The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams – Advice for Affiliate Program Managers

Today, we’re taking a trip to the dark side of affiliate marketing, talking about fraud, rule breaking and nefarious activity. It’s a rare but, costly aspect of running an affiliate program. And today I’ll show you how to spot the fraud, how to prove it, and what to do about it.So this is a topic I’ve Never covered before. 502 podcast episodes, never covered it. Fraud, rule breaking.You know, when affiliates intentionally or sometimes unintentionally, and we’ll talk about that, do something that they shouldn’t be doing. Now, this is not common, but when it happens, it could be a disaster. Like it can cost a lot of money. Again, to be totally clear, this is not to scare you away. If you don’t have an affiliate program, this is not like the don’t start an affiliate program.

This is very uncommon. But when it happens, it’s bad. So you have to be diligent and it requires very little effort. And I’m going to share more about that shortly. I’m going to share what to look for, what are the indicators, how do you even know that there is some potential fraud going on?How do you actually discover it? How do you, how do you root it out, what are the causes, how to prove it, and what to do about it. So first, what do you look for? You have to be on the lookout for fraud. Depending upon the size of your program.I’m gonna give you a rough idea here. For roughly every $100,000 in sales, this is annual sales. Now, if it’s a launch, you know, this would be roughly $100,000 in sales. For every $100,000 in sales, you’re probably going to spend, about five minutes. So, yeah, that means if you’ve got a million dollars in sales, you might spend 50 minutes in a week.

It begins to kind of peter off around the half million dollar mark. So it’s about five minutes per 100,000, up to about a half a million, then gradually goes up from there. If you’re doing $100 million a year affiliate program, does that mean you’re gonna be spending 30 hours? Of course not. I didn’t do the math on that, by the way, so I don’t know what it is, but I want you to commit to spending at least 10 minutes a week for every $200,000 or so, up to about a half million, and then grow from there.

And again, these are rough estimates, but be willing to spend a little bit of time. For most of our clients, we spend about a half hour a week, maybe upwards of an hour. Now, what I’m about to share with you in this what to look for section, these are indicators. These are not necessarily cause for immediate removal. So when I say, for instance, number one, their conversion rate is too high.All right, that doesn’t mean kick them out. Oh, their conversion rate’s high. No, that means that’s the flag that makes you go, Maybe we should look into this. So number one thing to look for, conversion rates that are too high, Clicks to leads. So let’s just say that Overall you’ve had 50,000 clicks and 30,000 leads.

A 60% conversion rate. This person sent 500 clicks and they have 496 leads. That’s a red flag. That could be an issue. We need to look into that.The opposite is true. They’re way too low clicks to leads. Again, using that example, they have 500 clicks and two leads. That’s kind of weird. We should look into that.Their conversion rates are too high. Leads to sales. So on average, let’s say you have 50,000 leads and so far you have 500 sales. A, 1% close rate. And your top affiliates are all averaging between a half percent and 3%.

But this person has 400. Well, that’d be a weird number. They have 200 leads and 70 sales. Again, that does not necessarily mean they’re doing something nefarious. It could be that they have some sort of amazing thing going on with their small number of people.Maybe they only invited their mastermind or their buyers. The only people that they even invited are people who paid them $25,000. And you’re selling a thousand dollar product and they’re going one on one with them. That could be, but it’s a flag to look into it. So those are the four things related to conversion rates.

The fifth one is they have a flood of clicks followed by droughts. You know, my friend Jeanine Crooks at Shareasale said on one program, and I’m quoting here, on one program, a certain affiliate seemed to be consistently performing at a small but steady level. However, when she reviewed the daily timing of his activity, it turned out that he was hand entering the leads into our program and our competitors programs as well. To keep his conversion rate realistic, he generated clicks during his coffee breaks while working his Day job. So in other words, they sent 1,000 clicks on one day and then none the next day or between the hours of 1 and 3:30, they sent 455 clicks and then the rest of the day sent none.

Natural things would tend to show filtering of clicks over time. They might send 400 in an hour and then only 300 the next hour and only 125 the next hour because it’s filtering off. Now, this again is not a reason to kick somebody out. Why? Because it might have been that they were running ads and their ads account got shut down.Not because they were doing anything wrong, but it’s a reason to look into it more. Another one is just someone comes out of nowhere and they’re a top affiliate and you have no idea who the heck they are. They’ve not been on the leads leaderboard. All of a sudden they’re on the sales leaderboard way up there. And like, who the heck is this person?

The seventh thing to look for is a high refund rate. You know, if your average refund rate is 5%, anything north of 15, I would be investigating deeply. Obviously, if you ever get a complaint of credit card fraud. Now, if it’s a known great affiliate who’s done hundreds or thousands of sales and they have one complaint of credit card fraud, it probably wasn’t them. it was probably somebody who bought and just happened to buy through their affiliate link.I wouldn’t worry about that. But this is a new affiliate. They have nine sales ever, and one of them complained of credit card fraud. I would investigate the other eight and we’ll talk about what to do on that. And then last is complaints of spam.

You know, you’ve got an, email forwarded to your service team and it’s spam, and you trace it back to this affiliate. I’ve seen that happen. Again, in and of itself, not necessarily a kick immediately out, but it’s investigate further. Okay? It’s investigate further.So maybe don’t think of any of these as red flags, but yellow flags, red flags, you’re gone. Now, these could be all be signs of common frauds. I’m going to share a couple of different types of fraud with you. the first is spyware. You know, they have somebody download some spyware, some pop ups, some other adware that inserts it like, and the back end secretly inserts this code into their computer and it inflates their traffic.

All right? They might actually be legitimate customers, but that’s fraudulent activity. We don’t allow spyware Adware, any of that type of stuff in any of our affiliate programs. So that’s breaking the rules. The second is cookie stuffing.You know, this is where they. They literally insert the cookie, the affiliate, like affiliate tracking, on the person’s computer. So whether the user clicked on the affiliate link or not, it’s going to credit that affiliate. Domain squatting is another one. You know, these look official.So mattmcwilliams.com and they get mattmcwilliam.com we have no product, no problem.com for our affiliate training. And they get no product, no problem.com looks official.

And when they go to no product, no problem, it just are no product, no problem. They have one little typo and it redirects them, snags the referral, right? IP spoofing. This is something where they create fake IP addresses to hide their identity.And then the affiliates are literally clicking on their own links to artificially inflate their numbers. That’s a big bad one. Iframes. Using iframes. Basically, it’s kind of like cookie stuffing.Maybe they write a review post and they put an iframe on there that automatically triggers their affiliate link. And so again, these are all things they could be doing. And you don’t know what they’re doing. That’s not the point. The point is they’re doing something.

Postbacks. This is where the fraudulent affiliate, they obtain a transaction ID and they have the address, and then they attempt to bypass the actual. You know, bypass the actual. Like a real affiliate. And they claim commissions for conversions that never actually happened.It’s really like some deep stuff. Never seen it happen. It just can happen. Fake discount codes. So somebody goes to Google and they type in, you know, a discount code for your product.And then it’s like, yeah, click here to retrieve this discount code. And it never actually happens. Maybe they don’t even offer discount codes. But now it’s cookie them. Cause they clicked that link.

And so when they go back and say, oh, screw it, I’m not even gonna bother to try to find a discount code, they just go back to your website. Boom. it’s credited to them, though, because they were the last click. And then if you have pay per call, this is a creative one. I read from Liza Schuber, she’s with Astoria Co.Said affiliates who post fake job opportunities on Craigslist, they’ll ask a potential job seeker to, quote, call and pretend to be a real customer. Stay on the phone for at least three minutes. The fraudulent publisher says, this call is part of the interview process. And then if the job seeker does a good job, they will be called in for an interview, which never happens, of course. It’s just a way of simulating traffic because pay per call is typically based on the length of time.

Now, I would never do three minutes anyway. I would do like, you know, depends on how long it takes to process an order. But you’re paying for the phone calls, so. Well, they’re on the phone call for seven minutes and there you go. So those are all reasons why.Now, going back to what we talked about at the beginning, I’m going to give you some reasons for removal. These are absolutely red flags. You are out if they break the explicit rules. And it’s like a blatant, egregious rule break if they break the law, if they make false claims, if they’re doing trademark bidding, if it’s not allowed. One of the ways, by the way, if you don’t know what trademark bidding is, is where they bid on your name.

Now here’s the thing. If they know that the affiliate manager lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana, like I do, guess what they’ll do? They will say, don’t run ads in that area. Don’t run, they won’t run ads from Illinois, Michigan, Indiana or Ohio. To avoid me catching them, I just go to Google and change my location and I change it to all kinds of different places so I can go look up the trademarked bidding and see if anybody’s bidding on our keywords.And if they are, especially if it doesn’t show up where I’m at and then it does show up when I change my location, they know they’re breaking the rules and I will kick them out in a heartbeat. I will not yellow flag them, I will not reach out to them. I will kick them them out, anything like that. You know, if they’re using scammy tactics, if they’re literally, you know, okay, I search from, you know, the product and it says it’s such and such a scam. We don’t allow that.

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You’re out. You knew what you were doing, you’re out. So from there you gotta dig in, right? so we have some yellow flags, right? We’re seeing some abnormal activity, some conversion rates too low, too high.There’s some weird patterns to the clicks. There’s a little bit of higher refund rate. There’s one complaint about credit card fraud. What do we do now? We want to dig in and think about some things.So number one, are they in contact with you? You know, scammers don’t typically, fraudsters don’t typically reach out to the affiliate manager very much. They’re usually not in contact. They like to hide. So that’s a consideration.

It’s not the end all, be all, but it’s a consideration. Are they always the last click but never the first? So if they have 50 sales and every single one of them had another affiliate assigned to them originally, or 40 of them did, maybe the other 10 had no affiliate. They’re always the last click, but none of their sales, they’re ever the first. Well, we’re talking about cookie stuffing, we’re talking about possible iframe.There’s no way that happens, not on that many sales. So I would remove them. In that case, is their sales page visit duration considerably shorter than normal or longer than normal? You know, okay, your average sales page visit per order is 14 minutes. There’s just three on 32 orders.

There’s no way. Or it’s an hour and 15 minutes. There’s no way. That’s just not possible. Look at the length from the click to the activity.Is it way too short or way too long? Is the IP address the same for multiple purchases? Maybe there’s maybe, they have 50 orders and 10 IPs. There’s no way that happened. What’s the open rate on their emails?You know, if they sent somebody sent a thousand leads, they have a 0% open rate or they have 100% open rate. What’s the bounce rate? Are a lot of their emails bouncing? These are signs of fraud, right? What’s the show up rate for their leads to workshops?

What’s the click through rate? So, well, they sent a thousand leads and none of their people showed up for the webinar, for the workshop, for the live training. Well, the normal show up rate is 27%. So that’s an issue. are all of their buyers coming from one route or route?If you wanna say Route? No, route. Route. Don’t really know. In other words, if you’ve got a big launch and you’ve got a workshop and you got a webinar, got a live stream, you got a Q and a live, you got a sales page and all their sales are from the sales page.That’s a possible sign. Like, okay, there’s no way. None of their people bought on the live stream. If they have enough leads. There’s no way.

None other people bought on the webinar. You know, we want to look at those things. We want to look at a patterns to Their lead signups like, okay, are their email addresses similar? This was probably 12, 13 years ago. And every single lead that this person sent out of hundreds and hundreds was first initial, last namemail.com. there’s no way that’s the case. So that’s not possible. Every single one of them was, their name was Thomas Jones and it was tjonesmail. It was like T.Jones followed by a number. That’s what it was. Oh, Amber Smith. Asmith143gmail.com.

Is it that way for their purchases? Is there a pattern to their names? Do they have, let’s say they have 40 sales and normally all your sales, 40% of buyers upgrade to a VIP version. None of theirs do. All of theirs do.That’s weird. Is their click to their country different? So their clique is from, you know, Spain, but their purchase is in Canada. That’s weird. All their clicks come from the same country, but their purchases are all over the world.That’s fraud. Is their shipping address different from their card address? Is that uncommon? No. Is it common for 15 of 15 sales to have a different shipping address from the card address?

No, that’s just not possible. It’s just not possible. So you dig in now you’ve red flagged things, right? Or it’s like a deep yellow and you’ve like, you’ve proven there’s something there and then you gotta prove it. So if you’ve checked search results, if we’re talking a violation of trademark bidding, check the search results, take screenshots.That’s it. You violated our trademark bidding. I have the right to kick you out. You know, we talked about the time between clicks, okay? There’s always a click at, 9:52 and then another one at 9:53.It’s always one minute later. And every other affiliate has sporadic patterns. Seven minutes, two minutes, one minute, 12 minutes, hour and 14 minutes. Theirs is always one minute. That’s probably a script.

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And I’ve seen that happen. I’ve seen it happen. Where they were able to get into. They hacked the page and they put their script on and it ran at the exact same interval. One minute later, there was another click.So then check your page for scripts. Make sure you get those removed. Right? And then ultimately at the end, click, contact buyers, see if they actually bought, see if they intended to actually buy from this affiliate. This solves the problem.90% of the time you reach out to 10 of their buyers and you say, hey, just want to know, how’d you hear about us? And they Say, oh, I heard about you from so and so. And it’s not the affiliate that actually got the credit. Eight people reply back, and all of them say, a different affiliate. That’s not normal.

