The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams – Advice for Affiliate Program Managers

Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode

TEXT ME: +1 (260) 217-4619

Get the Sample Affiliate Training + Slides Here

Get the Weekend Email Template Here

How to Close Sales on Cart Close Day

AffiliateHQ

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Listen on YouTube

Listen on Amazon

Email Me New Episodes

Ask a Question for the Show

Affiliate Onboarding: How to Get New Partners Promoting Quickly

How to Scale an Affiliate Program by Focusing on the Right Affiliates

How to Make Your Affiliate Commissions More Competitive

How to Turn Around an Affiliate Program That Isn’t Growing

How to Recruit Affiliates from Your Competition’s Program

How to Create Affiliate Emails, Images, and Social Swipe

What do you communicate to your affiliates and when do you communicate with them and how do you communicate them? What are the methods you need to use? These are three critical questions, and they’re all answered in this episode. So, a couple of episodes ago, I talked about onboarding your affiliates, and, we were focused on, like, what does that first week or so look like the first couple weeks? Because as I shared in that episode, if you can get an affiliate to promote within the first couple of weeks, you stand a much better chance of having them be a large affiliate over time than you do if they don’t promote in the first couple of weeks.

Now, you know, I shared in that episode, there’s caveats and nuance to that. I almost said, some. I almost got those words mixed up there.But, you know, there’s caveats and nuance. Right? You know, if you’ve got a launch that’s four months away, just because they don’t promote two weeks after signing up doesn’t mean they’re not going to promote. Clearly, if they sign up and they say, awesome, you know, it’s evergreen. And they sign up and they say, you know, it’s January when they sign up, and they’re like, dude, I have got you on my calendar for March 14th. That’s six, seven weeks away.That’s fine. You know, we want to get on their calendar, but it’s really important to get them active quickly.

But what about the long term? You know, I promised that I would share this in an upcoming episode, and you only had to wait two weeks. So I’m going to share today about the regular updates. You know, what do we do between launches?What do we do between big promotions? What do we do if it’s an evergreen program? Right. What are those regular updates? So there’s a couple of nuances there in and of itself. Again, there’s.If you have a completely evergreen program, really, there’s not a whole lot that changes week to week, and you’re not really all that seasonal. Maybe you have a little bit of an increase right before Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, or maybe you have a little bit of a bump in Q4. You know, maybe you sell more or you sell an equal amount from June through August as you do the other nine months.

But, you know, it’s still half your sales are the other nine months. That’s kind of, you know, pure evergreen. On the flip side of that is maybe you only launch once a year, or you launch, you know, two products each once a year, or you launch, you know, one product twice a year, something like that.You know, you have two, three, four launches a year, and that’s it. And then in the middle is more of a, is a cyclical evergreen program or something where you’re doing special promos periodically. So maybe you have, you know, your product’s available 24, 7, 365, but you’re going to run big promotions, you know, four weeks out of the year. And really you’re, you know, 75, 80% of your entire year sales will come in those four weeks. So that’s kind of a hybrid between the two. Right.

There’s other nuances as well that we’re not going to get into, but I’m going to talk about all of those, right? All of the things that you need to do, no matter what kind of a program you’re running. One of the biggest mistakes we see with launch affiliate programs, when it’s pure launches, is they go dark for nine months, 10 months, 11 months out of the year between launches. And that’s something. We worked with one client recently. I, was really excited.This ended up being they’ve done 16 or 17 launches. And one of the things that we really hammered home months in advance and we worked with them was get them warmed up, get them fired up now it’s June and your launches in November. Get them fired up now it’s July.

Get them fired, like, get them excited. You know, we don’t want to get them burned out, but we want to get them really, you know, pumped up to promote. And so that’s one of the things that we worked on with them is not going dark, not being dark in June, July and August for a.For a November launch. Let’s get them psyched up now. So that’s a big mistake we see with the launch programs is just lack of communication, period. Like, any communication is better than no communication whatsoever. But what are some of the things that you do need to communicate? There’s no particular order to anything I’m going to share today.All right. We’re going to probably bounce around a little bit. I’m going to share some for pure Evergreen, some for the Evergreen hybrid, some for the launch specific ones.

But the one thing you got to do for all of them is you got to educate them you know, if we’re talking about launches in the months leading up to, you know, you probably don’t want to do this six months out, but in like the 90 days leading up to your launch. We want to educate them. Evergreen, you can do this year round Evergreen hybrid.You want to do this kind of leading into any big promotions, but educate them, share with them what’s working, what’s working for other partners. Teach your affiliates the strategies and the tactics that they need to use. If you want a good example of that, go to mattmcwilliams.com affiliatetraining I’ve got an example training there that we did. We did an affiliate training webinar for one of our clients. So the only, the normal way to get access to this is only if you’re one of our, your affiliate launch coach clients.And this is the actual training that we shared with the affiliates of one of those clients. And you can down, you can actually watch the training, see how we do it, see how we train them.

You can also download the slides. We’ve got, you know, keynote PowerPoint version, I think we got, even got a PDF version. And you can download those and use those as a guide for you to train your affiliates. But you need to teach them what works.Teach them the strategies, teach them the tactics and there’s some statistics in there that’ll blow their minds. That’s going to help them to promote more. You know, teach your affiliates why mailing more works or why mailing at a specific time works. Yeah, I think when we’re running launches. Right. When we’re running launches.

I often share why mailing on a weekend is a good idea. So what I do, it’s a little trick here. So the idea is to get them to send an email or two over the weekend. And a lot of times we’ll wrap that up in a contest. You know, there’s all kinds of reasons for this. You actually, I’ll share in a second how you can get a template of this email.But what I don’t want to do is have them like cancel their Friday email and then send it on Saturday because of this contest. So here’s what we’ll do on Friday about 2 o’. Clock. There’s a balance here like 2 o’ clock p. m. most people have sent their emails for the day by 2, 2:30.But it’s early enough in the day where they can pivot. Like I know for me, you know, I’m recording this on a Friday at about 2:30 and if I’m, you know, doing an affiliate promotion right now. And you emailed me at right now and said hey, you should mail this weekend. Maybe you weren’t planning on emailing this weekend. We’re doing a special promotion. The top three affiliates, you know, get this or something like that.

I have the ability to go, I think I could pull that off. Let me type up some stuff, boom, boom, boom. Get our team to load the email, yada yada, right? If you email me at 5, I can’t do that. I’m like I’m, I’m a half hour from leaving the office. I got my kids, I’m coaching my kids games tonight, now whatever, you know, great, that’s great.Somebody will win. That contest is not going to be me. But if you email me at like 10:30, maybe that’s just early enough. It probably wasn’t. But if you email me at like 9 o’, clock, it was just early enough that I can go into ConvertKit, click pause on our email that was going out today. And instead of sending an email today and then, oh man, I’ll send one more over the weekend.Now I’ll just send two on the weekend and maybe, you know, win the contest. This is all about getting affiliates to add an extra email that they weren’t planning on sending. But I have to educate them. I have to educate them. So I’ve got a template if you want it. You can download the template if you just go to mattmcwilliams.

comweekend email. But basically this email teaches them why they should email this weekend and it gives them the stats and it gives them, you know, things like well, email volume is pretty quiet and people have more time to interact with it. Right? Help your affiliates understand why you want them to mail more. It’s not just hey, if you mail more then you’re gonna make more money or you mail more. It’s good for me.No, help them understand that way. Share with them the data about how mailing more on cart close day will exponentially increase their sales. Just share the data with them. I’ll include a post in the show notes here that you can download about why mailing more on card closed day is such a good idea. Teach them how to send to their non clicks and their, their unopened. Right?

Teach them those things. So number one, you got to educate your affiliates whatever it is, you know, if you’re running an evergreen program, teach them some of the things that are working right. Teach them some of the strategies that are working for other affiliates. If you ask the affiliates, hey, do you mind if I share? Some of them might say, no, that’s a trade secret and I don’t want anybody knowing. Okay, fine.But many of them will say, yeah, go ahead, Happy, if you share that, that’s fine. If you’re doing launches, make sure you get them warmed up before the launch. I’ve done a couple of episodes on that. You can just look those up. Just look them up on the podcast, like warm up. And you’ll find numerous episodes.

That’s communication. That’s what you should be communicating. What should you be communicating? All of the things we’re going to talk about today. When should you communicate? You should be communicating weeks or months and then weeks in advance.I Recommend Starting about 6 months out. About 6 months out. Just once a month up until about 2 months out. Just 4 emails over the course of 4 months with some of the stuff that we’ll share today. Then one Facebook post. So typically what I’ll do is I’ll send, an email early in the month, then in the middle of the month I’ll post to the Facebook group for the affiliates and then repeat that cycle up until about two months out.Then I start to ramp it up just a little bit. Okay. Because there’s more stuff that you’ll see as we go along. Biggest thing is just communicate a lot.

The biggest mistake is not communicating enough.Right?that’s the biggest mistake that we see is just not communicating enough. So what are some of the other things that you should be communicating? You know, again, this applies launch, applies Evergreen, applies hybrid, whatever. Give them behind the scenes access, you know, give them access to what’s going on in your preparation for the launch, for example. And one of my favorite videos that I always have clients do is if they’re recording, you know, the pre launch videos or they’re doing like a run through of their live workshop. Just get on and do a five minute video.

What you do is you set up, you know, you got your team there setting up and you just, you know, you’re on set and you just say, hey guys, hey partners, I’m on set here. We’re three days from the start of the live workshop or we’re a week away from the live workshop or whatever it is and we’re just doing a test run through. Just wanted, you know, here’s what it looks like, here’s some of the stuff we’re gonna be doing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I might even include, you know, if they’re doing the walkthrough I might even include like a 10 minute little snippet of it. Or a blooper, you know, that’s always fun. Like I might even start off like we’ve done this because I don’t want it to be too polished, but we’ll take, you know, a blooper or two at the beginning and then, hey, partners, I’m here live, you know, boom, boom, boom, you know, three to five minute message and then at the end finish up with a couple more bloopers.

So there’s like four or five bloopers, you know, two, three on either end, bookending the message. This just keeps it fun, right? Videos just going live in the Facebook group, you know, for partners, periodically. Again, this doesn’t matter what kind of program you’re running. Just going live or recording a quick five minute video, you know, hey, partners, I was thinking of, you know, something, you know, such and such, right? Sharing a lesson that you learned from another.Maybe you promoted something as an affiliate and sharing something that worked or didn’t work. Constantly hammering home those important dates. You’ve got to do that, right? You’ve got to constantly remind them of when does the promo start? Promotion starts April 14, April 14, April 14, April14, April 14, right? You got to hammer that home.

You got to give them plans. You know, if this is, a purely evergreen program, but maybe there is some cyclical ness to it, they need to know what those dates are that are important and have a plan for building up to that. You know, teach them, going back to that. Teach them how to warm their audience up. Teach them, you know, how to promote the webinar, how to promote the ebook, how to promote the free report, how to promote the quiz, how to promote the assessment, how to promote the workshop, how to promote, you know, sales, whatever it is. Teach them specific things, how to do better with email.Give them a specific lesson on social media. Give them a specific lesson on a part of social media, Instagram, Facebook, whatever. Give them, a specific lesson on how to use DMs, how to use their Facebook groups, how to do lives, you know, all of those things, right? These are all the things that you can be giving to your affiliates, announce contests and prizes. That’s pretty popular, right?

Give them the information they need to know about, hey guys, we just announced this.It’s a $250,000 contest or it’s a $10,000 contest or everybody who makes five sales gets this, whatever it is. Like, let them know those things if you know what your contest is going to be eight weeks in advance, announce it. You’ll remind m them, but go ahead and announce it. Get some excitement about it. Give them updates on everything. You know, oh my gosh, the webinar was amazing.Oh, you know, last week was our second biggest week in, you know, the past year. Whatever it is, just give them updates. Share success stories, testimonials. When you get a testimonial, if you’re an affiliate manager, here’s what you do. You tell your customer service team anytime somebody sends an email with a really cool story, do me a favor, take a screenshot, send it to me, or let’s start a channel in Slack or whatever. But I want to know anytime somebody says something nice about our product so I can tell it to affiliates.

You know, one of the biggest things you can do with Evergreen, every three, four months, just reach out and ask if there’s anything they need with a launch, Ask if there’s anything they need, you know, a couple weeks out and then, you know, maybe a day or two in or the day before. Just ask if there’s anything that they need. Ask for referrals. Hey, do you know anybody who’d be a good partner? That should be your number one source of affiliates, by the way. Once you get up and running now, this is not true of your first hundred to 200, but once you hit a point where you have about 500 affiliates, your number one source of new affiliates should be your current affiliates.So reach out periodically. You know, a couple months out from a launch, hey, really excited. Remember, April 14th. April 14th. Do you know anybody who might be a good fit to promote this? If it’s Evergreen, just maybe reach out, you know, once a quarter, once every six months is probably enough.

So of course the next question is, when do you communicate with them? If you have a pure Evergreen program, like there’s no cyclicalness whatsoever, if there’s any cyclical nature whatsoever, then naturally throughout the year you’re going to ramp up, leading into the high points, right? If you’re running periodic promotions, kind of that hybrid program, you’re going to, you’re going to center your communication around those high points. I mentioned earlier with the launch, I would do monthly up until about two months out from the launch, and then I would get a little bit more frequent. We’ll talk about that in a moment. But if you have no cyclicalness whatsoever to your affiliate program and you’re not doing any promotions, there’s like literally nothing that changes.

Then I would send a, once a month kind of newsletter type thing, I’d include three of these elements. Maybe a tip, a strategy, you know, what’s working, maybe a good story, a testimonial or an update, something like that. I would include, you know, things like that. And then one of the other things, right, you maybe announce a new contest for the next month. Well, if you’re announcing a contest for the month of say March, then in March you’re going to increase the frequency. You’re going to really start increasing the frequency 10 days out from March, you know, about February 18th or so.And now that almost becomes like a launch. Almost kind of becomes like a launch. And so as far as the win, again a consistent once a month email. And then I would, if you can track this in your system, I’d send to, you know, pop that out to the unopened, roughly you know, 10 to 12 days later. And then I would post once a month or so in your Facebook group, maybe even twice a month in your Facebook group. The Facebook group is going to be one thing.

In fact, you can use your email to point back to the Facebook group. So you know, you post in the Facebook group a tip and you post in the Facebook group a really cool testimonial and you post in the Facebook group, you do a live where you answer some questions, then use the newsletter almost to point back to those pieces of content. You can include something else as well. So they make sure to open your emails. But that would be the rhythm I would get into with that, with the cyclical type thing. Maybe you got like four big promos a year.So once every roughly 90 days you’re basically have two months off and then a month where you’re ramping up and then two months off.

I would follow the evergreen pattern, you know, for those two months and then I would just ramp it up. In the midst of say a 10 day promotion, you know, you’re emailing every day, five days before through the, you know, the promotion, 15 days. You’re posting in the Facebook once or twice a day during that period and then for a launch again, you know, the thing is once a month. So if you’re launching say March 1st, then you got your follow up emails, things like that, we’ve talked about those before. That’s kind of like the week or two after the launch.But I would send an email, you know, depends on the payments as well. If you have affiliates getting paid and let’s say you’ve got a four month payment plan, well that kind of takes care of that. You know, but what about the affiliates who didn’t get paid? So I would just send a once a month email or once a month, you know,

Facebook post. You don’t really need to get too hyperactive about it. You know, you could alternate between Facebook and email for about five months or so until you hit about, you know, six months out.Then I’m going to go basically every other week. So I’m going to send an email at the beginning of the month, Facebook post in the middle, vice versa, doesn’t matter. And then the next month I’m gonna repeat that. So it’s just starting to amp up the frequency. And when I get about, you know, six to eight weeks out, I start going roughly, you know, every two weeks or so, about eight weeks out until about the two weeks out mark. And then I start really ramping it up from there.

Get the EXACT Template We Give to Our Affiliates to Get Them to Promote More and Generate More Sales! Click Here to Download it Now!

So that’s the win. But the biggest thing is just having some level of consistency so that they’re never going more than about 30 days without hearing from you in some manner. Just keeping them somewhere in their brain. And if you give value, then they’re going to love it. You can use email, you know, how do we communicate? Use email, use Facebook group, use telegram groups if you want.Communicate with them however they want to be communicated, especially for your bigger ones. One of the things I highly recommend is stop relying on email and Facebook periodically. Send them something in the mail. This was hugely popular. We haven’t done this with all of our clients, but we do like, we’ll do like a quarterly physical newsletter. It’s basically, you know, if you can picture, you know, it’s two, so it’s four pages.

You know, the one side is the mailing stuff. So there’s really nothing on there. So it’s actually three pages of printed stuff and it folds in, in half and then in half again. And you know, you mail it and I mean it costs 50 cents to print and like 89 cents to mail. not even that. I don’t even know how much it costs.It’s pretty cheap though. So you cost about a buck 50 a person. You have a thousand affiliates, it cost you 1500 bucks. Send them something in the mail. Really gets people excited. For your bigger affiliates you could do something special.You know, the list is endless. Just do something special for them. One of my favorite gifts I ever got was a custom made Lego set. And it was me. In fact, they, it was from Pete Vargas and they made two of them, one with glasses and one without because I kind of go 50 50. If you know anybody who knows me, like from May through October, I tend to not wear my glasses.

And then over the winter I wear my glasses because of allergies. And so they sent me two versions of the, you know, like a Batman and a Superman. It had my head, you know, a custom made Lego head. And I’m like, that is so cool. So there’s all types of, things you can do as far as mailings that you can do that would really move the needle. So the important thing is get creative, be consistent, and break the mold again.Communicate via physical mail periodically, occasionally pop out a DM to somebody. And like, here’s the thing, if you’ve got a thousand affiliates. Well, I can’t DM a thousand people. Well, for one, you could have like a VA do it. I don’t have a va. My company doesn’t provide one.You could pay for it yourself. I did that, 11 years ago. I worked for a company and I paid out of my pocket about 200 bucks a month for a virtual assistant because it was cheaper to pay them, you know, for 20 hours, you know, 200 bucks than it was to do some of the things myself.

And I got a, 10x ROI on their work. I mean, I guarantee you the work they did, like DMing affiliates wasn’t called DMing back then. I don’t even know what it was called.Instant messaging. You know, sitting there instant messaging affiliates on my behalf was worth what I got out of it. And I never could have found the time to do it. So don’t make the excuse. I don’t have the time to do that. Yes, you go hire somebody.It’s super cheap, really. You can hire somebody overseas for less than $10 an hour. And so what I would do, you know, I’ve done this periodically, is so you got a thousand affiliates. Again, this isn’t. If you got a hundred thousand affiliates, it’s different. But you take your top thousand and let’s just say I post, you know, in the Facebook group, or I send an email.

Let’s just say I send an email and that email says, here’s your links and swipe copy for next week. Something like, I’m just making that up, right? Or there’s a really cool tip or something like that. Or announces a new contest, doesn’t matter. But let’s just say go with announces a new contest. Then I’ll have my VAS dm, as many people as they can.What if they only get to 274? Okay. Well, it’s 274 people who just got a DM. Hey, just want to make sure. Did you see the email I sent out announcing the contest? Super simple, right?But it stands out, breaks the mold. And I get a lot of responses like, no, I didn’t. Hey, cool. Then, boom, boom, boom. Make sure you go check it. Here’s the subject line.And every now and again, I would say probably 1 out of 30, my VA will basically say, I don’t know how to respond to this, so can you handle it? But, I mean, we get mass communication with a thousand affiliates, and it doesn’t. I mean, you know, it’s something that the VA, I mean, they’re doing, you know, one every 20 seconds, so it takes them a few hours, and they’ve knocked out a thousand. So just don’t let that be an excuse. Break the mold.

Physical mail, DMs, texts, whatever.Just break out of. Just emails and Facebook group. Emails and Facebook group. Boring, boring, boring. Right. So lots to do, but now you have a plan.Go check out those links. Like I mentioned earlier, I’ve got a link in the show notes for, the affiliate training. So you want to know how to train your affiliates? I’ll show you. I’ll even give you the slides. I’ve also got that weekend email template, so you can use that.You can copy and paste the thing. I mean, you know, you might want to tweak it a little bit. I think the one I have in there is specifically for a client, but you can tweak that. And I’ve got a link for you to share with your affiliate. Affiliate on. why mailing more on Cart Close day is such a good idea?It’s actually got the stats that we broke down over the course of, you know, hundreds of launches that we ran. So make sure you go check those out. Make sure you subscribe and share, because in the next episode, I’m gonna be talking about donuts. Actually, just donut, period. Donut, singular. The affiliate donut.

I’m gonna be talking about the affiliate donut in the next episode, so you don’t want to miss that. So make sure you hit that subscribe button. Make sure you share this episode with somebody who could use it. You know, somebody who’s an affiliate manager, an entrepreneur, you know, an aspiring affiliate manager. And they’re like, I don’t know what to communicate. I don’t know how to communicate.I don’t know when to communicate. Well, then I just shared it with you in less than a half hour, so go share this episode with them. If you got any questions about this or anything at all, text me anytime at 260217 and I’ll see you in the next episode. Thank you so much for listening today. Remember to check out all of our deep dives into affiliate marketing at the Affiliateguide TV, and if you have a question, ask [email protected] who knows, maybe you even be featured on an upcoming episode.And lastly, if you haven’t yet, make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you’re listening to this episode.

The post How to Build an Affiliate Communication Plan That Keeps Partners Active appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode

TEXT ME: +1 (260) 217-4619

Weekend Email Template

Sample Affiliate Promo Plan

How to Write Swipe Copy for Your Affiliates

How to Warm Up Affiliates Before a Launch

AffiliateHQ

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Listen on YouTube

Listen on Amazon

Email Me New Episodes

Ask a Question for the Show

How to Scale an Affiliate Program by Focusing on the Right Affiliates

How to Make Your Affiliate Commissions More Competitive

How to Turn Around an Affiliate Program That Isn’t Growing

How to Recruit Affiliates from Your Competition’s Program

How to Create Affiliate Emails, Images, and Social Swipe

How to Build an Affiliate Agreement Affiliates Can Understand

So you’ve got some affiliates interested in promoting you now. What? How do you onboard your affiliates and get them rocking? Well, that’s what today’s episode is all about, getting your affiliates started the right way. So my friend Alan Thomas came to me the other day. I had referred some people to him as affiliates. Alan’s been rocking, you know, you’ve listened to him in a, previous episode. He’s now, co hosting our live lessons every Thursday at 2pm Eastern.You know, shout out for those. But he has his own business coaching, men on losing weight and he’s, you know, rocking the affiliate world. But he’s like, matt, you sent me all these affiliates. What, do I do now? Like, now what? I don’t know what to do.

I’m like, well, let me walk you through that. So I never did. I totally forgot to actually share all this with Alan, but I told him I would record a podcast episode or record something for him. So this is my way of, answering Alan’s question. It kind of depends on where you’re at. Just to be clear, how do you onboard affiliates?Well, it’s very different. If you’re a brand new program, you’re getting like one affiliate per day. Well, then you set up calls with them all. You know, if you’re an established program, you’re getting, you know, 10 new affiliates a day. It’s different. What I’m going to do is take you through that journey today.From beginner program, maybe you’re getting one or two affiliates a week to a more established program. Most of the stuff is the same. It’s consistent throughout. If you’re a new program, like I said, you get on the phone with each of them. The key is to establish the program. You want to wow your early affiliates, get things moving.

If you’re an employee working as a new affiliate manager, you want to impress your boss with some early momentum and you want to do those things if you’re an established program. Like when I ran Shutterfly’s affiliate program or Adidas affiliate program, we were getting 300, 400 affiliates per day, you know, especially like the time of year from like November 1st through Christmas. It was crazy. There was no way I could get on the phone with any of them, let alone, you know, all 300 or 400 of them. But I want you to think about this from the affiliate’s perspective. What do they want?This is why I recommend being an affiliate. So I recommend doing this. I’m a much better affiliate manager now than I’m also an affiliate because I know what affiliates want. I know what I want. They want it quickly and they want it easily. So I’m going to walk you through the steps you need to take, the things you need to do to onboard your affiliates here today.

So, Alan, this one’s for you, buddy. Number one, you need to set them up if needed. All right? So that kind of goes without saying. A few of these early ones, like, well, duh, no, you know, we handle affiliates a little bit differently than a lot of people. We like to white glove it.We don’t. I personally, as an affiliate, again, I go back to rule number one, do what I would want to do as an affiliate. Right. I don’t like it when people send me a link and say, go fill this out. That just ticks me off. I’m like, I’m busy, you know, and this is not an ego thing.I just, I might not be able to get around to it. And then I’m like, I forget about it. I’m not signed up four days later. Well, it’s your fault as the affiliate manager, not mine. So we white glove things, we sign them up, we set up their account, we get them their links, we do all that. Now you may do it differently and that’s fine.

I’m not against that way. But do what you need to do on the, on the tech side, add them to relevant Google sheets or Excel spreadsheets or databases. Right. One of the things that I highly recommend not doing is we don’t use the system to send most of the email. So if they’re in Infusionsoft, we don’t email them through Infusionsoft. we don’t email them through ConvertKit.Here’s the reason. In ConvertKit, in FusionSoft, if they unsubscribe from my main list, they’re also unsubscribing from affiliate updates. They may not want to do that. I’m gonna give you a really good example of that. I’m on Jeff Walker’s list. I was, I was on there twice.I was on there two times. I had an affiliate account and I had opted in to some stuff using that email and I had my regular just subscriber account. So every time he sent an email to his list, I got two of them. I clicked Unsubscribe. I no longer got affiliate updates. And I have seen this happen time and time again.

That’s why we don’t use the system. We use a mail merge tool that, called GMAs. We also use another one called yet another Mail Merge. I don’t recommend one over the other. We use both of them pretty interchangeably. There’s things I like about both, but we use those tools and we email them through a spreadsheet.Now, if you’ve got 300,000 affiliates like we had at, you know, Shutterfly and Adidas, you can’t do that, clearly. But as much as possible, I try not to email them through the system. And that’s a whole tech conversation. I’m not going to get into that. So you need to add them to whatever database that you’re using, you know, beyond your regular, your regular system. Number two, you need to send them a welcome message.

You need to make it warm and inviting, right? Well, this is going to have some of the elements that we’re going to talk about here, but the big thing is just make them feel like, you know, you’re really glad that they’re part of your affiliate program. Make them feel welcome. It’s called a welcome message for a reason. I want this to feel warm and inviting. Think about it like I’m welcoming you into my home.I wouldn’t use a bunch of corporate speak. Dear sir, thank you for being a part of our affiliate program. We are honored and humble. Like, what the heck is that? I feel like I should just do like entire episodes where I read emails that affiliate managers send and critique them. You guys, you know what, let me know if you’re interested in that.

Do me a favor, text me at 2602-1746-1926-0217-4619. And just let me know if you’d be interested in me critiquing affiliate programs. Like, different things, like things that I’m seeing and then commenting on it. It could be good or bad. If you’re interested in that kind of content, text me. That’s actually not a bad idea.I may just do it anyway, but I’d love to hear from you if you’re interested. All right, so number two, you got to have that welcome message. Number three, you need to give them their tools. Now, I’ve done a whole episode on this. I want to focus in on just a few things very quickly. Number one, you got to give them swipe copy.All right? It’s one of the most important Things you can give them killer swipe copy they can use for every part of your promotion, whether it’s a launch or whatever. I’m not going to go into a ton of detail. I’ve shared this before. But number one, you got to hire a copywriter. You know, you got to hire somebody that can write it objectively.

You’re too close to the product to be objective. number two, you need to include images, you know, that your affiliates might need. Number three, you need to have different versions for different audiences. So if you’ve got different target audiences, write different swipe copy for each of those. Number four, you need different links. So you need some short, two, 300 word emails, you need some thousand word emails.And then you need some blurbs for things like newsletters, right? And maybe, a 30 second clip from a podcast. And then number five, you need to teach your affiliates that swipe copy is a guide only. I talked about this in the last episode. Don’t use the swipe copy. You know, don’t copy and paste the swipe copy as an affiliate.

The worst thing you can have happen is 100 affiliates all sending the exact same identical emails. Tell them to make the emails personal and only use the swipe copy as a starting point. Share my guide on that with them. I the links in the last episode, share that with them. Right? You need to give them social media posts and images and links, of course, and give them the login information and all those things.So give them the tools and that they need to succeed. The number four thing you need to do is ask about them, learn about them, get to know the affiliate, learn who they are, learn about their website and their promotional methods. Again, as much as possible. Again, 300 affiliates, that’s different. Early on, you should know all kinds of stuff about them. I think back to my early affiliates.

I can still name them, I can still tell you stories about them. I still know, remember their URLs. As, my programs got bigger and bigger, I began to know less and less. But early on, learn about them. Keep a database where you know things like their wife’s name, their husband’s name, their kid’s name. Do you at least know their, you know, okay, what sports do their kids play?What activities are they in? Where do they live? Like when you’re talking to an affiliate for the fifth time and you’re going, remind me again, what part of the country are you? And you sound like an idiot. That’s just ridiculous. Like, no, I should not have to remind you where I live.You should know. You should know. Like, that’s. I mean, when I talk to my friends, they don’t ask me questions like that. Be their friend. So ask about them.Learn about them. Number five, part of the onboarding process, learn how they like to communicate. You need to learn their preferred method of communication and then use it. I know I work with affiliates that only do WhatsApp. That’s. That’s all they use.

Get the EXACT Template We Give to Our Affiliates to Get Them to Promote More and Generate More Sales! Click Here to Download it Now!

So I have to use that. I’ve got two that I can think of. That’s it. But, you know, I have to use that Skype. Outside of. If it wasn’t for affiliates, I would literally never use Skype.But I have some affiliates that prefer Skype. There’s Voxer, there’s email, there’s text messages. There’s. You know, some people like getting phone calls. It’s weird, but they do, you know. No, that’s why I’m cool with that, actually.But some people prefer Facebook, you know, DMs, Facebook or Instagram, DMS, things like that. Easiest way is just ask them. You know, like, you could do a survey, send in a quick survey. you could just hit reply and let me know. You know, initially, all you have is their email. Hit reply and let me know what’s, what’s your favorite way to communicate?

I want to make sure I communicate in a way that you most prefer. You’re going to get better replies that way, which is going to benefit you. So I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if I’ve got somebody that prefers text message and something big is happening, I’m going to text them, not going to send them an email or Facebook message. All right? The sixth thing you need to do, make sure they understand the basics. All right, the basics around your program’s rules.What are they allowed to do and not allowed to do? commissions, you know, are there any particular commission structures? you know, any nuances, special commissions, like, you know, you get 50% on, course sales, 30% on the membership. You know, things like that. They need to know the products and the pricing. You know, if you have ranges of prices, they need to know what those are.

And so they’re. You’re. Not. For one, they’re going to market it better. For two, you’re going to have less questions on the back end. They need to know important dates and time periods.And of course, if it’s a launch, they need to know not only when does the launch start. You know, okay, the launch starts April 21, but when does the promotion start? Well, it starts April 10. When does the warm up start? It starts late March. They need to know those things.You need to tell them and be clear about that. They need to know when you pay, do you pay monthly for the previous month, do you pay on the 15th, do you pay, you know, net 30? What do they, what do you pay? When do you pay? How do you pay? they need to know what bonuses are up for grabs.

I mean this is kind of 101, right? If you’re going to offer bonuses and prizes and contests, they need to know that. They need to know how to contact you. So I’m not going to list like I’m going to, I’m going to know my affiliate’s preferred methods but in my signature I’m going to list, you know, a phone number that they can contact me at. And I’m probably going to list like one alternative means my preferred method because maybe they don’t have a preferred method, maybe they don’t care. So I’m going to give them like two ways to contact me in addition to email.Number seven, get on a strategy call with them. You know, I’ve talked about this before, but one of the best things you can do to get your affiliates to mail more and promote early and get them going is just to create a personal promotion plan with them.

