If you want affiliates to actually promote, it’s on YOU to make it happen. Because the truth is… most affiliates don’t wake up thinking about your program, your product or your launch. They need a spark—and if you don’t light the fire, no one will. In this episode, I’ll show you how to activate affiliates early, keep them engaged, and turn passive partners into top promoters.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
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Links Mentioned in this Episode
Rethink Dieting Webinar with Matt and Alan
Get ALL of our Affiliate Activation Templates
What Affiliates REALLY Need to be Successful
How to Co-Create Promo Plans with Your Affiliates
Recommended Affiliate Programs and Upcoming Product Launches
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
How to Sell With Confidence (Not Desperation)
Is AI the End of Affiliate Marketing?
How to Grow Your Affiliate Program with Podcast Interviews
2026 New Year’s Resolutions for Affiliate Marketers
New Year’s Resolutions for Affiliate Managers
How to Get Affiliates to Actually Promote
Listen, if you want affiliates to actually promote, it’s on you to make it happen. Because the truth is, most affiliates, they don’t wake up thinking about your program or your product or your launch. They need a spark. And if you don’t light the fire, no one will. So in this episode, I’m going to show you exactly how to activate affiliates early, keep them engaged, and turn these passive partners into your top promoters .
So if you’ve ever felt like your affiliates could be doing more, and we all have, we all want them to be doing more, you know, they’re just kind of coasting. If you’ve ever felt like that you were gonna love today’s episode, I’m talking about how to get your affiliates truly active, like how to help them win so they stick around and then they keep promoting again and again and again. Not just showing up once for a launch, not, you know, sending a couple emails and then disappearing. Right. I’m gonna walk you through the exact things you can do to spark your that momentum and keep it going. Now today’s episode’s a little different in the best way. Right. This is what you’re about to hear is a private training that I shared a, couple of years ago with some of our members.
This was originally only for our inner circle, but I got so much great feedback on it that I decided to bring it here on the podcast. It’s all about getting your affiliates out, actively promoting, like really showing up, not just dropping a link and hoping for some clicks. Right, so this is the audio from that training. you’ll hear just as they did. Just they did. I only edit out like the first four or five minutes where I just welcome people and I answer a completely non related question from one of our members. And then I delete like the last two minutes where I talk about what’s coming up in the next training that I’m doing with them. And outside of that you’re getting everything. some of it I have shared before in different formats and in different places. Some of it I have not. So it’s a little bit more of like that behind the Scenes. Look into some.
A couple of specific things that I’ve never shared before that I know of. Maybe I did like episode 104. I don’t remember. So, here we are, 600 and some odd episodes in. And I mean, newsflash, I’m going to repeat myself a couple times, but I hope you get a lot out of it. Again, this is, kind of behind the scenes look just to a private training that I did a few years back. And well, with that, let’s jump right in. No matter what you do, any affiliate program with more than a few dozen affiliates is going to have some that become inactive. Okay. You can run the best program with the best commissions, have the greatest personality, great relationships, but some of them just fall off the earth. So what do you do about that? First, you need to understand why some affiliates become inactive. Okay. Why do they become active? And then what do you do about those specific things?
Well, number one, the reason why they might become inactive. And I’m sorry, this is driving me absolutely nuts. I don’t think I’m actually tilted. I just think my camera, my tripod is messed up. We’re gonna get a. I think we need to get a. Bring like a carpenter’s level and make sure we got it right. The magic rectangle. Right. there you go. The magic rectangle has a leveler. And it’s, it’s, I didn’t have a chance to run it before this, but I think what happened. Because my studio is between, it’s between the gym and the stair star. I’m assuming that one of the kids just bumped the, bumped things. So anyway, good times. Hey guys. You’re getting the, the behind the scenes today, where Matt worries and I, I just. It’s an OCD thing. I don’t actually have ocd. I was telling somebody earlier, I know I’m getting way off on a tangent here.
There are a few things I’m OCD about. One of them is my whiteboard. And this is. This sounds like I really do have ocd. One of the things I can’t stand is when there’s faint writing on the whiteboard from like a previous thing. And so I have to like wipe it off and then I have to windex it and make sure it’s perfectly clean again. That bugs me too. Yeah, that’s. That’s not ocd. That’s just normal. It’s a thing. And so I got great advice to go get a glass one. So, I’M going to get on Amazon later if I have time today, probably not, but probably tomorrow and order a glass whiteboard, because apparently they wipe perfectly clean. Cool idea. Yeah. So reason number one, they signed up on a whim. On a whim. Now, this happens more than I wish it did. You know, person A sees person B promoting something.
They sign up.They’re like, yay, I’m, you know, I want to be an affiliate for this. Then, they realize this is not a good fit for my audience. Or they realize I have no idea how to promote this. I don’t have time to promote this. With this group, there’s really not much you can do. If you find out that someone mistakenly signed up, just remove them, and move on. All right. The second reason why they might be inactive is that they’re promoting a competitor. This one sucks. All, Right.This one sucks. Sometimes people just leave for greener pastures. That’s the nature of our world. Right? And when that happens, it’s important to understand their why.In other words, shut up and listen. Okay? Shut up and listen. Don’t get defensive. Well, you said you were going to promote me.
Don’t get angry. Don’t try to convince them at first. We’ll do that a little bit. Just listen. Why did they switch allegiances? Why did they start promoting a competitor? Is it because the new offer converts better? Right. Is it because the new offer pays better? Is it because the new offer has better affiliate tools? Is it because the new offer maybe offers a reciprocal promotion where they’ll promote you or they’ll promote, that other affiliate program will promote them? My advice when you’re dealing with this type of situation is just stay calm. Ask why they switched, and then, like I said, shut up and listen. It’s best not to say anything initially. Just give them some time. Follow up in a few weeks to see if there’s anything you can do. So if the issue is something like tools like, well, they just have better graphics, they have better copy, they have better tracking. This is a sign. Maybe you need to fix these things. You lose a couple of affiliates because the other company has better graphics.
