How to Get Affiliates to Promote More: Get Them Active, Help Them Succeed, and Keep Them Promoting

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 you want? The key to over-the-top results is DEMONSTRATING to your affiliates that you want to see them succeed. In this video, I’m going to show you how to light the “affiliate fire” that gets affiliates eager to promote your program from pre-launch to cart close. If you want your affiliates pumped and primed to sell for you.

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What Affiliates REALLY Need to be Successful

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Transcript

Getting affiliates is simple but not easy. There’s a lot of work. It’s totally worth it. But there’s a lot of work that goes into getting affiliates. But there are three things, three common problems that I see once you get affiliates. So once you get the affiliates I see three common problems.

Number one, the affiliate never promotes. They just remain inactive.

Secondly, they try their best but they fail. They just don’t know what to do. Maybe they’re confused. They don’t know how to promote. What they need is some help, but you don’t know how to help them.

The third big thing that I see is they only promote once. So they promote one time, never hear from them again. So today we’re going to address all three of these problems and talk about this kind of three-part lifecycle of affiliates, and how to get affiliates to promote more. We’re talking about getting them active, helping them succeed, and keeping them promoting.

Matt: Welcome, bud.

Alan: Hey, glad to be here. Glad to get back to normal island life.

Matt: Nice. Listen, if you know somebody with an affiliate program, let them know about what’s going on right now. They need this information. We’re going to talk about how to get your affiliates active, how to keep them or how to help them succeed, and how to keep them promoting. Before we jump into that real quick though, just don’t take a minute. Since we got Allen on this week. Allen, we got something exciting going on next week.

Alan: Yeah.

Matt: Kind of something different there.

Alan: Well, some cool stuff. We’re going to do a live training next week and everybody that’s watching can go to transformmyfuture.com/Matt Wonder where I got that name. And we are going to walk through the strategy that Angie and I used to lose 192 pounds together. I lost 129 pounds in 260 days and with the same strategy, would you drop like 93 pounds of fat?

Matt: 88-89 pounds or something like that.

Alan: Yeah. So about 90 pounds of fat again, about 30 pounds of muscle, and who’s counting great. So I’m going to walk through that training. So it’s my turn to take the wheel for a moment. So it’d be fun. And so if you know anybody that is struggling with weight, it’s a must-watch. It really is. Seriously, check us out.

Matt: Where do we go for that again? Sorry, I got it.

Alan: Go to transformmyfuture.com/matt and I will put that in the chat here in a second. So we should have had that one ready.

Matt: Cool. Yeah. Guys go there and get registered. That’s next week. So we will not be live wherever you’re watching this. We’re not going to be live here. We are going to be live there at transformmyfuture.com/matt make sure you go check that out. Before we jump into what you need to do after you get the affiliates you need to make sure you can get affiliates in the first place so I’m going to put something up on the screen can you take it off? That’s going to be I guess you can override it probably. Yeah, we’re going to figure that out in about 2 seconds go get an affiliate that’s where you’re going to find them mattmcwilliams.com/first100 go learn how to get your 1st 100 affiliates.

So once you do have the affiliates what could possibly go wrong? A lot of things and that’s not to scare you. The number one thing that can go wrong is that they never promote, they never get active, and they remain inactive. So we want to talk about how do you activate your affiliates? No matter what you do any affiliate program with more than a few dozen affiliates is going to have some that become inactive okay, you can run the best program with the best commissions, have the greatest personality, great relationships but some of them just fall off the Earth. So what do you do about that?

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First, you need to understand why some affiliates become inactive. Why do they become active and then what do you do about those specific things? Well number one the reason number one, is they signed up on a Whim. On a Whim and this happens more than I wish it did. Person A sees person B promoting something. They sign up. They’re like, I want to be an affiliate for this. Then they realize this is not a good fit for my audience. Or they realize, I have no idea how to promote this. I don’t have time to promote this with this group. There’s really not much you can do. If you find out that someone mistakenly signed up, just remove them and move on.

The second reason why they might be inactive is that they’re promoting a competitor. This one sucks. This one sucks. Sometimes people just leave for greener pastures. That’s the nature of our world, right? And when that happens, it’s important to understand their why. In other words, shut up and listen. Okay? Shut up and listen. Don’t get defensive. You said you were going to promote me. Don’t get angry. Don’t try to convince them at first.

We’ll do that in a little bit. Just listen. Why did they switch allegiances? Why did they start promoting a competitor? Is it because the new offer converts better? Or is it because the new offer pays better? Is it because the new offer has better affiliate tools? Is it because the new offer maybe offers a reciprocal promotion where they’ll promote you or they’ll promote that other affiliate program will promote them?

My advice when you’re dealing with this type of situation is just to stay calm. Ask why they switched, and then, as I said, shut up and listen. It’s best not to say anything initially. Just give them some time. Follow up in a few weeks to see if there’s anything you can do. So if the issue is something like tools like, well, they just have better graphics, they have a better copy, they have better tracking.

This is a sign, maybe you need to fix these things. You lose a couple of affiliates because the other company has better graphics. Get better graphics. I mean, you just lost two affiliates who made, let’s say those two affiliates were doing $100 a month. Not even a lot of money. That’s $2,400 a year. You couldn’t spend $2,400 a year on new graphics if you tried. Don’t be cheap. Go spend $1,000 on new graphics. Get them what they need. If your tracking is broken, go get better tracking. If your swipe copy sucks, then go get a freaking copywriter. Fix the problem. Fix the problem.

