Want to grow your affiliate program and your brand at the same time? Start a podcast. Seriously. Podcasting isn’t just about sharing your expertise or building an audience (although that’s a huge bonus). It’s one of the easiest, most effective ways to connect with potential affiliates…the kind who can drive serious sales for your business. In this episode, I’m breaking down exactly how to use podcasting to grow your brand, attract affiliates, and turn conversations into commissions.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
Marketing That Actually Works: Donald Miller on Storytelling, Sound Bites, and Selling More
Are Affiliates Just Lazy? How to Motivate and Get the Most from Your Affiliates
Why People Really Subscribe & Buy (It’s Not What You Think)
Why I Finally Started My Own Affiliate Network
Scaling Your Affiliate Program and Your Business Without Spending a Fortune
How to Grow Your Affiliate Program (and Brand) with a Podcast
Do you want to grow your affiliate program and your brand at the same time? Here’s my advice. Start a podcast. Seriously. Podcast is not just about sharing your experience, your expertise, or building an audience. Although that’s a huge bonus, it is one of the easiest, most effective ways to connect with potential affiliates. The kind of affiliates who can drive serious sales for your business. So in this episode today, I am going to break down exactly how to use podcasting to grow your brand, attract affiliates, and turn conversations into commissions.
Let’s get started. Well, welcome back. Today’s episode, I am going to share one of the most underrated ways to grow your affiliate program, and that is podcasting. So there’s two types of people listening. First, you may already have a podcast. Second, you, maybe you’re thinking about starting one or you’ve never thought about starting one for that matter. Either way, this episode is for you. I’m going to share how to turn your podcast into a way of recruiting affiliates. And so we’re going to talk about how to identify the right guests, how to invite the right guests, and we’re not just talking like content creators, but actual potential affiliates who can drive real sales for you. I’m going to walk you through the exact process. So this is actually a video that I did a couple of years ago.
And so there’s a couple of parts where I’m like, if you’re driving, I might be referring to like a, you know, you know, look at the video. You don’t really need to be looking at the video. You’ll figure it out if you listen while doing what I’m saying. So if you actually follow along, one of the things I’ll give you an example is you’re going to go to Amazon, right? And you’re going to look up books on there. If you do it while I’m talking, it will all make sense, I promise you. So I’m going to walk you through the exact process, how to develop those relationships on social media, how to actually host an engaging interview that lead to these long term partnerships and all that stuff.
We’re also going to talk about how authentic conversations, I just had one with Donald Miller. If you missed that episode, go back and check it out, by the way, how these authentic conversations can build authority and trust, which make it easier for guests to become affiliates, to become Enthusiastic promoters of your brand, of your products. And I’m also going to share some real life examples and some tips how to turn these podcast interactions, how to turn these interviews into affiliate sales.
So grab a notebook. If you’re driving, feel free to keep listening. If you’re working out, feel free to keep listening. If you’re doing the dishes or something else, feel free to keep listening. But I want you to go back, bookmark it. I don’t know what minute it is, but the part where I start really walking you through it, you’re going to want to go back and listen to that while you do it. And we’re going to work together in this episode to turn your podcast into an affiliate recruiting machine. So with that, let’s jump right in. Hello. Hello, everyone. Hey there. Today we’re going to talk about how to use podcasting to grow your affiliate program.
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In other words, how to develop the relationships, get affiliates, scale your program using a podcast. How do you do that? That’s what we’re going to talk about today. So whether you have a podcast or you don’t, this lesson today is for you.
I’m going to show you how to capitalize on all the good stuff that a podcast can bring. So for those of you who are on with us live, shoot me a, a message there and say, hey, let me know where you’re joining us from and all that fun stuff. I’m going to share something kind of exciting, a couple of exciting things at the end of this today, one of which is that this is going to be our last one of these now, not our last ever live, but our last ever live single lesson. And I’ll explain that when we finish up here. So today we’re talking about how to use podcasting to grow your affiliate program. For those of you when you drop a note in the comments, let me know if you already have a podcast. As you can tell, I’m in the office, not in the studio. And as you can tell, Alan is not on because he’s on his way, I believe, to see his wife’s favorite band tonight.
