There was pressure. There were problems. There were moments when it felt like everything might fall apart. But in the end, we pulled off a multi-million dollar affiliate launch that blew past expectations. In this episode, I’m sharing the real behind-the-scenes story—what we did right, where we nearly failed, and the powerful lessons you can use to grow your own affiliate program.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
Avoid These 5 Big Mistakes When Recruiting Affiliates
AI for Affiliates: What’s Working Today (Part 4)
Even More Ways Smart Affiliates Are Using AI to Win (Part 3)
Smart Affiliate Moves: Advanced AI Tactics You Can Use Too (Part 2)
How Top Affiliates Are Using AI to Get Ahead (Part 1)
The Affiliate Army Playbook: Lessons from a Record-Breaking Launch
There was pressure, there were problems, there were moments when it felt like everything might fall apart. But in the end, we pulled off a multi million dollar affiliate launch that blew past expectations. In this episode I’m sharing the real behind the scenes story. What we did right where we nearly failed and the powerful lessons you can use to grow your own affiliate program.
Let’s get started. I gotta tell you, I am pumped about what we’re talking about today. This episode is called the Affiliate Army Playbook Lessons from a Record Breaking Launch. And that’s exactly, it’s exactly that. It’s a behind the scenes breakdown of one of the most successful launches we’ve ever run. It actually became the biggest revenue event in our clients history. And so I sat down with one of our affiliate managers, this is a couple years ago, sat down with one of our affiliate manager Jim Askins for a full debrief. We use the same process that we use internally after every major affiliate promo. We call it KISS Method K I S S. And I don’t know where I got this from. I feel like it was, you know, I don’t know, was it Geno Wickman? And I’d love to give credit where credit is due.
I don’t know where to give credit but KISS stands for Keep, Improve, Stop and Start. So keep what worked or what are we going to keep doing? You know, we want to know, want to identify, like some of the things maybe we tried that actually worked. Some of the things that are still working, we’ve been doing them for 10 years. Okay, are they still working? These are the things that worked. What do we need to improve? What, what needs tweaking?
So we’re going to keep it, but it needs to be tweaked a little bit. Maybe it’s something that we tried and we tried, you know, two versions of it and A worked better but there were elements of B that worked. Maybe it’s something that we’ve been doing for 5 or 10 years and we notice, okay, this is becoming a little bit less effective. What are some of the things that we can tweak? The stop is like we’re just done with this.
This didn’t work. It hasn’t worked. It’s the third time we’ve tried it and it has not worked yet. Let’s forget about it. And then what do we need to finally start doing something that we didn’t do that we need to start an idea that we had that we couldn’t execute on but we really feel would have made a difference. And so Jim brought some really killer insights to this one. So whether you’re in the middle of planning a big launch or you just, you know, want to improve your, like, some of these things are not just launches. These are applicable to Evergreen affiliate programs. And this episode is going to give you some real kind of insights, some practical takeaways that you can apply to your affiliate program.
And if you’re curious about what it looks like to work with us, if you’ve ever thought, you know, man, I’d love to have someone like Matt and his team run our affiliate program. You’re in good company. We have worked with legends like Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi, Jeff Walker, Ryan Levesque, Stu McLaren, Michael Hyatt, Lewis Howells, Ray Edwards, you know, brands like Shutterfly and Adidas, Claire Diaz Ortiz, you know, Kim Walsh Phillips, Brian Tracy. I mean, the list goes on and on. And if you want to explore what that could look like for you, I’m going to put the info in the show notes, but you can shoot me a text at 260-217-4619, area code 260-217-4619. Let’s chat.
Need help activating your affiliates? Use my proven email templates for getting inactive affiliates in the game and making sales! Get them here!
Let’s just talk about it. So, all right, let’s get into it. Here’s my conversation with Jim Atkins as we discuss the lessons from a multimillion dollar affiliate launch. Jim, welcome to the podcast, my friend.
Jim Atkins :Thanks, I’m looking forward to it. It’s been for this for a long time, so, yeah, it’s gonna be a lot of fun.
Matt :Yeah, man. So first off, man, like, let’s tell people about you because this is kind of cool. This is the second time we’ve done this where we’ve had one of our affiliate managers come on and we’re doing a recap of a launch.
But, you know, you’ve been with the team, gosh, for, you know, a little over six months now. Just a little bit over six months. And yeah, just tell everybody, you know, real quick, first of all, what part of England are you from? And just, you know, a quick, quick version, you know, kind of what, you know, your experience has been with the team so far.
Jim Atkins :Well, first thing I did was actually with a book launch, that was the first thing we did. And then we did with QFM here, the Quiz Funnel Masterclass and just finished that up. And you know, that started back in March and just ended up at th end of June. So that’s taken up most of the time that I’ve done since I’ve been with the team. But, you know, I know that we have some things coming down the road that I’m going to be starting here shortly and looking forward to that. But yeah, Quiz Funnel Masterclass was. It’s one that’s taken the most time with me that I’ve worked on.
Matt :Yeah, I love it. So, you know, one of the things that just to give some people a little bit of background like this ended up being a great launch overall. In fact, in one day they had the highest revenue producing event in the history of the company, which is pretty dadgum exciting. You know, we got to be a part of that. But what we’re going to talk about today is Lessons and Takeaways. You know, the, the working title of this. And I guess we’ll. It’s one of those things like we never know what the title is going to be till after we record sometimes.
So we might come up with something better. But you know, the title probably is something like the Affiliate Army Strikes Again. And we have been preaching this and talking about it like, no, you have to build an army. You cannot just have your 10 affiliates. And so we’ll talk about that as we go. How much of a role that played. But as we do this today, we’re going to be using our KISS method, which is not keep it simple, stupid, it’s actually keep, improve, stop, start. So we’re going to talk about things that we’re going to keep.
We’re talking about maybe it’s things that we tried and they worked, or things that we’ve done many times and they worked. We’ll talk about things that we’re going to improve again, things that we tried and like, we see potential for them, so we’re going to improve those. Or maybe there are things we’ve done for years, but we let slide and we’re going to improve upon those. Things that we’re going to stop. We ain’t doing those again. Those are just bad ideas, you know, and then things that we’re going to start as a result of going through this experience. So you guys get the benefit of this.
For all of you podcast listeners, you’re going to know all of the Intricacies behind a multimillion dollar affiliate launch. And along the way we’ll share some lessons. So there might be some things especially as we, you know, there are a few things. I know I’ve got a couple. Jim, you got some where it’s like this doesn’t fit into the keep improve stop start. It’s just, you know what, these are just lessons. So, Jim, I’ll kick us off. You’ve never done one of these before. And just so you guys know, I have no idea what Jim’s going to say. And he has no idea what I’m going to say. I’ll take that back. We kind of know because some of these things are things we’ve talked about as we’ve gone, but we did not sit down and write a script for this.
