We’re here to give you a break – but also a reality check, some tough love. Affiliate marketing is not a target for shiny object syndrome – you need to make sure you are prepared.
Do you have a solid offer? Do you know your conversion numbers? Have you stress-tested your backend? Do you have your pricing and refund policies down? And for goodness sakes have. You. done. Your. due. Diligence?!
Listen as we outline what you need to know, test and master before you get too excited – trust us, it will save you a lot of grief.
Have questions/comments/concerns? Email us at support@theaffiliateincubator.com
- Which Bucket Are You In? Gotta know where you stand before you take your marks. 00:55
- Keep People Out Of Your Pockets: KISS 1:54
- Are You Stacked? Assess what you are actually offering… is it irresistible? 2:46
- And What Makes YOU So Special? At least be clever or punny. Find your hook. 3:31
- Ok, But Do People Actually Like You? Refer to ep. 2 for a deeper dive, but do you have a community of fans behind you? 4:08
- Is The Price Right After All? If you don’t focus on VALUE first, none of this matters – but here’s some proven price points to test – notice that “price points” is plural 5:22
- Components Of A Winning Offer: high-level, what to consider 8:37
- Conversion Immersion: legitimate question: do you know your numbers? And can you get real with your affiliates on expectation for the fruits of their labor? 9:12
- Copy Your Way To Success: Imitation is the highest form of flattery. Do your Due diligence and mimic what wworks in your industry 14:25
- Don’t Be Shiesty: Being dirty with your money back guarantees, or lack thereof, is not the game to play..18:27
- Can You Follow Through? Don’t skim on support and fulfillment. Don’t overpromise and under-deliver – know what promises you can unquestionably keep…or customers, you will not 20:24
- Can Your Trunk Handle The Junk? Make sure your merchant accounts, and team, can take the heat before you hit the street 22:38
- You Have ONE SHOT, ONE OPPORTUNITY. You Have ONE Job Here: tracking affiliate leads and sales. Don’t blow it – here’s some tips 25:55
- Keep “Urchin” Up: There’s backup tracking systems for a reason – and they put your affiliates at ease 31:51
- Remove Obstacles And Make It Pretty: you’ve done the hard work, now have some fun sprucing up your front-facing image for affiliates 33:26
- In Conclusion: 38:23
Episode Resources
Click here for Episode Resources
Music Credits
Tangerine Dreams by Animal Behaviour
Check out Animal Behaviour on Spotify
Transcription
What’s going on guys, welcome back to another episode of the affiliate mastery podcast. Here I am, Frank Chen, with the amazing Alex May bringing you another episode of amazing affiliate information, and today we’ll be talking about: is your offer ready for affiliates. We’re gonna be talking about creating an attractive affiliate product and affiliate program.
Now this is probably one of the number one questions I get asked at my mastermind events from any kind of new info marketer coming into the business (I really want to categorize this in two buckets -and if you’re listening, you may fit in the first or the second.
The first person is definitely the person who has an idea or has been doing the business and are now they’re ready to create a product; and they don’t know what price point they should do what they should include in their product, what bonuses money back guarantees, fulfillment softwares that are going to use. We’re touch up on a few of these things today. Hopefully, it will give you guys a bit more direction.
The second bucket is going to be the people who have been in this space, have some products, maybe have sold a few products, do cold traffic, maybe a few handshake deals with their close friends and affiliates who have promoted them, but they’re not really transparent or sure on what their conversion numbers are, or if their offer is ready for affiliates, or if there’s certain things that could be doing better to simplify or remove redundancies before they start talking to affiliates.
Hopefully, we can help give you guys some information to give you guys some direction there on if you’re on the right track as well. Okay, so ready to dive in? Ready, Alex?
So ready, let’s do it!
I heard this at this event that I was at last and it just hit me to my core, which is KISS. And it’s not the band. It’s not the rock stars. It’s “keep it simple, stupid.” I cannot tell you guys how many people I’ve talked to overcomplicate – they’ve tried to do too many things, create a robust backend, pay for all these agencies, spend $5-$10k every month before they’re even ready for affiliates.
What I mean by that is, you should be focusing on your product, and you don’t need a ton of people putting their hands in your pockets to do that. So Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Now, the first question I’m gonna ask you is: does your product work? I know, it’s a stupid question. But if it doesn’t work, you’re not ready for affiliates, because your offer is definitely not ready.
