MBA2386 Guest Teacher - Matt McWilliams - How to Start and Scale an Affiliate Program

0:09Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show, powerful business lessons you can count on. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. I'm also the co-founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started back in 2014. And today we have a great guest teacher lesson. Matt McWilliams is here on the show to show you how to start and scale an affiliate program. Those who are in the know know Matt McWilliams. He's worked with some big brands and people in the industry. from Brian Tracy to Lewis House to Tony Robbins to Kevin Harrington from Shark Tank. The list goes on and on. And he's here today to show you how to get started with building your own affiliate program to promote your business.

0:53If you've never thought about creating your own affiliate program, well, you're probably going to be convinced by the end of this episode. You're also going to know exactly how to get started and get the ball rolling. And what are the most important things to consider when you are creating your affiliate program? So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Seriously, if you haven't seen any of Matt McWilliams' work or just are learning about him right now, check him out at mattmcwilliams.com. There's a ton of great resources over there, and he's got this great freebie, a great report that goes with today's lesson.

1:25So you may want to download that right now or make sure you do so if you're driving. It's mattmcwilliams.com slash Omar. I'm going to pass it on to Matt McWilliams now. He's going to walk you through why you need an affiliate program, where to find affiliates, how to reach out to affiliates, and how to motivate them to keep them active. I'll be back to wrap up today's episode and give my takeaways, but for now, take it away, Matt. What's up? This is the affiliate guy, Matt McWilliams, and I am super stoked to share with you today how you can start and scale your own affiliate program to bring you more traffic, more leads, and more sales.

2:00Now, I'm going to share exactly how I built a million dollar a month affiliate program in less than 18 months and have helped our clients like Michael Hyatt and Ray Edwards, Ryan Levesque, Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi and others to scale their affiliate programs. Now, first off, why do you need an affiliate program? And there's all these other forms of advertising, but there's four major advantages compared to all those other forms of advertising. The first is you make money before you spend it. You only pay for performance. That's nice when you're starting out and maybe don't have a ton of money to go spend money without making anything.

2:38The second big advantage is there's no guessing at targeting. You don't have to worry about targeting and demographics and psychographics and all this stuff, who to market to. Your affiliates do it for you. The third big advantage is there's no other form of advertising that brings in warm prospects quite like affiliates. If you think about it, your affiliates act as a third party referral. So they say nice things about you before sending them to your site. The prospects are already warmed up. And that's why no other form of advertising converts clicks into leads and leads into sales as highly as affiliate traffic does.

3:14And lastly, success leads to more success. When you have success with one affiliate, it often leads to other affiliates coming on board. They see what these other affiliates are promoting. They follow people in their niche and they want to join too. Affiliates talk to each other. And so when one affiliate's making money from your product, others will want to join your program as well. So you have four major advantages. Now we have a short time together here. And what are the first three things that you need to focus on to start and scale an affiliate program? Well, the three things that you need to focus on at first are number one, where do you find affiliates?

3:54Number two, how do you reach out to them? And then number three, how do you motivate them and keep them active for the longterm? So let's start with how to find affiliates. Many places to find affiliates. We're going to talk about a few here that are going to move the needle the most. And the first one is just start with who you know. You know, most of you aren't where I was when I started. I didn't know anybody. I had no connections, no credentials whatsoever, you probably know someone who would make a good affiliate partner. Do you know at least one person who could be a good partner? Start with them.

4:28Now I'm going to talk about the, but I don't know any one part in the moment, but this group of people here, these are the folks that are going to promote you because it's you, because they know you, they like you and they trust you. And you always want to start with these people because they're going to give you the most grace. The reality is when you start a new affiliate program or anything, new for that matter. Things are going to go wrong. You're going to have issues. Tech's going to break and these people, they don't care about all that. They're going to promote you because it's you. The second thing is you should watch other affiliate programs.

5:00We'll talk about this in the motivation section, but most programs publish leaderboards of their top affiliates. And we'll talk about why and why those work and how to use those in a little bit, but they're literally giving you a list of their top affiliates. So watch other affiliate programs, sign up for other affiliate programs, and you can get their affiliates. And then the third way I want to share with you is this website called Google. You might've heard of it, but literally you're going to look up your competition. If you've got a book coming out, look up similar books. Amazon tells you what they are.

