Most affiliate programs don’t fail because of tactics… they fail because the person running them believes the wrong things. In this episode, I’m breaking down 7 common beliefs that quietly kill affiliate programs, from what you think affiliates want, to how you think motivation works, to what you think “good management” looks like. I’ll show you what each belief costs you, what to do instead, and how to fix the foundations so your program stops leaking sales and starts building momentum.
Last updated: November 10, 2026
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
TEXT ME: +1 (260) 217-4619
Links Mentioned in this Episode
How to Get More Affiliates to Say YES to Joining Your Program
Top 5 Biggest Affiliate Recruiting Mistakes
How to Steal Your Competitors’ Affiliates
Affiliate Activation Templates
How to Give Your Affiliates What They Need
How to Communicate Better with Your Affiliates
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
How to Become an Affiliate Manager
How to Build a High-Converting Affiliate Webinar Funnel
7-Figure Affiliate Launches: The Exact Launch Plan
How to Screen Affiliate Applications (My Approval Criteria)
How to Set Up Affiliates to Win (Onboarding Checklist)
How to Fix the 7 Beliefs That Kill Affiliate Programs
Today, I’m pulling back the curtain on the seven biggest lies that people believe about affiliate management. These lies, these are program killers, believing them can sabotage your entire affiliate strategy. But don’t worry, I’m here to debunk them all, share the truth that you need to keep your program thriving.
So buckle up because you’re about to rewire the way you think about success with your affiliate program. Welcome to the Affiliate Guy podcast. If you want to grow your income, serve your tribe and enjoy all the benefits of affiliate marketing and having your own affiliates, you’re in the right place.
Thanks for joining me today. Let’s get started. So misinformation, disinformation, fake news, whatever it is.
Those are buzzwords today. And they typically apply to politics and health care and things like that. I mean, it’s crazy.
Like if you look at health and wellness, there are 40 different diets. I mean, you find everything like eggs have gone from good to bad to good to bad to good to bad to good to bad. No, nobody knows.
Maybe it’s just the egg yolks. It’s just the egg whites. Like the reality is who really knows about some of this stuff, right?
And I’ve heard different things about different supplements and then you get the supplement. The thing is good. But the thing that a lot of companies add to it is bad.
So that nullifies it and makes it a bad thing. And it’s confusing. There’s a lot of confusing stuff out there about health, about wellness, about politics, about the economy, about business, and of course about affiliate programs.
And so today I want to talk about seven of the biggest lies that I’ve heard. Now, these are a combination of things that I’ve seen 10 plus blog posts, podcasts, videos, talk about these things. Or I’ve just heard so many coaching clients, so many of our agency clients believe these things that I wanted to address them.
Now, it just so happens that there really are seven. It’s not just because seven is a great number for a podcast episode. There really are.
These are the seven that I have seen over and over again. And so it’s either misinformation. It’s either that the lies are being spread or that they’re just inherently believed by people who are starting or trying to scale an affiliate program.
So I wanted to address those today. And the very first lie, the very first lie kind of comes from one of my favorite movies of all time. If you build it, they will come.
Field of dreams, right? Your affiliate program is not a cornfield and Kevin Costner is not going to save you. So if I build it, affiliates will come is a lie.
You have to actively get out there and recruit affiliates. Now I talked, I don’t know, three to five episodes ago. I shared how I grew a program from about 15 million a year to 325 million a year.
And you go, well, you said in that episode that they got to the point where you had 10 to 50 affiliates every day just coming to your affiliate program. Yeah, after we crossed about a hundred million dollars in sales, we got to that point. It got to that point.
If you remember, I talked about it got to that point because I actively recruited one affiliate and then another affiliate. And it was really about the time that we hit depending upon the group of affiliates that we were targeting between one and 300 affiliates in that group. So I remember if you remember, I shared how we built that program one group at a time.
So we had mommy bloggers and we had nonprofits and we had photographers and so on and so forth. And I went out and I actively recruited hundreds of bloggers before before is the key here. I actively recruited them before they just started showing up on our doorstep.
And I talked about how it got to the point where if you were a blogger, if you were like a deal blogger, a mommy blogger type blog that it got to the point where it was step one, register your domain step to set up hosting step three register for this program. This affiliate program sign up for this affiliate program. Right.
But that took eight months, nine months of hard work actively recruiting affiliates. It was around the five, six month mark before we got our first affiliate who just showed up. So five months, 150 to 180 days of hard active work getting one affiliate at a time.
There were very few days where I got more than two affiliates. It was one and then one and then sometimes I’d go a day or two and not get any. And I remember like at the end of the first two weeks, I had six.
I got like six affiliates at the end of the first week and then the next week I got like seven and then eventually I started asking them for referrals, but that’s still actively recruiting. So I’m not contradicting what I said. Yes, eventually we got to the point where affiliates were coming to us, but it started with that active recruiting.
So I’m going to put a few links to a few episodes that will help you with this, but know that at the very least you will need to ask your customers to become affiliates and you will need to do this regularly. That’s usually nowhere close to enough, but it’s a start. But you have to ask if you build it.
