In the increasingly competitive world of affiliate programs, how do you stand out? How do you create an affiliate program that is so attractive to potential affiliates that they just HAVE to join? That’s what today’s episode is all about.
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LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
How to Determine the Right Affiliate Commission Structure
PODCAST EPISODE – How to Run Affiliate Contests Without Breaking the Bank
PODCAST EPISODE – How to Build Trust and Credibility with Your Affiliates
Affiliate Terms and Conditions Template
My #1 Affiliate Recruiting Email
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
How to Create Compelling Affiliate Offers
How to Use the Holidays to Recruit More Affiliates
How to Create High-Converting Affiliate Graphics for the Holidays
How to Make This Your Best Holiday Season Ever with Your Affiliate Program
How to Get Your Affiliate Program Ready for the Holidays
How to Make Your Affiliate Program Attractive to Affiliates
In the increasingly competitive world of affiliate programs, how do you stand out? How do you create an affiliate program that is so attractive to potential affiliates they just have to join? That’s what today’s episode is all about.
If you want to attract quality affiliates and you don’t want to have to do a ton of hard work for it, I mean, where you don’t have to just go out and beat down doors and recruit and recruit and recruit, and that’s what you have to do in your early days.
But if you want to build an attractive affiliate program that draws in the right affiliates, that’s what we’re talking about today. Creating an enticing, creating an attractive affiliate program that draws in affiliates. There’s a lot out there about creating irresistible offers for customers.
In fact, we talked about that last week. Go check out last week’s episode. The last episode we talked about how to create compelling affiliate offers, and a good chunk of creating compelling affiliate offers is creating compelling customer offers, consumer offers, and I shared the ten parts of that and how to make those compelling for the potential customers, which therefore makes
them compelling for affiliates to promote them. And one of the taglines that marketers often use, I’ve heard so many different people use this. Alex hermosi says it.
I’ve heard dozens of marketers over the years, but he’s kind of the one that’s using it right now, is that we have to make offers so good that people feel compelled to buy that they feel stupid not buying. Like, I cannot believe I didn’t take that offer. They have to buy.
There is a compulsion to buy. In fact, there was a deal like that recently. I won’t mention what it is, but it was a Black Friday offer from a friend of mine, and he’d never offered a Black Friday deal before, and he teased it for like a week or two in advance.
I signed up because I watch what he does. He’s a great marketer, and I wanted to see what he was doing. And I’m like, there’s no way I’m going to buy his thing.
I spent I don’t know, I’m going to go low and say $25,000 with him over the years, and I’ve gotten a 50 to 200 X return on that, just to be clear. So it’s been worth it. But I’ve spent $25,000.
I’m not going to buy his Black Friday thing. Like, I’m thinking this Black Friday thing is going to be $5100. And in fact, it was $37.
And many of you were like, I know who it is now. That’s fine. I bought his Black Friday deal because I felt stupid not buying, especially at that price.
But what about making your affiliate program that way? So attractive. Making your affiliate program so attractive, they have to sign up so attractive.
They feel stupid not signing up. So attractive they have to promote so attractive that they feel stupid not promoting. And then they feel stupid not promoting again, they feel stupid not promoting.
Every time you ask them to promote, or at least more than one out of every 50 times, they feel compelled to sign up and get activated really quickly and promote instead of once a year, they promote every six months or nine months or whatever it is. And they just promote. They promote.
They promote. And I’ve talked about parts of this throughout my we’re on 572 episodes. You believe it, by the way, 571 episodes before this.
I have talked about parts of this, but today, really, for the first time, I’m going to share the whole playbook. All right, so this is going to be the whole comprehensive guide. We’re going to combine hundreds of episodes on how to make your affiliate program stand out and appeal to potential affiliates.
So we’ve talked about like, this one thing here and this one thing here and this one thing here. I’m not going to take a massive deep dive into each one, but I’m going to give you the overview, I’m going to give you the playbook, and you’ll know how to make your program stand out, how to make your affiliate program attractive to affiliates. And I’m going to share 16 ways to do that as you listen, all right?
And you’re going to be like, oh, my gosh, 16 means I got to do 16 things. Don’t get overwhelmed. Take these one at a time.
Some are easy, some are harder. Some take weeks to perfect. Some take years.
Some you could pretty much do in a matter of a couple of hours. So don’t get overwhelmed. Take them one at a time.
And I will point you back to past episodes, both as I go along, if I remember, and in the show notes for sure. I’ll definitely have my team go back and make sure that we link to any relevant stuff and you can take deeper dives. But this is giving you the overview.
These are in no particular order. I’ve got 16 things. I did not take the time to put these in order, but as I go along, I’m going to highlight some must haves.
Need help activating your affiliates? Use my proven email templates for getting inactive affiliates in the game and making sales! Get them here!
