Well I will definately promote heavily in webmaster forums when I start up my affiliate program and see if I can catch a few good affiliates in transition. Just have to make it an attractive package now .
Depends on your product. However I suggest you get an affiliate manager if you are not familiar with affiliate program promotion. I'll suggest you to get in some affiliate network such as cj and shareasale. By this way you can get quite a lot of affiliates easily. Not all of them are quality, but if your program is good enough quality affiliates will stay with you.
I was leaning towards an affiliate manager but I have concerns 1. Where do you find one 2. Do they have afiliates they work with or do they just promote on my behalf?
If you are any good, Super Affiliates will find you. Most of them know each other or keep tabs on each other. When we first joined the program we are promoting now, we brought in 40 super affiliates under us in the first 2 days. Like I said, if your product is good and sells, Super Affiliates will find you soon enough.
Regarding bringing on an affiliate manager, you're definitely going to want to hire someone who has been in the business for awhile. This way, they will have connections to a lot of affiliates and know how to find new affiliates at the same time.
I wasn't talking about "Gurus" who sell awful ebooks, I was talking about real super affiliates. i.e. People who make more than $50,000 per month.
That happened to us a few times with other programs. So we actually contacted the program we are promoting now and said: "hey, we may start outranking you in the search engines on alot of keywords, do you mind?" They said they don't mind at all. They even said: "why should we? You are promoting our website". That's the attitude we like.