How to Use Affonso to Recruit Your Competitors' Affiliates

The short answer: if you can name three competitors and your program has fewer active partners than you want, Affonso's $15 Launch plan (yearly billing, $180) gives you 15 discovery credits a month, enough to search 3 competitors on 5 channels every month, but it includes no email lookups, so contact-hunting at volume belongs on Growth at $39 billed monthly or $29 a month billed yearly (checked on 26 October 2026 on the pricing page). The steps: price your searches, run competitor searches channel by channel, shortlist the people already reviewing your category, look up emails for the strongest websites, set a Discovery agent to keep looking, export the shortlist to your outreach tool, and measure joins per credit.

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The people most likely to promote you already promote someone like you: they have the article, the audience and the habit of affiliate links. Affonso's competitor search article calls them the lowest-hanging fruit, and this guide is about picking it with care. What the product is and costs overall is in the Affonso glossary entry.

Work out the credits before searching:

1. The cost of one sweep. Credits are (keywords + competitors) x channels, per the Discovery agent guide. For example, 3 competitors on websites, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit and TikTok is (0 + 3) x 5 = 15 credits, exactly Launch's monthly allocation. The trial gives 5 credits in total, one competitor on five channels.
2. The lists you already hold. Your current affiliates, your customers who write about your category, and the competitors sales loses to. Start with the competitor named most often in lost deals.
3. The measure that matters. Partners who join and send a first referral, divided by credits spent. Results found is a vanity count.

What you need

• An Affonso account with a program and a connected payment provider. You can configure and test on the trial, but a paid plan is needed to make the program public, per the cancellation article.
• Three to five competitor URLs; the competitor search article recommends running 3 to 5 rather than one.
• An outreach tool for the emails, such as Instantly or Smartlead, which Affonso's outreach article names.

Step 1: Run a competitor search

Go to Discovery, click New Search and enter a competitor's website, per the search article. Searches are saved under Discovery History and named by channel and term, for example YouTube · affiliate marketing, so you can tell two runs apart. Start with websites: they are the only results where email lookup works later.

Step 2: Read the results like an editor

Each result shows the site or creator, how closely it matches, an estimate of reach and, when found, an email. The competitor search article says to favour detailed reviews and comparisons over passing mentions, people who publish in your niche regularly, and audiences that comment and share. Click Add to Shortlist only for those. A short shortlist saves credits in Step 3.

Step 3: Find emails for the strongest websites

On a website result, click Find Email. A lookup that returns an address costs one email credit; a lookup with no result is refunded, and the same website looked up again within 30 days is free, per the email lookup article. YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and other social results have no Find Email button, so contact creators through the channel itself. Email credits start on Growth: 50 a month, or 600 up front on yearly billing.

Step 4: Let a Discovery agent keep looking

Under Agents, click New agent, name it, and click Analyze on your website so Affonso fills in a one-sentence product description and the audience; edit both, pick a language and exclusions, and add at least one keyword or competitor, per the agent wizard article. Auto-approve stays off during setup, and that is the right default. The agent's Overview lists found, accepted and rejected counts and the matches waiting for Accept or Reject, according to the agent overview article. A person accepts or rejects each match; the agent proposes, nobody is contacted.

Step 5: Export and write to each person

Under Discovery, Shortlist, click Export for a CSV with website, name and email, and load it into your outreach tool. Affonso's outreach article suggests 3 to 4 emails over two weeks, each referring to the person's own content and saying plainly what the commission is.

Before the first send, check the law, because the addresses came from a lookup, not from the people themselves. Article 14 of the GDPR requires that someone whose data you obtained elsewhere is told who you are, why you hold the data and its source, at the latest at the time of your first communication with them. Put that in the first email, not a privacy page.

Step 6: Open the inbound door

In Marketplace Settings, switch on Listed in Marketplace, write a description of at least 100 characters, choose the category and complete the audience profile, per the listing article. Choose private access if you want to review each applicant's profile and channels; public access approves them automatically.

An agent step over MCP

On Growth or higher, Claude can drive the same searches through Affonso's MCP server. The Finder tools reference lists tools to start a competitor search on one channel, list its results and add a result to the shortlist. Ask Claude to run your three competitors on websites, then list the results that look like reviews or comparisons, and to shortlist none of them yet. Read the list, then tell it which to save. The same reference warns that each unique search term costs a credit and that searches whose results were shortlisted are not refunded, so the human check comes before the save, not after.

What Affonso's docs warn about

• Email lookups on everything. The email lookup article says to shortlist first and look up only top candidates, and to check the website for a contact page before spending a credit.
• Testing on the live program. There is no sandbox mode; revenue in a separate test program counts toward the plan's cap, so reset it after testing, per the sandbox guide.
• Agent pages are not the search page. Discovery agents live under Agents; the older New Search flow sits under Discovery.

Once the shortlist works

The trial hands over 5 discovery credits for the whole trial, not a monthly refill, per the trial credits article: enough to prove the search returns real people, and the searches that fill a pipeline start once a plan is paid, which on Launch means a year paid in advance.

Measure after six weeks: shortlisted, contacted, replied, joined, first referral. If joins per credit are low, change the competitors before you buy credits; if joins are fine but first referrals are not, the problem is activation, and the program's terms or onboarding need work, not more searches.

FAQ

How many credits does a search use?

One per keyword or competitor per channel, so (keywords + competitors) x channels, per the Discovery agent guide. AI-suggested keywords are free until you select them.

Can I find emails for YouTube creators?

No. Email lookup only applies to website opportunities; social results such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok do not show Find Email, per the email lookup article.

Does the Discovery agent approve partners by itself?

Not unless you turn it on. Auto-approve is off when the agent is created and can be switched on later in its Settings tab, per the agent wizard article.