We’ll talk later about what tools you need to provide. But those are some signs that like, hey, the reason they’re promoting this competitor is that we have issues. We’ll fix those issues. If the issue is conversions, then find out what the competition is doing to beat you. Help them optimize their campaigns to convert better your affiliates. Work on your sales funnel. Get your conversions up. Start testing some stuff. Do better. If it’s Commission structure, well, then make sure you’re not underpaying.

If the competition is paying a 50% commission and you could get them back by bumping it up to 50% from 40. Just do it. Just do it. It’s 10%. I would rather make so you’re making 60. Now you’re going to go down to 50%. So you’re taking 10% less. I would rather make 10%. Less of something than more of nothing. My math is right on that. What’s the 100% nonthing. Alan, your math whiz what is it?

Alan: Still even at the University of South Carolina is zero.

Matt: Yeah, even at the University of Tennessee, where for some odd reason, we throw mustard bottles on the field. Well, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t even worry. I went to school. I was telling somebody the story the other day. We beat Florida one year, and it was my sophomore year of College year, Tennessee finally won the national title in football.

We stormed the field after tearing down the goal post. Because you could do that back then, and we carried him out of the Stadium. I got in so much trouble with my golf coach for that because I’ve only made Sports Illustrated twice. One was that if you remember the faces in the crowd, I won the high school state championship. I made Sports Illustrated.

I was in Sports Illustrated again in College, and that was because I was hanging off the goalpost and the Coach was like, what are you doing? You could have gotten hurt. He’s like, by the way, What’d you all do with the goal post? I was like, we took it out of the Stadium. He’s like, and then what? We marched it up to Cumberland Avenue and walked it down.

He’s like, did they shut down Cumberland Avenue? No, we were just kind of going between the cars. Well, then what did you do with it? We threw it in the Tennessee River. He’s like, Gosh, you’re an idiot.

So even at the University of Tennessee, 100% of nothing is still nothing. Just don’t be cheap. If someone’s beating you on commissions, then fight fire with fire. If the problem is that you can’t do a reciprocal promotion, then maybe reconsider your stance, it might be worth promoting them to keep them, and make sure you’re paying the right commissions. That’s the big one, though.

Reason number three is they went out of business. Nothing you can do here. Just move on. Just making you aware that does happen. They’re out of business. Great. Now we know no longer need to follow up with you. We can remove you.

The fourth reason this is something that you can do about is they don’t know how to promote. They just don’t know how to promote. And we’re going to talk about this shortly. Here’s the thing. Before we jump into that, though, I want you to remember a key thing. If you’re an affiliate manager, you’re running an affiliate program. It’s your job to help your affiliates. So repeat after me. It’s my job to help my affiliates. Alan, you’ve got affiliates, so repeat after me. It’s my job to help my affiliates.

Alan: It is my job to help my affiliates.

Matt: I was on the phone one earlier today. So helping that affiliate. So we’ll talk about that in a little bit.

Reason number five is they’ll get around to it later. No, actually, they’ll get around to it later quote, unquote. Now, there are two types of these. Get around to it later affiliates right there’s type one, which accounts for roughly one 10th of 1% that really do have you on their calendar for later in the year. The other 99.9% are 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.

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They just need a nudge. They need a specific email, they need a text, they need something to get them off their butts and start making some sales. And so we’ve optimized these activation emails, by the way, especially if you’re running a bigger program, you can’t really do this one-on-one. We’ve activated, I mean, literally hundreds of thousands of affiliates.

We’ve cataloged our best performers. I’m going to share how you can get those later because it’s super easy. I want to talk about some results from some of our activation campaigns just so you can see the power of this. So with Shutterfly a couple of years ago, many years ago, actually, not like eight years ago, we had about 15,000 inactive affiliates. 15,000. We did one push. This is just one example. One push One week, we activated nearly 1400 of them, about 10%. Over the next year, those 1400 produced an additional $430,000 in additional revenue. So that’s an evergreen program. We were doing this all year. Just one example there.

Michael Hyatt had a big launch in 2016. We had 944 affiliates who had not sent traffic yet after the first week. So one week went by, and 944 of them had not sent traffic. Three days later, 291 of those 944 were sending traffic in total. People that would have been completely inactive never made a sale and made $104,000 in sales, almost 7% or 8% of the total sales from that launch. If it wasn’t for the $104,000, we would have barely hit a million dollars. We would almost miss our million-dollar goal for that launch. Most people don’t activate affiliates. For most people it’s like if somebody’s not promoting, screw them, we work with them and we get results.

Learn a Master guitar here. This is one of my favorite activation campaigns. It’s also one of my very first. This is over ten years ago now, almost actually 13 years ago this summer, I ran the affiliate program for Learning Master Guitar. When I took over, I was taking over an existing program, with 704 inactive affiliates. Most of them had been a part of the program for more than a year. They were just basically considered dormant. So 704 inactive affiliates, within a month I took over on May 15, 2009, somebody looked me up on that. It was a Friday. I think May 15, 2009, was a Friday. But whatever the Friday closest to that was, within a month we had activated 261 of them combined. They helped the affiliate program grow from a $2.2 million a year program to more than $6 million within a year. One of those affiliates ended up being our number one affiliate. Of the top ten affiliates by years four were from that group of the inactive affiliates, including two of the top three.

