One of the most important jobs of an affiliate manager is to build strong relationships with their affiliates. But how do you do it? That’s the question we’ll be exploring in today’s episode. I’ll be sharing my top tips and strategies for building long-lasting relationships with your affiliates that will help you scale your affiliate program for the long-term. So whether you’re a seasoned affiliate manager or just starting out, listen up because this episode is powerful!

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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyEmail Marketing vs. Social Media Advertising: Which is More Effective? Insights from Igor KheifetsHow to double your affiliate commissions in 30 days or less

How to Use a Challenge for Affiliate Marketing: How Entrepreneurs on Fire Made More than $250,000 in One Affiliate Launch

10 Lessons I Learned Launching a Bestselling Book

Affiliate Profile: How Holly Homer Went from $0 to $3500 in Affiliate Commissions in Her 2nd Promotion

Listener Q&A: Finding Affiliates, What’s Working in Affiliate Recruiting, Email Templates, and More

How to Create Recurring Affiliate Revenue Promoting Membership Sites

How to Build Strong Relationships with Your AffiliatesOne of the most important jobs of an affiliate manager is to build strong relationships with their affiliates. How do you do it? That’s the question we’ll be exploring in today’s episode.

I’ll be sharing my top tips and strategies for building long-lasting relationships with your affiliates that will help you scale your affiliate program for the long term. So whether you’re a seasoned affiliate manager, you’re just starting out. Listen up, because this episode is powerful.

So we’re talking today about the importance of relationships, the importance of relationships as it pertains to running an affiliate program and connecting with your affiliates. I share a lot here about strategies. If you look at the last few episodes, ten lessons I learned launching a best-selling book, How to Use a Challenge for Affiliate Marketing, we did A Day in the Life of an Affiliate Manager.

We talked about strategies to turn your inactive affiliates into your best partners and how to solve some of the biggest challenges in your affiliate program, how to double your affiliate commissions in 30 days or less. All of those things, right? These are all things we’ve talked about over the last couple of months.

Those are strategies that really have to do with direct income-type things. And what we’re talking about today, it isn’t quantifiable. It doesn’t have a direct like, if you activate 20% of your inactive affiliates, I can guarantee you your revenue is going to go up 5 to 10% overnight, might go up 20%.

If you apply what I taught and how to double your affiliate commissions, I can guarantee you you are going to double your affiliate commissions or more. Today doesn’t have that. Now, there’s an instinctive element to what I’m talking about today, though, when I say have a better relationship with your affiliates, I think there’s an underlying assumption, though, that that’s going to improve your revenue.

One of my favorite quotes from all time is from Jeffrey Gitomer, the sales trainer, and I might butcher this a little bit, but says, “All things being equal, people want to do business with their friends”. And that makes sense. Guess what the second part of the quote is, all things not being equal, people still want to do business with their friends. We’re all like that. We want to do business with our friends.

There are many products that I buy that I could buy for slightly cheaper, but I buy for my friend. Now, part of that is selfish. I want to get the product that, yeah, it costs 10% more, so maybe I’ll pay $200 instead of $180, but I know that I’m going to get better service for that extra $20.

That’s obvious. There’s a selfish element, but the other thing is it’s easier, just easier to do business with your friends. And I want to make my friends happy.

So sometimes I’m not going to buy something I don’t need from a friend. Just to be clear, I don’t roll that way. Like, I’ve bought books to help them out, and maybe I don’t need the book, but I’ll give it to somebody who does.

Okay, that’s an example where I would but generally speaking, I’m not going to spend more than about $100 on something I don’t need. But if it’s something I need, I’ll spend a little bit more to buy for my friend because of that relationship. That’s the power of relationships, the power of being able to connect with people and really forge that relationship.

That’s what we’re talking about today. The good news is you aren’t born with a disability. That’s the good news. Nobody is born with a disability. The bad news is nobody is born with a disability. The good news is you can learn it. The bad news is no one really teaches this in terms of affiliates.

There are classics, classic books that I’ve read over the years off the top of my head, how to Win Friends and Influence People, one of the greatest books of all time, all the books from Jeffrey Gitomer, who I quoted earlier, influenced by Robert Childini. I could pull up my phone and just go through.

And there are dozens of books that I’ve gone through that I’ve read through over the years, many of which I read back in the early 2000’s to late 2000’s that formed the crux that formed the foundation of what I’m talking about today. Obviously, we’re going to talk about social media, and Dale Carnegie didn’t talk about social media. He didn’t talk about that.

