How do you build an affiliate army? A program that isn’t reliant on one or two or even a few affiliates? In today’s episode, I’ll share exactly how you can build an army of hundreds, thousands, or even tens or hundreds of thousands of evangelist affiliates.
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How to Turn Competitors into Affiliates
Top 7 Mistakes Businesses Make Reaching Out to Prospective Affiliates
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
Got a Low-Priced Product? Here’s How to Run an Affiliate Program
How Top Affiliates are Closing Sales in 2024
How to Find Affiliates Using Affiliate Program Leaderboards
If Donald Trump Ran an Affiliate Program
How to Create Promotion Plans for Affiliates
How Sarah Williams 20X’d her Affiliate Sales and Won a $100,000 First Prize
How to Build an Army of Loyal Affiliates
How do you build an affiliate army? This means a program that isn’t reliant on one or two or even a few affiliates. When today’s episode, I’m going to share exactly how you can build an army of hundreds, thousands, or even tens or hundreds of thousands of evangelist affiliates. I got a question from Kate Makalova, and she said, how do you find small and medium sized affiliates and build an army of affiliates?
She asked that in our survey that we do annually, which, by the way, if you haven’t completed that, if you just go to mattmcwilliams. com survey, you can take that. Why does she ask this question? Why does she ask, how do you find small and medium sized affiliates?
Most people ask me, how do you find the big whales, Matt? How do you, how do you go out and get the biggest person in your niche? So in my niche, how do you go out and get Jeff Walker? How do you get him to become an affiliate?
The answer to that is you get to know him for like ten years. You don’t like that answer, do you? The answer to how you get the really big ones is you develop a relationship with them. That’s the reality.
They have so many opportunities that it’s going to come down to relationships. But the other reason why we want to find small and medium sized affiliates is because the 80 20 rule doesn’t apply. It doesn’t apply. I’ve shared this before that I’ve heard people say from stage like statement of fact, 90% of your sales will come from your top three to five affiliates.
Nope. I remember sitting in an event when somebody said that, I looked over at one of our team members and they looked at me like, dude, they just, like, they kind of just said, everything that you teach is wrong. Like, well, maybe their program is like that, but not ours. And we’ll talk about that today.
Now, let me be brutally clear here. This is nothing more than a cop out. When somebody says 90% of your sales will come from your top three to five affiliates. I heard that for years.
You know the 80 20 rule, right? That should be. Not with my programs. Know when you run them.
Right. But then I heard it was the 90 ten rule in affiliate marketing. Like, really? I want.
I want 99% of my sales to come from my top 1%. Now, that’s a cop out. That’s an excuse not to work with smaller affiliates. That’s an excuse to go out and get three or four best buddies and just be like, peace out.
I don’t think, though, you’re listening to a podcast. Here’s something I know about podcast listeners. People who listen to a marketing podcast or a personal growth podcast or something like that. People who listen to parenting podcasts.
You know what? You know what I know about people who listen to parenting podcasts. They don’t want to be just kind of like, okay parents. They don’t want their kids to grow up and just be okay.
No, they want to be great parents. They want to be outstanding parents. They want to be known for being great parents, people who listen to marketing podcasts. I’m not saying you don’t want to be a great parent.
I’m just saying I know you want to be great at marketing. You want to have a great affiliate program. You’re not one of those people who’s just gonna sit back and be content just to, like, run your little insiders club, have a few affiliates, and that’s it. Am I right?
So I’m gonna share some cold, hard data in a moment that completely destroys this lie. This lie. But there’s two things that I find kind of play into this. Two other, I’m gonna call them mini lies.
Little mini lies. First one says that you have to personally know all of your affiliates. I have to personally know all of your affiliates. In fact, I should have every one of my affiliates cell phone numbers.
I should know everything about them. Like, I have to have a personal relationship. Matt, you just said that I have to get to know Jeff Walker for, like, ten years. Jeff Walker.
But guess what? You do not need to be best buds with all of your affiliates. I ran an, I mean, shutterfly, 100,000 affiliates. Adidas, 250,000 affiliates.
Ish. Like, we would add 500 in a day. Sometimes in mid November, mid to late November, Shutterfly, there were days we’d add 300 affiliates when we were talking about, like, right around, you know, the week leading up to Black Friday. Do you think I personally knew all of them?
I didn’t know 299 of their names. The next day, I might remember one for one. I wasn’t the only one looking. I didn’t look at the applications.
I only looked at the three or four that my team sent to me. If you’re going to run an affiliate program that is consistently growing year after year, it is simply not possible to know all of your affiliates personally. It’s just not possible. The second kind of, we’ll call it the mini lie.
Small affiliates are not worth the hassle. Now, I’ve covered this in past episodes where I’ve talked about why you want to work with small affiliates just to recap loyalty. That’s a big one. They grow, and they will remember you forever.
