What if you could create a steady stream of revenue month after month…just by doing a few things differently with your affiliate program? Today, I’m sharing the exact strategies we use to build recurring revenue for our clients…because affiliate revenue shouldn’t be one-and-done. This episode might just change how you think about your entire business model.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Links Mentioned in this Episode
Stu McLaren’s Membership Workshop
The 3 C’s of Successful Affiliate Programs
How to Decide the Right Affiliate Commission Structure
TEXT ME: +1 (260) 217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
 |
 |
|---|---|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
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
Tools of the Trade: What Every Affiliate Manager Should Be Using
7 Major Roadblocks to Scaling Your Affiliate Program (and How to Fix Them)
How to Create Recurring Revenue with Your Affiliate Program
What if you could create a steady stream of revenue month after month just by doing a few things differently with your affiliate program? You can. And today I’m sharing the exact strategies we use to build recurring revenue for our clients. Because affiliate revenue shouldn’t be one and done, this episode might just change the way you think about your entire business model.
Let’s get started. So I hear from a lot of people that the problem with doing affiliate promotions, big launches especially is, you know, they’re short term boost. Like it’s the launch, you get the spike, you may have like a little afterglow from it and then, and then it’s done. And this episode is going to completely reframe that.
It’s something I, I get kind of pigeonholed sometime is like the launch guy. People think, well, you run big affiliate launches and we do. But what most people don’t know is that’s less than 50% of what we do. The majority of programs that we run are evergreen.
The majority of programs that we run are either like evergreen retail products or they’re what we’re talking about today, which is the recurring revenue. And so as I wanted to talk about this, actually, you know, I went back and looked at some of the stuff we’ve done in the past and I realized I’d done a live lesson probably two years ago and these lessons are just as true today. So this live lesson, it’s about two years old. I realized there was nothing that I would take away or add to that. Everything I said is exactly what I would say today. So I’m just going to play this live lesson. So we’re going to listen to the majority of it.
Need help activating your affiliates? Use my proven email templates for getting inactive affiliates in the game and making sales! Get them here!
There’s some like talk at the beginning and the end that’s irrelevant. You know, to today there might be, we didn’t go through and look at the whole thing, but there might be a couple of things in there that are time sensitive to, you know, two, three years ago that aren’t relative to today. Well, you can just ignore those because what we’re talking about today is again just as relevant as it was two, three years ago.
It’s not about just making more Money, it’s ultimately about creating a predictable monthly revenue. And even if you still do launches, even if you still do promos, it’s creating that floor. This is something that we found. And when you can create a floor in your business, whether it’s, you know, a small business and it’s $5,000 a month or it’s a large business, it’s a million dollars a month, it doesn’t matter. But it’s like, that’s the, like, if you do nothing, if you go on vacation, you will still make that amount of money. And that’s really cool because having that kind of money, that’s the kind of money that pays your team. That’s the kind of money that takes all the financial pressure off, or at least most of it is the kind of.
I mean, seriously, it’s the kind of money that changes your life. I have seen it happen firsthand. Clients who go from a few thousand dollars a month to consistent five, six, sometimes even seven revenue, you know, seven figure revenue months. And it all started with just a few strategy shifts to how they ran their affiliate program for a subscription based product.
So if you’ve got a membership, you’ve got a SaaS, you’ve got a mastermind, any kind of recurring offer, or you want to have a membership site, a SaaS, a mastermind, a some sort of recurring revenue model. This episode is for you. We’re talking about recruiting and commission structures, how to communicate activation, all of it in this episode So let’s jump right in.
Jim :What I’m sharing today literally transforms affiliate programs. And at the risk of like, okay, at the risk of hyperbole, I don’t want to like overstate this, but in my opinion, it changes lives. It changes lives. You see, when I help and when our company helps a business owner take their monthly recurring revenue from say a few thousand dollars to like $10,000, that’s life changing. That is absolutely life changing. I had one of our, one of our.
This one, like, I think it was my very first coaching client back in like 2011, probably 2011 or 12. I worked with him for a year. He was doing about, let me think, trying to do the math, about $80,000 a year. So he’s probably doing about $7,000 a month and a year later.
So about nine months after we stopped working together, he was like, dude, I’m making, you know, it was a significant amount more money. I think he went from, if I remember correctly, he went from like 88 to 212,000. And I was like, dude, that’s awesome. He’s like, no, no, no, you don’t understand.
He’s like, let me explain what that did for me. He said, remember how my. I was telling you how we live in this crappy two bedroom apartment? Like, yeah, you know, with. With two kids and, you know, a little bit cramped. And he was like, well, we moved into this neighborhood and I know the neighborhood. And he knew that because I used to live in that area. And then he was like, remember how you.
My daughter, she’s like mildly special needs. Well, she’s in a, in a better school now. Like, all these things, you know. He’s like, I’m taking more time off. I hired somebody. Like, life is good. You know, I’m making like that’s what going from a few thousand dollars a month or $7,000 a month to, you know, almost $20,000 a month can do for somebody. This is like the type of thing that makes going full time possible, allows you to take vacations, just takes that financial stress off of you.
It’s the same thing when I help a business go from five figures to six figures a month. When they go from making $20,000 to 100,000, that creates jobs, that changes the lives of the members, that takes businesses to the next level. And it’s all because of one thing. One thing.
It’s like my one thing, right? A successful affiliate program. So that’s why we’re talking today about how to run an affiliate program for subscription service. So I’m going to reveal my secrets for running an affiliate program for a subscription service.
This applies to membership sites, monthly subscriptions, masterminds, you name it, anything that is generating recurring monthly revenue. Now, couple of things to keep in mind, actually. I’ve got three things to keep on. Thank you.
Three things to keep in mind before we get into, you know, first of all, like, what are the, you know, what are the logistics on this and how to. And all that stuff? Number one, you got to know that it requires an ongoing commitment. Okay.
Membership sites themselves. If you have a membership site, you know, this, I. They’re not a, they’re not a sprint, they’re a marathon. You know, it’s every month. Or if you batch, you know, we kind of do a combo. We. We try to batch, but we’re not. We were talking about this yesterday.
We’re not great at it. I’ll be the first to admit that. You know, hi, I’m Matt. I have a membership site and sometimes we produce content the week that it goes live, you know, but we try to batch them, try to get ahead, but it’s a marathon, not a sprint. So the affiliate program is no different than the membership site itself.
Number two, an affiliate program might not be suitable for your audience or your product. Okay, okay. You know, if, you know, if you know that people need to have had a personal interaction with you before they buy, an affiliate program might not be your best choice. So if this. If this membership site really only works if they’ve been through, say, your course, all right, or they’ve been. You know, they’ve bought another product for you, it’s like Stu McLaren’s membership site.
