“If you’re launching a book and want more sales, more exposure, and a bigger impact, affiliates are the secret weapon. But most authors screw up the launch because they don’t know how to use affiliates the right way. In this episode, I’m walking you through the exact blueprint we’ve used to launch more than 10 bestsellers: what worked, what didn’t, and how you can copy it step-by-step.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Links Mentioned in this Episode
Affiliate Marketing for Authors Training
Behind the Scenes of the Real Artists Don’t Starve Book Launch
Your First 100 Affiliates Report
Affiliate Recruiting Swipe Files
The Book on Affiliate Management
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
How I Found Affiliates for My Book (And How You Can Too)
The Shocking Truth About My Affiliate Program
How Affiliate Managers Can Get Focused and Stay Focused
$5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets: How Instagram Fueled a Top 10 Finish
The Affiliate Book Launch Blueprint
If you’re launching a book and you want more sales, more exposure and a bigger impact, then affiliates are your secret weapon. But most authors screw up the launch. Because they don’t know how to use. Affiliates the right way. In this episode, I’m walking you through the exact blueprint we’ve used to launch more than 10 bestsellers. What worked, what didn’t, and how you can copy it step by step.
If you’re ready to take your affiliate. Program and your business to the next. Level, we you’re in the right place. I’m Matt McWilliams, best selling author and four time affiliate manager of the year. And I’ve built dozens of affiliate programs from the ground up to over a.Million dollars a month. I’m here to show you how you can do it too.
Let’s get started. So in the last episode I talked about finding affiliates for your book launch. And if you missed that episode, make sure you go back and listen to it. Because I shared, multiple strategies, but one specific strategy that is just, I don’t know how to say. It’s like it’s a game changer for book launches. Right. Most of what I shared in that episode applies to book launches. They apply to product launches, service launches, like anything launches, really, whatever type of launch you’re doing. But there’s one specific thing that I shared in particular that applies to book launches.
So you want to make sure you. Go back and listen to that. I’m in book mode, as I. Mentioned in last episode. In fact, this is part of a series on books. I’m launching my book. It is officially live. The Book on Affiliate Management. Yes, that is the name. The book on affiliate Management. It is live now. You can get that@addilionatemanagementbook.com and I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. Make sure you go check that out. We got some, at least as of this recording, we got some amazing bonuses that are going along with the book.
Need help activating your affiliates? Use my proven email templates for getting inactive affiliates in the game and making sales! Get them here!
And you want to, make sure you get, you know, take advantage of those because they’re not gonna be available for very long again, affiliatemanagementbook.com and so we’ve applied these principles to that launch and to my previous book, Turn youn Passions into Profits, and over a dozen other book launches for people like Lewis Howes and Brian Tracy, and Jeff Goins and so many others that we’ve done this. And so I’m doing this series and in fact I’ve got an episode coming up about using affiliate marketing in your Book. And then I’ve also got an episode about a another new that is out right now with my friend Kyle Young and he talks about some of those strategies.
And today we’re going to talk about the actual book launch, the timeline, the specifics about what to do with your affiliates. Now in that last episode, real quick, I did, I, did mention some resources that I want to point out because they’re relevant to this episode as well. We’ve got the affiliate marketing for authors training mattmcwaims.com authors Again, these are all in the show notes.
You want to check that out? Got that. Behind the scenes look at one of the book launches we ran like almost a decade ago that you want to go check out, your First 100 affiliates. MattMcWams M M.com First 100. And like I said, my book affiliatemanagementbook.com. you will definitely want to check that out right now because again, these are all relevant to this episode.
So like I said, book launch mode for me. I’m talking a lot about books. I’m just kind of in that mode. And, I’m just, you know, I’m even thinking about like my next book launch right now. It’s you know, and then I’ve mentioned before, I’ve got a publishing company now. And so we’re launching like a book a month, mostly in the children’s book, you know, like middle age books.
Middle age meaning like, you know, middle grade, sorry, 10 to 15 year olds. And we’re launching these books. They’re all, they’re narratives that teach, you know, life lessons, like the lessons from the book Mindset by Carol Dweck and how to win friends and influence people atomic habits. We’re partnering with some amazing people that I can’t quite talk about yet, but I can soon.
Some living legends, all these things, it’s just, it’s on my mind. And I’m telling you affiliates are the secret weapon. In the last episode, I really focus on the finding affiliates part. Today I want to focus on what do you do once you’ve got them? What, like once somebody says, yes, now what do we do? Now? Everything, like I said, can apply to other, you know, launches as well. So if you’re like, I don’t want to launch a book, it’s okay.