When you meet with your affiliates one on one before the promotion, you’re able to craft a custom plan. Now we actually call it a commitment plan. Now there’s something we changed a couple of years ago we found like this, you know Robert Cialdini, right. The principles of commitment and consistency means that people stick to this plan.So we call them commitment plans. Usually what we found is that if we can get them one on one, do a plan, they agree to at least a few extra emails than they’d previously planned on sending. So this is a personalized plan. I’ve got a sample template that you can download. I will put the link in the show notes. I think it’s just mattmcwilliams.com affplan and you can go download that. These work so they only, you know, they only work when you’re small or you’re, you know, you’re only picking up like a few affiliates or maybe you can do it with Your, your top 20 or 30. It’s hard to do with more than two people a day. That gets a little bit out of hand.

with the bigger programs do them once or twice a week in small groups. So everybody that signed up you know, this week we’re going to get together and do a promotion plan.In fact, well, this is something we used to do with some of our bigger programs. We would just do it, twice a month, just regularly and like anybody could sign up. When you signed up for the program, you could be a part of these calls. And we basically do kind of more of a generic one and craft them together on those calls. The eighth thing that you should do to onboard people is give them a quick start guide. Like this is one to three pages.Really it should be two. Like on the high end. If it dips into a third page, that’s fine, but it’s a very quick guide. How do I get my links? How do I create custom links? How do I find swipe copy?

How do I find images, how do I find blank, like where is it? You know, how do I access my stats? How do I log in? How do I contact you? What are the basic no no’s, what’s working for others? You know, what are the mailing plans?When are the dates? Like this is all in one spot. All these things I’ve been talking about in one spot right there in one spot. What’s the commission, the products, like all this in a, in a quick start guide. That’s important with these mailing plans, for example, you know, goes back to what we just talked about. Like doing the kind of the generic meeting where you create those promo plans.I’ll meet with 20, 25 affiliates for a big launch. Personally, we have a thousand affiliates. So, what I do is I give them our mailing plans. We call them our ABC plans. The A stands for all in or aggressive. The C stands for conservative.

So all in or aggressive might be like 15 emails. Conservative might be five emails. And then a balanced plan, which is the B would be, you know, five emails. And so we outline, like, here’s what to do, you know, June 6th, do this, June 8th, do this, June 9th, mail to, you know, this group, then mail on, you know, here’s what to do each of these days. And so our objective here, just like the personalized commitment plans, just get them to commit to some level of participation. All I’m getting, all I want them to do is commit to a minimum number of emails, minimum promotion.And what we found is that people who commit to that C, you know, that conservative level will often move up to the balanced or even the all in level as the launch progresses. They just want to dip their toe in the water, right? You know, like, is this promo Going to work for me. And if it looks like it’s working, then they’ll get more aggressive as they go. But the key here is to get them to commit to something on the front end. So we make it very easy, super easy for them to commit on the conservative level.

Like the conservative level is usually going to be by five total emails, maybe six, like two, two, possibly three to your whole list. maybe one or two to unopened or you know, non clicks, one or two to, you know, engaged contacts and you know, maybe six emails. Pretty easy commitment level, you know, only two, maybe three to your whole list. Like that’s super easy. And then next thing you know, they add a couple more to their non clicks and then they add, oh well, when I’m promoting the sales, I only promote it to my engaged contacts. Oh, I can send, you know, six or seven.Now all of a sudden there are 13 emails, which is really cool. All right, the number nine thing we want to do when we’re onboarding our affiliates is get them their first sale quickly. We want them making a first sale asap. Now if it’s a launch, like, hey, we’re launching in April, it’s January, I can’t, like, I can’t really do anything for you there.

But if it’s a regular program, like get them a first sale quickly, incentivize it, you know, like, hey, on your first sale, if you make your first sale within 10 days, I’m going to give you 100% commission, double commission. You know, maybe you can’t do 100% because you’ve got cost of goods or something.But even then it’s like, maybe I want to, I don’t mind if I lose a few bucks on the first sale. if you make three sales in your first month, then you’re gonna get whatever, you know. So it’s like let’s say you got a thousand dollar product, you know, $500 commission, 50% commission. If you make, three sales in the first month, I’m gonna give you a thousand dollar bonus. You’re basically gonna make almost no money on those three sales. That’s fine.

Gets them going, right? We want to give them a low barrier, get them some, some movement, you know, rather than do the three sales in the first month, you know, you get, you’re guaranteed $1,000. Maybe it’s you make three sales in the first month and we’re going to enter you into a drawing for $5,000. You know, pretty impressive prize. And if you have enough Affiliates, it’s, it’s actually costing you less money. But again, low barrier, fast moving.That’s what we’re trying to get them to do. And tenth, you need to make it clear that you are there to help. Be available, be on the multiple channels like we talked about. You know, when they email, reply fairly quickly, make it clear, tell them I’m here to help. And not just in like a generic way. Tell them I’m here to help.

Here are the ways I can help you. What can I do to serve you? Make it abundantly clear that you are there to help. And then the last thing. And we’ll talk more about this, coming up. But once you’ve onboarded them, give them regular updates, educate them, share what’s working.And we’re going to talk about how to teach your affiliates and talk about the different ways that you should communicate with your affiliates. But there’s a lot to do. But now you have the onboarding plan, what to do when your affiliates sign up and how to get them started fast with making some sales. So I mentioned that upcoming episode that’ll be coming up in, two or three episodes. Our next episode we’re gonna be talking about how to use leaderboards to find affiliates, which I’m super excited about. I’m gonna share kind of a secret strategy there that I don’t.

I’ve kind of touched on it in some other content, but I don’t know if I’ve ever shared the exact strategy and I’m pretty excited about that. I shared it with a coaching client, client recently and pretty excited to share that publicly for the, what I believe is for the first time. So you’ve got the plan. My question for you and I’d love if you would text me Your answer at 260-217-4619. That’s the number you can text me anytime. I’m going to be the one that responds like this is not my team or anything doing this.Just to be clear, I want to know, like, which one of these things are you maybe not doing? which one of these things can you implement? Which one of these things you think maybe you’re doing poorly and you’re going to improve? And how are you going to improve? What did you get out of this episode? So please text me, let me know your thoughts, 260-217-4619 and let me know what you’re going to be doing, as a result of this episode.

Then make sure you hit subscribe because again, the next episode is all about finding affiliates using leaderboards. And then we’ll be talking soon about that communication plan. Plan for that ongoing communication. You’ve onboarded them. They’re up and running now. We’re a month later, like, oh, what do I do?Well, we’re gonna be talking about that soon, so I will see you in those upcoming episodes. Bye. Bye. Thank you so much for listening today. Remember to check out all of our deep dives into affiliate marketing at the Affiliateguide TV. And if you have a question, ask [email protected] who knows, maybe you even be featured on an upcoming episode. And lastly, if you haven’t yet, make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you’re listening to this episode.

The post Affiliate Onboarding: How to Get New Partners Promoting Quickly appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode

TEXT ME: +1 (260) 217-4619

Affiliate Training Templates and Scripts

Promo Strategy Call Template

Resources Page Guide

AffiliateHQ

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Listen on YouTube

Listen on Amazon

Email Me New Episodes

Ask a Question for the Show

How to Make Your Affiliate Commissions More Competitive

How to Turn Around an Affiliate Program That Isn’t Growing

How to Recruit Affiliates from Your Competition’s Program

How to Create Affiliate Emails, Images, and Social Swipe

How to Build an Affiliate Agreement Affiliates Can Understand

Affiliate Program Legal Requirements: What Every Affiliate Manager Needs to Know

Today, I’m sharing a story I have never shared before. The story of how I took an affiliate program from 15 million a year to a staggering 325 million annually in just four years. Yes, that is more than 20x growth in only about 48 months. I’m going to share everything, all of the basic principles, all of the secrets I have never revealed publicly that worked, and maybe even a few things that didn’t. Some of the methods I share might surprise you, so listen up. So that I know of. I’ve never shared this story before. I’ve probably, as I was thinking about this, I was thinking, you know, I know I shared at least one little part of it earlier this year, and it was kind of the first time I shared that.

And obviously I’ve shared some of the principles here and there and throughout different episodes, but I’ve never shared this story in its entirety. And it’s the story of how I took one affiliate program from right at 15 million a year when we took over to four years later. We were doing 325 million that year. Now, I am not going to say who this company was in part because I’m going to mention some specific people without mentioning their names, and I don’t want to call them out. But this company, it’s a publicly traded retailer. Now, we’ve worked with dozens of companies like that.So you can’t figure out who it is. Huge, right? And I am not going to share the exact numbers because you could Google these exact numbers and possibly figure out who it is, but their revenue last year was over $2. 25 billion. Okay, over 2. 25.

Not much over right around there. At, the time I took over the affiliate program in 2010, their annual revenue was about $300 million. Their affiliate program accounted for less than 5% of that. When I stopped working with them in 2015, they did $1. 1 billion in sales, with the affiliate program accounting for 32% of all sales. In other words, we did more in affiliate sales in 2015 than the entire company did in 2010.That’s the kind of growth we had. So the question, of course, is, how did we do it? You know, and as I looked back and thought about it, I found five things that we did specifically that contributed the most growth Could I do a 50 point podcast about every little thing we did that contributed an additional 100,000 in sales? Absolutely. I’m not going to do that though. I’m going to share five big things.

I think these were the five core principles that were all worth, I’m going to say, more than $20 million individually. And of course, the cool thing about them is they stack on each other and I’m going to share them in no specific order because they are all important. If I do a countdown from five to one, you’ll focus on number one, maybe number two, and that’s it. The reality is that doing any one of these things, or even two or three, will only get you half the results of doing all five. And so I actually am going to do them in some sort of an order, and that is the order in which we implemented them is I’m going to do this in chronological order. So I guess there is a particular order, but the reason why it’s chronological, it’s not just to be clear, is not most important, least important of the five.

They are all equally important. And like I said, they compound. You know, if all we do is the first thing, we might have grown to 50 million. But we did 1 and 2 which got us to 80. We did 1, 2 and 3, which got us to 140. We did 1, 2, 3 and 4, which got us to 230.We did 1, 2,3, 4 and 5, which got us to 325. The combination of these five things plus the magic factor of time, you know, it did take us four years now, to be clear, it’s still pretty awesome that we more than 21x in four years. When we do all five of these things plus time, I can promise you, you will grow. All right, so let’s jump into what we did to really grow that particular affiliate program. The first thing we did was we focused on one affiliate type at a time. You know, there are literally dozens of different types of affiliates you could work with.

There are coupon sites, there are co red sites, there are mommy bloggers that, you know, other content creators, YouTubers, Instagrammers, people who are big on Facebook, people who are big on TikTok deal blogs, all these different types of affiliates. Well, when I first took over, one of the very first things we did was we sat down with the CEO and I’m going to call the CEO Greg. Nice generic name there, right? Actually, come to think of it, I have worked with a CEO named Greg. It’s not him. Just so you know, their numbers aren’t nearly that big.So if you happen to know who I’ve worked with and know that I once worked with a CEO, Greg, it’s not him, okay? And he was like, okay, you got to go after a bunch of different types of leads. Here’s how we’re going to grow. We have a vision for how we’re going to grow. And here’s what we want you to do.

We want you to go after mommy bloggers and deal blogs and nonprofits and photographers, and we want you to go after all these 10 different types of affiliates.I was like, greg, no, that will not work. We have to focus on one type of affiliate. At first, the old saying that I shared with him was, you know, we don’t want to go a mile wide and an inch deep. We want to go in an inch wide and, ah, a mile deep. I said, we need to really lean in to focusing on one type of affiliate. And I went on to explain not only my theory, but my experience that here’s what’s gonna happen.This is what I explained to him. And what ended up happening, what I predicted would happen, did I say, here’s the thing, we need to focus on one, right? one type of affiliate.

And we go out and we work our butts off to get one type of affiliate, and we go take days to get the first one, and then we take less to get the second in the third, and then one of them starts having some success and we can use that as an example for the next one, which makes it easier to get the next one. And now we’re adding one a day, and then one and a half a day, and then 10 a week, and then we’re adding 20 a week. And the next thing you know, we’re going to grow from there.I said, that’s how this is going to work. I said, they talk to each other, they mastermind with each other, and we need to focus on one type. And so I picked mommy bloggers. Now, I know they hate that term. I’m just saying what the term was back then, back in early 2011, it was mommy bloggers. I said, I’m going to focus on them because I knew some and I knew that I could get 10 or 12 really fast to sign up.

Might even be like 20 or 25 pretty fast, like in the first week or two. And so that’s why I picked that. And so what I had predicted would happen is exactly what happened. I worked hard, I reached out to them. I got about 15 to 20 pretty fast. And then I worked hard to get more, and I asked for introductions.You know, I talk about that all the time. Your number one source of new affiliates should be your current affiliates. So I focused on the mommy blogger affiliates that we already had and the 15 or so that I brought on, and I asked them, and next thing you know, we’ve got like 75 to 100 mommy bloggers pretty quickly. But then I worked really hard to recruit one new one and then another new one, and. And then another new one. And so what happens over time is when you have, let’s say five, you have five mommy bloggers, five nonprofits, five deal blogs, five photographers, five coupon sites, five loyalty sites, you have five of each.

Then the promotions are so sporadic that none of the others really see them and notice them. But what happens when you get to a hundred of one type is now all of a sudden, you know this. Mommy bloggers follow other mommy bloggers. Deal blogs follow other deal blogs. Nonprofits follow other nonprofits. Right.The way I was saying that just made me think of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Willy Wonka in the chocolate factory. And he’s like, the strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozberries taste like snozberries. Sorry. Okay, that was my ADD moment for this episode. Back to what we’re talking about.You know, so they start seeing multiple promotions in a day. And then all of a sudden, when you have a deal, maybe five or 10 affiliates are promoting it that an individual mommy blogger is on their list or follow them on social media.

And now they’re seeing this program everywhere. And it got to the point as we grew and grew, and it literally, we went from getting one a day and working my butt off to get one a day for the first couple of months to two a day, three a day, five a day, 10 a day, literally 15 to 20 per day during peak season. And it got to the point where it was like, step one, register your domain. Step two, set up hosting, you know, WordPress.Step three, register for this affiliate program. Because if you followed anybody that was a mommy blogger, they were all promoting this company. And so I got the nickname from somebody that was king of the mommy bloggers. Right. Ironic nickname. And so we focused on one, okay?

From there, we’re getting 15 to 20 mommy bloggers signing up every day without actively recruiting them. It’s no longer worth actively recruiting new ones. We got all the big ones. We got like, the top two 50, and we’re getting all these new ones, setting up every Day. We’re well known. I don’t need to actively recruit any of them.So we moved on to photographers. And I didn’t know any. Actually, I knew one, a friend of mine from Franklin, Tennessee. And I did reach out to him, and he. I think he introduced me, like, two more, but that was it. And so we specifically focused on.On wedding and engagement photographers. And then we moved on to baby photographers. Then graduation, and then we were, you know, that was most photographers at that point, but we reached out to hundreds a day. But we’d get one or two to sign up. But then, like I said earlier, after we got like 20 or 30, and a few of them started having success, now we had case studies and. And our signup page got better.

And now we started getting multiple photographers in an area. And if you were a photographer in that area and you followed photographers in your area, all of a sudden, two of them promoted us in a week. Well, that’s interesting. And then three promoted us. Now it’s like, okay. Now all of a sudden, after a few months of really hard work, we started getting a couple a week to sign up that we didn’t even recruit.And then another month goes by, and all of a sudden we’re getting one a day. Same thing. Two months later, we’re getting two a day, three day, four day, they were flooding in. So at that point, when we kind of tapped that out, where we were getting more people signing up than we could conceivably actively recruit, we knew it was only a matter of time before we’d have almost all of them. So then we moved on to the deal blogs, and we specifically focused on loyalty sites. And we did the same thing.

Then we did coupon sites. Then we did nonprofits. But even with the nonprofits, we specifically started with PTAs and PTOs. And we specifically started with PTAs and PTOsn in a certain geographical region at that time. We started with them, in the Northeast, because we had connections there. And so that way we were only working with PTAs and PTOs in the Northeast.And then we expanded to the rest of the country. And then again, it got to the point where we were getting two to five per day signing up, which was more than we could actively recruit. So we moved on to other types of nonprofits, children’s hospitals, and then other types from there. And as they began to see what others were doing, they signed up. So this was so important to us. And one of the biggest reasons it worked was because we had that saturation we reached that point of saturation where like I said it was step one, register your domain.

Step two, sign up for hosting, Step three, sign up for this program. And this is how we went from having only about 5,000 affiliates when we took over to having more than 125,000 when we left. We stopped working with them four years later. What’s the math on that’s 25x the number of affiliates? Yeah, we 25x the number of affiliates. Newsflash.We 21x the sales. Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? Now none of that is possible or very little of that as possible. None of it. We probably could have taken it from 15 to 100 just on that, maybe even 140 or 50. But there’s still a lot to go to get to 325.So the second thing we did was we changed how we communicated with affiliates. Now I don’t mean how we communicated. My company communicated how I personally communicate with affiliates. I’m talking about how we as the affiliate program communicated. Because when we took over it was basically a weekly mass email newsletter. That was it.

52 emails a year every week at about the same time to everyone. No individualization, no segmenting, nothing more than the 52. Because apparently there were some unwritten rule that said you can only send one email a week. And then. And it has to be in a newsletter format and it has to go to everybody and say the exact same thing. That doesn’t work.We know that. So we started individualizing a lot of the emails. We started reaching out to affiliates with weekly milestones and goals and specific promos that were only for certain affiliates. And we knew that certain segments, I. E. Once we got it up and running, the nonprofits didn’t care about certain things.

So we left them out with. Which allowed us to send more emails that were very specific to the affiliates. We started sending a lot more emails, like a lot more. But to an individual affiliate they might only get three of them in a week. And so this was an example. One of the advantages that we have as a company is because we work on a lot of evergreen programs.And at that time I’d worked on a lot of evergreen stuff, but I’d also worked on launches. I’d worked on book launches and I’d worked on product launches and I’d worked on. They weren’t super popular back then, but I was starting to work on things like summits. So these event based promos, right? So we were able to bring some of the Excitement and the ferocity of a launch into Evergreen World. And we treated each promo like a launch.

So there might be a site wide sale this week or there might be a three day sale and then there might be this thing. And. And so each of these is now suddenly its own promo with its own launch like thing that has 3, 4, 5 plus emails in a week all about a specific thing rather than one giant email that covers five things. So we started segmenting the affiliates and yeah, as we grew and we had 50,000 affiliates, there might be an email that only went to 8,000 in that same day. There was one that went to 12,500 and there was one that went to another 30,000. There was one that went to.Yeah, there might be a little bit of overlap and that might mean, you know, heaven forbid, right? You got two emails in a day about different things instead of one email a week.

With five things, we started doing more phone calls and more strategy sessions with individual affiliates and small groups of affiliates. Which by the way, if you want to get a template for that, I’ll put the link in the show notes. I think it’s mattmcwilliams.com affplan affplan.We will edit that if that’s not the link. So and you’ll hear a voiceover from a, we’ll probably pick somebody with like a really, really good baritone. I’ll have James Earl Jones come in and like all of a sudden you’ll get the right URL. But either way we’ll put it in the show notes and you can get a template for those phone calls and the strategy sessions. We did all these things that individualized the communication and took that communication to a new level. When we announced a contest, one of the biggest things we did, we did tons of contests.

We’ll talk more about contests later. But they used to run like one contest every quarter and we were suddenly running one. It was like three day contest, two day contest, one day contest, weekly contest. But we required them to opt into the contest. Now there’s two things that, that did. So let’s say we ran a weekly contest.Like we’re going to run a big contest next week. Top affiliate earns $2,500. Second place, thousand, third place, 500. Whatever it is, right? Or however we did the contest, we did all kinds of different contests. I am talking 50 different contests a year, maybe more.And some of them were like every sale earns you an entry. So if you make five sales, you get five entries. You could Win versus, you know, if it’s top affiliate, second affiliate, third affiliate. A lot of the contests were make a sale tomorrow and you’re entered to win. If you make 50 sales, one sale doesn’t matter. We’ll talk more about that a little bit.

But we required them to opt into the contest. Now, this did two things. Number one, it saved us a ton of money from people accidentally winning something. So somebody win a prize like, oh, I didn’t even know I was in a contest. Well, then they didn’t do anything to win it. We want people who are actively going to participate.So we would require them to respond back or fill out a form and say, I’m in. And so we’d have 2,800 people sign up. Only those 2,800 people were entered to win the contest. That was number one. The second thing it did was we could communicate with them differently. And because I knew these 2,800 people are going to promote this specific product Tuesday and Wednesday, and they’re in this contest, right?

So I’m going to go overboard with communication next Tuesday and Wednesday. So I’m going to communicate with them the Friday before and really lead into it over the weekend. I’m going to send an email Monday. I’m going to send another email Monday night. I’m going to send an email at the butt crack of dawn on Tuesday morning, Tuesday afternoon, possibly Tuesday evening, a couple on, you know, Wednesday. Like, I’m going to go all.Because it’s like a launch. And if you’ve ever seen that ferocity and that excitement that comes with being an affiliate for a launch, that’s what we were replicating with these promos. Even though it’s an evergreen program as far as communication, we set up a Facebook group at that time. We were one of the first affiliate programs to ever do that. Like, looking back, I’m like, how did I not start doing that three years earlier? But as far as affiliate programs of more than a.

A hundred people, I think we were the first. And I had seen somebody else do it on a small level. I had seen an affiliate program that a friend of mine ran in a very small niche. And I thought it was really cool. You know, he had like 40 affiliates. And I saw the community and I saw the fact that it was another avenue to communicate.And I believe when we first did this, it was before Facebook really started pushing groups, but it was still an important thing. And so we set up the. These groups for affiliates. You know, Facebook groups started, I think, in 2010 sometime. And we took over this program in 2011. So they were new and like I said, I think Facebook was really pushing them at this time.

But even before that, you could set up a group in other ways, forums, things like that, and nobody was doing them. It was just kind of like everybody was in their own world, I guess. So we created that community. It gave us another way to communicate. We would show up not only in their email inbox, but we’d show up in their notifications. On Facebook, people started helping each other and offering advice and sharing what was working.And I would say once we got it up and running, and it took a good six months to really get, and we had separate ones for three segments of the affiliates, right? But once we got the first group up and running, the first three or four months, I did all the posting and we’d have like two comments, you know, then four and then six. And they were very rarely interacting with each other.

Usually they were just responding to me and asking me a question. But then it got to where other people would start posting and posting tips and sharing what was working and what was not working and asking questions and sharing struggles. And it became this amazing community and it became so much more fun.And that was huge. And then also it, opened the door for us to share what was working for other affiliates. This is a big part of our communication now. We got their permission, but before this program, everything just felt like it was so private and so closed. And we started interviewing affiliates and they were able to learn from each other.

And so we would see an affiliate do one cool thing and we do like a little 10, 15 minute interview about how they did this on social media, or how they did this email campaign or how they did this thing where they did a lot in sales.And we interviewed big affiliates, small affiliates, mid sized affiliates all over the place, different types of affiliates, and they all learned from each other. Suddenly the deal bloggers were learning from the mommy bloggers, the mommy bloggers were learning from the photographers even, and vice versa. And all these people were learning from each other. And it was so cool. And if I saw an email or a blog post from an affiliate, I would ask them, hey, can I share this? I really like your call to action.

Do you mind if I share that with the affiliate group or, you know, and send an email? And 99. 9% of the time they would say, yes every now. And you’re like, nope, that’s a secret plan. Like, I don’t want to share that. Okay, fine.In fact, I Don’t know that I ever had anybody with this particular company say no. I have had a couple people over the last decade and a half say no to that type of request. but it was really cool to see. And so everybody learned, everybody got better. So we totally changed the way we communicated. The third thing that we did was we trained the affiliates.This goes kind of just back to what I was saying. We shared what was working, but one of the biggest things that we implemented was a very consistent monthly training. This was the one thing we did that was like a, light clockwork. Still remember it. Second Tuesday to Tuesday. The second Tuesday of every month, we did a training.

In fact, one point, we did this with three clients, and it was always in the second Tuesday. So. So my second Tuesday of every month from like noon to 6pm was nothing but affiliate trainings. But each month had a topic, and I trained the affiliates on that topic. And so one month we’d talk about warming up your audience for a, promo, and then we would talk about how to promote webinars. So if they were using webinars, I would do a special training to teach them how to promote those webinars on the warming up, when I would teach them, you know, seven ways to get your audience warmed up for a promo set of, hey, I haven’t talked about this company in a few months.

Boom. I’m going to warm you up for a couple days. As we lead into this promo, I would talk about how to put together a bonus package, and we’d workshop different bonus packages and go through the bonus creation worksheet that I created for affiliates. And it was so cool because they would start sharing their bonuses. What do you think? And then an affiliate would be like.I would say, hey, that’s really good. You know, I like it. Which is true. And maybe I’d offer a tip. And then another affiliate would be like, ooh, but what if you did this? I’m like, wow, I never thought about that.Like, with the group, it got to the point where I didn’t have to do all the stuff early on, I had to do all the stuff, and I was the only expert.

But over time, we had hundreds of experts who were willing to share. It was so cool. We did a training on how to put together a promo plan. And so I would walk through, like, each day of a promo and co create their promotion with them. And I’d give them access to, a sheet if you want to get that.It’s the URL I mentioned earlier. The it’s both for private and like group promo plans. If you go to mattmcwaims.com affplan Remember James Earl Jones? Correct that URL. If it’s not it again, we’ll put it in the show notes.But I would do like 20 or 30 of the private ones. But then I would do these bigger ones where I could have thousands of affiliates at a time. And it was so cool.

And they would share what was working for them. And it, no longer was just me, you know, 45 minutes of Matt talking, followed by 15 minutes of Q and A with Matt. It became almost to the point where it was a little bit unruly, but it was awesome because people would say, well, here’s something I did.And boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, M. And oh my gosh, it was so cool. I did, a training on closing sales. So I would share how to close more sales and things like this. And for any type of promotion, especially, you know, how to close sales toward the end of the promotion. I did a training on promoting deals.You know, specifically about. Here are some things that we’ve learned about promoting deals and what works best and what converts best. How to use swipe copy. I, did an entire thing about that.

And these morphed into monthly strategy calls where affiliates could just come and ask questions. Like, it got to the point where we do like a, training and then the next month we do just a Q and A call.And we’d have more people come for the Q and A call because they get to come and ask questions. They could share wins, they could share ideas, they could ask again, what do you think about this? And what other affiliates would chime in, what about this strategy? And so we built up this huge library where, frankly, I was saying nothing new after the first 18 months, but we still hosted these monthly calls just to stay on top of things and get exposed to their ideas and having them help each other. But it just became something that was a part of being an affiliate. And we would have about 2,500, upwards of 3,000 people on these things alive.

And this was when we, you know, we only had 60,000 affiliates. We’d still get 2,500, 3,000. I mean, 3,000 out of M, 60,000. That’s 5% of the affiliates were showing up for these things. There were people that showed up probably 30 consecutive times or more for some of these things. It was amazing.So, real quick, I’m just going to walk you through what one of these calls looks like. Just so you can get an idea. If you’ve never been a part of one of these, they usually last about an hour, 75 minutes. About half teaching, half Q and a half strategy. You know, again, just chit chat. Sometimes affiliates get to ask questions, they get to share their experience, they get to learn from each other.It’s so awesome. And so here’s a quick rundown. You know, basically we do a big training leading into any major promotion or season. So with this particular company, the holiday season was huge.

It was 40, 50% of the sales for the whole year. Happened in about a seven, eight week span.So we would do a training in October and then another one in early November, 10th ish, where we would talk about the holiday season. So you know, spend a few minutes welcoming them, right, usually three, four, five minutes. Learn where everybody’s from, all that fun stuff, introduce ourselves if needed. You know, we always had new affiliates so that was always good. And then we’d spend about five to ten minutes vision casting. This is the part where we talk really about the mission behind whatever’s coming up.And you know, it’s a little bit more heart centered than money centered, especially if it’s announcing a new product or something like that. And we talk about why it’s important, share success stories, how we want affiliates to be part of something special.

So again, it’s more about the heart than the money. And then we go spend about five minutes or so talking about the promotion calendar. If it’s any type of product launch or promotion, we’ll spend some time going through the calendar, make sure we want to make 100% sure that affiliates know the important dates and what to do on these dates. So hey, here’s when Black Friday is.I know, you know, but here’s when it is, right? And here’s when the Black Friday promo ends. It ends Saturday, midnight Pacific time. Here’s when the cyber Monday thing ends. Here’s when the blah, blah, blah ends. Here’s when free shipping, guaranteed free shipping in the United States ends.Here’s when the final day is to order. And if you get the expedited shipping, it’s guaranteed to get there before Christmas Eve. That’s when this ends, right? So you need to know that. And we go through these and all these excuses to promote. And we would go through these.

Here’s this deal we’re running on December 7th. It’s a special thing and all that. And so as a part of that, I teach them how to warm up their audience. That’s the first part of the instruction I share the seven ways that they can get their audience warmed up that talked about earlier. And again, if you want to see a sample training, you can see a sample training. Get all the slides.For training your own affiliates, you go to mattmcwilliams.com affiliate training. That’s an easy one for me to remember. Again, we’ll put that in the show. Notes mattmcwams.com affiliate training you can actually download the slides.We’ve got them in Keynote, PowerPoint and I think Google Sheets or something like that. You can download the slides. It’s got all of the slides in there. You don’t even have. All you gotta do is like just slap your logo on, change the colors if you want. I’ve got that, I’ve got some of the worksheets and stuff that you can use.

It’s awesome resource, totally free. So go grab that. Mattmcwams.com affiliate training then I go into the training. So we’ve welcomed them, we’ve kind of chit chatted for a little bit, we’ve done intros. I’ve talked about the vision in the promo calendar, word about the 15 minute mark, 16, 20 minute mark somewhere in there.Then I get into the meat and potatoes which is the first part of the training. I spend about 15 minutes training my best practices. Share some tips and strategies they can use to, you know, grow their sales, ton of information to help them be a better affiliate. I then share the six best practices of a great promo with them and walk through that, right? This whole section takes about 15 minutes and I stop for a few minutes, take Q and A. Then we go into part two of the training.

The final 15 minutes or so I just share some different strategies, affiliate marketing strategies for specific platforms. So I talk about how to do email, how to market on your blog post, how to market on, you know, at that time, specific social media networks. So Obviously back in 2011 it was like here’s how to market on Facebook and Twitter and now it’s morphed into here’s how to market on Facebook and X But also Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, do all that. And then I wrap up. Then we’ll just go as long as we need to ask questions. My big call to action is get them to join the Facebook group where I’ll post even more tips and strategies and then I take, you know, final Q and A until we’re out of questions.

So again it takes about an hour to 75 minutes. I do that monthly if you want to see the sample slides for how we do the main training. This is the one you should do at the beginning of any promotion. MattMcWilliams.com affiliate training and Grab those. So just the training of affiliates.Every affiliate went up 5, 10%. Some of them 25, 30, 50% because of this. Again, we’re adding more affiliates and we’re getting dozens of applications a day. In the peak season, we would get over a hundred, by the way. Just imagine getting a hundred affiliates to apply that. It was crazy.And that’s when we hit like October. It just got insane. So we did that. So we’re adding more affiliates who were communicating with them better. And then we’re training them so they’re making more sales and see how this is starting to compound. Right.

Well, the next thing we did that was a big help is we dialed in our analytics. So we started analyzing everything. Who’s up, what affiliates are up, who’s making more sales this month than last month, who’s down. I want to know that. What’s working, what’s not, what specific links are working, what deals are working, what promos are working, what incentives work. Hey, we tried this and this didn’t work, you know, and this one did.So let’s do more of the thing that worked. That’s one of the secrets, by the way, of great marketing. Great everything is find the things that work and do more of it. I had somebody tell me years ago, and this was so true, hey, if you notice that if you’re trying to lose weight and you notice that certain meals you end up eating a lot and you gain a lot, don’t eat that food. But if there’s other food where it’s like, gosh, you feel full after eating not very much, and you tend to lose weight, eat more of that. Pretty simple, right?