They will come does not apply to affiliate programs. If you build it and you work hard to get hundreds of affiliates and you build the brand and you do the things that I talked about like simple things like adding a link to your footer that has your affiliate program. If you do those things, eventually they will come again that program that I talked about when you looked at it four years after we took over and we were doing over 300 million dollars at that point. 95% of our new affiliates every day just came to us.
We didn’t have time to actively recruit anymore. We still did a little bit, but it was an hour to a week. Most of our time was managing the current affiliates and just processing the applications.
Yeah, you will get to that point, but it starts with working hard on recruiting. So go check out the links in the show notes. Make sure you learn how because it’s working hard, but it’s also working smart.
I lie number two. I should only have affiliates that are in perfect alignment with my niche and my brand. No, no, no, no, no, no.
I see this so often. Companies are so protective of their brand and they only want affiliates who are perfect for their brand. Sometimes they’re so protective of the brand.
It’s ridiculous. They only allow affiliates who post perfect images when the reality is that what sells better is more authentic images. Anyway, I’ve seen this happen so many times.
They only want affiliates using the approved perfect images and just to be clear, I get it that like if the image has writing or you’re talking to your in the health and wellness space and you got before and after pictures and they’re not real and it’s showing that this helps somebody lose 300 pounds. No, it didn’t, you know, and so, you know, I get that like if you’re in a regulated industry, the images have to be approved, but it doesn’t mean that they can’t create their own and then you approve them or that you can give them parameters.
Because most of you aren’t in an industry like that. Most of you, if you’re selling, I’m just looking at my desk, if you’re selling planners, there’s nothing wrong with them showing an image of their planner and it’s not the perfect image and it wasn’t shot with a cannon, blah, blah, blah, high res camera. It was I mean, Chris, you have a 4K flipping camera in your phone now, but it shows their sloppy handwriting and things like that and it’s not used perfectly.
Need help activating your affiliates? Use my proven email templates for getting inactive affiliates in the game and making sales! Get them here!
Maybe they don’t use the planner exactly as you teach people to use it, but it’s pretty darn close and they share their kind of uglier pictures, but those work better. The other thing is like, well, what if an affiliate doesn’t agree with me on things? My platform is going back to politics.
Like maybe you’re saying, well, my politics are liberal, but you do a phenomenal job at making cookies and if a conservator wants to promote your cookies, let them. As long as affiliates are ethical and following the law, who cares if they support a candidate you don’t support, that means you can’t promote your brand. Like that’s just dumb.
That’s so narrow minded and it’s not just politics. It could be anything. You know, I’ve had people in the parenting niche that they say, well, I’ve got 20 things that I believe in regarding parenting and they disagree with this one thing like they believe in spanking and I don’t.
So they can’t promote my course. They believe in 19 of the 20 things that you believe in and they want to promote your course specifically because it will help their parents who have kids on the autism spectrum. I’m totally making that example.
That is not a real example just to be clear. So don’t go like trying to figure out who our clients are and go, oh, I know. No, that’s not a real thing.
I made that example up, but they feel like your course is the best course out there just because they disagree with you on spanking or just because they disagree with you on homeschooling versus public schools or private. It doesn’t matter just because they’re not perfectly in alignment with you. They don’t have to be.
No thing is, well, they’re not really in my niche and I talk about this from the affiliate perspective that I called the affiliate donut. I say, you know, you’ve got this donut, right? And the whole is that’s the thing that you’re the best at.
If it’s information, you’re the best at teaching this thing. If it’s a product, you’re the best at solving this problem. You have the best planner.
You have the best thermos. You have the best iPhone case, whatever it is. But there’s all these tangential things and especially if we’re talking about information, if they follow you for information to learn something like, say, affiliate marketing, there are other things that they want to learn, but you’re not the expert at or your product or service doesn’t solve their problem.
So you promote affiliate offers just like I promote affiliate offers because I’m not the expert at membership sites. I promote Stu McLaren and I explained that from the standpoint of an affiliate. But the same is true for an affiliate program.
You know, your core is let’s use membership. Your core is people who, you know, have membership sites. But just because they don’t have a membership site doesn’t mean they can’t promote your course about membership sites.
Just because they’re not an online marketer doesn’t mean they can’t promote your product. We have seen this time and time again, some of the best affiliates for courses for our clients. I mean, I think of one of the top 10 affiliates for product launch formula a few years ago.
I forget the lady’s name and that drives me nuts because I should know it. She teaches people how to make like 1800s corsets. There’s nothing to do with launching a product or internet marketing.
She was a top 10 affiliate. One of Jeff Walker’s other top affiliates teaches people how to do like medicinal herbs. One of their top affiliates is in the parenting niche.
One of Stu’s some of his top affiliates are not in the internet marketing niche at all in the same community for any product any service. If somebody wants to promote you and they are ethical and following the law, let them promote you. Okay, do not believe the lie that they have to be in perfect alignment with your niche with your brand or believe everything that you believe in.
