Believe it or not, you can scale an affiliate program to 7-figures and beyond…and you don’t have to do all the work. And you don’t have to hire a team of overly qualified affiliate managers. You can scale with a team of virtual assistants…or even a single one. In today’s episode, I’ll show you how.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
Time-Saving Tips for Busy Affiliate Managers
How Paul Pruitt Climbed to the Top of the Affiliate Leaderboard in Just 2 Years
Tools of the Trade: What Every Affiliate Manager Should Be Using
7 Major Roadblocks to Scaling Your Affiliate Program (and How to Fix Them)
The Best Ways to Celebrate Your Affiliates (and Keep Them Loyal)
How to Use Virtual Assistants to Run a 7-Figure Affiliate Program
Believe it or not, you can scale an affiliate program to seven figures and frankly, well beyond. And you don’t have to do all the work and you don’t have to hire a team of overly qualified, expensive affiliate managers. You can scale with a team of virtual assistants or even a single one. So keep listening and I’ll show you how.
Let’s get started. So in the last episode I talked about time management for affiliate managers. Now for some of you listening, you know, you’re doing this part time, you’re doing this an hour or two a day, you’re fitting this in on the margins. And for you, the last episode, in this episode might not be as relevant.Like, frankly, at the risk of sounding like this is a pitch for, for our agency, I’ve mentioned it before, we’re probably not adding a new client anytime in the, you know, next couple of months. So I’m not pitching my agency when I say this, I. But you probably should hire somebody.
If you really want to scale, it’s really hard to do in an hour or two a day. If you want to scale to seven figures, you need to be full time. And so I’m really talking to those people who are doing this full time or you know, four hours a day and you want to scale dramatically, you have to add some help, you have to get some help because you can do that, you can scale to seven figures, you can scale beyond and you don’t have to do it all yourself. And so like I said in the last episode I talked about time management.
The idea there was if you do only have four hours or you know what, if you only have eight or nine hours, everybody has a limited number of hours. Assuming that you are going to get some sleep, assuming that you are going to stop to eat, you’re going to stop to do a little bit of exercise, you’re going to stop to maybe have a social life, okay, on the high end you probably have 15 hours a day. You know, that’s what I had when I started my first affiliate program. I was probably working 90 hours a week, whatever the math is on that. But as you know, one of my. My good friends always says, we’re all part time.
Nobody’s truly working full time. You know, 40 hours is not full time. Whatever. What’s 168 hours in a week? If my math is right, I think that’s wrong. I don’t even know what. I don’t even know how many hours there are in a week. I have to have to go. Like, my brain has gotten to the point where I would have to Google that. I definitely, definitely ends in an 8. So anyway, we can come back to that later. But we’re all part time, so we need to get some help if we want to scale.
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So in this episode, what I’m going to do is I’m going to show you exactly how to use virtual assistants. Okay, I’m talking about human virtual assistants. Now. I’ve got a series coming up that I’m going to talk about how to use AI, how I and our team are using AI, specifically in the context of running affiliate programs. I think that’s going to be pretty cool because again, if you’ve got two hours a day and you have to optimize how you spend those two hours, if there’s something that takes an hour, but you can knock it down to 15 minutes, that frees up 45 minutes a day that you can do the things that only you can do, like relationship building, you know, I cannot. There’s no va, there’s no AI.
There’s none of that. They can do relationship building like you. And if you only have two hours, I would love if an hour and 30 minutes of that was on relationship building. And that’s what this is all about. That’s what we’re talking about today and in that series coming up, just to be clear, I don’t think that series is like the next few episodes. It’s probably two to four episodes from now is when it’ll start. So. So make sure you hit subscribe because you don’t want to miss that.
So I’m going to tell you right now that’s going to like, there’s just very little information out there. And I think some of the things are going to really help you. I think there’s a few of them that are going to blow your mind. Like, and a lot of them are, like, I did one with. I’ll just share one of them. Actually, I’ll share two of them real quick, even though I’m going to talk more in depth. But, like, one of them the other day, it’s amazing to me that back in the day in order to analyze, we have a new client, big brand, but starting an affiliate program in order to figure out what’s the competition paying their affiliates.
That used to be a two to four hour task of going around Google, signing up for programs, finding all the information. Now it’s you ask, you know, chatgpt and I got a list of all the competitions, affiliate programs and 2 1/2 minutes and was able to come up with the exact commission to pay. Like that’s a one time savings of 2, 3, 4 hours of my life that I can devote to other things.
