One of the biggest challenges of doing business these days is finding new customers for your service or products. And this is the case for all businesses that are just starting but also established eCommerce brands, SaaS, and small businesses.
So, if you are looking for the best strategy to increase revenue, brand awareness, or better engage your existing customers, you need affiliate marketing.
In fact:
- Affiliate marketing contributes 15% of the digital media industry’s total revenue.
- For 38% of marketers affiliate marketing is the top customer acquisition method.
To start an affiliate program you need to:
- Learn how to find affiliates that are suitable for your brand
- Know how to reach out to potential affiliates so they can’t say no
and after reaching out to around 1M creators that do affiliate marketing, we know how to do them both!
Brands usually target micro and macro influencers that are already successful in doing affiliate marketing. If you find experienced affiliates in your niche, you just need to offer them a fair commission, be helpful and offer support, and watch the sales coming in.
So, keep reading because we are revealing how to find affiliates the way our data analysts are searching and identifying affiliates for our clients.
Additionally, we will share the most effective methods to do affiliate outreach and get positive replies this year.
List of creators on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok that promote affiliate links.
9 best ways to find affiliates in 2024
Below we discuss how to find affiliates easily and effectively. All tactics offer different advantages and challenges, so you can combine multiple strategies or choose the best tactic for your business goals and campaign budget.
Find affiliates using Instagram
You can find affiliates for free using Instagram by searching for related keywords or hashtags and then analyzing the profiles to find the ones that are a good match.
Here’s a simple step-by-step explanation of how to do it:
1. Define your target audience. What type of affiliates are you looking for? Consider factors such as interests, niche, the products or services they promote, etc.
2. Search by relevant hashtags. Identify popular hashtags in your niche. For example, if you are in the fitness industry, search for hashtags like #fitness, #workout, #healthylifestyle, etc.
3. Explore top posts. Top posts usually have a high engagement rate so they are usually posted by influencers or creators with a significant following.
4. Visit and analyze the profiles. Evaluate the content quality, relevance to your brand, past collaborations, and posts indicating they are promoting affiliate links.
5. Check their bios. Look for keywords related to partnerships, promo codes, affiliate marketing, coupon, etc. Plus check for any affiliate links that might be included in the bio section.
6. Contact potential affiliates. You can reach out to them directly on Instagram or via email and invite them to join your affiliate program. To find the email address of the potential affiliate, check the “Email” or “Contact” button below the bio section. When you click the email address, it will directly open the email app you use so you can directly write and send an email.
Get a list of creators that promote affiliate links
We have a database with 70M+ creators, from which 1M promote affiliate links.
This means we currently have more than a million potential affiliates for your brand. Plus we can find, filter and deliver a custom list of affiliates per your criteria, including their email addresses.
We filter each affiliate through 40+ unique filters such are niche, location, presence on other social media platforms, whether they are bloggers or Instagram creators, and more. This way we find affiliates that are perfect for your brand.
More specifically, we are searching for creators that:
- Have posted links such as amazon.com/shop, ltk.com, etc.
- Are having keywords such Use my code, Get X% off in post captions or bio
With these steps, we not only find affiliates based on your criteria but also identify creators who are already successfully promoting products and earning commissions.
For example, we can give you a list of affiliates that:
- Have 1000 – 10k followers on Instagram
- Are YouTubers with 20k subscribers
- Use link in bio tools (Linktree, hoo.be, Koji, Zezam, etc.)
- Are from a specific niche (fashion, tech, parenting, DIY, etc.)
- Are based in a specific location
This means you can get highly targeted affiliates and you will:
- Save time searching for the most suitable affiliates. Sure, if you’re only looking for one or a couple of affiliates, you can always find them manually at no cost. But, if you’re in need of a larger number of affiliates, it’s best to get in touch with us.
- Minimize the risk of partnering with affiliates that are not a good fit for their businesses. Although you can find affiliates by yourself, the additional filters we provide for each affiliate give you a better understanding of their experience, influence on purchasing decisions, etc.
- Expert guidance and free strategy session – we’ve helped more than 1000 companies to find affiliates and creators in general, and we know what works best for specific types of businesses.
