The 6 Pillars of a Great Affiliate Program (Part Three)

by Matt McWilliams | Jan 22, 2024 | Affiliate Management, Podcast

A client of mine once told me that what I’m sharing today was worth more than $2 million to his affiliate program in one launch. Some have called it our “secret sauce” to run a great affiliate program. It’s the third pillar of every great affiliate program and yet most programs aren’t doing it at all.

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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy

The 6 Pillars of a Great Affiliate Program (Part Two)

The 6 Pillars of a Great Affiliate Program (Part One)

The 3 C’s of Successful Affiliate Programs Part 2

The 3 C’s of Successful Affiliate Programs Part 1

The New Model for Affiliate Programs

The Future of Affiliate Marketing & The Advantage of Being Small

The 6 Pillars of a Great Affiliate Program (Part Three)

A client of mine once told me that what I’m sharing today was worth more than $2 million to his affiliate program in one launch. Some have called it our secret sauce to run a great affiliate program. But for you, it’s the third pillar of every great affiliate program.

And yet most programs aren’t doing it at all. Hey, welcome back to this series, the six pillars of every great affiliate program.

I’ve said it at the top of the last couple of episodes, but we’re revisiting some of the basics, some of the foundations. What makes a great affiliate program? And ultimately this comes from a series that I did a while back.

I did a three part series, and today we’ll do the third episode of that where I talked about the three c’s of every great affiliate program, but not on purpose. I just hadn’t studied it enough back then to really analyze. Okay, what are all the foundational pillars? And there’s actually six. So we’re starting with those three. Those are the first three in this series.

And then in the fourth episode I’m going to cover the final three pillars of every single great affiliate program. Again, these work in every niche, every industry. They work for big programs, small programs, doesn’t matter.

So this is our foundation that we’re going to build this year. We’re going to make this our best year ever with our affiliate program. It all starts with this foundation.

And if you haven’t listened to the first two episodes, go back and listen to those and then come back for this one, the third pillar of every great affiliate program. And then make sure to come back for the next one because we got three more. So with that said, let’s jump into our third pillar of every great affiliate program.

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Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve shared the first two C’s of successful affiliate programs. First, I talked about contests, in the second episode I talked about communication and in that episode, I touched up very briefly on this third C, which is COACHING.

I talked about how you should teach them? How should you host a training session? How should you send cheat sheets? but I didn’t really dive too much into those.

Today I want to spend a little bit of time talking about those things. This coaching aspect of running an affiliate program it’s the key. I said at the top, one of our clients did about a $5 million affiliate launch and he estimated that about 40% of that was completely due to us training the affiliates.

A 40% increase from this one thing, the right contest. Yeah. You can lift sales 10, 15, maybe even 20% with the right contest. You can lift sales, certainly, 20, 25% with the right communication, but with the right training, the right coaching, that’s how you can lift them 40%.

We took a bunch of small affiliates and we got them to make 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 sales.

We took affiliates who would’ve made a hundred sales without the training and they made a 125, 150. That’s what we’re looking to do with coaching them.

In a little bit, I’m going to share a snippet of training that we did. It’s not the full training, but I’m going to share a taste of training that we did for one of our clients inside of our, Your Affiliate Launch Coach Program.

We did training for Jason and Cecilia Hilkey, they’re clients of ours. This clip’s probably nine, nine minutes long, nine and a half minutes long. And it’ll actually kind of give you a little taste of what that would look like the inside of the program.

But the point of sharing that is to show you this is how you train your affiliates. You teach them best practices. You walk through the calendar with them. There’s not a whole lot that we do, admittedly, in these trainings. It is that complicated. These aren’t super-advanced affiliate sales techniques. They’re the basics. You want to know the 10 secrets to close more sales in affiliate promos that you can share with your affiliates.

Go listen to my podcast series. I shared all 10. Now I talk about them specifically with the client, of course, but you can get an idea there.

The key is to coach them, teach them what’s working for you. If you ran a particular ad and it worked, share it with your affiliates, do strategy calls with them, you know, actually get together with them.

This is something we give our clients these worksheets they can actually go through but get together with them to share strategies. You don’t have to be the one who’s doing all the training.

You could actually just host a strategy call, maybe share a couple of ideas and then say, “Hey, why don’t you share an idea? And you share an idea and everybody shares some ideas.” And next thing you know, they have 15 ideas. That’s pretty cool like you can kind of mastermind it.