The way you tell is, are you creating weekly testimonials? That’s the biggest proof in the pudding – if it works, you’re gonna have people telling you it works, right?
The next thing is: does it have an irresistible product stack? Now without getting to the details there, the quickest way to establish that is, does each of the things that you include in your offer overcome a main objection in your industry? Now in real estate, it really falls into three simple categories: time, money, and experience. What we do to overcome these are include done-for-you components in our product, or some type of software and technology, right?
That helps overcome the experience and the time. And then money is usually our last factor. Usually, funding in our business overcomes that. So kind of think about what your business is and what the main objections are, and then design a product around those objections. They’ll set you up in a good direction.
Next is: do you focus on what makes you or your product unique? Now, that’s compared comparison I can give you here, is wholesalers. We have a whole bunch of wholesalers out there – what makes you unique? That’s how the terms of “wholetailng,” “pre-wholesaling,” “reverse wholesaling” – all these came out because someone was a wholesaler, they tried to be unique, and came up with all these unique terminologies which all essentially are relatively the same.
But its marketing, its advertising, it’s funny, a good hook. And we can associate that with how you become unique. So think of a really unique hook and how you separate yourself, and that will definitely help you out as well.
The last thing, which was really kind of blows my mind, is that a lot of people pay attention to us is fulfillment and support. We’re gonna go into this a little bit deeper, but now you know that you’ve sold some product, are you creating raving fans? Cultivating that community? And are you offering the support they need to be successful? Because if you don’t have support there, a lot of the times that’s where refunds come back, that’s where bad reviews online happen. And that will ultimately destroy your online business before it even starts. And don’t even talk about affiliates. So Alex, what are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, I think that that element of community completes the circle with fulfillment and support and if you haven’t listened to Episode Two yet, you can go back there and check it out. Make sure you check it out to learn how you can build community in order to support your buyers. So that’s a little teaser.
Absolutely, like Alex said, check out Episode Two, we just completed that one and it’s all about fostering community and selling more product, which I know you guys care about. So check that out.
But you know, I want to say real quick. As you guys can see, based on what we were talking about, everything that I mentioned did not talk about price.
Price is one of those [questions], “what should I price my product at?” Price only matters in the absence of value. Okay, so you got to focus on creating the best value first, then slap a price on there that makes sense. Now to give you guys some metrics to work off of specifically in the real estate information marketing space, where we’re selling education, software, things like that;I’m gonna give you guys a wider range of price points that have worked the best for us.
$97 is good. $297 is probably my favorite number for low price points. $497 is another strong price point. Now, when you start teetering on to like $797 to $997, then it matters what you include. But in terms of conversions, I don’t really see a big difference between 797 and 997. Now, when you start jumping into the $1000s, I really see $1500, or $1497, being strong ones, and then $1997.
Then for webinar-style products: I wouldn’t go anything further than probably $2497 at the Max Max Max, $3k, but I would say what we successfully sell the most is probably between $1000 to $1500 on the high end, and on the low end is going to be probably $100 to $300. Are you seeing that with your clients? Alex?
So it’s interesting, you know, it varies. It can be a lower dollar price point, $97, and it can go all the way up to $65,000. Really, you have to, obviously, test internally, but it comes down to also knowing your audiences and knowing your affiliate audiences and your affiliate avatars.
I know a lot of my clients have a myriad of affiliates where we’ll present a new offer with a $97 price point, and they’re like, “that’s not gonna fly with my people that’s too low,” or, you know, $10,000 offer, “oh, that’s way too high, do you have something lower?” so also being flexible and having different tiers or different levels of price points can help you fare better in the affiliate landscape. I think that that’s really a major point there is, is test internally, but also make sure you know who you’re targeting.
I’m so glad you touched on that, I actually didn’t include that in our in our notes. But that is such a good point is to actually have a low price point and a high price point offer to cater to both ends of the affiliate spectrum. Because so many people that we work with have a one singular product, one price, and that may not work for everybody. So you’re kind of leaving money on the table. So great point, Alex love that.
So let’s actually go ahead and dive into some of the more common questions. Pricing is definitely one of those, right? So you know, really look at your offer, I would say anything in the sub $1000 could just be education, you know, some people try to go above and beyond include technology and all these other things. And we’re going to actually follow up on another podcast where he actually talked about the details of a winning offer, right? Like what actually you should include, when it comes to software, what type of software? When it comes to the customer support, what type of customer support? What kind of bonuses should you include? and hopefully that translates to other industries, and we’ll walk you guys through the mindset of how that works.
