Is it better to hire an in-house affiliate manager or an outsourced one? My answer might surprise you. I know I’m biased, but I share the pros and cons of both in this podcast episode. So…which one is best? Well, the answer depends…and I show you what’s best for YOUR situation in this week’s podcast episode.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
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LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Affiliate Warm Up Plan and Promo Plan
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
What Kind of Affiliate Manager is Best: In-House or Outsourced?
What to Look for in an Affiliate Manager
Don’t Make These Killer Mistakes with Your Affiliate Program (Part 2)
Don’t Make These Killer Mistakes with Your Affiliate Program (Part 1)
The Surprising Thing That Might be Holding Your Business Back
How to Get Your Affiliates Fired Up Before a Promotion
You’re four months away from a big product launch or promotion. What do you do to get your affiliates fired up and then keep them warm leading up to this promotion? Well, in today’s episode, I share the exact strategy we use for our clients.
Let’s get started. So let’s say you’re six months away, four months away, whatever. Away from a big promotion or big product launch, and you’ve got some affiliates already lined up, right?
Like, that’s what you should do. Don’t wait till the last minute to get your affiliates. You’ve got them lined up. So here we are. We’re six months away. Four months away.
What do you do now? What do you do for the next four to six months? Well, this is the thing that most affiliate programs really mess up.
And this has happened to me so many times. I sign up as an affiliate like, yeah, we’re going to promote, and then they go dark. They go dark on their affiliates for months leading up to a launch or a big promotion, and then they wonder why no one promotes.
Well, duh. You haven’t communicated with them for five months, and then you come out of left field three weeks before the promotion. Hey, get all fired up.
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We got a big sales contest. It’s a big promotion. Where you been for the last six months? Dude, what the heck? So how do you warm up your affiliates? Four months out, five months out. Six months out. Before the promotion. Before the launch.
And then keep them warm leading into it. Well, that’s what this episode is all about, how to warm up your affiliates before a big promotion. And I’m going to reveal to you how we warm up our affiliates, how we keep them warm and ready to promote leading up to our big launches.
Launch could also be a promo. This could be leading into your Black Friday promo. It could be leading into a big, maybe you’re going to make a big push this August where you’re running like a huge promotion, right.
It’s a big discount or a new product. How do you get them going now, right? This is the number one key to getting the most out of your affiliates.
So listen up. This is how we do it. And again, the normal way that we see people warming up their partners is basically not at all. This is the typical pre launch calendar. One month out. One month out.
They announce the launch the day before the launch, they say, here’s what you need for tomorrow. That’s stupid. Think of your own list for this.
With your own list, you would never go months without communicating and then suddenly show up in their inbox and attempt to sell them something. That’s not how it works. Right?
We warm up our audience. I’ve done entire episodes on how to warm up your audience for affiliate promotions. Well, the same thing is true here.
That’s exactly what we see people doing. Most people, I would say more than half of the affiliate programs I’m involved in, they do this in advance of their launches. They have no communication with their affiliate partners for an entire year, for eleven months, ten months, and then they expect them to promote.
That’s not the way you want to do this. So I’m going to share with you the exact strategy we use starting at the end of the previous launch. Now, just for purposes of what we’re doing today, we’re going to talk about launches.
Now, this could be big promotions, could be whatever. And we’re going to assume six months between launches. So maybe you have two products and you launch them each once a year for this example.
Now if you want to download the exact timeline that we talked about, and then we’ve also got a promo plan that you can give to your affiliates, just go to mattmcwilliams.com\affwarmupdf. We’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s kind of a funky URL, I realize. Go there.
I’m going to give you the timeline and this promo plan that I’ll talk about as we go along. So the key here is to stay in communication with them. What do you do, though?
That’s the question. I get a lot and I’m going to give you some specifics and then some broader things. Right. So let’s say we’re launching today. Let’s just say our launch ends on March 30, 2021. The next day, I want to announce the next launch. So six months from now, I’m really bad at this. So we’ll just call it like October 1. That’s when it’s going to start.
Just for purposes of planning or for keeping it simple, the key here is to go ahead and get commitments for the next launch. You want to spend the next week or two locking down your top partners for the next one. Now, over the next month, what we will typically do in the six months to four months out phase, we don’t want to be posting every week in the partner Facebook group.