You should still listen because this is relevant. So what follows is about 20 minutes or so of a private training I did a few years ago for a mastermind all about book marketing. These are people that had already written at least One book that sold a minimum of, I want to say, at least 3,000 copies, which, just to be clear, something like less than 1/10 of 1% of all books sell more than 100 copies. So these guys are already in the top, like,.05%. And these, you know, they want to sell more.
They want to sell more. So this was a private training I did, about a year after kind of like everything reopened. So I say, you know, mid to late, early 20, 2022. I’m not sure when. Somewhere in that range, like early 2022. And I was about a year out from my book. So I even talk about that. My. My previous book, Turn your passes into profits. So that’s what you’re getting ready to hear. This private training, I’m now opening it up for you to have access to it. So let’s jump right in.
A lot of what I’m sharing comes from my own experiences. I think. I think I’ve run 16 book launches, affiliate book launches. If it’s not 16, it’s pretty darn close. But I remember the very first one that I ever ran. Like, I’d run product launches. I’d kind of been in that world. I’d run some big affiliate programs like Shutterfly and Adidas, along with, you know, my own programs. And a guy named Jeff Goins came to me and said, can you run my, you know, help me with affiliates on my book launch?
I’m like, I never thought about that. This is almost 10 years ago. Like, affiliates for a book launch, you know, okay, that kind of makes sense. But, you know, I’ve never even thought about that. And he came to me and he said, you know, after we’d been working together for a couple of weeks, he’s like, hey, we’re, you know, we’re like eight weeks out from the launch. And I need to tell my publisher, in a pretty big publisher, I need to tell them how many books I’m going to sell.
And I said, well, you know, based on the numbers that I’m seeing and what I expect to be able to do for you and help you, I’m like, tell them 15,000. He’s like, I cannot tell them 15,000. I’m like, why not? And he’s like, dude, my Last book sold 3,500. I’m M. Like, so, okay, well, you’re a little bit bigger. That’ll get you to 5,000. He’s like, yeah, I was thinking like six or 7,000, you know, like, no, you’re going to get to 5,000. You’re going to go from 3,500 to 5,000 on your own.
I think we can triple that with affiliates. In fact, I know we can, we can triple that with affiliates. He’s like, there’s no way I can tell them 15,000. And I finally just kind of said, you’re going to tell them 15,000 or I’m not going to work with you. You know, like, just I’m so confident in that that I do not want you to go to them and tell them seven, you know, or even 10. And then we’re blowing through that. Well, long story short is we ended up doing 22,000 pre orders and we’ll talk about why pre orders are so important here in a little bit.
But we ended up doing 22,000 pre orders with more book sales down the road. And from there we went on to run book launches for, you know, Brian Tracy, Lewis Howes, number two, you know, bestseller. I think every book we’ve ever done, almost all of them have been at least like number one in their category on Amazon. We’ve had, you know, half a dozen Wall Street Journal bestsellers and couple of New York Times. And I mean, just like crazy, right? And so we have a proven track record of this and I feel like we’ve learned a lot of stuff over the years.
Now, last time I shared how you want to, you know, number one, these are relevant to actually, once you get the affiliates, you got to set up a back end offer. We talked about that in the last episode, so I won’t go into that here. How you want to drive traffic to an opt in page, how you want to upsell and pay a solid commission, and you want to make your cookies long. Now, ideally, you want to recruit your affiliates at least six months out. So we’re going to use that as a guideline here, right, for what you’ll do leading up to the launch.
The big thing, just mentally is you want to treat it like a product launch. You want to treat it like a product launch. We’re looking at this and going, okay, we got to get on people’s calendars. So all that has to do with the recruiting side. But then what do we want to do? We want to keep them engaged. You know, I’ve talked about this, I talked about this when I talk about onboarding affiliates and how to keep your affiliates warm, how to use a, communication calendar and things like that. It’s a little bit different for books because typically there’s only one call to action for a book. Go buy the book. Go buy the book. Go buy the book. You know, claim the bonuses. Claim the bonuses. Claim the bonuses. Those are the calls to action. So there’s not a lot of moving parts, just one call to action, typically. But starting out, before you even recruit your first affiliate, one of the things that I want you to do is get clear on your number one purpose.
All right? Is your number one purpose sales? You know, I wanna make as much money as possible on the back end. We talked about that in the last episode. Like I wanna make, you know, I wanted this to be a million doll book launch. Is it to kind of have the book be like a lead magnet and, you know, a low price but still paid lead magnet. Is it to have a bestseller? Is it, you know, something else? Right.
