Hi, We're a startup affiliate network (or a sub-affiliate network if you will). It's been really hard to get it off the ground w/ more publishers using it. What is the best way for publishers to use it, or to get it off the ground? Edward Team Swagly
Best bet would be getting it setup on clickbank. Many affiliate promoters go there looking for products to sell.
Are you an affiliate network like Hydra Media, Azoogle, ect. or do you have an affiliate program? If you have a network, best thing to do is go to all the affiliate conferences and market your company. If you have an affiliate program, try advertising on affiliate forums.
Seems like it might be a tough nut to crack without something unique. Perhaps setting up some sort of online affiliate training college will draw in the people looking for products to promote and wanting to learn. This in turn will attract the vendors. If vendors see you training people they will know that the quality of affiliate members will be better than the newbs fresh off the street that they are recruiting. Many of my new affiliate members are very green and could use some guidance in promoting products and setting up a proper website. Something I do not have time to do. Perhaps teach them how to properly market products, set up wordpress blogs, use the various Google tools, etc... Perhaps even issue a Certification for potential publishers such as a Certified Affiliate Publisher or some such thing. I know it means nothing but it could have some great psychological advantages. I know that I would be attracted to a network that trains and certifies their members as this is going to help me out as a vendor in the end.
the best way is always to lead by example, show your success with what you're doing and people will want to copy your success using your method\product in this case your affiliate network
Well, What we are is an affiliate network. Going to conferences might work, but I think it's the publishers I have to convince. We don't have a traditional affiliate network where we just provide the links. We're a TechCrunch featured startup actually, and we're looking to co-work with a couple of affiliate networks to throw our app widget out to gain some traction. Right now I'm just working with a few blogs and get them started so others will follow suit. I think this is the easiest way. In terms of training, there isn't much needed (yeah?), because our service just plans to solve 1 problem. Which is to allow publishers or taggers to tag products they see in pictures. Other people will be able to see what products are present in the pictures via the Swagly Widget, and can buy them. That's how our stuff works. So you see, we're have a pretty specific mission. Well, what do you think?
@HomeComputerGames Oh btw, we don't need to attract vendors or merchants, because we work with Commission Junction and Linkshare and Trade Doubler. So we actually already have a load of products in our database already. Which is a pretty good thing. So right now we only need to attract publishers. We're trying to grind it down to a specific category (female fashion), and we're just sending out individual emails to attract new publishers. I think this is kind of like a chicken and egg thing. Everyone asks "what has been the revenue run rate for your other participating publishers."