There are a million little tasks that come with managing affiliates…leaderboards, nudges, bonus ideas, follow-ups… and most of it eats up your day. In this episode, I’m sharing how I use AI to handle all of that faster, better, and without losing my mind. These are the behind-the-scenes tasks that move the needle…and AI makes them way easier.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
The AI Systems Powering My Affiliate Programs (Part 3)
Advanced Ways I Use AI to Manage Affiliate Programs (Part 2)
The AI Tools I Use to Manage Affiliate Programs (Part 1)
Behind the Scenes of a 1,200-Affiliate Launch: What I Learned
Creating Recurring Revenue Through Your Affiliate Program
How I Use AI to Run Affiliate Programs (Part 4)
There are a million little tasks that come with managing affiliates. Things like leaderboards and bonus ideas and follow ups and all of the above. Right. And most of it ends up eating up your day. In this episode, I’m sharing how I use AI to handle all of that faster, better and without losing my mind. These are the behind the scenes tasks that move the needle and AI makes them so much easier.
Let’s get started. Well, welcome back. If you are listening and this is the fourth episode in this series and if you’ve listened to the previous three, congratulations. Well, you’re not at the end. There is at least one more episode after this. I gotta start from the beginning. I don’t know how many episodes there’s gonna be. And we’ll see because we’re kind of going through this together. And you know, I thought I’d be able to cover like 10 or 15 things per episode and it’s been more like five or six. And that’s cool because what I’ve been hearing from people, thank you, by the way, those of you who’ve reached out is I’ve been hearing that you actually appreciate the fact that I’ve gone in depth.
Sometimes when I’m recording these, I feel like maybe when I talk about one of these things for five, six, seven, eight minutes, it’s like, oh my gosh, am I ever gonna move on to the next one? And what I’ve heard, multiple people have actually reached out and said, thank you for doing that. Thank you for like going in depth into each one and not just being like, here’s a list of 15 or 20 things. So I appreciate that so much. A bunch of people, you know, if you don’t know, you can text me by the way at 260-21746. Speaking of that, if you want the prompts from anything that I mention here, definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely text me.
I’m happy to send them to you. I’m actually going to cover those. That’s one little piece of feedback I got was, could you cover those a little bit more? So I’m going to try to do that in, in this episode. But we’ve already covered onboarding and we’ve talked about content creation, outreach. Today we’re going to talk about some of the things that tend to fall through the cracks. At least I think we’re going to get that far. I don’t know.
Again, don’t know. You know, bonus suggestions, leaderboard type stuff, reactivation messages, all of that. The thing about AI is it makes them fast and personal and surprisingly really, really good. So before we get too deep into this episode, I’ve had a bunch of questions about what I brought up last week, which is our new tool called Affiliate Email Pro. And as I mentioned last week, this is our new tool that basically helps you write amazing affiliate emails. I have had so many awesome just since last week. So many awesome emails come in and messages come in, texts and whatnot. Just share a few of them.
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We had a few questions that I want to get to, but you know Michael Davis, who’s an affiliate manager in the nutrition niche, he said, matt, I just used AEP for the first time. Wow. Usually takes me two to three hours to put together an email to affiliates. We segment segment them into four segments. Took me less than 20 minutes to create all four emails. Already worth the investment. Thank you for creating this. Taylor Reed, she’s a small business owner, said, hey Matt, I bought this for our affiliate manager last week. She’s always struggling to come up with topics for emails and reach outs to affiliates. She used it to basically map out the next six months of reach outs and she already sent two emails out. We already activated four emails and had our best weekend ever.
Charge more. That’s my only advice. She said. I mean like we have so many of these. I mean just people. I used to sit there looking at a blank screen for 30 minutes before I’d write a mediocre email. Then when AI came out I started using that. But the emails were robotic and not compelling at all. Ended up rewriting them completely. I love how it will brainstorm ideas for emails and how they sound like me. Plus it creates swipe copy for me too. That alone has saved me 10 hours a month.
I’m using it almost daily now. That’s Allison Nippert. Dustin Manford said, I was able to write four killer emails to my affiliates in less than 20 minutes this week. We ended up activating 32 previously active inactive affiliates from one email. Dude, this is huge. Justin Smith easily saved our affiliate team a few hours a week. Now we only have to make one or two edits per five emails. He said, that’s one of the things I Love about you don’t like.
