How To Find Affiliates To Promote Your Business (and Get Results)

If you’re a marketer looking to set up an affiliate program for your business, check out this guide.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most potent weapons in your digital marketing arsenal. Nearly 40% of marketers believe it’s one of the most effective ways to acquire new customers.

You can use affiliate marketing to promote your products by working with bloggers, publishers, or other influencers who can reach your audience. Especially for tech companies, prospective customers usually look to business and industry blogs to solve a specific problem.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular marketing channels for acquiring new customers. Businesses use affiliate programs to recruit affiliate publishers to promote their products in exchange for a commission. The sales generated are tracked via affiliate links to calculate commissions. Sales commissions on conversion are typically a percentage of the sale price or a fixed amount.

How to start with affiliate marketing

1- Is affiliate marketing right for your business?

The best way to find out if an affiliate program is right for your business is to check to see if other companies in your industry have created them.

How can you see if other businesses in your niche have successfully learned how to create an affiliate program?

🔧 Use this directory to find all the affiliate programs available in the SaaS industry.

Don’t hesitate to analyze your competitor’s affiliate programs to stay up to date with their offers and beat them at their own game.

2- Create your affiliate program

The next step is creating an affiliate program for which people can sign up.

Your affiliates will receive a unique link they can use to promote your product and track the sales they generate.

Use an affiliate marketing platform to simplify all aspects of affiliate program management. It will help you adjust your program, track traffic, and invite affiliates.

How to recruit affiliates in your industry

You’ve created your affiliate program.

The next step – and not the easiest – is getting people to use your affiliate links.

Recruiting affiliates means identifying the right prospects, outreach to them, and follow-ups.

It is one of the most time-consuming and labor-intensive tasks that affiliate managers must tackle.

An affiliate manager usually spends as much as 80% of their time on recruitment-related activities.

So, what is the best way to recruit affiliates?

Identify the affiliates of your direct competitors (as well as the influent affiliates in your niche) and then reach out to them to join your affiliate program.

Here’s how:

Step #1 – Find affiliates that promote your competitors
Step #2 – Find contact information
Step #3 – Pitch your affiliate program

Step #1 – Find affiliates that promote your competitors

Let’s imagine that you could focus your recruiting efforts only on creators that are most likely to link to you.

Yes, that would be fantastic.

The good news is that you can. Linkub’s tool allows you to get insight into people who are already affiliated with competing products.

Here’s how:

Go to Linkub’s Affiliate Marketer Database.
Enter the domains of competing products or keywords you target.

Example of search for domains and competing products.

🔧 Pro tips: you can enter an unlimited number of keywords or competitors with search operators to leverage a ton of results.

Now you can see a ranked list of people that have mentioned at least one of your keywords, “chatbot” or “intercom.com”.

These are the best influencers relevant to your request.

List of people results that have mentioned at least one of the keywords.

Step #2 – Find contact information

Now that you have sourced the affiliated influencers in your industry, you can access to their contact information and export your results in a CSV file.