Scaling your affiliate program sounds great…until you hit the roadblocks no one warns you about. Today, we’re tackling the biggest challenges standing between you and explosive affiliate growth…and, more importantly, how to solve them.
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Links Mentioned in this Episode
Affiliate Program Terms & Conditions Template
What & How to Communicate to Your Affiliates
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
The Best Ways to Celebrate Your Affiliates (and Keep Them Loyal)
After Studying 8,000 Affiliate Programs, I Found This Surprising Truth
How to Beat the Dreaded Mid-Promo Slump in Affiliate Launches
How to Grow Your Affiliate Program (and Brand) with a Podcast
Marketing That Actually Works: Donald Miller on Storytelling, Sound Bites, and Selling More
The 7 Biggest Challenges to SCALING Your Affiliate Program (and How to Solve Them)
Scaling your affiliate program sounds great until you hit those roadblocks that no one warns you about. So today we’re tackling the biggest challenge of standing between you and explosive growth. And more importantly, how to solve those challenges.
Let’s get started. So most of us that have run an affiliate program for more than six months, we’ve been in this situation where we’ve gotten to a certain point, we’ve, we’ve had a few good affiliates, maybe we’ve got hundreds of good affiliate. And so sometimes this happens, by the way, this happens when you know, you’re at the six month mark. It happens maybe not until you’re at the three year mark, four year mark.
It happens sometimes when you hit, you know, we plateau around the fifty thousand dollar mark. Sometimes it doesn’t happen to worth the million dollar mark or 2,5 million dollar mark. Sometimes this happens multiple times. We go through these periods where we hit these plateaus or even a slight decline. So we get to that certain point and we’ve had some success and we’ve, we’ve gotten, you know, we’ve kind of mastered the fundamentals, right? The consistent operations like paying affiliates on time, you know, and actually making sure they get their money and paying them the right amount and you know, checking stats and, and helping our affiliates and we’ve learned how to help our affiliates and we’ve learned we’ve had a few good success stories or maybe dozens of success stories or hundreds. And then we can’t scale past that certain point. And I’ve shared my story. If you’ve listened long enough.
You know, I’ve talked about my very first affiliate program I ever ran that I had no idea what I was doing and I scaled it from zero to over a million dollars a month in just a shade under 18 months. The part that I don’t necessarily share because it makes for a worse narrative is we got to about 1.1 million dollars right around month 18 and at month 24 we were still at 1.1 million dollars. As a matter of fact at month 27 we were still at 1.1 million dollars. Then we hit another inflection point.
I shared roughly 10 episodes ago, how I scaled the program in about 4 years, 3 half, 4 years, from 15 million to 325 million dollars a year. And again, I talked about the early stages where when I took over the program had plateaued. The program had been at about 13 and a half million two and a half years before and was only at 15 million two and a half years later when I took over. And it had been basically doing an average, you know, of one and a third, one and a quarter to one and a half million dollars a month, every month for almost a year. It really had just not grown. And so when I took it over, it took us a while. We really went through about another four months where we weren’t much bigger than about a million, you know, a third 1.5 million in a month. Then we started growing and I shared that story.
Yeah, the part that I didn’t share was in that, you know, four years we had multiple three to five month periods where we completely plateaued. We did not grow at all. And that’s common. But the thing is that scaling is so important for your long term success. You have to consistently be scaling. The reality is like, we don’t think about this in online marketing world, but just statistically, if you have a program with more than a thousand affiliates, no matter what age your demographic is, somebody’s gonna die in that year. And if you have a program with more than a thousand affiliates, multiple people, that’s just real, they’re gonna die.
Like you’re gonna have affiliates die. And don’t get me wrong, like there are bigger things, you know, around death than the fact that, oh no, our affiliate program is gonna go down 2.3% Yes.
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But I’m saying, like, these are the things we have to think about. We are going to have people die. We are going to have people get out of the business. We’re going to have people sell their business and the new business owners decide not to be an affiliate of ours. We’re going to have people who decide to promote other products and it’s nothing that we can do about it. I had a situation recently with the program where, you know, and I shared this, I don’t know, seven, six, five episodes ago, somewhere around there where I talked about why affiliates become inactive. And one of them is that they choose to promote your competitors.
Well, if it’s because their commissions are higher or they have better resources or they treat their affiliates better or they have better conversions, those are all things you can address. But this was one where their cousin or Nephew or somebody started a company and they chose to support. This is an affiliate, by the way, who makes up almost 5% of all the sales. They were like the number four affiliate for this program. And they had a cousin or a nephew or niece or something that started a competitor to this company and they’re going to support them. There is literally nothing I can do about that. So sometimes these things happen.
