Affiliate Recruiting

Hello everybody, me and my partner are building a freelance marketplace, but it works completely differently than sites like Upwork or Freelancer. Can't really say how and why we work differently than those site but we think it's a competitive advantage we have even if we are not directly competing with those sites of course.

We are about to launch in a couple of months and we are thinking about different marketing strategies.

I want to try something that i have never tried in the past. I want to recruit affiliates that will promote our service. We are a membership site and we are planning to offer a 50% recurrent commission to all our affiliates.

We have decided that we are not going to develop our own in house affiliate program but we are going to sign up as merchants on ShareaSale, for several reasons.
I am not expecting much from signing up on Shareasale. Yes, we will probably get applications from shareasale affiliates but i think that to find really good and active affiliates we would have to go and look somewhere else.

So i am thinking of course about reaching this people on social media, Youtube and our VAs's are also scraping Google with specific kws to find this peoples.

So Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Youtube and Google, probably Instagram, Reddit, Medium and Quora as well.

To my question. Do you know the best places where to find potential affiliates (people that talk about growing small to medium size businesses, people that talk about expanding your design/seo agencies, people that talk about hiring, recruiting and managing staff)?
Are there some cool forums related to this topics or for example a particular Facebook group you would suggest for us to find this people?

Also would like to know if someone has experience trying to market their business through affiliates. I have done a little affiliate marketing myself in the past but is not my thing, also this would be really different being on the other side as a merchant. Would like to know what has been your experience so far, howmany affiliates you have, how many of those are active, how much traffic do they drive to your site on average and things like that.

I know that recruiting affiliates might be a hard route, you have to recruit them, involve them, wake up the silent affiliates and maintain the active ones happy but if it works i think it can do wonders.

Looking for suggestions about recruiting affiliates and where to find them.


Thanks