Want to see behind-the-scenes on one of our big affiliate promotions? That’s what this episode is all about! I’m opening the vault to share everything we did to promote Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula a few years ago. My team and I share how we used live videos, created killer bonuses, segmented our list, and so much more!
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
How to Promote Virtual Summits as an Affiliate (If You Aren’t a Speaker)
Fix Your Funnel: How to Increase Sales and Make Your Affiliates More Money with John Ainsworth
Affiliate Marketing Lesson: Shifting From Promoting Free Content To A Paid Product
Book Launch Party: An Interview with Matt About Turn Your Passions Into Profits
Special Episode: Highlights from My Whirlwind Book Tour
The Untold Stories from Turn Your Passions Into Profits (Behind The Scenes Peek at My Book)
Behind-the-Scenes on Our Affiliate Promotion for Product Launch Formula
Want to see behind-the-scenes on one of our biggest affiliate promotions?
Well, that’s what this episode is all about.
I’m opening the vault to share everything we did to promote Jeff Walker’s product launch formula a few years ago.
My team and I share how we use live videos, created killer bonuses segmented, our list, and so much more.
So in late 2019, we did a major affiliate promotion for Jeff Walker’s product launch formula.
Now, at that time, we had a tiny list, and yet we managed to do over $20,000 in sales and finished just outside the top ten on one of the best leader boards in literally in affiliate history.
We did a recap of that with my team at the time and we’ve had this kind of in our vault for the last few years, two and a half or three and a half years with our insider members, but we wanted to open it up to share it with as many people as possible.
I mentioned I’ve done that for a couple of episodes now because in part well, as you’re listening to this, I’ve actually been back from the beach for a week now but right before when I’m recording this now, I’m leaving tomorrow.
So I wanted to get ahead on some content and one of the easiest ways to do that is a lesson there is to look at some of the stuff you’ve already created that could be of huge value to your podcast listeners and give it to them and this is one of those ways.
So we did this promotion a few years ago, and like I said, almost hit the top ten.
One of the most competitive leaderboards out there and who knew that this would be one of the reasons why Jeff would hire us to coach his affiliate management team and we’d help them have an even bigger launch?
Just a couple of years later, Jeff became a coaching client for us, our Your Affiliate Launch coach program, and I’ll put a link to that in the show notes.
I know we talked about this in the last episode as well, but he actually became a client of your affiliate launch coach, and we were able to help them have their biggest second biggest launch ever.
This is the guy that invented launches, and we helped him have his second-biggest launch ever.
So that was pretty cool, helping him to be able to do that and this was one of the catalysts, us doing really well in this affiliate promotion.
Now, in this episode, I’m joined by Mark and Robby from our team, and we’re sharing our lessons from this PLF promo, like how we use Facebook Live and kind of some of the surprising benefits of doing that that we didn’t expect, how we created a killer bonus package list segmenting and the things that we did. There is so much more.
Some of the mistakes we made and what we learned from them. So this is a long episode, so let’s jump right in.
Let’s jump into some lessons.
Matt: Robby, I’m going to let you take this one because this was 99% on your plate.
Robby: Yeah.
Matt: Right before we did the PLF promo and some of you guys will go through this. By the way, this was for Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula. That was the promotion.
Right before we switched email systems from MailChimp to ConvertKit and we’ll talk more about that, probably, I’ll let you take that one since you had primary responsibility for that.
Robby: Yeah. So this was a huge shift for us.
The way that ConvertKit works compared to MailChimp, the entire way that we send out emails is completely different.
MailChimp is list-based, whereas ConvertKit is based on tags and events, and custom content.
So that was one of the things that I think it was about a week before this promotion really hit full swing was when we or when I finally got the transition done.
Matt: Less than a week before.
Robby: Which was this was my deadline, was like, okay, we got to get PLF. We got to pick one or the other.
Matt: Real quick on that. Our recommendation is that you don’t switch email providers right before doing heavy promotions.
Robby: Yeah, don’t do that. Let’s get into that.
