Most people panic when managing 10 affiliates. We ran a launch with 1,200 of them. Today, I’m sharing the biggest lessons, the surprises, the wins, and the near-disasters from the trenches of our largest affiliate launches ever. If you ever plan to scale your program…or if you just want to avoid the same mistakes we made…I’ve got you covered.
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7 Secrets of 7-Figure Launches
How to Motivate Your Affiliates Before a Promotion or Launch
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
Creating Recurring Revenue Through Your Affiliate Program
Using Virtual Assistants to Scale Your Affiliate Program to 7 Figures
Time-Saving Tips for Busy Affiliate Managers
How Paul Pruitt Climbed to the Top of the Affiliate Leaderboard in Just 2 Years
Tools of the Trade: What Every Affiliate Manager Should Be Using
What I Learned From Running a Launch With 1,200 Affiliates
Most people panic when managing 10 affiliates. We recently ran a launch with 1200 of them. So today I’m sharing the biggest lessons, the surprises, the wins, even some of. The near disasters from the trenches of. One of our largest affiliate launches ever. If you ever plan to scale your program or if you just want to avoid the same mistakes that I made, I’ve got you covered in this episode.
Let’s get started. So recently we ran a massive launch. Not just, not just a big one. I mean it was a beast of a launch. We had over low, over 1200 registered affiliates like completely signed up. We had well over 750 who were active, you know, really, really close to eight figures in revenue. And I mean just a huge launch. Now it’s not the first time I’ve done this, but it’s the first time in a while that we’ve run a really big launch. Obviously I work with programs that have. Well over 1200 affiliates and well over.
You know, 750 active affiliates, but those are evergreen affiliates. So any given day, you know, in a program with, you know, I mean, even going back to the one I shared before, we talked about how we built a 325 million dollar program, you. Know, from 15 million in just a. Few years, even from that, with over A Hundred Thousand act or a sale. And that’s a massive program, you know, like beyond all comprehension compared to what we’re talking about here.
But you know, with a normal program. That would have say 2,000 affiliates and you know, 800 to a thousand of them would be active in a year. On any given day, only 40 or. So it’s, it’s manageable. Whereas this launch was confined to a 13 day period of time and it was absolutely huge. And so what I want to share here is kind of some of the real behind the scenes of a massive launch. I’m not going to talk a ton about the basics, all right, things like, you know, that I’ve done many, many times before where I’ve talked about the basics of running a Big affiliate launch. But what I also want to focus on is things that you can take away even if you only have 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 affiliates.
So these are things you’re going to want to write down. Some of this. I’ve, I’ve admittedly probably covered bits and pieces of this, but these are specific to the things that I learned. Having done our first big launch. I think this is our first big, big, big one since 2022. So over, I mean, almost exactly three years to the day, same time frame. So it’s been a while. I was reminded of some things. Honestly, I had forgotten a couple of things, to be fair or to be honest. Like, I really had just kind of. There’s a couple of things where I realized it, like, oh my gosh, I was supposed to do that. I just forgot, you know. So there’s a lesson for you. I talked, I’ve talked about this so many times. Make sure you keep things in your playbook and then make sure you actually.
Use your playbook, consult your playbook, don’t do like I did and kind of consult the playbook and forget about a. Couple of important things. So again, I doubt those cost us astronomical amounts of money, but, you know, probably cost us a few thousand bucks and that’d be nice to have. So there’s lesson one that I wasn’t planning on sharing, but something there.
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So I want to talk about, you know, kind of the good, the bad, the ugly, the overwhelming, all that stuff, right? You know, when you’re dealing with this massive launch for, you know, the Launch itself was 13 days, but there’s the obvious lead up to that, which is, you know, a week plus. And so there’s really like 21 straight days, give or take a couple of days, where it is completely chaos. Your inbox is always full.
