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Links/Resources Mentioned in This Episode
Turn Your Passions into Profits Book
Meet Edgar Social Media Scheduler
Affiliate Activation Email Templates
TEXT ME – +1 260-217-4619
Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
The 10 Commandments of Building a Winning Affiliate Program
Should Your Affiliate Program be on a Network or In-House?
Oops! This Affiliate Program Totally Blew It (Here’s How to Avoid Their Mistake)
7 Things Every Affiliate Manager Needs to Know About the Holiday Season
New Year’s Resolutions for Both Affiliate Managers and Affiliate Marketers
So happy almost New Year. My family and I are now entering week three of whatever virus or viruses that we have had. I know I’ve had a couple of episodes here where I’ve aired in an oldie but a goodie. And then we aired a special episode last week where we gave you access to a training. This week, I’m hoping, is the final week where I have to air one of these old episodes. But the timing couldn’t be better. In fact, if I had to record an episode for this week, I was pretty much going to record this episode anyway and say pretty much the same things I said last year at this exact time, right after the New Year. Last year is when I did this. And it’s.
It’s 10 New Year’s resolutions for affiliate managers and for affiliates. And so I’m still struggling. I cannot record an entire episode without having a massive coughing fit multiple times. But I’m getting there. I’m on the recovery. Thank you all for reaching out. Those of you who have texted me, who have reached out with your well wishes and your prayers, they are much appreciated. Hopefully next week we will be back at it because I actually have some really good episodes planned for the new year that I really want to record and a couple of them don’t really make a lot of sense. If I record them, say, in late January, I want them to air in early January.
So hopefully I’ll be back at it soon. With that, let’s jump into this episode, which again is the 10 New Year’s resolutions that that affiliates and affiliate managers should be making for 2025. And it’s funny because I’ll say this at the very beginning episode, I even said, no matter when you’re listening to this, everything I’m sharing applies. So even if you’re listening to this way off in the future, in the middle of summer of 2026, everything I’m saying applies. So let’s jump in. Let’s get started.
Well, first off, happy New Year. It’s kind of cool. I don’t believe in resolutions, but I believe in goals. But there’s something special about turning the page on the calendar. People have asked me when I’ve talked about goal setting and things like that, you know, at year’s end or years beginning, like, okay, why now? Can’t you set a goal Anytime. Yeah, and I do. I set goals in August. Sometimes I set goals in December. We set a goal as a team. Literally, I’m recording this in the middle of December. We set a goal two days ago for the end of January. Why?
Because that’s when the idea came up and it just made sense. But there is something special. Even though it’s an arbitrary thing in terms of the scheme of our lives, if you think about it, most of us aren’t born on January 1st. Most of us aren’t going to die on December 31st. So really, if you think about it, it’s kind of arbitrary. But there’s just something special about turning the page now. If you’re listening in March, resolve to do these things for the next ten months and beyond. Of course, if you’re listening in June, do them from now on. Like, there’s nothing special about a new year in the sense of when you can start doing these things.
Like the old Chinese proverb, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. The best time to implement these is right now. Right now, when I’m releasing this on January 2, 2024. But if you’re listening to it on July 17, 2025, sorry, now. And what I’m going to share with you today are resolutions. I’m going to share five resolutions for affiliate marketers and five resolutions for affiliate programs, affiliate managers. And so I’ve divided it up. I want to talk to both groups today, and most of you listening, you’re going to be in both. So all 10 of these are going to apply to you. I probably have a bonus one. I definitely have a bonus one. All right, so what are these resolutions? Well, resolution number one for you affiliates out there is to resolve to really learn how to use AI.
Yeah, I wanted to talk about the hottest topic right now, and we’re talking about AI, and everything’s about AI. And yeah, it’s a game changer. It’s a game changer. But honestly, there’s so much crap out there now. And we can tell if you use AI at all, you can spot AI content from a mile away. And honestly, a lot of it’s garbage. What’s not garbage is when they use it. And I can’t tell what’s the difference. The difference is they took the time to train it. It’s similar to hiring a copywriter. If you pull a copywriter off the street, a great copywriter, but he has never read a single one of your emails. Never read a single one of your blog posts, never read a single one of your social media posts, never listened to one of your podcasts, and then he tries to write an email selling one of your products. It’s going to sound different.
If you’ve been around for more than a couple of years, your audience knows your voice and it’s important to train it. Just like you would train a copywriter. You would say, hey, copywriter, here’s a hundred emails of mine and a thousand podcast episodes, et cetera, et cetera. Here’s a bunch of my content. Go read it. Now, I want you to write an email promoting this thing, and then I’m going to read it and I’m going to give you feedback, and then you’re going to do it again, and you’re going to do it again, and it’s going to be an iterative process. And every time you edit it, you’re going to be editing a little bit less. But what do you do? You take the time to train it. So the same thing is true with AI. Let’s take Chat GPT for example. It could be Chat GPT, it could be Claude. Doesn’t matter. There’s dozens of tools, probably not dozens, but there’s like a few tools out there now that are really good.
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You know, when I first started using Chat GPT, the first thing I did was I took about a hundred emails and I loaded them in to a chat and I said, here are my 100 best performing emails. Then I actually took about 50 of our worst performing emails and I loaded those as well. And I said, I want you to look for the differences between them. And we used the creative writing analysis tool in ChatGPT4, and it gave us some really cool things. Like we could kind of see, okay, what, what are the differences? And then I took that and I loaded it into a chat. I said, here’s what we’re looking for. Here are the qualities. Here are the rules, right? Here are the rules based on how I communicate. I communicate in email on the Flesh Kincaid scale at like a, you know, a sixth grade level, which is what you want to be at, by the way, between fourth and eighth grade, eighth grade on the very high end. This is what you want to communicate. I speak on a college level. Cool. Nobody understands you, and you actually sound pretentious and. And you’re not communicating very well. Every study that’s ever done on communication has proven that. You know, look at every political campaign in the last 40 years. The candidate that won was the candidate that communicated at the lowest Level. That’s what works.