It’s really only for people who’ve been through his course, and then, you know, it comes after. It wouldn’t make sense for him to have affiliates promoting the membership site directly. Third, it does mean you got additional tech systems to set up. Right?
This is not necessarily an issue, but it’s worth just bearing in mind, if you’re not a fan of tech, maybe now’s not the time to start an affiliate program for your membership site. That said, I would encourage you, like, learn the tech or find somebody who does. You don’t want to miss out on this.
It’s just there are some complexities to it. There’s. And we’ll talk about this. Like, when you have ongoing commissions, you know, but somebody doesn’t pay, or their credit card fails or they cancel.
You know how, like, you gotta. You gotta make sure you’ve got those logistics covered. So the first question to consider, by the way, guys, say hey. Say hey to me.
Let me know you’re on. Hey, man, I’m on. That’s really hot. Holy mother of pearl. Oh, my gosh. It’s always exciting doing Facebook lives. We never know what to expect. I was not expecting.
I gotta put some cold water. And I was literally, I thought, because I put some cold water in, was like, room temperature or maybe a little on the warm side. It’s like, scalding. I had burnt my lip, of course. Oh, man. Where was I? Okay. Oh, hopefully that’ll nullify that. So, yeah. Anyway, say hey, let us know where you’re joining us from. All right, so the first thing to consider when you are setting up your affiliate program is how will you recruit your affiliates? Okay, who will you let in right now?
This is one you’ve got to decide. Thank you, Jim. This is one you’ve got to decide in general. But this applies more so to a membership site because you’ve got basically three choices. All right? You can let in members only. So you’re only going to have people who are members of your site can become affiliates. Let’s try this again. Yeah. It’s only like the surface of the sun. Hot now. Tasty. Excuse me.
Floyd’s like, yeah, I’m looking for. I haven’t. It’s been a while since I’ve been on a live. Looking forward to soaking up the knowledge so far. We just talked about how I burnt myself. That’s where we at. Robbie’s leaving. I’m burning myself. You’re good. You’re caught up. Floyd Olaton, Kentucky. That’s good. I, I don’t know where that is and I don’t have time to look that up on a map. But just let me know how far that is from, from Somerset. I’m kind of curious there. Jim and hey Nina.
Hey Chad. Hey Jim. Okay, so members only, like the rule is a lot. This is very common. I’d probably say, I want to say 60% of affiliate programs for membership sites or subscription sites are only people. Only members can become affiliates. Secondly is invite only. So you hand select people. Maybe it’s only bigger affiliates. Maybe it’s only members of certain, you know, certain like you know, qualifications. Right. Members who are, you know, raving fans or whatever and then public, which is anyone who wants can become an affiliate.
There’s nothing wrong with any of these. It’s just something that you need to consider. I don’t have. We’re not going to go into like the benefits of those that. It’s really a personal decision. I will say this for me, I definitely don’t do invite only. It’s either all members or the public and it really kind of depends. I’ll give you just one thing thing because like I said, we’re not going to go super in depth if you have a service.
No, actually let me go back. If you have a membership, a knowledge based membership. Okay, so you’ve like our, like our membership Affiliate Insider Monthly. And by the way, if you want to join Affiliate Insider Monthly, now’s the time to join. You can get in for a buck and get all of August, September and October plus everything coming up. So you get a crap ton of stuff for a whole dollar. You know, it’s like I don’t mean to be like one of those commercials back in the day with Sally Strothers, but it’s like $0.08 per piece of content that you’re gonna pay for the first three months. So Robbie is awesome and just dropped the link in my name so. Thank you Robbie. Yeah, so check that out.
It’s mattmcwams.com aimtrial but with that we need to knowledge based membership. I, I tend to lean towards members only. It’s not to say that you we were just. Oh, my gosh, what was I doing? Oh, this book, guys, you’re gonna love this interview, dude, you just set me up for that and didn’t even know it. So this book here, the Ultimate Marketing Engine with John Jenks. I’m. I’m actually. I just interviewed him, and I’ll tell you guys, it’s the best podcast interview I’ve ever done in my life. Not me. Like, it wasn’t. Like, I did a great job interviewing him. He was just amazing. I’ve never taken that many notes.
I’m going to have our whole team listen to the interview. I’ve never done that before. I’m on episode 450. I’ve never had my team listen to a podcast episode of mine. Like, intentional. Like, hey, go listen to this. We’re going to listen to it together. There are so, so much good stuff Well, I interviewed him about this book, and he talks about the Members Only jackets. I think it was. Gosh, now I almost want to. Yeah, it was. So there’s this concept that he talks about. Let me see real quick. I’m going to preview that. You just were, like, all over the place today.
Something about. Oh, yeah, here we go. Nope, that’s not it either. What is this? I’m trying to remember the exact concept, but it’s basically like thinking of your customers as members. Customers as member mindset. And he talks about the Members Only jacket in here, and it is. I can’t find it, but it is so fun. So, guys, you’re looking forward to that podcast. I’m pretty sure it comes out on September 21st. Almost positive that. So, guys, Mark, Mark, your calendars. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast. You know, subscribe to the podcast so you don’t, you know, miss that. So you’re gonna love that. You’re gonna love that. Okay, where was I? Members only. That’s typically for knowledge base if it’s. If it’s a service.
So it’s a. It’s a subscription site, but it’s like a service, like a software. I think you can definitely open that to the public. And a good example of that is we promoted ConvertKit. Gosh, how long, Robby? For two, three years before we switched to ConvertKit. We still recommend Mailchimp as an affiliate, and technically we still have a Mailchimp account, but we don’t use it. So that’s kind of a funky example.
But even if we didn’t have a mailchimp account, we would still recommend that to newbies as an option all right, so the idea here is when you open it to the public, and it’s more of a like a service type thing, they can honestly recommend it as an, as an alternative. We’ll talk about that next week. Next week we’re going to talk about how to promote something that you haven’t used as an affiliate. And one of those things is like, again, remembering that you’re at a different level than your audience, so you might want to recommend products that are good for them. Alright, so we talked about some of the considerations. Who will you let in?
Second thing, second big question is how will you reach out to your members? Okay, how will you reach out to your members? Here’s the very important thing. When you’re dealing with your members or your subscribers or your customers, whatever you call them, you need to position it not as an affiliate program, but as like something that’s exclusive to them. Assuming that it is. And you need to position it not in terms of a 25% commission or a, you know, 20% commission or any of that. Position it as if you refer x new members, your membership is free. All right? That’s the big thing. So, like free stuff. Yeah. So 25% commission, you can do the math. Refer four members. Always an adventure when I take a sip today, because who knows, I can’t feel my upper lip. It’s so funny right now.