So I don’t know his bullet points. He said he has like 20 things. I have like 11 things. Some of them are probably overlapping. So I mean, like, this is. You guys are getting the raw, unfiltered. Like, this is just Jim and I almost like we’re sitting together going, okay, what, what do we do? Like, this is our company rehash or recap of the launch. We will not really do a private one of these other than there are a couple of things that we do know that we’re. We’re not going to talk about on this. And we’ll do a private, what we call an after action review in AAR where we talk about a couple of those things that are a little bit more sensitive topics.
So I don’t know what Jim’s going to share. He doesn’t know what I’m going to share. If he shares something and I’m like, you know what? That actually is a little bit too confidential or something like that. And we decide we’re gonna pull out, then we’ll just pull it out. Be like, I was listening to a book recently about a CIA operative and there’s this one chapter where I swear every fourth word was redacted. And I’m like, I can’t follow it. I don’t know. What are you talking about? And I’m like, you know, trying to figure out, like, who’s redacted. Was redacted the chief or was redacted this other guy? I don’t remember. And then there was two people named Redacted. And I’m like, well, which one did it?
I don’t know. So we’ll try to limit that though. But just know that might happen. So with that said, I’m going to Jump in with a keep. You know, one of the keeps is that we continue to evolve and do more one on one communication. You know, I have been in this industry, Jim, for 17 years now. And early on it was a lot of one on one communication. You know, I built my first affiliate program, believe it or not, starting with one affiliate. Duh, right. And then I had two, and then three, and then four and so on into thousands. Built that into over a million dollar a month affiliate program.
Years later as I was running programs for like Adidas and Shutterfly and big companies like that, you know, we would have hundreds of thousands of affiliates. And I just, I wasn’t able to do a lot of one on one with them. And so it became more mass communications. And over the past few few years we’ve continued to do more one on one. And we figured out a pretty good system for that. You know, we figured out how to do that one on one communication in a way that my friend Hunter Ingram refers to it as developing intimate relationships at scale. You know, you cannot spend a half hour a day, like if you do the math, if you work 40 hours.
And you spend a half hour talking to somebody, that means you can have 80 conversations at max and do no other work. So assuming you got other work to do, which you do as an affiliate manager, as a business owner, you got at least 20 hours. So that means you can do 40 conversations a week. That’s it, that’s your max. And if you talk to everybody once a quarter, I’m not doing the exact math on that, but there’s some sort of limit there, you know, that’s under 500, like that’s the absolute max that you can tap out at. But we figured out a pretty good system for managing those one on ones. And so my lesson in that and the keep is continuing to develop those one on one relationships and that one on one communication before leading up to a big launch.
And during the launch, not just the mass communication, those quick little like you send a mass communication then you send a follow up one on one with your, you know, your top 30 to 50 with a little bit of something specific to them is very powerful. So Jim, like you said, we’ll alternate, we’ll just alternate and I’ll let you. What do you got for a keep?
Jim Atkins :Yeah, I know that you and Jason did this on tme but the hot leads, I mean it’s still, you know, with how it’s paying off, how it worked with us on our launch and you know, just given the affiliates what they need there at the end and being able. You just touched on about the one on one with the affiliates but then the affiliates doing one on ones and reach outs with the people that you know that had clicked, that had opted in and things like that.
So the hot leads and you know, you have the stats, I don’t but just you know how that pays off and the one on one developing relationships and then closing the sale at the end of the launch and using that the hot leads list, you know, it’s been good and we’re going to keep making it better. But that, you know, I love it.
Matt :That was on my list that is in our playbook for every launch especially. So let’s describe what the hot leads are. You know, hot lead is exactly what it sounds like. It’s. I’m going to use round numbers here. If somebody sends a thousand leads, a thousand opt ins, roughly 2 or 3%. So 20 or 30 of those leads are like scalding hot, ready to buy. They’re at an 8 or above out of 10 on the potential buyer scale. And basically what we’ve done is developed a system for Identifying those.
Now, it varies a little bit based on the launch sequence, or it could be evergreen as well, you know, but it develops a little bit. So in the membership experience in tme, you had three days of the workshop and then a webinar, and then you had open cart. So basically five actions. And what we identified was, okay, who had attended all four live events and clicked to the sales page or attended, I think it was three live events in abandoned cart. You know, they had actually gone all the way to the checkout page and then left. Or maybe it was two. I think it was two.
If they’d attended two live events and abandoned cartoon or they attend all four live events and they clicked on the sales page, I think it may have been multiple times. And for most people, you know, we had. I remember one lady, she had 15 hot leads. She closed 11 of them, 11 out of 15 in less than an hour. That’s 11 times 800. That’s eight. Almost $9,000 in affiliate commissions for less than an hour of work. I don’t know about you guys. That’s a really good ROI. So with this one, we had, like, 10 live events followed by all kinds of stuff. And so what we did was we scored the leads, and then we said, I think it was like, everybody who scored a 10 or above, we would consider those to be a hot lead.
And so you just have to figure out, like, what you’re looking for is, what is that top, roughly 2 to, on the high end, 7%. Like, if you get 2,000 leads, you got somebody with 2, 3, 4,000 leads. They’re not going to be able to deal with the hot leads of more than, you know, 100 people at most. So you’ve got to figure out a scoring system or something like that. And so, you know, you might assign, like, a point for every live event they signed up to. Maybe it’s like, you know, two points for a sales page visit, you know, four points for an abandoned cart. And, okay, you total that up and you figure, okay, what’s the max number of points? Well, the max number of points is 24. Okay, what’s the average number that all of you know that all the leads have?
The average number is six. Okay, so if the max is 24, the average is six. A hot leads, probably somebody at 15 or above or 18 or above. And then you just kind of look and go, okay, you know, if I just pick a thousand leads, what percentage are at 8 or above? Oh, it’s 5%. Boom. That’s probably a good threshold. And so there’s two options. You can score their whole list and just say, here’s your whole list and the scores. Do what you want with it. Or you can just say, I’m telling you your hot leads. And it’s really super easy, you know, once you develop the technology in the background to be able to do that. It’s super easy for you as an affiliate manager, and that’s something we’re definitely keeping. Jim, you’re spot on there. So good on that.
Number three, keep great affiliate gifts. You know, I’ve done affiliate gifts for years, just to be clear. Not gifts, like animated gifts, but gifts with a, you know, gift. S.bYou know, we sent out a couple of really good affiliate gifts in advance that they just built that reciprocity and got people excited. And, you know, they were talking about it. And for us, it was a way, again, not only of building that reciprocity with people who are already 100% committed to promote, but just getting them, you know, even more excited, but also it was a really good way of getting some people who maybe were on the fence to like, reach out to us and say, thank you so much for this really amazing gift. You know, few hundred dollars gift. I’m using them, you know, like, by the way, isn’t your launch coming up? You know, and so that worked really well.
