Believe it or not, you CAN forecast affiliate revenue – despite leaning heavily on other people on many levels – as long as you know what you’re working with. Oh, and you have a 30-60-90 day plan of course. Frank’s gotchu there with this episode.
All businesses are strapped for time and calendar bandwidth, focused on selling their OWN products. So how do we weave in affiliate promotions effectively to respect the balance AND plan for your own projections?
Have questions/comments/concerns? Email us at support@theaffiliateincubator.com
- BE REALISTIC: If you’re a small fish in a big ocean without a track record, you need to get real about your revenue goals 1:49
- Break It Down, Back It Up: Reverse engineer your numbers, do the math with your price point and the amount of units you need to sell to reach your goal 2:52
- Apples To Apples: Make sure any frame of reference you DO have is transferable as well. Be realistic about the differing scale your various streams have 5:17
- Ready To Forecast?: Get this granular: ow many units do you need to sell PER AFFILIATE to reach your goal? 6:32
- You’re Cruising: In your last 30 days, everything should be dialed in and it’s micro-adjustment time. REMEMBER – isolate one variable at a time. 10:11
- Don’t Knock The Small Guys: When it comes to actually scheduling, know that heavy hitters schedule out way in advance. Have a rotation of the smaller guys that are more available. 13:04
- Reciprocity Factor: Know your slots and bandwidth for cross-promoting, and save your spots for the top dogs. 14:16
- “Handshake”: These are gentleman’s agreements without contracts – so stay true to your word and nix those who don’t 15:33
- You Bet Your Butt…: Be transparent, know your track record..but if you’re wrong, take the L 16:47
- Don’t Play Dumb: If you CAN’T promote them back, what else can you do of equal value? Get creative 17:44
- Remove Obstacles: Dial in your onboarding with affiliates so they are equipped with EVERYTHING they need to make money with you 19:01
- Snooze You Lose: Batton down your processes and make it quick – or you’ll lose your spot 20:08
External 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.
What’s up everybody, your host today Frank Chen and welcome to another episode of The Affiliate Mastery Podcast.
Man oh man, am I excited to talk to you guys about our topic today! This is something that I help every one of my clients do every quarter, and really helps provide a very, very clear vision when it comes to monthly revenue that’s brought in from affiliates.
Our topic today is scheduling and forecasting affiliate monthly revenue. Everything we’re going to talk about today is really going to bring you closer to hitting your quarterly and your annual goals. We’re also going to show you guys how to maximize each affiliate promotion, and of course, how to scale your most important relationships.
Now, the underlying tone here that you guys need to understand is that everybody has a very limited amount of time, and a limited amount of promotion space on their calendar, because everybody I’m talking to has a list – but more importantly, they’re trying to sell their own products every month. So how do we weave in affiliate products? And how do we get our products to affiliate lists in a way that creates a balance across both of these opportunities, right? We can’t have only affiliates promote our offers 100% of the time for the rest of the year. I wish that’s how it was, but it’s not. So we have to be truly strategic and how we approach this, and we always do that with the end in mind.
Okay, so let’s go ahead and dive right on in: the very first thing that I want to talk to you guys about is my 30 – 60 – 90 day plan that really gets you through each and every quarter with a very clear vision and plan, okay, 30 – 60 – 90 days.
The very first thing that I ask any one of my clients to do is that you have to start with the end in mind. Okay, and I have to put a caveat here, which is you need to BE REALISTIC.
If you’re a small fish in a big ocean, you don’t have any affiliates promoting you, you have no stats on your offer and I ask you how many products do you want to sell this year – it’s not being a good businessman to say I want to sell a million, $2, $3 million in product that’s a pipe dream without any type of support there. I think realistically, I’d be happy if I sold this per month, we multiply that by 12 and see how realistic it is. Now if you have a performing product, you already know your annual numbers and you’re just trying to shoot for higher goals. Great. I love that vision.
Typically the price range – or I would say the revenue range – we typically see regardless of small or large is an annual goal of $500,000 to a million dollars in gross affiliate revenue. Okay, this is before fees, splits, sales floors, all that stuff, right? Just a direct, “how much did we generate total from core sales, service, coaching,” whatever it is that you’re selling, okay?
Most people say $500,000 up to a million dollars, which is a very, it’s a very high goal benchmark that most people want to hit is the $1 million mark, if you’re doing a million, you’re doing great.
