Learn How To “Steal” Your Competitors’ Affiliates

Attracting affiliates isn’t the easiest thing to do – UNLESS you know how to ethically make your competitors’ affiliates YOURS! If you want to learn how to “raid” your competitors’ cookie jar – and “steal” all the good ones! And do it the right way.

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Transcript

When I first started my first affiliate program back in 2005 company, we were almost broke. Basically. We couldn’t make payroll. We were desperate. We are, we’re literally a week away from going out of business. And unfortunately, none of our employees that we had, our few employees that we had at the time could pay their bills on our hopes and dreams.

And so we were, we were in a desperate place. You fast forward, 18 months later, we were doing almost actually more than a million dollars a month just from our affiliate program. Now, one of the ways that that allowed this to happen, one things that allowed this to happen was that we stole, I stole, however you want to say it.

We stole some of the affiliates from our top competitors. And today I’m going to show you what we did and how you can replicate that with your affiliate program. I’m going to take you back. I’ve got a story to share with you about how we did that. And I’m going to, I’m going to show you kind of step by step, how to do what I did almost 17 years ago and what I still continue to do to this day for our affiliate program and for our clients.

I’m gonna walk you through that. Before we get started, though, make sure you say, Hey there and let us know, always love to know who’s with us and where you’re joining us from. And a welcome Alan who just shared a kind of a cool bit of news in your business there, which we got some stuff to talk about there in the future.

You said your best month ever, you said like, or like, or February is your best month ever. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a biggest month we’ve ever had. And And you’re not even still got four days left. We’re not done. Thanks to All from all from affiliates, huh? Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, First of all, that’s awesome. Thank you. It’s exciting, Dude. Where’d you learn this stuff? Some guy, I don’t know. He wears, he wears Mickey mouse shirts a lot and has, he’s up north and wearing short sleeves and I’m in Florida wearing long sleeves, but I do keep a really cold air conditioner.

And hopefully we have a heater in the house that works. Our heater runs like 23 and a half hours a day, this time of year. So I’ve, I’ve just, it’s like, it’s one of those things. I notice it more when it goes off, then when it comes on, I’m like, it’s really quiet. Cause I’m, my office is 14 feet from the furnace.

And like I’ve gotten so used to that noise. It’s pretty subtle. It’s not like it’s running right now. The microphone isn’t going to pick it up. You know, my I’m in the studio, which is also about 14 feet, but in a different location, but you know, it’s really close and I’ve gotten so used to that.

Nice humming, just drone. It gives some nice background noise that when it goes off, I’m like, it’s really quiet down here. I need music. And it’s like disconcerting. I’m so used to that noise, but dude, that’s awesome, man. That is so awesome. And so we’re, we’re going to talk more about that, you know,

with you, we’ll talk about that in the future. Also want to give you guys a heads up here, coming up in, I don’t know, we’re trying to figure out the exact dates. Allen, you know, for those of you don’t know, he is a professional weight loss coach and he does not do this hosting with me for the money.

We, we pay him a fraction of what he makes on his own, but you know, he does it because I hopefully it’s fun for him. And, and so one of the ways that I want to make sure that we, you know, periodically make this a sweet deal for Alan is we’re going to, we’re going to do a training with him here over the next couple of months.

And I’ll just kind of give you guys the heads up that if you’re in a position, no matter what you’re doing, whether it be in your own business, in your job, whatever, if your weight is holding you back, Allen’s the guy. So, you know, you can, you can reach out to Allen anytime. Now you don’t have to wait till his training. Cause that’s while a ways. Just Allen, you know, you see his name there, alan@transformmyfuture.com. That’s all right. Yep. Exactly. You did it perfectly Because every time I see it, it looks like transforming future. That’s how I process it. It’s it’s like the old website. I don’t know if you remember back in the day, there was a website that sold pins and it was pin island.com. I don’t remember that year when I’m, when I get to be your age, You’ll get the joke. It Was pinisland.com. I have to write it out. Okay. Got it. Okay. Right. It is one word, like a URL. Hey, anyway, you picked it up.

Now. There you go. I missed that class. It wasn’t for it. Wasn’t just to making fun of it. That’s the run that you were talking about that like a pen, like a, yeah. So reach out to Allen. He can help you guys, you know, he can help you guys. So we’ll do a training with them. Be a free training. But if you’re interested yeah. He’s just had his best month ever was just so awesome. So if you know someone who would benefit from today, they need to know how to grow their affiliate program. This is the lesson for them. I am going to kind of reveal a little small piece of our playbook out of steal your competitors affiliates.

