Key #1: Plan, Plan, Plan (Ultimate Guide to Holiday Affiliate Promotions)

It’s that time of year again…the holiday season. Which means…BIG MONEY in the affiliate world! That’s why we’re starting a new podcast series today as a part of our Ultimate Guide to Holiday Affiliate Promotions, full of strategies, tips, and tricks for making the most of your holiday affiliate promotions. Listen up and follow my plan and you can make 30-50% of your entire year’s affiliate income in just a few weeks!

Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below

Links/Resources Mentioned in This Episode

Ultimate Guide to Holiday Affiliate Promotions

Affiliate Promotion Prep Plan

How to Warm up Your List for Affiliate Promotions

Take our Affiliate Marketing Survey

Ask Me a Question here

All our recommended affiliate programs

Your First 100 Affiliates Report

How I Currently Make $3,874 a Week Without Creating a Single Product

TEXT ME – +1 260-217-4619

Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy

The REAL Reason You Aren’t Successful Yet

#1 Key to Successful Black Friday and Cyber Monday Affiliate Promotions

The Secret to Connecting with VIPs and Influencers

How Mike Turned His Passion into a Full-Time Business

Key #1: Plan, Plan, Plan (Ultimate Guide to Holiday Affiliate Promotions)

All right. We’re kicking off a brand new series on the affiliate guy podcast. It’s all about the holiday season. We have a 12 part series. Yeah, that’s right. 12 parts full of strategies, tips, and tricks for making the most of your holiday affiliate promotions. Listen, top affiliates can make 30 to 50% of their entire year’s revenue in just a few weeks. If you follow this plan.

So listen up and rock this holiday season. Welcome to the affiliate guy podcast. If you want to grow your income, serve your tribe, and enjoy all the benefits of affiliate marketing and having your own affiliates. You’re in the right place. Thanks for joining me today. Let’s get started.

Yeah. You heard it right. We’ve got a 12 part series coming up. We did this last year and we were updating it for 2019. So even if you listened to last year’s 12 part holiday series, you want to listen to this year’s because we’ve got some updates for the 2019 season. These are going to be some at least I think like last year, some quick hitter, shorter episodes. I don’t really have a time limit on these.

Like I never know how long these are gonna be until I record them. Some of them might drag on like I have no idea. I really have no idea, but we’ll see like I haven’t recorded these in advance. Yes. I kind of have last year’s as a guide, but I have some new stuff to share this year.

So this series is 12 part series here that we’re doing on the podcast. This is part of our Ultimate Guide to Holiday Affiliate Promotions. I want you to check that out again. If you checked it out last year, if you’ve been on my TRIBE for a while, you saw that we did an Ultimate Guide to Holiday Affiliate Promotions, but we’ve updated it for 2019. So we got some awesome stuff that’s new on there. Some new stuff on black Friday and Cyber Monday, which are coming up like next week when this goes live the next week. So that guide is at Mattmcwilliams.com/holidayguide. So go check that out. You can subscribe there to get updated.

We’re going to be adding some new stuff over the next few weeks. We’re going to be doing some Facebook lives about a holiday affiliate promotion, some new stuff for 2019, we got, like I said, the Black Friday and Cyber Monday stuff. We got a new post on there that’ll help you to craft better holiday offers. Let me pull this up real quick. I’m gonna open up the slack. This was from Mark Sieverkropp. We got a channel in slack here and his exact quote here was pretty awesome. So he was working on this ultimate guide, just getting some of the integrations updated.

He said also it’s CRAZY in all caps, how much content is on that guide. And I just thought that was fun like that he’s acknowledging like there’s a massive amount of content on there. That’s going to help you. Like I said, 30 to 50% of your annual revenue, affiliate income can come in a very short period of time, like a month.

We’re talking between like black Friday. So, and it’s late this year. So really we’re talking like three weeks through that last shipping day. That day, wherewith physical products, the deadline occurs. And even up through like Christmas Eve, if you’re ordering digital products. So it’s a very compressed timeline this year. I think if I’m not mistaken, Thanksgiving is at the latest possible date. And so we’re talking 24 days, 25 days and you can earn half your annual income in that period of time. That’s how important this time is. If you run an affiliate program, listen to these episodes and help your affiliates, help your affiliates to maximize this time.