We added a lot of extra work on our back end because one of the reasons we wanted to use ConvertKit was that we were able to run or send a lot more targeted emails.
We were trying not to overwhelm people’s inboxes it’s one of the things we want to be aware of because we’re sending as many emails as we are and as many as we recommend, we want to make sure that people are getting the emails that actually matter to them so that they’re not seeing the same piece of content multiple times.
We want to make sure our deliverability rate is good. We want to minimize our unsubscribes from people just getting overwhelmed if they get twelve emails in a day versus four on a closed card day.
So it was a major shift because the way things were set up in MailChimp didn’t transfer well to Convert kit, especially the biggest one being like subscribe dates.
I did not have a way to bring that over so all of that data that we were working with there, we had to do by hand, I guess by hand, by mouse, or by spreadsheet.
But yeah, that made it really difficult. So I probably spent more time than we will in future promotions, just making sure content was tailored to the right group.
And that kind of led to one of the other issues we had that people kind of snuck through our filters because I did not have the filters all set up properly.
Matt: Well, let’s come back to that, actually.
Robby: Okay, yeah, we’ll come back.
Matt: I just posted a question for you guys.
I mentioned that you should not switch email providers right before doing a big promotion, whether it’s your own promotion or promoting affiliate offers.
So let us know in the chat if you guys want to know why that is.
Because I want to make sure we’re tailoring this content, you guys, and I don’t want to share that if you guys already know that.
We’ll talk about that and then I want to go back, I want to go back to the things we did to Mitigate that.
Let us know in the chat, guys if that’s something you want to know.
So far, nobody has said they want to know that, so maybe you all get the reason for that.
Robby: They’re all smarter than us on that one, I guess.
Matt: Yeah, okay. Stacey wants to Stacey funny because we’re getting ready to
talk about you, Stacey.
Mark: Well, and before we I mean, they’re all smarter, but, I mean, there were specific reasons we did, and we’re going to, I’m sure, get into some of the things we did to Mitigate that.
Matt: Yeah.
Mark: We didn’t just switch and then say, well, we hope this is going to work.
Robby: No, we’ve been planning this for months.
Matt: Yeah. So the reason why you don’t normally want to do that and then we’ll talk about why we had to the reason why you don’t normally want to do that is when you switch to a new email provider, whether it be from MailChimp to Infusionsoft or Infusionsoft to convert kit or whatever AWeber to something.
Or something to AWeber. You’re on a new IP, you’re on a new system.
The way that the emails are sent is different and when you come out of the gates with a new system, sending 20,000 emails right away, almost, they’re about a promotion.
Your spam complaints, your unsubscribe rates, your unopened rates, your unread, and your unliced rates are higher during a promotion.
Robby: Your deliverability rates are affected, too.
Matt: That’s what happens is then your deliverability goes even long term with your new email provider.
Robby: Yeah. Even before unsubscribes and spam complaints and things like that, because you’re delivering email from a new IP, it completely changes all your deliverability rates.
And we actually saw that, and that’s one of the things that we had to do luckily, ConvertKit was great about this.
They emailed us multiple times and said, is everything good with your account?
We emailed them, and I think you guys even got on calls with them and said, “Hey, guess what?
We are about to do a major promotion.
We just switched to you guys, can we get some hands-on help making sure that our deliverability in the future isn’t messed up?”
Because that’s a heck of a way to start your transition onto a new piece of software.
Matt: Guys, if we didn’t do it the week before the PLF promo, it was going to be when next?
Robby: It should have been like February or March.
Matt: That was actually the one week we had where we could do it.
And quite frankly, this comes for me as much as you guys. I just wanted to get off MailChimp.
I’ve been talking about it for so long and you could do the work.
Robby had the time and he was ready to do it and so that’s why we decided to, even though the reality is I would implore you guys not to ever do what we did, like do as we say, not as we do.
It was not our best idea. It really came down to impatience to get off MailChimp and get over to ConvertKit for various reasons.