The third lie is that I’ve heard this so many times inactive affiliates. Somebody signs up and they are inactive within 30 days. They’re never going to be active.
They should be ignored or even removed from the program. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Okay.
I’ve talked about this many times most of the time the reason somebody is inactive like we think oh, it’s because they change their mind. They’re not a good fit. Maybe they’re just lazy.
Maybe they are a competitor and they’re spying on us. Yes, you will find some examples of that. Okay, most of the time the reason somebody is not active.
It’s because they got busy. They got distracted. They got busy with other work related activities.
They got busy with their kids. They got sick. Oh, it’s life got in the way.
The reality is your affiliate program is not their top priority. Their top priority is running their business. All right, a lot of times what they just need a gentle reminder.
Maybe when they come back from whatever kept them from promoting they got sick, whatever they get. They have a mound of emails. They got calls to return.
They got posts to write. They got videos to record. They’re not thinking about you.
No offense is just not that high on their priority list, but that gentle reminder gets them back on track and fired up again. So I talked about probably a couple hundred episodes ago, right? I talked about some examples almost sure kind of the highlights here real quick, but to give you some perspective on this, right?
When we ran Shutterfly and Tiny Prince program, Tiny Prince is owned by Shutterfly. We ran their program back in 2013. We had more than 15,000 inactive affiliates and they were being completely ignored.
I did one push that lasted less than one week. We were able to activate nearly 1400 almost 10% who produced more than $430,000 in additional revenue during that campaign. If you look at that once those 1400 ish got active over a thousand of them stayed active for the next year.
We are talking millions of dollars in additional revenue for a launch. Michael Hyatt’s five days to your best you ever launched back in 2016. We had 944 affiliates who had not sent any traffic zero hits after the first week.
Three days later. We had 291 of them were sending traffic over 30% of them. We got active in total those affiliates those 291 produced more than $104,000 in sales almost 10% not quite 10% of total revenue 10% of total revenue came from people who were completely inactive after one week of the launch.
One of my favorite activation campaigns ever was actually my very first holy crap. This is 15 years ago. Learn a master guitar when I took over there were 704 inactive affiliates.
Most of them had been a part of the program for more than a year. They were just considered dormant and actually the CEO who hired me and he had run the affiliate program. You know, it was like a four million dollar company.
So that’s typical. He’s around that part where he’s starting to get busy with everything else and he’s hot. You know, we got 10 employees.
So I can’t run the affiliate program anymore. He said he’d actually meant to remove over 500 of those 704 inactives. He had meant to remove them.
He just forgot. He just got busy. I took over my first month.
I spent focused on the active affiliates. I said, okay, it’s time to get these inactive affiliates active within a month of starting this activation campaign. We had activated 261 of these affiliates 261 out of 704.
That’s probably borderline 40% there doing some quick math combined. They help the affiliate program grow from 2.2 million dollars a year to 6 million dollars a year. Now not all of that was from the inactives but of the top 10 affiliates at the end of the year the top 10 affiliates four of them were from that group of inactive affiliates including two of the top three are second and third highest affiliates like most sales all well over six figures two of those top three were from that inactive group.
The CEO had meant to delete. That is why we don’t delete affiliates or just ignore them. So I’ve done a ton about activating affiliates.
How do we activate inactive affiliates? I will make sure to include those links and make sure you get the templates. I’m going to include a link to our activation templates.
Okay, this is probably the best thing we’ve ever put out because it’s literally copy paste. You change a couple of things. We need to know why are they inactive?
First reason is they signed up on a whim. They signed up. They all this cool affiliate program.
I saw some emails from it and they’re like, I decided I don’t want to. Okay, not much you can do there. Just you’re fine.
The second reason is they decided to promote a competitor and if they start promoting a competitor, you need to shut up and listen to them. Ask them. Why are you inactive?
Why are you promoting this competitor? Do they pay better? Do they convert better?
Do they have better affiliate tools? Are they promising to promote you to do a reciprocal promotion and solve those problems? If you can’t oh they pay better.
Well, we can also pay better. Are they convert better? Let’s work on our conversions.
Let’s solve the problem to get them promoting. A lot of times it’s easy or simple. It’s not easy.
Fixing your conversions is simple like hey, this other program is converting at 3%. You’re converting at 2% and you pay the same. So you need to convert 1% better.
That’s simple. Not easy though. You got to really do some work there.
Third reason somebody’s inactive. If you look at those numbers, we activated 10%, 30%, 40%. Well, that means we didn’t activate 60, 70 and 90%.
The reality is we did not activate over 50% and certainly not 100. Some people they just will never be active and that’s okay. It’s a numbers game.
Some people they went out of business. Not much you can do there. Sometimes it’s just they don’t know how to promote.
Sometimes an affiliate just doesn’t know how to promote your product. They haven’t done a good job of adapting to the new marketing. Your job is to help your affiliates succeed.
That is what affiliate management is. If you think about it, I hate that term. I’ve did a podcast episode a while back.
I hate the term affiliate manager. But if you think about what a manager is, if you’re a sales manager, your job is to help your salespeople sell. It’s not to sell yourself.