Because the same thing is true. You can make 30 to 50% of your income at this time. So real quick listener, shout out though. I want to give a shout-out to SuperJennyBeans33. I love this is a fun name, SuperJennyBeans33, who left a five-star rating. Thank you. I’m assuming your name is Jenny. Thank you. And, and the title of it is no BS. She says “Matt’s content is straight to the point with no fluff and no BS. The episodes are short, but they’re packed with super actionable tips and I’ve already made two sales.” I don’t look at these until we go until I’m actually recording. I already made two sales because of his help.

That’s awesome. That is so awesome. So if you haven’t left a rating review, please do it. It helps us to reach more people like Jenny. I mean, imagine if you leave your review rating and review can help us reach one more Jenny. And then if that person leaves a rating review and we all like leave ratings and reviews, then we’re going to reach more Jenny’s who can make two sales like that. And then it just gets that snowball rolling. We can help more and more people begin to monetize their passion and be able to fund them reaching out to the world with their messages is just like the coolest thing in the world.

Also real quick, wanted to point out that ultimate guide. You’ll see a link to our Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, but I just wanted to highlight those again. You still have time, depending upon when you’re listening to this Mattmcwilliams.com/deals. Not only do we have some amazing deals on there, but we also have some awesome deals.

I have talked about them in past episodes. We got our ultimate affiliate swipe file on there, like 70% off. We’ve got a $1 trial for our membership program. We’ve got some free stuff. We’ve got other deals from other people, some amazing black Friday, amazing Cyber Monday deals like these are off the hook incredible. Not only do I want you to check those out, of course, I want you to copy that page. I want you to create your own or be inspired by it, create your own black Friday and Cyber Monday page. Because again, you can make a lot of money in a very short amount of time. So I was listening. I was listening to this podcast. I think it was a podcast.

It might’ve been on the radio, something on NPR. And again, I don’t remember if it was a podcast or a radio thing, and they were talking about just how many people failed to budget for the holidays. They were talking about like how Thanksgiving travel, Christmas, travel, Christmas gifts. And they were talking about it. Like it was a surprise to people like, like Christmas, it’s like at a different month this year, apparently. Thanksgiving is always in the same, like seven-day stretch people. It’s not like Easter where it could be like a six-week window it’s at the exact same time every year, basically.

Anyway, this podcast or whatever it was talking about, how people don’t plan and they don’t have a budget for these things and what the context actually was kind of disturbing because it was like, well some things that have happened have made it harder for people to spend as much money this year. And I’m like, no, it’s just because they plan poorly. And then basically they’re up the creek without a paddle come late November. And it’s a problem. So they end up going into this massive debt, right? They go into this massive debt. It creates this cycle. And it got me thinking that everyone thinks of buying gifts. They think of getting deals during the holidays.

But if you ever thought about making money during the holidays, what if you can make enough in the next few weeks promoting affiliate offers to fund what you’re spending? What if just from black Friday, Cyber Monday, you knew you had a thousand dollars in affiliate commissions coming in December or January, that would allow you to spend a little bit more money. If you want it to, you don’t have to spend the money. I’m just saying it’s a lot easier, right? These huge affiliate income without much effort. Now, some people might make 10 or 20,000 or 100,000, but I’m saying just reasonably $500, $1000, $2,000. So it’s instinctive to think that that’s easy if you’re in the holiday niche.

I know people that they’re in niches that are more traditionally associated with Christmas. And so 95% of their revenue comes in the months of November and December. I know a guy who runs a Halloween website, guess when most of his revenue comes in the month of October, but generally speaking seriously, even if you’re not like that, you can make 30 to 50% of your revenue can come during this next month or so. If you throw in Halloween, if you know if you go back, so you listen to this now and you want to think ahead to next year, and I’m going to talk about that in an upcoming episode, you throw in Halloween like I’m not a fan of getting rich quick of getting rich. Why do you say those things get rich quick? I just wasn’t coming off my tongue very well.

I’m not a fan of those schemes, right? But the fact of the matter is if you go from Halloween through Christmas, you can piggyback on this excitement that’s created like this is natural excitement. That’s created by major retailers for deals during the holidays. Like you can’t watch, I don’t watch television. I’m assuming you still can’t watch television this year without hearing a Christmas jingle at a commercial and talking about a significant deal. I’m assuming that right now, here we are a week before Thanksgiving, when I’m recording this, you can’t watch television or listen to the radio without hearing something about a black Friday deal. And so you can piggyback on that to generate affiliate income for yourself. I know when I ran the Shutterfly affiliate program years ago, 60% of the annual revenue was in that affiliate program. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars came between black Friday.