So if you think about this, we went from basically only having six of those top ten and one of the top three a year later. Two of those top three. Four of the top ten were from that previously inactive list. That’s why this is important. Because it works. That’s why this is important. So who is considered inactive? How are we defining inactive? In an evergreen program, it’s simple. I want to talk about launches first. But just to let you know, in an evergreen program, it’s simple. Have they sent any traffic in the past 60 or 90 days? No. Then here we go. For a launch, it’s a little bit harder because you might only have like 17 days. Like we’re running a launch right now coming up. And basically, the launch started about four days ago and runs through the 18th.

So today, I mean, probably like our team’s working on this right now, at least. By the way, if you are watching this and not doing this, if you’re watching this but not doing the inactive, stop watching this. I’m just kidding. They should be doing this literally right now. And for that particular campaign, there are three links that people could mail to.

So that’s important because if they’ve sent three opt-ins, it might all be tests. So for us, it’s anything less than three opt-ins or three or less opt-ins that have six or less hits. That’s basically right around the threshold where we say, okay, we know that the reason why they have some hits. And opt-ins are not just because they’re testing the links.

Now, if we send an email to somebody who has two opt-ins and four hits and say, “Hey, I just wanted to help you out and we’ll talk about what to send in a little bit. Why aren’t you promoting?” And they go, well, I am. No big deal. No big deal. Like we offended them, most likely. Sorry, it looked like you had it. No big deal.

So for us, anybody within this particular launch with three opt-ins or less and six hits or less is considered inactive, you might go a little bit lower on those numbers, maybe a little bit higher depending upon the number of links you have.

Typically, if there’s only one opt-in link, we’ll say if there are two or less, one or less depends on how early it is. And maybe like four hits, three or four hits. And so we might raise it, we might lower. But depending upon the system that you use, just running a simple traffic report will show you exactly who’s inactive.

So in Infusionsoft for example it’s a total pain in the b***. Some systems have a link you can click on this to show me my inactive affiliates easy. Other times it’s like just show me all the affiliates really easy way to do it. In fact, we’re going to create our own affiliate system.

We talked about this for a while it’ll have this button that you can click and say show me what your parameters are and it’ll spit out the numbers for you and you can easily contact all those affiliates.

What we have to do in Infusionsoft total pain in the b*** is we have to actually go through download a list of all the affiliates sort them by activity, take the active list, de dupe that in Microsoft excel against the total affiliates whose remaining is inactive. It takes about a half-hour to an hour but it’s totally worth it.

We don’t want to reach out on the second day and say, “Hey, you haven’t seen any traffic yet.” They’re like, yeah, it’s day two. Give me a moment. I slept in yesterday. Good grief, you know? So reach out around day four, day five depends.

If you’ve only got like an eight-day launch, you might want to reach out on day three and say, “Hey, you haven’t seen any traffic yet. I just want to let you know this is a really short launch.” You need to get going. If it’s like a four-day promo, you might reach out on the second day. But generally speaking, the average launch is around 15 to 17 days. So day four, day five, again, day eight or nine, and then right after the day after open cart, just saying, hey, it’s not too late yet.

Alan: Got a question somebody was asking. When do you reach out to Evergreens? How often do you do that?

Matt: When do you reach out on Evergreens? Good point. So typically what we’ll do is run a report every two months and what we’ll do. So here we are. We’re recording this on April 14. So if I were to run that today, I would typically run it at the very beginning of the month. But if I ran that, we’ll just say if I run this report on the 1 March and then I run it again on the 1 May and I would run it for the previous two months.

So when I run it on the 1 March, I would basically look for people who sent no traffic in March and April or fit those criteria, like they sent two or less opt Ins or one or less, whatever the numbers are that you decide to go with. And I would look specifically for those who didn’t meet the traffic criteria for the previous 60 days in an Evergreen program, unlike a launch you can get away with, I’m going to do this six times a year. And because there’s not as much urgency and you can if you do this six times a year, you’re in that Gray area between really annoying and effective. And so that’s how we do it.

Alan: Cool.

Matt: So you know, when how do you reach out to them? The how is very simple. Use any means necessary. You use email, you use text. I’ve got apps on here that I use. I’ve got let me go through here real quick. Apps that I use to communicate with affiliates, Voxer, Telegram, WhatsApp I’ve even got Google Hangouts on here because a couple of people use our Google Hangouts, use Google Hangouts, Skype, that’s it on here that I’ve got on there. And then Facebook DM on a computer, use whatever they use.

Now, typically we use email because that’s what we have for most affiliates, especially with bigger programs. I mentioned 944. I can’t send 944 DMs or texts, but what I can do is send 944 emails using a blast. And then the next day we got 342 replies. Great! Take those out of those 602 people left who are the ones that I should spend the most time on. There are seven big-time affiliates. Normally I text with him, so let me go to my tech, and send him a text. Great!

I would never do any of that on my phone. I would do it on my computer, but I’m going to send it. I have my phone just in case I have those apps on there. But let me send a quick Skype. Let me send a quick DM to those people. The key is over time, just to learn their preferred method of communication.

