My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email Ever

Do you want to know the single email that’s responsible for more than $1 billion in sales for our clients? It’s our #1 affiliate recruiting email of all time. I’m going to share it with you today!

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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy

How to Build Your Affiliate Army

What GREAT Affiliate Programs Provide for Their Affiliates

How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World with Dorie Clark

The Most Important Part of Your Marketing with John Jantsch

How to Run an Affiliate Program for a Low Ticket Offer

The Simple Habit That Expands Your Influence with Jeff Brown

My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email Ever

Today I want to talk to you about my number one email to get affiliates. Here’s the thing, you have been lied to about finding affiliates. You’ve been lied to about getting them to promote. A lot of them I’ll call them gurus. I did the little air quotes they’re out there. They’ve been, they’ve been spreading and perpetuating these lies about finding affiliates to promote you. I’ve shared this before, but they want you to think that you need to wait to start your affiliate program. I don’t know. I’ve talked about this probably about 50 episodes ago like you don’t need to wait. The world is moving too fast to wait to start an affiliate program. You can’t wait.

You can’t wait three years to start an affiliate program. You need to start one pretty much on day one. Once you get a product up and running, do a little bit of testing. You start the affiliate program. In fact, you even started before that because they’re probably not going to promote you the next day, of course, but these gurus, they want you to think that affiliates are only for the cool kids are insiders. I said that, I think in the last episode they are wrong. Now they have their own reasons for wanting you to think those things.

Well, I mean, the real reason is that it helps their business, not yours, but I want to set the record straight because if you’ve ever seen people out there they’re doing these $3 million product launches, $10 million product launches. I’m not doing a million dollars a month for my business and you’re like, wait, I could do that. Right? You’ve seen these where it seems like everyone under the sun is promoting them. I’ve seen people post it’s, like I got ten emails today, all promoting the same thing.

That could be you. That could be you. You could do that. If you think what I could run a multi-million dollar launch. Well, you’re right. You can, you can, if you’ve got the right affiliates, if you don’t have the right affiliates, you could have the greatest offer. You could have the best product.

You could have a killer sales funnel, your launch still pretty much going to be a flop. I mean, yeah, if you’ve got a massive list, if you’re listening, you already got half a million people on your list and you guys are just like, your team is a ninja at running Facebook ads. Okay. Could you do great?

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I’m sure you could still run a multimillionaire launch, but it could be 10, 15, 20, 30 million with affiliates. I remember some said, “well I’m getting leads for $5 on Facebook.” Great. How about if you had an extra thousand clicks to your sales page a day and you could retarget them on Facebook because those thousand clicks came from affiliates and you re-targeted those thousand clicks. How much those leads are gonna cost like 10 cents, like 10 flipping sense.

How do you recruit these great affiliates? Later on, I’m going to reveal my number one, affiliate recruiting email. We’re going to link to this in the show notes, by the way. But this email has been used to literally recruit hundreds of thousands of affiliates for affiliate programs we’re talking about Stu McLaren’s and Michael Hyatt and some big names like Brian Tracy, Lewis Howes, Kevin Harrington, Rich Schaeffer the list goes on and on but it’s also been used to recruit affiliates for bigger companies incorporate Adidas and Shutterfly companies like that. Gibson’s learn and master guitar we’ve used this, I’ve used it with tiny entrepreneurs who were completely unknown. Absolutely completely unknown.

I think of Alex. Alex, put him in one of our clients and he wrote me this email, this is a few years ago. “Matt, I just had to let you know that when I signed up for the training, I didn’t know anyone who had could be an affiliate because here’s the thing recruiting great affiliates starts with who you know, your network.

Today, I’m going to focus on how you can recruit affiliates without knowing anyone. And this is the number one recruiting email. I mean, this is the email that alone has helped us recruit more than 500 affiliates for our own programs. We brought in more than a billion dollars for our clients over the years. No exaggeration. It is well over a billion dollars just from this. Are there other things that we’ve done to recruit that brought in hundreds of millions? Absolutely. In fact, collectively some of the other things that we’ve done if brought in probably two to two and a half billion, this one has brought in over a billion though.

It’s number one by far. But Alex said, again, he didn’t know anyone who could be an affiliate yesterday. We finished the first launch of our course and did $374,000, 360,000 of that was from affiliates, not a single one of them did he know. He didn’t get 14,000 in sales from his own list and his own social media ads, 360,000 from affiliates, not knowing anybody, he didn’t have a network.

He was completely unknown in his industry. And he said I’m on expletive deleted. I’m on expletive deleted cloud nine right now. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Like he went nine months, nine months. He went from knowing no one to doing $360,000 in affiliate sales. He didn’t have to burn his list with reciprocal promotions. He didn’t know anybody. He didn’t know anybody.

