The Affiliate Manager Holiday Survival Guide

The holidays are here… which means chaos for most affiliate managers. There are promos flying everywhere, inboxes are packed, and your affiliates? Half of them are over-promoting, and the other half have gone silent. So how do you stay sane and strategic when the whole season is moving at lightning speed? Today, I’m sharing the practical guide to not just surviving December, but actually thriving as an affiliate manager during the busiest season of the year.

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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy

Why Every Author Should Be Using Affiliate Marketing

Inside the Mind of a Strategic Affiliate Marketer

The Affiliate Book Launch Blueprint

How I Found Affiliates for My Book (And How You Can Too)

The Shocking Truth About My Affiliate Program

The Affiliate Manager Holiday Survival Guide

The holidays are here and that means craziness, total chaos for most affiliate managers. There are promos flying everywhere, inboxes are packed and your affiliates, well, half of them are over promoting and the other half have gone completely silent. So how do you stay sane and stay strategic when the whole season is moving at lightning speed? Well, today I’m sharing the practical guide to not just surviving December, but actually thriving as an affiliate manager during the busiest season of the year.

So let’s be honest, this, this time of year, it can be insanely chaotic. Personally it can be crazy. I know for us, it’s a busy time with we’ve got 1, 2, 3, our daughter has four futsal tournaments, over the next five weeks she’s got league soccer games, I think she’s got a few of those. We got to prepare for her team going to Arizona. we’ve got the holiday shopping, we’ve got Thanksgiving, we’re hosting Christmas Day, we host New Year’s Eve, we’ve got all these things, we’ve got Christmas parties to go to, meals to make, you know, desserts to make. We gotta drive down here, drive down there, across the state, over state lines like all these crazy things.

And so just personally it is, it’s insanely busy. So it feels chaotic even without the business side of things. But for a lot of us between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, a lot of companies are doing, you know, 50% or more of their sales in like a five, six week period. And if you’re an affiliate manager, you feel every single bit of that, right? You’re juggling deadlines, you’re getting assets ready for your affiliates.

Your answer. Every email is urgent, right? Every message is urgent. Links don’t work. They’re trying to squeeze in one more follow up email before midnight.

It’s just crazy. So much is going on and so it ends up being a lot of early mornings, late nights, working seven days a week, 57 to do’s, you know, and you’ve got your list just keeps getting longer. And most of the year, when I’m running affiliate programs like outside of holidays, Most of the year my list gets shorter. I have four items at the beginning of the day and I complete all four of them and then yeah, I add three or four more for the next day. But that’s feels like I start every day this time of year with 15 to do’s and I end the day with 18.

I always end with more and I never finish all 15. So I’ve been there. I am there, been there, done that. And you know, it’s got the T shirt right. And that’s exactly why I wanted to create this episode.

To help you not just survive the holiday madness, but actually to thrive in it. Because this season could be a huge opportunity as well. Everything comes down to numbers. We’ll talk about this a little bit later. But you know the great thing about 50% of your sales, let’s just say for example coming in a six week period is, you know, if you do the math that, that’s 42 days, but let’s just call it 50 days.

50% of your sales in 50 days. That means if you do little things that bump up sales 10%, that actually is 5% of your annual sales that you can increase. And so every little thing has a big impact. Affiliates are hungry to promote the right offers. Customers are actively looking to buy.

The barrier to buying becomes shorter, especially as you get closer and closer to like, you know, shipping deadlines. December 20th, 18th, 21st. Somewhere in there, people begin to make quicker decisions. And if you can show up with a solid plan, some good creative, a little bit of energy, this might be your best quarter, might even be your best month of the year.

So today I’m going to walk you through, got about 15 or 16 of the most important things that you can do to stay ahead of the chaos. Make the most of your affiliate program this holiday season. So let’s get into it, All right?

Number one, start earlier than you think you need to. This episode is going to air sometime in very early December. You should have already started.

