What do you do when your niche isn’t exactly crawling with “traditional” affiliates? You know, the ones who seem to pop up everywhere in the online marketing world. Maybe you’re in a tiny, obscure niche, or perhaps your audience doesn’t include a ton of so-called “internet marketers.” Maybe you run a brick-and-mortar store, or you’re in a service-based industry where affiliate marketing isn’t even on the radar. Or maybe none of that applies to you, but you’re just tired of using the same old methods to find affiliates and want to get creative. In today’s episode, I’ll share 5 killer tips to help you track down your ideal affiliates—whether or not they’ve ever even heard of affiliate marketing. Let’s shake things up and find the hidden gems who will take your program to the next level!
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
2025 Affiliate Marketing Predictions
5 Affiliate Recruiting Mistakes That Are Costing You BIG Time
Behind-the-Scenes on Our Affiliate Promotion for Product Launch Formula
How to Promote Virtual Summits as an Affiliate (If You Aren’t a Speaker)
Fix Your Funnel: How to Increase Sales and Make Your Affiliates More Money with John Ainsworth
How to Expand Your Affiliate Army by Recruiting Non-Traditional Affiliates
What do you do if you’re in a niche that isn’t full of traditional affiliates? Maybe you’re in a tiny, obscure niche, or perhaps there just aren’t a whole lot of Internet marketers in your niche. Maybe you run a brick and mortar store or you’re in a service industry, or perhaps none of the above are true and you just want to find affiliates outside of the traditional ways of finding them.
On today’s episode, I share five tips to help you find your ideal affiliate, regardless of whether they’ve even heard of affiliate marketing. Let’s get started. So a lot of people are starting an online business, they’re starting an affiliate program when a majority of their audience, and especially a majority of their potential affiliates, they, they still live in an offline world. Maybe they’re, they’re just, maybe they’re not offline, but they’re just not well versed in affiliate marketing. So maybe they run a brick and mortar store, maybe they’re in a service industry, maybe they’re online. You know, your potential affiliates, they’re online, but they’re not really online marketers. So they don’t even know what the heck affiliate marketing is. They don’t even know that it’s a thing.
They might have seen it done, but they’re not aware that they could potentially do it. So the question is, how do you get these people to affiliates when they don’t really understand affiliate marketing? Well, what we’re going to do in this episode today is show you exactly what to do and then, of course, what not to do as well when approaching what I’m calling non traditional affiliates. These are affiliates that probably have never even heard of affiliate marketing. These are affiliates that certainly have never promoted anything as an affiliate. But the caveat is they have an audience. Maybe they have a small email list or even a big email list.
I’ve worked with folks never even heard of affiliate marketing. They have a hundred thousand people on their list and they end up driving tens of thousands of dollars in sales in their first affiliate promotion. Maybe they have a large social media following, maybe they’re huge on Instagram, but they don’t really know what affiliate marketing is. So there are some specific things that you must do in order to effectively communicate with these people. And there’s some things that you must avoid. You know, there’s definitely some things you don’t want to do. These work in small niches. They work in non Internet marketing businesses. And they even work. This is the cool thing about non traditional affiliates is it’s not just for people in a niche where you go, well, they gotta, you know, they gotta work with non traditional affiliates. That’s a, you know, it’s a non traditional niche and nobody’s ever really heard of affiliate marketing in that niche.
So, you know, of course that makes sense. But it’s also a great way to expand. It’s also a great way to expand your affiliate program. You know, when I ran Shutterfly’s affiliate program, one of the things that we did was, yeah, we worked with all the traditional affiliates. Worked with the quote, unquote, mommy bloggers. I know they hate that term, but that’s what we call them back then. We worked with the big websites, the big content creators, and the big coupon websites and whatnot. Coupon, coupon, however you pronounce it.
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I use it interchangeably. And we worked with all them, but we also worked with non traditional affiliates. We worked with PTAs and we worked with nonprofits, we worked with children’s hospitals, people like that, using affiliate marketing for fundraising. And we had to do some things specifically for them that made it more relevant to them because they didn’t. I couldn’t just approach them like I would, you know, a big name in the Internet marketing industry and be like, hey, we’re doing a big affiliate launch. Do you want to be a part of it? And so we used these non traditional affiliates to grow. I mean, gosh, by the time I left, those non traditional affiliates were doing 5 to 8 million dollars a year.
