Affiliate Managers: 10 Things You MUST Do During Holiday Affiliate Promotions

It’s the most wonderful time of the year for many affiliate programs. Some companies have half their sales or more in less than a month. For affiliate managers, it’s critical that you get absolutely clear on what’s important and what’s not during this busy season. Today, I share 10 things all affiliate managers must do during their holiday affiliate promotions.

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Holiday Affiliate Promotions: 7 Things Every Affiliate Manager Needs to Know

How to Crush Your Black Friday and Cyber Monday Affiliate Promos

Affiliate Profile: How a First-time Affiliate Finished in 2nd Place with Tosha Schore

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What The Top Affiliates Are Doing in 2022 According to Award-Winning Affiliate Manager Jamie Birch

The Massive Shift in Affiliate Marketing…and The Opportunity it’s Creating for YOU!

Affiliate Managers: 10 Things You MUST Do During Holiday Affiliate Promotions

It’s the most wonderful time of the year for many affiliate programs.

Some companies have half their sales or more and less than a month.

For affiliate managers, it’s critical that you get absolutely clear on what’s important and what’s not during this busy season.

Today, I share ten things all affiliate managers must do during their holiday affiliate promotions.

So, yeah, it’s the most wonderful time of the year for so many affiliate programs.

Sales are up, traffic is up, conversions are up. We talked about this a few episodes ago.

It’s traffic and average order size conversions and average order size are up.

So traffic, conversions, order size, all those go up this time of year. So it means things are crazy in a good way.

And for affiliate managers and business owners who are running their own affiliate programs, this means they have to pick and choose what to focus on.

The reality is, you wake up during the holiday season, there’s an endless list of things that you could do this time of year.

There are hundreds of things you could do.

But what are the musts?

What are the 80 20? Right?

What are the 20% of things that you have to do?

These that are going to get you 80% of the results and if you don’t do them, could possibly completely destroy your whole holiday season in terms of sales for your affiliate program.

Now, just a reminder, if you haven’t yet checked out the Ultimate Guide to Holiday Affiliate Promotions, check that out at matt@McWilliams.Com/holidayguide.

Got tons of stuff on there I don’t even know, like 15 podcast episodes, five or ten blog posts and some videos.

It’s just a ton of stuff all about holiday affiliate promotions.

So for affiliate managers, you want to share that with your affiliates, I’ve got tons of resources on there.

And for you affiliates, go check that out because there’s tons of awesome stuff on there for you.

Okay, so what are the ten musts for affiliate managers this holiday season?

These apply. If you’re a full time affiliate manager, if you’re running a program as part of your job responsibility, or if you’re a business owner running your own affiliate program, the number one must is you got to start now.

We talked about this with regard to the affiliates before, and they’ve got to get what they need now.

The reality is, as an affiliate manager, you cannot wait until the week of Thanksgiving, monday of Thanksgiving, go, crap, we got to start our holiday stuff.

No, you got to start now. So here’s the thing.

Get to know your affiliates now.

I mean, the best time to do this was like, in August, but get to know them now.

Get to know where their revenue or their traffic sources are coming from.

What are their stats?

Study the stats. Study the heck out of the stats.

Identify affiliates who could dramatically increase.

We talked about this the last episode. Start digging into those stats.

Who’s down? Like, we talked about this in terms of, okay, last year they were at a certain level to this point, and this year they’re down.

But even look at maybe those affiliates.

Start looking at, like, what did they do last year through September?

And let’s say last year through September they did $10,000.

And then June through September they did $3,000 and then this year they may even be up.

They may even be at $13,000 this year.

But June through September, they only did $2,000.

So that means they’re actually going down right now.

So who are those affiliates?

Who are those affiliates?

What are these affiliates you need to dig into that could really increase?

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If you’re going to start reaching out to affiliates about improving, like, those are the affiliates that you want to focus on.

Give them some sort of sprint goal.

Hey, from November 15 through the end of the year, if you hit last year, you hit 5000.