It’s not to make sure they’re doing their work to make sure they show up on time and leave. No, your job is to help them sell. I mean, I’ve run sales departments.
If you know we had quotas, you got to sign up 15 people a week. That means three a day. If you signed up five people today and it’s four o’clock and you want to leave, leave.
I don’t care. Like I just don’t usually a good sales person’s like now I’m going to stay. I’m going to sign up a six person and seven person, but your job is to help them succeed.
So you need to train them. You need to show them how to promote. You need to get on calls with them.
You need to tell them to subscribe to Matt McWames dot com. Tell them to subscribe to the podcast. I’m serious about that.
By the way, create a promo checklist. Like I said, train them. It is your job to help your affiliates.
The last reason is they’re going to quote unquote get around to it later, right? So you got to give them a nudge. Again, August said earlier, all it takes is that gentle reminder.
You send them a specific email go grab the activation templates. I will include in the show notes grab the activation templates. I have sent probably 500 activation emails over the last 19 years.
What I did was I took the best few that actually work there at Madam McWames dot com forward slash activate and get all of them. They’re totally free. Madam McWames dot com forward slash activate.
I’ll put that link in the show notes. So go grab those. So again, don’t remove them.
Don’t discount them. They absolutely can become some of your best affiliates. I lie number four line of her forces our product sells itself.
This is the lie. That’s affiliates don’t need anything like our product is so good. It just sells itself.
This lie is mouse to say is like this is some seriously old school thinking because yeah products back in the 1980s might have sold themselves. If you had the best widget, it sold itself. But there are now hundreds of widgets.
There are dozens of widgets with varying degrees of nuance that are niched down and those are made in the United States and then there are hundreds made overseas at half the price or a third of the price or a quarter of the price. There are cheap versions that yeah, maybe they’ll fall apart in a year, but they get a person through a year. That’s the thing you have to remember like oh my product is the best.
Yeah, yours is the best. And it costs eight times more. And so somebody who’s looking for a short-term solution will buy the cheap thing.
I’ll give you an example. I was talking with a business partner of mine the other day and this particular business partner is worth roughly half a billion dollars pretty close to that what I understand. I mean the guy’s super wealthy and we were talking about the fact that we both despite having the financial means not to we both still do our yard work and I told him the reason for me actually is it’s 70% selfish when I go out to do yard work.
That’s my time. I don’t as a busy entrepreneur a dad who has two kids playing travel soccer who is coaching one of the teams and then this winter our daughter has three different clubs that she trains with and two different clubs that she plays with and our son has two different clubs that he plays with one of which I coach two days a week of training and two days a week of games.
I am busy. I have a lot going on. I don’t usually have time to myself and I don’t say that to complain but I say that because when I got to do yard work, I work on computers all week.
I’m a white-collar, you know, worker, right? When I go to do yard work, it’s my one time a week where I get to use a chainsaw and a tractor and I get dirty. And so we were talking about this.
I know it’s taking a while to explain this but I just I love it. It’s irrational, but I love doing it and it’s an opportunity sometimes for me to bring the kids out. My son the other day helped me get the leaves up and he earned 10 bucks and he got to buy something with it and he felt so good.
He was asking when he could do it again. Like, well, there’s no more real leaves, you know, like we don’t need to do this daily. Well, anyway, I say all that to say that I was explaining to him that one of the parts of our tractor broke and I don’t know what you call it, but it’s basically the leaf collector part of the tractor.
I was like, I could spend 600 bucks to buy that and buy it one time for something that frankly, I only use four times a year or I could buy a cheap bag manufactured in China for $25 and get that and I read the reviews and that most of them said I only used it 10 times and it ripped and I’m like, well, I’m doing the math. If it rips after 10 times and let’s say that it only last eight times even it lasts two years four times each year for 25 bucks.
I mean, my tractor is not going to last as long as 10 of these bags are going to last or 20 of these bags. I’m like, that’s a good deal. So sometimes cheap is better for certain people and you may have the best product in the world, but you’re going to get undersold on certain things for certain people.
The best products require effort to sell especially it is so crowded now and affiliates need training. They need resources. They need strategies to sell and assuming that your product will sell with minimal support is a recipe for disaster too many affiliate programs make the mistake of assuming their affiliates already know everything about affiliate marketing.
Let me let you in a little secret. They don’t so training your affiliates. We talked a little bit earlier about what to provide your affiliates.
Let’s talk about training for a moment training. Your affiliates is not only important for them, but it’s important for you. It is absolutely crucial that you provide them with the knowledge the tools that they need to promote your products.
So how do we do this? One way is just hosting regular training events walking your affiliates through your promotions. If you have a big affiliate promotion coming up a big sale walk them through it host a half-hour call share tips on being a great affiliate cover the basics but also some other bigger things but even just in the beginning like record videos show them how to find their links how to get their login information how to use the swipe copy don’t take those things for granted throughout the year host training sessions on different topics.
