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###### Affiliate webinars can bring in a flood of leads and still leave a lot of sales on the table. The difference usually comes down to what happens before, during, and after the webinar. In this episode, I’m showing you how to make affiliate webinars convert better, including how to promote an offer that doesn’t perfectly match your niche, what to ask affiliate managers and partners for before you promote, and how encore webinars can double or even triple sales. These are practical lessons we’ve learned from real promotions, including what worked, what didn’t, and how to get more value from every webinar you run or promote.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Make Affiliate Webinars Convert Better
How to Find What’s Wrong with Your Affiliate Program and Fix It
Affiliate Program Support: 5 Things Your Partners Need
How to Recruit Affiliates Who Keep Promoting
How to Recruit Affiliates from Competitor Leaderboards
How to Get Affiliates to Plan Their Promotions in Advance
Affiliate Fraud: Red Flags Every Program Should WatchToday, we’re taking a trip to the dark side of affiliate marketing, talking about fraud, rule breaking and nefarious activity. It’s a rare but, costly aspect of running an affiliate program. And today I’ll show you how to spot the fraud, how to prove it, and what to do about it.So this is a topic I’ve Never covered before. 502 podcast episodes, never covered it. Fraud, rule breaking.You know, when affiliates intentionally or sometimes unintentionally, and we’ll talk about that, do something that they shouldn’t be doing. Now, this is not common, but when it happens, it could be a disaster. Like it can cost a lot of money. Again, to be totally clear, this is not to scare you away. If you don’t have an affiliate program, this is not like the don’t start an affiliate program.
This is very uncommon. But when it happens, it’s bad. So you have to be diligent and it requires very little effort. And I’m going to share more about that shortly. I’m going to share what to look for, what are the indicators, how do you even know that there is some potential fraud going on?How do you actually discover it? How do you, how do you root it out, what are the causes, how to prove it, and what to do about it. So first, what do you look for? You have to be on the lookout for fraud. Depending upon the size of your program.I’m gonna give you a rough idea here. For roughly every $100,000 in sales, this is annual sales. Now, if it’s a launch, you know, this would be roughly $100,000 in sales. For every $100,000 in sales, you’re probably going to spend, about five minutes. So, yeah, that means if you’ve got a million dollars in sales, you might spend 50 minutes in a week.
It begins to kind of peter off around the half million dollar mark. So it’s about five minutes per 100,000, up to about a half a million, then gradually goes up from there. If you’re doing $100 million a year affiliate program, does that mean you’re gonna be spending 30 hours? Of course not. I didn’t do the math on that, by the way, so I don’t know what it is, but I want you to commit to spending at least 10 minutes a week for every $200,000 or so, up to about a half million, and then grow from there.
And again, these are rough estimates, but be willing to spend a little bit of time. For most of our clients, we spend about a half hour a week, maybe upwards of an hour. Now, what I’m about to share with you in this what to look for section, these are indicators. These are not necessarily cause for immediate removal. So when I say, for instance, number one, their conversion rate is too high.All right, that doesn’t mean kick them out. Oh, their conversion rate’s high. No, that means that’s the flag that makes you go, Maybe we should look into this. So number one thing to look for, conversion rates that are too high, Clicks to leads. So let’s just say that Overall you’ve had 50,000 clicks and 30,000 leads.
A 60% conversion rate. This person sent 500 clicks and they have 496 leads. That’s a red flag. That could be an issue. We need to look into that.The opposite is true. They’re way too low clicks to leads. Again, using that example, they have 500 clicks and two leads. That’s kind of weird. We should look into that.Their conversion rates are too high. Leads to sales. So on average, let’s say you have 50,000 leads and so far you have 500 sales. A, 1% close rate. And your top affiliates are all averaging between a half percent and 3%.
But this person has 400. Well, that’d be a weird number. They have 200 leads and 70 sales. Again, that does not necessarily mean they’re doing something nefarious. It could be that they have some sort of amazing thing going on with their small number of people.Maybe they only invited their mastermind or their buyers. The only people that they even invited are people who paid them $25,000. And you’re selling a thousand dollar product and they’re going one on one with them. That could be, but it’s a flag to look into it. So those are the four things related to conversion rates.
The fifth one is they have a flood of clicks followed by droughts. You know, my friend Jeanine Crooks at Shareasale said on one program, and I’m quoting here, on one program, a certain affiliate seemed to be consistently performing at a small but steady level. However, when she reviewed the daily timing of his activity, it turned out that he was hand entering the leads into our program and our competitors programs as well. To keep his conversion rate realistic, he generated clicks during his coffee breaks while working his Day job. So in other words, they sent 1,000 clicks on one day and then none the next day or between the hours of 1 and 3:30, they sent 455 clicks and then the rest of the day sent none.
Natural things would tend to show filtering of clicks over time. They might send 400 in an hour and then only 300 the next hour and only 125 the next hour because it’s filtering off. Now, this again is not a reason to kick somebody out. Why? Because it might have been that they were running ads and their ads account got shut down.Not because they were doing anything wrong, but it’s a reason to look into it more. Another one is just someone comes out of nowhere and they’re a top affiliate and you have no idea who the heck they are. They’ve not been on the leads leaderboard. All of a sudden they’re on the sales leaderboard way up there. And like, who the heck is this person?
The seventh thing to look for is a high refund rate. You know, if your average refund rate is 5%, anything north of 15, I would be investigating deeply. Obviously, if you ever get a complaint of credit card fraud. Now, if it’s a known great affiliate who’s done hundreds or thousands of sales and they have one complaint of credit card fraud, it probably wasn’t them. it was probably somebody who bought and just happened to buy through their affiliate link.I wouldn’t worry about that. But this is a new affiliate. They have nine sales ever, and one of them complained of credit card fraud. I would investigate the other eight and we’ll talk about what to do on that. And then last is complaints of spam.
You know, you’ve got an, email forwarded to your service team and it’s spam, and you trace it back to this affiliate. I’ve seen that happen. Again, in and of itself, not necessarily a kick immediately out, but it’s investigate further. Okay? It’s investigate further.So maybe don’t think of any of these as red flags, but yellow flags, red flags, you’re gone. Now, these could be all be signs of common frauds. I’m going to share a couple of different types of fraud with you. the first is spyware. You know, they have somebody download some spyware, some pop ups, some other adware that inserts it like, and the back end secretly inserts this code into their computer and it inflates their traffic.
All right? They might actually be legitimate customers, but that’s fraudulent activity. We don’t allow spyware Adware, any of that type of stuff in any of our affiliate programs. So that’s breaking the rules. The second is cookie stuffing.You know, this is where they. They literally insert the cookie, the affiliate, like affiliate tracking, on the person’s computer. So whether the user clicked on the affiliate link or not, it’s going to credit that affiliate. Domain squatting is another one. You know, these look official.So mattmcwilliams.com and they get mattmcwilliam.com we have no product, no problem.com for our affiliate training. And they get no product, no problem.com looks official.
And when they go to no product, no problem, it just are no product, no problem. They have one little typo and it redirects them, snags the referral, right? IP spoofing. This is something where they create fake IP addresses to hide their identity.And then the affiliates are literally clicking on their own links to artificially inflate their numbers. That’s a big bad one. Iframes. Using iframes. Basically, it’s kind of like cookie stuffing.Maybe they write a review post and they put an iframe on there that automatically triggers their affiliate link. And so again, these are all things they could be doing. And you don’t know what they’re doing. That’s not the point. The point is they’re doing something.
Postbacks. This is where the fraudulent affiliate, they obtain a transaction ID and they have the address, and then they attempt to bypass the actual. You know, bypass the actual. Like a real affiliate. And they claim commissions for conversions that never actually happened.It’s really like some deep stuff. Never seen it happen. It just can happen. Fake discount codes. So somebody goes to Google and they type in, you know, a discount code for your product.And then it’s like, yeah, click here to retrieve this discount code. And it never actually happens. Maybe they don’t even offer discount codes. But now it’s cookie them. Cause they clicked that link.
And so when they go back and say, oh, screw it, I’m not even gonna bother to try to find a discount code, they just go back to your website. Boom. it’s credited to them, though, because they were the last click. And then if you have pay per call, this is a creative one. I read from Liza Schuber, she’s with Astoria Co.Said affiliates who post fake job opportunities on Craigslist, they’ll ask a potential job seeker to, quote, call and pretend to be a real customer. Stay on the phone for at least three minutes. The fraudulent publisher says, this call is part of the interview process. And then if the job seeker does a good job, they will be called in for an interview, which never happens, of course. It’s just a way of simulating traffic because pay per call is typically based on the length of time.
Now, I would never do three minutes anyway. I would do like, you know, depends on how long it takes to process an order. But you’re paying for the phone calls, so. Well, they’re on the phone call for seven minutes and there you go. So those are all reasons why.Now, going back to what we talked about at the beginning, I’m going to give you some reasons for removal. These are absolutely red flags. You are out if they break the explicit rules. And it’s like a blatant, egregious rule break if they break the law, if they make false claims, if they’re doing trademark bidding, if it’s not allowed. One of the ways, by the way, if you don’t know what trademark bidding is, is where they bid on your name.
Now here’s the thing. If they know that the affiliate manager lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana, like I do, guess what they’ll do? They will say, don’t run ads in that area. Don’t run, they won’t run ads from Illinois, Michigan, Indiana or Ohio. To avoid me catching them, I just go to Google and change my location and I change it to all kinds of different places so I can go look up the trademarked bidding and see if anybody’s bidding on our keywords.And if they are, especially if it doesn’t show up where I’m at and then it does show up when I change my location, they know they’re breaking the rules and I will kick them out in a heartbeat. I will not yellow flag them, I will not reach out to them. I will kick them them out, anything like that. You know, if they’re using scammy tactics, if they’re literally, you know, okay, I search from, you know, the product and it says it’s such and such a scam. We don’t allow that.
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You’re out. You knew what you were doing, you’re out. So from there you gotta dig in, right? so we have some yellow flags, right? We’re seeing some abnormal activity, some conversion rates too low, too high.There’s some weird patterns to the clicks. There’s a little bit of higher refund rate. There’s one complaint about credit card fraud. What do we do now? We want to dig in and think about some things.So number one, are they in contact with you? You know, scammers don’t typically, fraudsters don’t typically reach out to the affiliate manager very much. They’re usually not in contact. They like to hide. So that’s a consideration.
It’s not the end all, be all, but it’s a consideration. Are they always the last click but never the first? So if they have 50 sales and every single one of them had another affiliate assigned to them originally, or 40 of them did, maybe the other 10 had no affiliate. They’re always the last click, but none of their sales, they’re ever the first. Well, we’re talking about cookie stuffing, we’re talking about possible iframe.There’s no way that happens, not on that many sales. So I would remove them. In that case, is their sales page visit duration considerably shorter than normal or longer than normal? You know, okay, your average sales page visit per order is 14 minutes. There’s just three on 32 orders.
There’s no way. Or it’s an hour and 15 minutes. There’s no way. That’s just not possible. Look at the length from the click to the activity.Is it way too short or way too long? Is the IP address the same for multiple purchases? Maybe there’s maybe, they have 50 orders and 10 IPs. There’s no way that happened. What’s the open rate on their emails?You know, if they sent somebody sent a thousand leads, they have a 0% open rate or they have 100% open rate. What’s the bounce rate? Are a lot of their emails bouncing? These are signs of fraud, right? What’s the show up rate for their leads to workshops?
What’s the click through rate? So, well, they sent a thousand leads and none of their people showed up for the webinar, for the workshop, for the live training. Well, the normal show up rate is 27%. So that’s an issue. are all of their buyers coming from one route or route?If you wanna say Route? No, route. Route. Don’t really know. In other words, if you’ve got a big launch and you’ve got a workshop and you got a webinar, got a live stream, you got a Q and a live, you got a sales page and all their sales are from the sales page.That’s a possible sign. Like, okay, there’s no way. None of their people bought on the live stream. If they have enough leads. There’s no way.
None other people bought on the webinar. You know, we want to look at those things. We want to look at a patterns to Their lead signups like, okay, are their email addresses similar? This was probably 12, 13 years ago. And every single lead that this person sent out of hundreds and hundreds was first initial, last namemail.com. there’s no way that’s the case. So that’s not possible. Every single one of them was, their name was Thomas Jones and it was tjonesmail. It was like T.Jones followed by a number. That’s what it was. Oh, Amber Smith. Asmith143gmail.com.
Is it that way for their purchases? Is there a pattern to their names? Do they have, let’s say they have 40 sales and normally all your sales, 40% of buyers upgrade to a VIP version. None of theirs do. All of theirs do.That’s weird. Is their click to their country different? So their clique is from, you know, Spain, but their purchase is in Canada. That’s weird. All their clicks come from the same country, but their purchases are all over the world.That’s fraud. Is their shipping address different from their card address? Is that uncommon? No. Is it common for 15 of 15 sales to have a different shipping address from the card address?
No, that’s just not possible. It’s just not possible. So you dig in now you’ve red flagged things, right? Or it’s like a deep yellow and you’ve like, you’ve proven there’s something there and then you gotta prove it. So if you’ve checked search results, if we’re talking a violation of trademark bidding, check the search results, take screenshots.That’s it. You violated our trademark bidding. I have the right to kick you out. You know, we talked about the time between clicks, okay? There’s always a click at, 9:52 and then another one at 9:53.It’s always one minute later. And every other affiliate has sporadic patterns. Seven minutes, two minutes, one minute, 12 minutes, hour and 14 minutes. Theirs is always one minute. That’s probably a script.
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And I’ve seen that happen. I’ve seen it happen. Where they were able to get into. They hacked the page and they put their script on and it ran at the exact same interval. One minute later, there was another click.So then check your page for scripts. Make sure you get those removed. Right? And then ultimately at the end, click, contact buyers, see if they actually bought, see if they intended to actually buy from this affiliate. This solves the problem.90% of the time you reach out to 10 of their buyers and you say, hey, just want to know, how’d you hear about us? And they Say, oh, I heard about you from so and so. And it’s not the affiliate that actually got the credit. Eight people reply back, and all of them say, a different affiliate. That’s not normal.
They’re doing something. You’ve proven it beyond a shadow of a doubt. So then what do you do about it? What do you do about it? First of all, make sure your affiliate terms are airtight.Are the things that you call fraud actually listed as fraud? Are your rules clear? Okay. You can’t kick an affiliate out for bidding on your trademark terms if you don’t tell them not to. That’s not inherent.Some affiliate programs actually allow it. Some affiliate programs advocate it. So there’s nothing wrong with it, provided that it’s actually allowed. So are, your rules clear? Secondly, when do you warn and when do you remove?
We warn when they break a rule. Like, you know. Yeah. We say, don’t do trademark bidding. Well, here’s the thing.If the term is okay, of course, you know, company I used to work for, Legacy Learning Systems, Learn and Master Guitar. And when I go search for Learn and Master Guitar and they bid on Learn Guitar, that’s not a trademark violation. So we tell them. We say, hey, make sure you do a negative, keyword so you don’t show up. it doesn’t look like you’re bidding on Learn and Master Guitar.
That’s it. Just don’t bid on this exact phrase. And we just teach them. We reach out and we say, hey, don’t do it. If it’s clear they’re running an iframe, they’re out.They’re cookie stuffing, they’re out. They’re doing anything like domain squatting or spyware adware things. Fake discount codes. They are. Bye bye.Like we are kicking them out. Some of the things, it’s a warning. It’s just a warning. Hey, you know, don’t do that. That’s against the rules.Or maybe we need to update our rules. Oh, used a picture that we said you shouldn’t use. Hey, make sure you don’t use it. Right? And then the big thing is act.
You’ve got to take action fast. Take action fast. If you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt there is a problem, you take action to remedy it. If it’s a script on your page, get the script off there right away. You know, there’s nothing wrong with that.It turns out maybe it’s not that affiliate. Like, that’s not even what’s doing. It’s not even this thing. But you Just there’s a weird script, so get it off there. If they’re doing anything nefarious, you gotta kick them out right away and let them know.
Cause the other thing is you don’t wanna just shut down their account and not tell them. Cause then they might still have the ads running or the pop ups running for 36 hours and people are still getting, maybe they’re going to an error page or they’re still running the ads and it could come back to bite you and document everything. Don’t call them either text them or email them so you can document. So if they come back and say you didn’t pay me my commissions, you can go, yeah, because you’re fraud. We got proof right here.
And in case anything ever comes back to bite you, this is very rare, but like somebody files a complaint against you for running adware when you’re not the one doing it. So take action fast. Make sure you contact them, tell them to remove their ads, to shut down their stuff, you’re not going to pay them and make sure they know that. So again, this is not a huge issue, but it’s one that you have to be on top of. So now you know how to find it, how to, how to get like what are the triggers, what are the yellow flags?
Right? You know what to be looking for, you know how to dig in and you know what to do about it. If you got questions about this or anything else, text me anytime at 260-217-4619. I’ve got plenty more stories to share on affiliate fraud. I’m happy to share with you, so feel free to text me anytime at 260-217-4619 if you got any questions about fraud or anything else.And make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. I’ve got some creative ways to triple your affiliate commissions. You don’t want to miss it. I’ll see you then. Thank you so much for listening today. Remember to check out all of our deep dives into affiliate marketing at the Affiliateguide TV. And if you have a question, ask it@asktheaffiliateguy.com who knows, maybe you even be featured on an upcoming episode. And lastly, if you haven’t yet, make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you’re listening to this episode.
The post Affiliate Fraud: Red Flags Every Program Should Watch appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.
###### An affiliate promotion calendar is a twelve-month plan that maps which offers you’ll promote, when each promotion runs, and how hard you’ll push on each one. Most affiliates can build the first version in about two hours and adjust it once a quarter. The payoff is bigger commissions, fewer scrambles, and an email list that still likes you in December.
Your affiliate promotion calendar decides how much you earn next year, and most affiliates don’t have one. They hear about a launch nine days before the cart opens, throw together two emails on a Tuesday night, finish 40th on the leaderboard, and then do the exact same thing in March.
I’ve watched this from both sides of the table for twenty years. As an affiliate manager, I can tell you who planned and who didn’t within about four hours of a cart opening. The affiliates who finish in the top ten knew about that launch back in November. They blocked the dates, built a bonus package in advance, warmed their audience for three weeks, and wrote their review post in October when they had time to make it good. The affiliates who finish 40th found out about it on Instagram.
The gap between those two groups isn’t talent or list size. One group planned the year. The other group reacted to it.
What goes on an affiliate promotion calendarFour things belong on your calendar, and you plan them in this order.
Big launches from other people come first. These are the Product Launch Formula style promotions with a defined open and close date, usually running seven to fourteen days. They produce the biggest single paydays of your year.
Your own product launches come second, if you sell anything of your own. They outrank every affiliate offer on the calendar.
Seasonal windows come third. Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the New Year goal-setting rush in the first two weeks of January, back-to-work season in early September, and whatever seasonal spike exists in your specific niche.
Evergreen offers fill everything else. Software you use daily, courses that sell year-round, the tools on your resources page. These pay the mortgage between the big launches.
Two more items deserve dates even though they don’t earn commissions directly: your list-building pushes and your content production windows. If you plan to write three review posts this year, put them on the calendar in the months you’ll write them, not the weeks you need them.
Start with the launches you already know are comingRoughly 80% of the launches you promoted last year will happen again this year, usually within two weeks of the same dates. Jeff Walker has run Product Launch Formula in the spring for over a decade. Michael Hyatt ran his goal-setting launch in December and January for years because that’s when people care about next year. Launch dates repeat because buyer behavior repeats.
So open last year’s inbox, find every promotion you ran, and write down the dates. That’s your starting skeleton.
Then do the thing almost nobody does. Email the affiliate managers in December and ask this: “I’m planning my 2027 promotion calendar. Do you have tentative launch dates yet? I want to block the time and plan properly.” I get maybe five of these emails a year across programs that have thousands of affiliates. Five. The people who send them get answers, and they get on my radar as someone worth giving a heads up to when dates change.
If you’re still building your first few partnerships, the calendar gets easier once you have offers worth putting on it. My free Affiliate Marketing QuickStart Guide covers how to find programs, get accepted, and start earning without creating a product of your own. It includes copy and paste email templates you can send to managers this week.
How many affiliate promotions can you fit in a year?Somewhere between two and fifteen, depending on your audience and how much support you give each one. I’ve coached people who do two promotions a year and clear six figures. I’ve coached others who run fifteen and their audience loves them for it.
Three questions determine your number. How does your audience respond to promotions now, measured by unsubscribes, click rates, and replies? How much support will you give each promotion? And how much of your revenue needs to come from affiliate commissions versus your own products?
If you send one email per promotion, you can run a lot of them. If you build bonus packages and write review posts and host webinars, you’ll run far fewer and earn more from each. I break down the full decision process in How Many Affiliate Launches Can You Promote Each Year?, and the answer changes as your list changes.
For most people with a list under 10,000, eight to twelve total promotions a year works well. That’s roughly one a month with a few gaps.
Pick a promotion level before you pick a dateI promote at three levels, and the level determines how much calendar space a promotion needs.
All-in promotions get everything. I promote the pre-launch content, push the webinars, build a custom bonus package, write a review post, run ads, and send five or more emails on the final day. Each one eats two weeks of my focus. I do three to five of these a year, and they produce most of my affiliate income.
Limited promotions get one or two emails, often to a segment of my list rather than the whole thing. They take an afternoon. I might run eight of these in a year and barely feel them.
JV webinars sit in between. Someone I trust runs a webinar exclusively for my audience. I promote the registration, show up, and let them do the selling. Three emails and an hour of my time.
Assign a level to every promotion before you assign it a date. Two all-in promotions back to back in the same month will wreck you, and you’ll do a mediocre job on both.
How to space promotions so you don’t burn your listLeave at least three weeks between hard promotions, and four to six weeks between all-in promotions. Count from the last sales email of one promo to the first sales email of the next, not from cart close to cart open.
The mistake I see constantly: someone finishes a fourteen-day launch on a Friday and starts warming up for the next one on Monday. Their audience got sold to for two straight weeks, got four days off, and now they’re being sold to again. Unsubscribes spike, open rates drop, and the second promotion underperforms because the audience has stopped reading.
Between promotions, send content that gives something away. Teach, tell stories, answer questions, link to useful things without a commission attached. Your audience needs to remember that you’re worth reading when you aren’t selling. I go deeper on the mechanics in How to Promote MORE Affiliate Offers Without Burning Your List.
Segmenting buys you extra room. If you promote a photography course to the 2,200 people who clicked photography content, the other 8,000 never see it, and you can run something else for them the following week.
Fill the gaps with evergreen offersThe weeks between big launches are where most affiliates earn nothing, and that’s the easiest money on the calendar to fix. Evergreen offers sell year-round with no cart deadline, which means you control the timing completely.
Block one evergreen push a month. Pick a tool you use every single day, tell a story about a problem it solved for you, and link to it. That’s a single email that takes forty minutes to write and pays for years because the link keeps working.
Rotate them so the same offer doesn’t come around more than every three or four months. And route the traffic somewhere permanent. A resources page earns commissions on autopilot from people who find it six months after you sent the email. Mine has produced five figures a month from a page I update twice a year. The tactics live in How to Promote Evergreen Affiliate Offers.
Evergreen income depends on having somewhere for people to land between promotions. I walk through the exact structure I use, including the five things that make one convert, in How to Create a Killer Resources Page (That’s Crazy Profitable). Build it once in January and it earns for the other eleven months.
Protect your blackout weeks before you schedule anythingMark your blackout weeks first, before a single promotion goes on the calendar. Vacations, your kid’s graduation, the week your second child is due, the family reunion in July. Block them and treat them as immovable.
I learned this the expensive way. Years ago I agreed to promote a launch that ran during a week I’d promised my wife we’d be off the grid. I ended up in a hotel lobby at 11pm writing emails while my family slept upstairs. The promotion did fine. The week was ruined, and my wife still brings it up.
Add the weeks your audience checks out, too. The week of July 4th, Thanksgiving week through the following Monday, and December 20th through the 26th produce terrible numbers in most niches. Open rates fall, and the people who do open aren’t buying $2,000 courses.
Once those weeks are blocked, you have permission to say no. When a manager asks you to promote during your blackout week, you tell them the truth: you’re out that week and you’d rather skip it than do a half job. Good managers respect that. And you stop resenting promotions you never should have accepted.
Build the calendar around your own launchesIf you sell your own product, your launch dates go on the calendar before any affiliate offer, and they get a buffer on both sides.
Give yourself thirty days clear before your cart opens. You need that runway for pre-launch content, and your audience needs to hear from you about your thing without another offer competing for their attention. Then give yourself at least two weeks after cart close before you promote anything else. People who bought need onboarding. People who didn’t buy need a break.
That single decision costs you one or two affiliate promotions a year and protects the revenue that matters most. Your own launch converts at three to ten times the rate of an affiliate offer because you own the relationship and the delivery.
If you run an affiliate program of your own, you’re building a second calendar for your affiliates at the same time, with different rules. I cover that side in How to Build an Affiliate Promotional Calendar.
How to decide which offers make the cutYou’ll get more promotion requests than you have slots, which is a good problem. Five filters decide what goes on the calendar.
Audience fit comes first. If 70% of your list is course creators and someone pitches you a supplement, the answer is no regardless of the commission.
Then trust. Have you used the product, or do you know the creator well enough to vouch for the experience your people will get? Your reputation gets spent on every recommendation.
Then the math. A $997 course at 40% commission needs eleven sales to beat a $47 product at 50% commission selling 170 units. Run the numbers against what your audience buys, not what looks impressive.
Then support. Does the program give you swipe copy, decent tracking, and a manager who answers email? Programs that leave you to figure it out yourself cost you hours you didn’t budget.
Last, timing. A great offer in a terrible week is a bad offer. How To Choose Affiliate Products That Actually Convert breaks the vetting process down further.
How to build your calendar in one sittingSet aside two hours in December, grab whatever tool you already use, and work through it in this order.
- Block your blackout weeks and your own launches.
- Add every repeating launch you promoted last year, using last year’s dates as placeholders.
- Email five affiliate managers asking for their tentative dates.
- Assign a level to each promotion: all-in, limited, or JV webinar.
- Check your spacing and move anything sitting closer than three weeks to the promo before it.
- Drop an evergreen push into every gap of four weeks or more.
- Work backward from each all-in promotion and schedule the prep: bonus package built two weeks out, review post written three weeks out, audience warm-up starting three weeks out.
That last step separates the top ten finishers from the rest. The work that wins a leaderboard happens three weeks before the cart opens, and it only happens if it’s on the calendar. Start with 7 Ways to Warm Up Your Audience Before an Affiliate Promotion and build your prep list from there.
Once the dates are set, you need a repeatable process for each individual promotion so you’re not rebuilding your plan from scratch every time. My free Promotion Checklist Template maps out every email and social post for a full promo. Duplicate it for each promotion on your calendar and you’ve turned a twelve-month plan into twelve ready-to-run playbooks.
What to do when a great offer shows up in JuneSwap, don’t add. When an offer you love lands in the middle of a planned year, look at your calendar and find the weakest promotion in that quarter. Then either drop it or move it.
Adding is how a calendar dies. You planned ten promotions, said yes to four more because they seemed too good to pass up, and now you’ve run fourteen promos in a year your audience was ready for ten. Unsubscribes climb, your average commission per promotion drops, and you conclude that affiliate marketing stopped working.
Give yourself a review window instead. Fifteen minutes at the start of each quarter, look at the next three months, and adjust. Did the last quarter’s promotions perform? Did anything get moved? Did you skip prep on something and pay for it? Then confirm the dates for the coming quarter and go back to work.
Track results as you go. Revenue per promotion, unsubscribes per promotion, and how many emails you sent. After a full year you’ll know which offers deserve an all-in slot next January and which ones belong in the limited pile. Pair that with a strong bonus offer on the promotions that earn it, using the approach in How to Build an Affiliate Bonus Strategy That Drives More Sales.
Turn each calendar slot into a real promotionA date on a calendar earns nothing by itself. Each slot needs emails, and the emails need to be good.
For all-in promotions, plan on eight to twelve emails across the launch window, with three to five on the final day. That final-day cluster produces 40% to 60% of total commissions in most launches I’ve run or managed. If your calendar doesn’t include time to write those, the slot is decorative.
For limited promotions, one strong email beats three weak ones. Tell one story, make one recommendation, include one link.
Write the emails during a scheduled block, not the morning they go out. How to Write Affiliate Promotion Emails That Actually Convert covers the structure I use, and a review post written three weeks early gives you something to link to in every email you send.
What to do nextThree things, and you can do the first two this week.
Open your calendar and block your blackout weeks. Vacations, family commitments, holidays, and your own launches. Do this before you plan a single promotion, because everything else moves around them.
Then list every promotion you ran last year with its dates and its result. That list becomes the skeleton of next year’s calendar, and it tells you which offers earned an all-in slot.
Then email five affiliate managers and ask for their tentative dates. You’ll hear back from three, you’ll get on their radar as someone who plans, and you’ll have most of your year mapped before anyone else has thought about January.
Planning the year is the easy part. Earning consistently from it takes a system for choosing offers, warming your audience, and converting without a huge list. I break down exactly how I do it in my free masterclass, How I Currently Make $3,874 a Week Without Creating a Single Product. It’s two hours, it’s on demand, and it pairs well with a calendar you’ve already built.
The post How to Build Your Affiliate Promotion Calendar for the Year appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.
###### To migrate an affiliate program to new software, export your roster with commission rates and tax records, move only the historical data you need, set up tracking on the new platform, run both systems in parallel for two to four weeks, redirect your old links, then tell your affiliates what changed. The order matters more than the speed.
Most affiliate managers put off a software migration for a year longer than they should. I get it. You’re picturing broken links, lost commissions, and forty angry emails from your best partners asking why their dashboard is empty. So you stay on a platform you hate, paying for reports you can’t read, because the alternative feels like open-heart surgery on your revenue.
A migration goes badly when you do the steps out of order. Announce before tracking works and you’ve told 300 people to go break something. Redirect links before you’ve confirmed attribution and you’ll spend a month reconstructing commissions from memory. Do it in sequence and the whole thing is boring, which is the goal.
Why affiliate program migrations go wrongThree failures cause most of the damage, and all three are sequencing problems.
The first is data loss you didn’t plan for. Some platforms let you export affiliate records but not commission history, or they export commission history without the affiliate IDs attached, which makes the file useless. You find out about this after you’ve canceled your old subscription and lost portal access. Export first. Cancel last.
The second is a tracking gap. Your old pixel stops firing at 11:59 p.m. and your new one starts at 12:15 a.m., and the sixteen minutes in between belonged to somebody. Multiply that by a launch week and you have real money going unattributed. How Affiliate Tracking Works explains what’s happening under the hood, which helps when you’re trying to figure out where a click went.
The third is silence. You migrate on a Tuesday and email affiliates on Friday. In those three days, your top partner noticed her clicks weren’t registering, assumed you were stiffing her, and pulled your offer out of her nurture sequence. She’s not coming back with a follow-up email. That relationship took you eight months to build and four days of quiet to damage.
How long does an affiliate program migration take?Plan for three to five weeks end to end for a program with more than 100 affiliates. Here’s the realistic breakdown:
- Export and audit your data: 2 to 4 hours
- Decide what history moves: 1 hour
- New platform setup and tracking install: 30 minutes to 2 days depending on the software
- Parallel run: 2 to 4 weeks
- Link redirects: 1 to 3 hours
- Affiliate communication: spread across the full window
The parallel run eats the calendar. Everything else is a workday. And the parallel window shrinks dramatically if your new platform gets you live in one session instead of stringing setup across a week of support tickets, which is the whole argument for choosing software with a guided setup.
If you’re migrating right before a launch, don’t. Give yourself a full sales cycle of quiet time on the other side. I’ve watched a manager cut over eleven days before a seven-figure launch and spend the entire promotion reconciling two sets of numbers instead of coaching affiliates.
Step 1: Export your affiliate roster with commission rates and tax recordsPull everything while you still have portal access. At minimum you need name, email, affiliate ID, signup date, commission rate, payment method and payment details, tax form status, and any custom rate overrides.
Custom overrides are the field people forget. You gave four affiliates 40% instead of 30% two years ago, it lives in a settings screen rather than the main roster export, and you won’t notice it’s missing until one of them emails you about a short payment. Open the per-affiliate settings and write those down by hand if the export won’t include them.
Tax records deserve their own file. W-9s, W-8BENs, and year-to-date payment totals matter for 1099 filing whether or not the affiliate is still active. Download the PDFs. Don’t assume the new platform will accept an import of them.
Also grab your terms. If your agreement references your old platform by name or points to a portal URL that’s about to die, you’ll need to update it. How To Write An Affiliate Program Agreement covers what belongs in there.
Your payout obligations don’t pause during a migration, and affiliates notice a late check faster than they notice a new dashboard. How to Pay Affiliates walks through payout schedules and the mistakes that create support tickets, which is worth reading before you change the system that cuts the checks.
Step 2: Decide how much historical data needs to moveManagers waste weeks trying to import five years of click data into a new platform. You almost never need it.
Here’s what has to come across: the active roster, current commission rates, unpaid commission balances, and tax documentation. That’s the operational set. Without it you can’t pay people correctly next month.
Here’s what’s nice to have: lifetime earnings per affiliate, so your tier logic still works and your top-25 list stays accurate. Most platforms accept this as a single number per affiliate rather than a transaction-level import, and one number per person is a ten-minute job instead of a ten-day one.
Here’s what you can leave behind: individual click logs, expired cookie records, old creative assets nobody used, and affiliates who haven’t logged in since 2022. Archive the exports to cloud storage and move on. If you need a 2023 number for an audit someday, you’ll open a CSV.
One caveat on the dormant accounts. Before you cut them, check whether any have an unpaid balance sitting below your payout threshold. Those balances are still owed. Pay them out or carry them over, but don’t delete them.
Step 3: Set up tracking on the new platform before anything else goes liveInstall the new tracking, then test it with real transactions before a single affiliate hears about the change.
Run a test purchase through a test affiliate link on desktop. Run another on mobile. Run one where the buyer clicks, leaves, comes back three hours later on a different browser, and buys. That last one is how you find out whether cross-device attribution works the way the sales page promised.
Check your attribution settings match what you had before. If your old platform ran last click with a 60-day cookie and your new one defaults to first click with 30 days, you’ve quietly changed the deal for every affiliate in your program. That’s a terms change, and you owe people notice. Affiliate Attribution Models Explained and What is a good affiliate cookie duration? both matter here, because migration is when these settings get changed by accident.
Verify refund handling too. Ask the platform how a refund on day 40 reverses a commission you already approved on day 12, and whether the reversal shows up in the affiliate’s log where they can see it. Silent clawbacks generate more angry emails than any other single thing in affiliate management.
Step 4: Run both systems in parallel for a defined windowKeep the old platform live and paid for while the new one runs, and compare the two daily. Two to four weeks is the standard window. Under two weeks you haven’t seen a full buying cycle. Past four weeks you’re paying two subscriptions to avoid making a decision.
Compare three numbers every morning: total clicks, total conversions, and total commission dollars. If the new platform reports within 2 to 3 percent of the old one, your tracking is fine and the difference is bot filtering or timezone boundaries. If it’s off by 15 percent, stop and find out why before you go further.
Set an end date and put it on the calendar. “We’ll run parallel until it feels right” turns into four months of double subscriptions and split reporting. Pick a date, tell your team, and cut over on it.
During the parallel window, pay commissions from one system only. Choose the old one until cutover day. Two payment sources means one affiliate gets paid twice and another gets missed, and you’ll spend a week untangling it. Affiliate Program KPIs covers which numbers to watch when you’re comparing two data sets.
Migration is one of maybe six decisions that shape how your program runs for the next five years. The Book on Affiliate Management covers the full system I used to build a $1 million per month program, including the operational decisions most managers make by default instead of on purpose.
Step 5: Redirect your old affiliate linksEvery link your affiliates have already published stays published. Blog posts from 2021, YouTube descriptions, pinned tweets, resource pages, email autoresponders running on a five-year sequence. You cannot ask people to go update all of it, and if you do, half of them won’t.
Map old affiliate IDs to new ones and build 301 redirects that carry the affiliate parameter through. If Sarah was ID 4471 on the old system and ID 88 on the new one, a hit to your old tracking URL with 4471 has to land on the new URL with 88 and register the click.
Test ten redirects manually before you trust the batch. Pick your five biggest affiliates plus five random ones. Click each link, buy something, confirm the commission lands on the right account. How to Track Affiliate Links is useful background if you’re building the mapping yourself.
Keep the redirects live for a minimum of twelve months. Old content keeps sending traffic long after you’ve forgotten it exists, and the cost of maintaining a redirect table is near zero compared to the cost of a partner discovering her three-year-old review post has been sending you free traffic.
Step 6: Announce the migration to your affiliatesSend three emails, not one. A heads-up, a go-live, and a follow-up.
The heads-up goes out seven to ten days before cutover. Tell them the date, tell them what changes for them, and tell them what does NOT change. That second part carries most of the weight. Affiliates read “we’re switching platforms” and immediately assume their commission rate is getting cut, because that’s how these emails usually go.
The go-live email lands the morning of the switch with their login instructions and their new links. Include the actual link, not a link to a page where they can generate a link. Every extra step you add loses another 20 percent of them.
The follow-up goes out three to five days later. Ask whether anything looks wrong. This email finds problems your testing missed, and it tells your partners you’re paying attention.
Send all three from a person, not from a no-reply address. When somebody replies “my dashboard shows zero clicks,” you want that landing in an inbox a human reads.
What to put in your migration email to affiliatesA migration email that costs you partners usually reads like an internal memo. It leads with the platform name, uses the word “exciting,” and buries the one thing the affiliate cares about in paragraph four.
Lead with what stays the same. “Your commission rate is not changing. Your cookie window is not changing. Your unpaid balance carried over in full.” Then explain the change.
Give them a specific date and time with a timezone. “We’re switching over the weekend” produces a week of confused support emails.
Include their new link inside the email, personalized. Include their new login. Include one sentence on what’s better for them, because affiliates don’t care that your reporting improved, they care whether their payment gets there faster or their link stops looking like spam.
Close with a direct ask: reply to this email if anything looks off. Then answer every reply within a day during the first week.
Writing three migration emails from scratch takes longer than it should, especially the go-live one where the wording determines how many people log in. Grab my free affiliate email template, the same structure I’ve used to email thousands of affiliates across a dozen industries, and adapt it for your announcement sequence.
How to migrate to AffiliateHQ in under 30 minutesI built AffiliateHQ because I spent twenty years running programs on software written by people who had never managed one. Migration was the worst part of every platform I used, so it’s the part I designed around.
The setup runs as a seven-step wizard. You import your roster from a CSV, set your commission structure including per-affiliate overrides, paste three tracking snippets, configure your cookie window and attribution rule, connect your payment method, upload your terms, and go live. One session. Most managers finish in about 25 minutes.
The reason that matters for migration specifically: your parallel window is only as long as your setup takes plus your test period. If getting live burns six days of back-and-forth with a support queue, you’re carrying two subscriptions for six extra days and delaying your affiliate announcement the whole time. Get live in one sitting and the parallel run starts immediately.
Per-affiliate overrides import directly, so the four partners you gave custom rates to years ago don’t quietly drop to your default. That single field is responsible for more post-migration commission disputes than anything else I’ve seen.
Vanity aliases are the other piece worth knowing about before you send that go-live email. Instead of handing Sarah a link ending in a raw ID number, she gets one with her name on it, running on your own domain, with no redirect service and no DNS configuration. Your migration email goes from “here’s your new tracking link, sorry for the hassle” to “here’s your new link, and it looks better than your old one.” That reframes the entire announcement.
If you’re comparing platforms before you commit to a move, look at how each one handles the import rather than how many integrations it lists. AffiliateHQ maps every feature to what I teach in The Book on Affiliate Management, including a migration path you can finish in one sitting instead of one quarter.
Migration mistakes that cost you affiliatesCanceling the old platform too early tops the list. Keep it active for 30 days past cutover even though you’re no longer using it. You will need to look something up. Access costs one more month of subscription. Losing access costs you a reconstruction project.
Changing commission terms during the migration is the second one. If you want to restructure your tiers, do it 60 days before or 60 days after, never during. Affiliates who get a platform change and a rate change in the same email assume the platform change was cover for the rate cut, and some of them will be right about programs they’ve dealt with before.
Skipping the parallel run to save $99 is third. That $99 is cheap insurance against a month of unattributed sales.
Migrating during a launch is fourth, and I’ve already said my piece there.
The fifth one is quieter. Managers migrate, get through the technical work, and never go back to check whether affiliates who used to promote are still promoting. Pull your active affiliate count 30 and 60 days after cutover and compare it to your pre-migration number. If it dropped more than 10 percent, somebody’s links are broken or somebody never got the login email. How to Handle Affiliate Disputes covers what to do when the fallout reaches you directly.
What to do nextThree moves, in order.
Export your full roster today, including per-affiliate rate overrides and tax documents, and store it somewhere outside the platform. Do this even if you’re not migrating for six months. If your provider raises prices or sunsets a feature, you’ll want that file already sitting on your drive.
Pick your platform based on the import path and the tracking test, not the feature list. Ask the sales rep to walk you through a CSV import and a refund reversal on a live call. Best Affiliate Program Software breaks down the main categories, and Affiliate Network vs. In-House Program is worth reading if you’re also reconsidering whether to stay on a network at all.
Write your three affiliate emails before you touch the technical setup. Drafting the go-live email first forces you to answer the questions your partners will ask, and you’ll find gaps in your plan while they’re still cheap to fix.
Still unsure whether a migration is the right call this quarter or whether your current problems are program problems rather than software problems? Book a free 20-minute coaching call and we’ll look at your program together and map out what to do in the next 30 to 60 days.
The post How do You Migrate an Affiliate Program to New Software? appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.
###### LinkedIn affiliate marketing works, but it works nothing like Instagram or TikTok. The platform has 65 million decision makers and 10 million C-level executives, which means the people scrolling your posts have company credit cards and budget authority. Business software, courses, and high-ticket training convert here. Supplements and skincare do not.
Most affiliates skip LinkedIn because they assume it’s a job board. That assumption costs them money. The audience skews older, wealthier, and more educated than any other major social platform, and roughly 54% of U.S. LinkedIn users live in households earning over $100,000 a year. Those people buy software subscriptions, professional certifications, and coaching programs without blinking.
I’ve watched affiliates with 2,000 LinkedIn connections outearn people with 50,000 Instagram followers, because the offer matched the room. Below is how the platform works for affiliate promotion, which post formats drive clicks, how the newsletter feature changes your distribution math, and the rule that will get your account restricted if you ignore it.
Can you do affiliate marketing on LinkedIn?Yes, in organic posts, articles, newsletters, and your profile. LinkedIn’s Professional Community Policies allow commercial content as long as you’re not spamming, scamming, or making misleading claims.
The one hard restriction sits on the paid side. LinkedIn’s advertising policies prohibit affiliate advertising outright, in the same bucket as gambling, political ads, and tobacco. You cannot run a Sponsored Content campaign that points at an affiliate link. If you want paid distribution on LinkedIn, you have to send traffic to something you own, like a lead magnet or a review post, and monetize from there.
That restriction pushes most affiliates toward organic, which is fine. LinkedIn organic reach still beats most platforms for B2B, and 97% of B2B marketers use it for content distribution, which tells you the feed rewards the format.
Why LinkedIn converts differently than other social platformsBuying power is the difference. LinkedIn members have roughly twice the buying power of the average web audience, and LinkedIn’s own data says four out of five members drive business decisions at their organizations.
Compare that to a Pinterest or TikTok audience, where you’re often reaching a consumer spending personal money on a $40 purchase. On LinkedIn you’re reaching someone who can expense a $99/month tool without asking permission. Same click, very different average order value.
The tradeoff is volume. LinkedIn has about 310 million monthly active users against TikTok’s billion-plus. You’re not going to get a post seen by 400,000 people. You’re going to get it seen by 4,000 people, 200 of whom run marketing budgets. If you’ve spent time using social media for affiliate marketing on other platforms, recalibrate what a good post looks like before you decide LinkedIn isn’t working.
Which affiliate offers convert on LinkedInOffers that solve a work problem convert. Offers that solve a personal problem mostly do not. The categories I see working:
- B2B software with recurring commissions. Email platforms, CRMs, project management tools, scheduling software, hosting, and design tools. Recurring 20-30% is standard.
- Professional courses and certifications. Sales training, marketing certifications, data and AI courses, leadership programs.
- High-ticket coaching and masterminds. Commissions of $500 to $5,000 per referral are common, and LinkedIn is one of the few places you can find people who write those checks.
- Done-for-you services and agencies with referral programs.
- Books and business publications, which convert at low dollar amounts but build enormous trust.
Consumer offers die on this feed. Supplements, fashion, home goods, kitchen gear, and travel gear get almost no traction unless you’ve built a personal-brand angle around them. The audience has its work brain on.
The economics favor bigger offers here anyway. A LinkedIn audience of 3,000 engaged professionals promoting a $2,000 program at 30% pays better than the same audience promoting $30 products. If you haven’t sold at that price point before, my breakdown of getting started with high ticket affiliate marketing covers the trust-building sequence that makes it work. And before you commit to any program, run it through the same filter you’d use anywhere else, which I laid out in how to choose an affiliate program to promote.
Picking the wrong offer wastes months on a platform this slow-building. The Affiliate Marketing QuickStart Guide walks through how to boost your income without creating a product, including how to get accepted into programs worth promoting. It’s free and includes copy-and-paste email templates.
How to set up your LinkedIn profile for affiliate marketingYour profile does more selling than your posts do. Someone reads a post, clicks your name, and decides in about eight seconds whether you’re worth following.
Three parts matter most. Your headline should name who you help and what result you deliver, not your job title. “I help agency owners cut reporting time in half” beats “Digital Marketing Consultant.” Your About section should read like a short sales page and end with a specific next step. And your Featured section, which sits right under About, holds up to several links with images, which makes it the best real estate on the entire profile for affiliate traffic.
Put your highest-converting asset in Featured. For most affiliates that’s a resources page, a review post, or a lead magnet. Sending profile traffic to a lead magnet instead of straight to an offer usually earns more over 12 months, which is the whole argument in using a lead magnet to grow your affiliate income.
You also get one website link in your contact info. Use it. Point it at your resources page, not your homepage.
A resources page is the single best destination for LinkedIn profile traffic because it converts without a promotion cycle. The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Resources Page shows how I earn $10,000+ per month from one page, including the five keys that make it convert. Free download.
LinkedIn post formats that drive affiliate clicksFour formats carry the load on LinkedIn, and they behave differently.
Text posts run 150 to 300 words with a strong first two lines, because LinkedIn truncates after about 210 characters and the “see more” click is a ranking signal. These are your workhorse. Document posts, the swipeable PDF carousels, hit the highest engagement rate of any format at around 6.6%, and they’re the best format for teaching a process you can attach a tool recommendation to. Native video views grew 36% year over year, and demos work well for software offers. Long-form articles rank in Google and hold evergreen affiliate links, which posts do not.
The format that consistently wins for affiliates is the teardown. Take a workflow you use, show the actual steps, name the tools, and link one of them. You’re not writing an ad. You’re documenting your process and the recommendation falls out of it. That approach maps closely to the formats I broke down in what types of content work best for affiliate marketing.
Carousels also give you a workaround for the link problem. Slide 8 of a document post can name the tool and tell people where to find the link, without a URL sitting in the post body.
LinkedIn shares a lot of DNA with another professional-skewing platform where link posts get suppressed. My guide to affiliate marketing on X (Twitter) covers the same link-suppression problem and the thread formats that work around it. The tactics transfer with light editing.
Should you put affiliate links directly in LinkedIn posts?Put the link in the first comment, not the post body. LinkedIn wants people to stay on LinkedIn, so posts with external links in the body get less distribution than posts without them.
The mechanic is simple. Publish the post, immediately comment with the link and one line of context, then edit the post to add “link in the comments” at the end. Your comment appears at the top for anyone who follows you, and the post keeps its reach.
Two things will hurt you here. Raw affiliate URLs with tracking parameters look like spam and get fewer clicks, so cloak them through your own domain. And a post whose only purpose is dropping a link reads as promotional and gets buried by the algorithm and ignored by humans at the same time. Give the post standalone value first.
Some affiliates report no reach penalty on links in 2026. My experience says the gap is smaller than it was three years ago but still real, and the comment method costs you 20 seconds. Test it on your own account across ten posts before you take anyone’s word for it, including mine.
How to use LinkedIn newsletters for affiliate marketingThe newsletter feature is the most underused affiliate asset on LinkedIn, and it’s available to every member. Publish an edition and LinkedIn sends a push notification, an in-app notification, and an email to every subscriber. That bypasses the feed algorithm entirely.
Two mechanics make it compound. When someone new follows you, LinkedIn automatically prompts them to subscribe to your newsletter. And when you first create the newsletter, you get a one-time invite you can send to your connections and followers.
Do not burn that invite on an empty archive. Publish three solid editions first, then send it, so anyone who clicks through lands on a library instead of a blank page. Most high-performing LinkedIn newsletters run 450 to 800 words per edition, with the occasional longer piece when the topic earns it.
For affiliate purposes, treat each edition like an email to your list, because it functions as one. One idea, one recommendation, one link. The catch is that you don’t own the subscriber list and you cannot export it, which is why every edition should also point at your own opt-in. That’s the same argument for building an email list for affiliate marketing alongside any platform you publish on. If you’ve considered a standalone newsletter instead, the tradeoffs look a lot like using Substack for affiliate marketing, with better B2B distribution and worse ownership.
How to write a LinkedIn post that sells without sounding like an adLead with a specific result or a specific mistake, then explain the mechanism, then name the tool. Never open with the product.
A post that works looks like this: “We were spending 6 hours a week on client reporting. Now it takes 40 minutes.” Then four paragraphs on what changed. Then one line naming the tool. The recommendation arrives after the reader already wants the outcome.
A post that fails opens with “I’ve been using and I love it.” That’s an ad, and LinkedIn readers have a finely tuned filter for ads.
Also, write like a person. LinkedIn is full of posts that read like a press release wearing a hoodie. Short paragraphs, one idea per line, no wind-up. Your review posts can carry the detailed comparison work, which is why sending LinkedIn traffic to a proper affiliate product review post converts better than trying to cram the whole case into 300 words.
A LinkedIn promotion works better when it runs alongside email and other platforms instead of standing alone. The Promotion Checklist Template maps an entire promo across email and social so nothing gets missed. Free, and reusable for every promotion you run.
How to use LinkedIn DMs without getting restrictedNever send an affiliate link in a cold DM. LinkedIn treats unsolicited promotional messages as spam, and enough reports will land you a restricted messaging status or a suspension.
Free accounts cap out around 100 connection requests per week. Blowing past that with automation tools is the fastest way to lose the account you spent a year building.
DMs do work for one thing: responding to someone who engaged. If a person comments on your post about reporting workflows, a message that says “you mentioned the same problem, here’s the walkthrough I wrote on it” is welcome. That’s a conversation, not a pitch, and it converts at rates cold outreach never touches.
The pattern that works is post publicly, respond privately. Let the content do the qualifying.
Affiliate disclosure on LinkedInThe FTC requires disclosure on LinkedIn the same as anywhere else, and LinkedIn has no built-in disclosure tool for affiliate relationships. You write it yourself.
In a post, put the disclosure in the post body near the recommendation, not buried in the comment with the link. Something like “I’m an affiliate for this one” works. In a newsletter edition, disclose above the first link. In your Featured section, disclose on the destination page.
The requirement is that a reasonable person sees it before they click. A disclosure sitting in the 14th comment does not clear that bar. I covered the specific language and placement rules in more depth in this guide to affiliate link disclosure requirements.
How long it takes to make money with LinkedIn affiliate marketingPlan on 90 days of consistent posting before your first meaningful commission, and 6 to 9 months before LinkedIn is a real income line.
The timeline runs slower than TikTok and faster than SEO. Weeks 1 through 4 you’re posting three times a week and getting almost no reach while the algorithm figures out who you are. Weeks 5 through 12 your engaged audience starts forming and comments become conversations. Around month 4 the first commissions land, usually from someone who read six posts before clicking anything.
Two things speed it up. Commenting on other people’s posts, 5 to 10 thoughtful comments a day, builds visibility faster than posting alone. And launching a newsletter early gives you notification-based distribution that doesn’t depend on the feed.
The compounding is real, though. LinkedIn content stays searchable and gets surfaced for months, and your profile keeps working while you sleep.
Your first 30 days on LinkedIn as an affiliateWeek one, rewrite your headline and About section around who you help, and put one asset in your Featured section. Pick two or three affiliate offers that solve work problems and commit to them instead of promoting everything.
Week two, post three times. One teardown of a workflow, one lesson from a mistake you made, one document carousel. No links yet. You’re establishing that you’re worth reading.
Week three, add link-in-comment posts and start commenting daily on posts from people in your niche. Week four, create your newsletter and publish edition one, then hold the invite until you have three editions live.
Do that for 90 days and you’ll know whether LinkedIn fits your offers. Most affiliates quit at week five, right before the part where it starts working.
The three things to do nextFirst, audit your current affiliate offers and identify which ones a business buyer would expense. If none of them qualify, find one B2B software program with recurring commissions before you post anything.
Second, fix your Featured section today. It’s the only spot on LinkedIn where you get a permanent, algorithm-proof link with an image, and most affiliates leave it empty.
Third, publish three posts this week using the teardown format, with no links at all. Watch which one gets comments. That tells you what your audience wants before you spend any credibility on a recommendation.
Learn How My Resources Page Makes Me $10,000+ Each Month… and How You Can Create One Easily! Grab The Free Guide Here
The post How to use LinkedIn for affiliate marketing appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.
###### AffiliateHQ is affiliate program management software built by Matt McWilliams, a four-time Affiliate Manager of the Year who has run programs from $0 to $1 million per month and from $15 million to $325 million per year. Every feature maps to a specific method taught in The Book on Affiliate Management.
I built AffiliateHQ because I got tired of paying for software that had clearly never been used by anyone who ran an affiliate program for a living.
Twenty years in this business. Four Affiliate Manager of the Year awards. Programs for Shark Tank’s Kevin Harrington, Michael Hyatt, and Shutterfly. And in all that time, the tracking platform was the part I fought against instead of the part that helped. Every one of them tracked clicks and calculated commissions fine. Then they stopped, right at the point where the actual work starts.
What is AffiliateHQ?AffiliateHQ is affiliate program management software for businesses that run their own in-house affiliate programs. It handles link tracking, commission calculation, affiliate recruiting, activation, training, contests, communication, fraud review, and payouts inside one platform.
The category label is “affiliate tracking software,” but tracking is maybe 20% of what the platform does. The other 80% covers the work most affiliate managers do in a mess of spreadsheets, Gmail drafts, Google Docs, and sticky notes. AffiliateHQ pulls that work into the same system that already knows who your affiliates are and what they’ve sold.
You connect it to your own Stripe account, drop three tracking snippets on your site, and run your program from there. No network in the middle. No revenue share on top of your commissions.
Who built AffiliateHQ, and why does that matter?I built it. I’ve managed affiliate programs since 2005, won Affiliate Manager of the Year four times, and recruited more than 330,000 affiliates across dozens of industries. Those affiliates have generated over $1 billion in sales for me and my clients.
That background shows up in the product in a specific way. Most affiliate software gets built by engineers solving a data problem: track a click, attribute a sale, calculate a payout. That’s a real problem and they solved it years ago. But the reason affiliate programs fail has almost nothing to do with attribution accuracy.
Programs fail because 80% of the affiliates who sign up never send a single click. They fail because nobody trained the affiliates on the offer. They fail because the manager sent one launch email and hoped. I’ve written about how to activate inactive affiliates for years, and the process was always the same: export a list, sort it in Excel, write emails by hand, track responses in a second spreadsheet. AffiliateHQ runs that process for you.
If you want the full system the software is built on, it lives in the book. Three hundred pages covering how I built a $1 million per month affiliate program in under two years, from recruiting through payouts. Grab The Book on Affiliate Management and you’ll recognize every feature in the platform.
What does AffiliateHQ do?AffiliateHQ covers seven areas of affiliate program management: tracking and attribution, commissions and payouts, recruiting and onboarding, activation, training, contests and communication, and fraud review.
On tracking, you get three snippets, cross-device stitching, UTM passthrough, vanity link aliases that need no DNS setup or redirects, and a test mode so you can confirm a sale fires before you send affiliates anywhere near it.
On commissions, you get multi-level structures up to four levels deep, per-product rates, per-affiliate overrides, split commissions by click timing or tag, recurring commissions on every renewal and upgrade through Stripe, and automatic refund clawbacks that cascade through every level with a full audit log.
On the human side, you get four built-in activation sequences with 11 trigger types, a Training Hub with module completion tracking, a contest engine that runs ranked and threshold prizes at the same time, segmented broadcasts with merge tags, 22 alert types, and encrypted W-9 storage that warns you before you pay someone with a missing tax document.
Setup runs through a seven-step wizard that includes a hosted signup page, so you can go from empty account to live program without a developer. If you’ve read my walkthrough on how to set up an affiliate program, the wizard follows the same order.
Who is AffiliateHQ for?AffiliateHQ is built for businesses running in-house affiliate programs where affiliates need to be recruited, trained, and motivated rather than approved once and forgotten.
That describes course creators, coaches, authors, SaaS companies, membership sites, and info product businesses. It describes anyone doing launches, where a five-day cart window means an affiliate who goes cold on day two costs you real money. It describes agencies managing programs for several clients, since you can run unlimited programs under one account with role-based access and scheduled reports.
It’s a weaker fit if you sell one $19 physical product and want affiliates to grab a link and disappear. That business does need tracking. It doesn’t need activation sequences or a Training Hub, and paying for them would be silly.
Software will not recruit your affiliates for you. That part is still on you, and it’s the part most program owners get wrong. My free report Your First 100 Affiliates walks through the exact strategies I used to recruit 604 affiliates and build a $1.1 million per month program in 18 months, including the email templates.
What makes AffiliateHQ different from other affiliate software?Six features in AffiliateHQ have no direct equivalent in Tapfiliate, Rewardful, Post Affiliate Pro, or iDevAffiliate: Commitment Plans, the four activation sequences, the AI Swipe Copy Generator, a first-party MCP server, the AI Program Analyzer, and the Training Hub.
Commitment Plans are the one I care most about. When an affiliate agrees to promote your launch, you build a plan with them inside the platform: how many emails, which days, which social channels, what bonus they’re offering. AffiliateHQ calculates expected email counts from their list size using the ABC formula I teach, then exports the plan as a PDF you can send them. Affiliates who write down a plan send five to twenty emails. Affiliates who say “sure, I’ll promote” send one, maybe.
The Training Hub holds your launch videos, swipe files, and promo checklists in modules with completion tracking, so you can open a readiness view and see exactly which affiliates have finished the training and which ones are about to embarrass you on cart open day. My post on how to train your affiliates explains why this matters more than any tracking feature.
The contest engine runs ranked prizes and threshold prizes simultaneously. Ranked-only contests kill motivation for anyone outside the top five by day two, which is a mistake I made for years before fixing it. I broke down the fix in how to run an affiliate contest.
How does AffiliateHQ handle affiliate activation?AffiliateHQ ships with four activation sequences that fire on 11 trigger types, with exit conditions that stop the sequence the moment an affiliate takes the action you wanted.
The triggers cover the moments that matter. An affiliate joins and never clicks their own link. Seven days pass with zero traffic. An affiliate sends clicks but no sales. A previously strong affiliate drops below a percentage of their usual volume. Each one starts a different sequence, because the affiliate who signed up and vanished needs a different email than the affiliate who sent 400 clicks and converted nobody.
The 22 alert types cover what you should look at rather than what the software should send. Down-alerts flag an affiliate whose numbers fall by a percentage you set. Inactive flags surface partners who’ve gone quiet. You decide what to do about them.
I kept fraud detection on the same side of that line. AffiliateHQ scores seven fraud signals and flags accounts for human review. It does not auto-penalize anybody. Automatic penalties punish good affiliates for weird traffic patterns they had nothing to do with, and you lose partners you spent months recruiting. If you want the full picture on that, see affiliate fraud prevention tools.
What does the AI in AffiliateHQ do?AffiliateHQ includes three AI features: the Swipe Copy Generator, the Program Analyzer, and a native MCP server that exposes more than 20 tools to Claude and other AI assistants.
The Swipe Copy Generator writes promotional emails, social posts, and blog copy for your affiliates, then lets you train and refine it on your own voice and offer. You export the finished set as a CSV your affiliates can drop into their scheduler.
The Program Analyzer grades your program across six categories and tells you what’s broken. It reads your actual numbers, not a generic checklist. If your activation rate is 12% and your top three affiliates produce 71% of revenue, it says so and tells you what to do about it. I wrote about doing this manually in how to audit your affiliate program, and the manual version takes about four hours.
The MCP server is the one nobody else has. It lets you ask Claude to pull your top affiliates from last month, draft a reactivation email, or check which partners haven’t finished training, and Claude does it against your live program data. Every write operation asks for confirmation before it runs. No AI is going to email 400 affiliates on your behalf without you seeing it first.
Before you change platforms, it helps to know whether your program’s problem is the software or the strategy. Book a free 20-minute call at Your Affiliate Launch Coach and I’ll review your current program and give you an action plan for the next 30 to 60 days.
How does AffiliateHQ track sales and pay affiliates?AffiliateHQ connects to your own Stripe account and creates a commission record on every payment event: initial sale, renewal, upgrade, cancellation, and refund.
That structure solves the recurring commission problem cleanly. You set a program-wide rule, lifetime or a fixed number of months, with per-affiliate overrides for the partners you negotiated separately. A cancellation stops future commissions. A refund reverses the commission already recorded and cascades the clawback through every level of a multi-level structure, with an audit log showing exactly what changed and when.
On the tracking side, three snippets handle click capture, conversion, and cross-device stitching. Vanity aliases give affiliates a clean link without asking them to set up a redirect or touch DNS. Test mode lets you fire a fake sale and confirm the whole chain works before launch day.
The reporting connects to the metrics I actually watch. Activation rate, revenue concentration, average order value by affiliate, and the rest of what I cover in affiliate program KPIs. Commission structures for subscription businesses follow the same logic I laid out in how to structure affiliate commissions for a SaaS product.
What AffiliateHQ does not doAffiliateHQ is not an affiliate network. There’s no marketplace of 200,000 publishers waiting to discover you, and there’s no revenue share taken off the top of your program.
You recruit your own affiliates. That’s a feature, not a limitation, because network affiliates promote whatever pays best this week and your own recruits promote you because they know you. But it means the platform starts empty, and you should plan for that. My guide on how to recruit affiliates covers the outreach system.
It also won’t fix a bad offer, a broken sales page, or commission rates nobody wants to promote. I’ve watched people change platforms three times looking for a software solution to a conversion problem. If you want a broader view of the category before deciding, read best affiliate program software, which compares the major options on their merits.
Frequently asked questions about AffiliateHQIs AffiliateHQ an affiliate network or in-house software?
In-house software. You own the relationships, you recruit your own partners, and you pay commissions directly from your own Stripe account. AffiliateHQ takes no percentage of your program revenue. An affiliate network sits between you and the affiliates and charges a revenue share for access to their publisher pool.
Does AffiliateHQ support recurring and multi-level commissions?
Yes. It creates a commission on every Stripe payment event, including renewals and upgrades, with lifetime or fixed-duration rules set program-wide and overridable per affiliate. Multi-level structures run up to four levels deep, and refund clawbacks cascade automatically through all levels with an audit log.
What is the MCP server in AffiliateHQ?
MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. AffiliateHQ ships a first-party MCP server exposing more than 20 tools, which lets AI assistants like Claude read your program data and take actions on it. Every write operation requires your confirmation before it executes, so nothing goes out to affiliates without your approval.
Can AffiliateHQ manage more than one affiliate program?
Yes. One account runs unlimited programs with role-based access controls and scheduled reports, which is why agencies and consultants managing several client programs use it. You can give a client read-only access to their own program without exposing anything else.
What size business is AffiliateHQ built for?
Businesses running in-house programs where affiliates need recruiting, training, and activation. That covers course creators, coaches, authors, SaaS companies, and membership sites, from brand-new programs through programs doing seven figures a month. The activation and training features matter more as your affiliate count grows past what one person can email individually.
How long does it take to set up AffiliateHQ?
Setup runs through a seven-step wizard covering your program terms, commission structure, tracking snippets, hosted signup page, and approval rules. Most people finish in under an hour without a developer. Test mode lets you fire a sample sale and confirm tracking works before you invite a single affiliate.
What to do nextIf your current platform tracks sales fine but leaves you doing activation, training, and affiliate communication by hand, that’s the gap AffiliateHQ was built to close. Two decades of running programs went into deciding what belonged in it.
Go look at it at AffiliateHQ. Run your numbers through the Program Analyzer and see what it says about your activation rate. That one number tells you more about your program’s health than revenue does, and most owners have never calculated it.
Every feature in the platform maps to a method I teach, and you can see the whole system in one place. AffiliateHQ handles tracking, activation, training, contests, and payouts in one account, built by someone who has run affiliate programs for a living for twenty years.
The post What is AffiliateHQ? appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.
###### A brand monitors its affiliates for FTC compliance by auditing a rotating sample of each partner’s live promotional content against two federal standards: the FTC Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255) and the Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (16 CFR Part 465), effective October 21, 2024. The FTC holds the advertiser responsible for what affiliates claim, so the monitoring job belongs to you, not them.
Here’s the part most program owners find out too late. If one of your affiliates writes “this supplement cured my anxiety” and you can’t back it up, the FTC can come after you, the brand, even if you never saw the post and never told them to write it. The advertiser carries the liability. Your affiliate agreement doesn’t transfer that away.
So the practical question isn’t whether you’re on the hook. You are. The question is how you build a monitoring system that catches problems before an FTC investigator does, without turning compliance into a full-time job you don’t have time for. That’s what the rest of this covers: what to watch, how often, how to sample instead of reading every affiliate’s every post, the specific red flags that signal real exposure, and what to do the moment you find one.
Are you legally responsible for what your affiliates claim?Yes. Under the FTC Endorsement Guides, section 255.1(d), the advertiser is responsible for the actions of its endorsers and is expected to monitor them. The FTC has stated that if you lack adequate substantiation for a claim, you’re liable regardless of whether the endorser is also liable. Their example: an influencer says a lotion cures eczema, and if the advertiser can’t prove that, the advertiser is on the hook no matter what.
Affiliates are endorsers. When they promote your product for a commission, that’s a material connection, and the claims they make become claims you’re accountable for. The 2023 revision to the Endorsement Guides also extended liability to intermediaries like agencies and management companies that help create or spread non-compliant content.
I’ve watched brand owners assume their terms and conditions form a legal shield. It isn’t one. Terms set expectations and give you grounds to terminate. They do not move federal liability off your business. For a fuller picture of how the rules landed and what changed for program owners specifically, read the breakdown of the FTC’s newest AI endorsement rules and the 2023 Endorsement Guide updates.
The AI angle is where a lot of new exposure lives, since AI-written reviews and synthetic testimonials now fall squarely under the rules. If your affiliates are using AI tools to write reviews, read FTC’s New AI Endorsement Rules: What Affiliate Managers Need to do Now before your next promotion goes live.
What FTC rules actually apply to your affiliate program?Two federal standards govern affiliate promotion, and they work differently. The first is the FTC Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255), revised effective July 26, 2023. These are administrative interpretations of Section 5 of the FTC Act. They don’t carry direct monetary penalties, but they define what counts as deceptive endorsement and give the FTC grounds to act.
The second is the Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (16 CFR Part 465), which took effect October 21, 2024. This one has teeth. It authorizes civil penalties of up to $51,744 per violation, and it explicitly covers AI-generated reviews and testimonials from anyone with no real experience with the product. The rule also states that advertisers are responsible for the activities of their employees and agencies.
The difference matters for how you prioritize. The Guides tell you what “compliant” looks like. The Rule tells you what a mistake can cost. Together they set the standard you’re auditing your affiliates against. For the broader legal baseline every owner should know, the legal requirements for an affiliate program covers the ground beyond disclosure alone.
What affiliate content do you actually have to monitor?You monitor the content where an affiliate makes a claim about your product or fails to disclose the paid relationship. That’s blog reviews, YouTube videos, email promotions, social posts, and any paid ads an affiliate runs pointing to your offer. The format doesn’t change your obligation. A TikTok caption and a 2,000-word blog review carry the same disclosure and substantiation standard.
Prioritize by reach and risk. A blog review that ranks on Google and pulls traffic for years creates more standing exposure than a Story that vanishes in 24 hours. Video with spoken claims and no on-screen disclosure is a common failure point, because the FTC expects disclosure in the same medium as the endorsement. If someone makes the claim out loud, the disclosure has to be spoken too, not just parked in the description.
You don’t need to read every word your affiliates publish. You need to see enough of it, often enough, to catch the patterns that create liability. That’s a sampling problem, and it’s solvable.
How often should you audit affiliate content?Set a fixed cadence rather than checking whenever you happen to remember. A workable baseline: review your top earners monthly, rotate through the rest of your active affiliates quarterly, and check every new affiliate’s first promotion before you approve their second payout. That third rule catches problems while the relationship is young and easy to correct.
Tie the cadence to launches too. During a big promotion, when 40 affiliates might mail on the same week, do a fast sweep of the highest-volume promoters within the first 48 hours. That’s when claims get loose and enthusiasm outruns accuracy. Catching a bad income claim on day one of a launch is a quick fix. Catching it after the promotion closes means the deceptive content already reached everyone it was going to reach.
The point of a cadence is consistency. A program that audits hard once a year and ignores it the other 11 months has gaps a regulator would find in an afternoon.
How do you sample instead of policing every affiliate?You risk-weight the sample. Review 100 percent of your top 10 to 20 earners every cycle, because they drive the most sales and create the most exposure. Then pull a rotating random sample of the long tail, maybe 10 to 15 percent per quarter, so every affiliate knows they could get checked at any time. And review 100 percent of new affiliates on their first promotion, no exceptions.
This mirrors how the FTC itself thinks about reasonable monitoring. The Guides don’t demand that you read everything. They expect you to take reasonable steps to discover and address non-compliance. A documented sampling method, applied consistently, is exactly that kind of reasonable step, and it’s the record you’d want to show if anyone ever asked what your program does.
The random element does real work. If affiliates believe only the top earners get checked, the bottom 80 percent treats compliance as optional. A visible rotating sample keeps the whole roster honest without requiring you to read all of it.
What are the red flags that signal a false or non-compliant claim?Six claim types create most of the exposure, and you can train yourself to spot them in seconds. Income and earnings claims (“I made $10,000 my first month”) need substantiation and a typical-results disclosure. Health and cure claims (“this fixed my back pain,” “cleared my acne”) require competent scientific evidence, and for anything medical, that bar is high.
The other four: absolute guarantees (“you WILL lose 20 pounds”), unsubstantiated comparisons (“better than every competitor”), fake or manufactured scarcity (“only 3 spots left” when there aren’t), and testimonials presented as typical without the disclosure the Endorsement Guides require. When an affiliate shows an atypical result, the FTC expects a clear and conspicuous disclosure of the generally expected performance, and the advertiser has to hold substantiation for that typical figure.
Two patterns to flag on sight: any hard number about money or results, and any medical or health outcome. Those two categories cause the most FTC actions in the endorsement space, so they earn the closest read.
What does a compliant affiliate disclosure look like?A compliant disclosure is clear and conspicuous, which the FTC’s 2023 revision defines as “difficult to miss (i.e., easily noticeable) and easily understandable by ordinary consumers.” Plain words work: “sponsored,” “paid partnership,” or “I earn a commission if you buy through my link.” Clever euphemisms and vague hashtags don’t.
Placement is where affiliates fail most. A disclosure buried at the bottom of a long caption, hidden behind a “more” click, or dropped into a video’s closing credits is not clear and conspicuous. The FTC’s own example holds that a disclosure during a show’s closing credits fails the standard. For video with sound, the disclosure has to appear in both the audio and the visual, because it must use the same medium as the endorsement.
Tell your affiliates exactly what you expect and give them the language. Most disclosure failures come from confusion, not defiance. If you want the affiliate-facing version to hand your partners, point them to how to disclose affiliate links and what you’re required to say in an affiliate disclosure.
What should your affiliate terms require to reduce your exposure?Your terms can’t erase FTC liability, but they can shrink your exposure and give you enforcement power. Four provisions do the heavy lifting: require clear and conspicuous disclosure on every promotion, ban the specific claim types you can’t substantiate (income guarantees, health cures, false scarcity), reserve your right to audit any affiliate’s content at any time, and reserve your right to suspend, terminate, and claw back commissions for violations.
That clawback clause matters more than owners expect. If you can’t withhold or recover commissions on sales driven by a deceptive claim, your affiliate has no financial reason to stop. Write the consequence into the agreement so enforcement isn’t a negotiation.
Terms are the foundation the whole monitoring system rests on. Build them right and every later step, from the audit to the termination, has a documented basis. The full walkthrough lives in how to create affiliate program terms and conditions.
If writing terms from scratch feels like a project you’ll keep putting off, the Affiliate Terms Wizard builds a complete, attorney-trained agreement in 4 to 15 minutes, drawing on 1,000-plus real affiliate agreements. It’s a $49 one-time tool that covers the disclosure, claim, audit, and clawback language you need in place before you police anything.
What do you do when you catch a violation?You move through five steps in order. First, document it: screenshot the content, save the URL, note the date. Second, notify the affiliate with the specific problem and the exact fix (“add a clear and conspicuous disclosure at the top,” or “remove the income claim on line 4”). Third, set a deadline, usually 48 to 72 hours. Fourth, re-check that they actually fixed it. Fifth, escalate if they didn’t.
Escalation means pausing their links, withholding commissions on the affected sales, and terminating repeat offenders. Most affiliates fix a first violation fast once you point it out plainly. The ones who ignore two clear notices are the ones creating your real risk, and those are the relationships worth ending.
Keep a simple compliance log: affiliate, date, issue, action taken, resolution. That record protects you. If a regulator ever asks how your program handles non-compliance, a log showing you found problems and fixed them is the difference between a program that monitors and a program that claims it does. Affiliate fraud lives in the same operational lane, so pair this with how to catch and prevent affiliate fraud.
Compliance gaps are one of the mistakes that quietly grow into expensive problems. The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes report walks through the errors that nearly sank my own program and how to fix each one, including the operational ones most owners don’t see until they cost money.
How do you monitor compliance without it eating your week?You systematize it so the work happens on a schedule instead of in a panic. Set up saved searches and Google Alerts for your brand name plus terms like “review” and “discount code,” so new affiliate content surfaces automatically. Keep your rotating audit list in one place. And use AI to speed the first-pass read, flagging posts that mention income, health, or guarantees for your human review.
AI handles the volume problem well here. A model can scan 50 affiliate reviews and surface the five that mention earnings or medical outcomes far faster than you can read them yourself. You still make the compliance call, but you spend your time on the posts that actually carry risk. The workflow is covered in how to use AI as an affiliate manager.
Fold compliance into the metrics you already track. If you review affiliate program KPIs monthly, add a compliance check to that same session, and pull in your affiliate fraud prevention tools while you’re there. One recurring block on the calendar covers monitoring, fraud, and performance together, which is how it stays sustainable instead of becoming the task you always mean to get to.
Compliance is one piece of running a program that scales past a handful of affiliates. The Book on Affiliate Management lays out the full system I’ve used to build affiliate programs past $1 million a month, from recruiting and activation through the operational monitoring that keeps a growing program out of trouble.
Frequently asked questionsIs the brand or the affiliate liable for a false claim?
Both can be liable, but the brand carries liability it can’t delegate away. Under the FTC Endorsement Guides, the advertiser is responsible for substantiating claims made about its product, and the FTC has said the advertiser is liable for an unsubstantiated claim regardless of whether the endorser is also liable. Your affiliate agreement can create consequences for the affiliate, but it doesn’t move federal responsibility off your business.
How much can an FTC violation actually cost?
Under the Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (16 CFR Part 465, effective October 21, 2024), civil penalties reach up to $51,744 per violation. The older Endorsement Guides don’t carry direct monetary penalties on their own, but they establish the deceptive-conduct standard the FTC enforces under Section 5 of the FTC Act, which can lead to enforcement actions and orders.
Do I have to monitor every single affiliate post?
No. The FTC expects reasonable steps to discover and address non-compliance, not a reading of every post. A documented risk-weighted sample, 100 percent of top earners and new affiliates plus a rotating share of the rest, meets the reasonable-monitoring expectation while staying manageable for a small team.
What makes a disclosure “clear and conspicuous”?
The FTC’s 2023 revision defines it as difficult to miss and easily understandable by ordinary consumers. In practice that means plain language like “sponsored” or “paid link,” placed where people will see it before they act, and delivered in the same medium as the endorsement. For a video with sound, the disclosure has to be both spoken and shown, not tucked into the description or the closing credits.
Can my affiliate terms protect me from FTC liability?
Terms reduce your exposure and give you enforcement power, but they don’t transfer federal liability. Strong terms require disclosure, ban unsubstantiated claim types, reserve your right to audit, and let you withhold or claw back commissions for violations. That combination shrinks risk and documents that your program takes compliance seriously, which is what you’d want on record.
How do I handle affiliates using AI to write reviews?
Treat AI-written content by the same standard as anything else, because the Rule on Consumer Reviews and Testimonials explicitly covers AI-generated reviews and reviews from anyone with no real experience with the product. Require that affiliates only review products they’ve actually used, disclose the paid relationship, and substantiate any specific claim, whether a human or a model produced the words.
Where to startPick three moves this week. Write or update your terms so they require disclosure, ban the claim types you can’t substantiate, and reserve your audit and clawback rights. Set a monitoring cadence: top earners monthly, a rotating sample of everyone else quarterly, and every new affiliate’s first promotion before their second payout. And start a compliance log today, even a simple spreadsheet, so the first thing a regulator would ever see is a record of you finding and fixing problems.
You can’t hand this responsibility to your affiliates, because the FTC hands it to you. But you can build a system that makes it a scheduled hour, not a lurking risk. Start with the terms, add the cadence, keep the log.
Make sure that your affiliate program has a solid agreement (AKA Terms & Conditions). To make things simple, use Affiliate Terms Wizard. It will write your terms in minutes and save you $100s in attorney’s fees.
The post How to Monitor Your Affiliates for FTC Compliance appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.
###### Affiliate contest software increases sales by giving every affiliate in your program something they can still win on day four, not just the five people at the top of the leaderboard. The mechanics matter more than the prize budget.
Affiliate contest software increases sales for one reason that has nothing to do with how much money you put into the prize pool. It keeps more affiliates in the game for more days. A contest that only ranks people creates a small group of competitors and a very large group of spectators, and the spectators stop opening your emails around day two.
I’ve run programs where the total prize budget was $500 and programs where it was $50,000. The $500 contests sometimes produced a bigger lift. The difference came down to how the contest was built and how it was tracked, which is where most managers lose the thing.
So let’s talk about the operating side. Not the psychology, not the prize list, but the machinery that decides whether your affiliate in 14th place is still mailing on Thursday.
Why affiliate leaderboards increase salesLeaderboards work because affiliates are competitive people who publish for a living, and a public ranking turns a private commission report into a scoreboard their peers can see. Money motivates them. Being seen next to names they respect motivates them more.
Dan Pink covered this in Drive: once people earn enough to stop worrying about money, mastery and status outperform cash as motivators. Affiliate contests run on exactly that. An affiliate who would shrug at an extra $400 in commissions will send two more emails to move from ninth to seventh.
The second thing a leaderboard does is create a deadline that isn’t your cart close. Affiliates procrastinate. A leaderboard that updates every few minutes gives them a reason to mail Tuesday instead of “sometime this week,” and Tuesday mailers outperform Friday mailers because they get a second and third touch in before the cart closes.
None of that is new. Matt’s covered it in 6 tips for using affiliate leaderboards and how to use affiliate leaderboards to skyrocket your sales. The part that gets skipped is what happens to the 90 people who aren’t in the top ten.
Why a ranked-only affiliate contest stops working by day twoRun a straight top-five leaderboard with 100 affiliates and watch what happens. On day one, everybody checks. On day two, the affiliate sitting in 14th place with four sales looks at first place sitting on 61 sales and does the math. She can’t get there. She has a list of 2,400 people and the leader has 80,000.
She doesn’t quit the promo. She stops treating it like a competition. The three extra emails she was considering become one. Multiply that by the 85 affiliates below the top 15 and you’ve quietly deleted most of your upside.
The math on that is worth sitting with. One rockstar affiliate producing 60 sales feels like the win. But 85 mid-tier affiliates each producing 1.5 extra sales is 127 sales. You will almost always make more money by moving the middle than by squeezing the top, and ranked-only contests do nothing for the middle.
If you want the full breakdown of how to design the tiers themselves, prize types, thresholds, and what to award for, start with how to run an affiliate contest that actually motivates your affiliates. This post covers running one. That one covers building one.
How to run ranked prizes and threshold prizes at the same timeThe fix is running two contests inside one promotion. A ranked contest for the people who can win it, and a threshold contest for everybody else, both live at the same time, both visible to every affiliate.
Ranked prizes go to positions. First through fifth, or first through tenth if your program is big enough. Threshold prizes go to numbers. Hit three sales, get something. Hit 10, get something better. Hit 25, get something better than that.
The affiliate in 14th place now has a target she can reach. She’s at four sales, the next threshold is ten, and ten sits six sales away instead of 57. She keeps mailing. Her personal contest has nothing to do with the leaderboard, but she’s still watching the leaderboard, because that’s where her threshold progress lives too.
Most affiliate platforms make this hard. They’ll track a leaderboard or they’ll track a bonus rule, and running both means you’re exporting reports and reconciling them by hand at 11pm. AffiliateHQ runs ranked prizes and threshold prizes simultaneously inside the same contest, so an affiliate can be 14th on the board and 100% of the way to her second threshold, and both show up in the same place without you touching a spreadsheet.
What a live affiliate leaderboard needs to doA leaderboard you update by hand twice a day is a report. A leaderboard that updates itself is a contest.
That distinction shows up in affiliate behavior fast. When affiliates know the board is live, they mail and then refresh. When they know you post updates at 9am, they mail and check tomorrow. You lose the same-day feedback loop that makes people send the second email.
The other thing a leaderboard needs is more than one sort. Ranking by gross revenue tells your affiliates one story. Ranking by conversion rate tells a completely different one, and it’s often a smaller affiliate at the top. Sortable columns let an affiliate with 2,400 subscribers find the metric where she’s winning, and affiliates who find a metric where they’re winning keep promoting.
Sorting by EPC, opt-ins, refund-adjusted revenue, and unit count also tells you things about your own program. An affiliate ranked 30th on revenue and 2nd on conversion rate is someone you should be calling. Track those numbers year-round and you’re most of the way to the reporting covered in affiliate program KPIs every affiliate manager should track.
Want to see two of these contests from the inside, including the emails and the prize structures? Affiliate Contest Bonus Videos is a free behind-the-scenes walkthrough of two of the most effective contests Matt has run. It’s the fastest way to see the mechanics in a real promotion instead of in theory.
How personal bonus targets keep mid-tier affiliates in the gameThreshold prizes are the same for everyone. Personal bonus targets are different for each affiliate, and they’re the single most underused mechanic in affiliate contests.
The idea is simple. You set a target based on what that affiliate did last time, then reward them for beating it. An affiliate who produced 12 sales in your spring launch gets a target of 18 for the fall launch. An affiliate who produced 40 gets a target of 55. Both are chasing something real, and neither is comparing herself to a list ten times her size.
Matt’s covered the compensation side of this in how to use performance bonuses to get your affiliates to go all-in and how to use tiered affiliate commissions to motivate your best affiliates. The operational problem has always been tracking. Setting 90 individual targets by hand is a Saturday. Checking them daily during a launch week is another Saturday.
` tracks personal bonus targets against each affiliate’s own history automatically. You set the rule once, the platform pulls each affiliate’s baseline, and every affiliate sees their own progress bar. Nobody has to email you asking where they stand, which alone saves a manager several hours during a launch.
Milestone badges that award themselvesBadges sound like a small thing until you watch an affiliate screenshot one and post it.
A milestone badge is recognition attached to an event: first sale, tenth sale, first $1,000 in commissions, three launches promoted, top ten finish. It costs you nothing and affiliates chase them anyway, because status is a real currency in this business.
The value for you is the first-sale badge specifically. Most programs have a large group of affiliates who signed up and never promoted, and the single hardest number to move is zero to one. A badge that fires the moment an affiliate makes her first sale gives you a reason to email her, congratulate her publicly, and pull her into the active group. Matt covers this activation problem in how to grow your affiliate program quickly without adding new affiliates.
The catch is that manual badges don’t happen. You will not watch a dashboard during launch week to catch someone’s tenth sale. AffiliateHQ awards milestone badges automatically the moment the affiliate hits the number, and notifies them, so the recognition lands while the affiliate still cares.
A full affiliate contest structure you can copyHere’s a structure that works for a program with roughly 100 to 300 affiliates and a $497 product. Total prize budget is about $4,000.
Ranked prizes. First place gets a $2,000 experience prize, something like Kentucky Derby clubhouse passes or a weekend trip. Second gets $750 in gear the affiliate picks. Third gets $400. Fourth and fifth get $200 each. Physical and experiential prizes outperform straight cash here, for the reasons Matt lays out in the easy way to pick awesome prizes for your affiliate launch.
Threshold prizes. Three sales earns a $50 bonus. Ten sales earns $150. Twenty-five earns $400. These stack with commissions and they’re open to everyone, including the affiliate who finishes 62nd.
Personal bonus targets. Beat your own result from the last promotion by 25% and earn a $100 bonus. Beat it by 50% and earn $250. New affiliates with no history get a flat five-sale target.
Milestone badges. First sale, tenth sale, first $1,000 in commissions, and a “beat your best” badge. No cash attached.
One 48-hour flash contest. Mid-promotion, usually the Tuesday or Wednesday after the weekend lull, most sales in 48 hours wins $300. Short contests inside long promotions pull affiliates back in right when attention drops.
That’s five ways to win running at once. An affiliate with 800 subscribers can hit the three-sale threshold, beat her own record, and earn two badges without ever cracking the top 20. She’ll promote again next time.
The contest is one piece of a program that has to hold together across recruiting, activation, communication, and payouts. The Book on Affiliate Management is the 300-page version of the system Matt used to build a $1 million per month affiliate program in under two years, and it covers where contests fit in the bigger structure.
Affiliate contest software vs. a spreadsheetPlenty of managers run contests out of Google Sheets. It works right up until it doesn’t, and the failure points are predictable.
Refunds break the math. You awarded a threshold bonus on Tuesday and three of those sales reversed on Friday. In a spreadsheet you either catch it manually or you overpay. Affiliate contest software reverses the credit and adjusts the standing.
Manual updates kill urgency. A board you refresh twice a day removes the reason affiliates check it. And during a five-day launch, “twice a day” turns into “when I remember” by day three.
Affiliates ask you where they stand. Every one of those emails is five minutes. Ninety affiliates during a launch week is real time you’re not spending on recruiting or one-on-one calls with your top partners.
Running five contest types at once out of a spreadsheet is not a thing anyone sustains. That’s the argument. The structure that produces the most sales is also the structure that’s hardest to track by hand, so managers default to the ranked-only version, which is the version that leaves money on the table.
If you’re evaluating platforms generally, Matt walks through the criteria in best affiliate program software. For contests specifically, the question to ask any vendor is whether it can run ranked and threshold prizes in the same contest, with a live board, without an export.
Affiliate contest ideas beyond the leaderboardA few that consistently pull affiliates off the sidelines:
- Random draw among qualifiers. Everyone who makes three sales goes into a drawing for a $500 prize. A 900-subscriber affiliate has the same odds as a 90,000-subscriber affiliate, which is the whole point.
- Weekend contest. Weekends are dead in most launches. Offer a prize for the most sales Saturday and Sunday and you’ll turn a flat two days into a real spike.
- Most improved. Biggest percentage gain over the affiliate’s own last promotion. This is the personal bonus target, made public.
- Highest conversion rate, minimum five sales. A different affiliate wins this almost every time, and it surfaces partners you should be talking to.
- Opt-in contest during pre-launch. Reward registrations before the cart opens. It gets affiliates mailing early, which is the behavior that predicts everything else.
Matt broke down which of these produce the biggest lift in what kind of affiliate contests work best. Run three or four of them at once and the compounding effect on total sales is bigger than any single prize increase.
What to do nextThree things, in order.
First, add threshold prizes to your next contest. Even if the budget is $300 total, a three-sale bonus will move more affiliates than adding $300 to first place. This is the change with the largest gap between effort and result.
Second, make your leaderboard live and sortable. If affiliates can only see gross revenue, most of them can only see that they’re losing.
Third, stop tracking it by hand. The structure that works, ranked plus thresholds plus personal targets plus badges, is not something you can maintain in a spreadsheet during a launch week. AffiliateHQ runs all four at once, updates the board in real time, reverses credit on refunds, and awards badges without you watching anything. Matt built it after twenty years of affiliate platforms failing at exactly this, and every feature maps to what he teaches in the book.
Your affiliate in 14th place is the one who decides how big this launch gets. Give her something to chase.
Not sure where your program is leaking sales? Grab a free 20-minute call at Your Affiliate Launch Coach and walk away with an action plan for the next 30 to 60 days, including how to structure your next contest.
Scaling contests as your program growsContest structure changes as affiliate count grows. At 40 affiliates, a top-three leaderboard plus one threshold covers it. At 400, three ranked spots means 99% of your program is outside the running, and you need deeper thresholds and more segments.
The usual move at scale is running separate leaderboards by tier. Affiliates who produced under 10 sales last time compete against each other. Affiliates over 50 compete against each other. Everyone gets a board where the top spot is reachable, and you stop asking a 1,000-subscriber blogger to race a podcast with 200,000 downloads.
Matt covers the broader version of this problem in how to scale my affiliate program from $10K to $500K+ each month. The contest piece follows the same rule as the rest of it: the structures that work at 40 affiliates break at 400, and the managers who keep growing are the ones who change the machinery before it breaks.
The post How do Affiliate Contests and Leaderboards Actually Increase Sales? appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.
###### Promoting an online course as an affiliate works differently than promoting software or a physical product. The price is higher, the buying window is often closed, and your audience needs more proof before they hand over $997. Here’s how to pick the right course, time your promo, and do the commission math before you send a single email.
To promote an online course as an affiliate, you vet the course and the creator first, apply to the affiliate program, get your link, and then build a promotion around the course’s launch window or its evergreen funnel. The mechanics are simple. The part most affiliates get wrong is everything that happens before they hit send.
I’ve promoted courses priced from $47 to $25,000. I’ve made $50 on some and five figures on others. The difference almost never came down to my list size. It came down to whether I picked a course my audience already wanted and whether I promoted it at a moment when they could buy.
Courses are a different animal. A $39/month software tool sells itself on a free trial. A $19 kitchen gadget sells on a photo. A $997 course sells on trust, and trust is the one thing you can’t buy with a discount code.
Why online courses convert differently than software or physical productsCourses ask for more money up front and more work after the purchase. Somebody buying a $37 tool risks $37. Somebody buying a $1,997 course risks $1,997 plus the 40 hours they’ll spend on it plus the embarrassment of admitting they didn’t finish. That’s a much bigger ask.
Three things change because of it. First, conversion rates drop. A good software affiliate promo might convert at 3 to 5% of clicks. A course promo at $997 converting at 1% of clicks is doing fine. Second, the sales cycle stretches. Course buyers see the offer four, five, six times before they move. Third, your endorsement carries more weight than any sales page. Nobody reads a 4,000-word sales letter for a $19 product. They read every word of one for a $2,000 course, and then they go looking for someone they trust to tell them it’s legit.
That’s the opportunity. On a $1,000 course paying 40%, you earn $400 per sale. Ten sales is $4,000. You don’t need a huge audience to get to ten sales. You need the right ten people.
Course offers sit squarely in high-ticket territory, and the promotion rules change once you cross about $500. I broke down the pricing tiers, the conversion math, and the trust-building sequence in How to get started with high ticket affiliate marketing. Read it before your first course promo.
How to vet a course before you promote itAsk the creator for four numbers: the refund rate, the conversion rate on the sales page, the average earnings per click for their affiliates, and the number of students who’ve finished the course. If they won’t share them, that’s your answer.
Refund rate is the one I care about most. Under 5% on a course means students got what they expected. Over 10% and something’s broken, either the promise or the delivery. I walked away from a $1,497 course paying 50% because the creator admitted their refund rate was 18%. That’s not a commission. That’s a chargeback with extra steps and a pile of angry replies in my inbox.
Then check the creator. Have they run this launch before? Do they have testimonials with last names and photos and specific results? Do they answer their own support email? I’ll take a first-time creator with a real reputation over a serial launcher with a slick funnel and no student outcomes.
Last, check the fit. Your audience should already be one step away from wanting this. If your list is beginner bloggers and the course teaches advanced paid media buying at $2,997, you’ll get clicks and zero sales. I’d rather promote a $297 course that fits perfectly than a $2,997 course that fits nobody.
Vetting the offer is half the battle. The program behind it is the other half, and I wrote up the cookie length, payment terms, and red flags I check in How to Choose an Affiliate Program to Promote.
Should you promote a course you haven’t taken?Yes, and you say so out loud. I promote courses I haven’t finished all the time. What I don’t do is pretend otherwise.
The honest version sounds like this: “I haven’t gone through all eight modules. I’ve watched three of them and I know Sarah personally. I’ve seen her do this for six years and I’ve watched four people I know get results from her system. That’s why I’m sending this.”
That converts better than a fake testimonial, because your readers can smell a fake testimonial from four states away. And if you’ve got nothing at all, no relationship with the creator, no experience with the material, no results from anyone you know, then you shouldn’t be promoting it. That’s not an honesty problem. That’s a judgment problem.
Ask the creator for reviewer access. Most say yes. On a course paying you $400 a sale, spending two hours in the member area before you promote is the highest-ROI thing you’ll do that week.
I get this question so often that I wrote a whole post on it, including the exact language I use when I’m recommending something I haven’t used myself. Read Why You Should Promote Products You Haven’t Used.
Launch windows vs. evergreen: when to promote a courseLaunch promos make more money in less time. Evergreen promos make less money over more time. Most affiliates should do both.
A typical course launch runs 10 to 14 days: free content for a week, cart open for five to seven days, then it closes. The deadline does the heavy lifting. In my experience, 40 to 60% of launch sales land in the final 36 hours, which means the email you almost didn’t send on closing day is the one that pays for the promo.
Evergreen courses have no deadline, so you have to supply your own reason to act now. Bonuses with an expiration date. A live Q&A you’re hosting for buyers this month. A cohort of readers going through it together. Without a deadline, evergreen course promos convert at a fraction of launch numbers.
My rule: build your calendar around two to four launches a year, and let evergreen offers run in the background through your resources page, review posts, and automated welcome sequence. The launches produce the spikes. Evergreen pays the electric bill between them.
Evergreen course offers need different mechanics than launches. I cover the deadline substitutes, the traffic sources, and the automation setup in How to Promote Evergreen Affiliate Offers.
And on frequency, the answer surprises most people. You can promote more than you think, as long as you’re picking offers your audience wants. I laid out the numbers in How Many Affiliate Launches Can You Promote Each Year?
The commission math on a $500 to $2,000 courseRun the numbers before you commit, because a big commission percentage on a course nobody buys is still zero dollars.
Here’s a realistic model. You have 2,000 email subscribers. You send six emails over a 10-day launch. About 35% open at least one, so 700 people see it. Of those, 15% click, which is 105 clicks. At a 2% conversion rate on a $997 course, that’s two sales. At 40% commission, you made $797.
Now change one number. Same list, but you promote a $1,997 course to a segment of 400 people who told you they want that exact thing. Open rate climbs to 55% because it’s relevant. Click rate hits 25%. That’s 55 clicks, and warm segmented traffic on a well-built sales page converts closer to 4%. Two sales again, but at 40% of $1,997, you made $1,597 from a fifth of the audience.
The math rewards relevance over reach. It always has. That’s also why I’d rather have 400 people who trust me than 40,000 who don’t remember signing up.
One more number worth tracking: earnings per click. If a course affiliate program tells you their top affiliates run $3 to $8 EPC, then 105 clicks should produce $315 to $840. When your actual result lands far below the range, the problem is your positioning or your segment, not the offer.
You don’t need a big list to make course promotions work. My free masterclass How I Currently Make $3,874 a Week Without Creating a Single Product walks through the exact promotions I run and the numbers behind them, plus a bonus report on passive affiliate income.
What to send during a course promotionSix to eight emails over a 10-day launch. Fewer than that and you’ll leave money on the table. Every affiliate I know who complains about a bad promo sent three emails and quit.
The sequence I use for a course launch:
- Pre-launch: point people to the free content. No pitch, no link to the cart. Two emails.
- Cart open: your story with the problem this course solves, plus the link. One email.
- Objection: the reason people hesitate, addressed head-on. Price, time, “will this work for me.” Two emails.
- Proof: a specific result from a specific student, with numbers. One email.
- Closing day: two emails, morning and about three hours before the deadline.
The closing-day emails feel excessive. Send them anyway. On a launch I ran last year, the 9 p.m. email on the final day produced 41% of my total commissions for that promo. People are busy. They meant to buy. Remind them.
Also, write like a person recommending a thing to a friend, not like a brochure. “I bought this and here’s what happened” beats “Introducing the revolutionary system” by a mile.
Planning a promo across email and social gets messy fast. My free Promotion Checklist Template lays out every asset and every send date on one page, and you can reuse it for every course launch you promote.
Bonuses that make people buy a course through your linkYour bonus should fix the reason people don’t finish courses. That’s the gap, and almost nobody fills it.
Bad bonus: five PDFs and a spreadsheet nobody opens. Good bonus: a live 60-minute call two weeks after they buy, where you answer their questions about implementing module three. The course teaches. Your bonus makes sure they do it.
A few that have worked for me on course promos:
- A private group for buyers who came through my link, with a weekly check-in thread
- A one-page implementation plan that turns the course’s 12 modules into a 30-day schedule
- Two office-hours calls, recorded, in the first month
- My templates for the exact thing the course teaches you to build
Keep the stack honest. A $497 course doesn’t need $10,000 in bonuses, and claiming it does makes you look like the guy selling supplements out of a van. Two or three bonuses that connect to the course’s weakest point will outperform a wall of stuff.
Bonus strategy deserves more than a few bullets. I broke down what to offer, how to price the perceived value, and how to deliver without drowning yourself in work in How to Build an Affiliate Bonus Strategy That Drives More Sales.
Where to find course affiliate programs worth joiningStart with the courses you’ve already bought. You own them, you know if they’re good, and the creator already has your email address. Search the member area for “affiliate” or email support and ask. About half of course creators have a program they never advertise.
Next, look at the people your audience already follows. If your readers keep mentioning the same three teachers, go check whether those three have affiliate programs. That’s your shortlist.
Then check the platforms. Teachable, Kajabi, Thinkific, and Podia all have built-in affiliate features, so any course hosted there can turn a program on in about ten minutes. If a creator says they don’t have one, ask anyway. I’ve had three creators build a program specifically because I asked to promote them.
Skip the giant marketplaces for course offers. ClickBank and similar sites are full of $47 courses with 60% commissions and 25% refund rates. The math looks great until the refunds hit.
Once you’ve got a shortlist, evaluate each one the same way you’d evaluate any offer. My post on choosing affiliate products that convert covers the filter I run every offer through, and if you want to turn one of those courses into an evergreen income stream, a well-built review post will keep paying you long after the launch closes.
Handling the promo when your list is smallWith under 1,000 subscribers, stop broadcasting and start talking to people one at a time.
Before a course launch, I’ll pick 20 to 30 people from my list who I think are a fit and send each one a personal note. Not a template. An actual message that says “Hey Jen, you mentioned last month you were stuck on X. Sarah’s course opens Tuesday and module four is exactly that. Want me to send you the link?”
That converts at 10 to 20%. Three sales from 25 messages on a $997 course at 40% is $1,200 for maybe 90 minutes of typing. Try getting that from a broadcast to 25 people.
Live sessions work too. Host a free workshop the week before the cart opens, teach one useful thing for 30 minutes, then mention that the course goes deeper. That’s the same mechanic that makes webinars work for affiliate offers, and you don’t need a big audience for it. You need twelve people who show up live.
For more on this, I wrote a full breakdown of promoting affiliate offers to a small email list, including the segmentation approach that makes small lists outperform big ones.
If you’re at the beginning of this, my free Affiliate Marketing QuickStart Guide covers getting accepted into programs, picking your first offer, and the copy/paste email templates I use to get promotions off the ground.
What to do nextPick one course you’ve already bought and would recommend to a friend without hesitation. Email the creator and ask three questions: do you have an affiliate program, what’s your refund rate, and when’s your next launch.
Then do the math before you build anything. Take your list size, multiply by 35% for opens, 15% for clicks, and 2% for conversions. Multiply that by the commission. If the number is worth ten days of your attention, run the promo. If it isn’t, find a better-fitting offer or a tighter segment.
And when you do run it, send more emails than feels comfortable and send the last one on closing day. That’s where the money is.
The post How To Promote An Online Course As An Affiliate appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.
###### The best affiliate software for a SaaS company is whichever platform creates a new commission on every renewal payment, not just the first one. Most tools track the initial signup and stop there. For subscription businesses, that single design choice decides whether your affiliates earn $30 once or $30 every month for two years.
I’ve watched SaaS founders sign up for affiliate software, run it for four months, and quietly shut the program down because their best partners stopped promoting. In almost every case the platform paid on the first invoice and nothing after that. The affiliate did the math, saw a $24 payout on a customer worth $1,700 in lifetime revenue, and moved on to a program that paid them for the whole ride.
So before you compare feature lists, ask one question of every vendor on your shortlist: when my customer pays their sixth monthly invoice, does an affiliate commission get created?
Does affiliate software pay commissions on renewals or only the first payment?It depends entirely on the platform, and a surprising number of them only pay on the first transaction. Some tools were built for one-time digital products and bolted subscription support on later, which usually means they record the signup as a conversion and never look at your billing system again.
The distinction sounds small. It isn’t. Take a $99/month product with an average customer life of 18 months. At a 25% commission, first-payment-only pays your affiliate $24.75. Recurring pays them $445.50 on that same customer. An affiliate deciding where to spend their next launch email will pick the program paying $445.50, and they’ll pick it in about four seconds.
The mechanical question is where the commission gets created. Platforms that pay on renewals listen to your billing system for payment events, and every successful charge generates a new commission record. Platforms that don’t listen only fire once, on the checkout event, and go silent.
Before you pick software, settle what you can afford to pay. The commission rate you can sustain on a subscription product depends on churn and lifetime value, not gut feel. How to Structure Affiliate Commissions For a SaaS Product walks through the LTV math and shows why flat fees push out your best partners over time.
Why do most affiliate platforms handle SaaS renewals badly?Most affiliate platforms were designed around a single conversion event, and subscription billing produces dozens of events per customer. A one-time-purchase model needs the software to answer one question: who sent this buyer? A subscription model needs it to answer that question again on every invoice, every plan upgrade, every downgrade, every failed payment retry, and every cancellation.
Here’s where the difference shows up in practice. When a customer upgrades from your $49 plan to your $149 plan, does the commission amount change? When a payment fails and retries successfully three days later, does the affiliate get paid once or twice? When a customer cancels in month seven, does the platform stop creating commissions or keep generating them forever against a subscription that no longer exists?
Platforms that read your billing system directly get these right because they’re reacting to the same events your accounting sees. Platforms that rely on a checkout-page pixel can’t answer any of them, because they never see the invoices. That’s a tracking architecture problem, not a settings problem, and no amount of configuration fixes it. If you want the underlying mechanics, How Affiliate Tracking Works explains what the software is doing between the click and the payout.
The second failure mode shows up in reconciliation. If your affiliate platform and your billing platform maintain separate records of what a customer paid, they drift. Every month you spend an hour matching two spreadsheets, and every quarter you find a commission that should have been reversed six weeks ago.
How does AffiliateHQ handle recurring commissions on Stripe?AffiliateHQ connects to your own Stripe account and creates a commission on every renewal, upgrade, and cancellation event, so affiliates earn on every payment a customer makes. You aren’t syncing two systems or importing a CSV once a month. The commission records come from the same payment events Stripe already generates.
You set the duration rule program-wide. Pay affiliates for the first 12 months, the first 24, or for the life of the customer. Then you override it per affiliate, which matters more than founders expect. Your top three partners will eventually ask for lifetime commissions while everyone else stays on the standard 12-month term, and you want that conversation to end with a settings change instead of a spreadsheet workaround.
Because the commission ties to a payment event rather than a checkout, the amount tracks the actual charge. A customer who upgrades mid-year generates a larger commission on the next invoice without anyone touching the affiliate’s record. A customer who downgrades generates a smaller one. Your affiliate’s earnings move with the revenue they created, which is the whole point.
I built AffiliateHQ after two decades of running programs on software that kept letting me down. Every feature maps to what I teach in The Book on Affiliate Management, including the Stripe-native recurring commission engine SaaS founders need on day one.
What happens to the commission when a SaaS customer cancels or refunds?In AffiliateHQ, cancellations and refunds reverse the commission automatically and cascade the clawback through every level of a multi-level structure, with a full audit log. Nobody hunts through Stripe for the refunded charge and then hunts through the affiliate dashboard for the matching commission.
Clawbacks are the part of SaaS affiliate management that founders underestimate. A one-time product has a refund window of 30 or 60 days and then you’re done. A subscription generates refund risk on every invoice for as long as the customer stays. If your software doesn’t reverse commissions on its own, you’re either eating the loss or clawing it back by hand, and the manual version is where affiliate relationships go to die.
Multi-level structures make it worse. If Affiliate A recruited Affiliate B, and Affiliate B’s customer refunds, both commissions need to reverse together. AffiliateHQ supports multi-level structures up to four levels deep, and the clawback cascades through all of them.
The audit log is the piece that saves you when an affiliate emails asking why their balance dropped $340 overnight. You pull up the reversal, show the refunded charge and the date, and the conversation ends in two minutes. Without a log, you’re asking a partner to trust your memory. How to Handle Affiliate Disputes covers how to run those conversations without torching the relationship.
Reversals are one flavor of affiliate risk. Fake signups and self-referrals hit SaaS programs hard because free trials make the entry cost zero, so read Affiliate Fraud Prevention Tools before your program gets big enough to be a target.
How do you set different commission rates for different SaaS pricing tiers?You set product-specific rates, which lets you pay one percentage on your entry plan and a different one on your enterprise plan. Most SaaS companies sell three or four tiers with wildly different margins, and paying a flat 25% across all of them means you’re either overpaying on the plan with thin margins or underpaying on the one with fat ones.
Say your Starter plan runs $29/month with heavy support load and your Pro plan runs $199/month with almost none. A flat rate treats those as the same sale. They aren’t. Product-specific rates in AffiliateHQ let you pay 15% on Starter and 30% on Pro, which does two things at once: it protects your margin on the cheap plan, and it points affiliates at the customers you want.
That second effect is underrated. Affiliates read your commission structure as a signal about what you value. Pay more on Pro and your partners will write content aimed at Pro buyers. I’ve seen a rate change like that move a program’s average deal size by 40% inside a quarter without a single conversation about it.
You can layer tiered affiliate commissions on top of product-specific rates, so an affiliate who crosses 25 active subscriptions moves to a higher bracket across the board. And if you’re still deciding what your base numbers should be, What is a Good Affiliate Commission Rate? gives the benchmarks by category.
How long should a SaaS affiliate keep earning on a customer?Twelve to 24 months covers most SaaS programs, and lifetime commissions belong to a small group of partners who earned them. Anything shorter than 12 months tends to read as stingy to experienced affiliates, who know your average customer sticks around longer than that.
Run the math on your own numbers before you commit. If your median customer life is 14 months, a 12-month commission window pays affiliates on about 85% of the revenue they generated. That’s generous enough to recruit well and cheap enough that your CAC stays sane. If your median customer life is 40 months, a 12-month window pays them on 30% of what they created, and your best affiliates will notice.
Lifetime is the strongest recruiting tool you have, which is exactly why you shouldn’t hand it out at signup. Hold it back as the thing an affiliate unlocks at 50 active customers, or offer it to the three partners you’d hate to lose. AffiliateHQ’s per-affiliate overrides make that a two-click change instead of a migration project.
There’s a churn consideration too. If your product churns at 8% monthly, a lifetime commission costs you very little because almost nobody reaches month 20. If you churn at 1.5%, lifetime is a real long-term liability and you should price it accordingly. How To Run An Affiliate Program For Monthly Subscription Services goes deeper on how churn changes what you can afford.
What should a SaaS founder check before choosing affiliate software?Check six things, in this order: renewal commission creation, refund and cancellation reversal, product-specific rates, per-affiliate overrides, the audit trail, and how the platform connects to your billing system. Everything else on a features page is secondary for a subscription business.
Renewal commission creation is the disqualifier. If a platform can’t create a commission on invoice number seven, stop the evaluation there regardless of how good the rest looks.
Reversal handling comes second because it’s the thing you’ll deal with weekly forever. Ask whether reversals happen automatically, whether they cascade through multi-level structures, and whether there’s a log you can show an affiliate.
Billing connection matters more than the integration count on the marketing page. A platform that connects to your own Stripe account reads the same events your finance team reads. A platform that sits between you and your processor gives you a second source of truth to reconcile, and two sources of truth means one of them is wrong.
Then look at flexibility. Product-specific rates and per-affiliate overrides sound like advanced features until month four, when your best partner asks for a custom deal and your top-tier plan needs a different rate than your entry plan. Both requests arrive faster than founders expect. If you want the broader platform comparison outside the SaaS-specific criteria, Best Affiliate Program Software breaks down the main categories.
Software is one decision out of a dozen you’ll make in the first 90 days. The Book on Affiliate Management covers the full system I used to build a $1 million per month program in under two years, including commission design, recruiting, and activating the 95% of affiliates who sign up and never promote.
What do you do after the software is running?Recruit affiliates, because the platform won’t do it for you. This is where most SaaS affiliate programs stall out. The founder spends three weeks evaluating software, picks well, sets up the commission structure, and then waits for partners who never show up.
Start with your existing customers. In SaaS, the people already paying you are the most credible promoters you’ll ever get, because they can write about the product from real use instead of a demo video. Wait until they’ve been active for 30 to 60 days so they have something to say, then invite them personally.
Then go after the people already writing comparison content in your category. Search your product name plus “alternative” and see who ranks. Those writers have the traffic and the intent, and half of them are already mentioning you without a link. How To Find Affiliates For a SaaS Business has the full recruiting playbook.
Get your payout process settled before your first payment cycle, too. Deciding your payout schedule and threshold after affiliates have earned money is a bad look, and How to Pay Affiliates covers the choices worth making up front.
Recruiting is the part that decides whether your program works. Your First 100 Affiliates is a free report showing the strategies I used to recruit 604 affiliates and build a $1.1 million per month program in 18 months, including where to find partners and the emails that get replies.
Frequently asked questions about SaaS affiliate softwareCan affiliate software track free trials that convert to paid later?
Yes, if the platform ties the commission to the payment event rather than the signup. The affiliate’s referral gets recorded at trial start, and the commission gets created when the first real charge goes through. Platforms that fire on the signup event alone tend to either pay on trials that never convert or miss the conversion entirely when it happens 14 days later.
What commission rate do most SaaS affiliate programs pay?
Recurring programs commonly pay 20% to 30% of each monthly payment. One-time structures usually run 50% to 200% of the first month’s revenue, paid once. Your sustainable number depends on your gross margin, your churn rate, and what you currently spend to acquire a customer through paid channels. Work backward from CAC rather than copying a competitor’s rate.
Do I need a developer to connect affiliate software to Stripe?
Usually not. Platforms built for subscription businesses connect to Stripe through an authorization flow that takes a few minutes, and the tracking script drops into your site the same way an analytics tag does. You’d need engineering help if you run a custom-built checkout, use a payment processor the platform doesn’t support, or want commissions tied to usage-based billing events.
What happens to affiliate commissions if a customer downgrades their plan?
On a platform that reads payment events, the commission on the next invoice reflects the smaller charge automatically. On a platform that recorded the original signup amount, it keeps paying the old rate until someone notices and fixes it by hand. Ask specifically about downgrades during your evaluation, because it’s the case vendors skip in demos.
Should a SaaS company use an affiliate network instead of its own software?
Running your own program usually makes more sense for SaaS. Networks charge a fee on top of your commissions and own the affiliate relationship, which hurts more in a business where partners earn for years off a single customer. Networks help most when you can’t recruit on your own, and for SaaS you can recruit from your customer base and your comparison-content competitors.
How do multi-level affiliate structures work for SaaS?
An affiliate who recruits another affiliate earns a smaller percentage of that person’s commissions. AffiliateHQ supports this up to four levels deep, and clawbacks cascade through every level when a customer refunds or cancels. It works well in SaaS because recurring revenue makes the second-level earnings meaningful enough to motivate recruiting, rather than a rounding error.
What to do next
Three things, in order.
First, ask every vendor on your shortlist whether their software creates a commission on invoice number seven and reverses it automatically on refund. If they hedge, cross them off.
Second, decide your commission duration before you decide your rate. Twelve to 24 months for the standard program, lifetime reserved as something affiliates unlock. That single decision affects your recruiting pitch more than the percentage does.
Third, set your product-specific rates so your affiliates aim at the plans with the margin to support them. Then go recruit, because the best software on the market tracks zero sales until someone promotes you.
If you’d rather talk it through than read another comparison chart, grab a free 20-minute call at Your Affiliate Launch Coach. I’ll review your current setup and give you an action plan for the next 30 to 60 days.
The post What is the Best Affiliate Software for a SaaS Company? appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.
###### Affiliate webinars can bring in a flood of leads and still leave a lot of sales on the table. The difference usually comes down to what happens before, during, and after the webinar. In this episode, I’m showing you how to make affiliate webinars convert better, including how to promote an offer that doesn’t perfectly match your niche, what to ask affiliate managers and partners for before you promote, and how encore webinars can double or even triple sales. These are practical lessons we’ve learned from real promotions, including what worked, what didn’t, and how to get more value from every webinar you run or promote.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Find What’s Wrong with Your Affiliate Program and Fix It
Affiliate Program Support: 5 Things Your Partners Need
How to Recruit Affiliates Who Keep Promoting
How to Recruit Affiliates from Competitor Leaderboards
How to Get Affiliates to Plan Their Promotions in Advance
How to Make Your Affiliate Program Stand Out to Affiliates
How to Make Affiliate Webinars Convert BetterWebinars are one of the best ways to get more leads, more sales, and more great affiliates. They’re also an easy way to promote something that benefits your audience. Today, I’ll, share how you can use affiliate webinars to grow your business. So I did a promo back in the fall of 2001. I think that was a little bit different than what we usually promote. And, you know, it didn’t really like, kind of square up exactly with my niche, you know, And I wanted to do.
We did some private content for a small group of our audience where we discussed that, you know, first of all, okay, promoting something that’s a little bit outside of your niche, how do you do that? But how do you tie it into your niche? And we talk about that in this episode. We also talk about webinars from both ways. Why promoting JV webinars, affiliate webinars, one of the quickest ways to grow your list, how to use it to get affiliates to promote you.
We also talk about in this episode what you should ask affiliate managers and what you should ask your partners for so that you can have the best promotion. And then we also talk about how to use encore webinars to quite frankly, double or triple your sales. We found some success with that. We’ve had issues with that in the past and so we cover a lot in this episode. This was originally a, private kind of behind the scenes lesson for some of our members, but we wanted to open it up to the public here on the podcast.
I’m super excited to, share this because I think there’s just a ton of lessons inside of this one big lesson. So again, ultimately, it’s all about how to use webinars to grow your business, how to use affiliate webinars to grow your business. And I mentioned before, I think it was like four or five episodes ago, I said, hey, if you want to know, kind of our framework for webinars, I’ve done two live webinars. Really small, intentionally really small. These are both brand new webinars.
Well, not brand new like they’ve tweaked webinars, but we’ve made some tweaks. And the one we closed, 17% of live attendees. The most recent one we closed almost, we almost hit 25% if we’d had one less person on. We would have closed 25%. So we’re really killing it with these webinars.Like, they’re converting extremely well. And if you want to know how we do it, then shoot me a text at 260-217-4619. And if I get enough people who text me, I’m going to do. It’s going to have to be at least a two episode, probably three episodes. Might even have to do an entire month.
And it would be like next, March. It would be a while from now because we’ve got content planned through. Gosh, when do we have content planned through? Looks right now. Looks like we’ve got our content for the podcast planned through March 28th of next year.So it would be next April. So go in. Yeah, like almost a year from now. Just crazy to think about that. What is that?That’s, I don’t know when this one’s going to go live, but that’s like seven months from now. But either way, text me at 260-217-4619 and I’ll probably do a series. And plus, I’ll have a little bit more dialed in. Right. Then I’ll do a series on what we are doing in webinars.
That’s converting. So if you’re interested, let me know about that. With that, I’m going to cut to this private interview that I did with Robbie Miles, who’s our operations manager on our team, about this webinar promotion that we did. So we talked about it from all the different angles. Again, the angle of promoting something outside your niche, but also working with affiliates on your webinars and being an affiliate on your webinar.We share tons of tips in there. So listen up and learn, because I think this is some valuable stuff. There were some revelations for us that we share in this episode, so listen up and learn. And do me a favor. At the end of this episode, shoot me a text again.260-217-4619. We’ll put that in the show notes as well. And let me know your biggest takeaway. I’d love to hear from you. All right, let me cut to that interview now, and welcome back to another Backstage Pass.
We’re going to take you on a deep dive into a recent affiliate promo, unlike any other affiliate promo that we’ve ever done that we did just, about a month ago or so. And, well, we’re going to be doing it again soon, and we’ll talk about that at the end. So I Want to welcome Robbie Miles on our team, who is our head of operations and the guy who. Well, quite frankly, anytime we do one of these backstage fasts and we look back at, you know, here’s what we learned and here’s what we did, he’s the guy that remembers it all. And then I just stand here and talk about it.So, Robbie, welcome, man. Hey, you know, it’s easy to remember things when you have pen and paper around, so. Well, that’s Robbie’s. That’s Robbie’s skill set. For those who don’t know, we did a Facebook Live recently, and I think somebody said, oh, so the business secret is I need a robby.I was like, yeah. And I think you said, yes, you do. Yes, you do. Yes, you do. You know, just not this one.
And so. But it is true, you know, that’s not my skill set, the organizational side of things. And so we have a Robbie, whose name, ironically, is Robbie, and he, he keeps us on track. So, Robbie, I’m excited about today because we’re talking about affiliate program that we did recently. So as we’re recording this in December, and I believe it’ll go live for you guys in December.This is a promo we did a little bit over a month ago, so it’s still really fresh in our minds, and it’s really outside of, my niche. That’s actually the cool thing about it, makes me really excited to talk about this. And there’s some things that we did that we’ve never had to do before that are lessons for you. Things that we did that we had to do before that are lessons for you guys. And I’m just really excited to share this.
So I’m going to jump right in and explain the promo real quick and kind of the backstory to it. So, as you may notice, if you watch some of the original AIM backstage passes, I look a little bit different than I did in the original ones. And I think we launched aim, if I’m not mistaken. We launched AIM when I was a wee bit into my weight loss journey, but not way into it. Yeah, just a couple months, if I remember. I think because we pre recorded some of the content, some of the content would have been about two and a half months in, so I’d probably lost about 20ish pounds at that point. But it’s still come a long, long way since then. In total, my doctor says, you know, about 88 pounds of fat is roughly probably about 91, 92 by now. And, the reason I say of fat is because I actually have only, I say only, I’ve only lost £56 or something. But I’ve also put on some muscle.
And so, you know, that’s why he says about 80 something pounds of fat that there. And you know, the revelation that I had earlier this year was just, you know, we, we teach so much about marketing techniques and marketing strategies and marketing, you know, affiliate marketing, how to make more money, how to monetize, how to have more influence and impact in the world. Those are all great things. But for many people, their weight is holding them back. I can teach you all the best marketing strategies.I can teach you all the best email copy. I can teach you how to be confident on camera. There’s one for you. How to be confident. Newsflash.
I was never confident on camera before I did them. I produced videos, some really good videos, some impactful and life changing videos for people. I was never confident on camera, I am now. And so I realized, like, you can have all the best stuff, but if you’re just not confident in just who you are. And appearance is just appearances and everything, but it’s just a part of who we are, you know, I mean, the example I’ve always have used when I talk to people about this is there’s the old joke or thing, you know, you picture the audience naked, you know, right.
If you’re nervous, how about what if you were naked? Like, I don’t care. It’s not about looking good or anything. You want to tell me? Okay, we’ll go like your boxers, right?Who’s my friend? Skibbies. Your skibvies. Skibbies, yeah. If you had to go up on ste.I don’t care if you look amazing, right? And you had to go up on stage and deliver a talk about marketing or gardening or productivity or high performance or, being a real estate agent in your underwear, would you be comfortable? It’s just your appearance. I mean, all that matters, right, is the content. No, your appearance does matter.
If you had to go up, you’re going to deliver a presentation to a group full of, you know, professional real estate agents, for an example. And you went up there and you had a green mohawk, you know, one of those green and like, you know, piercings all over your face and you’re covered in tattoos and you’re going to talk about generating more real estate leads. Your appearance is going to distract, detract and distract from the message. So appearance does matter. And I said to Alan Thomas, my friend and now a coach, you know, my weight Loss coach said, this is holding me back this way to swing back.
And the revelation I had a few months ago, Robbie, was. Is affecting other people. And so I asked Alan. Alan’s in our Start Mastermind, and he’s just getting started with this platform. He’s been at it for about a year.He’s coaching, you know, people just like me and helping them. He’s helped men lose literally thousands of pounds now. He himself lost like £130 a while back. And I said, we need to teach this stuff. We need to help people.So I invited him to do a webinar with me. And so today, what we’re talking about is a few things. Number one, we’re going to talk about promoting outside your niche, because this is definitely outside my core content. But we were able to tighten. You mean, this isn’t just, you know, marketing and affiliates and, you know, growing affiliates programs and.
Yeah, I mean, it’s. Gosh, it’s just so far out there. So we’ll talk about that. We’re going to talk about promoting new JV partners. You know, this was Alan’s first ever JV webinar, and he did it with us, and he was terrified.and he didn’t know anything. Like, he didn’t know what to give us or what to do. So we’re going to talk about that. We’re going to talk about things to ask for when you’re promoting a JV webinar. We’re going to talk about that from our perspective.And then lastly, we’re going to talk about how to do it again, how to do an encore, which is what we’re doing with Allen in January. So, Robby, let’s start with kind of the outside your niche thing. I think this is important. And I sort of said this when I was introing this and giving the backstory is there’s two places your audience can be. They can be past your core content, or they can be before your core content, or they can just.
Actually three places they can be parallel to your core content. I think in your world, you know, you’re the productivity guy, and yet you have a new thing out called the Better Men or Better Man. I keep forgetting. Yeah, the Better Men Project. Better Men Project.Okay. Yeah, I was pretty confident, but I didn’t, you know, And you have this thing called the Betterment. Now. This is your own thing, but it’s not in, like, core productivity lane. It’s not on the side of it, though. We would not dispute that if you have better family Relations. If you get in less fights with your wife, if your children are more obedient and just you have more peace in the home, then you’re going to be more productive. I mean, I don’t think anybody would go, no, I think that’s too far. Yeah, exactly. Or vice versa.
If you’re more productive at work, you know, you have more time to focus on family at home. Like it goes both ways, but they’re not the same thing. So I think first of all we can look at those areas where they’re tangential, they are related. There’s maybe something that’s keeping them from getting to the level that you’re teaching at with your products or the products that maybe you have a physical product or a coaching service or something and there are things that need to get them to that point. The same thing is true.
Maybe they’ve progressed a little bit past your core content. Well, what are you going to do? You know, you have two options. You can be like, hey, bye, farewell, Avita Z. You know, you can let them go and just whatever you lost, a really enthusiastic person.Or you can make offers to them and not only serve them, that’s definitely the most important part. But also Instead of making $0 going forward, you make lots of dollars going forward. I don’t know, which one would you rather have? And so we looked at it from the perspective more of, we’re getting people to build a business. We’re getting people to build a platform to learn again how to do videos, do podcasts and write emails, build an affiliate marketing business, build side income, make their first thousand dollars or first ten thousand dollars to go full time, start an affiliate program and all those things.
It can’t happen if you’re not confident until you are. So we do talk a lot about personal growth and this was a part of personal growth. The other thing that we were talking about this before we started recording is there’s an opportunity, no matter what niche you’re in, to tell your audience, here’s a product that has completely transformed my business. I think you should, I think you should check it out. One of the good examples we were talking about was Kathy Hay.
Kathy is in the. I don’t even know what they call the niche. It’s like the period costumes. Yeah, that’s specifically with like, what are those things called? Corsets. Corsets, yeah. So corsets from the, like I don’t know, 100 and some odd years ago. Right. I mean, I literally know nothing about the industry. And quite frankly don’t care.you know, it’s like a very niche thing. And yet she was like the number six or seven, I believe, affiliate partner for Jeff Walker’s product launch formula, which you could not find a course that would define Internet marketing as it is today. More than PLF. Right. She was the 6 or 7th affiliate.
Her audience against some of the biggest people in the Internet marketing space and teaching corsets with all, women who. Want to know how to make period piece corsets. How do you make that leap? Very simple. She said, hey, I know some people in my audience.I mean, by definition, most niches, no matter what niche you’re in, you’re in the productivity niche, Robbie. You have people who are entrepreneurs, you have people who are middle managers, people who are CEOs, people who are low level people who are students and they want to be more productive. You know, like about the Better Men project, how do you pitch that? Well, because I’m going to guess roughly half your audience is male and half your audience is. Now, it might be skewed.
It might be 60, 40. I’m just saying. But just, you want to know people who want to be more productive and you just go pull over 100 random people. Guess what? About 51 of them are going to be men or women, and the other 49 or 51 are going to be the other.You know, that’s. Duh. right, but you said. I know at least half my audience is men. And I also know that a large percentage of my audience is married and, or with children.And that’s just statistically probable. You wouldn’t even have to show me a survey, Robbie. And I can probably guess that of your audience, 39% of them are married men with children. And, probably right into about 6 to 7%. You know, actually according to the survey, it’s higher.
Married men with children. Wow. Okay. Yeah, yeah, but she. Because who follows you?Who follows anybody? Somebody who is usually striving to be or to get to where that person is. I don’t do a great job of attracting 27 year old single dudes. Yeah. And I’m cool, you know, because that’s not my audience.You know, I. Right. I’ve said this many times, like I have no desire to be the marketing guy who’s holding up the big check from Google that doesn’t cast a shadow. Yeah. I may or may not be talking about a very specific famous marketer out there who got caught doing that years ago.
He was like, look, at me. This is my $100,000 plus check from Google. Yeah, there’s no shadow, dude. You have to look that up. there’s like him by his, like, you know, Lambo that he got from Hertz, right? Yeah, you know, but yeah, so like Kathy, like, she teaches corsets and like, that’s specifically what I know most of her product is about. And somehow that’s literally all she talks about. Yeah. But if you think about this, in. This Internet marketing space, boom. Some percentage of her audience is entrepreneurs. Some percentage of her audience is aspiring entrepreneurs. And from the get go. And I’m assuming she did this because, you know, I know she does some of the stuff that we teach, which is when you promote something like this, you say up front, hey, I’m gonna be talking about this thing. It’s not what I normally talk about.
If you’re not interested, click here and I’m not gonna say anything else about it to you. Yeah. And then you create an opt out for them. In our system, ConvertKit. We highly recommend, if you’re not on ConvertKit, that you switch to ConvertKit.We’ll put a link. Robbie’s making a note right now to link. I can tell he’s making a note right now to link. You know, below the video to ConvertKit. You can get a free trial of up to like a thousand subscribers, I think.Is that right? It is, yeah. Yeah. So you can get a thousand subscribers for free. Even if you’re well above that.It’s super affordable. It’s probably the most affordable for the bells and whistles it has. It’s quite frankly, I think it’s cheap and I hate that word. It’s inexpensive. That’s probably a better word.Very inexpensive. And so in ConvertKit you can literally just, when they click this link, it just tags them like, not interested in plf. Not gonna email them about that anymore. Cool. So she did that on the front end.
Probably knocked out 10% of her list right away. That’s awesome because now she doesn’t have to worry about them. And she talked about a product that impacted her. That was the big thing with me. I was talking about something that I, you know, I said this genuinely, of course, but I said this.Like I realized up front, half the people, I mean, you look at statistics, you know, we look at them and go, man, half the country’s obese. Guess what? Half the country’s not. You know, so right there I met. No, my audience is probably a cross section of, the population, maybe even slightly Skewed towards less obese because, you know, they’re high performers.
So I know 50 to 60% of my audience doesn’t care about this at all. And that’s totally fine. They can click the link. I’m never going to email them about Alan’s stuff again. And I, like, I’m glad when people click that because first of all, it means they don’t need it or that other end, not denial.That could be the other issue. But I don’t have to worry about sending more emails and more emails and more emails promoting this. So that’s number one. And then number two, I just, you know, I was just open and honest. And, hey, this made a big difference for me.
You were doing a free webinar with Alan. He’s going to teach you some of these things. You know, if this sounds interesting to you, I think you should attend. And I think, you know, and some people attended, so it was kind of awesome. Yeah. And that’s interesting. You know, this isn’t. We didn’t have this in the bullet points or anything, but, you know, you presented it really. It was genuine. Like, you just wanted to help people.You said, hey, this drastically changed my life. It changed my life, it changed my business, it changed my relationships. And I think that it’ll help you, too. And that was really neat to see. There wasn’t a huge push like, get to this webinar, make your $10,000 now, or, you know, whatever else.
All that kind of in your face Internet marketing. And, you know, sometimes we push that when we’re in a big launch or something like that. But this was just like, it felt more like what we talk about asks and gives. This felt more like a give in the marketing. It was, hey, we want to help you. Yeah, man, I think, you know, well, you just kind of reminded me that, like, the way that we were able to market this was just telling my story. All I did was just tell the story. That’s all. I’m assuming, again, I didn’t watch her campaign, but I’m assuming that’s all that Kathy did. Or literally, you look at anything where people are promoting things that are, quote, unquote, outside of their niche, and they’re just telling their story about how this thing helped them or why they might need this thing.
I think the other important thing is, again, when you care about your audience, like, I cared more about serving my audience and saying, like, no, I get that this isn’t the norm. This is not the norm. And I, again, you acknowledge that when you’re promoting stuff. The lesson years. When you’re promoting things that are outside of your niche or they’re out to the size of more, you know, you gotta acknowledge the fact that it is.I didn’t come out and say, you know, this is right on par with. I didn’t come out and I forgot. I mean, to view that. I never sent an email, like, hey, this is my normal thing today. No, I never sent.
I didn’t send an email going, like, just out of left field, like, where people are going, wait, why is he talking about this? You have to explain why you’re talking about things. When I send an email and say, hey, I just did a new podcast and we’re talking about how to find affiliates, nobody goes, why would he send me that? And that’s what you signed up for, you know, but when you are sending something that’s not that, you have to explain it. There has to be that backstory.So we started off. The very first email, if I remember correctly, is, hey, this was me 15 months ago. Yeah, this is me now. You know, like, very visual, but also, okay, he’s going somewhere with this. And here’s how I did it.And then we positioned Alan and we told Alan’s story. We said, hey, you know, if this sounds like it might be helpful to you, then it’s going to be helpful to you. If you believe that your voice holding you back, you need to come to this. If you believe that this could potentially transform your life, then come to this. That story is what is super important now.
If I didn’t have that story. But I knew Alan because now he’s reaching out to know. I. We’re encouraging him. He’s in our mastermind.So one of the things that we talked about is like, dude, you got to be. You know, I told him, I want you to spend 20 hours a week reaching out to potential JV partners. All these other people who aren’t affected by him. He’s not coached them, but they know his story. And so they can say, hey, my friend Alan lost £129 in whatever.
It’s like 300 days or something. You know, he went from being obese for two decades to being a very, you know, fit man in, less than a year. And he said to me that, you know, his weight was holding him back. Well, if it’s holding you back. And now you can basically tell the exact same.The marketing could be the exact same. From that point forward, it was a little bit easier because I had the personal story and so look for those products where if they’re outside of your niche, but you believe that they have transformed something that you’ve done. I think of like Cara Andretta teaches cake decorating. She was a top 20 partner for Michael Hyatt’s goal setting course. You know, it makes sense.
When you did really well in that, you know, a few years ago. That makes sense. You’re the productivity guy. Goal setting, you know, two peas and a pod. Right?no idea why I did that voice. Butter pain, but a poop, you know. They go together like peanut butter and tuna fish, you know, and that makes sense. But cake decorating in goal setting, like, well, who again, who’s her audience? Entrepreneurs who are cake decorators.Entrepreneurs need to what, set goals. It’s off to the side. But it definitely makes sense if she explains. If she just came out right away and said, hey, Michael Hyatt released a new thing all about goal setting. I’m sorry, what?
But if she explains it in the context and introduces it softly, then transitions into the quote, unquote, normal marketing, very effective. So we talked about at the beginning, and we talked about how Alan had never promoted a JV offer before, and we’ve never really promoted anything that was this far outside of our lane. So one, of the cool things that this can apply both ways. You know, we really try to focus on being an affiliate inside of aim. But I’ll just give you this tip that one of the best ways to find affiliates to be an affiliate, you know, and to basically do webinar swaps.
Now, we’re not doing that with Alan. I did this, you know, on some level for him, you know, to be perfectly transparent again, he’s in our mastermind, he’s a dear friend, and he’s changed my life. So there’s no, like, Ellen, you got to promote our affiliate marketing stuff to your audience now. Like, that’s not on the table at all. If he chooses too great.But I never once asked him to do that. But finding those people who maybe where you’re both doing it for the first time, you know, finding those people where you both have a small list. Maybe you both have a list of 700, 800, 900 people. I think Alan’s list before this was under 800. I think it was like 750 people.
Typically, we partner when we promote people. There are people with list of 200,000, you know, 100,000, maybe 35,000 on the small end. But we. There is an opportunity when you’re first starting out to look for partners both ways that are much smaller. For one, when you’re doing these webinars, like, if this had been, you know, let’s just say this was our very first affiliate promo, did I want to do it where I’m, doing it with, you know, somebody who’s got a certain level of expectation?
You know, let’s say we had 800 people on our list. The reality is, if you have 800 people on your list, we’re probably going to get like 10 people to show up for the webinar. Maybe 15. I don’t want to have 15 people on somebody’s list who’s used to having a thousand, you know, and so there’s a certain level there. The other thing for him is he doesn’t want to be on a webinar where there’s a thousand people.And you don’t either if you’ve never done one before. You know, you want to be on where there’s 10 or 15 or 20 people. And so it’s an opportunity for you to work your way in, I was going to say. And you talk about this all the time within start. And a lot of that’s getting in your reps.
And how do you get in your reps is you do that at a smaller level, a, practice level. And not that it wasn’t professional, what you got, the webinar that you guys did, but because it was a smaller audience, it’s a great opportunity to practice your professionalism at that smaller level. So. And now as he does this again and again and again, that webinar is just going to get better and better and better and better and. And so are the products that he puts together for you. Yeah. And if you’re doing a webinar, again, we’re speaking more from the, you know, finding affiliates out here. But just think about this way. Like, I see so many times I just got to go out and I got to get that one. If I could just get that one person.It’s like the author saying, if I can just get on Oprah. Right. What if Tim Ferriss had just waited to get on Oprah or J. K. rowling had waited to get on Oprah?Like, we would never have heard of either one of them. So rather than get on Oprah, what if you’re on, you know, WKCL in Denton, Texas? You know, I’m just trying to pick a random place. Then you’re on W. You know, ABC on.
And I think that’s in New York. City. So that’s a bad example. But you’re on some poodle, you know, in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and you’re going, you know, one by one, and people are like, well, that’s just harder than getting the one. Well, do you have the one?You know, did you get on Oprah? How much longer is it going to take you to get on Oprah? And why would Oprah have somebody on who hasn’t even. Like, you get on. You’re like, I don’t even know what to say because I’ve never done it before.Then you go on Oprah after You’ve been on 300 radio interviews, and you’re like, boom. Got. Yep, got my talking points. I’m in. You know, you got your stories down, all that stuff.
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And that’s what we talking about with the reps. It’s like, do the smaller ones. You want. You want to get in front of, Everybody wants to do the one webinar with 4,000 people. Oh, man, I just want to do a webinar with 4,000 people on it.How about just do 40 webinars with a hundred people? Here’s the deal. You’re much more likely to get one with 4,000 people if you’ve done 40 with a hundred or even 80 with 50 or 120 with 33. 3 people, you know, or 200 with 20 people, and you’ll be a million times better. So I’m gonna tell you guys, again, getting a little bit off track here, but here’s what I told Alan afterwards.
I said, go do it again and again and again. I said, dude, if I were you initially, I told him I was like, every Thursday, I would be doing a webinar. I don’t care if it’s for your internal audience and you have six people on, or if it’s a JV webinar and you have two people on or 30 people on or whatever. Just get in the reps. Get in the reps.Get in the reps. Then I was like, you know what? Thursday’s not enough. I said, you got to get this, like, really cranked up. I said, I would be doing an internal webinar every Tuesday, come hell or high water.
I would probably be doing one on Wednesday to your paid traffic, and then I’d be doing one on Thursday with the jv. And I said, I don’t care if you’re JV ing with, like, one of your clients who does nothing but post it on his personal Facebook page. Nine people show up Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Every single week. I said, it only takes about 10 weeks before you got 30 reps in and you started to refine those stories. And then you, you know, like, I was sharing with him, and I’ll share with you guys, like, the little things, like, we’ve done this where, I don’t know, I was doing a presentation that I’ve done five times, and then suddenly I said something.
And, when I said it, I leaned in like this, and we went, ooh, that was good. So now what does it say in the script? Lean in. Because if I don’t put it in the script, I’m never going to personally remember to do that again. I might do it randomly just thinking about.I just go like that. But the only reason I did that was, like, just that morning, I’d been watching Zig Ziglar, and he does that move when he asks a deep, question. And it’s the same thing. Puts the arm over and he leans in like that and asks the question. If he was speaking on a stage, he would get down on one knee, always the same way.And it was the same move. So I had it somewhere in m. My subconscious. But when I deliver it two weeks later, I might not even think about that. So now it says in the script.
Now, when we studied what I did, we noticed there were parts where suddenly I started talking a little bit faster because I was really excited, but I actually needed to pause between sentences and give the audience some time to think about what I was saying. Like, even just there, you know, I slowed down. You don’t know those things until you’ve just gotten in the reps and observed and studied and watched your own presentations. And so that’s the beauty of working with small partners both ways. The cool thing is, it’s also a heck of a lot easier to get somebody who’s got a thousand people on their list to say, yeah, I’ll host a webinar with you, and you can host one with me.
And it’s a lot easier to get them to switch. And then, you know, you get your reps in, but also they host a webinar with you. And you grow your list by 50 people. Like that. When you’re starting out, there’s very little you can do in an hour of your time to get 50 people on your list, because even if they don’t show up, they’re on your list.I don’t know what most of you, when you’re starting out, can do with an hour of your time to get 50 people on your list? Please tell me. I’m asking for a friend. We’ll add it to list launch challenge. Dude.
Here’s the deal. You know, eight hours a day, that’s 400 subscribers a day. There are not many people out there adding 400 qualified people to their list every single day. Exactly. So even you say, oh, only I had 50 people in my loan.I want to work with the big boys. Well, work with the small, and then, you know, do 10 of those, and then go up to people with 2,000 people, and then 3,000 work your way up. Because here’s the thing. If you do 10 of those, let’s say you have 500 people on your list and you do 10 with, and you get 50 subscribers. Now you have a thousand subscribers.
A little bit of attrition. But just work with me here. Now you can go after people who’ve got slightly bigger lists because you’ve got something to offer. Now they’re sending 80. You do 10 of those, you’ve got 1800 subscribers.Even with attrition, you got 1500. Now you’ve got more to offer somebody with 2000, they’re sending 100. You do 10 of those. Now you got 2,500. You got something to offer somebody with 3000, they’ll send you 125 and so on.
And now, now you’re only having to do eight of them to get to another thousand, and then so on and so forth. And on the affiliate side there, it’s important to remember that, you know, you’re getting your reps in, too. You know, if they bring you on at all, you’re getting in front of, you know, your audience in a way that serves them. Plus, you are practicing that webinar thing. That way, when you grow your business to that point, you will know how to do it, how to host the webinars, how to, you know, use the training.
You will have seen the webinars enough that especially the more different programs that you can work with, you’ll start to understand what you like and what connects with you and what you can put into your webinars in the future. Which, you know, that’s a really good point. I mean, you’re attending webinars and learning from them and seeing how your audience, like, it’s not just. It’s different when you attend a webinar, right, as an attendee, because you’re trying to, like, learn stuff, right when you’re on there and you’re watching how your audience responds to them and the things that they do and you’re making notes like, oh, when he did that, my audience really. Oh, that’s good.
You know, it also, you’re in the chat with them. yeah. Like, you can have that conversation. And some of that material is gold because it’s you connecting straight with your audience. Yeah.And then when with the smaller ones too, man, I didn’t even think about this. But the smaller ones, like, there’s something about, you know, now he’s blown up, you know, our friend Jonathan Milligan. I mean, we started promoting Jonathan when he definitely didn’t have a list of more than a few thousand people, you know, and yet we introduced tons of people in our audience. Like, we still hear about it from, like, Phil and Gwen and Mary. I’m trying to think of a few others that we introduced him that we actually, I think that was probably it.
Jim M. Folsom. We introduced all them. They still follow Jonathan. And to them, it was like we introduced them to a hidden gem.If we promote Jeff Walker, it’s like, yeah, they’ve all heard of Jeff Walker. If we promote Ryan Leveque, I mean, yeah, the product’s great. We sell a lot of them, we make a lot of money, but it’s like, yeah, I already know who that guy is, you know. Yeah, I bought through your link map because I wanted you to get the commission and I wanted your bonuses, but it wasn’t like a, Man, thank you so much for introducing me to Stu McLaren. You know, it’s like, I heard of him.
I’ve been listening to his podcast for three years. Dude, you know, there’s this, like, I’m introducing them to, like, underground heroes, you know, and like, these people that they’ve never heard of, and it’s really, really cool. These subject matter experts. And then we’re growing our list together. A lot of times we end up in, you know, masterminds together.We have a certain connection together. You know, the marketing is a lot easier sometimes. And there’s just, I don’t know, it’s just. It’s a really cool experience to kind of do that together. So look for people who, you know, they’re at your level or one level above.
You know, certainly the one level above can still be like, the, you know, they’re not bunt singles, but you can hit some doubles with those people. Stop trying to go for the home runs initially. Again, you do enough of these and eventually you wake up one day and you have a list of 45,000 people and you can, you know, so there’s probably a lesson for us, Robbie. let’s do more, let’s do more of these with, you know, some people. The third thing that we talked about was, I think, what you called it, a list of demands to make.
I called it things to ask for. One of us was being polite. You know, the cool thing about this is like with somebody doing a first time webinar, or even if they’ve done a couple, they don’t know necessarily what to give you as an affiliate. So you as the affiliate get to set the rules. And we basically said, alan, okay, here’s what we need, right?And he had to give it to us. You know, and that’s the cool thing about this is like, you get to say those things and. But he feels like, oh my gosh, you guys did such a service. Like, he told me the other day that because we forced him to do it, it’s like now he has everything ready for all these other JV partners, right? All these people he’s doing webinars with.
He’s like, well, here’s the file. It’s already done. Like, I know. Here’s your link, here’s the file, here’s all the images. Bada boom, bada bing. Here’s what the landing page looks like. Like, he’s done now, I would say 90 to 95% of the work. And it’s just plug and play going forward for him. And so when you’re approaching somebody, the lesson there is, you know, don’t be afraid to hold their hand. Robbie, you were super helpful.Alan. I mean, he. I don’t know if I told you this, maybe I did, but he, he and I were talking afterward and we were just talking about like, you know, how things went. He’s like, I gotta tell you, Robbie is. He’s got a little bit of a certain action.He’s like, Robbie is just the nicest. He might be the nicest person I’ve ever talked to. Huh? Did I tell you that? He didn’t say that.
well, yeah, he was super complimentary. And I mean, you spent what, half hour, maybe more? I probably spent, yeah, half hour to an hour with him because walking him through landing page setup and different types of emails that he would want to send, what his introduction automation should look like, just, you know, some of the stuff that as an affiliate we would expect because part of what we were doing was trying to set him up to do his future webinars. Yeah, exactly. And so giving him the tools and kind of the marketing ideas of.
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Okay, here’s what an affiliate’s looking for. You know, it’s the same things that anybody watching this is looking for. What do you want? You want to have some swipe copy, right? You don’t want to have to write everything that goes into all your emails.You want to have your landing page that’s set up. You want to hope that when you’re sharing, you know, a webinar with your audience that they have some sort of welcome sequence instead of just show up, show up, show up, show up. Because that gets really boring. So, you know, he had a whole welcome sequence with his story and, you know, phase that in over a couple of days. So everything that you’re looking for as an affiliate, you can share that with somebody if they haven’t done a JV promo before.
And it’s just an opportunity to kind of work with each other to build both of your platforms. Yeah, I mean, I, I didn’t even like, this is not why we did this with Alan, but we did it with Alan because he’s in Start, so he’s in our mastermind. And we just, like, we wanted to help him. You know, I don’t know that I ever would have done it for anybody else, but I’m glad that we did because it showed that, like, we can help him. And then, of course, we succeed more because he has better marketing.
And he’s going to remember that, like, he’s. I mean, that was just over a month ago, and he just brought you up on the call the other day. Like, he still remembers. He still, when we talked the other day was like, oh, my gosh, you guys, that email that you sent, you know, as an affiliate, because he’s on our list, like, that email that you sent, I’m totally having, you know, JV partners send that. It’s like, we might want to edit a little bit.You know, I mean, that was a good email, man. Don’t copy it exactly. No, I’m just kidding. But, like, I think for. He’s learning.
Here’s the thing, Robbie. When, you do this for your partners, they will remember it, which means they will want to promote you more and they will want to tell other people to do JV webinars with you. And again, you know, you end up expanding your list and expanding your influence, and possibly they might even tell somebody. You know, this is the thing I found is, like, Alan’s really good friends. He has 700 people in his.Actually, it’s now in the 800s, because you know, doing with us, but, like, he has a friend. One particular friend that would be a really good partner for us that he’s really, really tight with is another friend that actually is already one of our top partners. But that’s not the point. But he has another one that would be a really good partner. And there’s a certain level of influence there that, you know, could mean good things for us.
So, anyway, yeah, I was going to. Say the other thing that I thought was really cool about this is it kind of put us in that beginner mindset again. Like, sometimes it’s really easy to get really far out there and be like, we know what we’re doing and we’re going to run these promos. And it was so good for us to step back and be like, okay, as a beginner affiliate, essentially, what do we need? What’s the minimum swipe copy we need?What are the minimum tools that we need in order to promote this? And so having that beginner mind is just a wonderful way for you to check what you’re doing and make sure that you’re really connecting with your audience and doing that serving like we were talking about before. Yeah, there’s just a lot you can learn. That really is the ultimate lesson, is you’re going to learn so much from each other, and that’s super powerful. The last thing, and you brought this up.
You’ve added this to the list. We’re promoting Alan again at the beginning of the year because beginning of the year, New Year’s resolutions. I know you and I both agree. I think New Year’s resolutions are total garbage. I think.What is it about January 1st? Oh, that’s a good time to set a goal. I set a goal just the other day and it expires in middle of February. I don’t need a new year. But for 80% of the population out there, perception is fresh start. And they just think there’s something magical about New Year’s Day. And so they’re going to settle these goals. And we know that the most common one is to lose some weight. So we have to do this. Like, it makes total sense for us to do this.And here’s the cool thing is, I mean, we’ll probably New Year’s eyes it just a little bit, but 90 on both ends collectively, 93% of the work’s already done. The 7% is me making it something New Year’s related. You know, you’re not going to have to talk to Alan again, you know, about this. You know, he’s a great guy. I know.
I’m just saying you don’t have to, you know. Right. You don’t have to talk to him. I don’t have to do anything, you know, I mean, there’s nothing to be done. And then he and I both just. Instead of like him being like, hey, can we get on Zoom 20 minutes early? Because I don’t know if, you know, you know, we’ll both show up five minutes early and do our thing, you know, and we already know because we’ve already debriefed about it. And so we’ve learned the lessons, we’re going to apply them next time. And I personally think it’s. I think it’s going to do three times better.
You know, that’s just my personal belief. So as an affiliate do these things. Can I ask you. I’m going to ask you a question, put you on the spot as an affiliate. Like saying within a couple months of each other, two months.How are, yeah, how are you going to promote this to the same audience? You know, is it. Do you have a different angle? Is it. Yeah, they’re like, hey, wait, I’ve seen these emails before. I mean, number one, because that’s a. I’m thinking it’s important because you can, as an affiliate, you can promote the similar or the same offer repeatedly. You can do that several times a year. And maybe that should be, you know, for those of you setting your New Year’s resolutions, maybe there’s a resolution for you or a goal is to promote the same thing, you know, once a quarter and see how that impacts your business. Yeah, I think it depends a lot on the offer.
When something opens up once a year, like Pharmacolons formula, like we’re talking about, well, promote it once a year, we found. And I know I was talking with an entrepreneur, I won’t mention Stu McLaren’s name, but I was talking with Stu McLaren. Yeah. And what we realized is about 20% of And we found this to be true with. Are actually a little bit higher with some of our stuff, but he found about 20%.We found us about one third of all affiliate sales in a given year were referrals from the year before. That means they opted in. Maybe they came to Sue’s webinar or they came to, you know, Michael Hyatt’s webinar, or they came to whatever, you know, they opted in for the free video series or the ebook or the quiz or the assessment. Doesn’t matter. Then they bought a year Later.Part of that is, you know, in a launch, it’s 14, 17 days on average. You know, 17. 2 days is actually the average. It’s probably a bit shorter today. We haven’t run that average in a couple years.
Launches are getting a little bit shorter. That’s a pretty quick amount of time to be like, oh, I like this person. I feel that I can trust them. And, oh, yeah, I’m going to give them thousands of dollars, potentially. Well, then they go a whole year of being on that list and they attend some of their Facebook lives and they laugh at a few of their emails and they read one of their books and they’re like, yep, when that thing opens up, next time I’m in.Yeah. And you get that effect of, like, literally when the workshop starts. For example, for Tribe, the first question that, like, a thousand people have is, when. When does registration open up for the course? And you’re going, a thousand people times $2,000.
That means, you know, there’s $2 million on day one if we don’t get a single new person, you know, you just know you’re getting 2 million like that. It’s a cool feeling as the, you know, as the product owner. but I say that to say that that’s kind of shows you what happens over the course of a year. And so year to year, we’ll promote things very similarly. You know, of course, the difference, you know, we’re looking at 2020.When we promoted Tribe in 2020, we rewrote the emails from scratch. I literally didn’t even look at the emails from 2019. Why? Global pandemic, maybe. You know, we were six weeks into a global pandemic.Not even that much. Like, it was like four weeks when it started. Literally a month almost to the day. Kind of needed to tweak things. We needed to talk about the value of this from that perspective.Now, two months later, of course, we would not have done two months later if it was April to June. Let’s think about what two months later was. We not do April to June, but it made sense to do it at the beginning of the year. So, yeah, the big difference will be that it’s New Year’s. Sounds like a George.
His New Year’s attacks. I need to get my friend. Sorry. Oh, boy. Wow. We’ll link to that. I’ve got a good friend named John Morgan who’s a George W. Bush impersonator. He’s like, the other guy died. There were two big George W.Bush impersonators and one Guy Steve passed away and John’s the other one. And anyway, I should get him New Year’s entire. We want to promote this for New Year’s so it makes sense. We’ll tweak it and I know he will too. And we’ll probably, he’ll encourage him to like tweak the title and a little bit of his marketing to fit that, you know, like New Year, new you type thing.
But otherwise pretty much the same messaging. The one thing just from a practical standpoint of, course we remove buyers. So we will remove people who bought who signed up for his offer. You know, that makes total sense. Like when we promote PLF every year, we remove the buyers.There’s no point, you know, we might even, you know, this is something we’ll talk about. Robbie. We might segment, not segment out, but segment to the side. People who clicked. We don’t look at people who clicked because we want to include people not only who registered but people who clicked over to the replay because that didn’t require registration.
And so we’ll look at like, okay, these people probably watched some of it or register they got his follow up emails, blah, blah, blah. They know what’s coming. We, we’ll probably take those and segment them over. You know, I don’t know, It’ll be like 500 people, 400 people, whatever. We’ll take those 400 and they’ll kind of have a slightly different path where we’ll use.I’ll probably address the fact that, hey, you know this webinar that you registered for back in, you know, November. Well, he’s, you know, he’s doing it again and now’s your opportunity, it’s a new year, blah, blah, blah. And that’s about it. That’ll be the extent of the difference. Nice.There’s things you can do like that. If you have people, I think that’s, that’ll be helpful for our audience to see that. How, you know, you can just change a couple of things and all of a sudden you have a whole new perspective on promotion. Yep. so here’s what I’ll say.
For AIM members only. We’re going to tell you at the beginning, click here if you want to opt out of this campaign. Basically, you know, this isn’t for you. Don’t ever do that with our emails or anyone else’s emails because you want to watch the marketing. We talk about this so often in aim.Become a student of marketing. Fall in love with marketing. There’s a reason why I don’t unsubscribe from very many marketers emails. Even though I get a lot of emails, it’s because I want to study them. So I recommend not clicking there.
You could be 6ft tall, 181 pounds, you know. And you, you’re as fit as a fiddle. I don’t even know what that means. Literally no clue. But whatever.You could be fit as a fiddle as they’d say down in some parts of somewhere. And this isn’t for you. Still watch the marketing, watch how we do it. That’s my advice to you. So I hope you got a ton out of that talk with Robby there.I just think that it’s interesting to talk about some different things here. Speaking of different things, we got an episode, a couple of episodes coming up that I am particularly excited about. I want to let you know about. We’ve got one with Richie Norton. All about time management is dead.
You know how to reclaim your time and get bigger results with my friend Richie Norton. He and I go back. Oh my gosh. So far, he’s been one of our top affiliates over the years. Just meant so much to me.Sent me a text the other day that like made my week. got another one all about how a first time affiliate finished in second place in a big launch with Tasha Shore. And then guys, it’s the holiday time. Can you believe it? Like when we hit mid October, it’s time to start thinking about Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
So we’re going to start our annual holiday series this year. We’ve got five episodes planned from mid October through mid November with some of the best tips. All new tips this year. Not a. I mean I’m sure I’ll say something that I’ve said before, but all new stuff for 2022 that I can, I can’t wait to share with you.So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss any of those episodes coming up. And again, as I mentioned earlier, if you got questions about this or anything else, you can text me anytime. 260-217-4619 I’d also love to hear your biggest takeaway from today. With that, we’ll wrap up and I’ll see you in the next episode. Thank you so much for listening today.Remember to check out all of our deep dives into affiliate marketing at TheAffiliateGuide TV. And if you have a question, ask it at AskTheAffiliateGuide.com who knows, maybe you even be featured on an upcoming episode. And lastly, if you haven’t yet. Make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you’re listening to this episode.
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Want to know how someone with a small email list still landed in the Top 10 of one of the biggest affiliate launches of the year using a single social media network? In this episode, you’ll hear directly from a social media pro who leveraged Instagram — not ads, not email — to crush it on the leaderboard.
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Links Mentioned in this Episode
Manu’s Instagram – @YourSocialTeam
How to Start Your Affiliate Program
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Your First 100 Affiliates
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy$5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets: How Justin Demers & Sara Temte Climbed to Second Place
$5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets: How a Beginner Earned $18K on Their First Promo
$5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets: How to Create Irresistible Opt-in Offers
$5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets The Affiliate Playbook Part Two
$5.7 Million Launch Secrets Revealed: The Affiliate Playbook Part 1
$5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets: Top 10 on the Leaderboard Using Instagram
Matt McWilliams: Want to know how someone with a tiny email list still landed in the top 10 of one of the biggest affiliate launches of the year using just a single social media network? Well, in this episode, you’re going to hear directly from a social media pro who leveraged Instagram. Yes, Instagram. Not ads, not email, Instagram. To crush it on the leaderboard.
Let’s get started. Hey, welcome back. We’ve got an amazing interview in this series that we’re doing on the secrets of the $5.7 million affiliate launch. And today I’m talking with Manu Muraro, who is a social media strategist who teaches entrepreneurs how to grow sales using Instagram. And here’s what’s wild though. This is what so just blows my mind because I’m not, I’m not big on Instagram. I don’t know a lot about it. You know, I admit, like, that’s not something I really know that much about, especially the freestyle, like, I know ads, I know how to run ads on Instagram, but I don’t know anything about the other side. This is what’s wild.
She finished in the top 10 in this $5.7 million affiliate launch despite having a ridiculously tiny email list. So much smaller than probably anybody else in the top 20, let alone top 10, and still finished up, I think eighth or ninth place, like, just amazing, right? All using Instagram, basically. And so in this interview, Manu shares some of the, the strategies that she used, the bonus content that she used to on Instagram. So cool, right? She also opens up about, you know, kind of bouncing back from some burnout. This is something we didn’t plan on talking about. I kind of wanted just the strategy, but we got into it and I was like, you know, that’s, that’s pretty good.
Let’s leave that in. Really cool. Just, you know, she was kind of burned out and came back from that. Why listening to your audience is one of the most overlooked. So skills for affiliates in one of these big launches. So if you’re not using Instagram in your affiliate promotions, and I’m going to tell you right now, this got me thinking, or if you’ve ever felt like maybe your list was too small to compete. This episode’s about to flip that mindset upside down. So let’s jump right in to my interview with Manu, and she’s got a really cool story that maybe we can get into a little bit today.
But we’re going to focus on one of her affiliate promotions and maybe even a little bit of a second one because she was just schooling me on some, like, social media stuff. Y’ all know, insiders, you know, social media just ain’t my thing. Now I’m all for it. How it can, you know, it can work. And it works great for some people. We have clients who are huge in the social media space, like Julie Solomon and, you know, Kim Walsh Phillips, and, like, they’re huge in the social media space. I don’t understand any of it. And that’s okay. So you come to me for email stuff and then I bring on guests like Manu to help you understand some of the social media stuff. So manufacturing. Welcome.
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Manu Muraro: Thank you, Matt. I’m excited.
Matt McWilliams: I got your name right twice, and then I called you Manu because I am from the South.
Manu Muraro: You have a bonus point now that you can mess up my name in the middle of an interview.
Matt McWilliams: If you are in fact a redneck from North Carolina, you get away with calling. And I always joke, like, I had a Spanish teacher growing up and she was from east Tennessee, and it was like, hey, Pablo, como estas? And I’m like, oh, that’s bad. Wow. But that’s how. That’s what she was. So thank you. This is going to be awesome. I’m so excited because I know I’m going to learn from you. And selfishly, one of my favorite things about our membership affiliate Insider monthly is I get to interview people and I get to take notes. Then if it’s about social media, I get to go tell my team, go do this. If it’s about something else, I get to do it. So I’m excited. So we’re going to talk first of all about the tribe promotion back in April. For those of you watching way off into the future, April 2021. And this was a really great promotion. I think it was. Was it the first time you had promoted tribe or had you promoted it before?
Manu Muraro: I believe first time I promoted tribe. Yes.
Matt McWilliams: All right. So you’d been in tribe for a couple of years at that point, Right?
Manu Muraro: I took tribe the year before.
Matt McWilliams: Okay. All right.
Manu Muraro: Then I came back last year and.
Matt McWilliams: All right, cool.
Manu Muraro: Promotion.
Matt McWilliams: This is my first time promoting this Product and you killed it.
Manu Muraro: You are right there.
Matt McWilliams: Like, where did you end up finishing? I forget, was it right in 10th place?
Manu Muraro: It wasn’t. I think it was like 8th or something. I don’t remember exactly.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, it was awesome. And I love interviewing people like you, who, who you know, I know you’ve done other affiliate promotions, but at least in our world, in Stu and Matt world, Manu was not in our expected top 10. And yet you finished there in like 8th. 8th. 9th place. Somewhere in there did awesome. And you were. The thing is, you were right there the whole time. This was not like Manu came in and did great the last day and finished in 8th place. No, this was like she was between 5th and 11th or 12th place, like the entire launch and did awesome, guys. So we’re going to learn from her today. So I just want to start with like, you know, first of all, why did you promote Tribe? What was the attraction there for you other than you’d been through the course?
Manu Muraro: So to me, what I do is I help people with Instagram specifically. Right. But I’ve always kind of like went a little beyond because I really don’t care how many followers you have. The only reason I want to help you with Instagram is to grow your business. Like that’s the focus. Right. I teach people how to be salesy on Instagram. So to me, in my community and I have a membership as well, obviously that’s why I was in Tribe. To me, the goal is always to help people learn how to grow their small business. And Tribe did tremendous to me as growing my business. So I thought it was super relevant to people because, you know, my members that are in my social media membership, they’re like, so how did you do a membership? So you think membership is good? You prefer course. Course. And they’re always interested in those things as well. So I knew that my audience would definitely benefit from Tribe and that’s basically why I chose to do the affiliate campaign for first two.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. And that’s rule number one. You pick products that are going to serve your audience.
Manu Muraro: And that, you know. Right. Like, I know, I know it adds value in it. I trust it.
Matt McWilliams: So yeah, that’s awesome.
Manu Muraro: That was kind of a no brainer. Yeah, yeah.
Matt McWilliams: So you said you help people with Instagram before we get into this affiliate promotion, like help people with Instagram. That’s. I know that’s a broad thing. What does that mean? Because I, I’d be the first to admit I don’t know a whole lot about Instagram.
Manu Muraro: Yeah. So I. So there’s many sides to Instagram. Obviously, my focus is people who have a business. It’s not an influencer or even though they can take some advantage of the things I teach. But my focus is businesses or social media managers or social media agencies or social media experts. Like, those are the people that I’m focusing on. What I do is I teach them how to get more engagement, obviously grow followers as well. But you know very well it’s the same with email, right? If people are not opening your email, how does it matter the size of your list? So if Instagram is the same, I’m like, I don’t care if you grow a bunch of people, if they’re not buying from you, or if they’re not taking your calls to action, join your email list. So that’s what I help with. Not just be like, oh, how to grow Instagram, but how to get the most out of Instagram for your business. And I, you know, every now and then I talk about email marketing, I talk about affiliate marketing, I talk about, you know, memberships and courses. So that’s basically how my focus is on. And I. And I really focus a lot on helping women be more salesy because we have a problem, Matt. Oh, my gosh, I’m glad you’re saying that. Not me.
Matt McWilliams: But statistically, when we’ve studied this, like, objectively, you know, not. Not like I think, but statistically, the studies have shown it’s. It’s. It’s very, very true. Um, yeah.
Manu Muraro: And we hear, even today, I mean, we get it, right? It’s ingrained in our culture. It comes back from hundreds of years just saying, like, maybe women shouldn’t work or they can make more money than the man, or they can’t, you know, talk about money, or they can. There’s a lot of that. So I understand all that. But up to today, women are sharing those messages of, like, how to sell without being salesy, how to sell without being sleazy. So why are you sleazy if you’re selling? Why are you salesy if you’re selling? You know, and that’s still what I try to, like, really work on with people. Because I’m like, no, you don’t do posts on Instagram for your business. And you’re putting all this time in just to put a cute photo of you and your trip. Like, no, you have to promote your stuff, you know, like, effectively. Many, many times. It’s the same work you do with emails, right?
Matt McWilliams: Mm, no.
Manu Muraro: Like sending one cute email about how I started my business with no call to action. Yeah, it’s great here and there, but it’s not gonna do much in the long haul, so.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, exactly.
Manu Muraro: Work on the other side. Yeah. That’s basically like what I focus on.
Matt McWilliams: That’s awesome. And that’s a powerful message. I mean, in and of itself. Right there, that’s a powerful message. Like, there should be a call to action. You need to tell them to do something, you know, whatever. It doesn’t have to be buy something necessarily. It could be download something or go read this post or even just leave a comment. You know, something that tells them, like, we talk about conditioning our audience. We want to condition them to Absolutely. Some sort of an action and not talking about that.
Manu Muraro: Yeah. We have a weekly live room that we do on Instagram, so the four of us, like four Instagram experts, just talk every week about things. And we’re talking about this today. It’s like, it’s not just like, okay, I have a product to sell, so go to the link in my bio. If you’re not telling them, asking them questions, telling them to download something, giving them a freebie, telling them to go to Stories to check out this tutorial you put there. Whatever thing it is, you have to have people used to talking back to you. Right. So by the time you actually have the call to action that is going to sell something, people have that relationship with you. I was joking today. I was like, yeah, if you have a friend that every time you meet up and you have ice cream, you’re going to expect ice cream the next time you meet up with them. The same way, if you are used to having this call to action relationship with your audience, they’re going to always expect that and look for that. So I think that’s very important.
Matt McWilliams: That’s awesome. So I would love at some point in this conversation maybe to talk specifically about Instagram, but I want to get back to you promotion. I’m sure there’ll be a lot of that in here. So you decided to promote Tribe. You did great. What were some of the things that you did that you look back and go, that is something that worked? It worked really well. And I’m going to keep doing that. Like maybe one, two, three things that you’re like that. Those are good strategies that worked for you.
Manu Muraro: So a super specific thing actually is that I shared a graph of my membership before and after Tribe, and it was very visual. I actually shared a few times. I share an email, I share an Instagram post, and I Actually share the slide. When I had a live with Stu, before Stu joining my join my live on Instagram, I put a slide up when I was introducing him and I was showing like, this is before tribe, this is after tribe. And it was very easy to see. Yeah, no, it was ridiculous. It was ridiculous. I think I started like for, you know, eight, nine months. I had like, I think I was making like 2,500 on my membership monthly. And after tribe like to spike to 10k a month.
It’s ridiculous. So it was very visual and very easy to see. And I think even if you don’t have that spike as big, even if you double it or something, which you may very well do, I think if you have any results to show from yourself or someone else that is in the program, I think the visual really gets people going instead of just going through the oh, here’s the problem. You have the advantages. Of course you have to say all these things, but I think if you have something visual to show, it makes a huge difference. And the other thing I learned something from you that I kept for myself and it has worked pretty well for everything so far is the three emails on the last day.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah.
Manu Muraro: Three meals the last day because I always did two. And you know, like, try not to be salesy or sleazy. I don’t have that problem. But we’re always a little concerned. That’s too many emails. The third email on the last day gets. Got me another like 20 sales or something. It was, it was ridiculous. It was ridiculous. And the last day. Yeah, and the last day is when people buy the most. Right. So they’re like, oh, it’s going to close. I need to join now. They stop what they’re doing. Which they had done. They hadn’t done that the last few weeks you’ve been promoting because they knew that time was not running out. So that last email and then countdown for me is really big too. I think the countdown, the end really helps as well.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah.
Manu Muraro: I did not add, did I add a bonus to try Blanche. I’m like now I’m thinking about it. I, I did think I did add a bonus. I added a bonus. I have this product that I do which is like a done for you campaign on Instagram to promote any launch or sale. So that comes with captions, canva templates which would be like your visuals that you can just change colors or put your own text. So everything kind of pre done for you and the whole strategy too. There’s a 30 minute video that explains to you when you should post all these things and how many posts, how many stories, what you do. And then it has captions for business that have services and for product based business. And I gave that as a early bird bonus as well for the people who joined tribe in the first two or three days. And that worked really well. Yeah, that worked really well. It’s a great product to launch your membership. So I think because it was so relevant to that specific offer, they made.
Matt McWilliams: A lot of sense and that’s super important. Like, the bonus has to fit. I see a lot of people that are like, hey, go buy this course on say gardening and I’ll give you this bonus of like this puppy. Like, it’s like, what does that have to do with gardening? What does that do with membership sites? There’s no connection. Yeah, and I think a lot of.
Manu Muraro: People, yeah, and a lot of think, I think a lot of people give like credit or something like, oh, if you buy this program, you get 50% off on my store. And it’s like, that doesn’t people have to still spend money to get any benefit from that? You know? It doesn’t.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. I love the graph because the one thing I do know about Instagram is it’s 99% visual. You know, and the thing is like, you know the old saying, a picture’s worth a thousand words. I don’t know about that in this case. But immediately when you see, you know, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, you go, especially to your audience of business owners, what do we immediately associate with? I mean, immediately we got, we got, what happened? What did she do? What, what was it? It could have been email list, it could have been revenue, it could have been number of employees, it could, you know, amount of time off doesn’t matter. I want to know what made it go like. And so I immediately have to read this post and then I find out it’s your membership. So now I have to know, okay, how did she do it? So I love that. And then, yeah, last day. Oh, go ahead.
Manu Muraro: Yeah, no, I think the graph was really nice because, you know, like you said, one thing is it’s visual and people are like, wow, this really happened. Also they have the dimension, right. Of the change and also they have proof. So I think all that really helps to be like, oh, she’s not here, just, you know, talking it up.
Matt McWilliams: And yeah, I love that. The other thing about, I thought about this the other day, actually. The thing about the emails on the last day is, you know, number one, if you are giving them an opt out to opt out of the campaign. Then you know, the example I shared with you is like, I mean again, on that at the last day, 8 o’ clock at night, they are sitting on the fence and it’s like if they haven’t bought or they haven’t opted out, there’s only two explanations for why they haven’t bought or opted out. Number one, they’re not opening your emails.
Manu Muraro: Yes.
Matt McWilliams: Okay, so by sending them another email, it’s not like it’s a big deal. Or two, they are going, I don’t know what to do.
Manu Muraro: I don’t know.
Matt McWilliams: Something you say in that third email that just, it triggers with me. Like you said you made $16,000 on that last email. That’s pretty cool. And what we’re ultimately doing in email, I feel like, is we’re in a constant battle for the top spot. And most people organize their emails. I studied this a while back, like 96% of people organize their emails. Newest to oldest. If you go to my, just click on my Gmail, you can’t do this, but if you do, it’s, you’re gonna see the most recent email. You know what dictates whether or not you get the top spot or not? Dumb luck. Because I could email, you could check your email at 7:01 and I could email you at 7 and two other people, their emails just happen to go out 30 seconds later. And now I’m all the way down in the third spot. And so it’s dumb luck. But here’s the thing.
Manu Muraro: I love that third email.
Matt McWilliams: If you send three, four or five emails, you know, three emails, you have a 50% chance, greater dumb luck chance of just being towards the top of their email and getting seen.
Manu Muraro: Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: And making, you know, in your case an extra 20 sales. So I love that.
Manu Muraro: Yeah. And I think also on the last day or last couple days, one thing that I always do on my lounge is on the affiliate and affiliate promotion as well is that I always have one or two emails or I invite people to email me back. That can be a lot of work, especially depending on your list size. But I think if it’s something, you know, the commission for tribe is pretty high. So that justifies that extra time that you put into talking to people. But one of the things I do is like, so if you’re here, you’re still debating and you might not know if this is right for you. So what, you know, what are your questions? I am just responded to this email.
Let me know what your questions are. Because I can figure it out with you, whether this is for you or not, because I don’t want you joining if it’s not the best idea for you right now. So I always try to make them feel like, yeah, I don’t want you to just join just to get a sale. Like, I wanted to join if it’s going to be a success for you. So I did get quite a few emails on that last day that I talked to the person and maybe they’re like, oh, I’m about. There’s a girl that. She was like, I’m about to move to Europe and I’m having a baby. I’m like, not the year for you to join right now. Don’t do it. Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: And you know what? Your. Your audience, I mean, this particular person will love you for that. I did that with. I did that with PLF. When we. When I promoted PLF in 2019, it was actually funny. This lady was just on all. All of our members will know Gwen Morasco in 2019, she. She messaged me and said, Should I purchase PLF? And I responded back and said, no, you are going through. I think she was going through tribe, and I know where you’re at in your business, and I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen. You’re going to buy PLF and you’re going to sit on it for a year. So guess what?
Manu Muraro: It’ll be there by next year. Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: I said, if I thought it would be like three or four months, I would. I would tell you, go ahead and get it and have it in three or four months, but you don’t need to do that. And so, sure enough, a year later, she was like, okay, when. When does it open? When does it open? When does it open? I’m ready. And she bought it and she’s a huge fan of it. And me, because I was just honest, of course.
Manu Muraro: And I think also, you know, we’re thinking of our business long term, so just try to force a sale right now because that’s what you’re promoting. You know, it’s much better to actually work in the best interest of your audience and then have them, you know, trust you for the future and continue being with you.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, but I love that you invited those questions, Manu, because, yeah, you said it took some time, but the reality is you might have paid five or six sales. Just look at the pure financial side.
Manu Muraro: Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: I know that where you finished was one spot higher. You know, if you’d made five sales less, you’d have finished one spot lower. So that’s, you know, about 1,000 bucks. So you made an extra thousand dollars in bonuses. Yeah, for those five sales, plus, you know, the 4,000. So you made 5,000 bucks extra. You know what? You just have to ask yourself, and if you do make $5,000 an hour.
Manu Muraro: Like, consistently, I’m at 49.99.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, I don’t. But I’m saying, like, if you look at total amount of time that I work in a given day and what we bring in, news flash, y’. All. I don’t make $5,000 an hour. Yeah, no, I’m doing all right. We’re good. And we’re having our best year ever. Right. It’s going to be amazing finish to the year. But I’m not making $5,000 for an hour of work.
Manu Muraro: No, I think it’s like 20 minutes.
Matt McWilliams: 30 minutes, and I make five sales.
Manu Muraro: And I do something on Instagram, too, because that’s my place, you know, And I’m talking about that. Well, so one thing that I always do in all my campaigns is similar to the email. It’s all the same strategies kind of adapted to the different platform. So I do something on the last couple of days and a bigger launch like Tribe, which is longer. I do that a few times, actually, but especially like before an early bird ends or before the cart closes, I always do something where I ask people questions in a poll in my stories. So when they answer a poll, you actually get a list of people with a direct link to their DMs. So if I say something about, you know, like, whether you’ve considered a membership?
Sometimes I ask things that are not as specific but are, like, are you maxed out on one on one time and you’re looking to scare your business, but you don’t know how is the ceiling looking? Really low or whatever. And people would say yes, like, would you like to know more about memberships? Or something like that? And people are like. Or, you know, like, are you interested but not sure it’s for you. And when people ask yes, like, I’ll not like more information, I hit them up on dms. So actually, on the last day or the last couple of days, I free out my time a lot because I have all these people to talk to via DMs, and I have all these people to talk to in email and on DMs, I actually send them a voice memo instead of just sending a text first. It’s much faster if I’m already there for it and also because they already answered to a poll welcoming more information. I think it’s not the same as like cold voice messaging someone, you know.
Matt McWilliams: Sure.
Manu Muraro: So I always do that. And sometimes people are like, oh, that’s so cool to respond to get a message, a voice message or whatever. And when you have someone in your DMs to ask the questions they. That they have, that really helps too. So that always helps converting as well.
Matt McWilliams: I think the key there, this would be the lesson is you intentionally set aside time on that day.
Manu Muraro: Yes.
Matt McWilliams: This is not one of those things where you hoped you had time or you did it for five minutes and 10 minutes. No. You knew this one day out of the entire calendar year. Cart close day for tribe.
Manu Muraro: Yes.
Matt McWilliams: 20, 30, 40 sales. It could be worth 10, 15, $25,000. That maybe you should put it on your calendar.
Manu Muraro: Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: And I think I love that because.
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Manu Muraro: That card closes at night or something. I said to my husband, I’m like, go take the kids. Like, you know, I’m going to go keep working. He’s like, yeah, keep working tonight. I’m like, do you want me to base the kids or you want me to write this extra email that may make us like another $3,000. Like write the email. I’ll take the kids.
Matt McWilliams: Exactly. Yeah. And that, that’s such an important thing, like whether you’re running a launch. You know, my family knows that. Like, you know, again, I went to bed well after midnight that night. I was up like DMing with affiliates at 1:30 in the morning about strategy. You know, I remember, yeah, my family knows that those last two days, especially that, yeah, I’m probably going to miss dinner or I’m going to have a quick dinner. And the kid, as much as we hate it, the television might be the babysitter for, you know, it’s fine.
Manu Muraro: They need a little downtime as well.
Matt McWilliams: And things like that. Right. And that’s important, like just communicating and in your case, putting it on the calendar, being intentional about it. Like, this is a big day. This is not your average affiliate promotion. This is a big day. Every sale is worth $800, $798.80. Every sale’s worth a lot of money. Not to mention, you know, I mean, you know, the difference between 10th and 5th and you were right in that like the, the difference between 10th and 5th was like 15 sales total.
Manu Muraro: Oh, wow. Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: And that was like the difference between like a $10,000 bonus and a $200 bonus. You know, so all this stuff is up for grabs. And you were intentional and put that on your calendar, which I love.
Manu Muraro: Yeah. And. And on Instagram, I went live a lot, too, and I went live with Stu twice, but just without Stu. I just went live, like, a couple of times. And even the lives I did with Stu, because I think Stu has, like, a little. Maybe a window of 15 minutes or something to going live, which is great. But when you’re live on Instagram, when you go live, that’s when people start being told that you’re live. So even if you put, like, a countdown, which I usually do, that people can save and be notified. They need to be on the app to be notified, you know, so the longer you stay, the more people you can reach.
So what I would do is I would start. Get Stu on, and then continue. So I had that longer live where I would just kind of. I would start a little before Stu, give a little intro, then Stu will come in. We’ll just start the discussion, say all the good things. And when Stu is gone, like, I’ll say, okay, so I’m staying here. I’m answering questions. I’m showing you guys, you know, more what happened behind the scenes, what you get, blah, blah, blah. And I just kind of stay there longer because if I’m live for 40 minutes, I have a lot more time for people to be notified that I’m live and then come to the Live and the lives.
Like, when it comes to Instagram, the lives you get people to join, it’s not a huge amount of people, because think of your audience plus the amount of people that actually are on the platform at that point in time and that are free to watch your live right now, better than before, because people are more working from home and all that, but it’s still like a big funnel in your number of. In your audience. But what happens is that even if I’m live and I’m talking to, like, 40 people, every time, you get, like, five sales out of the Live, because you’re there, you know, talking to that person, and they can see your enthusiasm. They can see what’s doing for you, and it’s. I find it super helpful. That’s why I don’t think a lot of people watch the long replays of Alive. But I think going live a few times, you’re able to get more people just to join you live, even if it’s a few at a time.
Matt McWilliams: That’s. That’s powerful right there. I mean, I love. Yeah, that’s super smart based on that kind of the way that works. And the algorithms and things like that, like it’s super, you know, go live for 10 minutes or so. You bring the guest on. So you tell them, you know, okay, you get on at 4:35, you go live at 4. That’s a weird time. Go live at 4, 20, whatever. Yeah, you go live for 10 or 15 minutes. Then they come on right. Kind of the height when you’ve got a lot of the people on, then you, you know, you wrap up and then they might not want to watch. Like you said, they don’t watch the 45 minute replay. But if at the end, one things that I’ve done that’s worked really well is, hey guys, if, you know, if you missed the part where Stu was on, go watch. Yeah, the replay will be up, skip ahead to about minute 14. That’s when Stu comes on.
Manu Muraro: Yeah. So what I, what I do with my lives is two things and it helps a little bit. You still get some view after. One is that I put a top, a list of what was talked about. So I don’t necessarily put time stamps because that’s kind of, it’ll be a lot of work for me. But I definitely put like a bullet point and say, this is when we talked about starting a membership. This is when we talked about finding a niche. This is when we talked about, you know, the details of tribe this year or whatever. And then I also say, pro tip, listen to the audio only in your car when you’re driving or something like that. Put your headphones on and just listen to the audio like it’s a podcast. So I always put that in there too because I think that helps people be like, oh yeah, I don’t need to be holding my phone to watch this because I mean, we’re pretty mad, but they don’t need to be seeing our face like the whole 45 minutes.
Matt McWilliams: This is good stuff. Oh my God, this is like a masterclass in Instagram. Okay, so I want to go back. So we’ve always taught, because this is what the statistics have shown. Now this, this is a self fulfilling prophecy though. Okay, this is why I want to talk to you about this. Because we’ve always taught like on social media, focus on the free. So what I mean by that is use your social media to get them to Stu’s workshop. Use your social media to get them to Stu’s webinar. This is something they can register for for free. And then they get on, they get tons of valuable content and then Stu sells them and they buy Yay we make a commission. But I’m hearing, like, you’re using your social media directly to sell and try.
Manu Muraro: Much heavier than the work.
Matt McWilliams: You’re bucking the trend of what the statistics say so that, you know, you’re an outlier here. Let’s talk about that now.
Manu Muraro: Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: So how are you doing that?
Manu Muraro: Yeah, so I think that’s this whole thing. I think so. Here’s a little history. Instagram history, right? Instagram started 10 years ago. It’s over 10 years old. It’s almost 11 years old. So it’s not new. However, when Instagram started, it was one thing for people to connect with each other and share photos and stuff like that. So there wasn’t a business aspect to it.
So when business and brands start being a little more serious About Instagram, maybe 2015, 2016, that’s when Instagram did a business type of account with business features, with a lot more ads and just made it a platform for small businesses and for businesses in general.
So But people continue thinking, because when businesses join in 2015, they thought they had to kind of like, put the mustache, glasses and disguise in the middle of the lifestyle bloggers, you know, and be like, oh, no, we can’t just be like, buy this. We have to be like, oh, here’s a girl on top of a mountain. You know, And I think that’s a really old or dated strategy because people follow brands. Like, people go and click to follow brands that have a logo. I have a logo on my Instagram. It’s your social team. So if anyone is watching and wants to check it out, I have my logo. I don’t have my face or my name in it. It’s a brand.
So people buy from Instagram. Like, a lot of people buy from Instagram. That’s, you know, there’s all data about this. So to think that, no, people don’t want to see our, you know, promotions in here. They don’t want to see, know about our, you know, promotional, like, content, our offers, our sales, our course. It’s an old story. Like, I, you know, obviously I’m an expert on Instagram, so I have a little bit of an advantage there. But I just adapt strategies. Like, it’s the same marketing strategies from elsewhere. So to me, it’s the same as my email. Like, you push a bunch for the workshops because they’re there and they’re free and they’re great and still can do it. But if you want to sell more, you have to push for the sales. So I actually think I pushed for the sales. Harder on Instagram than I did for the workshops.
Matt McWilliams: Interesting.
Manu Muraro: Yeah, no, I’m all for being salesy and people are buying. So there’s this whole thing like, oh, don’t be salesy. People don’t want to see your messages. No one would be shocked that a business is selling like, good point.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, I talk about all the time like crazy businesses monetize hobbies, give away content for free. And if you want to run a hobby, Instagram, you just want to go right ahead. I don’t have a problem with that. But if you’re a business, you walk in the door, they build a Costco in your neighborhood. It opens tomorrow at 9am you walk in the door at 9am, everything is for sale. Now they have free samples. They have free samples, but they have free samples for one reason, because they’re addictive and they usually taste really good. And then you end up with a. Is this just me? You end up with a freezer full of like appetizers. I don’t know, maybe that’s just me.
Manu Muraro: That’s exactly what people do. I think you know all the other content you do. You do helpful content. That’s for them to know your knowledge and then come buy from you. Not just because that’s what you do with your time, you know. So I would challenge you the next year for your affiliate push for tribe to change that just have people pushing for the actual course as well because they’ll see a lot more sales.
Matt McWilliams: Love that. So I want to shift gears for just a moment. What didn’t work? What is something maybe that you either tried or whatever like with the tribe promo and you look back and go, wow, that did not go as I thought it would.
Manu Muraro: I got burned out at some point and I think I thought to other group, I’m like, Matt, I don’t know. Like I feel like I did too much for the workshops and I feel like I abandoned my business. So I think that’s the one thing. I think that’s maybe partially why I burned out. I’m having a really excellent year in sales, which is a great problem to have. And I sell low ticket price stuff. Right. I sell Instagram templates like captions pre made for you and content like visual canva content pre made for you for Instagram and as well as memberships, you know. So my templates sell really well. And of course if I’m just talking about, I’m telling you, I’m sales you on Instagram.
So And on my email. So if I’m only talking about tribe. Obviously I’m not promoting my stuff and not seeing sales on my stuff. And at one point I got like, wait, am I going to do a month and a half of this? Like, how do I, you know? So I think having. But that was also my first year, so it’s not even something that I’m like, oh, that went wrong.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, because you learned from it.
Manu Muraro: I learned from it. And I also, when that happened and I think I talked to you about this, I’m like, well, I have to balance it because I also have my own business to promote and sell from. Obviously I’m making more money doing the tribe affiliate, so it’s okay to have a lot less sales on my business at that point in time. But I kind of took a step back and it was okay. And I remember, like, I was much higher on the, on the list of the affiliates. And then at one point I’m like, it’s okay. I know I’m going to drop. It’s all right. Because I felt like I needed to tame myself a little bit from, you know, imbalance better between my own business. I think for next year what I would do is I would set up more aggressive ads for my own business as tribe is going on and then I can. I don’t have to be the person selling my own stuff.
Matt McWilliams: That’s a good idea.
Manu Muraro: Yeah. So I think that was one. But that was. That was the biggest thing that happened to me during the lounge. I’m like, wait, I’m used to shorter campaigns. You know, like my campaign system is like eight days, nine days. That’s something that I do. So for a tribe that is a much longer one, I didn’t even think about it. I was like, I just went all in sprinting. And then I was like, wait, I cannot run this fast for what was it, like a month and a half.
Matt McWilliams: I mean, if you really like warm up your audience and yeah, I mean, it can be about a five or six week thing. And I think the lesson there, and I know I shared this with you, but I think the lesson there is you can actually the. One of the ways to pace yourself is to start sooner. And what I mean by that is as much as you can do. Let’s say you’re going to promote for five weeks, you know, as much as you can do 10 weeks out. Scheduling that first week or two. Yeah, that’s number one. And like you said, you know, like you just said, if you start Talking about it eight, 10 weeks out, you don’t Feel like you have to, you know, sprint from that first week. You can pace yourself. It is, it really is a marathon, not a sprint. And then, you know, the second thing is I tell you this all the time. We talked earlier, you know, that last day. Yeah. The husband takes the kids out that last day.
Manu Muraro: Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: You don’t watch your favorite show that last day. You know, there’s things that I don’t do. I maybe, you know, I go up and I give the kids a big hug and a big kiss and then I’m back to work. That’s one day. The other days you have to pace yourself, you know, and it’s, you have to do those little things, those self care things. You have to get outside.
Manu Muraro: Yeah, I think things like for me it was like I didn’t plan my side of the business as well as I was doing that. I’m like, wait, still your social team still, you know, needs to keep going. And I feel, I feel like I’d abandoned a little too much and I would have felt better if I had a better plan for it. So definitely doing more of that next year. But I also, it was something that it’s okay, like, all right, if I have a few more, less sales, I still did great and I was very happy. So. But I think definitely for next year it’s something that I’m going to pay more attention to. Being like, this is how I balance this content throughout, you know, this period of time.
Matt McWilliams: That’s awesome. So if somebody were going to, well, just, let’s just say tribe, you know, we’ll just use that as an example. If somebody said, you know what, I’m going to promote Tribe. I’m a first time affiliate and you know, I’m going into this in, you know, April 2022 and there’s maybe one or two big tips you could give me. What, what would you tell them?
Manu Muraro: I would say lean on the reason why you’re doing it too. You know, especially if you have an experience with Tribe that was good for you and for your business. For me, one of the things I did is I actually did and I don’t remember if that’s something you recommended or not, but I felt like it was right for me and I did a page on my website all about my experience with tribe.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah.
Manu Muraro: And the links to join, you know, the, the workshops and all that because I’m like, if I’m here and I say like, oh, just go to link in my bio and they go to Stu’s world, that’s great. And Stu obviously has great marketing and, you know, is all set up perfectly. But my audience knows me.
They don’t know Stu yet. So I felt like they needed, like, this is what happened to me. This is why I’m telling you to do this. This is free. You’ll have nothing to lose here. So I use that same website for the workshops and then switched to when Tribe was on and I kept sending people there. I know it’s one more click.
So there’s always a balance, right? Between a benefit or not. But I think if you have a strong story, I had a really strong story. I wanted people to see that graph, you know. So if you have that really strong story I told students, like before I took tribe, now it becomes like a tribe commercial. But before I took Tribe, I did not see a way of scaling.
I had like a nice salary, you know, my business was a nice salary. And this year my business has grown like four times. I don’t know how many, probably eight times. So it’s insane. So I had such a strong story and a strong reason why that aligned with all my values while sending people to Stu. So to me it made more sense to do it that way.
And then the other thing I’m doing this year, so that might not be so much a tip for the first timers, but what I’m doing is that I’m keeping track of all the people that join tribe to me through me. And also I had people that started memberships without even going to Stu’s workshop just because I talked about membership so much. So I had a couple of people who did that.
I have a couple of people who started memberships just doing the workshop, the free workshop, which I doubt that they. I mean, I’m sure that they will join Tribe next year because they already made much more than tribe costs. And so because of that, I made a form on that same page. I just kind of changed up that page on the website, made a form and I called it like the tribe check in form or something.
Asking people where they are, what that means to their business. Like when did they start if they took tribe or not, if they took the free workshops or not. I even put if they use my eight day campaign or not to promote it. So now I’m starting to get all this data and what it meant to so many people that I have all of them to tell their stories next week year.
Matt McWilliams: That is so awesome. I want to go back to what you said about that page though. Here’s why that page actually does work.
Manu Muraro: Okay.
Matt McWilliams: And We’ve. We’ve studied this extensively.
Manu Muraro: Awesome.
Matt McWilliams: Why these bridge pages work so well is the biggest thing that we see. Affiliates. The biggest mistake they make is so the beginning of the promo, they go, go sign up for Stu’s workshop. And the person signs up for Stu’s workshop, and they go, good, because, like, you’re in Stu’s world now. Like you said, here’s the thing. This is like. Like you’ve known this person for a year, two, three. You’ve been in their inbox three, four, five, six times a week. You’ve been in their feed every day for two years. They see Manu Marado and they go, I know her. And then they open it, or they choose not to maybe, you know, but they see that name and there’s a history. They sign up for Stu’s workshop, ask him the next day who’s who this workshop is with. Half of them will say, it’s with Steve. You know, McFarlane don’t even remember his.
Manu Muraro: That’ll be a workshop.
Matt McWilliams: So we have to keep reminding them. It’s like. It’s why we actually. When we send out the email that says the workshop starts today, we go register. Go register. P.S. if you’ve already registered. Awesome. Just consider this your reminder. The reason why we still send that out to everybody is precisely that, because half the people who signed up don’t even remember later.
Manu Muraro: Don’t even remember later. Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: Like I said, they think his name’s, you know, Sal or, you know, Steve or something. And so we want to remind him. Now, this page, what it does is there’s a reason why it’s called a bridge page. And this is not where the term comes from. But the reason why I like the term bridge page is it’s bridging the gap between you and in this person, and it’s making that connection of, oh, yeah, Stu. Stu McLaren, you know, like, now it’s the guy they’ve been through a couple days of the workshop with, and they pretty much know his name, but you’re reminding them. I’m not just sending you to this guy and saying, go register. And, you know, peace out. Right? You’re bridging that and saying, here’s my story. And now click here and that extra. Click. We actually. We actually tested this in multiple campaigns about four years ago, back in 2000, actually, 2016, we tested this, and we found that the use of that bridge page actually increases sales by over 8%.
Manu Muraro: That’s amazing.
Matt McWilliams: Awesome.
Manu Muraro: Good to know. Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: Extra, you know, sale instead of 10 sales you’ll make 11. You know, it’s a pretty big deal.
Manu Muraro: Yeah. And also, I think, just makes more sense to your standpoint. Right. You’re explaining why you’re not just like, here you go. For me, there’s also an audience thing because I really focus on women and diversity. And I think I even joked, I’m like, if I’m promoting a white guy, like, he’s good, because, you know, for my audience, it’s different. I don’t go live with dudes. Like, you know, like, I really focus on women and giving women a platform. So if you have that bridge, you’re explaining why, like, here’s. This is.
Yeah, this is a white dude we’re supporting here, but he’s helping so many women and so many, you know, diverse groups, like, just go for the business. So to me, that page was really, really important. And then the other thing, we keep going to Instagram, obviously, but I think just reminding them of, you know, from the workshops, to try being open and all that. I think that’s another benefit of promoting on social as well, on Instagram as well, when Tribe is actually open. And the other thing that I was doing is after every workshop, I would go live and just chat about the workshop. So I did that, like, the three days I went live after the workshop and chatted with people, like, for 40 minutes about what they saw in the workshop. And so it was pretty fun.
Matt McWilliams: That is a killer strategy. We’ve used that very, very well in the past. And it. Yeah, again, it’s bridging that gap. It’s like, your audience wants to know, what did you get out of the workshop? Your audience wants to know in the fomo, Right. Your perspective.
Manu Muraro: Yeah, because I had all these people that went. And then the other. And they’re like, what is your best takeaway? And then I’ll talk about the takeaway. And people be like, oh, you thought all this.
Matt McWilliams: I don’t know if you. If you do this on purpose, but, like. And this kind of sounds sinister because it’s not. There’s. This is healthy. What happens is it’s just like, you go into a conversation. All right, so, yeah, there’s. There’s six people in a group. They all watch the same show last night, and you come into the conversation and do what? I don’t even know, like, who’s. Who’s that character who. I don’t even know what. You know, like, you feel, like, totally left out. So what happens is you’re not in the cool kids club.
Manu Muraro: Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: So you are interacting with the 37 people on live who. Who were there and there’s 24 who weren’t. They’re going. I mean, this sounds really interesting. What?
Manu Muraro: Well, you can still join. Yeah, yeah.
Matt McWilliams: It’s a very. It’s a healthy fomo, like you said.
Manu Muraro: Yeah. And I invited people to, like, I invited people via email. I’m after the workshops, we’re going to do the chat online on Instagram. So I had the people that actually attended the workshop just join again because I think everybody, like, in my world, everybody leaves the workshop for a couple hours and they go straight to Instagram.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. Oh, I love that. Yeah. It conditions them to point back to you and it bridges that. Bridges that gap as well. So as we wrap up here, Mina, first of all, thank you so much. This has been amazing.
Manu Muraro: Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: It’s going to sound like the dumbest question ever, but I’m going to ask because this will show you my level of understanding of Instagram.
Manu Muraro: It’s great. It makes me look smarter. So it’s perfect.
Matt McWilliams: There’s like Manu’s level of Instagram and then there’s mine, which is right above, like, my mom’s probably. So is there a way for people to be able to see some of what you did promoting Tribe on Instagram.
Manu Muraro: You know, this past year? Yeah. So they can DM me and I can point them in the. Like, just share the stuff for them because the lives are saved and the posts are there too. So I could just send them one post and be like, look at the ones around that, you know?
Matt McWilliams: Yeah.
Manu Muraro: So, yeah, anyone wants to check out some of the stuff, just let me know. DM me on Instagram at your social team. Your social team on Instagram. And then I can put that below.
Matt McWilliams: This video as well, just so we’ll put a link to that so nobody gets confused.
Manu Muraro: So I’m happy to share some of the content.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. Make sure you go follow, you know, Manu on Instagram first of all, at your social team and then just shoot her a DM and she’ll share those, which is going to be cool. And you’ll get to see some of the. The stuff that she did and pick. I mean, there’s like another 20 lessons just in watching her do it, I’m sure. So you guys are going to love that.
Manu Muraro: We can. I can also give you a couple of links to things that if you might want, link somewhere, if you like, on the show notes or something.
Matt McWilliams: Hook those up with me. We’ll put them. Put them below this Video. So you kind of just answered my last question again as a. As a thank you for, you know, speaking to our members today. I want them to be able to connect with you. So what is obviously at your social team is a great way to connect with you. Is there another way that they should connect with you?
Manu Muraro: I mean, you’re at your social team. You have a good idea of what I do. If you want on Instagram, my website is yoursocial Dots team, so pretty easy as well. I have two memberships, so I have a training membership for Instagram, and then I also have a membership that just sends you Instagram templates twice a month via email.
Matt McWilliams: I love that.
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Manu Muraro: I love it. It’s the second membership I started this year. It’s called your template club, and it has its own Instagram account. I’ll send you some templates for you to try if your team met.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. Thank you.
Manu Muraro: We have really good templates because we start from strategy, and I already tested. I already know what performs, so it’s not. I think most templates you see out there are from a design standpoint, but design for Instagram and what really performs is really different than just. Just what’s beautiful. So our templates are really, really good. So we have those two things. But, yeah, your social team on Instagram is a great place to connect. And if you want to check out the website is your social team.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, well, we’re. We’re hiring somebody probably the beginning of next year for. To kind of ramp up our social media stuff.
Manu Muraro: So that’ll be awesome.
Matt McWilliams: Something we’ll check out. So, guys, here’s something Manu and I were talking about before we went live, and we didn’t even get a chance to talk about it today, but she’s actually promoting something, like right now. So when this goes live in aim, she’ll probably have just wrapped it up or maybe like right on the tail end. So great time to connect with her. Go follow her and just keep following her because you’re going to see how she promotes well tribe in 2022, and you’re gonna see how she promotes other stuff throughout the year. She’s a great person to learn from. I know there’s a lot of people that do really well in affiliate promotions. Just they have a huge list. Yeah, that’s awesome. I love having affiliates who have that. I really especially love watching people who are kind of scrappy and make the best of their. I mean that in a positive way.
Manu Muraro: Yeah. No, my list is not that big. Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: In the top 10 of one of the biggest affiliate launches of the entire calendar year. So guys, go watch what she’s doing. You’re going to pick up so much stuff and be able to learn from modeling her. So Manu, thank you so much. This has been amazing.
Manu Muraro: Thank you so much, Matt. So fun to talk to you anytime.
Matt McWilliams: What an awesome interview, right? I just, I loved her approach. It’s simple, smart, scalable, it’s repeatable. I loved, you know, again, like I said at the top, the transparency that she shared about the burnout, the highs and lows of these big affiliate promos. And so if you want to see how a social first strategy can work for affiliate promos, this episode should give you a ton of ideas to test out. So if you need to go back and listen to it, hopefully you took good notes. Go back and listen to it.
If you have any questions about today’s episodes or anything that we, you know, I’ve been sharing in this series on the 5.7 million dollar affiliate launch. You can just text me anytime at 260-217-4619 and I’m happy to answer any questions you have and share your feedback as well about these episodes or any episodes. Again, 260-217-4619. Lastly, don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss the final episode in this series. We’ve got more affiliate secrets coming your way. And the next episode, well, I, I saved the best for last. You know, I saved the best for last. It’s actually the very first return guest we’ve ever had. And you know, this person finished in the top three and did some pretty amazing things. So you’re gonna want to be here for that one. So make sure you hit subscribe. I’ll see you then.
See you soon.
The post $5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets: Top 10 on the Leaderboard Using Instagram appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.
What happens when two marketers team up, run a paid workshop, and use that momentum to finish second in a $5.7 million affiliate launch? In this episode, you’ll hear how Justin Demers and Sara Temte built an audience of buyers before the launch even started… then used that list to generate massive affiliate sales, deepen their relationships, and create a winning campaign. If you’ve ever thought, “I don’t have a big list,” or “I’m not sure how to stand out,” this is the playbook you’ve been waiting for.
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Wake Up to Freedom
How to Start Your Affiliate Program
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy$5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets: How a Beginner Earned $18K on Their First Promo
$5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets: How to Create Irresistible Opt-in Offers
$5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets The Affiliate Playbook Part Two
$5.7 Million Launch Secrets Revealed: The Affiliate Playbook Part 1
How Two Parents Built a 104,000-Person Email List in Just 14 Days
$5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets: From Zero to Second Place with Justin Demers & Sara Temte
Matt McWilliams: So what happens when two marketers who just a year before had virtually no list, team up to finish second in a $5.7 million affiliate launch? Well, you’re going to find out in this episode because you’re going to hear how Justin Demers and Sarah Tempte built an audience of buyers before the launch even started, then used that list to generate massive, uh, affiliate sales. If you’ve ever thought I don’t have a big list or I’m not sure how to stand out, this is the playbook you’ve been waiting for.
Let’s get started. Hey, welcome back to part five of this seven part series on the $5.7 million affiliate launch secrets. Uh, in this episode you are in for a treat because I’m joined by Justin Deemers and Sarah Tempte who basically went, uh, they went from basically zero list to finishing second overall in this massive launch. Literally, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales. And they did it in a really unique way. And so in this episode, and by the way, if you’ve missed any of the previous episodes, go back and check them out.
Uh, the first two episodes we did kind of a recap of what worked and what didn’t in this almost 6 million dollar launch. Then I had a special bonus episode where I shared a, uh, strategy that I taught the affiliates in that launch. And then the last one was our first, uh, interview that we did with Michelle Caruana. And she learned, you know, we learned how she made almost 20,000 bucks, uh, from, you know, this affiliate promotion when she was a complete beginner.
So go back and listen to those episodes if you missed them. But in this one we’re talking about how Justin and Sarah used a paid workshop before, uh, before the cart even opened, before the launch even started, to build a list of buyers, not just leads, but buyers. And that made a huge difference in how they promoted and who they promoted to. We also talk a little bit about how they promote as a team that’s unique. How they use their personal stories, uh, that’s an important part. And how you can take just what they did, a small, focused audience, and turn it into a huge launch.
There’s so much good stuff in this one, so let’s jump right in. Hey, what’s up, insiders? And welcome to another insider profile. I am super excited today. I’ve got Sarah Tempte and Justin Demers. Um, and we are going to be talking about, like, they were telling me a little bit about it before we went live. This is just crazy, guys. I ran the affiliate launch that they promoted and I had a certain idea of what size audience they had and what they were doing. And I’m going to tell you right now, I knew nothing. I literally knew nothing.
They did so amazingly well that I just assumed they were considerably larger than they are. And so, guys, for those of you out there, you got a small list or maybe you got a small Facebook group. Maybe you’re not like the be Everywhere club where you’re, you know, you’re not on Instagram and Pinterest and Twitter and I don’t know, like, name a social media network that’s gonna pop up in the next eight minutes. Like, you’re not on there. Uh, this is the insider profile for you guys because you’re gonna learn how they did it with a small list. Some might even say tiny in Internet marketing circles. And one social media channel, one Facebook group that, well, I’ll let them tell you how big it is. So, Justin and Sarah, welcome.
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Sarah Tempte: Thanks for having us.
Justin Demers: Thanks for having us stoked, man.
Matt McWilliams: I mean, I’m super excited about this. This is gonna be so awesome because think people are gonna be like, blown away. So I wanna start first of all with, um, I know what promotion you did. Um, I ran it. So, so this is one of those questions like, like, just don’t look at me like, why are you asking us that, dude?
Justin Demers: Have to play dumb. We get it.
Matt McWilliams: Did you get hit in the head in the last couple of months? So tell us a little bit about this promotion, uh, that you did and how you ended up doing, like, what were the chain of events that led you guys to being an affiliate for this?
Justin Demers: You want to start, Sarah?
Sarah Tempte: Yeah. Let’s dive in. So we promoted tribe, Stu McLaren’s membership course. And I mean, we promoted it because we, we have a membership. We love memberships. And most importantly, we learned memberships from Stu himself. So for us it was a no brainer. Justin, uh, had promoted Tribe previously before we partnered up in business. And, um, so he done a pretty chill affiliate campaign the year before. And we were like, let’s do this again. We had a community where because we run a membership, I’M sure people can relate. Whatever business you’re running, you get people asking you questions about the things that you’re doing. And so we were running a membership and so we had people in our community saying, how are you growing your membership?
How are you doing this? What are you using for this? And we’re like, we love running a membership, but we’re certainly not the experts. Let’s send you over to our friend Stu, who knows about 10 times more about memberships than we do. So it just felt like a really natural fit for us.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. So who is your audience then? Like, you’re not the membership people, clearly. Uh, but who is actually your audience and what are they coming to you for?
Justin Demers: It’s um, we’re a strange bunch around our parts. So, so, I mean, who our audience is. We have a lot of people in the online space, so course creators or membership site owners, coaches, consultants. We have some local businesses. But I mean, our company is called Wake up to Freedom. And so we’re attracting a specific type, someone who wants to run a business but doesn’t want their life to be like only the business.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, yeah.
Justin Demers: And so, you know, it’s generally a slightly older demographic, um, you know, mid-30s and up. Usually people, um, who have done life for a little bit and realized like, maybe they were sold something that didn’t quite live up to what they thought it was going to be. And now they’re looking for something that has a little bit more meaning, a little bit more purpose, and definitely a little bit more, uh, a lot more freedom associated with it. Which again, kind of like memberships are perfect for that. So it’s a natural fit.
Sarah Tempte: Yeah. And we specifically teach people about front end offers. So we teach a method that we call mini workshops. And we help people who have an online program, a two, uh, thousand dollars course, a coaching program, a service. We help them get clients by doing a low ticket workshop. So we’re like, you know, are you sick of doing free webinars? Are you sick of doing free content every single day? What if you got people to pay you to come to a workshop? So you make money through the workshop, but then also you get an opportunity to help people and then upgrade them into their backend offers. So it’s perfect. We teach the front end. And for everyone in our community who wants a membership on the back end, we’re like, go chat with Stu. Tribe is out.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. So that path for your students might look like, you know, a low ticket workshop. And I would imagine low tickets. What’s what, seven to $37 on average?
Justin Demers: Probably we have something that do a little bit more, but it’s, it’s around that range.
Matt McWilliams: Okay, so double, you know, single or double digits, they’re going to go from that. They are going to have a thousand dollar plus you know, potential product and maybe a coaching service, something like that. But then from there they want that recurring revenue, that membership. And like you guys said, you know, you could probably teach people how to start a pretty decent membership. You learn from the best or you could actually send them to the best. And that would be Stu, of course. And so I love, I mean that’s, that’s like the first rule of affiliate marketing is you find the gaps in your business. Um, you find the things that your audience needs that they, they really do need to learn, that you’re just not going to be the ones that teach them. And then, and then you teach them.
Justin Demers: Um, I mean, I mean it goes back to our own. Like our own wake up to freedom is uh, we do one thing and we do it amazingly well. And so it’s the mini workshops, like that’s what, that’s our expertise. And so we are a. Okay to point people in the direction of someone who does one thing amazingly well. That’s not that. So if it’s a membership, you know, it’s Stu. If it’s an uh, all in one platform, it could be kajabi. Like so for us, like we love nothing more than pointing people to the best resource that they’re looking for.
Matt McWilliams: So about two years ago, did you guys even exist? Two years ago or. Yeah, no. This is a crazy whirlwind thing. Like you just, oh, here I am. And now I’m going to be second place in one of the biggest Internet marketing launches of the entire year. Um, that’s kind of cool. So two years ago you didn’t exist. Uh, when did you guys actually start?
Sarah Tempte: We just hit one year in business a couple weeks ago.
Justin Demers: Our one year anniversary.
Matt McWilliams: Wow. When you promoted Tribe last year. So 2020, how did you even do that? I mean you really didn’t even have an audience or anything?
Justin Demers: No, I had just left uh, my previous company and I was just kind of like, I mean I’d been in Stu’s world for a couple years, um, and I had a membership in my last company so I was familiar with membership. So there wasn’t like a new thing for me.
Matt McWilliams: Sure.
Justin Demers: And um, I just love Stu and his approach. And so I was an affiliate and um, I had ah, one of my own Mini workshops at the time. So it was around teaching people live video. And so I had my list of customers which wasn’t very large. And so that’s who that affiliate promotion went to. And same thing, just kind of sharing my story, why I love memberships, uh, from a. From a freedom perspective. And, um, I’m a dad. And so being able to spend time with my kids, like that type of story. And, you know, some people gravitated towards it and signed up using my link. But it was, it was definitely not. Nothing like what we did this year.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. And I think the beauty is like. And I say this in a sense from a sense of awe, not a, uh, please do not take this as me insulting you. But Stu said, I don’t know, back in like January, this is four or five months, he said, you know, we were kind of going through like, who we expected to do what and okay, what big affiliates had dropped out. What were some of the affiliates we wanted to get, who are going to be some of the people who might surprise us, you know. And so we’re looking at all these metrics. Like I’m looking at, you know, Facebook, you know, we use Facebook following, Instagram following as a proxy for email list size. It’s.
It’s not a one to one, clearly, but there’s a pretty good chance if you’ve seven extra Facebook following, you probably at least doubled your email list. You know, again, not always the case, but we can use that as a proxy.
So we’re looking at those things. And he goes, he goes, one of the people I want to put on that, that list, Matt, is Justin, you know, Demers. And I’m like, who? I don’t even know you’re talking about. Like, wait, I’m looking at the list. It’s like, yeah, he. He’s like way down there. What? Why are you telling me m this, Stu? And he’s like, I think he’s going to do something.
I just have this feeling he’s doing. He explains. And I’m like. And I kind of. I told him this afterwards. I was like, I kind of like, okay, sure, I will do it because you’re my client and you pay me a lot of money and I’ll do whatever you say to do. And then, sure enough, you actually far outperformed even what he thought you were gonna do. I think that’s just amazing. And so that’s what we’re gonna talk about today is how you did that. So first, let’s start with those numbers that I think just Blow me away. Uh, you have two basic assets as far as audience. You’ve got your email list and you’ve got a Facebook group. Um, let’s talk numbers on those. What’s the email list size?
Sarah Tempte: So the email list is about 6,500.
Matt McWilliams: So for all of you out there, we know this from polling, you guys. Um, the average list size of AIM members is around 4 to 5,000. So Justin and Sarah here, it’s like the difference between. They’d be the first said the difference between 5,000 people and 6,500 people is not like, that dramatic. Um, this, you know, if they had 50 or 60, I could see you. I was arguing. Well, they’re unrelatable. No, they’re super relatable. And then you have a Facebook group. So this is what I know what happens. Oh, well, they have a small list, but I’ll bet you they have a big group, you know, like fifty thousand, a hundred thousand members. We know some people like that. Tiny list, big Facebook group. Um, I’m totally setting you up for this. I think people know where I’m going. How many people are in your Facebook group?
Justin Demers: It’s less than 3,000, I think. I mean, it was probably at this point, maybe 2,500.
Matt McWilliams: Wow.
Sarah Tempte: And to be super clear, we don’t have an audience hiding somewhere else either. Like, we don’t have a YouTube following. We don’t have a podcast, we don’t have an Instagram account. We’re not on Twitter. We’re not Clubhouse. We’re not on TikTok. Like, we’ve got the Facebook group and we’ve got our email list. And, man, we’re super happy to not be famous and to have a small, awesome community of people who really trust us.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. And just as a side note, I love, um, you know, you and I are friends on Facebook. Justin, I just love your post. I will say that for about the first four months that we were, we were friends, you kept posting about, you know, wutf, Wake up to freedom. And I know you know where I’m going with this. I swore that your acronym was WTFU or UF or what.
Justin Demers: Wtf. We have, like, uh, running, like, story in our community. It’s like, we help people go from wtf, what am I doing? To Waking up to freedom. Like, that’s actually.
Matt McWilliams: I just thought it was, uh, wake the up, uh, is what I thought. I was like, oh, so Justin’s like one of those, like, you know, ex Navy SEAL motivational. Like, you got to get up at 4:30 in the morning, work 19 hours a day, eight days a week. You know, like, that’s what it’s. Complete opposite.
Justin Demers: Yeah. Couldn’t be any further from that.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. Um, and I’m, like, looking at this, and it’s like, you know, he’s like, wake the leap up. And he’s like, I’m on vacation. And I’m like, what are you doing? You’re not living what you say. And it took me about a couple of months to figure out that was not the acronym. Um, so let’s talk about this. I want to talk about, strategically speaking, how you guys did this. Uh, and then I want to talk about the workflow between the two of you. But let’s start with the strategic side. Um, if you had to pick maybe your top three, like, you look back and go, because again, you went from with tiny audience and, you know, less than 3,000 people in your Facebook group to finishing guys.
I just want to say, like, second place in one of the biggest Internet marketing launches of the year. I mean, it was a $40,000 second place prize. And you guys, I think maybe 17, 14 something sales from first place. The hundred thousand dollar prize. Um, you know, nearly, uh, we’ll just do round numbers. Nearly $400,000 in sales, everyone. So this is like, these are massive numbers. So if you had to sum up and say, like, here are the top three things that we did, what would those be that got you? I know it’s kind of a loaded question, but I’ll throw it out there.
Justin Demers: I mean, maybe I want to say one thing because there’s like a little, like, asterisk next to our list size, which is we don’t do any freebies so that we don’t have a lead magnet. We don’t have an opt in. We don’t have. So our 6,500 are buyers. They’ve bought something from us. And so the trust is much, much, much higher than a, um, list of 50,000 people who’ve just downloaded a freebie. And so that’s our approach. Our approach is always like a transfer of money, usually a small amount, then a ridiculously amazing experience that far exceeds the expectations that someone would have paying that little amount. So for this tribe launch, we did a paid product on the front end. We m sold it for a dollar.
Matt McWilliams: I think there’s an important distinction there before you move on. Sorry. When people talk about growing their list, the number in itself can very much be a vanity number. Now, all things being equal, I’ll take a quarter of a million people versus 5,000 people. But all things aren’t equal, you know, and it’s a very good point. Like our best, when I look at the, you know, we’ve done a couple of paid challenges, and we only had, you know, 400 people in each of them.
I would say 50% of our annual sales come from the 800 people that were in those two paid challenges versus, I mean, it’s a fraction of our list, and yet that’s half of our. Our sales. Um, I think that’s a really important distinction because a buyer is a buyer is a buyer, as Dan Kennedy famously said. And you’re creating these people, and then, you know, you charge them a dollar or $7 or $17 or whatever, and then what you’re doing is you’re giving $1,000 worth of value, 100%. So they paid anything. Their expectations are here. They’re already significantly higher than free. And even if you exceed the free expectations by a factor of 10, you know, I learned math. I’m not very good at it, but I remember that 10 times zero is zero.
Sarah Tempte: Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: So it’s a hundred times zero. It’s still zero. But if it’s one and you exceed it by a hundred, it’s a hundred. You know, I don’t know how that works in Canadian Justin, but, um, it’s like a quarter.
Justin Demers: Yeah, it’s like 25 cents.
Matt McWilliams: There you go.
Sarah Tempte: Uh, no, it’s true, though.
Matt McWilliams: Like, I just think that’s a very. I mean, that’s huge. That’s everything right there.
Sarah Tempte: Yeah. We’ve got a community of people who’ve proven that the way they operate in the world is they’re willing to spend money to solve problems. And yes, a lot of those people have only spent 27 bucks with us, uh, and bought a simple workshop. But I think it’s still a very different perspective than the type of person who’s downloading all the freebies or attending all the webinars. Doesn’t mean that’s a worse person. And yet which person you rather have on a business list. So we came into this affiliate promotion with the same perspective.
We kind of looked at each other and said, are we going to do something really weird and not do anything free for this affiliate promotion? We’re like, yeah, we’re going to stick with this. So we launched a paid warmup product. So to our list, to our Facebook group. And then we also ran some ads to something that we called membership magic, which was essentially, I think, the easiest way to think about it is a Private paid podcast, um, where we basically, we didn’t do a bunch of training. We didn’t promise anyone that we were going to teach them about memberships.
But we said, hey, we’ve grown our membership from 0 to 500 people in the last eight months. Do you want to hear that story? And we were going to do eight live episodes, and people would get access to those eight episodes plus show notes.
So it was pretty simple for us. We showed up on a Facebook live, recorded the episode and sent out the recording, and then also sent out some simple show notes for each episode. And we did that in the 30 days leading up to the, um, affiliate cart open. So we’d created this segment of our audience that was not only tangentially interested in memberships or hypothetically interested in memberships, but they’d actually paid us a dollar to learn our membership story. And they’d spent, you know, the last 30 days hearing from us twice a week, just for like 30 minutes or so about our membership growth story. And we, um, dropped Sue’s name along the way, shared that we’d learned a bunch from Stu, even had Stu on as a guest for one of the episodes. Um, so we, I think that was the first big thing that we did was create a paid warmup product. And just like, we’re really intentional about that Runway.
Justin Demers: It also gave, I mean, for our mini workshops, we’re always looking at like average order value so that we can, you know, Stu talks about like, now the idea of like the unlimited marketing budget, like to scale our membership and our paid products. We have an unlimited marketing budget because our average order value is higher than it costs us to acquire a customer. Well, we were doing the same thing with membership magic. Like we were looking at it and saying, yes, it’s a dollar, but we’ve got an upsell and We’ve got a one time offer. So our average order value is around 30 bucks, maybe 35 depending on the day. So we can spend $35 to sell a $1 product to get someone into our world who may be interested about memberships.
Matt McWilliams: And so everything on the affiliate side is pure profit.
Sarah Tempte: Yes, totally.
Justin Demers: Yeah. So we made money before the affiliate promotion launched and we had grown our audience of buyers.
Matt McWilliams: That is super powerful. And Sarah, you said some there people are, they’re willing to spend money to solve problems. And I mean, the example I always use is, know I’m in my office now, my wallet, I got to go up the stairs, down the hall, try not to make too much noise that I wake up Our dog. Because then I have to take him out. And so it’s. And so if I’m looking at something, just pay a dollar. It’s not even the dollar. Like, I mean, I live in the. I live in America, not Canada, you know.
You know I live in America. Right? I don’t care where you live in America. You can afford a dollar. Okay, you can find a dollar. Right. But it’s the going upstairs. Try not to wake up the dog, you know, tiptoeing down the hall and all that. And then got to come all the way back down and enter digits into the thing. There’s a certain barrier to entry versus type your best email, click Enter. And then I may never even look at it again.
Just because I did all of that, you can bet I’m going to download every episode, I’m going to make sure they end up on my phone, I’m going to listen to them and I’m going to take notes because I went through a lot of effort. And even if your wallet’s right here, you still got to pull it out, type in. You know, there’s a certain level I just. That is super powerful. Um, that is huge. So you did this mini workshop kind of, um, what was the next step for people from there? You mentioned the average order size of $35. So I’m kind of curious. Like, you know, they paid a dollar. What’s the other 34 bucks?
Sarah Tempte: Yeah, so we had an upsell and a one time offer. Okay, so upsell was a, uh, um, training that we called Churn Buster. So here’s, you know, five ways that we reduce Churn in our membership. And then the one time offer was 97 bucks. And it was another training. We called it the anti webinar and it was like get the slides and a breakdown and the emails for a webinar that we used, or we call it, you know, an anti webinar that we used to add, you know, 300 members in, you know, with a single presentation.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. You ended up with how many people in the workshop?
Justin Demers: Just under 1500 people.
Matt McWilliams: 1500. I mean, so you guys, I mean you’re talking. Well over 10% of those people ended up buying tribe. Um, that right there is just the power of this, you know, that, that paid idea. Uh, we also.
Justin Demers: The thing that’s interesting too is we can get into this, but we had a percentage. I guess this would be point two. Do we want to move on to point two?
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, let’s. I just, I want to just point out for our, for Our members like that. And I’m sure you guys would agree with this when you have a list of everybody, there’s a certain reluctance to really push hard on a product as an affiliate. They paid money to learn about memberships. They may turn out. I mean, clearly 87% of them did not pay anything to Stew or whatever the percentage is. 85% paid nothing. But you had no fear in going, you know, completely all out because they’re not going to pay you money and then be like, actually, I have no interest in this whatsoever. There’s at least a cursory level of interest versus, wow, they downloaded a PDF while that really, they’re really interested, you know, um, all right, let’s go into point two. So the.
Justin Demers: When this relates to what you’re just sharing, it’s the idea of, like, the content that we firmly believe, like, there’s no one, one way to do everything. There’s like a million ways to do everything. And so for us, in these eight episodes, it was us sharing our story about why membership.
And, uh, part of that is, like, breaking down a lot of, like, myths around, like, the content treadmill or always having to be on the clock or, um, you know, memberships being harder to sell than courses. Just stuff that people generally take as fact. In our experiences, it’s not fact at all. In fact, in a lot of cases, it’s like the opposite. But in sharing that, we also wanted to make it clear that, like, memberships are not for everyone.
So even if you paid us a dollar, and at the end of this experience, you learn that you don’t want a membership, that was awesome. It was not. The goal of this, was not give us a dollar so we could sell you another product. It was, give us a dollar, we’ll share everything we’ve done to grow our membership. But if at the end of this experience you’ve realized that a membership is not right for you, then that’s a dollar well spent.
And so when I look at, like, let’s say 150, I don’t know, as, like, 150 people that signed up for Tribe, I don’t look at the other people as, like, failed conversions. I look at that and say, like, they. They found out that either tribe wasn’t right for them just fine. A membership wasn’t right for them, or even just like this, this time this year, the season wasn’t right for them. And so that’s. That’s a success for us.
But the other thing that came from this, and this was totally like, uh, an unexpected but welcome surprise is because of the way our product fits in. It leads perfectly to memberships. So, like, if you have a mini workshop on the front end, like, that’s what we do, right? We have a mini workshop that fills our membership. Well, there’s a number of people that went through the M membership magic and realized they actually wanted to focus first on the mini workshop. So we had a bunch of people who became members of our own membership instead of building their membership first. So it actually worked out that we did like the tribe launch. And then on the back end of that, we opened up our membership to people. Uh, only in that group is like a private launch. And we had a good amount of people hop in to wake up to freedom.
Matt McWilliams: So you had another revenue stream there.
Justin Demers: Little down sell.
Matt McWilliams: I mean, that’s. I mean, you’re probably. I’m just gonna guess you’re talking over from that mini workshop. You’re talking 25%. Probably bought something else for me. Yeah, that’s. Yeah. I got to talk to you guys about to do that. Um, I’ll just say our mini workshop slash challenges convert more about 8%. So, um, you’re about three times higher. We’ll talk later because I gotta learn from you guys. Um, so that’s two. Let’s look. Let’s look at maybe that third strategy. Is there something you guys did, um, you know, that just, you know, maybe you haven’t seen done before or, you know, you feel like you kind of innovated it, uh, for this promotion specifically. Um, let’s talk about specifically once tribe opened, you know, the selling part of tribe. Um, just curious, is there anything you guys, did you think that was pretty cool?
Justin Demers: I mean, Sarah’s sales page was a work of art, so we didn’t treat it like a tribe’s open. Now go check out, like, we had a whole sales page for our own bonuses and stuff, which are fine. But I think it was again, just the story of, um, why tribe, what it’s done for us, uh, how it’s been a shortcut. Um, how we’re. We’re not online marketer famous. Nobody knows who Sarah and Justin are. We’re just two regular people and somehow we’ve made it work so you could too. I mean, we really leaned into that story. I mean, not only through membership magic, but the sales page and also during tribal, like the open cart, like, we’re not special. We don’t have some unique gift. We weren’t. We don’t have a huge audience. None of that stuff. We’re just like two normal people who somehow built a seven figure membership doing things taught by this guy. Like if that’s what you want, there’s no better place to learn it.
Sarah Tempte: Mhm. And I think in addition to that, Matt, you hinted at this earlier that it’s easy to hold back from going level 10 with an affiliate launch.
Matt McWilliams: Mhm.
Sarah Tempte: When you’re not sure if the people in your audience are going to be annoyed or going to be interested or going to be turned off. And I think because we had this group of people that we knew we were the right fit for this, it did really free us up, uh, to treat this promotion really seriously. And so that included building a full sales page and an awesome stack of bonuses. But it also was, we sent I think 30 emails during the um, main window of the promotion. I don’t actually know if that’s like that maybe that isn’t really high. It felt like a ton to us. But okay, so we sent 30 emails.
Matt McWilliams: If you look at, if you look at the plans and I could pull it up. Mhm. I think our all in plan, I say only, only had 21.
Sarah Tempte: Okay. So we sent 30 over the span.
Justin Demers: Of the promotion just like, like copy and paste. Like Sarah wrote like 30 emails that were again works of art. Like I remember people in our M membership magic group saying like they were adding these emails to their swipe files. They were like they couldn’t wait for the emails to show up in their inbox and read them as examples of like how to do emails. Well, like that’s what you want, right? Like people waiting for emails, not unsubscribing because you’re like, you know, banging them over the head.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, that’s powerful. Uh, I mean, just the number, I mean that’s kind of like the ultimate success secret we tell people when we look at like the biggest differentiator between, you know, affiliates who kind of like do mediocre and then wildly successful. It’s like it’s not, oh, they’ve sent three emails versus 30. It’s, they sent 20 versus 30. And the reality is those extra 10 emails from a, um, from a upsetting audience standpoint have almost no effect. From a conversion standpoint. That extra 50%, you know, can generate an extra 50% in sales.
Sarah Tempte: Right.
Matt McWilliams: And there’s a, there’s a direct correlation just between volume and sales. Uh, that’s awesome. I think you guys that might have broken the record. I’ll have to go back and look, I know we’ve come really close to 30. And there’s one specific campaign I’m thinking of that when we’re off here. I just wrote a note. I’m actually curious to go back into our archives and look because I think we came really close to 30, but didn’t. And so as far as I know, that might be some sort of Internet marketing record, which is awesome. So awesome.
Justin Demers: Here’s all about the email records. Look at the length, the word.
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Matt McWilliams: Yeah, just in bonus money. Not even, not even. Just forget commissions. Forget the, you know, you guys almost earned six figures in just commissions bonus money. And I forget the exact number of prizes, but that’s probably $1,500 per email in bonus money. It’s probably a little bit off. That’s probably use 40,000 bucks for second place. So um, yeah, you probably earn 1500 bucks in bonus money for every one of those emails. Again, above and beyond commission. So it’s like, you know, right in this email, 1500. I mean like I just turned, if I Finish this email, $1500 is going into our bank account.
Sarah Tempte: Yeah. And we were really transparent. I mean I sent an email on um, it was probably like the second to last day that said the subject line was please stop sending me emails.
Matt McWilliams: Mhm.
Sarah Tempte: And I was literally just saying like, we know that we’ve sent a lot more emails than you’re used to. We know it’s a lot. We know you might be rolling your eyes but like here’s just like three reasons that we’re still emailing at this point. And so like we wanted to acknowledge like we gave people chances to opt out. We told people it’s okay to decide that tribe isn’t for you. It wasn’t like 30 hardcore sales emails, but it was 30 chances for us to tell our story or point people to, you know, a webinar. I mean we sent emails for the live streams that Stu did. We send emails to replays of things because it was just like if we can get people into um, the tribe funnel, basically we know that Stu and his team will take care of them. So let’s give as many touch points and we know that there’s going to be some people who sign up for the webinar and watch it.
There’s going to be other people who aren’t webinar people. So like, let’s give them a Facebook post they can go read. Let’s give them um, a live stream replay they could go watch because you know, different people have different content consumption habits.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, that’s so important. And I think I Think it’s uh, pretty powerful there. You know, you mentioned, well, there’s actually two things, um, that you touched on. The first is just touching on the different, you know, like some people aren’t webinar people, some people aren’t podcast people, some people aren’t. They, uh, don’t do live videos because maybe they have a full time job. You know, you’re going live at 2pm I’m in a meeting.
Justin Demers: Mm.
Matt McWilliams: I mean, like, are you. I mean, I can’t come, so hook me up with the replay. I think the other thing, you know, just the basics of what you did, including the opt out, um, that says I’m not interested in tribe, please don’t send me any more emails. That’s a very basic thing. Because here’s the thing, it’s Easy to send 30 emails when you know that in the previous 29 you gave them a chance just to go click and tell you that I’m not interested.
And so I always create this visual picture cart close day when I’m um, taking a deep breath before I write seven emails to send to our audience. On the sixth email and the seventh email if they haven’t A, bought or B, click that opt out link. There are only two possibilities. They either aren’t getting the emails, you know, they’re on vacation or something. Okay, well, sending a sixth email, seventh email when they’re on vacation isn’t gonna, they’re not gonna like be like that, uh, that gum it, Matt. And I’m unsubscribing because it’s the first one I’ve read all day. Or B, they’re on the fence and they’re just, they’re looking for something and it could be a specific story that you tell Sarah. It could be, you know, um, uh, a case study. Could be an extra bonus. Could just be the deadline. You know, they’re looking for that incentive to kind of push them to one side of the fence.
Justin Demers: Before I ask, we actually got an email like the following day we got an email from someone that was like, I’m so glad you sent this email because I just checked, like I was out and I just got this and this was like, was like an hour before the car. I just got this and I just signed up for Tribe. Like the person had not seen anything else. I mean maybe they uh, probably would have signed up for membership magic. But literally, like they didn’t see the whole tribe promotion. And then that email like an hour before and then they thanked us. Like they legitimately thanked.
Matt McWilliams: Glad you said that because some people think I’m lying when I say that people thank me for the after midnight emails and they’re like, nobody really does that. I’m like, yes, they do. Here’s a screenshot. And they’re like, that person has the same last name as you. I’m like, no, I’m just kidding. Before I go on to the last two questions, I want to go back to something, Justin, that you kind of. I feel like you glossed over it, but I think it was like marketing 101 when you were talking about the sales page and you said, you know, I wrote down just a few notes. You said that. First of all, you said all we did was just tell our story.
Justin Demers: Mhm.
Matt McWilliams: That’s marketing right there. And I know you know this, but I just want to point out for our viewers, you also said a phrase like tribe was the shortcut. And you’re acknowledging the fact this is a $2,000 investment.
Justin Demers: Mhm.
Matt McWilliams: And you’re acknowledging that you don’t have to buy this to do a membership. Many people have done memberships without Stu’s help and been wildly successful. But if you want the shortcut, here’s the answer. And then you pointed out like the objections. I think, well, we’re not famous. We’re not like big names. We don’t, we didn’t. We don’t have a big list. But we did it. And you can too. And I just wanted to highlight that. That’s, um. If you guys want to copy a sales page, just follow those four points right there. That’ll be a killer sales page. Take that, combine it with our bonuses template and um, There you go.
Justin Demers: Here’s the other part of that sales page. So, um, we had a bunch of people that are in wake up to freedom or that had bought membership magic who were already in Tribe. They signed up for Tribe years ago. And so. But they read that sales page and saw those bonuses and wanted them. So we actually made the offer to say like, hey, if you’re already a triber and you just want to buy these bonuses and just participate in our experience, you can. And it was like $700, $800. So it wasn’t an inexpensive downsell. And again, a significant amount of people bought that. That’s how powerful the sales page was. So we treated it like a product. And I think the other thing about this, which I got from.
Matt McWilliams: Uh, I.
Justin Demers: Can’T remember who it was from one of the other affiliates last year, um, was they were, they were just, it was kind of Like a comment made in passing in the Facebook group where it was like they treated the Tribe launch as their own launch. And that’s what we did. Like Sarah and I looked at the calendar. We’re like, we are not going to launch our own product. That would make us hundreds of thousands of dollars, add reoccurring revenue.
We’re gonna like, we’re all in on Tribe. So that meant that like we did the sales page, we did the emails, we did the ads, we did the nurturing, we did the trust building, we did the amazing product. We did everything we would have done except at the end we sold someone else’s product. So we didn’t have to deliver on that. Like that was the only. And. And then we delivered our bonuses. But that’s uh, that was the only exception. And I think that’s the. Like Sarah and I looked at, um, like we’re obviously going to be promoting Tribe again next year because it works. But we put all this effort into this year to create so many assets that now we can package up in a new package next year. So all the work we did this year is not just for a one time launch. Now we’ve got stuff that we can build on for next year.
Matt McWilliams: Uh, we’ve had the same tribe bonuses. We created a new one last year. We have the same otherwise, because I think this was the fifth time we promoted Tribe. You know, we’d only. We not only run, we’re not only the president of the company, we’re also a client. Uh, if you remember those commercials, the hair club for men back in the 90s. Anyway, um, we not only ran Tribe, but we’re also promoted. Our bonuses have been the exact same every year. The first year, I remember like right after the launch and we did really well.
I think we finished like in 10th place or something. And I was like, yeah, oh crap, we have to create all this stuff. And so the next year, it was like a week before the launch and the team’s like, hey, what are we gonna do? I’m like, same thing as we did last year. No questions, shut up, move on. And then we finally we added one. We saw a need last year when we did really well and we created, created, um, another bonus. But that is the beauty. Guys. Like you can recreate these. The other thing you mentioned, this sort of Justin, like four. I’m trying to think of our tribe bonuses.
Four of those have become individual products that we sell for what we, uh, like when it says 997 value, that is not like me Pulling, you know, like, ooh, this workshop’s worth $5,000. Wink, wink. You know. No, we, like, sell it on the website for, like. And people buy it once a week, you know, for $1,000, you know, and they’ve become products that we can sell. And then one of the things that we’re able to do is actually go to people who have purchased those products and say, hey, you’ve purchased this. Uh, this is a part of our, you know, our tribe. Um, bonus. If you want all this other stuff, you know, here’s how you get it. And it’s been really effective. So, um, I want to talk about the workflow for you guys you mentioned, like, Justin, of course, you know, you’re doing. You’re being the typical humble entrepreneur and giving all the credit to Sarah. And, um, and that’s awesome, but I know it’s not 100% true.
Justin Demers: I just hang out in my bunky all day and build Lego. That’s all I do.
Matt McWilliams: What’s a bunky? That’s what.
Justin Demers: That’s my. That’s our office is a bunky.
Matt McWilliams: Is that a Canadian term or did I just not.
Sarah Tempte: It is brand name, but I think it is a Canadian brand.
Justin Demers: It is a Canadian. Yeah, it’s a Canadianism. Okay, so in your Bunky, what’s a Bunky?
Matt McWilliams: I mean, I didn’t know if that was like a kid’s thing, like my blankie, you know, I mean, kinda.
Justin Demers: It’s an adult. It’s an adult kids thing. Like when you get older, you now have like a little house in your backyard versus, like a fort out of cardboard.
Matt McWilliams: That’s awesome, Bunky. I’ll have to look that up. Um, uh, what was the workflow for you guys in this lunch? Because, you know, this is a team effort, so it’s not just like one person, you know, running the thing. Um, what did that look like in terms of just how you guys work together and delegated or, um, you know, whatever that process was.
Sarah Tempte: Yeah, I feel lucky because I think we, as a partnership versus doing the solopreneur thing, which I did for a long time, is we get to divide and conquer. And so there’s a lot of, here’s our launch plan. Like, if we got on that planning call in January or February saying, what are we going to do for this tribe launch? Then cool, I’m going to go write the sales page copy and then I know I can send it Justin’s way and he’s going to build it, design it, get the pixel set up and all of that. And so, I mean, there’s a lot of collaboration, but I also think there’s a lot of, like, trusting each other to do their thing. So Justin’s not micromanaging my sales page, writing, or we’re not trying to do it together and vice versa. Like, when he is designing, building, working on ads, like, that’s his thing. And I think we really trust each other with our pieces of the puzzle, which allows us to actually save time versus the two of us trying to do everything together or agree on every little thing.
Matt McWilliams: That’s powerful. Justin, anything to add to that?
Justin Demers: I mean, I think there’s. It’s just that, like, um, that shared vision, like, so, you know, both of us showed up with the same, you know, goal in mind for this promotion and why we’re sharing with it. And yeah, like, for us, it was like, we’re on the same page and we’re running the same race. And so it is definitely a T. Everything we do is a team effort and we have staff now and. And it’s just like we’re all running the same race. Um, um. And there are. I mean, I remember there were some days where it was like there was, you know, we have our own business to run, so it’s like there’s that happening while this promotion is happening. And so there are some days where, like, Sarah went through quite a lot actually, and prepared, like the show notes before we were going to go and share the story and I was like. Like, she just made it happen. Um, and so, yeah, there’s just. We’re all in it together.
Sarah Tempte: Yeah. I think the last thing I’ll say about workflow is a shared work style or work ethos. Like, we say a lot. We don’t run an emergency business. We don’t do emergencies in our business. We’re not supplying oxygen to anyone. We’re not doing surgery. Like, everything’s going to be okay. And so I think that really helps us when we’re in launch mode, that we’re not adding drama to each other’s plate. If an email doesn’t go out, if something breaks, if certain numbers aren’t what we thought they would be, I don’t think we’re not adding stress to each other by freaking out and saying, oh, my gosh, we’ve got to stay up till midnight fixing this, or we’ve got to put all these fires out or this is a disaster.
That’s just not how we operate. Like, that isn’t the type of interaction that either of us is really Available for, like, we solve a lot of problems, we get things done, but we don’t want to run the type of business where we’re melting down during launches. Like, that doesn’t feel fun to either of, uh, us.
Justin Demers: I’m going to add something to the end which I thought was awesome, which I learned in this launch, is that Sarah is also very competitive. And so there was a moment near the end, like, you know, Matt, all your gamification, leaderboards and all that stuff. There was a moment near the end where Sarah got real feisty and I was like, wow. Like, this is the first time I’ve seen Sarah at this level of, like, game face. Um, which was fun because I think, like, heck, yeah, it wasn’t like, um, yeah, I mean, this, this was, you know, you could say it was a competition, but it wasn’t a competition because at the end of the day, like, anyone who signs up for Tribe wins. Like, that’s. So this isn’t a competition amongst affiliates where it’s like, you want everyone to succeed.
And so the game face was also like, hey, this is actually really cool. Like, the. And I mean, I don’t know how much we can share, but, like, the. The numbers were at some point, like, um, lower than last year. Right? So we’re like, but this can’t. This can’t be. There can’t be less people signing up for Tribe this year than last year because Tribe works like, more people need to sign up for this. And. And like, that conviction definitely came out, um, in. In our teamwork too.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, it’s a healthy competitiveness, absolutely. Like, my best friend and I, like, we. We played golf every day and we would all mean. We were always, you know, loser. You know, loser buys dinner. Loser. You know, it was like, uh, I remember one we used to. We used to take. We’d spend. We take three people and we’d stay in a hotel room at golf tournaments just to save money. Losers, like, whoever had the high round of the day slept on the rollout. And when I walked off the course, it didn’t matter if I just shot my best round, you know, uh, it didn’t matter if I was leading the tournament, if I played really bad, if I played really bad, but I was one shot better than one of the other guys.
It’s like a little bit of yes. Like, I get to at least sleep in the bed. I don’t just sleep on the rollout. Like, and I could be leading the tournament. But, like, I remember one time there was. I was leading the Tournament after three rounds. But I didn’t play great that day. I didn’t care about lean turns. Just like, what did Hunter and Connor shoot? You know, I had immediately went to the cause they had already left. And I’m like, yes, okay, I didn’t beat Hunter, but I beat Connor. I get to sleep in the bed tonight. You know, like, that’s a healthy competitiveness, you know? And I still wanted them to do well. Like, I wanted us to always. I wanted them to finish in second and third place every time.
Sarah Tempte: Yeah, no, it’s fun because, like, we’re in a mastermind with the person who got first place are you. And third place in the competition.
Justin Demers: So.
Sarah Tempte: So we weren’t against them in this sense. But it’s like, I’m okay not getting first place or I’m okay not being on the leaderboard. Like, I’m okay, but I’m not okay not being on the leaderboard or not placing because we just didn’t send an email or, uh, because we just didn’t show up. Like, I think it’s that, like, leave it all on the field sort of.
Matt McWilliams: You forgot that thing. Like, right. It’s like, why can’t we do that, right?
Sarah Tempte: If we’re not top players, like, that’s fine, but let’s not not be top place because, like, we didn’t send the voice messages or we didn’t reach out to the people who are on the fence, or we didn’t send the five or seven emails on cart close day.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah.
Justin Demers: So this is the thing. This is. This goes back to, like, how we work. So Sarah is, like, the very competitive. Right. And Justin is the Canadian who’s filmed Super Bowls and every NFL stadium and not cared at all about who won any of the football games. Cause I just don’t care about sport.
Sarah Tempte: Meanwhile, I, like, have NFL podcasts on my phone. That’s the main type of media that I consume.
Justin Demers: So maybe that’s the other part of teamwork is that there’s one person who’s, like, very competitive to carry the other person through. Because it totally, like, uh. I mean, for me, it was like, Sarah’s game face brought my game face on too.
Matt McWilliams: That’s awesome.
Justin Demers: We’re all in this.
Matt McWilliams: No, I love that. I think. I, uh, mean, that’s just so important if you’re. If your partner or. I mean, I think, you know, my business partner’s my wife. And when it comes to planning and budgeting and, like, if it were up to me, like, I literally have no clue how much Money we have. Uh, you know why I don’t? Because our quarterly meeting was 13 days ago. That’s the last time I knew how much money we had, and I will not know again until October 1st. No clue. And. But I’m glad that she does. You know, our employees would never get paid. Our team would never get paid.
You know, like, I would just assume that they were doing great because I’d work for free, so that, sure, they’ll work for free, too. You know, and they’d have to remind me. And you know why? They could also take advantage of that. They could remind me twice in a month, and I’d pay them twice. So I’m glad she’s got that. Um, before I wrap up with our last question, I just want to. I want to thank you guys, especially something you said, Sarah. Um, the part about the, you know, we don’t do emergencies, um, that’s a great reminder for me. I know a, uh, few years ago, and you guys have probably heard. Heard him do this, but Stu spoke at a conference that I was at, and he just.
You know, when the stuff hits the fan in a launch or a promotion, he’s like, I just want you to remember. And he played the song, you know, Bob Marley, Two Little Birds, I think, is that. I don’t know the name of the song. I just always known it as Every little thing is going to be all right. And, um. And, you know, I. That song will pop in my head, and it reminds m. Like, we’re in the middle. I was telling you guys before we, you know, we went live, like, soon as we get off this, I know what I got to go back to. It’s a big old poop storm with a. With a launch, and yet nobody’s panicking. I’m not like, you know, um, one of the guys on our team texted me. He’s like, I’m trying.
I’m trying, trying. I go, great, thanks. You know, like, I know you’re trying. And if it gets fixed by three, it gets fixed by three. If it takes till four, it takes till four. If it’s not today, well, we did our best, you know, and it’s not like the. Well, I’m just going to go watch ESPN for two hours while my team fixes it. I’m here to help, but I realize there’s nothing I can do. I’m not the tech guy. I don’t know how to do it. So thank you for that reminder. And, Justin, thank you just for what you have shared today. Like, again, I Know you kind of, you glossed over it but man, that uh, what you shared about that sales page was so good and just uh, this has been so awesome.
So here’s the last question. I think I would like to know, and I know people who are where you were two years ago, would love to know, um, if you could take somebody who’s exactly where you were two years ago, no audience, like not even really have a business yet, um, and you could give them one piece of advice, what would you say to them? And maybe we could go each of you, Sarah first or Justin first or however you want to do it.