Okay. So how we do this is we break this down into 12 months. If you’re doing a million dollars, that comes out to be about $883,333 for a 12 month period, and you have to do that much in gross revenue per month. If you’re doing a $500,000 then it comes out to be $41,666 per month, okay, in gross revenue.
Now, the next thing you need to figure out is forecasting, and how we figure this out is okay, “we need to hit on the low end $41,000 to hit half a million or $83,000 on the high end to hit a million per month.” Identify what your price point is, if you’re selling a $500 product or $1,000 product, you understand that at every 30 days at $500k, you have to sell 40 to 80 units at $500, you have to sell twice as many $1,000 products. So 40 to 80 units.
If you’re doing a million dollars, same thing right: now you’re talking about, let’s see here…80 to 160 units. Okay, now if your price points higher, you can do the math respectively. But now you got to figure out how many promos do you need a month to hit your target revenue goal. Now I’m not even going to include affiliates promoting their products to your list adding to the overall gross revenue. All I’m saying is how do we hit total number of units of your product to affiliates to hit your goal. Okay, so at $1,000, and this speaks to those who are brand new to the space, if your goal is a million dollars, are you able to find enough affiliates to sell 80 plus units of your product?
Now we’re going to get through the actual realistic numbers of what that will look like to hit 80, and maybe that’ll give you a clearer picture. Some people who are brand new always say, “absolutely my product is super great! It’s converting…” and you know, all these things and I ask them, “okay, so are you doing paid ads?” “No, I’m not,” “well, how have you sold this?” “I did a podcast and they sent 20 people over and five people bought, that’s my conversions.” That is not a good metric to use guys straight out of the gate, because a podcast is a different type of medium of selling.
It’s not necessarily scalable, because you have to physically go to all of these podcasts to sell this product. The affiliate approach needs to be more of a plug and play with a little bit of customization, right? Not a lot, a little bit based on the JV relationships. So scalability means automated webinars, you send people the emails, everybody sends out the same emails, some will edit it here and there. But bottom line is what’s the most non-variable process to help you get 80 units? Okay, then how many products do you need to sell to hit that goal again? 80 to 160 is kind of a rough number at the $1,000 price point to hit your million dollar mark.
Okay, now, what I do next is that I break this number down to PER affiliate, you guys with me? So we start with a big goal in mind that we break into 12 months, to a single month, and now we have to break that down to a four week period. And then how many affiliates can we squeeze in – assuming we’re not doing any reciprocity – to hit our number?
Now specific to the real estate space, I’ll tell you right out of the gate, without any reciprocity, you’re going to make it out maybe two to three months before you’re out of affiliates, two to three months before you’re out of affiliate. This is without reciprocity. With reciprocity, you’re more likely going to be able to map out probably three to six months possibly, three months, for sure, six months, possibly, and there are some factors we’re going to cover there.
Now understand that not all affiliates can sell 15 to 20 units at a time. Okay, 15 to 20 units, if you do math, if you watch one of my other conversion videos, typically just a rough number is 5% conversions out of total people who show up on a webinar, 5% or above at $1,000 price points is a strong conversion percentage, okay? Meaning out of 100 people who show up if I can sell at least five at 1000 bucks or even $1,500. Good, good to go.
Now, the question is: how many people can actually put 100 people on a webinar? I’ve heard people who only put on a total of 100 registrations, and then that means only 20 to 30 people show up per webinar. We do about three or four of these – that equates to a total of 100 people and if we can hit five units, that’s great. That is the majority, in my opinion – I believe most of the people are able to put on anywhere between 100 to 250 people total – the larger affiliates could put on anywhere between 250 up to 500 plus, and then at the 5% level at 500 attendees, then you’re hitting 25 units.
So for going back to the numbers we were establishing before, if you’re gonna have $1,000 product, and you’re trying to do $500,000, in annual affiliate revenue, you need to sell 40 units. Let’s do some math here: the average person does 100-250 at 5%, right, you’re gonna be anywhere between five to 10 units. So you’re gonna need at least four of these relationships to consistently sell at least 10 units at 5%. Hope you guys understand the importance of knowing your numbers now.
