Paul Pruitt is not exactly a household name in the affiliate marketing world. And yet…he’s consistently finished in the top 10 of major affiliate launches over the past two years. Today, Paul reveals the strategies he used to once again finish in the top 10 of one of the biggest affiliate launches ever. Listen to this, learn from Paul, and apply what he shares and you’ll be on YOUR way to the leaderboard!
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
Tools of the Trade: What Every Affiliate Manager Should Be Using
7 Major Roadblocks to Scaling Your Affiliate Program (and How to Fix Them)
The Best Ways to Celebrate Your Affiliates (and Keep Them Loyal)
After Studying 8,000 Affiliate Programs, I Found This Surprising Truth
How to Beat the Dreaded Mid-Promo Slump in Affiliate Launches
How Paul Pruitt Went from Unknown Affiliate to The Top of the Leaderboard in Only Two Years
Paul Pruitt is not exactly a household name in the affiliate marketing world, and yet he has consistently finished in the top 10 of major affiliate launches over the past few years. Today, Paul reveals the strategies he used to once again finish in the top 10 of one of the biggest affiliate launches ever. So listen to this, learn from Paul and apply what he shares and you’ll be on your way to the leaderboard.
Let’s get started. So today you’re going to learn how an unknown affiliate went to the top of the leaderboard in less than two years. This is the story of Paul Pruitt. I’m so excited to share this because this is a story of a guy that I only got to know recently, as of the time that I recorded this interview. And then I got to watch him go from like just outside the top 10 in a big launch to just inside the top 10 to seventh to fifth to top five, like, just unbelievable progress. And I asked him a couple of years ago to do an interview for some of our paid students and they loved it. This is one of those interviews that they absolutely just raved about because the lessons are so practical.
How he went from literally just starting his business, kind of dipping his toe into affiliate marketing, making a little bit of money and going a little bit higher, a little bit higher, a little bit higher. And it’s just such a great story. And so I wanted to make this available to everyone. I wanted the world to be able to hear this and not have to pay a dime for it, even though it’s clearly worth, well, hopefully worth tens of thousands or more to you if you actually apply what he shares in this episode.
So that’s my hope, is that you make a ton of money off just this episode. So here’s the deal. If you’ve got affiliates, share this with them, share how he got better and better. And if you’re an affiliate yourself, learn from him and make a whole lot more money. So that’s my hope for this episode. So with that, let’s jump right into my talk with Paul Pruitt. We’re going to jump right in here, guys. Welcome, Paul. Paul Pruitt. Guys,
Paul Pruitt :hey, thank you for having me. I’m really blessed to be here. And yet I would say I’m passive in the sense that I just sit back and absorb, you know, and I do that in the real world as well. A lot of people think I’m an introvert initially. I just like to learn and absorb and, like, feel the room out before I know where I fit in. So thank you for having me on here. I’m really blessed to be here.
Matt :So are you an introvert?
Paul Pruitt :I wouldn’t classify myself an introvert. You know, it’s something that I’ll say that I have. It’s something I discovered younger and then older. It came back anxiety about publicly reading something I didn’t realize. It just came back, like, in recent time, and I know we’re going to jam in on some PLF launching and stuff. And I didn’t realize this until in recent years that Melissa and I did a PLF style launch back in, like, 2016, and we had a professional crew and they were doing a teleprompter. And when I started reading, I tripped up, got in my head, start repeating words. It brought me back to my childhood. Like, I’m. I’m a rifter. Like, I can riff. You give me three bullet points and, like, I’ll just. I know my thing and I’ll just do it. But when I started reading, like, I didn’t realize, like, I had this public phobia of doing that, so. Wow, it was a lot to learn there.
Matt :Yeah. Interesting. That’s. Yeah. I don’t know how. I guess I’ve been using teleprompters. I was like 22 when I used my first teleprompter. Yeah, almost 40 years ago, early 2002. And for some reason, I just got it, you know? And it’s like, sometimes you just don’t know. Like, why? Why is that? I have no idea. You know, it’s not that. Oh, I practiced this or I practiced. Like, I was nervous. I was a nervous wreck. I’m like, the words are gonna be moving. How am I supposed to. You know? And, like, I’m thinking my eyes are gonna be going like this, you know, and I’m gonna be just a total doofus. And, you know, I did it the very first time. And, like, the guy was like. He goes, you are. You are. He’s like, you’ve done this before? I’m like, no, I really haven’t. He’s like, there’s no way. He’s like, you’ve done this Before, I’m like, no, really, I haven’t. And for some reason, you know, there’s. There’s just weird things like that, you know, I think we.
I think the important thing is when we identify those, there’s a lesson, you know, like, tap into them, and when we don’t have them, the lesson for you, I think, you know, getting away from the affiliate side, but the lesson for you is don’t give Paul a script. Give him the bullet points, and then let him, you know, go from there.
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Paul Pruitt :And I spoke in front of more than 6,000 people, you know, but it’s like I knew my. I knew. I have internalized the script, you know, so it’s. It’s just something. It’s. It’s. I think, for all of us, you know, on this journey, especially with Internet marketing, everything, we have to find our strengths and our weaknesses and just identify and lean in to amplify what works, you know? Yeah. Surround yourself with other people. Like, Melissa’s incredible that way with. With reading and stuff. But I. I digress. I’m getting on tangents here. This is all about.
