Direct recruitment is a super important way of finding affiliates that is underused by many affiliate program managers. Rather than waiting for big-time affiliates to stumble upon your affiliate program on an affiliate directory or forum, why not find out who they are and contact them directly with a great offer. This tactic allows you to pre-screen your affiliates based on their earning potential, so the sales per-affiliate rate is likely to be higher than among affiliates recruited by other "organic" methods.

Make them An Offer they Won't Want to Refuse

Begin your direct recruitment campaign by composing a short email about your products/services and why it is a fantastic idea to join your affiliate program. Make sure that this "invitation" sounds enticing and exclusive.

Emphasize the following points in your email:

• You are contacting them directly because your know their blog/site is one of the best, most important and most popular in the niche (flattery is good but keep it real)
• Your affiliate program is new and will be interesting to their readers
• You have a good conversion rate and state-of-the-art tracking software
• You are offering them a special incentive if they sign up now, e.g. they will join the "gold-star" affiliate track, with bonus commissions etc. – exclusively for top affiliates

The last point is good because it creates a sense of urgency, and also makes them feel like you want to compensate them for all their hard work and ingenuity in rising to the top of their niche. Keep your email to 3-4 paragraphs max – successful bloggers and webmasters get a lot of mail and don't like their time wasted. Include a link to a page on your site where they can get more information, as well as an email address where they can contact the affiliate program manager directly.

When you have a killer email proposition written up, it's time to find people to send it to. Let's cover that below.

Identifying Your Potential Affiliates

One fast way to find popular sites and blogs in your target market is by visiting blog networks, such as Technorati, and social bookmarking networks, such as Delicious and StumbleUpon. By performing searches for your keywords there, you can easily find which blogs and sites are popular in your niche. To be really thorough, you should also perform simple Google blog searches.

Do 5-10 keyword searches until you get a lot of good-quality results. For example, if you are in the home improvement industry, you could perform the following searches:

You could also do more specific searches related on particular aspects of the home-improvement industry that are relevant to your business. For example:

You get the idea. Click on the top results returned by the social networks and Google and quickly check if this is the kind of site that you would like to affiliate with. Take note the of site's Alexa ranking (easily done by installing the Alexa ranking toolbar). This gives a good idea of how popular the site is.

With every site or blog that you find that you think is a good potential affiliate, click on the "contact us" link. Adapt your standard email slightly to include the person's name (if known) and the name of their website. Then press "send."

How many potential affiliates should you contact directly? As many as possible! You can start slow but ultimately it is a good idea to contact hundreds of blogs and websites with your affiliate proposition. Remember: the more affiliates you have, the more you earn. It's that simple.

Time Saving

I hope that by this point you are thinking that you are too busy building your business and serving your customers to spend countless hours researching and contacting potential affiliates. You are 100% right. The bulk of the work in finding affiliates is a low-skilled, admin job and it does not require a high level of expertise to do it right. Therefore, if you have a few dollars to spare I urge you to assign it to a staff member or outsource it on Elance. On Elance you will easily find a freelance admin/web marketer who is experienced and capable in this kind of marketing who will work for $5 an hour. Just be sure to hire someone recommended, to give clear written instructions, and to supervise their work.

When it comes to writing your proposal email and making the basic keywords list, I would recommend that you write it yourself or hire a professional, native-English marketer on Elance.You don't want to cut any corners there.