If you’re still spending hours trying to find affiliates, segment them manually, or figure out who’s actually worth reaching out to… you’re doing it the hard way. In this episode, I’m showing you how to use AI to uncover hidden affiliate opportunities, personalize your outreach, and grow your program faster…with less guesswork.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
Advanced Ways I Use AI to Manage Affiliate Programs (Part 2)
The AI Tools I Use to Manage Affiliate Programs (Part 1)
Behind the Scenes of a 1,200-Affiliate Launch: What I Learned
Creating Recurring Revenue Through Your Affiliate Program
Using Virtual Assistants to Scale Your Affiliate Program to 7 Figures
How I Use AI to Run Affiliate Programs (Part 3)
If you’re still spending hours trying to find affiliates, segment them manually, or figure out who’s actually worth reaching out to, listen, you’re doing it the hard way. In this episode, I’m going to show you how to use AI to uncover hidden affiliate opportunities, personalize your outreach and grow your program faster with less guesswork.
Let’s get started. So welcome back to part three of our series on AI for affiliate managers. If you missed parts one and two, go back and check those out. You can definitely start here. The cool thing is you can listen to this series in any order. If you start on episode four, I might reference something from episode one, you know, a little callback that you might not get.
But 99% of anything I’m going to talk about you can listen to in pretty much any order. In fact, you can pick up in the middle of an episode. You can start on number five in the first episode and you’ll be fine. That’s the cool thing about this series. Now today’s focus is all about finding affiliates, segmentation, outreach, a few other things.
Again, we’ll see like the past episodes. I don’t know how far I’m going to get into it. I kind of had an idea when I started this series. I said all along, I don’t know how many episodes it’s going to be, but I kind of thought it was going to be four and figured it’d be like four episodes. As I’m recording part three here, I’m thinking we’re looking at six, maybe seven. And then we’ve got the whole series on how to use AI for affiliate marketing.
Not to mention the fact that I’m probably going to have to update this whole series, you know, in six months as things are changing. And so what I want to talk about today is, you know, some, some about finding affiliates, how to segment, how to make, you know, every affiliate feel like a VIP using AI. Now if you want the prompts that I mentioned, if I do mention any prompts in this episode, or if you want access to certain tools that I might mention, you can text me at 260-217-4619 now, the first way I want to talk about today, I think I touched on this in the first episode.
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I touched on it in like, in passing, like in four seconds. But it’s segmenting affiliates by behavior. So one of the things that you can use AI to do is you can use AI to tag your affiliates and you can form as many groups as you want. Typically I have four groups and I name them in fun ways because I want to. But you know, you could have six or seven groups.
I have, I have one program where we have six groups because there’s actually, it’s really four groups. Actually, it’s. No, yeah, it’s four groups and two of the groups have a subgroup. So my main four groups typically are lurkers, clickers, converters and Rockstars. So let’s go backwards there, Rock stars. Those are our top X affiliates. Some programs it’s as many as 50.
When, you know, when I ran certain programs that shall be nameless where we had, you know, literally tens of thousands of affiliates and we were doing hundreds of millions of dollars, it was like my top 100, roughly. So those are the rock stars. The converters are like the people who, you know, they’re making some sales, they’re, they’re doing some damage. They’re, you know, like they’re valuable in and of themselves.
Like, no one of them makes up more than a tenth of a percent of sales. But collectively this group makes up 30 to 40 to 50% of sales. So this is typically, you know, on a big program, might be as much as, you know, 5, 600 people. On a small program it might be kind of like affiliates number 20ish, Again, just depends on the size of the program going back. Then that next group is, I call them the Clickers.
Now just because they’re called the Clickers doesn’t mean they don’t have any sales. It just means maybe they’re making, you know, on a, on an average order size of 100 bucks, they’re making four sales a year, one one a quarter. Again, as a individual, you know, there no individual accounts for more than 1/200th of all the sales. But as a group, you know, they make up 20, sometimes as much as 35% of all the sales. And so it’s a valuable group. But I treat them differently. That group just, it’s unrealistic for me to do private phone calls, you know, hour long strategy calls with them.