And you will build an army of loyal affiliates. Okay, so what happens when you ignore this? When you create this army of awesome affiliates. Well, I think I shared this in a past episode, but I’ll share it again.
You know, Michael Hyatt, his leaderboard, if you look at his top seven. The only reason I’m saying top seven is I took a screenshot of his leaderboard and the screenshot only took up the top seven. I don’t remember who was on 8th, but I think it was also a big name. His top seven was Jeff Walker, Sally Hogshead, Ray Edwards, Pat Flynn, Jeff Goins, Stu McLaren, John Lee Dumas.
I’m talking people who made six figures in sales, sent 5000 plus leads each. Just think about who. I named some of the biggest names in Internet marketing. Massive multi seven figure launch.
Who’s who, right? And yet those top three, the top three of Ray Edwards, Sally Hogshead and Jeff Walker only accounted for 14% of of the sales. The 27% came from the top ten. Again, who is made up of those three plus?
Pat Flynn, Jeff goins to McLaren, John Lee Dumas, and I think Kevin Harrington and some others were in there. We had 500 plus affiliates. Make one sale. Name an affiliate launch where 500 plus make one sale.
That doesn’t happen very often. That’s an army. That’s what Kate was asking about. How do I build an army?
There’s no risk of losing. You know, if Jeff Walker had quit, man, that would suck. We’d have lost five and a half percent of our sales. Most programs your top affiliate quits, you lose 20% to 50% of your sales.
I’d say on average, probably around 28% to 30%. Your top affiliate, you lose your entire top three. As a matter of fact, the next year we lost number two, number three, number five and number seven. We lost four of our top seven affiliates.
You know how much we lost? None. We actually went up. But those four combined only accounted for like 11% of the total sales.
You know, Ray Edwards launch, same thing, same kind of numbers. Top eight was Jeff Walker, Jeff Bullis, Don Miller, Michael Hyatt, Dan Miller, Craig Ballantyne, Chandler Bolt, John Nemo top 319 percent top 1034. Just barely over a third of the sales came from the top ten. So how do we do this?
How do we do this? The conventional wisdom says that finding affiliates is super hard. You know, it’s just hard to go. It’s not worth the small affiliates.
Right? It tells you not to work with those small affiliates, or like, you have to intimately know all of your affiliates. This is not true. This idea that most of your sales will come from only a few affiliates is a lie.
So the first step is you have to stop believing the lie. You have to believe that you can build an army of affiliates fast, and that lasts. You got to build it fast and last. So how do you build that army?
Now, here’s the thing. What I’m about to tell you is so ridiculously simple. It is so elementary, my dear Watson, that you might feel tempted to completely brush it off. But you know what?
It’s also my company’s secret weapon. Because I know that no matter how many people I share this with, most of them aren’t going to actually execute it. Like, I can literally give you the playbook. I’m going to do that.
It seems too simplistic. Like, it cannot just be that easy, dude. I know, because I do the same thing. I just.
It can’t be that easy to, you know, get more viewers on my facebook, you know, lives. Yes, it is. I did it. You can do it, too.
So enough disclaimers, all that crap. Here’s how to build this affiliate army. There’s three things you got to consider. Number one, when to begin.
Number two, where to look. And number three, the actual tactical side of things. So we’re going to start with when to begin. This is one of the biggest mistakes I see people making.
I’m going to talk a lot more in depth about this. Depending upon when you’re listening to this, we’ll put a link in the, in the show notes. But depending upon when you’re listening to this, I’m either about to do a live lesson on this or I just did a live lesson on this. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is that they simply wait too long to start recruiting.
Okay. You need to start at least six months out if you have a launch. If you’ve got a big promo, you need to start at least six months out if you have an evergreen program. I mean, just start now.
Just start now. Just don’t expect them to promote you for a few months. Simple reason for this is people have promo calendars. I’m looking at our promo calendar right now.
I just pulled it up. So I am recording this. So this, this interview will go live on October 5. I’m recording it a couple weeks in advance, and I’m looking at our calendar and we have a promo.
We have 1234 promotions, either internal or affiliate promotions scheduled between the time this podcast will release and November 12. We then have promotions scheduled in mid and late November. We have another promotion scheduled in December, then we typically go off a little bit and go to 2022. We got two promotions in January.
We actually have a spot open in February. I’m not going to tell you when you can reach out to me. If you’re, you know, if you’re curious, we’re booked in March. We’re booked solid in April.
Half of May is when things start opening up. I mean, that’s a long fricking time from now, right? I’m not atypical. In fact, I would say prior to this year, I probably was a little bit atypical in that we only planned about three or four months out.
Now we’re planned out. In some cases. We actually have. We have June.
We don’t have anything scheduled in June of next year, but we do have something scheduled in July and we got something scheduled in September. So we have stuff scheduled a year out. You got, you got to start right now, at least six months out. If you’ve got a launch coming up, you’re just not going to get on people’s calendars.