Now, at the higher level, if you’re trying to do a million dollars, you’ll need 80 units, at least, which means you’re gonna need at least four large affiliates to promote you.know, Understand most large affiliates are going to ask for reciprocity. So is that realistic when you say a million dollars in annual revenue, gross revenue from affiliates, if you don’t have a list, and you have no way to reciprocate? So this is why I was really kind of emphasizing the whole BE REALISTIC and hopefully I can give you this exercise to help you really scale back your numbers and start hitting goals because that’s my 30 – 60 – 90 day plan:
The first 30 days we’re gonna figure out if your goal is actually possible. That all comes down to reciprocity or not, do I have a list and what other ways are we selling through affiliates? Do we have a podcast? Do we have a Facebook page? Do we have other channels to sell? If it’s only webinars and only through email, that’s where we have to make adjustments in the first 30 days. Okay, let’s get realistic.
Now the next 30 days, we try to repeat and improve our results, meaning let’s go for our lowest hanging fruit, our best opportunities for the first 30 days to see if we can even hit this goal. If we can, that becomes our new benchmark and see if we can do this again, the next 60 days, if we don’t hit those goals, we make adjustments. We’re still trying to be aggressive with this process. But now we know “okay, at a minimum, even with our best opportunities, we’re hitting at least this many units.” I can’t give you a number because it depends, okay.
Once we scale back, and either increase or try to repeat those results, the last 30 days where we’re going to make small, small micro adjustments to improve conversions – whether that’s on the registration side, the attendee side, the follow up – we’re going to really dive into the numbers over the first 60 days and figure out where do the improvements need to be made, and then we scale accordingly. We can make small changes over the next 30 days, and once we dial in this process, we scale and we move on to the next variable.
We don’t want to mess with three, four or five different variables – like we’re gonna mess with the headline for the registration page, we’re also going to mess with the the follow up process in terms of number of emails, text message timing all these – too many variables and you’re not going to be able to identify what is actually making the biggest impact on conversions. So start with one, make it consistent that 30 days and then move on to the next thing. We’re gonna reset this every 90 days, and the goal here is to always consistently be improving our KPIs (key performance indicators).
Just example of what that may be is out of 1000 clicks, we’re always averaging between this many registrations: that becomes the KPI. If for any reason it falls below or above then we need to improve the registration process to where it’s more consistent.
Getting people on the call: what’s the average number? If we get this many people, at least this many clicks, we should have this many people attending. Is that what we’re seeing every 30 days? By being building that consistency every 90 days, you can really start focusing on the higher converting tasks that improve these type of promotions, which we otherwise wouldn’t be able to pay attention to, if we’re always messing with things every week, every month, and just always trying to improve 100 different things.
Always use the first 90 days to build consistency and pretty much after your last 90 days, that’s when we start messing around with that micro conversion kind of stuff.
Okay. To kind of summarize, what we’re going to look forward to our last step is starting with your big goal, breaking down the 12 months, to a month, identifying who your affiliate relationships are, getting them scheduled (if you can’t get them scheduled, that’s, you know, roadblock number one), but if you get these scheduled, is this realistic?
The last step is actually scheduling. Once you’ve mapped out these affiliates, understand that most affiliates who have larger lists are going to be scheduled out at least 30 to 60 days, sometimes already into second three quarters later. So if you’re trying to depend on them to hit your first 30 day goals, you’re gonna have to manage that expectation. Unless you have a very strong relationship with that affiliate, more than likely, they’re going to push you out 60 – 90 days out.
Smaller lists typically are every 30 days, when they’re always looking for something within two to four weeks for that month, because they’re promoting things more frequently than larger lists, they’re more open to those type of relationships. So that’s why I always encourage those always have smaller affiliates in your back pocket really focus on those relationships, because they’ll help you out with these larger ones don’t follow through. One of the biggest mistakes people make is “I only want large ones. I don’t want to waste my time on the small ones” – but three or four small affiliates can equal one large affiliate, and that’s enough traction to get some stats for you get some conversions to bring to your larger affiliates, letting them know like, “hey, here’s what I’ve done consistently over the last six promotions, I’m pretty confident we can do this at scale with your numbers.
The next thing I really want to talk about is whether you plan to recip or not, again, we talked about this pretty heavily, is the reciprocity factor. You need to be prepared for those conversations. What needs to happen is: if it is on the table, you need to reserve the top one to two spots, depending how frequent you want to bring affiliates to your lists, and assuming you know you only have one slot that needs to go to the top affiliate meaning the one who can produce the most amount of clicks and opportunity for you.