If you haven’t start now, start today. That’s the, the biggest mistake I see affiliate managers make during the holiday season is just starting too late. Everyone’s inboxes is more packed, everyone’s bandwidth is a little bit lower. They’re doing other stuff like I talked about earlier outside of, you know, outside of business or just a little bit more on their plates. Their energy is already a little stretch.

And if you’re waiting to mid December to push out copy and reminders, you are already behind. You have got to Account for slower replies. You’ve got to account for delayed content approvals. If you have to go through your legal department, you got to go. You got to account for the fact that your affiliates have their own promos going on too.

So the earlier you get on their radar, the more likely that they’re going to carve out space up for your promo on their calendar. So if you could go back in time, what’s the old saying, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago.

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The second best time is now. The best time to have started was November 1st. The second best time is right now when you’re listening to it today. And if you’re late to the party, it’s okay again today. So start earlier than it feels comfortable and you’re gonna have a major edge on the competition with that.

Number two, it becomes even more important than ever. You should already be doing this, but it becomes five, ten times more important. I mentioned earlier, when you have, you know, when 50% of your sales come in, effectively what amounts to 10% of your year, you can do the math on that, right?

That means you know only 50% are coming. The other 45 weeks, 46 weeks of the year, everything is 5, 10, 15, 20x right now. So it’s very important, number two, that you segment your affiliates by activity level. I know you know this, but not all affiliates are created equal. And during the holidays the last thing you want to do is treat them like they are, right?

So segment them by activity level. Your top performers, your kind of, your mid levels, your newbies, your inactives. You have to do that. You don’t need to write four different emails necessarily, but you do need to speak differently to someone who’s made 200 sales this year versus someone who hasn’t made a single sale. You need to speak differently to people who are making a sale a week than, people who are sending no traffic.

And your top affiliates, they need even more advanced notice. They need those custom deals, they need some personal shift check ins. Your mid level affiliates might need some encouragement or maybe a little extra push, like a bonus tier. Newer affiliates, they need onboarding, they need clarity. And then those inactive, they need a wake up call. They need to know that this is the time of year to get active.

So segmenting helps you use your time wisely. And one of the things it does is it allows you to focus on your big movers. I mean it’s simple math. If you only have two hours to spend at the biggest time of the year, those two hours should be spent on the biggest impact.

And so one of the ways that you can do this, just very simple, is if you’re sending out, you know, let’s say you have 500 affiliates and you’re doing like I do, I don’t send our emails through an email system. I send them using mail merge tools because the deliverability is higher and they feel more personal. Very simple thing that I do, that I actually do throughout the year. I order them in terms of activity, so I order them in terms of sales year to date, and I update that about once a month. That means that at the very least, my top affiliates are going to get the emails first.

So if I do need to send something that is urgent, like we have a flash sale and we just announced it and it goes live in two hours, the inactive affiliates, the lower affiliates might not get that email until like 5 seconds before it goes live. Oh, well, but at least my bigger ones are gonna get it first. That’s just a simple thing. There’s so many more things you can do, but make sure you are segmenting your affiliates by activity level. The third thing you have to do is set crystal clear deadlines.

And part of this is to use urgency and use scarcity, but make sure, of course, you’re using it ethically. Right? Nothing motivates action. Now, I say this so many times, nothing moves people like a deadline. And this becomes twice as true when you got the holiday pressure on people because you have deadlines that are literally get this in time for Christmas or don’t.

So it goes from being a Christmas gift to a Mother’s Day gift really fast. And, and people don’t want a Mother’s Day gift in December. They want the Christmas gift because they waited till the last second, Right? Not that I do that. So vague language doesn’t work this week, only doesn’t work when attention spans are short and distractions are everywhere.

So be crystal clear. This ends Friday at, midnight Eastern standard time. So build in some scarcity, but only when it’s real. If you’re limiting something to 100 buyers, say so, just don’t fake it. Affiliates, even more so than customers, hate being manipulated.

So you want ethical urgency, ethical scarcity. That’s gonna build, you know, build trust, of course, but it’s gonna also drive results. And that’s what you’re looking for. So be direct, be specific, always honest, and your affiliates are gonna respond more frequently. They’re gonna do more for you.