And right now you’re projected to probably do 2000. You don’t tell them that.

If you hit that goal, remember we talked about you hit that goal, then you’re going to get this bonus.

You want to start getting to know them.

Start getting to know them.

Start planning your promotions now, planning your contest.

What do you need to request of your marketing department?

Think about that.

What do you need to ask your marketing department for?

What graphics do you need?

What do you need from them?

For Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

What do you need from them for the first and second week of December?

What do you need from them for Hanukkah or Free shipping Day or the last shipping day, like December 21, where it’s like the last guaranteed day to get items on Christmas Eve?

What do you need to request of them?

What do you need from your tech team?

Do you need codes installed, like Facebook tracking codes or anything like that?

What do you need from your copywriters?

I don’t know your company.

So think about all the different people you have that touch, the affiliate program copywriters, graphic designers, your tech people, your boss, if you have a boss, what do you need in terms of budget approval?

Start talking to them now if you’re not already.

If you say, hey, I want to spend $20,000 on contests, and they say, no, you’ve got ten. Great.

You know, now this episode is going to go live sometime.

Let me think here, probably the end of October.

So it would be nice to know now that you’re not going to get the budget you want or that maybe you will get the budget you want.

You can start planning those things.

What do you need to request of those people on your team and in your company?

If you’re the business owner, okay.

You need to start thinking about what you need from your team members or yourself.

Are you optimized?

Are things optimized or the checkout pages optimized?

Are they working?

If there are certain products where the sales are going to dramatically increase during the holidays, have you been split testing throughout the year to see what converts better?

And do you now flip the traffic to go 100% to the highest converting thing?

Do you know what promotions you’re going to do?

All of these things like, is everything functional?

Is everything optimized?

Does it have language on there that maybe it shouldn’t?

Pictures on there that maybe it shouldn’t?

And you need to replace them with more holiday centric things.

If you have new packaging, right, and the pictures are representing the old packaging, but your affiliates are doing unboxing videos with the new packaging, there’s a disconnect.

It’s kind of weird, right?

And so you just got to think about these things.

If you remember back to 2020, there was a lot of sensitivity

around putting large family gatherings on pages, because a lot of people weren’t doing that over the holidays in 2020.

They weren’t gathering with their extended family.

And if you put that, it was like there was a disconnect between people’s reality and what you were portraying.

So you had to think about those things.

So test things now.

Start testing things here in late October through November.

Make sure everything’s working.

It’s a big investment. It’s an important thing.

Like actually get that stuff nailed down right now.

All right, so start now.

Start now.Okay.

Number two big must is you got to give affiliates what they need.

You want to give it to them early, give it to them often, give it to them clearly.

What do they need?

We talked about this in the last episode.

You got to know what’s hot, right?

They need that winning plan.

They need great creatives.

They need incentives above and beyond commissions.

They need good contests, those individual goals.

They need you.

This is a big one.

They need you to stick to the plan as much as possible.

This is huge.

Like, they need you to come up with a plan, but then stick to it.

Don’t make a lot of changes.

No surprises if you can avoid them.

Now things has come up.

If something ends up breaking and golly, you did everything you could, it happens.

And just plan on that happening at least once.

But try to avoid surprises just because you didn’t do a good job of planning, right?

Test things in advance.

I shared this in the last episode, put a moratorium on tech updates a week before your busy time, a week before Black Friday.

No more tech updates unless you know you have to, right?

It’s okay if you need to call an audible once or maybe twice, but not a bunch as much stuff done.

Now, people talked about, and I talked about this in the last episode, that it’s hard.

It’s hard work.

You’re going to work hard.

You’re going to work long hours.

I can tell you right now, if you invest ten to 15 hours an hour a day, three days a week for the next five weeks, roughly, if you invest that time now, making sure everything is set up, it will probably save you 30 hours during the holiday season, maybe even 40 Dealing with crises, you invest that three, 4 hours a week now to avoid that time.

