Attracting publishers to an in-house affiliate program

distro_dave

The cost to enter affiliate networks can be prohibitive for (cash-strapped) small business, particularly if they are simply testing the waters of an affiliate program. If such a company wanted to run an affiliate program in-house using off the shelf software, what methods would they use to attract publishers? Is it simply a case of SEO or SEM, attempting to attract publishers to the page on their website which outlines their affiliate program?...

Originally asked by Steve on Stack Exchange (webmasters) (CC BY-SA 3.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

Affiliate network fees are high for the larger networks. I work with clients in both Google Affiliate Network and Commission Junction, and know first hand what the fee's are and what it takes in sales to cover them. I would suggest looking at http://zferral.com/ they are cheap and you can setup your own affiliate program. If you are already setup with an affiliate application then, create a page on your site which goes over the program. Optimize the page's meta tags content etc to be "Product X affiliate program" or similar. See who's already ranking for the terms you'd optimize for and build a page with roughly the same amount of content. Link to the page from the footer of your site. If...

Full answer by Anagio: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/27527 (CC BY-SA 3.0).

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