And again, that’s the key. I mentioned they were using them. Don’t send them a gift. I’m using a gift right now, an affiliate gift. It’s a mug. So this person knows I drink green tea every afternoon. This person knows specifically exactly what I’m drinking right now, which is green tea. So my coffee in the morning, I put in a thermal mug. I have a big thermal mug also from a client, Zig Ziglar mug. He knows I drink green tea, and he knows I don’t. Somehow we came up in conversation. I don’t use a thermal mug when I drink in the afternoon because I want to let it cool off so it’s not so hot. So what did he do? Sent me a couple of mugs with his branding on them. But they’re super classy. You know, I’ll show you, Jim.
You can see, you know, it’s got a thing. It’s a nice mug. It’s really nice mug. So he sent this to me. I’m. Right now I’m thinking about him. The odds of me possibly, when we end this podcast, sending him a text and just saying, hey, man, how’s it going? Are pretty high. And so if you can find something that they use. People say, I got coasters, I got a coaster set right here that I use. Not custom made, but they’re like from Etsy. They were custom made, but not just for me, just to be clear. Things that people will use. You know, think about that. Like they’re gonna, they’re gonna look at a lot. If you can find something like that, that’s a good affiliate gift. All right, Jim, what’s your next?
I mean, you know, we had strategy calls twice a week. So, you know, they were receiving reminders for those, you know, and then with those, you can always attach, you know, swipe, you can attach other things to it as well. So that was a little tool that we started using recently. We used it in this launch and we’re going to keep using it, refining it and making it better because it is a great tool. It is. And I mean, that was something we used. It’s such a simple thing. Like I say that and it’s like, oh, duh. But we had the, you know, we got 500 affiliates, you know, for going back to TME, we had, you know, thousand affiliates and you know, we’d have 30 people show up for a strategy call. And we started using those Google Calendar invites.
We started it with qfm, but then we applied it to tme, which, because there’s actually qfm, we started using that before, like months in advance of the launch. And we’re like, wait a minute, duh, we’ll use that for TME too. And it doubled the show up rate on everything. And you can use those calendar invites for all sorts of things because if they accept it, then it pops up and if they decline it, then, you know, they’re not attending.
You get a notification, you can reach out to them, Be like, hey, since you can’t attend, I’ll make sure to, you know, whatever, hey, you want to jump on a private call, whatever the case may be. And so the very first one we ever did, we had like 300 people. And I remember we had one of our VAs copy and paste every single email address, go, click, save, send, click, you know, paste, save, send, copy, paste, save, send. And it only took him like a half hour, but it’s still a half hour of just utter boredom. And then he finally figured out that if you actually, in a spreadsheet, you have all the affiliates listed, you have their email address. Then if you then in the column next to it, list their email address followed by a comma, you can drag and drop down the whole way, copy and paste those over and invite everybody. And that worked really well. So that is definitely just like the hot lead, something that we are keeping in the future. So that was a good one. Jim let you go with another one.
Jim Atkins :Okay. The video and social media calendar we made after Ryan, I mean, it was detailed from the very beginning until the very end. Know, Ryan’s brilliant and he knows how to do a lot of things, but it was this one thing, one less thing he really had to think about. And we went through there and it was, you know, even just, you know, after. Whether it was a webinar or a workshop or any, I mean, it didn’t matter what it was. It’s just he had that schedule there because he has so many other things going. He’s like, okay, you know, I can look at this and then go on here, here’s what I need to do. Oh, here, I can put this, you know, on social media, do whatever. But, you know, I just really liked having that laid out. He even remarked about how helpful it was to him as well. But that’s.
Matt :Let me, let me interrupt you and have you describe what you’re talking about to everybody because this applies whether you’re, you know, if you’re an affiliate manager full time working for a company or you’re an outsourced program manager or even for, just for yourself. Tell us exactly what you mean by that calendar for him.
Jim Atkins :Okay. So, you know, just when we actually started promoting and so we would start, we started June 1st and we’re like, you know, we put down, okay, Ryan, here’s what’s going on on this day, you know, you can go into our Slack channel, click post here with this message when you’re going, you know, on the second, you know, when you’re driving around or get your phone, are you doing your walk or whatever, get your phone out, make a short video and then, you know, we can put that on our Slack channel or you can, you know, send it however, you know, however you want to do it.
That would be most effective. And then even some things like with emails with, I mean, it just, it laid out everything as it went along and then even like, you know, after a workshop or a webinar or something. Yeah, he’d get on there and you know, and say about how awesome it was and you know, just all the things that went on and all the people and everything. Just reminding him again to make sure and follow up with the entire schedule that was going on throughout the launch. It just, you know, again, it just, it took something off of his plate he really didn’t have to think about and was able to go through and just execute and do the things that he needed to do.
Matt :Yeah, I’m definitely writing that one down as a keep. So we need to document that one, Jim, keep that one because that’s a good one. What we did, just so you guys know is we told our client Ryan Levesque in advance, here’s all the stuff we will need you to post to affiliates that needs to come from you sometimes going in and be like, hey guys, it’s the first day of the workshop. I’m so excited. I can’t wait. Coming from him is better than it coming from me. But we told them months in advance. I think probably like two months before the launch even started. We had everything like, hey guys, it’s a month before the launch. Hey guys, it’s two weeks before launch. Hey guys, the launch starts tomorrow. Hey, the webinars tonight, blah, blah, blah. Oh my gosh. It was, you know, like. And most of those things like, hey guys, the webinars today. I’m so excited.
I can’t wait. He could record that weeks in advance, months in advance, and then schedule the post. Some of the stuff, like post the thing after the webinar saying how it went. You can’t do that in advance. But at least he knew. He knew April 1 that on June 21 he was going to have 10 minutes to go post a message to the affiliates saying here’s how things went. So he could, like when he was planning his schedule, he couldn’t schedule something at 6:30 that night because at 6:30 he. From 6:30 to 6:40, he had to take that time to write that message and post it. So if you’re doing it yourself, making that list yourself, what videos can you record in advance? Hey guys, the launch starts tomorrow.
I can’t wait. I’m so excited. You know, blah, blah, blah, make sure you grab your swipe copy, if you haven’t yet, etc. Etc. You can record that weeks in advance. And it saves you from having to do all the stuff like the day of or the night before. And you know, when you get into a launch, things can be really crazy and hectic. So as much as you can do in advance, the better. Here’s one that we did. So we did a ticketed workshop. So the workshop was not free. It’s what we call paid free. So there’s free free, which is.
