Today, I’m pulling back the curtain on the 7 biggest lies people buy into about affiliate management. These myths? They’re program killers. Believing them can sabotage your entire affiliate strategy. But don’t worry—I’m here to debunk them all and share the truth you need to keep your program thriving. Buckle up…you’re about to rewire the way you think about affiliate success!
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 Episode
Top 5 Biggest Affiliate Recruiting Mistakes
How to Steal Your Competitors’ Affiliates
Affiliate Activation Templates
How to Give Your Affiliates What They Need
How to Communicate Better with Your Affiliates
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
How to Get Hired as an Affiliate Manager
The MASSIVE Shift in Affiliate Programs is Here: Are You Ready?
How to Activate Your Inactive Affiliates (And Make Them Lifelong Partners)
7 Secrets of 7-Figure Affiliate Launches
Should You Approve or Decline an Affiliate? How to Decide
7 Affiliate Management LIES That Will Kill Your Program
Today I’m pulling back the curtain on the seven biggest lies that people believe about affiliate management. These lies, these are program killers. Believing them can sabotage your entire affiliate strategy. But don’t worry, I’m here to debunk them all. Share the truth that you need to keep your program thriving. So buckle up. Cause you’re about to rewire the way you think about success with your affiliate program. Let’s get started. So, misinformation, disinformation, fake news, whatever it is, those are buzzwords today, and they typically apply to politics and healthcare and things like that. I mean, it’s crazy. Like if you look at health and wellness, there are 40 different diets. I mean, you find everything. Like eggs have gone from good to bad to good to bad to good to bad to good to bad.
Now, nobody knows. Maybe it’s just the egg yolks, it’s just the egg whites. Like, the reality is, who really knows about some of this stuff, right? I, and I’ve heard different things about different supplements. And then you get the supplement. The thing is good, but the thing that a lot of companies add to it is bad. So that nullifies it and makes it a bad thing. And it’s confusing. There’s a lot of confusing stuff out there about health, about wellness, about politics, about the economy, about business, and of course, about affiliate programs. And so today I want to talk about seven of the biggest lies that I’ve heard. Now, these are a combination of things that I’ve, where I’ve seen ten plus blog posts, podcasts, videos, talk about these things, or I’ve just heard so many coaching clients, so many of our agency clients believe these things that I wanted to address them. Now, it just so happens that there really are seven.
It’s not just because seven’s a great number for a podcast episode. There really are. These are the seven that I have seen over and over again. And so it’s either misinformation, it’s either that the lies are being spread, or that they’re just inherently believed by people who are starting or trying to scale an affiliate program. So I wanted to address those today. And, and the very first lie, the very first lie kind of comes from one of my favorite movies of all time. If you build it, they will come. Field of Dreams, right?
Your affiliate program is not a cornfield and Kevin Costner is not going to save you. So if I build it, affiliates will come is a lie. You have to actively get out there and recruit affiliates. Now, I talked, I don’t know, three to five episodes ago, I shared how I grew a program from about 15 million a year to 325 million year. And you go, well, you said in that episode that they got to the point where you had 10 to 50 affiliates every day just coming to your affiliate program. Yeah, after we crossed about $100 million in sales. We got to that point. It got to that point.
If you remember, I talked about, it got to that point because I actively recruited one affiliate and then another affiliate. And it was really about the time that we hit, depending upon the group of affiliates that we were targeting between 1 in 300 affiliates in that group. So I remember, if you remember, I shared how we built that program one group at a time. So we had mommy bloggers and we had nonprofits and we had photographers and so on and so forth. And I went out and I actively recruited hundreds of bloggers before. Before is the key here.
I actively recruited them before they just started showing up on our doorstep. And I talked about how it got to the point where if you were a blogger, if you were like a deal blogger, a mommy blogger type blog, that it got to the point where it was, step one, register your domain. Step two, set up hosting. Step three, register for this program, this affiliate program. Sign up for this affiliate program. Right. But that took eight months, nine months of hard work actively recruiting affiliates where it was about the five, six month mark before we got our first affiliate who just showed up. So five months, 150 to 180 days of hard active work getting one affiliate at a time. There were very few days where I got more than two affiliates.
It was one and then one, and then sometimes I’d go a day or two and not get any. And I remember like at the end of the first two weeks I had six. I got like six affiliates at the end of the first week, and then the next week I got like seven. And then eventually I started asking them for referrals, but that’s still actively recruiting. So I’m not contradicting what I said. Yes, eventually we got to the point where affiliates were coming to us, but it started with that active recruiting. So I’m going to put a few links to a few episodes that will help you with this. But know that at the very least you will need to ask your customers to become affiliates and you will need to do this regularly. That’s usually nowhere close to enough, but it’s a start. But you have to ask, if you build it, they will come.