Whereas I do with that first group, the rock stars, and then the Lurkers, you know, these are people who signed up more than six months ago and still haven’t done anything. They haven’t even sent any traffic, but they’re still there. And there’s really no harm in communicating with them. Those are the inactive affiliates. Now, the subgroups would be the inactive affiliates, but. So actually, I usually do segment this, but they only stay there for a short period of time. Brand new affiliates, first couple of weeks, you know, you’re onboarding affiliates.
The subgroup to the Lurkers would be high potential but inactive. We’ve identified that if we can get them active, they can do a substantial amount of sales. For some programs, that might be $10,000. For some, it might be $100,000. And then the other kind of subgroup is in the converters. It’s, you know, that group that’s like they’re, you know, they’re making, depending upon the size of the program, you know, $2,000 plus a month, $5,000 plus a month. And they’re really, you know, a considerable part of the program.
Again, any individual might make up, you know, 1/10 of 1%, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but, man, you lose 20 or 30 of them and lost The subgroup I often use in that is overall, they’re doing really well, but they’ve started to slide. They started to slide. Another subgroup might be. I just don’t do this typically because we just move them to the rock stars. One is like, all right, they’re kind of looking like they’re going to move up to that top category. And so I tailored the messages based on these buckets. This helps with things like contests and. And bonuses.
I’ve talked about this so many times, but I prefer not to. When I get somebody who’s really their potential, at least in the next year or two, is 20 sales a year on the high end. I don’t want to be throwing out contests, incentivizing them. Hey, make 20 sales this week and you get a prize. It’s almost demotivating to them. And so I tailor the content based on the bucket. But I have AI create the buckets. It does all of the segmenting, and it does it in a matter of 20 minutes. Now, the cool thing is I say 20 minutes. Well, how long does it take you, Matt? I know that’s what you’re saying, right?
Two hours. And you go, well, okay, that’s not as impressive, taking 20 minutes, you know, two hours down to 20 minutes. It’s it’s nice. An hour and 40 minutes a month. Well, I mean, I’ll take it. But here’s the thing. That 20 minutes is spent just thinking I’m doing other work during that 20 minutes. So it’s really saving me an hour and 59 and a half minutes. It is cutting my time down to virtually nothing. The 20 minutes is because I typically will do the deep analysis. I’m okay with it taking 20, 30 minutes. I don’t need a quick answer to this. And so I’ll have it do the deep analysis. It exports it into a CSV which I can upload to Google Drive. And I mean, again, the whole process takes me 30 seconds.
A little bit unrealistic, takes me a minute and a half. And I have everything that I want once I trained it. And I’m going to walk you through how to do that. And this is, again, this is one of those tools where I’m thinking about maybe just creating it, but it’s so specific to every affiliate program that I don’t know that I could train it. Right.
Unlike some other tools that we’re creating where I’ll talk about a little bit that, yeah, I. They’re easy to train across niches. So basically, you know, for this one, I personally use Chat GPT and let me pull it up, make sure I’m getting the right thing that it’s called here. So I will. What is it called? Run Deep research. I haven’t used the, the deep research. I use ChatGPT. Let me see here. I have it do. Yep, 4.0 Okay. And there’s actually some that are new now, 4.5, that are coming out. I know I actually use 4.1, believe it or not. Okay. So I thought I was using 4.0, but I use 4.1 for this. Okay.
So now that I’ve checked that, so I take it, I dump. Basically what I did was I dumped a spreadsheet into, you know, 4.1 and I. And I then uploaded a comparable spreadsheet that was broken down into tiers. And I said, here’s how I did the data analysis when I was doing this myself. Now granted, it helped that I had.
I mean I just saved, I had 40 examples. So I was able to, I think I took like 15 of them, 20 of them maybe and trained it on those and it was, it was so good by that point I didn’t need to train it anymore. Now I’d help that I had those, but you could do some of the analysis yourself. And I showed it how I wanted it formatted and then I basically said, here’s a spreadsheet, do the analysis please. And it had, I had a couple of corrections.
