We just finished running a multi-million dollar affiliate launch. The first one, in fact, that wasn’t run entirely by me, but rather by our agency. There are a TON of lessons to share that YOU can apply to your affiliate program.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
How to Hire an Affiliate Manager
The Surprising Thing That Might be Holding Your Business Back
This Affiliate Program Just Made a Fatal Mistake: Here’s What They Should Have Done Instead
How to Work with An Affiliate Network: Q&A Lightning Round
Lessons Learned from a Multi-Million Dollar Affiliate Launch
We just finished running a multi-million dollar affiliate launch. Now, this was the first one. In fact, that wasn’t run entirely by me, but rather by our agency and there are just a ton of lessons to share that you can apply to your affiliate program. So, let’s dive right In. So I’m super excited about today’s episode because it’s the very first time that I get to interview.
One of our affiliate managers, not really an interview more like a behind-the-scenes. Look as we recap a recent affiliate launch that we ran one of the biggest launches that you’ll see on the internet marketing, calendar, and 2022. And we have some lessons that we want to share with you. Now, there’s a combination of things today.
There are some things where it’s like, “Hey, these are things we did that we knew we were going to do and we knew they were going to work and they did work.” There are some things where it’s like we did these. We weren’t sure if they were going to work and they did there are some things that we did and they didn’t work and there are all kinds of stuff. Right? There are like 10 or 11 very valuable lessons that we’re going to share in this episode.
I’m going to be joined today by Jason Alberti who’s one of our new affiliate managers. Many of you probably know by. Now. We started an agency this year prior to this. This year, it was mostly me running the affiliate programs and it was our team supporting me this year.
We’ve actually shifted a lot of the burden and it’s allowed us to grow and to help more entrepreneurs, which has been something that I’ve wanted to do for years and just haven’t gotten around to because it kind of been busy and so it’s just, it’s been awesome. It’s been such an experience, Jason’s been a rock star.
So this is the first one of these that we’ve done where we actually get to bring him on. And like I said, Discussing what worked, and what didn’t work? We use a format in our company that we don’t use on the podcast because it doesn’t quite work as well. But we use the KISS method which Keep Improve Stop and Start, keep improving start and stop actually.
So one of the things we’re going to keep one of the things that we’re going to improve or things we’re going to start doing and one thing that we’re going to just not do that anymore because they working and if we feel like in our Recaps is we debrief these big affiliate launches.
It keeps us from just “Oh, that didn’t work and this went wrong” and they interesting up being really depressing, or they, it’s like, well, “we hit our goal. Yay”. Everything went perfectly. We’re going to talk about anything. You know, it’s like, no, there’s always got to be something. We’re going to keep something. We’re going to improve something.
We’re going to stop and something. We’re going to start. You know, that has to be that way is the way that we do those but in this one, we’re just going to share some lessons again. Combination of lessons, things that we tried and didn’t work things that we tried and did work things that we just discovered, and there’s one in here.
It’s like we just kind of discover this one thing this thing by accident, you know, and oh my gosh, it worked and saved us a ton of time. So yay. So hope you enjoy it. Let’s Dive Right In.
Matt: Jason, Welcome to the first of hopefully many times that you’re going to be on the show here, man. Thanks for being on.
Jason: Yeah. I’m excited. This is gonna be fun.
Matt: Yeah. So the first time that we’ve ever had somebody from our new agency is on the podcast. Like I said, first of many, because we’re probably going to do these periodically where we recap. The lessons that we learn from, you know, multimillion-dollar one of the biggest affiliate launches of the entire calendar year.
So I know we were talking beforehand. We’ve got some notes, you know, things that we want to share. These are for those of you who are new to these Recaps, you know, we’ve done them before but these are effectively kind of like you’re getting a seat at the table and us recapping. Okay, here are the things that we’ve learned here are the things that we did.
Well, whether they be new, They are things that were just reinforced, like, our first one that we’ll talk about here in a second, or whether they are mistakes. We made lessons we learned the hard way. The cool thing for you guys is, that you’re getting all the information. So those mistakes you don’t have to make them the good stuff. You can put it right into your playbook.
So we’re going to Dive Right In. I think as I see in my notes here, just we got 11 things that we want to talk about. So lots to cover. So we’ll start at the beginning which is always a good place to start. I’ll share my lesson, first of all, kind of alternatives from there, bud. I feel like one of the most important things that I got out of this launch that I’ve known for years.
