Q: I am a new affiliate manager and am working on recruiting affiliates to my niche. How do I use search to find qualified affiliates of my competition, or even if they are not promoting my competition?
A: There are a handful of software programs, such as Link Capture that purport enabling you to find the affiliates of your competition.
Essentially, these programs run queries in search engines and enable you to save some time in finding which sites are ranking well for various searches, as well as which sites are linking to your competitor’s site(s).
Presumably, those companies linking to your competitor(s) are affiliates, but this technique relies on affiliate programs having affiliates link directly to the company’s domain, as Amazon.com and other affiliate programs do.
Most affiliate programs use a redirected url with affiliate networks, so this method isn’t useful. You can do this sort of search on your own via Google Webmaster Central.
Also, search on the big search engines to see which sites rank well for your top keyword searches. Then contact these sites to see if they’d be willing to work with you.
Video: Finding Niche Affiliates
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Thanks – gotta give some love to ShareASale for ThinkTank.
Nice shirt Shawn
Thanks for the input, Brett.
When you say you’ll make up to 100s of articles – that’s for a single product?
I work, have worked as a niche affiliate on a handful of products and topics over the years. For me this is the only successful affiliate business that I have found. When I cover a product, I write dozens if not hundreds of articles on the subject, I create videos, screencasts, tutorials, I give speeches and presentations. I go very deep.
You might consider that there is at least another sub division of niche affiliates. There are deep niche affiliates and there are shallow niche affiliates. (not claiming one is better than the other, they both serve their purpose).
A deep niche affiliate typically becomes ‘the person’ that knows anything important about a product, shows people how to use it in every circumstance and probably even gives lots of direct feedback to the company on how to improve the thing.
A shallow niche affiliate will at a minimum (and possibly in total) look at their site, see that if any new products or services in the niche that their site covers that day/week/month have come up on their radar, if so, they will throw up a page, might be just a landing page or it could be a full on review. They’ll include affiliate links, maybe even do a follow up article/video or two and then move on.
Shallow niche affiliates might also link to a deep affiliate site, essentially pointing to what becomes one of the primary sources on the topic.
In either case, if you can’t find the shallor deep affiliate in either a google search or in a google blog search, then they are probably not going to generate much business for you (people that advertise via PPC as affiliates being separate from this conversation)
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