Don’t Launch if You Don’t Want This…

by Matt McWilliams | Mar 21, 2022 | Business, Podcast

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.

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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.

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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 podcast. 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.

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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.