I’ve been preaching. And for years. I’ve been changing the opinions of some of the OGs and online marketing, but I was reminded of it again because they made the launch. The importance of small Affiliate guys. I’m going to share these stats. Let me open some stats herein, in this particular Philly at launch that we’re talking about.
We had a 159. Affiliates with one sale. 159, Affiliates who made a sale guys. There are affiliate programs. There are affiliate launches that don’t have 159 Affiliates. I mean, that’s the reality. So we had roughly do the quick math, 27 to 30 percent of all sales came from first-time Affiliates. Meaning.
This is the very first time that they’d ever promoted anything ever as an affiliate that is 750 thousand dollars and change from affiliate almost three-quarters of a million dollars. Now, if you strike strap late that to a year, what those people are going to bring in over a year of sales and things like that, over a million dollars, a couple of million dollars in sales from the first time ever
Affiliates as far as the number that made there. First-ever say love this product. Well, it’s in excess of that. We haven’t even run the numbers yet, but it’s probably an excess of 450-500. Where’s the first time they ever sold, you know this product guys. That’s what we’re talking about when we say building an army.
Not discounting someone just because I’m going to make one or two or three sales not discounting something because I only have 1000 Facebook fans, not discounting somebody because their email list is only 800, people will talk about this because we know what can happen when you have an eager Or and engaged affiliate reaching out to individuals that can close a really high percentage. We’ll talk about that here in a little bit. So, just reminding you of the importance of small affiliates.
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Go get the report of your first 100 Affiliates at mattmcwilliams..com/first100. Go get the report and go get Affiliates. They don’t have to be Wales to go get him or put that link in the show notes. Adjacent. You’ve got a good one here. I’m looking at our notes. This is big. This is Like a game-changer right here. Tell us about it.
Jason: Yeah, this is huge. One of the things that we did was we gave all of our affiliates a targeted, hot leads list based on the card. Abandons people who saw certain pages, things like that. So we’re able to give them, you know, these hot leads where they were able to kind of have the email addresses and then go out and close them. They can set them as DMs. They can send them a personalized email or video message or something to help close those sales. It worked. It was very effective. We had one person. She had I think somewhere between like nine or ten. She closes like seven or eight of them. agency closes five.
Matt: Yeah 8 and close five. I liked what I was just saying about the importance of when, when people do one-on-one communication, that’s eight people. Now that’s eight of hundreds. But still what if he had a list of eight people, she closed five of them. Would you be? Like now? We don’t have those five sales? It’s only, it’s only ten. A dollars. Yeah, that was huge. Yeah, go on. I just, this is, that is just insane.
Jason: It’s an amazing stat. And then, we saw that across the board. I mean, I had multiple Affiliates that reached out that said, hey, I had two of them. One of them, are we bought and I closed the other different Affiliates for reaching out and say, man, that really helped and they were able to kind of get in. And again, make that Personal Touch be able to connect with those sales, you know, a lot of these people are on the fence and go. Going through everything in their head. Like, should I get this? Should I not? And sometimes all it takes is somebody who can come out and say, hey, this is why you should do this, or this is why it fits for you specifically, and it just gets them to pull the trigger. So that happens. This was awesome.
Matt: Yeah, and just three, I mean, literally, what we do is on the last day and this is something we can improve. This is a lesson that we learned is improving the process of identifying the hot leads. But also, you know, the timing in which we get them because I think we got them.
It’s one of those things where it was like, oh my gosh, we need to do this and it was 12:30. And by the time we got it done was like, 3:30 getting that to him a little bit earlier in the day, you know, on cart closed a possibly running that list, you know, first thing in the morning and getting it to him would certainly improve the process, but just kind of nailing down that process and tags.
So what we did was it was like, oh, shoot, we should do this. I’m like, well, what tags would work and we were like, whoa car. Abandons, it was like card abandons and one other. And so what are those things that would trigger somebody to would be identified as a hot lead when I think of a hot lead. I’m looking for the top two percent now.
Yeah, that means if somebody has only two hundred leads, it might be for people. We have people getting one. I remember specifically, I think it was Brenda. We sent her to, she closed, both of them. So hey. You’re not going to argue if it’s only one of four. So you’re looking for that top 2%. Now, if it’s 2.75 percent, that’s fine.
Some people might only have 150 leads, but they have 13 hot leads. That’s fine, too. It just kind of depends. So for us, we’re looking at card abandons. So you should be tagging card abandons. If you are tagging card abandons, tell them who their card abandons are. If that’s all you gave them, great.
