Everybody makes mistakes. That’s why they put erasers on pencils. But some mistakes have a greater impact than others. Especially when it comes to using social media to promote your affiliate marketing program. These are mistakes that COULD COST YOU MONEY! If you want to learn from the mistakes I have helped countless others avoid and saved them a fortune!
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Transcript
Hey, everybody, everybody makes mistakes. We all understand that. That as my good friend, Gary Black says, that’s why they put erasers on pencils, but some mistakes have a greater impact than others, especially when it comes to using social media, especially when it comes to using social media, to promote affiliate offers. These are mistakes that are amplified.
They can cost you money. They can cost you a lot of money. So if you want to learn to avoid the mistakes that I’ve seen so many people make, right? I mean, I’ve worked with over 300,000 affiliates. I’ve seen so many people make these mistakes. If you want to learn how to avoid those, then you’re in the right place today.
This could possibly save you a fortune. Now, I’m not sure if you guys have heard the social media is kind of a big deal. It’s, it’s something that’s now worth, you know, and just in the affiliate marketing world, you know, as much as 30 to 35% of all affiliate marketing revenue goes through social media and that’s directly not even indirectly where you’re, you know, you’re getting somebody to join your list. And then using that, the other thing about social media is it’s evolving. It’s evolving like every five minutes. You know, there’s a new network every three months. And as social media has grown in popularity and impact. So have the number of mistakes that entrepreneurs make, especially when they’re promoting affiliate offers.
So today I’m sharing the top 10 mistakes that affiliates make on social media. I have purposely kept them network neutral. All right. So because the next week there’s going to be a new network and then six months from now, there’s gonna be a new network. And so I want this lesson to be sitting where it’s like, well, that doesn’t apply to, you know, I mean, can you imagine before Tik TOK, people would say, there’s going to be a social media network called Tik TOK. I mean, Facebook, Twitter, what do these things even mean? You know, it’s like, they don’t mean anything, right?
Snapchat, you know, like seriously, if you think, if you know, it’s funny, if it’s better, if you use those words in like an old man, snap chat, like, what are you, what is this? Why are people on there chatting and snapping, you know, like what, what is that right? People are going to evolve. So I want to keep these network neutral so that they apply four years from now.
Before we get started, just want to say, Hey, Luke, I see you there. Hey and welcome, Alan. Good to see you again, bud. Hey, good to be here, Matt. And you’re digging out of the snow. You said Yeah. Back in the studio this week and we’re, we’re experiencing snowpocalypse 2022. I’m looking right outside the studio right now.
So my studio is like about four feet underground. You know, it’s in a, it’s down in our lowest level, about four feet underground, about six feet above ground. So mostly, mostly above ground technically, but it’s on eye level with, you can just picture our property. We have a Creek that runs through our property. I joke with people, we actually own land on the other side creek that I’ve never even stepped foot on. So there’s the Creek. Well, they, they built this part up right here because I’m technically, you know,
I literally am at like creek level, you know, if you think about the ground and then it drops down, but I’m at like Creek level. So they built this part up. And so I’m like, eye level with that. And it’s, it’s a solid nine to 10 inches deep right there. And it’s well, probably considerably. In fact, when I went out and took the dog out this morning and it was about that deep and it’s just still coming down hard in the front yard.
So we were down to the last, like four or five hours of it. But it’s funny, the walkway or our walkway from our driveway to our house. It’s like walking into a gladiator arena right now. It’s like either side’s already about that high in, you know, in snow. And, and like, you know, when we, for like the first day when we went out there and shoveled it, you know, I’m all like, I’m going to throw the snow off, you know, and get it out of the way. Earlier today, I’m like just barely moving. And I’m just like, I’m done with this. I’m tired. I’m sore. I haven’t even, I haven’t even been in the gym the last two days.
Cause that’s been my workout. You don’t need it. You don’t need a gym when you’re shoveling snow. So that’s a, you work muscles, you don’t work. So it’s like arms lower back, abs little bit of legs, definitely shoulders. You know? I’m like, what am I not working, you know, chest muscle, that’s about all, I’m not working out. We’re in shoveling snow. It’s a beast. And yeah, well guys, I’m so excited today. We’re talking about the top 10 affiliate marketing mistakes on social media.
If you know anybody who’s doing social media promotions, them on social are doing affiliate promotions on social media, hit that share button, you know, ironically share it on social media, share, you know, send them a share with your friends, your page, whatever. Get the word out about this. Yeah, it is definitely. I see Angie, you know, 69. Yeah. We went through and we were down to Florida two weeks ago and it was chilly for Florida. Yeah, we endured it. It was seriously. We spoke last Thursday. I was at the beach still and it was like 56, 57 out. It was beautiful day. And this was a North Carolina Topsail island. Beautiful. Next day it did snow.
