Today, I’m giving you something that was previously only available privately. I’m going to share a training about how to get your affiliate program up and running from scratch and use it to scale your business…without spending all day on social media or having to run paid advertising. And I’m going to show you how to do it all in about an hour a day.
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
 |
 |
|---|---|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
Links/Resources Mentioned in This Episode
Affiliate Program Kickstarter Package
Email Template: Text “REFERRAL” to 260-217-4619
TEXT ME – +1 260-217-4619
Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
The 10 Commandments of Building a Winning Affiliate Program
Should Your Affiliate Program be on a Network or In-House?
Oops! This Affiliate Program Totally Blew It (Here’s How to Avoid Their Mistake)
7 Things Every Affiliate Manager Needs to Know About the Holiday Season
7 Keys to Successful Affiliate Management During the Holidays
BONUS: How to 10X Your Sales WITHOUT Spending All Day On Social Media or Expensive Paid Ads…All in About ONE HOUR a Day
Today I’m giving you a special Christmas gift of something that was previously only available privately. I’m going to share a training about how to get your affiliate program up and running from scratch and use it to scale your business without spending all day on social media or having to run expensive paid advertising. And I’m going to show you how to do it all in about an hour a day.
So, unlike last week, we’re not using the AI mat to record the intro to a special episode. As I said last week, I’m recovering from COVID and like two other things. This, it got really bad in our house and we’ve just, all four of us have been just so sick. And you could probably tell I sound a little nasally. I am not fully back to be able to record a 30 to 45 minute podcast episode, but I got just enough in me with some pauses and some drinks to get through this, like two minute, three minute intro here. What we’re doing is actually going to give you access to a training I did a few months ago. It’s called how to 10 extra sales without spending all day on Social Media or Expensive paid ads, all in about an hour a day. And this just walks you through how to start your affiliate program from scratch.
Gives you some case studies about some things that we’ve done and some examples of how this can work for your business. And we’re even including the Q and A at the end so that you can hear some of the questions that were asked that you might be having. Life is like seventh grade algebra. If you’ve got questions, odds are somebody else does. And so if somebody else has them, odds are you do. There are a couple things I’ll tell you on the front end.
All the links we talk about are in the show notes. So I talk about a workbook. If you want to set this to the side and you’re here over the holidays and grab the workbook and actually go through the training with the workbook. I think that’ll help you to really follow along and get the most out of it. And you can download that workbook.
There’s a link in the show notes. Just grab the workbook there. You can download that. It’s a PDF and print it off if you want, or fill it out online either way if you want to go through that. So I referenced that a few times. I kind of cut out the first like three minutes of the training where it’s like, hey, where are you from? Oh, look, you’re from Canada. Oh look, you’re From Trinidad, you know, and that’s always really cool, but you don’t really want to listen to that. And I cut out. There’s a little section toward the end where we had some audio difficulties that I cut that out. But otherwise this is completely just as is. So there’s probably a few mistakes and all kinds of fun stuff in there.
So, I mean, this was recorded live, so you’ll get to hear all of it. But in that, in the first couple minutes, I do talk about downloading the workbook. Downloading the workbook. And I think I mentioned it one or two more times in the training. And we just left that in. So that link is in the show notes to grab that. And all the other links I talk about are in the show notes as well. So with that, I’m going to go back to resting up, trying to get better before Christmas, as we’re just really struggling with this here. So with that, we’ll jump right into the training. So many of you are, are like, I was about 20 years ago. I had a business that we were in intense crisis mode and we had a great idea and we had all the right intentions. We had a really good team, you know, like many of you probably do.
But we just lost half of our money on banner ads. Now, that was 2005, not, you know, we’re 19 years now later. So, so don’t laugh at me, you know, just because I, you know, we spent all of our money on banner ads back then. And I remember, like, I remember this feeling like it was yesterday. It was kind of like it was, you know, around today. We’re recording, you know, this in the spring of 2024. And, you know, I look outside my, my window right now. I’ve got this perfect view of the Bradford Pears, which are like my favorite tree. They’re blooming right now. They’re absolutely beautiful. And it was kind of a day like that beautiful day outside.
We’re looking at each other like, how in the heck are we ever going to recover from this? You know, the reality is we didn’t have enough money to go out and compete with our competition at their level. They were all publicly traded companies. They’d been around for years, and we were the new kid on the block and we were absolutely broke. And maybe you can relate to that now, years later, after we discovered the solution.
I’m going to talk about that today, I began to work with other businesses who faced similar problems. They might be on the verge of bankruptcy, or maybe they were just tired of not Growing, you know, they, it seems like that’s when people call me by the way. It’s when they’re either in crisis or they reach the point where they’re just tired of mediocrity. And, and that’s when I had this, the bright idea to start an affiliate program. An affiliate program for those of you who know my story. In fact that grew to more than a million dollars a month in only 18 months. And since then I’ve gone on to be named top affiliate manager of the year four times.
I’ve able to help some of the biggest brands and biggest entrepreneurs out there. People like Tony Robbins, Dean Graziosi, Kevin Harrington from shark tank, Stu McLaren, Michael Hyatt, Ray Edwards, Kim Walsh Phillips Shutterfly, Lewis Howells, Adidas, Jeff Walker, Brian Tracy, you’ve probably heard of a few of those. And I’ve also worked with startups. I’ve worked with brand new solopreneurs, everyday entrepreneurs who, who are, to me they’re, they’re, they’re just, they’re standing like. I just always envision them. It’s like there’s a scene, I can’t remember what movie it is.
It’s one of those old British movies and I cannot think of the name of it for the life of me. It’s just escape me. I would if you’d asked me five minutes ago, I knew the name of the movie. Anyway, it’ll come to me in a moment. And they’re standing on the precipice at the cliffs of Dover, right? If you know British geography. And they’re standing there on the cliffs of Dover. It’s a stunning scene and they’re just waiting for something, just waiting for the right opportunity to explode. And so today I’m going to share with you exactly how we did that, how we built that million dollar a month affiliate program. In about 18 months, I’m going to bust three killer myths about affiliate programs.
I’m going to show you why you need an affiliate program. I’m going to show you how to build one from scratch and grow it and use it to explode your sales. So your blanks for the workbook there. By the way, if you don’t have your workbook, Alan’s going to drop that link again. If you don’t have your workbook, make sure you got the words why and how there, those are the two words. So you’ll want it to follow along and take good notes. Now there are four huge advantages of affiliate programs compared to other, other forms of marketing. The first one you make money before you spend it.
You make money before you spend it. You only pay for performance. That’s pretty cool, right? You only pay for performance.The second one, you don’t have to guess at targeting. You know, back in 2005, again, back in the ancient days of the Internet, you know, we didn’t, we had no idea, like how to, how to market to anybody in particular. We didn’t have Facebook, right? There was no targeting. It was, it was like the wild, wild west. But even today, you can get so caught up in targeting and markets and demographics and psychographics, all that, like, we cripple ourselves. And so typically, people make one of two mistakes when they go into marketing.
The first mistake is they target too broadly. And so they’re like, my product’s for everyone, which effectively means it’s for no one. Even toilet paper is not for everyone because there’s different types of toilet paper. There’s toilet paper, if you’re buying it for a large arena, what do you want? Cheap toilet paper, right? And there’s toilet paper, if you’re buying it for your home, what do you want? Not cheap toilet paper, right? So they, they try to target so broadly that they reach no one. The second one is they get so myopic, they’re literally like, okay, we’re going to Target Men ages 31 to 33 who have three kids who homeschool in their favorite football teams in the NFC West. It just doesn’t work with affiliates. You don’t have to worry about targeting and who to market for, who to market to, because they do it for you. The next big advantage is that there’s like no other form of advertising brings in warm prospects like affiliates.
If you think about it, if you run an ad on Facebook, you’re basically saying good things about yourself. Not really that big of a deal. But your affiliates act as a third party referral. So they say nice things about you before sending them to your site. So the prospects are already warmed up. That’s why no other form. You can write this down in your workbook, it’s not in your blanks or anything. But no other form of advertising converts clicks into leads and leads into sales as highly as affiliate traffic does no other form, including SEO. And the last big advantage is that success leads to more success. Not only do affiliates talk with each other, they’re in mastermind groups together. They’re in forms, they talk to each other, they follow each other online. And so what happens is when you recruit 100 affiliates actively, you work hard to recruit those 100, you’ll get another 40 to 100 for free.