It’s normally free and it’s still free. You got paid paid. It’s normally paid and it’s still paid. And you got paid free normally costs money. Now it’s free. That’s what we did with the workshop. People have attended this workshop and they paid $100. Exactly a hundred dollars. But with the affiliates and for some other people with affiliates and through some other means, there were ways to get in for free. You had a exclusive code that got you in for free. And the result, I posted some stats about a month before saying, because we were deciding on whether to do this and I shared these numbers with the team, like okay, here’s what will happen. Here’s the studies that we’ve done and other clients that we’ve worked with that have done this and here’s the results.
And we had projected that basically you’d have about a 350% increase in engagement and about a 40% increase in buyers as a percentage of opt ins. I was wrong on that. To the tune of engagement was up over 600%. Not as a percentage of opt ins. We actually had lower opt ins and a six fold increase in engagement. So as a percentage of opt ins, engagement was up almost 900% as a result. Why is that? Well, we know when people pay, people who pay attention, right? When people pay, they are more likely to engage.
That of course makes sense. When it’s free, it’s like, you know, and I’ve said this many times, it’s like that’s why if you look at my bookshelf, I’ve got it organized by books I’ve read, books that I’ve read and will read again. Books that I’ve read but probably won’t read again, Books that I haven’t read and want to read and they’re definitely in my queue. And then books that honestly I still can’t remember why I haven’t given them to Goodwill.
None of those books on that shelf are books that I bought. They’re books that were given to me. I don’t value them. That’s just reality. I just don’t value value them. Now I consume some free books. I got some free books up here given to me by some friends, published by Chandler Bolt was free. The Hidden Psychology of Social Networks. I read that one. Expert Secrets from Russell Brunson was free. Fix this Next by Mike Michalowicz was free. I’ve read those books.
But I look over here, most of these free books and read them. So we know why people engage more if they paid. But what about if it’s free but it’s positioned as paid and there’s a coupon code. It’s in that middle ground. You end up in that middle ground. If people had actually paid, engagement would have probably been 15 times higher. But nine times higher is pretty good, you know, as a percentage of opt ins.
And you get that by if you normally sell something and then you position it as free, that’s a way of doing it. So put it on sale on your site. You know, go put it on Amazon. It’s the reason why you know, free book funnels work much better if you actually sell it on Amazon. You know, that works great. You know, it’s a little trick. If you ever go to Amazon, you see a book that’s like a hundred dollars, they don’t sell any on Amazon.
They sell it on their website for free plus shipping. The Amazon book is totally, you could argue it’s a ruse, but it’s positioning. So anyway, that ticketed workshop, that’s one of the reasons why that, you know, the early bird webinar ended up being the largest revenue event in the history of the company was because, you know, of that engagement, because of the ticketed webinar. All right, Jim, your turn, bud.
Jim Atkins :The strategy calls just how helpful they are, the engagement. I mean, you’re getting affiliates engaged and even sometimes some of them that would show up that really, I mean, you know, you wouldn’t expect them to show up, but yet they’re there, they’re successful because they do show up to the stretch you cause in the trainings and things like that.
So, you know, just laying out everything and you know, it’s an opportunity to also answer questions because there’s always questions that come up. But it’s just such a tremendous learning opportunity. And no matter where you’re at as an affiliate, a beginner intermediate or you’re ultra successful, it’s just something that is helpful and something that, you know, that everybody gets at least something out of.
Matt :Yeah, those are huge. You know, affiliate training is huge. So guys, if you want to see how we do an affiliate training, we’re going to put a link in the show notes. You can go watch that training. So training is a, literally a video that we did for a client. Not only watch that training, but we’ve got the slides for you in a PDF, in PowerPoint and in Keynote. So three different formats. You can take those slides. If you download the PowerPoint or Keynote version, you can upload those to Google Slides and it’ll create them for you.
Might change like the fonts or something. You just go in and tweak that. But we’ve got those slides for you in three different formats as well. So you can download those slides, go tweak them, watch how we do it and see. Okay, what should you be like? Don’t steal my stories. You can’t tell the story about the b*** sniffing monkey. All right, you can’t tell the story about your first affiliate promotion being $588. You can’t tell like don’t steal my stories and pass them off as yours. That’s just not cool. But steal the ideas, steal the principles, steal the bullet points, steal the slides. I don’t care if you literally copy my slides. I’m giving you permission.
You can go download those and get the access to that completely for free. We’ll put the link in the show note for that. Speaking of affiliate trainings, I got another one here, that launch kickoff event, you know, which kind of doubled as a training, something we’ve done before, but not every single time. This was so important and we’re going to do it every single time, doing a big launch kickoff where you cover the offer, you cover the funnel, if there’s a funnel, you cover the important dates and all of that.
Here’s the great thing about it. If you do that and we did it, you know, about 90 days in advance, you will reuse that material so much. We ended up reusing slides. I took screenshots of those slides every single day to send them to people like, what’s the offer stack here? Boom. You know, we use that as a guide, became a great guide.
So it kind of forces you to just to think through all that stuff well in advance and have a big event, a big kickoff. We really, really, really, really stressed how important it is. Like this was our only ask prior to June 1st. The only ask was come to this kickoff so you can begin to plan. And then we had the replay for it. And you know, I know that video we had, you know, I don’t know, 300 some odd affiliates or something like that. And that video was watched by more people than we had affiliates. So that tells me a couple things.
Number one, they were sharing the video with like their assistant, their team. Number two, some people watched it multiple times. Now they might have gone back and only watched a segment of it, but I don’t know. You know, that video was watched by more people than there are affiliates.And that doesn’t even include the people who showed up live. So it’s a big event, big excitement. You want to make sure to invite them. Like we talked about using Google Calendar, really make a big deal out of it. So do some sort of a launch kickoff. If you’re doing a launch, do it at least 60 days out and make it huge. All right, your turn, Jim.
Jim Atkins :All right. This will probably be my last keep. And, but you know, and you preach this all the time, Matt. But you know, and you even meant, we even mentioned it here early. But I mean the affiliate army, the idea of smaller affiliates that you’re recruiting while everything’s going on and you’re working with the smaller affiliates, you’re working with first time affiliates.
But just building that affiliate army and the difference that it made in this launch, the difference that it makes, you know, for the affiliates that are involved in it. And you know, I mean, who knows how this is going to pay off down the road. And that’s part of the philosophy of this But just, you know, the small affiliates and building that affiliate army was, you know, really awesome.
Matt :Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s like the backbone of our company and it’s the reason why we’ve, you know, you look at, you know, why we helped Michael Hyatt go from a $300,000 launch to a $1.25 million launch in a year. Well, we went from about 40 affiliates to well over a thousand. We had over 500 affiliates with the sale.
