I’ve been there.
You feel as though your affiliate program is stagnant.
Limited organic growth.
No new affiliates have joined your affiliate program in months.
Your boss continues to ask “Why hasn’t the affiliate program taken off yet?”
The pressure is on to recruit more affiliates, activate them, and grow channel revenue!
But, where to look for new affiliate partnerships?
First stop, your competition.
It’s time to crawl and recruit your competitor’s top affiliate partners for your own. Let’s dive into exactly how to do this, shall we?
To make it easier to follow the steps to recruit your competitor’s affiliates, we’re going to act as if you’re managing a new affiliate program for an up-and-coming CRM software company.
The affiliate space for this category has many established players and is quite competitive, but let’s see what we can find!
Before I even go to Google and begin searching, I first collect search query data from either my in-house content team, Google Analytics, CRM, or sales team – really whatever resources I have available to source keywords that turn to profit.
Profit driven keywords we want to show up in Google:
After doing some research, we’ve found the above 5 keywords are very valuable to our business to show up in Google for.
These are keywords we know will drive leads, new customers and revenue for the organization.
Now, it’s time to head over to Google and begin typing in some of these search queries.
But, what are we looking for exactly?
Let’s begin with the search: “Best CRM software”
In the image above, we can see there are 4 Google Tex Ads present for this query. When you dig deeper into who those advertisers are, you’ll find 3 out of 4 are your competitors (Salesforce, Zoho, Keap), but you also notice this company: Top10.
What exactly is Top10?
Top10 is considered a paid search affiliate. They use their own marketing budget to drive users to a landing page (like the one below) in return for a commission on leads/sales generated from their paid search investment.
Now, let’s move on the rest of the organic results you comb through.
In the below screenshot, we see 10 different results Google has listed in the “top 10” for this specific keyword.
After digging into each one of the listings, you find that 7 out of the 10 listed websites are affiliates.
How to identify an affiliate website?
Now that we’ve identified some of the top affiliates, in the space, we’re also going to list which competitors they’re promoting within the listing.
Within the affiliate publisher page below, we can see they have listed 9 different competitors.
We’ll add these competitors to our outreach template.
Now that we’ve identified some of the top affiliates in the CRM space and the competitors who are owning the “real estate” on these affiliate publisher websites…
It’s now time to find your competitor's affiliates at scale.
We’ll continue to use the CRM . org affiliate publisher example, where they’ve listed 9 of your competitors.
We’re using this tool because a lot of affiliate publishers use their own internal tracking tool that redirects that affiliate URL provided by the brand.
The final URL is what’s typically used to track clicks/sales within an affiliate tracking software.
Now that we’ve identified the original affiliate tracking URL, we can now run a backlink analysis with a tool like Ahrefs to identify other affiliate publishers promoting your competitors!
Here’s what the Ahrefs report would look like.
So there you have it!
You’re now able to go off and begin leveraging this strategy to find and recruit your competitors’ most valuable affiliate partners.
Though, it must be said, this is only the first part of the journey.
You have the list of affiliates, but now it’s time to form true partnerships with these publishers and give them compelling reasons why they should also promote your brand.
With over 7 years navigating the intricate realms of marketing, and specifically B2B partner marketing, Nick has forged collaborations with top-tier tech brands, prominent agencies, and some of the industry's foremost B2B publishers and content creators. His deep immersion in both marketing landscapes showcases a trajectory of expertise and innovation. Identifying a significant void in specialized resources, he founded Growann.The aspiration? Deliver unparalleled insights and guidance, carving out a dedicated space where the broader marketing and B2B partner marketing communities can flourish.