These are people who literally went all the way to the point where they have one last step and then they leave. So they’re being retargeted and then you’re following up with them. People who clicked two or more times to the sales page. We talk about identifying those people on your end as an affiliate. But what about on the end of the affiliate manager identifying who the hot leads are, people who have clicked the sales page two or more times, and sending those to your affiliates.
If you have a sneak peek page, maybe it’s people who click the sneak peek page. In this particular launch, we had three workshop days plus a webinar. What if somebody clicked on all four or they clicked on three plus the sales page. So basically what we’re saying is if they clicked on the five things they can click, if they clicked on four or more, they’re a hot lead, four more times plus the card. So just I think there are four things that we can improve Jason and I know we’ve talked about this already, but nailing that down months in advance or weeks in advance so that it’s there for us. And like, okay, if we run the numbers as we’re going along and it’s like, okay, this is adding up to 10%, well, then we need to back it down. But that’s something we can work on. But if you’re running an affiliate launch, who are those hot leads, nail those down.
Jason: Then talking about starting earlier, really everything should start earlier in terms of training. In terms of obviously we’re already reaching out to we’re starting reaching out to affiliates right after the launch ends.
Matt: Yeah, you’re in advance.
Jason: There is no time that’s too early for that. But even starting with the training, we’ve got so much knowledge and so many things that work that doing one or two trainings isn’t going to cover. So being able to start those training earlier and having them ongoing, what that also does is that all people new affiliates that join, they already have a handful of videos that they can start and watch in advance. So we’re already creating basically a training course for affiliates as they’re going through the launch that’s specific to the launch that we’re running.
So really just being able to start months in advance and making sure that we get the right information to them as early as possible. And it also helps build in that buying right as they’re going week to week and they’re learning new stuff. And they’re going to the videos. They’re getting excited. So they’re getting excited about the launch. They’re getting excited about promoting, and they’re just being more invested. They have more skin in the game. They’ve invested their time, and they’re just a lot more able to get better results because they’re in.
Matt: Yeah, I think it’s important. Like, we’re not talking about the recruiting side. We’re doing that a year in advance. But what we did was we focused, and this is important. We focused for ten months on recruiting and then two months on serving. Go eight and four. You know, it doesn’t need to be like six and six. Go eight. And there’s an overlap, like the training that we’ll start doing next year for this launch will start four months out, for maybe four and a half months out.
We’re not going to start nine months out, but we’ll start a good solid four and a half months out. And it’ll be a slower move like we did those. I know you want to talk about this in a second with you. The weekly strategy calls. What if we did more of like in every other week strategy call and really allowed them to actually think about things and it wasn’t such a commitment Or maybe we could, I don’t know, we could figure some stuff out. Like maybe we do two topics at once and we just do a monthly strategy call. That could be an option.
But things like that were just something we realized, like planning your bonus. We only did that like three weeks before the open cart this year. I think it was four weeks. But still, that’s only four weeks before open cart. If we did that two months before open-cart, that’s an entire other month for them to prepare their bonus. And I think we would have just had slightly better results.
I think we would have had people more fired up. I think even like, we’ll talk about the engagement of the Facebook group, but one of the things there is starting to get that engagement months earlier seeds the group. And if you know how Facebook works, from an algorithm standpoint, the more active your group is in February, the more active it’s going to be in April when you need it to be active, just from an algorithm standpoint, let alone a human behavior standpoint. So doing more months and months in advance, I don’t think you have to do it.
You don’t have to be like in June going who’s excited for the launch next April. I think that’s a little bit overkill. But starting four months out instead of two months out is definitely something we’re going to work on for next year. So that started early. We talked about the importance of small affiliates.
The counter to that is the importance of big affiliates. And this is something we are putting in place with our company. We haven’t done a great job of this systematically. Okay, we’ve done it. We’ve just done it kind of as we’ve done it instead of like, no, we’re creating a system around this. It’s replicable.
So now with our next launch, what we’re doing as a result of something we learned in this launch, I’m going to give you the result. And then kind of how we got there is we basically will have our top 25 to 40 affiliates projected, and then we’ll have everybody else. Everybody else is more mass communication. We are not creating specific promotion plans for them.
We’re not tracking their individual stats. The reality is somebody who we’ve set a goal of 3250 leads and they’re tracking towards 2100. That’s a problem. Somebody who they’re probably going to do 40 leads and they’re tracking towards 31. What am I going to do with that? Like, hey, you’re really falling nine leads short there, buddy.
