Ever wish you could scale your affiliate program without cloning yourself? In this episode, I’m breaking down the exact ways I use AI to run affiliate programs more efficiently and effectively… and how you can do it, too.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
Behind the Scenes of a 1,200-Affiliate Launch: What I Learned
Creating Recurring Revenue Through Your Affiliate Program
Using Virtual Assistants to Scale Your Affiliate Program to 7 Figures
Time-Saving Tips for Busy Affiliate Managers
How Paul Pruitt Climbed to the Top of the Affiliate Leaderboard in Just 2 Years
How I Use AI to Run Affiliate Programs (Part 1)
Ever wish you could scale your affiliate program without cloning yourself? Well, in this episode, I’m breaking down the exact ways that I use AI to run affiliate programs more efficiently and effectively and how you can do it too.
Let’s get started. All right. Well, if you’ve been listening to the last three or four episodes, I’ve kind of been teasing this one. And I wish I was a smarter marketer. And I would say, you know, I did that on purpose. I said that I’m going to be doing this episode or these episodes and this is going to be a series.
I said that. I don’t know when it’s gonna be, but it’ll be soon, I think, you know, three episodes later is pretty soon if you ask me. And I said I don’t know how many episodes it’s gonna be. And that’s true. I don’t. It might be. I know it’s gonna be three and it’s probably not gonna be seven. So it’s three to six, you know, we’ll see. But this is part one and it’s all about this series or this episode is about using AI as an affiliate manager. I think the next one, two or three will be about that same topic, about using it as an affiliate manager. Then we’ll have an episode or two or three about using it as an affiliate marketer. Again, I don’t know.
I haven’t planned these out. I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to talk about the things that I’ve kind of got on the agenda for today. I think today I’m probably going to share roughly the first ten, but it might be six, it might be eleven, I don’t know. And I’m going to share ways that I use AI nearly every single day to run programs I have tested.
I have refined every single one of these inside of real affiliate programs. So this is not theory, okay? This is specific stuff that I am doing. These are real things I am not going to share with you. Things that I think might work. I could. But why would I do that? Why would you listen to. Like here are some things I think maybe would work Maybe you should try them. I don’t know if they’ll work. I haven’t done them. No, this is like things that I am. Not only have I done them, but I’ve done them, most of them, with a frequency of either every day or as applicable every week or two weeks. And I’ve been doing them all for more than 90 days. Some of these I’ve been doing for well over a year. So these are proven.
There are many things I’ve done that I’m not going to share because they honestly didn’t work. They either made things take longer or the result was worse. Things like that. Now, before we jump in, if you want specific prompts or you want some help implementing these ideas, you can shoot me a text at 260-217-4619.
I’m not going to share specific prompts like me here. I’m going to read my prompts. Most of everything you’re going to do is pretty just natural language. You know, there’s other ways to get a little bit better results. Absolutely. But most of the stuff just talk to it like you would talk to a person. But if you do want specific prompts, like you’re like, hey, I heard what you said about number 13. Could I get the prompt for that if I still have it?
You know, if I have a specific prompt, I will definitely, you know, be happy to send it to you. One thing before we get in. I use a bunch of different AIs. Okay. The three that I use overwhelmingly more than any others are ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini. And I use them for different things and you may find different results. What I have found, I’ll give you an example. The email that I sent out for this episode, if you saw it, was something along the lines of the Popeven.
The Pope is talking about this now as I’m recording this. The new election of the Pope is a big deal. He’s an American Pope, he’s from Chicago. It’s a pretty cool thing, right? Right. And so it’s big news. Any new Pope elections, you know, big news. And he talked about AI. So I, I went to grok. I use Grok for a lot of research, deep research data, you know, other things. Like I’m using it right now to create. Well, I’ll come back, I’ll actually talk about that in a little bit.
So I used Grok to say, hey, I. I’ve got a podcast episode coming up about AI. What are some news related events that are happening right now that people will relate to and that are related to this topic. And so what I’ve done is I’ve actually trained that chat in GROK to go out and look for the news and it knows kind of like the things that I’m looking for. And it’ll give me 10 suggestions and I’ll say, great, that’s a great one.