So they’re doing some traveling today. But for those of you who do have a podcast or you don’t just drop a note, say, have a podcast, don’t have a podcast. You know that a podcast can be a great tool for, first of all, building authority. If you’ve got a podcast, you become like the instant authority or one of the instant authorities in that niche. It’s just the way things go. I know for me, I’ve shared the story before. I won’t share the whole story again.
But we named my podcast the Affiliate Guy Podcast. If you want to listen, by the way, you should go to mattmcwaims.com podcast. Check that out. But we named it the Affiliate Guy Podcast. There’s a whole story behind that that I won’t get into. But what happened, I noticed is, like, people would literally just introduce me as the affiliate guy.
That’s the affiliate guy. And then we started getting clients who are like, yeah, I listen to your podcast and. And blah, blah, blah. And then the other day, I was on a client call and I started to tell a story, and she’s like, yeah, I remember when you said that on your podcast. And there was another one where I started to share kind of a philosophy, you know, an idea. And he’s like, yeah, I remember you. He’s like, didn’t you just talk about that, like, back in January on the podcast? Like, yeah, I think so. Yeah. I’m like, you know better than I do, apparently. You know, I don’t remember when I talked about that, you know, and so it’s. It’s kind of weird, like, what starts to happen when you have a podcast in terms of building authority.
It’s almost. I really can’t think of anything else that does that. And part of that is, you know, if you think about how most people listen to podcasts, they listen to it on their phone. They don’t listen to it most of the time on a computer. You know, it seems a little bit more impersonal. That phone is probably in their pocket. And this sounds like maybe like it’s psychobabble. It’s not. The phone is next to them. It’s touching them. They’ve got earbuds in. More than likely, not always, but more than likely.
They’ve got earbuds in. You’re literally in their head. You’re literally in their head. They’re blocking out the whole rest of the world to listen to you. That’s a pretty unique thing versus reading a blog, you know, I’m not saying don’t have blog posts. We have thousands of blog posts. I’m not saying don’t have blog posts. I’m not saying, you know, that if you’re a writer, don’t write. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just talking as far as intimacy and authority. I mean, nothing tops a podcast. But it can also be used for affiliate recruiting.
It can be used for building relationships. It can be used for creating long lasting Affiliate partnerships and so much more. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. So I’m going to walk you through step by step. All right. I’m going to walk you step by step through how to do this day. Whether you already have a podcast or you don’t also stick around to the end, I’m going to share not only the process throughout this for getting really good guests, this is what we’re going to talk about.
You know, how do we get great guests who turn into great affiliates, but I’m also going to share a really cool resource for podcasters from whether you’re a newbie or an expert. Robert says, you’re in my head right now, Matt. Kind of creepy, man. I guess you’re listening to me in the earbuds. Maria says, love your podcast. I’ve been listening to it for years. It’s awesome. And Connie as well. So thank you, guys. Connie said she does not have a podcast, but wants to be a guest on podcast. Well, listen, today I think you’ll glean some stuff from that, but I’m going to encourage you, Connie, to start a podcast. I’m going to walk through that today. So, all right, how do we do this? How do we take a podcast and turn this into something that actually gets us good affiliates and grows our program? Number one step.
Number one, you need to identify potential guest. So what you’re looking for here are experts, experts who are one or two notches above you or maybe at your level, right? So one of the mistakes a lot of people make is, like, when you’re starting out, don’t go for the A list guest. So, hey, I’m starting a podcast on personal growth. I’ll go get Tony Robbins. Don’t make that mistake. Go for people who are one or two notches above you. So if you’ve got a list of 5,000 people, look for people that you think have a list of, say, 10 to maybe 25,000 people.