Today, we really want to focus on just your overall offer. Let’s talk about some conversions. So leading to our first question, which is: what should my conversions be? My question to you is, are you selling?
If conversions are zero, that doesn’t matter what your conversions are, if you don’t your numbers, go back to the drawing board. But when it comes to cold traffic, if you’re working with smaller affiliates, or even your own list – typically in our space – and we talk about overall general numbers – let’s use probably about $1,000 price point to keep things pretty simple for you…
Our conversion numbers are roughly around 5 -10% on an $1,000 product; so maybe out of 100 people watching an offer, five people should at least buy at $1,000. The lower you go, the higher the conversions, and it’s proportionate, right? It’s not like 20-30-40% when you go down to $100, it really rarely exceeds 20%. Our most successful webinars right now are probably around 10-20%. Anything between 5-10 is mediocre, it is not bad, anything less than five is not that great for that price point.
As you go higher to $1000 to $2,000 price points, then you’re lowering your conversions, but then your dollar per attendee goes up. Now, that may not make a lot of sense now, but just know that conversions fluctuate based on price point. So that’s why I’m saying to – “what should my conversions be?” Well, what’s your price point? if it’s higher, it’s gonna be slightly lower. Look at overall revenue sales, if it’s a lower price, then your conversions should be within that range, then you’re good to go.
Now, understand what you got to do is take whatever you’re getting from these three channels – cold traffic, smaller affiliates, your own list, then multiply that number by about 50 to 70% (multiply that gross number by that much), and that’s how your affiliates will do. Okay, but THEN you got to cut that in half, and that’s what they’re going to make.
That’s why I always tell my clients: if you’re testing things internally, make sure your conversions are much higher than at least the average, because it’s going to be lower with affiliates.
It’s easily the most challenging part to get your offer to convert. 50% of my conversations are like helping people get their offers to convert. Also, the flip side of that is once you get there and put forth the effort, it is literally the most fulfilling feeling ever, because now you have an offer that’s gonna carry through at least for the next six or 12 months, until you have to refresh it or update it. What are your thoughts on that Alex?
No, you made some really good points. And honestly, I’ve worked with clients in the past that just didn’t know this information, which, to you and me seems like very basic information. But when you’re raking in $50,000, $100,000 a month and you’re in the green, and you’re rolling in it, it’s sometimes easy to see past it or glaze over those really important metrics. And why is it important?
Because it enables them – you, the prospective product owner – but also us as affiliate marketing professionals, to really help use that information to project and then in turn, scale that affiliate program.
If you don’t have that basic knowledge of your conversion data…we’re focusing on sales data here, but I’ll take it just a step behind, and I’m sure we’ll get into this a little bit more in depth in future episodes… but conversions from every step of the funnel beforehand. So click:opt in, meaning somebody clicked on whatever.. an ad, or the email, that promotional door – how many of them actually provided their information? And what is that percentage compared to internally? And what your benchmarks are…which, again, we don’t have to go that in depth…but it’s important to back it up and know that data, because it will empower you to make decisions for the future.
Literally, it’s so cliche, but knowledge is power. It’s easy to glaze over it, so a lot of people don’t and they’re fine. But Frank and I are here to just from experience convey how much easier it makes your job, but also the benefit of knowing that information.
Alex you’re on fire today, I’m glad you brought that other point up too, it’s not just about the sales, guys, it’s about everything leading up to that sales point. And you’re not alone, I have tons of clients who have zero transparency on the front side – these are people who are spending $50k-$100,000 per month on advertising. Some of these people think as long as more money is coming in, then the going out there is good.
But that makes it almost virtually impossible for you to make very good decisions without knowing what is bringing the most money, or what doesn’t have the best conversions, especially if you’re dealing with tons of funnels or even just more than two or three funnels.
It can start to stack and compound in terms of complexity. Understanding your numbers gives you something to work off week to week, so if you’re not operating from a numbers perspective yet, that’s the first thing you should do with your offer. What are your numbers and how well do you know them all? You got to know him as good as what’s on the back of your hand guys.
All right. So let’s dive into the next thing which is – and this is gonna be more catered to those who have maybe never created a product before but they have a great idea in their mind – where do you get started?
