So you think you could never get a squeaky clean, direct link from an affiliate blogger? Think again.
What if I told you that you could not only get clean links from your own affiliates, but from your competitors' affiliates?
Stay with me here.
It's no secret that bloggers want to make money. Of course they're going to throw affiliate links into their posts, which is totally understandable. If I was an affiliate, I'd be doing the same in hopes of making as much money as I could. But there's a way to get some clean links out of the gig, so don't completely give up hope of getting a direct link from an affiliate blogger.
Here's how:
Requirements:
- Client that has an affiliate network OR a competitor with an affiliate network
- Client willing to do product reviews or giveaways
Step 1: Set up alerts with TalkWalker
Set up an alert using TalkWalker, which is an alternative to Google Alerts. I've found that TalkWalker picks up way more results than Google Alerts, and TalkWalker picks up a ton of the affiliate posts that Google Alerts misses.
Set up alerts for your client and all of your clients' competitors. Depending on the niche, you may need to include "review" into your alert query, but typically the blog results that are picked up are review posts (especially, I've found, if your target audience is in the lifestyle blog niche). TalkWalker allows advanced queries, so don't be afraid to use them!
Set up a filter and route all of the alerts to a separate folder in your email.
Step 2: Open blog results
Once a week, go through all of your alerts by looking at the "blog" results. TalkWalker will give you multiple categories of results, much like Google Alerts, but for this purpose, you want to focus on the blog results.
Install Link Clump, and open up all of the blog results.
Step 3: Mine the comments
Scan the blogs that are reviewing you and your competitors' products, and read the comments. A majority of the time, other bloggers are commenting on these blog posts, praising the product.
Find all of the bloggers who have commented on the affiliate posts who have reacted favorably to your product featured in the post.
Step 4: Outreach
Reach out to these bloggers with an offer to give them a free product to review or offer to host a giveaway on their site.
This is the perfect target audience because they have already been exposed to your brand, and they thought favorably enough of your product or service to comment on the blog. This makes outreach a breeze. How about a two-sentence message (my favorite kind for link outreach) like this:
"I noticed that you were interested in [our product] from your comment on [affiliate]'s post, and we'd love to offer you a free product to review on your own blog if you'd like! What do you think?"
Okay, so maybe I lied a little bit.
You're not exactly getting a link from an affiliate themselves, but you're getting links from people who have been exposed to your product via an affiliate post, and liked it enough to comment on it.
In my experience, this type of prospecting and outreach has had a 70-80% success rate (meaning the bloggers agreed to review/host a giveaway). Good luck and happy prospecting!