Get better graphics. I mean, you just lost two affiliates who made. Let’s say those two affiliates were doing $100 a month. Not even a lot of money. That’s 200.That’s $2,400 a year. You couldn’t spend $2,400 a year on new graphics if you tried. Don’t be cheap. Go spend a thousand bucks on new graphics. Get them what they need. If it’s your tracking is broken, go get better tracking. If your swipe copy sucks, then go get a freaking copywriter. You know, fix the problem. Fix the problem. We’ll talk later about what tools you need to provide, but those are some signs that, like, hey, the reason they’re promoting this competitor is because we have issues. We’ll fix those issues. If the issue is conversions, then find out what the competition is doing to beat you. Help them optimize their campaigns to convert better your affiliates. Work on your sales funnel. Get your conversions up, start testing some stuff.
Do better. If it’s commission structure, well, then make sure you’re not underpaying. You know, if. If the competition’s paying a 50 commission and you could get them back by bumping up to 50 from 40, just do it. Just do it. It’s 10% I would rather make. So you’re making 60%. Now you’re going to go down to 50%. So you’re taking 10% less. I would rather make 10% less of something than a hundred percent more of nothing. My math right that. What’s 100% of nothing? Alan, you’re a math whiz. What is it still even at the University of South Carolina? Zero.
Yeah, even at the University of Tennessee, where for some odd reason we throw mustard bottles on the field. So if you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t even worry. You know, we’re. I went to school. We. I was telling somebody the story the other day, like, we beat Florida one year. And, it was my sophomore year of college year that the Tennessee finally won the national title in football. We stormed the field after. Tore down the goal post, because you could do that back then. And we carried him out of the stadium. I got in so much trouble with my golf coach for that because I’ve only made Sports Illustrated twice. one was that, if you remember the faces in the crowd where. It’s where I, you know, I. I won the high school state championship and made Sports Illustrated. I won.
I was in Sports Illustrated again in college, and that was because I was hanging off the goal post and coach was like, what are you doing? You could have gotten hurt. He’s like, by the way, what’d y’ all do with the goalpost? I was like, we took it out of the stadium, like. And then what? We marched it up to Cumberland Avenue and walked it down. He’s like, did they shut down Cumberland Avenue? I’m like, no, we were just Kind of going between the cars. Well, then what’d you do with it? we threw it in the Tennessee River. You know, he’s like, gosh, you’re an idiot. So even at the University of Tennessee, 100% of nothing is still nothing. Just don’t be cheap, right? If someone’s beating you on commissions, then fight fire with fire. Right? if the problems that you can’t do a reciprocal commotion, then maybe reconsider your stance. It might be worth promoting them to keep them, make sure you’re paying the right commissions. That’s a big one, though. reason number three is they went out of business. All right?
Nothing you can do here. Just move on. Just making you aware that does happen. They’re out of business. Great. Now we know no longer need to follow up with you. We can remove you. The fourth reason this is something that we, you can do about is they don’t know how to promote. They just don’t know how to promote. And we’re going to talk about this shortly. Here’s the thing, before we jump into that, though, I want you to remember a, key thing. And like, if you’re an affiliate manager, you’re running an affiliate program. It’s your job to help your affiliates. So repeat after me. It’s my job to help my affiliates. Alan, you’ve got affiliates, so repeat after me. It’s my job to help my affiliates. It is my job to help my affiliates. I was on the phone one earlier today. Yeah.
So helping that affiliate. So we’ll talk about that in a little bit. Reason number five is they’ll get around to it later. No, actually, they’ll get around to it later. Right. Quote, unquote. now there’s two types of these get around to it at later affiliates. Right? There’s type 1, which accounts for roughly 1/10 of 1% that really do have you on their calendar for later in the year. The other 99.9% are never going to get around to it unless you give them a nudge. Often, all it takes to activate inactive affiliates is a gentle reminder. Call them. They just need a nudge. They need a specific email. They need a text. They need something to get them off their butts and start making some sales. And so we’ve optimized these activation emails, by the way, especially if you’re running a bigger program. You can’t really do this one on one. We’ve activated, I mean, literally hundreds of thousands of affiliates.
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We’ve cataloged our best performers. I’m Going to share how you can get those later because it’s super easy. want to talk about some results from some of our activation campaigns, just so you can see the power of this. So with Shutterfly a couple years ago, many years ago, actually now, like eight. Years ago.
we had about 15,000 inactive affiliates. 15,000. We did one push. This is just one example. One push we activated one week. One push, one week. We activated nearly 1400 of them, about 10%. Over the next year, those 1400 produced an additional $430,000 in additional revenue. So that’s an evergreen program. We were doing this all year. Just one example there. Michael Hyatt. He had a big launch in 2016. We had 944 affiliates who had not sent traffic yet after the first week. So one week gone by, 944 of them had not sent traffic.
Three days later, 291 of those 944 were sending traffic. In total, people that would have been completely inactive never made a sale, made a hundred and four thousand dollars in sales, almost like 7 or 8% of the total sales from that launch. If it wasn’t for the $104,000, we would have, we would have, we would have barely hit a million dollars. We would almost missed our million dollar goal for that launch. Most people don’t activate affiliates. Most people, it’s like if somebody’s not promoting, screw them. we, we, we work with them and we get results. Learn to Master Guitar here. This is one of my favorite activation campaigns, is also one of my very first. This is over 10 years ago now. almost, actually 13 years ago this summer, I ran the affiliate program for Learning Master Guitar. When I took over, I was taking over an existing program, 704 inactive affiliates. Most of them had been a part of the program for more than a year. They were, they were just basically considered dormant. So 700, and I say 704 inactive affiliates within a month.