It makes the holidays less busy because everything is magnified.

Black Friday, and after the site’s down for an hour, it’s magnified because I run affiliate programs, we’re down for an hour.

That time of year was a million dollars, $1 million.

We’re doing $25 to $35 million a day.

So down for 1 hour was a million dollars or more.

Down for an hour for that same company in the middle of July was $70,000.00

So it’s a big difference.

Down in July.

And we kind of went, well, we’ll get around to it.

Like, it’ll get fixed.

No big deal.

No affiliates, nobody is dying.

Nobody’s not going to be able to feed their family.

There were individual affiliates.

That 1 hour could cost them 5000, $7,500.

It’s a big deal.

So make sure things are working.

Now, number three most is you must over communicate the important dates.

Notice I talked about this last time, over communicate.

But I really want to hone in on the important dates, right?

Your job is to over communicate those important dates.

They need to know all the dates.

They need to know every single relevant date, relevant time.

They need to know every single relevant promotion.

Even those dates that we didn’t cover, we talked about like, the shipping date and things like that.

They need to know it only affects, what, 2% of the population?

But what’s the last day to order?

That guaranteed shipping for the first day of Hanukkah?

That’s important to 2% of the population.

Let your affiliates know.

Maybe there’s a specific promotion that you’re running from, say, December 3 to December 8.

It’s not wrapped around a holiday or anything.

It’s just yeah, it’s wrapped around Christmas in general and Hanukkah in general, the holidays in general.

But there’s nothing significant about December 3 to December 8.

But in your company, you’re running a promotion.

They need to know this.

They need to know, is there a flash sale going on, a two day sale, a weekend sale, some sort of special offer, bundle discount?

They need to know about that, right?

As an affiliate manager, it is your job, by the way, if you’re an affiliate, it’s your job to ask.

It’s weird how it’s like you say, I’m putting the burden on both.

So the thing is, if both sides do their job, then there’s no mess ups.

If your affiliate manager gets it right 95% of the time, but you ask 100% of the time, then you get that other 5%.

Reverse is true if the affiliates are asking, but you’re also communicating, you’re less likely to have a screw up, right?

The other thing is, you got to be clear on date ranges.

When is your Black Friday sale?

Is it Friday only?

Is it Friday through the weekend?

Is it combined with Cyber Monday?

Is it Friday and Saturday, and then the Cyber Monday when there’s

Monday, Tuesday, does it expire at 06:00 p.m.. Midnight Pacific?

Where does it apply the last shipping day, for instance?

Typically it’s only for the lower 48.

Alaska and Hawaii and Canada are usually, like, two or three days sooner.

So they need to know all this well in advance.

They need to know these things now.

As a matter of fact, they need to know as much as possible of this now.

Get this done in the next week.

If you’re listening to this, whenever you’re listening to this, get it done in the next week. All right?

Your number four must do as an affiliate manager is you must act fast.

One of the things you have to do this time of year is be available. You have to be available.

Things move so fast this time of year, and I’m going to share it.

Number five, I’m going to talk about how to balance this with number five, which we’ll talk about in just a moment because it will seem contradictory but things move fast.

So you have to answer texts and emails and messages fast.

You have to approve affiliates fast.

You have to onboard them fast.

So the reality is, as I talked about in the last episode, you’re going to be working longer hours.

You’re going to be available early.

You’re going to be available late.

You’re going to be available on weekends.

You’re going to be on all channels, and you’re going to communicate how they want you to.

So I’ve got apps on my phone.

Let me pull it up here.

I’ve got Voxer.

I’ve got WhatsApp

I’ve got telegram.

And then typically during launches, I’ll put messenger on.

I don’t keep messenger on most of the year because I don’t need to respond to messenger messages super fast.

When we’re not running a big launch, I have those on my phone specifically for a handful of affiliates.

I think those four combined, I communicate with 15 people.

Typically, it’s email and text.

