We’re here with a hot take up top: Paying for ads online is NOT the sole obligatory tactic for selling more products, as popular opinion – and Big Tech – would have you believe. And neither are big affiliate promotions (“Gasp! Why would they say that? It’s only episode 2 and they’re shooting themselves in the foot!”)
Chill. Instead, Frank and Alex reveal that FIRST, you should go WITHIN and nurture your inner chakras…or at least your raving fans, ripe to become your ambassadors. We chat culture, empowerment, infrastructure and the opportunity that you have right in front of you – you just need to know how to cultivate it. And we’ll reveal just how to do that.
Have questions/comments/concerns? Email us at support@theaffiliateincubator.com
- Marketing Evolution: From “tit-for-tat” to “ads are where it’s at”
- Focus shift: From PPC To Community: Put ads in their place: when you should hold off and why 2:54
- The Case Against Building The Plane While Flying: Go narrow before you go wide for longevity in your business 4:20
- A Baby Won’t Fix What’s Broken: Are you even having success without affiliates? If not, bringing in another party before focusing on conversion issues isn’t going to be the solution 5:00
- Does Anyone Back You Up?: The evolution and anatomy of the testimonial, and why capturing these is a mandatory first step 5:13
- Bippity Boppity amBassador: do you mic up your customers and let them gush about you? Why there is extreme opportunity for your bottom line in doing it right 6:18
- Reviewing Your Review System: How are you currently leveraging word of mouth? 8:00
- Ditch The Microchanges: trade short term-thinking for quick sales for longevity and long-term investment 9:17
- Action Plan 10:40
- Back Up – Do You Even HAVE A Community?: Why you’re losing out if you don’t and if you aren’t leveraging it 10:45
- You’re Showing..But Are You Growing? So you have a community. How are you managing it? Do you have rules in place? Are you establishing culture? 12:18
- Dealing With Grumpy Members: How to pull the weeds and deter future parasites from poaching your community 13:38
- Amplifying Cheery Members: How to nurture and empower the stars in your community for mutually beneficial domino effect 16:10
- Recommended Tools For Capturing Raving Reviews: Easy, low-barrier ways to kickstart this process for you 18:46
- Next Phase: Your Community As A Recruitment Tool 20:03
- Training Your Affiliate Army 22:37
- Tapping Into Spheres Of Influence: the anatomy of an affiliate army, and the six degrees of Frank Chen 23:21
- Mapping your “Monday Motivation” & “Wednesday Wins”: Creating a consistent schedule and system for magnifying your student wins 26:36
- It’s Not All About The Money: How to get creative with incentivizing your ambassadors 27:42
- If You Don’t Have The Money, Put In The Time: Whether you bootstrap or delegate, nurturing your communities is worth it – and free 30:50
Episode Resources
- Imperfect Foods http://imprfct.us/v/alex_8900 for $80 in free groceries
- Videoask.com
- Click here for 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.
FRANK: Welcome back guys to another episode of The Affiliate Mastery Podcast. Today, we’re doing episode two on how to sell more products without paid ads. Now today’s episode is brought to you and sponsored by the affiliate incubator, your one-stop shop for all things affiliate management, consulting, and training.
For more information on that, we’ll talk about that at the end, but right now I’m ready to dive right on in how you been Alex?
ALEX: I’ve just been awesome. Frank, the sun has been out for a consecutive week, which is nice . In Colorado it’s been super rainy. So that makes a huge difference. I feel like that’s a little cliche to say, but just the sun is out, the sky is blue, it’s beautiful and so are you!
FRANK: Sun’s out guns out, right? Sun’s out guns out. Yeah. We’ve been having a tremendous amount of rain here in Houston and it’s just been so gloomy over the last two weeks believe it or not, but yes, finally, you know, we can take a break, give me some sunshine. I’m ready to get outside and enjoy the weather finally.
