Ever feel like your affiliate promotions start strong, end with a bang, but completely fizzle out in the middle? That mid-launch slump is real…but it doesn’t have to be! Today, I’m sharing exactly why it happens and, more importantly, how to keep the momentum (and sales) going strong. Whether you’re an affiliate or you’re running the launch, you don’t want to miss this!
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
How to Grow Your Affiliate Program (and Brand) with a Podcast
Marketing That Actually Works: Donald Miller on Storytelling, Sound Bites, and Selling More
Are Affiliates Just Lazy? How to Motivate and Get the Most from Your Affiliates
Why People Really Subscribe & Buy (It’s Not What You Think)
Why I Finally Started My Own Affiliate Network
How to Beat the Dreaded Mid-Promo Slump in Affiliate Launches
You ever feel like your affiliate promotions, they start strong, they end with a bang, but they completely fizzle out in the middle. That mid launch slump is real, but it doesn’t have to be. So today I’m sharing exactly why it happens and more importantly,how to keep the momentum and your sales going strong in the middle of a launch. So whether you’re an affiliate or you’re running the launch, you, you don’t want to miss this. Let’s get started. All right, affiliate launches. Let’s talk about affiliate launches day.
Specifically how to avoid that dreaded mid launch dip. You know, affiliate launches, affiliate promos, they’re a marathon, not a sprint usually. And one of the toughest parts is keeping the energy up, both yours and your audiences during that messy middle. And I’m not talking about physical energy, although that matters. You know, if you’ve got a two week long launch, it’s tough sometimes to keep up your physical energy.
If you’re the affiliate manager, if you’re running the launch, if there’s a big promo going on and you’re the affiliate, it’s like, oh my gosh, is this ever going to end? It feels like sometimes, but, but I’m talking about keeping the excitement alive when sales aren’t rolling in, in the middle of the launch, middle of the promo, when there’s no excitement from the beginning and there’s no urgency at the end, how do we keep that excitement up?
Most launches, most promos, they run a little over two weeks. And so the beginning is easy. The card opens, everyone’s pumped, sales start coming in. The end is easy because the final push creates urgency and people are rushing to buy. But the middle, that’s where things can fall apart. You know, if you don’t find a way to keep momentum going, all that effort you put in early can be wasted.
So today I’m going to show you how to sustain that momentum, how to keep your engagement high, how to avoid what we call the mid launch slump. And so whether you’re an affiliate promoting your launch or managing one, these strategies that I share today, they’re going to stay, help you stay on track, help you stay motivated and keep the sales coming in the middle, but also set you up for a big finish. So what I’m about to share with you is about a half hour or so presentation I did a while back with my friend Alan Thomas and we talked exactly about this.
So this is part of that presentation. It was actually a much longer presentation, but this specific part covers how to really keep from having that mid launch slump. Well, guys, we’re talking about this mid launch dip. You know, if you can picture the excitement level and the energy level in a launch, 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. You know, I just finished reading a book called 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 he talks about these are hundred mile races plus like 100 plus miles sometimes. And God bless them. Yeah. You know, these are through like trails and mountains. You know, sometimes they’re literally in a given race, they are climbing and descending the equivalent of Everest in addition to running 100 plus miles. And he’s talking about how, you know, the first 30 to 40 miles for them, relatively easy, the excitement level, 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.
Yippee. 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, your spirits lift. And he talked about miles 60 to 90. Sometimes 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 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, yeah.
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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 pre launch phase where we’re going to call 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 is roughly day 2, 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. And 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 card opens.
There’s no sales yet. There’s okay, the cart’s 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 six, seven days ago with a bang.
We were excited. The leads were pouring in. Now let’s say you have a list of, let’s go with an even number. And you’re probably going to get 400 leads. Well, on day one you get 200, so you’re already halfway there. You’re living on a prayer. Sorry, couldn’t resist the song layer there. Yeah, sorry.
Listening to Bon Jovi yesterday. Nice. So you got 200 leads in the first day, another 50 you’re going to roll in on the second day from that first day’s email. You’re already 65% of what you’re going to get. Well, the next seven days you’re only going to get another one hundred and fifty leads. And it kind of feels like a, 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. 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 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 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 four. We’re getting ready to run one that’s basically. Yeah, it’s 14 and 4, you know, roughly. We’ll run one in June, that is, it’s longer. Let me do the quick math. It’s 15 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 two weeks of pre launch and then 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 email is 300 words, I think ours are probably about I’m actually curious about that. I’m going to do a study later and see what the average length of my emails are.
