How to find your first affiliates (when you don't have a network yet)

You’ve decided to start an affiliate program. You’re excited. You Google “how to find affiliates” and within five minutes you’re on the website of some affiliate network, staring at a signup form that asks for your monthly revenue, your number of SKUs, and your existing affiliate count. You fill it out, you hit submit, and you get an automated email back telling you that you need to be at $5,000 per month in revenue to qualify. Or $10,000. Or $25,000.

You are not there yet. That’s the whole reason you’re building an affiliate program in the first place.

So you click a few more links. You find a marketplace that does let you list your program, and within 48 hours you have 40 affiliates signed up. All 40 of them are strangers. Most of them won’t ever log in again. The ones who do log in are going to try to rank for “your product name coupon” and intercept your existing customers with discount codes. You’ve seen this movie before, even if this is your first time watching it.

Here’s the truth nobody tells you. The path that actually works for small businesses looks nothing like the affiliate network path. It’s harder, it’s slower, it’s more personal, and it produces a program that actually drives sales instead of one that drowns you in busywork. Let’s walk through it.

The trap of affiliate networks

Before we talk about what works, let’s be clear about why the default advice doesn’t.

Affiliate networks exist to solve a specific problem for a specific kind of business. If you’re doing millions in revenue and you want to tap into thousands of affiliates quickly, a network makes sense. They handle the vetting, the payouts, the dispute resolution, and the tax paperwork, all in exchange for a meaningful cut of your commissions. For big brands, that trade is worth it.

For a small business doing $3,000 a month in revenue, that trade is disastrous. The networks that will take you at your size are the bottom-feeder ones, and the affiliates who join them are mostly chasing quick coupon commissions rather than driving genuine new customers. You end up paying a cut to the network, a commission to the affiliate, and getting customers who would have bought from you anyway. That’s not growth. It’s leakage.

The first piece of advice for finding your first affiliates is this. Skip the networks. They are not for you yet, and the ones that would take you are not the ones you want.

Your first affiliates are people you already have a relationship with. Let’s start there.

Your first affiliates are already on your customer list

Look at your customers. The ones who love your product, who email you unsolicited feedback, who tell their friends about you without being asked. These people are already referring you. They’re doing it for free, without a link, without a tracking code, and without any reward from you. Every one of those referrals is a customer you’re acquiring that you don’t have to pay for.

The highest-ROI move you can make with your first affiliate program is to formalize what those customers are already doing. Give them a link. Track what happens. Pay them when their referrals convert. Nothing about the customer’s behavior needs to change. They were already recommending you. Now you can see it, measure it, and reward it.

This is exactly what the customer rewards program recipe and the refer a friend program recipe are built for. Both get you set up in one click. The refer-a-friend version defaults to a flat $10 reward because that’s the simplest thing a customer can explain in a text message to a friend. Simplicity matters more than the exact dollar amount here. A customer who’s already telling people about you isn’t doing it for the money. The reward is a token of appreciation that turns a one-time kindness into a habit.

The announcement is easy. One email to your customer list. “Hey, if you’ve ever told a friend about us, you can now earn $10 when they buy. Here’s your link.” Done. You’ll get signups within a day. Some of those signups will never produce a sale. That’s fine. The ones who do produce sales will produce them reliably because they’re already embedded in the communities where your customers live.

This single move is often all you need to get your first 10 or 20 affiliates signed up and producing sales within the first month. Don’t skip it because it seems too obvious. It’s obvious because it works.

Your existing audience is the next pool

The second pool of people who are already primed to promote you is your existing audience. This means your newsletter subscribers, your podcast listeners, your Twitter followers, your blog readers, anyone who’s opted into hearing from you but hasn’t necessarily bought yet.

These people already trust you. They opted into your content because they find you valuable. Telling them “we have an affiliate program now, here’s how to join” is a warm pitch, not a cold one. The conversion rate on a warm pitch is an order of magnitude better than the conversion rate on cold outreach. A 5,000-subscriber newsletter announcement can produce more qualified affiliate signups than six months of cold emails to strangers.

The pitch should be honest about what the program is and who it’s for. “If you run a blog or podcast in the [your space] niche, you can earn a commission for every customer you send our way. Here’s the rate, here’s how it works, here’s how to sign up.” Don’t oversell it. Don’t promise passive income. Just describe what you’re offering and let people self-select. If you haven’t locked in what “the rate” actually is yet, how much should you pay your affiliates walks through the math.

The people who sign up from your existing audience are the best affiliates you’ll ever have. They already know your product, they already trust your brand, and they already have an audience that overlaps with your ideal customer. Treat them well.