No extra effort. Because if they’re. They’re following each other and they’re talking to each other. So those are the four advantages to having the affiliate program. Once we figured those out, like, we’re on board, right? We’re all in. We’re gonna, like we were going to start working with affiliates. And then, of course, my friend Hunter looked at me, the CEO of the company was like, yeah, but how do we find affiliates? And so that’s what we’re going to talk about today. My goal today, here’s the thing, you could go out and try to figure all this stuff out on your own. It’s, trust me, it’s possible, but it’s also painful. It took me almost a decade to get to the point where I had most of this stuff figured out. And yet still today, I mean, every single day, I learned something new that I put into practice.
The time and the effort that it took to get to this point sucked. It was hard. But there’s a better way. You know, Pablo Picasso said one of my favorite quotes of all time, write this down. Good artists copy, great artists steal. Good artists copy, great artists. I’ll probably say that like four or five times a day. You know, it’s just such a powerful quote. And so what I want to do today is show you how to steal my best stuff. One last reminder. Make sure you grab your workbooks. You can follow along. And if you’ve got questions, pop them in the chat as we go. If you got questions, Alan might interrupt me and ask a question if it’s on topic. And if it’s not on topic, we’ll have tons of time at the end.
So by the end of our time here. Speaking of the end, by the end of our time here today, I want to convince you of two things. Number one, an affiliate program is the best way to grow your sales. And number two, the best way to start, build and grow an affiliate program is to model others. And the great thing about this, it takes all the pressure off. You simply copy what others are doing. Sound easy enough? So what I’m about to teach you, it hasn’t just worked for me.
I’ve talked a little bit about my story. That’s my genesis, right? That’s how I got into this world. But it’s worked for our clients. You’re going to see someone throughout the training because I want you to see what’s possible and kind of like what they did, you know, Lewis Howell is a great example. Lewis Howe, his School of Greatness book, his first book before he was a household name, had a number 10, two New York Times best seller. He had over a thousand affiliates sharing his book on the same day. Just imagine a thousand plus people sharing your product on the same day. What would that do for your business? That is the power of an affiliate program like this. Ray Edwards is another great example. Ray Edwards, I mean, our plan, you know, what we did for Ray helped Ray double.
Just get this statistic here Doubled his entire annual revenue in only one month. Had his first million dollar year. And think about what it would mean to you to do those kind of numbers. Like can you even see yourself doing those kind of numbers? I’d love to hear from you in the chat. Like just put yes. If you don’t see yourself, don’t put yes, don’t lie. You know, if you honestly don’t think you can do those kind of numbers, that’s okay. Maybe you don’t have any desire to have a million dollar year or to make a hundred thousand plus in a month. Maybe that’s just not. And you know you’d like, that’s cool, this is still relevant. But I’m curious, like who among you is it? Oh, and I see it. Oh crap, dude. This is. Due to the large number of assistants in this meeting system, messages for those who joined or left have been disabled.
So you guys might not be able to put anything in the chat. Well, that really sucks. I know Alan can because he’s a host. So if you can’t put anything in the chat, I would tell you to tell me, but you can’t. So. Well that kind of. Oh, there we go. Biggie can. That’s good. I think if you, if you got, if you left and came back, maybe you can’t. Maybe that’s what it’s trying to tell me. So glad you can. So yeah, if you can see yourself doing those kind of numbers, let me know. All right, so I mentioned earlier there’s three pervasive lies about affiliate programs. And these lies hold some of the smartest, most motivated, hardest working people I know back and they will keep you from exploding your business if you believe any of them. The first lie is this absolute worst of them all. It says I don’t need an affiliate program. I don’t need an affiliate program. I can do it with other forms of advertising. Right. About six, seven years ago now, I met a guy, I’m going to call him Joe. And I’m calling him kind of a nzric name because you’ve heard of this guy, right? He’s done a main stage TED Talk. Not a TEDx, a main, like a real TED Talk. Multiple best selling books, huge email list, hundreds of thousands of people. By all accounts, he was making it. And you know, a friend of his referred him to me, but when we talked he’s like, I don’t need an affiliate program now man.
I run Facebook ads. That’s all I need, Facebook ads and a couple other things. I’m good to go. I don’t need an affiliate program. Now, the irony of this is that this guy had built his empire in part by telling people to diversify their incomes through different things like investing in real estate and et cetera, et cetera, right? And yet he had put all of his marketing eggs into the Facebook basket. Now, thankfully, he had a CMO who was a pretty smart dude, and this guy’s trying to talk him into starting an affiliate program, but he wouldn’t listen. About three, four months after we talked, Facebook shut down their account for an entire. I think it was a little bit over a week. And when they got it back up and run, they spent an entire week nearly no revenue, no sales leads. When they finally got it up and running, their cost per click rates, like, tripled. Their ad costs, you know, doubled, tripled. There they went from nearly a hundred percent profit margin down to basically nothing.
They were running, like, super thin margins. And Alan, who’s on the call with me hosting him, he’s a friend of mine and he runs his own business, had the same thing happen to him. Facebook shut down his account, and that’s what happens. This is not unusual. These nightmare scenarios are not that uncommon. The lies that you’re told about not needing an affiliate program, they say you can do everything on your own. You. You don’t need help from anyone. You can reach everyone on earth through, you know, Facebook, Google, and maybe LinkedIn. And I know those platforms are huge. But I’m telling you, you are missing out on all the benefits. The benefits that we talked about a few minutes ago, the scalability, no risk because you make money before you spend it.
The easy targeting. And that’s the problem with putting all your, you know, marketing eggs into the Facebook basket, so to speak. Go off script here for just like this was. This happened recently. I’m not going to mention this person’s name, but somebody in. In one of my masterminds, she. We got on, we share wins, right? We get. We get on, we share wins. And she’s like, my win was I finally got my Facebook page up after. I mean, this is two weeks. She talked about starting it two weeks before, and her win was finally getting Facebook.
I mean, I was like, I don’t want to. I don’t want to be insulting, but I was like, why is that a win? Why is that a win that you got your Facebook profile or your Facebook page up, your Facebook page, if you are lucky, has a 3% reach, like, stop fiddling with Facebook. I was like, you could have spent all those hours that you spent on Facebook and gotten one good affiliate who would make you twice as much money in a week as you’re going to make all year from your Facebook page. I’m not saying don’t have a Facebook page or run Facebook ads, but if you want quick and risk free and highly scalable and easy, you don’t go the Facebook route. You get affiliates. And simply put, when you don’t have an affiliate program, you put a very low ceiling on your growth. Now, wrapped up in this lie is another underlying belief that my niche won’t support an affiliate program.
Years ago, I had lunch with a guy, the guy you see on your screen here, Eric Andreas. Eric is an online guitar instructor, if you couldn’t figure that one out. And when we first met, he flat out told me, like, an affiliate program won’t work in my niche. And I showed him a Google sheet, showed him a Google sheet from the Learn and Master guitar program which I had run, which the year before I, when I took over their program in 2000, it was early 2009. May of 2009 was doing about half a million a year. I grew it to over 4 million the next year. We’re doing almost targeting six and a half million that year. And his mind changed. He’s like, oh, yeah, I can do this. And so I talked to Eric, helped Eric out, helped him start an affiliate program. Talked to him about, you know, six months later, seven months later, and I was like, man, how, you know, how’s it going? He’s like, dude, you have no idea.
He’s like, I went from making, you know, $88,000 last year, in an entire year, I made $212,000 so far this year. This is like seven months in the year. I was like, man, that’s awesome. He’s like, no, no, you don’t understand what that did for me and my family. He’s like, we paid off all my debts. We took our daughter who was in, she has kind of mild special needs, and we took our daughter and put her into a much better school. We took her out of the crappy school she was in and put her in a great school. Cost 15 grand a year, but she’s thriving.
We moved into a bigger house. So my kid, you know, he had two kids and they were in a two bedroom apartment and they moved into a nice neighborhood. I know the neighborhood because I grew up not too far from there. And like, it completely transformed everything in his business and his life. He was working less, making more money. I mean, like what more can you ask for? Right? So this lie that says doesn’t work in my niche.
I don’t need an affiliate program. It is simply not true. Don’t get me wrong. I know a lot of people who run a nice business. They’re happy, they’re content, and they haven’t grown in five years. They hit their ceiling. And that ceiling might be a hundred thousand dollars, it might be 2 million, but they’ve hit their ceiling and they’re not growing. And Tony Robbins, you know, former client, says, if you’re not growing, you’re dying. I don’t think that’s. People who come. This is a hunch, but people who come to trainings like this angel, I don’t. Aren’t the types who kind of go home at the end of this and they’re content with mediocrity and stagnation. That’s, you know, could be wrong. But you want to grow. And if you want to grow your sales and business, there’s simply no better way than to start and build an affiliate program. So this lie is flat out busted. Absolutely busted.
Need help activating your affiliates? Use my proven email templates for getting inactive affiliates in the game and making sales! Get them here!
