How to win an affiliate contest comes down to two decisions you make before the cart even opens: what bonus you’re offering, and how you plan to use the last 48 hours. Heidi Easley finished third in a $5.7 million affiliate launch with a prep course nobody else had built. Manu Muraro cracked the top 10 on a list too small to matter, using Instagram instead of email. Both tactics work no matter the size of your list.
Most advice on affiliate contests is written for the person running the leaderboard, not the person trying to climb it. If you’re the one managing the contest, how to structure one that actually motivates your partners is worth a read on its own. This post is the other side of that leaderboard: what the affiliates who finish in the top 10 actually do differently, pulled from real finishes in a launch that did $5.7 million. Two of those finishes came from affiliates with very different resources. One built a bonus nobody else in the promotion had made. The other used a channel almost nobody else was using. Neither finish happened by accident, and neither depended on having the biggest list in the room.
Heidi Easley’s prep-course bonus that put her in the top 3
Heidi Easley isn’t new to affiliate promotions. She’d promoted the same launch before and finished 10th. The next time around, she finished third and earned nearly $100,000 in commissions. The difference wasn’t a bigger list. It was a bonus nobody else in the promotion had thought to build.
Instead of a PDF or a swipe file, Heidi created a short prep course for her audience. It did two things at once: it kept people engaged in the days before the cart opened, and it told her exactly who on her list was serious enough to want more. People who finished the prep course and still showed up for the offer weren’t guessing whether this was for them. They already knew.
That’s the part most contest advice skips. A bonus isn’t supposed to be a thank-you gift for buying. It’s supposed to do work before the sale happens, by filtering your list down to the people who were going to buy anyway and giving them a reason to do it through your link instead of someone else’s.
Compare that to the standard affiliate bonus: a checklist or a discount code that every other promoter in the launch is also offering. Those bonuses don’t filter anyone. They don’t tell you who’s warm and who’s cold, and they give the buyer no reason to pick your link over the next affiliate’s. Heidi’s prep course did the opposite. Someone who spent three days working through it before cart open was already sold on the outcome. By the time the offer launched, she wasn’t persuading strangers. She was closing people she’d already qualified.
Heidi walked through the whole strategy, including how she built the prep course and timed it against the launch calendar, in her full episode. If you promote the same launch more than once a year, it’s worth the listen before your next one.
Why collaborating with other affiliates beat competing with them
Heidi’s other advantage was less about tactics and more about attitude. During the promotion, she treated other affiliates as people to work with, not people to beat. A leaderboard makes it feel like a zero-sum game, like every sale someone else makes is a sale you didn’t. It usually isn’t. Most affiliates in a big launch are pulling from different pockets of the same audience, and the ones who share notes, cross-promote, or just compare what’s working tend to outperform the ones who treat the whole thing like a solo sprint.
You don’t need a formal partnership to do this. It can be as simple as telling another affiliate what subject line is converting, or agreeing not to email your lists at the exact same hour on cart close day so you’re not fighting each other for the same inboxes. If you’re already active in launch communities or Facebook groups built around a specific product line, that’s the easiest place to start. A five-minute message to another promoter costs you nothing and often comes back with information worth a few hundred dollars in sales.
The affiliates grinding it out alone for the entire launch window are usually the ones hitting the mid-launch dip the hardest, because they’ve got nobody to compare notes with when sales slow down in the middle. That dip happens to everyone in a multi-day launch. The affiliates who climb the leaderboard aren’t the ones who avoid it. They’re the ones who have someone telling them it’s temporary, and what tends to work to pull out of it.
Manu Muraro’s third email on the last day, and why it outperformed
Manu Muraro finished in the top 10 of the same launch with a list most affiliates would consider too small to bother promoting. On the final day, she sent three emails instead of one. The third email, sent late in the day as the cart was about to close, brought in roughly 20 sales and $16,000 on its own.
That’s not a fluke of good copy. It’s math. A chunk of any list doesn’t open the first email of the day, and a chunk of the people who do open it still don’t act on it right away. Every additional email on the last day of a launch is a second and third chance at people who already wanted to buy but got distracted, not a fresh pitch to people who said no. Stopping at one email on cart close day leaves sales sitting on the table that a second or third message would have closed.