Now, if you want to build that army, you want to build those small to medium affiliates. They typically have a little bit more time on their calendars. So if I were you, instead of going after the one big whale, you know, if you only got 94 days before your launch, before your big promo, go get the small to medium affiliates. They typically have a little bit more open calendar.
All right. Where do you look? Where do you look? Most of you aren’t where I was 16 years ago when I started my first affiliate program, I didn’t know anybody.
I knew nobody in the industry, not a single person on the face of the earth who would make a good affiliate partner. Odds are you probably know one person. So start with who you know. Start with them.
Start with them. I’ll talk about the, you know, I don’t know any one part in a moment, but, like, start with the people who are going to promote you because it’s you. They are going to promote you because they know, like and trust you. They are going to give you grace.
If. Let’s just say that you’re, your tracking breaks down on the third day of the launch, well, they’re going to give you grace. Somebody you don’t know is going to be like, screw you, dude. You cheated me.
I’m out. I’m never promoting you again. They give you grace if you don’t have a tool for them. Maybe you should go back and listen to the episode that I just released about what great affiliate programs provide for their affiliates so you don’t make this mistake, but maybe you get busy and you don’t end up having graphics.
An affiliate who doesn’t have a connection to you is going to be like, I’m out. You can’t even give me graphics. I’m out. But the people who know you are gonna be like, dude, it’s cool.
Totally cool. I totally understand. Get them to me when you can. So here’s what I want you to do.
I want you to hit pause if you’re driving. Don’t. Don’t hit pause yet. But I want you to make a mental note.
You know, what? If you’re doing yard work or you’re out for a run, maybe, you know, I don’t know if you’re running. I don’t recommend stopping. I personally can’t start and stop running.
Like, I’m. If I stop running, I stop running. That’s why I try not to cross roads. That’s why I just, I absolutely try not to cross roads.
Cause I’m not one of those people who can, like, I’m gonna stop for 30 seconds and then get back going like, oh, no, I feel so good to stop. I’m gonna just. I’m done. But press pause.
Write down a few names. Write down a few names. People who would make good affiliates, people who know, like and trust you, people who will promote you because it’s you. Write down a few names.
Get my #1 affiliate recruiting email (the one I’ve personally used to recruit thousands of affiliates in dozens of niches). Grab your copy here!
I’m gonna just wait for you to press pause. Here, take a sip of tea. That’s good. All right.
Hopefully you press pause. If you didn’t, it’s because you’re doing something that prevents that. But I want you to write down some names. Now.
What if you literally don’t know anyone? If you know absolutely no one in that could possibly be a good affiliate. Well, then watch other affiliate programs. And you want to build an army.
Don’t go for their top ten yet. Watch their affiliate program. If they’re like us, if they do like we recommend and we suggest, because this is one of the things that helps you build an army as you have a deep, deep leaderboard. I’ve talked about that in past episodes.
Watch for their affiliates that are the also mentioned, also with sales. So they’ll list their top ten and then their next ten, and they’ll say, also with some sales go down, they typically go in order, go down to that list. Look for their 27th, 30th, biggest affiliates. You know, here’s what you know about them.
They can make a couple sales, make one. At least they know what the heck they’re doing, but they’re not big enough that they’re like, nope, I’ve got my calendar plan. Like, I kind of just did that, didn’t I? Like, look at me, y’all.
I’m so important. I just planned my calendar out a year in advance. The reality was two years ago I didn’t do that. That’s a system we’ve put in places.
We’ve grown. The company. I used to suck at that. But watch these other affiliate programs join them.
They publish a list of their top affiliates many times. Watch those and reach out to those people. We show you how to do this and find affiliates. Now it’s our course, right?
There’s also. We go really in depth. Yeah. I’m going to make a little pitch for the course here.
So if you have like. I’m not going to buy your course. I have no interest in finding affiliates. I don’t know why you’re listening to this episode, but if that’s you just click like the 15 2nd fast forward.
I don’t know. We’ll see. I don’t know. But we’re going to help you find affiliates fast.
All right. This is not like an eight week course, just to be clear, it’s a five day course. I don’t find affiliates now. It’s not like, here’s every step you need to do to grow your entire affiliate program.
This is like, how do you find affiliates as soon as possible so you can see results quickly. So basically it’s everything you need to know and nothing you don’t need to know. Most people who go through it, we designed it. It’s a five day program.
You go through in less than an hour a day. Most people go through, they take about 20 minutes to watch the lesson. Maybe, you know, take a few notes and press pause a few times and write down some ideas. And about a half hour to 45 minutes to do the exercise.
And actually it’s, the exercise is go find affiliates. But we’re showing you how. So it’s, this is the process we use. It’s a process that we use in our company to reach out and find the right affiliates for our clients, for our affiliate program.
So it’s there. It’s a proven process. Proven process. No guesswork.
