How To Get Your Own Affiliates and Referrals

There are two main reasons internet marketers who fail to make money (which is something like 99%) remain unsuccessful. And those are: quality converting traffic and motivated skilled affiliates. Traffic is far more complex issue that I will address in another article, so in this one we will concentrate on affiliates.

Main problems with affiliating are trust and ignorance. If you are brand new on the scene nobody will trust you, we ALL went through that period, nobody got born a guru, and as you are unknown your target market will have to be people who are willing to take a chance on you, most of which will be ignorant about what you are doing and why you are doing it.

Your affiliate links will be used and abused. You will lose commissions to cookie stuffers, to affiliate link modifiers, to people who for no reason at all just remove your affiliate link, and still go sign up or buy that product, solely due to your promoting efforts, but do not let you get rewarded even tho you just helped them. All that is part of being affiliate marketer, and you need to learn to live with it, while trying to reduce percentages of bad things happening.

Cloaking your links helps somewhat, but keep in mind that there are as many ways around that as there are ways to do it. Try to educate your clients/referrals to clear cookie cache first, then click on your affiliate link if they want you to receive commission. Simple way of clearing cache is with a program CCleaner. Its free program and simple to use. That step will remove cookies used by cookie stuffers before they click on your link.

If you do not deal with the above first, all your efforts will be for nothing. Any popular affiliate program out there WILL have THOUSANDS of people trying to cheat the system. Their accounts do get banned, less that 0.01% of them ever get paid, but desperation for money and ignorance drives people to behave uncool anyway. You CANNOT just toss out your affiliate links everywhere like a spammer, hope for the best, and succeed. It simply does not work like that. If you do not believe me, bookmark this article, go try it, then come back and read the rest after you fail. While I never bothered to try spamming (I learn from other peoples mistakes whenever I can, to avoid making too many of my own), plenty of people I know have, and I learned from their frustration.

So here is simplest possible way of getting people to click on your links, leave your affiliate links whether they are cloaked or not and try services and products you are promoting in the earnest. Build trust. Be honest. Promote only things you tried yourself, got paid from, and KNOW for a fact work.

So what attracts affiliates like flies? Benefits. When you join affiliate program and try to promote something, you are not doing it to help others but yourself. Key to succeeding as affiliate marketer is finding a balance between helping yourself and helping your entire network succeed as well. Most people will struggle. My primary reason for starting this specific blog is to help my own struggling affiliates as trying to do that on person to person basis becomes impossible after you start dealing with thousands of people. And if they do not succeed, my own success is slowed as well.

So to get affiliates do not lie. You see tons of spammy posts all over internet saying stupidly unbelievable things like 'I made 5000 doing nothing last week, YOU can too, just click this link'. The unbelievable part is not 5000 per week doing nothing. Once you set up your funnels right, that happens more often than not. No, the unbelievable part is that you can too just by clicking on that persons link. Because making money is not about clicking on some link, it is about finding ways to remove your income ceiling, it is about networking, and it is about providing value to others.

I realize that most people who try reading this article expect actual easy ways of getting affiliates. I can give you that too. But easy ways that a newbie would like do not work. There are few hundred sites that pop up on Google catering to people who want affiliates. Who do you think goes to those sites? People who want to affiliate for you? No, lol! People who go to those sites are people who are just like you. They are equally clueless and they might sign up as your affiliates to get points so others will sign up as theirs, but as they are all not making any money and do not know what to do, even if there was million of you in MLM pyramid, 99% (those at bottom) will still not make any money and if its pay to play type of MLM like most of them, you will most likely just waste your own money.

Here is how to get started getting your own affiliates:

Do NOT get started with anything requiring people to pay any amount of money. You should know what you are doing before you promote things that cost money. Not only will odds of getting affiliates be drastically reduced if you are asking them to pay, but you might get utterly discouraged and quit.

Do NOT get started with free program that does not offer near immediate rewards. Good example was QuinPro (which is now dead anyway). Its too complex for newbie to understand, and while all they need is email, and they lose nothing, there are also no quick rewards. They give you about dozen different cryptocurrencies for free every day, but amounts are too tiny to attract people. I joined and just left my account alone. I suggested it to my friends to do same. Eventually it might make some amount I can use, or not, all it cost me was a minute of my time. But its still bad place to promote as people will simply not understand it.

DO start with free affiliate program where minimum payouts are very, very low as odds of you keeping any affiliates that sign up to continue to make you money drastically increase if they are seeing cash coming to their hands quickly. The best example I can provide is EasyHits4U. Its PTC (Paid To Click) network that is also traffic exchange. Not only do you get 1:1 traffic, but you get paid on top, and you get paid to bring in new affiliates. Whoever you recruit for that program has nothing to lose. Its free to join. They get paid from advertisers for people seeing their ads, you get paid for seeing ads, or bringing referrals, or traffic or all three. Its a win/win for all involved. Another decent place to start with could be CliXSense but unless you are going to do surveys and/or want to keep signing up and cancelling their free trial offers, amounts you get per day could be very discouraging to continue.

Easiest way to get affiliates is targeted paid traffic. Its what I use these days. That is also easiest way to waste your money by making a mistake in what keywords or what program or something you just missed. If you do not have money to waste, wait until you do.

Poor quality traffic is mostly automated bots, or people who click like mindless drones and could not care less about what you are promoting.

Ideal traffic for programs I just mentioned are poor, desperate, low skilled, individuals who want to make some money and who are ok if amounts are fairly low. Type of people who can really use extra 50-200 dollars a month.  So you simply need to promote them in places such people are likely to congregate, and in a way that appeals to them.

First, join programs yourself. Use them as you think your affiliates would. Click. Click thousands of times. There is simply no other way to understand but through doing. Click enough so that you get paid, just make minimum payout amount.

Then reflect on how long you worked and what you just received. If you still think it is worth it to somebody, then go and suggest it to that demographic on forums, twitter, blog comments. Do not spam, just interact normally and mention it in passing whenever it would feel natural. I very rarely promote that way any more, but that also needs to be addressed in another article. Hardest is when you start out and unfortunately you have to start out on bottom.

Places I would recommend: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Warrior Forum, Digital Point Forum. If you mostly post links, you will get banned quick. But posting comment on a video about similar but worse product that you know a better place might be appropriate. Joining as many Facebook groups and pages as you can and sporadically advertising where allowed also might get you people. On Twitter follow people who Tweet about things attracting same demographic you want. Reply to their Tweets, and to Tweets of people following them, and toss in some links sometimes. Not often. Maybe one out of 10. Both Warrior and Digital Point Forums cater to internet marketing. You are allowed to post some links in your signature, but they have rules so read those first.

Keep one very important thing in mind. If all you are doing is sending traffic to somebody else in hope for tiny rewards, you are never going to succeed. People might click on your links and become your affiliates, but you have no connection with them. E4U that I linked above has rare approach of connecting you to your affiliates, and letting you connect, like a social network, with other users of their service. Great majority of others do not, they just take your traffic, toss you peanuts, and you are back to hawking in the street for pennies.

So, put lot bigger priority on networking with likeminded individuals than anything else. Use social media. Make friends, acquaintances and partners. And learn as you go, ideally mostly from mistakes of others.