That’s pretty frickin cool. And then obviously there’s so many more uses that we’ll get into in that series, some of which are like, they’re the things that save. We wrote a, I created a GPT that basically every day we upload the, the stats from the day before and it analyzes those stats and it tells me exactly like okay, here’s who’s, you know we green flag, yellow flag and red flag affiliates. Like here’s who’s up. Yellow flag means ah, they might be down a little bit but it’s not, you know, it’s not a huge down. So probably don’t want to do anything about it yet. But keep an eye on them because if you see somebody go yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow, you reach out to them before they go red.
So again that’s the, the human side is the reaching out. The analytic side is the AI. So again that’s just one of the examples of the or two of the examples the way we’re using it. And we’ll talk more about that in that series. But today we’re talking about humans. All right, listen, the thing is, VAs can be your secret weapon. In fact, they are the secret weapon of most of the highly scalable affiliate programs that I know of. I know very few people who have built an affiliate program that has scaled, you know, significantly that was either went from six to seven or eight figures orwent from seven to eight or went from like okay, it was already in the eight figures.
You know, this affiliate program was already doing you know, 15 million a year and they took it to 50. I’ve seen very few affiliate managers do that single handedly. I don’t actually come to think of it, I don’t know of one. I’m sure there is one. So that’s why I’m saying I’m sure there’s one. But I don’t know of one. When I mentioned, you know, did an episode like seven, eight episodes ago where I talked about how we took an affiliate program from 15 million to 325 million. I don’t mention the name of that program. If you know me, you know who it is. But I don’t mention that for, you know, privacy reasons. Even though we’re way past the NDA on that.
I just, I don’t do that to our clients. But when we did that, all of the stuff that we’re going to talk about today, or most of the stuff, because this was, you know, 13, 14 years ago, most of the stuff that I’m going to talk about today, it was done by my VA so that I could focus on the things that only I could do. There’s an old saying, you know, what got you here is not what’s going to get you there. So what got you to a hundred thousand dollar a month affiliate program is not going to get you to a million dollars. What got you to a sustainable affiliate program? Whatever, whatever level makes you happy. Maybe you’re making $30,000 a month.
That’s not what’s going to get you to 100,000amonth. The reason that you need a VA, like I’ve said, is so that you can focus on the highest leverage tasks. So a couple of things, you know, some of the big benefits, the obvious ones, time leverage, again, you’re having them do things that are, that you can train anyone to do.
You get to specialize in the things that only you can do. It’s very cost efficient. We’ll talk about this later. But you know, if you’re paid X amount of money and you’re only working eight and a half hours a day, then the cost efficiency and what you’re making per hour compared to what you’ll pay a VA is it’s like the difference can be very stark. And the other thing is it creates consistency, it creates follow through. And I’ll give you an example. Well, two examples that we can, you can dive into a little bit more later.
But number one is typically my VAs are overseas, so they’re in a different time zone. And while there is some overlap because I want them working with the same time I’m working for part of the day, I get a little bit more coverage. And there have been times where I’ve done launches and I quotation marks, I am responding to emails essentially 24,7 during this launch. That’s pretty amazing.
The other thing is I know that there needs to be follow up. And I have systems to make sure that follow up is done, but I’m gonna drop the ball. And having VAs means, like, they can handle certain things like follow up. So what are some of the affiliate tasks that you have that are high value but not necessarily high skill?
That’s where you start. What are some of those tasks? Like, doing this is important. Analyzing data. I mentioned earlier, We’ve written an AI program that does 70% of it, but. Some of that, you know, the, the, I would say 18 of the remaining 20% still needs a human to look at it and I don’t need to be the one that does that. I can come in at that final 2% and analyze that data.
High value Follow following up with an affiliate via email. How many different ways am I going to follow up with an affiliate that I’ve sent an original email to? You know, how many different ways am I going to word that email? That can be a VA task. So we’ll talk about some of those specifics. But think about what are the high value but low skill things. That’s va, that’s perfect VA territory. And then here’s the cool thing. The skill level can increase as they get more knowledgeable. So today it might be high leverage, high value, low skill.
Six months from now it’s high value, medium, low skill a year from now. Like I mean my va, my primary va, Kevin, I mean his skill level, it’s not at mine, but it is one notch below. And I am talking on like a 50 notch, you know, scale. He can do things that I can’t do. It’s gotten to that point. So let me be clear about something before we jump into some of the specifics.