Matt :No worries. I think that was an important lesson. It’s like, it’s not about the. Whether you can use a teleprompter or not. It’s, you know, like, I have people all the time. They’re like, well, I can’t start a podcast because I don’t like talking. Well, then write. People still read, y’all. Like, you don’t have to have a podcast. I don’t read, but I’ve never. I mean, I read, but I’m mostly an auditory learner, so I listen to audiobooks. So if you’re going to get me. I don’t. I got a bookshelf back here.
I haven’t read very many of those. I listen to the books. I listen to the audio version, though. And just. Just a side note there. But, yeah, tap into that strength, you know, whether it be an inborn strength or a strength that maybe you developed over the course of Maybe. Maybe you learned a lot about something and you didn’t even mean to learn a lot about it. I don’t know. So let’s talk about this promotion you did for product launch formula. First of all, it wasn’t just you. It was you and your. And your wife Melissa. And you guys are business partners, though, just to be clear, too. So you’re like my wife Tara, and I. You. You guys are, I presume, equal business partners.
Paul Pruitt :Definitely equal, if not more. She, if she was not involved, this would be a house of cards. You. You know, I’m an idea person. I’ve always been that way. And she’s very structured and she, you know, we wouldn’t even be on this call today if she did. She is actually at a doctor appointment and still texted me to remind me to get on this call. That’s how she knows me so well. So it’s, it’s definitely a delicate balance. Yeah. And it’s, you know, we’re, you know, of course we’re married and have an incredible life together on a personal one. But we are. Are actually very well balanced business wise also.
Matt :Yeah, that’s awesome. So you guys promoted one of the biggest product launch, affiliate. Affiliate launches of the entire calendar year. And it has been for 15 years. Something that we were super blessed too, to get to see from behind the scenes because we were coaching Jeff’s team on that. Um, but this was. How many times have you promoted PLF before.
Paul Pruitt :Last year and this year and last year was one of those. And I’m sure a lot of us are that way where it’s kind of like, oh, yeah, I was going to promote this. Maybe I should send out an email before they close cart. You know, so I think we sent out like two emails, two or three emails last year, and I think we might have. We might have gotten like, you know, eight or nine sales or something just because we had some people that were in our audience that were aligned for it, but it was very much an 11th hour type thing.
We had other things going on and that were in conflict and. But it was like one of those things, like, oh, yeah, better. You know, we were going to get part of this, so. But this year we, we definitely treat our affiliate launches. We actually put them in our schedule as a A or a B level style launch for us, like a main launch or a secondary launch.
Matt :And that would be lesson number one, y’all. Put, you know, treat them like you’re your own launch. Put them in the calendar. We talk a lot about, you know, the, the ATM or. No, not the ATM report. The backstage pass last month was all about creating content which leads to warming up your audience. You can’t warm up your audience if you don’t know what you’re warming them up for. So put it in your calendar. Have it in there, you know, months in advance if at all possible. Sometimes a year in advance. I know we’ve got them planned through August and we actually have one in our calendar for next November, so we’re almost a year ahead.
That’s how you should be. You should treat them like that so you can plan on those things. Now, you, when I introduced you, introduced you to Chris on the. You had already committed to promoting. But it wasn’t like I said, here, let me introduce you in that way. But you had, I think you had DMed me and said, you know, hey, I really would like to do well. What do you recommend?
I’m like, let me introduce you to Chris. I will tell you privately. That I texted him and Jeff Walker and said, look out for this guy. I’m going to call it. He’s going to finish in fifth or sixth place. And they both responded back like, really? I’m like, yep, I’m calling it. I’m like, no offense to you, Paul. I’m like, I know he’s not going to win. You know, not there yet. He’ll get there in a few years, but he’s not going to win this year. But I’m predicting fifth place, sixth place might even surprise you and pull in fourth place. What. What place did you actually finish?
Paul Pruitt :It was six. It was. Nailed that one. We tried. We tried a little. We put a little, you know, push in, but some people that have way bigger lists, we’re all about guerrilla marketing. So just something where this. We’re the. It’s the David and the Goliath. And, you know, our list is not as big as the others. And. And we. We’re very thankful. Yeah, we’ve been part of the top, you know, five to 10 and a couple launches this year. I think we caught a lot of people off guard, but it’s a lot of grassroots, old school guerrilla marketing versus just being able to push a button and go to a mass audience with little effort.
Matt :Yeah, I want to share this. I asked permission to share this because this was a private message in our system, and we use Basecamp with our clients. And so let me pull this up real quick, because now that screen just went dead. I had this all prepared, y’all. And. Okay, there you go. So this was a private message from Chris, who’s the. Chris is the affiliate manager for Jeff Walker. And the subject. The subject line was Paul Pruitt. And I remember seeing this come across my. You know, my email. Like, I get the Basecamp notifications email. I didn’t open it there, but I saw it and I had this, like. I’m like thinking. I’m like, I’m just gonna be honest. My first. First thought was, oh, crap, what did Paul do? That would be my reaction. Did he do something nefarious?