I know my dogs are struggling with just not being able to go outside, but yeah, like it’s been awesome. Business has been great. I know we have a great topic today. I’ve been having so many phenomenal conversations with affiliates in our market, as well as in the biz op space, internet marketing, and I’m excited to kind of bring you guys what I’ve learned over the last week, but more importantly, give you guys some cool solutions that hopefully don’t take an impact on your marketing dollars, but really raise your bottom line through just some simple things you could be implementing.
So with that , let’s definitely dive in. For those out there who are listening, you know, our space has really shifted over the last I’d probably say 10 years, you know, back in the day we were doing $2 million launches, almost every two months. Anybody who wanted to get into the space, who needed to build a list quickly, did these product launches, right?
Get 50, 20, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 affiliates on board, everybody’s driving leads to one funnel and, you know, there’s prizes and things given away… but that has definitely changed over time. And we’ve kind of evolved from where we were kind of doing more joint ventures, “hey, you promote me. I’ll promote you.” And there was a lot of that going on, and now we’re kind of in a space where paid ads is the name of the game, right?
The goal is “how do I spend a dollar and make $2?” and then “how do I protect that lead and squeeze as much money as I can out of every dollar that I spend” before I quote unquote, “pawn it off to a potential affiliate offer.”
So that has definitely made it much more difficult for smaller affiliates or those without really an ad budget to get the support they need to get off the ground, build a name for themselves, but most importantly, start generating revenue so they can start growing their business. Alex, you were in the ads space, what are you seeing right now?
ALEX: Yeah, I mean, ads were my “OG” and they have their place, right. And I think we mentioned in another episode that they have their place in multiple areas from beginning to end when it comes to testing, and then when it comes to scaling. Honestly, even before you test with ads, you need to get back to basics.
First of all, you mentioned budget – if you don’t have a budget, you should not be messing with ads at all, but the basics are backing it up, focusing on your customer support your fulfillment and your community, your reputation. And what I’m seeing is sometimes clients, or people that I’ve worked with in this space have that order of operations and they have those basics, they have that infrastructure down so then they can confidently dip their toes in and, and not get overwhelmed.
But sometimes they don’t and they think, “okay, we gotta scale. We gotta, you know, shotgun approach, get as many people in the door, fill the funnel”… before the bones are strong.
That’s what I’m seeing. I think, you know, it works for some people. A lot of what we talk about is “well, you don’t have to do it this way,” there’s success stories everywhere, but our job is to share what our best practices are. And honestly, I think that focusing on your core competency and your community is first and foremost.
FRANK: And we’re definitely going to dive into that a little bit more. I talk to a lot of people, I’m talking to entrepreneurs, I know who you guys are out there, and I always hear, like, “I love to ‘build it on the way down'” and all that stuff. And you know, what is it called… execution before planning as a plane crashes or whatever. Trying to put your parachute together as you’re falling from the sky.
I know that’s how we do it in order to get things done, and I’m all for that. But in order to really be successful in terms of longevity, we’re gonna be emphasizing this quite a bit, which is having a firm and strong foundation before you go wide. Go narrow before you go wide. So we’re gonna bring attention to a few things you’ve got to go narrow on before you go wide.
First thing I wanna tell you guys is, if you are relying on affiliates to sell more products, whether it’s right out of the gate or that’s like your core focus in order to drive revenue. My first question to you is: how well are you selling without affiliates? Because if you’re not, don’t expect that an affiliate’s going to be the solution to that problem.
Okay. So let’s first correct the conversion issue before we even dive into that. Then, are you creating weekly and monthly testimonials? This is probably the most important thing I know before the past, you know, it was kind of more gimmicky about testimonials and like the real granular videos of, you know, John Smith in front of an event sign kind of giving their two second spiel of why this person is amazing…
There’s the evolution of the testimonial as well, whether it’s the authenticity that’s built in, whether it’s an unadulterated, an d unfiltered testimonials, which have been such a powerful tool for many of my clients in order to sell more products.
Now understand these are not testimonials that people have asked for. These are testimonials that people are giving freely because they just had such an incredible experience working with your business. So this is literally the single most important question that you need to answer right now: am I creating testimonials, and am I selling well without affiliates? If your answer is yes, then we can take next steps.