You are going to lose sales through no fault of your own. That’s why it’s important to continually scale. And so just like last week’s episode, I’ve got an acronym because I love acronyms, right? I mean, I love acronyms more than Kamala Harris loves, you know, what are those things? Venn diagrams, right. If you’ve heard that whole thing, I love acronyms. I need to come up with an acronym for acronym. The word acronym. I’ll have to do that. Maybe in another episode. It’s not because I’m from Akron either. I just came up with that.
That’s funny. Come on. Anyway, so the acronym is scaling. You know, the episode is all about the challenges to scaling your affiliate program, how to solve them. So we’re going to talk about acronym of the seven biggest challenges. Make it easy for you to remember, because I want these to be seven things that you can take action on. And by using the acronym, it just makes it easier for you to remember.
Especially because I know if you’re like me, you’re listening to this while you’re working out, driving, you’re paying attention to your kids, soccer practice or something, but you’re still listening to a podcast about business, doing the dishes, cleaning the house, doing the garage, whatever, yard work. That’s when I, you know, I don’t like, sit down. Who listens to a podcast like sits down? I’m going to just listen to a podcast with a notepad in hand.
That’s not how we operate typically. So you can remember most of these, then come back, take notes later, maybe listen to a part if you need to re listen to it. We’re going to talk about those seven biggest challenges that affiliate programs face in scaling and how to overcome them. So let’s start with number one.
Challenge number one. That’s a good place to start, right? The s. That is, you have a small affiliate base. Small affiliate bases, yes. So in this case, you’re relying too heavily on a handful of affiliates. This is so dangerous. And I have talked so much about building your affiliate army because when you build your affiliate army, you have a program that is, it’s Resistant to losing a couple of affiliates. That one affiliate program that I mentioned earlier, it’s an affiliate program we took over about five months ago.
We’re in the process of scaling it. And I can tell you that when we took over that program, that affiliate made up about 8% of sales. Now they make up 5% of sales. That’s good. We reduced the risk by 3% in about four and a half, five months. Our goal would have been if they had stayed to have them down around three to three and a half percent of sales by, you know, another three, four months, maybe even get them down to like two and a half percent of sales by about the one year mark.
So again, when you diversify, it’s less risky. The other thing about diversifying is it’s just the sheer number of affiliates that you end up having when you, you know, again, when you go from 500 to 1000 affiliates and you think, maybe I go from 500 to 1000 affiliates, you double the number of affiliates, but your sales only go up.
I mean, I’ve had programs where they only went up in the first couple of months, 15%. Even though we doubled the number of affiliates. You go, was that really worth it? Yes, long term it is worth it because some of those affiliates that we bring on, they won’t even be active for six months. Some of those affiliates that we bring on, we schedule a promo with them. You know, we bring them on in April and they don’t even do a promo until November or sometimes next February. Was that worth it? Absolutely.
Sometimes they don’t get big until they’ve been in an affiliate for a year and a half. We’ve had affiliates that came on. They did two sales their first year, their second year, you know, they did 11. And their third year they did 415 sales, you know, making those numbers up. But those are, those are representative of reality. We have had affiliates 20, 30, 50,X in their second, third, fourth years. So long term, we want to build that larger affiliate base. We want to prove the Pareto principle, which in the rest of the world is the 80, 20 rule, but in the affiliate world is often the 95, 5 rule. We want to prove that wrong. And we have consistently so three solutions here.
Number one, consistent, constant, ongoing, never ending. How many other ways can I say this? Affiliate recruitment. Every day with each of our clients, we reach out. Depending upon the client where we’re at. Like when we start, we usually go a little bit heavier, but we reach out to 10 to 20 people every single day. Not 50, not 100, not 25, 10 to 20. And we will set that number based on where the program’s at, what else we have going on in the program.
Sometimes as we’re going into a big seasonal promo, my time gets a little thinner because I’m working more on the current affiliate. So we’ll back that down to like the 10 number. And then other times when it’s a little slower, we’ll bump it up to 20. But it’s 10 to 20 every day. If I reach out to. Let’s just split the difference there and say 15. That is pretty much our typical number. Usually falls right around 80 per week with each client.