Sarah Tempte: I think one of the big things for us has been staying in our lane. I think that’s one of the things Justin, you alluded to earlier that opened up the opportunity to do this affiliate promotion because it was a gap, something we don’t teach. We have really leaned in to teaching one method, becoming known for one front end product, you know, not trying to reinvent the wheel every quarter or launch some new offer every other month. But we’ve got our mini workshop, we continually are sending people to that. Like we teach a specific method in that.
It’s like go to that, that’s our thing, that’s what we’re known for, that’s what we talk about, that’s what we do, that’s what we build our community around. And then in our membership we help people implement. And so it’s helped us uh, build a community that’s really aligned. It’s helped us help people get actual results because we’re not trying to teach them a million different strategies. It’s helped us create an awesome product because it’s not bloated and it gives us a lot of opportunity to point people towards softwares and programs that fill in other gaps.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, that’s awesome. You finished right as I had to cough. That was great.
Justin Demers: Perfect.
Sarah Tempte: You nailed it. That was awesome.
Matt McWilliams: Please keep talking for five more seconds. Uh, Justin, how about you?
Justin Demers: So I mean at the end of the day we as much as this, like yes, this is an affiliate competition or an affiliate thing and yes we’re making money. That’s not like our guiding beacon. And so for many workshop Magic for wake up to freedom for membership Magic for Tribe, it really is about like helping people get the thing that they’re after, like get that result. And um, the reason, the reason people trusted us to sign up for tribe is because their trust is well placed. And it was well placed when they signed up for mini Workshop Magic and got that result. It was well placed when they joined us in Wake up to freedom. And I’ve seen that result. Um, I hate to say it, but there’s a lot of overhyped products with big promises that don’t deliver. And so if you’re out there.
Matt McWilliams: Um.
Justin Demers: Don’T make crappy products. Like, don’t. It sounds silly to say, but, like, there are a lot of crappy products. Like, make something that works because as soon as you do, you immediately stand out. And it’s not like we’re not, again, famous. We don’t have flashy marketing. We don’t rely on nice cars or any of that stuff. Like, we just have a product that works and we just continually make it better. Which is like Tribe, right? He’s stu. Continually makes it better and. And better and better. And that’s just in service of clients. So that’s the thing that’s worked for us.
Matt McWilliams: Well, guys, thank you. I know we went a little long for all of our time here, but I just want to thank you so much for your time. Um, before I go Google bunkies and learn more about this Canadian gym, um, that I still think you might be making up that word. It’s probably going to end up being something that I’m going to regret. Googling. I don’t know why. I just.
Justin Demers: D u n K I E. Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: I’m hoping that this doesn’t lead me down a weird path.
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Justin Demers: It’s like a Canadian cottage.
Matt McWilliams: Um, where can people find you? And I just want to say before. Before you answer that you mentioned earlier, you guys don’t have, like, you know, free entry points. So, guys, what I want you to do is listen to what Justin says. And then below this video, we are going to put a giant link, probably in the form of a button. Okay? Click it. If what you see is good for you, you say, I gotta have that, then go upstairs, don’t wake your dog up. Whatever you gotta do, tiptoe down the hallway, grab your wallet. I get it. It is. I know I said it earlier. It’s an. It’s a barrier. Across the barrier and go. You know what? I gotta have that. Because if nothing else, I want you guys to see how Justin and Sarah, I, uh, want you to see those 30 emails.
I want you to see what they’re doing in their business. So you can, you know, like you said, Sarah, like, people are at. You’re gonna be adding these to their swipe file. Um, you know, if nothing else, do it for that reason. So where can people go on that link? Below Justin or that link will take.
Justin Demers: Them right to mini workshop magic. So if you’re interested in building a workshop that helps you create a list of buyers, buyers who sign up for affiliate offers or sign up for your main product or your membership or whatever it is that you typically sell, we want to help you do that. So click that button.
Matt McWilliams: I don’t think anybody’s like, after hearing this, they’re probably like, whatever, you know, many workshops, it doesn’t even work. Well guys, thank you so much. This has been awesome.
Sarah Tempte: Thanks for having us.
Matt McWilliams: So how awesome was that from basically zero to second place? Uh, Justin and Sarah, they are proof you do not need a huge list. You don’t need years of experience, you don’t need a massive team to absolutely crush it in one of these big affiliate launches.
Really, you just need the right story. You need, you know, right strategy, the right compelling story. And you need to really understand your audience. I mean it really comes down to that. So if you loved what they shared about running a paid workshop, about building buyer focused lists, maybe partnering up for your promotions, imagine what would happen if you actually put even one of those things into action for your next launch.
Just one. So try it. Try something you learned today. Put it into practice. And don’t forget this is part five of this seven part series. So if you missed any of the earlier episodes, go back and catch up there. There are gold nuggets in every single one. And make sure you hit subscribe because we got two more episodes coming up. Not to mention all the other amazing content we have coming up this year.
Uh, so go make sure you hit subscribe if you haven’t yet because you do not want to miss the episode. Upcoming episodes, I got two more amazing interviews. If you want the swipe copy the behind the scenes stuff, uh, that midnight mover email I talked about before, you can Text midnight to 260-217-4619. Again, you can text me anytime there as well. Uh, questions or ideas for episodes. So with that again, like I said, make sure you hit subscribe because the upcoming episodes are amazing.
The next one is one of my favorite interviews I have ever, ever done. You don’t want to miss it. So I will see you then.
See you soon.
The post $5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets: From Zero to Second Place with Justin Demers & Sara Temte appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.
What if your very first affiliate promotion brought in $18,000… and landed you in the Top 25 out of hundreds of seasoned pros? In this episode, we’re talking with someone who did exactly that. No list, no big team. Just a smart plan, a clear voice, and a whole lot of heart. It’s proof that you don’t need to be a marketing ninja or email wizard to have a massive impact in your first affiliate launch.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy$5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets: How to Create Irresistible Opt-in Offers
$5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets The Affiliate Playbook Part Two
$5.7 Million Launch Secrets Revealed: The Affiliate Playbook Part 1
How Two Parents Built a 104,000-Person Email List in Just 14 Days
How Affiliates Can Profit from Virtual Summits (Without Being a Speaker)
$5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets: How a First-Time Affiliate Cracked the Top 25 and Made $18K
Matt McWilliams: Matt McWilliams shows you how to launch a successful affiliate program What if your very first affiliate promotion brought in $18,000 in commissions and put you in the top 25 out of hundreds of seasoned pros? Well, in this episode we’re talking with. Someone who did exactly that. No list, no big team, just a smart plan, a clear voice and a whole lot of heart. It’s proof that you don’t need to be a marketing ninja or email wizard to have a massive impact in your first affiliate launch.
Let’s get started. Part four of our 5.7 million dollar affiliate launch secret series is out Hey, welcome Back to part four of our 5.7 million dollar affiliate launch secret series. today’s episode, one of my favorites in this whole series.
As I’ve mentioned in each episode it’s a seven part series and the first couple of episodes were a recap of the launch, some lessons learned. And then the last one was this bonus episode where I shared a training from the launch. And then the last four are actually interviews with some of the top affiliates. And like I said, this one’s one of my favorites because it’s proof that you don’t need massive list, you don’t need like a huge team, you don’t need to be established for years and years and years to crush it as an affiliate. And in this interview I’m talking with Michelle Caruana who’s, she was a first time affiliate who frankly surprised even herself. She finished 24th out of thousands of affiliates and earned more than $18,000 in the process. And this, this episode, to me it’s all about possibilities. She talks about how she didn’t know what to do. She was really uncertain of.
How could. She even compete in this. But she leaned into it and she talks about how she pivoted in the middle of the promotion by listening to her audience. That’s huge.
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And how being small actually gave her a big edge when it came to building community and offering bonuses. So whether you’re brand new to affiliate marketing, you’ve been, you’re managing a program, you’re, you know, you’re looking to coach up your rookies a little bit and get, you know, have some people like Michelle promoting you, you’re going to want to take notes. So let’s jump in to my conversation with Michelle.
I got to say, this is one I’m like. I don’t know. I excited and, like, nervous in a way, because this one is just going to be, like, super, super awesome. This is our first affiliate promotion, um, ever we are here today with Michelle Caruana.
Yes. That is how you pronounce the name. Okay. She’ll be the first to tell you. It’s. It’s how you think it’s pronounced. And the reason I’m so excited about this, and you can correct me if I’m wrong when we do this, Michelle, is I’m pretty sure we’re talking about your first affiliate promotion, ever. Is that. Is that right?
Michelle Caruana: Yes. Ever. Ever.
Matt McWilliams: Okay. And, guys, we’ll talk about the performance. She absolutely crushed it. Like, this is from a launch that we ran. This is for Stu McLaren. We ran the launch. And I know you’ll take no offense to this, but you weren’t even on our radar, Michelle. Like, it wasn’t even like, this is somebody who could sneak into the top anything, nowhere on the radar, and then all of a sudden, she’s in the top, like, 25, you know? And if I remember correctly, I think you finished in, like, 24th or 26th place.
Michelle Caruana: Like, yeah, I think there was, like, a really big tie for one of the places could have been any of those.
Matt McWilliams: And one of the biggest launch in the Internet marketing world all year. And that is not hyperbole. Stitch launches are always one of the biggest. So I am super excited to, do this today. So, first of all, welcome, Michelle.
Michelle Caruana: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited, too.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. I started as a corporate marketing professional before opening an indoor playground business so let’s start real quick. Maybe take a few seconds just to talk about who you are and who you serve, and then we’ll talk about this specific promotion.
Michelle Caruana: Sure.
Matt McWilliams: So tell us about you.
Michelle Caruana: So, I have, I started as a corporate marketing professional. I, went to school for economics, and I just randomly happened to get a marketing internship in, corporate America. It was just pure chance that I got into marketing. It was nothing that I considered, but I loved it. I really was able to hone in my skills there. And eventually I started having kids. And I just decided that the corporate life just wasn’t really going to fit into the lifestyle that I wanted. So I opened a brick and mortar indoor playground business, which was kind of a complete 180 from my corporate life.
And then after a couple years of running that and kind of fine tuning it, I decided to start teaching other people how to open indoor Playgrounds. And that was really my first venture into online courses, online memberships, things like that. So my main course is how to teach people how to open an indoor playground. We get people all the way from daydream to opening day. And then I have a back end membership from that. I launched that in 2017. and then since then, I’ve launched a couple of different courses, a couple standalone courses, and I now have three different memberships that I. That I run. so, yeah, I mainly serve brick and mortar businesses, local businesses, but I have branched out a little bit from that.
Matt McWilliams: So not exactly the audience, and we’ll talk about this. Not exactly the audience one would think to do really well in an online Internet marketing course, launch and make like $20,000 in commissions. Stu McLaren’s tribe affiliate promotion kicks off April 21, 2022 So I want to talk about that a little bit.
Michelle Caruana: Yeah, I was surprised myself.
Matt McWilliams: To be clear, we’re talking about the, you know, the tribe affiliate promotion. you know, Stu McLaren. This is his annual launch. For those of you watching, by the way, we’re gonna put a link under here to sign up as an affiliate for the 2022 launch, because we already know the dates it kicks off. April 21, 2022. Write it down. Tell all your friends. but. And sign up below. Okay, so that’s number one. That’s your call to action. Everyone sign up to be an affiliate. and then let me just give you a little hint. Watch what Michelle does. Oh, here’s another hint. Go back and when you sign up, you’ll get in the Facebook group. Go back and just read what she wrote from this. She’ll share some of it today, I’m sure, but read what she wrote for this year’s promotion. It’s like a masterclass in, like, how to run an affiliate promotion when you don’t have an audience that necessarily fits, at least logically. So that’s just awesome. Okay, so the cost of the product, 1997, $2,000
Okay, so the cost of the product, 1997, $2,000. about 800 bucks per sale that you were making. And remind me again exactly how many sales you made, because I don’t remember the exact number.
Michelle Caruana: 23.
Matt McWilliams: 23. Okay. I knew it was between 20 and 25. So I’m going to do some quick math. That is $18,400 total. Once everybody’s paid their payment plans roughly, you’ll make. Could make a tiny bit less, a tiny bit more. Just kind of depends on, you know, how people, pay and whatnot. and this was your very first affiliate promo. Why have you never done affiliate promotions before? I’m curious So here’s a. Here’s a question for him. I’m kind of curious. Why have you never done any affiliate promotions before?
Michelle Caruana: You know what, first of all, I.
Michelle Caruana: Was very blind to the possibilities because I didn’t really realize how much people were paying in commission. I always, ah, promoting other people’s products.
And I just kind of assumed that they get, you know, 10%, something like that. Because in the brick and mortar space, when you become an affiliate for retail products or something like that, the commission is much lower, the profit margin is much lower So I understood the concept behind affiliate.
Michelle Caruana: Marketing, but I wasn’t really privy to the upside and how much potential there actually was. And I would see people putting out all these bonus packages and things like that. And I was thinking to myself, you.
Know, I can’t be making that much. You know, I kind of had this negative connotation with, affiliate marketing. So I was happy when your email. Came across my inbox from, yourself and Stu’s team.
And I thought, you know, might as well. Maybe there will be one or two. People on my list that are interested. I really didn’t have any plans to do any sort of content creation or ads or anything like that. My plan was just to send a couple emails. But then I kind of switched gears once I realized how much potential there really was for my audience. You know, my audience, the brick and mortar world. A lot of people join my list fully expecting to open an indoor playground. And then because of the pandemic, when it happened, a lot of people completely changed their tune and no longer wanted to open a brick and mortar business. Understandably. So while they probably didn’t join my.
List expecting to hear about this sort of thing, they were actually kind of perfect candidates for it because they had that entrepreneurial bug, but their original plans didn’t quite work out and they were kind of looking for the next thing.
Matt McWilliams: So what changed? Like you said, you had, you know, you’re thinking, I’ll make one or two sales, don’t really have any plans because, I mean, you ended up going all in. All in which we talked about, which just as a side note, you know, I remember, right, I wrote about this in my book, like just the other day. So I remember it’s fresh in my mind. Like, that’s the number one thing. When we studied what separates, you know, like mediocre affiliates from, like, the ones who succeed, the ones who do, like you did, and we go, holy crap, we’re.
Wait, where’d she come from? You know, how did she make 23 sales? It’s just they went all in, you know, and the level of effort from all in to, like, half in is not double. It’s. It’s actually not that much more, you know, for most people. so that said, what changed? Like, you went from, I’ll, make one or two sales, I’m just gonna, like, maybe do like, an email or something and call it a day to I’m gonna go all in, be one of the top affiliates, and be, like, super involved and, like, hyperactive in the Facebook group, which was awesome.
Michelle Caruana: Yeah. So, two things, really. First of all, I started joining the affiliate calls, and honestly, I was really just bored.
I have to be honest. I really. I was in an Airbnb thousands of miles away from any family and friends that I had, and I was like, you know what? I saw the call pop up on my calendar, and I was like, I’ll join. I’ll see what these people are up to.
Matt McWilliams: Interesting.
Michelle Caruana: Yeah. So I.
Matt McWilliams: That’s the tagline. Come join my affiliate training if you have nothing better to do.
Michelle Caruana: But I really didn’t. I mean, my husband was still going to work every single day. I was home all day just with my two kids. They were playing outside night. Just joined a couple calls just to see what it was about. Because, again, I really didn’t know that much or if anything, about affiliate marketing. So I joined a couple calls, and. That really kind of ignited.
Michelle Caruana: The possibilities for me. It helped me realize, okay, these people don’t have typical audiences either. Like, Heidi Easley is a perfect example. She doesn’t have an audience that would necessarily be perfect for, online memberships. And she was, you know, getting all of these really early leads for the workshop. So I kind of said, you know, first of all, that was why I started to join the affiliate calls, because I really was a little bit isolated, and I just thought it was, you know, would be an interesting opportunity.
But then once I heard people speak on these affiliate calls, and once I heard you speak, I realized that, you know, it’s not just about making sales. It’s not just about, you know, making a little bit of extra income for me. It really started to open my eyes to the possibility that my audience had. Because when I got the opportunity to join as an affiliate, again, it really didn’t click yet that my audience might actually benefit from this and might actually be interested, because, again, they’re prospective indoor playground owners, or maybe one once hopeful indoor playground owners.
But once I heard the different stories and all of the different walks of life that people were coming from, ah, as Affiliates, I started to kind of think, well, you know, why can’t my audience create memberships? Why can’t teachers or stay at home moms or home organizers or coaches, which are a lot of people on my, email list, why wouldn’t they be interested? I might as well share. And then once I kind of made that switch in my mind, which was definitely ignited by the affiliate calls, I kind of just said, you know what? If I’m going to do it, I’m not going to do it a little bit. I’m just going to go all in. And then if it works, it works. If it doesn’t work, I know better for next year.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, I think that’s awesome. I mean, you realize that how much it can serve your audience, especially with the way things have changed. And the reality is they’ve changed forever. At some level. You know, clearly we’re not in March of last year. You know, just for those of you who if depending upon when this goes live inside of AIM guys, you know, we’re recording this in May of 2021. So there’s clearly it’s not March of last year, but it’s also not, January of last year, you know, and it’s probably not going to be like that anytime in the extremely near future for some people.
So, I think that’s really cool. Like you saw how much it can serve your audience that this is, this is more than just a quick buck or even, a long term buck. You know, it’s a really cool way to fill a gap because while you have three memberships, I think you’d be the first to tell or tell your audience, you’re not an expert on starting and growing memberships like Stu is. And if you are interested in this, he’s the guy. And I know that messaging has worked really well for us because clearly we have this membership. I know how to run a membership. If you want the comprehensive system from start to finish, don’t ask me
I have a lot of pretty good knowledge about that. I can give you a lot of tips and if you ask me, I’ll tell you. But if you want the comprehensive system from start to finish, don’t ask me. Because I’m not going to spend the time that Stu spends teaching this stuff. I don’t want to. It’s not my jam, but it’s his jam and he’s the best in the world at it. And so find those people. That’s one of the lessons I’m getting from you there. How did you take your audience and tie it into this promotion so let’s talk.
I mean, I’m curious. You kind of Touched on a few, but maybe. Is there any other specific ways that you, you took an audience that you know, like, you know, if you have an online course, it’s really easy to say you should have an online membership. And there’s a, you know, there’s a one to one correlation between those two, but you have an audience that. There is no one to one correlation to membership sites. How did you take that audience and tie it into this promotion?
Michelle Caruana: Yeah, so I really looked at my. Once I decided I was going to go all in, I realized that I had to get my audience kind of over four different humps. the first being that I had to get them on board with the memberships with a membership site and I had to get them to see the possibilities that I saw with a membership.
So that’s exactly where I started. And I have a blog, a podcast and a YouTube channel and that’s really what I focused on. So I was already putting out content on all of these platforms weekly. I have a small but engaged audience. So the people that are listening to my episodes, the people that are watching my videos, they watch every single one and they watch them all the way through to completion.
So that’s something that I had as a strength, that’s something that I had on my side going into it, is that I have a very engaged audience that already knows and likes and trusts me. And I’ve been consistently showing up for them for years. So the first thing I did was I had to get them on board with membership. So I started with my story because that’s something that I noticed that everybody else was kind of doing. And that’s, really what’s unique about me.
So I started talking about how I decided to create my course and then I talked about how I decided to create my first membership, which was completely out of need. because everybody from m. My course was wanting additional support, they were wanting ongoing support. They, wanted more of me. Exactly what Stu teaches in his course. So I talked about that transition, how I went from, you know, corporate marketing to brick and mortar to almost a stay at home mom, then to finally an online entrepreneur.
And I think because I don’t have thousands and thousands of members, it actually worked on my. Worked as a benefit to me because it was a little bit more relatable than some of the stories that you hear, you know, maybe on Stu’s podcast. Yeah, I could say, you know, I don’t have a thousand members, but I do have 200 members. And this is exactly how it’s impacted My life, just finding those 200 people for my indoor playground membership has changed everything for me.
So I think talking in smaller numbers, that’s something I do. Anyways, on my podcast I really get specific and I think that people related a lot to that. So they didn’t say, okay, I need to have a million dollar launch in order to change my life. I can just make 1, 2, 3 extra thousand dollars a month with my membership and that’s going to change things for me. So I think that was the first thing I did is I told my story and then I actually went into the tribe alumni group and I got a couple other people who I knew through the tribe experience.
And I tapped on a couple shoulders and I said, hey, I think my audience would really resonate with your story. Would you mind hopping on my, YouTube channel on my podcast, sharing your story? So I specifically sought out people that I knew my audience would connect with. So one of them, is Jerry Potter. He has a social media membership. Juliana, she’s, just a stay at home mom who has a purposeful play membership. and then I chose someone who was of retired age that had a subscription box membership because for whatever reason, my audience is like most interested in subscription box memberships. At least that’s what they think they’re interested in. So I tried to get a variety and luckily they were very generous with their time and their knowledge. So I put all of those interviews out on my YouTube channel, on my podcast. And I think that really helped, give people some different stories and different perspectives. So that really, I think, helped them.
Michelle Caruana: See the possibility with membership sites. And then after that I had to get them on board or I had to get them familiar with Stu, which is honestly was the hardest part. because I would say my audience is probably 90% women. So anytime I put a man in front of them, even if he’s the most brilliant man in the world, sometimes a lot of people just completely ignore it. so that was honestly the hardest part.
But then once I could just give them a little bit of taste, then the rest was kind of downhill. So that was really the hardest part. So I think next time going into it, I’m going to talk a lot about it throughout the year and I’m really going to try to integrate talking about memberships throughout all of my promotions, throughout all of my content. because that was the hardest part and I was trying to do it in a really short time period. So I know, but I know now that if I can just get people into Stu’s world earlier. They’re going to be very likely to purchase when the time comes. But that was hard to get them warm to him, if that makes sense.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, it does.
Michelle Caruana: But once they did, once, once they gave him a chance, he blew their socks off with all of the information. but just getting them to sign up for the workshop and the webinars, that was the hardest part. And I wish I would have started a lot earlier. I wish I would have made that decision to go all in weeks, months earlier because I was trying to create all of this content like a week before cart open.
Matt McWilliams: I’m just glad you got bored all over the place. I think you’re glad you were bored too. Number one was getting them on board with memberships. That was difficult but not impossible That’s three things and I want to recap those in a second. What was the fourth?
so after. After getting them familiar with Stu, or was that the fourth? And I missed the third.
Michelle Caruana: So number one was getting them on board with memberships. That was. That was. That ended up being not. Not as difficult as I thought it. Was going to be. And I had to get them on board with Stu. Then I had to get them on board with tribe because a lot of them, you know, they’ve never taken an online course before.
They are not online course takers. I m would say most of them have not ever purchased an online course before. So that was the next thing I had to get them to buy into tribe. And the interviews with the triber certainly help with that as well. So they had benefits in multiple areas. and then the last thing I had to do was get them on board with my bonuses and how I could help them. Because even though my audience is super engaged, I definitely have people hanging out on my email list that have not engaged with me that maybe, wouldn’t understand what additional value that I could bring.
Because a lot of my audience, again, they’re not marketers. They don’t understand what affiliate marketing is. They don’t understand why I might be promoting somebody else’s products. So I actually had to give them, like, almost a very basic explanation of this is why I’m promoting this. This is the additional value that I could bring. And a lot of people, honestly, I would get emails like, hey, I don’t understand. Is this a catch? Like, why do I get all of this additional support for free just by clicking your link? Like, people were almost thinking that it. Was too good to be true.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, I’ll bet.
Michelle Caruana: So I had to really take a.
Michelle Caruana: Step back and before I could even.
Michelle Caruana: Talk about my support group or the bonuses that I could offer or the additional value that I could offer. I really had to be like, listen, this isn’t a trick. You know, I’m making commission on every sale. you know, this is. But I’m doing it because I believe in the program, and I would never promote something that I didn’t full, wholeheartedly believe in. And because I don’t, you know, over. I don’t, you know, I was very selective by becoming a tribe affiliate. It is a program I believe wholeheartedly in. but I had to kind of take a step back, and I. As soon as I started getting those emails, I was like, oh, my gosh, I have to go back and explain this whole thing to people because they actually thought it was a scam. They thought it was that they, were almost getting, you know, the wool pulled over their eyes or something. So I had to be a little bit more honest with them than I expected to be. But it was a good learning experience. Important that you shared your story and the impact that it made
Matt McWilliams: Okay, this is powerful. I just want to recap. So much of this is stuff that we teach, and yet you did it. I don’t know how much of it you got from us, but how much of it you got on your own. But, like, so you start with the possibility. It’s like just creating that vision that this concept is even, a possible good idea. Important that you shared your story and the impact that it made. And like, you said, it just really. Just getting familiar with the concept. You know, it’s exactly what we teach when we teach about warming up your audience. And then I’m actually going to skip to now you’re, you know, getting them familiar with the actual product. you know, and Stu and, you know, again, like we talked about, like, just quoting him and kind of, you know, you’re doing a Facebook Live or YouTube Live, and you just, you know, you quote Stu like, you don’t even explain anything.
You know, it’s just. It could be something completely unrelated to the tribe promo. I quoted Stu in my book, it’s completely unrelated to membership sites. It’s just, you know, his famous quote, the more money you make, the more impact you can have. Right. That has nothing to do with impact, but it introduces the. Put somewhere in the recesses of their mind, like, what was that name? Steve McLaren. Gets them thinking the thing where you reached out to the tribe alumni. That was a brilliant move.
Michelle Caruana: Yeah, I’m not even sure where I got that idea. I think I just got tired of putting out content of myself speaking, and I was like, Listen, yeah, I’ve talked enough. They need to hear from other people. Because the biggest objection that my audience had was imposter syndrome. They were all reading my emails and thinking, yeah, recurring revenue sounds good, but I don’t have a business. I would say 90% of the. But eyes does not have any business. So I really had to get people with experiences other than my own to say, okay, it’s not just me, you know, other people that are moms, that are teachers, that are, not who you would normally think of as a typical membership site owners. Because at first I was just kind of directing them to, you know, Zeus podcast episodes where he interviews people.
But a lot of them, again, have these big, crazy success stories, which are great, don’t get me wrong. They’re very motivating. But I think they really needed to hear from people that were a little bit closer to where they are. And I had to get them to kind of say that, like, why not you? And that was really the only. The thing that I found was most effective to kind of get them over that. Get them over that hump. Because I noticed that when I. When I did get people reach out to me, when I did get people on the phone, when I did get people into my Facebook group, they reference those. So I know they watch them.
I know that they were listening, and I think those were really helpful. And I tried to repurpose those interviews in as many ways as I could. So I put clips on my podcast. I did the full interviews on YouTube. I took clips and put them into blogs. I tried to get as much traction as I can out of them, and I’m definitely going to be doing that again because something that I didn’t have the opportunity to do was interview Stu et al. So I kind of had to find a unique way to introduce my audience to Stu and get them to trust him, kind of through these other people who are talking about how much Stu and Tribe changed their life. So they were kind of almost like spokespeople, if that makes sense.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. So here’s a call to action for you then. In January, reach out to me. We’ll get on Stu’s calendar. Like you put that on your calendar.
Michelle Caruana: Like, January, I waited too long.
Matt McWilliams: Okay, you’re sending me an email. that way you’ll be the first person and we’ll get. We’ll get you a couple of interviews with them.
Michelle Caruana: this worked. I’m sure, you know, that would have had an impact, but I found that this was honestly probably just as effective.
Matt McWilliams: Probably I think it’s just. It would have been, it’s both.
Matt McWilliams: And not either or, you know, and adding on. I think adding him on, you know, in having a. Doing a podcast in late March, early April, just to kind of like, you know, because they listen to your podcast and it doesn’t matter if it’s a guy or not, and they’re not selling anything.
They’re just hearing him and they’re going, oh, my gosh, like, this is a dude. But I can relate to him. That would be, because, I mean, 92% of Stu’s audience is female, you know, which is admittedly kind of weird when you think about it, you know, mine’s like 51% female.
You know, like, we’re like one whole percent tilted. I just. I just love this, you know. You know, one of the things that you were talking about there with, like, the, you know, we call them the but eyes. You know, it’s just those excuses. And, I mean, the reality is, like, online business owners have.
They have big butts, you know, and not. Not the way that it sounds. Well, that’s a great subject line. Do you have a big but? All right, I just came up with a real. I gotta write that one down. That’s gonna be some email copy right there. but they have like, big buts. Like, oh, but, you know, that doesn’t work for me. And that’s where you overcame that. I just wanted, like, to recap, guys, she went into the alumni group. So most stuff that you will promote, you have access to the other students in some way or the other users or whatever. Go to the Facebook group or the forum or wherever they’re at and just ask. Ask what Michelle did. Hey, I’m looking to interview a few people. You know, I’d love to do that. I’ve done that. Right? I’ve done that many times where I’ll host like a little get together, like the day before cart close. And I have five to eight people from that have been through the same course that I’m promoting. They’re friends of mine. They come on.
How are you feeling before you purchase PLF and how did you feel after And I just. I remember one time, and I know I shared this with. With you in that little mastermind that we did. and that’s where you shared this idea with that group. And I just said, there’s something about, like, if I say if I. And I asked Tim, be Becca, who just record. She’s from Zimbabwe, so she has an accent, which is really cool. And she’s from our, And she’s a woman, you know, and when I said, do you have any last words or what would you tell somebody who’s on the fence? She goes just by the course. If I say that, it comes across a certain way because, you know, I’m a 6 foot 2 white guy, you know, and it’s like. And I don’t have an accent, really. People from the south say I start to sound Midwestern. People in the Midwest think I sound like I’m from the south, but whatever. That doesn’t come across the same as her saying it.
Michelle Caruana: Yeah.
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Matt McWilliams: And my favorite thing courses of plf.
Michelle Caruana: Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: Because of her saying that.
Michelle Caruana: And my m favorite thing to ask people, actually, because my audience is also like a little bit emotional. I’ve grown to learn over the years, like, they make a lot of decisions based on emotions. so I asked them. So I asked them, how did you. How are you feeling before you hit that purchase button and how did you feel after?
And I didn’t tell them I was. Going to ask them that because I wanted their, like, genuine reaction and they had perfect answers. Like, they completely blew me away. You know, I was feeling nervous, I was feeling unsure, I was worried I was going to have fire remorse. But then after, you know, I felt supported, I felt relieved. I had an accountability group so they.
Gave exactly what I wanted and they. All gave different answers, which was really interesting. But that was a question that I’m really glad that I asked and I’m. Going to do it again if I. Continue doing interviews, which I definitely, definitely plan to do.
Matt McWilliams: Oh, I hope y’ all are taking notes. You guys gotta write that one down. That is a powerful. We talk about doing that ourselves. We share. you know, one things I talk about is make sure you share what if you were nervous, you know, whatever. And I think I know I shared this in the tribe training where I talk about when I was buying PLF and it was like 10 minutes before the deadline, it was 2:50 in the morning and I’m like shaking to press the button. And when I share that story with my audience, there’s that like, okay, well, yep. And I overcame it and it changed my life, you know. But you asking those people that is a brilliant question. And guys, when you use this strategy, steal that question is that it’s powerful.
I followed your email marketing strategy to a T So I would like to, I know you. You didn’t plan on going all in, but once you shifted and you’re like, okay, I’m, I’m in. what would you say the number one thing that was that led to your success.
Michelle Caruana: Well, first of all, and this is not. You didn’t tell me to say this. But I really followed your email marketing strategy to a T. Email marketing, it’s pretty refined. It’s not something that I teach, it’s. Not something that I, you know, I.
Do my best at it, but I’ve never put a feather in my hat and said, you know, I am the best email marketer in the world. So I was like, you know what, I know how my audience, I know.
What content they need, but I don’t know how to deliver it to them. So I literally followed your email marketing Strategy to a T. And while I didn’t really follow the swipe copy, I did follow the general topic So, okay, if the, if let’s say the five topics of the swipe copy.
Are, you know, recurring revenue, our success. Stories are social, things like that, I. Took the topics and I made them my own. I didn’t utilize the swipe copy probably as much as I should have. but I did let that lead my way.
Matt McWilliams: But you probably used it the right way.
Michelle Caruana: Yeah. In terms of, like, timing, in terms of frequency, things like that, that I tried to follow to an absolute T, which I think even when it felt uncomfortable, like sending that midnight email, sending 10 emails on current closed day, Things like that, it didn’t feel natural. It didn’t feel right. But I did it anyways and I’m. Definitely glad that I did. So I think that played a big part. And then another thing that I did. That I really think made a big difference is I created a closed Facebook.
Group, like a pop up group for people going through the workshop. Because something that I noticed, and my. Email list isn’t huge, it’s around 7,000 people. But I noticed, that people were. Opening my workshop emails, but they weren’t joining. Like, it took me a long time. To ramp up to get people to actually sign up for the workshop. And I, I kind of had to think, like, what am I doing wrong? What it. Where is this disconnect? And I finally figured out that the disconnect was actually getting them, was the call to action, was getting them to sign up for the workshop. I found that it was so much easier to get them into the Facebook group because it’s, you know, my audience is in a million Facebook groups. That is something that they are very free to do. M. It’s a very easy thing to.
Get them to do. So I would get them to join my Facebook group and that ended up having around 200 people. And then I said, okay, if you want to benefit from this, you have to sign up for the workshop.
But I got them in the Facebook group first. And once I started doing that, the rate at which I was getting people to actually sign up for the workshop and the webinar, that went way, way up. So I think that was absolutely crucial, not only with just getting the leads, but also getting people to engage with me. And something that I did, I shared this in our little mastermind group. But one of the things that I did, because a lot of these people. Again, they don’t have businesses, they don’t.
Have accounts where they can just say. Oh, I’ll expense this. You know, these are parents, these are teachers, these are stay at home moms. So what I did was I did Several different zoom sessions. I actually had a weird number of people from Europe. Like, half the audience was from Europe, which is interesting. Indoor playgrounds are really big in Europe. So a lot of audiences, because it’s.
Matt McWilliams: Really cold in most of Europe.
Michelle Caruana: They. Started there way before they came to the US So a lot of my audience is from Europe. So I had to combat a little time zone issues. But I did four or five different zoom sessions. And they were all called, like, I want to help you pay for Tribe. And we just brainstormed, like founding member launch ideas. We brainstormed different membership offers. We really took the content that Stu was talking about in the membership workshop. But I asked every single person individually. Like, what’s your situation?
I will come up with a membership idea for you, and I will walk you through an entire founding members launch strategy. And a bunch of them actually did launch. And I think the Facebook group really helped them get that momentum because they were seeing other people do it. And it’s easy to get lost in that free Facebook group that Stu has. It has like 60,000 people in it. So I think just having a smaller group, it was easier to get people to engage with each other. It was a little bit tighter knit. So a lot of people, I think, saw everybody launching and got a little FOMO fear of missing out. And then once people were joining, I think that was the real key to.
My entire success was the people in. The Facebook group, because every single person that joined was in the Facebook group. but I was constantly celebrating people. I was calling people out, I was celebrating them for joining. I was asking them. I actually, after a couple people joined, I got them to come on video with me and ask them, you know, what made you buy? How did you feel before?
Matt McWilliams: That’s awesome.
Michelle Caruana: So because luckily I would a lot of people that joined tribe through my link, they’re previous course students of mine. And it’s so funny because back when. I met them, I was so scared to charge them $500 for my course and watching them like take out their cards and pay $2,000, I was almost. Kind of like, wow, you know, this is really interesting. So it taught me a lot about. My own business as well. You did a pop up Facebook group that attracted 32,000 people But because I had such a.
Strong relationship with a lot of them. They were willing to hop on a. Call with me like immediately after they bought. So that I think was really helpful as well. But I don’t think I would have. Been able to establish quite a strong connection or momentum with people had I not done that Facebook group. So I’m glad that you put that. that was in one of the affiliate calls where we talked about m doing the pop up Facebook group. And I’m actually just going to use the same group next year. I’m just going to reopen it because a lot of the people were interested, they were on the fence. So I think if they didn’t buy. Last year, they might, you know, they have a really good chance of buying the next year.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, that’s powerful. Just, I mean, a few quick takeaways. I think the big lesson is know the audience. You know, you, you saw that like, okay, what I mean, we told you to start a Facebook group and you did. So it’s not like, it’s not like we weren’t saying to do that, but. We were really focused on like get.
Matt McWilliams: Them to the workshop, get in the workshop. And it’s like, well, that wasn’t working. So number one, if you, if you don’t know your audience, you never would have known. Wait, they’re really into Facebook groups? They’re in hundreds of Facebook groups. Let’s use that. So that’s first of all, second of all pivoting, you know, okay, this, this strategy isn’t working. I’ve got to do something different. And then you tried something different. And the cool thing is like you spent I don’t know, 20% of the promo doing something that didn’t work.
Matt McWilliams: Next time you get to spend 100% doing something that does. So it’s only going to make you a few more sales. Like if you do nothing else but just start at that, you know that point and don’t do the 20% that didn’t work, you’ll make more sales. Like you could do nothing else differently. No other lessons that one, doing your own Facebook group, guys, you’ve got to do one. Like she said.
I think the Tribe Workshop Facebook group is great, but there, I think there were 32,000 people in it, if I’m not mistaken. Roughly, it might have been like right under 30, you know, at the high point. But it was, it’s just ridiculous and it’s awesome. But half, you know, half the people in there don’t know a single other person in there. And then there’s 30,000 people. But in your group, 200 people, half of them know half the other half of the people, you know, they all pretty much know somebody in there. And so it’s more intimate. And then the strategy, like welcoming new members. I remember when we shared this, you know, that’s just social proof when you say Joe Smith joined, or in your case, 90% women. So when you know, Sally Smith joins, congratulations and welcome. And then she says, yeah, I’m so excited and here’s why I decided to buy. Somebody reads that and they go, wow, I am right where Sally is. She made the decision, maybe I should.
Michelle Caruana: And a lot of these people knew each other already. A big mistake that I made. And I spent a good amount of money, like probably like $2,000 on ads going. Like, I was only targeting my email list, so I wasn’t doing any cold audience ads.
Matt McWilliams: Sure.
Michelle Caruana: You know, another source of income that I have in addition to my courses is I manage Facebook ads for clients. I’ve been doing it since like 2015. and that’s something that I’m just, I’m great at. So I have a lot of confidence in my ad strategy. And I was getting a ton of clicks. I don’t think anybody opted into the workshop through my ads, like thousands of dollars of ads. I would say that was the biggest mistake that I made was I put so much time and energy into those ads. And I know for a fact that every single One of the 23 people that bought, they didn’t, they didn’t join because of the ads. even all the people in the Facebook group, I knew them all, either through them engaging on my YouTube channel or them in one of my other memberships. What I will focus on next time is I’m almost going to, as soon as my like pre launch starts, I’m going to completely turn off any cold audience targeting I’m going to turn off any trying.
Michelle Caruana: To develop any new relationships and I’m just going to focus on the relationships that I already have, whether that be my email list or my subscribers. I’m not going to try to get any new people. I spent a lot of time and energy, like trying to get these new people warmed up to me really, really quickly.
Like, I did a lot of, I didn’t do any direct workshop or direct to course ads to a cold audience, but I was promoting the content that I was creating to a cold audience and I spent a lot of money doing that. And I don’t think it made a difference whatsoever. I think the only people that. The only people that bought through my link already had an established relationship with me and they were watching. They were already watching my YouTube videos. They were already listening to my podcast episode. So next time I’m really going to focus on going all in on the relationships that I already have. And I’m just going to do list building all year and work on growing my YouTube channel, work on growing my podcast, because those are the things that made the difference. It was definitely not the ads and I will not be doing that again this year. You said all 23 buyers came from the Facebook group
Matt McWilliams: So you mentioned two things you would do differently. Well, three. Number one, you would start earlier and have a longer Runway.
Michelle Caruana: And I will create all the content when I have energy and not when I should be working on building relationships. I’m going to do my content literally months before because I spent so much time creating content during like the cart open period. And I should have been on the phone with people. I should have been engaging in the Facebook group. But I was like, shoot. I promised eight episodes and I only put out three so far. So I was.
I definitely shot myself a little bit in the foot there. So I’m going to batch create all my content and I’m going to go full 100% in trying to engage people that I already have in my audience. I’m not going to try to expand my audience anymore. Once that probably pre launch start, I’m just gonna say, okay, if you’re in my audience already, good, buckle up because this is what we’re doing. I’m not gonna spend any energy, you know, trying to get people, because I had a really, Because I was trying to like answer comments and stuff like that in Stu’s group. And I had a really. I love helping people and I try to think that I have, you know, a good heart. But the couple people that I met and while I was doing that were actually not nice at all. And a couple people actually messaged me and said that they bought, but specifically not through my affiliate link for whatever reason. It was super strange. so Again, I’m really not going to try to get any people from. From that aren’t already super familiar with me.
Matt McWilliams: interesting.
Michelle Caruana: So that was a mistake I made. I really thought, like, if people are already bought into tribe, I just have to get them to buy into me. But I should have thought the other way around. I need to get people to buy into me first and understand my value, because the best bonus package in the world is not going to work if. People don’t trust me.
So I’m going to spend the entire year getting people to know, like, and trust me. And it’s a lot easier to get them to, be in Stu’s world once I get there. But I kind of did it backwards a little bit. And next year I’m definitely going to do it in the, opposite.
Matt McWilliams: Well, I mean, that’s the cool thing is, like, you know, next year you get to do. You get to take away and not waste your time on any of the stuff that wasn’t working. And I don’t know if that was 20% of your time or 70% of your time, but let’s just say it was 50%. The 50% that you. You would be the first to say, like, I wasted my time because you said all 23 buyers came from the.
Michelle Caruana: Facebook group, and they were people that I knew already.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. And it’s like, boom, you know, and so it’s like you can put a hundred percent of your effort into the 40, 50, 60 people that are predisposed to buy already and just go all in on them, and that’s how you’ll make 40, 50, or 60 sales.
Michelle Caruana: Yeah. And I really underestimated my audience. Like, I was really surprised at a couple of people that bought. I thought, you know, wow. I know. She, you know, so I want to give my audience a little bit more credit because again, I went into this thinking that, or assuming that my audience just wouldn’t be able to see the benefit in memberships. I thought it was going to be too uphill of a battle, but I really missed an opportunity, which is another reason why I’m going to start producing more regular content about my membership, about why I created a membership, just kind of, again, weaving it into my regular content creation process because it was easier than I thought. And my audience really surprised me at how open their minds were to the possibilities. So I wish I would have gone a little bit more into that. One thing that I think played a huge factor into my success was my bonus package
Matt McWilliams: M. So an interesting question, and we’ll wrap up with kind of a last one. What’s something I didn’t ask you, like what is something you would share. You just, you feel like, I don’t know, it’s a strategy, a mindset of whatever that you’re like, okay, this is something I just, I want to like take people who were in my position, you know, a month ago, two months ago and like I want the world to know this.
Michelle Caruana: Yeah. So one thing that I also think played a huge factor into my success was my bonus package because I knew that I wasn’t going to get 100 sales or 200 sales. I knew that I was going to be serving a very small audience through this program. So I took that as an opportunity and I said, you know what, I’m going to over deliver like crazy.
So my bonus package was probably one of the more robust ones and it’s something that I don’t offer a lot. Like I don’t ever do one on one calls. I don’t ever do, you know, accountability, stuff like that outside of my memberships. So it gave people a unique chance to work with me and again it was included in the course price so I included a lot of support. I’m doing weekly Q and A calls with my group.
I’m doing hot seats and something that I probably wouldn’t do again next year. But I gave everyone a 30 minute one on one call after tribe is over to kind of set up their the rest of the year strategy and make sure that they, you know, are feeling good after they finish the tribe program. So next time I’m going to do that as a fast action bonus for like the first X number of people that join. But I took my small audience as a huge advantage and I said, you know what, I am going to create a bonus package. And another objection that my audience had was overwhelmed. They didn’t, they don’t have time, they don’t have, you know, because they’re not serial course purchasers like you or I might be. So I had to really overcome that time obstacle. So I created my bonuses not to give them more stuff but to really.
Michelle Caruana: Take stuff off their plate to reduce overwhelm. And it’s funny because it’s a lot of stuff that I already had. So a lot of people reached out to me like other tribe affiliates and they were like, I can’t believe you’re creating all of this for your bonus package.
Matt McWilliams: Rule number one of creating a bonus package, use what you have.
Michelle Caruana: Yeah, most of it I already had. I used to have a membership called like a funnel bundle membership and I used to Give them email swipe copy, Facebook ads, swipe copy, canva templates for ads, things like that. So I kind of pulled what I already had, and I said, okay, how can I use what I already have to not give them more courses, not give them more information, but give them implementation help. Because I knew that’s where my audience was going to get stuck. So I focused on support and accountability, and I focused on anything that’s going to help them implement what Stu teaches easier.
So, again, email swipe files, ad swipe files, sales page templates, which I already had created. So once I would say 90% of the calls I got on people said, I really. I get Tribe. But I think I’m going to do it next year because I just don’t have time. And that was this thing I was hearing over and over. And I knew. I kind of anticipated that because I hear that a lot from my audience. So I would immediately say, you know what? I completely get it. I don’t have any childcare right now. I’m in a bungalow with my two kids trying to take this call right now. So I’m actually giving you all of these resources so that you can not only kind of take the course at your own pace and not have to worry about doing all this stuff, but it’s going to help you get success much faster than you would otherwise. So I think that really helped sell people, was not giving them more stuff, but helping them take stuff off their plate, if that makes sense.
Matt McWilliams: No, it does. I mean, that’s an important thing. Pay attention to what your people are saying.
Michelle Caruana: Yeah, that was. I think the biggest part was pivot. I knew. I know my audience so well. I knew what their objections were going to be. Most of them. I knew what most of their objections. Were going to be before they even said them. So I created my bonus package, like, months before.
Matt McWilliams: Okay.
Michelle Caruana: And I talked about it a lot. but, like, it meant nothing to somebody who didn’t know me because. Exactly. So I. So next time I’m going to really focus on something that I. Because I don’t talk about membership sites ever. It’s not something that I’ve ever mentioned on my YouTube channel or anything like that. But now, again, I’m going to be more consistent with it so that next time my audience hears about memberships, about Tribe, it’s not going to be like, wait, why are you talking about this? Because that was, like. That was a whole, objection that I had to overcome right at the beginning. So just exactly what you said. Next time I’m not going to have to do that because I’m going to really work on building those relationships. Talking about tribe, talking about, membership sites and things like that all year round so that it’s less of, a uphill battle when the launch officially comes.
Matt McWilliams: M. No, I love that. And yeah, paying attention to what people are saying and not only pivoting in your strategy, you know. Okay. You know, like the thing about them not signing up for the workshop, that’s an analytical. That’s a strategy thing. You, you know, nobody was saying, I’m not signing up for the workshop. I’d rather join your Facebook group. No, he’s saying that. But paying attention to what people are saying and you know, and pivoting the messaging.
The cool thing is you probably have it 95% dialed in for next year now. There’s always that 5% that could change. Right? after next year, you’ll have it completely dialed in. Like nobody’s going to ask a new question. It really does. I mean, I can’t remember the last time we got a new question about tribe already. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, like, I shared this, you know, with, with you guys. we literally sent the exact same emails almost word for word. We had to kind of de. Emphasize the pandemic a little bit over last year. you know, but same, same basic. Those 30 minute coaching calls could turn into actual coaching clients if done right
There’s one email we literally took out completely and rewrote. that was, you know, specifically, like, you could not send this outside of May and June of 2021. Like, it will never apply again. But otherwise the content was the same. Why? Because we know the objections. We know the, the stuff, we know the audience.
Matt McWilliams: Other one. You know, here’s a, here’s a little tip for you. I think we shared this guys, in the backstage pass this month. I don’t remember where we learned this, but somebody on one of the tribe calls said that she. So those 30 minute coaching calls that you’re going to do, if you do them right, a good chunk of them could turn into like actual coaching clients. So just a little too. So I know it’s like, I don’t want to do those. I’m not saying you don’t want to do them, but I mean, like, it’s hard, you know, that’s doing, you know, let’s say 18 people sign up for them. That is nine hours of coaching calls that you aren’t making anything on. You know, technically, if you can turn like five or six of them into like full time coaching Clients though, it’s totally worth it because so give them like just go all out for them and it’ll work.
Michelle Caruana: I really want to get testimonials out of them too especially. Yes, that’s something that I really had working against me as well. I had never had anyone in my audience go through tribe before so. So, now I’ll have people that not only will have testimonials for tribe but they’ll have testimonials of going through tribe through me. So that’s something that I’m really going to focus on getting all year round so that I’m not scrambling at the end.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. So my thought would be if I were to coach you on that I would block off an hour of your time. You know, don’t do them like back to back to back to back because then you won’t have time. Block off an hour. tell them at the beginning, hey, at the end I would love to spend, could we spend like seven or eight minutes? I’d love to just capture some of your thoughts on tribe and then you can ask Robbie on our team. I’ll be happy to share this with you. We have a format for asking these questions. and then you basically ask the questions in like a sequence. The big key I found is and tell them this in advance. depending upon how you use zoom or whatever you use. When you ask the question, they can’t respond for two seconds. It needs that that you being quiet thing to trigger like them, you know, or else like don’t talk over them, don’t say mm, anything like that. It’s really weird sometimes but if you.
Do it right and then when they. Finish answering a question you’re just dead silent for like three seconds and ask the next and then you can splice them together but you ask the questions in a specific manner that leads them to basically tell a story that’s really tight and succinct but really effective. I don’t know how we do it. that’s all magic as far as I’m concerned. but Mark used to do it on our team. Robbie does them now. So ask him and he’ll share. Michelle says it all comes down to knowing your audience
So as we wrap up Michelle, what advice would you give to someone who they’re promoting something that maybe doesn’t make the most logical sense? You know, there is not a linear connection and if you could take somebody who is coming in and promoting a product like in your case, you know, tribe had a huge impact on you, but there was Maybe that like, is my audience, like, am I going to sell zero?
Michelle Caruana: I really thought I was going to sell zero to you.
Matt McWilliams: What advice would you give to them?
Michelle Caruana: I would definitely kind of reiterate what I said about finding people that are in their situation and find people that they can relate to. So my audience I knew didn’t want to hear about the million dollar launches, about the million dollar success stories, about people with huge email lists. They didn’t want to hear from, you.
Know, an Amy Porter field. They wanted to hear from people who are just a few steps ahead of. Them and to have similar backgrounds. So I tried to really. And again, this all comes down to knowing my audience. But I try to find someone that really fit into each of my little avatars that I have. And again, I think it really made a huge difference that they were just a few steps ahead. It wasn’t like, oh, it took me 10 years to get here. It’s no. I launched after tribe last year and this is how my life is different. So finding people that aren’t huge leaps because they all listen to, you know, these big name podcasts, they all follow these influencers on social media, they know their stories. I wanted to bring them some stories that were a little bit more relatable and a little bit more real realistic for them, if that makes sense.
Matt McWilliams: That is such a great lesson. you only have to be one step ahead, you know, Exactly.
Michelle Caruana: And yeah, and really understand their objections before I even opened my mouth or before I even created my content plan. I knew based on my previous interactions with them because I am so engaged with my audience because I have been working on building a relationship with them for so long. I again already knew what objections I had to overcome, that it was going to be impossible. Imposter syndrome, money time. Those were going to be the big things that I had to hit on again and again and again and again because unfortunately my audience a lot of times just doesn’t believe in themselves because a lot of them are still disappointed that they didn’t get to go through. With their original dream.
Michelle Caruana: So I m would just find people that they’re going to relate to and make it realistic or else it’s going to be too much of a, bridge that you’re going to have to walk them over to get them from A to B. They want to see, you know, the people that are just a few steps ahead of them.
Matt McWilliams: I love that.
Michelle Caruana says YouTube is best place for people to follow her online business Well, Michelle, if people are curious, want to follow you. And guys, I would. I mean, this is one of the things, like, you may even have no interest in starting, an online indoor playground. That would be weird. An indoor playground. You may have no interest in doing anything brick or mortar. but if you just want to follow Michelle and kind of see the cool stuff she’s doing. Where. Where can they do that?
Michelle Caruana: Yeah, so the best place is probably my YouTube channel. It’s just my name. that’s a newer channel. I have an indoor playground specific channel. I do more behind the scenes tutorials of things that I do in my online business on my Michelle Caruana channel. And then my podcast is just called the marketing junkie channel, which is exactly what it sounds like. I really dive into what works and what doesn’t work with my online business. Even though that’s not something I teach, I find that it really helps. and it’s really going to help me, I think, in the future, get people on board with memberships by sharing more behind the scenes details exactly how I get there.
Matt McWilliams: Love that. Well, Michelle, thank you so much. this has been awesome and I can’t wait till next year to see how you do again. We’ll probably have to have.
Michelle Caruana: I’m excited. I’m going all in. My other triple.
Matt McWilliams: You’re going to triple sales next year?
Michelle Caruana: Oh, I’m definitely going to. I’m already starting. I’m like, starting now.
Matt McWilliams: Love it.
Michelle Caruana: I’m doing all sorts of stuff. I have tons of content planned for next year that I’m going to start right now while it’s still all fresh in my head. But my other tip, if I could just share one more, is to just. Go all in, like you have nothing to lose.
I was really hesitant and I was like, you know, my audience doesn’t care. My audience doesn’t care. But I just kept going and I just didn’t relent. And I didn’t give, up either. When I didn’t get a ton of sales on the first day, I didn’t. I got zero sales on like days two and three. I got all my sales on like, day one and four, but I didn’t give up. I m. Lose energy. I didn’t say, oh, you know, I guess everyone that’s bought has already bought. I didn’t give up energy. I didn’t lose hope. I just kept, you know, going and going and put on the gas. And then it paid off because I like doubled my sales on the last or triple my sales on the last day. So I’m glad I didn’t lose Energy.
Matt McWilliams: But, like, I taught that or something, right?
Michelle Caruana: Yeah. It’s so weird.
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Matt McWilliams: I feel like that was, like, in the. In the training, you know, to. Reiterate what you said or to say, I mean, that’s what we talked about is like, yeah, there’s the excitement on day one. The early adopters are in, and then there’s a little bit.
Michelle Caruana: You said it was gonna slow down. I had zero and that.
Matt McWilliams: And that’s. See, that’s the thing is, with 23, slowing down could be zero. Like, when I talked about. The example I share is Ray Edwards. You know, he was making, like, one a day out of 200, you know, and so to slow down to one a day out of 200 is. I mean, it’s the same as going to zero out of 23. but what was happening on day two and three, and you know, this now, of course, is you took people that were maybe at a 5 out of 10, they were like, halfway there, and you moved them to a six, and then do a seven, and then do an eight. And then, sure enough, now there’s a deadline, and it’s like, well, I’m not. I’m not fully convinced, but there’s a deadline. I just. I’ll just buy, you know? and so that’s. That’s what happens is, you know, when there’s no deadline and they’re kind of like at an 8, they don’t buy. But then the deadline comes in. We always say the deadline’s worth two points.
Michelle Caruana: and it’s so funny, though, because my own launches, I’m very fast to give up. I’m very fast to lose energy when I’m not seeing the results that I want. So now I know that if I just keep going, if I just don’t give up, because I only did that because people were watching, and I felt like I was gonna. You know, I’m so competitive. I’m hyper competitive. I don’t know if you noticed that, but, like, having other people watch and having that accountability really helps. So now I’m like, oh, my gosh, what if I took the same level of energy and the same level of commitment to my own launches? So that really helped in my overall mindset, is I’m going to take that same energy, that same plan, that same commitment, and go through to my own launches. Because I, a lot of times will give up, like, even a couple days before cart closes if I’m not where I am or if I’m not where I want to be. So I Have to just keep that in mind when no one is watching.
That’s a powerful lesson. You said this multiple times, but you took stuff from this affiliate promo. You can apply to your own business, which is, that’s what we want. We want people to do that. So, everyone do that. And, Michelle, guys, reach out to Michelle, tell her thank you. hit her up on social media, give her a follow and watch what she’s doing. Definitely subscribe to her podcast. We’ll put the links below. And Michelle, thanks so much. This has been awesome.
Michelle Caruana: Thank you.
Matt McWilliams: What a cool episode, right? This episode is probably my favorite in the series And I hope you see why I said this is probably my favorite in the series. here, right in the middle. Because if you’ve ever thought, you know, I’m too new, my list is too small. Today proved otherwise. She didn’t just earn $18,000. She didn’t just finish in the top 25. She did it by leaning into what made her unique, by really, really, really listening closely to her audience and building real trust.
That’s ultimately what that’s all about. So again, like I said at the top of the episode, whether you’re a first time affiliate, you’re an affiliate manager, coaching your team, whatever you are, there are so many takeaways you can use right now. I mentioned it in the last few episodes. If you want a copy of the exact, opt in or the exact, not opt in strategy, the, the midnight email that made such a big difference for her and, and other affiliates, just text the word midnight to 260-217-4619. I’ll send it right to you again. You can text me there anytime, actually. So, 260-217-4619. If you got questions or, you know.
Ideas for the show, whatever, that’s how to reach out to me. Also, make sure if you are not that you are subscribed so you don’t miss the rest of the series. We’re at the midway point, so we still got three more amazing episodes episodes in this series. I’ll see you in the next episode.
See you soon.
The post $5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets: How a First-Time Affiliate Cracked the Top 25 and Made $18K appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.
###### So you’ve got some shiny new affiliates who want to promote your stuff. Congratulations! Now what? Do you just send them a link and say “figure it out”? Do you dump them into some automated email sequence and hope for the best? Or do you turn them into affiliate ROCKSTARS who will move heaven and earth to sell your products? If you picked option three, you’re in the right place.
How to Onboard New Affiliates The RIGHT Way (10 Steps That Actually Work)So you’ve got some shiny new affiliates who want to promote your stuff.
Congratulations!
Now what?
Do you just send them a link and say “figure it out”? Do you dump them into some automated email sequence and hope for the best?
Or do you turn them into affiliate ROCKSTARS who will move heaven and earth to sell your products?
If you picked option three, you’re in the right place.
The Difference Between “Okay” and “AMAZING” Affiliate OnboardingHere’s the thing most people get wrong about affiliate onboarding:
They think it’s about giving affiliates access to stuff. Links, banners, maybe some copy to swipe.
Wrong.
Great affiliate onboarding is about creating MOMENTUM. It’s about making your new partners feel like they’re part of something bigger. It’s about giving them everything they need to succeed AND the motivation to actually use it.
My Friend Alan’s Wake-Up CallQuick story…
My friend Alan Thomas came to me recently. I’d referred some people to him as affiliates for his men’s weight loss coaching business.
Alan’s doing well, but he wants to get his message out to more people. Think Mick Jagger and Gene Simmons level impact…
So he said to me:
“Matt, you sent me all these affiliates. Thank you. But how can I get them laser-focused on selling my product?”
I told him I’d share my recipe and then… completely forgot to do it!
So Alan, this post is for you (and anyone else who wants affiliate partners that actually PRODUCE).
NOTE: If you are interested in partnering with Alan, check out this affiliate program here.Who This Article Is ForThis guide is perfect if you:
- Just launched an affiliate program and want to do it RIGHT from day one
- Have affiliates signing up but they’re not promoting (or barely promoting)
- Want to turn average affiliates into commission-generating machines
- Are tired of affiliates who sign up and then disappear into the void
Bottom line: If you want affiliates who are excited, equipped, and ready to sell, keep reading.
What’s Your Starting Point?Your affiliate onboarding strategy depends on ONE thing:
How many new affiliates are you getting?
If your program is brand new, you’re probably averaging one affiliate per day. At that rate, you can easily hop on the phone and welcome them personally.
But if you have an established program? You might be bringing on 10+ new affiliates daily. That calls for a completely different strategy.
When I ran the affiliate programs for Shutterfly and Adidas, we were getting 300-400 affiliates per day. Especially from November 1st through Christmas. It was absolutely CRAZY.
There was no way I could get on the phone with that many people.
But for most of you? Personal onboarding IS an option. So do it!
Many of the strategies I’m about to share work for both situations. But regardless of where you’re starting from, the key is to “WOW” your new affiliates.
Why You Should Become an Affiliate YourselfHere’s the secret to understanding what affiliates really want:
Become an affiliate yourself.
I’m a MUCH better affiliate manager now because I’ve walked in those shoes. That’s how I learned that speed and ease of use are absolutely critical.
Always look at things from your affiliates’ perspective. What do THEY want?
When you’ve personally experienced:
- Waiting days for approval
- Struggling to find working affiliate links
- Getting terrible swipe copy that converts nothing
- Having your questions ignored by affiliate managers
You’ll NEVER let your affiliates go through the same frustrations.
The golden rule applies here: Treat your affiliates how you would want to be treated.
All set? Let’s walk through the steps for making your affiliates feel like they’re an important part of your team.
If you are ready to take your business to the next level and start an affiliate program, start with my free report, Your First 100 Affiliates. This report takes nearly two decades of experience, trial and error, and lessons learned about finding top affiliates in nearly every conceivable niche and puts them all into one report. Grab your copy here!
10 Steps For Onboarding Affiliates The RIGHT Way!1. Be Prepared to Help Them Set Up (White-Glove Treatment)This should be a no-brainer, but most people screw it up.
Don’t just fire off a link and say “go fill this out.” That ticks me off when affiliate managers do that to me. I’m busy. This isn’t an ego thing – I might not be able to fill out the form right then. I might forget about it. Four days later, I still might not be signed up.
That’s YOUR fault as the affiliate manager, not mine.
Remember the golden rule: Treat your affiliate how you would like to be treated.Here’s what we do instead:
- WE sign them up
- WE set up their account
- WE get them their links
- WE help them with the tech stuff
Do we have to? Nope! Does it make a huge difference in how they perceive us? You bet!
PRO TIP: Don’t use your main email system (ConvertKit, Infusionsoft, etc.) for affiliate updates. If they unsubscribe from your main list, they’ll also unsubscribe from affiliate updates. Use a tool like GMass instead and email through a spreadsheet.
Now, if you’ve got 300,000 affiliates like we had at Shutterfly and Adidas, you can’t do that in a controlled way.
Bottom line: you need to add them to whatever database you’re using in addition to your regular system.
2) You need to send them a welcome message.Who doesn’t like a warm, inviting welcome?
The key is making new affiliates FEEL like you’re genuinely glad they’re part of your program.
Skip the corporate-speak approach: “Dear Sir. Thank you for being a part of our affiliate program. We are honored and humbled.”
Really? I could write an entire article critiquing so-called “welcome” emails that affiliate managers send.
Make your welcome message actually FEEL like one. Think about how you’d welcome someone into your home.
- Equip Them with SUCCESS ToolsI’ve written an entire article on what affiliates need to succeed (and I highly recommend checking that out) but if you don’t read the article, at least know that the #1 tool affiliates need is SWIPE COPY!
They need copy they can use for every part of your promotion. And please… hire a copywriter who can write it objectively. You’re too close to the product to be objective.
Your swipe copy must include:
- Images they might need
- Different versions for different target audiences
- Short 300-word emails AND longer 1,000-word emails
- Blurbs for newsletters
- Clear instructions that swipe copy is a GUIDE ONLY
Teach your affiliates: Don’t just copy and paste. Make it personal. Use the swipe copy as a starting point, not the final destination.
Otherwise, you’ll have 100 affiliates all sending identical emails. That’s a disaster.
TWO RELATED POSTS:How to Write Swipe Copy for Your Affiliates
How to use Swipe Copy as an Affiliate
- Build Affiliate Relationships (Know Them Like Family)Much success in business relies on nurturing relationships. LEARN about your affiliates. Get to know them. Visit their websites and research their promotional methods.
When I think back to my early affiliates, I can still name them. I can still tell you stories about them.
Keep a database with:
- Spouses’ and children’s names
- What sports their kids play
- Where they live
- Their preferred communication style
If you’re talking to an affiliate for the fifth time, you shouldn’t need to be reminded what part of the country they live in or if they’re married. You should KNOW them.
Check out my podcast episode “How to Build Strong Relationships with Your Affiliates” to learn how.5. Learn How They Like to CommunicateYou need to discover their preferred communication method.
I work with affiliates who ONLY use WhatsApp. So I use WhatsApp when communicating with them. Others prefer Skype, Voxer, email, text, phone calls, Facebook DMs, or Instagram DMs.
The easiest way to find out? Just ask them. Do a quick survey.
When you communicate through their preferred channel, you’ll get better responses. And better responses benefit everyone.
- Make Sure They Understand the BasicsYour affiliates need to know the fundamentals:
Program Rules:
- What they’re allowed to do (and NOT allowed to do)
- Commission structures and any nuances
- Special commission rates (like 50% on core sales, 30% on memberships)
Not sure what commission structure to use? Check out this podcast episode to learn!
Products and Pricing:
- All product details and price ranges
- This helps them market better and reduces questions later
Important Dates:
- When the launch starts
- When promotion should begin (often 10+ days before launch)
- When the warm-up period starts
Commission Details:
- How you pay (monthly, net 30, etc.)
- When you pay (15th of the month, etc.)
- Payment methods
Bonuses and Contests:
- What bonuses are available
-
How to contact you (give them at least two ways beyond email)
-
Get on a Strategy Call with ThemOne of the best things you can do to get your affiliates to promote early and mail more is to create a personal promotion plan with them.
Meet with them one-on-one BEFORE the promotion and craft a custom plan. We actually call it a COMMITMENT plan. When you invoke the principles of commitment and consistency, people follow through.
Usually, when we get them to commit to a plan, they agree to do at least a few extra emails beyond what they originally planned.
This works best when:
- Your affiliate program is smaller
- You’re only picking up a few affiliates
- You can stretch it to your top 20-30 over time
Can’t do individual calls? Do them once or twice a week in small groups. Everyone who signed up that week gets together for a group promotion planning session.
You can get the EXACT template we use to get affiliates to mail more here.
- Use a Quick Start Guide to Onboard PeoplePut together a short document that gets people going FAST.
Keep it to about two pages. If it goes to a third page, that’s fine, but don’t go crazy.
Your quick start guide should answer:
- How do I get my links?
- How do I create custom links?
- How do I find swipe copy?
- How do I find images?
- How do I access my stats?
- How do I log in?
- How do I contact you?
- What are the basic no-nos?
- What’s working for other affiliates?
- What are the mailing plans?
- What’s the commission structure?
When all the need-to-know information is in one spot, affiliates can find what they’re looking for instantly.
Get my #1 affiliate recruiting email (the one I’ve personally used to recruit thousands of affiliates in dozens of niches). Grab your copy here!
- Help Affiliates Get Their First Sale QuicklyYou want an affiliate to make their first sale ASAP.
Obviously, if you’re launching in April and it’s January, you can’t really help them there. But if it’s a regular program, use an incentive to get them on the board.
Example offers:
- “Make your first sale within 10 days and I’ll give you 100% commission”
- “Make three sales in your first month and I’ll give you a $1,000 bonus”
I don’t mind losing money on the first few sales. It gets them going and builds momentum.
You want to give them a low barrier so they can gain momentum. If you have enough affiliates, it actually costs you less money per affiliate, but creates fast-moving action.
- Make It Clear That You Are There to HelpIn today’s impersonal world, there are plenty of opportunities to show you’re someone who “goes the extra mile.”
And it’s not hard to do.
Not only that, it’s the RIGHT thing to do when working with affiliates who can help you succeed.
Here’s how:
- Be available through multiple communication channels
- Reply to emails quickly
- SHOW them you’re there to help through your actions
- Be constantly on the lookout for ways to serve them
- Make it abundantly clear that you are there to serve
Remember: Your affiliates will appreciate being treated like the valued partners they are.
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
| Find Your First 100 Affiliates | Affiliate Program Terms & Conditions Template | Get My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email |
| Avoid The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes | Turn Inactive Affiliates into Your Best Affiliates | Get My Template for Writing Affiliate Emails |
| Affiliate Marketing Sales Secrets | Learn How to Create a Resources Page | Learn How to Write a Product Review |
The post How To Onboard New Affiliates appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.
What if one simple bonus could double your opt-in rate… and build a list of buyers before the cart even opens? In today’s episode, we’re unlocking a powerful strategy from a $5.7 million affiliate launch—a strategy that helped dozens of affiliates stand out from the crowd, grow their list, and convert at higher rates. It’s time to talk about opt-in bonuses that actually work.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Links Mentioned in this Episode
How to Start Your Affiliate Program (FREE TRAINING)
Get Started with Affiliate Marketing
Your First 100 Affiliates
TEXT ME: +1 (260) 217-4619
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy$5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets The Affiliate Playbook Part Two
$5.7 Million Launch Secrets Revealed: The Affiliate Playbook Part 1
How Two Parents Built a 104,000-Person Email List in Just 14 Days
How Affiliates Can Profit from Virtual Summits (Without Being a Speaker)
How Affiliate Managers Can Beat Burnout
$5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets: Opt-in Bonuses That Convert & Grow Your List
What if one simple bonus could double your opt in rate and build a list of prospective buyers before the cart even opens? In today’s episode, I’m going to share a powerful Strategy from a $5.7 million affiliate launch. This is a strategy that helped dozens of affiliates stand out from the crowd, grow their list and convert at higher rates. It’s time to talk about opt in. Bonuses that actually work.
Let’s get started. Hey. So welcome back. This is part three of this special series where we’re breaking down this 5. 7 million dollar affiliate launch that we ran. A few years ago. And today’s episode’s a special one. I’m actually opening the vault, so to speak, sharing this private training that I originally created just for our affiliates. I talked about it in episode one of this seven part series and it’s like, you know what, I’m going to include this, this actual, you know, actually include the training. And so there’s, it’s a little bit different.
It’s about how to use opt in bonuses to grow your email list before a launch even begins. And it’s different in that this is the training that I actually did for affiliates. So there’s a little bit of Q and A, there’s a little bit of back and forth with me and some affiliates and you get access to that. We kind of cropped off like the first, I don’t know, four or five minutes where I talk about the, the count, the promo calendar for the affiliates.
And you know, because that’s, you know, you don’t need to know what the dates were and all that stuff. And then there’s a little bit of stuff at the end where I just talk about like further instructions for them in terms of the launch itself. But the middle, I don’t know, 30, 40 minutes or so, you’re getting access to all of that. And this is a strategy that helped a bunch of our partners get new subscribers, warm them up and then ultimately convert at ridiculously high rates once the cart open. This is the whole point. So, so whether you’re an affiliate looking to stand out or maybe you’re an. Affiliate manager who want to teach your. Partners, something that actually worked.
Need help activating your affiliates? Use my proven email templates for getting inactive affiliates in the game and making sales! Get them here!
This episode is for you. Quick reminder, the first two parts of the recap, again, this is a seven part series. They’re a recap of what we did during the launch. So those are the behind the scenes stuff, the lessons we learn and all that. So if you missed parts one and two, go back and listen. I shared the behind the scenes kind of how we ran the whole launch and closed strong on cart close day. Then we got the special bonus episode. That’s part three.
Today we’re going to talk about opt in bonuses. And then finally the last four episodes after this are interviews with some of the affiliates who absolutely crushed it in this promo. We’ve got an interview with the top affiliate, I think the number two or number three affiliate, another affiliate who stuck in the top, who snuck in the top 10 and like had no business being in the top 10. But the things that she did were.
Absolutely amazing to do that. And then an affiliate who finished, I. Don’T know, like 17th, 18th place, you know, made over $20,000 but again had no business being up there. And so, so some of you small affiliates or affiliate managers who want to help your small affiliates, those are the two episodes to listen to. So we get a variety of episodes there with these interviews and they are absolutely awesome. So with that said, let’s jump into today’s bonus lesson about these opt in bonuses. The number one strategy that is, I very rarely see people using, I would say less than. So we followed almost every one of the top 50 last year in tribe quite frankly because we were competing against them and I wanted to steal their stuff.
I think two other people did this, but I’m telling you it is the single best way to get more opt ins and create massive engagement with your audience is to offer an opt in bonus. Okay, so what makes a good opt in bonus? A good opt in Bonus is not $1,000 bonus package, okay? It is not seven things. It’s not, you know, like this massive thing. Right? An opt in bonus is super simple. It’s when you opt in to the tribe workshop, you get to join my private Facebook group which we’ll talk about later.
Okay. Or when you opt into the tribe workshop, I’m going to give you this $17 ebook, okay. Or I’m going to share my notes from each day of the workshop. Courtney just says she was just listening to a podcast episode and I talked about that specifically. It’s just some sort of a small bonus. It does not have to be this mega, mega thing, right? It is Something super simple. And so what I would love for you guys to. I’m going to share a couple of other just ideas and in a moment, I love you to take this sheet, type in some ideas but also put them in the chat or if you have a question about them, just jump on and ask me the question.
I just want to spend, you know, five or six minutes kind of like throwing out ideas at each other for opt in bonuses so that someone who’s on this or watching the replay and they’re struggling with it. Like I can’t think of anything, you know, everything I have is either too expensive or it’s just not. It still needs to be like attractive, right? And you can’t think of something, then maybe they’ll get inspired by that. Some other ideas are a template, you know, it could be. I’ll give you an example with, you know, with, with the fml, you know, with the finding member launch. Give them your email templates from your founding member launch.
Like here are the five emails we sent promoting our founding or two or one or whatever. That’s a bonus. What’s the value of that? I don’t know, $27. What would you sell it for? 25 bucks? Again, it doesn’t have to be like this massive thing. We, when we do this, ours is actually very, very, very simple. We give them a PDF of all of the emails that we used when we launched our membership site. We just copied and pasted them from ConvertKit and I think we cleaned it up so that the URLs didn’t work because they go to a dead page now. That was it. Like that’s all we did when you opt in for this workshop.
Oh, and then there’s like a eight minute video. I do an eight minute run through. That’s a little bit long. It’s like 15 minutes. I do an 8 minute, 15 minute whatever run through where it’s just me on, on the, this is me doing a screencast, walking through. Hey, we sent this email. Here’s who we sent it to. Here’s why I said, you know, use this language, blah, blah, blah, kind of breaking down the email from a strategic standpoint.
Then we sent to these people, boom, boom, boom, that’s it. And so let’s see here, let me pull up in the chat. So, you know, Russ says I have a mini course I plan to offer. Yeah, mini courses are really good. We have a $37 mini course that we’ve used as a bonus a couple of times for opting into stuff. Manu, that does. Like somebody else said, kind of seems like that might be more for buying the course. But yeah, the eight day Instagram campaign, let’s see, Russ.
Yeah. Called testimonials that work. It’s about a very specific thing. So the concept is still the same. When we think about a bonus, it either makes it easier or faster to implement what the, what the workshop is about or it fills a gap. And so a good example of filling the gap would be if you have. Let me think here, let’s say your entire audience is they. Oh gosh, I’m trying to think of a good one. Homeschool moms. See where I can go with that. Okay, so the gap you’re going to fill, you know, Stu has some homeschool moms. Clearly there’s probably at least one on here.
You know, raise your hand if you’re homeschool mom. I can’t raise my hand. That’s bad. Homeschool dad, though. Which basically means I do nothing and my wife does all the teaching. And then like once every month when she wants to sleep in, I teach them something for 20 minutes and talk about it on Facebook for a week endlessly, as though I’m like a hero. That’s how that works. Okay, so homeschool moms.
Right. Then the bonus would be something like how to run a membership site and how to create the content when you’re, you know, when you’re a busy homeschool mom. That’s not something Stu’s gonna offer, but it fills that gap. You know, there’s something there. Right. Find that thing, you know, that’s like just that, like slight. It’s that missing piece that’s specific to your audience and how to apply the workshop to them. And again, it can be as simple as, you know, ours is like a three page PDF of email copy.
It could be that you’ll share your notes. That’s one of my favorite ones, you know, which the bonus is at the end of every session. The next day I’m just gonna send you my typed up notes and it’s like they get access to your, to your brain power on that, which is, which is kind of cool. So any others, like anybody want to just jump on and say something they’re thinking about or have a question about this, you know, pretty simple.
Yep. To Courtney, to be create. You don’t have to create your own opt in, but you will. So I’m going to address Courtney’s thing because I think you were the one that said you listened to my podcast episode. So if somebody has that link available, I don’t know what it is. It was like episode 420, I think. So I might know the link. Let me look it up real quick. Says the guy who doesn’t know how to access his own website. Nope, I think it’s 419. Okay, so I’ll drop this episode link here. Nope, that’s not it either.
Oh, for two. This is compelling video. Right? I sent the link to the chat because I was just. Oh, cool. There you go. Thank you. Okay, so what that was specifically for, Courtney, is if you’re running ads to target people you don’t know. So let me back up. If somebody clicks on your email to the tribe workshop and they opt in, and we’ll have about an 80% opt in rate. So most people that click are going to opt in. You know who’s opted in?
Pretty much. Okay. If they opt in through an ad or through a social media post and they’re not on your list, legally, we cannot say here, Courtney, here’s all the people because they didn’t opt into your list. So what you do, and you guys can listen to the podcast episode to get like all the details, but you’ll create what’s known as a bridge page. They’ll come to that bridge page, opt in through you, and then you’ll turn them into. You’ll send them to the tribe workshop and there’s a whole process. I think there’s a, There’s a sheet, too. Go to the link and there’s a link to grab the sheet.
The PDF that my team put together. It’s. I think it’s pretty simple. I haven’t seen it. I whiteboarded it. Just full disclosure. I whiteboarded it and they made it. And I think it’s pretty. Because everything they create is pretty. Okay, so that answers your question. Courtney, you don’t have to do that. If you’re sending them, if you’re sending this to your email list, send them directly to the workshop and just tell them when you opt in.
I’m going to give you this bonus and I’m going to talk about how to get them to do that in just a second. Courtney. I’ll go through that in just a moment. See? Offering a help call once a month. So I’m not talking about the experience, Jacqueline. That’s, that’s, that’s going to be next week’s session. I’m talking about specifically an opt in bonus. So any other questions on this? I think it’s pretty straightforward. What I’d love you to do, like I said, brainstorm some ideas, put them in that box there or wherever and you can continue to share your ideas in the chat. And as I see them, I’ll kind of, I might say some of them out loud.
So people who are watching this later will grab those and they don’t have to, you know, scroll through the chat. But any other questions or thoughts on that before I talk about how to deliver that bonus the super easy way? Just a quick question. If they’re on our list and we send them directly to opt in, the assumption is if they click the link, that’s who we’re tagging.
Yes, but not who gets the bonus, let me tell you. So I’ll talk about that. That actually leads right into how to deliver your bonus. Here’s what I do to deliver the bonuses. This works really well. I want to give credit where credit is due and I’m 80% sure I stole this from Jonathan Milligan like seven years ago. I saw him doing this was like, oh, my gosh, that is brilliant. Almost positive it was him.
I’ll have to ask him. So what I do is in this email I’ll say something along lines of like, Stu starting his, you know, his tribe workshop. It’s going to be amazing. Yada yada. When you register you just for the free workshop. When you register for the free workshop, I will send you this. To get it, I just want you to forward your confirmation email. You’re going to get a confirmation email from Stu saying you’re registered.
Now what is that doing? That’s actually making sure they have to go open the email from Stu. It’s an incentive for them not to just put that. Delete that email. Okay, they have to go check that email from Stu. Well, that email has all the goodies, like the calendar reminder to add the workshop to their calendar. It has, you know, it gets them getting Stu’s emails. It triggers, you know, in Gmail, if you open an email from Stu, he’s more likely to end up in your inbox, not your promotions tab.
So all these good things are happening and we’re conditioning our audience to do that. Right. It’s a little ninja trick. But what we say is forward the email from Stu, the confirmation email, forward it to tribe@mattmcwilliams.com when they do that, we just set up what they called in Gmail auto reply, I think. Or it’s like a rule. I think they’re called rules. We set up a rule tribe williams.com actually doesn’t exist, but when they.
So it goes to our support email. But you can tell Gmail, guys, I promise this is super easy if you just Google it. How to set up a rule in Gmail. Any email that goes to tribematmcwilliams. com gets an auto reply. And it just basically says, hey, thanks for opting in to Stu’s, you know, workshop. You’re gonna love it. We then remind them to put it on their calendar, even though Stu did. It’s another reminder. Make sure you put it on your calendar. Yaddy, yaddy. I got so much. I went through it last year. I got so much out of it. Like, we’re, we’re selling the workshop again.
Here are your bonuses. Here are your bonuses or bonus. And then it’s just a link to the PDF. So the cool thing is you do a little bit of work on the front end and then you don’t have to like, keep, keep actually setting up, you know, replying to emails. You could manually reply to them if you really wanted to. I just don’t want to do that. So to answer Courtney’s question, how do you set up a dummy email? What we did on our end is if you type in anything@mattmcwilliams.com that doesn’t actually exist. So we’ve got one, two, seven names and then support those.
I think we have eight emails that actually exist. Nine.We have nine emails that actually exist. Everything else just goes to the support email. So for instance, we tell our students, like, if you, you know, send if our no product, no problem students. Npnpattmcwilliams.com all that does is star it for priority response.
It just, we’ve created a rule that stars that email so our support team knows when they go in. Let’s look for the, you know, the starred emails first. Same with llamatmcwilliams.com or fan, you know, for find affiliates. Now, tribe does not exist, but we can tell it what to do with that. And in this case, it would be an auto response. I do put at the end of that autoresponder.
I do put something that says, FYI, this was an auto response email. So if you asked a question or, or had any other comment, you know, or something like that, please send a separate email to mattmcwaims. com so we do put that at the end of that email so they don’t think Matt’s kind of a jerk. I sent him an email and sent him my receipt and asked him a question or complimented him on his, you know, his post on Facebook or, you know, whatever. And then he doesn’t even respond to me about that. Like that’s kind of a jerking. No, we cover that at the end of the email. So. So that’s how you deliver these bonuses, these opt in bonuses. We’ll talk about next week about how to deliver the $2,000 course bonuses. That’s also really easy to do, but you do want to do a little bit more white glove with that. So that’s number one is come up with an opt in bonus.
Again, super inexpensive. Doesn’t have to be this grand thing like you’re, you know, your bonus package will be for the core sales. That all make sense. Guys, get Back for the eight of you I see on video no. 10, you’re nodding heads. Good. Basically everyone else, if you’re not on video, the people who are on video, they represent you. So if I see them all nodding their head, you’re totally out of luck.
Just picking on you guys. All right, so create a Facebook group. Alright. Again, this is all about when I think about promoting things as an affiliate. And I’m going to send a certain number of people to this workshop. How do I, how do I create a level of engagement and excitement with them that is like, they’re already going to be super excited. Stu, you guys know he’s going to massively deliver. He is going to rock the house.
The chat is going to be just like, if you, you guys know how it is. Like the chat is just stupid. You know, it is so engaged. It’s absolutely insane. That’s awesome. That is absolutely awesome. Well, why don’t we just take it up a little bit more and create kind of that like we’re all on the same boat. So again, let’s just go back to the example.
My audience is homeschool moms. Just record. My audience is not homeschool moms. I know that totally surprises every single one of you, like, oh, wow, I totally thought he was a homeschool mom. I’m not. But if my audience is homeschool moms, and let’s just say I have a couple thousand homeschool moms on my audience. We’re all homeschool moms. And now I’m going to create a Facebook group for homeschool moms that are going through the tribe workshop.
We’re all speaking the same language. We all have similar struggles, similar, you know, obstacles, and probably similar questions. And we’re now like, you know, it’s a homogenous group. Right. And that, that’s actually good for this. You know, this, this is good to have a homogenous group. And we’re going through a similar experience together. And so that’s super awesome.
So we, we create this Facebook group and it’s a private Facebook group for people who are going through our, you know, our affiliate link through the Tribe Workshop. They get that link in the email. Remember, they forwarded there. So even, even if this is the only bonus you offer, only bonus you offer, then you say, hey, when you join the workshop, forward your email to try that.
Your domain. com or whatever it could be. You could. Here’s another easy way to do it. If you can’t figure out the thing I just said, forward your email to me. Well, guess what? You know what the subject line is going to be because it’ll be the same subject line you got when you, you know, signed up for the workshop. And now you can just say, all emails with this subject line reply with this message.
You could tell them, you know, again, if you just manually process them because someone might forward the email, but put in the, you know, change the subject line and then you’ll have to manually process those. If you use that, some of them might forward it. We probably will get three people out of, you know, hundreds of who will forward the email. And instead of tribe, they’ll type in Terb or they’ll leave off the Ian tribe.
And we have to just manually process those. Takes 30 seconds. It’s not a big deal. So I got a question from Heidi Easley. I think she asked yesterday and I responded to her today about naming the Facebook group. And I gave her kind of my formula for naming Facebook groups. It is ridonkulously simple because I like to keep things simple. The big thing is don’t get creative. Now is not the time. If you have homeschool moms going through Tribe Workshop, don’t name it like the super awesome club of rock star moms. What the heck is that? What does that even mean?
You know, okay, I don’t, you know, okay, we’ve identified their homeschool moms and they’re super awesome. But like, what. What is it about? So the simple formula is audience who want to and then what they want to do. So I give some examples in that worksheet. Bloggers who want to create recurring revenue. If you are thinking of, if you find this group, this is the other thing. When they find the group, you say, did you register for the tribe workshop?
If so, put in your email. If not, go to and you create a URL. So mattmcwilliams. com tribeworkshop that redirects to your affiliate link. Join there and you might actually catch some people like just. You get free opt ins at that point for doing nothing other than creating a Facebook group. Hint, hint. If you do this, you’ll get a lot of those.
It’s actually a really cool strategy. Again, bloggers who want to create recurring revenue. What’s this group about? Bloggers who want to create recurring revenue. You know, gym owners who want to start an online platform or gym owners who want to start a name. I mean like name something online business platform may not even be the word. Gym owners who want to start an online business. You will attract newsflash.
Gym owners who want to start an online business. Like super easy, right? That’s the formula. It is the Nate. Just name the audience, the people. I think Heidi’s was, I was like artists who want to teach online or something. You know, like I told her that was like it’s your audience who want to and then this is the result they want to achieve. So it could be just about anything. Tie it back to tribe workshop, of course. But in her case it was a little bit broader and then the tribe workshop is kind of the way that you, you get to that. So yeah, I mean Courtney isn’t a. No, no.
To put something about tribe. So here’s another way to name this. If you don’t really want to come come up with something like that. You’re not trying to attract anybody out. It’s just a bonus. You could literally call it like Courtney Lynn fans who are going through the tribe workshop, you know, or tribe workshop, you know, Stu McLaren’s tribe workshop brought to you by Courtney Lynn or something like that. You know, it could be like really simple. It could be very, very simple.
Let’s just see a couple questions. You suggest sending people to the group now, but then opening or starting the group right before the workshop. I think I’m going to kind of address that when I talk about engagement here in just a second. Because the answer depends on how much work you want to put in and how much you want to engage them beforehand.
So you totally could create that group now, Corey and yeah. And get them kind of like starting to think about it and reminding them that it starts on April 22nd. This starts on April 22nd. You could totally start a group now. The key is you got to make sure like these all have to. People have to be on the same path. So they need to get registered for the, you know, the tribe workshop, which right now they would just get on the wait list, which is totally cool. So if they register for the wait list, that’s totally fine.
So think about that. Write out your group name. Come up with a cool group name. You don’t have to start a Facebook group. Just FYI. I hear that a lot. Well, Matt said start a Facebook group. Well, what if you don’t like Facebook? Well, then don’t do a Facebook group. You know, I did that with a coaching client earlier. She’s like, I don’t like having eight meetings in one day. I’m worn out at the end of the day. I’m like, well, then don’t. Don’t have eight meetings in one day. Just do them over the course of two days. Oh, I can do that.
Yeah, but you said to batch. Not if you don’t like it, you know, so just because I say, like, do this doesn’t mean you have to do it. Just FYI, if Facebook is not your thing, if it’s not, like, if you don’t feel comfortable on Facebook, you will suck at doing a Facebook group. Okay, There’s a reason why I hire people to do Facebook groups because I suck at doing Facebook groups.
If you’re not comfortable doing it, then don’t. Don’t do it. You’ll be better off focusing your efforts on other things. Do slack. Like Manu said, you could start a voxer group. It doesn’t matter to me, but the principles apply. What if we already have a free Facebook group? No, I would create a specific one for people who are going through the tribe workshop. That’s the key here, Lisa. Promote the tribe workshop. And your bonus of getting this other Facebook group that way. The thing you want in this group, Lisa, this is the key.
You want to be able to go. I was thinking of a phrase that’s not exactly the most appropriate phrase. Let me come up with something different. You want to go all out. You just want to go all out. Like, you want to be able to be in there three times a day. Once the workshop starts asking, what was their favorite takeaway asking, you know, what’s the biggest lesson they learned? Okay, like starting a thread where you share your favorite quote from the thing you want people posting in there.
And it’s all about the tribe workshop. It’s all about founding member launches. It’s all about, like, oh, my gosh, when Stu said that, I got goosebumps. I started crying. And then you don’t want half the people in the group Going, what the heck are they even talking about? And why are they all talking about this? Because it’ll hurt that group. It’ll actually hurt that group, meaning your.
Your other free group, Lisa. Because now they feel like in a bad way. They feel like they’re kind of left out. Oh, all you’re talking about is tribe for the next two and a half weeks. I’m not in that. I’m just gonna leave this group. We don’t want to make people go for the nuclear option, so. Okay, let me make sure I didn’t miss any questions.
Catherine. Oh, I am wearing that shirt. All your excuses are lies. That’s what my shirt says. Catherine. I’m sorry. So cool. That made sense. Yeah. Biggest advantage of Facebook is all most people are there. Yep. Absolutely. I get sucked into the vortex all the time. I go to Facebook to find. To take a screenshot of something said on fake, you know, somebody said about me on Facebook. The next thing I know, I’m in responding to a Facebook thread about something that my cousin posted, and then I’m responding to 17 comments in that thread.
That’s the. You know what heck of a business model they’ve got there. I don’t know about you, but I get sucked into the vortex at least once a week, and I’m usually annoyed by it. So come up with the group name. Then you want to engage the members. Okay. Five very simple things you can do. And most of you probably know more about Facebook engagement than I do.
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That’s why I did not write these five things, because I left these to my team to tell me what to post quotes from that day. Guys, if you haven’t used Canva, I mean, you’ve all heard of it, right? Our graphic designer, who makes a lot of money, uses Canva, and he does a great job. But I can do really cool stuff in Canva if I want to. It is super easy. You literally take something, take an image of Stu, and. Or don’t even do Canva. You know, just do, like, something and just post your big takeaway from Stu.
But I would literally just. I would have Stu face and then a blue background and then a quote. And then the next time, I’d have a different Stu face and a red background and a quote. Something that I got from, you know, from that day leading up to the workshop for that engagement. Absolutely. You’re allowed to use pictures of Stu. Crystal. Here, I’ll drop a link in the folder.
You guys got this in another place, but I just texted it to Heath earlier, so I will drop this and then this message will self destruct. No messages for Robbie on our team. Robbie, when you watch this video, can you post that below this video when you put this on the replay page? Thank you. Okay. Yeah. And then there’s a Facebook thread in the group, in the partners group of Stew isms. I don’t know, like 40 or 50 quotes in there that are all over the place.
We talked about that last week, so I won’t go into depth on that. But just taking images too. Here’s my favorite quote from the workshop today. In the days leading up to the workshop, it could just be some of those other quotes, you know, and it’s like Stu says, I’m just making something up. I don’t know if he actually said that. Stu says, the more money you make, the more impact you can have. Agree or disagree. That’s a good Facebook post, right?
Stu says that, you know, such and such. What’s your opinion of this? Or how do you feel about that? What’s your number one obstacle to creating recurring revenue? You know, so quotes, what you’re excited about. What you’re excited about is a good one, you know, hey, guys, day one of the workshops coming up and Stu’s gonna cover this. It’s gonna be amazing. I can’t wait.
You know, hey, guys, this is coming up and Stu’s gonna talk about this. It’s gonna be amazing, right? Stories, you know, like, you guys all probably know somebody. If you don’t go read through the Facebook group, you know, find, you know, you probably have tons of stories from last year that you remember. Just tell a story. Just literally just be on there. Be like, hey, my friend Courtney, you know, she’s. I don’t know what you do, Courtney, but she does such and such.
She started a membership site because of Stu’s training. And here’s the results that she got. Boom, boom, boom. You know, start seeding. Especially after, like the first day of the workshop. So going into the workshop, it’s all about the workshop. It’s all about the workshop. After day one is all about the second day. But after that second day, start seeding tribe, okay? And start telling stories of people who took the next step. Start telling the stories of people who bought the course and got these results. You know, that’s kind of the strategy outline there for stories.
Sharing nuggets of the lessons or a reinterpretation of a lesson. I probably should have put that on there. I’m actually going to do that. It’s the cool thing about Using this sheet is I can just reinterpret a lesson. Haha. I finally added one myself. Gimme. So what I mean by reinterpret so a nugget of a lesson is very simple.
Here’s what Stu said, I liked it. Or here’s what Stu said, here’s how I applied it. A reinterpretation of a lesson is. Here’s what that means for my specific audience of pet influencers. For Courtney. Here’s what that means for stay at home moms. Here’s what that means for stay at home dads. Here’s what that means for corporate CEOs.
You know, whoever your audience is, you take what he said and then interpret it for your audience of people who are thinking about creating a membership site. So if you’re going to create a membership site about this, here’s what that means. Man. Who says if anyone needs a story, I’m your girl. Went from 30k to 160k in my membership. Holy freaking crap. That’s awesome. Yeah.
I mean, I’m assuming that’s dollars, not members, because you have 160,000 members. Okay. I just think, oh wow. I mean that’s still absolutely amazing. Please don’t misunderstand me. But I took that as members. I’m like, Dang, you had 30,000 members before tribe. What the heck? Questions. Yeah, it’s true. If I wouldn’t be here if it was 360,000 members, unless they only paid like a dollar a month, then you might still be here, right? Yeah. So questions, you know, just what was your biggest takeaway from today? There’s one. Okay. The next morning.
Hey. It’s the day after the first day and yesterday you learned this. What are you gonna do today about it? What are you gonna do with what you got today? Ask a question. If they have any questions. Do you have any questions about day one? Do you have any questions about what Stu covered yesterday? I’ll answer them as best I can. Here’s the other thing. I didn’t talk about the reason why I like this. I love the Facebook group. Please. This is not a knock on the Facebook group. That’ll get created as a part of the workshop. You guys know how absolutely insane that place can get.
Your people might feel like they are getting lost, but so in your Facebook group. Let’s go hot. Let’s go. See, you have a medium to high audience and you’ll get a thousand opt ins. It’s pretty big. Like a thousand opt ins would put you 10th place, 12th place on the Leaderboard, Ish. Give or take. You’re gonna be one of the top 10 or 12 affiliates. Okay, so let’s go 500, you’re gonna be a top 40 affiliate. 500 opt ins. Only 360 of them are going to register for the Facebook group. They’re one of 360.
If you only have a hundred, they might only be one of a hundred people in your Facebook group. With direct access to you, you can reply to 100 people or 360 people. These are not all going to be messaging you. You know, you can reply to that in 10 minutes a day. You can manage that in 10 minutes a day. Maybe 15. If you’re trying to find your people in the main Facebook group, it’s like trying to find a needle in a stack of needles. It’s going to be a disaster.
Right. And then they feel lost. It’s a great place. It’s a great place. Please don’t misunderstand me. That’s awesome. This is a supplement to that. This is the more intimate, slightly more chill, less getting 84 updates from Facebook a day group. And there’s almost no risk of them leaving because they’re overwhelmed and they’re still getting the value. So that’s the beauty of that. So when you ask a question, some number of people will respond instead of 4,000, you know, and it’s more manageable. And so I want you to write out your engagement strategy.
Just think about what are you going to do. It doesn’t have to be to the minute, but I’m going to post a quote every morning or every day, you know, middle of the afternoon, whatever. I’m going to reinterpret a specific part of the lesson as it pertains to my audience. Maybe the day after each of the workshop days, I’m going to share what I’m excited about the day before.
I’m going to tell a story, you know, I’m going to tell these five stories over the course of, you know, maybe like one before the workshop one, you know, the day before day two that you know, one the day before day three and start seeding tribe share some nuggets. I’m going to ask a question every day, you know, and you just come up with a. It’s just a basic plan that you can follow that you can. And if you have a random thing like I want to ask this question, it’s too Tuesday afternoon.
I just want to ask this question. Go right ahead. But if you come up with at least one, one and a half Things per day now that you can plan, it’ll be easy to run. So typically we, we meet as a team and we just plan these out. We come up with like one or two a day and then we’re done. So how many total days is tribe the course or the launch? Eric, Matt, Manu asks if I missed anything. Guys, just retype it.
Sorry. Do you recommend a page on our website with the rules for the opt in bonus and to sign up and maybe the other freebie links or is it better to pull it all in emails? I think I sort of understand the question menu. I don’t like pages with rules. It just, it’s kind of a deterrent. I just make the. We just keep this simple. So but if I’m, if I’m not mistaken if, if you’re. So if you’re replying in the email and you’re sending them to get something. So if I’m sending them to a PDF, what I’ll do. I didn’t cover this. I should have covered this in the last thing I do create a very simple template.
I didn’t have so much stuff on my whiteboard already. I would write it up there. But it’s a very simple template that just set, it has like the tribe logo says welcome to my Tribe Workshop bonus page and then I put a two sentence description of what they’re like. Here’s your PDF of my. These are the emails that I use to promote Affiliate Insider Monthly when we did our founding member launch. Click here to get them. I do put on there the calendar links again. Again.
I’m just, I’m looking everything I do, I’m looking for how can I get 2% more? How can I get 2% more? How Can I. If I have, If I get 400 people to register for the workshop, how can I get 5 more just to show up live? Just 5 more. But if I get 5 more from the email and then 5 more from the page and then 5 more from the next thing and 5 more from the Facebook group, I just added 20 people that are showing up live. Not, you know, like we’re not just little things. Right.
So I do put the calendar things on there. I put, I put links to the Facebook group on there as well, you know, so anything you can put on that page is super helpful. I think hopefully that answered your question, but they came from email. Sherry, do we avoid talking about Tribe course during and before the workshop?
Yeah, I don’t talk a lot about it up until about the second day or until after the second day of the workshop, I’m focused on the workshop. The workshop, the workshop. Free, free, free. Value, value, value, Right. What I do is very subtly seed that there’s a paid course, like I said, using stories. I’ll mention that we were. That we’ve been through his. We’ve been through his course.
We are a student of Stu’s. You know, I’ll say little things like that that make you go, oh, there’s a course. Right. And also, most people, they’re not stupid and they kind of know. And yeah, I mean, to Garth’s point, yeah, I mean, Stu will present the course, but we do want to start to seed it a little bit and just get them thinking about that because what starts happening after the second day, this is kind of the. So the psych. If you actually study the psychology. And man, I would love, if I could ever get somebody to like, actually, really, really study this.
This is one of those, like, I need Robert Cialdini to do like a massive 50,000 person study and like, probably cost me about $2 million. But I have a hunch based on studying these things over the years that what happens after the second day is they realize there’s only one more day left. And there people are going to fall into one of three camps. Camp number one is I’m overwhelmed. And I. I’m. I’m like, I need to start implementing this. Okay. So that’s fine. They’re probably not going to buy tribe. Camp number two is. I don’t get it. I didn’t get much out of this. I already knew all this stuff and, or, wow, I’m. I don’t know. Like, that’s gonna be something.
Some people are just not gonna resonate with Stu. Like, we all resonate with them. Like, clearly we’re here because we think it’s awesome, but some people, man, when Stu gets on there and goes, well, hello there. They’re like, this guy’s a tool bag. Like, I’m just. I mean, like, that’s. And he’s cool with that, right? We all understand that we’re going to not attract some people. I don’t attract people who can’t handle the fact that every now and again, if you notice, but I’ll go off in a really different direction, like a rabbit trail, and end up over here when I’m supposed to be here. And my audience is like, that’s cool. Right? So those are the first two camps.
The third camp is, they’re going, oh, my gosh, this was so amazing. I’ve done an. I’ve done an fml. I’ve actually made some money. I love this community. They’re so, so helpful. You know, like, there’s, like, Courtney in the group and Christine’s in the group, and, you know, and, oh, my gosh, like, everybody’s been so helpful. Stu’s amazing.
He’s the most amazing person on the face of the earth. And, man, there’s only one more day left. What’s next? I’m going to kind of feel lonely, and I’m being dead serious when I say that. Like, that is a real thing that we have found. If you’ve ever gone to a conference, the next day kind of sometimes sucks because it’s like there’s a letdown, and I feel like, oh, man, I want to be back at the conference. Like, I had to go back to all, like, now I got to go hang around all these people that I don’t even like in the real world. Like, that’s what, you know, Jeff Walker talks about the real world and RIM world.
Right. If you’ve ever heard that, I don’t want to do that. And so they’re going, what’s next? Those are the people that we now start to work on, and we start to focus in on, and we don’t have to do it with abandoning those other people. The other people just abandon themselves. The other people will leave your Facebook group. They will opt out of the emails. Cool.
I actually love it when people do that. I actively encourage people. In my very first email I’m going to. Speaking of rabbit trails, this is Rabbit Trail, the very first email that I send out about Tribe, I think it’s like the second paragraph. I say, if you don’t want to build recurring revenue and have no interest in starting a membership site, click this link. I make it so easy for them to opt out of the emails about Tribe workshop and Tribe. And I’m super happy when 3% of my list clicks that link, because now I know that the remaining 97%, I can go all out talking about tribe. So brainstorm some stuff for the engagement strategy.
The next thing is your content strategy. I didn’t have a lot of notes here, because I’ll tell you this. One of the biggest things I see. This is why literally all you see is a box that says my content channels. I just want you to make a list of all your content channels. So podcast, Facebook, Instagram, Facebook. I think I said Facebook already. Blog, Facebook Lives.
You know, I would say those are kind of separate from just, you know, Facebook post, Pinterest, whatever. I don’t need to name every network. Then I almost started to again as I thought of more. Think about all your content channels. Just use all of them. That’s. We’re not going to talk about the whole strategy here. Just use all of them. Put an ad in your. In your podcast. Do a segment of your podcast. Think about.
This is the big thing. If you. See if I can pull it up. If you think about what you need to start talking about now or next week or the week after, you know, the first week of April, the second week of April, whatever, leading into that big push in April 15, what are the ways that we can start to warm our audience up? And so I can tell you right now, for us, we have. We have an offer coming out. We’re going to be pushing people to our membership site in a couple of days. Not a couple of days.
When is that? 27th to 28th of March. They’re going to see the word membership just planting a little seed. So that’s like the first little shot across the bow, so to speak. The first salvo. Right? Then we actually have our own promotion. So we’re not gonna really talk about Tribe at all through April 8th. But then we start talking about little things. Like, I’m gonna quote Stu on some. We got some social media posts where we’re gonna talk about stuff. Most of those have nothing.
I’m looking at the list. They have nothing to do with memberships or anything. It’s just putting Stu in front of my audience. And then I have a podcast scheduled right before where I talk about this whole thing about meeting with Stu. He and I got a phone conversation one day, I don’t know, some number of years ago. And it helped me do this, this and this. That actually has nothing to do with membership sites, but it positions Stu as an expert, as a coach, as somebody who can help your business. And then I have, you know, this whole.
So, like our Facebook Live two weeks before, I’m going to be talking about kind of the launch roller coaster. And then the following week, I’m talking about Evergreen Affiliate Strategies. And so I’m going to tie that into recurring revenue. So nothing to do with Tribe Workshop. I’m just going to subtly start mentioning Stu and memberships and things like that. And then when we start hitting, you know, hitting the ground running there on April, so we have a promo that runs through April 16th. So we won’t be able to do anything until April 18th. On April 18th, it’s going to be like, you know, go register for the workshop.
Go register for workshop. Go register for the work workshop. But my podcast on the April 20th is all about membership sites. Podcast on April 23rd is all about membership sites, you know, and go register for the workshop. The Facebook Live on April 22nd. We are Mo. We are actually doing that after the workshop ends and the whole thing is just going to be our takeaways from that day. And go register for the workshop.
So you start thinking like, just list all your content channels and then, okay, what am I going to do on those? I’m going to do three Pinterest. I don’t know how often you should post to Pinterest. I don’t know the first thing about Pinterest, but, you know, I’m going to do three posts about that. Or is that something you can post to 12 times a day? I don’t know. I’m going to schedule five tweets a day because Twitter is totally something. If you did five a day, the reality is less than 5% of your audience is going to see, you know, any one of the five.
That’s what the numbers show. I’m do five or six tweets a day, you know, spaced out. I’m going to do a Facebook post every other day. I’m going to start sending email on this day. I’m going to work this into my podcast. Just make a list of your content channels and then do it. That’s the big thing, promoting the workshop. And then lastly, paid ads.
This is something not everybody can do. Like, I remember when I first started out, so circa 2005, I couldn’t do paid ads to an affiliate promotion because I didn’t money, you know, that was the hard part of that. But if you got a little bit of money and you want to run some paid ads, who do you target? The easiest people to target? If you have promoted in the past and you’ve sold any of Tribe, create a lookalike audience of buyers. That’s actually probably the second group I would do. The first group I would target is people in my audience, and it might be people within a segment. Maybe you have a segment of people that you.
You think would be better equipped for. You know, for Tribe, I would target those people. Literally. You just download your email list, download that segment list, upload them to Facebook. A lot of the times they don’t match. Like, I have a separate. Like, I will never get targeted for being on someone’s list. I don’t. I didn’t do this on purpose. I actually did it for a different reason. My email address that I use on Facebook, I don’t use anywhere else. I will never opt into anything using it.
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There’s a whole different reason for that. So, you know, so you can’t target me on Facebook in that way. But most people, they have one or two email addresses, and it’s probably the one they use on Facebook. I would say 70, 80% of the people.
So target your own people. That’s number one. And then target lookalikes of people who bought Tribe in the past or have attended the workshop in the past. If you know those people, that would be who to target. Secondly, the big thing is based on the numbers. So you can do the math on this. Last year, I’m going to go with round numbers. We closed about 6% of leads. So people who registered for the webinar are for the, for the workshop. We got about 6% of them into a sale. So I’m going to do the quick math. Your affiliate commissions are 70, 98.80, if I’m not mistaken. And I’m going to multiply those by 6%.
That means that you could spend $47.93 and break even on your ads. $47.93 per opt in. Now, that said, we closed just over 6%, but that’s 6% of all leads. So cold traffic Facebook ads, the leads are going to convert less. So let’s divide that 47 in half. Now we’re down to. We’ll just call it 24 from there. I don’t really want to run ads and not make any money. So I want to make at least 100% profit margin. So we’re going to divide by, and we’re at about 12 bucks. And then I just like round, you know, nice, round, super easy numbers. So I would not spend more than $10 per lead to run them profitably.
I don’t think you need to spend anywhere close to that to get some seriously good traffic through Facebook. So again, I’m not suggesting if you don’t have the money that you go out and like, go into debt to run ads. But if you’ve got the money and you’re wanting to compete, you’re wanting to do some, you know, get a few, you know, extra hundred people, then definitely, definitely consider running ads. And again, $10 CPA is going to probably be about as high as I would personally go.
We’ve run them in the past, and I don’t think we spent more than 350 a lead. I mean, I We didn’t spend that much money at all. I actually last know. Yeah, last year, last year I kept trying to give Facebook more money and I could, I couldn’t spend it because we were targeting our audience plus a lookalike of our past buyers, you know, and that’s what we’ll do this year.
Like we’ll run, we’ll run them to my audience and you know, we have about 3, 400 past buyers now. So we’ve got a pretty good look alike list. That’s it. That’s the only people we’re going to run up to. And I doubt that we could spend more than last year. They were really cheap admittedly because a lot of people shut their spending down, you know, because of the pandemic. That’s back up. I don’t think we’ll, I still don’t think we’ll spend more than 525, 550 a lead in the very high end.
Probably get it under five. That’s kind of our goal is to keep it under 5, you know. So then if we convert even 1% of those people, you do the math. If you convert 1%, I can do that easy math. That’s $500 per sale and we’re making 800 bucks. That’s $300 profit. We’ll probably convert at least 2%. So that’s a pretty substantial profit.
You know what we’ll make even spending five bucks a lead. So then you like do the crazy math. What if I spend 10 bucks a lead and only convert, you know, 2%? Well then I’m gonna spend 500 bucks and make 798.80. I mean Fortune 500 companies make it on 2 and 3% margins. So. Wow, what a powerful bonus lesson there.
So I hope you found value in me, including this. Again, it’s a little bit of a different episode but if you’ve ever struggled with like how do you grow your list before a big promotion? How do you grow your list while promoting, you know, other people’s products? Or how do you warm your audience up? How do you get those lists of. Like really active buyers? These opt in bonuses are kind of the secret weapon. And when you nail this, you, you don’t just build your list, you actually start build building momentum for, for, you.
Know, for the launch. So if you want one of our highest converting emails for the launch, by the way, the one we use to close sales at midnight on cart closely, I mentioned this in the last episode, just text the word midnight to 260-217-4619 one of the best emails that we have ever used in all of our promotions. We use it, you know, probably two or three times a year and it works every single time. As always.
You can text me at that number 260-217-4619 anytime if you got questions or need anything or have ideas for, you know, episodes for the show. And lastly, if you are not subscribed yet, make sure you are so you don’t miss the rest of this series. We’ve got some incredible affiliate interviews coming up where they share exactly what they did to truly outperform past performance, expected performance, and a bunch of other affiliates. There are so many ideas you can steal from these interviews, so make sure you are subscribed if you’re not already and I will see you in the those next four episodes.
See you soon.
The post $5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets: Opt-in Bonuses That Convert & Grow Your List appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.
What if the difference between being a good affiliate and a TOP affiliate…came down to how well you tell your story? Or when you send one single email? In Part 2 of our $5.7 million launch breakdown, we’re revealing the next-level strategies that turned browsers into buyers, including what worked on cart close day, how to find your hottest leads, and why your personal story might be your most powerful sales tool.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy$5.7 Million Launch Secrets Revealed: The Affiliate Playbook Part 1
How Two Parents Built a 104,000-Person Email List in Just 14 Days
How Affiliates Can Profit from Virtual Summits (Without Being a Speaker)
How Affiliate Managers Can Beat Burnout
Lessons from a Record-Breaking Affiliate Launch
$5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets: The Affiliate Playbook Part 2
What if the difference between being a good affiliate and a top affiliate came down to how well you tell your story or when you send one single email? In part two of our $5. 7 million launch breakdown, we’re revealing the next level strategies that turn browsers into buyers, including what worked on Cart close day, how to find your hottest leads, and why your personal story might be your most powerful sales tool. If you’re ready to take your affiliate program and your business to the next. Level, well, you’re in the right place.
I’m Matt McWilliams, best selling author and four time affiliate manager of the year. And I’ve built dozens of affiliate programs from the ground up to over a million dollars a month. I’m here to show you how you can do it too. Let’s get started. Hey, welcome Back to part two of our $5.
7 million affiliate launch secret series where I am. I’m going to show you kind of behind the scenes a little bit on one of the biggest and most successful launches that I’ve ever been a part of that we’ve ever run. This was a massive launch, over $5. 7 million in revenue. And we learned a ton along the way.
And so for the first time ever, as I mentioned the last episode, we’re. Opening up the vault. We’re sharing everything. You know, until now, this content was available only to our private members. But for this series, I wanted to make this available to everyone.
So like I mentioned before, this is a seven part series and trust me, every single episode is worth listening to. Whether you’re an affiliate, an affiliate manager, you’re doing both. There is so much here for you. Okay, so the first two parts as a reminder, including today’s episode, are a recap of what we did during the launch. Some of the behind the scenes strategies, the decisions, the lessons we learned from affiliates to again produce a, you know, almost $6 million launch.
Then we’ve got a special bonus episode that’s part three where we I talked about opt in bonuses to grow your email list. That’s a behind the scenes training that we actually shared with affiliates during the launch. This is pure gold, I’m going to. Tell you that much. And then finally, the last four episodes are interviews with some of the affiliates who crushed it.
And to be clear, like it’s not. Necessarily all the top affiliates. I know we had one, three of them were like top affiliates. But then we have one who actually. Was a smaller affiliate but did amazing.
If you are ready to take your business to the next level and start an affiliate program, start with my free report, Your First 100 Affiliates. This report takes nearly two decades of experience, trial and error, and lessons learned about finding top affiliates in nearly every conceivable niche and puts them all into one report. Grab your copy here!
I mean made like almost $20,000 I think with A tiny, tiny list. So let me just say this. If you’re an affiliate manager and you. Kind of think, like, I don’t need. To listen to those interviews, you absolutely do.
There’s so much you can learn and share with affiliates from hearing what worked for them. And if you’re affiliate, you know, an affiliate, and you’re thinking, well, these, you know, like, this isn’t for me. Like, these are. These are all big affiliates. I’m too small.
No, you still want to listen because there are lessons in here that even some of the big affiliates did that small affiliates can do. So part one, set the stage. Part two. Today we’re going to talk about again, one of the. Some of the biggest lessons from this launch.
So let’s get into it. And so Today I’ve got 10, 9, 10 tabs open on my computer to share some lessons specifically from the Facebook group. These are lessons that we shared with affiliates, lessons that comments that we responded to, some of their questions and some of the lessons they shared. Which goes back to the final thing that I shared last time, which is use the Facebook group as you will get so much from the partner Facebook group. If you’re in there, you’ll get connections, you’ll find affiliates, you’ll find partners, you’ll find people to interview on their podcast or in their membership.
You’ll find friends, you know, you’ll find mastermind people to connect with. Like, here’s an idea. How about you reach out, if you’re 25th on the leaderboard, how about you reach out to everybody from 20th to 30th and see if you can join a mastermind? What a great idea, right? Is that a bonus lesson right there?
Yeah, starting out with a bonus again. Starting out with a bonus again, baby. Like, that’s what that’s. Guys, just use the Facebook groups. I’m just going to go in this here in chronological order of when I opened them, not necessarily when I posted them, but I saved them here.
So here’s a great lesson. We sort of talked about this last time. I’m just going to read a little bit of what I posted. I just talked or chatted with most of our top 20 affiliates. 12 of the top 15 are either calling prospects, recording personal videos to prospects, or sending personal texts or Facebook messages to prospects.
So we shared last time, right? This is what the top affiliates are doing. My question is this. What are you doing? So I said, let’s do the math.
If you record 40 videos for your top 40 prospects and they take two minutes each that’s 80 minutes. Add in a 10 minute break. I know I need one and that’s 90 minutes. 90 minutes can make you three, five or even 10 sales. If you make just five sales, that’s $4,000 or what, roughly.
Or roughly half of what the average American makes in a month. I mean, actually it’s a little bit more than that. Like the average American makes about, I believe, $5,000 a month. So you’re gonna make 80% of what the average American makes in a month in 90 minutes. If I were me, I’d be all over this opportunity.
Let me know how I can help. All right. And then we saw in the comments like, you know, people, Jai posted and said, jai, I’m in. Thanks for coming back for me. High five.
Like she was reaching out to people individually. Jessica Brown, I individually emailed in Facebook message Michelle Caruana posted and she, she had a picture of her whiteboard. She’s recording bombbomb videos and it says, hi Melanie. She’s holding up this little whiteboard that says hi Melanie and recording that. And so guys, this is super powerful.
Do it. I can teach it to you all day long. But I’m going to tell you right now, nothing just beats that little bit of hustle. Little bit of hustle. Second thing I posted was, you know, we’re talking about the very end and I sent this, you know, to the, to the partners in the Facebook group and a little bit of rah rah at the beginning that I’ll skip for you.
But I just, you know, I just said, hey, like the emails tonight. So this was posted at 8:36 at night. So six and a half hours left. Emails tonight can account for 10% or more of your total sales. So remember that when we’re talking about deadlines.
Guys, the cart was open for this almost five days. Five days times 24 hours. It’s 120 hours. And yet. So the last six hours realistically should only account for 5% of sales.
But they ended up accounting for 12. 7% of all sales. I was actually a little bit off. I didn’t think they’d quite count for that much. I thought they’d count for about 10%, 11%, 12.7% of all sales. That’s, you know, 250% more than they should be accounting for in terms of they should be, you know, 5%. And I shared my magic midnight mover email and as I said, let me tell you, or as I posted in there, let me tell you about this email. I’ve used it for years in affiliate promos. Every single time it produces results.
So we send this at midnight eastern or a couple minutes after and you know, people wait until the last minute. Right? Bottom line, this email works so send it at midnight eastern. I put gave four subject lines and we’ll include this copy. We will include this text for you guys so you can we’re just gonna give you a copy paste, you know, version of this, a couple subject lines you could use.
You still up or midnight, you know. Did you miss tribe? Don’t turn into a pumpkin. Right? And I say it’s midnight eastern when I do that.
By the way, that means all caps. You might have thought that you missed the deadline for tribe but I have good news. You didn’t. The deadline to join for 2021 is at midnight pacific. I just triple checked and that means you have three hours to join tribe or you miss out for an entire year.
That is way too long to wait to create a business built on recurring revenue. So don’t wait. Take a moment to learn more and join before it is truly too long late. Click here to join. Yadda yadda.
That email moved people in this launch just like it always does. That email flat out works. I have seen this in my own promotions. I’ve seen it as we’ve run affiliate promotions and it’s always funny because people are seem a little skeptic to actually send that email. But there was one affiliate this time who when she posted in the Facebook group she said, you know, I was so afraid to send this email, I sent it anyway. And 5 of my sales came in the last hour of promotion. Like I’ll see if I can find it here in my notes but oh. My gosh, I think I screen I want to see that. I don’t know that I sent that or saw that while you’re looking that up. Tip number three, this is from Jai Stone.
She posted this after the launch and said reduce your refund rate. Just thought I’d share how I started to immediately engage my subscribers or my registrations. Most of the list is standard business practices but there might be a nugget for someone. So number one, all of my affiliates for the past week included instructions to retrieve retrieve bonuses along with my affiliate enrollment link. So you’re conditioning your audience.
Number two, the instructions had them forward their registration receipt to my team. This also helped me see three folks that didn’t show up on my ledger. These are people that she, you know that said they they bought, they contacted the the Tribe team And got added. Okay, so that’s a great strategy there. Make sure they send the receipt.
Number three, on day two of OpenCart, I emailed all the current registrations thanking them and provided next steps. She’s already engaging them. I mean, only two days into open cart, like there’s still plenty of time left. Number four, on the day after cart closed, I sent their first bonus link. We talked about that in the last lesson.
We delivering bonuses. Right. Number five, there’s also a private Facebook group just for them with a welcome video. They are engaging with each other already. All right, now they’re engaging in their private community. And number five, she said she posted two number fives. I think she met. Number six. I posted a thread encouraging them to introduce themselves and find a tribe accountability partner within that small group. Accountability partners, like you’re going to get actual results.
They’re going to see more results in the first two weeks of tribe than they’re going to. They usually see when they buy an online course and go through it for months. Why? Because they got the accountability partner. I want them to feel connected and committed right away. And some of the comments, you know, this is gold. You know, such great suggestions. Stu said, thank you for the way you continue to show up and serve. Very grateful for your leadership and support and a ton of other comments. Guys, this is what you know, this is a great way to reduce your refund rate.
All right, so I just found this post and it says, listen to Matt McWilliams, you guys. His advice pushed me to send my fifth email in the last 48 hours. I sent one at midnight eastern, which sounded silly and made at least five sales in that last hour. Yeah, dude, that’s awesome. I mean, yeah. And you know, and the number, the numbers show up like she was in. Let me pull that up real quick. It’s over here. She was in 11th place with about 9:30, 10:00pm and finished in eighth. That’s the difference. Let me pull up the numbers. That is the difference between no prize money and $750. Okay. More importantly, it’s the difference between like 11th place and like, hey, you don’t even get your picture on the leaderboard and you get a picture on the final leaderboard. Like, I.
These are big things. Like, she’s 11th place to eighth place is. I’m seeing as a little bit more of a leader in this community with the other affiliates. Like, you know, that’s a big deal. And I’m looking at it. I mean, she went, if we look at number of sales separated 13th from 8th, 7 sales. So 5 sales. I mean, that could have been the difference, you know, I mean. I mean, that’s a pretty. Pretty big.
I just. Funny, I had that. I had that. Yeah, listen to Matt McCoys. I had that. Oh, is that the next open? Yeah, I had. I had it open already. I didn’t even realize that. That is too funny. Yeah, that is. That is. That is awesome. Fifth email in 48 hours, midnight eastern. Made at least five sales. Boom. That is too cool. So here’s a lesson that I shared, and the title of this post was feel like you’re promoting too much. So it’s a little bit of a long one and I’ll include the text for this for you guys. So you can actually just read this if you want to.
But I’ll break it down here a little bit. I just talked about if you feel like you’re promoting too much, if you’re getting. You know, I posted this right before the card opened and I just, you know, there’s three. There’s three things, right? There’s the tactical, there’s the mindset, and there’s the strategy. And so from a tactical perspective, we already talked about this in the last, you know, recap. Give them an opt out. Okay. Give them an opt out. So I don’t need to go back into that, right?
On the mindset side, you know, promoting a lot can be tough on your psyche. Like, it’s. Especially if you’ve never really done, like, big affiliate promotions or done any affiliate promotions before. Like, we feel like, oh, my gosh, I’m burdening people. I tell people, you know, the example I often give, you’ve probably. Many of you have heard me talk about is like, if you found your new favorite restaurant, you would tell everybody. You’d be like, oh, my gosh, I got to call my sister, tell her about this. Like, oh, my gosh, this restaurant is unbelievable. You know, I got to tell everybody. That’s how we do.
Like, we find something that we had a positive experience with and we want everybody to know about it. So if you’ve actually been through the course you’re selling or you’ve used the product you’re selling, it’s impacted you, then be confident, right? I said this in the thing. The same is true here. You aren’t overwhelming your audience.
You’re encouraging them. This is why we share the tactical part first, right? Because if someone doesn’t click, if they click the opt out, you don’t have to worry about offending or overwhelming them. If they do not click it, they either haven’t read your email, they’ve been busy, life’s gotten in the way, or they’re still interested. Either way, another email is always a good idea and then third is the strategy side. And so I shared this email, which we’ll share from this post here. I say don’t shy away from openly addressing that. You acknowledge that you’re promoting a lot. Right? And I shared this email where, you know, I sent a couple of years ago and the subject line was tired of Stu yet you know, I think this was right before you came on on board Robbie, when we, when I sent this email and I don’t think.
We remember getting this email. Yeah, you know, we had, we didn’t send it, you know, the last couple of emails or the last couple of years, but it’s like, hey, you know, are you tired of me talking about stuff? Well, here’s why I’m talking about student. We’ll include the text so you can use this email. That’s how you continue to promote with confidence, you know, and you know, and even like kind of aggressiveness, you know. Here’s a really cool post from Michelle that I thought was really Michelle. Yes, it is pronounced Carowana. When I asked her like the very first time training, I was like, how do you pronounce your name? She’s like, it’s like marijuana. So always got a trip out of that.
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This is just so cool. She said, hey, just wanted to hop in here and share something while it’s fresh on my mind. I had a scheduled live Q and a video at 10:30 Eastern in my pop up group for people going through Stu’s workshop with about 70 of my leads in it. I’ve been doing this twice a day. Things did not go as planned.
Lol. Usually I can depend on iPads to babysit my kids during quick videos. But for whatever reason, I ran out of luck today and had to answer questions through snack making, toddler rocking and consoling and my dog chewing, loudly chewing on a water bottle. It’s like I really wanted to just slam my laptop shut at multiple points during the live. But I powered on, answered every question for an agonizing 38 minutes.
But I kept a smile on my face. After it ended, I sobbed, which is really unlike me, literally sobbed. But since then, not even an hour later, I got so many comments thanking me for still showing up and answering questions and not cutting my life short even though it was messy, very messy. I got a lot of DMs, too, saying my answers gave them a lot of clarity and that they needed to hear what I said. So even if you’re like me and have zero childcare right now, currently on a four month vacation across the country with my family, blah, blah, blah, and you feel like you’re not perfectly polished when you show up, do it anyway.
People love the real and your people love you. Don’t let it deter you from showing up as much as possible this week. That was one of the coolest things with Michelle was that she was so real all the time in everything she did. And this goes back to what we talked about last month, right, with showing up and she just showed up. Like few affiliates I had seen in this promotion.
Yeah, I mean, it’s a powerful lesson, guys. You don’t have to be polished, you don’t have to be like perfect. And you know what if, I mean, I’ll tell you the best video that we did during the launch for affiliates, we. I was announcing the winners and my son came down and he’s like, dad, he’s like crawling up him, like, hey, you know, say hey, hi. But then he’s like, you know, making noise and all of a sudden one of his toys goes off. And then when it’s like time to celebrate, I’m like, hey, dude. I was like, hey, you want to celebrate? He’s like, yeah. Like, well, there’s a. Because everybody should have one of these in their office, right?
There’s a box of party hats and like the little whatever those things are called. And like, you know, like, I’m like, grab some of that. So he comes over, he’s got like three hats on and he’s like, burp. I’m like, and the burp. Like, not, not yet, bud. You know? So guys, in the winter burp. Giovanni, we’re doing the burp after I announce the winner. But they loved it. Who wouldn’t? You know, he’s cute, right? Adorable five year old. So, you know, like just embrace that kind of stuff. It was fun. We ended up just having a blast. And he was. Tell you what, that’s the thing, he talked about that. That was like two weeks ago that that video happened. He still talked about that video for like a week later that he got to work with daddy. Yeah.
I don’t know, is it going to be something he remembers when he’s 30? Probably not. But you know what, it was worth it. So Belinda asked a question I thought was really cool because it led to something that you guys will Definitely want to use. Said this was on April 23, the day after the first day of the workshop. Cart does not open for like 10 days. Well, that didn’t take long. I’m already getting repeated messages that sound like, how much will Tribe cost? How do you suggest we respond? So here’s what I wrote and I’m going to share this with you guys.
First. When this happens, you have someone who is probably at a 6 to an 8 on a 10 point scale, okay? So we talk about the. We got to get them from zero to a 10. You know, like we’re constantly progressing from where they started. So they started at zero, maybe upwards of a two or three, and we got to get them to a 10 to buy. That’s a good thing. Nobody asks about the cost of something they have no interest in buying. Okay, Just for the record, I don’t care how much the house across the street from us costs because I don’t want to buy it. Actually, I do care because it affects our home values.
Now, I think about a bad example, okay? I have no, I have no interest in knowing how much any Kia’s cost, okay? I have no interest in buying a Kia. You know, so just as an example, I just, I don’t care. So they have a number in their head. It might be 100 bucks, might be 500 bucks, might be 5,000. You don’t know. The idea here is to build up value first, then reveal the price, which is what the workshop is all about, right? It builds up that value. So I wrote that when I answer something like this so early, I avoid answering it publicly is because anybody who’s in A4 just says, oh, that’s too high, and they’re gone.
They haven’t established value and demand. Okay, so we can’t answer it publicly. We just respond like, Hey, I DM’d you about this. And then we go from there. You know, if it’s an email, you don’t have to worry about that. And then I gave them an example of, you know, of what I, you know, would say. So first off, let me say that Tribe was worth more than blank times what I invest in it. So for us, I’d say it’s probably worth more than 100 times what I invest in it. Just in the first year. No matter what you pay for something, especially a course that helps you grow a business, it’s all about the roi, return on investment.
It changed my business and changed my life in the following ways. And then I would list the ways that it’s Changed your life. And we’ve heard from countless others it’s done the same or similar for Stu. Started off by only teaching what he teaches now in tribe, in private, small group and one on one settings. These lessons would cost tens of thousands of dollars.
It’s value establishing or anchoring the price and help numerous entrepreneurs build six and seven figure year memberships. Now he wants to help as many people as possible achieve the same results. And not only. And the only way to do that is with a course which cost a fraction of what his private workshop costs. Personally, I think his free workshop that is going on right now is the second best training on earth.
For memberships that’s important. But the best one is the tribe experience itself which you can join. And now I tell them the price. I’ve established the value. You can join for $3. 97 a month for six months or $19. 97 one time. And then at the end we talk more about the impact that, you know, it made on you and others and how it’s more than worth the investment. And of course, you know, lots of people. Paul joked you should teach affiliate marketing, you know, the second best training.
That’s an important thing. Right? You know, but yeah, that’s, those are, that’s how you answer price when people are asking really, really, really, really early. I’m gonna share this lesson last from Diane. So here’s something. Robbie, did you have anything to add there? Sorry, no. I think that you’ve got to, you can’t just come out and smack people the price. Even though, even like I’ve been a customer and I’m like, just give me the bottom line. I just want to know first off, is this within my budget?
Second I’m off is do I think the value is there? And that second part is the key there. You have to show your customer or potential customer the value is there. And the way that you, you know, weave that story like you’re still giving me the price, which I appreciate, but you led me there. Right, yeah.
So make sure you answer their question. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because if you don’t, if you go through that whole story and don’t tell me the price, I’m going to be a little peeved at you. Yeah, yeah. But you’ve again, if they have a higher price in mind, you already won. And if they have a lower price in mind, then you’ve built it up, hopefully at least somewhere in the vicinity of where the actual price is. This third to last one here is just a reminder, if you’ve actually been through a course or if you’ve used the product, that’s your superpower. I posted this to the partners and just said, before we enter the final 16 hours or so, I wanted to share something with you. It’s your superpower and your secret weapon today. It’s truly something only you have, and that’s your experience with tribe that gives you a huge, massive, unbeatable advantage.
You have a unique story about your experience with whatever the product is, and then I just say so. I want to encourage you to share that with your audience. Don’t focus on the swipe copy. Don’t focus on the facts. Focus on your experience. Focus on your transformation. Focus on what it did for you. Years back, I took a course from Michael Hayek called Five Days to youo, Best Year Ever. Literally changed my life. So I told my tribe about it.
I wrote from my experience, I told my story. And two year, my second year promoting it, I made $19,991 in commissions. With a list of under 2,000 people, I finished in third place. Blah, blah, blah. I said, that is the power of personal story. So for the next 16 hours, and this is true for the whole launch, tell your story, Be open, be bold, be you, and good things will come, even with a small list. If you have experience with the product, talk about it, share it openly. People will be very, very attracted to that. Second, last thing I want to share, I think I’ve got three or four takeaways here that I posted in the Facebook group. On the Friday before CART open, we did a.
We did a ladies only mastermind. And I was the only. I was ironic that I organized it and it was. I was like, you know, because one of my missions is to really kind of like, give some diversity, you know, especially on the gender spectrum, to affiliate promotions like this. And so I was like, let’s just get together, just the ladies and, you know, master.
But I got to be there because it’s my Zoom Room and I’ll, you know, kind of lead you guys. And so it had been really cool. Because when I look at the final leaderboard at that particular time, only like four of the top 20 were female. I’m looking. I mean, female winner, third place, fourth place, sixth place, eighth place, 10th place, 11th place, 12th place, 13th, 14th, 19th, and 20th.
So I think 12 of the final top 20 ended up being female. So I’ll just say this worked. And so here are a few of the takeaways from that, you know, from Marisa Ann Cummings. She Doing a Q and A right after each of the workshops, how important that was. She would schedule them for when she knew they, you know, they could be.
So based on, okay, the lives are going to be about two hours so we’ll schedule them like an hour after that. So we’re going live at, I think at 2 each day was when Stu went live. So she scheduled them for five. She would do a Q and A and so she would start addressing objections and answering questions before they became an obstacle to joining Tribe. From Michelle.
You know I sort of touched on this earlier but she was using Bombbomb. You can use Bombbomb, you can use Bonjoro. There’s probably a half a dozen other services out there you could use to send videos to her most engaged audience. So again these could be defined like we talked about last time last month. If you missed that, go back and watch.
You know, it could be defined by different parameters but like who are my most engaged people? And then you just do like she would do like this one or two minute video saying, alright, Stu’s going live tomorrow, here’s what it’s about, here’s something to look for or here’s what he just did, here’s what to look for. Great strategy. And then from Stacy, from Stacy Nicole. We talked about this a little bit last time but helping each other out.
So one of the strategies we shared that worked really well with our affiliates was like get with some other affiliates, get with other students if it’s a course, get with other buyers from that Facebook group and go live on the last day or the day before the last day sometime when there’s not like the main live cast. So with tribe, the main live cast was on Tuesday. So go live on Wednesday or Thursday and have like a few other people on, you know, and do like a big live cast on your own. And so have some people who’ve been through the course or bought the product, some other affiliates and just like almost like work with each other. There’s something about like I remember we did one for PLF a while back.
I think you were on the team then, Robbie. I was, I was just gonna bring this up. Yeah. I said Timby, what would you say to somebody who’s on the fence about buying plf? And she’s like, just pull out your card and buy. There’s something about me saying that as you know, a middle age white guy versus Timby who’s an African American female. And it just came across differently. And we had like two people in the chat like Okay. I, I bought, you know, like, I might not have been able to communicate hearing her story and this other different. How she moved from Zimbabwe and you know, like her whole immigrant story and how she built her business and like using this model, like it was.
It connected with people. You never know where you’re going to connect with somebody. And that connection can come at any time. Yeah. And so that was a powerful, powerful lesson that a lot of partners ended up using very effectively. The last lesson here, and I just, I love ending on this one. I think this is so, so awesome from Diane Spadola. She said total honesty here. Is it odd that I’m having more fun promoting Tribe than any time I’ve ever promoted anything for myself? Makes me wonder, you know, it makes me wonder if maybe I should be doing community manager or something.
Right. I’ve had four private phone conversations. Okay. Going back to that. With potential drivers and they all joined. Okay. By the way, phone calls. Yeah. You’re closing like close to 100%. I close about 80% of phone calls into high ticket courses. That’s 100% conversions. Even if they didn’t all join in Real Link. Way better than my own membership. What’s with that? I know it’s the messaging. The messaging. The messaging. I’m having so much fun preaching the tribe gospel. And the lesson there is, yeah, have fun. Have fun and do the things that it takes and learn the lessons.
Diane was like, you know, we saw this over and over, Robby, you know, this like people were having fun. They were having fun in the Facebook group. They were having fun cheering each other on. They were having fun making sales, they were having fun getting leads. They were having fun participating in the, the actual Facebook group of the launch, you know, not just the partners Facebook group.
They were having fun on the trainings, they were having fun on our strategy calls, they were having fun writing the email copy, doing their posts, running ads. Like, I don’t know everything about this. They were having fun. And, and you look at the leaderboard, those are the people who succeeded or the ones that you can just tell this was fun. This was fun for them.
And it also just happened. They had a lot of fun and made tens of thousands of dollars in some cases, or hundreds of thousands, but they looked at it and they just had fun. And every lesson you learn in promoting Tribe or anything as an affiliate, you can apply to promoting your own products. There are emails that people tried in this. They never would have tried on their own thing, but they worked.
And they’re going to try them on their own stuff. There are strategies that they, you know, take the, you know, the one we talked about, your hot prospects. You can do the same in your own. Go into your own list and identify who are the people who attended all three days and click the sales page and send them an email saying, hey, give me a call. You know, like you can do the same thing outside of affiliate promotions, but you can use affiliate promotions as your testing ground and have some fun.
That’s super important. You should be enjoying this, guys. I hope I stress that enough. So, Robbie, any last words from you as we wrap up another awesome, I believe, backstage pass? No looking at my notes, like talking about how to talk about price, how to use your superpower and your story and how to have fun.
Like if you’re, that’s the basics, you know, Rule number one, don’t promote crap. Rule number two and three, share your story and have fun. If you’re doing those three things, there’s no way that you cannot not be successful as an affiliate. Can’t not, cannot not not be successful. Not exactly. You’re going to be successful if you do those three things. Yep. So, guys, have fun and do that. I mean, we shared about 20 takeaways, all of which are more. All of which you can apply pretty much right away.
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So do that. All right. That was, that was awesome. Right? If, if your brain is buzzing with ideas right now, that’s good. It means. Well, it means your brain’s working. That’s the good news. Your brain is working. If your brain is just buzzing with ideas, like I said, that’s good because I don’t know, there’s just so much.
Good stuff in there. So my advice to you would be to pick one thing and implement it. Just one, implement it in your next promo. Then take good notes, of course, come back and you can implement other stuff, but focus on one thing in your next promo. If you want to see the exact email that we use to bring in those last minute waves of sales text, that’s. We call it the Midnight Mover email. By the way, just text the word midnight to 260-217-4619 and I’ll send it straight to your phone again, 260-217-4619. As always, you can text me there. About anything as well. If you got questions, ideas, suggestions.
If you have questions, you know that you want to answer on the podcast. That’s usually how I answer questions these days, is on the show. So text me. You can also, of course, go to. Asktheaffiliateguy.Com and ask there. Lastly, don’t forget to hit subscribe if you haven’t yet, so you don’t miss the rest of this series. The next episode is a bonus one. As I mentioned at the top of the show, you’re gonna love it. So hit subscribe so you don’t miss it and I’ll see you then.
See you soon.
The post $5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets: The Affiliate Playbook Part 2 appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.
Big launches create big lessons…and a $5.7 million affiliate launch we ran was no exception. In this episode, we go behind the scenes of one of the biggest promotions we’ve ever run and share what worked, what didn’t, and what you can apply to your next campaign. You’ll learn how to deepen connections with your audience, grow your list while promoting, deliver bonuses at the perfect time, and the strategies top affiliates used to dominate the leaderboard.
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$5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets: The Affiliate Playbook Part 1
Big launches create big lessons. And a $5. 7 million affiliate launch that we ran was no exception to this. In this episode, we’re going to go behind the scenes of one of the biggest promotions that we’ve ever run and share what worked, what didn’t, and what you can apply to your affiliate promotions and your affiliate program. You’re going to learn how to create deeper connections with your audience, how to grow your list while promoting, how to deliver bonuses at the perfect time, and the strategies that top affiliates use to dominate the leaderboard.
We’re going to talk about some lessons that we learned from a mega promotion, a huge affiliate launch. I am so excited about what we’re going to be talking about not only in this episode, but over the next seven episodes. This is a seven part series. I think it’s the longest series I’ve ever done. And we’re looking at lessons learned while running the affiliate launch of Stu McLaren’s tribe course a few years ago. And so we’re, we’re opening the vault, so to speak. This was previously. Some of this content was previously only available to members. Some of it’s brand new that we’ve never shared anywhere and it comes from a $5. 7 million launch we did a few years ago.
The first two parts are a recap of the launch. These are our lessons that we got from the launch, both as affiliate managers. But also things that we saw affiliates doing. The last four parts are interviews with affiliates and there’s so much good stuff for affiliate managers and affiliates. So do not skip an episode.
Okay. If you’re an affiliate, you think the. First two episodes aren’t for me. They are, alright? They absolutely are. We’re going to talk about lessons for affiliates again. There’s some stuff in there for affiliate managers as well. If you’re an affiliate manager and you think, okay, well I don’t want to. Listen to the affiliate interviews like they’re not for me. They are, okay.
You will learn so much stuff you. Can share with your affiliates. Now I said the first two parts are the recap and then the last four parts are the interviews. But there’s a total of seven parts. No, I am not that bad at math. Okay. I can do math. Part three is actually a special bonus. Episode on how to use opt in. Opt in bonuses to grow your list and to get more opt ins.
Right. And so I mentioned it in episode one and I’m like, you know what? I actually did a lesson on this. It’s this kind of behind the scenes look at a training that we did for the affiliates of this launch. So I just figured, you know what, let me share the whole training and rather than try to reference it and share it in the episode, let me.
Just share the training itself. So you’re going to get access to. That in part three. The first lesson is now in this episode we’re going to talk about. This is part one of the kind of the recap that Robby and I did on the launch itself. So how to increase intimacy with your audience. How to show up for your audience. Right. How to build your email list while promoting affiliate offers. That’s something that is really cool.
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You can actually add people to your list while promoting the best time to deliver bonuses to lower refunds and why it’s not what you think. Like the best time to deliver bonuses is typically not. I see very few people do it right. So I talk about that. The one strategy that nearly all the affiliates in the leaderboard use to earn bonus cash.
This is a big one and a bunch more. So there are, I don’t know, we think we talked like 10 lessons in this episode probably. So this is part one, seven part series on one of the biggest launches that we’ve ever run with affiliates. So with that, let’s jump right into the first lesson with takeaways. So it was a massive launch and we learned a ton of lessons.
And I’ll share this with you, this was the cool part. This was not a launch where we had a bunch of big names up on the leaderboard and there’s nothing you can learn. The lady who won this promotion with almost 200 sales and she took home $100,000 first prize. Okay, she took home. I’m gonna do some quick math. She took home like $170,000 total in commissions and prizes in this launch last year. She made nine sales. Not even a full two hands full of sales. Okay. She’s like a friend of mine who unfortunately lost a finger.
That’s how many. Two full hands for him, but not. For most of us who’ve got all 10 of them. Oh, that was wrong. That was just wrong. I’m gonna have to send this to him anyway. She made 9 sales last year. She made over 180 this year to win the thing 20xing her sales. And so some of these lessons are from her, from the other affiliates, from things that we shared, from things that we learned that I’m really excited about as always. I’m joined by Robby Miles who is going to have some of his own takeaways.
And like, this is a true behind the scenes because we don’t know. We shared Robby. Like four, I think we had four of these that we kind of already talked about. And I think we’ll probably end up with like 20. So who knows? I’m pretty excited. This is going to end up being a two parter. I can already tell. So we’ll talk about a few here, we’ll share a few here, and then we’ll probably do some more next month, y’. All.
So I’m excited to jump in. Robby. Yeah, let’s do it real quick. Quick background. This promotion was Stu McLaren’s tribe promo. We promoted it. We did really well. Again, we’ve been one of his top 10 affiliates for like the last three or four years. But we also ran the launch this year. So this is totally different because not only do we get to see things from the affiliate side, we got to see what all the other affiliates are doing.
And man, did we. Not only did we get to share some cool stuff with them, we, we got to rethink some stuff of our own. As we were helping them, we learned some lessons from them. Like, so this is like three way learning, which is really, really cool. And you guys get like a front seat, backstage pass. It’s kind of weird, all of this, guys. So we’re going to, we’re just going to jump right in. I’m going to start, I’m going to start off. That’s a bad thing. I’m going to start off with a bonus tip.
Usually you do a bonus tip at the end. I’m going to start off with a bonus tip. For those of you running an affiliate program or who will be running an affiliate program, this is the only one that really fits like this, but this is it. The future of affiliate programs is not in getting the big marketers. It’s not in the reciprocal promotions, the tit for tat, the quid pro quo, however you want to word that it’s in customers who are loyal followers and true believers promoting you. I ran these numbers. Let me pull these. Robby, you haven’t even seen Some of these, but I pulled these numbers for Stu and let me just read a couple of these. These are gonna blow you guys away. Total affiliate sales.
No, no, we’ll skip that one because that’s not public yet. Okay. There’s a lot though. Affiliates with the sale. 215. 215 affiliates with the sale. Most big, these big launches, Robby, you know this. 30, maybe 50 on the high end. Occasionally you’ll get somebody who gets close to 100. 215 affiliates with the sale. 69 with 5 plus, 45 with 10 plus and so on and so forth. Affiliates with their first ever tribe sale. 107. Wow. Okay, get this stat.
Total sales from affiliates making their first Tribe sale was 44%. Almost half the all the sales. It was their first ever tribe sale. Total sales from a first time affiliate period. So not just their first tribe sale, this is the very first time they have ever promoted anything as an affiliate was 40% of all the sales. That’s. I mean these are like, that’s mind blowing that. So only 4% of them were the first timers that had already promoted something. Previous where they’re, they had already promoted something and then made their first, you know, tribe sale was 4%. Wow.
Like that’s, that’s. I mean it’s unbelievable. You know where, where those numbers were. I mean just, just truly, truly mind blowing statistics. And so that’s the future of affiliate programs, guys. It is in these small. We have been preaching this for 10 years. Robby hasn’t. I have. Robby didn’t even know this stuff 10 years ago.
But I have been preaching this for. 10 years and I always knew it to be true. And I’d always seen it true on some small levels and it’s true on a big level. And I’m telling you, like we’re starting to get. We’ve been evangelists for this for a while now. People like Stu are on board with this philosophy and they’re seeing the power of this, guys. It’s huge. First big takeaway though for affiliates, guys, is the importance of giving your audience an opt out. Those hundred and seven. Well, clearly this was the first time they’d ever done this.
But we had hundreds of affiliates who had never offered an opt out to their, to their audience before. They had never offered the opportunity for their audience to say, I don’t want to hear any more about Stu’s workshop. Let me click here and just say, but I still get all your other emails. They either they either kept them in and they got annoyed or they had the nuclear option of unsubscribe. When you do this, it allows you to promote aggressively.
It allows you to promote with confidence. It allows you to send more emails and more emails and more emails because you know, you gave them a chance to opt out. And you have to remember, most people don’t opt out or unsubscribe on the fifth email. Definitely not the 10th email or the 15th email. They do it on the first 1, 2, or 3. Like I don’t care about that. So they opt out. And what that allowed, what allows people to do is say, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t. Not interested. Maybe the timing’s not good.
I’m not interested in the subject matter, but you still get all my other emails. And so as an affiliate, that allows you on the last day, the second to last day, the last few days of a campaign to go. People that are left, they’ve had the opportunity to opt out, but they didn’t buy. They are sitting there on the fence going, which side is the greener grass? But it’s this side. But that that side costs a lot of money to get that greener grass. Am I really willing to part with that kind of money? I want greener grass. For example, in our yard, we have some brown spots. I’m not willing to pay $10,000 for the greener grass though.
But if I look, if somebody comes along and offers me a green lawn for four or five hundred bucks a season, sign me up that program, you know, and so it’s not the lawn care membership though, guys. But that’s the importance of that opt out. And it’s, it’s a super easy way to make sure that the people you’re mailing are the most are the people that are still at least somewhat interested. It was great to see how many people jumped on when we shared this in the group. They were like, oh my gosh, I’ve never thought of it that way before.
I never thought that if they’re still on this email list, then their interest is there. They don’t have to blast their entire list with an offer repeatedly. Instead, they get to. People get to self select. You know, I still, maybe, maybe they want to stay in because they’re watching your marketing. Maybe they want to stay in because they’re interested in the product. Like, there’s lots of different reasons people would stay in and it’s just your opportunity to help your audience self select so you can serve them best. Yeah, I mean, it’s huge. Second, don’t underestimate the importance of intimacy with your audience. And don’t underestimate the importance of one on one reach outs.
A lot of people think, oh, I want to, I want to make, you know, 25 sales of a $2,000 product. Like, that’s $50,000 worth of sales. I got to have a massive list. I’m looking at the leaderboard from this launch, guys. I mean, they’re 25, 26. I’m sorry, 26 sales. First ever affiliate promo. Tiny list, couple thousand people. How did she do that? It was one on ones.
I think we’ll probably talk about this a little bit more in depth because I’m gonna read you guys some Facebook posts in part 2 of this next month. But I mean, just don’t underestimate that. Don’t underestimate the power of a simple text of a Facebook message taking an extra 30 seconds to reach out. If you reach out personally to 100 people and five of them buy, if it takes you 30 seconds per person, that takes you 50 minutes. Five $2,000 courses, you’re going to make $4,000.
If you can make $4,000 in 50 minutes doing something else, then go do that. I mean, I feel like I’m really highly paid as a coach, and on average I make a little over a thousand dollars per hour, you know, coaching with their clients that are paying us long term, you know, so for me to make four or five thousand dollars an hour is pretty, pretty sweet. It just works because that intimacy and that one on one communication. Third, the affiliates that succeeded in this launch. I’m looking at the leaderboard again. Eight of the top ten all started. So the real big promo kickoff was April 15th. The, the workshop started on April 22nd. So you at least had the one week Runway going into the workshop. Okay, but eight of the top ten all had, roughly, looking at the percentages here on the low end, 18%.
So the lowest of the eight had 18% of their leads prior to April 1. They were all promoting and warming up their audience a month before or a little bit over a month before that Long Runway. The longer the Runway, Stu often says, the greater the success. And a lot of times it wasn’t even generating leads. Like if you look at just clicks. What they were doing was they were doing what we teach. They were posting the connection videos. These connection videos are two minute videos on Facebook. Now they’re using their affiliate link. There’s no opt in.
But then what happens when the launch is ready to kick off, Stu and his team can retarget those people. You’re already cookie and connected to them, and now they opt in and it’s credited to you. And even if they don’t, even if they don’t, they’re seeing Stu. They’re seeing this concept of recurring revenue, of memberships. Whatever it is you’re selling, whatever it is you’re promoting, they’re seeing this thing, and they’re starting to think about it, and it’s warming them up.
For when you do come out on April 15th and go, Stu has a workshop in a week. You should go sign up. Instead of it being like, the wait, Stu, who. Are you gonna date me first, or are you gonna just ask for my marriage? Steve McFarland. Is that his name? And he’s talking about memberships. What are like, net. Like membership to the zoo. What are we talking about?
You know, you’ve been talking about the problem, which is the cycle, you know, the revenue cycle versus a consistent, you know, revenue. You’ve been talking about Stu and just introducing Stu as a cool dude, as an expert. And now you’re saying on April 15th or April 10th, like, go sign up for his workshop. And they’re like, heck. Heck, yeah.
I’m kind of wondering if you were ever gonna invite me to something. You know, that. That long Runway, guys, is as long as you can make it. Within reason make it. And it doesn’t take a lot. Just to be clear, they weren’t going all in on Stu and Tribe on March 15. It was one Facebook post a week for three weeks. It was a tweet a day. It was like quoting him in a blog post. It was sending an email in late March and talking about this tribe workshop they took.
Not even giving a link to. Was sending to a PDF, you know, download. It was just little things, little tiny things that got people warmed up. Yeah. Just getting that familiarity is like I said, you know, are you going to date me first? Are you going to ask for my marriage right away? Like, you’ve got. Shop is dating Robby. This is like, are you even going to tell me about this person? I don’t know how you and your.
Your wife. This isn’t. This isn’t. You don’t want it to be a blind date. Yes. The first time I had met Tara at church, we had shaken hands. You know, I had heard my friend Hunter talking about her. I had seen her a few times. It’s. It’s the exact process, guys. And there was a slight when he said, I think you should go out with Tara. My response Was you think that too? If he had said, you should go out with my friend Tara. Like, why? I don’t.
Like, who. Who is this? And why do you think I should like. And then we go out and it’s like, oh, hi. You know, it’s, it’s awkward. But there was already, I don’t know, on a, on a scale of 1 to 10, I was already at a level like 2 when we went out on our first date. Truth is, I was like, on a level five, you know, but even if you’re at a level two, it’s better than zero, you know, So I think that’s a great example. But I would even say, yeah, it’s the, like, do you want to just even get to know me before we go out on a date? Even? All right, number four.
That was number three because we started with a bonus. It’s weird, I know, but that’s how we roll. Number four, like utilizing pop up Facebook groups. This is not new, but this launch, I’m telling you, we had dozens and Dozens, possibly over 100 affiliates who had pop up Facebook group groups. What does that mean? It means that they started a Facebook group somewhere, you know, a month or so before the launch. Again, this is all about warming up. And they’re starting to indoctrinate them into the terminology, recurring revenue, memberships, success path, the terms that you lose, founding member, launch, purple pickle, you know, things like that. They’re indoctrinating them into the language of tribe and they’re getting them to start thinking about. So then when the workshop comes, it’s like you have an easy group there to reach out to and get them to join.
And as much as we love the, you know, the tribe workshop Facebook group with its 35,000 people, people can get lost in there. But if they’re drinking like through a fire hose, you’re just like, how the heck do I even find my people within this group? Turn off notifications for that group. I mean, that’s, that’s the way it is. But they’re in your group with 200, sometimes 1,000, but 200, 350, 70, whatever the number is in your group with you, you’re answering questions.
We had people. I forget who it was. See if I can pull up off to look. But I specifically Remember she had 17 sales and she had 52 people in her Facebook group. Now, she made a few sales that were not in the Facebook group, but her guess was that 12, 13 of those sales, that’s over 20% of the people in that Facebook group, that’s not normal.
Just for record, when you get up to a thousand, you’re not going to sell 200 from the Facebook group more than likely, but you can sell 100 because of that intimate connection. Again, don’t underestimate the power of intimacy. And so do a pop up Facebook group started a few weeks before. Make it about the concept of the topic, then shifted to being specifically about the free content, then about buying and then, then you shut it down, you know, then you shut it down. And if you need to, as a bonus, you know, you can create another Facebook group specifically for your buyers, of course.
But that group shuts down when, you know, I usually, I recommend giving it like a couple of days, you know, so you can say like, thank you and things like that. And it’s just like, launch is over, bye. You’re dead to me. You know, give it a few days. But it does need to shut down.
Yeah. And I think that that’s an important point you made there, is that this group doesn’t compete with the main body group or whatever you’re promoting. It’s a group that you can use to support and. And one of the easiest ways to do that is within your group. You know, everybody shares something and then you say, now go share these wins, you know, in the main group and tag us so we can keep our group going in there too.
And that helps build traction for the launch as a whole. Yeah, that’s super important. You actually just remind me this is a fun little takeaway that I didn’t have written down, but we’ll just add it. When your students sign up, when you have buyers, go welcome them in the buyers Facebook group. There are multiple reasons for doing that, and I’m gonna share.
Kind of the number one reason is it will lower your return rate. Okay. It makes them feel awesome. It’s engagement in that group that’s great. Gets them kind of like when you welcome them, other people will come in and welcome them. So again, it just makes them feel amazing. The other kind of like side little thing that a lot of people don’t think about is it. It definitely puts you more on the radar of the course creator and, you know, in their team, which has benefits long term, you know, I’m just saying, so you can think about what those might be, but it definitely has benefits that you might not think about. All right, so that was now number five. I’m gonna have to.
Oh, my numbers are all messed up here. That was a bonus extra one I just threw in. I don’t even know what number on. I think we’re on number seven. Number five. Five ish. Show up in. This was the big thing we saw like the guy, the people who outperform their lists and they’re like those first time affiliates ended up making 2030. One first time affiliate made like 50. Oh man, let me. What was it? I mean, one first time affiliate made 60 something sales. Let me pull that up because this was just, I accidentally. This is wild. Just blew me away. Final leaderboard. Here we go. Let’s. Okay, so I was, I was a little bit off. One first time affiliate made 47.
Another first time affiliate 43. Going down. Another one 34. But then I’m looking here, 29, 27, 23, 20, 20. I mean, like, wow, 16, 16. First time 14. 14. I mean, guys, one of them in particular, I’m thinking of like showing up in the workshop, showing up in the Facebook group, you know, the free Facebook group for the workshop for your people. But also, you know, just in general, meaning you’re showing up there. So they’re attending the workshop and there’s a chat going on and they’re the ones saying hey to any of their people that they see.
Now if the person, if one of your people is John Smith and you see a John Smith and they don’t have an avatar, you know, their picture, it’s kind of hard to tell if it’s that John Smith. But again, it’s like they see their people and they’d say, hey, so? And so they were answering questions in there. Their people saw that they were active in this free workshop and that meant they even got more excited. And when I look at like, you know, manual, I’m just, I mean, look, she closed, I mean, good grief, she closed 7, 8% of her leads. Michelle was like, I mean, she close like 10% of her leads. How do you do that? By showing up. Yeah, being active. And you can say, well, I got to be.
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You don’t have to be there for the whole two and a half hour of each workshop. Show up in the middle for a little bit when things die down. Because initially that chats like. And then it dies down and you can interact, you can, you can do it while doing other work. You know, I’ll do this sometimes.
I’ll show up and I’ll be there to support my people and I’ll show up for like an hour in the middle while I’m checking email and I’ll just glance over, oh, there’s, you know, so. And so left a comment and I’ll, you know, I’ll respond to them. So it doesn’t take a lot of time. I probably actively spent personally one hour. I think most of them probably actively spend an hour or two. And again, if you spend an hour, let’s just say two hours. Actively two hours is not that much time. And it helps you close 10 sales. That’s a thousand dollars for two hours. Again, there’s not a whole lot any of us can do.
You are making more than the average American makes in a month of work for two hours. I mean that’s a pretty cool deal. And something to think about with this and you talk about this all the time isn’t how. It’s not about, you know, you’re not closing sales on the second workshop training or anything like that. You’re just moving that, that potential customer closer to a purchase. And, and the more you show up, the more you build that relationship, the more you, you know, you’re serving them as they’re going through whatever free material is available, the more that they’re seeing like, wow, this really is a community. This is something that, you know, I want to be a part of. And that’s moving them closer, closer to a purchase decision. Yeah. So number six or seven, however, we’re counting these six B.
We’re not going to go into detail on this. Robby, I’m going to ask you if you can, if you can provide a link to a video under. Or we’ll put a video under here. Guys, let me explain this. It’s opt in bonuses. The affiliates that did well and I’m looking down the list. I mean the affiliates that did amazing. You haven’t heard of any. I mean, I seriously doubt I’m gonna use out of 20 affiliates, you guys, the average person in here has probably heard of two. Two of the top 20.
Thing is they offered a bonus for coming to the workshop and they offered a bonus for coming to the webinar. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to put a video under here. We did a strategy call with the affiliates where we talked about strategies to get them to come to the workshop and we talked about opt in bonuses. So I’m not going to go in. That’s a, it’s a 20, 25 minute discussion that we could talk about that you’re going to have access to that so you guys can watch.
There’s other discussions we had in there, but we talk about promoting the free workshop and one of the keys that Almost all. In fact, I think literally all of the affiliates used, practically the ones who made more than a few sales, was an opt in bonus. Number seven is something we talked about in our recap. We talked about Pedro’s launch, the Crush it with challenges launch, and that’s creating a bridge page to collect leads. Again, that’s something we talk about in this video as well.
I just wanted to reiterate that when I look at the top affiliates, more than half of them created a bridge page to collect leads of their own, so then they can follow up with those leads. This is specifically for your social media. So just to be clear, if you’re emailing your list, you don’t need a bridge page. You know who, you know, clicked and opted in. But if you’re promoting on social media, we send them to a bridge page that ties into that opt in bonus.
Because you’re entering your email to, to gather or to claim this bonus. And then you go to the opt in page for the affiliate promotion. This is a very simple way of, rather than sending say 500 leads from your Instagram profile, your Facebook ads, sending them to the affiliate program and be like, hey, here’s all these leads, and now I got none of them. You can capture those. It’s a little bit.
It’s especially relevant for ads because you might be running ads like a lookalike audience that has no association with you whatsoever. So they are most definitely not on your email list. A lot of people who follow you on social also might be on your email list. But still, you’ll get some new subscribers and you’ll have a way of identifying who these people are to follow up with them. Number 8. ISH, 8. 5. As Jeffrey Gittermer would do. This was a new one that I think is a game changer. I don’t know if you know where I’m going with this, Robby.
I think I know. Hot prospects, baby. Yeah, this was so. This is. We saw the needle move so quickly on this. This is something we did as the affiliate managers. We sent out a list of their hot prospects. And I’m going to explain what that is in a moment. But if they, if they don’t send it to you, you should be asking for that. That is the takeaway for you guys.
Okay, so here’s, here’s how this works. We ran a report on our back end and we identified who were the like 1 to 2%. Okay. Without mentioning names. Like, the average top 10 affiliate had 2,500 leads, probably, probably a little bit less probably 2,000 leads. The average number of people we sent them was like 40. So whatever the math is on that, I know the top affiliate. We would have sent them less than, give me a second, 10%. We just sent them about 1. 3% of their total leads.
On this hot prospects list. We identified that there could be any number of metrics you could use. But the only two groups that we sent them were people who had opted into the sneak peek form. So this was people who sat on before the cart open, they clicked over to the sneak peek page and said, I want to know when Tribe opens. Knowing the cost and everything, they wanted to do this, right?
Or they had watched all three of the videos or the lessons and visited the sales page. It might be that you say people who visited the sales pages a certain number of times. It might be people who attended the webinar and went to all whatever variables that you think are best ask for those leads. And so for us, it was super easy. I mean, it’s time consuming to send these out to like 50 people.
You know, Kevin spent like, I don’t know, three hours doing it. It’s not easy in the sense of like, you know, press a button and you’re done. I mean, it’s very time consuming. But you literally go into whatever system, ours is infusionsoft at the time with tribe and you click on, you say, show me all the leads for Robby Miles who fit these criteria. And then, you know, like I said, about 1%, sometimes upwards of 2% of your leads.
These are the people that you can then apply all the stuff we’ve been talking about, the individual reach outs, you know, that you could, you know, specifically like pick up the phone and call them or send an email inviting them to call you. We’ve shared how to do that before. You could specifically find a way to communicate them maybe with them more. Because if you think about this, if they watched all three videos, they opted in, watched all three lessons and visited the sales page or did the sneak peek, how likely are they to unsubscribe? Like 0%.
So if you’re really like, oh, I don’t know if I want to send a lot of emails, well then just segment these people and send them 50 emails. You know, that might be a little overboard. 50 would be much. But send them, send them like, you know, send them like eight or nine emails in the last three days. Because, I mean, that’s what, that’s, that’s how you do this. So if they don’t offer this and I’m telling you, this will get out that we did this because we’re sharing it right now. People will start doing this proactively. But in the meantime, ask, say, I need a list of my hot prospects. How can we define hot prospects? Maybe it’s not a maybe.
They don’t have three live lessons. Maybe it’s okay. I just need to know who, you know, who’s clicked the sales page twice. You know, people who open, you know, who have an open rate of 70% or more of the, of the launch emails and have visited the sales page. Oh, well, that generates, you know, 6%. Well, then let’s make it smaller. You want it to be pretty small. You want it to be, you know, like I said, I mean, over 5,000 leads from the top affiliate. And I think we sent 84. Like you want this to be a very refined list so that you can legitimately talk to 30 of them, you know, or 40 of them in a 48 hour period. We sent that at about 2pm on the very last day.
Because I just thought of it at 1pm on the very last day. I would ask for it. I would ask for it in advance. I would ask for it, hey, on the day before cart close, I would like this list. And then I would start working that list in the afternoon of the day before. Yeah, I think that last point is key. Just from the affiliate management side of it, your affiliate manager is going to be much more likely to get those to you if you give them the Runway to do. So if you throw something at them last minute, they’re gonna be like, I’ll get to it if I can find time today. It’s part close.
I got a lot of things going on. So please give them the Runway to know that you’re going to be asking for something specific. That’s a good point. I mean, you’re doing me a favor as well as an affiliate manager, if you know there are things, and you can never predict everything, but if you know there are things you are going to need, especially in the last 72 hours of a launch, you know, or a big promo, ask for them in advance. Tell them that this is what you’re gonna need. And if they’re just by themselves, then they can at least put it on their to do. Like I would put it on my to do list Wednesday morning, send Joe, you know, hot prospects list. Or in my case, I would say, hey, Kevin, on Wednesday morning, run this report and he’ll put it on, you know, his list and send it to Joe. Yeah. Lesson nine, when to deliver your bonuses.
This is something that came up a lot in the Facebook group for our partners and something we’ve advocated for a long time. Most of your bonuses, you don’t want to deliver until after the refund period. Especially if it’s access to a course or templates or swipe files or anything tangible like that where they can take it and be like, haha, got it. Refund, thanks. Peace out. You know, if it’s anything you sell, you definitely do not deliver it until after the refund period. You will have. Some people are just dumb, you know, they’re kind of jerks and they’re, they’ll take advantage of you. So that said though, if it’s a Facebook group or coaching calls, start them right away. That’s a retention, that’s a retention thing.
So if you’re doing Q and A calls or coaching calls, you got a group specifically for your buyers, give them access right away. That’ll help retain them. Everything else comes after the refund period. 11. No, 10. If they do training, take advantage of them. I’m blown away. I’m looking at our leaderboard here and when I think about who showed up at these trainings. One person out of the. Nope.
Two people. Three people out of the top four people out of the top 32, as far as I went down, didn’t come to the affiliate trainings. 28 of the top 32 came to at least one, more than likely a half a dozen of them. You know, I mean, I’m looking at like number, number one, number three, five, eight. Tied for ninth. The final two were tied for ninth. I mean they came to probably close to every one of them. One of them missed the last one. I was like, I’m so sorry because I changed the time. She was like, I had a Facebook Live already scheduled, like for the launch.
I couldn’t come. I’m watching the replay now, like, okay, cool. You know, do the trainings. We over train our affiliates. Like we do more training than any other affiliate program. So that’s easy for me to say. But if they offer any type of training, even to be honest, even if it’s not even that great, you don’t even learn. You don’t, you don’t learn what you wouldn’t learn in five minutes watching an AIM video. Okay, but you’re learning the calendar and you’re internalizing it and there’s something about like, you know, here’s, here’s the tribe calendar and I can, I can look at this Tribe calendar be like, yeah, PLC1. But then because I’m an auditory learner, I go to the training and I hear Stu talking about, okay, workshop number one.
It’s going to be about this. We’re going to do this. And like, I’ll remember it all. I don’t even tell you right now, okay, 26. I don’t even know when the second PLC was in the launch we just ran, you know, but if I’m there, here, I’m joking. But I wouldn’t remember if all I did was that. And so, like, if that’s all you get is like the launch theme and some principles and maybe you pick up on, like, he’ll share a story. This was the thing I love about with Stu is he was sharing stories of tribers like, yeah, you know, Brenda did this. And I’m like, oh, that Brenda did. That’d be really good for me to talk about Brenda because she’s similar to my audience.
If that’s all you get out of being at one of these trainings for 45 minutes, you just got marketing material. If you didn’t learn a single tactic or strategy. Like, we teach, like, we’ll teach you all kinds of stuff. Like, you can watch the video that we’re going to put below here and you’ll learn, like, what we teach when we run launches. But even if you learn nothing like that, but you just get a couple of ideas for your promo or, you know, something like that that works. If not, you’ll also get more than that, though. You will, you’ll get that. You’ll, you’ll learn from. Like, even if the training itself is terrible, this goes back to what you were talking about in what number five? And anything that you said show up.
Yeah, anything where you said show up. Right when you show up, those affiliate managers see you, the product creators see you. They know, they know that you’re there, that you’re trying to serve their audience by serving yours. And when you show up, people respect that there’s a certain understanding between them and you that you’re in this not just to like, you know, drop a couple links and run off. You’re in it to serve. And I mean, maybe I shouldn’t admit this, but I’m going to because it’s. I’m a human being. When we got to the last day and we had a few. Stu had a few spots open for some lives. I think he had about three 15 minute spots open.
We pretty much already done like the top 20. And I’m scrolling through this list. And these are people who are outside the top 20 who were all. I mean, I’m looking right here between, you know, 24th and, you know, 50th, they’re separated by 9, you know, 26 to 50th, they’re separated by nine sales. Okay. Roughly. And I’m looking at this list going, who should I send these emails to? Who do you think I sent them to? The ones who were on most of the calls. Why is that?
Well, for one, I mean, like, I know that they’ve been busting it. The fact that they were willing to spend four, five, six hours coming to these calls, I knew they were busting it. Second of all, I knew they were going to do them right, you know, and so, I mean, I went through the list and I’m like, you know, who’s getting these? Michelle Courtney. And that’s who got. Was Michelle Courtney and I remember who got the last one. I think it was just, oh, and Christie. Why? Because they were at all the things.
So I’m like, you know, they go. They. Technically, if I went in order of the leaderboard, there were a few others that should have gotten them before them. But I, like, I. Not only was rewarding them, that was part of it. Second of all, it was like, I just. I knew they were going to be just so excited, you know, and like, they were gonna make the best of this. So that’s why I did that. So take advantage of the trainings. It’ll help you strategically also, just getting ideas.
But, you know, like Robby said, you’ll be on their radar and you’ll get. Here’s the thing, you’ll get special treatment. Simply put, you’re gonna get special treatment. Don’t tell anybody. All right, this is something we’ll talk a little bit more about in part two next month. But use the Facebook group. And then again, we’re going to talk. A lot of what we’re going to share in the next one is just stuff from the Facebook group. Lessons from the Facebook group. Utilize the Facebook group, Connect with other affiliates.
There were relationships made and relationships solidified in this launch like nothing I’ve ever seen before in an affiliate launch. There was one particular post. Like, guys, this. I mean, this was just unreal. You know, Stu and I did a Facebook Live at the end, and I went back and looked around. I don’t know if you saw that post, but there were like a thousand comments on this 30 minute Facebook Live. That’s just indicative. They were interacting with each other. They were helping Each other. But the post that Sarah posted when, you know, she.
She posted afterward that Heidi called her and a few of the other. They got together and they FaceTimed. And, you know, she took a screenshot of that. Like, that’s that community that you just. It’s irreplaceable. It’s absolutely irreplaceable. And like, use it, ask questions, support each other, cheer people on. And here’s the thing. Sometimes you’ll be in these Facebook groups and there will be some people who are at a level above you, and you answer their question or you encourage them, or you. You give them a tip that you, you know, you like.
Just because they’re at a level above you doesn’t mean that you’re not better at something than them. You know, maybe they’re. They have a bigger email list and they’re doing better than you, but you’re an expert at Facebook pages, and that’s your thing. And they ask a question about that, and you’re the one who comes in and helps them with it. They will remember that you are now on their radar. You know, you’re now like somebody to them. And so participate in the group. Don’t just go through liking posts. That’s who’s liked my post recently. I have no idea who’s commented on my posts.
I have a vague idea of the people who’ve commented on my posts. Again, you’ll show up to the affiliate manager, too. That played a role. Not only was it the people who, you know who came to the trains, but it was the people who were active in the group. That’s human psychology. You know, the reticular activating system. You know, when you buy a blue truck, what do you suddenly see? A bunch of blue trucks. Right? So who are the people that.
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When I go through this list, the names that stand out to me are not the names of the people that weren’t emailing me, that weren’t in the Facebook group and weren’t coming to the trainings. I know all of the names when I think about them long enough, but the ones that stand out to me are the ones that I kept seeing, like, every day in my notifications, they were commenting on the post. And so just participate, help cheer, offer tips, share a success story, share a strategy. We had. So this is what we’ll talk about in the next one, guys. You know, we had so many affiliates posting in there. Okay, I just did this, and here’s what happened. I just did this. And it worked. I just did this, and it didn’t work.
I just did this and I split test something and this is the one that like that’s, that’s what you want to be doing. Yeah. And that rising tide rises all ships. Right? Everybody did better because they were able to find that, that one thing that somebody they may have never even heard of two weeks ago.\ But now they learn something and that community continues to grow. It’s just, it was incredible to watch. So awesome. All right. I hope you got so much out of this episode.
I cannot wait for part two. We’ve got more lessons like how to identify and serve your hottest prospects. The secrets for closing sales on the final day. I’m going to share an email in that that it works. It works.
How to use story like how your story connects in ways that no other affiliate can and a bunch more. And then remember in episode three there’s going to be that bonus lesson on how to use opt in bonuses to grow your list. So make sure you hit subscribe. We got six more amazing episodes that you don’t want to miss in this series and really, you do not want to miss a single one of them. So make sure if you haven’t yet, you hit subscribe.
And as always, if you’ve got questions about this or anything else, you can hit me up, text me anytime at 260-217-4619. If you’re in the U. S. right? That only works if you’re in the US. so 260-217-4619 if you’re outside the U. S. hit me up on social media. Just go to mattmcwaims.com and you can find all my content contact information there. And reach out anytime. I’ll see you in the next episode. Thank you so much for listening today. If you know someone who would benefit from hearing this episode, make sure to.
Share it with them. And if you have a question, you can ask it at asktheaffiliateguy. com Questions make my best episode and it’s a great way to get featured right here on the podcast. If you’re loving what you’re hearing, please take a moment to leave a rating and review that helps others find this content so we can all benefit from it.
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The post $5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets: The Affiliate Playbook Part 1 appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.
Meet Jason and Cecilia Hilkey. They’re not your typical online marketers. They don’t sell courses on “how to get rich quick” or promise to teach you the “secrets of internet millions.” They’re just two parents in the parenting space who, until recently, had a modest email list of 3,000 people. Then they did something that blew my mind: they added 104,000 new subscribers in just two weeks using a virtual summit. This strategy is hands down my second favorite way to explode your email list…and this episode will show you exactly how they did it.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Links Mentioned in this EpisodeJason and Cecilia’s Virtual Conference Workshop
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow Affiliates Can Profit from Virtual Summits (Without Being a Speaker)
How Affiliate Managers Can Beat Burnout
Lessons from a Record-Breaking Affiliate Launch
Avoid These 5 Big Mistakes When Recruiting Affiliates
AI for Affiliates: What’s Working Today (Part 4)
How Two Parents Added 104,000 Email Subscribers in 14 Days
Matt McWilliams: I want you to meet Jason and Cecilia Hilkey. They are not your typical online marketers. They don’t sell courses on how to get rich quick or promise to teach you the secrets of Internet fame and millions. They’re just two parents in the parenting space who did something that blew my mind. They added 104,000 new subscribers in just two weeks using a virtual summit. This strategy is one of my favorite ways to explode your email list. And this episode will show you exactly how they did it.
So picture this. 104,000 new email subscribers in just 14 days plus instant authority, massive recognition, flood of sales. That’s exactly what today’s guests pulled off in a niche most people think is impossible to monetize online. virtual summits, ah, are one of my favorite ways to explode your email list to lead to sales. I mean, obviously my first is affiliates.
That’s of course, but we’re actually going to talk about how to incorporate affiliates into your virtual summit. And last week we talked about the other side. We talked about, you know, so if you missed that episode, make sure you go listen to it. We talked about being an affiliate for a virtual summit and why that’s such a good promotion. And today you’re actually going to get to meet two of my former clients from our, your affiliate launch coach program.
This is an interview I did a few years ago after one of their virtual summits. it’s a husband and wife team, Jason and Cecilia Hilkey, who are absolutely crushing it. And they told me something that just, completely stopped me in my tracks. I said virtual summits have been the most reliable, consistent way for us to grow our business, make money online and change lives, period. Jason and Cecilia there, as I mentioned earlier, they’re in the parenting space. You know, the niche that everyone says is too saturated or too hard to make real money in. But here’s what makes their story incredible. They are not like they’re good marketers, but they’re not slick Internet marketers.
They’re not professional speakers, they’re not industry celebrities. They don’t have a, you know, virtual Rolodex of a list influencers they did this as just two regular parents who figured out how to use virtual summits to absolutely blow up their email list and working with a bunch of other regular parents and people in their niche to be affiliates. And so we’re going to talk about how to go from a few thousand subscribers to possibly hundreds of thousands.
The numbers are going to blow your mind. And in this interview, you’re going to learn exactly how they did it and how they, how they structure their summits, why this strategy works so consistently, and most importantly, how you can copy their blueprint and make it work for your business, too. So let’s jump right in. Well, Jason and Cecilia, welcome.
Matt McWilliams: Thank you. Thanks for having us, Matt.
Jason Hilkey: It’s great to be here.
Matt McWilliams: Awesome.
Matt McWilliams: So, guys, I’m really excited about this. Just to give everyone just a very quick background, Jason and Cecilia are our clients in our, your affiliate launch coach program. I’m also joined today, as you can probably tell by our head coach in that program, Mark Severkrop, who also happens to be our resident summit expert, and he’s been working with Jason and Cecilia. I’m sure we’ll talk about, that as we go. But, I mean, let’s start at the beginning, what with that being a good place to start and all. how in the heck did you guys get started doing summits? Like, tell us a little bit about your audience first and who you serve, and then we’ll kind of transition into that.
Jason Hilkey: Sure, sure. so we got started online because we wanted to teach parenting classes. We were preschool teachers teaching in the same preschool classroom, and we discovered that parents need a lot of help. And we were parents at the time, and so we wanted to teach.
Matt McWilliams: Are you still parents now or did we. Yeah, still hasn’t changed.
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Cecilia Hilkey: We have since sold our children.
Jason Hilkey: They’re just a little older now.
Matt McWilliams: They’re still working.
Jason Hilkey: It’s different. Anyway, so we’re trying to teach parenting classes online, and we’re getting into coaching, and we were kind of like, really trying to figure out the whole online thing.
Matt McWilliams: Let’s say struggling might be a word.
Jason Hilkey: Struggling. We’re just like, slowly watching our bank account get smaller and smaller. and after a couple of years of doing that, one of our friends was like, hey, why don’t you guys do a summer or like an online conference? And we’re like, oh, okay, we’ll try that. And so we didn’t really have any training from anybody special.
Matt McWilliams: We’d seen a few.
Jason Hilkey: Yeah, we’d seen it. We’d Seen a few, we, didn’t know any famous people or anybody that was well known in our space, any authors or experts. and so we started, yeah, I.
Matt McWilliams: Just finished reading the book 12, week year. And so we thought, hey, here’s a chance to actually put that into effect. So we started, and from day one when we sat down, we said, okay, let’s figure out a summit. That was day one of 12 weeks. And the summit went off 12 weeks later. So we did it from absolute nothing, figuring it all out on our own to now we’re what this is. We’re coming up on our ninth summit right now. and we have, you know, we’ve, we’ve got people from over 190 countries that show up for these things. we’ve grown our email list, and we’ve increased it 30 times.
I mean we’re over 100,000 at this point. And it just keeps growing each time. And it’s like our favorite part of the business. I mean, that’s really the thing about it. And it took our business this whole nother level. Like we realized when we were doing the other work, the coaching, doing online products, doing all that stuff that really, to go to another level, we needed to increase our audience. And one way for us to increase our audience very quickly was with conferences or with an online summit. And that’s really transformed the other parts of our business as well. And so, we now have a much larger audience that we can then use, for, all kinds of different marketing.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, that’s awesome. So let’s define summit. Let’s go back to that first summit. I don’t want to focus on your ninth summit. We’ll do that later, of course. but let’s go back to that first summit. What is a summit? As best as you can remember, you understood it back when you were doing that first one. And then, we’ll transition to what did that actually look like for you guys in that first one?
Matt McWilliams: Sure.
Jason Hilkey: And you’ll hear that we use summit and conference kind of interchangeably. Those are the same thing in our book.
Matt McWilliams: and the reason, just real quick, the reason we do that is because most of our audience, like parents, are.
Jason Hilkey: Not at the time, teachers and professionals.
Matt McWilliams: Weren’T very online savvy or Internet savvy. So the idea of a summit was something that they didn’ really understand conferences they could relate to. And so we’ve had in the back of our mind the whole time as we’ve Been developing these is what’s it like to go to a real conference, like an in person conference? What are the benefits? What are the experiences? And so that’s always something that we keep in mind as we develop our online conferences and our summits.
Matt McWilliams: There’s an important lesson there. Real quick. I don’t want to pass by understand your audience’s language. It’s the same reason why we tell people don’t use the word affiliate if they don’t know what the heck affiliate means. Call it a partner or ambassador. and I don’t want to like just gloss over that because that’s super important when people say, oh, we can’t do summits. Summits don’t work in my niche. Have you tried just changing the word? You know, because it will work if you know your audience’s language. So kudos to you guys for that one. That’s good. Okay, so let’s take, let’s take us back to that and tell us what that meant for what that was like for you guys and how you understood it.
Jason Hilkey: well, we, I don’t know if this is exactly what you mean, but we do use this pretty specific formula that helps in getting everybody really excited about the event, getting lots of interaction happening, making it be something that’s profitable. we can go over that formula so that when people listen to this, they know exactly what we’re talking about.
Matt McWilliams: It’s not that different than what we do now. Even in the first one we just found it worked so well that we’ve kind of just continued to use the same formula. We’ve tweaked it, we’ve experimented, we’ve tried things that are different, but we keep going. For the most part we’ve kind of kept the same formula of five days of pre recorded videos. And so these are pre recorded interviews that we’ve done each day. We have five speakers that we’ve interviewed and during that whole day all five of those interviews are available for people to watch. And then the next day five new ones.
We do that five times. And then, we usually, and so far every time we’ve been able to add like a bonus day at the very end which makes all 25 videos available for the day. we keep that kind of in our back pocket because there are, there could be technical problems and we don’t, we hate to promise that kind of a thing, but it also ensures that people are going to really work to show up for the event because it’s the event that makes it exciting. Like if this is available all the time, or if it was available for like three weeks or four weeks, it loses some effectiveness. So really we concentrated it down into a short period of time and made an event out of it. And then what people can do is they can buy the recordings during the event at a discount and, then they can watch them for a lifetime at any time on their own. They, they can just log into the site and watch the videos. but then the price goes up after the conference is over and the.
Jason Hilkey: Whole event is free.
Matt McWilliams: Oh, yeah.
Jason Hilkey: So, that’s a key part. That’s a really key part.
Matt McWilliams: Good price for most people.
Jason Hilkey: Yeah, lots of people come in, they’re really interested, they watch a few videos. Maybe there are a few people that are able to get through the whole thing, but most people aren’t able to. And they discover, oh my gosh, this is such an amazing experience. I want to have it all the time. So, I don’t like being salesy, but this is something that we do that sells itself without us having to push it. and people just enjoy it. They enjoy the free experience. They want to pay for it to get that same experience. So it’s really exciting to be able to provide that as a service and also to be able to make money.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, I think that’s the thing that I’ve said. There’s a few things we keep in the back of our head, and one of them is also that we’re being of service in our world. We really want to be serving parents around the world. And this is a way for us to be able to do that, where it doesn’t cost them anything. They show up for free and they get great content. we also are there to serve, the people that we’ve interviewed, these authors, these experts, all of the people we’ve interviewed, we keep in the back of our head. How are we serving them? How can we just lift them up and expose them to this audience that they may not have had a chance to before? And how can we best serve them? So those are things that we keep in the back of our head throughout the whole development of the conference.
Matt McWilliams: So, Mark, I don’t know if you noticed this. I want to clarify something. How far into your business were you when you did your first summit?
Matt McWilliams: That’s a good question.
Jason Hilkey: We had been struggling to build an online business for a couple of years.
Matt McWilliams: We started kind of slow, but yeah, it was about two to three years.
Matt McWilliams: What was your list size? Two years in, before you did your first summit, and I know you already mentioned the revenue, which was, you know, negative, basically. So what was the list size, though?
Jason Hilkey: We had about 3,000 people.
Matt McWilliams: Okay. So, I mean, very slow growth, and that’s. That’s the norm. we’re gonna. We’re talking today about things that aren’t the norm. We’re talking about how to explode your list with summits. But there’s something I noticed there. So prior to that two years, you were both preschool teachers.
Jason Hilkey: Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. You kind of both seem to have a certain level of marketing acumen. There’s a reason why I asked you to go back to when you started. It’s because you talk to somebody who’s been around for four or five, you know, six years, and we’re talking to them at a different place in their life, and it’s great. You want to talk to experts. I love, you know, sitting down with people who’ve been doing online marketing since the mid to late 90s, you know, before I ever had my first computer. You know, that’s. That’s fun because they have experiences that I don’t, and they have, you know, I can learn from them. But it’s also good from a story standpoint to hear kind of that origin story. And, Mark, I know you weren’t around for that origin story. but does it seem like Jason and Cecilia have, like, a certain level of marketing acumen that, I’ve already noticed two things. The thing about calling it a conference and then you said, make it an event.
Those aren’t things that tend to, you know, come natural ly to people. I don’t know, Mark, is that. Am I right there, or are they actually just total idiots? I’m just kidding.
Matt McWilliams: We have been exposed.
Cecilia Hilkey: Well, geez, I feel like I’m put on the spot now.
Matt McWilliams: I should say something nice about them. No.
Cecilia Hilkey: I mean, I think. Yeah, I think it’s interesting because I think people look at, you know, Jason, you and Cecilia, and say, oh, I can never do what they do, but, you know, it’s cool to see that.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah.
Cecilia Hilkey: You started off and kind of what you said with the language, Matt, but the same thing. I love how you guys took something that you knew, conferences and people going to conferences, and you just said, how can we apply that online? How can we apply that in an online business? And I think that’s something that a lot of people miss. It’s like you can take from other parts, other industries, other modalities, and apply it in a different way and have it work really well. And it seems like that’s what you guys did really well. It wasn’t a, it wasn’t that you knew how to create an online summit. It was that you said, I know that our target market likes conferences. What’s a conference? Like, how do we create that environment in this modality? And that’s the thing that I think is really cool because I think more people could do that and realize. Kind of like you said, Matt, it does work in your industry.
This could work in any industry. It’s just how do you frame it? How do you show people this is the value and this is what it’s like? My question is, did you frame it that way to people? Did you say, hey, this is just like the conferences you go to in person. It’s just online. I mean, did you tell people that or did you just call it a conference and they got that?
Matt McWilliams: well, I think we didn’t say outright in the very beginning this is just like an in person conference. We actually, it took us a few times to figure out that we needed to say that because it was in the back of our heads and people were having these experiences where they’re like, I can’t see every. I can’t fit all this in every day. Like, there’s so much coming, there’s so much content. And so we framed it as like, it’s just like as if you went to an in person conference where you can’t go to every single talk. So you choose who are the key talks that you want to go to and how are you going to spend your time and really go deep on those talks and choose. So we had to sort of frame it a little bit, but that took us like listening to people. I think some of what’s happened is in our figuring out marketing is just listening to people. I think that’s been the most.
One of the most important parts for us is listening to people. And, and honestly, we have gone and sought out training and good coaches and, the training and the coaches is what’s really helped us. And we’ve taken what applies to us and we leave the rest. We had some coaches that actually we had a coach, someone who’s really well known in the industry, say, yeah, the parenting niche, that’s hard. Like when he found out what niche we’re in and we’re like, oh my gosh, like, this is the first, like early on and we’re like, have we goofed up? Like, maybe we shouldn’t be trying to do this? And then we Also heard from almost the same person, summit, summits don’t work anymore. Like don’t bother with summits. And so we heard this from both, you know, twice. And we still.
Matt McWilliams: He’s no longer a coach for you, is he? Because he’s 0 for 2. At least based on the two things you’ve told me.
Matt McWilliams: And I would say that what’s taken us to the next level, you know, like we said, this is coming up on our ninth summit. working with you guys took us to the next level. Like Mark, working with us on how to do summits with affiliates at a more in depth level has transformed how we do summit. So the coaches have been very instrumental in us figuring things out. It’s not like we just figured it out as we went. We weren’t like, yeah, we definitely got good training and good coaches.
Jason Hilkey: I say, yeah, we studied a lot of online marketing. Like we were teachers. So we’re also good students. I like to deep dive into stuff. But we not ever studied exactly how to do a summit. We just kind of copied other people and made it up and found something that worked.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, that is, that is studying. you know, I mean good artists copy, great artists steal. I said that I was the original person to ever say that. I’m taking full credit for that quote. no, it’s Picasso actually. and we say there’s a training I’m doing, this weekend for a mastermind group. And I say by the end of this presentation, I want to convince you of two things. Number one, an affiliate program is the best way to grow and scale your business. Number two, the best way to learn how to run an affiliate program is to, model and copy others. so you guys are doing the same thing with your summits. You’re modeling, you’re seeing what they’re doing with this little piece here and how they lay out their page and all the little things like what their doing the day before, what emails they’re sending, how they’re running their ads. but you touched on something there that, let’s go back to that coach, I’m going to use air quotes there. That coach, who said two things. Number one, parenting is hard.
I have friends, including you guys, who prove that otherwise. I don’t believe there’s any niche that’s harder than any other to break into and make money in. maybe the ceiling is lower in some niches, but you know, we’re talking millions versus deca. Millions, you know, that’s my spiel there. So if you’re out there listening and you’re in some obscure niche, not that parenting is obscure, you know, but you’re in some niche where you think it’s not possible. you’re wrong. And so is that, coach. Secondly, summits are dead. you just did your eighth summit earlier this year, right? It was your eighth. You’re going on your ninth. Okay, you did your eighth. of those eight, which one was the biggest this past one?
Matt McWilliams: The eighth one.
Matt McWilliams: Okay, so before that, which one was the biggest?
Jason Hilkey: The seventh.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, you can see where I’m going with this. I’m gonna spare everybody the rigmarole here. Actually. Before that, which one was the biggest? They’re not dead. My personal opinion is we think they’re dead in marketing world because there was a period of time where everybody was doing them in the marketing world. Here’s the thing. Your audience isn’t in the marketing world. And you know that your summit, your ninth summit. Your ninth summit. Not even like the ninth parenting summit. Your ninth summit will be the first summit that probably half your people have ever even heard of, let alone attended. So keep doing them, you know, and no, they are not, they are not dead. So what’s been a curious question here? What’s been. I think it’s obvious that the benefits are growing your list and you make sales. what’s been one of the benefits that surprised you about summits?
Jason Hilkey: I didn’t realize that many of the speakers that we’ve had over like three, maybe four or five times that we’ve talked to them, that now they’ve become our friends. They used to be these people that I admired and I looked up to because I studied their books and I.
Matt McWilliams: Still admire them, maybe, but I do.
Jason Hilkey: But now, like, we, like some of them, we’re on text messaging basis with, or we, like, have, you know, coffee zoom time calls and stuff, we get together with some of them. I never imagined that, that I would get to hang out with these people that I had, like, just admired from afar, and to see how human they are. So that’s one of the. One of the big benefits for me.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: And I think the thing that surprised me and it really was it just after the first conference, it immediately became evident. But before the first conference was I didn’t recognize the. I think we call it like the Oprah effect of, like, the credibility of what happens when we start talking to these people that are recognized by our whole audience. We’re talking to them we’re interviewing them and people then elevate our credibility because we’re being associated with them. And that was not immediately obvious to me. we got lots of things that were like, oh, I didn’t expect that to happen.
Jason Hilkey: The other thing that happened immediately that I didn’t expect was I didn’t expect it to be so successful so quickly. And all of a sudden we’re like, wait, we’ve done something that’s actually like, in our little own, tiny corner of the Internet, it’s actually worked. And we were having the impact finally that we wanted to have and really helping parents and like, getting back testimonials, getting back emails and comments on social media from people about how it’s changed their parenting. They’re doing different things in their family. It’s healed stuff.
They’ve, you know, done had this miracle happen with their child or even with their spouse or even a grandma that’s trying to do something with her kid, her grandchildren, or a teacher or a therapist or a coach. Like, we were like, oh my gosh, this is actually having the impact that we, that we want to do. Like, it. We had to like, not read our email for a few days because we almost couldn’t run the summit because it was so. We were getting so touched and moved by the response from people that it would, like, distract us too much. We could function.
Matt McWilliams: I can see you lighting up. I mean, and I can hear it in your voice, like you’re lighting up about this. And it also sounds like, I mean, you can get that. We’ve gotten that from our little corner of the interwebs, you know, with pre recorded videos. And when I say pre record, I mean like just the two of you and, you know, some B roll and some music playing in the background. but it sounds like these are just fun. Sounds like you guys actually really enjoy these. Is that, Is that the case? I know there’s some stress and some stuff that goes in, but sounds like these are like, it’s a really fun form of marketing for you guys. Is that, Is that the case?
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, that’s what I was gonna say. That’s the other.
Matt McWilliams: There’s like a lot of your sadomasochistic. Because if you’re doing a ninth one and this isn’t fun, what’s wrong with you?
Matt McWilliams: That was one of the other things that surprised me out of it, is how much fun it was. And we didn’t have some special training on interviewing people. We just talk to people. That’s all we do we, say this often to the speakers? Like, we’re just gonna have a conversation and see where it goes. And, you know, some people are gonna watch this eventually, but we have a lot of fun, and we definitely recognize, like, this is the most fun part of our business. Like, we have completely shifted a lot of things around this because it ended up being way more fun than anything else that we were doing in our business. And people come to us and say, you guys really are great at interviewing. And we’re thinking, I don’t know why. I don’t know what we’re doing.
Jason Hilkey: It’s because of all the prep work I do beforehand. It’s not just to show up and have a conversation.
Matt McWilliams: It’s true.
Jason Hilkey: Read their book.
Matt McWilliams: Jason, she just, like, yeah, steamrolled that whole thing.
Cecilia Hilkey: And she just took credit with pages of,
Matt McWilliams: She does.
Jason Hilkey: And questions.
Matt McWilliams: And the joke is that when we interview, Cecilia is totally prepared. Thank goodness, because I’m not. And that’s kind of the way we run our business. Right? She does content. I do like the running of the business and some of the tech stuff. But what happens in the interview is Cecilia’s all prepared. She has done her homework on this, right? She knows the people, she knows their work. She gets a question in, and then I usually send us down some tangent and we go somewhere completely else. But it’s important because sometimes we get stuck and we have these questions to.
Jason Hilkey: Go back to, and I arc it back in a really nice way and wrap it all up and tie a bow on it.
Matt McWilliams: I just thought of something that applies to Jason and it applies to me, and I’ve never heard this phrase used before, so I’m gonna, I want somebody to like, Mark, can you tweet this? Put a dash next to my username, and, like, we’ll just make a shirt out of this. The shortest distance between two points is a suggestion. I think that’s totally how you and I both operate. I want to go there. This is. We’re going to get off summits for just a second because of the direction you guys just went. so I totally blame you guys for this. what’s it like working together? I mean, I know we have people, we have listeners. We have, you know, people in our audience who, they’re either starting a business with their spouse or they already have one, working together. And there are certainly unique challenges and unique benefits that I’ll let you guys cover. But what is that whole thing?
Matt McWilliams: Like, you want me to start? You Want to start?
Jason Hilkey: You can start.
Matt McWilliams: You can start.
Cecilia Hilkey: And then she’ll bring it back and round it up.
Matt McWilliams: Okay, so Jason’s going to start talking about it, then talk about something else. Go over here. And then Cecilia is going to repeat the question I ask and actually answer. Good. Got it. Okay.
Matt McWilliams: Figured this out very quickly. yeah. So, it’s really cool to be working with my best friend. You know, Like, I get choked up about it because I never thought that I’d be able to do, something so meaningful, with my spouse, my best friend. And there’s definitely challenging times, you know. But what really makes it all worth it is that we, together, are creating something that we get to share, and we both believe in it deeply. And, it’s our passion. And, so above everything else, in all the difficult times that we have, we always come back to that. And what’s funny is that we could be having some kind of major disagreement argument, but we have to go into an interview, and we come out of that interview so connected, and we’re like, yeah, what were we arguing about? Like, I don’t remember what that was. That’s cool. Been really good for us just to be able to work through our stuff.
And we understand each other better now because, we work closely together and we do stuff that’s pretty, intimate when we’re talking with someone. We understand each other really well. so I would say that we’ve done a lot of work together to develop our relationship, and the business has been the catalyst for that to happen. That’s the short answer. We could do a whole interview, a whole talk, just about working with your spouse.
Matt McWilliams: I’m just gonna, like, invite you guys back in the future and we’ll talk about working with a spouse. But I just couldn’t let that go. When you guys said that. That was really cool. I noticed that about Tara, and I, too. It’s like, well, we gotta. We gotta show up for this thing. And then, yeah, you know, there’s something about working together towards a shared. You know. Like, in the old days, I feel like we would have built something, you know, together. Or, like, gone and milk some cows, I don’t know. and then we would have forgotten about it. But you guys are, you know, running a summit, you know, or doing something, like doing an interview, you know. That’s really cool, Cecilia. yeah.
Jason Hilkey: So absolutely everything that Jason already said, it’s like, the most fun and also, like, the hardest thing to do. but when. When I look back and think well, would I. Would I want it any other way? No, I wouldn’t. and I get to work with my best friend. it’s not always pretty. sometimes it’s kind of messy. And that’s. That’s our own opportunity to grow and to show up. Just like parenting is a messy process, it’s your opportunity to show up and to, like, do the hard work. so it’s been a wonderful, Our business, our marriage, our family are all opportunities for us to grow. And part of it. Sometimes it’s like honoring, and trusting in the other person, in their expertise, and recognizing which things in the business are better to. To have somebody else do. Because it’s sometimes cheaper to hire somebody else than this to do marriage counseling. Not that we’re opposed to marriage counseling, because that’s awesome, too. But just know there’s, some things that are good to hire out.
Matt McWilliams: Designers are way cheaper than a marriage counselor. We found.
Matt McWilliams: I found that hiring a painter is cheaper than marriage. Like, the level of marriage counseling that we would have to go through. If I ever paint again in this house, because I painted one room, it was the worst three weeks of my life, I think. I’m kidding. It took me three weeks.
Matt McWilliams: I could completely believe that just from experiences we’ve had. Totally.
Matt McWilliams: And, how much cheaper it would have been just to hire somebody. And I mean, on all levels. That’s why I’ve never done it again. I know, Mark, you’re the same way. You’re like, I’m never painting again. Paintbrushes are banned in your house. All right, so you mentioned having fun with these speakers and getting, you know, the Oprah effect. That was really cool. I never. I. I thought about that. Like, there you’re. It’s almost like, I don’t know how much you guys. You guys have children, even though they’re older. You watched a lot of animated movies. It’s a hard word for me to say there. And, you know, like, in the animated movies where, like, the evil guy discovers, like, this secret gym and then, like, all these, like, things, like, he, like, sucks up the life force of the gym and, like, achieve superpowers. I feel like your credibility is the same way with the speaker.
Like, you have these 25 speakers, and you get, like, a little bit of each of their credibility that gets added to you. so, of course, that begs the question, how in the heck do you find speakers? What’s been that process, like, for you guys?
Jason Hilkey: And I want to, like, twist the metaphor a little Bit because you just compared us to the evil guy.
Cecilia Hilkey: I was going to say they’re not evil, just to clarify.
Jason Hilkey: So here’s how.
Matt McWilliams: Didn’t really think that one through now, did I?
Jason Hilkey: Here’s a different metaphor. I think there’s an Amish saying that, you lift me, I lift you. Together we rise. That would be more of our model is how do we find people that maybe they’re, like a voice that needs to get turned up on the volume. They get the volume turned up on them. They have an awesome message, but they don’t have a big audience. But we really believe in that and trust in them. So we find those like little hidden gems. even with the bigger name people, our focus is continually on what can we do to serve them, how can we grow their list. And sometimes we even have marketing conversations with them and talk to them about their website and talk to them about different things because we want them to succeed. And coming from that service based perspective on how can we help the speakers, get. Sell more books, sell more products, get more coaching clients, then makes it a natural partnership.
So I think that’s one of the reasons why people tell us they’re like, you’re the only parenting conference that we do. You’re the only summit that we do. We don’t talk to other people because we come from that perspective. but your original question is how do we find speakers?
Matt McWilliams: you’re doing what Jason normally does there. What was the quote again that you shared?
Jason Hilkey: I lift you, you lift me. Together we rise.
Matt McWilliams: And you said that was Amish, right?
Jason Hilkey: I think it’s Amish.
Matt McWilliams: Well, it doesn’t matter because the best thing about quoting the Amish on the.
Jason Hilkey: Internet is they might not ever find it.
Matt McWilliams: They’ll never know. it’s like misquoting, misquote the Amish all day long. And the good thing is I can say that right now and nobody is offended. Literally, nobody listening is offended. Right.
Jason Hilkey: Because, I love Amish people. I think it’s like really amazing.
Matt McWilliams: We’re surrounded by and the houses they make are unbelievable. Oh my goodness. Yeah, our next house.
Cecilia Hilkey: And now Matt’s doing what Jason does.
Matt McWilliams: Okay, so back, let’s talk more about the Amish.
Jason Hilkey: So how do we find speakers?
Matt McWilliams: Can I just say real quick? One word? Bookshelf. I mean, really, that’s. I’m looking around at our bookshelf. The way we found our first speakers is we looked at the books that we were reading and we just reached out to them and really like Email or call. Like, it’s really amazingly easy. That’s where we started. And then we also. Well, that was the one thing I was gonna say. That was more than one word, wasn’t it?
Jason Hilkey: It was amazingly easy. And I was the one that did the work.
Matt McWilliams: Absolutely. So it’s much easier for me.
Jason Hilkey: yes, but it was. How many people were willing to. To do this?
Matt McWilliams: even when you first started, when you had. You were, like, total nobodies, right?
Jason Hilkey: We were nobodies.
Matt McWilliams: That was one of the shocks.
Jason Hilkey: Didn’t really know what a summit was at that point. Like, was only four years ago. but it was a long time ago in, like, Internet history. In our. In our space, the parenting space is, like, a little bit less developed than other, marketing spaces online. So there was a fair amount of education that we had to do with our speakers to help them just explain what it was that we were doing. And I think one of the things that made the difference was one coming from service, but also explaining to people how much they’d impacted our lives. Like, we knew their work. We’d used it in our family, we’d used it in the classroom. We’d been impacted by it deeply. And so for them to then kind of partner with us and for us to interview them, they trusted that we were going to honor their work. it wasn’t like, oh, I’m going to use this person for a big name. It wasn’t that. it was.
No, we already love you. We’re already like your superfans, and we want to see if we can help get more attention. No matter how big your audience is, maybe we can get it a little bit bigger.
Matt McWilliams: And I think that was. What was surprising to us, is the number of people that just said yes. I remember. Do you remember, like, when we, like, some of the bigger names that we get?
Jason Hilkey: Oh, yeah.
Matt McWilliams: We were like, oh, can you believe that? He said yes. Like, we were just shocked. And the reality is they’re just. They’re just people, right? They’re like, people like us. And it actually. I say it was easy, but the hardest part about it was actually making that initial contact because of feelings. I think the feelings that you had. You were so scared. Even still, there’s times when you’re like.
Jason Hilkey: I had to, like, really get on, like, my big girl panties and do that. Like, do that work and feel, like, honestly, like, have the mindset to feel like, that we’re. We’re worthy enough to go and do this.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, that’s awesome. So summit number seven. let’s go from. From one to seven. No summit number one. You had about how many people?
Jason Hilkey: Oh, number one was we. Our list size was 3,000.
Matt McWilliams: Yep.
Jason Hilkey: And then we increased it to almost 8,000, almost 5,000 people.
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Matt McWilliams: What was this last one?
Matt McWilliams: hundred and I don’t remember. It was over a hundred thousand. I don’t remember the exact number.
Matt McWilliams: Four, I believe, is the number I heard. Yeah, I mean, that’s. I generally don’t ask questions that I know the answer to, but I do know the answers.
Matt McWilliams: Could I ask you some questions?
Matt McWilliams: how many do we have again? yeah. So, anyway, how you doing today? How am I doing today?
Matt McWilliams: You’re doing great so far.
Matt McWilliams: Room am I staying in? Oh, boy, this is deteriorated. All right, so she went from 5,000 to 100,000 plus. I mean, what was that progression? Like, what were some of the. I want to look for, like, the two, maybe three things that made the biggest impact to go. Because that’s crazy. That’s in less than four years. You know, 5,000 is amazing for a first summit. You know, usually we teach. You can get about two, maybe three, and you guys did five, so that’s awesome. But clearly, you know, 25 times more is, well, better. that’s. How did you guys do that? everything.
Matt McWilliams: One of the things that we kind of failed to mention that is, like, for us, it’s just. It’s an assumed thing that we didn’t explain in a summit, is that it’s an affiliate program. I mean, that’s what. That’s what it’s all about, right? Like, everyone that’s speaking or is a speaker for it, we automatically make them affiliates, and we let them know, hey, you can spread the word, and you can get a percentage of any sales from it. So that’s like another added benefit for them. But it’s because that’s the reason it grows so much is because it is. one of the reasons it grows so much is because they’re all affiliates, and we bring on additional affiliates on top of that. But that’s what’s really had it get bigger and bigger. the other thing I would say is that it’s an event.
And because it’s an event, that experience, once that flywheel kind of got going, of the word gets out, and the word’s getting out by these affiliates or by the speakers letting their audiences know, that flywheel effect just kept going and going because it was all focused on an event. And, so I think that’s really Made a big difference in growing it. And we run ads, but the ads are not the thing that are driving the incredible growth of it. Really.
Jason Hilkey: Yeah. About a third of our traffic comes from affiliates. About a third of our traffic comes from ads. And then a third is just organic traffic. People that are excited about it, they’re sharing about it on social media or even people will just email their friends and I guess, yeah, that it’s just they’re touched and moved enough that they and have found it to be valuable enough that they just share about it organically.
Matt McWilliams: And it’s easy to share about because it’s, you know, if someone has an audience, like if they’re going to affiliate, it’s easy to share about it because it’s just nurturing their audience. It’s already, it’s a free nurturing for their audience. So it’s easy for them just to say, hey, this is something. They have all this great information and it’s free. So it makes it very, very easy to share about.
Matt McWilliams: And they’re a part of it. And I think now you guys have reached the point where they’re getting some, some of that rub off, you know, like credibility because you guys are the experts and your other guests are the experts. And I know me, when I’m a part of a summit, I’m like, yeah, I’m a part of this summit with these seven names that you’ve all heard of. And I’m not necessarily promoting it because I hope to make a few thousand dollars. I’m promoting it because I want my audience to know that I’m in a summit with those seven people that they’ve heard of. You know, like that’s how we all operate. So you mentioned affiliates. Well of course affiliates need to make a commission. but it’s a commission on what? Because you said it’s free. So explain how that works.
Matt McWilliams: Sure, sure.
Jason Hilkey: Because people can buy the recordings. the live event happens where you only get access to five talks each day. but anytime during that event, including the sixth bonus day, they can buy the recordings and own those recordings.
Jason Hilkey: on their own listen to them. They get transcripts, they get an audio only version of the recordings. There’s some other bonuses and things that.
Matt McWilliams: We get the video of course with.
Jason Hilkey: It and they get the videos, they can download them, they can keep them.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. And so that’s what we sell. And then we have upsells that go along with that. So we might have like an added, like get the last conference or get the last five or get this best of or some things like that that we add in there. And then any affiliates get a percentage of those sales.
Matt McWilliams: Nice.
Cecilia Hilkey: What’s the I’m just curious. And again, Jason, I don’t know if you’ll have this number off the top of your head, but what percentage of people take that? I mean what percentage of people say I want the recordings, I want to be able to. Matt, what’s that number again?
Matt McWilliams: I know industry standard numbers on that, but I don’t know yours.
Matt McWilliams: For us it ends up being about 3, a little bit more than 3%. it depends on how they come in. You know, if they come in from an affiliate, it’s a little bit higher. If it’s cold traffic, they don’t know it’s, it’s a little bit less. But it averages about 3%.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, highlight that number right there. I mean that is, that’s, that’s an important figure. Not only.
Cecilia Hilkey: Well, I think it’s not have to.
Matt McWilliams: Pay for the traffic on the front end affiliates, but they actually do. In summits we found they convert about 25 to 30% higher. so what we found. I’ll just share industry numbers for anybody listening. We found that with social media traffic, ad traffic, the conversion rate’s about two and a half percent. With affiliates it’s a little bit north of four. and so we just always say about four, you know, is what it is to be. And you guys are at three and that’s not that far off.
Cecilia Hilkey: And I think the value of that and the value of the summit model is the fact that, you know, 3% are basically funding it for you and you’re providing enormous amounts of value for free for 97% of them, you know. And so it’s like this win, win on both sides. The people that say I want to be able to dig deeper, they get to, you know, and the people that say, hey, I just want, I just want to, like you said, you know, pick the three or four that I’m really interested in and watch them and I’m good with that. They get to do that too, which is really awesome. I mean for me, anytime I get to a summit, I almost always buy the all access pass because I know I’m not going to watch them all and I know I’m going to be able to go back and watch. And so I think some people will do that. But you know, I just, I love that that it allows you to serve both groups in the way that’s best for them.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah.
Cecilia Hilkey: And. And still make, you know, a good chunk of money and, you know, to be able to fund your business and impact more lives. but I guess, you know, there’s a lot of moving parts. There’s a lot of things, you know, you guys, like you said, you. Oh, go ahead.
Matt McWilliams: Can I say one thing about that?
Cecilia Hilkey: Yes.
Matt McWilliams: Because I think it’s important. There’s two things that came up. One was that.
Matt McWilliams: Oh, no, sorry. Different thing.
Matt McWilliams: One was that, many. We had heard that summits weren’t. You couldn’t make money on summits. And you had asked earlier what was one of the surprising parts of running of us doing these online conferences. It became like, one of the most profitable parts of our business, which I don’t. I have not heard that from anyone else that we’ve talked about, talked to, that does summits, which is surprising to me because we’re not doing anything impressive. We’re not. We don’t have, like, amazing conversion rates. Like, you know, we just went through them. But it’s. It’s like the most. One of the most profitable parts of our business. And the other thing is that we look at lifetime value, and I think sometimes we forget that. But, like, it’s also bringing in potential customers for the future. We’ve just kind of glossed over saying, yeah, we’re growing our audience and we’re making this much in the conference. But it’s not just about how much we make in the conference.
It’s how much we make for the lifetime of those people that then are on our email list or that become our audience. So I just wanted to point those two things out because I think they’re important. I think it’s one of the reasons people discount, summits oftentimes.
Matt McWilliams: Well, they’re starting off that relationship with you where you’re the Oprah. You know, they’re starting off that relationship with so much value that you gave. I mean, look at the emails you’re getting and the test, you know, all those stories that you’re getting, and that’s how they’re starting off the relationship with you.
Jason Hilkey: yeah.
Matt McWilliams: So even if they don’t convert into an upsell like that, when you offer them something three months from now because they applied something that either you taught them or a speaker taught them, you know, for 90 days. I mean, I always just use the example, like, imagine that bedtime is total chaos for you and for the. And you did, and you taught something that for the next 90 days made bedtime Peaceful. You could sell me anything. You know, bedtime actually happens to be pretty good for us because I learned a few things. But, you know, as an example, like, if you suddenly are sleeping through the night because your children are sleeping through the night, I mean, what would you pay 90 days later after getting 90 consecutive good night’s sleep? Anything. Anything. Cecilia, you were going to say.
Jason Hilkey: Something there, and it makes it so much easier, to your point, for us to sell coaching or other parenting classes or any of those other things. Because of that positioning, the credibility, the relationship, people feel like they know us because they’ve read our emails, because they’ve seen us talk with, different speakers. We tell part of our story. we ask our own parenting questions in addition to the parenting questions that people send in to us. so it really just helps build that relationship.
Matt McWilliams: Mark, I think I cut you off and I’m sorry.
Cecilia Hilkey: I was very offended, but I’m slowly getting over it. no, I was just gonna, you know, you guys make it look easy. You know, you’ve done, you know, eight of these. You’re going on your ninth. You know, you’ve had massive success with them, and it just looks easy. But I know that there’s a lot of moving parts. We’ve helped you with yours, we’ve helped other people with theirs, and there’s a lot of moving parts. So if somebody is watching this and they’re thinking, man, it’d be really cool to do a summit for my business, what would you tell them? I mean, what are the things that you would either warn them about or you’d say, hey, this is what you absolutely have to do?
Matt McWilliams: yeah, so that’s a great question. It’s a question we get often. we actually, Well, can I, Can I have a little spoiler and say, we’ve been asked this question so many times that we’ve decided we’re actually going to do a class on this.
Matt McWilliams: But we can still idea this is coming as a total shock to us. We did not schedule this interview as you have a class about summits coming up. That’s not how we work in marketing.
Matt McWilliams: We’ve been avoiding it for years. Honestly, like, we’re just. We’ve avoided, like, okay, fine, we just finally gave up. but it’s. The nice thing is that I actually find it fairly simple. and what’s nice is once you figure it out, it’s just copy and paste. You just take the same thing and you do it again and you just change the name. I mean, really, we’ve done that with our design, we do that with the back end. We do that with just everything. Ads, all of it. Yeah, you have to tweak copy, you have to tweak the images. But the nice thing is, once you do the work, that first summit that we did for 12 weeks, the next one did not take 12 weeks to do. And every one of them gets easier and easier and shorter and shorter because we just have mastered it. but just to start with, you.
Jason Hilkey: Want to say, yeah, I think that’s one of like the myths of doing summits. A lot of people say, oh, I don’t want to do that. It looks like so much work. But then if you think of, okay, you’re going to sell a product, you’re going to sell a parenting class, you have to not only design that program, but you have to design all the marketing. And you got to make sure you’re nurturing your list while you’re also building your list. And there’s a lot of moving parts in that. Whereas doing a summit or a conference, it’s all of those in one little unique package. It’s growing your list, it is nurturing your audience, it is the pre launch content, it’s also the product. It’s so many of those things in one. It’s like a one stop shop. So, yeah, it does take a little bit of time to get the speakers on board and do the interviews.
And, it totally pays off in the end because you can use those for the nurturing, for the product, and even then continue to reuse them after or beforehand. So it just totally pays off.
Matt McWilliams: And it’s flexible. You can use what you’re comfortable with. I mean, that’s, you know, we didn’t have formal training on how to do a summit. Like I said in the very beginning, we just were like, okay, we need to record video of these interviews. So what do we got? Okay, well, we know how this works. So we started using this thing called Zoom, which the whole world knows about now. Right. But at the time, we’ve had a number of people come up to us. Now they’re like, so do you, have you been using this Zoom thing all this time? We’re like, yeah, so. But it’s something we knew, right? Cameras, we just used what we had. Okay, we need to put the videos up. What do we know? Well, we know how to do this. So we just put it up and we figured out what we were comfortable with. And it’s the format and the communication and the relationship that really make it work. we give you the whole formula.
We can say do this, do this, do this. But it’s really about just figuring out what are you comfortable with and how can you best present it and figure it out, with a way that is easy for you. Because people are going to be in different levels and in different places.
Matt McWilliams: and I think this training is going to be, amazing because you take a lot of things that you can train people on, and then there’s. You also got to have this, this, this and this to be able to execute. Most of us have a fairly functional 720 or 1080p, you know, webcam. If you don’t know what that means, just look at your webcam. It’ll usually tell you. Like, mine says 1080p HD. You know, I think this thing costs like 50 bucks on Amazon. You know, it’s like four years old. I haven’t felt the need to upgrade, you know, and it plugs into the computer. Most of you have one of those. And here’s the thing, believe it or not, if you don’t, if you have this little magic. I called it the magic rectangle. If you have one of these, this actually takes better video quality than this camera. It’s just easier for me to use this. Go get a tripod also. Probably you can get one for 50 bucks on Amazon.
Set it up like this on the tripod and you can use Zoom on your magic rectangle. Okay. Like everything. You have all the tools. Zoom. Yeah. You’ll need a paid account. But I mean, heaven forbid, if you really are on a budget, you can use Skype, which is free, and then there’s a way to record it. There’s like 17 different ways to do that, some of which are very, very low cost or even free. Like, you have the tools, you know, if you don’t have a good microphone, which my microphone is only 75 bucks on Amazon, if you don’t have a good microphone and you’ve got a decent computer. Or again, the magic rectangle, the audio quality. I mean, you can do a 2, 3, 4,000 person summit with stuff that you probably literally already have in your pocket or on your desk. And that’s what I just want to point out. There are no limitations, guys.
Matt McWilliams: We didn’t have a studio that we were doing this in. We literally did it in a laundry nook next to the kitchen.
Matt McWilliams: That’s next level right there. I was just going to say, did you do it in like a bedroom? But no, you.
Matt McWilliams: Oh, no, we didn’t have a house.
Matt McWilliams: Washing in the background.
Matt McWilliams: We didn’t have room in our house. We had a small house. So really, like, we. We just totally, like just MacGyvered everything.
Matt McWilliams: And tide as a sponsor.
Matt McWilliams: I could just change laundry, fold laundry.
Matt McWilliams: You MacGyvered it, dude. You just use one of my favorite verbs. Oh my goodness. That is one of. Mark knows this. That is one of my top three favorite verbs. oh, we’re gonna have to MacGyver that landing page there, you know, that’s awesome.
Matt McWilliams: And MacGyvering, it was like setting stuff on top of books and holding stuff.
Jason Hilkey: Like putting up the curtains.
Matt McWilliams: That’s what we do when we’re. I was talking with Joe Fear, who’s the host of like one of the top podcasts in the world right now. He was talking about when they first started their podcast back in 2010, they had microphones on mattresses. And he was like, I don’t even know why we used mattresses. Why didn’t we use a table? I said, easy soundproofing. He’s like, oh, yeah, that’s why we did it. I’d forgotten. It helps mute some of the sound when in this, like they were hardwood floors in this bedroom. And I’m like, you know, you think about those things or when you, when you like, you know, we were talking about earlier. I’ve said this publicly. This table, guys, you know, this looks great. It’s studio, right? It’s sitting on top of paint cans. You know, there’s blue painters tape all over my carpet to tell me where to stand. I don’t have like fancy stuff. It looks great, but it’s.
You know, sometimes we have to MacGyver things and just don’t let that hold you back. There’s nothing in here except for, I don’t know, 30 or $40 sign that my wife bought. there was nothing, there’s literally nothing in my studio that we didn’t already have in the house.
Jason Hilkey: Our picture.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, it was just in a different location. Like now we don’t have an entertainment center. No, I’m just kidding.
Jason Hilkey: our preschool students in our classroom. M painted that picture.
Matt McWilliams: It’s actually m really good for.
Matt McWilliams: It was a year long study of Jackson Pollock, but it’s. It’s. The nice thing is it’s meant to us.
Matt McWilliams: And preschool were you guys running?
Matt McWilliams: It was. We worked at a very different kind of preschool.
Matt McWilliams: Okay. You’re learning about Jackson Pollock and I was learning how not to pick my nose. But hey, you know, potato, potato.
Matt McWilliams: But it’s like, original. It’s, like who we are, and it’s part of our.
Jason Hilkey: Yeah, it’s homegrown.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, I love it. And it kind of represents what you guys were talking about earlier about the, you know, the messiness of things and how, you know, how Jason goes all over the place and then, you know, you bring it back in and here and there, going all over the place, and then you end up with something really cool, you know, Mark, there was something you wanted to say there, and I. We started talking at the same time. So.
Cecilia Hilkey: Yes. No, you know, I acknowledge Jason when you say it’s actually pretty simple, but I think one of the things to hone in on. And yes, you guys, you have this training coming up, and you’ve been asked this many times, and yes, I’m kind of telling you that this is important and you guys should check it out, because you should. But really, it’s simple to you because you figured out the formula, and I think that’s the key. And you talked about that with other aspects of your business of finding the coach, finding the mentor that can teach you the formula. And when you know the formula, yes, it is simple, and I think that’s the value.
And, you know, like you said, you didn’t have this when you started out, but there, to somebody on the outside, there is a lot of moving parts, and you don’t, you know, we even kind of did it just now. It’s so easy to get, sucked into. I’ve heard people call it the how hole. You know, it’s like, how do you do it? What do you use? And you get so overwhelmed by all that stuff and you miss the important things. And I think that’s the value of coming to somebody like you guys that have done it multiple times that you can say, okay, I’m just gonna give you the simple stuff. Here’s what you do. But here’s the secret sauce, here’s the process, here’s the.
Here’s the how you do it as far as the big picture stuff that makes the difference. And I think that’s the value of what you guys have done. And I think it’s so easy for all of us to get to that point. And this is. Matt, you’ve heard me say this. This is one of my biggest pet. Not pet peeves. But it just kind of makes me chuckle every time because you hear really successful people, and I would put you guys in that category when it comes to some, it’s really successful, and they just say, well, you know, I’m just like you. I’m just a normal person. And you just do this, this and this.
And there’s people sitting there thinking, no, it’s not that easy. Like, I don’t know, I don’t understand. And I think it’s so easy once you’ve done it and you have the system. And that’s really the value of what you guys are going to be offering, is that system, you know, And I think that’s the key, is, yes, it’s simple. If you have the system and this is the system. And I’ve watched you guys run summits. You know, I’ve been on the backside and we’ve talked about it. We’ve seen. I’ve seen what happens behind the scenes, the good and the bad and the stressful and everything else. But on the outside, it looks amazing.
And it’s because, you know, the system, you know, the things that are important and, you know, the things that aren’t important. You know, like you said, you know, the things where it’s like, this just has to get done and we just have to do it, and it doesn’t have to be perfect. And that’s really the key to any good system. And if anybody’s created a system for summits, I think it’s you guys, because like you said, you went from 5,000 to 100,000 plus and you’ve made money. You know, like you said, it’s. It’s one of the most profitable parts of your business. And so I just wanted to make sure that we point that out, because I know somebody’s gonna listen and say, yeah, right, it’s simple. Whatever. Like, it’s easy for you because you’ve done it nine times, you know, and it is the first time, but it’s because of the system. Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. I think that’s. I think that’s so valuable to say, Mark. you know, we’ve talked to people who we’ve supported in their summits, and it’s good to remember for me, like, it’s a reminder for me when I talk to them, like, oh, yeah, this did take a little bit of work. You know, like, this was. This was hard at first.
Jason Hilkey: It, wasn’t obvious.
Matt McWilliams: It wasn’t obvious. what’s simple is that there’s everything’s available to us, you know, and so there’s a simple part of it that’s like, you know, we have it all available and it’s not hard to get. The challenging part of it is figuring out how that all goes together and the running of that machine. I think that’s really great to point out. And what’s been, what I’ve also noticed is once we got that machine figured out, you know, after the first summit, we started focusing on the other parts that were important. You know, like, that’s when we started focusing on how can we support our speakers better, how can we do the affiliate part of it better. You know, that’s why we brought you guys on.
That’s why we’ve been working with you on this. Because like, we had that down where we were focusing on other parts of the business. We were like, what’s another upsell? You can focus on other parts of the conference at that point, once the machine’s figured out and we worked with you then to figure out like, okay, so how can we do our affiliate support better? How can we take that to the next level? and that’s what we’re hoping to do with this class is to take care of that how of it, like the whole machining of it, the recipe of it, so that people can focus on providing a really top notch summit and be able to enjoy it and be able to see how it can really benefit them and they’re not struggling with that first one and figuring out the how of it. So I thank you for that. I think that’s, that’s very, very true. Brings it back to us.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. So, tell us real quick. So this, this class that you guys are doing, just what does that look like when somebody signs up? And I know, as of when this releases. Let’s see when this releases. You guys who are listening, we’ll have a URL for you at the end of this where you guys can go to, to get, to get in on this, on this workshop. what actually are, like, what are they going to take away from this workshop?
Matt McWilliams: Sure. a number of things. One we’re going to do, we’re going to give you our recipe. Like we kind of talked about it here, but like we have that whole thing, we use asana for all of our project planning and we’ve got that whole thing mapped out. And so we’re excited to share that. we’re excited to share the actual copy that we use in emails.
Matt McWilliams: That’s huge. Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: Because that, at least for me, like staring at a blank screen is so painful. But if I have something to start from.
Matt McWilliams: Ah.
Matt McWilliams: And that’s what we’re trying to give you is something to start from for those initial emails.
Matt McWilliams: Swipe, copy it’s great stuff. Swipe copy.
Matt McWilliams: We have swipe copy for, how to reach out to speakers, what those initial emails are like for your conference. and then the format that we use for actually running the actual conference and how we roll it over each day.
Jason Hilkey: Yeah, we’ll talk about how you prepare for interviews, how you build relationships with speakers, the things that you need to do before and during and after your conference to really maximize it.
Matt McWilliams: and your mindset, I think mindset, we’ve talked about it here a little bit, is like, where are you coming from? Because. Because I don’t know about you guys or people, that are listening. We’ve been approached by many people like, hey, I got this conference, I want you to be a part of it. Or I’ve got this summit and I just need you to fill out this form and I need you to, like, tell me how many people you have on your list and I need you to do this.
Matt McWilliams: I just fell asleep when you were describing that.
Matt McWilliams: And you have to send this number of emails and you have to send these number posts, and, like, there’s like, all of this. And that’s not what we do because we come from a different place. And that’s the mindset that we talk about, is that mindset informs actually what we say rather than following a script. So, I think that’s one of the most valuable parts of the training because that will inform you on how you run, how you approach, how you experience the whole conference for the people that are coming and the people that are speaking there.
Matt McWilliams: I love that. So, guys, keep listening and I’ll have that URL for you here shortly. Cecilia, I have to assume you’re the one teaching about the, interview prep, though.
Jason Hilkey: Yes.
Matt McWilliams: If Jason were teaching, it would be like, okay, five minutes to interview. Get ready. Two minutes to the interview. Boot computer up, Start talking. M. Am I right?
Jason Hilkey: That is right.
Cecilia Hilkey: So I was wondering if we’re gonna get. We’re gonna get both. You know, we get Cecilia’s like, 15 page checklist, and then Jason’s half a page. Show up.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah.
Cecilia Hilkey: Make sure Cecilia is there. Show up.
Matt McWilliams: You have a little bit of a balance. It is interesting, but we figured it out over time. Like, I’ve got the little spiel that I say here. I have the spiel I do at the end.
Jason Hilkey: he has a whole checklist of everything that he does to set up the interview and make sure that the computer is all arranged and Cecilia’s here. We both play our parts.
Matt McWilliams: That’s awesome. Okay, so we’re making fun of Jason, but it’s deserved.
Matt McWilliams: Okay, so I’m an easy target.
Matt McWilliams: So let’s finish up with, our last question, because we started at the beginning, and then we’re gonna finish at the end. that’s how I do interviews.
Cecilia Hilkey: Genius.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. I’m curious, because we were talking before we went on live, and I joked that I was gonna take something that you guys said and put it in the outtakes. But you know what? Let’s talk about it. What are some of the weirdest things you have seen doing summits? Like, you’re doing these live interviews with people. Tell us a few of those things, because I know these are fun for you guys, but part of the fun is just what ends up happening. So tell us some of those things.
Matt McWilliams: I mean, there’s the obvious ones. We didn’t mention this to you. The obvious ones of, like, when we have a table that we work from here, when we’re standing and doing the interviews, and my water bottle just, like, flies off, and, you know, it’s spraying water everywhere, and we’re just like, yep, this is fine.
Matt McWilliams: Everything’s good.
Matt McWilliams: Or the bug that flies in and lands on Cecilia, and I’m like, I’m just gonna take that off her. We’re gonna keep going.
Jason Hilkey: Or. It landed on my forehead one time.
Matt McWilliams: Oh, yeah.
Jason Hilkey: Yeah, that was awesome.
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Matt McWilliams: But with our. With our speakers, we’ve had some funny things. one of our speakers was trapped in, up at a ski resort in Canada. They, got snowed in. And so she was sitting there interviewing, and in the middle of the interview, just, like, an avalanche of snow just flew off and, like, went by her window. And it’s like the big rut. She’s like, wow. And so we just, you know, we talked about it, but that. That was a little bit startling. we’ve had the dogs. Dogs freak out the couch behind a speaker one time.
Jason Hilkey: Yeah, I mean, it’s just like these. These folks are just normal people, and they’re all doing all the same stuff that we do before we get on camera. They’re fixing their hair. They’re making sure that the.
Cecilia Hilkey: It’s in the background.
Jason Hilkey: Exactly. He’s fixing his hair.
Matt McWilliams: Or they’ll have their tie on. I mean, again, this is like a different era right now because so many people are used to zoom. But, like, they got their shirt on, their tie, and then they stand up to go change, and they got, like, shorts and flip flops on, you know, like, now we’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But back then, that was like, oh, my gosh, really? Or the person who’s like, hold on just a sec. I smell smoke. And so we’re like, yeah, okay, we can edit this. Don’t worry about it. Go figure out what’s on fire. The others that I’m missing there.
Matt McWilliams: It’s hard doing an interview and your building’s burning. Did they just leave something in the oven? Did they ever tell you?
Matt McWilliams: Never told. Well, my kids are by themselves. I need to check on this. They’re like young kids. Never said what it was.
Matt McWilliams: My kids are by themselves, and we have a lot of matches in the house. I mean, cooking something. Oh, my goodness. Oh, speaking of smells, we got to wrap up because I smell garlic chicken. Just being honest. That’s why we need. We could go on all day, but I have to end because I’m hungry. Oh, my goodness. Jason, Cecilia, Mark, this has been awesome. I mean, if people listening aren’t convinced that virtual summits are the future, they’re the past, but they’re the now.
That’s the big thing is they are the right now. They are still huge. You’re about to do your ninth one, which will be your biggest one. I’m so proud of you guys, because watching your success has been an inspiration to me personally, and I know to our whole team. so, guys, go check them out and, make sure you hit them up on social, media and tell, them that you were listening to them. Say nice things about them, make fun of them, whatever. and make sure you get in on this workshop. Jason, Cecilia, Mark, thank you guys so much for being here today.
Jason Hilkey: Thanks for having us, Matt, Cecilia, you’re.
Matt McWilliams: Breaking my heart, my confidence daily. That was awesome. you can see why I love, Jason and Cecilia so much. Why they’re. Well, they’re such great clients of ours. Like, they get it, right? They get it. They execute. So your next step is to go to mattmcwilliams.com/summitworkshop to register for Jason and Cecilia’s summit. And we’ve been working side by side with them for this whole year now, and I can tell you they are rock stars. you could tell that just from listening to them right now, from the interview. Right. So this training is going to be awesome. They put their hearts and souls into this stuff. So, Again, go to mattmcwilliams.com/summitworkshop to register, and I’ll see you in our next episode.
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Virtual summits are one of the easiest, highest-converting affiliate promos out there. They’re free for your audience, packed with value, and loaded with backend commission potential. And the best part? You don’t even have to be a speaker to win big. In this episode, I’ll show you exactly how to promote virtual summits as an affiliate, even if your name isn’t on the agenda, and turn them into serious revenue for your business.
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How Affiliates Can Win Big with Virtual Summits (Even if You Aren’t Speaking)
Virtual summits are one of the easiest, highest converting affiliate promos out there. They’re free for your audience, they’re packed with value and they’re loaded with back end commission potential. And the best part is that you don’t even have to be a speaker to be successful as an affiliate. So in this episode I’m going to show you exactly how to promote virtual summits as an affiliate, even if your name isn’t on the agenda, and turn them into some serious revenue for your business.
Let’s get started. Listen, I love virtual summits. I have been a part, I’ve spoken it probably 100 to 150 over the past, you know, seven or eight years, nine years, I’ve done almost as many virtual summits as I have podcast interviews. And I love them because they’re quick and easy to promote. You know, they are some of the lowest effort, highest reward affiliate promos you can do. And sometimes I’ll send, you know, one or two emails and I’m done, maybe three. And I make a ton of money, you know, and it’s, the promotion is so easy. So here’s the thing, you get to be the hero to your audience, right? You’re, you’re giving your followers access to something incredibly valuable, completely for free.
Because most summits, most virtual summits, if they’re done right, they’re free for people to just register and then they’ll have an early upsell like a VIP pass where your people can get special access. Maybe it’s special Q and A or, or they get the recordings, they get more out of the experience, whatever it is, they get access to like a special session. And then there’s the back end offers, there’s the courses, the memberships, you know, that kind of thing that bring in some, some serious commissions just for promoting something for free. And like I said, I’ve promoted a bunch of these over the years.
Usually, I mean, I think I’ve only promoted one or two as a non speaker, but back in the day, you know, I should say I’ve probably like one or two in the last seven or eight years where I was a non speaker back in the Day I promoted a few where I wasn’t in the lineup. And the cool thing about that is again, that I get to be the hero to my audience.
Now, I’ve also helped thousands of affiliates promote who were not, you know, actually they weren’t a part of the summit, but they promoted it. So if you’re an affiliate manager, I want you to lean in for this, okay? In most of Most virtual summits, 80% of the OPT ins and sales come from the speakers. But when we run summits, it’s flipped the majority over 80% of all the leads and all the sales come from non speaker affiliates. Okay, that’s huge. Do not let that escape you. If you’re affiliate manager and you’re running a virtual summit, you need to know that and you need to run your affiliate program in a way that that’s the result that you get.
To put it bluntly, if the majority of your leads and your sales, your registrations and your sales come from your speakers, you are leaving an astronomical amount of money on the table. Yeah, the biggest one or two promoters probably are speakers, but the bulk of our success is non speakers, regular affiliates. You know, one summit we ran brought in over 124,000 registrations. Of those, a little bit less than 20,000 came from speakers.
That’s less than 20%. We had over 100,000 registrations came from affiliates who weren’t on the virtual stage. And so that’s why I’m so fired up about this episode. Whether you’re an affiliate or, or an affiliate manager, we’re gonna show you how to turn virtual summits into big wins. So this interview was originally, it was a live lesson that I did for some of our members. Right. So people who’ve paid, and I brought Robbie Miles from our team on to.
Talk through exactly how to crush it. With summits, even if you’re not a speaker. So we cover a ton. We’re talking about why virtual summits still work. That’s the big one. Like a lot of people are, oh, virtual summits are dead. I’ve been hearing virtual summits for dead since 2017. Every year. No, we had a client last year do one with over 100,000 people registered. I would say not dead, very much alive. We’re going to talk about the subtle art, if you will, of giving versus asking in your promos, giving versus asking, how to build long term relationships with speakers.
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So this is an awesome place for you, if you’re a non speaker, to still connect with some of the speakers who are usually at A higher level than you. And then we’re gonna talk about a full email plan, a full promo plan that you can swipe and use for your next summit promotion. So this one is packed. Let’s jump right in.
jump :Hey, what’s up insiders? And I’m super excited this month to talk to you about how to promote virtual summits as a non speaker affiliate.
Matt :I think we all kind of understand how if we’re a speaker for a virtual summit, if you’ve ever been fortunate enough to do that, it’s a really cool experience getting to be a part of that audience and be one of the featured speakers. Promoting an event like that as a speaker, kind of easy, you know, hey, I’m speaking at this event and you should join it. Right? But promoting them as a non speaker affiliate. I’m going to share some of the ways and some tips for doing that coming up here today. So I’m joined today by Robbie Miles. As always, Robbie, welcome.
Robbie :Hey Matt.
Matt :It’s great to be here. Yeah. So I’m going to share. First of all, we’re going to start with, you know, it’s a backstage pass. This goes back to a promotion that I did recently. Now I was a speaker, but we’re going to take those principles and extract them for non speakers summit called the Monetize youe Genius Summit that we promoted. It was run by Daniela Nica. And we’re going to take a PDF by the way, for all of you.
There’ll be a PDF below this video of the email that we sent promoting that summit that you guys can use just to kind of get an idea of some of the ways that we promoted that. If you want like all of our emails like that we’ve ever sent for everything, you know, for summits and other stuff. Make sure, by the way, you go grab our ultimate affiliate swipe file.
You can just go to affiliate swipe file. What is it? Affiliateswipe files.com affiliateswipe files.com make sure you go check that out and grab a copy of that. We’ll send it to you for basically the cost of shipping for your first 30 days. And if you don’t like it, then you send it back and we don’t charge anything. And if you love it, then we’ll charge you something. So. But not even close to what it’s actually worth because we’ve heard amazing things about this book.
Some of you insiders already have the book and you know how awesome this is. So go check that out. So first of all, why are virtual Summits, great affiliate promotions. I first want to kind of overcome a myth that says that, well, summits are dead. Virtual summits are dead. Everybody and their grandmother’s doing virtual summits. Okay, first of all, that’s not true. That is simply not true. There’s a lot of talk in the online marketing world about virtual summits, but that’s because we’re in the online marketing world. I can promise you this is. I call this the Target test. The reason I don’t say the Walmart test is there’s a certain connotation with Walmart.
But if you go to Target, I feel like Target, at least when I’ve been there, is a pretty good cross section of America. It’s pretty average income. You get some higher income people, you get some CEOs shop at Target. And also school teachers shop at Target, stay at home moms shop at Target, and automobile mechanics shop at Target. Like, it feels like everybody I know shops at Target, not everybody I know shops at Walmart. And so the Target test. Go into a Target, find a hundred people, ask them if they’ve ever attended a virtual summit. Now first of all, that’d be a really weird thing to do.
But if you did it, I bet the most number that anybody would get that have ever attended virtual summit would be three, probably one or two. And in fact, if you asked a. Hundred people five or more times, I bet on occasion you’d get zero people. Most people have never even heard of a virtual summit, let alone an attended one. And the same thing is true.
Like we’ve heard this throughout history about every new technology that’s shown up on the Internet. Email marketing is dead. I was hearing that one for email marketing is dead. If you go Google the phrase email marketing is dead, right? You will find articles all the way back to 2002, 2003 that say email. Marketing on it’s on its way out. Well, it’s, you know, it’s just dead. Really. You’ve been wrong for 18 years, 19 years, you’re still saying the same crap, right? It’s still the number one way to sell anything online. Well, now, about five, six years into the virtual summit craze, everybody’s saying the same thing.
Here’s why it feels like there are so many virtual summits. Why they’re dead. You or not, Robby, this applies to you. This is me, all of our insiders who are hypersensitive to these types of things because we’re in this world. We have friends who run a virtual summit. Maybe you spoke at a virtual summit. You’ve attended a virtual summit. You’re thinking of running a virtual summit. You want to promote a virtual summit. You’re on a lot of email marketers. List and one of them is doing. A virtual summit or speaking and promoting at a virtual summit.
The reality is, like I said, most of your audience has never even heard of a virtual summit, let alone attended one. So I just want to get that out of the way up front. Virtual summits are not dead. So I’ve got five reasons for you why virtual summits are a good affiliate promotion. Then we’ll talk about some of the strategies. The first benefit to you, the first reason why I love promoting them as an affiliate. There’s no hard sell. All we’re trying to do, it’s really, we talk about often in terms of promotions, there’s gives and there’s takes. When I say go buy this product, it kind of feels like a take. It has a take feel to it.
Robbie :Even if you tell them how amazing the product is, it’s still a take. You’re like, here, I’m giving you all this value by getting this amazing product. Buy it. Like that’s still the key. There is. You’re asking something of them.
Matt :Yeah, even if it’s go buy this product for a dollar when it normally costs $100, it’s still kind of
Robbie :you’re asking for a transaction.
Matt :you’re not asking for this at all. Like, a typical virtual Summit will have 20 to 30, maybe upwards of 50amazing speakers. Many of them will be people that your audience has never heard of. Many of them will be people that your audience is dying to see. Like, there’ll be at least one like super recognizable speaker that your audience is like, oh my gosh, this person’s on. Right. They get to see them speak for free. A lot of times these people speak at events like this where there’s 10, 20, 30 speakers.
I think of like the Global Leadership Summit and things like that. I don’t know how much that costs. Or to go see somebody deliver a keynote, you might pay 200 bucks for dinner and a talk from them. And you get to see them for free, not to pay a dime. So this is a total give. They don’t have to pull out their wallet, they just have to register. Okay, so positions you in the is just giving, you know, and there’s no hard sell. Secondly, there’s super high value.
I mean, this kind of ties in what I just said, right? Average virtual summit interview is probably about 30 to 45 minutes long. There are 30, 40, upwards of 50 speakers. Sometimes I think Claire Diaz Ortiz, she had one that we ran many years ago. We ran the affiliate site called the Success Mentor summit. She had 70 plus speakers. So she had 35 hours of amazing content that you got to offer as an affiliate. You can’t tell me that giving your audience 35 hours of free content from thought leaders in the industry wouldn’t be like, insanely valuable to your audience. Of course it is. And as the affiliate, you’re going to be the one that gets to share it with them. So that makes you the hero to your audience, which is great positioning. Third reason you should promote virtual summits, even if you’re not speaking.
There’s multiple entry points because there’s different topics and different speakers. Typically one of the things I hear about, say, a book, for instance. A book. And I love promoting books as an affiliate because I can, I maybe will send like two emails and I’m hoping to get affiliates for our book coming out, the Passion of Profit Path. Like, we’re going to be working a lot with some big affiliates, but there’s only so many ways you can say, hey, go buy Matt’s book. Go buy Matt’s book. Hey, today if you buy Matt’s book, you get this. And tomorrow if you buy Matt’s book, you get, well, the same thing. And he has a book coming out and here’s who it’s for. Oh, did I mention who it’s for. Go buy the book. Go buy the book. Go buy the book. I mean, like, if I kept going much longer with that, you guys would all tune me out, right? That’s how.
Robbie :Yeah, I almost muted your mic.
Matt :I know. Like, go buy the book. Go buy the book. Go buy the book. Like, you sound like a repetitive bird. It gets old. But with a summit, like there’s different categories of speakers, right? You’re going to have some big name speakers group with some lesser name speakers, and each group is going to be on a slightly different subtopic. So you’ve got like your broader things. I’ll use like Chandler Boltz, we ran his self publishing success summit.
There’s like how to outline the book, how to write the book, how to get the book published, you know, to self publish it, how to market the book, how to use the book long term as like a business card, right? And so each of these speakers is going to speak about some aspect of that subtopic. And so it gives you multiple entry points into the summit. You can talk about a specific speaker.
Oh my gosh. Tony Robbins is speaking. Oh my gosh. Jeff Walker speaking. Oh my gosh, Matt McWilliams. Okay, maybe not that one, but you know, like you can talk about those things, right? Then you can send an email about the virtual summit as a Whole. So you got one about a specific speaker, then one about the summit, like how amazing the whole thing is.
Then another one’s about a specific topic. Maybe another one is about a specific nugget that one speaker shared. Debbie Steinberg Kis is doing this with hers. She posted on Facebook the other day. We’re coaching her on running her summit in our your affiliate launch coach program. And I saw it on Facebook and it was just like, dads, watch this one quick tip. And it was like a, I don’t know if you saw that, Robbie. It was maybe a four minute video. That’s something. As an affiliate you can be like, hey, this one tip for dads. And you can use that as an angle to promote him.
Robbie :And that’s a sell takeaway too, which I just love. It’s like as you’re promoting it, you’re giving while you’re promoting another give. So like you had mentioned, like you’re the hero to your audience. Yeah, the double give. It’s a good feeling to be able to share those wins, especially when it’s a nugget that they can have a quick win on their own.
Matt :Now that’s super powerful. So you’ve got these multiple entry points. This is getting into the tips. But one of the tips here would be pick three or four speakers that maybe you have a personal connection with, meaning you might even know them.
Maybe you used to work with them or you were a client of theirs or they were a client of yours or you read their book, you know, you took their course. You, you watched them on Oprah seven years ago and it changed your life. Like, and send an email specifically talking about that speaker. So you get to get personal. You get to help your audience see why this virtual summit is perfect for them to attend. So that’s reason number three. Reason number four is you can connect with the speakers. Many of the speakers of the summit are also going to be promoting it to their list.
That means they will most likely be in the affiliate Facebook group. Not all the time, but many times they will. This allows you to connect with some of the all stars in your industry. So like maybe you can get a podcast or get them on your podcast, right? Maybe you can get them to endorse a book. Maybe you can get them to come on your, you know, do a Facebook live with you. These are people you might have a hard time connecting with otherwise. But because you’re both supporting my summit, you’re able to connect in deeper ways.
Some of the people I think of, Daniella, Danielle, is going to be an insider profile. Why? Because I connected with her for her. Actually, this is. Oh, whoa, this gets really deep. Okay, check this out. We both promoted a summit that led to her promoting another summit for a client that made us quite a bit of money. Both being involved in that summit led to her reaching out to interview me to be on her summit, which exposed me to tens of thousands of people in her summit, which led to me getting to know her better, which led to me asking her to come do an insider profile.
And we’re going to do some other stuff together, partnerships together. All because we both were in a summit Facebook group together. So you can connect with these thought leaders, you can connect with these experts in the industry, could have a huge impact on your business going forward if you do that rightly.