So an example with this program, when we took over, they offered a $5 bounty to anyone who posted about a deal. So there’d be a promotion and you could Google that coupon code and you’d have like a thousand affiliates, you know, or thousand results show up and they each get $5. So that’s $5,000 for a thousand posts. That’s going to be worth like 60, 70,000 in sales on average. Like, not bad. Don’t get me wrong, you’re going to pay 10,000 in commissions and about 5,000 in bounties for 60,000 in sales.That’s great. But there’s no rhyme or reason for it other than that’s what they had always done. So I tried something new, like the very first thing that we ever did. I said everyone who posts is entered to win. It was an iPad mini which was really hot right then like $600, right? I think five, six hundred bucks back then.

Get the EXACT Template We Give to Our Affiliates to Get Them to Promote More and Generate More Sales! Click Here to Download it Now!

It was like the best kind. It was the cell enabled gold plated ones. It might have been like 7 or 800 bucks. It was a pretty fancy, it was like the best iPad mini you could get that wasn’t like one of like $10,000 ones where they encrusted it in diamonds and while you carried around your little chihuahua, you know, in your handbag. But anyway, but it was a really nice iPad. I think it was like 7, 800 bucks.We had 2,500 people post and this was before we’d even added that many affiliates. Like we were still at 5,200 affiliates, you know and we had 2,500 people post. Eventually we run contests for like thousand dollar Items. We get 10,000 posts in a matter of hours. And when we showed the CEO like this was mind blowing, like we could google that coupon code in the name of this company. And it was unbelievable.

So when we first did it again, 250 people post, we did 108,000 in sales. $108,000. We spent seven or 800 bucks instead of 5,000. We got two and a half times as many posts and nearly twice as much revenue while spending 16% as much money. We spent so much less money and got so much more engagement. Why?Because we studied the Anna La. Now we tried that out and once we decided that works, we knew that could this works. Do more of this. So the next week let’s up the ante. Let’s try a thousand dollar giveaway. So sometimes we do cash, sometimes we do prizes.We didn’t just keep doing iPad cause we knew that would eventually not work. Sometimes we did multiple spots and we found no, we want to spend all the money on this top spot. People wanted to be entered to win this one thing.

We got up to like two and $3,000 prizes but it was still less than if we’d been paying a measly $5. It’s that psychological principle, right? They much rather have ah, a one in 5,000 chance of winning $3,000 in a guaranteed five bucks.Because like five bucks is just, isn’t that exciting. Another example of how analytics just really studying them is we trended every single one of our top 200 affiliates every Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Were they down, were they up? What were their conversions looking like? What are they promoting Every one of those top 200? We wanted to know if they started promoting a new thing, but the conversions weren’t as good.

Maybe they needed to stop promoting that. What can we get them to promote that would be similar but might convert better for their audience and therefore make everybody more money? Make them happier, and everybody makes more money. Right. We trended the 200th to 500th affiliate every week. We trended the next 500 or so every two weeks, and then we would reach out based on that.So if we noticed an affiliate was down Wednesday, so we’re looking at Monday, so Monday, we’re looking at Friday sales through Sunday sales. Okay, that can be different than your Monday and Tuesday. But we’re looking at if they’re consistently going down four straight checks. Okay, we need to reach out now.

Like, they’ve only been down for eight days, but we’re reaching out now. So we’re dialing in those analytics on every single, one of our top 1,000 affiliates at the least every two weeks, you know, on the smaller of the top 1,000.Another example, on a macro level, we’re looking at things like what links are converting best, and then we’re driving more affiliates to promote them because maybe they’re converting thing A and thing A for this affiliate is converting at, 3%, but overall this thing B is converting at 7%. And overall their conversions are pretty similar to the overall conversions of the program. They that means, hey, switch to promoting thing B and you’ll be converting in 7% probably, or based on conversions, you know, we’re having them switch their links from one page to another.

We found that switching the links from the homepage of one particular product to the top sellers page, which wasn’t even in the system, got a 12% lift in sales. Again, we knew that because we studied the analytics. And so we first told the affiliates this and we had them change it.But then we were like, hey, what would happen if we just changed it on our end? Because we can change the link where it goes on our end. So we changed it. We did it for one day, and we noticed that sales went up 12%, so we kept it. So instead of them linking to the homepage for this product, it linked straight to the best sellers page. It was just a better converting page.They made 12% more money, and so did we. So really dial in your analytics.

Study the data, see what comes of it. I mean, gosh, you can look at a thousand different things, but the big ones to look at Underperforming affiliates. So who are affiliates that are the outliers or they’re down? The same is true for affiliates that are up.Because if an affiliate is consistently going up, let’s reach out. Like, hey, they were our number 800 affiliate last year, and then in Q1 of this year they were up to like 500. Now they’re up to 300. Hey, you know what? They’re already moving up. What can I do to pour some gasoline on the fire?Or better yet, what can I do to put some dry wood on this fire and get them from 300 to 100 and everybody’s making a lot more money. Look at, like, conversions that are dropping. You know, hey, for the landing page for product A, the conversion last year was 3. 7%. This year, you know, it’s down to 2. 4.

What’s going on? I don’t know, but let’s dig into it. It could be all kinds of things. Look for any reduction in sales on a macro, a micro, any type of level. look for high converting links or high converting deals, high converting promos. Same if they’re underperforming.Like, again, do more of what’s working and less of what’s not. And ultimately it’s about replicating one affiliate success to your others. You see one affiliate doing something well and this thing is working and you go, whoa, we need to change it. And we did that so many times. Why? Because we studied the analytics where we saw that an affiliate was deep linking to a page that maybe we didn’t provide to affiliates.

And it’s like, tag on, that, that affiliates conversion rate is 6 1/2% promoting this thing, and the overall is 2. 4. What if we switch that link? Like, let’s just try it. Oh my gosh. It, went from 2.4 to 4,5 on an overall basis. Yeah, that other affiliate was at 6. 5 because they’re just better. But we just almost doubled the conversion rate. Things like that happen all the time because we study the analytics. The final thing that we did was we expanded the range of products that affiliates were promoting.When we took over, affiliates were basically promoting just the best sellers, the most obvious things to promote, the things that this company was known for, you know, where they had a market edge, things like that. We had, probably close to a thousand products. In fact, I know by the time we, we were no longer working with them, it was a little bit over a thousand. So we created links for all of them. We ran promos around all of them over the course of a year or two. This created a lot of variety.

So affiliates weren’t promoting the same things over and over again. When I took over they basically only had, you know, they had a link to the homepage, they had links to like the major categories page, they had a link to the deals page, maybe 14 total links. And the only promos they ran through affiliates were site wide deals which basically happened once a month or so. Same thing over and over and over again. It was so boring. We would cycle through five to 10 promotions every week.So we’d find like one or two products for each audience, each affiliate type, we base them on the type of year. So at Christmas we had more holiday themed stuff of course, but there were promos for Mother’s Day, Father’s day, graduation time, Valentine’s, July 4th, Halloween sweetest day.

I learned, I mean I learned a bunch of weird holidays, right? Grandparents and all that stuff. Even wedding season, you know, I mean again, we know my wife and I were married on November 22, but most weddings happen in the late spring through the summer. So there is a four and a half month period where almost two thirds a, ah, disproportionate amount of weddings take place.So we had all sorts of things where we ran promos for it. And even without that, we ran promos on specific products and categories. We had links to each product, links to each category, links to each theme. We had links to here’s the holiday guide. They weren’t even linking to their holiday guide before we took over. We started linking to the holiday guy.

We started linking to the graduation guide, we started linking to the wedding guide and to all these things. And this variety allowed us to have affiliates promote a ton of different things and then see what worked for them. Sometimes what worked best for one affiliate was very different from what was working for most of them. So it became not just about our best sellers overall, but about our best sellers for individual affiliates. So we would have graphics for those different things, we had holiday graphics, we had specific landing pages and all that stuff made it super easy for them to navigate all of that. So over the course of a year, a specific affiliate might only promote 10 times for the products and categories that work best for them.

But that was 50,000 plus active affiliates promoting 10 times compared to 5,000 promoting three or four times. Made a huge, huge difference. Again, starts compiling, we added affiliates, we also got them promoting two and a half times more per year. Now the final thing here that occurred to me as I was talking through this today. I wasn’t planning on this, but I usually like to include a bonus so it works out great. I guess as I was recording it, I didn’t really know where to put this is we got affiliates to promote us truly evergreen.And what this did was it created a baseline for us so that even in a slow, like a really slow week, and we had those, we’re still doing over a million dollars when we took over a slow month would do under half a million.

And now we got it to where a slow week was like 1. 2, 1. 4 million bucks. Things like adding our stuff to the resources page and showing affiliates how to do that. And if you want to see a sample of that, if you go to mattmcwilliams.com something or another, I don’t know, but I will put a link in the show notes so that you can get that guide and give it to your affiliates. And again we give you permission to share it with them. But we showed them like how to categorize things so that if they categorize it, it might mean that we were recommended two or three times multiple times on this page. Instead of just like here’s a list of things we use. So photographers would have multiple sections. Same for nonprofits.

They’d have multiple sections. So we’d be on there 2, 3, 4, 5 times instead of just once or none at all. If they weren’t doing that. We got them to add us to their automation sequences. So now we had a steady flow of daily clicks from thousands of affiliates. It might only be one a day or five a day from each affiliate.Sometimes it was one click a week from their automation, but that’s 52 clicks a year. And we had 4, 5, 6,000 affiliates doing this. Average probably was three a day. Man, that’s 15,000 clicks a day. It starts adding up really fast. We created a deals page widget.So this was. They could basically create a deals page on their site that had our rotating deals on it so they didn’t have to update it. They didn’t have to update when we ran a two day sale or one day sale or a four hour sale as we sometimes did. It was one time install ongoing commissions. We created auto updating banner ads. Same thing.

It’s just like the deals widget. Like banner ads still work. Yes. We created a bunch that auto updated. So it’s like, hey, you would install this banner if you were say in a certain niche and it would auto update with the latest deals, the latest holiday themes, the Latest bestsellers. Some were just a, generic banner that we update weekly with the latest, whatever was relevant.Right. And this saved the affiliate a ton of work. They loved us for it, but it got them to add this one thing. And these auto updating banners now again, I know this is back in 2009 to 12 years ago is the range. Basically I get it this a while ago, but they still work today. Not as well.

They still work today. These auto updating banners as a category responsible for over $5 million in annual sales. But more than that, the fact that affiliates loved them meant that they probably did other things as well. And so there’s a certain aspect that like I can’t quantify. What was the Facebook group worth? I don’t know.I can’t quantify that. But affiliates loved it. I think it was worth 10% increase. You know, I mean I’m making that number up because I, again, I can’t quantify it. Same with the auto updating banner ads. We can show that they were directly worth 5 million a year.You go, well, 5 million is not a very high percentage of 325. But I also think that it got them to do other stuff because they loved it so much.

So there you have it. Six ways and plus a few more actually we’ll separate those. But again, under that, Evergreen getting people to really promote Evergreen. And I took an affiliate program from an annual revenue of 15 million to 325 million in just four years.I’d love to hear from you what your biggest takeaway is. you can text me anytime about this or anything else, any questions you have. 260-217-4619. Text me anytime. we’ve got links in the show notes to the affiliate training templates and scripts. We’ve got links to the promo strategy call template and that resources page guide that I just talked about.I don’t remember the link for that, but I said it’ll be in the show notes.Got a link for that last thing. Make sure if you haven’t yet hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. We’re going to talk about affiliate onboarding.

You know, you’ve got these affiliates, they’re interested in promoting you now. What do you do?How do you onboard your affiliates so they can actually get started the right way? And that’s what the episode is all about. I’m going to share the steps that it takes to get your affiliates to hit the ground running, so to speak, and really hit their full potential. So we’ll talk about that winning onboard process in the next episode, so make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. I’ll see you then. Thank you so much for listening today.Remember to check out all of our deep dives into affiliate marketing at the Affiliateguide TV. And if you have a question, ask [email protected] who knows, maybe you even be featured on an upcoming episode. And lastly, if you haven’t yet, make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you’re listening to this episode.

The post How to Scale an Affiliate Program by Focusing on the Right Affiliates appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode

TEXT ME: +1 (260) 217-4619

Affiliate Program Email Template

Podcast Episode – How to Negotiate Affiliate Deals That Benefit Everyone

What Affiliates Need to be Successful

AffiliateHQ

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Listen on YouTube

Listen on Amazon

Email Me New Episodes

Ask a Question for the Show

How to Turn Around an Affiliate Program That Isn’t Growing

How to Recruit Affiliates from Your Competition’s Program

How to Create Affiliate Emails, Images, and Social Swipe

How to Build an Affiliate Agreement Affiliates Can Understand

Affiliate Program Legal Requirements: What Every Affiliate Manager Needs to Know

How to Create Affiliate Relationships That Last

Are you struggling to attract affiliates to your program? Looking for the secret sauce to make your affiliate program absolutely irresistible? Well, you’re in luck. In today’s episode, we dive into the art of attracting affiliates with the right commission structure. I, share the strategies and techniques that will make your program stand out from the crowd and have affiliates flocking to join you. I’ll even share some creative ways to incentivize top affiliates without breaking the bank.Let’s dive right in. So today’s episode is all about attracting affiliates with the right commission structure.

And we’re going to start with looking at a basic commission structure. And then I want to talk about some creative ways to get affiliates going, to get them excited, to motivate them, to incentivize them that maybe don’t involve money, at least on the front end, for those of you out there who maybe are just starting out. So some of the stuff I’m going to share, you go, well, that’s really easy when you have a ton of money. Yeah. Like, some of these are things you should do when you have more money, and some of them are things that you’ll do when you’re starting out. So I want there to be a, kind of a broad array of possibilities today.

So what I encourage you to do is when you hear something, you go, well, I can’t do that. Or, the budget for that, or don’t just shut down and stop listening. I’m going to talk about some things that are for every budget, literally from the person who has $200 in the bank and you’re starting your business and you get your first couple of affiliates to people who’ve got millions and, everything in between. All right, so let’s start with that basic commission structure. I get asked this all the time, Matt. how much should my commissions be?What should my commission structure be? And the answer is, it depends. There are so many factors. What type of market are you in? What’s the actual product? Is it a physical product with low margins?

I’ve worked with companies like Shutterfly and Adidas, where the margins are only 20 to 25%. So if we pay, like with Shutterfly, we had a very competitive commission by industry standards. It was 10%, 13% for. I’ve talked about this before, but, like, storefronts nonprofits and stuff. 13%. If I did that in digital course world, I would get laughed at in the coaching world where maybe the offers are $50,000, but the commission is 2500 to, 5000.That’s different. And that’s a lot of money because you’re spending a lot of time with them. So it really depends on the type of product in the market. Generally speaking, the higher cost of goods, the lower the commission. Obviously, the more time and the more hand holding you personally spend with somebody, the lower the commission. But I’m going to walk you through that basic structure.

This is a starting point. This is not the end all, be all. So the first thing we do is we start with the price. You are not going to pay a, $200 commission on a $100 product. There might be reasons to do that. Well, we can talk about those later.But then from there you’re going to subtract your incremental costs. What do I mean by an incremental cost? Well, I get a lot of people who say, well, you know, if I’m going to produce this course, I’ve got to go to the studio and I’ve got to hire somebody to do this, we got to edit it and I’ve got to do all this. Well, you’re going to pay that whether you sell one or 1000 courses. The studio time. I’ll give you an example.The last course that I produced cost roughly 13, $14,000. From everything included was about probably more towards $14,000. All right? I was going to spend that $14,000 if I sold zero courses. And I was also going to spend that I did. Whether we sold 500 on the initial offering didn’t matter.

I spent the 14 grand. So that’s not an incremental cost. An incremental cost is okay, every unit we sell we have to pay $40 for access. That’d be ridiculous with stuff like teachable and whatnot today, you know, and Social Glow and other companies. But let’s just say you had to pay that for some reason there was something going on. Okay, for every 100 members, for every 100 people to sign up, you need to hire a community manager at $50,000 a year.So for every 100 people that sign up, you’ve got to spend 50,000. Okay? That’s a reasonable cost. If I’m doing my Math right, that’s $500 per customer. Okay? So that’s not outrageous.

Especially on some higher end courses, to have like a community manager and something like that another incremental cost would just be if you provide access to software that maybe you license and okay, everybody who joins you’re licensing this $100 software. That’s an incremental cost. So just for some perspective, like our most recent couple of courses, we have virtually no incremental costs. I mean, it’s maybe in the neighborhood of 20, 25 bucks per course. So it’s very, very low. But we do subtract that when we’re calculating this.Then we subtract the time. This is not a cost. This is your specific time. If you have a business partner, it would be their time. If you’re hiring somebody, you just subtract the cost for that. That’s just a cost.

Not sure how much to pay your affiliates? Watch my free video tutorial on YouTube that walks you through step-by-step.

What I mean by this is when I say subtract my time is if I’m giving a 30 minute coaching call to every single person who signs up for the course, I want to factor that in. I cannot sell a course for $300 and then give a 30 minute coaching call to everybody who signs up. I’m just not going to, There’s no way to be able to pay a fair commission and do everything else and make it worth my while. Now I’m not going to factor in my time at like my one on one coaching rate. I’m going, to downplay it and just, okay, what’s my time worth to me to be able to do this? I’m going to subtract that.Again, incremental time only, not the time it takes to produce the course. I’m not even going to do it if it’s like, okay, we do group coaching. So If I have 500 students and they can all come to the group coaching call, that time is not factored in. This is incremental time only. The fourth thing you want to do is decide what you want to make. You know, I don’t want to make less than $200 per unit.

It’s just not worth my time. Or I don’t want to make less than $10 per shoe or whatever, $500 per widget, whatever the case is, I don’t want to make less than that. So you have to factor that in. And then the last one, and this is the most important one, you got to look at the competition. Okay? you have to look at the competition.If the competition is paying 30%, you need to be in the ballpark. You need to be at 20 at the minimum, 25 preferably. Do you have to compete with them directly? Oh, they’re at 40%. That means I have to be at 40%. No, but generally speaking, you want to be within 25.I would say 25 to 40% of them. What I mean by that is 25% of 40% is 10%. Right. So you want to be no lower than 30% on a 40% commission. If your competition’s paying 40. If your competition is paying 15%, you can be no lower than 10.

I mean, technically you could be nine, but why would you be at 9%? That’s just weird. Go to 10, make it. It’s much more attractive at 10 than nine. If your competition’s at 10, you better be at six, probably at eight to be competitive. All right, so an example of this calculation.Let’s just say you get a price point of $500 and you got a cost of 200. That is a fixed cost per unit. That is literally, if we’re talking a widget, it cost you $200 to manufacture it and ship it to get it in your, you know, and then ship it to you and then ship it to them per unit. Right. If it’s a community, then it costs you $200 incrementally per student for community manager and coaching. For this example, let’s just say time is zero.

You’re selling a digital course, or it’s just basically something where you’re not doing any. You’re not offering any coaching from you. So time is zero. Usually that’s the case. And you say, you know, I don’t want to do this for less than 100 bucks a pop. So right there, 200, 100.We’re left with $200. We could offer a 40% commission. Now we look at the market, we see that the market’s average is 30% on a $600 product. So they’re making about $180 a pop. We have a $500 product. Now I’m gonna then look and I just said, the average is 30% on a $600 product.Now I’m gonna go kind of and look at the high end and say, okay, the high end people, they’re at 40% and their product is about 500 bucks. So they’re paying $200. In that case, I’m going to compete with them. I’m going to go to 40%. I said, I only want to make 100. So if it cost me 200 and I spend 200, I’m going to make my 100 bucks.

I might go a little bit lower. Depending upon various circumstances, I might go as low as 30%, and then offer some incentives to get them higher. I might even be willing on big affiliates, say 100 sales per month or more. I would be willing to eat into those margins a little bit and maybe pay like 35% plus some incentives where they make upwards of 42%, 43% in incentives and things like that. Now, ultimately, what really matters is EPC earnings per click. If I’m an affiliate, I don’t care what your commission is.Now, I do look at your commission, because if your commission’s 10% and everybody else is at 30 or 40, I’m like, that’s insulting. Your conversions are not going to be so much better that I can afford you to pay me such a lower commission. But if you’re at 30 and they’re at 30, and maybe this other guy’s at 35 and this other guy’s at 25, ultimately what matters is how much am I going to make per click. So we’re talking about conversions, and that factors in, and we’ll talk about that a little bit later. But how much? If I send a thousand clicks and your offer.

We’ll just do the math on this. I might screw up the math, but let’s just say we both convert it 50% and both products are $100. Well, then the higher commission wins. But if I convert it 60% and you convert at 50% and our, price points are the same and we offer the same commission, well, then you’re going to make more money with me because of the higher conversion. But let’s just say I offer 5% less, but my conversions are. What’s the math on that?20% better. Well, you’re still going to make more money with me if we have the same price point. And then, of course, you got to factor in, like, okay, if the price point’s higher, but the conversion rate’s lower and the commission rates the same, and all these things, well, all that factors into that epc. What am I going to earn for sending a thousand clicks or a hundred clicks? Doesn’t matter. If I’m gonna send a lot of clicks, what am I gonna earn?

That’s what matters to me as an affiliate. So that’s what you’ve gotta focus on as an affiliate manager. Now, let’s say you can’t offer a higher commission than the competition. You just can’t. What are some creative ways that you can still attract affiliates? Well, I discussed a few of these.I think it was about three, four episodes ago I talked about negotiating affiliate deals. That benefit everyone. And I shared, I kind of touched on some of these, one or two of them at least in that context. You know, like, how do we negotiate a deal? How as an affiliate, do I get a little something, something extra when maybe they can’t afford to pay me more? And as an affiliate manager, how do I get them to actually come on board when I can’t afford them?

Pay them more. So the first one, you know, is just, again, this one means you’re going to spend more money and maybe you can’t do this one, but could you offer some tiered commissions? I mentioned this a moment ago. Okay, I can’t offer 30% across the board. The competition’s at 30%. I can’t do that across the board.I just, my margins are going to be too low. So what do I do? Well, maybe you advertise a 25% commission or 20% commission even, but anybody who does a hundred sales or more gets that 30%. You go, man, that really eats into my margins. Yeah, but it’s on a lot more sales and it gives people something to shoot for. One of the things you have to remember that I share so often with regards to affiliate bonuses is if somebody’s going to make 60 sales and you incentivize them heavily to get to a hundred, keep in mind that next month they’re only going to get to 70, the next month they’re only going to get to 82, and then the next month 94 and then 97.

And so for four months you got increased sales for that incentive without paying the bonus. And that’s why I love flat like bonuses where it equals that percentage. So if, let’s say instead of offering a 30% commission, you offer a 25%, but you pay them a bonus of the 5%. So on a hundred sales, you just give them a $500 bonus. If they land on exactly 100 sales, yes, you’d outpay 30%. But.But what if they hit 111? That’s really, you know, now you’re paying only, effectively a 29. 3% commission or whatever the math might be. 28 and a half, something like that. You got all those extra sales for the only really a three and a half percent, you know, 4% bump. So look for those ways you can do tiered commissions or bonuses that get people, that drive people to create more sales, but don’t necessarily, especially early on, result in paying a higher commission.

The second thing you can offer, and these are no particular order by the way is offer free trials. I mean this both as an offer but also as an incentive to affiliates paying for free trials. So the first thing you do is you offer them, especially if you have a software or some sort of a monthly access type thing, offering your affiliates the ability to promote free trials. That gives them an unbelievable marketing edge. So if I’ve got a hundred dollar a month software and you’ve got a hundred dollar a month software and we convert similarly and all those things. But I can let the affiliate promote via, free trial to much easier promotion for them and something they can run on a continual basis versus feeling like they have to, you know, sell, sell, sell, right?

So it creates this marketing edge for you even if all other things are equal. And the second thing is to pay for those free trials if you can. Maybe you can’t offer more on the sales, but you can offer on the free trial. And this becomes a very attractive thing to an affiliate. So the math on this. Let’s say you have $100 a month software and you convert 20% from free trial into paid customers and they stay an average of two years.So they stay for 24 months. So you’re going to make $2,400, right? You’re going to pay a 25% commission. So that’s 2400, that’s 600 bucks you’re going to pay. You’re going to make $1800 over those two years. But what if you also paid a bounty per trial?

And just for example, let’s say you paid a $50 per trial bounty. If you know your numbers and you convert 20%, that means you’re paying $250 for that 2,400 bucks. You’re basically paying an extra $10 a month is really what it works out to. An extra 10% roughly. You could go lower though. Maybe you offer a $10 per free trial, but if you send 50, you get it bumps up.And if you send 500 in a month, I mean think about that. If somebody can move 500 free trials or a thousand free trials, you might be willing to pay substantially more per free trial in addition to the commission. And so this becomes a really attractive offer to the affiliate because they know the thing they control is the free trials.

And man, if I can get 500 people, I mean I’m instantly going to make, let’s say you go 20 bucks per, I’m going to make another thousand dollars plus. So this gives them that immediate hit, gives them some revenue right now and they know they’re going to make revenue long term. Now if you’re worried about a bunch of bogus trials, like where somebody is going to send like hundreds of like to make thousands of dollars in bonuses and their trials don’t convert, put it in the language that your trials have to convert at a reasonable or, comparable level to the average or higher.And so what we’ll then do, we do this with leads contest as well. So it’s like, oh, if you send a thousand leads for the webinar, but none of them convert into sales, well, we don’t pay you on those. Those are bogus leads. The same is true with trials. So if your normal conversion rate is 20%, like this example, and somebody converts 19%, you pay them, you pay them on the, all the trials, because 19% is comparable to 20%, I would say, like in that case, 15% or lower. And no, you don’t pay them.

Now you’ve got to make that choice of, somebody just maybe had a funky month. If the three months before they were converting in an average of 20% roughly, and then suddenly in one month they convert only 13%. I would still pay them on their bonuses that month because you don’t want to lose them. Okay. The other thing here is make sure that you’re checking those conversion rates, the bonuses. We will pay them typically after we would have some sort of a way to know how they’re going to convert.So we would pay the bonuses, say, a month later than we would pay their normal commissions just to be able to verify things. So that’s how you avoid those bogus trials. Paying on the trials is a great way to just incentivize. And it’s kind of like we’re willing to do something a little bit extra. And it really, it’s kind of a very creative way of getting affiliates motivated to promote you when maybe you can’t pay a higher commission rate. Next, you can offer exclusive coupons.

This is a way of, again, motivating and incentivizing affiliates without paying more money necessarily. Obviously we hope to pay them more money because you hope they’re making more sales. But this is a way of giving them something that not everybody has. So whether it be an exclusive coupon code that effectively gets the same thing as everybody else, or just could be a special deal. Maybe you have a specific product that this affiliate really wants to promote because this particular product is perfect for their audience and you offer them an exclusive deal on this specific product with a coupon code. So like coupon code MATT25 gets you 25% off.

Coupon code, whatever. And then usually that’s how you do it. Like their first name and then a number or something like that or their brand name. And a number gets you 20% off. 25% off. This one thing, that’s something you can offer them and nobody else can necessarily offer them that.And if you get creative and think how can we really motivate an affiliate with something you don’t necessarily have to pay more money. The next thing is access to training. And I specifically mean not only to help them with affiliate marketing, to help them promote them better. Because if I’m going to get training that helps me make more sales and somebody else is not going to train me. I’m going to pick the company with training. But also how can they train me to help me with my own stuff?

And I’ve got a couple of examples of that that I’ve employed over the years. You know, there have been opportunities where I basically, in a given month, had to choose between two different promotions. They were both around the same time and we could not promote both. I chose the one where I knew their affiliate program was going to help me so much along the way. They were gonna make sure, by gosh, that we had a great promotion. And so I went with that one.There have been times where I wanted access to that product. Cause I knew it would help my business or they were going to offer some things. Like one of the bonuses was that they were going to coach me. I did this years ago where there was one particular affiliate program and I was particularly attracted to. They didn’t have a ton of money. Like the bonuses they had were not like first Prize is like $25,000, whereas some of the other was like a hundred thousand dollars.

And I was in the running. I ended up finishing in third place. And I think we got like a $7,500 bonus. Whereas third place and other promotions like that were just as big, might have been 20, 25,000. And we chose to go with this one because their bonus is they had. They had a mastermind for their top affiliates, which I really wanted to be a part of.And then the person who ran the launch would coach me. So I got like a four hours of coaching. And there was a particular thing I wanted coaching on. And then I got access to their software, which was this particular software was really expensive. And I got access to a bunch of other stuff that didn’t necessarily cost them money that they didn’t have. So it’s one of those things like the value to them, what they were going to spend on these prizes was a few thousand dollars.

The value to me was $25,000 plus. So think about ways where you can increase the value to them without increasing the cost to you. And training is one of those things. Obviously. Better conversions, having better conversions is a great way. All things being equal, if you have similar commissions and your thing converts 10% better, I’m going to choose you.Like I said earlier, if you pay 30% and somebody else pays 25% but yours converts at say from click to sale converts at 2% and theirs converts at 3%, oh my goodness, that’s a 50% increase in conversions for only a 5% decrease in commissions. So like if you can’t afford to pay more, hone in on conversions, what can you do to get those conversions up? 1/10 of 1% and then another 1/10 of 1% and Then another 1/10 of 1%. Can it be on the front end? Can you get your click to lead conversion to be 2% better from a 48% to a 50% conversion from click to lead, can you then get maybe your initial sales to go from 2. 1% to 2.

2%? That’s not that much better. That’s almost 5% better if you actually think about it. And then can you get your follow up sales to just go up by say 1%, a half percent, a quarter of a percent? Typically in these types of worlds where we’re dealing with 2. 2% conversion rates to go from 2.2 to 2. 4, oh my goodness, you can pay a little bit less if you’re converting that much better. So what can you do to make them more money without costing you more money? And conversions is going to be one of those things. Another thing you can do is just make it easy for them again. I have chosen programs that, where I’ve like I thought about maybe promoting something else the following year but I went, oh my gosh.

It’s just easy to promote them. They make it easy to get graphics, they make it easy to get swipe copy. It’s just easy to navigate. You know, it’s why we just rolled out our brand new affiliate dashboard for our affiliates. If you want to see it, sign up as an affiliate. Just hit up our affiliate manager [email protected] and Jennifer will help you to get everything including access to the affiliate dashboard. Well, one of the reasons why we did that was we are making it easy for Our affiliates. Where is everything? It’s right there and it’s so easy to find. Just make it stupid easy for them. Don’t make it hard for them to find something.

They should be able to find everything they want. Promotion, dates, swipe, copy, graphics, stats, the rules, the terms. Like everything should be right there. Ridiculously easy for them. The next creative way you can help your affiliates to, you know, make more money is just a long term collaboration. These are things like having them come on and teach your audience.If there’s a topic that they’re an expert at, have them come on and teach your audience. Have them come on and teach your affiliates. You go, how does that help them? Well, it puts them in front of your affiliates and obviously helps you make more money long term because they’re going to help your affiliates make more money for you. But just find ways that you can collaborate long term. This ties in with the next one which is to promote them.

But collaborating long term, what are some things that you can do? Ties in with the one after that, which is co branding. There’s all these things like they’re really just are tied up in this long term collaboration. Promoting them is a way. I mean if I’m gonna make $8,000 rather than $10,000 in a promotion, if I’m choosing between affiliate programs and I’m gonna make $8,000 promoting you versus $10,000 in another one, maybe they have a slightly higher commission or a little bit better conversion, something like that. But you are going to promote me and make another $8,000.That’s $16,000. I make more than that, $10,000. So promoting me becomes an incentive for me to promote you. And that’s something that you tie those together, that’s a big deal. Especially long term. I mean, look, long term it could be six figures because.