Besides the fact that we know how to find affiliates at scale, for some clients, we also handle the affiliate email outreach.
We send emails at scale and reach out to affiliates from all niches. For one of our recent clients, we’ve reached out to 38k+ affiliates in two months, and we achieved an average 54% open rate and 15.7% positive reply rate.
Get a custom list of affiliates and start your affiliate program
Schedule a free meeting with our affiliate marketing experts and find out how you can leverage our database to achieve your goals.
Join affiliate networks or directories
Affiliate networks and directories are one of the best places to find affiliates to promote your product or service as they exist to connect businesses with potential affiliates.
They provide a platform where businesses can promote their affiliate programs and affiliates can discover and apply for the ones that are interested in.
Some affiliate networks and directories may require a fee to list your product, while others earn a commission from each sale made through their platform. Currently, the best-known affiliate networks are ClickBank, ShareAScale, Amazon Associates, Awin, etc.
Here is a step-by-step guide to finding affiliates using ClickBank, but keep in mind that most of the affiliate networks work very similarly:
1. Sign up or Log in to your ClickBank account
2. Click the Accounts tab and click Create an Account. Next, click the nickname with the marketplace listing you want to use.
3. Click the Vendor Settings tab and then click My Site.
4. Locate the Marketplace Information box and click Manage Marketplace Listing.
5. Select the Category and Subcategory that best fit your marketplace listing.
6. Enter the listing details.
7. Enter up to 10 keywords that describe the offer.
8. Enter the Affiliate Tools URL, Affiliate Support Email Address, and Skype Name. Although they are optional, they are highly encouraged.
9. Enter the URL of the landing page where you want affiliate HopLinks to direct. This is usually the page where you promote your affiliate program.
10. Click Save to save and publish your listing.
In the end, here’s how your listing will look once it’s live:
Publish your affiliate offer in creator newsletters
Creator newsletters are a perfect place to present your affiliate offer to content creators. They typically have a dedicated subscriber base of content creators who are actively engaged in their niche. Plus creators see them as reliable sources of information and recommendations.
So, by publishing your affiliate offer in a creator newsletter you will:
- tap into targeted audiences
- increase credibility
- expand your reach
- drive engagement and conversions
- establish cost-effective marketing channels
One of the currently most trusted newsletters that sends brand deals to 30K+ creators every week is AsaCreator and you can publish your affiliate offer free of charge, by filling out this form.
You can also try reaching out to other well-known creator newsletters such ThoughtLeaders, Marketing Brew, Buffer’s Social Media Newsletter, etc. But, keep in mind that these newsletters don’t primarily promote brand deals or affiliate offers. They are focused on creator economy news, trends, etc.
Leverage influencer marketing
Considering their influence on people’s buying decisions, influencers can be a great fit for your affiliate program. Depending on your offer, budget, and goals, you can approach both micro and macro influencers to ask them to join your affiliate marketing program.
This is what you need to do:
- Define your target audience. This way you can get the best-suited influencers to join your program. For example, if you want to sell products for kids or babies, instead of partnering with lifestyle influencers with diverse audiences, it’s best to find mom influencers that engage with your potential customers.
- Research relevant influencers. You can search social media platforms, use influencer marketing tools or agencies, or get a custom list of influencers per your specific criteria.
- Engage and reach out. Before you reach out to influencers that are a good fit, like and comment on their posts. This way you will get their attention and your offer won’t seem out of nowhere. We suggest you reach out via email, but social media DMs will work too if you are reaching out to influencers with smaller followings.
Among your customers
A happy customer always suggests your product to family or friends and what’s better than earning while doing this?
Another effective way to find affiliates is to identify those who already love your brand. It is highly likely that there are affiliates who are not only familiar with your brand but are also your existing customers.
Collaborating with them increases the likelihood of them accepting your offer. Plus, they have firsthand experience with your products or services, so they can speak confidently about the advantages and benefits, making them reliable promoters of your brand.
