Affiliate marketing can be one of the most effective strategies for retailers, but only when you find the right partner. Here’s some background on affiliate marketing, plus five steps to finding the right affiliate partner.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

In short, affiliate marketing is the promotion of a company’s product on your website in an effort to receive a commission on each generated sale.

Successful affiliate marketing requires two groups—the affiliates, who publicize and promote products, and the merchants, whose goal is to increase sales. This system can be broken down further to include four different parties: the affiliate, merchant, consumer and affiliate network.

• The affiliates (publishers), market to the needs and desires of the consumer on various channels, ranging from social networking sites to digital billboards.
• The merchant simply wants to reach a publisher’s audience with a relevant product.
• The consumer, otherwise known as the customer, is one who reads the blog or visits the website of the affiliate/publisher.

An affiliate network acts as a middle man—the network connects qualified affiliates and merchants and consolidates the whole process.

5 Steps for Finding the Right Affiliate Partner

1. Attend an Affiliate Conference

While conferences cost money up front, their impact on your long-term success far outweighs the temporary impact on your wallet.

Firstly, you get to meet experts in the field and learn from them—keynote addresses, breakout sessions, and roundtable discussions will send you on your way with more knowledge than you’ll know what to do with.

Secondly, conferences place in in the same building—or room and table—with highly qualified potential partners, many of whom are looking for people to do business with. If your business cards and elevator pitch are ready, you might leave the conference with your first big-time affiliate partner.

2. Asses the Market

It’s important for new affiliates to figure out what works best for their potential advertisers. Do they benefit the most from newsletter traffic? Display traffic? Parenting blogs? Shopper loyalty? Ask them and find out.

You can also keep an eye on your advertiser’s competition; by taking a hard look at the creative they use and placements they pay for, you might unlock a successful idea to use on your site.

3. Determine Whether These Companies Have Affiliate Programs

Using a search engine, pick a relevant company and search for the brand + affiliate program.

Example: “Best Buy + Affiliate Program”

Apply to each of these affiliate programs and be as specific and compelling when filling out your information. A number of these blogs and pages receive tons of applications, so do your best t stand out!

4. Decide On a Good Partner

“I look for publishers who try to offer a unique value in what can be a saturated marketplace and who are motivated to see a campaign through,” says Kristina Nolan, director of affiliate marketing at DMi Partners. “There are several times a day where I ask myself, ‘What can I do to exceed this clients expectations? What’s working? How can I replicate that?’”

If you’re the advertiser/merchant in the relationship, you want to partner with an affiliate who has the same mentality as you. At the end of the day, every success is shared.

If you’re an affiliate, your next step (after you’ve applied and been accepted by a handful of programs) is to comb through the list and look for the site with the highest generated revenue per visit. You can use Commission Junction or ShareASale to find the affiliate revenue per visitor. You can also compare your results across the various programs.

5. Join a Trusted Affiliate Network

If you want to avoid the hassle of finding your own affiliate partners, there’s another resource at your disposal: an affiliate network. An established affiliate network has trained account managers who match brands with their ideal publishers, and vice versa.

Do you want to learn more about affiliate advertising? Send us a note! We’d love to hear from you.