So if they prefer text, stick to text. They like Skype, then stick to Skype. I mean, I use Voxer with one person, one affiliate out of the 7000 8000 affiliates will work with this year, and one affiliate uses Voxer. I’ve got maybe four that use Skype. I’ve got a couple that uses WhatsApp probably about 150 that use Facebook DM, about five or ten that use Telegram. All the different ones.

I got a few that use Google Hangouts or Google, whatever it’s called now on there. Most of them are fine with email, but again, I want to be available. If I know they’re a Voxer person, then I’m going to use Voxer. So that’s the house. It’s whatever means necessary. Speaking of email, what should you send them? And we’re going to specifically focus on email because I’m going to share one of the most effective emails I have ever used to activate affiliates.

With a larger program, 95% of your communications are going to be via email. So we’re going to focus on that here. I’m going to give you an example of an email. Just go along with me. I’m not going to put it up on the screen, but we sent this to everyone on day four or five of the launch, and we’ve used it ever since. And the subject line was “Everything okay First Name?” So everything okay?

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Let’s pick somebody here. The subject line would be Everything okay, Jackie? Everything okay, Jackie? Like, pretty cool. The subject line breaks through right? “Hey, Jackie. Just making sure everything was okay. I had you down to support such and such a launch, but I haven’t seen any activity 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”

There are five elements to this email, Number one, it grabs their attention. Everything okay. Everything okay, Jackie? That stands out in your inbox, doesn’t it, Jackie? It definitely stands out. Secondly, it reminds them of a commitment. Robert Cialdini in his book Influence, which is a must-read, by the way, mattmcwilliams.com/influence you should go grab that. There’s nothing as powerful as the principle of commitment.

The studies he talks about in that book about commitment and consistency and commitment are unreal. We have a natural desire to do what we said we would do. So I remind them of their commitment. I remind them of their commitment. I say we had you down to support this launch. And people ask me a lot like, okay, is this a bit of a guilt trip? Yeah, it’s a guilt trip. You said you were going to do something and you haven’t. But it has the results, so it’s going to make them a lot of money.

So there I don’t really care if it puts them on a guilt trip. Third, it encourages them. I say twice. There’s still time. It’s not too late. By day, four or five, people might just think, oh, it’s too late. I can’t even join. And I want to make sure to tell them otherwise. So it encourages them. The third thing is it has social proof. I point out things are going great and I want them to be a part of this greatness because people want to be a part of something successful.

And the fifth, I offer help. I say I’m here to help. That’s what I do, right? Make sure you are clear that you are there to answer questions and hold their hand if necessary. So I mentioned that we have these templates. We have these templates. If you want to grab these templates, Jackie and the others I see on here. Hey, Gina, by the way, Jesse, get all of our best email templates for the activation of your affiliates. So that gets them promoted. How do we help them be successful?

So this is that they try their best, but they fail. Or maybe they just don’t know how to promote. They need you to help them. Help them. Help me help you said Jerry Maguire. So how do you help your affiliates succeed? Sometimes an affiliate just doesn’t know how to promote or they haven’t done a good enough job of adapting to the ever-changing landscape of the marketing world. I don’t know. Your job is to help them. Have I made that clear enough? We’ve made you say it earlier.

My job is to help my affiliates. Your job is to help your affiliates succeed. So that means you’ve got to do the things that we’re going to talk about here. I’ve covered this extensively, and I have a post. It’s called What Affiliates Really Need to be successful. If you go to MattMcwilliams.com/successful you can grab this I’m not going to go super in-depth. You can go read the post and I don’t know it’s thousands of words long. It’s got pretty much everything they need in there.

They need general direction number one. They need an amazing swipe copy. They need a really good swipe copy. They need the right graphics to give them the right graphics in that post. I walk you through how to get them to your affiliates. There’s a video in that post that walks you through that, they need banner ads that actually convert they need sample mailing plans.

I’ll show you how to do that in the post. This is like the one I don’t highlight in that post but set up one on one personal promotion plans with your affiliates but don’t call them promotion plans. It’s one of the best things you can do to get your affiliates to mail more often. Create a personal promotion plan with what we just did this morning. Actually this afternoon with an affiliate. I did one yesterday. I do these all the time.

I just get on a quick call and we craft a plan with them. And I’m going to share a video in a moment that will walk you through one of those. This is kind of like our secret sauce when we run affiliate programs for clients. But here’s the gist. You meet with affiliates one on one, you get on Zoom before the promotion, and you craft a custom promotion plan that works with their calendar. So earlier today, the one that I had said we have nine days marked off.

This launch is like a two-week launch. She said we have nine days where we can mail. And I said, send me those nine days and I’ll tell you what to mail them so you don’t have to think about it. I’m going to pick what’s going to convert best on those days. So you co-create this plan with them. And what I found is when you 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 she said, we had nine dates, and then you go through it with them. And I think, you know, there’s eleven on there. And she’s like, yeah, we’re good. Remember I talked earlier? The principle of commitment and consistency from Robert Cialdini means that when people commit to something, they stick to it.

That principle of committing consistency, going back to something we started off with something we’re probably going to be talking about next Thursday with Alan. Some of the reasons why his program works. The program he’s going to share next Thursday works for weight loss; if that’s something you’re interested in. So jump on Zoom, jump on Skype. Go through the promotion plan spreadsheet with them. Make sure you download the template, by the way.