The next thing to know is how do you make an offer that’s ready? Model it after what’s working in your industry.
One guy in my space created a book, it was Corey Peterson, he has “Copy Your Way To Success.’ At first I was like “this isn’t good. It’s like we were always taught in school, plagiarism is bad.” Don’t you know, don’t steal someone else’s idea? But Copy Your Way To Success means modeling your business after someone who’s already done what you have. Notice it didn’t say “steal,” or “completely copy and paste?” Exactly what they’re suggesting to do is find out what they’re doing well – the components of what they’re doing well – and copy that into your business.
If they have great customer support, you may not need to do it exactly the way they’re doing it, but do it with your flavor. Modeling it after what was working in your industry, right? Something to pay attention to, when you do look for these things is: how long is the person’s presentation (assuming that’s the way they’re selling their product)? Or how are they selling their product? What are the landing pages? What methodology are they using? Start gathering that info.
What are they including in their presentation that you’re not? So if you’re like, “well I don’t even have a presentation yet,” then look at what they’re using in their presentation to sell their product. “Well, Frank, I don’t want to create a presentation, I just want to talk about it and sell it.” Well then, find other people who just want to talk about it and sell things and see how they’re doing it.
What is the medium they’re using? Are they using it through a [Facebook] Live? Or are they doing it through Tick Tock or Instagram? How are they selling? Find the people that are doing what you want to do and start modeling it after them.
Next? Are they using early calls to action? Meaning, are they selling stuff right out of the gate or halfway through, or at the end? You can model it after that way. One guy in our space that does incredibly well, probably one of the best webinars. He did an early call to action in his webinar – he was the first person to do this. Then most people in our space started doing it. Because we realize about 20-30 minutes into webinars is when most people start to decide, “am I staying or am I leaving?” So he gave people the option. “Go ahead and leave if you like, but let me leave you with my link.” That jumped his conversions. Again, we’re modeling after something that he did, we’re not doing exactly the same way.
Next: are they using tons of testimonials? Sometimes I’ve worked with presentations when I’m reviewing people’s presentations – no testimonials?! I ask “why don’t you have them?” Oh, we haven’t gathered any yet. Well, if you haven’t gathered, wait till you get some and then put them in. Because I can’t tell you how important testimonials are to any type of validation or authority style presentation.
Testimonials are key. That’s a non negotiable for me.
Next, are their bonuses better than yours? What are they including in on top of the product that makes it sexier or attractive? A mentor of mine once said “people should buy this product just for the bonuses alone.” So don’t just throw things in there and call it a bonus because it’s extra, make sure there’s actual value there and value enough to where someone buys us just for that bonus.
The next thing is: do your research and due diligence. This is something that we even tell our existing buyers in the education space like, “hey, we’re here to present you information. But you need to do your due diligence.” If you find this person, one thing that this person is doing is awesome, don’t just take it at face value and immediately implement it in your business. Make sure that what’s happening after that actually is a good fit for your business too. Because you don’t know – everyone appears on the front to be awesome, but maybe completely ugly on the back end.
So be very careful what you tend to model and of course, making sure the person that you’re modeling ever has a great reputation, because a lot of people (just like Instagram – obviously everybody wants to put their best foot forward online), you only see the best things. Then, when you really get involved in their business, you’re like, “holy crap, this is really scary what they’re doing.” So always do your due diligence there. That’s the best way to protect yourself, and the longevity of your business.
One other thing I’ll touch on real quick is important: fulfillment. Typically, when I talk to people, we never really dive into support and fulfillment, we usually have like one person handling support, and then they’re the ones handling fulfillment, or maybe they have a fulfillment house. That’s really it. But the most common question when it comes to this is” “what should my money back guarantee be?”
Industry standard is around 30 days, some people try to do a three-day money back guarantee. My honest opinion about this after selling 1000s and millions of dollars in product is that a three-day is really dirty. Think about what you can actually accomplish in three days. If I bought an education program, there’s 30 modules. There’s all this homework I got to do. I got a full time job. I got kids at home, how am I actually gonna get through this in three days? It’s impossible. So it’s almost like you’re setting up your buyers for failure. And you’re like, “oh, my numbers are great. My refunds are low!” – that’s because you’re in the business of keeping people’s money.