There’s always an unread, like you don’t go 20 minutes without getting a slack message. You wake up to important things and you go to bed with important things still hanging and you have important things in the middle of the day, in the middle of the morning, in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of the evening, and you know, everything’s just blowing up and it’s crazy. Obviously there’s the build up to all that where it’s a lot less crazy.
But for roughly three weeks, it is complete chaos. And the thing is that scale, when you, when you’re dealing with bad. You know, there’s the old Saying like, money is not evil, money is not good or bad. It amplifies everything. If you’re a jerk, then you’re going to be a bigger jerk when you have a lot of money, you know, and if you’re generous, you’re going to be more generous.
When you have a lot of money, it amplifies everything in scale of an affiliate launch does the same thing, 100 to 1200, it’s 12 times more chaotic. It’s you’re 12 times busier. Maybe if you don’t follow some of the stuff I’ll talk about today, but you’re definitely going to be busier. There’s no doubt that I could take every lesson I’m going to share today. And if I run a program, if. I run a launch with only 100. Affiliates versus 1200, it’s going to be a lot less stressful and a lot less chaotic. The thing is, it amplifies especially every. System that you have. When your systems work, it is magical. When they don’t, it’s chaos. So how do we make it magical? How do we make it not unstressful? That’s unrealistic.
But how do we make it less stressful? How do we make it where we’re. Getting that extra 5 to 10% in. Sales from our systems? So actually, that’s lesson number one, just to transition right into that segue. Lesson number one, systems, save your sanity. All right, I made that alliterative. I think that’s my only alliterative one. So it’s because it’s that important system, save sanity.
So number one, do as much as you can in advance. Every communication, maybe not every 90 plus percent of the communications were templated in advance. They were ready in advance. I know going into a launch what. My day one communication is going to be pretty much. Now, might I change it a little bit based on something that happened, you know, the day before with a split test that we learned about X, Y and Z and we decided to move forward with that. Sure. But generally speaking, I know what I’m going to be saying. I know what I’m going to be saying in my last email.
My last email that I send out. Or second to last email is usually more of a heartfelt message that says, thank you for everything you’ve done. This is the end, but could you do one more final push? That’s the gist of it. And so I don’t necessarily have to write everything down to the word, but I could at least have a basic communication calendar. So as much as you can template things. If you’ve done something in the past, typically you’re not going to be doing a 1200 person, you know, 1200 affiliate launch if you, if it’s your first launch.
So if you’ve done stuff in the. Past, save emails that have worked, plan on like, hey, day three, I’m going to send this. Day five, I’m going to send this, the webinars on this day. So here’s my morning and my afternoon. Are going to look like and, and pre schedule as many of those. If you’re going to, and if you know for a fact that you’re going to announce a new contest, go ahead and plan that. If you, if you think you might announce a new contest, you know, if you’re undecided about maybe we’re going to roll one out for this weekend, this. The second weekend, right? We’re going to roll one out for the second week. We’re not sure we’re going to see.
How things are going. You could at least outline that so that it’s ready on Friday if you do decide to move forward. Because I would much rather spend 10 hours planning things and maybe not using 30 minutes of that work than having to spend that 10 hours during the launch. That’s how important the planning is.
I’d rather actually waste a half hour to an hour of my time, a month and a half, two months in advance than be scrambling during the launch. Because the time that I spend writing that email usually takes me half an hour to 45 minutes to put together an email and, you know, do all that. But if you add up the planning and the thinking about what should go in it, it could be an hour. Hour and 15 minutes.
The 30 to 45 minutes that I save that I don’t have to actually spend on the nitty gritty, for instance, a leaderboard. I don’t know who’s going to be in the leaderboard. But here’s what I do know. I can get their pictures in advance. So if I’m going to make a leaderboard, I’ve got not asking somebody for their picture when I’m putting them on the leaderboard.
