Most affiliate programs communicate in a way that makes affiliates tune out… or walk away. Too many emails, not enough clarity, missing details, last-second requests, and “helpful” messages that don’t actually help anyone promote. In this episode of the 6 C’s series, we’re talking about the second C: COMMUNICATE. I’ll show you what great communication looks like from an affiliate’s point of view, what to send (and what to stop sending), and how to make it easier for affiliates to say yes and promote.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
The 6 C’s of Elite Affiliate Programs (Part 1)
How to Choose the Right Affiliate Manager
How to Get Affiliates Excited to Promote
How to Avoid the Biggest Affiliate Program Mistakes (Part 2)
How to Avoid the Biggest Affiliate Program Mistakes (Part 1)
How to Decide Between an In-House Affiliate Manager and an Agency
The 6 C’s of Elite Affiliate Programs (Part 2)
Most affiliate programs mess this up big time. As an affiliate, it’s not only annoying, but it leads to me quitting at least a few programs each year. And getting it right is foundational to building a great affiliate program. So today I’m sharing the second pillar of great affiliate programs. Hey, welcome back to this series. As I said the top of the last episode, you know, we got a new year, so we’re going to do a new series.
We’re going to get back to basics, get back to the foundational aspects of great affiliate programs. And as I mentioned in the last episode, we’re starting with three episodes that kind of a blast from the past that, most of you probably haven’t listened to because they’re from so long ago when I talked about the three Cs of every successful affiliate program. So we’re going to revisit that. And then at the end of that series, those three, I’ve got the final three Cs. There are six pillars to every great affiliate program, and I don’t want you guys to miss out on all six of them.
So we’re going to cover those three, then the final three at the end. So with that said, let’s jump in to our second pillar. So in the last episode, I talked about the first C of successful affiliate programs, which is contests, and ended up going a little bit deeper. And I talked about not only the three types of contests or the three keys to contests that you need to have, but I talked about how to make your affiliate program fun. If you missed that episode, make sure you go back and listen to it because you’re going to get a ton of valuable information about how to make your affiliate program fun and run contests that actually result in more sales.
That’s the key, you know, if you remember in that fun acronym, the F stood for focus on results. You need to make sure that your contests and your fun stuff actually leads to more sales. But the key throughout all of this, and it’s our second C in the three Cs of successful affiliate programs, is to communicate with your affiliates. And I mean all of them, not just your big ones, not just your big ones. I cannot stress the importance of having a communication plan with your affiliates.
Okay. I just cannot stress how important that is. We created a template that you can download, by the way, we’ll put the link in the show notes. It’s mattmcwilliams.com affplan if you go there, you can download our template that we created.It’s a free PDF. It’s the template that we give our affiliates to get them to mail more, promote more, and generate more sales. You know, like it’s, you know, it’s one thing to get your affiliates to promote your program, right? To, oh, yeah, sure, I’ll promote. It’s an entirely different thing to get them to mail 5, 10, 15, 20 times and go all out.
This template will help you to do that. All right. We’ve been using it for years. We’ve refined it over the years. And you definitely want to grab this template because I’m going to tell you right now, I can make the difference in communicating.Mediocre, Lily, I don’t know if that’s a word, but in a mediocre way, or communicating in a way that’s actually going to get results. So what do you communicate? Like, if you go check out this template, like, I’m just looking at one of the ones that we put together for a client here and there. You know, it says on here like, okay, on 1 27, we’re going to send the login and swipe for Monday on 1 28. That’s via email.
So it’s got the channel, it’s got the email subject line, things like that. What’s the medium? You know, we’re going to send an email. What time are we sending it? Who’s it from? Because it might not be just from me. We might send one from the client name. We might send one from, you know, might be from like my assistant or something. So who’s it from? What day of the week? What’s the date then? So we send the login and swipe on that day. The next day we send an email announcing the contest prizes. The following day, we’re going to post to Facebook and we’re going to announce a training webinar. Then we’re going to ask if they need anything going into next week.