And this is not a knock against MailChimp, but if it had been halfway to where ConvertKit was, we probably would have just gone ahead and waited until February but it just wasn’t what we needed.
Mark: Well, I think it’s important, too.
I mean, there’s no good time, I don’t think, to do something like that, because credit to them, systems like MailChimp make it really, really hard to switch, and they don’t do it by being jerks or rude or anything.
It’s just we have built out tons of systems, and automation and stuff tend to switch all of that over.
So yes, it wasn’t the best timing, but at the same time, I don’t know that there ever was a good time.
We would have got to February and said, oh shoot, we’ve got this in two weeks.
So I think sometimes it’s important to realize in your business that sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and do things.
But when you do that, you do everything you can to mitigate those risks.
Like contacting customer support, contacting their affiliate manager, because we promote form, so we know the affiliate manager doing everything we can.
Matt your friends with the CEO, messaging him, texting him, sending him, and it behooves them to help us with that, especially with us, where it’s like, hey, we’re going to send a lot of traffic to you and we can do that more effectively on your system to help us out.
So I think it’s important to realize that you can do those things and it doesn’t hurt to reach out to the companies and say”
“I need some help.”
“I need you to be looking out for us.”
“I need you to be watching this, monitoring this.”
And a lot of times they will because they want you to be successful, they want you to switch.
Matt: But they got three or three practical tips.
Guys, if you’re ever switching email systems, do this whether you’re doing a promotion right away or not.
Okay, so here are the three things, the three things that we did.
Number one, like Marc and Robby both, we reached out to them directly before there was an issue, okay?
We said, hey, we just moved all these people over.
We will be sending a lot of emails because when we’re doing a big affiliate promotion, we send more than when we’re normally sending.
I think we sent like 15 emails in 15 days.
Robby: I was going to say we’re up to we’ve sent almost a million emails in the last month.
Matt: There you go.
Robby: Total number of people.
Matt: When you factor in unopened and non-clicks and segments, we probably have sent 500 emails in 30 days, though, like an actual number of emails, because of all the different segments that are getting but we reached out to them and gave them a heads up.
They all have algorithms, just like Facebook, just like Twitter, and all those things have algorithms.
They have an algorithm that says this new subscriber or this new customer might be spamming and so they will ban you.
But we reached out to them, so we had a human element override the algorithm.
Looking for some good affiliate programs to promote? Check out our recommended affiliate programs here!
Secondly, early on, we split test all of our emails, which I recommend doing anyway because you want to know what subject line converts better, and what text of the email gets a better click-through rate.
That’s actually not why we did it. We did it specifically because it meant that we could split up the traffic.
Instead of a lot of emails going out at once, it kind of divided it up and we got the benefit of sending a better subject line later in the day.
And then third, everyone was talking about this earlier guys, it was funny.
In the very first email that we sent about pls, the very first one. This is not the best practice.
I don’t normally suggest doing this, but we did it because we had just switched email systems.
The very first email, like the third sentence, said, by the way, if you don’t want to hear any more about Jeff Walker’s product launch master plus link, and like, within 10 seconds of reading this email, you could say, I don’t want to hear any more about this, click a link and opt out now.
We’re not sending you any more emails. We’ve kind of separated the weeds from the chaff.
Three, Four, and Five percent of the people who were likely to maybe unsubscribe or be marked as spam because they got tired of getting emails went ahead and just removed themselves, which we were able to do easily and converted it, as opposed to MailChimp.
MailChimp, do you want to give people an opt-out? Let’s talk about that for a second.
We always give people opt-out of an affiliate campaign.
We give people the chance to opt out of most of our internal promotions because it’s like, some of our promotions, some of our products are not for everybody.
And, for example, we didn’t have an opt-out. Why? Because it’s for everybody in my audience. But sometimes PLF is not for you.
And yet at the bottom of the email, hey, if you don’t want to hear any more about the product launch formula, click here we’ll remove you from MailChimp.
That was a manual process. That was an absolute nightmare.
I don’t even know it because I never did it.