If you’ve got a list of 5,000, you’re like, the person at 25,000 is not in a whole different league than you. All right? If you’ve got 10,000 Instagram followers and somebody’s got 40,000, they’re not, like, in a whole different league. Somebody that’s got a million and a half Instagram followers. They’re in a totally different league. Right? I’m going to talk about how to possibly get some of those, but that’s not the focus today because we’re looking to turn them into affiliates. So we’re going to start small.
We want to get some yeses again big mistake is people think I just got to get one whale if I want to grow my affiliate program I just need one affiliate who can make like $200,000 in sales. That’s a huge mistake on so many levels. I’m not going to get into all the reasons but number one probably not going to happen. It’s not going to happen most likely. Number two even if you do get them what if they come out of the gate and they do like a ton of sales for you real fast and it goes poorly for them or even if it goes well for them but they don’t stick around for whatever reason they just don’t stick around. So now you’re dealing with losing that one affiliate who accounted for all of your sales.
The other thing as I’ve shared many times before is when you have a bunch of small affiliates they become very loyal to. And you grow an army of affiliates over time. So we’re not going to make the mistake of targeting like one big affiliate and trying to get them. I’ll talk about an example where you might do that a little bit later. But we want to get a bunch of small to medium sized fish, not a whale.
Step two is find a reason for them to be a guest. So what are some reasons why somebody would be a guest? Matt, my podcast is just starting out. I’ve got 57 listeners. Why would anybody want to be a guest on my podcast? Let me share the biggest reason. They have a book coming out. They have a book. And so I’m going to walk you through real quick here. I’m going to go to Amazon. com and I’m going to go here to books. And Maria said it right here. Why would somebody want to be on a podcast? Exposure for them. Exposure for them.
All right, so again we’re trying to find a reason. So if I’m looking up on Amazon right now, I’m going to go new releases coming soon. So it was on the left side here. Now let’s just say, you know, I’m going to do my category. I’m going to do business. I’m going to narrow it down from there. I’m going to go to the business and money category. Now I’m going to narrow it down. Ed, my lut’s got a book coming out. I did not know that. And actually I’m going to save that because I know who published this book. So from there what I’m going to do is narrow it down.
So mine typically are business development and open that up in a new tab. And I think there’s usually one that’s like marketing and sales. Those are the two that are best for me. And I’m going to scroll through and I’m going to see what are some authors that have stuff coming out that I might want to interview. Now I’m always looking number one, just to be clear. I’m looking number one for who would be great guests, who’s going to provide the best content for my audience. But if I can turn them into an affiliate, that’s what we want to do. And we’ll walk you through to do that.
So I’m going to look and find some authors. Just going to scroll through and you know, I’m going to look at some of these people and I’m going to reach out to them. We’ll talk about that a little bit. So I’m going to find these people On Amazon, these people who have books coming out, and then I’m going to invite them, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, to be on the podcast. So if they’ve got a launch coming up, you know, a product launch, get on their affiliate list so you can find them on Amazon. That’s great. But also if they’ve got a launch coming up, be on their affiliate list. Just be on people’s affiliate list.
You want to be affiliates, something else that’s important to them. Maybe they’ve got a cause, maybe they’re supporting a charity and they really want to talk about that charity. Then if that’s a decent fit, then have them come on and follow them on social media and invite them to talk about something specific that they’ve been sharing. Now, to be clear, you can use this process, I talked about this earlier, you can use this process from time to time to get some whale guests. Like, I’ve used this method. I’ve gone to Amazon and I’ve gotten guests that I had no business getting. I had the former on my old podcast. Maybe you can find the archive somewhere.
But I had a show where it was called the World Changer show. And I interviewed just really cool people, mostly in personal growth and things like that. But, you know, I mean, I had just some of the most amazing guests. Dr. Dale Archer, who. He’s one of the leading ADHD doctors. And I say, I have ADHD so bad, I couldn’t even finish saying adhd. But he’s one of the leading ADHD doctors in the world.