They’re doing something. You’ve proven it beyond a shadow of a doubt. So then what do you do about it? What do you do about it? First of all, make sure your affiliate terms are airtight.Are the things that you call fraud actually listed as fraud? Are your rules clear? Okay. You can’t kick an affiliate out for bidding on your trademark terms if you don’t tell them not to. That’s not inherent.Some affiliate programs actually allow it. Some affiliate programs advocate it. So there’s nothing wrong with it, provided that it’s actually allowed. So are, your rules clear? Secondly, when do you warn and when do you remove?

We warn when they break a rule. Like, you know. Yeah. We say, don’t do trademark bidding. Well, here’s the thing.If the term is okay, of course, you know, company I used to work for, Legacy Learning Systems, Learn and Master Guitar. And when I go search for Learn and Master Guitar and they bid on Learn Guitar, that’s not a trademark violation. So we tell them. We say, hey, make sure you do a negative, keyword so you don’t show up. it doesn’t look like you’re bidding on Learn and Master Guitar.

That’s it. Just don’t bid on this exact phrase. And we just teach them. We reach out and we say, hey, don’t do it. If it’s clear they’re running an iframe, they’re out.They’re cookie stuffing, they’re out. They’re doing anything like domain squatting or spyware adware things. Fake discount codes. They are. Bye bye.Like we are kicking them out. Some of the things, it’s a warning. It’s just a warning. Hey, you know, don’t do that. That’s against the rules.Or maybe we need to update our rules. Oh, used a picture that we said you shouldn’t use. Hey, make sure you don’t use it. Right? And then the big thing is act.

You’ve got to take action fast. Take action fast. If you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt there is a problem, you take action to remedy it. If it’s a script on your page, get the script off there right away. You know, there’s nothing wrong with that.It turns out maybe it’s not that affiliate. Like, that’s not even what’s doing. It’s not even this thing. But you Just there’s a weird script, so get it off there. If they’re doing anything nefarious, you gotta kick them out right away and let them know.

Cause the other thing is you don’t wanna just shut down their account and not tell them. Cause then they might still have the ads running or the pop ups running for 36 hours and people are still getting, maybe they’re going to an error page or they’re still running the ads and it could come back to bite you and document everything. Don’t call them either text them or email them so you can document. So if they come back and say you didn’t pay me my commissions, you can go, yeah, because you’re fraud. We got proof right here.

And in case anything ever comes back to bite you, this is very rare, but like somebody files a complaint against you for running adware when you’re not the one doing it. So take action fast. Make sure you contact them, tell them to remove their ads, to shut down their stuff, you’re not going to pay them and make sure they know that. So again, this is not a huge issue, but it’s one that you have to be on top of. So now you know how to find it, how to, how to get like what are the triggers, what are the yellow flags?

Right? You know what to be looking for, you know how to dig in and you know what to do about it. If you got questions about this or anything else, text me anytime at 260-217-4619. I’ve got plenty more stories to share on affiliate fraud. I’m happy to share with you, so feel free to text me anytime at 260-217-4619 if you got any questions about fraud or anything else.And make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. I’ve got some creative ways to triple your affiliate commissions. You don’t want to miss it. I’ll see you then. Thank you so much for listening today. Remember to check out all of our deep dives into affiliate marketing at the Affiliateguide TV. And if you have a question, ask it@asktheaffiliateguy.com who knows, maybe you even be featured on an upcoming episode. And lastly, if you haven’t yet, make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you’re listening to this episode.

The post Affiliate Fraud: Red Flags Every Program Should Watch appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

How to Build Your Affiliate Promotion Calendar for the Year

Matt McWilliams — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 10:10:13 +0000

An affiliate promotion calendar is a twelve-month plan that maps which offers you’ll promote, when each promotion runs, and how hard you’ll push on each one. Most affiliates can build the first version in about two hours and adjust it once a quarter. The payoff is bigger commissions, fewer scrambles, and an email list that still likes you in December.

Your affiliate promotion calendar decides how much you earn next year, and most affiliates don’t have one. They hear about a launch nine days before the cart opens, throw together two emails on a Tuesday night, finish 40th on the leaderboard, and then do the exact same thing in March.

I’ve watched this from both sides of the table for twenty years. As an affiliate manager, I can tell you who planned and who didn’t within about four hours of a cart opening. The affiliates who finish in the top ten knew about that launch back in November. They blocked the dates, built a bonus package in advance, warmed their audience for three weeks, and wrote their review post in October when they had time to make it good. The affiliates who finish 40th found out about it on Instagram.

The gap between those two groups isn’t talent or list size. One group planned the year. The other group reacted to it.

What goes on an affiliate promotion calendar

Four things belong on your calendar, and you plan them in this order.

Big launches from other people come first. These are the Product Launch Formula style promotions with a defined open and close date, usually running seven to fourteen days. They produce the biggest single paydays of your year.

Your own product launches come second, if you sell anything of your own. They outrank every affiliate offer on the calendar.

Seasonal windows come third. Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the New Year goal-setting rush in the first two weeks of January, back-to-work season in early September, and whatever seasonal spike exists in your specific niche.

Evergreen offers fill everything else. Software you use daily, courses that sell year-round, the tools on your resources page. These pay the mortgage between the big launches.

Two more items deserve dates even though they don’t earn commissions directly: your list-building pushes and your content production windows. If you plan to write three review posts this year, put them on the calendar in the months you’ll write them, not the weeks you need them.

Start with the launches you already know are coming

Roughly 80% of the launches you promoted last year will happen again this year, usually within two weeks of the same dates. Jeff Walker has run Product Launch Formula in the spring for over a decade. Michael Hyatt ran his goal-setting launch in December and January for years because that’s when people care about next year. Launch dates repeat because buyer behavior repeats.

So open last year’s inbox, find every promotion you ran, and write down the dates. That’s your starting skeleton.

Then do the thing almost nobody does. Email the affiliate managers in December and ask this: “I’m planning my 2027 promotion calendar. Do you have tentative launch dates yet? I want to block the time and plan properly.” I get maybe five of these emails a year across programs that have thousands of affiliates. Five. The people who send them get answers, and they get on my radar as someone worth giving a heads up to when dates change.

If you’re still building your first few partnerships, the calendar gets easier once you have offers worth putting on it. My free Affiliate Marketing QuickStart Guide covers how to find programs, get accepted, and start earning without creating a product of your own. It includes copy and paste email templates you can send to managers this week.

How many affiliate promotions can you fit in a year?

Somewhere between two and fifteen, depending on your audience and how much support you give each one. I’ve coached people who do two promotions a year and clear six figures. I’ve coached others who run fifteen and their audience loves them for it.

Three questions determine your number. How does your audience respond to promotions now, measured by unsubscribes, click rates, and replies? How much support will you give each promotion? And how much of your revenue needs to come from affiliate commissions versus your own products?

If you send one email per promotion, you can run a lot of them. If you build bonus packages and write review posts and host webinars, you’ll run far fewer and earn more from each. I break down the full decision process in How Many Affiliate Launches Can You Promote Each Year?, and the answer changes as your list changes.

For most people with a list under 10,000, eight to twelve total promotions a year works well. That’s roughly one a month with a few gaps.

Pick a promotion level before you pick a date

I promote at three levels, and the level determines how much calendar space a promotion needs.

All-in promotions get everything. I promote the pre-launch content, push the webinars, build a custom bonus package, write a review post, run ads, and send five or more emails on the final day. Each one eats two weeks of my focus. I do three to five of these a year, and they produce most of my affiliate income.

Limited promotions get one or two emails, often to a segment of my list rather than the whole thing. They take an afternoon. I might run eight of these in a year and barely feel them.

JV webinars sit in between. Someone I trust runs a webinar exclusively for my audience. I promote the registration, show up, and let them do the selling. Three emails and an hour of my time.

Assign a level to every promotion before you assign it a date. Two all-in promotions back to back in the same month will wreck you, and you’ll do a mediocre job on both.

How to space promotions so you don’t burn your list

Leave at least three weeks between hard promotions, and four to six weeks between all-in promotions. Count from the last sales email of one promo to the first sales email of the next, not from cart close to cart open.

The mistake I see constantly: someone finishes a fourteen-day launch on a Friday and starts warming up for the next one on Monday. Their audience got sold to for two straight weeks, got four days off, and now they’re being sold to again. Unsubscribes spike, open rates drop, and the second promotion underperforms because the audience has stopped reading.

Between promotions, send content that gives something away. Teach, tell stories, answer questions, link to useful things without a commission attached. Your audience needs to remember that you’re worth reading when you aren’t selling. I go deeper on the mechanics in How to Promote MORE Affiliate Offers Without Burning Your List.

Segmenting buys you extra room. If you promote a photography course to the 2,200 people who clicked photography content, the other 8,000 never see it, and you can run something else for them the following week.

Fill the gaps with evergreen offers

The weeks between big launches are where most affiliates earn nothing, and that’s the easiest money on the calendar to fix. Evergreen offers sell year-round with no cart deadline, which means you control the timing completely.

Block one evergreen push a month. Pick a tool you use every single day, tell a story about a problem it solved for you, and link to it. That’s a single email that takes forty minutes to write and pays for years because the link keeps working.

Rotate them so the same offer doesn’t come around more than every three or four months. And route the traffic somewhere permanent. A resources page earns commissions on autopilot from people who find it six months after you sent the email. Mine has produced five figures a month from a page I update twice a year. The tactics live in How to Promote Evergreen Affiliate Offers.

Evergreen income depends on having somewhere for people to land between promotions. I walk through the exact structure I use, including the five things that make one convert, in How to Create a Killer Resources Page (That’s Crazy Profitable). Build it once in January and it earns for the other eleven months.

Protect your blackout weeks before you schedule anything

Mark your blackout weeks first, before a single promotion goes on the calendar. Vacations, your kid’s graduation, the week your second child is due, the family reunion in July. Block them and treat them as immovable.

I learned this the expensive way. Years ago I agreed to promote a launch that ran during a week I’d promised my wife we’d be off the grid. I ended up in a hotel lobby at 11pm writing emails while my family slept upstairs. The promotion did fine. The week was ruined, and my wife still brings it up.

Add the weeks your audience checks out, too. The week of July 4th, Thanksgiving week through the following Monday, and December 20th through the 26th produce terrible numbers in most niches. Open rates fall, and the people who do open aren’t buying $2,000 courses.

Once those weeks are blocked, you have permission to say no. When a manager asks you to promote during your blackout week, you tell them the truth: you’re out that week and you’d rather skip it than do a half job. Good managers respect that. And you stop resenting promotions you never should have accepted.

Build the calendar around your own launches

If you sell your own product, your launch dates go on the calendar before any affiliate offer, and they get a buffer on both sides.

Give yourself thirty days clear before your cart opens. You need that runway for pre-launch content, and your audience needs to hear from you about your thing without another offer competing for their attention. Then give yourself at least two weeks after cart close before you promote anything else. People who bought need onboarding. People who didn’t buy need a break.

That single decision costs you one or two affiliate promotions a year and protects the revenue that matters most. Your own launch converts at three to ten times the rate of an affiliate offer because you own the relationship and the delivery.

If you run an affiliate program of your own, you’re building a second calendar for your affiliates at the same time, with different rules. I cover that side in How to Build an Affiliate Promotional Calendar.

How to decide which offers make the cut

You’ll get more promotion requests than you have slots, which is a good problem. Five filters decide what goes on the calendar.

Audience fit comes first. If 70% of your list is course creators and someone pitches you a supplement, the answer is no regardless of the commission.

Then trust. Have you used the product, or do you know the creator well enough to vouch for the experience your people will get? Your reputation gets spent on every recommendation.

Then the math. A $997 course at 40% commission needs eleven sales to beat a $47 product at 50% commission selling 170 units. Run the numbers against what your audience buys, not what looks impressive.

Then support. Does the program give you swipe copy, decent tracking, and a manager who answers email? Programs that leave you to figure it out yourself cost you hours you didn’t budget.

Last, timing. A great offer in a terrible week is a bad offer. How To Choose Affiliate Products That Actually Convert breaks the vetting process down further.

How to build your calendar in one sitting

Set aside two hours in December, grab whatever tool you already use, and work through it in this order.

Block your blackout weeks and your own launches.
Add every repeating launch you promoted last year, using last year’s dates as placeholders.
Email five affiliate managers asking for their tentative dates.
Assign a level to each promotion: all-in, limited, or JV webinar.
Check your spacing and move anything sitting closer than three weeks to the promo before it.
Drop an evergreen push into every gap of four weeks or more.
Work backward from each all-in promotion and schedule the prep: bonus package built two weeks out, review post written three weeks out, audience warm-up starting three weeks out.

That last step separates the top ten finishers from the rest. The work that wins a leaderboard happens three weeks before the cart opens, and it only happens if it’s on the calendar. Start with 7 Ways to Warm Up Your Audience Before an Affiliate Promotion and build your prep list from there.

Once the dates are set, you need a repeatable process for each individual promotion so you’re not rebuilding your plan from scratch every time. My free Promotion Checklist Template maps out every email and social post for a full promo. Duplicate it for each promotion on your calendar and you’ve turned a twelve-month plan into twelve ready-to-run playbooks.

What to do when a great offer shows up in June

Swap, don’t add. When an offer you love lands in the middle of a planned year, look at your calendar and find the weakest promotion in that quarter. Then either drop it or move it.

