“Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” Pablo Picasso
Last week I told you to chase down every outside yes your fourth quarter depends on, and to do it before the calendar starts charging you rent.
A fair question came back almost immediately.
Yes from who?
Most programs never answer that one. They answer an easier one, which is “how do we get more affiliates,” and then they go do the thing that feels like recruiting. Log into the network. Click the discovery tab. Sort by whatever looks big. Send the template.
I ran that play for years at SmarterChaos and I was proud of it. Fired off a few hundred invitations in one afternoon, got two yeses, and both of them were already sending us traffic. I put that in a deck. I called it a recruiting engine.
It was a slot machine with a CRM attached.
Here is what would have saved past me a decade. Before you go hunting for partners nobody in your category has heard of, pick the fruit hanging at eye level.
Half of it is out there right now pointing at your competitor. Writing the roundup, ranking for the review, sending the buyer, and getting paid for it by somebody who is not you. The other half is already signed up to your program and has not sent you a click in over a year.
Fair warning on the tone. I am not feeling especially collegial about this one. There are a finite number of publishers who are good at selling what you sell, all of them are allocating Q4 right now, and if they are allocating it to your competitor, that is not fate. That is a payout, a relationship, and a phone call. You can beat all three.
What You’ll Get in This Issue
Three low hanging fruit plays you can run this week with no budget and no new hire. How to rebuild your competitor’s partner roster in an afternoon for free, and how to take it with a better number and better manners. Why the fastest revenue in your program is buried in your own dashboard under partners you wrote off, and the four piles to sort them into first. The partner types nobody in your category is pitching, including the one whose Q4 deadline is already here. Plus the last inch where most recruiting quietly dies.
Part One: Yes From Who?
Recruiting gets treated like it has to start with discovery. Sometimes it does. Just not in the last week of August, because there are two lists sitting right here and you already own both.
The public one is every publisher currently sending traffic to your competitors. Not the competitor. The people pointing at it. Programs of any size leave footprints all over the open internet, because the model requires publishers to link in public. If somebody is monetizing your category, they cannot hide it.
The private one is your own program, specifically the part nobody looks at. Everyone who signed up and never clicked. Everyone who produced last Q4 and went dark. The one hit wonder who did a great placement and vanished like a witness.
Between them you have hundreds of names and not one of them is cold. A publisher already linking to your competitor has done the hardest part of your job, which is deciding your category is worth writing about. You are not selling them the idea. You are asking them to add a line.
Finding net new partners matters too, and it is the harder job. We will get to who should be doing it. But nothing you turn up this month pays faster than the names already standing in front of you.
The gray hairs in this business, and gray hairs are experienced people, will tell you the same thing about every program that looks unbeatable from the outside. There was no genius. Somebody worked a list, every week, when it was boring and nothing was happening, and one year it looked like an overnight success.
Nobody does it for the same reason as last week. There is no applause for a spreadsheet and forty emails in August, and there is no time for it in October.
Part Two: The Playbook
Three moves. All of them grunt work. That is why they still work.
Move 1: Steal the Roster.
The publishers driving your competitor’s revenue are not a secret. They are a search result.
Take your top three competitors and search their brand name plus “review,” plus “coupon,” plus “vs,” plus “alternative,” then search “best” plus your category. Whoever comes back on page one is pointing buyers at somebody in your category today. That is your recruit list, sorted by intent, at no cost.
Then open those pages and read the links. Hover one. If the domain is not the brand’s domain, it is a tracking domain, and one search of it tells you which network they are on and how to reach them. Anything running through /go/, /out/, /r/, or /recommends/ is monetized and that publisher knows exactly what an affiliate program is.
Want it faster and deeper? That is what tools are for. Backlink and publisher discovery software will map it, your network has a discovery marketplace you are underusing, and pointing an Alfie campaign at a competitor surfaces who is actually feeding them, which is a very different list from who claims to be in your space.
Rank what you find by proven intent, not traffic. A small site already sending buyers to a competitor beats a huge site that has never touched your category.
Then be competitive about it, and I mean actually competitive, not polite.
Ask: “What would it take for you to recommend my brand over brand X…”….
Offer a better payout. Not forever and not to everybody. Take the partners visibly producing for a rival, put a real number in front of them, box it to Q4, add a tier they can climb. They do not need convincing that your category converts. They need a reason to reallocate, and that reason is arithmetic.
Then out attention them, which is the part almost nobody does and the part that wins. Publishers rarely leave over rate. They leave because nobody answers, nobody sends fresh creative, nobody warns them a product went out of stock before their readers find out the hard way. Attention is the cheapest competitive weapon in this business and it is lying on the ground.
And write an ask a human would answer. “Join our program” is not an ask. It is a form, and forms do not get answered. Name the exact page and the exact placement. You have us missing from this list. Here is why we convert better than the brand in slot three. Here is the number I will put behind it if you get us in before October. Four sentences, no attachment, no deck, no calendar link.
→ The publishers feeding your competitor do not need convincing, they need a better number and somebody who actually answers, so go take them while their Q4 is still unspoken for.