You should send an email to ten people. There’s not much we can do. And so we’re not just going to worry about the individual stats. We’re going to work on that on a macro level, it could be 15, it could be 30, it could be 35, 40, whatever. We’re going to work with them on a micro level, one-to-one.
So that one to one communication earlier. We did a lot of it right when we got to the launch, doing that more again, everything going up three months, those six weeks leading up to the launch, really focusing on one on one communication, making sure that once a week we’re doing what we’re doing. We’re DMing them, we’re sending them a one-off email, we’re texting, and we’re getting on a call with them, just checking in with them. That’s super important. That’s something we’re working with new software that we’ll talk more about. We got some cool episodes coming up. We’re going to talk about software. And one of the things that we’ll be able to do.
Jason, with that software, is used that to track those things, to be able to actually make sure that every week we’re engaging one on one with those people, not waiting until the week before the launch, the week of the launch. And now we’re like, oh, we see that they’re behind and we’re DMing them know, like, we’re working with them one on one for weeks and weeks leading up to it. That’s going to be a big change. So I’m looking forward to seeing how that works because what little bit we were able to do this year worked well. Just seeing you be able to do that full board next year is going to be fun.
Jason: I’m excited. I’m excited about that software and getting to kind of dive into that more.
Matt: Yeah, I touched on this a little bit ago, and we’ll come over to want to talk about the leaderboard thing here in a little bit, but we touched on this a little bit for just a moment, though. The strategy calls that something that you wrote down is something to talk about. So tell us about that real quick.
Jason: Yeah, so we got a lot of good feedback on the strategy calls, on just how we gave them worksheets. We gave them, obviously, the training, we give them things that they can work on and stuff that has worked in the past for other launches and even in this launch last year and years before.
So we gave them just a ton of really good information and actionable items that they can physically who not only on the strategy calls but kind of moving forward and it really gave them a bunch of ideas and we had a really good conversation even on the specific calls with different affiliates that hey, I tried this last year. I tried that last year.
And it worked really well. We had a lot of really good conversations. And so we got a lot of really great feedback from the affiliates, not only on the stuff that we were teaching and the stuff that Matt was talking about that he’s worked on throughout this process of being an affiliate manager but also from other affiliates that said, “Hey, I tried this last year. I tried that. This worked really well.” And even the support was great. So you get a couple of people that are like, I’m really nervous. This is my first launch. I don’t know what to do.
Matt: Oh, that was awesome.
Jason: Yeah. And you get so many other affiliates that are experienced and know what they’re doing. They’re saying, no, you got this. And it’s just the support on those calls. And I know for a fact that some of the people that might have been hesitant or unsure about what they wanted to do said, “you know what? I’m going to do it.” And it was because of the support of the other affiliates.
And they got a couple of sales. They got their first sales. They’ve got multiple sales. And just seeing the emails come in and say, “Hey, those strategy calls were awesome.” I got my first sale ever in the affiliate online world. And it was because of the stuff that I learned on those calls and the support that I got from the other affiliates.” It was huge. It was absolutely paramount.
Matt: I love those. That’s something we started doing last year for the first time. And I’m going to walk people through how we do those. But just one of the things that I was really surprised about before I walk people through how we do them is who showed up, first of all, a lot of the people who ended up in the top ten in the top 20. But it was also a lot of people like the number two affiliate.
I’ll just call him out. Paul Pruitt, the number two affiliate, was on almost every strategy call. And the number five affiliate, 4th, 5th somewhere in there, four-fifth on every single strategy call. In fact, let me pull up the leaderboard I’m going to just see because I can tell you real quick who was on there. The point is these are people who were on last year.
And I even said I was like, “why are you on here?” “You are on this. You already know all this stuff.” And they’re like, “no, I might learn something.” “I might learn one thing that makes this worth 30 minutes of my time.” So I’m just looking like the number two affiliate, number four affiliate, the number ten affiliate, the number eleven affiliate, the number 12 affiliate, the number 13 affiliate, one of the guys from the 15th of the team, 15th, 16th right there. What is that half roughly of the top 20.
I’m talking more on every single call, another few were on all but like one or two. And so what these end up taking on is I come on and there’s a specific topic we’re going to cover. So how to promote the workshop, how to promote the webinar, how to close sales, how to create bonus packages, how to promote this, how to warm up your audience, whatever it might be, and how to email them. There’s a specific topic, and I’ll teach on that for 20 to 40 minutes and answer questions as we’re going.