This is like, boom. I want to go find affiliates right now. So if you’re one of those people who you were like, okay, we talked about that, watch other launches, right? And you’re like, but I don’t know anyone.
If you said that you don’t have to know anyone for find affiliates now to work. You don’t. If you have a few potential affiliates, if you wrote down some names because you press pause earlier. Right?
Awesome. Awesome. It’s not required. I’m going to show you how to find them, how to contact them, how to recruit the perfect affiliates for your program.
Even if you know literally no one. No one. It’s a proven system. So go check it out.
We’ll put a link in the show notes. Find affiliatesnow. com. Dot.
This is going to allow you to find, well, what the name says, right? Find affiliates now. How to increase your sales quickly and efficiently. Just go check it out.
Find affiliates now. com. If you’re like, that’s not for me. Okay, cool.
If you join and you’re like, this is not what I thought it was. It’s too hard for me. It’s. I already know all this stuff.
Cool. We’ll give you a refund, so go check that out. Find affiliates now. com.
All right, you want to build relationships, all right, you need to go out right now and start building relationships. You cannot go into this asking people to marry you on a first date. So you want to build an army. Part of building army is to get the big ones, and that takes time.
You know, Jeffrey Gimmer says, all things being equal, people want to do business with their friends. Guess what? When all things are not equal, he says, people still want to do business with their friends. I’ll make a little bit less money to promote a friend.
I cannot stress this enough. Build the relationships. Build the relationships. Key is intentionality.
I’m gonna give you one example. I could give you a hundred examples. Look up networking on my website. Go to Matt mcweems.
com. Look up network. Don’t look up networking. Look up network.
I’ve got a video on there where I talk about how to network as an affiliate or, you know, for affiliate programs. We’ll talk about that. But I’ll give you one. The other night, I went into a.
A fast food restaurant, Culver’s. It’s a midwestern thing. If I think they’re. I think they’re growing.
But I went into Culver’s. I got a salad. Don’t judge me. I did.
I really. I did get a salad. Their bacon blue salad is. I mean, it’s a salad, so it better have bacon on it.
Anyway, went into Culver’s. It’s gonna be about a six, seven minute wait. I went inside to grab him just sitting there at the table, and I’m like, boom. Text messages.
I fired off twelve or 13 text messages. Just, hey, man, thinking about you. Wanted to reach out to you. That was it.
The other night, took my dog out. He’s being stubborn. Well, he needed to poop. He wouldn’t go poop.
You know what? I’m gonna pull my phone. I’m gonna knock off a couple of text messages. Now, I’m suggesting you have to always do this.
Sometimes you just need space to think. I don’t do this all the time, but I was like, you know what? When I think about it, I need to, I need to do this. I need to just reach out.
Let me just hit up a few people and say, hey, so build those relationships. Build those relationships. Use various methods to reach out. Don’t just stick to email.
Do physical mail, text, social media, WhatsApp, smoke signals, I don’t care. You know, like I said, send them a package. Send them a. Send them a letter.
A FedEx letter, a USP’s letter. I can’t do Fedex, Matt. That’s dollar 20 per. Okay?
Send a regular letter in an envelope. What’s a stamp? I know the price. I think I just heard the price went up.
You know what? People are freaking out. The price of stamps has gone up. I’m like, I don’t send enough mail.
That’s really going to influence my life. But you know, I’ll go buy 500 stamps. And we did like, man, I would have been better off taking that whatever money and investing it. But no, we went and bought a bunch of stamps because we do actually send a lot of mail.
But it’s like, it’s less than sixty cents to send something into someone’s mailbox. How many emails do you get a day? I don’t know about you. I get to my personal email.
Not even my business email. I get about 50 emails. You know, stuff I get in the actual mail. Four things.
On a good day, on a heavy day, I get four things. One is something I ordered, one is a bill, one is junk mail, and the other is from somebody I actually give a flying crap about. That’s an average day. So give me a second thing from somebody I actually give a crap about.
You’re gonna stand out. I did a Facebook live a while back about how to stand out. It was a guy. He mailed me his, I think he mailed me his book.
And there was some other stuff in there. I don’t remember what it was, but I did this whole Facebook live on. I’m like, dude, stood out. So use various methods.
Secondly, keep that initial contact short. I talk about this more on that Facebook live I mentioned where I talk about one of the big mistakes people make is that their, their first reach out is just way too long. We are not trying to get a yes. Oh my gosh.
Do not try to share everything about your product, the history of the company, how much your uncle, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I share all about this. I share the exact templates, the exact templates for this in find affiliates now. Exact template.
So you start a conversation. It allows you to start a relationship which grows from there. Which grows from there. As far as more ways to build an army.
Get your customers on board. Get your customers on board. I mean, think about what better source of promotional partners than your customers, right? But for some reason, though, almost no one we talk to, no one whose programs we take over and we start running them for them.
