Frank is looking at you product owners – for this show he single-handedly breaks down the blueprint for creating badass offers for real estate investors that ALSO attract affiliates.
Bottom line is: if it is a high-converting offer, affiliates will flock. Period. Every bullet in this episode not only outlines how to attract affiliates, but how to attract buyers.
It’s a win-win-win: customer wins, affiliate wins, and you win.
Have questions/comments/concerns? Email us at support@theaffiliateincubator.com
- 3 Key Components Of Attractive Offers: There are exceptions…if you’re creative 00:55
- #1 – Education: Lower your price, or get unique 1:40
- Butter ‘em Up: Ascend your lower ticket buyers into your upsell funnel 4:17
- Ain’t About The Cha-ching: Talking money back guarantees and refunds – choose your battles, bad reviews aren’t worth saving one person’s money. 5:13
- What’s In A Name?: Everything. Find your hook and name your product intelligently 6:58
- #2 – Software: Supercharge your offer portfolio with a complementary software 9:37
- Keep It Cohesive: White label softwares and skip the black hole tech stack 11:06
- “YO YO YO…What is this payment?!”: Be thoughtful when pricing your software offers, and nix the fine print 13:28
- Date On Your Level: Know your target avatar – if you have a sophisticated audience, reflect that in your offerings 16:51
- #3 The Illusion Of Work: Breaking down the third component of “Done-For-You” 18:38
Episode Resources
Music Credits
Tangerine Dreams by Animal Behaviour
Check out Animal Behaviour on Spotify
Transcription
Welcome to the affiliate mastery podcast. A show about making money online and mastering the affiliate game. Your host Frank Chen.
All right, what is going on everybody? Welcome to another episode of the Affiliate mastery Podcast. I’ll be your host today. Frank Chen. I do not have Alex with me today, she’s actually working on another project for us, which is going to be one of our campaigns intake our new leads. And of course I wish she was here, but I have her working on something very, very important that it we’re excited to bring to you, but today’s topic:
We’re gonna be talking about something pretty important and probably one of the most asked questions that we get as well, which is creating offers specifically for real estate investors that also attract affiliates. Okay. Now we’re gonna explain really the key component to a successful real estate offer and really kind of what it boils down to is three buckets:
You’ve got the education bucket, then you have some type of software component. And then the third thing is some type of “done for you.” A bolt-on . Now understand that there are products in our space that don’t have all three or even two of these, and they sell very well. It doesn’t mean you have to have these, but if you really are coming to the space brand new, these are just kind of the tips.
I have that are things that you should be paying attention to or things you could potentially add just to help improve on the conversion side of things cause understand: improving conversions ultimately attracts affiliates. So let’s go ahead and dive right on in. The first thing that I want to talk to you guys about is the education.
Typically, for most people , when they start in this space, it’s probably the easiest point to create education, right? Create a bunch of modules, then , include a bunch of your documents and scripts, and then you can slap a pretty product image on there, and then you can start selling it.
If you are in a very unique niche or niche or niche, however you want to say it, like STRs, () (which is short-term rentals), specialty needs, housing, residential assisted living, self storage, multifamily- pretty much the outliers of the average investor. Most people are coming into the space. ” I want to know how to do wholesaling, reverse wholesaling, how do I make money as quick as possible?” Anything that requires work like fix and flipping, is going to be of a little bit less interest because of the extra work component. But if you’re in a very unique niche, then you can actually offer your pricing at around $797 to $997, and sell at this price all day without those other two components like software and done for you.
Now, typically if you have a unique product like this and you do have those other two components, then you start teetering into the $1,497, the $1,997, and even sometimes $2,497. I know in my job, I’ve never seen anything really go past $3,000 that didn’t require a sales floor or some type of phone conversation to close that person.
But again, as you grow in price point, you need to start adding more things into it, to kind of bulk it up a bit. Now, if you happen to be in the more common spaces like wholesaling or REOs which is known as bank owned properties, now you’re dealing with a lot more competition, right. So you have to figure out little things you can do to stand above others -unless your strategy is very unique, meaning you do wholesaling in a completely different way, like how you find your leads or how you outreach or what you send out to them. Maybe I set out a pink letter instead of a yellow letter, like whatever your uniqueness is. The most important thing is that very few others either, know about it, or are doing it in your market. And maybe if it’s applicable nationwide, then you have to consider changing a few things.
Again, if you’re very unique and doing something very different and have a very cool hook, then you could potentially sell it at the higher price point without those three key components: education, software, and “done for you.”