But there’s a specific topic, a theme, and a call to action. Like work on your bonuses, fill out the bonus worksheet. We create these very simple worksheets. I hate to say this, but between us girls on this podcast, those worksheets take me ten minutes to put together. They are not revolutionary, but people are blown away by them because there’s something that walks them through there’s one where it’s like how to put together a bonus package.
And there’s a bonus page template where it shows you how to put together the bonus page. Like your bonus package page. That template is just it took me like five minutes to do that and it’s based on our template. I literally took our template and said, actually, I didn’t do it. But I said, take this page. That’s our template for creating a bonus page from ClickFunnels and putting it on a pretty thing over here.
Robby did it last year. So it ends up being this really cool brainstorming session where you can tap into like as an affiliate, you have access to the number two affiliate, the number four affiliate you have access to last year’s, number two, who finished number two last year, you have access to me who has promoted this thing before and finished really well.
But I’m saying you have access to all this knowledge and it becomes a crowd-sourced thing. And so people are in there going, “Hey, what do you think of this bonus?” And people are saying, no, you can’t do this, do this, or I love it for this reason. How valuable is that? Like, instead of trying to figure this out on your own or just having me be the one who’s like, well, I think it’s good for this reason, but here’s what I would do. And there’s value in that.
You get access to 40 or 50 people who are like tearing apart the little details of it or adding little things to it to make it better. People were blown away. And then you mentioned this, but there was a lady on there who was really nervous about interviewing someone and it was just like, “I’m freaking out. I don’t know what to do. ” And I said a few things, but then people jumped on, this is not a webinar, so they can just jump on. We’re all together in a meeting.
Most of us ever came around and there’s audio and they’re like, “Hey, I was in the same boat last year, but here’s what I did.” And by the end of it, she was like, I can’t wait for my interview. I’m so excited, and that’s what we’re looking for. So, yeah, those strategy calls are huge. Again, big changes. We’re going to start doing those.
Probably do, like, two more of them. I think we did six this year. Five or six. I can’t remember. Last year we did, I think, eight and we convinced them. I think we’ll go back to what we did before the same number that we did last time but move them up and figure that out. So we did them on Tuesdays at two. So if you can find an angle like that where I think that’s pretty much the only day of the week that that works. Thursdays at three don’t really roll as much. So we did them on Tuesdays at two because they were easy to remember.
Also, it was like the only consistent hour I had on my calendar. I think one of the things we did really well was how we hyped the leaderboard with two of the people on there who were back and forth between number two and number one. They were in just, like, epic battle, right. And I am not joking.
There were times when we knew that one of them was moving up and had just emailed and we were like, refreshing the stats to try to catch it when they were tied. And so we’d screenshot and be like, oh, my gosh, you guys are tied. And I remember specifically with 22 minutes left in the leads contest. This is a two weeks long leads contest.
Actually, technically, it started even sooner. So weeks long, he was 22 leads ahead with 22 minutes left, and she ended up winning by ten. She sent a final message. I was able to get some registrations for the webinar, and I just thought that was the coolest thing. Like, you’re 22 ahead and then all of a sudden you lose by ten. Pretty cool.
That’s how close they were. Every time they were back and forth, we would play it up and we were damning them screenshots and things like that, and they ended up connecting, which is kind of cool. So there might be something there, but yeah, I like how we both kinds of played that, played that pretty well.
Jason: That was fun. It was really cool to see how that work out.
Matt: Yeah. Here’s a little thing. We did want to talk about the Google calendar invites that you brought up. This is a very small thing, so if we haven’t set it yet, I’ve kind of skirt around it. We’re talking about Stu McLaren’s launch for the membership experience. And when Stu was live and he was live for about 13 hours total.
This was just in the prelaunch range we’re talking about during the open cart. But in the prelaunch, she was live for about 13 hours I think. One of the things that happened last year was one of the affiliates, Tracy Harris. She had said, hey, her brand is Mums with Hustle. She’s from Australia that are called Mums. Mums are what we put on our front porch in October, but whatever.
So Mums with Hustle. So hashtag Mums with Hustle. And Stu happened to catch and he was like, “Oh, look at all you see all the Mums with Hustle. Hey, Tracy’s people.” And we’re like, we should do that this year. I think this was Stu’s idea, actually. Like, can we get a list of these to call out? I’m just going to pull it up on this list.