I’ve got thousands of people that I communicate with via email and text.

And, like, maybe not 15, but 30 to 40 that I communicate with across those.

There’s only a couple of people I communicate with on Boxer, a few on WhatsApp.

So why do I have those apps?

Because that’s how they prefer to be communicated with.

So I communicate with them where they want to be communicated with, what’s going to work best for them, not what works best for me.

So you’ve got to act fast.

And the only way to act fast as we’ll talk about in the next one, like you got to get sleep good 8 hours.

But I don’t normally check email first thing in the morning.

When I was running Shutterfly’s affiliate program or learning master guitar, other things where we had big holiday promotions, I did check email first thing in the morning for about 30 days.

I would check email very first thing.

I would check my messages, and I’d spend 30 to 40 minutes responding to all the messages because we had affiliates all over the world or just some late some night out and I would reply to all those messages because if I did all the other things I needed to do that day, it would be 150 before I got back to them.

In the middle of July again, when we’re talking about hours only costing ten, $50,000, I could reply in 6 hours.

Who cares?

Nothing was urgent.

This time of year, everything becomes urgent.

So act fast.

Your number five must it seems contradictory to what I just said is you got to manage your energy.

You’ve got to prioritize sleep, exercise, getting outside, meditating.

Of course, the question is, how do you balance this with what I just said?

Be available, right? Act fast.

Well, for me, the solution is that I work in blocks.

So this is the same when we’re running a big product launch, right?

Typically most days my work window is 9 hours long.

My typical day is I work for a couple of hours, then I work out.

I assume it’s 9 hours long, it’s 10 hours long.

I work out for an hour, then I work for a couple more hours, and I eat lunch, get ready for the rest of my day, and I work in about a three and a half, four hour block at the end and I’m done.

During a big launch or a holiday promo, my work window is more like 15 to 16 hours.

But the reality is I usually don’t work more than eight or 9 hours a day.

And so for me, what I’ll do is I wake up first thing in the morning, I check emails, messages, I react, right?

I’m working on reactive-type things, okay?

I spend like an hour doing that, an hour scheduling anything for the day, like emails and posts and things like that.

Then I break an hour or so for a workout.

Then I’ll check email again real quick.

I eat breakfast, hang out with the family, maybe go for a walk with the kids and the dog, get ready, all that stuff, kind of in that two hour or so window there.

Then at twelve, I check messages, I post any updates.

I do all that two to three.

I’ll do, like, a break, maybe a meditation, a nap, some time with family that’ll work for a couple more hours.

And I’ll again respond to messages.

I’ll do calls, schedule stuff for tomorrow.

They’ll take a break from like 530 to 730, do dinner and whatever maybe.

It depends if the kids have soccer and things like that, and we work our schedule around that.

Then you got the West Coast people are finishing their day, so I check again.

You?

About 7: 30 to 9 I’ll respond to any messages at the beginning.

Typically I respond to messages the beginning, do work in the middle, then respond at the end.

So nobody’s really ever waiting more than 2 hours for response.

And then at the end of that work session or in the middle of that last one, I’ll schedule anything for the following morning, any emails or post, I want to go out first thing in the morning, and so on and so forth, right?

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The total is like eight or 9 hours, but no one goes more than a couple of hours without a response during the window from like seven to 910 o’clock at night, right?

On weekends, I make sure that I just check in three, four times real quick.

Usually it takes 20 minutes.

So I’ll check in mid morning on a weekend right after lunch, late afternoon, and again at night.

I also leverage my team.

I’ve got a team overseas, I’ve got a team on the West Coast.

I’m in the Eastern time zone.

So I leverage them to check email and respond to messages on my behalf.

As we have begun our agency, right now, everybody in our agency is so far our affiliate managers are all within one time zone of me.

But now we’re looking at hiring somebody in Asia, we’re looking at hiring someone in the US.

So if we need it, we’ve got virtual all day coverage. And again, like I said, we’ve got VAs.