All right? And as you listen, I want you to check off the ones you already do well. So you probably, if you’ve had an affiliate program for a while, you probably do five to ten things really well, check those off and then commit to mastering one in the next week to four weeks.
You decide, hey, this is probably a one week thing. This is a few day thing. I’m going to take a week or this is going to take me all of a month.
If you say, hey, this is going to take me six weeks, take six weeks, I don’t care. Let’s say you do five things right, that means you have eleven things more. If you do do one right every single month, less than one year from now, you will have an incredibly attractive affiliate program.
So we start with one, and then we go on and we do the next one, and do the next one and do the next one. I don’t know how many must haves I’ve got in this, but if you got all but one must have, that’s your starting point. Start with the next must have and then just pick a next one.
It doesn’t even matter. It doesn’t matter what order you go in. If you start doing things right and making your program stand out, make it attractive, you will build the kind of affiliate program that you want to build.
All right, so let’s jump in with number one. The number one. And this is a must have.
This is an absolutely must have. Great commissions. You’ve got to have great commissions.
The highest possible commissions. Just having a great commission is the cornerstone of any attractive affiliate program. I say this is a must have, because if you don’t have a great commission, none of the other stuff is even remotely relevant.
You can have the best service and you can have the greatest personality, great conversions and all these things. If you don’t have a competitive commission, does not need to be the highest in your industry or in your niche among your competition. But it’s got to be pretty darn close.
If you don’t have that, nothing else matters. Nothing else matters. You’ve got to offer competitive commissions.
Now, I’ve got an entire video that walks you through this. I will put it in the show notes, how to determine the right affiliate commission structure. Put a link to YouTube where you can watch that.
That will walk you through how to do that. Now, one of the things that I don’t cover in that video, this is kind of the insider one, right? Look at commission tiers.
Tiered commissions. Look at ways where you can incentivize people to do more sales. So the more they sell, the higher their commission becomes.
So one of the things I do talk about in the video, but I’ll touch on here, is don’t necessarily publicize the absolute highest you can go. So let’s say that the highest commission. When you consider all your cost of goods, all the costs that go into you selling one unit, the highest you could offer is 40%.
Maybe it’s 42, 43%. But you’re like to make it a round number. You say 40%, right?
I wouldn’t advertise a 40% commission. I would not advertise that. What I would do is I would advertise a 30% commission with tiers to move up.
And that allows you, when you’re recruiting a super affiliate to just go straight to 40. Like I know you’re going to hit these numbers, boom, 40% and it allows you to give incentives. So again, advertise a little bit lower, it gives you some wiggle room.
The other thing is actually in this particular case, number two thing you’ve got to have to build the super attractive affiliate program is contests, prizes and other incentives like a leaderboard competition. Right? Now, again, in that example that I just offered, if you could go say 43%, that was the highest you could go and make the kind of profit you want to make, 43% and you’re advertising 30, but you have some incentives, a tiered structure that maybe gets them up to 40.
That still leaves a little bit of wiggle room to run contests that take it up to maybe 43%. And one thing to consider in this regard is that maybe your higher volume affiliates, we’re talking some programs I’ve run, we had affiliates doing 5000 units a month. On those we would eat into our profit margins a little bit and so on those we might actually end up paying.
Between the high commission and the prizes and contests and all that, we might end up at 44 45%, but on a ridiculously high volume but we’re only at 34% on kind of those mid tier, lower volume affiliates. So in total, our average commission is 38% on all products. And that’s worth it sometimes.
But you need to reward affiliates, you need to get creative, exciting contests and prizes, leaderboards, things like that. This not only motivates them, but it actually fosters a sense of community, which we talked about a few episodes ago, that community aspect. I’ve got an entire podcast episode I will link to that talks about how to run affiliate contests without breaking the bank.
So for those of you who are thinking, okay, I want to run affiliate contest but I don’t have much wiggle room. I remember the first time I did a big affiliate contest and the people that have been around for a while, this is seven years ago, the first time I did a big affiliate contest on my own stuff. The people that had been around in Launch World were doing $100,000 1st prizes.
Earlier that year, I had won a $20,000 1st prize. And here I was doing my first launch and ended up being about a $225,000 launch. It wasn’t huge, but my first prize was only $5,000.
Now, there were some other stuff, and we’ll talk about that here in a SEC, but there were some other things that were added onto that 5000, and I kind of felt like I was playing small, like $5,000 compared to 100,000. Well, those $5 million launches. So as a percentage, mine was actually really high.
And the guy who won the $5,000 prize, he was pretty thankful for that. He busted his b*** and he made an extra ten or 20 sales on $1,000 product to get to that 5000 level to beat out the second place. It was totally worth the extra money to me, but there is a way to do it without breaking the bank.
So I’ll put a link to that episode in the show notes. Another thing to consider here is just get creative. Like I said, look at things like Trips.
Some of the best affiliate prizes I’ve ever won and offered and been a part of in any way were Trips. I think of Ray Edwards, affiliate mastermind. We had all but one of the top ten affiliates in that room in Coeur d’alene, Idaho.