We ended up with a list. We just sent an email out in a Facebook message saying, hey, if you’ve got a hashtag that you’re going to tell people to drop in the chat, give us the spreadsheet so we can be looking for those. The team can be looking specifically for these. Pass that on to Stu. And he can call you out.
And he’ll know the name because one of them, for example, is coaching Hive Morah. Hannah, he might not know who hashtag coaching Hive is. And he sees that. And he’s like, I don’t have a context for that. So he’s just like, oh, hashtag coaching. But instead, he’s like, well, shout out to all the Morahana’s people.
It’s a small micro commitment from the affiliate because they fill out the form now they have to tell their audience to do that and then what happened? So that’s the value there. But then when he says, Let me just find another one. Hashtag Tom Woods Peeps for Tom Woods. #Tom Woods Peeps, shout out to all the Tom Woods peeps. I see you. Tom woods is like, oh, yeah, she said my name.
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That’s awesome. And it’s just like, it’s even more likely that one of those people is going to buy #BestDogMom #NoLimitsTriathlon #expansive #ArtistsMonkey #Podworldwide. I’m hoping that’s a podcast not like some sort of a capsule where you keep monkeys, Greg. Excellent. I know, Greg. I will listen to this, too.
I mean, all of these, right? #playmaker, Society Confidence performance, membership talk with Gina. It allowed him to call them out on the live. And then, of course, you know that there’s that feeling like, that’s me, I’m in that group, I’m in that tribe. And so that’s a dopamine hit, right? And we know all of these things. Is that the one reason why somebody bought it?
Probably not. But did it move somebody 1 YD closer, this little thing 1 YD closer to a buying decision? You better do it. Moved 50-100 people and made the affiliates feel really special. So that’s a win-win. If you ask me. Any thoughts on that, bud?
Jason: Yeah, I thought it was really awesome to see. And again, it builds a sense of community for everybody.
So not only are you connecting with your other members of your community on a live event, but then you’ve got to call out your community and you feel included. And that’s ultimately what people want. They want to be a part of something big and they want to feel included. And yeah, that was huge to kind of help move that needle, for sure.
Matt: Yes. Very cool. You’ve got a good one here, bud.
Jason: Yeah. One of the things that we did and that came out of it came up with the idea. He said we need to come out. We need to send a calendar invite to everybody that’s an affiliate so that they can come on these strategies. And so we did. So we just went into Google, set up a calendar invite, and they sent the email to all the affiliates that we had on our list. And it got a really good response. We saw a lot more people come on to the strategy calls this year.
Matt: Twice as many. Yeah. Than last year. It’s crazy.
Jason: I mean, we just got a lot more people showing up to the calls, and that helped create and foster that environment where people can be more supportive and communicate and all those kinds of things. The last thing here was that when we initially sent the first couple out, apparently Google sets up this Google meets thing and automatically attaches it to all of it.
Matt: I think they’ve removed that since we talked about it. I’ve noticed in the last few that they haven’t added it automatically.
Jason: They haven’t complained enough. Yes, we were adding them on. So that was one of the lessons that we saw. We’re like, okay, because people are getting confused. They’re like, hey, we’re on the Google Beats and there are ten other people here and nobody showed up. And so we kind of looked into it like, oh, because it automatically adds that, hey, join the Zoom meet here.
So we had to just take that as a lesson to make sure that we remove it. We had the Zoom link in there and we had everything in there that communicated to them. But that one thing that said, hey, join here, it’s a button that they pressed so loud, just making sure that we removed that was the lesson kind of in that.
Matt: Great point. And I think one of the other lessons we learned was how easy it is to add all 800 affiliates to a calendar invite. And so very simple. If you’ve got a spreadsheet of all of your affiliates and you got the first name, their last name, their email, their affiliate ID, anything like that, just create another column.
That’s their email address, plus a comma, and then you drag it down and paste them in the invite field. It’ll invite every single one of them. The one thing you have to do is make sure the last one that you add doesn’t have a comma. That’s the only thing that has to keep updating. But it’s a super-easy way to add everybody because I think the first one we didn’t know that.
And literally, one of our VA’s was like, copy-paste, copy-paste, copy-paste, copy-paste. And then he’s like, wait a minute. And he tried it and he tried like two. And it added both. That’s such a big one you would think that would be so obvious. But yeah, it’s super easy. It takes 2 seconds to drag and drop or drag and copy and then invite all of them.