Adding is how a calendar dies. You planned ten promotions, said yes to four more because they seemed too good to pass up, and now you’ve run fourteen promos in a year your audience was ready for ten. Unsubscribes climb, your average commission per promotion drops, and you conclude that affiliate marketing stopped working.

Give yourself a review window instead. Fifteen minutes at the start of each quarter, look at the next three months, and adjust. Did the last quarter’s promotions perform? Did anything get moved? Did you skip prep on something and pay for it? Then confirm the dates for the coming quarter and go back to work.

Track results as you go. Revenue per promotion, unsubscribes per promotion, and how many emails you sent. After a full year you’ll know which offers deserve an all-in slot next January and which ones belong in the limited pile. Pair that with a strong bonus offer on the promotions that earn it, using the approach in How to Build an Affiliate Bonus Strategy That Drives More Sales.

Turn each calendar slot into a real promotion

A date on a calendar earns nothing by itself. Each slot needs emails, and the emails need to be good.

For all-in promotions, plan on eight to twelve emails across the launch window, with three to five on the final day. That final-day cluster produces 40% to 60% of total commissions in most launches I’ve run or managed. If your calendar doesn’t include time to write those, the slot is decorative.

For limited promotions, one strong email beats three weak ones. Tell one story, make one recommendation, include one link.

Write the emails during a scheduled block, not the morning they go out. How to Write Affiliate Promotion Emails That Actually Convert covers the structure I use, and a review post written three weeks early gives you something to link to in every email you send.

What to do next

Three things, and you can do the first two this week.

Open your calendar and block your blackout weeks. Vacations, family commitments, holidays, and your own launches. Do this before you plan a single promotion, because everything else moves around them.

Then list every promotion you ran last year with its dates and its result. That list becomes the skeleton of next year’s calendar, and it tells you which offers earned an all-in slot.

Then email five affiliate managers and ask for their tentative dates. You’ll hear back from three, you’ll get on their radar as someone who plans, and you’ll have most of your year mapped before anyone else has thought about January.

Planning the year is the easy part. Earning consistently from it takes a system for choosing offers, warming your audience, and converting without a huge list. I break down exactly how I do it in my free masterclass, How I Currently Make $3,874 a Week Without Creating a Single Product. It’s two hours, it’s on demand, and it pairs well with a calendar you’ve already built.

The post How to Build Your Affiliate Promotion Calendar for the Year appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

How do You Migrate an Affiliate Program to New Software?

Matt McWilliams — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 12:34:46 +0000

To migrate an affiliate program to new software, export your roster with commission rates and tax records, move only the historical data you need, set up tracking on the new platform, run both systems in parallel for two to four weeks, redirect your old links, then tell your affiliates what changed. The order matters more than the speed.

Most affiliate managers put off a software migration for a year longer than they should. I get it. You’re picturing broken links, lost commissions, and forty angry emails from your best partners asking why their dashboard is empty. So you stay on a platform you hate, paying for reports you can’t read, because the alternative feels like open-heart surgery on your revenue.

A migration goes badly when you do the steps out of order. Announce before tracking works and you’ve told 300 people to go break something. Redirect links before you’ve confirmed attribution and you’ll spend a month reconstructing commissions from memory. Do it in sequence and the whole thing is boring, which is the goal.

Why affiliate program migrations go wrong

Three failures cause most of the damage, and all three are sequencing problems.

The first is data loss you didn’t plan for. Some platforms let you export affiliate records but not commission history, or they export commission history without the affiliate IDs attached, which makes the file useless. You find out about this after you’ve canceled your old subscription and lost portal access. Export first. Cancel last.

The second is a tracking gap. Your old pixel stops firing at 11:59 p.m. and your new one starts at 12:15 a.m., and the sixteen minutes in between belonged to somebody. Multiply that by a launch week and you have real money going unattributed. How Affiliate Tracking Works explains what’s happening under the hood, which helps when you’re trying to figure out where a click went.

The third is silence. You migrate on a Tuesday and email affiliates on Friday. In those three days, your top partner noticed her clicks weren’t registering, assumed you were stiffing her, and pulled your offer out of her nurture sequence. She’s not coming back with a follow-up email. That relationship took you eight months to build and four days of quiet to damage.

How long does an affiliate program migration take?

Plan for three to five weeks end to end for a program with more than 100 affiliates. Here’s the realistic breakdown:

Export and audit your data: 2 to 4 hours
Decide what history moves: 1 hour
New platform setup and tracking install: 30 minutes to 2 days depending on the software
Parallel run: 2 to 4 weeks
Link redirects: 1 to 3 hours
Affiliate communication: spread across the full window

The parallel run eats the calendar. Everything else is a workday. And the parallel window shrinks dramatically if your new platform gets you live in one session instead of stringing setup across a week of support tickets, which is the whole argument for choosing software with a guided setup.

If you’re migrating right before a launch, don’t. Give yourself a full sales cycle of quiet time on the other side. I’ve watched a manager cut over eleven days before a seven-figure launch and spend the entire promotion reconciling two sets of numbers instead of coaching affiliates.

Step 1: Export your affiliate roster with commission rates and tax records

Pull everything while you still have portal access. At minimum you need name, email, affiliate ID, signup date, commission rate, payment method and payment details, tax form status, and any custom rate overrides.

Custom overrides are the field people forget. You gave four affiliates 40% instead of 30% two years ago, it lives in a settings screen rather than the main roster export, and you won’t notice it’s missing until one of them emails you about a short payment. Open the per-affiliate settings and write those down by hand if the export won’t include them.

Tax records deserve their own file. W-9s, W-8BENs, and year-to-date payment totals matter for 1099 filing whether or not the affiliate is still active. Download the PDFs. Don’t assume the new platform will accept an import of them.

Also grab your terms. If your agreement references your old platform by name or points to a portal URL that’s about to die, you’ll need to update it. How To Write An Affiliate Program Agreement covers what belongs in there.

Your payout obligations don’t pause during a migration, and affiliates notice a late check faster than they notice a new dashboard. How to Pay Affiliates walks through payout schedules and the mistakes that create support tickets, which is worth reading before you change the system that cuts the checks.

Step 2: Decide how much historical data needs to move

Managers waste weeks trying to import five years of click data into a new platform. You almost never need it.

Here’s what has to come across: the active roster, current commission rates, unpaid commission balances, and tax documentation. That’s the operational set. Without it you can’t pay people correctly next month.

Here’s what’s nice to have: lifetime earnings per affiliate, so your tier logic still works and your top-25 list stays accurate. Most platforms accept this as a single number per affiliate rather than a transaction-level import, and one number per person is a ten-minute job instead of a ten-day one.

Here’s what you can leave behind: individual click logs, expired cookie records, old creative assets nobody used, and affiliates who haven’t logged in since 2022. Archive the exports to cloud storage and move on. If you need a 2023 number for an audit someday, you’ll open a CSV.

One caveat on the dormant accounts. Before you cut them, check whether any have an unpaid balance sitting below your payout threshold. Those balances are still owed. Pay them out or carry them over, but don’t delete them.

Step 3: Set up tracking on the new platform before anything else goes live

Install the new tracking, then test it with real transactions before a single affiliate hears about the change.

Run a test purchase through a test affiliate link on desktop. Run another on mobile. Run one where the buyer clicks, leaves, comes back three hours later on a different browser, and buys. That last one is how you find out whether cross-device attribution works the way the sales page promised.

Check your attribution settings match what you had before. If your old platform ran last click with a 60-day cookie and your new one defaults to first click with 30 days, you’ve quietly changed the deal for every affiliate in your program. That’s a terms change, and you owe people notice. Affiliate Attribution Models Explained and What is a good affiliate cookie duration? both matter here, because migration is when these settings get changed by accident.

Verify refund handling too. Ask the platform how a refund on day 40 reverses a commission you already approved on day 12, and whether the reversal shows up in the affiliate’s log where they can see it. Silent clawbacks generate more angry emails than any other single thing in affiliate management.

Step 4: Run both systems in parallel for a defined window

Keep the old platform live and paid for while the new one runs, and compare the two daily. Two to four weeks is the standard window. Under two weeks you haven’t seen a full buying cycle. Past four weeks you’re paying two subscriptions to avoid making a decision.

Compare three numbers every morning: total clicks, total conversions, and total commission dollars. If the new platform reports within 2 to 3 percent of the old one, your tracking is fine and the difference is bot filtering or timezone boundaries. If it’s off by 15 percent, stop and find out why before you go further.

Set an end date and put it on the calendar. “We’ll run parallel until it feels right” turns into four months of double subscriptions and split reporting. Pick a date, tell your team, and cut over on it.

During the parallel window, pay commissions from one system only. Choose the old one until cutover day. Two payment sources means one affiliate gets paid twice and another gets missed, and you’ll spend a week untangling it. Affiliate Program KPIs covers which numbers to watch when you’re comparing two data sets.

Migration is one of maybe six decisions that shape how your program runs for the next five years. The Book on Affiliate Management covers the full system I used to build a $1 million per month program, including the operational decisions most managers make by default instead of on purpose.

Step 5: Redirect your old affiliate links

Every link your affiliates have already published stays published. Blog posts from 2021, YouTube descriptions, pinned tweets, resource pages, email autoresponders running on a five-year sequence. You cannot ask people to go update all of it, and if you do, half of them won’t.

Map old affiliate IDs to new ones and build 301 redirects that carry the affiliate parameter through. If Sarah was ID 4471 on the old system and ID 88 on the new one, a hit to your old tracking URL with 4471 has to land on the new URL with 88 and register the click.

Test ten redirects manually before you trust the batch. Pick your five biggest affiliates plus five random ones. Click each link, buy something, confirm the commission lands on the right account. How to Track Affiliate Links is useful background if you’re building the mapping yourself.

Keep the redirects live for a minimum of twelve months. Old content keeps sending traffic long after you’ve forgotten it exists, and the cost of maintaining a redirect table is near zero compared to the cost of a partner discovering her three-year-old review post has been sending you free traffic.

Step 6: Announce the migration to your affiliates

Send three emails, not one. A heads-up, a go-live, and a follow-up.

The heads-up goes out seven to ten days before cutover. Tell them the date, tell them what changes for them, and tell them what does NOT change. That second part carries most of the weight. Affiliates read “we’re switching platforms” and immediately assume their commission rate is getting cut, because that’s how these emails usually go.

The go-live email lands the morning of the switch with their login instructions and their new links. Include the actual link, not a link to a page where they can generate a link. Every extra step you add loses another 20 percent of them.

The follow-up goes out three to five days later. Ask whether anything looks wrong. This email finds problems your testing missed, and it tells your partners you’re paying attention.

Send all three from a person, not from a no-reply address. When somebody replies “my dashboard shows zero clicks,” you want that landing in an inbox a human reads.

What to put in your migration email to affiliates

A migration email that costs you partners usually reads like an internal memo. It leads with the platform name, uses the word “exciting,” and buries the one thing the affiliate cares about in paragraph four.

Lead with what stays the same. “Your commission rate is not changing. Your cookie window is not changing. Your unpaid balance carried over in full.” Then explain the change.

Give them a specific date and time with a timezone. “We’re switching over the weekend” produces a week of confused support emails.

Include their new link inside the email, personalized. Include their new login. Include one sentence on what’s better for them, because affiliates don’t care that your reporting improved, they care whether their payment gets there faster or their link stops looking like spam.

Close with a direct ask: reply to this email if anything looks off. Then answer every reply within a day during the first week.

Writing three migration emails from scratch takes longer than it should, especially the go-live one where the wording determines how many people log in. Grab my free affiliate email template, the same structure I’ve used to email thousands of affiliates across a dozen industries, and adapt it for your announcement sequence.

How to migrate to AffiliateHQ in under 30 minutes

I built AffiliateHQ because I spent twenty years running programs on software written by people who had never managed one. Migration was the worst part of every platform I used, so it’s the part I designed around.

The setup runs as a seven-step wizard. You import your roster from a CSV, set your commission structure including per-affiliate overrides, paste three tracking snippets, configure your cookie window and attribution rule, connect your payment method, upload your terms, and go live. One session. Most managers finish in about 25 minutes.

The reason that matters for migration specifically: your parallel window is only as long as your setup takes plus your test period. If getting live burns six days of back-and-forth with a support queue, you’re carrying two subscriptions for six extra days and delaying your affiliate announcement the whole time. Get live in one sitting and the parallel run starts immediately.

Per-affiliate overrides import directly, so the four partners you gave custom rates to years ago don’t quietly drop to your default. That single field is responsible for more post-migration commission disputes than anything else I’ve seen.

Vanity aliases are the other piece worth knowing about before you send that go-live email. Instead of handing Sarah a link ending in a raw ID number, she gets one with her name on it, running on your own domain, with no redirect service and no DNS configuration. Your migration email goes from “here’s your new tracking link, sorry for the hassle” to “here’s your new link, and it looks better than your old one.” That reframes the entire announcement.

If you’re comparing platforms before you commit to a move, look at how each one handles the import rather than how many integrations it lists. AffiliateHQ maps every feature to what I teach in The Book on Affiliate Management, including a migration path you can finish in one sitting instead of one quarter.

Migration mistakes that cost you affiliates

Canceling the old platform too early tops the list. Keep it active for 30 days past cutover even though you’re no longer using it. You will need to look something up. Access costs one more month of subscription. Losing access costs you a reconstruction project.

Changing commission terms during the migration is the second one. If you want to restructure your tiers, do it 60 days before or 60 days after, never during. Affiliates who get a platform change and a rate change in the same email assume the platform change was cover for the rate cut, and some of them will be right about programs they’ve dealt with before.