To get started with affiliate marketing the right way, download my free quickstart guide to affiliate marketing. Grab your copy here!

So hit that, share button, send , text, you know, whatever smoke screen that works, whatever. Can I say something too Matt? I mean, just speaking to people, who are watching. One of the reasons I do this with Matt, like I said, Matt’s paying me a seven figure a fee, no, not really. I’m kidding, but the reason I do it. Are we because I’m not the one who actually pays you. If we were at figure that much, that I need to have a conversation with. And I want to say, I want to say this for people who are listening later, or now I do this because it forces me to sit here and listen to the, to the golden nuggets that Matt drops.

He drops these nuggets and I’m making notes promise you. I’m not just sitting here texting. I’m making notes because the reason I’m having the best month I’ve ever had is because of some things that I learned from Matt in, in his process. So force yourself to listen to this. Even though you got to look at me along the way and Matt, but it is worth it. So, so you can have your best month. So I want to give you a little plug there and that’s why I do it. Forces me to listen. That’s awesome. Yeah. That’s awesome. So, so picture this, you’re minding your own business, the phone rings, and this guy on the other end, he’s saying, listen, I’ve got a list of your competitors affiliates. Would you like a copy? You’d be absolutely insane not to take that. Now. I can’t just give that to you. I’m going to show you how it’s kind of the next best thing. I’m going to show you how to get them, how to reach out to them.

You know, back in 2005, when I was first starting out, I think I was like the first person to ever do this because I remember, you know, Like I remember going, I remember sitting there, it was Memorial day weekend, 2005. And I’ve shared this story many times, but it was the Saturday of Memorial day, weekend, the morning of the Memorial day weekend.

And we basically had a team meeting myself and my two co-founders at this company that I ran back then and we were broke and we were just flat out broke. And when things that was the scariest was we brought on, we had a couple of things we had, three team members. Might’ve been two. I think we had three though.

We had two full-time and one part-time team member. And I remember going the worst part about all of this is not the fact that, you know, I’m gonna, I’m broke. You know, I had like a thousand dollars to my name. The worst part of this was not the fact that I was going to have to go back to like, go get a full-time job that I’d failed. It was my second business. My first one failed this one failing there. Wasn’t I had the philosophy, you know, I knew about founders and I knew that, you know, companies failed. And I heard something today that was like, you know, talking about VCs venture capitalists. They won’t even give money to somebody who hasn’t failed in at least one business before.

And I remember thinking, okay, that not the worst part. The worst part is the fact that we told two people, you know, we told one who’s part-time, but we told two other people, hey, quit, what you’re doing. You know, they had jobs, come work for us and the promise was that we would pay them consistently for more than the three months that they’d been working for us.

And we’re just going, this sucks, you know, it was Memorial day weekend, 2005. And I said to the guys that I worked with, I said, you know, of these people called affiliates, right? Like these are people who promote you, but you don’t pay them until after. That’s kind of cool. Now I am not recommending what we did.

I’m gonna, I’m gonna share kind of what we did in a second. This part I’m not recommending, but we were able to, well, I’ll share in a minute, I’ll share why I don’t recommend it, but it was a pretty good situation for us. We ended up building this to a dollar amount that I just never dreamed was even possible, mostly at the expense of our competitors. And it’s completely legit. That’s the cool thing. So again, back to Memorial day, 2005 real quick, we, I spent that Saturday afternoon all day, Sunday, all day, Monday, like it’s Memorial day.

For those of you outside of the United States, you know, that means that we basically go to cookouts all weekend, sit around, enjoy the outdoors, go swimming, eat hot dogs and hamburgers, and kind of, you know, gain like three or four pounds, you know, and whatever, and, you know, imbibe in other beverages. And we have fun. And I did none of that, I literally, I was in the office like 18 hours a day, those three days. Working at trying to figure out how to start an affiliate program. That first month I got a couple, well that weekend by Tuesday morning, I had a couple of affiliates. I still remember our very first affiliate, a guy named, Brandon Young. He’s from Western North Carolina. He called me up, hi, mate, it’s Brandon.

If he called me right now, I would still recognize his voice. You know, he’d be like, Hey man, I’d be like, Brandon. You know, as soon as he spoke, I would know exactly who it is. And he did like $300, $400, $500, that first month we had a couple of others. Total that first month we did $5,000, which was just enough. We had just enough money. So we were a week away from going bankrupt, right or broke. We had just enough money saved up. Plus the $5,000 that we made from our affiliates to cover payroll and not have to lay anybody off.

