How to Use Leaderboards to Find Affiliates

by Matt McWilliams | Jan 17, 2022 | Affiliate Recruiting, Podcast

Today I’m going to share a little secret weapon with you. It’s something I’ve used to get some awesome affiliates and develop some amazing relationships over the years. I shared it with a client the other day and already she’s used it to get two affiliates who are likely to bring in more than $200,000 in sales.

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How to Start 2022 Off the Right Way

2022 Affiliate Marketing Predictions

My Top 10 Lessons of 2021 and What They Mean for YOU!

My Top 10 Mistakes of 2021 and What You Can Learn From Them

How to Use Leaderboards to Find Affiliates

Today, I’m going to share a little secret with you. It’s something that I’ve used to get awesome affiliates and develop some amazing relationships over the years. I shared it with a client the other day and already she’s used it to get two affiliates who are likely to bring in more than $200,000 in sales. Listen up because this episode is going to be juicy.

So this is like the epitome of an unplanned podcast episode because we didn’t have it on the plan. We did not have this on our calendar, but I shared this with a client the other day. And as I said at the beginning, she’s used what I’m going to share with you in this episode very quickly. I mean, we’re talking right before Christmas, I’m recording this right after the new year. So this is like two weeks ago. So this is over Christmas.

She landed two affiliates. Who, based on what I know about these affiliates, I’m pretty confident. I mean, on the very low end, they’re going to bring in between the two of them, 125,000 in sales. This is a client just for the record who last year did less than $600,000 in sales. So to get two affiliates who could potentially be worth a quarter of a million dollars a year, first time she did what I’m teaching in this episode.

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So if I just want to be clear, if that hasn’t made you like perk up, press pause. Like if you’re in the car and you need to press pause so that you listen to this, when you can take notes and actually put this into action, I don’t know that I’ve ever shared anything.

I love to think that, this is our 473rd episode. I love to think I’ve shared some six-figure ideas. I can promise you. I don’t think I’ve ever shared anything. That’s going to make you six figures in that shorter period of time. I’m not a get-rich-quick person. All right. That’s not my MO, but this is big.

I had to check. I don’t think I’ve ever had. I don’t know. Maybe I have shared this. So maybe I’ve shared this before. Maybe I haven’t, if I have shared it, I’ve shared it kind of in passing. I haven’t shared it in the detail that I shared with our client the other day about this.

I’m going to tell you what it is in a second. I’m not going to build this up too much, but again, just to be clear, like we’re talking, she just started doing this. She did this with only a handful of people got two of them to agree, to promote her upcoming launch. And I am confident, almost guaranteed. I looked at their numbers. I know their metrics. I know one of them’s promoted some of their clients. I am confident. This is going to be worth over $200,000. I mean, 33% increase in revenue over last year. Just boom like that.

So this is huge. I, so here’s what I had her do, you know, we’re doing a coaching call, one of our clients in your affiliate launch coach, you can find out more about that by the way, youraffiliatelaunchcoach.com She was promoting this launch. She’s promoting another big launch out there, that was happening, actually overlapped with the new year. She was doing okay. She was in like, I think she said she was in ninth place.

It’s not like she’s not one of the top three affiliates. She was pushing pretty hard. She was doing pretty good. You know, this was a big deal for her. She’d never finished top 10 in a launch before in a launch leader board as an affiliate. So she’s pretty stoked. Now, that’s not necessarily, you don’t have to be in the top 10. We’ll talk about that. Like, you don’t have to be one of the top 10 affiliates that’s necessarily relevant. Just giving you some perspective on where she was.

So right before Christmas, she was like, Hey, I’m getting ready to go into open cart after Christmas, you know,

I’m promoting this launch, I’m in a ninth-place right now. She ended up finishing in ninth place. Exactly. You know, she finished right where she was. She was like, I got up to eight and then I dropped back to like ninth and then 10th and back up to ninth. And she was asking me for some advice as an affiliate, you know? because clearly, I know what I’m doing on that side too. Like, Hey, how do I make more money? Are there any things? and I shared a few things with her and I said, everything I just shared with you.

