Laura Wardlaw doesn’t have a huge list or a large social media following. In fact, of all the affiliates in a recent promotion, she had one of the smallest audiences. And she still finished in the top 20…in only her second affiliate promotion ever. How’d she do it? Well, that’s what today’s episode is all about.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
How to Get Affiliates Excited to Promote
How to Build Trust and Credibility with Your Affiliates
How to Fail Your Way to Success with Omar Zenhom
How to Avoid the Most Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes
Why Your Affiliate Program is Failing (And What to Do About It)
How Laura Wardlaw Finished Top 20 in Only Her 2nd Affiliate Promotion
Laura Wardlaw doesn’t have a huge list or a large social media following. In fact, of all the affiliates in a recent promotion, she had one of the smallest audiences of anyone, and yet she still finished in the top 20 in only her second affiliate promotion ever. So how’d she do it?
Well, that’s what today’s episode is all about. So I’m really excited about today’s guest, Laura Wardlaw. She’s not somebody you’ve probably heard of, and there’s a reason for that. I met her through Pedro Adeo’s Crush It with Challenges launch that we ran Our agency ran Pedro’s launch, and she’s someone that we invited to promote because she was a student of Pedro’s, and we knew she had some audience. She had a little bit of an audience.
We figured, hey, this is somebody that could make one or two sales. She was small but eager. And this is a lesson for affiliate managers that I talk a lot about. We had dozens of Lauras in this launch, dozens of people who made one to two, or their cap was twelve sales, and their ceiling was twelve sales. But we had 40, 50, 60 people who made between one and twelve sales.
That adds up really fast. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, literally over half a million dollars from affiliates like that. That’s what you’re looking for. Golly, like, probably 600, $700,000 from people you’ve never heard of in tiny audiences that individually wouldn’t have been worth it, but collectively they were.
And Laura was somebody that we kind of figured would fit into that mold. Hey, maybe she’ll get five sales, and she did quite a few more, finished in the top 20, and she was ecstatic. Like she was over the moon. You’ll hear from her at the end just how much it meant to her. So I wanted to find out how she did it, so I interviewed her. That’s what I do here.
That’s the kind of content I want to provide for you on this podcast. So we’re going to jump right into my interview with her, and you’re going to find out, how did she finish the top 20 of a pretty big promotion? This is a multimillion-dollar launch, only her second affiliate promotion ever, with a tiny audience, significantly smaller than anybody else in the top 20, and as a matter of fact, smaller than 90% of the people who finish 21st through 50th.
So as you listen, I want you to listen for three things, specifically. Number one, I want you to listen to her mindset. It’s a huge thing here. Where was her mind in all of this? What difference did that make? Number two, I want you to listen to her tactics and strategy. That’s important tactics and strategy are super important. They don’t mean anything if you don’t have the right mindset. But I want you to listen to those.
Thirdly, I want you to listen to her goals and her mission and how those drove what she was doing in this promotion. So with that, again, we’re going to listen for her mindset, her tactics and strategy, and her goals and mission. Let’s jump right into my interview with Laura Wardlaw.
Matt: I am super stoked to be talking today to Laura Wardlaw. Laura is somebody that about six, seven weeks ago, we had no idea the other person existed. And now I’m such a huge fan of hers because of what you’re going to hear about in today’s insider profile. Just to give you a little bit of background, we’re going to be talking about Laura’s second affiliate promotion ever.
The first one was almost a full year before. This is not her thing. Like affiliate marketing is not her thing. She doesn’t do a lot of it. I have a feeling, though, that she’s going to be doing a little bit more. I could be wrong on that. We’ll see. But she finished 20th out of more than 600 affiliates in roughly a four-and-a-quarter, four-and-a-half million dollar launch of Pedro Adao’s. So, guys, that’s like just a little bit of background on Laura. We’ll talk a little bit more about her business and her during this. But she’s legit y’all, and she did this with a small list in her second affiliate promotion ever. So whatever she says today, like, take notes and learn from her.
Laura, welcome.
Laura: Oh, thank you so much. I’m humbled.
Matt: Well, I know one of the things that I loved was that you had posted. This is like the type of stuff that just really gets me excited. We post these visual leaderboards for anybody who’s ever promoted one of our things that we run.
We’d like to put people’s headshots on there and put their faces we like to make the leaderboards fun. So sometimes we do them kind of silly. Like we did the Etcher Sketch leaderboard, if you remember that because it was like literally things were changing so fast. We did it on an Etcher sketch that was really cool. We put their headshots on, we put their names on. We kind of gamified to make it look like a leaderboard.
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You might see it on an old Nintendo game or what are the arcade know at the arcade, right? And you had posted on there on Facebook like, oh my gosh, I made a leaderboard look at who’s on the leaderboard too. That’s like the coolest thing to me. When people do that, I want more people to do that, like celebrating their wins. And so let’s talk about how you ended up in this promotion. Because again, this is not like you’re one of those people who does a lot of these in a given year.