Number four, just really put the extra effort into your assets. Your swipe copy this time of year. So we’re going to talk about assets in a couple of different places, but I want to talk about swipe copy. The reality is affiliates, more so than the rest of the year, are overwhelmed during the holidays. If you give them a reason to skip your promo, they will.

And so if you don’t provide swipe copy or you give them a swipe copy that they have to spend a lot of time on, it’s just they’re not going to use it right. So generic copy doesn’t work. So pre written, plug and play swipe copy becomes non negotiable this time of year. You want full email sequences, you want social media captions, you want different subject lines, image suggestions, hand it all to them. Make it easy to copy, paste and tweak.

Yes, I say all the time. Matt, don’t you say don’t copy and paste the swipe copy if you’re an affiliate. Yes I do. But they’re gonna do it. So account for that and make it easy for them.

Offer different variations by audience or voice. Again, don’t be generic. Don’t put it in five attachments or buried in a Dropbox folder. Put it all in one place. Format it cleanly, ready to go.

Like when it’s. When you make things easy, they will promote. When they, you make things hard, they will not promote. It is truly that simple. I talked about it before with your big affiliates.

This is why segmenting is important. With your big affiliate, use AI to create their voice. I have an AI chat I just counted this morning because I was telling a client about this. I currently have 47 different AI chats where I have loaded more than 50 emails from this affiliate. So I have all named and I’ve you know created.

There’s 47 right now. I’ll probably have 50 by the end of the year. I’ll probably, I have three or four more that I add in each of these. So I’m looking at these, these are all different. There’s 47 names right now and I can take you know, I can take an idea, I can take a sales page and I can take a theme and I can feed it to this AI chat and say write this in the style of blank and let’s create a three email sequence for this person.

And it is completely trained on more than 50 of their emails. I mean some of them, I have hundreds of emails in there. Just depends on how I got them. some of them, I had them send them to me and they sent me like their entire convert kit or sorry kit now export or whatever. They’re using HubSpot.

They sent me their entire export since 2018. I probably have 1500 emails in there. But you know, at the very least I would grab like 50 of them and I would load them in and I would train it on their style and their tone and I would take I would take like a few emails and write them and then I would send them to them and say, how would you edit this? And then they edited it and I reported that back to the AI and used that to train the AI. And anytime they report back to me that they made an edit, I train it more.

But basically I’m giving them copy and paste email. And so that’s really important this time of year because you want to make it really, really simple for them.

So number five, speaking of what we talked about just a moment ago with crystal clear deadlines, urgency, scarcity, use bonuses, they are not just for customers, they are for affiliates too. So if you want them to choose your offer over the 15 other offers in their inbox, you need to give them a compelling reason. So, you know, cash bonuses for hitting a certain tier, commission bump, early payment, you know, that’s a big one.

We use this time of year that, hey, if you, you know, let’s say that they earn, they typically earn $10,000 a month. If they, I will literally tell them like if they normally earn $10,000 a month and they’re, and I look at their past data and I see that typically they earn $10,000 in commissions by December 23rd, I’ll tell them, hey, if you earn 10,000, if you hit 10,000 in commissions by December 15th, we’ll send it to you on the 16th. That’s an easy thing for us to do. I mean, for one thing we get the expense in this year, you know. And so from a taxes standpoint it’s great.

you know, any kind of physical gift or thank you, like anything you could do to make it fun, make it feel like a no brainer for them. And so yeah, like the $10,000 will pay on December 15th. That’s relevant because they’re spending money on Christmas gifts and it doesn’t have to be 10,000, it could be a thousand, it could be whatever makes it a little bit easier for them to go, well, okay, I’m going to, I could promote a product, a, and I can make $2,000 this month and I get paid in, you know, February or middle of January. Or whatever. Or I could promote B, I could promote Matt’s company.

And if I hit 2000 by December 17th, they’re gonna go ahead and give me the tooth. That’d be really handy. I’m gonna go ahead, I’m gonna promote that. So we want to make it really easy for them to decide on this. And of course, yeah, bonus, they should be adding bonuses to their offers as well.