I think it was probably closer to 8. We didn’t need them to have an affiliate program. They weren’t the easiest to work with because they required a little hand holding. We’ll talk about that. But it allowed us to expand our affiliate program by 15, 20% over the course of about four years just through those types of affiliates. Now, here’s the cool thing. I’ve got five tips for you. All of them apply to all, you know, when reaching out to all of the, all affiliates, especially number four, number five.
But all of these, they, you’ll see as we go along that they, they apply to reaching out to anyone. So let’s dive right in. We’ll start with number one. It’s a good place to start. And again, you’ll see these apply not only to non traditional affiliates, but all affiliates as well. Number one is find their pain points. Again, this applies to any type of affiliate recruiting. You want to focus on what causes them and their audience pain. Yeah, I heard this example recently. I was talking with a friend of mine. He was somehow. One of the big pain points for brick and mortar business owners, for example, was keeping inventory. I don’t ever think about inventory. You know, when you’re running an online business, you don’t even think about that. Like, I don’t have inventory. All of my products are digital.
But for a lot of offline businesses, this is a big pain point. So the solution here is to, well, focus on affiliate marketing as the solution. Now, again, this applies to brick and mortar businesses, but it also applies to businesses online. But maybe they actually ship their goods. And so someone who maybe they can earn, you know, 10, 20, 30% even commissions without having to have any inventory. This is addressing a pain point. So you go to this person, you say, hey, you’re keeping all this inventory. What are you making, you know, in terms of percentages on this product?
You’re a small business. You’re making what, 10, 12%? I’ll pay you 15%, and you don’t even have to keep inventory. Or, okay, you’re making 12%, I’ll pay you 12%. And you don’t have to keep inventory because most people don’t really think about. I know most business owners that I’ve known who have inventory, they don’t even think about just the cost of keeping the goods. They don’t ever factor that in. Just not really just the space, you know, unless you’re literally renting a warehouse.
But just the annoyance, you know, it’s like you don’t factor in that you have to unload the boxes. And that took an hour out of your Wednesday. You know, it takes an hour out of your week, once every two weeks, to unload boxes. And you say, well, you know, but we make 12%. Well, no, you really make 11% when you factor in that you’re spending 1% of your time unloading boxes. And so if you go to them and offer the same margin commission, and it’s pure profit. That’s the thing about affiliate commissions. It’s pure profit.
You don’t have to do any of the service, you don’t have any of the inventory, you don’t have any of the hassle, you don’t have any of the cost, you don’t have any of the fees, you know, the credit card processing fees. You don’t have to hire anyone. And so if you go to somebody and you offer them the same margin, basically, but with none of the hassle. There’s a benefit there. Now, if you can offer more margin, if you can offer a higher commission, even better. Because I might argue that, you know what, okay, yeah, you’re going to offer me 12%. I make 12%, but I gain a customer.
But if you offer me 20% and I normally make 12% off, yeah, I’ll get over that really fast. So some other pain points, you know, margins. You know, margins and staff. You know, typically, again, the pain point, like affiliate marketing margins are higher because you get to keep all the commissions. So you don’t need staff. You know, unless you’re running, like, ridiculously high numbers, in which case you might need a support person or something, but usually you don’t. And so, you know, you’ve got things like margins, staff, inventory, rent, warehouse space. You know, think about what those, you know, support the hassle.
Think about what those pain points might be. Think about how you can address those pain points and how them being an affiliate for you, actually fixes those pain points. Another pain point that really. We talked about this in our report. It’s called you’d first 100 affiliates. And you can grab your copy@mattmcwilliams.com firsthand. First 100 first 100, go grab your report. We got 15 places there to find, you know, top affiliates. And one thing I talk about is working with your competitors. And when you work with your competitors, one of the ways you’re addressing a pain point is when they have, let’s just say it’s digital course world.
They have a digital course that talks about painting, and that course is all about, you know, general painting, but it doesn’t go into deep detail on watercolors. And I don’t know painting very well. So we’ll just stick with watercolors. You’re an oil painter, so you don’t go into depth, into watercolors, and you don’t want to because it’s not your type of painting. It’s not your thing. Right. It’s kind of like if you play the saxophone and not the clarinet, they’re pretty similar, is my understanding, but they’re a little bit different. So You go into depth, into oil painting, and you really focus on just. Or just general painting. And you’re willing to create an oil painting course that dives deeper into oils, but you don’t know how to do watercolors. It’s not really your thing.