Does not apply to affiliate programs. If you build it and you work hard to get hundreds of affiliates and you build the brand and you do the things that I talk about, like simple things like adding a link to your footer that has your affiliate program, if you do those things, eventually they will come again. That program that I talked about when you looked at it four years after we took over, when we were doing over $300 million, at that point, 95% of our new affiliates every day just came to us. We didn’t have time to actively recruit anymore. We still did a little bit, but it was an hour to a week. Most of our time was spent managing the current affiliates and just processing the applications. Yeah, you will get to that point, but it starts with working hard on recruiting. So go check out the links in the show notes. Make sure you learn how.
Need help activating your affiliates? Use my proven email templates for getting inactive affiliates in the game and making sales! Get them here!
Because it’s working hard, but it’s also working smarteen. All right, lie number two. I should only have affiliates that are in perfect alignment with my niche and my brand. No, no, no, no. I see this so often. Companies are so protective of their brand, and they only want affiliates who are perfect for their brand. Sometimes they’re so protective of their brand, it’s ridiculous. They only allow affiliates who post perfect images when the reality is that what sells better is more authentic images anyway. And I’ve seen this happen so many times, they only want affiliates using the approved, perfect images.
And just to be clear, I get it that, like, if the image has writing or you’re talking, you’re in the health and wellness space and you’ve got before and after pictures and they’re not real and it’s showing, this helped somebody lose 300 pounds. No, it didn’t. You know, and so, you know, I get that, like, if you’re in a regulated industry, the images have to be approved, but it doesn’t mean that they can’t create their own and then you approve them or that you can give them parameters, because most of you aren’t in an industry like that. Most of you, if you’re selling, I’m just looking at my desk.
If you’re selling planners, there’s nothing wrong with them showing an image of their planner. And it’s not the perfect image. And it wasn’t shot with a canon, blah blah blah high res camera. It was. I mean, of course, you have a 4k flipping camera in your phone now, but it shows their sloppy handwriting and things Like that. And it’s not used perfectly. Maybe they don’t use the planner exactly as you teach people to use it, but it’s pretty darn close. And they share their kind of uglier pictures, but those work better.
The other thing is like, well, what if an affiliate doesn’t agree with me on things? My platform is going back to politics. Like, maybe you’re saying, well, my politics are liberal, but you do a phenomenal job at making cookies. And if a conservative wants to promote your cookies, let them. As long as affiliates are ethical in following the law, who cares? If they support a candidate you don’t support? That means you can’t promote your brand. Like, that’s just dumb. That’s so narrow minded. And it’s not just politics. It could be anything. You know, I’ve had people in the parenting niche that they say, well, I’ve got 20 things that I believe in regarding parenting, and they disagree with this one thing, like, they believe in spanking and I don’t. So they can’t promote my course.
They believe in 19 of the 20 things that you believe in, and they want to promote your course specifically because it will help their parents who have kids on the autism spectrum. I’m totally making that example. That is not a real example, just to be clear. So don’t go, like trying to figure out who our clients are and go, oh, I know. No, that’s not a real thing. I made that example up.
But they feel like your course is the best course out there just because they disagree with you on spanking or just because they disagree with you on homeschooling versus public schools or private. Like, that doesn’t matter just because they’re not perfectly in alignment with you, they don’t have to be. Another thing is, well, they’re not really in my niche. And I talk about this from the affiliate perspective that I call it the affiliate donut.
I say, you’ve got this doughnut, right? And the whole is, that’s the thing that you’re the best at. If it’s information, you’re the best at teaching this thing. If it’s a product, you’re the best at solving this problem. You have the best planner, you have the best thermos, you have the best iPhone case, whatever it is. But there’s all these tangential things, and especially if we’re talking about information, if they follow you for information to learn something, like, say, affiliate marketing, there are other things that they want to learn, but you’re not the expert at or your product or service doesn’t solve their problem. So you promote affiliate offers.
Like, I promote affiliate offers because I’m not the expert at membership sites. I promote Stu McLaren and I explain that from the standpoint of an affiliate. But the same is true for an affiliate program. You know, your core is, let’s use membership. Your core is people who, you know, have membership sites. But just because they don’t have a membership site doesn’t mean they can’t promote your course about membership sites. Just because they’re not an online marketer doesn’t mean they can’t promote your product. We have seen this time and time again some of the best affiliates for courses for our clients.
I mean, I think of one of the top ten affiliates for product launch formula a few years ago, I forget the lady’s name and that drives me nuts because I should know it. She teaches people how to make like 18 hundreds corsets has nothing to do with launching a product or Internet marketing. And she was a top ten affiliate. One of Jeff Walker’s other top affiliates teaches people how to do like medicinal herbs.
One of their top affiliates is in the parenting niche. One of Stew’s, some of his top affiliates are not in the Internet marketing niche at all. And the same can be true for any product, any service. If somebody wants to promote you and they are ethical and following the law, let them promote you. Okay. Do not believe the lie that they have to be in perfect alignment with your niche and with your brand, or believe everything that you believe in. The third lie is that, gosh, I’ve heard this so many times.
Inactive affiliates, if somebody signs up and they are inactive within 30 days, they’re never going to be active. They should be ignored or even removed from the program. No, no, no, no, no. Okay, I’ve talked about this many times. Most of the time, the reason somebody is inactive, like we think, oh, well, it’s because they changed their mind. They’re not a good fit.