All right, so that’s seven. I told it all these rules, right, based on the feedback that I got and just my own personal interpretation of how I communicate. So I create this thing. I say, here are the emails to look at. Now take it away. Now here’s what AI can’t do. I’ll give you an example of an email we recently sent where I talked about a particular story that really did happen in my life. This is like a real story. I’m gonna find this email here real quick. I’m gonna read this, right? I remember the exact moment I found out that I was being sued. And I talk about this Picture in Franklin, Tennessee, 2007. Our attorney calls and asks if we’re sitting down.
I kid you not, it was right out of a scene of the movies. I don’t sit much. In fact, I was on a treadmill in my office. So, no, I was not sitting. What’s up? I asked. You’re being sued for trademark infringement. The only thing I could respond with was, what? Now, I cannot write that. AI doesn’t know that story. I haven’t told that story before. So that’s the part where I have to add it. But there are a lot of parts like the factual information and kind of just here’s what this podcast is about and things like that that it can write if I train it. And so it’s iterative.
I take that email that it gives me, I rewrite it, and I say, here’s how I would actually have this be. And then I rewrite it again. And what I’ve noticed is, let’s just say the average email is 15 sentences. The first time I have to rewrite 11 sentences. The first five times, I have to rewrite an average of 11 sentences. The next five time, I have to rewrite an average of nine. And then eight, seven, and so on and so forth. The same is true of social media. What we did, I took about 400 posts from social media that I’d written.
I had actually written those posts. And we gave it to Chad. GPT said, here’s the style of posts that I wrote. And I said to it, hey, I want you to study this. Now, just as a side note, I took the 400 posts that had the most engagement. They might not have been like my literal 400 most, but they were like the 400 most engaged post out of like the previous 1200-1500 or so. So I took those as the model. Why? Because I wanted to model it after my highest performing posts.
So we took that. Here are the rules. I say, now write me. I’m going to pull up a prompt here, actually. So here’s the prompt. I’d like to create 10 tweets promoting an article entitled whatever the name of the title is. Right. So the Ten Commandments of a Great Affiliate Manager. All right, Here are the hashtags to use, and so on and so forth. I kind of explain the difference between the different hashtags, like why you would use this hashtag or this hashtag.
Because we don’t use all of those hashtags. Right. We’re not going to use every single one of those hashtags in every single tweet. So I’m teaching it. Here are the three possible hashtags that it could use. So I like to create 10 tweets, even though I’m going to use more than that. And I’ll explain why in a second. Promoting an article about the ten commandments of great affiliate managers. Okay. And then I reminded each time rules use conversational language. Follow my style as indicated in this chat above.
Do not use emojis on more than 5 of the 10 tweets. That’s important. I don’t use a ton of emojis, but I do use them some, so I only want them on about five. Then I tell it actually always use this hashtag on this one. Always, always link to this post. Here are some notes about the article. And then what I do typically is I copy the post. I copied the text. Takes like two seconds. I copy it over say reminder. Please use the include the URL I provided. Cause I found that sometimes it just puts the words URL in. So I’m like, I have to remind it each time. It’s kind of weird. I can do this with podcast episodes, videos, et cetera. And then it gives me the 10. And there’s a reason why I only ask for 10. Even though I’m going to load. We’re going to load into our social media management system, which is meet Edgar, by the way, mattmclaims. com Edgar, if you want to go check that out. So we load them into Social Media Manager.
We’ll have AI create between 22 and 30 variations or different tweets, and then we’ll create 10 to 20 variations of those. We’ll load 500 tweets. I mean, I’ve literally got tweets that are not going to hit until 2026. And so they’re just there. And this all takes just a few minutes. And I’m not the one who does this anymore. I’ve actually trained one of my assistants to do this, to use AI and to be able to see the patterns. And so when I first did, I said, Write me 10 tweets. And a wrote 10 and five of them suck.
So I said, Here are the five that I don’t like. And I explained why. Please write ten more. Six of them were good, only four of them suck. Okay, cool. And then in order to get 20 that first time, I had to have it right, 40. But I told them the 20 I don’t like. And I explained briefly why I don’t like them. If I really like to tweet. But I rewrote it, then I’ve actually got a prompt down here that says, here are the tweets I ended up using, I made some edits. I’m sharing them for two reasons. Number one, so you learn my style, tone, and types of tweets I want. Number two, I’d like you to produce more tweets like this. But first, please confirm that you understand and they’re learning my style and desired tweets. And then I write whatever I edited and it does it, and it’s like, okay, got it. And then I also say, okay, here are some tweets I did not like. Please learn from these. Now please create 10 more tweets.
Now, it’s at the point where nine of the 10, there are times where all Perfect. There are times where nine out of the 10, that’s probably the most common numbers. There’s usually like one where I’m like, ah, that one’s not very good. Occasionally, I’ll give it rules like, don’t use this word. Never use this word. Never use this phrase. I don’t like them. And I’ve taught my assistant kind of like it’s those phrases where it’s like, oh, that reeks of chat GPT. It just sounds like a bot wrote it. So we go through this whole process and again, I could go on and on with examples. But my point here is to resolve to really learn how to use AI and then do it, execute on it. So I would probably do some more stuff about using AI but make a resolution. Like, I mean, seriously, there are courses, but honestly, Google, just play around with it. I learned mostly from trial and error. And I’ll give you the one tip. Communicate like you would to an actual person.