So what I recommend, the kind of flow I recommend is about six weeks to two and a half months before the affiliate promo, hosts a big training, make it into a big event. You could even do this three months in advance.

We did one recently think yeah, almost three months to the day in advance of when the launch started and you walk them through the calendar and how to prepare? How to warm up their audience? Walk them through what they can do now to get their audience engaged.

Let them know some basic strategies about affiliate promos, How to find their link? How to get their login information? How to use swipe, copy all those things. You walk them through all of that and then starting about two months out, you do a weekly strategy call, you do it on zoom or whatever.

If you’re listening to this seven years from now, there’ll be some new technology. But you do it where you can all be on there. See each other. This isn’t like a webinar you’re going to, you’re going to do this like open, you’re in a virtual room together, a conference room and you’re going to present to them and you’re going to share some stuff with them.

I’ll tell you what to do with that in a moment. But you’re going to walk through some of the stuff that they can do to promote, and then you’re going to open it for Q and A, and you’re going to mastermind together.

You don’t have to be the one who does all of the teachings. So for us, we did this recently with Stu McLaren’s TRIBE promo. We hosted six of these sessions and started with the warmup part. Also did a strategy and walked them through some of the things that they can do to warm up their audience.

We walked them through how to get their audience thinking about the concept of membership sites and recurring revenue. We walked them through how to just introduce Stu to them. For instance, we recommend that like you quote, the person, just quote them. It doesn’t even have to be about the topic. You just introduce the concept of Stu and membership sites.

The following week, we talked about the commitment plans, the promo, and how to create one. The template we gave them, which again, you can download at Mattmcwilliams.com/promoplan.

Download the template and you can basically copy and tweak it and give it to your affiliates. But we walk them through that. Here’s what you should be doing here & here, here’s when you should mail and all these things, right?

We walked them through the calendar. Then we walked him through promotion strategies for the workshops, like how to create an opt-in bonus, we had them brainstorm and share some of their ideas with each other. We taught them how to name a Facebook group and how to start a little pop-up Facebook group.

So they could do that, we had them share those ideas. Again, they got inspiration from each other. The following week. So this was week four we talked about bonus packages, how to create your bonus package and when to deliver it.

With that one, we were able to literally just walk them through. Step-by-step how to create a bonus package.

We have a template that we use for that where we talk about how to use what they have and tell them to list out their current assets and bonuses that they can create.

We write out some sales copy for each bonus and we show them how to set up a bonus page template and walk them through what to do in each of the descriptions of their bonuses that they’re offering.

In the fifth week, we talked about how to promote the webinar, we talked about strategies for promoting the webinar. In the sixth week, we talked about closing sales. Actually, we ended up tweaking it in the sixth week. We did kind of an open strategy call because we were in the promotion and had already started.

Then the following week, we talked about closing sales. So we ended up doing seven of those for that promotion. That’s what training them is. I taught for 15 to 25 minutes. The calls were like 75 minutes long because we were strategizing together. That’s how you do it.

You don’t have to know everything, just share a few things, teach them, strategize with them, help them to get comfortable with the calendar and the promotion.

As I said, I’m going to cut to some audio here. This is audio from a webinar training. We did training for Jason and Cecilia’s affiliates. They’re in the parenting space and some of their last summits had like 124,000 people.

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It was insane and we trained their affiliate. I’m going to cut to that audio here. You can listen to that. These are like a few clips. I think there are three or four different clips from different parts of the training.

Cecilia: Welcome to the Happily family. I am Cecilia Hileky.

Jason: I’m Jason. We’re here today to do the training for all of the partners for the upcoming happily family conference.

We’re so lucky to have Matt Mcwilliams and his team here to give us a run-through on the best ways, best strategies on how to promote this conference. But also you’re going to be able to get a ton of skills out of how to just do online promotions in general.

I’ve worked with Matt and previously on another promotion and it was mind-blowing what he had to share. I hope you enjoy this as well.

We’ll be around here. I’m going to turn it over to Matt and his team now. And if you have any other questions, email us on support@happilyfamily.com. You can also just put something into comments if you’d like.

Cecilia: I want to just reiterate what Jason is saying, that this isn’t just for how you can help spread the word about the conference.

