Hundreds of thousands of products are sold on the market daily, with many million web pages aimed at drawing in business. Affiliate manager, Stu McLaren, has discovered a few little tricks of his trade which has made him one of the most successful mangers currently managing some leading affiliate programs. Here he reveals some of his secrets in finding the best affiliates.

How you can find the best affiliates on the web.

In Google search string type in ‘allinurl: (keyword)’, that will bring up all the websites that have all your keyword in their domain name.

Find out all about your competitors’ affiliates by discovering your competitors’ domain, then go into Google and in the search string type in ‘link: www.(your competitor).com’.

“What is going to happen is that you are going to get all the web sites linking to your competitor’s web site," Stu said. “And I will tell you the majority will be affiliates if your competitor has an affiliate program.’’

After this process affiliate managers would have a huge list of potential affiliates. However this process does not reveal the quality affiliate that managers should spend time chasing. It can be a lengthy process to filter through all the information to determine which affiliates are right for your business. But Stu has another tool to make this process simpler.

“We don’t use the Excel spreadsheet anymore, because we have something that saves hundred of hours of work in a program called SEO Elite. This tool when first launched it was designed to help find link partner to help improve search engine placement.’’

“But it is one of the best tools for the affiliate manager because when you type in a keyword it brings up all the sites relating to that keyword, as well as contact information. Plus it will reveal its Google page rank on one fail swoop.’’

As well as finding affiliates through the business environment, one avenue of affiliate generation that is often overlooked is through people that have already purchased the product. If customers are using the product and happy with the product, then they may turn into the best affiliates because they will be enthusiastic about the product.