Abstract: Affiliate marketing is an ideal marketing campaign which helps to develop your business size faster and stably. This marketing model allows your products to be advised through the affiliate advertising sources such as social media channels, websites, etc. As long as a customer uses the unique link or coupon associated with their recommendations to make a purchase, they will be paid commision for every successful referral order.

Via the affiliate network, your brand will be reached closer to different target customers, and that positively affects your sales conversion. Nowadays, to manage and track affiliate performance, we can find some potential affiliate applications to support, such as UpPromote: Affiliate Marketing. However, the question is where we can find affiliates, especially qualified affiliates? Firstly, let's answer these following questions.

1. Who Are Qualified Affiliates/ Ambassadors?

Affiliates can be bloggers, active social media posters, niche content sites, personal website owners, product review websites, etc who affect purchase decisions of others in a market because of their authority/knowledge or their position, relationship with their audiences.

Qualified affiliates are people who have their image reputation, or particular topics on their social channels are qualified with your brand and products direction. So when your products are promoted here, they will make regular posts about those topics and gain the attraction of audiences who pay attention to these posts in form of engagements and actual purchase decisions.

Depending on your business market that you should choose proper influencer types to work with:

• Social media influencers: those that share their posts on social media to attract their followers’ attention for engagement (like, share, comment). Nowadays, the most popular social channels are Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

• Blogger and Journalist: Those that share their contents via blogs and articles. Much like social media influencers, bloggers share about a product and add their endorsement in a blog post that is then shared via Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

• Business expert: In case your product aims to a specialized and professional market, you may consider contacting industry experts in your market to raise their voice for your business. This category of influencers is used mainly by B2B brands.

• Advocate Customers: Those who are already fans of your brand will be most likely to bring their positive impression of your brand to share with their peers. That will result in the fact that your target audience will deem their recommendations trustworthy.

2. Why Work with Qualified Affiliates/ Ambassadors?

The fact is that customers are more likely to reach your products when they hear reviews/ recommendations from people they know who have experience with these products. In this case, the voice of affiliates would be powerful in the decision-making process.

Especially for social media influencers, social media are playing a more and more vital role in daily life. Research reports that one-in-three people in the world are using social media, and more than two-thirds of all internet users do. For this reason, having an influencer in your affiliate team will help you get a higher chance to approach potential customers.

3.How to Find Qualified Ambassadors?

On social media

You can search on the search bar of those tools with keywords of your niche market, especially, search with hashtags of your business to see who’ve posted about your brand or look up the relevant suggested keywords to find influencers that post about your industry.

On Instagram, when you click to follow an influencer, a list of relevant people will be shown below, you can take them all into consideration.

Besides, do a quick research on your customers to see who their favorite influencers are, who they follow and who they normally come to when having intention to buy an item of your brand.

List Your Offer on Marketplace

Marketplace is one of the popular ways where you can find your qualified affiliates. This way is easier than finding influencers in the social “ocean”. The marketplace allows affiliates to reach thousands of offers from many merchants in the world. They only need to filter offers by important indicators such as category, commission amount, EPS (earnings per sale), cookie period, etc, to find their “Mr. Right”.

However, before listing your offers somewhere, make sure you have found a trusted marketplace where your shop information is secure, and a huge amount of affiliates are interacting on this.

For example, UpPromote Marketplace is a recommendation marketplace where top Shopify offers are open here, and affiliates can join and apply. You can list your information, as well as affiliate programs on UpPromote Marketplace. Don’t forget choosing your correct category and having a competitive commission rate. This is a key factor to increase the chance your offer will be more noticeable than the others.

Once the affiliates want to know more about your products, they will visit your website, or contact you directly. Congratulations! It's halfway there to turn them into your members.

Using Multi-level Marketing to Grow Your Affiliate Team

Multi-level Marketing (MLM) refers to a marketing model in which the distributors' income includes their own commission and a percentage of the sales group (network commission) they recruit or refer (known as a downline affiliate).

You can apply MLM strategy to encourage your affiliates to invite their peers to join your affiliate system. The monetary motivation is in the form of network commission: when a downline affiliate successfully brings an order, the upline one gets their extra reward. This tactic not only motivates your affiliate team to grow your list but also inspires them to push their downline team to work harder, more effectively.

When setting an MLM commission level rate, consider thoroughly the goal, budget and profit margin to make sure you set the commission level rate within the reasonable boundary based on your condition.

Convert Your Own Customers to Your Brand Ambassadors

A report from Nielsen showed that 92% of people tend to trust the recommendations from friends and family over any other kind of advertising.

Hence, one of the best practices for making the most of WOM marketing is: Turn your customers into brand ambassadors, still, keep them as loyal customers.

Nowadays, there are many affiliate applications to support you to apply this tactic. You can use UpPromote: Affiliate Marketing to create a post-purchase popup. Whenever a customer successfully places an order from your shop, a popup will show up on the Thank you page to introduce your affiliate program.

With the option to Convert customers to affiliates, you can:

• Boost your sales without using ads spend
• Reference become effortlessly and more trustworthy
• Increase customer lifetime value (CLV)

Conclusion

To summary, affiliate marketing is a potential tool for all size businesses, especially small-medium businesses that helps you advertise without any upfront cost. Recruiting affiliates is hard, recruiting qualified affiliates is harder. For this reason, you need to spend time defining your goals, understanding your products and target market before finding suitable affiliates to join your system.