We’ve talked about that a million times. But you know, you want to make it easy for your affiliates to decide to promote you. Speaking of making it easy to promote you.

Number six is just make sure to simplify your offer. I was writing, some copy for a client this morning and we were talking about how during the holiday, the exact line was during the holidays, cognitive load is high. People don’t want to think harder than they have to.

That was the actual line that I wrote. it’s a supplement in the brain health industry. And it’s true, like cognitive load we talked about earlier, your brain is moving faster and it’s a little bit overwhelmed. You’re probably getting just a little bit less sleep and things are like, it’s just, it’s different. Right?

And so if you’re, if your offer is confusing, if it’s clunky, they’re just going to skip it. So keep it simple. One promo, one main link, One core benefits affiliates more than anything. What they need is clarity, not complexity. Same goes for customers.

So of course, if your offer takes forever to explain, it’s. It’s DOA, right? It’s totally dead on arrival. Just strip it down, tighten it up. And so we want to put your affiliates in position where they can easily communicate, this is why this matters right now, to their audience in a single sentence, maybe two.

So make it easy to explain to customers. That’s going to make it easy to explain to affiliates. And the same goes for those bonuses. Make it simple. Don’t have like four layers to it.

Five layers, different tiers, just like, very simple. Earn $1,000 by December 15th and we’ll send it to you on the 16th. There’s your offer, there’s your bonus. Earn, you know, make $2,000 in sales before the shipping deadline of December 21st and we will send you a MacBook. That’d probably be a little bit bad for a $2,000 in sale. You know, make $6,000 in sales. We’ll send you, I don’t know, something like that, right? Make it simple.

Seven, speaking of making it simple and all the things we talked about this only happens if you over communicate, but keep it short. Over communicate does not mean a weekly email that’s seven and a half paragraphs long.

Over communicate does not mean a weekly novel. Over communicate does not mean sending out an email every couple of weeks that has five, six, seven, eight bullet points. It’s chaos. Again, as we mentioned, you want to rise above the noise. So don’t think essays, think just clear quick updates more frequently than you might during the rest of the year.

You might only send one email a week to your affiliates the rest of the year. Let’s send three a week, but make them three to five sentences. Or send daily reminders during key sales windows. Send quick leaderboard updates. Send some like, hey, just, you know, here’s an email.

Use this. Over communicate in a way that respects their time and makes their job easier. You can’t assume that they remember the key dates. You can’t assume that they remember their link, their promo code, the deadlines, when the ship, when shipping is for, you know, when free shipping ends, when, expedited shipping ends, when guaranteed shipping by Christmas ends. Like you want to remind them over and over again, but very quickly.

So I typically my emails, my rule, I don’t have a number of sentences necessarily, but my rule is absolutely no more than two screens on my phone. It’s a pretty short email, two screens on my phone, and that includes my signature. So that takes up like a fourth of the fifth of the screen. So I’ve got 1. 8 screens on my phone for this email.

That’s my general rule. And I’ll send myself a test and if it’s a little bit longer than that, I take it to the chopping block. I don’t include if it’s got like swipe copy, you know, at the bottom of the email that they can just copy and paste. That’s, that’s always going to be longer. But as far as the updates, 1. 8 screens on my phone, whatever I have, it’s black. I have a black phone. It’s an iPhone. I don’t even know what number it is. Whatever the one that came out this year is anyway.

Number eight, set up automated reminders. Okay. So as much as possible with you know, things like Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I’ll be honest, I don’t want to get up at 5:30 in the morning on Cyber Monday. But I do want an email to go out then. So I schedule it. I don’t want to send an email on Thanksgiving, so I schedule it don’t rely on memory either.

Make sure you set reminders for everything that needs to be done in advance. As much as possible. Yes. Can you innovate?

You know, can you come up with something on December 14th? Of course. But as much as possible, plan these things out. Like, this is the day that I’m going to do this as much as possible. Still batch.

