Affiliates are all around you and here are some tips to locating them.
#1 Tip You Mustn’t Forget: The best way to find affiliates or partners in any type of project, product or anything in business is to ALREADY know the people who reach your target market. This can be website owners, email list owners, message board owners, blog owners or even people you might consider to be your competition. When you already know people reaching your target market and have a personal relationship with them, it’s easier to ask them to help you promote a new product.
Here are some ideas to start developing a relationship:
- Offer to send them your product for free so they can review it – or just mail it to them right away without any expectations. Even if they can’t promote your product now, if you treat them cordially, they might just promote your product down the line.
- Show them that you know something about their business and comment specifically on some of the projects they are working on or some of their products that you have purchased
- Do something for them first. List them as a recommended resource on your website, etc., and tell them about it.
- Pick up the phone and develop a relationship. Perhaps you can offer to promote his or her product first, instead of asking for a favor right away. Don’t be in a rush to get them to promote your product or you may just burn your bridges completely.
- Show them proven results of other affiliates or illustrate how well your website converts visitors to sales.
Taking things slow is best long-term strategy in finding great JV partners, but of course, you can’t be friends with every affiliate and you will want to search and approach some affiliates with the sole purpose of promoting your product.
More tips for finding new affiliates: When looking for new affiliates, ideally you want affiliates who have…
• Good website traffic
• Decent-sized lists
• Targets your buying audience
The first two are nice, but aren’t totally necessary. Don’t ignore a potential affiliates with a highly-targeted audience just because you think they don’t get much traffic or have a lot of subscribers. You want affiliates that can reach your very targeted market of customers.
• Ask your fellow online business owners if they know anyone who reaches your target market and they could introduce you. These types of “recommendations from a friend” can go a long way.
• Go to your favorite search engine and see which sites come up near the top for your target keywords. This is a great way to piggy-back on those great rankings without having to pay for them – until the affiliate makes sales for you.
• Check their ESTIMATED traffic ranking at Alexa.com – This site very roughly estimates how popular a site is based on traffic and page views. The lower the ranking number, the busier the site. This is not a foolproof method, but can be used as a guideline to compare websites in similar markets.
One of the reasons I really like using Alexa.com for finding sites is because they always list “related sites” for each site information you view. This can keep you going for a very long time finding related websites.
• See which sites link to your competition. Go to Yahoo.com type in the following: link:yourcompetitorsdomain.com. Just substitute “yourcompetitorsdomain.com” with your competitor’s actual domain name. The results that show up will be sites that link to your competitor. You will potentially find some good sites to partner with here. I prefer Yahoo for this check because they will show many more links than Google does.
You can also simply enter the company name or a product name at Google, Yahoo or other search engine in quotation marks to see which websites are writing about your competitor.
Also, check Technorati.com, the blog search engine to see who’s talking about them too. If your competitor has a blog, search for it on Technorati and use the handy “Blogs that Link Here” feature to see whose linking to their blog. You can also search for other on-topic blogs to be your potential affiliates.
• Check DMOZ.org and the Yahoo Directory for websites in an appropriate category for your market.
• Look through Ezine Directories for potential affiliates. Most directories are categorized by subject and some include information about the size of the list. Some Ezine Directories you can look at include: The Ezine Directory, EzineHub.com and EzineLocator.com. You can also search for your target market keywords plus the words “newsletter”, “ezine” or “mailing list” on a search engine to find even more publications.
• Find message boards related to your target market by searching on a search engine with your target market keywords plus words like “message board(s)”, “forum(s)” or “board(s)”. You can also search