Like, I know it’s there, I just can’t feel it. And so you, you refer four members, you don’t pay. Like, as long as those four stay, you’re never paying effectively. Now, it doesn’t work like that. Most of the time they do pay, but then they’re basically getting the money back, you know, is how that works. So the big thing here is like, just make sure that you’re, you’re, you’re mentioning your affiliate program, your, you know, your affiliate program. True Confession. We do a crappy job of this, all right?
So do as I say, not as I do actually do as we’re going to, not as we’re currently doing. So mention that you can, you know, you can promote the, you know, you have an affiliate program, you have a partner program, a referral program. And here’s what it does. Talk about it in your membership group, talk about it in your videos, talk about it in your, your email blast that you send out, you know, as a P. S. you know, include it regularly to your members. You don’t have to do like a whole campaign for it. Just if you constantly mention it a little bit, you’ll pick up people to answer Nina’s percentage or question, what percentage do you give them?
What percentage is right? I have a whole video on how to determine affiliate commission, and I’m really hoping that Robby can find it. This is why I’m gonna. This is why I’m gonna miss Robby so, so much. One of the 8,000 reasons why I’m gonna miss Robbie is he knows where my content is better than I do half the time. But also, you know, like, I’m. I’m doing this, and it be kind of like, hey, you guys want to watch me go look around my website for this thing? No, but that said, Nina, basically you take, you know, what does it cost you to have a member?
Not what is your. What I mean by that is like, what is the incremental cost per member? So if you have 500 members, and every 500 members, you need a community organizer, community manager, and they make. I’m just going to go with a nice round number. They make $5,000 a month. That means your cost per member is $10. You don’t need another one of those until you have, you know, a thousand members, at which point you’ll still be $10amember. Okay, so I’m not talking about, like, your website hosting and things like that.
That’s. You’re going to pay for your web hosting with website hosting, whether you have one member or one million members. Okay, so what are your incremental costs per member? Now, you take that. Maybe if you. I’m. I’m making this up. But maybe for every 100 members, you. You have a coach that you hire, and that coach costs $10,000 a month. So that’s a Hun from Do. What’s 10,000 divided by a hundred? Is that. Is that a hundred? Yeah, a hundred dollars per member. Maybe your membership’s 297 a month. You know, it’s a. Maybe for like, C suite executives.
I don’t know. But if you. If your cost is at $30 a month and you have $10 a month, you know, hard cost per member, then the most you could give after you factor in credit card processing and, you know, things like that, Even little things like chasing down members who have a credit card that failed, and the most you could offer just to break even is probably $17, maybe even like 16. So from there, you got to go. I’d like to make some money.
So I’d like to maybe split that. That $16 in half and give them eight. Well, $8 is a weird percentage of 30 it’s like, you know, 26.2%. I don’t know. So let’s just go 25. Or maybe we advertise 20, but we can bump somebody to 25 if they refer 10 or more members in a month. So it’s an incentive. Nina. So it’s really just a math equation. The last factor. And again, I recommend watching that whole video. The last factor is that you are going to look at the landscape your competition.
So in that example that I gave, you got a $30 commission. And we’ll talk about this a little bit more in depth, I think. But you know, you have a $30 commission and, or $30 membership a month, $30 a month. And your two biggest competitors are $50 with a 10% commission. So it’s five bucks and $25 with a 10, 25% commission. Then your 20 or 25% commission at $30 is right there. You’re very competitive. You’re better than one right around the other one.
But if your competition’s at $50 with a 30% commission and maybe $40 with a 50% commission, you can’t go with a 20 or 25% commission. You’re just not competitive, you know. Now again, members only. Yeah, sure. But if you open it up to the public at all, you’re going to have to be a little bit more competitive. So again, with your members, I always recommend messaging it as, you know, send four, refer four people, get your membership free. Maybe five people. Membership’s free.
The big thing is just keep, keep talking about it. Alright, so if it’s invite only, how do you find affiliates? How do you find people that are going to be good affiliates for your membership? We have an entire course on this, guys. It’s called Find Affiliates now. All right, find affiliatesnow.com you can check that out. Find affiliatesnow.com and then I want to go back to the commissions thing though real quick because Nina brought this up. That 25%, is it ongoing? Yes. Or that 20%, is it ongoing? There are a lot of memberships that pay like they give you 100% of the first month and, and then nothing. Here’s why you want an ongoing commission.
We talked about this with a client yesterday and I explained it this way. And this guy’s like, he’s a big, big deal in the Internet marketing space. All right? And when I said it this way, it was like it clicked with me. He went, yep, we’re gonna do it that way. That ongoing commission, that $30 a month, you’re sending that $100 a month, $200 a month, that’s a marketing cost, Nina. That’s a marketing cost. That every time you send that every time you send them a commission, a monthly commission, it’s a reminder, man, I’m making money from that person.
I should promote that more. And furthermore, there’s no better time to ask them to do something or tell them about maybe an upcoming promotion, maybe you’re going to run a trial, you Know, like. Like our dollar trial for Affiliate Insider monthly, for instance, maybe you’re gonna. Maybe you’re gonna do that part of your affiliate program and give them an option to do that. So let’s just say it’s September 2nd, and you’re paying commissions from August. And you sent, you know, you’re sending somebody $184. Last month, you sent them $184.
To this month you say, hey, there’s a. You send them a separate email. We sent you $184 via PayPal. By the way, our big trial push, where we discount our membership for the first two months and it’s only a dollar, is coming up in October. Do you want to promote that? Do you want to share that with your audience? You know, is there ever a better time? Go ahead, Robbie.
Robbie :I was going to say it doesn’t hurt to become a line item in their budget either, because, you know, as an affiliate, like, I do that where I’m like, okay, I know that I’m, you know, I’ll. I’m expecting this much for this specific offer. Right. And it’s like, I can plug that into my own marketing materials in addition to, you know, hey, let me go in on the launch. Like, it’s. There’s no better place to be than on their budget.
Jim :Yeah. Like, we have. So there’s a lot of stuff we promote that we don’t make very much money on. That falls under the miscellaneous income. Exactly. But there are a couple things that we promote that have their own line item. You know, we make enough money. I mean, it’s like, it’s enough to pay half of a team member a month. I mean, that’s a, you know, that’s a substantial amount of income.
If you think about it. If you can pay half of someone’s, you know, salary or whatever, you, you know, I. I kind of like that. If I can find four of those, I can pay for two employees. You know, like, that’s a big deal. Yeah, so. So, yeah, that 25%, the 20. Whatever it is. That’s. That’s, you know, that’s a. That’s a. Basically a way of. An ongoing way to keep them engaged. So. So again, find affiliates now to find affiliates. The biggest thing here. Let me just share the gist, though. Find people who are promoting similar products that are courses or that are some sort of physical product, not a membership. So they’re promoting. I’m just using this example.
