Cold emailing affiliates can be tough
If you have ever tried to reach out to new affiliates cold, you know it can often be an uphill battle. Top affiliates receive so many emails about new programs that even with a high converting offer or a top name in your industry, it can still be almost impossible to stand out in the inbox.
So how do we make sure that affiliates read our emails, warm up relationships, and eventually get them not only to sign up, but be excited about your affiliate program? By not telling them about your affiliate program… yet.
The strategy
The best way to create actual relationships with your affiliates is to give something to them before you ask for anything in return and if there is anything we know affiliates love, its backlinks, mentions, and traffic.
The easiest way to give them all three, and to do it at scale, is to write a "roundup" post that mentions their sites. You can find a great example from ReferralCandy here.
Once you have published the post, you can share it to social media and tag each of the sites you mentioned as well as email the writers to let them know they were included.
How to find sites to write about
You will want to include sites that are already promoting other affiliate offers in your industry because you know that their traffic will be relevant and because you know that the creators will be familiar with the process of promoting affiliate links.
One easy way to find a list of such sites is with Google and Bing's advanced search operators.
All affiliate sites are required to include a disclosure letting their readers know that they take commissions on the sale of the products they recommend. We can leverage this buy finding sites that include an affiliate disclosure and use keywords related to your product. To do this in google you can search "Affiliate Disclosure" AND "Your Keyword". Example here.
Once you have found a list of sites you want to include, use Snov.io to get the creators email address.
Finding more affiliates
Once you have seen some results and need to scale this process, we can find you thousands more affiliates to reach out to across the web, youtube, social media, and even affiliates who are buying ads for your competitors. More here.
Special thanks to Hailey Friedman who inspired us to use this strategy with our clients after we read her post on how she used this strategy to grow the affiliate program at GrowthBar 9x year over year.
