Hiring affiliate creators without the right processes in place is a serious headache 😵‍💫 Yet a lot of brands are relying on random DMs tracked in chaotic spreadsheets with zero follow-ups. No wonder they’re struggling to scale.

If any of that sounds familiar, you need a more systematic approach to affiliate recruitment – think scalable search, personalized outreach templates, and structured onboarding. I’ll explain exactly how to do it in this article…

What makes a good affiliate creator

Audience-product fit

If the affiliate’s audience doesn’t care about your product, the collaboration is doomed before it’s even begun. In fact, Modash research shows that “audience mismatch” is the #1 reason why brands believe influencer collabs fail.

To be clear, when I say “audience-product fit”, I’m not necessarily talking about finding influencers in your niche. There’s no law that says yoga brands always have to work with yoga influencers or clothing brands with fashion creators. In fact, some of the best campaigns I’ve seen involve out-of-niche creators.

For example, noise-reducing earplugs brand Loop Earplugs doesn’t exclusively work with affiliates in the, erm, earplug niche. This collaboration with TikTok micro influencer @the.florida.sahm – a mom influencer – racked up 8.6 million views with an estimated EMV of almost $180K:

Why? Because it tapped into a relevant audience: overstimulated parents. They’re (probably) not following @the.florida.sahm for earplug recommendations, but they are looking for tips to make their lives a little easier.

🤓 Further reading: For more on working with less obvious creators, check out How To Identify & Test New Niches For Your Influencer Program.

Content style and authenticity

Even if an affiliate’s audience is super relevant, that’s no guarantee they’ll do a good job promoting your product. Their content style needs to fit your brand – and it needs to feel authentic, or no one will listen to their recommendations. 

Authenticity comes when the creator has a genuine use case for your product in their life. If they don’t, your collaboration will feel contrived.

Durable phone accessories brand Looxer gets it right in this collab with Instagram micro influencer Hüseyin Kara (AKA @threeblacknumbers), a professional filmmaker and photographer:

Naturally, Hüseyin wants to protect his gear while he’s shooting content, so it feels totally natural for him to promote sturdy phone cases.

Consistency vs one-off promotions

The best affiliate creators aren’t those who generate a short spike in clicks and sales with one or two promo posts – they’re the ones who can credibly mention you repeatedly because your product perfectly fits their routine and content format.

You’ll find that affiliate performance compounds through consistency, with multiple touchpoints building recall and trust. So when choosing affiliates, you should prioritize creators whose content naturally supports repeat integrations. Think formats like:

• Recurring series
• Tutorials
• Day-in-the-life posts

Also, bear in mind that not all audiences expect (or want) regular recommendations from the creators they follow. If they don’t typically share products they love, don’t expect them to consistently post about your product.

Micro vs macro creators for affiliate

Follower count isn’t everything when it comes to affiliate marketing success. Remember, in the Loop Earplugs example I shared above, TikToker @the.florida.sahm generated literally millions of views, despite her modest 15.5K follower count 💰💰💰

Still, audience size is definitely a factor when hiring affiliates.

Smaller accounts – AKA micro influencers (and nano influencers, too) – often feel more relatable, which helps their recommendations feel authentic and trustworthy. Plus they typically charge lower fees and are more likely to accept commission-only partnerships, which means more scope for experimentation (even if your budget is super tight). 

On the flip side, macro influencers have such large audiences – we’re talking 100K – 1M followers – that even if only a tiny fraction buy your product, it’ll still have a big impact on your bottom line.

Ultimately, follower count should be considered alongside the other factors I listed above 👆 A large audience is a good thing, but only if those followers are interested in your product and the creator’s content feels authentic (and you can afford their fees).

Where to find affiliate creators worth hiring

Searching by niche, location, and follower size

Clearly, you want to work with affiliates who post content that’s at least somewhat related to your product and speak to audiences within your geographical market(s). And you might also prefer them to meet a specified minimum (or maximum) follower count. 

There are two ways to find ‘em:

• Manually: Google “[niche] influencers in [location]” (e.g. “beauty influencers in Paris”) and/or ask ChatGPT to list influencers in your desired niche and location with the right number of followers.
• Using software: Dedicated influencer marketing platforms let you search for relevant influencers by niche, location, follower size, and various other filters.

