Finding a high volume of affiliates isn’t hard. There are millions of creators out there itching for the chance to promote products like yours. What’s tough is finding quality affiliates – those who fit your brand, engage your audience, and consistently drive sales and revenue. With that in mind, in this article, I’ll be discussing: 

👉 What a “good” affiliate actually looks like

👉 How to find quality affiliates (broken down into outbound and inbound tactics)

👉 Tried-and-trusted ways to approach affiliates and get a “yes”

What makes a good affiliate before you start recruiting

Niche fit vs. audience size, which matters more

The simple answer is that both niche fit and follower count are important when searching for potential affiliate partners. However, you’re unlikely to persuade a Mr Beast-grade creator to collaborate on a commission-only basis. So, if we’re being realistic, it’s better to work with a super relevant niche affiliate with a small audience than a massive creator whose followers are barely interested in your product.

Engagement vs. follower count for social affiliates

Similarly, it’d be fantastic if all your affiliates had massive audiences and sky-high engagement rates. But the two rarely go hand in hand. Indeed, there’s plenty of research that shows engagement rates actually decline as follower count increases.

So if you’ve got to prioritize one of the two, engagement wins every time. When an affiliate has a high engagement rate, you can feel confident they’re creating quality content that resonates with their audience – whereas a big follower count might just show that they’ve bought a ton of fake followers.

🤓 Pro tip: Use Modash’s influencer analytics tools to find detailed engagement rates and audience breakdowns (including fake follower %age) for any public account with 1K+ followers on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. It’s free to try!

Conversion track record: What signals to look for

In an ideal world, you could ask a creator for their historic conversion rate across various campaigns (or find the answer yourself using software), then hire those with the best numbers. Trouble is, they might not want to tell you – and even if they do, they might not be able to find the data themselves 🤷‍♀️

So you might have to make do with conversion signals you can measure, such as:

• Multiple repeat collaborations: If an affiliate regularly posts about the same brand, it’s a decent indication that they’re generating sales. Otherwise, why bother?
• Affiliate content has lots of shares & saves: People share and save content when they find it genuinely valuable – so if a creator’s followers regularly share and save product-related content, that’s a strong signal of buying intent.
• Amazon storefront presence: To qualify for and retain an Amazon storefront, affiliates must create high-quality content that influences purchase decisions, and continue generating sales over time. So if they’ve got an active storefront, they’re clearly doing something right.

• Lots of product-related comments: If followers regularly ask questions in the comments about things like sizing, pricing, and shipping information, it’s a good sign they’re interested in buying.
• Some of their most popular posts are affiliate content: Memes are more likely than product recommendations to generate a ton of engagement. So if their product posts are super engaging, they clearly understand what good affiliate content looks like (and good affiliate content gets more sales).

🤓 Further reading: For more on measuring affiliate performance, check out Influencer Marketing Metrics: What to Track (and What to Ignore).

Red flags to filter out early

Just as there are a few tell-tale ways to assess a creator’s conversion track record, there are some red flags that should (probably) disqualify them from your recruitment process 🚩 Look out for:

• Low engagement rates across the board: Don’t be swayed by a big follower count! If no one’s engaging with their content, they’re not worth working with.
• Low engagement on affiliate content: Maybe all their likes, shares, and comments come from “engagement bait” content, while their affiliate posts get nothing but crickets. This suggests their followers aren’t really interested in their recommendations.
• High fake follower count: Every creator has fake followers; anything up to ~25% of their total audience is pretty par for the course. If it’s much higher, they’ve got a fake follower problem. (You can use our free fake follower checker to vet potential affiliate partners – you’re welcome.)
• High proportion of affiliate posts: If a creator posts nothing but product recommendations, most audiences are gonna get bored pretty fast.
• Controversial behavior: Understandably, most brands don’t want to associate with creators who are discriminatory, aggressive, offensive, or engaged in anything illegal.

⚠️ Disclaimer: This list isn’t meant to be exhaustive. Also, I’m not saying that you definitely shouldn’t work with creators who check any of those boxes – that’s up to you and your brand.