Now it’s the type of snow that you wake up. And by eight 30, there was a half an inch. And by 11 it was gone. That’s My kind of snow. Yeah. Alright. So mistake number one, the top 10 social media mistakes to avoid as an affiliate mistake. Number one, not promoting affiliate offers at all. We got to start there. You know, I just, yeah. It’s like, well, duh Matt, you know, I’m already promoting stuff, that doesn’t apply to me. Understood. Hopefully a little bit of what I’ll share here will help you. But just not promoting affiliate offers at all, having no, literally no affiliate offers nothing on your social media. That’s promoting affiliate offers of any kind paid free. We’ll talk about those of any kind.
And the thing is you have to think of social media as a valuable tool in your marketing toolbox. You need to use it. You know, there’s no disputing that when it comes to affiliate success, email list is king. Email is king, but social media is maybe like the, you know, prince, you know, it’s a powerful tool. So the solution is promote more on social media, promote some affiliate offers on social media. There’s tons of ways you can do that.
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You can promote evergreen offers. You can promote launches, you can promote free things. We’ll talk about that. Paid things doesn’t matter. Discounts, all those kinds of things you can promote just on a regular schedule. All of those things, our studies have found that an email subscribers worth anywhere from 50 to 100 times or 50, I’m sorry, five to 50 times more than a social media follower, but there are some strategies you can use to make social media a huge part. And that’s part of what we’re going to talk about today. When we talk about these mistakes, we’re going to talk about the solution, the right thing to do. So I’m going to share more about this later, but you know, promote at least four affiliate offers daily on Twitter, about every six hours.
That’s not too much. If tweeting enough, at least twice every week on Facebook, once every couple of weeks on Instagram, and I’m going to share more about a promo plan later and kind of what my cycle looks like, it’s worked for us, but the idea is just to do some, you know, so just don’t not do nothing. It’s like what’s a triple negative as a triple negative, a positive or a negative still. I don’t know, Did something when you not, don’t not do Not do nothing about anything or nothing. And you lost me. Ain’t doing nothing. The second, and this is like the total flip side is only promoting affiliate offers or only promoting your own offers on, on social media. There’s nothing worse than going to a social media feed. And everything’s a promotion. You know, that’s not social media. We need to do it. Sometimes people are following you. They want your recommendations on products. So do some of it just don’t make it everything. And so to be clear, you’ve got to be selective in what you promote on social media.
You should be selective in general. You know, the first rule of affiliate marketing is don’t promote crap. Don’t promote something that you wouldn’t recommend to your friends, your mom, even if you weren’t making an affiliate commission. So don’t make every post a sales pitch. I typically, what I like to follow is what we call the 10 to one rule. Is there anything scientific about this? Just to be clear, you know, a lot of people say you need to do the 10 to One rule. It’s been proven that’s the right. No, it hasn’t. If you didn’t the nine to one rule, it would probably work just as good. This isn’t about falling. Oh, it has to be every 10th one.
Really it’s every 11th one because it’s 10 to one. You do 10 non-promotional posts and then one promotional post. Now again, is that perfectly scientific? No. I said earlier that you should post twice a week on Facebook, on affiliate offer. Most people, social media experts recommend about 24 Facebook posts a week, about four day, you know, on average, about three and a half a day for week, you know? And again, if you did 25, is that going to break the algorithm? No. All right. Well, it’s two out of 25, a 10 to one rule. Not exactly. It’s more like the 12 to one rule oh no.
What if you did three a week, would it, it’s not going to mess it up, but I just like to tell people like, you know, if you need something to follow, follow the 10 to one rule, 10 non promotional posts for every one, promotional posts focus more on promoting the free offers and opt-ins rather than direct selling. You know, I love this quote from pat Flynn. I wanna make sure I get this right. He said selling to people through social media is like going to a party, meeting someone for the first time and then saying, Hey, do you want to buy this Tupperware? Those are the people that we then go, I got to go to the bathroom and then we go like this, the whole rest of the party, or are they okay? I’m going to go over here. I want to talk to these people. I’m going to go to this room. I want to get as far away from that person as possible.
So focus on the free offers like webinars, video series, a free PDF downloads, checklists reports, cheat sheets, things like that. These will lead the sales. It’s just that you’re promoting something free. Secondly, promote a focus on deals and low ticket offers. Most of your promos on social media should be free. You can also promote deals and low ticket offers. So a deal, you know, it’s like, especially when it’s a flash sale or something like that is any kind of limited time thing, that’s a percentage or dollar off. Alright. So coupons and things like that. Those work on social media really well, in fact. Now I’m not recommending that unless you run a deal feed and there are accounts like that, where you only follow them to get a deal, you only follow them for the latest coupon or coupon code. Those you can totally get away with.
