How Many Affiliate Launches Can You Promote Each Year?

by Matt McWilliams | Jul 7, 2016 | Affiliate Marketing

One of the most common questions I get from my tribe is about how many affiliate launches one can promote each year. In other words, how many big promotions for other peoples’ products can you do in one year? The answer varies, but there is a simple way to decide how many promotions are right for you.

First, you have to acknowledge that there is no “one-size-fits-all” answer. For some people, the answer may be as few as two per year, while others have tons of success promoting as many as 15 per year.

Here’s what we advise our private coaching clients to do to find the right number for them.

Ask yourself these three questions:

QUESTION #1 – How Does My Audience Respond to Affiliate Promotions?

I’m not asking if ANYONE ever complains. Someone always complains. That’s just some folks’ prerogative no matter what you do.

So, I am not suggesting you cater to the whims of a handful of outspoken people who hate it when you promote affiliate offers.

But you SHOULD make educated decisions when it comes to what you promote (the offer), how you promote it (your marketing strategy), and who you promote it to (segmenting).

What price points do they respond best to?

What do the numbers tell you, both financially and in terms of audience reaction (unsubscribes, positive emails, click through rates, etc.)?

Asking yourself this question is the foundation for every other question you will ask as you determine what to promote and how often to do so.

QUESTION #2 – How Much Will I Support Each Promotion?

If you plan on giving a lot of support to each promotion, you will naturally promote fewer launches.

If you plan on only sending a single email for each promotion, you can promote more offers.

Personally, I have three different levels at which I promote affiliate offers.

Going All-In

The first level has me going ALL-IN.

These are the promotions that I do just about everything I can to promote.

My promotion includes most of the following:

Promoting each piece of pre-launch content.
Promoting webinars.
Promoting livecasts and AMAs.
Creating a bonus package for the offer.
Writing a review post about the product.
Spending money on Facebook Ads.
Sending 5+ emails on the final day of the launch.

You can see why I call this “all-in.”

We do only a handful of these promotions each year and they require a lot of our energy and focus for at least two weeks each promotion.

Limited Promotion

The second way I promote affiliate offers is Limited Promotion.

I’ll bet you can guess what separates this way from the All-In promotions?

You guessed it…it’s limited!

This means I might send only one or two emails during the entire launch.

Or I may segment my email list and only promote the offer to a portion of my list.

JV Webinars

The third way I promote affiliate offers is by promoting JV Webinars.

By JV Webinar, I mean when someone I am promoting does a webinar exclusively for my audience.

These promotions typically last no more than 10 days. The promotion breakdown might look like this:

Webinar promotion: 2-3 days
Webinar: 1-2 days (occasionally we will do two sessions)
Webinar replay: 2-3 days
Open cart: 3-4 days

This is a type of promotion that my team and I are really focusing on in the coming year.

Why? Because there is more flexibility in terms of scheduling compared to a big product launch.

Of course, in addition to these three ways, there are:

Evergreen offers
Promoting on podcasts and video
Resources pages
and many other ways to promote an offer…

But when it comes to a planned promotion, these are the three main ways that I promote.

Determining what level you’ll be promoting a launch greatly impacts the number of promotions you’ll be able to do in a year.

QUESTION #3 – Do I “Owe” Anyone a Reciprocal?

If someone has promoted you in the past and you owe them (implied or explicitly stated), you should honor that agreement.

If you owe 5 people this year, that sets your minimum number of promotions at 5 of course.

You have to schedule those 5 promotions in your calendar before any other affiliate promotions. These come only after your own promotions (see below).

The Most Common Range

Most people will answer these questions and fall somewhere in the spectrum of doing 4-10 affiliate launches per year.

Yes, I know that is a broad range…but I know very many people who do more or less than that range.

How to Narrow Down Possible Affiliate Opportunities

Once you have a good idea of how many affiliate promotions you want to promote in a given year, follow these 5 steps:

1. Start With Your Own Launches and Promotions

The first dates that should go on your calendar each year are your own launches and promotions.

Get those set in stone before you commit to anything else.

2. Build a One Week Buffer

Once you have your dates on the calendar, add at least one week before and after. Longer, if at all possible.

Those dates are off limits as well, as you’ll want to give your audience a rest before and after your main events.

This also keeps you from getting burned out.

Trust me, I’ve made this mistake.

If you don’t build in this buffer, you will burn out, which will cause all aspects of your business to suffer.

3. Make a List of Everything You Could Support

This step is simple.

Make a list of everything you could possibly support as an affiliate. If you are looking for a good list to start with, check out our upcoming affiliate launches page.

BE THE FIRST TO KNOW: Click here to be the first notified when a new affiliate program is coming up.

4. Decide What Fits

Now it’s time to decide what fits.

Start with the easiest qualifier first: the dates.

If the dates don’t work, you can’t promote it. These are easy to eliminate.

Next, use this free scorecard to decide if the product or service is a good fit for your audience and if you will succeed at promoting it.

If any of the launches overlap, you have to decide what you want to do about that. You could:

Choose one over the other
Segment your list and promote both
Promote both at first and segment from there
Promote one via email and the other via paid ads

Steps three and four should narrow things down considerably.

5. Make a Final Cut to Your Desired Number

At this point, you have to make tough choices.

The remaining launches are all good fits for your audience and calendar, but you don’t want to constantly be in promotion mode. So you have to eliminate some to give your audience some space.

This final cut is generally very subjective. I will often take a look at the scores from my “Should I Promote This?” scorecard and drop the lowest scores.

Other times, it’s a matter of the calendar.

If I decide to promote two launches back-to-back, the third one loses out.

Sometimes, I just want to help a friend with his or her promotion. Other times, I want to get on someone’s radar, so I choose his or her promotion over something else.

Usually, at some point, it ends up being a coin flip or deciding to push one promotion off until the following year.

My Magic Number

For me, my magic number of affiliate promotions is about 8 per year. Here’s how that looks for me:

4 internal launches effectively eliminates 4 months of the year.
Typically we’ll see about 20 offers we want to promote. We start by looking at the dates. That usually knocks out about 5.
Next, we score them on our 1-30 scale. That gets us down to about 10.
Lastly, we have to eliminate two, which is tough. Like I mentioned before, this part is a lot less science and more of a coin flip.

Once we have our eight, they are mostly set in stone. We’ll occasionally add one (as we just did recently), but otherwise, we stick to the calendar.

Follow my formula and you’ll know your magic number, too.

What is your magic number of affiliate launches per year?