That was all Mark and Robby and virtual assistants.
Mark: No, Robby never did it because Robby but wasn’t that an agreement when he started, like, I will never do this?
Matt: Okay, but with Convertkit, you set up the tag. You tell it to always remove this tag, and then it just does it.
Mark: You set up the page that they go to that says, hey, great, we’ve removed you. You won’t get any more emails. But that’s it.
Robby: Yeah. One-click optin.
Mark: Matt, I don’t know if you saw Stacey’s question here. She said, so ConvertKit is better.
Matt: Yes. Short answer, yes. Okay, let’s talk about that super quick.
The advantage to MailChimp, is it’s free to how many subscribers, guys? Is it 1000?
Robby: I think 2000 now.
Matt: Is it two? It went from two to one. I didn’t know if it ever went back up.
Okay, it’s free for 2000 subscribers. That’s a hard price to beat. You get a lot of stuff that you need, and you don’t get some stuff.
For us, it’s ConvertKit. I will continue to recommend MailChimp unless they get any worse, and it’s not a knock on them.
But I will continue to recommend MailChimp, for starters, newbie online beginners on an extremely shoestring budget.
You have $40 a month to spend on your platform when you’re starting out, and you’re spending $20 on hosting.
I got less than 20 and if you need anything, well, that’s going to get eaten up. Convertkit does cost money, even at the very lowest level, I believe.
Robby: 29 a month, I think the lowest level.
Matt: right there. You got $40 a month. You’re spending 20 on hosting. You don’t have a choice but to go with MailChimp and it’s not like they’re bad. They weren’t for us and they haven’t been for us for two years.
Marl: And I think, Matt, it’s important with this group to let them know that ConvertKit is much more affiliate friendly.
Now, we never had an issue with MailChimp, but we know people who did.
Matt: One of them is a case study in our right in the middle of a launch.
Mark: Right in the middle of a promo.
Matt: One of our biggest partners, affiliate partners.
Matt: But, I mean, we never had any issues, but I know for a fact, we know for a fact that ConvertKit does not have an issue with it, period. Good.
So for what we’re doing, and guys for you here that are interested in affiliate marketing, that is an important distinction. That is something to be clear about.
Robby: Yeah. We can do a training or even a backstage pass someday on what ConvertKit looks like so that we can go into all that detail, and give people everything they want there.
Matt: Yeah. Let’s move on to our next lesson.
This is one you started to talk about, and I said, Stacey, we’re going to talk about you because we’re going to talk about you, so let’s talk about that.
Robby: I transferred everybody over, and I thought I had all my tagging and custom fields and everything set up right.
Because internally, we don’t want to send emails, especially promotional emails, to people who we haven’t had a chance to build a relationship with yet.
And because of that, we set filters up in a very specific way. Well, somewhere along the line, somebody got this email.
Stacey got an email that we didn’t intend for you. I have no idea.
Matt: I think it was from Facebook. That’s what I was going to say. We’re promoting the Product Launch Formula.
Stacey, who is ON. Hey, Stacey. She purchased. It was like, I’m so excited to join PLF and my first reaction was not, yeah, we made an affiliate commission.
My first reaction was how bad she get in.
Robby, what’d you screw up?
Because here’s the thing. Stacey had just purchased one of our products. She was new to our audience.
We don’t want to promote anything to them, typically for 45 to 60 days after that, especially somebody else’s product.
That’s just because we want to nurture that relationship. Like Robby said.
What had happened, as far as I could tell, just based on the click streams, guys, is, yeah, I’m glad we didn’t screw up.
Actually, Stacey, if you guys are watching the comments, Stacey’s like, oh, I’m glad you screwed up.
So for those of you watching the replay, sometimes I’ll respond to stuff that you have no idea what I’m responding to, and then you need to clarify that.
But what happened was we were also pretty heavily promoting this on social media, and we’ll talk about that in a little bit.
And she caught one of those, and that got her into Jeff’s ecosystem, and then she purchased from there.
