Do affiliate leaderboards actually produce more sales? The answer is a resounding YES and I’ll explain why below. I’ll also share how to make the most of your leaderboards to dramatically increase your sales.
At their core, affiliate leaderboards are a form of psychological persuasion.
They encourage people to aim higher, achieve more, and fight it out. They are fun and engaging and produce more sales. But why?
The majority of the population has a hard time asking for things, even from those whom they’ve helped. For some, the idea of it is downright terrifying. But if you are going to succeed in launching a product or service, you’ll have to get over your fears and learn how to ASK.
I recently received a very common question from a reader, Adam Franklin. Adam is one of our top partners in multiple launches and one of my favorite people in online marketing. You should definitely follow him on his blog.
He asked:
The #1 thing I struggle with is the “ask” — especially when I ask people to support me.
I am totally fine supporting other people’s launches, as you’ve probably noticed. And I’ve spent the last 18 months, forming and strengthening relationships on this basis. It’s easy because it’s GIVING.
But…when I try to recruit JV partners to support my material, that makes me a bit uncomfortable because I feel it more as TAKING. I know it’s meant to be win-win etc… but there’s discomfort.
You’re six months from launch date. What do you do to keep your affiliate partners warm before your launch? Here’s the exact strategy we use for our clients.
Unfortunately the “normal” way we usually see people warming up their partners is “not at all.”
Here’s a typical pre-launch calendar:
1 month out: Email announcing launch.
Day before launch: Here’s what you need for tomorrow.
Not exactly warming them up.
You have a product ready. You know it will change people’s lives. The question you ask yourself now is: “Will my launch be successful?” How can you know if your launch will be successful?
This is the exact question I get asked frequently. Here’s a recent example from a reader:
Do you have criteria for “what should be in place” to judge whether a launch would be successful or not? (Email list numbers, FB page Likes etc..)
Humans are intrinsically wired to do things which have a certain guarantee of success. Even climbing Mount Everest, where 1.6% of climbers die trying, has a success rate of 50%. In other words, you are 31 times more likely to reach the summit than die…sounds appealing.
We want to know if we are ready to launch. We want to make sure everything is in order to guarantee success.
We all have to start somewhere. Some first time affiliate launches are big. Some are small. Some are resounding successes, while others are unmitigated disasters. Most, however, fall somewhere in between. That’s exactly what happened to Scott Barlow with his first affiliate launch.
I’ve participated in JV launches for over 2 years for several different courses. Some of them were total failures and others have been very successful.
I recently moved into doing JV Partnerships for my own products as a way to build out my list and be able to reach a greater number of people.
We began by offering a free 8 day course that helps people learn what they should be doing for work or business. Later, this turned into webinars. With each new affiliate partner we would offer the 8 day course to their list — which was an extremely high value optin and led to an opportunity for people to learn more through the webinar. We went through this same sequence one affiliate partner at a time. This allowed us to send a lot of people through the 8 day course and do a lot of webinars so we could really perfect our messaging and sales funnel.
Once I had proven the sales funnel and messaging I knew I wanted to do a full JV launch.
We did our first full-scale affiliate launch in January 2016 with approximately 15 affiliates.
Finding affiliate partners is a lot easier than it may seem. In fact, you have a whole bunch of them right under your nose. Today, I will share three surprising sources of affiliate partners.
To get started finding good affiliates, there are two obvious places to look:
But what about the not-so-obvious, but oh-so-easy places?