If I reach out to 80 affiliates in a week, I’m going to hear back from about 12 would be the statistical number. I reach out the first time to 80. So I hear back from 12. Two of them are flat out no’s, two of them are flat out yeses, and the other eight are maybe. So we’re going to get roughly half of those maybes eventually. That gives me about five affiliates, maybe six. In some weeks we might get as many as nine or 10. Some weeks we get as few as one every now and again.
I think we might even get a zero, you know, especially around holidays and stuff. But if we get five affiliates a week times 52 weeks, that is adding 260 affiliate per year. Now, in a program like some of the bigger ones we’ve run, like Shutterfly or Adidas, adding 216 years is nothing. We get 50 who sign up per day just doing nothing. But I’m talking actively recruiting an ideal affiliate. If you consistently do that, that’s about what we average per week. So that’s number one.
Number two, start diversifying the affiliate types. Like if you only work with influencers, you only work with email marketers, you only work with, you know, affiliates who Run ads, stop doing that. Now I talked, when I talked about how we scaled that affiliate program, I talked about being disciplined early on and focusing on one type of affiliate. And I talked about how we purposely targeted nothing but mommy bloggers for about six months, then we targeted nothing but wedding photographers for six months and then we targeted nothing but other photographers for six months and then we targeted nothing but nonprofits for six months.
That’s different. If you intentionally are doing that over time, that’s fine. But if all, you know, if you’re in your 18th month and you’re starting to plateau, maybe it’s because you’re out of email. Marketers in your niche, start looking at some podcasters, start looking at some influencers, start looking at affiliates who are maybe outside of, you know, the exact niche.
I’ll give you an example. Like when we work with a company that’s in the cbd, oil industry, Cannabolics. Well, think about that. It’s like, okay, health and wellness, Health and wellness, Health and wellness, right. It makes sense. But as we started to plateau, we start looking at what about entrepreneurs, what about productivity, what about other niches where we can, the product makes all the sense in the world.
So long term, we want to start diversifying our affiliate types. And then the third thing to do here to kind of combat this, you know, small affiliate base relying too heavily on a small number of affiliates is start to incentivize your mid level affiliates and your smaller affiliates to step up. Don’t, don’t forget about a prize like, you know, yeah, you got your top affiliate of the month. Or if you hit, if you have a thousand sales, you get, you know this.
What about somebody who makes 3 sales, 5 sales, 25 sales? What if somebody, you know has, if they’re, if the only goal you give them, if they’ve consistently been in the 16 to 18 sale a month range for the past three months. What if you just incentivize them to get to 25 and get a special prize? Because here’s the cool thing, if they get to 25 this month, let’s do the math on this. Let’s say you have a hundred dollar product in a, for easy math, a 20% commission and they’re consistently making 20 sales per month. So they’re making $400 and to get to 25, they would make $500. What if you gave them, if, if they got to 25 sales, what if you gave them one time a $200 bonus? You go, that’s ridiculous. That’s effectively making those last five sales a 60% commission. Yeah. You might even lose money on those five sales.
A, if they land on exactly five sales, if they hit 25 on the dot, which nobody ever does, what’s more likely to happen is they’re going to blow through it and hit 32, or they’re going to fall just short, but make an additional three or four sales that you don’t even have to pay anything on. That’s it. So this is why I’m talking you into going a little crazy on some of these bonuses sometimes.
B, if they hit 25 this month, they’re infinitely more likely to stay at that number for the next 23 months, just looking at two years or continue to go up. But let’s say they just stay there. So you made an extra 60, 120 sales for the next two years. You paid a $200 bonus. I think you can afford that. And C, the thing is, if you incentivize them this time, makes them more likely to want to shoot for another goal. What will you do if I make it to 50? What about a hundred?
So they’re going to increase their goals. So consider doing some of that and be willing to set a bonus that may be on those additional sales if they land exactly on the number that you don’t make any money or you may even lose a few bucks. Because again, they’re probably going to blow past it or fall just short and for the other reasons we talked about.
So the S is that small affiliate base. The C challenge here is that you’ve got a complicated affiliate program. There are too many rules. There are too many barriers to entry. Just to be blunt, affiliates avoid affiliate programs that feel restrictive or confusing. I’m dealing with this with. We’ve got somebody that purchased our affiliate program, Kickstarter package, and I’ll put a link to that. It’s a great program.