So that does happen. It’s one of those things where in that particular case, it’s not that I didn’t want to sell a few extra product launch formulas.
It’s that I don’t want the appearance to be that ten days after she purchased our product, I’m turning around going, hey, you got to go buy this other thing.
Because when you see something on Facebook, you inherently know that this is everyone.
Anybody could see this, but she wasn’t getting emails about it at the beginning, in part because she was filtered out.
Mark: Here’s the lesson from that, though, Matt, and I think this is important for everyone because I know that everybody struggles with they don’t want to sound salesy, they don’t want to be pushy, they don’t want to bug people.
But when it’s the right offer for the right person, nobody’s mad. As Stacey said, I’m glad you screwed up.
I’m glad it worked out that way because it’s something that she wanted and she needed.
So when you’re promoting those affiliate offers, you have to have that mindset.
You have to realize that the people that it’s for, they’re not going to be mad at you.
And even the people that don’t buy most times, nine times out of ten, aren’t going to be mad that you promoted you.
But it’s still good to have these types of systems in place where you do get the nurture that relationship going forward.
But it is a good reminder for all of us that regardless of anything else, people are normally happy that you’re recommending something that’s good for them, and that’s going to help their business.
Matt: Great point there, guys. I mean, that was kind of a fluke thing it’s ever happened, but that ties directly into what we did well.
And one thing is we’re going to kind of alternate. We’ve got four what we call did wells or do it again, and then we’ve got four improves or don’t do it again.
So speaking of Facebook lives, Jeff had a live launch.
You guys will see more of these from different people where they’re doing a live launch.
So what he did by live launch was instead of having a 30-minute pre-launch content seating video, and then having two more of those and then a sales video, he did them live.
So he’s reacting to comments. It’s done completely live with squirrel cam and everything, right?
And one of the things that we found was it was best to, during a live launch was not just send out an email saying, here’s what we learned from this one, or whatever, was actually to do a live recap.
What we found this last year, the 2018 PLF launch was also a live launch.
We found there were some ancillary benefits to doing these live recaps, and I’m going to share those with you.
Did they, in fact, help us make more sales? I only can document that they helped us make three more sales.
So we made $2,400 in commissions, more than we would have if we hadn’t done them.
Was that worth the amount of time we put into them if that was all that we had?
Questionably no.
Now, could there have been another two or three sales that we don’t know for a fact or five sales that we just don’t know for a fact?
Absolutely.
Let me share the ancillary benefits of doing those lives and guys, maybe you have some ancillary benefits as well.
The first ancillary benefit that we found was we dramatically increased the size of our audience.
The average video that we did as a PLF live recap had something like seven times the number of views as we have Facebook likes.
You guys do the math on that one. We encouraged people to share the videos, and they did.
You could tell, like, I would get a little alert, I’d be logged into Facebook and it would say, so and so shared your video, and then I would watch, and the number of people on would go, one more, two more, three more, four more, five more, six more, seven more, eight more.
And then it would kind of be like seven more, six months and then it would go back up.
But it would always go up and stay there and then you’d see so and so share and you’d see, like, six more people.
Come on. I don’t know if that is causation. I think there is. So, number one, we increased our rates.
Number two, the people that we were promoting watched him. We know they watched him. We’ll tell a quick story here.
Thankfully, today I have a much better relationship with Tim Walker than I did a year ago.
But a year ago, we were kind of on the radar like Mark and I had Jeff’s cell phone number.
That was about the extent of our relationship. Mark was a work colleague.
Mark: I’m a work colleague.
Matt: Jeff mentioned him in a video once without mentioning his name.
So a funny story that we don’t have time to get into now. We knew John and Jeff. We knew a couple of people on their team. Don crowder, for example. We know pretty well from another world.
But last year, when we did the Live, the Facebook Lives, we had PLF live this year and in this room of, I don’t know, about 100 influencers and Jeff’s up there with his team, and I said something.
I was sharing a tip for how to go through PLF with the group. I was like, you really got to do it together. Go through it with your team.
