Want to have an army of marketers marketing your product, so you’re getting paid doing almost zero work? It does take a little bit of work, but the rewards are well worth it. In this article we’ll talk about laying the groundwork for getting affiliates, how to attract affiliates and how to actively seek out and recruit super affiliates.

The Groundwork: Your Conversion Rate and Payouts

Your conversion rate and your payouts are two of the most important numbers that any affiliate marketer will look at.

What’s a good payout? If you’re selling a physical product or a workshop, 10% to 20% is standard. If you’re selling an information product, 50% to 90% is standard.

If you look through a bunch of affiliate programs, you’ll find that most infomarketers who are attracting a lot of affiliates are offering 60% or above commission. Even on Clickbank, where 75% commission is the limit, top marketers are often paypaling their top affiliates another 15% bonus on top.

Why is that? Would you rather make $4 on 2,000 orders a month, or keep the entire 100% and have no affiliates? The high commissions will attract more affiliates and super affiliates. Even if you only make a few dollars per order, it can be made up in sheer volume.

That’s how affiliate marketing works: You give away a cut, but you make it back in volume.

Clickbank, Commission Junction, CPA Networks

Affiliate networks are a powerful tool for getting more affiliates.

Clickbank is great for infomarketers. If you can get to the top of a category in Clickbank, you’ll make well over 500 sales on autopilot just from affiliate marketers.

The trick with Clickbank is attracting your first few affiliates and getting your Gravity rating above 10. After that, let your conversion rate and product attract the affiliates for you.

Commission Junction is great for physical products with lower payouts. It’s quite tricky to get on CJ. Usually they only accept major players who’ve been in the market for some time.

CPA networks are great if you can pay per action instead of per sale. If you can pay $3 for an email address or $6 for a form submit because you know your conversion rate, you can really make a killing put putting your product on those networks.

Finding Affiliates

One method of getting affiliates is to have a good product and conversion rate and attract affiliates by being on networks and offering a high payout. The second method is to actively seek out affiliates and super affiliates.

First, build a name for yourself in your own industry. Then start contacting people in your industry and offering to partner with them. Google your top keywords and contact the owners of the first 3 websites and see if they’d like to try promoting your product. Contact well known names and talk about JVing.

Also, meet people in person. Go to both marketing conventions and conferences in your industry. If you’re in health for example, go to both marketing conventions and health conventions.

At marketing conventions, you’ll meet “super affiliates” whose sole business is promoting other people’s products. At industry conventions, you’ll meet people in your industry with already high trafficked lists and websites. Build a relationship with these people, do something for their business, then ask them to try out promoting your products for a commission.

Even if you can’t make it to national conferences, go to your own local get togethers. Almost everywhere in the world are business and marketing mastermind groups and meetups. Almost everywhere in the world are smaller interest meetups.

In short, pay your affiliates extremely well, build a killer salespage, list your product on affiliate networks, become known in your industry and contact other known individuals, seek out affiliates and super affiliates at conferences and build your affiliate base.