This lie says you have to know people. You have to do lots of reciprocals to get affiliates. We talked about that before. When I first started, I didn’t know anybody. We had no one, no one. Literally in 2005,

I didn’t know anybody who could be an affiliate. I had to completely operate off of affiliates that I had no idea who they were and they had no idea who we were. And yet we built a million dollar a month affiliate program about 18 months later in our second year we did $12.6 million. Same as Alex, right? $360,000 without knowing anyone.

How is this? How is it that you could know no one like if you’ve been concerned about you gotta know all the right people? I want to put those fears to rest. You can grow an affiliate program without knowing a soul. Now, does it help if you’ve got some connections, absolutely utilize those, but then use this to build on. I’ve had people who were like, yeah, I’ve got really good connections.

I’ve been around for a while and I’m, well-known in my industry. We have a couple of thousand customers. And of course, we focus on the customers and the people they know, and those people we might be able to build up. I don’t know, on the small end, a $2 million, a year affiliate program on the high end, maybe that might be enough to build a ten. But then we add on the people. They don’t know when we add another 3 to 15. So the people that they don’t know might only account for 50% of their affiliate program. Well, okay. So we doubled their sales for some people like Alex it’s, whatever the math is on 360 divided by 370 from, I’m just going to call it 95%. For us, my first affiliate program was 100%. It was 100%.

I’m going to walk you through it step-by-step. Now here’s the thing. You could go out and figure out how to do this totally on your own. I made this process outback in 2005.

I didn’t have people teaching this. It took me a decade though. It was about 2015 before I really felt like I’d nailed this stuff down that I wasn’t going to screw things up. Today, every single day I learned something new and put it into practice. The time and the frustration that it took me to get to this point sucked. It was awful, but we want to learn from Pablo Picasso. You’ve heard me if you’ve listened long enough, you’ve heard me share this quote so many times “Good artists copy great artists steal.”

What I want to show you in this episode is how to steal my best stuff. So if you want to copy-paste the version of this email that I’m going to share, just go to Mattmcwilliams.com/bestemail. I’ll link to that in the show notes, you can grab it. By the way, I read it to you in a little bit, but it starts with you gotta go step one first, we’ve got to start at step one before you can’t just like send this email to random people of course.

You want to start at step one, which is look up affiliates who promoted similar products. There’s this website you may have heard of called Google. You don’t even have to go to Google. You just type it into the browser, whatever the URL bar, what is that thing called? Where do you put in URLs? I don’t even know when you just type it in up there and it searches. I mean this I’m being facetious. This is by far the easiest way to find your competitor’s affiliates. You go out, you think of, okay, who are your competitors? You don’t need to list a thousand competitors. In fact, that’s the biggest mistake I see people make is they think I’ve got to list 50 competitors. I got was 20 competitors, no list one. And then do this and go through this process and then list another and do this. And as you hear me talk through this process, you’ll understand this.

There was a study done years ago, like an actual study that like it was couples doing their wedding invitations and the couples were divided up and group one, they would do something like address the envelopes, all the envelopes, then stamp the envelopes and then fold the invitations and then stuff, the invitations and seal the envelope like, and it would be, they would do all the envelope parts first, then all the invitations part, then all the stuffing, then all the sealing or maybe stuff in seal at the same time that wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense to not do that. But it was basically like a conveyor belt or an assembly line-type process.

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The other group would do kind of either one of two variations. They would go through one whole thing. They would address it, stamp it, folded stuff it, and seal it one at a time. Or they would like address five, stamp five, fold five, stuff five and seal five. Right? Which group moved faster in theory, like scientifically what should move faster? If we were robots, is that the first group would move faster. I’m going to go. I can’t just address, address, address, address, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp fold, fold, fold, fold stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff, seal, seal, seal, seal, right? That should move faster, but we’re not robots. So they actually found that the second group moved like 20% faster because they had let’s see 300 invitations at the end of day one, they had 40 completed invitations. And so mentally they had made more progress than the couple that had simply think about addressing envelopes.

That takes a while, especially if you’re writing them, if you’re writing them I don’t know by you. I could probably only address like 40 before I’d go insane. And at the end of the day, you’ll see you got a hundred done. You’ve made no progress. It feels like. So I don’t want you to looking up thinking of 50 competitors. Step one, think of a competitor and then look up their affiliates, look up their affiliates.

Make a list of one, one competitor, not five, not 10. We don’t go Googling competitors and trying to find out who, who are the competitors. I don’t know. Just think of one that you already know of. Surely you know of one competitor. And so you go, you think of that. You go to go, you look up their affiliates. Now we’re not looking for a list of a hundred affiliates that have promoted this client or this, this competitor five or 10, just five or 10. Why? Because we’re going to move on to step three, which is to create a spreadsheet. We’re going to create a spreadsheet of these affiliates. So you need to find their email addresses of course.

