Right now, someone is searching “best [your category]“ and reading whatever article ranks first.
They know what they want; but they don’t know whose to buy yet.
Whether your product is in that top-ranking article or not was decided months ago, by an editor you’ve probably never spoken to.
Affiliate PR is how you get into it. It’s the part of the affiliate channel that works at the consideration stage, where the decision actually gets made, and it’s tracked to the sale like everything else in your program.
That combination is rare. Traditional PR reaches people early but struggles to prove revenue. Most affiliate partners prove revenue easily, but they arrive later, once the customer has already picked a product.
Affiliate PR does both, which is why it’s the fastest-growing part of most programs we run.
At Studio Two, we’ve won more than 250 tracked editorial placements for consumer brands including Penelope Chilvers, Much Better Adventures, Addison Ross and TBCo.
In this guide, we show you how we do it, covering what it is, how it differs from the PR and affiliate work you’re already doing, and how to get started.
Affiliate PR is the practice of earning editorial placements in product round-ups, gift guides, and buying guides, where the links back to the retailer carry affiliate tracking. The publisher earns commission on any sale, the brand reaches customers who are actively researching a purchase, and nobody pays for clicks or impressions.
In plain terms, it’s how your product ends up in the “best beginner telescopes” article that ranks first on Google, and how that placement becomes revenue you can actually attribute.
It’s a hybrid discipline. You pitch like a PR. You measure like a performance marketer.
Traditional PR is built to change what people think about your brand. Affiliate PR is built to reach someone who is about to spend money, and to prove, with a tracked link, what happened next.
In practice, this means:
Both disciplines are worth running. But a traditional PR agency generally can’t tell you whether a placement tracked, whether the article ranks, or whether it sold anything, because it was never built to.
This is the distinction that matters more, and it isn’t about good partners and bad partners.
Discount, cashback, and loyalty partners do a real job. They convert hesitant buyers, they recover abandoned baskets, they hold onto customers who’d otherwise shop elsewhere. Most affiliate programs need them.
But they operate at the bottom of the funnel, close to the transaction. The customer has usually already chosen your product.
Affiliate PR operates several steps earlier, at the point where someone knows they want a wool blanket, or a first model railway, and has no idea whose to buy. That’s why it tends to produce a materially higher new customer rate than the rest of the program.
Traditional PR vs Affiliate Marketing vs Affiliate PR | Traditonal PR | Affiliate Marketing | Affiliate PR |
Funnel Position | Awareness | Conversion | Consideration |
Who You Talk To | News and Features Desks | Networks and Partner Managers | Commercial Content Editors |
Success Metric | Reach, Sentiment | Total Affiliate Revenue, Partner Volume | Revenue Per Placement, New Customer Rate |
Tracked to Sale | No | Yes | Yes |
Shelf Life | Days | Campaign Duration | Years (if the article ranks) |
In short, affiliate PR is more measurable than traditional PR, and more incremental than most of the traditional affiliate marketing channel.
Almost every major publisher now runs a commercial content team, separate from the newsroom, producing product recommendation content monetized through affiliate links.
Four things about how they work should change your approach:
Most brands start by pitching. That’s roughly the fourth thing you should do.
Here’s the order we work in, and what goes wrong when it’s skipped:
Before contacting a single publisher, we make sure the program can receive the traffic.
That means being live on the networks publishers actually use, working deeplinks, an accurate product feed, and a commission rate that’s competitive for the category.
What goes wrong: broken links, out-of-stock hero products, feed prices that don’t match the site. Publishers won’t chase you to fix any of it. They’ll feature someone else.
We search for existing mentions of the brand across round-ups and guides. There are almost always more than the client expects, and a share of them link to the wrong place, a discontinued product, or carry no tracking at all.
What goes wrong when you skip this step: brands chase new coverage before claiming the old. Fixing what exists is faster, cheaper, and tells you which publishers already rate your product.
We search the terms customers use before they’ve picked a brand. Category terms, not brand terms. Then we take the top ten results for each. That list of URLs becomes the target list.
What goes wrong when you skip this step: pitching a title in the abstract. You’re not trying to be “covered by” a publication. You’re trying to be on a specific ranked page.
For each target article, we identify the section, the writer, and the commercial content lead, then check whether they’re already in the program and which network they use.
What goes wrong when you skip this step: teams rely on an old contact list. Relationships matter, but a current map of who owns the specific pages you want matters more.
Most product recommendation content is written by someone who has handled the product. We agree who ships, how fast, and what goes with it: cut-out imagery, price, direct product URL, and a one-line answer to “who is this for.”
What goes wrong when you skip this step: a writer waits a week for a sample, and the piece runs without you.
Short, specific, aimed at a named article. Who the product is for, why it beats the obvious alternative already in their list, and confirmation that a sample is available now.
What goes wrong when you skip this step: “please consider us for coverage.” Commercial editors are filling gaps in specific pieces, not evaluating brands.