You very rarely have to edit the emails. Reply rate is up nearly 2x since starting to use it. Melissa Tyler saved me at least five hours every week. She runs multiple programs. Plus I’m actually getting responses from affiliates. It’s given me at least three good ideas for emails just next week that I never thought of. So that’s what we’re hearing now. A few questions, actually like five or six that we’ve had. You know, number one, I mean, can I trust AI to write emails for my brand? Absolutely. I am using it every day. If I’m just gonna say this, if I can trust it, if the people I just talked about can trust it, so can you.
Big one. Will it sound like me? Yes. If you train it, upload some of your past emails, the more the better. The more different styles, the more different links, the better. So if you have 50 emails that you’ve written, share those. Share like it will learn if you don’t use the word awesome, but use the word amazing, it’ll pick up on that and it will write like you. The other thing is, over time, like the. One of the things I don’t think I mentioned before, but this is super helpful, is it gives you a result and let’s say you rewrite two sentences, tell it, say, here’s how I rewrote that. Please use this to learn more about my writing style. Now, the very first time you do that, is it going to learn anything? Probably not.
But if four consecutive times you change a word from italicize to all caps, it will pick up on that and it will start to make that change. You know, another one was, isn’t this just Chat GPT with a fancy name? Not at all. It is built on ChatGPT, but it is fully custom. We trained it with over 2000 actual affiliate emails. That was the starting point. I trained it with about 1800, 1900 of my emails, then a few hundred of emails from other people in our agency. And then I actually trained it on more emails from other different people that I’d saved over the years. And, and then I did what I just talked about. I went back and forth and I used it and I tweaked it and I found problems.
You know, it got to the point where after about a month, I stopped finding problems. It’s been pretty darn good for the past four or five months. So, I mean, yeah, another big one. What if my, what if my promotion, my program is super niche? I’m going to tell you right now, we have this. Just a short list. We’ve had people so far that were in like, the beta test, right? We had a guy who did Bonsai Tree tools. We’ve done cbd, Bible study guide, baby products.
These including, you know, beta testers, plus me and our agency. We Wedding planning, supplements, travel, weight loss coaching, crypto franchise finder, vintage typewriter accessories. I’m not joking. Geocaching gear, my favorite one. Viking reenactment gear, pet supplies, tech gadgets, photography, sports equipment, fashion and apparel, pickleball. I mean, the list goes on and on. We got a whole list on the site. But, like, portable Hammocks was another one of my favorite ones.
Historical costumes, all kinds of stuff. Do you need to train it or set anything up? Not really, except for what I just talked about. You need to provide it with writing samples. Now, if you don’t have writing samples, it will default to what it’s been trained on. Again, over 2,000, most of which were mine, but about 800 of them were not mine. So it’s got some variety in there. And it’ll default and you can kind of tweak it.
Like I said, tell it. You don’t like the word amazing, you like the word awesome, you don’t like two exclamation points, you like three. And if you tell it that, it’ll change, you know, Will it make you sound like everybody else? No, it’s going to be your voice, assuming that you actually train it just a little bit again, even just a few thousand words. If you have, you know, 10 or 20 blog posts that you’ve written, or just go through your sent folder and just copy emails that you’ve sent. You know, if you can have a VA do that, that’d be great. And just say, hey, copy 100 emails that I’ve sent and it’ll. I’m telling you right now, it’ll sound like you.
The last question that I got was, do I need anything else to use this? And yes, you do need a ChatGPT plus subscription. As of this recording, it’s 20 bucks a month. Odds are you probably already have one. And if you don’t, I highly recommend you get it. Not just for this, but because it will completely change your life.
I mean, just right now, like just a few examples, I’m using it for. Planning the podcast, you know, just condensing my notes into a good outline. I’m using it as a writing editor for a book that I’m working on. I’ve got, let’s see, I’ve got a random questions, you know, I ask a lot of questions of it. I’ve trained, I’ve got it to create social media posts. We’re creating terms and conditions GPT as well. And it’s helping me with that.
I use it as a business coach. I use it to every day I provide an inspiring mini biography, you know, four to 800 words for my kids and different athletes and famous people. Not famous people. I’ve created over a hundred of these so far, all using ChatGPT. I ask it to analyze things like. Subject line split tests and things like.
That and find, you know, I use it for writing code, creating images. Let’s see what else here. Currently, I’ve learned so much about my health. I report to it every day. My current weight, what I eat throughout the day, how I’m feeling, how I slept, you name it. And so I’ve learned things like I should not eat more than a tiny, you know, like 10 to 20 peanuts at a time.