And this is a launch where if she did really, really well, like the top affiliate was going to do 75, maybe a hundred thousand in sales. So we’ll go a hundred thousand, they’re going to make $40,000. And she’s probably going to make it, she really busted it. She could top out at 30,000 in sales. So about 12,000, 13,000 in commissions. And she was trending towards about like she was going to probably do like, you know, $9,000, $10,000. And I had to hold her. I said I can give you some advice. My advice is going to help you grow by 20 or 30%. And that’s great.

You know, making an extra three, $4,000 is awesome. But if you want me to give you some advice on, what’s going to make the biggest impact on your business, let’s talk about something else. She’s okay, I’m listening. And I was like, okay, let me teach you real quick. How to do better on the leaderboard. Because what I’m about to share with you will help you.

Finishing higher on the leaderboard will help you get affiliates. Okay? When you follow what I’m about to share with you. So no doubt about it.

If you’ve got a chance, you know, to finish ninth on the leaderboard, Hey, ninth is top 10. That means something people list their top 10 and their top 20. If you got a chance to finish a 19th versus not being in the top 20, then you’ll fight to get top 20. Follow what I teach about affiliate marketing,

nothing I shared with her, nothing that I shared with her is something that I haven’t shared inside of Affiliate Insider Monthly, for example, our membership site. If you want to get a trial of that, by the way, Mattmcwilliams.com/AIMtrial for affiliate insider, monthly trial, you can get in for a buck, right? It gets you a couple of months for a dollar.

And it’s not anything I haven’t shared inside of there. This was not like monumental things that I’ve never shared with anybody. I told her, Hey, do you have a bonus package? She’s like, yeah. And I said, okay, let’s tweak that a little bit. Let’s, let’s add this, but let’s do this to make that’ll get a little bit more attraction. And I said, here, I want you to add this email at this time. You know, on the last day I told her to do this. I said, Hey, reach out to the person. Who’s running the launch. Why don’t you do a live with them?

Go live on the second to last day or the last day, do a few things to tweak her promotion that helped her. She said later, she’s like, you know, I looked at the numbers. There’s, there’s no way I would’ve finished in 11th place, which would sucked. You know, 11th place is terrible compared to nine, even though it’s only two spots, it’s kinda like in, that was listening to a guy earlier, he’s a marathon runner. And he’s about like top 10 is what, you know, when he was running is what got paid. And he’s like, I kept finishing in 11th or 12th. And he was like, there’s nothing else I could do.

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So he’s finally realized that he either needed to completely change his training so that he could become more professional and actually make money doing it. Or he just needed to slow down and because who cares if you’re finishing 12th or 23rd, you know that he was like, it wasn’t a pride thing. He was like, it really was a money thing. So he beefed up his training and he became, you know, he’s one of the top like 10 marathoners in the country right now. Isn’t he’s actually making money doing it, which can justify the time spent.

So yeah, 11th would be terrible. So I gave her some tips on the affiliate side and that plays a role in what I’m about to share with you because the higher she finished, well, the better it looked when she did this thing. And so what I said to her, I said, the thing is going to move the needle the most. Yeah. Extra $4,000, a little bit of prestige. It’s great. You learn a little bit about some promotional stuff. I spent 15 minutes helping her on the affiliate side. Maybe 20 shared some basic stuff with her. She and her team implemented it. They made more money. That’s awesome.

But I said, number one, I want you to engage with the other affiliates in the Facebook group and privately. So that’s number one. I was talking about how to use leaderboards, to find affiliates. These other companies, the one that you’re promoting as an affiliate, they are publishing a list of their top affiliates. They are handing them to you on a silver platter.

