How to find influencers for your affiliate campaign?

1. What are influencers?
Influencers are individuals who affect purchase decisions of others in a market because of their authority/knowledge or their position, relationship with their audiences.
Influencers are normally found on Social media because that’s where they can easily spread their power and have the most influence, however, many other kinds of influencers will be mentioned in the next part.
Influencers have built their reputation for their knowledge and expertise about a particular topic. They make regular posts about that topic on their preferred channels and gain the attraction of audiences who pay attention to these posts in form of engagements and actual purchase decisions. 
Depending on your business market that you should choose proper influencer types to work with:
1.
Social media influencers: those that share their post on social media to attract their followers’ attention in form of engagement (like, share, comment). The most popular social channels these days are Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
2.
Blogger and Journalist: Those that share their content in form of blogs and articles. Much like social media influencers, bloggers share about a product and add their endorsement in a blog post that is then shared via Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
3.
Business expert: In case your product aims to a specialized and professional market, you may consider contacting industry experts in your market to raise their voice for your business. This category of influencers is used mainly by B2B brands. 
4.
Advocate Customers: Those who are already fans of your brand will be most likely to bring their positive impression of your brand to share with their peers. Those micro-influencers have their significant reach, which helps to boost your brand’s visibility. They’re also considered knowledgeable in their respective niches, which results in the fact that your target audience will deem their recommendations trustworthy.
2. Why work with influencers?
Influencers are those who get a high reputation on a specific market, and people tend to trust their friends, relatives and people they admire than the selling company. Buyers are more likely to reach for reviews from people they know before actually buying the products so the voice of influencers would be powerful in the decision-making process.  
Especially for social media influencers, social media are playing a more and more vital role in the daily life of each individual, one-in-three people in the world use social media, and more than two-thirds of all internet users do. Needless to say how regular we are to engage with social media on a daily basis.
Having an influencer to be your brand ambassador, you would get a higher chance to approach potential customers.
3. Choose what type of influencers to work with:
Depending on your market characteristics should you pick out which kind of ambassadors you want to collaborate. Initially, you should answer the following questions:
Where does your customer hang out? Put yourself in customers’ shoes. Imagine if you are someone who is on demand for the product your business offers, where would you search for or which site would you access to get more information. If you want to sell a medical product, Snapchat or Twitter may not be the ideal channels to approach your potential customers.
What is your goal? Do you want to boost brand awareness, encourage current customers or other specific purposes, your campaign goal plays a vital role in how and where you would execute your influencer project.
Where could your product be best illustrated? It strongly depends on the product itself to choose the promotion channels. An ideal influencer for cooking equipment would be a well-known housewife rather than a celebrity that barely cooks.
Last but not least, what is your budget? Answering this question you would  know the types of influencers that are affordable with your current financial status. A promotional video on Youtube would take a lot more effort to produce than a picture on Instagram, so you should expect to pay more to the content creator that needs to invest more resources on the same product.
4. How to find influencers?
Now that you have a clear idea of your suitable influencers, it’s time to start looking. You can choose one of the following channels to explore or combine them to find the best ambassadors for your brand.
On social media
Most influencers will work in multiple channels, and social media is a must-have.
The most popular social channels are Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
You can search on the search bar of those tool with keywords of your niche market, especially, search with hashtags of your business to see who’ve posted about your brand or look up the relevant suggested keyword to find influencers that post about your industry.
On Instagram, when you click to follow an influencer, a list of relevant people will be shown below, you can take them all into consideration.
Besides, do a quick research on your customers to see who their favorite influencers are, who they follow and who they normally come to when having intention to buy an item of your brand.
Also, the recommendation from influencers themselves would be extremely useful. Once you establish your collaboration with one influencer, ask him/her to recommend others, social media network would do a lot with your influencer marketing campaign.
Search engine
Everybody uses search engines like Google to look for things, but there are some tips when using Google to look for the right influencers of your business.
Using Google to find influencers on Instagram
Try to search site:instagram.com “k followers” on Google
The site: instagram helps to generate all the users on Instagram while k followers is how Google filter accounts that have more than 1000 follow, which is good with your influencer searching. Or you can change k followers to 100k followers when looking for those who have more than 100.000 followers.