But he talked about the principles that I’m going to base today’s lessons on. I’m going to include a link to those books. By the way, my Recommended Reading page, you can go grab all of them there.

But today, how in today’s world do we build those long-lasting relationships that transcend just a financial transaction? Ultimately, everything I’m sharing with you today will result in more sales. Will you be able to quantify it? No.

Will you be able to say, of the 16 things I’m saying, that number four made you $1 million, but number five only made you 70,000 and number eight didn’t move? Then I don’t know.

I don’t know how that’s going to work, but I’ve got 16 ways that I want to share with you today. So let’s jump in here:

Number one, number one thing you got to do to develop these relationships with your affiliates is you got to take it past the affiliate manager or merchant or CEO/affiliate.

You got to become friends. Think about how do you become friends with somebody. A lot of times we become friends with people. I think of my best friend in the world. We became friends kind of by accident. You could call it divine, divine timing.

But he was on a practice team at a golf course, and I was on a practice team, and he was annoying me, and I walked away from him. It’s the truth. He wanted to talk, and I was like, dude, I’m warming up for my round. Like, we’re at a tournament. I don’t talk. I’m focused for the next hour.

I’m focused until the round begins, and then I’m focused for the next four and a half hours. I saw him, like, six weeks later, and I was in a place where I could talk, and we talked. The next thing you know, we’re traveling to golf tournaments together.

Next thing you know, he’s best man in my wedding. Those are the type of things that just if he hadn’t shown up today, we wouldn’t have been friends. But when I break it down and look at it further, how did we become friends?

Because he showed a genuine interest in me, and I showed a genuine interest in him. So show a genuine interest in your affiliates as people get to know them, know their kids names. Don’t you dare talk to somebody for the fifth time and say, how’s your wife?

How are the kids? Yeah, if they’ve got six kids, you might not remember all their names but don’t say those things. Know their kids names, know their spouse’s name, know what’s important to them.

Where do they go to college? Are they a fan? Like, I have a friend of mine went to the same college as my dad, wake forest, and we always talk, wake forest sports on every call.

I had an affiliate back in late 2005 through about 2008 for a company that I ran back then called hometown quotes. And this affiliate’s name was Alberto. Alberto Canas got to know each other.

He went to wake forest and graduated a few years before my dad went to wake forest. I grew up a wake forest fan, and it just so happened that in 2006, wake forest had a historic season. I think they went ten and two that year in football. They won the ACC championship. They went to the orange bowl, and it was, like, the story of the year. They actually made a movie out of it called the fifth quarter.

It’s a really cool movie, and we were going through that together. So he and I would talk every week on Mondays, so we would relive the game. Well, if you didn’t go, if you didn’t follow their sports team, that’s okay. We should still know it. You should know who they root for. You should reach out when their team wins a big game.

You should be looking for those things. I got so many messages from people that are important in my life. After Tennessee, which is my alma mater, so my dad went to wake forest. I’m still a wake forest fan. But I’m obviously a Tennessee fan. After they beat Alabama, those people get my business.

You should know their birthdays. And don’t you dare post on their Facebook wall wishing them a happy birthday. Know you at the very least, send them a text. You call and leave a voicemail and sing to them. Take it past just affiliate manager and affiliate. Take it past transactional into a genuine relationship by showing genuine interest.

You got to know those things. You got to get to know them. Use the research that you can, Google them. It does not take much to learn that I like Tennessee, that I went to Tennessee, that I like Wake Forest. It does not take much to know that I’m a huge Nashville SC fan.

It does not take much to know that. As I’m recording this episode, it’s really hard for me to focus because I’m trying to fit this into a very small window. I’m probably going to record this in two parts because I want to get back to watching the Manchester City Arsenal game because I’m a Man City fan.

So by the way, they’re up one nil right now as I’m recording this, that’ll tell you when I’m recording this, Wednesday, April 26. That’ll tell you when I’m recording this. And if they win, I’m going to go crazy. I’m going to be excited. You should know that about me if I’m going to be your affiliate, so that you can say, whoa, what a game. So that’s number one.

Number two, communicate regularly. Regular communication is absolutely essential to building strong relationships with your affiliates. The basics, you got to keep them updated on new products. You got to keep them updated on new promotions, any changes to the promotions, right? Those are the basics. You got to be available to answer their questions.