Not that it didn’t get anything wrong, it’s just that I changed some of the parameters and didn’t tell it. So I was like, here, wait, here are the brand new parameters. Took me 45 minutes to change, you know, to train it maybe. And most of that was just uploading and explaining it to it and then it was done. So again, I mean the first time I used it a lot of times when you do stuff like this, you might spend two hours to train it on something that will save you 10 minutes a day and you go, gosh, that kind of feels annoying. But okay, at the end of a month you’ve saved time, 10 minutes a day, times five days a week, that’s you know, 200 minutes.
It’s a little bit over three hours and you’ve saved, you know, an hour at the end of the month. But it took you to like the three week point to break even. This is one of those things, if you train it right, you’ll break even. You’ll actually be ahead of the game the moment you start using it. So we use these different buckets to run different contests, to run different bonuses, to run different, you know, just different messaging. You know, I message our rock stars very differently in terms of when we have a new promo than I do the completely inactive affiliates. Alright, the next way is to find affiliates. Now I have built a tool that does this but you know, if you want to do it the kind of harder way you can, you can prompt AI to do it.
It’s, it’s a little bit challenging. And I’ll tell you, when I tried to use like non trained stuff, the, the weirdest thing kept happening. I kept getting the exact, it would, I’d be like, okay, please suggest, you know, here’s a lot about our program and I spent like an hour telling it all about our program and blah, blah, blah, and it’s like, you know, here and I gave it a list of our top affiliates and their Instagram profiles and their TikTok profiles and all Their, you know, all their stuff. And I said, cool, go find me, you know, some more affiliates. And it was like, well, here’s a list of affiliates. It was just people from the list already.
I was like, no, that’s the list of affiliates that I just uploaded, you know, And I said. I think I said, told it to give me five at a time or ten at a time, I can’t remember. And this is a little tip also. I had it interview me, you know, so I had it actually ask me questions. This is just a small tip here that has been a huge game changer for me. Ask it to interview you one question at a time. If you say, do you have any questions for me? It’ll list 15 questions or five questions, and it.
It’s not learning each time. So tell it to interview one question at a time, and then you answer those questions and then it’ll ask you the next question and then just let it keep going. But anyway, I trained this AI for, I don’t know, an hour, hour and a half, this GPT. And I did the same thing with Grok. And the first time it just listed 10 people who were already affiliates of ours. Like, no, I want these to be. And then it was like, well, here’s, you know, five or ten more. And none of the profiles that it was linking to actually existed.
It actually was hallucinating or it was like this, you know, and I gave it a parameter, like, I want at least 5,000 followers on Instagram. And, you know, because it does help, by the way, when we get in, when I share this tool with you in a little bit, it helps to tell it, like, to focus on just Instagram affiliates at first, and then just TikTok and then just Facebook and then just people who are doing SEO. Like, don’t try to just say, give me five affiliates in general.
That’s not gonna work. But I was very specific. And so it gave me five or 10, whatever number I said profiles. And I went to them and like, all of them either didn’t exist or they, you know, it’s like they have seven followers and it’s saying, it’s like, this person has 17,000 followers. I’m like, no, they don’t. They have five, and four of them were related to them, you know, and so I’m like, what is going on? And so I did some more research and finally ended up creating a tool of my own. And it basically, you know, you can look it up and. And all that. So I’ve been using that tool if you are interested in using it, text me at 2602-1746-1926-0217-4619. If enough people are interested, I’ve, I’ve got it dialed in for me.
But there’s a lot that I would need to do to make it usable by other people. And I know this all too well because speaking of tools, I’ve been teasing something for the past few episodes and I, I said just what I said there, like, hey, if you are interested in this tool, text me at 260-217-4619 and let me know. And so many of you wanted it that I actually created solves one of the biggest headaches in affiliate management. And it’s the tool that I wish that I had 20 years ago.