Yeah, you may. Let’s say we do a webinar. Let’s say I promote your webinar and you promote my webinar. And I could have made a little bit more promoting another webinar, but you promote mine. And not only do I make 8, 000, but and I’m just m, you know, low sometimes these numbers could be astronomically higher. I make $8,000 and I get 400 leads.It’s probably bad math. I would make a lot more than $8,000 and 400 leads. But you get the idea. Maybe we’ll go 300 leads. I get 300 leads, whatever of 16 buyers. But I got another 284 people that didn’t buy 170 of which will stick on my list for the next three years and will buy other things.

So I make $20,000 off them and I make another $10,000 off the. Whatever the numbers are, it doesn’t matter. The reality is that becomes an incentive. Just like collaborating long term co branding is a way of collaborating. Is there a way for, for us to work together on a product? I’ve done this with a couple of partners over the years and we’ll collaborate and we’ll come up with some cool ways to work together.We’ll co brand pages as simple as that. Like when I’m going to do a webinar with somebody, if they’ll put my name on it and put my name in the follow up stuff, then that increases conversions which goes back to what we talked about. If you’re willing to do those things and do a little bit of extra work to make my webinar go from say maybe I was initially I was going to send. I’m going to send a thousand clicks and convert 450 of them. But you do a few things to the landing page that increase the conversions to 500. Now we got 50 more people on.

And then you do things in the follow up that increase the show up rate from 100 to 175. We’re going to make more sales and you do things in the follow up they’re going to mean instead of those 325 just falling off the earth, a hundred of them are going to watch the replay. Now we have 275 instead of 160. Engaged, we’re going to make more sales and then the follow up’s better from there we’re going to close a higher percentage and this those things start stacking. The higher conversion rate on the front end, the higher from click to lead, from lead to show up or to engagement, from engagement to sale. If you increase each of those by 10%, that’s not 30%.

That’s. I don’t know what the number is but I think it’s something like 35%. It compounds. You start compounding multiple things and it gets ridiculous. And then the last one. Could you offer equity in the company early on?I’ve seen this done and it absolutely can work. You got to make sure you cover your legal dot IN your eyes and crossing your T’s here. Could you offer equity especially early on? Somebody is going to help you build your company and build your brand by introducing you to their audience. You can’t afford to pay A higher commission. Could you offer equity?

And what that might look like is if your company is currently valued at half a million dollars, just using round numbers here and you really truly feel like you’re going to get this to a $10 million company in say five years instead of paying a little bit higher commission and they make an extra $10,000 right now, which might really hurt you. Could you offer a half percent of equity and initially that’s only worth do 1% would be worth 5000. So it’s worth 2500 bucks instead of 10,000 in commissions. But if you more than 4x over the next five years, that’s worth it to them and it shows that you’re willing to get creative, that you’re willing to break the mold. Would you be willing to do that again? I’m not suggesting it’s for everyone.

That’s not one of the ideas I would suggest. If you’ve currently got a million plus dollars in the bank, that’s not something I would suggest somebody who’s already making it and you’ve already, you’re winning on other levels. I would not suggest lowering your commissions and then offering equity. It’s too complicated. But initially, if you can get a big affiliate who’s willing to maybe your list right now is 6,000 people and this person single handedly, overnight is going to put your list at 25,000, would you be willing to offer them half percent to 1% of your company? No voting rights, none of that.It’s just equity. Something to consider might be a terrible idea, but it might just work. So you have some creative ways here to motivate and incentivize your affiliates without breaking the bank. That’s what we want to be able to do here. I would love to hear from you. What was your biggest takeaway?

Like, what’s one of the like oh my gosh, you’re going to put this into use tomorrow. This is awesome for you, right? Shoot me a text at, 260-217-4619. I would love to hear from you just what your biggest takeaway and what you’re going to do with this episode. Also make sure check out the links in the show notes. I’ll have that email address to join our affiliate program.I got a couple other links, some things that I didn’t really dive into today but I want to make sure you check those out because I do go deeper into some of the stuff we talked about today. So check out the links in the show notes. There’s some good ones in there for you. And if you got questions about this or anything else, you can text me. I mentioned that number is 260-217-4619. Last thing, make sure you hit subscribe.

The next episode coming up is going to be a good one. We’re going to talk about how to avoid the most common affiliate marketing mistakes. I’ve got so much to share in that episode. I don’t want you to miss that. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. I’ll see you then.Thank you so much for listening today. Remember to check out all of our deep dives into affiliate marketing at the Affiliateguide TV. And if you have a question, ask [email protected] who knows, maybe you even be featured on an upcoming episode. And lastly, if you haven’t yet, make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you’re listening to this episode.

The post How to Make Your Affiliate Commissions More Competitive appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode

TEXT ME: +1 (260) 217-4619

How I Built a $1 Million a Month Affiliate Program In Only Two Years Without Any Connections or Credentials

Find Your First 100 Affiliates

Affiliate Email Template

Get Our Sample Affiliate Training

AffiliateHQ

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Listen on YouTube

Listen on Amazon

Email Me New Episodes

Ask a Question for the Show

How to Recruit Affiliates from Your Competition’s Program

How to Create Affiliate Emails, Images, and Social Swipe

How to Build an Affiliate Agreement Affiliates Can Understand

Affiliate Program Legal Requirements: What Every Affiliate Manager Needs to Know

How to Create Affiliate Relationships That Last

How to Tell Affiliates When Something Goes Wrong

So you’ve started an affiliate program and it’s not going as you hoped. What do you do now? Well, first identify why it’s failing and then fix the problems. Today, I’ll share some of the most common reasons we’ve seen affiliate programs fail and what to do about it.Hey, what’s up? And welcome back. We’re talking about a kind of a negative topic today. I like to keep things positive on the podcast, I really do, but it’s important to address this topic of failure. I’ve heard from so many people that have attended our trainings, or maybe they become clients. So we diagnose, like, okay, why is their affiliate program failing? Why did they come to us?

And I keep seeing the same things over and over again. I’ve got 14 reasons today, and typically I see probably three or four of these with every single person. And it tends to be the same ones. Like, in these 14, everybody’s got, like, three, four, maybe five of them, and then the next one will have a couple of those and a couple of different ones, and it’s the same things over and over. Honestly, I’ve never seen a 15th reason.That’s why I have 14. I often joke, like, you know, we want to get 10 reasons, right? Well, there’s not 10, there’s 14. Or maybe we want to get seven or 13. A cool, odd number.

Nope, there’s 14 reasons that have happened more than once with the people that we’ve worked with, that we’ve seen over the years. Before I get into that, I just want to say, like, this is kind of a weird thing to say. We’re talking, like, such a negative topic here, in a sense. But I love doing this. I really do.I love doing this podcast. I love sharing things like this. I’ve been in this world now, this affiliate world, for over 18 years now. Kind of crazy. I’m like a dinosaur in this industry.I’ve been in it for a long time. I love talking about it. I say all the time, like, if a high school guidance counselor even knew that what I do exists, they would tell me to do this. They probably don’t know this exists, though. But this is what they would tell me to do.

This is what I was meant to do. And I love it. I love talking about it. I love Sharing with you. So seriously, if you ever have any questions or you just want to, like, I don’t know, reach out to me and tell me, good job on the podcast.Whatever. Shoot me a text. 260217-4619 I would love to hear from you. And just the feedback that I get every week, people shooting me their biggest takeaways from the podcast. That’s the kind of stuff that keeps me going.So I just want to hear from you. I just would love to hear from you. So shoot me a text. We’ll put that in the show. Notes 260-217-4619 and yeah, of course, let me know what you got out of this episode.

Just let me know what you’re getting from the podcast in general and also how I can serve you better. Hit me up if you got some topics for some episodes. We’ve got the podcast planned out through like the end of the year, but we can always put something in if you reach out and say, hey, I need you to talk about this. This episode will be our 547th episode of this podcast. That’s insane.If you listen to an episode a day, it’s over ten years of content. Ten and a half years, almost. Yeah, ten and a half years, exactly one one over. Last episode was ten and a half years. If you listen to an episode a week, it’s crazy.

So a lot of content. We probably already talked about it, but text me, let me know your questions. So all ah, right. Why is your affiliate program failing? Well, one of the first distinctions we’ve got to get here is are you the one that’s running it, or have you hired someone full time in house, or did you outsource it? So some of these will apply to specific ones of those. Some of these will not apply if you’re running it yourself. Some of these will not apply if you hired someone full time in house or if you outsourced it. I talked about two months ago I did an episode 15 biggest affiliate program Challenges and How to Fix Them. So there’s gonna be a little bit of overlap with that.

Some of the challenges are the reason why affiliate programs fail. But I want to share some specific reasons why your affiliate program might be failing. And, I’m talking virtually no leverage whatsoever here. All right, again, these are the reasons that people have come to us. They’ve either written to us, they’ve become clients, and they’ve had a failing affiliate program for a year and want us to take over.And the first thing you Gotta do is check your expectations. You know, when a client comes to us, a potential client says, my affiliate program is a disaster. It’s failing. Okay, Is it really failing or were your expectations too high? They come to me and say, yep, I tried this other company for three months.

This is our competition. And I say, whoa, you need to give them another three months. You know, unless they are showing zero results, I’m going to tell you right now, it’s going to take us four to six months just for you to break even. It takes time. I can go out today and I can bust my butt working on your affiliate program and assuming that hypothetically everything was set up today, I didn’t have to go in and change any settings.I didn’t have to set up an email address. I didn’t have to do anything. I understood your program on day one. Takes us a week just to understand your offers and your just everything about your story and your program. Right?

Takes us like a week just to do that, to really craft a good narrative. But assuming I could do on day one today, if I shoot messages to my top 50 contacts, you know how many of them are going to promote you in the first 90 days? Zero. Every now and again, we will get lucky. This happened two, three months ago.I messaged friend of mine who’s a great affiliate, one of the top consistently top five, top seven on big launch leaderboards. And I said, hey, I’ve got this thing I’d love for you to promote. I think it’s perfect for your audience. I explained to him why we have that kind of relationship, that I don’t need to beat around the bush. I just say, hey, got this thing for you.

And he was like, can I promote it next week? I was like, what? That never happened. Why did that happen? Dumb luck.Not because I’m good. I mean, I’m good. But that’s not why. Normally he’s like, great, I’m recording this here in late May of 2023. He’d be like, awesome, let’s get that on the calendar for November.Let’s get that on the calendar for next February. Something like that. But he’s like, can I promote next week? Why did that happen? Because he had another offer that he was going to promote and they canceled the promotion.And he already had it on his calendar. He didn’t want to come up with something else. And so he’s like, I’m looking for an affiliate promotion. Again, dumb luck. Really good timing, right?

But in all my years of doing this, that’s probably happened five times in 18 years. Five times that’s ever happened. So, again, check your expectations. Some people come to us and I, tell them, hey, I don’t recommend you hire us right now. I recommend you continue working with this other company.I know the CEO of that company. They’re a good company. Don’t hire us yet. Now, if it doesn’t work with them in the next three months, maybe there’s something going on, I don’t know, then you can talk to us. Now, part of that is just to be honest, is I don’t want to work with a company that, you know, 90 days in, they’re like, well, screw it, I’m out.I don’t want to work with them. And number two, I know how the game’s played, I know how it works, and I know that they can deliver results. So that’s first. Is it really failing? Or maybe you’re just.

Your expectations were unreasonable. You’re 47 days in, you’re like, I don’t have any sales yet. Well, again, we’ve scheduled stuff in November. We’ve already scheduled stuff, maybe even sooner. August, September.We’ve got stuff lined up. We’re doing what we’re supposed to do. Let’s be patient. The second reason why an affiliate program fails is the lack of variety, specifically on entry points. You’ve got one entry point.We do webinars or we do PDF, we do a three video workshop, and that’s it. And I mentioned it many, many episodes ago. But the difference we found when we did a study of seven figure to eight figure launches. What separated a couple million dollar launch from a $10 million launch that had basically the same affiliates, the same price point, all the things lined up, lack of entry points. The bigger launches had more entry points.

The bigger affiliate programs have more entry points. So one of the reasons why it might be failing is you just don’t have enough entry points. You, you need a webinar and a workshop and a summit and a challenge and some written stuff. So, PDFs and a free trial and payment plans and all these things. So that lack of variety could be a big reason for failing.Now, the counter to this, the third common reason I see is they just bounce around from idea to idea. Variety is great, but bouncing from shiny object to shiny object just doesn’t work. So you’re like, okay, we’re going to try a webinar. This. Well, that webinar didn’t work, so we’re going to do.

No, maybe you need to. The Counter to that is you need to get the webinar down first, and then you can use that to create the workshop, and then you can use that to create the so on and so forth. So when I say number two, lack of variety is one of the reasons why it might be failing, it’s probably more not the reason why it’s failing from the get go. You’re 60 days in and it’s not working. That’s a reason why they fail long term.They become stagnant. First they plateau. You get to say, oh, we’re doing a hundred thousand dollars a month, and then it plateaus at 100,000 for six months, and then next month it’s 95, and then 92, and then 85. That’s a lack of variety failure. Never getting to a hundred thousand could be the complete opposite.

You’re trying so many new things that nothing sticks. The fourth thing I want you to look at if things are failing is your terms and conditions. All right, here’s the question to ask. If you were an affiliate, would your terms and conditions scare you? Would they scare you? Are they too restrictive? Are you prohibiting affiliates from doing the things they need to do to succeed? You can’t use these things and you can’t do this and you can’t do this, and it’s like, oh, my gosh, what can I do? And if you keep saying you can’t do this, this, this, and this and this and this, eventually you’re just like, well, I don’t even want to try to figure out what I can do. Screw it, I’m out.

So take a look at your terms. Use your terms to protect you. Of course. Use your terms to make sure you don’t get people doing really bad things like pretending to be you or promote. Like, we don’t allow you to use the word scam in your marketing.You can’t create a blog post that says, is such and such product a scam. It’s clickbait, right? We don’t allow that. We don’t allow negative marketing. But that’s okay.We just don’t want that. That’s not prohibiting 99. 9% of affiliates from marketing us. So take a look at your terms and just, I mean, read through them. Is there anything in here that’s scaring you as a potential affiliate?The fifth reason your affiliate program might be failing is bad onboarding. All right? Getting an affiliate is a lot of hard work. We might spend 30, 40, 50 minutes, sometimes hours to get one affiliate. They finally sign up, they Agree to promote and then we onboard them incorrectly.

Now I don’t say we do that, but I’m saying these are the things that I see. A lot of times we see these affiliate programs that they’re like, matt, I’ve got great relationships and we just don’t know how to onboard them. We don’t have to, we don’t know how to handle them once they sign up and we come on and really help them with those. And ah, we can take an affiliate program from say 75,000amonth to 250amonth, 250,000 like that just by proper onboarding. Then we’ll go out and we’ll get more M affiliates of course.But that’s one of the, you know, that’s one of the biggest things we see is just not onboarding them properly. I talked about this a few episodes ago, you know how to onboard your affiliates. So you can go listen to that. But literally it’s making sure they have everything they need from the get go. All right.

If you are ready to take your business to the next level and start an affiliate program, start with my free report, Your First 100 Affiliates. This report takes nearly two decades of experience, trial and error, and lessons learned about finding top affiliates in nearly every conceivable niche and puts them all into one report. Grab your copy here!

If you have a purely evergreen program, make sure they have all their proper links. They have a login, if there’s a login, they have their swipe copy and then follow up to make sure they actually get those, you know, that information. A lot of times our onboarding email, it’s an automated email and it goes out and it has five, six links and it’s got three of their affiliate links and a link to the swipe copy and a link to the graphics and their login information. And it’s this big email with a lot of information. So a lot of times it gets stuck in maybe not spam filters, but gets put in the promo tab in Gmail.And so we’ll then send a private email, a one on one email that’s very short, no links in it that just says hey so and so. Just want to make sure you got my email. Here’s the subject line, let me know if you didn’t get it. And when people write back and say I didn’t get it, then we’ll say, hey, make sure you check your promo tip, I found it found in the promo tab. Or nope, I really didn’t get it.

Then we’ll manually send it to them. Did you get it now? Sure did. So we want to make sure they have all that information. And then we’re going to run incentives to get them to promote of course, which we talked about in that episode about onboarding your affiliate.So make sure you go check that out. Cause that’s one of the biggest reasons we see affiliate programs failing because they do all the hard work and they just drop the ball. Number six. All right, this one’s an easy one. Your commissions are just non competitive.Your commissions are not competitive in your market. You’re paying 20% when the market’s paying 30. You’re paying 30 when the market’s paying 40. You’re paying 10 when the market’s at 25. So here’s the deal.Go check the competition. You need to be playing in the same ballpark as him. If your number one competitor is at 50%, can you pay 40? Absolutely. But you can’t pay 30.

It’s a good rule of thumb. You need to be within 20%, 25 on the high end. So if somebody’s paying 40, I think 30% technically would be 25% lower or whatever. You can probably get away with that if you’ve got some other stuff going for you. But you need to be competitive.You can’t be half of what your competition is. You can’t be at 20% when they’re at 40. You just can’t. So check the competition. And if you need to cut some costs to have a better, more competitive affiliate program, or maybe you just need to make a little bit less money per transaction, but you’re going to quadruple the number of transactions because instead of 20 affiliates sending $10,000 in sales, you now have a hundred affiliates sending $100,000 in sales.

Well, yeah, you might go from making a 50% profit margin to a 30% profit margin. Well, last time I checked out just went from 5,000 to $70,000 or what? I’m not sure the math on that, but you went or 5,000 to 30,000. You know, you’re making a lot more money making six times more money by having a competitive commission. So check those commissions against the competition.All right. The seventh reason why your affiliate program might be failing is you’ve hired the wrong affiliate manager. And typically this is being too cheap hiring. You hired a VA and you’re expecting to run a million dollars a month affiliate program. That’s just probably not going to happen.

Now if you are an expert affiliate manager like I have hired VAs and train them, do they run a million dollar a month affiliate programs? No, but they can run six figure programs. No doubt. But being too cheap in the hiring process, hiring the wrong person, nepotism, hiring somebody because they’re related to you, it doesn’t work most of the time unless they’ve got the Right. Training.Now, we do work with people. I jokingly call myself the brother in law trainer because I work with a lot of people who are related to the owner and they become the affiliate manager and then I train them on how to become an affiliate manager and how to do the right things. Does it work sometimes? Absolutely. But it goes back to the first thing.

That’s not going to happen if you hire us. We’re one of the best agencies in the world. There’s a reason why we’ve run so many huge affiliate programs and why we’ve worked with the people that we’ve worked with. It’s why Kevin Harrington hired us to run his affiliate program, why Michael Hyatt hired us. It’s why Ryan Levesque hired us, why Stu McLaren hired us.That’s why Shutterfly hired us. It’s why, we worked with Adidas and Jeff Walker and Tony Robbins. Why? Because we’re if not the best or one of the best in the world. Right.I’m not going to go out and say like, we are absolutely the best, because I don’t know. I really don’t. But even if we take four to six months, how long is your in law going to take? How long is that VA going to take? So don’t be cheap in hiring an affiliate manager.

You get what you pay for. So be willing to spend a little bit of money and hire the right person or hire the right agency number. A reason your affiliate program might be failing is it’s just not standing out. You know, we talked a little bit about this in the last episode. I talked about how to steal your competitors affiliates.And I talked about how I stood out by that personalization. Right. By giving them my cell phone number, by treating them like a person, not a number. And I talked about how we stood out at a time when we couldn’t stand out on commissions. We couldn’t stand out on conversions, we couldn’t stand out on brand reputation, we couldn’t stand out on 900 other things.

But we stood out on me and my personality, and me giving my cell phone number and saying, text me anytime if you need something. That’s how we stood out. So how can you stand out? What are some of the ways you stand out? Do you need to offer a car for your top affiliate?Probably not, but it doesn’t hurt. Do you need to stand out by having a great personality with your affiliate manager? You don’t have to, but it doesn’t hurt. Do you need to stand out by having a killer affiliate page yeah, that helps. You should have a good affiliate page.Do you need to stand out by offering generous commissions? Absolutely. Do you need to stand out by writing articles and appearing in affiliate trade publications? Yes, absolutely. Do you need to stand out by just getting out there more in front of these affiliates, showing up in their inbox once every two weeks rather than once every six months?

Absolutely. Those are the things you gotta do. So if you’re not standing out, your affiliate program’s probably gonna fail. That’ll tie in with number 12, just not having enough affiliates. The ninth reason your affiliate program fails, you screw up the basics.This is the one we see the most of, bad affiliate tracking. So affiliates don’t trust you, so they leave again. You work so hard to get them and then your tracking doesn’t work. Usually this cause you’re cheap with your tracking. You go ahead and get the $37 a month tracking instead of spending a couple hundred bucks.Doesn’t have to be expensive. Just to be clear, most of the good ones are either $300 upfront or 50 to 100 bucks a month. They’re affordable. Think about how important this is. People ask me all the time, like, what do you look for in an affiliate system?

And they’re like, well, the number one thing is tracking. Yes, I want the reports and I want to be able to do all the cool things that we want to do as an affiliate and agency. But if it doesn’t get the tracking right, nothing else matters. So the basics like tracking, paying on time, good communication. We talked about this a few episodes ago.You know how to communicate with your affiliates following the template that we have. Right. I’m going to put a link in the show notes. We have a template you can just download. It’s a PDF that shows you exactly what to put in your affiliate emails, how to communicate with your affiliates.That’s a basic. That is a basic thing in paying on time, making sure that your affiliates are getting their money. You tell them that you’re gonna pay the first week of the month, pay in the first week of the month, and by gosh, if you don’t. And we had to do this recently with a client, their PayPal account got shut down. No reason whatsoever.

Their PayPal account got shut down. And we had to email the affiliates. But we knew about it. It was like the 29th of the previous month. So on the 30th, 31st, I actually think it was the 31st because of the, weekend.We emailed them and said, we are so sorry, we want to Let you know payments will be delayed. We’re working on an alternative payment solution and thankfully their account was back up and running. I think we ended up still paying in the first week of the month. I think we paid on like the fifth. We normally pay on the second or third.

Wasn’t that big of a deal. But make sure you’re doing those things. Just get the basics right. Most of the rest of the stuff’s easy. All right.The tenth reason why your affiliate program might be failing is just lack of training for your affiliates. Making the assumption that your affiliates know what the heck they’re doing, that they are experts at affiliate marketing, that they are experts at your program, they are experts on your product and not educating them, not giving them tips for how to promote, not making sure they understand the program and the offer and the bonuses and the sales, messaging and all that, just not training them. If you want to know how to train your affiliates, go get our training. We have a training on training. So we’ll show you how to train your affiliates totally free.

We’ll show you how to train your affiliates. We even give you some of the slides that you can literally, if you use Keynote, download them. If you use PowerPoint, download them. You can grab the slides and use those. Let me show you a sample training how we train affiliates.So go grab that, there’s no reason not to and use that to train your affiliates. All right, number 11. You just don’t have a clear strategy. You just don’t have a clear strategy. Kind of goes back to what I said before, bouncing around from idea to idea.What is the strategy, what is the plan, what are the goals around? Like that can get you just to be able to get some traction going, right? So a good goal typically is to be able, you know, 45 days into an affiliate program, M. This is what we tell our clients. 45 days in, we want to do a small promotion.

So typically this will be a small webinar, maybe 100, 150 people. And we have our small and mid sized affiliates promoting. It might be a small workshop or a small challenge. And we’re stress testing, we’re telling the client like, no, we want this to be small. This is usually somewhere between, depending on the price point, between a, that could be low as $3,000, like a $3,000 to upwards of a $20,000 promo, very small.But we’re stress testing it and we do this 45 days in so that, honestly, so that, number one, they get some revenue and they see that, you know, it’s kind of goes back to where you’re talking about like the expectations thing. Like, no, I can get a few small affiliates to promote 45 days in. So we get proof of concept. But number two, we work through any problems because here’s the deal. You’re gonna mess something up.

We’re gonna mess something up. This is what we tell our clients. You’re gonna mess something up. We had a client first webinar. We did.Oh man, it was awesome. And they forgot to set up their payment plans. None of the payment plans worked. So it cost us a lot of money. Cost everybody a lot of money.Oops. So we worked through that. Well, we learned that when it was small, it probably, I say a lot of M money probably cost $5,000, $6,000 instead of costing 50 or 60,000 or a hundred thousand dollars like some of the later promotions. So we do these small promotions about 45 days in. And our goal, again, depending upon the client.But our goal is really small. But we usually hit it. Nine times out of ten we hit it. So we’ve gained that traction. So what’s the clear strategy that you have?

And the clear plan, the clear goals? Again, if you don’t have a target, you’re going to miss it every time. Number 12, reason you might be failing. And it’s one of the most obvious ones. You just don’t have enough affiliates.Duh. you know, don’t have enough affiliates. And they got two affiliates. Hard to gain any traction. Right?Well, maybe it’s because you’re not tapping into your customers or some of the non traditional affiliate sources. Maybe you’re only trying to get people who promote your competition like we talked about in the last episode. Maybe that’s your only source and it’s just not working because you don’t have that way to stand out. So you got to go get some customers to be affiliates. You got to go get some non traditional affiliates.

You got to look at other places for affiliates. So go grab our report your First 100 affiliates. Maverick williams.com forward/first100, first100. I’ll put that in the show notes.Go grab that. Go get more affiliates. That’s a great way to grow your program. The 13th reason for failure is you just don’t nurture those relationships. So yeah, you go out and you get them.We talked about this a few episodes ago, how to build those strong relationships. Go check out that episode. Don’t treat your affiliates like a number. Treat them like people. We talked about that in the last episode.And build those relationships. You have to make a commitment. I don’t know if I made this clear in the episode I did on how to build strong relationships with your affiliates, but the key word is intentionality. You have to be intentional. You have to set aside 15 minutes a day or 30 minutes a day, three days a week, something like that.

You have to make that commitment to building those strong relationships with your current affiliates and spending a little bit of time with potential affiliates. Typically, what I do, I’ve reached the point where now it’s 80, 20. I spend 80% of my time developing and nurturing my current relationships. People that I already have a relationship with on nurturing those, and I spend 20% developing new ones just because I have such a huge network now. Ten years ago, it was 80, 20 the other way.I spent 20% of my time nurturing the current relationships. I only had, like, 50, and I spent the entire rest of my time developing new ones. But if you don’t nurture these relationships, it’s kind of what I said earlier. You’ll stagnate over time, and you’ll notice that you start to decline very slowly. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

It also didn’t decline in a day. And neither is an affiliate program. It’s not built in a day, and it will not decline in a day. You should be growing every month, barring, you know, of course, if you have a huge promo in January, and then, you know, it’s not until April that you have another one. Well, you may not grow every month, but every launch should be bigger than the last.Every month should be bigger than the last. Every quarter, at least, should be bigger than the last. Every year should be bigger than the last. And if that’s not the case, usually comes down to, again, you’re not nurturing relationships. You’re not adding new affiliates.

You don’t have that variety. So you start to stagnate. Those are the reasons why you start to decline and why your affiliate program goes from success to failure. And then the last reason for failure, very simple one, you’re not listening to your affiliates. I mean, what are they asking for?What are they asking you for? What graphics are they asking you for? What types of promotions are, they coming to you and saying, I need you to do a challenge. Challenges are killing it with my audience right now. Will you do a challenge?Or, hey, man, I really, you know, could you take that same webinar you’re already doing, but do it specifically for blank? That’s how we did. We Have a, training that we do for authors, how to sell books using an affiliate program. It’s the same basic presentation that I do already about how to start and grow an affiliate program with 20% of it tweaked. The cool thing was it only took me about three hours to put together the whole presentation because I had 80, 90% of it already done.

Well, where did that come from? It came from affiliates asking us to do it. And I said, well, enough of them are asking. I’m going to do it. But I listened to them.I listened to them, and that’s what allowed us to have that killer webinar that’s now actually become our number one webinar. We just recently did our biggest webinar ever, and it was that one because I listened to my affiliates. So here’s the simple thing. What are they asking for? give it to them.Very simple. Whatever they’re asking for, give it to them. That will address some of the stuff that we talked about. If you are listening to them, that’s what will dictate some of your variety. That’s what will dictate some of the variety that will dictate your strategy and some of the other stuff that we talked about.

So now you know why your affiliate program might be failing and how to fix it. You have 14 reasons. I’d love to know. I, mentioned earlier. Which one’s yours?What are your 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6? Hopefully not 6. Why is your affiliate program failing? Text me at 260-217-4619. I’d love to hear from you.And there might be a little bit more nuance to yours, and you could tell me in that text and I can help you out there. Also, make sure that you hit subscribe. Next episode is gonna be a good one. I hope this. This was a good one, too.We’re going on a roll here. Actually had some really good ones lately. I’m gonna share what the number one trait of great affiliate managers is. This is something that came up from a conversation with our team, our affiliate managers, and I told them, like, guys, this is the number one trait of a great affiliate manager. And I shared it.

It. And so as soon as I was done sharing it with the team, our operations manager texted me. He’s like, dude, that has to be a podcast. You have to talk. You’ve never talked about that.I’ve never heard you say that. You have to talk about it. Let’s do a podcast on that. So next episode, I’m going to share the number one trait of great affiliate managers, so hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. I’ll see you then.Thank you so much for listening today. Remember to check out all of our deep dives into affiliate marketing marketing at the Affiliateguide TV and if you have a question, ask [email protected] who knows, maybe you even be featured on an upcoming episode. And lastly, if you haven’t yet, make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you’re listening to this episode.

The post How to Turn Around an Affiliate Program That Isn’t Growing appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode

TEXT ME: +1 (260) 217-4619

How I Built a $1 Million a Month Affiliate Program In Only Two Years Without Any Connections or Credentials

Find Your First 100 Affiliates

AffiliateHQ

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Listen on YouTube

Listen on Amazon

Email Me New Episodes

Ask a Question for the Show

How to Create Affiliate Emails, Images, and Social Swipe

How to Build an Affiliate Agreement Affiliates Can Understand

Affiliate Program Legal Requirements: What Every Affiliate Manager Needs to Know

How to Create Affiliate Relationships That Last

How to Tell Affiliates When Something Goes Wrong

How to Plan Your Day as an Affiliate Manager

What if you could steal affiliates from your competition? That’d be pretty freaking awesome, right? I mean, not only is this one of the easiest ways to start and grow an affiliate program, but it has the added benefit of growing your market share while decreasing your competitors. So listen up because today I’m going to show you exactly how to steal your competitors affiliates. . So as far as I know, a part of the story I’m about to share I’ve never shared before. I’ve talked a lot about how I got into the affiliate world and how the company that I ran at the time there were three of us that were partners, how we were basically 10 days away from going bankrupt.

We couldn’t make the next payroll, we just paid payroll, it was a Friday and we just paid payroll. And ah, we could not pay payroll in two weeks. We did not have enough money nor enough like, we didn’t have enough money on hand nor enough money projected to come in over the next two weeks to pay payroll. And we kind of had one of those, I call it like the business equivalent of like trying to pay your mortgage by finding change in your couch. Right.You know, or doing a garage sale. Like we’re trying to figure out, okay, how are we going to make payroll and we’re just trying to survive two weeks. And the answer ended up being to start an affiliate program. And it’s an affiliate program that over the course of about the next 18 months we built into a million dollar a month powerhouse and we became a respected player in our industry.

We grew and we grew and we grew and a lot of times I tell that story and just for the purposes of time, I don’t tell the whole story.I, talk about how we started an affiliate program, what the advantages are. You know, I’m actually doing a training coming up. If you want to hear parts of the story I’m not going to share today. I’m doing a training how I built a million dollar a month affiliate program in only two years, really less than two years without any connections or credentials. And we’ll put a link to that in the show.Note. Well, the part that I’m probably not going to share on that because it’s not relevant and I don’t know that I’ve ever shared it publicly really is the middle Part of that story, you know, how do you go from zero to a million dollars a month in 18 months? What did that actually look like? Did we grow by $75,000 a month? Was there an inflection point?