Okay, this is again for only if you’re only promoting one to two affiliates per month to your own list. Prioritize the top relationships, you will come in contact with those who are like, “well, we’ll just wait, we only want to promote you the same time you’re promoting us.” And what that really is telling you is they lost confidence in people promising and fulfilling. So there are some relationships where like, “hey, you go and promote me first, and then I’ll promote you in a month or so.” And it never happens. If you promoted them, and it didn’t go according to plan and now they don’t want to waste their efforts promoting you – that’s a bad affiliate.
Whether it goes well or not for me, I made that commitment and I held true to my word, therefore, it’s your turn. We are a word of mouth trust type of business. There are people who do paperwork and contracts – not everybody likes to fill out contracts, it’s really a relationship style business. Because if ever you shortcut me or you don’t fulfill on what you’re going to say, word gets around in our community. If they ever suggest to promote them first and not recip…. don’t do it, don’t do it. It’s a temporary fix. So if that’s the case, that’s fine. Then organize your schedule to where if this person really only needs to promote the same time you do then be like, “How about this? How about you promote us first, within a week, we’ll promote you? What are some benchmarks I can put in place to make you feel comfortable with that?What are some guarantees I can put in place?” (even if it requires you to connect with your team saying ‘there is zero chance of us backing out of this, we need to follow through in order to lock this down and generate revenue because no other large affiliates gonna take a chance on us’). If that’s a conversation that needs to be had, have it.
I just want to prepare you guys that not every affiliate to be like “you promote me, probably it’s all good, I trust you.” Some people do want to wait till the same week, if that’s the case, it is what it is, then look for someone else to replace that affiliate, and then plan that one 60 days later, that’s fine. That is a past that is a common conversation.
Now, the next thing to do is to make sure that you have your conversions readily available. Everything that I talked about before is prepare you and find the ideal relationship that’s going to be a perfect fit to hit your goals. But end of the day, they’re always going to want to know what your conversions are, right? If someone could put 500 people on a webinar, and you don’t know your conversions, I’m gonna automatically assume that you’re gonna bring in zero sales for me or below the average, which isn’t worth my time.
If I only have one or two spots left per month, you bet your butt, I’m going to be looking for the best opportunities – and if you bring me something that fails, I’m not going to be mad at you if I’ve established transparency, but I’m not going to work with you again. So make sure that you really know your numbers before approaching people because you’re trying to create Win Win situations, not probably or maybe situations, okay, you want to create Win Win situations.
The other thing you guys should do to prepare is “what is another type of give I can provide if I can’t do reciprocity, I need this to happen!” What is something else you can provide? You have a podcast? Is there another medium and of equal value – don’t just be like “I just kicked off a podcast, I’ll have you on and speak…but there’s zero downloads,” – that’s not a give, that’s just an additional take. So don’t try to lie to yourself and think that you’re giving value. Really look at what the other person is giving and providing to you and see “what can I do to create something of equal value?”
I trust that you guys know what that is, if you want to play dumb here and do it, I’ve dealt with that before, but I don’t really don’t work with people who don’t really have something to offer if I’m bringing something pretty big to the table. Now, again, a lot of these are just tools in your tool belt to improve your chances of locking down an affiliate, right? If I’m very hyper focused, I know exactly who I’m going for, because I’ve done the research, and then I’m being very transparent: here are my conversions – if you can at least put on this amount, here’s what we can actually make together. And if for any reason we don’t make this how can I provide an extra bit of guarantee?
Start getting more creative with these opportunities, because your goal is to hit your numbers, right? If you’re hitting your numbers, then trust me, it’s profitable for your affiliates as well. All you got to do to manage that relationship is transparency, which I talk about all the time.
Lastly, I really want to touch up on also make sure that your affiliate signup process, you know, getting your affiliates their links, their login and swipe copy, are all dialed in. Once you’ve already overcome their objections, you’ve already had these conversations, ( what we covered in other episodes, regarding prospecting, having a winning affiliate offer), once you get to this point, just provide them a link, get them signed up, send them their one pager, which in our book basically means everything they need in one email to promote, and then all the contact information in case they have questions for you, the product, customer support, accounting and everything like that. They’ll love that, and then then you’re done.