Like, okay, if you’re creating copy, communicate like you would to a copywriter. If you’re creating graphics, communicate like you would to. To a graphic designer. Just think about what you would say. And yes, I use words like please and thank you. Why? Because I’ve actually found, and I’ve. There is some documentation to suggest this, that you probably get better results. So if you haven’t done it, commit to doing it. Resolve to doing it this year. All right, resolution number two, resolve to build your list. You got to build your list. You got to grow your list, your email list. You know my book, turn your passions into profit, which, by the
way, if you’re listening to this the day it comes out, or if you’re listening to this in the eight days after, either tomorrow or right now, you can get the Kindle version for 99 cents. knowledge about growing an Internet based business. Kindle version $0.99 plus over $500, $588 to be specific, in bonuses. So if you go to passionsindoprofitsbook.com I will put that link in the show notes. You can get it. I mean for a buck, for less than a buck actually, you can get the book and almost $600 worth of amazing bonuses. And in there I share in step four I talk about converting visitors into subscribers. That’s step four in the passion into profits path. And it’s all about building your list. It’s about building your list. And I’ve shared this before, but I mean, number one, you get a deeper connection with your audience than any other way.
Number two, you’re guaranteed to be seen. Most people don’t realize, but if you have a Facebook page, oh, I got 50,000 followers on Facebook. Cool. Less than 500 of them are ever going to see anything you post. Not anything, but any one thing that you post. You have an email list of 2000. All 2000 are at least going to. It’s going to be there in their inbox. They might ignore it, but it’s going to be in their inbox. Less than 2% of people will ever even be shown what you post on Facebook unless it goes viral.
Number three, you can segment your messaging. Number four, you can allow them to opt out of campaigns. And number five, you own the connection. Here’s the thing about your Facebook and your LinkedIn connections. You rent them, Zuckerberg owns them. Whoever owns LinkedIn now, Microsoft, they own them. So again, just like AI starting AI, the best time to start your email list is the day you start your website. The second best time is right now. So I go through in the book how to create lead magnets and I share. You know exactly how to think of it like a solution to pain.
This is one of the examples I use in the book is talk about your lead magnet. You know, if you came to your friend and said, oh my gosh, my back is killing me, and you said, well, here’s a list of 37 exercises and I gave you a chiropractic appointment for next Friday, your friend is going to hate you. Now what your friend wants is an ibuprofen. They want to feel better right now.
So think of your lead magnet as a solution to pain. And it needs to be a quick solution to pain. So I go through in the book how to create a lead magnet that converts and the short version is step One, define the one problem that you’re going to solve. And number two is solve that problem. But again, I share all kinds of lead magnet examples, how to name it so that it converts. There’s a whole formula for that ton. More about growing your list, but it starts with making that a priority this year. So resolve to build your list. All right, Resolution number three, resolve to diversify your affiliate promos. I fall into the same trap. Most people do promote the same things year after year. And even if it’s not literally the exact same products, you know, year to year, we’ll promote 12 to 14 things, and about 10 of them are the same because they’re products. I believe in product launch formula.
I will promote product launch formula every year. Not necessarily because it’s in my best interest, because it’s in my audience’s best interest, and because I believe in it so much, will promote a lot of the same things. But even those two to four other things, they’ll be kind of like the other stuff. And so I’m making a resolution this year to mix things up a little bit, to promote something new, to change it up. I’m gonna try some new price points. I want to promote some stuff that’s 47. I want to promote some stuff that’s $10,000. I want to try some new promotional methods.
Not my end necessarily, but I want to promote. You know, this is one of the things I really haven’t done. I’ve promoted a lot of launches and a lot of webinars. I want to promote more summits this year. In fact, we’re talking about AI this month. I’ve got two AI Summits that I’m a part of, and I’m going to be promoting both of them in January. So make sure if you’re not on my list, text me 260-217-4619.area code I will tell you about those summits, okay?
They’re all about AI and you should be on those. Like, if going back to resolution number one, we’ll talk about that. But I haven’t really promoted summits as much. I promoted like a few summits. I want to promote more summits, more challenges. I want to promote maybe some other things. So for you, try to mix it up. If you’re always just promoting webinars, that’s great. But this year, make 20% of your promotions non webinars. Try some different promotional methods of your own. Try promoting things that are shorter versus longer, you know, or longer versus shorter.
If you’re always Promoting, like the two week launches. Promote something for three days. Promote a flash sale. Promote something that’s, you know, whatever. If you’re only promoting like I promote it Monday through Friday for a product. All right? Add a few days, see what happens. Try a new strategy. Record some videos, call people, get on the phone with people, close sales, do more social media, test some things out, see what works. You know, this is a formula we use. It’s tmi. Not too much information, but test, measure and innovate. We test, we try something new. We test, we measure. Okay, that did not work. And then we use that to innovate from there.
Okay, that did not work. Why? Because we need to do something else that’s different or we need to go back to the thing that’s working. But either way, we’re going to innovate over time. So we’re going to test everything. We’re going to measure the results, we’re going to document the results. If I test something and don’t document it, that wasn’t a test, that was just random new things. I want to measure everything and then I’m going to innovate from there. All right? Resolution number four is going to be a nightmare for some of you introverts. Here’s the deal. Newsflash. I’m an introvert. Most people don’t realize that, but I’m actually an introvert. I say it all the time.