All right, the affiliate promo plan template. Allen will put that in the chat on the screen there. Make sure that you download that. So once they have that plan set, have them commit to it. Email them a copy of the spreadsheet, thanking them for their commitment to the promotion. More often than not, they will stick to that plan. If anything, they might add to it.

They’ll go, you know what? We need to add one more cart close day email. Rarely will they subtract from it. I’ve personally done these plans with people whose products I’m promoting. And then I’ve fallen short of, like, in the middle of the promotion, I got busy and I was like, oh, crap, I didn’t live up to my plan.

We just need to add an extra email or two when I promise that I’m going to mail eight times. By gosh, I’m going to mail at least eight times. I might even mail nine or ten. That’s the power of creating these personal commitment plans. I’ve interchanged the words promo plans and commitment plans. We used to call them promo plans, but starting last year, we started calling them commitment plans and we found that when we call the commitment plans, we get an average of 1.7 more emails sent from each affiliate, which is a huge win.

Alan: Language matters.

Matt: Yeah. So if you want to see how we do these, you just have to wait until I take a sip of coffee. If you want to see how we do this, I’ve got a video, a lot of links for you today. If you’re watching this live and you can’t keep up with them, come back to the post and they’ll be there. For those of you watching the replay, they’re all below this video.

How to Concrete Promo Plans with Your Affiliates We got a YouTube link there that will walk you through that in that post. Going back to that original post, if you remember the one affiliates need to be successful, we talk about affiliates need a checklist. They just need a checklist that tells them what to do.

So make sure you download the affiliate promo. The checklist that’s in that post as well, mattmcwilliams.com/promochecklist they need to feel a part of the process. Involved them ask for their opinion on things like what about the logo for the course? We have a book launch team of affiliates and I’ve involved them in selecting the cover of the book.

They’ve been a part of the process throughout. Many of you helped with picking the cover of the book and we have a cover now. It’s dialed in. The book is actually live. It doesn’t even launch until next January. But if you look hard enough, if you go to penguinrandomhouse.com largest distributor, largest publisher in the world, you may or may not be able to find links to my upcoming book. Just wink, wink. Yeah, that’s kind of cool. I got to see it up on the interwebs. It’s pretty awesome anyway, but make them feel a part of the process. Other things you need to Do You need to give affiliates their opt-in list. They need to know who’s already opted in.

So if you’re promoting something free on the front end, as an affiliate who’s already signed up, I don’t want to keep emailing them to sign up when we get towards cart close, I want to focus on those people as well. So make sure you give them their opt-in list. Make sure you run short, frequent, and exciting contests. Move the needle, And so run contests that are exciting for them. Focus on very short, like 24 to 48 hours contests to get them excited to promote instead of running like two big errors lead contest and a sales contest. Do those, but in addition, run a couple of really short contests.

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These are some examples of the ones we run, like a webinar opt-in contest. Just webinar opt-ins for the next three days. Three-day contest, two-day contest. First place. Must opt-in. Most opt-in is a Caribbean cruise for two or 5000 We did a drawing, so every opt-in got you an entry. So everybody’s interested to win thousand dollars MacBook Air, something like that. We knew the webinar converted, so running a contest was worth it.

Running a contest is worth it. We did a weekend contest for Michael Hyatt for his assessment. And the first place was 25000, 2nd, place was 1000, 3rd, the place was 500. Anybody with 25 plus opt-ins, we had two winners at 250 each. And so we did this for Michael Hyatt’s five days to the best year ever. His assessment was converting amazingly well. We did it for the weekend because weekends typically suck for launches. So we ran it over the weekend. And here’s the key.

We announced it at a very specific time. There’s a little bit of science, especially with weekend contests that what you don’t want to do is announce it so early on Friday or before Friday that people go, “oh, I was going to mail Friday. I was going to mail at 10:00 a.m.. But I’m glad I saw this email.” So let me just delay that email till Saturday.

Now, we want them to still mail on Friday and get a couple of emails out of them on the weekend. If they were only going to mail Friday and maybe not over the weekend, that’s one email. And then they just move the email from Friday to Saturday and then mail again on Sunday. We gained one email. That’s okay. But what if they were going to an email Friday and Sunday and they just moved that Friday email until Saturday? That doesn’t help.

I mean, we got the same amount of emails from them. So the idea is you got to announce it early enough on Friday that it’s not 05:00 P.m. And they go, oh, crap, I didn’t even know about that. I can’t really react to it or whatever. I’ll just sit this one out. So we announced it like 1130 on Friday. Most people have sent their Friday emails.

We announced it at one or 130. That’s plenty of time for them to see it and take action on it. Schedule some weekend emails. And so I know from that we saw 57% lift, 57% increase in opt-ins over the weekend compared to projections. We spent $4,250 on that. That was worth close to six figures, easy. We’ll do a first-day sales contest, first-day sales. So first place, most sales, whatever, $1,000, 2000 might be 5000 if the campaign is big enough. And then do a drawing.