We guarantee results. By the way, we will help you recruit your first 30 affiliates. There are so many things you get in this, if you want to check it out. It’s a Kickstarter package.com and I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. But this particular client has a very restrictive and confusing program. Their commission structure. I mean, you practically need a degree in accounting to figure it out. Their compliance, I get it. They’re in a highly regulated industry and we want to be compliant. But they are crossing the line into paranoia and doing things that they don’t have to do in their industry. And so they’re getting no Results. We’ve had, I don’t know, 45 to 50 people purchase our Kickstarter package over the past couple of years. And again, this is a. It’s a package that we have where we help you recruit affiliates. We show you how to set it. Like, we’ll set up your terms and conditions. We’ll get you set up on a network.
You know, we’ll literally set your affiliate program up and get your first few affiliates. And one of the things that we do is we guarantee that within six months of submitting your program, you will make your money back. And if you don’t, we’ll give you. We’ll pay you the difference. So if, you know, if you fall $200 short of breaking even, we’ll give you $200. And out of about 45, I think we’ve had two people that we had to pay a little bit of money. One was literally, one was like, $11, and we paid it. We were like, hey, you only made this much money. You’re $11 short.
Here’s $11. They were like, keep the money. Now we’re like, no, we, we, this is what we said. We’re going to give you the $11. The other, we actually paid back like a thousand bucks. And, you know, they, they didn’t, they didn’t make that money. And that’s fine. That’s what the guarantees for. Everybody else has made more.
Some people have made, I mean, literally over 50x returns, right? Some people made well over $100,000 on this. The most people make, you know, 30, $40,000 and, you know, 20, something like that. And it’s a great ROI, but it’s not outrageous. Well, this company has made zero. We’re three and a half, four months in. And our team and I have spent so much time with them, and I keep saying, like, you’ve got to reduce the barriers to entry. We have sent. And their terms and conditions, it’s like a 10 page document. They, the rules that they have, some of them are just like why would you have that rule? You know. Well, we saw this one program.
Yeah, well that one program added that rule after they hit the hundred million dollar mark. You know, you probably need to be a little bit looser. So three solutions here. Number one, keep your terms and conditions simple. Grab our terms and conditions template. I will put a link to that in the show notes. There are no unnecessary rules in that template. There are some that are relevant to some industries and not others. And so we include that along. It’s not just a template. We actually have notes that are like, hey, here’s why you might include this rule and why you might not. But make your terms and conditions simple.
Don’t write them in legalese. We wrote ours, they were by an attorney, but we put them in terms that people understand. The second thing is you need to make the sign up and approval process easy. I’m not saying that you should approve affiliates that really shouldn’t be approved, but make it clear, here’s why we’re going to approve or decline your application and make the signup process easy. You do not need to collect a frickin blood sample on the signup process. And a lot of people are like well we need, we need this and we need that.
Do you on the signup. Because here’s the way I look at the sign up process. It’s almost like a lead, this is an affiliate program lead that then I can follow up with them if I make the process, if I make them have to enter information on that signup process that they don’t have right in front of them at the, at their fingertips, I might lose them forever. So for instance, what’s our EIN number?
That’s our tax number for our company. If I have to enter that, if I’m kind of like on the fence whether or not to join your affiliate program, like whatever, I’ll join it and see. And you ask me for my EIN on the sign up. I don’t know it now, it’s different if it’s, I can sign up for the program and then in order to be active, I need to actually enter the EIN.
I need to submit a W9. Although we don’t technically have to submit a W9 because we’re incorporated, but you know, still a lot of Programs require them. You know, I need to submit my payment information. That’s all great, but that should come later. And then the third thing is just be clear in your communication on how to promote. Be very clear on what they can and cannot do and, and what are the best practices on promoting. So, number one, the small affiliate base. Number two, complicated affiliate program.
Number three, challenge. Is affiliate fatigue. Just affiliates dropping off. Even great affiliates lose steam over time. And so there’s a few things that you should look for.
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Number one, look at their look at the data. You should be studying the data every month at a minimum, with your big, big, big affiliates. I try to look at it once a week. And I’m just looking. If. Let’s just look at the first 10 weeks of the year. Let’s say that last year they averaged 50 sales a week. And for purposes of this, let’s assume there’s no seasonality. And so in December of last year, they, they did 54, 47, 55, 51 sales. Right. And then in January, first week of January, they did, you know, 40. And you’re going, okay, well, that’s, you know, could be the New Year’s. There’s a little bit of seasonality. You know, it’s New Year’s the way New Year’s Day was on, you know, fell on a, on a Wednesday. So, man, you know, the first five days of the year were kind of out the window, whatever.