Now I’m not recommending this next part just for the record. But we brought in that 5,000 and we paid net 30 at that time from the end of the month. Now we changed that very fast. But that first month we had to. So you brought in the sales for, we had a couple, I think we had, I don’t know, like a handful of sales in May and we paid for those June 30th, but I mean, it was like, you know, $200 in commissions. It was pretty low, but that money that we brought in in June, we floated that money. We actually spent it in late June, into early July, hoping that we would grow enough in July, that we could still cover payroll and pay the affiliates at the end of July. I’m not recommending you do that.

That is a dangerous thing to do. I was 26, 25 at the time, I think had just turned 25 at the end of June, 2005. Other business partner. One was about a half year older than me on my good friend Hunter. So we were in a spot where we had to do that. And I don’t recommend doing that just for the record, but we had enough to cover payroll and we got by. July, our second month, we did $15,000. Still not enough. We actually got a line of credit that I don’t think we ever tapped into, but I think we might have, I don’t remember. We might’ve paid our affiliates.

It was like a $20,000 line of credit. Here’s the funny thing, banks, aren’t lining up to give money to people who need money. You know, most people think, oh, they should give money to people who didn’t know. They give money to people who don’t need money. We have a long line of credit in our business is so frigging huge and we never even have to tap into it.

You know, like, it’s ridiculous. Why? Cause we don’t need it, you know, but we got a line of credit. So second month was $15,000 again, first month, $5000 2nd month, $15000 3rd month, $24,000. All right, we’re seeing some progress. Fourth month, 37,000. I’m like, all right, now we’ve got some profits. We still have the same two and a half people working for us.

I think back then we were paying them collectively about $10,000. You know, 10 or 11, $12,000 bucks. We actually got to pay ourselves money for the first time in our business. It was so cool. I think my first check was like a thousand dollars literally. And I was so excited. I was like, oh, I got money. You know? And so just to make it clear, first month, the fourth month, 5,000 to 37,000 now $37,000 in a month, we paid out about $12,000 in commissions. We really made a little bit of money. It was kind of cool. It’s not bad growth. Fifth month, more than a hundred thousand dollars.

I want to talk about that. That’s the moment that things changed. I’m going to talk about that. Today. Six months we did about 1750007th month, we did about 250000 fast forward a month, 12. We were at half a million month, 18. We were at $1.1 million a month. So what happened in month five? What happened when we went from, you know, 37,000 to a hundred thousand, when we were pretty much growing before that, if you look at that growth, five to 15 to 24 to 37, all of a sudden do a hundred, we tripled. It was just really hard to do when you’re at that number, what happened? That’s when everything changed, right?

To be clear, those first months laid the groundwork, or we could not have gone from 37 to a hundred. And then from a hundred to 1.1 million a year later, If we hadn’t gotten to 37. If we hadn’t started the affiliate program, but something happened that was beyond our control, that allowed us to accelerate this. I shared this on a podcast the other day. The thing is when, when something happens beyond your control, it’s beyond your control. You did nothing to cause it bad or good. Sometimes bad things happen, a pandemic, right? That was beyond our control. But you know what? I know people whose businesses quintupled in 2020, and you know what? You could say, you could argue, it was because of the pandemic. What was it because of the pandemic or how they reacted to the pandemic?

You know, that’s, that’s the question, right? The chicken or the egg type question, you know, there are things that happen to us beyond our control, but it’s how we react to them, that determines what happens. So sometimes good things happen. You get lucky, and this is what happened. We got a lucky break and it’s how we reacted to it because the truth is we could have gotten this lucky break and we would have gone from 37 to 40,000, 45,000. We would not have gone to a hundred to 250, you know, onto 1.1 million. I would estimate, that we probably could have gotten to 300,000 in 18 months without this lucky break. So yeah, it accelerated it dramatically.

So I want to go back to those first few months, how we found those affiliates. Basically we stole them from our competitors. I mentioned Brandon Miller. We got Mark Feldman. I’m trying to think. What was that guy’s name? I cannot remember. He was from Greece and for the life of me, I can not remember his last name first or last name. It was like Taurous was his first name or Tasious or something like that.

And that got us to consistent month over month growth got us to about $40,000. I truly believe, like I said, if we hadn’t had our big break, we’d have still gotten a 300,000, maybe even a half a million by month 18. But what, how we got to 1.1 million, that was a lucky break, but how we reacted to it.