I learned like I cannot do, even though I eat a higher fat diet and a pretty low carb diet, I can’t do high fat at night for dinner. I’ve got to go really high fat during the day. And these are all things that I’ve learned from ChatGPT. And so much more. There’s so much more. So if you don’t already have it, get it. All right. If nothing else, so you can use Affiliate Email Pro. Okay, now that being said, let’s jump in back into, you know, the ways that we can use AI. Here’s a great one for affiliate managers.
Use AI to write what I call affiliate spotlights. So these are short personalized blurbs for your top performers that you can then share with other affiliates, whether it be in your partner Facebook group or via email. It’s so good at building morale and it really encourages others. And so I like to do a quick interview with them and then yet you can share that video. And I’ve done that many times. But are people going to watch a half hour video? Maybe not. So I’ll take that video and I’ll have AI kind of summarize it and you know, what are the key lessons? And then I’ll say, you know, here’s a prompt for you, right?
Write a 200 to 500 word spotlight. For an affiliate named Sarah, who promoted. Our summer sale and made $3,240 in commissions. She primarily uses Instagram and blah, blah, blah. And I just copy, you know, and has a fun, upbeat tone. Here are my notes from the interview. I did with her. And it’s just a transcript of the interview. And then it writes the blurb that you can share with affiliates. And you can say, here’s this thing about Sarah.
Here are the top three lessons that she shared. If you want to watch the full. Interview, watch it here. And it’s amazing what that can do. The second way that you can use. It is now, this is a tool. We’Re creating, but to write your terms and conditions. Here’s the thing, there’s a couple ways you can do this. I’m going to teach you the hard way and then the easy way in a second, the hard way. That’s still a million times easier than. Anything we could have done before. AI to be clear, it’s still 80% easier.
It’s still thousands of times faster and. Cheaper because you don’t have to pay an attorney. You know, I have a template that I use that I had updated every year. And I’m still going to do this because it’s important enough for me. But I pay like $300 a year to have an affiliate, an attorney review this. So it’s kind of not fun, you know, but you basically go get, go find like 20 really good T’s and T’s out there that you like and say, I would like to create terms and conditions.
So, you know, go find big brands is what I would recommend. I would like to create terms and conditions for my affiliate program. Here are 20 that I like. I’d like you to use these as guides. Now, please ask me one question at a time, whatever questions you have to help me create this. And so you can do that and it works. Now what we are doing, and we’ve actually already created it, we just haven’t released it yet, but we will be soon.
We’re going to have, I think we’re calling it like affiliate terms Pro. We just basically like affiliate and then. Some other word and then the word. Pro at the end, apparently. But we’re not very creative with the names, but basically it’s already been trained and we actually uploaded the template as the guide. And then we uploaded literally every affiliate terms and condition over. I mean, there’s over 10,000 programs on the networks that we got them from. We basically said, here, here’s every affiliate terms and conditions. This is information that ChatGPT did not have access to. No AI tool has access to because they’re behind a login. You actually have to have a login.
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So we were able to quickly create a. What’s the imacro? I think it’s something like that where it, it can do repetitive tasks like click here, copy this, Click here, copy this, Click here, copy this. And it took that and put it into a Google sheet. And we actually realized after like a thousand pages that it was maxing out each one. We had to, you know, manually take over like every 800 pages or whatever it was in this Google Sheets. But we uploaded something, I think there were some that we couldn’t get, but it was something like 10,000 affiliate agreements. And man, to be honest, man hours, I think we spent like four hours on that.
I mean it was super easy again using AI, right? And we took those and we uploaded them and we uploaded the template and now we created this thing where you just walked you through step by step. You answer like 12 questions and you have affiliate terms in five minutes. So we’ll be releasing that soon. Keep an eye out for that. If you’re interested, you can always text me. Like I mentioned earlier, 260-217-4619. I’ll make sure that you’re the first to know about that.
Again, it’s something you can do on your own by even just taking like 5 to 10 big company ones and saying I want to create one like this. And then also this is another little prompt here, take that and at the end say rewrite these affiliate terms in plain English. I want you to highlight the top five most important things in one to two sentences using plain English so that your affiliates can easily read it. The next really cool way that we’re using AI absolutely love is creating like mock up landing pages for some of our top affiliates. So if you want to help one of your top affiliates actually promote more, ask AI to draft a mini site or a landing page ask that is specific to their brand, their voice and their audience.
So I will, I’ll use a prompt like this. I’ll say I’d like you to write landing page copy for affiliate Alex, who you know, speaks to busy moms. Make it warm, encouraging, and focus on how our planner helps simplify their daily routine. Here is the, here’s the about page for Alex and here’s the copy from her homepage period. And here’s a couple of her blog posts. Again, all that like you can just give it the links, all that takes a couple of minutes to gather. And I might even be like, here’s your Instagram, or something like that.