But if that’s not your feed, if you’re not like a hundred percent that, then you should probably only be like two or 3% that it’s feast or famine with that. There really is no in between again, you know, five, it probably as high as 5% or it’s a hundred percent, all right. Low ticket items, books, you know, things that cost seven bucks, 10 bucks, five to 25 bucks. You know, anything in that range, those work on social media and they lead to a funnel. So low ticket funnel starters are good things to promote on social media well.
Mistake number three is not having a plan. All right. So we’re just flying blind. The Tinder one rule is a plan. Now, does it mean that you have to go 10 in a row? Non-promotional then one no. And then 10 and then one and then 10 and then one, no, it’s a general rule over the course of say a hundred posts. You probably want about 92 of them to be non-promotional and maybe eight to be promotional roughly.
But if you went 90 10, that’s fine. And it’s not about like maybe, you know, for a six hour period, could you do three posts that are about a product? You maybe it’s a deadline, could you absolutely. And then you back off for a couple of days, maybe only do one or none. The point is not just to go Willy nilly about it. I’m going to just promote when I feel like it and not promote when I don’t feel like it. And I mean, you can work in some evergreen stuff into your automation. We’ll talk about that in a moment. The solution here is just create a plan, stick to it long enough to find out what works. I’m as guilty of this as anybody. I, by nature, I’m not a planner.
If you know the disc profile, you know, Allen, and by the way, Christopher, if you know, the, the disc profile, you know, the D I S C the C is the planner, the CS, the one who has a spreadsheet for everything. Even they have a spreadsheet for what underwear they’re going to wear each day of the week, actually each day of the month, a week, wouldn’t be long enough. They have that, which reminds me, I need to ask my wife to get the laundry out of the washer. Cause I don’t have time to do it, But you don’t have a spreadsheet for them. Nope. Nope. I don’t. Cause that’s not me. That’s the high C I’m the high D and the high I.
I am like not the planner type, but I’ve learned to at least create a framework for posting frequency. So we have a plan. So what mine looks like, you know, typically is like, I block the day into, into segments, you know, roughly six hour segments. And in like that first six hour segment, there’ll be like a blog post and some shares of other people’s content and one affiliate promotion.
So we’ll do you know, some other people’s content we’ll do like a blog post or two, maybe a podcast episode or a video, depending upon if we have a live coming up, which we always typically do. We start promoting those on Mondays, we’ll start, you know, working those in. Then in the second six hour block, we’ll kind of repeat that maybe instead of like promoting one of my free offers, maybe I’ll promote a paid offer of mine. Maybe I’ll promote a paid affiliate offer in the next six hour block, we’ll promote, you know, same kind thing. We’ll promote a blog poster to a podcast or to maybe an upcoming lesson. And then maybe we’ll look for, you know, a free, like a webinar, an webinar, or my webinar we’ll promote that or both, you know?
And then the last six hours we’ll do, you know, same kind of thing. I forgot about one thing that will work in there is like some images, some quotes, things like that as well, just good shareable content, but then we’re work in again some other people’s content, you know, just free content, not, not even not affiliate stuff at all, but then maybe we’ll promote a book, whether it be my book or somebody else’s book or some sort of low ticket offer. So again, there’s roughly, you know, four to six affiliate promotions throughout the day at different times, just depending upon.
And that’s Twitter, just for example, you know, with Facebook do about three or four posts a day. And typically we just rotate through those. And so again, about every 10th, 11th, one ends up being some sort of an affiliate promotion, whether it be a webinar, a book, a free entry point, you know, a trial. You know, those work great too trials. If it’s a software, some sort of monthly recurring thing because you’re offering value to your audience.
So it varies a little bit from day to day, but you get the idea like just have some sort of a plan, create some guidelines and follow them. That’s really what we’re saying there with that one. Mistake number four is not using images. I’m just not saying you have to use images on every post, but you know, just having these bland posts, they’re not eye catching. My friend, Jeff Bullas. I found a quote on his blog and he said images on Twitter cause tweets, Alan, could you put this up on the screen? I just want people in case I mess this up. Images on Twitter, cause tweets to take up more space in the feed and help drive engagement.
Tweets that include an image, have a 200% more engagement than tweets without images. Right? Think about that. That’s huge. They draw attention 200% more engagement that’s that’s where my friend Jeff Bullis there. That’s why we always offer our affiliates different sized images for each social media network. So right now, as we’re recording this, the big ones, you know, would be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, obviously like I’m forgetting one, LinkedIn, you know those typically with our clients, those are going to be the five big ones. And we’ll include images for each of those. If you, as an affiliate are promoting a, an offer that doesn’t have images, just ask for them, ask for them.