If you can get your company to pay one, do it. But if not, consider paying for it yourself. So if you’re an entrepreneur, just pay for it. Get a VA 5 hours a week even to start, get a VA, pay for it yourself. It is one of the best investments you will ever make. Alright? But if you’re working for a company, if you’re working for a company, most of the time I have gotten my company to pay for a VA because I sold them on that. As I talk through this today, you’ll probably be able to learn how to sell your boss on this. You know, essentially the pitch was, listen, here’s the deal. I’m currently working 45 hours a week and here’s how much our affiliate program is making, here’s how much it will make if I am able to focus more on higher leverage tasks.
And I would tell them like the first two months, I just assume it’s going to make no difference in terms of the bottom line. And the reality is it probably won’t. But here’s what it’s going to do to our revenue. And usually with like one of the programs, a 3% increase in affiliate revenue would more than pay for. And that’s including like taking off the commissions, taking off what I get paid for that, taking off all the fees, you know, a 3% increase in revenue would be worth it to pay the va. And so they, okay, that’s an easy decision. But years ago, I’m gonna share the math here.
Years ago I worked for a company and I kind of ran the numbers on this. I worked about 40 to 45 hours a week. I was paid a salary of $6,000 a month plus a percentage of the affiliate sales. So in a good month, like December, I’d make a 7,500, $8,000 bonus. In a bad month I’d make, you know, 2,500, maybe even a tiny bit less. I mean, trying to think like probably about 2500 was probably the worst month. Once I got started, the average is probably about 4,500. So I’m taking home, you know, I’m banking about 10,000, 10,500, maybe upwards of 11,000amonth, you know, about 125,000 a year. Right. So keep in mind I was a two time affiliate manager of the year at this point.
But even if the numbers are lower, so maybe you’re not making 125, maybe you’re making 60, you know, which I think the industry standard or industry average is like 72, you know, today I haven’t looked it up in a couple of years, but let’s just say you’re even slightly below industry standard, $60,000. I was literally in charge of everything. Let me literally everything. So I started with outsourcing, just the affiliate approvals and the onboarding. Literally just looking at the application.
I taught them how to look at it. We got 40 applications a day. And I said, okay, here’s, and I just went through, here’s the 20 or so that you should approve. Like these are the factors. It was a, it was basically a human algorithm. Like if it has this thing, this thing and this thing and this thing, approve it. Here are the ones you should definitely decline. There’s 10 that you should definitely then handle, like turn the other ten over to me.
And so each day, so I did, I reviewed like three days worth of stuff, recorded it, sent it to them, and then for the first week I had hit him record a video saying, okay, I’m going to approve this one, this one, this one, decline, approve, approve, decline, not sure, not sure, not sure. And then I would teach him, okay, here’s the not sures, here’s how to get the not sures, here’s how. And so over time, yeah, the first like two weeks, it actually took me more time to do affiliate approvals. But by about the third week it started taking me less time. By about the sixth week he was doing all of them.
Or maybe he would have like two a day out of 40 that I’d have to look at. Then he started doing the onboarding. Sending the personalized welcome email is a copy paste email. I say it’s personalized because it’s not the automated one. I still wasn’t personalizing it in this particular case I was. So I was just copying and pasting the same thing 35 times a day. So now I’m no longer doing affiliate approvals.
Takes me over an hour. I’m no longer sending the onboarding emails. Takes me about an hour. I’ve all of a sudden saved over two hours a day. Then I taught him how to handle specific emails and then handling the reporting and so on. And we’ll talk in specific, like how I walked him through that. At first I was spending about $400 a month and saving 50 hours.
Now I paid much better. To be clear, I paid much better than the overseas average. Okay, Most of the VAs were making at that time. Again, this is over a decade ago. We’re making about $5 an hour. I paid eight. This is 50 hours that I could then spend optimizing the program we built. I mentioned earlier, we built it in this massive program, made me a lot of money. But I also started building my personal brand. I would not have had time to build my personal brand without this VA one VA working 80 hours a month. And at that time him working 80 saved me 50, maybe 60. Wasn’t a one to one.
Now frankly, he’s so good that, I mean him working 160 hours a month, he’s full time, probably does save me 159 hours a month. I would probably be able to do it one hour faster over the course of an entire month. But again we. So by the time he got to the, the, you know, not the end, but by the time we got to like, you know, the three month mark, I was spending By the end I had a full time VA and a part time one. I was essentially cloning myself.