Move 2: Wake the Dead.
The cheapest quarter you will ever buy is sitting in your own dashboard, filed under partners you quietly gave up on.
Every program has a graveyard, yours is bigger than you think, and a lot of those partners are not dead. They are waiting for somebody to notice their link has been broken since March.
Sort it into four piles, because each one needs a different message. Signed up and never clicked, who raised their hand and then hit a wall. Produced and went dark, the most valuable pile you own. Declining but alive, which is fixable right up until it is not. And the one hit wonders, who almost always changed jobs or never got a reason to do it twice.
Then find out why they stopped, because it is never mysterious. Their link is broken. The landing page returns a 404. The product they built the article around went out of stock during their best week. A competitor gave them exclusive content or a better rate. Your payouts were slow and they got tired of financing you.
Run a link audit before you send a single email. Dead links on old posts are the quietest revenue leak in this business, because the content is still ranking, the traffic is still arriving, and it is landing on nothing.
When you do write, write like a person with their numbers in front of you. What they did last Q4, what has changed, one specific thing to run, and a deadline that actually exists.
Then ask the best question in affiliate management, the one almost nobody says out loud: what would we have to do to get back in the article?
Most people just tell you. It is alarming how often the answer is something you could fix on a Tuesday.
→ These partners already said yes to you once, so fix the broken links and ask them what it would take to say it again before you spend a dollar chasing strangers.
Move 3: Get Out of the Coupon Aisle.
Coupon and loyalty are not villains. They convert, they onboard easily, and they sit right by the front door, which is why every program ends up with a cart full of the same thing. Your program is capped by the partner types you actually recruit.
Editorial and content commerce teams. December gift guides are being locked right now, by editors who will not remember your name in November. This is the most time sensitive item in the issue. If you do one thing from this move, do this one.
Niche newsletters. The most underpriced inventory in performance marketing. A few thousand engaged subscribers, a host who answers their own email, and most have never been pitched by a brand like yours.
Long form video and podcasts. Slower to land, and the placement keeps paying for years. You are buying an asset, not a burst.
Community operators. Discord servers, Facebook groups, forums. Nobody has ever pitched these people. They have an audience that trusts them completely and a link they have never once been paid for.
Sub affiliate networks and content monetization platforms. One integration, hundreds of sites. The lazy person’s leverage, and I mean that as a compliment.
Agencies, consultants, and service partners. Especially B2B. They recommend a stack as part of the job, and being in the recommendation beats being in a roundup.
And the one almost nobody works: the brand your customer buys right before or right after you. Not a competitor. A neighbor. That is a partnership, not a placement, and it is the highest leverage conversation on the list.
→ Pick two types you have never seriously recruited and go be the first brand in your category that bothered.
Part Three: The Last Inch
Most recruiting fails after somebody has already said maybe.
Speed is a weapon nobody uses. Most brands take a week to answer a publisher. Answer in an hour and you will win partners on manners alone, which is a strange and wonderful way to beat better funded companies. Recruit the person, not the site, because people take their roster with them to the next job and they remember who treated them like a vendor.
And your program terms are recruiting copy whether you treat them that way or not. Cookie window, deep link support, how fast you pay, whether you explain a reversal or quietly claw it back. Publishers talk constantly. Your reputation arrives before your email does, which is the whole reason we spent an issue on trust two weeks ago.
Your Weekly Chaos Challenge
Two lists and forty five minutes. Today, not Thursday.
Work the searches from Move 1 and write down twenty publishers pointing traffic at your competitors and not at you. Then pull every partner who produced last Q4 and has sent nothing since, and check their links before you write a word.
→ Build both lists today, fix the broken links, and get twenty five real notes out the door before Friday, each one with a number in it.
And in the comments: what is the strangest partner type that ever worked for you? Not your biggest, your weirdest. Somebody reading this is about to steal your idea, which is the entire point of this issue.
Final Thought
Recruiting is not hard. It is just tedious, and tedious is a much better filter than hard, because tedious eliminates almost everybody.
Everything here is the easy stuff. You can start today and have something to show by Friday. None of it requires a clever idea, just somebody willing to work a list while nothing is on fire.
Two honest notes on who does that work.
If you would rather not do it yourself, this is what our agency side, Chief of Chaos, does for the programs we run. You pick the fruit or we pick it for you. I am fine either way as long as somebody picks it before October.
And if you already have an agency or a sharp team on it in house, good. Point Alfie at it anyway. A hundred years of affiliate judgment baked into a tool means the easy stuff gets worked faster, and it keeps going once the easy stuff runs out. Because it does run out. The obvious names are finite, and then the job becomes finding net new partners nobody in your category has spotted yet. That part is not a search result. That is the real work, and it is why we built the thing.
The programs that look unbeatable in December are not smarter than you. They just started picking in August.
So go ask. Worst case somebody says no, and a no in August is free.
Until next week.
Run toward the chaos.
Matt Frary Chief of Chaos
President & COO, XPFlow
#AffiliateMarketing #PerformanceMarketing #PartnerMarketing #FoundersJourney #ChaosToGrow
