13 Super Easy Ways to Find Affiliates for Your Business in 2024

Finding the right affiliate partnerships is essential to succeed in your affiliate marketing business. It is one of the most important skills for succeeding in your strategy. We’ve created this step-by-step guide with 10 easy ways to find affiliates and level up your business. 

Knowing how to find affiliates for your business that are suitable and effective simultaneously is a skill that many desire in this day and age.

Good affiliate partnerships are indispensable for small businesses and large, well-developed corporations. In fact, next to marketing strategies that most businesses already know all too well and employ daily, affiliates are what will probably bring you that extra exposure and attention. We could even say that in the developed business world of today, the revenue that your affiliates bring is what makes or breaks your business, period.

But it is precisely this that makes the whole search so difficult. A successful business usually operates in a well-defined niche that offers customers a unique service. Therefore, finding affiliates that suit and benefit you requires thorough research and patience.

For that reason, we’ve created an affiliate marketing guide consisting of the 10 best and easiest ways to recruit affiliates to grow your business exponentially. Keep reading to find out more.

Start Your Search for Affiliates Within Your Own Customer or User Base

When a customer loves your product or service, they’ll likely share your brand with others via word-of-mouth. Consumers are more than willing to purchase a product if it’s been recommended by a family member or a friend. In fact, 82% of Gen Z shoppers count on advice from their friends or family when finding products. Furthermore, 68% of consumers from the same demographic are more likely to recommend a product they regularly use to their peers. 91% of millennials are likely to consider buying a product if it has been recommended by someone close to them. Moreover, for 68% of B2B professionals, word-of-mouth influences their purchasing decisions. 

These numbers only show a small portion of the power of recommendations or referrals.

With referral programs, you’re targeting existing customers or users (in the case of SaaS or app companies). In a referral program, you give your customers a unique link and reward them with exclusive perks like discount coupons, cash, free products, or an upgraded subscription. Furthermore, you’re leveraging the relationship between the referrer and the potential buyer to facilitate successful referrals. 

And because these recommendations come from someone they know or are close to, these referrals usually come with a degree of personalisation. There are other benefits to incorporating a referral program into your affiliate marketing efforts. For instance, 36% of business owners found that referrals are powerful tools for driving revenue. 

If you want to incorporate a referral program into your affiliate marketing strategy, then a reliable affiliate tracking software like trackdesk can help you do that. With trackdesk, you can optimise your referral marketing efforts through features like powerful analytics, customisable commissions, and real-time intelligent insights. 

Source: https://help.trackdesk.com/en/articles/8312670-coupons 

Consult Affiliate Networks

Becoming a part of an affiliate network is one of the relatively easier ways to find affiliates. Many such networks, like ShareASale, Commission Junction (CJ), or others, can help give you a head start in finding affiliates for your business.

You’ll be able to have a preliminary exploration of the market and see what other businesses offer to potential affiliates regarding financial business deals and collaboration compensations.

Thanks to this, you can model your approach to recruiting affiliates, both within the network and separately.

As part of your subscription, you’ll also be able to consult professionals who’ll give you personalised advice on managing affiliates successfully, ensuring they keep coming while offering them convenient deals for all parties.

The best part of resorting to an affiliate network, at least for small businesses, is that the affiliates will automatically come to you. Such networks have integrated affiliate tracking software that will help you link up with potential collaborators, which may be fruitful.

However, it’s best to be wary of affiliate networks for several reasons. For instance, if you’re marketing a “common” product (not the unicorn types that everyone wants to try), then you need to come up with a different approach to attract big fish affiliates. The thing is, with some verticals, it can be challenging to reach out to potential affiliate partners, and affiliate networks suffer from this problem. Furthermore, you’ll need a bigger upfront capital since you’ll have to consider paying the network on time and accurately so that your affiliates can get timely and correct payments.

Get Those Big-Name Business Influencers

To put it simply - in the internet age, influencers are the key to booming revenue. Yet, there are multiple types of influencers, and depending on various factors, including your business, some may be more useful than others.

For instance, if your business is predominantly B2B, social media personalities won’t cut it when establishing your affiliate partnership network. You’ll need to delve deeper into the current state of your business niche and locate the most intelligent, influential, and ground-breaking personages right now.

Whether it’s an academic, a speaker, the leader of a related company, or a professional with a well-developed online presence, you need to have all these people in mind. Approach them carefully but diligently, and show them why they need you as a partner.

Such affiliates will primarily get you that business credibility that you - and all business owners - crave. Moreover, you’ll get first-hand exposure to a broad and relevant audience, who’ll immediately start respecting your business on the mere basis of you collaborating with a person they admire.