I said, what we do is download all the files. I have a VA go through, download all the files, and we watch them in quick time at like 1.2 speed.
I’m sure this is many of our PLF buyers. We watch them at 1.2 speed because 1.2 Jeff kind of talked slowly and everybody kind of chuckled.
Jeff’s like, yeah, it’s kind of like watching your Facebook lives where I know there’s going to be a nugget in there.
I just have to wait 20 minutes to get to. I was like, solid burn, Jeff. Mark looks on.
Mark: Everybody checks out louder.
Matt: Mark looks at me and goes, the only thing I got out of that is Jeff Walker watches our Facebook lives.
So that wouldn’t have happened were we not doing those. So those are two ancillary benefits that we got from it. There’s one more, actually.
Even if you didn’t buy PLF, we enhanced the experience of the live because you came from my audience and we helped you to get more out of the course, to get more out of the master class, to digest stuff or if you missed one.
We heard this from at least two people, and said, thank you so much for this map. I just got behind. I had some work commitments. My dog ate my homework.
My kids were walking uphill both ways in the snow, barefoot to school. Life happened, right?
I couldn’t watch the three-hour replay, so I watched your recap, and now I can watch the next one that Jeff does, and I don’t feel like I’m behind. Those are some of my silly benefits. What are yours?
Robby: I think an additional one for me was that it kept us on a track like we were going through the launch with Jeff. It made our email copy better.
It made just our overall focus on our launch. I felt like it was a lot tighter than it would have been otherwise.
Matt: Yeah.
Mark: I think that’s true, especially with Jeff’s live lessons being 3 hours.
If we weren’t doing a recap, it would have been really easy to be like, I don’t have time to watch the whole thing and then you’re right.
I think our copy would have suffered, and our interaction with our audience would have suffered for sure. The one that I got Matt, that I think is important too.
And again, I can’t quantify that this 100% helped, but I know long term it will, retargeting Facebook retargeting.
When we have these specific videos that were about PLF, we are able to then say we want to retarget everybody that watched 50% of these videos for a sales message.
And the way that compounds are we did this last year too and so when we were running ads and I know we’ll talk a little bit about that, I think here in a bit we were able to pull in some of those people from the last year that had watched those videos and say,
“Hey, they were interested in PLF.
Last year they watched 50, 90% of these videos.
They have some interest in PLF.
Let’s target them.”
And we actually think you remember. I don’t remember if I looked this year, but I know last year, Matt, the lookalike audience to those views, a very low cost for ads.
Matt: Oh, yeah, it was like something real quick, I suppose I know Jenny and somebody else said that they would love a tutorial on ConvertKit.
I dropped the link in the chat, but I’ll mention it here for those watching the replay, and we’ll put it below the video on the replay.
Robby, if you can make a reminder of that, it’s just Mattmcwilliams.com/convertkit and it sounds like you guys would love a tutorial on that.
So if you’re on live or you’re watching the replay, if we get enough people, probably won’t take very many who would love not necessarily a backstage pass, but a separate tutorial on how to use ConvertKit, but more importantly, how we use it in affiliate marketing.
A lot of how we use ConvertKit, for example, we’ll teach you how to use ConvertKit because we believe in it so much.
But also a lot of the specific things that we do are applicable to any other system, provided it’s not a system.
And I’m not picking on MailChimp, like MailChimp where you just can’t do some of the stuff that we did.
I guarantee you, though, we made mistakes in this promotion. It would have been infinitely worse if we hadn’t converted in every promotion we will ever do, whether it be for AIM.
Oh, my goodness. It was so much. I mean, how smooth was it this time?
Like, Mark was gone the whole time, and no offense to Mark, we didn’t meet him in part because we got converted.
And also, just to be clear, because he had busted his b*** for the two weeks before he left. Okay.
Mark: And because of that, I’m taking ten days off every month, just so you know.
Matt: All right. I love that. Yeah. Missing tasks.
I think we’re definitely going to do that. Robby, that’ll be all in you. I will enjoy hearing how that goes.