I took over on May 15, 2009. Somebody looked me up on that. It was a Friday. I think May 15, 2009 was a Friday. but whatever the Friday closest to that was, within a month we had activated 261 of them combined. They helped the affiliate program grow from a $2. 2 million a year program to more than $6 million within a year. One of those affiliates ended up being our number one affiliate of the top 10 affiliates by year’s end. Four were from that group of the inactive affiliates, including two of the top three. So if you think about this, we went from basically only having six of those top 10 and one of the top three a year later.
Two of those top three, four of the top 10 were from that previously inactive list. That’s why this is important, because it works. That’s why this is important. So who is considered inactive? How are we defining inactive? Right. In an Evergreen program, it’s simple. I, want to talk about launches first, but just let you know that in an evergreen program, it’s simple. Have they sent any traffic in the past 60 or 90 days? No. Then here we go. All right. For a launch, it’s a little bit harder because you might m only have like 17 days. Like we’re running a launch right now coming up. And basically the launch, you know, started about four days ago, runs through the 18th.So today, I mean, probably like our team’s working on this right now. At least. By the way, if y’ all are team, if y’ all are watching this and not doing this, you know, if you’re watching this but not doing the inactive, stop watching this. No, I’m just kidding. like they should be doing this literally right now.
And for, for that, for that particular campaign, there’s three links that people can mail to. So that’s important because if they’ve sent three opt ins, it might all be tests. So for us, it’s anything less than three opt ins or are three or less opt ins that have six or less hits. That’s basically right around the threshold where we say, okay, we know that the reason why they have some hits and opt ins is not just because they’re testing the links. Now if we send an email to somebody who has two opt ins and four hits and say, hey, just wanted to help you out and we’ll talk about what to send in a little bit.Why aren’t you promoting? And they go, well, I am. No big deal. No big deal. Not like we offended them, most likely, you know, oh, oh, sorry, it looked like you hadn’t, you know, no big deal.
Right. So for us, anybody within this particular launch with three opt ins or less and six hits or less is considered inactive, you might go a little bit lower on those numbers. Maybe a little bit higher depending upon the number of links you have. Typically if they only if there’s only one opt in link, we’ll say, if they’re, you know, two or less. One or less depends on the how early it is. And maybe like four hits. Three or four hits. And so we might raise it, we might lower it, but depending upon the system that you use, just running a simple traffic report will show you exactly who’s inactive. Okay, so in infusionsoft, for example, it’s a total pain in the butt. Some systems have a link, you can click on this.
So show me my inactive affiliates. Easy. Other times it’s like just show me all the affiliates and you know, just a really easy way to do it. In fact, we’re going to create our own affiliate system. We talked about this for a while. It’ll have this button that you can click and say show me what your parameters are and it’ll spit out the numbers for you and you can easily contact all those affiliates. What we have to do in infusionsoft, total pain in the butt, is we have to actually go through, download a list of all the affiliates, sort them by activity, take the active list, dedupe that in Microsoft Excel against the total affiliates whose remaining is inactive. It takes about a half hour to an hour, but it’s totally worth it. All right, so when do you reach out to these affiliates in a launch? Typically we’ll reach out sometime around day four or five of the launch and we’ll reach out again around day nine.
And then we might reach out like right after cart open to say, hey, it’s still not too late. But the idea is we want to give them just enough time to get active. We don’t want to reach out on the second day and say hey, you haven’t seen any traffic yet. You’re like, yeah, it’s day two. I’m gimme a moment, I slept in yesterday. Good grief. You know. So we reach out around day four, day five, depends. If you’ve only got like an eight day launch, you might want to reach out on day three if you and say hey, you haven’t sent any traffic yet. Just wanted to let you know this is a really short launch, you need to get going. You know, if it’s a really, you know, if it’s like a four day promo, you might reach out on second day. But generally speaking, the average launch is around 15 to 17 days. So day four, day five again, day eight or nine, and then right after like the day after open cart, just saying, hey, it’s not too late yet. Got a question, got a question somebody was asking. How, when do you reach out on evergreens?
How often do you do that? When do you reach out on evergreens? Good. Ah, point. so typically what we’ll do is run a report every two months. and what we’ll do so here we are, we’re recording this on April 14th. So if I were to run that for, if I were to run that today, now typically run it like the very beginning of the month. But if I ran that. Let’s go. We’ll just say that if I run this report on CIS B, I would run it the 1st of March and then earn it again on the 1st of May, and I would run it for the previous two months.
So when I run it on the 1st of March, I would basically look for people who sent no traffic in March and April, or no, you know, or fit those criteria. Like they sent, you know, two or less opt ins or one or less opt in, whatever the numbers are that you decide to go with. and I would look specifically for those who sent, you know, who didn’t meet the traffic criteria for the previous 60 days. In an Evergreen program, unlike a launch, you can get away with, you know, I’m going to do this six times a year. And we’re going to, you know, because there’s not as much urgency. and you can kind of, if you do this six times a year, you’re in that gray area between like really annoying and effective. And so that’s, that’s how often we do it. Cool. All right. So you know, when.
How do you reach out to them? The how is very, very simple. Use any means necessary. You use email, you use text, you use. I’ve got apps on here that I use.I got an. I’ve got, Let me go through here real quick. Apps that I use to communicate with affiliates. Voxer, teleprompter or telegram, WhatsApp. I’ve even got Google Meet on here because a couple of people, use, our Google Hangouts. Use Google Hangouts, Skype, that’s it on here that I’ve got on there. And then Facebook, DM on computer. Use whatever they use. Now typically we use email because that’s what we have for most affiliates. and especially with bigger programs.