I work with people who have offered 12 month guarantees with eight different guarantees. And their refund rates are still lower than people who have seven-day money back guarantees, it comes down to the value you provide your customers. Okay? That’s a big component of whether you’re whether you’re ready or not.
If you’re really thinking about “how do I reduce my refunds by reducing my money back guarantee,” you’re really looking at this the wrong way. I like 30 days, I like 60 days. I like 90 days. I like lifetime guarantees, because you’re focused more on support when you offer crazy guarantees like that. I like being behind businesses like that.
Refund rates anything less than 15% in our industry is good. Sometimes people say if your refund rates are not above 10%, or 15%, you’re not selling enough. That’s a pretty interesting concept. Once you start teetering over 20%, now things are getting kind of scary. If one in every five buyers are refunding, you really got to go back and assess what’s going on with your product in terms of support, fulfillment, and just customer care, right?
Next – are you able to handle student and buyers at scale? Now, this is from a personal experience, when smaller affiliates come in to get a handful of sales – three to five, five to 10, every month – they assume they’re ready for the big dogs, but they’ve never really fully stressed tested their CRMs, their merchant accounts.
Something about some merchant accounts with smaller affiliates, or smaller companies: when they start seeing a mad influx of cash come in, they might freeze your account…keep your capital for 90 days…how you gonna operate your business that way? Having a backup merchant account is important.
Another thing too is fulfillment – depending on what you’re promising in your product, “oh, you get one-on-one call with me, I do weekly calls…”once you start having more students come in, that’s gonna take up more of your time. So really consider what you’re promising. And at scale, can you keep that pace? Because if you can’t, then your offer is not ready for affiliates, because it’s gonna only add more stress onto your team and yourself.
All right. Next is: do you have a support team and a ticket system that actually works? I mean, once people buy your product, awesome, great..you collected the money, but if people are having problems can they actually get ahold of you? Is it only by phone? Is it only by email?
I freaking hate the businesses now Alex that literally make it impossible to reach somebody. It’s like they purposely Round Robin, you experienced that as well?
It’s like the bane of human existence, major third world problem….but yeah! I mean, I guess the sentiment is that they’re, you know, trying to delegate to technology, to focus on other things. But that is not the way to do it. When your customer experience is suffering because of it…you’re shooting yourself in the foot. So yes, I’m unfortunately familiar.
It’s crazy. I’ve seen great companies with phenomenal products, but they have like one to three star reviews because their customer service is complete garbage. So don’t sacrifice all the hard work to get a converting offer only for it to come crashing down because you didn’t handle the support side.
That’s probably equally if not as important as creating a solid good offer. 50-50. Let’s call it that.
Lastly, I kind of briefly touched on this – can your merchant account handle the amounts being processed? A lot of my clients now that who are doing, you know, 10s of 1000s of dollars every month, six figures a month, that’s what they talk about. “I need a merchant account and a backup merchant account a third merchant account specifically for these larger promotions or a large influx of cash.” Most people don’t think about it until it’s too late. So my advice to you is always have a backup merchant account, especially if you’re considering doing more volume with affiliates. What do you got to add to that, my friend?
I just want to go back to one of your earlier points as far as “are you able to handle the new customers, and your existing customers?” Really…it’s it’s supply and demand baby! I have worked with people who have the best intentions, but they’ve gotten themselves into so much trouble because they’re just so overzealous to get new customers in the door.
And they’re like, “Oh, I have this friend or I have this…assistant can help be a salesperson or a support person, and I can pull in my son, and I could do this, and oh, maybe do you want to help?” It’s like, “No. You have to not only have the support internally, to match that projected external scale, meaning new new buyers, but you also have to make sure that they know what they’re doing. Just having that internal support is not enough. They need to actually really know your product and your business inside and out, as well as your merchant accounts, the backup merchant accounts, they need to know all of that stuff, because in the end, you’re going to just provide a bad customer experience. So I think that was one of the more important points here is you can have everything in place as far as infrastructure goes. But if you don’t have the human capital, that is actually “with ya,” then you’re off to a bad start.
Another great point, Alex, but I gotta tell you, this just put a seed in my brain is we definitely got to do a follow up episode regarding having a winning team. If you’r – and we’ll talk about it in two buckets again, your bootstrap team if you’re just starting or you’re winning team, if you’ve got the capital to hire the right people.I think that would be a phenomenal episode. We’re definitely gonna do that.