Now, if you don’t, you’re just a run of the mill, “hey, I just work hard, I send out a lot of direct mail, I just do what everybody does, but what I do doesn’t work,” then you should consider lowering your price point just to have a lower barrier of entry, and so you can call your corner of your market, essentially. So a good price that I typically like to mess around with for that is $297 to $497. These have always been very strong entry level price points.
Understand , that’s just a starting point. And since again, everyone is selling at the $997, yours stands out. Now you can even use lower price points as a launching pad into your ascension model, right? A $297 buyer or a $97 buyer is a qualified buyer.
These are usually serious people who are investing in their future and by really focusing on the indoctrination, building in culture, you could actually ascend them to your higher ticketed coaching programs, masterminds, maybe have other softwares and things at a higher price point you just simply can’t include, at those lower price points.
Again, you’re qualifying the buyer at a lower price point, and then you can actually craft a more sophisticated upsell model that gets them into your higher ticket offers.
If you want to raise your prices, usually you have to include the two other buckets, which is software or some DFY component- or, it can also include some type of unique money back guarantee. All I say here is just don’t over promise .
Our standard money-back guarantee is 30 day money back guarantee. I don’t really see going less than that. I know a lot of people out here will be well, “what if they download my program or what they buy and all these things, and they return?
My question for you is if someone is really going to want to refund and you deny them that refund, they typically are going to go out there and leave a bad review about you. It’s not really not worth keeping their money in order to keep someone happy. Right? We’re doing a volume style business.
We’re going to have people are unhappy. We spend a lot of our attention on those people. One, we’re not going to get a lot done. And two, it’s just going to create a lot of backlog and headache for your support team. Right? So just make it easy, 30 days. And then focus on how you can really support your clients and reduce your refund rates by really just creating a lot of value.
Okay. So, sorry, we were on a little bit of a tangent there, but you can do 30 days, I’ve seen as far as 90 days, even at the level of 12 month guarantee. I had a client before that was the king of guarantees. He had like eight different guarantees. You know, “you do a deal with me, you get your money back or you submit a deal to us, if it goes to closing you, get your money back” or “Hey, submit a deal to us, we’ll send you 20% of the proceeds as we do all the work and collect 80%.”
The most important thing here is if you’re actually giving their money back, always have an opportunity where they’re still in your system to continue to be a part of your ecosystem, you know, buy your other products or upsells and things like that.
Again, the money back guarantee is just an extra incentive for someone to remove the risk off the table. So you can get pretty creative with this. Again, the most important thing here is just don’t over promise.
The last thing that I want to cover here is -so many people think this may not be as important- but I believe this is very, very important: the naming of your product.
For example purposes: wholesaling. You’re not going to be like, “Frank’s Wholesaling Program” or “Frank’s one of a kind Wholesaling Program”. You have to identify what your hook is. This is not something that you’re just going to be drinking coffee and come up with an idea. Really sit down and start brainstorming and start writing down. What is my product and what isn’t my product? What you’re going to figure out, you’re going to whittle this down into a few taglines. It doesn’t really need to be a long-winded name.
Just to give you guys an example, someone in our space has a product called The Real Estate Trifecta.” It has the three components: the education, the software, and then they offer funding. So it’s pretty much the three components that you need to do a deal from start to finish, but it’s unique name… trifecta, okay, it has to be three things. What are the three things? It’s the only three things you need.
Another person did an offer like “Buyers “On Fire,” but really what the program is, is how do you create a buying frenzy around the product, around the real estate that you post up for sale. You start creating a buyers list, you create the interest there, you go out there and you find your buyers, and then you go out there and you find your deals that your buyers already want.
And that’s how you create a frenzy. It’s called “Buyers On Fire” it’s like, “oh, cool, I get it!” So start thinking along those lines, and obviously if you guys ever need help with this, you can feel free to reach out to my business. We love crafting new ideas and hooks and things like that. The best part about that is it’s all in your program, your product, your education already, you just got to sit down and really kind of brainstorm it.
Crowdsource the idea. Run it by your team, run it through your networks, your masterminds, people in the business that are with you. Say “hey, does this name make sense or does it confuse you or is it just completely off base?” Just start playing around with it, don’t go with the very first idea that comes to mind.
Then the secondary thing is following that specific tagline or headline, a one to two sentence description of what it’s going to do: it’s going to give you back 10 hours a day, it’s going to add an extra one to two deals per month to your business, it’s going to eliminate the headaches that typical investors deal with, how you’re going to eliminate all your marketing costs in the next 60 days.
