What To Do When An Affiliate Promotion Is Going Badly...and How To Avoid Bad Promos in the First Place

There are many reasons an affiliate promotion can sputter. Anytime you combine lots of moving parts and people…bad stuff can happen. But it doesn’t have to be that way. I’m going to explain how you can position your affiliate promotion for success in this video.

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Links Mentioned in This Lesson:

Promo Plan Template

Affiliate Program Scorecard

Affiliate Insider Monthly Trial

7 Ways to Warm Up Your Audience Before an Affiliate Promotion

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Transcript

Hey, what’s up, everyone? Super excited about today. I’m flying solo, as you can see here. So, yeah, it’s going to be a little bit different today, but I am excited for this because we’re talking about what to do when an affiliate promotion goes badly and more importantly, how to avoid these bad promos in the first place.

So we’re going to start in a little bit here with we’re going to talk about why do affiliate promos go bad? And this is the part where I try to figure out how in the heck to add something to the screen here. But I don’t know if I can pull this off. Let’s see here. No, can’t do it. So I was going to try to do a little something, but I am failing to do this by myself.

Here we go. Let’s add that awesome. So one of the things that’s important to understand is why they go bad. And we’ll talk about those. Then we’re going to switch over to okay, what do we do if something is actually going badly before we get started?

First of all, if you know somebody who would benefit from this today, they’re an affiliate and maybe they got something, they’ve got it going badly, or maybe this is something they might encounter in the future.

Make sure you share this with them today. Hit them up on social media, hit them up here on Facebook or wherever you’re watching this. Hit them up and share this with them. Also, let me know. Shoot me a quick message in the chat there and say hey to me in the chat. I’d love to know where you’re joining us from. So what do you do if an affiliate promotion of an affiliate program, affiliate launch, or whatever it might be, is just flat out straight up not working? I got a question recently from an affiliate who’s promoting an affiliate promotion that we had recommended.

It just wasn’t working. And he was asking, why is this not working? Why is this not working? So I responded by asking several questions because basically there are seven reasons that an affiliate promotion just may not be working. What are those reasons? There are seven reasons. And I’m going to share the why first. Then we’ll get into the what to do part.

All right. So why might an affiliate promotion not go well for you with this affiliate? I’m going to read this kind of a brief gist of his email. He had sent four emails promoting the offer. And hey, Kristen. Hey, Tracy. He had nearly a thousand opt-ins at the end of okay, so four emails, 1000 opt-ins at the end of card open day, and zero sales. And he said that normally I’d have liked at least five sales, probably ten or more. So what’s going on here? And I kind of responded back and said, that’s a loaded question because I don’t know.

I asked a bunch of questions. Why is this not working for him? Why is this not working for him? Well, the first reason is that it’s not a good fit for your audience. The offer is not a good fit for your audience. There’s no need. There’s not a need for this. They don’t have a need for this product. They don’t want it. They don’t understand it.

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Maybe they just don’t understand the product. So if they don’t have a need, they don’t have a want a desire for it. More importantly, they don’t have a desire for the end result. They don’t have a desire for the transformation. So if you sell a weight loss product and they’re like, I want to lose weight, you’re not going to sell the weight loss product like it’s just a bad fit or if they don’t understand how it works, like, man, yeah, I want to lose weight. How is that going to help me?

Yeah, I want to sell more. My process. I don’t understand the software. I don’t understand the product. How is that going to help me? So there are a few reasons why it might not be a good fit. It’s not appealing. It’s just simply not an appealing product. There’s nothing about this product that appeals to your audience, but it might be that the price points are off-target. If all of the stuff you sell and promote is under $200 and then you try to sell a $2,000 product, maybe that’s the reason.

Maybe you got to warm them up. Maybe you need to promote something similar, but it’s only $500, $200 to $500. We can pull that off ten times the price. That’s a little bit harder, a little bit more of a challenge there. If your audience is primarily retirees on a fixed income or single moms, I think of my mom growing up. I grew up until the age of nine. My mom was single. We could afford anything. Not all single moms can’t afford anything. But the reality is most can’t.