But if your answer is no, go back to the drawing board and figure out how to make this an unquestionable yes. Okay. Now once you’ve done this, I would say my next question for you is: are you giving your existing buyers – these are your raving fans – the ability to praise your service and celebrate your wins?
It’s constantly amazed me how you know, companies that are doing anywhere between a million to $10 million are driving tons of buyers, tons of success stories. But they’ve never generated a process to actually capture this information, right. There is no followup or there’s no way to really give these people opportunity to kind of just share their wins.
That’s always my first point of advice to clients that aren’t doing this, because there are so many ways to generate sales out of these opportunities in the longterm. And I’m definitely give you guys some more information on that, but I know Alex has something to chime in in here as well.
ALEX: I mean, believe it or not most companies that I’ve had experience with, whether they are companies I’ve worked with or companies that I have purchased something from, they don’t. They don’t have, you know, I have one client who is doing it right. They have a really robust review actual funnel, an entire funnel with the call to action and the nurturing goal of getting people to submit reviews.
And they have that down pat and they have that right. But most companies – that’s one out of, I mean, 10 clients that I’ve worked with in the past year. And then there’s other companies, 10 times their size like Wayfair, for instance, doesn’t have the simplest mechanism to capture customer feedback good or bad.
I was on the phone, I had an excellent experience with someone who turned a bad experience into a good one. And I was like, how can I thank you? How can I, you know, tell your boss how great you are? How can I help? And she said, “we don’t really have that. I can give you my boss’s email….” I was like, “well, okay, yeah, do that!” But it’s just crazy to me. So this is something that you can instantly get an edge with because not so many people are doing it, but even more than an edge, it is that fundamental core that we were just talking about, which is focusing on the value and amplifying the wins that you have and that you create and that your biggest fans have.
FRANK: It makes me think. It’s like, the review system these days is really the key to making our decisions, right? Whether where we go to eat, what we decide to watch, who do we decide to hire and all these things…. it almost feels like…
I was just like, thinking about it right now, we should only honestly have either a one-star choice or a five-star choice, because really it’s either people who are annoyed or pissed off who leave the bad one-star reviews or the people were leaving raving reviews at five. I think the people who do two star, three star.. You know, make a decision, it’s either one or five guys! It’s not two, three or four, it’s like the polar sides in terms of people who actually submit reviews.
Our point is if you’re doing great customer service, creating great value, then you can always get a ton of five star reviews, which really just boosts your ratings and across so many platforms, right? We’ll talk about a few tools that you could potentially use to start gathering that information.
Like we were talking about before is, too often guys, do we see product owners focused all of their efforts on making their products more robust so they can maybe charge more or maybe they’ll take some things away and charge the same, or maybe even lower the number of days that someone can refund the order in order to reduce the refund rates.
What I call these are really micro changes and very short-term thinking, and yes, you’re going to be sell more products this way – and yes , most people test these changes through paid traffic and that’s the greatest way to do it, right? If you’re thinking about micro conversion issues but again, guys, these are not longevity decisions. These are very shortsighted. Really the methodology we’re trying to talk about here is, it’s not about “how do I make more money now” instead of “how do I help more of my buyers, my customers, reach success?”
I really want to say that again: if you’re focusing on making money, I want you to start thinking about helping more buyers reach success, because you’re ultimately going to get more of what you want by helping others get more of what they want.
Now, it’s like really trying to sell more of your product when you’re getting like a ton of one-star reviews, and rather than addressing the question at hand you just keep thinking about how to sell more products. Really backwards way of thinking. To avoid this pitfall, what we’re going to try to do here is really create a simple action plan for you that you can implement right away. The theme of today’s call is how do you start selling more products without ads?