Skipping the parallel run to save $99 is third. That $99 is cheap insurance against a month of unattributed sales.

Migrating during a launch is fourth, and I’ve already said my piece there.

The fifth one is quieter. Managers migrate, get through the technical work, and never go back to check whether affiliates who used to promote are still promoting. Pull your active affiliate count 30 and 60 days after cutover and compare it to your pre-migration number. If it dropped more than 10 percent, somebody’s links are broken or somebody never got the login email. How to Handle Affiliate Disputes covers what to do when the fallout reaches you directly.

What to do next

Three moves, in order.

Export your full roster today, including per-affiliate rate overrides and tax documents, and store it somewhere outside the platform. Do this even if you’re not migrating for six months. If your provider raises prices or sunsets a feature, you’ll want that file already sitting on your drive.

Pick your platform based on the import path and the tracking test, not the feature list. Ask the sales rep to walk you through a CSV import and a refund reversal on a live call. Best Affiliate Program Software breaks down the main categories, and Affiliate Network vs. In-House Program is worth reading if you’re also reconsidering whether to stay on a network at all.

Write your three affiliate emails before you touch the technical setup. Drafting the go-live email first forces you to answer the questions your partners will ask, and you’ll find gaps in your plan while they’re still cheap to fix.

Still unsure whether a migration is the right call this quarter or whether your current problems are program problems rather than software problems? Book a free 20-minute coaching call and we’ll look at your program together and map out what to do in the next 30 to 60 days.

The post How do You Migrate an Affiliate Program to New Software? appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

How to use LinkedIn for affiliate marketing

Matt McWilliams — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 19:30:33 +0000

LinkedIn affiliate marketing works, but it works nothing like Instagram or TikTok. The platform has 65 million decision makers and 10 million C-level executives, which means the people scrolling your posts have company credit cards and budget authority. Business software, courses, and high-ticket training convert here. Supplements and skincare do not.

Most affiliates skip LinkedIn because they assume it’s a job board. That assumption costs them money. The audience skews older, wealthier, and more educated than any other major social platform, and roughly 54% of U.S. LinkedIn users live in households earning over $100,000 a year. Those people buy software subscriptions, professional certifications, and coaching programs without blinking.

I’ve watched affiliates with 2,000 LinkedIn connections outearn people with 50,000 Instagram followers, because the offer matched the room. Below is how the platform works for affiliate promotion, which post formats drive clicks, how the newsletter feature changes your distribution math, and the rule that will get your account restricted if you ignore it.

Can you do affiliate marketing on LinkedIn?

Yes, in organic posts, articles, newsletters, and your profile. LinkedIn’s Professional Community Policies allow commercial content as long as you’re not spamming, scamming, or making misleading claims.

The one hard restriction sits on the paid side. LinkedIn’s advertising policies prohibit affiliate advertising outright, in the same bucket as gambling, political ads, and tobacco. You cannot run a Sponsored Content campaign that points at an affiliate link. If you want paid distribution on LinkedIn, you have to send traffic to something you own, like a lead magnet or a review post, and monetize from there.

That restriction pushes most affiliates toward organic, which is fine. LinkedIn organic reach still beats most platforms for B2B, and 97% of B2B marketers use it for content distribution, which tells you the feed rewards the format.

Why LinkedIn converts differently than other social platforms

Buying power is the difference. LinkedIn members have roughly twice the buying power of the average web audience, and LinkedIn’s own data says four out of five members drive business decisions at their organizations.

Compare that to a Pinterest or TikTok audience, where you’re often reaching a consumer spending personal money on a $40 purchase. On LinkedIn you’re reaching someone who can expense a $99/month tool without asking permission. Same click, very different average order value.

The tradeoff is volume. LinkedIn has about 310 million monthly active users against TikTok’s billion-plus. You’re not going to get a post seen by 400,000 people. You’re going to get it seen by 4,000 people, 200 of whom run marketing budgets. If you’ve spent time using social media for affiliate marketing on other platforms, recalibrate what a good post looks like before you decide LinkedIn isn’t working.

Which affiliate offers convert on LinkedIn

Offers that solve a work problem convert. Offers that solve a personal problem mostly do not. The categories I see working:

B2B software with recurring commissions. Email platforms, CRMs, project management tools, scheduling software, hosting, and design tools. Recurring 20-30% is standard.
Professional courses and certifications. Sales training, marketing certifications, data and AI courses, leadership programs.
High-ticket coaching and masterminds. Commissions of $500 to $5,000 per referral are common, and LinkedIn is one of the few places you can find people who write those checks.
Done-for-you services and agencies with referral programs.
Books and business publications, which convert at low dollar amounts but build enormous trust.

Consumer offers die on this feed. Supplements, fashion, home goods, kitchen gear, and travel gear get almost no traction unless you’ve built a personal-brand angle around them. The audience has its work brain on.

The economics favor bigger offers here anyway. A LinkedIn audience of 3,000 engaged professionals promoting a $2,000 program at 30% pays better than the same audience promoting $30 products. If you haven’t sold at that price point before, my breakdown of getting started with high ticket affiliate marketing covers the trust-building sequence that makes it work. And before you commit to any program, run it through the same filter you’d use anywhere else, which I laid out in how to choose an affiliate program to promote.

Picking the wrong offer wastes months on a platform this slow-building. The Affiliate Marketing QuickStart Guide walks through how to boost your income without creating a product, including how to get accepted into programs worth promoting. It’s free and includes copy-and-paste email templates.

How to set up your LinkedIn profile for affiliate marketing

Your profile does more selling than your posts do. Someone reads a post, clicks your name, and decides in about eight seconds whether you’re worth following.

Three parts matter most. Your headline should name who you help and what result you deliver, not your job title. “I help agency owners cut reporting time in half” beats “Digital Marketing Consultant.” Your About section should read like a short sales page and end with a specific next step. And your Featured section, which sits right under About, holds up to several links with images, which makes it the best real estate on the entire profile for affiliate traffic.

Put your highest-converting asset in Featured. For most affiliates that’s a resources page, a review post, or a lead magnet. Sending profile traffic to a lead magnet instead of straight to an offer usually earns more over 12 months, which is the whole argument in using a lead magnet to grow your affiliate income.

You also get one website link in your contact info. Use it. Point it at your resources page, not your homepage.

A resources page is the single best destination for LinkedIn profile traffic because it converts without a promotion cycle. The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Resources Page shows how I earn $10,000+ per month from one page, including the five keys that make it convert. Free download.

LinkedIn post formats that drive affiliate clicks

Four formats carry the load on LinkedIn, and they behave differently.

Text posts run 150 to 300 words with a strong first two lines, because LinkedIn truncates after about 210 characters and the “see more” click is a ranking signal. These are your workhorse. Document posts, the swipeable PDF carousels, hit the highest engagement rate of any format at around 6.6%, and they’re the best format for teaching a process you can attach a tool recommendation to. Native video views grew 36% year over year, and demos work well for software offers. Long-form articles rank in Google and hold evergreen affiliate links, which posts do not.

The format that consistently wins for affiliates is the teardown. Take a workflow you use, show the actual steps, name the tools, and link one of them. You’re not writing an ad. You’re documenting your process and the recommendation falls out of it. That approach maps closely to the formats I broke down in what types of content work best for affiliate marketing.

Carousels also give you a workaround for the link problem. Slide 8 of a document post can name the tool and tell people where to find the link, without a URL sitting in the post body.

LinkedIn shares a lot of DNA with another professional-skewing platform where link posts get suppressed. My guide to affiliate marketing on X (Twitter) covers the same link-suppression problem and the thread formats that work around it. The tactics transfer with light editing.

Should you put affiliate links directly in LinkedIn posts?

Put the link in the first comment, not the post body. LinkedIn wants people to stay on LinkedIn, so posts with external links in the body get less distribution than posts without them.

The mechanic is simple. Publish the post, immediately comment with the link and one line of context, then edit the post to add “link in the comments” at the end. Your comment appears at the top for anyone who follows you, and the post keeps its reach.

Two things will hurt you here. Raw affiliate URLs with tracking parameters look like spam and get fewer clicks, so cloak them through your own domain. And a post whose only purpose is dropping a link reads as promotional and gets buried by the algorithm and ignored by humans at the same time. Give the post standalone value first.

Some affiliates report no reach penalty on links in 2026. My experience says the gap is smaller than it was three years ago but still real, and the comment method costs you 20 seconds. Test it on your own account across ten posts before you take anyone’s word for it, including mine.

How to use LinkedIn newsletters for affiliate marketing

The newsletter feature is the most underused affiliate asset on LinkedIn, and it’s available to every member. Publish an edition and LinkedIn sends a push notification, an in-app notification, and an email to every subscriber. That bypasses the feed algorithm entirely.

Two mechanics make it compound. When someone new follows you, LinkedIn automatically prompts them to subscribe to your newsletter. And when you first create the newsletter, you get a one-time invite you can send to your connections and followers.

Do not burn that invite on an empty archive. Publish three solid editions first, then send it, so anyone who clicks through lands on a library instead of a blank page. Most high-performing LinkedIn newsletters run 450 to 800 words per edition, with the occasional longer piece when the topic earns it.

For affiliate purposes, treat each edition like an email to your list, because it functions as one. One idea, one recommendation, one link. The catch is that you don’t own the subscriber list and you cannot export it, which is why every edition should also point at your own opt-in. That’s the same argument for building an email list for affiliate marketing alongside any platform you publish on. If you’ve considered a standalone newsletter instead, the tradeoffs look a lot like using Substack for affiliate marketing, with better B2B distribution and worse ownership.

How to write a LinkedIn post that sells without sounding like an ad

Lead with a specific result or a specific mistake, then explain the mechanism, then name the tool. Never open with the product.

A post that works looks like this: “We were spending 6 hours a week on client reporting. Now it takes 40 minutes.” Then four paragraphs on what changed. Then one line naming the tool. The recommendation arrives after the reader already wants the outcome.

A post that fails opens with “I’ve been using and I love it.” That’s an ad, and LinkedIn readers have a finely tuned filter for ads.

Also, write like a person. LinkedIn is full of posts that read like a press release wearing a hoodie. Short paragraphs, one idea per line, no wind-up. Your review posts can carry the detailed comparison work, which is why sending LinkedIn traffic to a proper affiliate product review post converts better than trying to cram the whole case into 300 words.

A LinkedIn promotion works better when it runs alongside email and other platforms instead of standing alone. The Promotion Checklist Template maps an entire promo across email and social so nothing gets missed. Free, and reusable for every promotion you run.

How to use LinkedIn DMs without getting restricted

Never send an affiliate link in a cold DM. LinkedIn treats unsolicited promotional messages as spam, and enough reports will land you a restricted messaging status or a suspension.

Free accounts cap out around 100 connection requests per week. Blowing past that with automation tools is the fastest way to lose the account you spent a year building.

DMs do work for one thing: responding to someone who engaged. If a person comments on your post about reporting workflows, a message that says “you mentioned the same problem, here’s the walkthrough I wrote on it” is welcome. That’s a conversation, not a pitch, and it converts at rates cold outreach never touches.

The pattern that works is post publicly, respond privately. Let the content do the qualifying.

Affiliate disclosure on LinkedIn

The FTC requires disclosure on LinkedIn the same as anywhere else, and LinkedIn has no built-in disclosure tool for affiliate relationships. You write it yourself.

In a post, put the disclosure in the post body near the recommendation, not buried in the comment with the link. Something like “I’m an affiliate for this one” works. In a newsletter edition, disclose above the first link. In your Featured section, disclose on the destination page.

The requirement is that a reasonable person sees it before they click. A disclosure sitting in the 14th comment does not clear that bar. I covered the specific language and placement rules in more depth in this guide to affiliate link disclosure requirements.

How long it takes to make money with LinkedIn affiliate marketing

Plan on 90 days of consistent posting before your first meaningful commission, and 6 to 9 months before LinkedIn is a real income line.

The timeline runs slower than TikTok and faster than SEO. Weeks 1 through 4 you’re posting three times a week and getting almost no reach while the algorithm figures out who you are. Weeks 5 through 12 your engaged audience starts forming and comments become conversations. Around month 4 the first commissions land, usually from someone who read six posts before clicking anything.

Two things speed it up. Commenting on other people’s posts, 5 to 10 thoughtful comments a day, builds visibility faster than posting alone. And launching a newsletter early gives you notification-based distribution that doesn’t depend on the feed.

The compounding is real, though. LinkedIn content stays searchable and gets surfaced for months, and your profile keeps working while you sleep.

Your first 30 days on LinkedIn as an affiliate

Week one, rewrite your headline and About section around who you help, and put one asset in your Featured section. Pick two or three affiliate offers that solve work problems and commit to them instead of promoting everything.

Week two, post three times. One teardown of a workflow, one lesson from a mistake you made, one document carousel. No links yet. You’re establishing that you’re worth reading.

Week three, add link-in-comment posts and start commenting daily on posts from people in your niche. Week four, create your newsletter and publish edition one, then hold the invite until you have three editions live.

Do that for 90 days and you’ll know whether LinkedIn fits your offers. Most affiliates quit at week five, right before the part where it starts working.

The three things to do next

First, audit your current affiliate offers and identify which ones a business buyer would expense. If none of them qualify, find one B2B software program with recurring commissions before you post anything.