So I can plan that, but that 30 to 45 minutes out of the hour, hour and time. Instead of spending planning the email and kind of laying it out and writing most of it, I can literally spend that doing something that is, that needs to be done right. Then I can spend that responding to emails, I can spend that responding to Facebook messages. I can spend that talking to affiliates. So use sops for everything. This is all about systems. Sops everything. Onboarding, affiliates, swipe, copy, distribution, support, all that. Use SOPs as much as possible. Make sure you have checklists that are made in advance. So as I mentioned earlier, so much can get lost, so much can get forgotten when you’re running around like a chicken with your head, you know, your head cut off.
So having checklists like, okay, on webinar day, here’s what I know. We’re going to run a contest that ends when the webinar begins and the webinars at 8pm Eastern. So I want to be available from 3 to 8, like clockwork. I want to be completely available. So I’ve planned my personal schedule plan, who’s going to take the kids to practice, whatever.
I’ve planned that. And then I’ve planned on at 3, I’m going to send out kind of the one final email that gets them to push. But I’m also going to post leaderboards for this final bit at 4, And I’m also going to be reaching out to affiliates that are in those like, hey, the guy who’s. Maybe there’s not a battle for first, but the second, third and fourth place are all within 50 leads of each other.
I’m going to be reaching out to them individually. I’ve already planned that. I’m going to be doing that. Now, I can’t plan the exact message because I don’t know exactly what that should be. I don’t know who it is and how I communicate them. But creating the template for the leaderboard is something I can do three months before the launch.
I can create the template for how I’m going to do the leaderboard, I mean, as far out as I want. And then all I gotta do is just, you know, import the pictures, uploading the pictures. So like, for instance, I do the images. I don’t do them now, but you know, I set up the templates at least. But we do the images in Canva for the leaderboards, making sure that all the pictures are Uploaded so we’re not looking for the picture while we’re doing the leaderboard. That’s a little thing, but doing that a month out is so much easier. It’s a two minute task.
But those two minute tasks and those 10 minute tasks and those what leads to overwhelm is they add up. So do as much as you can. Have as many systems as possible. Even if you have five affiliates, act like you’re running a program with Build your scalable systems now. All right, lesson two, personal outreach still wins that. The bigger you get, the more you need to stay human.
That’s the lesson. The bigger you get, the more you need to stay human. Your top affiliates especially still need individualized attention. Now again, you can plan for these, you can plan for these, even just that you’re going to send them and win. And setting aside time is helpful. So sending voice messages and personalized videos, quick personal check ins, these make all the difference.
Some of the biggest affiliates, some of the biggest earners, they almost didn’t promote, but one perfectly timed message changed everything and got them to promote. So the thing is like doing a first sale. Congratulations. Doing a, hey, you know you just moved up to third. Yeah, you mention it in the leaderboard that you send out to everyone, but sending them a personal message, letting them know how far they are from first, letting them know how far they are from tenth, letting them know how far they are from the prize that you know they want, letting them know where they stand. And you know, hey, it looks like your, your traffic to the webinar is converting at 20%.
Your traffic to the PDF or you know, your traffic to the quiz is converting at 20%. The webinar is 20% but the PDF is 2%. Hey, I’d recommend that over the next couple of days you send to the webinar and the quiz, that’s a personal thing overall that might not be true. Maybe the PDF overall is converting it 5% and the webinar and quiz are 6%. So hey, you want people to mail to whatever they think is best, but for this person it’s, it’s a 10x difference or a 5x difference. So let them know that. And the thing is these can still be scripted in advance how you congratulate somebody on their first sale. You’re probably going to say the same thing over and over. So plan how you’re going to say that. And then if you want to add a personal note. Add a personal note.
But how you’re going to, you know, do these things is it can be scripted out and planned in advance. So for instance, every day I had a thing that was like, here’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for first sales. I’m looking for close races for positions. I’m looking for people where I already know in advance that this guy said he really wants to hit top five because he gets invited to the Mastermind. Well, I already know that halfway through I need to be looking for where he’s at, letting him know and reminding him what he said and pushing him to get to top five because maybe he’s in fourth, maybe he’s in seventh.