So what happened? What happened in month? The end of month four? So it would have been in, it was like, I think it was shortly after labor day, 2005. Might’ve been later September, we got wind. We got news that our biggest competitor who had all of our affiliates, I mean, this is a company doing at the time was doing a hundred million dollars,

50 million from affiliates we were doing that was per year. We were looking at maybe scratching close to half a million, probably more like 400,000, you know, 300,000 of which would have been from affiliates, right. Or something like that. They got bought by a publicly traded company. And you think, and our first reaction was, oh, yay. Our biggest competitor just got bought by a publicly traded company.

They have all the money in the world and now they’re getting what more money? Woo, yay. So excited. And I was kind of depressed because I’m like they have all the money. They’re gonna be able to pay their affiliates more. They’re gonna be ready to do all these things. And then I literally had one of those. I don’t know how else to say this, but I had one of those toilet moments, where I was sitting on the toilet, and this was before smartphones and all that.

So I remember when I had the idea, my first reaction was, I need to write this down now. If I’m on the toilet in my apartment and the nearest writing paper is many steps away and there’s nothing like, I can’t just be like send a text. So I literally kept saying it to myself, like, don’t forget, you know, like here’s the, I kept saying the thing to myself over and over and over again. So I wouldn’t forget. And I got done doing what I was doing. And I ran to my flip phone and pulled down the number and I called our CEO, my good friend Hunter. And I said our biggest competitor, I didn’t say it like that. But I said the name of the company, but our biggest competitor just got bought by a publicly traded company. And he’s like, I know, dude, the one that told you I’m like, and what does that mean? He’s like, I don’t know where you’re going with this.

I’m like, it means that our biggest competitor is now a corporate, no name entity. That’s going to treat their affiliates the same. They’re going to treat their affiliates. Like most big corporations treat their affiliates, dude. I’m like, here’s what we do. We reach out to every single one of their affiliates. And we basically say they just got bought by this publicly traded company. And do you know what that means for you? It means you’re now a number, not a person. It means you’re a number, not a person. So that’s what we did. We reached out to every a single one of our competitors affiliates that we could find. And we said, this company got bought by a publicly traded company.

I should probably be at this point, I feel like I could say the name of the company and what trouble is it going to cost me but I’m not going to. They got bought by a publicly traded company. You’re a number, not a person. It’s a line we stole from a local bank. There was a local bank where we lived at the time that’s been now of course bought by like six other companies over the last 12 that use that.

You’re you’re, you’re a person not a number. And we flipped it and said, you’re a number, not a person now. And you know, this is what’s going to happen. They have a track record of this. It kind of gutsy like could have, could they have possibly have sued us? Probably not. I didn’t, say you know, they were going to do anything or whatever. I just said, you’re a number, not a person. That’s how, that’s how they’re affiliated there. I can show you the searches, you know, go search for it on Google. You’ll find reports of their affiliates complaining about that.

And I said, I wish I had the email, but it was basically something along the lines of, you know, here, this is the name of our company. We’re hometown quotes. And you know, with us, you know, we want to get to know you and we want to get to know your audience. I said, here’s my cell phone number. Give me a call anytime. Their affiliate manager for the other company did not give out a cell phone number. I gave out my cell phone number. Now, is that scalable and sustainable? Long-term no. And did I change my phone number about a year later? I did. And you know, gave all the people who had it, that number and none of the new people.

But I give them my cell phone number. I said, call me. And I started talking to these affiliates. And a lot of them were smaller affiliates, just wanted attention. They wanted somebody who jumped on the phone with them and strategize with them. They want an affiliate manager who gave a flying crap about the success of their business. And we started signing them up 2, three, a day. $500 a month affiliate thousand dollars a month affiliate $200 a month affiliate couple three, and four and $5,000 affiliates and a $10,000 affiliate. Just one after that, there was a stretch where, you know, we were aggressive in those four first four months. And I feel like we signed up maybe, you know, three affiliates a week for 16 weeks.

It was pretty awesome. We had like, you know, 35 active affiliates at the end of the fourth month. At the end of the fifth month, we had over a hundred active affiliates and it just picked up and continued. Some of them grew with us and we had a lot of new ones coming in. And so what happened was some of these competitors affiliates started switching over to us and it got noticed. And so while we had to actively go out and reach out to those first two, 300, they just started coming to us and coming to us and coming to us, they started reaching out. I started getting emails literally every other day saying, Hey, Matt, we’re, you know, we promote so-and-so. We promote this other company we’re interested in and I’ve heard good things about you guys were interested in switching over to you.