5:36If you've got a product, look up similar products and look up and see who are the affiliates promoting them. You find those affiliates. You just Google them and you look up those affiliates. And then we're going to talk a little bit about how do we reach out to them. But Google is a great place because you can find the affiliates of your competitors and similar programs. So those are just three of the places to find great affiliates. Now I actually put together a full report with 15 places to find affiliates and get your first 100 affiliates. It's called your first 100 affiliates and you can get it at mattmcwilliams.com forward slash Omar.

6:19So just go to mattmcwilliams.com forward slash O-M-A-R and you can grab that report there. All right. And that'll go through all the places where you can find affiliates. There's some really cool stuff in there and some templates and all kinds of good stuff. Okay. So how do we reach out? Well, there's two keys when you're reaching out to affiliates. The first one is you've got to use various methods to reach out. You cannot just rely on just social media or just email or just whatever. Like we always start with email because it's free and it's easy. It's easy to send out a hundred emails from a spreadsheet using a tool like Gmass or other mail merge tools.

6:55Then we'll go to social media because it's also free and text. But eventually we'll go to physical mail sometimes. But use various methods. If they hang out a lot on Instagram, probably won't do any good to shoot them a DM on Facebook and vice versa. So you need to know those things. But you can try all of them. Try the different social channels. Try email. Try physical mail. And when you do, this is the second key. When you do reach out, keep your initial contact short. When you're sending an email, we call it the five sentence rule. As a client of ours, you are not allowed to send more than five sentences in that first email.

7:35It should be one swipe up on a phone. That's how long this email should be. Your goal, this sounds counterintuitive, is not to get a yes response from that first email. I've been doing this for 18 years. At first, I tried to get a yes response. That was a big mistake. I know this sounds weird, but your goal is not to share everything with them about your product or your program. I mean, if you think about it from your standpoint, when you get a long email from somebody you don't know with a bunch of links and a bunch of information, what do you do with that email? You delete it. So keep this first email short, five sentences max.

8:16Your goal is simply to inspire enough curiosity that they write back with three simple words. Tell me more. Those are the three sweetest words you can read or hear because that starts a conversation. And when they write back and say, tell me more, now you can write them up eight to 10 sentence email with details on the commission, details on the product. But that initial email should be super short and sweet. And if you go to mattmcwilliams.com forward slash Omar, as I mentioned in that report, I've also included some templates you can use to reach out to affiliates. So I won't go into like reading different emails that work here.

8:56All right, so we've talked about how to find them, how to reach out to them. Once we get them, they say yes. How do we motivate them and how do we keep them active? Well, this is a multi-hour podcast in and of itself. It's a big reason why people like Tony Robbins and Michael Hyatt, Ryan Levesque, Stu McLaren, Adidas, Shutterfly, Jeff Walker, and others have hired us to run their programs or coach their teams. But I want to give you a few of the best ways to motivate your affiliates. All right. These are proven time tested ways that work in every single niche that we've ever worked in. And the first one is co-branding.

9:34Just adding a little something extra to the landing page specifically for the affiliate. If it's a webinar, making sure the affiliates on the webinar that you maybe do it in their colors, taking a moment to add a logo and some text, altering the colors if possible, usually doesn't take long. And it is virtually guaranteed to motivate the affiliate more and increase conversions. You know, having custom promotional graphics, taking a moment to create some graphics that are on brand with them. Again, not only does it increase conversions because they're landing on a page that looks like something they're familiar with, which means more sales, but it increases the likelihood they will share and how often they share because they're impressed and they want to share stuff that's on brand with their brand.

10:23The second way to motivate affiliates and increase their sales and to keep them promoting long-term is targeted commission increases and bonuses. So very specific offers for them. And let me give you one tip here to kind of get your juices flowing. once you get an affiliate, if you notice that their sales are down from last year or quarter over quarter, let's say for example, that in 2022, they had a hundred sales in Q3. And this year they only had 50 sales in Q3. And last year in Q4, they also had a hundred sales. What I'm going to do is I'm going to reach out to them in late September, early October and say, hey, if you hit 100 sales last year, you hit 100 sales.

11:15If you hit 100 sales this quarter or beat it, I should say, if you beat it by one, we're going to give you a big bonus and whatever. That number might be tens of thousands of dollars if you can afford it. And it makes financial sense. But that's a targeted commission increase or a bonus for that specific affiliate. it. The next way that absolutely motivates them is an affiliate community, a Facebook group or some other, you know, sort of community. Now this works for a few reasons. Number one, it can introduce competition, which we'll talk about when we talk about leaderboards in a moment, which works in most niches, but also community.