That actually statistically is true. And so if your audience is primarily single moms, asking them to buy something that’s $2,000, that isn’t like guaranteed to have a return or even if it is, might be impossible. So if the price points off target, it’s just not going to work. If the price point is, for instance, I’ll give you an example. My planner is here.

All right, my Planner, the Full Focus Planner. You can find a link for it on MattMcwilliams.com/toolbox. By the way, I love this planner. Absolutely love it. I prefer my new one. This is an old one. I prefer my Brown one. Just a side note, my Brown. I don’t know. It just feels better. But I love these things. I don’t know how much these are.

They’re like $30 a quarter, maybe $40 a quarter. They were expensive. The point is, if this was $100, I would never have bought it because I look at this and I know it’s a planner. I know what’s inside of it. I know that there’s some really cool stuff inside that’s going to help me be more productive. But my paradigm for this, my comparison for this is a book or a Journal. Okay?

This Journal here cost me like $10. This planner here cost me, I think, $40, $39, or something like that. It’s at least within the realm of possibility. It’s in the wheelhouse of that. If Michael Hyatt charged to charge me $100. Not that I’m saying it’s not worth it, because I think it is now that I’ve used it. But I never would have bought it in the first place because I’m like $100 for this not worth it. So if the price points are off target, it’s too similar to your own offerings.

If I don’t see a need to buy this affiliate thing, I’m like, you offer the same thing. I already bought your thing. Why would I buy this other thing? And so if the price point is too similar, that’s a problem. No amount of good marketing is going to overcome a bad fit. Just super clear on that. No amount of marketing is going to overcome a bad fit. And I’m going to post a link here in the chat. Grab this scorecard. All right. Should I promote this scorecard? This scorecard is going to save you so much money. And so much heartache.

Go grab this scorecard. There are ten questions on there. You’re going to score them between one and three. Each of these questions, you’re going to answer these three questions and kind of go like, okay, one or three or zero to three, actually, you’re going to add them up and it explains it all.

Basically, the higher your score, the more likely you should promote this. And there have been many things that subjectively. I said, oh, man, I should definitely promote that. And then I filled out the scorecard and I scored a 22. 22 is pretty low for me. I don’t promote things below about a 25 out of 30.

And I was like, Now I look at this and I go, okay, well, I can improve that and that, but I can’t improve these things. The highest I’m going to score on this is 24. I just need to not promote this. So grab this scorecard because it’s going to help you so much in terms of just avoiding bad promotions in the first place. The next thing I want you to consider is that the promo timing is off. Maybe your timing for this promotion is just off. It is too soon after another promotion. Maybe it’s too close to certain holidays.

So if you have an audience, for example, that is predominantly in the west and Christmas is December 25, promoting something that’s not Christmas-related or New Year’s related, end of the year related, two weeks before Christmas, probably not the best idea. It’s just not if you promote something the week of Thanksgiving, that’s not related to Thanksgiving or deals or Christmas, it’s probably a bad idea. And so you have to consider those things like who is your audience? If a large percentage of your audience, let’s say 25% of your audience is in Europe.

Maybe the reason that the webinar didn’t convert was that it was 08:00 at night Eastern time, which is two in the morning, you know, in like Italy, I think, or one in the morning in Italy. That’s when it started.

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There’s no perfect time to do a webinar. But if 25, 40% of the audience is in Europe, you need to at least consider that and make an account of that. So that might be the promo timings off. The third reason that it might just not be working is that the sales page doesn’t convert. The sales page doesn’t convert. This guy that emailed me, has optin over a thousand opt-ins. But zip, zero sales.

So it might be a sales page issue. So the first thing I want you to do is to check your email, like checking your DMs. Are any of the people that you’ve referred in your audience? Are they saying they’re having issues like I can’t buy or I went to the sales page and it’s all white dudes.