Robbie :Now, not everybody has to do this whole summit ception thing, which you just talked about, right? Yeah. Summits within summits. It’s the Russian dolls of summits. Like, we don’t know. Not everybody has to do that. Instead, like, just connecting with these people in the Facebook group is oftentimes enough to just take that next step because you’re promoting them a lot of times directly and they appreciate that as well.
Matt :Yeah. I mean, here’s some tips on that real quick. You’re like, well, how do I connect with them? Number one, compliment them on their presentation. When their presentation goes live Tuesday morning, be the first one in the Facebook group to say, oh, my gosh, I just watched your presentation. Or if you got access to the speakers beforehand, which, you know, you should, so you can use them in your marketing. Oh, my gosh, I just watched your, you know, Robbie Miles, I just watched your presentation on how to use nozbe.
You know how to use nozbe for task management. It was so good. Well, then Robbie’s like, that’s Joe Smith. I kind of like Joe now. He was complimentary. You know, little things like that. If Robbie’s in the Facebook group, you know, he’s a speaker and he posts something and says, my audience is loving this summit, just comment and say, mine too. Robbie, isn’t this thing awesome? Just interact with people, right? Be a human freaking being with them. It’s not. It’s not rocket science, but the little complimentary thing, that is one that is a little tactical there.
So the fifth reason why the top promoters get invited to speak at the next one. All right, I will tell you right now, and this is not achievable for everyone where you may be at. If you promote a virtual summit you’re one of the top promoters and I’m just mean like you’re one of the top two or three non speaker affiliates. Very likely you’re going to be asked to speak at the next one.
Very likely. And if you’re not, you can certainly approach them about speaking because now you have some leverage. Like I remember when I think of leverage, I think of 2014 probably when I promoted Michael Hyatt’s Five Days to your best year ever. And I promoted the year before my very first affiliate promo made $588.
Many of you know that story. Well, I was his 34th largest affiliate. Well, about a week before, I don’t know, a month before the launch, I said, hey, can I interview Michael? And his assistant kindly responded back and said no, Michael doesn’t have time. Well, fast forward about three days into the launch and I’m in like sixth place. And I messaged a friend of mine. I said, so here’s the deal. Michael Hyde, originally his assistant said, no, I’m a six place affiliate. How do I go about this? Because I think I have leverage now. It’s a different conversation. And sure enough, he had time. You know, he found the time.
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And she, this friend of mine, she gave me some really good advice. She just said she didn’t come into it from, like a cocky standpoint. I wasn’t planning on it, but just, hey, it looks like my audience is really responding to this. I think they’ll respond even more if I can get Michael on the podcast. And so the other thing is speaking at a virtual summit. If you can get that, if you can turn this into a speaking gig, it’s a great way to get in front of all the people as a part of that summit. And so if you’re one of the top affiliates, you’ll likely get the opportunity to speak at the next summit. And even if you don’t, then ask them.
I mean, you don’t have to be a jerk about it. Don’t be like, well, I’m not going to promote you anymore. No, just say, hey, I’d really love to promote this again to my audience next year or six months from now, but I know I’ll do even better if I’m actually a speaker. And here’s what I can contribute, here’s what I can share.
Robbie :I was just going to say I was going to ask about this because, like, we’re talking about give, give, give, give, give, give. Now you put me on mute. Whatever. Um, but this. Give, give. How do you actually make any money in a virtual summit?
Matt :Yeah, so the upsells. Okay, so you’re probably thinking like, okay, wait, I’m promoting a free event. How do I make any money? Well, here’s the thing. They’re going to have upsells. So typically, the path that we recommend is the initial upsell is immediate access to all the presentations. Now, if you’re doing it live, that’s not possible. But if they’re pre recorded, you get immediate access to all the presentations.
You can watch them on your own time, and you have lifetime access. Whereas during the summit, typically we like to expire them after 24 or 48 hours. So you have 24 to 48 hours to watch them for free, then they’re gone. So you get lifetime access immediately to all of the presentations, plus a couple of other bonuses. We call that an all access pass. All right, and so they can decline those and get all the valuable content for free.
That’s totally awesome. They have that opportunity. We’ll find anywhere between 3 and 6% will upsell like that immediately. Typically we’ll value that all access pass between 97 and 297, just depending upon the industry and the, the depth of it. But we’ll offer it for between as low as, or as much as 75% off. Typically won’t go 75% off on a, on like a $97 one. That’s 25 bucks. It’s kind of cheap, but not a 97. We’ll go down to like 47. On a 297, we might go down to 97. So that’s $200 off the eventual price, you know, two thirds off. And so they’ll get, like I said, all the interviews, maybe some other resources, transcripts, audio recordings, you know, things like that that they don’t get in the regular summit.
So that’s the initial upsell that’s valuable if you’re running the summit. That’s valuable because your affiliates are seeing immediate revenue come in. So it’s like if I send a thousand people, you know, and I convert half of them into registering and then I convert 5% of those, you know, it’s $100 all access pass. I’ll make $2,500 like that. Sending a free thing. That’s pretty cool. There’ll be some other backend offers as well, a related course, other products. Again, these upsells not only provide insane amounts of value, but they also allow you the opportunity to make some commissions. And so one of the things that I would encourage you to do, speaking of bonuses, this wasn’t even on our list. Robbie, create a bonus that you can offer for people who register for the summit. And here’s a very simple one you can do that requires no work on the front end.
Let’s just say that the new summit interviews, let’s say there’s five a day for five days. Just that’s what Debbie, you know, one of our clients is doing. So we’ll just use her as an example. They’re released every day at 9:00am Eastern Time, every night at 8:00′, clock, 9:00′, clock, whatever, because hers is a parenting summit.
So nighttime’s going to work best. We’ll say 9 o’, clock, maybe even 10 o’ clock Eastern. Every night at 10 o’, clock, you are going to gather with the people that you referred in a private Facebook group, talk about the speakers and the lessons that day. And here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to pull out your journal and you’re going to say, here are the top five things I learned. What did you learn? Share them. In the chat. What were some of the big takeaways? Maybe bring on some people. Maybe do it on Zoom. Maybe do it on a Facebook group. Just do it on Zoom.
Robbie :I’ve seen people do it before just in like a Google document where they’ll have everybody share their takeaways.
Matt :Yeah, even that simple. I mean, there’s one where you don’t even have to like, you don’t even have to commit to putting makeup on. Do it on Clubhouse. I mean, again, the limit to that right now would be that it’s iOS only. But if you don’t want to make yourself up and look pretty, I can tell you right now, I don’t want to do these at 10 o’ clock at night because I usually have taken the dog out in the cold and my hair’s standing up like six different ways and I’ll probably be wearing a beanie and nobody’s really ever seen me publicly wearing a beanie.
So that’s the reason. Yeah, there’s no reason for that. I don’t wear them in summer. At least I’m not that guy. Or vests. One of my favorite quotes of all time is I don’t get vests. What is it, winter on your torso and summer on your arms?
Robbie :Sorry, I’m from the Pacific Northwest. Vests are a thing up here.
Matt :You get a lifetime supply of vests the moment you’re born. Right. You get one for every three month stage of your life. You come out of the womb and the states of Washington, Oregon, Montana and Idaho hand you an 18 year supply of vest with backups that you can purchase if one of them should tear. Where are we going with that? I don’t even know.
Robbie :So we’re talking about bonuses for people who opt in? Yeah.
Matt :Yeah, so do that. That’s a super good, super awesome way to just encourage people and again turn these into events. That’s the big thing about these summits from a practical standpoint. Some promotional tips here. Number one, don’t start more than about 10 days before promoting. Preferably really seven.
When we teach people how to run a summit, we have what we call our 7, 10, 4 formula. The reason for this is it works. There’s a little flexibility. I’ll explain it here. That’s seven days of promotion, 10 days of summit, four days of the upsell at the end Promoting the higher ticket item. So that would be seven days of promotion, then ten days of the actual summit, then four days of promoting your thousand dollar two thousand course or promoting your mastermind, or promoting whatever it is. You know, the bigger thing, that’s not the All Access pass that you’re selling.
So in that seven days, typically that seven days is when it’ll be like two thirds off or half off or 75% off. Whatever it is, the All Access Pass, then that’ll go through typically the first day of the summit. So now we’re within the 10. And then the next four days it’ll be a little bit less off. So if originally, let’s say it’s 297 and you drop down to 997, then it’ll go to 147. So there’s a deadline and then sometime. But right before the end of the summit, it’ll go up to 197 or even all the way up. So we teach that to people who are running summits that anything more than seven days, maybe upwards of ten days. Okay.
Anything more than that before the summit starts. And we just noticed that attendance and engagement drops precipitously between the time they, the longer the time between they registered and when they attended. Really the ideal window is about three days. Now. Here’s the problem though. If you wait until about three days before, it just shortens the amount of time you have to promote it.
So we found that seven days is kind of the ideal time to start. That’ll look like an email seven days before, an email probably to unopened, five days before, an email to everyone about three days before, an email the day before and an email the day of. And you find the different things like we talked about, maybe at the beginning you promote the whole summit and then the next one you’re promoting a specific speaker.
I’m so excited that so and so speaking. Here’s what I learned from so and so. Then three days before, you’re talking about a theme, oh my gosh, you have to attend the summit on day two, they’re going to be talking all about, you know, supplements, you know, if it’s a fitness summit or something. And then the day before, it’s really more focused on like a specific theme or a specific speaker, but also with an element of scarcity. And then the day of, it’s like, hey, this summit starts today. Here’s what you’re going to get. Sign up here. Boom, got to go. You know, like it’s super quick.
There’s only so many ways you can say it’s today. We do recommend if you’re really serious one after the first day. So it can be like early morning of day two of the summit or the night of day one and you just talk about how amazing day one was. Here’s who spoke, blah blah blah. You still have a chance to go watch their presentations for free if you register now and you’ll be registered for the rest of the summit where all these people are speaking. We found that converts really well too. So that’s what a promotional plan looks like. There’s second tip and I sort of just touched on this.
But at least two of your emails should be about a specific theme or a specific speaker. Get really granular with your promotions. Again, it can’t just be like I said earlier, Buy the book. Buy the book. Buy the book. Attend the summit. Attend the summit. Attend the summit. You know, that gets old. Find some different angles. If you can get access to some of the recordings, say that say, hey, I got access to the recording of Robbie Miles speaking about productivity. And he talks about this nozbe. And if you’ve ever been confused by Nozbe, Robbie will clear it all up in this in 30 minutes. He’s the most amazing speaker I’ve ever heard on this topic. I don’t know that being the most amazing speaker on Nozbe is much of a compliment. I mean, I don’t know.
Robbie :I mean, they’ve only got 700,000 users, so.
Matt :Okay, I guess it is, but. But it’s like being the coolest Dungeons and Dragons player in high school, right? You know, now it’s like it’s actually like nerd culture. To quote what’s his name from Parks and Recreation, Ben. You know, he’s like, dude, nerd culture’s gone mainstream, man. When I was growing up, we made fun of the D and D kids. Now I know a lot of them and they’re actually pretty cool, so. And then last big tip here is again, focus on the fact that it’s a give to your audience. Don’t talk about the All Access Pass. Don’t even mention it in your promotion. Just focus on getting opt ins.
Focus on getting people to the registration page. They’ll see the value and they’ll want to register. Make it clear, you know who it’s for and who it’s not for. So if this, you know, we’ll go back to Debbie’s, you know, as an example. Hers is the Brighton quirky. What is it called? The bright and quirky child. I’m going to look up the actual name of the summit.
I’m not even sure, but it’s for bright and quirky kids. In other words, these are kids with. Well, we’ll use the terms that we use in the world. Even though she doesn’t like them, these are kids who are super intelligent, highly intelligent, typically their parents, I mean, like, they’re like Professors and like CEOs in Silicon Valley type people. Right? But their kids are. Have adhd, they’re on the autism spectrum. They have. What’s the thing with, like, they have sensitivity to.
Robbie :Yeah. Sensory disorders. Sensory disorder,
Matt :yeah. Our daughter has a friend who’s like that. Like, she cannot go to Chuck E. Cheese for more than 20 minutes. Either can I, for that matter. I can’t believe I would have sensory disorder. And I can’t stand that place for more than about a half hour. It’s really ironic when I go, though, and Chucky and I are wearing the same shoes. Red checks.
Robbie :Not a fan of the child casino, huh?
Matt :Yeah, that’s exactly what it is. Child casino with equally crappy food and so where were we going with that? Oh, yeah. And so hers is about bright and quirky kids. So really play in to what that means and who that helps. If your child is A, B, C, D, E, F and G, this summit is for you.
If you are, I don’t know, like whatever. It’s not. If you think your child’s perfectly normal or he’s not that intelligent, you know, then don’t, you know, don’t attend this. No. If you’re a dad who blank. If you’re a mom who Blake. If you’re a busy executive who like start talking about that in the copy and get people interested in this. Again, highlight specific speakers and what they talk about.
Don’t just say, and Marshall Smith is delivering a talk about how dads can communicate better with their children. No, like, talk about, like. Marshall Smith is sharing a talk entitled how dads can communicate better with their children. And he shares five specific questions that you should ask your teenager at least once a week. Like, I gotta know. If I have a teenager, I gotta know what are those questions? You know, like there’s that element of mystery. And so there’s some things like that that you can do in your copy that really get them excited to attend.
So just focus on the free. Don’t talk about the All Access pass. You’ll make money through their funnels if they’re doing them right. So definitely find some virtual summits to promote. If you’re looking for some good ones, we’ve got some. You know, we recommend Debbie’s for example. We’ve got other clients who run virtual summits, so. And a lot of our friends. So just reach out to us and I’ll be happy to recommend some. So Robby, any last words from you about promoting virtual summits as a non speaker affiliate?
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Robbie :I think one of the things to point out is that it can be really fun to kind of get caught up in. Like there’s a certain momentum that gathers around the speakers and the virtual conference or whatever you want to call it. And so. So let yourself get caught up in that a little bit and watch the videos, enjoy them yourself. And just having those conversations with people, it can drive out some of the monotony of everyday life too. And the marketing aspects of it. Like you can actually enjoy what you’re doing.
Matt :Yeah, I have a hard time with this because, you know, like everybody, I’m busy. But make some time to participate in that in that affiliate group and the. Which again, they usually lump the speakers and the affiliates together and have some fun. In there, like I said, connect with those people. You can get a lot of value out of these things. Connect with your audience, attend some of the stuff if you can, you know, like I said, share your takeaways and create a pop up Facebook group or a zoom room that you’re just going to meet in every night to discuss some of the lessons.
It doesn’t have to be a 45 minute thing, could be a 2, 20 minute quick Zoom room and just say that I’m going to jump on for 20 minutes, I’m going to share my biggest takeaways from the day and I’d love to hear a few of yours. And like you said Robbie, we’ll put them into a Google Drive doc for you as well, you know, or a PDF that will will make that bonus by the way. And that, that’s the one part where you can then say and by the way guys, if you missed anything and you didn’t notice, there’s a link to to get the All Access pass.
Make sure if you guys want to have lifetime access to this stuff, Debbie’s offering. Boom boom, boom, boom boom. So go check that out. And you just made a 30 second pitch to a very targeted audience, not the people who haven’t opted in yet. A 30 second pitch for the All Access pass and you made it. There’s value in that. So these are some things you can do to increase your sales as well. So I hope you enjoyed that lesson there.
I would love to hear from you. What was your biggest takeaway? What was your biggest lesson from this episode today? You can text me anytime at 260-217-4619 as always, again you can text me anytime about anything else as well. So 260-217-4619 also I’ve got links to everything that we talked about in the show. Notes the Virtual Summit Swipe mattmcwams.com Virtual Swipe we got the swipe files book, we got got links to your affiliate launch coach@your affiliatelaunchcoach.com we’ve got all of that. And lastly, make sure you hit subscribe as always if you haven’t yet so you don’t miss the next episode. It’s going to be a good one. I’ll see you then.
See you soon.
The post How Affiliates Can Win Big with Virtual Summits (Even if You Aren’t Speaking) appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.
You got into affiliate management because you love it. You believe in what you’re doing. You love seeing affiliates succeed. But right now? You’re running on fumes. You’ve got 47 different things on your plate, affiliates texting you at all hours, and it feels like every day brings three new fires to put out. Sound familiar?
Look, if you’ve ever caught yourself thinking “”I can’t keep doing this,”” you’re not broken. You’re just burned out. And that’s exactly what we’re talking about today. This episode is your survival guide for affiliate manager burnout…what it really looks like, why it happens, and most importantly, what to do about it. Because here’s the thing…you don’t have to choose between loving your job and actually having a life.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyLessons from a Record-Breaking Affiliate Launch
Avoid These 5 Big Mistakes When Recruiting Affiliates
AI for Affiliates: What’s Working Today (Part 4)
Even More Ways Smart Affiliates Are Using AI to Win (Part 3)
Smart Affiliate Moves: Advanced AI Tactics You Can Use Too (Part 2)
The Affiliate Manager’s Burnout Survival Guid
You started an affiliate program. You got into affiliate management because you love it. You believe in what you’re doing. You love seeing affiliates succeed. But right now, you’re running on fumes. You got 47 different things on your plate. You got affiliates texting you at all hours. It feels like every day brings three new fires to put out.
Sound familiar? Look, if you’ve ever caught yourself thinking, I can’t keep doing this, you’re not broken, you’re just burned out. And that’s exactly what we’re talking about today. This episode is your survival guide for affiliate manager burnout. What it really looks like, why it happens, and most importantly, what to do about it. Because here’s the thing, you don’t have to choose between loving your job and actually having a life.
Let’s get started. So we’re talking about something different today. Something important, something that I have been asked repeatedly to discuss. I would say I’ve been asked since I got asked a little bit pre pandemic, I’d say maybe once a quarter, you know, four or five times a year, somebody would say like this, I think this would be a really good episode. I’m like, okay, well, you know, four or five times a year is not really a lot.
Like there are some episodes I’ve done where I got asked, you know, 10 times in a week and a half, you know, basically every day. And there’s others where, you know, I’m asked five, six times a month consistently. This wasn’t something I was asked a ton about pre pandemic, but I was asked and so it was kind of on my radar. And then during the pandemic, it really started to increase. And interestingly enough, over the last two years, it’s really ramped up. And I get asked this by people who are full time affiliate managers is what they do for a living is nothing but affiliate management. But also people who are doing an affiliate program as part of their job or they’re a small business owner and affiliate management started as something they did an hour a day.
And as the program grew, it became two hours a day, three hours a day. And this is what happened to me. When I started my first affiliate program, and I’ve shared this story many times, but as we grew it from scratch and I was spending like an hour a day, you know, I was young and I was working 12 hours a day on other stuff.
So what the heck, what’s an extra hour a day? What’s a 13th hour a day? Six, seven days a week at that point as we were starting our business. But all of a sudden, you know, six months later, we’re doing, you know, 200, 225,000amonth.
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And I realized I was doing it like four hours a day. And my other stuff wasn’t slowing down. I was still running the sales department, I was still running the marketing, I was still managing our team, I was still running operations. All of a sudden I’m like, I’m working 15 hours a day. And you know, when we first started, I was working like six days a week and then on Sundays I’d work, you know, a couple of hours. Now all of a sudden I was working 10, 12 hours on Sundays and I’m like, I, I can’t keep this up. And then as it grew and grew and it got to half a million dollars, I had to let some other stuff go. But I was still, still working 15 hours a day. And then all of a sudden, like it was truly a full time and full time and a half job. And finally we were able to hire some people, you know, to help me out. But the thing is like burnout. It doesn’t, it doesn’t always hit like a lightning bolt, like my story.
It creeps in slowly. It starts with, maybe you don’t normally check slack at dinner, but now you are. And then you’re doing a few emails in bed. Yeah, just a few. I’m going to just spend 10 minutes. And we’ve all been there. To be clear, there are times where that’s okay. When you’re running your annual Launch and for 10 days, you’re working 16 hours a day, that’s acceptable. And we all have seasons where it’s like, okay, this four week sprint here, it’s Q4, this is 50, 60% of our annual revenue. And so for these four weeks, I’m going to be working extra. And I’ve talked about this before.
I communicate to my family that daddy is going to be busy for a while and want to let you know that. Right. But it starts happening with regularity. It’s not just your busy month. It’s not just the once or twice a year launch. It’s not just because this week, for the first time in three years, something blew up and I’ve got to work some extra hours. It gets to the point where you’re answering the same affiliate questions over and over again. It gets to the point where you can’t remember the last time you did something proactive instead of reacting to a hundred things at once. That’s the problem is when you’re burnt out, when you reach this point, you no longer proactive, you are only reactive. And so if you’ve ever been in a position where you feel guilty taking a full weekend off, that’s a problem.
If instead of celebrating that you got a new affiliate, it’s just more work, that’s a problem. If you’re always on but you’re never caught up, that’s a problem. If any of those sound familiar, I first want to encourage you, okay? I want to first encourage you. That’s not weakness, that is being human. You’re simply stretched too thin. So let’s say the quiet part out loud, right? About affiliate management. Yeah. You can do it in an hour a day and you can build a successful affiliate program an hour. To have talked about that.
I’m not saying you’re going to build a six figure affiliate program in an hour a day, because you know you’re not. But you can build something pretty good in an hour a day. But I’m going to tell you the quiet part out loud. And that is this job is hard and no one tells you how to survive it. There’s a thing in our culture that I believe in. I believe in hustle. I believe in working hard. I believe in working focused. I believe, for example, when I coach my soccer teams, I want them to be exhausted. I told them yesterday at practice, you guys look great. About halfway through. Why?
Because they were bent over in dripping sweat and it wasn’t a particularly warm day. It was like 80 degrees, you know, but they were drenched. Why is that good? Because in practice for those two hours, we are going to work hard so that we can be good in games. That’s not what I’m talking about. There’s this mythology that you’re lazy for needing rest. You’re not taking rest is smart. Okay? You don’t owe anyone 24, 7 access just because you care. Alright? Hustles. Hustling is not the same as being effective.
Your value is not in how fast you respond, it’s in how well you lead your affiliates. So rest is part of the job. Yes. There is a time when speed is critical. That busy two weeks, that busy. Three weeks, that busy launch. Speed is important in a 14 day launch when you really are doing the, you know, you’re working 13, 14 hours. And I’ve done episodes on how to manage that, by the way. I’ve, I’ve done those episodes where I talk about how to manage that and not burn out in that short period of time. I’ll give you the super quick synopsis of that.
Basically it’s to, to block your time and to work for like two, two and a half hours, but then take a break and I talk about how when I’m in a really busy season and like we’re doing a busy launch and it’s 14 days of go, go, go, go, go, I work, you know, get up and I’ll start working at 7:30 and then I’ll work till 9:30 or 10 and then I’ll do my workout. I won’t check email for that hour, hour and a half. And that’s okay. If somebody has to wait 47 minutes to get a response from me, that that’s okay, that’s acceptable.
They can’t wait 24 hours. Not during a launch, not during the busy season. And then, you know, I’ll work for like another hour and a half, two hours, I’ll eat some lunch, maybe go for a quick walk, then I’ll work for. And I’ll do that throughout the day, basically the whole day. But again, your value is not normally 320 days out of the year, 340 days out of the year. It’s not in how fast you respond, it’s how well you leave. Rest is a part of the job. Boundaries are a part of the job.
They are a strategy. You’re not a robot, right? You cannot go 24, 7, 365 and nobody talks about that. It’s hard when you’re building a big affiliate program. It is hard. It’s really easy to get burned out. And so we hear burnout and we think, okay, that’s mental health. Burnout is mental health. And it is. I am not here to talk about your mental health. I am not qualified. Like, yes, I majored in psychology for two whole years in college. Yippee. I know a little bit more about mental health than the average person, but that’s about as far as it goes. I’m talking about how it impacts your program. Affiliates can feel when you’re disengaged.
So can your boss, by the way, if you have one, right? The growth slows, the communication slows. Like I said earlier. You get reactive. You miss opportunities. You don’t do as many of the fun things as you did. And I’ve been there, done that. I have been there, done that. With pretty much everything that I’ve reached about the three year point in, it’s no surprise that that’s when most affiliate managers burn out is in the third year. And they need to know how to overcome that burnout because again, it’s going to affect the bottom line. So sometimes the best thing you can do, not during that busy time, not during that launch, but sometimes the best thing you can. I’ll take that back.
Sometimes the best thing you can do during that launch is to take an hour break or two hour break. But sometimes the best thing you can do overall is to take the weekend off, to take a three day weekend, to take a full week off periodically. And so we’re going to talk about how to do that here. Some of the strategies for burnout survival. I did a lot of research for this and if this sounds like, you know, it’s a little bit of a personal episode, that’s because it is. It’s the stuff that I went through. I’ve been doing this for 20 years. So newsflash, I’ve been through this about five or six times where I was burned out.
The very first time was that first affiliate program that I mentioned where I just got to the point where I could not handle everything that I had going on in the company. I was one of the founders of the company, so I was on the executive board and all of a sudden, you know, I managed a team of 15 total people along with a like the three of us managing a team of over 50 and I was managing quality control and our programmers and our. I was just in the affiliate program and I was running operations and it was too much. I was just, I was overwhelmed and it felt like there just no day was different than the previous day. And so here’s what happened. Just both mentally and physically, emotionally, but also in this, I don’t know how else to say this, but in a spiritual sense of my connection to the company and
the mission that I had. Because I started off, we were on mission and by about year two and a half ish, every day felt the same. And so I went from, you know, operating system, say at a, at a level in the mid-90s to the next month I was operating in a 93. A couple weeks later I was in a 91 and then a 90. And all of a sudden I realized like I was just coming in every day and operating in the low 70s. That’s not acceptable to me. I’m a high performer. That’s how I identify as a high performer.
So operating at, at a what amounts to a C, a low C in terms of a grade level was not acceptable to me. And the thing is, as we’ll talk about here in a second, I would have been better served taking some time off to come back in those night, you know, that 95, 97, 98 range. So instead of my team, my company, my, my partners, my affiliates getting everyday Matt at a lower and lower level and the already in the low 70s, trending towards the mid 60s, trending towards a failing grade, I’d have been better off getting just taking some time off and coming back and being at close to 100%. I mean just think about it mathematically, which of the following is a better grade? You know, if you make a 65 on five papers or if maybe you skip a paper, you know, you skip a test, but you make 100 or 95 on the other four, you’re going to make a better grade.
Now I’m not suggesting you skip tests, you know, that’s not the point. So let’s talk about some of the strategies. These are strategies that I’ve used, strategies that I found in some of my research as I talk to other affiliate managers and Duncan just kind of to like overall burnout stuff as well. Some of these things are things like I said, I have used, but some of these are also things that I wish that I had used and will be using in the future because you know what? I’m gonna hit that point again, even though I’m better about not getting to that point. So here are 10 things, 10 moves you can make right now to reclaim the energy and stay, stay in this game for the long term.
That’s the point here. So number one, set real working hours. Real work. I don’t care if you’re an agency owner running someone’s affiliate program. You’re the boss, you’re, you know, you’re an employee. I want you to set real working hours and protect them, block them off, communicate them to affiliates and enforce them. So for me, you know, my working hours, they’re in the, basically in the 8 to 6 range. So I might be done at 5:30 some days for soccer or even 5:15, I might not start till 8:15, but I’m not working outside of 8 to 6.
You’re not a 911 operator, right? Nobody is going to die if you don’t get back to them right away. You’re not on call every hour of every day. So again, there’s exceptions to the rule that you plan for. The exceptions you Know, again, big launch, big promo, busiest time of the year, where we plan for that. And so for me what that means is, you know, I’ve run, I’ve run $50 million launches, right? I know going into it, I’m just going to make up the dates here. August 1st to August 15th, it’s going to be unbelievably busy. And during that time I’m going to be working 13 hours a day, all 14 days. So what do I do in advance of that? Well, the week before is also pretty busy. I don’t need to be like 13 hours a day and I can probably take off like a day, a full day and recharge the batteries and I might work eight or nine hours to get ready for that week and I’ll do that.
But 10, 12 days before, I like to take a four day vacation. And I, you know, just depending upon how everything falls, I take, you know, like a Friday through Monday off. And my family and I just enjoy some downtime. No work, no checking of anything. If you need me for some reason, if the business catches on, you know, the proverbial fire, text me and we’ll figure it out. But usually nobody needs me and I’m completely left alone and I get to recharge. And so when I come back the next day, I’m at 100.
By the end of that launch, I’m in the mid-70s. But the thing is, if I didn’t take those four days off, by the end of the launch, I would be in the 30s or 40s. It would be torture. So set those real working hours and protect them. All right, number two, very simple, practical thing here. Build a living FAQ for your affiliates. Here’s my rule. If you have answered it more than twice, it belongs in the faq.
Create a doc, you know, a page, create a video. Train affiliates to self serve and reduce that load. Again, if You’ve only got 30 affiliates, first of all, you’re not gonna be burned out. But when you reach the point where you got thousands of affiliates, as much as possible provide tools for them where they can get answers to those questions themselves. Same goes for a va. You’ve got a good va, they can answer most of these questions from your faq. So it takes a little bit of time on the front end. But I like to train my VAs when I’m in the 90s, not when I’m in the 70s. Because when I do it, when I’m in the 70s, I’m short. I don’t go into detail. But When I do it, when I’m in the 90s, I’m detailed with them and they don’t have questions.
So whether you’re training a VA to answer using the, you know, the FAQ, or you’re training affiliates to kind of self serve, build that faq. If you get it, if you get asked a question more than once, more than twice, create it as an faq. I mean, if you get asked like, you know, twice in the first day, well then go ahead and create an FAQ for that. Number three, automate as much as possible, especially onboarding.
All right, so create an email sequence. It’s going to look the same for most affiliates. Give them a welcome video, some PDFs, let new affiliates hit the ground running without you manually walking them through it. Again, early days, you manually walk them through it. That’s how you learn what to automate. But you start to notice, gosh, I’m saying the same thing about this. And so instead of having a 30 minute phone call with an affiliate where you spend 25 minutes on tactics, you have a 20 minute phone call where you spend 10 minutes getting to know them and building rapport.
So you get to do more of that and then you spend 10 minutes helping them with a few things and you say, listen, I’m going to send you a video that I did, you know, a couple months ago that’ll walk you through, blah, blah, blah, and you send them that video. So that’s 10 minutes less that you’re on the phone, but five minutes more rapport building and a lot less stress on you. All right, number four, batch, batch, batch. All right, batch as much as possible. It goes back to something I talked about when I talked about getting ready for those busy times. Big launch, big promo, busiest time of year. If you can do some of the work in advance, writing emails, recording videos, things like that, batch those. Okay, so for me, we’ve all heard of this, right? I try to theme my days. I have one day where I write all of the emails.
Now, does it end up being all of the emails? Are there literally only 52 days a year that I write emails? Of course not. I probably write emails 100 days out of the year. You know, maybe probably about a hundred is about how often I write an email. Well, how is that? Well, there’s going to be a lot of times throughout the year where something comes up and I have to add one. But let’s say that my goal for a client is to send three emails in a week and I have five clients, that’s 15 emails. If I write 10 of them on Monday, usually I write them the week.
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So for me it actually be Thursday. If I write 10 emails on Thursday, for the next week, I only have to write five the next week. So I leave space for things to come up and I try not to write in advance too many emails where I think, well, if this got moved back couple of days because something came up, would it be completely useless. In other words, I’m not going to pre write typically, you know, Memorial Day sale email more than a day or two in advance because then if something did happen where we, you know, something trumped the Memorial Day sale, which would be kind of a weird thing to happen. So this is not the greatest example.
Then that Memorial Day Salimille wrote, it’s completely wasted. Now I’ve mentioned before, like Affiliate Email Pro, the cool thing about Affiliate Email Pro is, okay, if I did waste it, I wasted all of 90 seconds creating that email because it makes it stupid easy to write these emails. And so definitely check that out.
I’ll put a link in the show notes. But either way, batch content. So have a day where you write emails. Have maybe another day where, you know, you spend on proactive reach outs and another day that’s all about recruiting and another day that’s all about like communicating with your, you know, your leadership or your client or whatever it is. So you theme the days.
Does that mean you theme all eight hours? No. Or nine hours or whatever? No, but you theme five, six of the hours. And so yeah, now that like writing those 10 emails takes me 25 minutes with, you know, maybe a half an hour with, you know, with Affiliate Email Pro, I don’t really have a day where that’s my theme. So it’s a little bit less relevant now. But as much as possible, batch things. So I do have an email like, you know, doing like Facebook posts in the Facebook groups for the affiliate programs. I want to do two of those a week. Those typically take about 15 minutes each.
Even with AI now because yeah, I’ll use, I’ll use affiliate email portal, write those because it also writes Facebook group messages. And I’ll write those, those messages and then I’ll create an image using AI, but then I have to schedule it in Facebook. You know, it takes 10 to 15 minutes each. And so that’s part of my, you know, email time now. And then I do some other stuff like, you know, what kind of emails I want to send in terms of recruiting emails and stuff like that. And yeah, it’s like in total it’s probably three hours that I spend doing that, but I do it pretty consistently on the same day every week and then I don’t have to worry about very much of it the rest of the week.
The most important thing here is just not to be bouncing around from task to task because it’s just not a way, it’s not healthy. All right, number five, if you are not your own boss and even if you are, set expectations with leadership, set expectations with your family, set expectations with your team members, let them know what you need to succeed.
You know, maybe it’s certain tools maybe you need, you know, if you’re an affiliate manager, I mean affiliate email pro is for example, is like 50 bucks a month. It’s not quite that much. I think you can, you know, it’s like 250 bucks a year. It’s pretty cheap. I would pay for it out of my own pocket if I were you. But why not ask them, hey, here’s a tool that is going to save me five hours a week that I can spend building relationships with affiliates.
You know, would you consider buying it for me if it’s, you know, if it’s a good camera to record videos for your affiliates, ask and like instead of trying to duct tape things together and record, you know, chinzy ones, maybe it’s another team member, maybe it’s hiring a part time assistant. Now again, you know, this is one of those things where if you hire overseas at say 10 bucks an hour, I mean, I’ve done it work. I’ve, when I was working for one company, I years ago I paid for a, paid 100 bucks a week out of my own pocket for an assistant because I couldn’t get one paid for by our company.
But it was worth, you know, $5,000 a year for me to have them do a bunch of the tasks that I didn’t want to do, wasn’t very good at and were a little bit slow and, you know, whatever for me. And it freed me up and it probably. I probably netted 15 to 25,000 doing that. So again, there might be an opportunity there for you to pay for it out of your own pocket. But why not ask first? Like, don’t wait until you’re drowning. Ask when you’re in the high 80s or low 90s. You know, ask like, hey, boss, I can already tell that this thing is taking longer than I expected. And here’s a tool that I believe will help me. Can I try it out? You know, can I get a trial? It’s 50 bucks a month or whatever. And try it out.
Number six. This is something, okay, this, this is one of those things that I’ve done since I think I started doing, like 2010. I think it was 2010, might have been 2009. Actually, it was 2000, late 2009. I would spend every day, and I still do it to this day takes 30 seconds. I review my wins, I review, I look back. So. So for me, I’ll tell you how I do it in a second. But this is the idea here is just to keep a running list of wins, big or small. Burnout. What?
Burnout. One things it does is it clouds our vision. It blurs the progress that we’ve made. So we want to celebrate what’s working so we can build on it. The other thing is it reminds us of how far we’ve come. It’s kind of like a friend of mine, Alan Thomas, you know, one of the reasons why his clients, he’s a weight loss coach, when they report in, they say, you know, here’s how much I’ve lost in the last seven days, the last 30 days. And like the last, you know, since the beginning. And sometimes you hit these plateaus and you’ve only lost, you know, somebody might have started off at 400 pounds and they’re down to 227, and they want to get down to 200, and they’ve only lost 1. 2 pounds in the last 30 days.
Okay. I can feel like, gosh, only lost 1. 2 pounds and 30. Like, oh, man, but you’ve lost 168 pounds since you started. And we look at that as a win, right? So what I do is I’ll just look at my list that I made. I write them down every day super quick again, 30 seconds, maybe a minute per day. How have I won in the last 24 hours? Oh, my gosh, these three things have happened and I’ve already forgotten two of them. I look at my wins from seven days ago, and I look at my wins from 30 days ago. That’s it. I just review.
You know what, that’s awesome. And that tends to help with burnout number seven. I’ve talked about tools but I mean I did a whole series on this use AI, like don’t be afraid of AI. Don’t be afraid of something like Affiliate Email Pro where it can literally just write the emails for you once you’ve trained it and it doesn’t take but half an hour. It’s Pre trained with 3,000 or 4,000, whatever we’re up to now of the best affiliate emails that have ever been sent.
But like just use it to write emails, do reports for your clients, you know, to answer FAQs. I have an ongoing chat. I think I mentioned this in that series six part series on using AI as an affiliate manager and one of the ones I talked about was I, you know I’ll write like here’s how this, here’s how, here’s how this affiliate, this affiliate asked me this question, here’s how I answered it.
Here was their follow up, here was my response. Here was their follow up, here’s my response and I haven’t heard back from them about it. I like a good follow up. Now could I write something? Yeah. Is it going to be the best? No. Can AI do better? Yeah. And does it take half as much time? Yeah. So I wrote a really killer follow up email to that affiliate and it took me two and a half minutes instead of ten. I have saved seven and a half minutes. If all I, if I save seven and a half minutes a day every day of the
week, that’s over half an hour that of my life. Half an hour over the course of 52 weeks. A year if I’m not mistaken is pretty much an entire work week and it takes the stress off of me. So come on, use AI. Go back, listen to that whole series again, six episodes on how I use AI to run affiliate programs and how you should be. So go listen for some ideas. Just start implementing them one at a time.
Don’t try to do, don’t get crazy. But if you implement one idea that saves you 30 minutes a week and then another idea that saves you 30 minutes a week and Then one that saves you 30 minutes a day. And another one, I mean, starts adding up. Like affiliate Email Pro is saving people four, five, six hours a week. Like people who run a lot of affiliate programs, like agency owners and stuff, saving them 10 hours a week. It’s crazy.
It’s just AI. So number eight is put think time on your calendar like it’s a meeting. One hour a week. I prefer midday Wednesday, right in the dead center of the week. I’m far enough into the week where I’ve had some stuff go wrong, but I’m not so far in a week where I can’t take this time and then act on it in the remainder of the week. And I put it on my calendar. It’s 4 to 5 every Wednesday, right?
Right now it’s 3:45 to 4:45. Because I’m in the middle of soccer season. So for the next like two months, it’s 3:45 to 4:45. Normally it’s 4 to 5. It’s on my calendar. No, my assistant knows we are not scheduling a meeting. Then if you want to schedule a phone call with me, well, you already know. Now don’t try to book it from. You know that time range, right? It’s not optional. And you want to take that time put on your calendar. This is like it’s a meeting. You are meeting with yourself and you are planning. And if here’s the deal, my rule, you’re done in 27 minutes. Then you just bought yourself. Don’t think that’s.
I got 33 minutes to check email. No, I would suggest going for a walk. I would suggest, you know, lying down or whatever, like rest. Because not only about burnout, but like, you meet with yourself for 27 minutes and you go for a walk, I guarantee you’ll think of something else. Whereas if you just jump right back into work, you have no time for margin there. Number nine, start saying no. Not every affiliate idea, not every thing that your boss comes to you with or a teammate comes to you with or an affiliate comes to you with is worth saying yes to. Practice saying not right now and mean it.
This is important. You, you know, you want to let them down easy. Not right now. That’s not a good idea for us right now. And then the final thing is, again, we all know these things, right? We know this. But are you doing it? Build a mastermind or a peer support circle or whatever you want to call it, right? I call them masterminds. If you’re looking for a good one, we have AM Club, you know, and it’s very, very simple. You’ve actually got access to me as well in AM Club, you know, and it’s just. We’ll just meet, and sometimes there’s just three of us, and we’ll talk and we’ll solve a few problems.
We’ll solve a problem or two. You know, if nothing else, you get your biggest problem solved every week. I mean, like, what a burden that is, like, to just unpack, right, and get it off your shoulders. And the thing is, like, everybody else has probably been there, you know, or at least one other person has been where you’re at right now, I think it’s from, like, Alcoholics Anonymous, where they talk about, like, you know, the two men, you know, walking by the pit, and, you know, the one guy’s down, or one guy’s down in the pit, and the other one gets down with him. He’s like, why’d you do that? And he goes, because I’ve been here, and I know the way out.
I mean, there’s not a whole lot I. You could go through that I haven’t been through. And what I haven’t been through, somebody else has been through. So get together with other affiliate managers if you’re looking for a group AM Club. I’ll put the. The. The link in the show notes and. But honestly, I mean, you can go find, you know, a couple other people and just meet once every, you know, week or month or two weeks or whatever. And it doesn’t have to be a big production. Sometimes. Sometimes we meet for 45 minutes and we’re done. Sometimes we go a full hour. You know, if we’re done after 45 minutes, we stop talking and end the zoom call and go about our lives. But again, if we’re done early, I always tell them, like, okay, take 15 minutes. Go for a walk. Think about what we just talked about.
Don’t just jump right into your next meeting or write an email or do any of that stuff. So, listen, you’re doing more than you think, all right? You. You’re holding the program together.
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There might be, I don’t know, hundreds, thousands of people, whatever, and no one builds something sustainable by burning themselves out. You can’t burn the candle on both ends, as they say. So I want you to take one of these ten things, just one. Give yourself permission to implement it this week, then we can do a second one next week.
So just pick one thing. It might be the last one we talked about starting a little Mastermind or joining AM Club. It might be getting affiliate email pro. It might be just setting your work hours and sticking to them for the first week, or building that faq or deciding like, you know, Monday’s the day that I’m going to spend or Tuesdays a day I’m going to spend writing emails so I can just kind of knock that out and not have them hanging over me all week.
I don’t know, putting, putting an hour on your calendar to meet with yourself. Just pick one thing, implement it this week, and then do the next thing the next week and so on. Because we need affiliate managers like we need good affiliate managers. This is becoming too big of an industry to have burnt out affiliate managers. So we need you rested, we need you. We need you on your A game. So you got this. You got this. All right, listen, if you got value out of this, make sure you share it with somebody who you think needs to hear this message.
If you’ve got questions about this or anything else, you can text me anytime at 260-217-4619. And lastly, make sure if you haven’t hit subscribe yet, that you do, because the next few episodes are gonna be good. I know I keep saying that because they are. So make sure you hit subscribe and I’ll see you in the next episode.
See you soon.
The post The Affiliate Manager’s Burnout Survival Guide appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.
###### You’ve been there, right? You spend weeks—or even months—finding the perfect affiliate, building the relationship, getting them excited to promote…and then…crickets. No traffic, no sales, no effort. So, what now? How do you turn those inactive affiliates into your top promoters? In this episode, I’m sharing the secrets to wake them up and get them in the game! You won’t want to miss this.
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Don’t make the same mistakes I’ve made with my affiliate programs. Learn my top 20 affiliate program mistakes…and how to avoid them!
Links Mentioned in this EpisodeAffiliate Activation Email Templates
How I Built a $1 Million a Month Affiliate Program In Only Two Years Without Any Connections or Credentials
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy7 Secrets of 7-Figure Affiliate Launches
Should You Approve or Decline an Affiliate? How to Decide
How to Communicate Better with Your Affiliates
Successful Affiliate Onboarding: How to Setup Your Affiliates to Win
How I Grew a Major Affiliate Program from $15M to $325M a Year (In Only 4 Years)
How to Activate Your Inactive Affiliates (And Make Them Lifelong Partners)I know the experience all too well. You work so hard to find a potential affiliate. You nurture the relationship, you get them to commit to promoting and then nothing. They don’t promote, they send no traffic and they make no sales. So what do you do? How do you activate those inactive affiliates, and in fact, how do you turn them into superstar promoters?
Well, this episode will show you how. Let’s get started. So I got this email from a guy. He said he has over 1000 affiliates in his affiliate program. Right. Got a really good product. The offer converts pretty well. Good start. He’s off to a great start. But he said only 42 of them have ever made a sale. Just less than 4% of the affiliates have ever made a sale.
I’m like, yikes. Like, we’ve had programs where we only had like 15%. Maybe it’s a big first promotion, maybe we’re only a couple months in, we might be down around the 13, 12% range, about 4%. That’s not good. So his question, of course was, how do I activate these inactive affiliates? And I mean, even at 15%, 20%, 25%, like we’ve been in the past or even north of that, that’s still a lot of inactive affiliates, a lot of people that we worked hard to get and we didn’t activate. No matter how awesome your affiliate program is, if you have more than a few dozen affiliates, you’re going to have some become inactive.
You can have the best commissions, the best conversions, you have the best offer, the best affiliate manager, all that stuff. But some of them just fall off the earth. So today I want to share the reasons why this happens. It’s important to understand why and then what to do about it. The question ultimately has two answers.
It really depends on whether your program is evergreen or if you’re doing a limited time launch. So if you’ve got an Evergreen promo, it’s available 24 7365 or kind of like I’ve talked about in past episodes, you’ve got what we call a hybrid evergreen wherever I, it’s available pretty much all year, but it’s typically in cycles, like you do a promo every three to five weeks, something like that. So it’s not a launch and it’s not evergreen. So it depends if it’s evergreen or if you’re doing a limited time launch. But first why do they become inactive in the first place? I’m going to talk about that first. Then I’m going to talk about why you need to activate them.
Don’t make the same mistakes I’ve made with my affiliate programs. Learn my top 20 affiliate program mistakes…and how to avoid them!
We consider an inactive affiliate to be anyone with less than three hits or one opt in by roughly day three. Okay. Sometimes we’ll do. If it’s a longer campaign, depending on exactly how long it is, we might extend that as far as day five. So why three? Why one, why three for hits and why one opt in?
Most people with only one to three hits or one opt in, they tested their link. So I don’t do zero. You can send one hit, and I’ll still consider you inactive. You can send one opt in, one lead, I will still consider you inactive. So the reason we do that is because that was probably a test. And so I’ll show you in a little bit when we reach out to them now, sometimes we’ll raise that three number to five or seven.
There’s no perfect number. I just figure most people aren’t testing their link more than three times. And so that’s why we do that. And so, depending upon the system you use, you just run a traffic report, it’ll show you exactly who is inactive. I know with some reports what we have to do is we have our master list of affiliates. So we’ve got our, let’s say 300 affiliates, right? And then we’ve got the list of their traffic, and we basically have to run it against Excel. And we take the ones that have zero hits through three hits, and we dedupe it. And then it takes like five minutes. It’s not that complicated. So that’s who’s inactive in a launch.
Inactive. In an evergreen program, there’s really two types of inactives. We got your inactives and your inactive inactives. So your inactive inactives are of. They’ve never sent traffic or, again, three, five hits or less. Maybe one or two leads. Zero sales like that. Is an inactive inactive, the second version of inactive. Sometimes they call them stagnant affiliates or dormant affiliates. There’s somebody who may, overall, they may have any number of hits and leads and possibly even sales.
They could have done $100,000 in 2021, and now in 2023, they’re completely inactive. They haven’t sent a sale in two years. They haven’t seen any traffic in 18 months. And so we’ll look at those as well. So typically we’ll run it for some period of time. Depending upon the program, it could be anywhere from as little as three months to as much as a year. And we’ll look at those periods of time for being inactive. So it’s not just the total. Now, if you’re on some funky system and there are some out there where, like, you don’t have access to reports by period of time, one of the things I recommend doing, and I’m not going to mention Kajabi here, but there I am an amazing. I’m just kidding. Their reporting is terrible.
There is no thing that says, like, show me how many hits or leads or sales this person has in a period of time. It’s total. Everything is total. So what we do when we have one client that’s on Kajabi is we basically go in and grab the stats every month. So now we can compare. And let’s just say this affiliate on January 1 had 200 hits, 50 opt ins and ten sales. And then in March, they have 300 hits, 75 opt ins and 15 sales. They’re active. Now, if we get to June and they still have whatever, I said, 375 and 15, now they’re inactive.
They’ve been inactive for 90 plus days. We need to do something to activate them. So that’s the who. Now, when do we reach out to inactive affiliates? Well, typically with Evergreen, we’re going to reach out roughly every quarter. We want to do this in a way.
We’re not doing it willy nilly and one off. If we do it every quarter, sometimes every two months, then we’re able to just hit a lot of people at once and really get into a rhythm with an evergreen program. So you might do it every month, depending upon the number of affiliates you have. If it’s a small number, you know, 50 to 100. I mean, you can do it every month in a launch.
Typically, launches last about an average of 15 days. Now they used to be a little bit longer, but now they’re about 15 days. We will reach out the day after the second day of pre launch content. So if it’s a PLF product launch, formula style launch, where you’ve got like maybe three days of a workshop or three videos and then a webinar, and that takes you through about day ten or eleven, and then you have five, six days of open cartae.
We will reach out the day after the second piece of content. So the day after the second workshop. So they’ve had time to promote the first one and a little bit of time to promote the second one, but not so much time that if we get them active that day or the next day, they don’t have time to promote the second piece of content. Now, for some reason, the calendar is a little funky and the second piece is. Or there’s just kind of weird timing.
We time that roughly around day three to day five, you know, so typically that second piece of content will drop. Maybe on the third day, we’ll reach out on the fourth day. So they’ve had basically no hits, no traffic again. Three in one, three hits and one opt in. But that’s basically nothing. So we balance that out, then we’ll reach out again.
This thing, we don’t just reach out. Once, we reach out again the day after the third piece of content, you still haven’t sent any traffic, basically. And again, we’ll talk about the messaging in a moment. We’ll reach out then, and then we reach out usually the day after open cart as well. This allows us to reach out three times, which is kind of a good balance between getting results and getting on their nerves. And so we reach out at different points and try to get them active. Now, if the promotion, you know, you can use your judgment there. If the promotion you’re running is different, if it’s a five day challenge, then we’re looking at, you want to get people registered before the challenge. So let’s just say starting about seven to ten days before we’ll reach out.
Let’s say we start the promo seven days before the challenge or summit or whatever, or the workshop even. There’s time before the challenge to promote. We will reach out after about three days. Usually we’ll do it mid to late afternoon on the third day. You’ve now had two and a half days to get active and you’re not. We want to reach out, and then we’ll reach out again, usually the morning of the 6th day, and then usually the day that the, like, the afternoon that the challenge starts. Like, hey, it’s not too late to join. It’s not too late to join. Come join us.
Stuff like that. So again, two, possibly three times, if you can. And don’t worry about the being annoying part. Kind of like said, it’s a balance. Don’t worry about being annoying. They can’t send you less traffic than they’re already sending you. Like, you can’t send us less traffic than your zero traffic, basically. So what if you get on their nerves? Who cares? But we do want to balance, you know, we don’t want to be like, every day, like, why are you active? Why are you active?
You know, that kind of stuff. So how do you reach out to inactive affiliates? The answer is very simple. You use any means necessary. Email, text, DM’s, voxer, Skype phone, smoke signals, carrier pigeons, like, whatever you can think of, you use. Now We typically use email.
It’s the easiest one, especially if you got a huge affiliate program I mentioned before, you know, 900 or 15,000. I mean, I can send 900 emails in 10 seconds using gmasks or something like that. So we’ll use that usually for that first one, and then I’ll take a look at it for the second one, and I’ll reach out and maybe identify, let’s say, 20 or 30 or 40 that we have other contact information for. We’re friends on Facebook, I’ll dm them, that kind of thing.
The key, over time you got to learn their preferred method of communication. So if they prefer text, use text. If they like chatting on Skype, you can do so much more with a 32nd Skype message and you can send them 15 emails. That’s why we keep tabs on everyone’s preferred methods of communication. We always keep that on hand. And I mean, I know for me like there are just people I know if I dm them, I’ll hear back from them in 2 hours. If I email them, it could be days. I’m the same way you text me, I’ll respond pretty quickly.
I can’t stand seeing that’s the only thing I see. I don’t have email. I don’t put email on my phone and I check email about once a day. Typically I check it four times a week. I’ll put it that way. I usually miss a day and I don’t get very many emails to me because most of them are handled by my assistant. So because of that I may could take 36,48 hours for me to respond to an email. Now our clients, we have a different way of communicating. My team, we communicate using slack. But my friends and people that I know very well text me, they don’t email me. So if you text me, I can’t stand seeing that I have an, I’ve got one right now. I got texted about ten minutes ago.
It’s driving me nuts. It’s like an OCD thing, right? I am getting, I’m like, you know, about ready to click on, pause the recording and go answer this text. I don’t even know what it’s about. It could be spam for all I know, but I have to respond to that text email. I’m like, I’ll get around to it whenever, so keep tabs on those preferred methods of communication.
All right, so that’s the how. What do we send to these inactive affiliates now? I’m going to share one of the most effective emails I have ever used to activate affiliates. All right, with a larger program. Like I mentioned, 95% of your communication is going to be via email.
So we’re going to focus on that, get you some ideas just to get you started. This was an email I first used about eight years ago during Jeff Goyne’s tribe writers affiliate launch. It was sent on day five of the launch to every affiliate who had three or less hits and one or less opt in. All right, I’m going to read this email to you real quick here. All right.
So the subject line was everything okay, first name. So I used their first name, but, you know, everything okay. Question mark. Hey, first name. Just check in to make sure everything was okay. I had you down to support Jeff’s tribe riders launch, but haven’t seen anything yet. There’s still plenty of time to join in.
The launch is going amazingly well, but it’s not too late for you to get started. Let me know how I can help. That’s what I’m here for. All the best, Matt. Now, there’s five elements here. All right. First of all, it grabs their attention.
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You know, if your name’s Tim and it’s everything okay, Tim, it stands out. Stands out. Secondly, it reminds them of a commitment. I say I had you down to support Jeff’s tribe writer’s launch, but I haven’t seen any activity yet. As Robert Cialdini, the book influence. Right.
My team and I just finished reading the revised edition. It’s the first time I’ve read that, but I’ve read the book overall, I think four or five times. Listened to it a few times as well. He says nothing is as powerful as the principle of commitment. We have a natural desire to do what we said we would do. Right. So I make sure to remind them of their commitment.
Hey, I had you down to support this promotion, but I haven’t seen anything yet. Now, a lot of people ask me like, isn’t that a bit of a guilt trip? And I’m like, yep, it is a little bit of a guilt trip, but it’s also going to make them and us a lot of money. So I don’t really care. The third thing it does is it encourages them twice. I say there is still time.
There’s still plenty of time to join in and plenty. I usually put in all caps and I say the launch is going amazingly well, but it’s not too late for you to get started and make sure to point out that there’s time, like day five when we said that there’s people might think it’s too late to join in. Oh, you’re a third of the way through.
No, I make sure to tell them that there’s still plenty of time, so there’s an encouragement in there. The fourth thing it has is social proof. People want to be a part of something successful. I make sure to point out that things are going great and I want them to be a part of it. It says in there, as I just said, the launch is going amazingly well. We did this with my book launch when we did activation campaign. We did it right on the heels of hitting some of the bestseller lists, the early bestseller lists.
And so we pointed out, like, the book’s already a bestseller. It’s already a bestseller. Don’t you want to be a part of promoting a bestseller? That’s social proof. People want to be a part of something successful, and that worked really, really well. We only had something like 110 inactive affiliates. We got, like, a third of them active just from that.
Just because we’re like, hey, we’re a bestseller. Go promote. And fifth, it offers help. You know, let me know how I can help. That’s what I’m here for, is how the email ends. Make sure that you are clear that you are there to answer questions and hold their hand if needed, be able and willing to jump on a call with them to give them tips, strategize with them and all that.
I’ve probably sent, I don’t know, 2300 different versions of activation emails. I’ve been doing this for 18 years now here in a couple months, and this is the one that worked the best. Now, I’ve also cataloged, we’ve got some others that work amazingly well and they are available. We open them up. I mentioned this in that episode back in the day for the new year’s one that we made these available. So if you want to get all of my best activation email templates, all right, go to madmcwilliams. com activate. Mammothwilliams.com activate.
We will put that in the show notes. Go there and you can grab all of the templates. All right, I gave you the best one here, but there’s so many more. There’s scenario based like that’s one that works, but it’s not going to work for everybody because it might not be relevant and you can only use that one once. The everything okay and the guild trip kind of thing.
You can use that one time. What do you do on the next one? Well, there’s plenty more templates, so madmcwames.com activate to get those templates. Also, we’ve got a training coming up soon. Talked about it last week how I built the million dollar a month affiliate program in only two years without any connections or credentials. So none of the like I’m gonna show you how to do this if you literally know no one Madmcwames. com million a month.
That’s where to go for that. We’ll put that in the show notes as well. That’s gonna be a live training, so you wanna make sure you get registered for that. So there you have it. How to turn your inactive affiliates into rockstars into some of your best affiliates I’d love to hear from you what your biggest takeaway from this is. What are you going to do with this information? Text me anytime.260-217-4619
We’ve got links to everything in the show notes that we talked about today. And lastly, make sure you hit subscribe because you do not want to miss the next episode. I want to share with you 15 of the biggest affiliate program challenges and how to solve them. That’s a big thing. These are challenges. I’ve faced every one of these 15, and almost everybody I coach has faced every one of these 15. Every client we’ve got has faced every single one of these 15. We’re going to talk about what they are and how to solve them. So make sure you join us for the next episode. Hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. I’ll see you then..
See you soon.
The post How to Activate Your Inactive Affiliates (And Make Them Lifelong Partners) appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### Today, I’m lifting the curtain on some of the most coveted secrets in the affiliate marketing world: the seven strategies that I’ve used to run seven-figure launches. These are the exact tactics that have taken five and six-figure launches and turned them into multi-million dollar successes. I’ve never shared some of these strategies before, so listen up!
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
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Links Mentioned in this EpisodeYour Affiliate Launch Coach
Avatar Creation Guide
Turn Your Passions Into Profits Book
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyShould You Approve or Decline an Affiliate? How to Decide
How to Communicate Better with Your Affiliates
Successful Affiliate Onboarding: How to Setup Your Affiliates to Win
How I Grew a Major Affiliate Program from $15M to $325M a Year (In Only 4 Years)
How to Create The Right Affiliate Commissions
7 Secrets of 7-Figure Affiliate LaunchesToday I am sharing some of the most coveted secrets in the affiliate marketing world. The seven strategies that I’ve used to run seven figure launches. Now, these are the exact tactics that have taken five and six figure launches and turned them into multimillion dollar successes. I have never shared some of these strategies before, so listen up. Let’s get started.
All right, if you’re listening to this, I assume that you want to know the secret of successful product launches. I have run, at last count, 68 product launches. I have studied hundreds of more. And today I’m going to share the secret weapons behind the biggest launches that I’ve seen, including those that we’ve run, that we’ve watched others run, friends have run, and I’m going to share what you can learn from them.
I’m going to share a few tips and strategies that I’ve picked out over the years about running these seven and even eight figure product launches. And some of these I’ve never really shared before. So take good notes. The secret weapons of successful product launches I’m going to show you what separates, this is the big thing is like what separates those five, even six figure launches.
Like the half million dollar launch is from the seven and eight figure ones. Its probably not what you think. A few episodes ago, two, three episodes ago, I did an episode. I shared how I took a program from $15 million to $325 million a year. This is an affiliate program, a big affiliate program. Took me about four years to do that.
That was all about Evergreen affiliate programs. Today im talking about launches, how to go from six to seven figures. Back in 2008, I did this big study and I verified it again in 2022. Same thing, found the exact same things. There was no difference between 2018 and 2022. And I looked at six figure launches and seven figure launches. Most importantly, I looked at the businesses that ran six figure launches.
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Then they ran a seven figure one. It’s kind of like good to great. If you’ve ever read the book good to great by Jim Collins, what he looks at is companies that went from, well, from good to great. You know, they went from, hey, maybe they’re returning an average of 50% better. I forget the exact criteria, but they’re returning better than the market average. And then they go to returning significantly better than the market average. Because here’s the thing. If you run a $700,000 launch. That is better than 99% of launches. But how do you go from a $700,000 launch to a $7 million launch?
What are the biggest differentiators? So we studied them and then we started putting them into practice with our clients, and here’s what we found. I’m going to share kind of the results of that saying. Now. Before I share that, though, actually, let me clarify what it is not, all right. It is not experience. It doesn’t take ten years to get to seven figures. People who’ve been in business a year have done massive launches. Our first guy that ever paid me money like a decade ago for a course or for my knowledge, meaning he wasn’t paying me to run his affiliate program. His first launch was $4.2 million, if I’m not mistaken.
It’s not list size. Now, that helps. There’s no doubt about it. If you have a 5000 person list size and somebody else has 100,000 people and you do everything else the same, the person with 100,000 will probably make more sales. They will probably make more money. It will be easier to do seven figures.
There’s no doubt about that. It’s not their qualifications or credentials. It’s nothing. The connections that you have, though, again, those help. If I know 50 people who have an average list size of 50,000 people who would make great affiliates, and you know none, I will probably do better than you. But does that disqualify you from having a seven figure launch?
No. So that’s not what we found. It was not their sales strategy. Again, if you have a better sales strategy, you will do better. It was not their ads. It was not how good they look on video or how good their copywriting is. It was not their social media following. It was not how long or short their launch was. Now launches are getting shorter. Just a side note, when we studied this back in 2015, the average launch, it was 17. 6 days, down to 17. 1. So a half a day shorter.
And now we’re down to 15 and a half. So just over two days shorter. But I’ve seen long ones succeed. I’ve seen three and a half week, four week launches succeed. I’ve seen really short ones, ten days succeed. So it’s not that. It’s not their reputation. It’s not whether they have a book or whether they’ve been on Oprah or been on major podcasts. It is none of those things. So what is it? What separates the six figure from the seven figure and the seven figure from the eight figure launches. Well, this is what the data shows. This is what the research shows. This was true in 2018.
We first did it. We found the exact same things in 2022. And guess what? They’re probably going to be true in 2025 and 2027. And unless some major thing happens, they’re probably going to be true a decade from now. So I have seven things and I’m going to put a number on them only for me because if I don’t put a number on them, I’ll forget where I’m at.
So I’m going to put a number on them. But when I say number one, that’s not necessarily number one ranked. I will highlight some of the key findings, though, as we go along. All right. The first thing they planned at least six months in advance, preferably much longer. When you have massive number of affiliates, and we’re talking about affiliate launches here, not just your internal stuff. When you have massive numbers of affiliates, you cannot run a launch like this in just a few weeks or months.
You do not want to be rushing at the last minute. I have been a part of launches where the talent, the team is writing copy the night before, the day of, and it’s stressful. We lose focus on customer interaction and doing things like Facebook lives with affiliates and we’re trying to get all this, our ducks in a row and we can’t do the things that are moving the needle. And so what we’re doing is we’re spending a lot of time on $10,000 needles instead of $50,000 needles. And you don’t get to seven figure on $10,000 needles. You get to seven figures on 50,000 75,000, $200,000 needles. And so I’ve been a part of that. That’s what six figure launches do.
Six figure launches do things last minute. Seven figure and eight figure launches, they prepare their team. They have a plan for things like customer support and live chat and what happens with failed payments and card abandons and all these things. They know who is responsible for what and when you have timesheets. So we make sure with our team, like, we’ve got people in different time zones, so we’re basically of 18 hours a day of coverage from about 01:00 in the morning till 07:00 in the morning eastern time. You’re not going to get any reply from us, but the rest of the day you’re going to get a reply.
Everything is done well in advance. They’ve tested their links. All of these things are set up in advance if you’re going live. They’ve done a run through of the live, a dress rehearsal. They’ve tested what happens when, I mean, literally years ago, we had some issues where the live stream just cut off after a few hours. And so we tried some new software, and here’s what we did.
We did a six hour live stream to test it. Basically, we did a dress rehearsal of the first half hour because that’s an important half hour. And then we worked on all the transitions multiple times. So transitioning from being live to a recorded commercial or recorded interview, and we worked on those transitions. Transitions are very important. And then we practiced coming back from the transitions.
We practiced the top of the hours. We were actually on video for like an hour and 45 minutes. And then, you know, but we were done what we did. We just left the thing running for another 4 hours just to make sure nothing broke. So meticulous planning. I think it back to my book launch. I planned that thing 18 months in advance.
Now, if you’re doing a yearly launch, obviously you can’t do 18 months, but you can do nine months, you can do ten months. You can make sure your affiliates know the dates of your launch, the moment your launch this year is over. If your launch ends today, let your affiliates know within the next 72 hours when the next launch is, then go and get it on their calendar, then take a couple of weeks off and then get back to planning the next one.
The second big thing, and this was the biggest differentiator we saw. I think I might have shared this before, some random podcast episode, as like a side note, but the biggest differentiator that we see between six and seven figure launches and seven and eight figure launches is the number and variety of entry points.
So just the sheer number of entry points and the types of entry points. So if you think about it, if you look at the typical launch, nice little six figure launch, or maybe a low seven figure launch, they’ll have a video series. So you got the overall video series, video one, video two, video three, maybe a webinar, that’s five entry points, eight figure launches compared to seven and seven compared to six.
They have the video series, so we’re at five. They have three webinars, that’s eight. They have like another little workshop day, a live day, that’s nine. They have a couple of ebooks, that’s 1011. They have a free report, that’s twelve. They have a cheat sheet 13. They have a guide, a live stream, another webinar, a challenge, a book, a. A mini course, a quiz, an assessment. I mean, these are things you don’t have to do.
All these case studies, coaching session with hot seats, going live in a group, they got all these things. And then when they open the sales page, when they open cart, they have a sales page, they have a sales video, they have a fast action bonus, they have a mid card bonus. The biggest differentiator between seven and eight figure launches was the number and variety of entry points is the same for six and seven figure launches.
The big thing here is you’re hitting different modes of learning. We’ve seen like, hey, get the access to the videos via audio. Why I am not a visual learner. I actually have a really hard time remembering things that I have read, for example, but I remember what I hear. I was one of those people who, I could not read the books for class, for history class, for example. But if I paid attention in class, I was going to get at worst a BDE if I never opened the book and all I did was paid attention to class because I would remember almost everything I heard. I’m an auditory learner. If you don’t give me auditory learner options, I can’t follow you.
So there’s different modes of learning. There’s visual, there’s auditory, there’s hands on, there’s all types of different modes. So give them those different modes of learning. Give them those entry points. The third thing is the affiliate resources are provided at least two months out and this will lead into our fourth thing. But that means if you are launching on November 1, you are giving the affiliate resources, the swipe copy, the graphics, the login to their portal so they can do everything they need to get their link and all that, everything that affiliates need by Labor Day at the latest.
So technically it’d be like September 1, which is before Labor Day, I believe, usually everything at least two months out. And that sounds crazy, right? How are we supposed to do that? Well, part of that is it takes all the pressure off. You’ve got that done. The last thing you want to be doing is putting your affiliate portal together a week and a half before the launch. It’s too much stress. I mean, the big reason why I think this means so much is that now affiliates have everything so far in advance and they can start thinking like, are they going to log in and get all the swipe copy and do all that two months in advance? Probably not. I’ve never done that as an affiliate.
But I might take a quick look at it, I might spend five minutes with it, eight minutes with it, and I’m in the Facebook group and all that. And so it’s in my subconscious and maybe I’ll have an idea like this happened with me. Speaking of product launches, I was promoting, if you’re on my email list, and you should be, by the way, sign up@madmcwames. com. dot I just promoted Jeff Walker’s PLF product launch, formula launch that we promoted every year.
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And I had a random idea back in June for this August launch, and it hit me out of left field, and I was like, wrote it down, put a note in my phone, you know, took a picture of it, sent that to myself. Then we executed on that weeks later. But I never would have happened, I don’t believe, if I hadn’t got an email from Chris on his team sending me some stuff about the launch. And the cool thing is, like, jeff and his team didn’t used to do that until I taught them, like, no, you got to do this soon. Soon.
Like, as soon as possible. So at least two months out, which this leads into number four. This was the fourth big differentiator that we saw is that affiliates were really warmed up. They prepared way in advance, but specifically with their audience. They were warmed up. Their audience was warmed up. This is the content, the warm up sequence, the teasing in advance.
You know? Stu McLaren, one of our former clients, talks about the longer the Runway, the bigger the result. So how can we help our affiliates warm their audience up weeks or even a month or so in advance? How can we get them to go all in, not just for the 15 days of the launch, the 16 days of the launch, but how can we get them to go all in for six, seven weeks like it’s their own launch?
Yeah, I remember we had an affiliate for Stu, who he was launching. I always remember the dates, because I have shirts that have the dates on them. April 21, April 22, and April 23 were the ones that we ran. And I have shirts to say April 21, a shirt that says April 22, a shirt that says April 23, which was really convenient, as a side note, because I have some dear Friends whose anniversary is on April 22. And so I gave them a couple of shirts, and they thought it was amazing that I made them shirts. I didn’t make those shirts, but they thought it was the coolest gift ever that had their anniversary date on it.
And we had an affiliate who canceled her launch. That was supposed to happen. I think it was, like, in early March. Cause she wanted more time to build that long Runway to promote. It was tribe at the time, but then it became the membership experience for Stu. So one key to this is just keeping your audience warm and teaching your affiliates, like, you gotta keep your audience warm.
Yeah, I preached this so much to our affiliates. You must warm your audience up before you try to sell them anything. One of the biggest mistakes I see new affiliate marketers make is trying to sell to a cold audience. They come out of nowhere with a promotion, and they expect their followers to suddenly develop a need and a desire for the product, and that doesn’t work. The master of sales, Zig Ziglar, said, every sale has five obstacles.
No need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust. And when you don’t warm up your audience properly, you face all five of those obstacles. You haven’t established a need, so you’ve given your followers no time to even consider coming up with the money. There’s no hurry because there’s no need or desire. There’s no trust for you or the product creator. So in short, you have no chance of selling. And so a cold audience doesn’t buy. You have to warm up your tribe first.
And you need to help your affiliates do that by providing things like quotes from the talent, right? Providing them just content that they can give to their audience. That just gets them thinking. It should be social media or little blurbs to put in emails. And from an affiliate perspective, make sure you’re posting in the Facebook group at least every two weeks. Just a quick thing, make sure you’re communicating with them.
Make sure you’re training them. Make sure you have a kickoff celebration a couple of months early. Make sure you have for the pre pre launch materials, right. Make sure you do a pre pre launch contest. It doesn’t need to be a $55,000 contest, but hey, like, especially for your smaller affiliates to get their audience really warmed up, whoever sends the most leads, let’s say your launch is again on November 1.
Whoever sends the most leads prior to October 28, from October something. Now, speaking of all those things there, the fifth thing we found is that they had superior affiliate management. It’s really hard to do all of the things that we just talked about, managing a Facebook group and training and communication and all the warm up stuff.
If you’re doing it by yourself, it’s impossible do not to do seven figures. Can you run a successful 300, 400, 500, even six $700,000 launch? Just pushing it over half a million. But can you get lucky and run one by yourself? Absolutely. But they have a superior affiliate management team. Once you hit about seven figures, you can have one person from about one to maybe 3 million.
Once you hit 3 million, you’re probably going to need a team, a full team. And these people who are running these eight figure launches, they did not skimp in this area. They knew the secret of successful launches that most people don’t talk about, and that is hiring the right people, either externally or internally, getting coaching.
If you can check out our coaching program@youraffiliatelaunchcoach. com. and it’s a great coaching. We’re helping tons of people with their affiliate programs there. They hire an agency, you know, like ours. But the most important thing is that they prioritized it. They invested in specialized people. So they had a full time customer service person.
They had a full time affiliate manager or affiliate team. They had a full time tech person who’s full time during the launch. It doesn’t have to be on your team full time, but they are full time during the launch. These are top tier people. They had a full time person, an expert, doing the retargeting ads. They weren’t trying to do diy it. You want to run a seven, eight figure launch, you can’t diy it very often.
I mean, again, you might get lucky. And I’ve done that myself back in the day, and we ran a really darn close to seven figure launch with four of us, and it was the same four that had built the business. You know, like, it was a diy thing. I was the affiliate manager. I was the late night customer service person.
I was doing the phone sales. I was running the retargeting ads, and I was the tech person. That’s how we did it. But that doesn’t typically work once you hit seven figures. The 6th thing is they solved a specific problem for a specific person. And this might sound a little counterintuitive because many people think that to go from six to seven figures, you have to add more people to your audience. And it can be true, but you don’t have to expand the audience. Really, the most successful product launches we studied solved very specific problems for a very narrow market segment.
What buyers need to know. They need to know exactly what they are signing up for. A clear and simple message allows them to understand the product right. And more importantly, to make the decision to buy. And if your product offering is not clear and concise, forget about it. Like, people want clarity. They want clarity and they want it quickly.
So solve one specific problem for one specific person. This one specific person is your avatar, right? And so an important exercise here. I talk about this in my book, turn your passions into profits. If you haven’t read it, go through it. This is the, basically the first and second chapters are all about, this is developing your ideal customer avatar. So this is that fictional person who represents your entire audience or a segment of your audience.
This is the one person for whom you are going to create content. This is the one person who this product is for. This launch is for this workshop, this webinar, this ebook, this video series, whatever that pre launch stuff is, this is for that one person. You are not creating content, you’re not creating products for the masses, you’re not creating products for your audience. You are creating and promoting them for one person who is your avatar.
You’re not marketing to your list, you’re marketing to an individual. So if you want to grab my avatar creation guide, it’s totally free. Go to mammothwilliams. com avatar. You can grab that there, or you, like I said, you can grab my book. And it goes into it.
A lot more detail in the book. Just go to passionsintheprofitsbook. com. you can grab that there. But you need to know this avatar better than they know themselves. And the last thing that we saw when we studied the differences between six and seven and seven and eight figure launches, the seven and eight figure launches were 100% clear on their messaging.
They had their stories nailed down, their themes were perfect, the exact phrases they used, and over again, those were dialed in like it was amazing. And this is something I learned with my book, was I had everything dialed in six, seven months in advance in terms of what are the stories that I’m going to talk about, what are, like my ten best stories, ten best examples from the book, what are the phrases, what are the things like, I’m going to say every interview over and over again? And so what stories are you going to tell?
Like, what are your five to ten best stories, best examples, best case studies, perfect. Those remember the names of people, don’t say, well, this one guy, I’ve got my ten for my book, nine of them, I use their name. The one where I don’t, I did not have permission. She did not want me to use her name, and I respected that. But it was such a great story that I still told it. So remember those names. Practice telling them over and over again.
What stats are you going to use? You shouldn’t memorize those stats. You shouldn’t be like, wow, I was like 40 or 50%, I don’t know. No, memorize those. What quotes are there quotes you’re going to use? Memorize those. Are there examples you want to cite? Then work on those.
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Work on areas of transition like we talked about. Work on whether it be in a webinar and you transition from teaching to sales. You might want to practice your whole webinar five times, but you want to practice those transitions 25 times. Probably practice your pitch over and over again. Dial in your messaging on your offer. Know your bonuses well.
We got seven bonuses. And crap. I can’t remember number six that happened with me with my book. There was a section of the book that I didn’t think anybody was ever gonna ask me about, and I’d written it. It was new content that I’d never talked about before, and they asked me about it on this podcast. I was like, shoot, there were seven, or I think there were five things.
I was like, I remember number one and two, and I think I remember the last one. So I’m like furiously going through the book, trying to get to that part, and I had to like really drag out one and two so I could find the third, fourth, and fifth things and say those, well, that’s my fault, right? You should know those. Know your price points.
What are the payment plans, what’s in the product, the modules? It’s a course. You know, if it’s a course, know the specs, know all of that well in advance. So those are the seven differentiators between these six and seven figure and seven and eight figure launches. Basically planning in advance number of entry points, getting those resources at least two months out to your affiliates and getting them really warmed up. Superior affiliate management, solving that specific problem for a specific person and getting 100% crystal clear on your messaging.
If you’ve got any questions about this or anything else in this episode, or any episode for that matter, you can text me anytime at 260-217-4619 And lastly, make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. It’s going to be a good one. Next episode we’re going to talk about how to activate your inactive affiliates and turn them into lifelong partners. How to take those inactive affiliates, the ones who aren’t doing anything, get them excited to promote and turn them into some of your top promoters. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. I’ll see you then.
See you soon.
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
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The post 7 Secrets of 7-Figure Affiliate Launches appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### Deciding whether to approve or decline an affiliate can be a tricky process. How do you distinguish between good and bad affiliates? Should you always accept or decline, or is there a middle ground? In today’s episode, I’ll walk you through our exact process for evaluating affiliate applications. Listen up to learn how we make these important decisions.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Get the EXACT Templates We Use to Train Affiliates PLUS a Behind-the-Scenes Look at One of Our Trainings! Click Here to Access it Now (100% FREE)!
Links Mentioned in this EpisodeYour Affiliate Launch Coach
TEXT ME: 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Communicate Better with Your Affiliates
Successful Affiliate Onboarding: How to Setup Your Affiliates to Win
How I Grew a Major Affiliate Program from $15M to $325M a Year (In Only 4 Years)
How to Create The Right Affiliate Commissions
Top 14 Reasons Your Affiliate Program is Failing (And How to Fix It)
Should You Approve or Decline an Affiliate? How to DecideHow do you determine the good affiliates from the bad affiliates, especially on an affiliate network? How do you know if you should accept or decline someone who applies for your affiliate program? Or is there some sort of middle ground where you don’t have to decline or approve something in the middle? So listen up to find out exactly how we process affiliate applications.
Let’s get started. So how do you determine good affiliates from bad affiliates, especially if you’re on an affiliate network? I got a question from a client recently that I thought was pretty good. I shared the answer with her, but I feel like it’s appropriate to share this with you guys as well. Here’s a question she asked. She messaged us, she’s one of our clients and your affiliate launch coach. And she said our shareasale account, because we recommended shareasale to her, they’re on the network now.
Our shareasale account is now active. I’ve been getting applications in, but I’m not sure how to determine if an affiliate is good or not. Do you have a checklist podcast that could help me shift out good versus bad affiliates based off their websites? Now, again, we put her on share sale because there’s two reasons. Number one, we recommend the network. It’s great.
I’ve worked with them for years, almost 15 years now, and we love the network. Number two, if you’re one of our clients, you get a pretty substantial discount on share sales. So, you know, the fom the friends of Matt, discount is what we call it. So that’s why we recommended it to them. And so she’s asking basically, how do I know if somebody’s good, how do, how do I know if they’re bad?
And how do I determine if I should approve or decline an affiliate? And let me just share a little bit of what I shared with her. You know, first of all, almost never flat out decline an affiliate just from their application. You want to take the extra steps and reach out to them. Now I say do that on the affiliate side as well. That’s important. If you’re an affiliate, don’t just fill out a lame application that I would
want to as an affiliate manager that you think I might just decline. Write a lengthy application, make it hard on me. Actually, don’t make it easy on me, make it hard on me. Make it so long, I just go holy crap. I’m just going to accept this person. Cause it’s detailed, but on the affiliate management side, reach out to them now. There are some factors that you can take into consideration.
Need help activating your affiliates? Use my proven email templates for getting inactive affiliates in the game and making sales! Get them here!
I’ll talk more about reaching out to them in a little bit. These are in no particular order. Okay. This is not like, okay, if they fail number one, then it’s just an automatic decline. This is not order of hierarchy here, to be clear. So the first thing I’m gonna just get the controversial one out of the way is country.
I know this is controversial, but it is what it is, right? Some countries have a higher fraud rate, and I’m not going to list them here. You can google them. To be clear, I don’t rule out someone just because of what country they’re from. I’m not saying, oh, that’s a red flag. It’s a bit of a yellow flag, though.
Okay. I’ve worked with affiliates from nearly every yellow flag country. There’s no red flag ones. I’ve worked with some of these affiliates and they were great. But the chance of a fraudulent or black hat tactics higher. Okay. So it is something that I take into consideration. To be clear, it’s like, if you fail on that one, you know, if you’re in those countries, then you now have to be better at some of the other things. And I’ve got ten criteria, right? Ten criteria. It’s one of these things. If you fail in, like four or more, then you are automatically out. But that’s very rare. So the second thing is their domain or lack thereof, right.
If they don’t have a domain or it’s a shady domain, then I take this into consideration. So this client will just say, you know, they’re in the, you know, they’re in the nutrition niche. And if somebody applies and their domain is like, you know, Bill Clinton sex dash scandalous dot blogspot. com. well, that’s not a good fit for my nutrition product.
You see what I’m saying? Like, that’s just. It’s like, what is. What is the deal with that? Or if their domain, you know, if. Well, this is number three, right? Does their site pass the smell test? So you take a look at their domain and you just go, I don’t know.
Feels kind of fishy. You take a look at their site. Is it something you want to be associated with? Is it adding value to your brand? Or is it just like a banner farm? Does their site load a software. Well, that’s not good. Does it give you an error message?
That’s a big yellow flag now. Okay, their site’s down. My site’s down about 2 hours a year. So if you just happen to go to my site on the wrong 2 hours out of the year, does that mean I’m some sort of a bad affiliate? No, just means you went to my site when my server company was doing maintenance. They were doing something and just happened to go down.
Maybe I got hacked. Does that make me a bad affiliate? No, I just haven’t caught it yet. And we, you know, we’ll fix it in five minutes, but it’s a yellow flag. So again, it’s like, okay, they’re from a fraud, you know, a higher fraudulent rate country with a really shady domain name and the website doesn’t load, well, then they’re out. They’re just out, you know, okay, fraudulent country, really shady domain name.
And I go to the site and it’s a banner farm. Okay, they’re out. Number four, does their site match your values? You know, this is a subjective thing. Your values are different than mine. Now if you have hard and fast rules such as not associating with illegal activities, pornography, politically charged sites, legal drugs, but you just don’t want to be associated with them, whatever you choose, like take that in consideration, this is subjective.
You get to choose what your values are. I have no issues with somebody saying I don’t want somebody who’s politically divisive. You know, I don’t care if I agree with their politics, but if everything they post is anti this politician or all people of this political party are bad, I don’t know that I want to be associated with that website for some of our branding and there’s nothing against them.
So that person might even be my friend, but I don’t know that I want that site associated with it. So you get to choose, does it fall in line with your values? If you are advocating a vegan lifestyle and you have a product that might be of use to non vegans, but you just say, you know what, I don’t want to be associated with products that talk about meat.
Those of you who know me know I love bacon, I have no problem with that. But if you’re a vegan and that’s a thing to you, then you get to choose that. And that could be, in that case it could be a red flag. And this is one area where I will just decline an affiliate without even reaching out to them. Now one thing to keep in mind on a network is affiliates might have one site that is displayed but own others.
So maybe they own a anti Democrat or anti republican website, but they also own a family friendly site that would be a good fit in this case. Just make it clear that you only want them promoting on the good fit site. That’s important and you get to choose that.
So the fifth consideration only applies if they’re on a network is how long they’ve been on the network. If the network shows you how long they’ve been on the network, use that as a consideration. Generally speaking, someone who has been on the network for five years is going to be better than someone who’s been on for seven minutes. Okay. Or, you know, a few weeks.
I will look at that. Generally, anything over one year, I kind of just count as the same. But if they’ve been on for a pretty short period of time, I’m not going to decline them unless. Okay, shady domain, you know, some of these other factors and they’ve only been on for three months, I’m probably going to decline them or at least do what we’ll talk about later and reach out to them. The same is true. Like, I’ll look up their domain.
Do I decline people because their domain was registered three days ago? Absolutely not. I encourage starting affiliate marketing when you’re new, but if I look at your domain, it’s shady. You’re from a more fraudulent country and your website’s kind of funky and you registered a domain three days ago. I’m probably not going to let you in if that’s the only thing. How long your domain’s been registered? It’s fine.
So number six, are they using trademarks in their URL’s so they apply to your program, especially if it’s not a fit. Their website is buy dash adidas dash shoes.com. all they’re doing is not adding any value to adidas whatsoever. They’re just basically profiting off their trademark. That’s usually a bad sign in and of itself. Doesn’t mean they’re nefarious or bad affiliates. It’s just, again, it’s a yellow flag.
Especially if they don’t have other websites. That’s their only website. And you’re that vegan, you know, let’s say you’re in the vegan supplement industry and you’re like buyadidashoes. com, that’s not really that great of a fit. So if they’re using trademarks in the URL’s, that’s a consideration.
7th, if they flat out say that their promotional methods violate your terms. So if you don’t allow adware, bhos, toolbars, trademark bidding, you don’t allow pornography, you don’t allow politically divisive statements. Whatever it is you don’t allow, again, you get to determine what you allow. And they say, we’re going to do this.
Whatever you don’t allow, that’s a giant red flag that leads to declining them. I mean, straightforward part of what that is is they will copy and paste the same message 2500 times to different programs.
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And some people do allow toolbars, some people do allow trademark bidding. I actually have no issue with trademark bidding for most of our products. There’s one where we don’t allow it. There’s the whole reason behind that. I won’t get into here. Some of our clients allow trademark bidding, some don’t.
I would say it’s probably 70 30. You know, 70% do, 30% don’t. None of our programs allow adware or toolbars. Just to be clear, we get to decide what we allow and so do you. So if they say they’re going to violate the terms giant red flag, the number eight thing to look for is just look at their promotional methods. Are they utter nonsense? You know, read their proposed promotional methods. Do they actually make sense? I’ve seen applicants just put my site, or they put like, your product is nice, or I like your product.
My followers, your promotional method is your followers, like, could you give me even like two freaking sentences on that? So again, if this is where you have to kind of be subjective, if it’s someone maybe that, like, if I invited them to the program, well, then clearly. But if I’m looking at the site and I’m like, oh, it’s Jeff Walker. And Jeff Walker says, my email list and cite, I go, well, it’s Jeff Walker. And he’s got a lot of people.
I’m going to approve that and not use that against him. But if it’s somebody I’ve never heard of with the domain name, that’s a little bit shady. That was registered 13 days ago and they’ve been on the network for two weeks and they put promotional methods, my site, I’m not going to let them in. You know, it’s like, really? You couldn’t write a few sentences? Just let me know. You clearly don’t want to be in my program anyway, so why am I going to waste time with you? Number nine?
Do some research. You know, if you aren’t sure, do some research. If you’re looking at this and going, hmm, I don’t think, I’m not 100%. I’m going to let them in and I’m definitely not 100%. I want to decline them, do a little bit of research. If they’re truly bad, you’ll be quick to find some negative feedback about the affiliate and affiliate forums, blogs, etcetera. Just go google them, see what pulls up.
You find something where, you know, maybe you see some of their other promotions, you see how they promoted another product and you’re like, oh my gosh, that is shady stuff. I am not working with that affiliate.
That is some seriously messed up stuff. Like, I don’t want anything to do with them. So those are nine things to look for. The 10th thing. So let’s just say we’ve reached the nine and we’re looking at this and we’re going, I’m not sure. It’s definitely like, if all nine are green flags, I’m letting you in. If everything else is a green flag but your country, I’m letting you in.
If everything is a green flag but you’re new to the network, I’m letting you in. You know that’s a yellow flag, right? If everything is a green flag, but, you know, your domain name is a little bit funky, I’m letting you in.
You know, if I maybe everything’s a green flag. Of course by then, I don’t even do number nine. I don’t even do research. If everything else is a green flag, but everything’s a green flag and I just can’t find anything on you, I’ll probably let you in. But if I reach out and just say, hey, I’d love some more information on, you know, on these things that maybe weren’t very clear.
I’m just not sure if you’re a good affiliate, blah, blah, blah, and they don’t reply. That’s number ten. They don’t reply. When you reach out, if you reach out to ask them to clarify something to get some more information, and they don’t reply within a week, that’s an easy decline. At that point.
I’ll just leave it pending and then I’ll decline it a week later. You know, in the end, you’re making a subjective decision. It’s kind of like a scoring system. Like I said, you know, if someone’s from a yellow flag country, their site is hideous and they’ve been on the network for two weeks, I’m going to decline them.
And here’s the thing, they have the choice to reach out to me and say, hey, you declined me, but here’s why. I think I’d be a good affiliate. I actually have another site and I know I’m new to this network, but I’ve been in affiliate marketing for six years. Oh, brilliant, you’re in.
I’ve said this before, if you just reach out to me, I’m probably going to accept you. But if they’re from the US, their site is okay, but they’re new to the network and their site’s a little off base for you, then you reach out to them. That gives them the opportunity. If they want in, they reply. They reply. It’s a subjective decision. I usually, unless I’m really feeling like, man, I could regret this later because of fraud or something, I usually err on the side of just approving them and then giving them a chance.
Just to be clear, the rules are different. If you’re in like a financial niche or something like that, then you almost err the other way. I’ve been in the insurance world and, you know, back when I got started, you know, I was in the insurance world up through 2011. Most of my time in there, I erred on the side of declining them, you know, because I just, it’s not worth the chance. Like, we could get sued over stuff.
We could end up in some serious hot water with the government. Not worth it to me. But if you’re in retail world, you have a course, you have a digital product, something like that, a membership, err on the side of letting them in. Keep a close eye on new affiliates. We always do that. We always do a manual review of any affiliates first five to ten sales to make sure, like, what’s going on here? Is their return rate normal?
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Is anybody saying, I don’t know what the heck’s going on? Was there any credit card fraud, things like that? We do a manual review, usually immediately on their first couple, and then we’ll review the other ones later. We look at things like, is their conversion rate just way too high? If our normal conversion rate from click to opt in is 58%, from opt in to sale is 7% and their opt in rate is 94%, that could be a yellow flag. Now, if it’s 94% on, say, 47 out of 50, I go, well, it’s a little bit early, you know, we had an affiliate, I’ll say his name, jonathan milligan. We were converting at over 90% on webinar registrations for like
I remember going, holy crap, is like, what is he doing? That’s amazing. Or maybe our webinar landing page is just really, really good. Guess what it was. And it ended up converting it like 62% for everybody else. He was just sending great traffic, you know. But we look at things like that. If the opt in to conversion rate is normally 8% and somebody converts like their first twelve people. Okay, is that fraudulent or are these things just like they’re just really good, you know, so we look at things like that and we monitor people that we accept in whether or not they’re, they could be fully green flag unless there’s somebody I know, you know, things like that.
But typically anybody new, we monitor them cause we wanna be safe on those things. So there you have it. How to accept or, you know, decide how to accept or decline an affiliate. Hopefully that helps you out with that, with the decisions that you’re making. Like our client was. So do a friend a favor.
If you know someone who’s struggling with this in their business, an affiliate manager or an entrepreneur marketing person, you know they’re struggling with this. Share this episode with them. Just text them the link, email them the link, dm them the link, whatever so they can get the benefit of this lesson.
Make sure you subscribe as well because the next episode I’m gonna share the secret worst part of my entire business. I’m gonna tell you. I’ve shared this with about three people. Every single one of them was like jaw dropped, floored that this was the worst part of our business. I think it’ll surprise you.
I’m gonna share why it’s been the worst part of our business and what we’ve done to correct it. Because it’s something that’s going to be revolutionarily game changing, blah blah blah blah blah for our business.So make sure you come back for that.
See you soon.
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
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The post Should You Approve or Decline an Affiliate? How to Decide appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### Effective communication with your affiliates is crucial for success. What should you communicate? When is the right time to reach out? And how should you deliver your messages? In this episode, I’ll answer these three critical questions and share strategies to improve your communication with affiliates. Get ready to take your affiliate communication to the next level!
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuySuccessful Affiliate Onboarding: How to Setup Your Affiliates to Win
How I Grew a Major Affiliate Program from $15M to $325M a Year (In Only 4 Years)
How to Create The Right Affiliate Commissions
Top 14 Reasons Your Affiliate Program is Failing (And How to Fix It)
How to Steal Your Competitors’ Affiliates
How to Communicate Better with Your AffiliatesWhat do you communicate to your affiliates and when do you communicate with them and how do you communicate them? What are the methods you need to use? These are three critical questions, and they’re all answered in this episode.let’s get started. So a couple of episodes ago, I talked about onboarding your affiliates and we were focused on like, what does that first week or so look like the first couple weeks?
Because as I shared in that episode, if you can get an affiliate to promote within the first couple of weeks, you stand a much better chance of having them be a large affiliate over time than you do if they don’t promote in the first couple of weeks. Now, you know, I shared in that episode, there’s caveats and nuance to that. I almost said some, I almost got those words mixed up there.
But you know, there’s caveats and nuance, right? You know, if you’ve got a launch that’s four months away, just because they don’t promote two weeks after signing up doesn’t mean they’re not going to promote.
Clearly, if they sign up and they say, awesome, you know, it’s evergreen and they sign up and they say, you know, it’s January when they sign up and they’re like, dude, I have got you on my calendar for March 14. That’s six, seven weeks away. That’s fine. We want to get on their calendar, but it’s really important to get them active quickly.
But what about the long term? I promised that I would share this in an upcoming episode and you only had to wait two weeks. So I’m going to share today about the regular updates.
What do we do between launches? What do we do between big promotions? What do we do if it’s an evergreen program, right? What are those regular updates? So there’s a couple of nuances there in and of itself. Again, there’s, if you have a completely evergreen program, really, there’s not a whole lot that changes week to week, and you’re not really all that seasonal.
Maybe you have a little bit of an increase right before Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, or maybe you have a little bit of a bump in q four. You know, maybe you sell more or you sell an equal amount from June through August as you do the other nine months, but you know, it’s still half your sales or the other nine months.
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That’s kind of pure evergreen. On the flip side of that is maybe you only launch once a year or you launch two products each once a year, or you launch one product twice a year, something like that. You have two, three, four launches a year, and that’s it. Then in the middle is more of a cyclical evergreen program or something where you’re doing special promos periodically. So maybe you have your product’s available 24 7365, but you’re going to run big promotions four weeks out of the year and really 75, 80% of your entire year sales will come in those four weeks.
So that’s a hybrid between the two. There’s other nuance as well that we’re not going to get into. But I’m going to talk about all of those, all of the things that you need to do, no matter what kind of a program you’re running. One of the biggest mistakes we see with launch affiliate programs when it’s pure launches is they go dark for nine months, ten months, eleven months out of the year between launches. And that’s something we worked with, with one client recently.
I was really excited. This ended up being, they’ve done 16 or 17 launches. And one of the things that we really hammered home months in advance and we worked with them, was get them warmed up, get them fired up. Now it’s June and your launch is in November. Get them fired up. Now it’s July.
Get them fired. Like, get them excited. You know, we don’t want to get them burned out, but we want to get them really pumped up to promote. And so that’s one of the things that we worked on with them, is not going dark, not being dark in June, July and August for a November launch. Let’s get them psyched up now.
So that’s a big mistake. We see with the launch programs is just lack of communication, period. Like, any communication is better than no communication whatsoever. But what are some of the things that you do need to communicate? There’s no particular order to anything. I’m going to share today.
All right, we’re going to probably bounce around a little bit. I’m going to share some for pure Evergreen, some for the Evergreen hybrid, some for the launch, specific ones. But the one thing you got to do for all of them is you got to educate them.
You know, if we’re talking about launches in the month leading up to, you know, you probably don’t want to do this six months out, but in like the 90 days leading up to your launch, we want to educate them. Evergreen, you can do this year round, Evergreen Hybrid, you want to do this kind of leading into any big promotions, but educate them, share with them what’s working, what’s working for other partners.
Teach your affiliates the strategies and the tactics that they need to use. If you want a good example of that, go to mattmcwilliams. com affiliate training. I’ve got an example training there that we did. We did an affiliate training webinar for one of our clients. So the only, the normal way to get access to this is only if you’re one of our, your affiliate launch coach clients.
And this is the actual training that we shared with the affiliates of one of those clients. And you can down, you can actually watch the training, see how we do it, see how we train them. You can also download the slides. We’ve got, you know, keynote PowerPoint version. I think we got even got a PDF version.
And you can download those and use those as a guide for you to train your affiliates. But you need to teach them what works. Teach them the strategies, teach them the tactics, and there’s some statistics in there that’ll blow their minds. That’s going to help them to promote more, you know, teach your affiliates why mailing more works or why mailing at a specific time works.
Yeah, I think when we’re running launches, right? When we’re running launches, I often share why mailing on a weekend is a good idea. So what I do, it’s a little trick here.
So the idea is to get them to send an email or two over the weekend, and a lot of times we’ll wrap that up in a contest. You know, there’s all kinds of reasons for this. You actually, I’ll share in a second how you can get a template of this email.
But what I don’t want to do is have them like cancel their Friday email and then send it on Saturday because of this contest. So here’s what we’ll do on Friday. About 02:00 there’s a balance here, like 02:00 pm. most people have sent their emails for the day by 2230, but it’s early enough in the day where they can pivot.
Like, I know for me, you know, I’m recording this on a Friday at about And if I’m, you know, doing an affiliate promotion right now, and you emailed me at right now and said, hey, you should mail this weekend, maybe you weren’t planning on emailing this weekend. We’re doing a special promotion. The top three affiliates you know, get this or something like that. I have the ability to go, hmm, I think I could pull that off.
Let me type up some stuff. Boom, boom, boom. Get our team to load the email. Yada, yada, right? If you email me at five, I can’t do that. I’m like, I’m a half hour from leaving the office. I got my kids, I’m coaching my kids games tonight now. Whatever, you know, great.
That’s great. Somebody will win that contest. It’s not gonna be me. But if you email me at like 1030, maybe that’s just early enough. It probably wasn’t. But if you email me at like 09:00 it was just early enough that I can go into convertkit, click pause on our email that was going out today and instead of sending an email today and then, oh man, I’ll send one more over the weekend.
Now I’ll just send two on the weekend and maybe, you know, win the contest. This is all about getting affiliates to add an extra email that they weren’t planning on sending. But I have to educate them. I have to educate them. So I’ve got a template. If you want to, you can download the template if you just go to mattmcwilliams. com weekend email.
But basically this email teaches them why they should email this weekend. And it gives them the stats and it gives them things like, well, email volume is pretty quiet and people have more time to interact with it.
Right? Help your affiliates understand why you want them to mail more. It’s not just, hey, if you mail more, then you’re gonna make more money, you know, or you mail more. It’s good for me. No, help them understand that way. Share with them the data about how mailing more on cart close day will exponentially increase their sales.
Just share the data with them. I’ll include a post in the show notes here that you can download about why mailing more on cart close day is such a good idea. Teach them how to send to their non clicks and their unopened, right? Teach them those things.
So number one, you got to educate your affiliates, whatever it is, you know, if you’re running an evergreen program, teach them some of the things that are working right. Teach them some of the strategies that are working for other affiliates. If you ask the affiliates, hey, do you mind if I share? Some of them might say, no, that’s a trade secret and I don’t want anybody knowing.
Okay, fine. But many of them will say, yeah, go ahead, happy. If you share that, that’s fine. If you’re doing launches, make sure you get them warmed up before the launch. I’ve done a couple of episodes on that. You can just look those up. Just look them up on the podcast, like warm up, and you’ll find numerous episodes. That’s communication. That’s what you should be communicating. What should you be communicating?
All of the things we’re going to talk about today. When should you communicate? You should be communicating weeks or months and then weeks in advance.
I recommend starting about six months out. About six months out. Just once a month up until about two months out. Just four emails over the course of four months with some of the stuff that we’ll share today, then one Facebook post. So typically what I’ll do is I’ll send an email early in the month, then in the middle of the month, I’ll post to the Facebook group for the affiliates and then repeat that cycle up until about two months out.
Then I start to ramp it up just a little bit. Okay. Because there’s more stuff that you’ll see as we go along. Biggest thing is just communicate a lot. The biggest mistake is not communicating enough. That’s the biggest mistake that we see is just not communicating enough. So what are some of the other things that you should be communicating? Again, this applies, launch applies, evergreen applies, hybrid, whatever.
Give them behind the scenes access. You know, give them access to what’s going on in your preparation for the launch, for example. And one of my favorite videos that I always have clients do is if they’re recording, you know, the pre launch videos or they’re doing like a run through of their live workshop, just get on and do a five minute video. What you do is you set up, you got your team there setting up, and you just, you know, you’re on set and you just say, hey, guys. Hey, partners, I’m on set here.
We’re three days from the start of the live workshop, or we’re a week away from the live workshop or whatever it is, and we’re just doing a test run through. Just wanted, you know, here’s what it looks like. Here’s some of the stuff we’re going to be doing. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I might even include, you know, if they’re doing the walkthrough, I might even include, like a ten minute little snippet of it or a blooper, you know, that’s always fun. Like, I might even start off like, we’ve done this because I don’t want it to be too polished. But we’ll take, you know, a blooper or two at the beginning and then, hey, partners, I’m here live, you know, boom, boom, boom, you know, three to five minute message, and then at the end finish up with a couple more bloopers.
So there’s like four or five bloopers, you know, two or three on either end, bookending the message. This just keeps it fun, right?
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Videos, just going live in the Facebook group, you know, for partners periodically. Again, this doesn’t matter what kind of program you’re running, just going live or recording a quick five minute video, you know, hey,
partners, I was thinking of, you know, something, you know, such and such, right? Sharing a lesson that you learned from another. Maybe you promoted something as an affiliate and sharing something that worked or didn’t work, constantly hammering home those important dates. You’ve got to do that, right? You’ve got to constantly remind them of, when does the promo start? Promotion starts April 14. April 14. April 14. April 14. April 14, right? You’ve got to hammer that home. You got to give them plans.
You know, if this is a purely evergreen program, but maybe there is some cyclicalness to it. They need to know what those dates are that are important and have a plan for building up to that.
Teach them going back to that. Teach them how to warm their audience up. Teach them how to promote the webinar, how to promote the ebook, how to promote the free report, how to promote the quiz, how to promote the assessment, how to promote the workshop, how to promote, you know, sales, whatever it is.
Teach them specific things, how to do better with email. Give them a specific lesson on social media. Give them a specific lesson on a part of social media, Instagram, Facebook, whatever. Give them a specific lesson on how to use DM’s, how to use their Facebook groups, how to do lives.
You know all of those things, right? These are all the things that you can be giving to your affiliates. Announce contests and prizes. That’s pretty popular, right? Give them the information they need to know about. Hey, guys, we just announced this. It’s a $250,000 contest. Or it’s a $10,000 contest, or everybody who makes five sales gets this, whatever it is.
Like, let them know those things. If you know what your contest is going to be eight weeks in advance, announce it. You’ll remind them, but go ahead and announce it. Get some excitement about it. Give them updates on everything, you know. Oh, my gosh, the webinar was amazing.
Oh, you know, last week was our second biggest week in, you know, the past year. Whatever it is, just give them updates. Shared success stories, testimonials when you get a testimonial, if you’re an affiliate manager, here’s what you do. You tell your customer service team anytime somebody sends an email with a really cool story, do me a favor, take a screenshot, send it to me, or let’s start a channel in slack or whatever.
But I want to know anytime somebody says something nice about our product so I can tell it to affiliates. You know, one of the biggest things you can do with Evergreen, every three, four months, just reach out and ask if there’s anything they need.
With a launch. Ask if there’s anything they need, you know, a couple weeks out, and then, you know, maybe a day or two in or the day before.
Just ask if there’s anything that they need. Ask for referrals. Hey, do you know anybody who’d be a good partner? That should be your number one source of affiliates, by the way, once you get up and running. Now, this is not true of your first hundred to 200, but once you hit a point where you have about 500 affiliates, your number one source of new affiliates should be your current affiliates.
So reach out periodically, you know, a couple months out from a launch. Hey, really excited. Remember April 14, April 14. You know, anybody who might be a good fit to promote this? If it’s evergreen, just maybe reach out, you know, once a quarter, once every six months is probably enough. So, of course, the next question is, when do you communicate with them?
If you have a pure evergreen program, like, there’s no cyclicalness whatsoever, if there’s any cyclical nature whatsoever, then naturally, throughout the year, you’re going to ramp up, leading into the high points, right? If you’re running periodic promotions, kind of that hybrid program, you’re gonna, you’re gonna center your communication around those high points.
I mentioned earlier. With the launch, I would do monthly up until about two months out from the launch, and then I would get a little bit more frequent. We’ll talk about that in a moment. But if you have no cyclicalness whatsoever, to your affiliate program and you’re not doing any promotions, there’s like literally nothing that changes.
Then I would send a once a month kind of newsletter type thing. I’d include three of these elements. Maybe a tip, a strategy, you know, what’s working, maybe a good story, a testimonial or an update, something like that.
I would include things like that. And then one of the other things, right. You maybe announce a new contest for the next month. Well, if you’re announcing a contest for the month of, say, march, then in March you’re going to increase the frequency. You’re going to really start increasing the frequency ten days out from March, you know, about February 18 or so. And now that almost becomes like a launch.
Almost kind of becomes like a launch. And so as far as the win, again, a consistent once a month email. And then I would, if you can track this in your system, I’d send to, you know, pop that out to the unopens roughly, you know, ten to twelve days later. And then I would post once a month or so in your Facebook group, maybe even twice a month in your Facebook group.
The Facebook group is going to be one thing. In fact, you can use your email to point back to the Facebook group. So, you know, you post in the Facebook group a tip and you post in the Facebook group a really cool testimonial. And you post in the Facebook group, you do a live where you answer some questions, then use the newsletter almost to point back to those pieces of content.
You can include something else as well. So they make sure to open your emails. But that would be the rhythm I would get into with that, with the cyclical type thing, maybe you got like four big promos a year. So once every roughly 90 days you’re basically have two months off and then a month where you’re ramping up and then two months off.
I would follow the evergreen pattern, you know, for those two months, and then I would just ramp it up. In the midst of, say, a ten day promotion, you know, you’re emailing every day, five days before through the, you know, the promotion, 15 days. You’re posting on the Facebook once or twice a day during that period and then for a launch again, you know, the thing is once a month. So if you’re launching, say, March 1, then you got your follow up emails, things like that.
We’ve talked about those before. That’s kind of like the week or two after the launch. But I would send an email, you know, it depends on the payments as well. If you have affiliates getting paid and let’s say you’ve got a four month payment plan, well, that kind of takes care of that, you know, but what about the affiliates who didn’t get paid? So I would just send a once a month email or once a month, you know, Facebook post.
You don’t really need to get too hyperactive about it. You know, you could alternate between Facebook and email about five months or so until you hit about, you know, six months out. Then I’m going to go basically every other week. So I’m going to send an email at the beginning of the month, Facebook post in the middle, vice versa, doesn’t matter.
And then the next month I’m going to repeat that. So it’s just starting to amp up the frequency. And when I get about, you know, six to eight weeks out, I start going roughly, you know, every two weeks or so, about eight weeks out until about the two weeks out mark, and then I start really ramping it up from there.
So that’s the win. But the biggest thing is just having some level of consistency so that they’re never going more than about 30 days without hearing from you in some manner, just keeping them somewhere in their brain. And if you give value, then they’re going to love it.
You can use email, you know, how do we communicate? Use email, use Facebook group, use, you know, telegram groups if you want, you know, communicate with them however they want to be communicated, especially for your bigger ones. One of the things I highly recommend is, you know, stop relying on email and Facebook periodically send them something in the mail. This was hugely popular.
We haven’t done this with all of our clients, but we do like, we’ll do like a quarterly physical newsletter. It’s basically, you know, if you can picture, you know, it’s two, so it’s four pages. You know, the one side is the mailing stuff, so there’s really nothing on there. So it’s actually three pages of printed stuff and it folds in in half and then in half again.
And, you know, you mail it, and, I mean, it costs fifty cents to print and, like, eighty nine cents to mail. Not even that. I don’t even know how much it costs. It’s pretty cheap, though. So you cost about a buck 50 a person. You have a thousand affiliates. It cost you $1,500.
Send them something in the mail. Really gets people excited. For your bigger affiliates, you could do something special. You know, the list is endless. Just do something special for them. One of my favorite gifts I ever got was a custom made Lego set. And it was me. In fact, they.
It was from Pete Vargas, and they made two of them, one with glasses and one without, because I kind of go 50 50. If you know anybody who knows me, like, from May through October, I tend to not wear my glasses.
And then over the winter, I wear my glasses because of allergies. And so they sent me two versions of the, you know, like a batman and a superman. It had my head, you know, a custom made Lego head.
And I’m like, that is so cool. So there’s all types of things you can do as far as mailings that you can do that would really move the needle. So the important thing is get creative, be consistent, and break the mold again. Communicate via physical mail periodically, occasionally pop out a DM to somebody. Here’s the thing.
If you’ve got 1000 affiliates, well, I can’t dm a thousand people. Well, for one, you could have a va do it. I don’t have a va. My company doesn’t provide one.
You could pay for it yourself. I did that eleven years ago, I worked for a company, and I paid out of my pocket about $200 a month for a virtual assistant because it was cheaper to pay them for 20 hours, $200, than it was to do some of the things myself. And I got a ten X Roi on their work. I mean, I guarantee you the work they did. Like dming affiliates wasn’t called dming back then.
I don’t even know what it was called. Instant messaging. Sitting there, instant messaging affiliates on my behalf was worth what I got out of it, and I never could have found the time to do it. So don’t make the excuse. I don’t have the time to do that. Yes, you go hire somebody. It’s super cheap.
It really. You can hire somebody overseas for less than $10 an hour. And so what I would do, you know, have done this periodically is, so you got a thousand affiliates, again, this isn’t.
If you got 100,000 affiliates is different. But you take your top thousand and let’s just say I post, you know, in the Facebook group or I send an email. Let’s just say I send an email and that email says, here’s your links, and swipe copy for next week.
Something like, I’m just making that up, right? Or there’s a really cool tip or something like that. Or announces a new contest. Doesn’t matter. But let’s just say go with announce is a new contest, then I’ll have my vas, DM as many people as they can. What if they only get to 274?
Okay, well, it’s 274 people who just got a DM. Hey, just want to make sure, did you see the email I sent out announcing the contest? Super simple, right? But it stands out. Breaks the mold. And I get a lot of responses like, no, I didn’t. Hey, cool.
Then boom, boom, boom. Make sure you go check it. Here’s a subject line. And every now and again I would say probably one out of 30. My VA will basically say, I don’t know how to respond to this, so can you handle it? But, I mean, we get mass communication with a thousand affiliates and it doesn’t, I mean, you know, it’s something that the
VA, I mean, they’re doing, you know, one every 20 seconds, so it takes them a few hours and they’ve knocked out a thousand. So just don’t let that be an excuse. Break the mold.
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Physical mail, DM’s, texts, whatever. Just break out of just emails and Facebook group. Emails and Facebook group. Boring, boring, boring. Right? So lots to do. But now you have a plan. Go check out those links. Like I mentioned earlier, I’ve got a link in the show notes for the affiliate training. So you want to know how to train your affiliates? I’ll show you.
I’ll even give, give you the slides. I’ve also got that weekend email template, so you can use that. You can copy and paste the thing. I mean, you know, you might want to tweak it a little bit.
I think the one I have in there is specifically for a client, but you can tweak that. And I’ve got a link for you to share with your affiliates on why mailing more on cart close day is such a good idea.
It’s actually got the stats that we broke down over the course of, you know, hundreds of launches that we ran. So make sure you go check those out. Make sure you subscribe and share, because in the next episode, I’m going to be talking about donuts. Actually, just donut, period. Donut singular. The affiliate donut.
I’m gonna be talking about the affiliate donut in the next episode, so you don’t want to miss that. So make sure you hit that subscribe button. Make sure you share this episode with somebody who could use it. You know, somebody who’s an affiliate manager, an entrepreneur, you know, an aspiring affiliate manager. And they’re like, I don’t know what to communicate. I don’t know how to communicate.
I don’t know when to communicate. Well then I just shared it with you in less than a half hour. Go share this episode with them. If you got any questions about this or anything at all, text me anytime at 260-217-4619 and I’ll see you in the next episode.
See you soon.
The post How to Communicate Better with Your Affiliates appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### So you’ve got some affiliates interested in promoting you. Now what? How do you onboard your affiliates and set them up for success right from the start? That’s what today’s episode is all about. I’ll share the key steps to ensure your affiliates hit the ground running and maximize their potential. Get ready to learn how to create a winning onboarding process that propels your affiliates to success!
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
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Links Mentioned in this EpisodeWeekend Email Template
Sample Affiliate Promo Plan
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How to Warm Up Affiliates Before a Launch
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow I Grew a Major Affiliate Program from $15M to $325M a Year (In Only 4 Years)
How to Create The Right Affiliate Commissions
Top 14 Reasons Your Affiliate Program is Failing (And How to Fix It)
How to Steal Your Competitors’ Affiliates
How to Create High-Converting Swipe Copy for Affiliates
How to Create an Affiliate Program Agreement
Successful Affiliate Onboarding: How to Setup Your Affiliates to WinSo you’ve got some affiliates interested in promoting you. Now what? How do you onboard your affiliates and get them rocking? Well, that’s what today’s episode is all about, getting your affiliates started the right way. Let’s get started. So my friend Alan Thomas came to me the other day.
I had referred some people to him as affiliates. Alan’s been rocking. You know, you’ve listened to him in a previous episode. He’s now co hosting our live lessons every Thursday at 02:00 pm. eastern. You know, shout out for those. But he has his own business coaching men on, losing weight, and he’s rocking the affiliate world. But he’s like, Matt, you sent me all these affiliates. What do I do now? Like, now what? I don’t know what to do. I’m like, well, let me walk you through that. So I never did. I totally forgot to actually share all this with Alan, but I told him I would record a podcast episode or record something for him. So this is my way of answering Alan’s question. It kind of depends on where you’re at.
Just to be clear, how do you onboard affiliates? Well, it’s very different. If you’re a brand new program, you’re getting like one affiliate per day. Well, then you set up calls with them all. You know, if you’re an established program, you’re getting, you know, ten new affiliates a day. It’s different.
What I’m going to do is take you through that journey today from beginner program. Maybe you’re getting one or two affiliates a week to a more established program. Most of the stuff is the same. It’s consistent throughout. If you’re a new program, like I said, you get on the phone with each of them.
The key is to establish the program. You want to wow your early affiliates, get things moving. If you’re an employee working as a new affiliate manager, you want to impress your boss with some early momentum and you want to do those things. If you’re an established program, like when I ran Shutterfly’s affiliate program, or Adidas affiliate program, we were getting 300, 400 affiliates per day.
You know, especially like the time of year from like November 1 through Christmas. It was crazy. There was no way I could get on the phone with any of them, let alone, you know, all 300 or 400 of them. But I want you to think about this from the affiliates perspective, what do they want? This is why I recommend being an affiliate.
So I recommend doing this. I’m a much better affiliate manager now that I’m also an affiliate because I know what affiliates want. I know what I want. They want it quickly and they want it easily. So I’m going to walk you through the steps. You need to take the things you need to do to onboard your affiliates here today.
So, Alan, this one’s for you. Buddha number one. You need to set them up if needed. All right, so that’s, that kind of goes without saying. A few of these early ones like, well, duh. No. You know, we handle affiliates a little bit differently than a lot of people.
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We like to white glove it. We don’t. I personally, as an affiliate, again, I go back to rule number one, do what I would want to do as an affiliate, right? I don’t like it when people send me a link and say, go fill this out. That just ticks me off. I’m like, I’m busy, you know, and this is not an ego thing. I just, I might not be able to get around to it.
And then I’m like, I forget about it. I’m not signed up four days later. Well, that’s your fault as the affiliate manager, not mine. So we white glove things. We sign them up, we set up their account, we get them their links, we do all that. Now, you may do it differently, and that’s fine. I’m not against that way.
But do what you need to do on the, on the tech side. Add them to relevant Google sheets or Excel spreadsheets or databases. Right. One of the things that I highly recommend not doing is we don’t use the system to send most of the emails. So if they’re in infusionsoft, we don’t email them through infusionsoft.
We don’t email them through convertkit. Here’s the reason. In Convertkit, in Fusionsoft, if they unsubscribe from my main list, they’re also unsubscribing from affiliate updates. They may not want to do that. I’m gonna give you a really good example of that. I’m on Jeff Walker’s list. Why was, I was on there twice. I was on there two times. I had an affiliate account and I had opted in to some stuff using that email, and I had my regular just subscriber account. So every time he sent an email to his list, I got two of them.
I clicked unsubscribe. I no longer got affiliate updates, and I have seen this happen time and time again. That’s why we don’t use the system. We use a mail merge tool that called gmass. We also use another one called yet another mail merge. I don’t recommend one over the other. We use both of them pretty interchangeably. There’s things I like about both, but we use those tools and we email them through a spreadsheet. Now, if you’ve got 300,000 affiliates like we had at, you know, Shutterfly and Adidas, you can’t do that clearly.
But as much as possible, I try not to email them through the system. And that’s a whole tech conversation. I’m not going to get into that. So you need to add them to whatever database that you’re using, you know, beyond your regular, your regular system. Number two, you need to send them a welcome message. You need to make it warm and inviting. Right.
Well, this is going to have some of the elements that we’re going to talk about here, but the big thing is just make them feel like, you know, you’re really glad that they’re a part of your affiliate program.
Make them feel welcome. It’s called a welcome message for a reason. I want this to feel warm and inviting. Think about it like I’m welcoming you into my home. I wouldn’t use a bunch of corporate speak. Dear sir, thank you for being a part of our affiliate program. We are honored and humble. Like, what the heck is that? I feel like I should just do like entire episodes where I read emails that affiliate managers send and critique them. You guys, you know what? Let me know if you’re interested in that.
Do me a favor, text me at 260-217-4619 260-217-4619 and just let me know if you’d be interested in me critiquing affiliate programs. Like different things, like things that I’m seeing and then commenting on.
It could be good or bad. If you’re interested in that kind of content, text me. That’s actually not a bad idea. I may just do it anyway, but I’d love to hear from you if you’re interested. All right, so number two, you got to have that welcome message. Number three, you need to give them their tools. Now, I’ve done a whole episode on this.
I want to focus in on just a few things very quickly. Number one, you got to give them swipe copy. All right? It’s one of the most important things you can give them. Killer swipe copy they can use for every part of your promotion, whether it’s a launch or whatever. I’m not going to go into a ton of detail, I’ve shared this before, but number one, you got to hire a copywriter.
You know, you got to hire somebody that can write it objectively. You’re too close to the product to be objective. Number two, you need to include images you know that your affiliates might need. Number three, you need to have different versions for different audiences. So if you’ve got different target audiences, write different swipe copy for each of those.
Number four, you need different links so you need some short 2300 word emails. You need some thousand word emails. And then you need some blurbs for things like newsletters, right. And maybe a 32nd clip from a podcast. And then number five, you need to teach your affiliates that swipe copy is a guide only.
I talked about this in the last episode. Don’t use the swipe copy. You know, don’t copy and paste the swipe copy. As an affiliate. The worst thing you can have happen is a hundred affiliates all sending the exact same identical emails. Tell them to make the emails personal and only use the swipe copy as a starting point.
Share my guide on that with them. I. The links in the last episode, share that with them. Right. You need to give them social media posts and images and links, of course, and give them the login information and all those things. So give them the tools that they need to succeed. The number four thing you need to do is ask about them, learn about them, get to know the affiliate, learn who they are, learn about their website and their promotional methods. Again, as much as possible. Again, 300 affiliates.
That’s different. Early on you should know all kinds of stuff about them. I think back to my early affiliates, I can still name them, I can still tell you stories about them. I still know, remember their URL’s. As my programs got bigger and bigger, I began to know less and less. But early on, learn about them.
Keep a database where you know things like their wife’s name, their husband’s name, their kid’s name. Do you at least know their, you know, okay, what sports do their kids play, what activities are they in, where do they live? Like when you’re talking to an affiliate for the fifth time and you’re going, oh, remind me again, what part of the country are you in? You sound like an idiot. That’s just ridiculous. Like, no, I should not have to remind you where I live. You should know. You should know.
Like, that’s just, I mean, when I talk to my friends, they don’t ask me questions like that. Be their friend. So ask about them. Learn about them. Number five, part of the onboarding process. Learn how they like to communicate. You need to learn their preferred method of communication and then use it. I know. I work with affiliates that only do WhatsApp. That’s all they use. So I have to use that, period. I’ve got two that I can think of. That’s it. But I have to use that Skype.
Outside of. If it wasn’t for affiliates, I would literally never use Skype, but I have some affiliates that prefer Skype. There’s Voxer, there’s email, there’s text messages, there’s, you know, some people like getting phone calls. It’s weird, but they do, you know. No, that’s fine. I’m cool with that, actually.
But some people prefer Facebook, you know, DM’s Facebook or Instagram, DM’s, things like that. Easiest way is just ask them. You know, like you could do a survey, send it a quick survey. You could just hit reply and let me know, you know, initially all you have is their email, hit reply and let me know. What’s, what’s your favorite way to communicate? I want to make sure I communicate in a way that you most prefer.
You’re going to get better replies that way, which is going to benefit you. So I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if I’ve got somebody that prefers text message and something big is happening, I’m going to text them, not going to send them an email or Facebook message. All right, the 6th thing you need to do, make sure they understand the basics, the basics around your program’s rules.
What are they allowed to do and not allowed to do? Commissions. Are there any particular commission structures, any nuances? Special commissions? Like you get 50% on course sales, 30% on the membership, things like that.
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They need to know the products and the pricing. If you have ranges of prices, they need to know what those are. And so they’re. You’re not. For one, they’re going to market it better. For two, you’re going to have less questions on the back end. They need to know important dates and time periods. And of course, if it’s a launch, they need to know not only when does the launch start, you know, okay, the launch starts April 21, but when does the promotion start? Well, it starts April 10. When does the warm up start?
It starts late March. They need to know those things. You need to tell them and be clear about that. They need to know when you pay. Do you pay monthly for the previous month? Do you pay on the 15th? Do you pay, you know, net 30? What do they, what do you pay?
When do you pay? How do you pay? They need to know what bonuses are up for grabs. I mean, this is kind of 101, right? If you’re going to offer bonuses and prizes and contests, they need to know that. They need to know how to contact you.
So I’m not going to list, like, I’m going to I’m going to know my affiliates preferred methods, but in my signature I’m going to listen, you know, a phone number that they can contact me at and I’m probably going to list like one alternative means my preferred method because maybe they don’t have a preferred method, maybe they don’t care. So I’m going to give them like two ways to contact me. In addition to email number seven, get on a strategy call with them.
You know, I’ve talked about this before, but one of the best things you can do to get your affiliates to mail more and promote early and get them going is just to create a personal promotion plan with them. When you meet with your affiliates one on one, before the promotion, you’re able to craft a custom plan.
Now we actually call it a commitment plan. Now, there’s something we changed a couple of years ago. We found like this, you know, Robert Cialdini, right? The principles of commitment and consistency means that people stick to this plan. So we call them commitment plans. Usually what we found is that if we can get them one on one, do a plan, they agree to at least a few extra emails and they’d previously planned on sending. So this is a personalized plan. I’ve got a sample template that you can download.
I will put the link in the show notes. I think it’s just mattmcwilliams. com aff plan. You can go download that. These work so they only, you know, they only work when you’re small or you’re, you know, you’re only picking up like a few affiliates. Or maybe you can do it with your, your top 20 or 30.
It’s hard to do with more than two people a day. That gets a little bit out of hand with the bigger programs. Do them once or twice a week in small groups. So everybody that signed up this week, we’re going to get together and do a promotion plan. In fact, this is something we used to do with some of our bigger programs. We would just do it twice a month, just regularly, and anybody could sign up.
When you signed up for the program, you could be a part of these calls and we basically do kind of more of a generic one and craft them together on those calls. The 8th thing that you should do to onboard people is give them a quick start guide. Like this is one to three pages. Really.
It should be two, like on the high end. If it dips into a third page, that’s fine, but it’s a very quick guide. How do I get my links? How do I create custom links? How do I find swipe copy? How do I find images? How do I find blank? Like, where is it? You know, how do I access my stats? How do I log in? How do I contact you? What are the basic no nos? What’s working for others?
You know, what are the mailing plans? When are the dates? Like, this is all in one spot. All these things I’ve been talking about in one spot. Right there in one spot. What’s the commission, the products, like all this in a quick start guide.
That’s important with these mailing plans, for example, it goes back to what we just talked about, like doing the kind of the generic meeting where you create those promo plans. I’ll meet with 2025 affiliates for a big launch. Personally, we have 1000 affiliates. So what I do is I give them our mailing plans. We call them our ABC plans. The a stands for all in or aggressive.
The c stands for conservative. So all in or aggressive might be like 15 emails. Conservative might be five emails. And then a balanced plan, which is the b would be, you know, five emails. And so we outline, like, here’s what to do, you know, June 6, do this. June 8, do this. June 9, mail to this group, then mail on, you know, here’s what to do each of these days. And so our objective here, just like the personalized commitment plans, just get them to commit to some level of participation.
All I’m getting, all I want them to do is commit to a minimum number of emails, minimum, minimum promotion. And what we found is that people who commit to that c, you know, that conservative level, will often move up to the balanced or even the all in level as the launch progresses. They just want to dip their toe in the water, right? Is this promo going to work for me? And if it looks like it’s working, then they’ll get more aggressive as they go. But the key here is to get them to commit to something on the front end.
We make it very easy, super easy for them to commit on the conservative level. Like the conservative level is usually going to be by five total emails. Maybe six, like two, possibly three to your whole list. Maybe one or two to unopens or, you know, non clicks. One or two to, you know, engage contacts and, you know, maybe six emails. Pretty easy commitment level, you know, only two, maybe three to your whole list.
Like, that’s super easy. And the next thing you know, they add a couple more to their non clicks and then they add, oh, well, when I’m promoting the sales, I only promote it to my engaged contacts. Oh, I can send, you know, six or seven. Now all of a sudden there are 13 emails, which is really cool.
All right. The number nine thing we want to do when we’re onboarding our affiliates is get them their first sale quickly. We want them making a first sale ASAP. Now, if it’s a launch, like, hey, we’re launching in April, it’s January. I can’t, like, I can’t really do anything for you there. But if it’s a regular program, like get them a first sale quickly, incentivize it, you know, like, hey, on your first sale, if you make your first sale within ten days, I’m gonna give you a hundred percent commission, double commission.
You know, maybe you can’t do a hundred percent because you’ve got cost of goods or something, but even then it’s like maybe I wanna, I don’t mind if I lose a few bucks on the first sale. If you make three sales in your first month, then you’re gonna get whatever, you know.
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So it’s like, let’s say you get a $1000 product, you know, dollar, If you make three sales in the first month, I’m gonna give you a $1000 bonus. You’re basically gonna make almost no money on those three sales. That’s fine. Gets them going, right. We wanna give them a low barrier, get them some movement, you know, rather than do the three sales in the first month, you know, you get, you’re guaranteed $1,000.
Maybe it’s, you make three sales in the first month and we’re gonna enter you into a drawing for $5,000, you know, pretty impressive prize. And if you have enough affiliates, you, it’s, it’s actually costing you less money. But again, low barrier, fast moving. That’s what we’re trying to get them to do. And 10th, you need to make it clear that you are there to help. Be available, be on the multiple channels like we talked about. You know, when they email, reply fairly quickly, make it clear.
Tell them I’m here to help. And not just in like a generic way. Tell them I’m here to help. Here are the ways I can help you. What can I do to serve you? Make it abundantly clear that you are there to help. And then the last thing, and we’ll talk more about this coming up.
But once you’ve onboarded them, give them regular updates, educate them, share what’s working and we’re going to talk about how to teach your affiliates and talk about the different ways that you should communicate with your affiliates. But there’s a lot to do.
But now you have the onboarding plan, what to do when your affiliates sign up and how to get them started fast with making some sales. So I mentioned that upcoming episode that’ll be coming up in two or three episodes.
Our next episode, we’re going to be talking about how to use leaderboards to find affiliates, which I’m super excited. I’m going to share kind of a secret strategy there that I don’t, I’ve kind of touched on it in some other content, but I don’t know if I’ve ever shared the exact strategy and I’m pretty excited about that. I shared it with a coaching client recently and pretty excited to share that publicly for the, what I believe is for the first time.
So you’ve got the plan. My question for you, and I’d love if you would text me your answer at I’m going to be the one that responds like, this is not my team or anything doing this. Just to be clear, I want to know, like, which one of these things are you maybe not doing? Which one of these things can you implement? Which one of these things do you think maybe you’re doing poorly and you’re going to improve? And how are you going to improve it? What did you get out of this episode? So please text me, let me know your thoughts, 260-217-4619 and let me know what you’re going to be doing as a result of this episode.
Then make sure you hit subscribe because again, the next episode is all about finding affiliates using leaderboards. And then we’re gonna be talking soon about that communication plan for that ongoing communication. You’ve onboarded them. They’re up and running now. We’re a month later like, oh, what do I do? Well, we’re gonna be talking about that soon, so I will see you in those upcoming episodes. Bye bye.
See you soon.
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
| Find Your First 100 Affiliates | Affiliate Program Terms & Conditions Template | Get My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email |
| Avoid The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes | Turn Inactive Affiliates into Your Best Affiliates | Get My Template for Writing Affiliate Emails |
| Affiliate Marketing Sales Secrets | Learn How to Create a Resources Page | Learn How to Write a Product Review |
The post Successful Affiliate Onboarding: How to Setup Your Affiliates to Win appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### If you have an audience of leaders, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, or people who want to change their world with ideas, this affiliate book launch opportunity is for you. Unicorn Team by Jennifer Kem will be one of the hottest book launches of 2024-2025…here’s how YOU can be a part of it!
Who Is Jennifer Kem?Jennnifer Kem has been called a go-to-market mastermind, a success strategist, and a brand expert.
She’s the secret weapon strategist who works behind the scenes with top brands you know and love – including the Oprah Winfrey Network, Steve Harvey, Verizon, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Oracle and Microsoft – as well as countless personal brands, experts and thought leaders who have bodies of work that need to get seen, heard and recognized more.
When she stumbled into this career instead of pursuing a law degree, she became absolutely fascinated with the way great brands became holy and marketing made people do things, just using the power of words and images.
She’s had the opportunity to work on some of the most legendary launches with some of the most iconic leaders. She’s also worked with leaders who are underground unicorns, the specialists who helped shape how we see the world we live in.
That mix of real-world strategic execution paired with working with the people behind a business’ success are what makes her know how critical mastering THE BRAND really is.
Years ago she was told, “Jen, your superpower is pretty cool. You can smell the money and see the future”. Simply put, Jennifer Kem helps leaders take game-changing ideas to the world with people who care, and deliver those ideas to people who need them most.
Interested in becoming an affiliate for this book launch? Click Here to Email the Affiliate Manager for More Information
About the Book, Unicorn TeamUnicorn Team: The Nine Leadership Types You Need to Launch Your Big Ideas with Speed and Success outlines the case for why re-igniting the way we bring innovative ideas forward needs a serious upgrade: why we’re in “worthy idea” atrophy, who we actually need to help us get the right ideas out there, and what our role as leaders is to bring more world-changing ideas to life, together.
Leaders are struggling with how to maintain a culture of innovation when their best talent has infinite choices and lifestyle demands. Mediocre ideas are being implemented by many because of the penchant for solo pedestal success. The truth is, humans are built to gather together to make great things happen.
And, innovation itself is innately human. For the best ideas to happen, we need people known as Unicorns to do it with.
Unicorn Team presents a solution that helps anyone who has ideas worth implementing needs – whether you’re an executive leader or solo entrepreneur, this is the map to do it successfully.
Instead of a workplace, leaders need to build watering holes where these Unicorns can see that their gifts, talents, and skills can be alchemized into undeniable magic. Visionaries are not the only unicorns. And unicorns aren’t just companies with $1B valuations. A Unicorn Team is a collective herd of humans who want to deliver something legendary. Something the world actually needs.
The book presents the proven Unicorn Innovation Model – a framework that helps sort, clarify and communicate why an idea is worth pursuing and then how to bring it to market fast with the right people.
Through case studies like Tracy, the head of human resources who was behind Moderna’s ability to bring the COVID-19 vaccine to market in just 42 days, or Bruce, the security guard-turned-CMO for helping Quest Nutrition sell for $1B in cash by creating an unconventional promotional street campaign because he loved the product so much, or the woman behind Steve Jobs who was the only person known to have his ear, as stubborn and egotistical as it was, to embed empathy into his creations – Unicorn Team will show you how they rallied the right people to make these miraculous things happen with astonishing speed and success – in a very practical way.
The book will include free access to the Unicorn Leadership Types Assessment (ULTA) valued at $199 and all of the Templates referred to in each Chapter of the book.
Target AudienceThis is a book to share with leaders, entrepreneurs, executives, intrapreneurs, managers of teams and colleagues – or anyone
- Executive Leaders
- Entrepreneurs
- Business Owners
- Solopreneurs
- Imperfect Genuises
…and who wants to launch something meaningful and just doesn’t know where to start.
Interested in becoming an affiliate for this book launch? Click Here to Email the Affiliate Manager for More Information
Launch, Upsells, & CommissionsThe official publishing date is February 4, 2025, with an Early Bird deadline of December 13…but there’s a whole lotta brand magic happening between now and then.
The book funnel has some awesome upsells, which means great commissions for you. In total, there are hundreds of dollars in possible upsells and with 50% commissions, that means some potentially huge commissions…just for promoting a book! There are multiple opportunities for pre-order buyers to upgrade their experience!
As an official part of the Unicorn book launch Team, you’ll receive early previews, invites to exclusive online and in-person events, and so much more…
Interested in becoming an affiliate for this book launch? Click Here to Email the Affiliate Manager for More Information
Click Here to Learn More About Our Recommended Affiliate ProgramsThe post Affiliate Opportunity – Book Launch: Unicorn Team by Jennifer Kem appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### If you have an audience of course creators, group program creators, or one-to-one service providers who want to automate their sales or discovery calls, this affiliate opportunity is for you.
About Nicki Krawczyk & The Circuit Sales SystemNicki Krawczyk is a 20-year copywriting and marketing veteran and founder of a multi-brand, multi-seven-figure per year digital training company.
Her team’s most recent brand, the Circuit Sales System, teaches online business owners the automated, scalable, customer-centric system she created to 40-x her first brand’s revenue in just over two years.
Nicki teaches this system to other course and group program creators who want to sell their offers on autopilot, every single day.
This system is based on her 20+ years of experience crafting effective messaging as a copywriter, as well as strategic insight into customer psychology. Her entrepreneur students are seeing excellent results—with one reporting that she’s now making 400% of what she was making in 2022—every single month.
Interested in becoming an affiliate for The Circuit Sales System? Click Here to Email Me for More Information
What’s Included inThe Circuit Sales SystemThe Circuit Sales System includes the step-by-step process for creating their own wildly effective sales systems, including guidance and templates for crafting every piece of their messaging.
On top of that, they get 6 months of access to twice-monthly coaching calls for strategy questions and 6 months of access to the student-only Facebook group, where their team of expert copywriters gives feedback on CSS messaging every day, Monday through Friday. (That’s more than worth the cost of the course, on its own!)
Target Audience* Course creators * Group program creators * 1:1 Service providers * Business Operators * Copywriters * Online Marketers
…and anyone else who wants to automate their sales and/or discovery calls!
Their students have seen success with products anywhere from $297 to $6,000+.
Interested in becoming an affiliate for The Circuit Sales System? Click Here to Email Me for More Information
Pricing* $2,997 (one-time only Fast Action pricing) * $3,997 standard enrollment pricing * 3-part and 12-part installment pricing options.
CommissionsBecause they run on an automated selling system, all you have to do is get your audience to opt-in, and they take it from there.
Even more, their automated selling means that our affiliates aren’t tied to a launch schedule—they’re welcome to promote at any time, but the easiest first step is to build in automated emails that go to each new subscriber (at some point in their workflow) so they can set it and forget it!
- 30% commission with a 30-day cookie
- Earnings per sale of $899 – $1,332!
TestimonialsCheck out all the testimonials here.
Interested in becoming an affiliate for The Circuit Sales System? Click Here to Email Me for More Information
Click Here to Learn More About Our Recommended Affiliate ProgramsThe post Affiliate Opportunity – The Circuit Sales System appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### Today, I’m sharing a story I’ve never shared before…the story of how I took an affiliate program from $15 million to a staggering $325 million annually in just four years. Yes, more than 20X growth in only 48 months. I share everything…all of the basic principles and secrets I’ve never revealed publicly that worked…and a few things that didn’t. Some of the methods I share might surprise you!
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Get the EXACT Template We Give to Our Affiliates to Get Them to Promote More and Generate More Sales! Click Here to Download it Now!
Links Mentioned in this EpisodeAffiliate Training Templates and Scripts
Promo Strategy Call Template
Resources Page Guide
TEXT ME: 260-217-4619
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Create The Right Affiliate Commissions
Top 14 Reasons Your Affiliate Program is Failing (And How to Fix It)
How to Steal Your Competitors’ Affiliates
How to Create High-Converting Swipe Copy for Affiliates
How to Create an Affiliate Program Agreement
What are the Legal Requirements for an Affiliate Program?
How I Grew a Major Affiliate Program from $15M to $325M a Year (In Only 4 Years)Today I’m sharing a story I have never shared before. The story of how I took an affiliate program from 15 million a year to a staggering 325 million annually in just four years. Yes, that is more than 20 x growth in only about 48 months. I’m going to share everything, all of the basic principles, all of the secrets I have never revealed publicly that worked and maybe even a few things that didn’t. Some of the methods I share might surprise you.
So listen up. Let’s get started. So that I know of. I’ve never shared this story before. I’ve probably, as I was thinking about this, I was thinking, you know, I know I shared at least one little part of it earlier this year and it was kind of the first time I shared that.
And obviously I’ve shared some of the principles here and there and throughout different episodes, but I’ve never shared this story in its entirety. And it’s the story of how I took one affiliate program from right at 15 million a year. When we took over to four years later, we were doing 325 million that year.
Now, I am not going to say who this company was, in part because I’m going to mention some specific people without mentioning their names and I don’t want to call them out, but this company, it’s a publicly traded retailer. Now, we’ve worked with dozens of companies like that, so you can’t figure out who it is. Huge, right? And I am not going to share the exact numbers because you could google these exact numbers and possibly figure out who it is.
But their revenue last year was over $2. 25 billion. Okay, over 2.25, not much over, but right around there. At the time I took over the affiliate program in 2010, their annual revenue was about $300 million.
Their affiliate program accounted for less than 5% of that. When I stopped working with them in 2015, they did $1. 1 billion in sales, with the affiliate program accounting for 32% of allsales. In other words, we did more in affiliate sales in 2015 than the entire company did in 2010. That’s the kind of growth we had.
Need help activating your affiliates? Use my proven email templates for getting inactive affiliates in the game and making sales! Get them here!
So the question, of course, is how did we do it, you know, and as I looked back and thought about it, I found five things that we did specifically that contributed the most growth. Could I do a 50 point podcast about every little thing we did that contributed an additional 100,000 in sales. Absolutely. I’m not going to do that, though. I’m going to share five big things. I think these were the five core principles that were all worth, I’m going to say, more than $20 million individually. And of course, the cool thing about them is they stack on each other and I’m.
I’m going to share them in no specific order because they are all important. If I do a countdown from five to one, you’ll focus on number one, maybe number two, and that’s it. The reality is that doing any one of these things, or even two or three will only get you half the results of doing all five. And so I actually am going to do them in some sort of an order.
And that is the order in which we implemented them is I’m going to do this in chronological order. So I guess there is a particular order, but the reason why it’s chronological, it’s not just, to be clear, is not most important. Least important of the five, they are all equally important.
And like I said, they compound. You know, if all we do is the first thing, we might have grown to 50 million. But we did one and two, which got us to 80. We did one, two and three, which got us to 140. We did one, two, three and four, which got us to 230. We did 1234 and five, which got us to 325.
The combination of these five things, plus the magic factor of time, you know, it did take us four years now, to be clear. Still pretty awesome that we more than 21 x in four years, when we do all five of these things, plus time, I can promise you, you will grow.
All right, so let’s jump into what we did to really grow that particular affiliate program. The first thing we did was we focused on one affiliate type at a time. You know, there are literally dozens of different types of affiliates you could work with. There are coupon sites, there are co red sites, there are mommy bloggers that other content creators, YouTubers, instagramers, people who are big on Facebook, people who are big on TikTok deal blogs, all these different types of affiliates.
Well, when I first took over, one of the very first things we did was we sat down with the CEO, and I’m going to call the CEO Greg. Nice generic name there, right? Actually, come to think of it, I have worked with a CEO named Greg. It’s not him. Just so you know, their numbers aren’t nearly that big. So if you happen to know who I’ve worked with and know that I once worked with a CEO Greg, it’s not him, okay? And he was like, okay, you got to go after a bunch of different types of affiliates.
Here’s how we’re going to grow. We have a vision for how we’re going to grow, and here’s what we want you to do. We want you to go after mommy bloggers and deal blogs and nonprofits and photographers, and we want you to go after all these ten different types of affiliates.
I was like, greg, no, that will not work. We have to focus on one type of affiliate. At first, the old saying that I shared with him was, you know, we don’t want to go a mile wide and an inch deep. We want to go an inch wide and a mile deep. I said, we need to really lean in to focusing on one type of affiliate. And I went on to explain not only my theory, but my experience that here’s what’s going to happen. This is what I explained to him and what ended up happening, what I predicted, what happened. Did I say, here’s the thing, we need to focus on one, one type of affiliate.
And we go out and we work our butts off to get one type of affiliate, and we go take days to get the first one, and then we take less to get the second and the third, and then one of them starts having some success. And we can use that as an example for the next one, which makes it easier to get the next one. And now we’re adding one a day and then one and a half a day and then ten a week, and then we’re adding 20 a week and the next thing you know, we’re going to grow from there. I said, that’s how this is going to work.
I said, they talk to each other, they mastermind with each other, and we need to focus on one type. And so I picked mommy bloggers. Now, I know they hate that terminal. I’m just saying what the term was back then, back in early 2011, it was mommy bloggers. I said, I’m going to focus on them because I knew some and I knew that I could get ten or twelve really fast to sign up.
I might even be get like 20 or 25 pretty fast, like in the first week or two. And so that’s why I picked that. And so what I had predicted would happen is exactly what happened. I worked hard, I reached out to them. I got about 15 to 20 pretty fast, and then I worked hard to get more. And I asked for introductions. You know, I talk about that all the time.
Your number one source of new affiliates should be your current affiliates. So I focused on the Mommy blogger affiliates that we already had in the 15 or so that I brought on, and I asked them, and next thing you know, we’ve got like 75 to 100 mommy bloggers pretty quickly. But then I worked really hard to recruit one new one and then another new one and then another new one.
And so what happens over time is when you have, let’s say, five, you have five mommy loggers, five nonprofits, five deal blogs, five photographers, five coupon sites, five loyalty sites, you have five of each. Then the promotions are so sporadic that none of the others really see them and notice them. But what happens when you get to 100 of one type is now all of a sudden, and you know this, mommy bloggers follow other mommy bloggers. Deal blogs follow other deal blogs. Nonprofits follow other nonprofits.
Right? The way I was saying that just made me think of Charlie and the chocolate factory. Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory. And he’s like, the strawberries taste like strawberry. The snozzberries taste like snozberry. Sorry. Okay, that was my add moment for this episode.
Back to what we’re talking about, you know, so they start seeing multiple promotions in a day, and then all of a sudden, when you have a deal, maybe five or ten affiliates are promoting it that an individual mommy blogger is on their list or follow them on social media.
And now they’re seeing this program everywhere. And it got to the point, as we grew and grew, and it literally, we went from getting one a day and working my b*** off to get one a day for the first couple of months to two a day, three a day, five a day, ten a day, literally 15 to 20 per day during peak season. And it got to the point where it was like, step one, register your domain.
Step two, set up hosting, you know, WordPress. Step three, register for this affiliate program. Because if you followed anybody that was a mommy blogger, they were all promoting this company. And so I got the nickname from somebody. It was king of the Mommy bloggers, right? Ironic nickname. And so we focused on one.
Okay, from there, we’re getting 15 to 20 mommy bloggers signing up every day without actively recruiting them. It’s no longer worth actively recruiting new ones. We got all the big ones. We got, like, the top 250, and we’re getting all these new ones setting up every day. We’re well known. I don’t need to actively recruit any of them.
So we moved on to photographers, and I didn’t know any. Actually, I knew one. A friend of mine from Franklin, Tennessee. And I did reach out to him, and he, I think he introduced me, like, two more, but that was it. And so we specifically focused on wedding and engagement photographers.
And then we moved on to baby photographers, then graduation. And then we were, you know, that was most photographers at that point, but we reached out to hundreds a day, but we’d get one or two to sign up. But then, like I said earlier, after we got like 20 or 30 and a few of them started having success. Now we had case studies and, and our signup page got better. And now we started getting multiple photographers in an area.
And if you were a photographer in that area and you followed photographers in your area, all of a sudden two of them promoted us in a week. Well, that’s interesting. And then three promoted us, and now it’s like, okay, now all of a sudden, after a few months of really hard work, we started getting a couple a week to sign up that we didn’t even recruit. And then another month goes by and all of a sudden we’re getting one a day. Same thing. Two months later, we’re getting two a day, three a day, four day. They were flooding in.
So at that point, when we kind of tap that out, where we were getting more people signing up than we could conceivably actively recruit, we knew it was only a matter of time before we’d have almost all of them. So then we moved on to the deal blogs, and we specifically focused on loyalty sites, and we did the same thing. Then we did coupon sites, then we did nonprofits. But even with the nonprofits, we specifically started with PTA’s and ptos. And we specifically started with PTA’s and ptos in a certain geographical region. At that time, we started with them in the northeast because we had connections there.
And so that way we were only working with PTA’s and ptos in the northeast. And then we expanded to the rest of the country. And then again, it got to the point where we were getting two to five per day signing up, which was more than we could actively recruit. So we moved on to other types of nonprofits, children’s hospitals, and then other types from there.
And as they began to see what others were doing, they signed up. So this was so important to us. And one of the biggest reasons it worked was because we had that saturation. We reached that point of saturation where, like I said, it was step one, register your domain. Step two, sign up for hosting.
Step three, sign up for this program. And this is how we went from having only about 5000 affiliates when we took over to having more than 125,000 when we left. We stopped working with them four years later. What’s the math on that? Yeah, we 25 x the number of affiliates. Newsflash, we 21 x’ed the sales. Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?
Now, none of that is possible, or very little of that is possibly none of it. We probably could have taken it from 15 to 100 just on that, maybe even 140 or 50, but there’s still a lot to go to get to 325. So the second thing we did was we changed how we communicated with affiliates. Now, I don’t mean how we communicated, my company communicated how I personally communicate with affiliates.
I’m talking about how we as the affiliate program communicated because when we took over it was basically a weekly mass email newsletter. That was it, 52 emails a year, every week at about the same time to everyone. No individualization, no segmenting, nothing more than the 52 because there apparently there was some unwritten rule that said you can only send one email a week and it has to be in a newsletter format of it has to go to everybody and say the exact same thing. That doesnt work. We know that.
So we started individualizing a lot of the emails. We started reaching out to affiliates with weekly milestones and goals and specific promos that were only for certain affiliates and we knew that certain segments, that is, once we got it up and running the nonprofits didnt care about certain things so we left them out which allowed us to send more emails that were very specific to the affiliates. We started sending a lot more emails, like a lot more but to an individual affiliate they might only get three of them in a week.
And so this was an example. One of the advantages that we have as a company is because we work on a lot of evergreen programs and at that time I had worked on a lot of evergreen stuff, but I’d also worked on launches, I’d worked on book launches and I’d worked on product launches and I’d worked on. They weren’t super popular back then, but I was starting to work on things like summits. So these event based promos. Right. So we were able to bring some of the excitement and the ferocity of a launch into evergreen world and we treated each promo like a launch.
So there might be a site wide sale this week or there might be a three day sale and then there might be this thing. And so each of these is now suddenly its own promo with its own launch like thing that has three, four, five plus emails in a week, all about a specific thing rather than one giant email that covers five things.
So we started segmenting the affiliates and yeah, as we grew and we had 50,000 affiliates, there might be an email that only went to 8000 in that same day. There was one that went to 12,500 and there was one that went to another 30,000. There was one that went to the other. Might be a little bit of overlap and that might mean, you know, heaven forbid, right?
You got two emails in a day about different things instead of one email a week. With five things, we started doing more phone calls and more strategy sessions with individual affiliates and small groups of affiliates, which, by the way, if you want to get a template for that, I’ll put the link in the show notes. I think it’s Matt mcWilliams.com aff an aff plan.
We will edit that if that’s not the link. So. And you’ll hear a voiceover from a, um. We’ll probably pick somebody with like a really, really good baritone. I’ll have James Earl Jones come in and like all of a sudden you’ll get the right URL. But either way, we’ll put it in the show notes and you can get a template for those phone calls and the strategy sessions. We did all these things that individualized the communication and took that communication to a new level. When we announced a contest, one of the biggest things we did, we did tons of contests and we’ll talk more about contests later.
But they used to run like one contest every quarter and we were suddenly running one. It was like three day contest, two day contest, one day contest, weekly contest. But we required them to opt into the contest. Now there’s two things that did. So let’s say we ran a weekly contest. Like we’re going to run a big contest next week. Top affiliate earns $2,500, 2nd place, thousand, third place, 500, whatever it is, right? Or however we did the contest, we did all kinds of different contests.
I am talking 50 different contests a year, maybe more. And some of them were like, every sale earns you an entry. So if you make five sales, you get five entries you could win versus, you know, if it’s top affiliate, second affiliate, third affiliate. A lot of the contests were, make a sale tomorrow and you’re entered to win. If you make 50 sales, one sale doesn’t matter. We’ll talk more about that a little bit.
But we required them to opt into the contest. Now, this did two things. Number one, it saved us a ton of money from people accidentally winning something. So somebody win a prize like, oh, I didn’t even know I was in a contest. Well, then they didn’t do anything to win it. We want people who are actively going to participate, so we would require them to respond back or fill out a form and say, I’m in.
And so we’d have 2800 people sign up. Only those 2800 people were entered to win the contest. That was number one. The second thing it did was we could communicate with them differently because I knew these 2800 people are going to promote this specific product Tuesday and Wednesday, and they’re in this contest, right? So I’m going to go overboard with communication next Tuesday and Wednesday. So I’m going to communicate with them the Friday before and really lead into it over the weekend.
I’m going to send an email Monday, I’m going to send another email Monday night. I’m going to send an email at the bug crack of dawn on Tuesday morning, Tuesday afternoon, possibly Tuesday evening, a couple on, you know, Wednesday. Like, I’m going to go all because it’s like a launch.
And if you’ve ever seen that ferocity and that excitement that comes with being an affiliate for a launch, that’s what we were replicating with these promos. Even though it’s an evergreen program as far as communication, we set up a Facebook group at that time. We were one of the first affiliate programs to ever do that.
Like, looking back, I’m like, how did I not start doing that three years earlier? But as far as affiliate programs with more than a hundred people, I think we were the first. And I had seen somebody else do it on a small level. I’d seen an affiliate program that a friend of mine ran in a very small niche, and I thought it was really cool. You know, he had like 40 affiliates.
And I saw the community and I saw the fact that it was another avenue to communicate. And I believe when we first did this, it was before Facebook really started pushing groups, but it was still an important thing. And so we set up these groups for affiliates. You know, Facebook groups started, I think, in 2010 sometime, and we took over this program in 2011. So they were new. And like I said, I think Facebook was really pushing them at this time. But even before that, you could set up a group in other ways, forums, things like that, and nobody was doing them.
It was just kind of like everybody was in their own world, I guess. So we created that community. It gave us another way to communicate. We would show up not only in their email inbox, but we’d show up in their notifications on Facebook. People started helping each other and offering advice and sharing what was working. And I would say once we got it up and running, and it took a good six months to really get, we had separate ones for three segments of the affiliates, right.
But once we got the first group up and running, the first three or four months, I did all the posting and I, we’d have like two comments, you know, then four and then six. And they were very rarely interacting with each other. Usually they were just responding to me and asking me a question. But then it got to where other people would start posting and posting tips and sharing what was working and what was not working and asking questions and sharing struggles. And it became this amazing community, and it became so much more fun.
And that was huge. And then also it opened the door for us to share what was working for other affiliates. This was a big part of our communication. Now we got their permission, but before this program, everything just felt like it was so private and so close. And we started interviewing affiliates, and they were able to learn from each other.
And so we would see an affiliate do one cool thing, and we do like a little 1015 minutes interview about. How they did this on social media, or how they did this email campaign, or how they did this thing where they did a lot in sales. And we interviewed big affiliates, small affiliates, mid sized affiliates, all over the place, different types of affiliates, and they all learned from each other.
Suddenly the deal bloggers were learning from the mommy bloggers, the mommy bloggers were learning from the photographers, even a vice versa. And all these people were learning from each other. And it was so cool. And if I saw an email or a blog post from an affiliate, I would ask them, hey, can, can I share this?
I really like your call to action. Do you mind if I share that with the affiliate group or, you know, and send an email? And 99.9% of the time they would say yes every now and again, like, nope, that’s a secret plan. Like, I don’t wanna share that.
Okay, fine. In fact, I don’t know that I ever had anybody with this particular company say no. I have had a couple people over the last decade and a half say no to that type of request, but it was really cool to see. And so everybody learned, everybody got better. So we totally changed the way we communicated. The third thing that we did was we trained the affiliates.
This goes kind of just back to what I was saying. We shared what was working, but one of the biggest things that we implemented was a very consistent monthly training. This was the one thing we did that was like a light clock work.
Still remember it, second Tuesday to Tuesday. The second Tuesday of every month we did a training. In fact, one point, we did this with three clients, and it was always in the second Tuesday. So my second Tuesday of every month from like noon to 06:00 pm was nothing but affiliate trainings.
But each month had a topic, and I trained the affiliates on that topic. And so one month we’d talk about warming up your audience for a promo, and then we would talk about how to promote webinars. So if they were using webinars, I would do a special training to teach them how to promote those webinars on the warming up when I would teach them, you know, seven ways to get your audience warmed up for a promo set of, hey, I haven’t talked about this company in a few months, but I’m going to warm you up for a couple of days.
As we lead into this promo, I would talk about how to put together a bonus package, and we’d workshop different bonus packages and go through the bonus creation worksheet that I created for affiliates. And it was so cool because they would start sharing their bonuses. What do you think? And then an affiliate would be like, I would say, hey, that’s really good.
You know, I like it, which is true. And maybe I’d offer a tip and then another affiliate would be like, oh, but what if you did this? And I’m like, wow, I never thought about that. Like with the group, it got to the point where I didn’t have to do all the stuff. Early on, I had to do all the stuff and I was the only expert.
But over time, we had hundreds of experts who were willing to share. So cool. We did a training on how to put together a promo plan. And so I would walk through like each day of a promo and co create their promotion with them. And I’d give them access to a sheet if you want to get that. It’s the URL I mentioned earlier, the, it’s both for private and like group promo plans. If you go to mattmcwames.com aff plan, remember James Earl Jones? Correct that URL. If it’s not it.
Again, we’ll put it in the show notes. But I would do like 20 or 30 of the private ones, but then I would do these bigger ones where I could have thousands of affiliates at a time. And it was so cool. And they would share what was working for them. And it no longer was just me, you know, 45 minutes of Matt talking followed by 15 minutes of Q and A with Matt. It became almost to the point where it was a little bit unruly, but it was awesome because people would say, well, here’s something I did, and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And oh my gosh, it was so cool.
I did a training on closing sales, so I would share how to close more sales and things like this. And for any type of promotion, especially, you know, how to close sales. Toward the end of the promotion, I did a training on promoting deals, you know, specifically about. Here’s some things that we’ve learned about promoting deals and what works best and what converts best, how to use swipe copy.
I did an entire thing about that. And these morphed into monthly strategy calls where affiliates could just come and ask questions. Like, we got to the point where we do like a training and then the next month we do just a Q and a call. And we’d have more people come for the Q and a call because they get to come and ask questions.
They could share wins, they could share ideas. They could ask again, what do you think about this? And what other affiliates would chime in, what about this strategy. And so we built up this huge library where, frankly, I was saying nothing new after the first 18 months, but we still hosted these monthly calls just to stay on top of things and get exposed to their ideas and having them help each other.
But it just became something that was a part of being an affiliate, and we would have about 2500, upwards of 3000 people on these things alive. And this was when we, you know, we only had 60,000 affiliates. We’d still get 2000, 503,000. I mean, 3000 out of 60,000. That’s 5% of the affiliates were showing up for these things. There were people that showed up probably 30 consecutive times or more for some of these things.
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It was amazing. So real quick, I’m just going to walk you through what one of these calls looks like, just so you can get an idea. If you’ve never been a part of one of these, they usually last about an hour, 75 minutes, about half teaching, half Q and a half strategy, you know, again, just chit chat. Sometimes affiliates get to ask questions, they get to share their experience, they get to learn from each other.
It’s so awesome. And so here’s a quick rundown. You know, basically we do a big training leading into any major promotion or season. So with this particular company, the holiday season was huge. It was 40, 50% of the sales for the whole year happened in about a seven, eight week span. So we would do a training in October and then another one in early November, 10 ish, where we would talk about the holiday season. So, you know, spend a few minutes welcoming them, right. Usually three, four, five minutes, learn where everybody’s from, all that fun stuff, introduce ourselves if needed.
You know, we always had new affiliates, so that was always good. And then we’d spend about five to ten minutes vision casting. This is the part where we talk, really, about the mission behind whatever’s coming up.
And, you know, it’s a little bit more heart centered than money centered, especially if it’s announcing a new product or something like that. And we talk about why it’s important, share success stories, how we want affiliates to be part of something special. So again, it’s more about the heart than the money. And then we go spend about five minutes or so talking about the promotion calendar.
If it’s any type of product launch or promotion, we’ll spend some time going through the calendar, make sure we want to make 100% sure that affiliates know the important dates and what to do on these dates.
So, hey, here’s when Black Friday is. I know you know, but here’s what it is, right? And here’s when the Black Friday promo ends. It ends Saturday, midnight Pacific time. Here’s when the cyber Monday thing ends. Here’s when the blah blah blah ends. Here’s when free shipping, guaranteed free shipping in the United States ends.
Here’s when the final day is to order. And if you get the expedited shipping, it’s guaranteed to get there before Christmas Eve. That’s when this ends, right? So you need to know that. And we go through these and all these excuses to promote, and we would go through these. this deal we’re running on December 7. It’s a special thing and all that. And so as a part of that, I teach them how to warm up their audience.
That’s the first part of the instruction. I share the seven ways that they can get their audience warmed up that I talked about earlier. And again, if you want to see a sample training, you can see a sample training.
Get all the slides. For training your own affiliates, you go to mattmcwilliams. com affiliate training. That’s an easy one for me to remember. Again, we’ll put that in the show notes. Madamclaves. com affiliate training. You actually download the slides. We’ve got them in keynote, PowerPoint and I think Google sheets or something like that. You can download the slides. It’s got all of the slides in there. You don’t even have. All you got to do is like just slap your logo on, change the colors if you want. I’ve got that. I’ve got some of the worksheets and stuff that you can use.
It’s awesome resource, totally free. So go grab that mammoth williams. com forward slash affiliate training. Then I go into the training. So we’ve welcomed them. We’ve kind of chitchatted for a little bit. We’ve done intros. I’ve talked about the vision and the promo calendar. We’re at about the 15 minutes mark, 1620 minutes mark somewhere in there. Then I get into the meat and potatoes, which is the first part of the training. I’d spend about 15 minutes training my best practices, share some tips and strategies they can use to, you know, grow their sales ton of information to help them be a better affiliate.
I then shared the six best practices of a great promo with them and walk through that. Right. This whole section takes about 15 minutes and I stop for a few minutes, take Q and A. Let me go into part two of the training. The final 15 minutes or so. I just share some different strategies, affiliate marketing strategies for specific platforms.
So I talk about how to do email, how to market on your blog post, how to market on, you know, at that time, specific social media networks.
So obviously back in 2011, it was like, here’s how to market on Facebook and Twitter, and now it’s morphed into here’s how to market on Facebook and X, but also Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, do all that and then I wrap up.
Then we’ll just go as long as we need to ask questions. My big call to action is get them to join the Facebook group, where I’ll post even more tips and strategies. And then I take, you know, final q and a until we’re out of questions.
So again, it takes about an hour to 75 minutes. I do that monthly. If you want to see the sample slides for how we do the main training, this is the one you should do at the beginning of any promotion. Matt mcWahiams. com affiliate training and grab those. So just the training of affiliates. Every affiliate went up 510 percent, some of them 25, 30, 50% because of this, again, we’re adding more affiliates and we’re getting dozens of applications a day.
In the peak season, we would get over 100. By the way, just imagine getting 100 affiliates to apply that. It was crazy. And that’s when we hit like October. It just got insane. So we did that. So we’re adding more affiliates who were communicating with them better, and then we’re training them so they’re making more sales. You see how this is starting to compound, right? Well, the next thing we did that was a big help is we dialed in our analytics.
So we started analyzing everything. Who’s up, what affiliates are up, who’s making more sales this month than last month, who’s down? I want to know that what’s working, what’s not, what specific links are working, what deals are working, what promos are working, what incentives work. Hey, we tried this and this didn’t work, you know, and this one did. So let’s do more of the thing that worked.
That’s one of the secrets, by the way, of great marketing. Great everything is find the things that work and do more of it. I had somebody tell me years ago, and this was so true. Hey, if you notice that, if you’re trying to lose weight and you notice that certain meals, you end up eating a lot and you gain a lot, don’t eat that food.
But if there’s other food where it’s like, gosh, you feel full after eating not very much and you tend to lose weight, eat more of that. Pretty simple, right? So an example with this program, when we took over, they offered a five dollar bounty to anyone who posted about a deal. So there’d be a promotion and you could google that coupon code and you have like a thousand affiliates, you know, or thousand results show up and they each get $5. So that’s $5,000 for a thousand posts.
That’s gonna be worth like 60, 70,000 in sales on average. Like, not bad. Don’t get me wrong, you’re gonna pay 10,000 in commissions and about 5000 in bounties for 60,000 in sales. That’s great. But there’s no rhyme or reason for it other than that’s what they had always done. So I tried something new, like the very first thing that we ever did. I said, everyone who posts is entered to win. It was an iPad mini, which was really hot right then. Like $600, right? I think five, $600 back then, it was like the best kind. It was the cell enabled, gold plated one.
So it might have been like seven or $800. It was a pretty fancy. It was like the best iPad mini you could get. That wasn’t like one of the, like $10,000 ones where they encrusted it in diamonds and while you carried around your little Chihuahua, you know, in your handbag. But anyway, but it was a really nice iPad, I think it’s like seven, $800. We had 2500 people post, and this was before we’d even added that many affiliates. Like, we were still at 5200 affiliates, you know, and we had 2500 people post. Eventually we run contests for like, thousand dollar items.
We get 10,000 posts in a matter of hours. And when we showed the CEO, like, this was mind blowing, like, we could google that coupon code and the name of this company, and it was unbelievable. So when we first did it again, 250 people post, we did 108,000 in sales. $108,000. We spent seven or $800 instead of 5000. We got two and a half times as many posts and nearly twice as much revenue, while spending 16% as much money. We spitzen so much less money and got so much more engagement.
Why? Because we studied the analytics. Now, we tried that out, and once we decided that works, we knew that could this works, do more of this. So the next week, let’s up the ante. Let’s try $1,000 giveaway. So sometimes we do cash, sometimes we do prizes. We didn’t just keep doing iPad. Cause we knew that would eventually not work. Sometimes we did multiple spots and we found, no, we wanna spend all the money on this top spot. People wanted to be entered to win this one thing.
We got up to, like two and $3,000 prizes, but it was still less than if we’d been paying a measly $5. It’s that psychological principle, right? They’d much rather have a one in 5000 chance of winning $3,000 in a guaranteed $5. Cause like, $5 is just, isn’t that exciting? Another example of how analytics, just really studying them is, we trended every single one of our top 200 affiliates every Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
Were they down? Were they up? What were their conversions looking like? What are they promoting? Every one of those top 200. We wanted to know if they started promoting a new thing, but the conversions weren’t as good.
Maybe they needed to stop promoting that. What can we get them to promote that would be similar, but might convert better for their audience and therefore make everybody more money, make them happier and everybody makes more money. Right. We trended the 200th to 500th affiliate every week. We trended the next 500 or so every two weeks, and then we would reach out based on that.
So if we noticed an affiliate was down Wednesday, so we’re looking at Monday. So Monday we’re looking at Friday sales through Sunday sales. Okay, that can be different than your Monday and Tuesday, but we’re looking if they’re consistently going down four straight checks, okay, we need to reach out now. Like, theyve only been down for eight days, but were reaching out now.
So were dialing in those analytics on every single one of our top top 1000. Another example on a macro level, were looking at things like what links are converting best and then were driving more affiliates to promote them because maybe theyre converting thing a and thing a for this affiliates converting athlete 3%. But overall this thing B is converting at 7% and overall their conversions are pretty similar to the overall conversions of the program.
That means, hey, switch to promoting thing b and you’ll be converting in 7% probably, or based on conversions, you know, we’re having them switch their links from one page to another. We found that switching the links from the homepage of one particular product to the top sellers page, which wasn’t even in the system, got a 12% lift in sales. Again, we knew that because we studied the analytics, and so we first told the affiliates this and we had them change it. But then we were like, hey, what would happen if we just changed it on our end?
Because we can change the link where it goes on our end. So we changed it. We did it for one day and we noticed that sales went up 12%, so we kept it. So instead of them linking to the homepage for this product, it linked straight to the best sellers page. It was just a better converting page. They made 12% more money and so did we. So really dial in your analytics, study the data, see what comes of it. I mean, gosh, you can look at a thousand different things, but the big one is to look at underperforming affiliates.
So who are affiliates that are the outliers or they’re down? The same is true for affiliates that are up, because if an affiliate is consistently going up, let’s reach out like, hey, they were our number 800 affiliate last year, and then in Q one of this year they were up to like 500. Now they’re up to 300. Hey, you know what? They’re already moving up. What can I do to pour some gasoline on the fire? Or better yet, what can I do to put some dry wood on this fire and get them from 300 to 100 and everybody’s making a lot more money?
Look at like conversions that are dropping, you know, hey, for the landing page for product a, the conversion last year was 3. 7%. This year, you know, it’s down to 2.4. What’s going on? I don’t know, but let’s dig into it. It could be all kinds of things. Look for any reduction in sales on a macro, micro, any type of level. I look for high converting links or high converting deals. High converting promos, same. If they’re underperforming.
Like again, do more of what’s working and less of what’s not. And ultimately it’s about replicating one affiliate success to your others. You see one affiliate doing something well and this thing is working and you go, oh, we need to change it. And we did that so many times. Why? Because we studied the analytics where we saw that an affiliate was deep linking to a page that maybe we didn’t provide to affiliates. And it’s like, tag that. Affiliates conversion rate is six and a half percent promoting this thing and the overall is 2.4. What if we switch that link? Let’s just try it. Oh my gosh, it went from 2.4 to 4.5 on an overall basis.
Yeah, that other affiliate was at 6. 5 because they’re just better, but we just almost doubled the conversion rate. Things like that happen all the time because we study the analytics. The final thing that we did was we expanded the range of products that affiliates were promoting.
When we took over, affiliates were basically promoting just the best sellers, the most obvious things to promote, the things that this company was known for, you know, where they had a market edge, things like that. We had probably close to a thousand products. In fact, I know by the time we were no longer working with them, it was a little bit over a thousand. So we created links for all of them.
We ran promos around all of them over the course of a year or two. This created a lot of variety. So affiliates weren’t promoting the same things over and over again. When I took over, they basically only had, you know, they had a link to the homepage, they had links to like the major categories page, they had a link to the deals page, maybe 14 total links.
And the only promos they ran through affiliates were site wide deals which basically happened once a month or so, same thing over and over and over again. It was so boring. We would cycle through five to ten promotions every week. So we’d find like one or two products for each audience, each affiliate type, we base them on the type of year. So at Christmas we had more holiday themed stuff, of course, but there were promos for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, graduation time, Valentine’s, July 4, Halloween, sweetest day.
I learned, I mean, I learned a bunch of weird holidays, right? Grandparents and all that stuff. Even wedding season, you know, I mean, again, we know my wife and I were married on November 22, but most weddings happen in the late spring through the summer. So there is a four and a half month period where almost two thirds a disproportionate amount of weddings take place. So we had all sorts of things where we ran promos for it, and even without that, we ran promos on specific products and categories.
We had links to each product, links to each category, links to each theme. We had links to. Here’s the holiday guide. They weren’t even linking to their holiday guide before we took over. We started linking to the holiday guy. We started linking to the graduation guide.
We started linking to the wedding guide and to all these things. And this variety allowed us to have affiliates promote a ton of different things and then see what worked for them. Sometimes what worked best for one affiliate was very different from what was working for most of them. So it became not just about our best sellers overall but about our best sellers for individual affiliates.
So we would have graphics for those different things. We had holiday graphics, we had specific landing pages and all that stuff made it super easy for them to navigate all of that. So over the course of a year a specific affiliate might only promote ten times for the products and categories it worked best for them. But that was 50,000 plus active affiliates. Promoting ten times compared to 5000. Promoting three or four times made a huge, huge difference.
Again, starts compiling. We added affiliates. We also got them promoting two and a half times more per year. Now, the final thing here that occurred to me as I was talking through this today. I wasn’t planning on this, but I usually like to include a bonus so it works out great.
I guess as I was recording it, I didn’t really know where to put this is. We got affiliates to promote us. Truly Evergreen. And what this did was it created a baseline for us so that even in a slow, like a really slow week and we had those, we’re still doing over a million dollars. When we took over, a slow month would do under half a million. And now we got it to where a slow week was like one point two, one point four million bucks. Things like adding our stuff to the resources page and showing affiliates how to do that.
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And if you want to see a sample of that, if you go to mattmcwilliams. com, forward slash something or another, I don’t know. But I will put a link in the show notes so that you can get that guide and give it to your affiliates. And again we give you permission to share it with them. But we showed them like how to categorize things so that if they categorize it it might mean that we were recommended two or three times, multiple times on this page instead of just like.
Here’s a list of things we use. So photographers would have multiple sections. Same for nonprofits, they’d have multiple sections. So we’d be on there 2345 times instead of just once or none at all. If they weren’t doing that, we got them to add us to their automation sequences.
So now we had a steady flow of daily clicks from thousands of affiliates. It might only be one a day or five a day from each affiliate. Sometimes it was one click a week from their automation, but that’s And we had four, five, 6000 affiliates doing this. Average probably was three a day.
Man that’s 15,000 clicks a day. It starts adding up really fast. We created a deals page widget. So this was, they could basically create a deals page on their site that had our rotating deals on it so they didn’t have to update it. They didn’t have to update when we ran a two day sale or one day sale or a four hour sale as we sometimes did, it was just a one time install. Ongoing commissions. We created auto updating banner ads.
Same thing. It’s just like the deals widget. Like Banner ads still work. Yes. We created a bunch that auto updated. So it’s like, hey, you would install this banner if you were say, in a certain niche and it would auto update with the latest deals, the latest holiday themes, the latest bestsellers.
Some were just a generic banner that we update weekly with the latest whatever was relevant. Right. And this saved the affiliate a ton of work. They loved us for it, but it got them to add this one thing and these auto updating banners. Now again, I know this is back in 2009 to twelve years ago is the range.
Basically I get at this a while ago, but they still work today. Not as well. They still work today. These auto updating banners as a category responsible for over $5 million in annual sales. But more than that, the fact that affiliates loved them meant that they probably did other things as well. And so there’s a certain aspect that like I can’t quantify.
What was the Facebook group worth? I don’t know. I can’t quantify that. But affiliates loved it. I think it was worth 10% increase. You know, I mean I’m making that number up because I, again, I can’t quantify it. Same with the auto updating banner ads. We can show that they were directly worth 5 million a year. You go well, 5 million is not a very high percentage of 325. But I also think that it got them to do other stuff because they loved it so much.
So there you have it, six ways, plus a few more. Actually, we’ll separate those. But again, under that evergreen, getting people to really promote Evergreen and I took an affiliate program from an annual revenue of 15 million to 325 million in just four years. I’d love to hear from you what your biggest takeaway is. You can text me anytime about this or anything else. Any questions you have 260-217-4619 text me anytime. We’ve got links in the show notes to the affiliate training templates and scripts. We’ve got links to the promo strategy call template and that resources page guide that I just talked about.
I don’t remember the link for that, but I said it’ll be in the show notes. Got a link for that last thing. Make sure if you haven’t yet hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. We’re going to talk about affiliate onboarding. You know, you’ve got these affiliates, they’re interested in promoting you. Now what do you do?
How do you onboard your affiliates so they can actually get started the right way? And that’s what the episode is all about. I’m going to share the steps that it takes to get your affiliates to hit the ground running, so to speak, and really hit their full potential. So we’ll talk about that winning onboard process in the next episode. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss it.
I’ll see you then.
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
| Find Your First 100 Affiliates | Affiliate Program Terms & Conditions Template | Get My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email |
| Avoid The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes | Turn Inactive Affiliates into Your Best Affiliates | Get My Template for Writing Affiliate Emails |
| Affiliate Marketing Sales Secrets | Learn How to Create a Resources Page | Learn How to Write a Product Review |
The post How I Grew a Major Affiliate Program from $15M to $325M a Year (In Only 4 Years) appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### Struggling to entice affiliates to join your program? Wondering how to create the perfect commission structure? Look no further! In this episode, I share the secrets to creating an irresistible affiliate program by nailing down the right commission strategy. I’ll unveil proven techniques to set your program apart, attracting affiliates in droves. Plus, I’ll spill the beans on clever ways to incentivize top performers without breaking the bank. Get ready to take your affiliate program to the next level!
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Don’t make the same mistakes I’ve made with my affiliate programs. Learn my top 20 affiliate program mistakes…and how to avoid them!
Links Mentioned in this EpisodeAffiliate Program Email Template
Podcast Episode – How to Negotiate Affiliate Deals That Benefit Everyone
What Affiliates Need to be Successful
TEXT ME: 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyTop 14 Reasons Your Affiliate Program is Failing (And How to Fix It)
How to Steal Your Competitors’ Affiliates
How to Create High-Converting Swipe Copy for Affiliates
How to Create an Affiliate Program Agreement
What are the Legal Requirements for an Affiliate Program?
How to Build Great Relationships with Affiliates
How to Create The Right Affiliate Commissions Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
| Find Your First 100 Affiliates | Affiliate Program Terms & Conditions Template | Get My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email |
| Avoid The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes | Turn Inactive Affiliates into Your Best Affiliates | Get My Template for Writing Affiliate Emails |
| Affiliate Marketing Sales Secrets | Learn How to Create a Resources Page | Learn How to Write a Product Review |
The post How to Create The Right Affiliate Commissions appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### Your affiliate program is failing…but WHY? Before you hit the panic button, let’s diagnose the problem. In today’s episode, I share the top 14 reasons why affiliate programs stumble and, more importantly, provide actionable solutions to get them back on track.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Not sure how much to pay your affiliates? Watch my free video tutorial on YouTube that walks you through step-by-step.
Links Mentioned in this EpisodeHow I Built a $1 Million a Month Affiliate Program In Only Two Years Without Any Connections or Credentials
Find Your First 100 Affiliates
Affiliate Email Template
Get Our Sample Affiliate Training
TEXT ME: 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Steal Your Competitors’ Affiliates
How to Create High-Converting Swipe Copy for Affiliates
How to Create an Affiliate Program Agreement
What are the Legal Requirements for an Affiliate Program?
How to Build Great Relationships with Affiliates
How Do Affiliate Managers Spend Their Day?
Top 14 Reasons Your Affiliate Program is Failing (And How to Fix It)So you’ve started an affiliate program and it’s not going as you hoped. What do you do now? Well, first, identify why it’s failing and then fix the problems. Today I’ll share some of the most common reasons we’ve seen affiliate programs fail and what to do about it.
Hey, what’s up? And welcome back. We’re talking about a kind of a negative topic today. I like to keep things positive on the podcast, I really do. But it’s important to address this topic of failure. I’ve heard from so many people that have attended our trainings, or maybe they become clients. So we diagnose like okay, why is their affiliate program failing? Why did they come to us?
And I keep seeing the same things over and over again. I’ve got 14 reasons today and typically I see probably three or four of these with every single person and it tends to be the same ones. Like in these 14, everybody’s got like three, four, maybe five of them and then the next one will have a couple of those and a couple of different ones and it’s the same things over and over. Honestly, I’ve never seen a 15th reason.
Thats why I have 14. I often joke like we want to get ten reasons, right? Well, theres not ten, theres 14. Or maybe we want to get seven or 13, a cool odd number. Nope. Theres 14 reasons that have happened more than once with the people that weve worked with that weve seen over the years. Before I get into that, I just want to say this is kind of a weird thing to say. Were talking such a negative topic here in a sense. But I love doing this. I really do. I love doing this podcast. I love sharing things like this.
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I’ve been in this world now, this affiliate world for over 18 years now. Kind of crazy. I’m like a dinosaur in this industry. I’ve been in it for a long time.
I love talking about it. I say all the time, like if a high school guidance counselor even knew that what I do exists, they would tell me to do this. They probably don’t know those exist though, but this is what they would tell me to do. This is what I was meant to do.
I love it. I love talking about it. I love sharing with you. So seriously, if you ever have any questions or you just want to like, I don’t know, reach out to me and tell me, good job on the podcast, whatever.
Shoot me a text.260-217-4619 And just the feedback that I get every week, people shooting me their biggest takeaways from the podcast. That’s the kind of stuff that keeps me going. So I just want to hear from you.
I just would love to hear from you. So shoot me a text. We’ll put that in the show notes.260-217-4619 Just let me know what you’re getting from the podcast in general and also how I can serve you better.
Hit me up if you got some topics for some episodes. We’ve got the podcast planned out through like the end of the year, but we can always put something in. If you reach out and say, hey, I need you to talk about this. This episode will be our 547th episode of this podcast. That’s insane. If you listen to an episode a day, it’s over ten years of content. Ten and a half years almost. Yeah, ten and a half years. Exactly one, one over. Last episode was ten and a half years. If you listen to an episode a week, it’s crazy. So a lot of content.
We probably already talked about it, but text me, let me know your questions. So, all right. Why is your affiliate program failing? Well, one of the first distinctions we’ve got to get here is are you the one that’s running it or have you hired someone full time in house, or did you outsource it?
So some of these will apply to specific ones of those. Some of these will not apply if you’re running it yourself. Some of these will not apply if you hired someone full time in house or if you outsourced it. I talked about two months ago, I did an episode 15 biggest affiliate program challenges and how to fix them.
So there’s going to be a little bit of overlap with that. Some of the challenges are the reason why affiliate programs fail. But I want to share some specific reasons why your affiliate program might be failing, and I’m talking virtually no leverage whatsoever here. All right.
Again, these are the reasons that people have come to us. They’ve either written to us, they’ve become clients, and they’ve had a failing affiliate program for a year and want us to take over. And the first thing you got to do is check your expectations. You know, when a client comes to us, a potential client says, my affiliate program is a disaster.
It’s failing. Okay, is it really failing or were your expectations too high? They come to me and say, yep, I tried this other company for three months. This is our competition.
And I say, whoa, you need to give them another three months. Unless they are showing zero results, im going to tell you right now, its going to take us four to six months just for you to break even. It takes time. I can go out today and I can bust my baow working on your affiliate program and assuming that hypothetically everything was set up today, I didnt have to go in and change any settings, I didnt have to set up an email address.
I didnt have to do anything. I understood your program on day one. Takes us a week just to understand your offers and your just everything about your story and your program. Right.
Takes us like a week just to do that, to really craft a good narrative. But assuming I could do on day one today, if I shoot messages to my top 50 contacts, you know how many of them are going to promote you in the first 90 days? Zero. Every now and again we will get lucky.
This happened two, three months ago. I messaged a friend of mine who’s a great affiliate, one of the top, consistently top five, top seven on big launch leaderboards, and I said, hey, I’ve got this thing I’d love for you to promote. I think it’s perfect for your audience. I explained to him why we have that kind of relationship that I don’t need to beat around the bush.
I just say, got this thing for you. And he was like, can I promote it next week? I was like, what? That never happened.
Why did that happen? Dumb luck. Not because I’m good. I mean, I’m good, but that’s not why. Normally he’s like, great. I’m recording this here in late May of 2023. He’d be like, awesome, let’s get that on the calendar for November. Let’s get that on the calendar for next February.
Something like that. But he’s like, can I promote next week? Why did that happen? Because he had another offer that he was going to promote and they canceled the promotion and he already had it on his calendar. He didn’t want to come up with something else. And so he’s like, I’m looking for an affiliate promotion. Again, dumb luck. Really good timing, right?
But in all my years of doing this, that’s probably happened five times in 18 years, five times that’s ever happened. So again, check your expectations. Some people come to us and I told them, hey, I don’t recommend you hire us right now. I recommend you continue working with this other company.
I know the CEO of that company. They’re a good company. Don’t hire us yet. Now, if it doesn’t work with them in the next three months, maybe there’s something going on. I don’t know. Then you can talk to us. Now, part of that is just to be honest, is I don’t want to work with a company that 90 days in, they’re like, well, screw it, I’m out. I don’t want to work with them.
And number two, I know how the game is played. I know how it works, and I know that they can deliver results. So that’s first, is it really failing? Or maybe your expectations were unreasonable. You’re 47 days and you’re like, I don’t have any sales yet. Well, again, we’ve scheduled stuff in November. We’ve already scheduled stuff, maybe even sooner. August, September, we’ve got stuff lined up. We’re doing what we’re supposed to do. Let’s be patient. The second reason why an affiliate program fails is the lack of variety, specifically on entry points. You’ve got one entry point.
We do webinars or we do PDF, we do a three video workshop, and that’s it. And I mentioned it many, many episodes ago. But the difference we found when we did a study of seven figure to eight figure launches, what separated a couple million dollar launch from a $10 million launch that had basically the same affiliates, the same price point, all the things lined up, lack of entry points. The bigger launches had more entry points, the bigger affiliate programs have more entry points.
So one of the reasons why it might be failing is you just don’t have enough entry points. You need a webinar and a workshop and a summit and a challenge and some written stuff. So PDF’s and a free trial and payment plans and all these things. So that lack of variety could be a big reason for failing.
Now, the counter to this, the third common reason I see is they just bounce around from idea to idea. Variety is great, but bouncing from shiny object to shiny object just doesn’t work. So you’re like, okay, we’re going to try a webinar this. Well, that webinar didn’t work, so we’re going to do, no, maybe you need the counter to that is you need to get the webinar down first, and then you can use that to create the workshop, and then you can use that to create the so on and so forth.
So when I say, number two, lack of variety is one of the reasons why it might be failing. It’s probably more not the reason why it’s failing. From the get go. You’re 60 days in and it’s not working.
That’s a reason why they fail long term. They become stagnant. First they plateau. You get to say, oh, we’re doing $100,000 a month, and then the plateaus at 100,000 for six months, and then next month it’s 95 and then 92 and then 85.
That’s a lack of variety. Failure, never getting to 100,000 could be the complete opposite. You’re trying so many new things that nothing sticks. The fourth thing I want you to look at, if things are failing is your terms and conditions. All right, here’s the question to ask. If you were an affiliate, would your terms and conditions scare you? Would they scare you? Are they too restrictive.
Are you prohibiting affiliates from doing the things they need to do to succeed? You can’t use these things and you can’t do this and you can’t do this. And it’s like, oh, my gosh, what can I do? And if you keep saying you can’t do this, this, this and this and this and this, eventually you’re just like, well, I don’t even want to try to figure out what I can do.
Screw it, I’m out. So take a look at your terms. Use your terms to protect you. Of course, use your terms to make sure you don’t get people doing really bad things like pretending to be you or I promote. Like, we don’t allow you to use the word scam in your marketing. You can’t create a blog post that says, is such and such product a scam. It’s clickbait, right? We don’t allow that.
We don’t allow negative marketing, but that’s okay. We just don’t want that. That’s not prohibiting 99. 9% of affiliates from marketing us. So take a look at your terms and just, I mean, read through them. Is there anything in here that’s scaring you as a potential affiliate? The fifth reason your affiliate program might be failing is bad onboarding.
All right? Getting an affiliate is a lot of hard work. We might spend 30, 40, 50 minutes, sometimes hours to get one affiliate. They finally sign up, they agree to promote, and then we onboard them incorrectly.
Now, I don’t see, we do that, but I’m saying these are the things that I see a lot of times we see these affiliate programs that they’re like, Matt, I’ve got great relationships and we just don’t know how to, onboard them. We know how to, we don’t know how to handle them once they sign up and we come on and really help them with those, and we can take an affiliate program from, say 75,000 a month to 250 a month, 250,000 like that, just by proper onboarding. Then we’ll go out and we’ll get more affiliates, of course. But that’s one of the, you know, that’s one of the biggest things we see is just nothing onboarding them properly.
I talked about this a few episodes ago. You know how to onboard your affiliate so you can go listen to that. But literally, it’s making sure they have everything they need from the get go. All right.
If you have a purely evergreen program, make sure they have all their proper links. They have a login. If there’s a login they have their swipe copy and then follow up to make sure they actually get those, you know, that information. A lot of times our onboarding email, it’s an automated email and it goes out and it has five, six links and it’s got three of their affiliate links and a link to the swipe copy and a link to the graphics and their login information.
And it’s this big email with a lot of information. So a lot of times it gets stuck in, maybe not spam filters, but gets put in the promo tab in Gmail. And so we’ll then send a private email, a one on one email that’s very short, no links in it, that just says, hey, so and so. Just want to make sure you got my email.
Here’s the subject line. Let me know if you didn’t get it. And when people write back and say, I didn’t get it, then we’ll say, hey, make sure you check your promo tip. Found it. Found in the promo tab or nope, I really didn’t get it. Then we’ll manually send it to them. Did you get it now? Sure did.
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So we want to make sure they have all that information. And then we’re going to run incentives to get them to promote, of course, which we talked about in that episode about onboarding your affiliate. So make sure you go check that out because this is one of the biggest reasons we see affiliate programs failing, because they do all the hard work and they just drop the ball.
Number six. All right, this one’s an easy one. Your commissions are just non competitive. Your commissions are not competitive in your market. You’re paying 20% when the market’s paying 30.
You’re paying 30 when the market’s paying 40. You’re paying ten when the market’s at 25. So here’s the deal. Go check the competition. You need to be playing in the same ballpark as them. If your number one competitor is at 50%, can you pay 40? Absolutely. But you can’t pay 30.
It’s a good rule of thumb. You need to be within 20%, 25 on the high end. So if somebody’s paying 40, I think 30% technically would be 25% lower or whatever. You can probably get away with that if you’ve got some other stuff going for you.
But you need to be competitive. You can’t be half of what your competition is. You can’t be at 20% when they’re at 40. You just can’t have. So check the competition. And if you need to cut some costs to have a better, more competitive affiliate program. Or maybe you just need to make a little bit less money per transaction, but you’re going to quadruple the number of transactions because instead of 20 affiliates sending $10,000 in sales, you now have 100 affiliates sending $100,000 in sales. Well, yeah, you might go from making a 50% profit margin to a 30% profit margin.
Well, last time I checked out just went from $5000 to $70,000 or what? I’m not sure the math on that. But you went 5000 to 30,000. You know, you’re making a lot more money making six times more money by having a competitive commission. So check those commissions against the competition. All right.
The 7th reason why your affiliate program might be failing is you’ve hired the wrong affiliate manager. And typically this is being too cheap hiring. You hired a VA and you’re expecting to run a million dollar a month affiliate program. That’s just probably not going to happen. Now, if you are an expert affiliate manager, like I have hired Vas and train them, do they run a million dollar a month affiliate programs? No, but they can run six figure programs, no doubt.
But being too cheap in the hiring process, hiring the wrong person, nepotism, hiring somebody because they’re related to you, it doesn’t work most of the time unless they’ve got the right training. Now, we do work with people, I jokingly call myself the brother in law trainer because I work with a lot of people who are related to the owner and they become the affiliate manager and then I train them on how to become an affiliate manager and how to do the right thing. So it works sometimes. Absolutely.
But it goes back to the first thing that’s not going to happen if you hire us. We’re one of the best agencies in the world. There’s a reason why we’ve runded so many huge affiliate programs and why we’ve worked with the people that we’ve worked with. It’s why Kevin Harrington hired us to run his affiliate program, why Michael Hyatt hired us, it’s why Ryan Levesque hired us, why Stu McLaren hired us.
So I, Shutterfly hired us. It’s why we worked with Adidas and Jeff Walker and Tony Robbins. Why? Because we’re, if not the best or one of the best in the world. Right. I’m not going to go out and say like we were absolutely the best because I don’t know. I really don’t. But even if we take four to six months, how long is your in law going to take?
How long is that va going to take? So don’t be cheap. In hiring an affiliate manager, you get what you pay for. So be willing to spend a little bit of money and hire the right person or hire the right agency number.
A reason your affiliate program might be failing is it’s just not standing out. You know, we talked a little bit about this in the last episode. I talked about how to steal your competitors affiliates. And I talk about how I stood out by that personalization, right, by giving them my cell phone number, by treating them like a person, not a number.
And I talked about how we stood out at a time when we couldn’t stand out on commissions, we couldn’t stand out on conversions, we couldn’t stand out on brand reputation, we couldn’t stand out on 900 other things. But we stood out on me and my personality and me giving my cell phone number and saying, text me anytime if you need something. That’s how we stood out. So how can you stand out?
What are some of the ways you stand out? Do you need to offer a car for your top affiliate? Probably not, but it doesn’t hurt. Do you need to stand out by having a great personality with your affiliate manager?
You don’t have to, but it doesn’t hurt. Do you need to stand out by having a killer affiliate page? Yeah, that helps. You should have a good affiliate page. Do you need to stand out by offering generous commissions? Absolutely. Do you need to stand out by writing articles and appearing in affiliate trade publications? Yes, absolutely.
Do you need to stand out by just getting out there more in front of these affiliates, showing up in their inbox once every two weeks rather than once every six months? Absolutely. Those are the things you got to do. So if you’re not standing out, your affiliate program is probably going to fail.
That’ll tie in with number twelve just not having enough affiliates. The 9th reason your affiliate program fails, you screw up the basics. This is the one we see the most of bad affiliate tracking. So affiliates don’t trust you, so they leave.
Can you work so hard to get them and then your tracking doesn’t work. Usually this cause you’re cheap. With your tracking, you go and get the dollar 37 a month tracking instead of spending a couple hundred bucks. It doesn’t have to be expensive.
Just to be clear, most of the good ones are either $300 upfront or $50 to $100 a month. They’re affordable. Think about how important this is. People ask me all the time like what do you look for in an affiliate system?
They’re like, well, the number one thing is tracking. Yes. I want the reports and I want to be able to do all the cool things that we want to do as an affiliate agency. But if it doesn’t get the tracking right, nothing else matters.
So the basics like tracking, paying on time, good communication. We talked about this a few episodes ago, how to communicate with your affiliates. Following the template that we have. Right.
I’m going to put a link in the show notes. We have a template you can just download. It’s a PDF that shows you exactly what to put in your affiliate emails. How to communicate with your affiliates.
That’s a basic, that is a basic thing in paying on time, making sure that your affiliates are getting their money. You tell them that you’re going to pay the first week of the month, pay in the first week of the month, and by gosh, if you don’t. And we had to do this recently with a client. Their PayPal account got shut down.
No reason whatsoever. Their PayPal account got shut down and we had to email the affiliates, but we knew about it. It was like the 29th of the previous month. So on the 30th.
Actually, it was the 31st because of the weekend. We emailed them and said, we are so sorry. We want to let you know payments will be delayed. We’re working on an alternative payment solution and thankfully their account was back up and running.
I think we ended up still paying in the first week of the month. I think we paid on like the fifth. We normally pay on the second or third. Wasn’t that big of a deal. But make sure you’re doing those things. Just get the basics right. Most of the rest of the stuff’s easy. All right.
The 10th reason why your affiliate program might be failing is this lack of training for your affiliates. Making the assumption that your affiliates know what the heck they’re doing, that they are experts at affiliate marketing, that they are experts at your program, they are experts on your product and not educating them, not giving them tips for how to promote, not making sure they understand the program and the offer and the bonuses and the sales messaging and all that. Just not training them.
If you want to know how to train your affiliates, go get our training. We have a training on training. So we’ll show you how to train your affiliates totally free. We’ll show you how to train your affiliates.
We’ll even give you some of the slides that you can literally, if you use keynote, download them. If you use PowerPoint, download them. You can grab the slides and use those. Let me show you a sample training how we train affiliates. So go grab that. There’s no reason not to. And use that to train your affiliates. Number eleven, you just don’t have a clear strategy. You just don’t have a clear strategy. Kind of goes back to what I said before, bouncing around from idea to idea. What is the strategy? What is the plan?
What are the goals around like, that can get you just to be able to get some traction going, right. So a good goal typically is to be able 45 days into an affiliate program. This is what we tell our clients. So typically this will be a small webinar, maybe 150 people, and we have our small and mid sized affiliates promoting.
It might be a small workshop or a small challenge. And we’re stress testing. We’re telling the client like, no, we want this to be small. This is usually somewhere between, depending on the price point, between a, that could be low as $3,000, like a $3,000 to upwards of a $20,000 promo, very small.
But we’re stress testing it and we do this 45 days in. So that honestly so that, number one, they get some revenue and they see that, you know, it kind of goes back to where you talk about like the expectations thing, like, no, I can get a few small affiliates to promote 45 days in. So we get proof of concept. And number two, we work through any problems because here’s the deal.
You’re going to mess something up. We’re going to mess something up. That’s what we tell our clients. You’re going to mess something up. We had a client first webinar. We did. Oh, man, it was awesome. And they forgot to set up their payment plans. None of the payment plans worked. So it cost us a lot of money. Cost everybody a lot of money. Oops.
So we worked through that. Well, we learned that when it was small, it probably, I say a lot of money, probably cost $5,000, $6,000 instead of costing 50 or 60,000 or $100,000 like some of the later promotions. So we do these small promotions about 45 days in. And our goal, again, depending upon the client, but our goal is really small.
But we usually hit it nine times out of ten we hit it. So we’ve gained that traction. So what’s the clear strategy that you have in the clear plan, the clear goals again, if you don’t have a target, you’re going to miss it every time. Number twelve, reason you might be failing, and it’s one of the most obvious ones, you just don’t have enough affiliates.
Duh. You know, don’t have enough affiliates. Only got two affiliates. Hard to gain any traction, right?
Well, maybe it’s cause you’re not tapping into your customers or some of the non traditional affiliate sources. Maybe you’re only trying to get people who promote your competition like we talked about in the last episode. Maybe that’s your only source and it’s just not working. Cause you don’t have that way to stand out. So you gotta go get some customers to be affiliates. You gotta go get some non traditional affiliates. You got to look at other places for affiliates. So go grab our report.
Your 1st 100 affiliates. Mammaquames. com first 100, first 10 zero. I’ll put that in the show notes. Go grab that. Go get more affiliates. That’s a great way to grow your program. The 13th reason for failure is you just don’t nurture those relationships. So yeah, you go out and you get them. We talked about this a few episodes ago, how to build those strong relationships. Go check out that episode.
Don’t treat your affiliates like a number. Treat them like people, we talked about that in the last episode. And build those relationships, you have to make a commitment. I don’t know if I made this clear in the episode I did on how to build strong relationships with your affiliates, but the key word is intentionality.
You have to be intentional. You have to set aside 15 minutes a day or 30 minutes a day, three days a week, something like that. You have to make that commitment to building those strong relationships with your current affiliates and spending a little bit of time with potential affiliates. Typically what I do, I’ve reached the point where now it’s 80 20.
I spend 80% of my time developing and nurturing my current relationships, people that I’ve already have a relationship with, on nurturing those, and I spend 20% developing new ones just because I have such a huge network now. Ten years ago, it was 80 20. The other way. I spent 20% of my time nurturing the current relationships because I only had, like, 50 and I spent the entire rest of my time developing new ones.
But if you don’t nurture these relationships, it’s kind of what I said earlier. You’ll stagnate over time and you’ll notice that you start to decline very slowly. Rome wasn’t built in a day. It also didn’t decline in a day, and neither is an affiliate program.
It’s not built in a day and it will not decline in a day. You should be growing every month, barring, you know, of course, if you have a huge promo in January and then, you know, it’s not until April that you have another one where you may not grow every month, but every launch should be bigger than the last. Every month should be bigger than the last. Every quarter at least should be bigger than last.
Every year should be bigger than last. And if that’s not the case, it usually comes down to, again, you’re not nurturing relationships, you’re not adding new affiliates. You don’t have that variety. So you start to stagnate. Those are the reasons why you start to decline and why your affiliate program goes from success to failure. And then the last reason for failure, very simple one, you’re not listening to your affiliates. I mean, what are they asking for? What are they asking you for?
What graphics are they asking you for? What types of promotions are they coming to you and saying, I need you to do a challenge? Challenges are killing it with my audience right now. We do a challenge, or, hey, man, I really, you know, could you take that same webinar you’re already doing, but do it specifically for blank.
That’s how we did. We have a training that we do for authors, how to sell books using an affiliate program. It’s the same basic presentation that I do already about how to start and grow an affiliate program with 20% of a tweet. The cool thing was it only took me about 3 hours to put together the whole presentation because I had 80 90% of it already done.
Well, where did that come from? It came from affiliates asking us to do it. And I said, well, enough of them are asking, I’m going to do it. I listened to them. I listened to them. And that’s what allowed us to have that killer webinar that’s now actually become our number one webinar. We just recently did our biggest webinar ever, and it was that one because I listened to my affiliates. So here’s the simple thing. What are they asking for? Give it to them. Very simple. Whatever they’re asking for, give it to them.
If you are ready to take your business to the next level and start an affiliate program, start with my free report, Your First 100 Affiliates. This report takes nearly two decades of experience, trial and error, and lessons learned about finding top affiliates in nearly every conceivable niche and puts them all into one report. Grab your copy here!
That will address some of the stuff that we talked about. If you are listening to them, that’s what will dictate some of your variety that’s what will dictate some of the variety that will dictate your strategy and some of the other stuff that we talked about. So now you know why your affiliate program might be failing and how to fix it. Yeah, 14 reasons. I’d love to know. I mentioned earlier, which one’s yours? What are your two or three or four or five or six? Hopefully not six.
Why is your affiliate program failing? Text me at 260-217-4619 I’d love to hear from you and there might be a little bit more nuance to yours and you could tell me in that text and I can help you out there. Also make sure that you hit subscribe. Next episode is gonna be a good one.
I hope this was a good one too. We’re gonna roll here. Actually had some really good ones lately. I’m gonna share with the number one trait of great affiliate managers is this is something that came up from a conversation with our team, our affiliate managers, and I told them like, guys, this is the number one trait of a great affiliate manager.
And I shared it. And so as soon as I was done sharing it with the team, our operations manager texted me. He’s like, dude, that has to be a podcast. You have to talk. You’ve never talked about that. I’ve never heard you say that. You have to talk about it. Let’s do a podcast on that. So next episode, I’m going to share the number one trait of great affiliate managers. So hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. I’ll see you then.
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
| Find Your First 100 Affiliates | Affiliate Program Terms & Conditions Template | Get My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email |
| Avoid The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes | Turn Inactive Affiliates into Your Best Affiliates | Get My Template for Writing Affiliate Emails |
| Affiliate Marketing Sales Secrets | Learn How to Create a Resources Page | Learn How to Write a Product Review |
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###### Imagine having the power to poach affiliates from your competitors. Sounds like a game-changer, doesn’t it? It’s also one of the easiest, fastest ways to grow your affiliate program. In this episode, I share the exact plan for stealing your competitors’ affiliates.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Create High-Converting Swipe Copy for Affiliates
How to Create an Affiliate Program Agreement
What are the Legal Requirements for an Affiliate Program?
How to Build Great Relationships with Affiliates
How Do Affiliate Managers Spend Their Day?
How to Communicate Bad News to Your Affiliates
How to Steal Your Competitors’ Affiliates Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
| Find Your First 100 Affiliates | Affiliate Program Terms & Conditions Template | Get My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email |
| Avoid The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes | Turn Inactive Affiliates into Your Best Affiliates | Get My Template for Writing Affiliate Emails |
| Affiliate Marketing Sales Secrets | Learn How to Create a Resources Page | Learn How to Write a Product Review |
The post How to Steal Your Competitors’ Affiliates appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### Swipe copy isn’t just a vital component…it’s the backbone of a thriving affiliate program. However, many programs miss the mark when it comes to this crucial aspect. Join me as we dissect the art and science of creating swipe copy that empowers your affiliates to max out their sales and keep promoting over and over. Get ready to learn the secrets to crafting compelling swipe copy that drives results.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Make sure that your affiliate program has a solid agreement (AKA Terms & Conditions). To make things simple, grab my template here!
Links Mentioned in this EpisodeHow to Use Swipe Copy as an Affiliate
Ultimate Affiliate Swipe File
TEXT ME: 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
| | | | --- | --- | | | | | | | |
Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Create an Affiliate Program Agreement
What are the Legal Requirements for an Affiliate Program?
How to Build Great Relationships with Affiliates
How Do Affiliate Managers Spend Their Day?
How to Communicate Bad News to Your Affiliates
How to Triple Your Webinar Sales with Affiliates
How to Create High-Converting Swipe Copy for Affiliates Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
| Find Your First 100 Affiliates | Affiliate Program Terms & Conditions Template | Get My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email |
| Avoid The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes | Turn Inactive Affiliates into Your Best Affiliates | Get My Template for Writing Affiliate Emails |
| Affiliate Marketing Sales Secrets | Learn How to Create a Resources Page | Learn How to Write a Product Review |
The post How to Create High-Converting Swipe Copy for Affiliates appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### Your affiliate program agreement is one of the most overlooked, but important parts of setting up an affiliate program. I’ve created affiliate terms and conditions for top affiliate programs like Shutterfly and Adidas and know what every affiliate program needs…and what to avoid. In this episode, I’ll show you how to create legally sound contracts for your affiliate program and I’ll share insider tips and real-world examples to guide you through the process. No need to be an attorney and you don’t even need to know how to speak legalese. I’ll break down the process into simple steps that anyone can follow.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Get the EXACT Template We Give to Our Affiliates to Get Them to Promote More and Generate More Sales! Click Here to Download it Now!
Links Mentioned in this EpisodeAffiliate Terms & Conditions Template
What the 2023 FTC Updates Mean for Affiliate Marketing
How to Identify and Stop Affiliate Fraud
TEXT ME: 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
| | | | --- | --- | | | | | | | |
Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyWhat are the Legal Requirements for an Affiliate Program?
How to Build Great Relationships with Affiliates
How Do Affiliate Managers Spend Their Day?
How to Communicate Bad News to Your Affiliates
How to Triple Your Webinar Sales with Affiliates
How to Identify and Stop Affiliate Fraud
How to Create an Affiliate Program AgreementYour affiliate program agreement is one of the most overlooked but important parts of setting up an affiliate program. I’ve created affiliate terms and conditions for top affiliate programs like Shutterfly and Adidas, and I know what every affiliate program needs and what to avoid. So in this episode, I’m going to show you how to create legally sound contracts for your affiliate program. I’m going to share some of my insider tips and some real world examples to guide you through the process. There’s no need to be an attorney. You don’t even know how to speak legalese. I’m going to break down the process into simple steps that anyone can follow.
Let’s get started. So I’m taking a risk here.
I’m going out on a limb and I’m doing back to back episodes on really boring topics. Last week was all about the legal requirements for affiliate programs. This week’s how to create an affiliate program agreement or terms and conditions. The terms are interchangeable there, right? So it’s a little bit of a risk. Like these are not exciting topics, but your terms and conditions, your agreement are. I’m going to just use the word agreement pretty much from this point forward.
But again, I’m going to use those terms interchangeably. So just bear with me. They mean the same thing. It’s super important because these set the stage for everything else. They set the stage for building trust, they set the stage for the rules. They set the stage for the guidelines that your affiliates have to follow, but also the things that you’re committing to.
They ensure that every affiliate is treated fairly. They ensure transparency. They know the rules. So when you have these rules, they should know the rules. If they break the rules, well, then they’ve broken the rules and we can, we’ll talk later about what to do in those situations. So if you’re just starting your affiliate program, do not put off creating your terms and conditions.
It is not just a formality, it is the foundation for your program’s success. So what I’m gonna do in this episode, I’m gonna guide you through the process of drafting your terms and conditions with clarity That’s the thing.
You have to understand what these things mean. Yeah, you could just say, hey, attorney, go create this. But your attorney is not an affiliate marketer. They are not running an affiliate program. And while it might be legally sound. It’s confusing and it actually costs you affiliates or it costs you So I’m going to walk you through these.
The process of this, as I’m doing, I’m going to share some real world examples, examples from affiliate agreements that we’ve written business down the road. over the years. Every solid contract, and this is a contract, has key components. So I’m going to walk you through each element. I’m going to explain what it is, why it’s crucial.
But first, as I did in the last episode, before we get into how to create your affiliate agreement, I have to say this. No, legally, I have to include this section here. Legal disclaimer I feel like I should hire a guy to read this right now.
A quick but essential note or he reads like super fast, right? While I’m providing this guidance here, it is no substitute for professional legal advice. I have to emphasize the content of this episode is intended to provide accurate and authoritative information. However, it should not be considered legal accounting or professional advice. If your affiliate program gets complex or you’re not entirely sure about the legal intricacies, you need to consult an attorney.
That’s a wise move. So I’m not a lawyer after all. I’m a podcaster right? Now. Again, I’ve created these, I’ve worked with attorneys. So it’s sound advice. As of the time of this recording, anything could change.
Need help activating your affiliates? Use my proven email templates for getting inactive affiliates in the game and making sales! Get them here!
The law could change from the time I hit record until this episode publishes a few weeks later. So just to be clear now, enough of the boring stuff, all right? If you do want to skip all the boring stuff, and I don’t think you should, I think you should understand why the suggestions that I make are what they are, I think you should understand some of the whys right behind this. But if you want to skip some of the boring stuff and just grab the template, I’ve got a free download.
You can actually download the template, the affiliate agreement template, and the link for that will be in the show notes. So just check the show notes. The link will be right there and you can grab that template. And I do walk through a little bit of what I’m saying today. I’m just going into more detail today, so you understand the different parts.
So let’s start at the very beginning. That’s a good place to start, as Mitch Hedberg would say, with the standard preamble. All right, so any terms and conditions should start with some sort of a preamble. I’m just going to read you an example here and then you’ll understand what I mean by that just says shutterfly affiliate program terms and conditions.
Please read our affiliate terms and conditions before you join our program or begin marketing our program. These terms and conditions are written in plain language, intentionally avoiding legalese to ensure that they may be clearly understood and followed by affiliates. Each affiliate is responsible for ensuring that its employees, agents, and contractors comply with these terms and conditions. Thank you.
Nothing fancy, right? It’s just a standard preamble. The next thing you need to do is definitions, right? You need to define any relevant terms. So this serves to make clear any of the ambiguous terms, right? Wherever you know, people might be like, wait, what does that mean? If you skipped to section eight, subsection b, what does that mean? We’ll go back up to the definitions, so it’s pretty boilerplate here.
Here’s an example from the definitions from the affiliate program for Michael Hyatt that we wrote as used in these terms and conditions. We, us or our refers to Michael Hyatt and Company incorporated and our website. You or your refers to the affiliate. And these are actually with like the little I, you know, all those little roman numerals, right? Our website refers to the Michael Hyde and Company Incorporated properties located at www. michaelhide come for your website refers to any websites that you will link to.
Our website five program refers to the Michael Hyde and company affiliated program. Again, just standard definitions, all boring boilerplate stuff, but also necessary so that no one questions what the definitions are. The next thing that we have is the approval and rejection policy.
Again, this is, we’re kind of going in chronological order from their interaction with the website, which is I’m applying, am I going to be approved or rejected and down through some other stuff that’ll happen later. And, and part of this is just setting expectations.
That’s the main part. Just setting the expectations. Part of it covers your b***. If you decline someone and they complain. I mean, it’s your affiliate program, you can make the rules, right? So they shouldn’t complain. Like they don’t really have a legal standing. But still, it’s good to cover this.
Again, part of this is like if you set the rules and you abide by them, they have nothing to complain about. So here’s an example that I often use with our clients. After receiving your application, we will review your website, notify you of your acceptance or rejection into our program.
Please allow up to 48 hours for your application to be reviewed. We reserve the right to reject any application. However, we encourage you to contact us if you feel we have made an incorrect decision, including all the websites that you use in your profile, will help us to make a better decision. So again, it sets the expectations, makes it clear that approving or declining affiliate is 100% up to the program itself.
Right. And the last part makes it clear they should include all their websites, which allows you to see the domains that they own. Again, we usually say 48. It should have said 48 business hours. I just didn’t read the word business there, 48 business hours. So that means if you apply on Friday at 05:00 p. m. you’re probably not going to hear from us, you know, get accepted until Monday. You can change it to 72 or whatever length of time you feel is necessary for your program.
The next thing is just basic rules for every affiliate program. You know, there are some rules that are specific. We’ll talk about this later. Certain types of affiliate programs, but there are some rules that apply to literally all affiliate programs. Whether you’re a retail establishment, you sell a digital product, high commission, low commission. These are the most basic universal rules that every affiliate program should enforce.
So you need to be clear about any website restrictions, linking techniques, black hat SEO practices, things like that. So if you’re not, like, if you are not clear about these, you could have a program full of, quote unquote undesirable affiliates, right? So the first is just website restrictions. Website restrictions here just sets the boundaries, right? This is about protecting your brand, protecting other affiliates.
So a lot of times what we’ll say is something like, you know, your participating website may not. Our website with parentheses ask may not number one, infringe on our or anyone else’s intellectual property, publicity, privacy or other rights. Number two, violate any law or regulation. Number three, contain any content that is threatening, harassing, defamatory, obscene, harmful to minors, contains nudity, pornography, or sexually explicit materials. Number four, contains any viruses, trojan horses, a bunch of other stuff. Again, you can copy these from the template.
If you go to link in the show notes, you can just copy these. That’s a long one there. Number five, contain software use technology that attempts to intercept, divert or redirect Internet traffic. Basically that, you know, cookie stealing, things like that, right? So see, these protect the integrity of the program, protect the integrity of your brand, and they make it clear in the rules there, it says if you violate these terms, we have the right to remove you. Obviously, you don’t want someone who is doing these things that they’re using.
Trojan horses, worms, cancel bots, things like that. They’ve got, you know, again, if you have a family friendly site. Again, if you don’t have a family friendly site, okay, that’s your choice. But most of the people we work with over the years would be considered family friendly.
They don’t want pornography. They don’t want, you know, harassing, threatening speech on sites. And so that’s going to harm the brand, it’s going to harm other affiliates.
Things like hate speech. Again, you can add or remove anything you like from that section, and you definitely do not want anything to do with sites that are using viruses or any. Those are nothing but trouble. I created a graphic like all affiliate programs should prohibit five things, right? Number one, spamming. Number two, viruses. Number three, trojan horses. Number four, cookie stuffing. Number five, illegal activity.
All of them. Everything else is subjective and up to you. But spamming viruses, trojan horses, cookie stuffing, and illegal activity, every program should prohibit those. The next thing you’ve got under this bigger agreement that you know, like the basic rules, right? It’s just rules for using links, what’s allowed and what’s not allowed when it comes to promoting your products or services.
These are not just about protecting your brand, but also we want to create a level playing field for all of our affiliates. Everybody knows the do’s and don’ts. So here’s an example. An affiliate agreement that we created for legacy learning systems years ago. Not going to read the whole thing, but says upon acceptance into the program, links will be made available to you through the affiliate interface.
Your acceptance into our program means you agreed to and abide by the following number one, you will only use linking code obtained from the affiliate interface without manipulation.
Number two, all domains that use your affiliate link must be listed in your affiliate profile. Number three, this is an important one. Your website will not in any way copy, resemble, or mirror the look and feel of our website. You will also not use any means to create the impression that your website is our website or any part of our website, including, without limitation, framing of our website in any manner.
So then we go on to say no cookie stuffing, no other illegal redirects, things like that. If you are found doing any of these things, or you attempt to hide or manipulate the original source of the link, your current and past commissions will be voided or your commission level will be set to 0%.
This does not include using out redirection, the same domain where the affiliate link is placed. So that doesn’t apply to pretty links and things like that. So when you look at these like just one by one, we’re preventing them from, you know, the number one where I say you only going to use the linking code, it prevents them from adding additional parameters that can mess up the tracking or steal the commission from another affiliate.
We actually often add at the end of the word manipulation. Usually we add unless you have obtained specific permission from the affiliate manager to manipulate the link for the purposes of ad tracking or other accepted methods of measuring link performance that makes it clear they can manipulate the links for tracking purposes as long as they have permission to do so.
Number two, all domains that use your affiliate link must be listed in your affiliate profile. Why is this? The biggest reason is it prevents affiliates from using domains that violate other parts of the agreement, such as the hate speech, pornography, obscene material, et cetera. But they’re not listed in their profile. So I go to their main site and it’s perfectly fine.
But they have five other domains. It also allows us to monitor all of their domains as a part of FTC compliance. And we talked about it last episode. If you have not yet, make sure you check out the guide that we put together on FTC compliance. You definitely want to check that out. It was a podcast episode I did a few months back, and you need to check that out to make sure you’re compliant with the FTC guidelines.
So the third one about copying the website, that’s a brand protector. I mean, the last thing you want is some rogue affiliate pretending they are you. All sorts of bad things can happen from that. Number four, we talked about, you know, no cookie stuffing, no pop ups, you know, no false or misleading links. That’s all about protecting your brand’s reputation and being fair to other affiliates if you’re not familiar with them.
Just real quick, cookie stuffing is basically where an affiliate places a tracking code on the user’s device without the user consenting to it or knowing it. So things like iframes and stuff like that, it’s extremely unethical. Extremely unethical. The whole point is to steal commissions. So instead of the correct affiliate getting the commission, the wrong one does, you know, pop ups. I don’t mean like where they can’t use a pop up on their site to collect email address.
I am talking about like run an automatic pop up of an affiliate link on their site. That is not allowed. That’s basically another way of cookie stuffing. URL masking is where they’re just masking the URL, so then they don’t know where, where are they? Basically it’s hiding referral sources and things like that. False links.
Basically, if the anchor text says free workout guide, but I land on a site for iPhone cases, that’s a false link. And so the thing about this section, it seems like, wow, there’s a lot of rules, and gosh, how do affiliates react to that? Here’s the thing.
Sections like this can actually help you attract good affiliates. When you emphasize these restrictions, when you make it clear you don’t allow unfair play, you set the stage for a fair and ethical affiliate program.
And your affiliates, they need to know that you are adhering to a level playing field where everybody plays by the same rules that you’re going to protect the integrity of the program. And so it actually helps you attract more good affiliates.
So any of those, they actually work in your benefit. So again, the last one there where I talk about, you know, using redirects to bounce a click off a domain where the click did not originate.
All that stuff. Again, if you don’t know what that means, it means you’re not doing it. But what this does is it prevents those black hat affiliates from using sneaky techniques that make it look like a click came from one website when it actually came from another. So they can’t use these tricky redirects where they pretend that a user clicked a link on their site, but in reality it came from a different site, which is totally, that’s like black hat type stuff, right? It’s all about affiliates being honest and upfront with their audience and then says, if you’re found doing this, we’re going to not pay you.
Yeah, that’s exactly, it’s very direct, very clear regarding violations of these terms. If you break the rules, you make no money, you make nothing. So don’t break the rules. The next kind of general thing is domain names. So we include a separate section so that things are abundantly clear about domain names.
This section prevents affiliates from using trademark terms, meaning our terms in their domain or subdomain. So here’s an example from the template. Again, you can get the template. The link is in the show notes. Use of any of our trademark terms as part of the domain or subdomain for the website is strictly prohibited. In other words, you can’t have something like, okay, let’s take Shutterfly. You can’t go buy shutterflycoupons. com and use that as an affiliate.
You can’t create a website like shutterflyphotobooks. com or Shutterfly dot photobooks. com or Shutterfly dot great coupons. com or something like that. Now, if you have it in the URL, such as myawesomesite.
com, shutterfly dash coupons, that’s acceptable. Nothing wrong with that. All right, so under advertising policies, it’s the next section. You’ve got to create an advertising policies section. Again, we’re talking about brand integrity, legal compliance, all of those things. So there are some key parts to include in your agreement here.
The first one is just prior consent for material reference okay, so what that means is affiliates must seek prior written consent before creating, publishing, distributing or printing any written material that references your program. Yes, I read that directly from the agreement. That’s basically if you’re going to create your own graphics, you just need to run them by the affiliate manager. That’s it.
So they’re, they’re on brand. So again, we’ve had, you know, we had a, I won’t get into what the company was. We had a company that was in a niche and again very family friendly brand and we wanted to keep it that way. But it was really easy to include some sexually explicit material in this niche. If you targeted certain people, we were targeting more dads and moms and homeschoolers and things like that. And we had an affiliate who created some very sexually explicit graphics. And we’re like no, that is not allowed.
And I had to tell them like those need to be pulled by end of day or we have to remove you from the program cause it’s killing our brand. If you’re running email campaigns, you know you have to comply with the can spam compliance. Right. You have to all like, I’m not going to go into what can we talked about last episode.
What is can spam is not like it’s legally required, but again it’s also ensuring that other affiliates who promote you, if you have five affiliates out of a thousand who are breaking the rules, it affects the other 995.
So you’ve got to comply with can spam. You got to comply with the sender transparency rules. You’ve got to, you know, this is an optional one, but you may or may not want to require all affiliate campaigns to be submitted for approval before distribution. I don’t usually do this. It usually slows affiliates down. But I’ve run one program in the past that we had to do it.
It was in a very regulated industry. I’ve got another one that I’m working with now. It’s in a very regulated industry. I have to approve the email campaigns before. It sucks, but it’s the reality. Before you send an email, we recommend not copying swipe copy directly. We’ve always talked about that.
I’ve talked about it a million times. Do not copy the swipe copy. But unless you do copy the swipe copy directly, you have to run it by me. And there’s actually something I’m going to talk about. I think it’s in the net. Yeah. The next episode how to create high converting swipe copy for your affiliates. I’m going to talk about something where I’ll share a way that you can customize using AI, you can customize copy for affiliates. It’s really cool Something that we’re doing a lot more of now.
And when you do this, it then makes it more likely where they don’t have to run it by you. Because if the email is written that’s in their style, they might just run with it. And so there’s some cool things you can do with AI now, and I’ll talk about that in next episode. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss it.
Okay? But if they do edit the email in any material way, they have to run it by us. And so typically we’ll just say like, hey, you know, if you’re changing an adjective from awesome to amazing, no, you don’t need to run it by us.
If you are deleting anything that does not fundamentally change the meaning of the email, no, like if you keep the rest but delete, say a paragraph, you do not need to run a bias social media. You know, when you’re writing about social media and your terms and conditions, okay, are you going to allow promotion to personal social media accounts? Some don’t allow that Others do.
Normally we do allow this. Are you going to allow them to do that? You need to make that clear in your agreement. You need to make it clear they cannot post links on company pages. That is not allowed. They cannot go on your Facebook page and post their affiliate link.
You need to make sure you’re protecting your trademark. So generally you do not want to allow affiliates to use your trademark name in ads. So an example from the affiliate terms and conditions template, which again you can get in the link in the show notes you shout out, create, publish, distributor, print any written material that makes reference to our program without first submitting that material to us and receiving our prior written consent.
If you intend to promote our program via email campaigns, you must adhere to the following again. Number one, abide by the Canned Spam act of 2003 with respect to our program.
Get my #1 affiliate recruiting email (the one I’ve personally used to recruit thousands of affiliates in dozens of niches). Grab your copy here!
Number two, email must be sent on your behalf and must not imply that the email is being sent on behalf of us. Right. Number three, emails must first be submitted to us for approval prior to being sent. I usually don’t include that, but you might include that. All right. And social media, it says from the agreement, promotion on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms is permitted following the general guidelines.
Number one, you are allowed to promote offers to your own lists. More specifically, you’re welcome to use your affiliate links on your own Facebook, Twitter, etcetera pages. For example, you may post 25% off sale, blah blah blah, through Wednesday with code you know. Number two, you are prohibited from posting your affiliate links on insert company names, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, et cetera, company pages in an attempt to turn those links into affiliate sales. Number three, you’re prohibited from running Facebook ads with company names, trademark terms.
All right, the next thing you’ve got to account for is just what we call operations in various jurisdictions. That’s a fancy way of saying if you’re outside of the United States or wherever your agreement is centered, you know, if you’re in Austria, well, it’s centered in Austria to date. I mean, I would say most of the programs we’ve run are based in the US. I mentioned last week, I know we’ve done one in Canada, the UK.
I kind of thinking about it and it was like, wow, this probably run one out of Italy, one out of Singapore, one out of Australia, Germany, Ireland. I think I said last week, like, I’ve only worked in the US.
And then I was like, wait a minute. No, I haven’t. I’ve worked. I started naming countries like, okay, I guess I just forgot about it now that there’s differing laws in each country, but you’re still going to have to account for the two biggest jurisdictions when it comes to online marketing laws, the US and the European Union. So even if you are outside of the US, if you are doing business in the United States and the EU, you have to account for those laws.
So here’s some language that you can get from our terms and conditions template. Operations outside the United States. If you are conducting business or taking orders from persons in other countries, you will follow the laws of those countries. For example, you will comply with the European Union’s privacy and electronic communications directive if you are conducting business in or taking orders from persons in one or more of the European Union countries, ultimately, again, dependent upon your jurisdiction. business in or taking orders from persons in one or more of the EuropeanSo consult your attorney if you’re outside the United States, especially, or if you have any weird laws in your state.
All right, the next thing we’ve got is the reversal policy. Basically, what are the circumstances under which orders can be reversed and make it clear what would cause a reversal, or perhaps even a suspension from the program if there’s a higher volume than normal of reversals, if that becomes an issue. So here’s an example of a reversal policy directly from the affiliate terms and conditions that we created for adidas back in the day.
Adidas takes pride in its very low reversal rate, which we attribute to open communication with our affiliates. However, we reserve the right to reverse orders due to order cancellations, duplicate tracking returns, disputed charges, program violations as outlined in these terms and conditions.
Additionally, if we ask you for clarification or more information on any orders or clicks that we suspect may be in violation of our terms and conditions, we expect that you will respond in a timely and honest manner below our violations of our communications policy. Number one, you are not forthcoming. You are intentionally vague or found to be lying.
Number two, you’re not responsive within a reasonable time period and after multiple attempts to contact you using the information listed in your network profile. Number three, you cannot substantiate or validate the source of your traffic to our program with a clear and demonstrable proof. Basically, it goes on to say failure to comply. But any part of the policy is grounds for removal, and the policy sets the expectations of the affiliate to comply. Ultimately, it’s your job as an affiliate manager It is your job to monitor reversal rates.
If an affiliate has a lower than average reversal rate, none of these really matter. If your typical reversal rate, you know, any returns or whatever is Any affiliate under 1. 5. I’m not even worried about them. Generally speaking, you know, affiliates with very low reversal rates are not a problem. But if an affiliate has a reversal rate that is above average, this outlines what you need to do.
Number one, you reach out to them, ask about the specific transaction. Number two, you follow up at least two times. Number three, if they do not reply, you set their commissions to 0% and you remove them from the program. Or, you know, either one or you can do both. But if they do continue to have a high, you know, reversal rate, you probably going to have to remove them.
You know, you’re probably dealing with fraud. And if you want to know more about fraud, I’ve got a link in the show notes to our episode on fraud I talked about last week as well. But the idea here is just, again, setting expectations. Here’s what we expect, and if it doesn’t happen, here are the consequences. The next section is all about the FTC disclosure requirements.
This is again, every affiliate agreement has to talk about compliance with FTC disclosure guidelines. The FTC, the Federal Trade Commission here in the United States, requires that affiliates disclose their relationships with your business when promoting your products and services. We talked about this last year when they released their new updates. This is not just a legal formality.
It is an absolutely critical part of complying with the law and frankly, not getting sued by the FTC. Again, I mentioned last week that has happened to me. It is not fun. So don’t get sued by the FTC and by explicitly including FTC disclosure requirements in your agreement, you and your affiliates are signing off on it to say, hey, we’re going to both abide by these.
And if the affiliates don’t, the very first thing you have to say is we told them they should. Now there’s more to it. You’ve got to monitor them and you got to keep them honest.
But still, the very first step. On day one, you can’t monitor somebody before they start sending traffic, but day one they agreed to abide by these rules. And so we say in this straight from the terms and conditions template, you shall include a disclosure statement within any and all pages, blog posts or social media posts where affiliate links for our affiliate program are posted as an endorsement or review, and where it is not clear that the link is a paid advertisement or advertisement.
If you’re overseas and it goes on to say it gives them some guidelines must be made as close as possible to the claims, should be placed above the fold. Scrolling should not be necessary. Pop up disclosures are prohibited. Must be made on the page where the endorsement is made. Non us based affiliates must still comply with these us FTC rules.
And then we link to the link on the FTC website where they talk about this and so we give them everything they need to do to be compliant, but it’s ultimately up to them. For more information on FTC stuff, check out my podcast episode.
In the show notes, I am actually, anytime there are new rules or clarifications made, that episode will be updated. I’ve had to do it one time real quick. I’ve had to update that podcast with one new thing that came out a few months after I released it. So there actually is an addendum at the end of that episode, so to speak. So again, I update that periodically when there’s new stuff.
All right, so those are all the rules that are, they are relevant to literally every single program. What about rules that are, you know, they’re specific rules for most, but not all programs.
All right, these are optional. They might not be applicable to your program. You know, for some affiliate programs, for example, that you don’t have coupons, you have no coupons. Having a section about coupons is irrelevant. That’s, I would still say include rules about coupons even if you don’t have them, because if you add them later, you don’t have to issue an updated agreement.
But that’s, you know, and that’s a little bit of a pain. So you might still want to have them even if you don’t have coupons. If you are 100% certain you will never offer coupons that you don’t need a section on it. So the first thing is pay per click guidelines. If you don’t have pay per click, like, I want, my affiliates, they can bid on anything.
They can do anything. Okay, then. There you go. But if you’re. Like Shutterfly, it said, if you are enrolled in our program and participate in PPC advertising, you must adhere to our PPC guidelines as follows.
Number one, you may not bid on any of our trademark terms which are identified below, including any variations or misspellings thereof, for search or content based campaigns on Google, being Yahoo, Facebook or any other network.
Number two, you may not use our trademark terms as a part of the name of your site. We talked about there earlier. You can’t name the site Shutterfly coupons.
Number three, you may not use our trademark terms in your ad title, copy, display name or as a display URL. Number four, you may not direct a link to our website using PPC on our trademark terms. You got to send them to your site. And then the last thing is, if you automate your PPC campaigns, it is your responsibility to exclude our trademark terms from your program.
And we strongly suggest you add our trademark terms as negative keywords. And it goes on to explain that basically what that means is if you bid on, say, photo books, but then you’ll show up for Shutterfly photo books. No, you have to add Shutterfly as a negative keyword. So I’m not going to show up for shutterfly photo books. And then we list the trademark terms.
There’s about eight or nine trademark terms. Now, typically we only enforce a few of those, particularly number two through four, which is we allow them to bid on trademark terms. But some companies, you know, we include number one. And so it’s ultimately up to you. Like should you allow trademark bidding in your affiliate program? That is a whole episode in and of itself.
There are benefits to allowing trademark bidding. You know, it’s defensive against competitors because if your competitors are going to bid on your trademark, if you’re a very small brand, but they might be bidding on you, well, have all of your affiliates saying nice things about you. You know, it gives you some extra real estate on search results. You get to control the message. You know, if you do allow trademark bidding, then you can set rules around it.
Like you can’t use certain terms like scam or anything like that. You have to keep the messaging positive. So it allows you to get a little bit more exposure out there, especially if you’re a smaller brand. If you’re a shutterfly or Adidas, you don’t need that. You don’t need that. Everybody knows who you are, right?
So if you’ve got a strong reseller presence or a limited budget for ads, you know, that’s an important thing. So again, it’s totally up to you, though, definitely you do not want them to be using your trademark terms in their URL and things like
that, though. So they got to send traffic to a bridge page rather than directly to yours. That’s another one.
Again, it helps eliminate any confusion about who’s running the ads. They’ve got to use negative keywords if you don’t allow trademark terms, for example.
So again, make sure that you decide what is best for you. All right, the next section that’s relevant to most, but not all, is coupon guidelines. Like I talked about earlier, this is 100% up to you.
I’m going to share the guidelines that we used with the Shutterfly affiliate agreement and then you can kind of go from there, right? It says, if you are enrolled in our program and your website promotes coupon codes, you must adhere to our coupon guidelines as follows.
Number one, if you choose to advertise Shutterfly coupon codes, then the only Shutterfly coupon code you may advertise are Shutterfly coupon codes that are provided to you through the affiliate program or network or that are displayed on our website. And it goes on to explain that. Number two, you may not advertise. May not.
It’s all caps. Actually, we’re not advertised Shutterfly coupon codes obtained from our non affiliate advertising, such as customer emails, paid search or other campaigns. Number three, posting any information about how to work around the requirements of a coupon or promotion, that is, first time customers only, will result in removal from the program. So if you say, hey, it’s only for first time customers.
So if you create a new email address, you can get this. No, that will kick you out so fast you won’t even see it coming. Number four, you should see it coming though, because it says in the agreement that you can’t do that, coupons must be displayed in their entirety with the full offer, valid expiration date and code. You may not use any technology that covers up the coupon code and generates the affiliate click by revealing the code. So in other words, those things you’ve seen was like click here to reveal the code.
That’s just, it’s basically a form of cookie stuffing. That’s all it is. And then there’s a bunch of other stuff again that we can go through those so the cows come home. But if you grab the template, you’ll see the different sections. Like if we don’t give you the code, you can’t promote it.
You know, you cannot help customers cheat, you cannot do cookie stuffing, and you can’t have people clicking on expired coupon codes and things like that. Don’t lie about how to redeem the code. Affiliates who do this know exactly what they’re doing and they should be removed. So the last thing is in the coupon section is like, do you want to have special terms for coupon website? We talked about.
This is straight from the terms and conditions here. If your website ranks on the first page of Google for terms related to our website or company’s name, combined with the words coupon, coupons, coupon code, promo code, etcetera, and your conversion rate exceeds 25%, you’ll be offered a lower commission than our standard rate to offset the reduced profitability of orders. The current rate is 1%.
This is one of the most controversial things we did at this affiliate program, Shutterfly, but it has become industry standard right now. Basically what was happening is these coupon sites were stealing the sale. So you got this person who blogs about it, introduces somebody to shutterfly and does all that work, and then they come there and it’s like, oh, do you want to enter a coupon code? So they go to Google and they click on that.
The thing is, the first site did most of the work, but the coupon site did something. So we didn’t want to go first cookie, and we did one last cookie. So we reached a compromise and we pay both affiliates a percentage. So if your affiliate tracking platform has the technical ability to do this, I highly recommend this approach.
Offering split commissions is a great way to reward both affiliates. You’re rewarding the first one for doing 80 90% of the work, but you’re also rewarding that closer affiliate, so to speak, for closing the sale.
The next section, again, most programs will have this, but some won’t, is about sub affiliate networks. Your entire thing about sub affiliate networks may say, no, we don’t allow sub affiliate networks.
End of discussion. This is different from a second tier affiliate where affiliate a refers affiliate BH and you know who affiliate a and b are. Everything’s transparent.But affiliate a, who referred affiliate b, gets a cut of the action, right? In a sub affiliate network. Affiliate a sets up a network and recruits affiliate b, who promotes through the network. Nothing is transparent who the affiliates are. You never know that. So there’s pros and cons.
You know, some of the pros of sub affiliates are scalability. You get more traffic sources, efficiency. You only have to work with one person, but you get thousands of people promoting.
If you are ready to take your business to the next level and start an affiliate program, start with my free report, Your First 100 Affiliates. This report takes nearly two decades of experience, trial and error, and lessons learned about finding top affiliates in nearly every conceivable niche and puts them all into one report. Grab your copy here!
You don’t have to pay them or monitor them or any of those. That’s also a risk. It’s a con, but not knowing who they are, the lack of control, the complexity, that’s the commission structure.
Why would somebody join. Think about it. If you pay a 30% commission and you pay the sub affiliate network Why would they do that? When you pay 30%, you know, so you end up having to pay the network 35%, which could be a problem. So there’s definitely a lot of pros and cons. Ultimately, it’s up to you if you’re going to work with the sub affiliate network.
Again, this is a whole episode in of itself. Number one, transparency is absolutely non negotiable. They need to disclose the source of traffic generated by their sub affiliates. The sub affiliates are bound by the affiliate terms and conditions. You know, they have to enforce those. Gotta be very careful with coupons.
I generally don’t allow sub affiliate networks to even use coupons, but if you do, I’ve got some language in that affiliate terms and conditions template that walks you through how to legally protect yourself if people are using sub affiliates. So again, those sections there, coupons and PPC and sub affiliates, those are relevant to some but not all affiliate programs. The last thing you have a model for the affiliate agreement.
Again, reminder, you can download the affiliate agreement template and pretty much copy and paste that. I’m recording this in the middle of 2024. Things are going to change over the next two years if you download that template. I’m going to update the template in 2026, but here’s the thing, you need to revisit it once a year. What’s working and what’s not working in this template?
Are there any policies you need to change or add? You know, maybe you don’t care if there’s anything about some affiliates on day one, but then you decide we’re gonna, you know, maybe you don’t allow them, but then you decide to add them.
Well, you got to add that section. Are there any new laws or regulations you’re going to need to address or policies that you need to change? You know, for instance, when the FTC updated its affiliate guidelines in 2023, we updated all of our clients agreements within a couple of weeks. It took a few hours, but again, we wanted to make sure we were in compliance with the new guidelines.
So we had to go in and update, especially the social media sections to specifically address the stuff that they had just talked about and when they updated their guidelines, I think you had until like end of the year to get compliant. You had like four or five months.
So they were not going to hold you accountable the day after the guidelines were updated. So you’ve got time. If you add new products, make sure to add those keywords. If you’re prohibiting trademark bidding and let’s say your company name is XYZ company, you sell putters, golf putters and you’ve got the Model A and the Model B, well if you come out the model C and D, you need to add those as negative keywords.
At the very least. Every year we take a look at these agreements, just make sure nothings missing. Theres nothing in there that doesnt need to be. Usually theres nothing. I mean from 2017 to 23 we looked at the terms and we did absolutely nothing in response to them. There was nothing to change.
And then in 23 we had to change them because of the FTC stuff. So ultimately these agreements, theyre not only going to protect you, but theyre going to protect the 99. 999% of your affiliates who are ethical and legit, really quality affiliates that it’s going to create this atmosphere of transparency and clear communication. That’s what affiliate program is all about.
So grab that template, use it as a guide. Create that affiliate agreement in a way that builds trust and sets the right expectations and allows you and your affiliates to grow. That’s what this is all about.
So if you’ve got questions about this or anything else, you can text me anytime at 260217 4619. Again, area code 260-217-4619 text me anytime if you got questions about the template or just terms and conditions in general or any of the legal stuff.
And then lastly, make sure you hit subscribe if you haven’t yet because next week, as I mentioned earlier, I’m gonna talk about how to create high converting swipe copy for your affiliates.
I’m gonna share some of the new stuff we’re doing with AI to personalize it. It’s really, really cool and it is having a big impact on sales. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss that episode.
I’ll see you then.
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
| Find Your First 100 Affiliates | Affiliate Program Terms & Conditions Template | Get My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email |
| Avoid The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes | Turn Inactive Affiliates into Your Best Affiliates | Get My Template for Writing Affiliate Emails |
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The post How to Create an Affiliate Program Agreement appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### How do you stay on the right side of the law with your affiliate program? Wondering about the legal ins and outs of running an affiliate program? You’re in the right place. In this episode, I will share the essential legal requirements every affiliate program owner needs to know. From compliance to disclosures, I’ll help you to keep your program on the right side of the law.
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Links Mentioned in this EpisodeWhat the 2023 FTC Updates Mean for Affiliate Marketing
How to Identify and Stop Affiliate Fraud
How to Write a Review Post that Ranks and Converts
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Build Great Relationships with Affiliates
How Do Affiliate Managers Spend Their Day?
How to Communicate Bad News to Your Affiliates
How to Triple Your Webinar Sales with Affiliates
How to Identify and Stop Affiliate Fraud
How to Solve the 15 Biggest Challenges for All Affiliate Programs
What are the Legal Requirements for an Affiliate Program?How do you stay on the right side of the law with your affiliate program? I mean, how do you make sure you don’t get sued or end up in trouble with the government? If you’ve been wondering about the legal ins and outs of running an affiliate program, you’re in the right place. Today in this episode, I’m going to share the essential legal requirements every affiliate program owner needs to know, from compliance to disclosures and everything in between.
I’m going to help you keep your program on the right side of the law. Let’s get started. So today’s episode, not a super exciting one. We’re not talking about growing 500%. How do you get more affiliates to promote? How do you get different types of affiliates? How do you steal your competitors affiliates? These are the types of things we’ve been talking about recently, right. We’ve been talking about some fun topics.
If you missed the last few episodes, what do affiliate managers do all day? How to communicate bad news. That one wasn’t fun, but still how to triple your webinar sales. But a little bit ago we talked about fraud. A little bit before that, we talked about how to make sure that your affiliate program recovers when things go badly, because things are going to go badly. And today we’re talking about the legal requirements of an affiliate program. How do we stay on the right side of the law? How do we make sure we don’t get sued?
How do we make sure that we don’t end up getting in trouble with government agencies, FTC and whatever. I can’t even think of a single other government agency. All of a sudden they would involve mostly f. FCC. Yeah. I was like, basically it begins in f and ends in c. Okay, that’s, well, not surprising anyway. Yeah, but this isn’t hard. You know, it’s not something that should take up more than 5% of your time, but it’s necessary. Like, you don’t want to mess around here. You got to cover your b***. As somebody who has spent time, as I mentioned before, being sued by the FTC from almost 14 years ago now, they ended up dropping it and we’ll talk about that later.
But like, that’s happened to me. So as somebody who’s been in that situation, this is something you don’t want to mess around with. So you need to listen carefully today it’s not hard. It’s actually really easy to stay on the right side of the law, but you need to know what to do.
Now, quick note, first, everything I’m about to say is us centric. All right. I am an american. Every affiliate program I’ve ever run has been based, actually, except for one. Okay. Actually I’ve run canadian. Okay. So never mind. That’s not true. I think about it. I’ve actually run at least two. One in England, one in one in Canada, two Canadians.
So three outside the US. But most of my experience, I mean I’ve run fully 50, 60 programs. Almost all of them have been in the US. But a lot of what I’m saying is applicable no matter whether you, you know, you’re in the US or you’re overseas.
Because most of what I’m saying is applicable to everyone doing business in the United States. Okay, so if you’re in Ireland, but you’re doing business in the United States, you have one american customer. This applies to you. So that’s 1st.
Second, I am not an attorney and nothing I am saying should be construed as legal advice. Just stuff I have to say. Right. These are based only on my own experiences.
Make sure that your affiliate program has a solid agreement (AKA Terms & Conditions). To make things simple, grab my template here!
I’ve been an affiliate manager for almost 20 years now and I’m gonna do my best to maintain accuracy at the time I’m recording it, you know, in the middle of 2024. What I am saying is accurate to the best of my knowledge. But laws change. Laws vary from state to state.
I’ve only run affiliate programs that were based in like eight states. Most Tennessee, Indiana, California has been a big one. Texas is another one. I know some of those state laws, but I don’t know every state.
I don’t know Wyoming’s laws. No idea. So no guarantee is given regarding the accuracy of anything I say. That said, you should consult the licensed attorney for accurate protection.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. With all that boring stuff said, I’m going to do my best to get you on the right track here. All right, so what are the legal requirements? What are the legal requirements? What must an affiliate manager do to make sure his or her affiliate program stays on the right side of the law? Everything I’m about to say, these are in no particular order. This is not like the number one thing you must do.
No, you got to do all of these things and you got to do all of these things well. So they’re all number ones. If you’re familiar with the author Tim Grover, he was Michael Jordan’s trainer and Kobe Bryant’s trainer, Dwayne Wade and some others. Everything is number one to him. So in his book is like every chapter, number one, do this. Number two. Number one, do this. Number one.
Number one. I always think that’s fun. All right, so number one, I said, there’s no particular, I just said number one because I was thinking about that. But advertising and marketing laws, you got to stay up on advertising and marketing laws.
First thing you got to pay attention to is email. Email marketing compliance, right? In the US, we have the can spam act. I mean, this, gosh, when that was around, I’d have to Google that 20 years ago, probably.
So one of the things that that requires is that you have consent and an opt out. So you have to make sure your affiliates have permission to send marketing emails. That must include a clear and easy way for. This is from the law for recipients to opt out of future emails.
All right? So that’s the first thing. If they are not abiding by the can Spam act, if they are spamming, you have to remove them as an affiliate, you cannot allow that in your program. If somebody promotes you and you remove them, and then the FTC comes and says, well, your affiliates are swinging, you say, nope, I removed this person and this person, you’re good.
Again, don’t quote me on that, but you should be in the clear. I removed them as soon as I found out about it. And make sure, by the way, you’re documenting these types of things. The second thing is just honesty and subject lines.
Subject lines should accurately reflect the content of the email. Your affiliates cannot make a claim in the subject line that’s not backed up in the content of the email. You gotta have an identifiable sender. I mean, that’s required by every, whether it be convertkit, Aweber, mailchimp, all that stuff.
You gotta have that physical address, right? Overseas in Europe, you’ve got GDPR, right? So you’ve got to have explicit consent. You cannot send marketing emails to people without being explicit that they are signing up for your email list.
And then of course we’ll talk about this a little bit later. But data protection with regard to email, that’s a big one. You gotta protect their personal data, all that stuff. Okay, anti spam, we sort of touched on this.
No unsolicited messages. None that applies to email comments, forums, social media. No unsolicited messages. Some of this is not illegal. Is it illegal for an affiliate to leave a comment on somebody’s Twitter post and say, I like this product, go buy it here? No, it’s a little bit unethical. And so there’s a little bit of a gray area there. It’s not illegal, but you don’t want that in your affiliate program.
And then the second thing, we just talked about respecting opt out requests. So if somebody opts out, even if they don’t do it the proper way, especially if you’ve got people who are a little bit less tech savvy and we get like one person a month who emails our customer support and says, please remove me from your email list. Like there’s a link at the bottom of every email. But again, they’re not super tech savvy.
And so if they’re not removed within a timely manner, you know, 48, 72 business hours, that’s a problem. All right, truth in advertising, this is a big one. Honesty and transparency are key here. Affiliates must make accurate claims.
They have to avoid making false, misleading, exaggerated claims about your products, about your services. I was talking with a client yesterday and I’m hesitant to tell the whole thing just because, again, it might fall into this area. But I’ll see how vague I can make this. I was talking about this product.
It is a supplement. And I was talking about something that this product does not claim that it does. It does not say anywhere on any of the packaging or anything that it will cure this problem. But it has alleviated a lot of this particular problem for my daughter and me, both of us.