Create them! That’s a pretty big thing. David dang talked about this insider profile inside of affiliate insider monthly. And by the way, if you want to get not free, but speaking of trials, you want to get a trial of affiliate, insider monthly for a dollar, literally $1 you can join right now and get all of February’s content. All of March’s content. I think if you join right now, right now, like before tomorrow we haven’t locked down January’s yet, so you’ll actually get access to January’s too. I’m pretty sure that’s not going to happen. Definitely not after tomorrow, but maybe even not after day.
I don’t know when we’re actually officially locking January’s content, but if we have, I don’t think we have already, cause I keyed into it this morning when I had to log in to check something else, but just go to Mattmcwilliams.com/aimtrial, aim, trial, and you can get in there if you do that and you message me. Okay. So if you, if you join affiliate insider monthly and you send an instant message to me on Facebook or email me at Matt at Mattmcwilliams.com.
I’ll hook you up with the interview that I did with David dang inside of there. Cause that’s from like a year ago. And he talks about how the images lift interaction in the hundreds of percent. This is a guy, all of his affiliate revenue. And he’s a, I mean, he was a hard number to affiliate for no product, no problem a few years ago.
And he’s been consistently one of the top 10 affiliates in numerous launches. It’s all from social media. So when I see that, when I see somebody who’s, I mean, built a very small list, which we’ll talk about building your list here in a little bit, but he’s about the very small list. So he’s done all this on social media. I listened to him and he was like, no, you like, it’s very much all about the image. So don’t be basic. Use those images in your social media posts.
Mistake number five is using your full affiliate link. So this is your long ugly affiliate link, right? So like my example that always using this as an example that I love because it’s so ridiculous. Sometimes they’re not this ridiculous. My affiliate link for ConvertKit I’m not joking is HTTPS colon Ford Salesforce. Okay. That’s always going to be the right app app dot convert kit.com forward slash users Ford slash signup question mark plan equals free dash limited ampersand, L M R E F equals. And then my affiliate ID, which is six letters, you know, numbers and letters.
It’s it’s like, it’s insane. It’s long, it’s complicated. It screams scam. It looks scammy. You know, now the shortened version on the other hand is very simple though, by the way, if you want to go check out convert kits, speaking of free trials and affiliate offers go, if you need to start an email list or you’re tired of your email list provider, go try out ConvertKit. It’s very simple. Mattmcwilliams.com/convertkit. If you can spell the word convert and the word kit, that’s all you need to know. If you can’t spell the words, convert and kit, you’re probably not a good candidate for convert kit, to be honest with you.
So it’s very simple. Mattmcwilliams.com/convert kit. So don’t use the full URL. When you go to social media, take a fricking second to go use a plugin like pretty link don’t don’t use Bitly. There’s nothing. I have nothing again. Don’t use the built-in like we use Edgar meet Edgar Mattmcwilliams.com/Edgar. And if again, if you can’t spell Edgar you’re in trouble.
My point is Edgar has a built-in URL shortener, but I think it’s like ed.gr and then forward slash a bunch of random letters and stuff it’s kind of ugly too, versus Mattmcwilliams.com/Edgar, which one looks less scammy. So I use pretty link. There are, things you can set up like custom URLs. Like we have, I think it’s Mattmick.com or Mattmick.us. And we use that sometimes for our pretty links, Matt, mick.us. But I just, it’s harder for me to remember that versus my own, you know, just Mattmcwilliams.com. So when we really need to shorten a URL and save the whatever the iliums and then the C you know, we saved like nine characters and we really need to save a few characters.
We use the Mattmic.us domain, but most of the time we just use Mattmcwilliams.com and it makes it easier for me. Cause I can remember most of those URLs. So make sure you’re not using that full URL mistake. Number six is not following trends, right? Not trend jacking. All right. The turn jacking is I forget what that w what’s the word what’s it called? When you take two words and combine them, is that an amalgamation, something like that. There’s a term for that. When you take two words and combine them to make a new word and I can’t for the life of me, I cannot remember what it is. But trend jacking is basically where you take a trend and you hijack it.
So it’s already trending in you jump in using that typically a hashtag, and you now use it for your own purposes in the farriers or otherwise. Right? I remember, I think it was back in 2016, the kind of at the height of Downton Abbey. And it was on a Sunday night whenever time Downton Abbey came on and I had a post that I’d written like four months before, based on an episode, we were not watching Downton Abbey live, but I knew when it would come on.
And I had a post about an episode from like the previous season. I still remember it was the Mosley was character’s name. And he was out there complaining about like his job or something. And his dad came out and he was like, you know, if you want to be successful, you got to find, you know, you got to work at your job. You got to discover your purpose and work hard at it. It was basically the message. So I, during the show tweeted out about that, like three times it led to an affiliate offer for Michael Hyatt’s five days to your best year ever.