Maybe they’re just lazy. Maybe they are a competitor and they’re spying on us. Yes, you will find some examples of that. Okay. Most of the time, the reason somebody’s not active, it’s cause they got busy. They got distracted. They got busy with other work related activities. They got busy with their kids, they got sick. In other words, life got in the way. The reality is your affiliate program is not their top priority. Their top priority is running their business. All right? A lot of times what, they just need a gentle reminder. Maybe when they come back from whatever kept them from promoting, they got sick.
Whatever they get, they have a mound of emails, they got calls to return, they got posts to write, they got videos to record. They’re not thinking about you, no offense, is just not that high on their priority list. But that gentle reminder gets them back on track and fired up again. And so I talked about probably a couple hundred episodes ago, right?
I talked about some examples, almost share kind of the highlights here real quick. But to give you some perspective on this, right when we ran shutterfly in tiny Prince program, tiny prince is owned by Shutterfly. When we ran their program back in 2013, we had more than 15,000 inactive affiliates and they were being completely ignored. I did one push that lasted less than one week. We were able to activate nearly 1400, almost 10% who produced more than $430,000 in additional revenue during that campaign. If you look at that, once those 1400 ish got active, over a thousand of them stayed active for the next year. We are talking millions of dollars in additional revenue for a launch.
Michael Hyatt’s five days to your best year ever launched. Back in 2016, we had 944 affiliates who had not sent any traffic. Zero hits after the first week. Three days later we had 291 of them were sending traffic, over produced more than $104,000 in sales. Almost 10%, not quite 10% of total revenue. inactive after one week of the launch. One of my favorite activation campaigns ever was actually my very first. Holy crap, this is 15 years ago. Learn a master guitar. When I took over, there were 704 inactive affiliates.
Most of them had been a part of the program for more than a year. They were just considered dormant. And actually the CEO who hired me and he had run the affiliate program, you know, it was like a $4 million company. So that’s typical. He’s around that part where he’s starting to get busy with everything else and he’s hot. You know, we got ten employees, so I can’t run the affiliate program anymore. He said he had actually meant to remove over 500 of those 704 inactives. He had meant to remove them.
He just forgot. He just got busy. I took over. My first month I spent focused on the active affiliates. I said, okay, it is time to get these inactive affiliates active. Within a month of starting this activation campaign, we had activated 261 of these affiliates. That’s probably borderline 40% there. Doing some quick math, combined, they helped the affiliate program grow from $2.2 million a year to $6 million a year. Now, not all of that was from the inactives, but of the top ten affiliates at the end of the year, the top ten affiliates, four of them were from that group of inactive affiliates, including two of the top three.
Our second and third highest affiliates. Like most sales, all well over six figures, two of those top three were from that inactive group the CEO had meant to delete. That is why we don’t delete affiliates or just ignore them. So I’ve done a ton about activating affiliates. How do we activate inactive affiliates? I will make sure to include those links and make sure you get the templates. I’m going to include a link to our activation templates. Okay. This is probably the best thing we’ve ever put out because it’s literally copy paste. You change a couple of things. We need to know why are they inactive? First reason is they signed up.
On a whim. They signed up. They all this cool affiliate program. I saw somebody else promoting, they’re like, I decided, I don’t want to. Okay, not much you can do there. Just, you’re fine. The second reason is they decided to promote a competitor. And if they start promoting a competitor, you need to shut up and listen to them. Ask them, why are you inactive? Why are you promoting this competitor? Do they pay better? Do they convert better? Do they have better affiliate tools? Are they promising to promote you to do a reciprocal promotion and solve those problems? If you can’t, oh, they pay better. Well, we can also pay better. Oh, they convert better. Let’s work on our conversions.
Let’s solve the problem to get them promoting. A lot of times it’s easy or simple. It’s not easy. Fixing your conversions is simple.Like, hey, this other program is converting at 3%, you’re converting at 2%, and you pay the same. So you need to convert 1% better. That’s simple. Not easy, though. You got to really do some work there. Third reason, somebody’s inactive, if you look at those numbers, we activated 10%, 30%, 40%. Well, that means we didn’t activate 60, 70 and 90%. The reality is we did not activate over 50% and certainly not 100. Some people, they just will never be active. And that’s okay.
It’s a numbers game. Some people, they went out of business. Not much you can do there. Sometimes it’s just they don’t know how to promote. Sometimes an affiliate just doesn’t know how to promote your product. They haven’t done a good job of adapting to the new marketing. Your job is to help your affiliates succeed. That is what affiliate management is. If you think about it. I hate that term. I’ve did a podcast episode a while back.
I hate the term affiliate manager. But if you think about what a manager is, if you’re a sales manager, your job is to help your salespeople sell. It’s not to sell yourself. It’s not to make sure they’re doing their work, to make sure they show up on time and leave. No, your job is to help them sell. I mean, I’ve run sales departments. We had quotas. You got to sign up 15 people a week. That means three a day. If you signed up five people today and it’s 04:00 and you want to leave, leave. I don’t care. Like, I just don’t. Usually a good salesperson’s like, now I’m going to stay.