Like when I have to be in a group of people or talk with people for more than two hours and I’m on the phone a lot, obviously, with our clients and our affiliates and other important relationships in our business. After those two, I have to have a break. I can’t talk to people for three hours in a row. I can talk to four people for 30 minutes each. I have to take a 30 minute break. I have to go do something else. I have to play a game on my phone or go read a book or just go lie down or go for a walk or do some work by myself and not interact with people for 30 minutes and then I recharge.
So this is not easy for me. But number four, resolve to get out of your comfort zone and connect with other affiliates and then use that to build your affiliate program. You know, most affiliate programs, especially the big product launches, they have leaderboards, they have private Facebook groups. They have other ways to connect with other affiliates.
I mean, some of my best business relationships are the result of promoting the same product to someone else and using that as a connection. The one who always comes to mind is Jonathan Milligan. Blogging your passion. He was promoting Michael Hyde’s Five Days to your Best yout Ever. We’re both in the top 10 on the leaderboard. I think I was. I was eighth, or he was ninth, or he was eighth and I was ninth and he recognized my name. But we never met. And he used that as an opportunity to reach out. And that initial one hour phone conversation, we ended up talking for over an hour. We were like a 30 minute call booked. We’re talking for an hour.
We kind of had to go turn into a great relationship. It’s not only been like super fulfilling for me personally, but it’s been incredibly profitable for my business. He’s one of the biggest promoters of my book. He’s been one of the biggest promoters of our courses.And we exchanged tens of thousands of dollars. And over the past few years, I have initiated literally close to a hundred relationships, probably just from affiliate leaderboards. That’s how I got Jeff Goins as a client. Back in the day. We ran his second book launch, but it was the first one that he did a huge one on. You know, I’ve shared that before. He did 3,000 books. Then we took over. He did 22,000 books. Like, I got that from a leaderboard. He beat me by a spot. I reached out to him, said, great job, and he’s like, hey, do you want to run my book launch?
That’s the short version. I mean, Dan Miller, one of my dearest friends and mentors in the online marketing world, came from that. That’s how I connected with Dan. That’s how I connected initially with so many people. I mean, golly, Matthew Loomis. I’m just trying to think of like, specifically people that come to mind. Daniel Decker. That’s how we connected was through an affiliate leaderboard. I mean, there’s literally close to 100 probably that I connected with that way. So resolve to connecting with people, whether it’s through a leaderboard or whatever, that’s just the easiest way to identify them, connect with them, promote other people and develop relationships that Way again, once you promote them, they might promote you. You’ve got great affiliates.
All right, and our last resolution number five for affiliate marketing is resolve to plan your content, your promo calendar specifically, at least 90 days out. Again, this comes from talking to probably 50 to 60 affiliates over the past 90 days. Some of them didn’t have it planned out through the end of the year. No, you need to plan your content in your promo calendar at least 90 days out. Here’s thing, just have a plan. If you need a template, go get my promo plan template and go to just mattmcwilliams. com promoplan I’ll put that link in the show notes. Plan your content. Plan your bonuses. Plan, plan, plan. A little bit more ahead.
I’m not a planner by nature. I thrive under pressure. I thrive under a little bit of chaos, right? I thrive under, like, okay, I gotta come up with this. And I thrive under deadlines. I was always a deadline dancer. Most of the things I’ve ever bought have been with three hours or less on the deadline, right? I’m one of those people that. I had an entire semester to write a paper. I started writing it three days before the semester was over. I basically spent like 40 hours out of the last 72 hours of the semester writing that paper. Got an A plus. In fact, funny story, my freshman year, I had. I don’t know how to describe, but it was a composition course. It was like English 201. I was a year ahead in college just for whatever that means because I took a bunch of college stuff when I was in high school. So I had. There was like, English 201, or it was 202 because I think it was in the spring. And I remember I was failing the course because I didn’t really go to class. I was an idiot.
You know, I golf that year and stuff. And I was just like, oh, my gosh. I don’t. Yeah, I didn’t want to deal with school and everything else was keeping me busy, and I was behind, and I basically was going to fail the class. And I went to the professor and I said, okay, what can I do? And she said, I’ll tell you what she said, if you make an A plus, she said, I need your paper, the final paper. There’s like 35 kids in the class. She said, your paper has to be one of the best three. You gotta write one of the best three papers. I’ve got three weeks before the end of the semester. When she says this, she’s like, I don’t care. What else you do.
But if you can prove that you’ve been paying attention in class, at least when I was there, and you’ve learned the skills and you write one of the three best papers in this class and it’s an A plus paper, I will give you a B. Said anything less than that because I was failing. She said, anything less than that, and I will fail you. There wasn’t even an option to get, like, a D. There was no option. She said, does that sound like a plan? She said, otherwise, I’m just gonna go out and fail you now.
And I said, okay. So I went out and spent the next 18 days doing nothing for that paper. Started four days before, and sure enough, she said it was the best paper in the class, A plus. And I passed the class with a B. That’s just how I’m wired. But I can’t run a business that way, in part because I have other people dependent upon this. And so I’ve gotten into the habit of planning, and I’ve actually found, like, I used to think that would stifle my creativity, and it doesn’t. It kind of unleashes my creativity in a sense, because I’m not spending so much mental energy coming up with stuff at the last minute and panicking.