And according to my tracking, I had more than 1400 hits, 112 opt-ins and two sales. So I had 110 people subscribed to my list too, that didn’t buy another two that did make 218 bucks and they go, wow, Matt, $218. That’s amazing. It took me 90 seconds to do that. I don’t know what the math is on that per hour. Well, that’s roughly, you know, five, $10,000 per hour. It’s a pretty good ROI. It’s a post I’d already written. All I did was during this promotion, this was a limited time promotion. There was only one Sunday that this product was available.
This was a Sunday night, I believe from nine to 10:00 PM Eastern. And so I had tweets go out at like 9 0 5, 9 25. And I don’t know, maybe like a few, you know, after something, I don’t know, three or four tweets make 218 bucks. And you think about that, that’s pretty only, it was just add the hashtag Downton Abbey. Yeah. 1400 hits. So take a look at those trends, take a look at those trends and try, try hijacking them a little bit.
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Alright. Number seven, you know, I kind of just touched on this. I use that to build my list. One of the biggest mistakes I see is not building your own list on social media. So basically doing like David dang now he’s been super successful, but even he said, man, I wish I’d started building my list sooner because instead of having, you know, he’s got millions of social media followers and a list of like 10,000 people. He could have millions of social media followers, and hundreds of thousands of people on his list. He would be making infinitely more money.
So yes, you should be promoting affiliate offers, especially those free offers like we talked about and the small ticket items on social media, but don’t forget to build your own list. All right, your number one source of affiliate revenue will be your email list. For most people, it’s 80 to 95% of their revenue. So make sure you’re building your own list through social media. I shared the strategy with a friend of mine, Clark Cooper, and I’m pretty sure he’s the only person I’ve ever shared this strategy with like that I know of, I mean, maybe I’ve shared it once or twice. It’s kind of like my top secret strategy to grow your list and make affiliate commissions at the same time. And I’m going to share that at the end.
All right. So this, this strategy will help you make more money in the short term and the longterm because you’re growing your list. Pretty cool. So let me, you guys let me know if you’re interested in hearing that and I’ll make sure to share that we wrap up because it’s pretty cool strategy. You basically, it allows you to, to promote on social media, grow your lists, make sales. Now it’s not going to cannibalize your now sales, but also have the list for later in and even future use and some other things.
So if you guys are interested in that, let me know. Just, just say you’re interested and I’ll share that at the end. So mistake number eight, big one here, not replying to people who have questions. You go through the effort. You, I know me like we, we’ve got social media down to a little bit of a science and I have a copywriter now. So I don’t have to do nearly as much of the work, but for me to promote something on social media, I would, I might spend 15 minutes writing, you know, 10 tweets, for example, and 15 minutes writing two or three Facebook posts, that’s a half an hour. And then somebody would reply with a simple question and I would miss it because I wasn’t using the right tools to follow my social media stuff.
Think about that. You spent all that time. It’s like writing a great post or doing your podcast and then not promoting it. We’ve talked about that before. That’s asinine. You should spend five times as much time promoting as you do creating. That’s a general rule of thumb. I’m finding that to be very hard with my book. Cause I’m going to spend about 500 hours creating the book.
I’m not sure that I’m going to spend 2,500 hours promoting it, but that’s neither here nor there. People ask a question and then you’re just silent. When people ask you a question about something you’re promoting, just respond to them. Usually these are simple questions to answer. And the thing I found is the close rates really, really high. Like someone has a question about a product you’re promoting on social media. They ask a question, you answer it. You’ll probably close about 50% of those people, maybe even higher. So don’t, don’t not reply to them. How about that? Don’t not reply, right?
I talked about this a moment ago, but number nine, mistake number nine is not tracking your links in results. And when I said in the Downton Abbey thing, I had, I had four. If I remember correctly, I had 1400 hits, 112 opt-ins two sales. You know how I know that because I used a specific tracking link. That was how I did it. I had a feeling that you don’t always have to do this. I don’t do this with every tweet. But when I like with that one, I used a specific link that tracked. So I knew exactly how many hits there were. And I knew exactly how many opt-ins there were. And I knew exactly how many sales there were. So make sure you’re tracking different links that you use in different places. And look at the results.
Maybe you create one link for email and one link for social, and that’s what you limit it to. Now, if you start having a hunch like man, I think, I think Twitter’s really the thing, you know, but I want to track that then maybe you have a link for Twitter and a link for all other social media link for email Twitter and all of the social media that you promote. So how would you do that? Like with something like, you know, the ConvertKit example, right? Mattmcwilliams.com/convertkit.
If I had four of those, I wouldn’t be able to keep up with it. Like I wouldn’t remember those. Well then I’m going to have one for that. I just say Mattmcwilliams.com/ConvertKit, but then I might have Forward slash convert kit T for Twitter convert kit, E that’d be convert. Kite. Just thought about that. You know, convert kite. I know I have one that’s specifically for my toolbox page, you know, for my resources page, maybe you have one, you know, convert kit, IG convert, kit, FB, something like that you just have. So you can track on the different platforms.