Anyone with just one sale you’re entered to win a certain amount of money, it could be 500,000, $2,000, something. That’s pretty lucrative. And so the thing is, you want your affiliates coming out of the gate strong on open cart day. So be willing to spend a little bit of money to get people energized. Other contests again, they’re just endless. Like I could go on and on about contests. Anyone can win a contest, we just say, hey, add this email address to your list. We give them an email address to add to their list. Every email you send today we typically do this for cart close day.

Every email you send today is entered to win. So then what we’ll do is we’ll go, oh, we got 557 emails today and then it will make the prize like $1,000 every email you send. So if you’re planning on sending two better load five got a bigger chance or we say you got to send three at a minimum to qualify.

So then we’ll go over to that inbox any address that only sent two, we’ll just delete those and then it’s like, oh, there’s 417 emails left to go to random.org 1417 email number 242 is the winner and we’ll scroll till we get the email 240 Baraboo Bing winner chicken dinner right? It’s open to everyone. All an affiliate has to do is send an email.

Every email to an affiliate sent is an entry to win. This encourages the smaller affiliates to mail an extra time or two, which in and of themselves might produce an average of half a sale more. But a half of sale times 300 affiliates is 150. Sales times $2,000 is $300,000 to your bottom line. And even if my math is off, even if they average a third of a sale and only 100 affiliates do it, that’s 33 sales. That’s $66,000. Here’s the type of prizes you can do for that.

Tickets to your live event technically cost you almost nothing. All right, $66,000 for maybe a $5,600 expense. How is that not like a massive win? Try going and getting $66,000 in sales from $600 in ads. It’s probably not going to happen.

Alan: Pretty nice ROI.

Matt: So one of the keys here is you got to build up each promo milestone. You got to build up each promo milestone. So if they’re five sales away from a milestone, tell them individually, tell them where are they in relation to first place or 6th place or whatever.

First place is at 100 sales. And you got to find something that’s practical for them to achieve. So if first place is at 100 sales and it’s two days before the end of the launch, place 100 sales and the affiliate in 14 places, nine sales. It’s not practical to say, “Hey, number 14, you’re going to catch up to number one.” But it is practical to say, “Hey, number 14, you could catch up to number ten. You could be in the money; you could be on the leaderboard.” So, “Hey, you’re only six sales away from 10th place.” If they’re not going to achieve a leaderboard position, focus on the guaranteed prizes.

So if you have a ten sale prize and they’re at seven sales, “Hey, you’re only three sales away from winning the MacBook Pro.” And when you build up these milestones, remind people where they stand, and show them how to get to the next level. It’s very encouraging for them. Every time we send one of these emails, we get emails back like, “Awesome. Matt has scheduled another email for tomorrow.” That’s what we’re looking for with these messages.

So that is how you get them promoted. You’ve got them active. We talked about that. We’ve gotten them promoted. Jackie has a question. Do you have an affiliate program that integrates email marketing or how do you track that? Jackie, I actually don’t understand the question. Can you reword that and ask me differently? And I’ll answer that in a little bit. Sorry, I just not following. Am I missing something there? Alan, do you understand the question?

Alan: Not quite. She may be asking for the actual software that you use. It almost sounds like.

Matt: Okay. So problem number three and we’ll come back to Jackie’s question. Problem number three is they only promote once and then you never hear from them again. So this is the keeping them promoting part.

So how do you keep your affiliates promoting long term? We don’t want them to be just the one-hit wonders. If you do everything I’ve suggested, if you pay them well, you get them active. You give them the tools that they need. You make them feel a part of the process. You do promotion plans with them.

You run exciting contests; you make your affiliate program fun. They will want to promote again. It’s that simple, but only if you keep in touch. If you go dark on them, let’s say it’s a launch, you go dark. End of launch. Don’t hear from Alan for four months.

Alan: That’d be terrible.

Matt: Really? Is that how you treat your relationships? So we talked about this right throughout the year. Now, Evergreen, you’re going to keep in touch for the promotions, but with a launch, you got to be intentional. So take them behind the scenes a month after the launch, and give them a recap of the launch. Teach them what worked for you.

Do a launch recap about a month afterward. That way it’s fresh but not too fresh. And it’s like, “Hey, we’re a full month later, maybe even 45 days later,” we’re going to give them a launch recap so they learn stuff that’s going to benefit them in their launches. Take them behind the scenes with what’s working for your business. Just share with them business tips throughout the year. I mean, the heck, be useful. Be helpful.

Take it behind the scenes of your product. So if you’re re-recording your course four months before the launch, do a little video onset of recording and be like, “hey, affiliate, see, look at the set, blah, blah, blah. Here’s what we’re doing.” Don’t tell them, “hey, we relaunched the course and that’s what you’re promoting in two weeks.” That’s a dumb way to do that. Tell them months in advance.

Tell them six months in advance that you’re going to reshoot it. Like just let them know, “Hey, we’re going to be reshooting the course for 2023. Just wanted to let you know. Awesome. That’s all I have to say.” All I got to say about that. We just watched Forest Gump the other night. 25 years since that movie first came out?

Alan: It’s crazy. That is showing my age, filling my age

Matt: Throughout the years. Things come in, you get a good testimonial, and share with your affiliates. You don’t have to text it to them individually. But here’s what I would do. If that testimonial comes in.