Get Some Smaller Influencers Too

Almost the same thing can be said for other influencers too—the smaller, more personal ones, including the bloggers.

An admirable quality of contemporary businesses is their willingness to collaborate with the everyman, the person your customers and audience can relate to and empathise with. Hence, there are online personalities and influential bloggers with niche audiences.

Not only will such affiliates probably have lower financial expectations from you as a business partner, but they’ll also give you exposure to more niche audiences. Such audiences tend to develop a personal connection to the online personalities they follow, so if they endorse and promote your business, their customers will almost immediately become your customers!

Partnering with such smaller enterprises or individuals will be a good opportunity for said enterprises to grow significantly while you reap the benefit of extra exposure and advertising. It’s up to you to use today’s online ecosystem to your advantage the best you can.

While working with several influencers can unlock benefits like boosting brand awareness, increasing audience engagement, and building your brand’s credibility, tracking their performance and that of your influencer marketing campaigns can quickly become a challenge. With trackdesk’s affiliate coupons, you’ll have a better way to monitor your affiliate and campaign performance. Plus, you can stay on top of payments to ensure that your affiliate partners get paid accurately and on time. Discover how trackdesk can supercharge your influencer marketing efforts with its powerful features.

Offer Affiliates Deals They Will Not Be Able to Refuse

Your commission rate is, ultimately, what will make or break a potential affiliate partnership. After all, nobody would be foolish enough to accept a deal that doesn’t suit them, so you have to know to offer substantial, if possible, quite lucrative deals to recruit affiliates and keep those you already have.

However, you need to be extremely careful not to promise something that you - and your entire business - won’t be able to make good on. An affiliate should help you grow, not drain your business of its finances.

To ensure that this functions as it should, the first thing that you’ll need to do is analyse the affiliate market and know your competitors. Not all potential affiliates will require the same commission rates, and you need to be able to tell which ones would be satisfied with less.

Know to offer a good deal that will benefit both parties somewhat equally and help you stand out from your competition. In the long run, by doing so, you’ll let your affiliates know that you’re good at leading a business, and through word of mouth, you may get acquainted with other potential affiliates. Leaving a good impression is key, regardless of the particular circumstances.

Attract Affiliates With a Welcoming Online Aesthetic

The other side of this coin is how you visually present your business. And considering how most businesses operate nowadays, this means having a good, welcoming online presence.

Get a professional web designer to make a user-friendly and easy-to-manage website so that visitors can find their way around your menus and systems quickly.

The portal for attracting affiliates needs to feel smooth and easy to comprehend. It should paint a picture of your business as steady and upfront, which is always clear to state and express what they want and what they’re willing to give in return.

Like it or not, affiliates are either individuals - people - or businesses - led by people - so they are prone to falling for a pleasant aesthetic impression. For that reason, make sure that you don’t scare potential collaborators off with a convoluted online presence and difficult-to-follow terms, rules, and contact information. The more welcoming you are, the more guests you’ll have - simple.

Know How to Tell Potential Allies From Rivals

Yet another thing that’s essential for both small businesses and larger corporations to be aware of is knowing who your competitors and potential allies are. The two can often get confused. When you start researching a certain professional branch or niche, on the one hand, you’re happy to discover companies that do the same things as you, but on the other, they are precisely your biggest rivals.

This is why you need to know which companies you can partner with. For example, you’re offering one kind of product or service, and another company offers a complementary product or service. You may benefit from contacting them and recruiting them as an affiliate.

You’ll both simultaneously benefit from each other, promoting one another to customers likely to need similar products and services. That way, your customer base may significantly grow, as it may end up fully incorporating that of your affiliate partner over time.

In the long run, you may even be able to start sharing affiliates with your affiliate, establishing a large and complex network that will keep growing by the day, getting you more revenue, more exposure, and an ever-increasing reputation.

Consider an Affiliate Recruitment Agency

An affiliate recruitment agency is also a good, smart, and relatively clean way to get extra affiliates. Operating somewhat similarly to affiliate networks, except with a much more dedicated, personalised, and hands-on approach, affiliate recruitment agencies will actively look to pair you with potential affiliates.

Of course, you’ll still be the one to come up with the commission rates and financial compensation deals, but the agency will be the institution to try and put you in touch with different affiliates. Considering how many businesses and individuals also prefer to rely on an agency, you’ll encounter one - or more - suitable partners sooner or later.

