The Essential Guide to Finding Your Competitors’ Affiliates And Putting Them To Work For You

The Essential Guide to Finding Your Competitors’ Affiliates And Putting Them To Work For You

The Essential Guide to Finding Your Competitors’ Affiliates And Putting Them To Work For You


Nick James’ Affiliate Traffic Game Plan

The Essential Guide to Finding Your Competitors’ Affiliates And Putting Them To Work For You

Smart product developers and online marketers know that one of the keys to creating a successful affiliate program is that you need to go out and recruit your own affiliates.

You see, the good affiliates aren’t looking for opportunities. They don’t have to, because so many good opportunities cross their desks every week. And if you want to build a good affiliate program, then you’re going to have to go out and recruit these affiliates too.

But here’s another key…

You need to find affiliates with a proven track record. You need to find affiliates who are already making tons of sales for your competitors. Then you need to recruit these affiliates and get them to play on your team.

How?

Let’s start with five good ways to find your competitor’s top affiliates…

1. Look For Reviews And Content

The first thing you’ll want to do is hit up Google to search for the names of your competitor’s products along with search terms such as “review” or “comparison.”

The reason is pretty clear: generally, affiliates are the ones who are putting up product reviews and comparisons, and that makes this method a quick and easy way to find those affiliates.

TIP: Better yet, you’ll also find out which affiliates tend to be good at search engine optimization. If the same affiliate holds multiple key rankings for multiple competing products, that’s a pretty good sign that the affiliate will be able to drive traffic your way, too.

The second thing you’ll want to do is search for the titles of your competitors’ Lead Magnets, as well as the titles of their articles, blog posts and other content. You can even search for excerpts out of articles.

Where do you get this information?

One good way to do it is by simply signing up for your competitors’ affiliate programs, which will give you access to the content they provide to their affiliates. Then you can search for the titles and excerpts from this content to uncover affiliates who are actively using the content to promote offers.

And now that you’re logged into your competitors’ affiliate centers, you’ll want to check out this next idea…

2. Check the Competitors’ Contest Leader Boards

Here’s a quick and dirty way to find out your competitors’ BEST affiliates: see who wins their affiliate contests.

Again, you’ll usually need to be signed up to your competitors’ affiliate programs in order to gain access to this privileged information. But once you’re in, you’ll likely to be able to see leader boards for both past and current contests. If you compare these boards across multiple competitors, you’ll see which affiliates consistently promote and drive sales.

3. Join Affiliate Groups and Forums

The next way to find your competitors’ affiliates is to go to the places where they all congregate online. In other words, seek out the affiliate forums and social media groups.

Specifically:

• Go to Facebook and use the search box to uncover groups. You’ll want to keep the searches broad, such as “affiliate” or “affiliate marketing.”

• Use Google to find affiliate forums. You can search for terms such as “affiliate marketing forums” and “affiliate discussion.”

• Uncover joint venture networks. Again, use Google to uncover these platforms in your niche. For example, “[Niche] affiliate network.”

Once you find these platforms, join the biggest and busiest ones. The watch the conversations to get an idea of who is promoting what, and which affiliates tend to be the super affiliates in your niche.

4. Follow the Money

Another way to find out who’s pulling down the big numbers for your competitors is by checking to see who is placing ads for them. If an affiliate consistently places paid advertising for a product, that’s a pretty good sign that they’re making money with their ads.

Here’s how to uncover these advertisers:

• Search Google for your competitors’ product names. Sure, you’ll find reviews and other content using this method (which is very helpful), but you’ll also run into text ads. Track down the person who placed the ad, and you have a potential affiliate.

• Take note of the Google paid ads. When you run searches for product names as well as relevant niche topics in Google, you’re going to get a list of sponsored (paid) ads. These ads may go to lead pages if affiliates are using a two-step advertising process. But whether one-step or two-step, this strategy will give you an idea of who is promoting what in your niche.

• Check niche sites that accept advertising. Then take note of who’s placing the ads—these could be your potential affiliates.

TIP: Sometimes it’s hard to decipher an affiliate link to determine who is behind it. Here are two tips that might help:

1. Check if there is a redirect URL. Many affiliates redirect their affiliate links through their own domains. All you have to do is visit the domain to see if it’s clear who owns it. If not, run the domain through a whois search such as www.whois.com.

2. Run a search for the affiliate link (or even just the affiliate ID). If it’s a direct affiliate link, then search for that link in Google. If the link isn’t a tracking link, then there’s a good chance the affiliate has used it elsewhere, such as on his own blog.

Next idea…

5. Keep Track of Top-Selling Products

The idea here is simple: some of the top vendors in your niche are often the super affiliates too. That’s because these vendors have built up big platforms, including big lists of proven buyers.

You probably already have a list in mind of some of the top sellers in your niche. That’s right, some of your biggest competitors could become your top affiliates. Once you draw up your list, you can add to it using these two tips:

• Check marketplaces such as Clickbank.com and JVZoo.com. These affiliate marketplaces tend to rank products based on popularity, so it will only take you a few minutes to uncover some of the best-selling products in your niche.

