The Image of a Perfect Affiliate – Who the Hosting Business Owner Should Look For

We are back to the topic of affiliate marketing and today we are going to tell you what a perfect affiliate should look like. While running your own web hosting business you may need to involve different marketing tools for promotion of your company. If you involve affiliate marketing, you will need to work out an affiliate program that would look and actually be fair and interesting for people to start referring customers to you. The main interest is about the commissions, of course and you surely understand that they can’t be too high – otherwise you will hardly get any return. Still, the conditions of your program should attract your potential partners, so you are most likely to offer performance rewards or monthly commission raise after they bring you a certain number of referrals.

These measures are definitely going to work – you will start receiving affiliate program signup requests as soon as you announce your program and its conditions. If you are too open for partnership so you don’t even check and filter requests, you will get a great number of partners, but their performance may disappoint you. If you pick your affiliates and manage your program carefully you will later understand that some of your affiliates are worth being provided with higher commissions, sometimes, right from the start. Here’s who you should look for.

Socially Active People

If your affiliate is an active blogger or a forum member, or just has an active and popular Twitter and/or Facebook account –  rest assured, they will spread the word about your hosting company very soon. Blog and forum posts, commenting, tweeting, re-tweeting and status sharing – everything is going to work for you and your business. Socially active affiliates are also known for referring a lot of other affiliates to your service. Thus, if you offer commissions for tier affiliates (commissions paid to the master affiliates from commissions, gained by affiliates they referred), your partners will not only deliver you a lot of new customers, but a great number of new reliable affiliates, too.

Where to start from: first of all, you should look for relevant websites – those, whose owners deal with hosting or anything around it – software, hardware, optimization tips, client management and billing solutions, etc. Such resources are going to grant a flow of specific target audience that may be interested with your offers. Talking about blogs, it is advisable to check those that accept guest posts – those blogs have a wider audience. Referring to forum members it is recommended to check if your  potential affiliate is a moderator or an administrator – those users have more privileges, so they won’t experience hard times posting affiliate links around. As for social media users, the best solution is to search for people, who represent their business accounts on different networks.

Freelancers

Searching for affiliates among freelancers is also worth doing. To be more precise, you should search for those who offer website building or administration services and those who deal with software or search engine optimization. Those who hire freelancers for website adjustment needs, especially when planning to build the project from scratch or radically change it, are usually also intended to switch from their current host to a new one, or may even not have any hosting account at all. That’s how you are going to get your referrals – your service will be recommended.

Where to start from: Except for giving personal recommendations, freelancers may also draw customers to your service by advertizing your company via email links during correspondence with their potential clients. Thus you should look for freelance workers with well-developed and active profiles on LinkedIn and other related resources. The last but not least is the visitor impact – if freelancers who cooperate with you have their own websites – their links (and probably banners) will hit a greater audience.

Own Clients

Who can prove the quality of your service better than your own satisfied customers? Hardly anyone, therefore your customers are worth being provided with higher commissions. This is fair enough since apart from just placing promo materials, they can also back those with their positive reviews. And the more serious review sites they are going to use, the more truthful their recommendations will look. Customers’ sites can be used for promotion as well – “powered by” or “hosted at” shields, tidily attached to their home pages, may attract their visitors’ attention and bring dozens of sign-ups.

Where to start from: If review placement is something everyone can do for you, picking affiliating clients with the most attractive websites is a task for you to carry out. Websites to pay attention to first are the ones that require non-standard technical solutions and that host unique content. If the resource is built with a modified CMS e.g. you host a customized WordPress or Joomla website, it is most likely to attract attention of those visitors, who would like to host something like that. Although aspects of content and design hardly have anything to do with the web host, many people will instinctively check up the hosting provider first (at least, it is obvious, they support it!).

Affiliates

No matter how confusing it may sound to you, you should also cooperate with people who take part in affiliate programs at different hosting companies. You shouldn’t think about any competition there, but about the experience – people who work in partnership with several hosting providers know their pros and cons well enough to be able to distribute their promo materials so as to represent the best package offered by each web host. Involving such affiliates will also show you which advantages and drawbacks your hosting packages have.

Where to start from: The best solution is to find affiliates, who promote other hosting companies that do not offer the same range of services as you do. For instance you are good at VPS hosting, while the affiliate, you are looking into cooperating with, is in partnership with a company that provides shared hosting services only. The competition is minimized while you let this affiliate earn money on a wider range of products promoted.

The Bottom Line

Promoting your hosting company with the help of affiliate marketing strategies may facilitate your business much and significantly boost up the sales. You should however, make sure that the strategies you involve are not trivial and that you apply personal approach to any of your affiliates. This will let you build your A-team of affiliates with the best performance rates. We at Sitevalley.com look at re-arranging our affiliate program, so if you want to join our affiliate A-team – feel free to sign up.

Tags: affiliate marketing, social media