $5,000 a month, after 3 months the payout for bringing in one affiliate reaches $150. After a year, $600. That’s a lot compared to sane marketing methods. And how long does this charity go on? As long as the network exists and the referred affiliate keeps running traffic to it. Probably years.
- Most affiliates will use the referral link to create a second account for themselves. And break the entire math of your business. Instead of spending money on a referral program, just raise the payouts for your own affiliates!
A referral program is a direct route to putting your business into financial servitude. And there’s no quiet way out: try switching the referral program off a year later, and the very affiliates it brought in will tell everyone how you screwed them over. When you’re building a business in a market as narrow as traffic arbitrage, where everybody knows everybody, what matters is building a reputation — not chasing a “fix” right here and now because the withdrawal is kicking in. Will a referral program drive a network into the red? If you do the business model math properly, no. Are there cheaper and more effective ways to attract affiliates? Of course!
Content Marketing
This is a long-established and very powerful way to promote yourself in B2B (business to business). The idea is to talk to your audience through useful content. To create advertising the audience actually wants to see. Not shoving your talking points down people’s throats, but honestly and carefully showing them to those who are genuinely interested.
The mechanics of content marketing in the affiliate niche can vary, but they usually come down to a few options:
- Building your own blog and then pushing it through SEO;
- Your own Telegram channel to gather an audience;
- Publishing case studies, reviews and other useful articles in industry media. One caveat here: media will only publish case studies based on real data. Otherwise it’s grey-area marketing, and most media outlets won’t run that kind of content;
- Running your own blog inside a media outlet.
And so you don’t think I’m all talk: this blog and the @altercpaworld channel on Telegram are exactly that scheme. Does it work? Well, you’re reading this right now. And how to actually do it hands-on — which formats exist, and how the standard approach differs from the guerrilla one — I broke down in a separate article on content marketing for affiliate networks. Here, just the gist.
Content marketing works over the long haul. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. That’s why young projects often avoid it. Starting with spam is a perfectly reasonable idea, but if you plan to be around for more than a couple of months, you absolutely have to get the content side going in parallel.
In terms of cost, this kind of promotion is comparable to social media ads. Sometimes it comes out more expensive. But the results are incomparably better. And over the long haul, they’re out of this world.
Another reason many networks stay away from content: it takes a strong team. You need a marketer who knows everything about the media, has personal experience in affiliate marketing and a fat contact list. In the dream team, that’s the CMO, and they’re not there for decoration. You need a team of writers capable of producing content that won’t make experienced affiliates’ eyes bleed. There are very few content people like that on the market, and most of them need to be trained or retrained.
Back in the day, I used to recommend Andrey to everyone: a guy with experience promoting both networks and services through content, and he helped me with this very blog too. I won’t promise you a couple of free tips, but messaging him and saying you’re from Reznik definitely won’t hurt.
Over a span of 3–12 months, content marketing can build your brand an entire fan base. Recognition, trust, loyalty — without these, you can’t expect hundreds of experienced affiliates to show up and run their traffic through you.
The Takeaway
The optimal combo is spam plus content marketing. Sure, spam may dent your brand’s reputation a bit, but for a new network that’s not critical. Especially since once you’re doing content marketing, any reputational damage from spam is easy to compensate for and outweigh. And while you can somehow get by without spam, building a network that’s still alive and turning a nice profit a year from now without the content side is next to impossible.
And finally, a fly in the ointment from a guy who sells engines for affiliate networks himself. An engine doesn’t bring you affiliates. Not a home-grown one, not AlterCPA Pro — whether on your own server or in our cloud. The engine is there so an affiliate has somewhere to come and no reason to leave. Making them find out you’re worth coming to in the first place — that’s marketing. Nobody will do it for you. Not even us.