So step one is just write down one competitor and go search for their affiliate. Step two, create a spreadsheet. You want their first name, last name, the email, the product they’ve promoted. Then you know, you’ll see why, but the name of the product owner, if it’s like a product launch formula, Jeff Walker, right? You want to create a simple spreadsheet. And then you want to find their email addresses. There are tons of ways to find email addresses. There are plugins and Gmail like Clearbit connect and rocket reach.io, domain tools. You know, those are some great tools.

If you want, like a really, really in-depth version of this, we have a course that walks you through all of the logistics on this. It’s called Find Affiliates Now. You just go to findaffiliatesnow.com and you can check that out, but we’re going to create this spreadsheet. We’re going to find their email address. Again. We want to do like 5 or 10 of these. I want to do 5 or 10. Why? Because I know if I tell you, I want you to get a list of 50, then you’re going to spend a week and a half making a list and you’re going to get to 50 and you’re going to be like, I’m so bored or you’re going to stop at 30th. Oh, you successfully made a list of 38 people and got no results. But if I get you to do five or 10 and you send the email, I’m about to share it’s that much sooner you’ll start hearing back from some, even if you hear back. No, at least I heard back from somebody, but maybe after, maybe not after five or 10, but maybe after 10 or 20, you’ll get a yes.

All of a sudden, this is what I did. And I fell into this. I did not do this because I’m super smart and knew some sort of system. All right. I accidentally did this. I did them like five at a time. And I heard back, yes, like an hour after I sent the first batch of emails. Now that’s dumb luck. It was Memorial Day weekend, 2005. It could have been three days later. It could’ve been four days later. I may not have heard back from any of the first 15, but I happened to hear back and I hear this from our clients all the time. Sometimes they just get lucky and they hear back from one of those first few and it lights a fire in them and now they’re excited.

It makes it easier because I got my first affiliate. I get to set them up. I get to send them swipe-copy and graphics. They might even start promoting. That’s what happened to us. We had one guy, Brandon Miller. He’s from Western North Carolina. He called me up today and said, Hi, Matt. It’s Brandon. I mean, he only did, like, I would still know who Brandon. I mean, he just, he’s a great dude and the very first affiliate I ever recruited in my entire life. He was the one who responded. It was a Saturday, late morning maybe. And he responded back within like an hour. And I was so excited. And that week he made like, I don’t know, maybe two or $300, I’m sorry, made us two or $300. So he made roughly half of that, but it was like, oh my gosh. At the end of like, I think by that like Wednesday he’d brought in like $75, a $100 in sales.

This was proof of concept for a company in our position. That was huge because, oh my gosh, if I can replicate that even just a few times will be a couple thousand dollars. This is big. And I got excited and I’m like, when I had that, just that $75, it showed me that I needed to devote more time to this and so I need to stop doing this and stop doing this and stop this and focus more time on our affiliate program. And then 18 months later, we’re doing over a million dollars a month. So you got to see that momentum. So don’t get bogged down. And I got to create this massive list, do five. send five emails, do the next five, send five emails, do the next one. And if you hear back from somebody, boom, now we got some progress going.

Then of course we need to send a very specific email. That’s what this episode’s all about. This is what you came for, right? This is like, our secret sauce is not so secret because I’m going to give you the email. But when I first started, I did not use this email. I used a different email and it didn’t work as well. It worked, I got lucky with Brandon recruited probably 400 or 500 affiliates with it over the next couple of years, but I tried some different ones and I found that some other ones worked in, in all. I’ve probably tried about 20, 30 different versions. This is the one that works best.

All right, don’t worry about writing it down again. If you go to Mattmcwilliams.com/bestemail or click it in the show notes, you can grab a copy-paste version of it that you can easily just poop, poop did. Right? And then you want to tweak it. Of course, I’m going to share the concept of the email with you here on the podcast, but just know that it’s a lot easier if you see it visually. So you want to use a subject line. So remember we made a list of these affiliates and we know what product they promoted. We know the personality name if there was one.

So what’s the name of the other product? Let’s just say the other product is we’ll use Find Affiliates Now. We kinda Metta let’s use actually use the, one of our other courses. Let’s use No Product No Problem. So I’m literally saying like if you want to go steal our affiliates like this is how I don’t know. Maybe that’s bad advice. Maybe I shouldn’t be saying them the pockets, but we’ll just do it anyway. So you go to Google. You search No Product No Problem. You find some of our affiliates. So the subject line would be No product No problem.