If one client I’ve talked about this before he teaches entrepreneurs how to build a membership site. It’s an annual launch over the course of about three to six months leading up to the launch. We hosted six training sessions.
We started with how to warm up your audience. So their launch was in April. What we were teaching them to do is what to do in March and early April was in their launches in late April.
So what do you do for like the six weeks leading up to it? We started with warming up your audience, right? Then we taught them how to create promo plans.
That was an entire week and we gave them a template for affiliates to download and tweak and if you want that by the way, just go to Matt McWilliams dot-com forward slash af plan. Matt McWilliams dot-com forward slash af plan. I’ve shared the URL before if you go to forward slash promo plan, that’s from the affiliate perspective.
What you want is the one that you can copy as an affiliate manager and give to your affiliates. You can find that at Matt McWilliams dot-com forward slash af p l a n and I’ll put that link in the show notes. So we gave them that and then the next week we walked them through when do you mail?
What are the things that you need to be doing each week? The following week we talked about how to create affiliate bonus packages, how to take what they have and create these attractive bonuses. We gave them a template for setting up a bonus page and how to write sales copy for each bonus and it just made it so it’s easier for them to put together compelling bonuses.
And then I think in the fifth week we talked about promoting webinars. We talked about different strategies tips for making the best of webinar promotions and then week six we talked about sales. How do you close sales?
We just walked them through different aspects of the promotion and then I think actually for them we ended up having a seventh week. We did an additional one on closing sales, some additional tips and we had like open Q&A calls. You know, so I think we ended up doing like eight or nine total because we had the Q&A calls.
They take about an hour. We do, you know, five minutes of beginning just welcome everybody. I’ll do 20-30 minutes of teaching and then Q&A and sharing their experiences.
The cool thing about it is these calls turned into community events. So we would have Heidi and Paul and and Sarah are like some of our top affiliates. That was the thing that surprised me.
Some of our top affiliates would be on these trainings and they would take what I said and then add their own twist or add like well last year. I remember when Matt said that and I thought I couldn’t do that, but here’s what I did or here’s a little twist that I did. You know, I took what Matt said and I added to it or you know, here’s what I found and so we found that they got to share from each other.
It built that community where they all felt connected which made them more motivated. So if you want to see an example of the training, if you go to MattMcWaims.com forward slash affiliate training, I will put that link in the show notes. You can actually watch a training see how I do it.
Plus, I’ve got all the slides. You can just download the side. So if you use Keynote, PowerPoint, whatever, you can download the slides and tweak them.
So like I think there’s a logo on there from one of our clients or maybe there’s not. I can’t remember. You just replace that logo.
Boom. It’s yours change the colors. They’re the colors of one of our clients change the words add a tip delete a tip make it relevant.
I mean, I’ve done 90% of the work for you. These are completely free. MattMcWaims.com forward slash affiliate training, but it’s an ongoing process.
It does not stop. So start early start when you only have a few affiliates train them. Oh, well, not only one person showed up.
Okay, that is one affiliate that is now super trained keep sharing successful strategies. If you do an affiliate promotion and you should be and you try something and it works share it with your audience. I remember years ago we promoted or we were working with Jeff Goins.
We were running his affiliate program and he promoted Jeff Walker’s course product launch formula and he learned something. I don’t remember what it was, but he tried something it worked for him. He told me about it.
I said do a video like a five-minute video share your tip and he did and affiliates loved it encourage your affiliates to share their ideas. Again creating community make sure you record them. This is a huge creative training portal.
If you don’t have an affiliate portal by the way, you should have an affiliate portal. If you’re interested in having one just reach out to me. Happy to walk you through or show you how we can help you set up.
We can just text me 260-217-4619. These are things we set up all the time for people. So we put those in the affiliate portal.
That’s where they can get their links their swipe copy their graphics all kinds of stuff the calendar and then we have a link for training. But at the very least have a training portal where they can access the replays anytime like if you think about just the numbers why if you help a hundred affiliates to be 10% better think about what that would do for your bottom line.
I mean even if you have a small program a tiny program an hour a month on training can be worth $5,000. I mean if there’s something else you can find in your life that you can spend an hour doing that makes you $5,000 go do that instead. But it also compounds because I mean if you spend that one hour the first month and it makes you an extra $5,000 a month and then you spend an hour the next month maybe that makes you an extra $3,000 starts adding up.
So again different aspects right just do one every month or do a schedule you can commit to do every other month. That’s only six already gave you seven ideas earlier. I think you know one month talk about how to grow their list.
Make them occasionally not just about promoting your course now it’ll benefit you. Here’s how you grow your email list every affiliate grows their email list by 5% your sales will go up by about 5% and that’s assuming that there’s not an ancillary benefit of them being thankful and promoting you more. So talk about how to grow their list talk about how to close sales how to promote webinars how to get more leads to promote your different things promoting a specific product share other lessons that other affiliates have shared with you get their permission first right.
We did that recently with one of our programs. We loved an affiliates TikTok video and this video produced over 50 sales directly from the TikTok video. We said can we share that with affiliates?