You know, have at it. Create some landing page copy or create a blog post. And it does. And it’s really, really good because I’ve trained it on how to do that, you know, by providing it with that information. So, so awesome. A way to use AI. Another one that has been super helpful for us is brainstorming creative promo angles. Basically for any audience. So what I do is I say, hey, we’ve got.
We’ve got this sale coming up. Here’s details about the product. Just copy and paste them off the site. Or a lot of times, if you have the same products, you have the, you know, like, create an ongoing chat. Here’s a tip, by the way. Create different chats, but have one that’s specifically called, like, you know, promo brainstorming. And say, you know, I’d like you. You’re. Again, remember we talked about last time? If you haven’t listened, you need to go back. But I will say something like, you are a marketing.
Expert, you have 30 years of marketing experience in the blah, blah, blah space, in the retail product space. And I would like to use this chat. And again, I shared that whole thing last time. You know that it’s a long thing. I take your time explaining it. And then you say like, okay, I’d like to start by providing product descriptions of our entire product suite. And you give it your product descriptions. You can copy and paste them off the site.
A lot of times you might already have like an XML feed or something like that that you can just be like, here it is. So you copy that, you provide it with that. Then you ask it something like, okay, we have an upcoming sale on Product xyz. How would a mom blogger pitch this? And then you wait for its response and then you say, okay, here’s a new promo, we have a new product coming out. Here’s a product description, blah, blah, blah. I’d like to, I’d like to do some podcasts. How would a podcast host.
What angle would work for a podcast host? Right? Or you could ask what bonuses might appeal to a tech savvy audience for this. This is great when you’re launching something new or maybe updating some, you know, evergreen copy. And again, you can use that for individual, like individual affiliates. How would so and so pitch this? Here are 10 of her blog posts. How would they pitch this? Now, one tip that I found when doing something like, here are 10 of her blog posts is upload them in a separate document and say they’re attached. I don’t know why that works better than posting it in line. I think. I don’t know.
My hypothesis is that it can reference that document consistently over and over and it can reference it as a whole. So that when I come back and say, you know, what suggestions do you have for Stephanie Johnson to promote this? It’s like, okay, yep, go back to the Stephanie Johnson doc versus you know, how. I don’t know. Again, don’t really know how that works. I’ve just found consistently better results by uploading files like that. So again, you can use these to create niche specific, swipe, copy, contest themes, all kinds of stuff as well. The next one is writing leaderboard updates that don’t sound boring, you know, like so many times.
Leaderboard updates are like, here’s the top 10. All right, good job, John, keep pushing. But AI actually helps you rewrite these in a fun way with some urgency. Again, this is part of, like, this is part of using affiliate email Pro, by the way, is, I mean, it has probably over a thousand leaderboard updates in its database. So it knows how to write leaderboard updates. But even just like the little things like adding emojis, adding inside jokes, you know, things like that, if you, if you want to kind of tell it about a person and then ask it to write the update, it can. And so what I do is I’ll feed in the raw leaderboard data.
Here’s our top 20. I’ll tell it the tone that I want and I just like, okay, I go ahead, take a crack at it. So I’ll say, like, write a fun and slightly competitive leaderboard update in a playful tone. Include the top 20 affiliates by name. You know, mention that number six is just a few clicks away from, you know, number five, something like that. And I just let it go. And 14 of the 20 are amazing. And I tell it I love number one, three, four, six, blah, blah, blah, please write different ones for the other ones. And then it does. This is something that used to take 20, 25 minutes. Without AI, it takes two, maybe three. Now that’s a substantial savings in time when you’re doing that even once a week, let alone in a launch.
When you’re doing it every day, that’s every day, six days a week and you’re saving 20 minutes, it’s two hours savings. And again, one of the cool things with AEP is that it’s just automatically built in. Like it has so many examples that it’ll start to pull from those and really create some good stuff. Because the reality is we’re saying the same thing over and over.
Generally speaking, another great way to use AI is to write one to one, you know, private DMs, private emails. I usually use templates for things like this, like people who made their first sale or someone who’s dropped off, someone who’s hovering near the leaderboard. But over time it gets to be kind of redundant. Like if I’m reaching out with the same email to the same affiliate once every four or five months.
So AI will get you 80% of the way there. And then you add the last 20 to make it feel human, some personal flair. So I’ll say something like, you know, draft a warm and encouraging message for an affiliate who made their first sale this morning, mention how excited we are to see their progress and suggest a quick tip to keep momentum going.