Beautiful setting. Lake Coeur d’alene. Gorgeous resort.
We went on hikes together, we goofed off together. We ate breakfast together every day. We Masterminded.
We had dinner on the pier at night. We did all these amazing things together. So much, so many memories.
I have so many memories from that trip. My very first affiliate, Mastermind that I ever won, we sat in a conference room all day in Atlanta, and it was cold. But I met some people that today are lifelong friends.
Jonathan milligan, john corcoran, josh turner, david gonzalez, andy husslen. Those are people that I met for the first time. These guys have become friends that we I mean, this is eight years later, we’re still doing business together, still texting each other, still checking in on each other, trying to meet up when we can, and doing a lot of business together.
My Mastermind, I did a whole series about it with Michael Hyatt, and I was one of Michael Hyatt’s top three affiliates. And so he brought the top three to BlackBerry Farm, Tennessee. Unbelievable place.
He spends easily over $10,000 per affiliate for this trip. It’s the most amazing place I’ve ever been in my life. Best food in America is what they’ve been voted.
The shuttle they take you on from your cabin to dinner. Across the property is a brand new Lexus LX $120,000 vehicle. It’s amazing place, right?
And he spends all this money on that. And I was there with it was Michael and some people from his team, and Jeff Walker and his wife, and Amy Porterfield and her husband Hoby. And I mean, it was just the most amazing experience.
So I would promote that for a million years because of that one experience. And those are the types of experiences you want to create. So if you can do that, that’s something you want to look into for a contest or prize.
All right, number three, way to make your affiliate program super attractive is beginner focused incentives. So we just talked about, like, I won a $20,000 affiliate contest, and I went to this Mastermind and we brought the topic. That’s great.
We did all that. But you need to make it easy for newcomers to join your program. We have talked about this before that the benefit of working with small affiliates is they are super loyal.
And you might have 100 small affiliates that add up to half of what one big affiliate adds up to in year one. But in year two, they add up to twice as much as one big affiliate. And in year three, they add up to five times what, one big affiliate.
And then in year four, one of them is one of your big affiliates. And collectively, they add up to ten times more than one big affiliate because they’re loyal. So we need to make it easy for them to win something.
Anytime we do an affiliate contest, we call it the three sale prize, because if you make three sales, you’re going to win this thing. It is usually something like an in kind gift, like access to the course. Or if you make three sales, you get to come to our live event.
You got to pay your way, but we’re going to give you a ticket. And people will fight for that. They will claw, they will DM their friends, they will text their friends, because they can get one sale, but all they got to do is get two more sales and they win this thing, and they will basically do anything they can.
And that’s what we want. So it’s an accessible prize, three sales. Anybody can do three sales, pretty much.
And so we want to make sure that we are offering some sort of incentive for those beginners, those small affiliates to be able to get that low tier. And we might go the first prize is three sales, and the next one is ten. There’s a pretty big jump, and we ended up with a lot of affiliates in that three, four, five bucket, but that’s fine.
We want to make it super easy to get that first goal, kind of. And we don’t want to make it five, because five, it’s a lot harder than three, almost twice as hard. And many of them can’t even conceive of getting three.
They can do number four. This is a must have here. You must have great support.
All right? To have great support, you need to be responsive, but you also need to be proactive, providing guides, providing make sure they have everything that they need. Weeks in advance.
We’ve talked about this before that it used to be back in the day that affiliate programs would say, hey, tomorrow’s the big promotion. Here’s your swipe copy. And people would send it out.
Here’s the swipe copy. When I was running programs back in 2016, 17, it was, here’s what you need for a couple of days from now. And that was about it.
I remember, like, 2018, I got it to, like, a week ahead, and I was like, yeah, we’re a week ahead now. I mean, it needs to be sometimes a month ahead. I want to have everything lined up a month in advance.
So that’s the proactive part, but then also reactive. And so you’ve got to have a full time affiliate manager or being dedicated yourself to putting in a minimum amount of time each day, one to 2 hours every single day. Specifically to affiliates, you have to do that.
And so they expect to be taken care of. Personal touch helps. So if you could offer one on one assistance, get on the phone with people, get on zoom calls, that helps.
I mean, if you’re building a massive program, like, I’ve done with, like, If Shutterfly and Adidas, where you have 200,000 affiliates, that’s impossible. But we’ll get on group calls. I’ve got office hours every day from twelve to one, and anybody can jump on and ask questions.
And a lot of times I can answer one person’s question, and there’s 56 other people on going, yes, I have the same question. Boom. And then I’ll send in an email afterwards, like, here are the questions I answered.
Here you go. You go check them out. So as much as possible, you got to have great support.
Number five, you got to be responsive. This is a little bit different here. You’ve got to be responsive to their needs, responsive to their feedback, responsive to their requests.