Like, I know you won’t, but I’m like, did he unintentionally do something that he wasn’t supposed to do? And then, like, my mind’s going into these different places. I’m like, no. Or. Or he’s slipping. And Chris needs some, like. Needs to know how to communicate with Paul and need to know, you know, how to get him back up. And anyway, he sent me this message and so is not loading. I was going to read it to you word for it, but I’ll just give you the gist. He’s like, you know, they just had a team meeting. No, it’s not loading. Just had a team meeting and they were talking about, you know, we were talking about Paul Pruitt. Wow.
I remember he wrote like, wow with like six exclamation points and like 14 emojis and basically said, just wanted to, you know, thank you for, for telling him to come talk to us. He’s just blowing us all away. Like, he’s been the surprise of the launch. So I just thought you’d like to know that. I wish I’ll send you the exact message when I remember. Really cool that you know, that you were, that was the reaction they were getting from you. And you know, the cool thing is it’s like, and I know you know this, but yeah, you’re on their radar and that can lead to some big things in the future. So just wanted to share that with you. So let’s talk about strategy. I mean, you know, smaller list, six place.
Again, this was Jeff’s. This was Jeff. They missed their biggest launch ever by a couple of sales. And when I say a couple of sales, I literally mean it was like less than $10,000. For somebody who’s been doing this for whatever, 15, 16 years to have your second biggest launch and it was the biggest in quite some time, that’s pretty awesome. You played a huge role in that. What were some of the things that you did just strategy wise, you know, what would you say was maybe your. One of your top five that you would share with us?
Paul Pruitt :Yeah, so what, what we typically do. And again, because we do look at this as like one of our own launches, because there is for us, we look at the entire buyer journey and because we’ve been doing this for many years in different, in different respects. So it’s like just instead of looking at it as like one sale, one opportunity, it’s, it’s being very conscious that the people in our world that we influence, this is going to be like a slice or a moment of their own buyer journey and communications with us right.
So knowing that it’s like, okay for us, it is like what is the pre launch conversation that we need to have to guide the messaging and the momentum to create awareness, in this case for product launch formula, which is all about launching. So like how do we start a launch dialogue in advance and what mechanisms can we put in, in front of this to guide people in? So we did do A challenge called the now this is a tongue twister. We’ll change the name next year. But it was called the Challenge launch Challenge.
So we, we did a small low level challenge where we just spoke into one spoke of launches and people do know us that we have very successful multi six figure launches of our own products that are around challenges itself. So really what we did without talking about product launch formula, we gave a very light high level, you know, exposure to people that came into that, into that challenge which was on the front end of you know, before we were like guiding people into you know the, the pre launch of product launch formula.
So what we did is we, we did this challenge and it was a, it was a low level paid challenge. We normally do free ones and paid and with this it was $10 and we had several hundred people that came in into that. So a bucket of our people out of our ecosystem came in from that because we created a launch conversation and but it was like okay, well we went through these seven days to teach you these things.
But really where we learned it from is our good friend Jeff over here and what we covered on the things that you need to work on, you know, he covers it more in depth in this space over in this. So we, we try to breathe a bridge. So our, our pre launch ourselves or our mechanism is setting people up to desire his pre launch.
So it’s not like we just like, like I did the year before is like oh crap, we forgot to do something. Let me just hit my list and say click this button, you know, which is like the 11th hour Hail Mary hoping that people are going to click through and make a couple bucks. It’s like we treated this as a launch so we, we were very specific.
Now I’ll tell you is that just like what you were saying earlier on our entire following year, you know, by November we already had scheduled out our entire year as far as all of our launches. Now what I’ll say is we have our own products like our own memberships and courses. But there are a couple of very big launches that we’re affiliates with as well. We place those in because we can’t change their timelines. So we actually place their like when their launch is so that then we can coordinate our launches around them to either segue. Again people are coming. It’s a buyer journey.
So people are coming in and out. And I have to say is that the guerrilla marketing side of me is that when I’m dedicated 100% on like acting like as if this was our own launch. Then what happens is we’re able to clear the calendar, clear the schedule, not do other promotions that cloud the conversation. And we’re focused solely like one lane instead of a five lane highway.
With our list, we’re like, here’s one thing that we’re bringing people through. And what that does, it also gives us me time, freedom and energy. Freedom is to look at like instead of saying, oh, you know, I could do paid ads over here that could amplify or I could do a Facebook group or I could, you know, send my things to my email list or I could, it’s like, no, I can look at the entire ecosystem and use the word and instead of or so it’s like, because a lot of people, you know, and I try to be as helpful as possible inside of these affiliate, you know, in the partner Facebook groups, like, oh, does anybody have any ideas? And it’s like, I just always like, should I do this or should I do this? And it’s like, well, get rid of the word or and throw in, if you have the space and time, throw in the word. And you know, so it’s like, you know, what, what is this person that maybe is going through this launch?
What are, are they searching on YouTube? Are they searching on Google? Are they in Facebook groups asking questions like are they already struggling somewhere else in the ethos in the world? You know, what are the conversations? Would they be typing in? You know, asking questions about, are you speaking into those conversations in your email? You know, are you doing Facebook lives? So I, I would do Facebook lives every day.
You know, I just speak into one micro topic. So what we, what we normally teach in our adaptive program is I, you know, we, I call it double zooming in. So it’s like, okay, if the conversation later on is going to be all encompassing about launching. So how do I zoom in on that? Okay, so as an example, like we just talked about, I would say challenge launches and then I would say, okay, well that’s just one layer zoomed in.
So how can I zoom in on challenge launches? So it could be like, okay, how do you fill a challenge launch? Okay, well now I can actually triple zoom in on that. So because that’s still a big topic. So it’s like what is the one email. What’s our top converting email that get people into our challenge launches? So now that’s my email topic, that’s my Facebook live. That’s what I’m going to talk about in a Facebook group or a community. You know, if I go on clubhouse, that’s what I’m going to talk about. So we try to double or triple zoom in on like a micro topic. Because if you like that topic then you’re going to want to know about launching, you know, like so now I have something to talk about every single day of the week leading up to the launch.
Matt :So clarifying question here. Do you. You did a seven day challenge leading into Jeff’s masterclass or leading into open cart?
Paul Pruitt :Leading into his masterclass.
Matt :Okay, so when did the challenge start and end in relation to when his masterclass started? Because I forget what day of the week you would remember. What day of the week did his masterclass start? Was it a.
Paul Pruitt :So we were allowed to email, I think on a Tuesday and I think for Friday started two days. Yeah, two or three days after that. So what we did is we landed the last day of the challenge as the first day we were allowed to tell everybody to go into his thing. Okay, does that make sense into his pre launch. What it is, is, hey, space between your challenge.
Matt :A little bit. A little bit of space. So it wasn’t just like day, you know, like 10 days in a row. That’s what I was wondering. So very cool. Well,
Paul Pruitt :yeah, so. So if you think about it, we supported the Facebook group of our challenge for the entire month. That way they would go through it would almost be like that, that bucket of people. Because we still did a study group during the pre launch itself, the creek conversations there. But during the challenge we would have, normally on that last day we would have made our own offer. You know, we would have said, hey, you know, we got this course, so we got this membership, you know, come into it. So instead we just had a different call to action. So we just brought them into signing up for Jeff’s program. So but what we did is we didn’t stop the conversation there. We had bonus trainings and other things throughout so that we could still keep interest in and keep the attention not just on what Jeff was teaching, but on us.
So when they made that decision, they didn’t get distracted because we all, we all know that in this type of space there people are, if they’re on your email list, they’re probably on two or three other people’s email lists and they’re getting hit really hard. And like, here’s a bonuses and all kinds of things. So we’re trying to keep people like focused and engaged to go through, like our world.
Matt :Yeah, no, that makes sense. I mean, you, that’s one of the beauties that I love about anything like this. It doesn’t have to be a challenge. It could be a workshop. It could be even just in, could be just starting a Facebook group, you know, where we’re gonna, and I’m gonna share a two minute lesson every day, something like that. It puts them, it kind of, it silos them in a sense, kind of keeps them in your lane. And so, you know, one thing that we teach so often, I know you know this, but it’s like, okay, yeah, create a mini course. Do something where on that Tuesday when they are getting seven emails from everybody else, they were on your challenge, they were focused on your challenge.
In fact, I would guess they probably ignored many of those emails because they’ve got the blinders on. You know, with your challenge, again, it could be a workshop, it could be anything, it doesn’t matter. That’s, you know, the challenge itself isn’t the point here, guys. But they put the blinders on and in a big launch like this, again, the, the good news is everybody’s promoting it. That’s actually good for affiliates on a macro level.
The bad news is if, you know, your people can be going, you know, like this, put those blinders on, lock them in. You’ve had seven days of being the challenge launch guy and in their minds, you’re the launch expert now. And then you went, nope, here’s the guy. So why would they go through so and so’s link or so and so’s link or that person. They wouldn’t even cross their mind because they don’t associate with them, them with as, as launch expert. Like they associate you. And I think that’s, I don’t know if you did that on purpose, but that is just brilliant.
Paul Pruitt :That’s how that works, guys. Well, that’s why we, that’s why we start off with Knowing on the calendar where we want people to land. Yep. And then we’re very, we’re very purposeful. We’ve done this the last couple of years and as you know, we’ve been in the top five of some other large launches as well. And we just had a different, you know, challenge that we put in front of it. And we previously done free challenges. We, this is really a test this time is that in our sense, it’s like, you know, we can have bigger numbers that we did a free challenge, you know, have way more people subscribe.
But we had is several hundred people that made a micro commitment of putting a transaction. So we had people that were more focused and that were showing up because they already did a transaction with us, that they’re like more engaged in the challenge. So the blinders definitely are on a little bit better because they paid to put the blinders on with us, if that makes sense. So it’s like. Yeah. And so when we land them there. And that was done very pretty purposefully.
And we also made sure we aligned. We, we already knew that going through the challenge launch itself, like teaching about challenges as a launch mechanism, that we would create desire for challenges, you know, for people to want to learn more, you know, because the natural thing would have been at the end of that is for us to launch a product that was a course about challenges, you know. Well, that’s exactly what we did, is we gave that to them as a bonus that you used our link.
Matt :Ah. Yes.
Paul Pruitt :We dovetailed and created pressure. So we do have some people that actually bought into PLF that actually just wanted the course.
Matt :Yeah.
Paul Pruitt :Because we set them up so well that the natural release from our challenge would have been a, you know, we have a high converting challenges course. And that was the most irresistible bonus that we put in on the backside of of that challenge. People were expecting us to sell the course and we didn’t. We brought the men to Jeff’s launch, they went and bought plf and one of the bonuses was a course that they really truly desired. But now they also get all the extra information. So it was a no brainer. It was a complete no brainer.
Matt :Yep. Creating irresistible bonuses they want independently of the thing they’re buying. And a lot of people would, would argue, well, why would I create this? You know, in this case, the challenge course, why would I create that and then offer it as a bonus when I can just sell it? You know, like if people want just that, what’s the point of doing it? As an affiliate. Well, it’s all those side benefits that we’ve talked about of, you know, yeah, you could go sell the challenge course and you would have maybe the same amount of money or, you know, I don’t know how much you would value the challenge course at, but I’d probably say, what. Tell me what the value is. Would you guys?
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Paul Pruitt :Well, we. We. We did sell it directly to the public in the past, and we did this past year as a beta, and we. We did offer it for a thousand, and in July, we’re actually going to offer it again publicly, a full challenge launch into the High Converting Challenges course. So you just had to wait six months if you want to get it through the plf, you know, bonus.
Matt :That’s what I was going to say is like, I probably would have said it was $1,000 course, you know, possibly a little bit higher. So it’s like, well, we can make the thousand versus an $800 commission. Like, why would somebody do that? Well, number one, prizes. Those are, you know, you guys made a lot more thousands of dollars in prizes. Number two, again, that recognition, you know, it may not be a decision you would make 10 years from now, but right now I would. I would venture to say that one of the biggest reasons why you’re building a brand that other people recognize is because of promoting these affiliate offers. And I can guarantee you Jeff Walker’s team is not talking about your internal challenge.
You know, they’re talking about how you’re doing on their affiliate leaderboard. And all those other people who finished 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 10th, 12th are noted. They keep seeing. I don’t know if you heard that. Sorry. When I back up there. All right, let me silent for just a moment here. Sorry. I think one of my kids might have died. You want to go check? No, my wife’s up there with them. Where I was going with that. Dang it. Oh, yeah. You know, they’re noticing you on that leaderboard, and that’s going to create partnerships in the future that’s going to create, you know, opportunities for podcast interviews. I don’t know. It’s going to create opportunities to be interviewed. And aim. I mean, the reality is, I know you know this, and you won’t take offense to it. If you weren’t on those leaderboards, I wouldn’t have reached out to you and said, hey, can I interview you? I don’t.
For aim. I don’t really care about your challenge launch. You know, I don’t care about that. I care about your performance and affiliate promotions, and I see your name popping up, and it’s creating opportunities for you, and so that’s why you might take that little bit of a hit. And do that. And it does, it creates that irresistible offer for plf. Because I, I know I get all the time people are like, matt, I was, you know, I was thinking about buying your course. I finally decided to buy PLF to get your course as a bonus. And my initial reaction is, dang it, I lost money. But then I went, no, what did they tell me? I was thinking about buying your course.
Not, I was already going to buy it. I, I was definitely going to buy. I was thinking about wasn’t quite sweet enough for him. So basically I threw in plf. Now I made the sale. That’s how I look at it. So, dude, that’s awesome. It comes back to that buyer’s journey real quick.
Paul Pruitt :Yeah, the buyer’s journey is that also you have to keep in mind is that if you have something built in your world, you have the back end benefit of doing all this as well. So not only do you get the authority and the association in the status of like being associated and being there, but we also, in the same space, a lot of us, we send traffic that is congruent with our audience to an offer. You know, we’re not going to send random things hopefully to them.
So people loop back to you for your future offers. So by me promoting and putting this out in the world, we’re actually now getting exposed to a new group of people as well as our existing people. And on the back end, they might not want whoever you send the traffic to, they might not want their back end offer. And through the experience, through your bonus experience, what you give, you might actually build more rapport with them where they come into your back end offers and you would not have had that opportunity.
So if you’re only selling the movie ticket, you’re always going to be selling the movie ticket because as soon as people leave, you need to make, you need more people to come into your shop. But if you have a concession stand in your business and you have, you know, if you look at that true buyer journey, I’m sorry I cut you off there because I just want to make sure that this is as important. Is that. Because if we look at this as a loss. Yeah.
If you only have one product in your entire inventory, I could see like you don’t want to give away your value and you might be protective of that. Sure. We also expand your opportunities then now you have this whole other group of people that you probably were not on the radar with before. Like you said, other, you know, partnerships.
But there’s other people that are going to Opt in on your email list because they just saw you, you know, you’re searching like for us to promote plf. Like I had the opportunity to interview Jeff. Well, that didn’t exist before. So I put some ad money behind that. So what did that do? That raised my authority. People are like, who the heck’s this Paul guy and why is he interviewing Jeff? You know, so I probably have other people in my audience now on the back end that didn’t take PLF but now see us and we’re on their radar that they never saw before.
They might come into our adaptive membership, they might come into our inner circle, you know, or private coaching. They might see something different that we provide, you know, that problem that we solve. So I think if we think bigger picture and just not always focus just on like the one transaction but like what’s the back end benefit as well?
What’s the long term, the long game versus just the short game. That money that you think that you might be giving up by including your piece in there, you’re also getting more people that are buyers that are saying, oh my goodness, you know, I, you know, last year with plf, I, you know, I bought through Paul’s link and I took his high converting challenges course. Oh my goodness, it changed everything we do, you know, but, oh, he doesn’t, you know, he’s not gonna over there for a year. But you know what, I think he’s launching that course next week. You should buy it. You know, like they’re going to be referral sources for you. They’re going to tell other people to buy your thing when it’s off season.
They’re just, there’s a three dimensional opportunity versus a lot of people look at the one dimensional opportunity. Like here’s the affiliate launch and that’s all they see. And there’s so much more depth when you actually look at the entire buyer journey that these people are not just buying that thing. They’re going to make other investments that are maybe possibly what you offer. And there’s a huge, there’s a lot longer benefit for you on the back end. Sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off.
Matt :No, no, that’s, that’s powerful. I mean I, I know for us, yeah, they get into that one product. You know, typically we don’t offer our high level products as bonuses. We offer the, not that the quality is lower, it’s just that they’re the entry level product. Right. Well, what does the entry level product do?
Leads directly into the next one and the Next one. And it’s like, I don’t. I truthfully don’t care how I get them into that low product. If I get them in through an affiliate, if I get them in through an ad, if I get them in through just they decided to buy, if I get them through a podcast episode, if I get them in as an affiliate bonus. If I get them in through offering it as a bonus for free, when they buy somebody else’s stuff. We’ve done a lot of that, you know, go on a live stream, and it’s like, hey, everybody, who’s on this live stream, whether they buy through my link or not, you’re gonna get this.
Why would I offer that? What’s. You know, it’s a $500 product. Well, first of all, these people have never heard of me. More than likely, they weren’t gonna buy anything from me anyway. Now they go buy. They get this $500 thing for free. They go through and they go, holy crap, that was awesome. Hey, do you offer coaching?
Yeah. Yes, we do. And it’s substantially more expensive than giving up that $500 course. So. So I want to touch in on maybe one more strategy real quick because this has been awesome, guys. I’ve already got eight, you know, amazing notes. What’s something else you guys did, you know, that really stood out as something that led to, you know, like, maybe it’s just. It’s one of those ways where you out. You outputted your coverage, so to speak. If you get the. For those of you who don’t understand American football, that reference means nothing. But you just, like, this is something that you excelled in, really made a difference, was probably worth a spot or two on the leaderboard.
Paul Pruitt :We. We’ve been leaning more and more into whatever is not scalable, do it.
Matt :Yeah.
Paul Pruitt :And. And it’s just we’re in this Internet marketing world and everybody’s treating Everybody like a 1 and 0 and everybody’s doing mass. Like, we can’t. We just know, like, you have a bigger audience and you can push a button. What are their strengths? And you reverse it and make it their weakness. So it’s like somebody has a big, huge list. They just can’t talk to people one on one. They can’t help people get over that last objection into the final, you know, thing. So our. Our in between page that we have our bonus page that we send all of our traffic to. We have four layers on that page for people can contact us directly during that open cart period.
So we have a live agent equivalent or whatever the chat thing is called. I don’t know the specific brand because we, we test out different ones at different times. So while somebody’s on the page, if they have a question or objection, you know, they can type in in that moment and you know, we’ll, we’ll get notified on the phone because there’s an app that’s there. So it’s not like we’re staring at a computer screen all day long and we’re doing other things. And I can just really quickly. Yeah. Something that majority of the people will never do is in the top banner where the countdown is and the call to action.
Everything on our bonus page, you know, I have my, I have my real phone number on there. Well, that’s like the bat phone. My, my family doesn’t actually call. Like we talk to each other on Facebook and we text message each other. So like anytime this phone rings, it’s either a spam call or it’s, you know, during an open card, it’s like, that’s the bat phone. Pick it up. Yeah, you know, so, so it’s like, I don’t, I don’t, it’s not like it’s a personal home number that’s going to ring off the hook type thing. So I put my, I’m like, text me if you got a question, text me. We can jump on a call. Yep. And it’s right, right there. So there’s that element as well.
There’s a couple other things. Maybe people have to scroll to see it when we do our launches. But, but there’s also an exit pop. So when you go and you’re like, oh, never mind, I’m going to back out of this. We have an exit pop that comes up and it’s like. And it’s just a picture of me with very casual. Hey, before you go, if you want to jump on a Zoom call, just fill out this form real quick and I’ll reach out to you and we can talk via Zoom. And you know what’s interesting?
Just those three, we talk to a lot of random people and a lot of them convert. And what’s cool is that they already feel connected by time they come into the bonus experience. And they also become raising fans. Like they come in and buy our backend offers on our end after they go through the main core offer, the affiliate relationship.