But then the next week they were down to 36. The next week, 28. Right. Then is when you should start raising yellow flags and start reaching out to them about how to help. Because what will happen the next week they’re at 24. The next week they’re at 20. And what’s happening is they actually cut off your promo. The only reason they’re still making some sales is because of remnant traffic or because maybe they had you on five pages on their site and they accidentally forgot to delete you from one of them.
But if you catch that problem when it goes from 50 to 40 to 35 to 28, that’s the time to catch it. So start, so look at, okay, are there sales dropping? Start looking at traffic. A lot of times you might have sales stay steady, but traffic begins to decline a little bit. And the reason why their sales stay steady, sales stay steady state. Say that. I can’t even get say that 10 times fast. Right. But the reason their sales don’t drop off initially is because again, they’ve got remnant cookies and they’ve got maybe, you know, especially if you’re in Legion. You’re still following up with their leads and making sales. So look at their traffic.
Look at just the number of posts. Like, if you’re following them on social media and they usually mention you two or three times a month and they drop down and they only mention you once, that’s a yellow flag. It’s not a red flag yet, but we want to keep an eye on that. So three ways to solve this. Number one, just offering fresh new promos, offering new angles, offering new bonuses, keeping things exciting with contests and new. New product launches, new banners. I know banner ads don’t work great, but new social media graphics and you go, is really. Is like new social media graphics that exciting? No, but it’s what we call an etp, an excuse to promote. It’s an etm, an excuse to mail your affiliates. It’s an excuse to reach out to your affiliates. And what we’ve noticed is when we release new graphics, we get about a 5% increase in use of those graphics. And you go, Whoop Dee Doo, 5% one time. No, it’s 5% every couple of months when we release new ones. And that’s not the only thing we’re doing.
But we’re getting new affiliates to use, and we’re also getting affiliates that maybe started fatiguing and affiliate that’s dropping off, they’ll suddenly do a promo because there’s a new graphic. And third, make sure you are constantly recognizing and appreciating your affiliates. If you are looking at those stats on a daily, weekly basis, then you’ll see things like first sales and whatnot.
But you’ll also see that affiliates hit milestones. And you’ll see affiliates doing things that you can recognize and show appreciation for. That keeps them from becoming fatigued. That keeps them from dropping off. You know, even just engaging with them on social media and treating them like a person, becoming friends with them and getting to know them. Those are the types of things. Like when you leave that social media comment that congratulates them on their team winning the championship, when you leave that social media comment that appreciates them for something they did.
When they do post, when you reach out to them and tell them Happy Birthday, not a post on their Facebook wall, but a genuine phone call or text message telling them Happy Birthday. When you do those things, it’s a little trigger. That means they’re more likely to do something promotional in the near future. The next one, our L is low conversion rates. In other words, your traffic’s just not converting. If affiliates send traffic, but don’t send sales or don’t see sales, they will quit. They’re going to quit. And I don’t have enough time to go into all the reasons why your conversion rates would struggle here, but here’s the thing. Keep a look at Keep an eye on conversion rates.
If you have certain products that are converting less than others, if you have certain price points that are converting less than others, if you have certain landing page styles that are converting less than others, fix it. Fix it. You need to be looking at your sales pages. You need to be looking at your checkout flow, you need to be looking at your lead capture, all of these things.
You need to be training your affiliates on how to send better qualified traffic. You need to be doing all of these things. And there’s so many reasons why things might not be converting, but definitely be taking a look at those things and fixing them. You know, if your conversion rates are down the last three months compared to the previous three months, why is that? Is it because traffic’s up and maybe it’s not as good?
Is it because you know X, Y and Z, like whatever it is, start addressing it. Maybe it’s because the landscape has changed. It could be a change in, you know, they released a new iPhone, they released a new Samsung Galaxy, and man, every month for the past, you know, four months, our conversion rate has gone down overall 0.05% Now it’s down 0.2% I’m assuming this is on like a 2%, you know, conversion rate. It’s down 0.2%, which is actually 10%. Why is that? Well, if the adoption rate of that new iPhone is increasing every month makes sense.
So look at that, like go fix your page or pages for that new iPhone. The I in scaling is that you are ignoring industry trends and innovations. You’re ignoring that the affiliate landscape is constantly changing. You’re ignoring that there are rules in place now that weren’t in place five years ago. You’re ignoring that there are, there’s a new social media network.
You’re ignoring that there are things that we can do better that other affiliate programs are doing that you’re not. And that’s why you’re losing some of your affiliates. I mean, the reality is what worked five months ago, little on five years ago, is not necessarily going to work today. The principles are the same. The thing is like the new social media network, let’s just say a new one comes along tomorrow and it’s huge. And it all of a sudden accounts for 3% of all, you know, sales. Okay?