The Pope. And it’ll give me a brief on it and it’ll cite the news sources if I need to, so I can say, you know, hey, I. There’s an article in Forbes about this, there’s an article in Fortune magazine about this. And it gives me that. Then I can use that to write the email. That’s an example of one of the ways where I’m using grok. And then Gemini is great at remembering. It’s by far the best at keeping characters A friend of mine and I started a company writing children’s books. And I’ll tell you all more about that later. I use ChatGPT to create the initial profile. It’s really good at creating an initial image.
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So we load in the character profile, we say create an image and we take that over to grok. And it’s really good at keeping the image consistent because there’s 14 chapters in the first book and we need Olivia and Emory and Noah and Ari to look the same in all 14 images. Gemini is so much better than ChatGPT at that and 10 million times better than GROK Edit.
So that’s how I use Gemini. And these are just some examples. I use Gemini for other stuff as well. So GROK and Gemini for deep research, chatgpt more for creation. So again, just some things like I’m using different ones I may or may not remember to mention, like, hey, I’m using, you know, grokmore for this thing, et cetera, et cetera. You may find different things, play around with it and you’re going to get good results. So how do I use AI to save a bunch of time? And I feel like I’ve already made myself, in two years of using AI heavily, I am a five, maybe upwards of a seven times better affiliate manager. I think in another year or two, I will be 10 to 20 times better than what I was just a year or two ago.
So number one thing that I use it for, and these are in no particular order of, by the way, the first thing I use it for is to create swipe copy that actually converts. I use AI to first of all generate the base swipe copy for our affiliates. So for instance, with passionate Penny pincher. We have a recent promo for work planners. These are planners that they can use from July through June. So they’re not just January through, you know, December work planners.
It’s a big launch and there’s certain details about it. I basically just take the description from the site, take the text, and I say, hey, generate me some base swipe copy for the average affiliate. So now we have our base, our basic swipe copy. And I’ve trained it. This is the first thing I did. So I do use ChatGPT for this one. Another one that I use quite a bit, and it’s really, really good at. This is Claude.
The reason I don’t use Claude is actually kind of a weird one for this. It’s because I’m currently using it for something else and I’m out of. I keep running out of tokens on a daily basis. If you’re not familiar, tokens are just basically usage, right? And so because I’m using it so heavily for something else, I. And it. It’s going to be that way for the foreseeable future. I decided to use GPT. I actually think Claude might be marginally better. And I. Part of it was just I didn’t feel like logging in and out of two different accounts on Claude. I mean, just that’s the simple reason and trying to remember where I’m at and things like that.
So I will use. Right now I’m using it in a GPT. Again, you could use Claude. Either one would work pretty darn well. But I basically just. I loaded about 50 emails from various affiliates of this program. Some of the client emails, probably more like 75 to 100 actually, now that I think about it. I just loaded all these emails. I had my VA do, going back to the episode where I talked about working with the va. I had them load all the emails into a document. I said, here’s the model. Now write copy like this. And then I trained it to create versions for different audiences. So you might create one for, you know, mommy bloggers.
I know they don’t like that term, but I’m just saying mom bloggers for podcast hosts, for people who are writing, you know, review posts and things like that, and you give them, you know, different swipe copy. As I’ve mentioned in a previous episode, I can even take this and write swipe copy for individual affiliates by training it and saying, okay, here’s my.
John smith copy. Here’s 30 of his emails. Now take this copy. Here’s his audience profile. And now take this generic copy and write it for John Smith. And I can do that. So this saves a ton of time because I don’t have to write the swipe copy or work with a copywriter to do it. I’m able to create three, four, five different versions, even some specific versions for individual affiliates.
Saves a ton of time, gives them better tools. The biggest thing is you just got to take that time up front. It shouldn’t take you hours, but it might take you 20, 25 minutes to train it by giving it Personas to write for, giving it example emails of, you know, good affiliates, things like that. And so that’s for email swipe copy again. We’ll talk a little bit more later about social media copy as well.
