If you run affiliate for clients, as a freelancer, or in-house at a brand, you probably feel this:
- Outreach is where the money is
- Discovery is where your hours disappear
My default stack is still boring and effective:
- Search operators
- Spreadsheets
Stuff like:
brand + "review"competitor + "coupon""[niche] alternatives"site:youtube.com competitor review
I am not giving this up.
The problem is scale, especially when you manage multiple programs and want to double down on outbound.
So I started testing tools that promise to help with discovery.
Right now: AffiliateFinder.ai and Affistash.
This edition is about AffiliateFinder.ai. Affistash will follow in the next one.
🔎 What AffiliateFinder.ai actually does
You enter:
- Your site
- Geo and language
- A few competitors and/or keywords
The tool:
- Scans the web, YouTube and Instagram
- Finds sites and creators already talking about your niche or your competitors
- Tries to pull email addresses and social profiles for each result
End result: one central list of people who already create relevant content for your space.
So far, this is what you could do yourself with search operators and enough time.
Two things made it interesting enough to keep testing.
❤️ The 2 features that matter for outreach
1. Weekly new opportunities in my mailbox
Once a brand is set up, I get a short email every week with:
- How many new potential affiliates it found
- A few examples I can click into
For agencies and brands this is the part I like most.
Recruitment does not depend on “I should really do a research day again”.
When I have time for outreach, I open that email, review the new names, and move a few into my pipeline.
It turns recruitment into a rhythm instead of a random sprint.
2. It helps clean the list before I waste time
This is where it saves the most energy for me:
- For most websites it surfaces one or more email addresses
- For YouTube and social it is far from perfect, still much faster than manual hunting
- I can see when a site last published something, so I can ignore dead publishers fast
If you want to increase outbound volume, this is usually where you lose hours or burn your VA.
With contact info, social links and recency visible in one place, I spend more time on:
- “Is this partner a fit for this brand?”
- “What angle should I pitch here?”
and less time chasing contact pages, solving CAPTCHAs or emailing blogs that quietly died in 2021.
If the weekly email and the enrichment layer disappeared, I would probably go back to just Google plus sheets.
🧂 How it fits next to search operators
Very simple split in my head:
- Search operators
- Understand the niche
- See who ranks
- Find angles
- AffiliateFinder.ai
- Keep a living list of potential partners per brand
- Feed me weekly new opportunities
- Show me who is still active
- Give me emails and socials fast so I can focus on outreach
It is a discovery and enrichment layer.
It does not replace your tracking, payouts or email tool.
🧪 How to test it without wasting your trial
If you manage outreach for clients or your own brand, I would do this:
- Pick one brand that already converts and has real competitors
- Add 3–5 of those competitors and/or strong keywords in AffiliateFinder.ai
- Let it run, then filter for:
- Multiple relevant pieces of content
- Clear proof of traffic, subs or views in your niche
- Recent activity so you cut out dead sites
- Use your current outreach templates, only change where you got the contacts from
- After the 7 day trial, look at:
- Time you spent on research
- Number of real conversations started
If those two numbers look better, the tool probably earns a spot next to your search operators.
If not, your current workflow is likely already tight enough.
🎯 If you want to try it while the deal is live
Right now they have:
- Free 7 day trial
- 50% off for BFCM
Here is my AffiliateFinder.ai link if you want to run the same test on your side:
👉 [insert your AffiliateFinder.ai link here]
Next edition I will walk through Affistash and how it compares, so you can decide what actually fits your way of working.
Disclaimer: This edition contains affiliate links. If you sign up through my link, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