But 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 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 roughly 2% of my list is in India. You know, that’s what, 8 o’clock in the morning for my British audience. About 15% of my audience is in Western Europe. So it’s perfect, you know, for tea and crumpet.
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, I think either one of them anytime during the day I know they’re allowed to. But I think traditionally it’s, it’s an after anything. Yeah. I will tell you one of my favorite breakfasts that I’ve ever had was cooked by a Brit.
I stayed at his house at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and he woke up, was like, I’m going to make a traditional British breakfast. I looked at the other guy staying with us. I was like, we’re going to Waffle House later because this is going to be disgusting.
And it was actually amazing. It was like a tomato, sliced tomato with an egg and beans. It’s 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, you know.
But anyway, we get a, they, they have group of people to come in and arrest us if we do that here. Uh huh, yeah. I mean there are 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 put milk in your pee, you’re getting arrested anyway. Like, you know, send these like weird timing emails.
Plan on sending 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. You know, just do something out of the ordinary.
Go live unplanned. Like we go live Thursdays at 2pm, you know, Eastern. If I had it to do all over again, I would have done Tuesdays at 2, but we didn’t think that far ahead.
And so we go live on Thursdays at 2. What if I went live on a Wednesday afternoon or a Monday morning? So I’d love to hear from you guys, like share some of your ideas. What are some of like 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 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 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 I mean the workshop, but it’s still three, four days away from the workshop, just interrupt and promote like a free report, they have one. But 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 could 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 dadgum thing for seven straight days. One of the ways you can do this on your own that’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. Would love if you would go watch it. Here’s what it’s about. Blah, blah, blah, blah blah. Right in that video says, yadda yaddy, I’m so excited. And here’s why you need recurring revenue. Stu McLaren’s doing a workshop. Click the button below. So it’s a different thing even though you’re still promoting the workshop. So just find something new to burn.
A new entry point number three, change your angle again. I’m you, 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 Stu’s affiliate program, we got this big launch coming up. It’s one of the biggest launches in the entire year. If you go to mattmcwilliams.com what’s up, mattmcwilliams dot com what’s up? You’ll see all of our recommended programs there. And you can sign up for Stu. So you sign up for that, right?
I hope you’ll do that today. Go sign up for stu’s affiliate program, mattmcwams. com WhatsApp 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? Recurring revenue memberships are. Great. What about it?
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 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, am I suggesting that if you send six emails about something that all six should be negative? No, I’m saying if the previous three have been positive, do a negative one.
If the previous three have been kind of generic, do one that 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 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 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’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, you, 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 Saucy or talk about Michelle Caruana, talk about Heidi Easley, talk about Sarah Williams, 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 pre launch phase, kind of that mid launch phase where things just aren’t going as well and the energy is kind of a little bit low. And so I mentioned, just by the way, just to go back to mattmcwilliams.com WhatsApp 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 we’re going 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. Closed cart exciting. There’s a deadline. Nothing moves people like a deadline. 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, and 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 before the pre launch and they’re at a 2 on a 0 to 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 ten. There’s no deadline, there’s no scarcity. So the deadline’s worth 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 card day at a 9 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 close 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, you know, 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. You know, something that’s only good for Wednesday 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 car close is going to be because it conditions people. Most cards close at midnight pacific. So make sure your bonus closes at midnight pacific.
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. I think it was actually. Yeah. This month I did an interview with Jamie Burch, one of the top affiliate managers in the world about what’s working for people. And he talks, really the first thing he 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 Burch. You can get into affiliate Insider monthly for just a dollar. Right now you actually get access to March, April, May, that 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, I 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 because they got a really busy day tomorrow and I don’t want them working on weekends.
So they’ll probably won’t switch it over till 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 Burch where he talks about live selling. But that’s a really good way. You know that Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, 2nd, 3rd, Do some live selling. Don’t try to sell via email. Mix it up. Do something live.
Speaking of live, 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 use 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 a student of Stu’s, you know, a triber 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 10, 15 minutes on the front end. Interview them. They’re all going to be on. So we’re going to have kind of a panel discussion.