It’s the kind of thing that I honestly like, I wonder how I lived without it. And so I’ve been talking about this. You know, if you ever struggle to write emails to your affiliates, if you’ve ever, you know, stared at a blank screen and you’re like what the heck am I supposed to write to my affiliates right now? If you wondered how, like how do you motivate your affiliates without sounding like a robot, you’re going to want to check this out. It’s called Affiliate Email Pro. It just went live. In fact, I have not released this to the public yet.
Podcast listeners are the first to hear about is the tool I’ve kind of been teasing for the last few episodes. I said if enough of you want me to do it, I will. It’s already existed because I created it for myself, but it is the, it’s the email writing tool. It’s built just for affiliate managers. It will not do anything else at least very well. You want it to write sales copy, not going to do it very well. Although it will write swipe copy for your affiliates. So it’s super easy to use. We made it ridiculously easy. I have been stress testing it for the last, you know, six months. Basically you tell it what kind of email you need.
So if you want to write a welcome sequence for brand new affiliates, you want to write a like some sort of a contest promo email that doesn’t sound like every other contest promo email end of month pushes that actually motivate people mid promo check ins, quick win reactivation emails to get your your inactive affiliates. I mean like any of these, it does any type of email you could imagine.
You just answer a few simple questions and boom, it writes the whole thing for you. And it’s not some generic robotic junk. Like there’s a ton of AI tools out there. Most of them sound robotic and generic and really, really off brand. And affiliate Email Pro is different. We trained it on almost 3,000 now. So over 2,000 of our best affiliate emails that actually worked. These are from us. There’s probably 1500 of them are emails that I’ve written over the years. Only the good ones we took out, the bad ones, the ones that didn’t work.
It’s across dozens and dozens of niches or niches, however you want to look at it. We also loaded other emails that I’ve seen from other people over the years that I liked. You know, we had like 7 or 800 from other people in there that just. These are just emails that I liked. And I loaded those in. We had a couple, you know, four, five, six, hundred from, from our agency. And so like I said, I’ve been using it every day for six months.
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It is saving me at least five hours a week, probably more like 10. The emails are better than anything I could have written on my own. If I’m like, you know, sometimes we have a week where there’s not a promo going on or something and I’m like, my gosh, I don’t even know what to write. I need to send something. I don’t, I don’t want to go nine days without communicating with our affiliates. What do I even say? And I’ll just ask it, I’ll tell it like that. We got nothing going on.
What do you suggest? And it’s like, well, it’s been seven months since you sent an email like this. Do you want to send this one? Or here’s another idea, or here’s an idea you’ve never used. You want to use this? And it gives me three or four ideas and I’m like, boom, number three is awesome. Roll with it. And so it’s gotten to the point where once you get it trained, so when you, when you log in, the first thing you’re going to do is you’re going to.
It’s going to take you through a quick onboarding session, depending upon how much information you have ready, readily available. Three minutes, maybe upwards of 10. It’s trying to capture everything about your company, your products, your affiliate program, who your affiliates are. You can give it profiles, you know, give it links to affiliate Instagram and TikTok and X profiles and Facebook profiles and all that stuff.
You can upload writing samples. So you train it in your own writing and it’ll combine like, it’ll take the best of the training that we’ve done with over almost 3,000 now, affiliate emails, and combine it with your style so that it’s saying the things that the emails that it was trained on says, but it’s written in your style, so it’s really, really cool. Again, you can. And it will write swipe copy for you for every social media network, email, etc.
You can train it on that as well. You can say, here’s some affiliate emails. Here’s. Here are some of our top affiliates and the emails that they’ve written. Maybe make it like theirs. Here are some Instagram profiles, so make the social media like theirs. All these things. You can do it. So, so cool. During this special launch period. So as you’re listening to this for roughly the next week or so, there’s something you can get that we’re never going to offer again. It’s just kind of for this launch here that we’re doing, it’s lifetime access. So it’s typically, it’s going to be a monthly thing like any SaaS product.
You’re going to pay every month and you know, it’s totally worth it. Again, you know, depends on what 10 hours a month, 20 hours a month is worth to you. I can promise you on average you’re gonna be paying like two to three dollars an hour, you know, which is less than you could ever hire a copywriter for. But we’re offering lifetime access.