Second, fix your Featured section today. It’s the only spot on LinkedIn where you get a permanent, algorithm-proof link with an image, and most affiliates leave it empty.

Third, publish three posts this week using the teardown format, with no links at all. Watch which one gets comments. That tells you what your audience wants before you spend any credibility on a recommendation.

Learn How My Resources Page Makes Me $10,000+ Each Month… and How You Can Create One Easily! Grab The Free Guide Here

The post How to use LinkedIn for affiliate marketing appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

What is AffiliateHQ?

Matt McWilliams — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 18:51:17 +0000

AffiliateHQ is affiliate program management software built by Matt McWilliams, a four-time Affiliate Manager of the Year who has run programs from $0 to $1 million per month and from $15 million to $325 million per year. Every feature maps to a specific method taught in The Book on Affiliate Management.

I built AffiliateHQ because I got tired of paying for software that had clearly never been used by anyone who ran an affiliate program for a living.

Twenty years in this business. Four Affiliate Manager of the Year awards. Programs for Shark Tank’s Kevin Harrington, Michael Hyatt, and Shutterfly. And in all that time, the tracking platform was the part I fought against instead of the part that helped. Every one of them tracked clicks and calculated commissions fine. Then they stopped, right at the point where the actual work starts.

What is AffiliateHQ?

AffiliateHQ is affiliate program management software for businesses that run their own in-house affiliate programs. It handles link tracking, commission calculation, affiliate recruiting, activation, training, contests, communication, fraud review, and payouts inside one platform.

The category label is “affiliate tracking software,” but tracking is maybe 20% of what the platform does. The other 80% covers the work most affiliate managers do in a mess of spreadsheets, Gmail drafts, Google Docs, and sticky notes. AffiliateHQ pulls that work into the same system that already knows who your affiliates are and what they’ve sold.

You connect it to your own Stripe account, drop three tracking snippets on your site, and run your program from there. No network in the middle. No revenue share on top of your commissions.

Who built AffiliateHQ, and why does that matter?

I built it. I’ve managed affiliate programs since 2005, won Affiliate Manager of the Year four times, and recruited more than 330,000 affiliates across dozens of industries. Those affiliates have generated over $1 billion in sales for me and my clients.

That background shows up in the product in a specific way. Most affiliate software gets built by engineers solving a data problem: track a click, attribute a sale, calculate a payout. That’s a real problem and they solved it years ago. But the reason affiliate programs fail has almost nothing to do with attribution accuracy.

Programs fail because 80% of the affiliates who sign up never send a single click. They fail because nobody trained the affiliates on the offer. They fail because the manager sent one launch email and hoped. I’ve written about how to activate inactive affiliates for years, and the process was always the same: export a list, sort it in Excel, write emails by hand, track responses in a second spreadsheet. AffiliateHQ runs that process for you.

If you want the full system the software is built on, it lives in the book. Three hundred pages covering how I built a $1 million per month affiliate program in under two years, from recruiting through payouts. Grab The Book on Affiliate Management and you’ll recognize every feature in the platform.

What does AffiliateHQ do?

AffiliateHQ covers seven areas of affiliate program management: tracking and attribution, commissions and payouts, recruiting and onboarding, activation, training, contests and communication, and fraud review.

On tracking, you get three snippets, cross-device stitching, UTM passthrough, vanity link aliases that need no DNS setup or redirects, and a test mode so you can confirm a sale fires before you send affiliates anywhere near it.

On commissions, you get multi-level structures up to four levels deep, per-product rates, per-affiliate overrides, split commissions by click timing or tag, recurring commissions on every renewal and upgrade through Stripe, and automatic refund clawbacks that cascade through every level with a full audit log.

On the human side, you get four built-in activation sequences with 11 trigger types, a Training Hub with module completion tracking, a contest engine that runs ranked and threshold prizes at the same time, segmented broadcasts with merge tags, 22 alert types, and encrypted W-9 storage that warns you before you pay someone with a missing tax document.

Setup runs through a seven-step wizard that includes a hosted signup page, so you can go from empty account to live program without a developer. If you’ve read my walkthrough on how to set up an affiliate program, the wizard follows the same order.

Who is AffiliateHQ for?

AffiliateHQ is built for businesses running in-house affiliate programs where affiliates need to be recruited, trained, and motivated rather than approved once and forgotten.

That describes course creators, coaches, authors, SaaS companies, membership sites, and info product businesses. It describes anyone doing launches, where a five-day cart window means an affiliate who goes cold on day two costs you real money. It describes agencies managing programs for several clients, since you can run unlimited programs under one account with role-based access and scheduled reports.

It’s a weaker fit if you sell one $19 physical product and want affiliates to grab a link and disappear. That business does need tracking. It doesn’t need activation sequences or a Training Hub, and paying for them would be silly.

Software will not recruit your affiliates for you. That part is still on you, and it’s the part most program owners get wrong. My free report Your First 100 Affiliates walks through the exact strategies I used to recruit 604 affiliates and build a $1.1 million per month program in 18 months, including the email templates.

What makes AffiliateHQ different from other affiliate software?

Six features in AffiliateHQ have no direct equivalent in Tapfiliate, Rewardful, Post Affiliate Pro, or iDevAffiliate: Commitment Plans, the four activation sequences, the AI Swipe Copy Generator, a first-party MCP server, the AI Program Analyzer, and the Training Hub.

Commitment Plans are the one I care most about. When an affiliate agrees to promote your launch, you build a plan with them inside the platform: how many emails, which days, which social channels, what bonus they’re offering. AffiliateHQ calculates expected email counts from their list size using the ABC formula I teach, then exports the plan as a PDF you can send them. Affiliates who write down a plan send five to twenty emails. Affiliates who say “sure, I’ll promote” send one, maybe.

The Training Hub holds your launch videos, swipe files, and promo checklists in modules with completion tracking, so you can open a readiness view and see exactly which affiliates have finished the training and which ones are about to embarrass you on cart open day. My post on how to train your affiliates explains why this matters more than any tracking feature.

The contest engine runs ranked prizes and threshold prizes simultaneously. Ranked-only contests kill motivation for anyone outside the top five by day two, which is a mistake I made for years before fixing it. I broke down the fix in how to run an affiliate contest.

How does AffiliateHQ handle affiliate activation?

AffiliateHQ ships with four activation sequences that fire on 11 trigger types, with exit conditions that stop the sequence the moment an affiliate takes the action you wanted.

The triggers cover the moments that matter. An affiliate joins and never clicks their own link. Seven days pass with zero traffic. An affiliate sends clicks but no sales. A previously strong affiliate drops below a percentage of their usual volume. Each one starts a different sequence, because the affiliate who signed up and vanished needs a different email than the affiliate who sent 400 clicks and converted nobody.

The 22 alert types cover what you should look at rather than what the software should send. Down-alerts flag an affiliate whose numbers fall by a percentage you set. Inactive flags surface partners who’ve gone quiet. You decide what to do about them.

I kept fraud detection on the same side of that line. AffiliateHQ scores seven fraud signals and flags accounts for human review. It does not auto-penalize anybody. Automatic penalties punish good affiliates for weird traffic patterns they had nothing to do with, and you lose partners you spent months recruiting. If you want the full picture on that, see affiliate fraud prevention tools.

What does the AI in AffiliateHQ do?

AffiliateHQ includes three AI features: the Swipe Copy Generator, the Program Analyzer, and a native MCP server that exposes more than 20 tools to Claude and other AI assistants.

The Swipe Copy Generator writes promotional emails, social posts, and blog copy for your affiliates, then lets you train and refine it on your own voice and offer. You export the finished set as a CSV your affiliates can drop into their scheduler.

The Program Analyzer grades your program across six categories and tells you what’s broken. It reads your actual numbers, not a generic checklist. If your activation rate is 12% and your top three affiliates produce 71% of revenue, it says so and tells you what to do about it. I wrote about doing this manually in how to audit your affiliate program, and the manual version takes about four hours.

The MCP server is the one nobody else has. It lets you ask Claude to pull your top affiliates from last month, draft a reactivation email, or check which partners haven’t finished training, and Claude does it against your live program data. Every write operation asks for confirmation before it runs. No AI is going to email 400 affiliates on your behalf without you seeing it first.

Before you change platforms, it helps to know whether your program’s problem is the software or the strategy. Book a free 20-minute call at Your Affiliate Launch Coach and I’ll review your current program and give you an action plan for the next 30 to 60 days.

How does AffiliateHQ track sales and pay affiliates?

AffiliateHQ connects to your own Stripe account and creates a commission record on every payment event: initial sale, renewal, upgrade, cancellation, and refund.

That structure solves the recurring commission problem cleanly. You set a program-wide rule, lifetime or a fixed number of months, with per-affiliate overrides for the partners you negotiated separately. A cancellation stops future commissions. A refund reverses the commission already recorded and cascades the clawback through every level of a multi-level structure, with an audit log showing exactly what changed and when.

On the tracking side, three snippets handle click capture, conversion, and cross-device stitching. Vanity aliases give affiliates a clean link without asking them to set up a redirect or touch DNS. Test mode lets you fire a fake sale and confirm the whole chain works before launch day.

The reporting connects to the metrics I actually watch. Activation rate, revenue concentration, average order value by affiliate, and the rest of what I cover in affiliate program KPIs. Commission structures for subscription businesses follow the same logic I laid out in how to structure affiliate commissions for a SaaS product.

What AffiliateHQ does not do

AffiliateHQ is not an affiliate network. There’s no marketplace of 200,000 publishers waiting to discover you, and there’s no revenue share taken off the top of your program.

You recruit your own affiliates. That’s a feature, not a limitation, because network affiliates promote whatever pays best this week and your own recruits promote you because they know you. But it means the platform starts empty, and you should plan for that. My guide on how to recruit affiliates covers the outreach system.

It also won’t fix a bad offer, a broken sales page, or commission rates nobody wants to promote. I’ve watched people change platforms three times looking for a software solution to a conversion problem. If you want a broader view of the category before deciding, read best affiliate program software, which compares the major options on their merits.

Frequently asked questions about AffiliateHQ

Is AffiliateHQ an affiliate network or in-house software?
In-house software. You own the relationships, you recruit your own partners, and you pay commissions directly from your own Stripe account. AffiliateHQ takes no percentage of your program revenue. An affiliate network sits between you and the affiliates and charges a revenue share for access to their publisher pool.

Does AffiliateHQ support recurring and multi-level commissions?
Yes. It creates a commission on every Stripe payment event, including renewals and upgrades, with lifetime or fixed-duration rules set program-wide and overridable per affiliate. Multi-level structures run up to four levels deep, and refund clawbacks cascade automatically through all levels with an audit log.

What is the MCP server in AffiliateHQ?
MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. AffiliateHQ ships a first-party MCP server exposing more than 20 tools, which lets AI assistants like Claude read your program data and take actions on it. Every write operation requires your confirmation before it executes, so nothing goes out to affiliates without your approval.

Can AffiliateHQ manage more than one affiliate program?
Yes. One account runs unlimited programs with role-based access controls and scheduled reports, which is why agencies and consultants managing several client programs use it. You can give a client read-only access to their own program without exposing anything else.

What size business is AffiliateHQ built for?
Businesses running in-house programs where affiliates need recruiting, training, and activation. That covers course creators, coaches, authors, SaaS companies, and membership sites, from brand-new programs through programs doing seven figures a month. The activation and training features matter more as your affiliate count grows past what one person can email individually.

How long does it take to set up AffiliateHQ?
Setup runs through a seven-step wizard covering your program terms, commission structure, tracking snippets, hosted signup page, and approval rules. Most people finish in under an hour without a developer. Test mode lets you fire a sample sale and confirm tracking works before you invite a single affiliate.

What to do next

If your current platform tracks sales fine but leaves you doing activation, training, and affiliate communication by hand, that’s the gap AffiliateHQ was built to close. Two decades of running programs went into deciding what belonged in it.

Go look at it at AffiliateHQ. Run your numbers through the Program Analyzer and see what it says about your activation rate. That one number tells you more about your program’s health than revenue does, and most owners have never calculated it.

Every feature in the platform maps to a method I teach, and you can see the whole system in one place. AffiliateHQ handles tracking, activation, training, contests, and payouts in one account, built by someone who has run affiliate programs for a living for twenty years.

The post What is AffiliateHQ? appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

How to Monitor Your Affiliates for FTC Compliance

Matt McWilliams — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 17:00:37 +0000

A brand monitors its affiliates for FTC compliance by auditing a rotating sample of each partner’s live promotional content against two federal standards: the FTC Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255) and the Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (16 CFR Part 465), effective October 21, 2024. The FTC holds the advertiser responsible for what affiliates claim, so the monitoring job belongs to you, not them.

Here’s the part most program owners find out too late. If one of your affiliates writes “this supplement cured my anxiety” and you can’t back it up, the FTC can come after you, the brand, even if you never saw the post and never told them to write it. The advertiser carries the liability. Your affiliate agreement doesn’t transfer that away.

So the practical question isn’t whether you’re on the hook. You are. The question is how you build a monitoring system that catches problems before an FTC investigator does, without turning compliance into a full-time job you don’t have time for. That’s what the rest of this covers: what to watch, how often, how to sample instead of reading every affiliate’s every post, the specific red flags that signal real exposure, and what to do the moment you find one.

Are you legally responsible for what your affiliates claim?