In other words, listen to your affiliates. If your affiliates are asking for certain creatives or certain pages or certain whatever, they’re asking for videos, get them done. If you have one affiliate, I don’t know, you don’t have to necessarily do something for one small affiliate, but if you have multiple affiliates asking for the same thing, do it.
And one of the ways to accomplish this proactively is just to survey your affiliates once a year. Ask them, what do you need? And I wouldn’t do it at the same time every year.
I would kind of vary the times because sometimes their needs change, or after a big promotion, hey, what did we not provide for you? What do you need next time? What do you need with the next promotion?
So be proactive and then actually respond to them, actually listen to them. The number six, this is a must have, for sure, because this is what affiliates see, is you got to have great metrics. Ultimately, especially if you’re in a network.
All right? This is what affiliates see. So earnings per click, that’s the big one.
If I send 1000 clicks, how much am I going to earn? If I send 1000 clicks to this program and I’m going to earn $2,000 or 1000 clicks here and I’m going to earn $1,500, the $2,000 is better. So you need to know this number.
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If you’re on a non public platform, you’re not on an affiliate network where they can see it on the front end. Be transparent about it and tell them what their earnings per click are going to be. I will tell you right now, the number one way, probably number one way to burn an affiliate and destroy a relationship long term and also cost you a lot of money down the road is to lie about your EPC.
If you lie about your EPC and you try to inflate it and make it look better, what will happen is you will get that one affiliate, hey, we got a $5 EPC, all right? $5, that’s great. And they sign up and they do a dollar 75, not only will they never promote you again, ever, they will tell other people that you lied.
Now, you might say, well, we really do have a $5. 01. Okay, that’s fine.
Show them where you really do $5 and be willing to back that up with actual data. So have the data. Be honest about it.
If you have a low EPC, first of all, try to fix it. Work on your conversions. Work on your average order value.
Work on your upsells. Because let’s say I have an offer just for a nice round number. It’s $100, and I pay a 50% commission, and you make ten sales.
You made $500. If it took you 500 clicks to get to that $500, EPC is a dollar. So to be clear, EPC is the affiliate’s earnings per click, not what you earn per click.
That can be completely different. If you offer a 10% commission, you’re earning ten times more what your EPC is. Okay?
So it’s a dollar per click. If I increase the average order value from one hundred dollars to one hundred and fifty dollars, the affiliate makes 50% more. All of a sudden, I’m at a dollar 50 EPC.
We’re getting better.
Now, what if I increase what I do on the back end follow ups and things like that? And affiliates make an additional they went from 500 to 750, but they make an additional one, $250 in back end commissions on all kinds of Upsells that we do 20, 30, 60 days later. Now, their earnings per commission is $4.
Math is right on that. Somewhere around there. I’m not sure I’m doing my math right on that, but yeah, I think it would be 2500 clicks.
Yes. So $2,000, they’re at $4. And so the thing is, when I look at this as an affiliate, if I’m sending traffic in the first month, I send 500, and I only make $500.
All right, made a buck, but I continue to promote it. And maybe in the next month I send 500, but I make $2,000 because I made $1,500 from the follow ups I now look at and go, well, that month my EPC was $4. That’s my true EPC.
So look at ways you can improve. Go listen to the last episode where I talk about how to create a compelling affiliate offer and make your offers more compelling. Follow up on the back end, offer those lifetime commissions so they continue to earn money.
If you’ve got a really low EPC, first of all, work on improving it. Second of all, be honest about it and tell them like, we have a program that we run that is like that. It’s a low upfront EPC, but they do make a lot on the back end.
And I say, here’s the deal. Our 90 day EPC, 90 days. So if you send 1000 clicks in the month of June, what you’re going to make from June, July and August is $4.
72. $4. 72.
That is the 90 day EPC. Your 30 day EPC is under $2. I forget exactly what it is.
It was like a buck $50 75. It’s not really that high compared to the 90 day EPC. Why is that?
Because right around day 60, they get pitched into an event. They go to the event and they spend a lot of money, and the EPC skyrockets. So I tell people, like, if you want a program that over time you’re going to make a lot of money.
That’s pretty solid. We have another program that we run that’s a membership. And I tell them, like, your first month EPC is under a dollar, but we have an 82% retention rate on people who sign up to make it to one year.
So if you do the math on that, the first month you make $0. 80. Basically.
The second month you’re going to make about $0. 78 for doing nothing.
The third month, you’re going to make about seventy five cents, seventy two cents, and down to about $0. 63 or whatever.
So the average, their one year EPC is like $8. 38. It’s pretty hefty compared to if I made $4 and then I made nothing.
So if you can look at that one year EPC, the two year EPC. Those are ways without artificially inflating it. Just to be honest and say, yeah, if you promote in the month of June, you’re only going to make eighty cents per click, but long term, you’re going to make these recurring commissions.