They’re promoting. You know what? We’ll go back to the. Yeah, here we go. I need to get this off my. I need to put something else on my desk. So. Pat, you have gotten so much publicity, dude, I’m. I’m gonna send. Yeah. When you watch this, I’m. You. Yeah, you owe me. Mattmcwams.com Switchpod, by the way.
Okay, you’re that. You find an affiliate who’s promoting the Switchpod. Well, what do you do? You have a membership that’s $30 a month that teaches people how to do video. All right, I don’t know what it would be, but whatever. Find people who are promoting Switchpod. Because all Switchpod is, is this little deal. You know, you put your phone and your camera on there.
You can set it up as a tripod. You go like that. You can do it as a handheld. So what do I know about people who bought one of these? They produce videos. I mean, why else would. I mean, unless you. I doubt that you follow Pat Flynn and bought his Switchpod if you don’t do video. I mean, maybe, like, I’ve actually used this just for personal use. It’s like, I actually really enjoy, you know, I’ll take it and, like, set it up in front of me and, like, record, you know, kids doing stuff. Or I just, like, you know, like, recording like this versus, you know, I mean, admittedly, you know, this is not nearly, you know, as comfortable as this, so whatever. But most of the people who are promoting this have an audience that wants to learn how to do video.
So you go get them to promote your membership. You go get them to promote your membership, and that’s. That’s how you do that. So with public, it’s the same as the invite only, but you just open it up. Anyone to join. So going back to our thing about commissions, because Nina got me way ahead of myself there. I mean, it’s one of the most important things to consider your commission rate. We talked about kind of the formula for that.
A couple other considerations. Are you going to offer a flat fee or percentage? So in that example earlier, let’s say we’ll go with $30. Again, let’s say you basically had no cost of goods. You know, it’s going to cost you a buck a month per member, and you wanted to go with, like, a 30% commission. I would go $10. I would go flat. Why 10 bucks sounds better than 30%? You know, it’s. It’s just. It’s so much better, right? And then no reason to be. Sorry, Nina. I super. Like, your questions are awesome. Just so I was not Ragged on you.
I was just saying we got a little ahead of ourselves. Again, it’s a recurring commission because it’s a marketing cost you need to think about. Are you going to offer a two tier program where if I refer affiliates to you, then you’re paying me a percentage as well. That’s just, you got to factor in is it worth, if you’re going to pay me, let’s say you’re going to pay the affiliate 25%, you’re going to pay me another 10%.
Is that worth it for the growth? Maybe the margins don’t work out. Maybe they probably do and it probably is and I think it is. And if you’re interested in having us promote your affiliate program, best way to just get started on this, just email me mattmcwilliams.com and we’ll have a conversation about that. You know, again, I mentioned that if some of your competitors have affiliate programs, then you need to be competitive effectively though. I mean you can set whatever commission rate you want.
It just needs to be attractive enough even to your members. If you said we offer a 5% commission, they’re like, I gotta refer 20 people I’m not that excited about. So it’s got to make it, you got to make it worth the time to promote it, right? You got to, you got to make it worth their time.
But you also got to make it worth your time. Like you still need a good roi. You don’t want to be signing up members and making two bucks a member. I mean, if you’re only making two bucks a member, I mean think like what do you, 5,000 members to make? $10,000 a month. That sucks. That’s not a good ROI. Now there are considerations like, well, we’re going to pay you $10 a new member.
What about a trial? You know, if you do a, if it’s a, like our one dollar trial, right? Well, I’m going to eat the nine dollars. I’m going to eat the nine dollars.
Now I’m not going to open that promotion up to just any affiliate who could possibly scam me. I’m, and if I do, I’m going to withhold their payments until they’re first thing renews. All right, so now it’s, they’ve, they’ve paid the, you know, the full membership. Now I’m at least break even roughly, you know, so cool, we’re good.
But in that particular case, if I did open it up, I would just withhold payment until their actual first full payment hit. And if not, like I said I’m just going to open it up maybe to a select, you know, proven affiliates who I know aren’t going to, you know, scam me. So to answer your question, Nina. Yeah.
The commission for membership sites is typically lower than what we recommend for digital courses, digital products, like, you know, 50%, 40. There’s. But the recurring model, it’s like, it’s different, you know, because you’ve got to do ongoing work. Like I go create a course and maybe I deliver the course for 12 weeks. For 12 weeks, I gotta bust it. But then I’m done, effectively.
So the membership sites, like every month we, you know, even if we batch it, we still have to batch a lot of content. If we batch four months worth of content, we still got to, you know, batch all that stuff. And so, yeah, I mean, hopefully that answers, hopefully that answers those questions. And yeah, Nina, you still pay the full percentage on that first month, typically, if it’s a, you know, a flat $10.
Otherwise, like, how we do it, it’s super easy. We just do. We offer a 40% commission on our membership. And so it’s easy.
Get my #1 affiliate recruiting email (the one I’ve personally used to recruit thousands of affiliates in dozens of niches). Grab your copy here!
Yeah, I had, we had an affiliate. It was so funny. He promoted it and he just wasn’t thinking, you know, mid size affiliate, not a huge affiliate. And I, you know, we sent him like a, we sent him a PayPal payment for like $3.
Whatever. What was it? No, 720. It was 720. I think he made, he made like 18 sales. He was like, he’s 17. He’s like, dude, my order at Chick fil A is 11. Like, what am I supposed to even do with this?
It was like, find $4 and go to Chick Fil A. You know, I’m like, or wait till next month and you can eat at Chick Fil A every day that month probably, you know, like, dude, stop complaining. But he just didn’t, he wasn’t thinking. He was like, I’m gonna make, you know, 15 or whatever, 20 bucks a sale.
He just wasn’t thinking. So how do you communicate? How often and how do you communicate with your affiliates promoting your membership site, your subscription site? Before I jump into that, are you guys with me? Like, are you guys. Let me know, Nina. Others are you are. Is everything making sense so far? Any other questions? That gives me a chance to take a sip of.
Robbie :I was going to say I was just pulling up a couple of affiliate offers that I currently promote. And the commission range on these subscription sites is, you know, 20 to 30% on every single one of them. Typically, it’s going to be right in there.
Jim :Yeah, we just want to go high. We just want to go. We just want to. Kind of. My philosophy and I shared this with that client yesterday. I don’t know if you remember this. My philosophy is on affiliate, on how we run our Affiliate programs, it’s like a, that’s one of our core values as a company comes from.
I still remember where I was. I was in line to get on a roller coaster and I had messaged Stu McLaren and I had said, you know, Stu used to be an affiliate manager. And you know, I’d been in the affiliate management world for 10 years at this point. But I had, I was curious about like with online courses. And I said, hey, should we pay on the downsells? Should we pay a commission on the downsells? And he was like, well, let me ask you a question in return. He asked me the question.