All right, Lie number two. Well, I gotta know a lot of people. I gotta do a lot of reciprocal promos to get affiliates. In other words, that’s only for the cool kids with the right connections. Right? And that’s gotta know all the right people. Or if you want to get affiliates, you have to burn your list promoting everyone else’s stuff all year long just to get your own affiliates.
You know, we first started our business, Lauren, I was telling you back in 2005, I knew absolutely no one. None of us did. None of the three partners knew a soul. We were not the cool kids. We didn’t have dads who knew the right people. We started with nothing. Now, in a little bit, I’m going to show you how to get affiliates even if you don’t know a soul. All right? What I’m about to teach has worked for so many of our students. It’s worked for our clients. Like Alex put him, he took this one strategy I’m about to share. Went from complete nobody to industry leader in nine months. I mean, look at this. Nine months, didn’t know a soul. He was one of the cool kids in his niche. He wasn’t famous. He didn’t have a.
He had like 400 social media followers. All right? I mean, I had like a list of like a few hundred people. It was tiny. Did $360,000 from affiliates in one launch. Didn’t burn his list with reciprocal promos. Didn’t know a soul. So how did he do it? That’s the first strategy I want to share with you today. Here’s the thing. What I’m about to tell you is so simple, so obvious, so elementary, you might feel tempted to brush it off. All right? You might feel tempted to be like, that seems so obvious, but are you doing it? You know, like, I can literally give you the playbook. It seems. Seems so simplistic. Like, it cannot be this easy. Right?
Trust me, I do it because I do the same thing. Like, I do the same thing. Okay, enough disclaimers, all that. Here’s how to recruit affiliates. Let’s. Let’s walk through the how to here. All right? There are three things you got to consider. Number one, when do we start? When do we begin? Number two, where do we find them? And then thirdly, you know, what are the tactics? How do we actually recruit the affiliates? We’re going to start with when to begin, when to start. This is one of the biggest mistakes I see people making. They simply wait too long to start recruiting affiliates.
But if at all possible, as Alex did, you need to start at least six months out, a minimum of six months out. Simple reason here, promo calendars. Your likely affiliates, you’re likely affiliates. They plan their promotions out. You probably do the same thing. And if I call you with the best offer, it’s a perfect fit for your audience. And I say, and I say to you, trisha, can you promote this thing next week? And you’re like, no, I’m already promoting something else, or I’m promoting my thing, or I’ve already got my content planned out for next week and I just don’t want to change it.But if I say, you know, if I say, robert, can you promote this thing in seven months? I got nothing on my calendar. I could promote it then. Let’s do it. So six months out, all right, Anytime you do a big launch or a big promo, this is down the road. This is not on day one.
Like, you’re not going to do a big launch or a day promo next week. But if you have a big launch or a big promo a few months from now, a year from now, right after that, recruit affiliates. So, Jessica, if you have this big thing that goes on eight months from now, and it, like, it gets some traction, you make some sales, and maybe you make a little splash in your industry, then reach out to some people. Why? Because they might have seen it. There’s a pretty good chance, because affiliates follow other affiliates, that some prospective affiliates that you reach out to heard about your launch or your promo. So reach out to them. And lastly, here, it never ends. Always be recruiting. Always be recruiting.
Literally, right now, while I am speaking, at least one of our virtual assistants is probably working on recruiting affiliates. And if not literally at this exact moment, they will be within the next hour. We’re always doing it. We’re always adding people to our list. It might be 10 a day, might be just 10 a day. Sometimes it might be, you know, one or two a day.
It could be a very small number, but we’re adding people every day to our list. It never stops because we always want to be growing. Always want to be growing. Okay, so that’s the win. Where do we find them? Where do we actually look for these affiliates? Well, the first place we’re going to look is we’re going to start with who we know. Most of you aren’t. Where I was when I started. You. You know someone who would make a good affiliate partner, right? Do you know at least one person who could be a good partner? Just one. Start with them. Start with them. Always start with these people because they’re going to promote you because it’s you. Not because they’re going to make $17 per sale or $142 per click or any of that stuff. They’re going to start. They’re going to do it because they know you, they like you, and they trust you. And you start with these people because they will give you the most grace. Because here’s the thing.
If you start an affiliate program, John, I can promise you something that’s going to happen. You’re going to screw some stuff up in the first few months. You’re going to have tech errors. Something’s going to break that. It’s just. It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen. Tracking is going to not work. This thing’s not. Their sales page is going to not convert very well. But your people that you already know, they’re going to be like, that’s cool, man. That’s cool. And they’re going to give you grace. So here’s what I want you to do.
I want you to take a minute. I think I’ve set a timer for two minutes, but we’re gonna. We’re gonna cut that a little bit short just to get things moving here. Take a minute. I want you to write some names down. There’s a box in your workbook. Just write down a few names that come to mind. And then when you’re done, I want you to put that number in the chat. Tell me how many people you put in the chat, not in the box. Yeah, tell me how many people you wrote down in about the next minute, maybe a minute and a half or so. All right? It. It’s.
Hopefully you guys are getting some good names written down there. We’ll finish up here in about 15 seconds. All right? So hopefully you guys got some good names right now. Remember, put if you can. Again, I know we’re having issues with the chat, and I super apologize for that. I don’t know what the heck is going on with Zoom today. But if you can put that number in the chat, like, just. You got three people. Write down three, four, whatever. Put that in the chat. So I know. Okay, so we start with people that we know. Chad got five.
That’s awesome. Love it. Seven from Brit, eight from Robert. Well done. See, something like the number doesn’t matter. If it’s three, it’s three. Like, that’s three people you can reach out to today about being an affiliate. If it’s 8, cool. If it’s 11, you’ll probably think of other names. Here’s a very simple way. Write this down. Rohi. I love it. Six. Six. Grab the magic rectangle. That’s your. That’s your smartphone, by the way. Go to your text messages or just go to your contacts.
Start scrolling, you know, and list them in alphabetical order. And I’m going right there. I’m on the fifth person in my contacts. The first one I got. Person from soccer. No. Friend. Friend. No. But this person, absolutely. They are an affiliate, you know? You know, I mean. It’s super easy. Right? So start with who you know. All right, next. What if you don’t know anybody? Well, one place to find affiliates is watch other affiliate programs. Here’s the thing, a lot of affiliate programs publish what’s called an affiliate leaderboard. Basically, they’re telling you who their top affiliates are.
I’m just going to leave that one there. If you can’t figure out what to do with that, they’re telling you who their top affiliates are. All right, forms and groups, I mean, affiliates hang out together. Think about, there are groups that have, you know, whether it be homeschool bloggers. If your audience is homeschoolers, what about a group of homeschool bloggers? Might be a few hundred people in there that would all make potential affiliates. And then the big question to ask yourself. This is the big question.
Who has my audience? Who has my audience? There are people out there who already have your audience. I mean, real quick, guys, put in the chat. Somebody put in the chat. What’s your niche? Tell me your niche. I want to know what niche you’re in. And I’m just going to kind of spitball here real quick. All right, Health. Little too broad. I would love to know a little bit more about that. Okay. Self management companies. Wow, Jeremy, that’s. That is. I like that. That is super specific. All right, well, here’s the deal. There are people who have an audience of people who lead self management companies.
I’m not even entirely sure what that is, so it’s actually hard for me to answer that one. If you can give me some more detail, Jeremy, maybe I can, I can give you a better answer there. Real estate services. Okay, so we could go a couple different ways there, Robert. It could be, you know, is your audience real estate agents? How many blogs, how many podcasts, how many, you know, sites out there are targeted towards real estate agents? How many real estate associations are there? There’s one.
I mean, Jessica’s asking the same question. What kind of real estate services? I know in Indiana, there’s. There’s three, I think, you know, three, like regions. I mean, those companies are those organizations, those blogs, those people who teach real estate, all those types of things. Companies who want to move from traditional hierarchy to self management within their operations. Yeah, I mean, there are people out there who have those people in their audience. Private yoga.
I mean, there are people out there who have that audience. Right. So in other words, it’s people who are in the second half of life, at least according to the current you know, life expectancy, we could argue that won’t be the case in 20 years, whatever, you know, but they’re in the second half of life. But they’re still, they’re professional and they are really getting into health and wellness. There are people who have that audience. I mean, just off the top of my head, any, you know, any site that is targeted towards seniors, encore careers, empty nesters, you know, I mean, there’s just a few that come to mind. And again, I mean, I spent 14 seconds thinking of that. Kathy, if you spend 10 or 20, 30 minutes, you’ll come up with a huge list who has your audience. That’s the big question to ask. Another way is partner with other affiliate programs. You know, if you have an affiliate program out there that you’re interested in getting their affiliates, talk to them about partnering together. What I won’t go into, like, all the details, but we do this a lot with our clients, right?