I had a former ambassador to the United Nations. I had people that had like massive audiences. All of these people that I had on my podcast, before I had any business having them on, I had Dr.Dale Archer when I had like 700 downloads an episode. You know, this guy can go on and get major media. Like he can be on Fox News and CNN and MSNBC and He’s doing Matt McWilliams podcast. That’s ridiculous. I mean, gosh, some of these books back here, books that I got from authors, Rory Vaden, procrastinate on purpose, hacking growth. These are all people. I’m trying to think of some of the other ones that I got before I was like, really? Anybody? Like, I mean, I had barely any listeners whatsoever.
I know I had one called the Leading Brain. I had another one that I remember the guest, I cannot remember the name of it, but this guest was like one of the leading lecturers in the entire world on different things related to psychology and mental Health. And I remember she was the one that taught me that if you go back to your old journals, if you’re a doodler, don’t. If we have any doodlers on live. But if you’re a doodler, you know, someone who’s sitting in a meeting and you. And you doodle and you go back and retrace, you know, what you drew, you can literally, like, remember. Things will come back to you.
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You’ll remember, like, who was sitting where and what they were wearing and all that stuff. Right? So reach out to those whales. Just don’t expect them to become affiliates. And one of the cool things about that is that if you can get one or two whales on your show, then when you’re reaching out to those people that we talked about, the ones that are a level up or, you know, two levels above you, then you can name drop those people for future. Reach out. So you can reach out, Maria, and say, you know, to somebody who’s a level or two above you that you want to be an affiliate.
Hey, would you come on my podcast? I’ve interviewed so and so and so and so. And like I said, I mean, I did this when I had basically no listeners back in the day, and it worked really well. All right, so step two, just to recap, step two was find a reason for them to be a guest. Step three is seed the relationship. Seed the relationship. Interact with them on social media. Okay.
Interact with them on social media. Engage with them. One of the keys here is to look for posts that have almost no engagement. So when you log into Facebook, for example, the way their algorithm works is it’s going to show you the post with the most engagement. So you log in, and the first 20 things you see are probably things that have the most engagement. I want you to look for something posted a day or more ago that has almost no engagement. Now, if they’re super famous, Elon Musk, for example, he tweets anything. There’s literally 30,000 replies on his lowest engagement post.
So you’re never going to break through that one. Okay, that’s not it. But look for the ones that maybe only have one or two or seven replies or zero. I found some, like, guys, I know people that they’re in my target list. And I’ll see A post from 2 days ago that has 2 likes, 0 comments. I comment on that one. They see that I stand out. I’m the only person who commented on that.
I still look for those posts with low engagements. The whole idea here is to just Seed this relationship before we reach out. See this relationship. Look for posts with low engagement and engage with those. Reply to their emails, right? Tag them on social media. Quote them on social media where it says, like, put the dash in their name. Put at so and so, right? Say, I learned a powerful lesson from, you know, from so and so today. If you want to interview them about an upcoming book, talk on social media about their last book. And you don’t want to bombard them like showing up in their timeline every single day, that’s kind of stalkerish. But just periodically start seeding that relationship.
You do all this before step four, which is to reach out and invite them to be a guest. Reach out to them. Now, this email, you know, Maria said it best earlier. She said the reason why that they would want to be on your show is exposure for them. Exposure for them. All right, so we’re going to make it all about them. Hey, I noticed you have a book coming out, a launch coming up, or you’ve been talking a lot about such and such. Would you be interested in coming on my podcast to talk more about it, you know, and of course sell some books or make some more sales for, you know, during your launch, things like that.
Right. So step five is, I’ll get to that in a minute, is nurture the relationship. But step five would actually be, now that I think about it, is through the podcast and really take the time for five minutes before the podcast and for five minutes after to develop a little bit of a relationship. Now if you get 25 minutes, I would rather you only take 20 minutes to do the podcast and leave five minutes before and after for a minute or two, you know, a minute before and four minutes after to talk than to just be like, I got to go 25 minutes on the podcast. Because then there’s no relationship whatsoever. There’s none.