They are saying to you, “Hey affiliate, do you want to know who our other top affiliates are thinking?” So I said, I want you to engage with them. Congratulate them. When somebody moves up three spots on the leaderboard overnight, put a comment on the Facebook post, DM somebody who passes you and, and just, kind of give a little playful trash talk, or just say, Hey, I noticed, you know, we’re like, we’re right there together on the leaderboard. I’d love to connect time. You know, we don’t really know. I’ve seen you around. Don’t know who, you know, Baba just be a human being, right?

There’s no. Oh, you got to craft this message perfectly, right? No, this is just being a good human being. So, Hey, I’d love to connect sometime. And I’ve talked about this before, right? You know, some of my best friends in the online marketing world, we connected because of affiliate leaderboards, but here’s the key number one, she engaged with them. She engaged with the people in the leaderboard, not just the top people as the ninth-place affiliate. She had a little bit of credibility. She had some street cred to be able to reach out to the top three and be like, Hey, I want to get to know you better, but she didn’t just do that. And we’ll talk about it in a minute and what to do if you’re not in the top 10, that’s fine.

But she reached out to people who were in 15th, 20th, 25th place. She even reached out to everyone that they posted and said, Hey, this person made their first sale today. She congratulated them. I asked her afterward, I was like, how much time did you spend in here? Like three minutes a day. I just did it when I was regularly checking into Facebook.

I didn’t specifically set aside time. I did it once a day for about three minutes. I took a couple of the posts and I engaged with them. She made sure that she was seen in that Facebook group. She would, when the affiliate manager would do because the affiliate manager is for lack of a better term, a disciple of mine.

I trained this affiliate manager. So he posts some of the same stuff that I would post. And he would post tips in the Facebook group, she’d say, thanks. And then offer a thoughtful response to it. So for instance, this affiliate manager posted a tip about how to use swipe copy, like the one that we’ve posted before, and many times every launch and this client of ours thanked the affiliate manager and said, yeah, whatever you suggested in number three is really important. Here’s how we’ve done it. And then people responded to her saying, oh, thanks so much. Now I get it. I didn’t understand what he said. Now I get it. Blah, blah, blah. Right?

So she engaged in the group and became kind of an expert in the group. She became someone that everybody recognized three minutes a day for a couple of weeks. I mean, literally less than one hour of her time. So that was step number one. One of those two affiliates reached out to her, saw her in there quite a bit and reached out to her. So you could easily argue that less than one hour of engagement in that group is going to bring in 50 to a hundred thousand dollars a year for her business because they reached out to her.

She didn’t even have to do part two or three about what I’m about to share. That’s pretty cool. That’s a good ROI. I don’t know about you. I don’t make 50 to a hundred thousand dollars in an hour. All right. I consider myself to be highly paid for what I do fairly paid for what I do. And I don’t make 50 to a hundred thousand dollars an hour.

And so if you can find something that I can spend one hour doing over the course of two weeks, that is virtually guaranteed, potentially to bring in that kind of money, I will do it all day long. And I do this all day long. It’s just, unfortunately, I can’t do it 40 hours a week, or I would. So that said hugely, hugely profitable for her in that regard.

The second thing she did, as I said, so she engaged in the group. She engaged privately with them on Facebook. The second thing she did is after the launch when they publish their final leaderboard via email, that is not in the Facebook group, but I’m counting that in the Facebook group. So she was congratulating people. She was trash-talking with people. She’d never done any of that before, by the way. She responded, she clicked reply to the final leaderboard message, but made the to field, be anybody that she wanted to engage with.

So anybody in the top, like 30, she reached out to him and said, Hey, congratulations on winning. Congratulations on fifth place. It looks like you beat me. Hey, I’d love to connect. Within a week, she had scheduled like half a dozen calls. She’s got more on the docket later, but she scheduled like six or seven right away. One of those people had already reached out to her. It became one of those calls.