All right. It is a side benefit that has been amazing and I feel amazing. And I was telling the founder of this, the client, I was telling him like, here’s what it’s done. Oh, my gosh. And it makes sense. He was like, medically, that makes sense. And I was like, yeah. And of course, I can’t really tell this story anywhere. Yeah, I can tell it privately and I can tell it in vagueness like I just did there. Cause I didn’t make an unsubstantiated claim right now. So we can’t say stuff like that, especially in the supplement where. Why? Because the FTC will crack down on the RB. You said that cure is a disease. Like. No, I did and I said it made my symptoms a lot better.
But you have to be really careful with stuff like that. So statements have to be substantiated. So any claim that an affiliate makes about a product’s benefits or performance has to be backed by evidence. I mean, simply put, if you start taking a supplement and the affiliate can honestly, like, here’s what I weighed on this date.
And what I weighed on this date. That’s a substantiated claim. What you can say is, this product helped me lose 35 pounds. This product helped me clear up eczema. This problem helped me hear better or walk with less pain. You can’t say it’ll help you because you don’t know. You cannot guarantee that this product will help anybody else. So it has to be a substantiated statement.
No deceptive practices like bait and switch. You cannot promise one thing and deliver another. If your affiliates are doing that, that is illegal. You have to remove them. They have to have a clear representation of the product or service, including the price, the feature and availability. So you cannot say, look at this. It’s 50% off. And they go to a page that’s 20% off. Now, can you say it’s 50% off now through Monday, July 17, at midnight Pacific time? And if they go there on the 18th, it’s not 50% off. Absolutely.
That’s not a bait and switch. That’s not a misrepresentation. They put it in the thing when the expiration date is. But that’s why it’s important to make sure your affiliates put, if there are expiration dates on things like that, and it has to be mentioned in the email, in the social media post. All right, speaking of social media, with social media, in terms of, we’re talking about advertising and marketing laws here.
You know, with social media, you have to comply with the platform, whatever the platform’s policy are you, whatever their policies on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, whatever, you have to comply with their terms.
You might not like them, but you have to comply with them or else, again, it’s not illegal per se, but you violated Facebook. Terms that could come back on you and your ads could be affected.
And by effective, I mean could be completely shut down, all because of what one affiliate did. That sucks. With regards to, like, endorsements and testimonials, you gotta make sure that things are authentic. You need to, only, your affiliates can only share genuine reviews, genuine testimonials from real customers. They have to disclose.
You know, we’ll talk about this a little bit. If they got free product, if they write a review and it’s paid, that has to be disclosed. If you send me free product and I do a review, I have to mention that I got the product for free and that I will get a commission.
It’s at the very top. Any product review that I ever write, by the way, if you’re an affiliate or you an affiliate manager, you want to teach your affiliates how to write product reviews. I’ll put this link in the show notes. If you go to Matt mcWilliams. com review post, it’ll walk you through how to write a product review that ranks really high on Google and converts into sales. That’s key. But when I do that, any of the ones that I write, I mention if I got the
product for free or I put at the very top, I’m an affiliate and I get paid for this. That doesn’t affect my endorsement. But just letting them know, no fake testimonials, no fake endorsements, that’s going to get you in a ton of trouble.
All right, so the next big thing, and we touched on this a little bit, I’m going to go, is FTC disclosures. Now, like I said, I have been sued by the FTC. I can attest to the gravity of getting sued by the FTC. I vividly remember spending two full days, roughly 20 hours of my life in a conference room with FTC attorneys who barely understood how to use the Internet, let alone anything about marketing.
I mean, again, we spent like, 16, 20 hours together. I remember the transcript. Every time I said pay per click marketing, those doofuses wrote the word pay per clip. Probably shouldn’t call them doofuses. I’m gonna get in trouble. And now they’re whatever. But that’s true.
I mean, it took everything in me not to just laugh. I’m reading this transcript. I’m like, oh, my gosh. But when you’re facing a giant government agency, you kind of have to take these things seriously, right? So anyway, the lawsuit, it was eventually dropped, but it still took up. That wasn’t just those 20 hours.
I spent dozens of hours meeting with our attorney. All these things took, all this effort, legal expenses. I had to drag up hundreds of correspondences with affiliates to show them that I had done nothing wrong.
And they eventually agreed. They at least agreed enough that, like, we don’t have any evidence whatsoever that he did anything wrong, and they dropped the case against me. But that experience highlighted the importance of strict adherence to legal guidelines, because, yes, I had done everything right. But what if I hadn’t? What if I had just gotten a little bit lazy? I remember I had.
Every month I did an audit of 100 of our affiliates. Every month I did that audit of 100 affiliates. Took me 3 hours. It was a real pain in the because I usually did, like, the top It sucked. I didn’t want to do those. What if I had just kind of gotten a little bit lazy?
And so they came in, and they said, well, let’s see what you’ve been doing. And I said, well, I did an audit in March and June, did one in August, and in November of last year. That’s all I did s*** for. Not every month. I probably would have still been sued and might have lost. So that’s the importance of really adhering to this.
I did an entire episode on FTC disclosures recently. I’m going to put that link in the show notes. Let me just share a brief section. So go back and listen to. It’s super important. It’s one of the most critical things you can ever listen to. I’m literally reading from the transcript here. All right.
That highlights the importance of this. I’m going to read this here real quick. Affiliate managers, advertisers, and affiliate programs now bear clear responsibilities.
This is from the FTC. The guidelines specify three main duties first, provide explicit guidance on the rules to your affiliates. Promptly communicate these guidelines via emails or posts in your Facebook groups to keep everyone informed. In other words, going off the script. Here it’s on you to teach your affiliates how to comply with the FTC rules.
If you don’t, you will get in trouble. Secondly, actively monitor compliance like I just talked about. Keep a close eye on your affiliates activities and promptly address any rule violations.
Exactly what I was doing. Third, take appropriate action if non compliance occurs. Ensure you handle any issues according to the guidelines. I’ll just tell you one more again. Go listen to that episode because I share it in detail but document everything. I kept a back then it wasn’t Google Docs, but it was like the Microsoft word online.
And I had this document that just had screenshots like every time I kicked out an affiliate and then they came back and said, why didn’t do that? And I said, yes you did. Here’s the proof. I had every one of those documented. If I found an affiliate was doing something wrong, but it was kind of like a, yeah, hey, you didn’t disclose on this one thing.
I documented that and then they responded back and said, oh, I’m so sorry, I won’t do that. Make that mistake again. Great. But the key is that I documented everything. You’ve got to monitor and you’ve got to enforce. So again, regular audits of affiliate activities to ensure compliance with all the advertising and marketing laws.
You have to be doing those audits. I’m just checking. All right. The next legal requirement is you’ve got to abide by privacy and data protection laws. This is becoming more and more important. It’s in, this is one of those things like the FTC disclosures, things that’s not in the mainstream news.
The email marketing, the spam stuff, that’s not in the mainstream news. Nothing else I’m going to be talking about is in the mainstream news.
Don’t make the same mistakes I’ve made with my affiliate programs. Learn my top 20 affiliate program mistakes…and how to avoid them!
But data and privacy protection is in the mainstream news. This is on like everything, let’s say mainstream news. Like, what I mean is not just, you know, mSN, BC, whatever it’s called, you know, Fox News and CNN.
I just mean people are talking about this thing outside of affiliate marketing. It’s becoming more and more important. So you’ve got to ensure that your affiliate program complies with
data protection laws such as GDPR that we talked about earlier from the EU, the California Consumer Privacy act. In the US, you’ve got to have a clear privacy policy outlining how you collect, use and protect personal data.
You gotta make sure that your affiliates adhere to the data protection standards, especially if they collect any consumer data on your behalf. So simply put, there are things you can and can do and things you must do. So, for example, you have to collect affiliate information. You have to collect their name. You need their contact details, you need their payment information.
You’re storing that information. But if you’re storing that information, you have to abide by the privacy guidelines and the data collection guidelines. And if affiliate says, remove me from your program and delete my information, you have to abide by that. It’s a pain in the b***, but you have to do it. Now, could you reply back to them and say, well, actually, you know, we still owe you some commissions and we want to pay those. Like, I can’t do that if we delete you. So that’s up to you. And they reply back and say, nope, delete me.
Cool. Well, you’re not paying their commissions and that you’ve told them, we’re not paying the commissions. We can’t do it if we delete you from the program and they’re okay with it. So there you go. Make sure that your general privacy policy is up to date, but make sure that you actually, in your affiliate agreement, address this as well. Like, are you going to be sharing their information with other programs? There’s nothing wrong with that if you tell them that you’re going to do it, but make sure that that’s in there.
Make sure that that’s in there, else you’re going to get in a lot of trouble. As far as, like, data processing agreements, DPAs is what they’re called. If you don’t know what that is, you probably don’t need to know this, but I’m gonna tell you anyway. If affiliates are processing any personal data on your behalf, you have to establish a DPA data processing agreement outlining their responsibilities for data protection. Because then if they break that, if they do anything illegal, you say, well, you broke the contract.
You broke the agreement. We’re in the clear. But you need to make sure, and again, audit these things, making sure that affiliates are implementing whatever technical organizational measures that they need to put in place to protect personal data. All right, this is super, super important. Cookie consent.
You’ve seen these since, you know, for the last seven, eight, nine years or so. If you are using affiliates, you are using cookies. of the time, you have to have a cookie consent banner. If you’re not using any cookies, which is really, really rare, I guess you could get away with not having one. But even then, I think you still have to have a cookie policy that says we don’t use cookies.
Again, it’s really rare. I don’t know why you wouldn’t be, but if you’re using affiliates, you are. So you have to tell people who are coming there. Lastly on this, make sure you’re educating your affiliates on data protection requirements.
All the best practices around this stuff. Keep them updated on laws, whether it be FTC laws or data laws, they can get you in trouble, so you need to train them so that you don’t get in trouble. All right, the next legal thing to be aware of is fraud, affiliate fraud.
I did an entire episode on this very recently, actually within the past six, eight weeks. And I will link to that in the show notes. But this is on you, the affiliate manager. This is on you. If your affiliates do wrong, you’re sensing a theme here. It’s your responsibility to catch it. You know, affiliate fraud might seem like this shadow that’s kind of lurking. It’s not as prevalent as you might fear, but as affiliate marketing grows, so does the temptation for fraudulent activities. They’re rare, but when they happen, they hit hard.
I mean, they could destroy your company. And I looked up some statistics before I recorded this. I was curious, you know, since I recorded that episode, if I could find any new stuff, and I mean, the data is all over the place. One source, let me see here from the performance marketing, the PMA, I gotta accept their cookies so I can look this up. Yeah, I mean, they’re, you know, they’re saying up to 10%. I don’t believe it’s that high.
But holy crap, one out of ten. But my experience, the actual frequency of fraud levels is much, much lower. But it’s important to stay vigilant. All right. Again, the rise in affiliate fraud, it is rising proportionally to the increasing attractiveness of affiliate marketing. With each opportunity, every new opportunity that comes along for legit affiliates to make money, there’s an equal chance for the scammers and the fraudsters to exploit the systems. Right. That’s just like anything.
If you double the amount of revenue, typically everybody’s making more money. Right? That’s the same thing with fraud. So again, it’s not huge. The small percentage, though, ultimately comes down to being proactive. The small percentage, it just, it’s such a problem.
Like if it’s a quarter of a percent, it’s still such a huge problem. So you’ve got to be proactive. You know, as I say in the episode, monitoring for affiliate fraud is an ongoing necessity.
So depending upon the size of your program, again, it doesn’t have to be a huge, like, I’m going to spend hours and hours every week. No.
In the episode, I shared a practical way to think about it. Every hundred thousand dollars in sales, you’ll spend about three to five minutes checking for fraud. So again, it scales up as your sales increase.
If you got a million dollars in sales, you’re probably going to spend 30 to 50 minutes a week monitoring the sales. Does that have to be you, the affiliate manager? Probably, yes, for the first few months.
But over time you can outsource that and you can even use AI to do a lot of that. But again, you still want a human element. Just checking. Check periodically, you know, weekly check for most businesses, It’s enough to stay ahead of the fraudsters. And these are going to maintain the integrity of your program.
Not only is it going to save you money, because you’re making sure that when you’re paying commissions, those are genuinely earned, but you’re also going to make sure that you’re staying legal. In that episode, I shared some of the different types of affiliate fraud, some of which are downright illegal and others which are just unethical. Right. I share what indicators to look for, how to catch affiliate fraud.
That’s a big one. How to document it. And we’ve talked about that. Right? This is what you want to make sure that you’re protected legally. So if you tell an affiliate you committed fraud and I’m kicking you out of the program and not paying your commissions, they can’t come back six months later and be like, he never paid my commissions. I’m suing you. No, you’d be like, here’s the documentation that shows that we called 35 of the people you referred and they were all fraudulent.
We have documents on that. So that’s, that’s huge. I talk about how to do that in the episode, also talk about how to prevent it in the first place, which is important, and when to remove an affiliate for fraud and when not to. All right, so again, the link for that is in the show notes. So the next thing you’ve got to consider as far as legal requirements is tax compliance.
Again, I want to be clear. I’m basing this on the US. I don’t know how things are in Belgium or Australia, and I don’t know how they are in every single state. All right, there are 50 different states in the United States alone with 50 different very complex, complicated and way overly complex tax codes that could probably be simplified to, you now, roughly like three lines. But that’s a whole different story. Thing is, affiliate earnings from commissions are considered taxable income and they have to report these taxes.
So if you get an individual that is income tax in my case, you know, all of my stuff is done through our corporation. So that is revenue to the company. And I don’t need a 1099. You know, you don’t need to send me a 1099. But if they are an individual, you have to send, what’s 1099? Mis C for miscellaneous. If you pay them $600 or more than a year or in a year, now, if you have an affiliate network that does that, they handle that.
If you pay through PayPal, they handle that. So most of the time you don’t need to send a 1099, but you might again, if you’re not through a network where you’re paying an individual $600 or more, not through PayPal or some other service where they aggregate the payments. Right. You’ve got to keep records.
All right, keep records. I know for us, very simply, what we do for our stuff and for our clients is we have a Google sheet that about every three months I download into an Excel file and upload that to Dropbox again, just in case, heaven forbid, anything ever happened with Google. Yeah, I might lose two months because I don’t do it every single month. I probably should, but I don’t.
But about every two to three months, I’ll just download the Excel file and upload it to Dropbox. I have a folder in there. So I’ve got two different places where we keep this. We’ve got copies of all of the payments. We have an email copy. Every time we email somebody regarding their payments, then obviously in PayPal, we’ve got a record of that.
But that spreadsheet that just got everybody there. And if I need to know, how much did I pay John Smith in May of I mean, I’ve got a record right there. So any of those, any correspondence related to affiliatepayments, we keep that in a specific folder, even if it’s just as simple as somebody responding back and saying thanks, we keep that in a folder. Why would I do that?
I would say 96% of the emails we send out regarding payments aren’t responded to. Bu t if they say thanks, why would I keep that? Because if that particular affiliate two years from now tries to argue that we never paid them, here’s the email saying that you, I mean, I guess saying thanks would not say that you actually got it, but if they say I got it. Well, you said two years ago you got it.
Not only do I have a record in PayPal or in my bank, but I’ve got a record here of you acknowledging that you received it. So we keep records of all that. If we request, if we send an email that says we need your w nine, we keep records of those emails because then when you complain that you haven’t been paid, hey, here’s the email that we sent you telling you we need your w nine and you haven’t sent it, so we can’t pay you.
The other thing to be aware of is the Nexus and Nexus sales tax laws. So in the US, again, some states have what are known as Nexus laws. So that means if you’re so Amazon, right. Amazon has a nexus in every state because they have a warehouse in every state. So like, I know back in the day when I lived in Nashville and we got the warehouse, the closest warehouse for a long time was in Louisville, Kentucky and then they built one in Nashville and so we got everything like next day and it was so cool. I mean I live in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
I don’t know, the 70th largest city in the US. We have two Amazon warehouses. Two absolutely massive Amazon warehouses. There is nothing that I can’t get practically. I can’t remember the last time I waited more than two days. Most everything I get next day if I order by 04:00 p. m. and so now that they have those, they have a nexus in that state.
In some states they even consider that if you have a certain amount of sales, even if you don’t have a physical presence there, you have a nexus. Having affiliates in certain states can create a nexus.
So you have to collect sales tax. You have to follow the law on this. So if you have a physical product that ships, even if your headquarters is in Salt Lake City and it is shipping from Louisville, okay, if you have one affiliate in the state of Indiana, you have a Nexus in Indiana.
And so in the early days, if you were around back then, back in the early 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 range, there were programs that, because there were nexus laws in certain states, there were programs that were like, we don’t allow affiliates. New York was one. I feel like Rhode island was a big one, Massachusetts maybe there were like two others really like, no, we’re not going to have a affiliates there. Well then when all the states started having them, they’re like, well I guess we just, you know, we can’t not have an affiliate program.
So you’ve got to do things around that. You’ve got to register for sales tax, sales tax permit in states where you have a nexus. Again, I don’t know what states those are. I know that when we start affiliate programs we’re on a network so we don’t have to worry about that. We just let them handle that. But we have to collect the sales tax.
Where you have a Nexus, you have to comply with the local sales tax rates and the reporting requirements and all that. Again, talk to an accountant if you don’t know about that stuff because it’s different in every state.
I don’t even know what states require them. I don’t know what the sales tax is in any other state. I don’t even know what the sales tax is in my own state. I think it’s 7. 5%, but it could easily be 7 or 8. I don’t know. I just don’t know because I don’t care. So it is what it is, right? International tax compliance, the value added tax, the EU VAT. If you have affiliates in the European Union, you have to be aware of these VAT rules.
So there might be, you know, instances where you do collect it and instances where you don’t. You need to collect the VAT on any sales to EU customers, generally speaking. But again, there could be exceptions to that. And most payment systems, stripe and things like that, they can figure that out, but you have to report that stuff. Again, there’s other, you know, rules for non eu countries.
Some of them are similar to the EU stuff, some of them are similar to Indiana sales tax or Kentucky sales tax, but they’re just different and they’re all over the place. But you have to comply.
The other thing to consider is any cross border payments. All right. Some countries require withholding tax on payments made to foreign affiliates. So you have to determine, do you need to withhold tax on payments to affiliates based in other countries? Again, this is only relevant if you’re in house. If you are on a network, they handle that for you.
So just be aware of, especially if you’re going to have a bunch of international affiliates, you probably should be on a network because you don’t want to be dealing with, you know, there’s things like withholding tax and tax treaties.
You know, like there’s all kinds of tax treaties where we have one treaty with Singapore and another with Japan, and then a different one with the EU. But then within the EU, we have different tax treaties with other countries. And it’s confusing. So there are advantages to working with networks for that reason, just because you don’t have to worry about all that crap.
Again, make sure you’ve got proper documentation in forms w nine s w eight b e n forms. Make sure you obtain their tax identification number, their tin, or their Social Security number, you know, again, it’s all on a w nine or weight. Ben, make sure you’re issuing the right invoices. Make sure you’re keeping these records. I mean, for tax related purposes.
I just say seven years, because I’ve never seen anybody go over seven years. I don’t know of any state or federal jurisdiction that goes over seven years.
Not sure how much to pay your affiliates? Watch my free video tutorial on YouTube that walks you through step-by-step.
Somewhere as low as three. Just keep them for seven. Make sure you have backups of those. So if they send you, I mean, back in the day, they used to fax w nines to send faxes. People would mail me. I haven’t received a w nine in the mail in 810 years, but I used to get them in the mail sometimes, and we would scan them and upload them. So we keep those all in a folder and all of those things. So again, just make sure you’re paying on time, that you’re reporting all of this stuff.
And then the last thing on the tax stuff, make sure you are staying up to date on tax laws. Again, it’s almost irrelevant if you’re on a network, but because they handle that stuff. But, you know, the government likes to change things just for the sake of changing things. So they’re gonna change regulatory things, they’re gonna all those things, right?
And make sure, as I said so many times, make sure you’re talking to an accountant, some sort of professional tax person, to make sure that you’re compliant with these tax laws. It’s a boring thing to talk about, but very necessary.
All right. And the last thing, everything points back to this. It all starts and ends with your affiliate agreement, your terms and conditions, your affiliate programs terms and conditions.
They set the stage for everything we’ve talked about. They need to be comprehensive yet easy to understand. They’ve got to cover everything, but yet not so legal that like an affiliate look at and be like, I don’t know what this is even saying.
So clarity is super important. This is setting the expectations for your affiliates. So they lay out the rules, the rules of engagement, so to speak, right between you, the business owner, the affiliate program manager and your affiliate partners. So you see, clarity is key. If you don’t have solid guidelines, then your affiliates don’t know what’s allowed, what’s not allowed, things like am I allowed to bid on trademark terms, for example, you know, we talked about building trust with your affiliates about 610 episodes ago. This is the trust building foundation. This agreement shows them what to expect, and it said they’re agreeing to it.
So this not only protects them, but it protects you and ensures everyone’s treated fairly. Everything is transparent. They know the rules. You have the framework for an effective partnership. All about win win here in the next episode, I’m going to talk all about this.
All right. It’s all about the affiliate agreement. I’m going to walk you through the exact process that I’ve used to develop terms and conditions for some of the top affiliate programs in the world, such as Shutterfly, Adidas and a bunch of others. And here’s the best part. You don’t need to be a legal expert. You do not need to be a legal expert to basically put together a great terms and conditions.
I’m going to break it down into simple, easy to understand steps to make it easy to create your affiliate programs terms and conditions. So make sure you come back for that. We’ll talk about some of the basic rules and there’s going to be a lot of legal mumbo jumbo, but it’s worth it. We’re going to talk about rules that you need to put in place for your affiliates, how to stay FTC compliant. That part of what we didn’t talk about earlier or touched on earlier is that that’s tied back to your affiliate program agreement. We’re going to talk about domain names and advertising policies and social media reversal policy.
You know, all the FTC stuff, all some of the specific rules for most programs, but they’re not necessarily for all programs. And your pay per click guidelines and trademark bidding and things like that. We’re talking about all that coupons so much more, all the things that you need to cover in your terms and conditions. We’re going to talk about that in the next episode, so make sure you come back for that. Hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. And if you haven’t yet, hit subscribe so you do not miss this episode.
It’s super important. And if you got any questions about this episode, anything we talked about today, the legal stuff, or anything at all affiliate related, you can text me anytime at 260-217-4619 again, all those links are in the show notes, all the ones I talked about in this episode, FTC updates, how to identify and stop affiliate fraud, and how to write a review post that ranks and converts. Those are all in the show notes, so check those out again.
Make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode where we talk about creating that official affiliate program terms and conditions agreement. Whatever you want to call it, hit subscribe so you don’t miss it.
I’ll see you then.
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
| Find Your First 100 Affiliates | Affiliate Program Terms & Conditions Template | Get My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email |
| Avoid The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes | Turn Inactive Affiliates into Your Best Affiliates | Get My Template for Writing Affiliate Emails |
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###### Planning a big affiliate launch or promotion in a few months? Getting your affiliates excited and ready to promote well in advance can be challenging. In this post, I’ll share proven strategies to motivate your affiliates weeks before the launch and keep their excitement high all the way through. Learn how to build anticipation, provide the right tools, and create a buzz that makes your affiliates eager to sell more. These tactics will ensure your affiliates are engaged and ready to go when the big day arrives.
So you’ve got a big affiliate launch, a product launch, or a big promo coming up. Maybe it’s your annual promo or your big quarterly event. You’ve got some affiliates lined up; they’re in the system, on a spreadsheet, and they’ve said, “I’m in.” That’s great! But now, you need to get them fired up and keep them warm for your launch or promo.
Imagine this: someone commits to your promo five months in advance. In those five months, they’re exposed to around 3,000 marketing messages a day. That’s about 450,000 marketing messages in total! They have their own business, team members, marketing problems, and customer complaints to handle.
It’s a lot, right? How are they supposed to keep your launch or promotion front and center in their minds? The reality is, they won’t unless you keep them fired up and engaged. In this post, I’ll share ten ways to do just that. I share proven strategies to ensure your affiliates stay motivated and ready to promote your product. By the end of this post, you’ll have a complete toolkit to keep your affiliates excited and committed to your success.
Let’s get started and make sure your affiliates are motivated and ready to sell more! But first, let’s take a look at how most affiliate managers do it wrong…
How Most Affiliate Managers Motivate Affiliates (The Wrong Way)Normally, when people have a big launch or promotion coming up, the way they usually warm up their affiliates isn’t effective at all. They spend ten months planning their promotion, and then a month out, they send an email to all their affiliates announcing the promotion. A few days before the promotion, they provide everything needed, like swipe copy, and that’s pretty much it. When the launch starts, they try to go all-in with contests and more. But this isn’t how you properly warm affiliates up.
Think about your own audience. If you went ten months without any communication and then suddenly showed up in their inbox trying to sell something, it wouldn’t work. You need to spend weeks, at a minimum, talking about the promotion, discussing the topic, and seeding the promotion. You have to warm your audience up. It’s the same for your affiliates. Even if they committed to your promotion six months ago, doing nothing for the next five and a half months isn’t effective.
Many people fail to communicate with their affiliate partners for months and then expect them to promote when the time comes. So how do you fix this? Start early and have a plan. The specific plan can vary, but the key is to have one. You can take the strategies I’m sharing today and put them into a plan. Even if you don’t follow all these steps or you add your own, that’s great.
At a minimum, start six months out. For example, with Stu McLaren, his launch is roughly the same time every year. We start seeding the next launch right after the current one and don’t let up. This doesn’t mean emailing every day, but communicating at least once every four to six weeks, just to stay on their radar.
Remember, they’re exposed to hundreds of thousands of marketing messages each day, pushing your promotion out of their mind. You want to keep replanting that seed in their brain. Each time you do, the roots grow a bit stronger. By three months out from the promotion, you’ll have a solid presence in their mind.
To keep your affiliates engaged and motivated, make sure your communication plan is clear. Start by outlining your plan six months before the promotion. Include regular updates, sneak peeks, and any new developments. This keeps your affiliates informed and excited about what’s coming.
Another way to keep them engaged is through personalized communication. Send them individual emails, acknowledging their previous efforts and successes. Make them feel valued and important to your promotion. Personalized messages can go a long way in building a strong connection with your affiliates.
Consider using various communication channels to keep things interesting. Mix up your emails with video messages, social media posts, and even direct mail. Different formats can capture their attention and keep your message fresh in their minds.
Additionally, provide your affiliates with useful resources and tools. Share tips on how they can maximize their efforts and reach more people. Offering valuable content not only helps them but also shows that you are invested in their success.
Regular check-ins are crucial. Schedule periodic calls or virtual meetings to discuss progress, address concerns, and provide support. These interactions help maintain a strong relationship and keep your affiliates aligned with your goals.
Remember, warming up your affiliates is not just about keeping them informed. It’s about building a lasting relationship and ensuring they are motivated and excited to promote you. Consistent, thoughtful communication can make a significant difference in the success of your affiliate program.
Below, you’ll learn a detailed plan to keep your affiliates engaged and motivated, ensuring they’re ready and excited to promote when the time comes.
In the meantime, if you’d like to get a copy of the EXACT timeline we use to warm up affiliates before promotions, you can grab it here:
Here are the 10 best ways to motivate your affiliates1 – Announce the Promotion DatesOne of the easiest ways to motivate affiliates is to announce the promotion dates. Yes, it’s that simple. Just get them to mark their calendars and invite them using a calendar invite. This ensures they know exactly when the promotion starts and ends.
If your launch starts on June 1, send them a calendar invite for June 1 and every day of the launch. This gets them to commit. Announcing the dates and hammering them home is key. Remind them regularly as the dates approach to keep it fresh in their minds.
If you don’t know the exact dates yet, date ranges work fine. You don’t need to announce all the details. They don’t need to know the exact day of the third live workshop. Just tell them, “The launch is from June 1 to June 25,” or whatever your date range is. This gives them a clear timeframe to plan their promotional activities.
Adding the dates to their calendars helps affiliates organize their schedules around your promotion. It makes it easier for them to allocate time and resources effectively. Plus, it shows you’re serious about the promotion and helps build anticipation.
Regular reminders about the promo dates help keep your promotion front and center in their minds. They receive thousands of marketing messages daily, so consistent communication is vital. By doing this, you ensure your affiliates are always aware of the upcoming promotion, which helps keep them motivated and ready to engage.
So, announce the dates, get them to commit, and keep reminding them. This simple step can make a big difference in keeping your affiliates engaged and excited about your upcoming promotion.
2 – Keep in Touch – A LOTThe second key to motivating affiliates is to keep in touch a lot. Consistent communication is crucial to keep your promotion front and center in their minds. Here are some effective ways to stay in touch and keep them engaged.
Share Testimonials and Success Stories
One great way to keep in touch is by sharing testimonials and success stories. Send them a quick email with a success story from someone who used your product. Include a short video showing how it changed their life. This not only motivates your affiliates, but also keeps your promotion dates in their minds.
Educate and Share What’s Working
Another way to motivate affiliates is by sharing what’s working for you. If you’ve promoted an affiliate offer and found a strategy that worked, record a short video to share it with them. Say something like, “Hey, this worked for me. You can apply it to our promotion or other promotions.” This shows you’re invested in their success and provides valuable insights they can use.
Engage on Social Media
Engage with your affiliates on social media. Comment on their posts, congratulate them on milestones, and show genuine interest in their lives. This builds a personal connection and shows you care about them as individuals, not just as affiliates.
Send Personalized Gifts
If it makes financial sense, send personalized gifts to your top affiliates. A thoughtful gift, like a gift card to a nice restaurant, can go a long way in building loyalty. For example, I once received a $200 gift card to Ruth’s Chris from an affiliate program. It made me feel valued and strengthened my loyalty to that program.
Monthly Engagement
Aim to engage with your top 30 to 50 partners individually at least once a month. This could be through emails, social media, or even phone calls. Additionally, engage with all your affiliates as a group at least once a month. This keeps everyone in the loop and maintains their interest in your upcoming promotion.
Consistent and meaningful communication is key to keeping your affiliates motivated and ready to promote your product. By staying in touch regularly, you ensure your promotion stays at the top of their minds and build a stronger, more loyal affiliate base.
3 – Ask Your Affiliates for ReferralsThe third way to motivate your affiliates is to ask for referrals. It’s very simple and effective. Here’s how you can do it.
Send an email to your affiliates saying something like:
Hey Joe,
We’re gearing up for the launch in six to seven months.
Just a reminder, the dates are such and such.
Do you have anyone in mind who might be a good partner?
Introduce them, and we’ll hook you up with a second-tier commission.
This approach does two things. First, it reminds your affiliates of the upcoming launch dates. Second, it gets them thinking about potential partners. If they introduce someone and that person signs up, both of them are now more likely to be engaged and excited about the promotion.
Asking for referrals is a simple yet powerful way to expand your affiliate network and keep your current affiliates motivated and involved.
In fact, it is the best way to get new affiliates that almost NO ONE uses.
As I mention in my post, The Absolute #1 Way to Get Your Best New Affiliates (That Almost No One Uses):
The number one way to get new affiliates is this:
Ask your current affiliates.
I hear you thinking (yes, I can hear your thoughts…it’s terrifying sometimes):
“Thank you, Captain Obvious!”
But here is the crazy thing about this…almost no one does it.
I’ve been a part of more than 250 affiliate programs and product launches in my life and less than 10 of them have ever asked me to refer other affiliates. That is ridiculous!
Your current affiliates should be your number one source of new, quality affiliates.
If you want to learn more about how to REALLY do this right, check out the full post. I share another example email template as well as when to ask (there are specific times that work great) and how to set up and structure your second-tier commission:
4 – Announce Affiliate Prizes for the PromotionThe fourth way to motivate your affiliates is by announcing prizes. This is a great way to get people excited.
As I mention in my post, The Easy Way to Pick Awesome Prizes for Your Affiliate Launch:
Having the right prizes for your budget can make your affiliate offer more attractive to potential affiliates. On more than one occasion, I’ve chosen to promote a launch based on the prizes, even when I realistically stood no chance to win some of them.
I’ve also gone out of my way to win certain prizes once I was in a launch. The fact is…they work.
Send an email saying:
Hey, we have a great contest and here’s what you can win.
Prizes can really motivate affiliates to go the extra mile.
Want to know how to pick the right affiliate prizes? Check out The Easy Way to Pick Awesome Prizes for Your Affiliate Launch. It walks you through the process step-by-step.
Picking the right prizes can significantly impact performance. The right prizes versus the wrong ones could affect performance by as much as 5%. Announcing prizes four, five, or six months out starts to build excitement. Affiliates will think, “Wow, you’ve got that kind of prize? I want to win that!”
If you want to know more about WHY they work (there are 5 big reasons) and HOW to pick the right prizes, look no further than right here:
5 – Create an Affiliate Group and Invite ThemThe fifth great way to motivate your affiliates and warm them up for a promotion is to invite them to join a Facebook group or another community. We’re experimenting with different platforms, and I’ll report back on how it works. For one launch right now, we’re trying Slack. It’s new for us, and it might not work, but it’s worth a shot. The key is to invite them to some sort of group.
Whether it’s a Facebook group, a Slack group, a Telegram group, or a WhatsApp group, just getting them in there is important. Joining that group is a micro-commitment. It’s a small step that shows they’re engaged and ready to participate.
Having them in a group allows you to communicate with them more regularly. Filling their inbox with an email every week might be annoying if you’re seven months out from the launch. But posting a quick video three times a month about a lesson you’ve learned, a little reminder, or a testimonial isn’t too much. It’s on Facebook, so not everyone will see it anyway.
This kind of engagement is less intrusive and keeps the momentum going. It allows you to build engagement in the group months in advance. So when you need high engagement right before the launch and through the end of the launch, it’s already started. It’s been seeded and nurtured over time.
Creating and nurturing an affiliate group keeps your affiliates motivated and connected. It provides a platform for sharing tips, updates, and success stories, and it helps maintain excitement about the upcoming promotion. This ongoing interaction builds a sense of community and support among your affiliates, making them more likely to stay committed and perform well when the promotion or launch happens.
6 – Send Your Affiliates “Lumpy Mail”Probably my favorite (but also the most expensive) way to motivate affiliates and really get them pumped up is send what we call “lumpy mail.” Send them some gifts to break through the clutter. I forget who originally termed it lumpy mail, but effectively, it’s anything that comes in a package that’s got some lumps to it.
Sending somebody a thank you note—that’s great. I used to do that and still do it fairly frequently. If somebody signs up for our affiliate program, I send them a thank you note. It’s just an initial, “Hey, thanks for signing up. Look forward to working with you,” or something like that.
But lumpy mail really breaks through the clutter, whether it be a T-shirt or something that they like. One of my biggest recommendations is to read the book Giftology by John Ruhlin. It’s a great book about the power of gifting. Again, the whole idea is just to break through the clutter. Some of my favorite gifts over the years have been unique and personalized.
A few years ago, I received personalized LEGO figures from Pete Vargas. He sent two versions to me. One was Batman, and the other was Superman. Each version had a little LEGO figure of me with glasses and one without glasses because I often switch between the two. The figures looked pretty much like me, and it was such a cool gift.
Now, every time I see those LEGO figures, I think about Pete and his launch. I have them in my office, so I see them all the time. That’s the kind of thing you’re looking for. He didn’t send me a T-shirt or a mug with his branding. Those are fine if you want to send those sometimes, but occasionally, just work in a gift that is simply thoughtful and nice.
Another idea is to send something related to their interests. If you know they love coffee, send a high-quality bag of coffee or a unique coffee mug. If they’re into fitness, send some cool workout gear or a personalized water bottle. The key is to make it personal and memorable.
Lumpy mail stands out because it’s different. It’s a physical item that arrives amidst the usual flat mail and emails. It’s unexpected, and that surprise element makes it effective. When your affiliates receive something thoughtful and tangible, it reinforces your relationship with them and keeps your promotion top of mind.
You don’t need to spend a lot of money. It’s the thought and effort that count. Personalized, thoughtful gifts show your affiliates that you value them and are willing to go the extra mile to make them feel appreciated. This kind of gesture can significantly boost their motivation and loyalty to your program.
So, start thinking about what kind of lumpy mail you can send. It might be a personalized item, a book that’s relevant to their interests, or something fun and quirky that makes them smile. The goal is to stand out and make a lasting impression.
7 – Train Your AffiliatesThe next thing you have to do to warm your affiliates up and motivate them is to train them. You need to start this process early…much earlier than you might think. We used to do this training two weeks before a launch, then we moved it to a month and a half before. Now, we start even earlier. For a big launch coming up in late April, we will begin affiliate training in January, possibly even before Christmas. We might do one session before Christmas and another in mid-January.
We hold strategy calls typically starting about six weeks out from the launch. We do a weekly strategy call where we focus on one aspect of the launch. For example, we’ll have a call about warming up your audience, creating a promo plan, developing a bonus package, promoting the workshop, promoting the webinar, and sales strategies. This time, we’re planning to start these calls at least three months out. We’ll do them less frequently at first, maybe every other week, giving affiliates more time to digest the information.
You can start with a big training session. Make it an event. Walk your affiliates through the promotion calendar and how to prepare. Teach them how to warm up their audience and what they can do to get their audience engaged now. Share basic strategies about affiliate promotions, how to find their links, how to get their login information, and how to use swipe copy. Cover all these details in the big training session. If you’d like to see how we train affiliates and get the exact templates we use for our training, click here.
Starting about two months out, begin weekly strategy calls. Use Zoom or another video conferencing tool. Make these calls interactive, like a virtual room where everyone can see each other. Present key points and then open the floor for Q&A and mastermind sessions. Encourage affiliates to share their ideas and strategies. This not only helps them learn but also builds a sense of community.
For example, with Stu McLaren’s The Membership Experience promo, we hosted six strategy sessions. We started with warming up the audience. We taught affiliates how to get their audience thinking about membership sites and recurring revenue. We suggested quoting Stu in their content, even if it wasn’t directly about the topic, just to introduce him to their audience.
The following week, we talked about creating promo plans. We provided a template that affiliates could download, copy, and tweak. We walked them through what they should be doing each week, when to mail their lists, and other key activities. We also discussed promotion strategies for workshops, such as creating opt-in bonuses. We had affiliates brainstorm and share their ideas, which helped inspire each other.
In week four, we focused on creating affiliate bonus packages. We walked them through how to use their current assets to create attractive bonuses. We even provided a template for setting up a bonus page and writing sales copy for each bonus. This step-by-step guidance made it easier for affiliates to put together compelling bonus packages.
In week five, we talked about promoting the webinar. We shared strategies and tips for getting the most out of webinar promotions. In week six, we focused on closing sales. Initially, this was an open strategy call because the promotion had already started. We adjusted based on what was happening in real-time. The following week, we revisited closing sales and refined our strategies.
These calls are crucial. Each one lasts about 75 minutes, with 15 to 25 minutes of teaching followed by strategy and Q&A. Affiliates get to ask questions, share their experiences, and learn from each other. It’s not just about what you teach them; it’s also about building a supportive community where they feel connected and motivated.
Training your affiliates is an ongoing process. You need to start early, stay consistent, and be engaged. Share what’s working for you, and encourage them to share their ideas. This collaborative approach not only helps them feel prepared but also keeps them motivated and excited about the upcoming promotion. The more invested they are, the better they will perform, and that’s how you build a successful affiliate program.
Get the EXACT Templates We Use to Train Affiliates PLUS a Behind-the-Scenes Look at One of Our Trainings! Click Here to Access it Now (100% FREE)!
8 – Create Affiliate Commitment PlansThe next way to get your affiliates motivated and ready to rock your promotion is to give them a commitment plan. When you create these plans, it gets them thinking about the promotion and starts getting them fired up. It’s an opportunity for them to co-create that plan with you.
One of the best things you can do to get your affiliates to mail more often is to create a personal promotion plan with them. Below, I have a video that walks you through how we do ours (this is some of our “Secret Sauce” when we run affiliate programs for clients), but here is the gist:
Meet with affiliates one-on-one before the promotion and craft a custom promotion plan that works with their calendar. I have found that when I meet with a partner one-on-one, they tend to agree to at least a few extra emails more than they had previously planned on sending.
So, jump on Zoom or Skype and go through the promotion plan spreadsheet (you can get the template here) with them. Work through each of the ideal situations and adjust their personal plan to meet their needs. Here’s a look inside what this plan could look like:
Then, once you have their plan set, have them commit to it. Email them a copy of the spreadsheet, thanking them for their commitment to promote. More often than not, they’ll stick to that plan. If anything, they will add to it during the promotion, but they will rarely, if ever, subtract from it.
I have personally done these plans with people whose products I’m promoting. When I have fallen short in the middle of a promotion, I have added extra emails to make up for it. When I promise someone that I am going to mail eight times, then, by gosh, I’m going to mail eight times at a minimum! THAT is the power of creating personalized promotion plans with your affiliates.
“Promo Plans” are great, but we don’t call them that anymore. In our last big affiliate launch, we learned something that completely changed the way we do these…and got us an average of 1.7 more emails from each affiliate. That is a HUGE gain!
All by changing what we call them…”Commitment Plans” instead of “Promo Plans.” The principles of commitment and consistency (Thanks, Robert Cialdini) mean that what people commit to, they stick to.
The affiliates leave that meeting with a tangible asset, that spreadsheet that says, “here’s what I’ve committed to doing.” They’re fired up about it and motivated to sell more.
What about the smaller affiliates?
Obviously you can’t meet one-on-one with every single affiliate, so you focus those on your larger affiliates. For everyone else, we use what we call “ABC plans” and send a mass email with suggested promo plans. Here’s how they work:
A – All-In or Aggressive: This plan is for people who are in it to win it. Typically 15-20 emails.
B – Balanced: This is our Goldilocks plan. The plan between All-In and Conservative. Usually between 10 and 13 emails.
C – Conservative: This plan is for those who just want to dip their toes in the water. They aren’t 100% committed to a full promotion…yet. This is usually 5-9 emails.
Here’s just one example of a Balanced affiliate mailing plan from Michael Hyatt’s 5 Days to Your Best Year launch we ran.
The great thing about these plans is that if you get someone to commit to the Conservative plan, they almost always bump up to the Balanced plan. And those who commit to the Balanced plan almost always bump up to the All-In plan, especially when you announce prizes. The key is getting them to commit to something, which is easy to do with these clear plans.
As much as you may want to meet with every single affiliate one-on-one, the reality is you can’t. So, what can you do for them? Well, typically in a launch, if we have 500 affiliates promoting, I will meet with between 15 and 25 one-on-one. For everyone else, you want to give them some generic mailing plans that they can use to plan their promotion.
Our objective with these plans, much like with the personal promotion plans, is to get your affiliates to commit to some level of participation. You’re looking to get them to commit to a minimum number of emails like I mentioned above. What we’ve found is that affiliates who commit to the Conservative level will often move up to the Balanced (or even the All-In) level as the promotion progresses, the competition heats up, and prizes are on the line.
They want to “dip their toe in the water” and see “is this promotion going to work for me?” And then, if it looks like it’s working early on, they’ll get more aggressive as they go. But the key here is to get them to commit to SOMETHING on the front end. So, make it VERY easy to commit to the Conservative level.
Typically, the Conservative plan includes 2-4 emails to their entire list, 2-4 emails to unopens, and 2-4 emails to engaged contacts (usually opt-ins). This gets them to commit to between 6 and 8 emails total, which is a pretty easy commitment level, especially when as few as two of them are to their entire list.
9 – Send Affiliates Their ResourcesGetting your affiliates motivated for your promotion means getting their affiliate resources to them early. The swipe copy, social media graphics, and other materials should be in their hands well ahead of the promotion. This preparation time is critical for them to plan their promotion effectively.
In the past, affiliates often received swipe copy just a couple of days before the promotion. That’s simply not enough time for them to prepare. I started pushing for earlier delivery, initially aiming for a week before the promotion, then ten days. Now, I get nervous if we’re three weeks out and the swipe copy isn’t ready. Ideally, affiliates should have their materials at least two weeks before the launch, but why not aim for a month?
Early delivery of resources allows affiliates to integrate your promotion into their schedules smoothly. For those of us with copywriters, staying ten days ahead of schedule is essential. If you provide the swipe copy a week before the promotion, affiliates are already behind. This delay means fewer emails sent and more stress on their end to catch up.
Providing social media swipe copy and graphics early means affiliates can schedule posts in advance. If they’re promoting you from July 10 to 25, getting everything to them in June allows them to plan and schedule their posts before July even starts. This ensures they are not scrambling at the last minute.
Late delivery of resources can lead to missed opportunities. If affiliates receive materials just a few days before the promotion, they might be too busy to incorporate them into their plans effectively. This could mean fewer social media posts, emails, and overall engagement in your promotion.
So, the key takeaway is simple: get your affiliates their resources early. The earlier, the better. This ensures they have ample time to prepare, integrate your promotion into their schedule, and maximize their efforts for a successful promotion.
READ MORE: What Resources Do You Need to Provide Your Affiliates?
10 – Give Your Affiliates Pre-Promotion Material to ShareOne way to get your affiliates motivated and ready for a big promotion is to give them pre-promotion content. This includes workshops, webinars, video series, ebooks, or any other free materials that lead into the main promotion. Providing this content helps affiliates warm up their audience well in advance.
Pre-promotion content can be a game-changer. By giving affiliates interviews, quotes for social media, articles to share, and topics to discuss, you are equipping them with the tools they need to engage their audience early. This keeps the promotion on their minds and helps build excitement.
It’s essential to provide this material months in advance. During your training and strategy calls, talk about how to use this content effectively. Give them things to promote four or five months out. This allows them to start seeding the promotion with their audience about three months before the promotion.
When affiliates start seeding the promotion early, their audience will be ready and excited when launch day arrives. This early engagement translates to higher enthusiasm and better results when the promotion officially starts.
So, give your affiliates pre-promotion content early and often. This will help them build momentum and keep the excitement high throughout the entire promotion period.
Bonus – Announce Something SpecialI promised ten ways to motivate your affiliates, but here’s a bonus tip. Announcing something special can create extra excitement. It could be an extra prize, a new contest, or a new bonus.
For example, if you’re doing a summit, announce a new speaker or a new resource. You might say, “Hey, we’re a month from launch, and we’ve added something really cool – extra webinar days!” This keeps your affiliates engaged and looking forward to the promotion.
Extra affiliate prizes are another great way to boost motivation. Announce additional prizes or new contests. You could also offer more spots for interviews or exclusive bonuses. Anything that adds value and gets affiliates motivated works.
The goal is to keep the excitement high and remind them why they should be all in for your promotion. Announcing something special is a simple yet effective way to do just that.
Final ThoughtsSo, there you have it – actually more than ten ways to warm up your affiliates and get them motivated before your launch or promo. Use all ten, or just seven or eight, but make sure you implement at least five of these strategies. They really work.
Don’t forget to download the timeline and commitment plan template here. This will help you stay organized and ensure you have everything in place to get your affiliates excited and ready.
If you have any questions, feel free to text me anytime at 260-217-4619. I’m always here to help.
Know someone running an affiliate program who struggles with getting their affiliates excited? Share this post with them. These methods are proven and have worked for over 20 years. Get your affiliates fired up and ready to rock your promotion!
By using these techniques, you’ll see a significant boost in affiliate engagement and motivation. Remember, keeping your affiliates motivated is key to a successful promotion. Good luck with your next promotion!
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
| Find Your First 100 Affiliates | Affiliate Program Terms & Conditions Template | Get My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email |
| Avoid The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes | Turn Inactive Affiliates into Your Best Affiliates | Get My Template for Writing Affiliate Emails |
| Affiliate Marketing Sales Secrets | Learn How to Create a Resources Page | Learn How to Write a Product Review |
The post How to Motivate Your Affiliates Before a Promotion or Launch appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### If you have an audience of leaders, influencers, entrepreneurs, or anyone who wants a better life, more wealth, unmatched health, & financial freedom, then this affiliate opportunity is for you. Jim Kwik’s Limitless Learner Summit is exactly what they’lll need to get ahead in 2025…here’s how YOU can be a part of it!
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Target Audience* Leaders * Influencers * Small business owners * Big enterprise * Online marketers * Entrepreneurs * Course creators * Coaches * Or anyone looking for a better life, more wealth, unmatched health, & financial freedom!
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Interested in becoming an affiliate? Click Here to Email Me for More Information
Click Here to Learn More About Our Recommended Affiliate ProgramsThe post Affiliate Opportunity – Jim Kwik’s Limitless Learner Summit appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### In the world of affiliate management, building robust relationships with your affiliates is a must. But where do you begin? That’s precisely what I’m sharing into today. I share the secrets to building long-lasting connections with your affiliates. From seasoned pros to novices, this episode packs a punch with top-tier strategies designed to propel your affiliate program to the next level. So, buckle up, because the tips and strategies I share today are nothing short of game-changing!
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow Do Affiliate Managers Spend Their Day?
How to Communicate Bad News to Your Affiliates
How to Triple Your Webinar Sales with Affiliates
How to Identify and Stop Affiliate Fraud
How to Solve the 15 Biggest Challenges for All Affiliate Programs
What the Latest Research Says About Affiliate Bonus Packages
How to Build Great Relationships with AffiliatesOne 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 you’re just starting out, listen up because this episode is powerful. Let’s get started.
So we’re talking today about the importance of relationships, the importance of relationships as it pertains to running an affiliate program, connecting with your affiliates I share a lot on 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 five to ten 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 doesnt have that. Now theres an instinctive element to what im talking about today, though, when I say have a better relationship with your affiliates.
I think theres an underlying assumption though that thats going to improve your revenue. One of my favorite quotes from all time is from Jeffrey Ginmer, the sales trainer. I might butcher this a little bit. It 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 from 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’ll. 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 gonna 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 relationship, the power of being able to connect with people and really forge that relationship.
Need help activating your affiliates? Use my proven email templates for getting inactive affiliates in the game and making sales! Get them here!
So that’s what we’re talking about today. And the good news is you aren’t born with disability. That’s the good news. You are not. Nobody is born with disability. The bad news is, nobody is born with 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 in one of the greatest books of all time, all the books from Jeffrey Gittimer, who I quoted earlier, influenced by Robert Cialdini. I could pull up my phone and just go through, and there’s 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 two thousands to late two thousands that formed the crux that formed the foundation of what I’m talking about today. Obviously, we’re gonna 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 gonna 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 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 affiliate manager or merchant or CEO slash affiliate. You got to become friends and 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 tee at a golf course, and I was on a practice tee, 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.
Like, those are the type of things that just, if he hadn’t shown up that day, 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, it was Alberto. Alberto Canas. Got to know each other.
He went to Wake Forest 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, 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 Wigfort. I’m still a wig force 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. No, 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. 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 cause I’m trying to fit this into a very small window.
I’m probably gonna record this in two parts. Cause I wanna 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. Like, that’ll tell you when I’m recording this. And if they win, I’m going to go crazy.
Like, 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, 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, did 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 online marketing space, and he was the operations manager for Jeff Goins. We were running Jeff Goins 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 beg 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 gonna 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? And I like you have to focus on results. The key here is to tie everything, 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 use 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, like, 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. I mean, like, 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, he gets on there, he’s like, hey there, tribe riders, affiliate aficionados, it’s w here. You know, and he goes on and he announces the prize guy, John.
John Morgan. John Morgan. I mean, just a great guy. Like, look him up. John Morgan, George W. Bush impersonator. He’s amazing. And like, that was a huge hit. Made our program fun. Got people really thinking about the prizes. If I had just sent out a simple email, wouldn’t have been as effective.
Wouldn’t have been as effective. And then the n is for nuttiness. Get a little crazy, get a little goofy. Nuttiness stands out. It gets attention, embrace you, the clutter, your affiliates. This thing 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 gotta 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. Yeah, I’m just going to be honest here. Like, this is an area where chat, GPT 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’ve got to comment on their post, you’ve 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 likes 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 a hundred. I’m not going to remember you if you’re one of a hundred because you’re one of a hundred.
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. I mean, there’s a tons of ways you could do a group.
You could use our clients 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. 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 ive 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 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 youve ever been there. And you know what, its 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 name. I had to google his name, but he’s the like the lead guitarist in Rascal
flats, the country man. And he’s like that’s all. 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. This is, 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 remember, like his name is John Smith, whatever, it doesn’t matter. And I walk over and I say, john, I’d love to introduce you to Lev.
And, like, without missing a beat, this dude from rascal flats, he’s like, lev, nice to meet you, man. Like, you wanna take a picture? Whatever. So again, iPhone just came out. I take a picture with this guy and Lev and I send it to him, which I could do. Cause we had email on our phone.
Now, like, we take that for granted, but this was 15 years ago that did not exist. This was so brand new, and it was the coolest thing ever to this day, like, I don’t even know the guy’s name.
And I’m, like, so thankful that he wasn’t like, who the heck are you? What? Dude, leave me alone. I’m with my friends. It was one of those cool things. 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. Here’s a quick tip. When you attend a conference, we’re back to doing that, by the
way. Whoo. Like, we’re actually attending conferences this year. Reach out to your affiliates and ask if they’ll be there. Schedule some time together. Like, I know for a fact there are conferences I will go to this year. I know who I’m meeting at that conference, and we’re going to, 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, like 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.
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I have video proof that that actually happened, though. We’ll do all these things, you know, like, we’ll actually schedule some time together. Like, 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 gonna 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 in 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. Like, is it 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 like then this is a great one. I got a shirt. This was, I think, 2011, 2012. Can’t remember exactly, but this long story on that. But basically there was 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 of it that had like a silhouette of that coach and like 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. You’ve got to know their interests and you got to send the appropriate gifts. You’ve got to be able to hook them up with things like, you know, years and years and years ago. So for those of you who know my backstory, I grew up in a town called Pinehurst, North Carolina.
Well, in Pinehurst, North Carolina is a golf course, Pinehurst number two, which about every six, seven years now hosts a US Open. It’s a world famous golf course and it’s really hard to get on and even if you can, it’s like $400. Well, my dad just happened to be friends. It’s not true anymore, but at the time my dad was friends with the head pro and so we were able to get people on and I had somebody that I did business with and I knew they were going to be in Raleigh because they mentioned it on a call. Raleigh is about an hour and 45 minutes north. I said, hey, do you have time to go down to Pinehurst? Hes like uh, yeah, you know, im not going to, but I have time, you know, I mean like id love to.
I said, well, if you can be there, what? That guy went on to do well over a million dollars in business with us. So there’s a book I highly recommend on this. It’s called Giftology by my friend John Rulin. I’ve got a link to my books in the show notes. It’ll be there. It’s a great book on how to gift.
If I can sum it up, one of the biggest takeaways is don’t send branded stuff. In other words, a gift. If I send a gift that has my name on it, that’s not a gift. So if I send you like, I know prior to one of our big affiliate launches years ago, we sent some branded stuff I didn’t intend that as a gift. I intended it as a little bit like, here’s a mug with our brand on it. That’s great.
And I sent them some sunglasses with our logo on it. And I said, hey, post in the Facebook group, you know, you looking all cool with your glasses on. And we had hundreds of pictures in the Facebook group with them on. But that’s not a gift. A gift is when Pete Vargas sent me some cutco cutlery, two of the best knives I’ve ever touched in my life, and they say McWilliams family on them That’s a gift.
I don’t need his brand on there. To think of Pete, every time I cut a loaf of bread or every time I cut a really thick steak or some really good, like ribs, like when you need a big knife, I think it Pete Vargas so send gifts. But again, you got to get to know them. You got to know about them to know what kind of gifts they’re actually going to like. The number nine thing for building a great relationship is just be responsive and be responsive as fast as possible. Now this is affiliate management 101 here.
Don’t take four days to respond to an email. You don’t have to respond same day. You don’t have to respond in an hour. A lot of people like you gotta have super fast response. No, I think anything inside we have a company rule, 48 hours is the absolute non negotiable time. Same day if the email comes in before noon is really kind of one of our rules.
Now if you’re going to be out of town, we don’t need to make, like I tell our affiliate managers, if you’re going to be at a town on a Tuesday, you do not need to make accommodations to have your email handled on Tuesday because it’s probably not in the middle of a big promotion. You wouldn’t schedule a day off in the middle of a big promotion. If you do, then we need to do that. But you’re not going to have anybody else come in and help you.
Now, if you’re going to be out of town Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, you need to get help. You need to have somebody help you and be in there answering emails real quick each of those days. So be responsive when they ask questions, answer them when they need something, get it to them. And one of the things that we talk about with speed and responsiveness is, okay, if it’s something where you got to dig into it and it’s going to take you a couple of hours, or you need to ask the client or you need to do whatever. It’s going to take you a couple of days, possibly, to get a response.
Respond back and say, I’m working on it. Send an email the next day and say, hey, I’m pretty close to having an answer. I’m waiting on a report or something like that, but be responsive. You can’t develop a good relationship without being responsive.
I don’t know about you, but if my mom texts me, I’m going to get back to her within a few hours at the earliest possible chance. I’m going to respond to my mom, I’m going to respond to my wife at the earliest possible chance, my daughter, which is weird because she has a cell phone now. Yeah. Anyway, I’m sorry, it’s hard for me to get over that. But when she texts me, I’m going to respond to her as soon as I possibly can.
I’m not going to disrupt recording right now if they text me, because I’ve got my phone and my computer on do not disturb. So if they do, I’m not going to see it. But as soon as I’m done with this recording, I’m going to turn that off and if they’ve texted me, I’m going to respond back. Think of your affiliates in a similar vein. Maybe not quite as fast, but you’re not going to just not respond to them.
Number ten, key to developing these strong relationship with your affiliates is you got to listen to feedback. Listen to them, listen, show them that you take their input into consideration. One of the things that I made a rule years ago is if I do something in response to something an affiliate or anyone said to me, I let them know privately. I can say publicly too.
I might say, hey, a lot of you have said such and such, which is true if like five or six people said the same thing. But I will privately message those five or six people and say, thank you so much for the feedback. Your feedback led to this decision. It led to this result. So years ago, I got some feedback from a couple of affiliates about the way that we were structuring our upsells and basically the way we were paying out commissions on those upsells.
And while I understood our position as a company and what we were doing, just to give you some perspective, we were paying, effectively a. Yeah, whatever. $50 into 147. So 35% roughly commission on the initial product. Because our upsells were typically lower priced.
They paid a lower commission. They paid a. I think it was 20 or $25 flat fee on our $97 upsells. And so our affiliates just had some issues with that. And I listened to them. I listened to them. And actually what we did was we ended up just doing a 30% flat commission.
We ran the numbers and on 147+97, so basically $250, 30% of that was almost identical to the price that it would have been in it. That might be off on the numbers. I can’t remember the exact numbers, but basically they were going to make, it was something like $0. 88 more doing a 30% across the board commission. When they said they had concerns, they weren’t suggesting that they didn’t understand it and they had a problem with it. They were saying, hey, we actually think you would be better to just do a 30% flat commission across the board or to restructure it so you didn’t have like six, because we end up with like six different commissions based on the product they bought.
And it was just better to do 30%. Like, we went back and we looked at the numbers and we said, okay, going forward, if we do the exact same number of sales, what is this going to do? And I feel like we paid 42 or 88 or some. It was less than a dollar, less than a dollar more per sale. And we ended up growing the affiliate program because of the ease of understanding.
And then I reached out to each of those individual affiliates and I said, thank you for this feedback. Your feedback led to us making this decision. So listen to their feedback. Don’t take offense to it. This is something I was just teaching our team about. When we get feedback from clients that, number one, we acknowledge their feedback. We acknowledge that they have an issue. We acknowledge that there is a disconnect or there’s a. Somewhere there’s a miscommunication.
We acknowledge that they experienced a problem with something that we did or a mistake that we made, that there’s a problem with that. And then we acknowledge that it was real. Like, it was a real challenge for them and then we diminish it. And what? So a lot of times we’ll say we sent that to 5000 people in one complaint.
That would be our response. You know, we say, no, we understand. I understand exactly where you’re coming from. We’re sorry that happened and totally get it that when somebody reaches out to you and says such and such, like that can hurt, right? Here’s the good news. It only happened with one person and then we commit to fixing it going forward.
So if you’re getting negative feedback, from your affiliates. Take it into account. Acknowledge what they’re saying. Don’t just say, well, whatever. That’s not going to build good relationships. So show them. You take their input into consideration.
Number eleven Provide feedback. Help them. Give them constructive feedback. Be on the lookout for ways to help them find opportunities to provide tips and assistance to them. It doesn’t just have to be stuff that benefits you, not just about helping them promote your program. Go to their social media pages and look up what they’re doing and offer them tips. It could be about your program, but it could be about somebody else’s stuff.
Hey, I saw that you were posted about such and such. Hey, you might want to do this, this and this. It’ll help you. It’ll improve your conversions. You got to find opportunities for that. I like to sometimes just go to their website and maybe pull it up on mobile or on the computer and just see if I can find something wrong with it unrelated to our products, our clients products, and just say, hey, there’s a typo on your about page. They’ll remember that. They will remember that. And that’s a very small way of helping them, giving them that kind of feedback that helps them. Number twelve, share success stories. Now, the best way to do this is to make them a success story and then share it because they will love you for that, but share other people’s success stories with them. This is more of a mass communication thing that helps to build those strong relationships.
I give you a good example. We had a client that we worked with and we had tons of success stories, tons of affiliates, 20 to 25 affiliates that promoted, that did an amazing job. Tiny Lisp did an amazing job. So we profiled them. We did like a little 20 minutes interview and we put it together in a little course.
Now, those 20 loved it, of course, because they got featured. They thought it was the most amazing thing in the world. But also everybody who got those success stories was super grateful because they saw what was possible.
They saw that they were, were able to do the same thing that Heidi did or Terry did or Sarah did or Jimmy did or whoever. They were able to see the success stories. And by sharing those, it really strengthened the relationship between not only us, but it goes back to what we said earlier, number six, fostering community. Cause now those 20 kind of became like the people that everybody looked up to and wanted to be.
And then they would help and they would ask them questions. And then again, it went back to number six, fostering that sense of community. It allowed them to connect with each other. And a credit goes back to us for being the ones who connected them. milestones. Now, what are the milestones? What are the milestones that you can have the cool thing is you get to make them up.
You make up the milestones. The first sale is an obvious one. First sale is an obvious milestone, right. But so is hitting any prize level. Three sales, five sales, ten sales, 25 sales, 100 sales, $100,000 in sales, $10,000 in commissions $1,000 in commissions.
All of these are milestones. You’re the number one affiliate. You’re the number ten affiliate. You had your best month ever. You had your highest converting month ever. You sent your most leads ever, your most sales ever. You have the most webinar registrations.
Like, all of these are milestones, but when they hit them, celebrate them. Even if you don’t have a public leaderboard, celebrate with the affiliate privately to tell them, you are our number one affiliate this month. Congratulations. Great job. Hey, this was your best month ever.
You had your most sales ever, your most leads ever, your most whatever ever. Celebrate those milestones. Be on the lookout for them. Make them up. Best week ever, highest converting. Like, it doesn’t even have to be end of month. You could be halfway through the month.
Just message them and say you’re on track for your best month ever. Like, if their best month ever, I’m just gonna use even numbers here. $10,000 and it’s the 15th and they’re at 5600. They are on track for their best month ever. Let them know it’ll drive them to push even harder in the second half of the month. So find those opportunities to celebrate with them.
Number 14, train them. You gotta train them. Kind of goes back to what I said. Provide feedback. Right, provide feedback, but train your affiliates. Give them tips and strategies to work with. Now, you can do this on a public level, on a broad level, which I highly recommend you go check out our sample affiliate trainings.
If you go to madmcwames. com affiliate training, I will put that in the show notes for you. We’ve got an example of a nearly two hour training that we did for affiliates of one of our clients. We also give you, we got the slides and the worksheets that we include. So, I mean, like, we basically give you how to do this training so you But that’s a public one.
And that certainly helps. Because think about if you do a big public training, what are we doing to. We’re number one. We’re making it fun because we have fun on those. We’re fostering a sense of community because they’re going can go train your affiliates to connect with each other.
We’re providing feedback. We’re sharing success stories, all these things we’re doing, all the things we’ve talked about before, but if we do it privately as well, one on one with them, coaching them and helping them, it goes a long way to developing a great relationship. Our last two here shared 14 so far. Our last two, number 15.
Keep good notes so you can recall those previous conversations. Now, again, this goes back to so many of the things that we’ve talked about, right. If we take it, get to know them, take it past that affiliate manager, affiliate relationship, all these things, but keep good notes on them. Now, I’m old school. We have a CRM.
I don’t use it enough. Now with us running an agency now, it becomes important because I’m not the only one having the conversations. And so we might have Jason on our team talking to Jim one day, and then a week later, Jennifer’s talking to him. And then you got Kate, and then Kevin’s emailing with them and Robbie’s in the background working on something like. And they’re all interacting, or they’re interacting with different team members on Jim’s team as well. And then I come in and I don’t remember anything they’ve ever said because I don’t know. That’s where CRM is handy, but old school. I keep a notebook and I can flip to a page and be like, boom, my notes with so and so. And I can go through those before a call, and I can go through those before I email them, before I reach out.
And a great example of that is I sent an introduction email. I was introducing a potential affiliate to a client. This is one of those. It’s a big affiliate, huge affiliate. And rather than just say to this affiliate, we’ll call them Ted, rather than say, teddy, I really think you should promote my client. I don’t usually say it like that, but you get the idea. I said, hey, can I introduce you to my client? Here’s what he’s doing. And I think you guys will really hit it off. And I want them to connect entrepreneur to entrepreneur, that will transcend that relationship.
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Even though I’ve got a great relationship with this affiliate, I want them to connect, because if they connect and hit it off, my part’s easy. Well, because I remembered something about that affiliate I was able to include it in. And I have this in my notes, but I was able to include it in the introduction email and make both of them laugh. So I start their relationship off with good vibes.
They’re both laughing, so keep those good notes. If I didn’t have those notes. I wouldn’t have remembered that. I wouldn’t have remembered to include that. So however you keep notes, CRM, spreadsheet, Google Doc, written down, post it notes, I don’t really care, but some way that’s easier for you to keep track of. And then last but not least, there’s no number one key here, but the number 16 key to building those strong relationships with your affiliates is to be proactive.
You have to be proactive in the relationship. You know everything we talked about, right? Connecting with them on social media. You should be the one to connect. Being authentic, you should be the one like be authentic, right? You proactively foster that sense of community You invite them to your headquarters or wherever you reach out. When you’re attending a conference, you provide them feedback. You share the success stories. You celebrate the milestones. You reach out to train them. You keep the good notes.
If you notice that they are slipping, their performance is down. Reach out. If you notice a drop in conversions, as I said, reach out. A drop in sales, reach out. Increase in sales. Reach out to be proactive. Don’t just be responsive to your affiliates, anybody can be responsive.
Take someone with skill and tenacity and drive to be proactive. So be proactive. Look for those opportunities. So to recap, well, first of all, I would love if you would share your biggest takeaway. Which one of these things can you do? All 16? Yeah. Which one are you going to do first? Which one are you going to do first? I would love if you text me your biggest takeaway or what you’re going to do first.
Shoot me a text anytime.260-217-4619 affiliate manager affiliate relationship being friends and showing genuine interest communicating regularly, making it fun, making your affiliate program fun, being authentic, connecting with them on social media and commenting and cheering them on and engaging with them. Fostering a sense of community, meeting them in person, sending them a gift be responsive. Be fast with your response listening to feedback and providing feedback.
Ten and eleven, they’re sharing a success story or stories, celebrating milestones, training them, keeping good notes and then 16th, being proactive. Which of those are you going to do right now? You’re going to make a commitment in the next 72 hours. I am going to do one of those. Doesn’t matter which one it is, whatever one it is.
Focus on that for a few weeks, then you can add a new one. So again, I’d love to hear your biggest takeaway. Just text me at area code 260-217-4619 and let me know what your biggest takeaway was or which one of those you’re going to do right away. I’ve got links to everything I mentioned in the show notes, our recommended books, the affiliate sample, affiliate training, where again, you can get a training that we did for one of our clients and see how we do them. We’ll also give you the slides.
You don’t even have to create the slides, we’ll give them to you. You might want to edit them a little bit, maybe fit your brand, colors and stuff like that. But to take you a few minutes and you can have the slides done. We’ll give you the worksheets we give to the affiliates and everything in that.
So go grab those, those links are in the show notes. And make sure you hit subscribe because in the next episode, I’m going to talk about how to promote an evergreen offer in just one week. So an Evergreen affiliate offer, just one week. You got one week to promote it. And we’re going to talk about how to do that next week. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. I’ll see you then.
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
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| Avoid The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes | Turn Inactive Affiliates into Your Best Affiliates | Get My Template for Writing Affiliate Emails |
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The post How to Build Great Relationships with Affiliates appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### Curious about the daily grind of an affiliate manager? You’re not alone. It’s a question I hear often, and for good reason…it’s a role shrouded in mystery. Today, I’m peeling back the curtain to give you an inside look at what really goes on in the day-to-day life of an affiliate manager.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Communicate Bad News to Your Affiliates
How to Triple Your Webinar Sales with Affiliates
How to Identify and Stop Affiliate Fraud
How to Solve the 15 Biggest Challenges for All Affiliate Programs
What the Latest Research Says About Affiliate Bonus Packages
How to Give Your Affiliates What They Need to Succeed
How Do Affiliate Managers Spend Their Day?What the heck does an affiliate manager do all day? If I had a nickel for every time someone asked that, I’d probably have like $14. 35. But seriously though, I get asked that a lot and for good reason. It’s a bit of a mystery to most people. So today I’ll take you behind the scenes on what a typical day in the life of an affiliate manager really looks like. Let’s go. Let’s get started. So the title of this podcast is a day in the life of an affiliate manager.
And here’s the thing before we get into it, there is no typical day. It depends on what’s going on. There’s no template for every day in a lot of jobs there’s a template. Your Monday is going to look a lot like your Tuesday. Your Tuesday is going to look a lot like your Fridays. And the first week of the year is going to look a lot like the middle of June. And the middle of June is going to look like the middle of November.
That’s not the case with affiliate managers, though. We could be in the middle of a massive launch, and those days are crazy. We’ll talk about that. It could be a big promo. It could be four months before a promo. It could be three days before a small promo. If you’re managing multiple programs like our affiliatemanagers do, you could be in the middle of a huge launch with one.
You could be five months out from a big launch with another. You could have an evergreen program, and you could have another program that has a big challenge in two weeks or a big webinar next week. So it really depends. Your day can vary greatly depending upon the industry, the company, the time of year, what’s going on, all those reasons, the season and when I was in retail, when I worked with Shutterfly, for example, my schedule from late October through right before Christmas was so vastly different than it was in July, my work schedule the week before Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, and during graduation season, much busier than it was in the middle of September.
However, there are a few core tasks that are typically part of an affiliate managers daily routine. And what I want to do is take a little bit closer look at what a typical day might look like. And so Im going to take a look at an evergreen program. So were going to look at what its like when youve got a program thats basically 24 7 365 and Im going to look at it like were in the middle of a medium sized promotion. So not this huge launch where youre working like 15, 16 hours a day, not a slow day, not a day where theres nothing going on at all.
Something kind of in the middle to give you perspective on what a typical, if there is a such thing, what a typical day looks like. Now a few things that are central to how I work and how I recommend most work. These are considering that our affiliate managers, so I’m doing this from my perspective and from our affiliate managers, you know, our agency here at Matt McWames consulting, these are the things that are central to us.
Number one, they work from home. So if you’re not working from home, you’re working in office, it could be a little bit different. Number two, we offer 100% flex schedule. I dont care when you work. I know my work schedule. I think I shared this before but I work for a few hours in themorning then I take time off in the late morning to very early afternoon. We have a team meeting at twelve so actually ive shifted this a little bit.
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Its more just late morning now. Thats when I get in my exercise and typically ill have, I usually have breakfast about 11:45 in the morning. Im kind of weird. I don’t eat first thing in the morning and so I do that and then I have team meetings and some other calls. Then I typically will take another little break in the early afternoon. I don’t know what you call to 230. I’ll take about a 30 to 45 minutes break. Then that’s when I typically do like my studying any courses I want to be going through or reading that I want to do. That’s when I do it. And then I work for another few hours before we have soccer practice typically and whatever else we have going on in the late afternoon, early evening. So we have 100% flex schedule.
Like I can work that. I work roughly 8 hours, eight and a half hours a day, five days a week, but I work those eight and a half hours over the course of like 11 hours. It’s a very unique schedule. We have other people that get up and work from like five to nine and then they work again from like twelve to four. We have other people who work nights.
I see work done like I’ll get in the morning and they’ve checked off stuff in Asana and it reports it to me. Asana is our project manager software and it’s like oh that person was working at 11:30 last night. We have people in different time zones. We have people around the world. We have people in 1234 countries. Two continents Yeah, two continents. Canada is not in a different continent, Matt. You know, we have people all over the world, though. We have probably a higher percentage of homeschoolers, or they have other home based responsibilities. You know, they have other things going on in the home. They’ve got kids at home or kid at home, or they’re the primary housekeeper, so to speak, in the home.
So they have other responsibilities like that. We have people who like to cook, and so sometimes they take an hour and a half off in the middle of the day and they make a meal. They make like a gourmet meal. For lunch. I usually have leftovers. I usually have, like, salad and leftovers for lunch. I don’t make gourmet meals even though I like to cook because I don’t want to take the time to do that. But sometimes they do. They want to have a life outside of work, and they want to crush their goals.
They want to kill it. For our clients, those are the things that are central to us. So you have to keep that in mind as I talk about this typical day. You have to keep those things in mind. So if you work from an office and you have a nine to five schedule and things like that, your life is going to be a little bit different. We have core values, two of our core values, for example, we always over deliver.
So we give our clients, our customers ten x value. We always take the one extra step to ensure that people feel amazing in their interactions with us. For us, it’s not about just customer retention or loyalty. It’s the driving force behind everything we do. So we work hard and we do what’s needed, but we also ruthlessly protect our downtime. That is a core value for us. We want people. We are purposeful. It says we are purposeful about giving our team the rest and rejuvenation they need.
Some days. We work nights, a couple of weeks a year. Youll have to work a weekend with us because theres a big launch going on, but we choose to do that. We dont work weekends because, well, I planned poorly as a leader, and now you got to work the weekend. We want people to take care of their health, their mental health, their physical health, their relationships, so they can do their best work.
We really encourage them, like I said, to divide up their day to work in two to three hour bursts with a couple of breaks to recharge, to batch their works. We’re going to do creative work for 3 hours, then we’re going to do calls, then we’re going to do the more mindless things like checking email and stuff later in the day.
We encourage them to get exercise and time outside and to eat healthy and work when they’re at their best. So if they’re at their best from the bug crack of dawn, you know, if they’re getting up at 430 and working from five to nine, means we’re going to get their best 4 hours.
Do it, do it. So here’s look here real quick. We’re going to get to that middle, kind of that middle of the road evergreen program. But when I was doing more affiliate management of my own, now we have an agency and I spend more time running the agency and doing things like this podcast, and I do actual affiliate management.
But when I was a full time affiliate manager, my day typically looked like what I described earlier. from ten to twelve, then I work from like twelve to 230, take an hour break, work from 330 to six. In a big launch, it was more like get up a little bit earlier. So I work from like 630 to 839. Then I would exercise, then I do a quick check in because things might have happened in that hour.
And when you’re in a big launch, speed is of the essence, right. And so I would do some quick work, then I would get ready and eat breakfast, then I would work for a couple of hours. Would be like 02:00 I take, my breaks are shorter.
You know, instead of an hour break, I take like a 30 minutes break. And that’s why like, you know, I always made sure that when we were in a big launch, especially if it was like one of those three week launches that on Sundays I batch cooked so that all I had to do during the week was reheat stuff and then we could enjoy the time together as a family, eating. Then I take a quick break, then I work to like 530, then I have time for family, then I do a quick check in from like 630 to seven. Then I do dinner and family time for seven to nine. Then from like nine to 1030. I’d work shorter breaks, making sure I’m on top of things all day.
So what is exactly does an affiliate manager do during those times? Well, there’s a pretty equal divide between creative work relationship works and analytics work. All right, now, again, for this example, I’m not talking about a massive launch or a regular, just kind of average day when nothing’s going on.
This is a middle of the road example involving a medium sized promotion in an evergreen program. So you’re going to ramp up, but it’s not, you’re not going all out for like three, four weeks. What does this look like? Well, in the morning for me, again, I work like seven to ten the night before.
I plan my major tasks for the day. But first thing when we’re in a promotion, first thing is I’m going to respond to overnight messages. Now, in a typical day, I’m not going to spend my first few hours responding to things from overnight.
But when we’re in the middle of a promotion, this would apply to a launch as well. Speed becomes important. So I’m going to respond to emails, Skype, texts, whatever else you’re using for messaging. I’m going to go most recent to oldest. The oldest are typically there might be from 11:00 the night before. They’re west coast people, they’re Asia, they’re not even up yet, so I don’t need to respond to them. So I get to the newest ones first, somebody that they might be in Europe and it’s noon and they just emailed me.
There’s a big difference between a ten minute reply and a two hour reply. There’s not so much of a difference between a two hour reply and a six or seven or eight hour reply. So I’m going to do that. I’m going to respond to message. I’m going to send the blast email for the day. I usually write it the day before, the late afternoon, night before, and then I make any tweaks the morning of. I want to get this out by 08:00 a. m. this is like, hey, today’s what’s going on in the promo. Today’s the webinar. Make sure you email now and again at 01:00 p. m. an hour before the webinar.
Here’s your links, here’s your swipe copy, et cetera. So I want to make sure I do those things specifically for the promotion. First thing, you know, communication, usually that takes me about an hour to respond to emails, to send that blast email. Sometimes I’ll respond to the most immediate emails and then if that takes me a little bit longer than it normally does, I’ll send the blast email and then come back and respond to other messages in a little bit later, like 08:00 or so.
I want to approve any affiliates, get them what they need during a major promo. I’m not doing a lot of affiliate recruiting, but we’ll have some people come to us, hey, you know, they might respond to a message from three weeks ago or they’ll say, hey, my friend is promoting and they recommended you, blah blah, blah. Or I saw this promotion and I want to be a part of it, so I want to make sure I get them approved because again, let’s just say it’s day two of a ten day promo.
Speed is important. If I wait till tomorrow to improve them, that’s a whole day. An entire day. Like they’re fired up. I want to get them approved. Like, hey, you’re approved. Here’s your link. Here’s your swipe. Copy. Boom, boom, boom.
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You’re ready to go. So that usually takes, on a normal day, 510 minutes during a promo could take 1020 minutes. Then I want to update stats. This might be for your client or for your boss, whatever it is, just for your own good, like who’s doing what, who’s sent a lot of leads overnight, who’s made a lot of sales. If you’re in the sales portion, what’s going on? Right.
Stats wise, how are things converting? Are there opportunities you want to check for? Opportunities like, huh, this person, it’s day five of the launch. This person sent 400 leads the first day. And here we are four days later and there are 472 leads. That’s an opportunity to reach out to them and say, what’s going on? You started off great, but you slowed down.
How can we help? What are the opportunities with your inactive affiliates? We’re going to talk in the next episode about how to turn your inactive affiliates into your best partners.
So I always say this at the end, but make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss this one. How do we work with those inactive affiliates? Well, how do you know if they’re inactive if you don’t check every day? So especially like day three, day four of a promo, you need to be checking like who’s not promoted, who said they were going to promote but they haven’t yet and reach out to them.
We’ll talk about that in the next episode. What’s working and what’s not. We need to know that, oh, we announced this new promotion yesterday or this new contest and sales did not increase.
That’s not working. What do we need to do differently? So that takes me through roughly 09:00 or so. You know about the two hour mark. I’ll typically then have a morning stand up meeting with the client. Again, this could be with your boss or your team. We’ll do that with the client for about 1012 minutes, then we’ll do a quick meeting with the team about 1012 minutes.
I’m now about the two and a half hour, a little bit under mark. I’ll then update the partner group. If we have a Facebook group with leaderboards, any major updates, anything like that, that needs to be updated.
And then the last thing I’ll do is I’ll reply to some more messages. Again, it’s been, I’ve been proven affiliates checking stats. It’s only been a couple of hours, but again in a promo, a couple of hours can be a lifetime.
So I want to make sure I check in one last time before I take a break. So then I’m going to take my break. Typically, I’m going to do a workout, eat some quick breakfast.
And again, I’ve usually prepped that when there’s a big promotion. I prepped that the week before or the Sunday before. I’m going to take a quick shower, shave and all that fun stuff. Get ready.
And now we’re about twelve, I’m going to. I’m immediately gonna check my messages again. Immediately gonna check my messages this time. Typically is when I focus on the inactive affiliates.
I’ve done the stats before. I’ve identified who’s inactive. Now I wanna activate them. And that’s what the next episode, like I mentioned, is all about.
So around 1230 to 01:00 I’m gonna spend 30 40 minutes just focusing on the inactives, reaching out to them to get them active. I’ll typically have any strategy calls during this time. I try to book strategy calls between one and 230 if I can.
If that doesn’t work, I’ll have some a little bit later in the day. I try not to do them in the morning just because there’s so much else going on, but I’ll troubleshoot with them, help them plan things like that if I’m working with other clients.
So for those of you like our team, our typical affiliate manager, we do it a little bit differently. We do it in teams, so they might manage six or seven at a time combined between the two of them.
So we manage it a little bit differently. But let’s say you’re managing three. This is the time. Once I’ve responded to all the messages, etcetera, I’ll spend some time doing my other client work again. I’ve got a medium sized promotion, not a massive, huge promo going on, but I’ll spend at least 30 to 45 minutes in this range working on other client stuff.
And then I’ll respond to some last messages. Take a quick break, come back about 330. Again, check messages right away. Usually this is when I have a lot of calls. Like I mentioned, I’ll check stats again, just see where things stand. Is there anything happened? You know, it’s been, what, 8 hours? It’s not like I’m not obsessed with stats, but I’m going to check who’s mailed, what’s going on. Has anybody promoted? This afternoon, we want to update the partner group with leaderboards and any other major updates, time permitting.
In this stage, this is when I’ll do some future focused work, such as affiliate recruiting or studying trends. I might catch up on a little bit of like I mentioned earlier, my study time, if I have time.
If I’m working with other clients, this is where I’ll spend 30 to 45 minutes on the other client work. And so how that works is if you have an exactly an eight hour day and you’re working with, you know, three clients and you know, again, this works out well, we got about, usually we do seven clients per two person teams. You got three and a half. In a typical day, each affiliate manager will spend an hour to 2 hours on each client, more like 545 minutes to an hour and a half on each client. But throughout the year there are different times where they will now spend four or 5 hours on one client for two weeks.
And so that means they only have three, 4 hours for all the other clients. And we manage that in a few different ways. The first is we might say, all right, this person, you know, they got two people on the team. Person number one, they’re going to spend basically full time on the one client and they’re going to go all in on that one client. They are in charge of nothing but that one client for that promotion, and the other person is going to take over all six for those two weeks.
Okay, that’s one way we do it. The other way is the workloads are still divided and each of them is going to spend three or 4 hours per day on the one and then three to 5 hours on the others combined. So we dont just abandon our other clients. Of course that would be ridiculous.
And it ebbs and flows because so those are 30 other clients. But at some point for the other client its going to be reversed, their time is going to be ramped up. Theyre going to get the four, five, 6710 hours a day attention.
So most of what happens in a medium promo is just keeping up with everything. And everything is fairly urgent now. During the slower times when there’s no major promos, I’ll spend more of my work day keeping up with industry news and trends.
Learning education. It’s underrated, but important. It’s easy to let up on education. This is why as a company we’ve built in learning time. So at least 1 hour a week, most weeks, we have committed time to learning. Now we meet for, let’s say about 30 to 35 weeks a year.
We meet for an hour to talk about what we’ve been learning. So we’ll read a book together for five or six weeks. And then typically we’ll take like two weeks off where we’re not doing that. And then we’ll go through a course together for maybe eight weeks, and then we’ll take two, three weeks off.
And then we’ll read a book together for three weeks and take a couple weeks off and so on and so forth. That’s what we do now, you think? Well, that means you’re spending an hour a week meeting to discuss it and share your takeaways and lessons and compile those so we can put them into action, because, like, oh, that was a good takeaway or that was a good quote. Well, what did you do with it? Nothing. So we want to make sure that we’re actually taking action.
You’re meeting for an hour, but you’re also studying for an hour, an hour and a half. So we’re spending two and a half hours, probably on average, learning, studying 35 weeks a year. So whatever that math is on that, we’ll just call that 75, 80 hours that we’re spending on top of whatever they’re doing on their own. This is just what we have. Like we built this into as a company.
One of our core values is we are constantly learning. So we are constantly learning. We’re reading a book as I’m recording this, we’re reading a book by a friend of mine about affiliate management. I am 220 some odd pages and I haven’t learned a thing.
That’s fine. I’ve been reminded of some stuff. I’ve taken some notes. It’s caused me to think about a few things. So I mean, it’s been worth the three and a half hours, 3 hours I’ve spent reading. It’s been worth it to me because of what will happen in our business. But there are things in that book because I’ve been doing this for 18 years that to me are like, well, duh. And I never even thought to teach them to our team.
And our team’s reading the book going, oh my goodness, I never knew that. It’s like affiliate management 101. Well, part of the problem is when I taught them a lot of the 101 stuff, but I skipped some of it because I didn’t think like in my brain again, having done something for 18 years, the curse of knowledge, right? I’m thinking, well, they know that. Or I just don’t even think about that. So I go from like 101 to 204. You know, imagine high school. It’s like I give them like half the freshman courses, two thirds of the sophomore courses, and I give them all the junior and senior year stuff.
Well, they’re missing some of the foundation, so this book is really helping them. So I’ll spend more time learning when things aren’t as busy. Recruiting affiliates is our biggest thing. Tons of calls with prospective affiliates, tons of emails and other messages with them. Relationship building, planning, future promos. We’re planning those future promos.
So we looked at the medium again when things are a little bit slower, more time learning, more time, relationship building and recruiting during big launches. I mentioned it earlier with the medium sized promo, but speed is everything.
Speed is absolutely everything. Perfection has to go out the window. One of our core values is that we do the things that scare us. So we talk about the 80 20 rule and the motto done is better than perfect. The wrong decision is better than no decision. And so what that means is speed is important.
If you really have to get a more perfect answer, because this is critical, then you reply and say, I’m working on it, or I should have an answer for you in the next couple of hours. During a big, big launch, you’re more reactive. And the proactive stuff, it’s done weeks and months before or it’s put on delay, but all the proactive stuff is done in the prep time for the big launch. You’re going to be checking messages more often. You’re going to have more calls to strategize with affiliates again.
You’re going to spend a lot of time working on those inactives. We’ll talk about that the next episode, like I mentioned, but it’s even more important during these medium to big promos because the window is so short in an evergreen program But we might only run an activation campaign once every month.
And the reality is, because you can’t spend all your time doing it, if you signed up on, say, April 10 and you haven’t promoted by April 23, no big deal. We’ll get around to you the 1 May and we’ll activate you in May. But if the promotion window, you sign up April 10 and the promotion window is April 15 to April 26 and you don’t promote by April 23, holy crap.
This is kind of urgent, you know, if you haven’t promoted, what I say, April 15 was the start date. If you haven’t promoted by April 17, this is urgent. So in a launch, you know, again, we’ll talk about in the next episode. But in a launch, I’m like, I’m activating people on day three. Like, we got to get you active because the window is so short.
So it takes on a very critical nature. So I spend an hour, hour and a half a day just on activation during big, big promos and launches versus 3 hours in a month on a pure evergreen program, like when there’s no urgency, hour and a half a day times, you know, five to seven days. Like, I mean, literally seven and a half hours that I might spend in a big promotion versus 3 hours in a whole month. Why? Because that big promotion might be the only promotion for that year or that half of a year. So we are, we really, really focus in on it. So I hope this gives you some insight on what a typical day looks like.
Again, there really is no typical day. There’s no typical day. If you’re interested, if you heard some stuff and you’re like, hey, I want to come work for you, like, I want to be an affiliate manager. I hope I haven’t turned you off from, it’s an amazing. Our affiliate managers love it. I love it. I mean, one of the biggest struggles I have is not being able to do it as much because I love it so much. Go to Matt mcwilliams. com careers. You can fill out the application to apply for one of our affiliate manager positions. I’ll tell you. It’s super competitive.
If you are ready to take your business to the next level and start an affiliate program, start with my free report, Your First 100 Affiliates. This report takes nearly two decades of experience, trial and error, and lessons learned about finding top affiliates in nearly every conceivable niche and puts them all into one report. Grab your copy here!
I think we’ve brought on, let’s see, five new affiliate managers, four, four new affiliate managers in the past 14 months out of about 100 applications. So it gives you some perspective. It ain’t easy. If I can give you a tip, take your dandy old time filling out the application. It could take you a few days if you fill it out right. The first step is getting through the application process. So just being able to even get into the training is hard because a lot of people just don’t fill out the application very well.
So do that. Make sure you do. Matt Mcqueen. com careers we’ll put that link in the show notes for you. Also, if you want to learn how to build an affiliate program, you’re like, hey, I want to like, I want to be doing some of this stuff. I want to know what I need to be doing day in and day out.
Come check out our training, our upcoming training. How I built a million dollar a month affiliate program in only two years without any connections or credentials. Like we did this, we didn’t know anybody. We had no connectns, no friends hooking us up or any of that. No partners that we had. We had to go out and work for every one of them. If you go to madmcwans.
com million a month, we’ll put that link in the show notes as we can register for that training. You want to make sure to register for that. And lastly, two things I would love to hear from you. What your biggest takeaway from this episode was. Text me anytime 260-217-4619 put that number in the show notes. Share your biggest takeaway with me.
What did you take away from this episode? And then the next episode, as I mentioned, said it before, how to turn inactive affiliates into your best partners. It’s going to be a good one. I’m going to walk you through step by step what we do to activate those affiliates. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss that episode. I’ll see you then.
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
| Find Your First 100 Affiliates | Affiliate Program Terms & Conditions Template | Get My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email |
| Avoid The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes | Turn Inactive Affiliates into Your Best Affiliates | Get My Template for Writing Affiliate Emails |
| Affiliate Marketing Sales Secrets | Learn How to Create a Resources Page | Learn How to Write a Product Review |
The post How Do Affiliate Managers Spend Their Day? appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### Breaking bad news is never easy, especially when it involves your affiliates. But sooner or later, we all need to know how to deal with challenging situations in our affiliate program. In this episode, I’ll share how to master the delicate art of delivering less-than-ideal updates to your affiliate partners. Learn how to maintain trust, manage expectations, and turn challenging situations into opportunities for growth. This may not be the most fun episode I’ve ever done, but it’s a must-listen!
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Links Mentioned in this EpisodeTop 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes
TRAINING – How to 10X Your Sales WITHOUT Spending All Day on Social Media or Expensive Paid Ads
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Triple Your Webinar Sales with Affiliates
How to Identify and Stop Affiliate Fraud
How to Solve the 15 Biggest Challenges for All Affiliate Programs
What the Latest Research Says About Affiliate Bonus Packages
How to Give Your Affiliates What They Need to Succeed
How to Build an Army of Loyal Affiliates
How to Communicate Bad News to Your AffiliatesBreaking Bad news is never easy, especially when it involves your affiliates. But sooner or later, something is going to go wrong, something’s going to break, and we all need to know how to deal with these challenging situations in our affiliate program. So in this episode, I’m going to share how to master the delicate art of delivering less than ideal updates to your affiliates.
You will learn how to maintain trust, how to manage expectations, and how to turn challenging situations into opportunities for growth. Now this may not be the most fun episode I’ve ever done, but it is a must listen. So what happens when things go wrong?
It’s gonna happen. As I said in the intro, things will happen, things will break, something’s gonna go wrong. You’re gonna have issues in your affiliate program, and we’ll talk about some of the different types of things that can go wrong. But what do we do when those things go wrong?
How do we react? What are the steps that we need to take to not only mitigate the bad news, but actually take advantage of it? I want this episode to offer up an opportunity to you that bad news, problems, mistakes, things breaking, all those kinds of things can actually be good news for your affiliate program. They can cause your affiliate program to grow.
And that sounds crazy, but that’s how we operate as humans. There’s a term called post traumatic growth, right? All these things we would never wish upon anyone. We would never wish that somebody has to go through those
life experiences, but they’re always better for it. Or they’re usually better for it if they use it as an opportunity. Well, it’s to a much lesser degree and much lesser severity here. It’s the same thing.
These are things we don’t want to happen. But there one of these things is going to happen to you. I’m going to list a few examples here of things that could go wrong. One of these is going to happen to you in the next three to five years.
I guarantee it. They’re going to happen maybe multiples, maybe one thing is going to happen twice, I don’t know. Something is going to happen and you’re going to need to know how to react.
You’re going to need to know how to make it less bad, but also make it a positive. So what are examples of some bad news that you would have to communicate? You know, the first one, the most obvious one for affiliate programs is the tracking is down.
This is something that will happen to every affiliate program roughly every five to ten years. It has happened to me multiple times with multiple programs, whether I was on a network or an in house program. The mechanism that controlled the tracking, not the website, but
that’s another one. You know, unexpected downtime on your website, but the tracking is down and this affects everyone. This affects all of your affiliates, and it affects you. You know, you’re not able to pull up reports or anything like that.
A lot of times if you’re on a network and the whole network goes down, that affects everyone. So let’s talk about the next one, that the website downtime, specifically when it’s unexpected, it is not bad news. If every few years you reach out to your affiliates to say, hey, our website is undergoing regular maintenance on Tuesday night between 02:00 a.
m. and 06:00 a. m. eastern time, that is not bad news.
Need help activating your affiliates? Use my proven email templates for getting inactive affiliates in the game and making sales! Get them here!
That’s a completely different thing. I’ve talked about how to communicate just in general with your affiliates. That’s something where you communicate in advance. You remind them, you remind them and you remind them that, hey, if, you know, keep your links up.
But I probably wouldn’t send out a promo email that night. Don’t send out a promo email at 09:00 that night. Don’t plan on sending one first thing the next morning just in case does turn into 09:00 a. m.
that would kind of be bad news. Like, hey, the downtime is longer than we thought, but if you plan those in advance, they don’t have to be a problem at all. So unexpected downtime, your website crashes, your database goes down and orders aren’t processing. Something like that.
Credit card processor doesn’t work. All those types of things. Something happened to impact conversions or the average order size.
A part of your website went down, or you can’t take orders from outside the United States, or a funnel piece broke a split test, had a negative impact, those types of things. Product is out of stock and it wasn’t anticipated. I’ll talk about that example later. That’s happened to me.
Product recall never had that one happen. Payment delays, that’s happened. You know, I had to pay late reducing commissions due to increased cost or other factors where this wasn’t anticipated. And all of those have happened to me except the product recall.
I’ve had to deal with every single one of those at least one time. I’ve probably had to deal with tracking being down a dozen to 15 times. I’ve had to deal with conversions or average order size, things like that a couple dozen times.
I’ve had a product go out of stock a couple of times. I’ve never had a product recall. I’ve had payment delays probably five, six times over the last two decades.
I’ve had to reduce commissions once. And I’ve had unexpected website downtime. Haven’t had it in almost a decade. Knock on wood.
Right? But I mean, I had it pretty frequently in the late two thousands, 2005 to 2010. We probably had it happen eight to ten times. We put a heavy load, the company that I started back then, we put a heavy, heavy load in our server and we never had enough firepower.
And we had these ebbs and flows where we would have spikes in traffic and it wasn’t bot traffic, but it was like good traffic and our site would just go down for like 15 minutes. And it was always frustrating. So all of these things have happened and it sucks, but how you deal with it, and it’s not like some great life lesson, right? You know, life sucks and things go wrong, but how you deal with it, by gosh, no.
But that is what matters. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, issues like this, if they’re dealt with properly, could actually be a huge plus for your program, bouncing back from what seems like a devastating problem. It can strengthen your relationships with your affiliates. It can even make them trust you more.
So how do we do that? How do we deal with these situations? So when the proverbial stuff hits the fan, what’s the first thing that we do? Well, the first thing you got to do is stay calm, especially when it’s something that is out of your control and it’s wreaking havoc like
downtime. I’m assuming you’re not also your sysadmin for your server, right. The network tracking goes down. When that happens, you gotta stay calm.
Like these are out of your control. Things like products running out, you usually at least have a little lead time to prepare. You don’t run out of product. You don’t go from having a full shelves, we got enough product to last months to, oh, we’re out of product.
That doesn’t happen in a matter of seconds. Downtime and tracking issues can happen immediately. You can have tracking 1 second. You can have a website at 12:42 a.
m. or pm and at 1243, you don’t have a website, you don’t have tracking, but stay calm. Take a deep breath.
Okay? Just take a deep breath. If you have time, if it’s looking like your product is gonna run out or that there’s going to be something, again, usually you have a heads up. Product recalls typically don’t happen in a matter of seconds
either. Never had that happen. But they don’t usually happen overnight. Usually there is some sort of heads up like, okay, we’re three
days away from might, we might have a product recall or payments being delayed. You don’t go from, payments are being made today, typically to, oh, they’re not going to be made for a while. Although actually I have had one instance where that happened. So again, stay calm, take some deep breaths.
You don’t have a lot of time because number two is be fast. And it seems contradictory, but it’s not like I’m not saying take 500 deep breaths and go for an hour long walk. Again, if you have to communicate bad news and you’ve got weeks of lead time, like, okay, you know that the product is going to run out in three days.
Taking a half hour walk is going to be fine, but otherwise, you got to be fast. The faster you acknowledge the issues, the better they must learn. Meaning the affiliates, your affiliates, must learn about issues from you, not from other sources.
So if you’ve got an affiliate Facebook group, and I recommend you do because it’s good for so many things, one of the problems is if they find out about it from other people, that’s a problem. Now I get it. If at 1242, your website’s up and you go to the bathroom and the website goes down right away, and at 1251, you come back from a bathroom. From the bathroom or from lunch, and your website’s down and you find out about it on Facebook from.
That’s understandable. But again, don’t just ignore it. Don’t just reply or start a new thread and acknowledge it. Right.
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So this initial contact should be short. It should cover three main things. Number one, acknowledgement of the problem, just be clear about it. Here is the problem.
I’m going to walk you through an email in a second. Here’s the problem. Number two, we’re working on it. Number three, I’ll keep you updated.
So acknowledge the problem. State that you’re working on it. State that you’ll keep them updated. You don’t need a ten point plan.
You don’t need a link to email. Just let them know you’re working on it. That’s it. It’s three sentences.
Three sentences. That’s it. So number one, stay calm, take a deep breath. Number two, be fast.
Number three, don’t sugarcoat. Don’t do the whole feedback sandwich thing where it’s like, you know, good news, bad news. Good news is the promo is going great.
Bad news is our server’s down. Good news is once it’s back up, the promo will be great again. No, just cut to the chase. Skip the good news part.
There is no good news right now. The server is down, tracking is down, the product is about to be out or whatever. So be honest and direct.
That’s the key here. Be honest and direct. I’m going to share some emails that I’ve sent in the past. All right?
Now I’m going to read these to you. If you want, just send me a text at 260-217-4619 260-217-4619 I’m happy to send these to you. It’s not like an automated thing.
So just text me, say, hey, can you send me the bad news emails or something like that? All right, so here’s a couple of examples. The first one is just one that we used when tracking went down and the subject line was tracking down for Shutterfly. Again, subject line, not bad news, not heads up or make sure you
read this or, hey, John, no tracking down for Shutterfly if I don’t read the email, here’s what I know. The tracking is down for Shutterfly. That’s what we want. I just said, hey, you know, first name, quick, heads up.
The affiliate tracking for Shutterfly is down. It has been for the roughly the past 15 minutes since 335 eastern and gives them a specific time. We’re doing everything we can to get it back up and working properly and I’ll update you as frequently as possible. I’ve also created an update thread here and that link to a Twitter thread, this was like 2013.
I linked to a Twitter thread where I announced it and then I updated it every, you know, ten minutes with just a quick, like, no word yet, haven’t heard back. Just talk to the network. They set an eta of an hour. Boom.
So I update there. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. So again, quick heads up. Affiliate tracking is down.
I give him the time, 15 minutes, 03:35 p. m. we’re doing everything we can to get it back up. I’ll update you.
Here’s where to find updates. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. That’s the email. That’s it.
It covers those three things, right? Acknowledgement of the problem. We’re working on it. I’ll keep you updated.
That was probably one of the longest ones I’ve sent for a tracking issue, and it was five sentences long. All right, another one. Product is about to run out. Okay.
This was an unexpected product that we were going to run out of. The subject line was out of stock. Name of product. I’m not going to name this company here.
Right. I just said, hey, first name. Just want to let you know so you’ll notice this one’s a longer one. Why?
Because this is not like there’s a problem right now. And we’re working on it. Bye. You know, just want to let you know that we’re just about to run out of name of product.
This is a bit of a surprise to us as a shipment from China is significantly delayed and we’re not sure when it will be back in stock. As of now, it looks like we will run out in approximately two to three days, but definitely by this upcoming weekend. This was sent on a Monday. If you planned any promotions for name of product, I recommend pulling them until at least April 17 to be safe.
I think this was sent around April 1 ish, but I’ll keep you updated and let you know if anything changes. But there is almost no chance right now that we’ll be back in stock by April 3. But name of company is already working with another vendor to
get a rush shipment in by April 13. So the 17th gives us a little wiggle room. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. And then I sent out another email a couple of days later.
Hey, we are definitely within 24 hours of running out. I would pull all of your links, et cetera, et cetera. At that point, I didn’t know for sure. And then I sent one, like three or four days later.
We will definitely have shipment on April 12, and they will be sellable on the 13th. So there we go for payment delay. Again, direct and to the point. Subject line commissions late by two to three days.
You know exactly what you’re getting out of this. The cool thing is, if you don’t really care, you know, you’re somebody. You’re earning $30 a month, and it’s not really like you’re active. You’re just kind of making.
Who cares? You don’t even need to read it. You know, there’s two thirds of the affiliate programs I’m in. I don’t care if the payments are late by three days.
I don’t even know when they’re due half the time. So it’s not a big deal. Now there’s a few where like, we got a $24,812 payment coming. I kind of would like that on time.
That’d be nice. But most of the time I don’t really care. So subject line commission is late by two to three days. Hey, first name, just want to let you know in advance.
And it looks like affiliate commissions will be late by two to three days for October. Again, this is one where we found out last second it was an urgent thing. This was not like we knew five days in advance, but it is a little bit longer an email because it’s not one of those emails where it’s like we already have the solution.
So it’s a company name, just had, you know, name of their payment processor account shut down and it’s doing everything they can to get it back up. Trust me, this sucks. And I hate that we’re going to be late. Since we don’t know when it will be back up, we’re going to use an alternative payment platform, which we are setting up right now.
Again, acknowledge the problem. We’re working on the issue sometime tomorrow, hopefully first thing in the morning, I’ll send a link to set up your payment information there. It then takes two business days to verify your information and two more to pay you, which puts us right at two days late.
If for some reason everything is fixed with the other payment processor, we’ll issue those payments as soon as possible. If you have any questions, let me know. Notice I didn’t fill it with a bunch of gobbledygook about valuing them and we value your partnership and blah, blah, blah, blah, right? No, I cut to the chase.
I apologize if it makes sense. I tell them we’re working on it and they will update them. That’s it. Now I tell them I’m going to update them.
Well, number four, remember, number one, stay calm, take a deep breath. Number two, be fast. Number three, don’t sugarcoat.
Number four, you actually need to update them frequently, but not too frequently because that gets annoying. So the best way to do this for things like downtime, tracking issues, all those things, create a blog post. Now if your site’s down, that might not be doable because your site’s
down. That’s why I actually usually host our affiliate blogs on a separate domain on a separate server. Usually our affiliate blog doesn’t get enough traffic, a few hundred visits a day if we’re lucky.
So I don’t even mind hosting that. Usually I host that on like the $20 a month. WordPress hosting, that’s one of the reasons is like that way if the server goes down, I’ve still got the blog server up.
So you put up a blog post and then you update that post and it just becomes like a running update, right. With the most frequent thing. Newest, uh, you could do a Twitter, you know, x thread, you could do a Facebook post, you could do it in the affiliate Facebook group, whatever it is. Just start a thread, update with comments, with any relevant
updates. And then once it’s updated, then you put like final, hey, this is fixed. Problem solve, yada yada. For big issues, you know, every two to 3 hours is a good mix
between frequency and annoying. Even if it’s just to say no new updates, the team is working on it. If there are big updates like the product is out of stock, then update them. So in that example before, I think I said, you know, we’ll have the product around the 13th, so plan on the 17th.
But I just found out that it’s moved up to the 12th. I told them it’s moved up to the 12th. That’s worth a post and maybe even an email, which is what I did. So number four, update them frequently, but not too frequently.
Number five, when it’s fixed, communicate that quickly. So this is something you have to prepare for in advance. Okay. You know that it’s going to be fixed.
You have time. If it’s the product out of stock, things like that. You got a lot of time, you got days probably. But even if it’s the sites down, tracking is down, you know it’s going to be fixed.
So work on the email communicating that it’s fixed while it’s being fixed. And if that’s not practical, then just send out a quick it’s fixed and I’ll follow up later. So I’m going to give you two emails that I’ve sent.
The first one is when I ran a big affiliate promo with a huge team and I didn’t have to be involved in fixing the problem. So I had time to craft a message to send in advance. It was a product out of stock and now it’s back in stock. The second email is actually one where I was literally helping to reboot the server.
We were bootstrapping this and I was the CTO, the CSO chief sales officer, and I ran customer service and I ran the affiliate program. I did a ton and I was also basically the head of SEO. I mean, we were a small company. We had like ten of us.
We were running almost a million dollar a month affiliate program. And I was doing all these things. So I was involved in all this. So it’s a different vibe, right?
All right, so the first one, I’ve got time. I wrote this email. The subject line was, name of product back in stock. Hey, first name, it’s official.
Name of product is back in stock. Yeah, baby. I can’t do a british accent, apparently. I don’t know what that was.
I’m just going to keep that in. I should probably just insert. I think it’s a copyright violation. I should insert Austin Powers saying, yeah, baby there.
Anyway, and I had an image of Austin Powers saying, yeah, baby. You know, I said, I know it was a rough eleven days. And I’m super grateful to our whole team for getting us back on track here. To make up for this problem, we’re running a huge promo on name of
product. Not only will customers save 20%, but we’re also paying you some huge bonuses. I then go on to explain the promotion, the bonuses, etcetera. I explained how we’re able to do that because the shipment from China will be there in five days.
It’s actually been cleared through customs. So now we’re expecting all this extra product. Plus we have a local distributor. So I explain, you may be thinking like, hey, you just ran out of this product, now you’re going to run a promo on it and offer us huge commissions.
You’re crazy. No, I explained why that we’re able to do that. I give them their link, some new creative. We refreshed it during the out of stock period.
So that’s the thing. Hey, here’s this nice thing we’re doing. We have brand new creative because we ran out of product. So we had time to update the creatives, created some new
leaderboards, and it was a huge hit. Huge hit. This ended up being massive. We sold more of that product.
I’ve got the numbers here. We sold more of that product in the second half of April of 2014 than we did in the entire first quarter of 2014. And it was not a seasonal product. It’s not like, well, it’s cause summer.
No, it was not a seasonal product. We sold more product in two weeks than we sold in 13 weeks before this happened. That’s how you can turn these into a positive. So the second one, again, this is when we’re back to normal, right?
I didn’t have time. I didn’t have time to write a message while I was helping to reboot servers and figure out what was going on. We had been down for about an hour and a half or so, and I was busy that whole time. So I’m like, as soon as it was fixed, I’ve sat down and wrote the email and it just said, subject line, we’re back up.
If I had to do all over again, I probably would have put back online or something, or servers back up or something. But again, I was trying to be fast. Said, hey, first name, real quick, we’re back up and running. Total downtime was less than 90 minutes and we found the issue in the back end.
I’ll share more details later and we’ll make sure you’re compensated for the downtime. For now, we’re going to keep an eye on things and probably take a quick nap. Smiley face. Thanks for your patience on this.
Again, straight to the point, we’re back up and running. I don’t have time to get into the problem because that would be too long and I don’t, I don’t need to explain it and take ten minutes to write this and that’s ten minutes longer. You think we’re down, but I shared exactly what was wrong. Less than 90 minutes and then we’re going to fix it.
That’s what we put in that message. So, number six, remember, number one, we got to stay calm. Number two, we got to be fast. Number three, do not sugarcoat it.
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Number four, update them frequently. Number five, when it’s fixed, communicate that quickly. And then, number six, in the end, follow up with a debrief after you send the email saying things are fixed. Want to follow up again with another email that’s got more details.
So on that example where I said, you know, we’re back up, hey, boom, boom, boom, quickly, we’re back up and running. I would send up a follow up email, depends on the time of day. Maybe later that day, first thing the next morning, hey, as you remember, we were down.
Remember earlier I said less than 90 minutes. I want to find out the exact amount of time. We were down for 83 minutes. We were down for 83 minutes yesterday, so I know that cost some of you some money.
So we looked at the numbers. We still could see traffic coming in. There are no conversions. And basically, we’re going to take your normal conversion rate.
And this is me not explaining here, but explaining to you. And let’s say the day before, you sent 100 clicks and converted ten. That’s a 10% conversion. And during that 83 minutes of downtime, you sent ten clicks.
We’re going to pay you for a conversion you would normally have made dollar 20. We’re going to just give you dollar 20 to make up for this. A lot of companies don’t do that. I do.
It just makes sense. It’s the right thing to do, and it makes them love you again. We want to use this as a positive. So we explain how we’re going to make it up to them.
Not just that, we’re going to. We explain it in detail, and then I’ll say something like, I’m going to send one more email where I outline your exact numbers, blah, blah, blah. So this is a little bit longer email with details. Right.
Sometimes they want to know the journey, too. Like, how’d you solve the problem and how are you addressing it going forward? Those types of things. And then, as I mentioned just now.
So, number six, follow up with a debrief. Number seven, make it up to them. Make it up to them. Pay those commissions for lost sales.
We did the promo for the out of stock stuff. We knew far enough in advance that we didn’t need to make up for it, per se, but I wanted to do something to make up for it. You know, they didn’t lose anything.
We give them plenty of heads up, but afterwards, when we were back up and running, like, hey, let’s do something to make this up to you. Let’s run this out of stock sale. If its tracking is down, you pay them for the lost commissions.
If tracking is down and you have no concept of how much was lost, then you kind of got to make it up. Well, your average daily commissions earned over the past three weeks is $500. So we were down for one 10th of the day.
So were going to pay you $50, something like that. And you make it up, it will come back tenfold over the next year or two. So there you have it. How to communicate bad news to your affiliates.
Number one, stay calm. Number two, be fast. Number three, don’t sugarcoat it. I’ve shared some examples, use those as guides.
Like just get to the point. Like man, I just cannot say it five sentences at a max on this initial email, unless, again, unless it is a longer one where you’ve got days in advance. Number four, keep them updated frequently, but not too frequently.
Number five, communicate any kind of a fix as quickly as possible. Update the blog post, update the thread, update the group, update them via email, et cetera. And number six, make sure you follow up with the debrief.
And of course, 7th, make it up to them, fix it, make it right. So there you have it. That is how you communicate bad news to your affiliates. I hope you never have to do it, but you know what?
You’re going to, you’re going to have to do it. So make sure if you haven’t yet, I mentioned earlier, if you never texted me, shoot me a text. I’m happy to send you these emails.
Like I said earlier, shoot me a text at 260-217-4619 that’s my favorite way to communicate. I just love communicating with people via text and it’s real time and more personal than, you know, sending me an email. So text me anytime. I’ve got links in the show, notes to everything we talked about as well.
And lastly, make sure if you haven’t yet hit subscribe so you do not miss the next episode. We’ll be talking about how affiliate managers spend their day. Like if you just want to see what’s a day in the life of an affiliate manager, like, it’s not as exciting as you might think it is.
That’s a terrible sales way to sell this episode. No, it’s good. You’re going to like it. So you want to know how we spend our days?
Go check it out. Go check out this episode. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. I’ll see you then.
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
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The post How to Communicate Bad News to Your Affiliates appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### Want to know how to triple your sales on webinars when affiliates are promoting them? Then you’re in the right place because today I’m sharing my secrets for making more sales on your webinars, especially when affiliates are promoting them. These specific strategies have worked for dozens of our clients to triple their webinar sales…and they will work for you, too!
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Identify and Stop Affiliate Fraud
How to Solve the 15 Biggest Challenges for All Affiliate Programs
What the Latest Research Says About Affiliate Bonus Packages
How to Give Your Affiliates What They Need to Succeed
How to Build an Army of Loyal Affiliates
Got a Low-Priced Product? Here’s How to Run an Affiliate Program
How to Triple Your Webinar Sales with AffiliatesWebinars are one of the best ways to get more leads, more sales, and more great affiliates. They’re also an easy way to promote something that benefits your audience.Today, I’ll share how you can use affiliate webinars to grow your business.
So I did a promo back in the fall of 2001. I think that was a little bit different than what we usually promote.
And, you know, it didn’t really, like, kind of square up exactly with my niche, you know, and I wanted to do, we did some private content for a small group of our audience where we discussed that, you know, first of all, okay, promoting something that’s a little bit outside of your niche, how do you do that?
But how do you tie it into your niche? And we talk about that in this episode. We also talk about webinars from both ways. Why promoting JV webinars?
Affiliate webinars one of the quickest ways to grow your list, how to use it to get affiliates to promote you. We also talk about in this episode what you should ask affiliate managers and what you should ask your partners for so that you can have the best promotion. And then we also talk about how to use encore webinars to, quite frankly, double or triple your sales. We found some success with that.
We’ve had issues with that in the past, and so we cover a lot in this episode. This was originally a private, kind of behind the scenes lesson for some of our members, but we wanted to open it up to the public here on the podcast. I’m super excited to share this because I think there’s just a ton of lessons inside of this one big lesson. So again, ultimately, it’s all about how to use webinars to grow your business, how to use affiliate webinars to grow your business.
And I mentioned before, I think it was like four or five episodes ago, I said, hey, if you want to know, kind of our framework for webinars, I’ve done two live webinars, really small, intentionally, really small. These are both brand new webinars. Well, not brand new like, they’ve tweaked webinars, but we’ve made some tweaks. And the one we closed, 17% of live attendees.
The most recent one we closed almost. We almost hit 25%. If we’d had one less person on, we would have closed 25%. So we’re really killing it with these webinars.
Like, they’re converting extremely well. And if you want to know how we do it, then shoot me a text at 260-217-4619 and if I get enough people who text me, I’m going to do. It’s going to have to be at least a two episode, probably three episodes. Might even have to do an entire month.
And it would be like next March. It would be a while from now because we’ve got content planned through. Gosh, when do we have content planned through? Looks right now.
Looks like we’ve got our content for the podcast planned through March 28 of next year. So it will be next April. So going y’all, like almost a year from now? Just crazy to think about that.
What is that? That’s, uh, don’t know when this one’s going to go live, but that’s like seven months from now. But either way, text me at 260-217-4619 and I’ll probably do a series. And plus I’ll have a little bit more dialed in.
Right then I’ll do a series on what we’re doing in webinars that’s converting. So if you’re interested, let me know about that. With that, I’m going to cut to this private interview that I did with Robby Miles, who’s our operations manager on our team, about this webinar promotion that we did. So we talked about it from all the different angles.
Again, the angle of promoting something outside your niche, but also, you know, working with affiliates on your webinars and being an affiliate on your webinar, we share tons of tips in there. So listen up and learn because I think this is some valuable stuff. There were some revelations for us that we share in this episode. So listen up and learn.
And do me a favor. At the end of this episode, shoot me a text again.260-217-4619 I’d love to hear from you. All right, let me cut to that interview now.
Matt: Welcome back to another backstage pass. We’re going to take you on a deep dive into a recent affiliate promo, unlike any other affiliate promo that we’ve ever done, that we did just about a month ago or so. And, well, we’re going to be doing it again soon. We’ll talk about that at the end.
So I want to welcome Robby Miles on our team, who is our head of operations and the guy who, well, quite frankly, anytime we do one of these backstage fastest and we look back at, you know, here’s what we learned and here’s what we did. He’s the guy that remembers it all, and then I just stand here and talk about it. So, Robby. Welcome, man.
Robby: Hey, you know, it’s easy to remember things when you have a pen and paper around, so.
Matt: Well, that’s Robby’s skillset. For those who don’t know, we did a Facebook live recently and I think somebody said, oh, so the business secret is I need a Robby. And I was like, yeah. And I think you said, yes, you do. Yes, you do. Yes, you do.
You know, just not this one. And so. But it is true, you know, that’s not my skill set, the organizational side of things. And so we have a Robby whose name, ironically, is Robby, and he keeps us on track.
So Robby, I’m excited about today because we’re talking about the affiliate program that we did recently. So as we’re recording this in December, and I believe it’ll go live for you guys in December, this is a promo we did a little bit over a month ago, so it’s still really fresh in our minds and it’s really outside of my niche. That’s actually the cool thing about it, makes me really excited to talk about this. And there’s some things that we did that we’ve never had to do before that are lessons for you.
Things that we did that we had to do before that are lessons for you guys. And I’m just really excited to share this. So I’m going to jump right in and explain the promo real quick and kind of the backstory to it. So as you may notice, if you watched some of the original aim backstage passes, I look a little bit different than I did in the original ones.
And I think we launched aim, if I’m not mistaken, we launched aim when I was a wee bit into my weight loss journey, but not way into it.
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Robby: Yeah, just a couple months, if I remember.
Matt: I think because we pre recorded some of the content, some of the content would have been about two and a half months in. So I’d probably lost about 20 ish pounds at that point.
But it’s still come a long, long way since then. In total, my doctor says about 88 pounds of fat is roughly probably about 91, 92 by now. And the reason I say of fat is because I actually only, I say only. I’ve only lost 56 pounds or something, but I’ve also put on some muscle and so that’s why he says about 80 something pounds of fat there.
And, you know, the revelation that I had earlier this year was just, you know, we teach so much about marketing techniques and marketing strategies and marketing, you know, affiliate marketing, how to make more money, how to monetize, how to have more influence and impact in the world. Those are all great things, but for many people, their weight is holding them back. I can teach you all the best marketing strategies. I can teach you all the best email copy.
I can teach you how to be confident on camera. There’s one for you. How to be confident. News flash.
I was never confident on camera before I did them. I produced videos, some really good videos, some impactful and life changing videos for people. I was never confident on camera. I am now.
And so I realized that you can have all the best stuff, but if you’re just not confident in just who you are in appearance is just appearances and everything, but it’s just a part of who we are, you know? I mean, the example I’ve always have used when I talk to people about this is there’s the old joke or thing, you know, you picture the audience naked, you know? Right. If you’re nervous about what?
If you were naked, like, I don’t care. It’s not about looking good or anything. You want to tell me? Okay, we’ll go like your boxers, right?
Who’s my friend? Skivvies. Your skivvies. Skivvies, yeah.
If you had to go up on stage, I don’t care if you look amazing, right? And you had to go up on stage and deliver a talk about marketing or gardening or productivity or high performance or being a real estate agent in your underwear, would you be comfortable? It’s just your appearance. I mean, all that matters, right, is the content.
No, your appearance does matter. If you had to go up, you’re going to deliver a presentation to a group full of, you know, professional real estate agents, for an example. And you went up there and you had a green mohawk, you know, one of those greens and like, you know, piercings all over your face and you’re covered in tattoos, and you’re going to talk about generating more real estate leads. Your appearance is going to distract, detract, and distract from the message.
So appearance does matter. And I said to Alan Thomas, my friend and now a coach, you know, my weight loss coach said, this is holding me back. This weight is holding back. And the revelation I had a few months ago, Robby, was, this is affecting other people.
And so I asked Alan, Alan’s in our start, mastermind. And he’s just getting started with this platform. He’s been at it for about a year. He’s coaching people just like me and helping them. He’s helped men lose literally thousands of pounds now.
Robby: There wasn’t a huge push like, get to this webinar, make your $10,000 now or whatever else. All that kind of in your face Internet marketing. And sometimes we push that when we’re in a big launch or something like that. But this was just like, it felt more like what we talk about asks and gives. This felt more like a give in the marketing. It was, hey, we want to help you.
Matt:Yeah, man. I think you just kind of reminded me that, like, the way that we were able to market this was just telling my story. All I did was just tell the story. That’s all. I’m assuming. Again, I didn’t watch her campaign, but I’m assuming that’s all that Kathy did.
Or literally, you look at anything where people are promoting things that are, quote unquote, outside of their niche and they’re just telling their story about how this thing helped them or why they might need this thing. I think the other important thing is, again, when you care about your audience, like, I cared more about serving my audience and saying, like, no, I get that this isn’t the norm. This is not the norm. And I, again, you acknowledge that when you’re promoting stuff.
The lesson here is when you’re promoting things that are outside of your niche or they’re out to the size more, you know, you gotta acknowledge the fact that it is. I didn’t come out and say, you know, this is right on par with, I didn’t come out and I thought I would do that. I never said anywhere, like, hey, this is my normal thing today. No, I never said, I didn’t send an email going, like, just out of left field, like, where people are going, why is he talking about this?
You have to explain why you’re talking about things. When I send an email and say, hey, I just did a new podcast and we’re talking about how to find affiliates. Nobody goes, why would he send me that? And that’s what you signed up for.
But when you are sending something to something, you have to explain it. There has to be that backstory. So we started off the very first email, if I remember correctly. Hey, this was me 15 months ago. This is me now. Very visual, but also, okay, he’s going somewhere with this. And here’s how I did it. And then we positioned Alan and we told Alan’s story.
We said, hey, if this sounds like it might be helpful to you, then it’s going to be helpful to you. If you believe that, your voice holding you back, you need to come to this. If you believe that this could potentially transform your life, then come to this. That story is what is super important.
Now, if I didn’t have that story, but I knew Alan, because now he’s reaching out. You know, we’re encouraging him. He’s in our masterminds. One of the things that we talked about is like, dude, you got to be, you know, I told him, I want you to spend 20 hours a week reaching out to potential jv partners.
All these other people who aren’t affected by him, he’s not coached them, but they know his story, and so they can say, hey, my friend Alan lost 129 pounds in whatever, it’s like 300 days or something. He went from being obese for two decades to being a very fit man in less than a year. And he said to me that his weight was holding him back. Well, if it’s holding you back now, you can basically tell the exact same.
The marketing can be the exact same. From that point forward, it was a little bit easier because I had the personal story. And so look for those products where if they’re outside of your niche, but you believe that they have transformed something that you’ve done. I think of like, Kara Andretta teaches cake decorating.
She was a top 20 partner for Michael Hyatt’s goal setting course. You know, it makes sense when you did really well in that a few years ago, that makes sense. You’re the productivity guide. Goal setting, you know, two peas and a fod.
Right? No idea why I did that. For this. They go together like peanut butter and tuna fish, you know, and it makes sense.
But cake decorating in goal setting, like, well, who again? Who’s her audience? Entrepreneurs who are cake decorators. Entrepreneurs need to, what, set goals?
It’s off to the side, but it definitely makes sense if she explains. If she just came out right away and said, hey, Michael Hyatt released a new thing all about goal setting. I’m sorry, what? But if she explains it in the context and introduces it softly, then transitions into, quote unquote, normal marketing, very effective.
So we talked about the beginning. We talked about how Alan had never promoted a JV offer before, and we’ve never really promoted anything that was this far outside of our lane. So one of the cool things that this can apply both ways, you know, we really try to focus on being an affiliate inside of aim. But I’ll just give you this tip that one of the best ways to find affiliates is to be an affiliate, you know, and to basically do webinar swaps.
Now, we’re not doing that with Alan. I did this, you know, on some level for him, you know, to be perfectly transparent, again, he’s in our mastermind. He’s a dear friend, and he’s completely changed my life. So there’s no, like, Alan, you got to promote our affiliate marketing stuff to your audience now.
Like, that’s not on the table at all. If he chooses to, great. But I never once asked them to do that. But finding those people who maybe where you’re both doing it for the first time, you know, finding those people where you both have a small list, maybe you both have a list of 700, 800, 900 people.
I think Alan’s list before this was under 800. I think it was like 750 people. Typically, we partner when we promote people, there are people with list of 200,000, 100,000, maybe 35,000 on the small end. But we, there is an opportunity when you’re first starting out, to look for partners both ways that are much smaller.
For one, when you’re doing these webinars, like, if this had been, you know, let’s just say this was our very first affiliate promo. Did I want to do it where I’m doing it with, you know, somebody who’s got a certain level of expectation. You know, let’s say we had 800 people on our list. The reality is, if you have 100 people on your list, we’re probably going to get like ten people to show up for the webinar, maybe 15.
I don’t want to have 15 people on somebody’s list who’s used to having a thousand. And so there’s a certain level there. The other thing for him is he doesn’t want to be on a webinar where there’s a thousand people. And you don’t either.
If you’ve never done one before, you want to be on where there’s 10 or 15 or 20 people. And so it’s an opportunity for you to work your way in, I was gonna say,
Robby: and you talk about this all the time within start. And a lot of that’s getting in your reps. And how do you get in your reps is you do that at a smaller level, a practice level, and not that it wasn’t professional what you got the webinar that you guys did, but because it was a smaller audience, it’s a great opportunity to practice your professionalism at that smaller level.
So, and now, as he does this again and again and again, that webinar is just going to get better and better and better and better and so are the products that he puts together for you.
Matt: Yeah. And if you’re doing a webinar, again, we’re speaking more from the, you know, finding affiliates out here. But just think about this way.
Like I see so many times, I just got to go out and I got to get that one. If I could just get that one person. It’s like the author saying, if I could just get on Oprah, right? What if Tim Ferriss had just waited to get on Oprah?
JK Rowling had waited to get on Oprah, we would never have heard of either one of them. So rather than get on Oprah, what if you’re on WKCL in Denton, Texas, just trying to pick a random place, then you’re on w ABC on. And I think that’s in New York City. So it’s a bad example.
But you’re on some podium in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and you’re going one by one and people are like, well, that’s just harder than getting the one. Well, do you have the one? Did you get on Oprah? How much longer is it going to take you to get on Oprah?
And why would Oprah have somebody on who hasn’t even, you get on, you’re like, I don’t even know what to say because I’ve never done it before. Now you go on Oprah after you’ve been on 300 radio interviews and you’re like, boom, got my talking points. I’m in. You got your stories down, all that stuff.
And so that’s what we talk about with the reps. It’s like, do the smaller ones you want to get in front of. Everybody wants to do the one webinar with 4000 people. Oh, man, I just want to do a webinar with 4000 people on it.
How about just do 40 webinars with 100 people? Here’s the deal. You’re much more likely to get one with 4000 people if you’ve done 40 with 100 or even 80 with 50 or 120 with 33. 3
people, you know, or 200 with 20 people, and you’ll be a million times better. So I’m going to tell, I’m going to tell you guys again, getting a little bit off track here, but here’s what I told Alan afterwards. I said, go do it again. And again and again.
I said, dude, if I were you initially, I told him I was like, every Thursday I would be doing a webinar. I don’t care if it’s for your internal audience and you have six people on or if it’s a JV webinar, and you have two people on or 30 people on or whatever. Just get in the reps, get in the reps, get in the reps. Then I was like, you know what?
Thursday is not enough. I said, you got to get this, like, really cranked up. I said, I would be doing an internal webinar every Tuesday, come h*** or high water. I would probably be doing one on Wednesday to your paid traffic, and then I’d be doing one on Thursday with a JV.
And I said, I don’t care if you’re jv ing with, like, one of your clients who does nothing but post it on his personal Facebook page. Nine people show up Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, every single week. I said, it only takes about ten weeks before you got 30 reps in and you started to refine those stories. And then you, you know, like, I was sharing with him, and I’ll share with you guys, like, the little things, like, we’ve done this where, I don’t know, I was doing a presentation that I’ve done five times, and then suddenly I said something, and when I said it, I leaned in like this.
And we went, oh, that was good. So now what does it say in the script? Lean in. Because if I don’t put it in the script, I’m never going to personally remember to do that again.
I might do it randomly, just thinking about. I just go like that. But the only reason I did that was, like, just that morning I’ve been watching Zig Ziglar. And he does that move when he, you know, he asks a deep question and it’s the same thing.
He puts the arm over and he leans in like that and asked the question. If he was speaking on a stage, he would get down on one knee, always the same way. And it was the same move. So I had it somewhere in my subconscious, but when I deliver it two weeks later, I might not even think about that.
So now it says in the script, now, when we studied what I did, we noticed there were parts where suddenly I started talking a little bit faster because I was really excited. But I actually needed to pause between sentences and give the audience some time to think about what I was saying. Like, even just there, you know, I slowed down. You don’t know those things until you’ve just gotten in the reps and observed and studied and watched your own presentations.
And so that’s the beauty of working with small partners both ways. The cool thing is it’s also a heck of a lot easier to get somebody who’s got 1000 people on their list to say, yeah, I’ll host a webinar with you and you can host one with me, and it’s a lot easier to get them to switch. And then, you know, you get your reps in, but also they host a webinar with you and you grow your list by 50 people like that. When you’re starting out, there’s very little you can do in an hour of your time to get 50 people on your list.
Because even if they don’t show up, they’re on your list. I don’t know what most of you, when you’re starting out, can do with an hour of your time to get 50 people on your list. Please tell me, I’m asking for a friend.
Robby: We’ll add it to list launch challenge.
Matt: Here’s the deal. You know, 8 hours a day, that’s 400 subscribers a day. There are not many people out there adding 400 qualified people to their list every single day.
Robby: Exactly.
Matt: So even you say, oh, only I have 50 people in my loan. I want to work with the big boys. Well, work with the small. And then, you know, do ten of those and then go up to people with 2000 people and then 3000.
Work your way up. Because here’s the thing. If you do ten of those, let’s say you have 500 people on your list and you do ten with people and you get 50 subscribers. Now you have 1000 subscribers.
A little bit of attrition, but just work with me here. Now you can go after people who’ve got slightly bigger lists because you’ve got something to offer. Now they’re sending 80. You do ten of those, you’ve got 1800 subscribers.
Even with attrition, you got 1500. Now you’ve got more. To offer somebody with 2000, they’re sending 100. You do ten of those.
Now you got 2500, you got something to offer somebody with 3000, they’ll send you 125, and so on. And now you’re only having to do eight of them to get to another thousand. And then so on, so forth.
Robby: And on the affiliate side there, it’s important to remember that you’re getting your reps in too.
If they bring you on at all, you’re getting in front of your audience in a way that serves them. Plus, you are practicing that webinar thing. That way when you grow your business to that point, you will know how to do it, how to host the webinars, how to use the training. You will have seen the webinars enough that especially the more different programs that you can work with, you’ll start to understand what you like and what connects with you and what you can put into your webinars in the future, which, you know,
Matt: that’s a really good point.
I mean, you’re attending webinars and learning from them and seeing how your audience, like, it’s not just, it’s different when you attend a webinar, right, as an attendee, because you’re trying to, like, learn stuff, right? When you’re on there and you’re watching how your audience responds to them and the things that they do, and you’re making notes like, oh, when he did that, my audience really? That’s good. You know it all.
Robby: You’re in the chat with them.
Matt: Yeah.
Robby: Like, you can have that conversation and some of that material is gold because it’s you connecting straight with your audience.
Matt: Yeah.
And then with the smaller ones too. I didn’t even think about this. But the smaller ones, like, there’s something about, you know, now he’s blown up. You know, our friend Jonathan Milligan, I mean, we started promoting Jonathan when he definitely didn’t have a list of more than a few thousand people.
You know, and yet we introduced tons of people in our audience. Like, we still hear about it from, like, Phil and Gwen and Mary. I’m trying to think of a few others that we introduced him, that we actually. I think that was probably it.
Jim Folsom, we introduced all them. They still follow Jonathan, and to them, it was like we introduced them to a hidden gem. If we promote Jeff Walker, it’s like, yeah, they’ve all heard of Jeff Walker. We promote Ryan Levesque.
I mean, yeah, the product’s great. We sell a lot of them. We make a lot of money. But it’s like, yeah, I already know who that guy is.
You know. Yeah, I bought through your link map because I wanted you to get the commission and I wanted your bonuses, but it wasn’t like, a man. Thank you so much for introducing me to Stu McLaren. You know, it’s like, I heard of him.
I’ve been listening to his podcast for three years, dude. You know, there’s this, like, I’m introducing them to, like, underground heroes, you know, and, like, these people that they’ve never heard of. And it’s really, really cool, these subject matter experts. And then we’re growing our list together.
A lot of times we end up in masterminds together. We have a certain connection together. You know, the marketing is a lot easier sometimes, and there’s just. I don’t know, it’s just.
It’s a really cool experience to kind of do that together. So look for people who, you know, they’re at your level or one level above. You know, certainly the one level above can still be like the. You know, they’re not bunt singles, but you can hit some doubles with those people.
Stop trying to go for the home runs initially. Again, you do enough of these, and eventually you wake up one day and you have a list of 45,000 people, and you can, you know, so there’s probably a lesson for us. Robby, let’s do more of these with, you know, some people. The third thing we talked about was, I think, what you called it, a list of demands to make.
I called it things to ask for. One of us was being polite. You know, the cool thing about this is, like, with somebody doing a first time webinar, or even if they’d done a couple, they don’t know necessarily what to give you as an affiliate. So you, as the affiliate, get to set the rules.
And we basically said, alan, okay, here’s what we need. And he had to get it to us. And that’s the cool thing. About this is like, you get to say those things, but he feels like, oh, my gosh, you guys did such a service.
Like, he told me the other day that because we forced him to do it, it’s like now he has everything ready for all these other JV partners, all these people he’s doing webinars with. He’s like, well, here’s the file that’s already done. Like, I know, here’s your link, here’s the file, here’s all the images.
Robby: Here’s what the landing page looks like.
Matt: Yeah,
Robby: he’s done now. I would say 90% to 95% of the work, and it’s just plug and play going forward for him.
Matt: And so when you’re approaching somebody, the lesson there is, you know, don’t be afraid to hold their hand. Robby, you were super helpful.
Alan. I mean, he. I don’t know if I told you this. Maybe I did, but he and I were talking afterward.
He were just talking about, like, you know, how things went. He’s like, I gotta tell you, Robby is. He’s got a little bit of a sudden action. He’s like, Robby is just the nicest.
He might be the nicest person I’ve ever talked to. I don’t know if I.
Robby: Did I tell you that he didn’t say that.
Matt:Well, yeah, he was super complimentary.And I mean, you spent, what, half hour, maybe more? I probably spent.
Robby: Yeah, half hour to an hour with him, just walking him through landing page setup and different types of emails that he would want to send, what his introduction automation should look like. Just some of the stuff that, as an affiliate, we would expect.
Because part of what we were doing was trying to set him up to do his future webinars.
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Matt: Yeah, exactly.
Robby: And so giving him the tools and kind of the marketing ideas of, okay, here’s what an affiliate is looking for. You know, it’s the same things that anybody watching this is looking for.
What do you want? You want to have some swipe copy, right? You don’t want to have to write everything that goes into all your emails. You want to have your landing page that’s set up.
You want to hope that when you’re sharing, you know, a webinar with your audience, that they have some sort of welcome sequence instead of just show up, show up, show up, show up, because that gets really boring. So he had a whole welcome sequence with his story and phase that in over a couple of days. So everything that you’re looking for as an affiliate, you can share that with somebody if they haven’t done a JV promo before, and it’s just an opportunity to work with each other to build both of your platforms.
Matt: Yeah, I mean, I didn’t even, like, this is not why we did this with Alan, but we did it with Alan because he’s in start, so he’s in our mastermind, and we just, like, we wanted to help him, you know?
I don’t know that I ever would have done it for anybody else, but I’m glad that we did because it showed that, like, we can help him. And then, of course, we succeed more because he has better marketing, and he’s going to remember that. Like, he’s. I mean, that was just over a month ago, and he just brought you up on the call the other day.
Like, he still remembers. He still. When we talked the other day was like, oh, my gosh, you guys, that email that you sent, you know, as an affiliate, because he’s on our list. Like, that email that you sent, I’m totally having, you know, JV partners send that.
It’s like, we might want to edit a little bit, you know? I mean, that was a good email, man. Don’t copy it. Exactly.
No, I’m just kidding. But, like, I think for. He’s learning. Here’s the thing, Robby.
Robby: When you do this for your partners, they will remember it, which means they will want to promote you more, and they will want to tell other people.
Matt: To do JV webinars with you.And again, you know, you end up expanding your list and expanding your influence and possibly they might even tell somebody.This is the thing I found is like, Alan’s really good friends.
He has 700 people on his list.Actually, it’s now in the 800s because, you know, doing with us.
But like, he has a friend, one particular friend that would be a really good partner for us that he’s really, really tight with is another friend that actually is already one of our top partners.
But that’s the point.But he has another one that would be a really good partner.And there’s a certain level of influence there that, you know, could mean good things for us.So anyway,
Robby: yeah, I was going to say the other thing that I thought was really cool about this is it kind of put us in that beginner mindset again.Like sometimes it’s really easy to get really far out there and be like, we know what we’re doing and we’re going to run these promos.
And it was so good for us to step back and be like, okay, as a beginner affiliate, essentially, what do we need?What’s the minimum swipe copy we need?What are the minimum tools that we need in order to promote this?
And so having that beginner mind is just a wonderful way for you to check what you’re doing and make sure that you’re really connecting with your audience and doing that.Serving like we were talking about before.
Matt: Yeah, there’s a lot you can learn.That really is the ultimate lesson is you’re going to learn so much from each other, and that’s super powerful.The last thing, and you brought this up, you’ve added this to the list.
We’re promoting Alan again at the beginning of the year because beginning of the year’s resolutions, I know you and I both agree I think New Year’s resolutions are total garbage.What is it about January 1?
Oh, that’s a good time to set a goal.I set a goal just the other day, and it expires in middle of February.I don’t need a new year, but
Robby: for 80% of the population out there
Matt: for a fresh start.And they just think there’s something magical about New Year’s day.And so they’re going to set all these goals.And we know that the most common one is to lose some weight.
So we have to do this.Like, it makes total sense for us to do this.And here’s the cool thing is, I mean, we’ll probably New Year’s is it just a little bit? But 90 on both ends, collectively, 93% of the work’s already done.
The 7% is me making it something new year’s related.You’re not to talk to Alan again about this.He’s a great guy.No, I’m just saying you don’t have to, you don’t have to talk to him.I don’t have to do anything.
I mean, there’s nothing to be done.And then he and I both just, instead of him being like, hey, can we get on Zoom 20 minutes early?
Because I don’t know if we’ll both show up five minutes early and do our thing, you know, and we already know because we already debriefed about it, and so we’ve learned the lessons.We’re going to apply them next time.
And I personally think it’s, I think it’s going to do three times better.You know, that’s just my personal belief.So as an affiliate, do these things,
Robby: can I ask you, I’m going to ask you a question, put you on the spot as an affiliate, like saying within a couple months of each other too much.
Matt: How are you.
Robby: Yeah, how are you going to promote this to the same audience? You know, is it, do you have a different angle? Is it.They’re like, hey, wait, I’ve seen these emails before.I mean, number one, because that’s, I’m thinking it’s important because you can, as an affiliate, you can promote the similar or the same offer repeatedly.
You can do that several times a year.And maybe that should be, you know, for those of you setting your New Year’s resolutions, maybe there’s a resolution for you, or a goal is to promote the same thing, you know, once a quarter and see how that impacts your business.
Matt: Yeah, I think it depends a lot on the offer.When something opens up once a year, like product launch, formula, like we’re talking about, well, promote it once a year.We found, and I know I was talking with an entrepreneur, won’t mention Steve McLaren’s name, but I was talking with Steve McLaren.
Yeah.And what we realized is about 20% of, and we found this to be true with actually a little bit higher with some of our stuff, but he found about 20%. We found that about one third of all affiliate sales in a given year were referrals from the year before.That means they opted in.
Maybe they came to Sue’s webinar or they came to Michael Hyatt’s webinar, or they came to whatever.They opted in for the free video series or the ebook or the quiz or the assessment doesn’t matter.They bought a year later.
Part of that is, you know, in a launch, it’s 1417 days.On average, 17.2 days is actually the average.It’s probably been shorter today. We haven’t run that average in a couple of years.Launches are getting a little bit shorter.
That’s a pretty quick amount of time to be like, oh, I like this person.I feel that I can trust them. And, oh, yeah, I’m going to give them thousands of dollars potentially.
Well, then they go a whole year of being on that list and they attend some of their Facebook lives and they laugh at a few of their emails and they read one of their books and they’re like, yep, when that thing opens up next time I’m in, then you get that effect of, like, literally when the workshop starts.
For example, for tribe, the first question that, like a thousand people have is when does registration open up for the course?And you’re going 1000 people times $2,000.That means, you know, there’s $2 million on day one.
If we don’t get a single new person, you know, you just know you’re getting 2 million like that.It’s a cool feeling as the product owner, but I say that to say that that’s kind of shows you what happens over the course of a year.
And so year to year, we’ll promote things very similarly.Of course, the difference, we’re looking at 2020, when we promoted tribe in 2020, we rewrote the emails from scratch. I literally didn’t even look at the emails from 2019.
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Why? Global pandemic. Maybe we were six weeks into a global pandemic. Not even that much. It was like four weeks when it started. Literally a month almost to the day.
Robby: Yeah.
Matt: Kind of needed to tweak things. We needed to talk about the value of this from that perspective. Now, two months later, of course, we would not have done two months later if it was April to June.
Let’s think about what two months later was.We not do April to June.But it made sense to do it at the beginning of the year.So, yeah, the big difference will be that it’s new year’s. Itized. Sounds like a George W.
New Year’s attached.I need to get my friend. Sorry. Oh, boy Wow. We’ll link to that. We got a good friend named John Morgan who’s a George W.Bush impersonator. He’s like, the other guy died.
There were two big George W.Bush impersonators and one guy Steve passed away and John’s the other one.And anyway, I should give him New Year’s a ties it.
We want to promote this for New Year’s, so it makes sense. We’ll tweak it. And I know he will too. And we’ll probably, he’ll encourage him to like tweak the title and a little bit of his marketing to fit that, you know, like new year, new you type thing.
But otherwise, pretty much the same messaging. The one thing, just from a practical standpoint, of course, we remove buyers. So we will remove people who bought, who signed up for his offer.
You know, that makes total sense. Like when we promote PlF every year, we remove the buyers.There’s no point.You know, we might even, this is something we’ll talk about, Robbie. We might segment, not segment out, but segment to the side.
People who clicked, we don’t look at people who clicked because we want to include people not only who registered, but people who clicked over to the replay because that didn’t require a registration.
And so we’ll look at like, okay, these people probably watched some of it or registered. They got his follow up emails, blah, .They know what’s coming. We’ll probably take those and segment them over.
You know, I don’t know, it’ll be like 500 people, 400 people, whatever. We’ll take those 400 and they’ll kind of have a slightly different path where we use.I’ll probably address the fact that, hey, you know, this webinar that you registered for back in, you know, November, well, he’s, you know, he’s doing it again.
And now’s your opportunity.It’s a new year, blah. And that’s about it.That’ll be the extent of the difference Nice. So there’s things you can do like that if you have people.
Robby: I think that’ll be helpful for our audience to see that how you can just change a couple of things and all of a sudden you have a whole new perspective on promotion.
Matt: Here’s what I’ll say for AIM members only. We’re going to tell you at the beginning. Click here if you want to opt out of this campaign.Basically, this isn’t for you. Don’t ever do that with our emails or anyone else’s emails because you want to watch the marketing.
We talk about this so often today Become a student of marketing Fall in love with marketing.
There’s a reason why I don’t unsubscribe from very many marketers emails, even though I get a lot of emails, it’s because I want to study them.
So I work with not clicking there You could be 6ft tall, 181 pounds, you know, and you, you’re as fit as a fiddle. I don’t even know what that means Literally, no clue.
But whatever, you could be fit as a fiddle, as I’d say down in some parts of somewhere, and this isn’t for you. Still, watch the marketing, watch how we do it That’s my advice to you.
So I hope you got a ton out of that talk with Robbie there. I just think that it’s interesting to talk about some different things here.
Speaking of different things, we’ve got an episode, a couple of episodes coming up that I am particularly excited about I want to let you know about We got one with Richie Norton All about time management is dead.
You know how to reclaim your time and get bigger results With my friend Richie Norton, he and I go back Oh, my gosh.
So far, he’s been one of our top affiliates over the years Just meant so much to me Sent me a text the other day that, like, made my week.
I got another one all about how a first time affiliate finished in second place in a big launch with Tasha Shore And then, guys, it’s the holiday time Can you believe it?
Like, when we hit mid October, it’s time to start thinking about Black Friday and Cyber Monday So we’re going to start our annual holiday.
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
| Find Your First 100 Affiliates | Affiliate Program Terms & Conditions Template | Get My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email |
| Avoid The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes | Turn Inactive Affiliates into Your Best Affiliates | Get My Template for Writing Affiliate Emails |
| Affiliate Marketing Sales Secrets | Learn How to Create a Resources Page | Learn How to Write a Product Review |
The post How to Triple Your Webinar Sales with Affiliates appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### If you have an audience of business owners, marketers, or anyone who makes a living online, then this affiliate opportunity is for you. EasyWebinar’s Easysuite bundle is exactly what busy business owners are looking for to simplify and automate their marketing and sales in 2025…here’s how YOU can be a part of it!
About Easysuite by EasyWebinarEasyWebinar does exactly what its name says. It makes hosting and delivering live or automated webinars effortless. And now with their revolutionary new CRM, Easysuite, your audience will never need another tool to track and nurture their leads. This bundle integrates with all the other software you already use and is great for software demos, live training, online courses, internal team training, and more.
Interested in becoming an affiliate? Click Here to Email Me for More Information
Target Audience* Small businesses * Big enterprise * Online marketers * Entrepreneurs * Course creators * Coaches * Or anyone looking to track their leads and make more sales!
Launch DatesThis is going to be one of the biggest launches to start off the year right in 2025.
Pricing, Commissions, & PrizesProduct PricingThis bundle offers unprecedented savings on integration costs. Last year, this package sold out during Black Friday even without a CRM.
This year’s launch is set to surpass all expectations, featuring their revolutionary new CRM. This cutting-edge addition will seamlessly replace all existing CRM solutions for creators’ webinar funnels, establishing a new benchmark in the industry.
- $3,995 for EasyWebinar Pro Lifetime + 6 Months Free CRM Access. Easy Payment Plan: 3 Months No Interest, $1,331 per month.
- $985 for 1 Year EasyWebinar Pro + 3 Months Free CRM Access.
Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity to help your audience elevate their webinar experience to the next level.
Commissions & PrizesOne of their affiliates has an EPC (Earnings Per Click) of around $41. And, another affiliate has earned approximately $40k in the last 12 months!
- Earn 25% of every sale
- Prizes ranging from $10k to $100k!
Past AffiliatesEasyWebinar has been promoted by some of the biggest names online including: Amy Porterfield, Susie Moore, James Wedmore, Erwin Mayer, Matthew Wolfe, Caitlin Boyle, Caitlin Bacher, and more!
Interested in becoming an affiliate? Click Here to Email Me for More Information
Click Here to Learn More About Our Recommended Affiliate ProgramsThe post Affiliate Opportunity – Easysuite by EasyWebinar appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### Today, we’re exploring the darker side of affiliate marketing—fraud, rule-breaking, and shady activities. While it’s rare, affiliate fraud can be a costly problem. In this episode, I’ll guide you on how to identify affiliate fraud, prove it’s happening, and take steps to stop it.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Looking for some good affiliate programs to promote? Check out our recommended affiliate programs here!
Links Mentioned in this EpisodeYour First 100 Affiliates
The 3 Secrets of Success Affiliate Programs
This Affiliate Program Just Made a Fatal Mistake: Here’s What They Should Have Done Instead
Text me at 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
| | | | --- | --- | | | | | | | |
Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Solve the 15 Biggest Challenges for All Affiliate Programs
What the Latest Research Says About Affiliate Bonus Packages
How to Give Your Affiliates What They Need to Succeed
How to Build an Army of Loyal Affiliates
Got a Low-Priced Product? Here’s How to Run an Affiliate Program
How Top Affiliates are Closing Sales in 2024
How to Identify and Stop Affiliate Fraud Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
| Find Your First 100 Affiliates | Affiliate Program Terms & Conditions Template | Get My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email |
| Avoid The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes | Turn Inactive Affiliates into Your Best Affiliates | Get My Template for Writing Affiliate Emails |
| Affiliate Marketing Sales Secrets | Learn How to Create a Resources Page | Learn How to Write a Product Review |
The post How to Identify and Stop Affiliate Fraud appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### If you have an audience of working women, homemakers, busy moms, or anyone who loves incredible premium planners and meal prep, then this affiliate opportunity is for you. Passionate Penny Pincher’s planners and menu plans are exactly what women are looking for to make their lives easier in 2024…here’s how YOU can be a part of it!
Who Is Laurie Hise & Passionate Penny Pincher?Laurie started blogging on a whim in the fall of 2009, after reading tons of amazing money-saving sites over the last few years. In September of that year, her father-in-law contracted West Nile Encephalitis, and she spent many sleepless nights reading blogs while her husband was away taking care of his Dad.
The one thing she didn’t see promoted often on many sites was a push for donations of really cheap and free items, as well as menu planning based on weekly sale ads. So, Publix Penny Pincher (now Passionate Penny Pincher) was born!
Never in a million years would she have seen the next ten years coming. Since starting on blogspot back in 2009, Passionate Penny Pincher has helped millions of folks save money on groceries, Amazon deals, Dollar Tree DIY’ing, and making simple frugal meals at home too.
In 2019 they launched their first Passionate Penny Pincher products (their first one sold out in 24 hours ~ crazy!) So now in addition to keeping up with all the deals they share each day, they’ve created a few simple ideas that have helped tens of thousands of women beautifully care for their home, family, and finances too.
Interested in becoming an affiliate? Click Here to Email the Affiliate Manager for More Information
What to Promote…Passionate Penny Pincher Academic Year Work PlannerAvailable until they sell out, this is the ultimate tool in helping you balance your work life and become more efficient and organized. It includes simple prompts and clear directions to help with goal setting, organizing your workspace, encouraging those around you, prioritizing tasks and so much more! With a Monday start and vertical hourly layout, you’ll be prepared for whatever your week might hold.
Summer Survival KitAvailable to promote all summer long (and even into the winter for a taste of summer), the Summer Survival Kit includes everything you need to have a stress-free summer! You’ll be prepared to check off those tasks and have a delicious dinner on the table every night. It includes our popular Summer Menu Plans Box, Kids Chore Chart, To Do List Notebook and set of Blank Journals.
Whole Foods Menu Planning BoxThis simple menu plan makes it easy to feed your family with recipes that can be prepped in under 20 minutes. These delicious and healthy meals on your table each night are even easier with the included grocery shopping lists. The Whole Foods Menu Plan was designed with recipes full of fresh ingredients that are either minimally processed or not processed at all.
Interested in becoming an affiliate? Click Here to Email the Affiliate Manager for More Information
2025 Home Planner (Launching Fall 2024)
This is NOT your traditional planner. The Home Planner is a game changer for busy families. It includes pre-made checklists, quick weekly projects and a recommended Bible scripture to read during the week. This planner helps you beautifully take care of your home, without having to think through everything that needs to be done!
Student PlannerThe PPP Student Planner helps students of all ages, including elementary, high school, and college, get organized, stay focused, and be inspired throughout the school year! Inside, you will find checklists for everyday tasks, along with back-to-school checklists, class schedules, a vision board, note pages, and so much more! The budget and savings worksheet allows you to create financial goals and plan for the future.
Target Audience* Christian Women, * Homemakers, * Busy Working Moms, * Working Women, * Young Adults, * People who struggle with staying focused, * women who are overwhelmed with managing their homes and want clear direction, * people who love planners and organizing * anyone who has to make dinner
Pricing & CommissionsAverage commissions are between $8 and $20 per sale.
- 15% commission on physical products
- 50% commission on digital products
Interested in becoming an affiliate? Click Here to Email the Affiliate Manager for More Information
Click Here to Learn More About Our Recommended Affiliate ProgramsThe post Affiliate Opportunity – Passionate Penny Pincher appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### Let’s be honest: managing a successful affiliate program isn’t a walk in the park. Every affiliate program faces its share of challenges that can hinder its success. In this episode, we’re tackling the 15 biggest challenges that affiliate programs encounter and exploring why they can be so problematic. But there’s good news…this isn’t just about the hurdles. I’ll also guide you through effective strategies to overcome these obstacles and propel your program to new heights.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Need help activating your affiliates? Use my proven email templates for getting inactive affiliates in the game and making sales! Get them here!
Links Mentioned in this EpisodeVIDEO – How to Decide the Right Affiliate Commission Structure
Your First 100 Affiliates Report
Affiliate Activation Email Templates
How I Built a $1 Million a Month Affiliate Program In Only Two Years Without Any Connections or Credentials
Sample Affiliate Training
Text me at 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
| | | | --- | --- | | | | | | | |
Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyWhat the Latest Research Says About Affiliate Bonus Packages
How to Give Your Affiliates What They Need to Succeed
How to Build an Army of Loyal Affiliates
Got a Low-Priced Product? Here’s How to Run an Affiliate Program
How Top Affiliates are Closing Sales in 2024
How to Find Affiliates Using Affiliate Program Leaderboards
How to Solve the 15 Biggest Challenges for All Affiliate ProgramsI wish I could lie to you and tell you that running a successful affiliate program is easy, but it’s not. In fact, there are a lot of challenges that get in the way of doing so. And today I share 15 of the biggest affiliate program challenges and why they often hold people back. But don’t worry, this episode isn’t all doom and gloom.
I’m also going to share how to solve those challenges. So we’re talking about challenges today, not challenges like we talked about a few episodes ago, running a challenge. We’re talking about the obstacles, the things that get in the way of a successful affiliate program.
And I have 15 of them, as I mentioned. Now, why 15 actually has nothing to do with that’s a good number or anything like that. Actually, the reality is the studies show if I wanted to make this the
perfect title, there would have been 17 and I would have done what I teach, which is get it to 17 or I would have cut it back to ten. But when I thought about what have been the biggest obstacles, and I’ve been in this for 18 years, we kind of front, if I did, did this last year, 17 and 17, oh, you know, that would have been a good thing. But like, when I made the list, there were 15.
That’s what we ended up with. You know, there were 15. There wasn’t a 16th and there wasn’t one where I was like, I could kind of cut that out.
And so I want to start at the very beginning. As we go through this, we’re going to kind of go in phases as it worked out. And I think there’s roughly five. I run through the list here.
There’s roughly five in each phase. We’re going to start at the very, very beginning. Before you even bring on affiliates, what are the challenges that even get you to that point? And the first challenge is finding the right technology, the right technology that has the right kind of tracking.
You know, that’s number one. If it doesn’t track, if affiliate sales don’t track, if it doesn’t track from the contact record, from the click through the contact record, you know, 97, 98% of affiliate sales are being attributed correctly. Well, then that’s a big problem.
So we got to find the right tracking. There’s tons of stuff out there. I’ll share ultimately what my recommendation is here in a moment.
But you also need good reporting. What do you need in terms of reporting? You need daily numbers. You need to be able to run a report that says, show me what’s happening for this time period.
You need your conversion stats. You need to be able to see, you know, at least see or create leaderboards. You need to know who your inactives are.
Even if it’s a little hard to get and requires a little digging, it must be accessible. Those are the big things you need to know. You need to know who’s moving, who’s growing, who’s growing month over month, who’s going stagnant, who’s falling off, who was doing $2,000 a month on average in 2022, and now they’re
doing $1,000 a month in 2023. So we can reach out to them. Reporting is not just about having cool stats or being able to put together really cool pie charts or graphs. It’s about the actions that you take as a result of that reporting.
So my recommendation is go with whatever you have if it’s an integrated solution, you know, number one thing you said is tracking. So you need cookies, you need contact record, and then look at reporting. I can’t make a recommendation for any individual or for a blanket statement until I know their individual needs and I know their
individual situation. If you’ve got a shopping cart set up on Shopify, I’m going to have a few different recommendations. If you have a retail product, I’m going to have different
recommendations. If you’ve got lead magnets into sales, into a webinar, into a video series, I’m going to have different recommendations. Odds are your current integrated solution, that is, if you’re on
clickfunnels, if your opt in pages, your webinar pages, and your sales pages and your order forms are on clickfunnels, clickfunnels is the best affiliate tracking for you. Do I love it? No, I don’t.
Do I have major issues with it? Yes, I do. But that’s the best one. If that’s what you’re using.
Don’t make the same mistakes I’ve made with my affiliate programs. Learn my top 20 affiliate program mistakes…and how to avoid them!
If you’re on Infusionsoft and all that stuff through Infusionsoft, then Infusionsoft is your best option. So it just really depends. There’s so many recommendations.
So that’s the number one challenge is finding the right technology. And if you’re like, I really don’t know, man, like, here’s my situation.
What should I set up? Text me at 260-217-4619 I’ll make the best recommendation I can based on your situation. The second thing, the second big challenge is website problems. If you’ve got problems with loading speed and image and video
quality, like how to navigate your website, is it easy, the responsiveness, does it work on mobile? I mean, we found an issue on my website the other day, pretty important page, and when I switched to an iPhone 14 and I’m like, oh my gosh, this button goes off the side of the page. Not a huge deal, but it cuts off like the last two letters of the text.
That was not the case on iPhone twelve. So as far as I know, it wasn’t the case on the iPhone 13. I don’t know. We didn’t test it on that.
It was not the case on the eleven. It was not the case in all the mobile testing that we did. But for whatever reason, when I switched phones, this thing was cutting off and so we had to address that. That’s a problem.
We figured it out. It was super easy. Well, is that an issue? You need to address those things before you have affiliates, your content quality, your sales page, your payment options.
Do you have the right payment options if the majority of your audience uses PayPal, especially with lower ticket items, for instance, we don’t offer PayPal in our high ticket stuff. Nobody ever used it. We had it for years.
Not one person ever used it. But on our low ticket stuff, like $17 to $500, tons of people use PayPal. So make sure you have the right payment options. Traffic leaks if you have a giant phone number on the top of your page that doesn’t provide any tracking and somebody calls in.
If you’re not using the right tracking, that tracks contact record and stuff like that, the affiliate’s not going to get credit. If you’ve got a ton of external links that are easy to get to. If you’ve got links to other products, your own affiliate links. If you’ve got links to pages on your site that aren’t going to track, that’s a problem.
You can’t have that. If you get an affiliate program, sometimes that means you need a separate funnel for your affiliates. You need separate landing pages, usually pretty easy.
You can clone and edit, and it doesn’t take hours and hours. Usually you can. I mean, like we can clone an entire sales page and with tons of stuff, we can clone it in 20 minutes for our affiliate, maybe ten. So the solution here, if you’ve got website issues, fix them, compress your images, get a better server, really like you’re hosting on a $30
a month server. If you upgrade to like, we recommend Agathon. That’s who we use. If you want mattmcwames.
com forward slash agathon. Right? It’s like a hundred. I don’t know.
We pay like a month. We’ve got a few other things that we pay for, but the hosting itself is like a month, $70. If I make one additional sale of a $500 product and pay the $200 commission, I’m $230 in the black on that one. So get a better server.
Test on all browsers, test on mobile. Right? Hire a copywriter, add payment options. We just added PayPal again to a few things that we’d missed over the years.
Close those leaks. That’s how you fix your website. The third thing is conversion issues. Now, this sort of ties in what we talked about, but this isn’t like
errors. Sometimes, even though your website looks great, it works great. The button doesn’t just go off randomly off the side of the screen on an iPhone 14, it fails to convert visitors into buyers. Maybe certain payment options don’t work.
We found out years ago we had a page, and for some reason, unbeknownst to anybody, we never figured out why. We just ended up deleting the page and recreating it from scratch.
International orders would not go through. Crazy. So what are the reasons why your website’s not converting? How do we optimize the sales page?
How do we optimize the landing page, the follow up? Like, how do you optimize your follow up so that if somebody sends 100 visitors, an affiliate sends 100 visitors? Yeah, you might sell one person through your own efforts, and they might sell one person through theirs. But how do you convert an extra person?
How do you get that conversion up to one additional person out of How do you optimize your shopping cart, your sales page, things like that? These low conversion rates are going to prevent affiliates from ever signing up. So again, we just talked about increasing speed.
But check your pricing, make sure it’s competitive. More payment options. And I don’t just mean PayPal, things like that. What about financing or payment plans?
More support options, chat and email. Money back guarantee the longer is better. Longer money back guarantees are better. And here’s why.
The longer the money back guarantee, the lower the return rate. Because when somebody sees a one week return or a two week return, there’s a ticking time clock.
And if they don’t get to it in two weeks, they just return it. But if it’s 90 days, six months, I also say this, quite frankly, they forget about it. But they also gives them time to actually implement. If it’s a course, for example, they have time to go through it and
they’re not going, okay, I got to finish this course in two weeks. And then life got in the way and somebody got sick and I had other things to do. I got busy with work and nevermind, I’ll just return it.
And make sure that you have exit intent pop ups on your landing pages. You can capture an additional five to 10% leads on those. On your sales pages, make sure you have x and intent and pop ups and offer some sort of a discount, or at least capture the lead. We did this with my book.
I talked about this a few episodes ago where thousands of people bought the book, but we also had like 1000 people opt in. I don’t think it was quite a thousand, but we had like eight or And we converted 20% of those into buyers.
So you think about that. You go, let’s just go with 800. That means we converted 160. That’s 160 people who otherwise we would have never converted.
That’s not a huge deal. But out of a couple thousand, I mean, that’s, you know, we’re increasing our close rate by six, 7%. That’s actually a pretty big deal. Make sure you’re retargeting.
Just don’t use an affiliate link to retarget track in other ways, like using a UTM, Universal, whatever UTM stands for universal tracking. I forget what it stands for. So look that up in a minute, but make sure you’re retargeting. These are usually super cheap.
You retarget like cart abandons. Usually you can pay $5. I mean, we’ve done it where we’ve done like thousand dollar sales for five to $10.
Why should I have to pay that? That’s, you know, I gotta pay the affiliate commission too. Yeah, you’re gonna pay dollar 400 for the affiliate commission and an extra $10 for the sale.
I mean, do you like, that’s. Sometimes I hear, hear this from people and I’m like, really? Do you hear what you’re saying? You’re going to pay $10 to make 600.
Even take out the credit card processing. So the credit card processing, 30 on 1000. So you’re going to pay $10 to make 570. I mean, sign me up for a machine where I can put $10 in and it cranks out 570.
In fact, sign me up for a machine where I can put $10 in and get 20 all day long. I’ll just sit there all day long putting $10 bills into the machine. So make sure you’re retargeting. Make sure you’re testing different parts of the funnel.
Raise prices lower, prices change. Copy things like that. Offer bundles. This can significantly increase your AOS, which is your average order size.
Just do the math. A 10% conversion with a dollar 50 a OS, that’s $5 right there. That’s better than a 15% conversion with a dollar 30 OS, which would be 450. So, yes, your conversions could be an issue, but your AOS matters, too.
Again, if I’ve got an affiliate program and my conversions are is enough higher to make up the difference. Well, the affiliate’s gonna make more money promoting you than me. So, speaking of money and making more money, next challenge is determining the right commission or another way. I kinda went back and forth on this one.
Uncompetitive commissions. Now, I’ve got a video that I’m going to link to in the show notes on how to decide your commission structure. And that’s linked in the show notes. It goes through in detail.
It’s about a 1012 minutes video that goes through in detail. But the gist is this. Number one, you start with your price. So let’s just say dollar 500.
Then you subtract your incremental costs. What’s incremental means it’s an incremental per unit cost. It’s not. Oh, it cost me $1,000 to record the course.
You’re going to pay that $1,000 whether you sell one or a thousand. So let’s just say I got to pay $100 per unit. So the most you can pay in breakeven is $400. In other words, if you paid your affiliates an 80% commission on Then you want to subtract your time.
Now, this is incremental. So this is not why I have to record the course again or I have to make the product. No, for most of you, this is nothing.
You don’t have time. But let’s say you offer a ten minute call with every customer, and you value that at $100. Well, now you’re down to 300.
And then lastly, you want to take a look at the market. You got to be in the same ballpark. If the market’s at 30%, you have to be at 25%. If the market pays a flat fee of $100 per sale and you offer 20% of
a $200 sale, you’re going to get your buck kicked. They offer $100, and you offer 40% of a $100 sale, you might still get your buck kicked. So think of creative ways where you can be competitive.
You’ve got to be competitive and go check out that video, because it walks you through in detail. And the fifth challenge is clearly defining the program policies. This is the boring legal stuff. All right, this is boring, but it’s important.
So things like, you’ve got to get clear on your cookie duration, I recommend lifetime. I’ve done numerous episodes on that, but be clear on the exact length and be ready to explain the why if you don’t offer a lifetime commission, why?
Why don’t you your affiliate eligibility criteria like I’m not a big fan of restricting who can sign up, but there sometimes are reasons why you can’t accept affiliates from a certain country. There are sometimes reasons why you can’t accept affiliates from a certain state.
So you need to define the eligibility criteria that affiliates must meet to join the program. Do they need to have a certain number of website followers or something?
Website visitors or something like that? Your intellectual property, your ip. You have to define your IP policies. Like are they allowed to use trademarks?
Make sure that your affiliate program has a solid agreement (AKA Terms & Conditions). To make things simple, grab my template here!
Are they allowed to use copyrighted material? Like they should not use your company trademark or any copyrighted material unless they have permission. So if you provide content and it’s copyrighted, just make it clear that they’re allowed to use it. Affiliates are allowed to use it.
No one else is. But they are. What are your PPC, your pay per click bidding rules? Are they allowed to bid on your trademark name?
There are certain keywords they can’t bid on. I recommend at the very least, you don’t allow them to bid on something like let’s say the name of your company is Acme Corp or Acme widgets. They’re not allowed to bid on Acme widgets.
Sucks. So sucks has to be a negative keyword or scam has to be a negative keyword. Negative words need to be negative keywords.
Negative keyword means that they can still bid on if we allow it. If we allow them to bid on Acme widgets, but then the person types in Acme widgets suck, then they would show up and we don’t want that. So those are the types of things where you have to be very clear in your PPC bidding rules.
Same thing with your promotional rules and restrictions. We’re going to talk about more about those later. Is there any prohibited content? You know what affiliates cannot promote like this kind of goes back
to types of websites that we would allow. There are times where we don’t allow a website because of the content, if it’s illegal, if it’s offensive, if they’re doing things that we just don’t agree with from a moral or ethical standpoint, our client doesn’t want to be associated with them, then we’re not going to allow them to promote.
It. Doesn’t matter what state or country they’re in. Doesn’t matter how, they could have a million website visitors a day. We’re not going to allow them in.
You want to get clear on how our commissions determine. First click, last click. Is there a split? We’ve talked about that before.
Your payout terms, the frequency and when. And then lastly, get clear on why you would kick somebody out, the circumstances in which you would terminate an affiliates agreement. So violations of company policies, fraud, do you kick them out for non performance? I don’t recommend that.
But do you then just get clear on it. So those are the early, kind of like the pre, even affiliate launch before you even bring on an affiliate challenges. Next we’re going to talk about the early stages of building your affiliate program. What are the challenges you face in the very early stages of building your affiliate program?
So the six biggest challenge, and it’s the first one here kind of in this early stages, you’ve actually, you’ve built the program, you’ve got the right commission, you’ve addressed those conversion issues, you got the right technology, you’ve fixed any website problems, you’ve clearly defined your policies. Now we’re going right.
What are the problems we face now that we’ve built the actual program and it’s ready to go from a legal standpoint? Well, the first biggest problem there, the 6th overall, is finding the right affiliates. I talk so much about this, I’m not going to discuss this, but I wanted to make sure that I at least highlighted this as, okay, it is a challenge.
So I’ve got two solutions for you. Number one, the training that I mentioned earlier. We’ve got the training coming up how I built a million dollar a month affiliate program in only two years without any connections or credentials.
So this applies like, okay, you can have a program that’s just starting out and you don’t have to have connections. If you’ve got 30 friends who all have big lists and they can promote you, you don’t need any of what I’m talking about. Now you can go do a $20 million launch, no problem. Oh, I’ve already got 200,000 people on my list.
You can go do a big launch. You don’t need any of that. But if that’s not you, which is 99. 9%
of the world, come to the training. So we’ll link to that in the show notes. It’s mattmclaims. com
million a month. We will link to that in the show notes. The second thing is go grab my free report about how to find your Mattmcwilliams. com first 100 first 10 zero and it will walk you through.
We’ve even got some email templates in there that you can use. This is a big challenge, finding the right affiliates, finding any affiliates, not so hard. Finding the right affiliates. Pretty big challenge.
Which then leads to the next challenge. This is what the last episode was all about. I talked about how to turn in active affiliates into your best partners. The 7th challenge is affiliate activation.
So if you haven’t listened to that episode, go back and listen to it. I walk you through and in that I talk about our affiliate activation email templates which you can grab@mammothwilliams. com
activate that will address that. All right, so finding the right affiliates and activating them now, we’ll go into depth on some of these here. Number eight is affiliate retention. How do we keep affiliates?
The reality is we work so hard to recruit them, and then we activate them. How do we keep them? How do we keep them? In the last episode, I sort of touched on a little bit because I talked about, in the activation side, I talked about, what are some of
the reasons why affiliates aren’t active? Maybe because of a competitor or because of they’re not getting what they need. We’ll talk about that in a little bit here.
They’re not getting the resources they need. That’s the same reason why they leave sometimes, as I talked about in the last episode, you’ve got an inactive affiliate. They signed up, and they never become active.
Here we are three months later, they still haven’t done anything. That’s like your inactive inactives, right? They’ve never been active, and they’re still not active. Then you’ve got just your regular inactives, which are maybe they
were active 90 days ago, and then they haven’t done anything. So how do we keep them active? How do we just keep them, period? Well, the next two challenges are going to cover a lot of that, but I’m
going to give you the big one, relationships. Relationship building, developing and nurturing and growing, and just really making it a priority to build and nurture those relationships with your affiliates. That’s how you keep them.
I remember years ago when I worked in the insurance industry, we sold insurance leads to agents. This is back in, this is like 2007, 2008. We had about 15 of our top agents come into Nashville, and we wind and dined them, and we brought them in because we were
redesigning our system, and we wanted to know what they wanted. So it was like a mastermind. They were sharing ideas, what works. We kind of divided the day up so we would know how they’re operating, and they could mastermind for an hour or so.
And then we wanted to quiz them, like, what do you need? How do you want this system to work? What are all the features? You want the bells and whistles?
All that. Then we go have fun with them at night. And I remember on the second day, we’re sitting with this good old boy from Texas. Literally, you know, wore a cowboy hat.
And I forget what that thing’s called, but the little, it’s like the necktie with the strings hanging down. It’s got like the gym at the top. And that word’s gonna come to me at the, like, the most random time.
Later today, I’m gonna be like, talking to somebody, I’m gonna shout out what it is. And so anyway, he’s sitting there and he’s like, you know, this guy has raved about us for two days. He’s referred probably six or seven clients to us. This guy loves us.
He is a raving fan, and he’s talked nothing but good for the last 12 hours. Been the life of the party all. And he goes, you know, now that I come to think of it, y’all’s leads ain’t been working out too well the last here few months.
And I’m like, we’re kind of like, what? You’ve been raving about us, referring people to us? And he’s like, yeah. He’s like, now that I look at the numbers, I ain’t been closing no leads.
He’s like, the quality just has been going down. And we’re like, well, that’s not good. And he’s like saying in front of all these other top agents, but why was he still with us? He’d been with us for two years.
He’s still referring people to us. He’s raved about us for 12 hours. And yet over the last couple of months, things have slipped. Why is he still with us?
Why is he raving about us? Why all those things? Because we had a great relationship with him. We’d nurtured that relationship.
And that’s the power of relationship. Even if somebody comes along and offers a little bit better commission, offers a little bit better of something, if you’ve got a great relationship, you’re going to win. All things being equal, Jeffrey Gittimer says one of my favorite
quotes of all time, all things being equal, people want to do business with their friends. All things not being equal, people still want to do business with their friends. So make friends, and you will keep more affiliates. Now, you also keep more affiliates by following what we talk about in
challenges number nine and ten here. Challenge number nine is affiliate communication. There is a balance between not enough and too much. We really got to be careful because you can’t communicate with them
too, too much. You’re going to drive them nuts. But you can’t, like, go weeks at a time and not communicate with your affiliates. That’s what we see most of the time.
I would say if I were looking at communication problems, 97% of communication problems are not enough, 3% are too much. So usually I would tell most of you, don’t even worry about too much. So what are the musts like, what do we have to do in terms of affiliate communication?
Well, number one, you’ve got to communicate about product or service launch. Like if you’re launching a new product or service, you got to tell them about it. You got to tell them about updates, increases in commissions, or we’ve added this new product, we’ve discontinued this product or service.
That’s a big one. We’ve ran out of this product or service. There’s a stock issue. We’ve had supply chain issues for the last few years.
So if that’s affecting things, let your affiliates know. Let them know about discounts, let them know about big promotions, coupons, anything like shipping deadlines. If you’re in retail, they need to know what’s that day? That’s the last day, usually around December, where you can
guarantee shipping in the United States without paying extra money in the lower 48 states. They need to know about that. They need to know about price changes. Now, if it’s a price that fluctuates frequently based on supply and demand, like, I don’t know, eggs, it’s a weird thing for an affiliate,
but if it’s a frequent price adjustment, then you don’t need to communicate those unless it’s fairly significant. But if it’s a product that’s been $99 for four years and you raise it to Commission changes if you add payment options. We did this recently. We changed our payment plan on a product from three times.
Let me do the math. It goes three times 197 to four times 147. We lowered the payment amount ever so slightly, but it was over four payments or no, we went the reverse. Sorry, we went from four to three.
Well, we made sure to communicate that to our affiliates, but you also need to communicate strategies. What’s working for affiliates? What are, what should they be doing on social media or email?
Again, what’s working, what are some tips you can give them? What are some trends? Give them some training. Do periodic trainings we do with evergreen programs.
We like to do at least a training every four to six months. Maybe you want to do quarterly or monthly, something like that. If you want to see a sample training, by the way, if you go to Matt mcWilliams.
com sampletraining, we’ve got a, well, exactly what it says, a sample training. We give you about a two hour training we did for a client, for their affiliates, and then you also will get a couple of the sample worksheets that we use and three different versions of the slides so we’ve got like a keynote PowerPoint and maybe a Google
sheets or a PDF or something like that. So we’ve got all that. They’re totally free. So you can do your own training with your affiliates.
You don’t have to worry about how to reinvent the wheel. Just follow what we do and you can use that as a starting point. So madmcwiams. com
sampletraining so those are the types of things that you have to communicate. There’s plenty more, but this is a big challenge if you get these right, if you simply communicate again, new products updates, program updates, stock issues, discontinued things, discounts, promotions, prices, commissions, payment options, things like that, the strategies, the tips, what’s working, any trends and you train your affiliates at least once a month.
You send them some sort of something that trains them, that gives them an idea or strategy. You are communicating well. The 10th challenge, and this ties back into that affiliate retention side as well, is creating promotional materials.
It’s hard. It is hard to create promotional materials. Whether we’re talking, they need banner ads. Banner ads are still relevant.
Roughly five to 7% of all affiliate sales still come from banner ads today. Mostly five to 7%. Do you want the five to 7% or not?
I do take the time to create ads that are visually appealing and contain a clear call to action. You want those social media graphics as well. About three to 5% of all sales will originate from a social media graphic.
So here we are. We’re talking 10%, roughly ten to 12% total that come from images. Images account for one out of ten sales. That’s a lot of sales to just, we’re not going to do images, obviously,
they need their links and they need to make sure, you need to make sure they work. They need swipe copy. They need swipe copy. Let’s talk real quick about how to create Swipe copy.
All right, number one, hire somebody else to write it, unless you are a professional copywriter. Even if you are a professional copywriter, you should hire an outsider that you’re too close to the product usually to write great swipe copy for your affiliates.
That’s why in our agency we usually write the swipe copy for our clients because our copywriter didn’t create their product. They’re not married to it, so they’re going to write it objectively. Second thing, we just talked about this, including images, including images that they can put in their emails.
Video screen captures, sale graphics, stat screenshots, if you’re talking about statistics, include a screenshot of the stats that can increase validity and believability. Countdown timers. We use motion mail to create countdown timers.
Make sure that you give them the code so they can use that in their emails. Third thing is you got to write different versions for different audiences. When we ran Jeff goins, his book launch, the Art of work, this was the first big book launch that I’d worked on. We identified four core audiences.
We had entrepreneurs, dreamers, faith based, and stay at home moms, stay at home parents. I think we primarily went with stay at home moms on that one just because that was what, like 99. 9% of them were.
So we wrote specific swipe copy for each of those core audiences. So we had affiliates, they had an entrepreneurial audience. They would grab the entrepreneurs, they didn’t even look at the other ones. They had a faith based audience, they grabbed that and so on and so forth.
Fourth, write different lengths of swipe copy. All right? Different links of swipe copy. You don’t necessarily need different links for everything.
Like the final email where it’s like the cards closing now, you know the deadlines approaching. You don’t necessarily need a different link for that, but your main content, where you’re introducing something, you definitely want different links. And then fifth, make sure that you make it clear that swipe copy is a
guide only. I have a post mammograms. com swipe tips and I’m going to link to that in the show notes you can share with your audience.
All right, shows them the best practices for using swipe copy. So share that with your affiliates. Tell them to make their emails personal and specific for their audience.
Use the swipe copy as a guide only. Now, a bonus tip on social media. Don’t forget about social media swipe. Roughly ten to 15% of all opt ins come from social media, so it’s a big deal.
So you need at least Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And then you need images size for those platforms. Like we talked about earlier, this is often an overlooked piece of content. With affiliate programs is a social media swipe copy.
Again, visually appealing, clear call to action optimized for each social platform. Getting back to we talked a lot about Swipe copy there. But as far as other things that you need in terms of these resources for affiliates, these assets, as we said, like creating those
promotional materials, you need coupons, you need discounts most of the time, not always. These are special offers that affiliates can promote to their audience to just encourage them to get across the finish line and make a purchase. And then lastly, videos.
This is so important now, video content. Optimizing video content for the search engines, giving them video content that they can promote is huge. So those are those middle five challenges.
Again, the early stages. Now let’s talk about the later stages. Right? You’re usually not going to deal with these in the first few months,
maybe even the first year, or they’re not worth the time because you’re focused on all these other things, like you’re trying to figure out the technology and get the legal stuff right and get the commissions right, get your website right. You’re trying to find affiliates and get them active and get them to stay on board and then communicate to them and create those promotional materials.
You don’t need to worry about any of these things in the early stages, but as you progress, these are some of those later issues that you’re going to deal with. All right, the number eleven challenge here, and it’s kind of that first that you will encounter in the later stages, is just adapting to changes in technology.
Going back to our very first challenge, which was the technology stuff. Now we’re going to adapt to the changing technology. You’ve got to adapt to to stay relevant.
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I’ll talk more about innovation as a challenge at the very end. And there when I talk about at the end, I’m talking more about innovation in terms of creativity, how we communicate with affiliates, motivate them here. I’m talking about things like integrating with new platforms.
Right. Improving tracking reporting capabilities, introducing new commission models such as split commissions for regular affiliates and coupon affiliates. Right.
So things like advanced tracking and reporting. As you grow, you’ve got to get more advanced in your tracking and reporting abilities so you can measure the performance of your program accurately. So things like how do users go across multiple devices?
When I got started in the affiliate marketing world, 2005, you only needed to track one thing. Like everybody had one computer, that that’s where they clicked on and that’s where they bought. And then, I mean, right around that time was like people started having like a home computer and a work computer, but very rarely did they do the same thing on both.
So then we got into, now you had like a laptop and a desktop and then you got into mobile and all these things. And now, of course, it’s roughly 50 50 in terms of where do people first interact with your website and where do they buy.
There was a time where back in the early 2010s, people searched on mobile and they might have engaged with your website, maybe even opted in to get a download on mobile and check their email on mobile, but they never bought on mobile. It was like 5% of all buyers were on mobile twelve years ago.
Now it’s over 50%, if I’m not mistaken. So you’ve got to be able to track, like contact record tracking. You’ve got to be able to track the effectiveness of different promotional materials and different promotion campaigns and different trends and all these things that you’ve got to keep track of in the affiliate world.
And that’s a challenge. We got like voice search optimization is a big thing. Now. I don’t type very much.
I do voice search, payment methods, digital wallets, crypto, all these things. You’ve got to adapt your affiliate program to support these payment methods. And they might mean that you need to give like, hey, you got an affiliate promoting, maybe you’re going to offer certain payment options that you don’t offer internally just because you don’t want to deal with the hassle payment frequency.
You’re going to have to adapt. We’ve talked about this a few, I don’t know, maybe like seven or eight episodes ago. Affiliates are starting to expect more and more to be paid on a
more frequent basis, whether it be weekly or daily or even real time. And as that happens, just what I’m saying is be ready. We’re not there yet. We’re not there yet.
We’re not to the point where affiliates need to be paid weekly or daily in order to promote you. But we’re getting close, so be ready for that. Number twelve challenge is affiliate fraud. Affiliate fraud.
This is a common challenge that affiliate programs face. And I don’t use this to scare you. It is. I mean, gosh, I mean, I’ve been in for 18 years as this episode is releasing.
I am weeks away from entering my now 19th year in the affiliate marketing game and I have seen this happen less than 20 times. But I say it’s common because inevitably you will deal with it. At some point, affiliates will use fraudulent means to generate leads or sales to earn those commissions.
Right? It could be fake clicks, it could be bot traffic, it could be spamming, cookie stuffing, other unethical things, credit card fraud, things like that. And we talked about this not too long ago.
We talked about the kind of the dark side of affiliate marketing. This is a challenge and the biggest thing is how do you catch it? We talked about how to catch affiliate fraud and how to make sure that you’re staying on top of your affiliates because it’s important.
So you need to be looking for those fraudulent activities. I’m not going to go into all the detail on that, but I talked about that. When I talked about affiliate fraud, I talked about this. But the big thing here is that you have a mechanism in place to at
least spend 15 minutes once a week. If you work 40 hours, that is one, one 60th of your week, 15 minutes a week, just looking for things like, okay, is somebody converting at a ridiculously high level or a ridiculously low level? If your typical conversion from click to opt in is 50% and you see somebody at 60% or 40%, no big deal.
Okay, somebody converting at a half of a percent, that’s a problem. Now, if they’re at 90% and it’s nine out of ten, that’s not a problem. That just means they’ve only sent ten clicks. But are they 90% out of a thousand?
How are they doing that? That could actually be legit. We actually had an affiliate years ago. Our normal webinar landing page conversion was 58%.
This guy was at 92%. He’s a friend of mine. He doesn’t do anything nefarious whatsoever. We just went, wow.
But if it’s somebody you’ve never heard of and they’re converting well over 90%, could it be something’s up? You use that as a trigger to dig in. Are they incentivizing them in an unethical way? That’s the big thing.
So are they doing anything unethical? You need ways to catch that. Is there conversion from lead to sale just astronomically high. If your normal lead to sale conversion rate is, say, 5% and you have somebody converting at 82% after enough leads, that’s a
problem. Or somebody at 0%, they’ve set 812 leads. You normally convert at 5%. If somebody’s at 3%, even 2%, I don’t worry about that.
I don’t think they sent crappy traffic, but if they’re at zero, they send crappy traffic. We need to make sure we’re not paying them on any leads. If we were paying them on leads, those are the type of things you want to be looking for.
The third thing, you know, third challenge later on 13th overall, here is brand reputation. You have to ensure, be 100% sure that your affiliate program is aligned with your brand’s values and messaging.
So as an affiliate manager, this is something we have to watch out for with our clients because we don’t work with the company. We work with them, but we don’t work for them. So we have to make sure we know what’s in line with their values and their messaging.
So we have to monitor those affiliates. We want to make sure that they’re complying with those things with the brand guidelines, so what is acceptable and what is not. Like, how are they allowed to use your company’s name and affiliate
materials? Are they allowed to create their own graphics to just say your company’s name? Or do they have to use the mark right, your logo.
Walmart requires you if you’re going to create an image, it has to have the Walmart logo, not just say Walmart in text. That’s fine. That’s their right, things like that. How are they allowed to use your company’s name?
Do they always have to put the little r register trademark after it, for example? That’s fine. You’re allowed to do that as an affiliate program.
Are they allowed to bid on trademark terms? Are they allowed to use your name and bid on searches and show up in search results for your company’s name? If they’re not allowed to do that, then let them know the places where affiliates can find the materials, like banners and ads and swipe copy.
You need to make sure that you’re telling them this is where you can find those things. And do not use anything that’s not these things. If they can create their own, make sure you give them tips on how to create and optimize their own creative materials to fit your
brand’s image. Here are our colors, here are our fonts. Do not create anything that doesn’t have these things. Make sure you have a clear process for approving affiliate
content if you need one. All right. Sometimes you don’t really need to approve affiliate content, but if you do, make sure you have that. How do you police your affiliates for any of your brand policies?
Like, what are they allowed to say on social media? Are they allowed to tag you or the client on social media or not? Some affiliate programs don’t want them to do that. Okay, that’s fine.
There’s nothing wrong with that. How should affiliates create and use affiliate links in their content? Like, just again, be clear about that. We talked about this earlier.
What are the prohibited activities? You know, no hate speech, no nudity, whatever it may be. Again, things that you don’t want to be aligned with in your brand. Don’t allow your affiliates to get out of alignment with your brand’s values and messaging.
Now, the 14th one’s boring, but it’s important. Compliance and regulatory issues, right? Affiliate marketing is subject to all kinds of laws, us, federal, European Union, different states. And if you don’t comply with those regulations, you can get fined and even some worse things can happen.
You can face legal nightmares. So you need to stay informed about the latest developments in these issues. Right.
So you avoid these legal problems. I don’t say this to scare you maybe a little bit. I do say to scare you a little bit. This isn’t like don’t start an affiliate program because there’s going to
be legal stuff. Well, that’d be like don’t start a business because there’s going to be legal stuff. Don’t buy a house because there’s going to be taxes.
Like, ridiculous, right? Like, don’t do anything, don’t make any money because you’ll have to pay income tax or pay sales tax when you buy anything. No, those are just a part of the thing.
Again, just make sure you know what the laws are. The best way to do that. Follow websites like mine, macquariemes. com.
sign up. I’ll let you know when things change. When there’s regulatory things, I will let you know. And follow other blogs out there that will let you know about those
types of things, laws and other regulatory issues changing. And then 15th, our 15th challenge is just innovation. Constant innovation. Newsflash, your competitors are watching you.
They are listening to you. Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery, but not when it’s your competitors who are completely ripping off your ideas. They’re watching what you do, they are copying it, and then
sometimes they’re going to execute it better. So watch them, too. All right? Watch them.
To copy and model, sign up for other affiliate programs in your niche, your direct competitors. Watch them and steal ideas from them. Watch them and say, what are they doing wrong? And how can we zig when they’re zagging?
Watch programs outside of your niche. Again, copy and model. I mentioned this a few episodes ago, but we call it the fake book check.
I was signed up for an affiliate program and they sent an email that said, hey, we’d like to give you some money to run Facebook ads. Just let us know if you want to. And I went, what if we did the same thing?
But instead of sending an email, we sent it physical mail and made it look like a check that they were getting in the mail. So we call it the fake book check because they get the check and then they open it up and it’s just us saying, do you want $1,000 to run Facebook ads?
Email us. And so we get people emailing us. That was a little bit of an innovation, right? Innovate.
Just try new things. Try new things. Like, I’ll give you two examples, the live leaderboard. Nowadays, live leaderboards are common in affiliate programs.
Eight, nine years ago, they weren’t 2015. I was annoyed that every time I was an affiliate, sometimes I wouldn’t get a leaderboard update for a day or two. Where do I stand?
I did this new thing. Did I move up? Did I move down? Am I in the lead?
I don’t know. And I was really annoyed. And so I said to one of our clients, Ray Edwards, I said, I’m going to create a live leaderboard inside the affiliate portal. This leaderboard, we’re going to update it every hour and we paid a VA to update it every hour.
Took five minutes and they updated this leaderboard. We had Google Analytics installed and we tracked it. And at the end of the launch we had like 150 affiliates and the homepage of the affiliate portal had like 1500 hits. This live leaderboard page had something like 10,000 hits.
The average affiliate hit it like 23 times or I don’t know the math, whatever the math is on that. It was an insane number of times and it was probably more like 100 affiliates hitting it 100 times.
Some of them probably only hit it like once or twice. They were refreshing it. Another one, we call them hot leads, talked about this. We did our recap of Ryan Levesque launch last year providing those hot leads, identifying who are those people
who are most likely to buy and then an affiliate might send 1000 leads. But here’s the 25 that haven’t bought yet that are the hottest. Go target. These don’t just email.
No. Get on the phone with them, close them, record what works, record what doesn’t work. Like watch these other programs and if they keep going back to the same well, it means it’s working. If they try something once and then never do it again, it means it’s not create sops, standard operating procedures for
everything that does work and keep doing it and then continue to innovate. Make it a goal. Try at least one new thing every two months. Make it a practice.
We haven’t done anything new in a while. Let’s try something new and just see if it works. So innovation is an ongoing challenge that you have to keep addressing.
So there you have it, the 15 biggest challenges that are facing affiliate programs and how to solve them again. Make sure you sign up for that free training we have coming up how I built a million dollar a month affiliate program in only two years without any connections or credentials.
I didn’t have network and all that stuff. Madmcwiams. com million a month. Get signed up for that training and let me know what your biggest takeaway was.
Shoot me a text at 260-217-4619 if you ever have any questions. That’s a great place to reach me as well. We got links in the show notes to that video on how to determine the right affiliate commission. Your 1st 100 affiliates report a sample affiliate training the training I just talked about that we’re doing the million dollar
month affiliate program, the affiliate activation email templates, all those links are in the show notes. Last thing, make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. Got a good one? We’re going to go back to the affiliate marketing side.
How to double your affiliate commissions in 30 days or less. I’ll see you then.
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
| Find Your First 100 Affiliates | Affiliate Program Terms & Conditions Template | Get My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email |
| Avoid The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes | Turn Inactive Affiliates into Your Best Affiliates | Get My Template for Writing Affiliate Emails |
| Affiliate Marketing Sales Secrets | Learn How to Create a Resources Page | Learn How to Write a Product Review |
The post How to Solve the 15 Biggest Challenges for All Affiliate Programs appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### Do affiliate bonus packages still work in 2024? Today I share what the latest research reveals about affiliate bonus packages. You’ll learn the truth behind common myths surrounding bonus packages and learn the secrets to crafting irresistible offers that drive results. Affiliates and affiliate managers, this episode could be worth millions, so listen up!
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Give Your Affiliates What They Need to Succeed
How to Build an Army of Loyal Affiliates
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How Top Affiliates are Closing Sales in 2024
How to Find Affiliates Using Affiliate Program Leaderboards
If Donald Trump Ran an Affiliate Program
What the Latest Research Says About Affiliate Bonus PackagesDo affiliate bonus packages still work in 2024? Today I share what the latest research reveals about affiliate bonus packages.
You’ll learn some of the common myths surrounding these bonus packages, and you’ll learn the secrets to crafting irresistible offers that drive results. Affiliates and affiliate managers this episode could be worth millions, so listen up.
So we’ve all seen these elaborate, some might say over the top bonus packages that come with affiliate offers, right?
You’ll buy this course through my link and you’ll get $47,942 in bonuses. Right. But do they actually work?
Almost a decade ago, back in 2015 or 16, I released the results of a study that I had done, the first of its kind that I know of that proved that, yes, they do work. Affiliate bonus packages worked to increase sales, but there were
some pitfalls to avoid some best practices that we found. So about every four years I revisit this, and here we are, 2024. Do they still work?
Are they going to continue to work for the next decade or so? You know, like I said, every few years I do this study and I do other topics as well. If you listen, you know that recently I released the findings of a And I do these studies periodically across a few different things just
to quantitatively, not just qualitatively prove what’s working in affiliate marketing, what is working to increase sales. And affiliate bonus packages are one of those things. So this episode is not only for affiliates, but for you affiliate
managers to share with your affiliates. Now let’s start with what I mean by, you know, these bonus packages.
And how do bonus packages work? You may have used this strategy. You may have seen it.
You’ve definitely seen it done, right? You offer an exclusive bonus if people buy a product through your link.
Now I’m going to go into more detail about what makes a good bonus package in this episode. But for now, what you need to know is that an effective bonus is
one that takes an on the fence buyer and turns them into an actual buyer. I always picture just, it takes somebody who’s literally got one leg on either side of the fence and they can’t decide, should I buy this thing or not.
And then you present a bonus package that makes this an irresistible offer, and they say yes. In other words, it’s something attractive enough to cause a
person to take action. That’s what we want people to do in affiliate promos. Now, as I mentioned earlier, I did my first study on this back in 2016, and it started with a personal test of mine.
This is how I know that affiliate bonus packages work, because I not only surveyed others, but I tested it myself. And bonuses, one, having bonuses increased sales by 240%. Before that, the reason I actually did this study, my hypothesis was
that they don’t increase sales. I actually went into the study believing that bonuses were a waste of time and I only offered them.
And I did a couple of affiliate promos. You know, this is early on in my where I started doing more affiliate marketing. You know, I’d been an affiliate manager for over a decade at that point, but I started doing affiliate marketing and I’m like, well,
everybody else is offering bonuses, let me test it or let me do it right. I never took the time to actually ask, do they work? And so I went into it with the hypothesis that they either did not
lift sales or they lifted it so marginally that it wasn’t worth the hassle. And that’s what I was hoping to find. The scientific method, if you learn that in middle school, high school,
you have a hypothesis, then you test it and you either prove or disprove the hypothesis. Well, I disprove the hypothesis. I went into it hoping that they would not work so that I didn’t
have to put in the effort to create bonuses. I’m only going to increase sales 5%, 10%, no percent. So why would I even bother?
So here’s what I found. Back in 2016, the first promo that I did was a $200 product. Having the bonuses, I made $9,000.
Non bonuses, I made $4,500, almost exactly half, just a couple of dollars off from being exactly half. So I made twice as much money with the bonus. That was on a $200 product.
On a $1000 product, the difference was huge. It was 13,000 versus $2,000 overall between those two promos. And then I found over the course of subsequent promos, subjectively, I would have people tell me that they purchased
through my link specifically for my bonuses. So I knew they were making a difference. Again, that’s a subjective justification for bonuses.
Now, since that first test back in 2016, I have noticed objectively that bonus packages work too. I’m going to share how the numbers line up in terms of
commissions earned per click sent to an offer based on five random promotions without a bonus and five with a bonus. This is across numerous niches, different size list. I’m trying to think of the five different affiliates.
There were two females, three males. Two of them were in similar niches. The other three were in completely different niches.
You know, these are, again, different size audiences, different experience levels, even different types of audience, different price points. I mean, everything you could think of, there is a total variety here.
The promotions with no bonuses earned the affiliate an average of click. The promotions with a bonus earned them an average of $1.
- And a crazy thing about the bonuses is they’re not even that elaborate.
I remember one of them was simply that I would join them, that one of them was me, I would join their accountability group. Another was that they would get a 15 minutes coaching call.
Not extravagant, right? And I’m going to share in a little bit why bonuses don’t have to be extra.
In fact, they shouldn’t be extravagant. Other affiliates, as we. That reported to me in a little bit less scientific method, right.
Just what they were reporting to me found that having bonuses increased sales little as 110% to as high as 320%, with the average falling right near what I found. I found 240%.
The average among these affiliates was 225%. So that’s what I found over time. What about now, though?
What about 2024? Well, here’s what the research found. Bonus packages are slightly more effective, marginally almost exactly
the same as they were ten years ago, eight years ago. But there are some important caveats that I’ll cover, okay? There are some aspects of bonuses that are relevant in 2024 that weren’t relevant even four years ago.
And the first important caveat, this has been true for a while, is that bonuses don’t have to be and shouldn’t be extravagant, as I mentioned. Now, if you look back at what’s worked, whether it be with me,
with other affiliates that I’ve talked to, studied, people that were in the groups that I studied, the bonuses were super simple. I created a formula about eight years ago for coming up with bonuses, and I just really made it easy on myself. And so for me, more recently, like, none of them are that particularly complicated.
They’re not difficult to put together. And so you’ve probably seen these extravagant bonus packages, right?
And you’re like, I could never do that. I cannot put like, that’s a $45,000 bonus package. You don’t have to do that.
You don’t have to do that. In fact, the effort you spend might literally be worth almost nothing I didn’t say earlier that like putting dealer bonuses as my hypothesis suggested is pointless.
But there is a point of diminishing returns and ill talk about that in a little bit where theres a point where adding more bonuses does not add sales. You see this increase, that adding a little bonus doesnt actually
increase sales that much. And then adding a little bit more, all of a sudden you start to see it go up and then when you get this sweet spot it goes up even more and then it levels off.
It just completely levels off. And so crossing that point, it’s kind of like I was listening to a book the other day about running and I’m training for a half marathon and I was listening to this book and you know, for me, running a half
marathon at my target rate, my age, my goal is to finish top five in my age group in this particular one. And so I know my target time. If you’re curious, it’s an hour 44 minutes and 48 seconds.
That is my target time. It’s based on who’s entered in the past. I would finish in the top five every year for the past decade.
So that’s my target time. If I happen to run that and finish in 6th place, so be it. I mean, it is what it is.
So, you know, it’s literally 1 second under eight minute miles. And I was listening to this book and it talked about how in your weekly training for me at that distance, I want to be targeting 42 to 48 miles a week.
And that running 52 will have no increase in anything. It will not make me faster, it will not make the 13. 1 mile easier.
Like it will have no increase past that certain point. And so again, like getting up to that point, obviously if I’m going to run 13.
1 mile at my sub eight minute miles, I need to be running at least 20. I’m not going to see much improvement going from zero to 5
miles a week. You know, I’m going to see very, very little improvement there. I’m going to see a pretty good improvement from five to 20.
I’m going to see a lot of improvement from five to like 35 and I’m gonna see a little bit more really fine tuning up until about 45 to 48. Then after that I’m not gonna see any improvement.
Same is true with these bonuses. And so what I found in my research over the past decade is that back in the mid 2010s, those extravagant bonuses with lots of extra courses, you’re going to buy this one course from this one person, but you’re going to get this course and this course and this
course and this course and this course. Having that $30,000 bonus package worked today, not so much.
And I’m going to share some of those important findings that I found that work more recently. It’s just not working as well to put together those big bonus
packages. People don’t, just don’t want the information as much. And so I’m going to talk about that in a little bit.
But first, I want to share some of the basics of putting together a bonus package. And I’ve shared these in prior episode, I don’t remember when,
but it’s been a long time. It was probably over four years ago. I shared these basics, but I’m going to cover them again just in case you missed them.
It’s a three part formula when we promote affiliate offers that we use in our company, but we also share with our affiliate partners for our clients when we’re running their affiliate launches and their affiliate promos. The first one, first key, use what you have.
Use what you have. Put together bonuses that you already have. If you look back to that very first promo where I ran that test, I
created a special bonus just for that affiliate launch, I created a bonus, but I’ve used it over and over again since then. Robbie Miles, who’s our operations manager, he calls this stacking the Lego bricks. The way he looks at it is our products, our mini courses, our ebooks, our templates, our swipe files, our cheat sheets, our
coaching, all of these things, these are Lego bricks within the company. And so to him, creating the right bonus stack is just all about combining those bricks into something appealing. So we have about 30 to 40 different Lego bricks, and we’ll be promoting something and we’ll bring in five of them for this
particular offer because those are the five best Lego bricks. If I were to add a 6th, it would dilute the offer. We’ll talk about that later.
And I’ve touched on it a little bit before. It would make the offer worse because that 6th thing is not perfectly relevant to this offer. And so what’s the right amount?
It’s everything that should be in it and nothing more. You know, if anything above, beyond what needs to be in it, is too much. The second key, second principle that I’ve shared before is create nothing if at all possible.
And so I found that a great way to offer a really amazing bonus package is to go through the course with them or to do some bonus coaching calls or something like that. We’ll do four bonus coaching calls.
Or, or I mentioned earlier, I joined their accountability group. I promoted my friend Alan Thomas’s weight loss offer. And one of the things is that each person, they create an accountability group.
And I said I will be in your accountability group. If you join Alan’s program through my link, I will be in your accountability group.
And that’s valuable to people because I mean I’ve been in a couple for over two years now and I’m in there cheering them on. Not every day, but it takes me, you know, 1015 seconds a week to
cheer them on. And people love that. And essentially like the group coaching, that’s small group coaching.
They can ask me questions and stuff. I’m, I’m going to be with them for 4 hours over the course of eight weeks.
But I’m not creating anything on the front end. And I just, I mean frankly all I have to do is show up and answer questions. That’s super easy.
The third key is to aim for an equal value or higher. Equal value or higher. So in other words, if you’re promoting something that’s
$1,000, your bonuses should be $1000 to $4,000. If you’re promoting something that’s $2,000 it should be about $2000 to $8,000.
If you go higher than this 8000, this is what we’ve begun to see and I’ll cover more later. It starts to seem ridiculous.
Destroys the effectiveness of offering a bonus. And the only exception to this that we found is if you do offer a single bonus that happens to be worth five, six, seven times the value of the product, that’s okay.
The issue is when you’re stacking like 10, 12, 13 bonuses and the value is $20,000 on a $2,000 product. The fourth thing is it needs to fit the offer. Your bonus has to fit the offer.
It cannot be this random thing. Like I mentioned Alan’s thing earlier. It would be ridiculous if I said, hey, join Alan’s weight loss program and get my free course on copywriting.
Get my course on copywriting that normally sells for $1,000 for free. Like what? Thats ridiculous.
Now if I offered my bonus about overcoming your limiting self beliefs, that makes sense. Thats a bonus that fits weight loss, right?
And the two best ways to fit an offer to complement and what we call compliment and close the gaps. Compliment is if youre promoting a course, for example, lets say it is about copywriting, then good bonus that complements a copywriting course is the sales page tactics sales page layout software tool that allows you to create landing pages.
That makes sense. With a copywriting program. Closing the gap means that the course is missing something that’s specific to your audience or it doesn’t go in depth.
I mentioned years ago, I worked with a company, we sold a course on guitar and we had an affiliate that had a blues guitar course. And so when they purchased our course right through him, he gave them his blues guitar mini course. Not his full blues guitar course, but his blues guitar mini course as a bonus.
Why? Cause we only had one lesson, an hour long lesson on blues guitar. He had a two hour mini course that took it to the next level.
So if you teach social media marketing, for example, and then you’ve got like a book that’s all about social media headlines to go viral, offer something like that. That’s a really good example.
All right, the last key here that I want to share, the key to effective bonuses, good bonuses that actually work is this. You gotta sell your bonuses.
You gotta sell your bonuses. Like seriously play them up big time. Talk about them in every email.
Yeah, I mentioned a few episodes ago, I talked about how top affiliates are closing sales. They are using these bonuses.
And when we studied what the top converting affiliates were doing, we found that they were mentioning their bonuses in every single email. They mentioned them.
Every single email they mentioned them. Every single cart close email. They had dedicated emails, at least one about all about their bonuses.
Most of them recorded a video explaining their bonuses. Most of them created a special page for their bonuses. All of these things to really play up and sell their bonuses.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear, does it make you sound the same? Is true with your bonus. You have the best bonus package in the world and if you don’t sell it,
it doesn’t work. And offering a great bonus package is one of the five things that I found that all the top converting affiliates did consistently.
On that note, really getting clear about the benefits of each bonus that’s part of selling. How does each bonus add value to the main product? Why is it a must have?
And this helps in justifying that overall package, right? It really helps people make a decision. So don’t just say, hey, you’re going to get this, this, this and this.
Well, okay, no, tell them what the benefit is so in that blues guitar example, it’s like, hey, go buy, learn and master guitar. You’re going to learn all about guitar and you’re going to get my
mini course on blues guitar. So when you come out of this experience, you’ll have a bass in guitar, but you’ll also have that next step, little bit of extra on blues guitar, which of course, to Dan Dinley, the maker of the blues
guitar course, is like, well, that sets him up to buy his main product, too. So that’s another great thing. But you want to really sell the bonuses and the value and the
benefits. What’s in it for them, getting those bonuses? And then one last note before we get into the big differences that I’ve seen over the last eight to ten years, make sure you don’t deliver
your bonuses until after the refund period has ended. So you deliver them after the refund period. Simple reason, people, otherwise, they might buy through you just for the bonuses and then return the course.
It’s just like, I don’t get how people do stuff like that. I just think that’s so lame. And they think that they’re justified in doing it.
You know, it’s kind of dumb, but it happens. And so you deliver the bonuses. If they buy it on May 1 and the return period is 15 days, then you
deliver the bonuses on the 17th, 16th, 17th, whatever the date would be. So that’s when you deliver the bonuses after the refund period is over. Okay, what are the big differences?
I’ve been alluding to these from when I first did the study in 2016. Today, number one, I touched on this a little bit earlier. Less is more.
Less is more. It used to be that when you hit about that 400% mark, it leveled off.
What we’ve actually found is that when you hit about 300%, it levels off and at about 700%, it begins to actually go down. It begins to go down.
We used to not notice that more did not mean less sales. More bonuses just meant equal sales to roughly two to three times as, you know, the value.
Now, we actually find that when you really start to add on, it can lower your sales because people are turned off by it feels, to use a term that my, you know, my ex client friend Jeff goins used to say feels smarmy.
He would use that word, smarmy. Yeah, it’s just a red flag. So the keys here, quality over quantity.
Now, I’ll talk about this in a second. People want solutions and ease, not more information. So quality, it is better to offer a few high quality, highly relevant bonuses than just start stacking on a bunch of low value, irrelevant
extras. Quality over quantity. This not only is it a credibility issue, but it’s a perceived value issue.
Some of my best affiliate promotions had two bonuses, $2,000 course, we had a $3,000 bonus and a $2,000 bonus, and that was it. And they were perfectly matched.
They either close the gap or complemented what we were offering. They filled in that gap. They perfectly fit with the offer.
The value was so high because these were such relevant bonuses. So, number one, again, less is typically more quality over quantity and focus on perceived value.
Okay. The bonuses should have a high perceived value. Doesn’t mean they have to sell for a lot.
Does it have to be something that would necessarily be expensive to produce? Again, you know, show up for four group coaching calls? What’s the value of four group coaching calls?
I immediately. $2,000 is the number to me. Immediately, it’s $2,000.
What? I’m going to spend an hour in a group of. Probably only 15 people are going to show up.
Well, I mean, if you look at what people pay for that in a month in our small group coaching program, that’s about that much. So, boom, you know, that’s exactly what it’s worth. So you don’t have to be super expensive.
You just want something that your audience is going to find genuinely valuable and would probably pay for separately. That’s the key. Is this bonus something that they would pay for separately?
I’ve told you, I said earlier, so many people are like, oh, my gosh. The reason I bought that thing was because you offered this thing. And if I offered this $3,000 bonus on a $2,000 course, I’ve had people who didn’t even want the $2,000 thing because the
perceived value of the $3,000 thing was so high. They bought the $2,000 thing and I got to give them this amazing thing.
So it needs to be something they would pay for separately, not be like, why are they adding this? There was a.
It’s probably not who you’re thinking, but I read that there’s a website I was on recently, I was looking at buying this product, and if you spent dollar 50 or more, they sent you a hat. I’m going to be honest, this hat was cheap.
It was a total dad hat. Nobody under the age of 70, and that’s not their audience. Their audience is 30 to 54 year old man.
Nobody under 70 would wear this hat. And it just looked like the hat you buy at the dollar effect. Somebody wrote that this looks like a hat I buy at a convenience
store that has, like, the fake logo of the university because they can’t get authorization to use the real one or just says, like, New York. And it kind of looks like the New York Yankees logo, but not exactly, you know, that kind of thing. You know what I’m talking about?
And so they wrote on here, like somebody wrote a comment, like, I didn’t want this hat. Why are you sitting people, multiple people were like, I don’t
know what to do with this. I don’t want to create more waste in the environment. Like, I had to donate it to goodwill.
This, they’re probably just going to take up space there that, you definitely don’t want that with your bonuses. All right.
The second thing that I’ve seen change, this has impacted everything in our businesses. People want solutions. People want ease, not more information.
People don’t want more information. Ten years ago, people wanted more information. Ten years ago, nobody knew how to do anything.
So they needed information. Now, information is so abundant, they don’t want more information. They want solutions.
They want ease. And this is primarily, I think this is due to Netflix and Cha GPT. Netflix, everything’s right there.
Everything’s on demand. I mean, outside of sporting events, when’s the last time you’re like, you know, I really want to watch this thing? And then you check to see when it came on.
Yeah, we’ll go to the movies every now and again because, you know, that’s an experience. We’ll go see a play if we know somebody who’s in it or whatever,
but otherwise, everything’s on demand. I want to watch this movie. Cool.
I will start, I will watch the first 45 minutes tonight and I’ll watch the next 30 minutes tomorrow, and then I’ll, I won’t watch it for two days, and then I’ll watch the last half hour. And that’s how I’m going to watch that movie.
Why? Because that’s the world we live in. With chat GPT, you can get the information really quickly.
So we want solutions and ease. So what kind of bonus can you offer that makes implementation or use of the product that makes it easier or faster?
This is why I like that done with you model where I meet with them in a small group. Because Chadgpt can’t offer that.
Netflix can’t offer that. Nobody else can offer that. Only I can offer the done with you model.
Because even if it’s done with you, you and not me, some people want the done with Matt model. They want done with Matt.
They want Matt’s coaching, not Craig’s coaching. And so that’s something that only I can offer. That’s one of the reasons why I love that.
And it’s not about more information, it’s about getting questions answered so you can implement quicker and faster and easier. So the done with you is one way.
Adding a software, adding cheat sheets. You know, if you have notes from a course and you add them. This is one of the things that I found years ago is we just gave
them our notes. Does that mean you shouldn’t go through the main course? No, but having my notes, you go, well, that’s more information.
No, my notes are seeing it in action. So, like, I gave them my scripts. There’s one particular course where one of the lessons is about
how to write a particular script. I gave them my script, my notes, and actually I gave them an additional video that walk them through how I did it.
And it wasn’t meant for more information, it was about showing them actually how to implement it. So I made the implementation faster, and then I actually took
pictures. This is one of the cool things we did. We’d scan my original handwritten.
This 20 to 25 page script was originally handwritten on like 75 legal pads with all my scratch outs and margin notes, like some of the stuff you can’t even read. Sorry.
We took that and scanned it and actually gave that to them. It was a really cool way so they could see the process. So again, what can you do to make it easier and faster for them?
And then the last big change that we’re seeing is the use of scarcity and urgency more. So using elements of scarcity, which is, you know, limited time, limited numbers, and then the urgency, which is. These are specifically time bound.
Right. Scarcity is just more different. Like it’s going to literally going to run out.
And urgency is like, this bonus is only available during this period of time, really making things more into a quick decision making process. So bonuses, like the bonuses available for the first 50 customers
or this bonus expires in 48 hours. If something is a fast action bonus and it’s about fast implementation, it’s great to expire that soon.
You know, the done with you example, I can only let 50 people in. I can’t have 200 people showing up on that.
So we limit the first x number of buyers or a bonus. It’s only available for the first three days of a five day open cart. So now you have a middle of the cart bump.
You get the first day where you get 25, 30% of sales. They typically last, say, 50 or 60% in that middle three days is like Now you can get like Wednesday if it’s Monday through Friday, and get a little Wednesday bump because you have something expiring so doing things like that using scarcity and urgency more.
So these are the things that we’ve seen. Again, the principles still apply, bonuses still work. So affiliate manager share this with your affiliates so they know they need to know this and affiliates apply this to your
promotions. So yeah, you can go, yeah, I need to add bonuses and you can just throw stuff in and they can be really crappy bonuses that don’t move the needle or actually even have a negative effect.
But if you follow what I’ve shared in this episode, both the principles and some of the new stuff, the three new things that I talked about, less is more, people want solutions and ease, not more information and really leaning into scarcity and urgency. These are things that are really move the needle for you to make more affiliate sales.
So if you have any questions about this or anything else, I’d love to hear from you. Share me your biggest takeaway as well. You can text me at 260-217-4619 I would love to hear from you.
subscribe so you don’t miss any of our upcoming episodes. The next episode I’m going to talk about how to solve the 15 biggest challenges for all affiliate programs.
These are the same 15 problems I’ve seen for every affiliate program we’ve ever run, we’ve ever coached, we’ve ever been a part of. I’ve seen these same challenges so you don’t want to miss that.
So make sure you hit subscribe if you haven’t yet and I will see you in the next episode. Thank you so much for listening today.
The post What the Latest Research Says About Affiliate Bonus Packages appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
If you’re stepping into the world of affiliate marketing, be aware: affiliate fraud is an unwelcome reality that’s growing. Concerned about how this might affect your program? That’s a valid worry. Today, we’re exploring the darker side of affiliate marketing—fraudulent activities that could significantly impact your operations. In this guide, I’ll help you recognize, prove, and address affiliate fraud effectively. Stay with us as I share the crucial steps to catch and prevent affiliate fraud and protect your business.
What the Heck is Affiliate Fraud?Affiliate fraud might sound complex, but it boils down to one thing: affiliates breaking the rules to cheat the system. This deceitful activity encompasses any actions that violate the terms and conditions of an affiliate program. The impact? It costs companies and retailers millions by unfairly claiming commissions that don’t rightfully belong to the fraudsters.
Affiliate fraud is essentially a form of corruption in marketing. It occurs when individuals use underhanded methods to trigger commission payouts they haven’t earned. These tactics could involve generating fake leads, or improperly claiming sales that they did not help to make. The ripple effects are damaging: legitimate affiliates lose out on earnings, businesses see a poor return on investment, and the overall brand reputation can suffer significant harm.
Understanding the mechanics of affiliate fraud is crucial for anyone involved in affiliate marketing. Scammers might use sophisticated strategies to mimic legitimate affiliate activity, creating false impressions of traffic or sales that never occurred. This type of fraud not only skews performance metrics but also drains marketing budgets without delivering any real value.
Make sure that your affiliate program has a solid agreement (AKA Terms & Conditions). To make things simple, grab my template here!
How Common is Affiliate Fraud?Affiliate fraud might seem like a shadow lurking in the corners of digital marketing, yet it’s not as prevalent as you might fear. While the allure of affiliate marketing grows, so does the temptation for fraudulent activities. However, it’s crucial to note that these instances are quite rare. But when they strike, they hit hard, potentially draining substantial funds from your business.
Statistics paint a complex picture. Reports suggest that in some cases, up to 10% of affiliate traffic could be deceptive (Source). That number might sound alarming, but let’s put it into perspective. In my experience, the actual frequency of encountering such high levels of fraud is much lower. It’s important, though, to stay vigilant.
The rise in affiliate fraud corresponds with the increasing attractiveness of affiliate programs as a revenue model. With each opportunity for legitimate affiliates to earn commissions, there’s an equivalent chance for scammers to exploit these systems. This makes affiliate programs prime targets for those looking to capitalize on the hard work of others.
Despite this, the situation isn’t as dire as it might seem. Most affiliate marketers operate honestly, focusing on building genuine partnerships and driving real results. However, the small percentage that engages in fraudulent activities necessitates a proactive approach.
Understanding the scale of affiliate fraud isn’t meant to deter you from starting or growing an affiliate program. Instead, it’s about preparation and protection. Knowing that the problem exists and recognizing its signs are your first steps toward safeguarding your interests. Next, I’ll guide you through spotting potential fraud and effectively managing these risks with minimal effort. Stay tuned as we explore the indicators of affiliate fraud and how to catch them early.
Monitoring for Affiliate Fraud (How Long Does it Take?)Monitoring for affiliate fraud is an ongoing necessity. Depending on the size of your affiliate program, the effort required to catch and prevent fraud will vary. Here’s a practical way to think about it: for every $100,000 in sales, you might spend about five minutes checking for discrepancies. This scales up as your sales increase. For instance, with $1 million in sales, expect to allocate around 50 minutes weekly to monitoring.
The frequency of these checks can intensify as the stakes get higher. While the initial five minutes per $100,000 might hold up until you hit the half-million-dollar mark in sales, beyond this point, the time commitment can grow. Committing to at least ten minutes of fraud detection work for every $200,000 in revenue beyond the initial half-million can help in early detection and mitigation of potential fraud.
For most businesses, a weekly check that lasts between thirty minutes to an hour is sufficient to stay ahead of fraudsters. These checks are vital for maintaining the integrity of your affiliate program and ensuring that every dollar spent on commissions is genuinely earned.
In the following sections, we’ll dive deeper into the types of affiliate fraud you need to watch out for and discuss strategies for catching and preventing these deceptive practices. Knowing what to look for is the first step in protecting your affiliate program and ensuring its success.
The Different Types of Affiliate FraudIn the affiliate marketing world, fraud can manifest in various forms, each with its unique challenges and indicators. Understanding this is crucial for anyone running an affiliate program, as recognizing these types could be the key to safeguarding your operations.
We’ll explore the most common types of affiliate fraud that businesses encounter today. From cookie stuffing to fake account creation, each method has its own set of red flags. Understanding these can help you not just catch fraudsters in the act but also prevent them from affecting your program in the first place.
Keep reading as I break down each type of fraud, how to spot the signs, and the steps you can take to combat these deceptive tactics. This knowledge isn’t just about catching wrongdoing; it’s about creating a robust system that deters fraudsters long before they can cause harm.
- Duplicating ContentContent duplication is one of the simplest yet most effective methods fraudsters use to exploit affiliate programs. Essentially, these schemers take high-quality content from legitimate affiliate sites and replicate it on their own. By merely swapping out affiliate links, they divert commissions that rightfully belong to others.
This form of fraud not only affects the rightful earnings of honest affiliates but also damages the integrity of your affiliate program. When duplicate content floods the market, it dilutes the uniqueness of your offers and can severely harm your SEO efforts, making it harder for potential customers to find the authentic sources. This can lead to a significant loss in both traffic and trust.
For businesses, identifying and addressing this type of fraud is crucial. Regularly monitoring the web for duplicated content and using tools like Copyscape or Google’s search functions can help pinpoint where your affiliate content is being misused. Educating your affiliates about the importance of reporting suspicious activities can also foster a proactive community, vigilant against such deceptive practices.
- Cookie StuffingCookie stuffing is a deceptive tactic used by fraudulent affiliates to earn undeserved commissions. Essentially, it involves placing a tracking cookie on a user’s computer without their knowledge or consent. This is often done through questionable methods like hidden iframes, misleading links, or invisible images that automatically trigger the affiliate’s code when a page is loaded.
This underhanded strategy leads to the affiliate getting credit for sales they did not help generate. Imagine a potential customer visiting various sites, including one infected by a cookie-stuffing scheme. Even if this customer later makes a purchase on your site through legitimate means, the fraudulent affiliate might still receive the commission, thanks to their unauthorized cookie in the customer’s browser.
The harm extends beyond misdirected payouts. Cookie stuffing can skew your marketing data, leading to inaccurate metrics on affiliate performance. This not only affects budget allocation but also unfairly disadvantages honest affiliates who genuinely promote your products.
Businesses must remain vigilant to prevent cookie stuffing. Regular audits of affiliate practices, employing stringent security measures on how cookies can be set, and educating affiliates about ethical practices are essential steps. Additionally, implementing advanced tracking solutions that can detect and disregard suspicious activities helps safeguard your program against such fraud. By staying proactive, companies can protect their interests and ensure a fair playing field for all affiliates.
RELATED POST: Affiliate Management Q + A: Clicks, Commissions and Cookies
- SpywareSpyware is a sinister tool in affiliate fraud, where deceptive software is installed on a user’s device without their consent. This software manipulates user activities by inserting or altering affiliate tracking codes. Essentially, it can redirect commissions to the fraudster when the user makes purchases online.
Often hidden in downloads like browser toolbars or ad pop-ups, spyware can mislead even legitimate customers into generating revenue for a scammer. This not only violates privacy but also distorts true sales data and unfairly diverts earnings from rightful affiliates.
This is one area where we have a zero-tolerance policy. Affiliates must adhere to strict guidelines that outlaw the use of such deceptive practices. By maintaining clear, enforced rules against spyware, businesses can safeguard their affiliate programs and ensure a fair competitive environment.
- Fake Discount CodesFake discount codes are a sly tactic used by some affiliates to trick potential customers into clicking their affiliate links. This kind of fraud begins when a user searches for discount codes for specific products or services. The deceptive affiliate sets up a site or an ad claiming to offer these discounts. When users click on these supposed discount links, they don’t actually receive any discount because, in many cases, the product doesn’t even have a discount code available.
What happens next is particularly cunning. The user, having clicked the link in hope of a discount, has unknowingly activated the affiliate’s cookie. Even if they realize the code is fake and decide to purchase at full price, the transaction gets credited to the fraudulent affiliate due to the cookie tracking their last click. This scenario not only misleads the customer but also unjustly rewards the affiliate.
Establishing clear guidelines and consequences for discount codes within the affiliate agreement is crucial to discourage such deceitful practices.
- Typo Squatting / URL HijackingTypo squatting (AKA URL hijacking) is a fraud tactic where fraudsters purchase domain names that are misspellings of popular brands. This form of affiliate fraud preys on accidental typos made by internet users trying to visit a specific website. For instance, if someone mistakenly types ‘noprodutcnoproblem.com’ instead of ‘noproductnoproblem.com‘, they might land on a fraudulent site for my No Product No Problem course without realizing it.
Once on the mimicked site, the user may click on a link that seems legitimate but is actually rigged. The click triggers an affiliate link, redirecting them to the real website where they complete their purchase. Unbeknownst to them, the commission for their purchase goes to the scammer, not the legitimate affiliate.
Businesses can protect their brands and customers by monitoring for domain registrations closely resembling their own and educating customers about correct URLs. Affiliate managers should also be vigilant in screening and approving affiliates to prevent those with dubious practices from joining their programs.
- Ad StackingAd stacking is a type of affiliate fraud where multiple advertisements are layered on top of one another within the same ad space. While only the top ad is visible and clickable, all underlying ads register impressions or clicks that they don’t legitimately deserve. This not only distorts engagement metrics but also unjustly increases costs for advertisers.
This fraudulent tactic is often executed using sophisticated scripts or bots that can simulate user interactions, making it challenging to detect. For affiliate programs, this means that they could be paying commissions on traffic that has never genuinely engaged with their ads. Detecting ad stacking typically involves analyzing traffic patterns for anomalies such as unexpectedly high click rates or abnormal patterns of user behavior, which could indicate automated interactions.
To combat ad stacking effectively, businesses need to implement rigorous monitoring of their ad placements. Utilizing advanced fraud detection tools that can identify irregularities in ad performance is crucial. Additionally, maintaining transparent relationships with affiliates and conducting regular audits of affiliate activities can help in identifying and addressing this issue proactively.
- Stolen DataStolen data represents one of the most severe types of affiliate fraud, crossing the line into outright criminal activity. This form of fraud involves affiliates who acquire stolen credit card details or personal information to falsely generate sales or leads, aiming solely to earn commissions. These unscrupulous affiliates are not interested in the products but are exploiting the system to siphon off affiliate commissions.
When affiliates use stolen data to make purchases, these transactions may initially appear legitimate, boosting perceived sales and commissions. However, once the theft is discovered, these purchases lead to chargebacks from credit card companies. This not only costs the merchant in refunded sales but also in additional chargeback fees, which can accumulate and significantly impact financial stability.
The challenge with stolen data in affiliate marketing is its sophistication and difficulty to trace. Fraudulent affiliates often use advanced techniques and proxy servers to mask their activities, making detection and prevention challenging. To combat this, businesses must enhance their security measures. Implementing strict verification processes for new affiliates, monitoring transaction patterns for irregularities, and using advanced fraud detection software are essential steps in protecting against stolen data.
- Fake Calls (Pay Per Call)Fake calls are a deceptive tactic in affiliate marketing, particularly within programs that operate on a Pay-per-call basis. This type of fraud occurs when affiliates set up sham scenarios to generate unearned commissions by exploiting the pay-per-call system. A common method involves posting fictitious job ads on platforms like Craigslist, where they lure unsuspecting job seekers into making phone calls under the guise of a job screening process.
The trick is simple yet cunning. Affiliates instruct these job seekers to call a specific number—purporting it to be part of the interview process—and maintain the conversation for a set duration, often at least three minutes. The callers believe they are making a legitimate inquiry or undergoing a pre-interview assessment, but in reality, there is no job. The affiliate, however, collects a commission for each call, exploiting these individuals’ efforts and the company’s resources.
Such practices not only lead to financial losses for companies but also tarnish their reputation with fake interactions. To counter this, businesses must implement stringent monitoring tools to detect unusual patterns in call durations and origins, and verify the legitimacy of calls linked to affiliate commissions. Establishing strict guidelines and quick response mechanisms for flagged activities can also help mitigate the risk of falling victim to this form of affiliate fraud.
- Trademark BiddingTrademark bidding occurs when affiliates bid on your brand’s PPC keywords, a practice that may or may not be allowed depending on your affiliate program’s rules. As the program owner, the decision to permit this lies with you. While there are arguments against allowing it due to potential fraud, sometimes it could be beneficial. See below where I get in more depth on whether you should allow trademark bidding or not.
Brand bidding can seem like a clever strategy for affiliates to leverage your brand’s reputation to boost their own commissions. This type of fraud involves using your business’s brand name in paid search ads to redirect traffic to their sites or affiliate programs, often leading to false attributions and undue commissions. Such actions not only misuse your brand but can also inflate your cost-per-click (CPC), making your keywords pricier.
To defend against trademark bidding, proactive monitoring of your paid search campaigns is essential. Here are practical steps to safeguard your brand:
Bid on Your Keywords: Actively bidding on your own brand keywords can prevent affiliates from capitalizing on your reputation and ensures your ads maintain top visibility.
Monitor Campaigns Vigilantly: Keep an eye on ad copy, targeting settings, and the analytics of clicks and conversions to spot any irregular activities.
Geotargeting tricks are often used by affiliates to hide their fraudulent activities from detection. For example, if an affiliate knows where the program manager is based (in my case, Fort Wayne, Indiana), they might exclude ads from appearing in that region. They won’t run ads from Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, or Ohio to avoid me catching them.
The solution to this is to change your location. I’ll change my location to another state far away and other countries to see if anyone is bidding on our keywords. There are also automated tools that accomplish this same thing. If an affiliate is found exploiting your brand outside your geographic area, immediate action can be taken, including termination from the program.
Should You Allow Trademark Bidding?At the risk of getting off-topic, this is an important question. In my post on creating an affiliate program agreement (AKA Terms and Conditions), I share my thoughts on trademark bidding. If you really want to know everything about trademark bidding and PPC (Pay-Per-Click) policies, read that post.
Here is an excerpt of the post most relevant to affiliate fraud.
Trademark bidding, simply put, is affiliates who bid on branded search terms. For instance, these paid search ads may contain your brand’s name alone or include modifiers like “reviews” or “promo code,” often referred to as “Trademark Plus” or “TM+.”
Before you dismiss this as a completely bad idea, there are legitimate reasons to allow trademark bidding by affiliates, such as:
1. Defensive Coverage Against Competitors
Allowing your affiliates to run ads with your trademark terms can be a smart move. It’s akin to fortifying your brand’s online presence. This strategy can push competitors off the page, effectively safeguarding your potential customers from being lured away.
2. Extra Real Estate on Search Results
Google typically permits only one ad per domain. By partnering with affiliate marketers, you increase the likelihood of potential customers finding your brand instead of competitors. This expanded real estate on search results translates to more visibility.
3. Message Control
When affiliates bid on your trademark terms, you retain the final say on their ad content. This level of control ensures that their messaging aligns with your brand’s ethos, enhancing brand consistency and customer trust.
4. Additional Exposure and Benefits
By allowing your affiliates to bid on your trademark terms, you open doors to potential benefits like media subsidy packages. These packages can provide your brand with extra exposure without hefty upfront costs, thanks to your affiliate’s marketing efforts.
So, should your affiliate program allow trademark bidding or not? Ultimately, it depends on a few factors. Here’s who stands to benefit the most from trademark bidding affiliate partnerships:
Brands in Competitive Industries
Highly competitive industries often witness aggressive tactics by competitors. Allowing affiliates to bid on your trademarks can be a savvy defensive move.
Brands with Strong Reseller Presence
If you prefer customers to buy directly from you rather than through resellers, trademark bidding with affiliate partners can redirect potential customers to your brand.
Brands with Limited Budgets
If you have budget constraints for search or affiliate marketing, leveraging affiliate partners for trademark bidding can help you extend your reach effectively.
Incorporating trademark bidding into your affiliate program terms and conditions can open new avenues for enhancing your brand’s online presence and safeguarding your market share.
The question to ask yourself here is how popular is your brand and what are people saying about it online?
If you have a huge brand with hundreds of positive reviews, you have no need for affiliates bidding on your trademark keywords. If you do not, you may wish to allow it.
- You may not use our trademarked terms as part of the name of your site (e.g., you cannot name your site “ Coupons”).
This is pretty straightforward. If you do allow trademark bidding, you will definitely want to disallow affiliates from using your name as a part of their site name.
- You may not use our trademarked terms in your ad title, ad copy, display name or as the display url.
Again, this helps avoid any brand confusion and avoids affiliates posing as your actual company.
- You may not direct link to our website from any Pay Per Click ad or use redirects that yield the same result. Affiliates must be directed to an actual page on your website.
This requires them to send traffic to a bridge page on the affiliate’s site, rather than directly to yours. Again, this helps eliminate any confusion about who is running the ads.
If you automate your PPC campaigns, it is your responsibility to exclude our trademarked terms from your program and we strongly suggest you add our trademarked terms as negative keywords. We have a strict no tolerance policy on PPC trademark bidding. You will forfeit all commissions for a minimum of the past 30 days and your commission will be set to 0% without warning if you engage in PPC trademark bidding that uses our trademarked terms.
This section puts an additional onus on the affiliate to protect your brand.
A “negative keyword” is a term that you specify to instruct search engines not to display your ad for searches containing that particular keyword. In other words, if your company name is “Acme Shoe Polish” and an affiliate bids on “shoe polish,” a search for “Acme Shoe Polish” will show their ad. But if they add “Acme” as a negative keyword, it will not.
Trademarked Terms:
Clearly list all relevant trademark terms they must avoid bidding on. You may wish to include any personalities’ names as well (such as the owner of the company or face of the company). Also, make sure to include any product names you do not wish affiliates to bid on.
This clearly lays out the rules and if someone breaks the rules, the punishments are also clear.
How to Catch Affiliate FraudSo now that you know what affiliate fraud is and what the different types look like, what are the indicators of affiliate fraud? What should you actually be looking for? Here are some of the leading indicators we use in our agency to spot fraud quickly and stop it in its tracks.
Unusually High or Low Conversion RatesOne of the most telling signs of potential fraud in affiliate marketing is unusual conversion rates, whether they’re too high or too low:
High Click-to-Lead Conversion Rates: A typical scenario might involve a high number of leads compared to clicks, such as 496 leads from 500 clicks. This disparity could indicate fraudulent activities where an affiliate uses deceptive tactics to generate leads.
Low Click-to-Lead Conversion Rates: Conversely, extremely low conversions, like two leads from 500 clicks, might also signal problems. This could be a sign of poor traffic quality or intentional misreporting to manipulate campaign data.
High Lead-to-Sales Conversion Rates: An affiliate showing a dramatically high sales conversion rate compared to the average could be manipulating their results. For example, converting 70 out of 200 leads could be suspicious unless there’s a credible explanation, like targeting a highly engaged, niche audience.
Low Lead-to-Sales Conversion Rates: While less common, significantly low sales rates can also be problematic, suggesting the affiliate might be inflating lead numbers without genuine conversion intent.
Patterns of Clicks: Floods Followed by DroughtsMy friend Jeannine Crooks from ShareASale shared an interesting pattern: affiliates showing sporadic bursts of activity followed by silence.
“On one program, a certain affiliate seemed to be consistently performing at a small but steady level. However, upon reviewing the daily timing of his activity, it turned out that he was hand-entering the leads into our program and our competitor’s programs as well. To keep his conversion rate realistic, he generated clicks during his coffee breaks while working his day job.”
Sudden Emergence as a Top PerformerIf an affiliate suddenly rises to the top of your sales leaderboard without a prior history or visibility in the program, this deserves scrutiny. Their sudden success might be legitimate, due to effective marketing strategies or promotions, but it could also be a result of deceptive practices like using unauthorized promotional methods or spamming.
High Refund Rates and ChargebacksA high refund rate significantly above the program average is a red flag. If an affiliate’s refund rate exceeds 15%, when your average is around 5%, it’s crucial to investigate the quality of the sales they are generating. High chargebacks might also indicate the use of stolen credit card information or dissatisfaction due to misleading promotion tactics.
Complaints and FeedbackCredit Card Fraud: Be especially cautious with new affiliates who quickly incur credit card fraud complaints. Investigating their sales thoroughly can help determine if there’s a pattern of fraudulent behavior.
Spam Complaints: Receiving spam complaints linked to an affiliate’s promotional methods is a serious concern. While not always grounds for immediate dismissal, it necessitates a closer examination of their practices to ensure compliance with your program’s guidelines.
These are by far the most common indicators of affiliate fraud, but of course fraudulent affiliates are getting more sophisticated, so there will likely be more indicators in the future.
Don’t make the same mistakes I’ve made with my affiliate programs. Learn my top 20 affiliate program mistakes…and how to avoid them!
Additional Indicators to Look ForOnce you’ve identified the obvious signs of potential affiliate fraud, we want to dig a little further. The following is a comprehensive list of all the things we check for when looking at potential fraud.
Lack of CommunicationIf an affiliate rarely or never contacts you, it could indicate they’re trying to fly under the radar. Scammers don’t typically reach out to the affiliate manager very much. While not definitive proof of fraud, it’s a red flag that warrants closer monitoring.
RELATED POST: How to Communicate With Your Affiliates
Traffic and Click PatternsAlways the Last Click: If an affiliate consistently appears as the last click but never the first, it could indicate manipulation, such as cookie stuffing or the use of iframes. This pattern, especially when repeated across many transactions, is usually a strong reason for removal.
Irregular Sales Page Visit Duration: Extremely short or long visit durations compared to the norm can suggest that the traffic is not genuine. If an affiliate’s traffic consistently shows unusual time spent on pages, it’s worth investigating further.
Technical FootprintsRepeated IP Addresses: Multiple purchases from the same IP address can indicate that a single entity is manipulating the sales. This situation often calls for immediate action if the pattern is clear and repetitive.
Email Metrics: Extremely low or near-100% open rates and high bounce rates are indicators of poor quality or fraudulent leads. Such anomalies should prompt a review of the affiliate’s methods and potentially their removal if fraud is confirmed.
Conversion and Sales AnomaliesUnusual Conversion Rates: Significantly higher or lower conversion rates than average can indicate deceptive practices. These should be scrutinized, and if no reasonable explanation is found, termination might be necessary.
Event Attendance Rates: If none of an affiliate’s referred leads attend scheduled webinars or workshops, it questions the legitimacy of those leads. Low participation rates compared to other affiliates is a concern that needs addressing.
Behavioral PatternsOne-Route Buyers: If all sales from an affiliate come exclusively from one source (e.g., only from a sales page, but not from live events or webinars), it may suggest manipulative tactics or non-genuine traffic.
Patterns in Sign-ups: Uniformity in email addresses or names, such as sequential or formulaic naming, can be a sign of automated or fake registrations. This pattern often merits a deeper investigation or even removal from the program. I once caught an affiliate submitting fraudulent leads solely on the basis of every one of this leads’ email addresses being in the same format (first initial, last name @ gmail.com, such as jsmith, tanderson, etc.).
To Remove or Not to Remove?Once you’ve identified potential signs of affiliate fraud, the big question remains: Should you remove the affiliate from your program? This decision can be complex, depending on the nature and severity of the fraud. Below, I’ll share whether or not specific situations warrant removing an affiliate or just warning them.
Think of it as red flags and yellow flags. A red flag is an immediate removal, with no warning. The affiliate knew they were breaking the rules and did so intentionally. A yellow flag is when there might be some nuance.
Duplicating Content
There is simply no way to duplicate content unintentionally. This is always a red flag and warrants removal.
Cookie Stuffing
There is no way to accidentally do this. Another easy decision.
Spyware
Most of the time, spyware directly violates the terms of the affiliate agreement. BUT…and this is a big but (pardon the juvenile giggles), sometimes it’s possible to market on a platform that uses spyware unbeknownst to the affiliate.
So this is a yellow flag but ultimately up to the affiliate manager. This is situationally specific and usually warrants reaching out the affiliate to ask what the heck is going on. Their response will determine the next steps.
Fake Discount Codes
Anyone using fake discount codes knows what they are doing. This is a direct violation of a good affiliate agreement and warrants immediate removal.
Typo Squatting / URL Hijacking
Presuming that your affiliate program agreement prohibits this, the affiliate knows they are breaking the rules and this is a red flag. Instant removal.
Ad Stacking
Again, there is no way to accidentally do this. It is 100% intentional and the objective to is cheat the system.
Stolen Data
Do I even need to address this one? The only question here is if you will need to involve law enforcement or not.
Fake Calls
This is a blatant red flag if you can prove that the affiliate is generating truly fake calls. If you record inbound calls (which is the norm), you have easy access to these calls to see what people are saying.
Trademark Bidding
This one is the trickiest of them all. Some programs actually allow unrestricted trademark bidding, so it’s not fraud in any way.
Others allow zero trademark bidding, while others allow restricted bidding.
Ultimately, this is up to the affiliate manager. If you have to protect a big brand at all costs and your affiliate program terms are clear about trademark bidding, it might be an easy decision. If your terms are murky at best, tread carefully.
It usually depends on the level of egregiousness in the violation.
I used to work for Legacy Learning Systems and one of our courses was “Learn and Master Guitar.” We did not allow trademark bidding but what if someone was bidding on “learn guitar.” That is not a trademark violation at all. So we would tell them to make sure they use a negative keyword for “master” when they bid on “learn guitar.” So if someone searches for our exact name, their ad won’t show up.
That’s education, not removal.
On the other hand, if someone is knowingly bidding on our trademark terms and geotargeting to avoid my location, I will kick them out in a heartbeat.
Ultimately, the decision to remove an affiliate should be based on a combination of these indicators, backed by solid evidence. Being proactive in detecting and addressing affiliate fraud not only protects your program but also maintains the integrity of your marketing efforts.
Documenting Affiliate FraudDocumenting any incidents of affiliate fraud is crucial for legal protection and maintaining the integrity of your program. Here’s how to systematically document affiliate fraud effectively:
Gather EvidenceStart by collecting all possible evidence of fraudulent activity. This includes:
Screenshots: Capture any suspicious activity, such as unexpected ad placements, strange affiliate performance metrics, or proof of trademark bidding.
Tracking Reports: Use reports from your affiliate tracking software to identify anomalies in traffic patterns, conversion rates, or payout amounts.
Communication Records: Keep a record of all communications with the suspected affiliate. Opt for written forms of communication like emails or texts, which can be easily documented and referred back to.
Detailed Record-KeepingMaintain detailed records of all findings. This should include:
Date and Time: Note when the fraudulent activity was discovered and any relevant timestamps from your tracking tools.
Affiliate Information: Document the affiliate’s ID, the nature of their agreement with you, and any past issues.
Incident Description: Write a clear description of the suspected fraud, explaining how it deviates from normal activity or breaches your affiliate agreement.
Verifying IncidentsBefore taking action:
Verify Purchases: Contact customers who made purchases through the suspicious affiliate. Confirm their purchase intent and inquire whether they were aware of being referred by the affiliate.
Analyze Behavioral Patterns: Look for unusual patterns like consistent last-minute clicks, high refund rates, or geographic discrepancies in sales data. I wrote extensively about this above.
Communication and ActionOnce you have gathered sufficient evidence:
Notify the Affiliate: Inform the affiliate in question about the issue. Provide them with the evidence and explain why their actions are problematic.
Demand Corrective Actions: Request the affiliate to cease the fraudulent activities. Specify actions they need to take, such as removing unauthorized ads or ceasing to use forbidden promotional methods.
Follow-Up: Monitor the affiliate’s compliance with your requests. Keep documenting any further interactions or continued fraudulent activity.
Legal SafeguardsDocumentation: Keep all documentation organized and accessible. This includes saving digital copies of all evidence and communications.
Legal Advice: Consult with legal counsel if the fraud is extensive or if the affiliate disputes your claims. This will help ensure that your actions are legally sound.
Just make sure you don’t just remove the affiliate and not say anything. This could land you in a lot of trouble.
In terms of communication, don’t call them. Either text them or email them so that you have documentation of reaching out.
So if they come back and say, “You didn’t pay my commissions,” you have a paper trail of informing them of how they broke the rules and that you are not paying their commissions.
So take action fast. Make sure you contact them. Tell them to remove their ads to shut down their account.
Preventing Affiliate FraudNow that you know how to catch affiliate fraud and what to do IF it happens, how do you actually prevent it from happening in the first place?
Create a Solid Affiliate Agreement/Terms and ConditionsClarity Is Key: Ensure your affiliate terms and conditions are explicit and comprehensive. Clearly define what constitutes fraud within your program. Specify which actions are prohibited, such as trademark bidding or cookie stuffing, especially if these actions may not be inherently illegal.
Regular Updates: Continuously review and update your terms to cover new types of fraud as they emerge. Affiliates should be aware of these terms from the start to avoid any ambiguities.
If you haven’t already, read my post on how to create an affiliate agreement.
Enforce Your Terms RigorouslyActive Monitoring: Utilize tools and software designed to detect fraudulent activities automatically. These tools act as an ‘affiliate watchdog’, scanning for signs of fraud and ensuring compliance with your program’s rules.
Consistent Enforcement: Apply your rules uniformly and take decisive action when a violation occurs. This deters potential fraudsters and maintains fairness among all affiliates.
Vet Affiliates ThoroughlyNo Auto-Approvals: Implement a rigorous vetting process for new affiliates. Do not auto-approve affiliate applications; instead, review each applicant’s background, previous marketing activities, and reputation.
Fraud Screening: Use built-in fraud screening services during the affiliate application process. This helps in identifying and rejecting potential fraudsters right from the start.
Monitor Traffic and Transactions CloselyAnalytical Vigilance: Keep an eye on traffic patterns and transactional data. Look for anomalies such as spikes in traffic from unusual locations or inconsistent conversion rates that might indicate fraudulent activities.