I’m going to sign up a 6th person and 7th person. But your job is to help them succeed. So you need to train them. You need to show them how to promote. You need to get on calls with them. You need to tell them to subscribe to Matt mcwames. com. tell them to subscribe to the podcast. I’m serious about that, by the way. Create a promo checklist. Like I said, train them. It is your job to help your affiliates. The last reason is they’re going to, quote unquote, get around to it later. Right? So you got to give them a nudge.
Again, like I said earlier, all it takes is that gentle reminder. You send them a specific email. Go grab the activation templates. I will include in the show notes. Grab the activation templates. I have sent probably 500 activation emails over the last 19 years. What I did was I took the best few that actually work there. At Matt mcwilliams. com activate. You can get all of them. They’re totally free. Madamcwiams. com forward slash activate. I’ll put that link in the show notes. So go grab those. So again, don’t remove them, don’t discount them. They absolutely can become some of your best affiliates. All right, lie number four. Line number four says our product sells itself. This is the lie that’s affiliates don’t need anything. Like, our product is so good it just sells itself. This lie is, I don’t know how else to say this.
Like, this is some seriously old school thinking, because, yeah, products back in the 1980s might have sold themselves if you had the best widget. It sold itself. But there are now hundreds of widgets. There are dozens of widgets with varying degrees of nuance that are niche down. And those are made in the United States. And then there are hundreds made overseas at half the price or a third of the price or a quarter of the price. There are cheap versions that, yeah, maybe they’ll fall apart in a year, but they get a person through a year. That’s the thing you have to remember, like, oh, my product is the best.
Yeah, yours is the best, and it costs eight times more. And so somebody who’s looking for a short term solution will buy the cheap thing. I’ll give you an example. I was talking with a business partner of mine the other day, and this particular business partner is worth roughly half a billion dollars. Pretty close to that. What I understand. I mean, the guy’s super wealthy. And we were talking about the fact that we both, despite having the financial means not to, we both still do our yard work. And I told him the reason for me, actually, is it’s 70% selfish.
When I go out to do yard work, that’s my time. I don’t, as a busy entrepreneur, a dad who has two kids playing travel soccer, who is coaching one of the teams, and then this winter, our daughter has three different clubs that she trains with and two different clubs that she plays with. And our son has two different clubs that he plays with, one of which I coach two days a week of training and two days a week of games.
I am busy. I have a lot going on. I don’t usually have time to myself, and I don’t say that to complain, but I say that because when I go out to do yard work, I work on computers all week. I’m a white collar, you know, worker, right? When I go to do yard work is my one time a week where I get to use a chainsaw and a tractor and I get dirty. And so we were talking about this. I know it’s taken a while to explain this, but I just. I love doing. It’s irrational, but I love doing it. And it’s an opportunity sometimes for me to bring the kids out. My son the other day helped me get the leaves up, and he earned $10, and he got to buy something with it. And he felt so good, he was asking when he could do it again.
Like, well, there’s no more real leaves. You know, like, we don’t need to do this daily. Well, anyway, I say all that to say that I was explaining to him that one of the parts of our tractor broke. And I don’t know, what do you call it, but it’s basically the leaf collector part of the tractor. I was like, I could spend $600 to buy that and buy it one time for something that, frankly, I only use four times a year. Or I could buy a cheap bag manufactured in China for $25 and get that. And I read the reviews, and then most of them said I only used it ten times and it ripped. A and I’m like, well, I’m doing the math. If it rips after ten times, and let’s say that it only lasts eight times, even it lasts two years, four times each year for $25. I mean, my tractor’s not going to last as long as ten of these bags are going to last, or 20 of these bags. I’m like, that’s a good deal. So sometimes cheap is better for certain people. And you may have the best product in the world, but you’re going to get undersold on certain things for certain people. The best products require effort to sell. Especially it’s so crowded now. And affiliates need training, they need resources, they need strategies to sell.
And assuming that your product will sell with minimal support is a recipe for disaster. Too many affiliate programs make the mistake of assuming their affiliates already know everything about affiliate marketing. Let me let you in on a little secret. They don’t. So training your affiliates we talked a little bit earlier about what to provide your affiliates. Let’s talk about training for a moment. Training your affiliates is not only important for them, but it’s important for you.
It is absolutely crucial that you provide them with the knowledge, the tools that they need to promote your products. So how do we do this? One way is just hosting regular training events, walking your affiliates through your promotions. If you have a big affiliate promotion coming up, a big sale, walk them through it. Host a half hour call, share tips on being a great affiliate.
Cover the basics, but also some other bigger things. But even just in the beginning, like record videos, show them how to find their links, how to get their login information, how to use the swipe copy. Don’t take those things for granted. Throughout the year, host training sessions on different topics. You know, for one client, I’ve talked about this before, but he teaches entrepreneurs how to build a membership site. It’s an annual launch. Over the course of about three to six months leading up to the launch, we hosted six training sessions. We started with how to warm up your audience. So their launch was in April. What we were teaching them to do is what to do in March and early April. It was in their launches in late April.
