Question #57: What’s The Best Way To Find Affiliate Partners?

Answer: We are going to give you two ways to find affiliate partners. Let us explain.

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The Best Way To Find Affiliate Partners Is…

The best way to find affiliate partners is to join other affiliate programs and find out who the top 10 are when they have a contest.

If you join an affiliate program and you're part of an affiliate contest, the top 10 producers of that affiliate program, even if it’s not you, is showing you who the top producers are.

If that affiliate program has a similar product as yours or a complimentary product then what a great way to legally and ethically find the top affiliate that could be selling your products and services.

Join an affiliate program and find out who the top producers are in the affiliate contest.  If an affiliate program doesn't have an affiliate contest then that’s not going to give you much information, but if there’s an affiliate contest join that affiliate program, because you’ll get the top 10 producers.

The affiliate manager is going to send you the top 10, 15 or 20, so they, being the affiliate manager can egg on or motivate and inspire the other affiliates to sell more.

In the effort to get other affiliates to sell more every other affiliate will see who the top 10 are.  You can contact those affiliates and figure out if they would be good strategic alliance partners for you.

I’ve built affiliate partners this way, what a great way for you to do the same thing.  That’s the best way to find affiliate partners.

The second best way is the link colon strategy.  Here’s the way to do the link colon strategy.  Find a competitor in your marketplace.  If you want to see how many people are linked into their website, meaning many times those are affiliates who are linking into them, because they're generating income.

Find the most closely matched competitor you could possibly find.  If you don't have any competitors you don’t have a market.  The first thing you should be looking for is a competitor, because they are plowing the ground before you.

You’d better hope that they're ahead of you.  You don’t want to be the pioneer; you want to be in back of their wagon not in front of it.

I don't know if this sounds counterintuitive to you or not, but you’re going to save a ton of time and money doing competitive analysis.  Find a competitor and then do the link colon strategy.

Let’s say you go to www.AlexMandossian.com, he’s your competitor.  Once you're on that website you’ll see the complete domain, http://www.AlexMandossian.com that’s Alex’s blog.

Then in front of the http type in link: so now what you would see is link:http://www.alexmandossian.com, the full URL with the http.  What I want you to do is type that full URL in including link: into Google search. This will show you all the reverse links to a website.

If you want to see who is linked to Alex Mandossian, in other words people who are feeding traffic to Alex, if you go to Google.com at the time of this recording over 270 websites are linked to Alex Mandossian and that’s for Google.

Why is that important?  If you're finding a competitor chances are many competitors have affiliate programs and those affiliates are linked to them.  This is a great way to find out if you're not part of their affiliate program yet or if you're not seeing who their top 10 affiliates are, this is a great way to figure out who’s linked into them.

This isn’t for the reason of stealing affiliates this is just to find out who’s linked to them, because if you have a similar or complimentary program you can go to that resource that’s linked to your competitor.

Call them up, do not email them and say I noticed you are linked to such and such.  I’m wondering if you and I could do business as well that's what you tell them.

They can either say yes or no.  If they say yes, you say great.  What are the rules of engagement to do that?  If they say no, you say how come?  They give you a reason and then you move on that's it.  Make a note to self and then you move on.

If you have over 270 people to call then you're going to be busy for a little bit.  You can even have a link manager do this for you; you don’t have to do this yourself.

It gets even better. On Google if I put link: and then the entire URL for AlexMandossian.com I get over 270 links.  If I went to www.Yahoo.com, because Yahoo news is bigger and, because Yahoo is part of a directory, if I type that into the web search for Yahoo; remember I’m typing in link: which is telling me all the backward links going into AlexMandossian.com, and that’s just the URL we're using now.  You can use any URL.

I’ll find on Yahoo over 6,100 websites that are linked into alexmandossian.com.  This can be for any website, but what a great shortcut to find affiliate partners.

I told you the best way is to join an affiliate program and find out who are the top 10 and many times you’ll find it’s on a blog for the affiliate program.

The second best way is use the Link: Strategy.