Affiliate Recruitment Outreach

Affiliate Recruitment Outreach

Draft the copy and sequence plan an affiliate program manager uses to actively recruit new affiliates. This skill owns active outreach only.

Affiliate recruitment has no canonical named industry framework. The only affiliate-native vocabulary with broad adoption is the active/passive recruitment split, coined by practitioner Geno Prussakov:

• _Passive_ recruitment makes the program findable.
• _Active_ recruitment reaches out to identified prospects.

Vendor and course models circulating in this space (five-P flywheels, "perfect partner" lists, 20-60-20 splits) are individual commercial programs, not industry standards. Never present one as a standard.

Interview

Ask before drafting anything. One question per message; offer multiple-choice answers when possible. Skip any question the user already answered.

• Is the program B2B SaaS or B2C ecommerce/DTC? (Or both - then segment everything downstream.)
• What makes the product worth promoting - the value prop an affiliate's audience would actually care about?
• What is the already-decided commission, exactly: rate/model, cookie or attribution window, payout terms? This skill communicates the commission; it never designs or adjusts it.
• Which affiliate categories does this list target? (Content/review/comparison sites, coupon/cashback/loyalty, newsletter operators, communities, YouTube/podcast, consultants/agencies/integration partners, existing customers, competitors' current affiliates.)
• Where did the prospect list come from, and how warm is it? (Competitor backlink analysis, marketplace directory, event contacts, existing customers, inbound-adjacent, purchased.)
• Where are the prospects located? (US / EU / UK / Canada / mixed - this drives the legal regime for each segment.)
• What is the brand voice? (Formal, peer-casual, playful - or point to an example message.)
• Which CTA can you actually honor: apply link, pre-approved account, reply-for-more-info, or a booked call?
• Who signs the email, and from which address?
• By what date must recruited affiliates be producing? (A live date, next quarter, or no fixed date.)
• Is this a one-off win - a launch, a seasonal push - or a compounding channel you will still be running next year?
• What is the effort ceiling: manager hours per week, and what is already owned? (An existing affiliate roster, a licensed backlink or publisher-discovery tool, a retained agency, an existing customer list.)

The last three questions decide every ranking downstream - sourcing categories, discovery methods, tier attention split, cadence, CTA - so ask them before drafting, never at the moment of choosing.

• A hard near date promotes the fast rungs: competitor-affiliate and SERP sourcing, the 5-touch cadence, the reply-for-info CTA. It demotes complementary vendors and agency/integration partners, which pay a quarter later.
• A compounding mandate reverses that: complementary vendors, agencies, and podcast partners move up, and the long tier-1 pursuit becomes affordable.
• A low effort ceiling deletes the rungs needing coordination or procurement rather than demoting them - name which ones you dropped and why.
• Anything already owned re-ranks on top of all of this: a licensed backlink tool promotes link-intersect sourcing, a retained agency promotes the 12-attempt cadence, an existing roster of dormant partners beats a fresh tier-1 build.

Every ranking in this skill and its references is a default, not a law - it shifts with the segment, the list, and who executes it. Re-rank against the answers before presenting anything, and say out loud what moved.

Workflow

1. Run the Interview; collect every answer before touching the list.
2. Qualify each prospect: audience fit first, then traffic/authority, then evidence of existing monetization. Treat "already promotes a competitor" as a positive signal, not a conflict. See references/prospect-sourcing-and-qualification.md.
3. Run a manual brand-safety screen - trademark bidding, coupon-injection/adware, spam sites - and drop failures before any outreach.
4. Verify prospect sites yourself if you can browse the web; otherwise ask the user for metrics from their backlink/link-intersect or publisher-discovery tooling.
5. Tier the survivors (1/2/3) per the sourcing reference; tier drives personalization depth, cadence length, and the order the week's hours are spent - tier 1 to exhaustion first, then down.
6. Segment the list by jurisdiction; apply each segment's outreach regime. Flag Canadian and German prospects - no cold email to them without a documented consent basis. See references/outreach-compliance.md.
7. Brainstorm the pitch angle before drafting: enter brainstorming mode and propose 2-3 candidate angles with trade-offs and a recommendation, in the manager's own vocabulary (prospect list, pitch angle, sequence, activation).
8. Ask brainstorming questions one at a time; write no message until the manager explicitly picks an angle.
9. Draft the first touch per tier and segment, following references/pitch-anatomy.md. Every message references one specific, verifiable thing about that prospect - never fabricated familiarity.
10. Draft the follow-up sequence with rotating angles and a breakup touch, following references/sequence-and-cadence.md.
11. Run your preferred humanizer skill over every drafted message. Never ship raw first-draft model output as final - it reads as the mass template affiliates delete on sight.
12. Self-check every message against the Quality gate below; iterate until every item passes on every message.
13. Present the plan section by section - tiers, angle, first touch, sequence, tracking - and validate each with the user before finalizing.
14. Hand off the full artifact (next section) including the pipeline-tracking plan.
15. If your harness has persistent memory, memorize the approved angle, brand voice, commission facts, and prospect tiers - later runs then skip straight past the interview.

What to lead with - and what to withhold

Lead with one audience-fit reason: why this program fits _their_ audience, stated in one sentence. Then the economics, stated plainly - affiliates evaluate economics early, so make the commission easy to find rather than burying it.

• B2B SaaS: lead with recurring commission and the cookie/attribution window; add one proof the product converts (conversion rate, review credibility). CTA skews reply-for-info or booked call.
• B2C ecommerce/DTC: lead with order value, earnings-per-click if known, and seasonal/promo fit. CTA skews apply link or pre-approved account.
• Identical for both: personalization depth, the one-ask rule, message length, follow-up discipline, and every legal constraint. Only the proof points, CTA, and incentive framing diverge.

Withhold, always:

• The feature dump.
• Unearned-riches earnings math ("you could make $X/month").
• Long text.
• Cliché "partnership proposal" framing.

Documented practitioner guidance is unanimous that overlong first emails and hypothetical earnings calculations kill replies.

Expected output

Deliver one structured artifact:

RECRUITMENT OUTREACH PLAN - <program>, <date>
Prospect tiers : tier 1/2/3 segments, counts, qualification rationale per tier
Legal segments : jurisdiction buckets + regime applied to each
Chosen angle   : approved pitch angle + why it beat the alternatives
First touch    : subject + body, one variant per tier/segment
Sequence       : table - touch / day / channel / angle / message summary
Breakup touch  : final message + what would reopen the thread later
Tracking plan  : pipeline stages, where tracked, review cadence, KPIs + targets

Cadence

Two candidate cadences for affiliate recruitment: