How to Avoid the Mid-Launch Dip in Affiliate Promotions

Most product launches roll out over a two-week period. Leading up to the launch, excitement levels are sky-high! Day 1…OPEN CART! The sales start to roll in! But what about those 7 or 8 days in the middle of the launch that period when sales tend to dry up? These are the “dog days” of a launch but they don’t have to be.

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Transcript

So affiliate launches, affiliate launches is what we’re talking about today. Avoiding that mid launch dip in affiliate promotions, guys, affiliate launches are, they’re a marathon. They’re not a sprint. And one of the hardest things I find to do is just to keep up those positive vibes, right. Keep from, from crashing, during, you know, in the middle.

And I, and I don’t mean like energy-wise, although that is, that is something to consider, but just kind of the, inner, well, yeah, the energy, you know, I’m not talking about like physical energy, but the excitement about a launch, about a promotion, especially when the sales aren’t rolling in.

All right. You know, we got these lengthy promotions and most of them, the beginning through even the middle of the open cart period, what we call the messy middle, there’s not sales rolling in. The average launch we found is a little bit over two weeks long. And those early days, you know, like the launch starts. Yeah. We’re excited.

And then at the end, it’s like, oh, it’s the end. We’re, you know, we’re, we’re running until the end. We’ve got we’re sprinting at the end. That’s easy. But that middle part, if you don’t find a way to keep the momentum going, you can just fall off a cliff and end up wasting those first four or five, six days of effort.

And so today I’m going to explain how you can keep the momentum going, how you can keep your interest level up for your entire launch. And we’re going to talk about this from both the perspective of an affiliate, what you can do as an affiliate, but also on the affiliate management side, if you’re running the launch.

So, first of all, I just want to welcome everybody. Who’s on live, say, Hey, in the chat there, let me know where you’re joining us from. Welcome again, Allen. Good to see you. Hey, good to be back. You’ll Be off next week. Remind me again while you’re off next week. I am my wife and I are heading to California.

So We haven’t talked about that yet. Huntington beach is going to take a little time. There’s some stuff Nice. So taken in and maybe go to the vet out there too. So, and just have some fun, but we’re so yeah, getting off the island, we don’t leave the island. That was always the goal.

And with these joint ventures has helped me with my goal of, I don’t leave the island, except when I absolutely want to, Oh, live in a good place. So Jim Gaffigan talked about like, you know, he’s from Indiana and he talks about how it’s like, you know, he’s not like new, you know, we’re from New York and we’re tough. You know, we’re from Texas and things are big and he’s like, we’re from Indiana and we’re gonna move.

I love that. Well, guys, we’re talking about this, this mid launch dip, you know, if you can picture the excitement level and the energy level in a launch, it’s, it’s huge at the beginning. It’s huge at the end and in the middle, it sometimes tends to cave. Once the cart is open,you know, it’s like sales the first day, you know, 25, 30% of all of your sales. Yay. Lots of sales. First day, last day, 50% of your sales. Woo. It’s the end middle.

I just finished reading a book called the rise of the rise of the ultra runner, I think, or rise of ultra runners. It’s about ultra marathoners. And you know, this guy is sharing his experience and it’s just so fascinating because it talks about, you know, these are hundred mile races, you know, plus like a hundred plus miles sometimes, and God bless them. Yeah. You know, these are through like trails and mountains.

You know, sometimes they are literally in a given race, they are climbing and descending the equivalent of Everest, you know, in addition to running a hundred plus miles. And he’s talking about how, you know, the first 30 to 40 miles, you know, for them relatively easy, the excitement level, the, you know, they’re already thinking about the finish and how amazing it’s going to be.

And he said, you know, the last five to 15 miles, you know, again for them, like if I’ve run 90 miles and it’s the last 10 miles, I’m not going him, who you’d be, you know, but he said, you know, a lot of times in these races, the last part will be a descent. So they’ll make the one last climb around the 10 mile mark and they’ll come down.

So you can see the finish from 10 miles away. And he said, once you can see the finish, like, you know, your, your spirits lift. And he talked about miles 60 to 90. Sometimes he’ll, you know, he feels like he’s barely moving. He’s not even running. But then he runs the last 10 miles and what happens and that’s all a mind thing.

And I feel like promote affiliate promotions are kind of the same way from both perspectives when it starts like we’re getting ready to start Stu McLaren’s. And it’s like, yeah. And then the reality is when we hit kind of that middle of the launch, it gets kind of like, huh. You know, if we don’t manage it, right. So today I’m going to talk about this both from the affiliate perspective and from the running the launch perspective.

And I’m going to divide things up into two phases. There is the kind of the prelaunch phase where we’re going to call just a kind of the mid-launch. So if you imagine the typical launch say 17 days long is about the average you got open cart for four or five days. We’ll just go with five, we’ll go the five day open cart.

So the middle of the total launch roughly day 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Before the cart opens, then we’re going to talk specifically about the mid cart. So not open cart day, not closed cart day, but those middle 2, 3, 4, 5 days of open cart where things kind of go. So we’re going to start with the affiliate marketing side. I want to share with you first some mid launch affiliate strategy. So this is the middle of the launch before the cart opens.

There’s no sales yet. Okay. The carts not open. What do we do in this situation? What do we do to kind of get ourselves energized? How do we keep our energy up? How do we keep our audience’s excitement up? What do we do to kind of manage this part of the launch? Because we started the launch, you know, six, seven days ago with a bang. We were excited, the leads reporting in. Now let’s say you have a list of, let’s go with an even number 10,000 people. And you’re probably going to get 400 leads, 400 people to opt in on day one, you get 200. So you’re already halfway there.

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You know, you’re living on a prayer. Sorry. Couldn’t resist the song layer. Yeah. Sorry. It says, listen to Bon Jovi yesterday. Nice. So you got 200 leads in the first day. Another 50 are going to roll in on the second day from that first day’s email, you’re already 60%, 65% of what you’re going to get. Well, the next seven days, you’re only going to get another 150 leads.

And it kind of feels like, you know, you send an email, you only get 42 that day. And it’s like, oh wow, am I doing something wrong? Did I mess up? First of all, no, you did not mess up. Okay. You did not mess up. This is just simply the way things are. You know, a lot of those leads came on the first day because those first 200 people of your 10,000 people list, those are the people who open every single email. They click on every single email. When you now send another email they’re already done, they’ve already done it. You know, you’re not going to send to them. So why you’ve lost 200 of your best people.

So the rates are going to be lower. So I want to share with you these mid-launch affiliate strategies. Again, for purposes of this example, I’m going to use a 10 day pre-launch or I’m gonna use a 12 day pre-launch and a 5 day open cart. That’s pretty typical. Sometimes it’s a little bit different. You might have 14 days, and then 4. We’re getting ready to run one.

That’s basically a, yeah, it’s 14 and 4, you know, roughly we’ll run one in June that is longer. Let me do the quick math. I think it’s, you know, it’s 15 and 8, yeah15 and 8. We ran one just recently, that was seven and seven, you know, seven days pre-launch seven days open cart,

I’ve run some that were, you know, two weeks open cart, four days, you roughly of, or 2 weeks of closed cart or two weeks of prelaunch. And then, you know, four days of open cart. So all kinds of stuff here, these mid-launch affiliate strategies before the cart opens, number one, do something out of the ordinary.

All right, just do something out of the ordinary. In this launch, send a really long email, send a really short email. If your average emails, 300 words. I think ours are probably about 150 is my average. If I am my 1 25 is probably a better guess. I’m actually curious about that. I’m going to do a study later and see what the average length of my emails are when I’m going with 125 to 150.

Send one that’s 600 words long or send one that’s 17 words, long, something that just kind of jolts people. It can be pointing to the same thing that you’ve been pointing to the webinar, the workshop, the PDF, the whatever, but it’s just different send one really late at night or really early in the morning. You know, sometimes I like to send an email at 3:45 in the morning, eastern time. Number one. Well, that’s the middle of the afternoon for people in India. And I have, you know, roughly 2% of my list is in India. I, you know, that’s what eight o’clock in the morning for my, you know, for my British audience, about 15% of my audience is in Western Europe. So it’s perfect.

You know, for tea and crumpets, I don’t know. When do you eat crumpets? Is that an afternoon thing? Actually, I don’t know if that’s, I think that’s An avenue many times. I think they’re allowed to come anytime during the Day. I know they’re allowed to, but I think traditionally it’s, it’s an afternoon thing.

Yeah. But I will tell you one of my favorite breakfasts that I’ve ever had was cooked by a Brit. I stayed at his house in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and he woke up, he was like, I’m going to make a traditional, you know, British breakfast. I looked at the other guy, stay with us. It’s like, we’re going to waffle house later because this is going to be disgusting.

And it was actually amazing. It was like, you know, tomato on top, but it had like, it was like a, it was like a tomato sliced tomato with an egg and beans and some sort of a meat type substance. And I’m not sure what it was, but it tasted delicious. And it was the first time I ever had tea with milk in it.

I did not know you could do that because where I come from, that’s actually in most of the state constitution, south of the Mason Dixon, and you don’t put, We get it. They, they have a group of people to come in and arrest us if we do that here. Ah, yeah. I mean, there were like a lot of things you can do.

Like you can go up on stage and slap Chris rock. You’re not going to get arrested in the south. You’re getting arrested anyway. Like go, you know, send these like weird timing emails You know, plan on sending, you know, an email, two emails, 30 minutes apart, you know, one that like says something and then maybe it has a mystery and the next one comes 30 minutes later

Just do something out of the ordinary, go live, you know, unplanned. Like we go live Thursdays at 2:00 PM Eastern. If I had it to do all over again, I would’ve done Tuesdays at two, but you know, we didn’t think that far ahead. And so we, we go live on Thursdays at two, but what if I went live on a Wednesday afternoon or a Monday morning?

You know? So I’d love to hear from you guys, like share some of your ideas. What are some of the things that would just be out of the ordinary? The idea here is just mix things up a little bit, get a little creative. Secondly, find something new to promote. Now I don’t mean, okay, it’s the middle of the launch.

It’s messy, go promote a different product. That’s not what I mean or go, you know, promote something else. I mean, promote a different entry point into the launch. If you’ve been promoting the PDF, promote the workshop, promote the webinar, promote the live stream, promote the, you know, whatever, find something new, mix it up.

If you’ve been promoting the webinar and it’s still three, four days away from the webinar or the workshop, but it’s still three, four days away from the workshop. Just interrupt and promote like a free report that they have one or just promote something that’s a little bit different.

One of the ways you can do this is just to ask the affiliate manager, ask the people like, Hey, what are some of the other things I can promote that would still count as leads that would get people into your ecosystem, get people into the funnel, but it’s not just the same dad gum thing for seven straight days. One of the ways you can do this on your own. It’s creative is rather than sending people just to the workshop.

Send people to a page where you do a three-minute video talking about the workshop and you, the email you send says, I just shot a three minute video. It only takes three minutes to watch. We’d love. If you would go watch it. Here’s what it’s about. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right in that video says, yada, yada, yada, I’m so excited. And you know, here’s why you need recurring revenue Stu McLaren’s doing a workshop, click the button below, you know, so it’s a different thing, even though you’re still promoting the workshop. So just find something new to bring in a new entry point, number three, change your angle.

Like again, I’m going to use Stu McLaren’s the membership experience. And by the way, if you guys want to sign up as an affiliate for, for Stu’s affiliate program, we’ve got this big launch coming up as one of the biggest launches in the entire year. If you go to Mattmcwilliams.com forward slash what’s up Mattmcwilliams.com forward slash what’s up, you’ll see all of our recommended programs there and you can sign up for Stu’s.

So you sign up for that, right? I hope you’ll do that today. Go sign up for Stu’s affiliate program Mattmcwilliams.com forward slash what’s up. And as you’re promoting it, you’re like Stu’s doing a workshop, recurring revenue, recurring revenue memberships. What if you just find a completely different angle?

You’ve been talking about how positive angle, right? Works, recurring revenue memberships are great. What about, well, the problem with launches is the problem with, you know, having only two or three big events a year and having the rest of your year, you know, be losing money is, and you talk about that instead of coming at it from a positive angle, you come at it from a negative angle.

Now my suggesting that if you send six emails about something that all six should be negative. No I’m saying if all the previous three have been positive, do a negative one. If the previous three have been kind of generic, do one that, you know, like right now, as we’re recording this, you know, end of March, 2022, the big event that happened recently you know, was Will Smith as I’ve referenced already, Will Smith slapping Chris rock. Talk about that. Like, you know how, I don’t know how the, you know, that, that the month after a launch is like a Will Smith hand to the face, you know, slap to the face because you realize, oh crap, we’re not bringing in any revenue this month.

That’s a kind of a negative angle, but it’s a funny angle. If you’ve been serious, be funny. If you haven’t been telling stories, tell stories, if you’ve been focused on you. So you like if you use, if you’ve used the membership experience, if you’ve worked with Stu, if you have a membership site and your first three emails are focused on you, and there’s nothing wrong with that because your audience loves you try a different story.

Try finding one of the 200 other case studies that he has talk about Anna Saucier. Talk about Michelle Caruana, talk about Heidi Easley, talk about Sarah Williams, you know, Paul Pruitt, whoever talk about some of the other case studies in that promotion.

So find a new angle that you can come at. If you just feel like you’re kind of getting down a little bit. So that’s the prelaunch phase, kind of that mid launch phase where, you know, things just aren’t going as well. And the energy’s kind of a little bit low. And so I mentioned just by the way, just to go back to Mattmcwilliams.com/what’sup.

Alan, can you drop that link in the, in there for people that’s where you can see all of our recommended affiliate programs. If you want to see all of this in action, what we’re talking about, both from an affiliate perspective and from an affiliate management perspective, go sign up for some of the stuff we’re running and you’ll see all of this, just a little tip there.

All right. Now I want to talk about the mid cart affiliate strategy. So We’re still on the affiliate side, not the affiliate management side, but we’re talking about five day open cart period. You might have four, you might have six, seven, but we’re just using five for this example, open cart, exciting, lots of good stuff going on. Close cart, exciting. There’s a deadline, nothing moves people like a deadline. What about, you know, let’s just say it’s open Monday through Friday. What about Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday? The reality is only 10, 15% of all of your sales are going to come Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. So what are we doing in that stretch?

Well, first of all, you have to keep in mind that the goal is to move people closer to a buying decision. I’ve talked about this so many times that people come into the launch, maybe, you know, before the prelaunch and they’re at a two on a zero to 10 continuum, and then they go through maybe the workshop and they move up to a seven and then an open cart day.

They’re at a seven and a half. Well, they’re not at a 10 and there’s no deadline, there’s no scarcity. So the deadlines were two points. Your goal is to get them to an eight on deadline day. So they tip over and buy, they tip over to the other side of the fence and they buy that’s what your goal is, is to get them to, that eight or plus. Now, if you happen to come into open cart day at a nine, and on Tuesday, you send an email, you will make some sales on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I said 10 to 15%. Well, that’s still 10 to 15%. Maybe you tip them over with something on that Tuesday or Wednesday.

And what I want to talk about is how to tip people over on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. So we’re not reliant on that one day, that closed cart day, the first way you can do that. The first strategy I want to share with you is a mid cart bonus. Now, this is specifically something that you come up with as the affiliate, in addition to your regular bonus package, this is the best way to drive sales and create what Jeff Walker calls the Walker W you know, the typical launch goes big here at the beginning, and then like that kind of like a check mark. He likes it to be a little bit more like a W and we’ll talk later about if you’re running the launch, what to do.

But as an affiliate offer a mid cart bonus, offer a, you know, something that’s only good for Wednesday, it goes away Wednesday at midnight. And just as a side note, if you do expire something, generally speaking at midnight, make sure that it’s the same midnight that cart close is going to be, cause it conditions people.

Most cards close at midnight Pacific. So make sure it closes, you know, your thing, your bonus closes at midnight Pacific. You know, this is the best way offer something that’s only available today. Typically on that Wednesday, the second way is to do some live selling. We talk about this in affiliate insider, monthly.

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I think it was actually, yeah, this month. This month, I did an interview with Jamie Birch, one of the top affiliate managers in the world about what’s working for people and he talks real. The first thing you shared about was live selling in other words, go live and sell. So you drive people to the live and then you sell them on the product.

And if you want to check that out, by the way, I highly recommend going to check that interview out with Jamie Birch. You can get into affiliate, insider monthly for just a dollar right now. You’ll actually get access to March. April, May. When you go to that page, it’ll say you get two months, but we’re here on the 31st of March.

So last day of the month, if you get in today, actually we actually probably shouldn’t say this. We’re going to extend it through the weekend because I don’t really want my team to have to switch it over until next Monday. Cause they got a really busy day tomorrow and I don’t want them working on weekends. So they probably won’t switch it over to Monday.

You’ll get access to the current month, which is March and then you’ll get access to April and May’s content for a dollar. So 12 pieces of content for a dollar. One of those is that interview with Jamie Birch, where he talks about live selling. But that’s a really good way. You know that Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, second, third, fourth day of the launch, do some live selling.

Don’t try to sell via email, mix it up, do something live. Speaking of live, you know, one of the ways you could really start to drive some sales is hosting a live cast. So here’s what you do. I’m going to take, I’m going to take you Stu’s again as an example. Now his cart is open Monday through Thursday.

What I would do on Wednesday is I would reach out if I’m, if I’m a student of Stu’s, you know, a Triber from his previous, you know, from the course TRIBE. TRIBE became the membership experience. I would reach out to three other people that I know have had a good experience with TRIBE, and we’re going to do a live cast.

I’m just going to interview them for 20 minutes. I’m going to talk about my story for, you know, 10, 15 minutes on the front end, interview them. They’re all going to be on. So we’re going to have, we’re going to have kind of a panel discussion. You know, I might even invite more people. I might invite like six people.

This is how I’ve done it. In the past. I invited like six or seven people and I’d have like two or three on at a time and I’d interview one of them and kind of overlap with the next person. We’d focus on one person for like 10 minutes then kind of discussed and focused on the next person and discuss and so on and so forth.

And it just became a really big event where we’re all discussing and all these other people, not me are saying, this is an amazing course. It’s the most amazing thing ever, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, and I share, you know, I shared this and this kind of applies to on more for selling anything else when we’re talking about that right now, we’re talking about the, you know, middle of the cart. I did a live cast and I recommend doing this on the second to last day. So the day before cart close days are really good time. Stu has a live cast on Tuesday. So it’s a perfect time for an affiliate to do one on Wednesday.

But I did one on the day before cart closed for PLF. And I invited a bunch of my friends on, I had them on, you know, to share their experiences with PLF. And one of the reasons why this works and I love your comment there, Tim. Thank you. We love you, Tim. I had, one of the ladies I had on was named is named Thembi Bheka.

Now Thembi is from Zimbabwe and she’s a woman, so, okay. She’s a woman she’s from Zimbabwe, which means really cool accent and really cool story. And I said, do you have any advice for somebody who’s on the fence about buying PLF? And she said, yeah, just buy it. Just buy the course, sign up now don’t wait, what are you waiting for? Stop waiting by the course. Now if me as a white dude, that’s from the Midwest in the south, you know, like pretty neutral accent, right? If I hang in round at Tennessee long enough, I get my Southern accent back.

But if I say what I just said, which is just buy the course, what are you waiting for? First of all, I’m the affiliate. Second of all. I’m me. It comes across differently than she does as a female who has no investment in them buying the course through me and with her really cool, you know, Southern African accent. I mean, it just like, it was so cool.

I just was like, all right, that’s a good place to end. See you guys like I can’t, what else could I say? And so there’s power in that. Just kind of crowdsourcing the selling process, hosting that live cast. I think it’s number four here, interview the talent. So in this particular case, it’s the middle of the cart.

If you can get Stu, you can get Jeff, you can get Ryan, whoever it is, you know that you’re promoting and get Amy interview em 10 minutes, 15 minutes, Hey, let’s come on and talk about one thing. This isn’t a pre-interview like you would do on your podcast week before the launch. This is like, Hey, my audience has five questions. Can you come on and answer them?

And you ask your audience to submit them in advance. You read them off. You know, you prepare them. And like, you know, they’re one minute answers, you know, and you just, you interview them and then you call them to buy. We sorta touched on this earlier, but number five is a limited time bonus.

And so, I mean, specifically, this is not a mid cart bonus. This is a bonus that you offer my favorite time to do it. If you’re doing the live cast, offer it on the live cast. This is a bonus. You only get if you’re on the live cast. All right. So I’m going to apply for three hours. This bonus is available.

These three hours, that’s it. Often you get people to contribute bonuses. I know that’s what we did. We had a couple of the guests who contributed some bonuses that were worth total worth like 600 bucks. They contribute those as an affiliate. When you host as an affiliate manager, we’ll talk about this a little, but when you host a live cast, then you know, you get them to contribute, you know, the affiliates to contribute the bonuses, but offer a limited time bonus. Even if you don’t do a, live cast just offer a bonus. That’s valid from 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM Eastern time on Thursday, like very short window of time, four to six hours. And it just kind of interjects some scarcity and some excitement into the launch.

And you know, it needs to be something that makes it faster or easier for them to implement what they’re buying. So if they’re buying, you know, if they’re buying the membership experience, for example, my four to six hour bonus, like all the bonuses, the bonuses overcome objections. That’s the number one thing about bonuses.

They need to overcome objections, but what would make it faster or easier? I’m going to offer a bonus for the next four, six hours where I, you get my course that talks about getting affiliates for your membership. I put it’s actually not even a course. It’s a, it’s a special that I put together. That’s about a 90 minute training on how to run an affiliate program for membership program.

You get that if you buy in the next six hours, now I give that to everybody who bought before. But after that 6:00 PM deadline or whatever, it is, 8:00 PM deadline, this goes away, you don’t get it. And I’ve done this before. And I’ve had like 20%, 25% upwards of all of my sales for a launch come in that four to six hour window because all of those people who got to Thursday afternoon and they were sitting there at an eight and a half or a nine, now they had a deadline today versus tomorrow. And what that meant was I got them to buy today versus waiting for tomorrow and waiting until tomorrow to buy is always a dangerous proposition in sales, you know, oh, I’ll come back tomorrow. The guy says the car dealer knows that never happens. And so things might happen. You know, I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.

That’s going to prevent somebody from buying a tornado hits. They lose internet. Their kid gets sick. You know, it doesn’t have to be anything. A tornado is kind of a dramatic thing, you know, but like it doesn’t have to be anything. They just have a busy day. So what happens when you have a really busy day? You’re busy all day.

You don’t buy you finish up. I know me, like I think of my Friday’s, if cart closes on a Friday. I’m busy all day. I’ve got interviews, I’ve got lives. I’ve got podcasts. I’ve got work to do. I’ve got to respond to my team’s messages. I’ve got to help them. And as soon as 5 :45 hits, I’ve got to get out the door.

Cause I gotta go coach my kids in soccer, I’m coaching from six to eight, then I’m watching our daughter play at eight till nine. Then we’re going with her friend. Who’s sleeping over, out to eat at Buffalo, wild wings. We don’t get there till 9 45. And the service is a little slow. This actually really happened.

It’s like, we don’t leave there till 11:15. We got to come back, get them to bed. It’s after midnight, you think I’m thinking about buying your course. No they’re thinking about buying your course. I’m thinking about going to sleep and I wake up the morning and go, oh crap. But if you had given me a compelling reason to buy the day before you wouldn’t have had to worry about that.

So we get people in on that Thursday versus waiting for tomorrow. So as an affiliate, those are the ways that you can overcome this. I want to switch sides to the affiliate management side. Talk about those mid-launch affiliate management strategies. So again, this is pre cart open. No sales are rolling in, how do we keep our affiliates engaged? And the first way is frequent contests.

So these contests are short. We’ve got our, you know, leads contest. I’ll use the membership experience as an example, you know, $10,000 for most leads to a hundred thousand dollar prize for most, or for most sales, its $10,000 prize for most leads. But that contest lasts like 13 days, 14 days. Actually, it really starts now.

So technically it lasts like 24 days. It’s a three and a half week contest. Now we want to reward people and we tell them those who start early, we’ll do the best. And those who push at the end we’ll do the best, but it’s still a long contest. And a lot of times you’ll have somebody who comes out, boom. They send an email in the first week and they run away with the whole thing.

They go all in and there’s no chance for anybody else boring, but I can beat them any given weekend. I can beat them on a Tuesday. I can beat them on a Wednesday. I can beat them in a bus. I can beat them. You know, I forget the rest of that green eggs and ham anyway, you know, so focus specific parts of the launch.

So we have a leads contest that’s for all the stuff, but we have four aspects. We have a membership guide and membership tips, the workshop, the webinar. So we do a webinar leads contest. We do a workshop, a webinar, our workshop leads contest. Maybe we’ll do a contest there in the middle that messy, middle around the 14th, 15th, 16th of April. We’ll do a two day contest on the 15th and 16th. We’ll do a weekend contest, which is probably about the one, the 15th and 16th hour without looking at the calendar.

You know, we’ll do a weekend contest there, you know, for those of you watching who are going to be in that launch, hint, hint, there may or may not be a contest in, we haven’t technically decided that yet, but we probably will. So we do a variety of contests. So we’ll do one, like I said, webinar only two days, three days, one day, you know, we’ll do, and anyone can win contest where it’s like, okay, anyone who sends 10 leads in the next 48 hours is entered to win.

And then we’ll just do a drawing 114 people enter you know, had 10 or more leads, boom person, number 72, you won, you know, an iPad mini or an iPad pro sorry, you know, we’ll do a top three. We’ll do a top one. We’ll do this contest is specifically for first time affiliates, you know, for the next three days, all first time affiliates, the person with the most leads wins. You know, you gotta be a first-time affiliate, do all kinds of things. Every lead you send over the next 24 hours, your intro to win. So the more leads you send, the better chance you have of winning, but not necessarily, you can still win with a seven.

I had one recently we ran and it was a sales contest. It was a sales contest. And it was the day before, you know, skipping ahead here. But it was the day before cart close. And we had, I dunno, like 87 people make a sale on that day. The first person made, you know, like 75 sales.

There was like 24 people that made more than 10 sales. And the guy that won the contest had one yeah, one sale. And it was a literally a random drawing. You know, we, we put in, we put in all the sales and it was like, you know, whatever, 842 sales. And I went to random.org

typed in one and 842 clicked enter. I scrolled down to sale number 578 guy had one sale, you know, the guy had one flipping sale that day. And he won $2,500. You know, we lost money technically on that one sale, we would’ve been better financially if he had not made that sale, but that’s how that works sometimes.

So the second thing you need to be doing, you gotta watch the stats. You gotta look for who’s dipping. So if your promotion starts on April 10th and we’re sitting there on April 13th, where’s the, where are those people that were doing really well on day one? Are they, have they gone just steady down? Or if they blipped back up, they’re never going to probably go as high as they did on April 10th.

That’s usually, unless they only mailed to a segment on April 10th or did like a small, maybe they did a Facebook live on April 10th, they got a hundred leads. And then on the 13th, they mailed and got a thousand. Okay. They might go like that, but who sent 500 leads on day one and then a hundred on day two, those hundred were not usually from a second promotion. They were just remnant clicks from the day before. And then you’re down to 75, then 30, then 22. And they’re continuing down without going back up. We need to focus on them. We need to reach out to them. We need to prod them. All right. So watch the stacks so that you avoid this mid-launch breakdown.

You know, focus on people who maybe are in that third, fourth, fifth position. Second position. Yeah. They’re not in first, but Hey, you’re gaining ground on first place. Cause at first place person hasn’t mailed in a while mail today, and you can be in first place. You can be in first place by the end of day today. Third key is you got to stop it before it starts share the strategies that I’ve shared, shared all the stuff from the affiliate section. I just talked about, teach them how to avoid the mid-launch, let down themselves, stop it before it starts. Make sure that you’re giving your affiliates commitment plans. Make sure that you’re sharing these commitment plans with them.

If you go to Mattmcwilliams.com/promoplan, we used to call them promotion plans. We changed it to commitment plan. I’ve shared why before I won’t get into it. It works better though. download this template. Okay. Just download it, use it on your end. Mattmcwilliams.com/promoplan. Grab that template and use them.

Walk through them with your affiliates. One-on-one in group on, on prerecorded videos and share this commitment plan with them so that they avoid these things before it even starts. You know, that’s the big thing is you’ve got to help them understand why, excuse me, there one second, why they need to not get into the situation in the first place.

All right, So we’ve talked about, mid-launch kind of that mid pre-launch phase. What about once the cart opens? What do you do as an affiliate manager to keep your affiliates from bonking? Well, I sorta just talked about this one, teach them number one, teach them. This is important here to teach them the strategies I just talked about. How do you avoid that mid cart bounce or mid cart dip.

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Teach them about creating a mid, a mid launch, you know, a mid cart bonus, you know, on their end, teach them how to use your mid cart bonus. We’ll talk about that in a second, but just educate them. That’s super important. Number two, daily sales contest. If you’ve got a five day open cart, I’m going to do a sales contest on days one through four, the five is all about the overall, you know, that’s all about the overall, but I’m going to do a day. One contest that doesn’t help the messy middle, but it does get us off on the right foot. I’m gonna do a contest on day, two day, three day four. And so the first day is probably going to be like a top three in sales, day two.

I’m probably going to do one where it’s like, depending on what we have going on. If we have a live cast that day, I’ll probably do like most live cast sales or something like that. But if not, that’s when I’ll probably interject and do something like everybody who makes one sale is entered. So really pushed to make a sale, day three. I’ll probably do something either centered around the mid cart bonus, or I’ll do something where it’s like, maybe you gotta make, you gotta make five sales to be entered or in every sale gets you an entry type thing. We’ll do something along those lines. And then day four. I’ll probably go back to just like a regular type leaderboard thing. You know, I’ll just mix it up again. Variety of contests is the key.

And then the last one here, this mid cart, you know, dip you want to avoid as an affiliate manager is specific mid cart bonuses. All right. So come up with a bonus or bonuses specifically for that middle of the cart. If you’ve got a seven day cart, I probably would do a day three in a day four.

No, I do a day three in a day, five, sorry, bonus. If you’ve got a five day cart, I would do a day three bonus. And then this is above and beyond. If you have like a live cast and offer specific bonuses for that, if you got a four day cart, I would do a day three bonus as well.

You know, that’s only available that day. You know, it’s okay. If you have one day where you kind of dip down and your focus more on like the FAQ’s and stuff like that. So the thing is you got to get your affiliates promoting them. So you do need to decide those in advance. You need to decide what those are going to be in advance and make sure that your affiliates, if they need special links that they’ve got them in advance, they make sure they’ve got copy. That addresses those. And so addressing those social media graphics, that address those, make sure they know what the heck is going on in terms of those specific bonuses.

So I mentioned that I’ve got some great or at least one great interview, but I’ve also got some others only mentioned one of them, tons of great interviews inside of affiliate, insider, monthly, that talk about this. The one with Jamie Birch is amazing. And then we did a, I did one with Matthew Lumis. We talked those limited time bonuses. That’s where I got that idea from. I never even thought of that before, until Matthew Loomis mentioned it to me. I’m trying to think of the other ones.

I know John Meese talks about it. Sarah Williams talks about it. I’m just trying to think of Paul Pruitt. I believe talks about it. Justin and Michelle Demers. I mean, there’s tons of interviews where they give you specific strategies around what I just shared today. And that’s inside of affiliate, insider monthly. You can get a trial of it. So basically can get access to everything we talk about in March and, and you know, everything we’ve got coming up over the next couple of months, just for $1. So, and I hate to be like one of the like Sally Struthers commercials, but for, for 7 cents a week or whatever, over the next, you know, two months, you can get access to all of that inside of affiliates that are monthly.

So there’s never been a better time to join. Go check that out. It’s just Mattmcwilliams.com/aimtrial , AIM for affiliate insider, monthly trial. And then as we wrap up, I’m going to give you a couple of specific action items for today. Number one is to take a look at your next affiliate promotion and identify where, where are the dips probably going to be? You know, if you got a four day launch, like the membership experience, you got day one, great, you got day four great, you know, four day open cart. You got day two with the live cast, about 20% of our sales are going to happen then. So the focus is day three.

What do you need to do on day three to really lift sales? You’ve got a seven day open cart. Maybe it’s you’ve got day one, great, seven day seven. Great. Maybe there’s a live cast on day six. Okay. We’re gonna focus in on days three and five. What do you need to do on day three and five to really lift sales?

So look at that upcoming promotion decide, okay, what are you going to do? What, what is your strategy? You’re going to do something out of the ordinary, you know, send that weird email, you know, what’s something, you know, kind of an angle change. You’ll plan ahead. Like you don’t have to do this. So it’s all about planning ahead.

I’m going to send five emails and they’re all basically going to be the same. No. How about number three or four? Be very different. Maybe email number three, we changed the angle, email number four, we send it a weird time. So there’s a little bit different shift in those. Like what are you going to do? What is your strategy?

Secondly, what kind of bonuses can you offer? You know, just make a list, like, hold back a bonus or two when you’re creating your bonus plan and, and think about those. Like what could you offer? And then third, if you’re going to host a live cast, you’ve got to plan that in advance. So what you do is you figure out, okay, let’s say you’re promoting the membership experience. You go into the Facebook group for students for Tribers and you go, Hey, I’d love to interview four or five, six of you who have a success story, anybody up for it.

And you know, 25 people respond and then you say, Hey, I’m doing it on April 26th at three, from three to 6:00 PM. That’s why you need about 25 people to respond. Cause some of those people, the time is not going to work for them. So you find a time that does work for them and you do it then, or you, you find a time that works for enough of them, like three to 6:00 PM. You get them in.

Sorry, I got distracted by a text message from a soccer coach. And, and Yeah, so I’m like, I always have to check. I never know because sometimes Alan will text me on the back end to be like, Hey Matt, your sound cutout or you know, or whatever. And I gotta make sure I’m checking those, those text messages.

So yeah, It is important stuff. So Lastly, if you, you know, a couple last action items here, if you have any questions, reach out to me, text me anytime at 2 6 0 2 1 7 4 6 1 9. I’d love to get your questions. I get always get great questions after these. So text me and just let me know if you have any questions and then the last action item.

If you know somebody who would benefit from hearing this message today, make sure you hit that share button or, you know, copy the link, text it to them, a message them, whatever, make sure they get access to this and then come back next week, guys, you’ve got a really exciting live lesson next week.

We’re talking about a topic that it’s really important, which is okay. So you got an affiliate promotion. That’s kind of jacked up a little bit. It’s not converting. Like you want it to, your audiences are very enthused. What do you do? Like what do you do when an affiliate promotion is going poorly, but more importantly, how do you avoid that in the first place? So we’ll talk about how to react to that.

It’s going to happen no matter how much preparation you do. If you do a hundred affiliate promotions over the next five years, one of them is going to go poorly. What do you do? And then secondly, how do you avoid 10 of those or 20 of those instead of just the one. So we’ll talk about that. The front end and what to do once it’s going wrong.

We’ll be live next Thursday, which is Thursday, April 7th. I had to double check. I was like, oh crap, did I schedule a Facebook? I schedule a live lesson on my daughter’s birthday. Oops. And no, I didn’t this the day before. So feel free. Also, if you want to text me and wish my daughter happy birthday, I’ll be glad to share it with her on April 6th. But anyway, we’ll be live Thursday, April 7th, 2:00 PM. Eastern for a what to do when an affiliate promotion is going badly and also how to avoid it in the first place. We’ll see you then. Bye guys. Bye-bye.