So of course, step 5 or 4B, you know, you invite them for step 4B would be to actually do the episode and do it well. I hate to say this, but this kind of sounds lame, but like, if you suck at interviewing, then learn how to interview. Listen to a lot of interviews, take some courses on how to do interviews, interview some really lower people first just for, like to practice. Biggest tip I can give you on interviewing is have a list of a few questions that you want to ask.
But don’t just go question 1, question 2, question 3, question 4, ask follow up questions, challenge them a little bit on something, ask them different things as they answer your previous question. Don’t just go immediately to the next question. Think about what you could ask in terms of a follow up. So invite them to be a guest on the show and then make sure that you actually do the interview and do it well. And then step five is nurture the relationship. We’re trying to take this from just getting them on the show to how do we turn them into a partner, an affiliate for the long term. So you continue to nurture the relationship. You continue to interact on social media. It doesn’t stop once you get them. In fact, you book it for three weeks from now. Continue to share their stuff just like you were before you booked the interview.
So that they’re showing up and going like, holy crap, man. Dude, you’re sharing my stuff all the time. That’s amazing. I make it a point that if I was scheduling an interview, let’s just say today that I was. I scheduled an interview with somebody for, let’s just say next Wednesday. I make it a point. I’m going to be mentioning them on social media sometime between now and the end of the weekend and again, you know, on Monday or Tuesday and again on the morning that we’re going to talk, I’ll schedule it.
So if we’re talking at three in the afternoon, I make sure that something goes out mentioning them like five, six in the morning. So it shows up. When they wake up in the morning. Boom. They’re going over their calendar. They already went at the night before, and they’re seeing me mentioning them. I’m making sure that I’m replying to something of theirs at least once, if not two or three times in the week leading up to that interview. And then afterwards, I’m going to continue to do that.
I’m going to continue to nurture the relationship. I’m going to continue to. This is a big one. To promote their episode frequently. This is something Joe Fear share with me the other day when I talked with him, we had an episode this past Tuesday. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to that, it’s really, really good. So I talked to him and he’s like, dude, you still promote the first interview that we did together. You still promote that. And he’s like, man, I’m getting notifications all the time about you.
So I’m always like, top of mind for him. Promote their products. You know, if you can become an affiliate, follow up with them periodically. Send them a happy birthday message, write them a note, share a success story. You know, if you bought something from them and it’s working for you, then talk about that. Share that, right? Build that relationship. And then and only then is it time to ask them to be an affiliate. Now we ask them to be an affiliate. Now we reach out to them and here’s what we say. Man, your episode has been so popular with my audience. Like, people are loving it. I’m assuming that you’re going to get some positive feedback on it. Maybe you share some of that positive feedback. That’s another thing.
Part of nurturing the relationship is periodically share some of that positive feedback. Like anytime somebody tweets you, Facebook messages you, emails you, text you, whatever, and says, man, I loved your episode with so, and so I did this with one guest in particular. I got a lot of positive comments. And in fact, I got so many.
I got like 12 to 15. It wasn’t 100, but I got like 12 to 15 positive comments in the first couple of days that I would saved them. And I didn’t just say, dude, we got like 10 positive comments. I would like say, hey, we got a couple of amazing comments. And then like five days later, hey, look up, there’s another couple more. And then a couple more. And then finally I asked him to be an affiliate. He’s turned out to be a very good affiliate for us over the years. Probably one of our top, probably seven affiliates for our stuff over the years. That all happened. When I sent that email. One of the things I pointed out was people loved your episode.
So I’m wondering, you know, hey, I think your audience, like, would like our stuff. Here’s how we can best serve your audience. So step six is ask them to be an affiliate. That’s going to get you one affiliate. So how do we turn this into something that dramatically increases our total number of affiliates when we do step seven, which is we ask them if they know anybody who would be great, a great guest. So now we’re partners. They’re promoting us, we’re promoting them. We’ve probably at this point been on each other’s shows.
Now I want to say, hey, do you know anybody else who’d be a great guest? And you repeat the process. So they introduce you to Sammy Smith. You don’t know Sammy, but immediately you go, start interacting with Sammy on social media. You schedule the interview for three weeks from now. That’s why I love scheduling interviews out, like in advance. If I schedule the interview for next week, I don’t have time to really nurture the relationship in advance of the interview. So if we schedule it for three, four weeks from now, I can interact with them on social media.