So just say like average black Friday is probably November 25th from black Friday through about December 19th, 18th, somewhere in there. That’s the cutoff for shipping, right? So for people being able to get the actual thing that they ordered delivered to people by Christmas Eve. And so people are looking for deals this time of year, they’re looking for deals.

I mean, I think people are always looking for deals. Your audience is no different. And you may say like my audience isn’t really they’re not deal sensitively. Yes, they are. The thing is, people are looking for deals. Everyone in your audience is no different. And you may think that like, well they’re not deal sensitive, they’re human beings so they’re deal sensitive. Now to be clear over the next 12 episodes. Like I said, yes, we’re going 12 episodes. It’s like the 12 days of Christmas holiday deals episodes. I don’t have a title for the series, but by the time you listen to this,

I’ll have to go back and look what the title last year. And we’ll just copy that for 2019. And when I just to be clear over these episodes, when I say holiday sale, I’m talking about a sale that’s based around a holiday. Okay. So the most common as you know, is Thanksgiving black, Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas. But just to be clear, what you’re going to learn in these 12 episodes, you can apply these in the future. Like literally next year apply these to Memorial Day, July 4th, New Year, Veteran’s Day, Easter, Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, any holiday sale. So the other thing I want you to keep in mind when we talk about holiday sales is they tend to be very compressed.

These are not like big product launches. So we did a study a while back, we found that the average product launch is 16.7 days long from the first piece of prelaunch content to open cart, to close cart with all the stuff in there, between they are about 17 days long. These holiday sales are typically four hours to maybe upwards of four days long, very compressed, like for instance, our Black Friday and Cyber Monday Deal, they run together. It’s the ultimate affiliate swipe file that I talked about. And it’s basically an FYI. It’s a book. We are getting a page count here and hopefully today it’s about 150 to 200 pages long. It’s all of our affiliate promotional emails for the last year and a half or so.

And you can literally use it as your inspiration, your swipe file, keep it on your desk and refer to it. When you need inspiration for an email. That’s going to run for only four days. And that’s on the long end, actually. That’s on the long end. So we’re going to go real quick over the next 12 episodes, including this one with these tips.

FIRST TIP here for holiday affiliate promotions. Are you ready? I hope you are because I’m going to share it with you because whether you’re ready or not to keep talking here, the first tip is to plan, plan, plan, plan, plan, plan. You’ve got to plan for this. You’ve got to sit down and make a plan for this holiday season.

I talk about this in our course, No Product, No Problem. I say that over and over again, that the key to any successful affiliate promotion, any marketing promotion at all, anything is planning. So do you have a plan? Do you have a plan for the holiday promotion type? You know there’s this famous quote.

Gosh, it’s one of the World War II guys. I think it was MacArthur, Douglas MacArthur. I think it could be wrong on that end. He said, “No plan survives the first shot.” And that’s true. That’s true. Plans break down. If you look at our affiliate promotions, yeah our plan changes 10, 20, 30%. But if we didn’t have a plan to start with, we would have never even gotten close to the point where we needed to change it. If you have a plan and you have to change even 30% of it, the other 70% was completely planned for. So a lot of times, the reason we chose to change the plan was that maybe we were jockeying for a position on a leaderboard. And we planned on sending this number of emails, but we added a couple more. That’s perfectly acceptable.

A lot of times it changes because you hear about something else, but it’s so much easier to add something or to change from A to B when you have C D E and F already set in stone in the plan, and the plan allows, ironically allows you to be flexible. So what do you want to do at the beginning is, is decide what you’re going to mail about. What are you going to email about? What are you going to post on social media about thinking through it? Like what days and times are you going to mail? What are you going to post on Twitter? What are you going to post on Facebook?

And so what are you going to post on Instagram? So let’s just say that the promotion is a 48-hour promotion and it’s, it’s a Thursday. Actually, let’s do black Friday. Okay. So it’s a black Friday promotion, but it lasts through the weekend. So it’s, it’s actually, we’ll say it’s three days long and it goes live at 6:00 AM on black Friday and it ends at midnight on Sunday.

So here’s the question. When are you going to mail it? Well, what I would recommend is and you can think about this. Are you going to send him a heads-up email the day before? Are you going to send an email on Wednesday? Because emailing on Thanksgiving day is probably not the best way to get people to read it.