Like, what is the number one purpose of your book? And you need to get clear on that because it does drive a little bit of what you do in terms of how you structure your launch. I won’t go into all the details in that, but if it’s, you know, to hit the best seller, then that rules out typically that you want to do a free plus shipping offer, for example, like we talked about in the last episode.
You don’t want to do that because they typically kind of frown upon those. It’s, not impossible with that. It’s just that they don’t typically like those as much as they do a paid offer. So it’s how you set up your funnel is going to be different. Are you focused on, you know, back end sales? Well, then you want to convert as many people into buying the book as possible. Absolutely.
But if you’re more focused on the back end sales, then you might lower the price of the book because you’re just focused on getting them to the next step. And the next step. And the next step. If it’s to maximize, you know, royalties on the book, well, then you price the book as high as possible, within reason. You know, a hardback would probably be 2295, something like that paperback would probably be in the $16 range. You know, something like that. What is it? You know, also it helps, you know, when you’re talking about back end sales.
If you hit a bestseller, well, then offering the audiobook as an upsell definitely increases the odds that you’re going to hit the bestseller list. Because if you sell 10,000 books, but you convince 4,000 of them to also get the audiobook, well, that has an impact on bestseller list. Is it to possibly sweeten the pot more for multiple orders? Hey, if you buy 10 books, then you get this 50 books, you get this. That increases the odds that somebody will buy 10 or 50 books.
So you gotta get crystal clear on your number one purpose. And the big thing is you gotta focus on pre orders. All right, the reason why we want to focus on pre orders is all those pre orders count to those first week sales, which typically, you know, again, this doesn’t matter if you don’t really care about hitting a bestseller list, but most people would prefer to hit a bestseller list rather than not. And so if you get 15,000 pre orders, that’s 15,000 pre orders that go to your first week sales, that’s 15,000 in a week, even if you collected them over the course of eight weeks.
And so you stand a much better chance of hitting a bestseller list with 15,000 pre orders than you do if you tried. If you only got 5,000 orders the week of, and then 5,000 the next week and 5,000 the next week, same number of orders over the case of three weeks. But you’re not going to hit a bestseller list with only 5,000 orders in a week. So if the launch date is August 1st, then the pre order push would really start post July 4th. Yeah, you could have people selling the book before that, of course, but really after July 4th is going to be the big pre order push.
So you want to focus on this. And I would basically, I would pick the first Tuesday after July 4th. I’m not looking at the calendar for when this is airing in 2022, but let’s just say that’s July 8th. Then July 8th is when we’re gonna start the push. That’s when we wanna start affiliates, emailing, doing things like Facebook Lives. We wanna have podcasts airing, you know, from basically July 8th through, you know, the launch date of August 1st. And you wanna think of launch day, August 1st. A lot of people think, oh, my book launched today.
Yay. No, that’s cart close day. That’s cart close day. I joke, like the day after your book launches client, I go on vacation. You know, I busted my butt for the six to eight weeks before this. You know, worked hard for six to eight months before that. But I really busted it for those last six or so weeks. I’m going on vacation the next day. Why? Because truth be told, I do care. But you’re probably not going to sell a whole lot of Books on August 2, and there’s not much I’m going to do to move the needle. And that’s not what we care about.
We want to help you hit your goal of reaching the best seller list, we’re going to work to get all those orders in from July 8th through August 1st. So if the promo starts after July 4th, we’re starting this timeline in January. All right, so number one, in January, as soon as people sign up, I want to get affiliates a copy of the book. In fact, I usually get them at least the rough copy of the book, the unedited or like a middle of the editing process book for review before they even sign up. You know, like, hey, go review this, you know, copy of the book.
See what you think. But now I want to get them as soon as possible a physical copy of the book, an audiobook if there, you know, if there’s going to be one of those. I want to get them everything that they need in terms of, you know, the book itself. I want to start scheduling podcasts. My book comes out in January of 2023. Turn youn Passions into Profits. I’ve already got podcasts scheduled to record in August of this year, to release after Christmas into January of 2023. So as far in advance as possible, we want to get on these people’s schedules.
So if you’re running somebody else’s book launch, you’re running your own, whatever it is, you’re running one for somebody you work for. Schedule those things as far in advance as possible and then communicate with them like you would like. We recommend for a launch. So six months out until about one month out. We want to communicate twice a month, once via email, once in a partner Facebook group. If you don’t have a Facebook group for your book launch affiliates, you should have one, by the way.
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So I’ll do something, you know, early in the month of January that’s focused on like maybe a scheduling things like that, letting them know, reminding them, giving them a copy of the book. Then I’ll do something in the second half of the month in the Facebook group and I’ll just kind of alternate email Facebook group once a month each of those. Now as we get to about four to six weeks out from our target date of, basically post July 4th. So in this particular case, I think I said July 8th, June 1st.
