Just launched an affiliate program. How do you promote it?

I think a few things have helped the Transistor affiliate program:

• We offer 25% of revenue ongoing. This is quite a bit more generous than other affiliate programs in the podcasting space, making it attractive to high-quality affiliates.
• We've been sharing our story and journey on our podcast which has motivated some affiliates to join up (because they want to be a part of our story!)
• Instead of targeting "affiliates" we've focused on partners who are focused on the podcasting space or are focused on a niche where we're getting a lot of traction.

At Velocity, we've had success with our affiliate program via three strategies:

1. Consultants in our space - Velocity is an Asana reporting product, so Asana consultants will recommend it to their clients.
2. Thought leaders in our space - Productivity content creators can post about Velocity, including their referral link.
3. Users - We include a link to our affiliate program on our marketing site, in our product, and and sometimes in our newsletter, and our users will sometimes join the affiliate program and send us referrals.

Affiliate programmes are best sold by existing users/customers who can be champions of the product/service - have you reached out to existing customers? In the same approach of 'word-of-mouth' marketing, it's basically that with incentives.

I haven't done an affiliate program myself as a creator but have recently participated in an affiliate program and thought the way the creator reached out was good.

I had been interacted with the author of a book for a while on Twitter. He provided value in tweets to questions I had. I eventually bought his book because it was a topic I was interested in and a way to say thank you for all the help and value he provided.

Eventually a few months later he started an affiliate program for his book. He reached out to a select number of customers who bought his book and had good relationship with him and asked them if they would like to join their affiliate program. I said yes, because A) I enjoy his work, B) I got value out of his book C) I didn't mind sharing it on my own site to my audience.

Perhaps you can reach out to current customers if you haven't already done so and see if they'll tap into their audience or reach and do the same in evangelizing your product and signing up as affiliate partners.