I can send, you know, 900, I mentioned 944. I can’t send 944 DMS or texts. But what I can do is send 944 emails using a blast. And then the next day, okay, we got 342 replies. Great. Take those. Out of those 602 people left, who are the ones that I should spend the most time on? Okay, there’s seven big time affiliates. Okay, great. All right. normally I text with him. So let me go to my text. Boom, boom, boom. Send him a text. Great. I would never do any of that. My phone, I would do it on my computer. Computer. But you know, I’m gonna send it. I have my phone just in case.I have those apps on there, like, let me send a quick Skype, let me send a quick dm, to those people. you know, the, the, the key is over time just to learn their preferred method of communication. So if they prefer text, stick to text. They like Skype, then stick to Skype. I mean, I, I use Voxer with one person, one affiliate.
Out of the 7,000, 8,000 affiliates we’ll work with this year, one affiliate uses Voxer. I’ve got maybe four that use Skype. I’ve got a couple that use WhatsApp, probably about 150 that use Facebook. DM, about five or 10 that use Telegram. You know, all the different ones.I got a few that use Google Hangouts, like, or Google whatever it’s called now on there. Most of them are fine with email, but again, I want to be available. If I know they’re a Voxer person, then I’m going to use Voxer. So that’s the how. It’s whatever means necessary. Speaking of email, what should you send them? And we’re going to specifically focus on email because this is, I’m going to share one of the most effective emails I have ever used to activate affiliates. All right. With a larger program, 95% of your communication is going to be via email. So we’re going to focus on that here.
I’m going to give you an example of an email. just go along with me. I’m not, I’m not gonna like put it up on the stream, but we sent this to everyone in like day four or five of the launch and we’ve used it ever since. And the subject line was everything okay? First name.So everything okay? Let’s just pick somebody here. Subject line would be everything okay, Jackie? Everything okay, Jackie? Like pretty cool. Subject line breaks through, right? Hey Jackie, just making sure you everything was okay. I had you down to support such and such launch, but I haven’t seen any activity yet. There’s still plenty of time to join in. The launch is going amazingly well.But it’s not too late for you to get started. Let me know how I can help. That’s what I’m here for. All the best, Matt. Now, there’s five elements to this email, all right?
Number one, it grabs their attention. You know, everything okay. When I put everything okay, Jackie, that stands out in your inbox, doesn’t it, Jackie? Like, it definitely stands out. Secondly, it reminds us of.Reminds them of a commitment. You know, Robert Cialdini in his book Influence, which is a must read, by the way. Mattmcwilliams.com Influence should go grab that. there’s nothing as powerful as the principle of commitment. The studies he talks about in that book about commitment and consensus, consistency and commitment are unreal. We have a natural desire to do what we said we would do, right? So I remind them of their commitment. I remind them of their commitment. I say, we had you down to support this launch, right?
And people ask me a lot, like, okay, is this a bit of a guilt trip? Yeah, it’s a guilt trip. You said you were going to do something and you haven’t, but it has the results, so it’s going to make them a lot of money. So there. I don’t really care if it puts them on a guilt trip. Right? third, it encourages them. You know, I say twice, there’s still time. It’s not too late. By day four or five, people might just think, oh, it’s too late.I can’t even join. And I want to make sure to tell them otherwise. So it encourages them. The third thing is it has social proof. You know, I point out things are going great and I want them to be a part of this greatness because people want to be a part of something successful.
And the fifth, I offer help. You know, I say, like, I’m here to help. That’s what I do, right? Make sure you are clear that you are there to answer questions and hold their hand if necessary. So I mentioned that we have these templates. We have these templates, right? If you want to grab these templates, Jackie and the others. yeah, I see on here, hey, Gina, by the way, and Jesse, get all of our activation templates. If you go to mattmcwilliams.com forward/activate, mattmcwilliams.com Forward/activate. You can get all of our best email templates for activating your affiliates. So that gets them promoting. How do we help them be successful? All right, so this is that, you know, they try their best, but they fail.
Or maybe they just don’t know how to promote. They need you to help them. To help. Help them. Help them. Help me help. You said Jerry Maguire. Right? So how do you help your affiliate succeed? Sometimes an affiliate just, they just don’t know how to promote or they haven’t done a good enough job of adapting to the ever changing landscape of the marketing world. Right. You know, they’re just, I don’t know, Your job is to help them. Have I made that clear enough? Right? We have. We’ve made you say it earlier. My job is to help my affiliates. Your job is to help your affiliates succeed. So that means you’ve got to do the things that we’re going to talk about here. Like, I’ve covered this extensively and I have a post, it’s called what Affiliates really need to be Successful.
If you go to mattmcwilliams.com successful, you can grab this. I’m not going to go super in depth. You can go read the post. And it’s, I don’t know, it’s thousands of words long. It’s got pretty much everything they need in there. You know, they need general direction number one. They need amazing swipe copy. You know, they, they need really, really good swipe copy. they need the right graphics. You know, they give them the right graphics. Right. I’m gonna, in that post, I walk you through how to get them to your affiliates. There’s a video in that post that walks you through that. they need banner ads that actually convert. They need sample mailing plans. I show you how to do that in that post. You know, this is like the one. I don’t highlight it in that post, but set up one on one personal promotion plans with your affiliates. But don’t call them promotion plans.
All right? That’s one of the best things you can do to get your affiliates to mail more often. Create a personal promotion plan with them. We just did this this morning, actually, this afternoon with an affiliate. I did one yesterday. I do these all the time. I just get on a quick call and we craft a plan with them. And I’m going to share a video in a moment that’ll walk you through one of those. This is kind of like our secret sauce when we run affiliate programs for clients. But here’s the gist, right? You meet with affiliates one on one. You get on Zoom before the promotion. You craft a custom promotion plan that works with their calendar. So earlier today, the one that I had said, we have nine days marked off. this, this launch is like a two week launch.