So what do you do for those of your students who want to go deeper into watercolors? You recommend an affiliate product, an affiliate. You recommend a course as an affiliate about watercolors. Also, you teach painting, but you’re not going to make paints, so you become an affiliate for the different suppliers of paints. Makes total sense. Right? And it’s addressing a pain point for that person. So, number one, address their pain points, which means you need to know them, you need to study them.
Number two, you need to speak their language. Now, if you notice, when I talked about pain points just now, I use the words that these business owners are using themselves, the types of words that they’re using. They’re using words like inventory, margin, staff support. So you want to find the words that they’re using and speak their language. There’s a book I read, I listened to it. Actually, I didn’t read it. It was about 12, 13 years ago called Mavericks at Work. And one things that they talked about was this only spoken here language.
It’s a language that that’s only spoken within the company. Every company has their own, you know, buzzwords, so to speak. And it’s actually important in terms of company culture. And so you want to know what are those only spoken here languages within their industry?
What are their buzzwords? What’s their terminology? Right. And so that might even mean that when you go to them, you don’t say affiliate because they might not understand what the term affiliate means. Like, when I first got into this industry back in 2005, I didn’t know what that meant. If you had said partner, I would have known what it meant. If you said ambassador, I would have at least been able to kind of figure out what you meant. And so you want to use those terms correctly.
You know, we did a Facebook live with Jason and Cecilia Hilke. Well, actually, Cecilia didn’t make it. We did it with Jason Hilke. And we were talking about virtual summits, you know, virtual conferences. And one of the things that Jason pointed out, actually I pointed out because I noticed it about him, was they call them virtual conferences. Why? Because they’re in the parenting niche. They’re in the parenting niche. And then the parenting niche summit doesn’t mean anything. Conference means everything. There’s parenting conferences. There’s not parenting summits.
So they call them parenting conferences. It’s the same as a virtual summit. It’s exactly the same. But they’re using that language that their audience speaks. And so just as a side note, if you’re interested in grabbing some free training on how to run summits, Jason, Cecilia’s last parenting summit that we helped them with, their clients of ours, they had 104,000 people come to this summit. Crazy, right? If you’re interested in that, just go to mattmcwilliams.com summit workshop and you can register for their free training. It starts, like now, I think as of this, as when this podcast is releasing, it’s like starting now. So again, all these links will be in the show notes.
So if you just go to the show notes for this, which is mattmcwilliams.com tag the affiliate guy 3, 5, 1, you can grab, you know, grab all the links and stuff there. So again, don’t say affiliate when they might not understand what the heck that term means. Don’t say cookies. Don’t talk about cookies. You know, cookie links. Like, they’re thinking chocolate chip, right? Not what cookies mean in terms of affiliate marketing. So find out their keywords. You know, like profit, inventory, tracking, you know, et cetera. Use those types of words when you reach out to them, that is the key. And this ties back into point number one about their pain point. You want to address their concerns using their language. I used cookie as an example there. Let’s dig into that for a second.
If I were reaching out to someone who doesn’t really know a lot about affiliate marketing, I wouldn’t say that I have a lifetime cookie. And by the way, you should have a lifetime cookie. I’ve done a past episode all about why you should have a lifetime cookie. Just search in the podcast episodes for lifetime cookie and you’ll find it. You should have a lifetime cookie. But I wouldn’t say that. Instead, I would say something like. I would say something like, all the traffic that you send to our website will be tracked to your link forever.
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Again, I’m just going to, like, that’s basically just saying if I’m talking to an affiliate marketer, you know, if I’m talking to somebody, you know, if I’m having a conversation with, you know, Jeff Walker or Ryan Levesque, I’ll be like, yeah, we have a lifetime cookie. Boom, done. They know what that means. I don’t need to say. I don’t need to provide any detail. But with These people, I would say, you know, it’ll be tracked to your link forever. That means as long as they’re using the same device, they don’t even have to do anything.
They are cookied, which means they’re tied to your account. And if they sign up for our list or they buy anything, their profile is tied to your account. Even if they switch devices, blah, blah, blah. That means you get fair credit for the traffic you’re sending to our website. Again, to an online marketer, I just say lifetime cookie. They know what I mean. But someone who’s not in the online marketing world, you have to explain it using their language. That is key.