So plan your content. Your promo calendar, at least 90 days out. My recommendation is the last couple weeks of a quarter, you plan, you know, like another quarter ahead. So if you’re listening to this, literally when it drops, if you haven’t planned all of your Q1 content, go and plan all of Q1, and then plan Q2, so you’ll stay 90 days ahead no matter what. And then at the end of Q1, go and plan Q3, and at the end of Q2, playing Q4. So again, at the end of the quarter, you’re basically about 90 days ahead. Otherwise, every couple of weeks, you plan another few weeks.
However you want to do it, that’s fine, too. It doesn’t matter how you do it personally. We kind of do it in batches. Like, we’ll plan like a couple of months, and then we’ll take like a couple of months off from planning, and then we’ll plan a couple of months and exhaust our mental energy, you know, in a short burst, and then we’re done. So those are five resolutions for you out there in affiliate marketing. Now, you affiliate managers, those of you running affiliate programs, your resolutions. Number one, also resolve to use AI and take the time to learn how to use it.
I shared some ways in the Last episode. In the last episode, I talked about some of my predictions for affiliate marketing in 2024. And I talked about how affiliate managers, affiliate programs can use AI. Things like creating personalized swipe copy for email and social media and personalized images, approving and declining affiliates. So go back and listen to the episode because I actually share a really cool way that you can personalize swipe copy for both email and social media. I shared this with one of our clients yesterday and his mind was blown. All right. He could not believe that that’s what we’re doing. He’s like, that is genius. He’s like, that’s going to have a huge impact on sales because the affiliates love it. Said, yeah, so go back and listen to that episode. I think it’s in toward the end.
Questions?
Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.
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I listened to the whole episode, if you haven’t yet. But in that episode, I share one of the coolest tricks that we’re doing with affiliate management now and Ford, and that’s that creation of personalized swipe copy for email and social media. We’re doing that. Personalized images. We’re doing all that with AI. It takes a matter of minutes once you train it. But again, I also talked about approving and declining affiliates, how you can use AI for that. Couple other ways that you can really use AI. The big one is analyzing your emails, specifically your recruiting emails. If you analyze your recruiting email. So here’s what you do.
Let’s say over the past year you’ve sent 20 different emails to try to recruit affiliates. We talked about this. Hopefully you’re measuring the response. That’s the first thing. What’s the response rate to those emails? Now you take that and you put it into ChatGPT. I think it’s called the creative writing something or another Creative writing coach. It’s not the data analysis. That’s not the one you’re looking for. Creative writing coach. Yeah. So take that and have it analyze your emails. The funny thing is, like, this is one of those things. It takes a long time. Like a lot of chat GPT, like, boom. It’ll spit out social media.
Post email copy in 5 to 10 seconds. The analysis took over an hour. I had to communicate with it like a person. I was like, are you okay? Any updates? It’s like, I’m almost done. Be patient. And so take that and analyze your recruitment. Say, here’s this one. This one got a 5% response rate. This one got a 4% response rate. This one got A 6%. This one got A 2%, 1% whatever. Please analyze, take the 10 highest response rates and compare them to the lowest 10. So actually, usually what I’ll do is I’ll, if I have 20, I’ll take out like the middle six or seven and I’ll say analyze the highest six and the bottom six, the middle six, eight. They’re usually just kind of average.
So I want to know what made those good ones really good and what made those bad ones really bad. And it’ll tell me some of the things that it picks up on. Here are some of the differences. And we begin to learn how to write better ones so that in 2024, if you send 20 again, you’ll write eight good ones and four bad ones and kind of eight in the middle, right? And then you have analyze those and then next year you’ll write 12 good ones and two bad ones and six in the middle. And before long you’re writing 20 really good ones. So that’s one way. Another way is identifying potential affiliates. Ask AI who are some of the affiliates for such and such. You can go to Google and find them, but it’s just quicker to use AI. So ask.
So those are just a couple of ways in addition to what I shared last week, that you can use AI, but resolve to use it and learn how to use it and take the time to train it. Resolution number two for you affiliate programs, affiliate managers out there. Resolve to communicate more often and go deeper with your affiliates. What do I mean by that? More often? Very simple. You’re going to communicate more often. I don’t want you going dark for more than 10 to 15 days. As I’m recording this here, we’re in the holiday season and if I go dark for a week or so now, it’s not a big deal. Actually, it is a big deal because we got that book promo that I mentioned. We got 100 affiliates or more promoting that, so we can’t go dark.
Our affiliate manager is not working full time during the holidays, but she’s, you know, putting in two hours a day outside of like a couple days before Christmas and a day after. She’s going to put in a couple hours a day up until the new year because we have a big promo coming up. But outside of that, like, don’t go dark. Just don’t go dark for more than 10, 12 days at the most. Communicate more often. Find reasons to communicate with them.
It could be something as simple as a tip. It could just be helpful information. When’s the last time you sent a blog post that somebody else wrote that you found? Like, you might have even posted it on your Facebook, you might have sent it to some of your friends personally, but when’s the last time you sent one to your affiliates? There are major changes happening in 2024. Should probably do an episode on this. Major changes happening with regard to how Gmail and Yahoo process email that’s going to affect Everyone who’s sending more than 5,000 emails has a list of more than 5,000 people. Basically, major changes. Have you sent that to your affiliates? Should probably look that up and send it to your affiliates.