So we’ll have an affiliate program that we run for company A. So maybe we have a. We’ll take one that we’re currently running right now with Peter Nieves, who’s in the AI Law space, right? So we’ll take that affiliate program and we’ll say, hey, Peter, we want to. We want to get some affiliates from this other client that we’re working with, and they want to send you some affiliates. So we’ll promote each other’s affiliate programs to the one affiliate program. And so you can do that on your own, though, you know, you can reach out to other affiliate programs, say, hey, can we promote each other’s affiliate programs to each other? Now?
Of course, you have to have a look, you have to have some affiliates first. You can’t do that if you have zero. So this is not. That one is not one you do. When you have zero necessarily affiliate lists, you know, you can work with a company like ours. Now, we have more than 10,000 affiliates on our list, and I’ll share how you can do that later, but there are companies out there that have list of affiliates and they will recruit affiliates for you and then lastly, referrals. And we’ll talk more about this in a moment, but I just want to make sure it was on the list so you could write it down. And I promise I will talk more about this in detail in a little bit.
All right, so we talked about when to begin, we talked about where to find them, and then some talk about how to recruit the actual tactics. The single most important thing here is to make sure that you first Build relationships. One of my favorite quotes of all time from a guy named Jeffrey Gittamer. If you’ve never read Jeffrey’s books, look them up. They are absolutely amazing. He says, all things being equal, people want to do business with their friends. I mean, Dala, right? But even when things aren’t equal, when things are not equal, people still want to do business with their friends.
You already know that, right? But don’t you want to do business with your friends if possible? Like, I cannot stress this enough, build the relationship. Now, from a tactical perspective, there’s two keys here. The first one, use various methods. Use email. Use physical mail, text, social media. Okay. And secondly, when you do, make sure you keep your initial contact short. This will be counterintuitive, but your goal is not to get a yes response. When you first reach out to someone about being an affiliate, your goal is not to share everything with them about your product or program. Your goal is simply to inspire enough curiosity that they write back with three simple words. Tell me more. Those are the three sweetest words you can read or hear that starts a conversation that allows you to then reach out and share more about your affiliate program with them. I want to share it with you real quick. This is the best converting email template that we’ve ever used for recruiting affiliates.
You guys can take a screenshot of this. You know, feel free to take a screenshot, copy and paste it. Whatever. Just simply says, hey, you know, hey, first name. I saw recently that you were promoting the name of another product. Right. So sorry, you’re promoting, you know, sorry, promoting Brit Malka’s such and such course. And I thought of you for something we have coming up this January. Now, I never put the dates because then they might say no to the dates. That’s a whole nother thing. But you know, this. Or you could say this spring, this April, you know, this summer, whatever we’re launching, or whatever the name of the product is. It’s similar to the other product. But here’s how it’s different. If you’re interested, let me know. Love to share more info with you. Sign off. That’s it Again, what are they going to write back with? Tell me more or nope, not interested? Both are great answers.
Most people aren’t going to respond back to and say yes. But here’s the thing. What do you do if somebody sends you an unsolicited email that’s 14 paragraphs long? What do you do with it? We all know the answer. We delete it. So keep it short and sweet. Yes, it is that simple. It starts a conversation, it allows you to start a relationship that grows from there. At the end, I’ll share how you can get access to some stuff that gives you some more of these emails, what emails to send and all this. But for now, know that it is possible and not that hard. Now that’s just one way to recruit affiliates. I think I’ve shared five or six or seven so far, but I want to hit on a few more real quick. First, your customers. There’s no better source of partners than your customers. They have an intimate knowledge of your product. They have a personal success story.
They know like and trust you. They couldn’t ask for better promoters. Most people don’t ask their customers to be affiliates. Don’t make this mistake. Live events are probably the costliest way to recruit affiliates, but often the most effective. You know, like there’s no better way. One on one in person, you’re having lunch with somebody and you realize, wow, we could be partners, we could be partners. And your competition, your competition, they can be your best promotional partners if you have a healthy mindset. And I’m going to share four ways that you can use competitors as affiliates real quick here. The first is an upsell. If you offer a low priced product that isn’t super in depth, then offer a higher priced detailed version as an upsell.
All right, so you offer that, you know you have a $500 product and it covers one specific thing. Offer another affiliate product for $2,000 as a downsell. So it’s basically the exact opposite of what I just said. It’s as a downsell, where you have an expensive product, you offer a cheaper product as a downsell to your non buyers. If someone’s on your list for a long time and hasn’t bought your stuff, find something cheaper. Find something that offers a little bit of a different perspective. Maybe they love your content, but they’re not going to buy your thing. Find something to sell to them. And then lastly, a niche within a niche. You know, if you have a course, for example, or product that reaches a broad audience, offer a complimentary product that really hones in on us on a specific need. Great example.
This was years ago I mentioned Learn to Master Guitar. Learn to Master guitar. Taught all guitar. And one of the lessons was on blues guitar. And at the end of that blues guitar lesson we said, hey, if you want to really dive into blues guitar, we recommend Dan Denley’s whatever the name of his course was. And we sold 250, $300,000 worth of his course every single year just to a very small subset of our of our guitar customers. And it works. So those are four ways you can actually work with your competition to be affiliates and my number one like, oh my gosh, this is no one uses this. It’s so easy. And literally almost no one uses my number one recruiting trick. Ask your current affiliates. Once you get some affiliates, ask them. This is the number one way to get new affiliates.
I’ve been a part of probably now almost 300 affiliate programs. Less than 10 of them have ever asked me to refer other affiliates. That is ridiculous. Your current affiliates should be your, your number one source of new quality affiliates. Once you get started, your number one source of new affiliates will be your current affiliates. The key here is to ask them and make sure that they get a second tier commission. So this means that they get, you know, if they refer somebody then they get 10% of whatever or 5% or 20% or whatever. If you’d like an email template that you can use to send to your affiliates asking them to refer other affiliates. Text the word referral okay, text the word referral to me. or have a question or need something that’s just reach out to me.
Now if you text the word referral, just to be clear, it’s an automated response. I’m not going to be like texting you the stuff. You’ll get it right away while I’m still talking here. So I’m not multitasking. But text the word referral to 260-217-4619. Normally when you text me at that I respond personally, just so you know. So make sure you get that template. The easiest way to get new affiliates is to ask your current affiliates. I’m just going to repeat it one more time. Your current affiliate should be your number one source of new quality affiliate. So this lie, you got to know all the right people, I’m sure, like 10 ways to find affiliates if you. Nine of which if you don’t know a soul. All right, this lie, you got to know all the right people, have all the connections, be one of the cool kids to run an affiliate program. It is busted. It is busted.
All right, so what’s lie number three? Line number three says, most of your sales are going to come from only a few of your affiliates. This lie is so pervasive, I literally heard one of the top Internet marketers in the world, someone you all know, one of the top names in the Internet marketing space, claim this is a statement of fact from stage. Fact. I wrote down the quote, the exact quote. He said, 90% of your sales will come from your top three to five affiliates. Here’s the thing. This same guy who said this about five, six years ago, about two years ago, became a client because you realize that doesn’t work anymore. He said, I see what you’re doing with your other clients and you’re building this army of affiliates. And the top three to five, I’ll share some stats in a minute that’ll blow you away. Your top three to five are making up 10, 15, 20% of your affiliates.
I want to work with you. And we helped him to have one of his best launches ever. Now, there’s two sub lies that make this big lie so seemingly true. The first one is you got to personally know all of your affiliates. In other words, you got to be. You have a personal relationship with them and be best buds with all of your affiliates. You can’t have any affiliates. You’re like, I don’t even know that person. Do you think that when I ran Shutterfly’s affiliate program with a hundred plus thousand affiliates that I knew all of them, or Adidas, that I knew all of the affiliates? No. If you’re gonna run an affiliate program that is consistently growing year after year, it’s simply not possible.
So you gotta get over that. And the second thing is, you know, they say small affiliates are not worth the hassle. That’s a lie. Here’s the reason why you want to build an army of affiliates and why small affiliates are worth the hassle. They grow. They grow. And they will remain loyal to you for years and years and they will promote you forever in a day. And you will build an army of affiliates. You know, let’s look at what happens when you Ignore this lie and you create an army of awesome affiliates. Michael Hyatt, one of his launches that we ran. Now keep in mind, this was a multimillion dollar huge seven figure launch featuring some of the biggest names in the Internet marketing world.