When you look at, you know, the numbers that we did with Ray Edwards when, you know, he went from a handful of affiliates promoting him to hundreds of affiliates promoting them, you know, where, you know, their top 10 is only making up 10 to 20% of their launches. Their top three are only making up, you know, 5 to 7% of the launches. That’s what you want.
And so this was one where we took it from like a very top heavy program to, you know, your top three affiliates only accounting for like, you know, 25 to 30% of the sales, which sounds like a lot. That’s a lot for us. You know, but in the past, you know, I mean, top three affiliates might account for, you know, 60, 70% of sales. And that’s super risky because, you know, there, there are times where, and we’ve seen this happen, I won’t mention, you know, which one, where your number one expected affiliate drops out at the last moment. And that really sucks. Well, you know what, we can replace Those sales with 10 small affiliates and it becomes less of a big deal when you have that army.
And so, and I’ve said this so many times, like, this is the direction the industry is trending. Affiliates are promoting like the bigger affiliates, the ones with seven figure plus businesses, they are promoting less affiliate offers. They promoted 12 a year to 10 years ago. And then it was, you know, five years ago, they’re promoting say 10, and then it was like eight or nine. And now it’s down to, well, we’re only doing four a year, five a year, six a year. That’s half a third what they were doing, you know, seven to 10 years ago. And so if they’re only promoting, let’s even just go high and say five, they’re only promoting five. They’re not going to promote you every year.
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It’s impossible. We’ll be back next year. Cool. But that means every other year we lose that big affiliate. So you’ve got to build the army. It’s just like, I don’t want to do that. Well, then you want to get left behind. Well, it’s not how we’ve done it for the last seven, eight years. Then you’re going to get left behind. Like, get with the times. It’s like saying, I don’t want to build a website. I don’t know if this Internet thing’s going to last. Well, it is. You know, I don’t want to run Facebook ads. Okay, well then you’re just leaving money on the table, you know, I mean, you don’t have to you don’t have to do this if you want to run. You know, I know many people who, they’re perfectly content.
They’re just going to have 20 affiliates and they’re going to run a million dollar launch. Cool. I’m not arguing with you, but it could be two and a half million, it could be three, it could be four. And a lot of these people that I know that have done this and that were arguing with me five years ago when I was kind of like a voice in the wilderness talking about this. Oh, many of them are coaching clients now and they’re like, yeah, we see it, we see it now. Like, teach us your ways. So, yeah, let’s talk about improve. What’s your first improve, Jim?
Jim Atkins :Well, it has to do with the hot leads and on improving, on qualifying the hot leads. And the reason I say that, Matt, is because, you know, I mean, you explained a little bit when I mentioned hot leads a while ago, but making sure that you have what you need beforehand to qualify. I mean, the information that you need, one of the things was leave cart. I mean, you get to the cart and then you leave it before you actually purchase. Well, we could have had that capability for this launch, but it would have been a little late because of some of the tweaking they had to do on the back end of it. So just making sure and improving the qualifying the hot leads, that’s my first improvement that I had down.
Matt :Yeah, that’s very important. Get clear with your tech team. Do it 90 days in advance. You can’t do it too soon. I mean, do it six months in advance if you want to. We thought we were doing it far enough in advance by doing it roughly a month before. Basically it would have been relevant and we thought that was plenty of lead time. So the lesson there, the improve is no time is too soon to talk about this, whether it’s with a client or whether it’s with, you know, your tech team.
Like, tell them five months, six months, eight months in advance, this is what you want to do and it’s better. We thought a month was plenty of lead time. It turned out not to be. That’s not anybody’s fault. That’s not our fault. That’s not, you know, the tech, like, oh, well, the tech team can’t do this. No, they had a bunch of other stuff going on and in retrospect, I wish we told them in April, you know, so as soon as you can come up with what’s going to be defined as a hot lead and let the tech team know the better.
A definite improve on our end. And this is not an insult to anyone. Please, nobody take it this way. Never assume a client or never assume that anyone has it all together, that they have everything figured out. The reality is, in a launch or in an evergreen, there are 182 moving parts. And guess what? They’re going to screw up one or two. They’re going to make mistakes, they’re going to make bad decisions, they’re going to whatever. And if you have an expertise or you have some knowledge, just speak up and say it and ask a lot of questions. You know, we’ll talk about this later. Like assume ignorance both ways. Oh, there’s a live stream. What’s the live stream? Tell us about the live stream. How many people are on it? How long is it?
Who’s in charge of getting the guests? You know, what technology are you using? So when you’re off for an hour, what are we doing in that hour? And like, I’m going to give you an example. Like we realized this is one of those little things rather than just we had an eight hour live stream. It was like live for seven hours, live for three, off for one, live for three. I think it was instead of an hour of dead air, basically where they actually restarted it, it was like, hey, all right, see you guys later. And then they were gone for an hour.
And then, hey, I got to come back to a different link, or basically the same link, but it’s slightly different or whatever. And we’ll be live again. What if in that one hour, like we came up with all these ideas? So if we ever do this with clients in the future, this is exactly what we’re doing. I’ll tell you guys, this is like, this is a seven figure strategy right here, y’. All. Okay? This is so cool. That hour you go, all right, listen guys, we’ve been live for three hours. I’m going to be live for another three hours at 1 o’. Clock. I need a little bit of a break.
I’m going to go spend some time with my family. I’m going to eat some lunch. But listen, we could not have a very special guest on Live Today. So this is where you pre record an interview with like somebody big. So maybe this is a Tony Robbins of your industry. You don’t tell a Tony Robbins. You got to be there at 3:25pm Eastern Time or you’re not going to be on this thing. So you get somebody big and you pre record it and you can go a little bit longer, whatever. And then what you do is you say, guys, we’re going to take, we’re going to take about a five minute break. There’s going to be a video that plays. It’s basically an ad that runs for whatever you’re selling and maybe or some testimonials. Then guys, I’ve got some amazing stuff to share with you.
And what do you share in Those, in that 55 minutes? Otherwise you share some stories, maybe some testimonial videos. But then you have that interview that you pre recorded or two interviews that you pre recorded, whatever it is, and you play those. And then about five minutes, you know, before the top of the hour, you have some music playing and a countdown timer, or it’s like it has a countdown timer will be, you know, the prerecorded will be live at, in 5 minutes and 17 seconds.
And it’s a testimonial thing playing. And then you come back on live and it’s an hour of engaging content. In fact, it might be the best interview you have. And it’s still quote, unquote, live because the only way to watch the interview is to be on live. But instead of an hour of dead air, you have amazing content for an hour that keeps people engaged. Keeps them excited. And then you come back an hour later, you still get your break. Your tech team gets their break. You know, everybody gets one hour just to chill.