How did you end up promoting it’s called Crush it with Challenges, which was set up by a challenge movement maker challenge with Pedro Odeo. How did you end up in that?
Laura: Well, first I have to say did you also see my Elmo gifts where Elmo like fainted?
I didn’t until you posted a wheel or my name was on. I was like what is going on..!
Matt: Like I said, I think it’s the coolest thing. I mean I sincerely love when affiliates get excited about that. And again, selfishly as an affiliate manager because I know that that’s going to drive you more. But also it just like I said so many times, I have a heart for people who when they make 3000 $4,000 in affiliate commissions, it’s a big freaking deal. It’s not just like a line item under a line item under a line item under budget. It’s like oh, she made $3,000 or $4,000. This is huge. So that was really exciting. But how’d you end up in this promo?
Laura: So, a year ago I was just a stay-at-home mom. I’ve been home with my kids for 14 years. Honestly bored. But I had been it. I’d worked in the corporate world for like twelve years. Before that I’d been a math teacher, I’d been a corporate trainer, I’d worked on software, so I had a lot of IT background. So when Pedro’s random Facebook ad crossed my feed at the very beginning of the pandemic, when all my boys were home, and my husband’s home from work, I didn’t feel like an entrepreneur. He was calling out Kingdom entrepreneurs. But something about the ad copy really caught my heart and I thought this was really interesting. And it was free.
So I took part in his 1st 30 in the 414 challenge for 30 days and he just started to help me believe that there’s something in me. I have people to serve, I have a problem to solve. That’s all entrepreneurship is, he said just solving problems for many. So that was new to me too. I just had a grand vision of what entrepreneurship was. I didn’t feel qualified to be an entrepreneur.
And it just started to come together where I just had time and I could walk across the hall and turn on my computer and I could go serve people, I could go find people that I could serve. And so I’ve been kind of doing ministry for many many years in my own home, but I’d kind of burnt that out and this was a way to go find people fresh and new that I could serve well. So I did that little promotion you were talking about. I just made a cheesy video and tried my very first Facebook ads ever a year ago. Had absolutely no conversions so really had not tried to do any affiliate marketing except just sharing it with my friends, and most of my friends are just stay-at-home moms too. They’re not interested in being entrepreneurs either.
So it wasn’t until this launch, since I’m in his certified coaching program and his consultant program, that I got a 50% affiliate fee, which is a fantastic affiliate fee. And I thought, well, I’d really like to build my coaching business. I’d really like to build my consulting business, so maybe I can go get people into the Movement Maker Challenge as an affiliate. And I just started thinking, I’m just going to go get people like me. I’m going to go get other moms who are technically adept people who have been teachers before. I don’t know. Maybe you want to ask me some more of that about that later.
Matt: I do, yeah. Let’s go into the audience. Where did you actually find the people? Did you have an existing list? And if so what size are we talking about?
Laura: Yeah, so a year ago, I had nothing, and I had to kind of stumble around and find my footing and figure out what I even wanted to do a challenge on. I ended up creating one to help moms save money that still have kids at home. One of the things Pedro talks about is having an authority, making sure that you’re not out there being an imposter is that one absolute cure to being the imposter syndrome is not being an imposter. So I had to make sure that I picked something that I really had an authority on. And my degree is in math, so I’m very analytical. I know how to do the numbers. I feel like basic financial wisdom has been lost for many, many decades. I’ve read a lot of the books, but kids aren’t learning that in school. They don’t teach math consumer finances in school.
I know our own stories. We were very passionate about being debt-free before I stayed home with my kids because I made more money than my husband when I quit. And so we wanted the option for me to be able to stay home. And so we became debt free by 33, by age 33, house and all, before we had and then we were debt free millionaires by age 35. And so I was like, we didn’t do anything special. We weren’t like CEOs. We weren’t like directors of the company. We just knew how to live within our means. We knew what money was coming in, and what money was going out.
We knew how to invest fully in our 401K. We knew how to pay cash for cars. I mean, there’s just these basic, fundamental things that have snowballed, and now I’m almost 50 years old, and we’re in a very good situation, and I think it’s just really sad how few people have that freedom that we have right now to really do what they want to do. And so, yeah, that’s just kind of the background. So I just went out to find other moms to kind of share my tips and tricks with. I figured they could relate to me, I do tend to think more like a man. And so maybe I may be saying some of the same things their husbands already say to them, but they could hear it from me because I’m a woman.
Matt: It’s true. The same is true. Like there are things that my wife says to me and then I’ll hear them in a book.
Laura: Yes.
Matt: And I’m like, you’re not going to believe what I heard today. She’s like, I said that three years ago. I’m like, you did well. Yeah, but this was a guy. But he said it in a deeper voice. It registered with me.
Laura: I went from zero, but I had no people at all. And over three challenges built up to 777 people.