Let’s go ahead and dive on in to this action plan, cause I know you guys want to hear this . The very, very first thing that I really like to advise my clients to do, especially if they have an email list or you have some type of marketing dollar, or maybe just starting to build some type of community: i.e. you have a hundred subscribers on YouTube, maybe you have 500 people on a private Facebook group… regardless of where you’re aggregating community, if you haven’t started pouring into them and giving them the opportunity to share these wins, like we were talking before, that’s where we’re going to start.
Now first, if you do have one, identify how you are using it. Now content is great. Content is amazing. But every piece of content you release must have some type of call to action. It doesn’t have to be a pitch. It’s more about “subscribe” or “like” or do something… always have some type of call to action at the end.
Really focus your content around it that way, and then make sure there’s cohesion among all of your channels that you have, a Facebook group, a YouTube and a podcast. Make sure your communities are very aware, well aware of all of these mediums and making sure that all this points towards one specific focus.
You’re trying to sell a course or you’re trying to become an authority as an educator or a coach or whatever it is that your business is about – make sure that every single one of these channels is designed to do that, to make you an authority, but also give them the opportunity to understand how to work with you. Or, people in your community or your students or your coaching students, or whatever you’re doing in terms of your buyers: are you giving them the opportunity to talk to your community?
Right? This is how you’re going to start making these micro changes, they’re gonna start to turn into conversions. So we’re going to go a little bit deeper there as well.
Now, another thing you also consider is: are you managing it right? Growing it is one thing, but managing it is how you start creating culture and making sure that the messages and it doesn’t run awry right?
We’ve all been a part of groups – 15,000 people, 10,000 people – and there’s no type of guidance in there. And all of a sudden, as you scroll down through the feed, it’s a bunch of people trying to poach their leads or they’re trying to advertise their own stuff.
So, do you have rules in place? Are you establishing culture? Do you have anything to add there, Alex?
ALEX: Yeah, Frank. Very good point. I manage a community for one of my clients right now. And they’re like you said, there needs to be a balance. There needs to be some rules, right. But the balance is where – it comes in where you’re enforcing the rules and where you’re also encouraging engagement and value-adds and kind of towing that line.
You mentioned poaching – that is one easy rule that I think most people, they know it, but they like to push their luck, right? And when I say poaching, I mean going in there and trying to generate leads for their own interests and their own businesses within your community, kind of taking the reins from you.
There are ways to add value and help these people’s businesses through leveraging your community and managing your group that don’t allow for just siphoning. I always find it interesting to deal with the grumpy people who are like, “whoa, what ? You know, this is supposed to be helpful to my business!”
And it’s like, well.. you’re just cheating, basically! You’ve agreed to these rules! All of that is to say, a way to get these people to agree to the rules and then not huff and puff as much is two things: include them as “do you agree to these rules?” as a question in the intro; sometimes they’re mandatory, sometimes they’re not; but the questions that group members have to answer before they join your group. Then they’re reminded of, “oh wait, maybe I should check these rules out…” then obviously you can redirect them to where they are.
Also a big one that we’ve done recently is actually pinned the rules up to the top as a post on the group itself so that no matter when they go to post, that’s what they see, it’s in front of them. So you know that if they’re doing it anyways that they are just maybe not a good fit and they’re not there for the culture. They’re not there for the greater good. They’re just trying to siphon off all your hard work and counteract the good that you’re trying to do so, that balance is important.
FRANK: And for those out there who are listening are like, “well, I don’t like, I don’t like confrontation. I’m not here to totally shake the tree” and things like that. I don’t want you guys to operate from a fear mindset. There are tons of people out there who are going to disagree with what you say, they’re not going to believe in your rules and guess what? They’re going to leave. And that’s okay.
This is where culture comes in. You want the people in here who are eating, breathing, and preaching what you want to do here. Right? And when other people are on here posting their links and their opportunities, you have absolutely zero control of what happens afterwards, which indirectly could affect your reputation. Where it means like, “well, last time I was in here, someone gave me a suggestion and that really, really hurt my business..” that’s reflective on you. If you’re taking the position “it’s not my fault. I didn’t suggest it,” that’s just really not the right way of looking at it.