I don’t know that in advance, but I know that I need to be talking about that. So that’s all planned in advance. So the big takeaway here is yes, use automation. We’re going to talk more about like grouping people and stuff like that. But don’t let automation replace relationships and individualized attention. Number three is, you know, tiered support. Total game changer. This is something I’ve talked about before but haven’t done the best of jobs because the lesson here is not all affiliates need the same thing. So for this one we created three segments. Most of our clients were in the three segment range. You know, sometimes we only have two if they’re smaller, four if they’re really big.
This one we had three. So basically we had, we decided it was going to be somewhere in the top 20 to 30 range. Again, it might be top 27, might be top 30. Exactly. There’s an, the cutoff points are arbitrary. So for us it was anybody that in the past had finished. Now they did smaller launches. Their last one had about 200 affiliates. So we had six times more. We said, okay, anybody in the past who finished in the top 15? Definitely. Now I then looked at like, okay, well who finished in 16th? And we actually ended up at okay, all these people who finished in the top 18 last time. These were our top tier affiliates.
Then we added a few larger influencers. And so we started off the launch with like 24, 25 that were like our top. It was like a few more, it was like 26 or 7, I think that were like our top tier affiliates. And then so we based that on like past performance of this particular launch. But also maybe they had promoted some of the clients.
Other stuff, I think there was like one or two in that and then there were a bunch that we brought in that they were just really good performers for previous clients of ours. And sometimes you just look at their stuff and go, well, you know, gee, they. They have 1. 8 million followers on, you know, Instagram and, you know, half a million on Facebook and throw 300, you know, or 3 million on TikTok. They probably can move the needle a little bit if they’re not an idiot, you know, and know how to set up an email list and things like that. Well, then as it went on, we added people. So anybody, once they hit about 250 to 300 leads, you know, if they hit 240 the very first day, well, they moved into tier one.
They’re gonna hit 300. When we got to sales, you know, like anybody who basically hit, you know, about 8 to 10 sales within the first 24 to 48 hours, we moved them into the top because we had two affiliates in particular that only had about 200 leads, but they converted unbelievably. They both had. I think it was. I think they had one had eight.
Maybe one had, like, 11 sales in the first day. And we moved them into that top tier. And so the. The way that we communicate with them changes. Then we had our mid tier. So I think that ended up being. I think there was 32 that ended up being in the top tier. Again, arbitrary number. The cutoff point could be whatever you want it to be. It could just be that maybe, you know, somebody, you know, based on the past. Last Launch, they did 25 sales, but only had 200 leads. But they convert unbelievably well. Well, cool. They’re a top affiliate.
So then our mid tier is like, again, typically for most will be somewhere in the 20th to 60th spot. For us, it was the 33rd to roughly 85th spot. These are people who. They’d been around the same spot in the past. Right. They finished 33rd last year. They had, you know, eight sales, nine sales. They’re moving the needle, but not in a huge way. You know, I can look at their fault if they’re new. I can look at their following. I can look at their past performance. Hey, that guy did seven sales for one of our clients, you know, last year. You know, they’re a mid tier affiliate. And then people moved into that and some people moved down. We had a couple of those top tier affiliates that we, we kind of shifted down a little bit just because they, they weren’t moving the needle. And, and then you got your newbies and your very small affiliates, which is the bulk of the affiliates. Basically anybody outside of, for this one, about outside of the top So the top tier got dedicated support.
I handled every single one of those. Every email, no matter how small or irrelevant, I handled it. Unless it was like, you know, hey, I lost my login, but I handled those emails. Those people had my cell phone number. Those people could DM me on Facebook. Then the next one was kind of group check ins. They still got more of like. So the top ones. Also we were very focused on the leaderboard, the mid tier. We were, we still mentioned the leaderboard because it was aspirational for them. Because just because I projected that you were going to finish in You absolutely could sneak in the top 20. So we wanted to make sure that we were letting them know where they were in relation to the 20th position because they totally could. Adding five or six sales and they are sneaking into that top 20, which was very important because there was a specific prize that everybody in the top 20 got that was very.