I can maybe buy something of theirs, read their book, whatever it is, really get to know, you know, what’s going on in their world and develop that relationship. So when they show up for the interview, we’ve already been interacting. There’s a pretty good chance that if I’m showing up a lot on their social media, you know, and I’m emailing them, they’re going to look me up and they’re going to be like, hey, I looked at your stuff, man. That’s kind of cool, you know, you got going on.
It’s pretty cool. And we talked about that. So we talk for 10:12 minutes before we even do the, the interview. Then we do the interview and we Talk for another 10:12 minutes. And guys, this happens over and over and over again. So I never, if at all possible, book an interview in like a very small period of time. I have time. We’re going to do a 40 minute interview.
I book it for at least an hour and a half and so that we have plenty of time. And. And I can’t tell you how many times I finished those interviews. And we’re still just yapping away 20 minutes after. And finally we’re like, oh, crap, we gotta go. It’s like, that sucks, but we’ve got stuff to do. So you just repeat this process over and over and over again. So that’s how that works.
Now, if you are just starting a podcast, maybe you’ve even, you’ve had one for a while, right? You’ve had a podcast for a while. You’re looking for something, some sort of a system to get started, some sort of a system to scale. I shared a pretty good chunk of it here. Like, this is a great way, what we talked about, great way, not only to get great guests and build that authority. That’s the thing about authority is if you get somebody who’s at a level that’s significantly higher than you or even just a couple notches higher than you, they sprinkle their little authority dust on you.
Not only might they share that podcast episode with their audience and you pick up 10 or 20 new listeners. That’s great. You pick up 10 or 20 new listeners. Awesome sauce, right? Those 10 or 20 might become fans and they introduce you to some other people. And if you do this enough, you can pick up thousands of extra listeners just from interviewing people.
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But also people begin to see, like, man, you got so and so on. You got so and so on. You got some, some good juju going, right? So, so the goal here isn’t to just get one great affiliate. It is to build an entire network of loyal, engaged affiliates who believe in what you do and want to share it with their audiences. But it starts with one affiliate. So I got five steps for you. These are your action items, right? You know, if you take nothing else away from this episode, these are the five steps to execute on right now. Number one, if you already have a podcast, I guess step one, if you don’t have a podcast, would be start a podcast, you know, but step one, make a list of 10 potential guests who align with your niche. First, they have to be a great guest. If they’re not a great guest.
Who cares if they become a great affiliate? You know, just turn them into an affiliate. Don’t try to get them to be a guest. But 10 potential guests, I don’t want you to make a list of a hundred because I want you to start reaching out. So 10 potential guests. Number two, start engaging with them on social media. This is also why you’re only going to have 10, because I want you to comment on their post, share their post, add value before reaching out. And it’s a lot easier to go a mile deep and an inch wide.
Yeah, an inch wide and a mile deep instead of a mile wide and an inch deep. So instead of trying to engage with hundreds of people, just really focus in on 10. Then I want you to invite your first guests learning what you used in this episode. Keep the focus on what’s in it for them and reach out. Number four, be intentional with your interviews, okay? Use those pre show moments, the post show moments, to build rapport, strengthen the relationship. That’s super important. And then fifth, follow up. You know, stay connected with them. Don’t just stop sharing their content. Don’t stop commenting on their stuff. When the time is right, you’re going to invite them to become an affiliate.
But follow up, that’s the most important thing. Follow up and stay connected. So finally, I’d love to hear what you took away from today’s episode. What’s one action step that you are committed to, to doing? Text me at 260-217-4619. I would love to support you on this and I’m here to help. So reach out anytime 260-217-4619. Lastly, make sure if you haven’t yet, that you hit the subscribe button and your favorite podcast player. You do not want to miss the next episode, so make sure you hit the subscribe button. I’ll see you then.
See you soon.