Just by being very, very clear, you can DM people who post things, you can delete them, and if they don’t like it, you could ask them to leave. If you want to just use meme culture – we do intro videos, where we’re very clear on the rules. “hey check out the rules above,” or anything else like that, just take a screenshot of your face like this with the rules, and then send it to them. Say “this is why I deleted your post. If you have any problems, let me know but this is your warning.”
We’re really here to help each other succeed, but the best way you can do that is by making sure we’re not here trying to poach each other’s leads, right? If you wanna to create your own community, go ahead and do that. But this is ours. Please respect the rules. So definitely focus on establishing the rules if you’re going to be going this route. And if you haven’t done this already, we highly encourage that you do this.
Okay. The next thing is: let’s start talking about celebrating your student wins. So once we’ve established some type of culture and our people know what the rules are now, it’s time for you to initiate. And it usually starts with you. “Winning Wednesdays” is something that we could do , where we post student wins every single Wednesday. And it’s not really intended where it’s salesy, “if you want to learn more and buy stuff then do this .” it’s more like, “hey, share your story!” If they’re brand new to your industry especially in real estate with their first deal, celebrate their wins.
Like, “Hey, this is Susan, she’s a single mom. She actually went through a lot of courses and when she came to us, she was really scared, but we made sure that she succeeded.” If she’s in the group, you’re not saying anything that’s false.
How powerful would that be? That after you share this story, that individual comments below and says, “this was such a phenomenal experience, thank you so much for helping me!” There’s transparency there. And there’s power in that.
The problem with certain testimonies that we see is some don’t have pictures, or there’s no accessibility to that individual. So do we really know if that happened, or is this something on another product they bought, but they’re using it as a testimonial for this other product? You know, you gotta be careful of these things, but in Facebook, that’s, what’s really cool about these opportunities that you can literally just click on that name and message them and you have direct access to that testimonial.
So that puts credibility on the group owner as well as, you know, again, bringing it back to culture -every time I talk about these things, I’m not trying to hide. You can reach out to me. You can reach out to that person, whatever you want. I got nothing to hide and there’s a lot of power in that guys.
Next is by after initiating that, what’s really cool that you’re going to start seeing is that other people are going to pop in there and congratulate them, and that’s going to start feeding an energy where people want to start winning more within your group. And when you start seeing more and more people winning, what is the natural path of the community?:
“How do they do this? How do I get involved and how do I join this movement?” So start planting the seed of hope, and every time you’re able to share this weekly, you’re just start seeing an exponential kind of engagement return based on these wins. But the most important thing here is consistency, right?
That’s why I said “Winning Wednesdays.” Every Wednesday, you’re gonna post a win like this, but it also, you want to follow up with a specific call to action, like, “Hey, if you would look like to learn how to work with us…” and put a Bitly link there, or a short link there. Really lead in with an actual story where that’s the focus, and leave it very passive little kind of opportunity to reach out to you at the very bottom.
No one’s going to feel dirty by that. No, one’s going to be like, “oh, he’s just posting this because he wants to sell us something.” It’s no, I really wanted to celebrate this win. I know Susan, we’ve worked with her, she’s an actual person. She’s not just another statistic when it comes to our bottom line. Transparency, there is very, very good.
Now we also talked about some tools that you can use in order to start capturing these testimonials and then start re-purposing them as you’d like, one of the things is called, “So Tell Us.”
So Tell Us if you’re listening, give me an affiliate link, hook me up! We’re going to be sending you all some business. Bottom line is, So Tell Us a very integratable software that can be built into your funnels. It integrates with whatever CRM you’re using as a followup sequence. As soon as they buy within, you know, 7, 10, 15 days, just like, Alex was saying, they built specific funnels to indoctrinate, to nurture in order to capture that testimonial without sounding too upfront about it. Like as soon as they buy: “what’d you think?” There’s an actual process in place.
Another one that is very similar as “Video Ask,” which is basically where you can record a video and send it to somebody asking for a little bit more of a personal response from people who have had great experiences with you.
