Objective: To find other websites that reach our target market. You are looking for information websites and product websites. Even if people are selling products to your market, they are potential affiliates too. Here are some places to search:
1. Yahoo Directory: Check out the websites listed http://dir.yahoo.com in the categories relevant to our target market. This is a large directory of websites that have paid for and have been approved by Yahoo for submission.
If you click the main category links (as shown in larger text in the image to the left), you’ll find plenty of sub-categories to fine-tune your search.
When you click through each sub-category, you’ll find the listed sites at the bottom, listed in popularity order by default. You can choose to view them alphabetically if you wish instead.
To the far right of the listings page, you’ll see sponsored listings. This is where companies. have paid to advertise and can be considered potential affiliates as well. Sponsored listings are shown below:
2. Open Directory Project (DMOZ): Look through the websites at http://www.dmoz.org in the categories relevant to our target market. This is a free directory, but the sites are reviewed by volunteer editors prior to acceptance into the directory. You can see the categories below:
Click on one of the main categories (in large bold font above) and you’ll see:
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All the sub-categories
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Related categories
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The Category in other languages
…allowing you to find plenty of potential affiliates.
3. ClickBank: Look for people selling information products and software to your target market. Choose a category in the marketplace at http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm and they are listed in popularity order by default. Just choose a category:
For example, if you chose the “Home & Family Category”, the most popular products will appear by default:
4. Search The Search Engines for Those Ranking Well for Your Keyword Phrases:
Check the major search engines:
Simply enter keyword phrases that people would enter to potentially find your product and other related phrases. For help with your keyword research, use http://www.wordtracker.com
5. Find out Who Links To our Competitors and Related Websites:
Go to http://www.yahoo.com and type in:
Note: Replace “yahoo.com” above with the URL you are searching for. ex. link:http://www.mysite.com. Then click “Web Search” and you’ll find the sites that link to the websites you’re interested in.
(Use Yahoo as they typically show the largest number of links and will yield more plentiful results)
6. Use Alexa for Finding More Websites:
At http://www.alexa.com, they claim to rank all the websites in the world by popularity. Although, the results cannot be deemed to close to being accurate, it is a good site for finding a good number of related website. Simply enter a website that you may have already found in your potential affiliate research like this:
And you’ll be shown a list of related websites that you can take a look at:
In addition, as you’ll see underlined in red, there are suggested “Related Searches” and you can click on each website for “Site info for…”.
TIP: If you download the Alexa Toolbar they have available, you can just surf from site to site and more related suggestions will appear in the toolbar as you go along. You can download it for free at: http://www.alexa.com/site/download/