IP Address Analysis: Regularly analyze IP addresses to identify discrepancies like geolocation mismatches. This can indicate the use of VPNs or proxies to mask fraudulent activities.
Develop Strong Relationships with Your AffiliatesBuilding a personal rapport with affiliates can foster transparency and loyalty. It also makes it easier to verify their marketing practices and ensure they align with your program’s standards.
Periodically review performance data with your affiliates. This not only helps in identifying any suspicious patterns but also assists legitimate affiliates in optimizing their strategies.
Use Advanced Detection ToolsFraud Detection Software: Invest in sophisticated fraud detection software that can automate the monitoring of affiliate activities. These tools can identify suspicious patterns and alert you to potential fraud.
Data Analytics: Employ data analytics to deepen your understanding of normal versus abnormal affiliate behaviors. This helps in setting benchmarks that make deviations clear and easier to investigate.
Educate Your AffiliatesTraining and Resources: Provide educational resources and training sessions on acceptable marketing practices under your affiliate program. Clearly communicate the consequences of violating the terms.
Get the EXACT Templates We Use to Train Affiliates PLUS a Behind-the-Scenes Look at One of Our Trainings! Click Here to Access it Now (100% FREE)!
Feedback Mechanisms: Establish clear channels through which affiliates can report suspicious activities or seek clarification on program rules. This promotes a culture of compliance and vigilance.
Be Proactive, Not ReactiveAnticipate Fraud Trends: Stay informed about the latest trends in affiliate fraud. Attending industry seminars, engaging in forums, and subscribing to security newsletters can provide insights into new fraudulent techniques and preventive measures.
Legal Preparedness: Ensure you have legal support familiar with internet marketing and fraud. This is crucial for drafting enforceable terms and handling disputes legally and effectively.
Final Thoughts: Staying Ahead of Affiliate FraudAffiliate fraud may not be rampant, but it’s an issue that demands your vigilance. Armed with the knowledge from this post, you’re now better equipped to recognize the signs of affiliate fraud, understand its various forms, and implement effective prevention strategies.
Remember, staying proactive is key to protecting your program. You know how to legally safeguard your operations and have the tools to deter potential fraudsters effectively. Ensuring the integrity of your affiliate program not only enhances its performance but also maintains the trust of your genuine affiliates.
Got more questions or need advice on affiliate fraud or any related topics? Don’t hesitate to reach out. You can text me anytime at 260-217-4619. I’m always ready to help and share more insights to keep your affiliate program secure and successful.
Stay alert, stay informed, and keep your affiliate program thriving by preventing fraud before it can impact your business.
The post How to Catch (And Prevent) Affiliate Fraud appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### What do the GREAT affiliate programs provide for their affiliates? If you are going to run a consistently growing, thriving affiliate program, it is YOUR responsibility to make sure your partners have everything they need to succeed. And I mean EVERYTHING. But what are the most important things you need to provide for them? That’s what this episode is all about.
Do affiliate bonus packages still work in 2024? Today I share what the latest research reveals about affiliate bonus packages. You’ll learn the truth behind common myths surrounding bonus packages and learn the secrets to crafting irresistible offers that drive results. Affiliates and affiliate managers, this episode could be worth millions, so listen up!
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Build an Army of Loyal Affiliates
Got a Low-Priced Product? Here’s How to Run an Affiliate Program
How Top Affiliates are Closing Sales in 2024
How to Find Affiliates Using Affiliate Program Leaderboards
If Donald Trump Ran an Affiliate Program
How to Create Promotion Plans for Affiliates
How to Give Your Affiliates What They Need to SucceedWhat do great affiliate programs provide for their affiliates? If you’re going to run a consistently growing, thriving affiliate program, it is your responsibility to make sure your partners have everything they need. And I mean everything. But what are the most important things you need to provide for them? Well, that’s what today’s episode is all about.
So one of the things that I’ve noticed over the past 16, almost 17 years now running affiliate programs is that the great affiliate programs provide five things for their affiliates.
These are pretty consistent. They’re across the affiliate programs that we’ve run, that we’ve seen friends of ours run, you know, people that we respect, great affiliate managers, you know, just companies that have good affiliate managers and the like that we’ve seen these five things and I’m gonna share today and, and it took a little bit of work. Those of you who know me know I love acronyms, makes it super easy to remember. And we’re gonna use the acronym.
Great. I will be the first to admit that one of the letters, and I’m gonna see maybe if you can guess what it is, hit me up on social media and let me know which letter you think it is. Took a little finagling. I had to like use thethorist. com
and kind of be like, okay, how do I get this to work? And that’s usually what happens, usually when I do one of these acronyms, a little behind the scenes here. And it’s like, you know, if there’s five letters, four of them are super easy, four of them are really, really easy, and then there’s one where it’s like, oh, I gotta, I gotta dig around. And I end up maybe with like a kind of a weird, like letter. You know, it doesn’t, the word is like not a commonly used one.
You know, things like that. I think of one of the acronyms that I used a while back and I can’t remember the actual acronym, but the A and it’s not the case today. The a ended up being the word alacrity. Well, alacrity is not a super common word. It’s actually a word my dad used all the time.
But I got there because I was like digging around on thesaurus. com and like, okay, I gotta go here. And then I found the word. I’m like, yeah, that kind of means what I want it to mean.
It’s not exact, but it works. So we got the acronym great here. And it starts with the g, of course, which is general direction. Affiliates need general direction. The first thing your affiliates need is guidance from you.
They need a target to aim at, okay? They need to know what to do. Like, exactly. Here’s the breakdown of the promotion. They need to know when to do it.
They need to know the calendar. They need to know how to do it, and also they need to know why to do it. What’s the why behind it? Now, we’ll talk about this a little bit more in the tea, but they need to know some of the backstory. Give them some behind the scenes.
Here’s why the launch breaks down this way. Here’s why we do the webinar on this day, because we found it converts better and things like that. It works better for our audience. So they need to know what to do, when to do it, how to do it and why to do it. And here’s the thing, don’t underestimate your own affiliate marketing experience.
Okay? And don’t overestimate their expertise. All right? So especially when you know the underestimating part there, right? Teach them.
Share as much as possible about what works in your niche. Share lessons you’ve learned from promoting launches or affiliate programs. Share success stories. Share experiments you’ve run. Share your experience promoting certain affiliate offers.
Right. And then don’t overestimate their experience, particularly when it comes to your product or your launch or your program. Just because they’re experts doesn’t mean that they can’t be taught. So don’t assume they know everything that they need to know. Don’t assume they know what to do.
Don’t assume they know when to do it, how to do it or why to do it. Share that stuff with them. Now, as far as things that you can share of your own experience, you know, share takeaways, maybe you promoted something a couple of months ago and you tried something or you saw somebody else do something. One of our former clients, Jeff Goins, did a great one. This probably like five years ago, he recorded a quick video and just basically shared a lesson that he learned promoting product launch formula.
All he did was say, you know, I accidentally did this and it worked really well. And I thought I’d share this with you. You could share a quick video just sharing a single lesson. You know when you do affiliate trainings, right. This is something that we do with our clients, and we highly recommend that you do where you host a quick 30, 40 minutes training.
If you want an example of our training, if you just go to mattmcwilliams. com affiliate training and I’ll put that link in the show notes, you can get a sample of it and you can actually, we’ll even give you the slides. We’ll give you the slides. You could literally take these slides, tweak them a little bit and do your own training.
Like, I’m giving you permission to do that. So don’t reinvent the wheel and then have a lot of Q and A at the end and just answer questions, you know, record a quick video with like a super quick lesson or post lessons to, you know, your affiliate Facebook group and things like that. So the big thing is just give them direction, give them guidance again, tell them what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and why to do it. So that’s the g, the r is the right graphics. They need the right graphics.
Now. Yes, email is king. You know, more people are, you know, doing emails that only have text in them because they tend to have better deliverability rates. Email is king, and text messages are coming up as well. But graphics are still important.
You need graphics for their blog posts, you need graphics for their emails. If they use graphics in their emails, you need graphics for banner ads. We’ll talk about that in a moment. They still are relevant. You need Facebook images and tweetable quotes and things for Pinterest and Instagram.
Now, if you want a video of how we provide these to our affiliates, like, to make it really stinking easy for them, I’m gonna have a link to a YouTube video. It’s like a two minute video that walks you through how to do that. But you also wanna have headshots, product graphics. So like a spread of your course. If you have a course or whatever, a physical product, show it being used.
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If it’s a course, you know, like show it on a computer screen, show the person exercising, using the weights, whatever it is, right? Screenshots. If there’s videos, things like that, and you want to have a dedicated page in your affiliate portal, okay, now, if you want to keep it really low tech and super simple, you can use like a Google Drive thing, that’s fine. But if you’re looking to build your own affiliate portal, that’s something we can help with. I mean, we’ve built dozens of really high quality affiliate portals.
If you’ve promoted any of our clients, you’ve seen them, you know what they look like. So if you’re interested in that, just text me at 260-217-4619 and I can give you more information on those portals. But they need. I mentioned Banner ads. Like, you may be thinking, like, banner ads, really, what is, like 2006?
No, Banner ads still work. They still work in affiliate marketing. And we want to provide good quality banner ads. Now, I wouldn’t expect more than about three to 5% of your total sales to come from Banner ads, but, you know, it’s three to 5% if you have even, even a small launch, $100,000 launch, you know, or let’s say you’re doing $10,000 a month. How’d you like to add an extra 300, 400, $500?
That’s kind of cool. You look up at the end of the year, that’s, you know, five, $6,000. That’s not bad. If you’re a bigger company, it could be, you know, 500, $600,000. So you need to have different sizes of banners.
You need to have a blog sidebar. The traditional size there is 300 by 250. You want to have a leaderboard, which is typically 728 by 90. You want to have a Twitter size and a Facebook site. Those sizes are changing.
Pinterest, Instagram, whatever, social media networks, LinkedIn that your people are on, you want to have those graphics for them. So we want to give them general guidance. We want to provide them with the right graphics and the e. We want to provide them with examples of promo plans. And one of the most common questions I get when I’m running an affiliate promotion is, what are the best days to email and who do I send it to?
And so we created these sample mailing plans. We actually call them our ABC. I get, I love acronyms, apparently, even though that’s not really an acronym. But our ABC mailing plans. So the a is all in or aggressive.
So this is the plan for people who are in it to win it or they want to maximize their commissions. This is typically like 15 to 20 emails. And I’ll walk you through what that might look like in a moment. The balanced plan. Actually, let me skip to the c, the conservative plan.
This is like they just want to dip their toe in the water, right? They’re not 100% committed to a full promotion yet. And I’ll share about that in a moment. That’s usually like five to eight emails. And then the balance plan is the Goldilocks plan, right?
It’s. Yeah, it’s not too hot, it’s not too cold. It’s just right. This is between the all in and the conservative. And usually this is about ten to 13 emails.
Now, how I come up with those. So I’m gonna give you an example. The all in plan for one of Michael Hyatt’s promotions that we ran had six emails to their entire list.
That’s it. Even though this is the all in plan, there are only six to the entire list, three to unopens, and seven to engage contacts. And so what that looked like was three emails about the ebook. Starting on November 21, you sent the ebook to the entire list. A couple days later to unopens, a few days later to unopens again.
Now they had the Thanksgiving holiday in there, so we had to account for that. So there’s like a little bit of a gap. Then a couple days later, they sent the assessment to their entire list, then to unopened, and then a couple days later, the webinar promo. They did a handful of webinar emails and they went to their entire list and then again to their entire list. For that one, they sent the cart open to their entire list, but they sent the early bird deadline where there was actually a deadline after like the second day to get a discount.
They only sent the early bird deadline to their engaged contacts. These are people who had clicked on previous emails or opted in. Then they had another webinar around. So we did a couple emails to that and then the cart closed. The last five emails pretty much all went to just engage contacts.
Typically we recommend a cart open and maybe like a mid cart and a close cart email to your entire list, or at least to like the segment that you want to mail to because there might be people who didn’t opt in for the ebook or the assessment or the webinar, but they will buy the product. So at least one or at least two emails to your entire list for that. And so what we do is we come up with that. That was 16 emails. That was the all in plan.
Then what I did was I just backed in to, okay, what’s the conservative plan? You know, what does that look like? And so we definitely want to send the ebook to our entire list. So I’m like, I go back and I go, okay, 16. So conservative is probably going to be, we’ll say seven emails and we’re probably going to cut the entire list in half.
So we’ll go three emails, maybe four. We’ll go four emails to the entire list and we’ll go like two to unopened and maybe, you know, one to engaged contacts or something like that. Maybe three to your entire list. Make it really simple for them. Just three emails to your entire list.
That’s it. Two to unopens and two to engage contacts. And so like ebook to your entire list, ebook to unopens. And then we do like assessment to entire list. Assessment to unopens, and then we go webinar to entire list, webinar to unopened, and then a cart announcement, you know, to the engaged contacts, people who clicked on any of those emails, for example.
Now then what I do is I talk them into adding one more email about cart close, you know, maybe the morning of the deadline. Then I just kind of split the difference, you know, with that balance list. But it’s super easy. I have a video on how we put them together, put that in the show notes as well. So it’s super easy to put those together.
The other thing affiliates need in this, you know, here in this e of this example, affiliate promotion or, you know, example promotion plan, they need a promo checklist. Like this is by far the simplest way to get more out of your affiliate partners. A simple checklist really works. Really, really works. I mean, affiliates are people, and they are people who own their own business, and they are crazy, freaking busy.
Here’s the thing we have to remember about affiliates. They’re not lazy. They’re just busy. Your launch, your affiliate promotion, your product is not their number one priority. In fact, it probably falls somewhere between get the oil changed and update their Netflix preferences like it is not their number one priority.
It’s not even probably their top three any given day. So we give them a checklist like we created an affiliate promo checklist. And it absolutely works. All right. It absolutely works.
This checklist is proven to get tons more out of your affiliates. So very simply, it lets them know exactly what dates they should be mailing. It tells them when and where to post on social media, encourages them to mention the launch in their podcast, their live videos. I mean, the reality is, like, people like things to be simple, and a lot of people operate better using a checklist. I know I do.
And what it does is it puts the whole launch right in front of them and it encourages them to do more for each piece of content than just send a single email. Like I said earlier, email is king, probably always will be. But you can get some great results from social media and podcasts, especially if you’re sharing, like, the free pre launch content. And so by keeping everything in front of your affiliates, we’ve also noticed this significant drop in what we call mid launch dropouts, or mid promo dropouts. These are people who come out of the gates swinging.
They’ll send like 200 opt ins on day one, and day three, they’ll send another 150, and then they just disappear. Disappear. So this is a big problem. But we noticed that dramatically drops when we have affiliates using this checklist. And so we’ve noticed with our clients about a ten to 20% increase in sales since we started using this checklist.
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
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That’s huge. Now, you might be asking if you need to create a new plan each time you run a promo. The answer is no, you do not. We use the exact same format. Exact same format.
So I’m going to put a link in the show notes. You can just grab the template. It’s just an editable word, doc. So you could upload it to Google Drive if you wanted to, even copy and paste it into Google Drive. But it’s super easy to use and we update it periodically.
You know, the original version had like, had like a para, had periscope and Google on it. I don’t know when’s the last time anybody used periscope? Maybe it’s still around. I have no idea. Or, you know, Google doesn’t exist.
And so we took those off. You know, we took those off. I think we put, you know, TikTok on there. If people are big on TikTok, for example. So grab that template.
It’s super, super easy to use. All right, so general direction, the right graphics, and you need to give them that e, the example of promo plans. Well, the a is you got to give them amazing swipe copy. Affiliates need amazing swipe copy. Swipe copy is super important, so making it great, making it amazing should be a priority.
And that means either taking a lot of time to write it or preferably hiring an expert to do so. All right? You do not want to provide mediocre or bad swipe copy. It’s just going to turn them off. You want to make it great, and if you do, they’ll go all in for your promotion.
So there’s five mistakes I see with Swipe copy. All right, I shared these. Gosh, I shared these many, many years ago, and I still see the same mistakes today. I’m not sure if I shared them on the podcast, though, so I think I shared them like a blog post. But the five mistakes I typically see is, number one, writing it yourself.
Now, I just said you got to take a lot of time to write it. Yep. If this is the only option, I’ll talk about, like, I strongly recommend hiring somebody else to write it. It doesn’t even have to be a professional copywriter because as the product owner, you are too close to the product to write great swipe copy. What you have to remember is swipe copy is a guide for your affiliates to use.
So it’s got to. It should be written from that perspective of an outsider, right? Not you. You put your blood, sweat and tears into the product, so you see things differently. So that’s mistake number one is writing it yourself.
Now, I will excuse you if you really, genuinely, just right now, don’t have the money to hire somebody, I totally understand, but you need to make sure you are putting yourself in the affiliate shoes and writing it from their perspective. Second, you don’t put images. You know, some people do use images in their emails very effectively. I don’t use them that often. When I do, though, my click rates skyrocket.
Should probably be a lesson for me, actually. But, you know, if you don’t include images or suggested images, then they might not know initially what to use. Third mistake is you only write one version. The problem with this is it assumes that every affiliate has the exact same audience. Your product probably reaches different demographics, different avatars, people who are different places in their life.
They have different struggles, they have different needs, they have different desires, and so you need different versions. Fourth, you write only long or short emails now, just like the one I just talked about, the different version. It assumes that every affiliate wants the same kind of copy. Some want the long form, others prefer short, shortened to the point. So you need to give that to them.
And then, fifth, you expect them to copy and paste it. In fact, you even encourage it. You tell them, just copy and paste this. No, no, no, no. Okay.
We always tell our affiliates not to copy and paste. The swipe, copy. It is unoriginal, it is ineffective, and a lot of times it backfires. So do not do that. So what do you do instead?
Number one, like I said, hire somebody to write it. Okay? Number two, include images. The four types of things that work particularly well for us are, if we’re sending to a video, a video screen capture. All right, a video screen capture.
You take a video screen capture, put a little play button over that. If you’re doing this yourself, it’s so easy. You take a screenshot, you upload it to canva, you put a triangle. You know, it doesn’t have to be something. It just looks like a play button.
I prefer goofy ones. So I pardon this, but I always prefer a screenshot. If I’m doing a video screen capture, I want a video screen capture that looks like I just smelled a fart or something like that. Like I want the goofiest thing possible. If you’re running a sale, give them a graphic representing the sale, stat.
Screenshots.
You know, if you mention statistics, then use a screenshot like, oh, look, here’s my increase in traffic to my website. And you see the spike. That’s kind of cool. You know, countdown timers or images. You know, if you have a countdown timer, give your affiliates the code.
If you don’t, then go get it. I’ll put links in the show notes. There’s a couple different services we recommend. They don’t even have affiliate programs. I don’t even have an affiliate link for them.
Create a countdown timer and give that to your affiliates. Third, you want to write different versions of your swipe copy for different audiences. When I was working with Jeff going to, I mentioned earlier, first thing I worked with him on was his book launch for the art of work. And as we were talking, we kind of identified these four core audiences. We had entrepreneurs, faith based stay at home parents, and what we called dreamers.
And so we created specific swipe copy for each of those four audiences. And the affiliates loved it. And the cool thing was, if you looked at that list and said, well, I don’t have entrepreneurs, dreamers, faith based people, or stay at home parents, you probably weren’t a good fit to promote. The book made that really easy. But if you looked at it and said, yep, I’m faith based, boom, you could grab the faith based copy.
I’ve got stay at home moms. Great. I’ve got stay at home dads. Awesome. I’ve got dreamers.
I’ve got entrepreneurs. Boom, you’ve got it. Fourth, you want to write different links of copy. Now, you don’t have to do this for every single thing like your cart close, you know, final email is probably going to be pretty short. You don’t need to write a long version for that.
But for your introduction, like the very first email, you want to have maybe a few different versions of the pre launch content. You know, the first piece, you want to have a different open cart email. Probably a day before cart close email. I recommend like a long FAQ version and a short reminder one. And then for the morning of cart close day, you probably want to have a couple different versions.
Now, other ones, you might have a long and a short version, too, but, you know, definitely for those four things. And then lastly, make it clear that swipe copy is a guide only. They are using it as a guide. They’re using it for inspiration. So tell them to make their emails personal and specific for their audience.
Show them, you know, I’ll put a link to a post that I did about how to use swipe copy and make sure that you send them to that post. You know, it’s kind of self serving, but do it right. Just send them to that post to how to use swipe copy. And then lastly, don’t forget about social swipe. We found this is, this is often an overlooked piece of content and launches.
We found that between twelve and 18% of all opt ins come from social media. So it’s a big deal. So you need to include versions for, you know, the mate, you may be listening to this five years from now and there’s like seven new social media networks. But, you know, for us, at the bare minimum, we do one for, you know, Twitter and then we do one that works for like, Facebook and Instagram for if we’re in b, two b, we’ll do one that works for LinkedIn as well. And then, like I said, images that are, you know, sized for that.
All right, so we want to give them some guidance. We want to give them general guidance, general direction. We want to give them the right graphics, we want to give them examples of promo plans and we want to give them amazing swipe copy. And then lastly, we want to give them a team atmosphere. A team atmosphere.
Affiliates need to feel like they are part of the process. People support the things that they feel like they’re a part of, right? This is true in every aspect of life. If you have a job, you support the initiatives, you played a role in planning. You know, if there’s a charity, you support the cause that you had a say in choosing.
If you’re forced to support a charity, it’s like, whatever, you know, it’s just money, who cares? That’s why it’s important to make your affiliates feel like they are part of the process because they are. So we want to create a team atmosphere. That means keeping them updated often, you know, if you’re running a launch, don’t show up out of nowhere a week before the launch and expect your partners to be excited. You need to include them along the way for weeks or even months ahead of your launch.
So give them behind the scenes access. Right. I’ve shared this before, but, you know, just shoot a quick video. If you’re on set, you know, share testimonials with them, post it in the partner group and, you know, like, just make them feel like what they’re doing is having an impact. I remember, you know, about three, about three years ago during our launch, we were going through the comments on.
So part of our launch we had a quick start guide and the comments that people were leaving. And I was like, mark, you got to go post those in the face in the affiliate Facebook group. And he went in and posted, he said, guys, you were seriously changing lives. You’re seriously changing lives. And he posted some screenshots of some of the, you know, comments that people left.
And one of them was like, well, I’ve wanted to do affiliate selling for 20 years and I’m just now going to do it. You were so kind, so dear. I think your program actually might work. You’re not too much of a hype guy for me. You know, I’ve been in business for 40 years, but some of the online guys are just too much hype for me.
I don’t need hype to sell. I just need to know how and expertise delivered kindly in a straightforward manner. And there was like all these comments, right? And so he, you know, mark then said, okay, here’s what I want you to do. Go opt into the guide or the video, you know, the same comments, basically, read some of the comments yourself.
Seriously, they will pump you up. Add your own response. Answering Matt’s question, seriously, imagine your people seeing your comment in there about how why you are excited about affiliate marketing. Hashtag huge for share a screenshot of your comment on social or in an email as social proof of what you’re telling your audience. And so he said, I’ll bet it helps.
You can’t tell me that at least one more person doesn’t opt in from seeing your comment. And so the point there is like, share those testimonials, right? Start a Facebook group. You have to have a Facebook group for your affiliates because then you can update them more frequently without clogging up their inbox. Also helps them to connect with each other.
Ask for their help, you know, ask for their opinion on things like logos or messaging. People love to feel a part of a decision like this and it dramatically increases the buy in and involvement. And then explain your thinking. You know, if you make a decision, any decision that affects them, let them know your thinking. Don’t just announce the change, explain the change.
Hey, guys, we decided to not do the webinar on Sunday. We’re moving it to Monday. Just wanted to let you know. That’s a terrible message. No, hey, guys, we decided to cancel the webinar on Sunday because of events that are happening in the world and we feel like moving it to sun, you know, Monday, just moving it back a day will give people some space to process things.
Over the weekend. You wanted to let you know so that’s the big update or something like that. Or we decided to add a third webinar because we found that, gosh, we actually ended up with 27% of our people that registered for this workshop are in the west coast, are in west coast time, Pacific time. So we wanted to give them an option to attend that wasn’t the middle of their day or something like that. You know, explain your thinking.
Make them feel a part of the process. So again, give them general direction, general guidance. Give them the right graphics, give them examples of, of successful promos and what they need to do. Make show them how they need to do stuff when they need to do it, why they need to do it and then give them amazing swipe copy and then create a team atmosphere. Make them feel a part of the process.
Make sure that your affiliate program has a solid agreement (AKA Terms & Conditions). To make things simple, grab my template here!
So as you can tell, you’ve got tangible resources like swipe copy, graphics, checklists. These are important, but the most important resources of all are a feeling of inclusion and general direction and that guiding your affiliate partners. When you provide your affiliates with these five things, these five must have, there’s no doubt that you’ll run a successful program. So come back for the next episode because I’ve got a juicy one. I’m going to show you how to build your affiliate army.
I showed you today what you need to give them. How do you get them? How do you build this affiliate army? I got a great question from Kate Makulova who asked, how do you find small and medium sized affiliates and build an army of affiliates? Well, I’m going to answer that in the next episode, so make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss it.
Hit that subscribe button. Tell your friends, if you know somebody running an affiliate program, they’re like, what do I do? What do I give my affiliates? Share this episode with them so they know. And make sure you subscribe.
I’ll see you in the next episode where you’re going to learn how to build your affiliate army. Thank you so much for listening today.
The post How to Give Your Affiliates What They Need to Succeed appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### How do you build an affiliate army? A program that isn’t reliant on one or two or even a few affiliates? In today’s episode, I’ll share exactly how you can build an army of hundreds, thousands, or even tens or hundreds of thousands of evangelist affiliates.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyGot a Low-Priced Product? Here’s How to Run an Affiliate Program
How Top Affiliates are Closing Sales in 2024
How to Find Affiliates Using Affiliate Program Leaderboards
If Donald Trump Ran an Affiliate Program
How to Create Promotion Plans for Affiliates
How Sarah Williams 20X’d her Affiliate Sales and Won a $100,000 First Prize
How to Build an Army of Loyal AffiliatesHow do you build an affiliate army? This means a program that isn’t reliant on one or two or even a few affiliates. When today’s episode, I’m going to share exactly how you can build an army of hundreds, thousands, or even tens or hundreds of thousands of evangelist affiliates. I got a question from Kate Makalova, and she said, how do you find small and medium sized affiliates and build an army of affiliates?
She asked that in our survey that we do annually, which, by the way, if you haven’t completed that, if you just go to mattmcwilliams. com survey, you can take that. Why does she ask this question? Why does she ask, how do you find small and medium sized affiliates?
Most people ask me, how do you find the big whales, Matt? How do you, how do you go out and get the biggest person in your niche? So in my niche, how do you go out and get Jeff Walker? How do you get him to become an affiliate?
The answer to that is you get to know him for like ten years. You don’t like that answer, do you? The answer to how you get the really big ones is you develop a relationship with them. That’s the reality.
They have so many opportunities that it’s going to come down to relationships. But the other reason why we want to find small and medium sized affiliates is because the 80 20 rule doesn’t apply. It doesn’t apply. I’ve shared this before that I’ve heard people say from stage like statement of fact, 90% of your sales will come from your top three to five affiliates.
Nope. I remember sitting in an event when somebody said that, I looked over at one of our team members and they looked at me like, dude, they just, like, they kind of just said, everything that you teach is wrong. Like, well, maybe their program is like that, but not ours. And we’ll talk about that today.
Now, let me be brutally clear here. This is nothing more than a cop out. When somebody says 90% of your sales will come from your top three to five affiliates. I heard that for years.
You know the 80 20 rule, right? That should be. Not with my programs. Know when you run them.
Right. But then I heard it was the 90 ten rule in affiliate marketing. Like, really? I want.
I want 99% of my sales to come from my top 1%. Now, that’s a cop out. That’s an excuse not to work with smaller affiliates. That’s an excuse to go out and get three or four best buddies and just be like, peace out.
I don’t think, though, you’re listening to a podcast. Here’s something I know about podcast listeners. People who listen to a marketing podcast or a personal growth podcast or something like that. People who listen to parenting podcasts.
You know what? You know what I know about people who listen to parenting podcasts. They don’t want to be just kind of like, okay parents. They don’t want their kids to grow up and just be okay.
No, they want to be great parents. They want to be outstanding parents. They want to be known for being great parents, people who listen to marketing podcasts. I’m not saying you don’t want to be a great parent.
I’m just saying I know you want to be great at marketing. You want to have a great affiliate program. You’re not one of those people who’s just gonna sit back and be content just to, like, run your little insiders club, have a few affiliates, and that’s it. Am I right?
So I’m gonna share some cold, hard data in a moment that completely destroys this lie. This lie. But there’s two things that I find kind of play into this. Two other, I’m gonna call them mini lies.
Little mini lies. First one says that you have to personally know all of your affiliates. I have to personally know all of your affiliates. In fact, I should have every one of my affiliates cell phone numbers.
I should know everything about them. Like, I have to have a personal relationship. Matt, you just said that I have to get to know Jeff Walker for, like, ten years. Jeff Walker.
But guess what? You do not need to be best buds with all of your affiliates. I ran an, I mean, shutterfly, 100,000 affiliates. Adidas, 250,000 affiliates.
Ish. Like, we would add 500 in a day. Sometimes in mid November, mid to late November, Shutterfly, there were days we’d add 300 affiliates when we were talking about, like, right around, you know, the week leading up to Black Friday. Do you think I personally knew all of them?
I didn’t know 299 of their names. The next day, I might remember one for one. I wasn’t the only one looking. I didn’t look at the applications.
I only looked at the three or four that my team sent to me. If you’re going to run an affiliate program that is consistently growing year after year, it is simply not possible to know all of your affiliates personally. It’s just not possible. The second kind of, we’ll call it the mini lie.
Small affiliates are not worth the hassle. Now, I’ve covered this in past episodes where I’ve talked about why you want to work with small affiliates just to recap loyalty. That’s a big one. They grow, and they will remember you forever.
And you will build an army of loyal affiliates. Okay, so what happens when you ignore this? When you create this army of awesome affiliates. Well, I think I shared this in a past episode, but I’ll share it again.
You know, Michael Hyatt, his leaderboard, if you look at his top seven. The only reason I’m saying top seven is I took a screenshot of his leaderboard and the screenshot only took up the top seven. I don’t remember who was on 8th, but I think it was also a big name. His top seven was Jeff Walker, Sally Hogshead, Ray Edwards, Pat Flynn, Jeff Goins, Stu McLaren, John Lee Dumas.
I’m talking people who made six figures in sales, sent 5000 plus leads each. Just think about who. I named some of the biggest names in Internet marketing. Massive multi seven figure launch.
Who’s who, right? And yet those top three, the top three of Ray Edwards, Sally Hogshead and Jeff Walker only accounted for 14% of of the sales. The 27% came from the top ten. Again, who is made up of those three plus?
Pat Flynn, Jeff goins to McLaren, John Lee Dumas, and I think Kevin Harrington and some others were in there. We had 500 plus affiliates. Make one sale. Name an affiliate launch where 500 plus make one sale.
That doesn’t happen very often. That’s an army. That’s what Kate was asking about. How do I build an army?
There’s no risk of losing. You know, if Jeff Walker had quit, man, that would suck. We’d have lost five and a half percent of our sales. Most programs your top affiliate quits, you lose 20% to 50% of your sales.
I’d say on average, probably around 28% to 30%. Your top affiliate, you lose your entire top three. As a matter of fact, the next year we lost number two, number three, number five and number seven. We lost four of our top seven affiliates.
You know how much we lost? None. We actually went up. But those four combined only accounted for like 11% of the total sales.
You know, Ray Edwards launch, same thing, same kind of numbers. Top eight was Jeff Walker, Jeff Bullis, Don Miller, Michael Hyatt, Dan Miller, Craig Ballantyne, Chandler Bolt, John Nemo top 319 percent top 1034. Just barely over a third of the sales came from the top ten. So how do we do this?
How do we do this? The conventional wisdom says that finding affiliates is super hard. You know, it’s just hard to go. It’s not worth the small affiliates.
Right? It tells you not to work with those small affiliates, or like, you have to intimately know all of your affiliates. This is not true. This idea that most of your sales will come from only a few affiliates is a lie.
So the first step is you have to stop believing the lie. You have to believe that you can build an army of affiliates fast, and that lasts. You got to build it fast and last. So how do you build that army?
Now, here’s the thing. What I’m about to tell you is so ridiculously simple. It is so elementary, my dear Watson, that you might feel tempted to completely brush it off. But you know what?
It’s also my company’s secret weapon. Because I know that no matter how many people I share this with, most of them aren’t going to actually execute it. Like, I can literally give you the playbook. I’m going to do that.
It seems too simplistic. Like, it cannot just be that easy, dude. I know, because I do the same thing. I just.
It can’t be that easy to, you know, get more viewers on my facebook, you know, lives. Yes, it is. I did it. You can do it, too.
So enough disclaimers, all that crap. Here’s how to build this affiliate army. There’s three things you got to consider. Number one, when to begin.
Number two, where to look. And number three, the actual tactical side of things. So we’re going to start with when to begin. This is one of the biggest mistakes I see people making.
I’m going to talk a lot more in depth about this. Depending upon when you’re listening to this, we’ll put a link in the, in the show notes. But depending upon when you’re listening to this, I’m either about to do a live lesson on this or I just did a live lesson on this. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is that they simply wait too long to start recruiting.
Okay. You need to start at least six months out if you have a launch. If you’ve got a big promo, you need to start at least six months out if you have an evergreen program. I mean, just start now.
Just start now. Just don’t expect them to promote you for a few months. Simple reason for this is people have promo calendars. I’m looking at our promo calendar right now.
I just pulled it up. So I am recording this. So this, this interview will go live on October 5. I’m recording it a couple weeks in advance, and I’m looking at our calendar and we have a promo.
We have 1234 promotions, either internal or affiliate promotions scheduled between the time this podcast will release and November 12. We then have promotions scheduled in mid and late November. We have another promotion scheduled in December, then we typically go off a little bit and go to 2022. We got two promotions in January.
We actually have a spot open in February. I’m not going to tell you when you can reach out to me. If you’re, you know, if you’re curious, we’re booked in March. We’re booked solid in April.
Half of May is when things start opening up. I mean, that’s a long fricking time from now, right? I’m not atypical. In fact, I would say prior to this year, I probably was a little bit atypical in that we only planned about three or four months out.
Now we’re planned out. In some cases. We actually have. We have June.
We don’t have anything scheduled in June of next year, but we do have something scheduled in July and we got something scheduled in September. So we have stuff scheduled a year out. You got, you got to start right now, at least six months out. If you’ve got a launch coming up, you’re just not going to get on people’s calendars.
Now, if you want to build that army, you want to build those small to medium affiliates. They typically have a little bit more time on their calendars. So if I were you, instead of going after the one big whale, you know, if you only got 94 days before your launch, before your big promo, go get the small to medium affiliates. They typically have a little bit more open calendar.
All right. Where do you look? Where do you look? Most of you aren’t where I was 16 years ago when I started my first affiliate program, I didn’t know anybody.
I knew nobody in the industry, not a single person on the face of the earth who would make a good affiliate partner. Odds are you probably know one person. So start with who you know. Start with them.
Start with them. I’ll talk about the, you know, I don’t know any one part in a moment, but, like, start with the people who are going to promote you because it’s you. They are going to promote you because they know, like and trust you. They are going to give you grace.
If. Let’s just say that you’re, your tracking breaks down on the third day of the launch, well, they’re going to give you grace. Somebody you don’t know is going to be like, screw you, dude. You cheated me.
I’m out. I’m never promoting you again. They give you grace if you don’t have a tool for them. Maybe you should go back and listen to the episode that I just released about what great affiliate programs provide for their affiliates so you don’t make this mistake, but maybe you get busy and you don’t end up having graphics.
An affiliate who doesn’t have a connection to you is going to be like, I’m out. You can’t even give me graphics. I’m out. But the people who know you are gonna be like, dude, it’s cool.
Totally cool. I totally understand. Get them to me when you can. So here’s what I want you to do.
I want you to hit pause if you’re driving. Don’t. Don’t hit pause yet. But I want you to make a mental note.
You know, what? If you’re doing yard work or you’re out for a run, maybe, you know, I don’t know if you’re running. I don’t recommend stopping. I personally can’t start and stop running.
Like, I’m. If I stop running, I stop running. That’s why I try not to cross roads. That’s why I just, I absolutely try not to cross roads.
Cause I’m not one of those people who can, like, I’m gonna stop for 30 seconds and then get back going like, oh, no, I feel so good to stop. I’m gonna just. I’m done. But press pause.
Write down a few names. Write down a few names. People who would make good affiliates, people who know, like and trust you, people who will promote you because it’s you. Write down a few names.
Get my #1 affiliate recruiting email (the one I’ve personally used to recruit thousands of affiliates in dozens of niches). Grab your copy here!
I’m gonna just wait for you to press pause. Here, take a sip of tea. That’s good. All right.
Hopefully you press pause. If you didn’t, it’s because you’re doing something that prevents that. But I want you to write down some names. Now.
What if you literally don’t know anyone? If you know absolutely no one in that could possibly be a good affiliate. Well, then watch other affiliate programs. And you want to build an army.
Don’t go for their top ten yet. Watch their affiliate program. If they’re like us, if they do like we recommend and we suggest, because this is one of the things that helps you build an army as you have a deep, deep leaderboard. I’ve talked about that in past episodes.
Watch for their affiliates that are the also mentioned, also with sales. So they’ll list their top ten and then their next ten, and they’ll say, also with some sales go down, they typically go in order, go down to that list. Look for their 27th, 30th, biggest affiliates. You know, here’s what you know about them.
They can make a couple sales, make one. At least they know what the heck they’re doing, but they’re not big enough that they’re like, nope, I’ve got my calendar plan. Like, I kind of just did that, didn’t I? Like, look at me, y’all.
I’m so important. I just planned my calendar out a year in advance. The reality was two years ago I didn’t do that. That’s a system we’ve put in places.
We’ve grown. The company. I used to suck at that. But watch these other affiliate programs join them.
They publish a list of their top affiliates many times. Watch those and reach out to those people. We show you how to do this and find affiliates. Now it’s our course, right?
There’s also. We go really in depth. Yeah. I’m going to make a little pitch for the course here.
So if you have like. I’m not going to buy your course. I have no interest in finding affiliates. I don’t know why you’re listening to this episode, but if that’s you just click like the 15 2nd fast forward.
I don’t know. We’ll see. I don’t know. But we’re going to help you find affiliates fast.
All right. This is not like an eight week course, just to be clear, it’s a five day course. I don’t find affiliates now. It’s not like, here’s every step you need to do to grow your entire affiliate program.
This is like, how do you find affiliates as soon as possible so you can see results quickly. So basically it’s everything you need to know and nothing you don’t need to know. Most people who go through it, we designed it. It’s a five day program.
You go through in less than an hour a day. Most people go through, they take about 20 minutes to watch the lesson. Maybe, you know, take a few notes and press pause a few times and write down some ideas. And about a half hour to 45 minutes to do the exercise.
And actually it’s, the exercise is go find affiliates. But we’re showing you how. So it’s, this is the process we use. It’s a process that we use in our company to reach out and find the right affiliates for our clients, for our affiliate program.
So it’s there. It’s a proven process. Proven process. No guesswork.
This is like, boom. I want to go find affiliates right now. So if you’re one of those people who you were like, okay, we talked about that, watch other launches, right? And you’re like, but I don’t know anyone.
If you said that you don’t have to know anyone for find affiliates now to work. You don’t. If you have a few potential affiliates, if you wrote down some names because you press pause earlier. Right?
Awesome. Awesome. It’s not required. I’m going to show you how to find them, how to contact them, how to recruit the perfect affiliates for your program.
Even if you know literally no one. No one. It’s a proven system. So go check it out.
We’ll put a link in the show notes. Find affiliatesnow. com. Dot.
This is going to allow you to find, well, what the name says, right? Find affiliates now. How to increase your sales quickly and efficiently. Just go check it out.
Find affiliates now. com. If you’re like, that’s not for me. Okay, cool.
If you join and you’re like, this is not what I thought it was. It’s too hard for me. It’s. I already know all this stuff.
Cool. We’ll give you a refund, so go check that out. Find affiliates now. com.
All right, you want to build relationships, all right, you need to go out right now and start building relationships. You cannot go into this asking people to marry you on a first date. So you want to build an army. Part of building army is to get the big ones, and that takes time.
You know, Jeffrey Gimmer says, all things being equal, people want to do business with their friends. Guess what? When all things are not equal, he says, people still want to do business with their friends. I’ll make a little bit less money to promote a friend.
I cannot stress this enough. Build the relationships. Build the relationships. Key is intentionality.
I’m gonna give you one example. I could give you a hundred examples. Look up networking on my website. Go to Matt mcweems.
com. Look up network. Don’t look up networking. Look up network.
I’ve got a video on there where I talk about how to network as an affiliate or, you know, for affiliate programs. We’ll talk about that. But I’ll give you one. The other night, I went into a.
A fast food restaurant, Culver’s. It’s a midwestern thing. If I think they’re. I think they’re growing.
But I went into Culver’s. I got a salad. Don’t judge me. I did.
I really. I did get a salad. Their bacon blue salad is. I mean, it’s a salad, so it better have bacon on it.
Anyway, went into Culver’s. It’s gonna be about a six, seven minute wait. I went inside to grab him just sitting there at the table, and I’m like, boom. Text messages.
I fired off twelve or 13 text messages. Just, hey, man, thinking about you. Wanted to reach out to you. That was it.
The other night, took my dog out. He’s being stubborn. Well, he needed to poop. He wouldn’t go poop.
You know what? I’m gonna pull my phone. I’m gonna knock off a couple of text messages. Now, I’m suggesting you have to always do this.
Sometimes you just need space to think. I don’t do this all the time, but I was like, you know what? When I think about it, I need to, I need to do this. I need to just reach out.
Let me just hit up a few people and say, hey, so build those relationships. Build those relationships. Use various methods to reach out. Don’t just stick to email.
Do physical mail, text, social media, WhatsApp, smoke signals, I don’t care. You know, like I said, send them a package. Send them a. Send them a letter.
A FedEx letter, a USP’s letter. I can’t do Fedex, Matt. That’s dollar 20 per. Okay?
Send a regular letter in an envelope. What’s a stamp? I know the price. I think I just heard the price went up.
You know what? People are freaking out. The price of stamps has gone up. I’m like, I don’t send enough mail.
That’s really going to influence my life. But you know, I’ll go buy 500 stamps. And we did like, man, I would have been better off taking that whatever money and investing it. But no, we went and bought a bunch of stamps because we do actually send a lot of mail.
But it’s like, it’s less than sixty cents to send something into someone’s mailbox. How many emails do you get a day? I don’t know about you. I get to my personal email.
Not even my business email. I get about 50 emails. You know, stuff I get in the actual mail. Four things.
On a good day, on a heavy day, I get four things. One is something I ordered, one is a bill, one is junk mail, and the other is from somebody I actually give a flying crap about. That’s an average day. So give me a second thing from somebody I actually give a crap about.
You’re gonna stand out. I did a Facebook live a while back about how to stand out. It was a guy. He mailed me his, I think he mailed me his book.
And there was some other stuff in there. I don’t remember what it was, but I did this whole Facebook live on. I’m like, dude, stood out. So use various methods.
Secondly, keep that initial contact short. I talk about this more on that Facebook live I mentioned where I talk about one of the big mistakes people make is that their, their first reach out is just way too long. We are not trying to get a yes. Oh my gosh.
Do not try to share everything about your product, the history of the company, how much your uncle, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I share all about this. I share the exact templates, the exact templates for this in find affiliates now. Exact template.
So you start a conversation. It allows you to start a relationship which grows from there. Which grows from there. As far as more ways to build an army.
Get your customers on board. Get your customers on board. I mean, think about what better source of promotional partners than your customers, right? But for some reason, though, almost no one we talk to, no one whose programs we take over and we start running them for them.
None of the clients that we coach, just none of the people that we talk to think of asking their customers to promote them. I don’t know why. I mean, I really don’t like, it’s the lowest hanging fruit. It’s like the first people, when we take over, a client comes to us and says, hey, run our affiliate program.
And we take over, the very first thing we do is say, okay, who are your customers? Who’s been with you for more than six months? And we reach out to them and turn them into affiliates. You know, think about it.
They have an intimate knowledge of your product. They probably have a personal success story. They know, like, and trust you that they’re fanboys, fan girls, right? They’re like people who buy apple products and stick with them for, for years.
They become fans. They’ll defend you to others. So when somebody comes along and says, well, I have a friend who bought that and it didn’t work for them, they’re like, well, that’s their fault. You know, if it’s a course, they’re like, well, I heard about somebody who bought that person’s an idiot.
Like, they didn’t put, they didn’t put in the work. They didn’t follow what so and so teaches. Like, you could not ask for better promoters. Now, if you use a system like infusionsoft, any type, there’s hundreds of these systems, right?
Maybe not hundreds, but there’s dozens where they run your affiliate program and your CRM on the same platform. So your email list, your customers are stored in the same place that your affiliates are. Okay, if you’re not on a system like that, you can skip this. You don’t need this.
But if they are, automatically sign your customers up as affiliates. And then, so what you do is, let’s just say you’ve got a course and the course is twelve weeks long. Then sometime around week 14 to 20, you want to reach out and say, hey, would you like to promote this? Here’s your affiliate link.
It just automatically creates, it’s super easy. You can actually set this up where it just automatically does it. There’s literally no work involved. So definitely, definitely your customers.
You want to build an army, you need to work with your competitors. Your competitors. I’ve done episodes on this before, how to work with your competitors as affiliates. But just, just remember this.
You know the old saying, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. That’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m not talking about keeping your enemies close, just to keep them close. These aren’t your enemies.
They can be your best promotional partners. So go listen to the episode about how to work with your competitors. I’ll put a link in the show notes. Go listen to it.
All right. Now once you have some affiliates, so you’ve gotten started, you know, you’ve built, let’s, we’re talking about building an affiliate army. Now, to start an affiliate army, you’ve got to get one. You’ve got to get one.
In fact, you need to get, you know, a couple dozen, right? You need to get 25, 30, 50 affiliates. And you get those by the things I’ve talked about. You get your customers, you work with your competitors, you go to Google, you find people who are promoting other, you know, other affiliate programs, right?
You can get thousands that way. Literally. I mean, I’ve gotten hundreds of thousands that way. But I’m saying once you get some, how do you exponentially grow?
How do you turn 100 affiliates, by the way, if you want to, if you want to find more affiliates, make sure you go download my report. You know, speaking of 100 affiliates, go download my report, your 1st 100 affiliates. Just, I’ll put a link in the show notes, but it’s super easy. It’s Matt mcWilliams.
com first 100. Matt mcWilliams. com first 100.
All right, so once you get those 1st 100 affiliates, how do you turn those 100 into 140 or 150 or even 200? And then you take the next, you know, 50 to 100 that you got and turn those into 50 to 100 and it begins to grow exponentially. It becomes like that snowball going down the hill. This is my number one affiliate recruiting trick that almost no one uses.
Like, oh my gosh, this is so easy. And literally almost no one uses it. You ask your affiliates. This is the number one way to get new affiliates.
Now I hear you thinking like, of course, thank you, captain freaking obvious. Like, oh, I know I should ask my affiliates, but are you doing it? In fact, almost no one is doing it. I’ve been the part of easily at this point, more than 300 affiliate programs.
Evergreen launches membership sites, courses, physical products, digital products, coaching programs, software service, you name it. I have been a part of more than 300 affiliate programs. Just for record, doesn’t mean I’ve promoted 300 things. I mean, sometimes I, newsflash, right?
I sign up for affiliate programs to watch what they’re doing. I want to see a, mostly, I’m looking to see how they screw stuff up and then do it better. But occasionally I actually get a really good idea. I’ve talked about this before, right?
Good artists copy, great artists steal. A lot of the stuff in our playbook now has come from those 300 affiliate programs. Very rarely, just as a side note, do I find that any of the 300 do more than a few things, right. But I get to take the two things that this one does and the one thing from this one and the four things from this one, and then like now I get 150 things that we do, right?
So 300 affiliate programs easily, it might even be, I mean, gosh, it could be well over 500. I’m not sure, but I know it’s at least three. I was thinking, I was like, okay, I want to go with the number. I can guarantee.
I believe without a doubt, I haven’t documented this, but I am positive less than seven have ever asked me to refer other affiliates. So let’s just go with seven out of 300. What percentage is that? Like 2%, 3%, 3% on the high end.
That’s ridiculous. Your current affiliates should be your number one source of new quality affiliates. That’s how we scale exponentially once you get started. Number one source of new affiliates has to be current affiliates.
Now the key here is to ask them. It’s to ask them and make sure that they get a second tier commission. There has to be an incentive for them. So you want to pay between a five and 10% commission depending upon if you’ve got a, if you’re a retail product and your main commission is 10% your second tier commission might be one or 2%.
So you typically want it to be somewhere around ten to 20% of the normal commission. So a 40% commission, we’ll go high and say 20% of 40% would be 8%, so we’ll make it 10%. If you offer a 50% commission, make it a 10% 2nd tier. If you have a 20% commission, you’re probably going to offer a two to 4% 2nd tier commission.
So that means that if this affiliate, so let’s just say I refer you an affiliate and then this month they do $1,000 in sales and you have a 10% commission, then I get $100 for referring that affiliate. I can’t afford that. Well, then pay less, but pay something. Okay.
Make it enticing for them to refer affiliates. Here’s an email that you can use. This is so easy. I’m not even, I don’t even know if we have a template.
I mean, we have a template internally. You know, I’d be a lot smarter probably if I said, you can go download this email. I’m not going to read it to you, but it’s such an easy email that you could just replay this twice and get the gist of it. All right, so the subject line is something like, know anyone, know anyone for our program?
Know anyone who can, you know, promote name of product? Very simple, right? Hey, first name. Do you know anybody who’d be, or anyone who’d be a good fit for our program?
If you refer them, we’ll make sure to set you up as a second tier affiliate. So you make money for every sale they make. Just send them our way and we’ll take good care of them. That’s it.
Three sentences. Remember the four sentence rule earlier? Right. Well, this is three sentences.
Do you know anyone? If you refer them, we’ll set you up and just send them our way. Like that’s it, very simple email. We basically copy and paste that every time we tweak it a little bit, just so it’s not like we have a lot of people who promote three, four, five of our offers a year and we try to vary some things just a little bit.
But don’t reinvent the wheel. You just ask them if they know anybody and if they send them, then you set them up as a second tier. We send this email in evergreen programs, we send it out about twice a year to every partner we then in a launch we send it out basically a couple of weeks after they sign up, up until about a month. And then we send it about two weeks before, you know, the launch.
We kind of just cut it off then. But here’s the thing. That’s not the only place you can ask for affiliate referrals. You can occasionally buried in a P’s.
You can put it in a payment email. Hey, Joe, I just sent you $500 for your affiliate commissions. Thanks for promoting us. By the way, do you know anybody who’d be, who’d also like to make some money promoting us?
And there was some other stuff in there. I don’t remember what it was, but I did this whole Facebook live on. I’m like, dude, stood out. So use various methods.
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Secondly, keep that initial contact short. I talk about this more on that Facebook live I mentioned where I talk about one of the big mistakes people make is that their, their first reach out is just way too long. We are not trying to get a yes. Oh my gosh.
Do not try to share everything about your product, the history of the company, how much your uncle, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I share all about this. I share the exact templates, the exact templates for this in find affiliates now. Exact template.
So you start a conversation. It allows you to start a relationship which grows from there. Which grows from there. As far as more ways to build an army.
Get your customers on board. Get your customers on board. I mean, think about what better source of promotional partners than your customers, right? But for some reason, though, almost no one we talk to, no one whose programs we take over and we start running them for them.
None of the clients that we coach, just none of the people that we talk to think of asking their customers to promote them. I don’t know why. I mean, I really don’t like, it’s the lowest hanging fruit. It’s like the first people, when we take over, a client comes to us and says, hey, run our affiliate program.
And we take over, the very first thing we do is say, okay, who are your customers? Who’s been with you for more than six months? And we reach out to them and turn them into affiliates. You know, think about it.
They have an intimate knowledge of your product. They probably have a personal success story. They know, like, and trust you that they’re fanboys, fan girls, right? They’re like people who buy apple products and stick with them for, for years.
They become fans. They’ll defend you to others. So when somebody comes along and says, well, I have a friend who bought that and it didn’t work for them, they’re like, well, that’s their fault. You know, if it’s a course, they’re like, well, I heard about somebody who bought that person’s an idiot.
Like, they didn’t put, they didn’t put in the work. They didn’t follow what so and so teaches. Like, you could not ask for better promoters. Now, if you use a system like infusionsoft, any type, there’s hundreds of these systems, right?
Maybe not hundreds, but there’s dozens where they run your affiliate program and your CRM on the same platform. So your email list, your customers are stored in the same place that your affiliates are. Okay, if you’re not on a system like that, you can skip this. You don’t need this.
But if they are, automatically sign your customers up as affiliates. And then, so what you do is, let’s just say you’ve got a course and the course is twelve weeks long. Then sometime around week 14 to 20, you want to reach out and say, hey, would you like to promote this? Here’s your affiliate link.
It just automatically creates, it’s super easy. You can actually set this up where it just automatically does it. There’s literally no work involved. So definitely, definitely your customers.
You want to build an army, you need to work with your competitors. Your competitors. I’ve done episodes on this before, how to work with your competitors as affiliates. But just, just remember this.
You know the old saying, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. That’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m not talking about keeping your enemies close, just to keep them close. These aren’t your enemies.
They can be your best promotional partners. So go listen to the episode about how to work with your competitors. I’ll put a link in the show notes. Go listen to it.
All right. Now once you have some affiliates, so you’ve gotten started, you know, you’ve built, let’s, we’re talking about building an affiliate army. Now, to start an affiliate army, you’ve got to get one. You’ve got to get one.
In fact, you need to get, you know, a couple dozen, right? You need to get 25, 30, 50 affiliates. And you get those by the things I’ve talked about. You get your customers, you work with your competitors, you go to Google, you find people who are promoting other, you know, other affiliate programs, right?
You can get thousands that way. Literally. I mean, I’ve gotten hundreds of thousands that way. But I’m saying once you get some, how do you exponentially grow?
How do you turn 100 affiliates, by the way, if you want to, if you want to find more affiliates, make sure you go download my report. You know, speaking of 100 affiliates, go download my report, your 1st 100 affiliates. Just, I’ll put a link in the show notes, but it’s super easy. It’s Matt mcWilliams.
com/first100. All right, so once you get those 1st 100 affiliates, how do you turn those 100 into 140 or 150 or even 200? And then you take the next, you know, 50 to 100 that you got and turn those into 50 to 100 and it begins to grow exponentially. It becomes like that snowball going down the hill.
This is my number one affiliate recruiting trick that almost no one uses. Like, oh my gosh, this is so easy. And literally almost no one uses it. You ask your affiliates.
This is the number one way to get new affiliates. Now I hear you thinking like, of course, thank you, captain freaking obvious. Like, oh, I know I should ask my affiliates, but are you doing it? In fact, almost no one is doing it.
I’ve been the part of easily at this point, more than 300 affiliate programs. Evergreen launches membership sites, courses, physical products, digital products, coaching programs, software service, you name it. I have been a part of more than 300 affiliate programs. Just for record, doesn’t mean I’ve promoted 300 things.
I mean, sometimes I, newsflash, right? I sign up for affiliate programs to watch what they’re doing. I want to see a, mostly, I’m looking to see how they screw stuff up and then do it better. But occasionally I actually get a really good idea.
I’ve talked about this before, right? Good artists copy, great artists steal. A lot of the stuff in our playbook now has come from those 300 affiliate programs. Very rarely, just as a side note, do I find that any of the 300 do more than a few things, right.
But I get to take the two things that this one does and the one thing from this one and the four things from this one, and then like now I get 150 things that we do, right? So 300 affiliate programs easily, it might even be, I mean, gosh, it could be well over 500. I’m not sure, but I know it’s at least three. I was thinking, I was like, okay, I want to go with the number.
I can guarantee. I believe without a doubt, I haven’t documented this, but I am positive less than seven have ever asked me to refer other affiliates. So let’s just go with seven out of 300. What percentage is that?
Like 2%, 3%, 3% on the high end. That’s ridiculous. Your current affiliates should be your number one source of new quality affiliates. That’s how we scale exponentially once you get started.
Number one source of new affiliates has to be current affiliates. Now the key here is to ask them. It’s to ask them and make sure that they get a second tier commission. There has to be an incentive for them.
So you want to pay between a five and 10% commission depending upon if you’ve got a, if you’re a retail product and your main commission is 10% your second tier commission might be one or 2%. So you typically want it to be somewhere around ten to 20% of the normal commission. So a 40% commission, we’ll go high and say 20% of 40% would be 8%, so we’ll make it 10%. If you offer a 50% commission, make it a 10% 2nd tier.
If you have a 20% commission, you’re probably going to offer a two to 4% 2nd tier commission. So that means that if this affiliate, so let’s just say I refer you an affiliate and then this month they do $1,000 in sales and you have a 10% commission, then I get $100 for referring that affiliate. I can’t afford that. Well, then pay less, but pay something.
Okay. Make it enticing for them to refer affiliates. Here’s an email that you can use. This is so easy.
I’m not even, I don’t even know if we have a template. I mean, we have a template internally. You know, I’d be a lot smarter probably if I said, you can go download this email. I’m not going to read it to you, but it’s such an easy email that you could just replay this twice and get the gist of it.
All right, so the subject line is something like, know anyone, know anyone for our program? Know anyone who can, you know, promote name of product? Very simple, right? Hey, first name.
Do you know anybody who’d be, or anyone who’d be a good fit for our program? If you refer them, we’ll make sure to set you up as a second tier affiliate. So you make money for every sale they make. Just send them our way and we’ll take good care of them.
That’s it. Three sentences. Remember the four sentence rule earlier? Right.
Well, this is three sentences. Do you know anyone? If you refer them, we’ll set you up and just send them our way. Like that’s it, very simple email.
We basically copy and paste that every time we tweak it a little bit, just so it’s not like we have a lot of people who promote three, four, five of our offers a year and we try to vary some things just a little bit. But don’t reinvent the wheel. You just ask them if they know anybody and if they send them, then you set them up as a second tier. We send this email in evergreen programs, we send it out about twice a year to every partner we then in a launch we send it out basically a couple of weeks after they sign up, up until about a month.
And then we send it about two weeks before, you know, the launch. We kind of just cut it off then. But here’s the thing. That’s not the only place you can ask for affiliate referrals.
You can occasionally buried in a P’s. You can put it in a payment email. Hey, Joe, I just sent you $500 for your affiliate commissions. Thanks for promoting us.
By the way, do you know anybody who’d be, who’d also like to make some money promoting us? And then you just explain it there. And a P’s to an email like, hey, guys, just a reminder, the launch is the 100 days away. We’re 100 days away from launch, by the way, if you know anybody, right, in a Facebook post, hey, guys, we’re only two months out from launch.
If you have anybody who, you know anybody who think you’d be a good partner for us, make sure to email me. And every time we do that, we get a few referrals. When we send out the specific email, we might get anywhere. Let’s say we’ve got 500 affiliates in the program, we’ll get anywhere from 50 to 100 referrals like that.
When we bury it in other communications, we’ll get three to seven, maybe upwards of ten. They start adding up. We do that 15 times. We send the one email, maybe a couple of times, well, that’s, you know, we get 150 that way, out of 500.
And then we do just kind of mentioning it casually. In like ten other communications, we’ll get an average of maybe five, that’s another 50. All of a sudden we have an extra 200, sometimes upwards of literally double, you know, we double the number of affiliates. Just from asking.
Just from asking. So I’m going to repeat what I said earlier. Your current affiliate should be your number one source of new quality affiliates. This guys, this is how you build an affiliate army.
You get over that belief that, well, most of my sales are going to come from a few affiliates. I have to personally know all of my affiliates. No, you don’t. No, you don’t.
You go out and you look, make a list of people you know who would make a good partner. Could be one person, could be seven or ten. Right? Though I hope you wrote those down on you pressed pause.
Right? If you don’t know anybody, watch some other affiliate programs. Go get, find affiliates. Now.
Click the link in the show notes. Just go try it out. Like I said, it’s a five day program. Five day program.
It’s going to help you a ton build those relationships. That’s the long term play. You got to have a combination here of short and long term. Use various methods to reach out.
Keep that initial contact short, super short. Make your customers and your competitors affiliates and then grow exponentially by asking your current affiliates. And like I said, the cool thing is that creates that momentum, because if you have 500 and you ask them and you get another 200, well, now you ask those 200 and you get another 80. You take those 80 and you ask them and you get another 40, you take those 40 and you get another 15 and, and yeah, eventually there’s a point of diminishing returns, but you can grow exponentially that way.
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
| Find Your First 100 Affiliates | Affiliate Program Terms & Conditions Template | Get My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email |
| Avoid The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes | Turn Inactive Affiliates into Your Best Affiliates | Get My Template for Writing Affiliate Emails |
| Affiliate Marketing Sales Secrets | Learn How to Create a Resources Page | Learn How to Write a Product Review |
All the while you’re adding another competitor as an affiliate and you’re adding another couple people who promoted another product as an affiliate. You’re adding more customers. The more affiliates you have, the more customers you have, the more customers have you have, the more affiliates you have, the more affiliates you have, the more customers you have, the more customers you have, the more affiliates you have. And you see it creates this endless loop and cycle that’s, I mean, it’s powerful.
It is powerful. Now that is how you build an affiliate army. Now if you want to know more about this, well, come back and listen to the next episode. I’m going to talk about my number one affiliate recruiting email.
I’m going to share roughly how much I kind of touched on it today a little bit, but I’m going to share it in detail in the next episode. I’m going to share the gist of it and why it works. I’m going to talk more about that four sentence rule. I’m going to give you a chance to download it so you don’t have to like and do like today and write it down.
But that’s how you build that affiliate army. All right, so make sure you subscribe. Make sure you subscribe. Hit the subscribe button.
Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, whatever, Spotify, click the subscribe button so you don’t miss that episode or any of the upcoming episodes. And if you’re enjoying the show, leave a rating and review. That’s what the Prairie homestead did on Apple Podcast. Said, I appreciate Matt’s simple approach to affiliate marketing, a topic that can feel formidable, like me saying that word to new bloggers and influencers, especially.
He breaks it down into bite sized chunks that are actionable and understandable. We’ll definitely be recommending this podcast to friends. Well, I don’t know what your real name is, but the prairie homestead, thank you for recommending it to friends. If you’re listening right now, do the same.
Send this episode to somebody who needs to know how to build an army of affiliates who maybe is caught up in some of those, those beliefs, those false beliefs that I talked about. Who doesn’t know how to turn competitors into affiliates, your customers into affiliates. Go share this episode with them and then tell them to subscribe too. So in one week, just seven days, they’re gonna get the number one affiliate recruiting email ever the one that has worked best for me.
So come back for that and I will see you then.
The post How to Build an Army of Loyal Affiliates appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### If you have a product that is a lower ticket item, it can be a challenge to run an affiliate program. The commissions are low, the margins are small, and there’s usually a lot of competition. So how do you get your program to stand out and keep your affiliates excited with low ticket offers? That’s what today’s episode is all about!
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Get the EXACT Templates We Use to Train Affiliates PLUS a Behind-the-Scenes Look at One of Our Trainings! Click Here to Access it Now (100% FREE)!
Links Mentioned in this EpisodeHow to Determine the Right Affiliate Commission
The Future of Affiliate Marketing
Your Affiliate Launch Coach
ConvertKit
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow Top Affiliates are Closing Sales in 2024
How to Find Affiliates Using Affiliate Program Leaderboards
If Donald Trump Ran an Affiliate Program
How to Create Promotion Plans for Affiliates
How Sarah Williams 20X’d her Affiliate Sales and Won a $100,000 First Prize
How to Get Your Affiliates Fired Up Before a Promotion
Got a Low-Priced Product? Here’s How to Run an Affiliate ProgramThe post Got a Low-Priced Product? Here’s How to Run an Affiliate Program appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### Have you ever dreamed of writing a book and not just getting it out there but actually selling it successfully? Here’s the thing – books, like any other product, need a push to get noticed. It’s a little-known secret that most bestsellers out there have a dedicated crew, an army if you will, tirelessly promoting them. Imagine what it would be like to multiply your book sales two, three, or even five times over. Sounds incredible, right? Well, that’s the power of using affiliates in a book launch. In this post, I’m going to walk you through the process of getting affiliates on board for your book launch and leveraging their support to skyrocket your book sales.
Want to go even more in-depth on launching a bestselling book? Click here to check out my free on-demand training How to Sell 10,000 Copies of Your Book…Without Major Media or Paid Advertising
So, you’ve written a book (or are in the process of writing one). Now what?
If you have any interest in writing a bestseller (or just selling as many books as you possibly can), there’s something you need to know. They are called “bestSELLers” for a reason…because the authors SELL a LOT of books.
They don’t write a great book, celebrate finishing it, and then HOPE that people buy it. Hope is not a great marketing strategy. I’ve helped launch 13 bestselling books, including my own, Turn Your Passions Into Profits. We’ve helped our clients sell more than 300,000 books (and that’s pre-orders!). And it was nearly 100% because of one strategy…getting affiliates to promote the book.
Most authors fall into this trap:
Don’t be like that poor author.
My First Book Launch with AffiliatesBack in 2015, I ran my first book launch with affiliates, working on Jeff Goins’s book, The Art of Work.
Just eight weeks before the launch, Jeff was in a bit of a bind. He had to report anticipated sales to his publisher…a daunting task given his last book sold only 3,500 copies. When I boldly suggested he promise them 15,000 sales, Jeff was understandably skeptical.
I was insistent. I knew that with the right affiliate strategy, we could reach that number. Ultimately, I told him he either needed to tell them 15,000 and go all-in or I was out. I need him to believe that we’d hit 15,000 pre-orders.
Reluctantly, Jeff agreed to my ambitious goal, albeit with some hesitation.
Not only did we meet the 15,000 book target, but we surpassed it with a staggering 22,000 preorders!
This success wasn’t just about numbers; it was about proving a concept.
The launch’s triumph showed the immense power of affiliate marketing in driving book sales. Following this, we managed launches for renowned authors like Brian Tracy and Lewis Howes, achieving multiple bestsellers. Almost every book we promoted topped its category on Amazon, with several making it to the Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestseller lists.
How This Post is Structured
I’m going to break this into three sections.
First, why you need affiliates to promote your book if you want to launch a bestseller.
Second, how to find the right affiliates for your book launch.
And third, how to actually work with the affiliates to get the most from them, so you can max out your book sales.
Why You Need Affiliates for Your Book LaunchLet’s face it, the chances of your book getting major media exposure like a spot on Good Morning America or Oprah’s book club are pretty slim. I know, it’s a tough pill to swallow. But even if you did land those big media spots, they don’t always translate into a ton of book sales, especially for niche topics.
And then there’s the world of paid advertising.
Sure, you could pour money into ads, but let’s be real…you’re basically just filling Zuckerberg’s pockets without any surefire return on your investment. It’s a risky game, and it can be costly with no guarantees of success.
That’s why what I’m going to share with you is not just a more cost-effective strategy, but it’s also one that guarantees profitability, and the best part? It costs you nothing upfront. Keep reading to find out how you can harness the power of affiliates for your book launch and make a real impact in your sales.
To be clear, you could totally try to figure out this whole affiliate thing on your own. But let me tell you, that road is long and full of potholes. I’ve been down it, and it took me nearly ten years to sort it all out. And even now, I’m still picking up new tricks every day. The journey to figure this all out was a real headache, to be honest.
But here’s the good news: there’s a smarter, less painful way to do this. Remember what Pablo Picasso said?
Good artists copy. Great artists steal.
Well, today, I’m going to let you in on a little secret – you can “steal” my best strategies.
By the end of this post, I’ve got two goals:
First, I want to make you a firm believer that an affiliate program is the BEST way to boost your book sales.
And second, I’m going to show you the best way to launch, build, and grow your affiliate program is by modeling what has already been proven to work.
The beauty of this approach? It’s like taking a shortcut without any of the guesswork. You just follow the path laid out by others. Sounds pretty doable, right? Stick with me, and let me show you how you can make your book launch a huge success.
Advantages of Having Affiliates Promote Your Book LaunchLet’s talk about why bringing in affiliates to promote your book is a game-changer:
1. Make Money Before Spending It
This is a biggie. With affiliates, you’re essentially only paying for performance. That means you’re not shelling out cash before seeing any returns. Pretty neat, right? You only pay when sales actually happen. It’s a win-win.
2. No More Guesswork in Marketing
Ever found yourself drowning in the sea of market targeting? It’s easy to either cast too wide a net or get so specific that you’re targeting an impossibly narrow audience. But when you have affiliates, they do the heavy lifting in figuring out who to market to. They’ve already got their audience dialed in, taking the guesswork out of the equation.
3. Warmest Prospects Ever
There’s something special about affiliate-driven traffic. It’s like getting a warm introduction at a party. When affiliates rave about your book before sending folks to your site, those prospects arrive pre-warmed and ready. That’s why affiliate leads usually convert way better than other types of traffic.
4. Success Breeds More Success
Here’s the cool part: when one affiliate finds success with your book, others take notice. Affiliates talk, share, and follow each other. So, if one is making a good chunk of change from your book, it’s likely others will want in on the action too. We’ve seen it firsthand. Recruit a hundred affiliates, and you might get another 40 to 100 joining in – all with zero extra effort on your part.
That’s the beauty of using affiliates for your book launch. It’s not just about the initial boost in sales; it’s about building a momentum that can carry your book to heights you might not have reached alone. So, ready to get those affiliates on board?
Why Would Affiliates Want to Promote a Book Launch?Before we focus on how to find affiliates, we need to focus on some of the foundational work. And the first foundational item is to understand why affiliates would even want to promote a book.
1. It’s Low-Pressure Selling
First off, books are typically low-ticket items. This means affiliates don’t have to be super salesy, as they might be when promoting higher-priced courses or products. It’s easier for them to recommend a book since it doesn’t feel like they’re pushing a big purchase on their audience.
2. No Need for Lengthy Explanations
Everyone knows what a book is, right? That simplicity is a huge plus. When affiliates promote your book, they don’t need to spend time explaining what it is or how it works. It’s straightforward, and people know exactly what to expect. This ease of understanding makes promoting a book a breeze for affiliates.
3. The Gateway to Your Sales Funnel
Here’s where it gets interesting. Affiliates might not make a fortune (or any money at all) from the book sales alone, but they’re savvy about the bigger picture. Your book acts as an entry point into your sales funnel. For affiliates, the real gold lies in the backend funnel – the upsells, courses, or additional services you offer after someone buys the book. That’s where they see their earnings potentially skyrocket.
How to Attract Affiliates to Your Book LaunchHere’s what you need to pull in high-quality affiliates:
1. A Great Sales Page
Your sales page is your make-or-break point. Whether it’s for a free book or a special early-bird deal, this page must convert visitors effectively. The better this page performs, the more your affiliates will benefit from sending traffic your way.
Here’s an a great example of a book sales page (if I say so myself).
2. A Compelling Backend Offer
To lure in top-notch affiliates, your book launch should include a strong backend offer. This means after someone grabs your book, they’re presented with additional offers – such as more in-depth courses, software, or other offers. The price point should be enticing enough for affiliates to earn a decent commission, ideally $197 or more in total. This setup ensures that your affiliates see the real financial benefits of promoting your book.
3. A High-Converting Backend Funnel
This is where the magic happens for your affiliates. Your backend funnel, which could include upsells or additional offers, needs to be finely tuned for conversions. Remember, the more successful this funnel is, the more your affiliates earn – and the more they’ll want to promote your book in the future.
If you want to see a high-converting book launch funnel for affiliates in action, send me a text at 260-217-4619.
Just type “book funnel” and it will automatically send you the funnel page by page. Feel free to copy it.
4. Generous Commission Rates
When it comes to commissions, generosity goes a long way. Aim to offer at least a 40% commission on backend products. This percentage makes it worthwhile for affiliates to invest their time and resources in promoting your book.
A solid commission is an enticing incentive for them to really push your book launch to their audience.
RELATED POST: How to Attract Affiliates with the Right Commission
5. Extended Cookie Duration
When you are doing a book launch is not the time to be cheap on cookie length. When you offer a lifetime cookie, it is a great way to promote your affiliate program.
Longer cookie lengths are a huge plus for affiliates, especially during a book launch. If you usually offer a 90-day cookie, consider extending it to last until your next big launch or even offering a 1-year or lifetime cookie. A lifetime cookie, in particular, is a fantastic selling point. Being able to say “Hey, we have a lifetime cookie!” sounds a lot better and doesn’t make you seem cheap.
It assures affiliates that they’ll benefit from any future purchases made by the customers they refer, compensating for the lower earnings from the initial book launch.
OK, you now have all of the groundwork in place. How do you actually FIND the affiliates for your book launch?
How to Find Affiliates for a Book LaunchFinding the right affiliates for your book launch involves three key steps:
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When to start
-
Where to look
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How to recruit (tactics)
When to Start Looking for AffiliatesOne of the biggest mistakes I often see is delaying the recruitment of affiliates. To be on the safe side, begin your search at least six months before your launch.
Why so early? Well, affiliates usually have packed promotional calendars. They plan their activities months in advance. By beginning the recruitment process early, you ensure your book has a reserved spot in their busy schedules.
Simply put, if you want to have a successful book launch, you need to start as early as possible.
Now, I know you might be asking…
“But Matt, my book launches in three months (or 40 days or whatever length is less than six months). Can I still do this?”
The short answer is YES! But just know that you might only get 40, 50, or 60% as many affiliates as you would have if you’d started months earlier.
Where to Find AffiliatesThere are many ways to find affiliates for your book launch. I’m going to share 8 ways below.
1. Start With Who You Know
Your personal network is a goldmine. Think about friends, colleagues, or acquaintances who might be interested in your book’s topic. They know you, trust you, and are more likely to promote your book with genuine enthusiasm.
Make a list of these potential partners and reach out to them. Seriously…stop right now and write down as many people as you can think of in 5 minutes. I’ll even provide a timer for you
2. Watch Other Book Launches
Sign up as an affiliate for other book launches and learn from their strategies. This experience gives you insights into what works and what doesn’t, helping you shape your own affiliate approach.
Check out our recommended affiliate programs page and see if we have any upcoming book launches.
3. Forums and Groups
Join online communities where people in your niche hang out. These platforms are full of potential affiliates who are already interested in your book’s subject matter.
4. Your Customers
Your existing customers can be excellent affiliates. Think about it…what better source of evangelists for your book launch can you think of?
They already appreciate your work and can authentically endorse your book. Surprisingly, this is an often overlooked source of affiliates.
5. Live Events
Networking at live events can be incredibly effective, albeit the most costly approach.
The key at live events is to build genuine relationships first. Focus on understanding the other person’s needs and how you can support them. Once a solid relationship is established, you can follow up later with an affiliate proposal.
6. Competitors
Yes, your competitors can be valuable affiliates. Here are three ways you can work with your competitors for a book launch:
- Offer the book as a downsell to their buyers. Could they offer your book to people who went through a funnel but didn’t purchase their more expensive product?
- Offer the book to their non-buyers. If someone is on their list for a long time but has not bought their expensive course or product, your book is an alternative to them making $0 from someone.
- Position the book for a niche within a niche. What are some ways that your book might speak to a small segment of someone else’s audience? Maybe they can promote your LinkedIn marketing book only to their financial advisors or your parenting book only to their single parents?
Click here for more on working with your competitors as affiliates.
The Amazon Rabbit TrailThe seventh way to find affiliates is the most powerful. It works for anyone. If you know hundreds of people or zero people who could be an affiliate, this is the way to find hundreds of potential affiliates for your book launch.
When I launched my bestselling book, Turn Your Passions Into Profits, we had more than 500 affiliates promoting. I did more than 200 podcast interviews. But, I didn’t know 80% of the affiliates prior to the launch. In fact, the first time I met most of them was when I showed up for a podcast interview!
That is the power of the Amazon Rabbit Trail. Here’s how it works:
1. Look up a Similar Book to Yours on Amazon
Head over to Amazon and look up a book similar to yours, preferably one launched in the last three years. Amazon conveniently shows the release date, helping you target recent launches. We want affiliates who have recently promoted a similar book.
2. Identify Promoters
Next, Google the book you found on Amazon. Your goal is to find affiliates who actively promoted the book around its launch period, specifically one month before and after the launch. This focus ensures you’re looking at affiliates who are interested in book launches, not just any random mention of a book years after the release.
What podcasts was the author on? What affiliates did video reviews or written reviews? Who mentioned it on social media?
3. Create a Spreadsheet
As you discover who promoted the book, add their details to a spreadsheet. Note their first name, last name, the book they promoted, the author’s name, and their website URL. I’ll share why you want all of these details in a moment.
4. Explore Similar Books
Back on Amazon, click on books similar to the one you first identified. Amazon makes this ridiculously easy for you with the “People who bought this also bought _____” links.
Research who promoted the next book. And the next book. And so on.
5. Follow the Rabbit Trail
Keep following this trail. Each book and each promoter you find leads you deeper into the network of potential affiliates. It’s like going down a rabbit trail, uncovering more opportunities as you go.
Now, once you have a list of potential affiliates, how do you go about reaching out to them? Well, that’s where a lot of the secret sauce is…and I’m going to share it with you now.
How to Reach Out to Prospective Book Launch AffiliatesThe single most important thing when reaching out to prospective affiliates is this:
Make sure to keep your initial contact SHORT.
Your goal is NOT to get a YES response. I know that sounds weird but your goal is not to share EVERYTHING with them about your book, the funnel, the upsells, the conversion rate, why you wrote the book, who it’s for, etc.
Your goal is simply to inspire enough curiosity that they write back with three simple words:
Tell me more.
Those are the three sweetest words you can get in response. That starts a conversation.
It’s an invitation to reply back and share more. Then, and only then, you can share details about the book, the audience for it, the funnel, the commissions, etc.
Our Number One Affiliate Recruiting Email Ever
Get my #1 affiliate recruiting email (the one I’ve personally used to recruit thousands of affiliates in dozens of niches). Grab your copy here!
Yes, it really is that simple. You find affiliates who’ve promoted similar books in the past three years, reach out to them about your book (using this email template), and follow up like crazy.
The #1 Way to Get New Affiliates (Once You Have Affiliates)I’m going to share with you now my #1 secret for getting new affiliates. You won’t believe how simple this is, yet it’s so often overlooked.
Here’s my number one trick for recruiting affiliates:
Just ask your current affiliates.
Sounds obvious, right? Yet, in my experience with over 250 affiliate programs, it’s astonishing how few actually do this.
Your current affiliates are a goldmine for recruiting new ones. They’re connected, they understand your book and audience, and they likely know others who would be a great fit. The secret is in directly asking them for referrals.
When you request your affiliates to recommend others, make sure you sweeten the deal by offering them a second-tier commission, typically ranging between 10-20% of the standard commission. This motivates them to actively seek out and refer quality affiliates.
If you aren’t sure how to ask your affiliates for referring, don’t worry…I’ve got you covered. For a proven email template that you can use to ask your affiliates for referrals, simply text “REFERRAL” to 260-217-4619, and I’ll send it right over.
Remember, your existing affiliates’ networks are incredibly effective for growing your affiliate base. They’re your best source for high-quality, interested, and capable new affiliates.
Keys to Getting More Affiliates to Say “Yes”First, you need to understand that affiliate recruitment is largely a numbers game. Typically, only about 5-20% of those you approach will say yes. That might seem daunting, but it’s normal.
During my Turn Your Passions Into Profits book launch, over 500 affiliates joined. But only because I reached out to an even larger pool of more than 3,000 potential affiliates.
Here’s a simple formula: More asks equals more yeses.
The Power of Asking
In “The small BIG,” authors Steve Martin, Noah Goldstein, and Robert Cialdini discuss how we often underestimate the likelihood of getting a ‘yes’ when we ask for something.
“…the authors collected additional data to determine exactly why people have the strong tendency to underestimate the likelihood that a person will respond affirmatively to request for assistance. In brief, they found that the requesters tend to focus on the cost to the potential help provider in terms of time, effort, or money if he or she says yes, while giving less consideration than they should to the social costs in terms of difficulty, awkwardness or potential guilt, embarrassment, the potential help provider will experience if he or she says no.
The implications seem clear when trying to decide whether to make a request of someone. It’s important to recognize that you might be underestimating the likelihood of hearing ‘yes’. This underestimation, if left uncorrected, could therefore potentially stymie your productivity or the accomplishment of your goals.” (emphasis mine)
The story of Vanderbilt student Michael Pollack, who got to play “New York State of Mind” on stage with Billy Joel, perfectly illustrates this. He dared to ask, overcoming his fear of rejection, and it paid off.
Check it out here:
Overcome the Fear of ‘No’
Many of us are afraid of rejection, but you’d be surprised how many people are actually willing to say ‘yes’. Through my experience, I’ve found that even those I least expected to agree to promote our book have said yes, leading to significant sales. It’s all about overcoming the fear of hearing ‘no’ and just asking.
Dealing with Rejection
It’s natural to fear rejection; nobody, from my kids to seasoned salespeople, enjoys being told ‘no’. However, not asking at all only guarantees one outcome: you won’t get what you don’t ask for. Remember, every ‘no’ brings you closer to a ‘yes’, and you might just be surprised by who agrees to support your book launch.
Remember, the key to getting more affiliates to say yes is simply to ask more people and overcome the fear of rejection. Your next big affiliate partner might just be one ask away!
How To Get Over Your Fear of Asking Affiliates to PromoteMark Twain once said:
Courage is not the lack of fear. It is acting in spite of it.
To overcome the fear of rejection when asking affiliates to promote your book, you must face that fear head-on. Remember, it’s about acting despite the fear of hearing ‘no’. The more you ask, the more accustomed you become to the possibility of rejection, which paradoxically increases your chances of hearing a ‘yes’.
‘No’ Isn’t Personal
Most of the time, a ‘no’ isn’t about you or your book. It could be due to a packed promotional calendar, a current pause in affiliate promotions, or perhaps your book simply doesn’t align with their audience’s interests. It’s crucial to understand that these rejections are not personal attacks but rather business decisions.
From my experience, when people decline to promote something (a book, product, whatever), they often do so apologetically. They might even thank you for considering them. Remember, the number of people who respond rudely to such requests is surprisingly low. This should encourage you to reach out to more potential affiliates without the fear of negative reactions.
Getting over your fear of asking affiliates to promote your book launch is all about embracing courage and understanding that rejections are part of the process, often not personal, and usually handled gracefully by both parties. Keep asking, and you’ll find those who are excited and willing to support your book launch.
The ASK Formula for Getting Affiliates to Promote YouWhen reaching out to affiliates for promoting your book launch, I suggest following my simple 3-part ASK Formula. While I won’t go into extensive details here (you can find an in-depth explanation in this post), let’s quickly skim through the basics of this effective approach.
A – Assume a Positive Response
The first step is about mindset. Before you reach out to potential affiliates, it’s crucial to have confidence. This confidence isn’t just in your product or offer, but in the belief that it’s an excellent fit for the affiliate’s audience, and that it will be beneficial for them.
Expect a ‘yes’ – focus on the reasons they would agree, instead of why they might not. Start with a positive assumption.
S – Show Them the Benefit
Next, answer the big question: “What’s in it for them?” Clearly, there’s a benefit for you, but what about the affiliate?
Think about how promoting your product can serve their audience, fill any content gaps, or add value to their business. Maybe it even offers an opportunity for them to network with other influencers.
Spend time understanding and articulating these benefits before you make your approach.
K – Know Their Audience and Needs
Finally, knowing your potential affiliate’s audience and their needs is crucial.
Have you ever received a pitch that was off the mark, showing no real understanding of what your audience cares about? The likelihood of taking such a relationship forward is slim. But if someone approaches you with a clear grasp of your audience’s needs and how their product can help achieve those goals, you’re more likely to engage.
Do your homework, understand their audience, and then make your pitch.
How to Run the Book Launch ItselfOnce you have your affiliates, what do you actually do?
Focus on Pre-OrdersAssuming that you are launching a book and want to hit the bestseller list, you need to focus on pre-orders of the book. Here’s why: all those pre-orders count toward the first week’s sales. This is key for hitting bestseller lists. Imagine you have 15,000 pre-orders…that’s 15,000 sales counted in just one week, even if they were gathered over eight weeks.
Let’s put it into perspective. Say your launch date is August 1st. Sure, you could start selling before that, but the real push for pre-orders would kick in post-July 4. This strategic timing helps accumulate a significant number of sales that count towards your launch week.
Now, consider this scenario: you get 5,000 orders in the launch week, then another 5,000 the following week, and so on. The total might be the same, but spreading them over three weeks won’t make the same impact as having 15,000 in one week. That concentrated burst of sales is what propels your book onto bestseller lists.
So, when planning your book launch with affiliates, emphasize the importance of pre-orders. It’s not just about the total number of sales, but how and when you achieve them that can make the difference between a successful launch and a chart-topping release.
Get Your Affiliates the Book ASAPWhen you’re managing a book launch, it’s essential to equip your affiliates with the right tools from the get-go. As soon as they sign up, make it a priority to provide them with a copy of your book. Even if it’s a rough or unedited version, this early access lets them familiarize themselves with your content.
When affiliates understand your book intimately, they can promote it more effectively. They can share genuine insights and personal takes with their audience, making their promotional efforts more authentic and impactful.
And don’t stop at just the manuscript. If you’re planning to have an audiobook version, make sure they get that too. Essentially, provide them with every format of your book available. This makes 100% sure that they have everything they need to support your launch and drive those crucial pre-orders and sales.
Start Scheduling Podcasts
Start scheduling podcast appearances for your book launch well in advance. And turn these podcast hosts into affiliates.
Take my book launch in January 2023 as an example. I had podcast recordings lined up a full year ahead! These were strategically planned to go live during the main launch window, maximizing exposure when it mattered most.
And always start with the smallest podcasts possible. Even if they have just ten listeners, it’s still great practice…and it’s better to start small than go big too soon.
In these podcasts, you start to flesh out the ideas and stories. This approach is beneficial for two reasons: it hones your message and reaches dedicated audiences, no matter the size.
Initially, focus on smaller shows. This stage is crucial for developing and refining your material, much like how a comedian tests their routine in smaller venues before hitting the big stage.
As you progress, gradually move to larger podcasts. This methodical approach ensures that by the time your book launches, you’re not just ready; you’re well-practiced and confident in discussing your book’s content in a compelling way.
Create a Communication PlanWhen you’re gearing up for a book launch, especially with affiliates, effective communication is key.
Here’s how to do it:
Early Communication: Six Months Out
Start communicating with your affiliates as early as possible. Ideally, six months before the launch, you should be on their calendars. Initially, communicate twice a month – once through email and once via a partner Facebook group (a must-have for affiliate communication). Use this time to update affiliates on important dates, share a copy of the book for review, and keep them engaged with the process.
Ramp Up One Month Before the Launch
As you approach the one-month mark, intensify your communication. Share behind-the-scenes content like unboxing the book or revealing editing insights. Emphasize the importance of the pre-order start date (December 17 in my case), ensuring there’s no confusion with the actual launch date (January 10). The focus should be on pre-orders, as they count towards the first week’s sales and are crucial for hitting bestseller lists.
Detailed Promo PlansProvide a clear promotional plan for your affiliates. This should include:
- First email to go out 10-15 days before the launch.
- Second email about a week before the launch.
- Final email on the last day of pre-orders.
- For highly engaged affiliates, suggest additional emails the day before and multiple times on the final day.
- Develop a strategy that includes email, social media, and live interviews or podcast appearances.
Get the EXACT Template We Give to Our Affiliates to Get Them to Promote More and Generate More Sales! Click Here to Download it Now!
Remember, the push is for pre-orders to claim bonuses, not just the book sale.
The goal is to keep affiliates informed, excited, and equipped to promote your book effectively. This communication plan is designed to build momentum and ensure everyone is on the same page as the launch date approaches.
Plan Your Affiliate Contest(s)When planning a successful book launch with affiliates, contests can play a significant role. They not only incentivize your affiliates but also create excitement and a sense of competition. Here’s how to effectively plan affiliate contests:
Focus on Book SalesFirst, determine the focus of your contests. Center them around book sales rather than backend products.
This approach simplifies tracking and aligns directly with your launch goals. Consider contests based on both individual and bulk sales to accommodate different levels of affiliate involvement.
Creative Contest IdeasGet creative with your contests and don’t just limit them to “Top 5 affiliates” or similar contests. Here are a few ideas for different contests:
Entry-Level Sales Contest – For example, every affiliate who makes 10 book sales gets entered into a draw to win a cash prize, like $1,000. This encourages even beginners to participate actively.
Higher-Tier Incentives – For affiliates reaching 25 book sales, offer something more exclusive, like entry into a special Mastermind group. This provides value beyond just monetary rewards and can be a significant draw for more established affiliates.
Tailor Contests to Your Launch – Your contests should reflect the specific goals and nature of your book launch. If your book has potential for bulk purchases, consider incorporating this into your contest structure. This could mean additional rewards for those who facilitate larger sales.
Remember, the primary aim of these contests is to drive book sales and create a buzz around your launch. By offering these incentives, you motivate your affiliates to push harder for sales and ultimately contribute to the success of your book launch. Keep your contests engaging, fair, and aligned with your overall launch strategy.
Teach Your AffiliatesWhen it comes to a successful book launch using affiliates, one of the most crucial elements is educating your affiliates. Teaching them how to promote more effectively can easily increase your affiliate sales by 200-300%. Here’s how you can effectively train them:
Training Sessions
Conduct training sessions on how to promote effectively. This can include webinars with extensive Q&A sessions or office hours, where affiliates can get first-hand advice and strategies for promotion.
You can get an example of an affiliate training I did for a client plus the slides and other resources for training affiliates here.
Tailored Advice
Share specific tips, like the benefits of mailing more often or choosing the right time to send emails. When running promos, I often suggest mailing on the weekends and share this tip on Fridays to encourage immediate action.
Help Them Understand the WHY
Make sure your affiliates understand why certain strategies are effective. Explain how increased mailing frequency, especially on cart close day, can significantly boost sales and commissions.
Provide Data and Insights
Share statistics and insights that illustrate the impact of their efforts. For example, show them how mailing twice as much can potentially increase sales by 120-200%.
Provide Clear Guidance
Your affiliates need a clear target. Inform them what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and importantly, why they should do it. See below in the Promo Plans and Promo Checklists section.
Share Your Expertise
Don’t underestimate the value of your own affiliate marketing knowledge, and don’t assume that your affiliates are already experts in your specific product or launch. Share your own experiences and lessons learned from other launches or programs. This not only educates but also inspires your affiliates.
One of our former clients, Jeff Goins, shared a valuable lesson with his affiliates about a time he was promoting Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula course. That lesson ended up being a big help to his affiliates.
Success Stories and Experiments
Share stories of what worked and what didn’t. This kind of transparency helps build trust and guides your affiliates in their promotional efforts.
Engage and Interact
Create engaging content like quick tutorial videos or informative blog posts (like this one). Sharing these with your affiliates keeps them engaged and informed.
Answer questions publicly. Remember, if one person is asking, many others are likely wondering the same thing.
By investing in teaching your affiliates and sharing your own experiences, you create a well-informed and motivated team. This approach not only helps them understand the promotional strategies better but also makes them feel more connected to your book launch, leading to a more successful campaign.
Keep in Contact With Your AffiliatesIt is absolutely critical that you provide regular updates to your affiliates. The idea is to just keep things warm and keep you top of mind. For a book launch, things like these make for great updates to share:
- New endorsements – if someone worthwhile endorses the book, share it with your affiliates.
- Media appearances – if you’re appearing on a significant show or podcast, share it. That will inspire others to have you on their show or introduce you to other hosts.
- Book cover finalized – Why not? It’s news.
- Editing done – It’s a milestone. Celebrate it WITH your affiliates.
Other significant developments should be shared as well. Anything you can think of that is a milestone or newsworthy, SHARE IT! This helps build excitement and keeps affiliates informed about the book’s progress.
Create a Facebook Group for Your AffiliatesStart a dedicated Facebook group for your affiliates, either for just the book launch affiliates or your entire affiliate program. This becomes a central hub for communication, updates, and sharing strategies.
Regularly engage with affiliates in the group. Ask if they need anything or if they have suggestions, and be responsive to their requests.
Here are some examples of content we’ve posted for our affiliates during our book launches:
Personalized SupportAsk your affiliates well in advance what they need to promote the book effectively.
This could range from specific promotional materials to more detailed information about the book.
By inquiring months ahead, you have ample time to prepare any requested materials, making sure nothing is left to the last minute.
Ask for ReferralsSee above for how to get your affiliates to refer other affiliates.
The important thing here is to send out emails specifically asking for referrals, emphasizing the second-tier commission. And also, include it as a P.S. regularly in your other emails.
Send Physical MailCut through the clutter of email and stand out by sending physical mail to your affiliates (this also works for prospective affiliates that you want to recruit).
A physical copy of the book can be an excellent tool for affiliates. It’s a cost-effective method (especially if sent via media mail, which as of this writing costs less than $4.00 in the United States) and adds a personal touch.
To REALLY impress your affiliates, try sending the book in a nicely designed box. This small investment can make a significant impact on how affiliates perceive and promote your book.
Remember, the success of your launch is closely tied to how well you support and engage your affiliates. Whatever you do, keep in regular communication with them!
For more ideas on communicating with your affiliates check out this post:
How to Communicate with Affiliates
What Affiliates Need to Succeed in Book LaunchesThe three most important things that affiliates need in a book launch are:
1. Awesome Affiliate GraphicsAffiliates need awesome graphics to share on social media. Yes, email is still the highest converting medium for sales and most people are using text-only emails, but you still need to provide killer graphics for things like:
- Blog posts
- Emails for those who use images
- Affiliates who want to create their own banner ads
- Social media, such as these:
Here’s how we do it:
You must also provide your affiliates with the following:
- Headshots
- 3-D book cover
- Book being read
Make sure you have a specific page in your affiliate portal.
If you are looking to build your own affiliate portal, we can help. We’ve built more than a dozen high-quality affiliate portals for clients in various industries. Click here to learn more.
2. Swipe CopyIt’s critical that you provide your affiliates with good swipe copy. If this is a new term to you, it’s basically suggested emails and social media posts.
I’ve written an entire post about how to write swipe copy for your affiliates. I highly recommend reading it to learn more about creating killer swipe copy.
If I were to sum up that post in one paragraph, though, it would be as follows:
Quality swipe copy is vital. It’s not just a task to check off; it’s a cornerstone of your launch strategy. Take the time to craft it carefully or better yet, consider hiring a professional. Mediocre swipe copy won’t cut it. It needs to be compelling, persuasive, and aligned with your book’s message.
In your book launch, providing tailored swipe copy for different audiences is crucial.
When it comes to your book, you’re likely targeting multiple groups. For instance, in Jeff Goins’ The Art of Work launch, we focused on distinct avatars:
- Current entrepreneurs
- Aspiring entrepreneurs
- Faith-based community
- Stay-at-home moms and dads
Each audience had its unique appeal and angle in the swipe copy. We made it easy for the affiliates to identify their core audience and pick the right swipe copy for them.
For your launch, identify three or four key audiences your book resonates with. Once you have these groups, create different versions of swipe copy for each. This customization ensures that your message hits home for every segment of your audience. It’s not just about the book; it’s about how the book speaks to each individual’s needs and aspirations.
And make sure to share this post with your affiliates so they know how to use swipe copy:
How to Use Swipe Copy as an Affiliate
- Promotion Plans and ChecklistsDuring a book launch, you need to provide your affiliates with a clear promotional plan and checklist. You usually have a very short window for them to promote, so make it easy for them to understand the best strategies for promoting your book effectively.
That’s why we offer them what we call ABC mailing plans.
A – All-In or Aggressive Plan
For the highly committed affiliates, this plan involves sending 7+ emails. It’s designed for those who are all in and ready to go the extra mile for maximum impact.
B – Balanced Plan
This is the ‘Goldilocks’ of plans – not too heavy, not too light. It typically involves sending 4-6 emails and is perfect for affiliates who want a balanced approach.
C – Conservative Plan
Ideal for those just starting out or wanting to test the waters. This plan usually consists of 2-3 emails and is great for affiliates who are not ready to commit fully.
Here’s an example from a product launch that we ran for Michael Hyatt. Note that a longer product launch typically involves more options and thus more emails, but you get the idea from this example:
Here’s how we create the mailing plans and make them easy for affiliates to navigate:
The beauty of these plans is their flexibility. Often, affiliates start with the Conservative plan and gradually move up to the Balanced or even the All-In plan, especially when incentivized with prizes (see above about contests). The key is to get affiliates to commit to a plan, and these structured options make it easier for them to say yes.Giving your affiliates a promo checklist is a simple yet effective to increase affiliate participation.Affiliates, like most people, are busy with their businesses and daily tasks. Your launch might not be their top priority. That’s why having a clear, easy-to-follow checklist can make a significant difference.
The Affiliate Promo Checklist should outline daily actions for the launch period, making it extremely convenient for affiliates to know exactly what to do and when. This clarity and simplicity can lead to increased affiliate activity…and…BOOM!…more sales. In our experience, using this checklist has resulted in at least a 10% increase in sales.
Here’s one from a launch we ran many years ago (you can tell because it has “Google Plus” on it lol):
Remember, you don’t need to create a new plan for every promo. Stick to a tried-and-tested format and adjust it as necessary for different launches. Click here to download a template for the Affiliate Promo Checklist – an editable document that you can customize to fit your specific needs.
Behind the Scenes on an Affiliate Book LaunchIf you want to see behind the scenes on an affiliate book launch that we ran a few years ago, check out the video below. I show you exactly what we did when we ran Mark Miller’s Smart Leadership book launch. It will tie some of the concepts I shared in this post together.
Complete List of Resources Mentioned in This PostList all of the major CTAsWhat should the FINAL CTA be?The post How to Launch a Bestselling Book Using Affiliates appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### Today I’m sharing the secret strategies of top affiliates who are closing sales like never before in 2024. You will learn what sets them apart from the rest, with conversion rates 4-5 times higher than average affiliates. These strategies can make all the difference between being a weak closer and a strong closer. PLUS, if you have an affiliate program, you’ll learn the strategies to share with your affiliates so they can make both of you a LOT more money!
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Looking for some good affiliate programs to promote? Check out our recommended affiliate programs here!
Links Mentioned in this EpisodeStruggle Sending too Many Emails? Watch This Video
How to Use Your Optin List
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Find Affiliates Using Affiliate Program Leaderboards
If Donald Trump Ran an Affiliate Program
How to Create Promotion Plans for Affiliates
How Sarah Williams 20X’d her Affiliate Sales and Won a $100,000 First Prize
How to Get Your Affiliates Fired Up Before a Promotion
What Kind of Affiliate Manager is Best: In-House or Outsourced?
How Top Affiliates are Closing Sales in 2024 Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
| Find Your First 100 Affiliates | Affiliate Program Terms & Conditions Template | Get My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email |
| Avoid The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes | Turn Inactive Affiliates into Your Best Affiliates | Get My Template for Writing Affiliate Emails |
| Affiliate Marketing Sales Secrets | Learn How to Create a Resources Page | Learn How to Write a Product Review |
The post How Top Affiliates are Closing Sales in 2024 appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### Effectively communicating with affiliates is the key to a successful affiliate program. The challenge? Figuring out WHAT to communicate, and HOW. Today’s post lays out a “what and how” plan you can use to make sure your affiliate communications are designed to maximize your sales results.
Affiliate marketers often ask me about how to create an effective communication system with affiliates. They want to know WHEN to communicate. WHAT to communicate. Along with HOW to do it.
These are the three critical questions, and they’re all answered in this post.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit…affiliate communication can be a bit of a moving target. There is no “one size fits all” strategy to follow because affiliate programs vary.
But there ARE some best practices.
I’ve broken things into “mini” explanations depending on the type of affiliate program you’re offering.
What might apply to a standard launch might not be relevant to an evergreen launch.
There are often nuances and caveats you need to take into consideration.
The Golden Rule of Affiliate CommunicationRegardless of what type of affiliate program you’re running, you need to make sure you keep your affiliates informed and engaged.
That means providing them with regular updates.
For example, share what’s going on between launches or big promotions.
But what about evergreen programs?
If you’re running an evergreen program, how do you build in regular updates when affiliates are coming on board at different times?
Like I said…you need to understand the nuances.
For example, say you have a completely evergreen program. There’s not a whole lot that changes from week to week.
But maybe you have a little bit of an increase right before Mother’s Day or Father’s Day. Or, you might see a little bit of a bump in Q4. Maybe you sell more or you sell an equal amount from June through August, as you do the other nine months.
Make sure to communicate this seasonality with your affiliates. And give them special swipe copy and graphics to help them promote.
My point is you need to create an affiliate communication program that MATCHES your business.
I’m going to cover all of the things that you need to do to keep your affiliates informed and motivated…no matter what kind of a program you’re running.
One Of The Biggest Affiliate Communication Mistakes I SeeI’m sure you’ve heard the expression ‘outta sight, outta mind’?
In the world of affiliate marketing, that’s a real danger. One that can cost you LOTS of money!
For some reason, affiliate managers will disappear for nine, ten or eleven months of the year.
Their affiliates hear crickets up until it’s showtime.
We worked with a client previously and one of the things that we hammered home was the importance of getting affiliates “warmed up”…MONTHS in advance!
If it’s June and your launch is in November, start getting them fired up in July.
Get them excited!
You don’t want to inundate them with messages but you DO want to get them pumped up to promote.
That’s a common mistake we see with the launch programs…a general lack of communication.
What Your Affiliates Need To KnowSo, what are some of the things that you do need to communicate?
There’s no particular order to anything I’m going to share here.
But I can guarantee…after reading this post, you’ll be well equipped to create a killer affiliate communication program.
And the strategies I cover can be used for…
- Pure Evergreen
- Evergreen Hybrid
- Launch-Specific
Regardless of the type of program you’re running, there is one thing you have to do for all of them…make sure you educate your affiliates.
You probably don’t want to start your education process six months out.
But during the 90 days leading up to your launch? Rev up your education machine!
If you’re running an Evergreen program, you can educate year-round on an ongoing basis.
During the lead-up to any big promotions, share what’s working for other partners.
Teach your affiliates the strategies and the tactics that they need to use.
We regularly do affiliate training webinars for our clients. In this training we go over the launch calendar, winning strategies, contests, and more.
Normally, the only way to get access to this training is to be one of our Your Affiliate Launch Coach clients or their affiliates, but you can get the affiliate training webinar here (including the slides) so you can train your own affiliates.
Get the EXACT Templates We Use to Train Affiliates PLUS a Behind-the-Scenes Look at One of Our Trainings! Click Here to Access it Now (100% FREE)!
Affiliate Email Hacks You NEED To KnowIt’s important to teach your affiliates WHY emailing more works or why mailing at a specific time is critical.
When we’re running launches, I often explain to clients why mailing on a weekend is a good idea.
The idea is to get affiliates to send an email or two over the weekend. A lot of times, we’ll wrap that up in a weekend email contest. (I’ll share in a second how you can get our “weekend” email template)
Here’s what we do to get affiliates to mail on the weekend:
What happens if you email me about the contest too early…
If you email me at 9am, it is just early enough that I can go into ConvertKit and pause our email that WAS going out today. And, instead of sending an email today and then one more over the weekend, I’ll just send two on the weekend.
Your program just missed out on a precious extra email to my list.
Friday around 2:00 PM is the key time.
Most affiliates have sent out their emails for the day. But it’s still early enough in the day when they can pivot and add an extra email.
For example, let’s say I’m writing this on a Friday at about 2:30. If you emailed me right now and said,
“Hey, you should mail this weekend. We’re doing a special promotion, the top three affiliates, get this awesome prize.”
I have the flexibility to go… “Hmm….I think I could pull that off. Let me type up an extra email. We’ll move on and get our team to load it.”
If you email me at 5, I can’t do that.
- I’m a half-hour from leaving the office.
- I’ve got my kids and I’m coaching their games tonight, or whatever.
- Oh well. Somebody will win that contest but it’s not going to be me.
DOWNLOAD: Click here to grab my weekend email template.
Take Affiliates Behind The ScenesTaking affiliates behind the scenes is a GREAT way to engage affiliates and, it can be used with annual, evergreen, or evergreen hybrid launches.
Give them access to what’s going on in your preparation for the launch.
For example, there’s one video I always recommend clients create. IF they’re recording pre-launch videos or a run-through of their LIVE workshop…take an extra five minutes to record a behind-the-scenes video for your affiliates.
Here’s the script: “Hey partners, I’m on set here. We’re three days from the start of the LIVE workshop, or we’re a week away from the LIVE workshop (or whatever it is), we’re just doing a test run-through and here’s what it looks like.”
Then, go on to explain some of the stuff you’re going to be doing.
Affiliates LOVE this insider access!
I might even include a 10-minute snippet that includes a few bloopers.
Don’t Forget To Constantly Hammer Home Important DatesMake it a point to constantly remind your affiliates of important dates that surround your promotion.
Let’s say your promotion starts April 14th. You’ve got to hammer that home!
And, be ready to provide them with a plan for building up to your launch date.
Some will need more coaching than others on things like…
- how to warm the audience up
- how to promote the webinar
- how to promote the ebook
- how to promote the free report
- how to promote the quiz
- how to promote the assessment
- how to promote the workshop
- how to promote sales
- how to do better with email,
You can also do special trainings by providing them with:
- a specific lesson on social media,
- a specific lesson on a specific tactic for social media, Instagram, Facebook, whatever,
- a specific lesson on how to use DMS, how to use their Facebook groups, how to do LIVES.
Whatever it is, teach them specific things.
These are all the things that you can provide to your affiliates to help them increase their sales! (and YOUR commissions!)
Build Excitement Around Contests And PrizesIt’s YOUR job to pump your affiliates’ tires…and keep them pumped!
Give them the information they need to know about…
“Hey guys, we just announced this, $250,000 contest,” or “everybody who makes five sales gets this…” Whatever it is, let them know!
And, if you’ve nailed down your contest eight weeks in advance, make sure to get an early start on letting affiliates know about it.
Start building BUZZ.
Get some excitement going about it.
To learn more about how to create great affiliate contests, check out this podcast episode: “How to Run Affiliate Contests Without Breaking the Bank.”
Don’t Underestimate The Power Of Updating AffiliatesGive them updates on EVERYTHING!
…“Oh my gosh, the webinar was amazing.”
…”Last week was our second biggest week in the past year!
Tell them about success stories. Share testimonials.
If you’re an affiliate manager and you get a testimonial, here’s what to do:
Tell your customer service team…”Anytime somebody sends an email with a really cool story, do me a favor, take a screenshot, send it to me, or let’s start a channel in slack or whatever. But I want to know any time somebody says something nice about our product so I can tell it to affiliates.”
So…WHEN Do You Communicate with Them?In the case of a launch, just ask if there’s anything they need a couple of weeks out and then maybe a day or two in or the day before. For evergreen, reach out AT LEAST once a quarter.
Whenever you choose to communicate, I’d include three of these elements,
- A tip or strategy
- What’s working, maybe a good story
- A testimonial or an update
But try to aim for a consistent once-a-month email. Then, track this in your system. Maybe re-contact “unopens” 10 to 12 days later.
Post once or maybe even twice a month in your Facebook group.
In fact, you can use your email to point affiliates back to the Facebook group so you have more ways to contact them when it’s promo time.
Inside the Facebook group, you can post a tip and a really cool testimonial. Jump in and do a LIVESTREAM where you answer some questions. Then, use a monthly newsletter that can point back to the other content.
If you have a cyclical evergreen program where you have 4 big promos a year, roughly every 90 days, follow the pattern above.
After a launch – Again, try to stick to at least once a month. Send an email to them when you pay them…If you are paying affiliates on a four-month payment plan, well, that kind of takes care of their updates.
But what about the affiliates who didn’t get paid? Just send a once a month email or Facebook post, you don’t really need to get too hyperactive about it. You can alternate between Facebook and email for about five months or so until you hit about, six months before the next promo.
Then you’re going to want to ramp up to every other week.
Send an email at the beginning of the month, Facebook post in the middle of the month vice-versa. And then the next month, repeat that.
The biggest thing is just having some level of consistency so that they’re never going more than about 30 days without hearing from you in some manner, just keep them somewhere in their brain.
And if you give value, then they’re going to love it.
Don’t Just Rely On Email and FacebookPeriodically send your affiliates something in the mail.
We haven’t done this with all of our clients, but we do send a quarterly physical newsletter. It’s four pages. One side is the mailing information. stuff. So it’s actually three pages of printed stuff and it folds in half and then in half again.
It costs 50 cents to print and something like 89 cents to mail. So it costs right around $1.50 a person. You have a thousand affiliates, it cost you $1,500.
Sending something in the mail really gets people excited.
For your bigger affiliates you could do something special.
The list is endless, just do something special for them.
The important thing is…get creative, be consistent, and break the mold.
Periodically, you can pop out a DM to somebody. If you have 1,000 affiliates, hire a virtual assistant to do it.
Here’s how I work with a Virtual Assistant to announce a new contest.
I’ll have my VA DM as many people as she can.
Maybe she can only get to 274? Okay, well 274 people who just got a DM.
“Hey, just want to make sure. Did you see the email I sent out announcing the contest?”
Super simple right?
But it stands out, breaks the mold and I get a lot of responses.
When you’re in constant contact with your affiliates, it makes it easy to ask for referrals.
“Hey, do you know anybody? Who’d be a good partner?” Your #1 source of new affiliates should be your CURRENT affiliates.
So lots to do.
But NOW…you have a plan!
Speaking of plans, did you know that giving your affiliates a simple promo plan has been proven to increase affiliate sales by as much as 25%? My affiliate promo plans will help you get your affiliates to promote more and need a lot less hand-holding.
Get the EXACT Template We Give to Our Affiliates to Get Them to Promote More and Generate More Sales! Click Here to Download it Now!
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
| Find Your First 100 Affiliates | Affiliate Program Terms & Conditions Template | Get My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email |
| Avoid The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes | Turn Inactive Affiliates into Your Best Affiliates | Get My Template for Writing Affiliate Emails |
| Affiliate Marketing Sales Secrets | Learn How to Create a Resources Page | Learn How to Write a Product Review |
The post How to Communicate With Affiliates appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### Are you looking to get a job as an affiliate manager? If so, you’re in the right place. In this post, I’m going to share the steps you need to take, the skills you should develop, and there might even be a job opportunity waiting for you at the end.
So, how exactly does one step into the role of an affiliate manager? It’s a question I often hear. People are intrigued by the idea, attracted by the cool factor, the potential for good earnings, and yes, all of these aspects are genuinely appealing.
I sometimes laugh thinking,
“If only my high school guidance counselor knew about this career path, he would have definitely pointed me in this direction.”
But my high school guidance counselor didn’t even know something like this existed!
But, as of this writing, I’ve been an affiliate manager for nearly twenty years!
Yes, that makes me a dinosaur in this industry. I’ve worked with amazing clients (such as Adidas, Shutterfly, Shark Tank’s Kevin Harrington, Michael Hyatt, Ryan Levesque, Stu McLaren, Kim Walsh Phillips, and dozens of others). I’ve been named Affiliate Manager of the Year four times and I’ve built numerous affiliate programs from scratch to seven figures and beyond. I’ve seen and done it all in the affiliate management world.
Being an affiliate manager is like striking the perfect balance for me. It meshes my inner tech-loving, marketing-enthusiast self with my people skills. It’s an exciting blend of dealing with numbers, stats, and spreadsheets (and let’s be honest, spreadsheets might not be fun, but the magic they create with data is fascinating) and nurturing relationships.
The financial rewards? They’re a nice cherry on top. I’m not gonna lie…if you’re great at affiliate management, you can make a LOT of money!
But even when I was just starting out and relatively unknown in the affiliate world, the job was rewarding because it’s largely a commission-based job. It’s not just a job; it’s a fun, thrilling adventure.
But the burning question remains: How do you get a job as an affiliate manager? It starts with asking yourself three questions.
3 Questions Every Prospective Affiliate Manager Should Ask ThemselvesBefore you decide to become an affiliate manager, it’s crucial to do some self-reflection. Not just a quick glance, but a deep, introspective look to see if this career is the right fit for you. Just like I wouldn’t suddenly aim to become an NFL quarterback at 44 years old, you need to assess if the role of an affiliate manager aligns with your skills and passions. Here are three critical questions to ask yourself:
1. Are You Cut Out for Affiliate Management?
First off, is being an affiliate manager the right job for you?
This role is a unique blend of technical savvy and people skills. You’ll be diving deep into data, embracing spreadsheets (even if they’re not your favorite), and extracting meaningful insights from them. In other words, there’s a lot of data analysis and left-brain activities.
But it’s not all left-brain numbers and analytics stuff. You also have to engage your right-brain creative side and your relationship-building brain.
A big part of this job is about building and maintaining relationships. Are you comfortable switching between being data-driven and creatively engaging with people? There are days when you have to do that more than ten times, sometimes multiple times in an hour.
If you find it hard to switch gears from analytical to creative thinking, this might not be your path.
2. Do You Have the Necessary Skills and Willingness to Learn?
Being a successful affiliate manager requires a mix of various skills – marketing, tech-savviness, sales, customer service, and leadership to name a few. You don’t have to be an expert in all these areas from day one, but a willingness to learn and grow is crucial. For example, you don’t need to be a TikTok pro, but you should be familiar with what’s trending in marketing.
If you’re not up to speed, dedicate time to learn. Listen to sales and marketing podcasts (like mine), read marketing books, and immerse yourself in learning new technologies. The field is always evolving, and so should you. More on this below.
3. Can You Lead and Delegate Effectively?
No one can manage an affiliate program single-handedly. You’ll need a team, or at least a virtual assistant (VA), to handle various tasks.
RELATED POST: How to Build Your Team: Working with Virtual Assistants, Contractors, and Full-Time Employees to Scale Your Business
Whether it’s running reports, handling administrative tasks, or reaching out to potential affiliates, delegating is key. This means you also need to have solid leadership skills. Being an effective leader involves guiding your team, making strategic decisions, and ensuring everyone’s aligned with the goals.
If you’re not there yet, start developing these skills. Leadership isn’t just about managing people; it’s about inspiring and guiding them toward a common goal.
Remember, if any of these areas feel lacking, it’s an opportunity for growth. Dive into resources that can enhance your skills, whether it’s sales techniques, marketing strategies, or leadership principles. Your journey to becoming an affiliate manager isn’t just about acquiring a new job; it’s about embracing a role that requires continuous learning and adaptability.
Here are some recommended resources for leaders:
My recommended leadership books
The LIE of Leadership
Find Your Leadership Mojo
Basic Skills and Knowledge Required for Affiliate ManagersAffiliate managers must have basic skills and knowledge in the following areas:
- Tech
- Sales
- People Skills (Networking)
- Marketing
- Networking
At its core, that is what affiliate management is made up of.
It’s like being a jack-of-all-trades in the digital marketing world. Here’s a breakdown of what you need to master:
1. Tech Skills
Being tech-savvy is non-negotiable. You should be comfortable with various software and tools used in affiliate marketing.
Just to name a few that you’ll likely interact with:
- CRM Systems – These include basic CRM systems to more advanced ones like InfusionSoft. These are where you’ll manage your potential affiliate contacts.
- Affiliate Tracking Software – There are dozens of good ones, about a hundred mediocre ones, and even more bad ones. Which one is best? That strongly depends on your needs. That said, whatever you decide to use, or whatever system the program you’ll be managing is already on, you’ll need to learn how to use it to the fullest. NOTE: My recommendations for affiliate tracking are here.
- Graphic Design – You don’t need to be a professional designer but having some basic skills saves a lot of time and money. I highly recommend spending at least ten hours learning the ins and outs of Canva.
- Web Design/Funnel Creation – You need to have a solid understanding of whatever system your company is using for their pages, funnels, and checkout.
You don’t need to be a tech wizard, but a solid understanding is crucial.
2. Sales Skills
As an affiliate manager, a big part of your job involves persuading potential affiliates to join your program and motivating them to perform better. Good sales skills are key here. If you’re not confident in this area, it’s time to hit the books.
Read sales classics like Jeffrey Gitomer’s The Little Red Book of Selling or Zig Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale. These resources can sharpen your sales skills and teach you effective persuasion techniques.
You can find all of my recommended books on selling here.
3. People Skills
Affiliate management isn’t just about managing programs; it’s about managing relationships. Whether it’s communicating with affiliates, negotiating deals, or working with your team, strong interpersonal skills are essential.
You need to be approachable, empathetic, and able to build trust. Books like Robert Cialdini’s Influence and Yes! (both of which can be found here) can offer valuable insights into human behavior and effective communication.
Work hard on developing your ability to create relationships with your affiliates! Here are some good places to start:
PODCAST: How to Build Strong Relationships with Your Affiliates
PODCAST: How to Leverage Affiliate Manager Relationships with Jessica Turner
4. Marketing Knowledge
You should have a good grasp of the latest marketing trends and strategies. This includes understanding different promotional techniques, from launches to evergreen promotions, and the nuances of webinars.
Continuous learning is vital here. Read books like Jeff Walker’s Launch or all of Russell Brunson’s books (you can find all of my recommended marketing books here) to stay ahead of the curve.
My rule: Always Be Learning!
In addition to those books, here are some other resources to help you stay on top of the marketing world:
- Subscribe to my podcast (seriously…we cover a lot)
- PODCAST: Marketing According to Brain Science with Ridgely Goldsborough
5. Creativity and Innovation
We (my agency) have a proven system for running affiliate programs.
It’s worked in just about every niche and with every type of affiliate program (evergreen, launches, book promos, you name it). It can be easy, though, to fall into the trap of just following the system.
While it’s important to follow proven systems, adding your creative flair can make a big difference. Innovate and tweak strategies to suit different situations. This ability to adapt and think outside the box can set you apart and lead to better results.
Being an affiliate manager requires a blend of technical knowledge, sales and marketing savvy, strong interpersonal skills, and creativity.
It’s about constantly learning and adapting, understanding the basics, and being willing to innovate within the framework of proven systems. If you find any gaps in these areas, now is the time to start filling them.
The Right Personal Habits/Values for Affiliate ManagersTo get hired as an affiliate manager, having the right personal habits and values is just as crucial as having the necessary skills.
1. Overdelivering
One of the core values you should embrace is overdelivering. This is one of our core values in our company.
Ultimately, the real question is this:
How do you want affiliates to feel about your work?
Do you want them to be “just okay” with it, or do you aspire to truly wow them? In our company, our ambition is always to leave our affiliates and clients thoroughly impressed.
This ambition is deeply rooted in one of our core values: always overdeliver. We’re committed to ensuring that our clients and customers receive at least tenfold the value of their investment with us. It’s not just about meeting expectations; it’s about far exceeding them.
We’re dedicated to taking that extra step, going above and beyond to ensure that everyone we interact with has an extraordinary experience. Our goal is to create a feeling of amazement and profound satisfaction in all our dealings. This commitment to excellence is what sets us apart and drives our success.
Always aim to provide your affiliates with more value than they expect.
2. Self-motivation and Productivity
As an affiliate manager, much of your work will be self-directed. You won’t always have someone instructing you on what to do every hour of the day. This requires strong self-motivation and excellent time-management skills. If you find yourself struggling with productivity, it’s time to invest in learning and improving this skill.
Some of my favorite books on productivity, focus, and working more efficiently are here. They offer practical advice on how to organize your tasks, prioritize effectively, and get more work done efficiently.
Here are some other resources for productivity and focus:
Top 10 Productivity Hacks for Online Business Owners
How to Boost Your Productivity to Uncharted Levels – These 10 Ways
3. Understanding the Basics
I’ve already touched on this above, but just in case you skipped down to this point, it is absolutely critical that you ensure you have a good grasp of the basics of affiliate marketing, including product launches, evergreen promotions, webinars, and general marketing strategies. These are the foundation of your work, and being proficient in these areas will make your daily tasks much smoother.
Scroll up a bit for some recommended resources on this
4. Continuous Learning and Adaptability
The world of affiliate marketing is always evolving, so being adaptable and willing to learn is essential. Stay up-to-date with the latest trends and techniques in the industry. This not only keeps you relevant but also opens up opportunities for creative strategies in your affiliate management role.
In conclusion, to be successful in an affiliate manager role, you need to blend creativity with a systematic approach, always aim to overdeliver, be self-motivated, and continuously learn and adapt. These personal habits, combined with your technical skills and knowledge, will set you on the path to success in this dynamic field.
Affiliate Marketing & Affiliate Management KnowledgeBecoming an affiliate manager is more than just a title; it’s about immersing yourself in the world of affiliate marketing. Here’s my take on why knowing the ins and outs of affiliate marketing is crucial:
1. First-Hand Experience is Key
Honestly, it’s tough to get a job as an affiliate manager (or actually be a good affiliate manager) without having dipped your toes in affiliate marketing. I mean, think about it. You can learn more in a year BEING an affiliate than you will by reading half a dozen books on affiliate management.
Before I started promoting affiliate products, I was okay at managing affiliates. But after I got into the game myself, everything changed. I went from just scraping by to winning Affiliate Manager of the Year. Four times.
That’s what being in the trenches does to you. You see the good, the bad, and the downright awesome, and it all shapes how you manage.
You copy the good. You tweak others’ ideas and make them your own (see the next point). And you learn from the bad things other affiliate programs do.
2. Learning by Observing
It’s crucial to keep an eye on what others are doing in the affiliate world. Sometimes, you come across something that makes you think, “Wow, that’s genius!” Other times, you spot mistakes and vow never to repeat them.
For instance, I once got an email from an affiliate program I was a part of about getting financial support for Facebook ads, and that sparked an idea.
Why not send out something tangible, like a fake check, to grab attention? We called them “Fakebook checks.” We physically mailed them to top affiliates and on the outside they looked like a check (think like a payroll check with the window that has your address on it).
When they opened the envelope and there was the “check.” It also had a letter explaining that we were advancing them $1,000 to run Facebook ads supporting the affiliate promotion. If they did $X in sales, they could keep the money. If not, it would just be pulled from their affiliates commissions.
It was a twist on someone else’s idea but with our own flavor. In case you’re wondering (or want to steal the message for your own use…go ahead, by the way) here’s the letter that was included with the “check.”
Hey {FIRST NAME},
You might be wondering why in the heck I sent you a fake check…a Fakebook check if you will. Well it’s because I can get away with writing things like Fakebook on paper and not have Zuckerberg hunting me down (Right? I can do that can’t I?)
Actually it’s because I want to offer you an advance on your affiliate commissions if you run Facebook Ads to the workshop and/or webinar!
If you send an email to xxx with the subject line of “Show Me the Money” I will PayPal you $1,000 right away so you can run your ads without having to spend your own money.
Easy peasy, right?
And remember…the big promo push starts April 15 and if you need anything, don’t hesitate to reach out!
Matt McWilliams
3. The Importance of Being Up-to-Date
If you’re trying to get a job as an affiliate manager, but you’re not up-to-date on the latest in affiliate marketing, you’re in for trouble.
For example, if you’re clueless about what TikTok is and how affiliates can use it to promote your company, we’ve got a problem. You don’t need to be a TikTok wizard, but staying in the loop with current trends is non-negotiable.
Just like I said in one of my podcast episodes, I’m not an expert at most new social media networks, but I’m learning. That’s the attitude you need.
4. The Power of Adaptation
It’s not just about learning what’s out there; it’s about adapting those strategies to make them your own. Take an idea, add your unique twist, and suddenly, it’s your innovation. Like those Fakebook checks I mentioned above – that was taking an idea and elevating it. Now, that’s what I call breaking through the clutter!
5. The Blend of Skills Needed
To be an ace affiliate manager, you’ve got to juggle a bunch of skills. You need to be tech-savvy, have a knack for sales, be a people person, and be up to speed on marketing. Plus, leadership is key. You can’t go solo; you need a team, maybe a VA, to help manage the workload. It’s about leading effectively and ensuring everything runs smoothly.
If you’re considering a career in affiliate management, make sure you’re ready to become a student of affiliate marketing, keep learning, and adapt ideas to develop your unique approach. It’s a blend of hands-on experience, continuous learning, creative thinking, and a solid grasp of essential marketing and management skills.
So, are you 100% sure you want a job as an affiliate manager? If so, this next section is exactly what you came here for.
We’re Hiring Affiliate Managers!If you’re looking to work with the best affiliate management company in the world (if I say so myself), you’re in luck!
We’re not just any affiliate management company; we’re considered one of the top affiliate management agencies on the planet.
With a history spanning almost two decades, our journey has been incredible, working with over 350,000 affiliates and collaborating with huge companies like Adidas and Shutterfly, as well as industry giants like Shark Tank’s Kevin Harrington, Ryan Levesque, Stu McLaren, Kim Walsh Phillips, Jeff Goins, Ray Edwards, Rich Schefren, Michael Hyatt, Tony Robbins, Dean Graziosi, and more.
Our Unique Hiring ProcessOur hiring process is something we take pride in – it’s meticulously crafted and has been proven to be effective in finding the best talent. This isn’t just a job offer; it’s a career-building opportunity with one of the industry leaders.
1. Five-Week Training Program
We kick things off with a comprehensive five-week training program. This isn’t your average course. It’s an in-depth exploration into the world of affiliate management, client relations, and beyond. The best part? This training is absolutely free, and it’s packed with valuable insights.
2. The Application Process
Our application process is thorough to ensure we find the right fit for our team. You’ll embark on a journey that requires you to answer situational questions, reflecting your problem-solving skills and approach to real-world challenges in affiliate management.
3. A Test of Skills and Cultural Fit
Post-training, we’ll be conducting tests to see how well you’ve absorbed the training and how well you fit into our agency’s culture and ethos. This phase is crucial in determining whether you’re the right candidate to proceed further.
If your skills, attitude, and values are a good fit for our agency, then we’re probably going to invite you to be a part of our team.
Our Mission and ValuesBefore you consider working for us, it’s important to understand our mission and values.
Our mission is simple: To provide world-class affiliate management and a 10X return on investment for our clients and to serve our affiliates with excellence and professionalism.
On top of that, we want to keep our affiliate programs fun, train our affiliates well, and have a lot of fun ourselves.
Here are our core values as a company:
We Always Overdeliver
In our company, overdelivering is not just an option; it’s a commitment. This core value is about giving our clients and customers at least 10X the value they invest. It’s our dedication to take that extra step, ensuring that every interaction leaves them feeling amazed and deeply satisfied. This ethos extends beyond mere customer retention; it’s our driving force.
We are Constantly Learning
For 17 years, we’ve embraced learning as a fundamental part of our journey. We believe in learning from every source – from others, from our own experiences, and even from our failures. Our culture of learning and experimentation fosters growth and innovation, enabling us to continuously evolve and excel.
We Allow Others to Surprise Us
We understand the power of delegation and the surprises it brings. By focusing on our unique abilities and allowing others to do the same, we not only foster a culture of trust but also make room for unexpected and remarkable achievements. This approach has proven vital in our leadership and organizational growth
We Don’t Work with Jerks
Our policy is clear: We don’t work with jerks. We approach every relationship with grace, but we firmly draw the line at negativity, jerk behavior, or any form of abuse towards customers. This policy isn’t just about maintaining a positive work environment; it’s about choosing respect and kindness in all our interactions.
We Ruthlessly Protect our Downtime
We fiercely guard our downtime. This isn’t about slacking off; it’s about ensuring that our team gets the rest and rejuvenation they need. By promoting a balanced workload, we ensure our team is always at their best – both for their personal well-being and to deliver optimal performance for our clients.
We are the Guide, Not the Hero
At the heart of our mission is a simple truth: our customers are the heroes, and we are their guides. Our goal is to empower them, to help them realize their dreams and fulfill their missions. Every customer, affiliate, and follower is valued and served with the highest level of commitment.
We do the Things that Scare Us
We’re not deterred by challenges; instead, we embrace them. Whether it’s a project that stretches our skills or resources, we tackle it head-on. Our 80/20 rule – focusing on completion over perfection – guides us, and we believe firmly that making a decision, even if it’s wrong, is better than indecision.
These core values aren’t just words on a page; they are the principles that guide every decision and action in our company. They reflect our commitment to excellence, growth, and a positive, supportive work environment. As we continue to grow and evolve, these values remain our guiding stars, ensuring that we stay true to our mission and our team.
How to Apply and What to ExpectIf this opportunity excites you, and you’re ready to take on a new challenge, here’s what you need to do:
1. Apply
Click here to start your application process.
Be prepared for an extensive application that will test your understanding and approach to affiliate management.
2. Expectations and Reality
Understand that this process is competitive and challenging. In our last hiring cycle, we had 52 applicants, out of which only two were hired. But don’t let this discourage you – if you’re passionate and committed, this could be the perfect opportunity for you.
3. Our Commitment to You
We assure you that joining our team will be a transformative experience. You’ll learn, grow, and be a part of a team that values innovation, fun, hard work, and getting results.
So, now that you know all that is involved in getting a job as an affiliate manager, what do you think? Still want to be one?
My hope is that this post has given you clarity. You should now be either 100% certain that you DO want to be an affiliate manager or 100% certain that the job is NOT right for you.
The post How to Get a Job as an Affiliate Manager appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### Did you know that your top affiliate prospects are right there in front of your nose…IF you know where to look? I’ve used the strategy I’m sharing today to find affiliates who’ve made me and our clients over $100 Million in sales. Today I show YOU how to use affiliate leaderboards to find awesome affiliates for your program.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Make sure that your affiliate program has a solid agreement (AKA Terms & Conditions). To make things simple, grab my template here!
Links Mentioned in this EpisodeYour Affiliate Launch Coach
Text Me: (260) 217-4619
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyIf Donald Trump Ran an Affiliate Program
How to Create Promotion Plans for Affiliates
How Sarah Williams 20X’d her Affiliate Sales and Won a $100,000 First Prize
How to Get Your Affiliates Fired Up Before a Promotion
What Kind of Affiliate Manager is Best: In-House or Outsourced?
What to Look for in an Affiliate Manager
How to Find Affiliates Using Affiliate Program LeaderboardsToday I’m going to share a little secret with you. It’s something that I’ve used to get awesome affiliates and develop some amazing relationships over the years. I shared it with a client the other day, and already she’s used it to get two affiliates who are likely to bring in more than $200,000 in sales. Listen up, because this episode is going to be juicy.
So this is like the epitome of an unplanned podcast episode. Because we didn’t have it on the plan. We did not have this on our calendar. But I shared this with a client the other day, and as I said at the beginning, she’s used what I’m going to share with you in this episode very quickly. I mean, we’re talking right before Christmas. I’m recording this right after the new year. So this is like two weeks ago. So this is over Christmas.
She landed two affiliates who, based on what I know about these affiliates, I’m pretty confident. I mean, on the very low end, they’re going to bring in, between the two of them, 125,000 in sales. This is a client, just for the record, who last year did less than $600,000 in sales. So to get two affiliates who could potentially be worth a quarter of a million dollars a year, first time she did what I’m teaching in this episode.
So if I haven’t, like, I just want to be clear, if that hasn’t made you, like, perk up, press pause. Like, if you’re in the car and you need to press pause so that you listen to this when you can take notes and actually put this into action. I don’t know that I’ve ever shared anything. You know, I love to think that, you know, this is our 473rd episode. I’d love to think I’ve shared some six figure ideas. I can promise you. I don’t think I’ve ever shared anything that’s going to make you six figures in, you know, that short of a period of time, I’m not a get rich quick person. All right?
That’s not my, my mo. But this is big. I had to check. I don’t think I’ve ever, I don’t know. Maybe I have shared this. So maybe I’ve shared this before, maybe I haven’t. If I have shared it. I’ve shared it kind of in passing. I haven’t shared it in the detail that I shared with our client the other day about this. And so I’m going to tell you what it is in a second. I’m not going to build this up too much. But again, just to be clear, like we’re talking, she just started doing this.
She did this with only a handful of people, got two of them to agree to promote her upcoming launch. And I am confident, almost guaranteed. I looked at their numbers, I know their metrics. I know one of them’s promoted some other clients. I am confident this is going to be worth over $200,000. I mean, a 33% increase in revenue over last year. Just boom. Like that. So this is huge. All right, so here’s what I had her do. You know, we’re doing a coaching call. She’s one of our clients.
And your affiliate launch coach. You can find out more about that, by the way at youraffiliatelaunchcoach.com. And she was promoting this launch. She’s promoting another big launch out there that was happening, actually overlapped with the new year. And she was, she was doing okay. She was in like, I think she said she was in 9th place. Okay.
So not, not like she’s not one of the top three affiliates. She was pushing pretty hard. She was doing pretty good. You know, this was a big deal for her. She’d never finished top ten in a launch before, in a launch leaderboard as an affiliate. So she’s pretty stoked. Now, that’s not necessarily, you know, like, you don’t have to be in the top ten. We’ll talk about that.
Like, you don’t have to be on the top ten affiliates. That’s not necessarily relevant. Just giving you some perspective on where she was. And, you know, so right before Christmas, she was like, hey, I’m getting ready to go into open cart after Christmas. You know, I’m promoting this launch. I’m in 9th place right now. She ended up finishing in 9th place. Exactly.
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You know, she finished right where she was. She was like, I got up to 8th and then I dropped back to, like 9th and then 10th and back up to 9th. And she was asking me for some advice as an affiliate, you know, because clearly I, you know, I know what I’m doing on that side, too. She’s like, hey, how do I make more money?
You know, are there any things. I shared a few things with her and I said, you know, everything I just shared with you, this is a launch where if she did really, really well, like the top affiliate was going to do 75, maybe 100,000 in sales. So we’ll go with 100,000. They’re going to make $40,000.
And she’s probably going to make, you know, if she really busted it, she could topped out at 30,000 in sales. So about 12,000, 12,000, 13,000 in commissions. And she was trending towards about like she was going to probably do like, you know, $9,000, you know, $10,000. And I told her, I said, I can give you some advice.
My advice is going to help you grow by 20 or 30%. And that’s great. You know, making an extra three $4,000 is awesome. But if you want me to give you some advice on what’s going to make the biggest impact on your business, let’s talk about something else. She said, okay, I’m listening. I was like, okay, let me teach you real quick how to do better on the leaderboard because what I’m about to share with you will help you. Finishing higher on the leaderboard will help you get affiliates. Okay.
When you follow what I’m about to share with you. So no doubt about it, if you’ve got a, if you’ve got a chance, you know, to finish 9th on the leaderboard, hey, 9th is top ten. That means something. People list, you know, their top ten, their top 20.
If you got a chance to finish in 19th versus not being in the top 20, then do you fight to get top 20? Follow what I teach about affiliate marketing. Nothing I shared with her, nothing that I shared with her is something that I haven’t shared inside of affiliate insider monthly, for example, our membership site, if you want to get a trial of that. By the way, Matt McLean’s dot aimtrial aim trial for affiliate insider monthly trial, you can get in for a buck, right?
Get you a couple months for a dollar. And it’s not anything I haven’t shared inside of there. This was not like monumental things that I’ve never shared with anybody. I told her, hey, do you have a bonus package? She’s like, yeah. And I said, okay, let’s tweak that a little bit. Let’s add this, but let’s do this to make that will get a little bit more traction. I said, here, I want you to add this email at this time on the last day I told her to do this. I said, hey, reach out to the person who’s running the launch. Why don’t you do a live with them. Go live on the second to last day or the last day. Did a few things to tweak her promotion that helped her.
She said later, she’s like, you know, I looked at the numbers, there’s no way I would have finished in 11th place, which would have sucked. You know, 11th place is terrible compared to 9th, even though it’s only two spots. It’s kind of like in. I was listening to a guy earlier, he’s a marathon runner and he’s talking about like, top ten is what get, you know, when he was running is what got paid.
And he’s like, I kept finishing in 11th or 12th and he was like, there’s nothing else I could do, you know, so he’s, so he finally realized that he either needed to completely change his training so that he could become more professional and actually make money doing it, or he just needed to, like, you know, he needed to slow down and, because who cares if you finish in 12th or 23rd? You know, he was like, it wasn’t a pride thing. He was like, it really was a money thing.
So he beefed up his training and he became, you know, he’s one of the top, like, ten marathoners in the country right now. So now he’s actually making money doing it, which can justify the time spent. So, yeah, 11th would be terrible. So I gave her some tips on the affiliate side, and that plays a role in what I’m about to share with you, because the higher she finished, well, the better it looked when she did this thing.
And so what I said to her, I said, the thing is going to move the needle the most. Yeah. Extra $4,000, a little bit of prestige. It’s great. You learn a little bit about some promotional stuff. I spent 15 minutes helping her on the affiliate side, maybe 20. Shared some basic stuff with her. She and her team implemented it.
They made more money. That’s awesome. But I said, number one, I want you to engage with the other affiliates in the Facebook group and privately. So that’s number one. All right. We’re talking about how to use leaderboards to find affiliates. These other companies, the ones that you’re promoting as an affiliate, they are publishing a list of their top affiliates. They are handing them to you on a silver platter. They are saying to you, hey, affiliate, do you want to know who our other top affiliates are? Ding, ding, ding. So I said, I want you to engage with them, congratulate them. When somebody moves up three spots on the leaderboard overnight.
Put a comment on the Facebook post, DM, somebody who passes you and just kind of give a little playful trash talk or just say, hey, I noticed we’re right there together on the leaderboard. I’d love to connect. Sometimes, you know, we don’t really know. I’ve seen you around, don’t know who you know, blah, blah. Just be a human being, right? There’s no, oh, you got to craft this message perfectly, right? No, this is just being a good human being. So, hey, I’d love to connect sometime.
And I’ve talked about this before where you know, some of my best friends in the online marketing world, we connected because of affiliate leaderboards. But here’s the key. Number one, she engaged with them. She engaged with the people on the leaderboard, not just the top people.
As the 9th place affiliate she had a little bit of credibility. She had some street cred to be were to reach out to the top three and be like, hey, I want to get to know you better. But she didn’t just do that. And we’ll talk about in a minute what to do. If you’re not in the top ten, that’s fine. But she reached out to people who were in 15th, 20th, 25th place. She even reached out to everyone that they posted and said, hey, this person made their first sale today. She congratulated them.
I asked her afterwards, I was like, how much time did you spend? You’re like three minutes a day. I just did it. When I was regularly checking into Facebook, I didn’t specifically set aside time. I did it once a day for about three minutes. I took a couple of the posts and I engaged with them. She made sure that she was seen in that Facebook group. She would, when the affiliate manager would do, because the affiliate manager is, for lack of a better term, a disciple of mine.
I trained this affiliate manager, so he posts some of the same stuff that I would post and he would post tips in the Facebook group. She’d say thanks and then offer a thoughtful response to it. So, for instance, this affiliate manager posted a tip about how to use swipe copy like the one that we’ve posted before and many times every launch. And this client of ours thanked the affiliate manager and said, yeah, whatever you suggested in number three, you know, you know, number three is really important.
Here’s how we’ve done it. And then people responded to her saying, oh, thanks so much, now I get it. I didn’t understand what he said, now I get it. Blah, blah, blah. Right? So she engaged in the group and became kind of an expert in the group. She became someone that everybody recognized, three minutes a day for a couple of weeks. I mean, literally less than 1 hour of her time.
So that was step number one. One of those two affiliates reached out to her, saw her in there quite a bit and reached out to her. So you could easily argue that less than 1 hour of engagement in that group is going to bring in $50 to $100,000 a year for her business because they reached out to her. She didn’t even have to do part two or three about what I’m about to share.
That’s pretty cool. That’s a good ROI. I don’t know about you, I don’t make $50 to $100,000 in an hour. All right? I consider myself to be highly paid for what I do, fairly paid for what I do. And I don’t make $50 to $100,000 an hour. And so if you can find something I can spend 1 hour doing over the course of two weeks that is virtually guaranteed potentially to bring in that kind of money, I will do it all day long. And I do do this all day long.
It’s just unfortunately, I can’t do it 40 hours a week or I would. So that said, hugely, hugely profitable for her in that regard. The second thing she did, like I said, so she engaged in the group, she engaged privately with them on Facebook. Second thing she did is after the launch when they published their final leaderboard via email. That is not in the Facebook group. I’m counting that in the Facebook group. So she was congratulating people. She was trash talking with people.
She’d never done any of that before, by the way she responded. She clicked reply to the final leaderboard message, but made the to field be anybody that she wanted to engage with. So anybody in the top, like 30, she reached out to him and said, hey, you know, congratulations winning. Congratulations on fifth place.
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Looks like you beat me. Hey, I’d love to connect. Within a week, she had scheduled like half a dozen calls. She’s got more on the docket later, but she scheduled like six or seven right away. One of those people had already reached out to her, became one of those calls. One of them was like, boom, I’m in. Your launch sounds perfect. I am in.
All in. I’m like, I’m in to win. I’m in it to win it. You know, let’s do something magical together, right? So you reach out to those people and you just say, hey, congratulations, or great job, or, I loved watching. Oh, hey, I subscribed to your email list. I loved watching what you were doing. I love that Facebook Live that you did.
That’s part three is start following them and engage with them on other levels. Right? But what she did, she took another couple of minutes and she followed the people who were on the leaderboard. She friended them on Facebook and she saw how they were promoting, and then she would say, oh, I love that Facebook live that you did, or I love the email that you sent.
I love the such and such that you did. I love the bonus that you put together. I shared with her the story of how I used to joke with Ray Edwards about how like, dude, your bonuses are so good, I’m going to buy through your link, even though I’m an affiliate. She used that line on somebody else.
You know, she gave her the idea. She was being honest. She’s like, your bonus package. I have bonus package envy. Your bonus package is so amazing. That started a conversation they haven’t, that I know of. They haven’t agreed to work together yet or do anything together yet. But I think it’s going to be a profitable relationship for her.
I’ve used this so many times. I’m telling you, it works. Now you might be thinking, okay, yeah, this works. If you’re in the top ten doe, your client is in 9th place in a multi million dollar, you know, affiliate launch. Of course she gets to go and be like, hey, number five affiliate. I’m somebody and you’re somebody. We should. Yeah, that’s, this only works, right, if you’re one of the top ten.
That’s not right. If you’re in 30th place, don’t reach out to the number one affiliate. All right, work your way up. Hey, maybe you’re on the others on the leaderboard or people who’ve also made sales. You know, I’ve run affiliate launches where, you know, 294 affiliates have made sales. We ran one last year, over 450 affiliates made a sale. You might be in 373rd place, but you’re in there, you’re in the Facebook group, you’re engaging, people are seeing you, you’re celebrating that you made a few sales. Okay.
You’re kind of legit. I’d maybe like to probably get to know you a little bit better, see if we can do some business together. So you reach out to some of those people who are also in the also made sales list. If you’re in 53rd place, you reach out to number 30 through number whatever, right? Are you going to make $200,000 off of two affiliates? No. But could you make 40 or $50,000 off of ten affiliates? Yes, absolutely could.
And then guess what? Now you do that, your list grows. The next affiliate promotion you do, instead of being in 184th place, you’re in 75th place and you’re reaching out to the 50th, to the hundredth affiliates. And now the next time you’re in 30th place and you’re reaching out to the top, you, you know, to the 11th through fifth.
And then the next time you’re in the top ten, baby, you work your way up. So number one, engage in the group. Number two, I kind of got number two and number three mixed up. Number two would be follow them, get on their list, get to know them, get to know their content and comment on that content, connect with them that way.
And then third, send that email, very simple email. You just reply to the final leaderboard and you just say, great job. Congratulations. One year I went into canva and I made images. It was like, congratulations on your performance in such and such launch. I’m like, well, that was overkill. A couple sentences would have sufficed. Don’t say, I’d love to get, you know, at that point.
Don’t be like, hey, I’d love to connect. No, just leave it at that. Just leave it at that. Put the ball in their court. They will reply and say stuff back to you that you’ll be amazed. And it’s a numbers game. You do this 20 times per launch, you’ll get one or two, three partners each time. You do it over the course of ten launches and you’ve got 30 really, really good partners.
So listen, if you got any questions about this or anything else, shoot me a text, you know? Make sure you subscribe because you do not want to miss the next episode. I’m going to share with you you what and how to communicate to your affiliates so what to communicate to your affiliates and how to communicate to them. What do you actually communicate to them?
When do you communicate with them and how do you communicate with them? Three critical questions that I’m going to answer in the next episode. So make sure you click that subscribe button if you haven’t yet so you don’t miss that and I will see you then.
The post How to Find Affiliates Using Affiliate Program Leaderboards appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### Oh boy…this is gonna be a fun one. What kind of affiliate manager would Donald Trump be? What can we learn from him about being a great affiliate manager?
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Create Promotion Plans for Affiliates
How Sarah Williams 20X’d her Affiliate Sales and Won a $100,000 First Prize
How to Get Your Affiliates Fired Up Before a Promotion
What Kind of Affiliate Manager is Best: In-House or Outsourced?
What to Look for in an Affiliate Manager
Don’t Make These Killer Mistakes with Your Affiliate Program (Part 2)
If Donald Trump Ran an Affiliate ProgramWell, this should be interesting. What kind of affiliate manager would Donald Trump be, and what can we learn from him about being a great affiliate manager? I’m going to go out on a limb on this episode and know that this is going to be a little controversial, but I think there are some powerful lessons in this episode, so listen up.
So what would happen if I took perhaps the most polarizing figure in the world and threw his name in a podcast title? Is that what I’m doing here? Is that what all I’m doing is this just clickbait? You know, let’s take the name of the most controversial person in the world and let’s put them in a podcast title and see what happens.
Well, yeah, that’s kind of what I’m doing, but actually, no, it’s really not. You know, this actually came about from a conversation I had with another affiliate manager friend of mine. And we were talking about the traits of great affiliate managers, and we were talking about historical figures, and we agreed that great leaders would probably make great affiliate managers.
And these transcend political parties and industries and niches and all that. You know, we talked about, like, we think that Barack Obama would be a great affiliate manager. Steve Jobs, both George Bush’s, Ronald Reagan, FDR, Eisenhower, Martin Luther King, junior, Churchill, probably even Napoleon.
We kept going through history with leaders such as Gandhi and Sitting Bull, Washington, Joan of Arc, Lincoln, Simone Boulevard, Julius Caesar. All in all, the ability to lead, to inspire, to develop relationships, to maintain those relationships, to connect on a personal level, to study a market and deliver results, that’s what it’s all about. And so we started talking about this hypothetical scenario where Donald Trump runs an affiliate program, and we looked at his strength and his weaknesses and the lessons from like, the guy’s been in business for 45, 50 years, whatever.
And, you know, he’s been in real estate, entertainment, politics. And so there’s a lot to draw on. And so we wanted to look at this and we kind of just did it for fun for a few minutes.
And that was like, oh, my gosh, I was like, this could be a great podcast episode because there are lessons to learn. Now here’s the warning to you. Regardless of how you feel about him, if you hate him, can you still learn from him? Absolutely. And if you refuse to learn from him because you don’t like the guy, then you’re missing out. You have to put yourself before your feelings, right?
Regardless of how you feel about him. And the same could be true if I did an episode about Barack Obama or Steve Jobs. You know, some people just don’t like Steve Jobs. Okay, but can you learn from him? Absolutely. That’s why there’s been half a dozen books written about him.
The same is true if you love them. You can’t just put your blinders on. Go. Trump never does anything wrong. That’s not true. He’s a human being. All right, so regardless of how you feel about him, learn from his strengths, his weaknesses, his good traits, his bad traits, his good things, his mistakes, you got to learn from all of them. So let’s start with the strengths.
Now, I had to start somewhere, right? I could start with weaknesses. I could start with whatever. I’m starting with strengths and weaknesses. And I’m talking about general strengths and weaknesses here. Just overall, you know, first of all, brand building, I don’t know that there’s been a better individual brand builder in modern times. I mean, literally, he’s built his name into a global brand, and that brand signifies a certain thing.
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It’s, you know, to me, it signifies luxury. You know, Trump Tower. If you live in Trump Tower, that is a desired place to live in New York City. The Trump hotels are nice hotels. You know, you’re not going to a Trump property and it’s a dump. You know, it signifies success, signifies power.
And so if he were an affiliate manager and running an affiliate program, it would benefit from this brand. What is the lesson here from this strength? Building a brand, building new a brand and becoming known for something that will attract affiliates.
Becoming famous will attract affiliates. If you have a brand that is well known as an affiliate manager or as a company, you will attract more affiliates. Simply said, the second big strength is there are very few people who are able to master the media like Trump has.
I’ve read something that was like in the 2016 campaign, he got something like 650 million, if I remember correctly, I could be off by $100 million, but he got something like $650 million in free advertising. Basically, Hillary Clinton got less than 200 million. So even though she outspent him by, I have no idea how much money, but a lot of money, he got so much free media attention.
He generates so much buzz. It was just, the attention he attracted was unbelievable. So he would be great at attracting Buzz around the affiliate program, keeping it in the public eye, attracting interest.
The third thing he’s a persuasive communicator, no doubt about it. Again, a lot of people feel negatively towards that, and I get that. They feel like he uses this skill, you know, it’s like using the force for the dark side. Right? And I totally understand that. But he’s great at it.
His ability to connect with an audience on an emotional level is one of the best I’ve seen. Obama was great at that. George W. Bush was great at. Reagan was amazing at that. If you look at the people who lost, look at presidential campaigns. Dukakis didn’t connect with anybody on an emotional level. Al Gore, I mean, boring. John Kerry, boring. John McCain, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, even. They’re just boring. They weren’t connecting with people at an emotional level.
And one of the lessons here, you know, is passion, Trump’s knowledge, pardon the pun. I was intentional about that. Passion, Trump’s knowledge. His campaigns are proof that people are drawn more to passion than policy. If you look at the top campaigns, it’s the people that ran against the people I just named. They built movements.
Trump, Bernie Sanders. I mean, Bernie Sanders, his positions are out there. You might like him, whatever. Cool. I think his positions are cuckoo land. But yet he built a movement. Why? Because passion Trumps policy. Barack Obama, they have passion, right?
The kind of fires you up and sometimes it ticks some people off and gets people to take action. And as affiliate managers, as marketers, isn’t this what we want? We want people to take action, right? We want them to send one more email. We want them to go live at 11:00 p. m.
On cart close day. We want them to be an evangelist. We want them to subscribe to our, whatever we want them to buy, want them to buy some more, want them to tell three friends.
And the lesson here is, like, if you try to promote something that you aren’t bouncing off the walls about, it will fail. If you’re not passionate about being an affiliate manager or an affiliate for it will fail. You cannot be a good affiliate if you’re not passionate about it. You cannot be a good affiliate manager if you’re not passionate about it. And Trump, I mean, it’s proof that people are drawn more to passion than policy. And that’s so true in the affiliate world as well.
All right. Another big strength for him, number four is just the entrepreneurial experience. He has a lot of experience and you could argue, always failed it a lot. Yeah. In Silicon Valley, if you want venture capital money, you better have failed at a business before. You better have at least one failed business under your belt to get a good deal. They’re looking for that because you’re going to fail at some point. But he’s also been very successful. And so having that entrepreneurial experience working with affiliates who are entrepreneurs, very beneficial.
Number five, he’s got a loyal following. He has a loyalty base of supporters who trust and believe in his brand, and they are highly motivated to promote him. So as an affiliate manager, he has that.
He’s a risk taker. He’s an innovator. No doubt about it. He’s willing to innovate. He ran 2016. It was like, I remember my first reaction was like, are you kidding me? This guy’s a clown. Nobody runs in a presidential campaign like this. Well, what happened? He won. And regardless how you feel about that, it worked. Like, you could argue, oh, he lost popular vote by whatever, a million votes or whatever.
Okay. But he didn’t lose by 10 million, which is what most people thought would happen. Like, I definitely thought, I never thought in a million years he would win Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and some of those states, and he did. And it was like, oh, my gosh, what he did actually worked. Why? Because he took risks.
He was innovative. And I talked about this before, but the number one trait of great affiliate managers, this is number seven, is this tenacity being tenacious. You know, I looked it up in the dictionary and I shared this before, but it says, tenacity means persistent in maintaining, adhering to, or seeking something valued or desired.
Persistent, stubborn, obstinate. If you look it up in the thesaurus, you get termination, perseverance, doggedness, persistence, endurance, resolve, grit. The list goes on on follow up. Persistence. Not replying is not an answer. When an affiliate doesn’t reply, that’s not an answer.
Don’t take no for an answer. When one contact method doesn’t work, you try others, you dm, you text, whatever. That’s tenacity. You have to have tenacity if you’re an affiliate manager. How is your tenacity? If you’re looking for an affiliate manager? We talked a few episodes ago about what to look for in an affiliate manager. Look for tenacity. Look for a bulldog with a bone. Trump has that again, regardless of whether you like him. He’s tenacious. Nobody would ever deny that.
All right, so the flip side, what are the weaknesses? Well, the first weakness that I see is he’s just inconsistent and his focus tends to bounce all over the place. You know, he’s a smart guy, no doubt about it, and so he has that. My friend of mine calls it attention deficit. Oh, shiny ados. He has so many interests, so many ventures that, like, he could be going down one trail and they were going to try this something.
And the inability to stick with one thing for six months and just keep doing what’s working, I think would be a big weakness for him as an affiliate manager. You know, let’s be honest, he’s got some regulatory challenges, he got some legal challenges. I think if he ran an affiliate program, they would be under a lot of scrutiny.
No doubt about it, would be under a lot of scrutiny that could affect things. Probably the biggest reason why I wouldn’t hire him as an affiliate manager. I’d be too afraid some bad things would happen like that.
Number three, the consistency and the reliability. Just changing direction instead of maintaining consistent policies and support for affiliates, it’s like, boom, we’re going to go in this direction and affiliates are just like, what are we even doing? And then number four, I think for lack of a better term, I’ll call it reputation management.
There are some negatives, there’s some baggage. He’s got a controversial past. What will be the press? Yeah, he’s going to attract the people that are like hardcore on his side, but what about the people in the middle? They’re going to be like, eh, like, I want to be associated with that because it’s a public association. That’s the thing.
It’s not like voting. You vote in private, who’d you vote for? I don’t have to tell you. It’s not public. So clearly, you know, if you look at the numbers, I mean, I’ve seen him, about 30% are reliably in his court and about 40% are reliably against him. But there’s that middle 30% that are silent about it.
And in 2016, two thirds of those people went for them. Now, who were they? Who were the two thirds of those people? Nobody knows because you don’t have to be public about it. So in a public setting, I could see that being a negative. That’s why it’s important as an affiliate manager to maintain your brand and maintain a positive brand.
Don’t put stuff out there. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. It’s too risky. Now, there’s a couple of things that are both strengths and weaknesses. And then I’ve touched on these. You know, the first one, these work both ways. They are a weakness, but a strength. They are strength but a weakness.
You know, just that controversy and polarization, he’s the most divisive person in America, and that’s going to limit the appeal. Just like we talked about just now, to a broader audience, brands and affiliates are going to be very hesitant to associate with controversial figures. And so we’re going to have a narrow reach in the affiliate program.
But it’s also a positive. You know, Trump is ridiculed for being such a polarizing figure. I can’t argue with that. But his strategy is effective. Like, one things that I think he’s done well is he’s identified his core audience, he’s spoken directly to them in their language and ignored everyone else. Now, whether that’s best for the country is up for debate, right?
But as a marketing strategy, it’s worth copying. He’s taken a stand. He solidified his base, and that base will follow him through h*** or high water. We saw that. We’ve seen it time and again. Even when it’s not in their own best interest.
You think about that from a presidential campaign and it’s like, gosh, you know, that’s maybe that’s crossing some lines we don’t want. But isn’t that what marketers want from their followers? You know, the lesson is, take a stand for something and people will stand with you.
If you identify your core audience and ignore everyone else. Stand for something and people will stand with you. That’s the lesson. And we see that in so many niches in the health and fitness world, it’s like you have to stand and say, we are keto, and everything else is terrible, right? Okay, don’t do cardio, do weights or don’t do weights, do cardio or don’t work out hard, work out light because of x, Y and Z. You should fast 18 hours a day.
And every other diet is garbage. That we see it in investing world, you know, it’s like, no, invest in this, but not that, because everything else is crap and they have to take a stand. And you go, well, can we attract everyone in that case? Of course not. So take a stand for something. Now, again, there’s a line there, and that’s why I said, it’s a strength and a weakness.
Clearly, we’ve seen both sides. I mean, no matter what side you’re on in this debate, so to speak, right. No one will dispute that Trump has roughly three to five times more hardcore, dare I say, would storm the Capitol followers than Joe Biden has.
Like, people will vote for Joe Biden and they did. No doubt about that. But are there that many people who are like, you know, yeah, I’d run through a brick wall for that guy. Not really. And that can be a positive in the affiliate world. Again, with the right type of product.
Are you going to do that if you’re in a commoditized industry with tons of competitors? No. Are you going to do it where in your industry where polarization and controversy works?
Absolutely. So what are some of the things that he would do well? I think there’s three things that he would do particularly well, and I think there’s three things that he would do poorly.
The first thing he would do really well is just leveraging social media. I mean, he’s the best presidential candidate ever at leveraging social media. It’s the reason why he won the first time around.
And he’s amazing at engaging with people. He would drive all of his followers to support his program. The second thing he would do well is negotiate deals.
I mean, he’s a great negotiator. He is going to negotiate, win wins. He’s done it in real estate, he’s done it in entertainment, and he’d do it again as an affiliate manager.
Number three, I think he’d be a phenomenal motivator for affiliates. The guy, he knows how to sell. He would teach selling, teach metaclose more sales.
He’s got experience in leadership and building, you know, teams. I mean, I don’t know how many employees he has, but it’s at least tens of thousands. And I think he would be great at motivating affiliates.
You know, his affiliates, if nothing else, would be on a mission. They would be on a mission. Like I said earlier, they would run through a brick wall for him.
As far as things that he would do poorly, I think he would struggle, obviously, at developing like some sort of level of diversity. And again, for some affiliate programs, that doesn’t matter. You don’t need it.
For others, it could certainly limit market appeal and it could eliminate certain types of affiliates from promoting. Now, on the flip side of this, one of the things that Trump has done really well, that actually been amazingly effective at, is attracting new voters.
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People who never voted before, people who don’t follow politics, people who are turning out for this larger than life personality that’s what happened in 2016. It also happened in 2008. That’s what happened in 2008. People who never voted for don’t follow politics.
They turned out for a larger than life personality. Running against John McCain, you know, it was kind of boring. It happened in 1980, the term Reagan Democrats.
Why do we have a term Reagan Democrats? Because it was people that had always voted Democrat, they’d voted Democrats since FDR, and they suddenly voted for Republican. Why?
Because of Ronald Reagan. We’ve seen this so many times where they attract new voters and voters from the other side. And at first glance, this seems to kind of be in contrast to what I said earlier about polarization, but in a sense, they’re one in the same.
Trump’s message all along has been one of anti establishment. His voters aren’t the typical people who show up on primary day. So he’s focused more on bringing in new people.
And polarization, in a sense, is, it’s all about preaching to the choir, so to speak. Attracting new people is about forming your own choir, which is exactly what Trump did. So in order to grow, the lesson here, in order to grow is you must attract new, non traditional followers into your tribe, and you got to do the same thing for your affiliate program.
So again, that’s a strength. But the weakness would be kind of that diversity side. Another big weakness, adapting to criticism. I mean, his history is like, he doubles down in the face of opposition. I don’t think he’ll handle criticism well. If an affiliate’s like, hey, what if you do it?
That’s it. I think he would push back and, you know, I just don’t think he’d do well. And an affiliate manager has to be able to take criticism. They have to be able to adapt to changes. And I don’t know that he would do that well. Third thing I would see him doing poorly is just building trust.
And I think he would build trust with a certain group of people, but it would be limited. So what are some of the lessons we can learn from Donald Trump if he was an affiliate manager, as a marketer, as a leader, as an affiliate manager, I mentioned earlier the power of branding. Building a strong, recognizable brand is the cornerstone of all marketing.
It’s the cornerstone of affiliate programs. Secondly is just engagement, social media engagement, other types of engagement, like keeping in front of your affiliates. That’s one of the things he does like people talk about.
Well, gosh, he spent so much time tweeting. No, he spends so much time connecting with his audience. Spend more time connecting with your affiliates. Don’t go dark on them for two weeks. Don’t send a monthly newsletter. And that’s it. No, no, no, no. That’s so 1999.
That is like 2005 at the latest. Resilience. I mean, give him credit. He keeps bouncing back. Whether you like him or not, he keeps bouncing back. It’s a lesson in persistence.
Another one, you know, big lesson is just be willing to get crazy. I mean, he is either is crazy or he acts like it. There, I said it.
He’s either crazy or he acts like it. And the amazing thing about him is what drives his opponents absolutely nuts is what makes his supporters love him. He is out there.
Like, he says things that nobody else says. He’s doing things that nobody else is doing. He gets crazy, and crazy gets attention. Crazy stands out. Crazy polarizes what he talked about earlier. Crazy is memorable.
And like him or not, Donald Trump is not a fool. Like, I don’t believe that he’s actually crazy, and I don’t believe he’s stupid. In fact, I think he’s quite brilliant.
And I believe that a lot of his craziness is an act that serves as an end to a means. And you could argue all day long that’s not presidential. I actually would agree with you, but it works.
Yeah, I talked about this in my book, turn your passions into profits. An interviewer asked the comedian Chris Rock if, like, why are you always so amped up? And like, are you always like this?
And he’s like, no, people don’t pay to see normal Chris Rock. They pay to see Chris Rock. They pay to see the version of me that’s three times me.
In other words, they pay to see the crazy version of him. So the lesson here is that extreme positions make you memorable. To get attention, you might have to get a little crazy.
So last year, I shared the number one trait of great affiliate managers. I also shared eight other traits in that episode that I see in great affiliate managers. And so how does Trump stack up on those?
As we wrap up, I’m going to cover these nine traits. And, Jessica, where’s Trump on these? Number one is tenacity. That’s the number one trait, I said, and he has absolutely shown tenacity. He has overcome obstacles just to bounce back from a few years ago. I mean, like, there’s no doubt he’s tenacious. He is like a bulldog with a bone. Like I said earlier, the second one, friendliness. All right, this one, I don’t know.
I’ve never met him in private. I only know his public Persona. His public Persona comes off as very confrontational to critics, but very friendly and engaging to his supporters. Very charismatic. No doubt about it. I don’t know.
That’s a tough one. You know, what’s it like to have a 30 minutes phone call with Donald Trump? I have no idea. I never had one relationship focused. This is something he’s done amazing at. You know, he’s done great.
But there’s a flip side. Right? He has shown an ability to cultivate and leverage relationships, to advance his business goals and to advance his political goals.
But I also see a transactional nature in his relationships, and I think that’s, you know, he favors those who are loyal to him, who can directly benefit him. And I see that as a negative. You know, I think there’s a flip side to that.
He’s done great at building them and leveraging them. But are they true relationships?
Fourth, empathy. I don’t know. Again, I don’t know him privately. In public, he has shown a very low degree of empathy, but again, I don’t know him in private.
So for all I know, he’s super empathetic. I don’t believe that’s the case, but, you know, it’s hard to say. Now, the fifth is creativity. Absolutely. One of the most creative people in terms of branding and marketing, media manipulation, finding those unconventional paths to reach his audience. That’s huge. A sense of humor.
All right, here’s one. Very polarizing. He has a very unique sense of humor. It’s laced with sarcasm. I personally love sarcasm. Sarcasm is my love language. But he can be seen as mocking. Very contentious. You know, we’ve seen that. It’s a turn off to a lot of people. You know, even to me, sometimes it’s a turn off. I’m like, oh, that wasn’t really as funny as you thought it was, dude. So he has a sense of humor. You definitely want that over somebody who’s bland.
But is it the right sense of humor? I don’t know. The 7th trait, you know, just the ability to make things fun for your affiliates and absolutely. He’s a showman. His showmanship, his energy, he makes things fun. I think he would be a very fun affiliate manager.
I think he would come up with lots of cool contests and all those things. One of the traits is the ability to bounce from left brain to right brain, the ability to go from analytical tasks to more creative or relationship focused tasks, and looking at the data, studying that. And then again, this is something I don’t know his career publicly suggests that he has this capacity.
He’s got to go from the analytical side, like all the complexities of real estate politics, and then be more creative and more relational. I don’t know him in private, but I think he probably has this. I think he’d probably be pretty good at it. And then, you know, the last one is the analytical side. You have to identify opportunities. I think he definitely has that.
And the ability, like you got to be able to go in and look at the analytics and say, okay, where are the opportunities for growth as an affiliate? Would he be good at it? Don’t know. Hard to tell, because again, I don’t know his private brain, but based on what I’ve seen publicly, I think he’d probably be pretty good at it. So in conclusion, how would Donald Trump be as an affiliate manager? I don’t know.
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I think, you know, again, having the tenacity and the creativity, the analytical side, all of those things, the sales, the ability to unite a certain group of people, which is all you want in an affiliate program, the ability to develop those relationships and those connections, all of those things. Willingness to get a little crazy and leverage media and all those things, I think would be a benefit. And then on the flip side, you know, the friendliness, the empathy, the divisiveness, you know, could be a problem.
So I think it depends on the program. I think he’d be a great affiliate manager for certain types of brands and programs and a terrible one for others. I think that’s ultimately what it comes down to So he’s got some of the traits, but then the flip side, there’s some definite downsides. So I would love to hear from you. Like, what do you think?
I know it’s a bit of a crazy episode, but I hope you got some takeaways from this with your own affiliate program. What do you think? Text me at 260-217-4619 we’ll put that in the show notes there. Donald Trump affiliate manager good or bad? What are his strengths? What are his weaknesses? What do you think? So make sure to shoot me a message. I would love to hear from you on that.
And make sure also to hit subscribe because in the next episode I’m going to show you how to find affiliates using leaderboards for other affiliate programs. So make sure to hit subscribe so you don’t miss that episode. I’ll see you then.
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
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###### If you want your affiliates to promote more often, more aggressively, and make more sales, you need to show them how. And one of the easiest ways to do this is to provide them with a clear plan for success. Tell them what to promote, when to promote, and how to promote by giving them easy-to-follow promo plans. I show you exactly how to create these affiliate promo plans in this episode.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow Sarah Williams 20X’d her Affiliate Sales and Won a $100,000 First Prize
How to Get Your Affiliates Fired Up Before a Promotion
What Kind of Affiliate Manager is Best: In-House or Outsourced?
What to Look for in an Affiliate Manager
Don’t Make These Killer Mistakes with Your Affiliate Program (Part 2)
Don’t Make These Killer Mistakes with Your Affiliate Program (Part 1)
How to Create Promotion Plans for AffiliatesOne of the best ways to get affiliates to promote more is to give them a clear plan for how to do so. In other words, tell them when, how and what to promote as well as who to promote to. Now, we do this with two types of affiliate mailing plans that I share in this episode. These are guaranteed to get your affiliates to promote more often. Send more emails and go all in promoting you.
So the idea of this episode is how do we take our affiliates like they’re ready to promote our launch, to promote our evergreen promotion? And how do we take them from sending two emails to five? How do we take them from five to twelve, from maybe seven or eight up to 15 or 16?
How do we get them to actually do that? And the idea is to get them to commit to anything. It’s just to get them to dip their toe in the water. And that’ll be the theme throughout is like if we can commit them to do just a little bit, they’ll do a lot. And there’s two ways that we’re going to do this. So we basically got, you know, let’s just say for argument’s sake you’ve got 200 affiliates.
What are we going to do for our top 20 to 25 and what are we going to do for everybody else? Because what I’m going to share, the first thing I’m going to share you cannot do for 200 people within reasonable time frame. All right, so for our top affiliates we’re going to do specific one on one promo plans.
Actually, well, we don’t call them promo plans anymore and I’ll talk about that in a moment. But we used to call them promo plans and that when I say that, it immediately makes sense. Right.
It’s a plan for the promotion. One of the best things that you can do to get an affiliate to mail more often is create a personal promotion plan with them. And if I had to pick a secret sauce, I mean, there’s a lot of things we do and there’s, to be clear, in any affiliate program there’s nothing that we do that I would suggest is this is the thing that makes up 50% of our, our success.
It’s just a lot of 2% and 4% here and 1% there and a half percent there. That adds up to massively successful affiliate programs that we run. But if I had to pick the one thing that was, like, the secret sauce, this is it.
It’s these personalized promotion plans. And so what you do is with as many affiliates as you reasonably can. Typically for us, it’s going to be between 20 and 30.
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There have been some smaller ones where it might have been only 15 or maybe on the high end 20, but typically for a big launch, it’s going to be about 20 to 30 in that range, and you meet with them one on one. Now, I try to target roughly about 30 days out from the beginning of the promotion, because that tends to be the area where it’s far enough ahead where they can take what we plan and actually execute it. They can also, they have that flexibility.
It’s far enough out where there’s some flexibility to know what’s going on with their schedule, but not know too much. So we can get things in early enough, but not be so early that it’s like, oh, wow. We ended up having something come up and we need to go completely back to the drawing board.
So somewhere in the neighborhood of two weeks out to 45 days out is kind of the sweet spot. And we meet one on one with them for about a half hour, and we craft a custom promotion plan that works with their calendar. And what this means is if I’m looking at a launch and the first day, and we’ll go through an example of this, but the first day of the promotion is January 10, and you can’t mail on January 10, but you can mail on January 11, then we’ll work that into the calendar and you’ll promote on January 11.
Let’s say you don’t typically mail on Mondays for whatever reason, or you have something else you’re mailing about on a Monday, then we’ll work something in maybe on Sunday or Tuesday, and we’ll work together to create a custom promotion plan. And this ultimately comes down to the principles of commitment and consistency. If you’ve ever read influence by Robert Cialdini, highly recommend that book.
I’ll put a link in the show notes there. I mean, I recommend this book so much, it’s mattmcwilliams.com/influence. It’s how often I recommend this book that I created a specific URL for it. But if you’ve ever read that book, you know that what people commit to, they stick to, and they want to remain consistent with their commitments.
It’s one of the dangers, so to speak, of any type of public commitment is, you know, by gosh, you’re probably going to stick to it. It’s why, you know, if you look at politics, for example, if the handlers of a politician, the people who run their campaigns, recommend that if they don’t have to make a commitment to an issue, if there’s no reason to, then don’t, because they’ll want to stick with it. And so the voters will expect them to stick to it.
So what we do is we tap into those principles of commitment and consistency, and we create this plan with them. So we jump on Zoom or Skype or Google Meet, whatever it’s called these days. We go through the promo plan spreadsheet.
Now you can get a copy of this. You can download it for free. MattmcWilliams.com/promoplan if you go there, we’ll put a link in the show notes as well. If you go there, you can download a copy of this to use for yourself.
And then you work through the ideal situations for them. So ideally, you would start promotion on June 1, but that doesn’t work for you. So do we back up a day or do we go for it a day? Can you start on May 31? We’ll open things up on, you know, May 28 for those of you who need to get in early. What fits your needs?
What fits your needs. And so if you look at this spreadsheet, basically what this spreadsheet will allow you to do, this promo plan template is go through and put in what’s generally happening in the launch. What’s the thing that’s going on today?
Well, today’s the webinar, so. Okay, now we back up to, okay, what should they be doing on this day? They should send two emails, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, blah, blah, blah.
And then we have kind of a generic template that we give them that’s like, here’s what you could do. And then we just move the pieces around. All right, you can’t mail on the 15th.
Well, how about we’ll do it on the 16th and we back it up to the 14th and we tell them who that email should go to. This one should go to your entire list. This one should go to the people who didn’t click.
This one should go to your entire list. This one should go to the people who did click. And the idea is, once they have their plan set, have them commit to it. So you’re co creating the plan with them. They’re involved in the creation. This is not you just saying, here’s your plan, go do it.
It’s like, no, they’re involved in this so that when you email them a copy of the spreadsheet you thank them for their commitment. More often than not they’re going to stick to that plan. If anything, what we found is they’ll add to it during the promotion but very rarely will they ever, almost never take away from that.
So whatever they commit to, they commit to nine emails. Here’s the list of things they committed to. They’ll probably send ten or eleven.
Very rarely will they send eight or less because they made a commitment and we want to remain consistent to our commitments. Now I’ve personally done these plans, this is why they work. I have done these plans with people who I’m promoting them and they’ve used this on me and I realized, oh shoot, we didn’t schedule that email.
Oh man, I got to make up for that. I’ve added extra emails to make up for it because I’m going to remain consistent to my commitment. If I promise someone I’m going to mail ten times, then by gosh, I’m going to mail ten times at least I might add an 11th or 12th, but I’m definitely going to mail the ten that I said.
That’s the power of creating these personalized promotion plans with your affiliates. Now a couple of years ago I used to call them promo plans. A couple of years ago we changed this.
We did a big affiliate launch for a client and I just randomly started calling them commitment plans and I found that we got an average of 1. 7 more emails from the affiliates that we call them commitment plans than when we call them promotion plans.
Because we had called them promo plans for about ten affiliates and then about ten more we did commitment plans. And what I mean by 1. 7 is I got 1. 7 more emails than they committed to.
The number of emails that the average affiliate committed to out of the first ten and the last ten was almost identical. That wasn’t where the difference was. It was just that when I followed up with them and I said here’s your commitment plan versus here’s your promo plan, I got 1.7 more emails above what they said they were going to do. On average, the promo plan folks sent.
Basically, I think it was like one more than they had said they were going to send. Total among the ten, the other group had sent 18 more emails than they had said they were going to send. That’s a huge gain, 18 additional emails from basically ten of our top 20 affiliates.
If I had done that across the board, I would have gained probably 36 emails over what we normally would have done 34 to 36 emails over what we normally would have done. Among our top 20 affiliates, that is, tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So that’s what we do for the big ones. We meet with them. We just go through the calendar and talk about what might work for them. This doesn’t work. Okay, so do this. Does this work better?
You know, here’s this. And then I send them an email that says, here’s your commitment plan that’s got the spreadsheet attached to it and says, you know, if you have any questions, let me know. If there’s anything else you need to talk about, let me know.
So that’s our big dogs, right? Our top 20 to 30 affiliates. For everyone else, we use what we call our ABC plans. This is a mass email, and I’m gonna walk you through how to actually do that in a second. And it’s got the suggested promo plan, but it’s got a, b and c plans. And the ABC stands for all in or aggressive, balanced and conservative.
So on the two polls is the all in and the conservative. So the all in plan. This is for people who are in it to win it. They want to go all in, all out. They want to be aggressive. This is typically going to be like 15 to 20 emails.
And I’ll walk you through an example from our own stuff here in a second. On the flip side, the conservative side, this is the plan for those who just want to dip their toe in the waters, right? They’re not 100% committed to a full promotion yet, and that’s the key.
This one is like five to nine emails. And then the balance plan is right in the middle, as you imagine this is. We call it the Goldilocks plan sometimes because it’s not too hard, not too soft, it’s just right.
So this is between the all in and the conservative. Typically, you’ll find this at ten to 13 emails. Now, here’s the great thing about these plans.
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If you get someone to commit to the conservative plan, they almost always bump up to more of a balanced plan. If you get them to commit to a balance plan, they almost always bump up to the all in plan, especially when you announce prizes, is what we found. And so they might bump up to the balance plan from conservative five days into the launch.
So it’s not a full balance plan. Maybe if the conservative is seven emails and the balance is eleven, all in 15, they don’t go all the way to eleven, but they send ten, you know, and if they go from balance to conservative, maybe they send 13 or 14. But still at some point they shift.
We find probably 70, 80% of them shift at some point. The key, though, is to get them to commit to something. I don’t care if it’s the c or the b or the a. I’d love them to commit to the all in from the get go. That’s great. But if I can get them to commit even to the conservative plan, getting them to commit to something will bump them up to the next level.
The reality is you just cannot meet with every single affiliate one on one, okay? That there’s just no possible way. And so our objectives with these ABC plans is just to get them to commit to some level of participation, just to commit to a minimum number of emails.
So we want to make it very easy to commit to the conservative plan if that’s where they’re at. Make it so easy. It’s like three emails to your entire list, maybe three to unopened and three to engage contacts that will account for the nine emails.
Very easy to get them to commit. So here’s an example from our stuff here. In our last launch, we did not do abcs, we just did acs. And there’s a reason we had three focuses. This is another way you can do these, all right? And again, the idea is to get them to commit to something.
So we had three different focuses. We had an ebook focus, so we had an ebook opt in, we had a video opt in. So we had a video focus and we had a webinar focus.
So depending upon who their audience is, it’s like choose your own adventure, right? They can say, well, my audience is really into webinars. So, great, you’re going to go down to webinar focus and you’re going to choose the all in or conservative. We just felt like we had nine plans. That was overkill. So we had all in and conservative.
So that’s another way where you can kind of separate these plans is based on, oh my gosh, you know, like my audience is really into videos, my audience is really into workshops, my audience is really into quizzes or assessments, you know, whatever your audience is into. And so in this example, if you click on, we’re going to go down to ebook focus, for example, 20 total emails. And we went heavy on the ebook slash free reports.
So these are written materials. They still promoted. We still recommended sending a few emails to the videos and a few emails to the webinars.
But it’s very different from the webinar focused one, which only sent two emails to the ebooks or to the free reports. But it had 123456 emails go into the webinar and only two to the videos. On the video, all in one, we had only one about the ebook or the PDF’s, and two about the webinars, but six about the videos.
So just different focuses. Now, in that example, if I go back to the conservative one for the webinar, that one had one about the ebooks, none about the videos, five about the webinars. Still more conservative, though, on the ebook, conservative when it was like three about the ebooks or free, four about the ebook or free report, one about the video, one about the webinar.
So you get the idea, if I were to do balance, if I were to not have the differentiation between ebook focus, webinar focus and video focus, then I would just take the. Basically, I always start with the most aggressive. Like, here’s the ideal plan.
And then I say, okay, what would I do if I stripped away basically 33% of that? That’s a really good way of thinking of is like, okay, you got 18 for all in. Great.
Twelve and six. And then the other thing that I do is I typically will add back a little bit. So instead of going 1812 and six, the total number of emails would probably be about 1812 would probably still be pretty accurate, and it would probably be eight, but to the entire list.
So this is one I’m going to look at the ebook one. For example, the all in ebook one, I’ve got eight to the entire list, three to unopens, nine to engage contacts. Okay, so on the conservative one, there’s only five to the entire list, two to unopened, six to engage contacts.
So not many less to the engaged contacts and unopens. That’s a big deal, right? If I look at on the video focus one, there’s only four to your entire list on the conservative one, versus seven to the entire list for the all in.
And so the idea here is just to create your ideal plan and then strip away roughly two thirds to maybe it might be like 1813. And then I go all the way down as far as I can, usually about a third. And then I add a couple of unopens or engaged contact emails back to the conservative ones.
So we provide these ABC plans to everyone, but then we do the individual plans with the top people. Now, as far as delivering the ABC plans to everybody, it’s usually in the partner center or in the partner guide, but then we go one step further with the smaller affiliates and we actually send out a specific email. And what I do is I record about a 15 minutes video.
That’s like I was doing a commitment plan with an affiliate and I record it in such a way that I go through this calendar and I say stuff like, hey, if this date doesn’t work, then you need to, you know, you can move it here, you can move it there. And I don’t create the plan on the video. I just leave the video as it is.
But I show them how I would change it. So I would move stuff around and just show them what it would look like if I moved it. But I always come back to the way that it was.
So I record this video again. It’s typically about 15 minutes or so. And I walk them through the whole calendar, walk them through how to create the plan, show them how to download the template so they can use the template.
And I encourage them to create the template and then send it to me. So we can just keep track of, you know, where they, you know, when they’re going to be promoting, so we can keep track of things for them. So we encourage them to send their commitment plan to us.
We usually, and out of, you know, 200 affiliates, usually we’ll get like 60 to 80 that’ll actually do that. That’s fine. We got 2025 that we co created plans with. We got another 75 that sent them to us. Great. Half of our affiliates have made some level of commitment.
That’s about as good as you’re ever going to get. All right, so we send this email, and one of the things that we do, this is some secret sauce here. We send this email out and we basically say, hey, your promo plan.
And we say, hey, you know, it’s a mail merge. Hey, first name, wanted to send this to you. I shot a video for you where I walk you through how to create a promotion plan, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah right? Now just like we do with the big affiliates, we send this spreadsheet out and it’s a specific Google Doc for them, a Google sheet for them. So the google sheet is already named. Let’s just say your name is, you know, todd Smith.
It says todd Smith, commitment plan for such and such. Your name is in the title of the spreadsheet. Your name is in the spreadsheet itself. It says, todd’s commitment plan, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And the video, we put a screenshot of the video that shows the spreadsheet, and we use a program called Nifty Images. I’ll put a link to that. It’s just niftyimages.com.
We use a program called Nifty images. And on that video, it says, like, promo plan for Todd, I think. Or it just says, like, todd Smith’s promo plan or commitment plan or something like that. So it says their name on the image. So this video feels like it’s a personal video, even though, of course, it’s not.
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
| Find Your First 100 Affiliates | Affiliate Program Terms & Conditions Template | Get My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email |
| Avoid The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes | Turn Inactive Affiliates into Your Best Affiliates | Get My Template for Writing Affiliate Emails |
| Affiliate Marketing Sales Secrets | Learn How to Create a Resources Page | Learn How to Write a Product Review |
And they know it’s not, but it feels like it is. And then we give them a specific Google sheet that they can use to do this. We do the legwork on that. It’s something that takes a while. You got to keep creating this. Clone the spreadsheet.
Clone the spreadsheet. Rename it, rename it, rename it, rename it. And we create these for them as we’re going along. So they get a personalized sheet with a somewhat personalized video. But it’s pretty generic. Right?
And that program is called nifty images. And it basically uses mail merge fields to slap onto the image. So it’s pretty cool. Pretty cool. Deal. And so we create those plans on that.
I walk them through. Okay, here’s what it would look like if you were all in, and then here’s what I would remove if you were gonna go, you know, have these. And here’s what I would do if I were gonna go conservative or if certain things don’t work for you.
So we walk them through that and essentially give them the template for them there. So that’s how we get these mailing plans to our affiliates, to get them to commit to something. It’s the reason why we typically don’t have more than a couple out of hundreds.
It’s one of the biggest problems I hear with affiliate managers. Only, like, 22% of my affiliates are doing anything. We get, like, 80. Most of our affiliates are active. Why are a few not active? Because life got in the way. Makes sense. Right? I get it. There’s a reason why I have such a high activation percentage. Because we give them these plans.
That’s it. That’s the secret sauce. It’s how you go from having tons of affiliates and doing a half million dollar launch to having the same affiliates and doing a million and a half dollars. You can triple your results with this. That’s why I say if we have a secret sauce, it’s this one. So hope this helped you put it into use and report back to me.
Please let me know how this is working for you. I would love to hear from you. Please text me anytime. All right? Just let me know how this is working for you. Can text me anytime at 260-217-4619 I would absolutely love to hear how this is working for you and then make sure you hit subscribe.
Hit subscribe so you don’t miss next week’s episode. Guys, we’re going to share some powerful lessons. Powerful, powerful lessons from a multi million dollar affiliate launch that we just ran as you do not want to miss this episode.
So if you haven’t hit subscribe yet, make sure you do wherever you listen to podcasts, all right? Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, wherever hit subscribe. Don’t miss a thing. I’ll see you then.
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
| Find Your First 100 Affiliates | Affiliate Program Terms & Conditions Template | Get My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email |
| Avoid The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes | Turn Inactive Affiliates into Your Best Affiliates | Get My Template for Writing Affiliate Emails |
| Affiliate Marketing Sales Secrets | Learn How to Create a Resources Page | Learn How to Write a Product Review |
The post How to Create Promotion Plans for Affiliates appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### In her first year promoting an affiliate offer, Sarah Williams made 9 sales. The next year, in the same promotion, she made 184…and won the $100,000 first prize. The crazy thing is…this was a last-minute promo…and she still won it! How’d she do it? Well, that’s what this episode is all about.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Get Your Affiliates Fired Up Before a Promotion
What Kind of Affiliate Manager is Best: In-House or Outsourced?
What to Look for in an Affiliate Manager
Don’t Make These Killer Mistakes with Your Affiliate Program (Part 2)
Don’t Make These Killer Mistakes with Your Affiliate Program (Part 1)
Affiliate Marketing and Podcasts: How to Make Money, Get Affiliates, and Build a Brand Through Podcasting
How Sarah Williams 20X’d her Affiliate Sales and Won a $100,000 First PrizeIn her first year promoting an affiliate offer, Sarah Williams made 9 sales. The next year, in the same affiliate promotion, she made 184 sales and won the $100,000 1st prize as an affiliate. The crazy thing is, this was a last minute promo and she still won it. So how’d she do it? Well, that’s what this episode is all about.
So I got to know Sarah Williams because she became one of the top affiliates for Stu McLaren a couple of years ago. And Stu was one of our clients, and we ran his launches for a while. And Sarah was one of those people that I got to know and just was like, this is somebody I’ve got to interview.
Even if she hadn’t gone from 9 sales to 184, if she hadn’t been the top affiliate, if she hadn’t won the whole affiliate contest and one of the biggest launches of the year, I mean, this is, Stu’s launches are over $5 million a year, and she’s one of the top affiliates, or the top affiliate. Even if that hadn’t been the case, I would still want to interview her because the things that she did, she converted close to 20%, actually, more than 20% of her leads into sales on a $2,000 course. How do you do something like that?
So I had to interview her, and I made this available a couple of years ago to our paid members, but I wanted to share it with the world because this is such an amazing story. We’re looking for some of these just amazing stories that could blow people away, people that could help not only affiliates, but affiliate managers, you know both sides. Like, if you’re an affiliate, listen to what Sarah talks about.
If you’re an affiliate manager, listen to this and teach your affiliates this. Now, as I said in the intro, the crazy thing about this, this was a last minute promo. She wasn’t sure that she even wanted to join the launch.
She’s glad that she did. She got not only 184 sales on a $2,000 product, it’s an $800 commission per sale. You can do the math real quick.
Then she got an extra $100,000 for being the top affiliate. I think she won a couple of other prizes. I think she won like $105,000 total in prizEs.
This is a big payDay. She made more in two weeks than most Americans make in about three years, all with affiliate marketing. And so she reveals in this interview the five key strategies that she used to close more than 20% of her leads on a $2,000 course.
Like I said, her crazy engagement strategy that she used, it’s one of my favorite ones. She created these hyperactive buyers. So I know you want to know how she did it.
I know you want to know how you can do it and how you can share this with your affiliates. So let’s jump right into my interview with Sarah Williams.
Matt: I’ve got another amazing guest, and let me just tell you this story. If you’ve ever wondered, how can I be, like, the top affiliate for any type of launch, okay, let alone one of the biggest Internet marketing launches of an entire calendar year, and how can I do that when maybe the year before I only had nine sales? How do you go from 9 to 184 sales? How do you 20 x your sales year over year in an affiliate competition?
Well, guys, that’s what you get to hear today, straight from Sarah Williams. I am so excited about this one. I got to be honest, y’all, I’ve been waiting to do this one for a while. Super excited to have her on. So, Sarah, welcome.
Sarah: Thank you. So good to be here.
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Matt: I am so thrilled because I want to take you back a little bit behind the scenes. I don’t know if I shared this with you or if Stu McLaren has shared this with you, but going back to January, February of this year, we’re three, four months before Stu’s big tribe launch, and we’re kind of talking about who’s going to be top five, top ten, but also who’s going to be like those sneaky ones that kind of, like, come out of nowhere into the top 20. Because I know as an affiliate manager, if I can take somebody who might have finished in like 23rd with, say, 34 sales and I can give them a little bit of help, I can get them to 50, 60 sales, and on a $2,000 course, that’s an additional $30 to $40,000 in revenue. You do that ten times, close to a half a million dollars. Right?
And Stu was like, look for Sarah Williams. And I’m just being honest, my reaction was like, dude, I looked at the sales from last year and she’s nowhere on there. I’m focused on the top 40. He’s like, watch out for now. Admittedly he was like, she’s going to win the thing, but she could sneak up there in the top five. And I’m like, all right, well, then I’ll do that. I’ll make sure that we give her some extra help.
Well, you proved him right to a certain extent, but you proved us both wrong by winning the whole dang thing. So I am so excited to talk about the day. So let’s talk about you real quick.
I mean, I want people to understand you and your business real quick. So tell us about that, because I think your business story in general is pretty freaking amazing. So tell us a little bit about that.
Sarah: So my business started out with a local brick and mortar retail store where I did personalized gifts for people. And that started many years ago. I’m going on year nine now.
And that quickly turned into a subscription box. After about four years into my retail business, I decided to start a subscription box. Had not yet come into tribe at that point, I grew that box to about 300 subscribers. And then it started to Plateau and kind of started to decline a little bit. And I got panicked a little bit.
And here’s just a little hint. Like, I had had no online business. It was all in person except my subscription box. And at that point, all my subscribers were local anyway. So they would come into my store, they would sign up online, but they were all local to me. And so I really needed to learn how to run an online business that was coming.
I knew if I needed to grow, I had to have people that lived outside of my town. And so I started looking into some online business coaching. And that’s where I found Stu McLaren just out in the world there. And through another coach that I had signed up for a monthly membership with, she was affiliating for tribe. And that’s how I came into.
So I joined tribe. My subscription box blows up, like just fast and furious. With one close of cart that I learned from tribe, I doubled my member, my subscription boxes, and that grew from 600 to now 3000 monthly box subscribers, which quickly grew to a seven figure subscription box business, just the box itself, not including all the other things in the shop that we sell.
And so that brought a lot of attention of people watching what I was doing. And I would get these DMs, Matt, that would say, like, can I pick your brain? Can I ask you about your packaging? Can I do this? And so it became this constant thing showing up in my inbox. And I decided to take on a couple of one on one people, charged them like, literally nothing.
Because I’m not a coach, I don’t teach people, I just do my thing. And that quickly turned into my new membership, which is called launcher Box where that very quickly scaled to another seven figure membership. And so I get to teach people how to start, launch and grow their own subscription box.
So I have these two great multimillion dollar businesses that I get to run every single day. And it all happened within a matter of a few years.
Matt: That’s amazing. So I have a question for you. Those boxes behind you.
Sarah: Yeah.
Matt: Are those some of your students boxes or are those yours?
Sarah: These are my students.
Matt: And representative of all your students different boxes that they have.
Sarah: Yeah. And there’s so many more that you can’t see. So once a month I do this monthly box opening where I take a dozen boxes, so members get to request a box opening from me. And there’s actually some, I don’t know if we can pan over here, but there’s some I just did that are sitting on my table. But I select twelve every single month.
They ship them to me and then I open them live for the very first time on camera with all my membership. So my thousands of members get to watch these particular box openings and I critique them and everybody gets to learn from these. And then I get to keep their boxes and they go on my wall of fame or I ship them back to them, whichever they prefer.
So that’s what you’re seeing behind me is it’s building and it goes very high and it’s down, but it’s been growing.
Matt: If I didn’t know you were in this niche, I would just think you were a slob.
Sarah: It looks messy. But they’re very neatly stacked subscription boxes behind me.
Matt: Yeah, I knew that. That’s why I wanted to get that out of the way before people are like, is she just really messy?
Sarah: I’m just a hoarder. That’s probably what they’re thinking.
Matt: No, those are her students. How cool is that? What a great membership where you also get a bunch of free stuff.
Sarah: Yeah, it’s really fun. It’s really fun to see their packaging, the experience that they’ve created for their subscriber. And then I get ideas from them too. I’m like, oh, this is awesome. I got to do this. So I get a lot of great ideas from the members as well. So it’s really fun.
Matt: That’s really cool. So I want to park there for just a split second because I think we know what a subscription box is. There’s some famous models out there, some well known ones. Birchbox is one. Of course I say famous. The only reason I know about it is because my wife, otherwise I would have no clue what that is, but I think most of us understand what it is. I mean, in a sense, kind of like Omaha steaks was like the original box for meat, ironically.
But tell us real quick, what is a subscription box to the average student, the average person that goes through your program, what are their subscription boxes and what would they be like in terms of price point and what would be in them? Maybe some of the cooler, obscure niches that you are kind of surprised to hear about that are Successful with those actually.
Sarah: We say the riches are in the niches every day because what we’ve seen inside our membership is that the niche specific boxes grow faster and higher than being a broad box. So if you’re just for a whole bunch of people, you’re not going to grow as fast. But we have like the guinea pig box. I love the guinea pig box story. It’s the gpigbox.com, but it is subscription box for guinea pigs and guinea pig owners. And so it comes with treats and snacks and a gift for the owner.
But it’s specifically for guinea pigs. And we watched her go in January of this year from zero subscribers to now she’s almost at 1000 subscribers in one year. And if you think about that in membership terms, right, because you’re talking memberships, but it’s just a product membership.
And when you have 1000 monthly payments hitting your bank account every single month, you’re building stability into your product based business, which is something we need desperately. We have a lot of capital tied up into our products if we know that we’re going to get paid on a regular basis every single month. It just helps our businesses grow, become stable, able to pay ourselves well and keep providing great boxes.
So there’s yarnable. I watched her go from about 300 members to 1400 subscribers in this past year. It is a hand dyed yarn subscription.
So she hand dyes all the yarn, she packs it in a cute little subscription box and her little yarn niche has just exploded in love with her box. We could talk about all these different industries. It’s so awesome.
Matt: That’s really cool. What was yours in?
Sarah: So I told you that my retail store was. I personalized gifts, we personalized things. So my box is called the monogram box and I still have it. So we personalize one item in every single box every month.
So we’d have your monogram on that. And if you’re not from the south like me, I’m from Texas, but we basically put our initials on everything. That’s just what we do in the.
Matt: So that’s the southern thing. I thought every normal person did.
Sarah: Well, it’s typically more prevalent in the south, but we have customers all over the United States and a couple in other countries. But we personalize something in every one of our box. So we have t shirts and bags and cups and all the fun girly things that you would find in my boutique. But it’s specialized in this box.
It’s exclusive. So what’s in the box is not in the store. So you’re kind of the VIP of my business by getting the box. And then your box is for you. As women, we don’t do for ourselves as much as we do for every other person in our life. And so when this box comes to your door, it has your initials on it. It is curated for you, and we just create a really fun experience.
Matt: That’s super cool. So you fast forward. You started your online subscription box. Things weren’t going as well as maybe you hoped. I’m guessing you were probably like, I was just talking with a client literally about an hour ago and brand new client, and she basically said, Matt, I’m at that crossroads where my two choices are go all in and take this thing to scale.
This thing or quit. I can imagine you might have been maybe somewhere in there, because…
Sarah: I don’t think I was there. I think I was at the point where this is either as good as it’s going to get with 300 subscribers, and I’m totally happy with that.
When I started it, my goal was 100 subscribers because 100 subscribers meant that I could pay the rent at my retail location every month and I could pay my one employee that I had. And so with 100 subscribers, I knew that my base expenses were covered every single month, whether I sold anything else in the store. And then everything else that I sold was profit.
Like, that was the gravy. That was the cherry on top. So it was like this sense of relief by having 100 subscribers that I didn’t have to worry about making sales because everything would be paid for. And then if I made more money, it was great. At 300 subscribers, I’m doing really well. I’m profitable.
I’m giving myself a paycheck regularly. I have multiple employees at this point, but I’m stuck there. And, you know, as an entrepreneur, we have this brain that tells us more, more more. Like, we got to keep going. I need to hit the next level. And I was kind of stuck and thought, okay, well, maybe this is as good as it gets.
I don’t know. And I was at the point where I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I kind of fell into this entrepreneurship stuff. I didn’t plan for this to be my road. I didn’t know a lot of things, and I was seeking out ways to learn. I love to learn.
So, okay, what don’t I know? What would either get me over this hump? What would get me out there? Because I’m stuck with my local audience. I need to get out into the world, but I’m not getting there. My Facebook ads aren’t performing.
Everybody locally loves me. They’re shopping every day. They’re buying the boxes. How come I can’t translate that into the online space the way I did in my local town? That’s where I was stuck.
Matt: Interesting. So you went out looking for something that would help you go to that next level. You found tribe through an affiliate promotion, which is super cool. You joined tribe. Obviously you had massive success from there that completely transformed your business. And then when did you decide, was it 2020, that you promoted tribe for the first time?
Sarah: Yes, 2020 was the first time I promoted tribe. I joined tribe in 2018, but again, I was a B to C business. I had consumers that just wanted fun, girly things.
I didn’t have an audience of people that were looking to take tribe. You know what I mean? So in 2019, the fall of 2019, I launched my founding member launch for launcher box, and I got 19 members.
And that kind of started this B to B business that I have now where I was teaching other entrepreneurs what I had done. And I had launched again that next year in 2020 in march, right before the tribe watch, I had launched again and I gained 100 members. So I was sitting at like 105 for my membership. And then here comes tribe, and I’m like, I don’t really know. I’ve got a little bit of an audience at this point.
Let me just put it out there and see if anyone’s interested. I know what tribe did for me, and I would shout that at the rooftop to anyone that would listen. And so I thought, I’ll just share my story and if anyone wants to join, great.
I have a link and I’ll get an affiliate commission and it’ll be great. And so that’s what I did. And I did a couple of lives, and I sent an email to my list and things like that, and I worked with another triber on a bonus so that we had a bonus, and so we did a collective bonus together.
And so she ended up getting like 20 something sign ups that I had my nine, and we did a bonus together, and it was great. And that’s how we did 2020.
Matt: I like that idea. So here’s the big question then. You had 105 members in 2020. How many members did you have in 2021?
Sarah: So by the time the tribulaunch came in 2021, I had 2100 members. So what happened in 2020 is my business completely exploded?
Matt: Let’s think what happened in 2020. Can you think of anything? But let’s be honest, though. We’ll come back to the affiliate side in a moment. Yeah. A pandemic helps. A pandemic is throwing gasoline on a fire.
Sarah: Matt, it does in a way that people were listening and people were seeing your content, but you have to put the gas there. Like, you can’t just assume that, okay, anything online is going to explode in 2020, but you have to be working it. So I went through, tried the first time as a subscription box owner.
Well, then in 19, I went through it again with the idea that I was going to launch a membership this time. And so I was putting all of those things back into play, into my new business. And I started with an SLO and I started building my list.
And I went from zero people on an email list to 17,000 people on an email list by the end of that year. So you can see that my email list was growing. I was doing full on launches like Stu teaches us to do.
I was showing up, going live, doing all the things for the launches, and I was gaining momentum. So in march, I added 100 members. In July I added 500 members.
In October of 2020, I started my little thing called the coaching week that’s now famous in tribe, and that’s when I added 1100 members during that launch. That propelled me into the new year. But I was growing my business all of 2020 by the things I had learned in tribe, all the things that I knew that I needed to do for a membership.
I created SLOs. I created my opt ins. I was running ads consistently. I was showing up. I was delivering content. I was serving before I asked for the sale.
All those things that we know how to do, I was just showing up nonstop and doing them. And the benefit of 2020 was people had more time to listen to that, people had more time to consume that. People were listening. People were showing up to those lives. People were coming to my workshop, us. And so that’s really what helped my business explode. And now I had this nice big pool of people ready to launch tribe 2021, too.
Matt: So that is obviously one of the things that made the difference. But still, to do 184 sales out of 2100 members is, I mean, heck, it’s doing nine sales out of 105 members is pretty amazing. Want to talk about those strategies? What are you doing? I mean, I’m just doing the quick math, nine percent, it might be eight and a half. I’m not sure.
I think the other thing that you have to consider is that the only thing people could buy from me was my membership, and it was $57. And now I got to show up and ask them to spend two grand on a course when the most amount of money they’ve spent with me is $57. So that was the challenge in my head that I had to overcome to figure out how to ask them to spend this kind of money.
Matt: I want to talk about the tactics and strategies. How’d you do that? What was the conversation that you were having in your head?
Sarah: That, look what it did for me. Look what that one, $800 did for me. I got my money back a million times. Right? So all I have to really communicate is that you’re investing in yourself, and it’s so easy to make your money back. When you put the practices into when you put them to work.
You got to do the work, though. You can’t just buy the program and then not do the work, but you got to do the work. And if it was possible for me, someone who was not an online entrepreneur, someone that was just this girl that had a little 600 square foot boutique in a small town and figured out a way to apply that to what I was good at, it could work for anyone, and I think that’s a big deal because they could maybe see themselves in me.
And I had a good story, and I still have a good story because I keep growing and I keep using the tribe tools to keep growing my business. So I think the number one thing is that I have a good story, and I was able to communicate my story to my audience.
Matt: That’s pretty cool. What was your goal going into the 2021 promo?
Sarah: Can I share a secret with you? And I don’t even think I’ve told Stu this, so he might listen to this and learn this for the first time. Breaking news, people. Breaking news.
It was a week before the tribe launch, and I was like, I’m not going to do the tribe launch. It was a week before. I was like, I’m exhausted. I cannot do another launch. I got too many things on my plate. I’m not going to do the tribe launch. And that was one week before April 22 or April 21, whatever day it was.
Matt: That 23rd, 22nd, 2021, though. Okay, so it was those seven days before that, and I was having a conversation with Heidi. Heidi and I are good friends. And she said, hey, you feel anything for tribe? And I’m like, yeah, I don’t think so. I got too much going on. I don’t think that I can do it. And if I can’t do it all in, I don’t want to half do it right.
And so I was like, I don’t think I’m going to do it. And she was like, okay. And so we talked through what she was going to do and we talked through her strategy and then what was happening was people were emailing me, hey, are you affiliating for tribe? Are you affiliated for tribe this year? Do you have a bonus? And I was like, no.
At first I was like, no. And then I was like, wait a minute. All these people are asking me, I don’t even have to sell it to them. They know my story.
Maybe I should affiliate for tribe. And I love to do and I’m part of his impact mastermind and so he’s getting geared up for the launch and he’s excited and now I’m like, oh, well, now I’m excited, too.
I got an affiliate. I’m just going to do a couple of quick things. It’s not going to be a big deal, but maybe I should affiliate for tribe. And so I started getting excited about, you know, how the launch is, matt. Like, it’s exciting. There’s a lot of energy around it. Stu brings a lot of energy. The tribers bring a lot of energy. And I thought, okay, let me map out a plan real quick.
So I got out my calendar. I thought, okay, we’ve got the videos. I’m going to have to drive people know because there was different places we had to send people, right? So there was all those things and I kind of mapped it out in my head, okay, this is where we need to send people and this is how I will launch it. I’ve been very successful at launches.
I know how to do a launch. So I just treated this as my own product launch. So I set up my launch in my brain. I didn’t run ads because it wasn’t in my brain to run an ad for someone else. I’d never done that before. So I was like, I’m not going to do that. And so I’m just going to go. I have this great pool of audience. I have this great pool of people that are perfect for this.
Let me just tell my story. Let me get them excited and let me go through the tribe launch with them. Like, we’ll hang out through the tribe launch, we’ll watch the videos together and I can kind of tell you what we did there, and I’ll follow up with them after each video lesson that the student like, okay, what’d you learn?
And here was the other thing that was hard for me. Tribe is not necessarily set up for product based businesses, so I knew I was going to have to filter some of the information so they could apply it to their product based businesses because it’s really for digital businesses, and so you’re able to apply it all. That’s how I came into tribe.
But you kind of have to think outside the box when Stu is talking. And so if you’re not open to that, I had to say, okay, when Stu says you’ve got to consume the content, that means you have to get them to consume those products in that box, because if they’re not using it, they’re going to cancel. So I would just regurgitate everything that Stu was teaching in those free workshops into product people language.
So now we would have conversations during those workshops. We had a texting group, so we were like, okay, what Stu said here, this is what it means in our product. I would regurgitate that. And so we had this group of people that was going through the launch together.
Matt: Love that. Okay, so I got three takeaways there, and I want to dive deep into two of them, even though you may have kind of gone into that third one. But we’ll say, number one, treat it as your own launch. I just did a podcast episode where I talk about, like, when you study those affiliates who vastly outperform their list size, their customers, whatever, they went all in.
And you said that earlier, you didn’t want to do this. You were going to go all in. And if all in had produced 100 sales. All in produced 100 sales. Absolutely. It was more about your experience with it and how you felt. And we found that, yeah, that was one of the biggest differences. Probably the biggest difference.
And it’s not a tactical thing. It’s more of just a mindset. Like, I’m going to sit down and do just what you did. I’m going to plan. The only thing is you’re being handed a calendar in your own launch. You get to choose the calendar. Oh, we’re going to do video. No, you don’t get to do that with this, with an affiliate thing. Like, he’s going live on this day whether you like it or not. But you sit down and you know, this is my thing. I’m going to plan this promotion just like I would my own launch.
Secondly, I want to talk about how you watch the videos together just from a purely tactical side. How did that work? Because Stu’s going live and he’s got his own platform. Were you just all logging in at the same time or what?
Sarah: We didn’t really do anything fancy. I know some people had it on Zoom and they were streaming it for the zoom room and stuff like that. We didn’t do anything like that.
We were watching it at the same time and we were chatting about what was happening in our text group.
Matt: Their own group basically.
Sarah: Yes.
Matt: What do you use for that?
Sarah: I use community.
Matt: Yeah, that’s what we use.
Sarah: And so what I had them do is I had them text me a keyword. It was like tribe or something like that. And so then they got put on that community inside there. And then I would broadcast, okay, Stu’s about to go live.
I’m here answering your questions. So I’m watching Stu on my computer laptop and I’m just answering text the whole time. And when Stu would say something that I knew that I needed to translate into product language I would say tip number two from Stu about this means this in our language.
And I would get replies, oh my gosh, that makes so much sense. And we would have conversations. So now I’m connecting with them. I’m connecting with them one on one because community is a two way text. They’re texting me back. It’s not a group text. I’m texting one on one with them. Even though I can broadcast those texts to everyone. Then I’m having personal conversations with people through every one of these videos.
And so I was just connecting with them on a personal level.
Matt: That sounds like a word that it’s kind of become a dirty word in the entrepreneurial world. At least for those 2 hours you were hustling.
Sarah: Hustling.
Matt: That’s not easy. I know because I haven’t done exactly what you’ve done. So just as a side note, totally stealing that strategy. That is brilliant. But I have done things like sent out questions via community and gotten 100 responses and now I feel like I’m compelled to respond to all of them.
And it is me. For anybody who’s on my text list, you know, it’s me. It’s not me on my team. And man, sometimes it’s like I’m on there for like an hour and a half straight just going back and forth. And by the time I finish the them have responded. The response yes. By the time I finished 40, 2-15 of those have responded. And it’s like, keep to going.
Sarah: And then what I would do, and I was it was like an hour, an hour and a half after sue was even done, I was still having these conversations, and I finally would send a broadcast. Okay, that’s a wrap for tonight. Meet me right back here in the text chat. Then it would be the next night.
I hope you got a lot out of tonight’s session from Stu because he was teaching great content. So I wanted them to walk away with having a little win. Like, okay, that makes sense.
If I can get them to have a little bit of win, they can start to see themselves in tribe. And so I was trying to get them to see have a little bit of win during those videos. So it propel them to know that they could have more wins if they joined tribe, too.
Matt: I love that. And then the other thing you mentioned was just filtering that info for your audience just like you were talking about. And Ram merch reminds me of a really good friend of mine her audience is like, none of them have email lists now, even though she teaches. Have an email list, have an email list, have an email list. None of them do, but they all have like 50,000 plus Instagram followers.
Ready to turn your passions into a profitable business? Check out my new book here!
And so she promoted, I cannot remember for the life of me, somebody a couple of years ago, I cannot remember who. And this person was like talking about basically doing promotions and email, like, send an email, send an email. And the whole time they did it.
Very similar, but theirs was a group thing. They did like, not Facebook group, but some sort of, I don’t remember how they did, but some sort of a chat room like chat role. She set up a page where she had her affiliate link to register for the workshop, and then blah, blah, blah, and then they had a chat role.
Just a total chat room, but just her people. So it didn’t get like, way out of hand. It was like a few hundred people. And she would just translate what that person was saying into Instagram lingo because her audience was all on Instagram. And I’m like…
Sarah: What would have happened if information is only for email? And I can’t visualize this to be like iGDMs or quick replies in my DMs. I’m shut down and this is not for me. And I’m moving on. So if you can translate how it is for your audience, wherever they’re at, like, whatever that means to them, then, like, okay, I get it. I can do that. And it’s a quick win for them.
Matt: And it turns what they’re teaching from tactical to principles, what Stu teaches. And this is true of any good teacher. It’s not. You do, A B C D it’s, here’s the principle behind it.
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
| Find Your First 100 Affiliates | Affiliate Program Terms & Conditions Template | Get My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email |
| Avoid The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes | Turn Inactive Affiliates into Your Best Affiliates | Get My Template for Writing Affiliate Emails |
| Affiliate Marketing Sales Secrets | Learn How to Create a Resources Page | Learn How to Write a Product Review |
The post How Sarah Williams 20X’d her Affiliate Sales and Won a $100,000 First Prize appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### If you’re looking for the best affiliate program for the Self-Employed Tax Credit (SETC), consider your search over. Discovering the perfect SETC affiliate program is akin to uncovering a treasure trove. I share what to look for in a program and unveil my top pick that promises not only the highest earnings but also ensures your clients receive the best service, all while ensuring you’re paid FAST!
What Exactly is the SETC Anyway?The Self-Employed Tax Credit (SETC) is like finding a treasure chest in your backyard, filled with up to $32,220!
The Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) is the hero behind this. It’s a federal law aimed at helping independent business owners like sole proprietors, consultants, freelancers, 1099 workers, and gig workers get compensated for not being able to work due to Covid. For the first time ever, the FFCRA Act (Sections 7002(a) and 7004(a) of Public Law No. 116-127) includes self-employed individuals in its protective umbrella.
Here’s the best part: it’s NOT a loan. It’s a refund of taxes you’ve already paid. Plus, it’s not taxable. That’s right, the government has set this money aside for you. It’s a take it or leave it deal, but with $50 billion approved for SETC, it’s like the government is saying, “First come, first served!” So why leave money on the table when it has your name on it?
Stay tuned to learn more about how to jump on the SETC affiliate program with IRSPlus, arguably the best way to navigate this opportunity. Whether you’re a seasoned SETC advocate or just getting started, IRSPlus’s affiliate program is your golden ticket.
MIND-BLOWING STATISTIC: 90% of eligible Self self-employed individuals have not applied for the Self-Employed Tax Credit, making it a perfect opportunity for those ready to claim what’s rightfully theirs. If you have an audience of self-employed workers, this is THE perfect affiliate program for you!
Who Qualifies for the SETC?First off, let’s answer the big question: Who qualifies for the SETC?
A better question might be…”Do I Qualify?” Yes, YOU might qualify yourself.
If you had self-employed earnings during the rollercoaster years of 2020 and 2021, and you’ve dutifully filed Schedule C or SE on your tax returns, you’re on the right track.
But there’s more. You also qualify if you’ve had to navigate the choppy waters of COVID-19 by complying with government quarantine or isolation orders, or if you were symptomatic or sick—and guess what? No COVID test is required for this part. If you’ve experienced side effects to vaccinations, had to attend vaccination appointments, or needed to care for a loved one under the weather with COVID symptoms, you’re covered.
And for all the superhero parents out there, if you had to take care of your kiddos because childcare vanished into thin air, school was canceled, or remote learning became the new normal, you qualify too.
So, when hunting for the best SETC affiliate program, make sure it clearly outlines these qualifiers. It should scream “Yes, you qualify!” and not make you jump through hoops to understand if you’re eligible. The best programs make it easy, offering straightforward info and support to help you claim your rightful credit without breaking a sweat.
What to Look for in an SETC Affiliate ProgramWhat should you look for in an affiliate program for SETC? Here are four MUST-HAVES:
1. Proven Reputation
You want to partner up with the creme de la creme, a company known for its reliability and success.
A glance through their BBB ratings or Google reviews should give you a fair idea. Stick with the tried and true to avoid any potential pitfalls.
2. Speedy Transactions
In the world of SETC, time isn’t just money; it’s everything. Nobody likes waiting, especially when it comes to money matters.
You want fast transactions from application to affiliate commissions.
3. Conversions
The heart of your success as an affiliate lies in how effectively clicks turn into leads, and leads into sales.
Seek out a program known for its high conversion rates. It’s the difference between a trickle and a flood in your commission stream.
4. Insurance
In the unpredictable world of finance and tax credits, having a safety net is paramount. Your chosen program must be insured to give you peace of mind with every transaction.
Partnering with a program that ticks all these boxes, such as my recommendation below, sets you on a path to success in promoting the Self-Employed Tax Credit. With these factors in mind, you’re well on your way to making an informed choice that benefits both you and those you refer.
DID YOU KNOW? Unlike loans, self-employed workers are not required to pay back the Self-Employed Tax Credit.
My Top SETC Affiliate Program RecommendationAlright, let’s cut to the chase because I know that’s exactly why you’re here.
When it comes to the SETC affiliate program, there’s one name that stands out from the rest: IRSPlus.
Having sifted through numerous SETC affiliate programs, I found some decent options. However, there’s only one that truly hits the mark for me.
With over 18 years in the affiliate marketing domain and having managed affiliate programs for industry giants like Shutterfly, Adidas, and influencers like Michael Hyatt and Lewis Howes, not to mention coaching teams for Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi, my reputation means everything. So, when I decided to recommend an SETC affiliate program, I needed to be absolutely sure. My criteria were strict, and only the best could make the cut.
IRSPlus emerged as the clear winner. Below, I share the reasons why I hold IRSPlus in such high regard, both from a customer and an affiliate perspective. However, if my word is enough for you, feel free to check out the IRSPlus affiliate program now. Trust me; it’s a decision you won’t regret.
Learn more about the IRSPlus affiliate program and sign up here:
CLICK HERE TO JOIN THE IRSPLUS AFFILIATE PROGRAM NOW!
Who is IRSPlus?IRSPlus is a division of Sunrise Business Solutions, focused on making the Self-Employed Tax Credit accessible.
IRSPlus isn’t just a name; it’s a testament to the enduring commitment to guide clients through thick and thin, helping them unlock paths to success regardless of the hurdles. Born out of the drive to simplify tax incentive programs for the self-employed, IRSPlus has been the go-to advisor since 2017.
Leading the charge is a team brimming with passion and expertise, aiming to elevate client outcomes across the board. Recognized as the nation’s premier SETC tax accounting firm, IRSPlus’s mission is clear: to ensure businesses fully leverage available government incentives.
But IRSPlus’s reach extends beyond just tax incentives. Catering to a diverse clientele, from buzzing startups to high net worth individuals, the firm embodies more than tax expertise—it embodies a partner invested in your success. This holistic approach encompasses a broad array of financial, tax, and accounting services, all tailored to meet the unique needs of each client.
What sets IRSPlus apart is not just their comprehensive service offering or their national presence. It’s their integrity-driven approach, powered by a formidable team of over 100 professionals, including top-tier lawyers, accountants, and SETC specialists. They’re not just offering a service; they’re offering peace of mind with a promise of speed, safety, and fairness, underscored by an unparalleled insurance against errors and omissions.
At its core, IRSPlus is driven by a singular vision: ensuring every eligible business in the United States can claim the Self-Employed Tax Credit. With their blend of expertise, compassion, and commitment, IRSPlus is not just an affiliate program. It’s a gateway to success with integrity.
Why I Love IRSPlus (as a Customer)Here are just some of the reasons customers love IRSPlus:
Billions in Tax Credits, Just for You
IRSPlus isn’t playing around. They’re the go-to experts that even the biggest companies in America trust to claim their tax credits.
Imagine what they can do for you!
Backed by the IRS
There’s something comforting about knowing you’re working with a firm that’s got the IRS nod of approval for SETC.
That’s IRSPlus for you — reliable and trustworthy.
Qualify in Minutes
Time is money, and IRSPlus gets that. Their filing process is lightning-fast, meaning you get your credits sooner rather than later.
With IRSPlus, qualifying for the SETC is a breeze. Just a few minutes and you’re on your way to claiming what’s yours. No hassles, no headaches.
Legally Sound
Navigating tax laws can be tricky, but IRSPlus does it with ease, ensuring you’re in full compliance and avoiding those pesky fines and audits.
In other words, there’s no risk.
Everyone’s Invited
The sheer number of self-employed individuals who qualify for the SETC through IRSPlus is astounding.
They make sure this opportunity is available to as many as possible.
Fair Fees
You only pay their fees after they’ve figured out your exact SETC amount.
Plus, they offer a 100% money-back guarantee. No benefits, no fees!
Guaranteed Greatness
Everything IRSPlus does comes with a guarantee, including their audit protection.
They stand behind their work, giving you that extra layer of confidence.
Crystal Clear Communication
From the SETC Due Diligence Report to constant updates, IRSPlus keeps you in the loop at every step, ensuring you’re always in the know.
This kind of communication, unfortunately, is rare in the world of SETC.
A Mission for the MassesIRSPlus isn’t just about filing taxes. They’re on a mission to help every eligible self-employed person in the U.S. claim their tax credit.
And that’s a mission I can get behind.
CLICK HERE TO JOIN THE IRSPLUS AFFILIATE PROGRAM NOW!
Why I Love IRSPlus (as an Affiliate)Here’s why affiliates love IRSPlus and why they are the ONLY SETC affiliate program that I recommend:
Mind-Blowing Commissions
Earning potential? Off the charts! IRSPlus rolls out a red carpet with their commission structure, letting affiliates pocket up to 20% or more on every SETC refund invoice.
Imagine the sweet sound of making $100 to $900 on each gross SETC refund by simply pointing businesses to their SETC program. That’s not just rewarding; it’s a financial game-changer.
Crazy-Fast Payments
We’re talking lightning speed here. Within a mere 7 days of IRSPlus cashing in, your commission finds its way to you.
In the fast-paced world of affiliate marketing, this quick turnaround is a breath of fresh air, promising a reliable stream of income when you need it most.
Second-Tier Affiliate Earnings
The cherry on top? You get to earn an extra 5% on every SETC refund invoice from direct referral partners.
This layered earning structure means your income potential grows exponentially with each sub-affiliate you bring into the fold.
Transparent Tracking
With IRSPlus, you’re never in the dark. Real-time updates keep you in the loop at every stage, from referral to paycheck.
This level of transparency ensures you’re always aware and ready to optimize your promotional strategies.
End-to-End Visibility
Visibility from start to finish—IRSPlus ensures you’re privy to the entire journey, from the moment a new client submits their application to the joyous day they receive their check.
This clear line of sight fosters trust and motivates you to drive more referrals their way.
Versatile Promotion Methods
Flexibility is key, and IRSPlus understands that. Whether you’re directing clients straight to the application or filling it out on their behalf, the choice is yours.
This versatility in promotion methods empowers you to engage with your audience in the most effective way possible.
Marketing Support
And the support? Unparalleled. IRSPlus hands you everything you need on a silver platter—high-converting links, assets, and funnels crafted for maximum impact.
This arsenal of marketing tools is designed to make promotion seamless and more profitable.
Exclusive Bonus
The icing on the cake? Signing up grants you exclusive access to personal training by yours truly.
With a history of training over 330,000 affiliates across various industries for companies such as Adidas and Shutterfly, as well as legends such as Tony Robbins, Michael Hyatt, Ryan Levesque, Pedro Adao, Stu McLaren and more, I’m here to help you skyrocket your success with IRSPlus.
If IRSPlus sounds like the perfect fit for you to promote the SETC as an affiliate, don’t wait. Click below to join now. Let’s make this a win-win for everyone involved.
CLICK HERE TO JOIN THE IRSPLUS AFFILIATE PROGRAM NOW!
Questions?Check out the FAQ Below or text me anytime at (260) 217-4619Here are some of the most common questions you might have about the Self-Employed Tax Credit (SETC) and IRSPlus.
Marketing the SETC ProgramHow can I effectively market the SETC program to potential clients?
Start by reaching out to your network and local small businesses. A simple conversation starter like, “Have you claimed your self-employed COVID tax credit yet?” can open up discussions. Many parents are unaware they can receive up to 5x more SETC amount. Employ various marketing strategies like cold calling, emailing, or online marketing. IRSPlus offers a risk-free solution for those unfamiliar with the credit, with a high percentage of self-employed individuals yet to claim.
Payment TimelineWhen will I get paid for referring clients to IRSPlus?
You’ll see your commission shortly after IRSPlus receives their fee, typically within a few days. The entire process, from client referral to receiving checks from the IRS, can take around 3 to 4 months. If you’re looking at this as a long-term opportunity, patience can yield substantial rewards.
Common ObjectionsWhat common objections might individuals have about claiming their SETC?
Some people might think it sounds too good to be true. However, IRSPlus’s history of assisting thousands to recover billions in tax credits lends credibility. Misinformation from accountants or unawareness of eligibility are common hurdles. Reassuring potential clients about IRSPlus’s reputable services can help overcome these objections.
Market Saturation ConcernsIs there a risk of the SETC referral program becoming saturated?
Not at all. With an estimated 44 million qualifying individuals and a small percentage having applied, the market is far from saturated. There’s a significant opportunity for growth within this 16-month window.
Choosing IRSPlus Over AccountantsWhy should someone choose IRSPlus over their accountant for SETC filing?
Many accountants might not specialize in this niche area of tax law. IRSPlus has a proven track record and offers a no-risk second opinion, ensuring clients maximize their credits.
Eligibility QuestionsDo I have to be self-employed to file for the SETC?
Yes, the SETC is designed specifically for self-employed individuals, freelancers, and 1099 contractors, providing a financial boost to those navigating their own business endeavors.
Can I claim SETC tax credits if I’m also a W2 employee?
Certainly! If you have self-employment income alongside W2 earnings in 2020 or 2021, you’re eligible. Adjustments may be necessary to ensure no overlap with FFCRA wages received through employment.
Credit CalculationHow is the credit amount determined?
The credit calculation takes into account your self-employment income, days affected by COVID-19, childcare responsibilities, and more. IRSPlus simplifies this with their Client Portal and Tax Credit Calculator, ensuring you get the maximum credit possible.
Taxable Status of SETCIs the SETC taxable?
No, the SETC is not considered taxable income, making it a beneficial financial aid without increasing your tax liability.
Spousal EligibilityCan both spouses qualify for the maximum SETC if they have self-employed income?
Yes, if both spouses meet the eligibility criteria with separate self-employed activities, they can each qualify for the maximum credit. They cannot, however, share qualifying COVID days for children.
Filing Paperwork with IRSPlusWill filing for the SETC with IRSPlus require extensive paperwork?
No, the process is straightforward and minimal. After completing a questionnaire and uploading necessary documents, IRSPlus handles the rest, ensuring an easy and hassle-free experience for you.
CLICK HERE TO JOIN THE IRSPLUS AFFILIATE PROGRAM NOW!
The post Best SETC Affiliate Programs: Self-Employed Tax Credit Recommendations appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### Is it better to hire an in-house affiliate manager or an outsourced one? My answer might surprise you. I know I’m biased, but I share the pros and cons of both in this podcast episode. So…which one is best? Well, the answer depends…and I show you what’s best for YOUR situation in this week’s podcast episode.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Need help activating your affiliates? Use my proven email templates for getting inactive affiliates in the game and making sales! Get them here!
LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Free Masterclass – How I Built a $12.6 Million A Year Affiliate Program In Only Two Years Without Any Connections or Credentials
Affiliate Warm Up Plan and Promo Plan
TEXT ME: 260-217-4619
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyWhat Kind of Affiliate Manager is Best: In-House or Outsourced?
What to Look for in an Affiliate Manager
Don’t Make These Killer Mistakes with Your Affiliate Program (Part 2)
Don’t Make These Killer Mistakes with Your Affiliate Program (Part 1)
Affiliate Marketing and Podcasts: How to Make Money, Get Affiliates, and Build a Brand Through Podcasting
The Surprising Thing That Might be Holding Your Business Back
How to Get Your Affiliates Fired Up Before a PromotionYou’re four months away from a big product launch or promotion. What do you do to get your affiliates fired up and then keep them warm leading up to this promotion? Well, in today’s episode, I share the exact strategy we use for our clients.
Let’s get started. So let’s say you’re six months away, four months away, whatever. Away from a big promotion or big product launch, and you’ve got some affiliates already lined up, right?
Like, that’s what you should do. Don’t wait till the last minute to get your affiliates. You’ve got them lined up. So here we are. We’re six months away. Four months away.
What do you do now? What do you do for the next four to six months? Well, this is the thing that most affiliate programs really mess up.
And this has happened to me so many times. I sign up as an affiliate like, yeah, we’re going to promote, and then they go dark. They go dark on their affiliates for months leading up to a launch or a big promotion, and then they wonder why no one promotes.
Well, duh. You haven’t communicated with them for five months, and then you come out of left field three weeks before the promotion. Hey, get all fired up.
Get my #1 affiliate recruiting email (the one I’ve personally used to recruit thousands of affiliates in dozens of niches). Grab your copy here!
We got a big sales contest. It’s a big promotion. Where you been for the last six months? Dude, what the heck? So how do you warm up your affiliates? Four months out, five months out. Six months out. Before the promotion. Before the launch.
And then keep them warm leading into it. Well, that’s what this episode is all about, how to warm up your affiliates before a big promotion. And I’m going to reveal to you how we warm up our affiliates, how we keep them warm and ready to promote leading up to our big launches.
Launch could also be a promo. This could be leading into your Black Friday promo. It could be leading into a big, maybe you’re going to make a big push this August where you’re running like a huge promotion, right.
It’s a big discount or a new product. How do you get them going now, right? This is the number one key to getting the most out of your affiliates.
So listen up. This is how we do it. And again, the normal way that we see people warming up their partners is basically not at all. This is the typical pre launch calendar. One month out. One month out.
They announce the launch the day before the launch, they say, here’s what you need for tomorrow. That’s stupid. Think of your own list for this.
With your own list, you would never go months without communicating and then suddenly show up in their inbox and attempt to sell them something. That’s not how it works. Right?
We warm up our audience. I’ve done entire episodes on how to warm up your audience for affiliate promotions. Well, the same thing is true here.
That’s exactly what we see people doing. Most people, I would say more than half of the affiliate programs I’m involved in, they do this in advance of their launches. They have no communication with their affiliate partners for an entire year, for eleven months, ten months, and then they expect them to promote.
That’s not the way you want to do this. So I’m going to share with you the exact strategy we use starting at the end of the previous launch. Now, just for purposes of what we’re doing today, we’re going to talk about launches.
Now, this could be big promotions, could be whatever. And we’re going to assume six months between launches. So maybe you have two products and you launch them each once a year for this example.
Now if you want to download the exact timeline that we talked about, and then we’ve also got a promo plan that you can give to your affiliates, just go to mattmcwilliams.com\affwarmupdf. We’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s kind of a funky URL, I realize. Go there.
I’m going to give you the timeline and this promo plan that I’ll talk about as we go along. So the key here is to stay in communication with them. What do you do, though?
That’s the question. I get a lot and I’m going to give you some specifics and then some broader things. Right. So let’s say we’re launching today. Let’s just say our launch ends on March 30, 2021. The next day, I want to announce the next launch. So six months from now, I’m really bad at this. So we’ll just call it like October 1. That’s when it’s going to start.
Just for purposes of planning or for keeping it simple, the key here is to go ahead and get commitments for the next launch. You want to spend the next week or two locking down your top partners for the next one. Now, over the next month, what we will typically do in the six months to four months out phase, we don’t want to be posting every week in the partner Facebook group.
We don’t want to be sending them an email every week. So sometime between the end of our launch and that next two weeks in that phase, that’s where I’m really focused both in the Facebook group and via email and other channels, texting, voxing, whatever, I’m focused on locking them down for the next launch. Then at around the five month mark, a little bit before the five month mark, I’m just going to post something else.
It could be a reminder. I’m going to put it in the Facebook group or maybe I’m going to email it. I’m going to post some sort of reminder and I’m going to post some sort of an update.
It could be just a really cool story we got from the last promotion. Maybe a testimonial, a case study. Could be something like that. Doesn’t have to be anything fancy. I’m just doing something to communicate with them so I don’t just go dark. It could be a tip.
So I’d probably limit it to one of three categories. A really cool update, a really cool story, a tip for them, or something from behind the scenes. Maybe you’re getting ready, maybe you’re shooting the videos for your next launch and you just want to give them a behind the scenes thing.
So you just go on set, on set with a selfie stick saying, hey, what’s up? It’s Matt. I’m on set here and I just wanted to show you kind of what we’re doing.
We’re doing this really cool setup for our next video series. Yada, yada, yada, right? Give them exclusive access.
About five months out, we want to ask for referrals. Now. This again serves as a reminder.
If I’m asking you for a referral, I’m reminding you of our dates. And hey, reminder, the dates are October 1 through 16th, something like that, right? Ask your partners if they know anybody who’d be a good fit to promote the next launch or the next big promotion if they refer someone.
We’ve done episodes on this, right? Set them up as a second tier affiliate. This is a super quick email.
It’s just basically, we actually have a template. I don’t know. If you go to mattmcwiams.com and search number one source of new affiliates, you’ll find a website or a website, you’ll find a page, a post where I talk about this asking for referrals and you can download the template. But it’s basically just, hey, do you know anybody who’d be a good fit for this?
If so, shoot me a quick intro. I’ll make sure you get a second tier commission on their sales. That’s it.
Like super quick, right? We do that about five months out, four and a half months to five months out in this lead up from about the six month mark until about the one month mark. I’m going to alternate every other week.
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So I’m going to send one email a month and then I’m going to send in the middle, I’m going to send posts to the Facebook group. And again, we can stick to. In the email I’m typically going to stick to something that’s a little bit more of an ask, maybe provide a slight give, but usually an ask.
And then in the Facebook group, that’s where I’m going to give them behind the scenes content, or I’m going to give them a really cool story, or I’m going to give them a tip, something like that. But then four months out is when we begin sharing what we call our pre prelaunch content. So this is content that’s published on your site, blog posts, podcast videos.
It’s not really a piece of launch content or promotion content, but we give it to them using an affiliate link so that they can just warm up their audience. Right. That’s the whole thing. We talked about that before. How do you warm up your audience? Well, the same thing is true.
We want to give them the tools to warm up their audience. Then we post another, just like a tip or a cool story. Three months out, this is where we invite them to join the partner community, if they haven’t already.
So again, we’re reminding them, hey, if you haven’t already, come join the partner community, private Facebook group. Come join here. And then we start to ramp it up.
Maybe we share two posts a month in the Facebook group inside of 90 days, and we share twice a month instead of once a month. Updates, tips, strategies, reminding them of the dates, letting them know for any changes to the launch calendar or the promotion calendar. Two months out, we start to send at least we send two emails.
Two months out. So roughly eight weeks and then six weeks out. And then we start posting about every week in the Facebook group.
Customer testimonials and stories backstage. Look at the content, we announce the exact launch sequence, we give them tips, we continue to share pre pre launch content, anything that we feel like we need to give them in terms of updates, we start giving those. And then about a month out.
So we’ve been in constant contact. We keep reminding them of our dates and all of these by the way you’re reminding them of the dates of the dates. Remind them.
Starts on October 1. Close cards on the 16th if you know the exact things like, hey, remember the webinar push starts on the 7th and goes through the 10th.
And if you, the card opens on the 11th and whatever that is, right, you give them all these dates and keep hammering them home, you’ll cut down on them asking you later, about a month out. So four weeks out, we’ll say, we announce prizes. You can announce them sooner, but this is the time that we make a big deal out of it.
And we usually hold back some of the prizes. So we usually hold back about 10% of the prizes. We’ll come up with a budget.
And again, this may sound big, but I’m just saying, for our clients, we’ll say, okay, there’s $100,000 budget. I’m looking at the sheet here. So for this client, we have 200.
And let’s see, $207,000 in prizes. That was our total budget. Okay, we’ll announce about 180,000 of those and then withhold the last 27,000.
And we’ll use that kind of like as needed for on the go prizes. But we’ll announce, okay, first prize is $100,000. We’ll announce the opt in contest and second place and all that stuff.
Three weeks out, we’ll send promo plans. Now with our big partners. With our big partners, we’ll do promo plans one on one with them, about four to eight weeks out.
With our smaller partners, we’ll send them. Basically, it’s a detailed breakdown of each day of the launch with suggested mailing times, and we’ll just walk them through. And again, if you go to that URL I mentioned earlier, which mattmcwiams.com/affwarmuppdf the links in the show notes, you can download an example of the promo plan we use along with that pre launch timeline. So we send that out about three weeks in advance.
It’s got a video that walks them through it. All that stuff. About two weeks out, we remind them that we’re two weeks out, not much more or less than, hey, we’re two weeks.
It’s a big milestone, right? About ten days out, we send the partner login. This has got all that they need, their links and all that stuff.
We offer these, by the way, whether you’re a client of ours or not, we actually do these. So if you’re interested, just send an email to matt@mattmcwalliams.com.
My team will get in touch with you about possibly doing a partner center for you. We talked about those, I think, in the last episode or the episode before, they’re pretty awesome. We do a really good job with those.
About a week out, we hold an event. This is usually just a training. We do a live training, share best practices, how to maximize their commission, go through the launch calendar, give them a tour of the partner center and all that stuff. And then we get the swipe copy out. I meant that before. Typically we’ll send that out about ten days as well.
We’ll send out the swipe, copy their links, all that stuff. We give them copy of what they’re going to be promoting. So if they’re promoting an ebook or a PDF, we give them a copy of that.
If they’re going to be promoting a video, we give them access to the video and all that stuff. Then about two days out, it’s two days, do you need anything? The day before, we ask again, do you need anything?
And then it’s launch day. The most important thing that we have learned over the years of doing this is you cannot over communicate with your partners. You cannot over communicate in every single email.
Remind them of something you’ve already said, like include their login information, remind them of the training that’s coming up, remind them of the contest, remind them of the promo plans, remind them that they can refer someone. Remind them about what strategies you’ve shared. Like what strategies have you personally used or seen others use to warm up their audience.
Share them with them. Right. What have you seen in terms of what’s working to promote webinars? Share them. Remind them of the dates. The dates, the dates, the dates, the dates over and over and over again.
Here’s when it starts. This is when the promo starts. This is when the big push starts. This is when the workshop starts. This is when the webinar starts. Keep reminding them over and over and over again.
Make sure it’s on your calendar. And so this is a basic plan. I say you can’t over communicate. Of course, you could send an email every day for six months. That would be overkill. So it’s nice and spaced out.
One email a month, one Facebook post a month and then ramping up. Just basically think about the gap between communications. This is a pretty good way of looking at it. The number of months out is about the number of weeks between your communications. Roughly over four. It’s about four weeks per thing.
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
| Find Your First 100 Affiliates | Affiliate Program Terms & Conditions Template | Get My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email |
| Avoid The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes | Turn Inactive Affiliates into Your Best Affiliates | Get My Template for Writing Affiliate Emails |
| Affiliate Marketing Sales Secrets | Learn How to Create a Resources Page | Learn How to Write a Product Review |
When you get down to three months, you start going about three weeks between emails and three weeks between Facebook posts. Two months out. It’s every other.
There you go. That’s a really easy way to kind of keep up with it until you get to about a month out. And then you start kind of ramping it up a little bit. More there. So again, go to that URL I mentioned, mattmcwiams.com/affwarmuppdf. It’s in the show notes.
You don’t have to remember that and download that report and also make sure to come join us. We have an epic training coming up where I’m going to walk you through step by step how to start, grow and scale an affiliate program just like we did to over a million dollars a month. The URL for that is mattmcwiams.com\sevenfigures
We’ll put that in the show notes as well. If you go there, get registered for this training. You do not want to miss it. This is not like a 45 minutes webinar.
I’m just going to pre warn you, it’s a little bit over an hour, almost an hour and a half long training. It is an epic training because there’s a lot to cover. So go there, get registered for the master class because it’s going to be epic and you do not want to miss it. mattmcwiams.com\sevenfigures I’ll show you how to build a seven figure affiliate program.
That’s exactly what I’m going to reveal to you. So it’s kind of our confidential playbook that we really don’t share that often. We usually do this like twice a year. So go get registered for that and I will see you there and see you in the next episode.
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
| Find Your First 100 Affiliates | Affiliate Program Terms & Conditions Template | Get My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email |
| Avoid The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes | Turn Inactive Affiliates into Your Best Affiliates | Get My Template for Writing Affiliate Emails |
| Affiliate Marketing Sales Secrets | Learn How to Create a Resources Page | Learn How to Write a Product Review |
The post How to Get Your Affiliates Fired Up Before a Promotion appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
Which is better? Hiring an in-house affiliate manager or outsourcing it? One person or an agency? Today, I share the pros and cons of both ways and show you which kind of affiliate manager is best for YOUR business.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyWhat to Look for in an Affiliate Manager
Don’t Make These Killer Mistakes with Your Affiliate Program (Part 2)
Don’t Make These Killer Mistakes with Your Affiliate Program (Part 1)
Affiliate Marketing and Podcasts: How to Make Money, Get Affiliates, and Build a Brand Through Podcasting
The Surprising Thing That Might be Holding Your Business Back
This Affiliate Program Just Made a Fatal Mistake: Here’s What They Should Have Done Instead
What Kind of Affiliate Manager is Best: In-House or Outsourced?Which is better, hiring an in house affiliate manager or outsourcing it? One person or an agency? Today I share the pros and cons of both ways and show you which kind of affiliate manager is best for your business.
Let’s get started. So is it better to hire an in house affiliate manager or an outsourced one? Now, my recommendation might actually surprise you. Yeah, I’m biased. I’m biased. I run an agency, so I am totally biased toward recommending an agency toward outsourcing it.
But in this episode, what I’m going to do is I’m going to share the pros and cons of both here. And the reality is I don’t always recommend an agency. In fact, for a good chunk of people, I don’t.
And there’s a reason for that. And I’m actually excited to talk about that today because as somebody who runs an agency, the reality is I want the right clients. I want the right clients.
So I don’t want somebody to come to me if they’re not ready for an agency, if they’re not ready for us. And so today I’m going to share the pros and cons of both in this podcast episode. Again, I touched on this very quickly in the last episode, but I really want to dig into it today. So which is best for you? Well, the answer is it depends. It depends.
Let’s look at the pros of going in house. First, what are the advantages of hiring an in house affiliate manager? Well, the first big one is that you have more control. Literally, you have direct oversight of an employee. This is an employee. You can meet with them whenever you want. You can fire them whenever you want. There’s no contract. There might be an employment contract, but you want to treat people right.
But I’m saying if they’re not performing well, you’re not obligated to stick with them for any length of time just based on a contract. If they’re in an office, you can literally walk into their office. When I won my first affiliate manager of the year award back in 2000, I think it was 2009, 2010.
I don’t remember if one of the two I worked for a company. It was one of the only two years post the age of 23, I think. My dad fired me the day after my 23rd birthday.
That was the last time I worked for somebody before this, I worked for a company for about a year and a half, and sometimes the CEO would just walk in my office and we’d chat. And I’ve done that with employees over the years when I had an office. So there’s control that you have, and that’s a big advantage. There’s no doubt about that. As a business owner, I prefer to have control when I can. And we’ll talk about the advantages.
The other side. Now the flip side to that, of course, is that, okay, if you can have control over somebody who’s maybe not as good, but you could give up a little bit of control and get somebody that’s better, okay, that’s worth it. But there’s no doubt that all things being equal, control is better. Having control as a business owner is better. Having control as a CEO, as a CMO, whatever your role is, is better.
All right. The second big thing or big advantage of having an in house affiliate manager is your affiliate manager is spending 100% of their time, well, at least 100% of their work time working only on your program. They spend 100% of their time focused on you. In our agency, for example.
We can’t do that. We just aren’t able to. But that’s a pretty big advantage to having, hey, I got somebody who’s 100% of their time is on my business, on my affiliate program. That’s a huge advantage. Security is another one. Now this isn’t a big one, but it’s something to be addressed.
I mean, if you hire a reputable outsourced agency, they have access to things that might scare you a little bit, and they can do things with this information. That’s the reality now. So can an employee. But there is a little bit more security going in house.
Now we overcome that using things like LastPass and whatnot, and we make our clients feel secure. But the reality is there is an extra level of security when you are in house. If they are using a company computer on your company network, then there’s a certain level of security that you have, and that is an advantage.
And then the last one, the last big advantage is there’s more integration with your team members. When you hire an in house affiliate manager, they might literally be down the hall from the graphic designer. They might work in the same office as the marketing team.
They’re in the marketing team’s meetings. They eat lunch regularly with other team members. They talk in the hall. They have a one on one with the CEO or the CMO or the VP of marketing or whatever. It is. And there’s more integration with the team.
Again, they’re a part of the team now. What we do as an agency is we integrate with our clients. We’re in their slack. 5.00 We use their email accounts, we sign our emails. Jennifer Elliott, affiliate manager for name of client not Jennifer Elliott. Matt McWilliams consulting.
Like we don’t do that like some agencies do. Now that’s not criticizing them, I’m just saying that’s not how we do it. But again, as much as we try to integrate, we’re not going to have casual conversations with the CMO.
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We’re not going to be in the Daily huddle with the marketing team. We’re not that level of integrated. We’re focused on the affiliate side.
So there’s an advantage to in house in that regard. And I said lastly there, but actually I just thought of another one, is the reality is an in house affiliate manager is going to know your industry better. They might not know other industries.
We’ll talk about that in a little bit. They know your industry, again, they’re a part of your team. They are immersed in your team, your culture, your niche, your industry. They eat, sleep and breathe your industry. So there’s a flip side to that. But again, that is an advantage.
I mean again, all things being equal, I would rather have somebody I’ve got more control over who spends 100% of their time focused only on my program that’s more secure, that’s more integrated with my team and knows my industry better. No doubt about it. If you can find the right affiliate manager that is equal to an outsourced one and has all those five, you’ve hit the jackpot.
You’ve absolutely hit the jackpot. Hire that person like right now. Go hire them now. That said, there are pros to outsourcing. We’re going to talk about the pros of both and the negatives of both. The first pro to outsourcing is just experience.
Outsourced affiliate managers are working with tons of different clients. They’re working in tons of different industries. They’re working on tons of different types of affiliate programs.
They’re working on product launches, book launches, evergreen webinar challenges, summits, you name it. And they’re pulling from different areas and they’re learning constantly. And we found this with our stuff over the year that we’re able to pull from.
If all we ever did was launch world, we’d never be able to pull some of the evergreen stuff in and vice versa. I grew up in evergreen World and I got into launch world about 2012, 2013. And I started real, oh, my gosh, we can pull some of these things from launch world into evergreen world.
And then we started doing summits, and I was like, oh, but there’s this. And book launches and there’s this. And we started pulling all these things in from all these different industries.
I started learning things from working in the parenting niche that applied to the Internet marketing niche and from the health and fitness niche that applied to the personal growth niche. And I started seeing all these things. An example of this, if you’re an in house affiliate manager and you have two annual launches, that’s two launches every year.