I responded. So I responded and said, so we can get away with not paying them, right? And he said my question. He never, never told me his opinion, just kept asking me questions, said, which is annoying.
But he said, my question back to you would be, do you want to get away with it or do you want to blow your affiliates away? That’s always what I’m looking for. Affiliates are customers. And it’s the same like when you, when you sell something, when you have a $50 a month membership, do you want to give them $50 worth of value? So they kind of go, okay, I’ll stick around for one more month. Or do you want to blow them away? Their first three months provide so much value that we see this happen all the time. They, I’ve done this. They stick around for years just because of their experience the first few months. That’s who I want. Stage for everything else. That’s who I want.
So blow them away. All right, Communication. This is the thing about communication with a membership site specifically. So let me go back to a launch, right?
So non recurring revenue with a launch type thing, you know, you communicate in the months leading up, infrequently, you know, every couple of three weeks, you know, something like that. You start to ramp it up right before the launch. And then every day, you know, it’s like for two weeks it’s like, there’s so much craziness, right? That doesn’t work. You can’t do that. All right, 24 7, 365 of the membership site. But you also can’t do too little.
So you can’t do too much. You can’t do too little. So we use the Goldilocks principle, not so much, but, you know, just right. So number one, regular. You want to have a regular communication once a week or every other week. It doesn’t matter which one you pick, just does not matter. But it’s either every Tuesday or every other Wednesday or every other Monday or Thursday. I do recommend.
Just to say I recommend Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Mondays are tough because it’s their first day. Friday, you all know what you’re thinking about. So it’s like Monday, Tuesday, or Tuesday, Wednesday. Right. As needed notifications. So. And as needed, not, you know, if your tracking stops working for some reason or you’re, you know for a fact the server is going to be down from 2 to 6 on Monday.
You don’t send that as a part of. Hey, by the way, the server was down from 2 to 6. No, you included in your regular communication in advance, but maybe you don’t know that. So on Friday, when you find out from the tech team that it’s going to be down, you send an email about it. You post in the Facebook group, whatever. So regular email once a week, every other week. Facebook post at least once a week or so. You know, just again, you know, on this one, I try to make it arrhythmical.
You know, I post on a Tuesday, and then I might not post till Friday, the next week. Two or three times a year, you treat it like a launch. So for seven, you know, seven to 10 days, we’re gonna boom, boom, boom, daily communication. And it feels like a launch. I don’t recommend definitely not more than three, probably only two. So about every six months. And then the same rules apply, you know, as both, you know, with the big promos, the ongoing, like, the same rules as launches. Right.
We want to. Want to make the communication impactful. We want to make sure that there’s a call to action, make it easy for them to know what they are supposed to do in reaction to this email. Oh, Matt sent this. There are two things I’m supposed to do. Number one, I want to go share about this on social media. Number two, I want to send this email, you know, oh, here’s some new social media graphics. My call to action is get my social media guy to load these into our, you know, our Meet Edgar account so that I’m tweeting about this offer once every five days. You know, something like that. Right. All right, next big thing you got to teach them.
Robbie :Mine is not hot, by the way. It’s cold.
Jim :Your coffee or your tea?Yeah. Are you doing tea?
Robbie :No, it’s coffee. Oh, what do you got? I didn’t see. Cold brew.
JIm :Yeah. Okay. You’re holding it, remember? Yeah, like, look at it.cIt’s over here. I’m holding this. You’re like, this Is here. What’s your mug say? Here, Here. You see it? You see it?
Robbie :Oh, wait, you can, because you’ve got.
Jim :I wasn’t. It’s weird because. No, you see yourself. Do you see yourself at the bottom of the screen or me? I see both because I’m the. I’m hosting the whole thing. Oh, I only see me. So that’s the thing is like.
Yeah, you do that a lot on these. You’re like, yeah, look, right. Right here, obviously. But if you look at yourself down there, you see, that’s the thing is, like, right. It’s like, right now, both. Let me get here. Both hands are on. Are on my camera technically right now. But you. It cuts me off at my elbows on, you know, on screen, so. All right, so you gotta teach them. All right, Go listen to the podcast series I just did. The three Cs of successful programming are successful.
Robbie :What are we, robots? You gonna program us?
Jim : I am so way off track today with the whole. I blame it on our dog. He woke me up in the middle of the night.
Robbie :I got like, four hours of sleep. So blaming it on hot tea.
Jim :Yeah. Yeah, it hurts. Yeah. I mean, three Cs of successful affiliate program. So if you go to the link that. Oh, my gosh, guys, this is awful. I told you, four hours of sleep. That’s gonna do it. That Robbie dropped earlier. All right, mattmcwams.com podcast. It’ll be on there. And I talk about coaching and one of these. So, you know, host a training. Right?Host a training and, you know, you can, like, make it into an event and train your affiliates. Give them cheat sheets, right? Just give them, like a simple PDF with all the important stuff and update that periodically. One of the things you can do as far as communication is share. Share testimonials, right? When you. When you get a particularly awesome testimonial, share it in the. Your partners group, your affiliates group. Right? We do this for our affiliates. It’s a great way to make them feel like what they’re doing is having an impact. Just give them updates.
Robbie :Yeah, go ahead. Oh, I was just gonna say it’s fun, too. You know, as the affiliate, you get to see that. You’re like, oh, my gosh. Yeah, I remember when I was like that. And I may have that change. Especially if it’s a members only. Like, it helps build. They’ll take that energy to your membership, too, or your subscription service or your community or whatever.
Jim :Yeah, give them updates. Leaderboards contest, you know, things like that. Ask if they need anything. You know, just reach out every six months or, you know, for those big promos, when the big promos coming up reach out like a couple days before and just say, do you need anything?It’s a very simple email. Hey, Jim, just wanted to see if you need anything for our, you know, our $1 trial promo coming up for Affiliate Insider Monthly. Let me know. That’s it. It’s a good email. Ask for referrals at least every few months. This is something you can bury in an email. You can put in your ps, but you can also send a specific email, you know, periodically, just asking them for referrals, like, do you know anybody who’d make a good partner?
Robbie :Very simple physical mail, you know, like,
Jim :yeah, I wish I still had him. Do I? Oh, where is he? I know what you’re talking about. No, I don’t have Lego mat, but one of my favorite affiliate gifts I ever got was some Legos that look like, well, one of them looks like me. The other one doesn’t look like me at all. I don’t know what, like melted in transit or something. But, you know, I’ve gotten all kinds of good, you know, physical, physical mailings, you know, that stands out especially. You can do that with your top affiliates. Do a physical newsletter, you know, sharing what’s working. We’ve done that for clients in the past.