Like, don’t be writing emails on the fly. you know, more than once or twice during, like, occasionally you just have to. But if you’re doing it even with the stuff that, like, if you’re doing it because something came up, that’s great. But if you’re doing it because you just didn’t plan far enough in advance, that’s bad. So if you send out 20 emails during the holidays and all 20 of them are rushed and sent out quickly, that’s a problem.

If one or two of them are, that’s not a problem. So again, automate the repetitive stuff. Automate the things that you can send out in advance. If you know all the details of your Black Friday sale, go ahead and send it out. Like, don’t wait and schedule some more reminders.

Don’t wait, just go ahead and schedule them so that frees up your energy so that if something does go wrong, you can react. If something, you know, if you need to get on strategy calls with your affiliates, you can.

All right, number nine, create an asset hub and give them a holiday cheat sheet. Okay? Especially this time of year, affiliates do not have time to dig around.

If your assets are disorganized, they’re in four different Google folders and they’re not labeled clearly. And you know, all that stuff, they’re just not going to promote. So you want a single link that has everything they need. That makes it really easy for them to find their links, their graphics, their copy, their deadlines, their bonuses, FAQs. And then go a step further and just create a holiday cheat sheet.

A, one page PDF, maybe a Google sheet, Google Doc, it’s got the top five to seven things they need to know in a glance. Not what are all the dates, but what are the three most important dates. Dates, typically that’s going to be the last day for shipping. That’s guaranteed by Christmas. that’s, you know, either free or standard.

However you do it, the last day for expedited shipping and like whatever the period of time is for your biggest sale, you know, if that’s December 3rd through 8th, give them that. What are your three, maybe four biggest times and dates they need to know. What are the, you know, two to three, maybe four biggest promos that they need to know about. What are the, you know, and the promo codes with those, you know, what are those types of things like where. And then on that, like, where do I get swipe copy, where do I get graphics, where do I get my links?

Make that really, really easy for them. When you make it easy for them to find and make it easy for them to use, everything just runs smoother and your affiliates are going to be grateful for it.

Number 10, run a holiday themed, you know, and holiday specific leaderboard and then give them real time leaderboard updates. You know, keep a real time leaderboard running. We all know this, that a little friendly competition goes a long way, especially when, you know, the rewards are good and the updates are frequent. Right?

So adding a little holiday leaderboard, like, you know, most sales before the shipping deadline or most sales of this promo that runs December 5th through 10th, all those things, you know, celebrate people. Make it a holiday theme. you know, put make it green and red or, you know, similar colors. Make it festive, Celebrate, you know, things like that, like have Santa do things, you know, and whatnot. Just like all these things. Right? I remember years ago, we. We had an affiliate.

This was like 2000. This is right when this might have been like 2009, maybe 10. It was like the second YouTube video I ever uploaded. So it might have even been like 2008. And we had an affiliate that, you know, we’re doing a holiday promo and did really well.

And so we had a guy, dress up as Santa and deliver a huge check. This particular affiliate earned a $10,000 bonus for winning this competition. And it wasn’t practical for us at that time to go there. I mean, it would have taken, you know, a day out and a day back.

And there was no, you know, airplane Wifi. It was too busy for us to go. But we did pay a guy, from like a local flower shop or something, you know, who knew his way around town and could do stuff like that. Had a Santa suit. You know, we paid him like 200 bucks to deliver this giant check for $10,000 to this affiliate.

And we had them recorded. And it was a really cool thing, you know. So do things like that. Make it fun and exciting for your affiliates.

Number 11, you know, do what Santa would do. Check your tech twice. The more traffic, the more risk, the more sales. The more risk, the more traffic and sales, the more likely it is that something is going to go wrong. And you multiply that by the fact that, you know, an hour of downtime in June might cost you $5,000. An hour of downtime in December might cost you 25, 50, $100,000.

So we’re talking bigger numbers. And if you’re, if your tech isn’t ready, it can fall apart quickly. So double check everything. It goes back again to planning ahead as much as possible. If you can get 80 to 90% of everything planned ahead, test it.

