How to grow your network as an affiliate marketer in 2023?

Do you want to win as an affiliate marketer? Then learn how to grow you network, because that’s your foundation, keep reading to find out how.

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We all know affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing strategy where the affiliates are rewarded based on each visitor or customer bought by them. But do you know, what’s the core of an affiliate marketing program? That’s the affiliates involved in the program. 

Because these affiliates are going to work for your business and help you generate enhanced sales. Hence, if you are not working on the quality and quantity of your network as an affiliate marketer in 2023, then you are not winning in the game. 

We understand it’s challenging to find quality and reliable affiliates, but it’s not impossible. In this guide, we are going to share some important ways to grow your network as an affiliate marketer & generate better conversions. 

Your Approach To Finding Affiliates 

You must have heard that 1 quality affiliate is way better than 10 random affiliates in your program. It’s extremely easy to reach out 1000s of affiliates to make them work for you by talking about the incentives they can get. 

However, we need to understand that only a few percent of those affiliates are going to help you enhance your business. Hence, it’s your responsibility to find the right affiliates for your program who are loyal. 

The major problem while finding affiliates is, the market is highly competitive and one can’t make drastic changes in the incentives and work strategies of their affiliate program to attract more affiliates. 

Ways To Grow Your Network As An Affiliate Marketer

When it comes to growing your network and finding the right affiliates, you should understand that not every strategy is going to work for you. There are numerous ways to grow your network as an affiliate marketer and it’s your responsibility to try out those ways to find the most appropriate option for you. 

Let us have a look at some of those ways. 

1- Take advantage of affiliate directories: 

Affiliate directories work as a middleman between you and your affiliates. It is considered the most prominent source to find affiliates for your program. Right after visiting an affiliate directory, you can list your affiliate program on it while mentioning all the important details about it. 

Once your affiliate program is listed on affiliate directories, there is a high chance that more affiliates would be able to learn about your program. Hence, you can notice an increase in the number of affiliates. 

Most of the affiliate directories work for free. While some directories ask for a backlink from your website in return for listing your affiliate program in their directories. You can also look for affiliate communities and forums online to post your queries or talk about your affiliate program. This can also help you find new affiliates for your affiliate program. 

2- Convert your customers into your affiliates: 

Your loyal customers can become your reliable affiliates. Because they have used your products and services, hence, can become your biggest advocate. Create a list of customers who have already invested in your products or services, and have been connected with you for a long time. 

In this way, you would be able to find customers who are already in love with your brand and might be already recommending it to others. You can ask such customers to join your affiliate program and offer incentives every time their recommendations generate a sale.  

As these customers have used your products and they know the benefits of it, it will become easier for them to convince others in making a sales decision. Secondly, being regular customers of your brand, they know what type of problems are being solved by your products and services. Hence, it will become easier for them to do the research around the type of people they need to target. 

3- Reach out to influencers: 

In 2022 influencer marketing’s global market size was around $16.3 billion. Under influencer marketing, the influencers promote different products and services using various social media platforms. The same strategy can be applied to affiliate marketing as well. 

You can carry forward industry research and find out the right influencers who can work as affiliates in your influencer marketing. By reaching out to the right influencers and converting them into your affiliates you can build a firm grip on their audience. Hence, you will notice an exceptional increase in your sales and overall conversion rate. 

4- Attend affiliate marketing conferences: 

By attending various affiliate marketing conferences you would be able to reach out to potential affiliates, share your business idea, and talk about the products and services. All these things are going to filter out the affiliates that are not the right fit for your program, and you can easily network with new affiliates. 

By attending various affiliate marketing conferences you can even get rid of other problems that you might be facing. As in these conferences, different affiliate marketers visit and discuss a certain topic. Hence, if you don’t want to enhance your affiliate marketing network, then also you should visit such conferences. 

5- Find out industry-specific content creators & websites: 

When you are dealing in the online market, having a specific niche helps a lot in building your audience and authority. Just imagine you are a business in the smartphone industry and have developed an affiliate program to sell smartphone accessories. 