Such agencies function with the help of special affiliate tracking software that helps them recognise and immediately establish connections between two or more parties with shared interests and potential services to offer to one another. This way, you can dedicate your time and energy to other areas of your enterprise while leaving it to the agency to find affiliates for your business.

One final point is that such agencies are great for small businesses still finding their footing in the affiliate landscape and for well-developed companies looking to extend their reach even further but are too busy to go hunting for partners manually.

Your Customers Can Carry the Brunt of the Burden

Yet another thing to bear in mind is that your affiliates can also be your customers. Just think about it. If you’re more of a B2B company, you’ll spend most of your time offering services to other businesses. You may happen upon a business that provides a service very similar to your own, which you would need for your business.

And precisely, this could be the starting point of a very beneficial partnership. If both you and your customer happen to have something to offer to each other, you could take them as your affiliate and allow them to promote you and spread the word.

Yet, you don’t need to be a B2B company for this to occur! B2C companies, being regularly in touch with customers and consumers, are ideal for leaving a good impression. A happy customer will not hesitate to spread the word, using their own personal experience to vouch for your quality.

Now, it would be especially fortunate if your customer happens to be an influencer or blogger of some sort, allowing them to pass on the knowledge of your high-quality delivery of services to a significantly wider audience, thus promoting you further. Trust us; it’s easy to tell if your affiliate is promoting you just because they were paid to do so or if they’re doing so genuinely because they’ve used your services and products and have been honestly impressed by them.

Social Media Communities Could Do the Trick

We hardly need to mention how important and influential social media is. Luckily, you can benefit from this. Join a social media group or a forum dedicated to your niche and see what kinds of people or businesses are also members. Among them, you’ll probably be able to find potential affiliates that will do you much good for the growth of your business.

People circulating in such groups, especially if these groups are tightly connected to your business, are probably looking for a service precisely like the one you’re offering. Promote yourself to them, and once they’ve used your service, allow them to spread the word online. You may become an online phenomenon in no time!

Hire the Best Affiliate Managers

Working with an experienced affiliate manager, particularly someone who has over 10 years of experience in the field and who knows all the top influencers, can help make your search for the right affiliates easier. Aside from having a vast network of affiliates whom they personally know, an affiliate manager can do the legwork for you. They can convince potential affiliates to try out your product or service first before giving their feedback. 

Affiliate managers can also help you come up with a strategy so that your affiliate program remains competitive. Plus, affiliate managers offer end-to-end affiliate program management. This means they can cover the entire process, from onboarding to affiliate monitoring. 

Trackdesk’s Partnership Managers Marketplace lets you find and work with top-notch affiliate managers. With the Partnership Managers Marketplace, you have full control over your affiliate program and have the ability to create a proprietary affiliate partners pool. 

Source: https://trackdesk.com/partnership-managers-marketplace 

Trackdesk’s Partnership Managers Marketplace lets you push the boundaries of affiliate marketing—you get access to hundreds of partnership managers. Plus, for existing trackdesk customers, you get free unlimited access to the Marketplace. Learn more about the Partnership Managers Marketplace and how it can advance your affiliate program.

Use the Barnacle SEO Strategy

Barnacle SEO is a great strategy for finding the right affiliates for your business. Basically, it involves you “attaching” yourself to a popular or high-ranking website (much like an actual barnacle) to leverage that site’s ranking power so you get positive results like increased traffic or a boost in SERP rankings. Unlike Parasite SEO, where you take advantage of high-authority websites to improve your site’s ranking for targeted keywords, Barnacle SEO is a more sustainable strategy that benefits your website, especially if you want to improve your site’s reputation and authority. With Barnacle SEO, you’re also making it easier for customers and potential affiliates to find you. Plus, it helps you expand your site’s reach. 

Make Your Affiliate Hunt a Priority

Perhaps the most important advice we could give you if you want to succeed is prioritising your affiliate program. Be incessant, devoted, and thorough in your search to find affiliates for your business. Employ various techniques and keep trying until you slowly get more and more affiliates. The more you successfully acquire, the more affiliates will follow.

Trust us, once you start - there’s no going back.

trackdesk is a powerful affiliate tracking software that makes setting up affiliate tracking easier; no technical expertise is required. With robust features, you can leverage seamless integrations, create custom offers, and invite affiliates to sign up through branded registration forms. It also has advanced features like fraud prevention and conversion currency override.

Source: https://help.trackdesk.com/en/articles/7222498-customize-affiliate-registration-form 

Whether you’re a SaaS company, start-up, or ecommerce business, trackdesk gives you a better way to optimise your affiliate program. Discover how trackdesk can transform your affiliate marketing program today.