It’s 40 testimonials from white guys. There’s no diversity whatsoever. Or I went to the sales page and it talks about how to go from seven figures to eight figures, but there’s nothing on there that talks about how to go from six figures to seven figures or zero figures to five figures. Will this work for me? Ask the affiliate manager.

Now, 0% low, you can’t scale zero, but let’s just say that it’s you said 2000 opt-in have one sale. That’s a point. Whatever. I don’t even know what the percentage is. It’s a really low percentage. But ask how are my conversions compared to everyone else’s? Talk to other affiliates that you might know and just ask them like, how are you converting? Make sure your links work. There’s a big one. Make sure your links actually work.

This is something I see more and more like today as an affiliate manager. Drives me insane. Well, I said 500 hits and did nothing converted. Did you use the right link? Well, no, it’s the wrong link, Dang it. That’s how they all talk, by the way. But hey, if you just run a test, like sending a click to your own affiliate link and test it to see if it actually tracked would have taken you five minutes, not even two minutes, 30 seconds. Yes, it worked great.

The reason why it’s not working is because you’re using the wrong flipping link. So that has nothing to do with conversions per se. But test your link. Go through the link on the front end. I mean, by gosh, go through the sales page for a few minutes. And in that example that I said earlier, like, you know, you have an audience that’s 80% women and 30% minorities.

You’ve got some diversity in your audience and the sales page is 40 white dudes. You might want to bring that up on the front end. But if you never even go to the sales page, how are you going to know and how are you going to be able to bring something like that up? So that’s something to consider. Take a look at the sales page. Apply basic. Are they making a basic mistake that doesn’t have to be a big thing like diversity or things like that or relatable stories?

Are they just following the basics on there that you know to be true? Maybe these are things that are specific to your audience, but they can still make some changes that would benefit your audience. The truth is you don’t care. You don’t care about everybody else’s audience. You care about yours. The next reason why it might not be working is that the sales funnel isn’t optimized and the sales funnel just isn’t optimized. Is their funnel actually optimized? Have you gone through it?

So if this is a lead into a free product, to a webinar, to whatever, to a masterclass that leads into sales, is it optimized? Have you gone through and kind of seen what’s working again? Ask, hey, how are things converting overall? Well, if things are converting overall pretty well, we’re converting about two and a half percent on a $2,000 product. That’s pretty good. But yours isn’t, then at least it’s not on their end. Maybe there’s some stuff that you need to tweak.

So in that example may be their sales page is a little bit light. Maybe your audience is 80% women and their sales page has 34 male testimonials and four women. That’s just the way it is. It doesn’t mean that they don’t have any women who’ve had success. They just happen to not have very many testimonials. Then a couple of things. You can reach out to them and say, hey, can we create a separate page that’s more exclusively for women, maybe only feature like twelve testimonials and really prioritize these two from these two women because they’re really good stories and then move these things around.

And then what you do is in your copy, you highlight the women in your sales emails. You pick the first four emails, you highlight one story. So naturally, what happens is when they are expecting to go to that page and read Anna’s story or read Jessica’s story or read Kristen’s story or Tracy’s story, then that’s what they’re looking for. The reticular activating system kicks in. They’re looking to see Kristen or Tracy’s story. So that’s the one they go to on the page.

And to them, it doesn’t seem as much like, wow, it’s just a bunch of dudes on here. So if the sales funnel is not optimized, well, clearly it’s just not going to work. It’s just simply not going to work. The next thing you want to look at as a potential problem is you don’t know how to market the product. You just don’t know how to market the product. You don’t have experience with it. You don’t have a relationship with the product owner. And so when I start talking about creating a promotion plan and strategies, you’re going, I don’t really know. Can you think of some stories that would be a really good lead into this product?

I don’t know, I can’t think of any good stories. Do you have experience with the product? No, not really a success story? No, not really. Have you ever even seen the product in use? No, not really. So you’re not going to know how to market the product? Who’s the audience for the product? I don’t really know. Who is it not for? I don’t really know what’s good about it. I don’t know. You just don’t know the product very well. So if you don’t know how to market the product, that’s a problem. And so if you look at the scorecard, if you actually download the scorecard, mattmcwilliams.com/scorecard, I think it’s question number ten on there is like, do you know how to market the product?