The manual approach is just peachy if you’re looking to partner with <10-or-so affiliates. But, realistically, most affiliate programs are way larger – and recruiting at that sort of scale is totally unwieldy without tools to help you out. Trust me; the time you spend finding and vetting influencers will more than outweigh the cost of the software subscription.

Let me show you how the search process looks with Modash, an influencer marketing platform with a database of 380M+ creators across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. It’s easy – just set your search criteria using filters like:

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

Then simply click through the results to check out each influencer’s collaborations, popular posts, engagement metrics, audience breakdowns, and more.

(Bear in mind that if you go the manual route, you’ll have to ask influencers to share screenshots of their engagement rates and other metrics, which seriously slows down the recruitment process.)

Finding creators already talking about your category

Unless you’ve started a totally new niche that no one else has ever thought of (unlikely), there’ll be plenty of creators already discussing brands and products like yours. Some of them will be a good fit for your affiliate program – so how do you track them down?

Again, it’s a straight choice between searching manually or using software.

The manual approach involves using the built-in search tools on platforms like Instagram and TikTok to search by hashtag or topic:

This works fine up to a point… but you can’t narrow the results by follower count or location (or any other filter, for that matter). And you face the same problem with having to message each individual creator to learn about their engagement metrics and audiences.

In short, it scales worse than eight-year-old me climbing the Eiffel Tower with a fear of heights. Brings me out in a cold sweat just thinking about it…

Alternatively, use an influencer search tool like Modash to search for creators by:

• Topic
• Hashtags
• Captions
• Bio content 

Or use our AI Search tool to find creators based on the images and videos they post, not just the captions and hashtags they write. Give us a natural language query like “lifestyle creator with daily routine and travel content” and we’ll use our knowledge of influencer content – based on analyzing literally billions of social posts – to surface all the relevant accounts on Insta, TikTok, and YouTube.

You can even narrow the results further by layering on filters like follower count, engagement rate, location, and more.

Browsing TikTok Shop’s affiliate marketplace

As well as its native search tools, TikTok has its own creator marketplace – the aptly titled “TikTok Creator Marketplace” – for brands using TikTok Shop. Like with Modash and other search tools, you can filter marketplace creators by…

• Location
• Topic
• Audience country

…and various other factors, such as average views and audience demographics.

It’s handy (and free!). But, of course, it only works for finding TikTok influencers – and you need a TikTok Shop account to use it. That’s a big problem if you’re not based in one of the 15* countries where TikTok Shop is currently available.

*Correct at time of writing – don’t come for me 🙅‍♂️

Scaling discovery with lookalike search

So you’ve found a creator you want to work with. Congrats! Now wouldn’t it be great if you could instantly find a bunch of similar accounts?

There’s no watertight way to do this manually. Your best bet is probably to ask ChatGPT (or your Gen AI tool of choice) for a list of creators who post about similar stuff to your preferred influencer:

Of course, there are no guarantees about the accuracy of those results, so you’ll need to do some serious manual sense-checking before reaching out.

Or you can browse the influencer’s content to look for other creators who regularly comment on their posts – chances are they’re targeting similar audiences. You might unearth a gem or two, or you might spend hours clicking around and getting nowhere 🤷‍♀️

Alternatively, if you prefer something faster and more reliable, Modash lets you instantly scale your results by viewing a list of lookalike creators with similar audiences and niches. Just click the Lookalikes tab in the creator’s profile, scroll through the results, and/or hit View all lookalikes to browse in more detail:

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

How to reach out to affiliate creators at scale

Building a repeatable outreach system

Finding relevant affiliates is only one part of the hiring puzzle – next you need to find out if they actually want to work with you. This process involves:

• Finding their email address (unless you prefer to reach out by DM; more on this later!)
• Writing your outreach message
• Following up if you don’t get a reply

You can do it all manually with your existing Google or Outlook account and an email finder like Hunter or Skrapp. You can even personalize bulk messages using Mail Merge. But it requires a ton of leg work to set up, and you’ll have to track the results yourself in a spreadsheet. All in all, there’s plenty of scope for stuff to go wrong here – plus it’s super labor-intensive.