Were we at a hundred thousand dollars a month a year later, and then we suddenly skyrocketed? What happened in that mix and what does that have to do with stealing affiliates from your competitors? Well, for us, what it looked like was we worked our butts off in the first month. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but, you know, the first month we did like 10, $12,000. Awesome, great start.That plus some other stuff was what allowed us to kind of stay in business. Then we grew to about $25,000, $40,000 and so on and so forth. And about six months in, we got it up to $100,000 a month, just shy of $100,000 a month. And that’s amazing. And that came through hard work and doing what I teach on the podcast, right.

Developing those relationships and all the things, all the things that we talk about. If you want to know where to find affiliates, I’ve got a free report, right. And I’ve talked about that before. Your first 100 affiliates.MattMcWams M.com first 100 F I R S T 100 we’ll put that in the show notes. And I talk about the ways that we did that in there. But here’s what happened around month, six, we had gotten to the point where we were doing about $100,000 a month. And we got what at the time felt like really bad news. Our biggest competitor had just gotten acquired by a large publicly traded company.We are talking a multibillion dollar company. And I remember, I think we found it out on a Thursday. And I was so busy with some work stuff that I kind of finished up the Thursday and didn’t really think about it. And then Friday, it just hit me like a ton of bricks. I left work.

I mean, I was young, I was single, and I was running a startup. I worked 90 hours a week. I worked seven days a week. I worked 10 to 15 hours a day. And I’m not saying that’s a good thing.I’m just telling you that was the norm. I left work at like 3 on Friday afternoon. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to do it. That Saturday, I watched more college football than I’d watched in years.I didn’t want to work. I never got my laptop out. And I remember that Saturday afternoon I don’t know how else to say this, but I was using the bathroom and I had this revelation. Like I went from, this sucks. That’s the natural emotion for the first 48 hours.

This sucked. This isn’t fair. They’re going to put us out of business. They have more money than they know what to do with. They’re going to be able to steal all of our affiliates because they got more money.They’re going to be able to crush us. Unpaid advertising. They’ve got more money. And as I’m sitting there in the bathroom, this thought went through my head, wait a minute. What if we could use this to our advantage?What if we could use this to our advantage? And we emailed all of their affiliates, or all the ones we could find at least, and basically said, hey, you may have heard that such and such company just got purchased by a big behemoth publicly traded company. Here’s the deal. That company has a reputation. They have a reputation for treating their affiliates like a number, not a person.

They even sign their affiliate emails, the affiliate team at such and such company. And they don’t want to get to know you. And if that’s not what you’re looking for in an affiliate program, let’s talk. As a matter of fact, here’s my personal cell phone number. You can text me anytime and let’s talk.And over the course of the next two months, I sent hundreds of those emails and I got probably close to a hundred. I probably sent 700 emails, I got probably 75 texts. I had about 60 calls and I got about 40 of them, including some that were doing in excess of $25,000 a month. Why did they want to become an affiliate for us? Because I found the angle that appealed to them.

And we’ll talk about that as we go along here. But like, I couldn’t pay them more commissions. Our stuff didn’t even convert better per se. We had no attraction other than we’re gonna treat you like a person, not a number. I’m gonna give you my cell phone number.Just try getting that from one of their affiliate managers. Their affiliate managers hide behind an email address. Never talk on the phone. I’ll spend an hour getting to know you and talking to you. I got on so many phone calls over the next couple of months, I mean, that’s practically what I spent.I’d say 50% of my time doing was just talking to affiliates, getting to know them. I learned things about them. To this day, I still remember many of their spouses names and I remember where they live. I, remember where they went to college. We talked about that a few episodes ago.

Or we talked about building strong relationships. Right. To this day, I remember those things to this day when I interact with them, because some of them still promote our clients. Here we are 18 years later. I can still tell you who their favorite teams are.And you can bet when the Chiefs won the Super Bowl, I reached out to a few of them because they’re Chiefs fans. You can bet that when their school plays well in a NCAA tournament or whatever, you bet, I reach out to them. But ultimately, what we did was we stole affiliates from our competition. And when I say that stealing affiliates from your competition kind of sounds a little bit cutthroat, right? But it’s not.You know, you’re not stealing them by lying. I’m making that assumption here that you’re not a liar. You’re not stealing by promising something you can’t deliver on. You’re not stealing by denigrating them. And you could argue, well, Matt, you kind of said that they treat their affiliates like a number.

That was. If you searched for their affiliate program back then, the second post down or the second article down was exactly about that. The first listing was their affiliate program. The second one was an article, an affiliate form where they talked about that. And you could argue that I denigrated them.I mean, I didn’t. I didn’t say they were terrible. In fact, I acknowledged in the email, hey, this is pretty much all we can offer. So we’re not stealing them by lying. You’re either giving them a better offer or you’re offering them something like I did that their competition isn’t offering them.In other words, you’re giving them a choice. If that’s a bad thing, well, then you hate capitalism, right? Like, you’re just, If you don’t want affiliates to have a choice, then move to North Korea where there’s no competition, right? No, that’s all we’re doing. And so you need to change your mindset if you see it this way.

You see, I don’t want to steal my competitors affiliates. That’s an evil thing to do. They worked hard to get them. No, you’re just giving them a choice. I didn’t threaten them.I didn’t lie to them. I didn’t offer something that we couldn’t deliver on, which is a form of lying. I did none of that stuff. All I did was offer them a choice. So again, if you see it that way, I want you to change Your mindset.So I shared one way to do this in my story that I shared to walk you through. What did I do? I found them. I went to Google. This is 18 years ago.Still works today. I went to Google and I found all the people who were promoting our competitor. Now I’ll share some other ways that you can find them in a moment. But regardless of where you find them, then you offer them something that the competition can’t offer them. Maybe it’s a higher commission, maybe your competition has lower margins.

Maybe they have a, ah, physical product that you’re not offering. So let’s just say you both have a $500 price point and they have a, physical component that, let’s just say cost them a hundred bucks. So they can only offer a 25% commission and you don’t have that. So you can offer a 30% commission or a 40% commission. If you can offer a better commission, then do it.We couldn’t. Maybe you could offer better conversions. I would argue that because we were in the lead generation business and our form was a little bit shorter than our competitions early on, that we did convert slightly better. I had no quantifiable data on that, to be clear, because I didn’t know their conversion rate. I didn’t know their exact conversion rate, but I did say that we had a shorter form.

So I was offering better conversions or at least saying we had something that should lead to better conversions. If you definitely know that, then use it. Or maybe you have better upsells. We didn’t have that. But maybe both Companies offer a $500 product at a 30% commission and they don’t offer anything on the back end and you sell a couple thousand dollars worth of stuff on the back end.So they’ll make more money long term. Maybe you offer a longer cookie. Side note, I’ve talked about this. Probably in 50 to 60 episodes, do a lifetime cookie. Offer a lifetime cookie.There is no reason to not offer a lifetime cookie. 96% of the orders will happen within 30 days. But saying we have a 30 day cookie or a 90 day cookie versus we have a lifetime cookie, which one sounds better? So if that’s something you can beat your competition on, then offer it. Maybe you have better creatives, maybe you have better copy.

Hey, we, we can’t beat them on conversions. We can’t beat them on commissions. We both have lifetime cookies. We both have roughly a, $2,500 average order size and upsells, but we’ve got tons of better creatives and we’ve got tons of better copy. So we make it easier for you.Can you make it easier for them? How about that? We’ll get on a strategy call with you. We’ll help you craft your promo. We’ll get the owner of the company to do an interview on your podcast, you know, or a video or whatever.We’ll co create some bonuses together. How can you make it easier for them? How can you allow them to do something they can’t do with the competition, like those bonuses or like custom landing pages or things like that? Maybe you have more promotion opportunities. Maybe you have a variety of them.

So your competition basically has a sales, page and maybe a lead magnet funnel, right? And you’ve got webinars, challenges, summit workshops, lead magnets, half a dozen lead magnets, you’ve got mini courses, all that stuff. Or maybe your program’s more fun. You make your program more fun. You personalize things for them.So again, treat them like a person and not a number. Maybe it’s just because you talk to them and help them doing those strategy calls, getting on the phone with them make it easy to contact you. Here’s my cell phone number. If you don’t want to be reached by the way, you can put your phone on do not disturb. I’m not saying you have to answer the phone when you’re eating dinner with your family or you’re at a movie.

I, have to be reachable 24 7. If you’re. No, you don’t. You don’t have to be reachable 24 7. Just put your phone on do not disturb.That’s why they created that. And I love the feature side note, where it’s like it automatically goes into do not disturb when you’re at a certain address. You know, so there are certain places I go, like our kids soccer. My phone automatically goes on do not disturb. My wife can get through, just to be clear.But I’m, coaching soccer, not going to talk to you, you know, so you can do that. Right. Maybe you can promote them so it becomes a two way thing. Or maybe you can introduce people to them, or whatever the case may be, but offer things that the competition can’t offer. And that’s your angle to get in with them.

That’s your angle. Right. And so we’ll talk, you know, about the where to find them part in just a moment. But going back to our story is we were at about $100,000, a little bit short of that. And two, two and a half months later after doing this, we were a little bit over half a million dollars a month.That was the catalyst to getting to a million dollars a month. It allowed us to scale and we did exactly what I just shared. Like I mentioned, almost every day I would get a text or an email reply and I would set up calls and I would set up calls and I would talk to people. And yeah, I mean it was a heck of a lot easier back then. Like I said, I was single, I was young, I was working 78 hours a week and so I was talking to people all day long.

Sometimes it would take two, three calls, hour long calls and follow up emails to convince them to just give us a test promo, just to convince them to try us. And here’s the thing, what they found was the combination of, of the fact that we didn’t have better upsells, we didn’t have better commissions, I mean marginally better conversions. We did offer a lifetime cookie when the competition offered something like a seven day cookie. So that was one way where we stood out quite frankly. We did not have better creatives at that time.We were working on it, but we didn’t. And we did have a variety of promotional opportunities. But one of the things that stood out was just the fact that I got on the phone with people and I helped them strategize and I helped them scale and I offered them tips and I shared what was working and what wasn’t working and I found typos on their website and made corrections to their marketing.

You know, we didn’t have social media back then so I wasn’t like able to do that. But I was finding these ways.I subscribed to their email lists and I would reply back to them and say great email, things like that. Love this, you know, love this. When they would promote something else that wasn’t ours. And I interacted with them. And so we had this one affiliate come into town.This is just a funny story here. This guy came into town to Franklin, Tennessee where we’re at at the time. And we’re at this restaurant that like every place in the Nashville area had live music. And we’re there, it’s loud, we’re talking, we’re getting to know each other. And this, you know, basically the day before they had agreed they were going to give us a test run.

They’re going to try us out effectively like 1/10 of their traffic, right? And so we’re excited about that. And again the fact that we brought them down and hosted them and for Lack of a better term. Wined and dined them and treated them really well. Played a big part in that the other company wasn’t doing that.So we had this personal relationship. We’d spent almost 48 hours, you know, or probably not spent 48 hours together. We spent, like, 20 hours together. We broke bread together. We.We hung out together. We went to a hockey game together. We did all kinds of fun stuff. And the night before they’re leaving, we’re at this place. And sitting at the bar is.I, couldn’t even tell you the guy’s name, but he’s, like, the lead guitarist for Rascal Flats. Well, this guy’s a huge Rascal Flats fan, and he’s freaking out because the guy. Not the lead singer, but the other guy from Rascal Flats is there, like, one of his favorite bands, and he’s there. And, like, you know where this guy’s from? He was from Ohio.

You don’t just see famous people at the bar in Nashville. I mean, quite frankly, it happens all the time. You can’t go into a store or a restaurant. I mean, I can’t tell you the sheer number of people that I sat near in restaurants or ran into at stores. I mean, it’s crazy, right?So anyway, I had a Windows phone. The Windows phone had just come out, and so I had Internet in my pocket. Now it was super slow. You know, I don’t even know what this was like a quarter of a g. We’re on 5g now.This was, like, 0. 25g. and so. But I had this Windows phone, and I’m looking up, like, the Rascal Flats band, trying to figure out who this guy is, and I couldn’t even tell you. I should probably look it up, but I’m not.His name is Clark. I’m m gonna call him Clark. And I’m like, okay. So I was like, dude, come here with me. I take this guy over.

His name’s Lev. I take Lev over, and I go. I was like, hey, Clark. He turns around, the guy from Rascal Flats. And I was like, I’d love to introduce you to my friend Lev here.Kind of a risky move, because I don’t know, Clark. I just Learned his name 12 seconds ago. And dude plays it off like, he’s like, lev, nice to meet you, man. I’m like, hey, guys, let me take a picture. And I got, like, my 0.2 megapixel flip Windows Phone. And I’m like, let me take a picture of you. It’s dark so it turns out, basically looking like crap. But I take this picture of, you know, of Lev and this guy from Rascal Flats, and, you know Lev’s on cloud nine, right? Lev is on cloud freaking nine.I text him the picture. I think I emailed it to him as well, because it was like, higher res that it came through again. This is 2005, so, you know, pictures are a little bit different back then. And Lev looked at me, he’s like, all right, man. He’s like, you know what?

Like, I’m in. I get it now. I’m in. Let’s do this. Let’s just go all in.He’s like, you guys are amazing. I want to work with you guys. And then, like, two days later, they flipped over half their traffic to us. Within a week, they’d flipped all of it over. Now, that’s illogical, right?It might have cost him a little bit of money, but I created an experience for him that he’ll never forget to this day. I’m not sure. I don’t know if he listens. I doubt. I’m not sure if he knows.I still don’t know who the guy is. From Rascal Flats. I know a lot of country music singers growing up and my dad’s golf course in Franklin, Tennessee. It was nothing, right? I knew so many famous.I knew a lot of famous golfers, but I knew a lot of famous country music singers. I did not know this guy. So I took a chance and it worked. But the point wasn’t that I did that. The point was that we’d hung out.

The point was that we had bonded, and that was something that the competition could not offer. So find that angle. Find that angle. What is it that you offer that they don’t? I give you probably 10 or 12 things you could think through.Get creative if need be. So where do you find them? Well, Google I, shared earlier, still works 18 years later. You go to Google, you type in the name of your. The company, you want to find their competitors, and you go find their affiliates.You can watch leaderboards, a lot of affiliate programs. We post the list of our top affiliates, and maybe not even some of our top affiliates. We might post a list down 50, 60 deep. Watch those sign up, join their Facebook groups, join their email lists. Make sure you watch those affiliate programs also.

Maybe they only post a list of, like, their top 20, but what about their 30th biggest affiliate? Some companies number 30 affiliate might be a $60,000 a year affiliate or even just a $5,000 affiliate. Don’t you want the $5,000 affiliate? Do you hate money? Do you not want the $5,000?I do. So watch who posts in their Facebook groups. And then we talked about don’t reach out to them in that group, duh, but reach out to them privately. And then groups, like I said, groups where people hang out, whether it be an affiliate group specifically for a company or just a place where, you know, the affiliates are hanging out. Like people in a certain niche are hanging out, coaches are hanging out, business coaches are hanging out there, gardeners are hanging out there, whatever the case may be.

Gardeners who have platforms. So then you reach out and I’m going to share more on how to do this. I mentioned the training earlier, how I built a million dollar a month affiliate program in only two years less than really without any connections or credentials. If you go to mattmcwilliams.com million a month, we’ll put that link in the show notes for you.There you can register for that training. In the meantime, shoot me a text and let me know what you got out of this, okay? Did you change your mindset on this? You see? You know what, this isn’t unethical.This is just giving them a choice. Text me, let me know what your biggest takeaway. What are you going to take from this? More importantly, not what your takeaway is, but what is your take action from this. What action are you going to take as a result of hearing this episode today?

So shoot me a text anytime 260-217-4619 and make sure also that you you hit subscribe because you do not want to miss the next episode. Terry, now it’s going to be a good one. Why your affiliate program is failing. Why your affiliate program is failing. What are the reasons why affiliate programs fail?More importantly, what to do about it. So we’re talking about that in the next episode. Make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. I’ll see you then. Thank you so much for listening today.Remember to check out all of our deep dives into affiliate marketing at the affiliate Market Guide TV. And if you have a question, ask [email protected] who knows, maybe you even be featured on an upcoming episode. And lastly, if you haven’t yet, make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you’re listening to this episode.

The post How to Recruit Affiliates from Your Competition’s Program appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode

TEXT ME: +1 (260) 217-4619

How to Use Swipe Copy as an Affiliate

AffiliateHQ

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Listen on YouTube

Listen on Amazon

Email Me New Episodes

Ask a Question for the Show

How to Build an Affiliate Agreement Affiliates Can Understand

Affiliate Program Legal Requirements: What Every Affiliate Manager Needs to Know

How to Create Affiliate Relationships That Last

How to Tell Affiliates When Something Goes Wrong

How to Plan Your Day as an Affiliate Manager

How to Fix the Biggest Problems Holding Back Your Affiliate Program

One of the single most important keys to a successful affiliate program is great swipe copy. If you do it right, it’s a powerful tool that’s going to help your affiliates succeed. Yeah, I see so many affiliate programs get it wrong. Today, I’ll, share exactly how to provide great swipe copy for your affiliates.So, obviously, one of the things that a lot of your affiliates are going to ask for is swipe copy. If you’re new to the world and you don’t know what swipe copy is, very simple explanation.The term comes from copywriters used to keep what they call swipe files. And I still have hundreds of these. In fact, we sell the ultimate affiliate swipe file, where we actually give you all of our affiliate emails for a given year.

And you can literally go in and open this book and be like, I’m going to promote a webinar and, oh, there’s some copy. You know, I’m going to use that.And you can see examples that we’ve used in our business. But this swipe file were examples of other copy to inspire your own copy. And then it evolved into, with affiliate swipe copy, it was like, for years, it was like, well, here, copy and paste this swipe copy and just send it to your list. There’s a big problem with that, of course, and that’s that a lot of people are on multiple lists now. And in fact, we wrote an entire article on how to use swipe copy as an affiliate, which we’ll put in the show notes.

You can go to mattmcwaims.com swipetips and it’s like, rule number one, don’t copy and paste the swipe copy. And so for us, that’s one of the services that we provide for our clients, is that we’ll help them craft this swipe copy. It’s meant as a guide for their affiliates. It’s meant to inspire them to give them ideas about the content that they could use.So with swipe copy, from an affiliate program perspective, there’s five mistakes that I see most often. So I want to share those five mistakes. Then I’m going to share what to do instead, how to actually provide great swipe copy for your affiliates. Mistake number one is writing it yourself. Now, this is if you’re the product owner or you know, maybe you’re an employee of the company that’s been around for a while.

Either way, you are too close to the product to write great swipe copy. You have to remember that swipe copy, it’s a guide for your affiliates to use. So these are people who are not that close to the product in the sense of they didn’t create it, they don’t work for you, they’re not super close to the product, they didn’t pour their blood, sweat and tears into the product. Right? So swipe copy should be written as though it’s from an outsider because that’s who’s going to use it, is the affiliates.So have somebody else write your swipe copy. It’s one of the reasons why I love that we’re able to do it for our clients so often, because I’ll have our copywriter do it and our copywriter doesn’t know the product very well. That’s a great thing. They’re writing it from the perspective of what would attract me to click on this link and get them to come to your workshop or buy this product. So do not write the swipe copy yourself.

Number two, you don’t include images. All right, Most people don’t use images in their emails, but some people do. And when they do, often they can be very effective. Like my company, I don’t know, we use an image maybe every four months. When we do, our click through rates skyrocket, which is probably like a lesson to me there.But the point is, I think it’s because we rarely use them. So you need to offer your affiliates some images that they can use in their emails. Number three, you only write one version. All right, Only one version. So you got this big thing, and maybe it’s a workshop, maybe it’s a product and you write one version of the copy.

So frustrating because it assumes that every affiliate has the exact same audience. That doesn’t describe any product, almost. That does not describe nearly any product. Most of the time your product reaches different demographics, different avatars. Each group is at a different place in life.They have different struggles, they have different needs, different desires. And so writing one version of the swipe copy is not a good idea. Now, that doesn’t necessarily apply if you’re writing the final email, like the 2 o’ clock in the morning, when the cart closes at 3 o’ clock in the morning, Eastern time, you know, midnight Pacific. That email, you may only need one version. There’s only so many ways to say you have one hour left to buy Click here.

The gist of the message, right? So I’m not, you know, I’m not complaining about that, but most of the time that’s not going to work. Number four, mistake. Every version of the swipe copy is the same length. You know, you only write long, you only write short length emails.Again, like the third thing, when I talked about that, you only write one version. It assumes that every affiliate wants the same kind of copy. Some affiliates prefer longer form copy, Some of them prefer shorter form copy. Some of them prefer something in the middle. And we’ll talk about that.

And then fifth, talked about this earlier. You expect them to copy paste and actually even encourage them to copy and paste it. You just tell them like, no, just go ahead, just copy and paste it. No, no, please do not do that. We always tell our affiliates, do not copy and paste the swipe copy.Go read the post that I mentioned, you know, mattmcwilliams.com swipetips that is from the affiliate’s perspective. Feel free to share that post with your affiliates and say, hey, here’s swipe copy. Go read this post from Matt McWilliams. He tells you how to use it.We tell people, don’t copy the swipe copy. It’s unoriginal. It doesn’t work. Sometimes it backfires. Sometimes if you send an email and another, just assume another affiliate’s gonna do it.

That’s the thing, you have to assume another affiliate’s gonna do it. So you send the same email as another affiliate, same subject line, same text. How does that come across? You know, how does that make you as the affiliate? Look, makes you look like an idiot.I’m just being blunt. It makes you look like an idiot. Super lame. So what do you do instead? Five best practices.Believe it or not, these are going to address the five mistakes I just talked about, right? These are the five musts for creating killer swipe copy. Number one, hire somebody to write it. Unless you are a professional copywriter. Even if you are a professional copywriter, hire an outsider.

Hire an outsider. Somebody that’s new to your team. Like if we were writing swipe copy for our products, our copywriter is new enough that I think he’d do pretty good at writing swipe copy for our affiliates. In fact, I have had him write affiliate swipe copy because he doesn’t know our products super well yet. Three years from now, I probably wouldn’t have him write it.I’ll probably hire somebody from the outside to write it. You are simply too close to the product to Write Great swipe copy. All right. An outsider is going to be able to relate to your affiliates and write copy for them. An outsider is going to be able to say, if I were writing this for my business, how would I write it?

And that’s what you want. Number two, give your affiliates images. Just give them the option of some good images for their emails. For us, you know, the ones that worked best are like video screen captures. So we’re talking about if they’re mailing about a video, then we find a screenshot from the video, and, typically we’ll go with like a goofy one.You know, I think I said this in an episode a while back where I was talking about what works for us in email. I don’t know of a less crass way of saying this, but typically it’s a screen grab where it looks like I smell the fart. And so we try to find like a goofy one. And then we put a little play button over it. And so give that to them, right?

Give them sale graphics. If you’re running a sale, give them some graphics. If you use stats, any statistics whatsoever, give them a screenshot of the stats. That increases the validity and the believability of it. Give them a stat where it shows, like, if you tell somebody, this helped us make $124,000, or we have this, or there’s some sort of a graph that shows something.Show them graphs. Show them numbers. You know, actual screenshots of numbers. Show them pie charts and bar charts and line graphs, the little dot graph thing. Give them countdown timers.You know, we recommend using, we use motion mail personally. Literally. I don’t have an affiliate link or anything. I think it’s just motionmailapp.com there’s out of timer.

There’s a bunch, but we recommend motionmail. They just seem to work best. Give the affiliates the code to use in their emails. These countdown timers increase conversion rates by as m much as 14% on cart close day. Don’t assume that they’re going to go create their own.Don’t make them go create their own. The reality is they’re busy. They have a ton of things going on in their business. So give them the countdown timer code that they can just copy and paste and put in their emails. I know in the last promotion where we did this, it actually was the first time ever it flagged our account in motion mail because we had over 10 million impressions on our countdown timer in a week.

And we actually had to pay more money to motion mail. 10 million impressions. That means there were more than 10 million opens. Now, an open doesn’t necessarily mean somebody opened it, just to be clear, but 10 million times that image fired, that image fired more than 10 million times. It’s a good thing we provided it to our affiliates.You know how many of those people that opened that email would have seen a countdown timer if we hadn’t provided it to our affiliates? I don’t know. My guess is probably 2 to 3 million. So that means 7 to 8 million more people saw this countdown timer and improved their conversions. So make sure you include these images.

Get the EXACT Template We Give to Our Affiliates to Get Them to Promote More and Generate More Sales! Click Here to Download it Now!

Like I said, the video screen captures Sale graphics stat. Screenshots, countdown timers, images that show the product, images that show the product in use. If it’s like, you know, a course thing where you got the spread right, where it shows the course itself, whatever it may be. Third, write different versions of the swipe copy for different audiences. All right.When we were working with Jeff Goins, we ran his book launch, the Art of Work. It was the first book launch I’d ever ran. It was back in 2000, 2000, I think. It’s like 2013 or 14. I was in the book and he knew that I did affiliate management.

He’s like, hey, can you help me with this book launch? And sure, you know, and I remember he said, I gotta tell the, publisher, you know, how many books I’m gonna sell. And I was like, I’m looking at the numbers and I’m looking at what we can do and how we can help you. I was like, tell him hm, 15,000. He’s like, I’m not telling him 15,000.I’m like, yeah, you are. And he’s like, no, my Last book sold 3,000. I’m like, tell him 15,000. I can see the math. I know what we can do and how we can help you.It’s 15,000. He argued with me. I’m like, dude, you’re either going to tell him 15,000 or I’m not working with you. We did 22,000 pre orders. When we were doing that for the swipe copy, we had four audiences and we wrote copy for each of those audiences for his.

I remember to this day, I remember it was entrepreneurs, Dreamers, faith based group and stay at home moms, stay at home parents. So we had the entrepreneurs. They were already established entrepreneurs. We had the dreamers, basically entrepreneurs. We had the faith based angle and then we had the stay at home parents angle.So we wrote copy for each of those audiences and affiliates loved it. They Knew that we had, I think we had seven emails times four audiences. We had 28 emails. They knew they could click on faith based. You know, I’m a Christian blogger.Boom, I clicked on that. I got my seven emails. Sometimes we have people who are like, well, my audience is faith based and they’re entrepreneurs. So they would take both and they would kind of combine them, like amalgamize or whatever the word is. They would combine them together.

We had others that said, well, I’ve got an audience of stay at home moms that want to be entrepreneurs. And they would take those and they would combine them. So provide different versions for different audiences. Come up with those four avatars or three. It might be three, it might be two, whatever it is, probably not five or more.I think four was pushing the limits with what we did. All right, number four, write different links of Swipe copy. All right, so you’ve got to have different links. Got to have a long and a short for each thing. Again, probably not like deadline emails.You just, you need just short for that. There’s only so many ways to say the webinar starts in 15 minutes, you coming or not? You know, but especially for your, if you’ve got to launch your core parts, you need different links, different links of copy.

Your affiliates are going to love you for this. So typically what we’ll do is we’ll write the long version, that’s the 2 to 300 word version, and then we’ll just chop that down to like 100.And we tell them like they’re not different in the sense of if you look at both, you’re going to get different things. Like if you want short, just use the short, you know, and then tweak that. But we provide different links just to give them. Like those who just want kind of the quick hitter, they get the quick hitters, they want the longer version, they can get the longer version. And then fifth, make it clear that Swipe Copy is a guide only.

I said this earlier, make it clear. Encourage your affiliates to only use the Swipe Copy as a guide or for inspiration. That’s the only purpose of it, right? You know, make their emails personal, make them specific for their audience if you need to. Like I said, share my post, you know.Mattmcwilliams.com SwipeTips how to use Swipe Copy as an affiliate. It shows them the best practices for using Swipe copy. So make that clear to them. Give them an example or two where somebody took swipe copy and tweaked it.I Always share the example. We were promoting a very specific affiliate promotion, and they gave us swipe copy. And in that swipe copy, there was a little part it talked about a teacher. And I was like, well, that’s kind of cool, but I have a better example. I have my teacher, and I’m pretty confident her name was Mrs.Terry.

And then I had another teacher. Mrs. Terry was my AP US history teacher my junior year of high school. That same year, I had a civics teacher that was a complete moron.Name is Mr. Calvert. So I’ve got these two contrasting teachers. One who is an amazing history teacher that taught me so much and gave me a lifelong love of history, and the other who would sit at the front of the room putting staples into his forearm and considered teaching to be telling us what chapter to read in class. And I remember that one of the subject lines that we used was don’t be a Calvert.So one of them was like, my best teacher ever. And I used the intro to Mrs. Terry. Here’s the deal. There is nobody else, in all likelihood, promoting that one product that had a, U.

If you go to affiliateswipefiles.com, we’ll put that link in the show Notes. You can grab a copy of that and actually go through those emails, because personally, I think they’re a great copy. I really do. And I’m not saying that because I wrote them.I actually did not write either one of those emails. but I think they’re great copy. And then the idea here is just tell them that it’s a guide and give them some direction. Like there might be parts in the swipe copy. You put in brackets, like talk about such and such here, Talk about your experience with this product, or talk about your favorite teacher here.

If you put that in brackets, talk about your favorite teacher, then every affiliate is going to have a different story. Unless you’ve got, like, twin brothers or sisters promoting this or two people who just happen to be in the same elementary school at the same time, which is pretty unlikely to happen. Although there is an affiliate. Ironically, that is actually the very first affiliate that promoted me, made me any money for my business. And ironically, we were born in the same hospital, grew up in the same small town in North Carolina and never knew each other.So I guess crazy things like that can happen. I also found out one time when I was sending 1099s to our affiliates that I lived next door neighbors with one of our affiliates.

This is back in 2009 and I thought that was weird. I was like, his address is next to. Oh my gosh, it’s that guy who is out on his deck sometimes in nothing but a Speedo and it’s really awkward.And so I took his check to him. I knocked on his door and took his check to him. And anyway, things like that do happen, right? So that’s how you write great swipe copy. Now one quick bonus tip.Don’t forget about Social swipe. All right, this is one of the most overlooked pieces in affiliate programs. Don’t forget about social swipe. We found that about 12 to 18% of all opt ins come from social media. So it’s kind of a big deal.So at least include versions for like Twitter and Facebook, whatever, you know, some images that are sized for those platforms.

So hopefully this helps you to write some great swipe copy for your affiliates. I’m telling you right now, like the difference between bad swipe copy and great swipe copy could be 30, 40, 50% increase in sales. It’s that important. That’s why I covered it in depth today.Make sure if you haven’t yet that you subscribe. You subscribe to the podcast so that you don’t miss the next episode. Guys, it’s gonna be a good one. I’m talking about how to use TikTok for affiliate marketing. You don’t want to miss that.That one. Make sure you hit that subscribe button. If you haven’t yet, make sure you share this episode.

If you know someone who could benefit from this episode, make sure you just hit the share button and share this with them. So I’ll see you in the next episode.We’re going to talk all about TikTok. I’ll see you then. Thank you so much for listening today. Remember to check out all of our deep dives into affiliate marketing at the Affiliateguide TV. And if you have a question, ask [email protected] and who knows, maybe you even be featured on an upcoming episode. And lastly, if you haven’t yet, make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you’re listening to this episode.

The post How to Create Affiliate Emails, Images, and Social Swipe appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode

TEXT ME: +1 (260) 217-4619

Affiliate Terms & Conditions Template

What the 2023 FTC Updates Mean for Affiliate Marketing

How to Identify and Stop Affiliate Fraud

AffiliateHQ

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Listen on YouTube

Listen on Amazon

Email Me New Episodes

Ask a Question for the Show

Affiliate Program Legal Requirements: What Every Affiliate Manager Needs to Know

How to Create Affiliate Relationships That Last

How to Tell Affiliates When Something Goes Wrong

How to Plan Your Day as an Affiliate Manager

How to Fix the Biggest Problems Holding Back Your Affiliate Program

Affiliate Fraud: Red Flags Every Program Should Watch

Your affiliate program agreement is one of the most overlooked but important parts of setting up an affiliate program. I’ve created affiliate terms and conditions for top affiliate programs like Shutterfly and Adidas. And I know what every affiliate program needs and what to avoid. So in this episode, I’m going to show you how to create legally sound contracts for your affiliate program. I’m going to share some of my insider tips and some real world examples to guide you through the process.There’s no need to be an attorney. You don’t even know how to speak legalese. I’m going to break down the process into simple steps that anyone can follow. So I’m taking a risk here. I’m going out on a limb and I’m doing back to back episodes on really boring topics. You know, last week was all about the legal requirements for affiliate programs.