She said, we have nine days where we can mail. And I said, send me those nine days and I’ll tell you what to mail then so you don’t have to think about it. I’m going to, I’m going to pick what’s going to convert best on those Days. So you co create this plan with them. And what I found is when, when you, when you meet with a, partner, partner, one on one, they tend to agree to at least a few extra emails, more than they had previously planned on sending. So she said, we had nine dates. And then you go through it with them and next thing you know, there’s 11 on there. And she’s like, yeah, we’re good. Remember I talked earlier, the principle of commitment and consistency from Robert Cialdini means that people, when people commit to something, they stick to it. That principle of commitment, consistency, going back to something we started off with, something we’re probably going to be talking about next Thursday with Alan.
Questions?
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It’s one of the reasons why his program works. The program he’s going to share next Thursday works for weight loss, if that’s something you’re interested in. So jump on Zoom, jump on Skype, go through the promotion plan spreadsheet with them. Make sure you download the template, by the way. All right, the affiliate promo plan template. Alan will put that in the, in the chat and on the screen there. Make sure that you download that. So once they have them, they have that plan set, have them commit to it, email them a copy of the spreadsheet, thanking them for their commitment to the, promotion. More often than not, they will stick to that plan. If anything, they might add to it.
They’ll get, they’ll go, you know what, we need to add one more cart. Close day email. Rarely will they subtract from it. I’ve personally done these plans with people whose products I’m promoting. And then I’ve fallen short of like, in the middle of the promotion, I got busy and I was like, ah, crap. I didn’t, I didn’t live up to my plan. We just need to add, add an extra email or two. When I, when I promise that I’m going to mail eight times, by gosh, I’m going to mail at least eight times. I might even mail nine or ten. That’s the power of creating these personal, you know, these personal commitment plans. I’ve interchanged the words promo plans and commitment plans. We used to call them promo plans, but starting last year, we started calling them, commitment plans. And we found that when we call them commitment plans, we get an average of 1. 7 more emails sent from each affiliate, which is a huge win. So language matters.
Yeah. So if you want to see how we do these, you just have to wait until I take a sip of coffee. If you want to see how we do these. I’ve got a video, a lot of links for you today. You can just, you know, if you’re watching this live and you can’t keep up with them, you know, come back to the post and they’ll be there. For those of you watching the replay, they’re all below this video. How to co create promo plans with your affiliates. We got a YouTube link there that’ll walk you through that. in that post, going back to that original post, if you remember the one affiliates need to be successful. We talk about, affiliates need a checklist. They just need a checklist that tells them what to do. So make sure you download the affiliate promo checklist that’s in that post as well. Just mattmcwilliams.com promo checklist. They need to feel a part of the process, involve them, ask for their opinion on things like, you know, what about the logo for the course?
You know, we have a book launch team of affiliates and I’ve involved them in selecting the COVID of the book. They’ve been a part of the process, you know, throughout. Many of you helped with the create, you know, the picking the COVID of the book. And we have a cover now, it’s dialed in. The book is actually live. It doesn’t even launch until next January. But if you look hard enough, if you go to penguin random house. com, you know, largest distributor, largest publisher in the world, you may or may not be able to find links to my upcoming book. Just wink, wink. yeah, that’s kind of cool, I gotta admit. Like seeing it up on the, on the interwebs is pretty, pretty awesome anyway. But make them feel a part of the process. Right? Other things you need to do, you need to give affiliates their opt in list. They need to know who’s already opted in.
So if you’re promoting something free on the front end as an affiliate, who have they already, who’s already signed up? I don’t want to keep emailing them, you know, to sign up. When we get towards cart close, I want to focus on those people as well. So make sure you give them their opt in list. Make sure you run short, frequent and exciting contests. Contests. Move the needle. Contests. Move the needle. And so run contests that are exciting for them. All right? focus on very short like 24 to 48 hour contests that get them excited to promote. Instead of running like two big, you know, like era leads contest and a sales contest, do those. But in addition run a couple of like really short Contests you could, I mean these are just some examples of the ones we’ve run. Like a webinar opt ins contest.
Right? just, just webinar opt ins like for the next three days three day contest, two day contest, first place, most opt in. Most opt ins a Caribbean cruise for two, you know, or $5,000. we did a drawing so every opt in got you an entry. So everybody’s entered to win thousand dollar Mac, you know, MacBook Air or something like that. Right. We knew that the webinar convert. We knew that the webinar converted. So running a contest was worth it. Running a contest was working. We did a weekend contest for Michael Hyatt for his assessment. And it was first place was 2500. Second place was a thousand, third place was 500. Anybody with 25 plus opt ins was we had two winners at 250 each. And so we did this for Michael Heights.
Five days to your best year ever. His assessment was converting amazingly well. We did it for the weekend because weekends typically suck for launches. So we, we ran it over the weekend. And here’s the key. We announced it at a very specific time. There’s a little bit of science, especially with weekend contests that what you don’t want to do is announce it so early on Friday or before Friday that people go oh, I was going to mail Friday. I was going to mail at 10am but I’m glad I saw this email. So let me just delay that email till Saturday. No, we want them to still mail on Friday and get a couple of emails out of them on the weekend.