Their first sale was of this product. You know, name the product and here’s their site if you want to mention, you know, kind of do something and make some suggestions for them and boom, again. It’s a great way to use Affiliate Email Pro, but I mean frankly you can do it without it, it’s just not going to be as good, you know, at least at first. That’s the advantage of having something that’s been trained. Creating bonus package ideas. I sort of touched on this earlier but you know, bonuses work. But a lot of times affiliates don’t have a clue what to create. So I use AI to just brainstorm ideas.
So I’ll tell it. I have a specific. Let me see if I can find. Actually I’ll find it before I finish this. I have a specific prompt that I use. Okay, it took me a second to find it. So may insert some music when that little awkward pause there. Now we’ll probably edit this. But anyway, so basically I have, I’ve uploaded a list of like all the bonus ideas that we’ve ever done and things like that for different affiliates, different types of affiliates, etc. Again, you know, over the years it’s been over thousands, but even if you don’t have that training, and those are loaded into Affiliate Email Pro, by the way, even if you don’t have that, you can, I mean you could still start with something.
Again, it’s better to have trained stuff but it’s okay if you don’t, you know, just not as effective. So I’ll say give me 10 creative bonus ideas an affiliate could offer when promoting a digital course on, you know, on productivity to busy entrepreneurs in Q1. All right, so I’ll soon say here’s the course and then here’s the audience. So I’ll tell it like this is for John Smith, and John smith’s audience is 40 to 64 year old married men who make over $100,000 a year and typically work in the technology sector. And so I tell that. And the reason I say give me 10 creative bonus ideas is the reality is just to be honest, even with affiliate Email Pro with ap, three of them are going to suck. Without aep, seven of them are going to suck, but you’re going to get. And then one of them, you’re going to be like, that’s not a bad idea, but I don’t really like that one. And you’re going to get one or two that are amazing that you might not have thought of.
Now with aep, you might get five that you know, you never thought of. And so you’re going to get by asking for 10, you’re going to get some that are actually pretty decent and that you can use. The last way that I recently used this, that I used AI that was a big deal for us is to identify gaps in our affiliate Resource Center.
So basically what I did was I said, here’s what we have in our affiliate Resource Center. I took, I used the, whatever tool it is where you take the whole screenshot like, of, you know, the whole page in, in Chrome. I think they have it in Safari. I think any of them have it, any browser has it. I’m not sure about Brave, but I’m pretty sure Safari has it as well. And you say, okay, here’s, here’s the pages I have, here’s what they accomplish. Then just say what’s missing? Give me 10 suggestions to improve it. Find typos, find errors.
What would you add? And it, it has suggested so many things like platform specific, swipe copy. You know, we had social media swipe copy. It’s like, well, why don’t you, you said that you’re, you know that Why don’t you have an Instagram section? I had to create a visual calendar for each month. You know what I did? I loaded the promo in TechSpace and said, Create a visual calendar. And it did in two minutes. I used to spend an hour and a half creating those in Canva. And before Canva, it was like two hours in Photoshop creating, you know, promo one pagers and promo guides. I mean, like, all of this stuff is so easy.
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Let AI help you see your resource center through a new affiliate’s eyes. Just say you’re in a, you’re a new affiliate and this is my resource center. What would you suggest? So I say like, you know, the prompt is like, here’s what’s currently in our affiliate center.
What additional resources would help new affiliates promote better and faster and then it makes some suggestions and I up. Okay, cool. What do you have any do you find any typos? Do you find any errors? Do you find anything that you would change any edits? You would make things like that and it sounds like magic because it kind of is. That’s. That’s how it works. It’s so freaking awesome. So again, if you want the exact props for any prompts I should say for any of these, you can text me at 260-217-4619 and in what might be the final, probably not what might be the final but probably isn’t episode of this series, we’re going to talk about creating content, calendars and follow up messages.
And you know how it can help you train team members and onboard affiliate managers, create SOPs, even build some goodwill with your partners in unexpected ways. It’s going to be pretty cool. So if you’ve got questions about this episode or anything else, you can text me at 260-217-4619. Links and everything we mentioned are in the show notes, so make sure you check those out and make sure you hit subscribe because you don’t want to miss episode five and six. There’s got to be a sixth. I’m pretty sure you don’t want to miss either of those episodes. Plus the whole series coming up about how affiliates can use AI as well. You don’t want to miss them. So make sure you hit subscribe and I’ll see you in the next episode.
See you soon.