The second way that I use it is creating amazing graphics without a design team. So we’re able to create graphics for affiliates using AI image tools. And again, I’m platform agnostic right now. I’m actually using with ChatGPT4O. I’ve found that it’s as good as anything else. There are a couple of others that I’ve used in the past that Honestly I. When 4.0 came out and I started using it, I was like, no, this is. I don’t need.
I mean, just, I don’t. There’s no reason for me to pay an extra 7,500 bucks a month, frankly. You know, why not save a thousand dollars a year when it’s just as good? And so what I’ve done is I’ve created for each client, I’ve created a chat. And again, you can do this with your own stuff. You can do that. I could create multiples for each client, but I uploaded their brand logos, some product descriptions, some overall descriptions. I took some.
I found some affiliate images that affiliates had created on their own and uploaded those and said, these are some great examples. I uploaded all the past creatives. Now, again, if you’re doing this from scratch, you don’t have those. So if you don’t have past images, you know, five years from now, when you’ve designed no images and just had AI do it, it’s kind of hard to do that.
But I had some for most of our clients. And then I uploaded all those again with the logos. I uploaded the logos in different colors and formats so that it had everything that it needed. I told it fonts, like, here are the fonts that we’ve used in the past Things like that. And then I gave it just general guidelines like, you know, who the target audience is.
So the target audience is, you know, typically going to be mothers age 25 to 54. And you know, we want to stick with soft pastels. Here are some brand colors. Like I literally just took colors off the site and gave it the RGB colors, you know, you know, gave it the hex codes for those colors and things like that. And then I was like, okay, I’d like you to create.
I did this recently. I just set up a new one. I set brand new one for a client and I said create. I’ve got a 20% off site wide sale plus free shipping. Create some images or create some, some graphics. Oh, also I uploaded product images and this super important upload them one at a time. Or you can upload multiple versions of the same product image.
Like if you have different, you know, views of it and things like that, with a product description. So like tell the name of it, name the files. Like, you know, so Cannabolics, one of our clients, it would be like cannabolics-freeze-gel.png and then there might be like three views of that. And I would upload it and I would upload that along with any images of where the products being used. Like affiliates have posted pictures of, you know, things like that.
So here’s all the pictures. There’s eight pictures, all of the freeze gel. And then I upload the product description of it and who it’s for and what it does, etc. Etc. And again, think that takes a lot of time. It takes less time for me to upload just a bunch of random images kind of like that. With Cannabogs, for example, there’s, you know, roughly 10 products. Probably takes me twice as long to upload those 10 products as it does to create one image.
So it takes the same amount of time as it does for me to create two or three of these graphics. But that’s one time that I’ve done it and then every other time it’s so much easier. So I had it create images and I trained it. I’m like, I like this, I don’t like this. Here’s what, I changed this again to go back to the swipe copy thing. If you change something, tell it what you changed and why you changed it. I don’t like this word, I don’t like this format. And just train it. And so now it’s gotten to the point where I tell it what it is.
Like for mother’s day with all of our clients. Everything was so trained that I just had to create the images and we were good to go. I mean, so unbelievably easy. So creating images is the second thing. The third thing is this is a cool one. Predicting and addressing objections before they happen. So this is one of the coolest ways that you can use AI, just in general is asking a question like, why wouldn’t someone promote this?
Why wouldn’t someone buy this? Why would, why wouldn’t someone download it? Why wouldn’t someone pay $499 for it? And you get that, you get that pushback and then that allows you. Okay, why wouldn’t somebody buy. Okay, how can I overcome this? How is this, how is this overcoming of the objection? How would you overcome that objection that you just brought up?
This helps us with affiliates to write better outreach emails, to write better follow up emails, to write better onboarding emails, to write better sales copy on the affiliate landing page, to write better everything, you know. So why wouldn’t you promote this in general? But then later on, okay, here’s our Mother’s Day promo.