Matt: Okay, so still considerably under 1000 people going into this promotion. Guys, I’m just going to do the quick math because if I’m not mistaken, you made pretty close to $4,000, is that right?
Laura: It was $5,500.
Matt: $5,500. Okay, yeah, that’s right. Because that was just $4,000, the initial commission. Then you’ve got the payment plan payment.
So that does make pretty good sense. I’m just doing some quick. I went to government schools, so just bear with me. I’m going to do some quick math. $5,500 divided by $777 is roughly about 7 dollars a subscriber guys, in a single promotion like, that’s not per year, that’s not per month. So the cool thing is you add a zero to that. Now we always tell people, don’t bank on when you add zeros. It’s going to add a zero to the revenue side because you’re going to lose a little bit of that intimacy with your list. But you can still multiply by nine.
So that’s amazing. We’ll just call it 800 subscribers. $5,500 is absolutely amazing. So I want to talk about some of the promotional strategies like going into this promo. It’s a challenge. And I just want to point out to our insiders, that we did a backstage pass. We shared five reasons, tied in with seven strategies for promoting challenges. And so that’s like what we saw from all of the affiliates and plus some stuff that we’ve known over the years. I’m curious to know what were some of the specific strategies that you did.
Let’s start with just getting people into the challenge, just getting them registered, and signed up for the challenge. What were some of the strategies used there?
Laura: Yeah, and I honestly did run some Facebook ads. I spent about $1,000 on Facebook ads because my current audience was women that needed to save money. So I kind of pivoted that a little bit and just said, okay, maybe now you’ve learned all you can about saving money. Maybe you need to just go make some more money. And if you already have these skills, if you already have a hobby or you already have a ministry, maybe you’re just like me, just a stay-at-home mom and you can do challenges too. So that’s kind of the spin that I put on. It’s kind of the big idea that I put on it.
I ran about $1,000 worth of ads. I ended up with 67 opt-ins in my bridge file. And then I ended up with only about 48 making it all the way over Pedro’s. And I kind of feared that would happen because here I am talking to a stay-at-home mom that has a ministry as a hobby, and then she lands on this page with Pedro and she sees all these big guys being, big guys. And so I figured that she would feel a little intimidated. So I knew I would lose a little bit there.
So honestly with that, I ended up with 40 opt-ins out of Pedro, and I ended up selling five of them. So that’s 10%, right? I felt really good about that. But as far as promotion, first of all, I took your No Product No Problem course that you bundled in. I don’t know if that’s something you normally are able to offer, but I felt so blessed that you offered that because I absolutely had no training and I knew that I had no success before.
And so I made the time to listen to that and took some really good notes and came up with some good bonuses. And so I created a bridge funnel that had kind of the same picture on me like I am now. And this is where I did my video. So they would kind of match up and they just kind of told my story about I was just a stay-at-home mom a year ago. Are you just a stay-at-home mom and you need some extra money? And let me tell you why. I think this is something you could do. And I gave my numbers. I shared how I had nothing and went to 777 people. I shared that I doubled my money for my very first challenge, I spent 1000 on ads. I made $2,400. So I was able to share my own personal story.
And so I think it would be very hard for me to affiliate for something that I didn’t have a personal story with yet. I’m not that good. But because I had a good story and I had a good teacher in you to teach me kind of how to do this, I put together a little bit of an additional prize package for them or additional bonuses for them. And a couple of them didn’t work. I can share those with you if your people would like to hear that. But a couple of them sounded really good and didn’t really work. And then some of them really blew me away.
Matt: So I love that. So you went through NPNP, which NPNP is super quick. It’s a five day course.
No product, no problem. In fact, I wish I could say I plan this, but I’m sipping from an NPNP mug today. Just happenstance there. We did not coordinate. Promise, you guys. It’s actually half my mugs are no product, no problem mugs. Where was I going with that? I don’t know. So you went through no product, no problem.
And that kind of gave you some of the basic framework, and one of those lessons in there is about creating a bonus package, and we’ll come back to that. Two things I want to touch on that you said there. Number one, I want to acknowledge you because you just gave me a really good idea.
We’re getting ready here in a couple of weeks to do our After Action review with Pedro and his team. And one of the suggestions that I’m going to make is that we have a few different versions of the landing page. And you just gave me kind of a little bit of a framework for one of those landing pages, which is one that is we’ll call the less intimidating page.
I think you reach a certain point in life, or maybe a lot of people are already there. They see the Dean Graziosi, the Pete Vargas, the Tony Robbins, and they, oh, that’s aspirational I want to be a part of. Like, that’s me, right? I see people like that. I’m like, I’m in. Sign me up. There’s another group that sees that, and, uh, I can’t be them. I’m intimidated. I’m out.
And so I think having a more female centric, softer message would go over very well. So I’m actually going to advocate in the After Action review. So I just want to acknowledge you for that.