M this week’s how to create an affiliate program agreement or terms and conditions. The terms are interchangeable there, right? So it’s a little bit of a risk. Like these are not exciting topics, but your terms and conditions, your agreement are. I’m going to just use the word agreement pretty much from this point forward, but again, I’m going to use those terms interchangeably.So just bear with me. They mean the same thing. It’s super important because these set the stage for everything else. They set the stage for building trust. They set the stage for the rules.They set the stage for the guidelines that your affiliates have to follow, but also the things that you’re committing to. They ensure that every affiliate is treated fairly. They ensure transparency. They know the rules. So when you have these rules, they, they should know the rules.

If they break the rules, well then they’ve broken the rules and we can, we’ll talk later about what to do in those situations. So if you’re just starting your affiliate program, do not put off creating your terms and conditions. It is not just a formality. It is the foundation for your program’s success. So what I’m going to do in this episode, I’m going to guide you through the process of drafting your terms and conditions with clarity.Thanks. That’s the thing. You have to understand what these things mean. Yeah, you could just say, hey, attorney, go create this. But your attorney is not an affiliate marketer.They are not running an affiliate program. And while it might be legally sound, it’s confusing and it actually costs you affiliates or it cost you business down the road. So I’m going to walk you through these, the process of this. And, as I’m doing, I’m going to share some real world examples, examples from affiliate agreements that we’ve written over the years. Every solid contract, and this is a contract, has key components.

So I’m going to walk you through each element. I’m going to explain what it is, why it’s crucial. But first, as I did in the last episode, before we get into how to create your affiliate agreement, I have to say this. No, legally, I have to include this section here. Legal disclaimer.I feel like I should hire a guy to read this right now. A quick but essential note. Or he reads like super fast. Right? While I’m providing this guidance here, it is no substitute for professional legal advice.I have to emphasize the content of this episode is intended to provide accurate and authoritative information. However, it should not be considered legal accounting or professional advice. If your affiliate program gets complex or you’re not entirely sure about the legal intricacies, you need to consult an attorney. That’s a wise move. So I’m not a lawyer after all.

I’m, a podcaster right now. Again, I’ve created these. I’ve worked with attorneys. So it’s sound advice. As of the time of this recording, anything could change.The law could change from the time I hit record until this episode publishes a few weeks later. So just to be clear now, enough of the boring stuff, all right? If you do want to skip all the boring stuff, and I don’t think you should, I think you should understand why the suggestions that I make are. Are what they are. I think you should understand some of the whys right behind this.But if you want to skip some of the boring stuff and just grab the template, I’ve got a free download. You can actually download the template, the affiliate agreement template. And the, link for that will be in the show notes. So just check the show notes. The link will be right there and you can grab that template.

And I do walk through a little bit of what I’m saying today. I’m just going into more detail today so you understand the different parts. So let’s start at the very beginning. That’s a good place to start, as Mitch M. Hedberg would say, with the standard preamble.All right, so any terms and conditions should start with some sort of a preamble. I’m just Going to read you an example here and you’ll understand what I mean by that. Just says, Shutterfly Affiliate Program terms and conditions. Please read our affiliate terms and conditions before you join our program or begin marketing our program. These terms and conditions are written in plain language, intentionally avoiding legalese to ensure that they may be clearly understood and followed by affiliates.Each affiliate is responsible for ensuring that its employees, agents and contractors comply with these terms and conditions. Thank you. Nothing fancy, right? It’s just a standard preamble. The next thing you need to do is definitions, right?

You need to define any relevant terms. So this serves to make clear any of the, ambiguous terms, right? Where, you know, people might be like, wait, what does that mean? If you skipped to section 8, subsection B, what does that mean? We’ll go back up to the definitions.So it’s pretty boilerplate here. Here’s an example from the definitions from the affiliate program for Michael Hyatt that we wrote. As used in these terms and conditions, we, us or our refers to Michael Hyde and Company Incorporated and our website. You or your refers to the affiliate. And these are actually with like a little I, I, I trust you know all those little Roman numerals, right?

Our website refers to the Michael Hyde Co. Incorporated properties located at www.michaelhyde.com. Your website refers to any websites that you will link to our website. Program refers to the Michael Hyde and Company affiliated program. Again, just standard definitions, all boring boilerplate stuff, but also necessary so that no one questions what the definitions are. The next thing that we have is the approval and rejection policy.Again, this is. We’re kind of going in chronological order from their interaction with the website, which is, I’m applying, am I going to be approved or rejected? And down through some other stuff that’ll happen later. And part of this is just setting expectations. That’s the main part, just setting the expectations.

Part of it covers your butt if you decline someone and they complain. I mean, it’s your affiliate program. You can make the rules, right? So they shouldn’t complain. Like, they don’t really have a legal standing.But still, it’s good to cover this. Again, part of this is like, if you set the rules and you abide by them, they have nothing to complain about. So here’s an example that I often use with our clients. After receiving your application, we will review your website, notify you of your acceptance or rejection into our program. Please allow up to 48 hours for your application to be reviewed.We reserve the right to reject any application. However, we encourage you to contact us if you feel we have made an incorrect decision. Including all the websites that you use in your profile will help us to make a better decision. So again, it sets the expectations, makes it clear that approving or declining affiliate is a hundred percent up to the program itself. Right.

Make sure that your affiliate program has a solid agreement (AKA Terms & Conditions). To make things simple, grab my template here!

And the last part makes it clear they should include all their websites, which allows you to see the domains that they own. Again, we usually say 48. I should have said 48 business hours. I just didn’t read the word business there. 48 business hours.So that means if you apply on Friday at 5:00pm you’re probably not going to hear from us. You know, get accepted until Monday, you can Change it to 72 or whatever length of time you feel is necessary for your program. The next thing is just basic rules for every affiliate program. You know, there are some rules that are specific, we’ll talk about this later. Certain types of affiliate programs, but there are some rules that apply to literally all affiliate programs.

Whether you’re a retail establishment, you sell a, digital product, high commission, low commission. These are the most basic universal rules that every affiliate program should enforce. So you need to be clear about any website restrictions, linking techniques, black hat SEO practices, things like that. So if you’re not like, if you are not clear about these, you could have a program full of quote unquote undesirable affiliates. Right? So the first is just website restrictions. Website restrictions here just sets the boundaries, right? This is about protecting your brand, protecting other affiliates. So a lot of times what we’ll say is something like, you know, your participating website may not a website with parentheses ask may not, number one, infringe on our or anyone else’s intellectual property, publicity, privacy or other rights. Number two, violate any law or regulation.

Number three, contain any content that is threatening, harassing, defamatory, obscene, harmful to minors, contains nudity, pornography or sexually explicit materials. Number four, contains any viruses, Trojan horses, a bunch of other stuff. Again, you can copy these from the template. If you go to link in the show notes, you can just copy these. That’s a long one there.Number five, contains software use technology that attempts to intercept, divert or redirect Internet traffic. Basically that, you know, cookie stealing, things like that. Right. So see these Protect the integrity of the program, protect the integrity of your brand. And they make it clear in the rules there says if you violate these terms, we have the right to remove you.

Obviously you don’t want someone who is doing these things that they’re using Trojan horses, worms, cancel bots, things like that they’ve got, you know, again, if you have a family friendly site, again, if you don’t have a family friendly site, okay, that’s your choice. But most of the people we work with over the years would be considered family friendly. They don’t want pornography, they don’t want, you know, harassing, threatening speech on sites. And so that’s going to harm the brand, it’s going to harm other affiliates. Things like hate speech.Again, you can add or remove anything you like from that section. And you definitely do not want anything to do with sites that are using viruses or any. Those are nothing but trouble. I created a graphic like. All affiliate programs should prohibit five things, right?

Number one, spamming. Number two, viruses. Number three, Trojan horses. Number four, cookie stuffing. Number five, illegal activity.All of them. Everything else is subjective and up to you. But spamming, viruses, Trojan horses, cookie stuffing and illegal activity, every program should prohibit those. The next thing you’ve got under this bigger agreement that you know, like the basic rules, right? It’s just rules for using links, what’s allowed and what’s not allowed when it comes to promoting your products or services.These are not just about protecting your brand, but also we want to create a level playing field for all of our affiliates. Everybody knows the do’s and don’ts. So here’s an example. An, affiliate agreement that we created for Legacy Learning Systems years ago. Not going to read the whole thing, but it says upon acceptance into the program, links will be made available to you through the affiliate interface.

Your acceptance into our program means you agreed to and abide by the following. Number one, you will only use linking code obtained from the affiliate interface without manipulation. Number two, all domains that use your affiliate link must be listed in your affiliate profile. Number three, this is an important one. Your website will not in any way copy, resemble or mirror the look and feel of our website.You will also not use any means to create the impression that your website is our website or any part of our website, including without limitation, framing of our website in any manner. All right, so then we go on to say no cookie stuffing, no other illegal redirects, things like that. If you are found doing any of these things or you attempt to hide or manipulate the original source of the link, your current and past commissions will be voided or your commission level will be set to 0%. This does not include using out redirection, the same domain where the affiliate link is placed. So that doesn’t apply to pretty links and things like that.

So when you look at these like just one by one, we’re preventing them from. You know the number one where I say you only going to use the linking code? It prevents them from adding additional parameters that can mess up the tracking or steal the commission from another affiliate. We actually often add at the end of the word manipulation. Usually we add unless you have obtained specific permission from the affiliate manager to manipulate the link for the purposes of ad tracking or other accepted methods of measuring link performance.That makes it clear they can manipulate the links for tracking purposes as long as they have permission to do so. Number two, all domains that use your affiliate link must be listed in your affiliate profile. Why is this? The biggest reason is it prevents affiliates from using domains that violate other parts of the agreement, such as the hate speech, pornography, obscene material, et cetera. But they’re not listed in their profile.

So I go to their main site and it’s perfectly fine. But they have five other domains. It also allows us to monitor all of their domains as a part of FTC compliance. And we talked about it last episode. If you have not yet, make sure you check out the guide that we put together on FTC compliant.You definitely want to check that out. It was a podcast episode I did a few months back and you need to check that out to make sure you’re compliant with the FTC guidelines. So the third one about copying the website, that’s a brand protector. I mean the last thing you want is some rogue affiliate pretending they are you. All sorts of bad things can happen from that.

Number four we talked about, you know, no cookie stuffing, no pop ups, you know, no false or misleading links. That’s all about protecting your brand’s reputation and being fair to other affiliates if you’re not familiar with them. Just real quick, you know, cookie stuffing is basically where an affiliate places a tracking code on the user’s device without the user consenting to it or knowing it. So things like iframes and stuff like that, it’s extremely unethical, extremely unethical. The whole point is to steal commissions.So instead of the correct affiliate getting the commission, the wrong one does, you know, pop ups. I don’t mean like where they can’t use a pop up on their site to collect email address. I am talking about like run an automatic pop up of an affiliate link on their site. That is not allowed. That’s basically another way of cookie stuffing.

URL masking is where they’re just masking the URL so then they don’t know where, where are they. Basically they. It’s hiding Referral sources and things like that. False links. You know, basically if the anchor text says free workout guide, but I land on a site for iPhone cases, that’s a false link.And so the thing about this section, it seems like, wow, there’s a lot of rules. And gosh, you know, how do affiliates react to that? Here’s the thing, sections like this can actually help you attract good affiliates when you emphasize these restrictions, when you make it clear you don’t allow unfair play, you set the stage for a fair and ethical affiliate program. And your affiliates, they need to know that you are adhering to a level playing field where everybody plays by the same rules, that you’re going to protect the integrity of the program. And so it actually helps you attract more good affiliates.

So any of those, they actually work in your benefit. So again, the last one there where I talk about, you know, using redirects to bounce a click off a domain where the click did not originate all that stuff. Again, if you don’t know what that means, it means you’re not doing it. But what this does is it prevents those black hat affiliates from using sneaky techniques that make it look like a click came from one website when it actually came from another. So they can’t use these tricky redirects where they pretend that a user clicked a link on their site, but in reality it came from a different site, which is totally this, like, black hat type stuff, right?It’s all about affiliates being honest and upfront with their audience and then says, if you’re found doing this, we’re gonna not pay you. Yeah, that’s exactly. It’s very direct, very clear regarding violations of these terms. If you break the rules, you make no money, you make nothing. So don’t break the rules.

The next kind of general thing is domain names. So we include a separate section so that things are abundantly clear about domain names. This section prevents affiliates from using trademark terms, meaning our terms in their domain or subdomain. So here’s an example from the template. Again, you can get the template.The link is in the show notes. Use of any of our trademark terms as part of the domain or subdomain for the website is strictly prohibited. In other words, you can’t have something like, okay, let’s take Shutterfly. You can’t go buy shutterfly coupons.com and use that as an affiliate.You can’t create a website like Shutterfly Photobooks.com or Shutterfly.Photobooks.com or shutterfly.greatcoupons.com or something like that. Now, if you have it in the URL, such as myawesomesite.com shutterfly coupons, that’s acceptable. Nothing wrong with that. All right, so under advertising policies, this is the next section.

You’ve got to create an advertising policies section. Again, we’re talking about brand integrity, legal compliance, all of those things. So there’s some key parts to include in your agreement here. The first one is just prior consent for material reference. Okay, so what that means is affiliates must seek prior written consent before creating, publishing, distributing or printing any written material that references your program.Yes, I read that directly from the agreement. That’s basically, if you’re going to create your own graphics, you just need to run them by the affiliate manager. That’s it. So they’re on brand. So again, we’ve had, you know, we had a.I won’t get into what the company was. We had a company that was in a niche and again, very family friendly brand and we wanted to keep it that way. But it was really easy to include some sexually explicit material in this niche niche. If you targeted certain people. We were targeting more dads and moms and homeschoolers and things like that.

And we had an affiliate who created some very sexually explicit graphics. And we’re like, no, that is not allowed. And I had to tell him like, those need to be pulled by end of day or we have to remove you from the program because it’s killing our brand. If you’re running email campaigns, you know you have to, to comply with the can spam compliance, right? You have to all.like I’m not going to go into what we talked about last episode. What is can spam? It’s not like it’s legally required, but again, it’s also ensuring that other affiliates who promote you. If you have five affiliates out of a thousand who are breaking the rules, it affects the other 995. So you’ve got to comply with can spam.You got to comply with the sender transparency rules. You’ve got to, you know, this is an optional one, but you may or may not want to require all affiliate campaigns to be submitted for approval before distribution. I don’t usually do this. It usually slows affiliates down. But I’ve run one program in the past that we had to do it.

It was in a very regulated industry. I’ve got another one that I’m working with now. It’s in a very regulated industry. I have to approve the email campaigns before. It, sucks.But it’s the reality. Before you send an email, we recommend not copying swipe copy directly. We’ve always talked about that. I’ve talked about a million times, do not copy the swipe copy. But unless you do copy the swipe copy directly, you have to run it by me.And there’s actually something I’m going to talk about. I think it’s in the net. Yeah. The next episode, how to create high converting swipe copy for your affiliates. I’m going to talk about something where I’ll share a way that you can customize using AI.

you can customize copy for affiliates. It’s really cool. Something that we’re doing a lot more of now. And when you do this, it then makes it more likely where they don’t have to run it by you, because if the email is written that’s in their style, they might just run with it. And so there’s some cool things you can do with AI now, and I’ll talk about that in the next episode.So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. Okay. But if they do edit the email in any material way, they have to run it by us. And so typically we’ll just say like, hey, you know, if you’re changing an adjective from awesome to amazing, no, you don’t need to run it by us. If you are deleting anything that does not fundamentally change the meaning of the email.

No, like if you keep the rest but delete, say a paragraph, you do not need to run it by us. Social media, you know, when you’re writing about social media in your terms and conditions. Okay, Are you going to allow promotion to personal social media accounts? Some don’t allow that. Others do.Normally we do allow this. Are you going to allow them to do that? You need to make that clear in your agreement. You need to make it clear they cannot post links on company pages. That is not allowed.

They cannot go on your Facebook page and post their affiliate link. You need to make sure you’re protecting your trademark. So generally you do not want to allow affiliates to use your trademark name in ads. So an example from the affiliate Terms and Conditions template, which again, you can get in the link in the show Notes, you shall not, create, publish, distribute, or print any written material that makes reference to our program without first submitting that material to us and receiving our prior written consent. If you intend to promote our program via email campaigns, you must adhere to the following.Again, number one, abide by the Can Spam act of 2003 with respect to our program. Number two, email must be sent on your behalf and must not imply that the email is being sent on behalf of us. Right. Number three, emails must first be submitted to us for approval prior to being set. I, usually don’t include that, but you might include that.

All right. In social media, it says from the agreement, promotion on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms is permitted following the general guidelines. Number one, you are allowed to promote offers to your own lists. More specifically, you’re welcome to use your affiliate links on your own Facebook, Twitter, et cetera, pages. For example, you may post 25% off sale, blah, blah, blah, through Wednesday with code, you know, 25 off.Number two, you are prohibited from posting your affiliate links on insert company names, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, et cetera, company pages in an attempt to turn those links into affiliate sales. Number three, you’re prohibited from running Facebook ads with company names. Trademark terms. All right, the next thing you’ve got to account for is just what we call operations in various jurisdictions. That’s a fancy way of saying if you’re outside of the United States or wherever your agreement is centered.

You know, if you’re in Austria, well, it’s centered in Austria to date. I mean, I would say most of the programs we’ve run are based in the U. S. i mentioned last week, I know we’ve done one in Canada, the UK I kind of thinking about it, and it was like, wow, this probably run one out of Italy, one out of Singapore, one out of Australia, Germany, Ireland. So I think I said last week, like, I’ve only worked in the US and then I was like, wait a minute.No, I haven’t. I’ve worked start naming M countries, like, okay, I guess I just forgot about it now. There’s differing laws in each country, but you’re still going to have to account for the two biggest jurisdictions when it comes to online marketing laws, the US and the European Union. So even if you are outside of the US if you are doing business in the United States and the eu, you have to account for those laws. So here’s some language that you can get from our Terms and conditions template.

Operations outside the United States, if you are conducting business or taking orders from persons in other countries, you will follow the laws of those countries. For example, you will comply with the European Union’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive. If you are conducting business in or taking orders from persons in one or more of the European Union countries, ultimately, again, dependent upon your jurisdiction. So consult your attorney if you’re Outside the United States especially, or if you have any weird laws in your state. All right, the next thing we’ve got is the reversal policy.Basically, what are the circumstances under which orders can be reversed? And make it clear what would cause a reversal or perhaps even a suspension from the program if there’s, you know, like a higher volume than normal of reversals, if that becomes an issue.

So here’s an example of a reversal policy directly from the affiliate terms and conditions that we created for Adidas back in the day. Adidas takes pride in its very low reversal rate, which we attribute to open communication with our affiliates. However, we reserve the right to reverse orders due to order cancellations, duplicate tracking returns, disputed charges, program violations as outlined in these terms and conditions.Additionally, if we ask you for clarification or more information on any orders or clicks that we suspect may be in violation of our terms and conditions, we expect that you will respond in a timely and honest manner. Below are violations of our communications policy. Number one, you are not forthcoming. You are intentionally vague or found to be lying. Number two, you’re not responsive within a reasonable time period.

And after multiple attempts to contact you using the information listed in your network profile. Number three, you cannot substantiate or validate the source of your traffic to our program with a clear and demonstrable proof. Basically, it goes on to say failure to comply. But any part of the policy is grounds for removal, and the policy sets the expectations of the affiliate to comply. Ultimately, it’s your job as an affiliate manager, it is your job to monitor reversal rates.If an affiliate has a, lower than average reversal rate, none of these really matter. If your typical reversal rate, you know, any returns or whatever, is 2. 5%. Any affiliate under 1. 5, I’m not even worried about them.

Generally speaking, you know, affiliates with very low reversal rates are not a problem. But if an affiliate has a reversal rate that is above average, this outlines what you need to do. Number one, you reach out to them, ask about the specific transaction. Number two, you follow up at least two times. Number three, if they do not reply, you set their commissions to 0% and you remove them from the program.Or you know, either one or you can do both. But if they do continue to have a high, you know, reversal rate, you probably going to have to remove them. You know, you’re probably dealing with fraud. And if you want to know more about fraud, I’ve got a link in the show notes to our episode on fraud. I talked about last week as well.

But the Idea here is just again setting expectations, here’s what we expect and if it doesn’t happen, here are the consequences. The next section is all about the FTC disclosure requirements. This is again, every affiliate agreement has to talk about compliance with FTC disclosure guidelines. The ftc, the Federal Trade Commission here in the United States, requires that affiliates disclose their relationships with your business when promoting your products and services. We talked about this last year when they released their new updates.

Not sure how much to pay your affiliates? Watch my free video tutorial on YouTube that walks you through step-by-step.

This is not just a legal formality. It is an absolutely critical part of complying with the law and frankly, not getting sued by the ftc. Again, I mentioned last week that has happened to me. It is not fun. So don’t get sued by the ftc.And by explicitly including FTC disclosure requirements in your agreement, you and your affiliates are signing off on it to say, hey, we’re going to both abide by these. And if the affiliates don’t, the very first thing you have to say is we told them they should. Now there’s more to it. You’ve got to monitor them and you got to keep them honest. But still, the very first step, on day one, you can’t monitor somebody before they start sending traffic.

But day one, they agreed to abide by these rules. And so we say in this straight from the terms and conditions template, you shall include a disclosure statement within any and all pages, blog posts or social media posts where affiliate links for our affiliate program are posted as an endorsement or review and where it is not clear that the link is a paid advertisement or advertisement if you’re overseas and it goes on to say it gives them some guidelines. Must be made as close as possible to the claims. Should be placed above the fold scrolling should not be necessary. Pop up disclosures are prohibited.

Must be made on the page where the endorsement is made. Non US based affiliates must still comply with these USFTC rules. And then we link to the link on the FTC website where they talk about this. And so we give them everything they need to do to be compliant, but it’s ultimately up to them. For more information on FTC stuff, check out my podcast episode in the show Notes.I am actually, anytime there are new rules or clarifications made, that episode will be updated. I’ve had to do it one time real quick. I’ve had to update that podcast with one new thing that came out a few months after I released it. So there actually is, an addendum at the end of that episode, so to speak. So again, I update that periodically when there’s New stuff.

All right, so those are all the rules that are. They are relevant to literally every single program. What about rules that are, you know, they’re specific rules for most, but not all programs. All right, These are optional. They might not be applicable to your program.You know, for some affiliate programs, for example, that you don’t have coupons, you have no coupons, having a section about coupons is irrelevant. That’s, I would still say include rules about coupons even if you don’t have them, because if you add them later, you don’t have to issue an updated agreement. But that’s, you know, that’s a little bit of a pain. So you might still want to have them even if you don’t have coupons. If you are 100% certain you will never offer coupons, that you don’t need a section on it.

So the first thing is pay per click guidelines. If you don’t have pay per click rules, you just like, I want my affiliates, they can bid on anything. They can do anything. Okay, then there you go. But if you’re like Shutterfly, it said if you are enrolled in our program and participate in PPC advertising, you must adhere to our PPC guidelines as follows.Number one, you may not bid on any of our trademark terms which are identified below, including any variations or misspellings thereof for search or content based campaigns on Google being Yahoo, Facebook or any other network. Number two, you may not use our trademark terms as a part of the name of your site we talked about there earlier. You can’t name the site Shutterfly Coupons. Number three, you may not use our trademark terms in your ad title copy, display name or as a display URL. Number four, you may not direct link to our website using PPC on our trademark terms.

You got to send them to your site. And then the last thing is, if you automate your PPC campaigns, it is your responsibility to exclude our trademark terms from your program. And we strongly suggest you add our trademark terms as negative keywords. And it goes on to explain that basically what that means is if you bid on, say, photo books, but then you’ll show up for Shutterfly Photo Books. No, you have to add Shutterfly as a negative keyword. So. So I’m not going to show up for Shutterfly Photo Books. And then we list the trademark terms. There’s about eight or nine trademark terms. Now, typically we only enforce a few of those, particularly number two through four, which is we allow them to bid on trademark terms.But some companies, you know, we include, number one, and so it’s ultimately up to you. Like, should, you allow trademark bidding in your affiliate program?

That is a whole episode in and of itself. There are benefits to allowing trademark bidding. You know, it’s defensive against competitors, because if your competitors are going to bid on your trademark, if you’re a very small brand, but they might be bidding on you, well, have all of your affiliates saying nice things about you.You know, it gives you some extra real estate on search results. You get to control the message. You know, if you do allow trademark bidding, then you can set rules around it. Like you can’t use certain terms like scam or anything like that. So you have to keep the messaging positive. So it allows you to get a little bit more exposure, out there, especially if you’re a, you know, smaller brand. If you’re a Shutterfly or Adidas, you don’t need that. You don’t need that. You. Everybody knows who you are, right?

So if you’ve got a strong reseller presence or a limited budget for ads, you know, that’s an important thing. So again, it’s totally up to you, though, definitely. You do not want them to, be using your trademark terms in their URL and things like that, though. So they got to send traffic to a bridge page rather than directly to yours. That’s another one.Again, it helps eliminate any confusion about who’s running the ads. They’ve got to use negative keywords if you don’t allow the trademark terms, for example. So again, make sure that you decide what is best for you. All right, the next section that’s relevant to most but not all is coupon guidelines. Like I talked about earlier, this is a hundred percent up to you.

I’m going to share the guidelines that we used with the Shutterfly Affiliate Agreement and then you can kind of go from there. Right. It says, if you are enrolled in our program and your website promotes coupon codes, you must adhere to our coupon guidelines as follows. Number one, if you choose to advertise Shutterfly coupon codes, then the only Shutterfly coupon code you may advertise are Shutterfly coupon codes that are provided to you through the affiliate program or network or that are displayed on our website. And it goes on to explain that.Number two, you may not advertise. May not. It’s all caps. Actually, we’re not advertise certified coupon codes obtained from our non affiliate advertising, such as customer emails, paid search or other campaigns. Number three, posting any information about how to work around the requirements of a coupon or promotion, I.

First time customers only will result in removal from the program. So if you say, hey, if you. Only for first time customers. So if you create a new email address, you can get this.No, that will kick you out so fast you won’t even see it coming. number four, you should see it coming though, because it says in the agreement that you can’t do that. coupons must be displayed in their entirety with the full offer, valid expiration date and code. You, may not use any technology that covers up the coupon code and generates the affiliate click by revealing the code. So in other words, those things you’ve seen where it’s like, click here to reveal the code.

That’s just, it’s basically a form of cookie stuffing. That’s all it is. And then there’s a bunch of other stuff again that we can go through those so the cows come home. But if you grab the template, you’ll see the different sections. Like, if we don’t give you the code, you can’t promote it.You know, you cannot help customers cheat. You cannot, you know, do cookie stuffing. And you can’t like have people clicking on expired coupon codes and things like that. Don’t lie about how to redeem the code. Affiliates who do this know exactly what they’re doing and they should be removed.So the last thing is in the coupon section is like, do you want to have special terms for coupon website? You know, we, we talked about. This is straight from the terms and conditions here.

If your website ranks on the first page of Google for terms related to our website or company’s name combined with the words coupon, coupons, coupon code, promo code, et cetera, and your conversion rate exceeds 25%, you’ll be offered a lower commission than our standard rate to offset the reduced profitability of orders. The current rate is 1%.This is one of the most controversial things we did at this affiliate program at Shutterfly, but it has become industry standard right now. Basically what was happening is these coupon sites were stealing the sale. So you got this person who blogs about it, introduces somebody to Shutterfly and does all that work, and then they come there and it’s like, oh, do you want to enter a coupon code? So they go to Google and they click on that. The thing is, the first site did most of the work, but the coupon site did something.

So we didn’t want to go first cookie and we didn’t want last cookie. So we reached a compromise. And we pay both affiliates a percentage. So if your affiliate tracking platform has the technical ability to do this, I highly recommend this approach. Offering split commissions is a great way to reward both affiliates.You’re rewarding the first one for doing 80, 90% of the work, but you’re also rewarding that close your affiliate, so to speak, for closing the sale. The next section, again, most M programs will have this, but some won’t is about sub affiliate networks. Your entire thing about sub affiliate networks may say no, we don’t allow sub affiliate networks, end of discussion. This is different from a second tier affiliate where affiliate A refers affiliate B and you know who affiliate A and B are. Everything’s transparent.

But affiliate A, who referred affiliate B gets a cut of the action, right In a sub affiliate network, affiliate A sets up a network and recruits affiliate B who promotes through the network. Nothing is transparent who the affiliates are. You never know that. So there’s pros and cons. You know, some of the pros of sub affiliates are scalability.You get more traffic sources, you know, efficiency. You only have to work with one person, but you get thousands of people promoting. You don’t have to pay them or monitor them or any of those. That’s also a risk. It’s a con.The not knowing who they are, the lack of control, the complexity. That’s a, you know, the commission structure, you know, why would somebody join? Think about it, if you pay a 30% commission and you pay the sub affiliate network 30% that means that those sub affiliates are joining at less than 30%.

Why would they do that when you pay 30%, you know, so you end up having to Pay the network 35% which could be a problem. So there’s definitely a lot of pros and cons.Ultimately it’s up to you if you’re going to work with the sub affiliate network. Again, this is a whole episode in and of itself. Number one, transparency is absolutely non negotiable. They need to disclose the source of traffic generated by their sub affiliates. The sub affiliates are bound by the affiliate terms and conditions.You know, they have to enforce those. You gotta be very careful with coupons. I generally don’t allow sub affiliate networks to even use coupons. But if you do, I’ve got some language in that affiliate terms and conditions template that walks you through how to legally protect yourself if people are using sub affiliates.

So again those sections there, coupons and PPC and sub affiliates, those are relevant to some but not all affiliate programs.The last thing you have a Model for the affiliate agreement. Again, reminder, you can download the affiliate agreement template and pretty much copy and paste that. I’m recording this in the middle of 2024. Things are going to change over the next two years if you download that template. I’m going to update the template in 2026.But here’s the thing, you need to revisit it once a year. What’s working and what’s not working in this template. Are there any policies you need to change or add? You know, maybe you don’t care if there anything about some affiliates on day one, but then you decide, we’re going to, you know, maybe you don’t allow them but then you decide to add them. You got to add that section.

Are there any new laws or regulations you’re going to need to address or policies that you need to change? You know, for instance, when the FTC updated its affiliate guidelines in 2023, we updated all of our clients agreements within a couple of weeks. It took a few hours but again we wanted to make sure we were in compliance with, with the new guidelines. So we had to go in and update the, especially the social media sections to specifically address the stuff that they had just talked about. And when they updated their guidelines, I think you had until like into the year to get compliant, you had like four or five months.So they were not going to hold you accountable the day after the guidelines were updated. So you’ve got time. If you add new products, make sure to add those keywords. If you’re prohibiting trademark bidding.

And let’s say your company name is XYZ Co.Say you sell putters, you know, golf putters and you’ve got the, you know, model A and the model B. Well if you come out with a model C and D, you need to add those as negative keywords at the very least. Every year we take a look at these agreements, just make sure nothing’s missing. There’s nothing in there that doesn’t need to be. Usually there’s nothing.I mean from 2017-23 we looked at the terms and we did absolutely nothing in response to them. There was nothing to change. And then in 23 we had to change them because of the FTC stuff. So ultimately these agreements, they’re not only going to protect you, but they’re going to protect the 99. 999% of your affiliates who are ethical and legit, really quality affiliates.