So, So Tell Us, and Video Ask… in all of our episodes, guys, any tools or resources that we’re talking about, we’re going to be putting in the comments section below. There is a bit of a cost to these softwares and if you’re not really ready to budget for these things, then you can still do this more manually at the get go.
The bottom line is to just start asking for, them, because like we said, asking for them way later down the road is a little bit more uncomfortable and a little bit more unnatural but definitely doing it as a flow and process at the point of a purchase will make it a lot more fluid for you, I guess is what I’m trying to say.
ALEX: I want to piggyback on that real quick. So to your point of celebrating the wins in the group or whatever your community is: those people -you’re empowering them directly and publicly, right. And so not only does that encourage more engagement and it is a positive community, but it also can kind of act as an indirect recruitment tool and end up empowering these people to add value to your business as more than just a customer, but perhaps as, you know, a potential teammate or a potential contractor or a potential… someone who is that crazy about your business and who was changed so much from what you’ve done for them could also come on board in some way for you.
I’ve seen that happen for many times, especially with some of the newer groups that are, are established from, you know, challenges that you do, are these just really tight-knit communities. That foam rises to the top. And then if you are- especially in real estate and this niche- if you’re looking for teammates, that is kind of the next level of a testimonial, if you will.
FRANK: Absolutely. This kind of segues into our next topic, but kind of to kind of wrap that together: I’ve seen entire coaching programs created by existing students, meaning they just promote from within, right. If someone continues to contribute, they’re, you know, a rockstar in the group, they’re always giving value and people see them as a potential authority and you didn’t do any of this. This is just a constant engagement in the group by highlighting them and rewarding them. It’s powerful for you as the influencer or the face of your business.
I don’t think you guys understand how much value it is when someone comments on your page and they see you reply to their comments. And the reason why that is so powerful, is because not very many people do that. As people get bigger and their heads get bigger and they start growing a brand, they don’t have time for the small people.
Take Gary V: no matter how big he is, he’s always answering people’s questions and Twitters, and it doesn’t matter who you are, he always is responsive to his community. And that’s why he’s been able to grow so virally because no one’s not worth his time. Right? Well, I guess I shouldn’t say that, there are people who definitely waste his time, but he always makes time for the, you know, the average Joe.
So same thing here is give your people the opportunity to prove themselves. Then, if you’re really trying to build a business like a coaching program, or maybe a support staff or whatever, you can actually do this, through what we’re talking about here. Which kind of leads us to our next point, which is training your best students to be affiliates.
So we talked about building community, establishing culture, highlighting the wins. And so almost establishing indirect authority through letting people know, “here are the people who are successful in our community, and you can actually be a part of this” as you’re creating this movement within your group.
Now you start training and equipping your soldiers, right? Your affiliate army. And everybody talks about like, “well, if I work with affiliate A over here, he’ll send all these emails out, drive through my webinar and generate 10, 20, 30 sales.” For some of our smaller affiliates, you know, five to 10 sales at a thousand dollar price point is a solid promotion. Our larger affiliates look like, you know, 30, 40, 50 units plus at a thousand is good for them. But the bottom line here is that you can still generate numbers very similar to this through your own community.
My best example for you, and I was just doing this on a meeting the other day, is tapping into other people’s spheres of influence.
One business that I learned in college that did this incredibly well was Cutco. I was actually just walking through a Costco the other day, and I saw a lady selling Cutco. I just love that they’re everywhere. And I just used my Cutco knives. They have great products. And one of my friends really kind of made sense of it to me from a broke college perspective:
Frank, you guys are selling high in knives to people in neighborhoods that are maybe at the average income level – most people can’t afford a $2k, $3k, $4k knife set, right? These are like $200, $300 knives. Most of us are buying whole entire sets for that much.” What’s interesting about their model is they advertise by saying “we do zero cold calling and you have the potential to make five or $10,000 a month”… to a college student, that’s a tremendous amount of money.