She’s like absolutely. So we posted in the Facebook group sent an email. So again if you want to see a sample generic training, you know we do dozens of these different types of trainees, but if you want to see a sample of a generic one to an overall training, it’s really good though.
Just go to Matt Mcleames.com forward slash affiliate training grab that I’m also going to include some links on how to train your affiliates and what to provide your affiliates. So some links to some past podcast episodes in the show notes. All right lie number five says I have to have a personal relationship with all of my affiliates or the flip side.
It’s one extreme or the other or I don’t need to have a personal relationship with any of my affiliates to two very different lies. It’s kind of like the lie. Oh, here we go that Democrats are always right and Republicans are always wrong or reverse that right.
It’s just it’s not true. We know that the truth is somewhere could be tilted one way or the other but it’s somewhere between those two extremes. The same is true here.
Now the first one says you have to have a personal relationship with all of your affiliates and in other words, you got to be best buddies with all of your affiliates. But the reality is if you’re going to run an affiliate program that is consistently growing year over year, it’s simply not possible. When you have hundreds of affiliates or thousands of affiliates or tens of thousands or literally hundreds of thousands of affiliates like I had Adidas and Shutterfly.
Do you think I knew all of them? I barely knew 200 of them. So what this says, you know, in other words is like well, I’ve got to know all my affiliates.
It’s only for the cool kids with the right connections, right? I’ve got to know all of them. I’ve got to have a personal relationship with them.
When I started my first business, well actually was my second business, but it was my first affiliate program, I should say. My very first business was just a web design business that you know, I ended up selling for like $75,000. Trust me, did not make me a Silicon Valley millionaire.
You know, when I started my second business, but my first big one, I knew absolutely no one. None of us did. My business partners, we had three of us.
None of us knew anybody. We were not the cool kids. We did not have the dads who knew the right people.
We started with literally $5,000. 18 months later, we were doing over a million dollars a month just through our affiliate program. We weren’t the cool kids. I got an email this a few years ago, and I think I’ve shared it before, but Alex Putnam just going to read what he wrote me said, Matt, I just had to let you know this.
You know that when I signed up for the training, this is one of our courses. I didn’t know anyone who could be an affiliate. So he did not have the connections.
He said yesterday we finished our first launch of his new course and did $374,000. 360,000 of that was from affiliates. I am on bleep cloud 9 right now. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you in nine months. He went from not knowing anyone in that training.
I say write down some names of people, you know, he was like one of the few people who had nobody most of us know somebody it might be one person who might be five people. They might be small. They might be big.
They might be medium-sized. They might only have an audience of a few hundred Facebook friend, but we know somebody who could promote our product. He literally knew no one.
He went from knowing no one to doing 360,000 in affiliate sales without knowing his soul. Now the reverse of this is that you don’t need to know any of your affiliates on a personal level and that is wrong too. You should know some of your affiliates on a personal level.
So how do you do that? How do you balance what I just said about scalability, right? You can’t know all of your affiliates with personal relationships.
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Very simple answer. You tier them. Okay, T-I-E-R to be clear you tier them.
So you’ve got depending upon the size of your program your top X can be as few as 10 people when you only have 10 affiliates. Yeah, know all of them and then grow from there. It can be as high as 50 possibly upwards of 75 depending upon again, how big the program is.
I’m going to say the average program. It’s 20 for me these 20. I keep records on all of them.
I know them you should have their cell phone number and they should have your cell phone number. All right, you should know their kids names their spouses names where they went to college if they did what their favorite teams are. You should be on their email list and you should read most of their emails.
You should connect on social media and just build the relationship. So you’re on their email list you read them reply to some dude love this email. Oh my gosh, I agree.
So true. Hey, like do you mind if I share this email, you know things like that again when you talk to them don’t ask was your wife and kids. That’s what you say to somebody you see once every five years.
Don’t say crap like that. Hey, how are Kim and John and Joey? How soccer going?
Oh man, you excited about the cheese game this weekend? Whatever like I said before when their team wins the National Championship congratulate them reach out to them send them a meme that like if you have that kind of relationship send them a meme that makes fun of their team send them a meme that makes fun of their team’s rival like again, it’s a relationship and it should be that way but that’s only manageable on those top X again, you’ve got to define X typically.
It’s about 20 people in a program with 300 plus affiliates. It’s somewhere in that neighborhood of 15 to 20. The second tier is a bigger tier.
This is very small program. It can be as few as from number 11 to number 25. Maybe 11 to 100.
It could be from 20 to upwards of 500 maybe even a thousand again depending upon the size of the program. This is going to be if you look at it from this perspective that top X that first group is the affiliates that account for 20 to 50% of your sales probably individually each of those affiliates accounts for 2% or more of your sales. We’ll put it that way.
That’s why I said it’s about 20 25 for me those 20 ish will account for upwards of 55 60% of all sales then I’ve got the group that basically accounts for all the sales up to about 90% or so individually. They are at at least 0.1% and they’re not north of one one and a half percent with them. I connect on social media and I comment periodically what I do is I intentionally spend five to ten minutes for me.