I mean, check out some of these names here. You’ve heard of a few of these people, right? You know, these are some of the biggest names in the marketing world. Stu McLaren, John Lee Dumas. Ray Edwards. Pat Flynn, Jeff Goyne. Sally Hogshead. Jeff Walker. And yet the top three only accounted for 14% of sales. The top ten only accounted for a quarter, just over a quarter of sales. We had over 500 affiliates make at least one sale. That’s an army. That is an army.
That’s what you want. Claire Diaz Ortiz. And we ran her summit a few years back, one of the first virtual summits that we’d ever done. I mean to this point, most summits had like a thousand, two thousand registrations. This was years ago. This one had over 12,000 registrations. And yet we didn’t have a single affiliate with more than 400 registrations. We had 110 affiliates, over 110 make sent leads. I mean, just like these are the kind of numbers that you want. Ray Edwards. Nearly the same numbers as Michael. You remember earlier I talked about, we helped him have his first million dollar year.
He 2x is 2x’d his monthly revenue. No, wait, let me reverse that. Leaderboard that looked like this. Again, who’s who, right? Dan Miller. Oh, he passed away recently, if you didn’t know. Anyway, Jeff Walker, Jeff Bullis, Don Miller, Chandler Bolt was on there. Michael Hyatt was on his leaderboard. Craig Ballantyne. These are names. These are some of the biggest names in the marketing world. And yet the top three only accounted for 19% of sales. The top ten barely made up a third of his sales. And he had over 16, not over 16, but 16 affiliates, including Ernie Spencen and Mike Kim, who won the affiliate competition, who doubled their sales year over year. Mike Kim beat, ended up beating all of those people you just saw because he was loyal. Jason and Cecilia Hilke.
Their parenting summit, the Happily Family parenting Summit a few years ago. Get these numbers. than 20,000. And yet no affiliates sent more than 2,000. And most of their affiliates, they were first time affiliates. Think, well, first time affiliates can’t do anything. Yeah, they can. They can send 100, 200 500, a thousand. You get enough affiliates with 500, 200, 150 even starts to add up really, really fast. So how did we do this? We did it by ignoring the conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom tells you the lies that I’ve been sharing. It tells you that finding affiliates is hard, that it’s not worth it, that you don’t need an affiliate program.
It tells you not to work with small affiliates, that you have to do a ton of reciprocal promos. You have to intimately all of your affiliates. These are not true. When you ignore these lies, and especially the third one that says that most of your affiliates will come or most of your sales will come from only a few affiliates, you can build an affiliate program fast and that lasts. So can we safely say that this one is busted? So let me ask you, how many of you are super excited about what we’ve just talked about and how many of you are maybe a little overwhelmed because we’ve covered so much and we
scratched the surface in our short time together today. It feels like you’ve been drinking water from a fire hose. And you know, you’ve seen these results, you’ve seen these results that you can get with an affiliate program and from working with us to run your affiliate program. Like Chandler Bolt. We haven’t talked about him yet. You know, Chandler Bolt from self publishing school not only increased his year over year sales more than 400%, but he did so with seven times as many affiliates. He diversified his affiliate base. Now he’s an industry leader in his niche. Isn’t that awesome? Just think about what that would be like.
Get my #1 affiliate recruiting email (the one I’ve personally used to recruit thousands of affiliates in dozens of niches). Grab your copy here!
s
It also worked for Jeff Goins. He worked with us on his second book launch. His first book sold just over 3,000 copies. And I’ll never forget, he’s like, Matt, I gotta know, I gotta tell the publisher, how many books am I gonna sell? And I said 15,000. He’s like, I can’t tell them 15 days. Like, Matt, my last book sold 3,000. I can’t tell them 15,000. Like, Jeff, you were gonna tell your publisher you’re gonna sell 15,000. I’m looking at the numbers. We’re running this thing, you’re gonna sell 15,000.
And if you don’t tell them 15,000, I’m not going to work with you because I need you all in. Well, we ended up helping him sell more than 22,000 books. Multiple bestseller lists, increased his book sales and his revenue by more than 500%. Sound like fun? Like that was fun. All by increasing his number of affiliates and applying what we’ve been teaching today. Stu McLaren, another example. $10.4 million in sales over two launches. This is a two thousand dollar product, right? The number one affiliate in year two had more than two hundred sales.
Had nine sales the first year, nine sales the first year, did over two hundred. That’s how we get success for our clients. So I’ve shared the results of what we do. You’ve seen how our clients and I have personally succeeded with affiliates. I’ve shown you a little bit about what we do behind the scenes. And so from here you have a few options. You know, the first one is you can, you can do it yourself. This works for a lot of people. It’s what I did when I first started. And I’m going to share something in a moment that will make that significantly easier. Or if you’re thinking you can need a little, you know, you need a little help, you can hire an in house affiliate manager and I’ll talk about that and whether or not that’s right for you here in a little bit, or you can hire an agency to run it for you.
I’m going to share the disadvantages and the advantages of each of these in a moment. So option one here, run your own affiliate program, the DIY option. About 15, 10, 15% of affiliate programs choose this option. It’s definitely the beginner option. So what are the advantages to doing it yourself here? What are the advantages to doing yourself? Well, the obvious first one is there’s no cost. There’s no cost. You have 100% control and you have an intimate connection with your affiliates.
This is a great option if you are, you know, extremely, if you’re on an extremely limited budget, you really want to control things. You don’t want the hassle of managing someone or, or working with a contractor. This is the option. It’s also the most intimate connections with affiliates because you’re entrepreneur to entrepreneur. Now, the disadvantages might seem obvious, but real quick. First disadvantage is time. Second one is you probably don’t really know what you’re doing. And the third one is it’s the growth is slow and this goes back to the time part, it doesn’t scale. Well. Most affiliate programs like this don’t make it past about a half a million dollars. But this is an option to do it yourself.
The next option is to hire a full time in house affiliate manager. They are an employee of your company. Right. So what are the advantages of this? Well, the first one is, you know, more control. You have direct oversight of an employee. They’re in the office, you can literally walk in their office. The second one is, you know, your affiliate manager spends 100% of their time working on your program, only your program. Third is security. You know, this isn’t, this isn’t a big one, but it’s something that needs to be addressed. Like if, if you hire, you know, an unreputable outsourced agency, right, they have access to things you might not want them to, you know, to have. It’s, you know, it’s a thing.
Now again, this is if they’re shady, right? The more integrated that you are with other team members like your graphic designer, your marketing team, the CEO, et cetera, like, you know, maybe they eat lunch together. If you’re in an office, that, that’s a thing. Now like with our agency, you know, we integrate with our clients. We use their slack, their email.
Like, we don’t sign our emails. You know, the Matt McWilliams Agency, you know, we sign them, you know, affiliate manager, name of client. But some agencies don’t do that. So it’s something to talk about. So control, focus and security. The disadvantages, you know, cost, we talked about earlier, cost, you got to pay health insurance for 1K office space, you know, all those things. Limited network of affiliates, you know, they just don’t typically have a network built in. Scalability.
You know, you have one person, if they’re sick, they’re on vacation, things shut down. And even if that’s only three weeks a year, that’s three weeks a year. You know that you’re completely shut down with your affiliate program. And the last one I call strategic Myopia. This is where they are just, you know, isolation. They’re isolated from things like trends and best practices.
I found this happened to me when I ran my first affiliate program. I was so focused on our industry that I missed out on a lot of trends and knowledge. Burnout’s another one. You know, they have. They’re doing so much, constantly having to hire a new affiliate manager. You know, that’s just the reality of our world. You’re probably gonna have to hire a new one every 18 months. Now the final option is to hire an agency. And this is what Nick Stevenson did, you know, when he hired us. It’s what all the others that you’ve heard about today did. We help Nick triple his launch size and double his email list in only about three weeks. This is what Nick had to say about working with us. Over 20,000 new leads, hundreds of thousands of dollars took his business to an entirely new level. Imagine if that was you. So if you did hire an agency, this is where you hire a team of professional affiliate managers to run your program.
What would that look like? What are the advantages and disadvantages to hiring an agency? So first, what are the advantages? The first advantage, you know, is just lower cost, usually half or less of the cost to get usually better results. You don’t have to pay health insurance, you don’t have to, you know, no 401k. Etc. You’re working with a team, you know, so when someone’s out, it’s no big deal. We have four to six people working on an account and those people are spread out among different skill sets.
You know, like I’m the relationship guy in the strategy, I’m not the analytics guy. You have an access to a nice large network of affiliates. More clients equals more affiliates. You know, we have over 10,000 affiliates in our network, for example. Quicker startup time, quicker scalability, you know, because again, this is tied to the access to affiliates. Usually we can scale quicker than an in house affiliate manager experience. And we work with a ton of different clients. Not, not, they’re not like all launches, they’re not all evergreen.