In such a situation you can find industry-specific content creators and website blogs and ask them to work as an affiliate for your company. The selected content creator and website blog would already have your target audience looking for your products and services. Hence, when they’ll promote your products/services, sales generation will become easier. 

6- Use paid media: 

If you have tried all the possible organic methods to grow your network as an affiliate marketer in 2023 and haven’t got your desired results. Then you should try out paid media methods such as running Facebook ads, Google ads and more to find out affiliates for your affiliate marketing program. 

Some affiliate marketing programs or companies also want to target offline networks to generate sales the other way. If you are a company with the same goals, then you can also try out print ads in newspapers and more to create an offline network that can help you promote your products and services offline as well. 

You can consider this step as an initial investment. Once you can get affiliates from your paid media campaign, your investments will return to you in the form of affiliate sales. 

7- Expert advice: 

There must be several industry experts who might be generating good business through affiliate marketing. You can reach out to them and ask for their advice on how you can grow your network as an affiliate marketer and generate growth. 

Being an industry expert, they must have tackled the problems before that you are facing today. Hence, with this small approach, you can easily solve the issues you have been facing for a long time. 

8- Develop an email marketing campaign: 

Email marketing is considered one of the oldest forms of marketing. But when we look at its relevance today we can notice that it’s still highly relevant and can be used to find out the right affiliates for your affiliate marketing program. 

While building an email marketing campaign you can take advantage of copywriting tips. These tips can help you showcase the benefits of your affiliate program through the campaign to generate leads/affiliates. 

You just need to scrape emails from online platforms, create a high-quality pitch, and automate your email marketing campaign. This will help you send a certain amount of emails daily. Keep tracking your email marketing campaign reports and implement changes to make them work better. 

9- Be transparent & real: 

The most important factor you need to grow your network as an affiliate marketer is transparency. Make sure that you are transparent with your affiliates and everyone you reach out to. 

To develop a successful partnership between you and your affiliates, it’s important for you to be honest with them about your commission rates, and your terms & conditions. Being transparent also means talking about the overall performance of your affiliates. Which will help your affiliates understand your goals and how they can improve. 

10- Use affiliate recruiting agencies: 

By using the above-mentioned ways you would be able to grow your network extensively as an affiliate marketer. While if you are looking for the easiest alternative to grow your network, you can take help from Affiliate recruiting agencies. 

You can easily generate leads for affiliates using the network of these agencies. On the other hand, you can look for an affiliate manager who will be responsible for selecting the right affiliates as per your requirements. Some responsibilities of an affiliate manager are as follows: 

• Dealing with the affiliates directly. This makes it easier for you to manage your affiliates and enhance overall productivity.
• Keeping track of your affiliate sales and conversions. 
• Monitoring your affiliates and improving their performance. 

Benefits of Growing Your Affiliate Marketing Network 

In 2022, Affiliate marketing spending in the US alone was more than $8.15 billion. Still, wondering why are companies spending so much on affiliate marketing? Well, building a great network as an affiliate marketer offers plenty of benefits. Let us have a look at some of them. 

• Cost-effective: 

In the initial stage, an affiliate marketing program may not help you make a good amount of money, but when you start growing your network it becomes a cost-effective method of marketing and lead generation as compared to traditional marketing methods. 

Affiliate marketing is also considered a lower-risk strategy. Because you would have to pay your affiliates based on conversions generated by them. 

• Better sales: 

By growing your network you can enhance your affiliate marketing sales. Just imagine you started with just 1 affiliate and the person can provide you with 10 conversions every month. Once you start increasing your affiliate, the number of conversions and sales will also start to increase.

• More affiliates: 

When your affiliate program has a huge network, it will become easier for you to attract new affiliates for your program. It’s the initial stage where affiliate marketers can face issues, but once you have started gaining new affiliates, the overall process will become easier for you. 

• Business automation: 

By building your network as an affiliate marketer you would be able to put your business on automation. You can distribute your tasks within your team and provide them with monthly or weekly goals to fulfill. 

Wrap Up

Starting a new affiliate program does not assure you its success rate. But when you invest in the right people and grow your network as an affiliate marketer, you will notice a change in your growth rate. Ensure to implement the above-mentioned strategies to grow your affiliate network and generate exceptional results.