One of them was like, boom, I’m in your launch. Sounds perfect. I am in all in. I’m like I’m in a to win it. Now let’s do something magical together. Right? So you reach out to those people and you just say, Hey, congratulations, or great job. Or I loved watching,

Hey, I subscribed to your email list. I loved watching what you’re doing. I love that Facebook live that you did. That’s part three is to start following them and engage with them on other levels. Right? But what she did is take another couple of minutes and she followed the people who were on the leaderboard. She friended them on Facebook and she saw how they were promoting.

And then she would say, oh, I love that Facebook live that you did. Or I love the email that you sent. I love the such and such that you did. I love the bonus that you put together. I shared with her the story of how I used to joke with Ray Edwards about how like, dude, your bonuses are so good.

I’m going to buy through your link. Even though I’m an affiliate. She used that line on somebody else, you know, to give her the idea. She was being honest. She was like your bonus package. I have bonus package envy. Your bonus package is so amazing. That started a conversation. They haven’t that I know of. They haven’t agreed to work together yet or do anything together yet.

But I think it’s going to be a profitable relationship. I’ve used this so many times. I’m telling you it works. Now you might be thinking, okay, this works. If you’re in the top 10 though, your client is in ninth place in a multimillion-dollar affiliate launch. Of course, she gets to go and be like, “Hey, number five, affiliate. I’m somebody. And you’re somebody we should. Yeah, that’s this only works, right?” If you’re one of the top 10, that’s not right. If you’re in 30th place, don’t reach out to the number one affiliate, all right, work your way up. Hey, maybe you’re on the others on the leaderboard or people.

Who’ve also made sales, you know, I’ve run affiliate launches where 294 affiliates made sales. We ran one last year, over 450 affiliates made a sale. You might be in 370th place, but you’re in there. You’re in the Facebook group. You’re engaging. People are seeing you. You’re celebrating that. You made a few sales.

Hey, you’re kind of legit. I’d let, maybe like to probably get to know you a little bit better. See if we can do some business together. So you reach out to some of those people who are also made sales. If you’re in 53rd place, you reach out to number 30, 34 number, whatever, right?

Are you going to make $200,000 off of two affiliates? NO, but could you make 40 or $50,000 off of 10 affiliates? Yes, absolutely could. And then guess what, now you do that. Your list grows the next affiliate promotion you do instead of being in 180 fourth place, you’re in 75th place and you’re reaching out to the 50th, to the hundredth affiliates.

And now the next time you’re in 30th place and you’re reaching out to the 11th through fifth. And then the next time you’re in the top 10 baby. You work your way up. So number one, engage in the group. Number two, I kind of got number two and number three, mixed up number two would follow them, get on their list, get to know them, get to know their content and comment on that content, connect with them that way.

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And then third send that email, very simple email. You know, you’re just replied to the final leaderboard and you just say, “Great job. Congratulations.” One year I went into Canva and I made images and it was like, congratulations on your performance in such and such a launch. I’m like, well, that was overkill. A couple of sentences would have sufficed. Don’t say I’d love to get, you know, at that point don’t be like, Hey, I’d love to connect. No, just leave it at that. Just leave it at that.

Put the ball in their court. They will reply and say stuff back to you that you’ll be amazed. And this is a numbers game. You do this 20 times per launch. You’ll get one or two, three partners each time you do that over the course of 10 launches. And you’ve got 30 really, really good partners.

So listen, if you’ve got any questions about this or anything else, shoot me a text 2 6 0 2 1 7 4 6 1 9. I’d love to connect with you that way. Make sure you subscribe because you do not want to miss the next episode. I’m going to share with you What and How to Communicate with your affiliates.

So what to communicate to your affiliates and how to communicate to them. What do you actually communicate with them and when do you communicate with them and how do you communicate with them? Three critical questions that I’m going to answer in the next episode. So make sure you click that subscribe button if you haven’t yet. So you don’t miss that and I will see you then.

Remember to check out all of our deep dives into affiliate marketing at theaffiliateguy.TV and if you have a question, ask it at, asktheaffiliateguy.com who knows maybe you even be featured on an upcoming episode. And lastly, if you haven’t yet make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you’re listening to this episode. See you soon.