Guys, we could have this is something, quite frankly, we messed up and here I’m looking at our list of four things that we say we could have improved.
We messed up mistakes, whatever you want to call them. Every one of these guys is playbook stuff, so it’ll be better.
Every one of these and this is me calling us out, every one of these that we will improve on and that we just, quite frankly, did wrong are things that we already teach.
We messed up our own playbook because we’re humans. One of these, the first rolls here is actually less because we’re human and more because of circumstances.
But we had no pre-pre-launch for PLF at all. We had no warm-up. And so for those of you who’ve been through no product, no problem.
You’ve seen this before, but there’s a warm-up sequence. Right here’s a whole entire way to warm up your audience.
You warm them up, and the promo begins. You continue to warm them up, the promo ends, and you do a cart close a cool down at the end.
Well, we had none of that on the ramp, at all. None. We had zero onramps, in part because of circumstances. We were busy.
We were switching to Convertkit for one. But that was something where, you know, Kenneth ties into something we did well, that we’ll talk about in a moment.
But we reused a lot of the content from the previous year. Would have been really easy to say, hey, it’s a week before the promo mail to this blog post.
The blog post is already written. Hey, Robby, I need you to take 45 minutes to just review it, and make sure that everything’s accurate.
Do we need to change this sentence?
Pass it on to Mark for a quick review. Pass it on to Tara.
Let’s reuse the same email, but with this one tweak, and in an hour and a half, we have an entire piece of warm-up content ready to go.
With an email written, it would have been easy to do. We just forgot about it.
I don’t know about you guys, but I feel like that was the mistake. That’s how we screwed that up we just forgot.
Mark: Well, that’s what I was going to say. It almost is more frustrating knowing that we had content we could have used.
It’s not like, well, we thought about it, but we didn’t have time because we didn’t want to spend 4 hours writing a blog post and doing a video and editing it.
No, all we had to do, as you said, was review it real quick and send it and we didn’t.
And I think everything we talk about Matt here with what we can improve, I think it’s important to point out that there’s no promotion is ever going to go perfectly. None care.
You can have the best information and the best playbook. You can have the best intentions. You’re always going to forget something.
Something’s always going to go wrong, but you just push through it. You just keep going.
And I hope that’s encouraging for you guys because I know that you look at Matt and I do this too, it’s like Matt’s forgotten more about affiliate marketing than I’ll ever learn, but he still forgets.
There are still things we don’t do and that’s encouraging to me.
It’s encouraging to know that you don’t have to get everything right for this.
You don’t have to get everything right to make an impact, to make a difference in your audience, businesses, their lives, or to make money for yourself.
So you’re always going to have something that you’re going to look back and say, dang it, why the heck didn’t I do that?
I knew I should have. I thought about it. I didn’t do it and that’s important.
That’s important to realize and you’re right. We even talked about it beforehand.
What are we going to do for pre then things got busy and we got working on things and switching over and this and that and didn’t do it.
Matt: And you have one or two choices at that point. A lot of people just go, oh well, I screwed up and I guess I’m just going to not promote this at all.
Like I’m done. I’m like I don’t know that I ever entered our minds.
Well, okay, we know it’s going to cost us something, but we can still recover.
We still have 16 days. We still have a launch parachute. Jeff teaches about that, right? and so we’re cool.
The lesson there is though, that what I showed you is what you want to do.
You do want to seed the launch in advance of any promotion you’re going to do, you do not want to come out.
We talked about this with the Black Friday and Cyber Monday stuff, it’s 70% off. I don’t know.
Let’s find something 70% off. What is this, a Samsung, some sort of a Samsung giant television that I’m looking at right now? Okay.
Where you guys are on a giant Samsung and seriously Robby, your head is ginormous on the screen.
I don’t know. I think this TV probably costs like one $200 or $800.
We’ll just call it to cost $1,000 and it’s 70% off. So you get it for $300. It’s a great deal, right?
If the first time your audience hears about that is at 01:00 on Black Friday, you’re gonna make no sales.