To find niche influencers for your market, type the niche keyword next to the original query, such as “food bloggers”
Moreover, you can add location keyword or other filter terms to find influencer in your need.
Using Google to find influencers on Facebook
Similarly, you can conduct the same kind of search on Facebook with this query;
site:facebook.com “1000...5000 likes” home + Niche market keyword
while 100..5000 looks for results that have any number between that range. You can change the values to suit the size of the company you’re looking for.
The last string Home is to make sure the results coming up would be pages. 
Using influencer platforms
There are many platforms that support you find influencers for your buniness:
​Social Baker​
You can use Social Baker tool to find proper influencers on Instagram.
All you need to do is filling information about Region and Interest, the tool will generate influencers with over 100,000 followers with their details profile. However, you may need to upgrade to use all features and be able to contact influencers.
​Influenex ​
Influenex is a helpful tool in case you want to do business with Youtubers, it helps you find, analyze and manage Youtube influencers, search filter is quite powerful because beside basic search categories such as category, area or subscribers, it allows you filter by Engagement rate, average video views,...
The result generated will include Youtube channel details and Influenex score.
​Buzz sumo​
Using BuzzSumo’s Influencer Marketing tool, you can look for influencers related to your industry and your topic. 
You just need to fill in your topic and receive a list of bloggers, influencers, companies, and journalists who mentioned the topic in their bio or recently shared content related to the topic.
Besides, to get unlimited searches and features that help your search more efficiently, upgrade to the paid version.
​Grough high​
GroupHigh is an essential content marketing tool that allows you to quickly find any blogger’s contact information. This tool filters blog results by content, SimilarWeb traffic, SEO authority, social following, language and location. You can also see blogs that have already linked to your competitors or your brand
​Influencity​
This tool helps you approach relevant influencers based on the type of content they produce and the type of followers they have.
This tool can also allow you to keep track of influencer performance on various social channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter
​Fiverr​
Fiverr is a service marketplace for businesses. You can search for proper influencers and read their descriptions to see if they are the ones for your brand. Influencers here work on various platforms, they also publish their pricing details on the platform so you can easily compare with others and consider if that person matches your campaign budget.
Find out from your customer
Learning from your customer is the best practices, here are some tips you can apply to know your customers better:
Do a survey to ask where they know your business from: if they know from an influencer, ask for the name. One customer knows from that influencer means that other customers may too.
Use Google analytics to know the referral traffic: Use data from Google Analytics to analyze your traffic, you would be surprised that your traffic comes from sources that you haven’t heard about.
Interview personally: Every business should maintain a long-term relationship with customers, not only can you grow sales stably but you can also get a lot of helpful advices from them.
5. Contact influencers
Done with finding influencers? Keep in mind that in the research period, you should list as many influencers as possible.
You can contact them depending on their channels and popularity:
Personal inbox: 
Personally send message to your influencers would be effective but just in case that influencer is not a celebrity or have a huge amount of followers (because imagine the number of inbox they will get every day, your offer could be easily ignored)
Networking event: 
Joining a networking event of your industry would be an ideal opportunity to not only find but also connect to well-known people on your market.
You can approach them and make the offer directly or since the influencers have an impression about you before, it would be easier to make the offer later.
Introduction from a mutual friend: 
In case you know a friend that can introduce you to an influencer, that would be the best. Because people tend to pay more intention on people they know having common points with them ( and in this case: a mutual friend)
Email: 
Send an email would be a professional way to get in touch with a well-known person, but just like inbox, you have no idea how many emails they get each day, so it would be better if you two meet before and that influencer is aware of your invitation before sending follow-up emails.
Follow and engage: 
You need to follow influencers to know them more before actually inviting them to your team, while viewing their posts, you can make regular engagements, they might notice and you can talk easier later.
In conclusion, working with influencers is an interesting but time-consuming process that you need to put a lot of effort if you are serious with your affiliate marketing campaign.
Hope using these above tips, you could find the right influencers for your brand and earn big with your influencer marketing plan.