5 Ways to Find Affiliate Marketing Opportunities and Boost Your Revenue  

A robust affiliate partner program has big potential to drive sales. By using affiliate marketing programs to tap into your existing audience and monetize your website, you can effectively attract more (and often stronger) leads and boost your revenue. This saves you money compared to many other lead-gen channels and also benefits your affiliates.

Similarweb has a unique and powerful set of affiliate marketing research tools to help you find new affiliate marketing opportunities to make your performance marketing strategy more impactful.

This blog will answer:

• What affiliate research is
• How to find affiliates that could become potential new partners
• How to qualify the value of any referral domain
• How to monitor and optimize your existing partnerships
• How to monitor and capitalize on your competitors’ affiliate partnerships

What is affiliate research?

The key to any successful affiliate strategy is to conduct research before investing time and money into a campaign or partnership. For affiliate marketers, looking at the industry or niche in which you operate is a great place to start. Consider these questions:

• What products or services exist that are similar to mine?
• What are the top-selling products in this niche?
• Who is promoting products similar to mine?

Answering some of the above will help you to figure out which domains and audiences have a synergy with your niche and allow you to target affiliate networks and referral domains that provide exposure to those audiences.

How to find affiliates with partner potential

Using the Affiliate Research module in Similarweb’s Digital Marketing Intelligence, there are three main ways we can help users find affiliate marketing opportunities:

1. Keyword Affiliates
2. Industry Affiliates 
3. Competitor Affiliates

Through the Find Affiliates tool, users can search by keyword, industry, or competition to retrieve a list of potential websites that receive traffic relevant to that keyword, rank highly in that industry, or are sending referral traffic to your competition.

1. Finding potential affiliates with keyword research

Imagine you’re a fitness equipment retailer and want to increase sales for yoga exercise accessories. Through the Affiliate Keywords tool, you can start affiliate marketing keyword research by entering a popular yoga accessory as a search term. “Yoga Mat” is a good one. We also focus our search on just the U.S. The Find Affiliates tool then does the heavy lifting, automatically generating a list of 100 ‘near match’ phrases and ‘question queries’ linked to the search keyword ‘Yoga Mat.’

Why is this valuable? Near-phrase matches and question-queries are great forms of long-tail keywords. They tend to be particularly relevant for affiliate research because they focus on user intent, and the closer a person is to buying, the more specific phrases tend to be.

The result: You get a list of the top 1000 referral websites that are receiving traffic from the keyword list generated by the term ‘Yoga Mat.’

Diving into these results, you can analyze the referral domains that have a good fit:

• For your audience and industry
• The number of monthly visitors
• For a balanced level of organic vs. paid traffic
• In terms of levels of outgoing traffic

All important factors to consider when choosing a good affiliate partner site.

With this information, you can quickly add these affiliate opportunities to a Partner List to identify the best affiliate opportunities before making the effort to reach out.

Depending on your niche, you can also filter the results by specific Website Industries or Website types (such as transactional websites, content publishing websites, or others). This is important for your affiliate marketing keyword research because as a fitness equipment retailer you might want to analyze the affiliate potential of specific sites that are publishing content about Yoga based interest topics e.g. fitness equipment reviews – undoubtedly an audience of high relevance to your business. Affiliate marketing keyword research should play a central role in every Affiliate Marketer’s strategy.

2. Breaking down potential affiliates by industry

This is one more targeted way for affiliate and partnership managers, even agencies and affiliate networks, to discover relevant websites to partner with based on research by industry.

Looking at referral traffic at the industry level can help them discover relevant, affiliate opportunities that they are not working with yet, as well as help them to discover the top referral domains sending traffic to websites in their industry of interest.

Using the health and fitness industry as an example again, we can choose the industry, select our country of choice, and hey presto – the Affiliate Research tool found the top referral domains sending traffic to websites in that industry.

This type of research can give you an immediate grounding and understanding of the type of referral sites that are frequently, and successfully, partnered with by other fitness-related companies –either because there is a good product or brand fit, the audience specificity is strong or the publisher is already well known in the niche of interest.

Looking for affiliate opportunities that are already sending referral traffic to your industry is another effective approach. You can also understand if your industry is receiving a lot of traffic from referrals more generally, how this trends over time, and which domains are leading in terms of referral strategies.