It stands out, right? So the next big consideration, who’s going to run it? Who’s going to run your affiliate program for your subscription site? I’m going to share the advantages and disadvantages of hiring someone or having yourself do it or outsourcing it if it’s you. The advantages of you doing it. Nobody knows your affiliate program like you. Nobody knows your brand, your product, your membership site like you do. You are the entrepreneur, and most likely you’re talking to other entrepreneurs. And that’s a different conversation than an affiliate manager talking to the other entrepreneur. If you want to learn how to do it yourself, check out the affiliate code, mattmcwilliams.com code and stick around because I’ve got kind of something cool to share with you about that in a little bit.
So a little bonus, little extra something. Something you don’t want to miss out on. So check that out. Also, your affiliate launch coach, you know, we, we coach people on how to run their own affiliate programs. We also coach their team members. If that’s the case, you can find out about that@your affiliatelaunchcoach. com maybe you wanna hire somebody.
Okay, so you’re gonna hire somebody to run your affiliate program, then put them through our training again, the affiliate code and your affiliate launch coach. There are advantages to doing that and keeping it in house. Again, my personal belief is that it’s hard to, it’s hard to have a better affiliate manager than a true believer. You know, somebody who’s just like, oh my gosh, I work for this company, they’re amazing and I’m just so excited about it. That said, you can outsource, you can talk to us about that. Just reach out to me personally. Mattmcwilliams.com and I’ll be happy to have a conversation about, you know, with you about that. You could also text me at 260-217-4619 and we can talk about, you know, talk about possibly working together and running your affiliate program. There’s advantages to all of that. The advantage to the last one, working with us or some other companies, I mean, admittedly it moves fast.
Like we’re able to get your results in 30 to, you know, 90 days. Like small results. But you’re seeing momentum. You bring somebody, you do it yourself, you hire somebody, it’s going to take longer. Why? Because you’re busy and most of the time they don’t have a clue what they’re doing. You know, they need that training to get going. All right, so what kind of tracking will you use?
What kind of tracking? There are several different options that you could choose. There are affiliate plugins. So if you use WordPress, you know, there’s tons of different, different plugins that you could use. We’ll talk about kind of what the ones I recommend here a little bit. You might have an affiliate platform. All right, now the disadvantage to this is all the data is kept off your website now. They’re going to have more features and things like that. And they usually, most of the time, you know, they have better reporting and things like that, but they’re less customizable, they’re less flexibility and leaving it is a pain in the bug. All right. If you decide to switch to an in house thing or a plugin of your own, there’s marketplaces like shareasale, clickbank, things like that.
Now the bonuses here, you know, they’re able to recruit affiliates for you. They often do. They usually do the payments for you, so you don’t have to worry about that. They handle a lot of logistics and overhead. They’re also very expensive. They usually, especially as you grow, they cost a lot of Money. There’s nothing wrong with any of the three. I don’t recommend any of the three over the others.
I just share the advantages and disadvantages with you. Again, advantages to keeping it 100% in house so you control all the data, you can customize it and you know, it’s a lot easier to use. Usually the middle ground we already talked about and then the advantages to the, you know, like the marketplace I shared, you know, they handle a lot of the logistics and work and payment.
They handle all the tracking. Usually they’ve got a lot of servers and so there’s very rarely is tracking down like it might be on your own. They also can help you find affiliates and things like that. The downside is, once again, they own everything. They literally own everything. Moving from one platform to another is a royal pain in the but. So it’s just something to consider, you know, when you’re, when you’re doing that. So think about some of the things you need to consider.
Number one, which of these options actually integrates with your membership plugin? So again, going back to what we talked about earlier, if I, if I join through an affiliate and I pay $25 a month and you offer a 25% commission, I’m gonna make it $30 a month because I don’t know the math on 25% of 25, you know, is it going to pay them 750amonth? That’s the big thing.
What commission options do you need? Do you need. Does maybe a certain platform not even offer a flat fee, you know, payment? That sucks. Like you don’t want to use that. You don’t always need a flat fee one, but it’s nice to have that option. Do they not even have a recurring payment feature? Well, that would stink.
You know, that, that would make. Are you able to. Yeah. Are you able to reach out to them one on one? Maybe not without. Maybe you don’t know their email address. But are you able to reach out to them one on one? Can you add your own creatives and resources for your affiliates? Are you stuck with whatever they, you know, recommend? You know, how do you account for refunds or cancellations? Like again, there are certain platforms where it’s like maybe they don’t talk to each other. You need us.
You need an integrated platform where when somebody cancels it either at worst you manually go cancel that affiliate payment going forward. Preferably when you cancel that person, it just cancels the affiliate payment. So think about other things, you know, just the cost, you know, the costs are There any. Some things, you know, it’s $300 one time. Other things it’s $200 a month. Well, which those is better? I don’t know. It kind of depends on the other features. Right. As far as plugins, the two best for membership sites that I’ve seen are, and this is funny, it’s like, wait, are you Dyslexic? Affiliate, WP and WP Affiliate. So no matter what order you type that, those are my two favorites.
Are there others? Sure. Have I tested every single affiliate plugin out there? Nope. Have I tested every single network? Nope. But like, we’ll talk about next week when we talk about recommending products you haven’t used. I also know how to ask my friends, which ones do you recommend? And then they keep coming back and saying affiliate, WP or WP Affiliate. You know, they are two separate things. Just for. I’m not saying affiliate, WP or WP affiliate. You know, I’m saying. No, they’re, they’re just two separate things. It’s just the WP and the affiliate are in different orders. Another option, you know, non WordPress.
This works with WordPress, but it’s just not dependent upon WordPress is IDEV. And then I mentioned Network Share Sale. That’s my favorite affiliate network. Personally, ClickBank’s an option. Not a huge fan, but yeah. All right, so what about contests and leaderboards? Do we do contests like we, you know, the big launches. Right. Do we do contests for membership sites or subscription sites? Absolutely, yes. Absolutely, yes. What I recommend, this is what I found talking with others and doing it myself over the years.
A quarterly contest, that’s about two weeks long. So two out of the 13 weeks and a quarter, we’re going to do a contest. If you do a quarterly contest and it’s all 13 weeks, here’s what happens. The person who’s leading after two or three weeks ends up winning. It’s boring. And then you go, boom, contest ends, another contest starts. But if you run a contest for just two weeks and it’s a sprint, yeah. Your sales are going to spike and then they’re going to go down or level off.
But each time that new value, that new leveling is higher than the next time and there’s going to be remnant sales. And so a two week contest. Now if you said, you know, for whatever reason, because we wanted to end this the week of Labor Day and it made my contest 17 days long, am I going to argue it? No, it does not.
Two weeks does not mean 14 days. Literally with stuff like this. If it’s 17 days, if it’s 10 days, that’s fine, but somewhere in that range. Somewhere in that range. So a two week contest every quarter or so. I don’t necessarily recommend the first two weeks of every quarter.