Outbound strategies: Finding affiliates before they find you

Searching for niche content creators and review sites

Even if your product category is super obscure, chances are there are hundreds of niche content creators – bloggers, YouTubers, newsletter writers, and more – posting about it day in, day out. These creators have a ready-made audience who love hearing from them and who rely on their product recommendations. 

In addition to niche creators, there are entire websites dedicated to niche topics with a built-in customer base for your brand.

By recruiting these creators and websites as affiliates, you not only get on the radar of potential new customers, but you also borrow the trust they’ve built among their followers.

How do you find these niche content creators and websites? Try these three methods…

Search for niche websites on Google

Search “[your niche] review sites” to find a list of review websites that might be able to list your product. As an example, I searched for skincare review sites, and Try and Review came up:

In Try and Review’s footer section, they promote their ambassador program:

They also offer a product listing service – they’ll send out your product to their members, who will review it on their site.

When you perform your own Google search, you’ll find similar affiliate sites for your niche. Narrow down or widen your search to find hundreds of potential affiliates who can discuss your products on their website. 

For example, if you specifically sell skincare products to reduce acne, just Google “best products for acne”. The search results will show you all the websites that regularly publish content on acne products. Maybe those sites would agree to feature your product – in return for a cut of any sales they generate, of course.

Browse social media for niche creators

Social media is teeming with niche content creators. They may not all be full-time influencers, but they’ve built an audience of people interested in the topics they cover. These creators are already sharing content about products like yours. Chances are, with a little incentive – like a per-sale commission – they’d be happy to post about yours as well.

You can manually search for niche creators on social channels using product-centric hashtags like #acnetreatment:

Just know that it can be time-consuming to vet every creator you find – and if you’re serious about running a profitable affiliate program, you should be spending as little time as possible on manual searching and vetting.

Ask your customers

Your existing customers found you somehow. They might have clicked through from an ad or a Google search results page, or stumbled across your organic posts on social media. Or maybe they discovered you through an online community.

For instance, a forum like Skin Care Talk is likely full of people looking for skincare product recommendations:

If you work for a skincare brand, maybe the good folks at Skin Care Talk (or their forum members) would be happy to earn a little passive income by steering customers toward your products?

To track down opportunities like this, simply ask customers how they found you. If multiple customers mention a specific blogger, social media creator, or community, then reach out to that person or website about becoming an affiliate.

🤓 Pro tip: Some niche content creators might not have heard of your product or brand. If you can afford to, send them a free product, no strings attached. If they genuinely like your product, they’ll likely post about you for free or reach out with potential collaboration ideas.

Ask AI to build you a list of niche influencers

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT are a quick and easy (and, often, free) way to generate a list of creators in your niche. Try a prompt like:

👉 List 5 social media creators who post about outdoors/hiking topics

You can “niche down” your prompt as much as you like, such as asking for creators in a certain geographic area or with a certain audience size. 

The only trouble is, all of these tools are desperate to keep you happy, so they rarely (if ever) admit they can’t do something – which could lead to lots of irrelevant results that require a ton of manual vetting.

Use a dedicated influencer search tool

If your goal is to find and hire up to ~10 affiliates, any of these manual processes will work just fine. But if you’re serious about scaling affiliate marketing, you’re gonna need a dedicated influencer search tool like Modash.

With Modash, you can instantly search our database of 380M+ creators across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube to find influencers in your niche. Search using filters like:

• Influencer/audience gender, location, age, and language
• Follower count
• Content topic
• Hashtags 
• Mentions
• Captions
• Previous collabs

Or use our AI Search tool to track down relevant creators based on what’s in their images and videos, not just the words and hashtags in their captions.

As an added bonus, when you find an affiliate you like the look of, you don’t need to waste time reaching out to ask about their audience and engagement metrics – you can find all that information (and more besides) on Modash, too:

Sure, most influencer search tools aren’t free. But is it really worth saving a couple hundred bucks on a software subscription if it means spending hours (or days) every month on manual searching and vetting?

