Affiliate marketing is a win-win situation for marketers and affiliates alike. It’s no secret that SEO affiliates drive the best quality customers to your business.
In this guide, we’ll go over the most effective ways how to recruit SEO affiliates.
Research into SEO Affiliates
Research is the first step in recruiting the best SEO affiliates for your business. And there are a couple of questions you need to ask yourself to get started:
- What is the product or service I am selling?
- Which countries/ languages will my product convert well in?
- Are people actively looking for my product?
- What keywords best describe my product or service?
- Are people searching for these keywords likely looking to buy my product/ service?
- Who are my competitors?
The answers to these questions result in a list of keywords, key phrases and competitors you would typically start your research from.
The next step is to get these keywords and start running them through tools like Google Adwords, SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc.
Other tools like Answer the Public help you branch out from your initial keyword research to get a wider range of long-tail keywords.
Identifying Affiliates to Recruit
Now that you’ve run through your initial research and identified target competitors and keywords, it’s time to start searching for affiliates.
Finding Affiliates from Keywords
Looking for affiliates with keywords is straight forward.
You add the keyword into Google and check the top 100 search results for sites that have SEO traffic relevant to your business.
Be sure to have a VPN set to the correct country and set your browser language to get localized results.
Pro tip: Check the affiliate website in Ahrefs > Site Explorer > Organic Keywords > Click the Country and click the, “Traffic” column to filter results by page.
A common mistake affiliate managers make is paying fixed fees to get on the homepage.
While traffic from the top converting keywords is actually landing directly on inner pages.
Finding Affiliates from Competitors
Chances are, that if you are new on the scene, your competitors are already working with the same affiliates that you are looking to recruit.
Take their domain and place it into Ahrefs > Site Explorer > Referring Domains > Search for all of the websites which are relevant to your business.
Pro Tip: You can export this list and filter based on quality to start.
Find Affiliate Contact Details
Identify contact details you can leverage to get in touch with the affiliate.
You’ll find that most affiliates have a contact page with an email address or contact form.
That said the really good affiliates are often quite difficult to get in touch with and require some creativity.
Such as looking through data protection pages, terms and conditions pages, social channels, IM channels etc.
Outreach
Following up with affiliates is a tiring process, especially if your niche is extremely competitive and you have thousands of leads to follow up with.
That’s why you need to automate the journey for the first, second and third contact you’ll make with affiliates until you get a reply.
Closing the Deal
Now that you’ve reached out to your ideal affiliates, you need to have a compelling affiliate program, strong offer, and competitive conversion rates to seal the deal.
Pro Tip: Never take a deal that doesn’t make financial sense. Affiliation is about mitigating risk, not raking up CPA’s which your CLV will never payback.
Final Thoughts on How to Recruit SEO Affiliates
The current tools you have at your disposal are massively time-consuming.
At Gain Changer, we’ve automated the entire process of identifying and recruiting SEO affiliates.
We’ve identified footprints to identify, target and contact SEO affiliates at scale. All automatically.
We can speed up your pipeline by months, in just a couple of days. So get in touch and start closing deals at scale today!
Gain Changer co-founder Sean Bianco is well-versed in determining market trends. Emphasis is placed on understanding relationships between technical problems and customer impact, resulting in customer-driven products and services.