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Yes, I do. It’s a three. Three. I’m out of three. I know how to market this product. I’ve promoted similar products. I promoted this specific product. Like, I know what I’m doing. Well, that’s easy peasy. That’s going to score high on that. But if you don’t have a clue what you’re doing, that’s going to be a problem. The 6th reason why an affiliate promotion might be a total flop is that you just have not warmed up your audience at all. We’re going all the way back to the beginning. Why didn’t it work? Why didn’t it work there?

Because your audience four days ago had no idea that they had a problem. They weren’t thinking about this problem or a solution. And now you’re trying to sell them a $2,000 solution or $1,000 solution, whatever the price point is, that’s a problem. So we’ve talked about many times, like, how do you warm up your audience? I’ve got tons of podcast episodes on this. If you just go, I’ll pull it up with you. If you go to MattMcquilliams.com and click on the search button, let’s just click there. Click on Warm-up.

Seven Ways to Warm Up Your Audience Before an Affiliate Promotion. How to Warm Up those are about warming up your affiliate partners. Let’s see, that’s probably the best one. There are some others as oh, yeah, that’s a good one. What affiliates are doing because that talks about different things. There is how to Stand Out during an Affiliate promotion. But I’m going to drop this one link here in the chat. This is probably the best one. Seven Ways to Warm Up Your Audience for an Affiliate Promotion and talk about like, number one, you got to engage your audience. You’ve got to consistently engage your audience. Keep them warm. Just period with you.

Secondly, one of the best ways to warm just start mentioning, I think of the membership experience launch with Stew McLaren’s coming up. Literally, two weeks from today is the first day of the workshop. So we’re starting to promote it. Affiliates are really starting to promote it next Monday, like, big time. So what should they be doing now? What should they be doing for the last couple of weeks mentioning Stew, quoting Stew on social media, talking about memberships, and just things like that?

Linking to Stew’s content just like a Facebook video or sharing his life on their Facebook, things like that. Just getting people kind of in that mindset of thinking about them, talking about the ideas in the membership experience. Interviewing somebody who’s been through the course just to again, warm up your audience, creating a mini-course, is there some prework that your audience needs to do to get into position for the thing you’re promoting?

So if you’re not doing those things, if you’re not warming up your audience, you’re probably not going to close a whole lot of sales. It’s just not going to happen. And then the last reason why an affiliate promotion might not be working is your audience. Just share that one. Let’s try a different one you haven’t planned properly.

So the easiest way to do this is to create a promo plan. I’m going to drop a link here in the chat. You can download the promo plan template. If you’re watching the replay, this will be below the video. You can download this promo plan template, download that and walk through that. All right, I’m going to show you guys just one example.

Let’s see here. Pull it up real quick here in Google Drive. I’m going to show you guys an example of one of these. And you guys can use this one as a guide. Give me just a second. No, that is not it. There we go. Got it. Now got to share my screen, which means I’ve got to figure out how to do that. Here we are.

So if you look here, you’ll see this is I think you guys. Somebody can confirm for me in the chat. I’m going to take DreamYard and move it over here. Somebody confirmed for me in the chat. I see it never run on my side. So we’re good? All right. Basically, I go through this with affiliates. That’s something you can do as an affiliate manager.

By the way, I just did this earlier today with one of our affiliates for this launch for the membership experience. And I walked them through like we decided that here Friday, April 15, that’s tax day. Not everybody waits till April 15 to file their taxes, but a lot of people do. So it’s going to be a busy day. So we moved to their normal Friday email. We moved it back to Thursday. We decided to do a Sunday email and then a Wednesday email.

That’s what works best for them. The point is to plan to pick something. I don’t care what your plan is, how aggressive it is, how neutral it is, how short it is, long it is, doesn’t matter as long as you have a plan and then stick to it. Okay. And so if you go to I’m going to drop it in the chat here.

