How I Stopped Guessing and Started Stealing My Competitors' Affiliate Lists
The Affiliate Channel I Kept Ignoring
For the first three years of my small SaaS, I treated affiliates as an afterthought. I had a referral program page, but it was buried in the footer. I assumed affiliates were for ecommerce or big brands, not for a niche project management tool. Then I looked at my analytics: 40% of my competitor's signups were coming from a handful of content sites I'd never heard of.
That's when I realized affiliate marketing isn't about having a program. It's about knowing who to recruit. And the fastest way to find those people? Look at who's already sending traffic to your competitors.
The Manual Way (Painful but Educational)
I spent two weeks doing this by hand. I'd pull up my competitors' backlink profiles in a free tool, filter for anchor text like "best project management software" or "vs asana", then visit each site to see if they had affiliate links. I found maybe 30 sites that way. Then I'd guess which ones actually converted. It was slow, and I missed a ton.
The problem is that backlinks aren't always affiliate links. A mention in a roundup could be editorial. A banner in a sidebar could be a paid placement. I needed to know which sites were actively monetizing with affiliate links, and ideally how much traffic they were sending.
A Shorter Path: AffiliateSpy
Eventually, I found a tool called AffiliateSpy that does exactly that. You plug in a competitor's domain, and it shows you the affiliates that are actively sending them traffic — with estimated percentages and contact info. No more guessing which backlinks are real partnerships.
I ran three competitors through it. Within an hour, I had a list of 80 sites that were actively promoting my competitors. Some were obvious (the usual roundup blogs), but many were surprising: a niche newsletter for remote teams, a YouTube channel with 10k subscribers, even a podcast that mentioned my competitor in a sponsored segment. I never would have found those by crawling backlinks.
What I Did With the Data
I didn't just spam them with a generic "join my affiliate program" email. I sorted the list by relevance and traffic, then personalized each outreach.
- For the newsletter, I offered a custom discount code for their readers and a lifetime 30% commission.
- For the YouTube channel, I sent a free premium account and a script outline for a comparison video.
- For the podcast, I offered a sponsorship deal, not an affiliate link — because they didn't do affiliate.
The response rate was about 20%, and within two months, affiliates accounted for 15% of my new signups. Not huge, but it's compounding. And I didn't have to spend a dime on ads.
The Reality Check
Not every affiliate you find will join you. Some are exclusive to your competitor. Some won't like your product. But you only need a handful of good ones. The list is a starting point, not a silver bullet.
I also use it to monitor my own program — see which affiliates are active, which ones are sending traffic, and which ones are just sitting there with a link on a dead page. It's like having a dashboard for your indirect sales channel.
If you're a small SaaS trying to grow without a huge ad budget, stop guessing. Go see who's already doing the work for your competitors. Then go ask them to do it for you.