But the principle is still the same, that you need to be on top of the new social media networks. And so the principles are always going to remain. If you treat your affiliates well, you have a high converting, high commissioned offer, you’re going to have a successful affiliate program. You still got to stay on top of these industry trends and innovations. So staying on top of, just imagine that you were unreactive to what’s happened with AI over the last few years. I mean, everything has changed. Everything has changed so much. If you’re unreactive to that, you are getting left in the dust. So three things.
Number one, stay on top of those tech trends. You need to be reading the publications, whether it’s the blogs, the websites, you know, listening to this podcast, all these things that deal with the trends in marketing, affiliate marketing, you know, affiliate management, tech, all those things. Number two, sign up for all of your competitors programs.
Sign up for other affiliate programs in what I would consider to be like tangential niches. So for instance, if I’ll take the CBD program, there’s a hundred other affiliate programs, roughly that I am a member. I guess you could say I’m a part Of I’m watching everything they’re doing. But because we have clients in all kinds of niches, I’m pretending I’m only in the CBD niche here. Right. If our only client was Cannabolics, what would I do? I, I would sign up for every affiliate program in the CB niche, CBD niche, but I would also sign up for 30 to 60, probably. I mean, you can get to the point where it’s overkill.
I’m going to sign up for some of the top and some of the mid tier because you want to, you know, some of the up and comers, you want to see what they’re doing, some of the ones in like health and wellness. So I’m going to sign up for some that are in the nutraceutical niche, but they’re not competitive with cbd. You know, maybe they make a, you know, product for the brain or probiotic or something like that.
I’m going to sign up for, you know, 10 or 20 of those. I’m gonna sign up for some in the fitness industry. I’ll sign up for some in those tangential niches so that I can watch what they’re doing and apply it to the CBD industry. Now, as an affiliate manager of, you know, literally clients in every conceivable niche on the face of the earth, I mean, I’m in roughly three or 400. I mentioned, you know, a couple episodes ago, signed up for 8,000 affiliate programs.
I have dropped out of many of those and by many I mean like 7,600 of them. But I’m still in a bunch so that I can keep up with things. So that’s number two. And then the third solution, make sure you’re staying up to date on what’s working in terms of like, mean YouTube shorts were really a big nothing burger four years ago. TikTok was truly, I mean, who had heard of TikTok, honestly, five years ago, you know, five and a half years ago, like so few people had. And then it blew up because of the pandemic and now.
But it stayed. That’s the thing, is it? You know, there’s things that blew up during the pandemic that dropped back down to some. Some of them dropped below their levels pre pandemic. Some of them dropped to equal. Some of them dropped to maybe 10 or 20%. TikTok stayed at, you know, 50x post pandemic. So make sure you’re staying up to date on stuff like that because if you, if your affiliates were not using TikTok if you have no affiliates using TikTok, you’re missing out how much of your. How many of your affiliate sales should come from TikTok? I don’t know, 10%? Maybe as low as 5, maybe as high as 25 in some industries, but it shouldn’t be zero in most industries.
All right, the end challenge number six is not knowing what to communicate to affiliates. I did an entire podcast episode on what and how to communicate to your affiliates that I’m going to share in the show. Notes. The thing is, they need more than just links. Here’s our latest promo. Here’s your link. Click. Great. They need guidance. They need guidance and they need it to be in a format and a frequency that works. One of the biggest, I’d say the worst communication mistake I see is not enough. Just too little communication. A once a month newsletter, like really once a month, and you expect me to even remember who the heck you are? No, less than that is even worse. And I’ve seen it.
Irrelevant communication. You’re sending out stuff that, I mean, really, like, you chose to make that an entire email and it was just so irrelevant. Too much can be a thing. You don’t need to be emailing every day. You don’t need to be posting in your Facebook group every day. So there’s a rhythm two, maybe three times a week. Occasionally spiking occasionally. Our biggest promo of the year. This is it. Yeah, every day for two weeks is actually a really good idea. Like you don’t need to take a day off in those two weeks. So how do we solve this? You know, not knowing what to communicate. Number one, listen to that episode. Let me give you three quick hitters here. Number one, create a communication calendar.
All right, Weekly, twice a week, relevant updates, fairly consistent updates. Right. Number two, share. At least every third message or post should be a promo strategy. It should be something that’s working for another affiliate if you get permission. Those are some of my best. I forward emails and say, here’s a great email. Check it out. Here’s a great blog post. Check it out. Here’s a great podcast episode. Check it out. Here’s a great ad. Go look at it and learn from it. And it gives them, you know, they get like, they’ll get signups, you know, typically when we do that with our, like some of our bigger affiliate programs, we can look at the numbers.
