The Affiliate Donut

by Matt McWilliams | Jan 31, 2022 | Affiliate Marketing, Podcast

This will probably be Homer Simpson’s favorite podcast episode ever because today we’re talking about the Affiliate Donut. What is the Affiliate Donut? You’ll just have to listen to find out!

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3 Lessons from a Hater Affiliate Marketing is a Butt Sniffing Monkey

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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy

What & How to Communicate to Your Affiliates

How to Use Leaderboards to Find Affiliates

How to Onboard Affiliates the Right Way

How to Sell Without Sounding Like a Used Car Salesman

How to Start 2022 Off the Right Way

2022 Affiliate Marketing Predictions

The Affiliate Donut

This is probably going to be Homer Simpson’s favorite podcast episode ever because today we’re talking about the affiliate donut. What the heck is the affiliate donut? Well, you just have to listen to find out.

So I get asked a lot about why would I promote other products? Like doesn’t that distract my audience? Why would I promote someone else’s stuff? When I have so many products on my own? I mean, just off the top of my head, I think about imagine if you’re known for one or two products, you don’t want to distract from those. But we have dozens of products off the top of my head and I’m going to forget half the stuff we have. I know we have Affiliate Insider Monthly, we have No Product No Problem, Find Affiliates Now, 7-Figure Affiliate Launch, The Affiliate Code, 10K in 10 weeks, List Launch Academy, List Launch Challenge. We have some of our mini-courses like our promo prep mini-course, Finding Affiliate Programs mini-courses. I mean, the list really just goes on and on and we’ve got a Copywriting mini-course, just specifically for affiliate marketers, we’ve got our Ultimate Affiliate Swipe File. Like the list goes on and on.

I am positive that I could promote a product every, I don’t know if I could pull off two weeks if I don’t think we have 26, but I could probably promote something every three weeks for a year and never promote the same thing twice. How can I have all those products and then still promote other companies, other products? Doesn’t that? Isn’t that a distraction? Isn’t my audience going to be like, well, “I thought you were all about this or that.” And I’ve shared these analogies because I like to create these vivid pictures in people’s minds of affiliate marketing and the analogies that I can come up with them.

One of the analogies that I came up with a while back I talked about this about 17, 18 episodes ago was I did a podcast on lessons from a hater. And so I talked about the butt-sniffing monkey, and I shared how this guy, you know, I did a training for Jeff Walker’s affiliates and they went on to have their second-best launch ever which is amazing. And this guy was like, “I can’t believe you let this guy, he’s talking about butt-sniffing monkey, he is so unprofessional.” And I was like, you know, okay, whatever. And the thing is, the example is basically talking about there was this video of a monkey that falls out of a tree. Because he smells this butt, you know, this whole thing. Right?

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In college, we didn’t have social media. We didn’t have emails. So we didn’t know how like how do you get this thing from one person to another? So we just kept going around and going, come here, come here, come here. You gotta see this. And the lesson of course was, and you can go back and listen to that episode is that’s all affiliate marketing is here’s this product, here’s this thing. It’s so good. You got to see it. And you’re excited to share something.

Well, another analogy that I’ve talked about, and I shared this with a client that today, and as far as I know, I haven’t shared this as a podcast episode. So if I have, oops, well, you know, to repeat 500 episodes ago or something is this affiliate donut concept.

And I was telling him like trying to get him to wrap his head around why he should be promoting affiliate offers. And I just said, okay, just picture this donut, all its glory, right? The glaze, the sprinkles. So think about your products and your services. Those are the hole right in the middle of that donut. This is your core offer.

These are the things that you are an expert on. You know, you’re the fitness trainer and you know how to get people in shape, right? You’re the accountant who knows how to do accounting. You’re the expert on growing tomatoes, hydroponically or whatever it is, right? This is the donut. This little part would be, if you think about it, just surface area wise, if you put a donut on a table and then measure the surface area, that donut is maybe 10, 20% on the high end, but the sprinkles all over this surface area of the donut, these are all the things that you’re not an expert at. You’re not the leader at, you’re not known for, but your audience needs to know. They need to learn. They need to buy, they need them to do something. They might even need them to do something that accomplishes the thing that you teach, for example.