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What’s what I’m looking for, Very persuasive. Now we ended up actually giving it to 24, 21 through 25, which we announced at the end based on what was happening. And this is the thing is we were able to look at these numbers and go, oh my goodness, there is such a tight race from like 23rd place all the way down to about the upper 40s, like 46, 47th place.
It was so close in that room. We’re like, we got to create this, we got to create this competition and really drive them. And actually what ended up happening was we had two affiliates who were outside the top 35 move into the top 25. But also what happened was like our 20, you know, 7th, I think it was like 27th and 20, 24th and 27th at that time ended up, moving well into the top 20. And they told us the reason was they really wanted to guarantee that, you know, that top 25 spot.
So we do group check ins with them with those, and we’re kind of providing a higher level of tips and encouragement. It’s a. It’s a different level. We’re talking to them like they’re actually legit marketers, because they are. And then the newbies and the, you know, the small ones, we focused more on, you know, giving them a specific action to do today. Because it was more like, hey, if we can get 800 people to all go live on Facebook or, you know, five or six hundred people to all post on Instagram about this, and each of them generates 10 to 50 leads, let’s say an average of 20 leads.
But you got 500 people. That’s a really good way to get 10,000 people signed up. Now, we would get 20,000 people signed up by our top 80 or so, but we could also get another 10,000, and we don’t want to miss out on that. So we did a lot more education, very low level education, very low level. Like, do this one thing today.
Here’s a sample post. Here are three sample posts. Pick one, post it. You know, here are some images. Pick one. You know, tweak it, use it. We would, again, just kind of. We’re talking, not talking down to them. We’re just. We’re treating them like they are, which is typically more of a newbie or a very small affiliate. And we would do things like, within that.
Within just that group, they would say, all right, any affiliate who makes. Who sends 20 leads over the weekend is entered to win this $500 prize. Well, $500 to that group is a lot. That’s the equivalent of one affiliate commission just for sending 20 leads. And for some of them, if they sent their normal plan, which was to send one email and do a social media post over the weekend, they’d get 14 leads. So they had to do a little something extra. They had to send a second email. And so we got an extra six leads times 300 affiliates. Again, that’s 1800 extra leads we got over the weekend. So we would do little contests with very attractive prizes like that. And by the way, with that group, that works a lot better.
A lot of people are like, well, okay, post, and we’ll give you a $5 whoopity. Do vs post. All you gotta do is post. We did one contest with this group. It was just post. Just do a post on the social media Network of your choice. Don’t care how many followers you have, don’t care how many clicks you get, don’t care how many leads or sales you make.
Just post and you’re entered to win a $250 prize. We had over a thousand every time you post. It was like in a three day range. Every time you post, you’re entered to win. We had over, I think it was over a thousand or two thousand something. I have to go look at the notes. But it was, it was an average. If every one of those people in this group of like 1100 posted, it was like 1. 5 from them. Now really what it was was about 600 people who posted an average of, you know, three times. But some people posted four or five times. And so we flooded like it was all over the place. And yeah, okay, they only had 182 followers and they got seven clicks and three leads. That’s three leads we wouldn’t have gotten.
So the big takeaway here is treat different affiliates differently. Meet them where they are. If they are an expert, you don’t need to teach them how to use swipe copy. If they are a newbie, you need to teach them how to use swipe copy. I’ve got an article on my site about how to use swipe copy. Feel free to share it with them.
But these are the types of things and I’ll put a link to that in the show notes, by the way. But you need, you need to be teaching them that. But it’s a bit of an insult to the bigger affiliate to be like, here’s how you swipe copy. But the lower ones are going to love you for teaching them. All right, lesson number four. Over communicate. Over communicate overly or over communicate overly Communicate. Yes. Clarity is so important, especially at scale. You cannot assume that people saw the update. You cannot assume that people read the email. You cannot assume that they clicked the link to go to the site to read about the thing.