All right? Number seven that you’ve got to have funny, this ties in with what we just talked about is trust and transparency. You’ve got to have trust.
Your terms and conditions have got to be clear. That’s the starting point. If you need a template, by the way, to create your affiliate terms and Conditions, I will put a link in the show notes, and you can just go download the template and use that template to create your terms and conditions.
That’s the starting point. That is like the basic that every program has to do. This builds trust and creates those long term partnerships.
I did a podcast episode a while back, how to Build Trust and Credibility with Your Affiliates, and I did not talk about the terms and conditions. Actually, that’s actually a new thing that we put together. So again, if you want that, I’ll put a link in the show notes to the Terms and Conditions templates, go download it, feel free to copy and paste you literally just where it says company name.
Put your company name and you’re done. Like it’s a command f or whatever you use on Windows computers, I don’t know, control f. You just search that, replace company name with your company name, and you can pretty much use that template.
There are some parts where I say, hey, you may or may not want to include this if it’s not relevant to your program, et cetera, et cetera. All right, so that’s that starting point then. Like I said, there’s the episode on how to Build Trust and Credibility with your affiliates.
I will link to that in the show notes, but some of the key points from that, number one, be honest. Number two, communicate any issues quickly. Keep them updated.
This open and honest communication with your affiliates is super important. So if there’s something going wrong, tell them. Don’t wait for them to reach out.
Tracking is down. Tell them you’re going to be late with your payouts. Tell them because things happen like that’s another one.
Pay on time, every time. Don’t ever be late. And if something truly happens this happened a few years ago with one of our clients where they were an international, they’re internationally based, they’re in Canada, and the bank was not releasing the money.
We literally could not pay the affiliates. We wanted to, but we couldn’t, and we had to communicate that. If you think you might be late, communicate.
I would much rather you say, hey, that we have an issue with our bank, and payments are due on the first. We have three days to pay you. We think we might be late, and then you’re not.
You might not be. Get to know your affiliates. I did a whole episode on how to build relationships with your affiliates.
This is key to trust. Get to know your affiliates. Protecting against fraud is a part of building trust and transparency.
Building community. Like I talked about earlier, community is trustworthy. Everything’s out in the open.
So when you create this sense of community with your affiliates and they start collaborating and they start sharing knowledge and they start networking amongst each other, that really creates a supportive environment for your affiliates. One of the things you need to do here, share your brand values. Share your brand values and your commitment to ethical business practices that really resonates with affiliates, particularly who prioritize social responsibility.
And so if your brand values are X, Y, and Z, make sure your affiliates know that you’re going to attract the kinds of affiliates that resonate with that, and you’re going to repel the ones who don’t. All right, number eight. This is a must have for sure.
You got to have a great product. If your product, your service, isn’t high quality, your affiliate program is not going to succeed. This is foundational here.
So one of the things you can do as you advance as a company, it’s just a little thing that we’ve done over the years that’s really helped involve your affiliates in new product creation. I’m not saying that they need to be like on the factory floor if you’re creating actual products like that, but surveying them, asking them for like, hey, if you were to create this product, what would you do? You’ll learn a few things that will be key to marketing the product.
And that’s the thing. This is your marketing force. This is your sales force.
You wouldn’t create a product and not tell your sales force, right? Because your salesforce is probably the one telling you what conversations they’re having with people. Your sales force is the one who is driving new product creation, right?
You’re not just making products up, right? No. They’re the ones talking to your customers.
Maybe it’s you. Maybe you’re the salesforce. So you’re the one doing that, but you’re driving that.
Your affiliates are the ones marketing the product, so involve them in the process. In new product creation, this creates a level of trust. Certainly it goes back to that, but it also creates that closeness.
There’s a word I’m looking for I can’t think of, but it creates that level of intimacy with your affiliates that really helps them. And if they’re involved in the creation of the product, they’re going to want to promote it even more. All right, number nine thing your affiliate program needs to have to be super appealing, super attractive to potential affiliates is an awesome affiliate sales page.
This is the page that sells them on the affiliate program. That’s what it is. It is a sales page.
This is the page I talk about so often. When you reach out to recruit an affiliate, you don’t want to write a novel. You want it to be a short email.
This is the novel. I’m not saying it needs to be 20 pages long, but it needs to be two or three page downs. It needs to be a few scrolls on a 24 inch monitor.
It needs to be three or four page downs on a 1517 inch laptop. It’s selling them on your affiliate program. What is it about?
Who is it for? Who’s the target audience? What are some of the features of the program?
What are your commissions? All the details. Those are the details.
If there’s dates that are relevant, these are the dates. Let them know this. On this page, by the way, if you want a template, I’ll actually send you it’s a template that we put together in ClickFunnels if you want the template.
I can literally share the template with you. So if you text me at two 60 217-461-9260, area code 260-217-4619, if you will text me, hey, like, hey, man, I want the affiliate sales page template. If you’ll text me, I will respond, and I will share that template with you.
