How to Build Your Affiliate Army

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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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy

What GREAT Affiliate Programs Provide for Their Affiliates

How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World with Dorie Clark

The Most Important Part of Your Marketing with John Jantsch

How to Run an Affiliate Program for a Low Ticket Offer

The Simple Habit That Expands Your Influence with Jeff Brown

How to Stop Procrastinating Once and For All?

How to Build Your Affiliate Army

How do you build an affiliate army? This means a program that doesn’t rely 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. Welcome to the affiliate guy podcast. If you want to grow your income, serve your tribe, and enjoy all the benefits of affiliate marketing and having your own affiliates. You’re in the right place. Thanks for joining me today. Let’s get started.

I got a question from Kate Maca Lova, and she said, how do you find small and medium-size 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/readersurvey, 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 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 10 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 that the 80-20 rule doesn’t apply. I’ve shared this before that. I’ve heard people say from the stage, statements 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, everything that you teach is wrong‘. I’m like, maybe their program is like that, but not ours, we’ll talk about that today.

Now let me be brutally clear. 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 the 80-20 rule, right? 20% of your affiliates will produce 80% of your sales. That should be not with my programs and when you run it right for but then I heard that it was the 90, 10 rule in affiliate marketing, 95, 5, even like really 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.

If you are ready to take your business to the next level and start an affiliate program, start with my free report, Your First 100 Affiliates. This report takes nearly two decades of experience, trial and error, and lessons learned about finding top affiliates in nearly every conceivable niche and puts them all into one report. Grab your copy here!

You’re listening to a podcast. Here’s something I know about podcasts, listeners, people who listened to a marketing podcast or a personal growth podcast, or something like that. People who listened to parenting podcasts, 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 am not saying you don’t want to become 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 going to sit back and be content just to run your little insider’s club, have a few affiliates and that’s it. Am I right? So I’m going to share some cold, hard data in a moment that completely destroys this lie, this lie. But there are two things that I find kind of play into this.

I’m going to call them mini lies. The first one says that you 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 10 years,

Jeff Walker? But guess what? You do not need to be best buds with all of your affiliates. I ran, I mean, Shutterfly, a hundred thousand 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 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 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 80-20, 90-10, 95-5 99-1, or when you create this army of awesome affiliates?

Well, I think I shared this in a past episode, but I’ll share it again. Michael Hyatt, here’s the leaderboard. If you look at his top seven and the reason I’m saying top seven is I took a screenshot of his leaderboard in the screenshot. Only took up the top seven. I don’t remember who was an eighth, but I think it was also a big name. His top seven were 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 5,000 plus leads each.

Just think about who I named. Some of the biggest names in internet marketing, massive seven, multi seven-figure launch. Who’s who right? And yet those top three, the top three of Ray Edward, Sally Hogshead, and Jeff Walker only accounted for 14% of the sales. The 27% came from the top 10. Again, which is made up of those threes, plus pat Flynn, Jeff Goins, Stu McLaren, John Lee Dumas. 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 makes 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. If Jeff Walker had quit, man, that would suck. We the last 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.

Do you know how much we lost? None. We actually went up, but those four combined only accounted for 11% of the total sales. Ray Edwards launch, same thing, same kind of numbers. The top eight were Jeff Walker, Jeff Bullas, Don Miller, Michael Hyatt, Dan Miller, Craig Ballantine, Chandler Bolt, John Nemo. Top three, 19%, top 10 34%. Just barely over a third of the sales came from the top 10.

How do we do this? The conventional wisdom says that finding affiliates is super hard. It’s just hard to go out. It’s not worth the small affiliates, right? It tells you not to work with those small affiliates. 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. 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 can not just be that easy, dude. I know because I do the same thing. It just can’t be that easy to get more viewers on Facebook lives. Yes, it is. I did it. You can do it too. So if disclaimers all that crap, here’s how to build this affiliate army.

There are three things you’ve 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.

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 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. 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. The 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 interview will go live on October 5th and recording in a couple of weeks in advance. I’m looking at our calendar and we have a promo.