This is also for anything that you want to turn up the volume within your own business, your own products, your strategies, and tips that you will learn today will help you in the rest of your business. So it’s really super cool. I’m so grateful for Matt and his team jumping in here and helping out.

Jason: Yeah, actually, I’ll just name a name real quick. Tasha was part of a previous promotion that we did where Matt did training and supported them with their training and Tasha was a partner and affiliate with that promotion. Tasha got so much out of the training that she then took everything that she had learned and worked with Matt on and applied it to her next launch. She said it was such a boost to her and it really helped out her business.

That’s what we’re hoping to do here as well. We want this to be a win for you, we also want to get the word out about the conference and have people find out more about you and what you have going on.

Cecilia: Dana Abraham has also worked with Matt too. So Matt’s behind a lot of the biggest launches that are happening, not even in the parenting space, but in the larger kind of online marketing world. So we’re super excited to be here and to have him.

Jason: All right, Matt.

Matt: Thanks, guys. I’ll have to text Tasha and see how things went because I actually had, I knew she was doing that, but I haven’t heard other fun stories about Tasha in that promotion in Dana.

I point blank asked her afterward, what was your goal in terms of sales? She said five and she actually did 40, and that is the value of this training today, guys.

I just want to say, Hey Katherine, Heather, Jackie, and Kira. So we’re going to talk about how to max out this promotion.

One of the reasons for this was actually a revelation I had about six weeks ago. I think it was Cecilia who mentioned Dana Abraham and I’ll tell you kind of why this means so much to me. I just didn’t really know how to quantify it, I guess.

It hit me that helping Tasha sell 35 more of Dana’s courses than she expected helping some of her other top partners 10, 20, 25 more than they expected to go from zero sales. One of them went from zero to like 18 or 19. She sold zero in the one before the same size list sold 19.

What hit me was the impact that that made. Maybe this is like an egotistical thing. The way to think of myself, I try not to let it be about me, but it hit me that me teaching affiliate marketing, there were hundreds of families somewhere in the world that that night also had a peaceful bedtime, because I did something like teach affiliate marketing, which at first glance kind of seems like really, how is that going to impact the world? How were you selling a course or promoting a summit, going to impact the world? Well, so that’s how.

So that’s why I’m excited to share this with you guys today, how to make this your best promo ever. So for those of you, who’ve never done affiliate marketing at all, or maybe you have, we’re going to talk about how to max it out.

That might be that you make your first affiliate marketing sale. It might mean that you make double or you make 8 times more sales than you expected, like Tasha.

So want to take a quick look at the calendar, Mark, if you can drop the URL in the chat, there’s a full plan that you can download. We’re going to talk through that in a little bit, but basically, if you go all in all in, it’s still only six emails to your whole list. Again, there’s no hard sell. This is a total give.

Here’s the cool thing. Many of these people on this summit are people that your audience has already heard of. They have a book somewhere by one of these people, attended a webinar, follow one of these people on social media and heard a radio interview three weeks ago with one of these people. So they’re going to be recognizable and they get to watch them speak for free.

You get to offer your audience this amazing opportunity without paying a dime. So I guess a total gift, you don’t have to convince them. Jason & them, they’ll take care of that. We’ll talk a little bit more about that later, but if all you do is get them to register, you don’t even get them to pull up their wallet. That’s a win on the front end.

So Monday the 13th is summit registration. We suggest, again, this is fluid. All right, if it’s Tuesday cool, but this is all just kind of the kickoff of, “Hey, they’ve opened registration for this amazing summit.” Maybe “Here are my favorite three speakers and what I like about them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Right?

We tested on these two launches. Tested the number of times that we mailed on the last day. I had already tested two times versus three times and it wasn’t even close.

You definitely should mail three times on the last day. Here are the results of this test:

Two times, basically 12 hours apart, the little bit under 5,000, you can look at the three times. You can look at a pretty big jump there between three and four times in a substantial jump between four times and five times. In other words, two emails versus five emails, twice as much revenue actually substantially more than twice as much revenue.

But here’s the thing, unsubscribes, right? Yeah, sure. I make more money, but oh yeah. Heather, you guys share that in the Facebook group. Oh, that’s so good. Oh my goodness. I didn’t have time to get into Heather’s. I’m saying these things and then people watching the replay are like, what the heck is Matt talking about?