The simpler, more scalable approach is to let an influencer outreach tool like Modash handle all the hard stuff. Hit the Email available toggle to show only show creators with available email addresses…

…then open the influencer’s profile and click Unlock to display their email:

Or if you’ve built a whole list of prospects, unlock all their addresses at once from our relationship management screen:

Once you’ve got emails for all the affiliates you want to contact, it’s time to reach out with a personalized email sequence. With Modash, you can create templated sequences that feel tailored to individual creators (more on this in the next section 👇).

You can send up to 100 personalized emails per day, because we know that scaling affiliate recruitment involves a whole lotta outreach. And because you can schedule each sequence step in advance, you never have to worry about missing a follow-up again 😮‍💨

🤓 Further reading: Learn everything you need to know about scaling outreach in How To Do Influencer Outreach: A Guide For Brands.

Personalizing without slowing down

There’s a ton of research on how personalized outreach emails get more responses. For instance, Hunter discovered that emails with two custom attributes see a 56% higher reply rate than non-personalized emails (5.6% vs 3.6%).

Trouble is, writing a new email from scratch every time you want to contact a potential affiliate partner is fundamentally unscalable. Reaching 50 creators would take you all day. That’s why it makes sense to only personalize certain elements of your initial outreach message:

Even if you’re using templates, you’ll still want to automate the personalization process. As I mentioned in the previous section, you can do it manually with Mail Merge, but it’s a pain to configure. Plus you’ll have to find all those juicy personal details about individual creators yourself, which takes yet more time.

The best way to personalize your email sequences without slowing outreach to a glacial pace? Use a tool like Modash. Our purpose-built inbox lets you view key details about the influencers you’re contacting, such as their social profiles, previous collabs, and custom notes:

That way, you can quickly add the unique personalized elements that have the biggest impact on reply rates, while automating more basic personalization – like names and social handles – and templating the rest.

📧 Check out our full range of outreach tools by creating your free Modash account!

DM vs. email vs. both

I’ve covered what your outreach should look like – sequential, scalable, personal. But which channel (or channels) should you be using to contact affiliate creators? We asked 51 influencer marketers how they do it, with 47.7% saying they prefer emails when first reaching out to creators and just 6.8% choosing DMs.

Sure, emails aren’t perfect. They can get messy at scale. Plus your would-be affiliate partner may not look at their inbox every day, so you might be left kicking your heels waiting for a reply 🥱

However, there are lots of positives to emails, too. They let you:

• Track things easily (provided you avoid long-winded threads)
• Easily find what you need using email search (especially if you use email subjects strategically)
• Use templates, labels, and folders to organize and systemize your outreach

And, of course, you can leverage all those super valuable Modash features – like automated sequences and scalable personalization – when you choose email.

But that’s not to say you should never send a single direct message. Progress is generally slower via email, so it’s not a great fit for anything time-sensitive. And if you emailed a creator a week ago and still haven’t heard back, it’s well worth sliding into their DMs instead.

🤓 Further reading: For more on this, check out Email vs. Whatsapp vs. DMs: A Guide for Choosing the Best Influencer Communication Channels.

Driving inbound applications

Not all brands rely on proactive search and cold outreach to hire affiliates. There’s another option: building an inbound recruitment funnel.

In a nutshell, inbound hiring is about giving creators some way of applying to join your affiliate program. Most often, it involves building a dedicated landing page featuring details of how the program works, plus an embedded application form (or a CTA to sign up via a third-party affiliate network).

For example, the affiliate landing page for pet products brand Tails includes:

• A brief history of the Tails affiliate program
• Benefits to joining the program
• Testimonials from existing affiliate partners
• CTAs to sign up through Awin, an affiliate network

Additionally, Tails needs a way to drive traffic to that landing page – such as linking to it in social posts and/or email newsletters. Then its affiliate team can simply sit back and vet all the inbound applications.

Done well, inbound recruitment can save you a ton of time. However, you’ve got limited control over who applies, so you could end up with mountains of applications from affiliates who just don’t fit your brand. 