I already did download the promo plan template. If you go to Mattmclaims.com/promoplan, you can download this effectively. It will look very similar to this. You can download this template and use that to plan your promotions. So the idea there is again just to have something have a plan that actually works.

So what do you do when it’s not working? All right, I’m going to share a few things that you need to do when these aren’t working. And these are going to tie back to one of the reasons why it’s not working. So for instance, if it’s not a good fit for your audience, if that’s the reason why it’s not working and they get a new audience, that’s probably not the solution. That is definitely not the solution. But what do we do when these things are just you know what, these are just totally bombing what do we do?

Well, number one, I need you just to stop promoting immediately. Stop promoting immediately. Let’s see if I can get that. Actually, there we go. Stop promoting immediately. Even if it’s your fault for not understanding the product. You didn’t plan well, any of those reasons that we talked about, you did a poor job planning. You didn’t use the scorecard.

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It’s totally your fault why this is bombing. You still need to stop. You need some time. You need some space. You need the opportunity to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it going forward. This is probably not the last time you’re ever going to promote this thing. Maybe, but what’s going on? You need some time. So here’s the thing. If you’ve got seven emails scheduled and you’ve already sent three of them, and it’s just not converting, cancel the next one. I’m not saying cancel the next four. Cancel the next one.

There’s no reason to send that fourth scheduled email if it’s bombing, you need to figure out what’s going wrong. Is it because the link is wrong? Well, great, we fixed that. Now we put the right link in, we schedule the next four, and, oh, look, we’re making money, right? Is it because you did a poor job explaining things? Is there something that needs to be tweaked on the sales page or in the sales funnel? What is it? Like, address the problem, but just press pause. Maybe not stop. Don’t press stop. Press, pause for a moment. Take a breath. Me with your team.

If you have a team, meet with the affiliate manager, go for a walk, think through like, what the heck is going on with this? I thought it would work, but it’s not like, maybe we’ll talk about this in a moment. Maybe you go through the scorecard and you identify like, okay, I didn’t use the scorecard before, but this is going badly. Here’s where I’m at it’s because my audience wasn’t warmed up.

So what do I need to do? Address that. If I’m still going to promote this now, my choice is I can just stop together. And next year I’ll do a better job. Great. Or six months from now, I’ll do a better job, whatever it is. Or you can go. Okay, there’s still time. I need to get my audience warmer right now. And so that means I need to go live every morning for 45 minutes and share something I can have the person on.

I can have Stu on an interview him, something like that, just to get your audience more warmed up. But first, just click the pause button. Stop and take a break. The second thing you got to do is just communicate, communicate that you’re quitting. And what I mean by this is reach out to the affiliate manager, reach out to the person that you’re in contact with at their company, and just say, hey, I’ve got to back out of this.

This is a relationship business. Don’t do what most people do and press pause, but not tell me. Excuse me if I’m the affiliate manager. Don’t tell me. All right, don’t leave me hanging thinking, what the heck is going wrong? Where are they? Is there a problem or is it just that they got busy? I don’t know.

This is a relationship business. They might be able to fix whatever’s wrong. So if you assess this and gosh, you know what? I figured it out. It’s the sales page. Their sales page. I’m going back to my example. It’s just everybody on there is male and my audience is 80% women. That’s why this isn’t converting. They might go, hey, you know what?

We have some maybe everybody’s male. Maybe it’s like I said, 36 males and four females. And they go, hey, we’ve got a couple more female ones. We’ll get those on there, we’ll strip out, maybe take off, make it like 50 50 or 60 40 even. And we’ll feature the women more because that’s going to convert better. Maybe they don’t have video testimonials from some women, but they do have some written ones.

So they could do that. Maybe there needs to be a language change. I’m trying to think of an example of that. Sorry. In the mid-afternoon, yawns. All of a sudden, maybe the audience wants to be referred to as creatives and so you refer to them as creatives, not bloggers, podcasters, and YouTubers. I don’t know. I’m trying to think of some examples, but there are some language tweaks. The thing is just to communicate because they might solve the problem like that. It might just really fix the problem quickly. Above all else, it’s just the right thing to do because you’re communicating with them. Like, I get it.