The first two weeks of the third quarter of the year includes July 4th holiday. I would not run a contest around then the first two weeks of the new year. It’s, you know, unless that makes sense, which might in many cases, you know, might not make sense. The first two weeks of, you know, the second quarter might have Easter in there.
So you move it around. Maybe so it does fit a holiday or maybe so that your Q4 contest is around Black Friday. I don’t know. You know, that’s for you to decide. So it doesn’t have to be exactly every, you know, the middle of the quarter, the end of the quarter. You know, you can move this around, try different things every year. Typically with the old membership site that I used to run the affiliate program for, back in the day, we had the Black Friday time. Black Friday through, like, the first week of December.
That was a given that was always going to happen. And we always, always, always, always had a Mother’s Day con. Like, right around Mother’s Day was like the two weeks leading up to. It’s like the two weeks through the Friday before Mother’s Day. I think we had. It was the Saturday. Yeah, I think it was the Friday before Mother’s Day or Saturday before Mother’s Day. Those were our two givens. So that was our Q4 and Q2 contest, our Q1 and Q3. We rotated. We move those around. I though we just would pick random times to have those, just for kicks and giggles.
There was no rhyme or reason because those are like the only two times that if you looked at the calendar, when sales spiked before we started doing the affiliate program, it was always the two weeks before Mother’s Day and Black Friday through, like, the first week of December. So it made sense to do big contests and really, like, amplify those up high. The rest of the time, we were just kind of pulling at straws and seeing if we could find something that worked. So, lastly, you need to make sure that you activate your affiliates. All right, so how do we activate? Well, first of all, why would an affiliate be inactive? There’s a few reasons for that.
Number one, maybe they signed up on a whim. All right? They just like, oh, that looks like a fun affiliate program. And then they never promote it.
Secondly, they switch to a competitor. Now, if they switch to a competitor. Listen, listen, why did they switch? Maybe the new offer converts better.
Maybe it pays better. Maybe it converts the same, but they pay 10% more. Maybe they have better graphics, better tools for affiliates. Maybe they had a promise of a Reciprocal promotion, you know, where it’s like, you promote me, I’ll promote you. So listen to them. If it’s conversions, then you need to figure out your conversions. If it’s pay, dude, I can bump you up, you know. I know. Oh, but I thought you only paid 20%. Yeah, but I’ve got some wiggle room. I can pay you 30%. I’ll do that. You know, help them to optimize their campaigns to work better. You know, just like, don’t be cheap. That’s like the big thing. Don’t pay. Don’t be cheap. Pay a competitive commission. If you can’t do a reciprocal promotion, maybe it just. You can’t, then try.
Try saying, well, I can’t do a reciprocal promotion, but I can introduce you to somebody who can. And we’re promoting them. So we call that a triangle. Reciprocal trademark. By the way, I’m trademarking that. So basically it’s A promotes B, B promotes C, C promotes A. You know, why would you do that? Well, there’s a whole myriad of reasons I’m not going to get into today.
Maybe they went out of business. Happened. All right, well, not how much I can do there and like, move on, right? Maybe they don’t know how to promote. So they’re just. They’re. I can’t promote. I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. Well, guess what? Your job is to help them.
Your job is to help them. Your job is to help your affiliates succeed. In this book that I mentioned, the interview I did with him, he talks about how. Let me see if I can find the exact line. Your business succeeds when your customer succeeds. Your customer here is your affiliate. So your business succeeds when you’re affiliate succeeds. So this is all the stuff that we’ve talked about.
The training, teaching them, getting on a call with them to help them one on one, you know, creating promo checklists for your affiliates. Like, your job is to help your affiliates. The only, the other reason that often people, they’re inactive, they’re an affiliate. They signed up and they’re not promoting is they will, quote, get around to it later.
All right, now, there are two types of get around to it later affiliates. The first one, and this accounts for about 0.0, like. 03% of all the get around to it later affiliates. They actually have it on their calendar for October 10th through 14th to promote you. They sign up in July and they’re gonna promote in October, and it’s on there hey, do a screen share with me. I’ll show you the other, would I say zero, zero point, the other 99, everybody else, 9 9 6% is. They’re never going to quote, get around to it unless you give them a nudge. Often all it takes is just a gentle reminder. Just a little poke. Little poke, poke. There’s one.
Robbie :And I meant to reply to this email, I won’t say which program it is, but you know they’re doing a special contest around end of September here and I was like, oh, I got to reply to that. Totally forgot about it. Got the nudge yesterday that just said hey, we didn’t hear back from you. Just wanted to make sure. Are you in, are you out? Like just let us know. And it was just enough to be like, oh yeah, I just wrote down email back today.
Jim :That’s awesome. I actually found, believe it or not, I found a note. So before I got like really organized and now I’ve got my full focus planner. It’s on, on my toolbox page by the way, if you guys are interested. Highly recommend. I got my full focus planner and I’m like super pretty organized for you know, for somebody with ADHD and who’s like a high DI on the disc profile and all those things. I’m pretty, pretty fairly organized. Like I got to switch over so I can see Robbie’s reaction. He’s like, no, you’re not.
No, I’m much better than I was. Absolutely. But I found a post it note that had to been from three years ago under my, my monitor stand had somehow ended up on top of it. And when I, I gotta be honest, I usually don’t pick my monitors up and clean under there when I clean my desk. But for some reason I did this day and there’s nothing there. I mean it’s perfectly clean because dust can’t get there. But I don’t even know why I bothered but I found this post it note and it was like, I won’t mention the company but was follow up with so and so because they had sent me some apparel.
Well, I won’t say the apparel because it’ll give away who this company is probably if you’re, if you got the same thing. And I got this box of like a bunch of apparel stuff that I still wear to this day. And then it was like follow up with them about that because I should promote them. I’m like, oops, Oops. Well here’s the deal. They never nudged me. Yeah, the get around to it affiliates are never going to take action unless you give them the nudge they need. So you got to send a specific email to get them off their butts.
Robbie :They want to promote. A lot of times, like, this is something I’ve been meaning to promote. I put it on my calendar way in the future. And, you know, this little nudge, I was like, oh, yeah, I wanted to promote that. I thank you for the reminder.
Jim :I wanted to promote this thing. Yeah, I’m looking, I can see the. I can see the box that it came in because the box is currently holding a bunch of mugs. And. And it’s literally down there. I. When I got that, I was stoked.
I was like, oh, my gosh, this is. I don’t know, I don’t want to say hundreds of dollars. It’s probably about $125 worth of stuff, nice stuff, stuff. Like I said, I wear it all the time. And. And I, you know, I’m like, you know what? I need to promote them because they sent me a bunch of stuff. Actually, they sent me two. They sent me. And then like, it was like two weeks late. They did give me the nudge, but it was, it was too close. It was like 10 days later. Two weeks later. Yeah. And I was like, oh, I need to do that. Never promoted them. And so again, the thing is, you gotta send this specific email that gives them off their butts. Okay? This is the key. I’ve tested out probably 300 emails, 300 different versions.