That may lead to something really cool for next year for this challenge. The second thing I want to talk about is the bridge page. We talk about this.
You all in the backstage pass, okay? And I actually whiteboarded up there and kind of showed you what that should look like. Laura just talked about that, and she gave the number she had 67 people land on the bridge page.
48 optins to your point, Laura, that is a little bit low. Now, I remind people all the time when we’re talking numbers like 67 and 48, you have to remember that if you’d had eight more people, you’d have been right at average. So it could just be it’s like that theory of small numbers, right?
When the numbers are small enough, it’s like, as you know, like 75%. Well, you had four leads. One more lead, and you would have had 75%.
But still, I think that’s a good point, but I want to talk about that because you say I spent $1,000 on Facebook ads, but you also added 67 people to your list.
Laura: Well, actually, 47 of them were leads from the Facebook ads, and then 20 of them were from my existing list.
Matt: So you added 47 people. So not only did you have an ROI, pretty high ROI on those ads and actual money, but you also grew your list, and that’s pretty cool.
That’s pretty cool. So let’s talk about that page. I mean, did you pretty much follow what we teach on that page? What did that page kind of look like, I guess.
Laura: The main sales page.
Matt: Yeah. Your bridge.
Laura: I use I was able to use one of Pedro’s templates because I’m one of his consultants, and so we have one of his he’s like millions and millions of dollars now on his phone.
Just kind of replaced his format. But on the thank you page, I did create a video that kind of said, okay, now when I tell you what to expect on the next page and I don’t know how many actually watched that video, but I was kind of trying to prepare them for feeling out of place, because I did. I felt out of place a year ago when I joined it and just kind of tried to tell them how I was going to hold their hand and how I was going to be there for them and I was going to make sure that they were successful.
So I think part of that drop off, I think, is also not a huge alignment between my typical audience and his typical audience. So that’s part of it, too. It’s not necessarily that I think it’s a great idea to have a more feminine looking take, but I think also the affiliates can do that, too. The affiliates can say, this is kind of the brand that I would give it. But, yeah, I did have some drop off because of that.
Matt: Yeah, that’s a really good point. I think I shared this in one of the trainings we did, and you were probably on there, and I talked about when you have an audience that’s maybe not quite aligned perfectly with the prospective offer, but, you know, the transformation it can have. It reminds me of we promoted and I think we talked about this in a backstage pass a couple of months ago, maybe three or four months ago, we promoted something that wasn’t really aligned with us from a style standpoint. Most of the people we promote, like Pedro and Stu and Jeff Walker, they’re pretty stylistically similar to me.
Stu’s got the stu isms and Pedro’s. Pedro and Jeff is. Like, stylistically, they’re not that far off for me. This was somebody who was all about the bling, and all of his photos are with him and his Maserati, and he lives in Vegas and all this stuff, right. He wears, like, giant rings, and basically he’s like flava flav, kind of, but he’s white, so it’s kind of that style. Right.
And the very first email I sent promoting, I said, listen, this guy is not like me. He’s a friend of mine. He’s a very dear friend, but his style is completely different.
I just want to acknowledge this, but I’m going to tell you, if you can get past the style stuff, he’s a genius. Listen to him. And that’s really important to frame those things.
Lauren I acknowledge you for that because if you just send him over to Pedro and then it is that jarring experience? There’s no preparation for it. Just like, if I had promoted this guy with no forewarning to my audience, they’re going to hit his landing page and be like, did Matt accidentally get was he drugged last night?
What did he do? Like, why is he been making this? Somebody has to. It might not be for you. Get past that. So I love that you mentioned bonuses. So did you offer bonuses for joining the challenge or just for purchasing the course?
Laura: Both.
Matt: So tell us about the bonus or bonuses for joining the challenge.
Laura: So I had a meet and greet because I figured again, they would kind of fill out a place. In that group of 30,000 people, only one person came, are busy. They were already going to commit the next five days to a challenge. So I don’t know if that was a fluke or if in hindsight that’s not going to be a great bonus.
I had a happy hour after the offer was made. Thinking like, that’d be a great time for them to ask me any questions. It’d be great time to bring out some testimonials.
I had three women join me that were all the fruit of my own challenges just to kind of, hey, like, this is why my life is different, because Laura did this and kind of inspiring them to do it themselves. Only had one person join, so same kind of thing like those.
Matt: I guess one of the three is not bad.
Laura: I hit or miss on those two. I did offer a free coaching call, which is all but one of them has taken me up on it and hers is supposed to be here any day now. And two of those I’ve already had additional sessions with additional paid sessions, like 3 hours paid with one of them. And she already asked me again today how she could have more time with me.
Matt: I love that. See, this is another thing you and I were talking before. I don’t teach. Build your business on affiliate marketing. So this is the thing.