We’re going to remind them about the swipe copy and teach them how to use swipe copy. Then we’re gonna keep going through this whole thing, right? We have, a whole breakdown of everything we’re gonna do to communicate with our affiliates day by day, starting months and months out. Now, of course, the question is, what do you communicate? What do you actually communicate with your affiliates? Well, the list is virtually Endless. I’m gonna just walk you through probably, I don’t know, a dozen or so today of things that you can communicate. The first thing is behind the scenes access. Give them a look at what’s going on. If you’re running a launch, give them a look at what’s going on.
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As you prepare for the launch, if you’re shooting the videos for your prelaunch content, let them in on them. Give them exclusive access to what’s happening. It makes them feel a part of it. I know one of my favorite videos to do for our affiliates is when I’m on the set recording the videos for the course or the, you know, maybe for the, prelaunch content. And I’ll be on the set and I’ll grab my selfie stick and I’ll just be like, hey, guys, I’m on set.I just wanted you to get a look at what we’re doing here and I just wanted to say thank you so much for your support. We’re about two months from launch. I can’t wait. We’re really going to over deliver for your audience. I can’t wait to serve them.
Blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? Or I’ll give them specifically. I remember this one. I’ll give them, like when I was recording and I screwed up and I remember this one where I had to say it was slimy, salesy or sleazy? Slimy, salesy. Sleazy. You know, like, how do you do, how do you promote affiliate products where it’s not slimy, salesy or sleazy? And you know, I’m doing this, I’m standing with my wife doing the teleprompter and recording and like, how do you do affiliate marketing where it’s not slime, slammy, slam, slim. Okay, that’s not it.
Take two. How do you do affiliate marketing without being slammy or slice? Dang it. And I mean, it took me like seven takes and you know, she’s cracking up. And then like another one, I’m like, how do you do affiliate marketing? And I just start laughing like I can’t even. I’m like, okay, so I gotta get this. I think it took like seven or eight, but possibly even like 10 or 12 takes for me to get through. Slimy, salesy or sleazy. And when I did, I was so excited at the end that I had.
I had to like stop. I was like, yeah, you know, I got through that. Okay, we can cut to the next thing you know, we had to use some B roll. Or something for that. But that was funny, right?I gave them the access to that. I shared that video with them because it was funny, you know, it was super funny. Secondly, like lots and lots of videos. Don’t just send your, your affiliates email updates. Do not just stick to text, please like give them videos.
Record a video. Just sharing. Like we recorded a video where we just. Hey, we’re super excited about this affiliate promotion and we’re really glad that you’re on board. In fact, I’m going to share the audio here from one of the videos.I think it’s about four or five minutes long. I’m going to share the audio from one of the videos that we did for our launch. Like this is years ago. Again, just to get them excited about the launch. Hey guys, real quick, I just wanted to give you guys a quick update. I know we are, as I said this morning, over 13,000 total opt ins. This is awesome. just finished the webinar or the masterclass this morning. Had a lot of sales coming in, so that was fun. And gosh, what else we got going on? Yeah, so wanted to show you guys the PDF that’s coming out tomorrow. It’s called Affiliate Marketing Sales Secrets.
How to Sell Without Being Salesy, scammy or Sleazy. And you guys should have seen me, I need to, I, ah, told Mark I want to get the outtakes at some point and share them with you guys from the video. Because the part where I say that took like nine takes. So I finally got it right and then, and then I was like, so amazing. I’ll read it. Because I still can’t get this right. You know, I’m like, so make sure you download the free PDF. It’s called how to Sell without being Slam Sammy. I’m like, slam Sammy, what is this?
You know, we talk about the limiting beliefs about why conventional wisdom is wrong. And it’s this limiting belief. As I say here, the biggest limiting belief that holds people back from success with affiliate marketing is the belief that affiliate marketing is salesy, sleazy or scammy. Hey, got it right. Cecilia Hilke: Not Slam Sammy though. It’s not Sam. You know, we talk about the five secrets of sales, masters. And a lot of this comes from the great Zig Ziglar. I quote him throughout the PDF. And I talk about secret number one, that to sell effectively, you’ve got to have passion and belief or you won’t sell anything at all.