You can even tell them like, we’re not going to be responding to comments, or maybe you have one person responding to comments, I don’t know. But you, it’s just something to give you a break because I’ve done that. I did a six hour live stream once and I’m telling you about four hours. We plan them like two hours and four hours. I had to go take a 15 minute break, I had to go to the bathroom and I had to go lie down for five minutes and just rest my voice in my head. So you can still do it. But that’s the lesson.
That’s, I mean, I’m telling you guys, that is a, not a seven figure, a six figure lesson that I just shared with you guys. Here’s why we didn’t do that. We just assumed that they had everything figured out and if we had just asked the question, we’d have been like, hey, what if we do this instead? And it would have been better. Much better experience. All right, so what other improves do you have? Jim,
Jim Atkins : I’m going to piggyback off of what you just said. And it goes with it. Communication. And that’s, you know, I mean, you know, the three C’s of affiliate marketing. The first one, communication. And it’s just, you know, again it’s, it’s like it’s not pointing a finger at anyone. It’s a matter of, you know, relationships, personal, business, doesn’t matter. Early communication, consistent communication, thorough communication. All the things that you just mentioned in the previous point. Just making sure that everyone’s on the same page asking questions. You know, communication is two way, but just improve the communication, do it earlier, be more thorough. You know, all those things that go along with communication.
Matt :Yeah, that is so true. And it’s something, I think we’re the best in the world of what we do. And the cool thing is you can be the best in the world at what you do and still get better. You know, the fastest man in the world can still get a little bit faster. You know, they didn’t just stop training, doesn’t stop working out. Like they’re still trying to get better. You know, as an agency, as, as me as an affiliate manager, me as a leader, I’m always trying to get a little bit better.
I feel like we have a great thing going here. We get massive results for our clients. Well, you know, what if I had known what I know now when I mentioned earlier, 300,000 to 1. 25 million for Michael Hyatt. If I’d known then what I know now, I’m going to tell you right now, that launch would have been 1.7 to 1.8 million. So how is that like, does that mean I sucked back then? No, this wasn’t as good as I am now. And I’ve learned a few things that we could have used. And I would have thought, it’s like in retrospect, I go, man, we would have done that. That’s why we do these, you know, these meetings. And so, yeah, communication is huge. Other improves. You got any more improves, Jim?
Jim Atkins :You know, it had to do with the hot leads too. But just. And that had to do with the qualifying and the issue we had with that. But the timing of the hot leads, affiliates again. And that goes with communication. All this ties in together, but just making sure that you have all that together and getting it to them. To me, I would like to have gotten those hot leads to them just a little bit sooner than what they received them. So just improve on that.
Matt :I like that. We. The first time we ever did it, the hot leads, we sent them late morning of CART close day, you know, that was. That’s when we did it. Why did we do it? Because I literally had the idea early morning of CART close day and nobody had ever done this. I’ve never seen it done. I told. I won’t say who, but there is an affiliate in this particular launch
we’re talking about that’s also a client. And I joked and said because they were asking me about how do you guys do these hot leads? And I said, I’ll tell you what, in our first coaching call, I said, if you guys hit this many sales in our first coaching call, I’ll tell you how we do it. You know, And I was joking because I’m gonna tell me they’re a coaching client.
I’m gonna pay us a lot of money. I’m gonna do it anyway. But I was just joking with them because that’s like, nobody is doing hot leads. We are the only affiliate programs on the face of the earth that I’ve ever seen. And I’m technically a member of hundreds. I’ve never seen anybody do this. I hope more people do it because it’s brilliant. And I hope affiliate programs that we promote will steal this idea from us. I’m not sharing this stuff publicly. Cause I don’t want people to steal it. I’m you know, there’s a lot of stuff I’m not able to share on this podcast that’s reserved for our clients, but this is something I’m sharing publicly.
So steal it. I forgot where I was going with that. But the point is, the point is we’re still improving that. I came up with that the last day of cart close five months ago. And so this one was like, well, the cart closes on Sunday so we probably need to get these to people on Friday so that it’s not like sending it to them on Sunday. They might got stuff planned.
So they was like, well, maybe we even need to do like, you know, Friday morning, not Friday afternoon. And in retrospect, yeah, I think we teased them this time. That was one thing that we kept mentioning them like you’re going to get them. But I. The more I see this, I’m thinking if car closes on a weekday, I think you get them to them.
So car close on a Friday, I’d probably go with Wednesday, you know, late afternoon. Car closes on the Sunday, I’d probably go Thursday, you know, mid afternoon, you know, something like that. So, you know, if car closed on a Thursday, then I probably get them to them on a Tuesday afternoon, something like that. About 48 hours or more in advance. And one of the things is, you know, you can get them to them and then they might not even use them until, you know, cart close day because that’s when it really takes effect. But at least it gives them that option. So. Good one.
Jim Atkins :There any other improves the timing of the partner assets again just because of sometimes communication gaps, everything going on and stuff. There was some, I would like to improve some of the partner assets that were sent to them. The timing of that and it wasn’t anything major and just what you were just talking about earlier, about just getting a little bit better every time, everybody in every way. And it just, I thought that we could improve on a couple of times there about getting the partner assets to them a little bit more timely.
Matt :No. And I love that. Like, I love that we’re able to talk about this and be open and honest. Like, did we do pretty darn good? Yeah. Could that have been 5% better? Absolutely. And the school thing is we’re not satisfied with that. Right. Like we realized we were about a day late. This is a six month launch window and we were one day late and we’re going, dang it, don’t like being a day late.
I want to get it out on time. You know, that’s how I view it as like a day late, you know, day late, a dollar short. Right. Let’s move on to stop things that we, if any more improves, we can talk about in the lessons. But I want to move on to stop. You know, we’ve talked about things. We’re going to keep things we’re going to improve. What’s the first thing that you would stop doing? You know, based on some stuff we did in this launch.
Jim Atkins :What I have the first one is we had that awesome early bird and then you had Juneteenth and Father’s Day. And I’m not even sure if we can do it here, but that the stop not take a break. I mean, did we have to take a break with Father’s Day and Juneteenth after the early bird? I, I just, I wonder if we hadn’t taken a break, what that possibly could have done, you know. So does that go to your launch calendar or whatever? I don’t know. But taking that break, I’ll always have that. I wonder if because of the break that we had.
Matt :Yeah. Holidays and weekends can be killers. And while that particular webinar was the best in, you know, in the history of the company, it’s then going, you know, effectively an entire day off. I’m with you. You don’t know. There’s no way to tell. And you know, when you have a lengthy launch and you want to own a month, I mean, name a month without a holiday of significance. I mean, March has Easter half the time, you know, so you can’t do March. You know, January is the beginning of the year. So that, and then you got MLK Day, which is typically, you know, that’s a three day weekend.