Okay? I actually shared these with a client recently who we were helping to create this. So they’re shareable now, but I’m not going to share them publicly, so you got to text me.
So again, area code 260-217-4619. Just shoot me a text. Ask me for those.
I’ll be happy to share them with you. These are the templates we’ve used to create awesome affiliate sales pages for us and our clients. All right, number ten.
Touched on this a little bit earlier, but personalizing your outreach, that is one of the keys to great outreach. If you want to make a super attractive program, the more personalized your outreach can be, the better. So telling me how this offer is good for my audience, telling me how it is good for me, and I’m going to give you an example.
We’ve got a client we’re working with that does the ERC, the employee retention credits, right? And by the way, if you’re interested in promoting that, interested in talking to me about ERC stuff, text me again, 260-217-4619, and just tell me you’re interested in talking about the ERC stuff, and I’m happy to hook you up with them and set you up as an affiliate for them.
So this is a client of ours, right, in the ERC space. When I reach out to a potential affiliate, I don’t say, hey, we have an offer in the ERC space. You want to promote it?
No, I say, hey, John, I know you’ve got a lot of small business owners. My best guess is, based on the conversations we had, that your average small business owner in your audience has five to ten employees. They are perfect for Er.
The next part is kind of generic, like, here’s what ERC is, here’s how it works, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If you’re interested in setting up a call, I’d love to talk, but yada yada yada, right? A couple other things that I would personalize in that if I know people have an audience that is split somewhat between beginners and more advanced.
So one particular affiliate that I’m talking with right now, they have an audience of it’s online marketers, but most of their people are beginners, but they have about 10,000 people who bought their course. Of those 10,000 people who bought their course, about 7000 of them bought that course more than two years ago. So here’s what I told them.
Those 7000 people, here’s a list of over 200,000 people, but 7000 people bought his course more than two years ago. Of those 7000, that’s who we want to target with this. People who bought the course two years ago or more are infinitely more likely to now have a team of at least one w two employee that qualifies for the ERC.
And so that’s how I personalize that reach out. When I do that, they go, oh, yeah, you’re right. You don’t necessarily need me to send this to my whole list.
You just want me to send it to just yeah, because if think about it as an affiliate manager, sure, I’d love them to send it out to all 200,000 people, because some of those 193,000 that either bought the course less than two years ago or have never bought anything are actually perfect for this. But it’s a small percentage of those 193,000. Maybe there’s 500 out of those 193,000 that are perfect for this, versus 3000 of the 7000 are perfect for this much higher percentage.
So by making this easy for him and personalizing it, he goes, yeah, absolutely, I want to do this. All right. Number eleven is conversion rates.
You got to have high conversion rates. We talked about it earlier with EPC. That’s the big one.
But a big part of that is high conversion rates. So show your potential affiliates on that sales page why you have high conversion rates or order values. That’s another part of it.
But break it down. Yes, the EPC is what matters the most, but show them your conversion rates. Show them what kind of tracking you have.
We use this tracking we’re on this network, or we use this system. That’s a trusted system. This is not on my list, but by the way, you need to have a reliable tracking.
This should be on my list. I lied. We’re going to do 17.
Number twelve, I’ll be off by one. Going forward, you got to have reliable tracking. So you need to be on a reputable network.
You got to be on a reputable network. You need to be on share of sale. There are others there are commission junction Clickbank for Info Products Impact I recommend Share sale just personally.
That’s what we use. That’s what we set our clients up on. But there are others, to be clear.
And if you’re already on a reliable network, that’s not Share sale, I’m not suggesting you switch to share sale. In fact, you shouldn’t. More than likely the best network for you is the one you’re already on.
And if you’re not on a network, you want to run this completely in house, you need to have reliable tracking, like infusionsoft Post Affiliate Pro. All my recommendations, if you go to Mattmcwiams.com/Toolbox, you can get my recommendations on tracking there, but you need to be on reliable tracking because that creates trust. That’s what ends up with high conversion rates and a high EPC. So now we’re off by one.
So number 13, lucky number 13 here, you got to be flexible. You got to be adaptable. So I talked about this earlier about reacting to affiliate needs.
I’m going to talk specifically, though, about customization. If you have one affiliate, particularly one of your bigger ones, and they require, they need a special landing page, make it for them. Don’t argue about it, don’t say no, just do it.
It’s so much easier to just do it. And there could be a compelling reason not to, and I get that. And if there is, okay, work through that.
But special landing page, special graphics, special offer code, all of these things, be open to this, be open to a special agreement. Don’t just close the door to certain terms. Great example, just did this within the past couple of weeks.
This is a low margin niche. It’s a consulting client low margin niche. So 10% affiliate commission.
They have a particular affiliate that’s going to do two to $3 million a month in business. And what that affiliate wanted to do was offer some of their commission to the customer. It’s not a loyalty program, so they don’t want to offer.