Yes. Under the FTC Endorsement Guides, section 255.1(d), the advertiser is responsible for the actions of its endorsers and is expected to monitor them. The FTC has stated that if you lack adequate substantiation for a claim, you’re liable regardless of whether the endorser is also liable. Their example: an influencer says a lotion cures eczema, and if the advertiser can’t prove that, the advertiser is on the hook no matter what.

Affiliates are endorsers. When they promote your product for a commission, that’s a material connection, and the claims they make become claims you’re accountable for. The 2023 revision to the Endorsement Guides also extended liability to intermediaries like agencies and management companies that help create or spread non-compliant content.

I’ve watched brand owners assume their terms and conditions form a legal shield. It isn’t one. Terms set expectations and give you grounds to terminate. They do not move federal liability off your business. For a fuller picture of how the rules landed and what changed for program owners specifically, read the breakdown of the FTC’s newest AI endorsement rules and the 2023 Endorsement Guide updates.

The AI angle is where a lot of new exposure lives, since AI-written reviews and synthetic testimonials now fall squarely under the rules. If your affiliates are using AI tools to write reviews, read FTC’s New AI Endorsement Rules: What Affiliate Managers Need to do Now before your next promotion goes live.

What FTC rules actually apply to your affiliate program?

Two federal standards govern affiliate promotion, and they work differently. The first is the FTC Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255), revised effective July 26, 2023. These are administrative interpretations of Section 5 of the FTC Act. They don’t carry direct monetary penalties, but they define what counts as deceptive endorsement and give the FTC grounds to act.

The second is the Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (16 CFR Part 465), which took effect October 21, 2024. This one has teeth. It authorizes civil penalties of up to $51,744 per violation, and it explicitly covers AI-generated reviews and testimonials from anyone with no real experience with the product. The rule also states that advertisers are responsible for the activities of their employees and agencies.

The difference matters for how you prioritize. The Guides tell you what “compliant” looks like. The Rule tells you what a mistake can cost. Together they set the standard you’re auditing your affiliates against. For the broader legal baseline every owner should know, the legal requirements for an affiliate program covers the ground beyond disclosure alone.

What affiliate content do you actually have to monitor?

You monitor the content where an affiliate makes a claim about your product or fails to disclose the paid relationship. That’s blog reviews, YouTube videos, email promotions, social posts, and any paid ads an affiliate runs pointing to your offer. The format doesn’t change your obligation. A TikTok caption and a 2,000-word blog review carry the same disclosure and substantiation standard.

Prioritize by reach and risk. A blog review that ranks on Google and pulls traffic for years creates more standing exposure than a Story that vanishes in 24 hours. Video with spoken claims and no on-screen disclosure is a common failure point, because the FTC expects disclosure in the same medium as the endorsement. If someone makes the claim out loud, the disclosure has to be spoken too, not just parked in the description.

You don’t need to read every word your affiliates publish. You need to see enough of it, often enough, to catch the patterns that create liability. That’s a sampling problem, and it’s solvable.

How often should you audit affiliate content?

Set a fixed cadence rather than checking whenever you happen to remember. A workable baseline: review your top earners monthly, rotate through the rest of your active affiliates quarterly, and check every new affiliate’s first promotion before you approve their second payout. That third rule catches problems while the relationship is young and easy to correct.

Tie the cadence to launches too. During a big promotion, when 40 affiliates might mail on the same week, do a fast sweep of the highest-volume promoters within the first 48 hours. That’s when claims get loose and enthusiasm outruns accuracy. Catching a bad income claim on day one of a launch is a quick fix. Catching it after the promotion closes means the deceptive content already reached everyone it was going to reach.

The point of a cadence is consistency. A program that audits hard once a year and ignores it the other 11 months has gaps a regulator would find in an afternoon.

How do you sample instead of policing every affiliate?

You risk-weight the sample. Review 100 percent of your top 10 to 20 earners every cycle, because they drive the most sales and create the most exposure. Then pull a rotating random sample of the long tail, maybe 10 to 15 percent per quarter, so every affiliate knows they could get checked at any time. And review 100 percent of new affiliates on their first promotion, no exceptions.

This mirrors how the FTC itself thinks about reasonable monitoring. The Guides don’t demand that you read everything. They expect you to take reasonable steps to discover and address non-compliance. A documented sampling method, applied consistently, is exactly that kind of reasonable step, and it’s the record you’d want to show if anyone ever asked what your program does.

The random element does real work. If affiliates believe only the top earners get checked, the bottom 80 percent treats compliance as optional. A visible rotating sample keeps the whole roster honest without requiring you to read all of it.

What are the red flags that signal a false or non-compliant claim?

Six claim types create most of the exposure, and you can train yourself to spot them in seconds. Income and earnings claims (“I made $10,000 my first month”) need substantiation and a typical-results disclosure. Health and cure claims (“this fixed my back pain,” “cleared my acne”) require competent scientific evidence, and for anything medical, that bar is high.

The other four: absolute guarantees (“you WILL lose 20 pounds”), unsubstantiated comparisons (“better than every competitor”), fake or manufactured scarcity (“only 3 spots left” when there aren’t), and testimonials presented as typical without the disclosure the Endorsement Guides require. When an affiliate shows an atypical result, the FTC expects a clear and conspicuous disclosure of the generally expected performance, and the advertiser has to hold substantiation for that typical figure.

Two patterns to flag on sight: any hard number about money or results, and any medical or health outcome. Those two categories cause the most FTC actions in the endorsement space, so they earn the closest read.

What does a compliant affiliate disclosure look like?

A compliant disclosure is clear and conspicuous, which the FTC’s 2023 revision defines as “difficult to miss (i.e., easily noticeable) and easily understandable by ordinary consumers.” Plain words work: “sponsored,” “paid partnership,” or “I earn a commission if you buy through my link.” Clever euphemisms and vague hashtags don’t.

Placement is where affiliates fail most. A disclosure buried at the bottom of a long caption, hidden behind a “more” click, or dropped into a video’s closing credits is not clear and conspicuous. The FTC’s own example holds that a disclosure during a show’s closing credits fails the standard. For video with sound, the disclosure has to appear in both the audio and the visual, because it must use the same medium as the endorsement.

Tell your affiliates exactly what you expect and give them the language. Most disclosure failures come from confusion, not defiance. If you want the affiliate-facing version to hand your partners, point them to how to disclose affiliate links and what you’re required to say in an affiliate disclosure.

What should your affiliate terms require to reduce your exposure?

Your terms can’t erase FTC liability, but they can shrink your exposure and give you enforcement power. Four provisions do the heavy lifting: require clear and conspicuous disclosure on every promotion, ban the specific claim types you can’t substantiate (income guarantees, health cures, false scarcity), reserve your right to audit any affiliate’s content at any time, and reserve your right to suspend, terminate, and claw back commissions for violations.

That clawback clause matters more than owners expect. If you can’t withhold or recover commissions on sales driven by a deceptive claim, your affiliate has no financial reason to stop. Write the consequence into the agreement so enforcement isn’t a negotiation.

Terms are the foundation the whole monitoring system rests on. Build them right and every later step, from the audit to the termination, has a documented basis. The full walkthrough lives in how to create affiliate program terms and conditions.

If writing terms from scratch feels like a project you’ll keep putting off, the Affiliate Terms Wizard builds a complete, attorney-trained agreement in 4 to 15 minutes, drawing on 1,000-plus real affiliate agreements. It’s a $49 one-time tool that covers the disclosure, claim, audit, and clawback language you need in place before you police anything.

What do you do when you catch a violation?

You move through five steps in order. First, document it: screenshot the content, save the URL, note the date. Second, notify the affiliate with the specific problem and the exact fix (“add a clear and conspicuous disclosure at the top,” or “remove the income claim on line 4”). Third, set a deadline, usually 48 to 72 hours. Fourth, re-check that they actually fixed it. Fifth, escalate if they didn’t.

Escalation means pausing their links, withholding commissions on the affected sales, and terminating repeat offenders. Most affiliates fix a first violation fast once you point it out plainly. The ones who ignore two clear notices are the ones creating your real risk, and those are the relationships worth ending.

Keep a simple compliance log: affiliate, date, issue, action taken, resolution. That record protects you. If a regulator ever asks how your program handles non-compliance, a log showing you found problems and fixed them is the difference between a program that monitors and a program that claims it does. Affiliate fraud lives in the same operational lane, so pair this with how to catch and prevent affiliate fraud.

Compliance gaps are one of the mistakes that quietly grow into expensive problems. The Top 20 Affiliate Program Mistakes report walks through the errors that nearly sank my own program and how to fix each one, including the operational ones most owners don’t see until they cost money.

How do you monitor compliance without it eating your week?

You systematize it so the work happens on a schedule instead of in a panic. Set up saved searches and Google Alerts for your brand name plus terms like “review” and “discount code,” so new affiliate content surfaces automatically. Keep your rotating audit list in one place. And use AI to speed the first-pass read, flagging posts that mention income, health, or guarantees for your human review.

AI handles the volume problem well here. A model can scan 50 affiliate reviews and surface the five that mention earnings or medical outcomes far faster than you can read them yourself. You still make the compliance call, but you spend your time on the posts that actually carry risk. The workflow is covered in how to use AI as an affiliate manager.

Fold compliance into the metrics you already track. If you review affiliate program KPIs monthly, add a compliance check to that same session, and pull in your affiliate fraud prevention tools while you’re there. One recurring block on the calendar covers monitoring, fraud, and performance together, which is how it stays sustainable instead of becoming the task you always mean to get to.

Compliance is one piece of running a program that scales past a handful of affiliates. The Book on Affiliate Management lays out the full system I’ve used to build affiliate programs past $1 million a month, from recruiting and activation through the operational monitoring that keeps a growing program out of trouble.

Frequently asked questions

Is the brand or the affiliate liable for a false claim?
Both can be liable, but the brand carries liability it can’t delegate away. Under the FTC Endorsement Guides, the advertiser is responsible for substantiating claims made about its product, and the FTC has said the advertiser is liable for an unsubstantiated claim regardless of whether the endorser is also liable. Your affiliate agreement can create consequences for the affiliate, but it doesn’t move federal responsibility off your business.

How much can an FTC violation actually cost?
Under the Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (16 CFR Part 465, effective October 21, 2024), civil penalties reach up to $51,744 per violation. The older Endorsement Guides don’t carry direct monetary penalties on their own, but they establish the deceptive-conduct standard the FTC enforces under Section 5 of the FTC Act, which can lead to enforcement actions and orders.

Do I have to monitor every single affiliate post?
No. The FTC expects reasonable steps to discover and address non-compliance, not a reading of every post. A documented risk-weighted sample, 100 percent of top earners and new affiliates plus a rotating share of the rest, meets the reasonable-monitoring expectation while staying manageable for a small team.

What makes a disclosure “clear and conspicuous”?
The FTC’s 2023 revision defines it as difficult to miss and easily understandable by ordinary consumers. In practice that means plain language like “sponsored” or “paid link,” placed where people will see it before they act, and delivered in the same medium as the endorsement. For a video with sound, the disclosure has to be both spoken and shown, not tucked into the description or the closing credits.

Can my affiliate terms protect me from FTC liability?
Terms reduce your exposure and give you enforcement power, but they don’t transfer federal liability. Strong terms require disclosure, ban unsubstantiated claim types, reserve your right to audit, and let you withhold or claw back commissions for violations. That combination shrinks risk and documents that your program takes compliance seriously, which is what you’d want on record.

How do I handle affiliates using AI to write reviews?
Treat AI-written content by the same standard as anything else, because the Rule on Consumer Reviews and Testimonials explicitly covers AI-generated reviews and reviews from anyone with no real experience with the product. Require that affiliates only review products they’ve actually used, disclose the paid relationship, and substantiate any specific claim, whether a human or a model produced the words.

Where to start

Pick three moves this week. Write or update your terms so they require disclosure, ban the claim types you can’t substantiate, and reserve your audit and clawback rights. Set a monitoring cadence: top earners monthly, a rotating sample of everyone else quarterly, and every new affiliate’s first promotion before their second payout. And start a compliance log today, even a simple spreadsheet, so the first thing a regulator would ever see is a record of you finding and fixing problems.

You can’t hand this responsibility to your affiliates, because the FTC hands it to you. But you can build a system that makes it a scheduled hour, not a lurking risk. Start with the terms, add the cadence, keep the log.

Make sure that your affiliate program has a solid agreement (AKA Terms & Conditions). To make things simple, use Affiliate Terms Wizard. It will write your terms in minutes and save you $100s in attorney’s fees.

The post How to Monitor Your Affiliates for FTC Compliance appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

How do Affiliate Contests and Leaderboards Actually Increase Sales?

Matt McWilliams — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 18:40:19 +0000

Affiliate contest software increases sales by giving every affiliate in your program something they can still win on day four, not just the five people at the top of the leaderboard. The mechanics matter more than the prize budget.

Affiliate contest software increases sales for one reason that has nothing to do with how much money you put into the prize pool. It keeps more affiliates in the game for more days. A contest that only ranks people creates a small group of competitors and a very large group of spectators, and the spectators stop opening your emails around day two.

I’ve run programs where the total prize budget was $500 and programs where it was $50,000. The $500 contests sometimes produced a bigger lift. The difference came down to how the contest was built and how it was tracked, which is where most managers lose the thing.

So let’s talk about the operating side. Not the psychology, not the prize list, but the machinery that decides whether your affiliate in 14th place is still mailing on Thursday.