You just want to go into a hole like you were planning on making $10,000. You made zero. But communicate to them that this isn’t working so that they understand. Maybe they can fix it. Maybe not, but at least you’re being just a good person to them. And then lastly, review what went wrong? What are the reasons that it went wrong? What did you do wrong? What did you do wrong? Okay, I didn’t warm up my audience and I didn’t really understand the product all that well. Those are two good things we learned. Next time I’m going to warm up my audience better. I have a better understanding of the product. Boom. Great. What did you learn from it? What have you learned from this process?

Well, I learned that I just got to have a better understanding of the product. I’ve learned that I need to review the sales page, and I learned that I need to look out for things that might lower conversions specifically for my audience. And I’ve learned something else. Whatever it is. What are you going to do differently next time? Well, next time I’m going to get the sales page before the promo even starts and I’m going to review it.

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Next time I’m going to offer suggestions for improving the sales page. Next time I’m going to go through the course or the product first or at least test it out. Next time I’m going to warm up my audience. I’m going to start three days earlier. Just three days earlier. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to start three days earlier. Boom, you got a plan for next time. That’s important. So get that scorecard that I mentioned earlier. Get that scorecard right.

Should I promote this? Go through it like retroactively, and review the questions. So I’ve decided I’ve stopped this promo. I’m going to go through the scorecard again and I’m going to go. Yeah, you know what? I really didn’t. And I didn’t know that as well as I thought I did. No, I scored that a three. It really should have been a two. And you know what?

It turns out I shouldn’t have promoted this ever. Or at least I shouldn’t have promoted this. Now that’s a big difference. Some things are I should never promote this. I understand the product and believe that my audience will benefit from it. Zero. Well, then you should never promote it. But some it’s just you shouldn’t promote it right now.

You should promote it next month or the month after when you can address some of those issues. So that is why it’s not working. But more importantly, how to avoid it not working in the first place. Get those seven things under control, and you shouldn’t encounter this very often. But if you do, you can follow the steps to address it when things are absolutely. Because something will go wrong. At some point, you’re going to have a promotion that’s just a total flop. So if that happens, make sure that you address that on the front end. And I’m going to drop one more URL for you here. Make sure you guys check out our membership site, Affiliate Insider Monthly. You can get a trial right now for one dollar. https://mattmcwilliams.com/aimtrial can get in.

One of the things that are going to help you do is learn how to avoid these mistakes by keeping up with what’s working in affiliate marketing. That’s what Affiliate Insider Monthly is all about. So go check out Aim. You can get inside. Get two months for a buck, literally two whole months of Aim for one dollar. So go get inside that now. Make sure you sign up for that. And I want to leave you with some action items as we wrap up here. I only got two steps today. Two action items.

Number one is to go download that scorecard. Go download the scorecard. MattMcwilliams.com/scorecard. Download that and use that on your next promotion. Use that on your next promotion so you can avoid these mistakes in the future. That’s the big thing, right? Use that scorecard for every affiliate promotion that you ever do. And the second call to action.

The second action I’m going to leave you with. Just text me if you have any questions about today’s lesson or anything else. Text me anytime. Area code 260-217-4619. Any questions about this or anything else about the scorecard, any of that stuff? You can text me anytime. There if you know someone who would benefit from hearing this or who wants to connect as well, hit that share button, and tell them about today’s lesson.

That’s super important. And then make sure you come to join us next week guys. I’m going to be live again at 02:00 p.m. Eastern. April 14 the day before tax day we’re going to be discussing how to get affiliates to promote you more. So we’re going to talk about how to get them active. That’s a big thing like you actually got to get them active first. How do you help them succeed and then how do you keep them promoted?

So if you’re watching this live, watch the replay. Whatever Mark your calendar for next Thursday at 02:00 p.m.. Eastern. April 14 for that live lesson. We’ll see you then.