And you’re right, you know, there’s only gonna be certain key roles in your business where you actually need to put the right person in place. Because either it’s going to cost you a ton of money and dude, I’m working with a client now or they had an executive assistant, and they rolled her into – and I was telling her, I was like, I see this all the time – one person if they start to scale ends up wearing 3, 4, 5, 6 different hats and that’s not even the role to begin with!
That’s like the worst thing you can do for your business, putting someone who has one specific job enroll, who maybe has a personality from a Colby test and predictive index and says, “they’re going to be a good executive assistant,” and then they’re like, “can you handle my accounting? Can you handle business development? Can you handle support? Can you handle my project management?”
And they all say “yes!” because most people in those roles say yes to everything. But then they’re going to do 20% of effort, and work and output for each of these roles, versus 100% at one role, okay, so be very careful about who you place in these roles. And we’re definitely do a follow up episode. So stay tuned for that. Thank you for that add. Alex.
Next is tracking. Now this is the coup de gras of like Alex said, the bane of our existence in terms of tracking.
Unfortunately, in our space, there just isn’t a “one and done.” The “Rolls Royce of affiliate tracking” does not exist unfortunately, if it does, hit me up, if you have a company out there that really understands how to handle affiliate marketing at scale, I’m talking real, real good – hit me up. And if you’re wrong, I’m going to call you out on it. Because I’ve had I’ve worked with companies that have used Go High Level, Post Affiliate Pro, I’ve worked with Kartra, I’ve worked with Click Funnels, I’ve done stuff with Infusionsoft and Ontraport. The list goes on and on these all relatively do what you need to do.
But they all have deficiencies as well, and we’re not gonna get into that now. My only opinions, I personally like Infusionsoft after working with all of these because they integrate well with certain other softwares that you’re going to use for your business. But at the end of the day, there’s always going to be tracking issues. I think if you don’t have this dialed in, it’s literally the quickest way to destroy your affiliate relationships and any possibility of you getting back into this with these same people, even months later.
I mean if you have 1, 2, 3 months of really bad tracking with a promotion, at least in our industry, word gets around really fast. “Don’t work with that person,” if they’re in a mastermind together, and they start chit chatting, and then like one person to three, another three to five and six to 10. And just almost it’s like gossip, right? It sucks. But if I work with someone, and they blow up my promotion, and they mess things up, because of tracking, you bet your ass, I’m gonna be telling someone else that I know, like, “don’t work with them,” because I don’t want them to suffer the same thing I did, right. So make sure your tracking is good.
Similar to what we were talking about before is stress testing that tracking by working with maybe one medium size affiliate, and understanding where the track deficiencies are there – if you know, three, five, 10 buyers out of 50 buyers, one tag…. if only one person promoted, you’re able to at least isolate that problem and figure out what’s going on. But if you had three affiliates, probably each with 50 sales and you have 15 untagged buyers, where the heck do they come from?
Okay, so we’re gonna talk a little bit, Alex is gonna talk about tracking the importance of that. But really have your tracking dialed in. Stress test the heck out of it, if you can – whether that’s been a ton of money on cold traffic, and just shoving a whole bunch of people in there and just seeing what happens to your CRM, I recommend that, before you even talk to affiliates…. or if you do, make sure you have a good relationship with that affiliate, and that they know full transparency, “hey, I’m stress testing this, just so we can identify where the issues are.” But every sale that you get belongs to you,d on’t worry, and definitely assure them okay, everything’s gonna be okay.”
So, again, nothing sucks more, nothing sucks more, and turns off an affiliate than when they don’t have transparency into their sales. Meaning, “I’m sending emails, I’m driving promotions to your offer. I don’t see any sales, zero sales.” Holy moly. That’s the worst feeling.
If something is broken, meaning “I’m sending traffic, and no one’s communicating with me, three, four days of the promotion…I get emails like “oh, my God, Frank, something broke…” I’m done with you. I’m so done with you. Just make sure things are tracking correctly. Right? If things are going great, you’re good to go.
What you need to understand here is that affiliates do think differently, they have a very simple mindset. Basically, all they care about is making money. That’s their primary concern and then customer care is secondary. Meaning they don’t want a lot of refunds, right? They want to keep the money they just made. Both are equally important. So all they care about is are you tracking my leads correctly? Am I getting credit for the leads I’m sending you and are you taking care of them? As long as you can take care of that, then the other things are kind of not as important, but will come up in conversation.