It’s just really benefit driven as a description or tagline to your headline. Okay. So the naming of your product is really important for your education, because pretty much everything is going to be derived from that. Your marketing, your landing pages, your webinar, your presentation; everything’s going to come from that. Definitely spend a lot more time on naming your product and that’ll really help you in designing your education.
Now let’s go ahead and dive into bucket number two, which happens to be software.
I’m going to speak first to those who came out with education and now you’re coming to thinking, “well, I don’t have a software component and I think I want one, but I don’t know what I should get. So what software compliments your offer? Is it a deal finding software? Is it an offer generator?
Does that make it easier for your students to get deals or contracts out and contracts in? Do you have a software that helps people do follow up, lead intake, disposition of deals? We call this like a CRM, which is a customer relationship or management system, right?
It keeps track of all of your leads that are coming in organizing, has tags, notes, and just informs you and your team of where each person is within your funnels. There are a lot of cool softwares out there that really can help migrate, you know, intake leads, move them along this buying process, or an indoctrination process, or a warmup process, and it’s all done for you.
Or maybe it’s a marketing style software where it automatically auto-populates your direct mail ,organizes your addresses, puts it into a very organized format that you can just immediately copy and paste, send it over, or attach it and send it to your mailing house and they’re ready to go.
But basically, what is it that’s going to make your offer more attractive and then eliminate the certain things that require work or a lot of time to do. That’s typically how I advise people to get started with determining finding a software.
The next thing you need to consider once you’ve found that software is: does it make sense to white label it? What I mean by that is you can take another person’s software, purchase a license for it, or work out a special deal, maybe allow you to call it something else on the front facing side, but it’s really this core software that belongs to someone else. You can call it your own, and they’re cool with that because you have a deal that you’ve worked out on the back end, right? That way it kind of is more cohesive with your branding and that way you don’t have to go through the school of hard knocks and spend tens of thousands of dollars and create your own software and test it. Let’s just say there’s a lot of work that goes into that and it can cost a pretty penny, without the right team in place.
The key to this guys is really understanding, do I want to do white labeling or should I create strategic partnership? That creates a win-win for the software as a software owner, as well as my students, as well as myself.
Right? Win, win, win I should say. You can set up in multiple ways. You can get paid for a flat fee every time you send the software person a new buyer. You can do a percentage on the continuity. So again, you just have to have starting to have these conversations and see what makes sense.
Again, we’re doing a volume business, so you need to start thinking bigger picture, right? How can we work out a deal if I’m sending you 50 new buyers a month, a hundred new buyers a month? It can open up a lot more fruitful conversations by approach that way versus like one-offs.
My main advice here is if you’re not already in the software game, save yourself the time and find someone who already is. Talk to them about what your product does, why you think their software is going to be a good fit. And then what’s the best way we can kind of integrate your product. Is it on the front end, at the initial sale?
Or do we introduce them as an upsell to your offer and have it as a standalone product where they buy through your funnel, then you just pay me like an affiliate would or do they buy on the front end, then I pay you cuz I worked in your pricing into my pricing? So again, you just got to start having these conversations, understanding your numbers and knowing how much room you have to wiggle around.
Now, as I said before, it can cost you tens of thousands of dollars to develop. Plus all the testing and the breaking and all that , the alpha and the beta testing. This could be a huge time suck and if you’re wanting to get this started as soon as possible, you want to start making some money with affiliates, and you want to avoid the tech stack black hole, then start looking for those types of partnerships.
For my software owners, the number one thing you’ve got to consider when you’re looking for affiliates, or kind of figuring out “how do I price my offer where I can still take care of my staff, but still make it a little bit, create enough incentive for an affiliate” is figure out the max and minimum that you’re willing to pay affiliates for that buyer referral.
You can either do it as a one-time flat fee. “Hey, I’ll give you a hundred percent of the first month or a hundred percent of the first three months.” However you want to do it. Or, a percentage of the ongoing continuity. In our space, depending on the price point, it can range between 10 to 25%, even on a hundred dollar per month style continuity, 25% of that.
So 25 go to the affiliate, then hopefully the remaining amount is enough for you to cover any hard costs that you have . The most important thing is understanding what are your hard costs and what can you afford to give away. Typically for pricing , what we see to be very attractive, or digestible for the average buyer, as well as for the affiliate, is anywhere between $47 to $197 per month. That’s already kind of stretching it on the high end. . Now there are of course softwares out there that are around $297 to $500 a month. and of course, those are a little bit more robust, but those are harder to bolt on to existing offers because it’s a bigger pill to swallow after the initial sale.