Why wouldn’t you promote this? I use this with almost every promo. Occasionally I forget, like, occasionally the promo is so freaking good that I don’t bother, but I use this as much as possible. It allows us to strengthen our value proposition and also to kind of rethink sometimes. Okay, maybe this contest isn’t that great. Sounds really good. In my head, we even brainstormed it as humans. The client loves the promo, I love the promo. It’s worked in the past. But that’s a valid point. Hmm, That’s a really good point. I also asked like, why wouldn’t it work? And so, for instance, I mean, you would think I’m pretty smart.
I just didn’t catch the fact that we, the way that we had a certain promo set up was going to basically mean that we made almost no money. So we reworded it so that we can make some money. And again, I just used AI to basically say, what’s wrong with this? And it went, well. Here’s four things that I see wrong. Frankly. Three of the four I wasn’t concerned about.
But that fourth one, I went, oh, good point. All right, number four, build affiliate training tools so quickly. AI is one of the most amazing things at turning long blog posts or videos into things like cheat sheets and checklists or just like one page, you know, PDFs, right? Or downloads. So again, if you do an affiliate webinar, just ask it like, here’s the webinar. I like to provide the transcript for it. I think we’re probably only a year or two away from not needing to do that. But again, I have AI generate the transcript, then I give it, you know, a separate thing.
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I’ve just found that that works better. I say, here’s a transcript of this hour long training I did turn it into a one page quick start guide and it does it. This is huge. It helps affiliates, especially new affiliates, take action faster in like a very confident way. And as you know, hopefully by now everything is a race to get them to get that first sale, to get that first success, to get to that three or four sale mark where suddenly it’s like, okay, they’ve made multiple sales and this is going to be a big thing for us. And so cheat sheets and checklists, same thing with any type of thing.
I can, I’ll just, sometimes I’ll just record like a 20 minute launch overview video or audio where I talk through the launch and boom, boom, boom. And then I say, hey, turn this into a quick checklist. No more than eight items and it turns it into those eight items and it’s amazing. Absolutely amazing how this works. All right, number five, this is somewhat on this, it’s on the same level as what I just talked about. But when I do affiliate calls, when I have a call with an affiliate and I take the transcript, I upload it, I ask AI to summarize it, highlight the action items, turn it into whatever it needs to do.
Now if I do the call on Zoom, that’s often the case. Zoom has a really good AI summarizer and it highlights the action items, et cetera. But I take that and I turn it into a specific plan in a trained AI where I have a trained chat in GPT where it basically says, okay, here’s your X number of day calendar, here’s what you’re going to do.
If it’s for a launch, here’s your launch calendar. If it’s for, you know, here’s your launch checklist and your launch cheat sheet. And it just again, it’s amazing what we can do. So I’ll take the transcript and I’ll take the summary that Zoom gives me and I’ll say turn this into whatever I need to turn it into a checklist for this specific affiliate, all those types of things.
If there is a conversation specifically about style and things like that, I will, I’ll take what they said about their audience and how they describe their audience plus 20 or 30 of examples of their emails, which I mean simply, again, you can do it yourself half the time. I do sometimes if it requires a little bit of work, I’ll have a VA do it and create a document with 20 or 30 of their emails.
We upload that and say, here’s again John Smith style. Or I did one recently where I said, here’s a social media influencer, about 1.1 million followers and we want to create social media copy for them. It’s like, here’s the URL, here’s their Instagram profile, go create Instagram content for them. Here’s their, you know, their X profile. Boom. Sometimes when you have a smaller affiliate, but you still want to kind of help them, you find a few that are like it and you say, go look at theirs too.
But again, like taking these, these webinars, these affiliate calls, Q and A calls, all those things, and turning that into stuff is you can create multiple assets from one call, from one live event, from one webinar, whatever it is I even have it with when I do those calls, I have it create me a follow up plan for them. So what that means is here are the emails that are the messages that I’m going to send to this affiliate over the next X number of days. So if we talked about A, B, C and D, then I’m going to follow up on A on, you know, Tuesday, I’m going to follow up, follow up on B on, you know, the following Tuesday, something like that. I would never be able to do that on my own, not in a million years. So it’s a huge way that AI helps.