Most affiliates hesitate to send a third email because it feels like too much. They worry about unsubscribes or annoying their list. Manu’s result suggests that worry costs more than it saves. The people who unsubscribe over a third email on the last day were rarely going to buy anyway. The people who buy because of that email are the ones who were on the fence, got busy, and needed one more nudge before the window closed for good.
If you want the full method behind how small-list affiliates consistently outperform people with ten times their reach, that’s exactly what The 7 Secrets of Overachieving Affiliates breaks down. Manu’s story is one data point. The report is the pattern behind it.
Using Instagram to make the leaderboard when your list is tiny
The part of Manu’s finish that surprises people is the channel. She’s a social media strategist who teaches entrepreneurs how to grow sales on Instagram, and that’s what she used for this promotion. Not paid ads. Not a funnel. Posts and stories, on a platform most affiliates treat as an afterthought to their email list.
Her email list was smaller than almost everyone else near the top of that leaderboard, and she still finished in the top 10. The lesson isn’t “use Instagram instead of email.” It’s that the channel doesn’t have to match everyone else’s. If your audience lives somewhere other than their inbox, the contest doesn’t care how you got the sale. It only counts that you got it.
This matters most for affiliates who’ve written off a contest before it starts because their list feels too small to compete. The leaderboard isn’t measuring list size. It’s measuring sales. If your following is bigger on Instagram, YouTube, a podcast, or even a niche forum than it is in your inbox, that’s where you promote. Trying to force a promotion through a channel where your audience barely shows up, just because that’s the channel other affiliates use, is how a small list stays small on the leaderboard too.
The real math of moving up one spot on the leaderboard
Heidi made a point in her episode that’s easy to miss if you’re only thinking about bragging rights: finishing first instead of third in that launch wasn’t just a better title on the leaderboard. It was worth $3,000 to $4,000 more per sale to her, because of how the prize structure and bonuses stacked for the top spot.
That’s the number contest posts for affiliates almost never run. Most of them talk about tiers and prizes in the abstract, the way you’d see them described from the manager’s side of a leaderboard. From the affiliate side, the question isn’t “what place am I in.” It’s “what is each place actually worth to me,” and the answer is usually a bigger number than people assume. One more sale on the last day, or one more affiliate you collaborate with instead of ignore, can be the difference between a good launch and a materially better one.
Run that math before you promote, not after the leaderboard closes. Look at how the prize tiers actually stack, not just the headline prize at number one. A lot of contests pay a flat bonus for the top three, which means the real gap in value sits somewhere else entirely, like between fourth and fifth, or between the cutoff for a bonus tier and one spot below it. Knowing where that gap sits before the cart opens tells you exactly how hard to push on the last day, and whether that third email is worth the risk Manu took.
Three things to set up before your next affiliate contest
Heidi and Manu didn’t do any of this mid-launch. They had it decided before the cart opened. Three things worth deciding now, before your next promotion starts:
First, pick your bonus before the launch, not during it. If it’s not something your audience can get anywhere else, it’s not doing the job a bonus is supposed to do. Give yourself enough runway to actually build it. A prep course, a short video series, or a live walkthrough takes longer to put together than a PDF, but it’s also the kind of bonus nobody else in the promotion is likely to have.
Second, line up at least one other affiliate to compare notes with during the promotion. You don’t need a formal deal. You need one person who’ll tell you what’s working before the launch is over, not after. Reach out before the cart opens, not on day three when you’re already behind.
Third, write your last-48-hour email sequence in advance. Decide now how many emails you’re sending on cart close day, so you’re not deciding at 11pm whether a third email is worth the risk. It almost always is. And if email isn’t where your audience actually pays attention, build the equivalent sequence for whatever channel is, whether that’s Instagram stories, a podcast mention, or a post in a community you’re active in.
If you want a head start on the planning instead of building it from scratch, the Promotion Checklist Template walks through exactly what to have ready before cart open, including the email cadence for the last two days. It’s free, and it’s the same checklist behind a lot of the finishes above.
Written by Matt McWilliams, a four-time Affiliate Manager of the Year who has trained more than 330,000 affiliates and driven over $1.8 billion in affiliate sales across programs including HometownQuotes and Shutterfly. Read more about Matt’s background.
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