That it’s going to create this atmosphere of transparency and clear communication. That’s what affiliate program is all about. So grab that template. Use it as a guide. Create that affiliate agreement, in a way that builds trust and sets the right expectations and allows you and your affiliates to grow.That’s what this is all about. So if you’ve got questions about this or anything else, you can text me anytime at 260-217-4619. Again, area code 260-217-4619. Text me anytime if you got questions about the template or just terms and conditions in general or any of the legal stuff. And then lastly, make sure you hit subscribe if you haven’t yet, because next week, as I mentioned earlier, I’m going to talk about how to create high converting swipe copy for your affiliates.

I’m going to share some of the new stuff we’re doing with AI to personalize it. It’s really, really cool and it is having a big impact on sales. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss that episode. I’ll see you then. Thank you so much for listening to me.Remember to check out all of our deep dives into affiliate marketing at TheAffiliateGuide TV. And if you have a question, ask it at AskTheAffiliateGuide.com who knows, maybe you even be featured on an upcoming episode. And lastly, if you haven’t yet, make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you’re listening to this episode.

The post How to Build an Affiliate Agreement Affiliates Can Understand appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode

TEXT ME: +1 (260) 217-4619

What the 2023 FTC Updates Mean for Affiliate Marketing

How to Identify and Stop Affiliate Fraud

How to Write a Review Post that Ranks and Converts

AffiliateHQ

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Listen on YouTube

Listen on Amazon

Email Me New Episodes

Ask a Question for the Show

How to Create Affiliate Relationships That Last

How to Tell Affiliates When Something Goes Wrong

How to Plan Your Day as an Affiliate Manager

How to Fix the Biggest Problems Holding Back Your Affiliate Program

Affiliate Fraud: Red Flags Every Program Should Watch

How to Make Affiliate Webinars Convert Better

How do you stay on the right side of the law with your affiliate program? I mean, how do you make sure you don’t get sued or end up in trouble with the government? If you’ve been wondering about the legal ins and outs of running an affiliate program, you’re in the right place today. In this episode, I’m going to share the essential legal requirements every affiliate program owner needs to know. From compliance to disclosures and everything in between, I’m going to help you keep your program on the right side of the law.Welcome to the Affiliate Guy Podcast. If you want to grow your income, serve your tribe, and enjoy all the benefits of affiliate marketing and having your own affiliates, you’re in the right place. Thanks for joining me today. Let’s get started. So today’s episode, not a super exciting one.

We’re not talking about growing 500%. How do you get more affiliates to promote? How. How do you get different types of affiliates? How do you steal your competitors affiliates?These are the types of things we’ve been talking about recently. Right? We’ve been talking about some fun topics. If you missed the last few episodes, what do affiliate managers do all day? How to communicate bad news.That one wasn’t fun. But still. How to triple your webinar sales. But a little bit ago, we talked about fraud. A little bit before that, we talked about how to make sure that your affiliate program recovers when things go badly, because things are going to go badly.

And today we’re talking about the legal requirements of an affiliate program. How do we stay on the right side of the law? How do we make sure we don’t get sued? How do we make sure that we don’t end up getting in trouble with government agencies, FTC and whatever. I can’t even think of a single other government agency all of a sudden that would involve mostly fcc.Yeah, I was like, basically it begins in F and ends in C. Okay, that’s. Well, not surprising anyway. Yeah. But this isn’t hard.You know, it’s not something that should take up more than 5% of your time, but it’s necessary. Like, you don’t want to mess around here. You got to cover your butt. As somebody who has spent time, as I mentioned before, being sued by The FTC almost 14 years ago now, now they ended up dropping it, and we’ll talk about that later. But like, that’s happened to me.

So as somebody who’s been in that situation, this is something you don’t want to mess around with. So you need to Listen carefully today. It’s not hard. It’s actually really easy to stay on the right side of the law. But you need to know what to do.Now. Quick note first. Everything I’m about to say is US Centric. All right? I am an American.Every affiliate program I’ve ever run has been based, actually, except for one. Okay, Actually, I’ve run Canadian. Okay, so never mind. That’s not true. Now think about.I’ve actually run at least two or three in England, one in, one in Canada, two Canadians. So three the outside of the U. S. but most of my experience, I mean, I’ve run fully 50, 60 programs. Almost all of them have been in the US but a lot of what I’m saying is applicable no matter whether you, you know, you’re in the US or you’re overseas.

Because most of what I’m saying is applicable to everyone doing business in the United States. Okay? So if you’re in Ireland, but you’re doing business in the United States, you have one American customer. This applies to you. So that’s first.Second, I am not an attorney, and, nothing I am saying should be construed as legal advice. It’s stuff I have to say, right? These are based only on my own experiences. I’ve been an affiliate manager for almost 20 years now. And I’m going to do my best to maintain accuracy at the time I’m recording it, you know, in the middle of 2024.What I am saying is accurate to the best of my knowledge, but laws change. Laws vary from state to state. I’ve only run affiliate programs that were based in like eight states. Most Tennessee, Indiana, California has been a big one. Texas is another one.

I know some of those state laws, but I don’t know every state. I don’t know Wyoming’s laws. No idea. So no guarantee is given regarding the accuracy of anything I say. That said, you should consult a licensed attorney for accurate protection.Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, with all that boring stuff said, I’m going to do my best to get you on the right track here. All right? So what are the legal requirements? What are the legal requirements?What must an affiliate manager do to make sure his or her affiliate program stays on the right side of the law? Everything I’m about to say, these are in no particular order. This is not like the number one thing you must do. No, you got to do all of these things. And you got to do all of these things.Well, so they’re all number ones. If you’re familiar with the author Tim Grover. He was Michael Jordan’s trainer and Kobe Bryant’s trainer, Dwayne Wade and some others. Everything is number one to him. So in his book is like every chapter.

Number one, do this. Number two, number one, do this. Number one, number one, I always think that’s fun. All right, so number one, I said there’s no particular word and I just said number one because I was thinking about that. But advertising and marketing laws, you got to stay up on advertising and marketing laws.First thing you got to pay attention to is email. Email marketing compliance, right? In the US we have the Can Spam Act. I mean this, when that was around, I’d have to Google that 20 years ago probably. So one of the things that that requires is that you have consent and an opt out.So you have to make sure your affiliates have permission to send marketing emails. That must include a clear and easy way for this is from the law for recipients to opt out of future emails. All right, so that’s the first thing. If they are not abiding by the Can Spam act, if they are spamming, you have to remove them as an affiliate. You cannot allow that in your program.

If somebody promotes you and you remove them and then the FTC comes and says, well, your affiliates are swaying, you say, nope, I removed this person and this person. You’re good. Again, don’t quote me on that, but you should be in the clear. I removed them as soon as I found out about it. And make sure by the way, you’re documenting these types of things.The second thing is just honesty and subject lines. Subject lines should accurately reflect the content of the email. Your affiliates cannot make a claim in the subject line that’s not backed up in the content of the email. You gotta have an identifiable sender. I mean that’s required by every like whether it be convertkit, aweber, mailchimp, all that stuff.

You gotta have that physical address, right? Overseas in Europe you’ve got gdpr, right? So you’ve gotta have explicit consent. You cannot send marketing emails to people without being explicit that they are signing up for your email list. And then of course we’ll talk about this a little bit later.But data protection with regard to email, that’s a big one. You gotta protect their personal data, all that stuff. Okay, Anti spam. We sort of touched on this. No unsolicited messages.None that applies to email comments, forums, social media. No unsolicited messages. Some of this is not illegal. Is it illegal for an affiliate to leave a comment on Somebody’s Twitter post and say, I like this product, go buy it here. No, it’s a little bit unethical.

And so there’s a little bit of a gray area there. It’s not illegal, but you don’t want that in your affiliate program. And then the second thing, we just talked about respecting opt out requests. So if somebody opts out, even if they don’t do it the proper way, especially if you’ve got people who are a little bit less tech savvy. And, we get like one person a month who emails our customer support and says, please remove me from your email list.Like, there’s a link at the bottom of every email. But again, they’re not super tech savvy. And so if they’re not removed within a timely MANNER, you know, 48, 72 business hours, that’s a problem. All right. Truth in advertising, this is a big one.Honesty and transparency are key here. Affiliates must make accurate claims. They have to avoid making false, misleading, exaggerated claims about your products, about your services. I was talking with a client yesterday and I’m, hesitant to tell the whole thing just because, again, it might fall into this area. But I’ll see how vague I can make this.

I was talking about this product. It is a supplement. And I was talking about something that this product does not claim that it does. It does not say anywhere on any of the packaging or anything that it will cure this problem. But it has alleviated a lot of this particular problem for my daughter and me, both of us.All right? It is a side benefit that has been amazing and I think feel amazing. And I was telling the founder of this, the client, I was telling him, like, here’s what it’s done. Oh, my gosh. And it makes sense.He was like, medically, that makes sense. And I was like, yeah. And of course, I can’t really tell this story anywhere. Yeah, I can tell it privately and I can tell it in vagueness like I just did there, because I didn’t make an unsubstantiated claim right now. So we can’t say stuff like that, especially in the supplement world.

Why? Because the FTC will crack down in the rb. You said that cures a disease. Like, no, I did. And I said it made my symptoms a lot better.But you have to be really careful with stuff like that. So statements have to be substantiated. So any claim that an affiliate makes about a product’s benefits or performance has to be backed by evidence. I mean, simply put, if you start Taking a supplement and the affiliate can honestly, like, here’s what I weighed on this date and what I weighed on this date. That’s a substantiated claim.What you can say is, this product helped me lose 35 pounds. This product helped me clear up eczema. This problem helped me hear better or walk with less pain. You can’t say it’ll help you because you don’t know. You cannot guarantee that this product will help anybody else.

So it has to be a substantiated statement. No deceptive practices like bait and switch. You cannot promise one thing and deliver another. If your affiliates are doing that, that is illegal. You have to remove them.They have to have a clear representation of the product or service, including the price, the feature and availability. So you cannot say, look at this, it’s 50% off. And they go to a page that’s 20% off now. Can you say it’s 50% off now through Monday, July 17th at midnight Pacific time? And if they go there on the 18th, it’s not 50% off.Absolutely. That’s not a bait and switch. That’s not a misrepresentation. They put it in the thing when the expiration date is. But that’s why it’s important to make sure your affiliates put.

If there are expiration dates on things like that. And, it has to be mentioned in the email, in the social media post. All right, speaking of social media, with social media, in terms of. We’re talking about advertising and marketing laws here, you know, with social media, you have to comply with the platform, whatever the platform’s policy are, whatever their policies on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, whatever, you have to comply with their terms. You might not like them, but you have to comply with them or else.Again, it’s not illegal per se, but you violated Facebook terms. That could come back on you and your ads could be affected. And by effective, I mean could be completely shut down, all because of what one affiliate did. That sucks. With regards to, like, endorsements and testimonials, you’ve got to make sure that things are authentic.

You need to. Only your affiliates can only share genuine reviews, genuine testimonials from real customers. They have to disclose. You know, we’ll talk about this a little bit. If they got free product, if they write a review and it’s paid, that has to be disclosed.If you send me free product and I do a review, I have to mention that I got the product for free and that I will get a commission. It’s at the very top. Any product review that I ever write, by the way, if you’re an affiliate or you an affiliate manager, you want to teach your affiliates how to write product reviews. I’ll put this link in the show notes. If you go to mattmcwilliams.com review post, it’ll walk you through how to write a product review that ranks really high on Google and converts into sales. That’s key. But when I do that, any of the ones that I write, I mention if I got the product for free or I put at the very top, I’m an affiliate and I get paid for this. That doesn’t affect my endorsement. But just letting them know, no fake testimonials, no fake endorsements, that’s going to get you in a ton of trouble.

All right, so the next big thing, and we touched on this a little bit, I want to go is FTC disclosures. Now, like I said, I have been sued by the ftc. I can attest to the gravity of getting sued by the FTC. I vividly remember spending two full days, roughly 20 hours of my life, in a conference room with FTC attorneys who barely understood how to use the Internet, let alone anything about marketing. I mean, again, we spent like 16, 20 hours together.I remember the transcript. Every time I said, pay per click marketing, those doofuses wrote the word paperclip. Probably shouldn’t call them doofuses. I’m getting in trouble. And now they’re going, whatever.But it’s true. I mean, it took everything in me not to just laugh. I’m reading this transcript. I’m like, oh, my gosh. But when you’re facing a giant government agency, you kind of have to take these things seriously, right?

So anyway, the lawsuit, it was eventually dropped, but it still took up. That wasn’t just those 20 hours. I spent dozens of hours meeting with our attorney. All these things took all this effort, legal expenses. I had to drag up hundreds of correspondences with affiliates to show them that I had done nothing wrong. And they eventually agreed. They at least agreed enough that, like, we don’t have any evidence whatsoever that he did anything wrong. And they dropped the case against me. But that experience highlighted the importance of strict adherence to legal guidelines. Because, yes, I had done everything right.But what if I hadn’t? What if I had just gotten a little bit lazy? I remember I had, every month I did an audit of 100 of our affiliates. Every month I did that audit of 100 affiliates. Took me three hours.

It was a real pain in the butt because I usually did like the top 20 and my assistant did some others. It sucked. I didn’t want to do those. What if I had just kind of gotten a little bit lazy? And so they came in and they said, well, let’s see what you’ve been doing.And I said, well, I did an audit in March and June, did one in August and in November of last year. That’s all I did stood for. Not every month. I probably would have still been sued and might have lost. So that’s the importance of really adhering to this.I did an entire episode on FTC disclosures recently. I’m going to put that link in the show notes, but let me just share a brief section. So go back and listen. It’s super important. It’s one of the most critical things you can ever listen to.I’m literally reading from the transcript here. All right, that highlights the importance of this. I’m going to read this here real quick. Affiliate managers, advertisers and affiliate programs now bear clear responsibilities. This is from the ftc.

The guidelines specify three main duties. First, provide explicit guidance on the rules to your affiliates. Promptly communicate these guidelines via emails or post in your Facebook groups to keep everyone informed. In other words, going off the script here, it’s on you to teach your affiliates how to comply with the FTC rules. If you don’t, you will get in trouble.Secondly, actively monitor compliance like I just talked about. Keep a close eye on your affiliates activities and promptly address any rule violations. Exactly what I was doing. Third, take appropriate action if non compliance occurs. Ensure you handle any issues according to the guidelines.I’ll just tell you one more again go listen to the episode because I share it in detail but document everything. I kept a back then it wasn’t Google Docs, but it was like the Microsoft Word online and I had this document that just had screenshots like every time I kicked out an affiliate and then they came back and said why didn’t do that. And I said yes you did. Here’s the proof. I had every one of those documented if I found an affiliate was doing something wrong but it was kind of like a, yeah, hey, you didn’t disclose on this one thing.

I documented that and then they responded back and said oh I’m so sorry, I won’t do that. Make them a sticking in. Great. But the key is that I documented everything. You’ve got to monitor and you’ve got to enforce.So again, regular audits of affiliate activities to ensure compliance with all the advertising and marketing laws. You have to be doing those audits and just checking all. Ah, right. The next legal requirement is you’ve got to abide by privacy and data protection laws. This is becoming more and more important.It’s in, this is one of those things like the FTC disclosures, things that’s not in the mainstream news, the email marketing, the spam stuff, that’s not in the mainstream news. Nothing else I’m going to be talking about is in the mainstream news. But data and privacy protection is in the mainstream news. This is on like everything, let’s say mainstream news. Like what I mean is not just, you know, msnbc, whatever it’s called, you know, Fox News and cnn.

I just mean people are talking about this thing outside of affiliate marketing. It’s becoming more and more important. So you’ve got to ensure that your affiliate program complies with data protection laws such as GDPR that we talked about earlier from the EU, the California Consumer Privacy act in the U. S. you’ve got to have a clear privacy policy outlining how you collect, use and protect personal data.

Get the EXACT Template We Give to Our Affiliates to Get Them to Promote More and Generate More Sales! Click Here to Download it Now!

You got to make sure that your affiliates adhere to the data protection standards, especially if they collect any consumer data on your behalf. So simply put, there are things you can and can’t do and things you must do. So for example, you have to collect affiliate information, you have to collect their name, you need their contact details, you need their payment information. You’re storing that information. But if you’re storing that information, you have to abide by the privacy guidelines and the data collection guidelines.And if affiliate says, remove me from your program and delete my information, you have to abide by that. It’s a pain in the butt, but you have to do it. Now, could you reply back to them and say, well, actually, you know, we still owe you some commissions and we want to pay those. Like, I can’t do that if we delete you. So that’s up to you.

And they reply back and say, nope, delete me. Cool. Well, you’re not paying their commissions and that you’ve told them we’re not, paying the commissions, we can’t do it. If we delete you from the program and they’re okay with it. So there you go, you know, make sure that your general privacy policy is up to date, but make sure that you actually, in your affiliate agreement address this as well.Like, are you going to be sharing their information with other programs? There’s nothing wrong with that. If you tell them that you’re going to do it but make sure that that’s in there. Make sure that that’s in there, else you’re going to get in a lot of trouble. As far as, like, data processing agreements, DPAs is what they’re called.

If you don’t know what that is, you probably don’t need to know this, but I’m going to tell you anyway. If affiliates are processing any personal data on your behalf, you have to establish a DPA data processing agreement outlining their responsibilities for data protection. Because then if they break that, if they do anything illegal, you say, well, you broke the contract, you broke the agreement, we’re in the clear. But you need to make sure, and again, audit these things, making sure that affiliates are implementing whatever technical, organizational measures that they need to put in place to protect personal data. All right, this super, super important cookie consent.

You’ve seen these since, you know, for the last seven, eight, nine years or so. If you are using affiliates, you are using cookies. 99. 9% of the time, you have to have a cookie consent banner. If you’re not using any cookies, which is really, really rare, I guess you could get away with not having one.But even then, I think you still have to have a cookie policy that says, we don’t use cookies. Again, it’s really rare. I don’t know why you wouldn’t be. But if you’re using affiliates, you are. So you have to tell people who are coming there.Lastly, on this, make sure you’re educating your affiliates on data protection requirements. All the best practices around this stuff, keep them updated on laws, whether it be FTC laws or data laws. They can get you in trouble, so you need to train them so that you don’t get in trouble. All right? The next legal thing to be aware of is fraud, affiliate fraud.

I did an entire episode on this very recently, actually within the past six, eight weeks. And I will link to that in the show notes. But this is on you, the affiliate manager. This is on you. If your affiliates do wrong.You’re sensing a theme here. It’s your responsibility to catch it. You know, affiliate fraud might seem like this shadow that’s kind of lurking. It’s not as prevalent as you might fear, but as affiliate marketing grows, so does the temptation for fraudulent activities. They’re rare, but when they happen, they hit hard.I mean, they could destroy your company. And I looked up some statistics before I recorded this. I was curious, you know, since I recorded that episode, if I could find any new stuff. And I mean, the data’s all over the place. One source, let me see here.

From, the performance marketing, the pma. I gotta accept their cookie so I can look this up. Yeah, I mean, they’re, you know, they’re saying up to 10%. I don’t believe it’s that high, but holy crap, one out of 10. But my experience, the actual frequency of, fraud levels is much, much lower.But it’s important to stay vigilant. All right, again, the rise in affiliate fraud, it is rising proportionally to the increasing attractiveness of affiliate marketing. With each opportunity, every new opportunity that comes along for legit affiliates to make money, there’s an equal chance for the scammers and the fraudsters to exploit the systems. Right. That’s just like anything.If you double the amount of revenue, typically everybody’s making more money. Right. That’s the same thing with fraud. So again, it’s not huge. The small percentage, though, ultimately comes down to being proactive.

The small percentage, it just, it’s such a problem. Like if it’s a quarter of a percent, it’s still such a huge problem. So you’ve got to be proactive. You know, as I say in the episode, monitoring for affiliate fraud is an ongoing necessity. So depending upon the size of your program, again, it doesn’t have to be a huge, like, I’m going to spend hours and hours every week.No, in the episode, I shared a practical way to think about it. Every hundred thousand dollars in sales, you’ll spend about three to five minutes checking for fraud. So again, it scales up as your sales increase. If you got a million dollars in sales, you’re, probably going to spend 30 to 50 minutes a week monitoring the sales. Does that have to be you, the affiliate manager?

Probably, yes, for the first few months. But over time you can outsource that and you can even use AI to do a lot of that. But again, you still want a human element, just checking, check periodically, you know, weekly check. For most businesses, 20, 30 minutes, it’s enough to stay ahead of the fraudsters. And these are going to maintain the integrity of your program.Not only is it going to save you money, because you’re making sure that when you’re paying commissions, those are genuinely earned, but you’re also going to make sure that you’re staying legal. In that episode, I shared some of the different types of affiliate fraud, some of which are downright illegal and others which are just unethical. Right. I share what indicators to look for how to catch affiliate fraud. That’s a big one.

How to document it. And we’ve talked about that. Right. This is what you want to make sure that you’re protected legally. So if you tell an affiliate you committed fraud and I’m kicking you out of the program and not paying your commissions, they can’t come back six months later and be like, they never paid my commissions.I’m suing you. No, you can be like, here’s the documentation that shows that we called 35 of the people you referred and they were all fraudulent. We have documents on that. So that’s. That’s huge.I talk about how to do that in the episode. Also talk about how to prevent it in the first place, which is important. And when to remove an affiliate for fraud and when not to. So, again, the link for that is in the show notes. So the next thing you’ve got to consider as far as legal requirements is tax compliance.Again, I want to be clear. I’m basing this on the US I don’t know how things are in Belgium or Australia, and I don’t know how they are in every single state. All right, there are 50 different states in the United States alone with 50 different, very complex, complicated, and way overly complex tax codes that could probably be simplified to, you know, roughly like three lines, but that’s a whole different story. Thing is, affiliate earnings from commissions are considered taxable income, and they have to report these taxes. So if you get an individual, that is income tax.

In my case, you know, all of my stuff is done through our corporation, so that is revenue to the company. And I don’t need a 1099. You know, you don’t need to send me a 1099. But if they are an individual, you have to send. What’s 10, 99 misc.For miscellaneous, if you pay them $600 or more than a year or in a year. Now, if you have an affiliate network that does that, they handle that. If you pay through PayPal, they handle that. So most of the time you don’t need to send a 1099. But you might, again, if you’re not through a network or you’re paying an individual $600 or more, not through PayPal or some other service where they aggregate the.The payments. Right. You’ve got to keep records. All right? Keep records.

If you are ready to take your business to the next level and start an affiliate program, start with my free report, Your First 100 Affiliates. This report takes nearly two decades of experience, trial and error, and lessons learned about finding top affiliates in nearly every conceivable niche and puts them all into one report. Grab your copy here!

I know for us, very simply, what we do for our stuff and for our clients is we have a Google sheet that about every three months, I download into an Excel, file and upload that to Dropbox again, just in case, heaven forbid anything ever happened with Google. Yeah, I might lose Two months. Because I don’t do it every single month. I probably should, but I don’t. But about every two to three months, I’ll just download the Excel file and upload it to Dropbox.I have a folder in there. So I’ve got two different places where we keep this. We’ve got copies of all of the payments. We have an email copy every time we email somebody regarding their payments. Then obviously in PayPal, we’ve got a record of that.But that spreadsheet that just got everybody there. And if I need to know how much did I pay John Smith in May of 2021? I mean, I’ve got a record right there. So any of those, any correspondence related to affiliate payments, we keep that in a specific folder. Even if it’s just as simple as somebody responding back and saying thanks, we keep that in a folder.

Why would I do that? I would say 96% of the emails we send out regarding payments aren’t responded to. But if they say thanks, why would I keep that? Because if that particular affiliate two years from now tries to argue that we never paid them, here’s the email saying that you, I mean, I guess saying thanks would not say that you actually got it, but if they say I got it, well, you said two years ago you got it. You, know, not only do I have a record in PayPal or in my bank, but I’ve got a record here of you acknowledging that you received it.So we keep records of all that. If we request, if we send an email that says we need your W9, we keep records of those emails. Because then when you complain that you haven’t been paid, hey, here’s the email that we sent you telling you we need your W9 and you haven’t sent it, so we can’t pay you. The other thing to be aware of is the nexus and, nexus sales tax laws. So in the US Again, some states have what are known as nexus laws.

So that means if you’re so Amazon, right? Amazon has a nexus in every state because they have a warehouse in every state. Twenty years ago, they didn’t have a warehouse in every state. So, like, I know back in the day when I lived in Nashville, we got the warehouse. The closest, warehouse for a long time was in Louisville, Kentucky.And then they built one in Nashville. And so we got everything, like, next day, and it was so cool. I mean, I live in Fort Wayne, Indiana, I don’t know, the 70th largest city in the U. S. we have two Amazon warehouses to Absolutely massive Amazon warehouses.There is nothing that I can’t get practically. I can’t remember the last time I waited more than two days. Most everything I get next day if I order by 4:00pm and so now that they have those, they have a nexus in that state. In some states they even consider that if you have a certain amount of sales, even if you don’t have a physical presence there, you have a nexus. Having affiliates in certain states can create a nexus.

So you have to collect sales tax. You have to follow the law on this. So if you have a physical product that ships, even if your headquarters is in Salt Lake City and it is shipping from Louisville, okay, if you have one affiliate in the state of Indiana, you have a nexus in Indiana. And so in the early days, if you were around back then, back in the early 2008, 2009, 2010, 11 range, there were programs that, because there were nexus laws in certain states, there were programs that were like, we don’t allow affiliates. New York was one, like, Rhode island was a big one.Massachusetts maybe there were like two others where they’re like, no, we’re not going to have affiliates there. Well then when all the states started having them, they’re like, well, I guess we just, you know, we can’t not have an affiliate program. So you’ve got to do things around that. You’ve got to register for sales tax, sales tax permit in states where you have a nexus. Again, I don’t know what states those are.

I know that when we start affiliate programs, we’re on a network so we don’t have to worry about that. We just let them handle that. But we have to collect the sales tax where you have a nexus. You have to comply with the local sales tax rates and the reporting requirements and all that. Again, talk to an accountant if you don’t know about that stuff, because it’s different in every state.I don’t even know what states require them. I don’t know what the sales tax is in any other state. I don’t even know what the sales tax is in my own state. I think it’s 7 1/2 percent, but it could easily be 7 or 8. I don’t know.I just don’t know because I don’t care. So it is what it is, right? International tax compliance, the value added tax, the EU vat. If you have affiliates in the European Union, you have to be aware of these VAT rules. So there might be, you know, instances where you do collect it and instances where you don’t you need to collect the VAT on any sales to EU customers?

Generally speaking. But again, there could be exceptions to that and most payment systems, stripe and things like that, they can figure that out but you have to report that stuff. Again, there’s other, you know, rules for non EU countries. Some of them are similar to the EU stuff, some of them are similar to Indiana sales tax or Kentucky sales tax, but they’re just different. They’re all over the place.But you have to comply. The other thing to consider is any cross border payments. All right? Some countries require withholding tax on payments made to foreign affiliates. So you have to determine do you need to withhold tax on payments to affiliates based in other countries.

Again, this is only relevant if you’re in house. If you are on a network, they handle that for you. So just be aware of especially if you’re going to have a bunch of international affiliates, you probably should be on a network because you don’t want to be dealing with, you know, there’s things like withholding tax and tax treaties. You know, like there’s all kinds of tax treaties where we have one treaty with Singapore and another with Japan and then a different one with the eu. But then within the EU we have different tax treaties with other countries and it’s confusing.So there are advantages to working with networks for that reason. Just because you don’t have to worry about all that crap. Again, make sure you’ve got proper documentation in forms W9W8BE in forms. Make sure you obtain their tax identification number, their TIN or their Social Security number. You know, again, it’s all on a W9 or W8BN.

Make sure you’re issuing the right invoices. Make sure you’re keeping these records. I mean for tax related purposes. I just say seven years because I’ve never seen anybody go over seven years. I don’t know of any state or federal jurisdiction that goes over seven years.Some are as low as three. Just keep them for seven. Make sure you have backups of those. So if they send you, I mean back in the day they used to fax W9. It’s the send faxes people would mail me.I haven’t received a W9 in the mail in, you know, eight, 10 years. But I used to get them in the mail sometimes and we would scan them and upload them. So we keep those all in a folder and all of those things. So again, just make sure you’re paying on time, that you’re reporting all of this stuff and Then the last thing on the tax stuff, make sure you’re staying up to date on tax laws. Again, it’s almost irrelevant if you’re on a network because they handle that stuff.

But, you know, the government likes to change things just for the sake of changing things. So they’re going to change regulatory things. They’re going to all those things. Right? And make sure, as I said so many times, make sure you’re talking to an accountant, some sort of professional tax person to make sure that you’re compliant with these tax laws.It’s a boring thing to talk about, but very necessary. All right, and the last thing, everything points back to this. It all starts and ends with your affiliate agreement, your terms and conditions, your affiliate programs, terms and conditions. They set the stage for everything we’ve talked about. They need to be comprehensive, yet easy to understand.

They’ve got to cover everything, but yet not so legal that like an affiliate look at and be like, I don’t know what this is even saying. So clarity is super important. This is setting the expectations for your affiliates. So they lay out the rules, the rules of engagement, so to speak, right between you, the business owner, the affiliate program manager and your affiliate partners. So you see, clarity is key.If you don’t have solid guidelines, then your affiliates don’t know what’s allowed, what’s not allowed. Things like, am I allowed to bid on trademark terms, for example? You know, we talked about building trust with your affiliates about six, 10 episodes ago. This is the Trust Building Foundation. This agreement shows them what to expect and it said they’re agreeing to it.

So this not only protects them, but it protects you and ensures everyone’s treated fairly. Everything is transparent. They know the rules. You have the framework for an effective partnership. All about win win.Here in the next episode, I’m going to talk all, about this. It’s all about the affiliate agreement. I’m going to walk you through the exact process that I’ve used to develop terms and conditions for some of the top affiliate programs in the world, such as Shutterfly, Adidas and a bunch of others. And here’s the best part. You don’t need to be a legal expert, you do not need to be a legal expert to basically put together a great terms and conditions.

I’m going to break it down into simple, easy to understand steps to make it easy to create your affiliate programs, terms and conditions. So make sure you come back for that. We’ll talk about some of the basic rules and there’s going to be a lot of legal mumbo jumbo, but it’s worth it. We’re going to talk about rules that you need to put in place for your affiliates, how to stay FTC compliant. That part of what we didn’t talk about earlier or touched on earlier is that that’s tied back to your affiliate program agreement.We’re going to talk about domain names and advertising policies and social media reversal policy. You know all the FTC stuff, all some of the specific rules for most programs, but they’re not necessarily for all programs. And your pay per click guidelines and trademark bidding and things like that. We’re talking about all that coupons so much more. All the things that you need to cover in your terms and conditions.

We’re going to talk about that in ah, the next episode so make sure you come back for that hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. And if you haven’t yet, hit subscribe so you do not miss this episode. It’s super important. And if you got any questions about this episode, anything we talked about today, the legal stuff or anything at all affiliate related, you can text me anytime at 260-217-4619. Again, all those links are in the show notes.All the ones I talked about in this episode, FTC updates, how to identify and stop affiliate fraud and how to write a review post that ranks and converses are all in the show notes. So check those out. Again, make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode where we talk about creating that affiliate affiliate program, terms and conditions agreement, whatever you want to call it, hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. I’ll see you then. Thank you so much for listening today.

Remember to check out all of our deep dives into affiliate marketing at the Affiliateguide TV. And if you have a question, ask [email protected] who knows, maybe you even be featured on an upcoming episode. And lastly, if you haven’t yet, make sure to leave a rating and review where every Listening to this episode.