Again, if any standout performers are on show in the results, they can be quickly saved to a Partner List for future analysis.

3. Researching your Competitor’s Affiliates

Yep, targeting your competitor’s affiliate strategy is probably one of the easiest tricks in the book, and definitely one of the most effective.

Your rivals may have already done all the leg work for you in terms of qualifying relevant referral domains with the right fit and audience for your product or service. With a bit more analysis, you can begin building a strong portfolio of potential affiliate opportunities, who have already been certified by your closest competitors.

With Similarweb, you can find your competitors’ affiliates and reveal exactly who the competition is getting the most referral traffic from, which industries they are getting the most referral traffic from, and just how well those referral visits perform through the Affiliate Engagement Score.

In the below example, we can see that our biggest three competing yoga fitness sites all focus on obtaining referral traffic from relatively different industries.

Lululemon.com, which is the obvious referral leader amongst the set, with a mammoth majority share in overall referral traffic, could be said to have the strongest strategy here. They have a good spread of referral traffic coming from domains in the Lifestyle industry as well as coupon and voucher sites.

Aloyoga.com predominantly focuses on partnering with publishers in the news and media and the fashion and lifestyle sectors, while beyondyoga.com has an alternative approach spread across other industries.

This is so useful to know as you’ve now got a clear understanding of who you’re going to be competing with, how much referral traffic is up for grabs, and where there are any opportunity gaps that you can stake a claim for.

When looking at the list of actual referral domains themselves, we get a great view of the top domains by total referral traffic share and who the competitor is with the biggest slice of the referral pie.

Using the Share Over Time drill down also allows you to see month on month what the competitive referral share of traffic has been for any domain.

Remember, just because one competitor has a bigger slice of the referral traffic for a specific domain, doesn’t mean they are the best performer. You can dig a little deeper using the Affiliate Engagement Score to see just how successful those partnerships are and understand which competitor is receiving the most engaged traffic from the referral site as the Engagement Leader. The more engaged traffic you receive, the more likely those visits are to convert.

This offers a great qualification metric for you to understand the best-performing referral domains, but can also help you identify opportunities to optimize engagement performance, improve landing pages, ensure the messaging is on point, optimize your CTAs, apply the right backlinks etc.

4. Researching similar sites

You might already have an affiliate site in mind that could satisfy your needs. To quickly and easily find more of the same affiliate opportunities, you can use the Similar Sites tool to help.

Simply plug in the website you’re researching or one of your existing affiliate partner’s websites and we’ll auto-generate a list of sites that have a close affinity to the analyzed domain in terms of content, audience, engagement performance, and more, quick and easy way to boost your potential affiliate partner list.

5. Identifying the best of the bunch

So you’ve done your research and you have the list of your prospective affiliates ready to go. But at this point, it’s worth going one or two extra steps and putting in a little more effort to understand the conversion potential of each of those affiliates, so you can focus on the best performers.

Our Analyze Affiliates toolset gives you a performance overview of any individual site. This will let you see an in-depth analysis of the selected affiliate site giving you the opportunity to review:

• Marketing channels sending traffic to their site, to see if your strategy is aligned
• Engagement overview, revealing how engaging their site
• Device distribution (mobile vs. desktop)
• Visits over time, so you can see how their traffic fluctuates over any given period
• Search terms they are optimizing for or bidding on
• The top publishers and top ad networks that are driving traffic to them
• The top social networks sending them traffic

It’s important to look at the above metrics and insights over time. Look for stability and growth in their traffic metrics, otherwise you could end up partnering with a site with a waning audience.

The Analyze Affiliates toolset also includes our Outgoing Traffic page, so you can get a clear understanding of the quality of the referral traffic you’re going to be receiving, which you want to be high, so there is more conversion potential.

Finding the perfect affiliate partner

Because you’ve been adding those sites to your Partner List throughout the research process, you can now whittle down your list based on your analysis and ensure that your efforts are focused on building relationships with only the best affiliate partners for your business.

You now know your prospective affiliate partner inside and out, you’re ready to open communication with them and start negotiating on your program terms, building your relationship, and driving new potential customers to your site.

High-fives all around.

by Owen Badham

Senior Product Marketing Manager at Similarweb

A product marketer with 10+ years in SaaS, specializing in product launches, GTM strategy, and collateral production.