So what do you do for like the six weeks leading up to it? We started with warming up your audience. Right then we taught them how to create promo plans. That was an entire weekend. We gave them a template for affiliates to download and tweak. And if you want that, by the way, just go to mattmcwilliams. com aft plan Matt mcwilliams. com forward slash aft plan I’ve shared the URL before if you go to forward slash promo plan, that’s from the affiliate perspective. What you want is the one that you can copy as an affiliate manager and give to your affiliates. You can find that@mattmcliams. com afflan and I’ll put that link in the show notes.
So we gave them that. And then the next week we walked them through. When do you mail? What are the things that you need to be doing each week? The following week we talked about how to create affiliate bonus packages, how to take what they have and create these attractive bonuses. We gave them a template for setting up a bonus page and how to write sales copy for each bonus. And it just made it so much easier for them to put together compelling bonuses. And then I think in the fifth week, we talked about promoting webinars. We talked about different strategies, tips for making the best of webinar promotions. And then week six, we talked about sales.
How do you close sales? We just walked them through different aspects of the promotion. And then I think actually for that we end up having a 7th week. We did an additional one on closing sales, some additional tips, and we had like open q and a calls, you know, so I think we ended up doing like eight or nine total because we had the q and a calls. They take about an hour. We do, you know, five minutes of beginning. Just welcome, everybody. I’ll do 2030 minutes of teaching and then Q and A and sharing their experiences. The cool thing about it is these calls turned into community events. So we would have Heidi and Paul and Sarah all like some of our top affiliates. That was the thing that surprised me.
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Some of our top affiliates would be on these trainings and they would take what I said and then add their own twist or add like, well, last year, I remember when Matt said that and I thought I couldn’t do that. But here’s what I did, or here’s a little twist that I did. You know, I took what Matt said and I added to it, or, you know, here’s what I found. And so we found that they got to share from each other. It built that community where they all felt connected, which made them more motivated. So if you want to see an example of the training, if you go to Matt mcwames. com affiliate training, I will put that link in the show notes. You can actually watch a training, see how I do it. Plus I’ve got all the slides.
You can just download the slides. So if you use keynote, PowerPoint, whatever, you can download the slides and tweak them. So, like, I think there’s a logo on there from one of our clients, or maybe there’s not, I can’t remember. But you just replace that logo, boom, it’s yours. Change the colors. They’re the colors of one of our clients.
Change the words. Add a tip, delete a tip. Make it relevant. I mean, I’ve done 90% of the work for you. These are completely free. Madamclaims. com forward slash affiliate training. But it’s an ongoing process. It does not stop. So start early. Start when you only have a few affiliates. Train them. Oh, well, Matt, only one person showed up. Okay, that is one affiliate that is now super trained. Keep sharing successful strategies.
If you do an affiliate promotion, and you should be, and you try something and it works, share it with your audience. I remember years ago, we promoted, or we were working with Jeff Goins, we were running his affiliate program, and he promoted Jeff Walker’s course product launch formula. And he learned something. I don’t remember what it was, but he tried something. It worked for him.
He told me about it. I said, dude, do a video. Like a five minute video. Share your tip. And he did. And affiliates loved it. Encourage your affiliates to share their ideas. Again, creating community. Make sure you record them. This is huge. Create a training portal. If you don’t have an affiliate portal, by the way, you should have an affiliate portal. If you’re interested in having one, just reach out to me. I’m happy to walk you through or show you how we can help you set up.
We can just text me 260-217-4619 these are things we set up all the time for people. So we put those in the affiliate portal. That’s where they can get their links, their swipe copy, their graphics, all kinds of stuff, the calendar. And then we have a link for training, but at the very least have a training portal where they can access the replays anytime. Like, if you think about just the numbers wise, if you help 100 affiliates to be 10% better, think about what that would do for your bottom line. I mean, even if you have a small program, a tiny program, an hour a month on training can be worth $5,000.
I mean, if there’s something else you can find in your life that you can spend an hour doing, that makes you $5,000, go do that instead. But it also compounds because, I mean, if you spend that 1 hour the first month and it makes you an extra $5,000 a month, and then you spend an hour the next month, maybe that makes you an extra 3000, it starts adding up. So again, different aspects, right? Just do one every month, or do a schedule you can commit to do every other month. That’s only six. I already gave you seven ideas earlier.
I think you know one month to talk about how to grow their list. Make them occasionally, not just about promoting your course. Now it’ll benefit you. Here’s how you grow your email list. If every affiliate grows their email list by 5%, your sales will go up by about 5%. And that’s assuming that there’s not an ancillary benefit of them being thankful and promoting you more. So talk about how to grow their list. Talk about how to close sales, how to promote webinars. How to get more leads to promote your different things, promoting a specific product. Share other lessons that other affiliates have shared with you. Get their permission first. Right. We did that recently with one of our programs. We loved an affiliates TikTok video, and this video produced over 50 sales directly from the TikTok video.