It leaves you that. Okay, I’ve only got an hour to test this out. So here’s the two things I’m going to focus on because I’ve tested the other five. So check your affiliate tracking. Check your landing pages, your promo code.

Like, make sure the promo codes work. if it says 25% off site wide, and then it doesn’t work on a certain item, why check all of your integrations, make sure everything works on mobile and, and all of these things. Right. It is, the reality is like a broken link or something going wrong on December 18th. If you know, if December 19th is the shipping deadline, it’s a missed opportunity.

You’re probably not going to get back. So do the testing. You know, like, don’t just assume that it worked last time. No, check it twice, maybe three times, just like Santa.

All right, number 12, make sure your, doesn’t have to do exactly with affiliate, but make sure your customer service team is ready. Okay, so if you’re just an affiliate manager at a company and you know somebody else is going to do that, that’s fine. You don’t necessarily need to participate in that. But you know, holiday buyers have higher expectations. They usually have more urgent questions. They’re in a rush and, and they need to know how to handle these situations.

What promos are running, what codes are valid, what bonuses to expect, you know, how to avoid refund requests, all these things. So you know this, obviously this helps affiliates because if your customer service is smooth, then it helps their credibility. Their credibility stays intact, but it also makes more sales. So make sure that your support team, your customer service team is ready. you know, make sure that they, they’re going to have an extra person.

If you have a two person customer service team and they’re normally pretty busy in June, they’re going to be extremely busy come December. Maybe somebody else needs to be stepping in periodically and helping them out.

Number 13, look at, look at the quiet affiliates. We talked about segmenting earlier, but I want to talk about focusing on the quiet affiliates. These are the affiliates who have gone silent in the last couple of months.

So maybe in March and June and you know, August, they’re doing five, $10,000 a month. They’re doing pretty well. And all of a sudden in September and October, early November, they’ve gone silent. Nothing. Just a quick email saying, hey, is everything okay?

Sometimes they just forgot, sometimes life happened. Sometimes they need encouragement, sometimes they need clarity. Sometimes they’re not getting your emails, they’re going to spam. And so, ah, a three sentence email that’s nothing but plain text with no links in it that says, you know, hey John, is everything okay? I haven’t seen anything from you in a couple of months.

I just want to check. We’re getting ready to enter Christmas. It’s a busy time and we to make sure you have everything you need. I cannot tell you how many times I have gotten emails that came back and said I haven’t seen any of them. So I went and looked for emails and I found them in my spam folder. I marked them as safe and now I’m getting them.

So that’s generally good advice just to periodically send emails like that, but especially to those down or kind of those quiet affiliates.

Number 14, make sure you’re using holiday themed creative. I have talked about this so many times over the years in holiday episodes. There’s a reason why I think I’d mention it every single year.

Simply put, holiday themed creatives, if I remember my numbers correctly, can increase your sales by as much as 18%. We did a study on it. Sometimes it is simply as just adding some red and green or blue and gold, or adding a snowman, something festive to it. If your creative looks like it was designed for July and it’s Christmas and it’s not festive, it’s not timely, it doesn’t feel urgent, it doesn’t feel like it’s a holiday special or a limited time bundle because the copy looks like it could be, you know, from any time of the year. It doesn’t have to scream Santa, but it should feel seasonal.

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And so make sure you are updating your creatives and you’re providing your affiliates with holiday creatives.

Number 15. These two are the last two are more on personal, on a personal level here. Keep your energy high. Your affiliates will feel it.

Your affiliates follow your lead. If you’re showing up stressed, disengaged, reactive, they feel it. If you’re excited, you’re proactive, you’re encouraging, they’re going to mirror that so keep your energy high even when it feels like a lot. Celebrate wins. Respond quickly. Smile, you know, smile, just smile. Like if you record video. Smile. Remind yourself this season only comes along once a year and that your energy is contagious. So show up for your affiliates with the right attitude and the right energy level.