So basically for the price of six months, you get completely lifetime access. Only time I’m gonna offer lifetime access at this price. So no monthly fees, no subscription, no price hikes later. You pay one time, you’re in for good. After this launch window, that’s gone. So depending upon when you’re listening to this, that may or may not be available. I will put a link in the show notes, but it’s super easy. It’s mattmcwilliams.com AEP for affiliate email pro. Go there, check it out. I’m telling you, this is gonna be so freaking awesome for the affiliate management industry.
For those of you especially who don’t do this professionally, if you’re running an agency, writing 20 of these a week, I mean, gosh, this can save you 20 hours or more. But if you’re just a part time, you know, you’re running a business and you’re a part time affiliate manager. Yeah, it’s going to save you a couple hours a week, but it’s just going to make this so much easier because they’re going to be so much better and you’re going to get such better results from your affiliates. So go check that out. Links in the show notes mattmcwilliams.com
AEP all right, the next one is discovering what I call the hidden micro niches or niches. So what I do is I again, this is like it’s using AI as a strategy, strategic thought partner. This is the biggest difference in the way I’ve used AI over the last few months is I am, I’m using it as a thought partner. So I created a chat. In this case, I used both GPT and GROK and I kind of played them off each other a little bit. And I’ll show you how I did that here. So I went to GPT and I don’t have the exact prompt in front of me, but basically this is the gist of it. You know, I said, so always give the chat a Persona.
So I said, you are a marketing consultant, you have over 20 years in small business marketing and you know, you’re an expert in marketing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you’re an expert at running affiliate programs as well. I have an affiliate program that I’d like to expand into some different micro niches.
So I give it some context. I say, I’d like to provide you with what I think you know, the, our niches are for our affiliates. So I say something like, you know, personal trainers, comma, health nuts, comma, and people who share workout tips on social media, just making that up. And then I say here are some, like here’s our top 20 affiliates and their social media profiles.
Then I specify the requirements and I say what I would like you to do is identify some new micro niches that I might not have thought of and suggest that, you know, these micro niches as possible niches to reach out and try to find affiliates. And then what I do is I take those and I once it gets the results, I say that’s great. And then I take those niches and I go over to Grok now and I say basically, here are the niches that right now, what do you suggest?
And it can just keep going and going and going and it’s an iterative process and you just ask it to list five at a time and you say no, no, no. Yes, that’s a good one. Okay, tell me more about this. Boom. And then you go back over to the recruiting stuff which if you want ours, like I said earlier, you can text me and we’ll consider releasing that to the public or you can kind of create your own thing.
It’s just a pain in the b*** to do that. But then you take those niches and say, great, now go find me five people in that niche. That’s a separate chat, but make sure you tell it like how do you want the results? And I will typically say I’d like five suggestions for new micro niches that are untapped and, and a 50 to 100 word description of each niche and who some of the top influencers are in that niche. And I explain why and I also tell it like, why did you, you know, why did explain why you suggested that niche and how you think that would be good for, you know, our, our industry, et cetera, et Cetera, I always end a prompt with, do you have any questions for me?
If so, please ask them one at a time. And so just trying to think if there’s anything else there. But I think that’s pretty much how I walk you through that. And so it suggests some pretty surprising one. Like, we found, you know, one niche for one of our clients. It was basically budget conscious pet parents. And it was like, what? You know, these are people who are obsessed with pets. They have, you know, their pet is their baby, but they’re really budget conscious. We had another niche for one of our products that said ADD ADHD entrepreneurs. It was like, oh, my word, that’s such a great niche for this product.
Notice how I go back and forth between niche and niche, because I don’t know how to say it. And so I use both interchangeably. And then one was actually for one of our clients, they suggested RVers. There’s a whole niche of people who their entire platform is about RVing, and I never knew that. And so what I found is when I say, give me five, it’ll usually three of them are like, no, that’s horrible.
