How to Build an Affiliate Army

So I've been brainstorming this lately for a few reasons. The most obvious one being this:

When you go to clickbank, and search for any product sorting by high gravity, you'll notice that most anything that has a gravity over 100 has a % referred of over 75% or more. There might be one or two that don't, but most of them have at least that much, or more.

So what does that tell you off the bat? The top traffic method out there has nothing to do with Media Buying, PPC, SEO, Blogging, or any of that stuff. The sites getting mondo traffic, are the sites that build affiliate armies. And the sites that build affiliate armies, all have a few things in common.

1.) The offer is really good, and the product sells easy

2.) The commission is more than fair. Status quo is 75% these days. But on a high ticket item, you can get by with 50-60% (If the commissions recur monthly)

3.) The product vendor gives away lots of sweet tools, and actually gives their affiliates tips on how to make sales. Why not? Better to have 1,000 people doing what normally cost you money, and make 25%, than to make 100% spending a ton on advertising, and having less reach.

Pretty basic stuff right?

Well in my thinking on this, I stumbled upon something that I think I'm going to be adding to all of my affiliate programs. It's called ListJuice. (First line in my sig). List juice is a sweet coregistration company that lets you swap ads on other partner network websites. Just like Getresponse puts coregistration ads on the unsubscribe and thank you pages if you don't customize those in your campaigns.

They have a lot of other really cool ways to utilize their program as well, but then I noticed something completely outside the box...

Offer your affiliates a coregsitration spot on the check out process of your product. That will encourage them to promote for you, because while they are working hard to make sales, they benefit from the hard work of the other affiliates as well. Since every single sale that comes in helps generate leads (and you can put these codes on your opt in thankyou pages too), they actually build their OWN list while sending traffic to YOUR website...

It's stuff like this that will get more affiliates promoting your program. I'm compiling a list of things to help build an affiliate army, because clearly, the programs with the most affiliates get the most traffic. That's the bottom line. If you have a cool strategy for getting affiliates, post it here.