But allowing them to handle all the things I hated doing. It cost me. I ran the Met numbers, it cost me eighteen hundred dollars a month out of my own pocket. Out of my own pocket. But I easily made at least $3,000 more per month. At least. And even if you factor in, okay, taxes, take home all that stuff. The 1800 I started a business. The business paid, you know, the VA, the VA’s. So that’s a business expense. And yeah, I made an additional maybe $3,400, you know, in income and had to pay taxes on it. I still profited. Money. I still profited.
And I was working at a minimum 10 hours less per week. I was only working about 30 hours a week on that program. And I was able to use that time again to build my brand, to take on new clients, to do some coaching, to basically launch this business. I didn’t quite launch this podcast then, but all that. So I’m making. I mean, worst cases, I was profiting four or five hundred dollars. So even if you don’t take that time to start a personal brand and make additional money, what if they’re just helping you be better? And let’s say you take off, let’s just go low 10 hours a week and it’s income neutral.
You end up making the same amount of money and working 10 hours less a week. How is that not a win? That’s. I mean, that’s huge if you think about it. So let’s look at some tasks that you can delegate and then I want to talk about how to work with them. Okay. The first one is just, you know, affiliate recruiting. We’re going to kind of go in order of the process. Like, so if I’m, you know, if I got an affiliate, I got to bring them on, I got to find them, got to bring them on all the way to, like, I got to support them and analyze the data.
So kind of that lifecycle of an affiliate, right? Researching potential affiliates. We’ll talk about AI again coming up and how we can use that. But a lot of that is VA’s. Like, my VA’s right now, as I’m talking, are probably finding, probably while I’m recording this episode, are going to find three to seven affiliates that are a good fit for one of our clients. So researching them, like, we’ve created an AI tool. And I’m going to talk about this probably during that, that series. The AI tool we’ve created, it’s. It’s pretty close. Like, it’s 95% of the way there in terms of being ready for, like, public consumption. Like, I use it, but I know how to, I know how to get through that 5%. That’s annoying. We use it as a team and we know how to use. So we’ve got to.
Fine, Tune the code a little bit so that it’s ready for the public. But it does a great job of finding the affiliates. But here’s the deal. Only nine out of 10 of the affiliates that it identifies are actually a great candidate for the affiliate program. There’s always going to be kind of that little bit of a percentage where you want to check on. You actually want to go look at their profile. You want to look at the last five posts. Just because they promoted a competitor of ours two years ago and they have 52,000 followers and they’ve posted on, you know, their social media within the past
And like all these algorithmic factors that it looks at, it doesn’t mean they’re a great fit. And we can usually take enter a human in 30 seconds and go, yep, good fit, bad fit, not sure, but let’s reach out and see. You know, and so there’s still a human element and they can be a part of that getting the contact info. Okay, so the AI is really good at telling you that my email address is mattattmcwilliams.com here’s the deal. I don’t know if you knew this, but when I say that that’s not my personal email, that is my public email. If you email me@mattmcwaims.com I’m going to be honest, I am not going to see that email first.
My VA is right now. If you text me at 260-217-4619, that is actually my public, you know, you can text me there. And I’m the only one who sees those. Actually, my team has nothing to do with that. To be, I’m being 100% transparent. I will read your text, I will respond to your text, but if you email me, that’s the unique thing about that.
By the way, my, my phone number with that is like, that’s a public one, but I’m also the only one interacting with that because, I don’t know, I like doing it. But if you email me, my VA is going to see that it doesn’t know my private email address. So you have to have a human element that can kind of use a couple different tools and pull from them and find my private email address, which you totally can find, by the way.
I’m not going to tell you how to find it, but you can totally find it. And here’s the deal. If you email me at that, I am infinitely more likely to respond. And then, you know, Sending kind of that first outreach message, that that’s a VA task. I don’t need to be the one sending the first outreach. You can train a VA how to do it and even how to personalize it. If you train them, they could, I mean they can do pretty much anything. Another great example, I talked about affiliate onboarding, sending those welcome emails, making sure affiliates get their links and assets.
Following up three days later. That’s, that’s a task. That’s a task based thing. I used to, before I started working with vas when I was building my very first affiliate program. This is now 20 years ago. Holy crap. Almost to the day that I’m recording this actually. That’s crazy. That’s just. Oh, sorry, that is so crazy to think about. But even like just reaching out three days later and saying, do you have everything you need? That’s a task. So what I used to do back then, there weren’t, there wasn’t an asana back then or a trello back then that I’m aware of. So what I would do is I would put it on my calendar. You know, sometimes I’d write it down, even using pen and paper, if you can believe that.