But two of them, one of them, I’m like, oh, crap, that’s right, I forgot about that. Like, I thought about that a year ago and totally. And then another one’s like, I never thought about that. So then you, you go dig down that rabbit hole and then say, hey, I’d like five more. And the same process is going to repeat over and over. About three are going to be completely useless. One of them is going to be like, well done.
Can’t believe, you know, I can’t believe I forgot about that. Or, you know, wow, how did I never think of that? And then one of them is like, oh, my word. So amazing. So looking at the timer here, I think we’re going to wrap up with this one, but this one is. Basically creating a dream affiliate profile. It’s, you know, predicting high potential affiliates using data. So what I’ll do is we’ll feed in, I mentioned earlier that segment, who are my rock stars? It might only be eight people. For you, it might be 30. It’s typically not more than a hundred.
But whatever number it is, I will feed that in. I will give it every data point that I can. What they sold last year, we will, we’ll take again a product list of everything that they sold, their conversion rates, their top landing pages, everything. I mean, every data point we can links to their social media profiles, anything that we can find. And then we ask AI. So we say again, we give it a Persona.
You’re a data analysis Expert with over 20 years experience in affiliate marketing and affiliate management, blah, blah, blah, blah. I give it context for what we’re looking to do. We give it requirements like how we want it to respond and you know, do we want it in a table, do we want bullet points, what do we want? Explain the why. And sometimes I’ll take like five minutes and I use voice to text, so I’m just talking about what I want and then I say, what do these affiliates have in common?
Can you identify any trends or any patterns, what their, you know, what’s their tone, what’s their content, style, what are they doing on the different networks, what products are they selling, what products are their highest converting, et cetera, et cetera. So all that stuff. And we use that to create that dream affiliate and then we use that as our guide to say not only like the types of affiliates we want going back to what we talked about earlier, but also we’re able to train our other affiliates and say, here are what, here’s what we’re seeing from our top affiliates. These actual patterns that I just could never, I could never catch on my own. It’s all about connecting the dots.
That, like, that’s the thing about AI. AI is so stinking good at connecting the dots. I can’t connect the dots. I’m not smart enough to do that. I mean, I guess I could if I stared at spreadsheets for 12 hours, but after about 12 minutes my brain goes, so I’m not going to do it.
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So there’s a few more ways that you can use AI to really, really, you know, help your affiliate program. Like you don’t need to guess who to recruit or how to segment or do any of the data analysis, what tone to write in all that. AI can help you. It can help you to Create more impact with your affiliates. So if you want to test out the Affiliate Finder tool or you want those prompts, text me at 260-217-4619. I’ll send them your way. If you’re interested in the Affiliate Email Pro and being the first to use it, check that out@mattmcwilliams.com AEP I say the first to use it.
We had plenty of beta testers go through and they absolutely freaking loved it. I mean I’m looking at the quotes right here. This one real quick from Allison Nippert. She’s a VP of marketing in the retail niche. She said, matt, this is absolutely amazing. I used to sit there looking at a blank screen for 30 minutes before I’d write a mediocre email.
That’s when AI came out. I start. Or then when AI came out I started using that. But the emails were robotic and not compelling at all. I ended up rewriting them completely. I love how it will transform or how it will brainstorm ideas. Sorry, how brainstorm ideas for emails and how they sound like me. Plus it creates swipe copy for me too.
That alone is saving me 10 hours a month. I’m using it almost daily now. Thanks for creating this. So it’s a pretty powerful tool. It is completely tested out by me and dozens of others who have beta tested this. So make sure that you go check that out. Mattmcwams.com AEP Again, there’s a link in the show notes for that. And then in part four so make sure you hit subscribe because there’s part four, there’s probably part five, there’s probably part six, I don’t know. Make it to part 10.
We’re going to talk about how to use AI kind of. I don’t know if we’ll talk about that. We may not get to that part, but we’re going to talk about, you know, how to how to create like affiliate spotlights, how to train affiliates, how to do your all kinds of stuff, your T’s and C’s landing pages, all kinds of cool stuff with AI. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. I’ll see you then.
See you soon.