Even your top affiliates miss stuff. Your most active affiliates miss stuff. So we sent daily updates, we sent, you know, recap emails, we sent contest reminders, we sent leaderboard numbers, all those things. So here’s the key point here. This is how I, I recently started explaining this. It seems to work really well if you set up a Facebook group or other kind of group. And I do recommend Facebook. And the very simple reason why I recommend that as opposed to a Slack group or a Mighty Networks group or other things, is people are already logging into Facebook and you don’t want to give Them one more thing to log into. Not for communication, you know, to check their stats. Yeah, to grab swipe copy.
Yes, sure. But not as a communication tool. And so you want them to be in a place where they’re already going to be and they might get kind of sucked in a little bit. So think of this Facebook group as your 24. This is your CNN, your Fox News, your headline news, you know, whatever your emails are, your daily newspaper. So use the Facebook group to announce things in real time. Send 3, 4 posts a day, even 5 or 6 if need be. Post leaderboard updates. Post big announcements that are just and small announcements. Post little things. Like it could be as simple as like, you know, omg, checking the stats. And you know, so and so is converting unbelievably. Way to go, dude. Or here’s a great example of a post of a video from John.
You know, make sure you get John’s permission. Just wanted to share this with you guys. You know, that’s your real time, like breaking news type thing. And then you use email as like a daily digest. So email is the big announcements, the headlines. Right. You know, new contest starts tomorrow, blah, blah, blah. It could be used as like, we use them to drive people back and forth from the Facebook group to email and email to the Facebook group. So I might post four things in the Facebook group on Tuesday. Let’s say I’ll post, you know, a new contest announcement.
I’ll post a link about how to use swipe copy. Because posting that in the group to everyone, that’s a little bit more acceptable. Now I’m only going to send it in the email, by the way, to the bottom two groups, not to the top group. So I might. I’ll talk about that in a sec. But like, I’ll post in about how to use swipe copy.
Post a quick leaderboard update randomly and I’ll post something else right then in the email the next day, I’ll highlight and say I made a big announcement about a new contest. Click here to read all about it in the Facebook group and I’ll give them the gist of it. But click here to read the details and I’ll say I posted about. Or by the way, if you’re wondering how to use swipe copy, click here to read my post in the Facebook group.
This is really relevant in the weeks and months leading up to the launch because you get them in the group, what will happen is you’ll send an email again with 1200 people. With 1200 people, we only had like 960 that were in the group. But initially when I signed them up and I said, hey, welcome to the program, here are three things to do. Number one, white list this email. Number two, sign up for the Facebook group.
Number three, put it on your calendar. You know, right. Only like 5, 400 people signed up for the group. The rest of them came to the group because I may, I forced them to come if they wanted to get the information. And it got them in the habit of checking both. And as they went to the group, more and more Facebook showed the post more and more in their feed and in their update, you know, what are the notifications. So now they’re actually checking the Facebook group, you know, three, four times a day, which is what we want. So again, going back to the original point, clarity is king ove communicate. So when in doubt, repeat yourself. Lesson number five, expect the unexpected. There’s going to be unexpected things.
So the lesson here is to build in that margin, things are going to go wrong. We had a random, just a top one of our expected top three or four or five affiliates who ended up, I think, finishing in like right on fifth place. Their email went out early. And the reason it went out early was somebody just scheduled it wrong. It was, it was actually supposed to be. So they, the promo started on a Tuesday and their email schedule was like Tuesday unopened, Wednesday unopened, Thursday. And then their second email to everyone was on a Friday.
They sent their second Friday email out the Friday before. Now, the good news was this email was written in a way that, that the content that it led to, it wasn’t like it was a second, you know, thing. It worked in the sense of it was for a webinar. And the webinar really was coming up the following week, the first one. But, you know, we didn’t really Want the email going out 11 days in advance, whatever it was. And there were still tweaks being made to the page because again we, the first email about the webinar was not supposed to go out until the following Thursday. We had planned, nobody was sending out. We weren’t sending any internal emails out until the following Wednesday night, I believe. And then affiliates were mailing on Thursday morning.