Part of that comes from just making sure that you prioritize Rest, if you are like I’ve been in some holiday years where I’m more confined 14 hours a day, seven days a week for almost a month straight. What that meant was I had to have that conversation with my family and they knew to expect it. There was no surprises. Hey kiddos, I, I’m not going to be able to do some of the things that we normally do.

Like I don’t, I’m not going to be able to watch the movie for two and a half hours because daddy has to go to bed. You know, I, I’m working till 10:30 at night and I’m going to bed at 11 and I got to get up at 6:30 so I need to make sure that I’m getting to bed at 11 so I can get up at 6:30. I need to make sure that I’m getting, Normally I get about seven and a half to eight hours of sleep pretty consistently. It’s gonna be like seven hours and 15 minutes. But I need to make sure I get that.

I can’t do it. I can’t do six hours of sleep for a month in a row. I can’t not personally and operate at my highest level. I can’t not work out right now like I did today. My workout was only 40 minutes long, super, intense for 40 minutes though.

You know, I can’t do my hour and 10 hour and 15 minute workout. I can’t lift weights and run. I can maybe run and then I’m gonna do 50 push ups and I’m done. Like that’s my workout. So everything is modified but I can’t not work out for a month.

I can’t only get six hours of sleep for a month. I’m not going to be, I’m going to be completely useless the last two weeks of that four week stretch there. So make sure you’re prioritizing your energy, your rest because it will come through to your affiliates.

And lastly, end with gratitude. Whatever happens, it might be your best holiday season ever. It might just be an okay result, whatever. End with gratitude. Thank your affiliates personally if you can send them an email Write a note, hop on a call, let them know you see them, you appreciate their effort. Gratitude is how you develop these relationships long term. Because what you’re doing with this holiday stuff is you’re setting up all of next year, you’re setting up all of the next holiday season.

How you react the week or two after the holidays, how you do during the holidays, but also the week or so after is what’s going to set up next year. And maybe this year it was average. Maybe it went you only grew by 2% over last year, and that wasn’t what you were trying to do. You’re trying to go by 8% over last year. Okay, what you do right now, at the end with that gratitude, making sure that your affiliates feel genuinely valued when you do that. That’s how next year you do hit that goal. But it starts right now.

Because if you don’t do this, they just see it as transactional. They’re not going to come back and promote next year. But when they do feel genuinely valued, like I said, they’re far more likely to come back next time. So don’t. I know you’re tired and you know, you want to get back to the routine.

You want to sleep eight hours a night, you want to work out an hour, whatever. You want to do all the things that you’ve been doing, you want to watch the movie, but for a few days after, don’t be silent. That’s your opportunity to build loyalty and you don’t want to lose that chance. So finish strong and finish with gratitude again. You can plan this in advance, too.

Go ahead. And you can even pre write the emails and then tweak them so that it’s not so much on you mentally. But go ahead and put it in your calendar that, okay, we’re going to get through Christmas. I’ll take a couple days off for Christmas, as you should. But on December 27th, 8th, 9th, somewhere in there, I’m going to spend two days focusing on thanking our affiliates in all the ways that I know how.

If it involves sending gifts, plan those gifts in advance. Don’t try to figure it out on December 28th. Have those things planned in advance. It’s super important that you finish with gratitude. So there you have it, 16 Ways to Survive the holidays as an affiliate manager.

And hopefully not just survive, but like I said earlier, to thrive. So with that said, if you got any questions about this or anything else, you, can hit me up anytime. area code 260-217-4619, shoot me a text. area code 260-217-4619.

You can shoot me a text with your questions or your comments or anything that you need help with your affiliate program. And make sure you hit subscribe because you don’t want to miss the next episode. The next episode, basically, we’re going to be talking about the same thing, but from an affiliate perspective. How do we make this the best holiday season ever for us as affiliates? And so if you’re listening to this episode as an affiliate manager, you think I don’t need to know that one? you absolutely do, because there can be some more goodies for that one just for you. Even though I’m talking to the affiliates, you’re going to want to listen so you can share that information with your affiliates. So if you haven’t yet hit subscribe, make sure you do because you don’t want to miss the next episode. I’ll see you then.