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. They’ll kind of discuss, then focus 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. This kind of applies to, you know, more for selling than anything else. But 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 day is a 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 card close for plf, and I invited a bunch of my friends on, I had them on 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. One of the ladies I had on was named Timby Becca. Now, Timby is from Zimbabwe, and she’s a woman. She’s a woman. She’s from Zimbabwe. Which means really cool accent, a 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. Buy 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 around in 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 and then buying the course through me and with her really cool southern African accent, it was so cool. I kind of just was like, all right, that’s a good place to end. See you guys. Like, I can’t. What else could I say?
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 middle of the cart. If you can get stuff, you can get Jeff, you can get Ryan, whoever it is that you’re promoting and get Amy, interview them.
Hey, let’s come on and talk about one thing. This isn’t a pre interview like you would do on your podcast weeks 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 they’re one minute answers, you know, and you just, you interview them and then you call them to buy. We sort of touched on this earlier, but number five is a limited time bonus. And, 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 livecast, offer it on the livecast. This is a bonus you only get if you’re on the livecast. All right, so I’m going to be live for three hours. This bonus is available these three hours. That’s it. Often you get people to contribute bonuses.
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I know that’s what we did. We had a couple of the guests who contributed some bonuses that were worth total, were worth like 600 bucks. They contribute those as an affiliate manager, talk about this a little bit. When you host a live cast, then you get them to contribute 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 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 the membership experience, for example, my four to six hour bonus, like all the bonuses, 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 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 6pm deadline or whatever it is, 8pm 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 those people who got to Thursday afternoon and they were sitting there in 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 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.
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, 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 Fridays. 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 because I need to go coach my kids in soccer.
I’m coaching from six till 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 recently. We don’t leave there till 11:15, we gotta come back, get them to bed, it’s after midnight. Do you think I’m thinking about buying your course?
No, I’m not thinking about buying your course. I’m thinking about going to sleep and I wake up in 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 worried 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 leads contest. I’ll use the membership experience as an example. $10,000 for most leads, it’s a hundred thousand dollars prize for Most sales, that’s $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. Three and a half week contest. Now we want to reward people and we tell them those who start early will do the best and those who push at the end will 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. I forget the rest of that. Green Eggs and Ham.
Anyway, 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 membership guide, membership tips, the workshop, the webinar. So we do a webinar leads contest, we do a 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. We’ll which is probably about the one the 15th and 16th are. 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 then. 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. And anyone can win contests 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. Boom. Person number 72, you won an iPad Pro. 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. Person with the most leads wins.You know, you gotta be a first time affiliate. We’ll do all kinds of things. Every lead you send over the next 24 hours, you’re entered to win. So the more leads you send, the more better chance you have of winning. But not necessarily. I had one recently and it was a sales contest and it was the day before skipping ahead here, but day before car close and we had, I
don’t know, 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.
He had one sale. And it was literally a random drawing. We put in all the sales and it was like, you know, whatever, 842 sales and I want enter went to random. org, typed in one and 842 clicked enter. It was sale number five, 78. Scrolled down sale number 578.
Guy had one sale, you know, got one flipping sale that day and he won $2,500. You know, we lost money technically on that one sale. We would have 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 got to watch the stats, you got to look for who’s dipping.
So if your promotion starts on April 10th and we’re sitting there on April 13th, where are those people that were doing really well on day one? Have they gone just steady down or have 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 do a segment on April 10 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. Then they’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. So watch the stats so that you don’t avoid this mid launch breakdown.
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 because that first place person hasn’t mailed in a while. Mail today and you can be in first place. You could be at 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 letdown 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 matmicwilliams.com promo plan, 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. Mattmcwames.com forward/promo plan. Grab that template and use them. Walk through them with your affiliates one on one in group 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 they need to not get into the situation in the first place. All right, so we 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 sort of just talked about this one. Teach them. Number one, teach them.
This is important here too. Teach them the strategies I just talked about. How do you avoid that mid cart bounce or mid card dip? Teach them about creating mid cart bonus 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. Day five is all about the overall. You know, that’s all about the overall. But I’m going to do a, a day one contest. That doesn’t help the messy middle, but it does get us off on the right foot.
I’m going to do a contest on day two. Day three, Day four. And so the first day is probably going to be like top three in sales. Day two, I’m probably going to do one where it’s like depends 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 push 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 got to make five sales to be entered or 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 dip that you want to avoid as an affiliate manager is specific mid cart bonuses, a bonus or bonuses specifically for that middle of the cart. If you get a seven day cart, I probably would do a day three and a day five bonus.