11:50You have affiliates sharing what works and encouraging each other and sharing success stories and motivating each other. It becomes a a communication outlet, but it also becomes about the community and they're part of a bigger mission. And that's motivating for affiliates. And the last one that definitely works 100 % of the time, and I've sort of touched on this issue multiple times, is affiliate leaderboards. At their core, these are a form of psychological persuasion. They encourage people to aim higher and achieve more and fight it out and be competitive. They're fun, they're engaging, and they produce more sales.

12:27They're aspirational and they're inspirational. You know, no matter where you find yourself on the leaderboard, they're inspiring. If you're at the top, you're excited. You celebrate, then you double down to secure your spot. If you're in 30th, you want to move up. So that's aspirational. Even if you're not on the leaderboard at all, seeing others can inspire you to aim higher. The other reason they work is that people love the sight of their name. You know, one of the greatest books of all time, and you've probably heard many people mention it on this show is How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

12:57And he talks about how there's no more lovely sight in the world than that of our own name. And people love seeing their name. And when you put their name on that leaderboard, they're encouraged. Thirdly, it fosters competition. You know, as much as we like seeing our own name and as much as we can be inspired by seeing others in the leaderboard, no one likes to lose. No one. And no matter where I'm at on a leaderboard, I want to be higher. I want the bigger prize. I want to beat so-and-so. I want bragging rights. Now, I don't have time today to get into all the best practices and the logistics of leaderboards.

13:30So I'm going to point you to a post I wrote called how to use affiliate leaderboards to skyrocket your sales. You can see that at mattmcwilliams.com forward slash leaderboards. And the last one I want to point out here is just a personal ask, a DM or a text or even a personal email asking your affiliates to promote. Not a corporate form letter, but a personal message. And this can incorporate some of the other aspects we talked about, like a personal bonus or a personal commission increase. It could be a co-branding, some sort of a special promo or event-based promo. These are all ways to motivate your affiliates more.

14:08So you've learned about why starting an affiliate program is the best way to grow your sales and how to do it. You've learned about how to find affiliates and get them to say yes and how to motivate them long-term. You've learned all of that today. Now, again, we've only had a few minutes today. So if you've got any questions, feel free to text me anytime at 260-217-4619. You can also use that number to share your biggest takeaway, share what you're doing with what you've learned in this episode and how you're implementing it. I would love to hear from you. This is the affiliate guy, Matt McWilliams.

14:41And again, I encourage you to learn how to get your first or next 100 affiliates at mattmcwilliams.com forward slash Omar. Thanks so much for listening. Now back to Omar. Thank you, Matt, for that great episode, that great lesson. Again, guys, don't forget to pick up that resource that he shared that goes along with today's lesson, mattmcwilliams.com slash Omar. Much of what Matt shared today is just right on the money. It's exactly what I experienced throughout my own career using affiliate programs to promote our businesses. What I have found is that you might get hundreds of affiliates signing up for your program, But most of the time, it's usually about eight to 10 people that really move all the sales.

15:22So you want to really treat these people well because they're really the ones who are really moving the needle and helping you grow. Whether that's getting on a call with them every quarter, incentivizing them, taking their family out to dinner, whatever it might be. These people are your top salespeople. These are the people that are actually your biggest advocates, your biggest cheerleaders, the ones that are really pushing the sales. And they should be rewarded for that. Obviously, you want to do it within your own budget. Any kind of thank you or any kind of incentive works. Even if you don't have the money, a thank you card or email goes a long way.

15:53A video message saying how much you appreciate their efforts goes a long way. Thanks so much for listening to The$100 MBA Show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe, hit follow so you don't miss an episode. It's also the best way to say thank you. If you've received any great value from this episode, from this podcast in general, hitting subscriber follow is a great way to show the algorithm, hey, this show's all right. Thank you in advance for doing that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. No one builds a business alone, okay? You're going to need the help of other people to spread the word, to be your advocates.

16:28You can't be the only one saying that my product, my service is the best thing in the world. You need other people to say that. And affiliate marketing is a great option to get people to do that and incentivize them without any out-of-pocket expense. It's like having a sales team without having to put them on salary, contracts, hours, all that kind of stuff. No, they're going to do all the legwork for you. It's a great option, especially if you're an online business. But even if you're an offline business, you can still get them to do this whole thing online, sharing things, sharing coupon codes, signups.

16:59I know that my local gym does this all the time. If I refer somebody, I get a free month and a free water bottle, whatever it is. The point here is that even though they're a brick and mortar business, they're using these strategies to grow their business. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you on Q &A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care.