And depending upon how many promotions there are like are you going to send a heads-up email about just that or that plus a couple of other things? when are you going to mail on Friday? Are you going to mail right at six o’clock and say, it’s live. Are you going to mail Friday at five and say, there’s an hour? You’re going to mail again, Friday afternoon, reminding them, are you going to mail Saturday and Sunday? Are you going to hit on opens? So think about that. What are you going to mail? And what days and times you’re going to mail. And so create that plan. Don’t just put, I’m going to send a few emails. No, like you have to put the times, and again, you might edit it.

You might call an audible in football parlance. You might call an audible because you do the heads up. So you do a heads up for a couple of different deals. All at once. Here are all the things you can get deals on this weekend that are applicable to you. And then you send that email announcing a specific one and it bombs. You don’t make a single sale from it. When you were expecting to make at least 10, maybe you don’t mail any more about it. So you do alter the plan.

So what do you do if you’ve got like three promotions over the course of three days, what are you going to do? Are you going to highlight one? Are you going to tell them about all of them? Before all of them are live? Like you just got to decide on those things or you going to do a blog post, you’re going to record a video or do a podcast episode, or you’re going to shoot a video. What graphics are you going to use? You’re going to create your own graphics or use their graphics. So you need to ask these questions before the promotion begins. Preferably you know, like now for black Friday now for Cyber Monday, even, and then next week start asking about the rest of the holiday season. Like you need to plan these at least a few days or a few weeks in advance.

And so right now we’re already like, I’m recording this episode, I’m recording shortly before you’re going to hear it. The future episode, you’re going to hear, I’m batching over the next two days. So you’ll hear like episode 12, you’ll hear, I don’t know, like three weeks after it was recorded, but I’ll tell you that as of now, we’ve had our about, been talking about black Friday for a couple of weeks. So I’ve been talking about it. Well, how long before that had we planned it? The answer is months in advance. And so we’ve got our promotional calendar down. We’ve got the approach to the calendar pretty much locked in now we’re flexible.

So if something comes up, this happened, I think yesterday, the day before I got an email about a black Friday promo and we added it to our black Friday deals page and we created a plan around that. Like I reserve the right and I have the ability to edit things, but at least we have that shell of the plan. we’re not married to the exact, like down to the minute we have a plan so I can look at that and go, all right, somebody emailed me. It’s definitely, I’m not going to promote it this week. Maybe we can work that into the following weeks and we work that in or they have an amazing deal and I know it’d be great for my audience. It’s next Tuesday and Wednesday, but I’ve already got this plan. So here’s what I can do. I can work this in here. I can move this, but I’m moving one or two things instead of reinventing the wheel every week.

So I cannot stress how important it is to have a plan. So if you go to the Ultimate Guide page. I mentioned that earlier Mattmcwilliams.com/holidayguide or Mattmcwilliams.com/promoplan and you can get our promo plan that we use. We use all of the promos that we do. So it’s Mattmcwilliams.com/promoplan. We’ll also have a link to that on the ultimate guide out. If you want the checklist, this is our promo checklist, Mattmcwilliams.com/checklist. We’ve got our checklist to make sure you get the most out of your next affiliate promotion.

So Mattmcwilliams.com/promoplan, Mattmcwilliams.com/checklist. And that just helps you make sure you don’t forget anything, if you like, it’ll have reminders on there, like, oh yeah, I should do a podcast episode on this. You can always choose not to do it but has things that you might consider doing and you can check them off as you didn’t miss a really handy guide.

Like we still use this, we still use this checklist, these promo plans on our own affiliate promotions. Like we’re pretty good at this. And we still use these. So that’s episode one and our holiday series, our series on holiday affiliate promotions I mean, who doesn’t love a holiday theme around 12 days, right? So I’ll figure out a way I’ll work in some partridges and some pear trees. What are the other things? Leopards? No, not leopards. Leaper’s leaping. I don’t know. Golden rings some other stuff. Oh my gosh. I can never, who knows all 12 things seriously, as repetitive as that song is nobody ever gets close to all 12. I should probably wrap up now and get a little bit loopy. So go to Mattmcwilliams.com/holidayguide. You are able to get all 12 episodes of this series on there, and I’ll see you in the next episode. Thank you so much for listening today.