We don’t want to be sending them an email every week. So sometime between the end of our launch and that next two weeks in that phase, that’s where I’m really focused both in the Facebook group and via email and other channels, texting, voxing, whatever, I’m focused on locking them down for the next launch. Then at around the five month mark, a little bit before the five month mark, I’m just going to post something else.
It could be a reminder. I’m going to put it in the Facebook group or maybe I’m going to email it. I’m going to post some sort of reminder and I’m going to post some sort of an update.
It could be just a really cool story we got from the last promotion. Maybe a testimonial, a case study. Could be something like that. Doesn’t have to be anything fancy. I’m just doing something to communicate with them so I don’t just go dark. It could be a tip.
So I’d probably limit it to one of three categories. A really cool update, a really cool story, a tip for them, or something from behind the scenes. Maybe you’re getting ready, maybe you’re shooting the videos for your next launch and you just want to give them a behind the scenes thing.
So you just go on set, on set with a selfie stick saying, hey, what’s up? It’s Matt. I’m on set here and I just wanted to show you kind of what we’re doing.
We’re doing this really cool setup for our next video series. Yada, yada, yada, right? Give them exclusive access.
About five months out, we want to ask for referrals. Now. This again serves as a reminder.
If I’m asking you for a referral, I’m reminding you of our dates. And hey, reminder, the dates are October 1 through 16th, something like that, right? Ask your partners if they know anybody who’d be a good fit to promote the next launch or the next big promotion if they refer someone.
We’ve done episodes on this, right? Set them up as a second tier affiliate. This is a super quick email.
It’s just basically, we actually have a template. I don’t know. If you go to mattmcwiams.com and search number one source of new affiliates, you’ll find a website or a website, you’ll find a page, a post where I talk about this asking for referrals and you can download the template. But it’s basically just, hey, do you know anybody who’d be a good fit for this?
If so, shoot me a quick intro. I’ll make sure you get a second tier commission on their sales. That’s it.
Like super quick, right? We do that about five months out, four and a half months to five months out in this lead up from about the six month mark until about the one month mark. I’m going to alternate every other week.
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So I’m going to send one email a month and then I’m going to send in the middle, I’m going to send posts to the Facebook group. And again, we can stick to. In the email I’m typically going to stick to something that’s a little bit more of an ask, maybe provide a slight give, but usually an ask.
And then in the Facebook group, that’s where I’m going to give them behind the scenes content, or I’m going to give them a really cool story, or I’m going to give them a tip, something like that. But then four months out is when we begin sharing what we call our pre prelaunch content. So this is content that’s published on your site, blog posts, podcast videos.
It’s not really a piece of launch content or promotion content, but we give it to them using an affiliate link so that they can just warm up their audience. Right. That’s the whole thing. We talked about that before. How do you warm up your audience? Well, the same thing is true.
We want to give them the tools to warm up their audience. Then we post another, just like a tip or a cool story. Three months out, this is where we invite them to join the partner community, if they haven’t already.
So again, we’re reminding them, hey, if you haven’t already, come join the partner community, private Facebook group. Come join here. And then we start to ramp it up.
Maybe we share two posts a month in the Facebook group inside of 90 days, and we share twice a month instead of once a month. Updates, tips, strategies, reminding them of the dates, letting them know for any changes to the launch calendar or the promotion calendar. Two months out, we start to send at least we send two emails.
Two months out. So roughly eight weeks and then six weeks out. And then we start posting about every week in the Facebook group.
Customer testimonials and stories backstage. Look at the content, we announce the exact launch sequence, we give them tips, we continue to share pre pre launch content, anything that we feel like we need to give them in terms of updates, we start giving those. And then about a month out.
So we’ve been in constant contact. We keep reminding them of our dates and all of these by the way you’re reminding them of the dates of the dates. Remind them.
Starts on October 1. Close cards on the 16th if you know the exact things like, hey, remember the webinar push starts on the 7th and goes through the 10th.
And if you, the card opens on the 11th and whatever that is, right, you give them all these dates and keep hammering them home, you’ll cut down on them asking you later, about a month out. So four weeks out, we’ll say, we announce prizes. You can announce them sooner, but this is the time that we make a big deal out of it.
And we usually hold back some of the prizes. So we usually hold back about 10% of the prizes. We’ll come up with a budget.
And again, this may sound big, but I’m just saying, for our clients, we’ll say, okay, there’s $100,000 budget. I’m looking at the sheet here. So for this client, we have 200.