None of the clients that we coach, just none of the people that we talk to think of asking their customers to promote them. I don’t know why. I mean, I really don’t like, it’s the lowest hanging fruit. It’s like the first people, when we take over, a client comes to us and says, hey, run our affiliate program.
And we take over, the very first thing we do is say, okay, who are your customers? Who’s been with you for more than six months? And we reach out to them and turn them into affiliates. You know, think about it.
They have an intimate knowledge of your product. They probably have a personal success story. They know, like, and trust you that they’re fanboys, fan girls, right? They’re like people who buy apple products and stick with them for, for years.
They become fans. They’ll defend you to others. So when somebody comes along and says, well, I have a friend who bought that and it didn’t work for them, they’re like, well, that’s their fault. You know, if it’s a course, they’re like, well, I heard about somebody who bought that person’s an idiot.
Like, they didn’t put, they didn’t put in the work. They didn’t follow what so and so teaches. Like, you could not ask for better promoters. Now, if you use a system like infusionsoft, any type, there’s hundreds of these systems, right?
Maybe not hundreds, but there’s dozens where they run your affiliate program and your CRM on the same platform. So your email list, your customers are stored in the same place that your affiliates are. Okay, if you’re not on a system like that, you can skip this. You don’t need this.
But if they are, automatically sign your customers up as affiliates. And then, so what you do is, let’s just say you’ve got a course and the course is twelve weeks long. Then sometime around week 14 to 20, you want to reach out and say, hey, would you like to promote this? Here’s your affiliate link.
It just automatically creates, it’s super easy. You can actually set this up where it just automatically does it. There’s literally no work involved. So definitely, definitely your customers.
You want to build an army, you need to work with your competitors. Your competitors. I’ve done episodes on this before, how to work with your competitors as affiliates. But just, just remember this.
You know the old saying, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. That’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m not talking about keeping your enemies close, just to keep them close. These aren’t your enemies.
They can be your best promotional partners. So go listen to the episode about how to work with your competitors. I’ll put a link in the show notes. Go listen to it.
All right. Now once you have some affiliates, so you’ve gotten started, you know, you’ve built, let’s, we’re talking about building an affiliate army. Now, to start an affiliate army, you’ve got to get one. You’ve got to get one.
In fact, you need to get, you know, a couple dozen, right? You need to get 25, 30, 50 affiliates. And you get those by the things I’ve talked about. You get your customers, you work with your competitors, you go to Google, you find people who are promoting other, you know, other affiliate programs, right?
You can get thousands that way. Literally. I mean, I’ve gotten hundreds of thousands that way. But I’m saying once you get some, how do you exponentially grow?
How do you turn 100 affiliates, by the way, if you want to, if you want to find more affiliates, make sure you go download my report. You know, speaking of 100 affiliates, go download my report, your 1st 100 affiliates. Just, I’ll put a link in the show notes, but it’s super easy. It’s Matt mcWilliams.
com first 100. Matt mcWilliams. com first 100.
All right, so once you get those 1st 100 affiliates, how do you turn those 100 into 140 or 150 or even 200? And then you take the next, you know, 50 to 100 that you got and turn those into 50 to 100 and it begins to grow exponentially. It becomes like that snowball going down the hill. This is my number one affiliate recruiting trick that almost no one uses.
Like, oh my gosh, this is so easy. And literally almost no one uses it. You ask your affiliates. This is the number one way to get new affiliates.
Now I hear you thinking like, of course, thank you, captain freaking obvious. Like, oh, I know I should ask my affiliates, but are you doing it? In fact, almost no one is doing it. I’ve been the part of easily at this point, more than 300 affiliate programs.
Evergreen launches membership sites, courses, physical products, digital products, coaching programs, software service, you name it. I have been a part of more than 300 affiliate programs. Just for record, doesn’t mean I’ve promoted 300 things. I mean, sometimes I, newsflash, right?
I sign up for affiliate programs to watch what they’re doing. I want to see a, mostly, I’m looking to see how they screw stuff up and then do it better. But occasionally I actually get a really good idea. I’ve talked about this before, right?
Good artists copy, great artists steal. A lot of the stuff in our playbook now has come from those 300 affiliate programs. Very rarely, just as a side note, do I find that any of the 300 do more than a few things, right. But I get to take the two things that this one does and the one thing from this one and the four things from this one, and then like now I get 150 things that we do, right?
So 300 affiliate programs easily, it might even be, I mean, gosh, it could be well over 500. I’m not sure, but I know it’s at least three. I was thinking, I was like, okay, I want to go with the number. I can guarantee.
I believe without a doubt, I haven’t documented this, but I am positive less than seven have ever asked me to refer other affiliates. So let’s just go with seven out of 300. What percentage is that? Like 2%, 3%, 3% on the high end.
That’s ridiculous. Your current affiliates should be your number one source of new quality affiliates. That’s how we scale exponentially once you get started. Number one source of new affiliates has to be current affiliates.