We’re doing Evergreen. We’re doing launches, we’re doing parenting niche and then the AI law niche and then, you know, physical products. And we’re doing all these things and we’re pulling from different areas. And so for instance, if you’re an in house affiliate manager and you run two annual launches, you run two launches a year, that’s it our agency runs 12. You know, an agency might run 12, 24 launches, some more exposure, more learning. We’re running book launches, summits, challenges, webinars. Like we just get all these different looks at different types of promotions.
A couple other advantages, you know, you get access to better tools because as I’ve been an in house affiliate manager, it’s really hard for me to justify spending $5,000 a year on a, on a tool when it’s just for one program. But I can spend the same $5,000 and use it across multiple clients. And so the last advantage I would say is you get to focus on your core business and your core business where you’re just focused on what you do best. Now what about the disadvantage? I mean just to be totally transparent, biggest disadvantage is less direct control. It’s the opposite of the pro to the in house side. You have less in house or oversight of the affiliate manager. The communication challenges, we’re usually in a different time zone.
We have different communication preferences, things like that. The brand understanding, you know, we make a huge effort to understand our clients brands. We have a huge onboarding meeting and we let the client talk for a long time. But there’s always going to be, we’re never going to know as much as the in house person that lives and breathes the brand daily. And then the last one is just potentially potential con, you know, conflicting priorities. Agencies manage multiple clients, so sometimes it can lead to conflicts and prioritization. Like how do we prioritize our time and resources?
Whose brand are we building? You know, again, we don’t build our brand. When we work with our clients, we represent the client. But some agencies do that. So what’s the best option and which is best? As you listen to the pros and cons, you probably started thinking like that. You can see which one’s best for you. If you prioritize control and access to your affiliate manager, 100% go in house. If you prioritize lower costs and access to a larger network of affiliates, an agency usually makes sense.
If you want someone who’s a hundred percent focused on your business and knows your business inside out in house, makes the most sense. If you want a team of people who are skilled in different areas then, and who work across different niches and program types, then an agency makes sense for you. So which one is best? Well, the answer is, well, it depends.
There’s no perfect answer universally, but there is a perfect answer for you. So just think whatever, whatever you found as you listen to that and you go, yep, that’s the one for me. Now, regardless, real quick, as you look to hire an affiliate manager, here’s a quick, quick checklist of what to look for. First, culture fit. This is always, always, always number one.
All right, do you get along with them? Do they fit your style in your team’s style? All right, you don’t have to be best friends, but do you at least get along with them? The second is an understanding of your niche and understanding of your brand. They need to have at least a basic understanding. Third, you’re looking for a track record. I mentioned our clients. Stu McLaren, Ryan Levesque, Michael Hyatt, Adidas, Shutterfly, Lewis Howells, you know, Jeff Walker. I mean, like, these are the people we’ve worked with. You want to look for somebody who has a proven track record. And the last thing is a network. Do they have connections? Do they have relationships?
They have an existing database. Does it need to be 10,000? It helps. I mean, I’d rather have 10,000 than 500, but do they have a database of connections? So ask the question again. Which option is best for you? Are you thinking that you want it? What you want to do is hire someone in house full time or maybe do it yourself or hire an agency. Regardless of how you answer that, you might be asking yourself this, how can we work together? Now listen, I’m not going to insult you with a 15 minute sales pitch. Now for agency, you know, anything like that, right? I’m going to take a few minutes to outline the options. Y’all are smart enough to make a decision. So if that sounds like a possible plan for you, if you’re like, you know what, I think we’re interested in possibly hiring your agency. Or, or I’ve got a, you know, I’ve got somebody on my team that I think would be really good at running this.
Let’s talk. All right, Just go to your affiliatelaunchcoach. com LetsTalk I will be happy to schedule a call, see how we can help you. I will tell you that most of the people I talk to, I’m able to just give em a plan, help em on the phone and they’re on their own. You know, like they don’t, they don’t need us to be successful. But maybe you’re interested in working directly with our agency. You know, you want to build a seven or eight figure affiliate program like we’ve done. For the folks you’ve seen throughout this training, I’ve given you a pretty good look at what, what that would look like, but obviously there’s a lot more to it. I talked a moment ago about culture, fit and understanding of your niche.
Do we have that? I don’t know. So let’s talk and see if we’re a good fit. Maybe you have a good team. Maybe you, you know, you want to do it yourself. In that case we can coach you and we can coach your team and we can talk about that as well. Or maybe you want to hire someone in house and, but they need a little coaching. This happens all the time. Like they just need somebody to point them in the right direction. Hey, can you spend an hour a month helping our affiliate manager know how to do this better so we can make a lot of extra money? It’s something we do all the time. So either way, use that link.
Alan will drop that link in the chat for you there. Your affiliate launch coach. com let’s talk. Use that link to schedule a call and I will point you in the right direction. All right. My honest promise to you is that if I think that we’re a good fit to work together in some capacity, I will, I’ll let you know. And if we’re not, I will let you know that too and I will point you in the right direction. So your affiliatelaunchcoach.com letstalk now the final way we can work together is if you truly want to DIY it, you want to do it yourself. Our affiliate program, Kickstarter package, you know, on my journey that I shared earlier, I discovered a system for finding affiliates and getting them to sign up and getting them to promote like crazy.
And I was able to share a little bit of that earlier. And this is the, this is the system, you know, that led us to building up, you know, a million dollar a month affiliate program and to run those huge affiliate programs that I mentioned earlier. Now here’s the thing. If you want to do this yourself, or like I said, if you have an affiliate manager who needs some training, it doesn’t take doing this full time to get some results. Will you get More results if you hire an agency or hire someone full time who’s devoting eight, ten hours a day. Absolutely, of course. But you can get results in about an hour a day. That’s it. Like an hour a day if you start the right way.
And the affiliate program Kickstarter will help you do just that. Let me show you real quick what’s inside this Kickstarter package. The first thing is we’re going to help you get your first 30 affiliates. I will actively help you recruit your first 30 affiliates. This is a fully done for you service. So what are your first 30 affiliates worth? You know, if you, if they average even just $50 a month, that’s, that’s low. That’s extremely low. But let’s run with it. $50 a month times 30, $1500 a month times 12 months. That’s $18,000 a year. That’s extremely conservative. Okay, but like even just what we normally charge for that would be $3,000 plus 10% of who we help you recruit.
All right. You’re going to get five years on our featured programs page or recommended programs page. This includes a dedicated affiliate recruiting post on my site@mattmcwaims. com normally we charge you $1000 plus 10% of who we help you recruit. You’re going to get two dedicated emails to our full list of 10,000 plus affiliates. Normally we charge you $1,200 each plus 10% of who we help you recruit. These are the Kickstart in the Kickstarter package. You’ll be off and running with these. Right. We do 95% of the work here. All you have to do is help us understand your offer. Okay, but we’re not going to leave you hanging. We’re going to position you to succeed long after the initial Kickstart.
So how do you keep recruiting long term? Well, you’re going to get access to our find affiliates now course. This is our premium affiliate recruiting course. This is the system that led me to working with more than 300,000 affiliates over the past 19 years. I’m going to reveal the quick and easy way to find affiliates now. And not only find them, but to reach out to them. Okay? To reach out to them, to effectively get them to say yes to promoting you and to keep them promoting you for years to come. This course cuts right to the exact proven strategies I’ve used for more than a decade to find top affiliates and get them to promote.
No fluff, no theory. This is a hundred percent practical improvement. In fact, I’ll tell You right up front. And this is for your workbook here. Building a successful affiliate program, less about knowledge and information than it is about simply taking action and doing the work. Now that said, I wish I’d had this information when I was starting out because it would have saved me hundreds or probably thousands of hours of searching, learning by trial and error, all that stress and frustration. So not only that, but you’re going to get all of my best affiliate recruiting emails.
I shared one with you earlier. If you want the whole suite, you’re going to get them in this Kickstarter package. I’ve used these to recruit more than 300, a thousand, 300,000 affiliates. Hundreds of millions of dollars in sales for our clients because of these emails. The best copywriters in the world. All right, these are, these are professional copywriters. They use swipe files for a reason. They work. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. These are my best recruiting emails that I tested out for over a decade. All you got to do is copy and paste them and edit them just a little bit to fit your needs. Okay. Included in these swipe files are my follow up templates, some of the most important emails you will ever use. This is also for your workbook here. The key to great affiliate recruiting is very simple. It’s follow up. You should follow up at least 10 times over the course of a year.