• Keep track of the big product launches. The marketers who are rolling out the biggest launches also probably have the biggest customer lists in your niche.

There you have it – five great ways to find your competitors’ affiliates. If you use all of these methods, you’ll easily be able to uncover all the super affiliates in your niche, as well as dozens of other really good affiliates.

Which brings us to this important question…

So, How Do You Recruit Them?

As mentioned before, these top affiliates get a lot of great offers crossing their desks every week. That means that just saying, “Hey, wanna make some great commissions?” isn’t going to cut it.

You need to make your offer standout. You need to have a standout product.

Here are tips for making it happen…

Build Relationships

People like to do business with those they know, like and trust. So if an affiliate gets two identical offers from two different vendors, you can bet the affiliate is going to join the vendor whom he already knows, likes and trusts. That’s why it’s a good idea to build relationships first before beginning your recruitment, especially when you’re trying to recruit super affiliates.

Here are three tips for building these relationships:

• Do something for the other person first. For example, if the person has their own product, then sign up as an affiliate and make some sales for them first.

• Interact with them online. Make comments on their blog. Connect with them on social media. Send an email to them to talk about a recent newsletter issue. Point is, just start talking to these potential super affiliates.

• Make a name for yourself in the niche. If you put out great products and build a good reputation for yourself, then people will start approaching you. They’ll know you and trust you.

This means you don’t need to necessarily go out into the niche and invest a lot of time building one-on-one relationships since everyone will be eager to work with you when you approach them.

Next up…

Give Access to the Product

Don’t hesitate on this point. Whether you’re selling a $20 eBook or a $500 home study course that’s shipped to the customer’s door, you need to give your potential affiliates access to this product.

First, a good affiliate isn’t going to promote a product without reviewing it thoroughly themselves. And secondly, since you are approaching this potential affiliate, you need to offer access to the product. Don’t make your affiliate ask for it, and certainly don’t expect them to pay for it. Just send access at the same time you’re sending your recruitment email.

Which brings us to the next point…

Offer Them Something Special

If you’re looking to recruit the top affiliates in your niche, it’s a good idea to give them perks that you don’t offer everyone else. This includes benefits such as:

• A higher commission rate.
• Exclusive discounts for their customers.
• Exclusive bonuses for their customers.
• Special personalized landing pages.
• Instant commissions, daily commissions or weekly commissions.
• The opportunity to promote the product before everyone else.
• Extra commissions on upsells and backend sales.

Here’s an example email you might send out to prospective affiliates (especially ones with whom you’ve built a relationship):

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Subject: New product – I wanted you to hear about it first…

Hi [First Name],

I’m just about ready to launch a new product, and I wanted to be sure you heard about it first. That’s because I think it’s a great fit for your audience, and I’m also offering a special commission rate if you come on board to promote.

The product is called [name of product], and [describe in a sentence or two what the product does – in other words, why would this person’s audience want this product?]

Here, you can check it for yourself: [download link to entire product]

Right now the sales letter is pulling a [%] conversion rate in our initial testing, so this is already proving to be an in-demand product that gives you the potential for a lot of sales.

And here’s the best part: you’re getting a special “inner circle” commission rate of [%] – that’s a full [$amount] in your pocket for every sale you make.

What’s more, you also get [insert any other perks… special discounts, exclusive promotions before the affiliate program is open to the public, etc].

I’ve taken the liberty of setting up your affiliate account. Here’s the info:

[affiliate link]

[affiliate log in info]

Once you log in you’ll get access to all sorts of emails, articles, banners and other ads and creatives you can use to promote this product.

We’re launching on [date] – are you in?

Let me know if you have any questions or if there is anything I can do for you to make promotions easier…

P.S. This is going to be a big event… I hope you’re a part of it!

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Parting Thoughts

If you’ve always wanted to enjoy a big product launch, or just get the sales boost that only a really good super affiliate team can deliver, then you need to find and recruit the best affiliates in your niche. And one fantastic way to do this is by uncovering your competitors’ best affiliates and persuading them to promote your offers too.

You just received a crash course in exactly how to do that. So what’s the next step?

Get started finding those affiliates. Because remember, just ONE really good affiliate could add thousands of dollars to your bottom line. So the sooner you get started, the sooner you could start reaping the rewards!

Interested in learning more about finding other people who are willing to get visitors to your website for you?…

Or putting the exact same strategies and emails that I use for my own business to work for you?

Then you will be interested to learn about the Affiliate Traffic Game Plan the new Home Study Course by Nick James that will teach you in step-by-step detail amazing no-cost strategies for getting other people in your niche to send you their very best customers.

For full details click the link below now:

The Essential Guide to Finding Your Competitors’ Affiliates And Putting Them To Work For You


Nick James’ Affiliate Traffic Game Plan