Now the key here is to ask them. It’s to ask them and make sure that they get a second tier commission. There has to be an incentive for them. So you want to pay between a five and 10% commission depending upon if you’ve got a, if you’re a retail product and your main commission is 10% your second tier commission might be one or 2%.
So you typically want it to be somewhere around ten to 20% of the normal commission. So a 40% commission, we’ll go high and say 20% of 40% would be 8%, so we’ll make it 10%. If you offer a 50% commission, make it a 10% 2nd tier. If you have a 20% commission, you’re probably going to offer a two to 4% 2nd tier commission.
So that means that if this affiliate, so let’s just say I refer you an affiliate and then this month they do $1,000 in sales and you have a 10% commission, then I get $100 for referring that affiliate. I can’t afford that. Well, then pay less, but pay something. Okay.
Make it enticing for them to refer affiliates. Here’s an email that you can use. This is so easy. I’m not even, I don’t even know if we have a template.
I mean, we have a template internally. You know, I’d be a lot smarter probably if I said, you can go download this email. I’m not going to read it to you, but it’s such an easy email that you could just replay this twice and get the gist of it. All right, so the subject line is something like, know anyone, know anyone for our program?
Know anyone who can, you know, promote name of product? Very simple, right? Hey, first name. Do you know anybody who’d be, or anyone who’d be a good fit for our program?
If you refer them, we’ll make sure to set you up as a second tier affiliate. So you make money for every sale they make. Just send them our way and we’ll take good care of them. That’s it.
Three sentences. Remember the four sentence rule earlier? Right. Well, this is three sentences.
Do you know anyone? If you refer them, we’ll set you up and just send them our way. Like that’s it, very simple email. We basically copy and paste that every time we tweak it a little bit, just so it’s not like we have a lot of people who promote three, four, five of our offers a year and we try to vary some things just a little bit.
But don’t reinvent the wheel. You just ask them if they know anybody and if they send them, then you set them up as a second tier. We send this email in evergreen programs, we send it out about twice a year to every partner we then in a launch we send it out basically a couple of weeks after they sign up, up until about a month. And then we send it about two weeks before, you know, the launch.
We kind of just cut it off then. But here’s the thing. That’s not the only place you can ask for affiliate referrals. You can occasionally buried in a P’s.
You can put it in a payment email. Hey, Joe, I just sent you $500 for your affiliate commissions. Thanks for promoting us. By the way, do you know anybody who’d be, who’d also like to make some money promoting us?
And there was some other stuff in there. I don’t remember what it was, but I did this whole Facebook live on. I’m like, dude, stood out. So use various methods.
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Secondly, keep that initial contact short. I talk about this more on that Facebook live I mentioned where I talk about one of the big mistakes people make is that their, their first reach out is just way too long. We are not trying to get a yes. Oh my gosh.
Do not try to share everything about your product, the history of the company, how much your uncle, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I share all about this. I share the exact templates, the exact templates for this in find affiliates now. Exact template.
So you start a conversation. It allows you to start a relationship which grows from there. Which grows from there. As far as more ways to build an army.
Get your customers on board. Get your customers on board. I mean, think about what better source of promotional partners than your customers, right? But for some reason, though, almost no one we talk to, no one whose programs we take over and we start running them for them.
None of the clients that we coach, just none of the people that we talk to think of asking their customers to promote them. I don’t know why. I mean, I really don’t like, it’s the lowest hanging fruit. It’s like the first people, when we take over, a client comes to us and says, hey, run our affiliate program.
And we take over, the very first thing we do is say, okay, who are your customers? Who’s been with you for more than six months? And we reach out to them and turn them into affiliates. You know, think about it.
They have an intimate knowledge of your product. They probably have a personal success story. They know, like, and trust you that they’re fanboys, fan girls, right? They’re like people who buy apple products and stick with them for, for years.
They become fans. They’ll defend you to others. So when somebody comes along and says, well, I have a friend who bought that and it didn’t work for them, they’re like, well, that’s their fault. You know, if it’s a course, they’re like, well, I heard about somebody who bought that person’s an idiot.
Like, they didn’t put, they didn’t put in the work. They didn’t follow what so and so teaches. Like, you could not ask for better promoters. Now, if you use a system like infusionsoft, any type, there’s hundreds of these systems, right?
Maybe not hundreds, but there’s dozens where they run your affiliate program and your CRM on the same platform. So your email list, your customers are stored in the same place that your affiliates are. Okay, if you’re not on a system like that, you can skip this. You don’t need this.
But if they are, automatically sign your customers up as affiliates. And then, so what you do is, let’s just say you’ve got a course and the course is twelve weeks long. Then sometime around week 14 to 20, you want to reach out and say, hey, would you like to promote this? Here’s your affiliate link.
It just automatically creates, it’s super easy. You can actually set this up where it just automatically does it. There’s literally no work involved. So definitely, definitely your customers.