We said, can we share that with affiliates? She was like, absolutely. So we posted in the Facebook group, sent an email. So again, if you wanna see a sample generic training, you know, we do dozens of these different types of trainings, but if you want to see a sample of a generic one, it’s an overall training. It’s really good, though. Just go to Matt McLean’s Dot forward slash affiliate training.
Grab that. I’m also going to include some links on how to train your affiliates and what to provide your affiliates. So some links to some past podcast episodes in the show notes. All right, lie number five says I have to have a personal relationship with all of my affiliates. The flip side, it’s one extreme or the other, or I don’t need to have a personal relationship with any of my affiliates. So two very different lies. It’s kind of like the lie, oh, here we go, that Democrats are always right and Republicans are always wrong. Or reverse that right. It’s just not true.
We know that the truth is, somewhere could be tilted one way or the other, but it’s somewhere between those two extremes. The same is true here. Now, the first one says you have to have a personal relationship with all of your affiliates. In other words, you got to be best buddies with all of your affiliates. But the reality is, if you’re going to run an affiliate program that is consistently growing year over year, it’s simply not possible. When you have hundreds of affiliates or thousands of affiliates or tens of thousands or literally hundreds of thousands of affiliates, like I had Adidas and shutterfly, do you think I knew all of them? I barely knew 200 of them.
So what this says, in other words, is like, well, I’ve got to know all my affiliates. It’s only for the cool kids with the right connections, right? I’ve got to know all of them. I’ve got to have a personal relationship with them. When I started my first business, well, actually it was my second business, but it was my first affiliate program, I should say my very first business was just a web design business that I ended up selling for like $75,000. Trust me, did not make me a Silicon Valley millionaire. You know, when I started my second business, but my first big one, I knew absolutely no one. None of us did my business partners, we had three of us. None of us knew anybody. We were not the cool kids. We did not have the dads who knew the right people.
We started with literally $5,000. 18 months later, we were doing over a million dollars a month just through our affiliate program. We weren’t the cool kids. I got an email, this is a few years ago, and I think I’ve shared it before, but Alex Putnam, just going to read what he wrote me, said, Matt, I just had to let you know this. You know that when I signed up for the training, this is one of our courses, I didn’t know anyone who could be an affiliate. So he did not have the connections. He said, yesterday we finished our first launch of his new course and did $3,74,000, & 3,60,000 of that was from affiliates. I am on BLeeP cloud nine right now. Thank you, thank you, thank you. In nine months, he went from not knowing anyone in that training. I say write down some names of people you know. He was like one of the few people who had nobody. Most of us know somebody. It might be one person, it might be five people. They might be small, they might be big, they might be medium sized. They might only have an audience of a few hundred Facebook friends. But we know somebody who could promote our product.
He literally knew no one. He went from knowing no one to doing 3,60,000 in affiliate sales without knowing a soul. Now, the reverse of this is that you don’t need to know any of your affiliates on a personal level, and that is wrong, too. You should know some of your affiliates on a personal level. So how do you do that? How do you balance what I just said about scalability? Right. You can’t know all of your affiliates with personal relationships. Very simple answer. You tier them. Okay, tier. To be clear, you tier them. So you’ve got, depending upon the size of your program, your top ex can be as few as ten people. When you only have ten affiliates. Yeah. Know all of them and then grow from there. It could be as high as 50, possibly upwards of 75, depending upon, again, how big the program is. I’m going to say the average program, it’s 20 for me. These 20, I keep records on all of them. I know theme.
You should have their cell phone number and they should have your cell phone number. All right. You should know their kids names, their spouse’s names, where they went to college, if they did what their favorite teams are. You should be on their email list and you should read most of their emails. You should connect on social media and just build the relationship so you’re on their email list. You read them, reply to some dude, love this email. Oh, my gosh. I agree. So true. Hey, like, do you mind if I share this email? You know, things like that. Again, when you talk to them, don’t ask.
Well, how’s your wife and kids? That’s what you say to somebody you see once every five years. Don’t say crap like that. Hey, how are Kim and John and Joey? How’s soccer going? Oh, man. You excited about the Chiefs game this weekend? Whatever. Like I said before, when their team wins the national championship, congratulate them, reach out to them. Send them a meme that, like, if you have that kind of relationship, send them a meme that makes fun of their team.
Send them a meme that makes fun of their team’s rival. Like, again, it’s a relationship and it should be that way, but that’s only manageable on those top x. Again, you’ve got to define x. Typically, it’s about 20 people in a program with 300 plus affiliates. It’s somewhere in that neighborhood of 15 to 20. The second tier is a bigger tier. This is very small program. It could be as few as from them. Maybe number eleven to number 25, maybe eleven to 100. It could be from 20 to upwards of 500, maybe even 1000. Again, depending upon the size of the program, this is going to be.
