What I’m about to share with you might honestly shock you. It used to be the single worst part of my entire business. Something that held me back for nearly three years. I’m ashamed to admit that the worst part of our company was our affiliate management. In this episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on exactly what went wrong, why even I — The Affiliate Guy — struggled with this, and most importantly… how we finally solved it.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
How Affiliate Managers Can Get Focused and Stay Focused
$5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets: How Instagram Fueled a Top 10 Finish
$5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets: How Justin Demers & Sara Temte Climbed to Second Place
$5.7 Million Affiliate Launch Secrets: How a Beginner Earned $18K on Their First Promo
The Shocking Truth About My Affiliate Program
Matt McWilliams: What I’m about to share with you might shock you. It’s the single worst part of my entire business, and it’s something that’s held me back for nearly three years. I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but the worst part of our entire company is.
Let’s get started. So the title of this episode, uh, if you read the full thing, is the worst part of my entire business, why you need to hire an affiliate manager. And that’s a little bit of a tease, right? If you read the full title, you’re going, huh, Huh. I may have figured out what the worst part of Matt’s business is, but surely it’s not affiliate management. Well, it is. The worst part of my entire business for the past three years has been affiliate management. Now I’m going to explain why that is and how we solved that problem.
We have solved that problem. But the reality is that I started realizing about three years ago that it’s hard to be my own affiliate manager. I feel like I might be the best in the world at, uh, what I do. And yet I am now managing a team of more than 10 people. I am now, you know, the CEO of a, uh, of a fast growing company. I’m responsible for, just like many of you, many business owners, I’m responsible for the management of our content. You know, I’m recording this podcast right now.
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This 20 minutes or so that I’ll record this podcast is time that I’m not being an affiliate manager. The hour or so that I go live every Thursday is time that I’m not an affiliate manager. The time I spend prepping for that is time that I’m not an affiliate manager. The time I spent planning the content and planning our promotions and planning all of our stuff and answering questions from the team and what do we want to do here? And what do you want to do that and delivering the webinars that we do with our partners.
It adds up to tens of hours a week. 20, 30. Now close to 35 hours a week that I spend doing the management. I didn’t have time to be an affiliate manager for my own company. And it really hit kind of a breaking, um, point a few years ago. We were running a big launch. I mean, this ended up, at the time, it was our biggest launch that we’d ever had. And we were on track to, you know, to absolutely just shatter all of our records and our goals. And I remember the second to last night we did a six hour live stream.
I feel like we started at like, you know, 5pm and I went till after 11pm and this is the night before cart close, day busy. I mean this is huge. Like all of our affiliates are getting ready for, you know, the next day and all of their plans. And I’m live for six hours. I remember, I think I was uh, I want to say I took like a break at the top or bottom of every hour for like, you know, three minutes. I run to the bathroom and uh, one of my old team members was on with me and you know, he’d take a break.
Like we kind of alternate, you know, like every half hour one of us would kind of take off for like two or three minutes. And I remember I took like a 10 or 12 minute break about halfway through. You know, it was like 8pm, went up and just, you know, took a quick break just to decompress and then came back on. But I remember like getting text messages about the launch from our affiliates who have questions of their affiliate manager. And I’m like trying to text them under the table that, you know, it was ridiculous and it was unsustainable. And the worst part of that whole launch was the affiliate management. And I went, okay, something’s gotta change. And so all throughout this though, when I’m running people’s affiliate programs, I’m the best in the world, but it’s the worst part of my business. So the solution was that this year we hired someone. And I wanna talk today about why you should too.
Now first I want to address the things that I’ve talked about before. You know, early on I believe you should be your own affiliate manager. And if you’re not, I feel like you need to know more about how to run an affiliate program. You need to understand it, right? This is the number one mistake. I see entrepreneurs who start an affiliate program when they’re starting out. They know they need some help running it. So they hire an affiliate manager and they promptly abdicate all responsibility for their program to him or her. And then they wonder why it keeps getting smaller and not larger.
Do not make this mistake. You need to be involved and early on you need to be the one doing almost all of the work on your affiliate program early on. But then as you grow, you begin to have different needs and you need to possibly hire one. So I’ve mentioned before kind of some of the problems with, you know, affiliate managers. I’ve been one for 17 years. But I want to be honest, I want to share some of the problems. I want to share the solution. I’ve seen three major problems with affiliate managers over the year. In fact, I’ve contributed to some of these problems.
