This article was originally published on the Growth Marketing Pro Blog

I had an epiphany about life that led me to the secret growth hack that grew our affiliate program 9X year over year.

First off, what’s an affiliate marketing program?

For those who don’t know, building an affiliate program means building partnerships with bloggers and influencers in your space that have an online audience and paying them per lead they send to your site. Usually you both sign an agreement at a set cost per conversion on your site. The partnership is mutually beneficial in that they benefit by monetizing traffic to their site, and you benefit by having an influencer vouch for your product and send qualified traffic to your site.

Affiliate traffic is “friendly” traffic

Bloggers who have a loyal following, have readers who return to their site time and time again. These readers have established trust with the blog and content they find there.

Therefore, when a blogger writes about your company and can recommend it to their readers in a truly genuine way, that blogger is sending a “warm lead” to your site. This is someone who’s already been primed, pre-qualified by learning a bit about your site and is interested enough to click through to learn more.

Why do affiliate relationships matter?

An affiliate lead is comparable in quality to the type of lead you’d get from a referral program- when a current customer refers a friend.

To give you an idea of how strong affiliate leads are, here’s a snapshot of my Google Analytics page showing that affiliate leads signup at a conversion rate that is more than 4.4X the average site visitor.





When I joined RealtyShares in 2015 as the second marketing hire and 20th employee at the company, among the many things on my plate, I was tasked with building an affiliate program from the ground up.

The first thing I did was research and create a list of all the FinTech/investing bloggers in our space and reach out to them via email to invite them to join our affiliate program…

I sent out 50 emails and got 12 responses. All of which did not think the partnership would be a fit or were not interested at this time. That effort produced zero affiliate partnerships.

It wasn’t until I was working on a side project of mine, when I unlocked the secret to building affiliate relationships.

How I discovered the secret to building affiliate relationships

www.topfivecityguide.com is a blog where I aggregated survey responses from hundreds of New Yorkers and San Franciscans about their absolute favorite restaurants in various categories. Each week I’d post a new blog post based off the data I collected “Top Five Brunch Spots in NYC”, “Top Five Burgers in NYC”, “Top Five Coffee Spots in NYC”.





Each time I wrote something I also posted about it on Facebook and Twitter, tagging every restaurant or company that was mentioned in the blog post.

To my surprise, these renowned restaurants and food brands were extremely flattered by the mention and over 50% of them “liked”, “re-posted” and “shared” my tweets…





It was at this point that I came to a realization about life that helped to drive my growth marketing career forward.

People love being recognized.

I took this concept and ran with it at RealtyShares. I put together content around the “Top 60 Real Estate Investing Blogs”, “Top 76 Alternative Investing Blogs”, “Top 75 Real Estate Blogs”, “Top 14 Personal Finance Blogs” and many many more. As many categories as I could possibly think of that related to FinTech or the Real Estate industry. All together we ended up mentioning over 373 different blogs, podcasts, books and influencers within these “Top” lists that we posted to the RealtyShares blog.

Next, I reached out to every single person that was mentioned in one of our blog posts, taking a slightly different approach then the first time I reached out via email- I didn’t mention our affiliate program at all.





Here’s the response I got this time around…

By first giving recognition to the blogger for their fantastic content, I was able to “warm up” the relationship, and therefore Joe and the rest of the bloggers I spoke to were far more open to learning about our affiliate program.

Not to mention all the shares and backlinks we gained when these 373 influencers shared our post with their followers.

Out of the 373 influencers we emailed, 66 of them ended up signing up for our affiliate program. That’s an 18% conversion rate!

By utilizing this strategy alone, I was able to grow our affiliate program 9X year over year.

Not only did affiliate traffic grow exponentially- but the quality of the leads proved to be among the strongest relative to other channels like SEM, Native and Paid Social.

Meaning that signups that came from our affiliate program, became investors at a higher rate and invested more dollars on our platform than signups from other channels.

How do I track my affiliate marketing program?

If you’re looking for a tool to manage & track your affiliate marketing partners and the commissions that they’re each earning, I use Ambassadorand it’s awesome.The Ambassador platform makes it easy for affiliates to sign up, access their unique tracking link and monitor their clicks, conversions and commission. You can even pay your affiliates through the platform.

How did I find out about Ambassador? Well, first I used them to build out our referral program at RealtyShares which scaled 10X within 45 days of implementing Ambassador. Enough said. I implemented it on the affiliate marketing side as soon as I saw those results.





Conclusion

People love to be recognized.

Identify influencers you want to partner with. Create a “top list” blog post that recognizes them for high quality content. Email them to let them know you think they’re awesome and they’ve been featured. Pitch your affiliate program. Manage your affiliate marketing program with Ambassador

If you carefully track your affiliate traffic, you’ll soon discover that it can be an incredibly valuable source of leads.

At RealtyShares, affiliate traffic has become a huge part of our funnel and this traffic converts to sign ups at a massive rate compared to other traffic sources.

Affiliate traffic is too valuable to ignore!

The great thing about an affiliate program is that it’s relatively inexpensive. Rather than paying per click or per impression like you do on Google Adwords or Facebook, you only pay for actual signups on your site. No money wasted!

If you’re looking for high quality traffic growth, an Affiliate program is a great place to start.





Have you built an Affiliate Program? What’s your experience?

Want to work on something together? Feel free to shoot me an email at hsfried7@gmail.com

Want to read more about my growth marketing secrets? Visit GrowthMarketingPro.com