Expand Your Reach: Diversify Publisher Base [Part 2]

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We're back again with two more affiliate strategies to help you diversify your publisher base, and ultimately expand the reach of your brand. In this post, we will explore two more strategies: Getting Certified and Activation. As this is a three-part series, check out Part 1 and Part 3 when you have a chance. 

Get Certified

Become Content and Mobile Certified as both can help broaden the reach of access to specific types of publishers for you to build out a diverse publisher base.

Mobile Certification indicates to publishers that your affiliate program tracks mobile transactions. Mobile tracking presents the opportunity to further develop a mobile strategy within the affiliate channel by working with mobile-specific partners.

CJ Affiliate's Content Certification program makes it easier for advertisers to work with vetted content publishers within an advertiser's category. The affiliate channel can be very labor intensive for new content publishers to join and establish relevant advertiser relationships, so the Content Certified program hand-selects CJ certified, high-end content publishers and pairs them with advertisers looking to develop these kinds of publisher partnerships. Once your program is Content Certified, be sure you don't fall into the trap of "set it and forget it." Select a handful of content publishers with whom to test sponsored posts, product reviews, and even contests each quarter.

Activation

Activation Campaigns can encourage newly joined publishers to get active in your program, and can also help with breathing new life into existing publishers who may have been inactive for several months.

Below are several recommended steps to creating a successful campaign:

• Select the affiliates you want to include in the campaign and Group them within the CJ Account Manager.

• Set up a Program Term with Performance Incentives, such as a flat fee bonus or a commission rate increase, to automatically pay the participating publishers if a performance goal is met.

• Send an Email Campaign to the activation group through your account manager. Be sure to include all the details of the campaign such as start and end dates, what the incentive is, as well as suggested creative to use.

• To be sure you are targeting publishers who want to participate, we recommend each publisher confirm they would like to participate by emailing you by a set deadline. After each affiliate lets you know they would like to participate, extend them the program term you created for the activation campaign.

• Send reminder Email Campaigns with any promotional creative throughout the campaign to encourage engagement with your brand.

While you may only offer the activation campaign for a one month time period, many publishers will continue to promote your brand on their sites beyond the end date. We recommend running performance reports for the publishers included in the activation group three months after the campaign is complete to help identify top performers.

That's it for today folks! But that's also two more strategies you can start testing. We are certain you will find success if you put the work in. Stay tuned for tomorrow's CJ Blog as we reveal one more strategy on how to best diversify your publisher base and expand your reach.