So that’s what I have on tracking, Alex… I know this is kind of like your field of expertise. You’re the one that’s always talking to me about implementing tracking and make sure we have that in place. So what are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, well, it’s born out of necessity. I started in pay per click advertising so this is really inextricable from that bucket of marketing. But as it applies – and when I I get into the the lingo here – it really does apply to affiliates as well.
Explicitly, my example is Google Analytics, because that’s a well known free tracking platform, and it’s a backup tracking platform. So Frank, you just talked a lot about the tracking and the credit, the sales credit, you know, from opt-in to sale, and making sure that gets back to affiliates, but things break, but like you mentioned, so it’s really important to have… Well, I’ll start by saying, most people don’t have this, so I’ll rewind, most people don’t use a backup tracking system like Google Analytics, and they’re fine.
And they are – similar to what we said earlier about how some people don’t know their conversion numbers to a tee, and they’re fine, they’re still raking it in – but having a backup tracking system like Google Analytics, where it really drills down into the, the very individual that is clicking and/or doing whatever behavior, it’s empowering to be able to make decisions, and also mainly reaffirm the confidence that your affiliates have in you. That you have this transparency, “here’s the transparency!” right? That’s really where it all matters. So we will definitely get into that in another episode but the gist is have a backing tracking system and offer as much transparency as you can, because it’s only going to make the confidence of your affiliates grow with you.
Absolutely, I gotta tell you, if I’m working with somebody, and they send me my affiliate link without a tracking link, it doesn’t really faze me. Because it’s an Infusionsoft link, I work with this tons of times, I put a test order in, I’m good to go. I know it’s tracking, that’s all I need to do. But when they send me a link with a UTM tracking link, which is what I just looked up as an Urchin Tracking Module … I don’t even know what that is, but I know what a UTM should say…
Hey, I just learned from you, I just knew “UTM”! And that’s..
That’s it! And we use that we use that term a lot, and all it is just adding certain tags to your link that communicate with your CRM. So you can get a lot more granular into the weeds with each person that’s coming into your funnel, right, where they came from, what link they clicked on, and allows us, like Alex says, to make some really important business decisions that you would not otherwise be able to make without these in place.
Again, it’s like putting all your eggs in one basket, where tracking and knowing your numbers is essentially the core of anybody’s business – without insight to that, how do you operate your business efficiently?
Where do you know where money is going? How do you know if you’re paying people too much or too little? Like, a lot of these things are all about tracking and where things are coming from and credit, like your credibility. So like Alex said, If I get a UTM tracking link, I’m like, “oh, this person’s paying attention!” I don’t ask him I “what are you doing with that information?” It’s like, I definitely know he’s paying attention, and if he’s paying attention, and others aren’t, I know that this is an extra layer of trust. Okay. Great point, Alex.
So the last and final thing I want to talk to you about too, and I realize a lot of people don’t do is: how easy are you making it for affiliates to sign up as a partner? Now I’ve seen a guy in a space this guy does a $10 million business he does so well, and he hasn’t really worked with affiliates to hit that number. Now he’s considering working with affiliates. Here’s the crazy thing: he has all of this built out on his page already, he has an affiliate page, all the different all the assets, even has a commercial, this guy has every possible asset…emails, everything you need!
But when I went on his landing page, it was so hard to navigate where everything was. He didn’t even make it easy to sign up to be an affiliate because there’s just so much information in here. You guys have heard the phrase “analysis paralysis,” right? That also applies to all things where it requires a decision to be made.
If you give too many options, you just can’t make a decision because you’re just thinking on too many things.
So how easy do you make it for affiliates to get more information about you, your product, commission structure, your marketing, your assets, your landing pages? It can all be done in a streamlined, one landing page. You can even do it on Click Funnels.
That’s what Alex did for us in our company. Just to provide an example and we’re going to do a follow up we’re going to give you guys actual samples what that should look like, what you should include…but the idea is one of the you guys know is if you don’t have a front-facing page yet, that shares this information…that’s where I got all my clients to first. I ask: “where’s your landing page where people affiliates can sign up?”
“Well, we don’t have them we have a Infusionsoft form or we have a Kartra form or an Ontraport form we just send people to.” I was like okay, so you still have to get on the phone if you want to explain what you guys do every single time?”