Also, bear in mind that the inbound approach works best for brands with a large existing audience. Otherwise, you’ll be waiting for creators to randomly stumble upon your affiliate landing page, which probably isn’t scalable.

How to onboard affiliate creators so they actually post

What a strong welcome email covers

Once an affiliate joins your program, you want them to get up and running fast. Because the longer it takes them to start promoting your products and earning commissions, the more likely they are to give up and go home 🏃💨

Help them out by sending a welcome email that explains:

• What you sell: A brief description of your products (with a particular focus on your bestsellers) and their USPs.
• Target audience: Who you’re trying to reach – where they live, how old they are, what they’re interested in, and any other relevant information.
• Geographic limitations: If you only deliver to the mainland US or the UK, for example, this is the time to tell your new affiliates.
• Commission rates: A reminder of what actions you’re trying to drive – presumably either leads or sales – and how much you pay per successful conversion.
• Tracking instructions: Explain how affiliates can access their unique UTM link or discount code (or, if possible, share them in the email).
• Additional assets: Detail what marketing collateral you offer, such as product feeds, banners, and promotions.
• Contact information: Tell affiliates who they can get in touch with if they have any questions, including a name and email address.

Because these emails are (mostly) generic, you can write a template then manually send it to every new affiliate partner you recruit. But it’s easier doing it through Modash – plus you can automatically add variable elements like gift links and discount codes.

Giving creators everything in one place

Sure, hiring affiliate creators can be tough. But what’s even tougher is keeping your existing affiliates active. In fact, 60% of influencer marketers described this as the biggest challenge of running an affiliate program.

🤓 Further reading: Find more insights like this in Affiliate Marketing Survey 2026: Why Hands-On Programs Outperform the Rest.

This means that once you’ve successfully onboarded a new affiliate, you should remove any points of friction that might stop them posting about your brand and product. 

You can do this manually – to a limited extent – by sharing a Google Drive or OneDrive folder featuring key assets like banners, discount codes, links, and product information.

But, for best results, give affiliates access to a self-service dashboard where they can find all those essentials, plus real-time metrics like clicks, sales, and commissions (hint: if you're a Shopify store, you can track sales/commission in our dashboard via our Shopify integration).

Setting up broadcast channels for ongoing comms

Another way to ensure affiliates feel engaged and motivated is to communicate with them regularly. Yet our research reveals that two-thirds of marketers only contact their affiliate partners on a monthly or quarterly basis:

One email every three months? That’s hardly going to make your affiliates feel loved 💔

Now, I’m not saying you should be individually video-calling each affiliate partner every day at breakfast. But you should absolutely take the time to send regular 1:1 messages to top-performing affiliates, while keeping the rest engaged through one-to-many communication methods like email newsletters, Slack channels, and WhatsApp/Discord groups.

One-to-many channels are a great fit any time you want to share information that’s relevant to all your affiliate partners. I’m talking things like:

• Sneak peeks at new products
• News about events, sales, and promotions
• Updates or changes to your affiliate program
• Marketing or branding updates

Just be careful not to go too far the other way by spamming affiliates with constant low-impact comms. It looks a little needy.

‍🤓 Further reading: Learn more about scaling communication with affiliates in How to Use One-to-Many Broadcast Channels in Influencer Marketing (Without Erasing the Personal Touch).

How to decide on commission and pay out your affiliates

Setting affiliate commissions

Affiliates are usually paid on performance, which means they earn a commission on each sale they generate. But how do you determine the rate of commission?

This is entirely up to you. Obviously, the higher the commission you offer, the more your affiliates will be motivated to promote your products and brand. 

Average commission percentages vary across the industry, even within Amazon’s own affiliate program, which currently ranges from 1% – 10% depending on the product category. 

That said, you don’t want to shoot yourself in the foot by eating into your margins. You can strike the right balance by calculating a commission rate based on your profits.

Let’s say your profits-per-sale work out to about $50 on average. From there, you can decide how much of that you want to offer to your affiliates for their commission. If you decide on 10% – 15%, you’d be looking at paying your affiliates $5 – $7.50 per sale. 

