Finding your first affiliate partner doesn’t have to be complicated. You don’t need a massive affiliate network or cold outreach campaigns. In-fact, your best first partner is likely already in your circle.
Instead of trying to recruit dozens of affiliates, focus on finding one high-quality partner who actually drives sales. Once you do that, you can repeat this process to find more affiliates, all of which will drive actual value and grow your business and theirs.
This post will show you exactly how to identify the right type of partner, and how to structure your offer to them.
Before You Begin – Validate Your Product
Before you even think about doing a cross promotion, you should have sold your product to customers at launch, and you should have validated your product for their audience.
An affiliate partnership is not the place to validate your product.
You’re coming to them to offer value to them as much as they’re offering value to you. First impressions matter, so be sure that your first launch with the partner you carefully selected, pitched, and co-launched with will look back on this partnership fondly, and want to come back to do it again.
In order for that to happen, you need to be confident that you can:
- Drive value to their audience.
- Generate sales, and make them money.
- Make them feel like their time was well-spent.
In other words, when you’re done with your first co-launch with this affiliate, they should be excited to want to do it again. And in order to do that, you need to make sure your product will sell, and you can drive value to their audience.
What Makes a Good Affiliate Partner
Before you can even think about reaching out to an affiliate, you need to spend time thinking about what your ideal affiliate looks like. If you don’t do this, you’ll most-likely end up finding a low-quality, low-effort affiliate who will sign up, post a link once, and never bring in a single conversion.
That’s why it’s crucial to choose the right partner from the start.
Inherently, finding an affiliate is a sales and marketing process, and the first step of creating a sales pipeline comes from identifying your avatar, and in this case your “customer” (see: affiliate) is what we’re going to define.
Here’s what to look for in a high-quality affiliate partner:
Their Audience Naturally Needs Your Product
Your best affiliate partner is someone whose audience already has a need for your product—whether they know it yet or not. Ideally, their audience is a customer that you already have validated and served, as well.
Your product should fit seamlessly into their audience’s journey. If you sell an online course platform, your ideal affiliate might be a business coach teaching people how to monetize their knowledge. Their audience is already learning about courses, so recommending your tool makes sense.
Conversely, if you’re selling websites for breweries, it probably doesn’t make much sense to partner with an accountant who serves breweries. Although you both serve the same customer type, there is very little alignment that connects website building to accounting services. Their audience won’t trust it, and it could even harm their list – definitely not something anyone wants.
Ask yourself:
- Does my product provide the next logical step for their audience?
- Would their audience naturally be interested in what I offer, even without a hard sell?
- Does my product enhance or extend their existing offers instead of competing with them?
If the answer isn’t a clear “yes,” keep looking. A mismatched partnership won’t deliver real results.
They Have an Engaged, Trusting Audience
A strong affiliate isn’t just someone with a large following—they have an audience that listens to them and acts on their recommendations, and they have sold to it successfully before.
A huge benefit of this is that they will understand their customer deeper than you, and their insights will prove to be vital in helping you tailor the offer to their audience and make sure it succeeds. Not only will this help you with this immediate launch, but it will help you fast-track your learning on how to better serve, and market to this audience. It’s like jump-starting your market research, seeding your email list, and getting a nice injection of customers all at the same time!
They should:
- Have an active, growing audience (email list, community, social presence).
- Have successfully launched their own products or services.
- Are recognized in their niche as experts or trusted voices.
- A history of consistent content creation (blog, podcast, YouTube, newsletter).
You Already Have a Connection (or a Warm Introduction)
The easiest first partner is someone you already know or can be introduced to. A cold pitch is much harder to land than an affiliate partnership built on an existing relationship.
You’re going to be asking them to use one of their most precious business assets – their contact list. In order to have a shot at doing that, they have to know, like, and trust you (see, I told you it was marketing!).
If you don’t have any existing connections, then it’s time to find some! Start going to conferences, start meeting new people. Your business growth depends on you being able to connect with your customers and your partners.
If you’re not sure where to begin, simply find a trade show that serves your audience, buy a ticket, and go. You will almost certainly find plenty of new partnership opportunities there.
Conclusion
Finding your first affiliate partner isn’t about chasing big-name influencers or casting a wide net—it’s about strategically choosing one strong partner who aligns with your product, and has an engaged audience. Often times these people won’t even see themselves as an “affiliate”, and that’s a good thing.
Your first partnership should be a win for both sides. If you approach the right person, with the right offer, and execute a well-planned launch, and they’ll be eager to work with you again.
Don’t over-complicate it. Start with the relationships you already have, build real value, and take the first step toward unlocking powerful partnerships.