And again, it just puts it in their calendar. They can decline it. That’s fine. But it’s just one more way of getting in front of them. And like I said, we ended up with twice as many people. One of the things I’m going to experiment with is something we’re going to do in a launch coming up.
I’m a little hesitant on it, but we’ll see if having calendar invites for big things that they committed to doing. So like send the final email about the webinar and have an individual calendar invite to that affiliate. We’ll see. I don’t know. I’m going to try it with a few people this year and see how it works. Might not be good.
All right, one other big lesson. We got two more for you. How important the engagement in your Facebook group is or whatever group, whether you’re using a slack group, a Facebook group, or a Telegram group, doesn’t matter. But again, going back to the strategy calls, the group was so supportive of each other that it just became its own driver of sales.
And I found that if we just got the conversation started, whether it be a leaderboard or a tip or some sort of an update, even the things we posted was like, I posted some stuff, like some silly stuff, like who’s excited about the workshop tomorrow? And 30 people like me, oh, my gosh, I’m so excited. Little things like that.
There was one that I did that was, like, really silly and ended up having to go back and look, but ended up getting a really good response. I just posted randomly. It wasn’t like a big thing, but it got that engagement. And again, people support each other. Facilitated conversation, and facilitated questions.
We have to remember, that questions from your affiliates are a good thing because they aren’t asking questions. If they aren’t getting ready to do something, they need clarification on something. It’s because they’re trying to move up. They’re trying to get more sales, trying to get more leads.
So anything that you can do just to facilitate conversation, questions, and engagement is a win.
Jason: Yeah, definitely.
Matt: All right, buddy. Our last big takeaway or lesson here is something you brought up, and we’ll end with this one.
Jason: Yeah. The importance of having a team can be one person, it can be multiple people. But I saw it a couple of times throughout this launch. There were a couple of hiccups on Stu’s end and this team just managed it really well. Just having the people and the resources to be able to kind of take care of any issues that come up.
So it seems seamless like nobody even notices that nobody even realizes that it’s going on and the benefit also on the affiliate management side for us was just having that other person to just kind of help out things get crazy in the morning, things are coming at you a million miles a minute and then just to have somebody be like, hey, let me help with this, hey, did you do this s*** and then grabbing the ball here, those little things just. Mean so much. And they go so far.
Like, one of the things that we talked about earlier with the hot lead thing that came up with that, I think Friday morning and it was probably 10:00 in the morning. And he’s like, “Hey, we actually had a question from an affiliate that asked about it,” and he’s like, I completely forgot about this thing that we did last year with the Holly. And I’m like, what’s the Holly? And just having that other perspective of like, hey, I’m in the middle of 15 other things because we’re in the middle of a lunch and having him.
Well, this is the focus that we need to get on. And then just having a team of VA that was able to get the information really quick and knock out a bunch of them, just having a team and multiple people to help take care of a simple task just went so far, didn’t pull me away from anything, maybe a little bit, but I was still being able to stay on task and getting all the help. The importance of having a team is just really to get that support and to kind of help move things forward when sometimes it doesn’t feel like it’s moving as fast as it should.
Matt: Yeah. Because this was your first big launch you’ve ever run. Just so for some perspective, I mean, Jason joined our team this year, and then here in April of 2022, he’s running a multimillion-dollar one of the biggest affiliate launches of the entire calendar year. And it’s like, I forget sometimes because you’re so good at what you do and you’ve progressed so much.
I just forget, like, wow, he’s actually really only worked with us for a few months. He’s still really new and so he still needs some things. You still need some lessons just between us and everybody else listening, of course, don’t hesitate to still ask me stuff because I forget sometimes you’ve only been on the team for just such a short time.
But I say that to say that, yeah, that is the value of a team. I often say that you cannot have a one-person affiliate manager team once you pass a certain level. That’s why we started an agency this year. I hesitated. I resisted it for a decade to start an agency because I was just like, no, no, no, I don’t want to do that. Well, basically what I was saying is only about two or three people a year are going to get access to me. And that means I can only help two or three businesses scale.
I can only help two or three audiences, people that get exposed to those products. And it was actually about this time last year, this money just said yes. A very selfish attitude. I was like, what do you mean? I was like, no, I was like, I kind of prided myself. I only worked with two or three entrepreneurs here. And he’s like, well, that’s a selfish attitude.
I’m like, what does that mean? He’s like, there’s 100 and 500, 1000 people out there that need your help. Maybe 500 is unrealistic. But do you think that maybe you could help 30 or 100 of them? Well, no, I only work with two or three, and that’s the way it is. And he’s like, or you could start an agency and stop being so selfish.