You can manually review the profiles of your business’s followers on Instagram, TikTok, or other social platforms. Check each profile to identify potential affiliates. Pay attention to individuals who promote affiliate links, engage in brand collaborations, or are creators/influencers.
However, this approach can be time-consuming and divert your attention from business growth. As an alternative, you can opt for a professional solution like customer data enrichment.
To discover affiliates among your customers you can import your customer list using our CSV upload, or for advanced users, connect our API.
Find top affiliates among your customers
Give us your customer list and we will find everyone that promotes affiliate links, plus 40 insights.
Find niche bloggers who are affiliate marketers
Bloggers are great at creating engaging and informative content. They have good writing skills and know how to communicate the benefits and features of products or services effectively.
That means if you find suitable bloggers and make them affiliate partners, you will have engaging and authentic promotional content for your products.
Here’s how to find affiliates among niche bloggers:
- Search blogging platforms such as Medium, Substack, Ghost, etc.
- Search social media. You can search by hashtags, niche-specific keywords, or phrases. Depending on the niche you are interested in, determine the appropriate social media platform to search on. For example, if you need tech bloggers is best to search for potential affiliates on Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
- Use simple Google searching tricks. You can use search queries like “best tech bloggers”, etc.
Affiliate recruitment agencies
If you are looking for how to find affiliates the easiest way, this is it. Affiliate recruitment agencies specialize in identifying and acquiring new affiliates to join your affiliate program.
This is what an affiliate recruitment agency can do for you:
- Find affiliates using various strategies such as researching relevant websites, blogs, social media influencers, and industry-specific leaders.
- Analyze and evaluate potential affiliates based on factors such as audience demographics, website quality, niche relevance, traffic volume, content quality, etc.
- Handle the affiliate outreach via email, social media, or other communication channels to present your offer and recruit affiliates.
- Once an affiliate marketer shows interest to collaborate, they hand over the affiliate details to you for further onboarding and management.
- Some agencies offer the onboarding, management, tracking, and support of affiliates as part of their service.
Based on the online reviews, the best affiliate recruitment agencies for this year are Acceleration Partners, Hamster Garage, Partner Centric, and All Inclusive Marketing.
Run social media ads
Another way to find affiliates is to promote your affiliate program with social media ads. This strategy will give you access to wide and diverse advertising, or targeted advertising based on interests, behaviors, demographics, and more.
The biggest advantage of this strategy is the fact that affiliates are the ones reaching out to you, not the other way around. That means those who reach out to you have already expressed an interest in your product or service, so they’re more likely to become a part of your affiliate program.
So, if you want to learn how to find affiliates through social media ads, here’s a guide you can follow:
- Define your affiliate program. Before you start running ads, you should have a clear definition of your affiliate program. Based on what you want to achieve, decide the commission rate, payment terms, what kind of support you will provide to your affiliates, and how you will track sales referred by your affiliate partners.
- Identify your target audience. This is important to keep in mind while creating your ads so you can create designs or write copy that resonates with your target audience.
- Craft your ad. Your ad should communicate the benefits of joining your affiliate program. Highlight the commission rate, the quality of your product or service, the support you provide to affiliates, and any other benefits that might attract potential affiliates.
- Create a custom audience for ads. You can create a custom audience in your social media ads manager. To do this you can upload a list of email addresses, or you can select characteristics like interests, job titles, behaviors, or demographics.
- Create an affiliate program landing page. Your social media ad should direct people to a landing page where they can learn more about your affiliate program and sign up. This page should provide all the necessary information about your program and have a clear call to action.
- Test and refine your ads. Start with a small budget and gradually scale up as you see what works. If you are running multiple ads, see which ones perform best and continuously tweak your messaging and targeting to improve performance.
- Retarget. If people visit your landing page but don’t sign up for your affiliate program, you can use retargeting ads to reach them again. These ads remind people of your offer and provide another opportunity for them to sign up.
The benefits of affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing offers advantages across a range of businesses, including big eCommerce enterprises, SaaS companies, and small businesses, making it an invaluable strategy.
This is a performance-based model, which means businesses only pay for actual results, such as conversions or sales. Hence, it’s highly cost-effective and with minimum risk of investing in ineffective campaigns.