They’ll gain 500 to 600 new followers in 48 hours after sending out that you know that message when most days they might only gain 100. So they, they picked up 3, 4, 500 new followers. They’re super happy. They don’t care if they’re other affiliates or not. Like, they’re, they’re stoked. So send out promo strategies, send out tips, share industry news. Now this is another reason why you should keep up on it. If TikTok. You know, imagine teaching your affiliates in late 2000 how to take advantage of TikTok. What, what percentage of your sales today would be coming from TikTok? If again, if it’s relevant to the industry, 10%, 15%, you’d have been a genius. I missed out on that.
I will admit that. I completely missed out on that. And I keep up with the industry better than 99.9% of people. It’s what I do for a living. I missed out on educating my affiliates about TikTok in 2000. I didn’t educate them, I don’t think. I think I did a podcast episode on it in mid to late 2001. I’m better late than never. But I, I can promise you, missing out on that trend probably personally cost me 25 to $100,000. Easily. So don’t do that if you can avoid it. And then, you know, just have multiple channels. Again, listen to the episode.
But you want a Facebook group or some sort of a social media presence. You want, you know, a Slack group or something like that. You want email. You want to be doing everything that you can. All right, the final challenge, the G here is getting overwhelmed, managing a high volume of affiliates. So you, like, growth is great until you are drowning in emails from affiliates. And I’ve been there. I’ve talked about this, that episode where I talked about growing the program from 15 to 325 million a year.
I mean, when we hit Q4, really specifically post, you know, November 15, like the week before Thanksgiving through December 22, I got three to 500 emails a day and probably 30 to 40 texts a day. And then we had. At that time, we had not a Facebook group, but I forget the name of the company, but it was like another social.
Not social media, but it’s like Mighty Networks, but before Mighty Networks, I can’t think of the name of it, but we had a group for affiliates, you know, and keeping up with the comments in there, I mean, we’re talking, you know, again, over 200 comments a day now. I utilized my VA to categorize the emails. So how we did it, in case you’re wondering, and we’ll talk about this. Well, let me get to this. I’ll get to the solutions here in a second. But the problem is real. And this is why some programs scale smoothly and consistently, while others, they hit that wall.
And I saw this happen. I’ll name the company, but I saw this happen with Click funnels in the 2019 to, like, 2021 range. Their support was terrible and it was all over the place, like, how bad their support was. And here’s the thing I told our team, despite the fact that the support was terrible and things weren’t working a lot, I said, they’re going through a growth spurt and it is a painful period of time.
I have been there with previous companies of mine where we are growing so fast that support can’t keep up with it. And this happens, and we don’t want it to happen because we want to give everybody a good experience, especially our affiliates. And so to avoid that as best as possible when we got to those really busy times and as we grew our affiliate programs, number one, I’ll walk you through three things here, how to work through this.
Number one, your affiliate onboarding and creating tools for them like automated emails becomes very Important, if you onboard an affiliate properly, they’re less likely to ask stupid questions later, like, where’s my link? How do I log in? No, they already know how to log in, that you onboarded them. Right. The second thing is you can implement a tiered support system. I have never done this, but I know people who have where like the top affiliates, roughly, you know, the top 99% of all sales, they get VIP access so they can email the affiliate manager.
They can, you know, do all those things. And the others, you know, they kind of get like an FAQ or help help doc or whatever knowledge base type thing. Let me share how I’ve done it is what I’ve done is when let’s say an affiliate emails. When an affiliate emails, my VA categorizes that email into, well, a category, Puts it into a category. Okay, this person’s just asking how they log in. He can help them with their login. Here’s how you log in. That’s a pretty copy and paste email. The second thing would be. So like anything like that, how do I log in? Where do I find graphics?
What’s the date of the promo? Next week? So in those days where you get like 500 emails, 450 of those would be categorized emails, login. What’s the date? When does this end? What’s the promo code? You know, what’s my link? Did this sale come through? Things like that, they’re just, I mean, it’s basic stuff. Does not require me to even touch those of the remaining 50. That’s a pretty accurate representation. Usually it’s about, you know, 10% of the remaining 10%. We’ll call it 50 in this case. He would sometimes know how to handle. Maybe there were two questions. He was like, number one, how do I log in?
