Know the four surfaces affiliates come from, and what each one is for

Affiliates reach you through four surfaces, and in onboarding calls new customers regularly confuse them within ten minutes. Each surface does a different job. Use each for its job and the month goes faster.

1. Marketplace inbound

Affiliates in the network find you in the marketplace, in their dashboard, and in the affiliate newsletter that announces new programs, and they apply. This is the largest source of month-one volume for a listed program and it costs you nothing but review time. It is also the surface you control least: affiliates opt in and apply, they cannot be mass-invited. Your program page decides how many of them do.

2. The vetted database

A subset of the network, 650 or so affiliates out of more than 2,000 who applied, who connected first-party data, their analytics, YouTube or LinkedIn, and were approved by the Reditus team. You browse it, mark the profiles that fit as qualified, and send a partnership request with a personal line. On their side it is one click to accept, and the program appears in the dashboard they already use.

Two things to know before you start sending. Bulk messaging is deliberately limited, because the database is a marketplace with two sides and affiliates leave when they are spammed; a request reads as a partnership or it gets ignored. And read profiles on their traffic, not their location: the analytics connection shows where the audience is, which is the only geography that matters.

3. The AI recruit finder

This one looks outside the network. It takes your competitors and the keywords you want to rank for from the scan that runs when you sign up, and finds the publishers already recommending those competitors with an affiliate link, down to the exact article, plus the content ranking for those keywords. Your first overview arrives within about five minutes of signing up, in the Finder, and it keeps updating as new affiliates start recommending your competitors. A trial shows the 10 best leads; a paid plan shows every lead.

The results include your competitors themselves, because they rank for your keywords too. Filter them out and look at the agencies, directories and publishers left over: those are the sites already sending your kind of buyer somewhere. Export them; the next lesson is what to do with the list.

4. Campaigns and the newsletter

A campaign is a paid ask, an article, a video, a review, broadcast to affiliates who then apply to do it. Public campaigns reach the whole network and, like new listings, go into the affiliate newsletter. Campaigns are mainly an activation tool and Track 3 covers them in full, but they recruit as well: an affiliate who has never heard of you will apply to a campaign that pays for work, and once they have written about you they are your affiliate.