Building and maintaining a network of publisher partners is a fundamental initiative for any strong affiliate marketing campaign. The benefits are clear: more and diverse partners introduce new streams of traffic, audiences, promotion ideas, and revenue sources, and constant recruitment helps affiliate marketers stay on top of trends in a highly dynamic industry.

In this post, we’ll examine affiliate recruitment from a few angles: timing, how to get started, the right mix, and a people-first approach that extends past recruitment and into ongoing relationships.

When is the right time to bring new publishers into the fold?

I recommend making this a constant initiative, but one sign to prioritize it is seeing either month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter, or year-over-year growth stagnation. In most instances, we look at revenue and sales as indicators. But it could be traffic, overall efficiency (ROAS), and/or other KPIs in focus for the brand in question.

Even if you have a full, diversified publisher portfolio, know that the best way to move past a plateau in affiliate program performance is establishing new partnerships. Consistent affiliate recruitment is the surest way to enable consistent growth.

How do you get traction in your affiliate recruitment? Throughout my career in affiliate, I’ve gotten the “where do I start?” question a bunch regarding recruitment. We already have a large list of publishers and contacts at DMi, but it took us years to build it.

To get a foot in the door and initiate conversations, your first step is to get familiar with the recruitment tool your agency or brand uses that allows you to find and engage a range of publisher partners. These directories are readily available through partners like Impact, ShareASale, etc. They’ll give you a foothold and the ability to reach out to relevant parties.

The recommended mix of publishers

No matter your brand’s goals, the ideal scenario is to recruit a diverse range of partners that specialize in content, loyalty, and deals/coupons. The right mix can help brands engage consumers at every point in the purchase journey – and introduce new consumers to your brand.

Your business (or your client’s business) may be focused on one or two KPIs, but a healthy long-term growth strategy will hit every point of the funnel. Even if you’re focused on revenue or sales today, content partners who bring recognition to your brand will mean more people in- market down the road.

Why (and how) effective affiliate recruiting strategies put people first

At DMi, we assign a relationship manager to each publisher partner. We don’t use generic team emails, and we don’t rotate responsibilities amongst a big group of people. The idea is that each publisher should know exactly who to contact at DMi, and each relationship manager at DMi should quickly get familiar with the ins, outs, needs, and challenges of their publisher contacts.

It’s important to remember that not every publisher partner will be a good fit for every brand. Even if a publisher isn’t aligned with our client portfolio now, we keep a repository where we create notes on our partners and can revisit the idea later if a better fit emerges.

Some agencies can break up relationships by brand categories, but we do it by publisher categories: content, influencer, loyalty, tech, Buy Now Pay Later, etc. Understanding the category as well as the nuances of each publisher helps our team members develop a deep understanding of the landscape our contacts are navigating, which keeps conversations efficient and fruitful for both parties during the affiliate recruitment process.

Extend the people-first approach beyond affiliate recruitment and into the engagement

Understanding the goals of each publisher and jumping on new initiatives and tests are both keys to our publisher retention and the variety of opportunities we’re able to offer to our clients. The uniqueness of DMi’s affiliate marketing methodology is that we aren’t strictly brand-centric; we work best when we drive benefits and growth for both brand and publisher partners, which makes brand/publisher alignment a big part of our practice. We’ve found that publishers who succeed with campaigns featuring our brands are likely to work with us for the long term, which is key to success across our brand portfolio.

Another key to maintaining great publisher relationships is responsiveness. We work in a very fast-paced industry with a lot of last-minute requests from both sides, and we try our best to meet deadlines and be nimble for partners and brands. In Q4 particularly, we get a lot of time-sensitive requests that need to be prioritized immediately.

Even if the offer or initiative isn’t a great fit, we’ll be as communicative as possible so nobody’s waiting on us for an answer. At DMi, one of our brand promises is responsiveness, and we commit to fulfilling that promise for our partners every day.

Ultimately, our approach with both brands and publishers starts with the knowledge that the core of affiliate marketing is strong relationships. Looking for ways to ensure all parties are satisfied builds allegiances that lead directly to opportunities that go far beyond one-and-done partnerships.