It’s not like one of those things like Rakuten where you’re going to get a rebate check. It’s not like that. Ebates and other companies, they wanted it to go directly to them on the front end.
So they wanted to offer special code that gets them an additional X off if they use that code. And we made that happen. We worked with a client to be able to make that happen.
They had to actually have some coding. They probably invested a couple of $1,000 in programming into the ability to make this happen, because there’s all sorts of technical logistics and all that stuff in the back end. But we made it happen.
And that affiliate, one of the things that we did with them in exchange for that, we explained, like, here’s what we’re going to have to do, and here’s how this works. And yada yada is we actually created a special contract with them, and we now have a one year exclusive that they cannot promote any other company in that niche. In exchange for doing this, you say it probably costs $3,000 in development, costs ten to 20 hours of our time to work out the logistics, map it all out, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But we got a one year exclusive. We have a contractual one year exclusive. They’re going to do, at a minimum, on the low end, $1.
5 million a month, $18 million in sales the next year. And yeah, we locked them in for one year, but they’re probably going to stay forever.
And that could be a nine figure deal over the course of the next five, seven years. It’s huge. So be flexible, be adaptable.
It’s worth it. All right, number 14, we added one training and education. Provide training materials, do the webinars, do workshops.
Teach your affiliates. I have done episodes on this. I’ve got a training on how to train your affiliates.
It’s totally free. I will link to that in the show notes. Okay, I’m going to put a link to this in the show notes, and I’m going to literally give you on this, I’m going to give you an example of a training we did.
I’m going to give you the slides. I think we’ve got them in three formats. We got them in PDF.
We got them in keynote. And if you use PowerPoint, weird, but whatever, we got PowerPoint. You can actually download the slides, reuse them.
If you are ready to take your business to the next level and start an affiliate program, start with my free report, Your First 100 Affiliates. This report takes nearly two decades of experience, trial and error, and lessons learned about finding top affiliates in nearly every conceivable niche and puts them all into one report. Grab your copy here!
I suggest changing them to your colors, but I’ve got the slides for you. And we’ve got some other downloads that you can give your affiliates, like worksheets and stuff. So train them, educate them, teach them how to be better affiliates an hour of your time.
If you can get 100 affiliates on and teach 100 affiliates how to be 10% better, that’s it. Oh, but I run a small program. It could be worth $5,000.
We’ll go 5000. Is there anything, honestly, you can do with your time where you spend 1 hour and it has a direct result of $5,000 a month or even $5,000 a quarter or $5,000 a year or just $5,000. 01
time? Is there anything you can do with 1 hour of your time that brings in $5,000 consistently? If there’s not, do this, train your affiliates.
All right. And it could be considerably more than 5000. If you continue to do these over time, it can start to compound.
All right, so host a monthly workshop where you discuss a specific thing about affiliate. Like, we’re going to talk about closing sales this month. We’re going to talk about growing your list this month.
And you keep inviting them. Over time, they will grow, and they will grow, and they will grow, and they will close more, and they will close more, and you will make more and more money. All right, the next one, number 15, is close to a must have, and that is an affiliate manager or manager’s plural.
I used to think otherwise. I used to even talk about how you don’t need to hire an affiliate manager. Just go through my training, and I’ll train you on how to run a decent affiliate program.
But I disagree with that now. I’ve just seen it too many times that the reality is when you try to do a role that you are not skilled at, it just doesn’t work. A good example.
I’m a really good writer, but if I try to write our content, it’s not as good as professional copywriter. I am really decent at project management, but if I try to manage all the projects in addition to running our company and doing all the things that I do, it fails. When I was an affiliate manager, the first thing I did was hire an assistant.
Years ago, when I actually worked for a company. Legacy Learning Systems is where I won my first affiliate manager of the year award. I paid for an assistant $300 a month out of my own pocket because I knew that if I could just get the lower level tasks, the tasks that were time consuming, but they had to be done.
Hey, I need all the addresses of our affiliates and into this spreadsheet. I don’t need to be doing that. I don’t need to be entered data entry.
I don’t need to be doing that. So I hired an affiliate manager because I knew that if I could take back then, it was like $7 an hour. It’s more than that now, but it was like $7 an hour.
If I could spend those 50, 60 hours every month on things that were more leverage, I was one phone call. I have 50 hours, and I can do one phone call, one phone call away from me personally making an extra thousand dollars a month.
So I made that investment. And the same is true just hiring an affiliate manager. The CEO of that company hired me.
He previously ran the affiliate program. He built it to one and a half million dollars a year in two years. I took it to over four.
By the time I left there, we were doing over $6 million a year from that affiliate program. Was that worth the 100 and 2550 thousand dollars he paid me? Absolutely.
You’ve got to assign at least one dedicated an affiliate manager to guide your affiliates early on. It could be you. I highly recommend, though, that it be somebody else who maybe has another role in the company.