We’ve got VA is in Asia, we’ve got people in the Pacific time zone. I don’t think we have anybody right now.

We don’t have anybody in Europe that I can think of and we do.

And I just forget we have people all over, right?

So we can have coverage even in the middle of the night to respond to simple emails.

And using that means I wake up and maybe I have like two emails that I need to respond to that are a little bit more complicated and there’s more complicated emails.

If somebody sends a complicated email at 1230 in the morning and my VA responds and says, hey, this is Kevin on Matt’s team.

Just want to let you know Matt’s going to look at this.

He’s sleeping right now, but he’s going to look at this first thing in the morning.

You’re cool. You know you’re going to get a response in eight or 9 hours and that’s fine.

All right.

Number six, you must focus on the needle.

Movers the needle. Movers, right?

This means affiliates, products and promotions, like, what are the ones who are going to really move the needle?

Who are the affiliates that are really going to move the needle?

What products are really going to move the needle?

What promotions are going to really move the needle?

Focus on those.

This is the 8020 rule, right?

You’ve got limited time, as we’ve discussed, so you have to do this if an affiliate counts for 5% of your sales and you help him or her grow by 50%, that’s a 2.5% lift in sales. 2.50% lift in sales during the holidays, if that matters to your company, is massive.

That is massive.

If you’ve got a product that only accounts for half percent of all sales and another that accounts for 10%, focus on that second one.

Unless that half percent is all during the holidays and that one with 10% is spread out through the year, then it might make sense.

So again, you need to know your numbers, right?

You could grow that 10% one by 20%, and it would have more of an impact than tripling the first product, right?

If you grow the triple it now, it’s 1.5. You grow the other one by 20%, it’s 2%.

So if certain promos move the needle more, focus on those.

So, again, who are your affiliates that are going to move the needle?

Who are the ones that typically dramatically increase around the holidays?

Focus on them Or they’re just big throughout the year?

Focus more on them.

If you’ve got a promotion that you’ve done in the past, you go back and study the numbers from last year and you go, wow, we ran that promotion.

It lifted sales 17%.

We did this promotion.

It really didn’t move the needle.

Then focus on the one that moved at 17%.

Study.

We talked about this in the last episode or two episodes ago.

Maybe it was three.

Study the past and use that information to dictate what you’re going to do now.

We learn from the past and then we innovate.

Of course. I’m not saying just only do things that, you know, work, try something new.

But if you’ve done this for three years, you should be copying at least 50 or 60% of your stuff and then innovating the other 30% to 50%, right?

Speaking of studying number seven, you must study the competition.

What is the competition doing?

What are they doing promotion wise?

Go sign up for their affiliate program.

What are they doing?

What are they doing with their promotions?

How are they communicating?

Maybe you can just beat them by being faster.

I can tell you right now, listen to this year.

What are we, three, four weeks from Black Friday?

If I’m picking a promotion between two programs, I’m picking the one that’s already ready.

So if you offer a 40% commission and they offer a 30% commission, but they’re ready, I’ll take 10% less.

I’ll take 10% less just to be able to get it up and running.

So look at those things.

Look at what your competition is doing.

What are they doing promotion wise?

What are they doing in terms of competitions and incentives?

Are they running specific contests or incentive programs?

What kind of creatives are they providing?

I’ve talked about that like, you need to provide holiday themed creatives, but look at what they’re doing.

They’ve got ten different Facebook size graphics and they’re all really good.

They’re holiday theme.

Maybe we need to have at least five.

Maybe we could get ten done, but we can’t have two because they’ve got ten.

That’s a problem.

So be looking at the competition.

What are they doing in terms of communication?

How often are they reaching out to affiliates?

I remember years ago, it was like 15 years ago, we had a competitor that always sent their weekly affiliate communication out on a Tuesday afternoon.

When I started sending ours out, I sent them on a Wednesday morning so that I could be able to react to theirs and see what they were doing.

And then when I started doing years later, as I got good, I started moving ours up to Monday so that I was first.