Like follow up with Brandon who signed up on Monday, want to follow up with him on Friday and make sure he got everything that can now be all done with a va, you know. And so pretty quickly that was one of the things that I made or had my VA do because it’s so simple, it’s so templated, but it had to be done on that third day and I would forget to do things because I got, I’m running a company, I’m running a, you know, at that time, 100, $200,000 a month company. I’ve got a team outside who’s asking me 500 questions a minute. And so I had the VA do the things that were more task based. So the next thing would be what I would consider like content and asset delivery, content and asset organization. Starting, you know, emails to send out. So I’ll give you an example of how the workflow on that.
If I’m sending out an email to affiliates and we’re announcing a big Mother’s Day sale, I or somebody else will create the graphics. Right? That’s, that’s the easy, that’s, you know, that has to be done. AI is getting pretty good at that by the way. I’ll talk later about how we were using that now. It’s pretty mind boggling actually. But you know, you can create the graphics there Requires a little bit of humanness there. But getting those graphics into an organized place, whether it be an affiliate portal or whatever you want to use, that’s a VA task.
Getting the links for those VA task, creating a first draft of swipe copy. VA task adding the links to the email. So what I’ll have One of our VAs do typically is kind of like, give me an outline of the email that we want to send. So, announce Mother’s Day promo. Here’s the three relevant links with their affiliate code for the three products that we’re promoting on Mother’s Day. Here’s a link to the portal link that has all the images and reminder that here are the facts about the promo. And I’ve got this outline. So when I’m staring at the.
I’m not staring at a blank sheet. I’ve already got everything. I don’t have to put it all together. I can focus on the things that only I can do. And frankly, again, it’s not at the point where only I can do this. But the idea is I can now write the email. That that’s what I’m good. I’m not good at retrieving links. I mean, I’m just as good as anybody. But why do I need to go over here and take three minutes to grab that link when my VA can put it there for me? So that’s how you got to start thinking it’s only three minutes. Uploading the graphics to the portal only takes three minutes, but I got to log in to the portal.
I got to do something that takes me away from what I’m really, really good at doing. Another thing is any types of reporting, performance reports, kind of doing that under. What’s the word I’m looking for? Underperforming affiliates.
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That initial analysis, finding affiliates that are up like, hey, who made their first sale? Who did this? Who’s up more than 20% this month? Who’s down more than 20%? Updating live leaderboards. Like, I don’t do that. Not the one updating the live leaderboard. That’s an affiliate, or that’s a. That’s a va, who’s going in and updating it. And then, you know, ultimately you can get them to the point where they can help you with your inbox. Now, it starts with, we’ll talk more in the training section about this, but it starts with like, okay, I can’t log in. That’s a basic response.
I’ve reset your password. So I show them how to reset the password. I’ve reset your password. Let me know if you have any problems. So if in a launch, for example, when we might get 40 emails in a day from affiliates, you know, in a two week span we’ll get 40 emails a day. It’s really, it’s intense. Of those 40, 35 of them are answerable by a VA 35 and then I only have to answer five. The same is true with Facebook messages.
Most of them are like, hey Matt, I didn’t get the email. I don’t need to be the one to go over to my email, find the email, forward it to them. No VA can do that. And they can respond and say I forwarded you the email. So anything, you know, again, login information, you know, I need to update my PayPal email. I need, where’s the swipe copy again? You know, I can’t find it. How do I log in again?
What’s the portal link? What’s the Facebook group link? When’s the webinar? When’s the cutoff for the leads contest? Like this, These are, they don’t require me. And you might be thinking, okay, how long does it take to answer that question about how long, you know, how long before, when does the leads contest? In 30 seconds. Okay, but 30 seconds.
But the average of those types of emails is probably one minute. Times 35 a day is 35 minutes. That’s three hours a week. That is a lot of time. Not to mention that I have VAs again in multiple time zones and multiple people working on this. So it, A, it keeps me from having to be in my inbox from 9 to 5 when I’m actually working. And B, I don’t have to be in there at 11 o’clock at night so I can go in and take a glance at it and go, okay, I’ve got two emails to respond to. I respond to those two emails and I’m back to something else. And if something’s truly important, you know, if Kevin’s the one doing the inbox checking, he’ll tell me there’s an email from John Smith and I’m pretty confident you need to respond to that right away. Awesome, I’ll go respond to that right away.