If they were only going to mail Friday and maybe not over the weekend, that’s one email and then they just move the email from Friday to Saturday and then mail again on Sunday. We gained one email. That’s okay. What if they were going to email Friday and Sunday and they just move that Friday email till Sunday or till Saturday? That doesn’t help. I mean we’ve got the same amount of emails from them. So the idea is announce it or you got to announce it early enough on Friday that it’s not, you know, 5pm and they go oh crap, I didn’t even know about that. I can’t really react to it. Whatever. I’ll just not, I’ll just sit this one out. So we announce it like 1130 on Friday. Most people have sent their Friday emails. We announced it at 1 or 1:30. That’s plenty of time for them to see it and take action on it. Schedule some weekend emails and so I know from that we saw, 57% lift, 57% increase in opt ins over the weekend compared to projections.
it was, we spent 4,250 bucks on that. I mean that was worth, you know, close to six figures easy. we’ll do a first day sales contest. You know, first day sales. So, you know, first place, most sales, whatever, you know, thousand dollars, two thousand, might be five thousand if the campaign’s big enough. And then do a drawing. Anyone with just one sale, you’re entered to win a certain amount of money. You know, could be 500,000, $2,000. Something that’s pretty lucrative. And so the thing is, you want your affiliates coming out of the gate strong on open cart day. So be willing to spend a little bit of money to get people energized. other contests. And again, they’re just endless. Like I could go on and on about contests. The anyone can win contest.
we just say, hey, add this email address to your, to your list. We give them an email address to add to their list. Every email you send today. We typically do this for cart close day. Every email you send today is entered to win. So then what we’ll do is we’ll go, oh, we have, you know, we got 557 emails today. And then, you know, we’ll make the prize like a thousand dollars every email you send. So if you say if you’re planning on sending two, better load five, got a bigger chance. Or we say you gotta send three at a minimum to qualify. So then we’ll go over to that inbox. Any address that only sent two, we’ll just delete those. And then it’s like, oh, there’s 417 emails left. Go to random. org 1. 417.Okay, email number 242 is the winner. And we’ll scroll till we get to email. You know, 242. Bada boom, bada bing. Winner, winner, chicken dinner, right?
that it’s open to everyone. All an affiliate has to do is send an email. Every email to an affiliate sent is an entry to win. This encourages the smaller affiliates to mail an extra time or two, which in and of themselves might produce an average of a half a sale more. But a half a sale times 300 affiliates is 150 sales times $2,000 is, is $300,000 to your bottom line. And even if my math is off, even if they average a third of a sale and only a hundred affiliates do it, that’s 33 sales, that’s $66,000. Here’s a type of prizes you can do for that. Tickets to your live event that technically cost you almost nothing. All right, $66,000 for maybe a 5, $600 expensive expense. How’s that not like a massive win. Try going again. $66,000 in sales from $600 in ads. It’s probably not gonna happen. It’s pretty nice, Roi. So one of the keys here is you got to build up each promo milestone.
You got to build up each promo milestone. So if they’re five sales away from a milestone, tell them individually, tell them where are they in relation to first place or sixth place or, or whatever. you know, like first place is at a hundred sales and you know, like, you gotta find something that’s practical for them to achieve. So if first place is at a hundred sales and it’s two days before the end of the launch, the top place, you know, is 100 sales and the affiliate in 14th place is nine sales. It’s not practical to say, hey, number 14, you’re going to catch up to number one. But it is practical. Say, hey, number 14, you could catch up to number 10, you could be in the money, you could be on the leader board. So you, hey, you’re only six sales away from 10th place. If they’re not focused on, if they’re not going to achieve a leader board, position, focus on the guaranteed prizes. So if you, if you have a 10 sale prize and they’re at seven sales, hey, you’re only three sales away from winning the MacBook Pro.
And when you build up these milestones, remind people where they stand, show them like, how to get to the next level. It’s very encouraging for them. Every time we send one of these emails, we get emails back like, awesome. Matt, I scheduled another email for tomorrow. Like that’s what we’re looking for with these messages. So that is how you get them promoting. All right? That’s how you, you’ve got them active. We talked about that. We’ve gotten them promoting. Jackie has a question. Do you have an affiliate program that integrates email marketing or how do you track that? Jackie, I actually don’t understand the question. Can you reword that and ask me differently? And I’ll answer that in a little bit. Sorry, I just not following. am I missing something there? Alan, do you understand the question? Not, not quite a. She may be asking for the actual software that you use.
It almost sounds like. Okay, all right, so problem number Three. And we’ll come back to Jackie’s question. Problem number three is they only promote once, and then you never hear from them again. Right? So this is the keeping them promoting part. So how do you keep your, your affiliates promoting long term? We don’t want them to be just the one hit wonders. All right? If you do everything I’ve suggested, if you pay them well, you get them active, you give them the tools that they need, you make them feel a part of the process, you do promotion plans with them, you run exciting contests, you make your affiliate program fun, they will want to promote again. It’s that simple. But only if you keep in touch. If you go dark on them, let’s say it’s a launch, you go dark. End of launch. Don’t hear from Alan for four months.
That’d be terrible. Really? Is that how you treat your relationships? So we talked about this, right? Throughout the year. Now, Evergreen, you’re going to keep in touch for the promotions, but with a launch, you got to be intentional. So take them behind the scenes, you know, a month after the launch, give them a recap of the launch. Teach them what worked for you. Do a launch recap about a month afterwards. That way it’s fresh but not too fresh. And it’s like, hey, it’s, we’re a full month later, maybe even 45 days later, we’re going to give them a launch recap so they learn stuff that’s going to benefit them in their launches. Take them behind the scenes with what’s working for your business. Just share with them business tips throughout the year. I mean, heck, be useful, be helpful. Share.
Take them behind the scenes of your product. So if you’re rerecording the, your course four months before the launch, do a little video on set of recording and be like, hey, affiliates. So you know, just want to see, look at the set, blah, blah, blah. Here’s what we’re doing. Give them, don’t, don’t tell them, hey, we relaunched the course. That’s what you’re promoting in two weeks. That’s a dumb way to do that. Tell them months in advance, tell them six months in advance that you’re going to reshoot it. Like, just let them know, hey, we’re going to be reshooting the course for 2023. Just wanted to let you know. Awesome. That’s all I have today. That’s all I got to say about that. You know, we just watched Forrest Gump the other night. Movie, I was about to say, all right, Forest.