I knew at that point we were more creative, we were more adept than them.

So let’s just beat them to market.

And the guy that ran that affiliate program for that company the ten years later, we actually ended up working together.

He worked for a company that I consulted and he told me just how frustrating that was for them.

It made it a little bit of fun for me.

And I was like, dude, it took you six months to figure that out when it was coming out on Wednesday and then we switched to Monday.

We were always one upping you on Wednesday and then we were beating you on Mondays.

And he was like, you always seem to know what we’re doing.

I’m like, yeah, because first of all, I knew what you were doing because you did the same stuff for a year, I would always react to it and then you were just predictable and I knew how to beat it.

I was always better than you because I knew how to beat you in advance.

So those are the type of things, if you notice a pattern, you can be the first to market.

You can beat them or you can react to them.

So those are types of things you want to do when you study the competition.

This is a great time of year to do that because their communication is going to increase and because speed matters.

You got to be ready to study them, look at what they’re doing and either react to it or start to beat them.

If you can figure out their patterns, the number eight must I hate to talk about this, but you got to watch for fraud.

I did an entire episode about affiliate fraud, I don’t know, like 20 episodes ago or so.

This time of year, this is when the fraudsters come out to play more.

They know that there’s a surge of legitimate orders.

So on a day when, let’s say you have 100 orders, I’m going to just pick round numbers here.

You got 100 orders.

It’s really easy to catch fraudsters, but when there’s 2000 orders, it’s harder or try bigger programs.

We would go from 3000 orders in a day to north of 150.

Sometimes the last shipping day there will be 30 to 400 orders.

So it’s easier for them to discuss is their illicit activity.

So be on the lookout, though.

Pay per click.

Trademark bidding.

I need hijacking of terms.

You don’t want them to multiple orders coming from the same IP address.

Huge spikes in traffic or sales that aren’t normal.

Like if every year this affiliate spikes around mid November through late December, and you go to their website and it’s a holiday themed website.

Well, duh. That’s why.

But if there’s no explanation for it, you need to dig in and again, we did a whole episode about this.

You can go look for that wherever you’re listening to this and go look up how to find and address fraud.

But there’s a huge spike in fraud this time of year because it’s easier to get away with it.

I don’t blame them personally. I mean, I blame them for being scumbags.

But if you’re going to do fraud, now is the time of year to do it.

So be on the watch.

You gotta watch for that because it could cost you a lot of money depending upon what position you’re in.

The number nine must you got to think outside the box.

What are some of the ways you can think outside the box this time of year to really move the needle?

Things like vanity codes for affiliates or the specific promos, like we talked about, for individual affiliates.

Unique contest and promotions, sending physical mail. Right?

There’s one like, spend $1,000 to send a holiday guide, a printed holiday guide.

You can print up a four to six page guide.

Nice one. Like, for $2, maybe buck 50 at Office Depot, Staples, let’s say they cost a buck 50 each.

Now, it’s cost you about a buck for postage.

So you’ll spend 1250 for a holiday guide.

I’m probably not that far off, right? Or save the date cards.

It costs you a buck for printing and postage.

Send a weekly postcard with reminders.

You send 500 of those if you have 500 big affiliates, most if you don’t.

Most affiliate programs have 50 big affiliates at the most.

But let’s just say you have 500, so you only got 50.

It’s going to cost you, like, $125.

You have 500 big affiliates, you spend $1250 emails free? Yes and they get a million of them.

How many postcards do they get?

How many holiday guides are they getting in the mail for $250?

It’s definitely worth it.

That’s the way you stand out.

You can spend $5,000 over the holiday season.

Increase your sale by millions.

You can increase your sales by millions to spend $5,000 in your tell me be cheap and just send email. Okay?

What if you only got ten?

You have ten big affiliates that are let’s say they’re worth even just looks so low.

Ten people worth $5,000 each, and you get them to increase by 50%.