Why affiliate leaderboards increase sales

Leaderboards work because affiliates are competitive people who publish for a living, and a public ranking turns a private commission report into a scoreboard their peers can see. Money motivates them. Being seen next to names they respect motivates them more.

Dan Pink covered this in Drive: once people earn enough to stop worrying about money, mastery and status outperform cash as motivators. Affiliate contests run on exactly that. An affiliate who would shrug at an extra $400 in commissions will send two more emails to move from ninth to seventh.

The second thing a leaderboard does is create a deadline that isn’t your cart close. Affiliates procrastinate. A leaderboard that updates every few minutes gives them a reason to mail Tuesday instead of “sometime this week,” and Tuesday mailers outperform Friday mailers because they get a second and third touch in before the cart closes.

None of that is new. Matt’s covered it in 6 tips for using affiliate leaderboards and how to use affiliate leaderboards to skyrocket your sales. The part that gets skipped is what happens to the 90 people who aren’t in the top ten.

Why a ranked-only affiliate contest stops working by day two

Run a straight top-five leaderboard with 100 affiliates and watch what happens. On day one, everybody checks. On day two, the affiliate sitting in 14th place with four sales looks at first place sitting on 61 sales and does the math. She can’t get there. She has a list of 2,400 people and the leader has 80,000.

She doesn’t quit the promo. She stops treating it like a competition. The three extra emails she was considering become one. Multiply that by the 85 affiliates below the top 15 and you’ve quietly deleted most of your upside.

The math on that is worth sitting with. One rockstar affiliate producing 60 sales feels like the win. But 85 mid-tier affiliates each producing 1.5 extra sales is 127 sales. You will almost always make more money by moving the middle than by squeezing the top, and ranked-only contests do nothing for the middle.

If you want the full breakdown of how to design the tiers themselves, prize types, thresholds, and what to award for, start with how to run an affiliate contest that actually motivates your affiliates. This post covers running one. That one covers building one.

How to run ranked prizes and threshold prizes at the same time

The fix is running two contests inside one promotion. A ranked contest for the people who can win it, and a threshold contest for everybody else, both live at the same time, both visible to every affiliate.

Ranked prizes go to positions. First through fifth, or first through tenth if your program is big enough. Threshold prizes go to numbers. Hit three sales, get something. Hit 10, get something better. Hit 25, get something better than that.

The affiliate in 14th place now has a target she can reach. She’s at four sales, the next threshold is ten, and ten sits six sales away instead of 57. She keeps mailing. Her personal contest has nothing to do with the leaderboard, but she’s still watching the leaderboard, because that’s where her threshold progress lives too.

Most affiliate platforms make this hard. They’ll track a leaderboard or they’ll track a bonus rule, and running both means you’re exporting reports and reconciling them by hand at 11pm. AffiliateHQ runs ranked prizes and threshold prizes simultaneously inside the same contest, so an affiliate can be 14th on the board and 100% of the way to her second threshold, and both show up in the same place without you touching a spreadsheet.

What a live affiliate leaderboard needs to do

A leaderboard you update by hand twice a day is a report. A leaderboard that updates itself is a contest.

That distinction shows up in affiliate behavior fast. When affiliates know the board is live, they mail and then refresh. When they know you post updates at 9am, they mail and check tomorrow. You lose the same-day feedback loop that makes people send the second email.

The other thing a leaderboard needs is more than one sort. Ranking by gross revenue tells your affiliates one story. Ranking by conversion rate tells a completely different one, and it’s often a smaller affiliate at the top. Sortable columns let an affiliate with 2,400 subscribers find the metric where she’s winning, and affiliates who find a metric where they’re winning keep promoting.

Sorting by EPC, opt-ins, refund-adjusted revenue, and unit count also tells you things about your own program. An affiliate ranked 30th on revenue and 2nd on conversion rate is someone you should be calling. Track those numbers year-round and you’re most of the way to the reporting covered in affiliate program KPIs every affiliate manager should track.

Want to see two of these contests from the inside, including the emails and the prize structures? Affiliate Contest Bonus Videos is a free behind-the-scenes walkthrough of two of the most effective contests Matt has run. It’s the fastest way to see the mechanics in a real promotion instead of in theory.

How personal bonus targets keep mid-tier affiliates in the game

Threshold prizes are the same for everyone. Personal bonus targets are different for each affiliate, and they’re the single most underused mechanic in affiliate contests.

The idea is simple. You set a target based on what that affiliate did last time, then reward them for beating it. An affiliate who produced 12 sales in your spring launch gets a target of 18 for the fall launch. An affiliate who produced 40 gets a target of 55. Both are chasing something real, and neither is comparing herself to a list ten times her size.

Matt’s covered the compensation side of this in how to use performance bonuses to get your affiliates to go all-in and how to use tiered affiliate commissions to motivate your best affiliates. The operational problem has always been tracking. Setting 90 individual targets by hand is a Saturday. Checking them daily during a launch week is another Saturday.

` tracks personal bonus targets against each affiliate’s own history automatically. You set the rule once, the platform pulls each affiliate’s baseline, and every affiliate sees their own progress bar. Nobody has to email you asking where they stand, which alone saves a manager several hours during a launch.

Milestone badges that award themselves

Badges sound like a small thing until you watch an affiliate screenshot one and post it.

A milestone badge is recognition attached to an event: first sale, tenth sale, first $1,000 in commissions, three launches promoted, top ten finish. It costs you nothing and affiliates chase them anyway, because status is a real currency in this business.

The value for you is the first-sale badge specifically. Most programs have a large group of affiliates who signed up and never promoted, and the single hardest number to move is zero to one. A badge that fires the moment an affiliate makes her first sale gives you a reason to email her, congratulate her publicly, and pull her into the active group. Matt covers this activation problem in how to grow your affiliate program quickly without adding new affiliates.

The catch is that manual badges don’t happen. You will not watch a dashboard during launch week to catch someone’s tenth sale. AffiliateHQ awards milestone badges automatically the moment the affiliate hits the number, and notifies them, so the recognition lands while the affiliate still cares.

A full affiliate contest structure you can copy

Here’s a structure that works for a program with roughly 100 to 300 affiliates and a $497 product. Total prize budget is about $4,000.

Ranked prizes. First place gets a $2,000 experience prize, something like Kentucky Derby clubhouse passes or a weekend trip. Second gets $750 in gear the affiliate picks. Third gets $400. Fourth and fifth get $200 each. Physical and experiential prizes outperform straight cash here, for the reasons Matt lays out in the easy way to pick awesome prizes for your affiliate launch.

Threshold prizes. Three sales earns a $50 bonus. Ten sales earns $150. Twenty-five earns $400. These stack with commissions and they’re open to everyone, including the affiliate who finishes 62nd.

Personal bonus targets. Beat your own result from the last promotion by 25% and earn a $100 bonus. Beat it by 50% and earn $250. New affiliates with no history get a flat five-sale target.

Milestone badges. First sale, tenth sale, first $1,000 in commissions, and a “beat your best” badge. No cash attached.

One 48-hour flash contest. Mid-promotion, usually the Tuesday or Wednesday after the weekend lull, most sales in 48 hours wins $300. Short contests inside long promotions pull affiliates back in right when attention drops.

That’s five ways to win running at once. An affiliate with 800 subscribers can hit the three-sale threshold, beat her own record, and earn two badges without ever cracking the top 20. She’ll promote again next time.

The contest is one piece of a program that has to hold together across recruiting, activation, communication, and payouts. The Book on Affiliate Management is the 300-page version of the system Matt used to build a $1 million per month affiliate program in under two years, and it covers where contests fit in the bigger structure.

Affiliate contest software vs. a spreadsheet

Plenty of managers run contests out of Google Sheets. It works right up until it doesn’t, and the failure points are predictable.

Refunds break the math. You awarded a threshold bonus on Tuesday and three of those sales reversed on Friday. In a spreadsheet you either catch it manually or you overpay. Affiliate contest software reverses the credit and adjusts the standing.

Manual updates kill urgency. A board you refresh twice a day removes the reason affiliates check it. And during a five-day launch, “twice a day” turns into “when I remember” by day three.

Affiliates ask you where they stand. Every one of those emails is five minutes. Ninety affiliates during a launch week is real time you’re not spending on recruiting or one-on-one calls with your top partners.

Running five contest types at once out of a spreadsheet is not a thing anyone sustains. That’s the argument. The structure that produces the most sales is also the structure that’s hardest to track by hand, so managers default to the ranked-only version, which is the version that leaves money on the table.

If you’re evaluating platforms generally, Matt walks through the criteria in best affiliate program software. For contests specifically, the question to ask any vendor is whether it can run ranked and threshold prizes in the same contest, with a live board, without an export.

Affiliate contest ideas beyond the leaderboard

A few that consistently pull affiliates off the sidelines:

Random draw among qualifiers. Everyone who makes three sales goes into a drawing for a $500 prize. A 900-subscriber affiliate has the same odds as a 90,000-subscriber affiliate, which is the whole point.
Weekend contest. Weekends are dead in most launches. Offer a prize for the most sales Saturday and Sunday and you’ll turn a flat two days into a real spike.
Most improved. Biggest percentage gain over the affiliate’s own last promotion. This is the personal bonus target, made public.
Highest conversion rate, minimum five sales. A different affiliate wins this almost every time, and it surfaces partners you should be talking to.
Opt-in contest during pre-launch. Reward registrations before the cart opens. It gets affiliates mailing early, which is the behavior that predicts everything else.

Matt broke down which of these produce the biggest lift in what kind of affiliate contests work best. Run three or four of them at once and the compounding effect on total sales is bigger than any single prize increase.

What to do next

Three things, in order.

First, add threshold prizes to your next contest. Even if the budget is $300 total, a three-sale bonus will move more affiliates than adding $300 to first place. This is the change with the largest gap between effort and result.

Second, make your leaderboard live and sortable. If affiliates can only see gross revenue, most of them can only see that they’re losing.

Third, stop tracking it by hand. The structure that works, ranked plus thresholds plus personal targets plus badges, is not something you can maintain in a spreadsheet during a launch week. AffiliateHQ runs all four at once, updates the board in real time, reverses credit on refunds, and awards badges without you watching anything. Matt built it after twenty years of affiliate platforms failing at exactly this, and every feature maps to what he teaches in the book.

Your affiliate in 14th place is the one who decides how big this launch gets. Give her something to chase.

Not sure where your program is leaking sales? Grab a free 20-minute call at Your Affiliate Launch Coach and walk away with an action plan for the next 30 to 60 days, including how to structure your next contest.

Scaling contests as your program grows

Contest structure changes as affiliate count grows. At 40 affiliates, a top-three leaderboard plus one threshold covers it. At 400, three ranked spots means 99% of your program is outside the running, and you need deeper thresholds and more segments.

The usual move at scale is running separate leaderboards by tier. Affiliates who produced under 10 sales last time compete against each other. Affiliates over 50 compete against each other. Everyone gets a board where the top spot is reachable, and you stop asking a 1,000-subscriber blogger to race a podcast with 200,000 downloads.

Matt covers the broader version of this problem in how to scale my affiliate program from $10K to $500K+ each month. The contest piece follows the same rule as the rest of it: the structures that work at 40 affiliates break at 400, and the managers who keep growing are the ones who change the machinery before it breaks.

The post How do Affiliate Contests and Leaderboards Actually Increase Sales? appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

How To Promote An Online Course As An Affiliate

Matt McWilliams — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:48:31 +0000

Promoting an online course as an affiliate works differently than promoting software or a physical product. The price is higher, the buying window is often closed, and your audience needs more proof before they hand over $997. Here’s how to pick the right course, time your promo, and do the commission math before you send a single email.

To promote an online course as an affiliate, you vet the course and the creator first, apply to the affiliate program, get your link, and then build a promotion around the course’s launch window or its evergreen funnel. The mechanics are simple. The part most affiliates get wrong is everything that happens before they hit send.

I’ve promoted courses priced from $47 to $25,000. I’ve made $50 on some and five figures on others. The difference almost never came down to my list size. It came down to whether I picked a course my audience already wanted and whether I promoted it at a moment when they could buy.

Courses are a different animal. A $39/month software tool sells itself on a free trial. A $19 kitchen gadget sells on a photo. A $997 course sells on trust, and trust is the one thing you can’t buy with a discount code.

Why online courses convert differently than software or physical products

Courses ask for more money up front and more work after the purchase. Somebody buying a $37 tool risks $37. Somebody buying a $1,997 course risks $1,997 plus the 40 hours they’ll spend on it plus the embarrassment of admitting they didn’t finish. That’s a much bigger ask.

Three things change because of it. First, conversion rates drop. A good software affiliate promo might convert at 3 to 5% of clicks. A course promo at $997 converting at 1% of clicks is doing fine. Second, the sales cycle stretches. Course buyers see the offer four, five, six times before they move. Third, your endorsement carries more weight than any sales page. Nobody reads a 4,000-word sales letter for a $19 product. They read every word of one for a $2,000 course, and then they go looking for someone they trust to tell them it’s legit.

That’s the opportunity. On a $1,000 course paying 40%, you earn $400 per sale. Ten sales is $4,000. You don’t need a huge audience to get to ten sales. You need the right ten people.

Course offers sit squarely in high-ticket territory, and the promotion rules change once you cross about $500. I broke down the pricing tiers, the conversion math, and the trust-building sequence in How to get started with high ticket affiliate marketing. Read it before your first course promo.

