How To Recruit, Motivate and Increase Content Sales with Affiliates
Developing an affiliate program should be a top priority after your site is up and running with regular content additions. However, there is much more to it than simply putting up an affiliate link and hoping people will sign up. The “build it and they will come” mentality simply doesn’t work with affiliates.
It also takes a lot more than just paying great commissions to entice high traffic bloggers and sites to sign up. You have to be willing to do more to help your affiliates become successful – in their own sites and in your affiliate program.
One of the best affiliate programs around for content is INO.com. Brad Stafford was hired just over four years ago to jump-start their affiliate program and it has been a huge success. I wanted to get Brad on the phone and talk to him about what he did to make their affiliate program such a powerful force in their overall marketing program.
If you are a large content company or a single site owner, you’ll find tips in this interview to help you increase sales through a well-run affiliate program.
4 ways to watch/listen/read:
1) Listen to the audio here (click on the triangle play button):
2) Download the mp3 file here
3) Read the transcript (below the video)
4) Watch the video:
Transcript:
Tim – MemberCon.com: Hi this is Tim Bourquin. Thanks for joining me for another interview from membercon.com. The whole idea of these interviews of course is to give you something to think about in doing your own membership site and selling your own subscriptions and so I wanted to talk to somebody who really knew the affiliate side of the game and somebody who could also just talk about marketing a membership site. So today I’m talking with Brad Stafford, he’s the marketing manager for ino.com, i-n-o.com. It’s a financial website so I knew him from my other website that I do, Trader Interviews, my membership site but Brad does a terrific job of basically getting affiliates recruited, motivated and just marketing the site overall so I wanted to get him on the phone and have him talk to us about how he does that. He has generously offered to do that with me, so Brad thanks very much for joining me on the phone.
Brad Stafford – INO.com: Hey no problem. With an intro like that I think I’ve a lot to live up to so hopefully I won’t let anybody down.
Tim – MemberCon.com: It’s good because I get your emails all the time and you really do a fantastic job of using affiliates to promote this site so I wanted to talk to a little bit about how you got started and did that. First of all, how long has INO been a membership site?
Brad Stafford – INO.com: Well ino.com was originally launched in 1995 almost as an Amazon for the financial world selling books and as time went on I think at around 1999 is when we originally launched Market Club which is our premier membership site and we’ve pretty much been membership since then. We do operate another arm of the business which is just advertising and lead generation for when membership slows down, advertising is there to pick it up and vice versa.
Tim – MemberCon.com: That’s good. I want to definitely get into that lead generation part of that because I think that’s important for our membership site owners as well.
Brad Stafford – INO.com: Yeah absolutely.
Tim – MemberCon.com: At what point did they decide to start doing affiliate marketing as a way to generate more memberships? Read more…
MemberCon is written by Tim & Emile Bourquin, brothers and owners of Ideas For Download. MemberCon.com is your front row seat to see what we've done that worked and failed in selling content online. Thankfully, we've been pretty successful but we promise to always show you the reality of building an online business.