Just because we were accessible. You know, we. We do things that are not scalable. So I’ve always been a guerrilla marketer. You know, that might rub some people wrong. And I’m. And that’s okay. We don’t do anything unethical, anything illegal, you know, but just like with Chris and with you, it’s like, I need to know the rules just so I know how far can. How far can I go without going over the line?
Matt :Yeah. And I love that. Do the unscalable is a. A huge thing. I know. We do the same thing, you know, we give them. I use Google Voice. You know, it still rings, you know, when I want it to this thing. If you call our Google voice number 354 days out of the year. Whatever. It’s just going to go to a voicemail that will get sent to my assistant, who will look at it and decide who needs to handle that. Oh, you know, you had. You didn’t get the. The ultimate affiliate swipe file I got. Great, Great. Then that goes to support. They send you the tracking number. It somehow ended up in Timbuktu. Great.
We’ll send you another one. You know, you call, you know, hey, I’m interested in, you know, coaching, you know, blah, blah, blah. Cool. We’ll set it up an appointment, talk and see if, you know, you could coach. But if you call on cart close day for, you know, whatever we’re promoting, you call that Google Voice number at Ford’s right here. Yep. To the magic rectangle. And I. Unless I am on another call or just unable for some reason to take that call at that exact moment, I will answer it. And I actually will go into my settings that day, turn off the block, you know, block unrecognized callers, which is a feature I love. But I will turn it off, which means, of course, I will get one call where I look at it and go, ooh, seems like it might be spam, but. Hello. Yes, sir, You’ve won a crew and we’re done.
But that day, I’m answering this thing and I’m on it for three or four hours, and I’m closing sales. And I know you’ve heard me say this because you’ve been to some of our trainings. They’re not long calls, they’re seven, ten minute calls. It’s usually one or two questions that they have that are pretty easy for me to answer. And every now and again, I’ll talk somebody else out. I’ll talk somebody out of buying because I’m like, no, this is actually. This is not a good fit for you right now. You need to not buy this. They’re so thankful that they inevitably end up doing something with us at some point.
Paul Pruitt :Yeah, I think some people test just to see that you actually will answer the phone. I had a guy do that and they’re like. And they’re, like, amazed. They’re like, oh, my gosh, it’s a human being. I didn’t think you really would answer because then it reinforces your credibility, you know, that you did answer. You said, you can call me and have a conversation, and you do. Can I bring up one other idea.
Matt :That we do, but I want to highlight accessibility for just one second. I think this is super important. We both probably have a million stories, but this one’s probably the most powerful because I want to hear your other thing. I really do. There’s a guy now that not only completely changed my life, he became my weight loss coach. He works for us now. He is my host, Alan Thomas, one of my dearest friends in the world. And the guy is changing lives left and right.
Came because I gave. I put my phone number out there. And what you just said is so powerful because he didn’t want to buy. He had been wanting to reach out to me for six months to ask if he could help, and he honestly was just testing to see if I would answer. And he called and we played, you know, we played phone tag for a little bit, but we connected. And you Know, fast forward two and a half years later. He’s not only working for us, but he’s one of my best friends in the whole world. Somebody that I, you know, respect as much as anyone.
That’s what accessibility can do. It didn’t have to be like, I’m not accessible. You call me in the middle of my kid’s soccer game. I’m not answering. You know, even if you do have my number. But for those few days out of the year when the bad phones open, as you would say, I’m accessible. And I think there’s some power to that. So go ahead. I want you to share what you were going to share there. But I just want to make sure people understood just how important that can be.
Paul Pruitt :Just to follow up on that real quick is that it’s just we’re in this day and age where like nobody picks up a phone. Everybody wants to message and be, push everybody so far away. And I think all of us are yearning for personal connection and I think that little nuance separates you from the rest of the market. But what I wanted to bring up is one of the things that we learned years ago. I made a mistake many years ago. This is like 2015, 2016. We did a big launch of a course product and I was like 6 or $8,000 in on Facebook ads, all the PLF stuff, really hitting hard and made mistake number one. Don’t do it, don’t do it. Open cart. While you planned a vacation, we were in the outer Banks.
Not happy about that. Yeah, I learned there. But what happened though, we first day open cart, it was a thousand dollar course, one sale. And Melissa and I had like, she had a meltdown and then I reacted off of that. We were very deflated. Right. But the next day I had to come back to like. Yeah, yeah. I had to come back to like my marketing background and everything. And you know, like back when I used to have my real estate company, I had to motivate agents and stuff. And I was just like, okay. So the next day I woke up, I was like, look, we’re going to create and we talk about this a lot in our programs, but we’re going to create unreasonable rewards so that
we, we don’t get emotionally attached to like the sales in a negative way, like a negative pressure. Like we’re not getting what we want. We need to reward ourselves in an unreasonable way so we can celebrate every sale that comes in. And so we made up a whole bunch of things and we did very well. That ended up being $135,000 launch for US in the end. So start off with one sale that first day but by the end of closed cart like we actually, we did incredibly well on that. But so with, with this PLF launch I told Melissa, I was like, look, so every first sale that we ever do on anything we get, we buy ourselves a bottle of Dom Perion. We would never buy this bottle ever for any reason.