I never shared this because I think it clouds the message. The beauty of offering a bonus that’s worth a lot of money of you coaching is no one you don’t have to create anything on the front end. That’s the big thing.
You didn’t have to create a course or put together a template, so you just had to show up after. But yeah, we’ve noticed the same thing that when we do those, we usually do the small group coaching calls. Not the one on one, but one out of five people that will join one of those small group coaching calls ends up in our Mastermind.
I mean we’re going to make more money down the road. I’m thinking of one in particular. He’s on his Thursday. He’s paid us, I don’t know, probably $9,000. That’s a lot of money over the course of time. I love that. Oh, my gosh. Okay, so let’s talk more about that real quick. So you got five people in.
You said four of them have done their coaching call and two of them. So half the people you’ve coached so far have basically upgraded to get more coaching.
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Laura: Yes, but they were not cold traffic. So I kind of went back and dissected this too. All but one of them were basically warm traffic people that kind of had already been seeing what I was doing too. I like to do the numbers I kind of see like am I getting more return on investment on my organic warm side or on the Facebook side.
But I also offered daily takeaways for them. And what was interesting is a lot of people talked about pop up Facebook groups and I just didn’t want to add another Facebook group. They’re already the challenge to be placed in a Facebook group and I didn’t want to compete with that.
And so I created a custom messenger group and added them into it. And what was so neat about that is real time. I could say, hey, this starts in an hour, here’s a link to the training.
Kind of give them a heads up because again, moms can get tied up with their kids or changing diapers, they’re feeding meal and they lose track of time and end up missing the live. And then I would give my takeaways right away within that little group. And I even tried having a hashtag so that they could do like hashtag challenge moms in there and find each other and tag.
But I’m worried it was perceived as pitching that I was pitching challengemom.com, which is not what I was doing, but I was trying to get them to find each other within the larger groups.
And if you have better ideas on that but a couple of them I don’t think understood the full power of tagging me, that by tagging me, I think some of them were worried about aligning themselves with me just yet if they didn’t know me yet. And by tagging me, maybe I wasn’t quite one of them. In fact, has already been a war room.
I didn’t know that she’s just a friend of mine. She had never shared that part. And so tagging me might actually kind of be a step down and make her look like she’s just a beginner mom entrepreneur when she’s really been doing this for many, many years.
But I think they didn’t understand is by tagging me then all of my friends, part of the Facebook algorithm then is going to show their life to my friends and then my friends are going to from Pedro’s world are going to come in and give feedback and give them comments and things like that. So once they I kind of had to train them a little bit on that, that it wasn’t like I was trying to get my name out there. I was trying to help them get connected.
I was trying to help them find a community. I was trying to help them start realizing the value of being in a group like this when you’re trying to do your own challenges well.
Matt: Also it’s important you want them to how many people we have? I’d have to look at the number. Maybe 50. We may have close to 50,000. 80% were in the Facebook group or 78% I think was the number. So what’s called 35,000 people in this Facebook group. It was massive. And you go in and post something and if you want a response, you’re going to respond. If they tag you.
It is in all of us. Like if I go to Facebook now and I look at my mentions, I can’t not at least go look at everything I mentioned in, right. I might not respond because there may not be a need to.
But if they’re tagging, at the very least you’re going to respond with heck yeah, or great job, or you’re going to answer their question versus not tagging you. Who knows where they’re going to get the response from? And I love that you took the time to educate your people.
Like that is so important. It takes just the slightest tiniest bit of extra effort. You put so much effort to get those 777 people. You put so much effort into nurturing 777 people. You put so much effort and money into getting them to sign up for the challenge. And then what normally happens is people go but it’s like the money really is made in that extra 10%.
Laura: Absolutely.
Matt: That’s the difference between you having made probably one sale. We’ll just say one of the sales you probably just would have made. Pedro is really good. You had 50 people, he would have closed one of them. But you closed 10% where the other four came from. That extra 10%. That’s the beauty of it. That I think is just amazing.
What else I’m curious, is there anything else that you did that you feel like kind of made this go so well for you? Because you were super engaged in the partner Facebook group. You were asking for advice, you were giving advice, you were encouraging people and getting encouragement.
Aside of those type of things, is there something in particular that maybe you did that you felt like that really worked really well?
Laura: Great question. I think the Swipe copy would have been really nice, except I knew it wouldn’t work for my people. It just was not in their language. It was not catering, even if it was catering to an entrepreneurial audience. So it was a little laborious, but I had to craft all my own emails. I did follow your stomp down sequence. Basically, I’m just a good student, so I did. You told me to do I did.
When you said go live, I went live that last day when you told me to send emails out every three or 4 hours, I did that. When you said to send one out at midnight. I had the free version of MailChimp, so I couldn’t even schedule it.
I had to stay up and but I did get one sale there that last hour. So I just basically….!
Matt: That’s a lesson in and of itself right there.