Now, what if the subject, what if the other product is? Let’s just say it was called No Product No Problem Masterclass for Beginner Affiliate Marketers. That’d be really dumb name for a product, but let’s just say that’s what it was. That’s really long. So how about the subject line of Mattmcwilliams, if it’s Product Launch Formula, that’s pretty short PLF. You could do Jeff Walker. See which one works best. So those are the subject lines.

Then you send an email that says, Hey, and then just some other first name. I saw that you were promoting the other product names. So I saw that you were promoting No product No problem recently, I thought of you for something we have coming up this February or next spring, next year, we’re launching our (name of the product.) It’s similar to Jeff’s course. It’s similar to PLF, but it’s different in that such-and-such and you list the difference. If you’re interested, let me know to share more info with you.

Now you notice I said I changed something. I said there because of something we’ve discovered over the years, depending upon how close the launch is, if it’s a launch, you might want to say be a little bit vague about the time. Because if I say, Hey, next February, and you go, Nope, I got something else in February. Boom, done. We don’t want them to immediately say no, it doesn’t work for me. We want them to be like, tell me more. And then if they say no, but I got them interested in the concept and we find a way to work together. Now, if it’s evergreen, you just tweak that email a little bit. You say, Hey, we have an affiliate program for {my product name.} It’s similar to {blank } but different in that. If you’re interested let me know, love to share more info with you. That’s it? That is it.

The easiest way to screw up an affiliate recruiting email is to make it too long. Do not try to fit everything in one email. I just did a Facebook live about this. Actually, we are on YouTube as well. So I can’t remember that. I always forget we’re on YouTube as well, but I did a whole live about this, right? Like, don’t try to fit everything in one email. Like I want to tell them about how long it took me to develop the product. I want to share six testimonials, tell them how awesome the sales funnel is. Remind them that my grandpa founded the company back in 1974 and built it with his own hands and how I walked uphill both ways in the snow barefoot.

When I was in school, I want to brag on my commission. We have 50% commissions. They’re the highest need we have prizes and contests and here’s who else is promoting? No, don’t do that. Do not do that. Keep it short. With our clients, we have a four-sentence rule that the email that I shared is technically five sentences. I just noticed that it’s five sentences long because I never caught the fact that we put a period in that one spot.

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All right. So we have to change that. We have a five-sentence rule. I’ve been totally being a, I wonder why some of our clients were like, whoa, can I have the fifth sentence? So have to change that five-sentence rule. We have a five-sentence rule with our clients do not put more than five. Well, we’ve been for more than four sentences. I see what we’ve been doing with our clients. We’ve been giving you a slightly altered version.

We just say we just similar to, so next spring we’re launching such and such, which is similar to, but different in this regard, if you, okay. So technically you could easily do that as well, but you want to keep it short,right? Four or five sentences. Take the copy that I provide for you. Don’t tweak it that much, right? Fit it to your brand. But stick to the proven script. I mean, it took me a decade to get this nailed down. Here’s the thing, your only objective is to get a reply. It is not to get a yes. Will you get some yeses? Yes. I got one of the very, I don’t know. I don’t know if Brian was the very first person I emailed, but he was definitely one of the first 10. I think he was one of the first five. That’s uncommon. You get some nos. You’ll get a yes, every now and again, but your objective is just to get a reply.

Remember those three magic words. Tell me more. That is an invitation to now say here’s our commissions. Here’s our contest. Here are our sales funnel. Here are some testimonials, right? Because they asked for it. They ask for it. Now this email again, Mattmcwilliams.com/bestemail in the show notes there as well. It’s one of the mini recruiting emails that we use just depending upon the circumstances I mentioned, this email probably brings in 30 to 40% of the total affiliates.

Well, what about the other 60 to 70? Of course, you want them. So when you go get that email, you’ll have an opportunity to get all of my affiliate recruiting email files as well. So make sure you take advantage of that and make sure that you hit subscribe so that you don’t miss a single episode.

If you can leave a rating and review like Sergeant Damien Scott said that he said the podcast is a must-listen. Thank you, Damien! Matt’s knowledge base has been instrumental for me in navigating the world of affiliates and integrating it into my podcasting practice. If you don’t know anything about affiliates and listen, and if you do then also listen and take notes. That’s what I hope you do. I hope you download this email and use it to take good notes on what you’re learning on the podcast.

As I said, make sure you hit subscribe because in the next episode I’m going to talk about how to get started in affiliate marketing fast. Maybe if you’re newer or not, you just, haven’t done a lot of affiliate marketing. What are your first steps to make your first thousand dollars from affiliate marketing? Well, that’s what I’m going to show you in the next episode. So hit subscribe. Make sure you don’t miss that episode. I’ll see you then.