This allows you to better serve your audience. Promoting affiliate offers, serves your audience by filling in the gaps in your own product offerings.

You know, if you have, as you mentioned a fitness trainer, right? If you’re a fitness trainer, you teach people how to eat, right, how to exercise. You have products, you’ve got a nutrition product and some different levels of exercise, but you’ve got a beginner and intermediate-advanced, maybe one for seniors, one for women, one for men, one that puts on more muscle. One that is about losing weight and whatever you get those. Those are your core offers.

But if your audience is coming to you for help on those things, they also need time management. They need stress relief. They need to know how to set goals. They need productivity, help. They need natural healing. You’re not an expert on any of those. You don’t want to be the expert on any of those. You have no plans on offering products in those areas anytime soon, those are the donut. Those are the sprinkles in the donut. So how do you best serve your audience? Option one is, to do nothing. Offer nothing in those areas from you or from affiliates.

And you basically are saying, screw your audience. I don’t care that you want to know stress relief. I don’t care that you want to know time management. I don’t care. If you want to set goals, be more productive or learn how to heal naturally. I’m not going to offer you anything. Or you promote products that fill those gaps. You promote the sprinkles.

If you’re a financial coach, we teach people how to manage their money, how to invest. But the thing is, your audience also wants to know leadership, how to be a better leader. They want to know how to start a business, how to be an entrepreneur, how to find work. They love, they also need productivity and goal setting. Like it’s kind of funny. Those are almost universal things, right? Productivity and goal setting.

Those are the donut. Those are the sprinkles, little leadership here, entrepreneurs stuff here. You know, Dan, Miller’s 48 days to the work you love here. Productivity, you know, from somebody like Robby Miles, goal-setting from Michael Hyatt or whoever, right? Those are the donut. Assuming you don’t want to teach on those subjects. How can you best serve your audience by recommending other products that teach those subjects? And then you make money. You make affiliate income. You know, if you think about it, you only make money from the whole and nothing from the sprinkles, that’s limiting your income to that’s a win-win.

And the thing is like using these as examples, think about people who have more time because they’re more productive at work. So instead of working 8:30 to 5:30 every day, they go to working nine to five. So they, they go to work in a little bit less. If they work 45 minutes less, the day that does It gives them more time to exercise. Maybe they’re only exercising a half hour. Now they can exercise an hour and they have 15 minutes to cook better food. That’s healthier for them. So they’re going to buy your fitness course because, well, I have more time. I’m not going to buy that. Dude’s fitness course. I only got 20 minutes for a workout every day. I don’t need a course. I just need to run in place for 20 minutes. Do a few pushups. I’m good. No, I’ve got time now. Oh, I have an extra half hour, a day to cook, right? I better buy a course that teaches me or a book that teaches me how to cook better.

They’re gonna buy more of your stuff. People who are better at setting goals, they’re going to seek out financial counseling to help them reach those goals. We have a goal that is a purely financial goal that cannot happen on our income from our business alone. More than likely there’s going to be some investment involved. And so we already do like, traditional investing. We have a, you know, it’s called the SEP self-employment pension. We’ve got IRAs and things like that. We’ve got a very diverse portfolio and all that stuff, but this particular goal required some next-level stuff that I don’t know anything about. So what did we do? We went and got a financial counselor, but what if I didn’t have that goal? Now, this happened on my own, but what if I didn’t have that goal, then I never would have sought the help of the financial counselor. You know, the fitness trainer back to that one. If they set goals to lose 20 pounds, now they’re going to be more serious than they’re going to buy your stuff, to help them.