Number two, I’m thinking about doing a TikTok video, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he doesn’t know how to answer that question. So what he will make the decision of is, I know how to answer the first question. And he’ll write that out and then he’ll leave it in the inbox for me. Or he’ll shoot me a message and say, hey, they’re asking this question, is this the right response about, you know how to do the TikTok video? And he’ll give it his best stabilization. Maybe it’s copied and pasted from our faq. Maybe it’s copied and pasted.
He’s like, I remember Matt did a blog post about that or something, and I say, yes, now he’s learned that’s the proper response to that question. Or he answers it incorrectly, I teach him how to answer it. And now he knows how to answer that question if it’s asked again. And so that 50 becomes the next day becomes 49 because he knows how to answer one of the emails that comes in. And the next day becomes 46 because he’s learned how to answer three more.
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And then eventually by the following Q4, when we’re super busy, we get 500 emails on a day, but only about 15 or 20 end up on my plate. And they are genuinely unique questions or like biz dev questions or questions where, you know, this is an affiliate who’s asking a question and he’s pretty sure he knows how to answer, but there’s a little bit of nuance. And also that affiliate generated $482,000 in sales this year. So he doesn’t want to mess up, so he leaves it for me. And so he goes through a quick three stop or three step process.
Number one, do I know how to answer the question? Is it a pretty categorized? Number two, if not, am I pretty confident in my ability? Number three, what’s the size of the affiliate? This affiliate has been around for a year and a half and they’ve done one sale. He’ll take his chances on getting the wrong answer, even though he’s probably right 99.8% of the time. So that’s how we’ve solved that. And the same is true with social media comments.
I don’t look at the social media feed. He does. He looks at it and then he says, here’s a question I know how to answer. I’ll answer, here’s a question I don’t know how to answer. Hey, Matt, here’s the question, here’s the link. Do you want to tell me how to answer or do you want to go post and I’ll go, you know, do one or the other? So it takes what seems like. It seems like I work 18, 20 hours a day during those busy seasons and really not working much more than normal.
A little bit, but not significantly. And so because my VA team is also international, it also seems like I don’t sleep, which is really cool. So again, the challenge is small affiliate base, small affiliate base. We’re going to overcome that by consistent, constant affiliate recruitment, diversifying your affiliate base, creating those incentives for affiliates. C. Complicated affiliate programs. We got too many rules, barriers to entry. Let’s keep things simple, make it easy to sign up. Clear communication. Number three, affiliate fatigue and drop off. Let’s update our promo materials. Let’s Keep things exciting with new contests and product launches, regular recognition and appreciation.
Number four, the low conversion rates, the L. We got to solve that by optimizing things. Basically our sales page, our checkout flow, our lead pages, affiliate training. Number five, the I ignoring those industry trends and innovations, stay on top of them. Sign up for competitor programs. If signing up for hundreds of affiliate programs intimidates you, go sign up for 20, 20 or 30. It’s not going to, trust me, you’re not going to spend that much time. You’re spend five minutes a day studying them and you should be doing that.
Number six, the n not knowing what to communicate to affiliates. Go listen to that episode. Go listen to the episode all about that. And number seven, getting overwhelmed, managing a high volume of affiliates. Again. How do you manage those? Just re listen to that whole section because I don’t think I’ve ever shared that before. And I’m telling you that it has been a lifesaver for me because our service and our support for our affiliates is so good and yet I don’t have to work an astronomical amount of time. So the biggest lesson here, guys, is that scaling isn’t. It’s not just adding affiliates. It’s not just adding a lot more affiliates.
That is a part of it. That’s why we started with that. You’ve got to improve those systems. That’s why we ended with a very system systemic thing. You know, you cannot handle more affiliates if you don’t have those systems in place. So constantly review your systems every 10 to 20% growth, whether it be number of affiliates or sales. Analyze your systems. Is this still working? Do we need to improve this? So for today, number one, I want you to pick one challenge from today and implement a fix this week. Just, just pick one of the challenges and start working on it this week and the next and stay with that for, you know, six to eight weeks. Number two, stay engaged with affiliates.
Remember we talked about this. Treat them like partners, not just promoters. And third, reach out with your biggest scaling challenge. Which of these seven are you going to implement? I would love to hear from you. You can text me at 260-217-4619. What’s your biggest takeaway and what are you going to do to implement what we talked about in this episode? Right away. So again, 260-217-4619, look forward to hearing from you and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. So make sure if you haven’t yet, you hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. Going to be a good one.
I’ll see you then.