Loyal customers as affiliates: How to identify and approach them

Loyal customers are the beating heart of any ecommerce brand, generating 44% of revenue and 46% of orders – despite making up just 21% of the customer base 🤯

Not only are they likely to buy from you again; they’re also happy to send new customers your way. Indeed, SAS Emarsys research shows that ​47% of loyal consumers recommend their favorite brands to friends and family.

This word-of-mouth marketing – also known as customer advocacy – is fabulous for brands since it comes from people who already:

• Love your product
• Understand its benefits
• Have stories that resonate with other potential customers

Many loyal consumers are willing to promote your brand for free… so just imagine how many more referrals they’d bring in if you paid them!

The best part? Asking satisfied customers to join your affiliate program increases their loyalty to your brand because they feel heard and valued by getting a cut each time they recommend you to their peers.

But how do you find faithful customers you can invite to become affiliate partners?

The best way is to check your order history for people who repeatedly buy from you, then reach out to them directly about joining your affiliate program. Ideally, those high-spending customers will also happen to have a few thousand social media followers to their name, plus an audience that aligns with your ICP – all of which you can check on Modash by simply searching for their handle.

Finding your competitors' affiliates

Chances are, you’re not the only brand in your space with an affiliate program. Rather than worrying about a little healthy competition, use it to your advantage by reaching out to your competitors’ existing affiliates and inviting them to promote your brand too (or instead 😈). 

You might even give them an extra incentive to join your program, like offering a higher commission rate than your competitor pays or the chance to earn performance-based bonuses.

Modash makes this process easy by letting you search our influencer database for: 

• Brand mentions
• Affiliate-friendly hashtags and phrases like #brandambassador and discount code

🤓 Pro tip: Don’t limit yourself to searching for direct competitors’ affiliates – cast the net wider by hunting for affiliates of brands in adjacent industries. For instance, a fashion brand might work with affiliates who’d love to promote skincare products.

The only thing I don’t like about targeting your competitors’ affiliates is that it can come across as inauthentic. If a creator is constantly promoting similar products from competing brands, their audience might start to question whether they’re just in it for the money 🤑

Collaborating with industry experts and educators

Trust is a key factor in buying. Research from Adobe shows that:

• 67% of consumers buy more from brands they trust
• 70% will stop buying from a brand if their trust is broken

So it’s in your best interest to build deeper, more trusting relationships with your audience. This process can take years – but you can potentially speed it up by collaborating with respected experts in your niche. Otherwise known as key opinion leaders (KOLs), these experts are strongly trusted, and their opinions can have a major impact on consumers’ purchase decisions.

KOLs come in all shapes and sizes, from bloggers and influencers to journalists and employees at a well-known company in your field. Either way, they make ideal affiliates, lending you credibility and boosting your sales. Here’s how to find them:

• Ask customers: Send a survey to ask customers who they turn to for product recommendations in your niche. Their answers might point to a key opinion leader in your space.
• Participate in industry events: Who are the expert speakers at your industry events? Consumers trust them, so seek out these speakers during the event to pave the way for a long-term partnership.
• Subscribe to industry-specific communities and newsletters: There are communities and newsletters for everything. Hunt on Google for these audiences in your niche, and you’ll soon land on an influential thought leader who would make a great affiliate marketer for your brand.

Just be aware that KOLs understand their value, so don’t be shocked if they ask for an upfront fee to post about your product, rather than “just” an affiliate discount code and an agreed commission rate.

Searching for lookalikes of your current top-performers

Want to know the quickest, most effective way to scale affiliate recruitment? Of course you do – it’s finding “lookalike” creators whose audience and content match those of your existing top performers.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to do this manually. The best solution is to ask a generative AI tool to list a bunch of creators who post about similar topics to your current fav affiliates 😍

Again, you’ll want to closely vet the results to weed out any irrelevant profiles – and you’ll still have to reach out to each individual creator to ask for their metrics. So it’s not exactly a hassle-free process.

Another manual option is to scroll through your top-performing affiliate’s social content and look out for comments from other creators. Maybe some will be lookalikes. Or maybe you’ll spend hours trawling through inane bot replies 🤖 There’s no way to know.

