Today, I’m sharing my 10 Commandments for building a winning affiliate program. After 20 years of experience, I’ve distilled the essentials of affiliate management into these must-do principles that can make a huge impact. And thou must followest these commandments. Trust me, you won’t want to miss #6 – it might sound crazy at first, but you’ll see why it works.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
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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
7 Keys to Successful Affiliate Management During the Holidays
How to Help Your Affiliates Write Better Emails
The 10 Commandments of Building a Winning Affiliate Program
Matt: This is not Matt. This is AI Matt’s voice. Matt is currently battling Covid, so we’re bringing you a special edition of the podcast today.
A few years back, I recorded a live lesson with Alan Thomas of the Ten Commandments of great affiliate programs. I decided to pull together my 10 commandments for creating successful affiliate programs. After 15 plus years of learning and applying what works, I could have easily chiseled out five or six more, but I decided to boil it down to the ones that have a huge impact. These are the must do.
As if you want to wring every last bit of selling power out of your affiliate marketing efforts, you’ll think I’ve lost it when you hear number six until I explain why. So with that, let’s dive into this special podcast episode, and hopefully real Matt will be fully healed in time for next week.
So welcome, everyone. Welcome. This is gonna be fun. We haven’t been live for a while because of the holidays, and so I’m super stoked to be on here today. We’re talking about the ten commandments of successful programs. And when I think of this, I think of, you know, Moses coming down from the mountain and sharing the word of the Lord with the people of Israel. So we’re not talking about those ten Commandments today, but we are talking about the ten commandments of successful affiliate programs. These did not come. Just to be clear, these are not from God.
They’re not even from Moses. They do come from the fact I’ve spent, well, gosh, it’s 2022 now, so 17, 16 years. Yeah, 16, 17 years, whatever.
Something like that. A lot of years I’m old from seeing what works in affiliate programs. So we’re talking about my own experiences, both positive and negative. So we’re talking about things that went well, things that I’ve done poorly, things that I broke and had to learn how to fix, things that I did wrong. Lessons I’ve learned the hard way, lessons I’ve learned from others.
They also come from my own experiences as an affiliate. You know, one thing that I talk often about is I was a good affiliate manager, you know, for years. In fact, I’d won three, two of my Affiliate Manager of the year awards prior to ever promoting anything as an affiliate myself. When I became a great affiliate manager was when I started promoting affiliate offers myself. And I started to see things.
I saw what other affiliate managers did. Well, what they did. Mom always said, if you’re. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything. And also not so well. We’ll just say, and so, Marcia and Angie, it’s good to see you guys. Over the past decade plus, I’ve developed some principles. These are the principles that we teach in, in our company.
You know, I know Alan, you know, of course we’re starting an agency. You know, we started it last year. We’re, we’re scaling it in 2022. And so I’m teaching people on our team these principles. We have more than 10 that we work on as a company, but I wanted to kind of do something fun and rather than just be like, here’s my, you know, my 18 principles. That’s kind of boring.
First of all, it’s not a really cool, you know, title. I wanted to narrow it down to the ten most impactful, right? So these are, these are our rules, our guiding principles, our playbook, if you will, for running great affiliate programs.
These are the ones we’ve used for running programs for Stu McLaren, Michael Hyatt, Shark tanks, Kevin Harrington, Shutterfly, Adidas, Mark Miller, all of our coaching clients, Shutterfly Adidas. We’re signing a contract today with a new company I’m excited to tell you all about. These are the commandments, right? So they’ve worked for the large clients. These commandments worked for Adidas.
You know, we ran. I don’t know where we were when I left. I’ll just say a lot. There were a lot of commas involved in the size of that affiliate program. They worked for Shutterfly. You know, we helped Shutterfly grow from about a 15 million dollar a year program to getting up close to a quarter of a million.
They’ve worked for our $500,000 clients. They’ve worked on big product launches, they’ve worked on evergreen programs, they’ve worked on memberships, book launches, physical products, digital products, memberships, like I said, courses, coaching, services, doesn’t matter, you name it, these have worked. And if you obey them, here’s what I can promise today. My big promise today.
If you obey these ten commandments, you are virtually guaranteed to have a successful program. If you fail to follow one or more, I think you can probably get away with one. If you fail to follow one, I’m not going to say you’re going to, you’re not going to succeed. But if you fail to follow more than one, you are guaranteed virtually not to succeed.
So it’s kind of a, it’s kind of a cool thing that we discovered. I told a client this years ago when I developed these principles. I didn’t develop them as like, these are like the things that we have to do. And if we don’t do them, we’re guaranteed failure. And if we do do them successfully, we’re going to succeed. But it kind of worked out that way. So listen up, guys.
I’m going to reveal what it takes to truly lead to affiliate program success. So first of all, I want to welcome you guys. Drop me a note, drop us a note there in the, in the chat. Say, hey, Alan, good to see you again, buddy. It’s been a while.
Alan Thomas: Yeah, man. Happy New Year.It’s a new year. so
Matt: Happy New Year. How was Christmas and all that stuff? So Christmas Eve, our daughter got some sort of stomach bug that hit her out of like left field. She was fine at 4:00, 5:00, 7:00, started feeling kind of weird and then she threw up six times overnight. So we ended up canceling the family coming over for Christmas. Wow. We’re actually. We said stomach bug probably it was more likely it’s kind of 5050 because I felt kind of like crappy that night.