7.42 Now, the advantage is that you’re able to get ready for just those two. You don’t have anything else keeping you busy. That’s great.
But an agency might run twelve to 24 launches, so there’s more exposure and more learning. Again, learning from different types of promos like book launches and summits and challenges and webinars, and you’re able to pull from those different things and say, okay, we can apply this to other types of programs that aren’t even related. So it’s just more opportunities to learn and to innovate and to apply those to all of your other clients.
That’s the first thing we do when something works with one client. We go, okay, that worked with one client. How quickly can we get this to work for a second client? How quickly can we test this out? With the second client, boom, we test it out as, okay, it worked with that one. All right, one more time.
We need to test this with a third client. If it works with a third client, we’re rolling this out company wide. And it works with the third. And boom. Now, all of our clients have the advantage of that thing. We learned from that one client. It’s pretty cool. Another advantage is lower cost. Usually you’re looking at half to two thirds the cost for the same results.
With an agency, you don’t have to pay health insurance, no 401K, you don’t have to buy the supplies. You don’t have to buy the computers, you don’t have to buy the office space. Our agency, for example, 90% of our revenue comes from a percentage of the sales.
So we only get paid more if you make more as simple as that, you might pay us $200,000 in a year because we’re really good at what we do. And you might pay a full time affiliate manager $85,000 a year, and you go, well, that’s actually $115,000 more. Yeah, you also made four times more money.
So you paid us twice as much, a little bit over, and you made four times more. That’s a good trade off. The other advantage to an agency is you’re working with a team.
When someone’s out, they’re sick, they’re getting married, they need a vacation. It’s not a big deal. We usually have four to six people working on an account.
And for one, that allows for people who can focus on different areas of affiliate management. Because if you think about there’s no such thing as the perfect affiliate manager. I would like to think that I am, but I’m not because I’m not really that great at the analytic side.
I’m great with knowing what to do with the data. I’m great at the relationship and the strategy, but I’m not an analytics guy. I have a hard time seeing when you give me a bunch of data in an affiliate thing going, oh my gosh, those are the opportunities. 10.00 Now if I can have somebody identify the opportunities, then I’m like, okay, Boom, we need to do this, this and this, and we’ll increase sales 25% in a week.
So I can see those things. When you have different people working on it, they’re able to extra size those different skill sets. Now that said, if one of our affiliate managers needs to be out for a week and the person taking over is just more of the relationship and strategy person, can they still do the analytics? Yes. Are they going to be doing it as well as the person who’s out?
No, but they’re going to be doing it 70%.70 % is greater tahn 0% When I was a full time affiliate manager with that company, when I went on vacation for a week, what people got was an autoresponder and no help whatsoever. And it cost us money. Now that said, I needed to go on vacation, though. So that is an advantage to working with a team. The other thing is big advantage.
You got access to a network of affiliates. More clients equals more affiliates for each of the clients and it becomes a really like, what’s the word I’m looking for? It’s like a flywheel, like the cycle, the snowball just starts picking up.
We have over 10,000 affiliates in our network, for example. We don’t have those. If we don’t have more clients, every client we add, we get another 50 to 100 affiliates. So when you join us, when you work with us, you have immediate access to those affiliates. I mentioned cost. One of the things I forgot, there is just cost savings on things like a network.
If you want to join an affiliate network like Awin or share a sale, there is an advantage to working with an agency because we get better deals. Like I just did this for one client. I to got them a deal they could not get on their own. 11.44 I’m not going to share the details. I’m just going to say that with a particular affiliate network, I saved this client about 40% on their monthly fees, saved them probably $10,000 to $15000 a month. Why?
Because I have access to those people. We work with multiple clients so we get better deals. That right there, I didn’t even think about it. But that money they save every month pretty much pays for us. Just about next one you got quicker startup time. Again, it’s tied back to the access to network of affiliates.
Usually with an agency you can scale the 10,000, 25,000, 50,000 a lot quicker. I haven’t seen much difference in getting to like a million dollars with a really good in house versus a really good agency, they will hit a million probably within a few months of each other. But like those first six to twelve months with an in house affiliate manager can be really slow.
I’ve done it. It can be really, really slow and plotting and oh my gosh, are we ever going to make any money with an agency? It usually happens a lot quicker. Three to six months. Another big advantage is just access to advanced tools and technologies agencies. We’re on top of those things.
We’re getting the technologies and the tools to run affiliate programs, prevent fraud, do all the analytics stuff, and they don’t make sense for a small to mid sized business to invest in because I’ll just do the math. Let’s say the thing costs $300 a month. And gosh, if you’re running a $10,000 a month program and you’re spending $300 $500 on fraud prevention, that’s three to 5% of your entire program every month, versus if we run ten programs doing the same amount of money, we spend the same three to $500.
It’s less than a half percent. So we’re able to use tools with our clients that the clients themselves couldn’t use because it’s just not cost effective for them. Another big advantage with the agency is you get to focus on your core business.
When you outsource anything, it allows you to focus on your core competencies and you let the experts handle all the complexities of affiliate marketing. And the last big advantage is cross promotion with other clients. When we have a client that’s a good fit for another client, it’s an immediate connection and we can run both of them. 14.00 And that’s awesome for both. We did this with two clients recently and both of them grew their email list by about 1000 people, about 800 on one side, about 1000 on the other. That’s awesome.
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They now have bigger lists, they have more sales. Life is good and that doesn’t happen when you’re not with an agency. There’s no cross promotion with clients at least.
So all of these, again, you have to think about these in context. If you could pass up all of those and get the in house, if the in house affiliate manager has kind of like, you can build a team, that’s great. If they come with access to a network of affiliates. Great. If they come with all the skills, maybe they have the analytics and the relationship and the strategy. That’s great.
If they come with those, you don’t need an agency necessarily. So if you can find that person, maybe. My recommendation is that you hire them and not work with us because there are cons to both as well.
So what are the cons to in house? Well, the first one is just as I talked about, above cost, you’re going to pay for health insurance, 401K, office space, maybe even on the front end. You’re going to pay for recruiting and hiring.
The salary can be higher. I’ll give you a broad range. Our quote unquote salary, our monthly fee is roughly half to as low as 40% of that of what you would pay in salary to a full time affiliate manager.
Now, again, where we make our money is on the percentage you win. When we hit home runs, we win, both of us win, we make you $2 million, we’re going to make a lot of money. And so we’re able to do that, unlike an in house affiliate manager who might not be willing to take that risk because that’s their only income. The reality is, every now and again we have a tough time with a client. It doesn’t grow as fast as we want it to. We’re really good at what we do.
There’s a reason why we’ve won all kinds of awards, but sometimes it doesn’t go perfect. And when that happens, we don’t make nearly as much money. We sometimes lose money and we’re able to do that because we have lots of clients versus if that was our only client, that would really suck.
So cost is a con to an in house affiliate manager limited network, as we talked about earlier. I need to go into that, but they usually don’t come with a huge network because they only work with one client at a time. Basically scalability.
Again, you got one person. Usually that person is scaled in one area. They are really heavy on relationships, really heavy on data. One of the two data analysis. They’re really heavy on strategy, but not on all. Is that always true? No. Occasionally you will find a unicorn that is really skilled at all three.
Hire that person. If I haven’t already. The other disadvantage that I see, one of the big cons is what I call strategic myopia. They are so tunnel visioned, so isolated that they miss out on trends and best practices. I found that this happened to me when I ran my first affiliate program. The company that I started called Hometown Quotes.
And I was so focused on our industry and our program that I missed out on lots of trends and knowledge. And I started that program in 2005 and I was ahead of the curve in 2005, 2006, we grew it from nothing to over a million dollars a month in about 18 months. In 2008, I started winning awards, I started being recognized.
It’s like a really good affiliate manager.2009 I was in high demand 17.25 But about that time, late 2008, early 2009, I realized, oh my gosh, I’m like a year behind the curve now. I went from being a year ahead like this expert, this go to guy that people wanted to be coached by, and they wanted consulting from me and wanted me to help them do what I had done for our program.
To all of a sudden in late 2008, early 2009, I’m like, I’m now a year behind. I’ve missed out on all these trends and I had to go educate myself. And I spent about four months where I had to spend 2 hours every single day.
I read every book, even the lame ones that came out. I read every book, I listened to every podcast, I read every site, I spent 2 hours every single day focused. And by the middle of 2009 I was up to speed.
I’m now caught up to the point where now I could be ahead of the game again. But that strategic myopia is a big disadvantage to an in house affiliate. Then burnout.18.24
They’re doing so many different tasks, they burn out easily. And when they do, then the disadvantage is you have to constantly hire a new affiliate manager. Most affiliate managers don’t last more than three years at a single firm.
That’s just the reality. And then again, I mentioned if they’re sicker on vacation, things shut down even three weeks a year, three weeks of complete shutdown. Basically, that’s a big disadvantage.
Now, what are the cons of an agency of outsourcing? Well, the first one is that loss of direct control, like I mentioned earlier, less oversight. Kind of the opposite of the pro to in house, right?
Big one here, potentially conflicting priorities. This is huge. Now, I would never say conflict of interest, meaning we would never work with a client that competes with another client, nor would any agency that I know of, even the kind of shady ones, they don’t do this.
But when you’re managing multiple clients, and if you’re an affiliate manager running three programs, you’re working 8 hours. Let’s just go 9 hours for a round number here you have 3 hours a day. How are you prioritizing your time and resources?
Whose brand are we building? Again, I’d mentioned earlier, we don’t build our brand. Our email signatures don’t mention our company at all. We represent the client, but some people don’t do that. That’s a disadvantage. They’re building their brand.
Good for them, but at what expense? There are times where we have a client where they’re doing a big launch, and I tell our affiliate managers, like today, you’re going to work 6 hours on client A and an hour and a half on client B and C. That’s what today looks like. Now that will look different next week. Next week you’re working 4 hours on B and 1 hour on A and three on C.
And your days kind of vary. But again, in a given day that can be a conflicting priority because all three of the clients want you to work a million hours on just theirs. Another big disadvantage to an agency is just communication challenges. Most of our clients are not in the same time zone as us. Most of them have different communication preferences than we have. We integrate with them.
So there’s a reason why I have telegram on my phone, because we have a telegram group with a client. I only have WhatsApp for one client. They have a WhatsApp group and I’m in there. But I don’t prefer that. So it’s a challenge. I have another one where we’re in slack, another one where we communicate via email, another one where it’s mostly text.
It’s all over the place. So there are communication challenges versus just in house where it’s like, no, this is the way we do it and you don’t have a choice. Another big disadvantage is just brand understanding.
I will never understand your brand as well as somebody who works on your team, who’s working on it 8 hours, 9 hours a day. Will I do my best to understand it as well as I need to? Absolutely.
I mean, we make an effort to understand your brand, but there are nuances in company specific knowledge that take longer to grasp compared to an in house team. Your in house team eats, sleeps, and breathes, and lives the brand daily. Now this is one of the reasons why when we bring on a new client, we do a ridiculously long onboarding meeting.
It takes about two to 3 hours. And most of that, the first hour or so, is just us letting the client talk so we can hear what they’re saying and we record it and we go back and watch it. And I just want to hear what are the words they’re using?
How are they referring to their customers? What’s their mission? Right. That’s important. Even then I’m still not going to understand it as well as I am if I’m on the team. So I’m just admitting that.
And then last one is just confidentiality and security. The reality is reputable agencies, I have strict confidentiality rules, I have strict security measures. But there’s always the risk. There’s always the risk. We talked about that earlier. That was one of the advantages of in house.
So which is best? As you listen to the pros and cons, you probably started developing some thoughts, right? If you prioritize control and access to your affiliate manager, 100% go in house.
If you prioritize lower costs access to a larger network of affiliates, then an agency usually makes sense. If you want someone who is 100% focused on your business, who knows your business inside and out, then in house makes the most sense. If you want a team, though, of people who are skilled in different areas, who work across different niches and program types and can bring in some of that knowledge and inject some new blood into your program, like, hey, oh, we’re going to do a challenge, right?
And none of our team knows how to do a challenge. Well, we do. Oh, we’re going to do this. We’ve already done that. We’ve done that with four of their clients. Here are some suggestions.
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Here are some best practices. Let’s rock then. An agency makes sense if that’s what you want. So it depends. There’s no perfect answer universally, but there is a perfect answer for you. For you.
And you probably know what it is now based on these pros and cons. Now, regardless of which is best, I’m going to give you a quick checklist. Just three things of what to look for. I did an entire episode on it last week on how to hire someone, but here’s a super quick overview. Number one, their track record. Don’t hire a newbie affiliate manager.
Probably not. Don’t have your brother in law do it. Do we have some great courses and training on how to help them? Absolutely. But I don’t recommend it if you need to because it’s free, basically. That’s different.
We can train them. Reach out to me, shoot me a text. I can train them to do what we do. But look at their track record. Have they built an affiliate program? Have they run one successfully?
Number two, access in the network. Here’s a quick one. Hey, before I hire you, I want you to go get ten affiliates for me. Once you go get ten Rockstar affiliates for me, I’ll pay you. Make them a second tier affiliate for them. So if you don’t hire them, they still make money.
But go give me ten. You have two weeks. Go give me ten Rockstar affiliates. Boom. Go. If they can do that, hire them. If they can’t, probably not. What if they get eight? If they get eight and they have a good track record and they fit.
Number three, which is culture fit, do you get along with them then maybe you still hire them. But do you get along with the person? You’re going to be working with this person, whether it’s an agency or an in house affiliate manager, are you going to get along with this person?
If you have a sense of humor and you make jokes and they look at you like you’ve lost your mind, don’t hire them. The same is true if they make inappropriate jokes and you’re like, oh my gosh, so you’re not funny. Don’t hire them.
So track record. Their network, their access and their culture fit. If you are sure you want to work with an agency or you’re just not sure what’s right for you, let’s talk. I mentioned it a moment ago. Text me 260-217-4619 let’s set up a call. Let’s set up a call and just say I’ll point you in the right direction.
I will tell you just like I did in this episode, do not hire us. Hire in house. Go find an affiliate manager. That is what you need. But if you’re like no, I know I want an agency, I already know. I’ve heard the pros and cons.
I want the agency, then absolutely. Let’s talk 260-217-4619 is where you can text me anytime. So that said, I’m excited to share some other news with you coming up soon about some software that we’re developing in a new, really fit like talks. Oh, I’m just so excited. Already said too much though. Just kidding.
But we are creating an affiliate network and some new software and I’m excited to talk about that. It’s going to be a while, but I’m excited to talk about that and then make sure that you hit subscribe so that you don’t miss any of the upcoming episodes. I’ve got a great one coming up next week.
How to get your affiliates fired up before promotion this is a big one. It’s a big one. How do you get your affiliates excited to be promoting? You got to know that. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss any of the upcoming episodes, including that one. I’ll see you then.
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
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The post What Kind of Affiliate Manager is Best: In-House or Outsourced? appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
###### Ever wonder what makes a great affiliate manager? It’s a BIG question…probably one of the most common questions I’m asked. What do I look for in an affiliate manager? In other words…WHO should I hire and WHERE do I find a good one? And how do I make sure they’re a great fit? Discover all the answers in this podcast episode. Any hire is a HUGE decision, but this is one you can’t afford to screw up.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyDon’t Make These Killer Mistakes with Your Affiliate Program (Part 2)
Don’t Make These Killer Mistakes with Your Affiliate Program (Part 1)
Affiliate Marketing and Podcasts: How to Make Money, Get Affiliates, and Build a Brand Through Podcasting
The Surprising Thing That Might be Holding Your Business Back
This Affiliate Program Just Made a Fatal Mistake: Here’s What They Should Have Done Instead
How to Build Your Team: Working with Virtual Assistants, Contractors, and Full Time Employees to Scale Your Business
What to Look for in an Affiliate ManagerHiring an affiliate manager is a big step for any company. It could be the catalyst to massive growth if you do it the right way and there are a lot of mistakes to avoid.
There are things to look out for, and there’s a best practice from beginning to end. And today I’m going to walk you through the entire process.
So when should you hire an affiliate manager? Who should you be looking for as an affiliate manager? Where can you find the right person for this job and how can you make sure that they are a good fit?
Today we’re talking about how to hire an affiliate manager. I talked about this, just seven episodes ago. I talked about the worst part of my entire business and why I hired an affiliate manager. And if you want to go back and listen to episode 481, the worst part of my entire business.
I shared a little bit about the process. Today I’m going to share our process in full for hiring an affiliate manager. And the thing is, it doesn’t have to be as strenuous as what I’m going to share today. If you want to do it the easy way, we’ll talk about that and we’ll kind of go through that. But I shared this live a few weeks ago, but I’m going to dive a little bit more in detail today.
First of all, when is the right time to hire someone? Secondly, who should you be looking for? Third, where can you find the right person? And then fourth, how do you make sure that they’re actually a good fit for your team, for your company? So we’re going to start with when should you hire an affiliate manager? These are some general guidelines.
These are not meant to be perfect. These are contingent upon some things like your profit margins and things like that. But generally, if you’re under 2000, even under 3000 in annual revenue, you definitely don’t want to be hiring an affiliate manager.
You need to be doing it yourself. In fact, if your margins are low, if you’re in a world where you might only have like 5,10, even upwards of 20% margins and your revenues under half a million, even upwards of a million, you need to be doing it yourself.
Now, you can use a VA. You can use someone else on the team to help, but you manage the program yourself. So when I started my first affiliate program back in 2005, it was just me. I scaled that to about a million dollars a month, a little bit over a million dollars a month in about 18 months.
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I’ve shared that story many times. Right around the point where we hit about a quarter of a million. We hired a virtual assistant to help me. This was a virtual assistant that we had working at that time, I think 10 hours a week and we were paying I don’t know, we’ll say back then this is 2005, so probably $15 an hour.
So we were paying like $600 a month and then we doubled the hours and paid like $1200 a month or whatever. And then I think we doubled the hours again to basically full-time. But this is somebody that I think we paid like less than $3,000 a month to. And again, this was back in 2005. So I don’t know, inflation right now is like a million percent.
So whatever. But add on $10,000, you might go overseas. It doesn’t matter whether or not you go overseas in the US or in your country, whatever. The cost is irrelevant. They’re typically not making six figures is my point. And so you can do this with the help of somebody like that. And that’s what I did.
We had a part-time VA, then a few months later went to like a half-time VA and then a full-time VA. And so we scaled from there as we grew that revenue. But with even paying that person $30,000 a year, we built this into a million dollars a month affiliate program.
Now don’t get me wrong, there’s going to be a day when you’re going to hire someone and that’s what we want to talk about. But it does pay to know the things that we talk about yourself anyway. So if you start off running it yourself, when you start off running the program yourself, you learn the things that you need to know over time.
You learn the ability to work with partners which will help you to manage your affiliate manager better because it’s going to be someone that’s going to report to you probably directly, at least in your 1st 25 employees.
Eventually, you might have a CMO and this affiliate manager will report to them. But when you’re under 25, even under 40 employees, your affiliate manager, if you’re doing it right, will account for at least 25% of your company’s sales, probably higher. I don’t know about you, but anybody on my team who is accounting for more than 25% of sales is reporting to me directly.
So early on, run it yourself. Over time, make sure you’re involved. Early on, you’re going to be the one doing all the work, all of the work. But then even over time, you’re going to still need to know how to do this stuff and work closely with your affiliate manager.
So initially you don’t have to hire someone to run your affiliate program. There are problems I won’t get into. I talked about them. The live lesson I did a few weeks ago about it, I’m not going to get into those. There are problems that you have with hiring an affiliate manager too early on.
So the question is, when should you hire an affiliate manager? Somewhere around $300,000 in revenue or about maybe $200,000 in gross profits or net revenue.
However you want to look at it, that’s a good time to consider bringing on at least a part-time affiliate manager, someone who’s either part-time with the company or they have other roles inside the company. That’s another option.
You might have somebody they already are running your customer service and they’re going to handle customer service and affiliates, or they’re going to handle your pay-per-click marketing and your affiliates. And so you might hire someone internally to come in and start doing multiple things. You might outsource it. We’ll talk about that.
You might train someone who’s already internally. Once you hit about $500,000 plus, it might be 600, 700 in revenue or roughly 300 and 5400 thousand dollars in net revenue, upwards of a half a million. That’s when you probably want a full-time affiliate manager.
So those are general guidelines. As I said, those depend on things like price points and profit margins, other costs, and other team expenses. So again, you’re going to go from running it yourself to having somebody part-time or who’s splitting their time to basically full-time, which might be outsourcing. You might be outsourcing to an agency.
So who should you be looking for? Okay, so we talked about the win. What’s who here? At first, it’s you. It’s you. Now you’re listening to an episode about how to hire an affiliate manager, and you’re probably thinking, all right, well, I think I’m mad. I’m at that point where at least I want to start thinking about it not being me.
Maybe you’re doing 150,000 a year in sales and you’re starting to get to that point where you’re a little bit busy with all the other responsibilities in the company. I know that for us, it was about a quarter million. We hit about a quarter-million back in 20, 16, and 17 in this business.
It got to the point where I just could not do it myself. And going back two businesses ago, that was about when we brought on a part-time VA. I was the affiliate manager. But that was not going to change. That was not really an option back then because there weren’t any good affiliate managers out there back then. This was 17 years ago.
I’m not saying I was inventing it. There were other affiliate managers, but they just weren’t very many. And there certainly weren’t very many good ones 17 years ago that we would have hired. And so that wasn’t an option. But if you are at that option, the big question that you’ve got to decide early on is, am I going internal or am I going outsourced? Am I going to hire someone internally or outsource it? And you might think that I’m biased while Matt, you run an affiliate management agency, clearly, you are biased to outsourcing. I’m actually not.
I had two phone calls this week with two people in very different situations. We’ll talk about this. One of them said I would not hire our agency and here’s why I explained they need somebody in the house. The other company I said, actually, you would benefit from hiring us.
There are a lot of positives both ways. I mean, the positives to an in-house affiliate manager are pretty clear. They only work for you so they’re more focused. They report directly to you. You can get them to do other things if needed.
I mean, I remember when I worked as a full-time affiliate manager for about 18 months for a company about once every two months we got really busy and I’d be in the back for half a day helping with shipping. I’d be back there Loading boxes.
You can’t get me to do that now. For one, I’m not in your office, not even in the same city as any of our clients. So I am not offended by any of our clients but I am not flying to Austin, Texas or Toronto, Or any of those places. I’m not flying to BC or out to Washington or anywhere like that to ship their stuff. Just not. It’s not worth my time. But you can do that.
If you hire an in-house affiliate manager and you have an office or they’re in the same town, you can get them to do things like that. But even if they’re not, if it’s not something like that you can still say, hey, I know this isn’t your main responsibility but we got this big thing going on.
Would you mind doing some customer service stuff for a couple of hours a day for the next week? One of our customer service people is out on maternity leave. Could you help out and they should be willing to do that? Of course, I can’t do that. When you outsource us like we’re not full-time team members, I’m sorry.
We are team players but it’s hard for us to do stuff like that, especially because we can’t get trained properly to do that. So they’re more integrated with your team. They learn every little part of your business. Those are big advantages, and I don’t want to downplay those. They’re absolutely big advantages to having an in-house affiliate manager that I fully acknowledge.
Now, the advantages to the outsourcing side are generally they cost less. I would actually say on average it cost more. And that’s why I recommended that one person that they do not hire us, that they hire somebody in-house and let us coach them.
I just said it’s just considerably cheaper to hire somebody in-house than us in their particular situation. Now, the investment in us is clearly worth it, but not in their case. I didn’t feel like the benefits outweighed the downsides but generally speaking, an outsource company will cost a little bit less.
They’re also more willing to make most of their money from commissions. We make 80% of our money from commissions/bonuses; however, you want to refer to them. So people pay us a retainer, but then we take a percentage of the upside. So if we help you grow your affiliate program from, say, a million dollars to $5 million, we make a lot of money on that $4 million.
Now, you make a lot more money, but we make a lot of money there. That’s where the majority of our money is made. An employee is not usually willing to work like that. That’s a hard sell. In fact, in some States, it’s illegal to pay them as little as we get paid. We have a team, and we make less per month in, quote-unquote, salary than a team member would. Just to be clear, in some states it’s illegal to pay people like that. There are a few. It’s not many, but there are a few.
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Third, outsource managers are going to have more pre-existing contacts. We have a database of more than 5000 affiliates. To be clear. That’s 5000 very weeded out affiliates. There are probably 1500 of those that have made more than $2,000 in commissions. You only have to get a fraction of those. You get 20 of those. We get 20 of those for you.
You have a half-million-dollar launch that’s if you just get 20, it might even be a million-dollar launch. We’re constantly tapping into our network. I had literally just yesterday, I had a DM conversation on Facebook with an affiliate, somebody that I’ve known for years. He was actually our top affiliate for a couple of years, I believe, for our stuff. And he’s promoting a client right now. And I DM’d him and said, hey, blah, blah, blah, “How are things going? I sent him kind of a funny message about something, and he was like, hey, by the way, all I’ve got you.
I know you’re the guy that you run all the big launches, who you got coming up.” And I said we got this coming up. You should be in. He’s like, I’m in. Signed up right then, boom. We just added $150 to $250,000 to the bottom line of that launch. It’s hard to get that in the house because all they do is your stuff. And that’s one of the big pros. The outsourced people.
We have varied experiences across dozens of niches. We work for example; we run launches in the pet space. We run online marketing launches. We run health and fitness, personal growth, and price points. We run stuff for entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs and all this stuff price points range from $47 products up to $5,000 plus products.
So you get that experience and you learn stuff. And then the third thing is the fifth thing I guess not. The third is that outsource managers know the industry. Like, for instance, we know the industry. I know what works. My team knows what works. We have a playbook and we execute that playbook. Now, we innovate, but the reality is we can execute that playbook. And we can, quite frankly, do this in our sleep.
So if you hire us and your last launch was half a million, we can run a, $1.25 million launch in our sleep based on the things that I shared. Now, we’re not going to do it in our sleep. We’re going to go all out for you and hopefully do a two-point, $2.25 million launch. But we can get you serious growth barely even wake up. Now that’s a Con.
The Con is that we have a playbook that we can do it in our sleep. And that can be a bad thing because if we’re not careful, we’ll run client C’s launch just like we were in client B’s launch, just like we were in client A’s launch. And it becomes kind of redundant and old hat. And so that can be a problem.
Now we make sure that that’s not part of our culture, though I always think of Southwest Airlines. Southwest Airlines. When they first got started, they refused to hire flight attendants from America and from Delta and other Airlines.
They didn’t want them. They went out and they hired waitresses. They hired people who sold cell phones. I didn’t have cell phones back then. You know, people who did, like, various things. Because they wanted to train them in the Southwest way. They wanted to train them in their unique way and teach them the industry. And that’s one of the reasons why we’ll talk about this.
When we hire, like, our affiliate, I don’t want to hire people with the affiliate management experience that’s just I don’t want to. And so one of the last things I would say and it’s kind of one of those pros and cons mixed in. One, we work with a lot of clients in various fields.
Well, the pro site is like I just said, we get all these different things. We get these different experiences. And I might be on the same day. I might be working on a pet client and a health and fitness client. I might be working on an audience that’s a young audience and then an old audience, a low price point, $20 a month, and then a $2,000 product, an evergreen product, and then a launch. All over the place. Super busy, though. That’s the downside. Super busy again, the pro and the Con is like, which one is the one that’s going to have the bigger impact? And I believe that the pros outweigh the cons there personally, but not for everyone.
So if you’re looking to hire internally, I want to share what you need to look for here. This is a little bit of course. The number one thing is always cultural fit. You can’t have an affiliate manager. This is if you hire internally and if you outsource, you have to have a cultural fit. Do they fit your team? If they don’t, it’s a no-go.
The second thing you’re looking for is those skills and attitudes, not knowledge. I just talked about this. There’s a reason why Southwest didn’t hire other airline flight attendants. They don’t want somebody coming and going. Well, at Delta, we did it this way. Herb Keller is like; I don’t care what you did at Delta.
We’re Southwest. We do it the Southwest way. You can hire us. We can train them in the knowledge. If you go to your affiliatelaunchcoach.com, we can train them in how to actually run an affiliate program. But those skills and they’re being a people person, they have a basic understanding of marketing. There may be some sales experience or customer service.
They may have promoted some affiliate stuff on their own. They have their own blog, their own YouTube channel, and their own podcast. Do they have the attitude? You just talk to them and they’re a people person.
You cannot be a good affiliate manager and not be at least a little bit of a people person. Doesn’t mean you have to be an extrovert. I’m actually an introvert. But when I get on the phone with somebody, I can carry on a conversation. You can’t have a jerk. You cannot hire a jerk as an affiliate manager.
So they have the skills and the attitude. Maybe they’re like, yeah, I don’t really know what cookies are, teach that. I don’t really know how to find affiliates. Great. We have a course for that. We have a coaching program for that. We can teach that. But do they have the skills and the attitude? Previous experience is a little bit of a plus but not required.
If they’ve got some existing connections, that’s a plus but not required. And then number five things, it goes back to the number one thing that culture fits. Are they a true believers in what you’re doing? This is why we love hiring people from our audience. They are true believers.
So do they truly believe your product is amazing or your products are amazing and they want to support that? Now, if you’re outsourcing again, number one is the cultural fit. Do you just get along with them? Did you enjoy your calls with them when they show up on time? Do they follow up with emails that make you go, oh, that’s a really well-written email, or are they writing emails and you’re going golly, what is wrong with this person?
Number two, do they have a track record? We work with Stu McLaren and Ryan Levesque. We’ve worked with Michael Hyatt. We run affiliate programs for Adidas and Shutterfly. Jeff, Goins, Lewis House, Brian Tracy. The list goes on, but also we work with companies like the Dog gurus.
We’ve worked with companies in the supplement space and in the different health and fitness spaces. We’re working with Jamie Brenkus on a big affiliate program launch coming up here soon. All of these things. We’re working with all these different clients.
So we have a track record of helping companies to grow. There’s a reason why people keep hiring us. People keep calling us. Like I’ve said many times, we turn away roughly 19 out of 20 people that reach out to us.
We have a good track record. Do they have an understanding of your niche Do they need to understand everything about it? No. Do they have a basic understanding? Yes. Are they willing to learn? That was the thing. The pet niche. I did not sign up for that. We did not agree to that. I did not say to them, like, I understand everything about your niche. I’m like, I want a dog. I have a basic understanding, but I need you to spend an hour teaching me and they taught us.
So in a moment, I’m going to talk about the hiring process. I want to make sure you get the right person, the right company, whoever that is. As far as where to find the right affiliate manager, that’s a big one. I’ll go through that real quick. Number one, referrals reach out to your network. Ask if they know anybody, and post on Facebook.
They know anybody who might make a good affiliate manager. And that’s where all of our hires come from either our list or my network. Number two, just look at who’s running other programs. This is more if you’re going to outsource, but go follow a couple of big affiliate programs or mid-size affiliate programs that matter, see who’s running them, and then reach out to them and say, hey, do you want to run ours too? Headhunters, you can use agencies that recruit for you, job sites, of course. Google around. Who are the experts? Who are the agencies out there? Again, who has a great track record? Who are the affiliate managers that are winning awards like Affiliate Manager of the year? I’ve won it four times, so you might find me there.
But who are the agencies winning it? Our agencies never won it because we’ve never gone for that, quite frankly. But even if we had, honestly, I think there are some agencies that are on a macro level are better than ours. They might not be better on a client-by-client level, but they’re better. They work with 40 or 50 companies.
We choose to keep things a little bit smaller. We’ll work with probably 10 to 15 companies over the next year. That’s just us, though. Does it mean that their model is wrong? It’s just the model that we choose. But if you Google around, you should be able to kind of sift through the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Look at your team.
There’s somebody on your team that’s just amazing at customer service or they’re amazing at sales. And you’re like, “man, I should approach them about being our affiliate manager.” The 7th way is you can find somebody where to look here to go to your audience.
Now, this is my favorite way because you’re going to hit all those things. They’re true believers. There’s probably a good cultural fit. They’re likely to be able to really connect with your customers. Who would be your best affiliates? Because they are customers.
They’re somebody that follows you, they’re a fan. What better place can you possibly think of to find an affiliate manager, someone to represent you? So you’ve got through when. We know the when. When should you hire an affiliate manager? We’ve talked to that right.
We’ve talked about who should you be looking for? Where can you find the right person? Now, the last part of this is how do you make sure that it’s not about finding the right fit necessarily, but how do you make sure that you kind of weed through these people? Because maybe you’ve got multiple applicants.
I’m going to explain how we do it. This is not necessarily to say you should do it this way. And I’m not recommending that you take as long as we do. But this is kind of our thing. We hire affiliate managers and they represent our clients. And so the price for us messing up is pretty steep.
So we want to make sure that we get it right. We want to make sure that we get it right. Now, the big thing is that you’ve got to have that cultural fit, and you’ve got to have the skills and the knowledge and the skills and the attitude, not necessarily the knowledge.
You definitely want true believers. So what we do, I’ll walk you through this process, and it’s evolved a little bit like our first round, we didn’t do some of this. What we do is actually host a training session. We do a six-week training two times a week, and you come to the training and in between each of the sessions is a quiz or some sort of assignment.
This effectively amounts to an extended job interview. Now, I’m saying I’m hiring affiliate managers and I’m an affiliate manager trainer, so I can do that. You probably can’t do that. So how do we lengthen this process? How do we take our time hiring? Well, the very first thing I would do is make sure that the application itself is expensive enough that it weeds people out.
So if you get 30, or 40 people to fill out the application, I’m just going to walk you through our application. We ask for their first name, their last name, their email address, their phone number, and all that. Please describe why you want to join Matt McWilliams Consulting Incorporated. What I’m looking for there. First of all, if they thought it out.
Number two, what’s their excitement level? Number three, can they write? You have to be able to communicate. So I want to put that we ask them questions like do you have previous experience as an affiliate manager? I don’t really care about one or the other.
It’s just good to know how many affiliate offers have you been promoted. Am I going to hold it against them if it’s zero? No. Is it better if they are five or more? Yeah. Please describe your current job or business.
Again, I’m looking more for communication skills. What do you like most about your job or business? I’m looking for their communication skills, but also, where do their skill sets lie? What do you like least? Do they whine and moan about their current job? Not a good fit.
It can usually rule out two people. Just based on that answer. Please describe why you would make a good affiliate manager. I just want to know what they think about themselves. And then we ask and we say the following are open-ended questions with no right or wrong answer.
We are simply looking to learn how you process certain situations. So ask them a couple of open-ended questions. If you’re running an affiliate program and you find out that one of your top affiliates is breaking the rules, what would you do first? How would you proceed from there? I’m looking for how they process this situation.
Yes, there is a certain right and wrong nest to these questions, but it’s not black and white. I’m looking for how they process through that. Affiliates asks you for a special landing page. This is not something you previously discussed with the client.
How would you handle this situation? Again, how do they think through this? If they just say, don’t know, the wrong answer, you’re out or I would go to the client. Really? That’s all you would do is more to that and I just go through these different questions.
I wouldn’t necessarily read all of them. Then says affiliate program questions. Note – all of these can be found on Matt’s website or podcast. We ask three questions. What is the ideal cookie length for affiliate programs? What is one of the three C’s of a successful affiliate program? What is one of the reasons why affiliate programs should work with small affiliates? Here’s the deal to answer those questions.
There are right and wrong answers. If you put a wrong answer to the tune of you are ever so slightly off. That’s not the issue. If you put I don’t know, that’s a problem because there are two ways to know the answer to these questions.
Number one, you listen to enough of my stuff and you already know, great. That means you’re a fan. You know a lot of my stuff. We’re already syncing up or two; you go use the search feature on my site. It’s not that hard. And if you’re not willing to do that and maybe spend a half-hour listening to a couple of podcast episodes to get the right answer to these three questions, you’re not an ideal candidate.
I can rule you out. We rolled out like five or six people who just put, I don’t know or couldn’t find it. It’s really easy to find, actually. I tested it out. Now, granted, I know where they’re at, but I tested it out and I had a couple of other people on the team tested out.
Everybody found the answer to every single one of those questions in less than 15 minutes. And then we just had a few last-minute questions, like confidentiality thing and stuff like that, and we went through that. The point is we weeded out. I think we had 52 applicants and we weeded out like 28 of them on the front end.
So from there, then I would do a quick phone call. This could be a ten to 15 minutes phone call with each applicant. The objective you’re looking for here is to weed out people. You’re going into the call from a pessimistic place and you’re looking for a reason to weed them out. And that sounds kind of counterintuitive, but I can get it down to like 15 people from there. And then for us, we then put them into training. But I’m not suggesting you do that.
I’m suggesting that if you read it down, how many people you got left. Now you do a video interview, do a video interview with the team, do a video or in-person interview with you and the spouse, go out to dinner with them, and do something together if possible. Kind of is the last thing. But typically we’ll get down to in our case, we got into five people and then everybody got a test project.
So this is actual work. Now, if you’re outsourcing their track record, suffices for this. But have them do some work, pay them for it. This is something that we do. We actually have them do a test project or two. Sometimes they do two.
We’ll have them do kind of a small one. It’s like, “Hey, put together a couple of things for this one client. Maybe it’s like two $300 worth of work.” Then we actually had each of them run a segment of a launch and I won’t get into the details on how to do it, but you could actually have them do some actual work that you pay them for.
Just as a side note, if you’re hiring a writer, pay them to write. That’s how we found our copywriter. And he’s absolutely amazing. He had already worked for us for 10 hours before I hired him. So if you decide to hire somebody internally, we can help with this process.
Just reach out to us at youraffiliatelaunchcoach.com. We can train them. But basically, you want to put them through the test project or projects, do that final interview for. Big hires will bring people here to Fort Wayne. We’ll spend a day with them. We’ll literally meet them for breakfast and we’ll talk for an hour and a half or two and be together. Then we’ll go do something.
We might just go to a park and just talk for another hour or so. We’ll go to lunch and then we’ll maybe go play disk golf together. How do we get along? Is there something we can do together just to talk through things, have dinner, and say bye.
But what is it like to spend 10,11, 12 hours with this person while you take an entire day? I might be spending 1000 hours with this person over the course of the next five years. Five to ten years? I think I can find the ability to spend 10 hours with them. Probably not even that. Actually, it is.
If you are ready to take your business to the next level and start an affiliate program, start with my free report, Your First 100 Affiliates. This report takes nearly two decades of experience, trial and error, and lessons learned about finding top affiliates in nearly every conceivable niche and puts them all into one report. Grab your copy here!
Usually, it’s from like 09:00 a.m. to 09:00 p.m. By the time dinner is over, I can find that time and I can get to see how they interact in all kinds of situations. How do they treat the waiters? How do they go about like hopefully at some point something goes wrong with their meal? Get to see how they process that.
I’ve never been one of those people who manufacturers that, but it’s always kind of an interesting thing. How do they actually do on the test projects? Those are the type of things that we’re looking for.
So if you want to know more about how we can help, if you hire internally or help you fit you to start with youraffiliatelaunchcoach.com, go there. You can apply for a coaching call there, our clients get results.
There’s a reason why we work with people like Ultimate Bundles and Julie Solomon and Jeff Walker, but also just everyday entrepreneurs and small businesses. So if you want to hire an agency, you can reach out to us there as well. Take a look at our agency. Right now, we’re basically about as close as we can get to being completely booked up and not be.
So we’re not really looking for new clients, at least for a few months. We’ve got a couple lined up for June, and as I’m recording this, it will go live in May, I believe May 3, 2022. So as of now, we’re kind of booked through like July, but we’re hiring new affiliate managers using the process that I shared before.
So if you’re interested, you can go to youraffiliatelaunchcoach.com or reach out to me at matt@mattmcwilliams.com or text me anytime at 260-217-4619.
So you can text me or email me about those things about hiring us, just like Michael Hyatt and Ryan Levesque, Stu McLaren Adidas, Shurrterfly so many others have done. Reach out to me that way.
So if you do you have any other questions, not even about that. You’re just like, Man, I really love your podcast. I have a question about such and such. Hit me up at 260-217-4619.
You can email me anytime there and then make sure you hit that subscribe button next episode. For those of you who already are working with affiliates, we’re going to talk about how to create mailing plans for your affiliates.
This is something that’s made a huge difference in our affiliate management, for our clients, for our own staff. It’s huge. Cannot stress enough how important the next episode is.
So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss it.
I’ll see you then.
Questions?Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
| Find Your First 100 Affiliates | Affiliate Program Terms & Conditions Template | Get My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email |
| Avoid The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes | Turn Inactive Affiliates into Your Best Affiliates | Get My Template for Writing Affiliate Emails |
| Affiliate Marketing Sales Secrets | Learn How to Create a Resources Page | Learn How to Write a Product Review |
The post What to Look for in an Affiliate Manager appeared first on The Affiliate Guy.
In 2005, I took my first affiliate program from $120,000 a month to $260,000…in less than 90 days. In 2009, when I won my first Affiliate Manager of the Year award, I took Legacy Learning Systems’ affiliate program from $150,000 a month to $310,000…in 90 days. In 2012, I helped Tiny Prints grow their affiliate […]
The post How to Double Your Affiliate Program in 90 Days appeared first on .
If I had to go back in time knowing everything I know now after nearly 20 years of running affiliate programs, how would I start a brand new affiliate program today? In this episode, I’ll share exactly what I’d do every single day for 30 days.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Ready to turn your passions into a profitable business? Check out my new book here!
LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
VIDEO: What is the Right Commission to Pay Affiliates?
Our Recommended Affiliate Tracking Platforms
How to Start an Affiliate Program for Free
Free Report – Your First 100 Affiliates
Find Affiliates Now
Our #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email Template
Affiliate Program Email Template
Podcast Episode – How to Negotiate Affiliate Deals That Benefit Everyone
What Affiliates Need to be Successful
Gmass Mail Merge Tool
How I Built a $1 Million a Month Affiliate Program In Only Two Years Without Any Connections or Credentials
Text me at 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow Laura Wardlaw Finished Top 20 in Only Her 2nd Affiliate Promotion
How to Avoid the Most Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes
Why Your Affiliate Program is Failing (And What to Do About It)
How to Build Strong Relationships with Your Affiliates
How to Use a Challenge for Affiliate Marketing: How Entrepreneurs on Fire Made More than $250,000 in One Affiliate Launch
How to Start an Affiliate Program: The First 30 DaysThe post How to Start an Affiliate Program: The First 30 Days appeared first on .
If your audience is of health-conscious men and women seeking information and support for kicking their sugar habit, this affiliate opportunity is for you. I’m excited about this opportunity because summit founder Florence Christophers has a proven track record. She is a trauma-informed certified Health Coach with expertise in sugar/food addiction recovery. Florence has been […]
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Laura Wardlaw doesn’t have a huge list or large social media following. In fact, of all the affiliates in a recent promotion, she had one of the smallest audiences. And she still finished in the top 20…in only her second affiliate promotion ever. How’d she do it? Well, that’s what today’s episode is all about. […]
The post How Laura Wardlaw Finished Top 20 in Only Her 2nd Affiliate Promotion appeared first on .
You’ve done the hard work of finding affiliates and getting them signed up. Now, are you ready to ignite their passion and make them eager to promote? In this episode, I delve into the art of getting affiliates genuinely excited to spread the word about your products or services. Let’s dive in and learn how […]
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Is it possible to launch not only a product but an entire business and even a lifestyle? The short answer is YES and today’s guest is the world’s leading expert on launches. What’s working in launches today? What’s changing? What does everyone need to know about launching? This is one of the most exciting podcasts […]
The post How to Launch…Your Product, Your Business, & Your Lifestyle with Jeff Walker appeared first on .
When it comes to writing great email copy, whether for an affiliate offer or to sell your own products, there’s a process you’ll want to start using if you aren’t already doing so. In fact, it’s MY secret weapon for getting prospects to buy…VISUALIZATION! Visualization is the process that allows you to “see” the outcome […]
The post How To Use Visualization To Write Better Emails appeared first on .
Trust is the backbone of successful affiliate programs. It’s the key factor in whether an affiliate promotes you the first time…and if they keep promoting you long-term. Today we explore the strategies and techniques that will solidify your position as a trustworthy affiliate manager. Get ready to unlock the secrets to building trust and credibility […]
The post How to Build Trust and Credibility with Your Affiliates appeared first on .
In the world of affiliate marketing, big news has just hit the scene. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has recently released updated guidelines that are set to have a major impact on affiliate marketers and affiliate programs. You might be wondering, are these changes good or bad, and what exactly do they entail? Well, fear […]
The post 2023 FTC Endorsement Guide Updates: What Affiliates and Affiliate Programs Need to Know appeared first on .
Are you ready to learn how to turn failure into a powerful stepping stone towards success? I recently had the privilege of joining renowned podcaster and entrepreneur, Omar Zenhom, to discuss his remarkable journey, how he transformed setbacks into opportunities and built one of the top podcasts and personal brands on the internet. This episode […]
The post How to Fail Your Way to Success with Omar Zenhom appeared first on .
Are you tired of making the same affiliate marketing mistakes over and over again? In today’s episode, we’re diving headfirst into the world of affiliate marketing blunders and how to avoid them like a pro. This episode is not all doom and gloom though. Because I’m not just here to point out the problems – […]
The post How to Avoid the Most Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes appeared first on .
If your audience is comprised of coaches and consultants, this affiliate opportunity is for you. I’m excited about this opportunity because: 1. SocialGlow Founder Daniel Burge REALLY thought this through. The SocialGlow App allows you to reach your community and customers where it matters most – on their phones. Your community, courses, and classes are […]
The post Affiliate Opportunity: SocialGlow Webinar appeared first on .
Are you struggling to attract affiliates to your program? Looking for the secret sauce to make your affiliate program irresistible? You’re in luck! In today’s episode, we dive into the art of attracting affiliates with the right commission structure. I share the strategies and techniques that will make your program stand out from the crowd […]
The post How to Attract Affiliates with the Right Commission appeared first on .
Breaking news…the FTC has released new guidelines that have a huge effect on affiliate marketers and affiliate programs. Are they good? Are they bad? What are the details? This episode has you covered. Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE 2023 FTC Endorsement Guidelines Text me at 260-217-4619 […]
The post BREAKING NEWS: What the 2023 FTC Updates Mean for Affiliate Marketing appeared first on .
Too many people make affiliate marketing out to be too complicated. They say it’s part science that requires decades of learning and experience and part “dark art” that requires the touch of a wizard to master. But neither of these are true. In fact, affiliate marketing is easier than you think. Today, I’ll share why…and […]
The post Why Affiliate Marketing Is Easier Than You Think appeared first on .
Affiliates want the highest commissions possible. Affiliate programs want to make as much profit as possible, which means paying the least amount they can. So, how do both parties win? Today, I’ll share how to negotiate affiliate deals that benefit everyone. Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE […]
The post How to Negotiate Affiliate Deals That Benefit Everyone appeared first on .
If your audience is comprised of entrepreneurs, authors, experts and public speakers, this affiliate opportunity is for you. Since 2018, the Thought-Leader Accelerator program has helped hundreds of individuals land a TEDx talk. This program is designed to take you on a journey from ideation to crafting and giving your talk. Currently, they’ve helped over […]
The post Affiliate Opportunity: Thought-Leader Accelerator appeared first on .
Are you ready to take your personal brand to the next level? I have a very special guest today to take a deep dive into the secrets of building a personal brand that will make you a sought-after, recognized authority and even a celebrity in your niche. Click Here for The Written Transcript of This […]
The post How to Build Your Personal Brand and Become a Celebrity in Your Niche with Rory Vaden appeared first on .
This might be the most important podcast episode I’ve ever recorded. If you want to run a successful affiliate program, whether you’re the owner of the company or an affiliate manager, this episode is a must-listen. Without this one trait, you cannot be successful. Today, I reveal the #1 trait of great affiliate managers. Click […]
The post #1 Trait of Great Affiliate Managers appeared first on .
So you’ve started an affiliate program and it’s not going as you hoped. What now? First, identify WHY it’s failing…then fix the problems. Today, I’ll share some of the most common reasons we’ve seen affiliate programs fail…and what to do about it! Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS […]
The post Why Your Affiliate Program is Failing (And What to Do About It) appeared first on .
What if you could steal affiliates from your competition? That would be pretty freaking awesome right? Not only is this one of the easiest ways to start and grow an affiliate program, but it has the added benefit of growing your market share while decreasing your competitors’. In this episode, I’ll show you exactly how to steal your competitors’ affiliates.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
To get started with affiliate marketing the right way, download my free quickstart guide to affiliate marketing. Grab your copy here!
LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
How I Built a $1 Million a Month Affiliate Program In Only Two Years Without Any Connections or Credentials
Find Your First 100 Affiliates
Text me at 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
| | | | --- | --- | | | | | | | |
Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Promote Challenges as an Affiliate
How to Build Strong Relationships with Your Affiliates
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
How to Steal Affiliates From Your CompetitionWhat if you could steal affiliates from your competition? That’d be pretty freaking awesome, right? I mean, not only is this one of the easiest ways to start and grow an affiliate program, but it has the added benefit of growing your market share while decreasing your competitors.
So listen up, because today I’m going to show you exactly how to steal your competitor’s affiliates. So as far as I know, a part of the story I’m about to share, I’ve never shared before. I’ve talked a lot about how I got into the affiliate world and how the company that I ran at the time, there were three of us that were partners, how we were basically ten days away from going bankrupt.
We couldn’t make the next payroll. We just paid payroll. It was a Friday, and we just paid payroll. And we could not pay payroll in two weeks. We did not have enough money, nor enough like, we didn’t have enough money on hand, nor enough money projected to come in over the next two weeks to pay payroll. And we kind of had one of those I call it the business equivalent of trying to pay your mortgage by finding change in your couch, right, or doing a garage sale. We’re trying to figure out, okay, how are we going to make payroll? And we’re just trying to survive two weeks.
And the answer ended up being to start an affiliate program. And it’s an affiliate program that over the course of about the next 18 months, we built into a million-dollar-a-month powerhouse, and we became a respected player in our industry. We grew and we grew and we grew. And a lot of times I tell that story, and just for the purposes of time, I don’t tell the whole story.
I talk about how we started an affiliate program, and what the advantages are. I’m actually doing a training coming up. If you want to hear parts of the story I’m not going to share today, I’m doing training. How I built a million-dollar-a-month affiliate program in only two years. Really? Less than two years without any connections or credentials. And we’ll put a link to that in the show note.
Well, the part that I’m probably not going to share on that because it’s not relevant and I don’t know that I’ve ever shared it publicly really is the middle part of that story. How do you go from zero to a million dollars a month in 18 months? What did that actually look like?
Did we grow by $75,000 a month? Was there an inflection point where we had $100,000 a month a year later and then we suddenly skyrocketed? What happened in that mix?
And what does it have to do with stealing affiliates from your competitors? Well, for us, what it looked like was we worked our butts off in the first month. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but the first month, we did like, $10-12,000. Awesome. Great start. That plus some other stuff was what allowed us to kind of stay in business.
Then we grew to about $25,000, $40,000, and so on and so forth. About six months in, we got it up to $100,000 a month, just shy of $100,000 a month. And that’s amazing. And that came through hard work and doing what I teach on the podcast, right? Developing those relationships and all the things, all the things that we talk about. If you want to know where to find affiliates, I’ve got a free report, right?
And I’ve talked about that before. Your First 100 affiliates, mattmcwilliams.com/first100. We’ll put that in the show notes, and I talk about the ways that we did that in there. But here’s what happened around month six, we had gotten to the point where we were doing about $100,000 a month, and we got what at the time felt like really bad news. Our biggest competitor had just gotten acquired by a large publicly traded company. We were talking about a multibillion-dollar company.
Need help activating your affiliates? Use my proven email templates for getting inactive affiliates in the game and making sales! Get them here!
And I remember I think we found it out on a Thursday, and I was so busy with some work stuff that I kind of finished up the Thursday and didn’t really think about it. And then Friday, it just hit me like a ton of bricks. I left work.
I mean, I was young, I was single, and I was running a startup. I worked 90 hours a week. I worked seven days a week. I worked ten to 15 hours a day. And I’m not saying that’s a good thing. I’m just telling you that was the norm.
I left work at, like, three on Friday afternoon. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to do it. That Saturday I watched more college football than I’d watched in years. I didn’t want to work. I never got my laptop out.
And I remember that Saturday afternoon I don’t know how else to say this, but I was using the bathroom, and I had this revelation, like, I went from, this sucks. That’s the natural emotion for the first 48 hours. This sucks. This isn’t fair. They’re going to put us out of business. They have more money than they know what to do with.
They’re going to be able to steal all of our affiliates. They got more money. They’re going to be able to crush us and paid advertising. They’ve got more money. And as I’m sitting there in the bathroom, this thought went through my head.
Wait a minute. What if we could use this to our advantage? What if we could use this to our advantage and we emailed all of their affiliates or all the ones we could find, at least, and basically said, “Hey, you may have heard that such and such company just got purchased by a big, behemoth, publicly traded company.
Here’s the deal. That company has a reputation. They have a reputation for treating their affiliates like a number, not person. They even sign their affiliate emails. The affiliate team at such and such company, and they don’t want to get to know you. And if that’s not what you’re looking for in an affiliate program, let’s talk.
As a matter of fact, here’s my personal cell phone number. You can text me anytime, and let’s talk. And over the course of the next two months, I sent hundreds of those emails, and I got probably close to 100. I probably sent 700 emails. I got probably 75 texts. I had about 60 calls, and I got about 40 of them, including some that were doing in excess of $25,000 a month.
Why did they want to become an affiliate for us? Because I found the angle that appealed to them, and we’ll talk about that as we go along here, but, like, I couldn’t pay them more commissions. Our stuff didn’t even convert better per se.
We had no attraction other than, we’re going to treat you like a person, not a number. I’m going to give you my cell phone number. Just try getting that from one of their affiliate managers. Their affiliate managers hide behind an email address. Never talk on the phone. I’ll spend an hour getting to know you and talking to you.
I got on so many phone calls over the next couple of months. I mean, that’s practically what I spent, I’d say, 50% of my time doing, was just talking to affiliates, getting to know them. I learned things about them.
To this day, I still remember many of their spouses’ names, and I remember where they live. I remember where they went to college. We talked about that a few episodes ago.
Or we talked about building strong relationships, right? To this day, I remember those things to this day when I interact with them because some of them still promote our clients. Here we are 18 years later.
I can still tell you who their favorite teams are. And you can bet when the Chiefs won the Super Bowl, I reached out to a few of them because they’re Chiefs fans. You can bet that when their school plays well in an NCAA tournament or whatever, you bet I reach out to them.
But ultimately, what we did was we stole affiliates from our competition. And when I say that stealing affiliates from your competition kind of sounds a little bit cutthroat, right? But it’s not.
You’re not stealing them by lying. I’m making that assumption here that you’re not a liar. You’re not stealing by promising something you can’t deliver on.
You’re not stealing by denigrating them. And you could argue, well, Matt, you kind of said that they treat their affiliates, like, a number. If you searched for their affiliate program back then, the second post down or the second article down was exactly about that.
The first listing was their affiliate program. The second one was an article on affiliate form where they talked about that. And you could argue that I denigrated them. I mean, I didn’t say they were terrible. In fact, I acknowledged in the email, hey, this is pretty much all we can offer. So we’re not stealing them by lying.
You’re either giving them a better offer, or you’re offering them something as I did, that their competition isn’t offering them. In other words, you’re giving them a choice. If that’s a bad thing, then you hate capitalism, right?
If you don’t want affiliates to have a choice, then move to North Korea where there’s no competition. That’s all we’re doing. And so you need to change your mindset. If you see it this way, you see I don’t want to steal my competitor’s affiliates. That’s an evil thing to do. They worked hard to get them.
No, you’re just giving them a choice. I didn’t threaten them. I didn’t lie to them. I didn’t offer something that we couldn’t deliver on, which is a form of lying. I did none of that stuff. All I did was offer them a choice.
So again, if you see it that way, I want you to change your mindset. So I shared one way to do this in my story that I shared to walk you through, what did I do? I found them. I went to Google. This is 18 years ago. Still works today. I went to Google, and I found all the people who were promoting our competitor.
Now, I’ll share some other ways that you can find them in a moment. But regardless of where you find them, then you offer them something that the competition can’t offer them. Maybe it’s a higher commission.
Maybe your competition has lower margins. Maybe they have a physical product that you’re not offering. So let’s just say you have both have a $500 price point and they have a physical component. Let’s just say, cost them $100. So they can only offer 25% commission, and you don’t have that. So you can offer a 30% commission or a 40% commission. If you can offer a better commission, then do it. We couldn’t. Maybe you can offer better conversions.
I would argue that because we were in the lead generation business and our form was a little bit shorter than our competitions early on that we did convert slightly better. I had no quantifiable data on that, to be clear, because I didn’t know their conversion rate. I didn’t know their exact conversion rate.
But I did say that we had a shorter form. So I was offering better conversions or at least saying we had something that should lead to better conversions. If you definitely know that, then use it.
Or maybe you have better upsells. We didn’t have that, but maybe both companies offer a $500 product at a 30% commission and they don’t offer anything on the back end and you sell a couple of $1,000 worth of stuff on the back end so they’ll make more money long term. Maybe you offer a longer cookie.
Side note I’ve talked about this probably in 50 to 60 episodes do a lifetime cookie. Offer a lifetime cookie. There is no reason to not offer a lifetime cookie, 96% of the orders will happen within 30 days. But saying we have a 30-day cookie or a 90-day cookie versus we have a lifetime cookie, which one sounds better?
So if that’s something you can beat your competition on, then offer it. Maybe you have better creatives. Maybe you have a better copy. Hey, well, we can’t beat them on conversions. We can’t beat them on commissions.
We both have lifetime cookies. We both have roughly a $2,500 average order size when upsells. But we’ve got tons of better creatives and we’ve got tons of better copy.
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So we make it easier for you. Can you make it easier for them? How about that? We’ll get on a strategy call with you. We’ll help you craft your promo. We’ll get the owner of the company to do an interview on your podcast or a video or whatever.
We’ll co-create some bonuses together. How can you make it easier for them? How can you allow them to do something they can’t do with the competition, like those bonuses or like custom landing pages or things like that?
Maybe you have more promotion opportunities. Maybe you have a variety of them. So your competition basically has a sales page and maybe a lead magnet funnel, right?
And you’ve got webinar challenges, summits, workshops, lead magnets, and half a dozen lead magnets. You’ve got mini-courses, all that stuff. Or maybe your program is more fun. You make your program more fun. You personalize things for them.
So again, treat them like a person and not a number. Maybe it’s just because you talk to them and help them do those strategy calls, getting on the phone with them, makes it easy to contact you.
Here’s my cell phone number if you don’t want to be reached, by the way, you can put your phone on Do Not Disturb. I’m not saying you have to answer the phone when you’re eating dinner with your family or you’re at a movie.
I have to be reachable 24/7 if you’re not, you don’t. You don’t have to be reachable 24/7. Just put your phone on. Do not disturb. That’s why they created that. And I love the feature side note where it’s like it automatically goes into Do Not Disturb when you’re at a certain address.
So there are certain places I go, like our kids’ soccer. My phone automatically goes on. Do not disturb. My wife can get through, just to be clear. But I’m coaching soccer. I’m not going to talk to you.
So you can do that, right? Maybe you can promote them so it becomes a two-way thing. Or maybe you can introduce people to them or whatever the case may be, but offer things that the competition can’t offer. And that’s your angle, to get in with them. That’s your angle, right? And so we’ll talk about where to find them a part in just a moment.
But going back to our story is we were about $100,000 a little bit short of that. And two, two and a half months later, after doing this, we were a little bit over half a million dollars a month. That was the catalyst to getting to a million dollars a month.
It allowed us to scale. And we did exactly what I just shared. As I mentioned, almost every day I would get a text or an email reply, and I would set up calls, and I would set up calls, and I would talk to people.
And yeah, I mean, it was a heck of a lot easier back then. Like I said, I was single, I was young. I was working 78 hours a week. And so I was talking to people all day long. Sometimes it would take two, three calls, hour-long calls, and follow-up emails to convince them to just give us a test promo just to convince them to try us.
And here’s the thing: What they found was the combination of the fact that we didn’t have better upsells, we didn’t have better commissions, I mean, marginally better conversions. We did offer a lifetime cookie when the competition offered something like a seven-day cookie. So that was one way where we stood out.
Quite frankly, we did not have better creatives at that time. We were working on it, but we didn’t. And we did have a variety of promotional opportunities.
But one of the things that stood out was just the fact that I got on the phone with people and I helped them strategize, and I helped them scale and I offered them tips, and I shared what was working and what wasn’t working. And I found Typos on their website and made corrections to their marketing. We didn’t have social media back then, so I wasn’t able to do that.
But I was finding these ways. I subscribed to their email lists and I would reply back to them and say, great email, things like that. Love this, love this, when they would promote something else that wasn’t ours.
And I interacted with them. And so we had this one affiliate come into town. This is a funny story here.
This guy came into town to Franklin, Tennessee, where we’re at at the time. And we’re at this restaurant that like every place in the Nashville area had live music. And we’re there, it’s loud, we’re talking, we’re getting to know each other.
And basically the day before, they had agreed they were going to give us a test run. They were going to try us out effectively, like one 10th of their traffic, right? So we’re excited about that.
And again, the fact that we brought them down and hosted them and for lack of a better term, wind and dined them and treated them really well, played the big bar in that. The other company wasn’t doing that. So we had this personal relationship.
We’d spent almost 48 hours, or probably not spent 48 hours. We spent like 20 hours together. We broke bread together, we hung out together.
We went to a hockey game together. We did all kinds of fun stuff. And the night before they’re leaving, we’re at this place, and sitting at the bar is I can’t even tell you the guy’s name, but he’s like the lead guitarist for Rascal Flats.
Well, this guy’s a huge Rascal Flatts fan and he’s freaking out because the guy is not the lead singer. But the other guy from Rascal Flatts is there like one of his favorite bands and he’s there. And where this guy’s from? He was from Ohio. You don’t just see famous people at the bar in Nashville. I mean, quite frankly, it happens all the time.
You can’t go into a store or a restaurant. I can’t tell you the sheer number of people that I sat near in restaurants or ran into at stores. It’s crazy, right?
So anyway, I had a Windows Phone. The Windows Phone had just come out and so I had internet in my pocket now. It was super slow. That went on. You know what, this was like a quarter of a G. We’re on five G now. This was like point 2G. But I had this Windows Phone, and I’m looking up like, the Rascal Flats band trying to figure out who this guy is, and I couldn’t even tell you. I should probably look it up, but I’m not his name is Clark.
We’re going to call him Clark. And I’m like, okay. So I was like, “Dude, come here with me.” I take this guy over. Name is Lev. I take Lev over, and I go I was like, “Hey, Clark.” He turns around, and the guy from Rascal Flatts. I was like, “I’d love to introduce you to my friend Lev here.” Kind of a risky move because I don’t know Clark.
I just learned his name 12 seconds ago. And the dude plays it off like he’s like, “Lev, nice to meet you, man.” I’m like, “Hey, guys, let me take a picture.” And I got, like, my point-2 megapixel flip Windows Phone. And I’m like, “Let me take a picture of you.” It’s dark, so it turns out basically looking like crap. But I take this picture of Lev and this guy from Rascal Flatts, and Lev is on cloud nine.
Lev is on cloud freaking nine. I text him the picture. I think I emailed it to him as well because it was like, higher res that it came through again. This is 2005, so pictures are a little bit different back then.
And Lev looked at me. He’s like, “All right, man. you know what? I’m in. I get it now. I’m in. Let’s do this. Let’s just go all in.” He’s like, “You guys are amazing. I want to work with you guys.” And then, like, two days later, they flipped over half their traffic to us.
Within a week, they’d flipped all of it over. Now, that’s illogical, right? It might have cost him a little bit of money, but I created an experience for him that he’ll never forget.
To this day, I’m not sure. I don’t know if he listens. I doubt I’m not sure if he knows. I still don’t know who the guy is from Rascal Flatts. I know a lot of country music singers. Growing up at my dad’s golf course in Franklin, Tennessee, it was nothing, right?
I knew so many famous I knew a lot of famous golfers, but I knew a lot of famous country music singers. I did not know this guy. So I took a chance, and it worked.
But the point wasn’t that I did that. The point was that we had hung out. The point was that we had bonded, and that was something that the competition could not offer.
So find that angle. Find that angle. What is it that you offer that they don’t? I give you probably ten or twelve things you could think through. Get creative if need be. So where do you find them?
Well, Google, as I shared earlier, still works 18 years later. You go to Google, you type in the name of the company. You want to find their competitors, and you go find their affiliates.
You can watch leaderboards and a lot of affiliate programs. We post the list of our top affiliates and maybe not even some of our top affiliates. We might post a list down 50, to 60 deep.
Watch those sign up, join their Facebook groups, join their email lists, and make sure you watch those affiliate programs. Also, maybe they only post a list of, like, their top 20, but what about their 30th biggest affiliate? Some companies’ number 30 affiliates might be a $ 60,000-a-year affiliate or even just a $5,000 affiliate.
Don’t you want the $5,000 affiliate? Do you hate money? Do you not want the $5,000? I do. So watch who posts in their Facebook groups. And then, as we talked about, don’t reach out to them in that group, duh…!
But reach out to them privately. And then groups, as I said, groups where people hang out, whether it be an affiliate group specifically for a company or just a place where, you know, the affiliates are hanging out. Like people in a certain niche are hanging out, coaches are hanging out, business coaches are hanging out there, gardeners are hanging out there, whatever the case may be.
Gardeners who have platforms. So then you reach out, and I’m going to share more on how to do this. I mentioned the training earlier, how I built a million-dollar-a-month affiliate program in only two years.
If you are ready to take your business to the next level and start an affiliate program, start with my free report, Your First 100 Affiliates. This report takes nearly two decades of experience, trial and error, and lessons learned about finding top affiliates in nearly every conceivable niche and puts them all into one report. Grab your copy here!
Less than really without any connections or credentials. If you go to mattmcwilliams.com/Millionamonth, we’ll put that link in the show notes for you there. You can register for that training. In the meantime, shoot me a text and let me know what you got out of this. Okay?
Did you change your mindset on this? Do you see? You know what? This isn’t unethical. This is just giving them a choice.
Text me. Let me know what your biggest takeaway is. What are you going to take from this?
More importantly, not what your takeaway is, but what is your take action from this? What action are you going to take as a result of hearing this episode today? So shoot me a text anytime at 260-217-4619 and make sure also that you hit subscribe because you do not want to miss the next episode because I am telling you now it’s going to be a good one.
Why your affiliate program is failing. Why your affiliate program is failing? What are the reasons why affiliate programs fail?
More importantly, what to do about it? So we’re talking about that in the next episode. Make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss it.
I’ll see you then.
The post How to Steal Affiliates From Your Competition appeared first on .
Challenges are so hot right now. And for good reason. They are easy to promote, offer huge value to your audience, and convert like crazy. Today, we’re taking a deep dive into why challenges work and share the proven strategies to maximize your affiliate commissions when promoting them.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
To get started with affiliate marketing the right way, download my free quickstart guide to affiliate marketing. Grab your copy here!
LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
List Launch Challenge
Want to Promote List Launch Challenge? Email us at partners@mattmcwilliams.com
Upcoming Affiliate Promos
Text me at 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Rock Your First Affiliate Promotion: Keira Merkovsky Case Study
How to Promote An Evergreen Affiliate Offer In Just ONE Week
How to Build Strong Relationships with Your Affiliates
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
How to Promote Challenges as an AffiliateThe post How to Promote Challenges as an Affiliate appeared first on .
Your first affiliate promotion. It’s usually a time of confusion, experimentation, and more often than not, failure. But what if your very first affiliate promotion could actually be a huge success and open the door to even more success in the future? That’s what happened to today’s guest and we’re sharing exactly how she succeeded in her first affiliate promotion ever.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Looking for some good affiliate programs to promote? Check out our recommended affiliate programs here!
LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Your Affiliate Launch Coach
Keira’s Site
Connect with Keira on Facebook
Text me at 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
| | | | --- | --- | | | | | | | |
Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Promote An Evergreen Affiliate Offer In Just ONE Week
How to Build Strong Relationships with Your Affiliates
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
How to Rock Your First Affiliate Promotion: Keira Merkovsky Case StudyYour first affiliate promotion. It’s usually a time of confusion, experimentation, and more often than not, failure. But what if your very first affiliate promotion could actually be a huge success and open the door to even more success in the future?
That’s what happened to today’s guest, and we’re sharing exactly how she succeeded in her very first affiliate promotion ever.
Hey, welcome back. And man, I’m excited about this episode because we’re talking about something we’ve really never talked about before.
Your very first affiliate promotion. Yeah, I mean, I’ve talked about how to get started, and I’ve shared the steps to do that, but we never really dove into, okay, how do we actually execute our very first affiliate promotion? As I said in the intro, first affiliate promotions are usually a little bit scary.
Most people don’t know what the heck they’re getting into. They’re confusing. What a swipe copy? When’s the webinar? How do I manage all of this? How do I do a promo calendar?
How many emails do I send? Like, I don’t know how to do anything. And usually, they’re failures. And that’s fine. That’s totally cool. Failure is a good thing.
We believe in that. We talk about failing fast as a company, trying new things, have a bias towards action. In school, getting a 65% is considered a failure.
You get an F, they don’t even give you an E. They skip E and give you an F. But in the real world, 65% is so much better, infinitely better than zero, that I would rather you fail than not take action at all.
So, yeah, first affiliate promotion usually fails, but they don’t have to be that way. And that’s what today’s episode is all about. A couple of years ago, I was coaching two of our clients in our your Affiliate Launch coach program, Jason and Cecilia Hilkey from Happily Family, and they had a summit coming up.
It was called the Happily Family Conference. I think the summit before, I think it did like, something like 20-25000 attendees, which is awesome. But Jason came to us and Cecilia, and they said, we need help.
We would like to scale this. We helped them get more than 100,000 attendees for their next conference. It was insane.
And this was in large part due to awesome affiliates that they worked with, like Keira Merkovsky. Keira is a family therapist. Like, she primarily coaches Moms on being a great moms, and dealing with the stress that can bring.
She’s built a good size audience, but not huge, and had a good following, but she’d never done an affiliate promotion before until this one. So she’s not like some internet marketer person doing like, okay, ‘Hey, person, with 200,000 people on your list, how did you make $50,000?’ ‘Well, I sent a couple of emails to my giant list.’
That’s not helpful. Right? So we’re going to talk about her very first affiliate promotion. Very first one. So how did it go? Like, how did it go with Keira?
We’re going to have to listen to my interview with her to find out. More importantly, you’re going to find out how she did it. There are tons of great lessons in this interview, not only for first-time affiliates but for anyone who wants to get back to the basics to increase their affiliate sales.
Ready to turn your passions into a profitable business? Check out my new book here!
So let’s dive right into my interview with Keira Merkovsky.
Matt: Well, welcome, Keira.
Keira: Hi.Thanks for having me.
Matt: So I’m really excited about this today because we were just chatting before we came on here recording this, and you had no idea what the heck we were doing today, which is so cool. We’re going to talk about your this is your first-ever affiliate promotion, and you promoted Jason and Cecilia Hilkey’s. Happily. Family conference.
Jason and Cecilia are clients of ours, and I’m really excited about this because it’s so cool to get, like, a fresh perspective on things. Like, so many of our profiles, it’s like yeah, a lot of them, they share similar things, and they’re coming from a place of experience. I actually love that this is coming from a place of you had no idea what you were doing when you first started.
So got some cool stuff today for everybody. So tell us real quick, I mean, this was your first affiliate promotion. How long have you been building your platform before you did that?
Keira: Yeah, I started working with Cecilia and Jason, actually, in 2018, and they were helping me to learn the online world of business. That was in October of 2018, and I really didn’t start building the business until probably the middle of 2019, and then the conference was in January. So I’ve been doing my business in person for a little over ten years, but the online thing is rather new for me.
Matt: Okay, and who do you serve?
Keira: I serve mainly moms and parents in general, but mainly the audience tends to be moms of kids who are preschool or elementary-age kids. There’s a wider range, but that’s the majority of the audience.
Matt: Yeah. And so just like, in a general sense, I would imagine you’re talking about things like potty training. That would be, like, very early on, I guess.
Keira: Really…Yeah, that’d be a little earlier.
Matt: What do you talk about with your audience?
Keira: I guess I am a licensed mental health therapist. Yeah. And so in terms of the online business, I talk with them about parenting. And even deeper than that, it’s about emotional regulation and managing our own reactions and responses to our kids and then helping the kids to manage their own emotional reactions and responses as well, just to help people have a greater connection and just more enjoyable and effective lives. When you’re not ruled by your emotions, it’s a lot more enjoyable to live.
Matt: I can tell you. This is a side note that has been huge for me, just realizing that my kids don’t make a mess because they’re trying to make my life miserable.
It’s because they’re children. I don’t know if people are aware of this, but from about the age of like, one to twelve, they have no sense of what slobbery is. And I remember, like, I used to get so frustrated to Felley, and I just realized, you know what?
They don’t have a clue. Wow. Our son the other day, he’s four and a half, we had some chicken nuggets from the day before.
We’re driving home, he just decides to whip one out and start eating it. They didn’t been sitting in the car for 24 hours.
Keira: Oh My God.
Matt: It doesn’t occur to him that that’s literally, potentially deadly. It’s food, it’s there, let’s eat it and start realizing, okay, my children aren’t morons. Not taking it personally, maybe I’m the only one who’s ever felt that way, was really, really big for me.
This is a teaching moment, so I appreciate what you’re doing, and I’m looking forward to engaging more with your stuff. Even though I know your audience is typically moms, I know I can learn a lot.
So that said, you did this promotion. Talk a little bit about what attracted you to promoting this. I know you knew Jason and Cecilia, but was there something particular that you looked for in this promotion that said that’ll resonate with my audience?
Keira: Well, this was the first time I had been an affiliate, so I was really looking for any and all information that I could get in order to be successful with it.
And I really like to know how things work. I feel like everything is time or money. In essence, you can spend your time researching how to do things, or you can pay somebody who already knows how to do it to teach you.
For me, it was really enjoyable to have you tell me the ins and outs of things so that I didn’t have to go spend that time researching it and learning it on my own. And I really just wanted to know what to do and when just lay out a plan for me. And I felt like that was what you delivered, and it helped me have a better understanding of how I could be effective with the launch.
Matt: Awesome. So specifically, though, like, promoting this, you’re going to take this summit and share it with your audience. You’re promoting for the first time.
What was it about what they’re doing that’s going to resonate with my audience?
Keira: Yeah. Yes. Well, Jason and Cecilia, are changing the world by helping parents and empowering parents with tools and information to help them be the parents that they want to be. And that’s my heart and soul right there, is helping parents not only feel good about the journey and the job that they’re doing but to really enjoy the journey of parenting and thrive in it.
And I feel like when they have the tools to help them with parenting and help them deal with all the struggles that come with the internal struggles that come with parenting, that’s the success right there. So Jason and Cecilia focus on that, and I really wanted to deliver that to my audience.
Matt: Nice. Love that. So you mentioned you mentioned this training something that we do for our clients. We train their affiliates. What was your preconceived notion, but what was your like going into this? What was your view of how this was going to work from how you were going to promote it or any preconceived notions? I guess I can’t think of a better phrase. I’m going to run with that that you had about promoting things as an affiliate.
Keira: Honestly, I had no idea. So the only thing I could have come up with was post it on Facebook and Instagram and ask friends to share it. I knew email, obviously, is an option, but I didn’t necessarily know how to go about doing that in a way that would be well-received by my audience. Yeah. So Facebook and Instagram were my go-to prior to this.
Matt: Did you end up sending emails?
Keira: I did not actually end up sending emails for this particular launch. The reason being my email list was still pretty small at that point, and the fear of people jumping ship was pretty great, and of just wanted to dig in a little bit more and learn a bit more before I did the emails.
Matt: Sure. That’s a totally justifiable thing. I know when the list is small, seeing even a few people leave is like it really is. It’s like losing a pet.
Keira: It is.
Matt: It’s like, oh, 50 people left today. Whatever, you know? Yeah, exactly. Not as big of a deal.
So very cool. So, okay. Now, coming back to that, you mentioned the training that we did. We came on and we taught Jason affiliates basically how to promote. We gave them some strategies and some different tactics that they could use. And you were saying to me that you watched it and you learned a lot and you did some of the stuff, but you didn’t do all the stuff.
And of course, I shared, like, 18 things. It’s like pick and choose. Don’t do all of them. What was something I want to just park there for a minute? What was something that you did do that worked really well for you, that maybe you wouldn’t have thought to have done until that training?
Keira: In terms of that launch, I had taken some notes here.
Matt: Just for everybody watching. This was like five and a half months ago when I’m like, ‘Hey, remember?’ ‘No, I don’t.’
Keira: Right. Actually, the one thing that I do remember that I did do was the specific topics that you had given us. You’d given us an outline in terms of when to send things and different types of topics that we could use, like picking a speaker or talking about your talk, or I can’t remember all the things, but you really broke it down to things that were applicable to that conference.
And while I didn’t do that in email, I did do that on social media. So I followed that email platform, but I used social media. And for me, that was really helpful, giving me those different ideas and running with that.
Matt: So if you’re promoting a summit, what Kira was just sharing, if you’re promoting a summit, one of the best ways, because I don’t know if I said this on that training, but in a launch, when you’re promoting something that has, like, an ebook and then a video, one video, two videos, three, a webinar, there are different things. Like, I’m going to promote the ebook, and then I’m going to promote the video and then the other video, and then the webinar, and it gives you what we call ETMs excuses to mail, excuses to promote.
In a summit. It’s like, ‘The summit starts on the 20th.’ ‘The summit still starts on the 20th.’ ‘Did you hear the summit starts on the 20th?’ Like there’s nothing new.
So what we taught you and you did I love that you took that was you picked one speaker and focused on that speaker and what they’re going to talk about and a highlight about them. And then you picked a topic that was going to come up in the summit and you found different excuses to promote. So that’s awesome.
What’s one more thing that you did that worked really well for you in promoting this summit?
Keira: Honestly, I don’t think this was something we necessarily talked about, but in the training. But I did a lot of personal reach outs to people that I knew had influence with other people that were in my audience. Right?
People that are connected to me so I know a lot of people. So I would just send text messages or personal emails and let them know what was going on, and ask them to share. And they did. They shared with their audience either via email or social media. And that was one of the most successful tactics for me.
Matt: That is awesome. Yeah. So in the May 2020 backstage pass, everyone talked about that one on one reach outs and how powerful those can be. So go check that out. If you have access to that and if you don’t, reach out to us and we’ll get you access. So, Keira, I love that you did that.
That is something that a lot of people don’t do because they don’t see the big people doing that because they don’t have to. And they think maybe that they’re supposed to do what the big people do. But when you’re starting out and you’re scrappy and you’re small, a lot of that one on one reach outs can be very powerful.
So kudos for that. That’s awesome. Yeah, we teach anything about that in that training. I might have to add that actually credit will go to you, though, on that strategy. So I love that. So I’m actually going to star that there for future use, something we should definitely teach.
So what’s something that you maybe tried or that you did in this that maybe just didn’t go so well for you, that maybe you had an I don’t know, just didn’t go well in any whatever way it didn’t go well. I don’t even know what that way would be.
Keira: I don’t honestly know. I guess maybe my therapist’s mind tends to not focus on the things that didn’t go well. I honestly can’t think of anything. I just kind of went with it and was pushing through and I didn’t take anything personally in terms of if people didn’t respond when I did the one-on-one reach outs.
And I felt more confident putting myself out there on social media because it was a little bit more comfortable. So I don’t know of anything that didn’t go well. I thought all of the things that you did teach us really resonated with me and kind of opened my mind. And I did actually go back and use the email kind of layout that you had given us when I did the first online launch of my class. So I did circle back to that and found that really helpful.
Matt: Okay, we’re going to come back to that because I think that is really cool. That’s actually the third person we’ve had do one of these insider profiles that said what you just said, and I never really pressed him on it. So we’re going to come back to that.
So it sounds like in a way that this kind of helps you. You said something in there like you got past maybe a little bit of fear or uncomfortableness of reaching out and promoting. And it sounds like this just, I don’t know, opened up some stuff in you that allowed you to become better overall with your platform. Would you say that’s true or am I putting too much?
Keira: Yeah, absolutely. I’m definitely one that’s of the mindset that if you kind of lean into your fears, then that opens up doors. So I was really nervous about having it be my first affiliate launch and all of that, but I really took to heart the encouragement that you had given.
One of the things that you had said in that training was that you’re gifting something to these people, and when you gift things to them, it opens up doors and makes it easier for you to be able to sell to them later. So I kind of had that in the back of my mind when I was putting myself out there and reaching out on social media and one on one reach out.
Matt: So cool, so cool. I have a feeling that helped you in your launch, which we’ll talk about in a second. So as you were promoting, I’m just curious if you had any negative feedback from your audience at all.
Keira: No, I did not get any negative feedback and in fact, I got a lot of gratitude for sharing, which is not a surprise, but it’s always wonderful to hear.
Matt: Sure, that’s something we do hear stories occasionally of negative feedback from promoting something. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with the phrase critics math, but basically critics math says 1000 compliments plus one insult equals one insult. And I just wanted to ask that question. You didn’t have any, so you didn’t have to deal with it and I’m not trying to scare you. Eventually, you will.
Keira: Yes. And that’s okay. Cool.
Looking for some good affiliate programs to promote? Check out our recommended affiliate programs here!
Matt: So I was going to ask you how you dealt with it, but since you didn’t have any, we’re just going to celebrate that you didn’t have any. Right on. So let’s come back to how this set you up kind of for your launch. First of all, when was your launch?
Matt: It was in okay, what month? Are we in?
Keira: It was in March.
Matt: Okay, so two months later, roughly, what was the launch for?
Keira: It was for an online parenting class.
Matt: Okay, so how did the experience promoting something as an affiliate, you mentioned a specific thing that we’ll talk about, but how did that set you up for your own launch? Just from various standpoints?
Keira: I think the main thing is it had given me experience reaching out to people, as I said, social media and personal reach outs with some of those fears initially and those insecurities. And since I had gotten such feedback for sharing, that gave me more courage as well. And then when it came to my own launch, I was proud of what I was offering, and just like I was with Jason and Cecilia’s Summit, and so I was able to use that email strategy that you had given us, and I wasn’t as worried about people unsubscribing or having anything negative to say. So I don’t know if that answers your question.
Matt: Yeah, it does. I mean, a lot of it sounds like was the mindset.
Keira: Yes. There you go.
Matt: Okay, so was there a specific strategy, though, just from I’m going to just go pure marketing strategy you got either from something I taught in the training or just your own experience or watching Jason and Cecilia that helped you in your own promotion.
Keira: The biggest thing was thinking about having a plan in terms of the emails and having the topics be relevant to what people wanted to hear, but also selling the course. And so it wasn’t all about selling. It had valuable content in there with each of those emails, but also the frequency with which those emails were sent and then the follow-up on those.
Specifically, I know you had taught us in that training to go to the ones that email that hadn’t been opened and resent those and change certain tweaks, certain things in the subject line and then each paragraph. So that was very useful. And again, the outline of knowing when to send emails and not fearing the unsubscribes.
Matt: Yeah.
So I’m going to take a moment to teach that real quick since you touched on it. I had no intention of this, but I think it’s powerful, and maybe something I say will serve as a reminder for you. So the basic strategy there, guys, is to make sure that you are mailing your unopens.
Typically, if we’re talking about a summit, in this particular case, it’s all about the summit. You start promoting seven to ten days before the summit. And like we talked about, there’s not really a whole lot that changes.
You’re promoting the same thing. So you got to focus on who you mail to. You want to mail to those who haven’t opened or engaged with the content yet. And one of the easiest ways to do that is about two to four days later, sending the exact same email a second time. Then you don’t have to.
I know how hard it is to write an email. It takes me a half hour to write a good email, sometimes longer. That’s a lot of time. I don’t have a lot of time, so I take the same email.
But what you do is you tweak one little thing in the subject line and then one little thing in each paragraph. It can be as simple as changing the word awesome to amazing. It can be as simple as changing a period to an ellipse, changing a dash to a colon, or one change in each paragraph.
There is evidence to suggest you don’t have to change something in every paragraph, but we do just to be safe, because we don’t really know Gmail’s algorithm. And Gmail is like 70% of email now. And so you do that.
You send it. The reason you do that is it doesn’t thread the conversation. Most people thread their conversations in Gmail. I personally don’t, because it annoys the crap out of me. That’s a whole different story. And so, yeah, that’s how you can avoid that threading without having to rewrite the whole email.
Usually, we can tweak an email in 90 seconds, two minutes tops, and you get a whole new email for basically two minutes of time. So use that strategy, which is awesome, I think. Would I be right in saying that just the fact that you had promoted anything, whether it had been the summit or something else a couple of months before, definitely showed you that your audience wasn’t going to, like, revolt?
Would I be right in saying, and I know I’m right in saying this just like the mechanics of promoting something just make it a lot easier when it came to your own launch. Like having done it kind of like practice.
Keira: 100% right. ‘Done is better than perfect’ is one of the sayings that constantly goes through my mind when I’m doing this online business.
Because since it’s all new. Pretty much everything I do is a first-time sort of thing at this point. So the fact that I had done the launch with Jason and Cecilia had given me a boost of confidence.
It had given me that experience, and it absolutely made my own launch easier in that sense. And I’m getting ready to do another launch at the end of this month and just checking in on my level of fear about that or nervousness. It’s so much less than it was.
Yes. And so just getting things done and doing it and having that experience, as you said, it has so much value.
Matt: Yeah. And you’re promoting somebody else’s summit, so the risk was really low. You didn’t have to create a product. You didn’t have to oh, my audience didn’t like that.
You learned some stuff. That’s what we teach. It’s like, hey, go practice on other people’s stuff, not yours. Your course is your baby. It’s taking a decade-plus of knowledge and experience and putting it into an online course. Like, it’s literally your baby. And then if you don’t know how to market it, that can really suck. I love that you use this as a springboard.
So, Keira, last couple of questions here. If you could give somebody who’s kind of where you were back when Jason and Cecilia first approached you about promoting, they have a small list, a small following. They’re right where you were.
I mean, we’ll just say, like, December, what would you tell them?
Keira: I would say just jump in, just give it a try and see what happens, and learn. Take the good and leave the bad. Learn from the bad, and then let go and take the good and tweak it and move forward. Just get better and better. The more you do, the better you get. And the fear of what might happen doesn’t do you any good. It just holds you back. So jump in.
That’s what I would tell them.
Matt: Love it. Last question here. I know you had some people who signed up for Jason and Cecilia’s all-access pass, and you had some of your people go deeper with them. Have you heard from any of them? And if so, what’s been kind of the coolest story that you’ve heard so far?
Keira: Have I heard from any of the people that watched the summit that they did? Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Yes. I had close friends. I had a family. I had complete strangers. Reach out to me and thank me for sharing the summit and letting me know just specific stories about how it has been. Some of you have said life-changing for them because it shifted the way that they perceived their role as a parent.
Just that small shift, how that had a major impact on their relationship with their child. And I think just parents are hungry for information, and they were very grateful to have been given that summit and all the information that was in it. Yes, I had great feedback from it all around.
Matt: It’s really cool.
Keira: It really fed my fire or fueled the fire to make me want to continue serving parents and helping them to enjoy the journey.
Matt: I love that. It’s a beautiful thing when you can do something like that that serves you. Clearly, we all know the benefits of affiliate marketing. You get to make money without creating your product, and that’s great.
But you also were able to serve a lot of people and there’s a lot of families. I don’t know if you know Dana Abraham.
Keira: Yes.
Matt: I helped Dana out last fall with her launch. And yeah, I remember one of the things I’ve battled with over really over the last ten years is, does my work matter?
Is it really like doing anything of significance? Right? We all want to have significance I’ve kind of reached that point once I hit my thirty s, I was like, I’ve made enough money, I just want to have significance.
And I was like, I had this revelation about a week after her launch. She helps parents who are basically called ‘Calm the Chaos’, as you know, and you can imagine, the name pretty much explains what she does. And we had a bedtime.
It was one of those perfect bedtimes. The kids went to bed, we had a hug. It was a nice pace. The kids brushed their teeth, went to the bathroom, put them to bed. They said I love you one last time. It was like literally out of a movie, right? And I remember walking down the stairs. I got halfway down the stairs and this thought hit me. I was like, oh my gosh, that’s what most of our bedtimes are like.
This is like so cool. And then it hit me as I continued down the stairs, that we had helped some of her affiliates who previously had made like zero, one or two sales make 30, 40, 50 sales. And I was just doing the quick math.
I was like, well, if I help that person make an extra 35 sales, I was like, I helped her affiliates make an extra 200 sales. That’s potentially 200 families who tonight are having the same experience. I just had that three weeks ago. Their bedtime was like, somebody’s going to die. It was total chaos and they were having a peaceful back time. And I was like, I guess what I do matters.
That was like a cool revelation for me that I could have that kind of impact and it’s way down the line. I helped the affiliate who sold Dana’s product, who helped them, who is now helping their kids, and I was like, oh my gosh, that’s really cool. And that’s the beauty of affiliate marketing, is you’re able to help people that you won’t even be the one who helps them, it’ll be somebody else, but possibly even somebody else.
And it’s really cool. So here. I just want to thank you. I want to congratulate you and acknowledge you. I mean, it’s so cool that you decided to jump into my world, so to speak. I love this stuff.
You sleep and breathe it, and it’s just so cool to hear from somebody who’s new to it. Congratulations on your own launch, which is just awesome.
Keira: Thank you. Thank you. I really enjoyed the training that you did, and I enjoyed being here with you today, so I appreciate it. Thank you.
And so, for those watching who are moms and they’re interested in learning a little bit more about you, where can they find you, Keira?
Keira: You can go to my website, it’s www.relationshipcubed.com just spelled out, and that’s probably the best place to find me. And then from there, you can connect with me on social media.
Matt: Awesome. Where at some point, she will promote an affiliate offer to you.
Keira: Looking forward to it.
Matt: Awesome. Well. Thank you, Keira.
Keira: Thank you, Matt.
Want to learn how to make passive affiliate income from product review posts? Get my free guide on how to write a review post that ranks and converts and learn how we bring in more than $10,000 every single month in passive affiliate income! Get it here!
So, as always, I would love to hear from you about your biggest takeaway from my conversation with Keira. Text me anytime and I’ll make sure to share these with Keira. By the way, I know she’d love to hear what you got from this interview. Text me at 260-217-4619. I would love to hear from you.
We got links to everything we talked about in the show notes. If you want to connect with Kira, we’ve got links to her Facebook and her sites. You can go check out her stuff if you’re like so many, you have kids and your mom and you want to be a better mom. Keira is the go-to person for that, at least that I know.
I’ve also got links for your affiliate launch, Coach, which is at your affiliatelaunchcoach.com. You can check out how to get involved with that and get the kind of result Jason and Cecilia got. We’re talking up nearly five times increase from a little bit over 20,000 to over 100,000 attendees. Those are the kind of results we get for our clients, Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi, we helped their team last year.
They did their biggest launch ever. Jeff Walker did his second biggest launch ever, his biggest one. And I think eleven or twelve years, those are the kinds of results we get for clients and so go check that out Youraffiliatelaunchcoach.com. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well. And lastly, make sure you hit subscribe because, in the next episode, we’re going to talk about how to promote challenges as an affiliate. Challenges are so freaking hot right now, and there’s a good reason for it.
Like, they’re easy to promote. They offer massive value to your audience. They convert insanely high. So we’re going to take a deep dive next week into why challenges work and share some of the strategies that we’ve got. We’ve run a couple of challenges. I say a couple, we’ve run like a dozen now ourselves.
And for clients, we’ve worked with the master of Challenges, Pedro Adao, and we’re going to talk about how to promote challenges. Max out those affiliate commissions when you’re promoting them, so make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss that episode. I’ll see you then.
The post How to Rock Your First Affiliate Promotion: Keira Merkovsky Case Study appeared first on .
Promoting evergreen affiliate offers can be a challenge because there is no urgency. When a product is available 24/7, 365 it can sometimes be hard for affiliates to put together a solid promotion plan and really get people excited. Today, I shared exactly how we did than in one of our evergreen promotions and how you can build excitement, buzz, and even urgency in your evergreen promotions.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Build Strong Relationships with Your Affiliates
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 Promote An Evergreen Affiliate Offer In Just ONE WeekPromoting Evergreen affiliate offers can be a challenge because there’s no urgency. When a product is available 24/7-365. It can sometimes be hard for affiliates to put together a solid promotion plan and really get people excited.
So today I’m sharing exactly how we did that in one of our Evergreen promotions recently, and how you can build excitement, buzz, and even urgency into your Evergreen affiliate promotions. So the good part of an Evergreen affiliate promotion, it’s available 24/7-365, right? These are most products.
The good part about them is they’re always available. You can do things like promote it on your resources page. You can do things like promote it on your podcast, and if somebody listens to it a year from now, it’s not a big deal.
You can promote it on YouTube and it’s going to be there when somebody watches that video 17 months from now. It allows you to put it into your autoresponder and things like that. That’s the good thing about an Evergreen affiliate promotion.
The other good thing is you can decide at any moment to do a hard push for something like that. You can do a promotion, a week long promotion or a five day promotion or whatever. And this week we’re talking about a week long promotion, just as an example.
But the problem with Evergreen is that it’s always available. It’s available 24/7-365 and so there’s no urgency, there’s no deadline. And so I want to talk today about the solution to that.
And the solution ultimately to that is to promote in a confined period of time. And so today I’m going to show you how to do that. I’m going to share some tips on how to do that today.
This was actually a lesson that we did for our Insiders club a couple of years ago, but we wanted to open up to the public. I had Robby Miles come on and we talked about a promotion that we were in the midst of. And this is something where we took a deep dive into how we promoted it.
And I share how you can apply these principles to your Evergreen affiliate promotions. And actually, how do we do an Evergreen affiliate promotion in a confined period of time? So how do we create that launch like atmosphere, those positive to launches where there’s momentum and there’s all these things and there’s a deadline, there’s urgency?
How do we apply that to an Evergreen promo? That’s what we’re talking about today. Now, I want to say if you’re an affiliate manager, you’re going, this is it for me, this is for affiliates.
I’m running an affiliate program. I’m not going to promote anything as an affiliate. Well, listen up.
And share this with your affiliates. If you have an Evergreen program, share this episode with your affiliates. All right?
So make sure you do that. Don’t just dismiss this because it’s not for you. So listen up.
I’m going to share today how to do an affiliate promotion, an Evergreen affiliate promotion in about a week’s time frame. I’m joined again by Robby Miles, and we are going to talk today about how to promote an Evergreen product, but in a defined period of time, specifically about a week. And this is all coming about because that’s exactly what we’re in the process of doing now.
We are promoting a product that’s available 24/7-365, and we’re promoting it in a one-week period. So we’re treating it kind of like a launch. And I’ve got six strategies for you today to help you to do that.
Matt: So. Robby, Welcome, my friend.
Robby: Yeah, this is awesome. This is a promo we’ve been looking forward to for a while, and now we get to actually pull it off.
Matt: Yeah. So for those of you who don’t know, we’re recording this in early August 2021. And this is a promo that was supposed to have happened last week, but about two weeks before that, I went through about with COVID and it laid me out for a few weeks. And just now getting back to things.
So we’re re-planing this launch. You kind of get to be a part of us planning this launch as we think through. What are the things that we need to do what are the six things that we need to do to make sure that this promotion is a success?
And so I’m going to be looking at my notes here. These are the notes that we’re going to use kind of as we think through this promotion. And so the first thing, which we already did, is you need to pick a seven day period.
An eight-day period could be a 6 to 9, 10 day period to promote. In our case, we picked an exact one week period to promote. Now, we ended up having to move it, and that happens sometimes.
I think we had to move it back, what, two weeks, three weeks, Robbie, which you’ll see part of the strategy, why we had to move it when we get to number two. But that’s the first thing, is pick a week and pick ten days, nine days, whatever it is. Pick a start date.
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Pick an end date. Now, if your product is a product that your audience is very dependent upon, they’re very sensitive to money, they’re employed full time, typically, they’re not entrepreneurs, then this is a product where you probably want to finish on a Friday. Because we studied it, we know that 42%, at least in America, 42% of the population is paid on any given Friday.
So 42% of your potential audience, if they’re full-time employees, they’re like the typical American. They don’t have $5,000 just lying around, thousands of dollars lying around. They’re getting paid on that Friday, and that’s a big deal from them from a cash flow standpoint.
And we all know the stories like, don’t go to the bank at 05:00 on a Friday. We make that mistake. We’re entrepreneurs.
We can go to the bank anytime we want. And anytime we inevitably go on a Friday, my wife’s like the line is 45 minutes long just to deposit our whatever check we got from a client. And it’s like, I’m turning around, I’m coming home.
I’ll just do this Tuesday afternoon or something because we forget. But that’s the rhythm. And so talk about it with the merchant, talk about it with the affiliate manager.
What is the best day for this thing to end? Do they find better success on Fridays? Do they find better success on Sundays or Tuesdays or whatever?
If your audience is less sensitive to cash flow, Thursday works great. If your audience is entrepreneurs, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays work great. But talk to them and also use your own experience to find that start date and then back up from there.
So with our promotion, I forget off the top of my head what day of the week we’re closing, but we picked the day that we’re closing and then we just backed it up. Actually, I think it is a Friday because we’re promoting Thursday through Friday, which leads into number two here in a second. But just pick that time and then back it up.
So for us, one of the key things was number two, which is with an evergreen promote, just like a launch, you want to warm up your audience. And so for us, part of that warm-up was making sure that we interviewed Joe Fier, who’s the if you read last month’s ATM report, then you should go back and read that. By the way, it’s all about monetizing a podcast.
You got introduced to Joe. But we wanted to interview Joe about how to start and scale and monetize a podcast. Well, we only do our live lessons.
We do those on Thursdays. When you’re watching this, you probably have noticed we haven’t done one in a while again, because I was sick. But we do those on Thursday.
So for us, that was one of the defining factors, was we’re going to start this warm up on this Thursday. So that looks like Thursday we do the Live, Saturday we mail to the replay.
And so those are kind of the baked in times there. So for us, that means the promotion starts on Sunday. We’ve introduced.
We’ll probably figure out, I don’t know what we’ve got planning for Friday, but we’ll probably figure out something along the lines of helping to warm up the audience. We’ve already technically started with the ATM report for you guys, but that’s what you want to do there, is you want to warm up your audience and I want to share some ways that you can do that. First of all, just make sure that you’re engaging your audience.
If you’re like, I’m going to do this big promo for this Evergreen product in two weeks. But for the next two weeks, you’re not keeping your audience engaged. Just in general.
That’s not good. You cannot come out this cold, Robby, I know you have some experience kind of coming in cold to some promos and it’s hard.
Robby: I’ve done this a couple of times with my own personal list.
I’ve let it go dry and then I’ll come back and it’s like we did a promotion with Alan Thomas. He’s like, ‘Hey, let’s do this, we can do it next week. ‘
And I was like, I haven’t emailed my list in like two months. I need to email them first and just get them thinking, first of all, that I exist again, and then second of all, that I’m leading them toward what his offer was finally going to be. And for me, that offer was to join the webinar.
But I had to start framing that at least two, or three weeks early and get them familiar with the rhythm again. And then the promotion, we got people in the door, got people to the webinar, and then Alan took it from there. And again, an Evergreen-type offer.
I’ve done the same with different review posts and stuff that I’ve mailed to where it’s like, well, let’s lead up to this reasons why you might be interested in this topic and then release the review post. So there’s a couple of different angles there that to use to warm up.
Matt: Yeah. So if you haven’t if you’re not keeping your audience engaged, if you are keeping your audience engaged, well, then just keep doing what you’re doing. Lean into more of the next six that I’m going to share to warm up your audience. But if you haven’t been like Robby just said, you just got to remind them again and reintroduce yourself.
Just give them valuable content with no financial call to action. Nothing to do on their part other than to read the content or listen to the content or watch the content.
You just want to pour in, build up some of that reciprocity. So make sure you’re engaging your audience. Start to ramp that up.
Maybe you consistently only do once a week. You’re going to go heavy as we’ll talk about in number three. So you need to ramp that up a little bit, starting a couple of weeks before the promo.
Maybe go send a second email that week or even a third, release a second and third piece of content and kind of bridge that. Okay, well, I normally just email once a week, and now I’m going to email six or seven times in a week. You want to bridge that with two or three.
The second way you can warm up your audience is just to mention people that you’re promoting. Mention the product, mention the concept, talk about just the concept in general. So in your case, Robby, you mentioned Alan Thomas, you’re promoting it’s a weight loss offer, and you’re tying that into productivity.
So you could be talking about fitness, talking about how fitness ties into productivity, talking about how studies show that if you’re a six foot tall man and you weigh 320 pounds, you are less productive than a six foot tall man who weighs 230 pounds. And tie that in, get your audience thinking about that.
Third thing you can do is to quote the person. So if you’re promoting something where there’s a face to the program, a face to the product, and most of the time there is in the digital world, whether it be a course or a membership, but even like, physical products. If I was going to promote my planner, my full focus planner created by Michael Hyatt. Ain’t no, Michael didn’t design the planner.
He didn’t whittle the tree down to the paper and create the product, but he’s the face of the company. So I would start quoting him about planners and productivity and get my audience thinking about it. The quotes don’t even have to be related to the topic.
If I were promoting Stu McLaren’s tribe course, I might just quote him one of his quotes. I actually quoted him in my book, in the chapter on Monetization. The more money you make, the more impact you can have.
What does that have to do with memberships? In theory? Literally nothing.
Now, I could certainly make it with that, but when you see that quote from Stu McLaren, the more money you make, the more impact you have. You don’t suddenly go, membership sites. You’re not even thinking about membership sites.
But I introduced you to Stu McLaren, and that’s important. You can link to content from the person. So just maybe linking to a blog post that they wrote or a podcast episode they did, or a Facebook post, a Facebook Live, a video they released, something like that, just linking to their content.
It could be linking to an article that they were mentioned in. So maybe they had a Forbes article written about them three months ago. And you link to that.
Well, you’re introducing your audience to the person and the topic and the concept, but you’re also kind of that Forbes article is like spreading some magic authority dust on them because you’re basically saying, hey, this Joe was in Forbes magazine, he must be legit, right? Fifth is just talking about the topic. We talked about this in the engaging thing, but just going more into that specific topic.
It could be as simple as promoting Joe. Well, the reason why we did the ATM report last month or this month. Yeah, this month, sorry.
The reason we did the 80 I wrote it last month. That’s why I was like, wait, the reason we released that to you guys this month was very specifically to get our AIM members thinking about podcasts and how they can start and scale and monetize a podcast. And so, of course, you guys are our top level, right?
You’re in our top 1% of our entire list. So we want you to be thinking about it first. And we’re creating demand with you to potentially want to buy Joe and Matt’s course all about podcasting and join their membership.
All about podcasting. So just getting you thinking about that, thinking about the topic of podcasting is important. Of course you can do that with your whole audience as well.
And we have been the 6th thing you can do is to find a student, to find a customer, somebody who’s purchased the product that you’re going to be promoting. Interview them. Like you may not be able to get Joe if you’re promoting Joe, you may not be able to get Joe or Matt.
I don’t know their schedule, right? Joe and Matt and I are really good friends. So I was like texting like, hey, let’s do a Facebook Live.
Cool, we’ll make it work. Boom, done. You may not be able to do that, so go find a student.
If there’s a Facebook group for students, if there’s a course directory, sometimes there’s like a student directory if it’s a product and there is no Facebook group, maybe go on Facebook and post to your friends and just say, any of my friends. I’m just going to make something up. The Switch Pod here, it’s like the thing we go back to any of my friends every time I know well because it’s always on my desk.
‘Any of my friends use the Switch Pod’ and a couple of them. ‘Yeah, I love it. ‘
‘Hey, can I hear you about how you love mine? ‘ Yeah, I know Robby, I think you got one right about the same time I did.
I remember we were at LaunchCon and we were like going around, we’ve got our Switch Pod. We’re like looking for excuses to use it. Like, ‘hey, just want to use my Switch pod. Is it super cool? ‘
Robby: if I don’t have direct access to Pat Flynn but I know you, and I know Matt uses this SwitchPod, and I could interview you. ‘Hey, tell me about this switch pod. ‘ Right?
Matt: It feels good in my hand. It is cold, though, right? Now, that’s the one downside I found to that.
Is it cold or hot? The metal is very sensitive to temperature. So here’s my honest review of the SwitchPod is the only downside.
Literally, there are two downsides. This thing comes off a little sticky thing. I have to periodically reapply superglue there.
And it’s very sensitive to temperature. So that’s why you have the box. And anyway, we got way off track here.
Yeah. But we’ll put a link to the switch pod, by the way, below the video, if you’re interested in grabbing one, because it really is probably the greatest. And it does that little thing.
It just goes right into a tripod. You can use it. But it’s also I’ve actually never used it as a tripod.
I’ve only used it as a handheld. But you could interview somebody who’s used the product, and then the last thing you could do is to create a little mini-course. All right, so if you create a mini course, like maybe a three-day email series, again, just getting people thinking about it, getting them some sort of tangible result.
So, Joe, they teach you how to start, grow, and scale and monetize a podcast, right? Well, could you do a mini course just getting them to maybe think about their podcast topic? Maybe a course that gives them some confidence in public speaking.
It shows them how to outline a podcast episode. All right. Maybe this shows them what equipment they need so they could just buy the stuff.
So if you’ve already got the microphone and the boom mic stand and the software, well, then a course comes along about how to do these things. You are much more likely to buy said course if you’ve already made progress. It’s right out of I know you know this because you’ve got the new edition of Robert Childini’s book Influence.
One of the things in the original book he talks about is like, I think it’s an influence. It might be in the book. Yes.
Where he talks about that when they give those reward cards for car washes. And when they studied this, they had one group they gave them the reward card and they gave them the first stamp because they got one they got a car wash that day. But they had another group that they actually gave a second stamp to just as like, thank you for getting it.
They gave them a second stamp. Now, over the course of the next six months, which group do we think had the most car washes? And it was like the first group averaged something like 3. 7 car washes. The second group averaged 5. 8. So by giving them one free car wash, effectively, because it was like, if you get ten, you get a free car wash. So they gave them one 10th of a free car wash.
They got 2. 1 or whatever, more car washes out of them. That’s a 20 X return on the investment of clicking that extra one because they’d made more progress. So we want to help our audience get progress. So, number one, pick a week or some period of time to promote.
Number two, warm your audience up. Number three, go all in. All right.
This very short period of time yeah, it’s evergreen. It’s not a once-a-year launch. If this promo doesn’t go great, you can promote it again in three months.
Sure, all those are true, but we’re going to go all in and we’re going to treat this like a launch. So what that means is, if you’re promoting it for seven days, you want to send seven emails, you want to promote it on all your mediums. If there’s a free entry point, if you’re promoting some sort of a thing that has a free webinar or something like that, maybe as the entry point, you want to promote that on social media.
Like four or five tweets a day. That’s not very many, actually. We’ve done a whole episode, a whole thing on social media with Jeff Bullas on the podcast, we’ll link to that.
He talks about how, I mean, he tweets 24 hours 15 minutes, 96 tweets a day, because the shelf life of a tweet is between ten and 20 minutes. So if you tweet the same offer out four or five, six times in a day, your audience is not going to be upset by it. Just word the tweets differently.
But promote on FaceBook Daily, you can do four Facebook posts a day. It’s pretty accepted. If one of them is this thing for seven days, that’s cool.
Talk about it on your podcast. Do a Facebook Live, going back to interview people about it. Do a live cast for maybe you bring on three or four students and you go live for a couple of hours and talk about it.
Or interview the creator if you can.
But just go all in. All the mediums that you have, every social media channel, your podcast, your email list, do a couple of blog posts about it, every medium that you have, and then make sure that every day for this, whatever defined, short defined period of time you’re emailing, you’re promoting, and you’re going all in. Like I said, just treat it like it’s your own.
Launch plan the warm-up and plan the promotion like it’s your own. So that requires you to take a little bit of time with this promotion. We’re now, I don’t know, we’re what?
Like about two weeks-ish a little bit less than two weeks from the actual week-and-a-half promo. And I’m starting to think about, okay, what are the themes? I’ve already read the swipe copy that Joe and his team sent and I’m starting to think, okay, because the way I use swipe copy is not like, oh, I’ll just go copy-paste.
Now I’m already starting to think, okay, is there some sort of a story from my past? Is there an angle? I have one in mind, like a really funny story from like 20 some odd years ago at a junior golf tournament, actually, 25 years ago.
And I’m like, okay, I see how that could tie in. So then I’m thinking, okay, what’s been my experience with podcasting? And I’ve already made a list.
I’ve got some notes about the time that Joe and Matt and I met for the first time at Rich Sheffern’s house and how we were talking there. And then when the background I’m not going to give it all away, but this whole thing happened in the background and how when we were standing there eating, I was eating like, I had a plate of fruit and I laughed so hard that I shot a blueberry out of my mouth. And the whole thing, it was like in slow motion.
This blueberry rolled down the floor and we’re watching, like, nobody step on it and squish blueberry all over Rich Shepherd’s hardwood floors. It was this whole thing. It’s a funny story about the first time we met and then hanging out at Mark Ford’s bar and just getting to know these guys and then being on their podcast.
Like all these things. I’m like, okay, make sure I talk about that. And I’m going through it.
I call it taking inventory. I’m just taking inventory so that I can remember all the things that have happened in our relationship or in my use of the product. Maybe I don’t have a relationship with the person.
I’m trying to think of something that I bought that I don’t have a relationship with. Okay, I don’t have a relationship with the creator of this microphone, but it’s kind of weird. Like, I got the microphone in the box and I hooked it up.
I don’t know. But there are certain things that we’ve bought that I don’t have a relationship with the person. So I think about, okay, what’s been my experience?
Is there a funny story related to the use of this product? I don’t even know what it is. Before I knew Jeff Walker, I’d purchased PLF.
And I remember the funny story there is when I bought PLF, I didn’t use it for seven months or eight months, and then I learned how to use a course properly because of my experience with PLF. My story about sitting in the hotel room buying PLF, like, nervous to buy, and my fingers hovering over the submit button, and I wouldn’t do. And I got up and paste around.
It was a $2,000 purchase. And I got up and paste around, and then I went over and how I literally pressed the submit button, like, five minutes before the deadline, went to bed. Didn’t even check to see if it went through.
And in my mind, I had decided, Robby, that if for some reason the order didn’t go through, my credit card didn’t work. My debit card, but my debit card didn’t work. Didn’t get the confirmation email.
The Internet went down, the servers broke. That it was God’s way of telling me, you’re not supposed to buy this course. That was what I decided.
That’s a great story. So I need to make sure anytime I’m promoting PLF even, of course, I have the inventory just all there, but I go through and just rethink through what’s that stuff that’s treating it like your own launch.
Robby: To a certain degree there you already kind of went into number four of what? And I’m going to give it away. What differentiates your promotion from somebody else’s promotion? The fact that you have all these personal stories.
The fact that you’re taking that inventory and you’re able to communicate that to your audience. That is something that’s going to differentiate you. So I know you’ve got other ways to differentiate, but just your stories in and of themselves, communicate and connect in a way that nobody else can.
Matt: That’s a great point. I mean, that really is part of it.
Robby: Yeah.
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Matt: Ties right into number four. Just thinking of those ways that you can differentiate. Could you white-label a course?
The course is named I’m just going to make one up. The course is named How to Paint with Watercolors. Could you rename it Watercolor Mastery with that person?
Is that something that you could do? And then it’s effectively just the same thing? Or maybe it’s not renaming the course.
Maybe they have a workshop, a free workshop. Could you rename the free workshop? Because that’s just something that makes it a little bit different so that it’s not the same thing that everybody else is offering.
Because you’re not the only one promoting this. Maybe even you’re not the only one promoting this at the same time. But maybe somebody else promoted it just last week.
So maybe they have to paint with watercolors Master class and you have the Watercolor Mastery Workshop. I don’t know, just thought, like, could you work with the product creator, the affiliate manager, on something like that? I know that we used to do these free workshops with the guitar company where I ran their affiliate program about eleven years ago.
We had about five names that we would cycle through. So, yeah, I mean, you were 20%. We would just cycle through those things so you didn’t have to ask us.
We would just kind of be like, hey, which one of these works best for your audience? Pick one. So there was one-fifth as many people promoting that same thing roughly.
You could white label the workshop, white label the webinar, white label whatever the livecast. Is there something you can do to differentiate? Could it be that you do a livecast, maybe again, that’s kind of treating it like a launch.
Typically, product creators will only do that as a part of a launch, but you’re going to host it. So here on maybe the second to last day, you’re going to host a live cast, and you’re going to ask the affiliate manager, the product creator, hey, do you have a few students maybe that I could interview? Could you come on maybe the last 30 minutes?
We’re going to do a two-and-a-half-hour live cast and answer a bunch of questions, have some students on, give away some stuff, et cetera, et cetera. Right? This is something that you can do that nobody else or very few other people are doing.
There are a million different ways you could differentiate yourself. So just think through when you’re planning, what is it I could do that just makes this different than the other? Let’s just say they have 35 affiliates promoting them every year.
What’s something different? What’s something little, even, that you could do a lot of. It could go back to what we sort of just talked about in number three with the stories.
Nobody else has the story that I know of, of their finger hovering in a hotel room and thinking that God’s going to tell them they shouldn’t have bought it. Nobody else has the story of not using the course for eight months and then finally going through it. Nobody else has the angle of teaching you how to go through the course.
These are all things that differentiate my promotion from everyone else’s. And you really want to look for those ways. Number five, you got to have some scarcity.
Now, number five and number six tie in together. We’re going to talk about how to create bonuses in number six. But number five, that scarcity is important.
There has to be something that goes away at the end of this week or eight or nine or whatever day period of time.
Robby: There has to be an evergreen offer. This is a complaint we get all the time.
Like, how do you say you can’t get this tomorrow? You have to buy today when they can buy it tomorrow for the same price.
Matt: Yeah, so you bring up the price there. One of the things is to get an exclusive discount. It’s $1,000 product, give my audience a $200 discount, $100 discount for this period of time that goes away.
And in fact, the messaging you’re going to use in the last day is, why pay more? You can get it tomorrow, but you’re going to pay $200 more. Why would you do that?
What will be the reason to pay more? I hate money. I just want to pay more.
I really like Joe Fier. I just want to give him an extra $200. I like Joe, and I don’t want to give him $200 if I don’t have to.
What is some sort of an angle? And it ties in with bonuses when we’ll talk about the specifics. But it could be that you have bonuses that go along with it.
Maybe they have bonuses that go along with it. Maybe you work together to create bonuses, so maybe the bonuses so and so let’s say you’re promoting a product on I’ll go back to the watercolor thing. So you and the product creator are going to do a 1 hour exclusive workshop to replicate in watercolor one of your famous paintings that your audience would know.
Who else can offer that? Who else can possibly offer a bonus like that? A live workshop with you and this watercolor instructor showing how to create this replication of one of your oil paintings.
I’m just using this as an example. Right? That would be amazing.
Or I know this is not an evergreen thing, but we did a bonus with Stu McLaren where we did a two-hour training with he, and I talking about how to promote memberships with affiliates. He was an affiliate manager, like, more than a decade ago.
So he has that background. So we get to hear from him. That’s something like an ex affiliate manager and a current affiliate manager talking about affiliate management, that’s a pretty darn cool bonus.
If I see so myself. Like that two hour video, I mean, if I were just charging money to access it, it’s not available. I would charge $1,000 for that a heartbeat.
It’s a master class on how to run an affiliate program for memberships and great bonus. Is there something you could do like that something that you can add that is exclusive to this period of time? And so, yeah, the $1,000 course is available tomorrow.
And you acknowledge that. That’s the thing is don’t try to act like it’s not. You’re going to get in trouble for that.
And I don’t mean like legally, your audience is going to find out. They’re going to hate you and it’s just don’t be that person, but tell them you can get this course tomorrow, but you’re not going to get this. This and this bonus, those are going to go away tonight at midnight.
So it creates that scarcity. So let’s talk about bonuses real quick. When you’re putting together this bonus package, there’s a lot of talk out there like, well, the bonuses don’t actually move people.
That’s not true. Bonuses absolutely do move people to buy. There’s an exclusivity that you just cannot replicate with other things.
But there’s also like this belief, well, it’s $1,000 course. I have to create a $12,000 bonus package. No, you don’t.
Thousand, 1000, $502,000 bonus package. Even a $500 to $750 bonus package will move the needle. Okay, so number one, use what you have.
If you have a mini course, if you have some sort of a product that you could offer that complements the product that you’re promoting, offer it. Offer it. So we have an unreleased, not really even a product.
We just did some stuff in the past about podcasting. We’re going to offer that as a bonus for this course. We did a behind the scenes thing a while back.
I don’t even remember who it was available to, but it wasn’t very many people about how we launched our podcast. We’re just going to give that as a bonus. But we also have some products like how to plan a promotion and things like that, that we can offer as bonuses to people who buy pod hacker through us.
So if you can’t use what you have, if at all possible, don’t create anything. We’re not going to do this for this promotion just because of my schedule. But one of the best things that you can do is to just offer to go through the course with them or to offer if it’s like, if it’s a physical product doing almost like a course that’s taught live over the course of, say, four weeks or four weeks of Q and A time.
So let’s say it’s an eight week course, and they deliver it weekly. Then every Friday at 03:00 P. m., we’re going to get together for an hour and I’m going to answer your questions, and we’re going to talk through what we learned that week. You don’t have to create anything on the front end.
All you have to do we did this with PLF Robby, a few years ago, where we just literally in fact, I’ve got one of the things. I was going through some notes the other day. I just went through and shared my notes from PLF.
So literally it was like, here’s what I learned about this. Blah, blah, blah. I did this.
Oh, okay. So here’s how we applied this to our launch. So now it’s a practical thing.
Here’s what we learned about this. And then he said this, but then I applied it in this way, and I kind of altered that. Here’s this I just went through my notes and then answered questions.
Robby: The other thing here is there’s a certain like, people will pay for accountability. And if you’re like, hey, I’m going to go through this with you, they’re like, oh, that means that instead of just buying something else and not using it, I’m actually going to use it because Matt’s there making sure I do it.
Matt: Yeah, you ask what your biggest takeaway is and they’re like.. . .oh. . .
Robby: I didn’t do the lesson yet.
Matt: Well, you’re not going to do that next week because you’re an adult who feels bad about that. So that’s valuable.
Like you said, accountability is just crazy valuable. And then also you get 15 people, or even just ten people on a zoom, and each of them spends two minutes sharing their big takeaway and how they’re applying it to their business. And you’re learning from that.
Like Gwyn Moresco calls. That sideways learning.
You’re learning from other people sharing their stuff. You could do that. Let’s just say you did a 45 minutes for eight weeks and you showed up and let’s say you had 15 people and you gave everybody a minute and a half to two minutes to share their biggest takeaway.
Well, that’s 30 minutes. And then you did 15 minutes of Q and A. You don’t have to do anything but the value to them.
What’s one of those sessions worth? I would say $150 times eight weeks. It’s a one $200 bonus.
Boom. If you want to make it a number and call it a thousand.
Robby: That’s just not marketing math either.
Matt: That is worth to them.
Robby: Exactly. The value is actually there.
Think about it. They’re getting a somewhat private mastermind for exactly what they’re getting, or even one $200. Wow, that’s a steal, actually.
Matt: Well, and it’s enhancing their learning because I just forked over $1,000, $2,000 for a course. But maybe I didn’t understand something. And yeah, I can go to the Q and A with the product creator, but I just need to hear it differently.
And so this other guy gets on and shares that. I’m just looking at my notes here, talks about the sideways sales letter and he gets on and says that, yeah, I wrote down an outline of my sideways sales letter and it’s this and this. And they go, got it.
Now it makes sense, okay? That’s what it is. This whole lesson, which is fundamental to PLF, for example, that they were struggling with in somebody’s 62nd explanation of how they’re applying it to their business, it clicked with them.
What is that one thing worth? How is that not worth the entire investment in the course? How is that not a $2,000 that could be worth millions of dollars and it’s not an exaggeration for that to click with them and them to be able to go through the rest of the course and get it.
I mean, PLF has been worth millions to us. It’s been worth millions to others. It’s been worth tens of millions to many people.
I mean, that’s the kind of stuff so lastly, yeah, the bonuses and then just to finish up with bonuses, we talked about this, make sure it fits the offer. Make sure that it actually complements the offer. Complements or closes the gap.
So complementing, for example, if you’re promoting a course on copywriting, then if you offered a mini-course on sales page design or a software tool that allows you to create like a landing page easily, right, that’s complimenting. It kind of goes it fits with it. Closing the gaps means that maybe if it’s a course, for example, maybe there’s something missing or not super in-depth, right?
Something specific to your audience. So if you’ve got an audience of authors and you’re selling a course as an affiliate on LinkedIn marketing, how do you create like a specific almost module that’s LinkedIn marketing specifically for authors? Like, here are the eleven things as an author that you want to do on LinkedIn that’s not going to be in the course because it’s not for authors, right?
If you’re promoting a goal-setting course, right, maybe you offer like a night in your audience as authors. You offer like a 90-day plan for getting published. So it’s 90 days of goals if your audience is in fitness, right?
Like a 60-day weight loss plan or something like that. The key is to make sure that you sell your bonuses, okay? Sell your bonuses.
Use them to close the deal. Like talk about them in that very short period of time. Talk about them in every email. Talk about them on your podcast. Talk about them on your live. Talk about them on the livecast.
If you do a livecast, just one more tip, have a specific bonus for the livecast. Typically an additional 20% to 50% value. So if it’s $1,000 product and you have $1,000 bonus package already, try to find a bonus that’s specific to the livecast that’s going to be worth two hundred and fifty dollars to five hundred dollars.
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One of my favorite ones because I love not creating anything, is if you purchase right now on this livecast, and this is like real scarcity. Let’s say the deadline to buy is tomorrow. You say tomorrow.
If you purchase while we’re live tomorrow, we’re going to do a Kickstart call. We’re going to get together for an hour and we’re going to kind of give you what you need to do before you start the course, before you start going through it. That’s going to get you hit the ground running, right?
And then if one of your bonuses is already like, we’re going to meet for the eight weeks of the course, this is like a 9th week free when you purchase through the live case. Now it makes logical sense why they have to sign up today because it’s happening tomorrow. And it’s like, wow, that’s a really cool bonus.
And you just acknowledge, I get it. People sometimes sign up for courses and they struggle to get started. And we’re going to do this Kickstart call and on that Kickstarter call, we’re going to pair you up with an accountability partner.
So we’re going to pair you up together so you can go through the course together. That’s amazing. I just thought of that.
That’s actually like I got to write that one down. That whole thing. I’ve never shared that before because literally.
Robby: I had to write it down here too. I’m like that’s good stuff.
Matt: Yeah. So just make sure that if you do a live cast that you’re offering an exclusive while we’re live bonus. All right, so I would love to hear from you. What your biggest takeaway on this is, how are you going to apply this lesson today to your business?
Text me anytime. You can text me about this or anything else and got questions, text me 260-217-4619. I would love to hear from you.
We’ve got links to everything we talked about in the show notes. We’ve got links to how to put together an affiliate bonus package. Pod, hacker, what’s working on social media right now.
The interview I did with Jeff Bullas even got a link to switch in there. Just kind of funny. So we’ve got links to all of that in the show Notes.
Make sure you go check those out and make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. We’ve got a good one. I’m going to talk about how to rock your very first affiliate promotion.
So if you’ve never done an affiliate promo before, how do you succeed? And we’ve got an example of that coming up with a guest, Keira Merkovsky, who did just that. She absolutely crushed her very first affiliate promotion.
So if you want to find out how she did it and how you can too, make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss that episode. I’ll see you then. Thank you so much for listening today.
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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.
The post How to Build Strong Relationships with Your Affiliates appeared first on .
###### If your audience is made up of coaches, this opportunity is for you.
ChatGPT For Coaches allows you to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) so you can authentically build your authority FAST! Quickly attract your ideal prospects and convert those leads into buyers in a fraction of the time!
I’m excited about this opportunity because:
1. Amy Yamada has a proven track record. With over 22 years in marketing, sales, and business development, Amy Yamada will empower you to scale your coaching business to multiple six and seven-figures, through irresistible messaging, a clear growth plan, and building a dream team to support you and your vision. Amy’s message is inspiring…“Inside all of us there lies a message only we can share with the world. When you find it, give it voice, and share it with the world, there is no way success CANNOT be yours!”
2. This is a comprehensive client attraction program for coaches. ChatGPT for Coaches helps coaches build authority by showing them how to create authenticity with AI. It offers essential prompts for streamlining your coaching business. In addition to saving you time, money, and energy, it lets you deeply connect with your authentic self, your vision, and those you are meant to serve, so you can make a bigger impact and bring your dreams to life!
CLICK HERE TO APPLY TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE
About ChatGPT For Coaches
Amy Yamada is a seasoned business coach and expert in the cutting-edge technology of AI who created this 30-day program to authentically build your authority, attract your ideal clients, and convert leads to buyers in a fraction of the time using ChatGPT.
ChatGPT empowers established coaches to grow their businesses in a way that is fully aligned with their authenticity and desired lifestyle, through deep connection in messaging, sales conversations, and transformational experiences such as VIP Days and high ticket retreats.
What’s included in the product: Four, live weekly group training calls walking you through our step-by-step ChatGPT process, including time for Q&A so you can receive personalized, on-the-spot coaching around how to leverage ChatGPT in your coaching business * INSTANT Access to: Their proprietary Prompt Generator tool helps you easily build your prompts to secure the most effective and authentic content from ChatGPT, in just minutes * 5 in-depth pre-recorded trainings, breaking down our step-by-step Chat GPT for Coaches system so you can learn in your own timing and implement our system into your business * “The Intensive” ChatGPT recording: Want to kickstart your learning? Get started right away with this pre-recorded 3-hour Intensive that dives right into how to leverage ChatGPT. * “The Ultimate Guide on Chat GPT for Online Coaches”,* your comprehensive, go-to reference for creating authenticity with AI, essential prompts for streamlining your coaching business, ultimately saving you time, money, and energy
CLICK HERE TO APPLY TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE
Target Audience:* Coaches looking to serve their clients better through cutting-edge technology
Pricing:* $1,500 for access to everything above
Commissions:* $300.00 flat commission per sale
Testimonials:CLICK HERE TO APPLY TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE FOR CHATGPT FOR COACHES
Click Here to Learn More About Our Recommended Affiliate ProgramsThe post Affiliate Opportunity: ChatGPT For Coaches appeared first on .
Social media is all the rage…and has been for a while now. Whether it’s Tik Tok, Instagram, Facebook, or whatever new platform pops up next month, everyone is talking about how to optimize social media and make money from it. But, the statistics don’t lie…email still outperforms social media nearly 50 to 1 in terms of sales. So, what are the secrets to better email marketing? Today’s guest tells all.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Want to learn how to make passive affiliate income from product review posts? Get my free guide on how to write a review post that ranks and converts and learn how we bring in more than $10,000 every single month in passive affiliate income! Get it here!
LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Get Igor’s Book
List Launch Challenge
Text me at 260-217-4619
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow 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
Email Marketing vs. Social Media Advertising: Which is More Effective? Insights from Igor KheifetsThe post Email Marketing vs. Social Media Advertising: Which is More Effective? Insights from Igor Kheifets appeared first on .
Is it possible to double your affiliate commissions in only 30 days? You bet it is! And it’s probably a lot easier than you think it is. Today, I share 10 ways to double your affiliate earnings!
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Ready to turn your passions into a profitable business? Check out my new book here!
LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
List Launch Challenge
Get Turn Your Passions Into Profits & $500+ in Bonuses
How to Create a Resources Page
How to Write a Review Post That Ranks and Converts
Turn Your Passions Into Profits Book
Text me at 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy15-biggest-affiliate-program-challenges-and-how-to-solve-them
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 Double Your Affiliate Commissions in 30 Days or LessThe post How to Double Your Affiliate Commissions in 30 Days or Less appeared first on .
I wish I could lie to you and tell you that running a successful affiliate program is easy. But it’s not. In fact, there are a lot of challenges that get in the way of doing so. Today, I share the 15 biggest affiliate program challenges and why they often hold people back. But don’t worry, this episode isn’t all doom and gloom…I also share how to solve these challenges!
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
If you are ready to take your business to the next level and start an affiliate program, start with my free report, Your First 100 Affiliates. This report takes nearly two decades of experience, trial and error, and lessons learned about finding top affiliates in nearly every conceivable niche and puts them all into one report. Grab your copy here!
LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
VIDEO – How to Decide the Right Affiliate Commission Structure
Your First 100 Affiliates Report
Affiliate Activation Email Templates
How I Built a $1 Million a Month Affiliate Program In Only Two Years Without Any Connections or Credentials
Sample Affiliate Training
Text me at 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Turn Inactive Affiliates Into Your Best Partners
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
15 Biggest Affiliate Program Challenges (And How to Solve Them)The post 15 Biggest Affiliate Program Challenges (And How to Solve Them) appeared first on .
I know the experience all too well…you work so hard to find a potential affiliate, nurture the relationship, get them to commit to promoting, and then…NOTHING! They don’t promote, they send no traffic, and they make no sales. What do you do? How do you activate those inactive affiliates and turn them into superstar promoters? This episode will show you how!
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Need help activating your affiliates? Use my proven email templates for getting inactive affiliates in the game and making sales! Get them here!
LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Affiliate Activation Email Templates
How I Built a $1 Million a Month Affiliate Program In Only Two Years Without Any Connections or Credentials
Text me at 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyDay in the Life of an Affiliate Manager
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 Turn Inactive Affiliates Into Your Best PartnersThe post How to Turn Inactive Affiliates Into Your Best Partners appeared first on .
What the heck does an affiliate manager do all day? I get asked that a lot. And for good reason…it’s a bit of a mystery to most people. So today, I’ll take you behind the scenes on what a typical day in the life of an affiliate manager really looks like.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Get my #1 affiliate recruiting email (the one I’ve personally used to recruit thousands of affiliates in dozens of niches). Grab your copy here!
LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
How I Built a $1 Million a Month Affiliate Program In Only Two Years Without Any Connections or Credentials
Check Out Our Careers Page
Find Your First 100 Affiliates
Text me at 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow 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
Behind-the-Scenes on Our Affiliate Promotion for Product Launch Formula
Day in the Life of an Affiliate ManagerThe post Day in the Life of an Affiliate Manager appeared first on .
###### If your audience is comprised of coaches and consultants, this affiliate opportunity is for you.
I’m excited about this opportunity because:
*1. SocialGlow Founder Daniel Burge REALLY thought this through.* The SocialGlow App allows you to reach your community and customers where it matters most – on their phones. Your community, courses, and classes are all together in one place.
2. SocialGlow’s commission package keeps on giving. Your ability to earn passive income isn’t capped. When you register as an affiliate for SocialGlow, you make 25% of the monthly subscriptions you bring in…for the LIFE of the customer.
CLICK HERE TO APPLY TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE
About SocialGlowSocialGlow puts your community, courses, and classes into a powerful and addictive “app” experience that keeps your customers engaged, connected, and focused.
Daniel Burge, the founder and CEO of Burada, Inc. heads up a company that builds SaaS products. Their two flagship products are SocialGlow and PostMyParty with over 150,000 customers.
SocialGlow is an all-in-one platform that helps coaches and consultants boost their course and community engagement.
This is done by integrating both powerful course creation tools with innovative community management capabilities.
Here’s a sample of some of the benefits SocialGlow offers:
Everything in an App
Reach your community and customers where it matters most – on their phones.
Put your community, courses, and classes together in one place.
Increased Engagement
SocialGlow lets you gamify your communities and courses!
You can award points to build community and boost engagement.
Guaranteed Reach
There’s no Algorithm.
This way, every member sees each of your posts using push notifications, SMS, and email broadcasts.
Easy to Use
Your members will love SocialGlow because it merges the best of Facebook and Course Creation into one simple app.
Earn Passive Income
When you register as an affiliate for SocialGlow, you can make 25% of the monthly subscriptions you bring in.
Make Your Life Easy
You’ll save time and money with SocialGlow.
Running and leading your community will become simple again.
What’s included with SocialGlow:* Full Unlimited Access to All Features * User-Friendly Mobile App (iOS and Android) * Unlimited Groups * Unlimited Video Courses and Lessons * Unlimited Members * Group and One on One Chat * Gamification and Leaderboard * Zapier Integrations * Content Scheduling Tools * Up to 10 TB of media storage included
CLICK HERE TO APPLY TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE
Target Audience:Coaches and consultants:
- Life coaches
- Business coaches
- Personal development coaches
- Fitness coaches
- Music coaches
- Health coaches
Pricing:Annual billing:
- Basic: $39.95/mo
- Plus: $79.95/mo
- Premium: $239.95/mo
Monthly billing:
- Basic: $49.95/mo
- Plus: $99.95/mo
- Premium: $299.95/mo
Commissions:25% RECURRING monthly commission for the LIFE of the customer.
CLICK HERE TO APPLY TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE FOR SOCIALGLOW
Click Here to Learn More About Our Recommended Affiliate ProgramsThe post Affiliate Opportunity: SocialGlow appeared first on .
You may know of Entrepreneurs on Fire as the home of John Lee Dumas and his interviews with top entrepreneurs sharing the stories of their success. But did you know that there is so much more that you might not see, including some massive affiliate promotions? In this episode, I have a very special guest who is taking us behind the scenes to explore the lessons learned from EOFire’s biggest affiliate launch to date, which generated over $250,000 in revenue. From planning and preparation to execution and follow-up, we’ll dive into the strategies and tactics that made this promotion such a massive success. Whether you’re a seasoned affiliate marketer or just getting started, you’re sure to pick up some valuable insights and takeaways from EOFire’s experience.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Ready to turn your passions into a profitable business? Check out my new book here!
LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Your Affiliate Launch Coach
Affiliate Marketing Quickstart Guide
Recommended Affiliate Programs & Upcoming Launchs
Text me at 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
| | | | --- | --- | | | | | | | |
Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy10 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
Behind-the-Scenes on Our Affiliate Promotion for Product Launch Formula
How to Promote Virtual Summits as an Affiliate (If You Aren’t a Speaker)
Fix Your Funnel: How to Increase Sales and Make Your Affiliates More Money with John Ainsworth
How to Use a Challenge for Affiliate Marketing: How Entrepreneurs on Fire Made More than $250,000 in One Affiliate LaunchThe post How to Use a Challenge for Affiliate Marketing: How Entrepreneurs on Fire Made More than $250,000 in One Affiliate Launch appeared first on .
###### If your audience is comprised of coaches, consultants, information entrepreneurs and service-based businesses, this affiliate opportunity is for you.
Simplero is an all-in-one platform that makes it simple to grow your coaching, information, or service-based business to 6, 7, or 8 figures.
Almost as important as having a great product, the people behind Simplero care. About you and your mission.
They care about work. They care about each other. And, they care about humanity and the world.
Caring about what they do provides the company with a solid foundation.
I’m excited about this opportunity because:
- *Calvin Correli walks the talk.* Calvin’s company uses Simplero for everything. By using his own software to run his business, it ensures he and his team are always 100% in touch with their own product. They constantly add little tweaks and additions and a little magic fairy dust to the product, because they use it themselves every single day.
2. Simplero has a powerful mission driving everything they do. Their mission is to create the greatest force for personal and spiritual growth the world has ever seen so that collectively, they can create a world people want to live in.
CLICK HERE TO APPLY TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE
About SimpleroSimplero is an all-in-one platform that makes it simple to grow your coaching, information, or service-based business to 6, 7, or 8 figures by combining CRM, payments, courses, and communities.
Founder Calvin Correli has been coding since he was five. His experience running a software consulting firm coupled with some personal growth led to him wanting to share some inner growth tools with other entrepreneurs.
Along the way, Calvin discovered online courses, and the more time he spent in the marketing space, the more he was able to see that a number of disparate systems were making things clunky and difficult for people to run their businesses efficiently.
So he created a solution for himself and quickly found other people wanted it too.
The Simplero platform is powerful…but the unwavering philosophy behind it makes them unstoppable.
Their mission is to create the greatest force for personal and spiritual growth the world has ever seen so that collectively, they can help create a world people WANT to live in.
By helping people like you transform lives at scale, they’re empowering humanity to solve its biggest challenges. Simplero isn’t in it for a quick buck.
- They pour their hearts and souls into the work they do.
- They truly get to know you so they can effectively partner with you.
- They focus on creating the best product they can.
- They provide you with the best customer possible.
What’s included in the product:* CRM * Payments * Courses * Communities
CLICK HERE TO APPLY TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE
Target Audience:* Coaches * Consultants * Information entrepreneurs * Service-based businesses
Pricing:* Free 14 Day Trial * $59/month and up * They also offer Simplero Academy…a $7200 coaching program that teaches people how to create profitable businesses.
Commissions:There are two levels:
- Affiliate: 20% for 18 months
- Trusted Advisor: 30% for 36 months
The Simplero team is open to creating special offers and negotiating commissions for larger affiliates.
Testimonials:“I love Simplero! I already referred you to some of my friends. Actually, we are now helping one of our business partners switch over to Simplero from WordPress. Simplero has been hands down the BEST SaaS in the world. Great and super useful product. Unbelievable features for our line of work and at a really affordable price. The support team is 11/10, fast, knowledgeable, and nice. And the best part is how aligned we feel with our values and what you stand for. LOVE LOVE LOOOOOOVE Simplero.” Aleana Bargaoui
“I love the ease and versatility of the Simplero program but their people are what retain my loyalty. They are LIVE, easy to connect with, quick to respond, helpful, and friendly, eager to solve any problem. I can’t recommend them enough.” Rog Nielson
“Simplero has customer service which is world-class! There is always help to get regardless of the time of day. They have this “willingness” to help and find a solution and that is priceless!” Raili Hannele Siiri
“Hi, Beth. I really like Simplero, but I actually like the people behind the scenes most that you have gathered such a crowd of talented and open-hearted people, that’s really a joy to feel a part of.” unknown
“Thank you so much for the detailed explanation and for providing the link, it saved me a lot of effort trying to locate this myself.
Another shining example of Simplero’s outstanding customer support!
Happy customer as always – huge thank you from Inger Lise :)”
“THANK YOU SCOTT!!! You are a star. I cannot thank you enough – and your instructions were so clear. I keep being impressed by Simplero. I think it’s brilliant, and you guys who make it run so smoothly are amazing! Thanks again!” unknown
“Thank you! Getting to know Simplero as it’s what a client of mine is using and I’m just swooning over all the data available to help us better plan her sales campaigns.” Tamika Auwa
“Just had the most amazing coaching call with Sami Meiber in the Simplero Academy and feel the urge to shout it a little from the rooftops! Sami is one of the amazing coaches we have access to and are supported by on a regular basis and he has given me so many “Eureka” moments already! So far this program is overdelivering on every level and I am so happy and grateful to be a part of it! There’s NO doubt in my mind that 2023 will be the best year yet for my business AND for me Thank you, guys!” Gunn Anita Winkler
“I appreciated that Scott replied immediately, then kept me posted as the engineers worked to solve the problem. It took under 2 hours to resolve from start to finish–very happy with how this was handled.” unknown
“It’s rare that you pay your subscription fee for a product with pleasure, but that’s how I feel with Simplero during the last 3 years. Great versatile and flexible product, awesome support/development, and great value for money.” Frank Kroyer
“I’m in love with the tech chops of your founder. I can tell from onboarding and the tool backend, his tech game is strong, since he’s been building software since the early web.” unknown
“Simplero is amazing! Been with them for over 2.5 years. The versatility and having so many functions under one roof makes life so much easier.
I love the website builder which has many features for creating attractive pages.
The product creation side of things is also impressive, I love that you can create secret prices as well as coupon prices.
The customer support is also friendly, quick, and reliable. And they are always improving the platform with ideas from the customers. Highly recommend.” Quinn Bluewood
If I had a $ for every time I’ve heard “should have gone with Simplero” I’d be rich. I dislike kajabi with a passion and whenever I have a new client with kajabi, I shudder a little bit inside and then gently encourage them to make the change to Simplero.” Rachelle Deem
“Thank you for always being there for us, and going above and beyond our expectations.” unknown
“…Your platform is stellar!!! The best UX UI and tech out there.” Shara Raqs
CLICK HERE TO APPLY TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE FOR SIMPLERO
Click Here to Learn More About Our Recommended Affiliate ProgramsThe post Affiliate Opportunity: Simplero appeared first on .
Well, we did it! Earlier this year, we officially launched a bestselling book. It wasn’t easy, but we not only beat our original sales goals, but we made a huge splash in the industry. We’re now nationwide in stores and the book continues to sell like crazy more than two months later. So…how did we do it? Today, I share my top 10 lessons from launching a bestseller. Some are painful, some nearly cost us big time, but I’m sharing them all with you today!
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
If you missed the other posts in this excerpt series from my upcoming book Turn Your Passions Into Profits, find them here:
- The LIE of Leadership
- The Only Reason I Passed Calculus
- Find Your LEADERSHIP Mojo
LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Get Turn Your Passions Into Profits & $500+ in Bonuses
Check Barnes & Noble for Availability
Text me at 260-217-4619
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyAffiliate 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
Behind-the-Scenes on Our Affiliate Promotion for Product Launch Formula
How to Promote Virtual Summits as an Affiliate (If You Aren’t a Speaker)
Fix Your Funnel: How to Increase Sales and Make Your Affiliates More Money with John Ainsworth
How to Increase Your Commissions by Guiding Your Followers & Creating Repeat Buyers with Dave Gambrill
10 Lessons I Learned Launching a Bestselling BookThe post 10 Lessons I Learned Launching a Bestselling Book appeared first on .
Holly Homer has an amazing affiliate story. She promoted an affiliate offer for the second time and her results were absolutely incredible! In her first promotion, she made ZERO sales! In the next one, promoting the exact same product, she made 22 sales…and more than $3500 in commissions! How’d she do it? This episode will share all her secrets!
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
To get started with affiliate marketing the right way, download my free quickstart guide to affiliate marketing. Grab your copy here!
LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Holly Homer’s Site
7 Ways to Warm Up Your List Before an Affiliate Promotion
Text me at 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyListener Q&A: Finding Affiliates, What’s Working in Affiliate Recruiting, Email Templates, and More
How to Create Recurring Affiliate Revenue Promoting Membership Sites
Behind-the-Scenes on Our Affiliate Promotion for Product Launch Formula
How to Promote Virtual Summits as an Affiliate (If You Aren’t a Speaker)
Fix Your Funnel: How to Increase Sales and Make Your Affiliates More Money with John Ainsworth
How to Increase Your Commissions by Guiding Your Followers & Creating Repeat Buyers with Dave Gambrill
Affiliate Marketing Lesson: Shifting From Promoting Free Content To A Paid Product
Affiliate Profile: How Holly Homer Went from $0 to $3500 in Affiliate Commissions in Her 2nd PromotionThe post Affiliate Profile: How Holly Homer Went from $0 to $3500 in Affiliate Commissions in Her 2nd Promotion appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
You’ve got questions. I’ve got answers. Today, I’m answering a backlog of affiliate marketing questions from affiliate recruiting to how to write an email to your affiliates. Plus, thoughts on social media, affiliate networks, and how to work with virtual assistants…and a whole lot more!
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Need help activating your affiliates? Use my proven email templates for getting inactive affiliates in the game and making sales! Get them here!
LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Ask Me Anything
Your First 100 Affiliates
Get My Best Affiliate Recruiting Email
Find Affiliates Now
Affiliate Program Email Template
ShareASale Affiliate Network
Text me at 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
| | | | --- | --- | | | | | | | |
Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Create Recurring Affiliate Revenue Promoting Membership Sites
Behind-the-Scenes on Our Affiliate Promotion for Product Launch Formula
How to Promote Virtual Summits as an Affiliate (If You Aren’t a Speaker)
Fix Your Funnel: How to Increase Sales and Make Your Affiliates More Money with John Ainsworth
How to Increase Your Commissions by Guiding Your Followers & Creating Repeat Buyers with Dave Gambrill
Affiliate Marketing Lesson: Shifting From Promoting Free Content To A Paid Product
Book Launch Party: An Interview with Matt About Turn Your Passions Into Profits
Listener Q&A: Finding Affiliates, What’s Working in Affiliate Recruiting, Email Templates, and MoreYou’ve got questions, I’ve got answers.
Today I’m answering a backlog of affiliate marketing questions, from affiliate recruiting to how to write an email to your affiliates, plus thoughts on social media, affiliate networks, and how to work with virtual assistants and a whole lot more.
So I’m doing something I haven’t done in quite some time today, almost six months. I’m taking questions, I’m answering a bunch of questions.
And this is something when I set out, when I created the podcast, I kind of made a commitment to doing this at least three times a year, preferably four, about every quarter.
And I forgot in the last quarter of last year with the book launch and everything going on, and one of the things I even talk about in the book is how content is really easy for me.
Now, coming up with content is so much easier than it was seven or eight years ago.
I outlined how to do all of that in the book, but it’s so much easier because I could, in theory, just answer a question on every episode and that would be the content.
Like, I have so many questions that I’m able to create basically unlimited content just from those questions, so I don’t have to worry about what kind of content you create.
And just by the way, you can ask your question. This is where all of these came from.
And asktheaffiliateguy.com if you go to asktheaffiliateguy.com, you can ask your question there.
Make sure you put your information if you want a public shout out, make sure you put your information there.
And so this is where our first question came from, actually and it is from I do not know how to pronounce this first name T-A-D-H-G.
I’m assuming it’s like a Welsh name, maybe? Or an Irish name.
And I am so sorry because last name is O’Crowley, so it’s got to be Irish or Scottish or Welsh then. It’s probably Dutch, but whatever. I don’t know. I have no idea.
I have to Google that and see is that a male or a female name? Said, “Hi, Matt, I’ve been working through FAN and have reached out to over 150.”
So FAN is Find Affiliates Now. It’s our premium course on How to Find Affiliates Now.
“Instead, I’ve reached out to over 150 travel bloggers. Any advice on the response?”
All right. In a few niches, this is extremely common. Travel is one of them. Most niches, it’s not relevant.
Most niches, you don’t have to worry about this. You might get 10 or 20% that respond this way.
But in the travel niche, it’s also very, very common in like, the weight loss niche and a few others where they’re just like, all we’re doing is paid promotions or they’re doing paid placements with an affiliate component.
Here’s the thing:
Number one, when you’re starting out and you don’t have the budget, you cannot allocate thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for paid promotions.
You’re going to have to sell them on the benefits to them. All right? So be honest and say you don’t have much of a budget at this time.
You can blame your finance team, which is you, but blame the finance team and say, “Hey, I don’t have the budget for this, but I would love to show you how well it converts and how you will make more in the long run and even pretty quickly in the short run if you do this as an affiliate.”
Here’s our conversions. Here’s what you will make. If you did $1,000 paid placement and generated this much traffic and this many sales, you would make exactly $1,000.
But if you do it as an affiliate, you will make $1,600, $1,800, whatever number is more. That would make sense.
So show them how well it converts, how they can make more money in the long term. The second part to that is consider doing a small paid placement plus a commission.
A lot of times what they’re looking for with the paid placement is it’s a weed out. It’s kind of like in college, I was a psychology major and we had Biopsychology Psych 201.
It was biopsychology. It was the weed out class. It was meant to weed out the kids who were not really into psychology, who did not want to go through.
And the funny thing is, it’s the only class in college, the only class in my sophomore year that I made an A, and I actually made like a 97 was my average because I was fascinated by it.
The neuropsychology side of things, the actual brain chemistry was fascinating to me. Unfortunately, I don’t remember 95% of what I learned, but I was fascinated at the time.
So that weed out class, kind of the same thing here with a weed out paid placement fee. It’s like let’s weed out the riffraff.
Let’s weed out who’s not serious? So could you swing a two or $300 paid placement? Maybe they’re asking for 750. Could you swing 250 and a commission? It shows you’re serious.
You’re not some sort of Joe Schmo off the street, but you’re still willing to be able to pay something up front and do a commission.
So those are my options there. That worked really well.
Typically, we’ll get about 70% to end up taking one of those options in the end, not 100% by any stretch, but even at 50% out of, let’s say you got 30 people who said that you’ll get ten to 15 to do one of those.
All right, another question from some of our Find Affiliates Now, students Chloe and Nile, I think N-I-A-L-L-I think it’s pronounced Nile.
They both ask similar, very similar questions, basically summing it up here what’s working in affiliate recruiting.
Now, I’ve been through FAN Find Affiliates Now, is there anything new that’s not in the course? Well, I’m going to go ahead and tell you guys.
There is something that we will be putting into Find Affiliates Now when we redo the course later this year or early next year, we are testing this out.
So please do not go out and do this, and it may not work in every niche. Do not go out and do the same.
Matt says it’s guaranteed to work. No, what we put in our courses is guaranteed to work.
Sometimes what I share on the podcast is something I’ve tried once or twice, and it maybe still doesn’t work.
Don’t hold this against me if this doesn’t work, but it passes the smell test, too. When I share this, you’re going to go, yeah, it kind of makes sense.
There’s a couple of things I did with my book launch that worked really well.
The first was I sent a message out to people that I was connected with, either really tightly or loosely connected.
After a couple of months of the book launch, after we’d already hit some of the early Amazon bestseller list, and stuff like that.
And we were doing really well, and our numbers were looking really good, and I sent a message out via email, text, Facebook, DM, et cetera, saying, “Hey, so and so
I just wanted to ask for some of your advice on my book launch, see if you had any strategies or any connections that maybe I haven’t thought of. We’re doing really great so far.
We’re well ahead of schedule, and we’re on target or actually a little bit ahead of a target for our goal of selling this many books.
So I just wanted to make sure. I wanted to uncover all the stones, and so on and so forth”, right? Was the basic gist of the message.
Now, when we break that down, number one, I’m just asking for advice. I’m not saying, hey, will you promote? I’m not asking that.
Although what ended up resulting out of about 150 to 200 of those messages is about 40 or 50 of them said, sign me up, let me promote, let me have you on my show, let’s do an interview, et cetera, et cetera.
So that’s number one, is I’m not asking for them to promote. I’m just saying, do you have any advice or do you know anybody who might be a good fit to promote this?
And so they volunteered to promote. The second thing is, I’m talking about the success.
I’m not bragging, per se. I’m just saying we’re doing really well. Basically. I left out one part there.
“We’re doing really well, and I want to make sure that we definitely finish strongly.
I was like, we have a really good chance to possibly finish up much higher on the best seller list than we expected.
And so I’m looking for some advice and some help on that.”
People want to be a part of something that’s winning and if the reality is that early on, I’m doing really well, people want to be a part of that.
Get my #1 affiliate recruiting email (the one I’ve personally used to recruit thousands of affiliates in dozens of niches). Grab your copy here!
So there’s two parts to that email that works really well.
The other thing, and this is typically going to be only applicable on a book, I think there’s some ways that you could possibly do this with courses and other physical products, but it really worked well for a book.
So we had this list of podcasts, hundreds of podcasts that I wanted to be on.
We ended up doing I did over 125 podcast interviews, but we had a list toward the end with about a month ago of, I don’t know, 600-700 podcasts, I think that we heard no reply from, never heard anything.
We tried all the traditional stuff, the stuff that’s in Find Affiliates Now that’s worked for decades and we had a pretty good response rate.
To get 125 responses out of about 600 emails is great. Whatever the math is on that. I mean, it’s a pretty good response rate.
But what about the other like I said, it was over 500 left, I think. What about those?
I reached out to them and basically just said I put the name of the book that they had promoted before.
So maybe they’d done an interview with the author of such and such book.
I put the name of that book in the subject line, and I said, it’s like the name of that book.
So if the name let’s just do Launch by Jeff Walker. I said it’s like Launch and I reached out and I said, “Hey, sold it a while back.
You interviewed Jeff Walker for his book launch. Great interview.
I’ve got a book coming out called Turn Your Passions into Profits, and I’d love to send you a copy and if you like it, would love to be on the show.”
That was the basic gist of it. We had over 50 people respond to these are people who had responded to none of the previous seven or eight emails, and over 10% of them responded to this email.
Unbelievable response rate. So we’re mailing these books out left and right and of course, the point there is I’m basically saying, I’d love to send you a copy of my book.
What’s the best address to send it to? And so we got a ton of responses. We had over 50 replies, almost 80% of those.
I think we ended up with 38 of those. I think we had 52 responses, 38 of them.
So whatever the math is on that one, roughly 75% of those ended up doing an interview for the prelaunch, and we had a few more that ended up doing an interview after the pre launch officially.
So actually, I’ve got even a couple of interviews scheduled this week from that reach out that we just weren’t able to work it into the pre launch schedule.
So that’s been working really well. Just think about how you could apply that to your products.
“Hey, could I send you my Widget by such and such? Could I send you one and have you tested out?”
All right, this is what I’ve gotten like a half a dozen times so far this year. In the first six weeks of the year, I’ve gotten a ton.
How do I write an email to my affiliates? I’m struggling for a starting point, or I don’t know where to start.
I don’t even know what to include in the email. Was something that another person said.
This is something actually, internally, we have a template and so we have a template that we use for writing emails to our affiliates.
It’s an outline of a typical affiliate program update email. It can be used during product launches, promotions, evergreen programs. It’s meant as a guide.
All right, so not every email that we send uses each section of this template. So I’m going to give you the template here, and then I’ll encourage you to go download a copy of the template.
We created it for you. It’s super and easy to reference.
I’m not going to go in through the whole thing in this episode, but if you go to MattMcWilliams.Com/aetemplate affiliate email template, so you can just grab a copy of this.
It’s the exact one we use internally. We made it a little bit prettier recently, so it’s got some cool graphics and stuff, just easier to follow. But we made a template for our internal use.
So here’s how it goes:
The first thing, what’s happening?
What is going on today?
What is happening this week?
What is something big that’s happening in the launch of the promotion?
So it’s launch day.
We’re officially live.
It’s webinar day.
Webinar registration is open.
The sales page is live.
All right, so this is the what’s happening section.
Typically, you might have their link right away, like the link that’s relevant for today or this segment of the promotion.
Maybe I note that there’s some resources below as well.
The second section is RAH RAH. We call this the RAH RAH section.
This is where we are cheering them on. We’re sharing exciting news. We’re sharing some cool stats. Whatever we can do to inspire and motivate them.
So one of the examples that we include in the template and there’s examples of all these, we got like three or four examples in the template.
So you don’t have to just kind of go, what’s RA RA? I don’t know. You know, sales are pouring in.
The conversion rate is through the roof is one of the examples in there and so sometimes we include the leaderboard in this one if it serves to inspire and motivate.
So we’ll include the leaderboard here if there’s some big shifts, especially at the top.
The third section. So we got the what’s happened in the RAH RAH. We got to educate. We got to educate them.
This is when we teach them what they need to do, what they need to know to succeed for that day or for tomorrow or for the rest of the promotion.
What are other top partners doing? What strategies are working? What are some how tos that we can do?
So we’ll put how to properly use swipe copy or how many emails you should send this week, things like that.
In the educate section, again, there’s more examples in the template.
Number four is the call to action.
This is exactly what we want them to do. Tell them exactly what to do.
One or two things. Not three, not four, not five. One or two, preferably most emails, one.
So we’re going to tell them mail and share about the webinar today, tomorrow, in the morning of Thursday, mail your unopeneds about the workshop right now, if you haven’t.
And so then I tell them where to find what they need. So your swipe copy is below. Or I attached a sample promo plan.
Then section number five is the leaderboard.
If you didn’t put it in the RA RA section, most of the time you won’t. This is where you’re going to put the leaderboard.
You want to make sure to provide commentary and encouragement or if it works for that person, a little bit of trash talk type things.
But this is where you’ll include your leaderboard and then section six is your final message or encouragement.
So this week, sometimes like RA RA part two, right, this is your final message before you sign off, one or two sentences is enough.
So you say something like, “Hey, magic is happening right now. We’re headed for uncharted territory. If I can be of any help, let me know. Keep up the great work and remember that we are here to help.”
Stuff like that. Then you have your signature.
Make sure you tell them how to reach out to you, phone number, et cetera, whatever that is and then at the bottom of the email below the signature.
So this is all just the message. Above is the what they need. So this is where all the stuff goes. What do they need to succeed here?
Things like their links, their swipe, copy graphics, log into the affiliate portal and all the stuff there.
Make sure you make it super easy for them to know where to find these things so you can grab that template.
Just go to MattMcWilliams.Com/aetemplate We’ll put a link in the show note as well. MattMcWilliams.Com/aetemplate
Download the template. Use the template again. Sometimes you’ll find that you don’t need everything.
This is not every single email. Sometimes there’s no time for educate.
If you’ve got along what’s happening in a pretty lengthy RA RA, and you know you’re going to have two calls to action, maybe you don’t educate them in that email, and then you spend more time educating them in the next one.
And obviously, if it’s two days before the launch, if it’s a launch, there’s no leaderboard. So that section comes out.
But it gives you kind of a template to follow to email your affiliates. This is from username A Burnett. You know who you are.
I don’t I think your last name is Burnett. At least I got that said a few episodes ago, you talked about working with coupon affiliates.
“I’ve read there are a lot of downsides, such as stealing commissions from other affiliates, them getting paid commissions when they really didn’t do much, et cetera.”
Basically, can I talk about that and what I recommend? He actually sent a pretty lengthy message there.
All right, so the problems here, the problems with coupon affiliates, and I did talk just a few episodes ago about coupon affiliates and loyalty affiliates as one of the examples of types of affiliates you might consider recruiting.
And I talked about the big mistakes that people make is not dealing at all with these.
Now, the downside, as I mentioned in that episode, are sometimes you’ll have a coupon affiliate that will steal a commission from another affiliate.
Now, you could argue that they’re not nefarious about it. They’re not stealing it like they’re doing anything illegal, but they know what they’re doing.
And that is that when somebody goes and searches for such and such product coupon or deal, then they’re showing up and they’re converting that person into a sale.
Or they’re converting somebody who never went through an affiliate and they’re getting the commission. So both of those aren’t exactly ideal. Now, here’s the way I look at that.
Number one, if they are, quote unquote, stealing, well, they still help close the sale. They didn’t buy until they saw that coupon and that deal and bought through that deal.
So we call that a closer we call that a closer commission sometimes nd one of the things that we like to do is pay coupon sites a closer commission. So we’ll do a split commission.
The original affiliate or the other last affiliate will get four fifths of the commission, and the coupon site earns one fifth.
So on a 10%, especially in retail products, 10% will do eight and two, and you go, well, why do they get only eight? They should get the ten only didn’t close the sale.
And do you want eight or do you want zero? And as the coupon affiliate, do you want two or do you want zero?
If there’s no affiliate, we’ll pay something like just the one fourth or one fifth of the commission. So that’s how we get around that.
And so most affiliate networks, and we’ll talk about affiliate networks, I think in the next question allow you to do this.
Some in house software allows you to do this as well. Where you can offer split commissions, there’s other creative ways to do split commissions.
You might just give the closer a bonus. So the first affiliate gets the 10% and the coupon site just gets the 2%, whatever. Sometimes I’ve seen it, you might go 60 40.
The 80 20 is not necessarily a rule, a hard and fast rule, but typically the coupon affiliate is going to make less than the other affiliate. A couple of things you need to make sure to do.
Number one, you need to make sure to prohibit them from doing trademark bidding so they can’t bid on your company name or your product name, and then the word coupon or deal or whatever discount, they cannot bid on that.
If you are ready to take your business to the next level and start an affiliate program, start with my free report, Your First 100 Affiliates. This report takes nearly two decades of experience, trial and error, and lessons learned about finding top affiliates in nearly every conceivable niche and puts them all into one report. Grab your copy here!
They can run SEO campaigns, but they can’t bid on keywords involving your trademarks And that you get to define trademarks.
You don’t have to have a registered trademark. To be clear, you could just tell them, don’t bid on my name, don’t bid on Matt McWilliams coupon, don’t bid on, et cetera, et cetera.
You could do whatever you want. You get to create the rules very clear about what you allow in terms of keyword bidding.
Secondly, do not allow them to target your audience. We don’t allow this, period.
This is just a generally good rule with affiliate programs. Do not allow them to target your audience for paid advertising.
And so we think about that 20 a week, a thousand a year, and even just the 20 a week, that’s 20. But I also get hundreds and hundreds of other emails.
How are we supposed to ever respond to every single one of those? It’s impossible.
That’s why we say you want at least 10 follow-ups, preferably 20 follow-ups and so I’m going to walk you through exactly how we do it.
Ultimately it’s a numbers game. The first email you’re get 2 to 3%. The second email you get 2 to 3%.
Yeah, once you hit about ten reach outs, the percentage goes down of the remaining people because you’re dealing with people who are unresponsive to the first ten.
Yeah, there’s only about one, one and a half percent chance they’re going to respond to the 11th one. But overall we end up with a 35% to 40% response rate.
So on 4000 reach outs, that’s 1000 on the low end, 1500 upwards of 1750, that is totally worth it. The key, like I said, ten to 20 follow ups.
So what we’ll do typically we follow up on an eight day schedule for the most part.
Occasionally it becomes nine or ten, just depending upon how the calendar falls and holidays and people’s vacations and stuff.
But we’ll follow up on an eight day schedule, we do not follow up on seven and the reason for that is you’re hitting the same day the next week.
And so when you’re hitting the same day the next week, maybe I’ll give you an example. Like Tuesday is a really busy day for me.
I am recording this on a Tuesday. I have three podcast interviews, two one on one meetings with team members, and I have a big leadership meeting for 2 hours a day.
I will be in meetings or interviews or calls for seven and a half of my eight and a half hour workday today.
And then I immediately have to go to my son’s soccer that I coach. So I have a pretty hard cut-off at 525 today where I have to be gone.
So because of that, I typically don’t even check email on Tuesdays. So if you email me on a Tuesday now, it gets buried down there and I’m just less likely to see it.
But you email me on a Wednesday, that’s the day I play catch up. So we go on an eight day cycle.
So number one, we’re not hitting the same day back to back to back weeks.
Number two, it gives a little bit more space, we’re a little bit less annoying.
And then we’ll do, typically we’ll do ten follow ups in about a 90 day period.
And if we still haven’t heard from them, we will basically kind of press pause on them. We’ll press pause on them.
Usually this kind of depends, like we’ll pick them up at the beginning of two quarters from now.
So if we’re sitting here late February, we’ll pick them up again in July. We’ll do the same.
If it’s mid January, we’ll still pick them up again in July, and we’ll just punt them to a head, roughly four to six months.
And the reason for that is you never know what season they’re in. Maybe they’re in a season where they’ve got a sick loved one.
Maybe they’re sick. Maybe they’re just in a crazy busy two, three months sprint like I was for my book launch.
I didn’t respond to any affiliate stuff for about 120 days. I just wasn’t able to. I was so focused on my book launch.
So maybe they’re like us. When we hit mid to late February, we’re in full swing with travel, soccer, both kids.
Theirs picks up, their number of practices pick up. Our daughter will play at a minimum 27 games this spring, possibly as many as 32.
It’s just crazy, right? They have midweek games. They have Friday through Sunday tournaments.
We literally leave at like three on Friday and get back at ten on Sunday. It’s insane.
And so my work schedule is around that, and it just gets crazy busy. So maybe that’s what their schedule is like.
So we kind of give them a break, and then we hit them up.
At the beginning of the next quarter, we’ll do another ten follow ups, at which point we will then remove them, or at the very least, we will attempt to find a better contact for that person.
If you want to know how to recruit, though, okay, you’re getting a 2 to 3%, maybe even 4% response rate, that’s great.
But maybe if you’re down in the 1% range, 2%, and you want to get a better response, grab our best email MattMcwilliams.com/BestEmail.
I’m going to put that in the Show Notes. Grab that template. That is a proven template that works time and time again.
You can tweak it a little bit, which is essentially what I suggested earlier. That email, we made a couple of slight tweaks to that.
I got creative. That’s another key. Get creative and try some things out.
But if you want the template just to get started, grab that at Mattmcwilliams.Com/bestemail and then the last thing is you need to look beyond email.
Look at developing multiple touchpoints. Communicate with them the way they want to be reached.
I mean, I have so many apps on my phone. I talked about this some number of episodes ago. I’ve got Facebook Messenger, Voxer, Skype. I’ve got Slack for our team.
I don’t have Instagram on my phone, but I could use Instagram DMs. WhatsApp said Voxer already.
There’s tons of apps, text, I have all those apps just for communicating with potential affiliates.
You name it, I’ve used it to communicate with an affiliate. Try mailing, physical stuff.
This cuts through the clutter we sent out super cheap. We sent out a letter, and that the letter it was just a regular standard letter.
Probably cost us, I don’t know, print whatever it costs. A two page letter, three page, I think it was three pages.
We attached a dollar bill to it, so that was our biggest expense other than payroll.
Probably cost us dollar letter in payroll to print it, fold it, address the envelopes, put the stamps on, take them to the post office, all those things.
Postage is like whatever postage is these days for a regular letter, I have no idea. It’s got to be over $0.50, but probably under 75. Might have to Google that one.
So all these things, it’s super cheap. Cost is like 2- $3 per letter. We sent out a letter and it had a dollar bill attached, so it captured attention.
And what it said in that letter was basically, “Hey, this book will help people make their first dollar online. Here’s why that’s important.”
That’s what the dollar represents and it was just a way of standing out. So try some physical mail.
We did for some key prospects. We mailed them a copy of the book and included a flyer in that.
These cost the book, plus the postage, probably $27 to $30 package. So you can’t send 1000 of those unless you have $30,000.
We didn’t want to send 1000 of those. We wanted to send them to highly targeted people. So I think we sent them to 75 to 100 people.
But it stood out because they’re getting this in the mail. They opened it and they read it, and we got a lot of partners from that.
All right, so we’re down to our last two or three questions here. We got this one from multiple people in the past few months.
It seems like every time I do a training for a client, we get this question from at least two people every single time.
Basically, the question is, do I have to use social media to be successful as an affiliate marketer?
I did a webinar recently with a good friend of mine’s audience, and we got that question probably ten times.
His audience just doesn’t want to be on social media. There’s nothing wrong with that and the answer is no.
You don’t have to use anything to be successful as an affiliate marketer. You do not have to have a blog.
Will you do better with the blog? Absolutely. You do not have to build an email list.
Will you do better building an email list? Absolutely. You do not have to use social media.
Can social media be a valuable tool for you? Absolutely. I’ve had variations of this question.
Well, do I have to be on TikTok? No.
Do I have to be on Facebook? No.
Do I have to be on Instagram? No.
Do I have to be on Twitter? No.
Be where your audience is? That’s the thing, and I’m going to tell you right now. Yes. If your audience, if there are a million people.
Let’s say you’re targeting primarily the United States, for example, there are a million people in your audience, or potentially in your audience who would be qualified for your product.
People under the age of 50 with type two diabetes. I don’t know what the number of people that is, but let’s just say it’s a million.
Maybe that’s a bad example because it’s probably higher than that, but let’s just say it’s something like that.
Middle managers who they’re over 50 and they’re middle managers and whatever, they make $100 to $250,000 a year type people, maybe a million people like that in the country.
If every single one of them practically is on LinkedIn, you should be on LinkedIn. If all of them are on Twitter, you need to be on Twitter.
You can’t not be where your audience is. But for most people, do you have to use social media? Absolutely not. But you can use social media.
And the important thing is that if you do use social media, you are not reliant on that platform, number one.
Number two, you turn them into email subscribers. You use social media to get them to subscribe.
So if I take total number of followers on social media, and in fairness, some of these people, if you add up Twitter and Facebook and whatnot, you can’t add them all up, because some people follow me on multiple platforms.
But even if you do add them all up, I still have four or five times more email subscribers than I do social media followers.
The point is, it’s more important to develop that email relationship. But you can use social to get new eyeballs.
You can use social to communicate certain things that you wouldn’t post on your blog, that you wouldn’t necessarily send an email about it, but you posted on social media, you can use it to go live, things like that, and develop community and foster community.
Question it ties in perfectly with that one. Well, if you are on social media, what are some best social media practices, techniques for both affiliates and affiliate managers?
The key there be human. It’s social media. Be human. Build relationships, develop relationships, nurture relationships and one of the ways that I do that is to be intentional.
I do not check social media just to check social media. I do not just go on and I’ve mentioned this before.
I find it fascinating when I observe someone who doesn’t use social media for business, how they interact with it.
It’s just like the thumb squirrel, and they just scroll and I’m like, for 20 minutes, they do nothing but scroll, and occasionally they’ll hit a like button.
They’re not commenting very, very often. They’re not nurturing a relationship. They’re just their Voyers. They’re gawkers.
That’s interesting, because that’s not how I use social media. I’m intentional and so the question is, how do we use this?
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As an affiliate manager or an affiliate, you have to be intentional.
I’ve talked about it before, and I interviewed Dana Derrick from Dream 100, and he has a plug in for Chrome.
And one of the things I love about it is it allows me to see all of their social media posts in one place.
It’s not cluttered by everyone else. It’s all right there for the people that I most want to interact with.
And so it kind of filters out, like my mom and my sister and I do care about those things, and I’ll check in every couple of weeks on those, but it’s not part of my relationship building for business.
And so I use that plug in, and I can go in, and it’ll show me the number of comments, and it showed me all their posts.
So I even see the ones that have zero comments and so when I comment on their post that has zero comments, I’m the only comment.
When you have a post that has 200 comments and you’re one of the comments, you get one 200th of the attention.
It’s like, imagine you’re meeting somebody and you’re in an audience of 200 people.
It’s the difference between going to somebody’s conference and eating lunch with them one on one. What’s going to develop the relationship more.
So I’m able to develop relationships more again, because I’m intentional. Then when I’m interacting with them, I’m human.
I build relationships. I’m not going on Facebook and be like, hey, go buy my product. No, I don’t do that.
So from an affiliate manager in a relationship standpoint, that’s the one part.
The other thing, like I’ve already said, from social media, from your followers, you need to make sure you are using it to drive them back to your stuff periodically.
We have a formula that we follow that honestly, it’s been so long since I updated the formula, and my team handles that now that I don’t really remember a lot of it.
But essentially, we post some questions. We post other people’s content. We post quotes. We post kind of random thoughts.
And that accounts for about 75% to 85% of all the content we post and it’s roughly like we’ll do. We kind of call it the four to one ratio roughly.
We’ll post somebody else’s blog post. We’ll post a question that solicits some feedback.
Then we’ll post a quote, and then we’ll share a podcast episode that I really liked from somebody else, an interview that maybe somebody did a friend or something, and that’s building relationships too, but it’s serving my audience.
Then we’ll post a link to one of my blog posts, and then we’ll post somebody else’s thing and then a quote, and then maybe just a short statement or something, whatever, just an interesting line.
Then we’ll share a lead magnet and then we’ll share some of these podcast episode and so on and so forth.
So roughly four posts in a row that have nothing to do with any of my stuff, and they’re not soliciting people to go to my website, they’re not soliciting people to subscribe.
But, you know, four ish times a day we have a direct lead magnet call to action about six to eight times a day.
We’ll call them to go read a blog post or listen to a podcast episode of mine and then the other 40 or 50 or whatever have nothing to do with anything that I’m doing.
So that’s kind of the rule that we use for social media in terms of our followers. So I hope you enjoyed this episode.
I hope you got a ton out of the Q and A today. If you’ve got questions, you can ask them anytime asktheaffiliateguy.com.
We’ll put the link to that in the Show Notes. Ask your questions, asktheAffiliateguy.com, and I would love to hear your biggest takeaway like, which one of these questions was the one that you had?
What are you taking away from this episode? What actionable? One actionable item are you taking away?
You can text your answer to me at 260-217-4619. I’d love to hear from you on that.
All the links we mentioned today are in the Show Notes.
We’ve got links, obviously, you can ask me questions that asktheAffiliateguy.com
Your First 100 Affiliates Report. My best affiliate recruiting email.
Our course Find Affiliates Now that affiliate email template, shareAsale, and whatever else I talked about today, they’re all going to be in the Show Notes for you.
And lastly, make sure you hit subscribe so you do not miss the next episode coming up here, we’ve got another affiliate profile with my friend Holly Homer, how she went.
So she did one affiliate promotion, made $0. Same one just a few months later, $3,500 in commissions, how did she do it?
Well, that’s what the next episode is all about. You do not want to miss it.
So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss that and I’ll see you then.
The post Listener Q&A: Finding Affiliates, What’s Working in Affiliate Recruiting, Email Templates, and More appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Promoting membership programs is a great way to get started in affiliate marketing…and a great way to boost your long-term earnings. Imagine every single month getting hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars deposited into your account automatically. That is the power of recurring affiliate revenue. In this episode, I’m going to share some of the benefits of promoting membership programs, some strategies for making more sales when you promote, and some of the top membership programs for affiliates.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Looking for some good affiliate programs to promote? Check out our recommended affiliate programs here!
LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Ultimate Guide to Resources Pages
How To Write A Review Post That Ranks & Converts
Notable Press
Pretty Link
ConvertKit Trial
How to Warm Up Your List Before a Promotion
List Launch Challenge
No Product No Problem
Transcript with List of Affiliate Programs
Text me at 260-217-4619
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyBehind-the-Scenes on Our Affiliate Promotion for Product Launch Formula
How to Promote Virtual Summits as an Affiliate (If You Aren’t a Speaker)
Fix Your Funnel: How to Increase Sales and Make Your Affiliates More Money with John Ainsworth
How to Increase Your Commissions by Guiding Your Followers & Creating Repeat Buyers with Dave Gambrill
Affiliate Marketing Lesson: Shifting From Promoting Free Content To A Paid Product
Book Launch Party: An Interview with Matt About Turn Your Passions Into Profits
Special Episode: Highlights from My Whirlwind Book Tour
Top 5 Biggest Affiliate Recruiting MistakesPromoting membership programs is a great way to get started in affiliate marketing and a great way to boost your long-term earnings. Now imagine every single month getting hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars deposited into your account automatically.
That is the power of recurring affiliate revenue. In this episode, I’m going to share some of the benefits of promoting membership programs, some strategies for making more sales when you promote, and some of the top membership programs for affiliates.
So every month, like our company, we get thousands of dollars in recurring affiliate revenue. Now, the truth is, we don’t do enough of this.
To be clear, we do not do nearly enough of this or it’d be a lot more. Most months we’re getting close to $10,000, doing virtually nothing.
It’s a pretty nice floor to have and that’s something I think I mentioned this late last summer in an episode where I talked about one of our things as a company last year was to create a higher floor. So as a company at that time, we have different parts of our business, but at that time, our floor was about $20,000.
There were a couple of months a year where we made just barely over $20,000 and payroll and everything else at that time was 32, $33,000 is it much higher now? And so we were losing money two months out of the year and there was like another two months where it was maybe in the high 20s, low 30s.
We were barely breaking even. So we made all of our money in like eight months and one of the goals that I set a while ago was like, okay guys, we got to get the floor up.
We need the floor like in our worst month, our absolute worst month, we need to make a dollar. Can we get our floor high enough so that in our absolute worst month, we make a dollar?
And we did that. And part of that, it’s not the only thing, but part of that was getting this recurring affiliate revenue up, getting that to a higher level.
Because at that time, I think it was about $5,000, $4,500. Now it’s up north of eight, almost $9,000 a month on average and so most months we’re coming close to that $10,000 number and we’re doing nothing to make that at least now.
And some of the things we promote that are recurring, we’ve got some SAS products, software, as a service Convertkit, for example, we promote that and email service is one that we recommend. If you want to trial by the way, you go to MattMcWilliams com/convertkit and it’s the best email service that we know of and recommend MailChimp is another email service.
It’s typically for beginners. For beginners, it’s a little bit less expensive and a little bit less complicated.
We don’t recommend it unless that’s exactly what you like. You are genuinely completely starting out.
You need the cheapest version possible without all the bells and whistles. Then, yeah, we recommend MailChimp.
I think that’s just mattmcwilliams.com/MailChimp, and most people go with Convertkit, but about 10% of the people that we recommend signing up to get an email system. They use MailChimp.
There are Clickfunnels, and simply Raven Tools I’m sure I’m forgetting at least like ten of all these things. Some bring in as little as $100 a month.
There was a time I remember our monthly affiliate commission from Convertkit was like $27. The monthly thing that we got from Clickfunnels is like $120 for Mailchimp, it was almost nothing.
Raven Tools at one point, I think it was $4. 70, but we got it for like four months before we made a second sale.
So some of those are still around. I mean, Raven Tools I don’t think we’re not above 150.
It’s a small amount of money. Others are more than $2,000, but it’s every single month and you get over $150 times twelve months.
I’m not a math whiz, but I can do that one and figure out that eighteen hundred dollars a year pay for our son’s soccer and some of the travel for it. Like, that’s a lot.
That’s an entire sport. Travel that we’ve paid for $800 a year is what we pay for a lot of things.
It’s a lot of money. That’s half of our team’s training budget every year.
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These are pretty cool things that we can think of. Some of these things we haven’t promoted in over a year.
Some we continue to promote either once a year or promote them. Evergreen Clickfunnels, for example.
We heavily promoted two times during our list launch challenge, but we still sign up a new person every six weeks or so. Evergreen so we add maybe seven or eight people for every one or two that drop off.
So every few months our income goes up, whatever, a few hundred bucks. That’s pretty cool.
So this is the power of this. This is the power of this recurring affiliate revenue.
And today I’m going to share some of the benefits of promoting membership programs. Some strategies for making more sales than you promote.
And then I’m going to share some of the top membership programs for affiliates. Now just caveat with those top programs.
Probably only one or two of them are going to be relevant to any specific affiliate. One or two of them are going to be relevant to you.
I’m just listing some of them. But more importantly, I’m sharing why I think they’re a top membership program.
So you can know what to look for in other programs. All right, so let’s jump into the benefits of promoting membership programs number one, you create that recurring revenue as we talked about.
I mean, this is my favorite part, promoting membership programs. As an affiliate, I can create that recurring revenue.
So month after month, I do one promotion. I continue to get paid sometimes for years.
As I said, some of these promotions I promoted as far back as 2017, and 2018, and today, I haven’t promoted them. One in particular, I won’t mention is I haven’t been promoted since 2020.
It still brings in enough money today to cover almost all of our monthly software expenses. So all the stuff that we pay for as a company, actually, it might even be above what we pay for.
Some of these things we pay for yearly. But if I divided them into a monthly thing like click, funnels and Convertkit, and this other service and all these things like the ads and all these things that the ad tools and the plugins and all these things that add up, they’re in the $7,800 range.
We haven’t promoted this thing in three years. March 2020 was the last time we promoted this particular product.
It’s bringing in a little bit over $1,000 a month, every single month. That’s pretty awesome.
The second thing is, this is passive income. Most of the income I create for membership programs is fairly passive.
Now, in a moment, I’m going to share benefit number three. Number three is the barrier to promotion is low.
So I don’t have to do a hardcore lengthy promotion. For most membership programs, I can casually mention them in Facebook Live, or casually mention them on a podcast like I just did Convertkit.
As I know for a fact, based on past history, one or two people will sign up for Convertkit again. Ramaclaims.
Comconvertkit. One or two of you listening are like, yep, I need to sign up for that and you will. So I just did a casual mention.
I’m not going to do a seven-email campaign or even a three-email campaign. All I did was just mention it on the podcast and then I’ll put it in the show notes for you.
Or I’ll do a live and we’ll drop the link in the comments and I’ll get two sign-ups. And you go with two sign-ups, let’s say $10 a month, Whoopee does $10 each. $20 a month? Yeah.
But some of those will go on for five years. That’s over $1,000.
I could take 7 seconds to mention a program and make $20 a month for the next five years. That’s pretty freaking cool.
So because most membership programs are between like $20 and $100 a month, the barrier to entry is incredibly low. I think the most expensive one we promote is $297 a month.
The next most expensive is $97 a month. So for most Americans, at least, this cost falls under their discretionary budget.
Each month, the decision-making process is shorter, especially some of the $ 20-a-month ones and $ 30-a-month ones. They don’t require any hard selling.
They’re like the candy at the grocery aisle when you just dropped $200 on milk and steak and chicken and whatever, what’s a 50-cent pack of gum, right? It doesn’t require a great display or any hard-selling things like that.
You just tell a few stories about how awesome whatever you’re selling is. The membership is provided a link and you’re good.
And that makes planning the promotions easier. Take some of the pressure off me as the affiliate.
So, again, that barrier to promotion is lower because I don’t need to take up a whole week. I don’t need to do like a full campaign like in this one.
I wasn’t planning on mentioning Convertkit. I didn’t have a note that I have to mention Convertkit for this podcast effect.
What I just did, was I had to pause for a second to write down in my notepad. I’ve got whatever links I happen to drop on the fly.
And I wrote CK for Convertkit so I didn’t have to plan anything around that. And then I get to make $20 a month for the next five years or so or longer.
How cool is that? That’s pretty freaking awesome.
So again, the planning is so much easier to take some of the pressure off. I’m not saying to do only recurring promotions, and recurring affiliate revenue, but having a little bit of it is pretty nice.
And then the fourth benefit is you get to be a part of a community. Generally, I only promote membership programs that I’m a part of or plan to join.
So part of the benefit to me is I get to be in the membership with the people I refer and that’s fun for me personally creates a cool community vibe with them. So some of the not software as a service stuff, but some of the memberships that I have promoted, are memberships I was already a part of.
And I’m in there and then when people buy through me, they see me in the community as well and they see me as a leader in that community, which reinforces that belief that I’m a leader outside of that community. Now, as far as strategies, what are some of the strategies that you need to use when you’re promoting some sort of a membership program?
Now, there are two types of membership programs that you might want to promote. There’s open or Evergreen and then there’s closed right? So the Open programs are open.
They’re open. You can join them year-round, 24/7, and 365 days. You can join them anytime. These are the type of things that you can promote.
Literally, you can promote them 24 7365 with no limit. Closed programs have a registration period that’s only open for a defined period of time.
So they might only open up for ten days out of the year or two six-day periods, or seven-day periods twice a year or quarterly or whatever, but they’re open only for a short period of time. Now, there are advantages and disadvantages to both.
I’m not going to get into that. That’s not what this episode is about. I think both of them can work and they work for different types of programs. But for you as an affiliate promoting them, all that matters is that the promotional strategies change.
So there are different strategies if you’re promoting an open program versus a closed program. So if you’re promoting an open program, an Evergreen program, make absolutely sure you do the following four things, all right?
Number one, you need to add the program to your Resources page. So if you go to Matt Mcwilliams.com/Toolbox, for example, you will see my Toolbox page.
And some of those things on there are recurring revenue items. Like they are membership programs or SAS or things like that.
They’re recurring revenue. And so I make sure I add those there because you can click on that any day, 365 days a year.
If you click on that link, you’re not going to get a Coming soon page or a Waitlist page. You’re going to be able to sign up and join.
If you want more on creating a Resources page that works, make sure you grab my Ultimate Guide to Resources pages. If you go to Mattmcwilliams.com/Resources page, I’ll put that link in the Show notes as well.
You can download that free guide there on how to create will actually walk you through how to create a resources page. The second thing is you got to memorize your link, and create a pretty link for the membership program or the software, whatever it is. For instance, that mattmcwilliams.com/convertkit. I didn’t have to go look that up.
I knew it was mattmcwilliams.com/convertkit and even if you don’t know, if you’re recommending a few different software and you want to say like, hey, go to mattmcwilliams.com/Toolbox, I’ve got links to all of them there.
That can work too. But if you’re mentioning them one-off, it’s generally better to just mention the one unless there’s a compelling reason to.
Again, if you’re mentioning something where you might say, I’ve also got some other recommendations at mattmcwilliams.com/toolbox where you’d be able to grab that but memorize the link. In fact, grab the pretty link.
It’s a plug-in for WordPress. If you use WordPress, I know what it is, it’s mattmcwilliams.com/prettylink because we created a pretty link for a pretty link. It’s like so meta, right?
So make sure that you memorize your links. Keep a spreadsheet with your links in case you don’t know them, so you’ve got them easily accessible.
The third thing is to talk about it regularly and mention it periodically on your podcast, your blog, and your videos. Find a reason to work these evergreen things just into the conversation to keep them front and center for your audience.
As I talk about Convertkit, I mentioned that link at least once a quarter. I don’t necessarily do that on purpose, it’s just that it comes up in conversation, right?
So the point there is just to make sure that you aren’t going dark on these evergreen affiliate programs and never talking about them, right? And then the fourth thing is to write a review.
Write a review about the product, whether it be a SaaS product or a membership, write a review about it because then it’s open 365 days a year. Writing a review for something that’s only open twice a year, I mean, you can do that.
It’s just a little bit more of a beast to keep up with it when it’s only going to be open for a week. And we’ll do it from time to time.
We’ll write reviews for things that are going to be open for a short period of time, but it’s better if it’s open again. You can grab my free report on how to write a review post that ranks and converts because that’s the super important thing.
You can’t just rank. You can’t just have it be, hey, great, I got the second-ranking for that.
You know that search term Whoopi. If you go to your page and it’s like, wow, this sucks, and it doesn’t convert.
Well, if it’s just ranking high because you’ve got good keywords and you’ve got good all that stuff, but it doesn’t convert, well, you’re not going to make any money. So you needed to convert the same thing is, the reverse is true.
Like, you got a beautiful page, the sales copy is amazing, and it converts like crazy, but you only get four hits to it. Well, all four of them bought it.
Well, what if you had 400 hits to it? I’m not saying you’re going to get 400 buyers, but you might get 50 or 100.
So go grab that free report. It’s at mattmcwilliams.com/reviewpost and again, I’ll put that in the show notes for you as well. I just wrote myself a note to do that. All right.
If you’re promoting closed programs, with a closed program, you’ll want to create more of a marketing strategy. Treat it like a product launch, because really, in effect, it is.
So make sure at the very least, you do the following two things. These are the two things that are specific to closing programs.
Number one, you warm up your audience in advance. Okay? Warm up your audience in advance. You’re treating this like a launch.
This is going to be like a 6, 7, 10-day sprint. You need to warm them up, right?
If you’re going to go that heavy, you got to warm them up in advance. If you want more on warming up your audience in advance of an affiliate promotion, I’ve got a blog post for you called how to Warm Up Your List Before a Promotion.
The same thing is applied to listing social media, podcasts, and all that stuff, and then secondly, mail like crazy during Open Cart.
During the open cart period, I want you to plan on at least one email every day of the open cart and at least five on the final day of the promotion. That sounds crazy, right?
But I have done the research. That is what works and if you want more cart close strategies, I did a whole series right here. I did a whole series about closing sales.
So just search for that. Look up closing sales. Go to mattmcwilliams.com look up closing sales or where we were listening to it, but look up that series I did on closing sales. I walk you through the ten keys to closing sales.
You want to follow those during the open cart period for a membership program and then strategies that work for both. There are three strategies, whether it’s open, closed, or whatever.
If it’s closed and it opens four times a year, ten times a year, it doesn’t matter. You want to get these basics down.
Number one, you want to focus on the transformation. Do not focus on the content of the membership, the cost of the membership, or the four things they get each month.
Whoopi. Dude, nobody cares. Focus on what they get from joining, which is the results they will experience. So what is the transformation you’ve experienced or others have experienced?
Talk about that. If it’s your transformation, then be personal about it. Get very personal and share your transformation.
Number two, share tons of case studies. Yes, you have a transformation, that’s one story. Or, you know, somebody who had a transformation, that’s one story.
So demonstrate the clear results that members are getting from the program. Make the ROI clear in terms of cost savings or time savings or results.
If it’s a membership for parenting, make it clear what are five or six other families got from this membership. And then lastly, sweeten the pot with bonuses.
I’ve done tons of episodes. I’m putting together a great bonus package. So I’m not going to belabor that here, but make it sweet for them. Give them some sort of a bonus.
And in those episodes, I share how the research has evolved over the years. And you want your bonus package to be roughly 100% to 200% of the value of the product.
Now, when you’re promoting a $2,000 affiliate offer, that means you want a $2,000 bonus. But when you’re promoting a $ 47-a-month membership, that means really anything.
Fifty dollars to one hundred dollars is a great bonus. If you have a $200 bonus, that’s awesome, but you don’t need it.
So it really, in terms of pricing your bonus, you don’t need a super expensive bonus. And even if it’s a $297, like I said earlier, $297 product, then a three to $600 bonus is phenomenal.
And it kind of takes the pressure off you to provide this, like, 3000 $4000 bonus package. You don’t need to.
The simplest way to do that, and you could even put a nice little price tag on this is just to say, hey, when you join this membership, for example, through my link, then once every quarter we’re going to go through the previous three months worth of material together. It’s a $ 200-a-quarter value, so it’s an $ 800-a-year value.
Boom. What a great bonus to offer people if it’s software, then offering them a tour of how you use that software.
This is something if you have a larger company, you probably already have a sop standard operating procedure for like, how do you create affiliate links in Clickfunnels? We’ve already got a video for that inside of our company.
Like, I’d probably just share that. Maybe not, because there are a few personal things in there I probably wouldn’t share, but those are the type of things that just show them how you use the software.
Before we purchase Notable Press, which is a WordPress theme company, we now own a company that creates WordPress themes, and if you want to check it out, go to Notable Press. By the way, we’ve got some amazing themes there and some other cool tools.
But before we purchased it, we were a pretty big affiliate for Notable Press. And one of the simple things that we did was we had a little bonus where we showed them how we set up our website.
I mean, it took 20 or 30 minutes, but they got to see like, oh, this thing that you did here, Matt, that we really like, here’s how we set that up. I didn’t even have to do the video.
It was Robbie on our team who did it. And it was a great bonus for purchasing this WordPress theme through us as an affiliate.
So again, focused on the transformation, share tons of case studies, and sweeten the pot with bonuses. Now, before we wrap up, I just want to share some examples of great affiliate programs for membership sites.
This is not an exhaustive list, all right. I’ve tried to cover a variety of really wide niches here.
Now, for the best programs in your niche, a simple Google search will do the trick. You might want to consider checking out day one of our No Product No Problem course, which is all about finding programs and getting accepted.
To get started with affiliate marketing the right way, download my free quickstart guide to affiliate marketing. Grab your copy here!
If you want these links, just check out the transcript at mattmcwilliams.com. page 53 two. I’m going to put the links and also you can kind of read through the descriptions in the transcript as well.
So the first one is Go join go. So this is it. A travel club. Gives their members access to unpublished wholesale hotel rates, 60-70 % off retail prices.
They’ve got almost a million hotels, I think, around the world now. Pays a $25 commission.
Everybody that signs up and then 1% of the hotel bookings, they’ve got a 60-day cookie. I’d like it to be longer, but most people aren’t taking much longer than that to plan their stuff.
So it’s got some cool advantages. Discount travel memberships are a pretty good commission for the niche.
I mean, it’s definitely in the top 10%, 20% of the travel niche, all those great things. The Lifetime 1% commissions on hotel bookings.
So once they book one time, they continue to book through Go join Go, you’re getting 1% of those hotel bookings, you know, $1,000 per week, you’re making $10 every time. Again, that’s residual.
That’s what we like about that. You can get some good coupon codes and all kinds of other stuff.
It’s really cool. They’ve got some pretty good graphics and social media posts, text links, and stuff like that as well wishlist products is another one. This is something that we use and recommend.
They’ve got a pretty good 30% commission, which is pretty sweet for a Lifetime cookie as well. So it’s a membership site software that helps people create their own membership sites.
It’s what we use, we run for us and our clients. I don’t know, I think we’re in the neighborhood of 15 or 20 membership sites now and that’s what we use.
We love it. They’ve got great training if you purchase through them.
I’ve never had an issue because everything I ever needed to know how to do was in their wiki and I’ve got access, they’ve got great support for them. So if I’m like, I don’t know how to do this, I just go on the support forum.
I usually get an answer within an hour or 2 hours on the high end. So really good wish List is what we use to run our membership site in-house.
So speaking In House, it is an in-house program so it’s not on a network. That’s pretty unique among membership sites and yeah, and they got great commissions, all this stuff and we’ll put links to all these in the transcript.
genie traveler is another travel deal site. So it’s a little bit different commission structure.
Theirs is 20%, just, you know, a little bit different. Same kind of thing as Go join Go, but a little bit different model.
They’re on a network which is a vaunt link. Cookies are also 60 days.
Again, I’d like to see that a little bit longer. sam’s Club we have all know at least heard of sam’s Club.
Their commissions are 7% off memberships and 4% on pretty much all other categories downside to sam’s Club’s three-day cookie. But again, not like people with an average order size of $265, probably a little bit higher right now.
Usually, people aren’t taking a ton of time now they’re on Rakuten, which is an affiliate network and they run that. So it’s great because they get over 46,000 products.
So yeah, I will say the one thing I don’t like about it in addition to the cookie link, but it’s not usually a problem. That cookie link is only a problem a quarter of a percent of the time, so it’s not that big of a deal.
Gift cards, laptops computers, and a few other things. You actually get 0% commission, so it’s just something to watch out for.
Just make sure you’re careful about what you promote on them. Dollar shave Club it’s a great 115 percent on razors, and 12% on non-razor stuff.
Three-day cookie. Again, it’s a low enough ticket item.
Most people aren’t a life-or-death decision about what kind of razor they’re going to buy. Most people aren’t taking more than a minute or ten, so they’ve got tons of stuff.
Their line, their product line is increasing, so it’s pretty cool to watch what they’re doing in terms of every month there’s more and more stuff to promote. So again, this recurring thing is as their stuff recur, every time those razors are shipped, you’re making money.
They update their creatives. I love the way they run their company, like their affiliate program.
They do a great job updating their creative. And usually, you don’t have to do the updating, they update them for you.
So as long as you’re pulling them directly from their stuff using linking to their images, then they update them for you. I wasn’t going to say about that one.
There’s something else, but I can’t remember. They’re on a network, which is Pepper Jam, so go check them out again, we’ll put links in there as well.
And then the last one is monthlyclubs.com commissions are pretty solid caps. They’ve got like a chocolate club, a beer club, a wine club, a cheese club, a flower club, all that stuff.
Pretty straightforward. cigars. I think they’ve got some others as well. And so yeah, it’s just a monthly club.
No, it’s a monthly club, and yeah, pretty flexible memberships. Like you can even design your own club on there, which is pretty cool.
So they use CJ Commission Junction to run their affiliate program and haven’t checked it out. It’s pretty cool.
Like they’ve got the number one beer of the month club. That’s their big one.
Some pretty cool plans that members can use. They got a 90-day cookie.
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So one of the better ones again, why not make it lifetime people? That’s how long your cookie should be because it just sells better and has pretty good commissions.
Typically they end up working out in the 15% to 20% range, which is pretty good for retail products. So those are just some suggestions.
Again, you can see some of the issues with those. Typically cookie length and maybe being a little bit stingy on the percentage.
But again, if it’s recurring and you’re getting a 15% or 20% recurring commission, that ends up being pretty sweet. So as we wrap up here, I would love to hear from you.
Your biggest takeaway. Shoot me a text, at 260-217-4619. Let me know what your biggest takeaway was. All the links we mentioned, will be in the show notes for you.
There are tons of links today. So go check out the show notes and make sure you hit subscribe because, in the next episode, I’m going to be taking your questions.
We have got a backlog of listener questions, and Q and A time. So you’ve got the queues, I’ve got the a’s.
I’m going to give them to you all about finding affiliates what’s, working in affiliate recruiting, affiliate email templates, different types of affiliate coupons, affiliates, whether you should go in-house or network, and just good grief.
There are so many other great questions. Oh, man, that’s a good one about social media. So, got some great questions that we’re going to answer in the next episode.
In our Q and A episode, we do one of those about every quarter or so. If you’ve got a question, go to Asktheaffiliateguy.com and you can ask your question there.
Maybe if you ask it in time, might be worth squeezing into that episode. I don’t think so.
I think I’ll record it too far in advance, but go there anyway. Ask your question and I’ll answer it in a future episode.
So with that, we’ll wrap up and I will see you in the next episode. Bye for now.
The post How to Create Recurring Affiliate Revenue Promoting Membership Sites appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Finding and recruiting affiliates is not complicated. But there are five things you can do (or not do) to really make it difficult…and even destroy your efforts. Today, I’ll share what the most common killer mistakes are and how to avoid them.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
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Links Mentioned in this EpisodeGet My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email
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Text me at 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
| | | | --- | --- | | | | | | | |
Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyBehind-the-Scenes on Our Affiliate Promotion for Product Launch Formula
How to Promote Virtual Summits as an Affiliate (If You Aren’t a Speaker)
Fix Your Funnel: How to Increase Sales and Make Your Affiliates More Money with John Ainsworth
How to Increase Your Commissions by Guiding Your Followers & Creating Repeat Buyers with Dave Gambrill
Affiliate Marketing Lesson: Shifting From Promoting Free Content To A Paid Product
Book Launch Party: An Interview with Matt About Turn Your Passions Into Profits
Special Episode: Highlights from My Whirlwind Book Tour
Top 5 Biggest Affiliate Recruiting MistakesThe post Top 5 Biggest Affiliate Recruiting Mistakes appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Want to see behind-the-scenes on one of our big affiliate promotions? That’s what this episode is all about! I’m opening the vault to share everything we did to promote Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula a few years ago. My team and I share how we used live videos, created killer bonuses, segmented our list, and so much more!
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Looking for some good affiliate programs to promote? Check out our recommended affiliate programs here!
Links Mentioned in this EpisodeConvertKit Free Trial
Affiliate Promo Plan
Your Affiliate Launch Coach
Turn Your Passions into Profits Book PLUS Exclusive Bonuses
Text me at 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
| | | | --- | --- | | | | | | | |
Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Promote Virtual Summits as an Affiliate (If You Aren’t a Speaker)
Fix Your Funnel: How to Increase Sales and Make Your Affiliates More Money with John Ainsworth
How to Increase Your Commissions by Guiding Your Followers & Creating Repeat Buyers with Dave Gambrill
Affiliate Marketing Lesson: Shifting From Promoting Free Content To A Paid Product
Book Launch Party: An Interview with Matt About Turn Your Passions Into Profits
Special Episode: Highlights from My Whirlwind Book Tour
The Untold Stories from Turn Your Passions Into Profits (Behind The Scenes Peek at My Book)
Behind-the-Scenes on Our Affiliate Promotion for Product Launch FormulaWant to see behind-the-scenes on one of our biggest affiliate promotions?
Well, that’s what this episode is all about.
I’m opening the vault to share everything we did to promote Jeff Walker’s product launch formula a few years ago.
My team and I share how we use live videos, created killer bonuses segmented, our list, and so much more.
So in late 2019, we did a major affiliate promotion for Jeff Walker’s product launch formula.
Now, at that time, we had a tiny list, and yet we managed to do over $20,000 in sales and finished just outside the top ten on one of the best leader boards in literally in affiliate history.
We did a recap of that with my team at the time and we’ve had this kind of in our vault for the last few years, two and a half or three and a half years with our insider members, but we wanted to open it up to share it with as many people as possible.
I mentioned I’ve done that for a couple of episodes now because in part well, as you’re listening to this, I’ve actually been back from the beach for a week now but right before when I’m recording this now, I’m leaving tomorrow.
So I wanted to get ahead on some content and one of the easiest ways to do that is a lesson there is to look at some of the stuff you’ve already created that could be of huge value to your podcast listeners and give it to them and this is one of those ways.
So we did this promotion a few years ago, and like I said, almost hit the top ten.
One of the most competitive leaderboards out there and who knew that this would be one of the reasons why Jeff would hire us to coach his affiliate management team and we’d help them have an even bigger launch?
Just a couple of years later, Jeff became a coaching client for us, our Your Affiliate Launch coach program, and I’ll put a link to that in the show notes.
I know we talked about this in the last episode as well, but he actually became a client of your affiliate launch coach, and we were able to help them have their biggest second biggest launch ever.
This is the guy that invented launches, and we helped him have his second-biggest launch ever.
So that was pretty cool, helping him to be able to do that and this was one of the catalysts, us doing really well in this affiliate promotion.
Now, in this episode, I’m joined by Mark and Robby from our team, and we’re sharing our lessons from this PLF promo, like how we use Facebook Live and kind of some of the surprising benefits of doing that that we didn’t expect, how we created a killer bonus package list segmenting and the things that we did. There is so much more.
Some of the mistakes we made and what we learned from them. So this is a long episode, so let’s jump right in.
Let’s jump into some lessons.
Matt: Robby, I’m going to let you take this one because this was 99% on your plate.
Robby: Yeah.
Matt: Right before we did the PLF promo and some of you guys will go through this. By the way, this was for Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula. That was the promotion.
Right before we switched email systems from MailChimp to ConvertKit and we’ll talk more about that, probably, I’ll let you take that one since you had primary responsibility for that.
Robby: Yeah. So this was a huge shift for us.
The way that ConvertKit works compared to MailChimp, the entire way that we send out emails is completely different.
MailChimp is list-based, whereas ConvertKit is based on tags and events, and custom content.
So that was one of the things that I think it was about a week before this promotion really hit full swing was when we or when I finally got the transition done.
Matt: Less than a week before.
Robby: Which was this was my deadline, was like, okay, we got to get PLF. We got to pick one or the other.
Matt: Real quick on that. Our recommendation is that you don’t switch email providers right before doing heavy promotions.
Robby: Yeah, don’t do that. Let’s get into that.
We added a lot of extra work on our back end because one of the reasons we wanted to use ConvertKit was that we were able to run or send a lot more targeted emails.
We were trying not to overwhelm people’s inboxes it’s one of the things we want to be aware of because we’re sending as many emails as we are and as many as we recommend, we want to make sure that people are getting the emails that actually matter to them so that they’re not seeing the same piece of content multiple times.
We want to make sure our deliverability rate is good. We want to minimize our unsubscribes from people just getting overwhelmed if they get twelve emails in a day versus four on a closed card day.
So it was a major shift because the way things were set up in MailChimp didn’t transfer well to Convert kit, especially the biggest one being like subscribe dates.
I did not have a way to bring that over so all of that data that we were working with there, we had to do by hand, I guess by hand, by mouse, or by spreadsheet.
But yeah, that made it really difficult. So I probably spent more time than we will in future promotions, just making sure content was tailored to the right group.
And that kind of led to one of the other issues we had that people kind of snuck through our filters because I did not have the filters all set up properly.
Matt: Well, let’s come back to that, actually.
Robby: Okay, yeah, we’ll come back.
Matt: I just posted a question for you guys.
I mentioned that you should not switch email providers right before doing a big promotion, whether it’s your own promotion or promoting affiliate offers.
So let us know in the chat if you guys want to know why that is.
Because I want to make sure we’re tailoring this content, you guys, and I don’t want to share that if you guys already know that.
We’ll talk about that and then I want to go back, I want to go back to the things we did to Mitigate that.
Let us know in the chat, guys if that’s something you want to know.
So far, nobody has said they want to know that, so maybe you all get the reason for that.
Robby: They’re all smarter than us on that one, I guess.
Matt: Yeah, okay. Stacey wants to Stacey funny because we’re getting ready to
talk about you, Stacey.
Mark: Well, and before we I mean, they’re all smarter, but, I mean, there were specific reasons we did, and we’re going to, I’m sure, get into some of the things we did to Mitigate that.
Matt: Yeah.
Mark: We didn’t just switch and then say, well, we hope this is going to work.
Robby: No, we’ve been planning this for months.
Matt: Yeah. So the reason why you don’t normally want to do that and then we’ll talk about why we had to the reason why you don’t normally want to do that is when you switch to a new email provider, whether it be from MailChimp to Infusionsoft or Infusionsoft to convert kit or whatever AWeber to something.
Or something to AWeber. You’re on a new IP, you’re on a new system.
The way that the emails are sent is different and when you come out of the gates with a new system, sending 20,000 emails right away, almost, they’re about a promotion.
Your spam complaints, your unsubscribe rates, your unopened rates, your unread, and your unliced rates are higher during a promotion.
Robby: Your deliverability rates are affected, too.
Matt: That’s what happens is then your deliverability goes even long term with your new email provider.
Robby: Yeah. Even before unsubscribes and spam complaints and things like that, because you’re delivering email from a new IP, it completely changes all your deliverability rates.
And we actually saw that, and that’s one of the things that we had to do luckily, ConvertKit was great about this.
They emailed us multiple times and said, is everything good with your account?
We emailed them, and I think you guys even got on calls with them and said, “Hey, guess what?
We are about to do a major promotion.
We just switched to you guys, can we get some hands-on help making sure that our deliverability in the future isn’t messed up?”
Because that’s a heck of a way to start your transition onto a new piece of software.
Matt: Guys, if we didn’t do it the week before the PLF promo, it was going to be when next?
Robby: It should have been like February or March.
Matt: That was actually the one week we had where we could do it.
And quite frankly, this comes for me as much as you guys. I just wanted to get off MailChimp.
I’ve been talking about it for so long and you could do the work.
Robby had the time and he was ready to do it and so that’s why we decided to, even though the reality is I would implore you guys not to ever do what we did, like do as we say, not as we do.
It was not our best idea. It really came down to impatience to get off MailChimp and get over to ConvertKit for various reasons.
And this is not a knock against MailChimp, but if it had been halfway to where ConvertKit was, we probably would have just gone ahead and waited until February but it just wasn’t what we needed.
Mark: Well, I think it’s important, too.
I mean, there’s no good time, I don’t think, to do something like that, because credit to them, systems like MailChimp make it really, really hard to switch, and they don’t do it by being jerks or rude or anything.
It’s just we have built out tons of systems, and automation and stuff tend to switch all of that over.
So yes, it wasn’t the best timing, but at the same time, I don’t know that there ever was a good time.
We would have got to February and said, oh shoot, we’ve got this in two weeks.
So I think sometimes it’s important to realize in your business that sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and do things.
But when you do that, you do everything you can to mitigate those risks.
Like contacting customer support, contacting their affiliate manager, because we promote form, so we know the affiliate manager doing everything we can.
Matt your friends with the CEO, messaging him, texting him, sending him, and it behooves them to help us with that, especially with us, where it’s like, hey, we’re going to send a lot of traffic to you and we can do that more effectively on your system to help us out.
So I think it’s important to realize that you can do those things and it doesn’t hurt to reach out to the companies and say”
“I need some help.”
“I need you to be looking out for us.”
“I need you to be watching this, monitoring this.”
And a lot of times they will because they want you to be successful, they want you to switch.
Matt: But they got three or three practical tips.
Guys, if you’re ever switching email systems, do this whether you’re doing a promotion right away or not.
Okay, so here are the three things, the three things that we did.
Number one, like Marc and Robby both, we reached out to them directly before there was an issue, okay?
We said, hey, we just moved all these people over.
We will be sending a lot of emails because when we’re doing a big affiliate promotion, we send more than when we’re normally sending.
I think we sent like 15 emails in 15 days.
Robby: I was going to say we’re up to we’ve sent almost a million emails in the last month.
Matt: There you go.
Robby: Total number of people.
Matt: When you factor in unopened and non-clicks and segments, we probably have sent 500 emails in 30 days, though, like an actual number of emails, because of all the different segments that are getting but we reached out to them and gave them a heads up.
They all have algorithms, just like Facebook, just like Twitter, and all those things have algorithms.
They have an algorithm that says this new subscriber or this new customer might be spamming and so they will ban you.
But we reached out to them, so we had a human element override the algorithm.
Looking for some good affiliate programs to promote? Check out our recommended affiliate programs here!
Secondly, early on, we split test all of our emails, which I recommend doing anyway because you want to know what subject line converts better, and what text of the email gets a better click-through rate.
That’s actually not why we did it. We did it specifically because it meant that we could split up the traffic.
Instead of a lot of emails going out at once, it kind of divided it up and we got the benefit of sending a better subject line later in the day.
And then third, everyone was talking about this earlier guys, it was funny.
In the very first email that we sent about pls, the very first one. This is not the best practice.
I don’t normally suggest doing this, but we did it because we had just switched email systems.
The very first email, like the third sentence, said, by the way, if you don’t want to hear any more about Jeff Walker’s product launch master plus link, and like, within 10 seconds of reading this email, you could say, I don’t want to hear any more about this, click a link and opt out now.
We’re not sending you any more emails. We’ve kind of separated the weeds from the chaff.
Three, Four, and Five percent of the people who were likely to maybe unsubscribe or be marked as spam because they got tired of getting emails went ahead and just removed themselves, which we were able to do easily and converted it, as opposed to MailChimp.
MailChimp, do you want to give people an opt-out? Let’s talk about that for a second.
We always give people opt-out of an affiliate campaign.
We give people the chance to opt out of most of our internal promotions because it’s like, some of our promotions, some of our products are not for everybody.
And, for example, we didn’t have an opt-out. Why? Because it’s for everybody in my audience. But sometimes PLF is not for you.
And yet at the bottom of the email, hey, if you don’t want to hear any more about the product launch formula, click here we’ll remove you from MailChimp.
That was a manual process. That was an absolute nightmare.
I don’t even know it because I never did it.
That was all Mark and Robby and virtual assistants.
Mark: No, Robby never did it because Robby but wasn’t that an agreement when he started, like, I will never do this?
Matt: Okay, but with Convertkit, you set up the tag. You tell it to always remove this tag, and then it just does it.
Mark: You set up the page that they go to that says, hey, great, we’ve removed you. You won’t get any more emails. But that’s it.
Robby: Yeah. One-click optin.
Mark: Matt, I don’t know if you saw Stacey’s question here. She said, so ConvertKit is better.
Matt: Yes. Short answer, yes. Okay, let’s talk about that super quick.
The advantage to MailChimp, is it’s free to how many subscribers, guys? Is it 1000?
Robby: I think 2000 now.
Matt: Is it two? It went from two to one. I didn’t know if it ever went back up.
Okay, it’s free for 2000 subscribers. That’s a hard price to beat. You get a lot of stuff that you need, and you don’t get some stuff.
For us, it’s ConvertKit. I will continue to recommend MailChimp unless they get any worse, and it’s not a knock on them.
But I will continue to recommend MailChimp, for starters, newbie online beginners on an extremely shoestring budget.
You have $40 a month to spend on your platform when you’re starting out, and you’re spending $20 on hosting.
I got less than 20 and if you need anything, well, that’s going to get eaten up. Convertkit does cost money, even at the very lowest level, I believe.
Robby: 29 a month, I think the lowest level.
Matt: right there. You got $40 a month. You’re spending 20 on hosting. You don’t have a choice but to go with MailChimp and it’s not like they’re bad. They weren’t for us and they haven’t been for us for two years.
Marl: And I think, Matt, it’s important with this group to let them know that ConvertKit is much more affiliate friendly.
Now, we never had an issue with MailChimp, but we know people who did.
Matt: One of them is a case study in our right in the middle of a launch.
Mark: Right in the middle of a promo.
Matt: One of our biggest partners, affiliate partners.
Matt: But, I mean, we never had any issues, but I know for a fact, we know for a fact that ConvertKit does not have an issue with it, period. Good.
So for what we’re doing, and guys for you here that are interested in affiliate marketing, that is an important distinction. That is something to be clear about.
Robby: Yeah. We can do a training or even a backstage pass someday on what ConvertKit looks like so that we can go into all that detail, and give people everything they want there.
Matt: Yeah. Let’s move on to our next lesson.
This is one you started to talk about, and I said, Stacey, we’re going to talk about you because we’re going to talk about you, so let’s talk about that.
Robby: I transferred everybody over, and I thought I had all my tagging and custom fields and everything set up right.
Because internally, we don’t want to send emails, especially promotional emails, to people who we haven’t had a chance to build a relationship with yet.
And because of that, we set filters up in a very specific way. Well, somewhere along the line, somebody got this email.
Stacey got an email that we didn’t intend for you. I have no idea.
Matt: I think it was from Facebook. That’s what I was going to say. We’re promoting the Product Launch Formula.
Stacey, who is ON. Hey, Stacey. She purchased. It was like, I’m so excited to join PLF and my first reaction was not, yeah, we made an affiliate commission.
My first reaction was how bad she get in.
Robby, what’d you screw up?
Because here’s the thing. Stacey had just purchased one of our products. She was new to our audience.
We don’t want to promote anything to them, typically for 45 to 60 days after that, especially somebody else’s product.
That’s just because we want to nurture that relationship. Like Robby said.
What had happened, as far as I could tell, just based on the click streams, guys, is, yeah, I’m glad we didn’t screw up.
Actually, Stacey, if you guys are watching the comments, Stacey’s like, oh, I’m glad you screwed up.
So for those of you watching the replay, sometimes I’ll respond to stuff that you have no idea what I’m responding to, and then you need to clarify that.
But what happened was we were also pretty heavily promoting this on social media, and we’ll talk about that in a little bit.
And she caught one of those, and that got her into Jeff’s ecosystem, and then she purchased from there.
So that does happen. It’s one of those things where in that particular case, it’s not that I didn’t want to sell a few extra product launch formulas.
It’s that I don’t want the appearance to be that ten days after she purchased our product, I’m turning around going, hey, you got to go buy this other thing.
Because when you see something on Facebook, you inherently know that this is everyone.
Anybody could see this, but she wasn’t getting emails about it at the beginning, in part because she was filtered out.
Mark: Here’s the lesson from that, though, Matt, and I think this is important for everyone because I know that everybody struggles with they don’t want to sound salesy, they don’t want to be pushy, they don’t want to bug people.
But when it’s the right offer for the right person, nobody’s mad. As Stacey said, I’m glad you screwed up.
I’m glad it worked out that way because it’s something that she wanted and she needed.
So when you’re promoting those affiliate offers, you have to have that mindset.
You have to realize that the people that it’s for, they’re not going to be mad at you.
And even the people that don’t buy most times, nine times out of ten, aren’t going to be mad that you promoted you.
But it’s still good to have these types of systems in place where you do get the nurture that relationship going forward.
But it is a good reminder for all of us that regardless of anything else, people are normally happy that you’re recommending something that’s good for them, and that’s going to help their business.
Matt: Great point there, guys. I mean, that was kind of a fluke thing it’s ever happened, but that ties directly into what we did well.
And one thing is we’re going to kind of alternate. We’ve got four what we call did wells or do it again, and then we’ve got four improves or don’t do it again.
So speaking of Facebook lives, Jeff had a live launch.
You guys will see more of these from different people where they’re doing a live launch.
So what he did by live launch was instead of having a 30-minute pre-launch content seating video, and then having two more of those and then a sales video, he did them live.
So he’s reacting to comments. It’s done completely live with squirrel cam and everything, right?
And one of the things that we found was it was best to, during a live launch was not just send out an email saying, here’s what we learned from this one, or whatever, was actually to do a live recap.
What we found this last year, the 2018 PLF launch was also a live launch.
We found there were some ancillary benefits to doing these live recaps, and I’m going to share those with you.
Did they, in fact, help us make more sales? I only can document that they helped us make three more sales.
So we made $2,400 in commissions, more than we would have if we hadn’t done them.
Was that worth the amount of time we put into them if that was all that we had?
Questionably no.
Now, could there have been another two or three sales that we don’t know for a fact or five sales that we just don’t know for a fact?
Absolutely.
Let me share the ancillary benefits of doing those lives and guys, maybe you have some ancillary benefits as well.
The first ancillary benefit that we found was we dramatically increased the size of our audience.
The average video that we did as a PLF live recap had something like seven times the number of views as we have Facebook likes.
You guys do the math on that one. We encouraged people to share the videos, and they did.
You could tell, like, I would get a little alert, I’d be logged into Facebook and it would say, so and so shared your video, and then I would watch, and the number of people on would go, one more, two more, three more, four more, five more, six more, seven more, eight more.
And then it would kind of be like seven more, six months and then it would go back up.
But it would always go up and stay there and then you’d see so and so share and you’d see, like, six more people.
Come on. I don’t know if that is causation. I think there is. So, number one, we increased our rates.
Number two, the people that we were promoting watched him. We know they watched him. We’ll tell a quick story here.
Thankfully, today I have a much better relationship with Tim Walker than I did a year ago.
But a year ago, we were kind of on the radar like Mark and I had Jeff’s cell phone number.
That was about the extent of our relationship. Mark was a work colleague.
Mark: I’m a work colleague.
Matt: Jeff mentioned him in a video once without mentioning his name.
So a funny story that we don’t have time to get into now. We knew John and Jeff. We knew a couple of people on their team. Don crowder, for example. We know pretty well from another world.
But last year, when we did the Live, the Facebook Lives, we had PLF live this year and in this room of, I don’t know, about 100 influencers and Jeff’s up there with his team, and I said something.
I was sharing a tip for how to go through PLF with the group. I was like, you really got to do it together. Go through it with your team.
I said, what we do is download all the files. I have a VA go through, download all the files, and we watch them in quick time at like 1.2 speed.
I’m sure this is many of our PLF buyers. We watch them at 1.2 speed because 1.2 Jeff kind of talked slowly and everybody kind of chuckled.
Jeff’s like, yeah, it’s kind of like watching your Facebook lives where I know there’s going to be a nugget in there.
I just have to wait 20 minutes to get to. I was like, solid burn, Jeff. Mark looks on.
Mark: Everybody checks out louder.
Matt: Mark looks at me and goes, the only thing I got out of that is Jeff Walker watches our Facebook lives.
So that wouldn’t have happened were we not doing those. So those are two ancillary benefits that we got from it. There’s one more, actually.
Even if you didn’t buy PLF, we enhanced the experience of the live because you came from my audience and we helped you to get more out of the course, to get more out of the master class, to digest stuff or if you missed one.
We heard this from at least two people, and said, thank you so much for this map. I just got behind. I had some work commitments. My dog ate my homework.
My kids were walking uphill both ways in the snow, barefoot to school. Life happened, right?
I couldn’t watch the three-hour replay, so I watched your recap, and now I can watch the next one that Jeff does, and I don’t feel like I’m behind. Those are some of my silly benefits. What are yours?
Robby: I think an additional one for me was that it kept us on a track like we were going through the launch with Jeff. It made our email copy better.
It made just our overall focus on our launch. I felt like it was a lot tighter than it would have been otherwise.
Matt: Yeah.
Mark: I think that’s true, especially with Jeff’s live lessons being 3 hours.
If we weren’t doing a recap, it would have been really easy to be like, I don’t have time to watch the whole thing and then you’re right.
I think our copy would have suffered, and our interaction with our audience would have suffered for sure. The one that I got Matt, that I think is important too.
And again, I can’t quantify that this 100% helped, but I know long term it will, retargeting Facebook retargeting.
When we have these specific videos that were about PLF, we are able to then say we want to retarget everybody that watched 50% of these videos for a sales message.
And the way that compounds are we did this last year too and so when we were running ads and I know we’ll talk a little bit about that, I think here in a bit we were able to pull in some of those people from the last year that had watched those videos and say,
“Hey, they were interested in PLF.
Last year they watched 50, 90% of these videos.
They have some interest in PLF.
Let’s target them.”
And we actually think you remember. I don’t remember if I looked this year, but I know last year, Matt, the lookalike audience to those views, a very low cost for ads.
Matt: Oh, yeah, it was like something real quick, I suppose I know Jenny and somebody else said that they would love a tutorial on ConvertKit.
I dropped the link in the chat, but I’ll mention it here for those watching the replay, and we’ll put it below the video on the replay.
Robby, if you can make a reminder of that, it’s just Mattmcwilliams.com/convertkit and it sounds like you guys would love a tutorial on that.
So if you’re on live or you’re watching the replay, if we get enough people, probably won’t take very many who would love not necessarily a backstage pass, but a separate tutorial on how to use ConvertKit, but more importantly, how we use it in affiliate marketing.
A lot of how we use ConvertKit, for example, we’ll teach you how to use ConvertKit because we believe in it so much.
But also a lot of the specific things that we do are applicable to any other system, provided it’s not a system.
And I’m not picking on MailChimp, like MailChimp where you just can’t do some of the stuff that we did.
I guarantee you, though, we made mistakes in this promotion. It would have been infinitely worse if we hadn’t converted in every promotion we will ever do, whether it be for AIM.
Oh, my goodness. It was so much. I mean, how smooth was it this time?
Like, Mark was gone the whole time, and no offense to Mark, we didn’t meet him in part because we got converted.
And also, just to be clear, because he had busted his b*** for the two weeks before he left. Okay.
Mark: And because of that, I’m taking ten days off every month, just so you know.
Matt: All right. I love that. Yeah. Missing tasks.
I think we’re definitely going to do that. Robby, that’ll be all in you. I will enjoy hearing how that goes.
Guys, we could have this is something, quite frankly, we messed up and here I’m looking at our list of four things that we say we could have improved.
We messed up mistakes, whatever you want to call them. Every one of these guys is playbook stuff, so it’ll be better.
Every one of these and this is me calling us out, every one of these that we will improve on and that we just, quite frankly, did wrong are things that we already teach.
We messed up our own playbook because we’re humans. One of these, the first rolls here is actually less because we’re human and more because of circumstances.
But we had no pre-pre-launch for PLF at all. We had no warm-up. And so for those of you who’ve been through no product, no problem.
You’ve seen this before, but there’s a warm-up sequence. Right here’s a whole entire way to warm up your audience.
You warm them up, and the promo begins. You continue to warm them up, the promo ends, and you do a cart close a cool down at the end.
Well, we had none of that on the ramp, at all. None. We had zero onramps, in part because of circumstances. We were busy.
We were switching to Convertkit for one. But that was something where, you know, Kenneth ties into something we did well, that we’ll talk about in a moment.
But we reused a lot of the content from the previous year. Would have been really easy to say, hey, it’s a week before the promo mail to this blog post.
The blog post is already written. Hey, Robby, I need you to take 45 minutes to just review it, and make sure that everything’s accurate.
Do we need to change this sentence?
Pass it on to Mark for a quick review. Pass it on to Tara.
Let’s reuse the same email, but with this one tweak, and in an hour and a half, we have an entire piece of warm-up content ready to go.
With an email written, it would have been easy to do. We just forgot about it.
I don’t know about you guys, but I feel like that was the mistake. That’s how we screwed that up we just forgot.
Mark: Well, that’s what I was going to say. It almost is more frustrating knowing that we had content we could have used.
It’s not like, well, we thought about it, but we didn’t have time because we didn’t want to spend 4 hours writing a blog post and doing a video and editing it.
No, all we had to do, as you said, was review it real quick and send it and we didn’t.
And I think everything we talk about Matt here with what we can improve, I think it’s important to point out that there’s no promotion is ever going to go perfectly. None care.
You can have the best information and the best playbook. You can have the best intentions. You’re always going to forget something.
Something’s always going to go wrong, but you just push through it. You just keep going.
And I hope that’s encouraging for you guys because I know that you look at Matt and I do this too, it’s like Matt’s forgotten more about affiliate marketing than I’ll ever learn, but he still forgets.
There are still things we don’t do and that’s encouraging to me.
It’s encouraging to know that you don’t have to get everything right for this.
You don’t have to get everything right to make an impact, to make a difference in your audience, businesses, their lives, or to make money for yourself.
So you’re always going to have something that you’re going to look back and say, dang it, why the heck didn’t I do that?
I knew I should have. I thought about it. I didn’t do it and that’s important.
That’s important to realize and you’re right. We even talked about it beforehand.
What are we going to do for pre then things got busy and we got working on things and switching over and this and that and didn’t do it.
Matt: And you have one or two choices at that point. A lot of people just go, oh well, I screwed up and I guess I’m just going to not promote this at all.
Like I’m done. I’m like I don’t know that I ever entered our minds.
Well, okay, we know it’s going to cost us something, but we can still recover.
We still have 16 days. We still have a launch parachute. Jeff teaches about that, right? and so we’re cool.
The lesson there is though, that what I showed you is what you want to do.
You do want to seed the launch in advance of any promotion you’re going to do, you do not want to come out.
We talked about this with the Black Friday and Cyber Monday stuff, it’s 70% off. I don’t know.
Let’s find something 70% off. What is this, a Samsung, some sort of a Samsung giant television that I’m looking at right now? Okay.
Where you guys are on a giant Samsung and seriously Robby, your head is ginormous on the screen.
I don’t know. I think this TV probably costs like one $200 or $800.
We’ll just call it to cost $1,000 and it’s 70% off. So you get it for $300. It’s a great deal, right?
If the first time your audience hears about that is at 01:00 on Black Friday, you’re gonna make no sales.
So whatever industry you’re in, whether you’re promoting courses, whatever and so we talk about this where you want to warm them up.
So I just want to give you three quick ways to warm people up. Just very practical.
The first is just to get them thinking about the topic. Get them thinking about the topic.
Get them thinking about Black Friday. Get something about that. You have Black Friday deals.
Get them thinking about that now is a great time to buy electronics. Get them thinking about product launches.
Get them thinking about lessons you’ve learned about product launches.
The Second is to introduce them to the product creator. This doesn’t work as much with say, a Samsung. Big screen television. People have heard of Samsung.
Mark: Let me tell you about Samsung, the massive company. Tell you about how they started in Korea, I think it is 1958.
No idea when they started. But introduce them to Jeff Walker.
So we have a post it’s like the top three lessons I’ve ever learned from Jeff Walker.
The number one lesson I learned from Jeff Walker’s.
No, you think we go from introducing them to Jeff Walker to introducing them to the concept of product lunch formula and then we go into the actual content.
And all throughout that, though, I just say, the product launch formula is Jeff Walker. The product launch formula is Jeff Walker.
I’m not telling you anything about the product launch formula. I’m just putting the words in your subconscious somewhere.
So introduce them to the topic, introduce them to the product creator.
And then third is begin to, I’ll just say, ramp up your contact and begin to segment as much as possible. Now you can begin to segment a year out.
So, for instance, over the next year, we’ll do anywhere from ten to 15 pieces of content about product launches.
Here’s the thing. A large percentage of my audience I don’t know exactly, 30%, 40% will never do a quote-unquote product launch.
They have only an evergreen product. They sell retail goods that don’t really have ebbs and flows or any seasonality whatsoever, and they never click on any of those emails about product launches.
Why would I promote anything about PLF to them? I won’t.
But you can begin to do that in advance where it’s like they don’t open any of those emails or click any of those emails even after sending them some reopens.
Maybe we shouldn’t even promote this at all to that person and so sometimes you’re segmenting is removing 5% of your audience, but it’s the 5% that’s most likely to unsubscribe because you’re promoting this.
So you give them those opt-outs beforehand.
Want to learn how to make passive affiliate income from product review posts? Get my free guide on how to write a review post that ranks and converts and learn how we bring in more than $10,000 every single month in passive affiliate income! Get it here!
Mark: Here’s a pro tip, too and this is something that we again, this is one of those, I think, Matt, you would say that the three of us know, but we haven’t done it.
So here’s the way it typically works. So I emailed somebody that we promoted last year a while ago, and I said, hey, when are your launch dates?
And they said, oh, it’s April 1 through the 15th. Those aren’t the dates I don’t remember.
And so I go into our content calendar, and I block out April 1 through the 15th pro tip, marking out two weeks before it.
We need to start doing that. We need to do a better job of that. But if you do that, if you just automatically say, we did try to, yeah.
Matt: We already had a promo scheduled for March 15 through 31st. But, I mean, and that saves that from happening.
If you say and you can figure out what you want it to be, I mean, it could be seven days before, it could be 14, it could be ten days.
But just figure out whatever amount of time you want to warm up your audience and block that out, too, and say, this is warming up my audience for this promotion.
So rather than having the exact dates of the promo in your calendar, have the exact dates plus seven to 14 days, that allows you to then not do what happened to us, where we got busy, we already had content, we already had this, we already had that, and we forgot or it didn’t happen.
If you block it out at the beginning. It allows you to then have that time built in, and then you are more likely to remember and make it happen.
So that’s something that will really help with that. Just by doing that just on the front end, just assume that you’re going to add ten days or 14 days to whatever date they give you as the start date.
Matt: Here’s something we did really well, guys, our bonus stack. So the bonuses we offer to PLF members that purchased through us were absolutely phenomenal.
And I want to share I want to have this pulled up when we talk about this. I got a message from someone.
Mark: And you in the interview that’s coming up, we call them not case study. What are you calling those?
Matt: Insider profile.
Mark: Yeah, the insider profile. You guys talk about that, right?
Matt: Yes. With Tasha next, how she did. Her bonuses are phenomenal.
The post Behind-the-Scenes on Our Affiliate Promotion for Product Launch Formula appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
###### If your audience is composed of people who value family, free time, and a desire to secure a solid income, this opportunity is for you.
Are you struggling financially? Are you missing those ‘Can’t-Miss Moments’ with your family because you work long hard hours? Are you sick of the grind?
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I’m excited about this opportunity because:
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About Flipped LifestyleMost families struggle financially or don’t get to spend a lot of time together because of their jobs.
We created the Flipped Lifestyle so you could stop worrying about money, become self-sufficient and spend more time with the people you love!
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Hi, we are Shane & Jocelyn Sams….
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To help people achieve financial success on THEIR terms, we offer courses, 1-on-1 coaching, group coaching, and we have a large and active Flipped Lifestyle community online.
What’s included in the product:We offer a basic Flipped Lifestyle Experience Membership and a number of color-coded packages…
Tier 1 – Grey
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- Community Calls
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Tier 2 – Teal
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- Community Calls
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Tier 3 – Blue
- Core Training Course – Flipped Lifestyle BLUEPRINT (Lifetime)
- Community Calls
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- 6 Months Coaching (12x 1-on-1’s, 24 Group Q&As)
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- 1 Advanced Training (Courses, Coaching, Community, Freelancing)
Tier 4 – Orange
- Core Training Course – Flipped Lifestyle BLUEPRINT (Lifetime)
- Community Calls
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- Local Mastermind (State Groups)
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- Currently 1 YEAR Coaching (24 1-on-1’s, 52 Group Q&As)
- “Launch Support” we will promote their biz on social and email*
- Restrictions reply
Tier 5 – Green
You get everything in the Tier 4 – Orange package but the Tier 5 Green package includes a turnkey website on Kajabi in 60-90 days.
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Target Audience:Our ideal target prospects are people between the ages of 28 to 58 who have school-age kids from K-12.
The main profile is someone who values family, free time, and wants to secure a solid income.
We do not go after hyper entrepreneurs…the Gary Vee or Grant Cardone types. Our people are often people of faith who are trying to replace their income and grow a business so they can have more freedom.
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Tier 1 – Grey
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Commissions:Flat rate determined by product sold.
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Click Here to Learn More About Our Recommended Affiliate ProgramsThe post Affiliate Opportunity: Flipped Lifestyle™ appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Virtual summits make for great affiliate promotions. They are easy to promote, free for your audience to attend, provide a great service to your audience, and offer some awesome backend commissions. Today, I share exactly how to best promote a virtual summit even if you aren’t a speaker.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
To get started with affiliate marketing the right way, download my free quickstart guide to affiliate marketing. Grab your copy here!
Links Mentioned in this EpisodeVirtual Summit Swipe File
Scalegest Affiliate Program
Affiliate Swipe Files
Your Affiliate Launch Coach
Text me at 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyFix Your Funnel: How to Increase Sales and Make Your Affiliates More Money with John Ainsworth
How to Increase Your Commissions by Guiding Your Followers & Creating Repeat Buyers with Dave Gambrill
Affiliate Marketing Lesson: Shifting From Promoting Free Content To A Paid Product
Book Launch Party: An Interview with Matt About Turn Your Passions Into Profits
Special Episode: Highlights from My Whirlwind Book Tour
The Untold Stories from Turn Your Passions Into Profits (Behind The Scenes Peek at My Book)
Ten Resolutions for Affiliate Marketers and Affiliate Managers
How to Promote Virtual Summits as an Affiliate (If You Aren’t a Speaker)Coming soon…!
The post How to Promote Virtual Summits as an Affiliate (If You Aren’t a Speaker) appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
The single best way to improve your affiliate program is…to improve your conversions! Better conversions means more sales. It means happier affiliates. It means getting more affiliates to sign up in the first place. And it means major growth. Today, we’re going to fix your funnel!
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
If you are ready to take your business to the next level and start an affiliate program, start with my free report, Your First 100 Affiliates. This report takes nearly two decades of experience, trial and error, and lessons learned about finding top affiliates in nearly every conceivable niche and puts them all into one report. Grab your copy here!
Links Mentioned in this EpisodePimp Your Funnel
Your First 100 Affiliates
Text me at 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
| | | | --- | --- | | | | | | | |
Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Increase Your Commissions by Guiding Your Followers & Creating Repeat Buyers with Dave Gambrill
Affiliate Marketing Lesson: Shifting From Promoting Free Content To A Paid Product
Book Launch Party: An Interview with Matt About Turn Your Passions Into Profits
Special Episode: Highlights from My Whirlwind Book Tour
The Untold Stories from Turn Your Passions Into Profits (Behind The Scenes Peek at My Book)
Ten Resolutions for Affiliate Marketers and Affiliate Managers
2023 Affiliate Marketing Predictions
Fix Your Funnel: How to Increase Sales and Make Your Affiliates More Money with John AinsworthThe single best way to improve your affiliate program is this, improve your conversions. Better conversions means more sales. It means happier affiliates.
It means getting more affiliates to sign up in the first place, and it means major growth. Today, we’re going to fix your sales funnel.
So obviously, I’m a big believer in having more affiliates, but most people think that the only way to grow their affiliate program is to have more affiliates.
And yes, you want that, go grab my free report and you’ll get more affiliates. Matt Mcwilliams.com/FIRST100. Get my report. Your first 100 affiliates. That’s important.
That’s one side of the equation. You also need to focus on your conversions, having better conversions across the board.
So better conversions from click into lead, better conversions from leads into sales, better up sales, getting more, higher average order size, more money.
Happier affiliates who promote more often and then they refer others. They’re easier to recruit because you’ve got a higher EPC earnings per click. All of those things.
You need all of those things. And so, yeah, you go out, you work your b*** off for your first 20 affiliates. But if you get better conversions, you’ve got higher conversions across the board.
You can get another five to ten from referrals, but if you don’t have a great conversion rate, you’re never going to get those referrals.
So not only are you not going to get to 30 and get those ten free affiliates, but you’re going to lose half or more of your 20 that you worked your b*** off for.
More profits also means higher payouts if needed. The more money you’re making, if you’re paying per sale and you’re only making, say, $500 per sale and you’re paying $200, you’re paying 40%.
So you’re making $300. But if you increase that to 1000 and you’re paying 400, you’re making $600, you’re making twice as much money. That means you can do more prizes to incentivize them or a little bit higher payouts.
Now, the thing is, I’m not an expert on these things. I don’t know all there is to know about improving your conversions. Yeah, I know a few things. I know a lot.I know how to do, you know, a few things that I could share.
But I also know when to invite the experts, which is what I did today. I’ve got my friend John Ainsworth on from data driven marketing or data driven marketing. Depends on where you’re from.
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And he is one of the world’s leading experts on fixing your funnel. He’s also a great guy, and I wanted to introduce him to you today and share some of his strategies for fixing your funnel.
So you can have all of these things again. Ultimately, you can have more affiliates and more income. So let’s dive right into my it’s a pretty quick interview, about 25 minutes or so with John Ainsworth.
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Matt: John, welcome, my friend.
John: Thanks very much.
Great to be here, man.
Matt: It’s so good to have you. I’m so excited because we talk a lot on the show about the traffic side of things.
We talk about getting affiliates, growing affiliates, motivating affiliates. And we need to do that. What do you have? Traffic core conversions. It’s like chicken or the egg. You can’t have one without the other.
But today I want to shift gears, and this is part of a little series we’re doing, and we’re going to talk about that conversion side because you’ll hear me say so many times, you’ve heard me say it, affiliates affect everything, and everything affects affiliates.
We tell our clients all the time, affiliates change the numbers. Affiliates convert better than most other forms of traffic that tweaks your numbers.
And also it affects maybe who you might have an expanded audience coming in, but different people outside of your niche coming into your audience. That’s going to affect your conversions. But everything affects affiliates.
If you change one element on your landing page and it lowers or raises conversions, affiliates to make less or more money, that affects them.
So John is one of the world’s leading experts on this side of things, especially with online courses, how to really dial in and nail down your funnel.
So, John, I’m super excited and I think a good starting point is just kind of some of the optimization strategies that you share if you think that’s a good starting point.
Otherwise, like I told John before we went live, guys, like, I’m letting him kind of dictate what we talk about today. I want to I’m going to be taking notes.
So if you guys see me looking down, that’s me writing notes. So John, I’ll let you take it away and we’ll just kind of see where this goes.
John: Yeah. So there’s three main areas that people can work on that is gonna increase the revenue that they’re making.
When you’re selling a course, a membership, some kind of digital product, those three things are increase the revenue per sale, increase the percentage of people who buy from you each month, and then increase your email list size.
Now, when you’ve got traffic coming in from affiliates, I’m going to come back and ask you a bit more about this just to double check for your audience.
But when you got traffic coming in from affiliates, one of the things to have in place is making sure that you’re increasing the revenue per sale you’ve got.
And there’s two ways you can do that. Most people miss this, and they are the 80 20 to the 80 20. They are the things that have a dramatic impact.
It’s not like it’s no work, but relative to most stuff in business, it’s almost no work. So order bumps for anybody.
If you don’t know if you’re listening to this and you’re not sure what it is, an order bump is when you go to the checkout page and there is an additional offer on the page that is sold as a tick box.
So you’re on the checkout page, not the sales page. You’re on the checkout page and there’s a tick box and a couple of lines of text explaining about an additional offer that the person can get.
Let’s say that you’re selling a course for $79. Your order bump might be another course, or some workbooks, or some Q and A, like FAQ webinar that you’ve done, or some interviews with people who’ve gone through the number of different things that you could have there.
Like anything you’ve got that kind of fits along with what you’re selling. And it might be selling for 27 or $37, something in that kind of ballpark.
As an idea, it’s normally about a third of the price of the main product that you’re selling. That answers my question. I was going to ask you what you’ve seen.
Matt: I think of the order bump as like the checkout aisle of the grocery store, probably not quite that low, but you spent $200 on groceries. You bought everything you need, everything you came for, your list.
You got everything on your list, right? We went the other day about $200. We got the fruits, we got the veggies, we got the ketchup, we got the milk and all the stuff we needed.
And then we’re there in the checkout aisle. And most of the stuff there is a dollar to $4. But the margins, this is one of the keys, like the margin on those things are virtually like 50%, which is really high in a grocery store.
They buy those candy bars for forty cents and sell them for a dollar. So think of it that way. What’s that checkout aisle type thing that makes it really easy for people?
You mentioned about a third of the cost. Are there some that you’ve seen, just maybe some examples you’ve seen that have converted really well for you or others?
John: You mean in terms of the price or in terms of what’s the product?
Matt: In terms of the actual product. And again, I’m asking selfishly, I’m taking notes. So we’re looking to improve our order bumps.
John: The crucial thing I say to start with, if you don’t have order bumps is put in something that you’ve already got. Don’t make a new product for it.You’ve already got some order bumps, right?
So you’re a bit ahead of the curve. But for most people, when they hear this, they think, how do I make the perfect order bump?And then they end up not doing something.
List them all out and find what is there that you could sell at a discount for about a third of the price of the main product you’re selling. And then that’s all of your options. Find the one of those that fits best.
Now, if you’re looking for the absolute ideal, then the thing that we see there’s a couple of things we’ve seen convert better than nearly everything else.
One of them is additional workbooks, challenges and activities that people can do, like additional exercises that can go along with what they’re buying.
So something to help them implement what they’re buying faster and more easily could be additional templates and resources that go along with it.
It has to be something that people don’t look at and think, wait a minute, that should be in the main course. It’s got to be an additional thing.
But anything that you might sell as a bonus could fit in here as an Order bump. The thing I’ve seen convert the absolute highest ever, and I’ve not been able to replicate this very easily.
Somebody was selling a course about how to grow your digital marketing agency, and the order bump was frequently asked as a webinar, where they asked ten people who ran million dollar digital marketing agencies what the biggest mistakes they made were.
It’s just like, oh, yeah, of course I need to know that I’ve got to get that. And that converted to 80%. An average order bumble converts somewhere between 30 and 50. If you get it converting really well, you can get to 60, but most are 30% to 50%.
Matt: I feel better about ours. We’re converting in the mid 40s, so right, yeah, I’d love to convert higher, and that’s why I was taking some notes, I think. I think one of the things that we can look at on ours, you mentioned a third of the price.
I think ours typically tend to fall lower, and so I’m going to talk with the team about maybe raising those and maybe go from 45% down to, say, 38%, but we’re making twice as much money. That’s a win.
John: I’ll give you a specific case study on that. We had a friend of mine actually wasn’t even a client, who I rave about these order bumps just to everybody, and he was selling a course for $1,000.
It would discount to 600 and threw a webinar, and he set up an order bump for $100. And it was converting at 42%. And he came to me and said, well, what can I do to increase it?
I said, 42% actually quite strong. But you’re selling something too cheap. Like, what if you took that same order bump and you made it $200 instead of $100, and it went from a 42% conversion rate to 38%.
So very small drop, like almost nothing. Right? But double the price.
Matt: So basically, even if it went down to 30%, that’s I mean, that’s a 50% win.
John: Yeah.
Matt: You know, you’re selling 25% less for 100% more. That’s a big win. So that’s definitely something. We’re going to look into some split testing with the price on those order bumps.
I would say the call to action guys, if you’re not implementing them yet, just get an order bump up. It could be one 10th the price, one third the price, 50% of the price.
If you got it, put it up there and see what it’s free money. It is literally free money. So you said there’s two ways to increase that RPS, that revenue per sale order bumps to number one.
Everybody listen, and you’re going to have an order bump up by the end of tomorrow. I don’t care what it is. It doesn’t even have to be a good fit, like John said.
It just needs to be something you already have. Yeah, you can optimize later. That’s what we’ve talked about so many times, guys. Just implement, then optimize.
Don’t optimize before you implement. What’s the second way we can increase that RPF?
John: Second one is upsells. And as a concept, it’s very, very similar to order bumps. The place it fits in the funnel is different. So you have the order bumps on the checkout page.
The upsell is on the confirmation page after somebody’s already put their credit card details in. Maybe they bought the order bump, maybe they didn’t. They hit submit the next page. That’s the upsell.
And there you’re normally offering something about the same price as what they’ve just bought. So if you sold an original course for the $99, you might have something on here for 79$,99$,129$. Something in that kind of ballpark could be $500. I don’t really care.
But that’s the stuff that converts best, is a similar price. If you’ve not got something a similar price, you got something five times as expensive. Go for it.
So this will typically convert at about ten to 15% your average upsell. And because it’s a similar price to what they’ve just bought, that means you’re getting about ten to 15% extra revenue on top of what you were getting. Before.
We had a client, he was running home studio recording courses. He didn’t have any order bumps, didn’t have any upsells. He went through and just put something in place for everything.
At like 1015 courses, he put something in place. His order bumps and upsells for all of them, revenue went up 30% to 40% for his whole business forever since then. The reason it worked as he did it, that’s the crucial thing.