I’ve been doing this for 15 years. I’ve tried a bunch. And what I did was I finally, once I figured out the, like, the five or six that actually work, I. I documented them, I catalog them, right? These are the best emails to activate your affiliates. This works in a membership site, a subscription site. It works with an evergreen program, a launch. Doesn’t matter.
Doesn’t matter. It works in everything, right? These are my best activation emails. And if you, I mentioned it earlier, if you go get the affiliate code right now, mattmcwilliams.com code, all right, you’re going to get a special bonus of my activation email templates. All right? So the software, just to be clear, it expires in just like a few days. I don’t know, like next Monday or something. But if you go to mattmcwilliams.com code, I’m going to give you all of these activation email templates, all right?
So you will just, I’m telling you right now, for all intents and purposes, you can copy and paste these. You might need to make like a specific tweet to fit your brand or, you know, you gotta, like, insert your product name or your affiliate program name or any of the specific details. But these work. There is a reason why in the affiliate marketing industry, the affiliate program industry, most people, they call it, you know that you’ve heard of the 80, 20 rule, the Pareto principle, right? In affiliate management, they call it the 95, 5 rule 5. Percent of your affiliates are going to produce 95% of your sales. Why? Because 95% of your affiliates are going to be inactive. Not with my programs.
With my programs, we achieve anywhere from 30 to 45% activation rate. And our top, you know, 95% of our sales come from like, our top 60%, you know, meaning our top 5% of affiliates only usually generate around 15 to 25% on the high end of sales. Because our affiliate programs are so diversified, in part because we don’t just get the people who come in like gangbusters and start making sales right away.
All right, we get people who might not make a sale for their first six months to start in month six. Months six. That’s hard to say for me. Month six, they start making sales. Why? Because of these emails. There’s a few different versions that worked really well for us over the last 15 years. You can get them. I’m not. There’s. These are not available elsewhere. Just to be clear. You can get them. Actually, I think they might be available through a backdoor on my website if you know how. But that’s not the point. I was going to say we’d have to figure out how. I don’t even know how to get to them.
Robbie :I’m not sure how to get to them. You know, I’d have to go look through the documentation.
Jim :I just want to be on it. Like, I don’t want to be like, oh, you can’t get the. I think they might be somewhere if you know how to find them. Super special bonus. You’re going to get the activation, but you have to pay for them. So they’re free.
They. When you join or when you get the affiliate code. The affiliate code presentation. Guys, it’s almost five hours of training on how to start, grow and scale an affiliate program. I’ve only shared it one time ever, but we recorded it and you’ll get access to it. So it’s basically our playbook. It’s all of my secrets. It’s the stuff that, if we were in person, would take a couple of days to cover and I would charge a crapload more because, you know, that’s how the world works. Plus, we’d be buying you lunch and stuff. And I don’t have to buy you any lunch with this. So instead of buying you lunch and a bunch of other stuff and, you know, you having to get on a plane, just go grab the affiliate code and get all these activation templates.
Matt :All right, so we covered a lot in this episode. I told you we would. We talked about setting commission structures, how to find the right affiliates, running contests, keeping your partners engaged, all that. And the big takeaway is that if you want recurring revenue, you need recurring relationships with your affiliates. And that takes intention, that takes systems, that takes support. And if you want help with that, I’ve got you covered. A couple of big things here. Number one, head on over to mattmcwaims.com stuworkshop s t u workshop. That’s the link for Stu McLaren’s membership workshop. It’s going on right now based on when this is airing.
So if you’re listening to this a couple months later, it’s not relevant. There’s probably some other good stuff there for you can get. But Stu is the membership guy. He is the membership guy. He, he has helped probably tens of thousands now of business owners, pretty much every niche you can imagine, turn what they, you know, their expertise, right, what they already know, what they love, what they do, into profitable and thriving memberships. And lucky for you and me, he’s got a free workshop going on right now. It’s live. It’s gonna show you exactly how to do what he’s done. He’s going to show you, you know, why recurring revenue is the future. We talked a little bit about that in this episode.
Get my #1 affiliate recruiting email (the one I’ve personally used to recruit thousands of affiliates in dozens of niches). Grab your copy here!
But he’s going to share kind of the, the basic structure, how to build a membership site, even if you think your audience is too small or too niche. He’s going to share some real world examples of membership owners who are just crushing it right now. I mean, like, you’re gonna be not only inspired, but you’re gonna get some, some really practical lessons from that and how to just get off that kind of one off sales.
I call it the, you know, the sales hamster wheel, where it’s like, in order to, you know, survive next month, you got to make more sales. And that’s the cool thing is like, are you gonna retain every member you have month over month? No. But if you sign up 100 members this month at 50 bucks a month, that’s $5,000 in revenue. Even if 10% leave next month, you still have $4,500 in revenue and you didn’t have to sell anything. That’s the beauty of it. So go to mattmcwilliams.com stuworkshop stu workshop. Check the show notes, the links in there. The second thing is, I talked about it a little bit, but check out the affiliate code. Mattmcwilliams.com code.
That’s that five hour training. You’re also gonna get my activation templates and a bunch of others. Those emails are responsible for turning thousands of ghost affiliates into top promoters. Seriously, they work. So all the other links are in the show notes as well. Your affiliate launch coach, the episode I Talked about the three Cs of successful affiliate programs. How to decide the right affiliate commission structure. That’s a YouTube video. The links there got links to everything. Find affiliates now all of that@findaffiliatesnow. com but all those are in the show notes. And if you got questions, you got takeaways burning question, whatever, text me at 260-221-74619. I’d love to hear what landed for you in this episode. Lastly, if you haven’t yet, make sure you hit subscribe. I talked about it in the last episode.
I’ve got a series coming out on how to use AI to save dozens of hours a month, if not week, and really ramp up your affiliate program. This is going to probably the most impactful episode I have ever done from just a practical like things you can put into practice the day that you listen to the episodes. Okay, so it’s a whole series. I have no idea how long it’s gonna be. It could be two episodes. It might be eight. I mean, it wouldn’t shock me if It’d be an 8, 9, 10 episode. I have literally no idea.
I mean, I can kind of guess. It’s probably not gonna be eight. It’s probably not gonna only be two somewhere in the middle. So. But it’s gonna be amazing. I’ve already been working on kind of the outline for it. Just like, yeah, you guys are gonna. It’s changed my life. Like it’s completely changed my life. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. And I’m not sure if that’s going to be the next episode. Again, I’m not sure when that’s going to be, but either way, I’ll see you in the next episode and I’ll see you in that series.
See you soon.