So as soon as you sit down, they give you your rough overview and then they ask you to write down 1-100. Then they ask you to start writing down the people that, you know: mom, dad, uncle, aunt, friends, friends of uncles and aunts and all these things, and that’s how you come up with your hit list of people to call.
What’s funny about this model, is that anybody who owns a Cutco knife, I promise you, they’re going to get a laugh out of this because it’s so true: anybody who owns a Cutco was more than likely sold that knife from a friend or a family friend.
Okay. It doesn’t matter like, my wife’s mom has a Cutco knife that was sold by her brother’s friend. My brother owns the Cutco knife cause I sold it to him. My mom owns Cutco knives because my brother’s friends sold it to her. Understand these are all within like 5, 8, 10 years. These are all independently done and that’s why their model works.
ALEX: Six Degrees of Frank Chen !
FRANK: Six Degrees Of Frank Chen, right! The idea here is that as long as they’re able to sell at least to one or two, every person that comes into their doors looking for an opportunity and they realize, “well, now I’ve got to put in the work cause my mom and dad already bought knives and I don’t really know how to sell this to anybody else oh, I don’t want to do this anymore” and they leave, Coco made their money.
They’re happy because their model is, I got to just keep filling people in this room because all I got to do is keep selling to one or two of their friends. And that’s the exact same cost that you should be using within your groups.
What I mean by that is by equipping your best students, your raving fans, with the education to talk about your products, use your links to sell your products and maybe make some money with you to work with you. Now imagine that power: these guys are already posting wins in the group. And what happens anytime you see someone on your own page or your own friend’s group that post something about their business and they’re like, “oh my God, I just made my first $5k! Ever since I started working on my own, this has been such a life changing experience.” Everybody in the comments section is usually pretty positive, right? And they’re always saying what? “Congratulations” and “good job” and then what else?
ALEX: “How did you do that?”
FRANK: “How’d you do it right?” And they DM you “hey can you tell me more information about what this is?” And start asking more questions. Imagine empowering that person to have the answers and the ability to give their friend a link, and “hey, this is exactly how I got started, these people are amazing, go ahead and get started.” And they get paid that way.
You’re creating a win-win solution. So you’ve got to be able to pour into your communities and start creating this opportunity within your social channels.
Okay. So if you’re not doing this already start mapping out a plan.
I always tell my clients, I do a 30, 60, 90 day plan. Definitely start mapping out your first 30 days. What is the “Wednesday Wins” look like for the next four weeks? What does my “Monday Motivation” look like for the next four weeks? Start really building consistently the schedule with the intent to ultimately get to this opportunity of training your students, you’re raving fans.
This is the best way to organically start generating sales without any effort on your part. You’re not spending a single dollar on marketing or ads. You’re not begging affiliates to work with you. You’re leaning in on the people who already love you.
And that’s why I was saying is so important at the beginning of this video is to create testimonials, create wins because the more you do this , the bigger your army gets. All you got to do is have each of them sell one a month. Imagine if you had 20 buyers, each of them sold one product a month. That’s 20 units guys. Remember my small guys do 5-10, my big guys do 30 to 50, and you could be doing those numbers by doing it this way. Okay. Um, yes, yes Alex?
ALEX: Hehe, teacher! Forgive me. I don’t think you covered this Frank, but you can get creative with how you incentivize or reward. if it’s not, giving them a revenue share or a cut of what they produce, you can also quote unquote subsidize what they’re already investing in. So an example I have, and it’s not from a Facebook group, but it is an affiliate model of this company called Imperfect Foods that I already am in love with.
It’s essentially saving the environment because they’re sending you ugly foods or foods that were overstocked and they were going to go to waste and you buy it and it’s super cheap and it’s a weekly thing and I love it. I’ve been just telling people about it, and I’ve had three people sign up and they take $50 off my box.
I haven’t paid for a box for three weeks and all I’ve done is talk about it. And I would consider myself a raving fan. So yes, in a way they are revenue sharing. But it’s going back into their business. You know, they’re not giving me money, they’re not paying me cash. They’re just giving me a discount on what I’m already signed up for and it’s worth it to them.