Very simple, right? Cause those links aren’t necessarily that ugly at that point, the convert kite one’s kind of fun. Actually. I could see that working really well. I could see that converting very well. You know, if you, this allows you to notice trends like how I’m spending 20% of my social media time on Twitter, but I’m getting 80% of my results. You know, the old 80, 20, maybe you need to spend a hundred percent of your time on Twitter for the next year. Cause that’s where all the results are. But you only know the results if you actually track them. So don’t make the mistake of not tracking them.
And then mistake number 10 is promoting in a different voice. It might be the number one mistake. I see. Like it’s definitely the most blatant kind of the most. I think it’s the one that more than any others, like using your full link. Okay. Not promoting enough, whatever, not tracking, not trend. Okay. All those are mistakes, but none of them are as, as, as big of a mistake is like promoting in this different voice, right? This different voice, you know, someone who’s typically lighthearted and funny on Twitter, you look at their feed and it’s like 15 posts in a row full of sarcasm and humor. And then as soon as they promote, they’re like a used car salesman.
I talked about this like 10 or 15, 20 episodes ago, I had recorded an episode called how to sell without sounding like a used car salesman. And you know, or they do the game show voice, you know, like the Merv Griffin voice. What the heck is that? Like it’s like the person who, as soon as they start selling, I mean stands out like typing in all caps and typing in all caps is a surefire. No offense, Alan, but typing in all caps is a surefire sign you’re over the age of 60 or you are a political operative. I’ll let some of the people that I have heard of that are over the age of sixty. Yeah, absolutely. I let them know. So don’t yeah. Don’t promote in a different voice in your everyday voice on media. Just people hate that, right?
If you’re normally funny, be funny when you promote something, promote them in a funny way. If you normally promote things, excuse me. If you normally use having like a really weird issue with my throat, Hey buddy. If you normally include silly images or animated gifs, use silly images. If you normally put a hashtag in your tweets, use a hashtag in your promotional posts.
If you normally don’t use a hashtag, if you normally don’t use the hashtag, then what should you do? Right. You to say hi, Say hi. Hi. Let’s see if we can get like there’s Alan say hi Allen. Hey, you can’t see, Are you getting ready to go out? You’re going sledding right now. No, man.
Oh, you’re going to go snow, go do some snow blowing. Cool. Have fun. That sounds like a blast. They’ll be picking you up. Don’t blink. Yeah. So yeah. It’s you know, the, the, the thing here be consistent to your brand and your voice. That’s the big way. Don’t be somebody different when you’re promoting. Don’t be somebody different. Go up. You gotta go help. I’ll be up for a little while. Okay. It’d be like two hours. Actually. I love you. Tell them what he says by everyone. All right.
So then where was I? Oh yeah, just be consistent. That’s the thing. Whenever you are in your regular social media posts, be that way in your promotional posts. All right, buddy. And then bonus mistake here, guys. I’ve got a bonus mistake. Cause this is one. It only applies to a specific part of social media, which is social media paid social media advertising, alright. Big mistake is running ads directly to your affiliate link. All right, So I touched on this earlier when, when I talked about list building, but I want to, I want to go more in depth. Like this is important because most of the networks they don’t, especially with paid advertising, don’t allow direct to affiliate paid advertising. But even if you’re not doing paid, how can you use social media to grow your list and make affiliate sales at the same time?
What you do is you send them to a bridge page, all right. As long as, as long as you aren’t an affiliate for like, you know, you’re not pruning a direct affiliate link, then you send them to a landing page. You send them to a bridge page, send them to a funnel, you send them something similar. Right?
So this is what we shared earlier. You know, as you mentioned, I showed this to the cart Cooper, and you guys said you wanted to hear this. So basically what you do is you set up an ad, you run ads to a special offer, promoting an affiliate offer. And so what we’ll do As let’s say, we’ll use this as an example. Let’s say I’m promoting the book think and grow rich. All right. I know that’s one of your favorites. Allen, one of mine as well. You can tell I’m actually rereading it. I’m almost done with this BMI. This has been my second reading in the last year and a half.
So I’m promoting the book think and grow rich, not the greatest example because if I sell this on Amazon and I make like 42 cents, all right, but just run with me here. This could apply to anything. I can be promoting anything in any niche, but if I’m promoting a book, then I’m going to give away an exclusive offer. When you purchase think and grow rich through my affiliate link, I’m going to create a bonus. All right. So whenever that exclusive thing is in this particular case immediately, I think of, you know, I’ve got a course on mindset with regards to building an online business.
Boom, you know, it’s a $37 mini course. It’s about an hour worth of lessons. I would offer that as an exclusive bonus. Just do what, enter your email address to unlock it. So you enter your email. Now I would say purchase this through my affiliate link, come back into your order number and your email address. And you can unlock those bonuses that now ops, and then to my list, then the thank you page has an offer recap.
