The essence of affiliate programs is to exchange the audiences with some other projects. You need to find non-competing projects that have a similar target audience who might not know about your community yet and negotiate with them to direct their audience to your platform in exchange for something else. When panthers start sending their audience to your platform you need to make sure that everyone who comes to your platform does some actions.
Partners do not need to have their own dedicated community platform; it is totally fine if they host their community on some third party platform. For example, if a potential partner does blogging on some popular site.
It is easier to find partners among projects that are trying to grow as well, large companies and non-profit organizations. The reason is that projects under active development use every opportunity to grow their product, whereas large companies have enough resources for altruism and helping those whose missions are aligned with theirs.
Always pitch your community to potential partners from the perspective of the mission and benefit to the public that your community brings. Communities at an early stage are rarely of commercial interest to others. Mostly partners will help you grow the community for the same reasons as your users do: because of its mission.
Finding a decision maker in another company is a difficult task for an outsider. You need to try to look for people in your community who are in some way connected to a potential partner. If there are such people, ask them for an introduction to the decision maker.
Here are a few examples of good affiliate programs for a community at the early stage:
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Conducting contests and competitions, when the essence of the competition is some activity in your community, while a partner announces the contest among its audience and directs it to your platform.
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Placing advertising posters in public spaces where your audience is. At the entrance to the office, in the cafeteria, on the general notice board, etc.
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Exchange of links, or so called “information partnership”, for building up backlink mass and stream the users from the partner’s platform to yours.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.