Direct outreach to creators in your space

After you’ve exhausted your customer list and your existing audience, the next move is direct outreach to creators who are already producing content adjacent to your product. YouTube reviewers, niche bloggers, podcast hosts, Twitter accounts with engaged followings in your space. You’re looking for people whose audience overlaps with yours and who have demonstrated that they can drive action.

The outreach has to be specific. Not “hey, check out our affiliate program.” That gets ignored by everyone. You need to have looked at their content, understood what they care about, and written an email that tells them exactly why your product is relevant to their audience and what you’re offering.

A good outreach email has four parts. One, specific evidence that you’ve actually consumed their content (mention a specific video, post, or episode). Two, a concrete reason your product fits their audience. Three, the rate you’re offering and whether it’s negotiable. Four, a single call to action. Don’t attach a 10-page PDF. Don’t ask them to fill out a form. Just ask if they’re interested and offer to set up a call if they are.

Expect a low response rate. Cold outreach always has a low response rate. But the creators who do respond are gold. They’ve pre-qualified themselves as people who are interested enough in your product to engage, which is more than you can say for the 40 random strangers you’d get from a marketplace listing.

Ten outreach emails per week is a sustainable pace for a founder. Don’t try to blast 200 emails in a day. Quality matters more than quantity here. One creator with 5,000 engaged followers is worth a hundred creators with inflated vanity metrics.

What not to do

A short list of things that will waste your time and money.

Don’t pay for affiliate leads. There are services that will sell you lists of “affiliates looking for programs to join.” These are almost always low-quality contacts, often scraped or bought, and the conversion rate is effectively zero. Save your money.

Don’t join bottom-feeder networks. You already know why. The affiliates there are chasing coupon traffic, not building relationships with your product, and you’ll pay network fees for the privilege.

Don’t accept every signup that comes through your registration form. If you have auto-approval turned on (which is fine for customer referral programs), review your list weekly and look for obvious red flags. Generic Gmail addresses with no accompanying context. Names that look like they came from a random generator. Entries where every field is filled out but the “how will you promote us” field is blank or copy-pasted boilerplate. These are not real affiliates. Reject them.

Don’t promise exclusive territories or categories to early affiliates. It feels like a generous move but it creates constraints that will bite you when you actually start to grow. Keep your options open.

Make it easy for qualified affiliates to find you

While you’re doing outreach, make sure the people who come looking for you on their own have an easy path to sign up. Your affiliate program page should be linked from your footer and your main navigation. The page itself should explain the rate, explain how tracking and payouts work, and include a registration form.

Siren’s registration form block is the fastest way to do this. Add the block to a WordPress page, configure it to auto-approve or hold for review based on your preference, and you have a working signup flow. The full walkthrough is at set up a program registration form.

If you’re starting with a basic structure, the basic affiliate program recipe configures a standard commission program in one click and gives you something functional to point new affiliates at. You can customize it later once you know what’s working. If you haven’t set up your program at all yet, the quick start guide walks you through installing a recipe and enrolling your first collaborator in about ten minutes.

When to actually consider a network

There is a right time to consider an affiliate network. It’s not when you’re starting. It’s when you’ve outgrown direct relationships.

The rough threshold is $50,000 per month in affiliate-driven revenue. At that point, you have enough volume that networks are willing to take you on reasonable terms, you’ve built enough internal understanding of what works to filter out bad-fit affiliates, and the operational overhead of managing direct relationships starts to outweigh the network’s cut. Below that threshold, you’re better off building direct relationships.

Most founders never get to this point, and that’s fine. A program running $20,000 per month in affiliate revenue through 15 well-chosen direct affiliates is a better business than one running $30,000 per month through 500 random network affiliates, because the first one is maintainable and the second one will eat your life.

A 30-day plan for your first 10 affiliates

If you want a concrete plan, here it is.

Week 1. Set up your program using the basic recipe. Announce the refer-a-friend option to your customer list. Expect 5 to 20 signups depending on list size.

Week 2. Announce the affiliate program to your existing audience (newsletter, social media). Expect another 5 to 15 signups, of varying quality.

Week 3. Start direct outreach. 10 emails to creators you’ve identified. Don’t expect immediate responses.

Week 4. Follow up on the outreach. Respond to any signups that need review. Look at which of your early affiliates are actually producing clicks and sales.

By the end of the month, you should have your first 10 real affiliates, and you should have a much better sense of what’s working and what isn’t. From there, it’s iteration. More outreach, better pitches, higher-quality signups, and gradually building the kind of program that actually moves the needle on your business.

You don’t need a network. You need 10 good affiliates who care about your product. That’s always been the answer. It’s just that nobody wants to tell you because “join a network” is easier to sell.

Swim fast, dream big!