I’m like, man, this is easier than I thought it would be. You know? And so we took advantage of the situation. Now you may not have a situation like that, but the key here is that the situation could have been negative. Our biggest competitor just got bought by a publicly traded company. And we’re going to just roll up and you know, we’re going to go into the fetal position and we’re never going to be like them. We never were like them. The weird thing is it didn’t hurt them. Their affiliate program, you know, year later was still doing about a hundred million dollars, but they didn’t grow. Ours was doing 18 million a year, roughly about actually more like 17 million. We’re doing a little bit over a million dollars a month.

They were doing almost $10 million a month. We were doing a million dollars a month. They didn’t get smaller for us to get bigger, but for us, you know, million dollars a month was pretty fricking awesome. You know, pretty significant. So what’s the lesson here and how can you apply it? Well, number one, you know, as, as Alan has up on the screen, there, identify your competitors, affiliates, identify who are your competitors affiliates. If you need help learning how to do this, I’m going to share a resource in a moment that’ll help you do just that. We want to identify. Who’s promoting our competition bigger, smaller, same size, new old bought by a publicly traded company.

Owned by a hedge fund. Doesn’t matter. They are competition. Who are they? The second thing that you should do is to find that angle like we did, that makes you a better option. So the angle that we found was we’re not owned by a publicly traded company. I’m gonna treat you like a person. Here’s my cell phone number. I’m going to be available to you. I’m going to answer your calls. I’m going to respond to your emails quickly. Like our advantage was that we were a startup and there’s a connotation with the startup that we’re going to hustle. We’re going to bring you to Franklin, Tennessee. And we’re going to, we never wined and dined by, but we beered and dined some people.

You know, we may or may not have had some keg parties with our affiliates. You know, I still remember one of them. We took them out with his place called tin roof and Franklin. And the, the lead guitarist for rascal Flatts was in there. Like, this is the thing about, you have to understand what Nashville, you cannot go anywhere and not run into somebody famous. It is physically impossible. Nashville, at least back then it’s grown a lot was a small enough place. You know, the area we lived in had about 125,000 people.

So that’s small enough. But when you have a thousand celebrities, literally, you know, people think, oh, Nashville, country music try also lots of movie stars and rock stars and athletes and other types, you know, television stars and all that all, live in that area. You couldn’t go anywhere and not run into somebody. Like if you went out to a restaurant, anytime we went to any decent enough restaurant, we were going to see somebody. I mean, I remember gosh, it was every time. You go to Walmart, you’d see people.

I remember running into a what’s the matriarch and the Judd family. Naomi. Yeah. I remember running into Naomi Judd at a Michael’s craft store, you know, Carrie Underwood in Walmart. Was it Cheryl Crow? Who was her Lance Armstrong, Lance Armstrong sitting there eating dinner one night, you know? So we’re there, we run into the guitars from rascal Flatts. Well, the guy we were with the affiliate with is, was like a massive rascal Flatts fan. He’s like, oh my gosh. So I’m like, Hey, let me go introduce you to him. I have no, I don’t know the guy, normally the guy day in my life, I just went up and I’m like, so I literally, thankfully smartphones had just come out and I Googled rascal flatts.

I don’t even know the guy’s name. I couldn’t even tell you what his name is now. Googled rascal Flatts. I’m like looking. I’m like, is that yep. That’s the guy I’m like, oh, his name’s, you know, whatever Larry Smith and I go up and go, Larry, I’d like you to meet the affiliates name. I don’t wanna say the guy’s name was Lev. I was like, Larry wants you to meet Lev. And he goes, love nice to meet you. And he’s like, oh my gosh, I’m such a big rascal Flatts fan, blah, blah, blah. You would have thought that Larry was like one of my best friends. He handled it perfectly. Like it could have backfired.

You don’t get those experiences when you work with the big homies. So, It was about how we’re going to treat you. So what’s the angle that makes you a better option. Do you have better commissions? Maybe you have better commissions, maybe a better conversions. Maybe it’s your company culture. Like it was with ours. We’re startup. Maybe it’s a better fit or alignment with your brand.

So this company makes the same thing you do, but they do animal testing. And you don’t. Is that going to resonate with all of your potential affiliates? Of course not. But it’s going to resonate with some. You’re going to be on brand with those people. One of our clients, Tricia, Brooke, you know, she’s, she’s worked with like actors and actresses, like James Gandolfini, Susan Surandon Bobby carnival. I’m trying to think Steve Buscemi. I think bunch of others, I cannot think of who she’s worked with like seven or eight, really famous actor, actresses. That’s an angle that you can find that sets you apart.