If you look at it from this perspective, that top x, that first group is the affiliates that account for 20% to 50% of your sales, probably individually, each of those affiliates accounts for 2% or more of your sales. We’ll put it that way. So that’s why I said it’s about 2025. For me, those 20 ish will account for upwards of 55 60% of all sales. Then I’ve got the group that basically accounts for all the sales, up to about 90% or so. Individually, they are at least 0. 1% and they’re not north of one, one and a half percent with them. I connect on social media and I comment periodically. What I do is I intentionally spend five to ten minutes. For me, it just helps if I do it first thing in the morning. I know what they say. Don’t check social media first thing in the morning. I don’t check social media first thing in the morning just because I’m bored and I want to scroll through crap for ten. I set a timer for ten minutes.
I don’t spend more than ten minutes doing this. And I comment on five to eight of their posts and I comment thoughtfully. I do like their post and the only reason I do that is to game the algorithm so that I see their stuff more. I will do that, but I make sure I don’t just say awesome congrats, because nobody, if you get 98 congrats who congratulated you? Do you remember their names? No. So I give a thoughtful post and I do that sometimes as little as four or five times a day. Sometimes I might sneak in eight or nine of them. And that’s not everyone, but I’m commenting on their social media posts five to ten minutes a day. You should know their birthdays by using a calendar every single day without exception, because I’ve run so many affiliate programs.
I have calendar reminders that go off for so and so’s birthday and some of these are specific to certain programs and sometimes it’s because they’re in my database of potential affiliates, but you should just put them in your calendar. When you learn their birthday, put it in their calendar. I also put in a ten day warning for most affiliates. The reason for this is, again, these are like my top affiliates, I put in a ten day warning because then instead of just getting a text, that’s the other thing. Don’t wish them happy birthday on Facebook. Oh my gosh, he gets lost in the sea.
Send them a text. Wish him happy birthday there. Send them an email if you don’t have their phone number, which you should, but send them that. And if you need to get them a gift, you need time to get them a gift. So I set a ten day warning and that’s where I remind you to make sure I go buy people a gift. Use technology to know basic things. Use alerts, be on their email list. But this group I mentioned earlier that top x, top 10, 20, 30, maybe upwards of 50, you’re going to be on their email list and they’re going to go to your inbox.
This group, you’re going to have them go to a special folder and again you’re going to set aside a certain amount of time. You could do five minutes a day. I personally do it once, sometimes twice a week and every now and again I’ll do it twice or three times a week. If I’m on a Zoom call and I’m there on time and I’m waiting five minutes for somebody, this is my default. I’ll go check this folder and all I do is just go read a couple of emails that they sent and I reply to a couple of them and say, dude, this email rocks. Love this email. This is awesome.
Something like that. And it stands out. Stands out. And then everyone else. So I got my top 20, my 21 through 150 or so. Everyone else, I’m just not going to know them. Probably. That’s the reality. When you have 1,25,000 affiliates, I’m only going to know on any level about a thousand of them, and that’s it. So these lies say you have to know every one of them personally or don’t have to know any of them personally. They’re both lies.
Lie number six, small affiliates are not worth the hassle. Now, this lie comes from the myth that most of your sales will come from only a few affiliates. Matt, didn’t you just say like your top 20 make up 50%? Yeah, first of all, that is only 50% and it is the top 20. All right, I shared this back in like 2021 maybe. I talked about how a guy, one of the top names in all of Internet marketing, one of my mentors, somebody I greatly respect, said from stage, 90% of your sales will come from your top three to five affiliates. It’s not true. Not if you run your affiliate program the right way. When you say that, it’s just an excuse not to work with smaller affiliates. And that’s not how you grow an affiliate program. Until, in fact, years after he said that, he said that in like 2018.
I remember I was there with a couple guys on my team and we all looked at each other like, that is not how we run affiliate programs. Years later, that guy came to us because he saw what we were doing with other affiliate programs and how our top three to five were making up 10% of sales. And he saw how we were running these multimillion dollar affiliate programs and the majority of sales were from small affiliates. It was from having 550 people make one to five sales. And he saw this and he wanted to work with us and he did, and it was really cool. So I want to share some cold, hard data here in a second. It just completely destroys this lie. But here’s the reality.
Small affiliates can be the backbone of your affiliate program. They can be the backbone of your affiliate program. Why? Because when you are a small affiliate and you promote a product and you make your first couple of sales, you’re loyal. There’s an overwhelming sense of loyalty. The thing is then that small affiliate grows. So maybe they only made two sales your first year, two sales of your $50 product, yippee, $100. You paid them $50 or what?
You know, maybe a little bit less. You paid them $30 and your cost of goods was 50. So you only made $20 and you’ve spent 45 minutes emailing with them back and forth. Maybe you had a ten minute call with them or whatever and you made $20. Yay. If you’re an affiliate manager, you didn’t even make 20, you made two, made $2 off that affiliate. But they grow. The next year, their list, their following is two times bigger. The next year it’s two times bigger. Again, on the Sudden now they’re from two sales to four to eight. Some affiliates will ten x 20 x 30 x. I mean, everybody started somewhere. Like the biggest affiliates in the world. Unless you’re somebody who was famous outside of your audience, right? So think about, like, Elon Musk. Elon Musk is famous mostly for things unrelated to his online presence.