And let’s see, $207,000 in prizes. That was our total budget. Okay, we’ll announce about 180,000 of those and then withhold the last 27,000.
And we’ll use that kind of like as needed for on the go prizes. But we’ll announce, okay, first prize is $100,000. We’ll announce the opt in contest and second place and all that stuff.
Three weeks out, we’ll send promo plans. Now with our big partners. With our big partners, we’ll do promo plans one on one with them, about four to eight weeks out.
With our smaller partners, we’ll send them. Basically, it’s a detailed breakdown of each day of the launch with suggested mailing times, and we’ll just walk them through. And again, if you go to that URL I mentioned earlier, which mattmcwiams.com/affwarmuppdf the links in the show notes, you can download an example of the promo plan we use along with that pre launch timeline. So we send that out about three weeks in advance.
It’s got a video that walks them through it. All that stuff. About two weeks out, we remind them that we’re two weeks out, not much more or less than, hey, we’re two weeks.
It’s a big milestone, right? About ten days out, we send the partner login. This has got all that they need, their links and all that stuff.
We offer these, by the way, whether you’re a client of ours or not, we actually do these. So if you’re interested, just send an email to matt@mattmcwalliams.com.
My team will get in touch with you about possibly doing a partner center for you. We talked about those, I think, in the last episode or the episode before, they’re pretty awesome. We do a really good job with those.
About a week out, we hold an event. This is usually just a training. We do a live training, share best practices, how to maximize their commission, go through the launch calendar, give them a tour of the partner center and all that stuff. And then we get the swipe copy out. I meant that before. Typically we’ll send that out about ten days as well.
We’ll send out the swipe, copy their links, all that stuff. We give them copy of what they’re going to be promoting. So if they’re promoting an ebook or a PDF, we give them a copy of that.
If they’re going to be promoting a video, we give them access to the video and all that stuff. Then about two days out, it’s two days, do you need anything? The day before, we ask again, do you need anything?
And then it’s launch day. The most important thing that we have learned over the years of doing this is you cannot over communicate with your partners. You cannot over communicate in every single email.
Remind them of something you’ve already said, like include their login information, remind them of the training that’s coming up, remind them of the contest, remind them of the promo plans, remind them that they can refer someone. Remind them about what strategies you’ve shared. Like what strategies have you personally used or seen others use to warm up their audience.
Share them with them. Right. What have you seen in terms of what’s working to promote webinars? Share them. Remind them of the dates. The dates, the dates, the dates, the dates over and over and over again.
Here’s when it starts. This is when the promo starts. This is when the big push starts. This is when the workshop starts. This is when the webinar starts. Keep reminding them over and over and over again.
Make sure it’s on your calendar. And so this is a basic plan. I say you can’t over communicate. Of course, you could send an email every day for six months. That would be overkill. So it’s nice and spaced out.
One email a month, one Facebook post a month and then ramping up. Just basically think about the gap between communications. This is a pretty good way of looking at it. The number of months out is about the number of weeks between your communications. Roughly over four. It’s about four weeks per thing.
Questions?
Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.
Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
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When you get down to three months, you start going about three weeks between emails and three weeks between Facebook posts. Two months out. It’s every other.
There you go. That’s a really easy way to kind of keep up with it until you get to about a month out. And then you start kind of ramping it up a little bit. More there. So again, go to that URL I mentioned, mattmcwiams.com/affwarmuppdf. It’s in the show notes.
You don’t have to remember that and download that report and also make sure to come join us. We have an epic training coming up where I’m going to walk you through step by step how to start, grow and scale an affiliate program just like we did to over a million dollars a month. The URL for that is mattmcwiams.com\sevenfigures
We’ll put that in the show notes as well. If you go there, get registered for this training. You do not want to miss it. This is not like a 45 minutes webinar.
I’m just going to pre warn you, it’s a little bit over an hour, almost an hour and a half long training. It is an epic training because there’s a lot to cover. So go there, get registered for the master class because it’s going to be epic and you do not want to miss it. mattmcwiams.com\sevenfigures I’ll show you how to build a seven figure affiliate program.
That’s exactly what I’m going to reveal to you. So it’s kind of our confidential playbook that we really don’t share that often. We usually do this like twice a year. So go get registered for that and I will see you there and see you in the next episode.
Questions?
Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.
Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
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