To summarize everything guys, we broke this down into three steps, which is: setting your initial goal (being realistic, of course), reverse engineering those numbers so that you can forecast your next 90 days, then once you understand who or what affiliates you need to approach in order to hit those gross revenue goals, then you schedule those people, have those conversations and then provide them with the information they need to make a decision on the spot.
Understand this moves really, really fast. If I take my time, if this isn’t ready, or that’s not ready, people’s limited calendar schedule is going to be taken by other affiliates, and when you’re ready to come back to them in two weeks or three weeks, based on the things you know you need to provide, it’ll be too late. You’re now pushed back another 60 to 90 days. So always be prepared when you go into these conversations, it’ll give you the most amount of credibility and allow affiliates to move quickly.
Affiliates love nothing more than to be able to have the information they need to make decisions quick and to make money with you to get paid quick. Is there theme there? Quick, quick, quick, quick, quick. Make it quick for them.
Remember to repeat this process every quarter. Our intention is to always improve every three months. There’s always room to improve on the conversion side, on the relationship side, on the scheduling side. Then you’re going to scale the relationships that are the most profitable. So the next quarter, you’re gonna look back on those 90 days, here are winners, here are losers, no hard feelings to the losers, business business, it just wasn’t a good fit for your list my product, your list your product to my list. You remove them, or maybe if your product is good to their list, we can keep them and have that conversation.
Bottom line is: pick out your best affiliates who sell the most amount of units, even your medium, even low, but the lowest that go on the lowest priority eventually get replaced. Then once you replace those, your next 90 days you go back and look through. Eventually going to get to a point we’re going to have six to 12 solid winners, and then all you got to do is just every three to six months replaced any 1-3 of these, which overall minimizes your outreach work in the long run. That’s really the intention of my 30 – 60 – 90 day plan is that you’ll eventually get to a point to where affiliates are going to come to you because your processes are dialed in, it’s super easy to work with you people get exactly what they get, you know, in terms of conversions, and you don’t have to start, you know, cold calling as much anymore.
By being consistent every quarter and establishing these benchmarks, you’re going to be much closer and on your way to hitting your revenue goals. Hopefully, this was helpful for you guys, this is something that I tried to implement at scale for a lot of my clients and I like to work as quick as possible. Typically, end of quarter two or three, we’re already working on scalability tactics, new conversion opportunities, other JV relationships, because everything else that we have with affiliates is pretty much dialed in, rinse and repeat. You’ve got the best relationships, everything’s working beautifully, and now it frees up a lot of our team’s bandwidth to go deeper and create more creative opportunities that now take us from $500,000 to $750k, or half a million to a million, because – consistency allows you to really scale much faster moving forward.
That’s all I’m looking for is that this consistently builds a great baseline and income for myself and my clients. But really what I’m in for is those bigger relationships that create those larger paychecks. And that’s really, really fun for me – but you have to work on this FIRST, before you can even participate over here.
If I could bring this all to a close, the most important thing I want to emphasize here is consistency. Now, if you’re listening to me, and you’ve been running promotions, you know, for the last couple of years, and you’re not doing these things, this is the best thing you can do for your business.
If you’re starting out,the best thing you can do is the prep phase. Getting realistic with your goals, and then try to hit those goals month, to month, to month, because I promise you as you hit those goals, it’ll organically start attracting more affiliates.
Hopefully this was helpful for you guys, this concludes our show today. This is something that I love talking about. I’m always about the numbers, always about hitting goals, because it ultimately brings in more revenue for my clients for myself, and I love when I’m able to do that.
If you guys want more information or need help in this process, by any means, feel free to check out theaffiliateincubator.com.
It has previous episodes that we refer to in our podcast. But more importantly, it gives you an opportunity to get more information about us, schedule a call with me…I think we’re gonna be implementing a survey so we can kind of prequalify and make sure you’re the best fit and of course, give us more direction on our call so I know exactly how to help you. We’re really excited to be connecting with more of you who are listening to our podcast and connecting with us on socials, because we really want to change how the space communicates, how we operate together, and ultimately lift all of us up together to recruiting amazing JVs, making a lot of money together but most importantly servicing those who are in our communities and changing lives and helping people really create freedom for themselves.
Thank you guys so much for tuning in. This is Frank Chen with The Affiliate Mastery Podcast signing off. We’ll talk to you next time everybody. Buh bye.