Laura: Matt knows what he’s doing. I’m a good student. I’m just going to do what he says to do. But in those emails.
I did try to really change them up there. After the offer was made, I had one email where I just highlighted all the people that had been in my challenges. I took a picture of like, our Christmas party where I gave them prizes and we’re having a good time and just kind of said a year ago, I didn’t know these people.
And I shared some of the testimonies. One of them is $50,000 less in debt. After three months of mentoring with me, one of them is hired a nanny one day a week because she figured out where all her money was going.
Just some testimonials like that to say, who out there is waiting for you. So I crafted one email, like, I crafted one email kind of to the whole just being a stay at home mom, but being a little bored, but not wanting to go back to work and have that dominate my life again and have to commute and everything. So I did have to customize a lot of the emails.
The swipe copy just I would have loved to have just popped it in there, but I knew in my heart that that was not going to resonate with them.
Matt: That works better. And that’s the important thing, is very rarely is the swipe copy perfect, as we taught you. Swipe copy is a guide. Swipe copy is where you go to maybe you catch a sentence or two. It’s where you go for the facts. Like, wait, when’s the webinar again? Oh, it’s at 08:00 p. m. Eastern. Okay, great. Got it.
It’s where you get inspiration. It could be that the way Pedro words a specific story gives you some ideas, right? There could be a testimonial that’s like, then make a good so again, there could be bits and pieces of it that you can copy and paste over.
There’s only so many ways you can say cart closes at midnight Pacific, right? So Peter, get off the pot. Like, that’s kind of the underlying line.
Laura: Like you said too. That one was like one line, just totally different.
Matt: So that’s one just the midnight email Laura mentioned that made a sale, 20% of her sales came from one email. That’s actually pretty typical. We see about ten to 15% of sales come from that one email. It is so critical that you actually stayed up to send it.
We recommend that right after midnight Eastern, you send an email that basically says, hey, you still up, or you thought you missed it, whatever. And the gist of the email says, hey, do you think you missed the deadline? Because I’ve been saying it’s at midnight.
Just a quick reminder, it’s midnight Pacific, so you still have 3 hours. That’s the gist of that email. Click here to get it.
And then also, we talked about this in the Backstage Pass Insiders, but Laura did what we talked about at point number five, which is she showed up. We talked about the power of showing up. And if you want to outperform your list size, you can do that by showing up, and you can do that by being in the comments.
When Pedro was live, Laura was in the comments. Like, her audience saw her there. When people asked questions in the Facebook group, she showed up. When her audience tagged her. As we talk about, she showed up. That extra 10%.
Here’s a little secret. Like, I don’t know about you, Laura, but there’s very little I was personally going to learn from Pedro’s challenge, because I already know all the stuff he teaches because we work with him. But I can have it on one monitor.
I can be listening, maybe while I’m, like, checking email, doing something that doesn’t require my full brain to be functioning. And if he says something really good, I can go over to the chat and say, that was really good, what Pedro just said it. Or if he says, who hears from Indiana, I can be like I am. And then my audience sees me in there.
Laura: And I think Facebook prioritizes some of that too. Just the fact that you’re interacting and then you all are connected, messenger, who knows how all that.
Matt: Yeah, probably shouldn’t have said that, but that is one of my little secrets.
I got to be honest. I’m usually not watching all the time super engaged because I know all the stuff. We’re in the middle of Stu McLaren’s launch right now.
I can say some of the stuff he’s going to say word for and like, I can even be like and here he goes. Voice and fletch in three, two I’m like, yep, boom. Nailed it.
I know this stuff. And yet I’m there. I’m showing up for my audience just enough they see me, and that’s super important.
So, last two questions, Laura, what’s something that you didn’t do, maybe that you saw another affiliate doing or that you just go, oh, I should have done that? That you didn’t do, but you wish you had done?
Laura: I think, I don’t know if this is exactly what you’re asking, but I think I trusted that I could just plug in the Facebook ads and do exactly what I was supposed to do and even copy the swipe copy originally.
Like I thought, oh, this is going to be easy. I’m just going to promote this and it’s going to be easy. And I think I had to be more all in than I realized I was going to have to be in.
But then I saw what that payout was going to be, that it was going to long term build my business. It’s going to build my coaching business. It’s going to build my consulting business.
And just want other thing I wanted to say to what you just said before, because you know Stu so well and you know Pedro so well, when you go in and make a comment, it can be a higher level comment than anybody else out there because everybody else out there is just learning. And so then when you share those things, it’s like, oh my. Like, how does she know that I’ve been training under Pedro for an entire year.
I’m even in his high level mastermind thing. So I’m going to be able to even synthesize some of what they’re saying in a totally new and unique way, which then makes you look like an authority again, right?
Matt: It does. Yeah. That’s super powerful.