Number six. Sort of talked about this a moment ago, but so again there’s gonna be a lot where I’m like, I’ve got these bullet points and I’m like, well I ended up talking about that before. I didn’t mean to, but I did. So. But I’m still gonna go through the bullet points because I’ll probably talk more in detail about it. So there’ll be some overlap between these points. I think you’re beginning to see that. And I’m probably gonna do like, I don’t know, maybe two, maybe I can, I don’t know how many I’m gonna do.
But staying on brand when writing to affiliates. So again, no matter whether you are running an affiliate management agency or you have, you know, two or three clients or you’re an in house affiliate manager, whatever it might be you want, your especially if the affiliates are often also customers and they know the brand tone, maybe they became an affiliate months after becoming a customer.
I use AI to match the client’s voice for affiliate communication. So again, what I said earlier, I’ll take 50 to 100 of the client’s emails, dump them in, say this is the client tone and style, learn their tone and style. Then I’ll take a generic email that I want to create. I’ll say now I’d like you to rewrite this in the style of the client. And it does. And I go through about 4 to 12 iterations of that where I get it really fine tuned and it nails it down. I also give it, I have a file that I have of, I don’t know, 500 plus emails that I’ve written to affiliates over the year. And I say, here are the types of things that I say and whatnot.
And then I use that and I say, okay, I’d like you to rewrite, you know, this email, this email, this email. These are past emails that I’ve used before. And we go through those iterations and we get it trained and then I basically just give it a prompt and I’ll be like, okay, we have a 20% site wide sale Coming up and I’d like to write an email.
Here are the details about the products that are, you know, on sale, blah blah, blah. And it does it, I mean it’s amazing, you know. Now I created my own tool for that. That one is not what I’m selling, it’s just one that I created that outside of, you know, chatgpt and stuff because I, I needed to because there’s some fine tuning that I needed to do and I freaking love it. That’s something I’m, it’s not that.
Well, the reason I’m never going to sell that tool, I don’t think maybe I will probably not going to, I don’t frankly want to do it. I don’t think there’s enough demand. So if I’m wrong you can text me, you know, and let me know. So let me know, like no, actually I really would like that tool. Again, My number is 260-217-4619. So if I’m wrong, I don’t plan on doing it.
Mostly because I don’t think that I want to make, I don’t want to have to make it pretty and all that. Now there is a tool I’ll talk about in a moment that I might sell. But again, creating this like on brand messages to your affiliates, even if you’re an in house affiliate manager, you still want to be on brand and that’s so important.
Number seven, creating just killer affiliate emails now not swipe copy but emails to your affiliates and creating them unbelievably fast. Now I mentioned that I’m building a tool for this. So if you’re interested in early access or trying it out, I don’t know, I don’t know the timeline on it. It’s built, I’m using it now, but we’re doing the things to kind of make it pretty and usable by the average person. Because like for instance, there’s certain things where when you pay for something like a tool like this, I don’t want you to have to continually prompt that.
There’s a particular piece of the prompt that I have to copy and paste every time because it, it forgets I don’t, you know, and we’re trying to like train it on the backside to where it automatically does that and it’s just a, it’s a simple like two sentences. But you know, again if you’re buying a tool like this, you shouldn’t have to copy and paste that every time. But you can text me at 260-217-4619 like I said before and again if you’re interested this is a tool to basically help you write killer affiliate emails like I mentioned it’s been trained on well this one actually has been trained on over 5,000 we basically took every email that we’ve ever written that we documented.