Make sure you go download that PDF. Check it out, it’s in the Partner center and, grab your swipe and mail tomorrow, because this one’s going to be one of the best ones yet, buddy. Cecilia Hilke: Can I just say, Matt, one of the things that’s worked really well for us in Swipe is when we have a PDF, when we have a guide that we’re promoting is I’ll go through before I write the swipe and I’ll just, like, look at headings. But I pick something out and I say, oh, and I really love on page 27 what they say or on page 4 what they say about. And when you do that, like, it just.
It’s one of those things where people are like, oh, I need to go read that. I need to go figure out what that is. You know, and so that’s a really cool thing to do. So definitely. I mean, you know, we’ve provided for you there in the partner center. Make sure you download that. Make sure you flip through it at least and look through it. But, Matt, you kind of hinted, you alluded to this. You can use all these things that do a lot better in this promotion, too. It’s kind of meta, but you can take everything that’s in this and say, okay, how can I apply that for the next.
What are we at now? 7 days left? 8, if you include today. Yep. Cecilia Hilke: So you can use these things to increase your sales.So, I mean, there’s a double reason to go in and read it. But, you know, definitely super, excited about this one, Matt. You know, historically, I say, historically, it’s been, what, a week? Historically, the guides have done really, really well. Like, we’ve been blown away how well the first two did.
I have no doubt that this last one’s going to do the exact same thing, Matt, because it’s. I mean, as you go along, it’s harder. You know, it’s no doubt harder because you have less of a pool to draw on because some people have already opted in.You know, engaged people have already opt in. But I believe in this PDF because we’re approaching this more of the angle of it’s not about the money. It’s not about. You know, you’ve heard of affiliate marketing. You thought it’s about.You believe those myths. I’ve never personally been a part of an affiliate promo where I was making money on day three. Cecilia Hilke: It’s kind of fun. It’s kind of fun for you guys, hopefully. And, we’re seeing some sales rolling in and the webinars are converting and, you guys are making an average of, like, you know, 30 bucks and change per referral or per shows up.
Yeah, so keep it up. Mail to the PDF tomorrow, the video on Friday, and don’t forget about the webinars that you want to mail to on Saturday. And then we’re going to do the heads up email on Sunday and then it’s going to be a, three days of absolute insanity. And I will proxy, I will be in there by then. I will be 99% caffeinated.So that gives you some ideas, right? Yeah, that’s during the launch, you know, really to keep them motivated. But you can do those weeks or months in advance just to get like give them just a quick video update. Thirdly, make sure you hammer home the dates. You cannot mention the dates enough.
If there’s a promo coming up, a launch coming up, hammer home the dates. Everything you do, every email has a reminder of the dates. You know, when I do that behind the scenes video. And hey, just remember guys, the promotion kicks off May 30th. You know, I’m constantly reminding them about the dates.Fourth, like give them. Well, we don’t call them promo plans anymore. We call them commitment plans. Right? These are plans that like you really want to spell things out for your affiliates.
You want to tell them when they should mail, when they should share. Create a detailed plan for them and guess what, they will follow it. But this is something we discovered over the past couple of years. We don’t call them promo plans anymore, we call them commitment plans. So again, if you want to get a template of a promo plan and you can get this from an affiliate perspective, just go to mattmcwilliams.com promoplan mattmcwilliams.com Prom promo plan. You can download the promo plan from an affiliate perspective. Okay. But it’s the same one that we use for if you’re an affiliate manager, right, that you’re going to give your affiliates same exact plan.
It’s just geared towards, you know, the affiliates. But it’s really, we call them a commitment plan. And the reason for that is a couple of years ago we found we were running a promotion and I don’t know why, but I started calling it a commitment plan and people started like using them more. They started actually implementing what we put in the plan more. And I’m like, psychologically it kind of makes sense, right?