Laura: So what I didn’t do probably is maybe even do more of the organic side. I think I thought I could put 1000 in and turn it into four or 5000, but when I really looked at the numbers, when I really analyzed it afterwards, it was the organic, it was the relationships that I had. It was the people that I had phone calls with, the people that I coached, all of that.
Matt: Yeah, that’s typically the way it’s going to be. If you look any given any given affiliate promotion, I look at Tribe last year. As an example, Pedro and I were talking about last year. We did about 110 sales, as usual.
About 30 of those sales about 25% of all of our sales were from about the 30 of those sales are from about the same 75 people. Meaning I know that doesn’t make there’s about 75 people in my audience that in any given promotion, about a third to half of them will buy the thing. Like, I can count on that group accounting for one third to one half of all the sales.
Those 30 people are the same. It was not even their second or third purchase from us or through us. They’re in our mastermind.
They’re in our coaching program. They bought two of our courses, and they bought our book, and they bought two things that we purchased as an affiliate. That goes to show, even with as big as we’ve grown, it’s still like a quarter of all of our stuff is from the same course 75 people.
And in your case, with 777, the percentages are about the same. It’s like the same core. Like 15 or 25 people who are getting coached by you. They’re doing this, they’re doing that. They bought the other thing that you offered.
They’re going to be the ones who are most likely to buy this affiliate thing or the next affiliate thing. That’s a super powerful lesson there. And the lesson, I think, that maybe neither of us said is those are the people that if you invest that extra just 10% a text message.
When I remember to and I forget, like, once a year, it drives me nuts. I’m like, oh, my gosh, I didn’t follow my own advice. We talked about that in the backstage passage where we just sometimes forget to run our own playbook. Oops. Do as I say, not as I do. But if I text people, personal text, I don’t know if Android does this thing I love about Apple this is not an endorsement on Apple, but I can do it on my computer.
And then it copies and pastes from my phone, and it’s easy to manage that way. And I’ll pick 30 or 40 people that I think would be really good. I’ll text 30 people.
I will sell 10,000 $2,000 courses like that. I don’t know what else I could do with 15 minutes of my life that would make me $10,000. I wish I could find more things that made $40,000 an hour doing Laura, but there’s not much I can do to make 40.
Laura: 18 million a year for a full time job.
Matt: Yeah, I mean, I wish, right? Did you just do that math? Like, that’s insane. How do you even do that? I can’t even comprehend how the brain works like that.
40 hours a week 50 weeks a year you multiply by $2,000. That’s all you have to do.
Matt: 40,000 yeah, that is. Is that 80 million? Yeah.
Laura: You multiply by around 2000.
Matt: Yeah, exactly. I mean, that’s insane, right? So I love that last question. If you had somebody so you have an opportunity now to kind of coach somebody who’s maybe in exactly the same position you’re in. They got a small list.
They’re promoting something you told me before effectively, really, for the first time, when you promoted a year before, like, you said, you had no idea what you’re doing. You did it all wrong. I don’t think you made any sales.
And so, really, for the first time, and you had two minutes to give them a pep talk and coach them on, like, what’s the 80 20 for them? What are the things they need to do? What would you tell them to do?
I think I’ve just been ingrained by Pedro to pick a niche. If you try to say it’s for everybody, that it’s for nobody. And so for me, once I said it’s going to be moms, and they’re going to be moms that have some kind of hobby or ministry, that they’ve been a teacher before.
So they’re comfortable in front of people. They’re comfortable delivering content. They’re somewhat tech savvy. I didn’t mention that before, but in my Facebook ads, I did that profile. I went niche all the way down to know, are they in me in communications? Have they worked for a help desk?
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Have they been a corporate tree, or have they been a certified teacher? And do they follow these certain influencers that talk like I do, that they will like me because I follow these same people? Are we going to have that much in common?
And that’s one of the key things that Pedro makes people do, is pick up who. And so once I niche that down, which is, again, what he teaches as a challenge, is then everything else comes easy. Knowing what to write in the email comes easy knowing what graphic to put.
I even was able to take. Like I knew out of all the graphics you gave us for Swipe graphics, I knew, because I’m a mom, that the clean white one was probably going to be the one that worked. The one that it was just a graphic that said Christian with challenges and how he and then I was able to add for Moms, like, in Canva.
I just went in and added for moms. But I did all five of the images that you gave us and did a split test in Facebook. And sure enough, the white one was the one that got all of the leads.
Matt: Interesting.
Laura: So it’s just like, I’m a nerd. Like, that being a math person. Like, I love to come in and see what the data says, but I kind of already had my gut reaction. Right? And then the other gut reaction is video typically converts more than anything else for other people, but for moms, when they’re just scrolling, they only got five minutes before their kids up.
They only got five minutes before they got to get a meal on there.
Matt: Yeah, they don’t have time to watch a video.
Laura: They don’t have time for that. And so guess what? I looked and I saw 39 of my leads came from the white graphic, and only eight conversions, and only eight of them came from video. So, again, I like looking at the data.