FRANK: That’s a great, I’m glad you brought that up. And I guess the terminology that I typically kind of default to is called gamification, right? How do you incentivize in a fun way for people to pour back into your business without necessarily a monetary gain? For me, I got it from a wine club. If I got five people to sign up, my next box of wine was free.
I love wine. Gimme more wine, right? So these are great ways you can do this, like creating a badging system, right? Some people go crazy over a badge, which is literally just a picture and it gives them a sort of authority in your group.
But that’s sometimes enough, right? You don’t have to give away the whole kitten caboodle in order to incentivize people to do this for you. You just got to tap into what’s important to them. In our industry we talk about real estate and, you know, marketing dollars. “Oh, I got to do a direct mail campaign.”
Well, imagine if you just sold one of our courses , you could pay for your next month marketing campaign, it’s on us. That’s powerful because that marketing campaign will create another revenue stream for them. So there’s always ways to figure out. Whatever it is that you’re selling or how you’re kind of cultivating that incentive, match it to what your actual business is. You can even do coupons or whatever it may be. Get creative with it. This is what’s fun about this process.
Another thing that I want to talk about to create some type of internal push is you can create internal competitions, right?
“Hey, for the next 30 days, the next 60 days, whomever are our top performers. (and you can do this as a separate thing so you’re not really posting this in the group per se), but those who are already signed up as your student affiliates or your buyer affiliates, get them on a separate thread or a second private Facebook group, and then create a competition there where you’re like, “Hey guys, here’s all the cool tools that we’ve made available to you, and for the next 30 days, whoever sells the most products, we’re going to fly you out to our office. You’re going to have a day with us. We’re going to a power day or something like that. . Imagine how much activity that’s going to stir up. You know, you have 10 people doing this, it’s going to great, a pretty exciting month for you.
So again, get creative. And again, if you have any questions about that, you can feel free to reach out. But this is exactly the kind of advice that we give our clients. This is super, super awesome stuff. Something you can implement right away. Don’t wait if you haven’t done this yet. All it will take is some time on your part, but the returns could potentially be 5-10X what you put in, right? We have a saying in our business: if you have the money, you don’t have to put it as much time because you just hire the right people to do the work for you.
But if you don’t have the money, you gotta put in the time . That’s the best way to start generating revenue without digging deep into your pockets and your savings taking out loans and all that stuff. Really start focusing and start getting creative. The opportunity is right in front of you. The more you start pouring into your best customers, the quicker they’re going to become your best affiliates.
That’s all I got for you guys today. I really hope this was really insightful for you. Super helpful. I know this has helped many of my clients add an extra six figures to their bottom lines annually, and these are still things I’m still helping my clients implement today. I really hope this was as value.
I want you guys to remember too, if you guys enjoyed it, we talked about today, remember to follow us on our social channels. Subscribe, if you can, to our podcast for more great videos and content like this. If you have any questions regarding the affiliate management training and consulting, check out theaffiliateincubator.com!
Reach out to us submit a form, schedule a call with me and we’ll do affiliate discovery, walk you through your programs or products and see if there’s any way that we can take your business to the next level.
That’s all I got for today. Thanks for tuning in guys. Make sure you keep it tuned for all of our upcoming episodes.
We have a lot of micro content coming your way on all of our social channels. Alex here is pushing that train forward for me and has an aggressive schedule for me to constantly be recording. I want you guys to check that out and if you have any feedback on ways I can improve on our content, I really want to be focusing on the things that you guys care about, but most importantly, creating insight to what our industry is about.
If you guys are in any other space and you find similarities or things that, we could be helping you do better, or you guys could be helping us to do better, let’s create that bridge and have that conversation because man, do I love learning about new businesses and how to create new opportunities and just really creating wins all around.
That really fuels me, and I hope that fuels you too. Thank you guys again. This is Frank Chen with Alex May. we’re signing off, we’ll see ya next time. Take care everybody.
