A few days ago Shawn Collins wrote a good post on recruiting targeted affiliates, in the comments to which I suggested several more me methods of affiliate recruitment. Among these methods I have mentioned affiliate program directories as one of the ways to get a word about an affiliate program out. I personally have never measured the success of recruiting affiliates through program directories. However, every time I do a comparative affiliate marketing analysis for a new client, I see affiliate program directories ranking extremely well in nearly every niche. Here’s an example:

Take “credit card affiliate program”  and variations of this key phrase, and you’ll see that  there is a total of over 5,000 people searching for these every month on Google:

When I search for this key phrase just now, here is what I see on the first page of matches (affiliate program directories are highlighted):

…and the same can be seen with nearly every [niche]+[affiliate program] key phase typed in (anywhere between 3 and 5 of the top 10 results belong to affiliate program directories).

Additionally, I see affiliate program directories having fairly good (and improving) Alexa rankings.

Back to Shawn Collins’ post. Commenting on my suggestions, a fellow-OPM, Debbie Carney challenged the idea that affiliate program directories carry much value in affiliate recruitment. She wrote that “even if affiliate directories show up in searches, I don’t think an affiliate has ever joined a program I run because of being listed in one.” Since I have never measured this myself, I have decided to put together a poll to find out what affiliates really think/do.

Here are the results of that poll as they look at the time of this post:

The above data made me conclude that affiliates are, after all, using them, but definitely not the majority of affiliates are.

Then last night when I got a hold of the new AffStat Report, another important piece of the puzzle was found. Here’s one of the pie charts from AffStat:

So, 18% of affiliates still do find out about affiliate programs to join from “affiliate directories”.

So, are affiliate program directories dying? Probably not.

If you haven’t yet voted on my above-quoted poll, I’d certainly love to have you cast your vote as well. Many thanks in advance.