To give you more insight into how much commission you should offer, look to your competitors! After all, you’ll want your offer to be as attractive as (if not more than) theirs.

You should also consider a tiered commission scheme. Perhaps, for affiliates who generate the most sales, you could offer an even higher commission percentage as an extra incentive. 

For example, you could start your affiliates off at 5% commission, and once they reach a certain amount of sales, you could bump that up to 10%. Ideally, they should be able to reach that first milestone relatively easily, and the next milestone should be a little harder to reach, and so on. 

How often to pay out affiliates 

Once you decide your commission rate, start keeping track of payment-related data, namely:

• How much commission you’re paying per “action,” such as form completions or sales
• How much you’ve paid out to an affiliate in total vs. over a given period

If you’re keeping track manually, either you or your affiliate will need to create an invoice for each payout. You can either: 

• Set a time frame for payments, such as monthly
• Pay out by threshold, i.e., once an affiliate earns X amount of commission

Larger or more successful affiliates are likely going to hit thresholds fast, so it makes sense to pay them out on a set time frame (mainly to maintain your own sanity). 

Smaller affiliates might take a few months to hit a particular threshold, but it doesn’t make sense to add on the extra work of processing and paying out an invoice for an amount that’s too small. 

So for example, you could have monthly payments that go out based on a threshold of $50, paid on the 15th of the month. 

Let’s say larger affiliates soar past the threshold and earn $200 from their affiliate redemptions. Paying out their amounts monthly makes the most sense for you, and they have the security of knowing that their payment is coming at a certain time.

If the smaller affiliates don’t hit the $50 threshold that month, then their next potential payment would be made on the 15th of the following month, assuming they meet the threshold by that date.

How to track commissions and payments

Anna Klappenbach used to track affiliate payments manually via discount codes. She’d pay them out on a monthly basis and send a screenshot of her sales dashboard showing their total code redemptions.

Affiliates would get a screenshot of my dashboard with their code redemptions. They’d invoice us for the amount of commission we agreed upon, and then we’d pay out.

Anna-Maria Klappenbach Senior Influencer Marketing Manager, Modash

This might involve a lot of back-and-forth, depending on how many affiliates you have, how successful they are, and how much information they need. But affiliate marketing tools help you track code redemptions or link clicks, and the sales generated. Exceptional tools will even generate the invoices and pay out your affiliates, whether automatically or with just one click. 

For Shopify stores, Modash tracks total clicks, discount code redemptions, sales, and payouts for all your affiliates, allowing you to see which partners are driving the most revenue for your brand and how much they’ve earned for their efforts (non-Shopify stores don’t get the same end-to-end attribution reporting).

You can even organize affiliates into multiple commission tiers, easily bumping your best performers into a higher tier. Because they’re worth it, right?

👉 Take our affiliate tracking tools for a spin by signing up for your free Modash account!

🤓 Pro tip: Realistically, even if you use an influencer tracking tool like Modash, you’ll probably still want to use spreadsheets to gather and share some of your affiliate performance data. For tips on how to do it, check out 5 Spreadsheets for Influencer Marketers (+ Free Template).

Final thoughts

Just like managing influencers, affiliate marketing is all about relationships. Want your affiliates to work hard to sell your product? Then it’s your job to make them feel all warm and loved 🤗

The trouble is, building strong relationships with affiliates takes time, and it’s only one piece of the puzzle that keeps your affiliate program functioning.

If you’re only working with a handful of affiliate partners, you can just about keep all those plates spinning yourself with nothing more than spreadsheets and a tool like Shopify Collabs. But what happens when your boss wants double the revenue and tells you to recruit twice as many affiliates?

Fortunately, Modash is here to help. With one platform, you can:

• Find brand-match affiliates by searching our database of 380M+ creators on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
• Reach out to potential affiliate partners using our dedicated influencer marketing inbox, where you can save templates, use variables, and find valuable context to quickly personalize your messaging.
• Manage affiliates by shortlisting those who match your criteria, sharing notes on individual creators, building campaign-specific lists, and unlocking contact details.
• Track affiliate content, including Stories – even if they forget 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 means you can spend more time supporting your best affiliates.

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