Like when the FTC released the new guidelines, did you tell your affiliates? First of all, if you didn’t, you could get in legal trouble. It’s your responsibility to inform them. Secondly, that’s helpful information. If you see an affiliate doing something cool, do you ask, hey, you mind if I share this with everybody else? If you see a really effective ad, do you share that with your affiliates? Look for reasons to reach out to them. Above and beyond. Just. We have another promo coming up. Here’s your swipe copy. Here’s your graphics. Do you need anything for the launch? Another promo coming up. Another promo coming up. Another promo coming up. We paid you. Those are great. What about above and beyond that? What about just some thought you had?
You were reading in a book and you got an idea and you wanted to share it with them. That’s how friends communicate. Your affiliates should be your friends. Communicate with them like that. Find reasons to reach out to them more. One on one communication, shooting them a DM or a text, DMs, things like that, more personal messages. Again, we’re communicating more, but we’re also going deeper. We’re going beyond just transactional.
If every one of your emails was have another promo coming up, or here’s what you need for the promo, like yeah, you gotta send those, but that’s not a relationship, that’s a transaction. All right, Speaking of affiliate communication, resolution number three is resolve to help your lower performing affiliates and activate your inactive affiliates.
They’re gonna tie those up into one. So we wanna help our lower performing affiliates like those affiliates that they’re kind of rocking like one sale a month, making, you know, 500 bucks a year. How do we help them get to a thousand, to two thousand? We’re not gonna get them to fifty thousand in a year probably. How do we get them to a thousand, how do we get them to 1500? And how do we help those inactive affiliates become active? Now the second part of that, I’ve had an entire episode.
In fact, I’ve actually done two episodes, but I did one recently where I basically gave the whole thing about activating affiliates. I’m gonna link to that in the show notes. So go listen to that. That’s an important thing for 2024. Whenever you’re listening to this for this year, for right now, got to activate your inactive affiliates. They are the lowest hanging fruit. You work so hard to get somebody signed up. You work so hard to find an affiliate and get in contact with them and you send six emails and it’s on the sixth one they say I might be interested. Then you follow up with them for three and a half weeks before they say yes. They go through the hoop of signing up for your affiliate program, which often involves not only putting their name and their phone number and their email address, but, but uploading a W9, entering their tax ID number, putting in their PayPal address, clicking Submit, signing an affiliate agreement.
Like there’s a lot of steps and you did all of that and then they don’t send traffic and you go, oh no, you got 90% of the way there. The last 10% is so much easier than the first 90%. Like I see it all the time. Drives me nuts when like my favorite football teams, they do great, they get down to the 12 yard line and then it’s like the offense completely stalls. Like they forget what they did to get there, they were in completely different plays. And I get it, the field smaller, but I’m not getting into like football strategy here. But it drives me nuts as a fan. Like dude, just keep doing what you were doing. It worked. Same is true here. You’re stalling on the 12 yard line. No, just keep going. Score. Touchdown. Activate those inactive affiliates for helping your lower performing affiliates.
Here’s some tips here. Number one, host training webinars where you show them how to promote. I just talked about sharing strategies with them. These lower performing affiliates, usually who they are, I’d say 95% of time they’re people with a pretty small audience and a limited knowledge of how to promote things. You can’t help them with the audience size. Although you could buy a bunch of the Kindle versions of my book and then share the codes with them. Tell them, go read step four about how to grow their list.
I actually it’s not a bad idea. I don’t even make any money. When you buy the 99 cent version of the book, to be clear, I literally don’t. I make zero dollars. But it will help them. And I know a few people who are doing that. They’re like, madam, when you do that promo in January, I’m actually gonna buy like a hundred codes. Cause for the cost of normally buying four copies of the book, you can literally get a hundred and just be able to share those codes.
So share that with them about how to grow their list. That’ll help them. But teach them how to promote better. Cause while you don’t have control over their list size, if they have a thousand subscribers and you can teach them to double their sales by promoting better, well, they double their sales, record videos, get on calls with them one on one. Say, you know what, I know I need to focus my efforts on big affiliates, but I’m gonna get on one call a week with a small affiliate for the first 90 days. So that’s 13 calls, one call a week.
So I do 13 calls with small affiliates. Start finding out what it is they need help with, then record mass videos with those. Or if you’re able to get on a zoom call, ask if you can record it and then share those recordings with your other affiliates and they learn from. Create like a learning vault where they can watch those calls.
Tell them to subscribe to my site. Seriously. Like tell them to listen to the podcast, tell them to go read my articles. I’ve got tons of stuff on my website, all about how to become a better affiliate, create a promo checklist for your affiliates, I will put a link in the Show Notes where I give you a template that you can just steal. Steal that. Remember, it is your job to help affiliates. Okay? That is your job. So in this year you are going to help those lower performing ones and activate those inactive affiliates. I’ve got a whole file of templates for activation emails. I’ve sent probably three to 400 different types of emails over the year and basically got like a few that worked best.
I did exactly what I talked about earlier. I didn’t have AI though. I just measured them. I said, I don’t know why these work the best, but these worked the best. And we put them into a file that you can download for free. I’ll put that link in the show notes as well. Mattmcwilliams.com activate. You can go grab those templates. All right, number three, resolve to spend 20 minutes a day, not five hours, not three hours, one time a week, 20 minutes a day, actively building your network, nurturing relationships and recruiting affiliates. Notice the first two parts are building your network and nurturing them, not asking them to be affiliates. And it’s 20 minutes a day. This is my thing. I do 10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes in the afternoon.
Most days I occasionally, I miss the afternoon session, admittedly because I other stuff that I got going on and I will know that in advance. I’m not like, oh, I didn’t have time, No, I know I’m not going to have time. So I do 20 minutes in the morning and that’s where I literally go in and I actively build my network. To be clear, what I do is every day I add a few people on Facebook, I reach out to a few people on Facebook.