You want to build an army, you need to work with your competitors. Your competitors. I’ve done episodes on this before, how to work with your competitors as affiliates. But just, just remember this.
You know the old saying, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. That’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m not talking about keeping your enemies close, just to keep them close. These aren’t your enemies.
They can be your best promotional partners. So go listen to the episode about how to work with your competitors. I’ll put a link in the show notes. Go listen to it.
All right. Now once you have some affiliates, so you’ve gotten started, you know, you’ve built, let’s, we’re talking about building an affiliate army. Now, to start an affiliate army, you’ve got to get one. You’ve got to get one.
In fact, you need to get, you know, a couple dozen, right? You need to get 25, 30, 50 affiliates. And you get those by the things I’ve talked about. You get your customers, you work with your competitors, you go to Google, you find people who are promoting other, you know, other affiliate programs, right?
You can get thousands that way. Literally. I mean, I’ve gotten hundreds of thousands that way. But I’m saying once you get some, how do you exponentially grow?
How do you turn 100 affiliates, by the way, if you want to, if you want to find more affiliates, make sure you go download my report. You know, speaking of 100 affiliates, go download my report, your 1st 100 affiliates. Just, I’ll put a link in the show notes, but it’s super easy. It’s Matt mcWilliams.
com/first100. All right, so once you get those 1st 100 affiliates, how do you turn those 100 into 140 or 150 or even 200? And then you take the next, you know, 50 to 100 that you got and turn those into 50 to 100 and it begins to grow exponentially. It becomes like that snowball going down the hill.
This is my number one affiliate recruiting trick that almost no one uses. Like, oh my gosh, this is so easy. And literally almost no one uses it. You ask your affiliates.
This is the number one way to get new affiliates. Now I hear you thinking like, of course, thank you, captain freaking obvious. Like, oh, I know I should ask my affiliates, but are you doing it? In fact, almost no one is doing it.
I’ve been the part of easily at this point, more than 300 affiliate programs. Evergreen launches membership sites, courses, physical products, digital products, coaching programs, software service, you name it. I have been a part of more than 300 affiliate programs. Just for record, doesn’t mean I’ve promoted 300 things.
I mean, sometimes I, newsflash, right? I sign up for affiliate programs to watch what they’re doing. I want to see a, mostly, I’m looking to see how they screw stuff up and then do it better. But occasionally I actually get a really good idea.
I’ve talked about this before, right? Good artists copy, great artists steal. A lot of the stuff in our playbook now has come from those 300 affiliate programs. Very rarely, just as a side note, do I find that any of the 300 do more than a few things, right.
But I get to take the two things that this one does and the one thing from this one and the four things from this one, and then like now I get 150 things that we do, right? So 300 affiliate programs easily, it might even be, I mean, gosh, it could be well over 500. I’m not sure, but I know it’s at least three. I was thinking, I was like, okay, I want to go with the number.
I can guarantee. I believe without a doubt, I haven’t documented this, but I am positive less than seven have ever asked me to refer other affiliates. So let’s just go with seven out of 300. What percentage is that?
Like 2%, 3%, 3% on the high end. That’s ridiculous. Your current affiliates should be your number one source of new quality affiliates. That’s how we scale exponentially once you get started.
Number one source of new affiliates has to be current affiliates. Now the key here is to ask them. It’s to ask them and make sure that they get a second tier commission. There has to be an incentive for them.
So you want to pay between a five and 10% commission depending upon if you’ve got a, if you’re a retail product and your main commission is 10% your second tier commission might be one or 2%. So you typically want it to be somewhere around ten to 20% of the normal commission. So a 40% commission, we’ll go high and say 20% of 40% would be 8%, so we’ll make it 10%. If you offer a 50% commission, make it a 10% 2nd tier.
If you have a 20% commission, you’re probably going to offer a two to 4% 2nd tier commission. So that means that if this affiliate, so let’s just say I refer you an affiliate and then this month they do $1,000 in sales and you have a 10% commission, then I get $100 for referring that affiliate. I can’t afford that. Well, then pay less, but pay something.
Okay. Make it enticing for them to refer affiliates. Here’s an email that you can use. This is so easy.
I’m not even, I don’t even know if we have a template. I mean, we have a template internally. You know, I’d be a lot smarter probably if I said, you can go download this email. I’m not going to read it to you, but it’s such an easy email that you could just replay this twice and get the gist of it.
All right, so the subject line is something like, know anyone, know anyone for our program? Know anyone who can, you know, promote name of product? Very simple, right? Hey, first name.
Do you know anybody who’d be, or anyone who’d be a good fit for our program? If you refer them, we’ll make sure to set you up as a second tier affiliate. So you make money for every sale they make. Just send them our way and we’ll take good care of them.
That’s it. Three sentences. Remember the four sentence rule earlier? Right.
Well, this is three sentences. Do you know anyone? If you refer them, we’ll set you up and just send them our way. Like that’s it, very simple email.