So find their pain points and address them. Number three, speak or number two, speak their language. Number three, you got to go to them, you got to go to, you got to meet them, where they are. When you’re talking about affiliates that are non traditional, sending them an email might not be enough. Hitting them up on social media might not work. But if you know that their big thing is Instagram, then use Instagram. If you know their big thing is, you know, YouTube, leave a YouTube comment even, you know. But more importantly, you might want to reach out to them through mail.
You might want to reach out to them via phone, might want to give them a call. You might want to get an article published in an industry magazine, you know, publish an article about how people in the. I’m going to make up a niche here, you know, people in the garden tools niche or the supplement industry are using affiliate marketing to supplement their, you know, their income.
Go to conferences, you know, once we’re back to doing that. And again, these all work in an on, you know, these all work with online marketers. I mean, the best way to recruit affiliates is at conferences. It’s in person. That’s where all of our big ones have come from. So get creative. Go to them, send a postcard to their office, send them a letter, handwrite, you know, their address on the envelope, send them lumpy mail, you know, send them. I mean, here’s a great.
I literally just thought of this. This would be really cool. So let’s say that they’re, say you have a thing of vitamins. We’ll just use the supplement industry. Let’s say you’re working with somebody who’s not really in the supplement world, but you know that they’re shipping supplements. Like they don’t create their own. This isn’t like a high profit thing. But they don’t know any better. Right? They’re a trainer. But they have all these supplements and they, they keep them all on hand and it’s just annoying. And you send them your supplement in the thing, you know, and it’s just like, you know that think of like the, like the big thing of protein powder I have this thing is like, you know, you have to put it under the forearm.
Like, you know, it’s like carrying one of those Strongman rocks, you know. Thing weighs like 12 pounds when you buy it. And just the size of it is huge. It’s like this, it’s bigger than a cup. It’s like a size of like two medicine balls. It’s just massive. If I sent that in the mail and said, look how big this is and consider how much space 500 of these are taking up in your, your thing and I’m pretty sure your margins are typical for the industry and they’re somewhere between 10 and 15%. But at my company we pay you 20% for everybody you refer and you don’t have to keep any of these in stock. That would be huge. That would be huge. Again, I’m addressing their pain points. I’m addressing their concerns. I’m speaking their language. I’m talking about things like inventory and space and I’m personalizing my recruiting, which is key.
I’m personalizing like this is specifically to them addressing their pain point. So we’re going to address their pain points, we’re going to speak their language, we’re going to go to them, we’re going to do some lumpy mail or something like that. We’re going to meet them in person. Number four, we’re going to educate them. You know, if you remember earlier I was talking about what a cookie was and I explained what a cookie is to this non affiliate person. So in the future when I use the term cookie, they know what I mean because I spent time educating them and this is really important. Like again, this applies to quote unquote, regular affiliates, just like the non traditional affiliates.
You want to educate your affiliates. So we send out emails with promo tips. We send out emails that talk a lot about mindset, like why you should mail this weekend, why you should not be afraid of unsubscribes, why you should mail more at cart close. And we teach them these things, we record videos for them. I’ve got a link in the show notes I’m going to include. It’s a video I recorded for Michael Hyatt’s affiliates a while back. Where I talked about how to use, I think it was about how to use an assessment or how to promote something as an affiliate. For Michael Hyatt, it was just like, I don’t know, maybe a 5, 10 minute video. Not looking at it right now, but it was pretty quick. I just gave some tips about some of the psychology they want to use to promote it in the Facebook group.
In the Facebook group, I post at least once every other day I post some sort of a tip, you know, that we have meaning in the Facebook group for our affiliates focused on what they need to be doing right now. So a couple weeks before the launch, I’ll post a couple tips on how to warm up your audience. And then right before the launch I’ll post, you know, a tip on like how to start off strong and how to promote specific parts of the launch.
Towards the end, I’ll put, you know, post about how to close sales. We do training webinars. You know, we do training webinars. Typically we do two. So we do these for our clients. Where in your affiliate launch coach, inside of your affiliate launch coach. We do two trainings for their affiliates. We do one about a week before the launch starts where we actually train them on kind of the basics. We go through the calendar with them, we talk about some promotional strategies, we talk about some of the best practices. If there’s a partner system, an affiliate system, we go through that, we take questions, we share with them and then we host one. Right. Usually like the day or two before the cart opens about closing sales.