When I first started as an affiliate manager, and I built it to, again, over a million dollars a month in 18 months, I also was the operations manager. I was in charge of all marketing, but our affiliates knew me as the affiliate manager. That was my title to them.
I also ran the SEO, I ran our PPC. We didn’t have social media back then, but I ran our banner ads and I ran our phone campaigns, and I also was the operations management. I oversaw all of the tech stuff.
Over time, we began to pull little pieces of that off my plate. I went from spending 30 hours a week on the affiliate program to 35 to 40. I was younger, unmarried, and had no kids, so I worked 70 hours a week.
But I began to pull those things off, and soon I was working 70 hours a week just running the affiliate program. So that personal touch that the affiliate’s got, that makes a huge difference. So if you need an affiliate manager, I’m going to just say, hire us.
Maybe not. Maybe we’re not the right fit for you. I’d love to talk, though.
So again, text me 260-217-4619. I can talk to you about what the best options are, and if we’re not a good agency for you, I will refer you to somebody. But we have amazing affiliate managers that would love to work with you.
All right, number 16 exclusive offers. All right? If you want to stand out, you want to have an appealing, attractive affiliate program, you got to have exclusive offers.
Simply put, this creates a sense of privilege. It creates a motivation to excel. Because if I’ve got an exclusive offer with you, like that affiliate I just talked about, we did that one year deal, they want to succeed.
If I’ve got an exclusive with you, I want that to succeed. I don’t want to just do, like, a sale a week. I want to do a sale a day.
I want to do two sales a days, ten sales a day. And it creates that sense of privilege, too, because, like, hey, I got a special deal with Shutterfly. I got a special deal with so and so.
That’s a big deal. So you’ve got to create exclusive offers, share them with your top performing affiliates. All right, and our last one, number 17.
This is a must have as well. If you want your affiliate program to stand out, you’ve got to have creative that stands out. You’ve got to have stand out creative.
I talked about this a few episodes ago where I talked about holiday creatives, right? And I shared the general principles. So go back and listen to those apply the general principles of any kind of creatives apply that I shared, and then I talked about how to specify those to make those specific to the holidays.
These are attractive. They make your program more appealing. So having a range of them, high quality promo materials, images, banners, videos, the more creative options you provide, the easier it is for affiliates to promote your company effectively.
And the better they look, the more they stand out, the more attractive your whole program looks. If you have kind of mediocre creatives, you could have a great EPC and a great landing page and a great conversion rate and high commissions. But your creatives are kind of weak.
They were designed seven years ago, and they look like that. And the quality of the images aren’t very good. It reflects poorly.
Think of this as the curb appeal. It’s like there’s this one house that we looked at, and we were looking at houses about twelve years ago. Unbelievable.
Inside, it had like the most gorgeous remodeled inside, according to my wife, because I never went to the house because we had driven by it ten times, going to where we were living at the time, it was a dump on the outside. They had to have put in $80,000 into just the kitchen, dining room, study area alone, $225,000 interior remodel. That’s your EPC, that’s your support.
That’s the trustworthiness. That’s all those things they’ll see once they get inside. But if the creative is bad and this should go on your sales page, by the way, like we talked about earlier, examples of creative.
If the sales page is bad, your program is bad. Your creative is the first thing they see. Sometimes that’s what they click on from another affiliate.
They see their social media post, and they’ve already formed an opinion, oh, my gosh, that brand, that is some b*** ugly creative. I do not want anything to do with that. So maybe this is your starting point.
I said at the beginning, take these one at a time. I’ve shared 17 ways to make your affiliate program super attractive. I said take them one at a time.
If you’ve got some creative that needs adjusting, that’s your starting point. So I’m curious which one you’re going to commit to doing in the next week to month. So reach out to me.
I mentioned different ways to contact me and different reasons to text me, but I also want to hear from you. Your biggest takeaway. What are you going to take action on in the next month from the time you listen to this before, a month from now.
If you’re listening to this when it drops, like before the end of this year, what are you committed to changing in your affiliate program to make it more attractive? Shoot me a text. I’d love to hear from you.
All the links that we talked about are in the show notes. I mentioned the training. That was the last one I talked about.
We’ll put that in there. We’ve got how to find affiliates. We’ve got how to determine the right affiliate commission structure, how to run affiliate contests without breaking the bank, how to build trust and credibility with your affiliates.
That terms and conditions template. We got all that in the show notes, so go check those out. And then the last thing, make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss our next episode.
We’ve got a good one coming up about how to recruit and work with international affiliates. This is a thing that you know a lot of people like, oh, we only work with US based, maybe US and know US Canada and maybe like, Great Britain. No.
There’s a whole new world of opportunity for your affiliate program. There are some challenges, things you got to consider to keep in mind if you’re going to work with international affiliates. I’m going to share exactly how to work with affiliates from all over the world and grow your program in new ways in the next episode.
So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. I’ll see you then.