What I mean by that is after a buyer spends money with you, the first 30 days, then their account gets hit again for $297 or $500. That’s going to show up on their credit card and hit their radar and be like, “yo, yo, yo… What is this payment?” Understand, not everybody is gonna be paying attention to the small print when it comes to, “Hey, your first 30 days are free, but you know, on 31, we’re going to auto bill your account.”
So the higher that number, the more potential customer service issues I can create, and most affiliates are aware of this. So they like to work with a little bit lower prices, more digestible for their buyers. Because a lot of the times when listeners or attendees are watching webinars that have any type of continuity style offer attached is, and you’re giving them 30 days for free, or the first 90 days for free is like, “oh, when is my billing going to be accounted?” Or like, “how much is the monthly?”
Not a lot of the times like, “Hey, you’re gonna get this really cool software” do they tell people how much the ongoing monthly is going to be. And if they do, it’s usually in the fine print. So again, if you’re on the higher price point side, usually maybe that’s best for an upsell funnel versus a bolt onto a product.
If I had a thousand dollar product and you had a $500 per month software; turning my product into a $1,500 product has the potential to hurt my conversions because now we’re testing at a different price point and it doesn’t necessarily mean that your software is going to allow me to sell more product.
Fingers crossed that’s what’s going to happen, but we don’t know until we test that. And the last thing I want to do as a product owner is hurt my conversions. Smaller price point means I can bolt it on, there’s a little bit more flexibility without me having to raise the price of my overall product and having to test something brand new.
I’m not saying that’s a bad idea. Sometimes that’ll work out really well in your favor, but I do believe it all comes down to where you’re going to position that software. Based on the price points.
Another thing that you need to understand as the software owner, depending on how sophisticated your software is, you got to identify the user. Meaning, is your software designed for the newbie? Someone who’s never done a deal before and they need help the basics in terms of, ” my software helps you create your landing pages” or, ” this one helps you create your intake forms” or whatever that may be. Or, is yours more sophisticated where “I’m doing a lot of deals and already have a marketing machine- does -your software help? Can I just plug my marketing machine into your software? How easy is it integrate with my existing processes?” And they start asking more sophisticated questions.
Identifying who that target buyer avatar is will help you determine who you need to be speaking to, to create this affiliate relationship. There are affiliates who cater to the newbies, and there are affiliates who cater to the more sophisticated buyer. Your time is going to be better well spent with the more sophisticated buyer your product just happens to be a sophisticated product. You’re going to just be spinning your wheels in the mud, talking to a lot of people who just aren’t going to get your product based on who you’re targeting.
So identify your buyer avatar, then go after the affiliates where this software best fits their audience. Usual advice for clients is again, to identify their buyer avatar. Then you’re going to find the affiliates that have that avatar and does not have I have a service or software like you do, or that piece of software, and that way it’s a perfect compliment to what they’re doing. They don’t see it as a competition to what they’re doing. Really just gets your foot in the door.
Then the next thing is you talk about pricing. So figure out where that compliment is. Lead in with that, with your conversations with affiliates, and then you guys can start talking about pricing.
So that’s what I have for the software section. The third and final bucket that I want to talk about is the service component or what we call the D F Y done for you. Now, this could be a wide array of things, so to simplify this, or maybe to oversimplify this, is basically, what can you include that gets rid of the illusion of work, right?
If I have to go out there and knock on doors or cold call- that feels like work. If I have to do research and analyze numbers and use my own spreadsheets, that feels like work. So what can I include that eliminates that feeling of work? I’m gonna go ahead and list off a few things just to give you guys some ideas.
Take VA services. You have ones that are here, you have ones that are overseas. There’s some variability there. We’re not gonna get into that, but a VA source that does cold calling for your clients; so maybe your product is all about prospecting new leads. You show them how to do all these things, but then now you have a service that shows ” Hey, I have a service that’ll help do this for you.” ” Cool! I don’t have to do that work. Great.”
Your copy and paste marketing templates and campaigns: your education teaches them “here’s all the things that are working, or you can just plug into our proven marketing templates, these are what we use in our business, you can just copy and paste, attach, and use, or have campaigns that are designed for instance once a lead opts into your landing page. You’re like, “Hey, if you’d like to get more information about how our deals for sale, you know, put your information here.” and then there’s a campaign that kind of walks them through a process.