Number one, I would post it to your partner’s Facebook group and just say, “Hey, guys, another great testimonial. Look what came in. It’s just a little thing, just keep in touch.” But look to see if an affiliate referred them and send it to that affiliate. One-on-one, text, whatever, send it to them, send it to their team. Tag them in that Facebook post.

Alan: That is gold right there, too.

Matt: You got to do it, though. You have to do that.

Alan: You told me how to do that. just from that piece right there.

Matt: If you hadn’t told me we’re doing this a week from today. We mentioned earlier Alan and I are doing a master class together about his thing, which is helping people lose weight.

This will be the third time we’ve done it together. If after that first one, he had not shared the story of one of the guys that signed up a guy named Bob Harris.

Alan: I messaged Bob yesterday. He’s still doing amazing.

Matt: If you had not shared Bob’s success story in other success stories, then I would have said, “oh, that’s okay, whatever. I made some money. But yeah, not going to promote again.” That’s no offense to you, Alan, but your stuff works and it worked for Bob and others. And I went, Holy crap, I have to do more.

Like, I have to help more people with this. So share those testimonials. Just update them once a month or so throughout the year. Keep in touch with them. Maintain those relationships. Comment on one of their Facebook posts or Instagram posts periodically. Text them periodically. Just connect with them periodically in a normal way that normal people do things.

Like I said, commenting on their Facebook posts. Don’t just like their post. Nobody knows who likes their post. Comment on it. Think about that comment. Don’t say Congrats. They just said they got married. They just said they had a baby and all you can do is Congrats. Like, at least throw in a Congrats brother. I’m so excited for you. Congrats, man. The best years of your life are ahead.

Just do something that maybe shows that you took 4 seconds to give a flying crap about them. Here’s a little tip if you’re like, well, I don’t have time to text people. A little tip here. I learned this. I would love to give credit where credit is due, but I have no idea who taught me this. My kids are in soccer, and so one of the things that I find myself doing a lot of is waiting. I’m waiting for us to get take out a couple of nights a week. You know salads. Don’t judge. Get salads sometimes ice cream and for the kids.

But I’m waiting and I have nine minutes of absolutely nothing to do. Or I’m sitting at the Barber and it’s eleven minutes before my appointment and I’ll be chatting with Greg Barber, chat with him for a little bit, chat with whoever else is there. But we find ourselves just waiting.

Here’s the thing. You could pick up the magic rectangle and be like, “oh, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to read the news.” Well, there’s something that’ll make you dumber and make you no money. I want to be an informed citizen.

Alan: The news is a great income.

Matt: The news is not making you an informed sentence. That’s a whole different just oh, man. Wow. I could go on a rabbit trail down there. I’m not going to though. I’m going to read the news or I’m going to scroll through my Facebook feed just for, kicks and giggles. What if you were intentional? This little trick I learned.

When I have time to wait, I go in, I click on the text, I go up to compose, and I type in A and it Scrolls down and it’s it says, Alan. “Hey, Allen. Just thinking about you, man. How’s life? You and Angie still biking a bunch.” that happened today. Oh, you did? Can I just say something really quick? I want to hear from you on that, but I just want to finish this.

And what I’ll then do is go to my text and I type in A and do that, or I go and scroll all the way down. I scroll all the way down. And that’s a message I don’t need. That’s an old message that has nothing.

The last person that I communicated with down here is a former client. So I’m going to send her. Not going to right now, but I’ll send her. So next time I’m in line, she’s getting a quick message. Then there’s, like, some fraud protection stuff from our bank. And I’ll Scroll up and go, oh, here we go. Boom, boom, Pedro. Great. She’ll probably text him. It’s been 70 some odd days since I texted him.

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Now go to the next person and I’ll just send a text. And if I constantly keep going to the bottom, then everybody’s going to get hit up eventually. And then, yeah, you could scroll through Facebook. But when you have that little bit of time, what if you did it with intentionality? There are some tools out there I’ll be sharing with you guys a really cool tool that our team is getting ready to try out.

I’m really excited to share it with you. I’m not going to tell you anything about it yet, but it will allow you to just get in front of the right people at the right times. So it’s not you don’t have your feed full of cat pictures and all that crap. I love my family. Every now and again, I want to check in on them on Facebook.

But sometimes I just want, like, these five minutes to be focused on relationships that are important to my business. I’m not thinking about my business 24/7, but 15,20 minutes a week. I want to focus on that. So there’s a little trick. You’re waiting in line. You’re sitting there. Anytime you have five or ten minutes to kill, just go in. That’s where you just reply to me.

Alan: I did.

Matt: You just scroll all the way to the bottom and go from there. Send them some physical mail. Send them some physical mail. Support them. Promote them. Ask how you can help them. Just reach out to them. Like there’s one.

You know, somebody’s got a big launch coming up. What if you just did this? Like, you can’t promote them. Maybe it’s not a good fit for you. You know, they’ve got a promotion coming up. Why? Because you saw it on Facebook or because they texted you and said, Get ready for our big launch in two months.

You go, hey, what are those dates? Oh, it’s April 21 to April 28 whatever. And you make a note on your calendar, and then on April 20, you get a reminder that says Text Stu. And on April 20, you text and say, “Hey, Stew, I know your launch is coming up tomorrow, man. Just thinking about you.