So all those types of things, checking links, being an extra, you know, resource for checking to make sure links are working, sending reminders to affiliates, activating affiliates, all that stuff, you can evolve your VAs. So I want to talk about how to train them. I’ve kind of touched on this before, but the biggest thing is that you take more time than it takes to do a task to train them initially. Now, the cool thing about this is you say, okay, so this, this task takes 10 minutes per day. That’s it, only 10 minutes per day. But I do it five days a week, so make it 12 minutes a day. So it’s an hour, that’s 52 hours a year. If I have to take three hours, which I usually don’t have to take that long.
If it’s 12 minutes a day task, I’ll take 30 minutes to teach them. I take 30 minutes one time and then maybe I have to spend 15 minutes a day for a week and then I’m done. So here’s what I do. I’m going to take an example here. Approving affiliates. I’m going to record a video. I’m going to not approve affiliates for two days so that I have like 80 affiliates. Or I might just record two videos and, you know, do that as well. But I want to have a big sample and I’m going to walk them through how I approve the affiliate. Now, I’ve gotten to the point where I can do it in 45 seconds or less, but I’m going to take two minutes to explain each one.
Probably I’m going to click on the affiliate, I’m going to open their profile, I’m going to look at their score if it’s on a network, I’m going to look at their website, I’m going to look at their socials, I’m going to walk through why I approved or declined this affiliate. And then I’m also going to walk them through early on. Like, hey, here’s this one. I’m going to let you know that I’m leaning towards approving this affiliate.
But this one I want you to leave for me. And here’s why I want you to leave it for me. And so essentially I just created into an algorithm. It’s like, okay, here’s this affiliate’s network score. Their website looks really good. Their social, you know, they’ve posted recently. You know, here are these five or six factors. If they fit all of those. Approve if they, if they fit two or less, especially if their network score is low, decline. And if they’re two to five of them out of the six. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
Then leave it for me. And then again, it’s iterative. So when I get those, like I said earlier, you know, they’ll prove 35 out of 40. When I get those five, I’ll then record a video each time showing them, and I’ll tell them, like, hey, get more confident in your ability. So this 35 turns into 36 after a couple of weeks, turns into 37. It’s gotten to the point now I do one every two weeks.
It’s truly one where they’re like, they got four of the six, but you know, their score’s high and their site looks really good, but they haven’t posted on Social in six months. So again, they go through. It’s not six things to be clear, it’s more like 20 factors. But they look at this and they’re like, oh, okay, I’ll. I’m not sure, but I record that lengthy video and then I hold their hand through the process.
So I walk through it and then I give them a. I say, okay, go, go do tomorrow’s. And let’s, let’s, let’s go through it. Let’s go through it together. Let’s jump on a zoom call and go through it together. And I’m going to have you do the work and I’m going to, I’m going to, I’m going to look over your shoulder, I’m going to micromanage you for two weeks so that for the next two plus years,
I don’t even have to worry about it. So videos, process videos, small test projects, checklists, all of these are key. And then, you know, set very clear expectations and boundaries, let them know, like, here’s who you. Like I said earlier, you are allowed to automatically approve anybody who fits these criteria. If they fit these criteria, approve them.
Don’t even question it, just approve them. And if they fall below this threshold, decline them. But again, this can be done for anything. Anything. So just, you just teach them. And so with email, for example, what I do is I teach them how to handle one type of email. So let’s again go back to the 40 example. I find the email, that’s the easiest, but it’s also the most common, 10 a day that are this. And I have them answer those for a couple of days. Boom, they got them. Now what’s the next most common? There’s seven of these. Great. I’m going to show them how to answer these.
And then I find these Things that fit into these categories. Same if I send out a bunch of emails and I say, okay, do you want to be. Basically, I’m summarizing here. Do you want to be an affiliate for this program? It’s not a good email, by the way. There are only three answers. Yes, no, maybe. So I teach them how to handle the obvious no’s. They say, no. Cool. Here’s how to process that. Delete them from our board. You know, move the email here, respond with this. Then I teach them how to handle the obvious yeses. Great, I’ve signed you up.
Show them how to sign up the affiliate, how to respond to that email, what to do, how to process those. Then it’s okay, the maybes, that’s a little bit more nuanced. But then there’s yes with a caveat. There’s yes, I’d love to sign up. Also, I have a question about that other email you sent me three weeks ago about this completely different thing. No, but I know somebody who sees something.
There’s different. There’s yes with a caveat. So initially, the easy yes, maybes, and nos, they handle. That’s 95% of the emails. Cool. I’ve just eliminated 95% from my workload. The 5%, okay, they have yes with caveat this. And I go, you know what? That’s. I’ve had that caveat twice in the past week. Let me teach them how to handle that caveat. I’ve had this caveat four times in the past couple of weeks.