Yeah. 25 years. Can you believe it’s been 25 years since that movie first came out? It’s crazy. That is showing. Showing my age. Feeling my age. yeah, actually a little over that. You wish. I wish. You know, throughout the year as things come in, you get a good testimonial. Share it with your affiliates. You don’t have to, like, text it to them individually, but here’s what I would do if that testimonial comes in. Number one, I would post it to your partner Facebook group and just say, hey, guys, another great testimonial. Look what came in. It’s just a little thing, just keeps in touch. But look to see if an affiliate referred them and send it to that affiliate, one on one text, whatever. Send it to them. Send it to their team, you know, tag them in that Facebook post. I mean, that is.That is go. That is gold right there too. Because that. Because you got to do it, though. You have to do it.
You told me how to do that. And that has turned into, Well, it’s over six figures just from that piece right there. If you hadn’t told me, you know, we’re doing this, you know, a week from today. We mentioned earlier, Alan and I are doing a master class together about, you know, his thing, which is helping people lose weight. Right. If he had. This will be the third time we’ve done it together. If after that first one, he had not shared the story of one of the guys that, signed up, guy named Bob Harris. If he had not shared Bob yesterday. What’s that?
I messaged Bob yesterday. He’s still doing amazing. I mean, he is. If. If you had not shared Bob’s success story and other success stories, then I would have said, oh, that’s, you know, okay, whatever, I made some money. But, yeah, not going to promote again. That’s no offense to you, Alan, but your stuff works. And it worked for Bob and others. And I went, holy crap, I have to do more. Like, I have to help more people with this, you know, so share those testimonials. Just update them once a month or so throughout the year. Keep in touch with them, maintain those relationships. Right? Go in, comment on something on, comment on one of their Facebook posts or Instagram posts periodically. Text them periodically.
Just connect with them periodically in a normal way that normal people do things. Right. Like I said, commenting on their Facebook post, don’t just like their post. Nobody knows who likes their post. Comment on it.Think on that comment. Don’t say congrats, you know, they just said they got married. They just said they had a baby, and all you can do is congrats. Like, at least throw in, like, a congrats, brother. I’m so excited for you.You know, congrats, man. The best years of your life are ahead. Just do something that maybe shows that you took four seconds to give a flying crap about them. here’s a little tip. If you’re like, well, I don’t have time to text people and do.Little tip here. I learned this. I would love to give credit where credit is due, but I have no idea who taught me this. we have. You know, my kids are in soccer, and so one of the things that I find myself doing a lot of is waiting.
I’m waiting for. You know, we get. We get takeout, you know, a couple nights a week, you know, salads, three judge. Get salads, sometimes ice cream and, for the kids, you know, But I’m waiting, and I have nine minutes of absolute nothing to do. or I’m sitting at the barber, and it’s 11 minutes before my appointment. And, you know, I’ll be chatting with Greg and barber. I’ll chat with him for a little bit, chat with whoever else is there. We find ourselves just waiting. Here’s the thing. You could pick up the magic rectangle and be like, oh, you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna read the news. Well, there’s something that’ll make you dumber and make you no money. I want to be an informed citizen. I don’t m. The news is the great income.
Yeah, the news is not making you an informed sin. That’s a whole different. Just. Oh, man. Wow.I could go on a rabbit trail down there. I’m not going to, though. I’m going to read the news or I’m going to scroll through my Facebook feed just for, you know, kicks and giggles. What if you. What if you were intentional? This little trick I learned, when I have time to wait, I go in, I click on text, I go up to compose, and I type in A and it scrolls down and it says, Alan. Hey, Alan. Just thinking about you, man. How’s life? You and Angie still biking a bunch?
You know, it’s funny. Funny. You mentioned you just got a text. Alan, mentioned that one that happened today. Oh, you did? Can I just say something real quick? I want to hear from that. I want to hear from you on that, but I just want to finish this, and what I’ll then do is go to my text, and I type in A and do that. Or I go and scroll all the way down. And if there’s.Okay, so I scroll all the way down, and that’s a message I don’t need. That’s actually an old message that has nothing.
The last person that I communicated with down here is a former client. So I’m going to send her. Not going to right now, but I’ll send her. So next time I’m in line, she’s getting a quick message. Then there’s like, some fraud protection stuff from our bank. And I’ll scroll up and go, oh, here we go. You know, boom, boom, boom. Pedro. Great. I should probably text him. It’s been, it’s been 70 some odd days since I texted him. now go to the next person and I’ll just send text. And if I constantly keep going to the bottom, then everybody’s gonna get hit up eventually.
And then. Yeah, you could do Facebook. You could. You could scroll through Facebook when you have that little bit of time. What if you did it with intentionality? there are some tools out there I’ll be sharing with you guys. A really cool tool that our team is getting ready to try out. I’m, really excited to share with you guys. Not gonna tell you anything about it yet, but it will allow you to just get in front of the right people at the right times. All right, so it’s not. You don’t have your feed full of, like, cat pictures and all that crap, you know? I, I. You know, I love my. My family. Every now and again, I want to check in on them on Facebook. But sometimes I just want, like, these five minutes to be focused on relationships that are important to my business. Not every. I’m not thinking about my business 24 7, but 15, 20 minutes a week, I want to focus on that. So there’s a little trick. You’re waiting in line. You know, you’re. You’re sitting there, just you, you know, anytime you have five or ten minutes to kill, just go in. That’s what you do. Alan, did you just reply to me? You know I did like that.
yeah. And you just scroll, scroll all the way to the bottom and go from there. All right? Send them some physical mail. Send them some physical mail. Support them, right? Promote them. Ask how you can help them. you know, just reach out to them. Like, there’s one. You know, somebody’s got a big launch coming up. What if you just did this? Like, you can’t promote them. Maybe it’s not a good fit for you. you know, they’ve got a promotion coming up. Why? Because you saw it on Facebook or because they texted you and said, get ready for our big launch in two months. You go, hey, what are those dates? Oh, it’s, you know, April 21st through April 28th, whatever. And you make a note on your calendar, and then on April 20, you get a reminder that says, text Stu.