So whatever industry you’re in, whether you’re promoting courses, whatever and so we talk about this where you want to warm them up.
So I just want to give you three quick ways to warm people up. Just very practical.
The first is just to get them thinking about the topic. Get them thinking about the topic.
Get them thinking about Black Friday. Get something about that. You have Black Friday deals.
Get them thinking about that now is a great time to buy electronics. Get them thinking about product launches.
Get them thinking about lessons you’ve learned about product launches.
The Second is to introduce them to the product creator. This doesn’t work as much with say, a Samsung. Big screen television. People have heard of Samsung.
Mark: Let me tell you about Samsung, the massive company. Tell you about how they started in Korea, I think it is 1958.
No idea when they started. But introduce them to Jeff Walker.
So we have a post it’s like the top three lessons I’ve ever learned from Jeff Walker.
The number one lesson I learned from Jeff Walker’s.
No, you think we go from introducing them to Jeff Walker to introducing them to the concept of product lunch formula and then we go into the actual content.
And all throughout that, though, I just say, the product launch formula is Jeff Walker. The product launch formula is Jeff Walker.
I’m not telling you anything about the product launch formula. I’m just putting the words in your subconscious somewhere.
So introduce them to the topic, introduce them to the product creator.
And then third is begin to, I’ll just say, ramp up your contact and begin to segment as much as possible. Now you can begin to segment a year out.
So, for instance, over the next year, we’ll do anywhere from ten to 15 pieces of content about product launches.
Here’s the thing. A large percentage of my audience I don’t know exactly, 30%, 40% will never do a quote-unquote product launch.
They have only an evergreen product. They sell retail goods that don’t really have ebbs and flows or any seasonality whatsoever, and they never click on any of those emails about product launches.
Why would I promote anything about PLF to them? I won’t.
But you can begin to do that in advance where it’s like they don’t open any of those emails or click any of those emails even after sending them some reopens.
Maybe we shouldn’t even promote this at all to that person and so sometimes you’re segmenting is removing 5% of your audience, but it’s the 5% that’s most likely to unsubscribe because you’re promoting this.
So you give them those opt-outs beforehand.
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Mark: Here’s a pro tip, too and this is something that we again, this is one of those, I think, Matt, you would say that the three of us know, but we haven’t done it.
So here’s the way it typically works. So I emailed somebody that we promoted last year a while ago, and I said, hey, when are your launch dates?
And they said, oh, it’s April 1 through the 15th. Those aren’t the dates I don’t remember.
And so I go into our content calendar, and I block out April 1 through the 15th pro tip, marking out two weeks before it.
We need to start doing that. We need to do a better job of that. But if you do that, if you just automatically say, we did try to, yeah.
Matt: We already had a promo scheduled for March 15 through 31st. But, I mean, and that saves that from happening.
If you say and you can figure out what you want it to be, I mean, it could be seven days before, it could be 14, it could be ten days.
But just figure out whatever amount of time you want to warm up your audience and block that out, too, and say, this is warming up my audience for this promotion.
So rather than having the exact dates of the promo in your calendar, have the exact dates plus seven to 14 days, that allows you to then not do what happened to us, where we got busy, we already had content, we already had this, we already had that, and we forgot or it didn’t happen.
If you block it out at the beginning. It allows you to then have that time built in, and then you are more likely to remember and make it happen.
So that’s something that will really help with that. Just by doing that just on the front end, just assume that you’re going to add ten days or 14 days to whatever date they give you as the start date.
Matt: Here’s something we did really well, guys, our bonus stack. So the bonuses we offer to PLF members that purchased through us were absolutely phenomenal.
And I want to share I want to have this pulled up when we talk about this. I got a message from someone.
Mark: And you in the interview that’s coming up, we call them not case study. What are you calling those?
Matt: Insider profile.
Mark: Yeah, the insider profile. You guys talk about that, right?
Matt: Yes. With Tasha next, how she did. Her bonuses are phenomenal.
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