I nurture relationships. I think of a few people. Sometimes I only get to one because we ended up in a conversation. I’ve got a dear friend of mine that I reached out to him, he was on my mind. Don’t know why, you know, maybe there’s a spiritual thing there. I’m not going to speculate about that. He was just on my mind. And I reached out to him and I said, hey, don’t know why, but you’re on my mind. How you doing? He said, wow, actually really bad. I’ve been in the hospital the last couple of days and he’s older, you know, he’s almost twice my age, but he’s been a friend and a mentor for years. And he said, not doing well, but I’m at peace. And I’m like, oh no, you know, what? That ended up being my entire 20 minutes. And that had nothing to do with business. Sometimes that’s the direction it leads.
I didn’t get to anything else that day, relationship wise. I focused on him. Got a message from him last night, actually, and turns out he has incurable cancer and doctors have given him only a few months to live. That was pretty much the extent of both those days. Was that another friend recently, this is going through a personal crisis. My entire nurturing of relationships was spent on them. But most days it’s not like that. Most days I’m able to hit up five or six people and have some decent conversations. And again, just nurturing the relationship, the little things. Like if I again know your affiliate’s favorite football team, know their NFL team. So that I’ve got a friend of mine who is also an affiliate of ours, and I know that he’s a Kansas City Chiefs fan. And so there’s this image that went viral. I don’t know which brother’s which. I don’t keep up with it, so I have no idea. But one of the Kelsey brothers, one of them plays for the Chiefs, one of them plays for the Eagles, and they played each other in the super bowl last year.
Well, one of them, whichever one it is, again, I don’t know their names, but one of them is dating Taylor Swift, and the other is not the one who’s not place for the Eagles. The one who is place for the G’s. Okay, most of you know their names, and I don’t because I don’t keep all this stuff, but whatever. Well, in the super bowl last year, the one Kelsey brother is like, the center or one of the offensive linemen for the Eagles. And then Jalen Hurts, I do know him, is the quarterback. I only know him because he played for Alabama. I don’t like Alabama.
But anyway, Jalen Hurts is the quarterback. And then they had a running back named Swift. So they’re standing in line, because if you know football, you typically would have a center or maybe he’s a left guard or a center. It looks like he’s a center in this picture, because then you got the quarterback and the running back behind him, and it says, kelsey hurts Swift. Well, the other Kelsey brothers dating Taylor. This is a funny. You know, So I sent it to him, and he’s like, oh. So it started a conversation, right?
Those are the types of things. I had one the other day. Good friend of mine who’s also, again, an affiliate and been a partner who’s been a client. You know, he’s a Clemson fan. Clemson’s in South Carolina. Their rivals are South Carolina. And it shows an image of Santa. This girl is saying to Santa, she’s sitting on Santa’s lap, and it says, for Christmas, I want a dragon. And Santa says, be realistic. She says, all right, then I want South Carolina to go to a bowl game next year. And Santa says, okay, what color do you want for your dragon? So I sent that to them. How did I know to send that to them? Because I know them. Those are the types of things you do to nurture relationships and then ultimately recruit affiliates. Building your affiliate army.
That’s all it takes. Building your network, nurturing your relationships, and turning them into affiliates. All right, resolution number four. Just like I mentioned with affiliates earlier, resolve to do something new, like the affiliates. Like, mix it up. Try some new things. Run some new campaigns. I said earlier, promote something new. Promote a summit. Promote a challenge. Okay, Run a summit. Run a challenge. Try some new marketing for your affiliate program. Try some new contests. Have some variety. Try some drawings. Involve all the affiliates. Do things where it’s like, hey, if you send more emails, then you’re gonna get more Entries. It’s not related to your performance so much as just your effort. I talk about taking over Facebook on cart close night sometimes. We’ve had over 100 people live in a very confined period of time where maybe 30 or 40 of them were all live at the same time. So if you think about this, we know for a fact that people who follow productivity experts follow productivity experts. Right? People who follow people in the weight loss niche follow people in the weight loss niche.
What do I mean by that? Nobody follows one productivity guru. Nobody follows one weight loss guru. They follow 5, 10, 15. Right? And if three people that you follow, because there’s 50 people all live at the same time talking about the same thing, but you only follow three if they’re all three live at the same time and they’re all three talking about the same thing, what does that mean? Oh, my gosh. This has got to be the greatest opportunity of the 21st century. So we do these Facebook takeovers. Here’s how you enter the contest. You do a Facebook Live. If you do a Facebook Live and you post your link, we usually do it, like in the Facebook group for affiliates. They post your link and you’re entered to win. Now what does that do? Now they’re posting the link and that post is going viral within the affiliate group, and everybody’s seeing it and they’re going, oh, my gosh, Like, I gotta do one too.
I gotta do. These are amazing. I gotta do one too. And so it grows and grows and grows. And we take over Facebook for, like, sometimes for a five, six, seven hour period of time. We might have 200 affiliates go live over a six hour period. So even if they’re not live, Even if the three people you follow, which is more probably more like 10, they’re not all live at the same time. It’s like, man, he went live today. She went live today. He went live today. He went live today. She’s live. They’re like, oh, my gosh. Like, and then every one of them, I’ve watched four of them and they’re all about the same thing. I’m gonna buy. Try new activation campaigns. Try new, new, new. Just try some new stuff. Try different angles. Try some different recruiting emails or emails were just everything, you know, Just try some stuff. That’s how we discover, that’s how we innovate. We test, we measure, and we innovate. Tmi. All right, number five, resolve to freshen up, to liven up your affiliate assets.