Provide support when needed, but be in touch with them regularly. Almost everything I’m going to say today keeps going back to number one, which is Transcend, the affiliate manager, affiliate relationship. So regular communication, when you’ve got new stuff, let them know.

And for your top affiliates, Transcend, that just basic blanket email. Send them a DM. Send them a text and say, hey, do you see my announcement about the contest? Let them know about that.

Number three, make your affiliate program fun. I will never forget. I was talking with Kyle Young, one of my dearest friends in the online marketing space, and he was the operations manager for Jeff Goins.

We were running Jeff Goins’s affiliate program at the time, and he said, I want to make this launch be so fun for our affiliates. They will tell everyone about it, and begged to promote again. And prior to that, I’d been running affiliate programs for ten years, and I never thought about that.

Yeah, I’d made them fun, but it never occurred to me that it might have an impact on results. And so I started looking at the past. I was like, when our program was fun, we got better results.

Now, I wrote a post years ago. I’m going to share a little bit of it here, but I shared this acronym for FUN. Like, how do we make an affiliate program fun and not get too caught up in just making it fun?

And the F is focus on results, right? You have to focus on results. The key here is to tie everything into a call to action for your affiliates.

So don’t just make it fun for the sake of making it fun. Tie it into the action you want them to take. The U is for Uniqueness.

We’ll talk about this later, but be yourself. Unless being yourself is boring and not fun, then be somebody else, but be yourself. Use your sense of humor.

If it’s dry, be dry. If it’s sarcastic, be sarcastic. If it’s kind of goofy and off the wall, be goofy and off the wall.

I mean, if you are none of the above, you are not dry. You’re not sarcastic. You’re not goofy at all.

No one has laughed at you for four years. Then hire someone to be funny. Hire someone.

We did that years ago. We hired a George W. Bush impersonator to announce the affiliate sales prizes.

And I think I played the video in a previous episode, but he gets on there like, “hey, there, Tribe riders, affiliate aficionados. It’s w here. ”

And he goes on, and he announces the prize. Guy named John Morgan. John Morgan.

I mean, just a great guy. Like, look him up. John Morgan. George W. Bush. Impersonator.

He’s amazing. And that was a huge hit. Made our program fun.

Got people really thinking about the prizes. If I just sent out a simple email, wouldn’t have been as effective. Wouldn’t have been as effective.

And then the end is for Nuttiness. Get a little crazy, get a little goofy. Nuttiness stands out.

It gets attention. Embrace you. The clutter your affiliates.

Just think, you have to remember, I’ve talked about this so many times. Your affiliates are just like you. They’re busy.

They have full inboxes. They have slack channels. Got 14 notifications in slack.

If you want to break through, get a little crazy. But you got to get a little crazy. So make your affiliate program fun.

They will remember it and they will refer people. They’ll tell all their friends. Number four, be authentic.

This ties into the last few, but off the wall humor is fine. If your humor is different, if your way of communicating is a little bit zany or a little bit different than the average, that’s fine. Be authentic.

Be you. Be yourself in this regard. I’m just going to be honest here.

Like, this is an area where ChatGPT and AI right now can’t touch the human element. It just can’t. It can communicate facts and it can actually write fairly persuasive copy, but it can’t be authentically you just yet and we’ll probably get there in three years.

Number five, you got to connect with your affiliates on social media. You got to comment on their post. You got to engage with them.

Goes back to number one. You got to get to know them so they post on social media. They’re telling you what’s important to them.

They’re telling you what they’re working on. They’re telling you who their favorite teams are. They are telling you all these things about themselves.

So this is an opportunity for you to cheer them on, to engage with them, to show your personality, share how you actually care about them as a person. And again, don’t just like their post. That’s a waste.

Nobody I couldn’t name one person who liked to post in the past five years of mine. I don’t know who liked my post. I have no idea.

Don’t like a post. What a waste of a thumb or a click of your mouse. No comment.

Sometimes, yeah, if it’s just awesome, dude, that’s fine. But sometimes it’s a more thoughtful comment and I like to personally look for the posts that don’t have a lot of engagement and comment on those because would you rather be one of four comments or one of 100? I’m not going to remember you if you’re one of 100 because you’re one of 100.

I’ll remember you if you’re one of four. So connect with them and engage with them on social media. When you connect people with other people, they will credit you.