“Yeah…”
“Like…why?!” Make this easier for yourself guys KISS keep it simple, but not that simple. Alright, don’t be lazy. You create a simple drag and drop landing page where everything off links to another, you know, Google Drive or this and that whatever. It’s not hard guys. Alex, how long did it take you? I know you made ours look pretty. But if you needed like a rough, simple “hey, I gotta get this done by tomorrow,” how long do you think it would take to create something like that?
An hour. I mean, as long as you have a basic understanding of a website builder like clickfunnels, not long at all, especially if you have examples to go by. As Frank mentioned, we’ll we’ll definitely be providing those in future episodes. But it’s really…if you think about also, this episode is about how to make sure that you are ready and you look…you are prepared for affiliates, and you are just the strongest you can be for affiliates before you even press play, having this landing page, this interactive one-pager, it really puts you a cut above the rest that don’t have that.
It presents you as… we talked about transparency in the last point, it’s now about authority and confidence and in your brand and in your business and your offer and your processes. So as opposed to sending a Google Doc with all of these points, you know, which I’m not gonna lie I have, I have clients that I’ve done that, I still do, not every one of my clients has that. So, it’s a recommendation and it’s a way to really syndicate your brand and attract people to want to be your affiliate. It’s not a requirement. But it’s so easy! It took me an hour (and then a little bit more because I wanted to impress Frank with my copy).
And it was really good. We were just talking about this for this episode of that Alex’s talent is that she’s very creative and drafting up landing pages, and we’ll talk about this too, about hiring your perfect team members in really leaning in on their genius zones, because we’d be able to produce so much more by leaning in on Alex’s genius zones and when it comes to – and she actually alluded to this earlier – about this one pager, which is actually in our in our Affiliate Incubator trainings where do this in our business.
We have a one-pager that we send out to affiliates that has all the information they need to make a quick decision. Or, we have a landing page where they can go where it’s a little bit more professional where they can extract the same information. But we have two touch points: one by email, and then through follow up, “hey, how do I get more information?” I send them a link. Right, they can actually see a more front-facing professional one that I didn’t already have a conversation with them about.
It’s about really being over-prepared for your affiliate. I remember one guy in our space, I’ll say his name because he’s he’s always out there – Chris Chico – we’re at an event and he literally took every bit of advice that I had, and created a Google Drive. It’s literally like one of those documents where had a table of contents. It had all these links that you click on it takes you right there. You did it for us too,working with Monday, connecting to Drive and you just click things that will take you to that draft… it was the easiest to work with him! I didn’t have to search for things, everything was in one place. It made it easy for me to work with him and I want to keep working with him because he made it easy for me.
Definitely start implementing these things, guys. Let’s go ahead and summarize real quick, all the points that we covered today: so the first thing that you guys got to do is one, keep it simple. If you’re new to the space, model it after somebody who’s doing it well, and start testing.
if you’re already in this space, start implementing these new things:
One, understanding your conversion numbers to the tee, don’t let that be a guessing game. The next thing is support in fulfillment. This is something that probably 50% of industry overlooks or don’t really put that much attention there. This is going to set you apart from everybody else, making sure you have the support system for your buyers, that’ll lower refund rates, and the fulfillment that’s creating the overall experience. Okay, and then making sure you can keep it at scale.
The next thing is tracking, probably one of the most important things you can do. Again, we gave you guys a few samples, and we’ll put that in the show notes. But most important thing here is to fully understanding and keep it simple at first, some of these CRMs you can get super crazy over tracking – you don’t need to do that when you’re starting out, okay? But definitely have this in place, understand how it works and then stress test the heck out of it before you bring on your first affiliate. And if you do bring on your first affiliate, make sure they’re fully transparent on them being a guinea pig, and then definitely reassure them on every single front they have concerns on okay, but stress that stress that stress test because it’s the quickest way to ruin your business if you don’t, okay.
Then lastly, making a very simple signup process that provides all the information for them. If you want more information or a one pager you can go to theaffiliateincubator.com and set up an appointment with us. We’ll tell you more about that. Or you can just create one for your own, and we can provide you guys with samples that way as well.
So, that’s all we got for you guys today! I hope you enjoyed our episodes and what we talked about. It’s hard to get into this business, but it’s all about consistency, testing and modeling after the ones who do it well.
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