So this is all the product details. The bonuses that I’m offering, the bonuses that maybe were, you know, if it was somebody else, if it was a product, because it’s, let’s say it’s a $2,000 course, let’s go a little bit more extreme. So $2,000 course, my ads are going to say exclusive offer on XYZ course. They’re offering these bonuses. I’m offering these bonuses. The bottom has a button that goes to your affiliate link. Okay? So in this particular case, if it’s a higher ticket item, I’m going to say into your email to unlock your bonuses, that then gives them the option to go to the affiliate link, to purchase this. Okay?
If it’s a low ticket item like this, I’m going to give them my affiliate link on the page and say, come back here and enter your order number and email address. So if it’s under like 30 bucks, that’s what I’ll do with ax. I’m not as worried about people taking advantage of it. Quite frankly.
Now this is where it gets real fun. Now here’s what you know, you know the people who clicked the button are likely to buy. They just clicked your affiliate link into their email address. They’ve already entered their email address and then they clicked another button. So you create ads around them. You can target them and you can even create a lookalike audience around them. So if they click that button, you’re able to track it. You actually know who that person is because they gave you their email address.
Now there’s a couple of things you can do with that email address. Number one, you can. And they D if they don’t buy, you can follow up with them. So they clicked your link. 12 hours goes by. They haven’t purchased that product. You compare the two lists. These are both going to be pretty small lists. I mean, unless you’re running a, you know, a $10 million enterprise here for most affiliates, you’ll get 20 or 30 people, you know, maybe 75 will go high and go 75. And you know, 25 of them will have bought. There’s only 50 people. You can do this daily. You can have a VA do it. That’s what I do is just have a VA do it.
That VA just goes in and says, oh, seven people yesterday clicked that button. Two of them bought, boom. Let’s send an email to these five. And we send an email to those five and we say, Hey, Frank, I saw that you clicked through to go purchase, you know, XYZ product, and you didn’t sign up. What questions do you have? That’s all email says, what questions you have, what customer is going to answer as I think how we word it, you can follow up with them.
How cool is that? How else are you going to do that from social media? If you send them directly to your affiliate link, you’ve lost them. But if you do it through this bridge page, you now have their email. Plus long-term you have their email address, right? You have an email list. That’s a great way to fund the email list. Because if you think about this, this would be like I said, the book would be a terrible example. You’re not gonna make enough money.
But if it’s a $2,000 course, Let’s say you spend high-end $10 a click. You make 800 bucks in commissions. Now, normally if you spend 10 bucks, a click, eight bucks, you know, $800 in commissions, 40% of 2000 is where I’m going with that. You know, by the way, now, normally at the let’s just say, you end up converting one out of 60 people. So it costs you $600 to acquire an $800 customer. That’s cool. You made 200 bucks. That’s not bad. That’s nice, but you have nothing else. Other than the 200 bucks at the end of this, you’ve converted only one at a 60, but you have 59 other email addresses. Some of whom will buy things eventually. So now, you’re funding your own email list growth. That’s pretty cool.
You’re making money right now and longterm, even though you don’t have necessarily products of your own. The other thing is those 1500 people are a retargeting list. You take those 59 people and throw them into a retargeting campaign. You take those 59 people and you promote something else to them. That’s similar, but maybe cheaper. Oh, you didn’t buy the $2,000 course on everything you need to know about golf.
Here’s a $200 course on how to stop your slice. You didn’t buy, you didn’t buy the, you know, the thousand dollar course on, I don’t know, whatever the thousand hour workout program, here’s a hundred dollar course on, you know, whatever. Right. You can promote other things to them. There’s a reason why they didn’t buy. So why not promote something else to them? I mean, and now you’ve got the asset. So if you’ve got nothing else out of this, I hope that’s the big thing that you got out as there are ways to do this, that work and that work very well for both the short term and the long run in the long run.
The key takeaway really is that everything we talked about today. Treat social media as a tool. It’s not the hammer and the nail, alright, it’s the hammer and the nail. It’s not like it’s not one or the other, you know, it’s, it’s just a tool. It’s a tool you gotta use. You gotta use it intentionally. So the key is intentionality, you know, action items, right? I want to leave you some clear action items, clear next steps. But when I speak of intentionality, intentionally action item, number one, use social media to promote affiliate offers. You know, those are the first mistake not doing it at all. Start doing it. Intentionally, create a promo plan for your affiliate promos, intentionally use more images.