I it just helps if I do it first thing in the morning. I know what they say. Don’t check social media first thing.
I don’t check social media first thing in the morning just because I’m bored and I want to scroll through crap for Tim. I set a timer for 10 minutes. I don’t spend more than 10 minutes doing this and I comment on five to eight of their posts and I comment thoughtfully.
I do like their post and the only reason I do that is to game the algorithm so that I see their stuff more. I will do that but I make sure I don’t just say awesome congrats because nobody if you get 98 congrats who congratulated you do you remember their names? No, so I give a thoughtful post and I do that sometimes as little as four or five times a day.
Sometimes I might sneak in eight or nine of them and that’s not everyone but I’m commenting on their social media post five to ten minutes a day. You should know their birthdays by using a calendar every single day without exception because I’ve run so many affiliate programs. I have calendar reminders that go off for so and so’s birthday and some of these are specific to certain programs and sometimes it’s because they’re in my database of potential affiliates.
We should just put them in your calendar when you learn their birthday put it in their calendar. I also put in a 10-day warning for most affiliates. The reason for this is again, these are like my top affiliates.
I put in a 10-day warning because then instead of just getting a text, that’s the other thing. Don’t wish them happy birthday on Facebook. Oh my gosh, it gets lost in the sea.
Send them a text. Wish them happy birthday there. Send them an email if you don’t have their phone number which you should but send them that and if you need to get them a gift, you need time to get them a gift.
So I set a 10-day warning. That’s where I remind you to make sure I go buy people a gift. Use technology to know basic things.
Use alerts beyond their email list. But this group I mentioned earlier that top X, top 10, 20, 30, maybe upwards of 50. You’re going to be on their email list and they’re going to go to your inbox.
This group, you’re going to have them go to a special folder and again, you’re going to set aside a certain amount of time. You could do five minutes a day. I personally do it once, sometimes twice a week and every now and again, I’ll do it twice or three times a week.
If I’m on a Zoom call and I’m there on time and I’m waiting five minutes for somebody, this is my default. I’ll go check this folder and all I do is just go read a couple of emails that they sit and I reply to a couple of them and say, do this email rocks. Love this email.
This is awesome. Something like that. And it stands out, stands out and then everyone else.
So I got my top 20, my 21 through 150 or so. Everyone else. I’m just not going to know them, probably.
That’s the reality. When you have 125,000 affiliates, I’m only going to know on any level about a thousand of them and that’s it. So these lies that say you have to know every one of them personally or don’t know any of them personally.
They’re both lies. Lie number six, small affiliates are not worth the hassle. Now this lie comes from the myth that most of your sales will come from only a few affiliates.
Then Matt, didn’t you just say like your top 20 make up 50%? Yeah, first of all, that is only 50% and it is the top 20. All right.
I shared this back in like 2021. Maybe I talked about how a guy one of the top names in all of internet marketing, one of my mentors, somebody I greatly respect said from stage 90% of your sales will come from your top three to five affiliates. It’s not true.
Not if you run your affiliate program the right way. When you say that it’s just an excuse not to work with smaller affiliates and that’s not how you grow an affiliate program. And so in fact years after he said that he said that in like 2018.
Remember I was there with a couple guys on my team and we all looked at you like that is not how we run affiliate programs years later. That guy came to us because he saw what we were doing with other affiliate programs and how our top three to five were making up 10% of sales and he saw how we were running these multi-million dollar affiliate programs and the majority of sales were from small affiliates.
It was from having 550 people make one to five sales and he saw this and he wanted to work with us and he did and it was really cool. So I want to share some cold hard data here in a second. They just completely destroys his life.
But here’s the reality small affiliates can be the backbone of your affiliate program. They can be the backbone of your affiliate program. Why because when you are a small affiliate and you promote a product and you make your first couple of sales, you’re loyal.
There’s an overwhelming sense of loyalty. The thing is then that small affiliate grows. So maybe they only made two sales your first year two sales of your $50 product.
You be a hundred bucks. You paid them 50 bucks or what you know, maybe a little bit less you paid them $30 and your cost of goods was 50. So you only made 20 bucks and you’ve spent 45 minutes emailing with them back and forth.
Maybe you had a 10-minute call with them or whatever and you made $20. Yay. If you’re an affiliate manager, you didn’t even make 20.
You made two made two bucks off that affiliate, but they grow the next year their list. They’re following two times bigger the next year. It’s two times bigger again.
One sudden now they’re from two sales to four to eight. Some affiliates will 10 X 20 X 30 X everybody started somewhere like the biggest affiliates in the world unless you’re somebody who was famous outside of your audience. Right.
So think about like Elon Musk Elon Musk is famous mostly for things unrelated to his online presence. So if he started, you know, hypothetically if we went back before he got on Twitter and X whatever and he started a blog, he would instantly have a hundred thousand subscribers, you know within 48 hours probably if you’re not like that everybody started somewhere these people that you follow these marketing experts.
They started with one person following them. So imagine if they become loyal to you. That’s how you build an army of affiliates.