So if you want to see an example that got a long URL for you, but it’s in the show notes, so don’t worry. We have an example of one of the training webinars that we did and you can download the slides and all that and use them for your own good. Or you can just hire us to do the training, of course. But you can see an example@mattmcwilliams.com sample Affiliate training mattmcwilliams.com sample Affiliate Training We’ve done this with physical newsletters, especially when we work with non traditional affiliates. It costs us a dollar to print and a dollar to mail the thing. We send them a newsletter like once a month with some updates or it could just be once a quarter. It could be whenever you want to. We give them tips, we give them strategies, we educate them, we keep them updated on what’s going on.
But again, we meet them where they are, like we just talked about and Then we educate them. So find their pain points, speak their language, go to them, address their concerns and personalize the recruiting. Fourth, educate them through those various means and then fifth, make them evangelists. The reality is, in the online world, people in the same niches, niches, whatever, the same industries, they tend to know each other.
We all tend to congregate in the same places. So we’re all friends on Facebook, we all follow each other, we’re all in the same few groups. And so that means that we’re in constant communication with each other. This is true with non traditional affiliates as well. Nonprofit owners are talking to other nonprofit owners. PTAs are talking to other PTAs. Business owners in a specific niche are talking to other business owners. Like the supplement shop in Kansas City’s talking to the one in Chicago.
They’re both talking to the one in Columbus, and they’re all talking to the one in Louisville. They’re part of groups, so they’re part of online groups, offline groups, they’re meeting at conferences, they’re meeting in all these different places. Right. And so even if you can’t be at a specific conference, if you have evangelists who are in love with your affiliate program, they’re going to spread the word. They are going to tell other people in their industry that are able to, you know, they’re going to be the one who addresses their concern. They’re going to be the one bringing up the pain points. They’re going to be the one speaking their language. Of course, they’re going to be the one educating them.
They’re going to be the one who’s going there and basically selling your affiliate program. They’re going to be able to share exactly how, you know, you address their concerns about margins or inventory or staffing. And then they’re going to talk about, yeah, they’re going to say like, oh my gosh, I’m making a 20% commission from them instead of a 12% margin with this thing and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? They’re going to share their success stories. So get them talking, get them talking. Encourage them to share your tips and trainings. You know, one things that we do is to say, hey, if you know anybody, like when we run an affiliate program and we send them to a blog post, you know, with some tips, or to a training, we say, hey, feel free to invite people who aren’t even affiliates. Feel free to invite them. We’ll train them.
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You know, we’ll still train them. And oh, by the way, you know, if you refer them, if they decide to sign up, you get a second tier commission. You know, you want to set up a second tier affiliate program so they can earn a commission for referring other people to your program. That is the number one way to get new affiliates.
Almost no one uses it, though. I did a podcast episode. I’m pretty sure it was episode 27. We’ll have a link in the show notes, but it was called like the number one way to get new affiliates that almost no one uses. And it was all about this, all about getting your affiliates to refer other people. So make your affiliates evangelists and they will spread the word. We found, I shared this in that episode. We found that for every affiliate we recruit or for every 100 affiliates we recruit, we get about 40 to another hundred.
Typically it’s about, we get like 2/3 of an affiliate for every affiliate doing nothing other than just making them into like, we don’t have to go out and find them. We just make our affiliates into evangelists by both doing all the things that we talked about, training them, educate them, motivating them, but then encouraging them and saying, hey, we’ve got a second tier program. In that episode, I share a way where you can get a sample email.
It’s super simple, but you send it out to your affiliates and you get referrals. I mean, like no extra effort. You send a single email that takes you 30 seconds to copy and paste, edit it and send it. I mean, it’s so quick. And you can literally nearly double the size of your affiliate program like overnight. So it is entirely possible to get these non traditional affiliates. And I recommend that you do. I mean, this is a powerful way not only to grow your affiliate program, but if you’re in a non traditional world, this may be the only way to grow your affiliate program. And I’m telling you right now, it works. So get out there and do it. And with that, wrap up. All the links I talked about will be in the show notes. Make sure you grab that report. Your first 100 affiliates. Make sure that you check out the summit training that Jason and Cecilia Hilke are doing. We’ve got the video tip that I talked about.
It’s on YouTube that you can grab. We did for Michael Hyatt. We’ve got a sample affiliate training and that episode, the number one way to get new affiliates. Make sure you check all of those out in the show notes, which you can find@mattmcwilliams.com tag 3,5,1. And with that, I will see you in the next episode.
See you soon.