I’m going to start to ramp up the communication again, just standard communication for a launch. So I’m going to start to give them things like behind the scenes access. I’m going to unbox the book for them. I’m going to share the concepts in the book. Maybe I’m going to read a few things, maybe tell them a story about how this chapter came to be or give them some of that behind the scenes editing access. Like right now I’m going through some of the big editing in the book.
I can give them, even though we’re 11 months out, but I could give them some of that, like, hey, this section here originally started as this and then it developed into this and yada, yada, right. I’m going to constantly hammer home those important dates. July 8, July 8, July 8, July eighth. Make sure they are clear about the push for pre orders, that this is not start promoting August 1st. That’s the book launch date. It’s all about pre orders.
I’m going to teach them why it’s about pre orders, why it’s about pre orders, you know, over and over. So there’s no confusion on the dates. I’m going to create promo plans for them. Now, it’s only one offer and that’s the book. Right? They’re not mentioning the back end stuff on the front end. So you got to help them understand the timing of the promotion. So we want that first email to go out, you know, 10 to 15 days before August 1st.
So we really want people to start promoting, you know, middle of July. Hey, if you want to start promoting July 8th, that’s great. We want that second email to go out around, you know, July 24th, 25th, about a week out. Want a final email on the final day. We want to tell them, hey, if you’re really intense, then mail even more. Right? You’re going to mail the day before the deadline. You’re going to mail two to three times in the final day.
In the push here, just so you know, the push for that Aug. 1 deadline, that push for that, whatever your deadline is, your launch date is to claim the preorder bonuses. Can you still get the book on August 2nd? Of course, you’re just not going to get the bonuses. So you want to craft a plan that involves email and social media, live interviews, podcasts, like be willing to go on as many podcasts, podcasts and lives as possible. I recommend.
This is something that I decided on early on, that what I want to do is once we finish the book in the sense of we’ve gone through the developmental edit, like, I’m not worried about copy editing, whether or not there needs to be a semicolon here or something like that, I’m not worried about that. But once the book is done and the content is done, and I know for a fact that you know everything that is in the book, that I wanted in the book is in there.
And I know what’s not in there. For example. So my original manuscript for turn your passions into profits, for example, is 117,000 words. Publisher wants it at 75,000. Between us, between us girls, we’ll get it down to about 78, and they’ll just have to deal with that. But so I need to know what’s not in it. You know, what’s going to be in the audio book, which will have the longer version. What’s going to be in the audiobook that’s not in the physical book. And so I need to know those things.
So once I’ve done that, then what I want to do is I want to start doing some small podcasts. Podcasts. I don’t care how many listeners. You can give 10 listeners, and I want that host to ask me questions. And I’m going to talk about the concepts in the book and develop those concepts, and I’m going to do 10 to 20 of those small podcasts. I’m going to talk about them on my podcast, develop those concepts. Right?
And the stories. Make sure I got. You know, there’s a lot of new material in my book, for example, so it’s not stuff I’ve talked about before, and I really don’t have it all nailed down. I developed some concepts, for example, I developed these eight archetypes of types of leaders. You know, like, I remember the hesitant hero and the master maestro and the revolutionary rebel, you know, But I honestly, I can’t remember all eight right now.
I developed them for the book, and so I don’t even remember them all. Well, if somebody asked me right now, what are the eight, you know, archetypes of, of a leader of, you know, meaning leading your platform, right? You know, blogger, podcast or whatever. I don’t even remember all eight, so I got to work through those. So I want to do these small podcasts six, seven months out, and then as we get closer, I’ll start doing bigger podcasts, but I’ll develop my material just like a comedian does, right?
They do their show in front of 20 people, 30 people, 50 people. They do it a hundred times before they ever go and do a Netflix special. So we want to craft that plan for them. We want to do that plan with the affiliates, like, here’s when you need to schedule the interview and when it needs to release and things like that. We want to announce contests and prizes, if there’s going to be any, you know, what kinds of contests you’re going to do. Are, they, they focused on book sales? Are they focused on bulk sales? Whatever. We want to do that, not focus on the back end. So we want to do different contests. Like, you know, every 100 books, you get this much money. If you do 100 book sales or 10 book sales and you’re entered to win, you know, $1,000, if you do 25 book sales, you’re entered into, you know, you get into the mastermind, things like that. Right?
Want to teach them, we want to help them with how to promote, we want to train them. So we want to do some trainings on how to train affiliates. Just keep constantly give them updates. Right. get a good endorsement, share that with them. If you get big media, share it with them.
