Finding Affiliates
One of the big questions for any business contemplating starting their own program is, where will I find my affiliates? Even those affiliate managers that run a program within a network will soon find that out of the many hundreds and thousands of affiliates in the network, only a handful of them actually make any sales.
So what’s an affiliate manager to do?
If you want to find good affiliates for a new, or up-and-coming program then you have to get your hands dirty. You need to find sites yourself and contact them with a compelling offer to join your program.
Existing Links.
First of all, check out the sites that are already linking to you. This can be done by going to the following free sites, entering your url and then looking at the results;
- http://www.linkpopularitycheck.com
- http://www.linkpopularity.com
- http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/
From these results you now know who is linking to you, from what page, and in what manner e.g. are they being favourable to towards your company or not? They may have a text link on a links page so you can email them and ask them if they’d like to link to you by joining your affiliate program as they could earn some money if they refer sales.
Why ask sites to join your program if they’re already linking to you? They could promote your site even more. They could add more links to their site if they know that they can actually earn money from them.
Link checking is a useful tool in finding sites that link to you, and a growing number of links is a good sign, but the actual figure should not be deeply analysed too much.
Finally, check that their links to you work and that they are not misspelt, or that they go to a page that does not exist.
Competitor Links.
That’s the friendly, technical term for copying. Carry out link popularity checks, as above, on your competition and find out who is linking to them. You will probably find sites linking to them that can also link to you as well. Let these sites know that you exist, that you are offering the same or a related service/product to your competitor and that they are invited to join your program too. I would not recommend that you contact a site and ask them to delete a link in favor of yours
