If you’re reading this, you already know that running an affiliate marketing program is a cost-effective way to drive traffic and sales to your business.
The trouble is that a lot of managers struggle to find bloggers and influencers in their niche. Relevant influencers are the lifeblood of successful affiliate programs, and without them, they can never materialize.
In light of that, this guide will help you learn where to find affiliates to recruit into your program.
How to Find Bloggers in Your Niche to Become Affiliates
The most popular avenue for affiliate marketing by far is blogging and writing.
People go to the internet looking for information and come across blog posts or content on social sites. When trusted voices talk about products and services that could help them, a successful affiliate program is born.
The first step is to develop a list of potential affiliate partners, and the following methods will help you do it.
1. Google Search
Running Google searches for topics relevant to your customers usually brings up content from blogs in your niche.
You’re looking for websites that are actively publishing new content and have a strong presence online. Links to social media accounts are good, and links to accounts with a substantial following are even better. Affiliate bloggers represent your brand, so you’ll only want to connect with people you’d be proud to be associated with.
Once you’ve identified the top sites in your niche, getting in touch with them should be relatively easy, as most blogs have a form or contact information readily available.
If you have trouble coming up with topics that your customers are looking for, you can start by running a search for something as simple as “[your niche] + blogs.” You can also find curated lists of the top blogs in almost any niche, such as Modest Money’s list of top finance blogs or this list of the top 100 gardening blogs in 2021.
When you find them, pay attention to those who are already talking about your competitors’ products. This is a clear indication that they are open to partnering with their favorite brands, which makes them much better potential affiliates.
2. Social Media
Another good strategy is to find influencers who already have an engaged audience that they can leverage to promote your business.
Searching social media platforms for relevant hashtags and keywords will reveal users who regularly create content about topics in your niche. These can be easily filtered to show only the top posts, giving you a pool of high-quality results and profiles with bigger followings.
3. Read Blogs in Your Niche
There’s a good chance that you’re already familiar with blogs that cover topics relevant to your industry and your consumers.
If not, it’s a good idea to start. Reading niche-specific blogs not only helps keep you current on the best new technology and trends for your business but also gives you firsthand knowledge of who the best blogs in your niche are. You’ll learn to identify high-quality content and organically grow your list of potential affiliates.
How to Reach Potential Affiliates
Now that you’ve identified some potential blogs to partner with through your affiliate program, you’ll want to know how to get them on board.
For starters, if you don’t have a clear path to a page describing your affiliate program on your website, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.
The best bloggers to promote your products and services are those who use and enjoy them anyway. These people are often actively looking for ways to increase revenue on their blogs, so they may skip over you if you make it difficult to learn about your program. If you can create a clear affiliate info page that gets their attention, you’ll have a way to passively recruit new affiliates at any time.
Aside from that, here are a few things you can do to start getting new affiliates onboard ASAP.
Look for the Top Bloggers
Before you contact every blog on your list, identify which ones represent the top blogs in your niche.
First, analyze their online presence. They should be regular contributors with a high Domain Rating (DR) score or website authority. This is a manual review of the public-facing information about their brand and their audience.
To take it a step further, review media kits from potential affiliates. These should be available either on the blogs themselves or by request, and they will provide insight into aspects like their audience size, case studies, and other relevant information. If a blog has no media kit available, that may play a role in whether you choose to partner with them.
Use Social Media
Interacting on social sites with the brands and influencers you’ve identified can help make them aware of your presence.
The currency of the internet is attention, so paying attention to content creators and helping them get their message out warms them up to a potential relationship and gives them the chance to see that you have an affiliate program before you formally reach out.
Reach Out via Email
If you want to grow your affiliate program, there’s no way around doing email outreach.
Top bloggers in your niche receive a lot of requests to become affiliates. Space in a busy inbox is highly competitive, so don’t be discouraged if you don’t receive a response on the first try. You’ll need to send a well-crafted outreach email, or even a full email campaign, to have your brand mentioned in top blogs.
This can be tedious work but, with enough effort, a competitive program should have no problem recruiting new bloggers.
Any one of these tips is sufficient to help you recruit bloggers in your niche to become affiliates, but the best way to see consistent growth is to take a multifaceted approach — at least in the beginning. Some techniques work better in different niches, so trying multiple techniques will help you refine your overall strategy.
When you do, you’ll need to be sure your program is set up for success. Use LeadDyno to manage every aspect from creating trackable links, sending affiliate communications, and of course, paying your partners.