It’s a commitment that they’ve made. If they say they’re going to mail on Saturday the 8th, then they mail on Saturday the 8th. If they say they’re going to post or, do a Facebook Live on Monday the 10th. Then they do a Facebook Live on Monday the 10th. Kind of cool.So create these commitment plans again. You can download it. Like, it has a spot to put your logo and who it’s for and the dates and all this stuff. And it’s like color coded and you can change the colors and stuff. But it’s really cool.
You know, these commitment plans are super cool. Fifth, I think we’re on five announce contests and prizes. Like, nothing gets people more excited than finding out what the heck the prizes are. You know, I touched on this when I talked about contests and prizes in that episode. But, like, you want to announce the contest and prizes.In fact, I’m going to do a little bit more of a deep dive here into contest and prizes that I didn’t get to in, in the last episode and cover some of these things in the last episode, you know, before we move on.
So I want to talk to you about again, what to communicate. But I was thinking about this after the last episode. I didn’t dive super deep into some of the stuff that I could have with regards to prizes. Number one, there’s two types of prizes. There’s fixed prizes and there’s incremental prizes. A fixed prize is someone is winning it no matter what. And this is risky when you’re starting off. I don’t recommend fixed prizes. So I don’t recommend, you know, top 10 prizes, top 5 prizes, top 20 prizes, whatever.
Because you might be paying a first prize of, you know, $20,000 and somebody makes eight tails. Unless you got a $10,000 product. That sucks. Incremental prizes, basically, it means the more sales they make, the more prize they win. So if you get 25 sales, you know, as we talked about last time, you do three sales, you get this, you do 10 sales, you get this, do 25, you get this. And I recommend when you’re running like a first, you know, contest that it’d be something like that.
It’d be like, you know, three or five for that low level. 10, 25, 50, 100, 250, you know, and so on, depending upon the, again, the price of, you know, if it’s a, $7 product, you may want to make the first prize like 10, you know, go like 1050, 250 or something like that. But, you know, if we’re Talking anything over 100 bucks, that’s kind of a good breakdown. And then you make Those prizes about 7% of the value of the, of the product you Go as high as 10%.So you want to do fixed and incremental, but start off with just the incremental. What works best in terms of prizes?
Well, here’s some of the most effective things, like number one experiences, right? Prizes should be aspirational. So I like to offer prizes that get people to think a little bit outside of their norms, like the Kentucky Derby or final four tickets, you know, things like that. These are things that, well, you know, kind of ties into the next one. Things that people wouldn’t buy for themselves, but they would let you buy them for them. I remember years ago, the second type of prize are what we call buy it for me items. Ray Edwards said he was like, I’m really shooting for third place. I’ve always wanted a drone, but I know I’ll never buy it for myself.
I will, however, let you buy it for me. That’s what we want. Like, we all want to own nice things. It’s nice when someone else buys them for us. And he ended up like really becoming like a drone. I don’t know, a drone junkie or something. I don’t know what you say there. Gadgets work really well. So the latest tech gadgets are always great prizes. But masterminds and retreats, you know, we often do these where, you know, it’s like if you make the top 20, you’re going to get this big affiliate mastermind.
We might do like top 10 and we take them to a luxury resort. These have always been some of my favorite prizes, because I get to go hang out with cool people and take my wife to an amazing place and I don’t have to pay anything for it. That’s fun. You know, just the more prizes the better. Right?So you might have overall opt ins, overall sales. You got Sprint prizes, jump prizes, webinar prizes, workshop prizes, pre launch contest prizes, weekend prizes. We call these if then prizes. So it’s like if you do this, then you get this. We talked a little bit about that in the last episode.
Goofy prizes. You name it. Just the more prizes the better. So that’s a little bit more on prizes. So to recap, we talked about behind the scenes access, things that we communicate, right?Behind the scenes access videos, hammering home those important dates, the commitment plans, announcing contests and prizes. Teach them. Teach them. Send emails, post tips in the Facebook group to help them along the way. Teach them about your product and details that they may not know about.