These problems are exactly why we now spend a lot of our time coaching entrepreneurs on running their affiliate programs and coaching affiliate managers on how to be better affiliate managers so that they aren’t contributing to these problems. You know, number one, they aren’t you. I can’t be you. When you hire Matt McWilliams Consulting to be your affiliate manager, I can’t be you. And there are certain relationships that you need to have as the entrepreneur. You are the best person at those relationships. Nothing I can do can replace that. And so we tell people all the time, hey, when we take over, we take over running your affiliate program, we’re going to take care of 98% of the stuff.
We’re going to take 98% of all the responsibilities off your plate. What’s the 2%? Relationships. Relationships. You know, as an affiliate manager, when a company hires us to run their affiliate program, the very first thing we do is we schedule a 90 minute, two hour long meeting just for us to better understand your company.
We go through. I tell people that one of the big things is we’re trying to craft a narrative. I want to know what are the stories? What are the cool stories from people who you know, your students, your, your, your clients, your customers, what are the results you’re getting? What’s the narrative? Who’s this product for? Who’s it not for?
Like all these things, I want to know these things. I want to be able to speak your language and speak the language of your affiliates and your clients, but I can never do it as good as you. And so with some of those top partners, you’re going to need to be the one that kind of has at least a part of that relationship. So let me be clear. Early on, there’s no one better than you to run your affiliate program.
When you’re first starting out under six figures, especially, there’s no one better. The second problem with affiliate managers is that their incentives are wrong. You know, by definition, they are often incentivized to grow your program, but at what cost? So when you have a growth at all cost strategy, they allow things like trademark bidding and rogue affiliates and affiliates who use nefarious tactics to attract customers, right?
They’re hard to police and they can cause brand damage. These are things that I worry about in my company. It’s why when we hired the person that we hired, I mean, it was a five month process. Like, I know Jim is amazing. And if you’re interested, by the way, in being an affiliate for any of our stuff, just reach out to partnersatmcwilliams.com you’ll get Jim Askins and he’s going to absolutely help you.
And he’s 100% on board. He has been trained by me and he’s still being coached by me, you know, so if you want an affiliate program run as well as any, it’s going to be ours now. Not, uh, before he took over. Before he took over, I sucked at it because I was too busy doing everything else in our company. So their incentives are wrong. And then thirdly, you know, their first priority is always their job.
Their first priority is protecting their job, looking good, keeping you as a client or an employer, making the most money for the longest amount of time. And so I remember, like, there have been times, I hate to admit this, but there were times back when our company, uh, you know, as affiliate managers, when we ran programs like Shutterfly and Adidas and other big companies, we had to be very careful not to grow too fast.
Publicly traded companies don’t want you to grow too fast. They don’t want you to grow by 60% this quarter and then only 20% next quarter. Even though that is better than 40. 40. If I grow 40, 40, that’s actually less growth than 60. 20. Okay. Uh, just because, you know, math, right. And so they’re worried about their stock price, so we would purposely hold back growth. Entrepreneurs don’t want that. I want to grow as fast as possible.
If Jim comes to me and goes, hey, Matt, just so you know, we got this deal and they’re going to do a million dollars next quarter, but nothing the rest of the year. I’m going to go, uh, cool. I have literally no problem with that. I don’t get it. So you don’t have to have someone run your affiliate program for you. Okay? You need to learn how to do it and you need to understand some of the principles, you need to understand the relationships.
But it reaches a point where you just can’t do it. You’re busy running your business, you can’t be on a live stream and at the same time be communicating with your affiliates. So you need a full time affiliate manager. You need someone like us to take that over for you. And just to be clear, I’m not selling you on Our agency, you know, we work with the best of the best. Yes. So maybe I am a little bit, you know, we work with Ryan levesque and Stu McLaren, we’ve worked with Michael Hyatt and Ray Edwards.
Uh, we work with, you know, Tricia Brooke. And just literally, if you look at an affiliate program over the past five or six years, pretty decent chance we ran it. There’s a reason for that. But that’s not what this is about. Whether you hire us and we’ll do an amazing job for you, or, or whether you hire, you know, somebody full time who we coach, we can coach them on how to do it. It’s probably not something that once you hit high five figures or six figures that you need to be doing yourself because it’s going to suffer.