In other words, this is the key, your affiliate recommendations, the sprinkles help grow the whole. They help your sales not hurt them. They don’t distract your audience. In fact, they can move them towards buying your products. You know, we have a client who’s in the parenting space. She specifically helps parents of kids who have learning disabilities.

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Guess what? Most parents have two or more kids, one of them has a learning disability, the others don’t. So what about their kids that don’t have a learning disability? How do they help them? She’s not an expert on that. That’s the sprinkles. Like this is still within, under the niche of parenting. This isn’t even getting slightly outside the niche.

What about the kids that have learning disabilities, but want to be entrepreneurs? She’s not an entrepreneur expert necessarily, so she can promote something as an affiliate for them. What about specific things within her? You know, there’s like this thing, and this is ADHD. There’s autism spectrum. There’s, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Right? Those are all in some cases the sprinkles.

I’ve got another client who’s in a very specific she’s focused on specifically on, I don’t know. I’ll just say it. People with what’s gluten intolerance have one Celiac disease. That’s her thing. That’s all she focuses on. But what about fitness? What about other parts of the diet? You know, you have celiac disease. Don’t eat gluten, but what about the other parts? Right? Like I said, what about getting in better shape? How do you get certain things done if you got celiacs, but you’re an athlete, things like that, right? Those are the sprinkles for her.

Got another client. Who’s all about public speaking. Tricia Brouk, what about building your platform? What about growing your email list? What about selling something on the back end? What about creating a product becoming the expert or growing on social media? Those are all sprinkles. She promotes others who teach those things. I’m not a membership expert, but Stu McLaren is. Stu is one of my sprinkles because I know the importance of recurring revenue.

I know the importance of membership. It’s why we created Affiliate Insider Monthly too, for one to serve our audience. But two, it creates recurring revenue for us. I’m not an expert on publishing books, but do you know who is? Chad Allen? And who’s an expert on writing a book Chandler Bolt. And if you want to self-publish Chandler Bolt, you want to get a contract, you know, a book contract like we did with Benbella. You know, Chad was a huge help. I learned from Chad and went out and got wrote the book proposal, got an agent. And we had got a contract with my dream publisher. Turn your passions into profits coming out January 2023, by the way, I see man... I got my dream publisher on that book because I followed what Chad taught so I can highly recommend him. He’s a sprinkle. I’m not an expert on copywriting.

We have a mini-course that sells for less than a hundred bucks on copywriting for affiliates. But if you want to get really, really good at copywriting Ray Edwards, he’s one of my sprinkles. Goal-setting Michael Hyatt. All of these things are my sprinkles. So that’s what you picture. You got your core offerings. That’s the whole, the sprinkles. Oh, the glorious.

Those are your affiliate offers. They are not a distraction. They’re not going to hurt your sales. In fact, if you do it right, they will, more than likely help your sales and provide you a lot of income in the meantime, from those affiliate offers. So my call to action to you, go out there and promote something, find a sprinkle, just one sprinkle in the next 60 days and promote it like crazy and serve your audience. Make a little bit of money, have some fun doing it. And yeah, it’s gonna help that whole get bigger over time with your own offerings.

So make sure you hit subscribe and share. You don’t want to miss the next episode. I’ve got a three-part series coming up on affiliate marketing for authors. I’m deep in book mode. Like I said earlier, my book, turn your passions into profits.

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It’s coming out in January 2023, coming out. Again, my dream publisher. BenBella, who’s published like half the books that are on my bookshelf. And so I’m excited because in this three-part series, we’re going to talk about number one, how to find affiliates for a book launch or really any launch for that matter. But we’re going to hone in on some specific nuances with book launches.

We’re going to talk about how to run an affiliate book launch. And then we’re going to talk about how to use affiliate marketing in a book. So if you have any interest in writing a book and launching a book, these next three episodes are for you. So make sure you hit subscribe, come back for those episodes. I’ll see you then.