Heather says, insanely, don’t be angry at me. Email. Thanks for that tip. Last launch. Yes. Okay. Heather, I’m going to rely on you to share that in the partner Facebook group, because Heather’s going to blow your mind with this one. So here’s the thing. The key though, of course, is that you’re worried about unsubscribes.

You’re worried about if I can be so Frank, I’ll just, I’ll be PG. You’re worried about upsetting people. Right? When I did this, I didn’t have a single unsubscribe. The key here is to make sure you give them an option to opt-out of this promotion.

Here’s a big thing. Make it personal. If you have personally engaged with Jason and Cecilia on any level, maybe you watched their last summit, maybe you’re a speaker like we talked about, tell your story. If they’ve impacted you in any way, tell your story. Focus on the transformation before and after.

Then also male off-peak simply put, most of us tend to mail at about the same time on the same day. Some of us, not me, but some of you probably when you mail Mondays and Thursdays at 10:00 AM Eastern standard time. Okay. This is the pattern and of course like the world’s smartest man or something like that.

World’s most interesting man, make sure you copy your boss. Any other questions guys? I know we ran through that fast. There was a lot to cover. I’m exhausted. I need a nap now, but this was fun to share. So any other questions or comments or thoughts from you guys? Jason and Cecilia. Cecilia, you said you were leaving and then you stayed on for the whole thing.

Jason: I’m telling you that you have so much great content here Cecilia was rapid, like writing notes.

Cecilia: I took notes. I had other plans.

Jason: You’re sharing like the insider tricks there. I mean, this is just so fantastic. I’m looking to see if there are any other questions.

Matt: I have nothing to add other than just to go back to that original point.

Remember this is every person you get to come to this summit is a, I mean, it sounds so cliche, but I will say, I mean, it’s a potentially life-changing opportunity for them.

Cecilia: And this is like our little corner of the internet universe, where we feel so grateful that we get to do this work and get to start a family.

So thank you for being here today Matt and your expertise and team and for helping us make this happen.

Jason: Yeah. Thank you, Matt.

Matt: Thank you, guys.

If you are ready to take your business to the next level and start an affiliate program, start with my free report, Your First 100 Affiliates. This report takes nearly two decades of experience, trial and error, and lessons learned about finding top affiliates in nearly every conceivable niche and puts them all into one report. Grab your copy here!

Again, when you train them when you teach them, you coach them. That third C in the three C’s of successful affiliate programs. It doesn’t have to be super complicated.

Teach them what, you know, go to my site and learn some stuff and teach them, share posts. We’ve had many people do that, programs I’m a part of, and they’re like, “Hey, you don’t know how to use swipe, copy. Here’s how to use a swipe copy.” I wrote a post on that,

Just go look up, swipe copy on Mattmcwilliams.com. You’ll find the post, but go through some of the affiliate marketing posts and see what would be good to share with our affiliates? Feel free to do that. Feel free to share my content. I’d love it if you would do that.

Do you see what I’m saying? That doesn’t have to be super complicated because you can crowdsource it as well. They want to help each other.

As I mentioned, you can grab that promo plan template Mattmcwilliams.com/promoplan. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes. If you think that some coaching would help you, would help you to get more out of your affiliate program, check out youraffiliatelaunchcoach.com.

That is our coaching program. We definitely can help you no matter what level you’re at, we help multi-million dollar entrepreneurs and also beginners. So we can help you there. Go check that out and apply.

Make sure that you subscribe to the podcast and your favorite podcast player. Because in the next episode, we’re going to get back on to that series of the big lessons we learned from these two massive launches.

I’m going to share lesson two from both an affiliate perspective and an affiliate manager’s perspective. So on both sides, I’m going to share a strategy that is brand new for us.

Something that we tried at the launch for the first time and it worked and it probably single-handedly accounted for about 3% of our sales. And we didn’t even do it nearly as well as we could have because we thought of it at the last second. This is a strategy that could increase your sales by five to 7%, very easily, very simple strategy. So definitely do not want to miss this episode. So make sure you subscribe.

If you know somebody that could benefit from this episode, maybe they need some help, they need to know how to coach their affiliates or they need to know these three C’s make sure you share this series with them so they can learn how to run a better affiliate program and with that, we’ll wrap up and I will see you in our next episode.