We work backward from publication dates, not trading dates. For seasonal content that means outreach months before the period you’re targeting.
What goes wrong when you skip this step: November outreach for Christmas. The slots went weeks ago, and no amount of pitch quality fixes bad timing.
Winning the slot is maybe 40% of the value. The rest is surviving the annual refresh, improving your position within the list, and turning one placement into a standing relationship.
What goes wrong when you skip this step: treating placements as campaigns. The brands that dominate a category aren’t the ones with the best pitch. They’re the ones commercial teams find easiest to work with.
This is the first thing we run for a new client, because it finds revenue that already exists.
A publisher features your product and links to Amazon rather than your own site, because that’s what their audience expects. Fine, until you look at what those links actually do.
Frequently, they point to a third-party seller rather than your own listing. Or a discontinued ASIN. Or a variant you no longer sell. Sometimes the article mentions your brand but links to a competitor in the same guide. Sometimes there’s no tracking at all, so the placement is invisible in your reporting.
Reclamation is the process of auditing existing mentions, finding those cases, and getting them corrected.
It isn’t growth in the usual sense. It’s recovering attribution and revenue you’ve already earned. For brands with a long press history, the audit alone often surfaces more value than the first quarter of new outreach.
Program-level affiliate metrics will hide what’s working here. The following five metrics will provide a better picture of how your affiliate PR is performing:
One caveat to take note of: measure at article level, not publisher level. A single title can host a top-ranking evergreen guide that pays all year and a dozen dead seasonal pages. Averaged together, they tell you nothing.
Hornby Hobbies runs a portfolio of distinct consumer brands, among them Hornby, Scalextric and Airfix, sitting in related but genuinely different categories.
They approached us at Studio Two because they wanted to grow affiliate revenue over peak without leaning harder on discount-led partners.
We treated each brand as a separate editorial proposition rather than running one portfolio-wide playbook. Model railways, slot car racing and scale modeling reach different buyers, rank for different terms and appear in different guides. Each got its own target article list, publisher map and seasonal calendar.
We worked to editorial lead times rather than the retail calendar, getting products in front of commercial content teams ahead of the autumn gift guide writing cycle rather than during the trading period itself.
A +100% uplift in affiliate revenue over peak, supporting the group’s biggest peak growth in recent years.
The structural point matters as much as the number. That growth came from reaching people choosing a hobby gift, not from discounting harder to people who were already buying.
If your affiliate revenue is dominated by discount, cashback, and loyalty partners, better management of those partners won’t fix it.
That’s a partner mix problem, and it needs a different discipline.
Start with the two boring things. Fix your tracking. Audit the coverage you already have.
You can’t sell a placement you can’t measure, and you shouldn’t chase new coverage before you’ve claimed the old.
Shaun Brown is the Founder of Studio Two, a UK affiliate PR agency specializing in editorial placements for consumer brands.
Studio Two has unlocked over £7m in affiliate revenue for clients including Penelope Chilvers, Much Better Adventures, Addison Ross and TBCo, combining editorial outreach, publisher intelligence and Amazon link reclamation to grow the incremental side of the affiliate channel. Connect with Shaun on LinkedIn.
Affiliate PR is the practice of earning editorial placements in product round-ups, gift guides, and buying guides, where the links to the retailer carry affiliate tracking. The publisher earns commission on sales, the brand reaches customers actively researching a purchase, and nobody pays for clicks or impressions. It combines PR outreach with affiliate measurement.
Traditional PR pitches news desks and features editors to shift perception, and reports on reach, coverage volume, and sentiment. Affiliate PR pitches commercial content teams to get products into buying guides, and reports on clicks, conversion and revenue, because the links are tracked. Traditional coverage peaks in days; a buying guide placement can earn for years.
Most affiliate partners like discount sites, cashback, and loyalty operate close to the transaction, after the customer has chosen a product. Affiliate PR operates at the consideration stage, when they’re still deciding what to buy. That’s why it typically delivers a higher new customer rate and a higher average order value than the rest of the program.
Yes. Editorial placements are monetized through affiliate links, so a publisher needs a program to join and a commission to earn. If you have no program, or you’re not on the networks the relevant publishers use, you can win coverage, but you won’t be included in the guides that pay, and you won’t be able to measure any of it.
Usually not. Most placements run on standard commission, so the publisher only earns if a sale happens. Some titles do sell guaranteed inclusion or fixed positions, particularly at peak, and hybrid fee-plus-commission deals exist. Paid options can work, but judge them as media spend rather than affiliate.
Expect a first wave of placements in around two to three months and meaningful revenue in three to six months, depending heavily on where you land in the editorial calendar. Placements in evergreen buying guides then compound, because those articles get refreshed rather than replaced.
Yes, often better than expected. Commercial editors are constantly looking for options their existing list doesn’t cover: a lower price point, a specific use case, a UK-made alternative. A clear answer to “who is this product for” matters more than brand size.
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