So just telling somebody, like, once you pick an audience, once you really niche down. And it may seem like that means you’re losing out on a lot of opportunities, but once you narrow down, then all of your language your graphics, the bridge page, the way that you nurture them, what bonuses you add are all going to be tied to that audience that you pick. And I just think that’s the only reason I ended up I don’t know how I ended up on the top 20 leaderboard, other than that.
Matt: We just shared all the ways you did. But yeah, I think the beauty of niching down like that is you never have to ask the question, is this the right thing for them, or am I speaking to them? If your audience is just like all men, there are so many variables religion, height, fitness level, like age, whether or not they have kids or not. They’re single, they’re married.
How do you target all men? That is not a target audience. And so I love seeing people like, yes, my target audience is married men 45 to 54 who are beginning to send their kids off to college.
And I’m like, that’s a niche right there. And the powerful lesson behind that is then you know that you can frame it exactly like you framed it. The four moms, you can frame it that way and not have to go, what about the men?
That’s not my target audience. And in fact, if you have somehow and I’m sure you have a few, I’m on your list technically, because I want to watch what you’re doing, but I know that I’m processing it in a different way, so that doesn’t count. But if you do happen to get some stragglers on there because of some opt in that you offered, you know, a year ago that turned out it attracted some men, that’s fine.
You’re actually going to chase them away, and that’s a good thing. You’re going to rip, like, for moms. I’m a know. Great. Bye bye. And now you can keep your audience fairly homogeneous, which is a good thing.
So, Laura, this has been awesome. Guys, I just want to say this is a master class right here in Monetizing, a small list. It’s a master class in starting affiliate marketing, and it’s a master class in just, again, finding the ways to do that extra 10% and getting some of those extra benefits, like coaching clients.
She basically got paid to get coaching clients. That’s the coolest thing. Usually we pay money to get coaching clients.
She got paid. Absolutely amazing. Laura, if somebody’s interested, you kind of talked about your niche, but if somebody’s like, well, I’m a mom, and I’m pretty tech savvy, and I think I might be good for your audience, like, I’m kind of interested in learning more about you.
Where can they do that?
Laura: Oh, well, thank you. So I have my one niche that’s for the people who need to save money and they can find me @ kingdomsavers.com.
That’s where I have the list right now. For my next challenge, I have a Facebook page for Kingdom called Kingdom Savers as well. Challenge moms right now is still redirecting to movement makers offer, so I need to get that fixed. But you can find me on Facebook if you Laura Wardlaw or find the other Kingdom Savers. But yeah, I’m really finding that side of the business growing because I used to be a teacher. I used to help this person.
I’m strong in IT. So rather than just helping people save money, I love helping people build their I’m finding that I love that piece. I love teaching and helping them get over the hump.
I’ve had a lot of peers ask me about Facebook ads. I’ve listened to your podcast this morning, by the way, about how you didn’t want to be The Affiliate Guy. And I was like, I don’t want to be the Facebook ads girl, but that is a need out there right now.
People call me to help them with their pixel. They call me to help them even under know commonent Torics what combinations of things to split test and all that is not something that every woman knows how to do. So it’s been fun to kind of see where the need is and how I can help people launch what’s in their heart and reach the people that they’re meant to serve.
Matt: That’s awesome. Well, Laura, thank you so much for being with us today. I appreciate it.
Laura: Yeah. Thank you, Matt. Take care. And thank you for encouraging the small guy. I think that’s the only reason I even had a chance once I saw, like, I didn’t belong in the top ten, but I could be down here in the bottom, the bottom ten. It gave me a lot of inspiration.
Matt: Well, you do belong in the top ten. You’ll be up there next time. So next time 10th place.
Laura: All right. Okay, we’ll try. Take care.
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Hey, I hope you enjoyed that interview, and I hope you got a ton out of it. Regardless of your list size, your following size, you can learn from Laura. If you went into that with that right attitude that I mentioned and you listened to her mindset, you learned from her tactics and her strategy, and you really honed in on her goals and mission then.
I know you have some takeaways from this, so I’d love to hear from you what your biggest takeaway is. Text me and let me know. I will share it with Laura 260-217-4619.
You can text me anytime, any questions you have anything, but I’d love specifically to hear from you what your biggest takeaway was from Laura today. Also, make sure you check out the show notes. I’ve got links to Laura’s stuff there along with the quickstart guide to affiliate marketing and a free training we’ve got coming up, a masterclass that I’m doing on affiliate marketing.
So go check those out in the show notes. And last but not least, make sure you hit subscribe because you do not want to miss our upcoming episode. The next episode, I’m going to talk to you about how to start an affiliate program.
We’re going to specifically hone in on the first 30 days. What do we do those first? That first month of starting an affiliate program?
The specific actions you need to take. That’s what we’re talking about in the next episode. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. I’ll see you then.
Questions?
Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.
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