We have 1, 2, 3, 4 promotions, either internal or affiliate promotions scheduled between the time this podcast will release and November 12th, 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 curious. We’re booked in March or booked solid in April 2nd half of May is when things start opening up. I mean, that’s a long freaking 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 June, we don’t have anything scheduled in June of next year, but we do have something scheduled in July and we’ve got something scheduled in September. So we have stuff scheduled a year out. You gotta 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 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 if you’ve 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.

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. Start with who you know just starts with them. I’ll talk about the, I don’t know anyone 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 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 pruning 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, and an affiliate who doesn’t have a connection to you is going to be like I’m out. He can’t even give me graphics I’m out. But the people who know you are going to be like, dude, it’s cool. Totally cool. I totally understand. Get them to me when you can.

Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to hit pause. If you’re driving, 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 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 turn out to crossroads. That’s why I just, I absolutely try not to crossroads. because 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, 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 and trust you. People who will promote you because it’s you write down a few names. I’m going to 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, because you’re doing something that prevents that, but I want you to write down some names. What if you literally don’t know anyone? If you know, absolutely no one, 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 10 yet. Watch their affiliate program. If they’re like us if they do like we recommend it. We suggest because this is one of the things that help you build an army is you have a deep, deep leaderboard. I’ve talked about that in past episodes. Watch for their affiliates that are also mentioned also with sales.

So they’ll list their top 10 and then their next 10 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. Here’s what you know about them. They can make a couple of 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 planned. Like I kind of just did that. “Look at me all I’m so important, I just plan 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 place as 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. 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 clicked like the 15 seconds fast-forward I don’t know. We’ll see. I don’t know 6, 12 times maybe I don’t know, but we’re going to help you find affiliates fast.

This is not like an eight-week course. Just to be clear. It’s a five-day course. It’s not like here’s every step you need to do to grow your entire affiliate program. It’s just 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 it, they take about 20 minutes to watch the lesson. Maybe 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. Actually, the exercise is go find affiliates, but we’re showing you how.

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, 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 to find affiliates now to work. You don’t.

If you have a few potential fits if you wrote down some names because you press pause earlier. Awesome! But 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 n no one. It’s a proven system. So go check it out.

We’ll put a link in the show notes, FindaffiliatesNow.com. 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 scale. Check it out. FindaffiliatesNow.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: FindaffiliatesNow.com.

All right. Do you want to build relationships? 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 an army is to get the big ones and that takes time. You know, Jeffrey Gitomer 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. The key is intentionality. I’m giving you one example. I can give you a hundred. I look up networking on my website, go to Mattmcwilliams.com. Lookup network. Don’t look up networking, look up the network. I’ve got a video on there where I talk about how to network as an affiliate or for affiliate programs.

We’ll talk about that, but I’ll give you one. The other night I went into a fast-food restaurant Culver’s, it’s a Midwestern thing. I think they’re growing. I went into Culvers. I got a salad. Don’t judge me. I did. I really got did get a salad. They’re baking blue salad is, I mean, it’s a salad. So better have bacon on it. Anyway, went into Culver’s is going to be about a six, seven-minute. Wait, I went inside to grab this, just sitting there at the table and I’m like, boom, text messages. I fired off 12 or 13 text messages. Just, Hey man, I’m thinking about you wanting 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’ll put my phone. I’m going to knock off a couple of text messages now is just, and 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 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. As I said, cinema package, send them a letter, FedEx letter, USPS letter. Oh, I can’t do FedEx Matt, that’s $20 per okay. Send them regular letters in an envelope. Puts some stamp. I know the price. I think I just heard the price went up. You know what? People were freaking out. The price of stamps has gone up. I’m like, I don’t send enough mail that that’s really going to influence my life. But I’ll go buy 500 to hips. 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 60 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. How much 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 others 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 going to stand out. I did a Facebook live while back about how to stand out. It was a guy. 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.

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!

Secondly, keep that initial contact short. I talk about this more on that Facebook live. I mentioned, or I talk about one of the big mistakes people make is that heir first reach out. It’s 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, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I share all about this. I share the exact templates, the exact templates for this, and find affiliates now exact templates. So you start a conversation. It allows you to start a relationship that 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 talked 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 talked to think of asking their customers to promote them.