Modash is a more reliable alternative. Just enter any creator’s social handle and open their profile to instantly see their top lookalikes, or click View all lookalikes for more comprehensive results:

And because every lookalike has their own lookalikes, you can use this approach to quickly expand from one brand-fit affiliate to hundreds of relevant creators.

🔎 Try all our search tools yourself by creating your free Modash account!

Inbound strategies: Making affiliates come to you

Build a dedicated affiliate landing page (what it needs to cover)

There are various ways to build an inbound affiliate recruitment process. But many rely on you creating a dedicated landing page where creators can sign up for your program. Here are a few best practices for creating a stellar affiliate landing page:

Design a curiosity-driven hero section

Grab the creator’s attention as soon as they land on the page. Make your header eye-catchy and intriguing, like Seed does, and invoke curiosity that’ll make potential affiliates scroll down to learn more.

Keep the copy simple yet compelling

Get creative with your website copy to encourage visitors to become your advocates. Add some personality to your writing and speak directly to your ideal affiliates. Decathlon does this well with its purpose-driven copy:

Explain what’s in it for affiliates

Your affiliate landing page is incomplete without answering why an affiliate should work with you. For the best affiliates, it’s not just about the money – so talk about your brand values, non-commission perks, and other key differentiators. Charlotte Tilbury gets it right here:

🤓 Pro tip: Add an FAQ section to your landing page, too – that way, your team isn’t wasting time dealing with the same questions about your program over and over again.

Drive traffic to your landing page

Once you’ve built an affiliate landing page, you need to start sending traffic toward it. The best options are to post about it on social media, like iLash UK does here:

(Just remember to tell people exactly how to find your landing page if you can’t link to it directly from the post.)

Another option is to promote it in your regular email newsletter, including a brief rundown of how your program works and who you want to apply. Or you can even do a little light SEO and optimize your landing page for search-friendly terms related to your niche, just like Mountain Warehouse and WildBounds have done here:

Add an affiliate CTA to post-purchase emails and order confirmations

Ideally, your affiliate partners will be people who like your products enough to actually buy them. It makes their recommendations sound a whole lot more authentic.

With that in mind, why not start targeting potential affiliates right at the point when they’ve just made a purchase? You can fully automate this process by adding a simple affiliate call to action to your post-purchase emails and/or order confirmations. Something like:

👉 Got 1,000+ social media followers? Want to get paid for promoting our products? Join our affiliate program!

As an added bonus, order confirmation emails typically get super high open rates, so there’s a good chance of getting plenty of eyes on your CTA 👀

Tap into affiliate networks (what they're good for and where they fall short)

Rather than doing all the recruitment yourself, why not tap into a ready-made network of affiliates?

When you sign up to an affiliate network, you get instant access to thousands (or even tens of thousands) of active, vetted affiliates who can search for your offer and apply to join your program – sometimes in a single click. These networks also handle other key elements of running an affiliate program, from contracting and paying your affiliate partners to tracking the traffic they send to your site.

There are plenty of affiliate networks out there, with some of the biggest and most legit including:

• CJ Affiliate
• Impact
• Rakuten

But while signing up for an affiliate network can be an easy way to recruit and manage affiliates, it’s not all good news. From a brand’s perspective, there are some significant downsides, including:

• High price: Affiliate networks aren’t cheap. You’ll likely have to pay a recurring platform fee, plus a cut of any commissions you pay through the platform.

• High competition: You’re listed alongside competing brands, so you need to stand out – which could force you to pay higher commissions.

• (Potentially) less brand loyalty: Most creators join affiliate networks to find a bunch of relevant programs rather than to work with one specific brand. So you might attract lots of interest – but not from affiliates who genuinely love your product.
• Comparatively small number of creators: Affiliate networks are typically much smaller than influencer search tools. For example, Impact says its marketplace has a “vast network of over 300K+ vetted and verified global partners”. In comparison, Modash has 380M+ creators.

Affiliate networks are a good fit if you’ve got a decent budget but lack the time to run outbound recruitment. Otherwise, there are better and more cost-effective options (*cough* Modash).