And on April 20, you text Stu and say, hey, Stu, I know your launch is coming up tomorrow, man. Just thinking about you. Hope it goes awesome. That’s the type of stuff we’re talking about being a good human. Right. Big thing is just don’t go dark on them. Just don’t go dark on them. I just see that so often, it drives me insane. Yeah, affiliates. You should, like, promote us.You’re amazing. We love you. And then six months of I can’t really make a cricket sound. I don’t know how they sound. Whatever.
A bird that swallowed the cricket. I was thinking it was more like a bird who’s, like, needs some antacids or something. But. So to recap. Oh, I want to.Wait, I wanted to hear your thing. You. You said something like, this just happens. Tell me real quick. Well, yeah, And Jackie reworded a little bit on a question, but today, something. Something happened. We just. I was in Facebook, saw a mutual friend of ours, Brian Dixon, who, you know, amazing coach. And just. I can. I commented on his post not with intention to do anything other than tell the truth. And it was. It was about a situation that he asked about that my daughter has type 1 diabetes.
And I was. I posted it and then, oh, by the way, I want you to meet somebody. This resulted in a potential, you know, business relationship that wouldn’t have happened had I not just cared. Taking a little time to care. So, you gotta. Nobody really wants to know what you know till they know that you care. Yep. So to recap, you got to get them active, you got to help them succeed, and then you got to keep them promoting. Jackie, Ask. So basically, software related, how do you have an affiliate? Do you have an affiliate program that integrates email marketing or how do you track that? yeah, if you’ve got affiliate wp, I mean, everything should track through that. I’m not sure I fully understand the question. Jack, you do me a favor. Feel free to text me, if you want to text me a link to your thing and we can go back and forth.260-2174. 619. That’s open to anybody. By the way, you can text me anytime. 260-217-4-619.
Text me, like, more of the details because I think there’s some nuance that I’m not picking up on and we don’t have time for here. so, yeah, I love to help you, though, Jackie. So real quick, guys, I want to leave you with some action items, some clear next steps. What do I do right now? Matt? Oh, my gosh, you dropped a bunch of. Now, I hope you guys think I dropped some knowledge. Let me know if, I did or didn’t, because maybe I didn’t know you guys. Like, this is all crap. I don’t know. I don’t think so, though. So what do we do now, though? What are the actions, the five things I want you guys to do? Number one, get all of our affiliate activation templates@mattmcwilliams.com forward slash activation. All right? Very simple. Go grab them, download them, use them, you know, send them. I showed you how to do. How to know who’s inactive.
Start sending them to people. Secondly, I want you to commit to embracing the fact we talked about this three times today. This is the fourth. Your affiliate success is your job. Your job is to help them succeed. All right? My job is to help my affiliates succeQed. Say it every morning if you need to. My job. There you go. My job is to help my affiliates succeed. do that, your brain is just like, in that mode. Right? So do it. Third, I want you to know what your affiliates need to succeed if your job is to help them succeed. Well, what does that mean? Check out that post. We dropped it earlier. We’ll drop it again here. What affiliates really need to be successful.
If you just get those seven things right, you’re going to be fine. Can you do a few of the other things I suggested today and that I’ve suggested, you know, before, that, you know, kind of take it to the next level? Absolutely. But if you get those seven things right, you’re good. The point is, none of the advanced stuff means crap.Like, if you do that. What I said, you know, texting people. But your swipe copy sucks. Your offer doesn’t convert. your graphics are terrible.Who cares, Matt, I got a great relationship with you. I love you to death. But your swipe copy’s terrible, and your landing page converts like crap. Okay? You’re not going to promote me, are you?
So get those seven things dialled in, and then you can do the more advanced stuff. Fourth, keep your affiliates promoting long term, not one and done. Follow what we shared today to get them promoting more regularly. And then fifth, reach out, Reach out to me. I mentioned it earlier, you know, to Jackie. If you’ve got questions about today’s lesson, anything else, text me anytime at 260-217-4619. So I hope you got a ton out of that. again, as I mentioned in the episode if, or in the training there that turned into this episode, if you got questions, you can text me anytime at 260-217-4619. If you know somebody who could benefit from this, make sure you share it with them. And lastly, make sure you hit subscribe because you do not want to miss the next episode.
The next episode, something I definitely have never shared before and the tentative title for it is what Affiliate Secret Secretly Hate and How to Fix It. And it’s a really cool episode. I’ve been working on it for the last couple of days. about exactly that. Like the things that affiliates, they don’t tell you. You can ask for feedback. You can say, hey, how can we improve our affiliate program? They’re not going to tell you these things. It’s the things, though, that I hear in Mastermind groups and in private and frankly, things I hate myself, but also how to fix them. That’s the important part.
So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. I’ll see you then. Thank you so much for listening today. If you know someone who would benefit from hearing this episode, make sure to share it with, them. And if you have a question, you can ask it at asktheaffiliateguy.com Questions make my best episode and it’s a great way to get featured right here on the podcast. If you’re loving what you’re hearing, please take a moment to leave a rating and review that helps others find this content so we can all benefit from it. See you soon.