So if he started, you know, hypothetically, if we went back before he got on Twitter and X whatever, and he started a blog, he would instantly have 100,000 subscribers, you know, within 48 hours, probably. If you’re not like that, everybody started somewhere. These people that you follow, these marketing experts, they started with one person following them. So imagine if they become loyal to you. That’s how you build an army of affiliates. So let’s look at what happens when you ignore the 80 20 rule. You create an army of awesome affiliates. Couple of examples here. You know, Michael Hyatt, we ran his launches for a while back in the late 2010 SDE and this big launch leaderboard. You know, leaderboard with people, like, just going through some of the names here, right? This is just some of the people. Craig Jarrow, Jeff Sanders. Dan Miller.
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The Ziggler family. Joseph Michael from Learn Scrivener Fest. Ryan Elias and John Lee Dumas. Stu McLaren. Jeff goins. Pat Flynn. Ray Edwards. Sally Hogshead. Jeff Walker. It’s a who’s who of names. And yet the top three affiliates accounted for only 14% of sales. I thought it was supposed to be 90%. No, it was 14. The top ten only accounted for 27% of sales. We had over 500 affiliates make at least one sale. under three.
But let’s just call it exactly through. That’s 1500 sales. That is an army. There’s no risk. That’s the other advantage. There’s no risk. Oh, well, if the following year, our number two affiliate didn’t promote, cost us 4% of sales, we more than made that up with all the new affiliates that we brought on. So it works, you know? Claire Diaz Ortiz, we ran her summit a few years back. It was one of the very first virtual summits we’d ever run into that point. Most summits had maybe, you know, a couple thousand registrations. This one had 12,000 registrations.
But not one single affiliate had more than 400 registrations. We had 110 affiliates send leads. Ray Edwards is another great example. When we ran Ray Edwards copywriting academy launch, same numbers as Michael leaderboard, kind of similar. Grant Baldwin. John Nemo. Chandler Bolt. Craig Balantine. Dan Miller. Michael Hyatt. Don Miller. Donald Miller, Jeff Bullis, Jeff Walker. Again, a lot of names that you recognize. And yet the top three only accounted for 19, not 90, but 19% of sales. The top ten accounted for only 34% of sales. And this was one of my favorite stats. They doubled from the previous year’s launch. One of them, I remember Ernie, the attorney, Ernie Svensson, he went from two sales to over 30. Huge growth. Mike Kim, I don’t remember when he made the year before. It was like five sales year before, had 50.
He won the launch. He beat Jeff Walker. He won the entire affiliate competition. But I mean, he was a nobody. So this is the power guys of having this diversity to your affiliate program. One last example, Jason and Cecilia Hokey, they ran a big parenting summit, 114,000 people. I mean, that is bigger than Michigan Stadium, bigger than the largest stadium in North America the year before when they had no affiliates at about 20,000 people. So we added 94,000. No affiliates at more than 2000 leads. Most of the affiliates were first timers. They were nobodies. They had a list of 10,000 people on their parenting blog. But they never done an affiliate promo before. And so. Oh, well, they’re not big enough. So how did we do this? Very simple.
By ignoring the conventional wisdom. And the conventional wisdom tells you, well, most of your affiliates are going to come from only a few affiliates. Don’t work with small affiliates. It’s just simply not true. It’s simply not true. All right, so our final lie here, very simple one, our final lie says higher commissions solve everything. So if things are going wrong, I’m not growing. Raise the commissions. You definitely need high commissions.
You should have competitive commissions. I’ve talked about that so many times. If your competition is paying 50%, you cannot pay 30, you got to pay and your competition did 50, pay 50. If they’re 20, pay 20 or 25. But that’s not the only factor driving your affiliate program. Raising commissions is just not going to compensate if you have crappy affiliate support. All right, it is not going to compensate if you don’t have the right communication. I would rather you be paying 5% less, but be a rock star communicating with your affiliates. It’s not going to compensate if you have your marketing materials, your assets for your affiliates. I talked about. I’ll put those links in the show notes to show you what to provide if they suck, if your graphics, your swipe copy, your affiliate portal if they suck. If you don’t have an affiliate portal raising your commissions, five or Raising your commissions when everything else is broken, at best it’s a band aid and at worst it’s an insult to your affiliates. So fix the broken parts first. Have a competitive commission, but fix the broken parts first. So shared seven lies.
If you believe these lies, they can absolutely destroy your affiliate program. If you’ve got questions about this or anything else and I mentioned earlier, but text me anytime. 260-217-4619 Ask your questions, comments, whatever. Love to hear from you. I’ve got links to everything in the show notes, the recruiting tips that we talked about, recruiting mistakes, how to steal your competitors affiliates, links to all those podcast episodes. You got links to the affiliate activation templates, the training templates, the promo plan, all that. How to give your affiliates what they need, how to communicate we just talked about communication, how to communicate better with your affiliates. Got all that in the show notes? So make sure you check that out again. It’s all right there for you. And make sure if you haven’t yet hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. It’s gonna be a good one. You don’t want to miss it. So hit subscribe. Make sure you hit you are subscribed to the show so you don’t miss it. I’ll see you soon. See you soon.
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