Matt: Yeah. Same lesson again? The lesson is it’s free money. People who want to implement faster, easier, or take the next step.
Maybe that’s the thing I’ve learned, is, like, people in our customer journey, some people come and we’ll just use one example. They say all they want to do is get their 1st 100 subscribers. Great. And they’ll pay $47 for that.
Maybe they’ll do, like, an order bump for some cheat sheets with some templates of emails. Okay, so they’ll spend $64 and they’re done. That’s all they want at that moment.
But other people go, yeah, but I don’t want to just stop at 100. I’m already ready. I know in a week I’ll get to 100, I’m ready to go ahead and oh, and a discount on this course where I can get to 1000 or 5000. Boom, I’m in. $200.00
And then about 10% of them will go, Wait, Matt, I want the whole thing. Like, I want to be at a 10,000 person list in six months. And that’s fine, it doesn’t matter.
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But regardless of where that person is, they have an opportunity to join. And so, same lesson, guys. Get an upsell up there.
It could be twice the price, same price, half the price, ten times the price. Like John said, make a list of everything you have and go, what’s the next logical step for them? Implement, then optimize.
So we increased our RPS. What’s the next way that we can make more money for us and ultimately for our affiliates?
John: So the second thing that I see, and I’m curious to hear if this is something that you see with your audience or if they’re different to people I normally talk to.
Most people send out about two or three email promotions a year. And what we’re recommending to people is to do two promotions a month instead.
Matt: Yeah, we do at some level, we do between five and seven per month. Now, some are more aggressive, some are a one off email.
Typically we do one full out push, full out push, a week long campaign, or a little bit longer if we do a really long campaign. And we do usually about four of those a year, like we’re doing with my book right now as we’re recording this. That’s a multi month campaign. Then we back off some other stuff.
But I would say in any given month, we’ll do a minimum three different ones, usually one big one, and then one, two, three day campaign and then a couple of one offs. Yeah, I don’t see how people survive on two or three or four.
I don’t know about you guys, I like food and travel too much to do that.
John: Yeah, I mean, this is the thing that it boggles my mind the most. A lot of the people that we work with have spent a lot of time building up an audience.
They’ve got a YouTube channel or they’ve got affiliates sending traffic, or they’ve got Facebook ads or they’ve got SEO traffic whatever, and they have people just go and people like them, and then they go and buy the courses and they don’t do the promotions of it. And it just drives me crazy because I’m like, this is what works, guys.
This is how this is done. The reason I hear from people that they don’t, and I’m curious to hear if this is the same for your audience at all, is they’re nervous about being too salesy. Is that something that comes up with your audience? It might be a different kind of angle you’ve got?
Matt: It does. I have done entire podcast episodes about that, and ultimately the big question I kind of proposed is what’s wrong with being salesy? I didn’t say be sleazy, I didn’t be scammy, I didn’t say be like a used car or salesman. But what’s wrong with selling?
Zig Zigler said selling is serving. Selling is nothing more than a transference of feelings, he said and so he was my virtual mentor.
Unfortunately, when I started working with this company, it was a couple of years after he passed away, so I didn’t have the opportunity to meet him. But I hung out with his son and I got to meet plenty of people that he personally mentored. And they all said the same thing.
I think the other thing that you probably hear is, what about unsubscribes? They don’t have unsubscribes. First of all, people will unsubscribe if you send them a free blog post.
If you say, here’s my latest podcast episode, they will unsubscribe. And secondly, I’d love to hear your thoughts, but to me, subscriber count is a vanity number.
If you have 10,000 people and you average, say, $5,000 a month in revenue, so $0.50 subscriber and I have 5000 people and average $7500, it’s not dramatically higher. I’m only averaging a dollar 50. It’s only a dollar higher.
But I’m making more money, I have more buyers, I have higher revenue. What’s a better subscriber count, 5000 or 10,000? Really? Neither one of those numbers matter.
It’s the buyers that matter, in my opinion. So I love this. If you needed permission, John, and I just gave you permission, email more.
John: One of the things I hear with people is that they’re scared about doing it because they don’t want to just come across as the only thing they’re doing is promoting.
And I think what people miss is the emails that you send out that promote your courses or your membership or whatever you’re selling can also provide value and should in fact, provide value.
It’s like you can do the two of them together. What a lot of people think is that they have to provide value and then that allows them to sell. You can actually do the two of them combined.
You can have emails that are both useful and wonderful, and people like reading them and they like getting them, and they sell, they move people close to the sale. And if you do it right, then that’s totally doable.
So there’s a couple of different frameworks that we use that allow people to kind of do that, which I mean, to kind of talk you through them.
Matt: Tell us what’s the best one or maybe the best two that you’ve seen converting. Because I think this is an important lesson.
One of the things that we teach very often is like, whether or not somebody buys or not, they should get value out of the email. And I think you and I are on the same page with that.
So if they get value out of the email, have you really been salesy? No. You’ve served? If they happen to spend money, great. If they don’t, okay, also great.
But long term, eventually they’ll buy. So yeah, what are some of those really high converting frameworks you’ve seen?
John: So you know how in a lot of promotions, you’ll tend to see a spike at the very beginning of the promotion when you first launch it, and then one at the end when you’re saying it’s about to go out, the discount or finish. We’ve came across this email, and it was from a training that was done on deadline funnels for deadline funnels customers.
It’s called a future pacing email. And it means that we now have a spike in the middle of promotions as well. It’s so good as well.
What you’re doing is you’re looking at people have a lot of fear about if I buy this, what if it doesn’t get me the result that I want?
Maybe it’s not even about the courses. Maybe it’s about me. What if I don’t manage to implement it properly, et cetera, et cetera. That role of fear.
So what you do in the future pacing email is you lay out, okay, what’s going to happen immediately after you buy this? What’s going to happen a day later or a week later?
We’re looking here at what if you put in the minimum amount of effort. What if you only do an hour a week’s work on this? Something like this.
You don’t throw yourself into this wholeheartedly you do an hour or 2 hours work a week or something on this, whatever it is, dog training, learning music, building your business, whatever.
How do you feel a week later? How is your life different? What results did you get? How do you feel about yourself?
How do you feel about your business a month later, two months later, three months later, six months later?
And you lay that out for people as a journey. And what they get to see is so powerful is how could their life change over that period if they take those two different paths if you do this versus if you don’t.
And people actually get to go through that journey of like, oh, that’s how my life could be over that period of time. And it alleviates a lot of their fears because they’re like, oh, but that’s it. Without me even doing a lot of work.
Just imagine if I did loads of work on it. It could be even better than that.
Matt: Love it. What’s another kind of framework that you’ve seen worked in really well.
John: Yeah, I mean the classic one that works in terms of the actual when you’re about to close the cart where you get most of the sale is the going going on, which is very, very straightforward, which is just basically saying to people the cart is about to close.
You answer questions, you have testimonials case studies. Most people, I think, have seen those kind of emails. They work better when you’ve set them up with a good campaign earlier.
So we like to use the Gain Logic Fear emails as ones to get people earlier in the promotion. So this is when we’re opening up the promotion.
And so the game Logic Fear focused on three different angles to help people to make the decision. The game is talking to people about what are you going to get if you go through and do this?
How is your life going to be better? It’s actually relatively similar in some ways to the future pacing, email, so you can kind of use one instead of the other.
But how is your life going to be better if you do this? What is going to change?
And you don’t just focus on if you go through this course, you also look at how is your life going to be better if you solve this problem?
So you’re providing value even if they don’t buy the course. The logic one is like, what is there logically that we can look at here in terms of if you’ve got a very factual based mind, what statistics are there?
What analysis can we do? How can we think the whole process through of like, why should you solve this problem from a logical point of view?
And the fear is empathizing with people and looking at what is it they’re scared of?
What are they worried about, what is it that’s freaking them out about this thing?
Let’s say they’ve got a course about how to train your dog to stop being aggressive around other dogs.
What is it that they’re currently worried about?
What are the neighbors going to think of me?
Maybe I can’t go out on these walks, maybe my kids can’t walk the dog, whatever, all these things and just showing that you understand where they’re coming from or what their problems are. And then say, this is solvable and you can include some tips about how that’s solvable.
And then say for the real way to solve this, to solve it properly, we’ve got this course available that you can buy and you can get that at a discount this week only.
Matt: Yeah, it kind of goes into the different types of buyers. You got the emotional buyers at the beginning.
They’ve seen the benefit from any of your pre marketing. They’re ready. They’re the type of people who the day before the cart opens are going, is there a way I can give you money?
Can I pay you to give me the they’re there, great. Those are the gains. The logics are the people who need to know how long is the course, how many modules are there, what does it cover?
They need basically, if you think about when you timestamp your videos, here’s a 20 minutes lesson in your course.
At 2 minutes and 35 seconds, you teach how to get your book on Amazon at five minutes and 17, how to pick the right keywords.
They need to know what those timestamps are. They are the logical buyers. When you think of cars, they want to know, okay, what’s the gas mileage?
How much does it cost to change the oil? What kind of oil does the oil last? 10,000 or 7500 miles. That’s the logical buyers.
And then the fear buyers are the ones who they’re the deadline dancers. They’re going to wait till the last frickin second and they have to be convinced through scarcity and time to buy.
And I think it kind of follows that same pattern that we teach. So I love how we’re overlapping.
The last thing I want to touch on is something that we agree on, but I have never talked about, so I’m going to let you talk about it.
One of the ways to increase your email subscribers, obviously, if you follow what John’s teaching, right, and we’re selling more email promotions.
So let’s say we double the number of email promotions, or you can exactly double core sales. Probably not exactly double.
If you double your promotions, I’ve seen there’s a little bit of a drop off. You’ll increase it between 80 and 90%. So we got an 80% increase in number of sales.
We increased our RPS by even just 10%, plus that 80. Now we’ve doubled our revenue and then we have some stuff on the back end.
So maybe we’ve increased it all this now, how do we get this to more people?
And one of the things that you recommend, and I’ll let you talk about kind of the why, and maybe some of the misconceptions about this is turning off the double opt in.
I still see almost half of people using a double opt in, maybe 70%. Talk about some of the metrics behind that and why that’s actually not a good idea.
John: Yeah, so double opt in is a shocking terrible idea. And but I understand why that’s I understand why it’s there. From an email service provider point of view of using MailChimp, right?
Because they want to have good deliverability, so they don’t want to have dodgy emails in the email list. So therefore, the easiest way they can do that is to set up double opts in.
But a lot of people who are good subscribers, who would like to get your emails, who would buy from you, won’t see that email people get so many emails or they won’t click on it.
And what we found is you can double the number of people in your email list by removing double opt in.
Now, the problem with that is some of those people, it’s not the right email, or they won’t ever open, and it does affect your deliverability.
But the double opt in is not the way to solve that. The way you solve that is by doing a removal of inactive subscribers every couple of months.
So you go, who didn’t open the emails in the last three months? Right?
I’m going to send the recovery campaign to those people, see if I can get them a reengagement, get them back onto the list. If it doesn’t work, okay, I’ll give in and I’ll remove them.
But that’s like, so much more effective. What we’ve seen is you double the size of email list and revenue goes up by about 20% if you remove double opt in. It’s just awful. So bad.
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Matt: Yeah, it’s an easy way. Like you said, we haven’t quite seen the double, but we’ve seen about a 60% increase.
So okay, let’s just say it’s somewhere in the middle. You’ll see you see as low as we did, 60% increase in subscribers for one bad email a day.
Maybe I’ve mistyped my email before. I wondered why. And I get that thing, I’ll just go back and I retype the right email, and sure enough, I got it.
If it’s that important to people, they’ll come back. But I mean, if they mistype the email, who cares if it had a double opt in?
They’re not going to get that email. So one of the things that we recommend, turn the double opt in, but on your confirmation page, after your funnel, make it abundantly clear, go check your don’t close this page. Go check your email right now.
We put a little button at the bottom that says if it’s been more than ten minutes and you haven’t gotten the email, click here to email us.
99% of the people who email us, and they say, I didn’t get my free report. It’s because they they fat fingered there, you know, they added a speech in the middle of their name, you know, and that happens to all of us.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve forgotten the second L in my name when I’m typing really fast. And so we give them an option. Don’t close this page.
Go check your email right now, and then you don’t have to worry about it.
So, John, this has been awesome. Three great tips for increasing your course sales.
John, I know people are like, okay, we got three things from this guy. We want more. Where can they go get more?
John: Yeah, absolutely. So what we do is we provide a coaching service where we help people to implement all of this and so people can get in touch. If they are interested in signing up for that, the best thing to do is go to Pimpyourfunnel.com.
Matt: Love it. Did you ever get exhibit to do that, by the way? Like, what’s stopping the exhibit? Oh, my gosh. MPV back in the early 2000s.
John: So if you go to Pimpyourfunnel.com, you fill in this, like, ten to twelve questions about your business. And what we’ll do is we’ll figure out for you how much more revenue you could be making by implementing these.
I’ve shown some of the tips today. There are others as well. We’re going to figure out how much more money you could make. What would you need to do? It’s a personalized report.
Someone from my team will also go through and record you a video breaking down for your site, like a video breakdown on your home page, your sales page, or check out page.
What’s some tips? What could you change on those pages in order to make more money from it?
Matt: So that URL one more time. We’ll put it in the show notes. Pimpyourfunnel.com, correct?
John: Yeah,
Matt: All right, guys, we’ll put that in the Show Notes for you, John. Thank you so much.
This has been amazing, guys. You scratched the surface today in the time we had, so go check them out. Make sure you click that link in the Show Notes and go check John out. Thanks, buddy.
John: Thanks, dude.
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Man, how awesome was that? Some really great tips. Thanks to John, we’ve got a link to his site in the Show Notes, so you can easily go to that.
As I mentioned earlier, if you want more affiliates to go through your funnel and check out our free report on how to grow your affiliate program, it’s called Your First 100 Affiliates. MattMcWilliams.Com/First100.
We’ll also put a link to that in the Show Notes as well, and I would love to hear from you your biggest takeaway from John. So if you will text me, I’ll pass these on to him and let him know your biggest takeaways Text me at 260-217-4619.
We’ll put that in the Show Notes for you, but just text me and let me know your biggest takeaway, your biggest lesson. What are you going to apply to your business today to improve your funnel based on this episode?
So I’d love to hear from you on that. Make sure as always, that you click subscribe if you haven’t yet, because the next episode is all about how to promote virtual summits as an affiliate so you’re not a speaker, but how to promote those virtual summits.
Because virtual summits are great. They make for great affiliate promotions. They’re easy to promote, they’re free, they ultimately provide a great service to your audience, and then you get those back end commissions.
And so in the next episode, I’m going to share how to best promote a virtual summit even if you aren’t a speaker. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss that episode. I’ll see you then.
The post Fix Your Funnel: How to Increase Sales and Make Your Affiliates More Money with John Ainsworth appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
###### It’s great to make an affiliate sale. We all start with ONE sale and grow from there. But what’s even better is repeat sales and long-term buyers and commissions. Today, I’m joined by a very special guest to share how he leads his followers, creates trust, and lowers returns, which all lead to repeat buyers and long-term commissions.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyAffiliate Marketing Lesson: Shifting From Promoting Free Content To A Paid Product
Book Launch Party: An Interview with Matt About Turn Your Passions Into Profits
Special Episode: Highlights from My Whirlwind Book Tour
The Untold Stories from Turn Your Passions Into Profits (Behind The Scenes Peek at My Book)
Ten Resolutions for Affiliate Marketers and Affiliate Managers
2023 Affiliate Marketing Predictions
Creating Your Ideal Customer Avatar: How to Get Crystal Clear on Your Audience Part 2
How to Increase Your Commissions by Guiding Your Followers & Creating Repeat Buyers with Dave GambrillIt’s great to make an affiliate sale. We all start with one sale and grow from there. But what’s even better is repeat sales and long term buyers and longterm commissions.
Today, I’m joined by a very special guest to share how he leads his followers, creates trust, and lowers returns which all lead to repeat buyers and long term commissions.
Welcome back, I am so excited about this episode today because I’m joined by my friend Dave Gambrill, who is literally the only affiliate marketer that I actively follow on social media and whose emails I open. And I love the guy.
We’ve known each other for years, been friends for a long time, and I did an interview with him a couple of years ago, and it was actually a live video that was open only to our insider members. But I wanted you guys to hear what he has to say about his affiliate promos.
There’s some really, really cool stuff that he shares in this interview. I think I say it. Dave was probably one of the only repeat, second repeat person we ever had for our insiders club.
I think he’s probably one of a handful five repeat guests, so pretty exclusive company. And you’ll hear why. The guy is just a powerhouse, and he’s one of those people who far out what is it? Out fights his weight class or whatever. Out punches his weight.
He’s constantly up at the top of leaderboards when the numbers suggest that he shouldn’t be, when he’s outperforming his list size. And I love guests like that because they show you hear his and you go, oh, well, he made $30,000 promoting that. I could never make $30,000 right now.
Well, but if you take the principles and apply what he teaches, you can make $3,000 or four or five or whatever. You know, yeah, he has a larger list than a lot of people, but it’s not nearly as big as some of the people that he’s beating. He’s making $30,000 in a promo.
When somebody with a list five times as big, he’s making $20,000. Who do you want to learn from? I want to learn from Dave. Proven strategies today, proven tips for lowering returns. So getting, you know, yeah, you go out and you bust your button, you sell ten, and then three people return it.
Well, what role do you play in that? We talked about that with Dave today. Increasing trust. He wants his followers to trust him. He wants to be a leader for his followers. We talked about that in some of the episodes where I shared some excerpts from the book.
And ultimately, when you have lower returns, when you have increased trust, when you’re a leader for your followers. That’s what creates those repeat buyers. That’s what creates those long term commissions.
So super excited about this episode. Let’s cut right to my chat with Dave Gambrill. As you can see behind you, we are going to unleash some awesome today.
I am joined today by Dave Gambrill, I believe only our second ever repeat insider profile here in Amen. He’s got a lot of stuff to share because we had him on last time. This was a couple of years ago, maybe almost three years ago.
And he shared some cool things that he was doing, some principles. Guys, he’s codified this now. I’m pretty sure. Dave, like what you told me before you went live, you had not kind of codified this back then.
And guys, this framework that he’s going to be sharing today, I am super excited. He’s going to share some just some cool stuff. Guys, this is somebody there aren’t many people.
Here’s what I’ll say, dave, if I want to make your head expand to the size of the screen here, there are many people that I follow. Like, I won’t mention names, but we know who they are, the Internet marketer types that we’re typically going to follow.
You and I probably overlap 60, 70%, right? Most of the people watching this, you overlap with me 50 or 60%, probably. Dave is the only one that I actually have notifications turned on for. All right?
Dave is the only one whose emails or whose Facebook posts I actually see, meaning 100% of them. I think he knows that because I probably comment on, like, 90% of them whatever.
There’s a reason for that, guys. I want to see what he’s doing because it’s always creative. It’s always innovative. Guys, I’m just super excited with his emails. He’s the only one his emails. There’s a rule where they go to my folder.
I’ll tell you this, Dave. Everyone else’s, they go to the look at those when I get a chance, which means about monthly, that’s where they go. Yours, they go to them. It’s called the mat needs reply folder. And that’s the ones that I check daily because I want to see what the heck’s going on with Dave.
So I’m super excited about this, guys.
Matt: Welcome, Dave. That long intro there.
Dave: Thanks, Matt. That was awesome! And in terms of growing my head any bigger, please don’t do that. My wife has already said that I need to get a bigger door made just to get out of my office sometimes for how big my head is so.
Matt: We all have those moments. I had one the other day where, you know, guy introduced me. I was speaking at a virtual event, and he introduced me. And I mean, as soon as he finished, I just literally he was like, welcome, Matt, and I just started laughing. What could I possibly share at this point that could supersede what you’ve already shared about me. He’s like, Tell us your story. And I’m like, you already did, so well, welcome, buddy.
I want to start with kind of your just philosophy on affiliate promotions, this framework, so to speak, that you were sharing with me, because I think it’s super important, and I’m just going to have you share that, and then we’ll talk about that because I have some thoughts on this lot. I think it’ll I don’t know, maybe you already you’ll see them. We’ll see. Okay.
Dave: Yeah. So thanks for the opportunity. I’m glad to be back with your audience. I think the fundamental thing that we didn’t discuss, but I think everybody has to have this train of thought when they’re going into this is the old idea that Zig Ziggler talked about so many times, about helping people get what they want. You can get anything you want, right?
So the basis, the foundation for what I do has been that. So anything that I’m doing, my Facebook group, my podcast, any of it coming on here and talking to your audience is, how can I help people?
How can I be interested instead of trying to be interesting? How can I be interested in serving and helping people in whatever niche it is that I’m serving in?
So that’s the primary piece. But what you were saying in my intro about kind of how I’ve codified it over the last few years and have a framework, what I’ve discovered is that people need three basic things to be successful, really, in any endeavor in life, but especially online, and it revolves around mindset, skill set, and tool set in that order.
Because if you wanted to be a master carpenter and you didn’t have any idea what a master carpenter does, you didn’t have a skill set, but I gave you all the tools.
You probably not only wouldn’t make anything but you would probably hurt yourself. And that’s what I see people doing online, right? They come to me and ask, what’s the best tool for this? And I’m like, well, what are you trying to do?
And I’d be happy to give you an affiliate link for whatever tool I have, but help me understand what you’re trying to do. And oftentimes they haven’t even thought about that. And so right there, that helps me give a more thoughtful response to them.
And hopefully when they get whatever software they’re going to get, they actually stick and stay with it because they’re successful with it, and that helps all of us.
I don’t want to get a one month commission on that thing, right? I want them to be there forever and continue to get paid. So really, I think it comes down to mindset, skill set, tools.
So as I’ve been thinking about the things that I’ve been promoting the last few years, they really fall into those categories. And I would say those big marquee courses, you know, those $2,000 $3,000 courses.
I would put them both in the category of mindset and skillset. All of them will tell you about the skill set piece. But I don’t know about you. If you’ve gone through any of those courses, you know, that the first module.
Sometimes I call it Module Zero. Sometimes I call it Module One. Sometimes I call it the intro is all about mindset. So that’s how I’ve been thinking about it.
So I’ve been thinking about, okay, what are the mindset and skill set things that I want to promote and talk about and teach and have affiliate relationships for?
And then once people have that, clearly going back to the carpentry example, it doesn’t matter if you’re really great carpenter if you don’t have the tools to do what you need to do.
And so once they kind of have the foundational piece of that, then I say, okay, now that you’re doing that, I was promoting Amy Porterfield’s Digital Course Academy, right?
And I would lump that course, that’s a $2,000 course roughly into the skill set piece and the mindset piece because clearly all of these courses, those good courses anyway, that you and I promote, we start with the mindset.
But I knew as people were doing that and Amy does it in her own course because she’s smart. She’s are talking about the different tools that people will need to make that happen.
So as people were signing up for that, I was saying, hey, as a special bonus, I will give you a 30 day trial to Kajabi. You can’t get that any other place except through an affiliate. I’ll give you that and I’ll give you all these Kajabi bonuses or whatever.
So I rolled the tool set piece into a bonus package that had to do with the skill set, right? So then they were kind of getting the whole thing, including the mindset.
And then clearly I helped them with the mindset. I will do office hours calls or one on one calls, a couple of those maybe as a bonus, but that kind of helps across those three categories of mindset, skill set and tool set.
Matt: Yeah, it makes total sense. I kind of think in a way, like “if you have tools without skills, you’re just going to fail.”
Like you said, you might even hurt yourself. You give me all the rock climbing tools. Actually, I probably not going to hurt myself because I’m not going to get up more than about 4ft. So I’ll twist an ankle at the worst.
But then skills without belief usually means you’re just never going to start all these skills and you just don’t believe and you don’t have the right mindset.
So you end up with one of those people who just keeps looking at the skills. You know you got the skills and then you’re. Either way, it really results in some form of failure.
Dave: Yeah. And if I could jump in there, this might help your audience around reducing the churn for some other people in some of these ongoing recurring revenue type affiliate relationships.
Matt: Yeah.
Dave: I’m sure you’ve heard that there are four phases that you go through learning something new. There’s unconscious incompetence, meaning you don’t know what you’re doing, but you’re really excited about it right?
Anytime you’re trying something new, like, I want to go do this new thing, but you just really don’t know what’s happening. But then very quickly you hit the conscious incompetence phase, meaning you now know that you don’t know what you’re doing. And this is going to be hard and it’s going to require work. And that’s where most everybody quits.
So as I’m helping support people that are doing these courses or going with these tools, I know they’re going to hit that spot. So I kind of double down on loving on them. If you would like making more resources, having office hours available kind of during that phase.
And then there’s conscious competence. People know what they’re doing, but they have to think about it. And then there’s unconscious competence where you don’t even have to think about it.
I’m not thinking about our conversations that I have not done any homework on this because I’ve been preparing for this conversation for 48 years of my life. I’m okay with that.
So as I think about some of these things, a lot of this mindset and belief and all of these other things, I know a lot of people I did when I first heard about some of this stuff, want to be like, oh, whatever, that’s dumb.
But seriously, if you don’t figure this stuff out, not only for yourself, but for the people that you’re promoting things to like if you’re like me and you want to sell something to someone and have them have success and have them come back and ask you for the next recommendation or continue to be on that software thing for life, So you keep getting a commission, then you have to understand this stuff and help people through this process.
Because then they will tell other people, hey, go get Matt’s affiliate link, or go ask Dave for his affiliate link like they helped me. And so really, I guess the other fundamental piece of this is I’m playing the long game.So yeah, I like the short term commissions.They’re great, but I’m in this for the long term.
Matt: Yeah. And I know for me, when I think about it, I want to dive into that mindset piece real quick. We’ll come back to something. But I think for me it makes sense that if you have the tools but not the mindset, if you have the skill but not the mindset, that makes sense.
But I kind of think of it more as a circle. It’s like if you have the mindset, but not the tools. I believe I can have the best landing page in the world. Okay?
You got to have the skills to build it. You either got a skill and even then you sort of have to have a tool, like an HTML design. Back in the old days, we had to handcu those things. I remember.
Dave: Yeah.
Matt: So you either have to have that skill or you have to have the tool. I believe I can create the greatest lead magnet. You still at least have to have a tool. You got to have like, Microsoft Word or Google Drive. You got to know how to Google Doc. You got to know how to use it might even help to have canva to design some images.
And that requires a certain level of skill. Maybe the skill is hiring somebody. You got to have that skill. There’s all types of things and it kind of works in that cycle. And I think about, like you mentioned that module zero.
And I was just like, I was picturing it. I’m thinking all of our courses, no product, no problem. The very first module, we called the Buteye Module and it’s the five biggest excuses people make.
My audience doesn’t buy anything, but I don’t know how to sell those type of things, but I don’t have an email list. Like, no, we get those out of the way as soon as that module is over.
People fall into one of two camps. I still don’t believe. So they asked for a refund. Cool. I can’t help you anymore. I tried. Or I believe, let’s learn how. And they, those people never return. They finish module.
And the statistics show 99 point something percent of the people who finish the first module don’t return the course. The return rate of people who don’t finish the first module is like 30%. It’s really high.
So I want to go back to something you just said just real quick, that you’re really looking for ways to take that person. Let’s look at two things. Let’s look at there’s two sides to this.
I think we all instinctively understand that the person who buys the software and most software is it’s a month or a year or whatever, you know, it’s something a month that you want to keep them in past that four to six month point.
Because if you do, they’re probably going to stay with them for ten years and you’re going to make a crap ton of money. We get that. That makes logical sense. We can talk about some strategies around that.
But I want to focus on that strategy of if I help them succeed with recommendation A, they’re more likely to come to me for recommendations B-C-D and E.
And I think that’s something I see in your audience because you don’t have a massive audience and you’re not selling 500 units of product launch formula, but you’re selling like, 20 30 40 to a lot of the same group of 50 to 100 people. That means they trust you.
Like, what are some of the ways that you do that above and beyond what you just said, with kind of helping them in that conscious incompetence phase?
Dave: Yeah, that’s a great question. And you’re right, I don’t have a huge audience. My email list is a little over 100,000, but I don’t send everything to all of them all the time, right? It’s segmented.
And my Facebook group is only 3600 people, not a ton of people listen to my podcast, but people that do. And I think I learned this from you was I try to indoctrinate them into being action takers and link clickers, right?
So it’s like, get them in the habit of doing these things. And so I always have this call to action about go try this, go check this out, go click on this, whatever.
But I try to get them some quick wins on whatever it is they’re doing. And I think I actually learned that from recent market troy, she was talking about how to get people a quick win right on the thank you page of what people walked into stuff.
So that’s what I try to do with a lot of these folks. When they go with a new software, they do something like the bonuses that I provide, which are all automated for the most part. If you sign up for this, something automatically gets triggered and they get some training course for me or some hand holding for me, a little board that will help them through it or whatever.
I want them to get a quick win because going back to the mindset piece, they still don’t believe they can do it. And so if I can get them a couple of quick wins on that platform or a couple of quick wins in that course, then they start to believe.
And this is the old confidence competence loop, right, of like, oh my gosh, now they have more confidence that they could actually do it, and they start to believe that they have the competence to do it, and so they just continue to do that.
So I really focus a lot of time out of the gate, even with my email sequences, they come way more frequently about, hey, make sure you do this, make sure you do the onboarding. Like they have a really good onboarding. Did you schedule?
Like Kajabi has these things, customer Success Manager calls, they offer them to everybody that becomes part of their platform. And I’m like, did you schedule that call? That is so important because you can get somebody at their team to walk through what you are trying to do and give you the best way to do it for you.
And people are like, I didn’t do that. I’m like, you need to do that. And so I found that when people take those steps and I help them get a quick win and then they have success on the platform. Then they come back to me and say, okay, what’s next? Or what else do I need to use?
And more importantly, I think they bring their friends and those trusted people that come to me now I don’t even know who I am, but I’m barring the credibility of their friend. If I continue with that cycle and I say, hey, what’s up new person, how can I help you?
And then I point them towards the right things, then that just cycle just continues. And now I’ve got that thing of the ripple effect or butterfly effect of like I’m not just one ripple out with like a handful of people. I’m now like five and ten ripples out with hundreds of people.
And how do I know this? Because I ask a question when people join my Facebook group, how did you hear about me? Or how did you hear about this group?
And people will often say like, Matt McWilliams invited me and he said you’re the smartest dude he’s ever heard of before, or something like that, right? Like some crazy accolade. I’m like…!
Matt: That happens like daily, doesn’t it?
Dave: Right, yeah. About you in particular. They’ll come to my group and just say like, hey, somebody referred me and they said you’re really good with this or you helped them a lot with that, whatever. I’m like, okay, cool.
So then I just continue on that trend. But again, this is like playing the long game. I’m not trying to get a quick, I’m not going to try to throw any program out of the bus here. So I need to be very delicate of how I share about what I’m going to share here.
But there have been some promotions in the recent years of platforms that were promising everything and people were out there promoting it and trying to make a lot of money up front.
But I looked at the platform and I thought, this thing is not ready. They’re trying to alpha tests, not even beta test or crowdsource for their platform.There’s no way I’m getting behind us.
And a lot of people in the space did. I chose not to. And not only did I usually stay quiet on those things, in this case I actually spoke up a little bit and I said, hey, any of you looking at this?
All I’m going to tell you is take a really good look because I’m not getting behind it. And that’s all I’m going to say. So I think there’s been some situations.
Matt: I know who you’re talking about.
Dave: I’m sure you do.
Matt: Because this came up like two weeks ago in one of these and same thing and he had to chat with me. So I’m going to ask you after work, privately.
Dave: Yeah.
Matt: This is fascinating. Okay, so full disclosure, insiders, I don’t always know the theme of these conversations.
I find people who I’ve seen doing something amazing, and I just wanted to bring again, what are you doing? But we found our theme.
This is all about increasing your commissions by getting repeat customers. This is all about going that extra mile to serve people and not just be like, hey, here’s an affiliate offer. Peace out. Homie.
You said something there that we teach this at a level. I’d probably say, like, a fourth grade level. Just like a master’s degree level, guys.Okay?
So it’s about yeah, you don’t have to fulfill the product. Yeah, you don’t have to do the customer service. These are all the things we love about affiliate marketing.
You don’t have to pay the credit card processing. You don’t have to to hire the customer service reps. You don’t have to do any of that. But can you go one step? One step mile? If you think about the phrase the extra mile, it didn’t say, like, the extra marathon. It gets just one more mile.
There’s a whole history lesson behind that I won’t get into. But you’re helping people succeed with the things that you’re referring them to. And you mentioned.
Have you set up? Have you done the onboarding? Like, you don’t have to do that. That’s not in the description of being an affiliate.
And they should do a good job of that, but it’s not that they do a bad job of it. It’s, you know, Kajabi, for example, sometimes their emails are just going to the promo tab, but your emails don’t because they’ve been on your email list for three and a half years.
Dave: Yeah.
Matt: And you following up. It’s like, oh, yeah. And even if let’s take a hypothetical, here is the cool thing, and I want to learn more about the strategies you’re using to do that. My hypothesis is, even if after a month with Kajabi, just using an example, I’m not picking on them a month with Kajabi, they still go, you know what?
I don’t like Kajabi. It’s just not for me. But man, that Dave went above and beyond. They love you even more. You didn’t make any money. But guess what?
They are ten times more likely to buy the next thing. Ten times more likely to refer you to somebody. They might even refer somebody to Kajabi through your affiliate link. Why would they? No, because it wasn’t for them.
Dave: Right.
Matt: It might be for Joe. And that’s the beauty of this. So what are some of the things specifically, like, that you’re doing that really work again, just that are making people love you and going that extra mile with these affiliate promotions to make sure your buyers really succeed?
Dave: Yeah, I think to put it succinctly, it’s trust. So I’m helping build a lot of trust between us and going back to that example I was given before of the not so good thing that I would not get behind and I saw other people in no space do it.
You know, I drew a line in the sand for my audience and like, let them know, like, beware, look out. And I had a ton of people come back to me and say, man, I really respect you for that. You could have gone to the bank.
They knew, like, I could have cashed in big time. I could have been on the leaderboard of that thing, right. I could have had anybody in their brother buying it. But I was like and so there’s been some times where I’ve said, like, I just kind of shake my head.
I have this thing of like, I’m not going to actively throw any company under the bus and talk negatively, so I won’t unless they really egregious about it. But if people bring it up or they ask me, especially when I’m doing Facebook Live, they’ll just see me shake my head or whatever, and they get it. And so I think that’s one piece.
But the second piece about getting people through the next phase or getting them establishing that trust. There’s a really fascinating thing I’ve found with software in general. And it’s this idea of if people are unfamiliar with that space, let’s say page builders, lead pages, click funnels, drop funnels, whatever.
I have found that I have my opinion on them, and I’ve done some research, and there’s people in my community that say, like, oh, this one’s easier, or this one’s more customizable or robust or whatever.
But I have found when people are kind of new to this space, which my audience tends to be, a vast majority of them don’t like the first one that they try, no matter what it is, but they love the second one, isn’t it?
Matt: Yeah.
Dave: And so what it comes down to is this idea around, okay, they went through that conscious, incompetence phase of being really frustrated with that other platform, and then they were like, okay, let me learn some things.
And they learned some things, but they didn’t like it. So then they try this other thing, and it seems so much easier, right? And it’s because they’ve tried this other thing.
And so I try to explain this to people. Like, I am as transparent as possible when people are going into these things. And to your example before about maybe it wasn’t for them, I will say that, too.
I’ll say, listen, ultimately, it comes down to, in a lot of cases, whether or not you like the user interface, whether or not you can handle it, whether you like the color scheme, whatever. This is like trying on a pair of shoes.
I’ll narrow it down for you that you need some running shoes and you’re trying to run your first five k all right, here’s two or three to pick from, but pick one and go run with it go.
Like, the little kids would try on shoes in the mall and do even still have shopping malls. They would try on shoes like I did when I was little, and then it would be like, how fast do they make me? And I would run out the store and run back in.
Matt: It’s got to be the shoes Mars.
Dave: Yeah. So I explained that to them, and I’m very transparent and open and honest and all those things. And so I think what happens is I do a little bit of hugs, handshakes, and high fives, like getting them past that kind of disgruntled phase of like, oh, my gosh, this is tough.
And then once they get past there, then what I do is I ask them to share their success with my audience, and I give them full range to promote whatever it is they’re doing.
So I’ll say, hey, yeah, you could come to my group to talk about whatever you’re doing, but I would love for you to explain your thought process about how you tried this tool and why you like it.
And often I don’t ask them to say this, but often they will say, like, yeah, Dave has never led me astray or Dave pointing me in the right direction. And now I have a course, and I just made my 1st using whatever this tool is because of Dave. And thank you. Dave like, okay, there you go.
So that helps with social proof. So many of you in the audience, if you don’t know me, you’ve never heard of me before. I really geek out on the psychology of marketing.
And so one of the books I know, Matt, you probably haven’t read in your bookshelf there, influenced The Psychology of Persuasion by Dr. Robert Childini. Most of the stuff I do is coming out of there. Like, how is it building one of those now? Seven levels of influence.
Matt: You interviewed him recently on your podcast, didn’t you?
Dave: Yeah, I’m on my podcast when the new version of his book came out.
The post How to Increase Your Commissions by Guiding Your Followers & Creating Repeat Buyers with Dave Gambrill appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
###### There is a right way to run an affiliate program for monthly subscription services. There is a right way and a wrong way because there are unique aspects to these monthly programs. In this post, you’ll learn EXACTLY how to run such an affiliate program.
What I’m sharing today has LITERALLY transformed affiliate programs from “bump along” businesses that make a few bucks into life-changing enterprises that change family trees!
What you’re going to learn today is NOT theory.
It’s proven itself where it matters most…in the marketplace.
When we can help a business owner take their monthly recurring revenue from a few thousand dollars to $10,000, it’s a game-changer.
Quick story…The first coaching client I had was back in 2011.
I worked with him for a year.
At that time, he was earning about $80,000 a year…about $7,000 a month.
About nine months AFTER we stopped working together, he informed me that he was making significantly more money.
He went from about $88,000 to about $212,000.
Naturally, I thought that was awesome and told him so.
But then he said…
‘No, no… you don’t understand. Let me explain what that did for me…remember how I was telling you how we lived in this crappy two-bedroom apartment? With two kids and hardly any room to turn around? Well, we’ve been able to move into THIS neighborhood! My daughter who has special needs is in a better school now! I’m taking more time off. I hired somebody…life is good!’
THAT’S what tripling a $7,000-a-month income can do for somebody!
Not only does it make going full-time possible, it also allows you to take vacations.
The financial stress melts away.
It’s the same thing when I help a business go from five figures to six figures a month.
When they go from making twenty thousand dollars to one hundred thousand dollars, that creates jobs.
THAT changes lives and takes businesses to the next level.
And it’s all because of one thing…
The ability to create a successful affiliate program for a subscription service.
This applies to membership sites, monthly subscription masterminds…you name it!
ANYTHING that is generating recurring monthly revenue.
Now, before I get started, I’ve got a few things I want you to keep in mind.
1. Know that creating a successful affiliate program requires an ONGOING commitmentThis is long-game stuff.
Membership sites are a marathon, NOT a sprint.
It requires taking action EVERY month.
2. Affiliate programs might not be suitable for your audience or your productIf you know that people NEED to have had a personal interaction with you BEFORE they buy, an affiliate program might not be your best choice.
For example, a membership site might only work AFTER someone has previously been through a course or bought another product.
Otherwise, it wouldn’t make sense to have affiliates promoting your membership directly.
3. It DOES require you to get additional tech systems set upThis is not necessarily an issue, but it’s worth bearing in mind. Especially if you’re not a fan of tech!
If that’s the case, maybe now ISN’T the time to start an affiliate program for your membership site.
If that’s the case, find somebody who IS a techie.
This is too good of an opportunity to let this prevent you from having a lucrative business you never dreamed possible.
All right, so let’s dive into the key considerations for setting up a successful affiliate program for monthly subscriptions…
#1. How will you recruit your affiliates?Who will you let in?
With a membership site, you’ve essentially got three choices:
- Members only. I’d say 60% of affiliate programs for membership sites or subscription sites ONLY allow members can become affiliates.
- Invite only. This allows you to hand-select people. Maybe you decide to bring on only bigger affiliates. Maybe it’s only members who are RAVING fans. You decide.
- Public. Basically, this is ANYONE who wants to become an affiliate.
There’s nothing wrong with any of these. You just need to think through which is the best fit for you.
It’s a personal decision.
I definitely don’t do invite only. For me, it’s either all members or the public.
Although I’m not going to go in-depth on this, I will say…
If you have a KNOWLEDGE-based membership, I’d tend to lean toward members only…
Here’s why: Members are familiar with you..through your podcast, emails, and various promotions…
They KNOW about you and the products you offer…
But if it’s a subscription site for a service like software, I think you can definitely open THAT to the public.
We do this all the time…a good example is ConvertKit – our go-to email service provider.
Although we switched over from MailChimp, we still suggest MailChimp to newbies as an option.
The basic idea when recruiting affiliates is to find people who are promoting similar products that are courses (not memberships, of course) and get them to promote yours as an ongoing thing.
Need help recruiting affiliates? Learn our secrets inside our Find Affiliates Now course.
#2. What will your commission rate be? This is one of the most important considerations.
Here are some things you should consider when deciding on your commission rate.
- Will you use a flat fee or a percentage?
- Will you pay recurring commissions or one-off only?
- Do you want to offer 1 or 2 commission tiers?
- Do any 0f your direct competitors have affiliate programs?
You can set whatever commission rate you want but it needs to be attractive enough to make it worthwhile for your affiliates to invest their time promoting your site AND provide you a return on investment you’re happy with.
The commission for membership affiliates is typically lower than is recommended for digital products or courses where you may find 50% or more as the suggested rate.
It’s important to remember that the RECURRING model is different than selling a one-off product.
Unlike a one-off sale where the affiliate’s work is done once the initial sale is made, you will be doing ongoing work to keep that member each month. So, giving something like 25% on a recurring basis is more typical for a membership.
#3. How often (and how) will you communicate?Communication can’t be too frequent. But, it can’t too little, either.
Unlike a launch, where you would typically be communicating on a daily basis, you need to be thoughtful in communicating with your members.
You CAN send emails once a week or every other week. (think “as needed” notifications.)
Don’t be shy about firing off a Facebook Group post once a week or so.
And, two-three times a year, you can do BIG promos of 7-10 days with DAILY communication.
Treat those using the same rules as launches…big promos and steady, ongoing contact with your affiliates.
Click here to get FREE access to an actual affiliate training we shared with affiliates for one of our client’s programs.
Use your communication to TEACH your affiliates.
- Host a Training…not just for small affiliates. Invite your largest affiliates to attend as well. Make it an EVENT.
- Send Cheat Sheets…a simple PDF with all the important stuff.
- Share Testimonials…when you get a really awesome testimonial, share it in the partner group. We do this often for our affiliates. It’s a great way to make them feel like what they are doing is having an impact.
- Updates…keep them informed…Make sure they see the leaderboards, get contest updates. This personal touch gets them INVOLVED. Ask for their picture for the leaderboard. Think about it…wouldn’t YOU be a little more excited about the prospect of seeing yourself on a leaderboard?
- Ask if They Need Anything…even if it’s something simple. Attending to it can have a huge impact.
- Ask for Referrals…this is the #1 way to get new affiliates. ASK them for referrals.
- Send Physical Mail…stop solely relying on email and Facebook. Send them something in the mail. Even if it’s a simple newsletter.
This is only a STARTER list of what to communicate and how.
#4. Who’s going to run your affiliate program?Like anything, there are advantages and disadvantages of your running your program, or outsourcing.
Here are some resources to help you decide which is the best option…
If YOU are going to run your affiliate program yourself…
Click here to get access to a recording of The Affiliate Code LIVE EVENT that reveals insider information to EXPLODE your affiliate program!
Or…apply here for a FREE Your Affiliate Launch Coaching Call…
If you decide you’re going to OUTSOURCE…talk to us!
#5. What kind of tracking will you use?You need to decide WHERE your program will live.
There are several options to choose from when it comes to actually setting up your affiliate program:
- Affiliate Program Software or Plugin – if you have a WordPress site then you can use an affiliate plugin. This means that everything will be kept on your site and you have total control over everything, but it may not be as powerful as a dedicated affiliate system. Here’s our favorite…Post Affiliate Pro. While it is not cheap, it offers affiliates reliable tracking via cookie, contact record (email), and IP. In addition, the reporting is second to none. If you have the budget and are serious about growing your business, Post Affiliate Pro is the affiliate tracking tool for you.
- Affiliate Platform – this is a third-party software which means your affiliate data will be kept off your website. These may have more features than affiliate plugins, but you will typically have less flexibility as far as customization and branding are concerned.
- Affiliate Network – if you’re running a public program, then you might want to consider a third-party network like Clickbank. These have the added bonus of being able to recruit affiliates for you, and will typically also reduce management responsibilities as they pay your affiliates for you.
- Custom Program– You might have a custom program that someone builds out that integrates with all your tools. There’s a higher cost to that, but it might work better for you.
Here are some things to consider BEFORE choosing your affiliate system:
- What options integrate with your membership plugin?
- What commission options do you need?
- Do you want to have a customizable affiliate area?
- Can you upload your own creatives and resources for your affiliates?
- Do you need to account for refunds?
- What are the initial and ongoing fees involved?
These are some additional Affiliate tracking software/plugins/networks we like:
- Our recommended network is ShareASale
- Our recommended tracking is Post Affiliate Pro, but we also recommend iDevAffiliate
#6. You need to make sure to ACTIVATE your inactive affiliatesBefore you can activate affiliates who have stopped participating in your promotions, you need to determine WHY they became inactive.
That will determine the best approach to take to get them back in the game.
Here are 5 typical reasons affiliates become inactive along with ways to get them reactivated:
Reason #1: They signed up on a whimThis happens more than I wish it did. Person A sees Person B promoting something, signs up and then quickly realizes one (or more) of three things:
- this is not a good fit for my audience, or
- I have no idea how to promote this, or
- I don’t have time to promote this.
With this group, there is not much you can do.
If you find out someone mistakenly signed up, just remove them and move on.
Reason #2: They are promoting a competitorThis one hurts. The reality is that no matter how awesome your product is, how great the commissions are, or even how solid you feel a relationship is, sometimes people leave for “greener” pastures. That’s the nature of our world.
When this happens, it’s important to understand their WHY.
In other words, shut up and listen. Don’t get defensive, angry, or try to convince them at first. Just listen to why they switch allegiances.
It might be for any of the following reasons:
- The new offer converts better
- The new offer pays better
- The new offer has better affiliate tools
- They may have been promised a reciprocal promotion
My advice when dealing with this type of situation is to stay calm, ask why they switched, and listen. Trust me, it’s best not to say anything initially. Give them some time and follow up in a few weeks to see if there is anything you can do.
If the issue is something like tools (graphics, copy, tracking), this is a sign you need to fix these things! Get them what they need and then tell them you listened.
If the issue is conversions, find out what the competition is doing to beat you. Help them optimize their campaigns to convert better. Work on your sales funnel and get your conversions up.
If the issue is commission structure, make sure you aren’t underpaying. I don’t prefer to get into bidding wars over commissions, but I will make sure we are competitive.
If someone leaves a program that is already paying 50% for a program that is paying 80%, let them go. It’s not worth killing your margins.
But if you are just being cheap and someone else is beating you, STOP BEING CHEAP! Pay a competitive commission.
If the issue is that you can’t do a reciprocal promotion, reconsider your stance. It might be worth promoting them to keep them. Or consider other alternatives if you truly can’t do a reciprocal promotion.
Reason #3: They went out of business It happens…and they’re isn’t much you can do about it. Move on.
Reason #4: They don’t know how to promote Sometimes an affiliate just doesn’t know HOW to promote your product. Or, they haven’t done a good job of adapting to the ever-changing landscape of the marketing world.
Regardless, your job is to help your affiliate succeed.
That means doing things like:
- Hosting training webinars to show them how to promote
- Recording videos to show them how to promote
- Getting on calls with them one-on-one to help them
- Telling them to subscribe to MY site (seriously)
- Create checklists for your affiliates
Reason #5: They’ll “get around to it later”There are two types of “get around to it later” affiliates…
- Type 1: (0.17%) They truly have it on their calendar for the future. These are the ‘let me look at our promo calendar real quick…Yep, it’s this September 7-12’.
And then, there are THESE guys…
- Type 2: (99.87%): They’re NEVER going to “get around to it”…UNLESS…you give them a nudge.
Often all it takes to activate inactive affiliates is a gentle reminder.
That means sending a specific email to get them to get off their virtual couch and start making sales.
I’ve sent more than 300 different versions of activation emails in my decade-plus of affiliate management. Along the way, I cataloged the BEST performers.
Click here to get our most effective “Affiliate Activation Email Templates.”
As you can see…there are A LOT of moving parts to create a successful affiliate program.
But, I’m here to tell you that if you follow the guidelines I laid out in this post, you’ll be glad you put in the time and effort necessary for phenomenal affiliate marketing success.
The post How To Run An Affiliate Program For Monthly Subscription Services appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
###### One of the hardest parts about an affiliate promotion is shifting from promoting the free content (workshops, pdfs, reports, webinars, etc.) to promoting the paid content. It’s a challenge to go from “here’s a free thing you might like” to “now you have to pay money for this.” I’m seeing a lot of affiliates really struggling with this so I want to share my best tips with my favorite people (my podcast listeners) on how to do this effectively. Listen up and I’ll share exactly how to transition from promoting free content to paid products.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Tired of having a small (or no) email list? It’s time to start growing your fast and easy! Grab my new book Turn Your Passions Into Profits now and watch our subscribe count soar!
Links Mentioned in this EpisodeTurn Your Passions into Profits Book & Exclusive Bonuses
Our Recommended Affiliate Programs
How to Put Together an Affiliate Bonus Package
Text me at 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyBook Launch Party: An Interview with Matt About Turn Your Passions Into Profits
Special Episode: Highlights from My Whirlwind Book Tour
The Untold Stories from Turn Your Passions Into Profits (Behind The Scenes Peek at My Book)
Ten Resolutions for Affiliate Marketers and Affiliate Managers
2023 Affiliate Marketing Predictions
Creating Your Ideal Customer Avatar: How to Get Crystal Clear on Your Audience Part 2
How to Get Crystal Clear on Your Audience Part One
Affiliate Marketing Lesson: Shifting From Promoting Free Content To A Paid ProductThe post Affiliate Marketing Lesson: Shifting From Promoting Free Content To A Paid Product appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
This is the day I’ve dreamed about for nearly 8 long years. Today is the day that my life’s mission takes shape and my book, Turn Your Passions Into Profits, releases. Come join me today for a very special episode celebrating my book launch.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
NEW EPISODE: “Book Launch Party: An Interview with Matt About Turn Your Passions Into Profits” Listen here now!
Links Mentioned in this EpisodeTurn Your Passions into Profits Book & Exclusive Bonuses
Text me at 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
| | | | --- | --- | | | | | | | |
Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuySpecial Episode: Highlights from My Whirlwind Book Tour
The Untold Stories from Turn Your Passions Into Profits (Behind The Scenes Peek at My Book)
Ten Resolutions for Affiliate Marketers and Affiliate Managers
2023 Affiliate Marketing Predictions
Creating Your Ideal Customer Avatar: How to Get Crystal Clear on Your Audience Part 2
How to Get Crystal Clear on Your Audience Part One
The Proven Path for Building a Rewarding Online Business
Book Launch Party: An Interview with Matt About Turn Your Passions Into ProfitsTranscript Coming Soon…
The post Book Launch Party: An Interview with Matt About Turn Your Passions Into Profits appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
A couple of days ago, I shared a post about how to get more from books you read. In case you missed it, you can read it here.
The problem with MANY books out there is this: They contain GREAT information but they don’t include action items. There’s no easy path on how to implement what you learn. In my book, Turn Your Passions Into Profits, I’ve made it easy for you to take the next step to BENEFITING from what you learn.
Each chapter concludes with a number of suggested ACTION ITEMS you can use to make implementation much easier…and, more likely.
So all you have to do is…read a chapter in Turn Your Passions Into Profits and then…Do the exercises you see listed.
Of course, I want you to get a lot of great information you CAN use to build your business. But..I want you to take ACTION!
Great information is USELESS if it isn’t acted upon.
You can STILL pre-order your copy and get nearly $1,000 in exclusive bonuses…but you only have a few days left to get the bonuses!
Check out what you get when you order now (these go away on January 10th at midnight PT):
1. Developing Your Ideal Customer Avatar ($97) – This exclusive bonus training takes a deep dive into the entire process for creating your Ideal Customer Avatar.
2. How to Create Consistent Content ($47) – Learn how to never run out of content ideas and create ongoing, profitable content in less than two hours each week.
3. Email Marketing Masterclass ($47) – Learn how to craft emails that grab attention, get opened, and are consistently read.
4. The Passions to Profits Training Vault ($397) – More than 10 hours of helpful marketing tips, in-depth training, business-building advice, and more.
5. Exclusive LIVE Training and Q&A ($197) – 2+ hour next-level training and Q&A time exclusively for those who pre-order the book.
Again, these bonuses disappear in just a few days…
CLICK HERE to pre-order your copy of Turn Your Passions Into Profits and get $785 in exclusive pre-order bonuses!
The post The Problem With Most Books appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Read any books lately? If so, you may have found yourself staring at them a few months later struggling to even remember what you learned…never mind IMPLEMENTING the great ideas you were exposed to.
You’re not alone…
Happens all the time.
You buy the book, read through it, and then…BOOM!…life intervenes…
And the opportunity to get any LASTING value you can use to make your life or business better disappears…
Why? Because you don’t put what you learned into practice.
The key is to become an ACTIVE reader…
Here are three ways to do it…
1. Start journaling or taking notes in the margins.
Writing things down helps imprint them in your brain. It reinforces what you read.
2. Listen while you read.
The combination of Auditory Learner and the book enhances your ability to INTERNALIZE what you learn. But to implement, you need to buy a book. You can buy Turn Your Passions Into Profits here!
3. Start a book club.
Can’t get simpler than this. I started one with my friend Hunter. We were the only two in it! It led me to starting my first blog. All you do is find a couple of friends and you can share the lessons learned and big takeaways on a regular basis. It’s all about implementing what you learn.
You can start becoming an ACTIVE reader by grabbing my new book, Turn Your Passions Into Profits (along with $785 in FREE bonuses).
And while you’re reading, highlight key passages. Make notes while you go along.
You can STILL pre-order your copy and get nearly $1,000 in exclusive bonuses…including a bonus lesson on creating your avatar…but you only have a few days left to get the pre-order bonuses!
CLICK HERE to pre-order your copy of Turn Your Passions Into Profits and get $785 in exclusive pre-order bonuses!
The post How To Get More From The Books You Read appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
There’s a story behind the story with my book, Turn Your Passions Into Profits. Today, I’m revealing how it came to be, how I landed my dream publisher, everyone’s favorite story plus my favorite, and the stories my publisher wouldn’t allow me to tell. Come join me on a behind-the-scenes peek at the inside of the book…and the process that got us here.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Links Mentioned in this EpisodeTurn Your Passions into Profits Book
Join My Book Launch Team
Text me at 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyTen Resolutions for Affiliate Marketers and Affiliate Managers
2023 Affiliate Marketing Predictions
Creating Your Ideal Customer Avatar: How to Get Crystal Clear on Your Audience Part 2
How to Get Crystal Clear on Your Audience Part One
The Proven Path for Building a Rewarding Online Business
How to Outperform Your List Size in Affiliate Promotions: Lessons From 15 Affiliates Who Had Small Lists But Finished High On Affiliate Leaderboards
The Untold Stories from Turn Your Passions Into Profits (Behind The Scenes Peek at My Book)There’s a story behind the story with my book Turn your passions into profits.
Today I’m revealing how it came to be, how I landed my dream publisher, everyone’s favorite story, plus my favorite story and even the stories that my publisher wouldn’t allow me to tell.
Come join me today on a behind the scenes peek at the inside of the book and the process that got us here.
So here we are. We’re one week away from the launch oh, my gosh.
The launch of my book Turn your passions into profits.
I honestly can’t believe that we’re here just because it’s been such a long process.
I began writing this book in December of 2020. I began thinking about this book sometime in 2014, 2014.
So it’s been eight years of my life’s work put into this book. I had that voice saying, yeah, I got to do this.
You got to write the book. You got to get this out in the world because we’re able to help a lot of people.
I’ve worked with over 300,000 affiliates. We’ve helped thousands of small business owners.
We’ve consulted with probably we’ve run probably 100 affiliate programs. We’ve personally coached about 30 people.
If you think about it, the more intimate it gets, the less that I can do and those numbers, yeah, it’s great.
It’s great that we’ve helped thousands of people, but how do we help tens of thousands?
And a book was the way to do that.
I knew that there was just no way that hundreds of thousands or millions of people were going to buy $2,000, $5,000, $10,000 coaching package. That’s just not going to happen.
So how do we get these lessons out into the world?
That was the point of this book.
We poured eight years of my life into this, basically.
And then ultimately, it took me about five, six months of just writing and writing and writing.
I wrote about a third of the manuscript in a matter of two and a half, three weeks when I had the time.
December and early January 2000, from 2020 to 2021, we always take off.
This will be the first year in years that I haven’t taken off two weeks.
We usually take off a few days before Christmas and then through a few days after the new year, just depending upon how the days fall.
So, for example, our company officially we’re shut down this year from December 23 through January 3, and then we do the same thing in the middle of the year.
And it worked out perfectly. You got Christmas in the new year, and then my wife and I’s birthdays are at the end of June, and then we have Independence Day on July 4
And I wish I could say I planned all that, but I didn’t. But it works out great because because every six months, we have essentially about a ten to 14 day reset.
And the studies show that it’s really hard to take out three day vacation or one week vacation, but if you can get it up around ten plus days, at least that middle few days, you’re completely disconnected.
That’s not going to be the case this year with this book launch. When you’re listening to this, I will have done about eight interviews the past two days.
I will have done probably 40 to 60 since I recorded this a week and a half or so before Christmas.
It’s insane. And the reality is, I’m doing all this because it is so important.
But I started this over that break, and I started writing, got about a third of the way through it.
And then I hit my busy season, one of the busiest seasons in my life. We had a massive launch, a multimillion-dollar product launch with a client.
And I looked at Robbie on our team, who’s our operations manager, who’s also my personal productivity guru, and I just said, how am I going to do this, man?
Like, I’m too busy. I’m already working 10 hours a day.
How am I supposed to do this?
He said, can you find 20 minutes?
Can you write this in 20 minutes a day?
The remaining two thirds of this book, can you write it in 20 minutes a day?
And I said, yeah. So what I did was I actually set up a timer.
I would get down first thing in the morning before anything else. I didn’t check email.
I did nothing. Busiest season of my life.
So I would just get down at about 6:15 and I didn’t do my morning routine.
I don’t think I made coffee, even, which is rare. I think I did that after.
I think I came down and did this for 20 minutes.
And then I checked email and kind of checked in on this big launch we were running for 2030 minutes, then went up and made coffee.
Then I checked in more, and then I did my workout.
But I came down, and I just wrote, and I set the timer for 17 minutes, set the timer on my phone for 17 minutes.
At the end of those 17 minutes, if I was done, I was at a good stopping point.
Then I typed my notes for the next day. That’s a key.
When I came down, I had my notes for that day already outlined.
It might say, Tell the story about your dad, and I’m going to tell you about that later.
And it would say, Tell the story about your dad, or Talk about Alan Thomas, things like that, right?
It would be talk about Chris Rock.
It would be my notes for the next day, and I would write for those 17 minutes when the timer went off, if I was at a stopping point, I stopped.
I made my notes for the next day. I’d be done in 17 and a half minutes if I needed to finish.
This was my two minute warning. I had two minutes to finish up, then 1 minute to make my notes, because at 20 minutes, I was done.
I had to be done and I think I stuck to that.
All but like two or three out of about 75 days.
There were a couple of days where I went like two or three, maybe upwards of even ten minutes over.
I got in a rhythm, and I was like, no, I got to keep going. I got to keep going.
But that’s how I wrote the book. You say I don’t have time 20 minutes. Just 20 minutes.
If you’re you can find that time to get kick started, grape.
But what if I hadn’t been a third of the way done after only two and a half weeks?
Then I would have written the book in 125 days.
One third of a year is all it would have taken, 20 minutes a day.
I do suggest if you can find one afternoon or one morning to get away, get away could mean you just go to a different part of your house where nobody’s there, and you plan the gist of the book out like I did.
That was what I did. I planned it out in an afternoon.
I marked off my calendar from like two to six, and I wrote the outline for the book.
I had the chapter names. I had the basic stories, the basic lessons.
Like, here are the five things I want people to be able to get from this chapter.
And that was it. That only took me about 3 hours, maybe four.
If you have that, then you can write a book in 20 minutes a day.
I hope that’s a big lesson right there for a lot of people.
So I wrote the book, and I wrote the book proposal.
I talked to my friend Chad Allen, highly recommend.
I’ve had him on the podcast before I talked to my friend Chad Allen, and he gave me the guidance on the book proposal.
So I followed his format, and then I was actually ready to sign with the publisher.
I had a small publisher that accepted the book.
I didn’t really seek out a major publisher.
And the day before I was going to sign the paperwork on it, I happened to be on a call with Amber Villhauer.
And Amber believed in the book and Amber was like, no, you can get a much bigger publisher.
You could get a big advance. You could do some big things.
Like, you could hit the list with this, man. You could hit the Wall Street Journal list.
You could hit New York Times. I was like, what? That’s not why I wrote the book.
I didn’t really care about those things. But she’s like, no, you can do that.
And there’s a lesson in there. Don’t sell yourself short.
Don’t sell yourself short. Someone else believed in me.
Someone else believed in what this book could do and that’s what led to she’s like, Let me introduce you to a friend of mine.
He’s an agent, and he’ll get you an amazing deal. Talk to Kevin Anderson.
A week later, maybe a week and a half, I’m on a call with if you look at my bookshelf, quarter third of the books up there are published by Ben Bella, Gino, Wickman, Rocket Fuel, and Traction.
I’ve read or listened to every one of his books multiple times completely changed my life.
David Finkel, who I interviewed for the podcast, I can’t see it from over here, but there’s, like, so many books.
Patrick Lincioni, one of my favorite authors, leadership expert.
I’ve read all but his newest book, which is published by Vanbella, distributed by Penguin Random House, like mine.
I’ve read all this book, so they’ve completely transformed my leadership, my business, my life.
So I got my dream publisher when I had no intention of getting a big publisher at all.
And so that’s the story behind the book. Kind of how it came to be.
Just, again, my own lack of belief. Just because I was thinking small, I didn’t know what was possible. And we don’t know what we don’t know sometimes.
Sometimes it takes others to highlight that. So whether it be a book or anything, think bigger.
Think bigger and look for those people in your life who can help you to think bigger.
So that’s a little bit behind the book. So as we move on in this episode, I want to share a few things.
Number one, I want to share the story here.
I’ve done 115 plus podcast episodes.
Another 50 to go, probably and this is the story in the book that like, two thirds of the people say, it’s my favorite story in the whole book.
About half the people are like, oh, my gosh, this clarified something so important for me.
And they love the story, and I love telling it and you’ll see why.
Then I want to share my personal favorite story stories in the book.
Then I want to share my favorite story that did not make the book that we had to cut.
It was in the original manuscript, the original manuscript from the book.
It was 117,000 words. We had to get it down to 75, they said and I was like, no, no, no.
I got this down to, like, 82,000 and I said, I’m done. I’m not cutting another thing.
Y’all are just going to have to publish it like it is and they said they agreed, so we had to cut 35,000 words.
So you’re going to share some of those today. That’s my favorite story. That’s not in the book.
So the first part here is this story that people keep bringing up as their favorite.
Again, I’d probably say 75 people out of 115 have said, this is my favorite story in the book.
And it’s the story of my dad, which I told in the last episode.
My dad was a golf instructor, and he would literally walk up and down the practice tee.
If you remember the last episode, I talked about lead magnets and how a lead magnet is a solution to pain, how we want people to get a quick win.
We want them to feel better right now and when they get that quick win, when they get that quick win, then they come back for more.
That’s the key and so I tell the story of my dad, how he would walk up and down the practice tee, and he would find somebody who was in pain.
And I don’t mean physical pain, like they’re hurting, but emotional pain from their performance, right?
They’d hit a shot, and then they slam their club into the ground, and they’d hit another shot, and they’d mutter something themselves.
And he would walk up to them and he would say, hey, can I offer you a suggestion?
Can I help you out for a few minutes? This is a lead magnet.
This is a guy who never owned a computer, never got on the
Internet, never had a smartphone, and yet he had the best lead magnet of anyone I’ve ever seen, because he would go up to them and he would help them out for just a few minutes.
He’d give them a quick win. He would help them with one little thing, one little aspect, and they would hit better shots, and they would go, wow, that was amazing.
Can I give you money for more golf lessons?
And you sell them $1,000 golf instruction package. That’s what a lead magnet is. That’s all it is.
And here’s the thing, like the behind the scenes look, because I want this to be behind the scenes today, that story came about by accident.
I was delivering a presentation about lead magnets that I had taught probably 20 times out of nowhere.
It was not in the script. It was not in my bullet points.
I don’t usually script things, but I have bullet points, right?
I have slides that at least have some notes, like talk about what a lead magnet is, quick win, things like that.
It would have those highlights that I just shared, right?
It would say immediate and pressing need and yada yada and I told that story.
I was like, now that I think about it, my dad had the best lead magnet ever. Boom, boom, boom.
And as soon as I told it, like, my whole team behind the scenes went, oh, dang, that is a good story.
Like, that sums it up. This was four years ago.
Three, four years ago and so what we did was we codified that.
When I would deliver these presentations, as we were still working on them, we would watch them, and we would analyze them and so we wrote that down.
So now, my notes, when I delivered that presentation about lead magnet, said, Tell the story about your dad.
And it would have a few notes, like walking up and down, looking for people in pain.
Help them with one thing. Quick win, best shot ever. $1,000 golfer circuit action.
Over time, it just became, Tell the story about your dad, because I knew what that meant in that context.
I didn’t need, like, I’m looking at my notes right now, and it says the story people keep bringing up as their favorite.
And then in brackets, it says about my dad and then how that story came to be.
That’s all it says. I know that story so well. Now, of course, that I don’t need any reminders.
And that’s, like, again, I just accidentally added it to a webinar, and everybody was like, oh, my gosh.
And so the lesson there for you is, number one, codify your stories.
Practice them. Get them nailed down.
There are details to that story that I didn’t share the first time.
The thing about the one where I would say, like, the muttering and the slamming in the club, I don’t think I said that the first time, but the second time I delivered it, I added that.
And then as I practiced it and I realized what worked, I was able to codify that story.
So codify those stories. Like, when you tell a good story, make sure you note it.
Oh, my gosh, that’s a great story. I need to add that to stuff. Like, write it down.
Sometimes, as I’m just out and about, I’ll tell a good story, and I’ll go, that’s an effective story.
Let me make some notes. What was that? Boom, boom, boom?
I told that I might remember something from history.
There’s a story that I tell I’ve told her on the podcast before about the Eastern Zoo dynasty and how I was listening to a biography of Confucius, and they said that the Eastern Zoo dynasty started to decline in, like, 700 BC.
And then it didn’t finish declining and go away till 300 BC or 100 or something like that.
It was like a 4500 year decline and I make the connection to how governments topple overnight.
Today, we watched the Soviet Union go from being our biggest enemy to not existing in, like, a year.
Governments are overthrown live on 24 hours. Cable news now in a matter of days or hours.
It’s insane how quickly the world is moving and so I was like, that’s a good story.
Let’s tie that to how fast you should grow and move in business.
We should move quickly. We should not be slow in our business.
And specifically with growing an affiliate program, don’t be slow. Move quickly, act fast.
Because we live in a fast paced world, and I was able to make that connection.
And so when I first heard that story and made that connection in my mind, I wrote it down and I codified it.
So now I can tell it without remembering the dates exactly.
I still always have the dates on my slide because I forget them. But we codify our stories.
So that’s the story that everybody says it’s their favorite and a little bit behind the scenes on that one.
My personal favorite story in the book is about Alan Thomas, actually.
It’s kind of a tie between Alan Thomas and I say it’s a tie between Alan and my friend Brian.
The story I tell about Alan in the book is specifically as it regards to kind of getting clips in the very beginning of the book.
It’s like the first 25 pages of the book. It’s the longest story in the book.
His story takes up almost four pages, and it’s in relation to getting clear on your passions.
What are your passions?
And I talk about how Alan, when he was 55 years old this is about five years ago, six years ago, woke up age of 55, weighed 304 punds.
Now, he knew he was overweight. He’d always been the husky kid.
He’d always said, Man, I’ve always been the husky kid. I was the obese 25 year old.
I was obese when I was 35, I knew I was overweight, but I didn’t know I was that overweight, right?
I thought I weighed 290 and when he had officially tipped over £300, he was like, all right.
He knew at that moment there were three things that went through his mind.
The first was he’d been in the life insurance business for, like, ten years.
He worked with people over 65, and he was like, I never met a single man over 65 who’s more than £100 overweight.
So that meant he had ten years to live.
And then the other two things that just scared him to death were he would probably be known in the future as Angie’s first husband, had been married for almost 40 years now, and everything that he had hoped to accomplish in the future would be nothing more than a dream.
He’d be too dead is what he said, and somebody else is going to walk his daughter down the aisle.
And so fast forward nine months later, he weighed 175 pounds. And now he teaches other people how to do that.
And so the question that we ask in the book is like, what did you struggle with but now you enjoy success at because you found something that works.
What does he do now?
He helps other men and women to lose weight because he has that story.
Now, the back story behind that that I don’t tell in the book is Alan’s the one that initiated our relationship?
Alan is the reason he’s in the book, not me. I didn’t go find him.
He found me and he reached out to me.
He had come to me a few years before because he was in Dan Miller’s group and Dan had had me on and interviewed me, just like he has for this book.
And he interviewed me for his podcast and Allen became a fan.
And Alan reached out to me one day and he said, matt, I don’t know how to say this, but I think your weight is holding you back and I can help.
I said, can you? All right, let’s do it. And he was terrified.
He was terrified I was going to respond back and go, who the heck are you?
How dare you reach out to me?
He was terrified that was going to happen.
It’s a reasonable fear, right?
We reach out to somebody to help them with something.
That’s a little bit of a sensitive topic. But he did.
He had the guts to do that and he helped me and he continues to help me, and I’ve continued to help him.
And it’s been a very symbiotic relationship. He’s on our team now.
He is the host of all of our webinars and anything I do live and he is a dear friend.
He’s a very dear friend, continues to help me to this day and the lesson there from Alan is be daring.
Help someone, be willing to reach out. His story wouldn’t be in the book.
He’s going to get exposed to tens of thousands of people I’m talking about him now to tens of thousands of people.
Never would have happened if he didn’t have the guts.
So I would just ask you, what is it that you’ve been delaying?
Because he’d been delaying that for some time and he finally reached out to me.
What’s something that takes a little guts? Huge upside, maybe a huge downside.
The upside is huge. What’s something that you’ve been delaying?
Reaching out to someone, asking someone for something or asking someone if you can do something.
What’s something you’ve been delaying that requires a little bit of daringness, a little bit of guts?
Just go do it. Today’s the day. Like, right now. Press pause.
Go buy the book, then press pause.
Go to passionsintoprofitsbook.com real quick, get the book.
If you’ve been delaying that, then go do that but no, seriously, press pause and go do that thing. Whatever it is, go do it right now.
My second favorite story in the book is for my friend Brian, and I’m just going to read you this excerpt from the book because I think the text itself conveys the message more than just me sort of telling the story.
It’s in the chapter about convening and cultivating community.
So this chapter is step five.
So it’s kind them in the middle of the book, and it’s all about the idea of people come for the content but stay for the community, right?
It’s about getting your community, your people, your followers to come together and then cultivating that community once you’ve convened them.
Your next objective is to connect your tribe with each other.
It’s one thing to lead an assortment of individuals who just happen to all be on roughly the same path that is leading with content.
In this step, we start to lead with community.
Remember, people come for the content, but stay for the community.
Community is why some people have been on my list for nearly a decade, and that is true, actually, as we record this now, my list is over a decade old.
And of the first 100 people who joined my list, 52 of them are still on my list over ten years later, based on life expectancies, they will have spent now one 8th of their life on my list.
The average age of people on my list is about 54 years old.
That means they’ve spent almost a fifth of their life on my list, a third of their adult life on my list.
It’s crazy when you think about that.
So I write.
I have a friend, Brian, who’s a huge Cincinnati Reds fan.
He became a fan when he was a child because he loved the product on the field.
That’s the content.
He loved watching individual players like Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan and Frank Robinson.
The teams he grew up watching were the stuff of legends.
Back to back World Series titles in the height of his impression ability turned him into a superfan.
And this is the key point here.
But what kept him going back year after year and game after game?
He attends more than 50 home games a year was the community.
From 1972 until his father’s passing in 1989, he and his dad kept the same two seats at the Reds Riverfront Stadium.
When his dad passed away, brian and his son began attending the games together in the same two seats for 30 plus years.
The majority of the seats around them were filled with the same season ticket holders they gathered together in the parking lot before games to tailgate.
They took turns grilling brought worse, bringing ice for drinks and planning pregame activities.
They shared stories about baseball and about life.
They attended family funerals and mourned the loss of fellow fans together.
They exchanged Christmas cards at first and business later.
Two of the families even had a son and daughter fall in love and eventually married.
In 1990, the year of the Reds’last World Series victory.
They had to postpone their wedding two weeks on account of the team’s run to the championship.
A few people died here and there, and the faces changed over time, but the community spirit always remained.
When the team left Riverfront Stadium and moved to the Great American Ballpark in 2003, their seats were in virtually the same spot up six rows up from third base, right behind the opposing team’s dugout Uncle Charles and Aunt Claire not his real aunt uncle remained right in front of them.
Charles still bringing his glove to the games at age 82 in hopes of finally catching a foul ball.
The Millers were two rows back now with only five children, as their oldest, Michael, had gone off to college.
The Clarks were to their immediate left, as they had been since.
The Moore family was the newest addition, having replaced the Nortons, who had moved to Phoenix, where they still meet up with the others every March for Red spring training.
They are new, but they’ve been with the group since 2011.
Brian told me that as a kid, he lived and died with every pitch.
The result of the game is what mattered most.
If the Reds lost, he would be dejected.
When the Reds won, he was on cloud nine.
In other words, he came for the product, but he stayed all these years because of the community.
The reality is that for the better part of the past 30 years, the Reds have been terrible.
The product has been awful most years, but the community keeps them all coming back.
Nearly every major sports team has examples of these types of groups.
Now, I’m not suggesting you let your product slide over the years.
I’m simply demonstrating the powerful effect of a community and what happens when you carefully cultivate that community.
As a leader, your job is to take the relationship from transactional and one to one to relational and many to many.
So that’s an excerpt from the book there’s.
My second favorite story, I would say, in order, my favorite stories are Alan’s, Brian’s, and then the one about my dad.
And the one about my dad, I think is powerful in the message that it conveys, but also because it’s about my dad.
He passed away 17 years ago.
And there’s certainly a connection, just the story behind the story there.
But those are some of my favorite stories from the book.
Now, my favorite story that did not make the book, as we wrap up here, just thought it’d be fun to share something that didn’t make the book and just kind of say, okay, what actually got cut?
And you’ll see kind of why it got cut.
And I’ll share a little bit about that.
So in Step Six, it’s called champion your cause.
There’s a section that my editor advised me to take out, in part because the context is hard to explain in writing.
It’s one of those things that if like when I share just this, you go, that’s kind of interesting.
You know, when like when I talk about just this section, you’ll see that without the context, there can be a little bit of confusion and controversy.
And what we had to decide on was, okay, was that worth it?
And ultimately we ended up going with, no, we ended up deciding that the downside was not worth the upside.
And so step six is all about championing their cause.
We want a champion who fights for us, who stands up for us, who says, you know what, I believe in you right.
They defend their cause.
This is an inherent human trait.
This is something that it’s built into so many stories and whatnot.
And so we talk about the steps to be a champion for their cause.
I walk through those in the book.
Again, just a reminder, you can get the book it passions intoprofitsbook.com.
And there’s a ton of extra bonuses there, by the way.
And just so much stuff.
Like, so much good stuff.
We got an email master class, got an exclusive Q and A with me.
We got a big old vault of over 10 hours worth of lessons.
Gosh, the ideal customer avatar training.
We kind of touched on that earlier.
So much stuff.
Now in this chapter, I talk about being polarizing and being controversial, but this kind of went to the next level.
So I want to give you some context for this.
I talk about the traits of champions, meaning not people who win, but people who are champions for a cause.
And I talk about embracing your role as a champion and some of the aspects of what makes a champion for a cause, what makes you a champion for the cause, what makes that community that we built in step five.
And I talk about the word culture and the word culture.
The word culture comes from, I think, the Latin word.
It’s in the book, but I don’t have it in front of me right now.
It’s. C-O-L-T-E-R-E-C-O-L-T-E-R-E. Culter maybe.
And that word talks about bringing together.
And so I write in the book, I’m just going to read to you from the book.
So the sub headline in the book is, is this some sort of a cult?
And here’s what I write.
I write warning, all caps.
Warning before we continue, what I’m about to share is extremely controversial and could perhaps trigger unwanted feelings in certain people.
In this section, I will explore the similarities between cults and what you are trying to create in your following.
I will focus entirely on the elements of influence as you can use them to grow your business and create a positive influence in the world.
I do not minimize or ignore the horrifying reality that some readers might be victims of actual cults and the damage they inflict on their victims.
So I even say this.
But again, if you keep listening, you’ll see where somebody could take a passage from this book and they could totally pull it out of context.
And that’s what we were trying to avoid.
That’s one of the things you have to remember about today, is they could post anything and say, matt said good things about Nazis.
I didn’t.
I don’t.
And so as you listen to this, just know that, again, there is context here.
And the reason why we had to pull this is because of that lack of context.
If somebody were just to pull a couple of sentences out.
So I’m here.
I’ve given the preface right.
I’ve said, hey, warning.
Given the warning.
That said during my sophomore year of college at the University of Tennessee, I took a class on the elements of Mass movements as a part of my psychology major.
What I learned was fascinating.
We spent time learning about the rise of the Nazis in Germany, the spread of Christianity and Islam from their localized origins to reaching the entire world.
And we also studied cults.
Now, this was only a few years after the famous Branch Davidian siege in Waco, Texas, which most of us in the class had watched play out on live television.
The first time in my life that I’d ever given any thought to the concept of cults or charismatic influential leaders.
When we think of cults, we most often immediately think of a religious or utopian group with a charismatic, sadistic, egomaniacal leader.
We think of broken families, mass suicides, ritual murder, and bizarre behaviors.
Yet, as Dr. Arthur Dykeman points out in his book Them and US cult Thinking in the Terrorist Threat, most cult behavior is only a somewhat more radical version of the cultural norms we are brought up to believe in.
Follow the social norms, conform to the group, follow the leader.
The desires that bring people to cults, Dickman points out, are universal human longings.
The need to feel accepted, secure, protected, and led.
Let me say that again.
The desires that bring people to cults, okay?
The same thing that bring people to cults.
This is not in the book.
I’m just rereading it.
Here are universal human longings.
We feel a need to feel accepted.
We have a need to feel secure.
We have a need to feel protected, and we have a need to feel led.
So back to the book.
Here, many people who join cults feel as if they, quote, fit in for the first time, that they belong to something greater than themselves, and that they are a part of a larger mission, whether it be to save humanity, achieve enlightenment, or create a master race.
And I’m quoting here from Dykeman Cults form and thrive not because people are crazy, but because they have two kinds of wishes.
They want a meaningful life, to serve God or humanity, and they want to be taken care of, to feel protected and secure, to find a home.
End quote.
In other words, these groups that we see as inherently evil and which have done so much damage to the world, have their roots in positive, meaningful things.
They’re rooted in basic human needs, after all.
Don’t you want to belong?
Don’t you desire to be taken care of?
Don’t you desire to feel protected and secure?
Don’t you long to be understood?
Don’t you have a deep yearning to go where everybody knows your name?
Yeah, I’m going to stop singing.
And they’re always glad you came.
If you think about that, that doesn’t make you a cult member or a weirdo.
It makes you human.
The word cult has a lot of negative connotations, for obvious reasons.
Yet adding three simple letters completely changes it from a
negative word to a positive one Culture.
Both cult and culture, as you might expect, come from the same root word in Latin.
Oh, I okay. I totally messed it up earlier.
I didn’t know I had this in here. Colair, I think. Or Colere. C-O-L-E-R-E-I think I added a t earlier, which means Protect Inhabit Cultivate.
As the leader of your tribe, those are the exact qualities you want to possess.
You want to protect your avatar.
You want to solve their pain we talked about that earlier.
And help them avoid the mistakes you’ve made in your own journey, right?
You want to inhabit or dwell among them.
Remember, you lead from a place that is right alongside them.
It’s one step ahead, not far off, some distant place.
And you want to cultivate the community and give them a sense of belonging, security, and understanding.
So what we want to do here is take the positive elements from cults and apply them to our own tribes.
We want to tap into those basic human needs and create a place where our avatar feels like they belong.
They are accepted, they are understood, they are safe, and they are part of something bigger than themselves revolutionary leaders, like them or not.
Here’s a list of arguably the top ten most impactful revolutionary leaders of all time.
Now, note, this is my list.
Not some universally accepted list, but I would imagine that it would be close to what historians would agree upon.
So then I list I’m going to list the ten here and there’s. A few of these. I’ll make a note.
After that, we pulled out, because, again, of pulling out from this chapter, some of this ended up staying.
So here’s my ten. Jesus Christ. Adolf Hitler.
We pulled him out. Martin Luther King, Jr. Napoleon Bonaparte pulled him out. Mahatma Gandhi. Joseph Stalin pulled him out. Mohammed Genghis Khan took him out. And Nelson Mandela and Steve Jobs.
They were leaders across various domains religious, military, business, political and social.
Some were violent, some were nonviolent.
Some were benevolent, and some were downright evil.
Some were honest, and some lied.
And some scheme their way to power.
But they were all, no doubt, transformational.
They got their followers to go above and beyond what was expected of them and what they thought was possible.
They got their followers emotionally involved, excited, and focused on the future.
That’s a key element in revolutionary leadership.
In the Bible, Jesus takes a lowly fisherman named Peter and transforms him into a man who would be known around the world.
I doubt Peter ever thought that that was possible. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Helped inspire Rosa Parks to risk her life and become a leader herself when she refused to give up her seat on the bus.
On the other end of the spectrum, history has noted that many of Hitler’s closest followers never imagined that Nazism would lead to the disgusting horrors of the Holocaust.
Yet there they were, leading the death camps and personally massacring millions of people.
The same was true of Stalin’s followers. They were true believers who bought into the lie that killing tens of millions of their fellow countrymen was what was best for their Marxist ideals.
Napoleon became a legend for inspiring his soldiers to continue on in battle when all hope was lost.
Ordinary men achieved extraordinary feats as a result.
Nelson Mandela continued to be a leader while spending 27 years in prison.
By keeping his followers focused on what was possible in the future.
Steve jobs, helped his employees push past what was expected of themselves and of Apple and created a new future for humanity.
Now, you may not think of yourself as a revolutionary leader, as one leading a revolution, but you are.
You are leading a revolution against the commonly held beliefs in your niche that hold your followers back.
You are leading a revolution against the enemies of their greatness.
You are leading a revolution against the lies they’ve been told, the snake oil they’ve been sold, and the beliefs that they hold.
So from there, I go on to share the seven core elements of revolutionary leaders, which is, again, one of my favorite parts of the entire book as well.
We had to cut that whole section out. There are a few little elements there that stayed in the book, but the rest got cut out because, again, a little bit controversial.
So, no, I’m not saying good things about Nazis or Marxist or Napoleon or Genghis Khan, and I fully acknowledge everything that they did bad, but I say there are things that we can learn from them, and that’s something I’ve talked about before.
If you study successful political campaigns, and I don’t mean individuals running for office, I mean whether it be certain rights.
If you studied the civil rights movement they pulled from the anti civil rights movement, this is one of the things if you study the successful movements over the years, what they did was, rather than say, everything the other side does us wrong, they went, you know, what can we learn from them?
What are they doing that we’re not?
This is something I’ve talked about before, but I’ll repeat, like, it just amazes me.
People are like, you said something I don’t like. I’m unsubscribing.
I said 99 things you do like you unsubscribe because of one.
That just shows that you’re ignorant.
You’re not adult enough to go, I don’t agree with this person, but I can learn a lot from them.
I’m on a lot of people’s list.
I don’t agree with even half of what they say, whether it be politically or personally.
They use too much language.
We keep my show family friendly.
I listen to a couple of podcasts where every fourth word every fourth word has four letters in it, and I could be turned off by that, or I could say, okay, you know what?
I’m going to pull what I can from that.
There are things that you can pull from all kinds of aspects.
And I’m not talking about going against your morals or your beliefs.
That’s not what I’m talking about.
That’s a little bit different.
But if you can’t be challenged a little bit, that’s a problem.
And if you can’t pull the good, if you can’t take the lessons from that person just because they say a few things that you disagree with, that’s on you, not them.
So anyway, that’s a hole that was unplanned, and there you have it right?
So there’s some of the behind the scenes stuff with my book.
It was really fun to do this again.
Some of the untold stories, right?
And some of the told stories.
So listen, if you got any questions about the book or anything else, you can text me anytime 260-217-4619 make sure you go grab a copy of the book it passionsintoprofitsbook.com while you can when this air is only like a week left to get all the amazing pre order bonuses if you go there after.
There’s still some amazing bonuses for podcast listeners, so make sure you go there passionsintoprofitsbook.com and grab your copy again.
Text me if you’ve got questions about the book or anything else. 260-217-4619 make sure you hit subscribe to the next episode.
We got a special episode so we’re dropping a couple extra episodesvhere.
Got a special episode with some highlights from my book tour, which has just been insane.
As I mentioned earlier, done over 115 now, I think podcast episodes, it’s been an absolute whirlwind.
It’s been one of the craziest, most fun, exhausting times in my life. All going to be worth it though. I know.
So in the next episode, I’m going to share some of the lessons, some of the highlights, some of the lowlights from almost a three month book tour.
So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss that. I’ll see you then.
The post The Untold Stories from Turn Your Passions Into Profits (Behind The Scenes Peek at My Book) appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
It’s that time of year again…time to make a commitment to big changes, massive improvement, and big ideas for the year ahead. Today, I’ll reveal my top 10 suggested resolutions for affiliate marketers and affiliate managers. Commit to these and I can promise you that next year will be 10 times better than this one was!
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy2023 Affiliate Marketing Predictions
Creating Your Ideal Customer Avatar: How to Get Crystal Clear on Your Audience Part 2
How to Get Crystal Clear on Your Audience Part One
The Proven Path for Building a Rewarding Online Business
How to Outperform Your List Size in Affiliate Promotions: Lessons From 15 Affiliates Who Had Small Lists But Finished High On Affiliate Leaderboards
8 Reasons People Fail At Affiliate Marketing
Ten Resolutions for Affiliate Marketers and Affiliate ManagersThe post Ten Resolutions for Affiliate Marketers and Affiliate Managers appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Yesterday, I wrote about the importance of CREATING raving fans.
In case you missed it, you can read it here.
In my book, Turn Your Passions Into Profits, I share TEN ways to go about creating raving fans.
These are very SPECIFIC ways…not theories or generalities.
Of course, if you want ALL ten ways…well, you gotta grab a copy of the book here:
Pre-order Turn Your Passions Into Profits and get $785 in bonuses – time is running out!
But, I’m going to share the MOST important way here so you can get your followers to LOVE you…
Get clear on your role…
Once you have identified WHO you help, it’s time to clarify your role in helping them.
In the book, I cover the seven archetypal roles…
…which one are you?
- Are you the “Master Maestro”…the seasoned veteran in your industry who leads with authority, power, and prestige? (think Gandalf in Lord of the Rings or Yoda in Star Wars.)
- Or the “Hesitant Hero”…who has a humble origin story and leads from a place of awe and wonder? (Think Spider-Man or Frodo in Lord of the Rings.)
- Maybe you’re the “Jolly Journeyman”…and you’re only one step ahead of your followers and simply share what you discover along the way? (Picture Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz or Harry Potter.)
- How about the “Eager Enthusiast”…who leads with passion and enthusiasm. (Luke Skywalker and Tarzan, for example.)
- Could be you’re the “Venerable Visionary”…leading with innovation, creativity, and wonder. (A real-life example would be Steve Jobs. From fiction, think of Willy Wonka.)
- You might choose to be the “Revolutionary Rebel”…who is mad as hell at the status quo, and you’re not gonna take it anymore. (Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games, Indiana Jones, and Ferris Bueller come to mind.)
- Lastly, you could be the “Cordial Caregiver”…who leads with love and generosity and has a strong desire to protect your flock. (Mary Poppins and Obi-Wan Kenobi are great examples.)
What role you pick DOESN’T matter…the key is to pick one and stick to it!
Don’t play the Hesitant Hero one day and then be the Master Maestro the next.
Your audience won’t know if you are truly leading with awe and wonder or if you are the leading expert who knows the answer already.
If you go from Cordial Caregiver to Revolutionary Rebel, your audience will rebel…against you!
They came because you are loving and soothing, not because you take on the establishment.
After you decide what role you’re going to own, make sure that EVERY piece of content, EVERY message, and EVERY product fits that role.
Once you know your role, then what?
What actions do you need to take?
Tomorrow…I’m going to share 3 specific actions you can take right now to create RAVING FANS
In the meantime, you can learn how to create your avatar, attract your audience, build a community, and leverage your knowledge and expertise to create a profitable business in my book, Turn Your Passions Into Profits.
You can pre-order your copy RIGHT NOW and get nearly $1,000 in exclusive bonuses…including a bonus lesson on creating your avatar…but you only get the bonuses if you order soon!
CLICK HERE to pre-order your copy of Turn Your Passions Into Profits and get $785 in exclusive pre-order bonuses!
If you missed the other posts in this excerpt series from my upcoming book Turn Your Passions Into Profits, find them here:
- How to Create RAVING Fans in Your Business…Your Next Level Avatar
- Get Clear On Your Role To Create RAVING Fans!
- 3 SPECIFIC ways to create raving fans (Coming Soon…)
The post Get Clear On Your Role To Create RAVING Fans! appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Last week I shared how having a clear understanding of WHO your avatar is essential for marketing success.
If you missed that series, you can read it here.
Your avatar is a personification of your IDEAL customer.
And giving your avatar a name provides you with a “picture” of who you’re writing your messaging for.
For example, our avatar’s name is PETE.
But what about your Next-Level Avatar?
The person who not only buys one thing from you, but buys EVERYTHING you offer…and every affiliate product you recommend.
Think PETE on steroids!
We call them GYWNs …(And yes, our Next-Level Avatar is named after a real person)
Gwyn’s full name is Gwyn Morasko…and she’s the PERFECT representation of our company’s Next-Level Avatar.
Gwyn is a RAVING FAN…exactly the type of follower you want in your business!
Once you have attracted the right type of followers, captured their attention, converted them into subscribers and established yourself as their champion, it’s time to turn these followers into raving fans.
It’s time to turn them into GWYNS!
So what EXACTLY is a RAVING fan?
In their book, Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service, Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles define a raving fan as:
“A customer who is so devoted to your products and services that they wouldn’t dream of taking their business elsewhere and will sing from the rooftops about just how good you are.”
That’s what you want!
Sure, it’s important to have people who are pleased with what you offer.
But happy, satisfied customers is NOT the goal.
You want them to be RAVING fans!
Like Gwyn!
She went on to sign up for our course, No Product No Problem.
She became an active participant in the student support group, sharing wins and struggles, asking questions, and answering others’ questions.
She was one of the first people to sign up for our START Mastermind six months later and has purchased just about every product we’ve offered, along with numerous products that we’ve recommended as an affiliate.
So, how do you do it? How do you CREATE raving fans?
I’ll be revealing that over the next couple of days…
In the meantime, I share in-depth how to create your Ideal Customer Avatar, attract them, convert them, and monetize them in my book, Turn Your Profits Into Profits.
You can pre-order your copy RIGHT NOW and get nearly $1,000 in exclusive bonuses…including a bonus lesson on creating your avatar…but you only get the bonuses if you order soon!
CLICK HERE to pre-order your copy of Turn Your Passions Into Profits and get $785 in exclusive pre-order bonuses!
If you missed the other posts in this excerpt series from my upcoming book Turn Your Passions Into Profits, find them here:
- How to Create RAVING Fans in Your Business…Your Next Level Avatar
- Get Clear On Your Role To Create RAVING Fans! (Coming Soon…)
- Deliver More Than You Promise To Create Raving Fans (Coming Soon…)
The post How to Create RAVING Fans in Your Business…Your Next Level Avatar appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
###### If your audience is made up of a mix of established SMEs looking for the next growth phase and high-growth businesses coming out of the startup phase, this opportunity is for you.
Scalefest is a unique event that brings together an audience of high-growth businesses looking to scale rapidly.
Whether that means bringing more products to market, scaling revenue, working on the brand, hiring a great team, or going global…Scalefest is a must-attend expo attended by a curated range of investors, VC fund managers, advisors, professionals, and experts that help drive growth.
The speakers, sessions, and workshops are all designed to deliver one outcome…helping businesses scale quickly.
I’m excited about this opportunity because:
-
Scalefest Founder & CEO, Mike Boorn Plener is a proven business growth specialist. A successful business builder with a 20-year track record in offline and online businesses, consulting, and start-ups, Mike studied at the Technical University of Denmark and Copenhagen Business School. Initially, Mike worked in an aggressively expanding corporate environment where he learned to successfully integrate a string of mergers, harnessing rapid growth. Since then he has built 2 consulting companies, launched online and offline, built large campaigns, successful teams, and built a business from zero dollars to millions in sales.
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Scalefest came about as a solution to a very real problem. Events for ScaleUps are almost impossible to find. Being an event-aficionado himself, Mike wanted to address his biggest pet–peeve…Seeing people go to events, have a good time, hear great speakers and…change nothing! People come to so many events, have a good time, and hear great speakers. Then change … nothing! Scalefest is really different. Yes, there is Inspiration, Aspiration and Transformation. But there is also implementation. Mike and his team make sure you have the people, the tools and the resources around you so it doesn’t just become a nice event but a pivotal point in the growth and development of your vision.
CLICK HERE TO APPLY TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE
About ScalefestExpected to attract 50,000 attendees, Scalefest is a hybrid global business event taking place April 27, 2023 with live audiences and streaming from Sydney, Singapore, London, and NYC.
This unique event features two core elements…
Learning…This comprises several parallel streams, each one focusing on a theme (like MedTech) or a business area (like brand and marketing). It’s a mix of keynotes, inspirational talks and energizing intermezzos that set the stage for a fast–paced program.
Implementation…This element is focused around workshops, workshops and more workshops. Sadly, many people come to conferences and events, hear great speakers, get inspired, and then go back to their businesses. Nothing new happens. The workshop element changes that outcome. Attendees are encouraged to jump on their laptop and work on their business in the specific areas they identified in Part 1 that needs strengthening.
For the duration of the Expo—the “expo floor” will be bustling with activity with a focus on starting engaging conversations…NOT on mindless collecting of business cards in fish bowls.
In addition, the expo floor will play host to a series of workshops and talks providing a highly integrated event experience with a mix of fun, social and networking opportunities…both pre- and post-event, online and in-person.
There will be a variety of access levels to the conference that include the keynotes, panels and firesides, the workshops & masterclasses and 1:1 coaching sessions.
CLICK HERE TO APPLY TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE
Target Audience:* Startups * ScaleUps * Founders * Directors * Business Owners
Pricing:* The STARTUP Pass $197.00 * The SCALEUP Pass $395.00 * The PRO Pass $795.00 * The VIP Pass $1,595.00
CLICK HERE to learn what’s included in each Pass.
Commissions:20% -40% depending on the number of Scalefest free & paid registrations
Important Dates:International In-Person & Streaming Event: April 27, 2023
CLICK HERE TO APPLY TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE FOR SCALEFEST
Click Here to Learn More About Our Recommended Affiliate ProgramsThe post Affiliate Opportunity: Scalefest appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
One of the most important things a business can do is create an Ideal Customer Avatar. Your avatar is a fictional person who represents your entire audience or a segment of your audience. This is the ONE person for whom you are going to create content. Today, I’ll walk you step-by-step through the process of creating your avatar and using it to get clear on who you are serving in your business.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Links Mentioned in this EpisodeTurn Your Passions into Profits Book
Join My Book Launch Team
Text me at 260-217-4619
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyHow to Get Crystal Clear on Your Audience Part One
The Proven Path for Building a Rewarding Online Business
How to Outperform Your List Size in Affiliate Promotions: Lessons From 15 Affiliates Who Had Small Lists But Finished High On Affiliate Leaderboards
8 Reasons People Fail At Affiliate Marketing
Time Management is Dead: How to Reclaim Your Time and Revolutionize Your Results with Richie Norton
My Best Affiliate Marketing Advice for the Holidays
Creating Your Ideal Customer Avatar: How to Get Crystal Clear on Your Audience Part 2One of the most important things a business can do is to create an ideal customer avatar.
Your avatar is a fictional person who represents your entire audience or a segment of your audience.
This is the one person for whom you are going to create content.
Welcome to part two of how to Get Crystal Clear on your audience.
Today, we are talking all about creating your ideal customer avatar.
So in the last episode, I shared kind of the first part of step one of Turn Your Passions into Profits, which is all about how to get clear on who you serve.
And today I’m going to share part two of step one, which is, again, the part about getting crystal clear to your audience.
You got to be able to create an avatar, this person, this fictional person that represents who your audience is, right?
Like I’ll say in the chapter when I read it here in a second, you’re not producing content for the masses.
You’re creating it for an individual.
You’re marketing to an individual.
Now, as I mentioned in the last couple of episodes, we got a professional narrator, a guy that I absolutely love, I’ve listened to him before we’ve ever even thought about having him do my book.
And I didn’t pick him. Actually. My publisher picked him.
And of course, I could reject him if I wanted to, but they found this guy, and as soon as I heard his voice, oh, my go, my gosh, I know that voice.
And I went back and looked, and I listened to, I think, four or five of his books just in the last, like eight or nine months on Audible.
I was like, oh, my gosh, it’s that guy.
His name is Kyle Tate and I’m like, this guy’s amazing, I love this guy’s voice.
Literally one of my favorite books of all time, a biography of the golfer Ben Hogan.
I had just listened to it, like a month before they emailed me, and I was like, that is so cool.
So love this guy again. Great voice, and great energy.
He’s going to do an amazing job on the audiobook, but I wanted an opportunity to share some of it with you and add a few little thoughts as well.
So that’s what we’re talking about today in the Ideal Customer Avatar.
Now, speaking of avatars, one of the things that you get when you preorder the book, when you pre-order the book right now, we’ve got depending upon when you listen to this, we’ve got nearly $1,000 in pre-order bonuses.
And the number one bonus is actually a deeper dive into developing your Ideal Customer avatar.
And what I’m getting ready to share right here, I go pretty deep into Ideal Customer Avatars.
But this bonus training takes a deep dive into the entire process and how to use your ICA, your Ideal Customer avatar to get clarity on your message and your marketing.
This training, it’s going to ensure that you are only working with people you love to serve.
There’s a quote on the pre-order page from Kathy Chavez that says, it was a total breakthrough for me.
You helped me figure out my avatar.
I’ve had this idea for almost two years and never knew how to start.
You helped me put it into gear.
You’re going to get that training when you preorder the book.
So it’s great training, and I’ll tell you that.
So the idea here is I’m going to share these exercises on how to create your ICA, your Ideal Customer avatar.
Do the exercises, then go get the book.
We’ve got links in the show, notes, passionsintoprofitsbook.com make sure you go grab a copy pre-order while all these bonuses, I’m getting $785 plus, depending upon exactly when you order it in, bonuses available.
Go grab a copy now.
We’re trying our best to hit the lists, the bestseller list.
And so the other thing we’re offering for you podcast listeners, if you grab five copies, if you’re like, man, I know I want a copy.
I got two friends and a relative, and maybe I don’t even have a fifth person.
I’ll just give a copy away.
If you go grab five copies, you pre-order five copies.
So you order them from Amazon.
In my free report, 75 Powerful Lead Magnets, I show you exactly what types of lead magnets actually convert and lead to explosive list growth. Grab your copy here!
You order from Barnes and Noble or Walmart or Target or wherever, anywhere books are sold, literally, they will send those books on January 10.
They will ship. I think actually, I’ve heard they’re going to ship on January 9, but you’ll get it in your hands on January 11 or 12th.
But if you want an early physical copy, I’ve got about 75 physical copies in my possession.
All right, I will sign and send you an early copy.
So you’ll have this in your hands well before Christmas, weeks before anybody else does.
You could be implementing what’s in this book before you even get the book that you ordered from Amazon.
I will send you a copy for you. Just pre-order five.
So that way you can give four-way or you could do like me, sometimes I keep a copy that’s like my display copy of a book.
When I do videos, I’m like, go buy this book.
Yay, I love this book.
And then you got the copy where I’ve ripped the thing practically apart and it’s dog-eared in 78 places and highlighted all over the place.
Pages are falling out, things like that. So you’ll keep two for yourself.
So passionsintoprofitsbook.com again.
If you order five, just email us at support@mattmcwilliams.com that day, or the next day we will ship you a book.
A physical book, not like a PDF.
No, we’re going to ship you a real physical hardcover book for free.
I’m going to sign it for you as well.
So make sure you do that.
passionsintoprofitsbook.com you can order through any of the major retailers there.
So now let’s jump in and talk about creating your ideal customer avatar.
Again, this is from step one of the book.
Get clear on who you help.
Get clear on who you help.
We talked about part one of that last week.
Here’s the second part of step one from the book Turn Your Passions into Profits.
KNOW THY AUDIENCE
An important exercise in getting clarity on who you serve is developing your Ideal Customer Avatar (ICA). Your avatar is a fictional person who represents your entire audience or a segment of your audience. This is the one person for whom you are going to create content.
You aren’t producing content for the masses. You aren’t creating products for your audience. You are creating and promoting them for one person, your avatar. You aren’t marketing to your list. You are marketing to an individual.
Luckily, your avatar is probably similar to you at some point on your journey. If you think back to when you first got started, you’ll likely be looking right at your avatar.”
Declaration time.
I am marketing to one individual.
I will be clear about my avatar and focus my marketing on him or her.
Reminder for Audiobook Listeners say it out loud.
Repeat it often if you need to.
I am marketing to one individual.
I will be clear about my avatar and focus my marketing on him or her.
Start with a Name
First, you’ll want to give your avatar a name. My avatar’s name, for example, is PETE. Yes, I always write PETE in all caps. In retrospect, considering that my audience is 52 percent female, I probably should have come up with a more gender-neutral name, but PETE was an actual person in my audience who personified my ideal customer, so we chose that.
So, before you go any further, I want you to take one small step now and choose your avatar’s name. If your audience is overwhelmingly male or female, pick a name that represents your target audience. Or perhaps, like me, you have an existing customer in mind or a particular friend or family member who perfectly represents your ideal customer.
Once you have the name picked out, it’s time to paint a vivid word picture of your avatar. In fact, you want to be so detailed in your description of your avatar that they feel like you know them better than they know themselves.
The name itself doesn’t matter, but your avatar needs a name. When I am creating content or creating a product, I am creating it for PETE. When I start an email or blog post, I imagine that I am writing it specifically for PETE. In fact, I stole a technique from my friend Chandler Bolt, the founder of Self-Publishing School, and I start off each email or blog post with “Hey PETE.” As I write this book, I begin each chapter with those two words as a reminder of who I am writing this book for. I am writing it for PETE, not the masses.
List Their Values and Aspirations
Next, ask about your avatar’s values. What values do they live by? Do they have a certain quote or mantra that they follow, or certain principles that define how they live?
I know PETE’s values. PETE values time with his family. PETE values hustle and perseverance. He values knowledge. He sees himself as a lifelong learner. PETE also values the DIY mindset. He likes to learn how to do things himself. PETE is scrappy and values bootstrapping. He loves reading biographies of tenacious entrepreneurs and startups.
PETE also values a sense of humor. One of the things that most attracted him to his wife is that she made him laugh. He likes to have fun. He doesn’t need to go to wild parties (he’s a family man, after all), but he values somebody who likes to have fun. One of the things I hear constantly in our surveys of the people on our email list is that they appreciate my sense of humor and my ability to keep things light. They also appreciate that I embrace my screw ups and don’t try to be too polished or perfect. PETE loves it when I’m doing a live lesson and forget a word or knock over my mug.
PETE values being able to relate to somebody on a personal level. He values relationships, authenticity, and genuine connection. As a result, I am constantly seeking ways to connect with my audience more personally. I make a point to personally reply to as many emails, social media messages, and texts as possible. Yes, you can text me personally at 260-217-4619, and
I will respond. I send personal welcome emails to new students, and we host weekly live lessons where we get to engage with hundreds of PETEs (male and female), answer their questions, and connect on a deeper level. Take a moment to think through and write down your avatar’s values. Now, they have a name and personal values. Next, we’ll define their goals.
What Are Their Pain Points?
Now, you want to turn your attention to your avatar’s challenges. What are their pain points?
These challenges and pain points are based on their values, which is why you listed those first. When their reality is out of alignment with their values, it creates a pain point, and solving it is likely a challenge.
If your avatar values health and vitality but is a hundred pounds overweight, that is a pain point. And most of us know how challenging it can be to lose weight.
Or perhaps, like PETE, your avatar values time with family, but he’s working a full-time job fifty hours a week and trying to build a side hustle business at night. Time with family, vacations, and relaxing weekends seem like a pipe dream.
How can I help him find that time and live out his values? I can help him take his side hustle and make it a full-time business. If I can help him make enough money in his side hustle to go full-time, he can quit that job he hates and spend more time with his family.
Part of knowing your avatar better than they know themselves is understanding and relating to their deep-seated pains, the real pains that are hidden underneath the more obvious, visible pains. Take, for example, someone trying to quit smoking.
Their addiction and the social stigma that comes from that is certainly enough for most people to want to quit. But often, the real pain lies in their inability to kick a habit. They feel like a failure and have a genuine fear that this habit will be the very thing that takes their life at a young age.
If you are a financial coach, a person might be challenged by the burden of debt, but their deep-seated pain point is that they feel like it’s impossible to get out of debt. They can’t even picture a life without debt. They feel like they’ll always have a car payment, a mortgage, or rely on credit cards to get by. Before you can help them with the tactical side of spending less than they make, you have to help them with the mindset first. This can only happen when you have a deep understanding of their mindset and of their pain points.
So, make a list of their sources of pain. Think about what keeps them up at night, what causes them stress, and what frustrates them. Take a moment to imagine their frustration and their pain. Odds are, this is easy because you’ve been in their exact shoes. That’s how I know PETE’s pain points. I just imagine myself two years into my blogging journey, when I was spending more money each month than I was making.
It’s easy for me to picture PETE’s pain, because his pain was my pain. I can see him waking up at 5:30 in the morning or staying up until 2:00 am writing. I can see him working hard and even enjoying the actual work, only to go another week with no growth, no income, and little to show for his efforts. I can see him questioning why he’s continuing to put in all this effort with no results. I can see that he is ready to give up, and I can see the regret he has, knowing that the world is missing out on his message.
If your avatar’s pains are different than yours were, that’s okay. It just takes a little more effort to really nail them down. Doing calls with your new subscribers, reading their social media posts, and surveying them will help you to really dial in their pain points.
List Their Info Sources
The next thing you want to explore and list is your avatar’s information sources. Where do they get their information? What books and magazines are they reading? What blogs or websites do they frequent? What podcasts are they listening to, and what YouTube channels do they subscribe to? What devices do they use to access this information? Do they go to certain conferences or other events?
For my avatar, PETE, I know that he likes to listen to podcasts by folks such as Ray Edwards, Pat Flynn, and Russell Brunson. He reads books by Robert Cialdini, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Jeff Goins. PETE reads blogs such as ProBlogger, Copyblogger, and Neil Patel.
He spends an average of thirty minutes every day listening to marketing podcasts and fifteen minutes a day reading marketing blogs. He spends another twenty minutes, on average, reading marketing and entrepreneurship books. He spends very little time on YouTube, but he does like to connect via live videos where comments are allowed. I write those things with certainty because I’ve surveyed my audience since 2013, and the numbers have changed very little. As a result, I focus the majority of my marketing efforts on my podcast and live lessons. And this is the first of many books I am writing, since I know PETE reads books (primarily physical books).
So, where is your avatar getting their information? Where are they learning about your topic already? Who is influencing them? Who do they look up to? Who do they follow on social media? Those are the types of things you definitely want to know about your avatar.
Surveys are great, once you have an audience, but what if you don’t have an audience? Then consider your own sources of information. What books, blogs, and magazines do you read? What podcasts do you listen to? Who do you follow on social media, and whose videos do you watch?
Then, once you start attracting a small audience, start asking them these questions. It may even be worth your time early on to get on a video call with them and have a fifteen-minute conversation about these questions as you seek to define your avatar clearly.
Demographics
Lastly, you want to describe your avatar demographically. What is their age and gender? Are they married? How many children do they have? Where do they live? I know, for example, that 72 percent of my audience is married, 61 percent are between forty and fifty-four years old, 82 percent have children, and 84 percent live in the United States. So, PETE is a married forty-fiveyear-old man with three kids, living in the suburbs of Kansas City.
What does your avatar do for work? What is their income, level of education, or any other demographic factors you can think of? If you find that you have more than one passion or avatar, check out the bonus guide on avatars at passionsintoprofitsbook.com/resources. I’ll show you how to narrow it down quickly.
We spent a lot of time here to get you absolute clarity on what your passion is and who you are serving. This was necessary because, without this clarity, all the best tactics and strategies in the world are useless.
Take the time now to go through the exercises for this step. Spend as much time as needed to complete them and feel confident in your assessments. Finish the exercises with 100 percent clarity on what your passion is, who you serve, who your avatar is, and commit to creating a platform that serves your avatar. I’d rather you take a few days to complete these exercises than rush through them (don’t worry, the book isn’t going anywhere), but they shouldn’t take you weeks to complete. Most of our students and clients take between one to four hours to complete all of them.
Now it’s your turn. It’s time to clarify who you help.
EXERCISES
1. Ask yourself the following three questions:
• What is it that people are always asking you for help with?
• What is it that people tell you is really interesting about you?
• What did you struggle with but now enjoy success at?
2. Create your avatar. As a reminder, here are the six steps.
• Give him or her a name.
• List their values.
• List their goals.
• List their information sources.
• List their pain points.
• List any demographic information.
So from there in the book, we go into step two, which is committing to leading.
There are a lot of misconceptions about leadership.
It’s important to acknowledge that leadership isn’t easy.
When we ask our students, ask our clients how they feel about being a leader, they often reply with similar answers that are scary.
They don’t feel up to it.
It’s hard, it’s overwhelming, and I get that.
But this chapter will show you how to be a leader.
And then on in the book, we talk about capturing attention, converting visitors into subscribers, building that community, championing their cause, being the hero to your audience, creating raving fans, conditioning your audience, committing to monetize, and creating consistent content.
Tired of having a small (or no) email list? It’s time to start growing your fast and easy! Join our List Launch Challenge now and watch our subscribe count soar!
So there’s a ton in the book that I’m just going to tell you this is the tip of the iceberg.
And we’ll talk a little bit more about the book here over the next few months, but right now you have an opportunity to pre-order that book, and Turn Your Passions Into Profits at passionsintoprofitsbook.com.
If you’re interested in joining the launch team and not only getting an early copy but also being able to promote the book to your audience and share the book with your audience, you can go to passionsintoprofitsbook.com/launchteam.
If you’ve got any questions about the book or what we talked about today, about creating your ideal customer avatar or the launch team, or any of that, you can text me anytime at 260-217-4619.
And make sure if you haven’t yet to hit subscribe, make sure to hit subscribe so you don’t miss next week’s episode.
We’re getting toward the end of the year, and that means it’s time.
It’s kind of a cliche time for all the year-end wrap-ups and the predictions for next year.
And so I’ve got my 2023 affiliate marketing predictions.
I’ve done this every year for about five years.
I think I’ve made something like 64 predictions, and I think I’m 59.
For 64, I’m not quite batting 1000.
I don’t have that 100%.
But I think I’ve only been wrong on four or five of my 64-65 predictions over the last five or six years.
So I’ve got some new ones coming up for 2023, and I think I’m going to be spot on.
I think I’m going to be spot on.
Pretty excited about it.
I’m excited to share some of the research that I’ve done over the last nine months getting ready for this episode.
It’s been crazy just how long I’ve been researching just this one episode.
So thanks for listening.
The post Creating Your Ideal Customer Avatar: How to Get Crystal Clear on Your Audience Part 2 appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Over the past two days, I’ve been sharing excerpts from my new book, Turn Your Passions Into Profits, about a subject I’m passionate about.
(If you missed the first two posts in this series, you can read them here.)
LEADERSHIP…
Specifically, how it applies to building an online platform.
Why do some people seem to effortlessly slide into leadership roles while others struggle to even THINK of themselves as leaders?
To me, it’s all about perspective…
Today, I’m sharing a story about a woman I interviewed a few years ago for our START Mastermind group and how her entire perspective changed because of one question.
It was an interview I will NEVER forget…
She’s a mom of two autistic children and wanted to help other parents with children on the autism spectrum.
Not only was she an amazing storyteller, she had an obvious passion for helping parents just like her.
But there was one BIG problem…
She didn’t FEEL qualified.
She began telling me all the reasons why she was the wrong person.
First off, she wasn’t a doctor. She cited the thousands of doctors who were up on all the latest science on autism. In her mind, THEY were qualified.
To her…she was “just a mom.”
As she continued to pile on more and more reasons why she could never build a platform helping other parents with autistic children, I HAD to interrupt her.
I asked her…’Have you ever felt like killing your children?’
The question didn’t shock her. She wasn’t offended. She didn’t scold me for asking such a ridiculous and insensitive question.
Her response was revealing…
She immediately responded with, ‘Yes. And I know many other parents who feel the same way.’
‘Then share THAT with the world,’ I told her.
‘Talk about your struggles and your daily life. You’re a great storyteller, and you’ll have no shortage of stories to share. Use a combination of humor, frustration, and emotional stories to reach your avatar. You don’t need the letters, degrees or decades of research to share your story and the lessons that you are living and learning about each day.’
That moment was transformational.
Immediately, the cloud of confusion and despair lifted off her.
Life would never again be the same for her…and many other people.
She began to list ideas and topics for videos, podcasts, and blog posts. And, even came up with a name for her platform.
All because she realized that she only needed to stay one step ahead of her avatar.
She went on to create a YouTube Channel with over 10,000 subscribers…many of them parents of autistic children.
About a year ago, she posted a video about how to travel with autistic children…something many parents avoided because of the looks and comments they received.
One parent who saw the video wrote to her to let her know she hadn’t left her hometown for over 4 years…
The video changed her life! (and many others, I’m sure)
All because someone embraced the fact that she was a leader!
How about you?
With your new understanding of what leadership actually is, you may be wondering how to use it to build a business…
My new book, Turn Your Passions Into Profits, will show you how to get clear on who you serve, capture their attention, convert them into subscribers and fans, be their hero, and create consistent and profitable content and products for them.
CLICK HERE to pre-order your copy of Turn Your Passions Into Profits PLUS almost $1,000 in exclusive bonuses!
Pre-order Turn Your Passions Into Profits TODAY and you’ll also get my “No List No Problem” ($197 Value) course that teaches you how to start monetizing…before you even have an email list!
That’s on top of the $785 in exclusive bonuses you’re already going to get!
CLICK HERE to pre-order your copy of Turn Your Passions Into Profits PLUS almost $1,000 in exclusive bonuses!
If you missed the other posts in this excerpt series from my upcoming book Turn Your Passions Into Profits, find them here:
- The LIE of Leadership
- The Only Reason I Passed Calculus
- Find Your LEADERSHIP Mojo
The post Find Your LEADERSHIP Mojo appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
The word leadership has a lot of connotations.
Sometimes it’s difficult to determine what ‘being a leader’ actually means…
If you’ve never thought of YOURSELF as being a leader, that’s about to change in a minute.
Typically, we think of leaders as business leaders…people who dazzle us with their innovations and their ability to build billion-dollar companies from scratch.
Or politicians…those who navigate nations through challenging times such as wars, economic depressions, or catastrophic natural disasters.
Or parents, teachers, and bosses, who can leverage considerable control over their “audience” in terms of authority, experience, and credentials.
In short, we tend to think of leaders as being older, smarter, more qualified…
But guess what?
We are ALL leaders…including YOU!
When we compare ourselves to people society historically labels as “leaders”, it’s easy to be blind to our own leadership abilities.
When compared to THAT yardstick, we shrink back from our own ability to lead. We diminish our own qualifications and consider ourselves unworthy of such a title.
Sadly, we play small.
But here’s the exciting and hopefully encouraging reality—you are a leader!
Think about it…
You’ve already been where your followers want to go.
YOU are the one they are always asking for help.
Consider this quote from someone who KNOWS what leadership is…
“Leadership is influence.” —John C. Maxwell, best-selling author of more than seventy leadership books
Now, you may be thinking…’okay, so maybe I am a leader BUT…I’m NOT an expert.
Tomorrow, I’m going to share why you don’t need to be and why being only ONE step ahead of your audience is the PERFECT place to lead from.
In the meantime, in my book, Turn Your Passions Into Profits, I share the entire leadership model which explains how to capitalize on your advantages (and even your disadvantages!) so you can be an even more effective leader for your audience.
CLICK HERE to pre-order your copy of Turn Your Passions Into Profits and take advantage of the EARLY BIRD Special PLUS $785 in exclusive bonuses!
$785 in free exclusive bonuses not enough?
Okay…I’m also including an EARLY BIRD SPECIAL…
Pre-order Turn Your Passions Into Profits now and you’ll also get my “No List No Problem” course ($197 Value) that teaches you how to start monetizing…before you even have an email list!
Remember, you don’t need anyone’s permission to be a leader…
You just need to change your thinking and my book will explain how to make this important mindset shift.
CLICK HERE to pre-order your copy of Turn Your Passions Into Profits PLUS almost $1,000 in exclusive bonuses!
The post The LIE of Leadership appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Too many people start an online business without being clear on who they are serving. They aren’t clear on who they help. They aren’t clear on what they are passionate about and what their message is. Today, I’ll show you exactly how to get crystal clear on your audience…and what that can do for your business.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Links Mentioned in this EpisodeTurn Your Passions into Profits Book
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate GuyThe Proven Path for Building a Rewarding Online Business
How to Outperform Your List Size in Affiliate Promotions: Lessons From 15 Affiliates Who Had Small Lists But Finished High On Affiliate Leaderboards
8 Reasons People Fail At Affiliate Marketing
Time Management is Dead: How to Reclaim Your Time and Revolutionize Your Results with Richie Norton
My Best Affiliate Marketing Advice for the Holidays
Affiliate Managers: 10 Things You MUST Do During Holiday Affiliate Promotions
How to Get Crystal Clear on Your Audience Part OneToo many people start an online business without being clear on who they are serving.
They aren’t clear on who they help.
They aren’t clear on what they are passionate about, what their message is.
Today, I’ll show you exactly how to get crystal clear on your audience and what that can do for your business.
One of my favorite authors, Irwin McManus, says, there are a few things more powerful than a life lived with passionate clarity.
Passionate clarity.
Think about what that means.
It’s being clear on what you are passionate about.
Last week, I shared the introduction in that secret chapter that had to be deleted from my book, Turn Your Passions Into Profits.
And just a reminder, you can preorder the book – at passionsintoprofitsbook.com.
We’ll put that link in the show notes for you, so it’s super easy to click on.
Also, we’ve got an opportunity for you to be an affiliate and join the book launch team passionsintoprofitsbook.com/LaunchTeam
We got tons of special bonuses for both.
You want to preorder the book?
You want to join the launch team?
Got tons of awesome bonuses for you.
And today I want to share an excerpt from step one.
Step one is clarify who you help.
Clarify who you help.
And it’s all about getting clarity on who you serve and how to best serve them.
How to get what McManus calls that passionate clarity, right?
So there’s three questions that are in this chapter that are going to lead you to this clarity, and I walk you through in the book how answering each of them has helped others, including me, to get this clarity.
In the next episode, I’m going to walk you through creating your ideal customer avatar, your ICA, something that we talked about throughout the book.
It’s like one of those things, if you don’t do this, if you don’t develop the right ideal customer avatar, the rest of the book is irrelevant.
Because the key to clarifying who you help is to be intentional.
You get to choose who you help.
You get to choose who your audience is.
You get to define them in the clearest possible terms.
You get to define who your tribe really is and who they aren’t.
And remember what I said in the last episode.
If you try to serve everyone, you end up serving no one.
If you try to reach everyone with a muddy, unclear message, you end up reaching no one.
That was my mistake for years, and it cost me big time, right?
So once I got absolute clarity on who I served and how I served them, my business began to grow.
As I mentioned in the last episode, the book itself, we got a professional narrator who I love.
I said in the last episode, I’ve read at least four of his audiobooks just
in the last eight, nine months.
Listen to, I should say, absolutely amazing.
So my publisher sent me the guy who’s like, we think we found the guy.
His name is Kyle Tate.
They’re like, we think we found the guy.
And I’m like, okay, what about him?
And I’m like, well, listen to this.
As soon as I heard, oh, my gosh, I know this guy’s.
Why do I know this?
Why do I know this?
And so I’m like, Wait, I was racking my brain, and I had to look him up.
I looked him up on Audible, and I was like, oh, yeah, it’s the guy from
Hogan and a bunch of other books that I have actually read.
I was like, that’s awesome.
So we got a professional narrator who I absolutely think is amazing.
But today and in the next episode, like the last episode, I’m going to read from the book a bit myself and share some extra goodies on the side before we do.
You can get the book now and all those amazing bonuses I mentioned before, go check them out.
Passions in the offence book.
We’ve even got one that’s not on there that I’ll let you know about real quick.
When you order the book, if you order five copies, if you know, like, Matt, this is what I want.
I got to get it for myself.
I also want to get some for some people that I know that need this book or you just really want this cool bonus.
If you pre order five copies, we’re not making this available publicly, but if you pre order five copies, I’ve got my author copies coming here.
By the time this goes live, I should be getting in within a few days.
So I’ve got my author copies coming, and I also ordered another 50 or 100 books on my own.
We will mail you.
A lot of people do the thing where you pre order if you order a bunch of copies and I’ll send you, like, a PDF version I don’t want to read a PDF version.
I’m a physical book person.
I only read physical books and listen to audiobooks.
I cannot read digital books personally.
I get too distracted with the ADHD, and I’m like, all over the place next to you, and I’m on Facebook.
And then I read, like, two pages.
So we will send you a physical, signed copy roughly three, four weeks before the book actually comes out.
So if you order five, you preorder five, you’re going to get those five.
You’re going to get those five.
They will ship on January 10 from wherever you order from Amazon, Margin, Noble, whatever.
You go to passionsintoprofitsbook.com.
When you submit your receipt, if you send an email to support@mattmcwilliams.com with a copy of your receipt, we will then not only get all the preorder bonuses.
We will physically the next day, maybe even that day, depending upon what time you email, we will ship you a physical signed copy of the book.
So you’re going to get a physical book like three weeks before anybody else.
Pretty stinking cool.
You will get the physical book well in advance and I’ll even sign it for you, so make sure you do that again.
It’s got links there to buy and get all those pre order bonuses.
So what I want to read to you now is not the introduction like I read last time, not a secret chapter.
I’m going to read directly from the book here about step one, getting clear on who you help.
On the next episode, I’m going to do the next part of this step how to create your ideal customer avatar.
In my free report, 75 Powerful Lead Magnets, I show you exactly what types of lead magnets actually convert and lead to explosive list growth. Grab your copy here!
So with that said, I’m going to jump right in and you’re going to hear from me, reading from step one of the book, get clear on who you help.
STEP ONE: CLARIFY WHO YOU HELP
It’s a lack of clarity that creates chaos and frustration. Those emotions are poison to any living goal. —Steve Maraboli, author of Unapologetically You
When I first started my personal platform at mattmcwilliams.com,
I was not teaching people about online business. I started a blog about leadership and personal development.
Why?
Because I thought that’s where the audience (and therefore the money) was.
I was determined to be the next Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, or Les Brown.
So I started writing a daily blog about leadership, mindset, personal growth, and occasionally advice for small business owners.
I was passionate about what I was doing.
I’m a self confessed personal growth junkie, but coming up with content on a daily basis was a challenge.
The reality is that I wasn’t much of an expert at any of the topics I was blogging about.
The amount of research that went into each blog topic usually took longer than the writing itself, and planning ahead more than a few blog post was impossible because I didn’t have a clear vision of what my audience needed or how I could help them.
As a result, while I quickly grew my email list to about 2000 people in a matter of just a few months, it stagnated there for years.
I’ll share more in step four about how I grew my list so quickly, because this is important.
If I chosen a better topic, I would have grown it quickly and continue to grow it every day after.
When I got clarity a few years later, I had another inflection point in my list grew from barely 20 people to more than 160 plus in just a few months.
It was during this two year stagnation period that I discovered my real passion.
I clarified who I helped.
I thought my passion was teaching leadership and personal development.
I thought my goal was to be the next Tony zig or less.
But it wasn’t that at all.
Up to that point, I’d spent more than a decade helping entrepreneurs scale their businesses, helping creatives monetize their passions, and helping ordinary people in every conceivable niche turn their message into a successful, profitable, fulltime business.
The people in my audience kept coming to me to learn how to do those things.
What I found as I went along was that people kept asking me for assistance with their online businesses.
And I discovered that my real passion was helping people to start monetizing their platform, or taking a business that was making a couple hundred bucks a month to making a few thousand, or helping someone who was making $5,000 a month to make ten 00:200 or more.
I loved helping them go from part time to fulltime with their passion and purpose.
But my platform didn’t reflect that.
And as a result, it suffered.
And I suffered from a lack of growth and became frustrated from the inability to take my business full time.
Every week I would see that I had the same number of subscribers. I was frustrated.
I wasn’t even doing what I was able to coach others to do.
That’s when I decided to get clear about my passion and get clear about who I could help.
I’d like to say that it was a flash of brilliance and that decision to completely shift my platform topics was immediate, but it wasn’t.
In fact, it took nearly a year of thinking and reflecting and discussing with others to finally make the leap.
But I did in February 2015, and I haven’t looked back.
Today, I’m 100% crystal clear on my passion and who I help.
I help content creators, people with a message or an expertise to spread that message to more people and build a profitable business around it.
Your passion is trying to tell you something.
For me, getting clear on my passion and who I help was easy.
People been telling me for a decade that I needed to teach this stuff, but I resisted.
I felt that teaching online marketing was no way to change the world.
I wanted to do something big and leave a lasting legacy.
I wanted to change the lives of millions of people around the globe and be known for doing just that.
People kept telling me that I needed to teach what I knew.
At the time, it was primarily affiliate marketing, which is when you refer business to someone else and you’re rewarded for that referral.
The seller provides you with a unique tracking link so that sales are credited to you.
The seller makes money and you make money, and I’ll share more about what that is and how to use it in step nine.
At that time, I’d won every affiliate management award you could win multiple times.
I’d worked with more than 300,000 entrepreneurs.
I was known around the world as the Affiliate Guy.
People knew my reputation as an expert in affiliate marketing and affiliate management, but I didn’t want to be the affiliate guy.
I wanted to do something bigger and change the world.
In the grand scheme of things, teaching people how to make a few bucks or even a lot of bucks from their website didn’t seem like a lofty enough goal.
But I loved helping people monetize their passions.
I love helping aspiring entrepreneurs go full time and seeing the impact they can make with their businesses.
It took a few years, but one night I suddenly realized teaching people something seemingly inconsequential, like how to do
affiliate marketing, could change the world the moment it all made sense.
One night, we had a great bedtime as a family.
It was peaceful, fun and efficient.
The kids did as they were told.
We had a great time reading and praying as a family.
They brushed their teeth without objection, went to the bathroom one last time without argument, and gave me the best hugs and kisses.
Life was good.
As I walked down the stairs to spend some time with my wife Tara, something hit me.
I stood halfway down the stairs for a moment and couldn’t move.
The thought occurred to me that right now, hundreds of other families were experiencing the same thing, all because I taught some people how to get better at affiliate marketing.
Wow…!
You see, a few months before, I’d helped a friend, Dana Abraham, with her course launch.
She helps parents whose lives and children are a bit, shall we say, chaotic.
I helped coach her affiliates.
These are people promoting her course as affiliates.
I shared some strategies with them to maximize their sales, help them plan their promotions, and shared my decade plus of experience with them.
Now, to me, what I was sharing was basic information, but to them, it was mindblowing, next level stuff.
One affiliate who made zero sales the previous launch had more than 20 sales.
Another quadrupled her sales from launch to launch.
Another set a goal of five sales and ended up with more than 40.
It was the number two affiliate in the whole launch.
One affiliate who I remember distinctly told me she’d set an ambitious goal of two sales and ended up with 14.
She was over the moon.
My first thought when I heard those stories was to think of the impact for the entrepreneurs making an extra thousand dollars, $5,000, or even $10,000 plus for some of them, they made more in a two week affiliate promotion than they made an entire month.
One made more than she’d made the entire previous year.
But on this night, standing in the middle of our stairs, I wasn’t thinking of them.
I was thinking of the families.
Hundreds of families were experiencing a peaceful and productive bedtime.
Because I taught some people affiliate marketing, because I was living out my passion and sharing my expertise, I stood there for what seemed like ten minutes it was probably 30 seconds basking in this thought.
And it finally truly clicked with me that changing the world wasn’t a result of massive actions and sharing big ideas.
It was the result of lots of individuals doing what they are called to do.
It was the byproduct of one person helping another person, who helps another person, who in turn helps another person, and so on, each of them doing what they are uniquely qualified, prepared, and called to do.
How to Get Clear on Your Passion for me, deciding what my true passion and purpose was ended up being easy.
I had the credentials and experience to be the affiliate guy with confidence.
But maybe, unlike me, you don’t have the credentials to consider yourself an expert.
That’s okay.
In fact, in the next chapter, I’ll share how you can use your lack of credentials and experience to your advantage.
I’ll show you why you don’t need letters after your name, awards on your shelf, or endorsements from the quote unquote experts to confidently share your message and change the world.
The key in this step is to get clear on your passion and who you help to do that, ask yourself three questions.
You can choose to stop now and answer these questions, or wait until the end of the chapter.
I’ll ask them again in the exercises.
Either way, take the time to think through them and answer them clearly.
Don’t gloss over these questions.
If needed, enlist others to help you answer them honestly and thoroughly.
Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to gain true clarity.
Your friends and your family they might see something in you that you don’t see yourself.
Question One what is it that people are always asking you for help with?
In what areas are you the go to person?
Is there a particular subject on which people are constantly seeking your advice?
Odds are there are one or two things that immediately pop into your mind.
There’s a good chance your true passion and purpose are tied to those topics.
For me, this became obvious when, in a single day, I had three calls with three entrepreneurs, all asking me the same questions.
They had a product launch or a book launch coming up and wanted to know how to start an affiliate program, how to find affiliates, and how to get their affiliates to take action and promote their product or book.
It became even clearer when, just a few weeks later, I was invited to be on a major podcast and the host wanted to talk about affiliate marketing.
Not personal growth, not leadership, not general business.
He wanted me to share with his audience how they could start monetizing their platform with affiliate marketing.
Another few weeks went by, and I was tagged in the comments on a blog I frequented at the time.
This person knew that when I first started my blog, I’d quickly grown my email list from zero to more than 10 subscribers in just a few weeks.
I’d never shared how I did it, but they asked how I wrote a 20 word response that later became our seven day list launch challenge course.
Even though I was creating content around the topics of leadership, personal growth, and general business, very few people were asking me for help in those areas.
They were asking me to help them in three areas growing their email list from scratch, monetizing with affiliate marketing, and starting and scaling their affiliate programs.
That was it.
Once I took a moment to reflect on this question, it was obvious and clear what my real passion was and who I was really meant to serve.
So what is the answer for you?
Maybe people regularly seek you out for your opinion on parenting.
After all, you’ve raised three amazing children in difficult circumstances.
There are likely millions of parents in a similar situation who would love to hear how you did it.
You don’t need letters behind your name or a specialized degree to share your personal experience and the lessons you learned from real life.
My friend jonathan Milligan started a career coaching blog for accounting professionals.
In 2009, he built a moderately successful business and soon actually made enough to go full time with his platform.
But he soon discovered that people were coming to him droves, asking for advice on one thing blogging.
People wanted to know how Jonathan had built and sustained his blog.
They wanted to know what tools he used, what routines he created for writing, how he came up with the content and how he was making money from it.
And it quickly became apparent to Jonathan that he could build a blog and a business around teaching others how to blog.
So he created Blogging Your Passion in 2011 and soon found that he had a rapidly growing tribe of aspiring bloggers.
Before long, BYP became profitable and Jonathan was no longer known as as the Career Advice Guy, but as the blog expert.
He since sold thousands of his blogging courses, written an incredible book called Your Message Matters and consistently ranks as one of the leading experts in the online marketing space.
A while back, Jonathan wrote something that aptly sums up his journey and contains a powerful lesson for anyone considering the question at hand.
He refers to an old book he’d read called Acres of Diamonds.
The founder of Temple University, Russell Conwell, turned a series of lectures into a book in 1015 and Jonathan writes this on his blog.
The book tells the story of an old man who sold his entire land to go on a quest to find riches and wealth.
He ended up spending all that he had on his quest and came up completely empty.
In a real interesting twist in the story, the man whom he had originally sold his land to uncovered by accident acres and acres of diamonds on the very land that the old man had sold years earlier.
Moral of the story what you are really looking for in life might just be right under your nose or buried deep within.
Could that be true for you?
Could the message you are called to deliver to the world be right under your nose?
Could your true passion and purpose be right there in plain sight?
Or perhaps it’s buried a little deeper.
Take at least a few minutes now, or at the end of this chapter to answer the question what is it that people are always asking me for help with?
If this question doesn’t give you the clarity you need to move forward with your passion and didn’t clarify who you want to help, that’s okay.
I have two more questions for you.
Question two what is it that people tell you is really interesting about you?
Dan Carlin is the host of one of my favorite podcasts, Hardcore History.
I’m a history buff and you spend all day listening to the riveting tales of history heroes of yours.
To give you some perspective on just how popular Dan’s podcast is, when a new episode releases on Apple podcasts, it’s the number one show on the entire platform for at least two full days.
There are more than 850,000 podcasts in existence as of this writing, and Hardcore History tops them all for multiple days each year.
Here’s the crazy part dan Carlin is not a historian.
In fact, he goes out of his way multiple times per episode to remind his listeners of this.
He makes it abundantly clear that he is not the most qualified, at least according to the credentials to be the host of his own show.
So how did Dan end up with the number one history podcast in the world and one of the most popular podcasts on the entire Internet and started with his own fascination with history.
He loved to learn about it, and in particular, he loved the human element of significant world events.
He loved learning about specific soldiers in massive battles within the greater war.
He loved focusing on the details of a specific general or a single event within the context of a larger historical narrative.
Tired of having a small (or no) email list? It’s time to start growing your fast and easy! Join our List Launch Challenge now and watch our subscribe count soar!
In short, he loved the stories.
He loved reading about them and then sharing them around the dinner table.
He’d share a fascinating anecdote about Genghis Khan.
While having coffee with a friend, he’d relay some crazy story he read from a front line troop at the Battle of the Bulge on Thanksgiving Day.
He captivated his family and friends with quotes from the letters of soldiers riding home of the untold real life stories of the hidden heroes throughout history.
And he’d share his opinions about what we can learn from those stories.
And people kept telling him this was fascinating about him.
He had a unique way of making history come alive to his listeners.
At first, his listeners were just family and friends, but eventually he was inspired to start a podcast, and word quickly spread.
I first learned about it in August of 2016 at a Marketing Mastermind from two friends who both repeated what Dan repeats so often throughout each episode.
He’s not a historian, they said, but I’ve learned more from his podcast than I did in all my history classes combined.
Today, millions of people around the globe are learning more about their world.
They have a better understanding of how we got here and how we can avoid the dark and destructive places we’ve been in the past.
They have a better appreciation of the sacrifices and struggles of those who came before us and the lessons we can learn from them all because Dan Carlin listened when people said, that’s really interesting about you.
Take some time now or at the end of this chapter to answer the question what is it that people say is really interesting about me?
If needed, ask your friends and family to help you here by giving their opinions often.
Others are a better judge of what makes you fascinating and interesting than you are now.
Most of our students by now have had a light bulb go off.
They are clear on their passion and purpose and know exactly who they are meant to serve.
If that’s not you, don’t worry.
This last question will give you all the clarity you need.
Question three what did you struggle with but now enjoy success at one of our Start Mastermind members, Alan Thomas woke up on March 2, 2017 at the age of 55 and saw something that terrified him.
The scale read 304 pounds.
Now, Alan knew that he was overweight.
He just didn’t know he was that overweight.
He assumed he weighed £290, but he had officially tipped over into the dark side.
He said what he saw on that scale changed the course of his life.
The day before, he and his wife Angie had celebrated their thirtyfirst wedding anniversary, and as he stood there staring at the number on the scale, three thoughts went through his mind.
One after years spent in the life insurance business serving individuals 65 years and older, he could not recall meeting a single man over the age of 65 who was more than £100 overweight.
This meant that Alan had roughly ten years left to live.
He would probably be known in the future as Angie’s first husband.
Three. Everything he’d hoped to accomplish in the future would be nothing more than a dream.
He’d be too dead to accomplish his dreams.
What Alan did next was remarkable.
He grabbed his cell phone, took a picture, and memorialized that moment forever. 304 pound the scale said.
Alan had always struggled with his weight, he told me.
He had always been the pudgy kid, the husky teenager and the plump adult.
And yet, a few short days after taking that picture, he did something few would dare to do.
He publicly committed to losing 129 pound by the day before
Thanksgiving Day, November 22, 2017.
That’s 129 pound in 265 days.
And guess what?
He did it.
In fact, he reached his goal five days early when he weighed in 175 pound on November 17, 2017.
In a matter of eight months, he had conquered decades of obesity.
Along the way, he documented his journey and held himself accountable by posting a picture of his scale every day to Facebook. Why?
Because it just might work, he told me.
Did he have proof of work?
No.
Had he tried and failed countless times in the past?
Yes.
Did he know what diet to do or what exercises he needed to perform?
Nope.
But as he told me, quote, it was never about a diet.
It was always about mindset.
Over those eight months, in the three plus years since, Alan discovered a system that worked for him to lose weight.
Now he coaches other men and women on that process, and his coaching isn’t cheap.
In fact, the average investment made by his coaching clients is well into the thousands of dollars, and they would say it’s worth every penny and more.
He is very clear about who he serves, his avatar, which we’ll explain more about in this chapter.
He works primarily with entrepreneurs, business executives, and others who are high achievers in most areas of life, but who struggle with their weight.
These are people who can afford a larger investment in exchange for a proven system in one on one attention.
His clients are getting results, as you can see, and there are pictures in the physical book.
You should get a copy of it just to see the results that people are getting.
And yet Alan will be the first to tell you that he’s not a medical professional, dietitian, or fitness expert like Dan Carlin.
He doesn’t have letters behind his name, a degree showing his worthiness, or even some specialized training and certification proving that he is, quote unquote, qualified.
He’s just an ordinary guy who struggled with a problem and discovered something that worked for him.
Alan knew he wanted to start an online business of his own, and he was determined to do so.
To find out his passion and purpose, all Alan had to do was ask the question, what did I struggle with but now enjoy success?
At when he answered that single question, the vision for his business became crystal clear.
Today, Alan and his wife, who lost 63 pound of her own, coach men and women on how to transform their bodies.
They live in their dream location by the ocean.
And every time I talk to Alan, I can sense the pride he has for his coaching clients and the thrill he gets from their results.
So what is something you used to struggle with but now enjoy success at did you struggle for years to lead a team, but now you’ve hired and retained dozens of great employees.
And do you geek out on sharing leadership tips and helping others to overcome the same problems you had?
This could be a sign that you’re meant to build a platform around leadership.
Or perhaps you struggled for years to wake up early.
But today you’re consistently awake and alert at 05:30 A.m.
In accomplishing more before the sun comes up than most people accomplish all day, you found a system that worked for you to wake up early and stick to it consistently.
That could be a platform right there.
Maybe you were ready to give up as a parent and felt inadequate and overwhelmed all the time.
But today your family is a model of peace and tranquility.
Perhaps you learned how to invest in the stock market after years of losing money.
Maybe you figured out how to grow a home garden in a dry climate.
After years of frustration, or possibly after years of not speaking up in meetings, you discovered how to come out of your shell and get the recognition you deserve.
These struggles are all examples from our students, clients, and mastermind members, all of which were turned into successes and then turned into world changing platforms.
Take a moment now or at the end of this chapter to consider what you used to struggle with but now enjoy success.
At odds are you probably already know what it is.
The key to clarifying who you help is to be intentional.
You get to choose who you help.
You get to choose who your audience is.
You get to define them in the clearest possible terms.
You get to define who your audience really is and who they aren’t.
As you decide who your audience is, you’ll need to exclude some people.
And I might not feel like the best way to grow your audience or help more people, but it is the best way to help more people is to intentionally attempt to help less people.
This counterintuitive strategy allows you to get absolute clarity on who you serve, and it causes those exact people to gravitate towards you.
If you decide to focus on serving single moms, you need to decide that your content will not particularly help married moms.
If you decide to focus on serving investors over the age of 50, you’ll likely repel investors in their twenty s and thirty s, and that’s good.
If your content is meant for urban gardeners, you won’t attract people with large plots of land or professional farmers.
The key thing to remember here is that if you try to serve everyone, you end up serving no one.
If you try to reach everyone with a muddy, unclear message, you end up reaching no one.
That was my mistake for years, and it cost me big time.
Once I got absolute clarity on who I served and how I served them, my business began to grow.
So that was pages 7 through 20 of my book, turn your Passions into Profits again.
If you want to preorder the book and get tons of amazing bonuses and help me get this message out, check it passionsintoprofitsbook.com.
You can also join the launch list for the launch team and get not only a ton of extra bonuses but also be able to promote this to your audience and make some money as well.
Looking for some good affiliate programs to promote? Check out our recommended affiliate programs here!
It’s a great affiliate opportunity.
Just go to passionsintoprofitsbook.com/launchteam for that.
And the next episode, we’re going to be talking about knowing thy audience and creating your ideal customer avatars.
This is how to get crystal clear in your audience, part two.
And this is I’m going to talk about something that’s been key for me.
It’s a super important exercise.
You want to get clear on who you serve, you got to have this ICA, this Ideal Customer Avatar, this fictional person who represents your entire audience or a segment of your audience.
This is the one person that represents your audience, and we’re going to be talking about that in the next episode.
I’m going to talk about all about how to create that avatar.
So check that out.
Make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss that episode.
It’s going to be a great, great episode.
Of course, as always, if you have any questions about a book, your avatar, how to get clear on your passion and your purpose and who you serve, the launch team, any of that stuff, you can text me at 260-217-4619.
If you have any questions about anything at all.
And make sure you hit subscribe like I said, so you don’t miss that next episode, all about creating your ideal customer avatar.
I’ll see you then.
The post How to Get Crystal Clear on Your Audience Part One appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
If your audience is made up of B2B consultants, business coaches, corporate trainers, professional speakers, marketing agency owners and B2B professional services firms, this opportunity is for you. David Newman specializes in working with B2B consultants and business coaches who want to stop throwing money into a marketing black hole and start attracting, engaging and […]
The post Affiliate Opportunity: Do it! Accelerator appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to build a rewarding online business? Today’s episode is going to get you started on the right path…the proven path to taking your idea, your message, and your passion and turning it into profits. Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode Links Mentioned in […]
The post The Proven Path for Building a Rewarding Online Business appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Every affiliate promotion has at least one…Someone who finishes in the top 5-7 affiliates and everyone asks the same question: “How in the heck did THAT happen?” It’s easy to think that you have to have a massive email list to get on the leaderboard of your next affiliate promotion. But, in this episode I […]
The post How to Outperform Your List Size in Affiliate Promotions: Lessons From 15 Affiliates Who Had Small Lists But Finished High On Affiliate Leaderboards appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
If you are going to succeed with affiliate marketing, you need to know the pitfalls that lie ahead. That’s why, in this episode, I’m sharing the top reasons why people FAIL at affiliate marketing. Take these reasons as warnings, not as discouragement. See where you might be prone to making these mistakes and vow to […]
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Flash sales are great for exciting and engaging your audience so you can ride the “buzz” wave on your way to making more money. And in the process, they also serve you in another important way… Flash sales condition your audience to buy! These seemingly ‘one-and-done’ events can help you achieve a transformation that sets […]
The post Affiliate Marketing: How To Promote Flash Sales appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Time management is dead. In this episode I have a very special guest to talk all about how to reclaim your time and dramatically revolutionize your results with the power of time tipping. This episode is all about anti-time management and I can promise you it might be one of the most powerful episodes I’ve […]
The post Time Management is Dead: How to Reclaim Your Time and Revolutionize Your Results with Richie Norton appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
If your audience is made up of Moms and Dads who cherish their children, this opportunity is for you. Blake Brewer is on a mission to help 1 million dads and moms write at least one well-written, meaningful, lasting Legacy Letter to their children. A Legacy Letter shares your values and virtues along with words […]
The post Affiliate Opportunity: Blake Brewer’s Legacy Letter Challenge appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
We’re officially in full holiday season prep mode now. For many, the next six weeks could make or break their entire year. Quotas can be crushed, goals met, and the holiday parties seem a lot more fun. Or budgets will be busted, goals missed, and you’re left wishing the ball would drop a little slower […]
The post My Best Affiliate Marketing Advice for the Holidays appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year for many affiliate programs. Some companies have half their sales or more in less than a month. For affiliate managers, it’s critical that you get absolutely clear on what’s important and what’s not during this busy season. Today, I share 10 things all affiliate managers must do […]
The post Affiliate Managers: 10 Things You MUST Do During Holiday Affiliate Promotions appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
It’s the holiday season and that means that there is A LOT of noise and clutter in the affiliate world. Everyone is ramping up their promotions, their recruiting, and their communication. Although getting noticed is easier than it’s ever been, standing out is harder than ever. The challenge is to find a way to make […]
The post Affiliate Management During The Holiday Season appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Affiliate managers all over the world are gearing up for the holiday season. For some affiliate programs, 40%, 50%, or even 60% of their sales could come in just a few weeks. It’s important that affiliate managers are prepared for what is about to come. Today, I share 7 things every affiliate manager needs to […]
The post Holiday Affiliate Promotions: 7 Things Every Affiliate Manager Needs to Know appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Thinking of buying Stu McLaren's TRIBE? Make sure to read this first. You’ll kick yourself later if you don’t. Full review and $4,781 $10,216 (Updated May 6, 2020 at 1:35pm ET) in bonuses below.
So…the big question…what’s up with Stu McLaren’s new course, Tribe? I hope this review answers any questions you have.
The post Agathon Review 2022 + Bonus Offer appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
We’re only six weeks away from two of the biggest days on the affiliate marketing calendar…Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Today, I’m sharing never-before-shared strategies and tips to absolutely crush your Black Friday and Cyber Monday affiliate promotions and get the holiday season off to a great start! Click Here for The Written Transcript of […]
The post How to Crush Your Black Friday and Cyber Monday Affiliate Promos appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
You’ve got the products. You’ve got the audience. Now…if only you could get past that last hurdle that keeps rearing its ugly head…overcoming your fear of selling! The fear of rejection and unhappy subscribers can paralyze you…WHEN you don’t know how to get past it. And that’s exactly what this post will help you do! […]
The post AFFILIATES: How To Overcome Your FEAR of Selling appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Thinking of buying Stu McLaren's TRIBE? Make sure to read this first. You’ll kick yourself later if you don’t. Full review and $4,781 $10,216 (Updated May 6, 2020 at 1:35pm ET) in bonuses below.
So…the big question…what’s up with Stu McLaren’s new course, Tribe? I hope this review answers any questions you have.
The post GMass Review: How We Use GMass to Recruit Affiliates appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Imagine doing your first affiliate promotion and having a goal of five sales. Some might say that’s ambitious. Others might say it’s impossible. But today’s guest far exceeded her goal and even her own expectations to finish in second place in one of the biggest affiliate promotions in the parenting niche. She might be a […]
The post Affiliate Profile: How a First-time Affiliate Finished in 2nd Place with Tosha Schore appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Webinars are one of the best ways to get more leads, more sales, and more great affiliates. They are also an easy way to promote something that benefits your audience. Today, I’ll share how you can use affiliate webinars to grow your business. Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode Links Mentioned in […]
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You’ve probably heard the expression ‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours, right? Well, successful affiliate marketers are constantly on the lookout for ways to put this adage into practice. Why do all the heavy lifting yourself? One of the most profitable types of affiliate promotions you can do as an affiliate is one-on-one […]
The post How To Increase Your Sales On Affiliate/Joint Venture Programs appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
What are the top affiliates doing in 2022 to stand out, boost their commissions, and grow their businesses? Today, I invite one of the top affiliate managers in the world to share what he’s seeing in the affiliate marketing world right now and what he shares is absolutely EPIC! Click Here for The Written Transcript […]
The post What The Top Affiliates Are Doing in 2022 According to Award-Winning Affiliate Manager Jamie Birch appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Thinking of buying Stu McLaren's TRIBE? Make sure to read this first. You’ll kick yourself later if you don’t. Full review and $4,781 $10,216 (Updated May 6, 2020 at 1:35pm ET) in bonuses below.
So…the big question…what’s up with Stu McLaren’s new course, Tribe? I hope this review answers any questions you have.
The post Grant Cardone Unbreakable Business Course 2022 Review + Affiliate Bonuses appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
There is a monumental shift happening in affiliate marketing, with huge implications for you! If you miss it, you’re going to get left behind! I’ve been predicting this shift would happen for years…in fact, I was the one who started it six years ago. It’s changing the entire landscape of affiliate marketing…and I’m excited to […]
The post The Massive Shift in Affiliate Marketing…and The Opportunity it’s Creating for YOU! appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Your competitors are probably your BEST source of affiliate partners… That’s probably not a statement you’d expect to see coming from me. After all, if you’ve followed me for any length of time, you know I’m always looking for ways to gain a competitive advantage. Well, some things never change. And gaining a competitive advantage […]
The post Working With Competitors As Affiliates appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Some of the best affiliates I know are teenagers or “young whippersnappers” who just entered their twenties. What makes them so successful at affiliate marketing and what lessons can you learn from them? That’s what this episode is all about! Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode Links Mentioned in this Episode Turn […]
The post Why Teenagers Are So Successful At Affiliate Marketing…And What You Can Learn From Them appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
If your audience is part of the 80 million “Boomers” in the US and 160 million out-of-shape and overweight individuals, this opportunity is for you. Fitness Pioneer and Author, Jaime Brenkus, puts the BOOM back into Boomers & Beginners with his legendary 8 Minute workouts…including the Million selling 8 Minute Abs video. Jaime has helped […]
The post Affiliate Opportunity: 30 Day Shape Up & Slim Down appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Today I’m going to share with you how I got my dream client and share an amazing affiliate opportunity with you. Listen up, if you’re looking for something awesome to promote or if you want to know how to land the clients of your dreams. Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below Links Mentioned […]
The post My Dream Client: Interview with Dean Graziosi appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
I’ve talked a lot over the first 504 episodes of this podcast about building an army of affiliates. But how do you identify, recruit, and even manage thousands of affiliates when you only have so much time in the day? Today, I’ll show you EXACTLY how to use virtual assistants to find affiliates so you […]
The post How to Use a Virtual Assistant to Find Affiliates appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Thinking of buying Stu McLaren's TRIBE? Make sure to read this first. You’ll kick yourself later if you don’t. Full review and $4,781 $10,216 (Updated May 6, 2020 at 1:35pm ET) in bonuses below.
So…the big question…what’s up with Stu McLaren’s new course, Tribe? I hope this review answers any questions you have.
The post The Dream 100®️ Software 2022 Review + Affiliate Bonuses appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
I’m going to cut right to the chase here. Standing out in your affiliate promotions is harder than ever. But if you do…it pays off BIG time! Today, I’m sharing 13 creative ways to stand out and boost your affiliate commissions by 300% or more! Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode Links […]
The post Creative Ways to Triple Your Affiliate Commissions appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
If your audience is made up of authors, writers, bloggers, and copywriters, this opportunity is for you. Joseph Michael is a top-notch writing coach who helps people become world-class writers by mastering tools like Scrivener and breaking through barriers like procrastination and writer’s block. His courses use a step-by-step approach and are deeply rooted in […]
The post Affiliate Opportunity: Learn Scrivener Fast appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Today, we’re taking a trip to the dark side of affiliate marketing. Fraud, rule-breaking, and nefarious activity. It’s a rare but costly aspect of running an affiliate program and today I’ll show you how to spot the fraud, how to prove it, and what to do about it. Click Here for The Written Transcript of […]
The post Affiliate Fraud: How to Spot it and What to do About It appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Many affiliate marketers face a challenge that causes them all kinds of anxiety and frustration. They aren’t sure how to find great affiliate programs and get accepted into them. After reading this post, you will have all the knowledge you need to not only FIND profitable affiliate products to sell, but also present yourself as […]
The post How To Find Affiliate Programs And Get Accepted appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
When you promote something that you have personal experience with, you have a massive, unbeatable advantage. Your unique story. It’s something that only YOU have. Today, I’m sharing the importance of getting personal in your affiliate promotions (and what to do if you don’t have personal experience with a product). Click Here for The Written […]
The post The Importance of Getting Personal in Your Affiliate Promotions – appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
If your audience is made up of social media professionals and Instagram-savvy business owners, this opportunity is for you. Manu Muraro, the founder of Your Social Team, offers Instagram training and templates through monthly subscriptions and online stores. After a 15-year career in creative at Cartoon Network, Manu has founded Your Social Team and Your […]
The post Affiliate Opportunity: Your Template Club appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
We just finished a massive multi-million dollar affiliate launch…and there are a ton of takeaways and lessons to share with you. Today, we take you behind the scenes on what went right, what we’d improve, and how you can apply these lessons to your affiliate program. Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode […]
The post Launch Lessons: The Affiliate Army Strikes Again appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Is it possible to start an affiliate program for FREE? Like actually get people promoting your business without spending money on tools, tracking systems and a bunch of other things? The short answer is YES. The longer answer is YEEEEESSSSSS! And I’m going to show you EXACTLY how to do it. Even if you’re just […]
The post How To Start An Affiliate Program For Free appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Wow! Can you believe it? 500 episodes! Today, we’re turning the tables and I’m getting interviewed for my own podcast. In celebration of my 500th episode, I’m answering all kinds of questions about the past, the present, and the future of affiliate marketing and this podcast. Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode […]
The post The Evolution of Affiliate Marketing – The Past, Present, And Future appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
If your audience is made up of people who have been working hard but still feel stuck in one or more areas of their life, this opportunity is for you. UNCAGED is the quickest and most impactful program for people who are struggling to : Enjoy better health; Build greater wealth; Develop stronger relationships; Advance their […]
The post Affiliate Opportunity: Uncaged by Chris Jarvis appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Today I’m going to share with you how I got my dream client…and share an amazing affiliate opportunity. Listen up if you are looking for something awesome to promote or if you want to know how to land the clients of your dreams. Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode Links Mentioned in […]
The post My Dream Client: Interview with Dean Graziosi appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
If you’ve ever wanted to become an affiliate manager, this episode is for you. I’ll share what it takes, how to develop the skills you need, and even share a possible job opportunity that you might be interested in. Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode Links Mentioned in this Episode Apply for […]
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Today’s guest proves that you can attract a following and build a business by being a bit “controversial.” While I don’t think he is, Ryan Moran is considered a bit of a controversial figure by some. He’s taking a stand for what he believes is right and has built a successful business and rabid following […]
The post How to Attract People by Taking a Stand with Ryan Moran appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
I’m so excited about today’s episode because I finally get to introduce you to someone who has made a huge impact on my business. If you want to learn how to connect with potential affiliate partners, clients, and VIPs in your industry, today’s episode is for you! Click Here for The Written Transcript of This […]
The post The Power of the Dream 100 with Dana Derricks appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Pinterest is averaging nearly one BILLION visits per month. They have more than 400 MILLION active monthly users. It’s users are active and highly engaged buyers. It’s a huge opportunity for affiliate marketers…and also one of the most underused social media platforms for affiliate marketing. Today, I’ll share why Pinterest is such a great tool […]
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If your audience is made up of homeschooling families or parents considering homeschooling, this opportunity is for you. Homeschool Resource Co. helps homeschool families build their digital library by helping them find quality educational resources on a budget. They offer a number of “Grab Bag” products and offer resources for every subject I’m excited about […]
The post Affiliate Opportunity: Homeschool Resource Co appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
The old model for effective and profitable affiliate programs is broken. Period. It used to be that having a few big affiliates was all you needed to generate impressive results. But not anymore. Today, you want an ARMY of affiliates bringing in sales. In this post, I’m going to reveal EXACTLY how I build successful […]
The post The 3 Secrets of Successful Affiliate Programs appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
You’re months away from a big affiliate launch or promotion. How do you get your affiliates fired up and ready to promote weeks or even months in advance? Today, I reveal the exact strategies we use to get our affiliates fired up…and keep them fired up before a launch. Click Here for The Written Transcript […]
The post 10 Ways to Get Your Affiliates Fired Up Before a Launch or Promo appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
If your audience wants to either start a side hustle or start a business…and have it positioned for almost certain success…this opportunity is for you. Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi (ever hear of ’em?😀 ) are hosting their FREE and VITUAL 5-Day “Time To Thrive” Challenge from August 2nd through August 6th, 2022. Expected to […]
The post Affiliate Opportunity: Time to Thrive appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
As of this recording, TikTok is the fastest growing social media network for Gen Z and Millenials. Personally, I’ve completely ignored it but with more than one billion active monthly users, it has huge potential as a platform for affiliate marketing. Today, I’ll share how you can use leverage TikTok to boost your commissions and […]
The post How to Use TikTok for Affiliate Marketing appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
If your audience is searching for a way to greatly increase their authority and visibility in the marketplace, this opportunity is for you. Leaders Press was founded in 2017 to meet the publishing needs of business leaders and entrepreneurs by providing premium book-writing and publication services. They are a USA Today and Wall Street Journal […]
The post Affiliate Opportunity: 6 Steps to Creating a Book to Double Your Business appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
One of the single most important keys to a successful affiliate program is great swipe copy. If you do it right, it’s a powerful tool that will help your affiliates succeed. Yet, I see so many affiliate programs get it wrong. Today, I’ll share exactly how to provide great swipe copy for your affiliates. Click […]
The post How to Provide Great Swipe Copy for Your Affiliate Program appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Odds are if you are listening to this right now, you are or you aspire to be an entrepreneur. You own your own business…or you want to. And I want that for you. But there is a dark side to the world of an entrepreneur that must be addressed. There are setbacks, pain, early mornings […]
The post The Dark Side of Entrepreneurship: Overcoming Setbacks, Pain, Fatigue, and Failure appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Who DOESN’T love a big product launch? Let’s face it…they’re exciting! The great contests! Fantastic prizes! And, let’s not forget…a wonderful way to bring in a lot of money in a short time! But evergreen offers can be incredibly lucrative as well. And, in this post, I’m going to share a number of ways you […]
The post How to Promote Evergreen Affiliate Offers appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
If your audience is made up of dog lovers for whom their dogs are an integral part of their lives, this opportunity is for you. Ruffly Speaking is a “pawsitive” online community for people who want to make the world a better place…starting with their pups. This is a monthly membership with access to training, […]
The post Affiliate Opportunity: Ruffly Speaking appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Did you know that entrepreneurs live an average of SIX years longer than the rest of the population? A longer lifespan isn’t the only reason why I’m such an advocate for entrepreneurship though. Entrepreneurs are also healthier, happier, and live more fulfilling lives…but WHY? Today, I’ll share why entrepreneurs live longer and what that means […]
The post 7 Reasons Why Entrepreneurs Live Longer appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
If your audience loves baking and is looking for a way to make the most delicious, economical, fast, and easy homemade bread around…this opportunity is for you. These Homemade Bread Bundles bundles are perfect for ANY baker …from beginner to pro. The Homemade Bread Bundle is specifically designed for making dough to make bread, cinnamon […]
The post Affiliate Opportunity: Fast Easy Bread – Homemade Bread Bundles appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
We just finished running a multi-million dollar affiliate launch. The first one, in fact, that wasn’t run entirely by me, but rather by our agency. There are a TON of lessons to share that YOU can apply to your affiliate program. Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode Links Mentioned in this Episode […]
The post Lessons Learned from a Multi-Million Dollar Affiliate Launch appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
One of the best ways to get affiliates to promote more is to give them a clear plan for how to do so. In other words, TELL them when, how, and what to promote…as well as who to promote to. We do these with two types of affiliate mailing plans that I share in this […]
The post How to Create Mailing Plans for Your Affiliates appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Hiring an Affiliate Manager is a big step for a company. It could be the catalyst to massive growth…IF you do it the right way. There are a lot of mistakes to avoid, things to look out for, and best practices from beginning to end. Today, I’m going to walk you through the entire process. […]
The post How to Hire an Affiliate Manager appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
When it comes to making money online, podcasting is one of THE best ways to do it. Podcasting provides you with an effective channel to build your brand. And allows you to get recognized for your expertise. But for an affiliate marketer, here’s the real gold. It’s one of the easiest ways to develop meaningful […]
The post How to Use Podcasting to Grow Your Affiliate Program appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Podcasting is one of THE best ways to make money online. It’s also one of the best ways to build a brand and get recognized for your expertise. But did you know…it’s one of the easiest ways to develop meaningful relationships with potentially huge affiliates? Today’s guest is my personal podcasting guru and will show […]
The post Affiliate Marketing and Podcasts: How to Make Money, Get Affiliates, and Build a Brand Through Podcasting appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Thinking of buying Stu McLaren's TRIBE? Make sure to read this first. You’ll kick yourself later if you don’t. Full review and $4,781 $10,216 (Updated May 6, 2020 at 1:35pm ET) in bonuses below.
So…the big question…what’s up with Stu McLaren’s new course, Tribe? I hope this review answers any questions you have.
The post PodHacker Review + Affiliate Bonuses (My Favorite Podcasting Program) appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
This might sound weird, but there’s likely something holding you back in your business that you haven’t thought about. Or maybe you think about it every day. Maybe it consumes your thoughts and energy and you know it’s holding you back…but you’ve never done anything to address it. Well, today is that day. Click Here […]
The post The Surprising Thing That Might be Holding Your Business Back appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
It’s YOUR job to make it easy for your affiliates to thrive! When you run an affiliate program, resounding success DEPENDS on your ability to inspire your affiliates to actively promote you. Without your cheerleading, they may end up simply going after the low-hanging fruit. Sure they’ll make some sales but is that really all […]
The post How to Get Affiliates to Promote More: Get Them Active, Help Them Succeed, and Keep Them Promoting appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
There are very few mistakes you can make in running an affiliate program that are absolutely devastating. Today, I’ll share one that I recently witnessed and how they could have avoided it. Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode Links Mentioned in this Episode How to Determine the Right Commission Structure for Your […]
The post This Affiliate Program Just Made a Fatal Mistake: Here’s What They Should Have Done Instead appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
There are many reasons an affiliate promotion can sputter. Anytime you combine lots of moving parts and people…bad stuff can happen. But it doesn’t have to be that way. I’m going to explain how you can position your affiliate promotion for success in this video. Click Here for The Written Transcript of This […]
The post What To Do When An Affiliate Promotion Is Going Badly…and How To Avoid Bad Promos in the First Place appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
For many affiliate managers, trying to decide who should get credit for a sale isn’t always obvious. The fog rolls in when multiple affiliates play a role in getting the click. Without a process in place to determine how the commission should be applied, bad feelings can result. It’s one of the biggest debates in […]
The post Affiliate Management Q + A: Clicks, Commissions and Cookies appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
We just hired our 15th team member. My role in our company is changing dramatically. But it hasn’t always been that way. It started with one part-time virtual assistant many years ago. Today, I’ll share the strategies we’ve used to build our team and show you how you can build yours, starting from your very first hire on up to building a full team.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
NEW EPISODE: “Affiliate Marketing and Podcasts: How to Make Money, Get Affiliates, and Build a Brand Through Podcasting.” Listen here now!
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy How to Work with An Affiliate Network: Q&A Lightning Round
Don’t Launch if You Don’t Want This…
The Worst Part of My Entire Business: Why You Need to Hire an Affiliate Manager
How to Decide to Accept or Decline an Affiliate
How to Write, Publish, and SELL Your Book with Chandler Bolt
How to Use Affiliate Marketing in a Book
How to Build Your Team: Working with Virtual Assistants, Contractors, and Full Time Employees to Scale Your Business We just hired our 15th team member, and my role in our company is changing dramatically, but it hasn’t always been that way. It started with one part-time virtual assistant many years ago, and we built it from there. Now, today, I’m going to share the strategies that we’ve used to build our team and show you how you can build yours, starting from your very first hire on up to building a full team. So this is something I’ve been asked a lot about lately. We’ve hired a lot of people here in the past six, seven months. Gosh, just since September of last year, we’ve brought on 1,2,3,4,5,6 team members. This is not my first rodeo, so to speak. I’ll talk about that as we go. But I’ve been getting a lot of questions about that because people see that we’re hiring, we’re posting like we’re hiring, we’re hiring, we’re hiring. We keep emailing my list about hiring. And just as a side note, if you’re interested in working with us, please go to mattmcwilliams.com/careers. Please go there, because we’ve got many positions open that we are looking for. But a lot of people have been reaching out to me. And I got this particular email the other day that said, how in the world do you keep up with everything, keep track of everything, and keep it organized. Also, how can I best delegate some of my affiliate campaigns to someone on my team? It just always happens that I have multiple campaigns running very closely.
Here’s the thing. I run these mega launches, right? We’re running a dozen ten launches this year, plus some Evergreen programs. We’ve run programs for Michael Hyatt, Ray Edwards, and Lewis Howes. We’ve run these big book launches, these big product launches. We got Stu Mrclaren coming up for the membership experience. That’s going to be an eight-figure launch. We’ve got Ryan Levesque with Quiz Funnel Masterclass. That’s going to be absolutely huge. We coach people like Jeff Walker and all these people that we work with. And the thing is, most people have two to three launches a year maybe. My company will run ten or twelve plus evergreen, plus coaching. And I’m personally involved in all of them. On top of that, I release two huge pieces of content every week, this podcast. And we do a live lesson every week. And we have tons of other content that we’re in. We got videos, we got podcasts, we got blog posts. We got opt-ins that we’re creating products that we’re creating. We redo our courses every two years, like social media, all these things, conferences, meetings, the one-on-one coaching that I do, and consulting with companies. As I said, the course is like how do I get it all done? Well, the answer is I don’t, at least not myself. I delegate. I have built a team and so that question, how do I get it all done? Well, I don’t lead to some other questions I’ve been getting about hiring.
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Today I want to share some lessons I’ve learned about building teams. This is the second company that I’ve run that is built at scale. It’s my fourth company overall. The first one, we ended up with three team members, and eventually, we got to like maybe two-thirds of a million dollars in revenue a year and made good money, and then it failed. In the second one, we built 52 team members. I’ll talk about that as we go. We’re doing over a million dollars a month just from our affiliate program. The third one, it’s like Bruno, we don’t talk about that one. If you’re listening to this in 2025, you’re like, I don’t get the reference. But if you’re listening to this in 2022 that we don’t talk about The fourth one here, we’re up to 15 team members. We’ve been at this for about nine years. It started with just me. And that’s something I want to talk about first. Do you start a loan or do you build a team? And I got this email recently about a brand new entrepreneur. Very common question. He’s in the early stages of building his business. And if you’re listening, you’re new, you’re an aspiring entrepreneur. You probably found yourself asking the same question or you’ll be asking yourself this question next week. He said I’m in this ocean of entrepreneurship dilemmas. I’m just starting my business. I’ve been told that I need to outsource certain things to offer a full range of services. Should I start out doing it all myself, contract out more complex projects or hire someone?
That’s a great question and I’m going to share with you a little bit of what I wrote to this person in response. I said, always start out doing it yourself. yourself as long as you don’t undercharge because you’re doing it yourself. So if you’re working with clients, as long as you don’t undercharge or overpromise, you’ll be fine. There are three huge benefits to starting it out by doing it yourself. Number one, you get to keep all the profits. When you’re first starting out, you need all the money you can get back to that first business. That very first business that I mentioned, I started in 2003. Soon after I started it, my dad fired me from my full-time job. I share the story often about how I got into internet marketing in golf instruction. I wasn’t an entrepreneur. That was not my business. I worked for my dad. Now we split the money on our golf schools if you’ve ever heard me tell that story.
But I was not an entrepreneur. I worked for him and he fired me. And I offered a very narrow range of web services. I had one client that was awesome. That client was paying me $500 a month, and I had plenty of savings from the I was making close to $200,000 a year running these golf schools. I made really good money because I got really good at marketing, but that was still nice to have $500 a month coming in because I was young. I was 22. I think, like 22 or 23 fire me in the dad for my birthday. I just turned 23, and I didn’t have a ton of expenses. I could live off of, like, $1200 a month. So having quite a bit of saving, plus making $500 a month, was nice. But overnight, I went from, like, a fun side project, making $500 a month for spending, like, 2 hours maintaining this website to this is now my sole source of income. I needed more money. I really wasn’t in the position, even though I had some savings to hire freelancers before I was actually paid by my clients. So I needed all the money I could bring in.
So initially, I learned how to do everything myself. I expanded my services. I picked up a bunch of new clients. I spent half my time learning how to do things that I said, yeah, we can do that. And then I’d spend the next two days learning how to do it. But I got to keep all the profits, and I built that emergency fund up. And in the process, I learned benefit number two, which is that you broaden your skillset, you learn new things that you like to do. The day after my dad fired me, I started reading everything I could about web design. I went from, I just kind of want to do this. It’s an easy web project. I know how to design websites, too. Oh, my gosh. I have to be, like, the best at this. And so I started selling my services to a broader range of customers.
Initially, all I did was basic design services for small businesses suddenly I was doing online fundraising for political campaigns and non-profits. I was building these elaborate, at least by 2003 standards, these elaborate e-commerce sites. And I was running these shiny new things called weblogs. People don’t realize the blog was short for weblog, by the way. Most people forget that. But I was doing blogs back in 2003. They were just called web blogs. And so typically, I would have these conversations with these prospective clients, and they’re like, hey, I’d like to do this. Can you do X, Y, and Z, right?’ And I’m like, of course, I can. And then I would be like, I’d write up a proposal, like, here, we’re going to charge $5,000 for that. And then I learned how to do X and Z. I didn’t know how to do X and Z. Each sales call, each new client, the amount of new stuff that I had to learn was astronomical but along the way it got lower and lower because I knew how to do stuff and then we got to the point where somebody would say, can you do these five things? And I’m like, oh my gosh I know how to do all five. Yes, I can do those in an afternoon and make four grand. So I was building my skill set up.
I was learning all kinds of new technologies and expanding the possibilities of what I could offer other clients. I even became an expert like accidentally in online fundraising. For most candidates political candidates since 2004, most nonprofits didn’t have an online presence. And if you remember back Howard Dean right with I cannot do an impersonation. I just sounded like one of those wind-up toys there. I cannot do an impersonation of that screech or whatever he did when he lost in Iowa but he was beginning to revolutionize. Give the guy credit whether you like him or not. That’s not the point. He was revolutionizing the internet and politics. He had a guy that ran his campaigns. I think his name was Joe Trippy and it was amazing what he was doing. This is only 18 years ago I had local congressional candidates raising tens of thousands of dollars per week online. This was an astronomical amount back then. Well, to them it was found money. Well, you can raise $100,000 in six months. Yeah, we’ll pay you 15%. I’m like, okay, all you got to do is raise money online and you’re going to give me money. I mean this is amazing. This was unbelievable. Nobody had platforms for collecting the money so we were using our own shopping cart and then having to dole it out to the campaigns charging them 15%. Now we had expenses. We had our two-point 99%. It was like $0.30 per transaction plus 2.9% so we weren’t making 15%. We were probably netting 10%.
So I remember, like, I had one guy, Congressman Howard Coble, and in the first year, we raised like $4000, for his pack. Well, 10%. I was just fiddle farting around on the Internet. I didn’t know. But I was learning these new skills that I loved using. I found that I loved writing. I enjoyed doing certain things that I just never even knew. And these discoveries became the basis for what I would choose to outsource and what I would choose to do myself. So as I built these skills and I grew my client roster significantly, I reached a point where I was simply unable to do everything myself. I was working 15, 16 hours a day, seven days a week. So then I began to outsource some things. And the cool thing about that was now I knew like, oh my gosh, before I just knew that I liked A and B. But I learned I also liked C and D, and I hated everything else. But now I got to do the four things that I loved. And maybe I thought I liked A and B, but I actually liked C and D more. I found that the writing side, I loved the process side that I loved, the planning side, the client communication side.
I loved talking to clients and hated designing the websites. And that leads to benefit number three when you’re first starting out. Why you should do it yourself is that you learn how to communicate with your team. Whether you outsource or you hire in-house, you have to be able to know how to communicate in the language of your team. And I don’t mean languages like when I speak Spanish or French. I’m talking about the languages of coding and design and marketing and the like. You do not need to become a marketing expert. You do not need to become a copywriting expert. But if you’re going to work with a team of copywriters, it might help if you go through a single copywriting course and maybe write a few emails of your own. When you start off outsourcing, start off hiring, you learn nothing new, and you find that you’re always going to have problems communicating with your programmers. Your marketing people use a bunch of fancy-sounding jargon to talk over your head and hide the truth from you, but not if you start off doing it yourself.
So because of that basic background that I had and think basic coding, design, marketing, honestly, still, am I’m able to effectively communicate with programmers, designers, marketers. I know when they’re talking out of both sides of their mouth. I know how to avoid bad hires, and I rarely have made bad hires in those areas thanks to this doing it all yourself. Just to be clear, it’s not a permanent solution, okay? If it stays that way for five years. You’re not an entrepreneur. You just own your job. You want to build a team. That’s what we’re talking about. You want to build a team, either in-house or virtually, or with contractors. Whatever you do, want to pay others to do the stuff that you can’t stand to do and focus on what you’re best at. But first, you need to keep the money for yourself, build that skill set, and learn the things that will serve you down the road.
Now, as you get ready to bring on team members, there’s something important you need to do. And we’ve talked about this before, and that is you need to know your Freedom Compass. And the Freedom Compass is something that Michael Hyatt teaches. And basically, these four zones, if you can imagine these lines, vertical line and a horizontal line of skill, proficiency, ability and passion, enjoyment, desire to do things. And there are these four zones. I’m going to talk about those real quicks. The top zone is the desired zone. The desire zone is things that you are both good at and you enjoy doing. So just imagine the lines intersect perfectly. Thereof passion and proficiency. The drudgery zone. Both of them are bad. You hate it, and you’re not even good at it. The distraction zone is things that you enjoy but you’re not good at. These are fun. They’re great distractions, but I suck at them compared to somebody who’s a professional. And then the disinterest on is the things where you’re actually pretty good at it.
These are things a lot of entrepreneurs find. Like, I’m the best person in my company at this, but you hate doing it. So for me, Desire is coaching, affiliate management, course creation, and teaching in the podcast. Those are my five things. That’s it. If it doesn’t fall into those, it’s not in my desire zone. The drudgery things that I’m terrible at and I’m not very good at financials, the tech work, anything involving spreadsheets, mundane tasks, HR stuff. Those are just distractions. These things I’m really good at or I really enjoy. But I’m not particularly good at, graphic design, video editing, those things. Like, I’m not really great at them, but man, they’re fun. Like the graphic design. I used to love doing graphic design because it was like an hour of just doing the graphics. Somebody else can do that in 15 minutes, even at $100 an hour, which is not what it costs. It’s going to cost me $25 to get that graphic done instead of me spending an hour. So the question is not, would I pay somebody $100 an hour to do graphics? It’s what I pay the math on that if I want to pay them $25 for 15 minutes, but it’s going to take me an hour. Yeah. Would I pay $100 per hour? Won’t know, but I already am, if you think about that. That’s the distraction zone stuff for me. The disinterest in the things that I’m good at, but I just hate doing editing the podcast. I’m good at it. I can get it done, but I hate doing it. Replying to most emails, scheduling things.
So you’ve got to know the freedom Compass, like, sit down, take the time, make a list of everything you do, and put them into those zones. Is this desire, Drudgery, distraction, or disinterest? This allows you to know what to hire first, so that’s step one. Step two is to hire a part-time VA for as many drudgery tasks as you can. 10 hours a week, 15 hours a week, 20 hours a week. I would focus immediately on getting rid of Drudgery tasks, the things that you suck at and hate doing. For me, that was part-time, about 20 hours a week. Virtual assistant, a VA to do all my spreadsheet work, do research, schedule social media posts, and format blog posts. I enjoy writing blog posts. I just don’t want to format them. I don’t want to have to spend the hour that it takes to make them look pretty. Transcripts, things like that. Step three is to scale up the virtual assistant. Scale up the VA to take on more and more tasks. So once you’ve eliminated Drudgery tasks, and this might mean adding a second VA, move on to the distraction and disinterest zones.
Personally, it took me a while. I needed one and a half VAs just to eliminate all my Drudgery tasks. And then I really wanted to focus more on eliminating tasks that I hated doing versus tasks that I enjoyed. But maybe I’m just not very good at, it because that’s just what I chose. There’s no perfect way to do this. You may eliminate disinterest and then distraction or distraction than disinterest or maybe things where you rate them. You say, Well, I really hate doing this, but I’m actually pretty good at it versus I only kind of hate it, and I’m pretty good at it. Get rid of the worst stuff first. So at this point in our business, I think I had two VAs. It was me, two VAs, and I still had most of the stuff I kept the graphic design, copywriting, video editing, all that stuff for years. And the simple reason is I enjoyed the work, and we weren’t ready to hire somebody for those roles. But about two years ago, we hired a graphic designer.
That was like the first distraction zone hire that we made. Now, to be clear, graphic design is not a typical VA task. I’m just using that as an example here. We did not assign that to a virtual assistant. We actually hired a graphic designer. But just keep offloading as much as you can from the Drudgery, the distraction, and the disinterest zones. And then, fourth, hire additional people as needed. Now, this is where you’re going to look for specific roles. Typically, these are contractors hired for a specific purpose. So these are things. Just some examples. Graphic design, copywriting, podcast editing. And this is actually Chris at Podsworth, not a team member. He does one thing the only thing he does on our team is podcast editing and I don’t consider him a team member. He’s an outsource person.
So copywriting, podcast editing, graphic design, advanced tech work, bookkeeper, video editing, and customer service like you can hire them part-time or full time just depending upon your needs and so you’re going to base those hires again. What are the parts of your business where you go that is drudgery, that is the distraction that is I’m just disinterested and you begin to outsource those, and then over time as you build your team you’re going to need additional specialized roles? You might need an operations manager for us if you’ve never read the book rocket fuel highly recommend every entrepreneur read the book rocket fuel. That book has just been transformative in our business because it showed me that there are two types of entrepreneurs. There’s the visionary and the integrator. The visionary is the idea minute guy that’s me.
All the ideas in the world are terrible at implementing and the integrator is the one who makes things happen. That’s our operations manager once you have three or more people on a team so hey, we got three salespeople we got three customer service people. They probably need a specific team leader that isn’t you. Now you might keep one team. That’s yours. I will probably always lead our team of affiliate managers I’m probably always going to be the team lead but I’m not going to lead our customer service team I’m not going to lead our finance team, I’m not going to lead our marketing team or our sales team or any of those teams like I’m going to lead our affiliate management team. That’s it.
You probably need a marketing manager over time, an affiliate manager. We talked about that before. Got an entire episode coming up about hiring an affiliate manager. You need salespeople and a sales manager, project manager, HR manager, CFO, and client success specialist. That’s when we and we just hired like those are all likely full-time positions. So over time, you’ve progressed, you’ve offloaded your drudgery Yay, you’re not doing things you hate and that you aren’t good at. Then you’ve offloaded the things that you hate but you’re good at and then the things that you really enjoy but you’re not very good at to be better as a company.
Now, eventually, you even start to offload some of your desired zone tasks for me, copywriting. I am good at it. I’m really good at it and I really enjoy it. But it’s a nine out of ten on both of those. It’s not a ten out of ten. And I had to make room for higher leverage tasks. And the reality is, for me in our company, if I can spend an hour writing copy or an hour leading our team, or an hour meeting with a client, those are higher leverage tasks than writing copy. So we hired a copywriter. Over the next year or so, I’m stepping down as CEO. This is a big decision and it’s something that one of the biggest roles of a CEO is company culture. I’m not great with that. And we need somebody who can come in and focus on that so that I can do what only I can do. Lead the affiliate management team, and be the face of the company. We’ve replaced probably 20, maybe upwards of 30% of my desired zone tasks over the past year or so. And so that’s eventually what you’ll get to you’re even replacing your desire zone. Some of those lower-level desires on tasks.
We basically took those desires zone tasks and anything that was like an eight out of ten on one of them, we removed. But then we looked at here are two desires on task and you can only do one of them. This one brings in $100,000, this one brings in $10,000. Well, I need to do the $100,000 thing. So that’s what that looks like. Now, in the hiring process, I get asked a lot about this. How do I actually hire people? It depends a little bit on the role. If we’re hiring a part-time ten hour a week type position and it’s an hourly rate, an hourly wage, and it’s a pretty simple thing that’s going to look a lot different than if I’m hiring like an operations manager if I’m hiring ahead of HR if I’m hiring a salesperson even so an example like if we’re hiring a part-time contractor who has a proven track record and I’m thinking of a person on our team, part-time contractor. She’s a referral from a friend. That was as simple as a single interview a single phone call, and then we had to do a test project, and I was like, yeah, you clearly got this. You’re good. You’re on the team. She had that proven track record. She had a referral from a friend. Yes. We wanted to do our due diligence. I wanted to make sure just because she can work with my friend doesn’t mean she can work with me, because maybe we don’t get along. Maybe I don’t communicate well. And I assigned her a test project. And part of that is to say, does she understand the way that I assign things? Does she understand my communication style? If not, then we have two choices. I can adapt, or maybe it’s just not going to work.
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There are a lot of people out there that want to work for us and are capable of working for us. So maybe I just need to find somebody who gets me better. And so it’s an opportunity for us to learn. That’s an extreme circumstance where the hiring process was two days long. Other times, I know the person’s work. Our graphic designer, Jim, is a great example. He was a student. He joined No Product No problem in 2017. He was in our Start Mastermind for two years. I had spent hundreds of hours with him. Effectively, it was an extensive job interview. I had seen his work. He actually had done some graphic work for other people in our mastermind, just as a kind of side project. So when we were looking for a graphic designer, I didn’t go to Google. I didn’t put it up on the website. Like, we never had graphic designers listed on our careers page at mattmcwilliams.com/careers We never had that. I just texted Jim and said, hey, do you have some time to talk this week? I’d like to talk to you about being our graphic designer. No interview, no test project. I just hired him because I knew so much. You spend 150 to 200 hours with somebody and you see three dozen samples of their work. You don’t need an interview. You don’t need them to do test projects.
Now, that’s usually fine for a few positions. There are probably people out there that you would be willing to just hire. I think of our podcast editor. He’s not a member of the team, per se. He’s just a contractor. It’s a company that actually does it. But I deal with one person there, and I was referred to him by somebody else, and I reached out and said, Are you looking for new clients? He said, yes. I said, Cool, you’re hired. Like, I know your work. I listen to this guy’s podcast. I know your work. So eventually, though, you’re going to have to hire people in other ways. I’m going to walk you through our process. It’s an eight-step process. It’s very extensive. I subscribe to the old philosophy in hiring, hire slow. I would rather put people through the wringer and have them come out going, yes, I still want to work with you, Matt. I know you’ve put me through all these test projects and you’ve done this stuff and I still want to work with you. And then they stay with us forever. That’s what we want. When I think of our hiring process, the goal is to identify the single best candidate. It really is. It’s to identify the single best candidate.
Typically, we start off we hire mostly from our audience. Outside of one person, I know two people. So outside of two people, everyone came from my audience. Of those two people, one was the one person I talked about earlier. They were a referral from a friend. And the second actually is a family member outside our audience per se but knows us pretty well. And so there are exceptions to that rule. But hiring inside my audience, especially with things like content creation, customer service, hosting, graphic design, like they know my brand, and that’s super important. So the first thing that we do is we reach out to our audience by sending an email and just putting it on our careers page at Mattmcwilliams.com/careers And you can see a lot of this stuff in action there. You can see how we do this. We get a lot of applications from this. So we create a very extensive application. I mean, I’m going to pull up two of ours for our agency. First name, last name, email, phone number.
Please describe why you want to join the Matt McWilliams Consulting Incorporated team. I’m not necessarily looking for the world’s perfect response there, but do you put more than just a sentence, do you think this through and tell me the reasons? I want to read through that. Do you have any previous experience as an affiliate manager? How many affiliate offers have you promoted? I don’t care if the answer shows are no or zero. In fact, I kind of like it when it’s no. I kind of prefer people who don’t have any experience because I can train them up in our ways. I do prefer it if you’ve promoted at least some affiliate offers. It’s not a requirement, but I prefer it. Please describe your current job or business. What do you like most about your job or business? What do you like least about your job or business? Like right there. What I’m looking for is please describe it. I’m a salesperson. Really? That’s the extent of it? No. Like, tell me about it. Can you communicate in written format? That’s an important job of an affiliate manager. What do you like most about it? I’m going to know. Are the things that you like most going to jive with our company? Well, I like most that it’s a very structured work environment with consistent hours.
Well, that’s not going to work for us. What do you like least about it? Are you a whiner or do you put an honest answer? Yes, you can be on your way through this but I still want to know it. And I still want to know. Do you communicate it? Do I come away clearly understanding what you like least about your job and what you like most? Please describe why you make a good affiliate manager. In other words, sell me on it. Can you sell something to me? I say the following are open-ended questions with no right or wrong answer. We are simply looking to learn how you process through certain situations. If you’re running an affiliate program and you find that one of your top affiliates is breaking the rules, what would you do first? How would you proceed from there? That’s an example, right? And I have a few of these. They’re sample things. Sample situations. What would you do? Here’s what I’m looking for. I’m not looking for the right answer. But what would you do? And I’ve had people put literally wrong answers but they explain why they would do it. I can teach them the right answer. These are all things I can teach them the right thing on. That’s not it. I just want to know how would you process it? How do you think through this situation? Can you communicate that? Then I have a section that says affiliate program questions. All of these answers can be found on Matt’s website or podcast. So three questions according to what is the ideal cookie link for affiliate programs.
According to Matt, what is one of the three C’s for a successful affiliate program? What is one of the reasons why affiliate programs should work with small affiliates? Here’s the thing we say right there. They can be found on the website. So there are only two ways to answer these questions. Number one, you got to be a big enough fan that you already know the answers or you got to go do the research. And here’s the deal. I had somebody I remember one application, we had like 52 applications and one of them put I couldn’t find this information. Really? Every single other person answered the question. You said you couldn’t find it. You’re not going to be a good member of our team. And so the question goes on. There are a few other questions on there and it goes through. The thing is that application, we’ll go over this in a second. With that application alone, we can weed out about half the people just based on that application. The other examples are content writer applications. We ask for all the basic stuff. First name, last name, city, state, phone number, all that. I want their website. Most content writers have a website of their own. What is it? Let me go look through it. Facebook profiling, Twitter profiling. I’m looking to see can they write social media posts that are coherent?
We ask for three writing samples and then we have two questions. So we’re reviewing these. And I’m immediately looking through these and going, okay, some of these are just not good. Let’s see, on this one, we had 53 responses. So one more than for the agency. Tell us about yourself, your writing background, your career goals, and your aspirations. 500 to 1000 words. So here’s the deal. A couple of things on this one I’m looking do they follow instructions? Is it between 501,000 words? Why is that important? Because there are times when we submit articles and they need to be between 501,000 words or 1500 to 2500 words, whatever. But can you follow the simple instructions? You have a 500-word range. That is 1000 is twice as long as 500. It can be anywhere in there. You write 998 words. You followed the instructions. The first thing we do is use word count. It’s 307 words. That’s not long enough. You did not follow the very simple instructions. Oh, it’s 1400 words. That’s too long. I just need you to follow basic instructions. Of those 53, I’d be willing to bet we weeded out five people just based on the length. But I’m also looking for again when I read this, do I get a sense of your writing background yourself? I understand you, your goals, your aspirations, things like that. I’m not looking for perfect punctuation, but man, do you at least have some basic grasp of the English language here? And then I write.
The last question is about Matt McWilliams consulting. We believe in having fun and communicating with a sense of humor and the space below. Tell us about a time you receive some bad news, but tell it using humor. I just need to know, can you write something that’s a little bit funny? Can you make me just go? I don’t need to crack up. I don’t need to fall over laughing. But can you make me go? That’s actually pretty funny. So provide questions that make it easy to weed them out. Details like 500 to 1000 words. We often put when we have a detail-oriented position, like a bookkeeper or a proofreader or an operations manager, we want somebody that is detailed. I put detail in there, like make sure you include a blue Buffalo in your cover letter. We had one guy who went so far, and he knows what we do. This is great. It would be on his cover letter. He just knew this would work with me. He designed a blue Buffalo logo and put it up at the top of the cover letter. And then at the PS, he said, in case you’re using command F to find this blue Buffalo, so he knew that we might go boom, open the cover letter. Command blue Buffalo. Okay, yeah, they’re in. And I think there was one application we did that 25 people. Two people didn’t put blue Buffalo immediately. They’re out. They’re done. But of course, using that humor goes a long way. So step one is just that extensive application. Step two would be to review the applications.
Again, we probably average 35 to 50 applications for positions. We can weed out about half right away. I would say for the agency, we were higher. We had some really good applicants. I want to say we wheeled it out about 15 to 17. Of the 52, we had about 35 people make it to the next step. The content writer was higher. I think we had 53, and we weeded out, like 34. On the front end, we only had like 19 or 20 make it to the second step. So we weed out people based on those requirements and just based on their writing samples and how they’re communicating. Because if you think about just those two positions, for example, written communication is kind of a key thing. Kind of a key thing. I’m looking for their ability to communicate a concept, an idea, or a message. So number two, review the applications and weed out people. Third, review their social media and other public information. So if we started with 50 people, we’re down to 25.
Typically, it’s step three, will we add another five? Because they post a lot of crap on social media? I’m not looking especially for some positions. Are they social media experts? What we’re actually looking for? And I don’t look at these. I’m not the one who does this, but we’re just looking for are the kind of crazy? We don’t want crazy. I don’t care what your politics are. I really don’t. But if every post you post is this President or that President is the devil and he or she is a N or a Communist and the country is going to h in a handbasket, I don’t need that on my team. I don’t really care what your politics are, but I don’t need crazy on my team. Do that privately, that’s fine. But don’t be posting it on your public social media stuff. If you think about that. If everything they’re posting is profanity, that doesn’t fit my brand, you’re not going to be a good fit on my team. I don’t care if you say a cuss word every now and again, that’s not it. But if you’re going on social media and every third word is profanity, you’re not going to fit in on my team. If you’re going on social media and you’re posting sexist, racist, or misogynistic things, you’re not going to fit in on my team. It’s just not going to work. So we review their social media. We kind of get through the crazy.
So now we’re down to like 20. The point is just to continue weeding down to rule out the people who can’t. They can’t write, they can’t follow instructions, and they’re a little bit nuts. So we’re down to step four, which is we do an asynchronous interview. Typically, it’s about ten questions that we asked them to submit video responses to. I tell them what we’ll do is we’ll give them the stuff on Wednesday, we’ll give them the questions on Wednesday, I’ll tell them on Monday that I’m going to give them to them on Wednesday. But when I give them the instructions on Wednesday, they have until like Tuesday at 10:00 A.M. To submit them. Here’s what I’m looking for. A couple of things here. Number one, I’m giving them just enough time that they can do it, but not enough time that they can really think through the process. So if I tell them on Monday or even maybe the week before, hey, you’re going to get instructions Wednesday afternoon, it’s due Thursday morning. It’s on them to Mark of the time. Okay, now I get it.
I had a couple of people over the years respond back and say, Man, I have my kid’s birthday Wednesday night. And one of our core values as a company is that we ruthlessly protect our downtime and that we prioritize life overwork. That is a priority for our company. It is a core value. Like one of our team members said in Slack this morning, I’m going to pull this up here. This made my day. Said, one of my favorite things about this company is how we live our values. How we live our values is so important to me and to our team that when I had people say, I’ve got my kid’s birthday party on Wednesday night, we’re not going to get in till late. I’ve got to be at my full-time job at nine the next morning. Is there any way that I can answer these questions early? It’s much better than can I answer them later and I let them I give them the questions Tuesday afternoon and I say, okay, great. They’re due Wednesday at 10:00 a.m. So I’m not looking to put them on the spot. But the thing is I want to give them enough time to do it but not so long that they can take forever to answer them and they can think through it and plan it too much. I give them it’s usually about 18 hours to get it done. I give them like 334 Wednesday and they’re due at ten the next morning. We then review those.
Step five is we review those and we usually can eliminate five to ten people and get down to about ten to twelve people left. So we’re now down. We’ll just call it ten people. We’re down to ten people. What we will do now is a test project, an actual project that we want to be done. So if it’s a content writer, we’ll do like five different projects. We’ll have two people kind of do each one of the five projects and we’ll say, hey, go do this. Here’s the thing. We pay them for it. So this particular project is going to take 6 hours in this position. It might be a salary position. Let’s just say it averages $30 per hour. We’re going to pay you $180 to do this and we give them a very short deadline. This is like we assign this on Monday. It is due Thursday. I want to see how you operate under pressure. You have 72 hours. Like when you’re with us full time, you might be doing this in 24 hours. You have 72 hours because I know you have another job and so we give them a test project and we pay them for it and it’s something like in the content writer position, it’s something that we will use as we say it in the explanation. We will use your content on my website so we’re paying you for it. Think of it as a freelance project but then we’re judging you and from there we’ll get it down to about five people now. Other positions like content writer’s easy. We’re paying you to do this project.
I give you a synopsis and I ask you to go write an article. Great. We can use that article. That’s understandable I’m going to pay $180 and that’s about what I’d pay a freelance writer. Maybe not quite as much, but roughly. And so we’re going to pay for that project. We’re going to use it. That’s easy to understand. What if it’s something like a project manager? What do you do? How do you do that and actually make use of it? The reality is you don’t. We have them do test projects and we compare the results. And the reality is if we have usually something like a project manager, we only have like five, or six people left. At this point, the reality is I’m going to waste $1,000. That’s just the reality. I’m going to waste $1,000. They’re usually just test projects. But I would actually say for something like that, I didn’t waste $1,000 because I can use one of them. Or there might even be elements from a bunch of them that we use for something we want to do. And so it’s not a waste of $1,000.
It’s just I could have gotten the same work done for $200 and instead I paid $1,000. But I’m not worried about that because I’d rather pay the $800 and weed out people. So if I started with ten on the test project, I’ll get it down to maybe as low as three, maybe as high as six. And we just keep doing that. At this point, we’re down to five or so. We will do a formal interview. This is a live interview, 90 minutes long. At this point, we haven’t talked to them at all, really, other than via email, we’ll do an interview and just see how are we getting along, and how are we communicating with each other? There are other ways to do this as well. If you have more people, maybe you do a 20 minutes phone call and just eliminate a few people that way. I’ve done that. When I get to that final step and I’m still at twelve people, I’ll do 15 minutes. I literally will block off 4 hours and just do all twelve in 4 hours and kind of make some notes like, okay, I don’t think this person is going to work yet. It may be down to nine, but I’ll just keep alternating. Do interviews, not necessarily alternate, but do interviews, do more test projects until I’m like certain of the person and part some people drop out.
The funny thing is, with paid projects, very few people drop out. We’re paying him a pretty fair wage if the position pays. Let me just do some quick math. If the position pays $8,000 a month, for example, it’s 160 hours. I believe that’s $50 an hour and the test project is going to take 5 hours. We’ll pay them $250 for the test project. So they’re getting a pretty fair wage. So most people are kind of like, cool, I’m going to do my best and they do their best on this. They do their best on it. And I do hear from people that sometimes the test projects take longer because they know their test projects. When I put you under the gun and need you to turn around a project that takes 6 hours and I need it in 24 hours, I don’t expect an A-plus effort. I expect an A-minus effort. You know, that’s the reality of something that’s a quick turnaround. They still put in an A-plus effort on the test project because they want to impress. So that’s what that process looks like. It’s not perfect. I’m not saying I’ve got it down Pat, but I do feel like we got a pretty good process. I had some pretty good results.
So as we wrap up, the final thing to consider is delegation. It doesn’t help to hire people and then not delegate to them. This is a lesson I learned the hard way. I used to micromanage the heck out of things. And then I heard a quote along the way that I need to lookup. I think it’s Douglas MacArthur. There’s some World War II general might have been Eisenhower said, don’t show people how to do things. Tell them what you want to be achieved and let them surprise you. And I might have butchered the quote just a little bit, but you tell them the result you want and you let them surprise you. And I had to get comfortable with not needing things to be perfect. I had to basically say, you know, what is good and I don’t have to be involved is a win. But here’s the thing. Oftentimes they’ll do it better than me anyway. Maybe they don’t even do it how I would have done it. If they get a better result. Maybe they get the same result, but they get it quicker. Maybe they get the same result, but they also get this other benefit over here. Maybe they do it differently and they do it 5% worse and I’m like, no big deal. Maybe they do it the wrong way and it cost us $1,000 and I had to just be okay with this allowing people to make mistakes.
There are no fatal mistakes that anybody in our company can make. Everything is backed up anyway. We’re all online and so I just had to be comfortable. You know what? I’m okay with $5,000 mistakes today. I’m okay with the $10,000 mistake. I’m not okay with like a $50,000 mistake and I’m not okay if you make the same $10,000 mistake three times. That’s absurd. Stop making the same mistake twice even. But you know what? If you screw something up, you make a decision and it was wrong and I delegated it to you and it cost us $3,000. Alright? I delegated 14 other things to you and they were right and they made us $200,000 and then the one mistake you made cost us $300,000. I’m $197,000 in the black, and I paid you 70, and I didn’t have to do anything. That’s a win. That’s a huge win. And the thing is, anybody passed the very beginning stage, you can afford to bring on somebody. You can afford 5 hours a week, 5 hours a week to a virtual assistant to take off your drudgery work. You don’t even have to work less. Maybe you’re putting in 45 hours a week and you take off 5 hours of drudgery. You might fill those 5 hours up, but you’re filling them with things that you enjoy and that you’re good at.
So for me, my rules are this. As far as delegation number one, I delegate everything in my Dresser’s zone. Nothing is left there. I have a very small roughly 30 minutes, a quarter of the dryer’s own work. That is one of those, like, only I can do it type things. It’s some of the stuff with our financials, and I hate doing it, and I have to do it once a year. I meet with our CPA. It’s torture, but it takes an hour, and I’m done. That’s about it. I have 3 hours a year. In my judgment, zone number two, I delegate everything that’s in my distraction zone. In my disinterest zone, that’s under a value of $10,000. Okay, that might be higher or lower for you. But for now, actually, everything in my distraction zone and my disinterest on have been delegated. But my rules over the years have evolved, and that’s it. I was like, okay if it’s bringing in under $10,000 and it’s in my distraction or disinterest, I need to get rid of it. And then over time, it was like, okay, anything under 20, anything under 30, anything under 50.
Eventually, it was basically everything in my distraction and disinterest. Third, my first reaction is always to delegate, not to do it myself. I might later decide to do it myself. But first, I always think to delegate. So immediately, okay, this needs to be done. My first thought is, who can do this? It is not, how can I do this? That’s the biggest mistake people make is how can I do this? So my first thought is, who can do this? And what do they need? And then if I go, you know what? Okay. Actually, come to think of it, I really do need to be the one to do this right now. Then I do it. My first thought is always to delegate. Fourth thing is, if it’s repetitive, I always delegate. I always delegate repetitive tasks because repetitive tasks can be taught. Let’s say you do something that is 30 minutes a week, and it’s going to be done for the next five years. That’s 26 hours a year. Next three years, we’ll just go with 75 hours roughly. If I have to spend an entire month doing that task, 30 minutes a week And I have to spend that whole 30 minutes documenting it. This is an extreme example. Usually, a 30 minutes a week task can be taught in 30 minutes. But hypothetically, I have to spend four weeks and people think, oh, gosh, I have to spend four weeks teaching this and then they’re going to ask a bunch of questions and it’s not worth it.
At the end of about five or six weeks, I no longer spend any time doing that 30 minutes task I’m done. I might take 30 minutes and document me doing it, and then I do it again the next week And I do it again the next week And I do it again the next week, and then I answer a few questions over the next month, spend maybe another 30 minutes. Over the month, I spent two and a half hours Versus 75 hours over the course of the next three years. So any repetitive tasks I delegate, and if I know for a fact that someone else can do it as well or 90% as well, I delegate. Very simple. So how do you delegate? This is a huge one. This is something I learned from I think I also learned from Michael Hyatt.
Number one is I have to look at what the level of delegation is. Level One, the lowest delegation is basically done what I say, how I say to do it, that kind of thing, right? So do as I say. Don’t really ask questions. You can ask questions, but don’t veer off the how I tell you to do it. So you do what I say, how I tell you to do it and you report back to me at every step. So if there are five steps, the end of step one, you tell me right now, that’s very rare. This probably accounts for maybe 5% of our delegation. Level Five, which is the highest I’m skipping. And this is like the basic delegation is here’s the mission. Go accomplish it. I don’t even need to know about it. I don’t even need to know when it’s completed. Just go do it. This is also very rare. This is maybe 10% now, the most common levels for us are two through four. Level two is basically I tell them how to do it, And I expect them to do it that way. In other words, do what I say, but they report to me when it’s finished. I don’t need to know every step of the way. Just report to me when you’re done and tell me that you’ve completed the project. That’s probably 10%. Level three is to tell me what you decide, And I’ll approve it. In other words, I’m going to delegate this to I want you to do the work, but I want to approve your decision.
Here’s how to do maybe parts of it. You decide on the rest, report the finished product to me. In other words, make decisions and tell me what you decide. I’ll sign off on the steps right now. This is about 50% of our delegation. It’s in this middle level here. And then level four is again between level three and level five, of course, is basically, tell me what you did, why you did it, and how you did it. It’s not that level five where it’s like, here’s what to do. Go do it. I don’t need to know anything. I still want to know what did you do and how did you do it? And I can kind of give you some feedback on it. This is probably 25%. So as time goes on, I trust people more and more as their level moves up. We have team members that they’re probably 80% level four and five others are maybe 70% levels one through three. Most are probably 50, 60%.
Level Three, a little bit of level four, a little bit of level two, very little level one or five right now. But other team members might be 30% level 540 percent level five. In fact, some team members are right around 50%, level five, and probably 95% level four and five. It’s very rare. It’s like if there’s something new, we might drop down to level three. For me, the best way to teach people stuff is just to record videos and provide written briefs. So I write like a little half-page, one-page document that’s got the gist of what they need to know. We create SOPs standard operating procedures, if possible, we explain it live so they can ask questions and we record it and they’ve got their questions answered. The big thing, especially early on when you’re working with just a virtual assistant. Explain the reason behind the task.
The biggest mistake I made before explaining the reason was just kind of like giving somebody a task saying, I need this report and I need it by 04:00 p.m. Today. Why? What is the mission of this spreadsheet? Just giving them a 32nd explanation of the reasoning behind it opens up new possibilities. And this applies to everyone on the team. Explain the problem, explain the reasoning, and explain the solution. What’s the problem? Why is this a problem? Like, what are we going to do to solve it? Not necessarily the actual solution, but what does the other side look like? The problem is when our customers log in to the system, they see this message, and that’s a problem because it’s conveying the wrong thing. So what we need to do is fix that for all the people who are logging in. And here’s the best way to do that, I believe or it might be just now. Please go fix that. But explaining that reasoning gives them some of that background. It also allows them maybe they’ll find a better way because they understand the reasoning, they understand what we were trying to accomplish. And they say, but if we did it this way, it would work better. Oh, my gosh. That’s right. I was going to say download this report and compare it to this report and we’ll find the differences and they go, no, there’s actually what we need exists in the system already. And I’m like, oh, I didn’t know that. They know a lot more than I do.
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So be willing to take the time to explain things Be willing to take 30 minutes to explain a ten-minute daily task Because again, you take 30 minutes to explain a ten-minute task. At the end of that first week of them taking over that task, you’re already 20 minutes ahead. You’re an hour ahead. After the end of next week, you’re 10 hours ahead. Eleven weeks later, end of the year, you’re 40, 50 hours ahead. So take the time to explain it. Document everything in SOPs we have a whole Asana project of nothing but SOP so anybody can access and go in like I want to learn, how do I do this in WordPress boom, I can do it. So there you have it. How to build your team. I hope that helps you as you get started building your team and scaling from there. If you have any questions along the way, feel free to reach out to me anytime. You can text me anytime at 260-217-4619, feel free to text me.
And if you have any questions about this or anything else and then make sure that you hit subscribe and come back next week, I’m going to share something that just happened. There was an affiliate program that made a fatal mistake. I think it’s going to really hurt their business. Unfortunately, I’m going to share what they should have done instead. So they really screwed up. There’s a big lesson that you can learn. I’m going to share that in the next episode. So make sure you hit subscribe if you know somebody who needs that. Oh, gosh, they’re running an affiliate program. They don’t want to make this mistake. Share that episode with them. Make sure you tell them about this episode. If they need to learn how to build their team, tell them about this episode. Don’t information hoard. Share the info. Spread the love with them. Tell them all about it, and I’ll see you next week. Thank you so much for listening Bye.
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Most product launches roll out over a two-week period. Leading up to the launch, excitement levels are sky-high! Day 1…OPEN CART! The sales start to roll in! But what about those 7 or 8 days in the middle of the launch that period when sales tend to dry up? These are the “dog days” of a launch but they don’t have to be.
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Transcript So affiliate launches, affiliate launches is what we’re talking about today. Avoiding that mid launch dip in affiliate promotions, guys, affiliate launches are, they’re a marathon. They’re not a sprint. And one of the hardest things I find to do is just to keep up those positive vibes, right. Keep from, from crashing, during, you know, in the middle.
And I, and I don’t mean like energy-wise, although that is, that is something to consider, but just kind of the, inner, well, yeah, the energy, you know, I’m not talking about like physical energy, but the excitement about a launch, about a promotion, especially when the sales aren’t rolling in.
All right. You know, we got these lengthy promotions and most of them, the beginning through even the middle of the open cart period, what we call the messy middle, there’s not sales rolling in. The average launch we found is a little bit over two weeks long. And those early days, you know, like the launch starts. Yeah. We’re excited.
And then at the end, it’s like, oh, it’s the end. We’re, you know, we’re, we’re running until the end. We’ve got we’re sprinting at the end. That’s easy. But that middle part, if you don’t find a way to keep the momentum going, you can just fall off a cliff and end up wasting those first four or five, six days of effort.
And so today I’m going to explain how you can keep the momentum going, how you can keep your interest level up for your entire launch. And we’re going to talk about this from both the perspective of an affiliate, what you can do as an affiliate, but also on the affiliate management side, if you’re running the launch.
So, first of all, I just want to welcome everybody. Who’s on live, say, Hey, in the chat there, let me know where you’re joining us from. Welcome again, Allen. Good to see you. Hey, good to be back. You’ll Be off next week. Remind me again while you’re off next week. I am my wife and I are heading to California.
So We haven’t talked about that yet. Huntington beach is going to take a little time. There’s some stuff Nice. So taken in and maybe go to the vet out there too. So, and just have some fun, but we’re so yeah, getting off the island, we don’t leave the island. That was always the goal.
And with these joint ventures has helped me with my goal of, I don’t leave the island, except when I absolutely want to, Oh, live in a good place. So Jim Gaffigan talked about like, you know, he’s from Indiana and he talks about how it’s like, you know, he’s not like new, you know, we’re from New York and we’re tough. You know, we’re from Texas and things are big and he’s like, we’re from Indiana and we’re gonna move.
I love that. Well, guys, we’re talking about this, this mid launch dip, you know, if you can picture the excitement level and the energy level in a launch, it’s, it’s huge at the beginning. It’s huge at the end and in the middle, it sometimes tends to cave. Once the cart is open,you know, it’s like sales the first day, you know, 25, 30% of all of your sales. Yay. Lots of sales. First day, last day, 50% of your sales. Woo. It’s the end middle.
I just finished reading a book called the rise of the rise of the ultra runner, I think, or rise of ultra runners. It’s about ultra marathoners. And you know, this guy is sharing his experience and it’s just so fascinating because it talks about, you know, these are hundred mile races, you know, plus like a hundred plus miles sometimes, and God bless them. Yeah. You know, these are through like trails and mountains.
You know, sometimes they are literally in a given race, they are climbing and descending the equivalent of Everest, you know, in addition to running a hundred plus miles. And he’s talking about how, you know, the first 30 to 40 miles, you know, for them relatively easy, the excitement level, the, you know, they’re already thinking about the finish and how amazing it’s going to be.
And he said, you know, the last five to 15 miles, you know, again for them, like if I’ve run 90 miles and it’s the last 10 miles, I’m not going him, who you’d be, you know, but he said, you know, a lot of times in these races, the last part will be a descent. So they’ll make the one last climb around the 10 mile mark and they’ll come down.
So you can see the finish from 10 miles away. And he said, once you can see the finish, like, you know, your, your spirits lift. And he talked about miles 60 to 90. Sometimes he’ll, you know, he feels like he’s barely moving. He’s not even running. But then he runs the last 10 miles and what happens and that’s all a mind thing.
And I feel like promote affiliate promotions are kind of the same way from both perspectives when it starts like we’re getting ready to start Stu McLaren’s. And it’s like, yeah. And then the reality is when we hit kind of that middle of the launch, it gets kind of like, huh. You know, if we don’t manage it, right. So today I’m going to talk about this both from the affiliate perspective and from the running the launch perspective.
And I’m going to divide things up into two phases. There is the kind of the prelaunch phase where we’re going to call just a kind of the mid-launch. So if you imagine the typical launch say 17 days long is about the average you got open cart for four or five days. We’ll just go with five, we’ll go the five day open cart.
So the middle of the total launch roughly day 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Before the cart opens, then we’re going to talk specifically about the mid cart. So not open cart day, not closed cart day, but those middle 2, 3, 4, 5 days of open cart where things kind of go. So we’re going to start with the affiliate marketing side. I want to share with you first some mid launch affiliate strategy. So this is the middle of the launch before the cart opens.
There’s no sales yet. Okay. The carts not open. What do we do in this situation? What do we do to kind of get ourselves energized? How do we keep our energy up? How do we keep our audience’s excitement up? What do we do to kind of manage this part of the launch? Because we started the launch, you know, six, seven days ago with a bang. We were excited, the leads reporting in. Now let’s say you have a list of, let’s go with an even number 10,000 people. And you’re probably going to get 400 leads, 400 people to opt in on day one, you get 200. So you’re already halfway there.
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You know, you’re living on a prayer. Sorry. Couldn’t resist the song layer. Yeah. Sorry. It says, listen to Bon Jovi yesterday. Nice. So you got 200 leads in the first day. Another 50 are going to roll in on the second day from that first day’s email, you’re already 60%, 65% of what you’re going to get. Well, the next seven days, you’re only going to get another 150 leads.
And it kind of feels like, you know, you send an email, you only get 42 that day. And it’s like, oh wow, am I doing something wrong? Did I mess up? First of all, no, you did not mess up. Okay. You did not mess up. This is just simply the way things are. You know, a lot of those leads came on the first day because those first 200 people of your 10,000 people list, those are the people who open every single email. They click on every single email. When you now send another email they’re already done, they’ve already done it. You know, you’re not going to send to them. So why you’ve lost 200 of your best people.
So the rates are going to be lower. So I want to share with you these mid-launch affiliate strategies. Again, for purposes of this example, I’m going to use a 10 day pre-launch or I’m gonna use a 12 day pre-launch and a 5 day open cart. That’s pretty typical. Sometimes it’s a little bit different. You might have 14 days, and then 4. We’re getting ready to run one.
That’s basically a, yeah, it’s 14 and 4, you know, roughly we’ll run one in June that is longer. Let me do the quick math. I think it’s, you know, it’s 15 and 8, yeah15 and 8. We ran one just recently, that was seven and seven, you know, seven days pre-launch seven days open cart,
I’ve run some that were, you know, two weeks open cart, four days, you roughly of, or 2 weeks of closed cart or two weeks of prelaunch. And then, you know, four days of open cart. So all kinds of stuff here, these mid-launch affiliate strategies before the cart opens, number one, do something out of the ordinary.
All right, just do something out of the ordinary. In this launch, send a really long email, send a really short email. If your average emails, 300 words. I think ours are probably about 150 is my average. If I am my 1 25 is probably a better guess. I’m actually curious about that. I’m going to do a study later and see what the average length of my emails are when I’m going with 125 to 150.
Send one that’s 600 words long or send one that’s 17 words, long, something that just kind of jolts people. It can be pointing to the same thing that you’ve been pointing to the webinar, the workshop, the PDF, the whatever, but it’s just different send one really late at night or really early in the morning. You know, sometimes I like to send an email at 3:45 in the morning, eastern time. Number one. Well, that’s the middle of the afternoon for people in India. And I have, you know, roughly 2% of my list is in India. I, you know, that’s what eight o’clock in the morning for my, you know, for my British audience, about 15% of my audience is in Western Europe. So it’s perfect.
You know, for tea and crumpets, I don’t know. When do you eat crumpets? Is that an afternoon thing? Actually, I don’t know if that’s, I think that’s An avenue many times. I think they’re allowed to come anytime during the Day. I know they’re allowed to, but I think traditionally it’s, it’s an afternoon thing.
Yeah. But I will tell you one of my favorite breakfasts that I’ve ever had was cooked by a Brit. I stayed at his house in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and he woke up, he was like, I’m going to make a traditional, you know, British breakfast. I looked at the other guy, stay with us. It’s like, we’re going to waffle house later because this is going to be disgusting.
And it was actually amazing. It was like, you know, tomato on top, but it had like, it was like a, it was like a tomato sliced tomato with an egg and beans and some sort of a meat type substance. And I’m not sure what it was, but it tasted delicious. And it was the first time I ever had tea with milk in it.
I did not know you could do that because where I come from, that’s actually in most of the state constitution, south of the Mason Dixon, and you don’t put, We get it. They, they have a group of people to come in and arrest us if we do that here. Ah, yeah. I mean, there were like a lot of things you can do.
Like you can go up on stage and slap Chris rock. You’re not going to get arrested in the south. You’re getting arrested anyway. Like go, you know, send these like weird timing emails You know, plan on sending, you know, an email, two emails, 30 minutes apart, you know, one that like says something and then maybe it has a mystery and the next one comes 30 minutes later
Just do something out of the ordinary, go live, you know, unplanned. Like we go live Thursdays at 2:00 PM Eastern. If I had it to do all over again, I would’ve done Tuesdays at two, but you know, we didn’t think that far ahead. And so we, we go live on Thursdays at two, but what if I went live on a Wednesday afternoon or a Monday morning?
You know? So I’d love to hear from you guys, like share some of your ideas. What are some of the things that would just be out of the ordinary? The idea here is just mix things up a little bit, get a little creative. Secondly, find something new to promote. Now I don’t mean, okay, it’s the middle of the launch.
It’s messy, go promote a different product. That’s not what I mean or go, you know, promote something else. I mean, promote a different entry point into the launch. If you’ve been promoting the PDF, promote the workshop, promote the webinar, promote the live stream, promote the, you know, whatever, find something new, mix it up.
If you’ve been promoting the webinar and it’s still three, four days away from the webinar or the workshop, but it’s still three, four days away from the workshop. Just interrupt and promote like a free report that they have one or just promote something that’s a little bit different.
One of the ways you can do this is just to ask the affiliate manager, ask the people like, Hey, what are some of the other things I can promote that would still count as leads that would get people into your ecosystem, get people into the funnel, but it’s not just the same dad gum thing for seven straight days. One of the ways you can do this on your own. It’s creative is rather than sending people just to the workshop.
Send people to a page where you do a three-minute video talking about the workshop and you, the email you send says, I just shot a three minute video. It only takes three minutes to watch. We’d love. If you would go watch it. Here’s what it’s about. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right in that video says, yada, yada, yada, I’m so excited. And you know, here’s why you need recurring revenue Stu McLaren’s doing a workshop, click the button below, you know, so it’s a different thing, even though you’re still promoting the workshop. So just find something new to bring in a new entry point, number three, change your angle.
Like again, I’m going to use Stu McLaren’s the membership experience. And by the way, if you guys want to sign up as an affiliate for, for Stu’s affiliate program, we’ve got this big launch coming up as one of the biggest launches in the entire year. If you go to Mattmcwilliams.com forward slash what’s up Mattmcwilliams.com forward slash what’s up, you’ll see all of our recommended programs there and you can sign up for Stu’s.
So you sign up for that, right? I hope you’ll do that today. Go sign up for Stu’s affiliate program Mattmcwilliams.com forward slash what’s up. And as you’re promoting it, you’re like Stu’s doing a workshop, recurring revenue, recurring revenue memberships. What if you just find a completely different angle?
You’ve been talking about how positive angle, right? Works, recurring revenue memberships are great. What about, well, the problem with launches is the problem with, you know, having only two or three big events a year and having the rest of your year, you know, be losing money is, and you talk about that instead of coming at it from a positive angle, you come at it from a negative angle.
Now my suggesting that if you send six emails about something that all six should be negative. No I’m saying if all the previous three have been positive, do a negative one. If the previous three have been kind of generic, do one that, you know, like right now, as we’re recording this, you know, end of March, 2022, the big event that happened recently you know, was Will Smith as I’ve referenced already, Will Smith slapping Chris rock. Talk about that. Like, you know how, I don’t know how the, you know, that, that the month after a launch is like a Will Smith hand to the face, you know, slap to the face because you realize, oh crap, we’re not bringing in any revenue this month.
That’s a kind of a negative angle, but it’s a funny angle. If you’ve been serious, be funny. If you haven’t been telling stories, tell stories, if you’ve been focused on you. So you like if you use, if you’ve used the membership experience, if you’ve worked with Stu, if you have a membership site and your first three emails are focused on you, and there’s nothing wrong with that because your audience loves you try a different story.
Try finding one of the 200 other case studies that he has talk about Anna Saucier. Talk about Michelle Caruana, talk about Heidi Easley, talk about Sarah Williams, you know, Paul Pruitt, whoever talk about some of the other case studies in that promotion.
So find a new angle that you can come at. If you just feel like you’re kind of getting down a little bit. So that’s the prelaunch phase, kind of that mid launch phase where, you know, things just aren’t going as well. And the energy’s kind of a little bit low. And so I mentioned just by the way, just to go back to Mattmcwilliams.com/what’sup.
Alan, can you drop that link in the, in there for people that’s where you can see all of our recommended affiliate programs. If you want to see all of this in action, what we’re talking about, both from an affiliate perspective and from an affiliate management perspective, go sign up for some of the stuff we’re running and you’ll see all of this, just a little tip there.
All right. Now I want to talk about the mid cart affiliate strategy. So We’re still on the affiliate side, not the affiliate management side, but we’re talking about five day open cart period. You might have four, you might have six, seven, but we’re just using five for this example, open cart, exciting, lots of good stuff going on. Close cart, exciting. There’s a deadline, nothing moves people like a deadline. What about, you know, let’s just say it’s open Monday through Friday. What about Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday? The reality is only 10, 15% of all of your sales are going to come Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. So what are we doing in that stretch?
Well, first of all, you have to keep in mind that the goal is to move people closer to a buying decision. I’ve talked about this so many times that people come into the launch, maybe, you know, before the prelaunch and they’re at a two on a zero to 10 continuum, and then they go through maybe the workshop and they move up to a seven and then an open cart day.
They’re at a seven and a half. Well, they’re not at a 10 and there’s no deadline, there’s no scarcity. So the deadlines were two points. Your goal is to get them to an eight on deadline day. So they tip over and buy, they tip over to the other side of the fence and they buy that’s what your goal is, is to get them to, that eight or plus. Now, if you happen to come into open cart day at a nine, and on Tuesday, you send an email, you will make some sales on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I said 10 to 15%. Well, that’s still 10 to 15%. Maybe you tip them over with something on that Tuesday or Wednesday.
And what I want to talk about is how to tip people over on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. So we’re not reliant on that one day, that closed cart day, the first way you can do that. The first strategy I want to share with you is a mid cart bonus. Now, this is specifically something that you come up with as the affiliate, in addition to your regular bonus package, this is the best way to drive sales and create what Jeff Walker calls the Walker W you know, the typical launch goes big here at the beginning, and then like that kind of like a check mark. He likes it to be a little bit more like a W and we’ll talk later about if you’re running the launch, what to do.
But as an affiliate offer a mid cart bonus, offer a, you know, something that’s only good for Wednesday, it goes away Wednesday at midnight. And just as a side note, if you do expire something, generally speaking at midnight, make sure that it’s the same midnight that cart close is going to be, cause it conditions people.
Most cards close at midnight Pacific. So make sure it closes, you know, your thing, your bonus closes at midnight Pacific. You know, this is the best way offer something that’s only available today. Typically on that Wednesday, the second way is to do some live selling. We talk about this in affiliate insider, monthly.
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I think it was actually, yeah, this month. This month, I did an interview with Jamie Birch, one of the top affiliate managers in the world about what’s working for people and he talks real. The first thing you shared about was live selling in other words, go live and sell. So you drive people to the live and then you sell them on the product.
And if you want to check that out, by the way, I highly recommend going to check that interview out with Jamie Birch. You can get into affiliate, insider monthly for just a dollar right now. You’ll actually get access to March. April, May. When you go to that page, it’ll say you get two months, but we’re here on the 31st of March.
So last day of the month, if you get in today, actually we actually probably shouldn’t say this. We’re going to extend it through the weekend because I don’t really want my team to have to switch it over until next Monday. Cause they got a really busy day tomorrow and I don’t want them working on weekends. So they probably won’t switch it over to Monday.
You’ll get access to the current month, which is March and then you’ll get access to April and May’s content for a dollar. So 12 pieces of content for a dollar. One of those is that interview with Jamie Birch, where he talks about live selling. But that’s a really good way. You know that Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, second, third, fourth day of the launch, do some live selling.
Don’t try to sell via email, mix it up, do something live. Speaking of live, you know, one of the ways you could really start to drive some sales is hosting a live cast. So here’s what you do. I’m going to take, I’m going to take you Stu’s again as an example. Now his cart is open Monday through Thursday.
What I would do on Wednesday is I would reach out if I’m, if I’m a student of Stu’s, you know, a Triber from his previous, you know, from the course TRIBE. TRIBE became the membership experience. I would reach out to three other people that I know have had a good experience with TRIBE, and we’re going to do a live cast.
I’m just going to interview them for 20 minutes. I’m going to talk about my story for, you know, 10, 15 minutes on the front end, interview them. They’re all going to be on. So we’re going to have, we’re going to have kind of a panel discussion. You know, I might even invite more people. I might invite like six people.
This is how I’ve done it. In the past. I invited like six or seven people and I’d have like two or three on at a time and I’d interview one of them and kind of overlap with the next person. We’d focus on one person for like 10 minutes then kind of discussed and focused on the next person and discuss and so on and so forth.
And it just became a really big event where we’re all discussing and all these other people, not me are saying, this is an amazing course. It’s the most amazing thing ever, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, and I share, you know, I shared this and this kind of applies to on more for selling anything else when we’re talking about that right now, we’re talking about the, you know, middle of the cart. I did a live cast and I recommend doing this on the second to last day. So the day before cart close days are really good time. Stu has a live cast on Tuesday. So it’s a perfect time for an affiliate to do one on Wednesday.
But I did one on the day before cart closed for PLF. And I invited a bunch of my friends on, I had them on, you know, to share their experiences with PLF. And one of the reasons why this works and I love your comment there, Tim. Thank you. We love you, Tim. I had, one of the ladies I had on was named is named Thembi Bheka.
Now Thembi is from Zimbabwe and she’s a woman, so, okay. She’s a woman she’s from Zimbabwe, which means really cool accent and really cool story. And I said, do you have any advice for somebody who’s on the fence about buying PLF? And she said, yeah, just buy it. Just buy the course, sign up now don’t wait, what are you waiting for? Stop waiting by the course. Now if me as a white dude, that’s from the Midwest in the south, you know, like pretty neutral accent, right? If I hang in round at Tennessee long enough, I get my Southern accent back.
But if I say what I just said, which is just buy the course, what are you waiting for? First of all, I’m the affiliate. Second of all. I’m me. It comes across differently than she does as a female who has no investment in them buying the course through me and with her really cool, you know, Southern African accent. I mean, it just like, it was so cool.
I just was like, all right, that’s a good place to end. See you guys like I can’t, what else could I say? And so there’s power in that. Just kind of crowdsourcing the selling process, hosting that live cast. I think it’s number four here, interview the talent. So in this particular case, it’s the middle of the cart.
If you can get Stu, you can get Jeff, you can get Ryan, whoever it is, you know that you’re promoting and get Amy interview em 10 minutes, 15 minutes, Hey, let’s come on and talk about one thing. This isn’t a pre-interview like you would do on your podcast week before the launch. This is like, Hey, my audience has five questions. Can you come on and answer them?
And you ask your audience to submit them in advance. You read them off. You know, you prepare them. And like, you know, they’re one minute answers, you know, and you just, you interview them and then you call them to buy. We sorta touched on this earlier, but number five is a limited time bonus.
And so, I mean, specifically, this is not a mid cart bonus. This is a bonus that you offer my favorite time to do it. If you’re doing the live cast, offer it on the live cast. This is a bonus. You only get if you’re on the live cast. All right. So I’m going to apply for three hours. This bonus is available.
These three hours, that’s it. Often you get people to contribute bonuses. I know that’s what we did. We had a couple of the guests who contributed some bonuses that were worth total worth like 600 bucks. They contribute those as an affiliate. When you host as an affiliate manager, we’ll talk about this a little, but when you host a live cast, then you know, you get them to contribute, you know, the affiliates to contribute the bonuses, but offer a limited time bonus. Even if you don’t do a, live cast just offer a bonus. That’s valid from 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM Eastern time on Thursday, like very short window of time, four to six hours. And it just kind of interjects some scarcity and some excitement into the launch.
And you know, it needs to be something that makes it faster or easier for them to implement what they’re buying. So if they’re buying, you know, if they’re buying the membership experience, for example, my four to six hour bonus, like all the bonuses, the bonuses overcome objections. That’s the number one thing about bonuses.
They need to overcome objections, but what would make it faster or easier? I’m going to offer a bonus for the next four, six hours where I, you get my course that talks about getting affiliates for your membership. I put it’s actually not even a course. It’s a, it’s a special that I put together. That’s about a 90 minute training on how to run an affiliate program for membership program.
You get that if you buy in the next six hours, now I give that to everybody who bought before. But after that 6:00 PM deadline or whatever, it is, 8:00 PM deadline, this goes away, you don’t get it. And I’ve done this before. And I’ve had like 20%, 25% upwards of all of my sales for a launch come in that four to six hour window because all of those people who got to Thursday afternoon and they were sitting there at an eight and a half or a nine, now they had a deadline today versus tomorrow. And what that meant was I got them to buy today versus waiting for tomorrow and waiting until tomorrow to buy is always a dangerous proposition in sales, you know, oh, I’ll come back tomorrow. The guy says the car dealer knows that never happens. And so things might happen. You know, I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.
That’s going to prevent somebody from buying a tornado hits. They lose internet. Their kid gets sick. You know, it doesn’t have to be anything. A tornado is kind of a dramatic thing, you know, but like it doesn’t have to be anything. They just have a busy day. So what happens when you have a really busy day? You’re busy all day.
You don’t buy you finish up. I know me, like I think of my Friday’s, if cart closes on a Friday. I’m busy all day. I’ve got interviews, I’ve got lives. I’ve got podcasts. I’ve got work to do. I’ve got to respond to my team’s messages. I’ve got to help them. And as soon as 5 :45 hits, I’ve got to get out the door.
Cause I gotta go coach my kids in soccer, I’m coaching from six to eight, then I’m watching our daughter play at eight till nine. Then we’re going with her friend. Who’s sleeping over, out to eat at Buffalo, wild wings. We don’t get there till 9 45. And the service is a little slow. This actually really happened.
It’s like, we don’t leave there till 11:15. We got to come back, get them to bed. It’s after midnight, you think I’m thinking about buying your course. No they’re thinking about buying your course. I’m thinking about going to sleep and I wake up the morning and go, oh crap. But if you had given me a compelling reason to buy the day before you wouldn’t have had to worry about that.
So we get people in on that Thursday versus waiting for tomorrow. So as an affiliate, those are the ways that you can overcome this. I want to switch sides to the affiliate management side. Talk about those mid-launch affiliate management strategies. So again, this is pre cart open. No sales are rolling in, how do we keep our affiliates engaged? And the first way is frequent contests.
So these contests are short. We’ve got our, you know, leads contest. I’ll use the membership experience as an example, you know, $10,000 for most leads to a hundred thousand dollar prize for most, or for most sales, its $10,000 prize for most leads. But that contest lasts like 13 days, 14 days. Actually, it really starts now.
So technically it lasts like 24 days. It’s a three and a half week contest. Now we want to reward people and we tell them those who start early, we’ll do the best. And those who push at the end we’ll do the best, but it’s still a long contest. And a lot of times you’ll have somebody who comes out, boom. They send an email in the first week and they run away with the whole thing.
They go all in and there’s no chance for anybody else boring, but I can beat them any given weekend. I can beat them on a Tuesday. I can beat them on a Wednesday. I can beat them in a bus. I can beat them. You know, I forget the rest of that green eggs and ham anyway, you know, so focus specific parts of the launch.
So we have a leads contest that’s for all the stuff, but we have four aspects. We have a membership guide and membership tips, the workshop, the webinar. So we do a webinar leads contest. We do a workshop, a webinar, our workshop leads contest. Maybe we’ll do a contest there in the middle that messy, middle around the 14th, 15th, 16th of April. We’ll do a two day contest on the 15th and 16th. We’ll do a weekend contest, which is probably about the one, the 15th and 16th hour without looking at the calendar.
You know, we’ll do a weekend contest there, you know, for those of you watching who are going to be in that launch, hint, hint, there may or may not be a contest in, we haven’t technically decided that yet, but we probably will. So we do a variety of contests. So we’ll do one, like I said, webinar only two days, three days, one day, you know, we’ll do, and anyone can win contest where it’s like, okay, anyone who sends 10 leads in the next 48 hours is entered to win.
And then we’ll just do a drawing 114 people enter you know, had 10 or more leads, boom person, number 72, you won, you know, an iPad mini or an iPad pro sorry, you know, we’ll do a top three. We’ll do a top one. We’ll do this contest is specifically for first time affiliates, you know, for the next three days, all first time affiliates, the person with the most leads wins. You know, you gotta be a first-time affiliate, do all kinds of things. Every lead you send over the next 24 hours, your intro to win. So the more leads you send, the better chance you have of winning, but not necessarily, you can still win with a seven.
I had one recently we ran and it was a sales contest. It was a sales contest. And it was the day before, you know, skipping ahead here. But it was the day before cart close. And we had, I dunno, like 87 people make a sale on that day. The first person made, you know, like 75 sales.
There was like 24 people that made more than 10 sales. And the guy that won the contest had one yeah, one sale. And it was a literally a random drawing. You know, we, we put in, we put in all the sales and it was like, you know, whatever, 842 sales. And I went to random.org
typed in one and 842 clicked enter. I scrolled down to sale number 578 guy had one sale, you know, the guy had one flipping sale that day. And he won $2,500. You know, we lost money technically on that one sale, we would’ve been better financially if he had not made that sale, but that’s how that works sometimes.
So the second thing you need to be doing, you gotta watch the stats. You gotta look for who’s dipping. So if your promotion starts on April 10th and we’re sitting there on April 13th, where’s the, where are those people that were doing really well on day one? Are they, have they gone just steady down? Or if they blipped back up, they’re never going to probably go as high as they did on April 10th.
That’s usually, unless they only mailed to a segment on April 10th or did like a small, maybe they did a Facebook live on April 10th, they got a hundred leads. And then on the 13th, they mailed and got a thousand. Okay. They might go like that, but who sent 500 leads on day one and then a hundred on day two, those hundred were not usually from a second promotion. They were just remnant clicks from the day before. And then you’re down to 75, then 30, then 22. And they’re continuing down without going back up. We need to focus on them. We need to reach out to them. We need to prod them. All right. So watch the stacks so that you avoid this mid-launch breakdown.
You know, focus on people who maybe are in that third, fourth, fifth position. Second position. Yeah. They’re not in first, but Hey, you’re gaining ground on first place. Cause at first place person hasn’t mailed in a while mail today, and you can be in first place. You can be in first place by the end of day today. Third key is you got to stop it before it starts share the strategies that I’ve shared, shared all the stuff from the affiliate section. I just talked about, teach them how to avoid the mid-launch, let down themselves, stop it before it starts. Make sure that you’re giving your affiliates commitment plans. Make sure that you’re sharing these commitment plans with them.
If you go to Mattmcwilliams.com/promoplan, we used to call them promotion plans. We changed it to commitment plan. I’ve shared why before I won’t get into it. It works better though. download this template. Okay. Just download it, use it on your end. Mattmcwilliams.com/promoplan. Grab that template and use them.
Walk through them with your affiliates. One-on-one in group on, on prerecorded videos and share this commitment plan with them so that they avoid these things before it even starts. You know, that’s the big thing is you’ve got to help them understand why, excuse me, there one second, why they need to not get into the situation in the first place.
All right, So we’ve talked about, mid-launch kind of that mid pre-launch phase. What about once the cart opens? What do you do as an affiliate manager to keep your affiliates from bonking? Well, I sorta just talked about this one, teach them number one, teach them. This is important here to teach them the strategies I just talked about. How do you avoid that mid cart bounce or mid cart dip.
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Teach them about creating a mid, a mid launch, you know, a mid cart bonus, you know, on their end, teach them how to use your mid cart bonus. We’ll talk about that in a second, but just educate them. That’s super important. Number two, daily sales contest. If you’ve got a five day open cart, I’m going to do a sales contest on days one through four, the five is all about the overall, you know, that’s all about the overall, but I’m going to do a day. One contest that doesn’t help the messy middle, but it does get us off on the right foot. I’m gonna do a contest on day, two day, three day four. And so the first day is probably going to be like a top three in sales, day two.
I’m probably going to do one where it’s like, depending on what we have going on. If we have a live cast that day, I’ll probably do like most live cast sales or something like that. But if not, that’s when I’ll probably interject and do something like everybody who makes one sale is entered. So really pushed to make a sale, day three. I’ll probably do something either centered around the mid cart bonus, or I’ll do something where it’s like, maybe you gotta make, you gotta make five sales to be entered or in every sale gets you an entry type thing. We’ll do something along those lines. And then day four. I’ll probably go back to just like a regular type leaderboard thing. You know, I’ll just mix it up again. Variety of contests is the key.
And then the last one here, this mid cart, you know, dip you want to avoid as an affiliate manager is specific mid cart bonuses. All right. So come up with a bonus or bonuses specifically for that middle of the cart. If you’ve got a seven day cart, I probably would do a day three in a day four.
No, I do a day three in a day, five, sorry, bonus. If you’ve got a five day cart, I would do a day three bonus. And then this is above and beyond. If you have like a live cast and offer specific bonuses for that, if you got a four day cart, I would do a day three bonus as well.
You know, that’s only available that day. You know, it’s okay. If you have one day where you kind of dip down and your focus more on like the FAQ’s and stuff like that. So the thing is you got to get your affiliates promoting them. So you do need to decide those in advance. You need to decide what those are going to be in advance and make sure that your affiliates, if they need special links that they’ve got them in advance, they make sure they’ve got copy. That addresses those. And so addressing those social media graphics, that address those, make sure they know what the heck is going on in terms of those specific bonuses.
So I mentioned that I’ve got some great or at least one great interview, but I’ve also got some others only mentioned one of them, tons of great interviews inside of affiliate, insider, monthly, that talk about this. The one with Jamie Birch is amazing. And then we did a, I did one with Matthew Lumis. We talked those limited time bonuses. That’s where I got that idea from. I never even thought of that before, until Matthew Loomis mentioned it to me. I’m trying to think of the other ones.
I know John Meese talks about it. Sarah Williams talks about it. I’m just trying to think of Paul Pruitt. I believe talks about it. Justin and Michelle Demers. I mean, there’s tons of interviews where they give you specific strategies around what I just shared today. And that’s inside of affiliate, insider monthly. You can get a trial of it. So basically can get access to everything we talk about in March and, and you know, everything we’ve got coming up over the next couple of months, just for $1. So, and I hate to be like one of the like Sally Struthers commercials, but for, for 7 cents a week or whatever, over the next, you know, two months, you can get access to all of that inside of affiliates that are monthly.
So there’s never been a better time to join. Go check that out. It’s just Mattmcwilliams.com/aimtrial , AIM for affiliate insider, monthly trial. And then as we wrap up, I’m going to give you a couple of specific action items for today. Number one is to take a look at your next affiliate promotion and identify where, where are the dips probably going to be? You know, if you got a four day launch, like the membership experience, you got day one, great, you got day four great, you know, four day open cart. You got day two with the live cast, about 20% of our sales are going to happen then. So the focus is day three.
What do you need to do on day three to really lift sales? You’ve got a seven day open cart. Maybe it’s you’ve got day one, great, seven day seven. Great. Maybe there’s a live cast on day six. Okay. We’re gonna focus in on days three and five. What do you need to do on day three and five to really lift sales?
So look at that upcoming promotion decide, okay, what are you going to do? What, what is your strategy? You’re going to do something out of the ordinary, you know, send that weird email, you know, what’s something, you know, kind of an angle change. You’ll plan ahead. Like you don’t have to do this. So it’s all about planning ahead.
I’m going to send five emails and they’re all basically going to be the same. No. How about number three or four? Be very different. Maybe email number three, we changed the angle, email number four, we send it a weird time. So there’s a little bit different shift in those. Like what are you going to do? What is your strategy?
Secondly, what kind of bonuses can you offer? You know, just make a list, like, hold back a bonus or two when you’re creating your bonus plan and, and think about those. Like what could you offer? And then third, if you’re going to host a live cast, you’ve got to plan that in advance. So what you do is you figure out, okay, let’s say you’re promoting the membership experience. You go into the Facebook group for students for Tribers and you go, Hey, I’d love to interview four or five, six of you who have a success story, anybody up for it.
And you know, 25 people respond and then you say, Hey, I’m doing it on April 26th at three, from three to 6:00 PM. That’s why you need about 25 people to respond. Cause some of those people, the time is not going to work for them. So you find a time that does work for them and you do it then, or you, you find a time that works for enough of them, like three to 6:00 PM. You get them in.
Sorry, I got distracted by a text message from a soccer coach. And, and Yeah, so I’m like, I always have to check. I never know because sometimes Alan will text me on the back end to be like, Hey Matt, your sound cutout or you know, or whatever. And I gotta make sure I’m checking those, those text messages.
So yeah, It is important stuff. So Lastly, if you, you know, a couple last action items here, if you have any questions, reach out to me, text me anytime at 2 6 0 2 1 7 4 6 1 9. I’d love to get your questions. I get always get great questions after these. So text me and just let me know if you have any questions and then the last action item.
If you know somebody who would benefit from hearing this message today, make sure you hit that share button or, you know, copy the link, text it to them, a message them, whatever, make sure they get access to this and then come back next week, guys, you’ve got a really exciting live lesson next week.
We’re talking about a topic that it’s really important, which is okay. So you got an affiliate promotion. That’s kind of jacked up a little bit. It’s not converting. Like you want it to, your audiences are very enthused. What do you do? Like what do you do when an affiliate promotion is going poorly, but more importantly, how do you avoid that in the first place? So we’ll talk about how to react to that.
It’s going to happen no matter how much preparation you do. If you do a hundred affiliate promotions over the next five years, one of them is going to go poorly. What do you do? And then secondly, how do you avoid 10 of those or 20 of those instead of just the one. So we’ll talk about that. The front end and what to do once it’s going wrong.
We’ll be live next Thursday, which is Thursday, April 7th. I had to double check. I was like, oh crap, did I schedule a Facebook? I schedule a live lesson on my daughter’s birthday. Oops. And no, I didn’t this the day before. So feel free. Also, if you want to text me and wish my daughter happy birthday, I’ll be glad to share it with her on April 6th. But anyway, we’ll be live Thursday, April 7th, 2:00 PM. Eastern for a what to do when an affiliate promotion is going badly and also how to avoid it in the first place. We’ll see you then. Bye guys. Bye-bye.
The post How to Avoid the Mid-Launch Dip in Affiliate Promotions appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Working with an affiliate network can be a great way to quickly grow your affiliate program. But it’s not an all-in-one solution. You still need to put in the work yourself to grow. Today, I’m answering some of the most common questions I get about affiliate networks. I’ll show you how to work best with them, how to handle the tech side of things, how to take advantage of what they have to offer, and what mistakes to avoid when working with an affiliate network.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Links Mentioned in this Episode ShareASale Affiliate Network
Find Affiliates Now
Your First 100 Affiliates
How to Get Affiliates to Go ALL-IN
EVE Formula
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy Don’t Launch if You Don’t Want This…
The Worst Part of My Entire Business: Why You Need to Hire an Affiliate Manager
How to Decide to Accept or Decline an Affiliate
How to Write, Publish, and SELL Your Book with Chandler Bolt
How to Use Affiliate Marketing in a Book
How to Run an Affiliate Book Launch
How to Work with An Affiliate Network: Q&A Lightning Round Working with an affiliate network can be a great way to quickly grow your affiliate program, but it’s not an all-in-one solution. You still need to put in the work yourself to grow. Today, I’m answering some of the most common questions I get about affiliate networks. I’ll show you how to work best with them, how to handle the tech side of things, how to take advantage of what they have to offer, and what mistakes to avoid when working with an affiliate network. So over the past couple of months, I have had a bunch of questions about affiliate networks. How do I work with them, how do I get into them? What about the tech side? Or there are different logistical questions, all of these things. How do I recruit affiliates for them? What mistakes should I be avoiding?