It’s unreasonable. We would not do that to ourselves like we would. It does financially we would never buy it. But we just do it just because like we put the energy, the time and effort into this and we’re just going to reward ourselves unreasonably for that first sale. Now what we did with the PLF launch I just told Melissa was like if we get at least in the top 10, I’m just going to buy something ridiculous that we totally shouldn’t have. We should not spend the money on it or anything like that. It’ll just be fun and it’s part of self care so. And she laughed and everything. So we did make the top 10 with that. You know, we were six. So I bought a several thousand dollar massage chair. It’s something we would never buy ourselves. You ever go into like the airports, the malls and you have these really high end.
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Matt :Yeah. Oh my gosh. A whole line of. Do they actually work?
Paul Pruitt :Yeah. It is incredible. It’s a zero gravity, you know, it’s got integrated your Bluetooth speaker system. So put in some meditation music and it just goes up and down the back and kneads and, and stretches. It’s a really, it’s a really nice high end one. We would have never bought that ourselves. We would have never bought that. It’s totally ridiculous. Yeah.
Oh my goodness. Everybody’s addicted to it. I gotta like wait in line between David and Melissa to get on it. But it’s just something it may. What happens then is then you, you yourself are gamifying your launch, your gal, gamifying your own affiliate because otherwise you’re gonna get. When the number isn’t doing what you want to do and you’re putting all the things. It’s like it then makes it fun to answer that phone and talk to the next person. It makes it fun to send another email. It makes it fun to get on another Facebook Live because you’re now instead of like ah, this is exhausting. I’m just trying to get sales. So we, we normally do like a first sale incentive, you know, a 5. Like when we do our own launches.
Like a 5, like 5 sales 10. Then we go 25, 25, 50, 100. And because of that we, you know, pre pandemic we went to, you know, three weeks to Italy and Greece, like our 100k level on one of our launches. We’re like, we’re just going to go away almost a month, you know, around the world and just have fun. Just totally unreasonable. We would never do it. We would never take the money and do it. It’s just. But now we gamify our launches. It just makes things fun. It just brings a different meaning to it. So I just at least want to leave on that or touch on that just because I think a lot of us, we take this very serious.
We need the money to come in or we’re counting on it or something. We allocate it, we have expenses or real world things and it’s like. But then we feel beat down. We feel, you know, the launch hangover, you know, even when it’s an affiliate thing and it’s like if we could just come back and like enjoy the ride, enjoy the journey, gamify it a little bit, have fun with it. How do you personally. So the leaderboard is rewarding you financially and their things. But what are you doing for yourself? Like what’s your rewards outside of just the financial coming in? Like what’s something you can do for yourself?
Matt :It’s really cool. I love that. Dude, that’s awesome. Make it fun. Create unreasonable rewards. That is so fun. Paul man, thank you so much for this. This has been amazing. Gosh, before we wrap up, where can people, where can people find you? What’s the best way for them to get in touch with you?
Paul Pruitt :Yeah, so I’d probably say the, the best thing I Think whenever this comes out, we’ll be doing a second season of our podcast and relaunching that in new year. And that is the onlinemarketingpodcast.com that’ll probably be a great starting point if you just want to kind of dig into our heads and get to know us. But otherwise, on all the social media handles, it’s real paulpruit. So ealpaulpruitt is where you can find us. Of course we have our memberships and courses like that, but you can kind of find that through those two channels. Too many call to actions just confuses people.
Matt :Yeah, I understand. Well, thank you so much, buddy. This has been awesome. And I don’t know, are you going to watch this insider profile, you know, inside of me?
Paul Pruitt :Probably not. You know, you know, the funny thing is, even when it comes to like training, like whenever Melissa and I record trainings or podcasts, I cannot hear myself. I’m just like, I can’t do it. I cringe.
Matt :So I don’t ever watch any. I don’t watch or listen to my stuff. And it’s not because I can’t stand it. It’s. I don’t have a need to. I mean, I already know what I said. We have occasional we. When I’m working on new material, we will analyze it and like, you know, I told this story and it’s like, okay, when I did that, and then, you know, I’ll accidentally do something. Like the third time, I’ll lean in. We’ll be like, oh, that was awesome. I leaned in. I should do that every time. And now the next few iterations, my script will say, lean in, you know, and I’ll do it. I’ll do it. And then eventually I get used to it and I don’t need that note anymore.
But yeah, we’ll analyze it, but for the most part, I don’t. I don’t study my own stuff. It’s boring. Well, dude, thank you. Thank you so much. This has been awesome. So I hope you got as much out of that. I mean, I learned a ton from Paul and I hope you got as much, if not more out of it than I did. And as so many of our students have. Listen, if you know somebody who needs this, you know, to hear this message today from Paul, make sure you share this episode with them. Introduce him to the podcast. If you haven’t yet, make sure you, you subscribe so you don’t miss the upcoming episodes and encourage your friend that you share this with to do the same.
I mean, we’ve this is like episode 640 something and so we’re always releasing hopefully amazing content. Hopefully you’re getting a ton out of it. And last thing, if you’ve got any questions about today’s content, if you got a question for Paul, you know, hit me up and I’ll be glad to relay it to him. You can text me anytime at 260-217-4619 with that, I’ll see you in the next episode.
See you soon.