So the page was still being worked on one of the automations in terms of like sending them. I think the initial email was already done where it’s like, you know, thanks for signing up, click here to add to calendar, blah blah, blah. I think that was dumb but like the second email wasn’t done and again what do you want to send the day after when your webinar is like 11 days away? And it was just, it was just kind of weird. And so, well this email went out and we noticed that all of a sudden we’re getting this flood of traffic and leads. You know, we didn’t catch it because of when it went out. We didn’t catch it until, you know, 300 people had signed up.
The good news is we had built margin into our schedule to be able to deal with that because I had built in the buffer time because I had planned what I was going to do that day. You know, pretty in depth but again not fully. It wasn’t as big of a deal for me to be like, okay, there’s an email that I want to send and a Facebook posts that I want to write and some follow ups that I want to do with some affiliates that are going to take me three hours. I wasn’t in that position because I had gotten it to where they were only going to take me an hour. And so we were able to, you know, I was able to alert the team, get them like. And it only happened because I did a test of a different thing and noticed oh My gosh, this affiliates 300 lead, you know, already like what is going on?
We were able to adjust, everybody was able to, we were able to, you know, get, basically turn the priority to getting this page completely done, getting the automation completely done now. And then we tweaked a little bit of the art. We added a different, like an extra email to account for the fact that they were, you know, they were getting these email like they, they signed up on a Friday when the next email is not even going to go out until the following Thursday, you know, and so we need to do or yeah, following Thursday was when the next email is going to go out.
We needed to account for that. So we scheduled like an. An email on, I don’t know, like Sunday and I think maybe even like another one on Tuesday just to give them something in the. In the interim. We had a tracking error that almost caused complete chaos, like about three, four days in. Won’t get into the details on that, but again, building the margin allowed me to dig into it and we figured out what was going on. This was because we had built in buffer time, because we had redundant systems, because we had a team who was trained to adapt. Because of that, we were able to handle it. So never. This is a big takeaway here.
Never assume smooth sailing. Expect disasters, expect chaos, and prepare for it. Final two big lessons. One of them is one that you’ve heard me say many times. This was not something I learned. It was just something I was reminded of. Don’t underestimate the little guys. Small affiliates can make a big impact. We had one affiliate, for example, tiny list, a little bit under 2,000 people. Yes, a very highly targeted list, but still under 2000. I believe he was around 17, 1800 people, he said, did over 20,000 in sales. Didn’t. Didn’t finish top 10. I think he ended up in 17th place because. And I said, what did you do? And he said, I followed the plan.
That was it. He did what we told him to do. We had another affiliate basically say the same thing. Somebody who finished in 30th, you know, 25th, 30th place, but was so excited to do that, you know, made like 12,000 bucks, business. You know, all on social media, some very small email lists. Sub 1,000 people. But, you know, I have like 7,000 followers. They did it all in there. They were DMing people. They were going live every day in one of their groups. They were doing all the things. Basically said the same thing. Matt. I just followed the plan you gave me. Like, you gave us a plan, and I just did it. So when you said, go live on Facebook, I went live on Facebook.
When you said, send this email, I sent this email. When you said, here’s a script for starting a DM conversation. I did that, Matt, Like, I just did. Make sure everyone has what they need. You never know who’s going to make a big impact. And when we added up all those affiliates that just the ones that told us that they had a goal of making three sales but made 10, they had a goal of 5, but made 15 or 20, they had a goal of, you know, cracking the top 50, but they ended up in 27th or whatever.
It was just the people who told us that they did significantly better than they expected. And the ones who said, well, I followed what you said, et cetera, et cetera. Just the ones who told us, not even the one. Like, there are probably so many who didn’t tell us something. Just the ones who told us accounted for over half a million dollars in sales. Again, I’m estimating that it was probably closer to 1. 5. If you look at the affiliates outside of the top 34. And there’s 34 sounds like an arbitrary number, but there’s a pretty significant dip from 34th to 35th.