So lastly, what about the tech work? Right? What about the tech work? Well, we’re going to get you set up on an affiliate network. We’re going to handle all the tech work. This is another done for you service here. We’re going to set you up on the world’s leading affiliate network. Plus I will personally make sure you get the best rate. All right, I’m going to make sure. I mean this could easily save you 10,000 a year. All right. I actually just recently negotiated a deal with an affiliate network that is going to save a client. Now this is a very, very, very large client. To be clear. It’s going to save them a quarter of a million dollars a year.
So Normally we charge $4,250 just for the tech setup. We’re going to get you set up on an affiliate network. And last but not least, so you have ongoing know how on how to run your affiliate program. We’re going to give you our seven figure affiliate launch course. This was recorded for a private group. I’ve never shared it publicly. This will show you how to run your affiliate program long term. You know, day after day, week, after week. Right? I said, last but not least forgot one thing. Our promo plan templates. These literally took us dozens of hours to create. We’re going to hand them to you. These promo templates will help you get your affiliates to promote more, and they’ll need a lot less handholding.
Giving your affiliates just a simple promo plan. I’ve done the studies. It has been proven to increase affiliate sales by as much as 25%. This is the easiest way to add 25% to your bottom line. Right? So as you can see here, the total of this separately, the $14,917. I’m not going to charge you anywhere near that, of course, but just think about it for a moment.
If, if all it did was get your first 30, you know, your first 30 affiliates, who they may, and they make you just the $18,000 in your first year. And let’s be real, that’s ridiculously low. Would it be worth it? Of course. Right. If all it did was continue to send you a few affiliates every month from being listed on our recommended programs page and the dedicated recruiting emails. I mean, if all you did was know how to make, just make it easy for you, so you could add just two affiliates a week and build a steady flow of new leads, fans and sales, would it be worth it? And you can probably see why people pay $10,000 or more for the results they get because it’s not a cost, it’s an investment. I’m not going to ask you to invest anywhere near $14,970 like this. Again, if you went to, to put it into perspective, if you went to my site right now and you purchased all of these separately, that is exactly. You’d pay nearly 15 grand.
But today it’s not $14,917. You can actually take advantage of this offer and get everything you see here for $2,497. Or if you need to, you can actually spread it over 6, 6 payments of only 4. You see the URL on your screen there. If you go to kickstarter package. com. if you need further proof, you can look around, watch the videos, read the proof, then click Join. Now you’ll be prompted. Enter your payment information. Enter the information. You’ll immediately be able to access everything you see here.
If you are ready to take your business to the next level and start an affiliate program, start with my free report, Your First 100 Affiliates. This report takes nearly two decades of experience, trial and error, and lessons learned about finding top affiliates in nearly every conceivable niche and puts them all into one report. Grab your copy here!
You will immediately get access to a course, the recruiting emails, the courses, the templates. We’ll set up a call so I can get to know your program and your brand so we can start helping you recruit your first 30 affiliates. We’ll get you set up on that recommended programs page. Once you get. It’s a simple form that you fill out. Once you fill out that form, we’ll get you set up on that page within a couple of weeks.
We’ll get that first email scheduled within the first month. Like you will start seeing results from this quickly. I will say the one thing, I will say the long term management of it. It’s going to take you a few weeks to learn how to do that. You know, you’re going to actually have to do the work. But we’ll get you kickstarted and you can build the affiliate program of your dreams. I’m going to show you how in this package here. So go to kickstarterpackage. com and check it out again if you need more proof. There’s proof on that page. And I’m going to repeat what I said earlier. And I hope I’ve convinced you of these two things. Number one, an affiliate program is the best way to grow your sales.
Secondly, the best way to start, build and grow an affiliate program is to model others. So get out there, start your program, we’ll show you, we’ll help you with this package here. I’ve never offered this before and I don’t want to say I’m never going to offer it again. I don’t know, I might, I might not. I really haven’t decided yet. We’ll see how it goes. Like, we’re going to put in a lot of work recruiting those first 30 for you, putting you up on a recommended programs page, sending out two emails to over 10,000 affiliates each.
You know, getting you set up on the affiliate network. Those are not easy. We’re going to do it all for you. We’re going to make this. I would just, I, when I was putting together this package, I’m like, how do I make this so stupid simple for somebody to say yes and hopefully I’ve done that with this. So get out there, start your program, study what the others are doing. Model copy steel, like we talked about, building is something great because I know you can do this. You can grow this beyond your wildest imagination.
So check it out. Kickstarter package. com and with that, Alan, I am ready to take some questions. I know we saw some coming in there, but let’s, let’s jump in with some questions, buddy. So here’s what the first question that came in. I’m still not sure working with competitors. This is an interesting question. I’m still not sure working with competitors is right for my industry. How could I make that work? It might not be. I mean, not every single thing that I shared is for every single person. To be clear, most of the things are for most of the people, you know, most of the things are for most of the people.
But that said, not everything is for everyone. So to answer the question of like, you know, could it be a good fit for you to work with your competitors? Maybe. How would you do it? Again, think, what do you have that could be an upsell? What do you have that could be a down sell? What do you have that could, you know, go to a niche within a niche?
If know, what do you have that could work with your competitors? You know, what do you have that could go to someone’s non buyers and vice versa, you know. And I will tell you that the niche within a niche and the non buyers part typically works the best. It’s a tough thing to reach out to somebody. You say, would you be an affiliate for my product and promote me to your entire list even though we’re pretty much competitors?
That’s a tough one. Why would they promote, you know, let’s just look at a, you know, let’s look at a supplement company. If I have a multivitamin, you have a multivitamin. Why would I promote your multivitamin to my buyers of my multivitamin? That would be idiotic for me, right? But if they’ve been on my list and my audience for four years and haven’t bought the multivitamin, maybe my multivitamin just isn’t good for him. They love my B complex and they love my fish oil, but they don’t like my multivitamin.
So I could promote your multivitamin and make some money, right? I could. At least I might. I’m going to make less promoting you than I am selling my own multivitamin. But they haven’t bought it in four years. So I’m going to make something instead of nothing. And that’s how you position that and then the niche within a niche. So here’s an example. Let’s just stay on the supplement niche. I sell multivitamins, fish oil and probiotics. You have other things like a prostate supplement thing that helps with menopause, a thing that helps with the, you know, digestion and blah, blah, blah. You have a bunch of stuff that I don’t have. So I’m going to promote that even though we’re both in the supplement niche. And you would, you could argue we’re in the supplement niche, so we’re competitors, but I don’t have those things.
So I’ll promote you in a heartbeat because then I’m going to make something instead of nothing. And here’s the thing. I look at this long term as in a potential affiliate. This is what we did. I mentioned the blues guitar Example, right. What we did is we determined a lot of people were interested in that blues guitar course.
So guess what we did? Eventually we stopped promoting Dan and we made our own, we made our own blues guitar course, but it was proof that we could sell a 100 blues guitar course because we sold, you know, 5, 10,000 of them through Dan. And so yeah, I mean eventually him work like we became no longer, we were no longer affiliates for Dan, but only after he’d made about $750,000 from us. So that worked out well for him. Real quick and we’ll, we’ll jump into the next question, but I just want to remind you guys, if you want to schedule a call, go to your affiliatelaunchcoach.com forward/letstalk and let’s just schedule a call and talk. I, I, we’ll just see what works. You know, we’ll see if it, maybe it’s coaching, maybe it’s, maybe it’s working with our agency. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe I can give you an ebook that will solve your problem for free.
You know, that might be the answer. And if you’re interested in getting it says find affiliates now, but actually should say the affiliate Kickstarter package there. If you want to get the affiliate Kickstarter package that we talked about getting proof that we are definitely live. Because it took me until the final slide to make a mistake. I told Robbie, who’s our operations manager, who was, I think he was on a little bit ago.
I told Robbie I’m going to screw up at least one slide today. And sure enough, I screwed up the, the like 150th slide. So final one, if you want to get that Kickstarter package, go to Kickstarter package dot com. All right, next question there, Alan. Sounds good. So Britta asks, and this is a great question too, what’s the ideal price of a product for such an affiliate program?
I’ve run programs where the average price was sub $50. Shutterfly Friend programs where the average order size was about I’ve run programs back, way back like 19 years ago where the average transaction was sub $15. And I’ve run programs where the average sale price was, you know, thousands of dollars. I mean Alan, Alan’s average price is $7,000 plus. And he’s rocked, rocked this. Isn’t that right? Isn’t your average is over 7,000, right? Yeah, yeah. We have different price points, but that’s, that’s the average. And, and it, so I mean, here’s the way I’ll say it. If, if I’ve done it at 15 and 25, you 50,150,500,1000,2000,2500,5000,7000. What’s the ideal price? It’s whatever your market supports.