Well, the average person would have to figure that out on their own. “Well, what do I do once they give me their email? what’s the next step? What’s the quickest way to get them on the phone with my team or myself?” By giving them a campaign, “all you got to do is use this software, plug and play the campaign that I’m going to give you in my program and you’re off to the races. Just connect these two softwares, follow this plan, you’re good to go.” We eliminated that potential obstacle for them.
Done for you websites. That used to be huge, right? We were kind of going into this 10 years ago. Most people didn’t really know how to create their websites.
There weren’t a lot of softwares at the time that were drag and drop simple. They’re pretty much everywhere now. So that’s a simple add into your program and just partner with whomever you use or believe is the easiest software to design front end funnels that just create a training on how to set that up, or just have one that has templates already set up. They can just plug it in and they just connect it to their hosting company and they’re off to the races.
Other things you can also do are softwares that create offers at the push of a button, meaning all in one system, you know, it’s attached to the MLS or a deal finding software.
It pulls the data, populates into a contract or populates to a first look offer, and you push a button and it automatically sends a direct mail to that person. All done through just a push of the button. That’s very helpful, right? Because each of these components takes time researching , then pulling all the numbers and doing some calculations takes time, and putting it into an offer takes time, then submitting that offer takes time.
So if you can create a seamless process that eliminates a lot of work. And the other thing is , softwares that organize your direct mail addresses. So a lot of times when you’re doing direct mail, you have to download a list and then you got to clean the list and then you have to organize it, it is called “mail merging,” like addresses, names, all that across a huge database- because you’re putting out 500 or a thousand letters and everything needs to match. Well, that’s typically a pretty manual process.
You can even pay someone like a VA or there are services where you could pay individuals who do this for a living and they’ll do it for you. Or you have software that can do it all for you just with certain data points.
So I mentioned two things there actually, which is the done for you software or hiring someone just to do it for them.
So another thing too that’s kind of on the rise is sending a service your dead leads. If you’re a wholesaler, you’re only going to be working with maybe 5% of your direct mail, -maybe if you’re lucky 10, but mostly five- but the other 90% of your leads… What happens to them? So there are services out there where you can make it attractive for your people.
“Hey, send us your dead leads, we’ll clean it up for you. We’ll send it to our team and warm up these leads for you, and then send you back the qualified ones that you potentially missed. That’s a great service, a done for you thing that gives me extra value on every marketing dollar I’ve spent as your student, as an investor. It’s a cool little thing.
So these are just some samples for you, but think of anything that requires a manual process, where I have to spend time, energy, brain power and effort. Is there any component of that that you can do for your buyers eliminating the time and work that’s needed?
Other than you don’t want to over promise and stress your team to where it just feels like you’re taking on that amount of work; but systemizing that process for yourself as well for your buyers.
Even having a network of sellers or buyers or a funding solution to where they don’t have to go and find their buyer, they could just tap into your network.
That’s considered a done for you service. “Hey, I’ve already done the workload. You can go out there and put up bandit signs,” or “I’ve already done this. I do this at a massive level at a national level, I have tens of thousands of leads. You can just use my database,” or “use my buyers database, or “I have the funds and you can do transactional funding with me,” or “I have a hard money lender partner that you can reach out to.”
So this helps you. Each of these things helps you eliminate the objections for your buyers. Now, the more objections that you eliminate, the greater likelihood that they’re going to buy the product. And the more people that buy, the higher the conversions and the more interest that’s going to create with your affiliates.
I know we covered a lot of things today, but these are the key essential components you’re going to need to create a successful offer. As I said before, there are offers in our space that can sell without these three buckets, but that all comes down to the uniqueness of the offer. And of course the components that they include in their webinar, their presentation, or however they’re selling it.
Now, if you’re brand new to this space, I definitely think you should follow this guideline. Do some deep thinking on your offer. And of course, reach out to your network and see if there are anything that you’re missing or maybe advice on ways to strengthen your offer.
Always use us as a resource here at the affiliate incubator! We’re here to help people work their way into this market and really reach success without really hitting those landmines that the average person experiences when they’re creating a new product.
Hopefully I was able to give you guys some price points, some directions, as well as what’s working in our space. Hopefully you guys enjoyed our podcast today. That’s all I have for you. As I mentioned before, if you ever need more information or need help with your affiliates, feel free to reach out to theaffiliateincubator.com.
Follow us on our socials as we release new content like this, as well as touch up on ,each of these things we’ve talked about in more detail in other episodes.
Thank you guys again for tuning in. I look forward to talking to you guys next time. This is Frank Chen signing off and we’ll see you.
Bye, everybody.