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I feel like I’m the best in the world at what I do and I can’t do my own affiliate program and run our business at the same time. It’s just not possible, not at, I can’t run it at the level that, that I know it needs to be run at. And part of that, admittedly is my expectations, my standards. But, uh, part of that is I know that if I invest in a good affiliate manager, you know, if I go out and hire someone and you know, just so you know, for us or somebody else, you know, you’re going to pay between, you know, 60 and $125,000 a year.
If I go out and invest $100,000, I’m going to make five, 10, 30 times that amount of money. Just to be clear, you pay us $125,000, you’re making about 20 times that, you know, and so I know that it’s going to be worth it and it’s going to free me up and I’m not going to feel the stress of, oh my gosh, I got to. Okay, I’m on this live stream and I have my 10 minute break. I have my 10 minute break in a 6 hour live stream. 10 minutes to go talk to my wife, put my feet up, you know, drink some throat coat tea and just go to the bathroom and rest for six seconds. And what am I doing?
I’m feverishly texting affiliates back and replying to emails. That’s not the way it should be. And if you don’t want that kind of life, you’ve got to hire an affiliate manager, not make the mistake that we made. I’ve been saying for years you don’t need to hire an affiliate manager, which is odds considering that I run an affiliate management agency. And you don’t. When you’re first starting out, what I don’t want you to do is make the mistake that a lot of people make and go, well, one of these days when I can hire an affiliate manager, I’m going to start an affiliate program.
What? That’s absurd. Uh, one of these days when I can afford to hire a weight loss coach, I’m going to lose weight. No, I love Alan Thomas, who works for us, and he’s a weight loss coach. I love him to death. But you don’t have to wait. You know, one of these days when, one of these days when I get married, I’m going to start dating. What? That would be ridiculous. You know, that’s absolutely absurd. You keep waiting. It’s not going to happen.
But once you reach a certain point, and typically that point is going to be somewhere between, you know, it’s going to be represented by revenue, somewhere between 100 and $250,000. Somewhere in that range, you need to hire an affiliate manager. So if you’re looking for an affiliate manager, you’re looking for somebody like us. You can reach out to us anytime. Just the best way for to hire us is to email me at mattattmcwilliams.com if you’re interested in coaching for someone that maybe you already have hired or you’re looking to hire or you do want to get started, you say, matt, I’m doing, you know, 30, 40, 50, 65, $75,000 a year, and I want to get to that point where I need to hire somebody.
I want to get to that $200,000 mark. Then go to youraffiliatelaunchcoach.com and, um, we’ll talk about coaching you or coaching someone on your team. So don’t make the same mistake that I did. Uh, like I said, it’s kind of weird to come on here and admit worst part of my business. But I remedied that this year we hired Jim Askins. He’s a rock star affiliate manager. Like I said, if you’re interested in partnering with us, promoting our products, making some killer commissions, then reach out to Jim partnersatmcwilliams.com and Jim, uh, will give you the hookup. We’ll schedule a webinar or something.
We’ll do something cool together, but definitely reach, uh, out to him. So like I said, don’t make the same mistake I did. If you’re in that position, start to look okay. How much time are you spending on your affiliate program? Or more like me. How much time do you wish you were spending? Mine wasn’t that, oh my gosh, I’m spending five hours a week. Mine was that I really need to spend 20 hours a week and I don’t have those extra 15 hours. So make sure you do that.
Don’t make the same mistakes I’ve made with my affiliate programs. Learn my top 20 affiliate program mistakes…and how to avoid them!
Make sure you don’t make that same mistake and make sure you hit subscribe so that you don’t miss the next episode. I’m going to share with you about well, don’t launch if you don’t want this. We’re going to talk about not doing stuff like don’t do a product launch if you don’t want to be known for that. It’s going to be a fun episode. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss that.
And if you know somebody who needs this message, you know somebody who’s right where I was. You know, they’re in that $200,000 range or higher. They might be already in a million dollars. They’re running their own affiliate program and they need this message. Don’t do them a disservice. Share this episode with them so they don’t miss out on this content. They don’t make the same mistake that I did. So with that, I’ll see you in the next episode. I’m going to share with you when you should launch and when you should not. We’ll see you in the next episode.
See you soon.