The post Affiliate Program Legal Requirements: What Every Affiliate Manager Needs to Know appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode

TEXT ME: +1 (260) 217-4619

Sample Affiliate Training

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Listen on YouTube

Listen on Amazon

Email Me New Episodes

Ask a Question for the Show

How to Tell Affiliates When Something Goes Wrong

How to Plan Your Day as an Affiliate Manager

How to Fix the Biggest Problems Holding Back Your Affiliate Program

Affiliate Fraud: Red Flags Every Program Should Watch

How to Make Affiliate Webinars Convert Better

How to Find What’s Wrong with Your Affiliate Program and Fix It

One of the most important jobs of an affiliate manager is to build strong relationships with their affiliates. But how do you do it? That’s the question we’ll be exploring in today’s episode. I’ll be sharing my top tips and strategies for building long lasting relationships with your affiliates that will help you scale your affiliate program for the long term. So whether you’re a, seasoned affiliate manager or you’re just starting out, listen up because this episode is powerful.So we’re talking today about the importance of relationships.The importance of relationships as it pertains to running an affiliate program, connecting with your affiliates. I share a lot on here about strategies. If you look at the last few episodes, 10 lessons I learned. Launching a best selling book, how to use a challenge for affiliate marketing. We did a day in the life of an affiliate manager.

We talked about strategies to turn your inactive affiliates into your best partners and how to solve some of the biggest challenges in your affiliate program. How to double your affiliate commissions in 30 days or less. All of those things. Right? These are all things we’ve talked about over the last couple of months.Those are strategies that really have to do with direct income type things. And what we’re talking about today. Oh, it isn’t quantifiable. It doesn’t have a direct. Like if you activate 20% of your inactive affiliates, I can guarantee you your revenue is going to go up 5 to 10% overnight.

Might go up 20%. If you apply what I taught in how to double your affiliate commissions, I can guarantee you you are going to double. Double your affiliate commissions or more. Today doesn’t have that. Now there’s an instinctive element to what I’m talking about today though, when I say have a better relationship with your affiliates.I think there’s an underlying assumption though, that that’s going to improve your revenue. One of my favorite quotes from all time is from Jeffrey Gittamer, the sales trainer. And I might butcher this a little bit, but it says all things being equal, people want to do business with their friends. and that makes sense. Guess what the second part of the quote is?

All things not being equal, people still want to do business with their friends. We’re all like that. We want to do business with our friends. There are many products that I buy that I could buy for Slightly cheaper, but I buy for my friend. Now part of that is selfish.I want to get the product that, yeah, it costs 10% more, so maybe I’ll pay $200 instead of 180 bucks. But I know that I’m gonna get better service for that extra 20 bucks. That’s obvious. There’s a selfish element. But the other thing is it’s easier, just easier to do business with your friends.And I want to make my friends happy. So sometimes I’m not gonna buy something I don’t need from a friend. Just to be clear, I don’t roll that way. Like I’ve bought books to help them out and maybe I’ll. I don’t need the book, but I’ll give it to somebody who does.

Okay, that’s an example where I would. But generally speaking, I’m not gonna spend more than about a hundred bucks on something I don’t need. But if it’s something I need, I’ll spend a little bit more to buy for my friend because of that relationship. That’s the power of relationship. The power of being able to connect with people and really forge that relationship.So that’s what we’re talking about today. Now the good news is you aren’t born with disability. That’s the good news. You are, nobody is born with disability. The bad news is nobody is born with disability.The good news is you can learn it. The bad news is no one really teaches this in terms of affiliates. There are classics, classic books that I’ve read over the years off the top of my head, how to Win Friends and Influence People. One of the greatest books of all time. All the books from Jeffrey Gittamer, who I quoted earlier, influenced by Robert Cialdini.

God, I could pull up my phone and just go through and the. There’s dozens of books that I’ve gone through that I’ve read through over the years, many of which I read back in the early 2000s to late 2000s that formed the crux, that formed the foundation of what I’m talking about today. Obviously we’re going to talk about social media. And you know, Dale Carnegie didn’t talk about social media. He didn’t talk about that, but he talked about the principles that I’m going to base today’s lessons on.I’m going to include a link to those books, by the way, my recommended reading page. You can go grab all of them there. But today, how in today’s world do we build those long lasting relationships that transcend just a financial Transaction. Ultimately, everything I’m sharing with you today will result in more sales. Will you be able to quantify it?

No. Will you be able to say of the 16 things, I’m saying that number four made you $1 million, but number five only made you 70,000 and number eight didn’t move the. I don’t know. I don’t know how that’s going to work, but I’ve got 16 ways that I want to share with you today. So let’s jump in here.Number one. Number one thing you got to do to develop these relationships with your affiliates is you got to take it past affiliate manager or merchant or CEO. Slash, affiliate. You got to become friends and think about how do you become friends with somebody? A lot of times we’ve become friends with people.I think of my best friend in the world. We became friends kind of by accident. You could call it divine, divine timing. But he was on a practice tee at a golf course and I was on a practice tee and he was annoying me and I walked away from him. It’s the truth.

He wanted to talk and I was, I was like, dude, I’m warming up for my round. Like we’re at a tournament. I don’t talk. I’m focused for the next hour. I’m m focused until the round begins and then I’m focused for the next four and a half hours.I saw him like six weeks later and I was in a place where I could talk and we talked. The next thing you know, we’re traveling to golf tournaments together. Next thing you know, he’s best man in my wedding. Like, those are the types of things that just if he hadn’t shown up that day, we wouldn’t have been friends. But when I break it down and look at it further, how did we become friends?Because he showed a genuine interest in me and I showed a genuine interest in him. So show a genuine interest in your affiliates as people get to know them, know their kids names. Don’t you dare talk to somebody for the fifth time and say, how’s your wife? How are the kids? Yeah, if they’ve got six kids, you might not remember all their names.

But don’t say those things. Know their kids names, know their spouse’s name, know what’s important to them, where do they go to college? Are they a fan? Like, I have a friend of mine went to the same college as my dad, Wake Forest. And we always talk Wake Forest sports on every call.I had an affiliate back in late 2005 through about 2008 for a company that I ran back then called Hometown Quotes and this affiliate, it was Alberto. Alberto Canas got to know each other. He went to Wake Forest, graduated a few years before my dad went to Wake Forest. I grew up a Wake Forest fan. And it just so happened that in 2006, Wake Forest had a historic season.I think they went 10 and two that year in football. They won the ACC championship. They went to the Orange bowl, and it was like the story of the year. They actually made a movie out of it called the Fifth Quarter. It’s a really, really cool movie.

And like, we were going through that together. So he and I would talk every week on Mondays, so we would relive the game. Well, if you didn’t go, if you didn’t follow their sports team, that’s okay. We used to still know it. You should know who they root for.You should reach out when their team wins a big game. You should be looking for those things. I got so many messages from people that are important in my life. After Tennessee, which is my alma mater, so my dad went to Wake Forest. I’m still a Wake Forest fan, but I’m, obviously a Tennessee fan.After they beat Alabama, those people get my business. You should know their birthdays. And don’t you dare post on their Facebook wall wishing them a happy birthday. No, you at the very least send them a text. You call and leave a voicemail and sing to them.

take it past just affiliate manager and affiliate. Take it past transactional into a genuine relationship by showing genuine interest. You got to know those things. You got to get to know them. Use the research that you can Google them.It does not take much to learn that I like Tennessee, that I went to Tennessee, that I like Wake Forest. It does not take much to learn to know that I’m a huge Nashville, SC fan. It does not take much to know that as I’m recording this episode, it’s really hard for me to focus because I’m trying to fit this into a very small window. I’m probably going to record this in two parts because I want to get back to watching the Manchester City Arsenal game because I’m a Man City fan. So by the way, they’re up 1 nil right now as I’m recording this.

That’ll tell you when I’m recording this. Wednesday, April 26th. That’ll tell you when I’m recording this. And if they win, I’m m gonna go crazy. Like, I’m gonna be excited.You should know that about Me if I’m gonna be your affiliate so that you can say, whoa, what a game. All right, so that’s number one. Number two, communicate regularly. Right? Regular communication is absolutely essential to building strong relationships with your affiliates.

The basics, you gotta keep em updated on new products, you gotta keep em updated on new promotions. Any changes to the promotions. Right? Those are the basics. You gotta be available to answer their questions, provide support when needed, but be in touch with them regularly.Almost everything I’m gonna say today keeps going back to number one, which is transcend. Transcend the affiliate manager affiliate relationship. So regular communication, when you’ve got new stuff, let them know. And for your top affiliates, transcend that. Just basic blanket email.Send them a dm, send them a text and say, hey, do you see my announcement about the contest? Let them know about that. Number three, make your affiliate program fun. I will never forget I was talking with Kyle Young, one of my dearest friends in online marketing space, and he was the operations manager for Jeff Goins. We were running Jeff Goins affiliate program at the time and he said, I want to make this launch be so fun for our affiliates.

They will tell everyone about it and beg to promote again. And prior to that, like I’d been running affiliate programs for 10 years and I never thought about that. Like, yeah, I’d made them fun, but it never occurred to me that it might have an impact on results. And so I started looking at the past. I was like, when our program was fun, we got better results.Now I wrote a post years ago, I’m gonna share a little bit of it here. But I shared this acronym for fun. Like how do we make an affiliate program fun and not get too caught up in just making it fun. And the F is focus on results. Right?

And you have to focus on results. The key here is to tie everything, tie everything into a call to action for your affiliates. So don’t just make it fun for the sake of making it fun. Tie it into the action you want them to take. The U is for uniqueness.We’ll talk about this later. But be yourself. Unless being yourself is boring and not fun, then be somebody else. But be yourself. Use your sense of humor.If it’s dry, be dry. If it’s sarcastic, be sarcastic. If it’s kind of goofy and off the wall, be goofy and off the wall. I mean, like if you are none of the above, you are not dry, you’re not sarcastic, you’re not goofy at all. No one has laughed at you for four years.

Then hire someone to Be funny. I mean, like hire someone. We did that, years ago. We hired a, George W. Bush impersonator to announce the affiliate sales prizes.And I think I played the video in a previous episode, but he, he gets on there, he’s like, hey there, tribe riders, affiliate aficionados. It’s W here. You know, and he goes on and he announces the prize guy. John, John Morgan. John Morgan.I mean, just a great guy. Like, look him up. John Morgan, George W. Bush impersonator. He’s amazing.And like, that was a huge hit. Made our program fun, got people really thinking about the prizes. If I just sent out a simple email, wouldn’t have been as effective. Wouldn’t have been as effective. And then the N is for nuttiness.

Get a little crazy, get a little goofy. Nuttiness stands out, it gets attention. Embrace you, the clutter. Your affiliates just think you have to remember, I’ve talked about this so many times. Your affiliates are just like you.They’re busy. They have full inboxes, they have slack channels. Got 14 notifications in Slack if you want to break through. Get a little crazy. You gotta get a little crazy.So make your affiliate program fun. They will remember it and they will refer people. They’ll tell all their friends. Number four, be authentic. This ties into the last few.But off the wall humor is fine. If your humor is different, if your way of communicating is a little bit zany or a little bit different than the average, that’s fine. Be authentic. Be you. Be yourself in this regard.

Yeah, I’m just gonna be honest here. Like this is an area where ChatGPT and AI right now can’t touch the human element. It just can’t. It can communicate facts and it can actually write fairly persuasive copy, but it can’t be authentically you just yet. And we’ll probably get there in three years.Number five, you gotta connect with your affiliates on social media. You gotta comment on their post, you gotta engage with them. Goes back to number one, you got to get to know them. So they post on social media. They’re telling you what’s important to them.They’re telling you what they’re working on, they’re telling you who their favorite teams are. They are telling you all these things about themselves. So this is an opportunity for you to cheer them on, to engage with them, to show your personality, share how you actually care about them as a person. And again, don’t just like their post. That’s a waste.

Nobody. I couldn’t name one person who Liked to post in the past five years of mine. I don’t know who liked my post. I have no idea. Don’t like a post.What a waste of a thumb or a click of your mouse. No comment. Sometimes, yeah, if it’s just awesome, dude, that’s fine. But sometimes it’s a more thoughtful comment and I like to personally look for the posts that don’t have a lot of engagement and comment on those because you. Would you rather be one of four?Comments are one of a hundred. I’m not going to remember you if you’re one of a hundred. Because you’re one of a hundred. I’ll remember you if you’re one of four. So connect with them and engage with them on social media.

Sixth, got to foster a sense of community. When you connect people with other people, they will credit you. Some of my best relationships, I remember who connected us. I credit them. That good juju rubs off on them and they get the magic fairy dust is sprinkled on them.And so start a Facebook group or other group you could use. I mean, there’s a ton of ways you could do a group. You could use our client’s social Glo and create a group in there. You could do whatever but form a group and foster this sense of community where they’re helping each other and connecting with each other and getting business through each other. It comes back to you.

The credit for that comes back to you. Seventh, meet them in person. You know, my closest relationships with I have with affiliates are people I’ve met in person. When I think about our top affiliates, with the exception of two, two affiliates, they are people I’ve met in person. Years ago.I remember we flew some of our top. Well, there were three of them. They were business partners. We flew them in to Franklin, Tennessee, to Nashville, and we did the typical thing, like we went to a Nashville Predators game and took them out to eat a nice restaurant. We spent a couple days with them, got to know them, hung out, laughed together, goofed off with them.We went to this restaurant called the Tin Roof in Franklin, Tennessee. If you ever been there, you know what it’s like. Live music every night, typical Nashville scene. And sitting at the bar is this guy that I don’t recognize. But the affiliate is like, oh, my gosh, that’s.

To this day I remember now. I had to Google his name, but he’s the, like the lead guitarist in Rascal Flats, the countryman. And he’s like, that’s so I’m a huge fan of Rascal flags, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, all right, come here. And I walk over and I’m literally like, the iPhone had just come out.This is. If I remember correctly, this was January 2008, might have been December 2007. And I think I’d had an iPhone for. I’d only had one for like six weeks. So I’m googling the name of this guy while we’re walking over, and his.I don’t even remember. Like, his name is John Smith. What? It doesn’t matter. And I walk over and I say, john, I’d love to introduce you to Lev.And like, without missing a beat, this dude from Rascal Flats, he’s like, lev, nice to meet you, man. Like, you want to take a picture? Whatever. So again, iPhone just come out. I take a picture with this guy and Lev and I send it to him.which I could do because we had email on our phone. Now, like, we take that for granted. But this is 15 years ago. That did not exist. This is so brand new.

It was the coolest thing ever. To this day, like, I don’t even know the guy’s name. And I’m like, so thankful that he wasn’t like, who the heck are you? What dude? Like, leave me alone.I’m with my friends. It was one of those cool things, right? But the point is, like, he remembered that. But even more than just getting a picture with one of his favorite guys from his favorite band, like, he remembers us hanging out. So fly them in if you can.Meet them somewhere. Host a mastermind, get your top. Goes back to what I just said. A community. Get your top 10 affiliates together and host a mastermind.Meet at a conference. Like, here’s a quick tip. When you attend a conference, we’re back to doing that, by the way. Woo. Like, we’re actually attending conferences this year.Reach out to your affiliates and ask if they’ll be there. Schedule some time together. Like, I know for a fact there are conferences I will go to this year. I know who I’m, meeting at that conference. And we’re going to.

At the very least, we’re going to have lunch together. We’ll probably have two meals together. We’ll probably spend an hour or so doing some businessy, like, brainstorming type stuff. We’ll goof off, we’ll laugh together. I’ll ride piggyback.Well, that’s a whole different story. Yeah, that’s a whole different. I have video proof that that actually happened, though. We’ll do all these Things, you know, like we’ll actually schedule some time together, like buy them a meal, take them a gift, and just joke, laugh, get to know them better. These are the type of things that are keys.Those in person meetings have been worth millions. Absolutely been worth millions to me. And probably I’m gonna go 80 million plus for our clients over the years. Meeting in person is huge. So you gotta do it.You gotta be willing to invest not only the money, but the time and the effort to meet in person. All right, speaking of gifts, number eight, Send gifts. This goes back again. I said before, it goes back to number one. You got to know what they like.

You got to know their teams. If you’re going to send like a hoodie to them, well, it would kind of help. Like, it’s kind of weird to be like, here’s this really cool looking hoodie that made me think of you versus here’s a shirt of your team. Here’s a shirt I found. Like, again, this is a great one.I got a shirt. This was, I think 2000, 2011, 2012. I can’t remember exactly, but there’s a long story on that. But basically there was a coach of an opposing team for Tennessee that had kind of talked some m trash about Tennessee. And then Tennessee went out and won.And I made a shirt out of it that had like a silhouette of that coach and like the quote or whatever, and somebody sent me a shirt of that. That’s so cool. That is so freaking cool. But they wouldn’t have done that if they didn’t know that I was a Tennessee fan. You’ve got to know their interests, and you got to send the appropriate gifts.

You’ve got to be able to hook them up with things like, you know, years and years and years ago. So for those of you who know my backstory. Yeah. I grew up in a town called Pinehurst, North Carolina. Well, in Pinehurst, North Carolina, is a golf course.Pinehurst number two, which about every six, seven years now hosts the US Open. It’s a world famous golf course, and it’s really hard to get on. And even if you can, it’s like $400. Well, my dad just happened to be friends. It’s not true anymore, but at the time, my dad was friends with the head pro, and so we were able to get people on.And I had somebody that I did business with, and I knew they were going to be in Raleigh because they mentioned it on a call. Raleigh’s about an hour and 45 minutes north. I said, hey, do you have time to go down to Pinehurst. He’s like, yeah, you know, I’m not going to, but I have time, you know, I mean, like, I’d love to. I said, well, if you can be there at 10:15 the next morning, I’ve got you booked.

And he was floored. That guy went on to do well over a million dollars in business with us. So there’s a book I highly recommend on this. It’s called Giftology by my friend John Rulin. I’ve got a link to my books in the show Notes.It’ll be there. It’s a great book on how to gift. If I can sum it up, one of the biggest takeaways is don’t send branded stuff. In other words, a gift. If I send a gift that has my name on it, that’s not a gift.So if I send you, like, I know prior to one of our big affiliate launches years ago, we sent some branded stuff. I didn’t intend that as a gift. I intended it as a little bit like, here’s a mug with our brand on it. That’s great. And I sent them some sunglasses with our logo on it.And I said, hey, post in the Facebook group. You know, you looking all cool with your glasses on. We had hundreds of pictures in the Facebook group with them on. But that’s not a gift. A gift is when Pete Vargas sent me some Cutco cutlery.

Two of the best knives I’ve ever touched in my life. And they say McWilliams family on them. That’s a gift. I don’t need his brand on there. To think of Pete.Every time I cut a loaf of bread or every time I cut a really thick steak or some really good, like, ribs, like when you need a big knife, I think it Pete Vargas. So send gifts. But again, you got to get to know them. You got to know about them to know what kind of gifts they’re actually going to like. The number nine thing for building a great relationship is just be responsive and be responsive as fast as possible.Now, this is affiliate management 101 here. Don’t take four days to respond to an email. You don’t have to respond same day. You don’t have to respond in an hour. A lot of people like, you gotta have super fast response.

No, I think anything inside. We have a company rule. 48 hours is the absolute non negotiable time. 48 business hours, non negotiable. 24 is better.Same day, if the email comes in before noon, is really kind of One of our rules now, if, you’re gonna be at a town, we don’t need to make, like I tell our affiliate managers, if you’re going to be at a town on a Tuesday, you do not need to make accommodations to have your email handled on Tuesday because it’s probably not in the middle of a big promotion. You wouldn’t schedule a day off in the middle of a big promotion. If you do, then we need to do that. But you’re not going to, you know, have anybody else come in and help you. Now if you’re going to be out of town Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, you need to get help.

You need to have somebody help you and be in there answering emails real quick each of those days. So be responsive when they ask questions, answer them when they need something, get it to them. And one of the things that we talk about with speed and responsiveness is okay, if it’s something where you gotta dig into it and it’s gonna take you a couple of hours or you need to ask the client or you need to do whatever, it’s gonna take you a couple of days possibly to get a response. Respond back and say, I’m working on it. Send an email the next day and say, hey, I’m pretty close to having an answer.

I’m, waiting on a report or something like that. But be responsive. You can’t develop a good relationship without being responsive. I don’t know about you, but you know, if my mom texts me, I’m going to get back to her within a few hours, you know, at the earliest possible chance, I’m going to respond to my mom, I’m going to respond to my wife at the earliest possible chance, my daughter, which is weird because she has a cell phone now. Yeah.Anyway, I’m sorry, like, it’s just hard for me to get over that. But when she texts me, I’m going to respond to her as soon as I possibly can. I’m not going to disrupt, you know, recording right now if they text me because I’ve got my phone and my computer on do not disturb. So if they do, I’m not going to see it. But as soon as I’m done with this recording, I’m going to turn that off.

And if they’ve texted me, I’m going to respond back. Think of your affiliates in a similar vein, maybe not quite as fast, but you’re not going to just not respond to them. Number 10, key to developing these strong relationship with your affiliates is you got to listen to feedback, Listen to them. Listen, show them that you take their input into consideration. One of the things that I made a rule years ago is if I do something in response to something an affiliate or anyone said to me, I let them know privately.I can say publicly, too, I might say, hey, a lot of you have said such and such, which is true if like, five or six people said the same thing. But I will privately message those five or six people and say, thank you so much for the feedback. Your feedback led to this decision. It led to this result. So years ago, I got some feedback from a couple of affiliates about the way that we were structuring our upsells and basically the way we’re paying out commissions on those upsells.

And while I understood our position as a company and what we were doing, just to give you some perspective, we were paying effectively a 35%. So we do 50. Yeah, whatever. 50 bucks into 147. So 35% roughly commission on the initial product.Because our upsells were typically lower priced, they paid a lower commission. They paid a. I think it was 20 or $25 flat fee on our $97 upsells. And so our affiliates just had some issues with that. And I listened to them.I listened to them, and actually what we did was we ended up just doing a 30% flat commission. We ran the numbers, and on 147 plus 97. So basically, you know, $250, 30% of that was almost identical to the price that it would have been. And that might be off on the numbers. I can’t remember the exact numbers, but basically they were going to make like it was something like $0.

88 more doing a 30% across the board commission. When they said they had concerns, they weren’t suggesting that they didn’t understand it and they had a problem with it. They were saying, hey, we actually think you would be better to just do a 30% flat commission across the board or to restructure it so you didn’t have like, six, because we end up with, like, six different commissions based on the product they bought. And it was just better to do 30%. Like, we went back and we looked at the numbers and we said, okay, going forward, if we do the exact same number of sales, what is this going to do?

And I feel like we paid 42 or 88 or some. It was less than a dollar, less than a dollar more per sale. And we ended up growing the affiliate program because of the ease of understanding. And then I reached out to each of those individual affiliates and I said thank you for this feedback. Your feedback led to us making this decision.So listen to their feedback. Don’t take offense to it. This is something I was just teaching our team about. When we get feedback from clients that, number one, we acknowledge their feedback. We acknowledge that they have an issue.

Need help activating your affiliates? Use my proven email templates for getting inactive affiliates in the game and making sales! Get them here!

We acknowledge that there is a disconnect or there’s a. Somewhere, there’s a miscommunication. We acknowledge that they experienced a problem with something that we did or a mistake that we made, that there’s a problem with that. And then we acknowledge that it was real, like it was a real challenge for them. And then we diminish it.And what, so a lot of times we’ll say we sent that to 5,000 people in one complained. That would be our response. No, we say no, we understand. I understand exactly where you’re coming from. We are sorry that happened and totally get it that when somebody reaches out to you and says such and such like, that can hurt.Right? Here’s the good news. It only happened with one person. And then we commit to fixing it going forward. So if you’re getting negative feedback from your affiliates, take it into account.

Acknowledge what they’re saying. Don’t just say, well, you know, whatever. That’s not going to build good relationships. So show them you take their input into consideration. Number 11, provide feedback.Help them. Give them constructive feedback. Be on the lookout for ways to help them find opportunities to provide tips and assistance to them. It doesn’t just have to be stuff that benefits you, not just about helping them promote your program. Go to their social media pages and look up what they’re doing and offer them tips.It could be about your program, but it could be about somebody else’s stuff. Hey, I saw that you were posting about such and such. Hey, you might want to do this, this and this. It’ll help you improve your conversions, but you got to find opportunities for that. I just sometimes just go to their website and maybe pull it up on mobile or on the computer and just see if I can find something wrong with it unrelated to our products, our clients products, and just say, hey, there’s a typo on your about page.

They’ll remember that. They will remember that. And that’s a very small way of helping them, giving them that kind of feedback that helps them. Number 12, share success stories. Now, the best way to do this is to make them a success story and then share it, because they will love you for that.But share other people’s success stories with them. This is more of A mass communication thing that helps to build those strong relationships. I give you a good example. You know, we had a client that we worked with and we had tons of success stories, tons of affiliates, 20, 25 affiliates that promoted that did an amazing job. You know, Tiny Lisp did an amazing job.So we profiled them. We did like a little 20 minute interview, and we put it together in a little course. Now, those 20 loved it, of course, because they got featured. They thought it was the most amazing thing in the world. But also everybody who got those success stories was super grateful because they saw what was possible.

They saw that they were able to do the same thing that Heidi did or Terry did or Sarah did or Jimmy did or whoever. They were able to see the success stories. And by sharing those, it really strengthened the relationship between not only us, but it goes back to what we said earlier, number six, fostering community. Because now those 20 kind of became like the people that everybody looked up to and wanted to be. And then they would help and they would ask them questions.And then again, it went back to number six, fostering that sense of community. It allowed them to connect with each other. And the credit goes back to us for being the ones who connected them. 13th way to really build those strong relationships is to celebrate milestones. Now, what are the milestones?

What are the milestones that you could have? The cool thing is you get to make them up. You make up the milestones. The first sale is an obvious one. First sale is, an obvious milestone, right?But so is hitting any prize level. 3 sales, 5 sales, 10 sales, 25 sales, a hundred sales, a hundred thousand dollars in sales, $10,000 in commissions, $1,000 in commissions. All of these are milestones. You’re the number one affiliate. You’re the number 10 affiliate.You had your best month ever. You had your highest converting month ever. You sent your most leads ever, your most sales ever. You had the most webinar registrations. Like, all of these are milestones.But when they hit them, celebrate them. Even if you don’t have a public leaderboard, celebrate with the affiliate privately to tell them you are our number one affiliate this month. Congratulations. Great job. Hey.

This was your best month ever. You had your most sales ever, your most leads ever, your most whatever ever. You know, celebrate those milestones. Be on the lookout for them. Make them up.Best week ever, highest converting. Like, it doesn’t even have to be end of month. You could be halfway through the month. Just message them and say you’re on track for your best month ever. Like if their best month ever.I’m just going to use even numbers here. $10,000 and it’s the 15th and they’re at 5,600. They are on track for their best month ever. Let them know it’ll drive them to push even harder in the second half of the month. So find those opportunities to celebrate with them.Number 14, train them. You got to train them. Kind of goes back to what I said. Provide feedback, right? Provide feedback, but train your affiliates, give them tips and strategies to work with.

Now you can do this on a public level, on a broad level, which I highly recommend you. I mean go check out our sample affiliate trainings. If you go to mattmcwilliams. com affiliate training, I, will put that in the show notes for you. We’ve got an example of a nearly two hour training that we did for affiliates of one of our clients.We also give you, we got the slides and the worksheets that we include. So I mean like we basically give you how to do this training so you can go train your affiliates. But that’s a public one and that certainly helps because think about if you do a big public training, what are we doing? We’re number one, we’re making it fun because we have fun on those. We’re fostering a sense of community because they’re going to connect with each other.

We’re providing feedback, we’re sharing success stories, you know, all these things, we’re doing all the things we’ve talked about before. But if we do it privately as well, one on one with them, coaching them and helping them, it goes a long way to developing a great relationship. Our last two here shared 14 so far. Our last two number 15. Keep good notes so you can recall those previous conversations.Now again, this goes back to so many of the things that we’ve talked about, right? If we take it, get to know them, take it past that affiliate manager, affiliate relationship, all these things, but keep good notes on them. Now I’m old school, we have a CRM. I don’t use it enough. Now with us running an agency now it becomes important because I’m not the only one having the conversations.

And so we might have Jason on our team talking to Jim one day and then a week later Jennifer’s talking to him and then you got Kate and then Kevin’s emailing with them and Robbie’s in the background working on something like. And they’re all interacting, they’re interacting with different team members on Jim’s team as well. And then I come in and I don’t remember anything they’ve ever said. Cause I don’t know that’s where CRM is handy. But old school.I keep a notebook and I can flip to a page and be like, boom. my notes with so and so. And I can go through those before a call and I can go through those before I email them, before I reach out. And a great example of that is I sent an introduction email. I was introducing a potential affiliate to a client.

This is one of those. It’s a big affiliate, huge affiliate. And rather than just say to this affiliate, we’ll call him Ted. Rather than say, ted, I really think you should promote my client. You know, and I don’t usually say it like that, but you get the idea.I said, hey, can I introduce you to my client? Here’s what he’s doing. And I think you guys will really hit it off. And I want them to connect entrepreneur to entrepreneur. That will transcend that relationship.Even though I’ve got a great relationship with this affiliate, I want them to connect. Because if they connect and hit it off, my part’s easy. Well, because I remembered something about that affiliate, I was able to include it in and I have this in my notes, but I was able to include it in the introduction email and make both of them laugh. So I start their relationship off with good vibes. They’re both laughing, so keep those good notes.

If I didn’t have those notes, I wouldn’t have remembered that. I wouldn’t have remembered to include that. So however you keep notes, CRM spreadsheet, Google Doc written down, post it notes, I don’t really care, but some way that’s easier for you to keep track of. And then last but not least, there’s no number one key here, but the number 16 key to building those strong relationships with your affiliates is to be proactive. You have to be proactive in the relationship.You know, everything we talked about, right? Connecting with them on social media, you should be the one to connect. Being authentic. You should be the one. Like be authentic, right?

You proactively foster that sense of community. You invite them to your headquarters or wherever. You reach out when you’re attending a conference. You provide them feedback. You share the success stories, you celebrate the milestones, you reach out to train them.You, you keep the good notes. If you notice that they are slipping, their performance is down. Reach out if you notice a drop in conversions, as I said, reach out. A, drop in sales, Reach out. Increase in sales, reach out.Be proactive don’t just be responsive to your affiliates. Anybody can be responsive. Take someone with skill and tenacity and drive to be proactive. So be proactive. Look for those opportunities.

So to recap. Well, first of all, I would love if you would share your biggest takeaway. Which one of these things can you do? All 16? Yeah.Which one are you going to do first? Which one are you going to do first? I would love if you’d text me your biggest takeaway or what you’re going to do first. Shoot me a text anytime. 260-217-4619, area code 260-217-4619.Which is taking it past that affiliate manager, affiliate relationship. Being friends and showing genuine interest, Communicating regularly, making it fun, making your affiliate program fun, being authentic, connecting with them on social media and commenting and cheering them on and engaging with them, fostering a sense of community, meeting them in person, sending them a gift. Be responsive, be fast with your response. Listening to feedback and providing feedback. 10 and 11 there, sharing a success story or stories, celebrating milestones, training them, keeping good notes, and then 16th, being proactive.

Which of those are you going to do right now? You’re, going to make a commitment in the next 72 hours? I am going to do one of those. Doesn’t matter which one it is, whatever one it is. Focus on that for a few weeks, then you can add a new one.So again, I’d love to hear your biggest takeaway. Just text me at area code 260-217-4619 and let me know what your biggest takeaway was or which one of those you’re going to do right away. I’ve got links to everything I mentioned in the show notes, our recommended books, the affiliate sample, affiliate training, where again, you can get a, training that we did for one of our clients and see how we do them. We’ll also give you the slides. You don’t even have to create the slides.

We’ll give them to you. You might want to edit them a little bit, maybe fit your brand colors and stuff like that. But to take you a few minutes and you can have the slides done, we’ll give you the worksheets we give to the affiliates and everything in that. So go grab those. Those links are in the show notes and make sure you hit subscribe because in the next episode I’m going to talk about how to promote an evergreen offer in just one week.So an evergreen affiliate offer, just one week. You got one week to promote it and we’re going to talk about how to do do that next week, so make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. I’ll see you then. Thank you so much for listening today. Remember to check out all of our deep dives into affiliate marketing at the Affiliateguide TV.And if you have a question, ask [email protected] who knows, maybe you even be featured on an upcoming episode. And lastly, if you haven’t yet, make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you’re listening to this episode.

The post How to Create Affiliate Relationships That Last appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.