Some of my best relationships, I remember who connected us. I credit them. That good juju rubs off on them and they get the magic fairy dust is sprinkled on them.

And so start a Facebook group or other group you could use. There’s a ton of ways you could do a group. You could use our client Social Glow and create a group in there.

You could do whatever but form a group and foster this sense of community where they’re helping each other and connecting with each other and getting business through each other. It comes back to you. The credit for that comes back to you.

My closest relationships with I have with affiliates are people I’ve met in person. When I think about our top affiliates, with the exception of two two affiliates, they are people I’ve met in person years ago. I remember we flew some of our top well, there were three of them.

They were business partners. We flew them in to Franklin, Tennessee, to Nashville, and we did the typical thing. Like, we went to a Nashville Predators game and took them out to Eat, a nice restaurant.

We spent a couple of days with them, got to know them, hung out, laughed together, Goofed off with them. And we went to this restaurant called the Tin Roof in Franklin, Tennessee. If you’ve ever been there, you know what it’s like.

Live music every night. Typical Nashville scene. And sitting at the bar is this guy that I don’t recognize, but the affiliate is like, oh, my gosh.

That’s to this day, I don’t remember. Now, I had to Google his name, but he’s, like, the lead guitarist in Rascal Flats, the country band, and he’s like, that’s so I’m a huge fan of Rascal Flats, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, all right, come here.

And I walk over, and I’m literally like the iPhone had just come out. If I remember correctly, this was January 2008, might have been December 2007. And I think I’d had an iPhone for I’d only had one for, like, six weeks.

So I’m Googling the name of this guy while we’re walking over, and I don’t even remember his name is John Smith. Whatever. Doesn’t matter.

And I walk over and I say, John, I’d love to introduce you to Lev. And without missing a beat, this dude from Rascal Flats, he’s like, Lev, nice to meet you, man. Like, you want to take a picture?

Whatever. Again, iPhone just come out. I take a picture with this guy and Lev, and I send it to him, which I could do because we had email on our phone.

Now we take that for granted. But this is 15 years ago. This was so brand new, and it was the coolest thing ever.

To this day, I don’t even know the guy’s name, and I’m so thankful that he wasn’t like, who the heck are you? What, dude? Like leave me alone.

I’m with my friends. It was one of those cool things, right? But the point is, he remembered that.

But even more than just getting a picture with one of his favorite guys from his favorite band, he remembers us hanging out. So fly them in if you can meet them somewhere. Host a mastermind.

Get your top. Goes back to what I just said, a community. Get your top ten affiliates together and host a mastermind.

Meet at a conference. Like, here’s a quick tip. When you attend a conference, we’re back to doing that.

By the way, we’re actually attending conferences this year. Reach out to your affiliates and ask if they’ll be there, schedule some time together. I know for a fact there are conferences I will go to this year.

I know I’m meeting at that conference. And at the very least, we’re going to have lunch together. We’ll probably have two meals together.

We’ll probably spend an hour or so doing some business, brainstorming-type stuff. We’ll goof off. We’ll laugh together.

I’ll ride piggyback. Well, that’s a whole different story. Yeah, that’s a whole different I have video proof that that actually happened, though.

We’ll do these things. We’ll actually schedule some time together, buy them a meal, take them a gift and just joke, laugh, get to know them better. These are the type of things that are keys.

Those in person meetings have been worth millions. Apps have been worth millions to me. And probably I’m going to go 80 million plus for our clients over the years.

Meeting in person is huge. So you got to do it. You got to be willing to invest not only the money, but the time and the effort to meet in person.

All right, speaking of gifts, number eight, send gifts. This goes back again. I said before it goes back to number one.

You got to know what they like. You got to know their teams if you’re going to send like a hoodie to them. Well, it would kind of help.

It’s kind of weird to be like, here’s this really cool looking hoodie that made me think of you versus here’s a shirt of your team. Here’s a shirt I found. This is a great one.

I got a shirt. This was 2011, 2012. Can’t remember exactly, but there’s a long story on that.

But basically there is a coach of an opposing team for Tennessee that had kind of talked some trash about Tennessee and then Tennessee went out and won. And I made a shirt out it that had like a silhouette of that coach and the quote or whatever, and somebody sent me a shirt of that. That’s so cool.

That is so freaking cool. But they wouldn’t have done that if they didn’t know that I was a Tennessee fan.

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