You can’t do it then, you know, at least with Juneteenth and Father’s Day, you know, that was on a Sunday and it was the same day. And so it wasn’t a three day weekend. September, you got Labor Day, you got, you know, Halloween, maybe October, if you did it, you know, I mean, when can you do it, right? August, you got kids going back to school members. Thanksgiving, when can you do it and not have something if. Especially if this, you know, with a longer launch cycle, you know, of over three weeks. And so, yeah, I don’t know what that like, you know, to me I look at that and go, they’re trying to fit it in, you know, move it back a week.
And I got Memorial Day, you know, at the beginning. And that’s tough. So it’s probably just moving the whole thing and that’s one of those things like, what do you do? Because then if you move the webinar to Monday, well, then do you lose the momentum from the workshop on Friday to Monday? You know, and. I don’t know.
I think that could work. I know why they moved the webinar from Sunday. That made sense. It was Father’s Day and it was Juneteenth. You just can’t do a webinar on that day. So was it better on Saturday for the overall launch, not for the webinar itself? For the webinar itself, I think it worked great. But for the overall, was it better on Saturday or was it better on Monday? And the answer is I don’t know. And it’s really hard to test something like that. Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. So I. Yeah, I’d love to say I have the answer on that. I don’t. In this particular case, like, given what we had, I don’t know. You know, and that’s one of those things. Maybe you can test that in a more of a. In a smaller setting with some different, you know, launches or different mini launches and test that. So I’ll be interested.
We’ll probably test that over the years and start sharing that with people. A stop that I’ve got is never, ever, ever will I. At least I shouldn’t say never ever, ever. But in the near future, we will not be using Slack as a communication tool for affiliates. Facebook group is still the place to be other than email. We tried Slack.
I was an experiment. It was not my idea, but I was 100% on board with it because I don’t like Facebook. I don’t like the fact that I have to log into Facebook to go see what’s going on with the launch. And then I get distracted with the ADHD and I’m like, oh, shiny object cat video. You know, I don’t watch cat videos, but you get the idea, right? And then I’m reading my friends like, no, I went there for this reason, or at least with Slack, I wasn’t going to have that. But the reality is we lost people just checking in. They’re checking into Facebook once a day, you know, and they just happened to see an update about the launch and they went, oh, you know, so we lost that. We. They had to either.
They’d either have the app. And if they don’t use Slack, you know, most of them use Facebook already 98% of them probably have a Facebook account. But we forget sometimes as entrepreneurs, like, we use Slack as a team. I’m in five different Slack teams for clients and our stuff and various things. I forget that it’s still not as ubiquitous as I believe it is. And I know you check in, Jim, you check into Slack 2, 3, 4, 5 times a day for just our stuff. I check in three times a day, every single day. I don’t check into Facebook three times a week.
But yet not everybody is like me. And I have to just remember that. So it’s something we tried. I’m glad we tried it. We now know officially that it’s not a good idea, at least for the next few years. Maybe that’ll change in 2025 and we’ll revisit it. But Facebook groups, you still want to have a partner Facebook group, don’t use Slack. That was my big. My, my stop. There any other stops from you?
Jim Atkins :No, not really. But I’ll say something with that. I did actually have had Slack slash Facebook on my improves about what to do with that. So you kind of touched on it with improving partner communication and better way to do that. So I had it on there just in a different area. But I 100% agree with you on that. But no, that’s really about the only thing I have on style. Matt Cool. And then once. Should we start? I’ve only got one and we’ve already touched on a little bit. But I’m curious to hear from you. What should they start doing?
Jim Atkins :I mean, Ryan was so thorough and just spending these months around him, learning from him in so many different areas. But the one thing was the tracking spreadsheet. I mean, we’re already starting to use that, you know, with us, but you know, to start using that. And we have already started using it, but just, you know, trying to have. And what it did was having a lot of stuff in one place. You know, maybe we can work on cutting down some of the tabs or whatever. But still just using that tracking spreadsheet for the affiliates and some other things to be able to go to it, find what you need, be able to track it, you know, communication, I mean, it was just very thorough and I thought it was a really good tool, you know, that we’re starting to use and I really liked it.
Matt :Yeah, this was just basically cleaning up some of the stuff that we’ve done. And we found that the way that they did some of their projections and things was super beneficial. One of the big ones we touched on earlier. But start, this is for affiliate managers, all right? Over communicate with your client or your employer. Over communicate and ask a lot of questions, get crystal clear on everything. Have discussions months and months in advance in crazy detail.
So some examples of things that you could discuss. Right, this is not talking about, you know, this particular promotion, just in general. Okay, so you’re going through the calendar and it’s a ten day sequence, right? And it says. We talked about this earlier. Like it says live stream. Okay, how long is the live stream? You should know that five months in advance. How many guests are there? Who’s responsible for.
Oh, the affiliate manager is responsible for getting the guest. Great, then. Okay, what are our criteria for that? What type are we looking for? A mix of genders and, you know, and races. Are we looking for a, you know, do they need to be in the top 20 or the projected top 20? How many do we want to go ahead and book right now?
When do we want to book them? You know, because this is one of those things, like there are things like that where the booking stuff could happen months in advance on a percentage of them and it leaves a lot less work for you to do leading up to it. So having those conversations. Oh, go through. Tell me what every day of the workshop is.
Yeah, there’s a PDF, but let’s have a five minute discussion about. Really? A five minute discussion about every day of the workshop? Yes. Because if I have that five minute discussion now, I will never Have a question later. And so we used to do a 30 minute onboarding call with new clients and then I bumped it up to an hour, then it became 90 minutes.
Now they’re two hours long and I honestly think that we will probably make them longer. You know, imagine like the vibe I’m getting when I do our onboarding calls with clients is I’m coming to your office and if I come all the way to your office, if I take the time to fly across the country, across the world, are we going to have a two hour meeting? No, we’re going to, we might, we might meet for two hours and then what are we going to do?
We’re going to go out to lunch and we’re going to continue to talk about it for another 90 minutes and then we’re going to go back to the office and we’re going to meet the team, or we’re going to meet the team first, then we’re going to meet for an hour and a half, then we’re going to go to lunch, then we’re going to come back and we’re going to have a whole day. And I’m not suggesting we do an entire virtual day with our clients, but really a two and a half, three hour meeting where we go through everything and we are so crystal clear.
And I’ll just tell them, like, this is going to reduce the number of questions we have by a factor of eight, seven, you know, whatever. So getting crystal clear on everything. If you’re an affiliate manager, you need to know everything about the products. Like, you need to know, you know, if it’s a, you need to know the launch schedule, you need to know everything.
Take that time to do that significantly more in advance. And I felt like our onboarding call for this was probably the most detailed we’ve ever had and it still fell way short. And that’s on us. And it’s why our onboarding calls now, you know, like we have to take a break halfway through. You know, we’re exhausted at the end of it. Like, I don’t book anything, I don’t do any other calls those days.