Knowing these advantages, 80% of brands including some of the top businesses worldwide have affiliate marketing campaigns and get 5% to 30% of their internet revenue via affiliate marketing.
Tips to attract affiliates to join your program
Until now we’ve worked with more than 1000 companies to help them find and partner with affiliates, and creators in general. Most of them had the same challenge – getting affiliates to agree to join their affiliate program, so they decided to use our affiliate outreach service.
The 3 biggest challenges they had are:
- Lack of reputation (especially for new or small businesses)
- Competition – it’s challenging to stand out among the crowd and convince affiliates to choose your program over others
- Finding affiliates who are relevant to their niche or industry
After analyzing diverse campaigns, testing different affiliate programs and different approaches to potential affiliates, we found these tips to be effective in improving positive responses:
- Understand your target audience and find affiliates who are relevant to your industry.
- Offer fair commissions and make sure they are competitive compared to others in your industry.
- Offer free products if the affiliate isn’t familiar with your brand
- Build relationships by reaching out to potential affiliates directly and establishing genuine connections with them.
- Point out what you love about their content.
- Clearly highlight what benefits will potential affiliates have if they join your affiliate program.
- Offer excellent support for your affiliate partners. Be responsive and helpful, answer affiliates’ questions, and provide assistance when needed.
- Be transparent and fair to build trust. This means clearly communicating your program’s terms and ensuring prompt commission payouts.
By following these simple tips, you can improve your chances of getting positive replies and attracting affiliates to your program.
Or you can get in touch with us, and let our team of 40 creator sales experts reach out to affiliates on your behalf.
To sum up
Affiliate marketing is crucial for driving growth in 2024 and now you know how to find affiliates to promote your products or services.
We’ve discussed the most effective strategies suitable for startups, eCommerce brands, and large corporations of any kind. You just need to set campaign objectives and choose the strategy that seems most suitable for your specific case.
Keep in mind that you have some free opportunities to promote your affiliate program, such as publishing your offer in a weekly newsletter with 30K+ creators subscribed by filling out this form.
Lastly, if you want to find affiliates at scale, we can find, filter and deliver you a custom list of affiliates per your specific criteria. For each contact, we provide 40+ unique data points, including the basic engagement metrics, plus deeper insights such are past brand collaboration, all social media platforms they use, monetization status, and more.
So, if you are currently seeking a growth strategy, schedule a free call with our team and learn what we can do for you specifically.
Get a custom list of affiliate marketers
Share your criteria and campaign goals, and we will find affiliates that are most suitable to spread the word about your business.
FAQ
We suggest reaching out to potential affiliates via email. However, if you are reaching out to affiliates with smaller audiences, you can send a direct message on the platform they use most.
To do the outreach effectively you can follow this affiliate outreach guide where our creator outreach experts share their best tactics for reaching out to affiliates so they can’t say no.
This highly depends on the affiliate program, the audience, and experience of the affiliate marketer, etc. However, currently, the affiliate commission rate can vary between 5–30%.
These are the things you must consider when selecting affiliates for your campaign:
- Relevance
- Reach, engagement, and audience size
- Quality of content
- Reputation and credibility
- Alignment with campaign goals
To measure the success of your affiliate marketing program, follow these steps:
- Set clear and measurable goals. These could include increasing sales, driving website traffic, generating leads, or boosting brand awareness.
- Use affiliate tracking software or platforms that provide you with unique affiliate links or tracking codes such as PartnerStack, Refersion, CrewFire, etc.
- Monitor affiliate-generated traffic using Google Analytics
- Track conversions and sales. Assign unique identifiers to each affiliate and their campaigns to track conversions and sales.
- Analyze affiliate performance. Regularly review key performance metrics for each affiliate, such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and revenue generated. Identify your top-performing affiliates and those who may need additional support or guidance.
- Make data-driven decisions to optimize your affiliate marketing strategies. Adjust commission structures, provide other resources, or refine your targeting to enhance performance.
Note: If you work with an affiliate recruitment agency, it’s best to find an agency that can handle this part of your campaign as well.