So let’s look at what happens when you ignore the 80 20 rule you create an army of awesome affiliates couple of examples here, you know, Michael Hyatt we ran, you know, his launches for a while back in the late 2010s and this big launch leaderboard, you know leaderboard with people like just going through some of the names here, right? This is just some of the people Craig Jarrow Jeff Sanders Dan Miller the Ziegler family Joseph Michael from learn Scrivner fest Ryan Elias and John Lee Dumas Stu McLaren Jeff goings Pat Flynn Ray Edwards Sally Hogg said Jeff Walker made to who’s who of names and yet the top three affiliates accounted for only 14% of sales.
I thought it was supposed to be 90% note was 14 the top 10 only accounted for 27% of sales. We had over 500 affiliates make at least one sale 380 affiliates made between one and five sales average of just under three, but let’s just call it exactly through that’s 1500 sales. That is an army.
There’s no risk. That’s the other advantage. There’s no risk.
Oh, well, if the following year our number two affiliate didn’t promote cost us 4% of sales. We more than made that up with all the new affiliates that we brought on so it works. You know Claire DSR T’s we ran her Summit fears back is one of the very first virtual Summit’s we’d ever run into that point.
Most Summits had maybe you know, a couple thousand registrations. This one had 12,000 registrations, but not one single affiliate had more than 400 registrations. We had a hundred and ten affiliates send leads.
Ray Edwards is another great example when we ran Ray Edwards Copywriting Academy launch of same numbers as Michael leaderboard kind of similar Grant Baldwin John Nemo Chandler Bolt Craig Ballantyne Dan Miller Michael Hyatt Don Miller Donald Miller Jeff Bullis Jeff Walker again a lot of names that you recognize and yet the top three only accounted for 19 not 90 but 19% of sales the top 10 accounted for only 34% of sales and this was one of my favorite stats 16 affiliates doubled their sales year over year doubled from the previous year’s launch. One of them.
I remember Ernie the attorney Ernie Svensson. He went from two sales to over 30 huge growth Mike Kim. I don’t remember when he made the year before was like five sales year before had 50 he won the launch.
He beat Jeff Walker. He won the entire affiliate competition, but I mean he was a nobody so this is the power guys of having this diversity to your affiliate program one last example Jason and Cecilia Hokey they ran a big parenting Summit 114,000 people. I mean that is bigger than Michigan Stadium bigger than the largest Stadium in North America the year before when they had no affiliates at about 20,000 people.
So we added 94,000 no affiliates at more than 2,000 leads most of the affiliates were first-timers. They were nobodies. They had a list of 10,000 people on their parenting blog, but they never done an affiliate promo before and so oh well, they’re not big enough.
So how did we do this very simple by ignoring the conventional wisdom in the conventional wisdom tells you well, most of your affiliates are going to come from only a few affiliates don’t work with small affiliates. It’s just simply not true. It’s simply not true.
All right. So our final lie here very simple and our final lie says higher Commission solve everything. So if things are going wrong, I’m not going raise the Commission’s you definitely need high Commission’s you should have competitive Commission’s.
I’ve talked about that so many times if you’re a competition is paying 50% you cannot pay 30. You got to pay 40. You got to be in the ballpark preferably if you have the margins and your competition did 50 pay 50 if there are 20 pay 20 or 25, but that’s not the only factor driving your affiliate program raising Commission’s is just not going to compensate if you have crappy affiliate support.
All right. It is not going to compensate if you don’t have the right communication. I would rather you be paying 5% less but be a rock star communicating with your affiliates.
It’s not going to compensate if you have your marketing materials your assets for your affiliates. I talked about I’ll put those links in the show notes to show you what to provide if they suck if your graphics your swipe copy your affiliate portal if they suck if you don’t have an affiliate portal raising your Commission’s five or 10% is not going to make up for that raising your Commission’s with everything else is broken at best.
It’s a Band-Aid and at worst. It’s an insult to your affiliates. So fix the broken parts first have a competitive Commission but fix the broken parts first.
So shared seven lies if you believe these lies they can absolutely destroy your affiliate program. If you’ve got questions about this or anything else and I mentioned earlier but text me anytime 260-217-4619 shoot me a text ask your questions comments. Whatever love to hear from you.
I’ve got links to everything in the show notes the recruiting tips that we talked about recruiting mistakes how to steal your competitors affiliates links to all those podcast episodes. You got links to the affiliate activation templates the training templates the promo plan all that how to give your affiliates what they need how to communicate. We just talked about communication how to communicate better with your affiliates got all that in the show notes.
So make sure you check that out against all right there for you and make sure if you haven’t yet hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. It’s going to be a good one. You don’t want to miss it.
So hit subscribe make sure you hit your subscribe to the show so you don’t miss it. I’ll see you soon. Bye.
Thank you so much for listening today. Remember to check out all of our deep dives into affiliate marketing at the affiliate guide TV. And if you have a question ask it at ask the affiliate guide.com who knows maybe you even be featured on an upcoming episode and lastly if you haven’t yet make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you’re listening to this episode.
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