1. Sell like a banshee

Merchants, before you start recruiting understand your audience. Make a decision on who you’re looking to recruit and try to get into their heads before you send that recruiting letter. So often I see recruiting emails telling me about the amazing FREE income opportunity with program X. These offers try to convince me with silly stats like “…last month, top affiliates earned over $X!” or with pictures of some cheese-ball guy standing next to an implant victim and a Ferrari in front of a big, ugly house with stunted trees.

From the offer, it sounds like they’re suggesting I can build a healthy income with their program (sounds okay, doesn’t it), but also like they assume I’ve been sitting around the house at 3 AM, drinking cheap beer and bemoaning my lot in life, just waiting for a FREE money making opportunity to hit me in the head. While the cheap beer part comes close, I find these offers insulting.

While all this is fine IF you’re looking to recruit drunken layabouts to drive your affiliate channel, it rather misses the mark if you’re looking to recruit marketing professionals. Your offer just hit the bin.

If you want to reach me, for example, consider a few things. First, I am a professional and this is my business. Second, yours is not the only pitch I will see today. And third, I’m very very busy making money for programs other than yours. Respect me and get to the point. Joining and marketing your program is a business decision. If it’s the right one, show me why.

2. Convince me that you have other plans for MY traffic

While this seems like a no-brainer in the extreme, you might be shocked to know just how many merchants are surprised by this little tidbit. Here it is:

If I visit your site and see a toll-free number, a third party book or magazine offer, Google AdSense or anything else that looks like my traffic might get distracted from making me money, I’m not promoting your program - no matter how many times you call me to follow up.

See, the deal is, it’s my traffic. You haven’t paid for it until the “A” in “CPA” actually occurs, and have no right to do anything with it other than shepherd it to the commissionable action. Anything you do that distracts my traffic from my goal is undermining my business. Call me crazy, but like many affiliates, I won’t partner with a program that seeks to undermine my business and telling me that your phone conversion is pretty low isn’t changing my mind.

Get rid of the distractions or hide them from affiliate generated traffic, even traffic returning with an affiliate generated cookie, or don’t expect affiliates to promote your program.

3. Have no idea what you’re talking about and/or hire clueless recruiters

You can be sure to lose each and every potential recruit you speak to that asks a valid question about your program and doesn’t get an answer. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, call me back when you do, or better yet, don’t call me back.

Questions like “Do you have a second tier?”, “Can I link direct to individual products?” or “Do you offer a datafeed?” are pretty standard to the industry. If you don’t know what the questions mean, you don’t understand affiliate marketing. If you don’t understand affiliate marketing, perhaps you haven’t put proper thought into building your program, marketing tools, etc.

Perhaps you do get it, do understand affiliate marketing and actually have an offer worth hearing. Excellent! Don’t cock that up by hiring some sales schlep to pitch me on it without even giving them basic training on what the hell they’re talking about. An affiliate recruiter should know the industry and know your program backwards and forwards.

An ill-informed recruiter is representing your program in the poorest light. Not only are you not getting the affiliate, but you’re looking bad in the process.

4. Generate the wrong sort of buzz

Affiliates talk, some more than others, and your reputation precedes you. If you really want to sabotage your recruiting efforts, one of the most effective means at your disposal is to run a crappy program. Offer poor to no affiliate support, make late payments, let your cart go down for extended periods, fail to communicate when issues arise, etc.

This sort of behavior is bound to catch the attention of your current affiliates, and in turn get passed on to potential affiliates via the grape vine before you get a chance to speak with them.

Buzz is a big part of affiliate recruiting and the wrong sort will cripple your efforts before you begin. If you have no reputation, build a good one. If you have a bad reputation, clean it up publicly, before you put more energy into recruiting.

5. Fail to market

Is this where I break out the “Build it and they will come” cliche?

No.

It seems obvious. You put time and money into building your brand, building your site, marketing your products/services - you’ve even gone so far as to build an affiliate channel - you must be a marketer. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d hired an SEO along the way and even tried a little PPC.

Marketing is good. You get that.

Why then, do so many merchants fail to market their affiliate programs? What’s this? It can’t be true; I see merchants all the time asking about recruiting on the affiliate boards. Eathan, you are high.

Okay then, call it a shameless plug if you like, but if merchants are actively marketing their programs, why then is this flippin’ affiliate directory so flippin’ empty [Note: AffConnect used to be a crappy affiliate directory before it became a crappy web marketing blog]? Feel free to say “…but affConnect sorta’ sucks” all you like, but the fact remains, the site gets crawled, gets traffic and has decent PR. A permanent static link for a one-time $25 fee is a no-brainer for most online marketers. The same should be true when marketing your affiliate program.

I’m not suggesting you send me money. That’s not the point. I’m suggesting you treat your affiliate program like you would your brand, your website, your product, etc and market the hell out of it! Do SEO, do PPC, advertise on affiliate forums, get listed in affiliate directories, promote in ezines, issue press releases and so on. Unless your current customer base is your pool of potential affiliates, you need to be marketing your program.

And don’t be cheap… Don’t spam the affiliate boards and don’t expect freebie listings all over the planet. A single good affiliate is worth their weight in marketing dollars, so don’t pinch pennies in your recruiting efforts.