The Affiliate Dating Game

There are thousands of advertisers looking for good-fit publishers to not just promote but successfully generate leads and sales on a pay-for-performance basis. Unfortunately for the advertisers, they are outnumbered by publishers actively generating considerable commissions. Not unlike The Dating Game, attracting and successfully courting top publishers is not as easy as it sounds. In working with many advertisers on a regular basis and being approached by many more with bad “pick-up lines,” let’s consider some effective and ineffective approaches that are witnessed on a regular basis.

The all-time favorite approach that gets the best response constantly is the “what can I do for you?” approach. I first heard about this from Joel Comm in watching The Elevate Blueprint. When you are on the dating scene, you offer to buy a member of the opposite sex a beverage, and then compliment them or attempt to engage them in a conversation which usually starts with asking questions first and telling about yourself second. Coming across as sincerely interested is crucial to getting your foot in the door. It is no different when engaging affiliates.

Tell the publisher what’s in it for them. Introduce yourself, tell them about your company, mention competitive advantages, increased commission opportunities, any exclusives, offline advertising, dedicated resources, etc. Last but not least, send 1:1 communication to prospective publishers and try to understand how they work ahead of time and how working with them is envisioned (i.e., I’ve heard a lot of great things about you).

At the end of the day you are competing with A LOT of advertisers and whoever answers the question “why should we work with you?” the best gets their offers picked up and promoted and on their way to a first date.

The “what can you do for me approach” will get your message quickly moved to the junk bin and possibly slapped in a social setting. No one wants to be approached by someone they don’t know and immediately asked a favor on any level. Other things that will get an advertiser shot down quickly include but are not limited to: no affiliate program, reaching out to a publisher whose model doesn’t align, not being in any large affiliate networks and/or only having an in-house program, or poor communication.

Employing these tactics are by no means a guarantee that more publishers will generate commissions for you or that they will even decide to run your offer, but this will get more publishers to take notice of you and increase your chances of working with publishers you might not have otherwise. Consider these an extra shot of mojo in the affiliate dating game.