Today I’m taking eight of those questions that I’ve been asked repeatedly over the past couple of months. And I was kind of like none of these questions were like an episode in and of themselves. What I wanted to do was take all of them and do kind of a lightning round type episode where I answer these eight questions about how to work best with an affiliate network. I’m going to dive right in. Before I do, though, I want to make sure that you check out our 1st 100 Affiliates report. This is where you get your first 100 affiliates and we’ll talk about this a little bit later. But before we get into it, go to mattmcwilliams.com/first100. Make sure you download that report. I walk you through how to find those affiliates. I walk you through some templates that you can use to recruit those. So you want to go check that out at mattmcwilliams.com/first100.
Question number one, which affiliate networks should I work with and why should it just be one or multiple? It’s actually two questions here and I’ll get into the second one in a moment. But our recommendation is ShareASale. There are many others that are just fine. It’s not that I have an issue with most of them. I do with some. So there’s really no right answer. But ShareASale is my recommended one. And I’ll put this link in the show notes. But you can go to Mattmcwames.com/ShareASale ShareASale and sign up with them. But there are tons of others.
The ones that come to mind that are probably the biggest and most well-known Clickbank is for course creators and Info Products Commission Junction CJ’s for kind of the big brands of the world, it’s very expensive for merchants. If you’re going to sign up to be on CJ, it’s expensive. ShareAsale is considerably less expensive, especially if you get the Friends of Matt discount. So if you reach out to me if you want to sign up with ShareAsale. In fact, if you want to sign up with a ShareAsale merchant, don’t go to Mattmclaims.com ShareASale. Email me at Matt@Mattmclaims.com or you can text me is probably the better way. 260-217-4619 just text me and I’ll hook you up with the Friends of Matt discount. You get a little nice little discount, but it’s still not much. It’s a fraction of the cost of the Commission Junction.
As I said, Clickbank is kind of the course. Creators info products type World CJ’s for the big brands link to share is a good one. There’s impact. The list goes on and on. AvantLink A win there are just so many. ShareAsale is the one I recommend. Although I’ve run some big brands on shares. I ran the Tiny Princess affiliate program which we took that was north of the nine-figure range with 25,000 affiliates. It was huge and we ran it on a share sale. So it’s not just for tiny brands, it’s for bigger brands too. It’s just not typically you do the work which we’ll talk about as we go along. They don’t run it for you on share sale at all.
So the second question that ties in with that and the first one kind of said, should it just be one or multiple? The second one I got was how do I integrate with multiple networks? And the answer to that is I wouldn’t at first. There are some serious complications to that, meaning you might be way overpaying commissions. Years ago when I was at Legacy Learning Systems and I was running the affiliate program for them, that was back in 20. 09, 20. 10. In early 2009, I came on board. I took over this small affiliate program. We grew it. So when it was small they weren’t really noticing something that was happening until we started growing. And we definitely noticed it, which was we were on multiple networks and we were overpaying because our customers would click through affiliate A on network A and then affiliate B on network B and they would convert through B. But A was still cookies on A. Nobody overrode on A.
So there’s only one affiliate on each network and it was crediting both affiliates for the sales. Whereas if it had been on just an in-house program or just on one network, it would only be paying one of those. If that makes sense, it would only be paying if affiliate A and B are both in the same network, then B is going to get the credit A is not going to get anything. It was a big problem because we were basically overpaying by 15%. We went from reporting say about 400,000 in sales and within about five months I had to stop to about a million in sales and this was per quarter. So we’re doing about 400,000 per quarter. I got a million per quarter at that point. But the profits were way down, like dramatically down. We cannot figure out how until I was like, wait a minute, you have this thing on two networks, but I never run a program on two networks. And it just didn’t occur to me. If you do this, if you do set up on multiple networks, if you do an internal in a network, what you want to do is set up the network as an affiliate internally and then you have to do some stuff on your end that only fires the Pixel if it’s that internal affiliate.
So how that would work is you would have your internal program on your in-house software, whether it be a plug-in or something that you built yourself, doesn’t matter, you got your internal affiliate and you’ll have an internal affiliate for the network A and network B. And then you might even have an in-house program that you run. So if the person who’s shopping goes through in-house affiliate A and then they go through affiliate B on network B and then affiliate C on network C, then each of those internal links is different and it’s only going to credit one of those. It’s how you avoid paying out multiple commissions. Now, there’s a little bit of tech work on the back end because you have to tell your system to only fire the network a cookie if the sale was produced by a network A affiliate. So how that would work, just so just to be clear, is if they clicked on network A affiliate, that was the only thing they clicked on. Network A gets the credit. It’s whatever affiliate referred to traffic through that. But if they click on a second one, then it overwrites that. That way you’re not paying out multiple commissions that you don’t need to be paying on.
Question number three is, how do I get accepted as a merchant for the networks? The short answer is, usually if you pay them and you’re legit, they’re going to accept you. The big thing here is to show that you’re legit. They do not want to add riffraff to their network. They just don’t. They want to add the highest quality merchants that they can add the highest quality companies they want to take a look at your website. Is your website easy to shop for? Does it look nice? Are you professional? Is your price point reasonable? Are you charging $5,000 for something that everybody else charges $200 for? Are you charging $200 for something everybody else charges $5,000 for? That’s the big thing I’m looking for its legitimacy. I’m going to look at your BBB ratings. If I’m in a network, make sure you’re not like some sort of a scam. I’m going to try to interact with your customer service and see what kind of customer service I get but normally and this is why some companies with higher upfront fees it can be a good thing because it kind of rules out some of the riffraff on their end is how they look at it. But really if you pay and you’re legit you’re probably going to get accepted.
There’s no magic trick for getting accepted. If they say that they don’t accept gambling websites and you’re a gambling website, you’re not going to get accepted. Just make sure you’re abiding by their rules and you’ll be fine. The fourth question I got was how do I make the integration easy? I’m on WordPress in this example, how do I get all the codes and stuff? The easy answer there is to ask the network they are going to help with the code. It is in their interest to do so. They want your stuff to work. They want your sales to track because they usually get paid a percentage of the sales. They’re almost like a sub-affiliate or a second-tier affiliate. They want to get paid. So if it’s not tracking not only is that bad for you and bad for your affiliate but is also it bad for the network and so ask them to get them to help. It’s usually really simple, it’s usually copying and pasting some code may be setting up something as we talked about in the second question about multiple networks a moment ago but that’s on your end it’s usually really simple. The second question was about multiple networks a moment ago. But that’s on your end. It’s usually really simple. I mean every time I’ve ever done it, I basically sent code to a developer and within an hour we were set up and running. I mean it’s very simple.
I have question number five. Five, once I’m on the network, what is the best way to do outreach and get affiliates active? The same principles that I always share. The big thing here is don’t expect the network to do the work for you. They are not going to do your affiliate recruiting for you. Okay. Like people think, oh, I get on the network and people are just going to find me. Yes, but that’s going to be few and far between, and especially early on they’re going to find you. But they’re going to look at your stats because your stats are public now and they’re going to go, well, this company doesn’t even they’ve never even made a sale. Their earnings per click are zero. Why would I sign up with them? Once you get some affiliates on board and active, then you can start attracting affiliates. So this is 101. This is basic 101, how to recruit affiliates. I’ve shared it before, but I’ll share it again real quick. You look up affiliates who promoted similar products. So you type in your competitors’ names and you look to see who’s promoting them.
Second is you find their email address and we’re not going to go into that because I’ve shared it before. We also cover this in our course Findaffiliatesnow. This is much more in-depth. If you want to check that out at findaffiliatesnow.com, you can. You create a spreadsheet of the affiliates and then you send them a specific email that basically says hey, I noticed you were promoting something else. Here’s what we have coming up or we’re doing. Would you be interested? Love to share some more info with you. The key here is I often say the objective is not to get a yes. You’re not trying to get a yes. You are trying to get the three magic words, which is to tell me more. So the biggest way you can screw up an affiliate recruiting email is to make it too long. In other words, don’t try to fit everything into one email like I know you want to tell me. You spend a bunch of time developing it. You want to share six testimonials. Tell me how awesome the sales funnel is. You want to brag on your commissions, the prizes, who else is promoting it? Don’t do that. You just want to get a reply. That is all you are trying to do. That is all you are trying to do in this.
So again, check out your 1st 100 affiliates report at mattmcwilliams.com/first100. That’s a free reporter. You can check out our course Find affiliates. Now all those links are in the show notes and I’m going to put a link in the show notes as well for that affiliate recruiting email that will walk you through that as well. So the key here is just you got to be active. Being on the network means nothing in terms of recruiting. The only advantage is if that affiliate that you’re trying to recruit happens to be on the network, it’s easier to sign them up and they trust you a little bit more because you’re on the network. But it doesn’t mean, oh, I’m just going to get a bunch of affiliates coming to me, at least not early on. I shouldn’t say it means nothing, but it means very little early on. So you got to go and bust your b*** to recruit affiliates. We’ll make it easier if you check out our stuff, but you definitely got to put in the work on your end.
Six questions, what types of affiliates should I target? Well, I just kind of talked about that. We cover that in your First100 affiliates report. If you’re asking that question, though, here’s my thinking. You probably don’t know a lot of people in your niche. You probably don’t have like a list of potential affiliates just sitting around like, oh, I’ve been in the industry for five years. I’ve got 50 or 60 contacts. That would be great affiliates. So you’re going to have to do some cold email recruiting. You’re going to have to find some affiliates with your limited network or even affiliates that you don’t even know. This is just straight-up recruiting cold. And I would say probably 80% to 90% of the affiliates that we’ve recruited over the years, they began promoting for us, for us, and for our clients before we had any relationship with them. That means that prior to reaching out to them to ask them to promote something, we didn’t know each other at all. We recruited them cold. So there are three keys to Cold recruiting. Number one, scale, just sheer number of affiliates, you got to cast a wide net.
Secondly is personalization. Don’t do the hello there or Hi there or Hi, friend, don’t do that crap. There’s a 0% chance of this working, mentioning their content, mentioning the programs or products they’ve promoted in the past, mentioning an interview that you saw with them or heard with them, congratulate them on accomplishment like, hey, Congrats on finishing third place. And so and so’s launch, right? That’s key. So scale, personalization and persistence. We have just found that if we email 1000 affiliates, we’ll get about 20. If we email them twice, we’ll get about 40. If we email them three times, we’ll get about 60. Eventually, there’s a point of diminishing returns. But the point is it’s just persistence, persistence, persistence, persistence, persistence, persistence. And you got to keep following up. Keep following up, keep following up, keep following up. If you want to actually get affiliates, nothing beats persistence. Absolutely nothing beats persistence. And so you want to target those types of affiliates that have been promoting similar products, and that means they’re probably going to be cold. But again, that’s going to allow you to expand your network. So remember scale, personalization, and persistence. Just cast a wide net, personalize the communication and follow up ten to twelve times. Seven, the question is what affiliate management software and plugins do you recommend with networks? Which ones do you recommend? What are the best ones? Why do you recommend them? Are there any deals on them? The network is your tracking. That’s your management platform. You don’t need anything else. Now, I mentioned if you have some internal stuff if you’re running an internal program and a network, well, then you need the internal stuff. And there’s so many there’s IDEV Infusionsoft. If you go to MattMcwilliams.com/Toolbox, I’ve got some recommendations there, but the network is going to be your primary tracking, especially if that’s all you’re using. If you’re not using an in-house one, that’s going to be all of your tracking. That’s going to be where all of your reporting and all of that stuff is.
Last question here. Number eight is how do I best leverage affiliates? Good question number one, you got to get them activated. I mentioned that earlier. I think that was question number five. I mentioned you’ve got to get them activated. And so I did an episode not terribly long ago. I did a series on Onboarding. So make sure you go back and listen to that. It was probably about 15 to 15 weeks ago. This will go live in, I think, late March of 2022, probably like the beginning of the year-ish maybe the end of last year. I did a series on Onboarding your affiliates. I also did one on Activating affiliates.
Well, go listen to those episodes. That’s the first thing you’ve got to get them active. You got to get them on board. You got to get them. You need to give them what they need. I did a whole episode on this as well. They need general direction. These are the seven must for us in our agency, right? They need general direction. You need to train them. You need to give them lessons. You need to share tips and strategies with them. They need a swipe copy, and they need to know how to use it. They need graphics. They need banner ads. They need mailing plans. They need to be told, here’s what to do. What are the best days to mail and who do I send them to? We create those mailing plans, right? We call them the ABC plans, all in or aggressive, balanced and conservative ABC. And so they need that they need to be told what to do and when to do it. They need a promo checklist, a very simple checklist about here’s what you need to be doing. And on this day, and it’s just kind of a checklist above and beyond mailing plans like make sure your blog post, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever you’re using right and they need to feel a part of the process.
So give them behind the scenes access. Make sure you create a Facebook group, ask for their help, share, testimonials, explain your thinking, just keep them updated and make them feel like they’re a part of the process. And then the last thing that comes to mind is internal with our agency we call it the Eve formula. Eve entry points. Variety and energy. They need multiple entry points into your funnels. They need whether it be a workshop, a PDF, a webinar, a podcast series, whatever the case may be, they need multiple entry points. We studied. I shared this I don’t know 20 or 30 episodes ago, what was the biggest difference between seven and eight-figure launches? Number and variety of entry points? Number and variety of entry points.
The second V speaking of variety is variety. They need a variety of things to promote. So not just entry points, but when you get to the sales part, when you get to open cart, for example, if it’s a launch, different things can they promote open cart? Is there a fast action bonus? Is there a mid-cart bonus? Is there a live stream that we can drive them to sell? Can we possibly do, you know, phone calls? Can I drive them to do phone calls with the sales team or chat with somebody? Like different things like that. And they need your energy. They need your energy. You’ve got to be the biggest cheerleader for the product and for your company and for your affiliate program or what the heck are they going to do? They’re going to be like, whatever.
So all of these things apply to any program, but of course, they apply to work with a network as well. A lot of times with the network, I see a lot of people, who run the program and they send out a monthly affiliate newsletter and they expect their affiliates to do anything with that. What the heck? I don’t want your newsletter. This is 2022. Stop sending newsletters. Stop emailing only once a month. Email your affiliates three, four times a week. Make it useful, though. Don’t email them just for the sake of emailing them. Used to just email for the sake of emailing. No, make the emails useful. This is marketing. You’re marketing to your affiliates. So market to them. Send them a lot of emails with updates behind the scenes to share, testimonials with them, give them new tools, announce new products. Treat it like basically an ongoing launch with your affiliates. Keep them engaged in the process so they can see your energy. So that’s our lightning round here for how to work with an affiliate network. There’s a little bit of nuance, but it’s about the same as working in-house with some of those nuances. As I said, I am so excited, guys, about the next episode, going a little bit off the track of specifically affiliate stuff. I don’t want to talk about how to build your team.
This is something we’ve been doing intentionally over the past couple of years. We’ve scaled up from six people just a couple of years ago. I think she starts in less than two weeks now our 15th team member, I think. So we’re scaling up. I’ve been there and done that from 2005 to 2011, we scaled the company from basically nothing, just the three of us, to 52 people and doing one and a half million dollars a month in sales. And so I’ve been there and done that. And I know what it’s like to scale. It’s a super fun process. But if you do it right. So next episode, I’m going to talk about how to build your team. We’re talking about working with virtual assistants just when you’re getting started. Like, how do you work with somebody who 510 hours a week? How do you work with contractors? How do you work with full-time employees to scale your business? So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss that episode. And make sure you share this episode. If you know somebody who needs this may be trying to work on an affiliate network or start an affiliate program. They could use this or next week. Tell them about the podcast so they don’t miss out on this information. And with that, we’ll wrap up and I will see you in the next episode talking about how to build your team. Thank you so much for listening today. You.
The post How to Work with An Affiliate Network: Q&A Lightning Round appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
If your audience is looking to start a business and wants to do so profitably…sooner rather than later…this opportunity is for you.
Ryan Levesque isn’t exactly new to online marketing. In fact, he’s written multiple top-selling books for online marketers and has been featured across national media including Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, USA Today, Forbes, NBC, & Fox.
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Ryan and his team have helped entrepreneurs like Michael Hyatt and Amy Porterfield revolutionize their businesses. Platform University introduced their quiz and increased their monthly revenue from cold traffic by 61%.
Their quiz funnel software, bucket.io, has had over 30 million + users in just the past 12 months.
Enough said?
I’m excited about this opportunity because:
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2. He’s every affiliate’s dream! Ryan knows that going the extra mile to make affiliates happy is good for everyone. And he walks the talk. Whether this is your FIRST affiliate promotion, or you’re aiming to make a MILLION dollars, Ryan and his team have one goal: to help make this your MOST successful promotion of the entire year. There’s $1 Million in cash and prizes up for grabs. A generous commission. And you get paid in 14 days!
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CLICK HERE TO APPLY TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE
Target Audience: So, WHO is this offer for?
- Entrepreneurs who want to Generate More Leads & Customers Online…
- Anyone looking to Build Your List & Grow Your Audience profitably…
- Businesses owners who Sell Multiple Products or…
- Anyone who sells ONE product/service that potentially helps Different Types of People…
- Anyone who sells E-Comm, Information Products, Coaching, Consulting, & Affiliate Marketing…
…and even Complete Beginners who are starting from scratch…
2022 Launch Dates: PHASE I
CHALLENGE: Choose Ask BUILD (Jun 8-14)
This FREE 5-Day Challenge is designed to help beginners CHOOSE their market and ASK what they want, and gear up to BUILD their funnel via the QUIZ Funnel Workshop. This phase ends with the “What Type of Funnel is Right for You?” Quiz.
PHASE II
WORKSHOP: QUIZ Workshop (Jun 15-21)
This is a LIVE 3-PART PLF Pre-Launch. PLC 1 (Mon, Jun 15), PLC 2 (Wed, Jun 17), PLC 3 (Fri Jun 19) with LIVE Q&A sessions in between each session (Tue/Thu/Sat). This phase ends with the Early Bird (EB) Sales Webinar and Open Cart.
PHASE III
OPEN CART: Webinars/Livestream (Jun 22-28)
This week-long OPEN CART (Jun 22nd) phase will feature a BIG WEBINAR (Tue, Jun 23rd), ALL-DAY LIVESTREAM (Thu, Jun 25th) and student SUCCESS PANEL.
This phase culminates with CART CLOSE Sunday night at 11:59PM US PT.
Pricing: The QUIZ Funnel Masterclass Payment Options
Full Pay…1 Payment of $1999 (+$99/mo starting in 30 days)
Pay Plan…3 Payments of $799 (+$99/mo starting in 30 days)
GUARANTEE: 14 Day 100% Money-Back Guarantee. All they ask is that you complete the course work from Module 1 to show them that you at least gave it a try. If, after completing the work from Module 1, you decide that the course isn’t for you, simply let them know and you’ll receive a swift and full refund.
Commissions/Prizes: * $1 Million+ in CASH Prizes & Commission * $100,000 1st Place Sales Contest CASH Prize * 40% Commission ($800+ per sale)
Commissions are paid within 14 days or less.
Ryan routinely writes six-figure checks to his top partners and pays out over 100+ affiliates every year. Whether this is your FIRST affiliate promotion, or you’re aiming to make a MILLION dollars, their goal is simple: To help make this your MOST successful promotion of the entire year.
CLICK HERE TO APPLY TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE
Affiliates who have committed to promote so far: Past partners include some of the living legends of online marketing. Jeff Walker, Michael Hyatt, Eben Pagan, Todd Herman, Josh Turner, Christian Mickelsen, and more.
Next Steps: The opportunity to promote the QUIZ Funnel Masterclass is by invitation only.
If you would like to promote this offer, please provide your FULL contact information and apply to become an affiliate by visiting this link here: QuizLaunch.com
Once they review your information and you’ve agreed to and accepted their affiliate partner terms and conditions and have been accepted as a partner, they will provide you with launch assets, including swipe copy, images, and your affiliate links as well as access to your affiliate area to track all your stats.
Testimonials Just look at some of these results…
CLICK HERE TO APPLY TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE
Click Here to Learn More About Our Recommended Affiliate Programs The post Affiliate Opportunity: QFM with Ryan Levesque appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
So, you’re ready to hire an Affiliate Manager and scale your business, but there are so many things to consider! In this video, I’m going to give you ALL the inside information on hiring an affiliate manager, from where to find them, how to vet them, and how much to pay them. I also share the pros and cons of outsourcing versus hiring in-house.
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
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Links Mentioned in This Lesson: Your Affiliate Launch Coach
Recommended Affiliate Programs and Upcoming Product Launches
TEXT ME: 260-217-4619
The post Hiring an Affiliate Manager: Who, When, Where, and How appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
There are so many opportunities to create new products, new services, and new offers. But there’s one big question you must ask yourself. Today, I share what that question is and how it drives nearly every decision we make in our company.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Links Mentioned in this Episode Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy The Worst Part of My Entire Business: Why You Need to Hire an Affiliate Manager
How to Decide to Accept or Decline an Affiliate
How to Write, Publish, and SELL Your Book with Chandler Bolt
How to Use Affiliate Marketing in a Book
How to Run an Affiliate Book Launch
How to Find Affiliates for a Book Launch (or Any Launch)
Don’t Launch if You Don’t Want This… There are so many opportunities to create new products, new services, and new offers. But there’s one big question you must ask yourself today. I share with you that question is and how it drives nearly every decision we make in our company. So this is something that came up in a coaching call I was doing with one of our affiliate launch Coach clients the other day. And she was asking like, should I go in this direction or this direction? And it kind of reminded me of a lot of our clients and quite frankly, myself and so many people that I know too many people are creating products just to make a buck. They’re creating products because they see a segment of a segment within their audience. And they’re like, well, I need to serve them. I need to create a product for them.
They’re creating products because somebody asked, would you create this product? One person asked two people. Everybody is asking, really? Everybody? You have 14,812 people on your list. You have 53,000 people on your list. How many people is everybody? Well, two. I see a need and I feel the need. But do you have to be the one to fill the need? So I just see people. They’re creating products. They’re creating services just to make a few bucks in the short term. The thing is, I’ve done that. I have done that. We used to have all these products and all these services all over the place. We had so many products, so many services that it was ridiculous. And the thing is, I didn’t really want to be known for those things. I didn’t want to be known as the guy who had half the products that I had.
Now, the problem here, to complicate matters, these products did serve my audience. They were useful. We got good feedback on some of them. Oh, my gosh. Matt, thank you so much for this training. Thank you for this training on how to start a podcast. Thank you for this training on how to do virtual summits. Thank you for this training on this course or this PDF on whatever it was. So they did serve my audience, but they only served a very small percentage of them. And so a few years ago, we started to get more intentional. And this process has taken about three years. We’re not 100% there, but we’re pretty darn close. And we just basically asked the question, what do I want to be known for right now? I’m the head of the company. I’m the face of the company that will evolve over the next five to seven years. That is a goal within our company
. Just because I want the company to outlive me. We’re not sure we’re morbid, but there is like Matt got hit by a bus. Yeah, we’ve got really good insurance on me as a company. That’s the problem is if I die, the company kind of dies. This podcast dies, our products die. Even our coaching and our agency die. Right now, that won’t be the case in two to three years. We’ll have people trained up more, but we wanted to get very intentional. And the question was, what do I want to be known for? The question is evolving to what do we want to be known for? And this became a very simple rule for us. And it’s my advice for you. Don’t do stuff you don’t want to be known for. Don’t create a product if you don’t want to be known for it. Don’t create a service. Don’t start coaching about something if you don’t want to be known for it, because that was what happened.
Well, I know a lot about business. I can be kind of a business coach. I know a lot about Virtual Summits. I’ve run 15 to 18 them. I can kind of teach this. And I started a podcast and it went really well. And we’re close to 500 episodes now. Holy crap, 482, I think, is this one. So I can teach podcasting, I can teach copywriting. The general copywriting I’ll talk more about. We teach copywriting for affiliates now, but that’s a specific part. It’s within my wheelhouse there. Right. I don’t want to necessarily be known as the affiliate copywriting guy, but I do want to be known as the affiliate guy, and copywriting is a part of that. And so we had to really get intentional about what we wanted to be known for. Don’t launch a product. Don’t create a service if you don’t want to be known for it. And so ask the question, do I want to be known for blank, what’s this product? It’s such and such.
Do I want to be known for such and such? And if not, don’t launch a product for that. Don’t create a service. Don’t create a coaching program for it. Don’t create a mini-course for it. Don’t create certainly a big course for it. Don’t create a physical product. Don’t create software for that thing if you don’t want to be known for it. There’s an old GE, General Electric Maximum from Jack Welch basically said, we are not going to enter a market unless we could be number one or number two. And if they had a business, because GE is one of those companies, they have things of all sorts. They owned NBC, they made blenders, and they were in like Rockets and engines. They were all over the place. Right? It was no longer General Electric. It was just general businesses all over the place. And when he took over CEO, they had a rule like, if we have a market and we don’t hit number one like we’re already in that business.
We’re already in that market. If we’re not number one or number two, within, I don’t know, like a year or two, we are getting out of it. We are selling that part of the company and we are not going to enter a market unless we can be number one or number two within a period of time. That’s their maximum. That’s their rule. And you need a rule like that, like don’t enter a market unless you can be number one or number two and you want to be known for it. So for me, just as an example, that is three things and three things only.
Number one, managing affiliate programs, talking about affiliate management and whether you be an affiliate manager or an entrepreneur who’s going to run an affiliate program, starting an affiliate program, scaling an affiliate program, recruiting affiliates falls under that finding affiliates, running affiliate contest, encouraging and motivating affiliates, getting more from your affiliates, teaching your affiliates, training your affiliates, what emails to send to your affiliates, how to run an affiliate Facebook group, what commissions to pay all that. Managing affiliate programs. Secondly is affiliate marketing. How do I get started in affiliate marketing? How do I make more money as an affiliate? How do I find affiliate programs, things like that, how do we get accepted into affiliate programs?
Third, get started with your email list. Now, this is the one that is kind of the outlier because it doesn’t technically have anything to do with affiliates. But it’s one of those things. Often I can’t get you to that affiliate marketing stage if you have nobody on your list. Everything I teach about affiliate copywriting and how to be a better affiliate, it’s relevant if you have zero lists. Now we have a course called No List, No Problem. It teaches you how to make a little bit of money if you don’t have an email list. And I think we sell it for like two $300, I can’t remember off the top of my head. But that program is like the here you spend two $300 and you make that back over the course of a couple of months, you know, and you’re going to make a few hundred Bucks a month maybe on the high end versus no product, no problem.
For example, teaching affiliate marketing. If you’ve got a list of 1000 people, which we teach you how to do that in our list building program, you can make up the $500 and no product, no problem in a day. Like you can make that up in a couple of hours if you have 1000 people in your email list. So there’s a reason why I teach email marketing and building your email list as a precursor to affiliate marketing, it actually makes sense. While it’s slightly outside of the wheelhouse, it makes sense. So the thing is those are our three things. Only those three things.
So now we create and sell only products around those three core areas. That’s it. Do I occasionally teach some other stuff? Yeah, I’m recording this the same day that I’m going to be doing a live lesson on YouTube and Facebook All about getting focused and staying focused and regaining focus. When you lose it. What the heck do I have to do with any of these things? No, nothing in a sense has to do with being an entrepreneur. It ties back to it. But I’m not going to create a product about focus. I’m just teaching it as a free lesson that you can come to. That’s already happened. So if you go to my website and search forsee that recently, you’ll find it.
But the point is I’m teaching that as a free lesson, but I’m not creating a product around it because I don’t want to be known for that. I don’t want to be the focus guy. If 20 people came to me after this life lesson and said, Matt, you need to create a product. They told me three years ago have been like, you know what we do? We need to create a product. It needs to be a ten-module course and I need to teach this stuff and we’re going to charge $1,000 and we’re going to go do a big launch around it in August. And now I’m like, no, I don’t want to be known for that.
So I shared some tips for free. If you really want to dive deep into it, I can make a recommendation to some friends who have products in that niche. So three core areas, that’s it for me. For most people, it’s probably one or two. So we ended up eliminating about ten products and services just because of this. And now we only offer five main products for beginner affiliates. For those who want to make more money from affiliate marketing, beginner to intermediate affiliates, we have no product, no problem for beginning affiliate program managers. Entrepreneurs who want to run an affiliate program. We’ve got Find Affiliates Now, right?
So these are three groups, but there are four products because we have more advanced. There’s a big difference between I don’t have an affiliate program and I want to get started and I’m running a seven-figure affiliate program already or I’m running a seven-figure business and want to start an affiliate program versus I’m starting a business and want to run it or I have a $20,000 business and want to start an affiliate program. So we have our affiliate launch Coach program like that’s, like the five and six-figure businesses where we coach them on running their affiliate program. And then we have our agency for the high six-figure and seven-figure businesses where we work with people like Ryan Levesque and Stu McLaren and Tricia Brooke and all the others that we work with flow chat. And we work with people in all kinds of niches as well, the pet industry, the Dog Gurus and Relationship Development, Stacey and Paul.
We work with some amazing people in the agency, but they’re all very high six-figure into some of them eight-figure business owners. And then for those just starting out, we have our List launch challenge, which teaches you how to get 1000 subscribers really quick. And the amazing thing is this drastic reduction in products and services led to an even more dramatic increase in revenue and therefore income. We had less products, less people than we could potentially get because all of a sudden all the people who wanted these things and these things and this thing, they couldn’t buy anything from us.
And the people who came to us for those three core things but then wanted to learn these other things, couldn’t buy anything else from us because we didn’t have the next thing. If you come to us and you become a new affiliate launch coach client, there’s no really next step other than to possibly work with our agency. And that’s probably a year or two down the road. You’re not going to buy that and then buy this like anything else, everything else is below you, right? So it’s kind of weird. Like we’re doing fewer things and making a lot more money. We also have less stress because we don’t have as much stuff to update, less customer service training.
We only have a handful of products, so there are only a few places you need to log into an update. You don’t have to remember how to process. There are only a few price points. And so things like my login doesn’t work well, it’s probably one of a few places, right? Less complication. On our end, we saved a lot of money paying team members to create funnels and products. We used to have 74 different funnels. Now we’ve basically got our four core funnels. There are only four funnels. If I create an opt-in, it’s going through one of four funnels. So I now focus on those five things. There are four funnels that lead to five things.
As I said, because the affiliate management piece has three kinds of branches, it makes them better. It makes the products better. Now, no product, no problem is better. Finding affiliates now is better. List launch challenge is better. Why? Because I can redo the course every two years. I can update it. I can reshoot it. I can make it better. I can answer questions that we got asked in the last thing. I can update it to the times like, oh, I can talk about this social media network or that thing or there’s a new law and I can talk about those things in the course. So they’re better. But I can’t do that if I’ve got twelve of them. If I have twelve of them, I can’t update them every two years. I’d go crazy.
I’m updating one every two months now I update one every six months. Really? I update like two every year. I just update like two in the same week. I’ll just update two of the courses and then I’ll go a whole year without updating anything. And then I’ll do another two and then I’ll loop back around. It makes things so much easier and less stressful for me. Now, to be clear, we do have other products. We’ve got mini-courses, we’ve got physical products, things like that. But they fit into those buckets and they lead to those core products. So we’ve got like our core buckets, right? Managing affiliate programs, affiliate marketing, getting started with your email list. So we have products and services like featuring your affiliate program.
You can feature your affiliate program on my website. Very cost-effective. Just as a side note, you can do that. And that serves those six and seven-figure. We don’t do it typically for new affiliate programs, but that serves those people in a different way. We’ve got the affiliate code training for more of the beginner who is looking to start an affiliate program. Or maybe they’re at like ten to $25,000 a month. They’re not ready for coaching, which is a higher investment, but they need some instruction. We’ve got our recruiting swipe files that are like $37, right. For affiliates. We have 10K in 10 weeks. We’ve got affiliate insider monthly our membership. We’ve got the ultimate affiliate swipe file.
We do bundles from time to time. We have many courses on finding affiliate programs and copywriting as I mentioned earlier, but they all tie back to the main thing here, which is affiliate marketing for beginners just starting out with their list. Yeah, we got the list on Challenge. But then we also have to turn your list into cash, which is kind of like the next step. Hey, you got that? First, like 500 to 1000 people. What’s the next step to just how do you make $500 a month? If you think of No Product No problem is how do I go to $10,000 a month? Turn your list into cash. How do I make a few hundred dollars a month? We’ve got our avatar creation training, which you need to do some of the other stuff that we teach.
So the question is, do you want to be known for what you’re creating? And if not, don’t create it. Don’t create it very simply, but you still need to serve your audience in other areas. And so this is where affiliate offers come in. You don’t have to be known for something just because you promote it. If you remember, I think seven episodes ago, eight episodes ago, we did an episode on the affiliate donut. And I mentioned how you’ve got your core thing is what you’re known for. That’s what you’re known for. And then all those sprinkles are your affiliate offers. And I mentioned that I know my audience wants to learn things. They want to learn about memberships. So we promote the membership experience with Steve McClaren’s client. But we do promote them. They want to learn how to set up quizzes.
So we promote Quiz Funnel Master Class with Ryan Levesque, also a client. But we still promote them. They want to learn how to do product launches, some of the basics of product launches. So we promote product launch formula with Jeff Walker, also a client, but we still promote him. They want to learn to podcasting. So we promote Pod Hacker, which I’ll share more about that coming soon. They want to learn speaking. So we promote BigTalk Academy, Tricia Brouk, who’s a client how to start a blog.
So we promote my friend Jonathan Milligan and so on and so on. And we promote all these things as an affiliate because I still want to serve my audience. But I don’t want to be known as the guy who teaches you how to start a blog or how to become a speaker or how to do podcasting or product launches or quizzes or memberships or whatever. I don’t want to teach you how to lose weight. So I recommend Alan Thomas and so on and so on. As I mentioned earlier, the old GE maximum, right?
Don’t enter a market unless you can be number one or number two. And if you want to be known for it, this is where you have to take an honest look at yourself, an honest look and say, can I teach this better than anyone else? Or can I teach it differently enough? Can I make this widget better than anyone else? Can I be the best? Do I want to be known for it? And if not, don’t do it. Find affiliate Offers to Promote if your audience still wants to do it, everybody’s coming to me. Ok, cool.
Then go find an affiliate offer. And if yes, go all out, go all out, go 100% into that market, into that product, and you’ll be known for it. That’s what you want, right? But only do it if you want to be known for it. If you can be number one or number two. So if you know a fellow entrepreneur who needs to hear this message, make sure you share this episode with them and tell them to do what you’re going to do if you haven’t already, which subscribes, make sure you subscribe hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss any of the upcoming episodes.
The next episode I’ve got coming up is I want to talk about how to work with an affiliate network so we’re going to do a little lightning round. For those of you who want to set up an affiliate program on a network, I’m going to answer all of your questions. I’ve been getting I’ve gotten like I don’t know half a dozen ten questions or so over the past couple of months. I’m going to answer them all on the next episode so make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. I’ll see you then.
The post Don’t Launch if You Don’t Want This… appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
I get asked about my top emails all the time, that’s why I have decided to reveal my top 5 affiliate promotion emails ever – I will walk through them and share why they worked so well – why we chose the format, words, etc. (which pretty much means all the details and secret sauce!) If you want to learn all psychology and marketing principles I USED to create my TOP 5 Affiliate Emails EVER then check this video. Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
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Links Mentioned in This Lesson: Ultimate Affiliate Swipe File
Recommended Affiliate Programs and Upcoming Product Launches
TEXT ME: 260-217-4619
Come join me on my next live lesson, “ My Top 5 Affiliate Emails Ever…and WHY They Worked”, Thursday, March 17 at 2:00 pm ET. More details can be found here.
The post My Top 5 Affiliate Emails Ever…and WHY They Worked appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
What I’m about to share with you might shock you. It’s the worst part of my entire business and something that has held me back for nearly three years. I’m almost ashamed to admit it but the worst part of our company is…
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Links Mentioned in this Episode Your Affiliate Launch Coach
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy How to Decide to Accept or Decline an Affiliate
How to Write, Publish, and SELL Your Book with Chandler Bolt
How to Use Affiliate Marketing in a Book
How to Run an Affiliate Book Launch
How to Find Affiliates for a Book Launch (or Any Launch)
The Affiliate Donut
The Worst Part of My Entire Business: Why You Need to Hire an Affiliate Manager What I’m about to share with you might shock you. It’s the single worst part of my entire business and it’s something that’s held me back for nearly three years. I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but the worst part of our entire company. So the title of this episode, if you read the full thing, is the worst part of my entire Business Why You Need to Hire an Affiliate Manager. And that’s a little bit of a tease, right? If you read the full title, you’re going I may have figured out what the worst part of Matt’s business is, but surely it’s not affiliate management.
Well, it is. The worst part of my entire business for the past three years has been affiliate management. Now I’m going to explain why that is and how we solved that problem. We have solved that problem. But the reality is that I started realizing about three years ago that it’s hard to be my own affiliate manager. I feel like I might be the best in the world at what I do. And yet I am now managing a team of more than ten people. I am now the CEO of a fast-growing company.
I’m responsible for just like many of you and many business owners. I’m responsible for the management of our content. I’m recording this podcast right now. This 20 minutes or so that I’ll record this podcast is time that I’m not being an affiliate manager. The hour or so that I go live every Thursday is a time that I’m not an affiliate manager. The time I spent prepping for that is time that I’m not an affiliate manager.
The time I spent planning the content and planning our promotions and planning all of our stuff and answering questions from the team and what do we want to do here? And delivering the webinars that we do with our partners, adds up to tens of hours a week, 2030 now close to 35 hours a week that I spend doing the management. I didn’t have time to be an affiliate manager for my own company. And it really hit kind of a breaking point.
A few years ago, we were running a big launch. This ended up at the time, it was our biggest launch that we’d ever had and we were on track to basically just shatter all of our records and our goals. And I remember the second to last night we did a six-hour live stream. I feel like we started at like 05:00 p.m. And I went till after 11:00 p.m. And this is the night before cart close day busy. This is huge. Like, all of our affiliates are getting ready for the next day and all of their plans and I’m live for 6 hours.
I remember I think I was going to say I took a break at the top or bottom of every hour for like three minutes to run to the bathroom and one of my old team members was on with me and he’d take a break. Like we kind of alternate like every half hour. One of us would kind of take off for like two or three minutes. And I remember I took like a ten or twelve-minute break at halfway through it was like 08:00 p.m. Went up and just took a quick break just to decompress and then came back on.
But I remember getting text messages about the launch from our affiliates who have questions about their affiliate manager and I’m like trying to text them under the table. It was ridiculous and it was unsustainable. And the worst part of that whole launch was the affiliate management. And I’m like, okay, something’s got to change. And so all throughout this though, when I’m running people’s affiliate programs, I’m the best in the world, but it’s the worst part of my business.
So the solution was that this year we hired someone and I want to talk today about why you should too. Now first I want to address the things that I’ve talked about before. Early on, I believe you should be your own affiliate manager. And then if you’re not, I feel like you need to know more about how to run an affiliate program. You need to understand it right? This is the number one mistake.
I see entrepreneurs who start an affiliate program when they’re starting out, they know they need some help running it. So they hire an affiliate manager and they promptly abdicate all responsibility for their program to him or her. And then they wonder why it keeps getting smaller and not larger. Do not make this mistake. You need to be involved and early on you need to be the one doing almost all of the work on your affiliate program early on. But then as you grow, you begin to have different needs and you need to possibly hire one.
I’ve mentioned before kind of some of the problems with affiliate managers. I’ve been one for 17 years, but I want to be honest. I want to share some of the problems. I want to share the solution. I’ve seen three major problems with affiliate managers over the years. In fact, I’ve contributed to some of these problems. These problems are exactly why we now spend a lot of our time coaching entrepreneurs on running their affiliate programs and coaching affiliate managers on how to be better affiliate managers so that they aren’t contributing to these problems.
Number one, they aren’t you. I can’t be you. When you hire Matt McWilliams Consulting to be your affiliate manager, I can’t be you. And there are certain relationships that you need to have as an entrepreneur you are the best person in those relationships. Nothing I can do can replace that. And so we tell people all the time, hey, when we take over, we take over running your affiliate program. We’re going to take care of 98% of the stuff. We’re going to take 98% of all the responsibilities off your plate. What are the 2% relationships? Relationships.
As an affiliate manager, when a company hires us to run their affiliate program, the very first thing we do is schedule 90 minutes to two-hour-long meetings just for us to better understand your company. We go through I tell people that one of the big things is we’re trying to craft a narrative. I want to know, what are the stories? What are the cool stories from people who, you know, your students, your clients, your customers? What are the results you’re getting? What’s the narrative? Who’s this product for? Who is it not for?
Like, all these things, I want to know these things. I want to be able to speak your language and speak the language of your affiliates and your clients, but I can never do it as well as you. And so with some of those top partners, you’re going to need to be the one that kind of has at least a part of that relationship. So let me be clear. Early on, there’s no one better than you to run your affiliate program when you’re first starting out under six figures, especially, there’s no one better.
The second problem with affiliate managers is that their incentives are wrong by definition. They are often incentivized to grow your program, but at what cost? So when you have growth at all costs strategy, they allow things like trademark bidding and rogue affiliates and affiliates who use nefarious tactics to attract customers. Right. They’re hard to police and they can cause brand damage. These are things I worry about in my company. It’s why when we hired the person that we hired, it was a five-month process.
I know Jim is amazing. And if you’re interested, by the way, in being an affiliate for any of our stuff, just reach out to partners. At MattMcwilliams.com, you’ll get Jim Atkins and he’s going to absolutely help you. And he’s 100% on board. He has been trained by me, and he’s still being coached by me. So if you want an affiliate program run as well as any, it’s going to be ours now. Not before he took over. Before he took over, I sucked at it because I was too busy doing everything else in our company. So their incentives are wrong.
And then thirdly, their first priority is always their job. Their first priority is protecting their job. Looking good, keeping you as a client or an employer making the most money for the longest amount of time. And so I remember, like, there have been times I hate to admit this, but there were times back when our company as affiliate managers when we ran programs like Shutterfly and Adidas and other big companies we need to be very careful not to grow too fast. Publicly traded companies don’t want you to grow too fast.
They don’t want you to grow by 60% this quarter and then only 20% next quarter. Even though that is better than 40 40. If I go 40 40 that’s actually less growth than 60 20. Just because math is right and so they’re worried about their stock price so we would purposely hold back growth. Entrepreneurs don’t want that. I want to grow as fast as possible. If Jim comes to me and goes hey Matt, just so you know we got this deal and they’re going to do a million dollars next quarter but nothing the rest of the year I’m going to go cool.
I have literally no problem with that. I don’t get it. So you don’t have to have someone run your affiliate program for you. You need to learn how to do it and you need to understand some of the principles. You need to understand the relationships but it reaches a point where you just can’t do it. You’re busy running your business. You can’t be on a live stream and at the same time be communicating with your affiliates. So you need a full-time affiliate manager and you need someone like us to take that over for you. And just to be clear I’m not selling you on our agency.
We work with the best of the best. Yes, maybe I am. A little bit. We work with Ryan Levick and Stu McLaren. We worked with Michael Hyatt and Ray Edwards. We work with Trisha Brooke and just literally if you look at an affiliate program over the past five or six years pretty disinterested. We ran it. There’s a reason for that. But that’s not what this is about. Whether you hire us and we’ll do an amazing job for you or whether you hire somebody full-time who we coach, we can coach them on how to do it.
It’s probably not something that once you hit high five figures or six figures that you need to be doing yourself because it’s going to suffer. I feel like I’m the best in the world at what I do and I can’t do my own affiliate program and run our business at the same time. It’s just not possible. I can’t run it at the level that I know it needs to be run at. And part of that, admittedly, is my expectations, my standards. But part of that is I know that if I invest in a good affiliate manager, if I go out and hire someone, and just so you know, for us or somebody else, you’re going to pay between 60 and $125,000 a year. If I go out and invest $100,000, I’m going to make 510, 30 times that amount of money.
Just to be clear, you pay us $125,000. You’re making about 20 times that. I know that it’s going to be worth it. And it’s going to free me up. And I’m not going to feel the stress of, okay, I’m on this live stream and I have my ten-minute break. I have my ten-minute break in a six-hour live stream. Ten minutes to go talk to my wife, put my feet up, drink some throat coat tea, and just go to the bathroom and rest for 6 seconds. And what am I doing? I’m feverishly texting affiliates back and replying to emails.
That’s not the way it should be. And if you don’t want that kind of life, you’ve got to hire an affiliate manager, not make the mistake that we made. I’ve been saying for years, you don’t need to hire an affiliate manager, which is odd considering that I run an affiliate management agency and you don’t when you’re first starting out, what I don’t want you to do is make the mistake. A lot of people may go, well, one of these days when I can hire an affiliate manager, I’m going to start an affiliate program. What? That’s absurd. One of these days when I can afford to hire a weight loss coach, I’m going to lose weight. No, I love Alan Thomas, who works for us, and he’s a weight loss coach. I love him to death. But you don’t have to wait.
One of these days when I get married, I’m going to start dating. What? That would be ridiculous. That’s absolutely absurd. You keep waiting, it’s not going to happen. But once you reach a certain point, and typically that point is going to be somewhere between it’s going to be represented by revenue somewhere between 100 and $250,000. Somewhere in that range, you need to hire an affiliate manager.
So if you’re looking for an affiliate manager, you’re looking for somebody like us. You can reach out to us anytime. Just the best way to hire us is to email me at Matt@MattMcwilliams.com. If you’re interested in coaching for someone that maybe you already have hired or you’re looking to hire or you do want to get started, you say, Mad, I’m doing 30,40,50,65, 75 thousand dollars a year and I want to get to that point where I need to hire somebody. I want to get to that $200,000 mark. Then go to your affiliatelaunchcoach.com and we’ll talk about coaching. You are coaching someone on your team. So don’t make the same mistake that I did.
As I said, it’s kind of weird to come on here and admit the worst part of my business, but I remedied that this year we hired Jim Atkins. He’s a rock star affiliate manager. Like I said if you’re interested in partnering with us, promoting our products, making some killer commissions, then reach out to Jim. Partners@Matt Mcwilliams.com and Jim will give you the hook-up. We’ll schedule a webinar or something, we’ll do something cool together but definitely reach out to him.
As I said, don’t make the same mistake I did. If you’re in that position, start to look at how much time are you spending on your affiliate program? Or more like me, how much time do you wish you were spending? Mine wasn’t that, oh my gosh, I’m spending 5 hours a week. Mine was that I really need to spend 20 hours a week and I don’t have those extra 15 hours. So make sure you do that. Make sure you don’t make that same mistake. And make sure you hit subscribe so that you don’t miss the next episode.
I’m going to share with you about well don’t launch if you don’t want this. We’re going to talk about not doing stuff like don’t do a product launch. If you don’t want to be known for that. It’s going to be a fun episode. Make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss that. And you know somebody who needs this message. You know somebody who’s right where I was. They’re in that $200,000 range or higher. They might be already in a million dollars.
They’re running their own affiliate program and they need this message. Don’t do them a disservice. Share this episode with them so they don’t miss out on this content. They don’t make the same mistake that I did. So with that, I’ll see you in the next episode. I’m going to share with you when you should launch and when you should not. We’ll see you in the next episode. Thank you so much for listening today.
The post The Worst Part of My Entire Business: Why You Need to Hire an Affiliate Manager appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
How do you determine good affiliates from bad affiliates? How do you know if you should accept or decline someone who applies for your affiliate program? Or…is there some sort of middle ground? Listen up to find out exactly how we process affiliate applications
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Links Mentioned in this Episode YALC
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy How to Write, Publish, and SELL Your Book with Chandler Bolt
How to Use Affiliate Marketing in a Book
How to Run an Affiliate Book Launch
How to Find Affiliates for a Book Launch (or Any Launch)
The Affiliate Donut
What & How to Communicate to Your Affiliates
How to Decide to Accept or Decline an Affiliate How do you determine the good affiliates from the bad affiliates, especially on an affiliate network? How do you know if you should accept or decline someone who applies for your affiliate program? Or is there some sort of middle ground where you don’t have to decline or approve something in the middle?
So listen up to find out exactly how we process affiliate applications. So how do you determine good affiliates from bad affiliates, especially if you’re on an affiliate network? I got a question from a client recently that I thought was pretty good. I shared the answer with her, but I feel like it’s appropriate to share this with you guys as well.
Here’s the question she asked. She messaged us. She’s one of our clients in your affiliate launch coach. And she said our share sale account because we recommended ShareASale to her. They’re on the network now. Our ShareASale account is now active. I’ve been getting applications in, but I’m not sure how to determine if an affiliate is good or not. Do you have a checklist/podcast that could help me shift out good versus bad affiliates based on their websites? Now, again, we put her on ShareASale because there are two reasons.
Number one, we recommend the network. It’s great. I’ve worked with them for years, almost 15 years now, and we love the network. Number two, if you’re one of our clients, you get a pretty substantial discount on ShareASale. So the FOM, the Friends of Matt discount is what we call it. So that’s why we recommended it to them. And so she’s asking basically, how do I know if somebody’s good, how do I know if they’re bad? And how do I determine if I should approve or decline in affiliate? Let me just share a little bit of what I shared with her.
First of all, almost never flat out decline an affiliate just from their application. You want to take the extra steps and reach out to them. Now, I say do that on the affiliate side as well. That’s important. If you’re an affiliate, don’t just fill out a lame application that I would want to do as an affiliate manager that you think I might just decline, write a lengthy application, make it hard on me. Actually, don’t make it easy on me. Make it hard on me. Make it so long, I just go, Holy crap, I’m just going to accept this person because it’s detailed. But on the affiliate management side, reach out to them.
Now, there are some factors that you can take into consideration. I’ll talk more about reaching out to them in a little bit. These are in no particular order. Okay? This is not like, hey, if they fail number one, then it’s just an automatic decline. This is not order of hierarchy here, to be clear. So the first thing I’m going to just get, the controversial one out of the way is country. I know this is controversial, but it is what it is, right?
Some countries have a higher fraud rate, and I’m not going to list them here.You can Google them. To be clear, I don’t rule out someone just because of what country they’re from. I’m not saying, oh, that’s a red flag. It’s a bit of a yellow flag, though. Okay? I’ve worked with affiliates from nearly every yellow flag country. There are no red flag ones. I’ve worked with some of these affiliates, and they were great. But the chance of fraudulent or black hat tactics is higher. So it is something that I take into consideration, to be clear. It’s like if you fail on that one, if you’re in those countries, then you now have to be better at some of the other things. And I’ve got ten criteria, right? Ten criteria. It’s one of these things. If you fail in like four or more, then you are automatically out. But that’s very rare.
So the second thing is their domain or lack thereof. If they don’t have a domain or it’s a shady domain, then I take this into consideration. So this client will just say they’re in the nutrition niche. And if somebody applies and their domain is like BillClintonscandalblogspot.com, well, that’s not a good fit for my nutrition product. You see what I’m saying? It’s like, what is the deal with that? Or if their domain. Well, this is number three, right? Does their site pass the smell test? So you take a look at their domain and just go, I don’t know. It feels kind of fishy.
You take a look at their site, is this something you want to be associated with? Is it adding value to your brand, or is it just like a banner farm? Does their site load software? Well, that’s not good. Does it give you an error message? That’s a big yellow flag now. Okay, their sites are down. My site’s down about 2 hours a year. So if you just happen to go to my site on the wrong 2 hours out of the year, does that mean I’m some sort of a bad affiliate? No. This means you went to my site when my server company was doing maintenance.
They were doing something and just happened to go down. Maybe I got hacked. Does that make me a bad affiliate? No, I just haven’t caught it yet. And we’ll fix it in five minutes. But it’s a yellow flag. So again, it’s like, okay, they’re from a higher fraudulent rate, the country with a really shady domain name, and the website doesn’t load. Well, then they’re out. They’re just out okay? fraudulent country, really shady domain name. And I go to the site, and it’s a banner farm, they’re out.
Number four. Does their site match your values? This is a subjective thing. Your values are different than mine. Now, if you have hard and fast rules such as not associating with illegal activities, pornography, politically charged sites, legal drugs, but you just don’t want to be associated with them. Whatever you choose, like take that into consideration. This is subjective.
You get to choose what your values are. I have no issues with somebody saying I don’t want somebody who’s politically divisive. I don’t care if I agree with their politics, but if everything they post is anti this politician or all people of this political party are bad, I don’t know that I want to be associated with that website for some of our branding, and that’s nothing against them.
So that person might even be my friend. But I don’t know that I want that site associated with it. So you get to choose. Does it fall in line with your values? If you are advocating a vegan lifestyle and you have a product that might be of use to non-vegans, but you just say, you know what?
I don’t want to be associated with products that talk about meat. Those of you who know me know I love bacon. I have no problem with that. But if you’re a vegan and that’s a thing to you, then you get to choose that. And in that case, it could be a red flag. And this is one area where I will just decline an affiliate without even reaching out to them.
Now, one thing to keep in mind on a network is affiliates might have one site that is displayed but own others. So maybe they own an anti-Democrat or anti-Republican website, but they also own a family-friendly site that would be a good fit. In this case. Just make it clear that you only want them promoting on the good fit site. That’s important and you get to choose that.
The fifth consideration only applies if they’re on a network is how long they’ve been on the network. If the network shows you how long they’ve been on the network, use that as a consideration. So generally speaking, someone who has been on the network for five years is going to be better than someone who’s been on for seven minutes or a few weeks, I will look at that. Generally, anything over one year, I kind of just count is the same. But if they’ve been on for a pretty short period of time, I’m not going to decline them. Unless shady domain, some of these other factors, and they’ve only been on for three months, I’m probably going to decline them or at least do what we’ll talk about later and reach out to them.
The same is true. Like, I’ll look up their domain. Do I decline people because their domain was registered three days ago? Absolutely not. I encourage starting affiliate marketing when you’re new but if I look at your domain, it’s shady.
You’re from a more fraudulent country and your website’s kind of funky and you registered your domain three days ago. I’m probably not going to let you in if that’s the only thing how long your domain has been registered, it’s fine.
So number six, are they using trademarks in their URLs so they apply to your program especially if it’s not a fit, their website is buyadidischews.com. All they’re doing is not adding any value to Adidas whatsoever. They’re just basically profiting off their trademark.
That’s usually a bad sign in and of itself doesn’t mean they’re nefarious or bad affiliates. It’s just again, it’s a yellow flag, especially if they don’t have other websites. That’s their only website and you’re that vegan. You know, let’s say you’re in the vegan supplement industry and you’re like buyadiditashouse.com that’s not really that great of a fit. So if they’re using trademarks in the URLs, that’s a consideration.
7th if they flat out say that their promotional methods violate your terms. So if you don’t allow adware BHOS toolbars trademark bidding, you don’t allow pornography. You don’t allow politically divisive statements. Whatever it is you don’t allow again, you get to determine what you allow and they say we’re going to do this whatever you don’t allow that’s a giant red flag that leads to decline them.
I mean straightforward part of what that is they will copy and paste the same message 2500 times to different programs and some people do allow toolbars some people do allow trademark bidding. I actually have no issue with trademark bidding for most of our products. There’s one where we don’t allow it. There’s a whole reason behind that I won’t get into here. Some of our clients allow trademark bidding, some don’t. I would say it’s probably 70, 30 do, 30% don’t. None of our programs allow adware or toolars. Just to be clear, we get to decide what we allow, and so do you. So if they say they’re going to violate the terms giant red flag.
The number eight thing to look for is just look at their promotional methods. Are they utter nonsense? Read their proposed promotional methods? Do they actually make sense? I’ve seen applicants just put my site or they put like, your product is nice, or I like your product. My followers. Your promotional method is your followers. Could you give me even like two freaking sentences on that? So again, this is where you have to kind of be subjective. If it’s someone maybe that invited them to the program, well, then clearly. But if I’m looking at the site and I’m like, oh, it’s Jeff Walker. And Jeff Walker says my email list in site. I go, well, it’s Jeff Walker and he’s got a lot of people, I’m going to approve that and not use that against them.
But if it’s somebody I’ve never heard of with the domain name is a little bit shady. That was registered 13 days ago, and they’ve been on the network for two weeks and they put promotional methods my site, I’m not going to let them in. Really? You couldn’t write a few sentences? Just let me know. You clearly don’t want to be in my program anyway, so why am I going to waste time with you?
Number nine, do some research. If you aren’t sure, do some research. If you’re looking at this and going, I don’t think I’m not 100%. I’m going to let them in. And I’m definitely not 100%. I want to decline them, do a little bit of research. If they’re truly bad, you’ll be quick to find some negative feedback about the affiliate and affiliate forums, blogs, et cetera. Just go Google them. See what pulls up.
You find something where maybe you see some of their other promotions, you see how they promoted another product, and you’re like, oh, my gosh, that is shady stuff. I am not working with that affiliate. That is some seriously messed up stuff. Like, I don’t want anything to do with them. So those are nine things to look for the 10th thing. So let’s just say we’ve reached the nine and we’re looking at this and we’re going, I’m not sure.
It’s definitely like if all nine or green flags, I’m letting you in. If everything else is a green flag, but your country, I’m letting you in. If everything is a green flag but you’re new to the network, I’m letting you in. That’s a yellow flag, right? If everything is a green flag, but your domain name is a little bit funky. I’m letting you in. Maybe everything is a green flag. Of course, by then I don’t even do number nine. I don’t even do research if everything else is a green flag, but everything is a green flag and I just can’t find anything on you.
I’ll probably let you in. But if I reach out and just say, hey, I’d love some more information on these things that maybe weren’t very clear. I’m just not sure if you’re a good affiliate, blah, blah, blah and they don’t reply. That’s number ten. They don’t reply when you reach out. If you reach out to ask them to clarify something, to get some more information and they don’t reply within a week, that’s an easy decline. At that point, I’ll just leave it pending and then I’ll decline it a week later.
In the end, you’re making a subjective decision. It’s kind of like a scoring system. Like I said, if someone’s from a yellow flag country, their site is hideous and they’ve been on the network for two weeks, I’m going to decline them. And here’s the thing. They have the choice to reach out to me and say, hey, you declined me, but here’s why. I think I’d be a good affiliate. I actually have another site and I know I’m new to this network, but I’ve been in affiliate marketing for six years. Oh, brilliant, you’re in.
I’ve said this before, if you just reach out to me, I’m probably going to accept you. But if they’re from the US, their site is okay, but they’re new to the network and their sites a little off base for you, then you reach out to them. That gives them the opportunity. If they want in, they reply. They reply. It’s a subjective decision, usually. Unless I’m really feeling like, man, I could regret this later because of fraud or something. I usually err on the side of just approving them and then giving them a chance. Just to be clear, the rules are different. If you’re in like a financial niche or something like that, then you almost err the other way.
I’ve been in the insurance world and back when I got started, I was in the insurance world up through 2011. Most of my time in there, I err on the side of declining them because it’s not worth the chance. Like we could get sued over stuff. We could end up in some serious hot water with the government. Not worth it to me. But if you’re in retail world, you have a course, you have a digital product, something like that.
A membership err on the side of letting them in. Keep a close eye on new affiliates. We always do that. We always do a manual review of any affiliates. First five to ten sales to make sure, like, what’s going on here? Is their return rate normal? Is anybody saying, I don’t know what the heck is going on? Is there any credit card fraud, things like that? We do a manual review, usually immediately on their first couple, and then we’ll review the other ones later. We look at things like is their conversion rate just way too high?
If our normal conversion rate from click to opt in is 58%, from opt in to sale is 7% and their opt in rate is 94%, that could be a yellow flag. Now if it’s 94% on say 47 out of 50, I go, well, it’s a little bit early. We had an affiliate, I’ll say his name Jonathan Milligan. We were converting at over 90% on webinar registrations for like 400 clicks years ago. I remember going, Holy crap, what is he doing? That’s amazing. Or maybe our webinar landing page is just really good.
Guess what it was. And it ended up converting. It like 62% for everybody else. He was just sending great traffic. But we look at things like that. If the opt in to conversion rate is normally 8% and somebody converts their first twelve people, okay, is that fraudulent or are these things just like they’re just really good? So we look at things like that. We monitor people that we accept in whether or not they can be fully green flag unless it’s somebody I know, things like that. But typically anybody new, we monitor them because we want to be safe on those things. So there you have it.
How to accept or decide how to accept or decline an affiliate. Hopefully that helps you out with that with the decisions that you’re making. Like our client was. So do a friend a favor. If you know someone who’s struggling with this in their business, an affiliate manager or an entrepreneur marketing person, you know they’re struggling with this, share this episode with them.
Just text them the link, emailing DM on the link, whatever, so they can get the benefit of this lesson. Make sure you subscribe as well. Because the next episode I’m going to share the secret worst part of my entire business. I’m going to tell you, I’ve shared this with about three people. Every single one of them was like jaw dropped, floored that this was the worst part of our business. I think it will surprise you. I’m not sure why it’s been the worst part of our business and what we’ve done to correct it, because it’s something that’s going to be Revolutionarily gamechanging, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah for our business.
So make sure you come back for that. I’ll see you then.
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Are you tired of riding the “focus” rollercoaster? Staying focused under “normal” circumstances is difficult. Coming out of a two pandemic where virtually NOTHING was normal? Next to impossible. But there is a path out of the “fog” and in my next Live Lesson, I’m going to show you the way to get focused…and STAY THAT WAY! If you’ve finally had enough of riding the focus rollercoaster, watch this video and learn “How to Get Focused, Stay Focused, and Regain Lost Focus”.
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Core Module Overview
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Click Here to Learn More About Our Recommended Affiliate Programs The post Affiliate Opportunity: The Membership Experience with Stu McLaren appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Are you tired of just “thinking about” writing a book, even making it a New Year’s Resolution or a goal for this year…but never actually making it happen? Are you looking for a map that will take you from blank page to published author as fast as possible… without the frustration, heartache, and the dreaded staring at a blank page? Today’s guest is going to show you the step-by-step process to write, publish, and SELL your book.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Links Mentioned in this Episode Get a 100% FREE copy of Chandler Bolt’s book “Published” here
Affiliate Marketing for Authors Training
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy How to Use Affiliate Marketing in a Book
How to Run an Affiliate Book Launch
How to Find Affiliates for a Book Launch (or Any Launch)
The Affiliate Donut
What & How to Communicate to Your Affiliates
How to Use Leaderboards to Find Affiliates
How to Write, Publish, and SELL Your Book with Chandler Bolt Are you tired of just thinking about writing a book? Maybe you’ve made it a New Year’s resolution or made it a goal for this year, but you’ve never actually made it happen. Maybe you’re looking for a map that will take you from a blank page to a published author as fast as possible while avoiding the frustration, the heartache that dreaded staring at a blank page. If so, today’s guest is going to show you the step-by-step process to write, publish, and sell your book. So this is the final episode in our book series, part four of this four-part series. And this has been fun. It has been really fun for me to dive into this one topic. It’s a commitment on my part to commit to an entire 12th of the year, almost 10% of our podcast content for 2022 about one little topic about books. I don’t know. I wouldn’t say it was a dangerous commitment, but I was nervous about it.
The response has been amazing. And so thank you to everyone who’s reached out to me, who’s left a rating in review on the podcast, specifically about this series, who just reached out to me on social media or texted me, who sent me whatever, sent me an email, just saying thank you. Great job. Enjoyed the series. Whatever it’s been, it’s been awesome. I got a text. Oh, my gosh, I got one earlier today. By the way, if you ever want to text me, just feel free to text me anytime at 260-217-4619. And this guy, he just said, I’m in that 81%, Matt. I’m in the 81% that has been talking about writing a book for ten plus years, and I’m finally taking action based on the series. Well, I told him I’m like, okay, you got to listen to the fourth episode because that’s the one that’s going to help you take action on what we’ve been talking about, like going out and finding affiliates. That’s great. Running an affiliate launch using affiliate marketing. Your book, those are all great. But you got to write the book. You got to publish the book.
And that’s what today’s episode is all about. Real quick. We talked about it through the series. Just remember, you can get the full affiliate marketing for authors training at mattmcwilliams.com/Authors. I’ve got three lessons there. Totally free. Also super crazy. I’m interviewing Chandler Bolt, who in my opinion is one of the leading experts about writing and publishing a book. If you want to get a 100% free copy, no free plus shipping. So you’re not paying to ship. None of that. I’m not against that. I think it’s a great deal. But none of that. No, buy the book, blah, blah, blah. Like, next thing, all that stuff. Keep listening to find out how to get a 100% free copy of his book published. I’ve got it on my shelf. We talked about it in this episode a little bit. It’s a phenomenal book I’m reading, and I’ve just finished the last section I’m going to read for right now. There are a couple more sections I’m going to read probably in a couple of months when I need them. But I’m taking what he talks about in the book. This is somebody I could call him up and be like, hey, walk me through it. But he honestly would just say, hey, go read this chapter. You don’t have to be on the phone with me. We don’t have to coordinate our schedules. You can read this chapter, and it’ll walk you through exactly what I would say.
So about Chandler real quick. Chandler is a former client. He’s become a dear friend. I was introduced to him, I think it was 2014 by a mutual friend. Who this guy Chandler was starting this company Self Publishing School. We kind of wanted to learn the affiliate game, better than to introduce him to me, and he introduced him to me. We kind of hit it off. We talked for over an hour. I shared a bunch of stuff, and then I looked them up after the call. And the fifth Google listing down was a podcast interview with a friend of mine, Roy Vaden. And it was like Seth Bolt. I need to breathe Seth Bolton, his brother Chandler. And I’m like, wait, what is he really the brother of the bassist in one of my favorite bands? Like, one of the founding members of my favorite band. So I texted him back, or I think I called him back, and I was like, dude, is your brother Seth Bolton? He’s like, yeah. I’m like, unbelievable. This is amazing. I can hear him typing. He’s like, hey, man, they’re going to be in Indianapolis, which is 2 hours. They’re going to be in Indianapolis Thursday. This is like a Monday. Do you want to go? Yeah. So three days later, boom, 7th row, center stage. First, need to Breathe show rocked it out. Like, just amazing. Fast forward, I think two years later, he’s a client, and we’re backstage with Needtobreathe down in Atlanta, hanging out with them. We were actually going through some of the photos the other day because they’re finally coming to Fort Wayne. I think about, I don’t know, two months after this episode airs, we’re going to be at the Needtobreathe show here in Fort Wayne. I’m so excited because we’ve always had to travel to go see them. So can’t wait to get to see an acoustic show, but that’s how we connected.
He’s just got an amazing story. He’s a College dropout from College dropout. He was like a C-level English student, kind of like me. I was a B minus so got you there. Chandler, like that matters, right? All the way from that. To CEO of Self Publishing School. He’s authored six books, helped more than 6000 aspiring authors, and published a book. Their students have published over 100 books. It’s absolutely amazing stuff. And his mantra is Books change lives. So keep listening to find out how he does it, how you can write, publish and sell your book.
Matt: Chandler, welcome, buddy.
Chandler: Matt, great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Matt: Oh, my gosh. We’ve been wanting to do this for a while. I got sick right now in the middle. We almost had to cancel the day, which I’m so glad. Our Internet is working and yours is working because we’re both having a snowpocalypse. Mine is 14 inches. Yours is a fourth of an inch, but a fourth of an inch in Austin, Texas, is a grind to a halt.
Chandler: Yes.
Matt: I mean, as we record I didn’t tell you this before. I interviewed as we recorded this, my parents are stranded in the Atlanta airport because they literally can’t fly into Austin right now because there’s a millimeter and a half of an inch or vice or whatever there is. But we’re currently trying to figure out how to get them landed in Austin, Texas. Yeah. They shut down the roads here today. Said do not travel unless you have to. I’m like, what some serious stuff that explains why there are no cars going by your house. Well, man, I’m excited about this because we’re talking about you don’t know this, but this will be the fourth episode and a four-episode series on books and affiliates. And with you, we’re going to cover all kinds, we’re going to cover some stuff that’s just general books. We’ll cover the affiliate side. Because I know that’s near and dear to you. It’s driven a lot of your business. We’ll cover all kinds of stuff because you’re the guy. I will just say your name. When I think of books, I think of Chandler Ball. When I think of certain of self-publishing, I think of Chandler Bolt. But just books in general, because so much of what you talk about is the writing process, the creative process, and yes, the marketing process, which we’ll talk about today. I’m kind of curious because I know a little bit of your backstory, but I don’t know that I know how you a College dropout so immediately College drop out. We do not equate that with book experts. How did you get into books? What became the thing that just made like books you’re calling?
Chandler: Yes. I mean, books changed my life. And I believe that books changed lives. I mean, it’s kind of a fundamental belief that I believe books change the lives of readers. And it’s like how many of you listening or watching have had your life changed by book? Right. Probably almost everyone. But then books change the lives of authors. So it’s not about the book it’s about who you become in the process of writing and publishing that book. And so I think you’ve just seen this in the process of writing and publishing your book Matt but for me, that was as a C level English student and College drop out with ADHD I dropped out of school because I was tired of learning how to run a business from professors who have never had businesses that didn’t make sense to me. But I said you know what? When I drop out I need to act like I’m still in school and I kind of convinced my mom to divert a little bit of my College funds instead of going to class I was going to conferences instead of textbooks I was reading books and the smartest, most successful people on the planet a lot of them most of them have written and published a book spent years to do it with all of their best knowledge and all you have to do is pay $15 and spend a few hours and you can learn what they know. I call it a $15 mentor and so then I went from someone who hated reading and writing to I’m reading a book a week and have been for years and it’s the way that I’ve grown my business it’s the key to everything that I’ve done and a lot of growth in my life has come through books so that kind of kick-started the interest in books wrote and published a couple of books. They did well, people started asking how are you doing that? Created what eventually became Self Publishing school and then fast forward to today and we’ve published about 6000 books since 2015 so that’s kind of been the journey.
Matt: All right. Say that again, say that number again. That’s crazy.
Chandler: It’s about 6000 that we know of. Those are people who joined self-publishing school, wrote and published a book like all that good stuff. But gosh, there’s probably been thousands more that have just read my book published. This is the second edition that I’m holding up here. But the first edition, and I’ve heard from so many folks there who have written and published books as well. But those aren’t on the official tally.
Matt: Yeah, I can’t help but giggle. It’s not really an inside joke because this is public. I can’t help but giggle anytime you say the word mentor. Here’s what I would encourage you. We’ll put a link below. If you’re in a place where you’re driving, you can’t click on stuff. Just Google Chandler Bolt Mentor. I don’t know, mentor.
Chandler: I love that.
Matt: It’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. So immediately I’m just thinking, is he going to say freedom units today?
Chandler: Oh, man, what a blast in the past.
Matt: So before we jump into this, you mentioned your book, you mentioned publishing the new edition, which it’s kind of weird because to a lot of people I feel like second editions of a lot of books are like a holiday album for an artist. It’s just really an easy way to make some money. I mean, yes, occasionally they write an original song that becomes a hit like All I Want for Christmas, Mariah Carey. But mostly it’s the same version of Silent Night that everybody else got. And this book, though, it’s the second edition, it’s nothing like the first one. There are some literal sentences in there. Exactly the same. When I opened it up and I had a certain level of expectation, to be honest, it’s not a low expectation, but I had the expectation of normal second editions of books. I’m like, yeah, this is a totally different book. I just think that’s fascinating because I just want to say we’ll talk about the end, how you can do this, but Chandler is going to do something that’s just absolutely insane, in my opinion. But you guys are going to benefit. And let me just be totally clear, it’s going to cost you guys nothing. So we’ll talk about that later. You guys are going to just flip out about this. Okay, so you teach people how to write books. The statistics say if I’m not mistaken, something like 81%, 88%. You know the number New York Times ten years ago did a study. They say they want to write a book less than 1% do. What’s the deal with that? Why?
Chandler: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of reasons why. I think there’s what keeps people from getting started, and then there’s what keeps people from actually doing it. And so I think what keeps people from getting started is they say, oh, I don’t have time. The timing isn’t right. Who am I to write a book? What if it fails? What if no one buys it? I think there are all these limiting beliefs that we have in our heads about why we can’t do it. And a lot of people put it on the maybe someday list and maybe next year list, and maybe someday becomes maybe never, and they just keep kicking it down the road. And so that’s actually you’ve probably seen this, but I talked about that in chapter two of the book is like all these limiting beliefs that we have, and then how do you overcome those to actually get started? A lot of people think that writing a book is hard and it’s not easy, but it is simple or it can be simple. And that’s my goal with this book, and that’s my goal with everything that we teach is to make complicated things simple. And so I think they don’t get started, but then when they do, they just kind of run in circles and they don’t have a process. There’s no accountability. There’s all that stuff. So the big focus, I tell people, is focusing on the rough draft and nothing else. And if you can just get a rough draft finish, you’re going to start to believe that this is possible and you’re going to start to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Matt: 80 something percent say they want to, but clearly not 80 something percent of the population is what we would call a writer. What about those of us, me raising my hand who aren’t writers? Like, what do we do to get the ball rolling? Because I know that was a big thing for me. I mean, I could have easily written this book ten years ago.
Chandler: Yeah.
Matt: I didn’t for nine years because I did where I finished it just a little bit over, just under a year ago. For nine years, I just feel farther around thinking about writing it. I know what kept me from doing it, but I’m curious, like for somebody who’s not a writer, what do they need to do to kind of get into a rhythm or to actually end up producing that first draft?
Chandler: Yeah, that’s a great question. So I would say follow what I call the More Writing Method. And so MORE is an acronym and M stands for Mind Map. So the first step I would take is to spend ten minutes mind mapping everything that you can think of on this topic. Ten to 15 minutes. You can do that. That’s why I recommend it. The first step, as soon as you stop listening to this episode or watching this or wherever you’re seeing this is to spend ten to 15 minutes creating your Mind Map. If you flip it in the book, that’s chapter five, and then turn that mind map into an Outline. And that’s the O in the More Writing Method. So your group of ideas into themes or sections. Right. And so create your outline. Then the R stands for Rough draft. And so you write your rough draft in chapter seven, I talk about the 30-day rough draft challenge. So how can you write your rough draft in as little as 30 days, maybe shorter or longer if you choose to? And then the E is for Editing, and that’s where you can do some editing yourself. But also if you’re not a writer, hire a great editor. And a great editor is going to make your book so much better in the process. So that’s the more writing method, Mind Map, Outline, Rough Draft, Editing.
Matt: I want to talk about that E real quick because I know with a lot of our people you mentioned they hire an editor. So do it yourself. Well, that’s a non-starter for some people because that’s not the way their brain works. Like me, everything I’ve ever written was amazing. I know that’s not actually true. It’s just how it sounded in my head. So it’s amazing. So editing is not my jam. I want to talk about just the cost with an editor. First of all, what does it cost for somebody who’s self-publishing to hire an editor? And secondly, what are some of the more creative, we’ll say lower costs or free options that maybe they could do when they just don’t have the money?
Chandler: Yeah, great question. So what does it cost? It could be a few hundred to a few thousand. It could be more depending on if you know what you’re looking for and you don’t. But I’d say typically a few hundred to a few thousand. There are two types of editing. There’s content editing and copy editing. So content edit is editing the actual content of the book. And then copy editing is the line editing, structural editing, and proofreading. The publishing world likes to complicate it. And there are like seven to 15 types of editing, depending on what I just simplified into those two types because I think it’s what they are. And so the more content editing that you need, the more expensive it’s going to be. That’s more in-depth. It’s harder. Copy editing is more of a commodity. Content editing is really there’s a lot of talent to it. Just a lot of talent to both. Right? It’s different talents. Yeah, different talents. And so those are the two types it can cost you. That’s the ballpark. And then I’m flipping in. It’s funny. We talked about spending time or money, depending on which one you have. I have a section that talks about that, but I listed out five ways. I’m just doing this. That’s the thing about having new content if you got to reference it. But five ways to save money on editing. And so you’ve got number one is reducing the word count before sending the book to your editor. So a lot of Editors charge on word count. So if you can trim some stuff yourself that can get creative help you save some money. Number two is to do more of the content editing yourself. Again, the less content edit it needs, the less cost by a lot. Number three is to spend more time self-editing before passing your book to an editor. So you’re just cleaning some of it up. And then number four is to hire an up-and-coming editor that’s more affordable. So this could be a recent English grad. This could be. I think I got I want to say I got one of my English teachers to help out on one of my first books. Sometimes you can get some free help. And then number five is to do a service swap. So if you want to get really creative, You’ve got a service that you can offer that’s valuable, do a service swap and you can get some editing help.
Matt: That’s fascinating. I think the first three that you mentioned just going through and doing it yourself. I did that because the publisher wanted a word count. I was roughly 37,000 words over that. Oh, my gosh. Wow. Now here’s the good news. I learned this from a good friend of mine. All that goes in the audiobook. So of course that’s going to be a great reason for you all to buy the audiobook version Because there are 37,000 words that aren’t in the print book. So they want to turn 37,000. And I knew that. I knew that going into it. I knew it was long. It was the first draft, right? Reading through that and I realized, first of all, just how many times that I wrote a five-sentence paragraph on four would do. That was number one. But Secondly, I know that book inside and out now. You just mentioned and that’s the thing I really don’t like. I list 20 things in step ten. What are all 20? I know about 17 of them. Okay. I cannot remember all 20 of them, but I know 17. Whereas if you’d asked me six months ago, I would have remembered maybe eight of them. So you gain that because when you go in and you’re doing an interview and somebody asked you that question, at the very least, at least you knew where it was in the book. No doubt there’s an advantage to doing that on your own too. I want to talk about how I went a different route with traditional publishing. And Matt Holt, if you’re listening, I love you and I love Ben Bella. You guys are amazing. But what are some of the advantages of self-publishing? Especially for somebody who’s kind of up and coming? Maybe they don’t have a huge audience because news flash if you don’t have a huge audience. Nobody’s going to publish your book. What are some of those advantages to the self-publishing route? Because you guys have had some amazing success stories.
Chandler: Yeah. And it’s a little bit confusing because we work with traditionally published authors as well. And so for me, I’d say, hey, make the best decision for you and for your book. And sometimes that’s self-publishing. Sometimes that’s traditional publishing. So at a glance, it used to be that the only way that you sold books was to get into bookstores. The only way to get into bookstores was to have the publishing deal. The only way to have a publishing deal is to have an agent like N right. There are all these gatekeepers. But now over the last couple of decades, there’s just been a radical shift in the publishing industry. And for a lot of folks, self-publishing is the preferred option. For most authors. There’s distribution, right? Well, now 70% of all books sold are sold on Amazon, not in bookstores anymore, and you don’t need a publishing deal to publish on Amazon. But then there are a few other things, like royalty rate. If you’re traditionally published, you’ll probably make somewhere between 8% to 12% per book. So we’re talking a dollar or two a book. If you’re self-published, you’ll make 20% to 70% per book. So that could be $3 to $6 a book, kind of in that range. How much is it going to cost? Obviously, traditional publishers, they’re covering the cost for you in exchange for a lower royalty rate. There’s hybrid publishing, which is where that kind of runs the gamut of versions of hybrid publishers. But you’re likely going to be paying for someone to publish your book. It could be 5000, 15,000, 30,000, maybe more, maybe less. And then there’s self-publishing, which you’re going to have to spend a few hundred to a few thousand dollars on cover design, editing, formatting, all that stuff. So that’s the cost piece. There’s also the cost of your time, which is if you’re traditionally publishing, it’s going to take you a minimum of two years. If you’re self-publishing, it might take a year or a decade, depending on how disciplined you are. And then with our students, I think we see it’s about roughly 50%, sometimes more write and publish or book in less than a year. And so you can save a bunch of time in the process. But the long and short of it is I mean, to make a long answer longer for 99% of people, it makes more sense to self publish. The only time it makes sense to traditionally publish is if you’ve got a good-sized audience and you can get a good advance then and only then. Or maybe there’s other fringe stuff like international distribution or stuff like that. But pretty much if you can get a big advance in a book deal, and that’s important to you, and that will also be helpful. It’s like, okay, I’ve got, like, awesome, do it. Otherwise, you’re probably going to be better off self-publishing.
Matt: Yeah. I think the control thing is certainly an aspect. The one thing you have is creative control.
Chandler: Yes.
Matt: I’ve been super pleased that that hasn’t been an issue so far. Fingers crossed. Again, if you’re listening, Matt, I love you, and I really want creative control. Yeah. Actually, I think he might listen to this. And so here’s one of the things I’m thinking, though, with regards to that is, like, you mentioned that for 99% of people, that’s probably the route. And I think the thing that you said, it’s the Trump card to all of this is Amazon. It’s so easy. It takes minutes now for a self-published author to click buttons and you can Google how to put your book on Amazon and figure it out. It’s so simple, and it blows me away. It really does. It blows my mind. I want to shift gears because we talked a little bit about the book writing process, so to speak, which I know the book writing process guy is all in the book published. All right. It’s 50 to 100 pages of that. That alone would turn this into a nine-hour podcast. Let’s not do that. So I’ll just tell you guys, I’ll mention the URL at the end, make sure you guys go grab a copy of this book and get that. But I want to shift gears to the marketing side because that’s what you when you reached out to me and I was like, what are we going to talk about? You’re like, I want to talk about this. And this is like I got so excited. I couldn’t stand it. You have sold a lot of books and you’ve taught people about how to sell a lot of books. When you started, you didn’t have an audience. There was like, no audience, literally. And part of that was affiliates. And you’ve done some really cool things with that. I want to talk about that. Like, I don’t even know the question I have, I don’t have, like a great question for this. Let’s talk about working with affiliates and books and tell me some of the stuff that’s worked for you over the years.
Chandler: Yeah. So I would say there are a lot of things that have worked well over the years, but a couple I saw back in the day. I mean, the free plus shipping funnel, which I mean, Russell Brunson has obviously done a ton of things with that with traffic Secrets.com, secrets, expert secrets, all that stuff. So Free Plus Shipping funnels work unbelievably well, but then we also use the book within mechanisms that we’re already doing, like a webinar funnel, for example, to get more people to register for the webinar, show up for the webinar, because then they’ll get a copy of the book, and that leads to more sales for us. It’s more calls booked. So they’re more likely to do all of those things. And then not to mention that, I mean, there’s building affiliate relationships and partnership relationships. I’m pretty sure I sent you one of these a boss with the book and all that stuff. And so, I mean, that’s building a lot of partnerships, which Pedro on my team, he’s able to do that sparked a lot of conversation. That also spark podcast interviews, which are a lot of times a stepping stone into a deeper partnership with folks. And so even just the most recent book has kicked off a bunch of those things. And we’re sending people books and all that stuff. So it feeds into a lot of what we do on the affiliate side of things, but then also a lot of what we do to actually grow the core business.
Matt: All right. Let’s talk about the Free Plus Shipping funnel. We talk about the different kinds of funnels, actually, because, well, it’s free, usually charging 799 to 999 for shipping, which is pretty reasonable. It Costs us like $80 to mail a book on average. So it’s not like we’re making a ton of money. The affiliate gets nothing on that. They’re getting paid on the back end. Sales. From your perspective as someone who maybe is promoting a book, is that an attractive offer for you as an affiliate?
Chandler: Yeah, good question. They would have to have a really strong back end. And so it depends. But that is, I think one knock on the Free Plus Shipping funnel is it’s tough to get to make sense for your affiliates. It’s not as much of a straight path. Now if you do have that dialed in and you can go directly from us, they grab a copy of the book, and then it’s on the thank you page. It’s, hey, I’m sending your book. It’ll get there within a couple of weeks. If you’re serious about this and you’re someone who likes to go faster further with your book. Well, there’s one thing that this book can’t do, and it talks to you and creates a customized strategy for you to implement with your book. So if you don’t even want to wait, you want to go and get started right now, scroll below this video book, a call with my team. We’ll chat with you about your book, your next steps, and put together a plan only if you’re a serious and an overachiever. Scroll below the video, that sort of thing. And then that segues directly into people booking calls with my team and signing up for self-publishing school. So if you can really nail the back end, which you got me thinking about as we speak here, because we do a lot of Webinar based affiliate partnerships. And I’m thinking we haven’t in a while maybe ever actually, because with this new model. But we’ve got a price point in the back end of the sales team and all that stuff to justify I’m like I wonder if we should have some of our affiliates instead of sending to a webinar sent to a free plus shipping funnel. I feel like it would work pretty well.
Matt: Yeah. I mean, it’s worked well for us. I know we did it with Jeff Goins, we did it with Lewis and we’ve done it with some others with Jeff and we moved 22,000 pre-orders, free plus shipping model. I think that was good enough for him to make the Wall Street Journal top ten. It worked really well. And I know for us, I talked about this a few episodes ago. Like for us, one of the big things is just such a low. Yeah. The affiliate knows they’re not going to make as much money as if they promote a $2,000 course. But number one, since there’s only one call to action, this isn’t like a 17-day commitment. Send two emails oftentimes if you’ll send one email and do one social media post, that’s all I’m asking. Maybe send it to your unopened, maybe if I really can get you to sneak in that extreme on the last day. Okay, so now I just turned that one email into two and a half. But still, it’s not that big of a commitment, but it’s the fact that it’s like they’re offering so much value to their audience that it blurs the lines. We typically talk about how when I send out a podcast or I send out a blog post, that’s a give. When I send out an offer, that’s an ask. And you can’t do ask, ask, ask. You have to give Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, as Gary Vaynerchuk would say, right? It’s a give give give to ask. The free book kind of blurs the lines between the give and the ask. It’s a give, but it’s an ask. I think it’s worthwhile. I want to talk about the webinar one, though, because this is something I’ve only seen done once outside of you and I don’t even remember where I saw it. So talk about that. They register for the webinar. The webinar is clearly about your topic. And then what are you doing from there? Cause I think I know, but I want to make sure.
Chandler: Yeah. So it’s on the landing page. It’s when you register, you also get a free copy of Chandler’s book published that has over a thousand reviews on Amazon.
Matt: So if they show up or they just get it.
Chandler: They will get that as part of registering. And I think we deliver it in multiple places. I can’t remember if we delivered it as part of their webinar workbook. I’m pretty sure we do. But then we also use lights, notes, et cetera, as a state of the end type deal. That’s a directly correlated version. Like, hey, stay to the end. You’ll get all this stuff. And I’m actually in the process of I just did a webinar yesterday and I’ve got notes where one was. I want to embed the book in the front of the webinar. We’re actually going to change it up a little bit because we’ve always done slides and notes, but I just want to do it more directly to stay to the end and you’ll get the audiobook or you’ll get a physical book. I’m going to test some stuff because I think that can just work better. And I’m really trying to focus on the audiobook. That’s kind of the number one place because it blends with the podcast. I think it will help us reach a larger audience. I narrated it myself. I think it’s a better reader experience, all those things that dovetail in. And then if we can get them to read or listen to the book or the podcast or a webinar, kind of the three forms of audio or obviously reading the book, by the time they get on the sales call, the close rate is just bananas because they know us, they trust us, they know the process. And then it also helps with onboarding. Like every part of your business, it will just make it a whole lot more frictionless.
Matt: Yeah, I like that. See, I thought where you were going with that as this is what I’d seen done. I haven’t seen the way you’ve done it personally. I’m also not a webinar person. I don’t sign up for webinars because I don’t personally learn from them. I get too distracted. So that entrepreneurial ADHD is like a rapid-fire where I can’t learn anything on a computer. It’s the weirdest thing I do Internet marketing. You can’t learn on a computer. That’s why I love that you sent me a physical copy of the book because I actually read it. But what we’ve seen done and I’m curious to try. I’m just curious if you’ve done it’s like they register. But then the bonus is you show up for the webinar and I’ll show you how to get the free book. So of course, the show-up rate goes from an industry average of whatever, 28%, 30% to 65% just for that. So I’m just curious if you’d tried that at all. But it sounds like I haven’t done it just like that. What other kinds of funnels have you seen with books? Because again, you would be the first to say this Newsflash, whether you self-published, traditionally published, whatever, you just don’t make a lot of money with the book, the book itself. So what are some of the other ways you’ve seen that they’ve turned that selling the book into a kind of instant revenue on the front end?
Chandler: Yeah, there’s a lot of funnels right? There’s free plus shipping. There’s a webinar funnel, just lead capture funnels, like all that stuff for the ebook and stuff like that. But I look kind of if we Zoom out a little bit, I look at how I use the book to get more leads, more sales, and more referrals. And so you probably saw this chapter 25 in the book, but more leads. These are people who hear about me because of my book. So they would never know about self-publishing schools. But they found the book published. They read it. They said, oh, this is interesting. Now they know about self-publishing schools. And that’s where I can go up on a tangent. And a bit of like, how do you improve your readers to subscribers ratio or your readers to paying customers? Because that’s a whole nother thing. So use the book to get more leads. Use the book to get more sales. That’s number two. These are people who already know about you who decide to do business with you because of your book. And this is the root word of authority is an author. And you can’t spell the word author without the word authority. And so you become more of authority by publishing the book. And those folks are more likely to do business with you. And then there’s the third piece, which is referrals. And so I look at how I turn to pay customers or in some cases even prospects into active referrals. And so with that, it’s okay. Every new customer sends them or gives them two copies of the book and says, here’s one for you, and here’s one for someone you know, who needs help with XYZ like insert a problem that you solve. And a book is a new business card. But I think it’s better than a business card. If you give someone a business card, they’re probably going to throw it away within 24 hours. You give them a book, they’re going to keep it. I mean, every time they see it, they’re going to think of you. And so that’s how you turn customers into active referrals because then they got that book and they say, oh, hey, I heard you need help. You should just read this book. And then now I call a book a silent salesman. Like that book is going out into the world and bringing back leads, sales and referrals.
Matt: That’s an idea I’m totally stealing right there. Oh, my gosh, I didn’t think of that.
Chandler: I’ll tell you one more thing, Matt, is we have a URL that we send people to its Forward slash Friend (/friend) on our URL. And you just set that up. And it’s so simple because every customer is easy to remember. Friends say, hey, anytime you run into someone that’s like, hey, how are you doing that book? Or I’m interested in writing a book, or they just mentioned it, send them to a forward slash friend (/friend) and we will ship them a free copy of the book and we’ll tell them you sent it. And so to make you look good. And then if they decide to sign up for self-publishing school, we’ll give them a discount on the program. So it’s the cheapest possible way that they can enroll in the program. And we’ll give you a two-way referral program. Right? I mean, it’s just like, hey, here’s my Uber Eats code, and you get $30, I get $30. It’s the same type of thing. But you’re starting with a value add, a give, and you’re saying, here’s a free book. And oh, by the way, if you want to do business without publishing school, shout out to your friend, you’re going to save some money in the process. And so that’s just another way to make it easier for people to refer to your business using the book.
Matt: All right, so this is the part where I didn’t have time to write that all down. So we’re 35 minutes into this, I will be going back and listening to minutes 32 to 35 to get that because that is a great idea that we can do with our clients. When you sign up as a client, just immediately send them a handful of copies of the book and be like, hey, anybody you know who this book would be good for? Because for some of our clients, the book is not a good fit. It’s a little bit more beginner for them. But hey, go give it this way. And then inevitably they’ll be talking about it. Oh, my gosh, that’s huge. All right, so let’s go back to the beginning part. You mentioned we only use the book to go from readers to subscribers to customers. Talk a little bit more about that process, because I found that this is an external observation. You mentioned Russell Brunson earlier. He does a great job with that. I think he does a great job with that. I know. Thinking of who else does a great job in addition to you, I feel like Grant Cardone does a really good job with that. And then you those are the three kinds that I’ve seen, Frank Kern, Frank Kerns, they’re really good at going from this to that very systematically, in a way. What are some things that you’ve done just again, to turn more readers into more subscribers and ultimately to buyers?
Chandler: Yeah, there are a few things. And pulling up my book and looking at what I’ve done. But chapter 16 is building an audience in an email list using the book. I kind of break down the ways to optimize your book. So even as you’re approaching publishing, I would go back to that chapter and there are some good ways to optimize it, but I look at a few things. So at the beginning of the book, I give away the audiobook and the video. The video summary is a webinar. They teach us core concepts and then lead to booking calls with self-publishing school and the audiobook. That’s a big one because I literally say in the book, instead of paying ten to $20 for the audiobook, I’d like to give it to you for free. I know you’re more likely to finish this book if you have the audiobook. I even narrated the book myself so it’ll feel like we’re having a conversation. And so I give that away and some people are like, hold up. You’re leaving all sorts of money on the table. Well, it’s an additional format and they’re more likely to actually read it and it’s more valuable than some other lame thing that you’re going to give away, right. Like some PDF or something. It’s like this is an inherent value. I just started reading this book. I don’t even have time to read this book. Oh, hold up. You’re going to give me the audiobook? I would much rather do that. And now we’re having a conversation. And then the cool thing about that, too, is you’ve done the look inside feature on Amazon. I’m sure you preview the first 10% of the book. Well, guess what? They can preview the first 10% of the book. See that, click, download the audiobook without even purchasing the book. And now people think, Chandler, you’re an idiot. You don’t even know that I can do this. Well, of course, that leads to me being worth way more than the three or $4 I would have made off them purchasing my book. And now I’m just funneling hundreds, maybe even thousands of leads a month off of Amazon into my ecosystem, whether they buy the book or not. And so those are a couple of practical things there’s embeds valuable content throughout like, okay, there’s a chapter on outlining. You want a 24 page Google Doc outline template that you can just fill in the blanks. Go here, right? So it’s like, how do we make the book more valuable but not withhold critical content? Because I think that’s where you just p*** off the reader. Where it’s like, oh, hold up. That should have been in the book. Why not have to go to your website every 5 seconds throughout your book? And so kind of walking that line. And then lastly, it’s Segwaying your hottest readers, which are the folks who finished the book to say, hey, you always secure this book. A call with my team, talk about your book and let’s talk and let’s put together what is planned and you can sign up for self-publishing school if you’re interested in that. You’re a fit. And so those are kind of the ways that there’s a lot of other stuff, but that’s kind of the 80-20.
Matt: I love that. And I think I made a good point there about you ever listening to one of those episodes of a podcast where they have an author in every question they get asked? Well, I talk about that in the book. I’m not really going to talk about it here. What’s the point of this interview then? Now, if in the book there are 25 things and you say in the book, I share 25, let me just share the top two with you. That’s a great interview. I expect you to share the 25, but give me something where it’s like making me want to go buy the book. I want the other 23. I feel like there is that balance. As you said, you can’t. It’s like, why didn’t you include them in a book? Well, because it’s a printable checklist. If it’s a printable checklist, you print it and you use it versus if it’s in the book, you get it one time. You can’t put the video in the book. Here, I do a video walk-through. It’s a video walk-through when you do those. I’ve noticed you did that. I was going to say a great job on that because I didn’t feel like you were sending me to go opt into something that could have been in the book. I was like, oh, I see why I have to go there. It’s a video walkthrough or something like that. And I think that’s important to be really careful about that. If you’re doing the inner book, don’t do it every two pages. You did a good job of balancing about one chapter. It felt like, yeah, but yeah. So make sure you guys do that. Make sure there’s a practical reason to send them out of the book, is what I’m saying there real quick. You mentioned the audiobook. You mentioned that you recorded it, and I’ve made a commitment. I told my publisher that I want to record it unless we can get James Earl Jones. If we can get James Earl Jones for less than $10,000, maybe 15, I’ll go up to 15. James, for your 12 hours, it’ll probably take them twice as long. Whatever. If we can get James Earl Jones, I’m not recording the audiobook. Tell me real quick, what was that process like? Was that what was it like for you? Was it fun? Was it tedious? What was it?
Chandler: I mean, it’s a grind. I’d like to batch it. I did I want to say most of a half-day on a Friday and then a little bit more than a half-day on a Saturday. Well, I did want to say 08:00 AM. To noon or noon 31 on Friday. And then I did what I wanted to say at 07:00 AM. To three on Saturday. And that day I mean, barely any breaks, didn’t eat. I’ve got hot water and honey and doing my thing. And it’s just in the booth. So I stand up when I do it to keep my energy higher. I like the batches so you can have the consistency of audio. I did it in the studio with a guy, but even still, I mean, it’s just the consistency so that it’s not inconsistent. I’m standing in the same spot. So it’s a grind, but it’s totally worth it. And I think it makes for a better product. And then one thing I’d say that might be helpful for you and your book, Matt, is this is a lesson within a lesson, but just easy links for people to do all the things that you want them to do. So specific to the audiobook. I know you said you’re being intentional about that as well if we have a URL. It’s publishedbook.com. And I just do publishedbook.com. Audible is the audiobook. You can do that on your podcast. So it’s just easy. It’s easy for your staff or your team, easy to send people to the audiobook. And oh, by the way, when people sign up for Audible via that, you get an Audible bounty, which is like 50 or $75 a pop. When people buy your book or do they get a trial for 14 days? And if they stay and your book was the first one that they bought, you get done. So that’s hundreds of dollars a month and royalties off of that. But then also things like publishedbooks.com/review, one of the biggest things you want people to do is leave a review. And so you probably saw that it’s in the book itself. But then also we’re able to use it. When people email us, if I’m on social media and someone posts something, it’s like, oh, hey, could you just go here and leave a review? Just like making it easy for you to do it and for people to do the action you want them to take, it makes a massive difference.
Matt: Oh, that’s awesome. Yeah. Because part of the reason I asked is I have chronic bronchitis, kind of. So talking for more than a couple of hours is very challenging. I’ll be sick for days after what it feels like. And even just doing this today with a phone call, a Facebook Live, this interview, and then a Q amp, a session for our members, I’m like, I’m done after that. And I’m drinking the hot. I got the hot tea and all that. I’m like that’s the part I’m dreading the most. So I’m just kind of curious about that. As I said, I’m hoping we can get James Earl Jones being told that’s a bit of a long shot, but I’m going to keep trying to wrap up. Man, you mentioned those URLs, right? But there’s one we want to share with everybody. I personally think you’re clinically insane for doing this, but whatever. But I do appreciate it. So if you go to publishedbook.com/Matt, if you don’t know how to spell that, whatever, click on the link. We’ll put it under the video, under the show notes for this. Publishedbook.com/Matt. We’re on a game show, right? Tell them, Johnny, what they’re going to get.
Chander: Yeah. So I published a book. So, like, I published a book publishedbook.com/Matt. If you go there, you can get a copy of my new book. So the new book is published. The proven path from blank page to 10,000 copies sold. Obviously, you can grab a copy on Amazon. You can get the audiobook version. I highly recommend it. But if you want a physical copy for the first 50 people, I will print it. The packet ship it. This is not a free plus shipping funnel. This is a free plus no shipping funnel. And you should literally just tell me where to send it. I will probably regret this and rack up hundreds and maybe even thousands of dollars in fulfillment costs. But I want to get this book in the hands of as many folks as possible. And so if you want to grab a book, welcome to its publishedbook.com/Matt.
Matt: That’s awesome. And let me just say, guys, if you read nothing else, I can tell you right now. I’ve got some highlights here. I will tell you guys, page 109 was absolutely huge for me because I’m not even going to tell you guys what it is. I’m not saying skip to it because if you’re not ready for that, don’t skip to it. It’s more about once you’ve written the book, page 109.
Chandler: You’ve been doing it with your book.
Matt: I have been doing it. So if you’ve been watching me, you probably know what page 109 is. And it helped us in a big way. And the publisher, I will tell you this. Ben Bella reached out to me and said, can you 207 document how you did that? Can you, like record a video and show you did that? We need to teach all of our authors how to do what you did. I’m not even going to tell you guys what it is. Just maybe skip to it real quick and see when you get the book. So, dude, free copy, nothing. As you said, it’s a free plus, no ship. It’s a free plus, nothing to go. Grab a copy if you get a chance to schedule a call with them he’s mentioned that before with Chandler’s team. If you are one of those people like, you know what? I’m ready. I’m tired of being that 80 something percent. That said, for years I’ve been going to write a book but I haven’t. Schedule a call with Chandler’s team and they’ll give you a plan. They’ll give you a plan for that. So, dude, this has been awesome. Chandler, thanks so much, ma’am. Matt, thank you. So real quick make sure you go get that 100% free copy of Chandler’s book published. It delivers what it promises from a blank page. The proven path from blank page to 10,000 copies sold. He shares some of the stuff he touched on today. That three-step process to go from blank page to rough draft in less than a week with a better book written in basically one 10th of the time. How to save literally thousands of dollars in the editing and book production process. His books, they’re traditionally published in quality and his students are not producing a self-published-looking book now. These are pro-quality books. He shares the launch strategies even if you’ve got no audience, no marketing skills whatsoever. How to keep your book sales going after your launch. Like great, you launched. Maybe you sold a thousand copies in your first week. How do you sell 100 copies each week after that? Or even 50 copies? How to drive more book sales long-term like we just talked about. But that leads to product and service offerings. So he shares the whole path, a blank page. How to write the book, that story, that message that whatever it is that’s burning inside of you, that voice that’s telling you to share your wisdom with the world. You can do that with this book. It’s going to take you from aspiring author to published author. So make sure you go grab a copy of that. Publishedbook.com/Matt. Just be clear. Published. So publishedbook.com/Matt. Click the link in the show notes just to make sure you get the right one. And also just one last reminder. Check out affiliate marketing for authors training at MattMcwilliams.com/authors. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. I’m answering a very common question. How do you determine the good affiliates from the bad affiliates? How do you know if you should accept or decline? Someone who applies for your affiliate program? Just accept the decline. Is there some sort of middle ground? So in the next episode, I’m going to share how we process affiliate applications. It’s called how to decide to accept or decline an affiliate. So come back for that. I’ll see you in the next episode. Thanks.
The post How to Write, Publish, and SELL Your Book with Chandler Bolt appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Attracting affiliates isn’t the easiest thing to do – UNLESS you know how to ethically make your competitors’ affiliates YOURS! If you want to learn how to “raid” your competitors’ cookie jar – and “steal” all the good ones! And do it the right way.
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Links Mentioned in This Lesson: Find Affiliates Now
Recommended Affiliate Programs and Upcoming Product Launches
TEXT ME: 260-217-4619
Come join me on my next live lesson, “ My Top 5 Affiliate Emails Ever…and WHY They Worked”, Thursday, March 17 at 2:00 pm ET. More details can be found here.
The post Learn How To “Steal” Your Competitors’ Affiliates appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
If you’re writing a book, I hate to break it to you, but they don’t make much money. One way to increase the worth of a book is to include affiliate offers in the book. This episode will show you exactly how to do that.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Links Mentioned in this Episode Affiliate Marketing for Authors Training
Resources Page Guide
My Recommended Books Page
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy How to Run an Affiliate Book Launch
How to Find Affiliates for a Book Launch (or Any Launch)
The Affiliate Donut
What & How to Communicate to Your Affiliates
How to Use Leaderboards to Find Affiliates
How to Onboard Affiliates the Right Way
How to Use Affiliate Marketing in a Book If you’re writing a book, I hate to break it to you, but they, don’t make much money. One way to increase the worth of a book to your business is to include affiliate offers in the book.
This episode will show you exactly how to do that. So trust me, I know the effort that goes into writing a book. If I knew what was going into writing a book, I don’t know that I would do it. I’ve been at Turn Your Passions Into Profits. I’ve said before January 2023, about the exact date soon coming out, published by my dream publisher, Benbella. I mean, the manuscript was 100 hours. There’s so much new stuff in this book. The publisher is a precaution for them so that they don’t get sued. They go out and they run what’s called a similarity scan. Is there anything in this book that’s, like, plagiarized?
Well, there wasn’t because it’s my stuff. But I was really pleased because they even said that almost none of it is identical to stuff that’s anywhere on my content. That’s a lot of new stuff, stuff that I just haven’t had the opportunity to share. And I’m really excited to put that into book format. So the main script alone took 100 hours, maybe over 100 hours.
I was writing an hour a day. An hour and a half a day, whatever the math is on that. 15-16 weeks. No, 18 weeks, sometimes 90 days. Take a few days off. An hour and a half. Yes. Over 100 hours of writing the book. I’m in the editing process now with the developmental editor. That’s going to be I’ll spend 25 to 30 hours reworking the book from that standpoint just to get it more.
Just to get it perfect. Little things like this sentence don’t need to be here and things like that. We’re going to spend 25, 30 hours in the developmental editing phase, take on the developmental editor and the multiple copy editors, and all of that. I mean, it’s an astronomical picture. Now, thankfully, my publishers pay for all of that on the front end, so I don’t have to.
But admittedly, that comes out of what the book makes. If the publisher spends $50- $100,000 on the book on the front end, that comes out of mine at the end. And so books just don’t make a lot of money. They don’t make merely enough money in and of themselves to be worth it and we all know that. Does it give you reputability? I think that’s the word authority. Yeah.
Does a position you as the expert. Yeah. Is it fun in the sense of, like, I can’t wait to hold the thing? I’ve never held one of my courses. I can’t hold my course. I can’t hold No Product No Problem. I can’t hold Find Affiliates Now like they’re not tangible. I get to hold my book and I can’t wait till I get that first copy sometime in October, and I unbox it.
I’m telling you, it’s going to be nothing short of a spiritual experience, but they don’t make a lot of money on their own, so they lead to things. But one of the ways that you can make some money initially, right away is through affiliate offers. And I want to share how to do that in this podcast. So I think I Jonathan Hyde. Reach out to me. So what’s the best way to promote affiliates with a book? This is such an overlooked area of monetization within books, I almost never see it done.
I mean, I can’t even think of a single book that I’ve seen it done in. There wasn’t a client of ours. Our clients do this. The things I’m sharing are these things we share with our clients, they do these things almost nobody else does. And I’ve read or listened to over 100 books in the past two years. Not a single one of them did this, actually, except for one. There’s one that kind of did it. Well, now that I think about it, and he’s not a client, so one out of 100, he’s like half out of 100. But it’s inevitable, if you think about it, that if you’re writing a book, you’re going to mention your favorite tools.
I’m reading through the manuscript. I’m on page 117 of two, I guess 288 or 298. I don’t remember. I’m on page 117 and already I probably mentioned seven or ten things that are affiliate related that are affiliate officers. I said I’m an affiliate marketer. These are just the tools. I’m mentioning them in normal conversation. If I read you the paragraph that I mentioned in a conversation that I’m having with you, it wouldn’t feel unnatural. It wouldn’t feel unnatural. So you’re going to mention things.
Unless there are six ways to monetize a book with affiliate offers, the first way is your recommended tools in the book. So you’re answering the question, what do you use? What do you use and why? They’re saying, here’s what I use and why. So having a page or a couple of pages at the back of the book that covers the tools that you use. So the key here is that you reference this throughout the book. I’m doing this with mine. Hey, I talk about this thing and I say, I’ll give you an example. I talk about email marketing, and I say my recommended email providers are at the resources section at the back of the book.
The key with this is you don’t want to just make a list of products and then have the links you want to put some extra effort by not only listing what you use but why you use it? So just a very quick synopsis. In my book, I talk about I mentioned Asana, and I just write a very quick thing like this is the tool that we use. It’s my favorite project management and task management tool out there. Easy to use makes collaboration and delegation super easy. You can start with the free version, which has worked for us for more than a year.
Here’s the link I talked about. Slack. This is the tool, the only tool that we use as a team to communicate with each other. So we’ve eliminated email, change, random text for getting to copy someone. It’s our go-to communication tool and again, you can get started for free. So make sure you make a compelling case for why your readers should check out the tool that you recommend. So using that recommended tools page, you can put it in the back of the book is a great way to do that. Now make sure you follow the principles of a good resources page. Okay?
If you want to learn how to put together a resources page, the same principles apply to a resources page inside of a book. Just go to MattMcwilliams.com/resourcespage and you can download my guide to how to put together a resources page you will follow based on the same principles as you would in the book. The one exception that I talk about on a good resources page online, is you want images, you want a logo, or some sort of representative image.
You don’t want to include that in a book. It just takes up too much space. And especially if you have a publisher and you’ve got 20 things, it’s going to take up a lot of space. It can be like a six-page long thing. I don’t want to personally use my space. Not my space, but my space that I have in the book. When I have a limit, we have a workout limit, but I also have a page limit with my publisher, I don’t want to take up an extra three pages just for a couple of images.
So people are in reading mode there. So that’s the one exception. So when you go download that report, just ignore the part about images, but follow all the other principles. They totally work. Make sure you use pretty links. That’s another one. Nobody’s going to type in your 8000 characters long affiliate link into their browser.
Just MattMcwilliams.com/convertkit, for example. Right? If you’re looking at ConvertKit, the second way to use affiliate offers inside of a book is to offer an extended study. So this is what I do a couple of times in the book. I don’t do it a lot because it just didn’t fit. But I say, hey, I touched on this subject. If you want to go deeper, check out blank. Right? So you’re giving in a book. You might touch on the subject.
You’re giving a 30,000-foot flyover. You go two layers deep when the real subject is seven layers deep. But the reader wants to go deeper. They want to take their learning to a whole other level. And that’s where affiliate links come into play. So, for example, I talk a little bit in the book about product launches, but I don’t go into detail because that’s a whole book in and of itself.
Jeff Walker’s book launch and his course, product launch formula. We’re getting ready to go through it as a team. I looked up that course is like 50 hours long. I can’t write a book about it and include it in my book. I’m also not the leading expert on it. So I point them to Jeff Walker. I say, hey, here’s a little bit about product launches. If you want to go deep, go learn from Jeff. Hey, as you’re building your online business, you may want to start a membership site. I’m going to give you a little bit of information about membership sites, but I’m not an expert on that.
I can’t write 300 pages right now. This book would be 3000 pages long. So I say, go learn from Steve McLaren. And so then if one out of 200 book buyers goes over to Jeff Walker and purchases PLF, I make a roughly $800 Commission. That’s $4 a book extra I made. Even if I only convert a quarter of a percent of the book buyers, then I made an extra $2 a sale. The third way that you can work affiliate offers into a book is to what I call the how I learned it. So you might go in-depth into something. Probably still not fully in-depth, but you write thousands of words about something, and then you say, hey, I became an expert at this.
Thanks to Blank, check out blank stuff. Here again, going back to Jeff Walker, I say that in the book like, hey, I feel like I’m an expert at product consciousness. I’m one of probably the one or 200 best experts in the entire world at product conscious. You know what? Because I’ve studied everything from Jeff. His product cons formula literally opened the door for me to do what I do today. Now, the thing is, my position, that is, yes, I am an expert. I can teach you a lot about it. But if you want to learn from my mentor, go learn from Jeff.
You want to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. I’m not going to plagiarize his stuff. I’ll teach you the basics, and I’ll teach you a few of the nuances that I’ve learned over the years. But go learn straight from him. Not only do I want to give credit where credit is due, thank you, Jeff. But I also want to show people where they can learn the same fundamentals I’ve learned. So I link to his stuff and say, Hey, do you want all the background? If you want all the background and you want to know the WHY, not just the little bit? That I share with you? Go learn from Jeff.
You want to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. I’m not going to plagiarize this stuff. I’ll teach you the basics, and I’ll teach you a few of the nuances that I’ve learned over the years. But go learn straight from him. Not only do I want to give credit where credit is due, thank you, Jeff. But I also want to show people where they can learn the same fundamentals I learned. So I link to his stuff and say, hey, do you want all the background? If you want all the background and you want to know the why not just the little bit that I showed you, go learn from Jeff.
So in the book, I say Jeff Walker literally invented the formula that is now so common in product launches. You may think that you can reverse engineer the process by watching other launches, but you can’t you can pick up some stuff, but you need the course. You need a course that gives you the solid framework you need to succeed. My team and I plan to regularly go through the course as a refresher. It’s a significant investment board. And on that note, we’re going through to the team as I’m recording this 14 days from now, we start now, we start next week.
So in seven days, we start going through it together as a team and they’re going to meet every week for an hour and discuss our biggest takeaways and ask questions and talk about how we might implement what we’re learning in the course. I was being serious when I say this is the third time I came and I’ve gone through the course in the last six years. Every other year is kind of what we’re training on that. So sharing how you learn something. It’s a really effective way of driving traffic to affiliate offers because you’re living proof that an offer actually works.
You’re living proof that what that person taught you actually works. That’s the third way. So just to recap so far, recommended tools. Having a page or two at the end of the book can offer an extended study as you touch on something. And then if you want to go deep, here’s how to learn. And then how I learned it right. The fourth is just a casual mention. This is probably the most low-key way to promote affiliate offers in a book. That’s the least profitable. But it’s worth it because it’s just so easy. And I do this probably ten or twelve times In the book.
I mentioned a person and I mentioned a product, and I just put a link in the ebooks. You can do the hyperlink, right? You can do footnotes, you can do a link in parentheses. So in the book, for example, I just mentioned this video, but I talk about ConvertKit and I just put this link MattMcwilliams.com/convertkit. That’s all I put I say a lot of people ask me, how do I set this up from a tech standpoint? And my recommendation is you sign up with ConvertKit – MattMcwilliams.com/convertkit, blah, blah, blah. I forget exactly how we word it.
Now, you’re not going to get a ton of activity on these links. I’m thinking I might get one out of every 300 to 400 people to click on that link. But it’s so easy, so why not? What would be the point in not doing that? For one, if I want to go, I’m still going to include it in the back, but it’s longer. If I want to drive people into longer for me to say I recommend ConvertKit parentheses. There’s a link to convert kit in the back of the book in the recommended tool section. Why not just put the link there? It’s shorter, right? So this is casual mention. Are you going to make tens of thousands of dollars even if you have to sell a captive book to make tens of thousands of dollars? NO.
But let’s not make an extra $0.25 a book. We’re going to sell hopefully between 20 and 35,000 preorders in the book if that brings you in an extra ten grand. Okay, that’s kind of cool. The fifth way is your bibliography or suggested reading. Basically, at the end of the book, I have a thing that says, Hey, I recommend numerous other helpful books on the topic of starting an online business. For a full list, visit MattMcwilliams.com/Books If you’re going to recommend other books, instead of having a bibliography in the back and making nothing, why not earn an affiliate Commission?
I mean, yeah, it’s like $0.28 on Amazon. Well, $0.28 times an average of 2.5 books, times one out of 100 people that buy your book. And Whoopi do you’re making an extra quarter of a book? Well, it could be an extra ten grand. Why not? I always look at things in terms of like if I can do something that simple and pay one fifth of something on my team’s, like an assistant salary. If I do five of those things in this book, I paid for my assistant’s salary. How cool is that in the ebooks, the bibliography or suggested reading section can affiliate links and a print book.
You got to get a little creative, though. So rather than providing a list of other books like I mentioned earlier, you provide a link to your suggested books page and then you create a suggested book page at link. I mentioned that MattMcwilliams.com/Books that follows the principles of the resources page that I mentioned earlier, but it’s for books. It says the name of the book, it has a picture of the book and why I recommend the book and then the link. You follow the same thing. If you go to the URL, you’ll see how I lay it out.
It’s MattMcwilliams.com/Books books and you can actually copy the way I do it. I don’t care, pretty basic format. And then number six is just recommended products from others. So this is not something that I do in my book. But we’ve done really well with some of our clients where they’re interviewing somebody for their book and they ask them for their recommendation of certain products and then link to them.
So they say Jeremy recommends focusing at will to improve your focus. Find out more at this link and then you provide the link to them. It’s a great way to avoid author bias and get kind of a neutral recommendation. And then you make money from products that you might not be the expert on, but somebody else did the recommending. That’s kind of cool. So if you interview people or if you can be just quoting somebody in the book, like you could find an article and so and so talked about such and such and recommends this product and you link to it as an affiliate. That’s pretty cool. That’s a pretty cool way. So again, number one is those recommended tools. Make sure you go check out the supplies for your what we talk about in the second.
Number five, is the bibliography as well. But make sure you go download that report. MattMcwilliams.com/ResourcesPage and learn how to put together a resources page. You can also use that to put together a recommended books page. Number two, that extended study. I touched on this little bit of a topic, but if you want to go deep, check it out here. How I learned it. Sharing how you learned something that you share in your book. That casual mention, just parentheses. Very easy. Talk about this when we go to the bibliography/ suggested reading, and then six recommended products from others, maybe that you interview like books can be a great way to promote affiliate offers if you do it right.
So six ways, hoping to maybe even double what a book is worth to you. Now I got a great question about this when I was doing a presentation recently and I’m going to have four authors and I want to share my answer here. Lady asked, how do you handle affiliate disclosure in book form? That’s the part that always keeps me off my website for a normal and more expected. But it feels like one of those moments in a book for some reason.
Now, number one, depending upon when you’re listening to this, this could change. So we’re talking about the disclosure of material connection is what the Federal Trade Commission in the United States said. So my first advice is go to the FTC. Just Google disclosure of material connection. FTC. Read what they say specifically about this because it might change in seven minutes. I might record this and release it and it’s already been changed.
Now, my personal answer, based on what I’ve studied full disclosure. I’m not an attorney. I did not stay at a Holiday Express last night is that you need to include a disclosure in the book. Now, I would recommend making it obvious. Put it in the beginning as like an author’s note or something. Don’t try to bury it. It’s not going to affect sales. I already bought the book. It’s not going to lower trust. It’s actually going to increase it.
So you might just literally put at the very beginning of the book, you talk with your publisher if your self published and figure that out. But something like note, some of the links in this book might forget how we worded. It might be affiliate links. That means if you click on them and make a Commission, however, it does not impact my recommendation of said product, et cetera, et cetera. You might put it on that resources page in the back. But based on what I read, if you put it at the beginning, you put it where there’s more than one week. You don’t really have to put after every single link. It would be ridiculous. It just clogs up the bug and makes it kind of sound stupid.
So hope that helps. On that I can ask the FTC, though. Seriously, legally, I have to say that don’t take my word for it because it might have changed. So again, six Reasons How to Work Books or Work Affiliate Marketing in Your Books as I say, I’m Super excited about my next episode. The first interview I’ve done in quite some time. And there’s a reason why I even decided to do it because I’ve got my good friend Chandler Bolton and we’re going to talk about affiliates and books. How to Write, Publish and Sell your book is coming up in the next episode.
I’m really excited about that. So make sure you hit that subscribe button if you haven’t yet so you don’t miss that episode and some awesome episodes coming up. I’ve got one I’m going to tell you. I’m going to talk about the worst part of our business, and I would be willing to bet that it will surprise every single listener. It’s going to shock you. What is the worst part of our business? If you think you might know, hit me up on social media and let me know what you think the worst part of our business is.
I’m going to tell you guys. So make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss any episodes. Also, if you know somebody who benefits from this hit the share button or just tell them what are you going to go listen to this episode. I know you’re one of 81% population who says they want to write a book, but you’re trying to make prices like money on it. So haven’t, go listen to this episode. I tell them to hit the drive as well so they learn everything is coming up that will wrap up and I will see you in the next episode.
The post How to Use Affiliate Marketing in a Book appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
I’ve helped launch more than 15 books and have had numerous bestsellers. On my next Facebook Live, I am pulling back the curtain on a successful affiliate book launch. You’ll learn the same strategies I used with Lewis Howes, Mark Miller, Brian Tracy, Jeff Goins, Ray Edwards, and more. I’m going to take you behind the scenes of some of our most successful book launches ever.
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
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Links Mentioned in This Lesson: My Book
My Podcast
Real Artists Don’t Starve Recap
How to Write, Publish, and SELL Your Book with Chandler Bolt
Recommended Affiliate Programs and Upcoming Product Launches
TEXT ME: 260-217-4619
Come join me on my next live lesson, “ My Top 5 Affiliate Emails Ever…and WHY They Worked”, Thursday, March 17 at 2:00 pm ET. More details can be found here.
The post A Behind the Scenes Look at Affiliate Book Launches appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Done correctly, adding affiliates to a book launch can double, triple, or even 5X your book sales. If you know how to do it properly. How do you run a book launch with affiliates? That’s what this episode is all about.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Links Mentioned in this Episode Affiliate Marketing for Authors Training
Behind the Scenes of the Real Artists Don’t Starve Book Launch
Your First 100 Affiliates Report
Affiliate Recruiting Swipe Files
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy How to Find Affiliates for a Book Launch (or Any Launch)
The Affiliate Donut
What & How to Communicate to Your Affiliates
How to Use Leaderboards to Find Affiliates
How to Onboard Affiliates the Right Way
How to Sell Without Sounding Like a Used Car Salesman
How to Run an Affiliate Book Launch Done correctly, adding affiliates to a book launch can double, triple, or even five X your book sales if you know how to do it properly. So how do you run a book launch with affiliates? Well, that’s what this episode is all about.
So in the last episode, I talked about finding affiliates for your book launch. If you missed that episode, make sure you go back and listen to it. Because I shared one specific strategy.
Most of what I shared in that episode applies to book launches, product launches, service launches, whatever, anything launches, really. But there’s one specific thing that I shared that really in particular applies to book launches. You want to make sure you go listen to that.
Today we’re going to talk about the actual book launch, the timeline, the specifics about what to do with your affiliates. Now, in that last episode, real quick, I did mention a couple of resources that I want to point out because they’re relevant to this episode as well.
We’ve got our affiliate marketing for authors training. So if you go to mattmcwilliams.com/authors, I’ve got some training there all about what we’re talking about over this series because it’s a four-part series on book launches as it pertains to affiliates.
I’m in book launch mode. I’m a year out from my book launch, but I’m already thinking about all the stuff that goes to that, which is kind of one of the messages here.
I want you to get this stuff long before you need it. Also talked about Your First 100 Affiliates Report, Madamclaims Make sure you go grab that so you can recruit those affiliates.
In the last episode, I really focus on the finding affiliates part. I want to focus today on what to do once you’ve got them because somebody says yes. Now, what do we do? Right? And a lot of what I’m sharing comes from my own experiences. I think I’ve run 16 book launches, affiliate book launches. If it’s not 16, it’s pretty darn close.
But I remember the very first one that I ever ran. Like, I’d run product launches. I’ve kind of been in that world. I run some big affiliate programs like Shutterfly and Adidas, along with my own programs. And a guy named Jeff Goins came to me and said, can you help me with affiliates on my book launch? And I’m like, I never thought about that.
This is almost ten years ago, like affiliates for a book launch. Okay, that kind of makes sense, but I’ve never even thought about that. And he came to me and he said after we’ve been working together for a couple of weeks and he’s like, hey, we’re like eight weeks out from the launch, and I need to tell my publisher, pretty big publisher.
I need to tell them how many books I’m going to sell. And I said, well, based on the numbers that I’m seeing and what
I expect to be able to do for you and help you, I’m like, Tell them 15,000.
He’s like, I cannot tell them 15,000.
I’m like, Why not?
And he’s like, dude, my last book sold 3500.
I’m like, okay, well, you’re a little bit bigger.
That will get you to 5000.
He’s like, yeah, I was thinking like six or 7000.
Like, no, you’re going to get to 5000.
You’re going to go from 3500 to 5000 on your own.
I think we can triple that with affiliates.
In fact, I know we can.
We can triple that with affiliates.
He’s like, there’s no way I can tell them 15,000.
And I finally just kind of said, you’re going to tell them 15,000, or I’m not going to work with you.
I’m so confident in that that I do not want you to go to them and tell them seven or even ten. And then we’re blowing through that.
Get my #1 affiliate recruiting email (the one I’ve personally used to recruit thousands of affiliates in dozens of niches). Grab your copy here!
Well, long story short is we ended up doing 22,000 preorders, and we’ll talk about why preorders are so important here in a little bit, but we end up doing 22,000 preorders with more book sales down the road. And from there, we went on to run book launches for Brian Tracy, Lewis Howes’s number two bestseller. I think every book we’ve ever done, almost all of them have been at least like number one in their category on Amazon.
We’ve had half a dozen Wall Street Journal bestsellers and a couple of New York Times and just like crazy, right? And so we have a proven track record of this. And I feel like we’ve learned a lot of stuff over the years.
Now, last time I shared how you want to number one, these are relevant to actually, once you get the affiliates, you got to set up a back end offer.
We talked about that in the last episode, so I won’t go into that here. How you want to drive traffic to an opt in page, how you want to upsell and pay a solid Commission. And you want to make your cookies long.
Now, ideally, you want to recruit your affiliates at least six months out. So we’re going to use that as a guideline here, right. For what you’ll do leading up to the launch.
The big thing just mentally is you want to treat it like a product launch. You want to treat it like a product launch. We’re looking at this and going, okay, we got to get on people’s calendars. So all that has to do with the recruiting side.
But then what do we want to do? We want to keep them engaged.
I’ve talked about this. I talked about this when I talk about onboarding affiliates and how to keep your affiliates warm, how to use communication, calendar, and things like that.
It’s a little bit different for books because typically there’s only one call to action for a book.
Go by the book.
Go buy the book.
Go by the book.
Claim the bonuses.
Claim the bonuses.
Claim the bonuses.
Those are the calls to action.
So there are not a lot of moving parts, just one call to action typically.
But starting out before you even recruit your first affiliate, one of the things that I want you to do is get clear on your number one purpose.
Is your number one purpose sales? I want to make as much money as possible in the back end.
We talked about that in the last episode. I want this to be a million-dollar book launch. Is it to kind of have the book be like a lead magnet and a low price but still paid lead magnet? Is it to have a best seller? Is it something else right?
What is the number one purpose of your book? And you need to get clear on that because it does drive a little bit of what you do in terms of how you structure your launch.
I won’t go into all the details in that. But if it’s to hit the best seller, then that rules out typically that you want to do a free plus shipping offer. For example, as we talked about in the last episode, you don’t want to do that because they are typically kind of frown upon those. It’s not impossible with that. It’s just that they don’t typically like those as much as they do a paid offer.
So how you set up your funnel is going to be different. Are you focused on back-end sales? Well, then you want to convert as many people into buying the book as possible?
Absolutely. But if you’re more focused on the back-end sales, then you might lower the price of the book because you’re just focused on getting them to the next step and the next step.
The next step. If it’s to maximize royalties on the book, well, then you price the book as high as possible, within reason. Hardback would probably be 22,95, something like that.
Paperback would probably be in the $16 range, something like that. What is it? Also, it helps when you’re talking about back in sales. If they hit the best seller.
Well, then offering the audiobook as an upsell definitely increases the odds that you’re going to hit the bestseller list. Because if you sell 10,000 books but you convince 4000 to also get the audiobook, that has an impact on the bestseller list. Is it to possibly sweeten the pot more for multiple orders?
Hey, if you buy ten books, then you get this 50 books, you get this.
That increases the odds that somebody will buy ten or 50 books. So you got to get Crystal clear on your number one purpose. And the big thing is you got to focus on pre-orders.
Looking for some good affiliate programs to promote? Check out our recommended affiliate programs here!
All right. The reason why we want to focus on pre-orders is all those pre-orders count to those first-week sales, which typically again, doesn’t matter if you don’t really care about hitting a bestseller list, but most people would prefer to hit the bestseller list rather than not.
And so if you get 15,000 pre-orders, that’s 15,000 pre-orders that go to your first week’s sales. That’s 15,000 in a week, even if you collected them over the course of eight weeks. And so you stand a much better chance of hitting a bestseller list with 15,000 pre-orders than you do if you tried.
If you only got 5000 orders the week off and then 5000 the next week and 5000 the next week, the same number of orders over the case of three weeks, but you’re not going to hit the bestseller list with only 5000 orders in a week.
So if the launch date is August 1, Then the pre-order push would really start post-July 4. Yeah, you could have people selling the book before that, of course, but really after July 4 is going to be the big pre-order push.
So you want to focus on this? Basically, I would pick the first Tuesday after July 4. I’m not looking at the calendar for when this is airing in 2022, But let’s just say that July 8, then July 8 is when we’re going to start the push.
That’s when we want to start. Affiliates emailing doing things like Facebook live. We want to have a podcast airing from basically July 8 through the launch date of August 1. And you want to think of launch day, August 1, help people think, oh, my book launched today. Yay.
No, that’s cart close day. That’s cart close day. I joke like the day after your book launches client. I go on vacation. I busted my b*** for the six to eight weeks before this. Worked hard for six to eight months before that. But I really busted it for those last six or so weeks. I’m going on vacation the next day.
Why?
Because the truth is told, I do care. But you’re probably not going to sell a whole lot of books on August 2 and there’s not much I’m going to do to move the needle and that’s not what we care
about.
We want to help you hit your goal of reaching the bestseller list. We’re going to work to get all those orders in from July 8 through August 1. So if the promo starts after July 4, we’re starting this timeline in January, right? So number one, in January. As soon as people sign up, I want to get affiliates a copy of the book.
In fact, I usually get them at least the rough copy of the book, the unedited, or like a middle of the editing process book for review before they even sign up.
Hey, go review this copy of the book, see what you think.
But now I want to get them as soon as possible, a physical copy of the book, an audiobook. If there’s going to be one of those, I want to get them everything that they need in terms of the book itself. I want to start scheduling podcasts.
My book comes out in January of 2023. Turn Your Passions Into Profits. I’ve already got podcasts scheduled to record in August of this year, to release after Christmas in January of 2023.
So as far in advance as possible, we want to get on these people’s schedules. So if you’re running somebody else’s book launch, you’re running your own, whatever it is you’re running. One for somebody you work for.
Schedule those things as far in advance as possible and then communicate with them as you would like. We recommend a launch.
So six months out until about one month out, we want to communicate twice a month, once via email, once in a partner Facebook group. If you don’t have a Facebook group for your book launch affiliates, you should have one, by the way.
So I’ll do something, you know, early in the month of January that’s focused on like maybe scheduling things like that, letting them know, reminding them, giving them a copy of the book.
Then I’ll do something in the second half of the month in the Facebook group. And I’ll just kind of alternate email Facebook group once a month, each of those as we get to about four to six weeks out from our target date of basically post July 4.
So in this particular case, I think I said July 8, June 1, I’m going to start to ramp up the communication again, just standard communication for a launch.
So I’m going to start to give them things like behind-the-scenes access. I’m going to unbox the book for them. I’m going to share the concepts in the book. Maybe I want to read a few things, maybe tell them a story about how this chapter came to be, or give them some of that behind-the-scenes editing access.
Like right now I’m going through some of the big editings in the book. I can give them, even though we’re eleven months out. But I could give them some of that like, hey, this section here originally started like this and then it developed into this and yadda, yadda, right.
I’m going to constantly hammer home those important dates. July 8, July 8, July 8, July 8. Make sure they are clear about the push for preorders, that this is not starting promoting August 1. That’s the book launch date. It’s all about pre-orders.
I’m going to teach them why it’s about pre-orders, why it’s about pre-orders over and over.
So there’s no confusion on the dates. I’m going to create promo plans for them now. It’s only one offer, and that’s the book, right?
They’re not mentioning the back-end stuff on the front end. So you got to help them understand the timing of the promotion.
So we want that first email to go out ten to 15 days before August 1. So we really want people to start promoting middle of July.
Hey, if you want to start promoting July 8, that’s great. We want that second email to go out around July 24, 25th, about a week out. We want a final email on the final day. We want to tell them, hey, if you’re really intense, then mail even more, right?
You’re going to mail the day before the deadline. You’re going to mail two to three times on the final day in the push here.
Just so you know, the push for that August 1 deadline, whatever your deadline is, your launch date is to claim the pre-order bonuses. Can you still get the book on August 2? Of course, you’re just not going to get the bonuses.
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So you want to craft a plan that involves email and social media, live interviews, podcasts like being willing to go on as many podcasts and lives as possible.
I recommend this is something that I decided on early on that what I want to do is once we finish the book, in the sense of we’ve gone through the developmental edit, I’m not worried about copy editing, whether or not there needs to be a semicolon here or something like that, I’m not worried about that.
But once the book is done and the content is done and I know for a fact that everything that is in the book that I wanted in the book is in there, and I know what’s not in there, for example.
So my original manuscript for Turn Your Passions into Profits, for example, is 117,000 words. The publisher wants it at 75,000. Between us will get it down to about 78, and they’ll just have to deal with that.
So I need to know what’s not in it, what’s going to be in the audiobook, which will have the longer version, what’s going to be in the audiobook that’s not in the physical book. And so I need to know those things.
So once I’ve done that, then what I want to do is I want to start doing some small podcasts. Podcasts.
I don’t care how many listeners you have ten listeners.
And I want that host to ask me questions, and I’m going to talk about the concepts in the book and develop those concepts. And I’m going to do ten to 20 of those small podcasts.
I’m going to talk about them on my podcast, develop those concepts. Right? And the stories make sure I got there’s a lot of new material in my book, for example.
So it’s not stuff I’ve talked about before, and I really don’t have it all nailed down.
I developed some concepts. For example, I developed these eight archetypes of types of leaders. Like, I remember the hesitant hero and the master maestro and the revolutionary rebel.
But honestly, I can’t remember all eight right now. I developed them for the book, so I don’t even remember them all. Well, if somebody asked me right now, what are the eight archetypes of a leader leading your platform. Right?
Blogger, podcast, or whatever. I don’t even remember all eight, so I got to work through those. So I want to do these small podcasts six, seven months out. And then as we get closer, I’ll start doing bigger podcasts. But I’ll develop my material just like a comedian does. Right?
They do their show in front of 20 people, 30 people, 50 people. They do it 100 times before they ever go and do a Netflix special.
So we want to craft that plan for them. We want to do that plan with the affiliates like here’s when you need to schedule the interview and when it needs to release and things like that. We want to announce contests and prizes if there are going to be any.
What kinds of contests you’re going to do? Are they focused on book sales? Are they focused on bulk sales? Whatever we want to do that not focus on the back end.
So we want to do different contests. Like every 100 books, you get this much money.
If you do 100 book sales or ten book sales and you’re entered to win $1,000. If you do 25 book sales, you’re entered into you get into the Mastermind, things like that, right.
We want to teach them. We want to help them with how to promote. We want to train them. So we want to do some training on how to train affiliates.
Just keep constantly giving them updates. Right?
Get a good endorsement, share that with them. If you get Big Media, share it with them.
Like, if you’re going to be on Good Morning America, share that with them because they want to be a part of something that’s featured on Big Media.
Start the Facebook group, as I mentioned, ask if they need anything. Ask them months in advance.
Hey, what do you need to promote this book? I need this, this, and this.
BOOM..! Got it.
The thing is if you ask your affiliates that three, four, five months out, then if they come up with something wild, you and your team have time to create it versus if you ask them just two days before it’s like, oh, shoot, we don’t have time to create that. Ask for referrals send them an email asking for referrals like hey, do you know anybody who might be a good fit to promote this book?
Make sure you send a copy of the book I mentioned earlier. I mean just you can have 500 affiliates it will cost you less than $2,000 to mail every one of them a copy of the book. If you send it via media mail if you get a little fancy send it to them in like a box nicer box it might cost you like $7 a pop. You can create a swipe copy that’s another thing you have to do. You have to create swipe copy for various audiences for the book. So identify those three or four audiences right?
I remember for Jeff Goins years ago with the book I mentioned earlier The Art of Work I think it was like we had an audience of current entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs, faith-based and I think it was like stay at home moms I think it was the fourth one and we had this book that was geared we had the same book but we had four different kinds of paths four different almost like four different avatars for the book. That’s important to make sure you have different versions of the swipe copy for your affiliates.
A few other little notes as you get ready for your launch to make sure you test the sales funnel out early don’t wait till the last minute get it done early, test it early and often test all kinds of scenarios if they buy the book and then go this way if they take this offer but don’t take this one if they don’t take this one but do take that one what happens if they bypass it?
Does everything work right?
Follow up, follow up, follow up, follow up.
We talked about this last time.
Collect their email address first before it goes to the buy page if at all possible, and then follow up if they don’t buy the book.
Follow up, follow up, follow up, follow up.
Claim their bonuses.
Follow up, follow up, follow up, follow up.
They don’t take an upsell.
Follow up, follow up.
This is a product launch. And remember, your affiliates only get paid on sales of the upsells.
Maybe you could do it. Maybe you could set up where they get a buck or two on the book. But usually there’s not a lot of money there.
So if they buy the book but don’t take any of the upsells, follow up with them.
Follow up with them before they get the book. Follow up with them a couple of weeks after they would have gotten a book.
Hey, how’s the book going?
Do you want this?
Are you finding it hard to read the book?
So go grab the audiobook and all that goes through your affiliates
and then make sure you encourage your affiliates to help with upsells.
All right. So this is something you got to make sure you get your Privacy stuff in order here. And I’m not a legal expert, so I just rely on our legal experts to do that.
But make sure, if at all possible, that you share those who bought the book or claim the bonuses with your affiliates so they can help with the upsells. That email coming from them will go a long way. So they can send a couple of have an email sequence, hey, send this to everybody who didn’t purchase the upsells.
They’re going to make a lot of money off those, and they’re only sending it to, say, 100 people.
So it’s not sending over their whole list or anything like that. So that’s what you need to be doing during the launch.
I know it’s a lot of different things kind of bounced around a little bit, but I just wanted you to get a really good idea of what it looks like.
Once you got the affiliates. What those timelines and specifics look like about what to do with your affiliates. It’s super important.
This is why Jeff Coins did 22,000 versus, say, 5000 or 6000. This is kind of the secret sauce here.
So I gave you the playbook to make sure you actually follow it, make sure you come back for the next episode. It’s a good one going a little bit different here.
So you’ve written the book. How do you make a little bit more money from the book?
I’m going to show you how to use affiliate marketing in a book.
How do you insert some affiliate marketing in the book to make a book that you might only make two $3 a copy in royalties?
How do you make 350, 450 a book? What I’m teaching in the next episode just to be clear is not how do you make an extra million dollars from a book?
If you sell half a million copies you could make an extra million dollars. But I’m thinking if you sell 100 copies how do you make an extra 20 or $25,000 from the book? It’s totally possible.
We’ve helped our clients do numbers very similar to that. When they sold 20, 25,000 copies they made an extra $50 to $75,000 just by implementing what I’ll teach you in the next episode so come back for that. I’ll see you then.
The post How to Run an Affiliate Book Launch appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
If your audience is made up of bloggers, vloggers, writers or business owners…or ANYONE who creates content…this opportunity is for you.
A group of affiliate marketing experts have packed all their trade secrets and best practices into one, convenient source of ‘how to’ information.
You don’t often see that.
And, better still, this valuable collection of expertise is discounted.
Introducing “Ultimate Bundles”…a goldmine of discounted templates and trainings for smart, ambitious content creators.
(You’ll find me in there.)
I’m excited about this opportunity because:
All of this valuable information on how pull off an affiliate marketing program that rocks in one place. You get The Content Marketing Dream Team and all their valuable “how to” information…at a discount!
CLICK HERE TO APPLY TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE
About Ultimate Bundles Create! Launch! Convert! That’s the theme of this offer.
“Ultimate Bundles” is a collection of discounted templates and trainings for smart, ambitious content creators.
(Of which, I’m proud to be included in.)
We’ve included swipe files. Graphics. The works!
And, if an affiliate requests one, they can even get customized landing pages for the contributors…for FREE!
All told, there are 43 products in this content creators treasure chest.
Ultimate Bundles is made up of videos, eCourses, templates, workbooks and ebooks.
What’s Included: There are 43 products in the package:
- 34 eCourses/Videos
- 1 Printable
- 2 eBooks
- 6 Templates/Workbooks
Target Audience: Any content creators (bloggers, vloggers, writers, business owners, anyone who creates content)
2022 Launch Dates: February 17th-23rd, 2022
Pricing: $97 + $50 cheat sheets
Upsells: The Collective subscription ($30/mo) and The Genius Blogger’s ToolKit 2021 ($97)
Average cart prices for similar bundles was $114.67 and $117.39 (so around $116)
Commissions: 70% for Contributors/40% for affiliates, with a newly introduced tiered system (need Matt’s help to figure this out – we uploaded the data to Basecamp).
Prizes: We’re going to introduce tiered commissions instead of prizes.
EPC, average commission per sale, etc: Stats for The Genius Blogger’s Toolkit 2021 (Sept 2021):
EPC: $9.52
Average commission per sale: $56.79
% of people who purchased the $50 cheatsheets: 29%
% of people who purchased one of the $97 upsells: 9.97%
Sales page conversion rate: 9.5%
Refund rate: 4.9%
Stats for The Writer’s Toolkit 2021:
EPC: $7.37
Average commission per sale: $56.01
% of people who purchased the $50 cheatsheets: 50%
% of people who purchased one of the $97 upsells: 4.85%
Sales page conversion rate: 6.24%
Refund rate: 6.5%
Who are some affiliates you have committed to promote so far?: Suzi Whitford
Gold City Ventures
Amira Irfan
Rachel Ngom
Bob Bly
Chelsea Clarke
Kate Ahl
Carly Campbell
Lucrezia Lapichino
CLICK HERE TO APPLY TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE
Testimonials Blogging for profit is a never ending learning experience, but with the help of the Genius Blogger’s Toolkit I am able to stay on top of all the new trends and best strategies. Take it from someone who’s bought the bundle 4 years in a row – and I don’t plan to stop anytime soon. In fact, the GBTK has been a contributing factor in me quitting my job and going full time with my blogging business. Because when you have access to the right educators – anything is possible!
Ana Skyes
I love how this bundle is jam-packed with so much value covering all the different areas that bloggers need to master on their blogging journey. Within a year of purchasing my first bundle, I was already earning a full-time income as a blogger!
Frances Vidakovic
I love the toolkit because it provides something for everyone at each level. And it’s structured in a way that allows you to move through it at your own pace.
Kate Ahl
Something I absolutely love about the Genius Bloggers Toolkit is that there is something for bloggers at every stage. Whether you are brand new to blogging, or have been in the game for years – you will always learn something new and find incredible value year after year!
Chelsea Clarke
The Genius Blogger’s Toolkit has so much amazing content. I bought the bundle last year and couldn’t believe how many resources were included! Believe it or not but I’m still working through last year’s content…
Gold City Venture
CLICK HERE TO APPLY TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE
Click Here to Learn More About Our Recommended Affiliate Programs The post Affiliate Opportunity: Ultimate Bundles appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
If you’ve ever thought about writing a book…and actually selling it, you need affiliates. The reality is that books, like most products, don’t sell themselves. Most bestsellers have an army of people promoting the book. Today, I’ll show you how to get affiliates for a book launch (or any launch really).
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Links Mentioned in this Episode Affiliate Marketing for Authors Training
Behind the Scenes of the Real Artists Don’t Starve Book Launch
Your First 100 Affiliates Report
Affiliate Recruiting Swipe Files
How to Recruit New Affiliates You Don’t Even Know
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy The Affiliate Donut
What & How to Communicate to Your Affiliates
How to Use Leaderboards to Find Affiliates
How to Onboard Affiliates the Right Way
How to Sell Without Sounding Like a Used Car Salesman
How to Start 2022 Off the Right Way
How to Find Affiliates for a Book Launch (or Any Launch) If you’ve ever thought about writing a book and actually selling it, you need affiliates. The reality is that like most products, books don’t sell themselves most bestsellers, have an army of people promoting the book. And today I’ll show you how to get affiliates for a book launch or any launch for that matter. So I’m in book mode right now, my brain, like, in addition to our regular stuff that our company’s doing, we’re running numerous launches right now, we bring it on three new team members and all of that.
Like other than that, I am in full-out book mode. I got the first round of edits back from my developmental editor for Turn Your Passions Into Profits, which will be coming out in January of 2023. So I’m going through that. I’m right now in, in kind of make the book better mode, but I’m also thinking about the marketing of the book we’ve already gotten, play half a dozen about upwards of 10 great endorsements people that I admire and want. We’ve got some commitments to promote it for some great people. That’s who we’re going to be talking about today is, promoting the book, using affiliates.
Now, everything we talk about in regards to promoting a book launch really applies to any product launch. There are some nuances that we’ll talk about here in this episode, and we’re actually going to talk about this over the course of four episodes. You got like a whole month, February effectively is going to be, maybe into early March is going to kind of be like book month. And we’re going to talk about, first of all how to find affiliates for your book launch. That’s what we’re talking about in today’s episode.
In the next one, we’re going to talk about how to run an affiliate book launch, and then we’re going to talk about how to use affiliate marketing in a book. So actually how to take that book that, I know I’m making, I don’t mind sharing this. I’m making roughly $3 a book, not a ton of money. How do I add on a buck, a dollar of $52 to each book sale through affiliate marketing? And then in the final episode, I’m going to keep that one, a little bit of a surprise for right now I’ll share more about that later because it’s going to be a good one. I’m going to have an expert on, that’s going to just blow your mind with regards to writing a book, sales, using affiliates for book launches. It’s going to be awesome, but I’ve been getting a lot of questions about book launches.
Now there are a couple of reasons for that. Number one, I’ve been talking a lot about my book and I’m in the process of finishing that here we’ll have the final manuscript done in the next couple of months. The first draft has been done for many months. We got my dream publisher, BenBella, I think I mentioned this a few episodes ago, that if you look at my bookshelf, the number one publisher on my bookshelf, if my bookshelf is primarily, you know, entrepreneur and business books is BenBella. And so I’m really excited. I mean, it’s not every day, you get your dream publisher. And I got mine. So I’ve been thinking a lot about books, talking a lot about books. And we just ran a big book launch with Mark Miller for his book, Smart Leadership. And so I’ve just been getting a lot of questions.
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You know, people ask like they’ve written a book, they’re all excited to launch it, but they realize they just don’t have that many people promoting it. So the reality is that you want affiliates for your book launch. The question of course is how do you get them? And that’s what this episode is all about. I’ve been fortunate enough. I mean, I’ve worked on tons of book launches.
Some awesome people, Lewis Howes, Brian Tracy. I just mentioned Mark Miller, Jeff Goins, Ray Edwards. We’ve run their book launches. Ran close to a little bit over a dozen. I think I probably went like 14 or 15 book launches over the years. Pete Vargas is another one that comes to mind. And Trevor Blattner, we’ve helped so many people with their book launches. We’ve helped multiple authors achieve a number one bestseller status. Whether it be on Amazon we’ve hit number two on the wall street journal list. We’ve hit number one multiple times on Amazon. I know Jeff Goins’s book, The Real Artists Don’t Starve was number one in multiple categories.
I think today we’ve probably helped the author sell close to 500,000 books, you know, half a million books. So how do you get affiliates involved in your book launch? And again, these principles applied to almost any type of product launch. I’m gonna show you how to do that in this episode. So first I’m going to start with the basics that apply, whether you’re launching a book or a product, and I’m going to get more specific to books in particular as you go along. So the number one thing we do, this is affiliate recruiting 1 0 1 is, look for affiliates who promoted similar books and products. You want to start by looking for people who promoted books that are similar.
You can use Google to do this. Just go to Google. And you know, I don’t think anybody actually goes to Google anymore, but you go up to the top, right? What was that called? Where you type in URLs and search things. I don’t even know what that’s called. I literally have no idea. I’ll have to look that up later. And you type in books that are similar to yours and you find affiliates who promoted those similar books, those similar products.
Again, if you’re doing a product launch, we’ve talked about this before you find people who promoted similar products, then you reach out to those people and ask if they’d be interested in sharing your book with their audience, I’ve got a whole post that shows you how to actually do that.
I’m not going to go through that whole thing. I’ll put a link in the show notes, but basically, you go online. You find those affiliates. We have some affiliate recruiting swipe files that will include the link too. Use those emails that we give you in the affiliate recruiting, swipe files. Use those use the tools that we share in the post.
There are numerous tools. They’re constantly changing. I think in this video, there’s one that I don’t even mention that we now use called Clearbit connect. It’s a Gmail plugin that we use. It’s phenomenal for finding email addresses. You send those potential affiliates and emails and basically ask them if they’re interested in promoting your book. If that’s something that would serve their audience.
Again, you don’t have to write the world’s most perfect email. I’ve got sample emails that you can use in the affiliate recruiting swipe files. Make sure you use those sampling of those that have been tested and split, tested and refined literally over 15 years, we kind of locked them down. About two years ago, we continue to test, but they haven’t gotten any better it took me about 14 or 15 years to kind of figure out exactly what works, the exact language that they are tested and proven to work. And so the other way you can do this is to use Amazon and I call this follow the Amazon rabbit trail. So I’m going to do this literally live.
You can’t see this here on the podcast, but you can picture what I’m doing. I’m going to go to Amazon. I’m going to go to books and I’m going to look up my books. I’m going to look up, actually, I’m going to look up mark Miller’s book Smart Leadership. This is one we recently did, and I’m going to open the book on Amazon and I’m going to scroll down.
I mean, Amazon makes it so easy. Explore similar books, products related to this item. People who bought this also bought. And so I’m going to go up here just to the, explore similar books. Now you could look for similar books by that author because Mark has written like 10 books, but I’m just going to open up.
The advantage is one by Patrick Lindsay on a great book, by the way. Oh my goodness. I love that book. That was a book that really, really, really helped me over the past year. See, because when that book come out, I think it came out about 10 years ago, but I finally listened to it in 2020.
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It was like right in the middle of the pandemic, as the height of the pandemic, summer of 2020, roughly. And I made a conscious choice in 2021 to focus on leadership. You know the basis of the book is why the organization, why your culture and you know, your health of the organization, beats everything else, beats marketing beats, all the stuff.
So anyway, sorry for that rabbit trail there. But speaking of the Amazon rabbit trail, now I’m talking about books that I love. All right. So I look up the advantage and I go find, okay, who promoted the advantage? Now I can go back to the smart leadership book and see, okay, what other books are here? Maybe you know, okay, Great Traction by Gino Wickman and published by Ben Bella. One of my absolute favorite books, all of Gino’s books are amazing. So I can keep following the rabbit trail books. Now from traction, I can go down to products related to this item. People who bought this also bought, right? And now we’re going to go to the business playbook and we’re going to look up people who look their Linkedin Riches by my friend, John Nemo awesome. I’ll have to tell him about that. You know, lead well by Ken Falke. And I’m going to go down that rabbit trail and I’m going to keep finding books going down the Amazon rabbit trail, looking up to see who promoted these books.
The thing is for most of us, you know, if you’re J K Rowling with Harry Potter, you don’t need to do this, but for most of us who maybe aren’t, you know, I have no delusions of grandeur. I’m going to just break the heartbreaking news to myself here. My book’s probably not going to have a quarter of a million pre-orders and we’ll talk about why pre-orders are so important.
The reality is our goal is 25,000 copies. I want to do 25,000 pre-orders and that is a stretch goal. Statistically, if you look at them, what we have, I’m probably going to do in the neighborhood of 16 to 17500, that’s what the numbers look like. And if you look at my advance that I got from the publisher and all of the stuff, that’s pretty much what they’re projecting as well. You know, somewhere in that like 15,000 to 17,500 books, I think it’s more like 16 to 75. So 25 thousand of a stretch goal.
So my point to that is this I don’t necessarily need to be looking at who promoted the biggest books. You know, I don’t need to be looking at the podcast necessarily that might’ve moved four and 5,000 books, although I will try to get on those, I want to look at, you know, who promoted some of these books build a business, not a job, who promoted some of these books that maybe you haven’t heard of, that might’ve only sold 5, 6,000 copies, but 3 or 4,000 of them were sold by affiliates. Those are great books to look at.
And I’m basically going to go down the Amazon rabbit trail. I’m going to go search for that book, see who promoted it. I’m going to probably find anywhere from five to 25 affiliates per book, and I’m going to reach out to them. And the message is essentially going to say it again. We’ve got the copy-paste templates, but it’s essentially going to say, I saw that you were promoted, let me see. I’m gonna, I’m gonna, you know, subject line David Finkel, because he wrote, build a business on a job, you know, Hey Joe, I saw that you promoted to build a business, not a job by David Finkel. When it came out a few years ago, I’ve got a new book called smart, or Mark Miller has a new book called smart leadership. Would you be interested in promoting it? That’s the gist of the message. All right. It’s not the whole message, but you get the idea.
So we’re going to follow that rabbit trail. You can just literally just keep going. And when we do it well I mean, we’ll end up with hundreds of books and thousands of affiliates that we reach out to now, of course, the key is you got to start doing this. Like we’re doing this for my January book launch. We’re doing this now, we are starting this now. If we wait until even June of this year to do it six, seven months out, there’s just no time, can we get a hundred affiliates? Sure. But can I get the 3 or 400 that I want? No, we just won’t have time.
So that’s how you start. Right? I mean, that’s the easiest way because you don’t have to know anybody and Amazon makes it so easy. It’s not like the old days where you had to kind of like be like, okay, go type in the leader. Say the old days, you know, like 10 years ago, you know, you had to go like type in leadership books, like find a bunch of lists. No, I mean literally if all you did, this is really fun.
When you go to the products related to this item often the very first one, let me just go back here and see if it does with this one. Yeah. I mean So of all of these on three of the four, it does this, it lists the book that you just released as the first one. So a just-released book means that somebody is promoting it like right now or weeks ago, a great time to reach out to them versus, Hey, I saw where you promoted this book from nine years ago. You know, in this example, trippy told you Traction came out, which came out about, about 10 years ago as well, but 8, 9, 10 years ago.
So to the advantage, I might not use those as the best examples because a book about nine years ago, Hey, Hey, I saw you interviewed this guy nine years ago. And so that’s not necessarily your best example of something. And so we typically would limit it when we’re doing it. We would limit it to, you know, something in the last four or five years typically. So, you know, I love it. Here is the name of a book, How great leaders create organizations that are people never want to leave. Clint Pulver, no idea who this guy is, but it was published on April 13th, 2021. I want to know who promoted that book if I’m, you know, and that’s one of the ones that we picked for smart leadership. So it just makes sense, right? Amazon makes it so easy to find these books. You just keep going down that rabbit trail.
The second way that you can find affiliates for your books is to ask your friends. You know this is the lowest-hanging fruit. Like these are the people you should reach out to. I started reaching out before I even had a publisher. I think I even, I think I even had a few before I even finished the first draft of the manuscript. And so don’t overlook these people that you know, they’re going to be motivated to make sure your launch goes well because of your relationship with them.
They’re going to promote it because it’s you, you’ll have friends who maybe don’t, they’re not in a niche that is necessarily relevant to your niche, but they’ll promote it anyway. I will have people who are in all kinds of niches that are promoting my book and the message they’re going to be saying is, Hey, I realize this isn’t for all of you, but this guy helped me build my business in the niche that I’m in, you know, fill in the blank. So if you’re interested in starting an online business, this is the guy to learn from, go get the book. Their audience might be in the parenting niche. They might be in the personal growth niche. They might be in the health niche.
They might be in all kinds of niches that have nothing to do with starting an online business, but a percentage of their audience will fit. And so they’re going to promote the book because it’s me. And maybe I’m some of these are coaching clients and things like that are just friends. They’re going to promote it because it’s me not because they necessarily think it’s the perfect thing for everyone in their audience.
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They’re going to make a ton of money. But if somebody like that can move 30 to 50 bucks times, you know, 30 to 50 of those people, that’s an extra 900 to 2,500. You know, we’re talking an extra couple thousand books from people that aren’t even in my niche. That’s a pretty big deal.
The third thing you can do is ask your list. Now I have a list of people who, you know, most of you are affiliates. So when I say to you, Hey, do you want to promote the book? Well, you know, there’s a pretty well like a one-to-one correlation there. Right? Makes a lot of sense. What if you don’t have a list of affiliates, right? It doesn’t matter, you know, ask the people on your email list that follow you on social media. If they’d like to be a part of your book launch team an affiliate program for a book is basically a book launch team on steroids. All right. It gives them a chance to earn a commission for helping to get the word out about your book.
Those that follow you will jump at the chance to help you share your book and earn some money as an affiliate. And so with those, you know, when you’re on the book launch team, what we recommend is that they buy the book, they leave a review and they promote it. And we kind of separate those first two things from the third thing, in terms of expectations. Like if you’re on the book launch team, there’s no expectation you’re going to promote it. But if you want to, you can also be an affiliate and promote the book.
There are tons of other places to find affiliates for a book launch product launch. Doesn’t matter again, all of the principles you can do that with the Amazon thing, do that with a product launch, you have a product that’s in the leadership space, we’ll go look up five books in the leadership phase, find out who promoted those books, and go ask them to be an affiliate for your product. And one of the ways you can do it, there’s odds are your product costs substantially more.
If you have a course, it costs substantially more than 15, $20 book. So you can talk about that. Like, Hey, it looks like you promoted this book. I have a course that’s much deeper. And you know, it’s a thousand dollars, a $2,000. You’re gonna earn, 500 to 1000 dollars in commissions and you can position it that way but there are tons of other places to find affiliates. If you probably heard me mentioned before, but my free report, your first 100 affiliates, I’ve got 15 places in there to find affiliates. I just go to Mattmcwilliams.com/FIRST100. You can download that report. I’ll put that link in the show notes as well.
All right. So what are the specifics because asking your friends, asking your list, you know, even the Amazon and going to Google and typing in your competitors, those all work for everything. What are some of the specifics you need to do with book launches, but things want to talk about now, don’t seem like they’re initially about getting affiliates, but they impact getting affiliates so much that I want to talk about them in this episode because if you don’t do these things, you’re not going to get the affiliates. And then we’re going to talk about the specifics of running the affiliate side of the book launch in the next episode.
So some of these, kind of blur the line between, you know, the front end getting affiliates and then the actual executing of the launch. But you’ll see what I’m talking about as I talk about these, because you’re not going to, you’re just not going to get affiliates. If you don’t do these things, the number one thing you have to do is to set up a backend offer in order to actually get affiliates, to promote your book launch, you have to have a backend offer that’s reasonably priced and therefore makes them a reasonable a decent commission, right? It could be a price point as low as $97.
It could be 197 upwards of 497 reasons is the affiliate don’t really make anything on the book. You know, when affiliates promote, say a free plus shipping offer or an offer where we’re selling the book directly through our website, we’re selling the book for free plus shipping. usually 799 to 999 for the shipping. You know, when it costs about 750 to nine bucks to mail the thing, you’re not making a commission as an affiliate. Even if we sell the book directly at 17 bucks, the is taking 11 of the hat or 12 that you’re not making anything as an affiliate. So we need to offer something on the backend as a part of the funnel.
This is how affiliates actually get paid in a book launch. So on a free plus shipping offer, they’ll go to the site, they’ll enter their information, they’ll pay the shipping. And then it’ll immediately go into a funnel. Typically, what we’ll do is something that, you know, maybe a workbook, your workbooks were great. Some sort of an audio course or a video course works great, checklist. Things that make the book easy to implement faster and easier to implement a journal could work great, a field guide, you know, something we did with Mark Miller, a quick start guide. It could be things like that. And then it’ll get progressively more. So might have you were from a three, you know, so the book would be the first step and then two more steps to a four-step fourth step offer just depending upon what they’re interested in. So we set that funnel up and then we pay 50% commissions on everything in that funnel.
So think of the book as a, as low ticket paid lead magnet, rather than having a free PDF or a free video free webinar. It’s a seven to $15 lead magnet. And it’s easy to do when you’re controlling the flow. So a free plus shipping offer where you’re selling all the books through your site, that’s easy. You can still do this as we do with Mark Miller and a few. And I know he did this with Brian Tracy. I think we did this with Jeff Goins’s second book that we did, if I’m not mistaken where you purchase the book on say, Amazon is where most people go, but there’s usually we’ll put links to like Barnes and Noble and Books-A-Million on there as well.
You purchase the book, then come back to the site to enter your order number and email address to redeem your bonuses. This is the, we didn’t get into this, but this is the big thing. What’s the urgency to buy the book.
You know what, what’s the urgency to actually purchase the book. And we’ll talk about this in the next episode where we talk about the importance of pre-orders and you know, and all that, but they enter their order number and their email address to claim the pre-order bonuses. And then it goes into the funnel. So it works either way.
Number one, you want to set up a backend offer. Number two, you want to drive traffic to an opt-in page. Okay. So when someone clicks the affiliate link, they’re sent to an opt-in page, they then opt-in to get access to the book, whether it’s a free book, a discounted book, or an early offer with bonuses, affiliates are driving traffic to a page, right? So like with Jeff Goins his book, for instance, you know, it said pre-order real artists, don’t starve and you’ll receive. And the bonuses were like a 12 part video course PDF downloads of all the interviews and the book access to a private Facebook group. When they click the button and it pops up and asks for their name and email address, then it takes them to the payment page.
This allows you to follow up with them if they don’t complete their order and that’s key. And so again, we want that to where they, we want them driving the traffic to. Now, if you’re not doing that, if you’re driving them to a page where they go to Amazon to buy and then come back to redeem itthat works as well. You know, effectively, it’s what I just said. You drive them to that page. They leave, they go to Amazon, but they have to come back to enter their order number in an email to claim their bonuses. So effectively it operates as, an opt-in page.
The third thing that you have to do, and is again how you track the affiliates. You got to have that upsell and you gotta pay a solid commission. You want an offer, a first offer. I used to see 7%. You want to convert at least 7%. We’ve actually found we’re getting much better. You know, we’re getting close to 10%, you know, 11% on, you know, with some of our offers you in 12% on a few, you want to convert at least 10% of the people who purchased the book into the first higher-priced offer. You then want to convert roughly 20%, one in five of them into the next offer. So if you do the math on that, let’s just say the book is, let’s say you do a free plus shipping and you charge 999.
So 10 bucks, basically for the shipping and just using nice round math, you should convert anywhere from 25 to 40% of the visitors to the page. So if an affiliate, a hundred people and you convert, we’ll just go with 40, for nice round number, convert, 40 people have them do a paid purchase of the book. We should then convert four of them into roughly a $100 offer, which we’re going to do a generous 50% commission. We’re not going to try to skimp and do 40 on a book launch. So they should convert four people into that. Now, what’s 20% of four. It’s technically less than one, but let’s just go with one. We should convert one of them into the purchase of whatever. The next highest thing is probably, you know, 297 to 497.
If they can drive a thousand people, so, you know, 350 bucks, we get roughly 40 of them ish into the first offer. And you know, eight to 10 of them into the higher-priced offer. The affiliates can make some good money, but they’re only, this is the attraction. They only have to sell a book.
You know, most people, most people that are on email lists that are getting promoted to whether it be in the entrepreneur space, the business space, the personal growth space, the gardening space, most people that go out of their way to subscribe to something and read blogs, have bookshelves in their home. Okay? Most people have tons of books on their bookshelf that they’ve never even read my point saying that is the 10 to $15 $17 purchase of a book is a very low barrier for most people on your list. No matter what niche you’re in, we’re not talking about a $1000 course or a $2,000 course.
So the barrier is really low. You don’t have to sell real hard. You don’t have to write long-form copy and convince them to buy the book. We like to feel it, the landing page for smart leadership. There are probably less than a thousand words on that page. Most of it’s testimonials, it’s mostly bullet points, headlines and pictures. Why? Because it’s 17 $18 purchase. I don’t have to convince you to pay 17 or 18 bucks. You know, this is not monumentally life-changing, it could change your life.
That book could change your life. If you read it, you know, just as an example, but the purchase price is not, life-changing like a $2,000 course. I don’t know what the average American makes per hour, but I know it’s more than 15 bucks, you know, and definitely, more than 10, whereas a $2,000, you know, purchase for many people is roughly, you know, half their weekly or no, that’s like their entire weekly income. I was like almost half of their monthly income. You know, it’s, it’s a week. It’s more than a week’s income for most people. It’s, you know, they have to work for seven days to earn that money versus maybe a half hour to buy a book.
And so you get to promote as an affiliate, a low ticket offer that can have a huge impact. You know, my books tend to run about 280 pages. It’s 280 pages of 17 years of lessons. I mean, for 15 to 20 bucks, that’s crazy. Right? And that’s the advantage. So the thing is you want to have those solid commissions on the backend so they can actually earn a lot of money.
And then the fourth thing you want to do is make your commissions long. When you’re doing a book launch, do not be cheap on cookie links. All right, this is not where you go. 30 days, 90 days, one year or lifetime. If you’re going to go one year, just go lifetime,…just go a lifetime. When you offer a lifetime cookie, it’s a great way to promote, you know, your affiliate program, right? You, you say, Hey, we have a lifetime cookie sounds a lot better than anything, even a one-year cookie, because here’s the deal, 95% of all the purchases that are ever made are going to be made within a year anyway, 90% are going to be made within 90 days.
But I mean, think about how much more attractive saying we offer a lifetime cookie versus a 90 day. Cookie sounds. It sounds like you’re being cheap. When you say 90 days you’re trying to keep me from earning money. Like I’m promoting your, your cheat book because it is, I mean, again, anything under 20 bucks to me is cheap.
You know, I’m not saying the value’s cheap, but the cost is cheap. And so I’m promoting your cheat book. You can’t even just give me a lifetime cookie. This allows affiliates who promoted your book launch, and maybe didn’t make a lot of money, make some money on the backend. Also as an affiliate manager, somebody who’s running your affiliate program, the advantage for you is they promoted your 10, 15, $20 book two years ago, they’re still making money. Now that means you’re still paying them now, which means you’re still reaching out to them every month with an email. I talk about this like 25 episodes ago, you reach out to them with an email and say,
Hey, Hey, Frank, just want to let you know, just sent you another $317 in affiliate commissions. By the way, our big launch is coming up in three months. Do you want to be a part of it? And what better time to ask somebody to join you to promote you than when you just gave them money? Pretty, pretty big deal, pretty big deal, right? So make sure that you give that lifetime cookie. If you, for some reason, really don’t want to do a lifetime, at least go one year. But again, you’re going to give up an extra three to 7% in sales to be able to say lifetime, if that gets you one decent-sized affiliate who otherwise wouldn’t promote you, it was worth it. It was worth it.
And I promise you it is worth it. I promise you in the long run, it’s worth offering a lifetime commission that’s in general. So did you just do it? Don’t question it, just do it. I got a ton of resources for you today. I’m violating all of my marketing roles by offering you a bunch of links here.
They’re all going to be in the show notes already talked about, your first 100 affiliates report. Make sure you go download that. I’ve also got specific training for authors affiliate marketing for authors. I talk about how to execute an affiliate book, everything that we talked about today, how to promote book launches is something we won’t really talk about too much on this series.
I don’t think, but how to actually promote book launches and how to promote affiliate offers inside of your book. If we are going to talk about it in an upcoming episode, but I’ve got more detail in this, these training videos. If you just go to Mattmcwilliams dot com forward slash authors, you can download all of them. All right?
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All of the stuff in there, it’s all of my best thinking on affiliate marketing for authors, probably going to turn this into a paid course. We’re probably sometime middle of this year. As we get ready for our book launch, we’re probably going to turn this into a course, so I’d go get it now. And that’s not me like doing the whole marketing ploy thing.
I’m just saying we’re probably going to pull it from free and turn it into more. You know, these videos are a couple of years old and we’re probably going to spruce it up, make it a lot of fans here and charge like 300 bucks for it. So go get it while it’s free and a little bit less fancy. And then also if you want it behind the scenes, look, I mentioned, Jeff Goins’s launch The Real Artists Don’t Starve book launch. This is like five years ago, but I did a recap, a private recap of that. And if you want to get access to that, if you just go to Mattmcwilliams.com/radsrecap. So real artists don’t starve, radsarecap.
Again, that’s in the show notes. You can download that or watch that video pretty cool. Little behind-the-scenes look that we did as a team about what that book launch looked like. So if you want to know all the nitty-gritty dirty stuff, go check that out. And then I mentioned earlier, the affiliate recruiting swipe files, we’ll put a link in the show notes as well, and that post on how to recruit new affiliates that you don’t even know.
Go look those, you know, just go grab those, those swipe files and use those swipe files to reach out to prospective affiliates. So with that, we’ll wrap up here. Make sure you grab all of those. Again, all the links in the show notes, come back for the next episode.
Make sure you hit subscribe because you don’t want to miss these upcoming episodes. The next one is going to be all about how to run an affiliate book on. So you got the affiliates, you got kind of these foundational things set up. Like we talked about here now, what do you do now? What do you do? We’re going to talk about that, talk about what you know about the actual book launch itself, timelines, the specifics about what to do with your affiliates. So that’s coming up in the next step. So make sure you hit subscribe. If you know somebody who can benefit from this, you’ve got a friend of yours. Who’s an author. Their book’s coming out in a few months or you know, a year from now. Go tell them about this episode. Tell him about the series, tell them to subscribe. If nothing else, just listen to the next four episodes because they don’t want to miss those. All right. See you in the next episode.
The post How to Find Affiliates for a Book Launch (or Any Launch) appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Everybody makes mistakes. That’s why they put erasers on pencils. But some mistakes have a greater impact than others. Especially when it comes to using social media to promote your affiliate marketing program. These are mistakes that COULD COST YOU MONEY! If you want to learn from the mistakes I have helped countless others avoid and saved them a fortune!
Links Mentioned in This Lesson: AIM TRIAL
Recommended Affiliate Programs and Upcoming Product Launches
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Come join me on my next live lesson, “ Behind the Scenes Look at Affiliate Book Launches”, Thursday, February 3 at 2:00 pm ET. More details can be found here.
The post Top 10 Mistakes Affiliates Make On Social Media appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
This will probably be Homer Simpson’s favorite podcast episode ever because today we’re talking about the Affiliate Donut. What is the Affiliate Donut? You’ll just have to listen to find out!
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Links Mentioned in this Episode 3 Lessons from a Hater Affiliate Marketing is a Butt Sniffing Monkey
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy What & How to Communicate to Your Affiliates
How to Use Leaderboards to Find Affiliates
How to Onboard Affiliates the Right Way
How to Sell Without Sounding Like a Used Car Salesman
How to Start 2022 Off the Right Way
2022 Affiliate Marketing Predictions
The Affiliate Donut This is probably going to be Homer Simpson’s favorite podcast episode ever because today we’re talking about the affiliate donut. What the heck is the affiliate donut? Well, you just have to listen to find out.
So I get asked a lot about why would I promote other products? Like doesn’t that distract my audience? Why would I promote someone else’s stuff? When I have so many products on my own? I mean, just off the top of my head, I think about imagine if you’re known for one or two products, you don’t want to distract from those. But we have dozens of products off the top of my head and I’m going to forget half the stuff we have. I know we have Affiliate Insider Monthly, we have No Product No Problem, Find Affiliates Now, 7-Figure Affiliate Launch, The Affiliate Code, 10K in 10 weeks, List Launch Academy, List Launch Challenge. We have some of our mini-courses like our promo prep mini-course, Finding Affiliate Programs mini-courses. I mean, the list really just goes on and on and we’ve got a Copywriting mini-course, just specifically for affiliate marketers, we’ve got our Ultimate Affiliate Swipe File. Like the list goes on and on.
I am positive that I could promote a product every, I don’t know if I could pull off two weeks if I don’t think we have 26, but I could probably promote something every three weeks for a year and never promote the same thing twice. How can I have all those products and then still promote other companies, other products? Doesn’t that? Isn’t that a distraction? Isn’t my audience going to be like, well, “I thought you were all about this or that.” And I’ve shared these analogies because I like to create these vivid pictures in people’s minds of affiliate marketing and the analogies that I can come up with them.
One of the analogies that I came up with a while back I talked about this about 17, 18 episodes ago was I did a podcast on lessons from a hater. And so I talked about the butt-sniffing monkey, and I shared how this guy, you know, I did a training for Jeff Walker’s affiliates and they went on to have their second-best launch ever which is amazing. And this guy was like, “I can’t believe you let this guy, he’s talking about butt-sniffing monkey, he is so unprofessional.” And I was like, you know, okay, whatever. And the thing is, the example is basically talking about there was this video of a monkey that falls out of a tree. Because he smells this butt, you know, this whole thing. Right?
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In college, we didn’t have social media. We didn’t have emails. So we didn’t know how like how do you get this thing from one person to another? So we just kept going around and going, come here, come here, come here. You gotta see this. And the lesson of course was, and you can go back and listen to that episode is that’s all affiliate marketing is here’s this product, here’s this thing. It’s so good. You got to see it. And you’re excited to share something.
Well, another analogy that I’ve talked about, and I shared this with a client that today, and as far as I know, I haven’t shared this as a podcast episode. So if I have, oops, well, you know, to repeat 500 episodes ago or something is this affiliate donut concept.
And I was telling him like trying to get him to wrap his head around why he should be promoting affiliate offers. And I just said, okay, just picture this donut, all its glory, right? The glaze, the sprinkles. So think about your products and your services. Those are the hole right in the middle of that donut. This is your core offer.
These are the things that you are an expert on. You know, you’re the fitness trainer and you know how to get people in shape, right? You’re the accountant who knows how to do accounting. You’re the expert on growing tomatoes, hydroponically or whatever it is, right? This is the donut. This little part would be, if you think about it, just surface area wise, if you put a donut on a table and then measure the surface area, that donut is maybe 10, 20% on the high end, but the sprinkles all over this surface area of the donut, these are all the things that you’re not an expert at. You’re not the leader at, you’re not known for, but your audience needs to know. They need to learn. They need to buy, they need them to do something. They might even need them to do something that accomplishes the thing that you teach, for example.
This allows you to better serve your audience. Promoting affiliate offers, serves your audience by filling in the gaps in your own product offerings.
You know, if you have, as you mentioned a fitness trainer, right? If you’re a fitness trainer, you teach people how to eat, right, how to exercise. You have products, you’ve got a nutrition product and some different levels of exercise, but you’ve got a beginner and intermediate-advanced, maybe one for seniors, one for women, one for men, one that puts on more muscle. One that is about losing weight and whatever you get those. Those are your core offers.
But if your audience is coming to you for help on those things, they also need time management. They need stress relief. They need to know how to set goals. They need productivity, help. They need natural healing. You’re not an expert on any of those. You don’t want to be the expert on any of those. You have no plans on offering products in those areas anytime soon, those are the donut. Those are the sprinkles in the donut. So how do you best serve your audience? Option one is, to do nothing. Offer nothing in those areas from you or from affiliates.
And you basically are saying, screw your audience. I don’t care that you want to know stress relief. I don’t care that you want to know time management. I don’t care. If you want to set goals, be more productive or learn how to heal naturally. I’m not going to offer you anything. Or you promote products that fill those gaps. You promote the sprinkles.
If you’re a financial coach, we teach people how to manage their money, how to invest. But the thing is, your audience also wants to know leadership, how to be a better leader. They want to know how to start a business, how to be an entrepreneur, how to find work. They love, they also need productivity and goal setting. Like it’s kind of funny. Those are almost universal things, right? Productivity and goal setting.
Those are the donut. Those are the sprinkles, little leadership here, entrepreneurs stuff here. You know, Dan, Miller’s 48 days to the work you love here. Productivity, you know, from somebody like Robby Miles, goal-setting from Michael Hyatt or whoever, right? Those are the donut. Assuming you don’t want to teach on those subjects. How can you best serve your audience by recommending other products that teach those subjects? And then you make money. You make affiliate income. You know, if you think about it, you only make money from the whole and nothing from the sprinkles, that’s limiting your income to that’s a win-win.
And the thing is like using these as examples, think about people who have more time because they’re more productive at work. So instead of working 8:30 to 5:30 every day, they go to working nine to five. So they, they go to work in a little bit less. If they work 45 minutes less, the day that does It gives them more time to exercise. Maybe they’re only exercising a half hour. Now they can exercise an hour and they have 15 minutes to cook better food. That’s healthier for them. So they’re going to buy your fitness course because, well, I have more time. I’m not going to buy that. Dude’s fitness course. I only got 20 minutes for a workout every day. I don’t need a course. I just need to run in place for 20 minutes. Do a few pushups. I’m good. No, I’ve got time now. Oh, I have an extra half hour, a day to cook, right? I better buy a course that teaches me or a book that teaches me how to cook better.
They’re gonna buy more of your stuff. People who are better at setting goals, they’re going to seek out financial counseling to help them reach those goals. We have a goal that is a purely financial goal that cannot happen on our income from our business alone. More than likely there’s going to be some investment involved. And so we already do like, traditional investing. We have a, you know, it’s called the SEP self-employment pension. We’ve got IRAs and things like that. We’ve got a very diverse portfolio and all that stuff, but this particular goal required some next-level stuff that I don’t know anything about. So what did we do? We went and got a financial counselor, but what if I didn’t have that goal? Now, this happened on my own, but what if I didn’t have that goal, then I never would have sought the help of the financial counselor. You know, the fitness trainer back to that one. If they set goals to lose 20 pounds, now they’re going to be more serious than they’re going to buy your stuff, to help them.
In other words, this is the key, your affiliate recommendations, the sprinkles help grow the whole. They help your sales not hurt them. They don’t distract your audience. In fact, they can move them towards buying your products. You know, we have a client who’s in the parenting space. She specifically helps parents of kids who have learning disabilities.
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Guess what? Most parents have two or more kids, one of them has a learning disability, the others don’t. So what about their kids that don’t have a learning disability? How do they help them? She’s not an expert on that. That’s the sprinkles. Like this is still within, under the niche of parenting. This isn’t even getting slightly outside the niche.
What about the kids that have learning disabilities, but want to be entrepreneurs? She’s not an entrepreneur expert necessarily, so she can promote something as an affiliate for them. What about specific things within her? You know, there’s like this thing, and this is ADHD. There’s autism spectrum. There’s, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Right? Those are all in some cases the sprinkles.
I’ve got another client who’s in a very specific she’s focused on specifically on, I don’t know. I’ll just say it. People with what’s gluten intolerance have one Celiac disease. That’s her thing. That’s all she focuses on. But what about fitness? What about other parts of the diet? You know, you have celiac disease. Don’t eat gluten, but what about the other parts? Right? Like I said, what about getting in better shape? How do you get certain things done if you got celiacs, but you’re an athlete, things like that, right? Those are the sprinkles for her.
Got another client. Who’s all about public speaking. Tricia Brouk, what about building your platform? What about growing your email list? What about selling something on the back end? What about creating a product becoming the expert or growing on social media? Those are all sprinkles. She promotes others who teach those things. I’m not a membership expert, but Stu McLaren is. Stu is one of my sprinkles because I know the importance of recurring revenue.
I know the importance of membership. It’s why we created Affiliate Insider Monthly too, for one to serve our audience. But two, it creates recurring revenue for us. I’m not an expert on publishing books, but do you know who is? Chad Allen? And who’s an expert on writing a book Chandler Bolt. And if you want to self-publish Chandler Bolt, you want to get a contract, you know, a book contract like we did with Benbella. You know, Chad was a huge help. I learned from Chad and went out and got wrote the book proposal, got an agent. And we had got a contract with my dream publisher. Turn your passions into profits coming out January 2023, by the way, I see man... I got my dream publisher on that book because I followed what Chad taught so I can highly recommend him. He’s a sprinkle. I’m not an expert on copywriting.
We have a mini-course that sells for less than a hundred bucks on copywriting for affiliates. But if you want to get really, really good at copywriting Ray Edwards, he’s one of my sprinkles. Goal-setting Michael Hyatt. All of these things are my sprinkles. So that’s what you picture. You got your core offerings. That’s the whole, the sprinkles. Oh, the glorious.
Those are your affiliate offers. They are not a distraction. They’re not going to hurt your sales. In fact, if you do it right, they will, more than likely help your sales and provide you a lot of income in the meantime, from those affiliate offers. So my call to action to you, go out there and promote something, find a sprinkle, just one sprinkle in the next 60 days and promote it like crazy and serve your audience. Make a little bit of money, have some fun doing it. And yeah, it’s gonna help that whole get bigger over time with your own offerings.
So make sure you hit subscribe and share. You don’t want to miss the next episode. I’ve got a three-part series coming up on affiliate marketing for authors. I’m deep in book mode. Like I said earlier, my book, turn your passions into profits.
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It’s coming out in January 2023, coming out. Again, my dream publisher. BenBella, who’s published like half the books that are on my bookshelf. And so I’m excited because in this three-part series, we’re going to talk about number one, how to find affiliates for a book launch or really any launch for that matter. But we’re going to hone in on some specific nuances with book launches.
We’re going to talk about how to run an affiliate book launch. And then we’re going to talk about how to use affiliate marketing in a book. So if you have any interest in writing a book and launching a book, these next three episodes are for you. So make sure you hit subscribe, come back for those episodes. I’ll see you then.
The post The Affiliate Donut appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
If you have an audience that is interested in finding efficient, automated ways to build targeted lists of sales leads, then this affiliate opportunity is for you.
FlowChat is a software platform that offers a SMART way to build targeted lists of sales leads so you can connect with qualified prospects quickly and efficiently.
The FlowChat Dashboard view of your sales pipeline quickly shows you all your opportunities, allows you to quickly drag & drop leads between stages and edit them by simply pressing the name of the opportunity.
I’m very excited about this affiliate opportunity because:
The FlowChat Team is LOADED with expertise!
Sean Malone: Sean comes from nearly two decades of studying communication, business, and professional sales and has successfully grown (and sold) multiple businesses on his own. He’s also helped guide 4 additional organizations into the 8-figures.
Chris Baden: The last three businesses Chris has started have done over $1 million each per year in revenue. He attributes sales as his key skill to solve problems and add value to others. Chris has thrived in B2B sales, B2C sales, and sales in numerous industries.
Bruno Domingues: Bruno has been busy helping High Ticket Coaches & Consultants streamline their Organic Client Acquisition on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn by using an Organic CRM Platform & Flow Strategies. As a Further, he is a software developer by trade. Bruno has built the backend systems for some of the largest companies in the world.
CLICK HERE TO APPLY TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE
About FlowChat
FlowChat is a software platform that offers a SMART way to build targeted lists of sales leads so you can connect with them quickly and efficiently. The FlowChat “10-minute Fast Start” tutorial explains everything you need to know to get up and running in minutes.
This product streamlines the process of lead generation by offering 3 key benefits: * It saves tons of time by allowing customers to collect thousands of highly targeted people instantly. * You can set up pre-defined messaging sequences once and automatically have them work for you over and over. * FlowChat will save you time by giving you the ability to send out multiple messages simultaneously.
FlowChat offers 24-hour product support from a dedicated agent so you are never in a position where you have to “wait” to get a question answered or an issue resolved. One of the biggest time-saving strengths of the product is the “Import” feature. This allows you to seamlessly transfer conversations, likes, contact information from other platforms such as Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn which eliminates the need for time-consuming data re-entry.
What’s Included:
Store up to 25,000 Leads
500 Prospecting DB Credits/month
Up to 10 Pipelines Book-A-Call Messaging Sequence
1 on 1 Onboarding Call
Slack Support
Zapier Integrations
Import FB – Friends List
Import FB – Groups
Import FB – Ppl who like posts
Import IG – Chats
Import IG – Followers & Likes
Import LI – Chats
Import LI – Groups & Likes BONUS WITH ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION: 8 Proven Pipeline Setups
8 Proven Messaging Sequences Target Audience: * Service Professionals * Coaches * Consultants * Agency Owners * Course Creators * Brick & Mortar Business Owners * Real Estate Agents, Financial Advisors, Insurance Agents
2022 Launch Dates: March 15-24 and July 12-21
Pricing: $1,997/year to $8,997/year depending on package selected
Commissions: $400, $1,000, and $1,800 per sale. Average sale is $1,092 commission.
Prizes: Awesome prizes and bonuses available for as few as 3 sales.
More About The FlowChat Team: Sean Malone: Sean comes from nearly two decades of studying communication, business, and professional sales, as well as tireless hard work. He has successfully grown (and sold) multiple businesses on his own. And, Sean has sold over $100 million and helped guide 4 additional organizations into the 8-figures. All the battle-field tested methods that he uses are part of the core of the Sales Ascenders Selling Systems & their proprietary Ascension Selling Method. With his unique ‘get-it-done’ mentality and a massively supportive team, he stays relentlessly focused on solving the revenue problem for business owners so they can experience the growth and success they deserve. Always Revenue. Always Relevant.
Chris Baden: Chris is typically thinking about building 3 things at any given moment: a life-long marriage, world impacting family and multi-million dollar businesses. The last three businesses Chris has started have done over $1 million each per year in revenue. In the last 10 years of being self-employed and employing others, he attributes sales as his key skill to solve problems and add value to others. Chris has thrived in B2B sales, B2C sales, and sales in numerous industries. While business is growing, so is his family! Chris is a father of two boys with a third on the way. Outside of business, Chris and his wife, Beth, competed on the hit TV Show American Ninja Warrior.
Bruno Domingues: Bruno has been busy helping High Ticket Coaches & Consultants streamline their Organic Client Acquisition on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn by using an Organic CRM Platform & Flow Strategies. Further, he is a software developer by trade. Bruno has built the backend systems for some of the largest companies in the world.
CLICK HERE TO APPLY TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE
Testimonials “FlowChat simplified my process in terms of reaching out to people and keeping my leads warm. It also allowed me to keep track of what I need to do each day.
I have literally made over $60k in sales just by following up with old leads thanks to FlowChat.
By this point, we’ve made over $200k since integrating FlowChat to our own systems.”
– Fabi Paolini
CLICK HERE TO APPLY TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE
Click Here to Learn More About Our Recommended Affiliate Programs The post Affiliate Opportunity: FlowChat appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
There are so many potentially great affiliate marketers that never get started because they buy into myths. In this video, I will completely DESTROY the 7 most dangerous myths that may be keeping you from becoming a successful and PROFITABLE affiliate marketer.
Links Mentioned in This Lesson: AIM TRIAL
Recommended Affiliate Programs and Upcoming Product Launches
TEXT ME: 260-217-4619
Come join me on my next live lesson, “ Behind the Scenes Look at Affiliate Book Launches”, Thursday, February 3 at 2:00 pm ET. More details can be found here.
The post 7 Affiliate Marketing Myths Destroyed appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
What do you communicate to your affiliates? When do you communicate with them? And how do you communicate with them? Three critical questions…all answered in this episode!
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Links Mentioned in this Episode Get the Sample Affiliate Training + Slides Here
Get the Weekend Email Template Here
How to Close Sales on Cart Close Day
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy How to Use Leaderboards to Find Affiliates
How to Onboard Affiliates the Right Way
How to Sell Without Sounding Like a Used Car Salesman
How to Start 2022 Off the Right Way
2022 Affiliate Marketing Predictions
My Top 10 Lessons of 2021 and What They Mean for YOU!
What & How to Communicate to Your Affiliates What do you communicate to your affiliates? And when do you communicate with them and how do you communicate with them? What are the methods you need to use? These are the three critical questions, and they’re all answered in this episode.
So a couple of episodes ago, I talked about onboarding your affiliates and we were focused on like, what does that first week or so look like the first couple of weeks because as I shared in that episode if you can get an affiliate to promote within the first couple of weeks, you stand a much better chance of having them be a large affiliate over time than you do if they don’t promote in the first couple of weeks.
Now, I shared in that episode, there are caveats and nuance to that. I almost got those words mixed up there, but you know, there are caveats and nuance, right?
If you’ve got a launch that’s four months away just because they don’t promote two weeks after signing up, doesn’t mean they’re not going to promote, clearly. If they sign up and they say “awesome”. It’s evergreen and they sign up and they say, you know, it’s January when they sign up and they’re like, “dude, I have got you on my calendar for March 14th.”
That’s six, seven weeks away, that’s fine. You know, we want to get on their calendar, but it’s really important to get them active quickly. But what about the long-term? I promised that I would share this in an upcoming episode and you only had to wait two weeks. So I’m going to share today about the regular updates. What do we do between launches? What do we do between big promotions? What do we do if it’s an evergreen program, right? What are those regular updates? So there’s a couple of nuances therein and of itself.
Again, there’s if you have a completely evergreen program, really, there’s not a whole lot that changes week to week and you’re not really all that seasonal. Maybe you have a little bit of an increase right before mother’s day and father’s day. Maybe you have a little bit of a bump in Q4, maybe you sell more or you sell an equal amount from June through August, as you do the other nine months. But you know, it’s still half your sales or the other nine months.
That’s kind of a pure evergreen. On the flip side of that is maybe you only launch once a year or you launch, you know, two products each once a year or you launch one product twice a year, something like that. You know, you have 2, 3, 4 launches a year and that’s it. Then in the middle is more of a, is a cyclical evergreen program or something where you’re doing special promos periodically. So maybe you have your products available 24/7 and 365, but you’re going to run big promotions, four weeks out of the year and 75, 80% of your entire year sales will come in those four weeks. So that’s kind of a hybrid between the two, right?
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There are other nuances that we’re not going to get into, but I’m going to talk about all of those. All of the things that you need to do, no matter what kind of a program you’re running. One of the biggest mistakes we see with launch affiliate programs when it’s pure launches is they go dark for 9 months, 10 months, 11 months out of the year between launches and that’s something we worked with one client recently, I was really excited. This ended up being they’ve done 16 or 17 launches. And one of the things that we really hammered home months in advance, and we worked with them was get them warmed up, get them fired up now.
It’s June and your launch is in November. Get them fired up now. It’s July and get them excited. We don’t want to get burned out, but we want to get them really pumped up to promote. That’s one of the things that we worked on with them is not going dark, not being dark in June, July, and August for a November launch. Let’s get them psyched up now.
So that’s a big mistake we see with the launch programs is just lack of communication. Like any communication is better than no communication whatsoever, but what are some of the things that you do need to communicate? There’s no particular order to anything I’m going to share today. All right, we’re going to probably bounce around a little bit.
I’m going to share some for pure evergreen, some for the evergreen hybrid, some for the launch-specific ones. But the one thing you got to do for all of them is you’ve got to educate them. If we’re talking about launches in the months, leading up to, you know, you probably don’t want to do this six months out, but in like the 90 days leading up to your launch, we want to educate them. Evergreen, you can do this year-round evergreen hybrid. You want to do this kind of leading into any big promotions, but educate them, share with them what’s working, what’s working for other partners, teach your affiliates, the strategies and the tactics that they need to use.
If you want a good example of that, go to Mattmcwilliams.com/affiliatetraining. I’ve got an example training there that we did. We did an affiliate training webinar for one of our clients. So then only the normal way to get access to this is only if you’re one of our, Your Affiliate Launch Coach clients. And this is the actual training that we shared with the affiliates of one of those clients.
You can download, you can actually watch the training, see how we do it, see how we train them. You can also download the slides. We’ve got keynote, PowerPoint version. Think we’ve got even got a PDF version and you can download those and use those as a guide for you to train your affiliates. But you need to teach them what works, teach them the strategy, teach them the tactics. And there are some statistics in there that’ll blow their minds. That’s going to help them to promote more.
Teach your affiliates, why mailing more works or why mailing at a specific time works. I think when we’re running launches, I often share why mailing on a weekend is a good idea. So what I do, it’s a little trickier. So the idea is to get them to send an email or two over the weekend. And a lot of times we’ll wrap that up in a contest. You know, there are all kinds of reasons, actually, I’ll share in a second, how you can get a template of this email. But what I don’t want to do is have them cancel their Friday email and then send it on Saturday because of this contest. So here’s what we’ll do:
On Friday about 2 o’clock, there’s a balance here, like 2:00 PM. Most people have sent their emails for the day by 2, 2:30, but it’s early enough in the day where they can pivot. Like I know for me, I’m recording this on a Friday at about 2:30. And if I’m doing an affiliate promotion right now and you emailed me at right now and said, “Hey, you should mail this weekend. You maybe you weren’t planning on emailing this weekend. We’re doing a special promotion, the top three affiliates, get this” or something like that.
I have the ability to go. “Hmm. I think I could pull that off. Let me type up some stuff. We’ll move on and get our team to load the email. Yada yada,” right? If you email me at 5, I can’t do that. I’m like, I’m a half-hour from leaving the office. I got my kids and I’m coaching my kid’s games tonight or whatever. That’s great. Somebody will win that contest it’s not going to be me, but if you email me like 10:30, maybe that’s just early enough. It probably wasn’t. But if you email me at like 9 o’clock, it was just early enough that I can go into convert kit, click pause on our email.
That was going out today. And instead of sending an email today and then, oh man, I’ll send one more over the weekend. Now I’ll just send two on the weekend. And maybe, when the contest is all about getting affiliates to add an extra email that they weren’t planning on sending, but I have to educate them. I have to educate them.
So I’ve got a template. If you want it, you can download the template. If you just go to Mattmcwilliams.com/weekendemail. But basically, this email teaches them why they should email this weekend. And it gives them the stats and it gives them the things like, well, email volume is pretty quiet and people have more time to interact with it, right?
Help your affiliates, understand why you want them to mail more. It’s not just, “Hey, if you mail more then you will make more money, you know, or you email more, it’s good for me.” No, help them understand that. Share with them the data about how mailing more on cart close day will exponentially increase their sales. Just share the data with them. I’ll include a post in the show notes here that you can download about why mailing more on cart closed days, is such a good idea.
Teach them how to send to their non clicks and their unopens right? Teach them those things. So, number one, you’ve got to educate your affiliates, whatever it is, if you’re running an evergreen program, teach them some of the things that are working, right? Teach them some of the strategies that are working for other affiliates. If you ask the affiliates, “Hey, do you mind if I share?” Some of them might say, “no, that’s a trade secret. I don’t want anybody to know.” Okay, fine. But many of them will say, “Yeah, go ahead. Happy if you share that, that’s fine.” If you’re doing launches, make sure you get them warmed up before the launch. I’ve done a couple of episodes on that. You can just look those up, just look them up on the podcast. Like warm-up and you’ll find numerous episodes.
That’s communication. That’s what you should be communicating. What should you be communicating? All of the things we’re going to talk about today, when should you communicate? You should be communicating weeks or months, and then weeks in advance. I recommend starting about six months out, about six months out, just once a month, up until about two months out, just four emails over the course of four months with some of the stuff that we’ll share today, then one Facebook post. So typically what I’ll do is I’ll send an email early in the month, then in the middle of the month, I’ll post to the Facebook group for the affiliates. And then repeat that cycle up until about two months out.
Then I start to ramp it up just a little bit here because there’s more stuff that you’ll see as we go along. The biggest thing is just to communicate a lot. The biggest mistake is not communicating enough, right? That’s the biggest mistake that we see is just not communicating enough. So what are some of the other things that you should be communicating?
Again, this applies to launch, applies evergreen, applies hybrid, whatever, give them behind the scenes access, give them access to what’s going on in your preparation for the launch. For example, one of my favorite videos that I always have clients do is if they’re recording, the prelaunch videos or they’re doing like a run-through of their live workshop, just get on and do a five-minute video. What you do is you set up, you’ve got your team, they’re setting up and you just, you’re on set and you just say, “Hey guys, Hey partners, I’m on set here. We’re three days from the start of the live workshop, or we’re a week away from the live workshop or whatever it is.
And we’re just doing a test run-through, here’s what it looks like. Here’s some of the stuff we’re going to be doing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” I might even include, if they’re doing the through, I might even include like a 10-minute little snippet of it or a blooper.
That’s always fun. Like I might even start off like, we’ve done this because I don’t want it to be too polished, but we’ll take a blooper or two at the beginning. And then “Hey partners, I’m here live, you know, boom, boom, boom”, three to five-minute message. And then at the end, finish up with a couple more bloopers. So it was like four or five bloopers, you know, two or three on either in book-ending the message. This just keeps it fun. Right?
Videos just going live in the Facebook group, for partners periodically, again, this doesn’t matter what kind of program you’re running, just going live or recording a quick five-minute video, “Hey partners. I was thinking of, you know, something, you know, such and such,” right? Sharing a lesson that you learned from another. Maybe you promoted something as an affiliate and sharing something that worked or didn’t work. Constantly hammering home those important dates. You’ve got to do that, right? You’ve got to constantly remind them of when does the promotion starts?
Promotion starts April 14th, April 14th, April 14th, April 14th, April 14th. Right? You’ve got to hammer that home. You got to give them plans. If this is a purely evergreen program, maybe there is some cyclical to it. They need to know what those dates are that are important and have a plan for building up to that.
Teach them going back to that, teach them how to warm their audience up, teach them how to promote the webinar, how to promote the ebook, how to promote the free report, how to promote the quiz, how to promote the assessment, how to promote the workshop, how to promote sales, whatever it is, teach them specific things. How to do better with email, give them a specific lesson on social media, give them a specific lesson on a part of social media, Instagram, Facebook, whatever, give them a specific lesson on how to use DMS, how to use their Facebook groups, how to do lives. You know, all of those things, right?
Looking for some good affiliate programs to promote? Check out our recommended affiliate programs here!
These are all the things that you can be given to your affiliates. Now it’s contests and prizes. That’s pretty popular, right? Give them the information they need to know about, “Hey guys, we just announced this, $250,000 contest, or it’s a $10,000 contest or everybody who makes five sales gets this, whatever it is, let them know those things.
If you know, what your contest is going to be eight weeks in advance announce it. You’ll remind them. But go ahead and announce it. Get some excitement about it. Give them updates on everything. “Oh my gosh, the webinar was amazing. Oh, you know, last week was our second biggest week in the past year, whatever it is, just give them updates, share success stories, testimonials. When you get a testimonial if you’re an affiliate manager, here’s what you do. You tell your customer service team – “Anytime somebody sends an email with a really cool story, do me a favor, take a screenshot, send it to me or let’s start a channel in slack or whatever. But I want to know any time somebody says something nice about our product so I can tell it to affiliates.”
One of the biggest things you can do with evergreen, every three, four months, is just reach out and ask if there’s anything they need, with a launch, ask if there’s anything they need, a couple of weeks out, then maybe a day or two in or the day before, just ask if there’s anything that they need.
Ask for referrals. “Hey, do you know anybody? Who’d be a good partner?” That should be your number one source of affiliates by the way. Once you get up and running, now, this is not true. If your first a hundred to 200, but once you hit a point where you have about 500 affiliates, your number one source of new affiliates should be your current affiliates.
So reach out periodically, you know, a couple of months out from a launch, “Hey, really excited. Remember April 14th, April 14th, you know, anybody who might be a good fit to promote this”. Fro evergreen, just maybe reach out, once a quarter, once every six months is probably enough.
So of course the next question is when do you communicate with them? If you have a pure evergreen program like there’s no cyclical illness whatsoever. If there’s any cyclical nature whatsoever, then naturally throughout the year, you’re going to ramp up leading into the high points, right? If you’re running periodic promotions, kind of that hybrid program, you’re going to center your communication around those high points. I mentioned earlier with the launch,
I would do monthly up until about two months out from the launch and then I would get a little bit more frequent. We’ll talk about that in a moment. But if you have no cyclical illness whatsoever to your affiliate program, and you’re not doing any promotions, there’s literally nothing that changes. Then I would send a once-a-month kind of newsletter type thing.
I’d include three of these elements, maybe a tip of strategy. You know, what’s working, maybe a good story, a testimonial or an update something like that. I would include, you know, things like that. And then one of the other things, right? You maybe announce a new contest for the next month.
Well, if you’re announcing a contest for the month of say March, then in March, you’re going to increase the frequency that you’re going to really start increasing the frequency 10 days out from March, you know, about February 18th or so. And now that almost becomes like a launch, it almost kind of becomes like a launch.
As far as the when, again, a consistent once a month email, and then I would, if you can track this in your system, I’d send to, you know, pop that out to the unopens roughly10 to 12 days later. And then I would post once a month or so on your Facebook, or maybe even twice a month in your Facebook group, the Facebook group is going to be one thing.
In fact, you can use your email to point back to the Facebook group. You post in the Facebook group, a tip and you post in the Facebook group, a really cool testimonial and you post in the Facebook group, you do a live where you answer some questions, then use the newsletter almost to point back to those pieces of content.
You can include something else as well. So they make sure to open your emails, but that would be the rhythm. I would get into it. That with the cyclical type thing, maybe you got like four big promos a year. So once every, roughly 90 days, you’re basically I have two months off and then a month where you’re ramping up and then two months off, I would follow the evergreen pattern, you know, for those two months. And then I would just ramp it up. In the midst of say a 10-day promotion. You know, you’re emailing every day, five days before through the promotion 15 days you’re posting on Facebook once or twice a day during that period.
And then for a launch – Again, the thing is once a month. So if your launch is on March 1st, then you got your follow-up emails, things like that we’ve talked about those before. That’s kind of like the week or two after the launch, but I would send an email that depends on the payments as well. If you have affiliates getting paid and let’s say you’ve got a four-month payment plan.
Well, that kind of takes care of that but what about the affiliates who didn’t get paid? So I would just send a once a month email or once a month, you know, Facebook posts, you don’t really need to get too hyperactive about it. You can alternate between Facebook and email for about five months or so until you hit about, six months out, then I’m going to go basically every other week. So I’m going to send an email at the beginning of the month, Facebook post in the middle vice-versa doesn’t matter. And then the next month I’m gonna repeat that. So it’s just starting to ramp up the frequency. And when I get about, six to eight weeks out, I start going roughly, every two weeks or so, about eight weeks out until about the two weeks out mark. And then I start really ramping it up from there.
So that’s the wind. The biggest thing is just having some level of consistency so that they’re never going more than about 30 days without hearing from you in some manner, just keep them somewhere in their brain. And if you give value, then they’re going to love it. You can use email, how do we communicate, use email, use Facebook group, use telegram groups. If you know, if you want, communicate with them, however, they want to be communicated, especially for your bigger ones.
One of the things I highly recommend is to stop relying on email and Facebook. Periodically send them something in the mail. This was hugely popular. We haven’t done this with all of our clients, but we do like a, we’ll do like a quarterly physical newsletter. It’s basically if you can picture, it’s four pages. The one side is the mailing stuff. So there’s really nothing on there. So it’s actually three pages of printed stuff and it folds in half and then in half again and email it. Again, it costs 50 cents to print and like 89 cents to mail. Some, not even that, I don’t even know how much it costs. It’s pretty cheap though.
So it costs about a buck, 50 a person. You have a thousand affiliates, it cost you 1500 bucks. Send them something in the mail really gets people excited for your bigger affiliate you could do something special. The list is endless, just do something special for them. One of my favorite gifts I ever got was a custom-made Lego set.
And it was me. In fact, they, it was from Pete Vargas and they made two of them, one with glasses and one without, because I kind of go 50, 50. Everybody knows me like, from May through October, I tend to not wear my glasses. And then over the winter, I wear my glasses because of allergies.
So they sent me two versions of them, like a Batman and a Superman. It had my head, you know, custom-made Lego head and I’m like, that is so cool. So there are all types of things you can do as far as mailings that you can do that would really move the needle.
So the important thing is -Get creative, be consistent and break the mold. Again, communicate via physical mail periodically, you know, occasionally pop out a DM to somebody. Like here’s the thing. If you’ve got a thousand affiliates or I can’t DM a thousand people, well, for one you could have like a VA do it. Well, I don’t have a VA.
My company doesn’t provide one. You could pay for it yourself. I did that. 11 years ago, I worked for a company and I paid out of my pocket about 200 bucks a month for a virtual assistant because it was cheaper to pay them for 20 hours 200 bucks than it was to do some of the things myself and I got a 10 X ROI on their work.
I mean, I guarantee you the work they did like DM-ing affiliates within called DM-ing back then. I don’t even know what it was called. Instant messaging, sending in instant messaging affiliates on my behalf was worth what I got out of it. And I never could have found the time to do it. So don’t make the excuse. I don’t have the time to do it. You go hire somebody it’s super cheap. It really. Hire somebody overseas for less than $10 an hour.
So what I would do, I’ve done this periodically, so you got a thousand affiliates again, this isn’t if you’ve got a hundred thousand affiliates are different, but you take your top thousand and let’s just you say I post in the Facebook group or send an email, let’s just say, I send an email. And that email says, here’s your links and swipe copy for next week. Something like, I’m just making that up, right. Or there’s a really cool tip or something like that, or announcing a new contest doesn’t matter. But let’s just go with announcing a new contest. Then I’ll have my VA’s DM as many people as they can.
And what if they only get to 274? Okay, well 274 people who just got a DM. “Hey, just want to make sure. Did you see the email I sent out announcing the contest?” super simple right? But it stands out, breaks the mold and I get a lot of responses. Like, no I didn’t. “Hey cool then boom, boom, boom.” Make sure you’re checking. Here’s the subject line. And every now and again, I would say probably one out of 30, my VA will basically say, I don’t know how to respond to this. So can you handle it? But I mean, we get mass communication with a thousand affiliates and it doesn’t, I mean, it’s something that the VA and they’re doing, one every 20 seconds. So it takes them a few hours and they’ve knocked out a thousand. So just don’t let that be an excuse. Break them old, physical mail, DMS texts, whatever. Just break out of just emails and Facebook group emails and Facebook group boring, boring, boring.
To get started with affiliate marketing the right way, download my free quickstart guide to affiliate marketing. Grab your copy here!
So lots to do. But now you have a plan. Go check out those links. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve got a link in the show notes for the affiliate training. So you want to know how to train your affiliates. I’ll show you I’ll even give you the slides. I’ve also got that weekend email template. So you can use that.
You can copy and paste the thing. I mean, you might want to tweak it a little bit. I think the one I have in there is specifically for a client, but you can tweak that. And I’ve got a link for you to share with your affiliates on why mailing more on cart close day is such a good idea. It’s actually got the stats that we broke down over the course of hundreds of launches that we ran. So make sure you go check those out, make sure you subscribe and share because, in the next episode, I’m going to be talking about donuts and actually just donut, singular, the affiliate donut. I’m going to be talking about the affiliate donut in the next episode. So you don’t want to miss that to make sure you hit that subscribe button.
Make sure you share this episode with somebody who could use it. You know, somebody who’s an affiliate manager and entrepreneur or aspiring affiliate manager. And they’re like, I don’t know what to communicate. I don’t know how to communicate. I don’t know when to communicate. Well, then I just shared it with you in less than a half-hour.
So go share this episode with them. If you’ve got any questions about this or anything at all, text me anytime at 2 6 0 2 1 7 4 6 1 9. And I’ll see you in the next episode.
Remember to check out all of our deep dives into affiliate marketing at theaffiliateguy.TV and if you have a question, ask it at, asktheaffiliateguy.com who knows maybe you even be featured on an upcoming episode. And lastly, if you haven’t yet make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you’re listening to this episode. See you soon.
The post What & How to Communicate to Your Affiliates appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Today I’m going to share a little secret weapon with you. It’s something I’ve used to get some awesome affiliates and develop some amazing relationships over the years. I shared it with a client the other day and already she’s used it to get two affiliates who are likely to bring in more than $200,000 in sales.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
NEW EPISODE: “The Affiliate Donut” was just released. Listen here now!
Links Mentioned in this Episode Your Affiliate Launch Coach
Affiliate Insider Monthly
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
| | | | --- | --- | | | | | | | |
Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy How to Onboard Affiliates the Right Way
How to Sell Without Sounding Like a Used Car Salesman
How to Start 2022 Off the Right Way
2022 Affiliate Marketing Predictions
My Top 10 Lessons of 2021 and What They Mean for YOU!
My Top 10 Mistakes of 2021 and What You Can Learn From Them
How to Use Leaderboards to Find Affiliates Today, I’m going to share a little secret with you. It’s something that I’ve used to get awesome affiliates and develop some amazing relationships over the years. I shared it with a client the other day and already she’s used it to get two affiliates who are likely to bring in more than $200,000 in sales. Listen up because this episode is going to be juicy.
So this is like the epitome of an unplanned podcast episode because we didn’t have it on the plan. We did not have this on our calendar, but I shared this with a client the other day. And as I said at the beginning, she’s used what I’m going to share with you in this episode very quickly. I mean, we’re talking right before Christmas, I’m recording this right after the new year. So this is like two weeks ago. So this is over Christmas.
She landed two affiliates. Who, based on what I know about these affiliates, I’m pretty confident. I mean, on the very low end, they’re going to bring in between the two of them, 125,000 in sales. This is a client just for the record who last year did less than $600,000 in sales. So to get two affiliates who could potentially be worth a quarter of a million dollars a year, first time she did what I’m teaching in this episode.
If you are ready to take your business to the next level and start an affiliate program, start with my free report, Your First 100 Affiliates. This report takes nearly two decades of experience, trial and error, and lessons learned about finding top affiliates in nearly every conceivable niche and puts them all into one report. Grab your copy here!
So if I just want to be clear, if that hasn’t made you like perk up, press pause. Like if you’re in the car and you need to press pause so that you listen to this, when you can take notes and actually put this into action, I don’t know that I’ve ever shared anything.
I love to think that, this is our 473rd episode. I love to think I’ve shared some six-figure ideas. I can promise you. I don’t think I’ve ever shared anything. That’s going to make you six figures in that shorter period of time. I’m not a get-rich-quick person. All right. That’s not my MO, but this is big.
I had to check. I don’t think I’ve ever had. I don’t know. Maybe I have shared this. So maybe I’ve shared this before. Maybe I haven’t, if I have shared it, I’ve shared it kind of in passing. I haven’t shared it in the detail that I shared with our client the other day about this.
I’m going to tell you what it is in a second. I’m not going to build this up too much, but again, just to be clear, like we’re talking, she just started doing this. She did this with only a handful of people got two of them to agree, to promote her upcoming launch. And I am confident, almost guaranteed. I looked at their numbers. I know their metrics. I know one of them’s promoted some of their clients. I am confident. This is going to be worth over $200,000. I mean, 33% increase in revenue over last year. Just boom like that.
So this is huge. I, so here’s what I had her do, you know, we’re doing a coaching call, one of our clients in your affiliate launch coach, you can find out more about that by the way, youraffiliatelaunchcoach.com She was promoting this launch. She’s promoting another big launch out there, that was happening, actually overlapped with the new year. She was doing okay. She was in like, I think she said she was in ninth place.
It’s not like she’s not one of the top three affiliates. She was pushing pretty hard. She was doing pretty good. You know, this was a big deal for her. She’d never finished top 10 in a launch before in a launch leader board as an affiliate. So she’s pretty stoked. Now, that’s not necessarily, you don’t have to be in the top 10. We’ll talk about that. Like, you don’t have to be one of the top 10 affiliates that’s necessarily relevant. Just giving you some perspective on where she was.
So right before Christmas, she was like, Hey, I’m getting ready to go into open cart after Christmas, you know,
I’m promoting this launch, I’m in a ninth-place right now. She ended up finishing in ninth place. Exactly. You know, she finished right where she was. She was like, I got up to eight and then I dropped back to like ninth and then 10th and back up to ninth. And she was asking me for some advice as an affiliate, you know? because clearly, I know what I’m doing on that side too. Like, Hey, how do I make more money? Are there any things? and I shared a few things with her and I said, everything I just shared with you.
And this is a launch where if she did really, really well, like the top affiliate was going to do 75, maybe a hundred thousand in sales. So we’ll go a hundred thousand, they’re going to make $40,000. And she’s probably going to make it, she really busted it. She could top out at 30,000 in sales. So about 12,000, 13,000 in commissions. And she was trending towards about like she was going to probably do like, you know, $9,000, $10,000. And I had to hold her. I said I can give you some advice. My advice is going to help you grow by 20 or 30%. And that’s great.
You know, making an extra three, $4,000 is awesome. But if you want me to give you some advice on, what’s going to make the biggest impact on your business, let’s talk about something else. She’s okay, I’m listening. And I was like, okay, let me teach you real quick. How to do better on the leaderboard. Because what I’m about to share with you will help you.
Finishing higher on the leaderboard will help you get affiliates. Okay? When you follow what I’m about to share with you. So no doubt about it.
If you’ve got a chance, you know, to finish ninth on the leaderboard, Hey, ninth is top 10. That means something people list their top 10 and their top 20. If you got a chance to finish a 19th versus not being in the top 20, then you’ll fight to get top 20. Follow what I teach about affiliate marketing,
nothing I shared with her, nothing that I shared with her is something that I haven’t shared inside of Affiliate Insider Monthly, for example, our membership site. If you want to get a trial of that, by the way, Mattmcwilliams.com/AIMtrial for affiliate insider, monthly trial, you can get in for a buck, right? It gets you a couple of months for a dollar.
And it’s not anything I haven’t shared inside of there. This was not like monumental things that I’ve never shared with anybody. I told her, Hey, do you have a bonus package? She’s like, yeah. And I said, okay, let’s tweak that a little bit. Let’s, let’s add this, but let’s do this to make that’ll get a little bit more attraction. And I said, here, I want you to add this email at this time. You know, on the last day I told her to do this. I said, Hey, reach out to the person. Who’s running the launch. Why don’t you do a live with them?
Go live on the second to last day or the last day, do a few things to tweak her promotion that helped her. She said later, she’s like, you know, I looked at the numbers. There’s, there’s no way I would’ve finished in 11th place, which would sucked. You know, 11th place is terrible compared to nine, even though it’s only two spots, it’s kinda like in, that was listening to a guy earlier, he’s a marathon runner. And he’s about like top 10 is what, you know, when he was running is what got paid. And he’s like, I kept finishing in 11th or 12th. And he was like, there’s nothing else I could do.
Get my #1 affiliate recruiting email (the one I’ve personally used to recruit thousands of affiliates in dozens of niches). Grab your copy here!
So he’s finally realized that he either needed to completely change his training so that he could become more professional and actually make money doing it. Or he just needed to slow down and because who cares if you’re finishing 12th or 23rd, you know that he was like, it wasn’t a pride thing. He was like, it really was a money thing. So he beefed up his training and he became, you know, he’s one of the top like 10 marathoners in the country right now. Isn’t he’s actually making money doing it, which can justify the time spent.
So yeah, 11th would be terrible. So I gave her some tips on the affiliate side and that plays a role in what I’m about to share with you because the higher she finished, well, the better it looked when she did this thing. And so what I said to her, I said, the thing is going to move the needle the most. Yeah. Extra $4,000, a little bit of prestige. It’s great. You learn a little bit about some promotional stuff. I spent 15 minutes helping her on the affiliate side. Maybe 20 shared some basic stuff with her. She and her team implemented it. They made more money. That’s awesome.
But I said, number one, I want you to engage with the other affiliates in the Facebook group and privately. So that’s number one. I was talking about how to use leaderboards, to find affiliates. These other companies, the one that you’re promoting as an affiliate, they are publishing a list of their top affiliates. They are handing them to you on a silver platter.
They are saying to you, “Hey affiliate, do you want to know who our other top affiliates are thinking?” So I said, I want you to engage with them. Congratulate them. When somebody moves up three spots on the leaderboard overnight, put a comment on the Facebook post, DM somebody who passes you and, and just, kind of give a little playful trash talk, or just say, Hey, I noticed, you know, we’re like, we’re right there together on the leaderboard. I’d love to connect time. You know, we don’t really know. I’ve seen you around. Don’t know who, you know, Baba just be a human being, right?
There’s no. Oh, you got to craft this message perfectly, right? No, this is just being a good human being. So, Hey, I’d love to connect sometime. And I’ve talked about this before, right? You know, some of my best friends in the online marketing world, we connected because of affiliate leaderboards, but here’s the key number one, she engaged with them. She engaged with the people in the leaderboard, not just the top people as the ninth-place affiliate. She had a little bit of credibility. She had some street cred to be able to reach out to the top three and be like, Hey, I want to get to know you better, but she didn’t just do that. And we’ll talk about it in a minute and what to do if you’re not in the top 10, that’s fine.
But she reached out to people who were in 15th, 20th, 25th place. She even reached out to everyone that they posted and said, Hey, this person made their first sale today. She congratulated them. I asked her afterward, I was like, how much time did you spend in here? Like three minutes a day. I just did it when I was regularly checking into Facebook.
I didn’t specifically set aside time. I did it once a day for about three minutes. I took a couple of the posts and I engaged with them. She made sure that she was seen in that Facebook group. She would, when the affiliate manager would do because the affiliate manager is for lack of a better term, a disciple of mine.
I trained this affiliate manager. So he posts some of the same stuff that I would post. And he would post tips in the Facebook group, she’d say, thanks. And then offer a thoughtful response to it. So for instance, this affiliate manager posted a tip about how to use swipe copy, like the one that we’ve posted before, and many times every launch and this client of ours thanked the affiliate manager and said, yeah, whatever you suggested in number three is really important. Here’s how we’ve done it. And then people responded to her saying, oh, thanks so much. Now I get it. I didn’t understand what he said. Now I get it. Blah, blah, blah. Right?
So she engaged in the group and became kind of an expert in the group. She became someone that everybody recognized three minutes a day for a couple of weeks. I mean, literally less than one hour of her time. So that was step number one. One of those two affiliates reached out to her, saw her in there quite a bit and reached out to her. So you could easily argue that less than one hour of engagement in that group is going to bring in 50 to a hundred thousand dollars a year for her business because they reached out to her.
She didn’t even have to do part two or three about what I’m about to share. That’s pretty cool. That’s a good ROI. I don’t know about you. I don’t make 50 to a hundred thousand dollars in an hour. All right. I consider myself to be highly paid for what I do fairly paid for what I do. And I don’t make 50 to a hundred thousand dollars an hour.
And so if you can find something that I can spend one hour doing over the course of two weeks, that is virtually guaranteed, potentially to bring in that kind of money, I will do it all day long. And I do this all day long. It’s just, unfortunately, I can’t do it 40 hours a week, or I would. So that said hugely, hugely profitable for her in that regard.
The second thing she did, as I said, so she engaged in the group. She engaged privately with them on Facebook. The second thing she did is after the launch when they publish their final leaderboard via email, that is not in the Facebook group, but I’m counting that in the Facebook group. So she was congratulating people. She was trash-talking with people. She’d never done any of that before, by the way. She responded, she clicked reply to the final leaderboard message, but made the to field, be anybody that she wanted to engage with.
So anybody in the top, like 30, she reached out to him and said, Hey, congratulations on winning. Congratulations on fifth place. It looks like you beat me. Hey, I’d love to connect. Within a week, she had scheduled like half a dozen calls. She’s got more on the docket later, but she scheduled like six or seven right away. One of those people had already reached out to her. It became one of those calls.
One of them was like, boom, I’m in your launch. Sounds perfect. I am in all in. I’m like I’m in a to win it. Now let’s do something magical together. Right? So you reach out to those people and you just say, Hey, congratulations, or great job. Or I loved watching,
Hey, I subscribed to your email list. I loved watching what you’re doing. I love that Facebook live that you did. That’s part three is to start following them and engage with them on other levels. Right? But what she did is take another couple of minutes and she followed the people who were on the leaderboard. She friended them on Facebook and she saw how they were promoting.
And then she would say, oh, I love that Facebook live that you did. Or I love the email that you sent. I love the such and such that you did. I love the bonus that you put together. I shared with her the story of how I used to joke with Ray Edwards about how like, dude, your bonuses are so good.
I’m going to buy through your link. Even though I’m an affiliate. She used that line on somebody else, you know, to give her the idea. She was being honest. She was like your bonus package. I have bonus package envy. Your bonus package is so amazing. That started a conversation. They haven’t that I know of. They haven’t agreed to work together yet or do anything together yet.
But I think it’s going to be a profitable relationship. I’ve used this so many times. I’m telling you it works. Now you might be thinking, okay, this works. If you’re in the top 10 though, your client is in ninth place in a multimillion-dollar affiliate launch. Of course, she gets to go and be like, “Hey, number five, affiliate. I’m somebody. And you’re somebody we should. Yeah, that’s this only works, right?” If you’re one of the top 10, that’s not right. If you’re in 30th place, don’t reach out to the number one affiliate, all right, work your way up. Hey, maybe you’re on the others on the leaderboard or people.
Who’ve also made sales, you know, I’ve run affiliate launches where 294 affiliates made sales. We ran one last year, over 450 affiliates made a sale. You might be in 370th place, but you’re in there. You’re in the Facebook group. You’re engaging. People are seeing you. You’re celebrating that. You made a few sales.
Hey, you’re kind of legit. I’d let, maybe like to probably get to know you a little bit better. See if we can do some business together. So you reach out to some of those people who are also made sales. If you’re in 53rd place, you reach out to number 30, 34 number, whatever, right?
Are you going to make $200,000 off of two affiliates? NO, but could you make 40 or $50,000 off of 10 affiliates? Yes, absolutely could. And then guess what, now you do that. Your list grows the next affiliate promotion you do instead of being in 180 fourth place, you’re in 75th place and you’re reaching out to the 50th, to the hundredth affiliates.
And now the next time you’re in 30th place and you’re reaching out to the 11th through fifth. And then the next time you’re in the top 10 baby. You work your way up. So number one, engage in the group. Number two, I kind of got number two and number three, mixed up number two would follow them, get on their list, get to know them, get to know their content and comment on that content, connect with them that way.
Need help activating your affiliates? Use my proven email templates for getting inactive affiliates in the game and making sales! Get them here!
And then third send that email, very simple email. You know, you’re just replied to the final leaderboard and you just say, “Great job. Congratulations.” One year I went into Canva and I made images and it was like, congratulations on your performance in such and such a launch. I’m like, well, that was overkill. A couple of sentences would have sufficed. Don’t say I’d love to get, you know, at that point don’t be like, Hey, I’d love to connect. No, just leave it at that. Just leave it at that.
Put the ball in their court. They will reply and say stuff back to you that you’ll be amazed. And this is a numbers game. You do this 20 times per launch. You’ll get one or two, three partners each time you do that over the course of 10 launches. And you’ve got 30 really, really good partners.
So listen, if you’ve got any questions about this or anything else, shoot me a text 2 6 0 2 1 7 4 6 1 9. I’d love to connect with you that way. Make sure you subscribe because you do not want to miss the next episode. I’m going to share with you What and How to Communicate with your affiliates.
So what to communicate to your affiliates and how to communicate to them. What do you actually communicate with them and when do you communicate with them and how do you communicate with them? Three critical questions that I’m going to answer in the next episode. So make sure you click that subscribe button if you haven’t yet. So you don’t miss that and I will see you then.
Remember to check out all of our deep dives into affiliate marketing at theaffiliateguy.TV and if you have a question, ask it at, asktheaffiliateguy.com who knows maybe you even be featured on an upcoming episode. And lastly, if you haven’t yet make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you’re listening to this episode. See you soon.
The post How to Use Leaderboards to Find Affiliates appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
If you have an audience that is interested in a Marriage Makeover, then this affiliate opportunity is for you.
Our client, Brittany Ann is hosting “Thrive Christian Marriage Conference” – a 4-day online event designed to help married Christian couples fall in love with their spouses all over again.
For couples whose marriage relationship has changed over time, the conference is an opportunity to get honest, biblical, actionable advice from 26 trusted Christian marriage experts.
This unique, online event is a chance to get inspired, encouraged, and equipped to build a better, closer, more fulfilling marriage — all from the privacy of your own home.
I’m very excited about this affiliate opportunity because:
1 – Brittany is committed
She’s an author, speaker, and founder of EquippingGodlyWomen.com – a popular Christian-living website dedicated to helping busy Christian moms find practical ways to go “all in” in on faith and family.
2 – She has forged a strong media presence
Brittany’s book, “Fall in Love with God’s Word: Practical Strategies for Busy Women,” is an ECPA and Amazon bestseller designed to help Christian women create a Quiet Time they love. Her work has been featured on CBN, The Christian Post, Crosswalk, and more.
CLICK HERE TO APPLY TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE
About Thrive Christian Marriage Conference The 2022 Thrive Christian Marriage Conference is a 4-day online conference designed to help married Christian couples fall in love with their spouses all over again.
Featuring 20+ professional counselors, bestselling authors, international speakers, bloggers, and podcasters all speaking on a variety of topics, participants will be encouraged, equipped, and inspired with actionable, biblical advice for the real-life situations they face each day.
Tickets are free, with the opportunity for participants to purchase an ALL-ACCESS PASS for extended access to all the sessions, the conference workbook, and a variety of bonus offers from our speakers.
What’s Included: The FREE TICKET allows participants to view each of the 24 sessions for 24 hours from the time the session goes live.
The ALL-ACCESS PASS includes:
- Lifetime access to all sessions
- Printable conference workbook
- A variety of bonus offers from our speakers/sponsors
Target Audience: * Married Christian Couples (Predominantly women, but may appeal to men as well)
Launch Dates: The promotion runs now through January 17 – February 14th, 2022.
Pricing:
Early Bird Pricing: January 17 – February 14: $35
Conference Pricing: February 15 – 21: $45
After Conference Pricing: February 22 on: $79
Commissions: Affiliates will earn 25% commission on each ALL-ACCESS PASS sold through their link, as well as on any upsells of last year’s conference.
The conference price will range from $35-79. The upsell (last year’s conference) will range from $19-$79.
Cookies are “last click” and stay active for 90 days. For example, if someone initially signs up for a free ticket and later decides to purchase the ALL-ACCESS PASS, the affiliate will still get the commission.
Prizes, Contests, etc.: Giveaway TBD.
EPC, average commission per sale, etc:
Our previous conference converted at 11% (free ticket sign ups to ALL-ACCESS PASS purchases).
More About Brittany Ann: Brittany Ann is an author, speaker, and founder of EquippingGodlyWomen.com, a popular Christian-living website dedicated to helping busy Christian moms find practical ways to go “all in” in faith and family. She is the author of “Fall in Love with God’s Word: Practical Strategies for Busy Women,” an ECPA and Amazon bestseller designed to help Christian women create a Quiet Time they love. Her work has been featured on CBN, The Christian Post, Crosswalk, and more.
CLICK HERE TO APPLY TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE
Testimonials “This conference truly helped me focus and find ways to cope with each day during this season of my life.”
“The speakers were awesome. Very much enjoyed the conference. Cannot wait for the next conference. Job well done!!”
“I really want to thank you for the time it took to put this together. It was definitely life-changing.”
“This online conference was a really refreshing experience.”
“This is the 2nd year I’ve bought the all-access pass and I really find the value of the conference to be more than what I pay. The price is totally worth what I learn. Thank you for making it accessible.”
“Thank you for putting this together! It was an awesome experience, and I can’t wait for the next one.”
“It was a wonderful conference and I have been working on this area for months so it was very keyed in for me. The women were all wonderful and I learned so much. I am already applying what I learned.”
CLICK HERE TO APPLY TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE
Click Here to Learn More About Our Recommended Affiliate Programs The post Affiliate Opportunity: Thrive Christian Marriage Conference appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
Recently, I looked through one of my wife’s old business books from college. The section about entrepreneurship had a half-page about online business. A half-page out of 400+ pages. That was the extent of their lesson on the internet. This little section packed a lot of punch though and all of the tips it offered for businesses in 2001 still apply today. Watch this video as I unpack these fundamental principles that have stood the test of time.
Links Mentioned in This Lesson: Ultimate Affiliate Swipe File
TEXT ME: 260-217-4619
Come join me on my next live lesson, “ Behind the Scenes Look at Affiliate Book Launches”, Thursday, February 3 at 2:00 pm ET. More details can be found here.
The post 20 Year Old Online Business Advice That’s Still Relevant Today appeared first on Matt McWilliams.
So you’ve got some affiliates interested in promoting you. Now what? How do you onboard your affiliates and get them rocking? That’s what today’s episode is all about. Getting your affiliates started the right way!
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
NEW EPISODE: “The Affiliate Donut” was just released. Listen here now!
Links Mentioned in this Episode Weekend Email Template
Sample Affiliate Promo Plan
How to Write Swipe Copy for Your Affiliates
How to Warm Up Affiliates Before a Launch
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
| | | | --- | --- | | | | | | | |
Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy How to Sell Without Sounding Like a Used Car Salesman
How to Start 2022 Off the Right Way
2022 Affiliate Marketing Predictions
My Top 10 Lessons of 2021 and What They Mean for YOU!
My Top 10 Mistakes of 2021 and What You Can Learn From Them
Top Affiliate Managers Reveal Their Holiday Strategies
How to Onboard Affiliates the Right Way So you’ve got some affiliates interested in promoting you. Now what? How do you onboard your affiliates and get them rocking? Well, that’s what today’s episode is all about. Get your affiliates started the right way.
My friend, Alan Thomas came to me the other day. I had referred some people to him as affiliates. Alan’s been rocking, you’ve listened to him in a previous episode. He’s now co-hosting our live lessons every Thursday at 2:00 PM Eastern, shout out for those, but he has his own business. Coaching men on losing weight and he’s, rocking the affiliate world, but he’s like, Matt, you sent me all these affiliates. What do I do now? Like now what? I don’t know what to do. I’m like, well, let me walk you through that. So I never did.
I totally forgot to actually share all this with Alan, but I told him I would record a podcast episode or record something for him. So this is my way of answering Alan’s question.
It kind of depends on where you’re at. Just to be clear, how do you onboard affiliates? It’s very different. If you’re a brand new program, you’re getting like one affiliate per day.
Well, then you set up calls with them all. If you’re an established program, you’re getting 10 new affiliates today. It’s different. What I’m going to do is take you through that journey today from beginner program, maybe you’re getting one or two affiliates a week to a more established program. Most of the stuff is the same.
It’s consistent throughout. If you’re a new program, like I said, you get on the phone with each of them. The key is to establish the program, you want to wow, your early affiliates, get things moving. If you’re an employee working as a new affiliate manager, you want to impress your boss with some early momentum and you want to do those things.
If you’re an established program, like when I ran Shutterfly’s affiliate program or Adidas as an affiliate program, we were getting 300, 400 affiliates per day, especially like the time of year from November 1st through Christmas, it was crazy. There was no way I could get on the phone with any of them, let alone, all 300 or 400 of them. But I want you to think about this from the affiliate’s perspective, what do they want? This is why I recommend being an affiliate. So I recommend doing this. I’m a much better affiliate manager now. I’m also an affiliate because I know what affiliates want. I know what I want. They want it quickly and they want it easily.
If you are ready to take your business to the next level and start an affiliate program, start with my free report, Your First 100 Affiliates. This report takes nearly two decades of experience, trial and error, and lessons learned about finding top affiliates in nearly every conceivable niche and puts them all into one report. Grab your copy here!
So I’m going to walk you through the steps. You need to take the things you need to do to onboard your affiliates here today, Alan, this one’s for you, bud.
1) You need to set them up if needed.
That kind of goes without saying a few of these early ones. Like, “well, dude, no.” we handle affiliates a little bit differently than a lot of people. We like to white glove it, I personally, as an affiliate again, I go back to rule number one, do what I would want to do as an affiliate. Right? I don’t like it when people send me a link and say, go fill this out. It just ticks me off. I’m like, I’m busy. This is not an ego thing. I just, I might not be able to get around to it. And then I’m like, I forget about it. I’m not signed up four days later. Well, that’s your fault as the affiliate manager, not mine.
So we white-glove things, we sign them up, we set up their account, we get them their links. We do all that. Now you may do it differently and that’s fine. I’m not against that way, but do what you need to do on the tech side, add them to relevant Google sheets or Excel spreadsheets or databases.
One of the things that I highly recommend not doing is we don’t use the system to send most of the emails. So if they’re in Infusionsoft, we don’t email them through Infusionsoft. We don’t email them through ConvertKit. Here’s the reason in convert kit Infusionsoft. If they unsubscribe from my main list, they’re also unsubscribing from affiliate updates.
They may not want to do that. I’m going to give you a really good example of that. I’m on Jeff Walker’s list. Will I was on there twice. I was on there two times. I had an affiliate account and I had opted into some stuff using that email and I had my regular just subscriber account. So every time he sent an email to his list, I got two of them. I clicked unsubscribe. I no longer got affiliate updates. And I have seen this happen time and time again. That’s why we don’t use the system.
We use a mail merge tool called GMass. We also use another one called yet another mail merge. I don’t recommend one over the other. We use both of them pretty interchangeably. There are things I like about both, but we use those tools and we email them through a spreadsheet. Now, if you’ve got 300,000 affiliates like we had at Shutterfly and Adidas, you can’t do that clearly, but as much as possible, I try not to email them through the system. That’s a whole tech conversation. I’m not going to get into that. So you need to add them to whatever database that you’re using beyond your regular irregular system.
2) You need to send them a welcome message.
You need to make it warm and inviting, right? Well, this is going to have some of the elements that we’re going to talk about here. But the big thing is, just make them feel like,
you’re really glad that they’re a part of your affiliate program, make them feel welcome. It’s called a welcome message for a reason. I want this to feel warm and inviting. Think about it. Like I’m welcoming you into my home. I wouldn’t use a bunch of corporate-speak, “Dear, sir. Thank you for being a part of our affiliate program.
We are honored and humble.” Like what the heck is that? I feel like I should just do like entire episodes where I read emails that affiliate managers send and critique them. You guys, you know what? Let me know if you’re interested in that, do me a favor. Text me at 2 6 0 2 1 7 4 6 1 9 and just let me know if you’d be interested in me, critiquing affiliate programs, like different things, like things that I’m seeing, and then commenting on it could be good or bad. If you’re interested in that kind of content text me. That’s actually not a bad idea. I may just do it anyway, but I’d love to hear from you if you’re interested. All right. So number two, you got to have that welcome message.
3) You need to give them their tools.
Now I’ve done a whole episode on this. I want to focus on just a few things very quickly. Number one, you got to give them swipe copy, right?
One of the most important things you can give them killer swipe, copy. They can use for every part of your promotion, whether it’s a launch or whatever. I’m not going to go into a ton of detail. I’ve shared this before, but number one, you got to hire a copywriter, you got to hire somebody that can write it up objectively. You’re too close to the product to be objective.
Number two, you need to include images that your affiliates might need.
Number three, you need to have different versions for different audiences. So if you’ve got different target audiences, write, different swipe copy for each of those.
Number four, you need different links. So you need some short to 300-word emails. You need some thousand-word emails, and then you need some blurbs for things like newsletters, right? And maybe the 32nd clip from a podcast.
Then number five, you need to teach your affiliates that swipe copies of the guide only. I talked about this in the last episode, don’t copy and paste the swipe copy as an affiliate. The worst thing you can have happen is a hundred affiliates all sending the exact same identical emails. Tell them to make the emails personal, and only use the swipe copy as a starting point. Share my guide on that with them. I, the links in the last episode, share that with them, right? You need to give them social media posts and images and links of course and give them the login information and all those things. So give them the tools that they need to succeed.
4) You need to do is ask about them.
Learn about them, get to know the affiliate, learn who they are, learn about their website and their promotional methods is they get as much as possible. Get 300 affiliates. That’s different early on. You should know all kinds of stuff about them. I think back to my early affiliates, I can still name them. I can still tell you stories about them.
I still know, remember their URLs. As my programs got bigger and bigger, I began to know less and less, but early on learn about them. Keep a database where things like their wife’s name, their husband’s name, their kid’s name. Do you at least know their, okay, what sports did their kids play?
What activities are they in? Where do they live? Like when you’re talking to an affiliate for the fifth time and you’re going, oh, remind me again, what part of the country? And you sound like an idiot. That’s just ridiculous. Like, no, I should not have to remind you where I live. You should know. You should know. I mean, when I talk to my friends, they don’t ask me questions that be their friend to ask about them, learn about them.
5) Learn how they like to communicate.
You need to learn their preferred method of communication in the news. It, I know I work with affiliates that only do WhatsApp. That’s all they use. So I have to use that period. I’ve got two that I can think of. That’s it. But I have to use Skype, if it wasn’t for affiliates, I would literally never use Skype, but I have some affiliates that prefer Skype. There’s Voxer, there’s email, there are text messages. There’s you know, some people like getting phone calls. It’s weird, but no, I’m cool with that actually. But some people prefer Facebook, DMs, or Instagram DMs, things like that. The easiest way is just to ask them like you could do a survey, send out a quick survey, you could just hit reply and let me know.
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You know, initially, all you have is their email hit reply and let me know what’s your favorite way to communicate. I want to make sure I communicate in a way that you most prefer. You’re going to get better replies that way, which is going to benefit you. So I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if I’ve got somebody that prefers text message and something big is happening, I’m going to text them, not going to send them an email or a Facebook message.
6) Make sure they understand the basics.
The basics around your program’s rules, what are they allowed to do and not allowed to do commissions? You know, are there any particular commission structures, any nuances, special commissions, like you get 50% on core sales, 30% on the membership, things like that. They need to know the products and the pricing. If you have ranges of prices, they need to know what those are and for one they’re gonna market it better, for two, you’re going to have less questions on the back end.
They need to know important dates and time periods and of course, if it’s a launch, they need to know, not only when does the launch start, okay, the launch starts April 21st, but when does the promotion start? Well, it starts on April 10th. When does the warm-up start?It starts in late March. They need to know those things. You need to tell them and be clear about that. They needed a, when you pay, do you pay monthly for the previous month? Do you pay on the 15th? Do you pay, net 30? What do they, what do you pay? When do you pay, how do you pay? They need to know what bonuses are up for grabs.
I mean, this is kind of one on one right? If you’re going to offer bonuses and prizes and contests, they need to know that they need to know how to contact you. So I’m not going to list like I’m gonna know my affiliates preferred methods but in my signature, I’m going to list, a phone number that they can contact me at. And I’m probably gonna list like one alternative means my preferred method because maybe they don’t have a preferred method. Maybe they don’t care. So I’m going to give them like two ways to contact me in addition to email.
7) Get on a strategy call with them.
I’ve talked about this before, but one of the best things you can do to get your affiliates to mail more and promote early and get them going is just to create a personal promotion plan with them. When you meet with your affiliates, one-on-one before the promotion, you’re able to craft a custom plan. Now we actually call it a commitment plan.
Now that’s something we changed a couple of years ago, we found like this, you know, Robert Cialdini, right? The principles of commitment and consistency means that people stick to this plan. So we call them commitment plans. Usually what we found is that if we can get them, one-on-one do a plan. They agree to at least a few extra emails that they’d previously planned on sending. So this is a personalized plan.
I’ve got a sample template that you can download. I will put the link in the show notes. I think it’s just Mattmcwilliams.com/AFFplan and you can go download that these work. They only work when you’re small or you’re only picking up like a few affiliates or maybe you can do it with your top 20 or 30. It’s hard to do with more than two people a day. That gets a little bit out of hand. With the bigger programs, do them once or twice a week in small groups. So, everybody that signed up this week, we’re going to get together and do a promotion plan. In fact, well, this is something we used to do with some of our bigger programs.
We would just do it twice a month, just regularly. And like anybody could sign up. When you signed up for the program, you could be a part of these calls. And we basically do kind of more of a generic one and craft them together on those calls.
8) You should do to onboard people is give them a quick start guide.
Like this is one to three pages. Really it should be two, like on the high end, if it dips into a third page, that’s fine. But it’s a very quick guide. How do I get my links? How do I create custom links? How do I find a swipe copy? How do I find images? How do I find a blank?
Like, where is it? You know, how do I access my stats? How do I log in? How do I contact you? What are the basic no-nos what’s working for others? You know, what are the mailing plans? When are the dates like this is all in one spot, all these things I’ve been talking about in one spot, right there in one spot, what’s the commission, the products like all this in a, in a quick start guide, that’s important. What are these mailing plans, for example.
It goes back to what we just talked about, like doing the kind of the generic meeting, where you create those promo plans. I’ll meet with 2025 affiliates for a big launch personally, we have a thousand affiliates. So what I do is I give them our mailing plans. We call them our ABC plans. The A stands for All in or Aggressive. The C stands for conservatives. So all inner aggressive might be like 15 emails. Conservative might be five emails. And then a balanced plan, which is the B would be five emails. And so we outline like, here’s what to do. You know, June six, do this June 8th, do this June 9th mail to this group, then mail, here’s what to do each of these days.
Our objective here, just like the personalized commitment plans, is just to get them to commit to some level of participation. All I want them to do is commit to a minimum number of emails, minimum promotion. And what we found is that people who commit to that C you know, that conservative level will often move up to the balanced or even the all-in level as the launch progresses. They just want to dip their toe in the water. Right. You know, like, is this promo gonna work for me? And if it looks like it’s working, then they’ll get more aggressive as they go. But the key here is to get them to commit to something on the front end. So we make it very easy, super easy for them to commit on the conservative level, like the conservative levels, usually going to be by five total emails, maybe six, like two, possibly three to your whole list, maybe one or two to unopens or non-clicks one or two to, you know, engage contacts and maybe six emails, pretty easy commitment level, you know, only two, maybe three to your whole list. Like that’s super easy.
And then next thing they add a couple more to their non-clicks and then they add, “oh, well, when I’m promoting the sales, I only promote it to my engaged contacts. Oh, I can send six or seven. Now, all of a sudden there are 13 emails,” which is really cool.
9) We want to do when we’re onboarding our affiliates is get them their first sale quickly.
We want them to make the first sale ASAP. Now, if it’s a launch like, “Hey, we’re launching in April, it’s January. I can’t really do anything for you there.” But if it’s a regular program, like get them a first sale quickly incentivize it like, “Hey, on your first sale, if you make your first sale within 10 days,
I’m going to give you a hundred percent commission, a double commission” maybe you can’t do a hundred percent because you got the cost of goods or something. But even then it’s like, maybe I want to, I don’t mind if I lose a few bucks on the first sale if you make three sales in your first month and you’re going to get whatever, so it’s like, let’s say you got a thousand dollar product $500 commission, 50% commission.
If you make three sales in the first month, I might give you a thousand dollar bonus. You’re basically, you’re going to make almost no money on those three sales. That’s fine. It gets them going, right. We want to give them a low barrier, get them some, some movement here rather than do the three sales in the first month. You get, you’re guaranteed a thousand dollars. Maybe it’s you make three sales in the first month. And we’re going to enter you into a drawing for $5,000, a pretty impressive prize.
If you have enough affiliates, it’s actually costing you less money, but again, low barrier, fast-moving. That’s what we’re trying to get them to do.
10) You need to make it clear that you are there to help.
Be available beyond the multiple channels like we talked about when they email reply fairly quickly, make it clear, tell them I’m here to help and not just in a generic way, tell them I’m here to help. Here are the ways I can help you. What can I do to serve you, make it abundantly clear that you are there to help.
Then the last thing, and we’ll talk more about this coming up, but once you’ve onboarded them, give them regular updates, educate them and share what’s working and we’re going to talk about how to teach your affiliates and talk about the different ways that you should communicate with your affiliates, but there’s a lot to do, but now you have the onboarding plan, what to do when your affiliates sign up and how to get them started fast with making some sales. So I mentioned that upcoming episode that’ll be coming up in two or three episodes.
In our next episode, we’re gonna be talking about how to use leaderboards, to find affiliates, which I’m super excited about.
I’m going to share kind of a secret strategy there that I’ve kind of touched on it in some other content, but I don’t know if I’ve ever shared the exact strategy. And I’m pretty excited about that. I shared it with a coaching client recently and I am pretty excited to share that publicly for what I believe is for the first time.
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So you’ve got the plan, my question for you, and I’d love it if you would text me your answer at 2 6 0 2 1 7 4 6 1 9. That’s the number you, I mean, you can text me anytime. I’m going to be the one that responds like this is not my team or anything doing this. Just to be clear. I want to know like, which one of these things are you maybe not doing?
Which one of these things can you implement? Which one of these things do you think maybe you’re doing poorly and you’re going to improve and how are you going to improve it? What’d you get out of this episode? So please text me, let me know your thoughts. 2 6 0 2 1 7 4 6 1 9, and let me know what you’re going to be doing as a result of this episode.
Make sure you hit subscribe, because again, the next episode is all about Finding affiliates using a leaderboard, and then we’re gonna be talking soon about that communication plan for that ongoing communication. You’ve onboarded them. They’re up and running now, where a month later like, “oh, what do I do?” Oh, we’re going to be talking about that soon.
So I will see you in those upcoming episodes. Bye-bye thank you so much for listening today.
Remember to check out all of our deep dives into affiliate marketing at theaffiliateguy.TV and if you have a question, ask it at, asktheaffiliateguy.com who knows maybe you even be featured on an upcoming episode. And lastly, if you haven’t yet make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you’re listening to this episode. See you soon.
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