If you got a five day card, I would do a day three bonus. Again, 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 you’re focused more on like FAQs 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, make sure they’ve got copy that addresses those, social media graphics that address those, make sure they know what the heck is going on in terms of those Specific bonuses. So as we wrap up, I’m going to leave you with a few specific action items here.
First, want you to take a look at your next affiliate promotion and identify where the dips are likely to happen. So whether you’re an affiliate promoting it or you’re the affiliate manager, if you’ve got a four day open cart, for example, you know day one and day four are going to be huge. If there’s a live cast on say day three, that’s usually another peak. That’s, you know, 10, 20% of sales can happen on the live cast. So that means that day two is the trouble spot. What can you do on day two to boost sales? If it’s a seven day open cart you’re likely to see again, you’re going to see solid numbers on day one. Day seven, maybe there’s a live cast on day six.
So we need to focus on days three through five. These are the quiet moments when you need to shake things up. So what’s your plan? You don’t want to just send five generic emails in the middle of the launch. Mix it up some. Maybe email 3 changes the angle. Maybe email 4 gets sent in an unexpected time.
If you normally email Every day at 10:15am Eastern, send Dave4’s email at 7:30 at night. See what happens. What’s your strategy to keep the momentum going? The second thing I want you to do is think about what bonuses you can offer. Make a list. I recommend a spreadsheet or some sort of Google Doc where you just list all the bonuses that you could offer across all any affiliate promotion or promotion of your own. And so when you’re creating your bonus plan, and I’ve done entire episodes on this, I don’t need to rehash it here, but one of the things I don’t think I talked about when I shared that episode before is hold back one or two.
So if you say, okay, I could create a bonus package that has five bonuses, hold back one or two for those slower days, what could you add that would make a difference? And the thing is, it doesn’t have to be huge, it just needs to be something compelling enough to get people off the fence.
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So when you make that list of bonuses, just decide on one or two to hold back. Typically, I like to hold back the one or the two that I think are going to be the objections that people have after that first day. Like, the first day people, they don’t have objections, you know, and maybe I can address a couple of those. I’m like, okay, what objections are probably going to come up during the launch? Or maybe you create one. You notice that you get, say, first day, you get 10 emails back or 10, you know, whatever, 10 comments back and six of them have the same objection. Maybe you could create it a bonus that addresses that. And it doesn’t have to be complicated.
You could just host a live meeting after the launch, right? It doesn’t need to be that you create a course or create something complicated. Sometimes it’s just like, hey, a bunch of you have had the same questions, so I’m going to answer them. We’re going to meet for four weeks into the course and we’re going to solve that problem.
The third thing, if you’re planning a live cast now, this is as you might be running the launch or an affiliate, you need to plan it in advance. And I talked about both. So if you are running a livecast as a part of a launch for your product, however, plan in advance. Make sure you have people booked in advance. Now, I usually reserve one or two spots for surprises. Maybe you got a surprise affiliate that’s crushing it and you want to reward them by putting them on your live cast. Maybe you have a student that comes out of the woodwork with an amazing story because of the launch. Maybe you have an objection that comes up that you feel like you need to address.
You know, something like that. Then if you’ve got 15 spots on the live cast, you want to fill 13 of them in advance at least. Now if you’re an affiliate and you’re promoting the launch, again, plan it in advance. Like, you don’t need to have as big of a live cast. Like, when I’ve done them, I’ve typically done two to three hours. And I’ll go into like the student Facebook group and I’d say, hey, I’d love to interview a few of you who have success stories, who’s interested? And you. Every time I’ve done that, I’ve gotten more than 20 responses.
And then you set a time. So it, we’re going to do it on May 1st from 3 to 6pm Eastern. And some won’t be available during that time, but you’ll get a solid group of participants, and this is a really cool way to build social proof and lift those conversions up in that messy middle. So those are my three action items for you today. Now finally, two other action items. If you have any questions, as always, text me anytime at 260-217-4619. I always get great questions after these episodes and I’d love to hear from you.
So take action on those. And then last action item, hit subscribe. If you haven’t yet subscribed, I promise you, promise you, promise you you don’t want to Miss the Next Episode Guys, I am sharing the results of a study that took me months and months to do. I studied over 8,000 affiliate programs and I found one thing that stood out. It wasn’t the niche, it wasn’t the commission rate. One thing that stood out? Something so simple that separates the best affiliate programs from the worst. And it’s an interesting one, so I’m excited to share that in the next episode. You you don’t want to miss it, so make sure you hit subscribe. I’ll see you then.
See you soon.