So you know some clients we had 100 emails other clients we had 400 or 500 going back you know there’s like there’s our affiliate program where we sent over a thousand affiliate emails so again these are emails to the affiliates these like we took other people’s affiliate emails I’m a member of like I’ve mentioned before over I don’t know whatever 10,000 NOW affiliate programs and we only took the good ones you know but I see usually I get one good one a day so I don’t even know maybe it’s 10 I’ll go look in a little bit and see that might be 10,000 emails we took these we loaded them into.
Into this, you know, AI. And we said, these are what affiliate email should be. And then we trained it on our writing style. So you do have to submit some of your own samples. You know, I think a minimum of five, preferably. The more the better. You know, if you can, you can submit 100, and they can be writing samples of just about anything. It could be emails that you’ve just sent to individual affiliates, like responses and things like that. The idea is to train it on your voice and it knows what works and it knows what flops and it sounds just like me. And so we’re able to then say, hey, we have this promotion coming up.
I want to write an email to the affiliates about this promotion that makes them be so excited to promote this. Go. And then it writes the first email and then you make four or five tweaks. And then you say, here are the changes I made. And then the next time you do it, you only have to make three tweaks. And then you tell them. And then the next time maybe you have to make three again. But usually after about the fifth to tenth time, you don’t have to make any tweaks. Most of our clients. Now, I’m not tweaking the emails. They are perfect. They’re absolutely perfect. So I’m going to wrap up after this next one. We’re going to.
It’s our top eight today. Actually. These are in no particular order. Some of the ones I’m covering in the next episode are just as important, if not more important than some of the stuff I cover today, but kind of ties in with what I just talked about, and that is building these automated onboarding sequences. Again, we trained the AI. You need to train it.
If you see some onboarding sequences that you like from an affiliate program, teach it. Or again, you can use our tool. If you’re interested, just text me. Again, it’s not available yet, but I’ll should be sooner. I’ll let you know. But AI can help you draft an onboarding flow. And so the first email is a welcome and what to expect and where to get things. You know, email number two might be, you know, swipe copy and assets and things like that number.
You know, the second or third one might be like some first promo ideas and, you know, the next one is bonus reminders and a soft nudge and, you know, how can I help things like that. And you say, here’s the sequence I want. Write the emails. And it does. It does. And the cool thing is now you can easily tailor this to okay, I’ve got a newbie affiliate.
I’m going to treat them differently than a seasoned pro. So you say, I want to write this sequence for newbies in season pros, for mom bloggers, for, you know, Instagram influencers, for people who are primarily doing sales on Instagram, for people who are primarily doing sales on Facebook, for people who are going to do review posts, for people who are going to run ads, whatever it may be. And you can build this onboarding sequence that is tailored to them. So there you have it. You have eight tools, eight ways today.
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I can’t wait to talk. I got so many more. Oh my gosh. So you know how to create swipe, copy and emails and graphics, onboarding flows, all that. Listen, some of this could be a little bit heavy for you because you’re not like big into AI. You don’t have to be an AI expert. You just have to be smart enough to feed it good inputs. Just talk to it like you would it was somebody sitting right there. You just, you just tell it what you want. Use please and thank you. It’s a weird thing that there is documented evidence that suggests that it works better if you do. But also it’s what you would say.
Like you would, you wouldn’t just walk up to your designer, be like, create me an image. No, you would say, hey, could you please create me an image that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So again, if you want some of the prompts that I use to make this all happen, you can text me 260-217-4619. Just let me know what you, what you want in terms of like, hey, what prompt do you use? If I have it, I’ll send it to you. If I don’t, I’ll tell you. I don’t have that. Like, some of these chats are so old that I don’t even have some of the original prompts. And then make sure if you haven’t yet, click subscribe you do not want to miss.
Like I said, this is at least a four part series. Probably five or six, maybe seven, but probably not. In part two, I’m going to share how to use AI to segment affiliates. How to find some, some hidden high performers. That’s kind of cool. How to brainstorm creative new outreach strategies how? And a ton more, including some of the ones I did not get to today. Like how to use AI to brainstorm contest ideas and prizes. Stuff like that. So excited about that. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode because that’s when I’ll see you next. Until then, bye bye.
See you soon.