Best way to promote a new affiliate program

I have created an affiliate program that has all the necessary items for an affiliate to succeed and gives them everything to get set up very easily. I need to start promoting the program, but I wanted to know if anyone here has had some experience with successfully launching a program or good ways to promote a program. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

Forums like this are great way to promote affiliate program. Read webmaster forums if anyone is looking for a affiliate program with the same ninch that you have. Other way is to submit your program to all large affiliate program directorys like affiliateseeking.com and associateprograms.com.

 

Yep the forums and affiliate directories are good places to start. Good luck with this.

 

If you have the money, there's a few really good places to advertise that can make a major difference (you're looking at about $3000 though).

Otherwise I'd recommend hiring an affiliate program manager, as they specialize in things like this.

 

or just use ppc advertising programs like adsense or anything similar to this.

or buy forum signatures, forum signatures are a great way to promote !

 

You can't use PPC, the costs are through the roof for affiliate program keywords, it's like $6/click. Even the tail keywords are pretty expensive these days, there's way more effective ways to advertise.

You could spend $1000 in PPC and get like 150-250 clicks and maybe 5-10 signups, or you can advertise on a site that's targetted at affiliates for $1000/month and get around 10,000 clicks and several hundred signups for the same amount of money.

 

That is very true. I tried looking into hiring an affiliate manager, but most of the companies that promote affiliate programs make you create one through them and all that mess. I just need someone to promote my already made program to the right places.

 

I do affiliate recruiting and promotion for a living so can give you some tips.

You said: "I tried looking into hiring an affiliate manager, but most of the companies that promote affiliate programs make you create one through them and all that mess."

I think you may be confusing affiliate network with affiliate manager. An affiliate manager will typically manage a program on whatever platform you are using. Some call affiliate networks affiliate managers but networks typically don't manage programs at least not without an additional 6K a month fee to do it.

As far as getting the word out - many affiliate forums including DP and my 5 Star forum do allow new affiliate program announcements. You just need to find them all and read the rules to see which ones do.

Affiliate directories are another option, but there really arent very many good ones and not many affiliates use directories any more to find programs because most directories arent kept up very well.

I disagree about PPC prices being through the roof for affiliate marketing related KW. I do a ton of PPC for 5 Star and there are lots of great KW in the 50 - 75C range. But really for your program you would want more specific KWs like "electronics affiliate programs" "computer affiliate programs" etc. so you get affiliates targeted to your niche. Those KW should not be that bad.

Hope this helps and best of luck!

 

5Star - $0.50/click is still pretty brutal. At $1000 you're burn through that in just 2000 clicks. I don't know what the conversion rates are, but lets say 10% (which I would think are optimistic). So $1000 to convert about 200 affiliates. That's actually not too bad.

But then you can buy a plug from Shoemoney or JohnChow for $1000 which puts your affiliate program on overdrive for a few days. Just a few days ago John posted that his 1 plug about that dealdotcom or whatever it was got him 220 people signed up under him in 3 days and people were still signing up like crazy.

I think I'd stick intially to getting ads like that and on affiliate specific sites like yours and ABestWeb, way more value for your buck I think. Heck, the last email I did through ABestWeb recruited over 400 affiliates for a site that I help manage.

To me, PPC just isn't worth what it was years ago.

 

Thanks for the words of advice guys. After talking with some of you, I have decided to get Shareasale to take on the program, but I still need some marketing. I will check into your 5 star site. Thanks again for the info.