Free Checklist Helps You Get the Most Out of Your Affiliates

by Matt McWilliams | Jul 14, 2016 | Product Launches

During a launch, it’s one thing to get affiliates to send an email or two. It’s another to get them to go “all-in” for your launch. Today, I’ll share the exact checklist that we use to get the most out of our affiliates.

When you first get someone to commit to promoting your launch, it’s exciting. You expect them to send a bunch of emails, share on social media, mention your launch on their podcast, etc.

But it rarely works out that way. Your affiliates have their own businesses to run and their own marketing to worry about. So, your launch can easily get lost in the shuffle.

But what if it didn’t have to be that way? And what if the solution was actually incredibly simple?

Well, it is. In fact, it’s as simple as a checklist. Below I’ll share with you how this checklist came to be and the results we’ve seen from using it with our affiliates. I’ll also share how you can get an editable version of the exact template we use for our launches…completely FREE. If you want to skip right to downloading the template, click here.

The Problem with Launches

As I wrote earlier, affiliates have their own businesses to run, their own lives to manage, and life can get busy and messy. Unfortunately, during a launch, you need your affiliates operating on all cylinders for you.

We used to have a problem with affiliates backing off their promotions during launches. They’d send one or two emails and maybe send a few Tweets and then disappear.

Why?

Because they got overwhelmed. They got distracted. They didn’t know the next right thing to do.

Affiliate Promo Checklist

That’s why we created our Affiliate Promo Checklist. We use it in all of our launches and in a moment I’ll share the results we’ve had since we introduced it.

This simple checklist makes it easy for affiliates to know the exact dates they should mail. It tells them when and where to share on social media and even encourages them to mention the launch on their podcast and live videos.

Here’s what one part looks like on the one we did for Nick Stephenson’s February launch:

Why It Works

Let’s face it…people like things to be simple. And some people just operate better using a checklist.

This puts the entire launch right in front of the affiliates and encourages them to do more for each piece of content than just send an email. Email is king and probably always will be, but you can get some great results from social media and podcasts, especially sharing the free pre-launch content.

By keeping everything right in front of our affiliates, we’ve also noticed a significant drop in “mid-launch dropouts” – those people who come out of the gates swinging and then disappear.

The Results

In the very first launch we used it in, we noticed a 14% increase in active affiliates (affiliates sending at least ten optins).

We also noticed a 7% increase in emails sent (not a huge increase, but certainly worth the effort). But the real uptick was in Twitter mentions. We saw a dramatic (89%) increase in those. We didn’t measure any other channels but we assume those were up as well.

Lastly, we had numerous affiliates report that they recorded commercials or inserted mentions of the launch into their podcasts and live videos.

In short, in that first launch, we estimated at least a 15% increase in optins and sales as a result of using the checklist. That meant more than $65,000 in sales. From a simple checklist.