Like if you’re going to be on Good morning America, share that with them because they want to be a part of something that’s featured on big media. You know, start the Facebook group, as I mentioned. Ask if they need anything. Ask them months in advance, hey, what do you need to promote this book? I need this, this and this.
Boom. Got it. You know, and thing is, if you ask your affiliates that three, four, five months out, then if they come up with something wild, you and your team have time to create it, versus if you ask them just two days before, it’s like, oh, shoot, we don’t have time to create that. You know, ask for referrals. Send them an email asking for referrals. Like, hey, do you know anybody who might be a good fit to promote this book? Make sure you send a copy of the book I mentioned earlier. I mean, just, you could have 500 affiliates, it would cost you less than $2,000 to mail every one of them a copy of the book. If you send it via media mail, if you get a little fancy, send it to them in like a box, a nicer box. It might cost you like seven bucks a pop. You know, create swipe copy. This is another thing you got to do. You got to create swipe copy for various audiences for the book. So identify those three or four audiences. Right?
I remember for Jeff Goins years ago with the book I mentioned earlier, the Art of Work, I think it was like we had the audience of current entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs, faith based. And I think it was like Stay at home Moms, I think was the fourth one. And we had this book that was geared. We had the same book, but we had four different kind of paths. Four different, almost like four different avatars for the book.
So that’s important to make sure you have different versions of the swipe copy for your affiliates. Few other little notes as you get ready for your launch. Make sure you test the sales funnel out early. Don’t wait till the last minute. Get it done early. Test it early and often. Test all kinds of scenarios. If they buy the book and then go this way. If they take this offer but don’t take this one, if they don’t take this one but do take that one, what happens if they bypass it?
Does everything work right? Follow up, follow up, follow up, follow up. We talked about this last time. Collect their email address first before it goes to the buy page if at all possible, and then follow up. If they don’t buy the book, follow up, follow up, follow up, follow up. They don’t claim their bonuses. Follow up, follow up, follow up, follow up. If they don’t take an upsell, follow up, follow up. Like this is a product launch. And remember, your affiliates only get paid on sales of the upsells.
Maybe you could do it. Maybe you could set up where they get a buck or two on the book, but usually there’s not a lot of money there. So if they buy the book but don’t take any of the upsells, follow up with them. Follow up with them before they get the book. Follow up with them a couple weeks after they would have gotten the book. Hey, how’s the book going? Do you want this? Are you finding it hard to read the book? Well, if so, go grab the audiobook and all that goes through your affiliates.
And then make sure you encourage your affiliates to help with upsells. All right, so this is something you gotta make sure you get your privacy stuff in order here. And I’m not a legal expert, so I just. I rely on our legal experts to do that. But make sure, if at all possible, that you share those who bought the book or claim the bonuses with your affiliates so they can help with the upsells. That email coming from them will go a long way. So they can send a couple of. Have an email sequence.
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Hey, send this to everybody who didn’t purchase the upsell. They’re gonna make a lot of money off those. And they’re only sending it to, say, 100 people. So it’s not like they have to, you know, send an email to their whole list or anything like that. So that’s what you need to be doing during the launch. I know it’s a lot of different things kind of bounced around a little bit, But I just wanted you to get a really good idea of what it looks like once you got the affiliates, what those timelines and specifics look like about what to do with your affiliates, that’s super important. This is why Jeff Goins did 22,000 pre orders versus say, 5,000 or 6,000. You know, this is kind of the secret sauce here.
All right, so I gave you the playbook. Make sure you actually go follow the playbook and make sure you come back for the next couple of episodes. Because I’ve got even more talking about affiliate marketing and books. You know, you’ve written the book. How do you make a little bit more from the book? Not like $20 more per book, but how do you make an extra dollar or two or three and, you know, say, well, whoop dee doo, Matt. Well, if you’re selling 50,000 copies and you make an extra 3, 4, 5 dollars a book from affiliate marketing, that can be a quarter million dollars. You know, how do you make. I mean, I’ve seen people make an extra 10 bucks a book just from affiliate marketing. So this is the things that we’ve helped our clients do. You know, we had one, sold about 25,000 copies, did over an extra 150,000.
In revenue at that time. This was almost a decade ago. That was two staff members that they. Could pay for just by doing some. Little things that I’m going to teach in the next episode. Like, these are really, really little things. So make sure you come back for that if you haven’t yet hit subscribe so you don’t miss that episode or any of the other ones. And if you’ve got questions about this, about book marketing, book sales, finding affiliates for your book or anything else, really, you can text me anytime at 260-217-4619. As always, make sure you come back for the next episode. I’ll see you then.
See you soon.