I am seeing a lot of old stuff out there. It’s time for some new creatives. It’s time for some new graphics and new videos. Again, AI makes this simple. Some of the new graphics that we’ve released this year were just AI AI creating, like, images. And then we’ll kind of tweak them a little bit, add some text and be done with it. And it just added a fresh face to it. Like, you can do it so fast now that I didn’t even have a graphic designer do them. I just did it myself because it took me like a half hour. So those new creatives, we created some comic strip graphics. Why? Because they’re fun. People can post them on Instagram, in Facebook, and they stand out a little bit more. They’re not just like the standard, like, go to this webinar. Boring. And you can create a comic strip in Dall E on ChatGPT4. Right. And it’s so easy. I could do a whole entire episode on how to create a comic strip on there, because it’s like a five minute process. To be clear, what’s my other option like?
Not sure how much to pay your affiliates? Watch my free video tutorial on YouTube that walks you through step-by-step.
I can’t draw a comic strip other than using stick figures. I can draw stick figures and morbidly obese office managers. All right, Those are the two things. I can draw, like, cartoons with my hand. So you can use Dall E to do that stuff. New swipe copy Again, how do you do new swipe copy? Use AI, use ChatGPT. Come up with one angle, get some creative stuff and then let it do the rest. New landing pages. Just go find five or six competitors and find, like, a couple of landing pages that stand out to you. Just go clone them. Just create something new for your affiliates this year.
Again, if you create some new graphics in Q1, okay, yay. New graphics. That’s cool. In Q2, new landing pages. Cool. Q3, some new offers. Yay. New offers. Q4, new swipe copy. Yay. New swipe copy. Like, every quarter you got something new. And then layer on top of that, new contests, you layer on top of that new activation campaigns, you layer on top of that new promotions and new campaigns, and you got something new every four weeks or so. Every month. And it keeps the energy in your affiliate program. So that’s 10 resolutions. I mentioned earlier. I probably have a bonus and I do. One quick bonus here. This is something that’s more and more important every year that we go by. And that is, I said this last year, so I’m going to probably say this in 2025 and 2026 and 2027. I’m gonna be saying this for the next decade.
Resolve to segment your affiliates. You’ve got to segment your affiliates because they require different communication. So just think about large affiliates, small affiliates, all right? They require different communication. The small affiliates are not in the running for the contest. They don’t care about the top 10 contest, but they do care about the if you get five sales, you get this prize contest. So we communicate to them differently. Coupon affiliates are different than content affiliates.
People who promote everything you put out are different from people who promote only one out of 25 things. Podcasters are different from bloggers. And this goes back to our second resolution earlier for affiliate managers and programs communicate more and deeper. So how are we going to do more one on one? By segmenting. How are we going to do different contests? By segmenting. How are we going to position different promotions to each group?
By segmenting. Got to start segmenting. Every individual affiliate should be in at least one segment. Sometimes they should be in five. You got large coupon affiliates who are frequent promoters. That’s three. I get it. But these are large frequent promoter coupon affiliates. And then you’ve got somebody who doesn’t promote as often. That’s a content affiliate. That’s pretty small. So there you have it. Always. I was like over delivering there. Ultimately, I mean, you can set whatever goals and resolutions you like. Whatever you feel like best serves you.
And you can do this any time of year. But these are some good guidelines. All the links I mentioned, the promo plan, the activation templates meet Edgar, the promo checklist, find affiliates. Now, all the stuff that I mentioned in this episode, all those links are in the show. Notes to go check those out. And no matter when you’re listening, like I said, put these resolutions into action. Make sure to check out my book. For most of you listening around the time this is released, I said earlier the kindle version is 99 cents. For the rest of you, it’s still super inexpensive. So the hardcover’s like 28 bucks. Last time I checked on Amazon, it’s like 15 bucks for the Kindle. The audiobook is one credit on Audible, which costs like 10 bucks.
These days I actually got. Probably shouldn’t say this, but I just went to Audible and they had this promo and I missed it by a day. So this is a little strategy that’s probably a publicly known thing. And I’m like, sharing it with you. And you’re all like, yeah, we know that, but I just live chatted with them, said, hey, can I have this promo? And it was like 24 credits for like 190 bucks, whatever. And the lady’s like, well, we can’t. It already expired.
But I can’t give you 12 for $80. I’m like, that’s a better deal than what I was asking for. So I got it. I mean, like, why not, right? Might as well save a few bucks. So whatever. You’re gonna spend 7 bucks on the audiobook, 10 to 28 bucks for two decades of lessons and experience. So go grab it and apply what I teach in there. If you happen to be listening to this before January 10, 2024, it’s 99 cents for the Kindle version. So you just go buy a hundred, go buy ten or whatever. Share them with some friends, share them with your affiliates. It’s going to help them.
So go grab that. Now it’s at Passions into profits book dot com. I’ll put that link in the show notes. And lastly, just make sure you share your biggest takeaway or any questions you have about today’s episode with me. Text me anytime.260-217-4619. Somebody asked me the other day, matt, can I really text you anytime? Yes. I’m not going to reply anytime. I’ll be honest, I am not going to reply to you probably between 9pm and 10am but I will reply. So usually within a day. So text me anytime. Area code 260-217-4619. Make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss all of our upcoming episodes. I’ve got a really cool series coming up called the Six Pillars of Every Great Affiliate Program. It’s gonna be four episodes throughout the rest of the month, so you don’t want to miss it. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. I’ll see you then.
See you soon.