Hope it goes awesome.” That’s the type of stuff we’re talking about being a good human. The big thing is just don’t go dark on them. Just don’t go dark on them. I used to see that so often it drives me insane. Yeah. Affiliates. You should promote us. You’re amazing. We love you. And then six months of I can’t really make a cricket sound. I don’t know how they sound whatever.

Alan: A bird that swallowed the cricket.

Matt: I was thinking it’s more like a bird who needs some antacids or something. So to recap, I wanted to hear your thing. You said, something like, this just happens. Tell me real quick.

Alan: Yeah. today something happened. Brian Dixon, who amazing coach. to do anything other than telling the truth, that my daughter has type one diabetes, and I posted And then, oh, by the way, I want you to meet This resulted in a potential business relationship cared. So nobody really wants to know what you know

Matt: Yeah. So to recap, you got to get them active, you got to help them succeed, and then you got to keep them promoting. Jackie asked.

So basically, software-related, how do you have an affiliate? Do you have an affiliate program that integrates email marketing or how do you track that if you’ve got affiliate WP? I mean, everything should track through that. I’m not sure I fully understand the question. Jackie, do me a favor. Feel free to text me if you want to. Text me a lengthier thing and we can go back and forth at 260-217-4619. That’s open to anybody.

By the way, you can text me anytime. 260-217-4619. Text me more of the details, because I think there’s some nuance that I’m not picking up on and we don’t have time for here, so, yeah, I’d love to help you, though, Jackie. So real quick, guys, I want to leave you some action items, some clear next steps.

What do I do right now, Matt? Oh, my gosh, you dropped a bunch of notes. I hope you guys think I dropped some knowledge. Let me know if I did or didn’t, because maybe I didn’t know you guys like this is all crap. I don’t know. I don’t think so though. So what do we do now though? What are the actions?

The five things I want you guys to do. Number one; get all of our affiliate activation templates. mattccwilliams.com/activate, very simple. Go grab them, download them, use them, and send them. I showed you how to do how to know who’s inactive. Start sending them to people. Secondly, I want you to commit to embracing the fact we talked about this three times today.

This is the fourth, your affiliate success is your job. Your job is to help them succeed. All right? My job is to help my affiliates succeed. Say it every morning if you need to.

Alan: My job is to help my affiliates succeed.

Matt: You do that, your brain is just like in that mode just do that. Third, I want you to know what your affiliates need to succeed. If your job is to help them succeed, what does that mean? Check out that post. We dropped it earlier. We’ll drop it again. Here is what affiliates really need to be successful. If you just get those seven things right, you’re going to be fine. Can you do a few of the other things I suggested today and then I’ve suggested before that kind of take it to the next level. Absolutely. But if you get those seven things right, you’re good.

The point is, none of the advanced stuff means crap. Like if you do what I said, text people. But your swipe copy sucks. Your offer doesn’t convert. Your graphics are terrible. Who cares, man? I got a great relationship with you. I love you to death. But your swipe copy is terrible and your landing page converts like crap. Okay, you’re not going to promote me, are you? So get those seven things dialed in and then you can do the more advanced stuff.

Fourth, keep your affiliates promoting long-term, not one. And done, follow what we shared today to get them promoted more regularly. And then fifth, reach out. Reach out to me. I mentioned it earlier to Jackie. If you’ve got questions about today’s lesson, or anything else, text me anytime at 260-217-4619. So next week I said it earlier.

We talked about a couple of times here. We’re not going to be here. Wherever you’re watching this, we’re not going to be here. We are going to be live on April 21, same time, 02:00 p.m Eastern. I did make the mistake recently of showing up an hour early for a webinar that was at three Alan, you were there.

Alan: That allegedly happened. We’re not going to confirm or deny it. So same time, 02:00 p.m.. Thursday, April 21. But we’re going to be live at transformmyfuture.com/Matt, you do have to register for that one. You can’t just show up like you did today. So go get registered for that. If you think that’s going to someone you know.

That is the big thing I would ask you I said this on a podcast episode that’s coming out next Tuesday about the same topic with Alan. This is a topic that if it’s not relevant to you, you know somebody who it is relevant for you absolutely do. The statistics, I mean 50% of the population will be 70% overweight the odds of you if you don’t know somebody who’s either of those you live in a cave, you don’t know more than three people like oh I hang out with this fit friends.

Okay but you’ve got some uncle or somebody it’s inevitable that you know somebody you could live on Okinawa like the most healthy place on Earth you still probably know somebody who supplies to so what I want you to do just tell them about it. “Hey, I know this is important to you and I believe that this could help you.” You don’t have to be like “hey fatty” you don’t have to be awkward about it.

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But if you know somebody that you love, you care about, share this with them. I’ll leave it at that. Hopefully, we’ll see you next Thursday. Or see somebody that you love next Thursday. If you know somebody, do this for just do this one thing for them. Don’t just say, hey, here’s this link. Go register. Have a nice day.

Maybe show up with them next Thursday. Just tell them I’ll be on the call, too. I’ll be on the Webinar too. I don’t need to know the stuff that Alan sharing. But you know what? Maybe you do because maybe you could help somebody.

So just show up with them, support them, and be there for them. And hopefully, we’ll see you on. Make sure you say Hi in the chat when you get on. And with that, we’ll see you hopefully next Thursday and thanks so much for being on today, guys.