So you make an extra 2553 weeks.

I think I’m doing the math.

I might be off there.

That’s $25,000.

You’ve spent $300 on printing and postage.

How is that not good math?

Email is free.

Yeah. Like I said, you get 150 emails a day.

Other things, like drawings, just do a drawing.

Every thousand sale gets a prize.

So the more sales you make, the better chance you have but everyone has a chance.

Daily drawings for everyone who made a sale.

Mix it up, right?

Every sale earns an entry.

Anyone with five sales or more is entered.

You could do anybody who sells this specific product is entered. Things like that.

Really just add energy to the program, right?

Thinking outside the box.

Doing weekly training sessions, weekly strategy sessions.

Just, hey, we’re going to open up every Wednesday at two or Tuesdays at two.

Those are the times we always pick.

So it’s the same time every week and it rhymes, sort of illiterate, at least.

Tuesdays at two, we’re going to get together for a strategy session and just talk about something.

I’m going to share, teach you something for 20 minutes or so.

Then we’re going to do Q and A mastermind together on promotional strategy.

So what are some of the things you can’t or wouldn’t do all year that you can and will do during the holidays?

Doing those strategy sessions in your slowest month that might not make any sense, doing it this time of year.

People come, they get a question answer, they mastermind real quick.

Everybody kind of crowd sources their answers, and boom, there’s this huge increase in sales.

That’s important.

So think outside the box.

And number ten, your number ten must is you got to plan for Q One. All right?

I know it’s big right now.

This time of year, the holidays again, if 50% of your sales are coming in the holidays, if that’s you, here’s the thing.

It still means 15% could be coming in Q 120 percent could be coming in Q1.

So you can’t take your eye completely off the future.

You can’t forget about Q1.

So here’s the deal.

In my new book, Turn Your Passions Into Profits, I show you exactly what types of lead magnets actually convert and lead to explosive list growth. Grab your copy here!

Now’s the time before you get busy with the holidays.

Now is the time to go ahead and start planning Q1.

Take a half a day to plan Q One if you need to now, because you’re not going to be able to take it that week after Christmas.

You’re going to be exhausted.

So take it now and plan Q1.

All right?

So just to recap real quick, number one, you got to start now.

Number two, you got to give affiliates what they need early, often and clearly.

Number three, you got to overcommunicate those important dates.

Number four, you got to act fast, right?

You got to be available, and you got to balance that with number five, which is managing your energy.

And I shared a strategy for doing that, at least how I do it. That works for me.

Number six, you got to focus on those needle movers in terms of affiliates, products and promotions.

Number seven, study the competition and either react to them or beat them.

Number eight, you got to be really careful about fraud this time of year.

Number nine, think outside the box for some creative ways to communicate and engage affiliates.

And number ten, plan for Q1, those are your ten must as an affiliate manager.

Now, I want to leave you with a couple of action items here.

These are clear next steps that you can take.

Number one, check out that ultimate guide to holiday affiliate promotions.

We’ll put the link in the show notes MattMcWilliams.Com/holidayguide

Number two, make a plan for how you will manage your time and your energy.

Whether it’s the time blocking strategy I shared, prioritizing things like medication well, do prioritize your medication, meditation, getting outside, exercise, sleep if you live like me in northern Indiana.

Now, typically right after the holidays we go down south, but sometimes during that busy holiday season, I have to force myself to get outside for 15 or 20 minutes, just get a little bit of sunlight, get some fresh air.

So make a plan for that.

Number three, make a list of the needle movers in terms of affiliates, promotions and products that are going to have the most impact this season.

So if you’ve got questions about this or anything else, feel free to text me anytime 260-217-4619 and make sure you hit subscribe if you haven’t already, because the next episode I am sharing my best affiliate marketing advice for the holidays.

I’m going to share some of my best tips over the years for holiday affiliate promotions and you don’t want to miss it, so make sure you hit subscribe.

I’ll see you in the next episode.

Thank you so much for listening today.