I was like, man, you don’t really mean to put your punches there, do you know? And yes, with us, I have to remind people, there’s me, there’s your affiliate manager, there’s Valerie on our team, our client success specialist. There’s at least one assistant. That’s four people working on your stuff. Like, I look at Ryan Levesque, for example. Just today we will have me, Jim, Kevin, and Valerie touching their stuff, and working on their stuff. On any given day, it might be all four of us plus, even you inputting brain power into it.
It could be six people in a given day or two that are touching that account. And there are so many benefits to that team, even if you do it internally. If you don’t hire us, that’s fine, right? If you do want to hire us, we should definitely have a conversation. Go to youraffiliatelaunchcoach.com, and we’ll talk about which options are best for you.
You can possibly get coaching to help you. That if you’ve got the team. Or we might run the whole thing for you as we do for Stu McLaren, Ryan Levesque, and others. There’s a reason why we work with the best of the best they trust us. There’s also a reason why we do coaching for people like Jeff Walker’s team and many others because they’ve got the team, but they need a little bit of guidance that we can give from our experience. So either way, youraffiliatelaunchcoach.com. I’ll put that link in the show notes.
So when you do that, whether you hire us to do it or you do it on your own, if you do it on your own, don’t expect to hire one person who just handles everything. Provide them with the resources. If it’s you don’t do everything, at least hire an assistant. At least hire a virtual assistant, somebody that like those hot leads.
There’s no way Jason could have gotten those out to all the affiliates over the course of a couple of hours while also responding to emails and Facebook comments and doing a phone call with an affiliate and responding to a DM and responding to a client about such and such. Sometimes I get this feeling that people think that we’re in multiple places at once because those emails they’re sent through the affiliate manager’s name. So just a side note, Jason didn’t actually send any of those emails.
Actually, I think those are sent in my name. I didn’t send any of those emails, guys, I didn’t download your list. I didn’t go into Infusionsoft and take the three minutes it takes to run the stupid report, download the list, and send it to you. It takes five minutes to do all that. One of those takes five minutes. That’s 12. We wanted to send as many of them.
I think we sent like 40 of them. That’s three. Probably took about three. It’s probably not 12 /hours. It’s probably more like 15 /hours. So we sell like 40. That’s 3 hours of doing this while also doing all the other stuff. And it feels like we’re in six places at once. And that’s a pretty cool thing that you can get with a team.
So if you do it on your own, you got to have at least one affiliate manager and some sort of an assistant. It doesn’t have to be a full-time assistant or somebody that can help out with some of that busy work, things that need to be done. Otherwise, Jason had to choose between sending hot leads. Very important, clearly, and probably would have been the thing I would have had them do if it was only him or reply to emails coming in from active affiliates who have important questions, which ones he’s going to do.
That’s a bad choice to have to make. Instead, we got both. That’s what we want. We got both. And to the affiliate, it just looks like we’re really super-efficient. And amazingly, we’re like that prototypical thing that’s got like the eight arms going like this and the phone, that’s what we look like. But we’re not. We just delegate well.
So got a great team and I’m super proud of them. So Jason, man, what a cool experience. Cool launch, tons of lessons that we learn both the hard way and by doing some stuff right and definitely set us up for a bright future with sue and with all of our other clients. So thanks for doing this, man. I appreciate it. This has been I hope everybody has just found a lot of value in this.
So here’s what I’ll ask you guys to do. If you got value out of this, why don’t you hit up Jason via email? His email is partners@MattMcwilliams.com. Just tell him to thank you. Tell him. Maybe share a lesson that you got out of it. Something was important for you. Just say thanks to Jason. Of course, if you have questions or comments or anything like that for me, I always tell people, just text me. Just text me anytime.
Need help activating your affiliates? Use my proven email templates for getting inactive affiliates in the game and making sales! Get them here!
You can text me at 260-217-4619. So reach out to Jason at partners@MattMcwilliams.com. That’s also the email you reach out to if you’re interested in being an affiliate for us, by the way. And I’m sure Jason would appreciate that email, but let them know. Check out your affiliate launch coach, youraffiliatelaunchcoach.com, and all that fun stuff, man. Thanks for doing this. I appreciate it.
Jason: Yeah, thanks for having me. It was fun. I really appreciate that as well. Looking forward to more of them.
Matt: Absolutely. Bye.
Questions?
Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.
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