Teach them sales techniques, show them what’s working with your ads because maybe they can apply them to Their ads, you know, teach them, teach them, teach them, run training for them. That’s just something like this is one of my favorite parts about our coaching program. You know, your affiliate launch coach is like when you sign up to get coaching from us, we don’t just say, hey, go teach your affiliates, we actually teach them for you. And they get to position me as the expert and I come in and I do this training and I teach them and I do these strategy calls with them and show them like how to close sales and the results are amazing. So teach them, teach them what’s working.
Show them the strategies they need to, you know, to be able to make more sales, to get more opt ins, whatever it may be. Like I said, host a training not just for your small affiliates. These aren’t just for the small affiliates. Some of them are the largest affiliates that we have. They attend our trainings.And the thing is you need to make it an event. You want to make it an event. Because if you make it an event then it’s a big thing. Like we send mail to them, inviting them to these. We make sure that like it’s 2:00 clock Eastern Wednesday, 2:00 clock Eastern Wednesday, you want to show up, right?
If you missed the other posts in this excerpt series from my upcoming book Turn Your Passions Into Profits, find them here:
So let me show you how we do this. I’m going to play a clip here. We just did one of these a few months ago for one of our clients in our, your affiliate launch coach program. I’m just going to play some of the highlights, right. We put together a little it’s like nine, nine and a half minutes. This is a training that we did for Jason and Cecilia Hilke of Happily Family. So like I mentioned, we with our clients we actually do two trainings for affiliates as a part of the program where we come on for like an hour, a little bit hour, hour and a half and we train their affiliates to start with about like the calendar, we walk them through the calendar, some promotional strategies, things like that and then we do another training where we teach them how to close sales as affiliates.
I’ll share more about that in the next episode. And actually I’m going to share a clip of a training that we did for a client so you can get a little taste of what that’s actually like. So we’re going to teach them, we’re going to host training with them. We want to send them cheat sheets. We always put together like a one or two page PDF that’s just got all the important stuff right. It’s got the dates right in front of them. It’s got a couple of tips that they need to make sure that they implement. It’s got important links, all of these things, right?It’s just something they can keep right in front of them and have open during the promotion. Quick little cheat sheets. So send those. Share testimonials. This is super important.
Like when you get a particularly awesome testimonial, share it in the partner group, share it in the Facebook group. It’s a great way to make them feel like what they’re doing is having an impact. Make sure that you do this. If there’s a testimonial that comes in. This is one of the most powerful things. When you get a testimonial, go look up and see who referred them and then send it to them. Like if Joe sends an affiliate lead and that lead buys and then that person says, oh my gosh, this was amazing. Then make sure that we make sure that like you share that with that affiliate. Share that with Joe. Share that with Joe.
You know, we got some testimonials a while back. You know that when we shared them with our affiliates, they were just blown away. Absolutely blown away. And this is super important. So share those testimonials. Just share updates with them. You know, whatever updates you think you need to share with them. You don’t have to be super picky, right? Leaderboards, contest updates where you stand on a personal level. You’re at 63 sales and you’re on pace for 90.And then you can do something like, you know, if you know they’re on pace for 90, hey, if you hit 100 sales, you’ll get a thousand dollar bonus. You know, that makes mathematical sense. You know, if it’s a $50 product, it probably doesn’t, but you get the idea. Like you can do things like that. Give them updates, keep them updated.
More is usually better. You’re looking for ATMs, what we call ETMs, excuses to mail. And if you have an excuse to mail, then mail. Make sure you have mentioned this before. Make sure you start a Facebook group and update it often. Post a countdown to the launch every week leading up until about 10 days before then go daily. You want to do multiple updates per day. You know, during a big promotion. Make it fun. Like we talked about before, we did, you know, we did a thing.I was like, on the first day of launch, it was like, post your launch face. Right? Post your launch face. So we all took selfies. Like, you know, There are like 50 people posting these selfies.