Join communities where your target affiliates already hang out

High-performing affiliates wanna be everywhere online – after all, that’s where they make their money. And they’re always looking for new opportunities, from identifying emerging trends in their niche to finding new affiliate offers. All of which means they’re often active members of communities on platforms like Facebook and Reddit. So if you can locate and join the right communities, you’ll get instant access to a ton of affiliates.

But what do those communities look like?

Well, there are plenty of dedicated affiliate marketing communities where you could post about your affiliate program, such as r/Affiliatemarketing:

And then there are niche-specific communities – like r/SkincareAddiction – where you could sign up to build relationships with potential future affiliates.

⚠️ Note: Be sure to read the terms and conditions of any online communities you join before posting about your program. For instance, r/Affiliatemarketing doesn’t allow unsolicited advertising of affiliate programs; you need to post your offer in the relevant sticky thread instead. Don’t get banned by inadvertently breaching house rules.

How to approach affiliates and get a “yes”

What to include in a cold outreach message

I’m not going to deep-dive into the process of writing high-performing outreach messages here – if that’s what you’re looking for, check out 51 Marketers Share How They Reach Out To Influencers.

Instead, here’s a simple formula that works for most brands and niches:

👉 Step #1: Start with a personalized compliment that shows you’ve researched the creator.

👉 Step #2: Enter a quick (templated!) introduction about your brand.

👉 Step #3: Close with a simple yes/no question to make it easy for them to reply (including brief details about your offer).

Now let’s see how that looks in practice:

🤓 Further reading: For more inspiration, check out 14 Influencer Outreach Examples From Real Brands.

The offer: Commission rate, perks, and what makes it worth their time

In affiliate marketing terms, your “offer” includes things like your:

• Commission rate, including details of higher commission tiers/bonuses for top performers
• Program perks, such as free products, Slack channel membership, or support from a dedicated affiliate manager
• Brand values and commitments around subjects like sustainability and inclusivity

In other words, your offer is the reason (or reasons) why an affiliate should bother joining your program in the first place. You can share the full details of your offer in your initial outreach email. Or for more complex offers, save it for a follow-up email. Speaking of which…

Following up without burning the relationship

Chasing creators who don’t reply to your initial email can feel a little… icky. But it’s a fact of life that sending follow-up emails has a big impact on reply rates. Indeed, Backlinko found that sending just a single follow-up can boost replies by 65.8% 😲

That said, you don’t want to burn the relationship before it even begins by sending a creator 57 unanswered emails while they’re on vacation or in hospital. So where’s the sweet spot?

Well, Modash research shows that almost three-quarters of influencer marketers send 1 – 2 follow-up emails, while one-fifth send 3 – 5. Only 7% don’t send any follow-ups.

If a creator still hasn’t replied after you’ve sent 1x initial email and 5x follow-ups, it’s time to accept that they’re just not that into you. Park it for now and reach out again in a couple months if you’re still keen to work with them.

🤓 Further reading: ​​I go into way more depth on the outreach process in 8 Ways to Hire Affiliate Creators (And Actually Activate Them).

Final thoughts

The problem with finding affiliates isn’t that there are too few creators out there. And it’s not about a lack of effective tactics – there are plenty of options, both inbound and outbound.

Instead, it’s a problem of resources. With infinite time, it’s easy to track down brand-fit affiliates, but no brand has that luxury. That’s why you need a tool like Modash to speed things along 🏎️💨

With Modash, you can:

• Find quality affiliates from our database of 380M+ creators on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
• Save time on affiliate outreach with our dedicated influencer marketing inbox, where you can save templates, use variables, and find valuable context to quickly personalize your emails.
• Shortlist affiliates who match your search criteria, add notes on individual creators, build campaign-specific lists, and unlock creator contact details.
• Track affiliate content, including Stories – even if a creator forgets to include the right tags, hashtags, mentions, or disclosures.
• Pay affiliates on time and in their own currency with zero back-and-forth.

All of which frees you up to build stronger relationships with your top performers.

But don’t take my word for it – see for yourself by signing up for your free Modash account 😎