Using Google image search for affiliate recruitment

A good affiliate marketing campaign is one that has a fair spread of affiliate types. It is not all desirable to have too few driving too high a percentage of the earnings. 

What if you were to lose one of those key affiliates?

Affiliate recruitment seems to have become a bit of a lost art these days. This is partly due to most affiliates taking themselves to the affiliate networks and looking out for opportunities without any prompting

That's a shame, as affiliate recruitment is important. Not only is it a way to ensure you have a healthly longtail of true content affiliates it can be a great way to poach your competitors' affiliates

Using Google image search to find sites that are running your competitors' affiliate banners is quick and easy. It is barely a three step process

Step 1: Log into a competitor's banner library

Some merchants make the point of allowing neither rivals nor non-roster agencies into their affiliate program. This may be good practice but it is a largely futile effort. The best agency staff all have their own affiliate side accounts to enlist from

In this scenario we're looking at the 468x60 banner creative from a large florist. Some of the banners are fresh and new and are so less likely to have been indexed by Google. Other banners date back to 2010. Perfect

Simply save the image to your desktop

Step 2: Drag the image to Google Image search

You can search by dragging images from your desktop to the search box (try the Chrome browser). Google will analyse the image

Step 3: Search through the results and approach the affiliates

The sites returned by this method are highly likely to be affiliates on this campaign