Like, you know, and remember your entire purpose is to keep your stuff front and center and top of mind. If you remember the principles of commitment and consistency, right? Commitment and consistency. They made a commitment and then they’re going to be consistent to that commitment. So one of the things you can do, another thing you can communicate. I don’t know what number on like 12 or whatever. Ask them for their picture for the leaderboard. You know, if you’re going to post a picture leaderboard, ask them for a picture. If I asked you for your picture, wouldn’t you be a little bit more excited about the prospect of being on the leaderboard? When you go a little bit more out of your way to make sure that you end up on that leaderboard, that’s important.
Ask if they need anything. Something like that is so simple, right? Can have a huge impact. I recommend if your launch is on, you know, starts on a Monday. I typically don’t recommend starting on Monday. Start on Tuesdays. But you know, let’s just say it’s Tuesday, then on Friday send an email. Hey, we’re heading into the weekend. I just wanted to check, do you need anything for next week? It’s like a two sentence email that generates a lot of responses. As a matter of fact, I do. Nope, I’m good. I’m set up. I’m locked and loaded. I’m ready, Matt. Okay, cool. Either response is great. So ask if they need anything. Ask for referrals. This is the number one way to get new affiliates.
The number one way to get new affiliates is ask them for referrals. Just send them an email months before the launch and just say, hey, do you know anybody who’d be a good fit for this launch or this promotion? If you have an Evergreen program, hey, do you know anybody who’d be a good fit for this program? Introduce us and we’ll hook you up with a second tier commission. Like there you go, super easy, right?Send physical mail, you know, stop relying on email and Facebook. Send them something in the mail. We used to do this with one of our clients. We put together a newsletter. It basically had stuff that we could send in an email, but we sent it in physical mail.
Cost us a dollar and you know what? They read it. I have on my desk over here I have these two Lego action figures that look like me. They were handcrafted Lego, one with glasses and one without, you know, m I got from Pete Vargas years ago. Like send a specific mailing to them with some testimonials like that can work.Send them something in the mail. And this is, I think I gave you 15 things, right? This is only a starter list of what to communicate and how to communicate. So it begs the question, of course, how often should you email your affiliates? How often should you post to Facebook?
How often should you mail them? The answer is very simple. A, lot. I mentioned earlier, the biggest mistake that affiliate managers make is not communicating enough. In our average 17 day launch sequence, we have 46 emails during.In a typical launch, you’ll get about 75 emails from us. Over the course of, you know, seven months or so, we’ll post probably a hundred Facebook updates. I mean, that’s a lot of stuff, right? But this is what gets those small affiliates engaged and helps you create this awesome army of promotional partners, which is what you want. That lie we talked about, right?
Most of your sales are going to come from only a few affiliates. That only happens if you’re not following the second C. It doesn’t have to be super time consuming. You can do this in about an hour a day most weeks. Maybe during your launch it’ll take you a little bit more. But the key is to communicate, communicate, communicate. That is our second C. First, we’re going to have great contests. We want to make our affiliate program fun. Second, we want to communicate in the next episode. I will share the last C. I’ll give you a little hint. I touched on it just a little bit today, but not in detail. And I’m going to share some of the details in the next episode. So that last C is super important.
You don’t want to miss it. So make sure you subscribe so that you don’t miss that episode. I’ve got some cool stuff in that next episode for you. Make sure you subscribe. Make sure you check out the promo plan link that we put in the show notes, the commitment plan link that we put in the, the show notes.I’m sorry, in the, the communication plan link as well. Make sure you check out all of that. I’ll see you in the next episode for our last c in the three Cs of successful affiliate programs. Thank you so much for listening today. Remember to check out all of our deep dives into affiliate marketing at TheAffiliateGuide TV. And if you have a question, ask it at AskTheAffiliateGuide.com who knows, maybe you even be featured on an upcoming episode. And lastly, if you haven’t yet, make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you’re listening to this episode.