How to get niche influencers to become affiliates for your product

This guide will show you how to reach out to influencers and hopefully drive traffic and revenue from them.

How to get niche influencers to become affiliates for your product
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This guide will show you how to reach out to influencers and hopefully drive traffic and revenue from them.
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Thanks so much to Kat for the advice that led to this article!
Cloakist has been getting a lot of new customers who use Adobe Spark to create beautiful pages and want to put them at their own domains, instead of being stuck on Adobe's spark.adobe.com domain.
So I figured that a good next step marketing-wise could be to reach out to influencers in the Adobe Spark space and see if they'd be interested in joining an affiliate programme, so that I can double down on the clear problem that exists for Spark users.
I mentioned this marketing plan to Kat, the founder of bordr.io. Kat recently ran a successful campaign to find travel influencers to talk about her product – which helps US citizens do the tedious paperwork of moving to Portugal.
Pretty much exclusively from this campaign, Kat acquired 26 new customers in the space of 3 weeks. And even cooler, she offered to share some of her tips from that experience with me.
Here's my write-up of them.

Tip 1: go niche

Kat's first piece of advice is to prioritise very specific niches of people.
In her case, targeting travel influencers was not going to be enough – it had to be travel influencers who are specifically in the area of talking about Portugal, and even better if they had moved to Portugal, were planning to, or encourage people to via their Instagram or YouTube channel.
The buzzword here is 'hyper-targeted'. That'll mean you waste less time on people who are ultimately not going to have the audience you want, even if that audience is massive.

Tip 2: quality over quantity

In her campaign, Kat only reached out to 13 people, and she made a big investment in making sure that she understood the profile of each one.
She watched at least one video for each of them, in some cases more. The aim was to understand who they are and what makes them tick.
That helped her to personalise cold outreach to at least make it feel warmer, and create a hook to show that she'd actually engaged with their content.

Tip 3: be ultra-friendly in your message, and leave it open

When it comes to the email or message you send to influencers, be conversational and drop in a personal comment at the start so that the influencer feels like you care about them and their life.
Kat kindly shared an example email with me:
Hi Xand Y,

It's so excitingthat you guys are makingthe movetothe Algarve! My husbandand I movedto Portolast Februaryand have been itchingto check outthe south.

I wantedto seeif you’d be opento setting up an affiliate relationshipwith a businessthatmy husbandand I recently started. Our companyis called Bordrand we help US citizens easily order a Portuguese NIF online.

We’re lookingtogetthe word outby partneringwith influencers like yourselves who have madethe moveto Portugal.

Would you be interestedin setting up a timeto chat?

Looking forwardto hearingfrom you,
Kathleen123456789101112
One important point here is that you shouldn't try to be too transactional, or get a yes or no response at this stage.
Leave it open. The influencer might want more information over email, or maybe will be happy to jump in right away with a call – it's up to them.

Step 4: track it well

Once you have some influencer traffic coming through, you'll want to:
  • Set up discount codes for each influencer so you know if people are buying because of them
  • Use a tool like Airtable to track how many people are buying for each influencer, so that you can pay influencers monthly for affiliate revenue that they created
The key to a successful affiliate programme is keeping your affiliates happy with clear data and regular payments.

That's it!

If this guide helped you out, please tweet thanks to Kat, because it was pretty much all her!

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Louis Barclay

Written by

Louis Barclay

ex-Founder of Cloakist