Let me teach them how to handle that. So again, it’s very iterative. So before we wrap up, I want to share two last, last big things with you. The first, just what are some of the big mistakes that I’ve made, you know, in working with VAs over the years? And also some of my favorite tools that have made it a little bit easier mistake wise.
You know, number one, not, this is a mistake I made for the first four or five years. And keep in mind, I’ve been working with VAs now for almost So 19 and 3/4 years. And the first three to five years, I did not allow them to be strategy partners. I didn’t allow them to think for themselves. I basically said, here’s what I want and how I want it to be done. And I gave them no freedom. Well, then finally, ahead of VA circa 2008, who was like, well, if we did it this way, it would be faster and I’d be Able to, you know, double my productivity. And I was like, oh. So I was like, well, you know what? Do do more stuff like that. And so understand they’re smart people. If you hire smart VAs, tell them the result that you want. Show them where to get the information. You know, for instance, okay, a welcome email is a templated email.
Here’s the welcome email. But if they have an idea for the welcome email, be open to it. If they have an idea for the process, does it need to be step one, step two, step three, step four, or could it be step one and actually there’s another step that if we do that halves of the time that steps two and three take, and then we do step four, could we do them out of order? Do I need to do them in that way?
You know, there have been times where I’ve suggested to the VA, again, it’s step one, step two, step three, step four, step five. Right? And then, and then we repeat step one, step two, step 3, step 4, step And we do that 50 times to get the result. And they went, well, what if we actually did step one for each of them? And then that would save us step two, and then we would just dothree, four and five with each of the. It’s like, oh, you’re right. So that’s a big mistake that I’ve made the other one just not, not documenting processes.
So in that example, when the affiliate says, or when the affiliate, when the VA says, let’s go step one on all, you know, boom, boom, boom, not documenting that. Now why do I need to document that? Because if all I have is the original training video, but we optimize it by 20%, I need to document the new one. Because what if I have a new va? The reality is, as much as I love Kevin on my team, hi, Kevin. He’s probably going to be listening this. As much as I love him and he’s been with me for grief, like eight years, 10 years, I mean, a long time. He’s not going to be with me forever.
That’s the reality. Like, he’s going to move on at some point. I don’t know if it’s 2 years or 5 years or 10 years. Also, as technology evolves, the process for how we do things has changed. So making sure that you’re documenting processes, another big mistake, you know, kind of goes along with the first one, is just micromanaging. Don’t. Don’t micromanage. If you do you micromanage for the first week or two, like I mentioned, earlier and then you back off. And all you care about is the results. Another big mistake that I’ve made is just under communicating the expectations that I have. If I want 50 of these done per day, I make that very clear. We do 50, not 30 on one day and 70 on another.
No, we do 50 every day. And you know, hey, I know life gets in the way. So communicate. If you’re not going to be able to do 50 tomorrow, tell me. We’ll make a plan. Maybe we do 75 today and then 75 two days from now. I get that. Life happens and you get sick overnight. Well, that’s fine. But again, we communicate expectations and then other big mistake is only giving negative feedback or not giving feedback at all. Give positive feedback. When things are done well, let them know.
Let them know that they’re doing a great job. That’s basic, you know, working with human beings, right? That’s how we work with human beings as we give feedback. Don’t only, don’t only criticize your children. Tell them when they do things right and vice versa. Don’t only praise them, tell them when they do things wrong. These are basic human things. So again, apply those as well. As far as tools, I use Vimeo for recording videos. I know there’s others. There’s loom, there’s others. All of them work great.
I use Vimeo because we have a massive Vimeo account that stores all the videos and they’re all right there. We use Slack and Asana, you know, a lot of Google sheets, things like that. I mean, nothing fancy, you know, Google, Google Drive for, you know, things. Asana is where all of our SOPs are. We have hundreds of SOPs. And so if you forget, you know, if there’s a task, maybe you only do once a month, you know, the reality is you might forget. Gosh, what was that? You know, what was that step?
I mean, what, okay, I log in, I click, oh, my gosh, you got to go look at the sop. And that’s fine. The big one that we use, you know, LastPass for sharing logins safely. Nobody on our team needs to know my logins, you know, for things. But there are things that they need to log into. So we use LastPass. And so if, heaven forbid, we do have to let go of a teammate, and we have, over the years, of course, we’ve, you know, let go of 10 or 12 people over the last decade or so.