Like these are because, you know, for me, spending three hours on Zoom is just exhausting, you know, but it is so important. And I mean, we just did one recently. It was the first one we did that was like that more. And I’m telling you right now, it’s like, oh my gosh, everything was so much better. So that was huge. So any other starts from you, bud?
Jim Atkins :No, I mean, you covered that and you know, I mentioned it about. Anyhow, it just boils down to communication, but no, nothing right now. No, that’s it.
Matt :Awesome. Any. Just other lessons you got from this that we want to share. Jim.
Jim Atkins :Nothing really specific. It just, you know, I touched on my last point, but just Ryan and his team about how good they are at what they do, how thorough they are, and just how blessed I am and the learning experience that I have
with the job that I have. I mean, you know, whether it’s spending time with you or the clients or whatever, it’s just, you know, I mean, you just. When you get a little older, you start looking at the blessings of life and it’s just. This is. It’s a blessing, you know, I mean, because we work with people, I guess. Why? From every continent except Antarctica, you know.
Matt :Yeah. I mean, affiliates for sure, but clients. We’ve had clients, you know, North America. Yeah. Claire was in Argentina. Europe, Australia, definitely.
I don’t know if we’ve ever. I know we haven’t had one in Africa. I don’t know if we’ve ever had a client in Asia. Technically, we have team members in Asia, but I’m trying to think if we. Affiliates, but I don’t know if we’ve ever actually had a client who lives in Asia. So we got four clients in four continents. That’s kind of cool, you know.
Jim Atkins :Yeah. I mean. And just, you know. So you’re talking about that. I mean, with, you know, lesson. It’s just, you know, look at the opportunity affiliate marketing is and how blessed we are to be able to be involved in it with all the people we get to work with and help and serve and all those things like that. So is that a lesson or not? I don’t know. It’s just something that. That I look on that I’m very thankful for.
Matt :I love that. I have a couple of lessons real quick that I’ll share from this.
Number one, the lesson, fear moves faster than hope. And we’ve talked about this in our team meetings a bunch lately. You know, the. In the middle of this particular launch, the stock market crashed.
I believe it killed sales immediately, even though it’s recovered and will continue to recover. The one thing you have to keep in mind when you’re planning your offers and thinking about, like, your business, people react much slower to recovery and much slower to hope. And they react much slower to good news than they do to fear, to bad news and to downturns. Like, they react overnight to those things to good news, they typically react much, much slower. And we even see this, like, you know, this isn’t a political thing, but you see this, you know. You know, with COVID you know, it’s like overnight we went into lockdown load, and we reacted very quickly to the bad stuff. And I believe that when things started to get much better, that people tended to react very slowly to that.
Others would argue we probably reacted too fast, but that’s neither here nor there. But it’s definitely true economically, when you look at when do people hire, oh, there’s an economic downturn. Lay off 20% right now. And then the economy has recovered for six months and they still haven’t hired any of that 20% back. And it’s like, well, we’re just being cautious about it. Like, really, you don’t have to hire all 20% back.
Do you think you can hire 5% back? You know, like, start the hiring process? So fear moves faster than hope, and people react much slower to good news than bad news. Just know that, know that we talked about this earlier as a team, that even when things have recovered, you. Your messaging still might have to be around that economic downturn. And we’re reacting to the economic downturn months after it’s actually recovered. Psychology and economics are different fields for a reason. They’re different fields for a reason. So economically, and I can look at this objectively and go, the economy has recovered or it’s in recovery. People aren’t going to react to that for months, I can assure you. And the second thing is, for those of you out there, if you hire affiliate manager, assume they know nothing. And this goes back to what I said earlier. I’m going to assume the client knows nothing. And I’m going to ask.
I’m going to ask such stupid questions. They’re going to think that I’d rather them think, oh, my gosh, did we hire the right affiliate manager and go out and crush it for them than try to be like the smartest guy in the room and end up looking like a doofus six months later. In other words, assume ignorance both ways and discuss things in advance. So assume that your affiliate manager knows nothing. If you hire an affiliate manager, assume that they aren’t an expert. Don’t treat them like an idiot. That’s not what I’m talking about. But, like, don’t just say, we gotta.
Okay, you know, here’s the schedule and we gotta no go, okay? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And by the way, you know, we have 50 slots for webinars, and you’re like, your job is to fill those 50 slots. And here’s the order in which we want to fill them. I know you may think that you should fill them in this order, but. No, it’s actually this order. Oh, well, you know, here’s the, the launch starts on this date. But, you know, I’ve had to make sure, like, assume that our affiliate managers know nothing. I don’t think, Jim, that you feel like I’m treating you like you’re an imbecile, you know?
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Yeah, he’s shaking his head. You know, you don’t feel that way it’s you just know that I’m covering my bases to make sure that, like I would rather waste a minute of your life explaining to you in depth something than have you. It’s not about avoiding mistakes.
I want you to make mistakes. I just don’t want you to make mistakes that I easily could have prevented in a minute of time. I want you to fail a lot and screw up and learn lessons the hard way because you tried something and it didn’t work, awesome. But if I can say, you know, boom, boom, boom, and assume that you know nothing and teach you something and make sure that everything’s understood, it’s a much better position. So if you hire an affiliate manager, just assume they know nothing. So, Jim, man, thank you for doing this. This has been awesome. Like, I mean, I know I got a few things out of it that I’m, you know, we’ve talked about but honestly had forgotten. So I’m excited to continue to improve, you know, our agency and keep getting better and serving our clients better and better every single day. So thank you for doing this, buddy.
Jim Atkins :I’ve enjoyed it. Thanks a lot, Matt. Thanks for having me on.
Matt :So there you have it. A behind the scenes look at one of the biggest affiliate launches of the year. As I mentioned earlier, if you got questions about this, questions about anything else you’re interested in working with us either in a coaching relationship or having us run your affiliate program for you, text me at 260-217-4619. That’s 260-217-4619. Make sure, if you haven’t already, that you hit subscribe. Make sure you hit subscribe because you do not want to miss the next episode.
We’re going to talk about the importance of getting personal in your affiliate promotions. This is going to apply whether you’re an affiliate or you’re running an affiliate program. Because if you’re running an affiliate program, this is a lesson you’re going to want to share with your affiliates. So make sure you hit subscribe and come back from that. If you haven’t yet, make sure you leave a rating and review. We would really appreciate that. It helps us to reach more people and it’ll make you feel good about yourself. So hope you got a ton out of this episode. I’d love to hear from you again. You can text me at 260-217-4619. I’d love to hear what you got out of this episode and we’ll see you in the next one.
See you soon.