Like, oh, this person teaches speaking on stage too. But as she worked with like eight celebrities, has she landed 60 Ted stages for her clients? No. So here’s the thing you find that, that difference, right? It could be the resources that you provide. You just provide better resources for your affiliates. You know, whatever it is like our case, it was that we were smaller. So we reframed the disadvantages into advantages. That’s key.

Just reframe those different disadvantages into advantages, right? Your, your price point, maybe it’s lower. Maybe it’s higher. That’s a difference. Why could both of them be better? Well, ours is lower. So more people will buy it. It’s more accessible to people. I know affiliates that we have that their audience just doesn’t really buy stuff that’s over a certain price point. So we have things that fit that, but higher means you’re gonna make more commissions. Is the type of product, a little bit different, you know, a course versus coaching, a membership versus a course, a physical versus digital.

You know, those are the types of things, right? Whatever it is, find a way to differentiate yourself and stand out and talk about that. The third thing is you gotta take action. You know, we talked about this, right? We got a great opportunity. We got lucky. But what happens when you get lucky or what happens when you get unlucky? What happens when something happens? It’s beyond your control. You take action. You take aggressive action.

We struck while the opportunity was there, granted it was a toilet idea. I did not go, huh? How can we capitalize on this? And I wish I could say that now today I would, because of this experience, it’s why I’m sharing this experience with you because of that experience. I now know to do this. I now know to make sure that I take advantage and take action. A very aggressive action. When situations like this arise. So strike fast, take action, be aggressive, do something, you know, think, okay, what is this? This seems bad. What do we do with, oh, this seems good. You know, it’s kinda like you inherit $10,000.

I have a friend of mine. He had literally, it’s like this is like as a Hollywood movie type prototypical star, right? He had an uncle pass away. And he inherited $10,000. I think it was actually $12,000. $12,000 from his uncle. Now you can say, well, I never inherited $12,000. And you just got lucky.

The guy’s a multimillionaire now. Overwhelming majority of that came because of how he invested the $12,000. He got that $12,000 roughly the same time that I was making six figures at the age of 23. Now you could, well, Matt, you worked hard for it. Yeah. I still got really lucky. All right. I discovered a website called Google and how to run ads on it. And it was making astronomically more money than I was worth at that age. Okay. Me at that age went and did a bunch of dumb stuff with it. There wasn’t a single time. I went out that I wasn’t the one paying the tab. I had a really nice car for a 24 year old. You know, I lived in a really nice apartment.

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That was really expensive. My furniture was really nice. I did nice things for people too. And I also had like the country club membership and all that other words. I was a moron. All right. Now my friend who inherited $12,000 did two things. Number one, he invested the crap out of it and happened to pull it out right before 2000, like the crash of 2007 or eight, I forget. But he had a pretty good run. Got that up to like $50,000. He then took that, started a business. He continued to invest afterwards. And he, again, he got lucky. He pulled the money out so he could start a business.

What if he waited six months? Well, he didn’t wait six months. You know, that’s part of the lesson there. My point to all that is like, you see this opportunity to take action, take aggressive action. I don’t care what it is. Okay. So maybe nothing happens to your competition. Well then just take action. Start reaching out about getting them to come over to your side. But if you hear anything, they lose their affiliate manager. They get bought by a hedge fund. They get some bad press. I mean, I know people who’ve that I’ve shared this strategy with privately that have, you know, they set up Google alerts for their competition.

One of them, I won’t mention who, but one of their competitors years ago, their CEO, I think he tweeted something. I can’t remember if he tweeted something or if he said something on the news and it was a very, I don’t know how else to say this, divisive, divisive I do now. So I’ll just say it to the way you can say it to divisive. It was something that I would fundamentally disagree with him saying and controversial.

Well, that company got a lot of bad press. So this guy in his affiliate program, they pounced, they pounced on that situation basically saying, Hey, do you want to be associated with this guy? Some people said, yeah, I do. Well, they already were an affiliate for them. It wasn’t like him not getting them to switch It was, what’s the no water off his back. Or, you know, whatever, no skin off his, whatever the saying is. You know, it didn’t hurt him. He didn’t have them as an affiliate anyway, but enough of those people, I don’t know, 20, 25% of this other big companies, affiliates switched to him.