We basically copy and paste that every time we tweak it a little bit, just so it’s not like we have a lot of people who promote three, four, five of our offers a year and we try to vary some things just a little bit. But don’t reinvent the wheel. You just ask them if they know anybody and if they send them, then you set them up as a second tier. We send this email in evergreen programs, we send it out about twice a year to every partner we then in a launch we send it out basically a couple of weeks after they sign up, up until about a month.
And then we send it about two weeks before, you know, the launch. We kind of just cut it off then. But here’s the thing. That’s not the only place you can ask for affiliate referrals.
You can occasionally buried in a P’s. You can put it in a payment email. Hey, Joe, I just sent you $500 for your affiliate commissions. Thanks for promoting us.
By the way, do you know anybody who’d be, who’d also like to make some money promoting us? And then you just explain it there. And a P’s to an email like, hey, guys, just a reminder, the launch is the 100 days away. We’re 100 days away from launch, by the way, if you know anybody, right, in a Facebook post, hey, guys, we’re only two months out from launch.
If you have anybody who, you know anybody who think you’d be a good partner for us, make sure to email me. And every time we do that, we get a few referrals. When we send out the specific email, we might get anywhere. Let’s say we’ve got 500 affiliates in the program, we’ll get anywhere from 50 to 100 referrals like that.
When we bury it in other communications, we’ll get three to seven, maybe upwards of ten. They start adding up. We do that 15 times. We send the one email, maybe a couple of times, well, that’s, you know, we get 150 that way, out of 500.
And then we do just kind of mentioning it casually. In like ten other communications, we’ll get an average of maybe five, that’s another 50. All of a sudden we have an extra 200, sometimes upwards of literally double, you know, we double the number of affiliates. Just from asking.
Just from asking. So I’m going to repeat what I said earlier. Your current affiliate should be your number one source of new quality affiliates. This guys, this is how you build an affiliate army.
You get over that belief that, well, most of my sales are going to come from a few affiliates. I have to personally know all of my affiliates. No, you don’t. No, you don’t.
You go out and you look, make a list of people you know who would make a good partner. Could be one person, could be seven or ten. Right? Though I hope you wrote those down on you pressed pause.
Right? If you don’t know anybody, watch some other affiliate programs. Go get, find affiliates. Now.
Click the link in the show notes. Just go try it out. Like I said, it’s a five day program. Five day program.
It’s going to help you a ton build those relationships. That’s the long term play. You got to have a combination here of short and long term. Use various methods to reach out.
Keep that initial contact short, super short. Make your customers and your competitors affiliates and then grow exponentially by asking your current affiliates. And like I said, the cool thing is that creates that momentum, because if you have 500 and you ask them and you get another 200, well, now you ask those 200 and you get another 80. You take those 80 and you ask them and you get another 40, you take those 40 and you get another 15 and, and yeah, eventually there’s a point of diminishing returns, but you can grow exponentially that way.
Questions?
Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.
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All the while you’re adding another competitor as an affiliate and you’re adding another couple people who promoted another product as an affiliate. You’re adding more customers. The more affiliates you have, the more customers you have, the more customers have you have, the more affiliates you have, the more affiliates you have, the more customers you have, the more customers you have, the more affiliates you have. And you see it creates this endless loop and cycle that’s, I mean, it’s powerful.
It is powerful. Now that is how you build an affiliate army. Now if you want to know more about this, well, come back and listen to the next episode. I’m going to talk about my number one affiliate recruiting email.
I’m going to share roughly how much I kind of touched on it today a little bit, but I’m going to share it in detail in the next episode. I’m going to share the gist of it and why it works. I’m going to talk more about that four sentence rule. I’m going to give you a chance to download it so you don’t have to like and do like today and write it down.
But that’s how you build that affiliate army. All right, so make sure you subscribe. Make sure you subscribe. Hit the subscribe button.
Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, whatever, Spotify, click the subscribe button so you don’t miss that episode or any of the upcoming episodes. And if you’re enjoying the show, leave a rating and review. That’s what the Prairie homestead did on Apple Podcast. Said, I appreciate Matt’s simple approach to affiliate marketing, a topic that can feel formidable, like me saying that word to new bloggers and influencers, especially.
He breaks it down into bite sized chunks that are actionable and understandable. We’ll definitely be recommending this podcast to friends. Well, I don’t know what your real name is, but the prairie homestead, thank you for recommending it to friends. If you’re listening right now, do the same.
Send this episode to somebody who needs to know how to build an army of affiliates who maybe is caught up in some of those, those beliefs, those false beliefs that I talked about. Who doesn’t know how to turn competitors into affiliates, your customers into affiliates. Go share this episode with them and then tell them to subscribe too. So in one week, just seven days, they’re gonna get the number one affiliate recruiting email ever the one that has worked best for me.
So come back for that and I will see you then.