So number one, actually do it. Number two, create a promo plan. Number three, use more images. Number four, just spend a few minutes. I don’t know. Once a week, you don’t have to do this every day. I don’t need you to become a full-time trend Jacker, but could you, could you test it out for three months? So 12 weeks once a week, maybe twice a week, once a week or so, go in and see. Are there any trends that pertain to your industry, to your niche, to your site, to what you might promote and do some trend jacking, just try it out for 12 weeks.
And if it doesn’t work, maybe it doesn’t work for your niche. That’s fine. Number five, make sure to reply to people. That’s the big thing. Make sure to reply to people. And then sixthly, I would say go back and listen to what I just talked about with the bridge page. Test that out because I know it works. It’s worked for me. It’s worked for countless others. You know that I’ve shared it with privately. So now you guys know it. So go, go try that out. Reach out. If you have any questions about today’s lesson, you have questions about anything else. Just reach out to me anytime at 2 6 0 2, 1 7 4 6 1 9. Just feel free to text me anytime.
If you know somebody, like I said earlier, who would benefit from this, then let them know, you know, let them know, like, just say, Hey, this guy, Matt, in a lesson today that I think you would benefit from, let them know about that. You know, shoot him a quick text or, or share it with them on social media. And then next week we will be back. And I don’t know what we’re talking about yet.
I am not sure what we’re talking about yet, because I’ve got about four or five topics in mind. I will tell you guys, I’ve got some episodes coming up on the podcast. If you go to Mattmcwilliams.com/podcast, you can subscribe there. I’m starting a series all about affiliates in books. All right.
We’re launching my book. I cannot wait to share more about this with you guys. Turn your passions into profits launch is a little bit over a year from now are a little bit under a year from now, January 20, 23, Ben Bella’s publishing and my favorite publisher and I, so books have been on my mind. So I’ve been talking a lot about books. And so I’m like, you know, I’ve helped. I think we’ve done like 16 or 17 book launches, you know, with affiliates. And so we’ve got a four-part series coming up. I’m getting ready to record the fourth episode here in 13 minutes with a really special guest of I’ll tell you more about later, but we’ve got an episode coming up called how to find affiliates for a book launch or really any launch for that matter.
I share a strategy in there that is going to blow your mind. If you haven’t, you probably haven’t heard of it. Cause as far as I know, I invented it. Like, I don’t know. I’m sure somebody else did it, but nobody told me it’s pretty cool that we’re going to talk about how to run an affiliate book, launch, you know, looking at the strategy. And then we’re talking about how to use affiliate marketing in a book. Because as you know or may not know, you don’t really make a whole lot of money from a book. So you make like buck 52 bucks, three bucks a copy typically.
How about we add another buck or two to that, you know, which could be potentially, you know, tens of thousands of dollars down the road. So we’re gonna talk about that. And then we’ve got that special interview. So four part series over the course of a month on the podcast. And I think what we’re going to do next week is talk a little bit about that. I think I’ve got kind of some more stuff I want to talk about live, but I’m not sure yet. So we’ll let you guys know, but I here’s what I can tell you. You don’t want to miss next week because whatever we talk about, it’s going to be amazing. It’ll be Thursday, February 10th, 2022 at 2:00 PM Eastern.
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So make sure you mark your calendars for that. Like I said, text me anytime at 2 6 0 2 1 7 4 6 1 9 and go check out affiliate, insider, monthly, go get your trial of that. We’ve got lessons in there. We got Jeff Bullis in there. We’ve got David dang. And we got actually we got Emanu. Oh my gosh I forgot about Emanu. Oh, her lesson on selling on social media. She talks directly about selling on social media, which I don’t typically advocate. She actually goes against some of what I taught today, but it worked for her. The guys she made like $75,000 in affiliate commissions in one promotion. And it was all from social media. I think it was like 94% from social media. She said, Whoa.
So here’s what you do. You go sign up for, those are all locked. You can’t access those without a special access code. You go sign up for this trial. You get in. If you end up hating AIM after the first couple of months, then you know, you just tell us which nobody ever does this. But if you hate it, you’re like, I don’t like it. Whatever reason you paid a dollar, you were out one whole dollar. I think you’ll make it.m I think you’ll survive. You’re out one whole dollar. But if you email me mad at Mattmcwilliams.com, just say, Hey, I want the social media stuff inside of AIM, the stuff that’s already locked.
I’ll show you how to get to it. You’ll get that interview with David Dang the interview with Jeff Bullas and the interview with, with Manu. I always forget her last name. Interview with her talking about how she literally got, she was, I think she was a number 10 affiliate for Stu McLaren’s launched last year. She wasn’t number 10. She was number 11. No, she was number nine. Actually. She was number nine. If I remember correctly,
I mean, it’s amazing. You know, this is a $7 million launch. She’s the one of the top 10 affiliates. So all this social media, I think it was all on Instagram even. So if you want to learn all that, make sure you join AIM Mattmcwilliams.com/aimtrial. And we’ll see you guys next week, next week.
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