It might have been 20%, it might’ve been 15%. We’re talking 15% of like a hundred million dollars. Plus in sales switched over to my friend’s company, all because their CEO said something stupid and he took advantage of it. So just as a side note, set up Google alerts for your competition. I know I do. Set up Google alerts for them. Somebody says something stupid, go take advantage of it.

All right, go get some of their affiliates to switch over to you. Yeah, well, but there’s a hundred other options for them to switch to. But you’re the one that reached out to them. You’re the one that reached out him within 24, 48 hours of the news breaking while it was hot and emotional and they switched over to you and then you kept them.

And then you don’t go on TV and say something stupid and you know, cost yourself some affiliates. So number three, you know, just strike while the iron is hot, take it. Take aggressive action. Fourth, followup, followup, followup, followup, followup followup, six follow-up follow-up follow-up follow-up. I reached out to them. They never responded. Okay. I, in 2005, I followed up five or six times and people got an average of like seven emails a day back then. You know what inbox zero was an everyday thing for me in 2005, it was an everyday thing for me through about 2010. Inbox zero is a fricking pipe dream for me right now.

I get too many emails. I, you know, I don’t even see 95% of the emails that come to me. And I still don’t hit inbox zero ever. I just have too many to get to. I’m always like a half a day, two days behind. And this has never, it’s probably, I don’t know. Maybe it’ll change some time. So the point is, keep following up, following up, following up, following up, the thing is most people order their email newest to oldest. As Gina says, the money’s in the follow-up Hey, Gina. The money’s in the follow-up. That’s true in everything. Most people order their email newest to oldest.

So here’s the thing. If you emailed an eight o’clock this morning, and now it’s 2 37 in the afternoon, or if I emailed you, then I’m number 14 down. But if I email you tomorrow at three 15 and you happen to check your email at 3 27, I’m the first or second email there and you see it now. Now I’m not suggesting you email every day. I’m suggesting that you follow up between eight and 10 days. I go eight days because then I’m hitting a different day of the week. And we vary the times. So I might send the first email Monday at 1:00 PM and then Tuesday at four 15, and then the next Wednesday at 9 27 in the morning. And then I’ll send an email in the middle of the night sometimes.

Because not everybody is on my sleep schedule. Not everybody’s even in my time zone. The Eastern time zone, I believe is the biggest time zone in the Western hemisphere. I could be wrong on that, but it’s still like less than 5% of the world’s population lives in the Eastern time zone. The United States is my guests. So a lot of people are in different schedules. So what if I send an email at 3 35 in the morning? That’s like 9:00 AM in Italy, roughly, maybe 8:00 AM. You know? So if you think about that, like we vary the times in the days and it’s just, and then we keep doing it and following up, following up and following up, following up.

I heard Matthew Kelly said, I’m going to butcher this. In fact, I’m actually gonna see if I can pull this up because I want to get this quote, right? Because I just think it’s so powerful. Basically. You know, it’s talking about the number of times that people you need to follow up.

And he said the first time that people hear it, the first time that people hear it. Yeah. He was using this training to sell knives. The first time someone hears something, they don’t hear it. The second time they hear something, they may have heard it, but it doesn’t really register. And the third time they hear it, they notice it. The fourth time they hear it. Now the pay attention, the fourth time they hear it, they say this is important because it’s the second time I’ve heard it. The fifth time they hear it. It starts to sink in, the sixth time they hear it, they start to think about it.

And the seventh time they remember, and I’m not even talking about that because they don’t, if they don’t hear your first email, they don’t see it. Then the second time becomes the first time. Sometimes the seventh time is the first time and then they mark it to follow up and they forget about it. But it’s the eight time that they’ve read it and respond. Follow-up follow-up follow-up and then fifth rinse and repeat.

So do this with the next one and the next one and the next one. Okay. Every time something happens. Your competition’s in the news, it can be bad. It could be good. Then getting bought by a publicly traded company. Definitely didn’t seem like bad news to them. It turned out it wasn’t really good news. I did hear later, years later. I shared that story and somebody connected the dots and they asked me, was it such and such company? And I said, yeah, we had another company do that in our industry. The first company that got bought by a publicly traded company, the second company got bought by the same publicly traded company. And we did the same thing, did the exact same thing.

We were a little bit late on that one in part, basically we were lied to, we were told we had heard it was happening, but we’re told that it wasn’t happening. And by the time we found out about it, the news had kind of broken. We kinda missed the boat and some of our actual other competition actually did the same thing. So just as a side note, like speed kills, you know, speed is what works. So the point is just keep rinsing, repeating, do it again with different companies. Find different angles. It doesn’t have to be that some big news broke with them. It could just be that you look at them and go, man, all their stuff is all with a man. And I’m a woman cool.