I don’t know why. I mean, I really don’t like it. 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 years, they become fans. They’ll defend you from 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. 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 of system. There are hundreds of these systems, maybe not hundreds, but there are dozens or they run your affiliate program in 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 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 12 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 don’t even, you can actually set this up where it just automatically does it. There’s literally no work involved. So definitely your customers. You want to build an army. You need to work with your competitors.

I’ve done episodes on this before, how to work with your competitors as affiliates. But just remember this 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 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, 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 a couple of 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 affiliate programs, 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 a hundred affiliates? By the way, if you want to find more affiliates, make sure you go download my report. Speaking of a hundred affiliates, go download my report. Your first 100 affiliates just I’ll put a link in the show notes, but it’s super easy. It’s Mattmcwilliams.com/first100.

All right. So once you get those first 100 affiliates, how do you turn those 100 into 140 or 150 or even 200? And then you take the next 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. And I hear you thinking like, of course, thank you, captain frickin obvious, like don’t know I should ask my affiliates, but are you doing it? In fact, almost no one is doing it. I’ve been a part of easily at this point, more than 300 affiliate programs, evergreen, launches membership sites, courses, physical products, digital products, coaching programs, software services, you name it.

I have been a part of more than 300 affiliate programs. Just for the record just means that promoted 300 things. I mean, sometimes I news flash, 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 a 300 affiliate comes easily. And 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 thought I was like, okay, I’m going 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 at like 2%, 3%? 3% on the high end? That’s ridiculous. Your current affiliate should be your number one source of new quality affiliates. That’s how we scale exponentially. Once you get started, the 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 5 and 10% commission depending upon, if you’re a retail product and your main commission is 10%, your second-tier commission might be 1 or 2%. So you typically want it to be somewhere around 10 to 20% of the normal commission. So a 40% commission will go high and say, well, 20% of 40% would be 8%. So we’ll make it 10%. If you offer a 50% commission may get a 10% second tier. If you have a 20% commission, you’re probably going to offer a two to 4% second-tier commission. So that means, let’s just say, I refer you an affiliate and then this month they do a thousand dollars in sales and you have a 10% commission.

Then I get a hundred bucks for referring that affiliate. Well, 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 don’t even know if we have a template. I mean, we have a template internally. 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 who can promote the name of the product?“. Very simple, right? They just,

“Hey FIRSTNAME,

Do you know 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 over 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 3, 4, 5 of our offers a year. 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 send 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 until about a month. And then we send it about two weeks before 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 be buried in a PS.

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 also liked to make some money promoting us?” And then you just explain that there. In a PS to an email like, “Hey guys, just reminder the launch is 100 days away. We’re a hundred days away from launch, by the way, if you know anybody, boom, boom, boom“. In a Facebook post, “Hey guys, we’re only two months out from launch. If you have anybody who you know anybody who thinks they’d be a good a partner for us, make sure to email me.”

Every time we do that, we get a few referrals and 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 3 to 7, maybe upwards of 10, you start adding up. We do that 15 times. We send the one email, maybe a couple of times. Well, that’s we get 150 that way at a 500. And then we do just kind of mentioning it casually and like 10 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. We double the number of affiliates just from asking,

Someone repeat what I said earlier. Your current affiliate should be your number one source of new quality affiliates. This guy, 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. You go out and you look, make a list of people you know who make a good partner. It could be one person could be 7 or 10. I hope you wrote those down and you press the 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. You’ll try it out. Like I said it’s a 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 of various methods to reach out. Keep that initial contact short, super short, make your customers and your competitor’s affiliates, and then grow exponentially by asking your current affiliates.

As I said, the cool thing is that creates that momentum. Because if you have 500 and you ask them and you get another 200, when 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, you get another 15. And, and yeah, eventually there’s a point of diminishing returns, but you can grow exponentially that way, all the while you’re adding another competitor as an affiliate. And you’re adding another couple of people who promoted another product as an affiliate. You’re adding more customers.

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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 one, 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 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 gonna share the gist of it and why it works. And we’ll 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 do like today and write it down, but that’s how you build that affiliate army.

All right. So make sure you subscribe, hit the subscribe button on 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 the apple podcast said, I appreciate Matt 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 beliefs, those false beliefs that I talked about, who doesn’t know how to turn competitors into affiliates or customers into affiliates, go share this episode with them and then tell them to subscribe to. So in one week, just seven days, they’re going to 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.