The ideal price is a competitive price that isn’t the cheapest. It isn’t the cheapest, but it’s, you know, it doesn’t have to be people. I, I know where you’re getting with that Brit, because it’s like, well, how can I compete when other affiliate programs are offering a thousand dollar commissions on a four thousand dollar product? Well, that’s a different market. Does anybody. Yeah, I mean people promote stuff all the time and make $0.50 commissions. The average commission on Shutterfly, I don’t have the stats in front of me, but I’m going to say it’s probably 8 to $12 per transaction. We had people making thousands of transactions a day, so that’s how they made their money, was in volume. Nobody is going to pay a thousand dollars for a photo quilt. Pay 80 bucks for it though, you know, so it just depends. Whatever your market will support. Right. So next question is how long does it take to go through the course? Find Affiliates now is a five day course. Seven figure affiliate launch. It is not a specific.
So Find Affiliates Now. Let me back up to that one. Find Affiliates now is actually meant to be a five day course that takes five days. I’m like, duh, thank you. No, it’s meant to, you know, you go through on a Monday and you finish on a Friday, so takes about an hour a day. And you do the exercises, you do the, at the end of each lesson there are specific things you are supposed to do for that day to accomplish a given result. And at the end of the day you will have achieved a result. At the end of the week you will know exactly what you’re doing. And it’s not just like information, it’s again, practical application.
Seven figure affiliate launch. You might be seven minutes into a video and pause it and go execute on what I just talked about and not come back to that course for five days or 10 days or a month. And that’s fine. It is not meant to be a course that you go through quickly. It’s meant to be a course that you watch it and there’s a lot of it that are like, there’s a specific lesson on how to run a book launch.
Don’t watch the book launch lesson until you’re ready to run a book launch. Fair enough. Don’t watch, watch the lesson on how to run a virtual summit until you decide to run a virtual summit. Don’t watch the lesson on anything else until you’re ready to do that thing. And so you. I, I have, I’ve heard people think of Pete Vargas. Pete Vargas is the very first person that ever paid me money to learn how to run an affiliate program. Not paid me money to run an affiliate program.
I’d been doing that for over a decade before Pete. But the very first person he paid me for seven figure affiliate launch. His very first launch was over $4 million. He never finished the course. Are you supposed to finish all the courses? You know, it’s like you’re not supposed to finish every book you start reading. Either if you got what you wanted out of it and, or you figured it sucked. Why didn’t he finish the courses? Because the course is terrible.
No, I just told you. Ran over a four million dollar launch using it. Why didn’t he finish the course? Because he got what he needed and was able to execute on that and finishing the course. Spending another two hours to finish the course might have been counterproductive and at the very least would have just been a waste of two hours because it wouldn’t have, he wouldn’t have been able to execute on anything else that he learned. So I’m totally cool with that course. If you get 10, 20 minutes in, you pause and go execute on it for some amount of time again, it could be weeks or even months and then you can come back. It’s not going anywhere. It’ll be right there when you come back. All right, so next question is, of the methods you shared, Matt, which of the best is to start with physical mail, social media, text or email? Email. Email is the one we always start with. There’s a few reasons.
Number one, you could send 100 emails. If you sent them one by one, you could send 100 emails in the next because they’re gonna, let’s be honest, you’re gonna copy and paste, you’re gonna edit the email a little bit. You could send 100 emails in the next two hours. Like that’s that’s high. You could probably send it in the next hour and 10 minutes, you know, but I’m gonna assume you’re a hunt and pecker typer and, you know, you’re not very fast. So let’s call it two hours. How long would it take you to send 100 DMS on social media? Because you got to go, you know, you got to go through that and like click on this thing. And they usually don’t let you send 100 very quickly. So you gotta send 10 and then wait a couple hours, send another It just takes a long time.
How long does it take, you know, to send, you know, 100 pieces of physical mail? A long time. Are they more effective? Yeah. So here’s what we do. We start with email and we follow up, and we follow up, and we follow up, and we follow up, and we follow up and we can send those. We use a program called GMASS. Highly recommend it. If you want the link, it’s mattmcwilliams.com gmas. I think it’s like 20 bucks a month. And you can send mail merges, mass emails through, you know, your own email account. Super awesome, love it. You can send those. I said 120 minutes.
You can actually, if you’ve got a spreadsheet, you can send them in about a minute. So you send those and you track them. Well, here’s what happens. You send a hundred, you get ten people who reply. Three people say no, one person says yes, six people say maybe. Now you keep those in separate tabs. You got the yes, you got the no’s, and you got the mate. Well, you’re down to 90 people. So then we follow up with those 90s and you get about another 10 who reply. And now you got some yeses, some no’s, and some maybes. And some of those maybes become yeses as you follow up them. But now you’re down to 80 people. You continually do that.
Now you’re down to 50 people. Now you have 50 people where you can say, okay, now I’m going to take the time to go to social media and do it. You still haven’t spent any money other than $20 on gas, right? You still have effectively spent no money. Then you do that and then, and now when you get down to, there’s only 30 people left, they have not replied to your emails, your dms. You go, do I want to maybe do a physical mailing to them?
A physical mailing that might cost you 10, 15, $20, you know, if you put something in there and you make it nice and etc. So instead of spending a boatload of money on the, the whole hundred, you spend a boatload of money on just 30 and it saves you a ton of money. And it’s quicker because again, the other thing about physical mail is I got to get it together. It’s going to take me a couple of weeks to get it together and mail it out. Then it has to get to them and then they, you know, they respond and it’s a three, four week process versus I could hear, I could send out 100 emails today. I could hear. We’re recording this right now and it is 3:27pm Eastern time. I could potentially hear from an affiliate before I take my kids to soccer practice tonight.
And what that does for your psyche, to get one yes or even just one maybe is so huge to just hear from one person. That’s what it was like for me. I heard from that first person, a guy named Brandon Miller. He’s from, he’s from western North Carolina. He called. Hi Mad, it’s Brandon. I’m still, man, still. If he called me up right now and said, hi Mad, it’s Brandon, like that’s Brandon Miller. I haven’t talked to Brandon in 18 years. Hi Mad, it’s Brandon. I got a quick question, you know, just outside of Boone, North Carolina. And, and he, I mean he was like the very first person. He only averaged like $300 a month. Wasn’t a, you know, if you think about to a million dollars a month. But the, the fact that I got somebody to say yes made it a million times easier. And I got him to say yes in the first weekend, that made the next week so much easier. And I started to get more and more yeses and I had confidence and I saw it was working.
So I know it’s a long answer to the question, but that’s why I start with email. Cool. All right, and then last question, last one is what if I go through the program and it doesn’t. If you go through. So if you get the Kickstarter package and I mean, I cannot comprehend or even foresee getting you 30 affiliates. Let’s just go back real quick. I’ll show you here, just as a reminder, probably put that up on the screen there.
But all this, I mean, if we recruit your first 30 affiliates for you, we put you up on our recommended programs page. I mean if you get one affiliate a month from that, that’s 60. If you get one a quarter, that’s 20 affiliates. If we send two dedicated emails to 10,000 plus and IT bombs and you only get 10 affiliates from each. So we’re at 30. We’re at, what did I say, four a year. So 50, you only get 20. So you’re not only.
You’re at 70. If you go through find affiliates now and you know it doesn’t work for you and you’re only able to recruit a few people, if we put you up on the network and we somehow manage to put together the least attractive affiliate offer in the history of affiliate networks, and you only get one affiliate a month, which would, would be the least attractive thing in the history of affiliate networks. All right, so at the end of three years, you know, you’re at a hundred affiliates. And let’s just say that hypothetically, those hundred affiliates were a total disaster and only ten of them made $50 a month.
I mean, I’m like, I’m making this into an Armageddon practically. It still pays for itself in about a year. And that’s in the absolute worst case. I mean, this simply put, it pays for itself very, very quickly. So again, that’s if, you know, if everything went wrong, the proverbial poop hit the fan and, you know, what is it? Basically, if it was a country song, your dog died, your mom got, went to prison, you know, and all those things, you’re still going to pay for it. It’s still going to pay for itself in a couple of years. So there you have it.
So again, check it out@kickstarterpackage. com if you want to. If you want to have a chat, go to your affiliatelaunchcoach.com forward slash. Let’s talk, guys, with that, I hope, like I said earlier, that I’ve convinced you of what I promised at the beginning. The best way to start an affiliate or the best way to grow your sales is start an affiliate program. And the best way to start and build and grow an affiliate program is to model others, guys. So get out there, go do it, and we’ll see you soon. If you have any questions like we talked about earlier, you can reach out to me at 260-217-4619 anytime. Talk to you guys soon. Bye.