Reach out to the people and say, would it, how would it serve your audience to have a woman presenting this? That’s an angle. Would it serve your audience to have a minority face presenting this? Would it serve your audience to have a short person, a tall person? I don’t know somebody who isn’t a PhD, somebody who is a PhD.

You know, somebody who, somebody who speaks with a Southern accent or somebody who has a pretty neutral accent like me, because I grew up in the south to parents from the north and they live in the Midwest. You know, I’m screwed. I basically have no accent is what I’ve been told. Although like people like hardcore northerners, like, especially Northeast think I have a little bit of a Southern Twain. And I can, if I spend about three minutes down south, that’ll start to come out. Like when I came back, I had to notice this. When I came back from being, I was down in Florida and North Carolina for awhile. And when I came back, Florida, wasn’t so bad because I wasn’t really around a lot of southerners down there.

In fact, I was around more. I forgot I was around a lot more people from overseas and I was people from the south. Then I spent a week with my mom and my sister and that whole side of the family in North Carolina. And I don’t know how else to say this, but they’re Southern. When you drove through South Carolina it happened. We were in South Carolina for like seven seconds. It just happens, I lived there for 25 years, it just happens immediately. We did stopped at Bojangles. I sent you that picture. You know, how do you tell me you’re in South Carolina without telling me your South Carolina, the picture of ad pimento cheese to any menu item for 69 is definitely a sign. You are in South Carolina, the way like the Southern comes out.

So whatever it is, like find the angle and then just keep falling up. I mentioned earlier that resource guys, if you need help finding affiliates, if you want to know kind of the mechanics of, we didn’t have time to get into that today in our 45 minutes or so, go check out, find affiliates now, it’s very simple. It’s findaffiliatesnow.com. Alright. The name of the course, the name of the URL says it all find affiliates now. It will show you how to find affiliates now.

So go check that out. That’s a very quick course. The total course is about 90 minutes. It is focused on action, right? So it’s going to take you step-by-step as a five day program going to take you step-by-step you will be finding affiliates now, while you’re going through the program, you will be getting affiliates now. While you’re going through the program, if you do it right.

It takes you back to that day. In 2005, when I had to find affiliates now. I had a week to find affiliates and have them start making sales. So that’s what that program is all about finding affiliates now. So I want to leave you with some action items. These are some clear, next steps you can take. Number one, follow the steps I just shared. You know, number one, identify your competitors affiliates. Then find the angle that makes you a better option. Take action, take aggressive action. Right? Follow up, follow up, follow up. And then rinse and repeat. Number two, check out, find affiliates now, you know, findaffiliatesnow.com. I told you what it’s all about. I won’t belabor that point.

But just go check it out. See if like, Hey man, I think this might be right for me. One of the things I will point out is we got all the email templates that I talked about earlier and kind of how we reach out. All of those are in the course. So you actually get the email templates. You can literally, our clients use these all the time. Like are our coaching clients using, they copy and paste them tweak. Like they fill in the blanks, you know, like, you’re not going to say a name of product here. They put the name of the product and they copy and paste them and they may be tweaked like a word or two to fit them and they send them and they get results.

So check out, find affiliates now, at findaffiliatesnow.com and then thirdly, reach out if you have any questions about today, about what I shared today, anything else don’t ask me the name of that company I had decided I’m not going to share that even though I think it would be totally fine, but any other questions about what we discussed today or just in general, help you to grow your business? You can text me anytime, 2 6, 0 2 1 7 4 6 1 9. So text me anytime, 2 6 0 2 1 7 4 6 1 9 and then make sure to come back next week as we’re entering March, can you guys believe we’re about to be in the third month of 2022, which is just insane, Man, ooh.

We had a spring-like day, the other day. We got up in the sixties and of course that meant that I canceled every call I had and went outside because the next day it snowed. So Thursday, March 3rd mark your calendars, 2:00 PM. We’re going to be discussing. We’re going to go a little bit different direction. We’re not going to be talking about anything related to affiliates per se, but we’re going to help you with your general business and life hopefully. I’m going to share with you some lessons that I’ve only shared privately with coaching clients in the past about how to get focused, stay focused and regain focus, if you lose it. So how to get focused, stay focused and again, lost focus next week. Make sure you mark your calendars March 3rd, 2:00 PM Eastern. And we will see you then See you guys later.