If we have to do that, you know, we just revoke their LastPass privileges and they can’t log in anymore. So we don’t have to, like, go change 37 passwords, which is a total pain in the b***. That’s how I used to do it before password tools existed. In fact, I did it for like five years after, you know, the password tools came about because I was stubborn. I was like, I don’t need a password tool. I can just change my passwords. And I realized, no, I can’t. I don’t even know half my passwords.
Changing them way too, too challenging. So as we wrap up, listen, you don’t need to get a team of 10 VAs to start. All right? Start with one solid VA part time. Have them be, you know, do start with five hours a week. You can do that. It might cost you like an extra two bucks an hour. So instead of paying them, you know, 10 bucks an hour, you might pay 12.
That’s okay. For 60 bucks, you’re going to unload five hours of things that you don’t want to be doing that aren’t the most, you know, best use of your time. Every single person I’ve ever known that started with five hours was at at least 10 hours per week. Within a month, as they started finding things the VA could do, you may have to hire one and fire them and hire a second. I will say I have been blessed. I’ve only had one mediocre VA over the years that I ended up having to let go after about 60 days. But I have heard people that, you know, after a couple days realize we’re not working and they had to move on to another one. It shouldn’t take you more than two or three to find a great one.
Begin with low risk, repetitive tasks. Like I said, it could be, you know, something as simple as, you know, copying data that you have to do every single week and then comparing it to data in another sheet. And, you know, that’s a, it’s a five minute, every week task, not a big thing. Low risk, very repetitive. It could be only handling specific email requests. Like, I can’t find my login info, what’s my affiliate link? Where’s the swipe copy?
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Those are low risk, repetitive tasks. And then it goes from there. And one of the things I found is like, especially with the email. As I get an email and I tell Kevin, for instance, how to respond to it, he learns not only how to respond to that email, but if I tell him three times a day, which now I’m not telling him any times per day practically because he knows how to respond to everything. But if I tell him three times A day for six months how to respond to certain types of different emails. He starts to make the connections in his own brain and he can figure out how to respond to that fourth email without even asking me.
But it starts with the very low risk repetitive task where the risk. So when I say low risk, two things are true. Number one, the risk of messing up is approaching zero. And the if they do mess up, big whoop dee doo, you know, if we approve the wrong affiliate, it’s, it’s repairable, it’s reparable. However you pronounce that word, you can easily go in and fix it by decline, by unapproving the affiliate, easy peasy.
If they decline someone and then later we’re like, oh wait, we should have, okay, it’s fixable. So that’s what I mean by low risk. And then repetitive is obviously the best way to start is not with one time, you know, two hour tasks, but with daily or weekly five to 20, 30 minute tasks. Focus your time, you know, on strategy and relationships and delegate the rest.
So if currently your time, you know, you’re spending, let’s say you’re full time and you’re spending eight hours a day and four of those are on strategy and relationships and four on all the other stuff. Start with delegating one hour of those four and then get it to one and a half to two and so on. Eventually you should be able to delegate all four hours.
But you should also begin to find things that they can do that you weren’t doing. That’s what I found, you know, was as I got better at this, I was having my VA do things that just weren’t being done before because I didn’t have the time to do them. Things like posting, you know, podcast episodes on social media. I didn’t have time for that 10 years ago, but I started having Kevin do it and now it’s done. And now we use a combination of AI and VA and it’s done. And I get business from that. So that’s something that just wouldn’t be done if it was only me.
It just wouldn’t be done. This is how you scale in a way that is sustainable without burning out. Like I said, like I said at the beginning, you don’t build a million dollar affiliate program, a seven figure affiliate program alone. So go hire one. Like I said, if you, if the first one doesn’t work, you’ll know pretty quick. You’ll have wasted 100 bucks, maybe 150 on the high end. Hire one for five hours. Just do it. Start doing it now. And as I mentioned earlier, make sure you hit subscribe because you do not want to miss the series that I have coming up on AI, specifically how to use AI to run your affiliate program. It’s gonna be pretty cool.
I’m looking forward. There’s a bunch of stuff I’ve never shared before. I’ve shared like two of them before, well I guess three or four now that I technically shared one or two of them earlier in this episode. But it’s gonna be really cool episode so make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. If you got any questions about working with VAs or anything affiliate management related or affiliate marketing related, you can hit me up anytime. I mentioned the number earlier, but it’s 260-217-4619. You can text me there if you’ve got any questions and I will see you in the next episode.
See you soon.