If you look at the affiliates outside of the top 34, we still had over 500 more affiliates make a sale that outside of the top 34, which in most launches, if you watch them when they’re run by other people, their top 10 will account for 95% of sales. That’s not the way it is with us. The affiliates outside the top 34 still accounted for 38% of sales.
Over one third of sales were by affiliates who individually made five or less sales. I mean, that’s a big thing. So you never know. Again, I talked about earlier tiering it. Yeah, you’ve got to tier it early on for your sanity, but be willing to move people up because you never know who’s going to pop. And even those small ones, we still treated them like they were a top affiliate. It was just different how we, what we did, it was just different. The information we gave them was different. Final lesson.
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So I mentioned that we, I said we just did this big launch. It’s been a couple of months. The final lesson is that you’ll see the ROI a lot of times later. Your relationship ROI is more important and usually bigger than your revenue roi. Some affiliates didn’t make a dime this time. Some affiliates only made one sale and over a hundred who only made one sale.
But they built confidence and they built trust and they’re going to come back stronger next time. I have seen this happen time and time again. It’s a long game game. Think long term. Every launch, plant seeds. The other thing that we’ve noticed, there’s been a bump in our evergreen traffic, a significant bump from the launch.
That’s why launches are great. They build that momentum. And when you do have 5, 600 people all talking about you on the same day, when you have 10, 20, 30 big affiliates who are all talking about you on the same day, where you have people are on multiple lists and they see them talking about you four, five, six times a day, feels like you’re everywhere and you’re getting flooded almost to the point you get right to that point where it’s like people are a little bit tired of you.
Just like you get of the hype of a movie a little bit tired. Like, gosh, it feels like every show I’ve watched this week, the actor’s been on or the author’s been on or whatever it is you want to get right there that helps you long term. That’s a big, has a big impact on your future sales. And so we’ve noticed, like our evergreen sales are up over 50% after they took a big dip right after the launch.
But if you look at 30 days after the launch, what our sales were compared to 30 days before the launch, they’re higher and they’re staying there. We’ve our, our plateau is higher. The plateau’s gonna go up each time you do a launch. That’s the beauty of it. So just to recap, number one, lesson number one, systems save you create those systems and those SOPs.
Number two, personalization is still super important. But lesson number three is make sure you tier your support. You’re not necessarily as personalized with some of the smaller ones, at least to start. Number four, over communicate over Communicate over communicate. Number five, build that buffer time so you can handle those urgent things. Number six, don’t ignore the small affiliates. And number seven, play the long game. So I’d love to hear which of these seven lessons stood out to you most.
You can text me at 260-217-4619. I’d love to hear what you’re going to implement in your next big launch. And if you want to learn how we help clients build these kind of launch launch systems that I talked about, go to your affiliatelaunchcoach. com your affiliatelaunchcoach.com I’ll put that in the show notes. Book a strategy session with me.
It’s completely free and we’re going to walk you through what it takes to scale your next promo with that. One last thing, make sure if you haven’t yet, you hit subscribe so you don’t miss the upcoming episodes we’ve got coming up. Then the next few are going to be amazing. And then like I said, I’ve got one coming up. I’m not sure when because I’m still working on it, but I’m going to talk about how we’re using AI and we are saving, you know, just individually 20 hours plus a week and we’re more productive, we’re making more money.
A lot of the stuff that, that I did, that I talked about today, it was enabled by AI knowing that, you know, an affiliate up down, things like that, that’s all AI and it’s amazing stuff. It’s stuff that I was capable of before for If I work 80 hours a week and I don’t want to do that. So now I can work a normal work week or even a little bit less and get twice as much done, which is good. That’s going to be coming up very soon. I’m really close to putting the finishing touches on the outline and then I’ll start recording that series. So make sure you hit subscribe and I’ll see you in the next episode.
See you soon.