Expand Your Reach: Diversify Publisher Base [Part 1]

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Publisher diversification strategies can be applied to expand the reach of your CJ Affiliate program with both new and existing partners. Whether your program recently launched or is more mature, the five strategies in this three-part blog series (see Part 2 and Part 3) can help grow your affiliate base, increase engagement with current publishers, and ultimately optimize your program to achieve goals.

In today's post, we'll take a look at the first two strategies: Investigate and Recruitment. Follow up with us over the next couple of days as we unveil three more strategies to help expand your reach by diversifying your publisher base.

Investigate

Get started by asking questions to better understand the history as well as the current state of your program. It is also important to clarify what your program goals are for the next 1-2 years, such as achieving an X% new customer rate, YOY revenue growth of X%, or adding a lead component that will help to identify the kinds of publishers you would like to target for recruitment, activation, and optimization efforts.

Additionally, take time to uncover reasoning behind decisions for any larger strategic changes to your CJ program that occurred the past 1-2 years. These changes may include:

• Attribution Methods

• Pixel Updates

• Removing High-Performing Affiliates or Coupon and Loyalty Partners

• Adjusting the Commission Rate and Cookie Length

• Pulling Back on Promotional and Coupon Offers

Once these changes and their motivations have been identified, determine if there may be some room to make adjustments to those decisions based on the current goals for the channel.

Recruitment

Recruit new publishers into your program on a regular basis to ensure that your program constantly adds new and innovative partners to help you achieve your goals. Fortunately, the CJ Publisher Development team brings thousands of new publishers into the network annually. A great tool with which to recruit loyal consumers as affiliates is the CJ Affiliate Branded Signup Page. You can link your website to this page within the CJ Account Manager, which gives site visitors the ability to learn about your affiliate program. Social media sites, such as LinkedIn, are also great resources for discovering and growing your publisher relationships.

Finding new publishers in the network is easy using the recruitment tool within the CJ Account Manager. The tool enables you to:

• Narrow the search criteria to find publishers in your category, by network earnings, by publisher classification and more

• Invite publishers to join your program by offering them a program term

Send a follow-up message to recruited publishers through their Publisher Detail Page of the CJ Account Manager and explain why you are a fit for their site, which will also bring attention to your pending offer. You can manage any responses on the Mail Tab within your account. Alternatively, most publishers have an email address in the Profile section of their Publisher Detail Page which you can contact. You can access the Publisher Detail Page by clicking on the name of the publisher within the CJ Account Manager.

Try your hand at these two strategies and let us know what kind of results you get. Then check out more strategies in Part 2 and Part 3 of this series!