How to vet a course before you promote it

Ask the creator for four numbers: the refund rate, the conversion rate on the sales page, the average earnings per click for their affiliates, and the number of students who’ve finished the course. If they won’t share them, that’s your answer.

Refund rate is the one I care about most. Under 5% on a course means students got what they expected. Over 10% and something’s broken, either the promise or the delivery. I walked away from a $1,497 course paying 50% because the creator admitted their refund rate was 18%. That’s not a commission. That’s a chargeback with extra steps and a pile of angry replies in my inbox.

Then check the creator. Have they run this launch before? Do they have testimonials with last names and photos and specific results? Do they answer their own support email? I’ll take a first-time creator with a real reputation over a serial launcher with a slick funnel and no student outcomes.

Last, check the fit. Your audience should already be one step away from wanting this. If your list is beginner bloggers and the course teaches advanced paid media buying at $2,997, you’ll get clicks and zero sales. I’d rather promote a $297 course that fits perfectly than a $2,997 course that fits nobody.

Vetting the offer is half the battle. The program behind it is the other half, and I wrote up the cookie length, payment terms, and red flags I check in How to Choose an Affiliate Program to Promote.

Should you promote a course you haven’t taken?

Yes, and you say so out loud. I promote courses I haven’t finished all the time. What I don’t do is pretend otherwise.

The honest version sounds like this: “I haven’t gone through all eight modules. I’ve watched three of them and I know Sarah personally. I’ve seen her do this for six years and I’ve watched four people I know get results from her system. That’s why I’m sending this.”

That converts better than a fake testimonial, because your readers can smell a fake testimonial from four states away. And if you’ve got nothing at all, no relationship with the creator, no experience with the material, no results from anyone you know, then you shouldn’t be promoting it. That’s not an honesty problem. That’s a judgment problem.

Ask the creator for reviewer access. Most say yes. On a course paying you $400 a sale, spending two hours in the member area before you promote is the highest-ROI thing you’ll do that week.

I get this question so often that I wrote a whole post on it, including the exact language I use when I’m recommending something I haven’t used myself. Read Why You Should Promote Products You Haven’t Used.

Launch windows vs. evergreen: when to promote a course

Launch promos make more money in less time. Evergreen promos make less money over more time. Most affiliates should do both.

A typical course launch runs 10 to 14 days: free content for a week, cart open for five to seven days, then it closes. The deadline does the heavy lifting. In my experience, 40 to 60% of launch sales land in the final 36 hours, which means the email you almost didn’t send on closing day is the one that pays for the promo.

Evergreen courses have no deadline, so you have to supply your own reason to act now. Bonuses with an expiration date. A live Q&A you’re hosting for buyers this month. A cohort of readers going through it together. Without a deadline, evergreen course promos convert at a fraction of launch numbers.

My rule: build your calendar around two to four launches a year, and let evergreen offers run in the background through your resources page, review posts, and automated welcome sequence. The launches produce the spikes. Evergreen pays the electric bill between them.

Evergreen course offers need different mechanics than launches. I cover the deadline substitutes, the traffic sources, and the automation setup in How to Promote Evergreen Affiliate Offers.

And on frequency, the answer surprises most people. You can promote more than you think, as long as you’re picking offers your audience wants. I laid out the numbers in How Many Affiliate Launches Can You Promote Each Year?

The commission math on a $500 to $2,000 course

Run the numbers before you commit, because a big commission percentage on a course nobody buys is still zero dollars.

Here’s a realistic model. You have 2,000 email subscribers. You send six emails over a 10-day launch. About 35% open at least one, so 700 people see it. Of those, 15% click, which is 105 clicks. At a 2% conversion rate on a $997 course, that’s two sales. At 40% commission, you made $797.

Now change one number. Same list, but you promote a $1,997 course to a segment of 400 people who told you they want that exact thing. Open rate climbs to 55% because it’s relevant. Click rate hits 25%. That’s 55 clicks, and warm segmented traffic on a well-built sales page converts closer to 4%. Two sales again, but at 40% of $1,997, you made $1,597 from a fifth of the audience.

The math rewards relevance over reach. It always has. That’s also why I’d rather have 400 people who trust me than 40,000 who don’t remember signing up.

One more number worth tracking: earnings per click. If a course affiliate program tells you their top affiliates run $3 to $8 EPC, then 105 clicks should produce $315 to $840. When your actual result lands far below the range, the problem is your positioning or your segment, not the offer.

You don’t need a big list to make course promotions work. My free masterclass How I Currently Make $3,874 a Week Without Creating a Single Product walks through the exact promotions I run and the numbers behind them, plus a bonus report on passive affiliate income.

What to send during a course promotion

Six to eight emails over a 10-day launch. Fewer than that and you’ll leave money on the table. Every affiliate I know who complains about a bad promo sent three emails and quit.

The sequence I use for a course launch:

Pre-launch: point people to the free content. No pitch, no link to the cart. Two emails.
Cart open: your story with the problem this course solves, plus the link. One email.
Objection: the reason people hesitate, addressed head-on. Price, time, “will this work for me.” Two emails.
Proof: a specific result from a specific student, with numbers. One email.
Closing day: two emails, morning and about three hours before the deadline.

The closing-day emails feel excessive. Send them anyway. On a launch I ran last year, the 9 p.m. email on the final day produced 41% of my total commissions for that promo. People are busy. They meant to buy. Remind them.

Also, write like a person recommending a thing to a friend, not like a brochure. “I bought this and here’s what happened” beats “Introducing the revolutionary system” by a mile.

Planning a promo across email and social gets messy fast. My free Promotion Checklist Template lays out every asset and every send date on one page, and you can reuse it for every course launch you promote.

Bonuses that make people buy a course through your link

Your bonus should fix the reason people don’t finish courses. That’s the gap, and almost nobody fills it.

Bad bonus: five PDFs and a spreadsheet nobody opens. Good bonus: a live 60-minute call two weeks after they buy, where you answer their questions about implementing module three. The course teaches. Your bonus makes sure they do it.

A few that have worked for me on course promos:

A private group for buyers who came through my link, with a weekly check-in thread
A one-page implementation plan that turns the course’s 12 modules into a 30-day schedule
Two office-hours calls, recorded, in the first month
My templates for the exact thing the course teaches you to build

Keep the stack honest. A $497 course doesn’t need $10,000 in bonuses, and claiming it does makes you look like the guy selling supplements out of a van. Two or three bonuses that connect to the course’s weakest point will outperform a wall of stuff.

Bonus strategy deserves more than a few bullets. I broke down what to offer, how to price the perceived value, and how to deliver without drowning yourself in work in How to Build an Affiliate Bonus Strategy That Drives More Sales.

Where to find course affiliate programs worth joining

Start with the courses you’ve already bought. You own them, you know if they’re good, and the creator already has your email address. Search the member area for “affiliate” or email support and ask. About half of course creators have a program they never advertise.

Next, look at the people your audience already follows. If your readers keep mentioning the same three teachers, go check whether those three have affiliate programs. That’s your shortlist.

Then check the platforms. Teachable, Kajabi, Thinkific, and Podia all have built-in affiliate features, so any course hosted there can turn a program on in about ten minutes. If a creator says they don’t have one, ask anyway. I’ve had three creators build a program specifically because I asked to promote them.

Skip the giant marketplaces for course offers. ClickBank and similar sites are full of $47 courses with 60% commissions and 25% refund rates. The math looks great until the refunds hit.

Once you’ve got a shortlist, evaluate each one the same way you’d evaluate any offer. My post on choosing affiliate products that convert covers the filter I run every offer through, and if you want to turn one of those courses into an evergreen income stream, a well-built review post will keep paying you long after the launch closes.

Handling the promo when your list is small

With under 1,000 subscribers, stop broadcasting and start talking to people one at a time.

Before a course launch, I’ll pick 20 to 30 people from my list who I think are a fit and send each one a personal note. Not a template. An actual message that says “Hey Jen, you mentioned last month you were stuck on X. Sarah’s course opens Tuesday and module four is exactly that. Want me to send you the link?”

That converts at 10 to 20%. Three sales from 25 messages on a $997 course at 40% is $1,200 for maybe 90 minutes of typing. Try getting that from a broadcast to 25 people.

Live sessions work too. Host a free workshop the week before the cart opens, teach one useful thing for 30 minutes, then mention that the course goes deeper. That’s the same mechanic that makes webinars work for affiliate offers, and you don’t need a big audience for it. You need twelve people who show up live.

For more on this, I wrote a full breakdown of promoting affiliate offers to a small email list, including the segmentation approach that makes small lists outperform big ones.

If you’re at the beginning of this, my free Affiliate Marketing QuickStart Guide covers getting accepted into programs, picking your first offer, and the copy/paste email templates I use to get promotions off the ground.

What to do next

Pick one course you’ve already bought and would recommend to a friend without hesitation. Email the creator and ask three questions: do you have an affiliate program, what’s your refund rate, and when’s your next launch.

Then do the math before you build anything. Take your list size, multiply by 35% for opens, 15% for clicks, and 2% for conversions. Multiply that by the commission. If the number is worth ten days of your attention, run the promo. If it isn’t, find a better-fitting offer or a tighter segment.

And when you do run it, send more emails than feels comfortable and send the last one on closing day. That’s where the money is.

The post How To Promote An Online Course As An Affiliate appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

What is the Best Affiliate Software for a SaaS Company?

Matt McWilliams — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 18:22:58 +0000

The best affiliate software for a SaaS company is whichever platform creates a new commission on every renewal payment, not just the first one. Most tools track the initial signup and stop there. For subscription businesses, that single design choice decides whether your affiliates earn $30 once or $30 every month for two years.

I’ve watched SaaS founders sign up for affiliate software, run it for four months, and quietly shut the program down because their best partners stopped promoting. In almost every case the platform paid on the first invoice and nothing after that. The affiliate did the math, saw a $24 payout on a customer worth $1,700 in lifetime revenue, and moved on to a program that paid them for the whole ride.

So before you compare feature lists, ask one question of every vendor on your shortlist: when my customer pays their sixth monthly invoice, does an affiliate commission get created?

Does affiliate software pay commissions on renewals or only the first payment?

It depends entirely on the platform, and a surprising number of them only pay on the first transaction. Some tools were built for one-time digital products and bolted subscription support on later, which usually means they record the signup as a conversion and never look at your billing system again.

The distinction sounds small. It isn’t. Take a $99/month product with an average customer life of 18 months. At a 25% commission, first-payment-only pays your affiliate $24.75. Recurring pays them $445.50 on that same customer. An affiliate deciding where to spend their next launch email will pick the program paying $445.50, and they’ll pick it in about four seconds.

The mechanical question is where the commission gets created. Platforms that pay on renewals listen to your billing system for payment events, and every successful charge generates a new commission record. Platforms that don’t listen only fire once, on the checkout event, and go silent.

Before you pick software, settle what you can afford to pay. The commission rate you can sustain on a subscription product depends on churn and lifetime value, not gut feel. How to Structure Affiliate Commissions For a SaaS Product walks through the LTV math and shows why flat fees push out your best partners over time.

Why do most affiliate platforms handle SaaS renewals badly?

Most affiliate platforms were designed around a single conversion event, and subscription billing produces dozens of events per customer. A one-time-purchase model needs the software to answer one question: who sent this buyer? A subscription model needs it to answer that question again on every invoice, every plan upgrade, every downgrade, every failed payment retry, and every cancellation.

Here’s where the difference shows up in practice. When a customer upgrades from your $49 plan to your $149 plan, does the commission amount change? When a payment fails and retries successfully three days later, does the affiliate get paid once or twice? When a customer cancels in month seven, does the platform stop creating commissions or keep generating them forever against a subscription that no longer exists?

Platforms that read your billing system directly get these right because they’re reacting to the same events your accounting sees. Platforms that rely on a checkout-page pixel can’t answer any of them, because they never see the invoices. That’s a tracking architecture problem, not a settings problem, and no amount of configuration fixes it. If you want the underlying mechanics, How Affiliate Tracking Works explains what the software is doing between the click and the payout.

The second failure mode shows up in reconciliation. If your affiliate platform and your billing platform maintain separate records of what a customer paid, they drift. Every month you spend an hour matching two spreadsheets, and every quarter you find a commission that should have been reversed six weeks ago.

How does AffiliateHQ handle recurring commissions on Stripe?

AffiliateHQ connects to your own Stripe account and creates a commission on every renewal, upgrade, and cancellation event, so affiliates earn on every payment a customer makes. You aren’t syncing two systems or importing a CSV once a month. The commission records come from the same payment events Stripe already generates.

You set the duration rule program-wide. Pay affiliates for the first 12 months, the first 24, or for the life of the customer. Then you override it per affiliate, which matters more than founders expect. Your top three partners will eventually ask for lifetime commissions while everyone else stays on the standard 12-month term, and you want that conversation to end with a settings change instead of a spreadsheet workaround.

Because the commission ties to a payment event rather than a checkout, the amount tracks the actual charge. A customer who upgrades mid-year generates a larger commission on the next invoice without anyone touching the affiliate’s record. A customer who downgrades generates a smaller one. Your affiliate’s earnings move with the revenue they created, which is the whole point.

I built AffiliateHQ after two decades of running programs on software that kept letting me down. Every feature maps to what I teach in The Book on Affiliate Management, including the Stripe-native recurring commission engine SaaS founders need on day one.

What happens to the commission when a SaaS customer cancels or refunds?

In AffiliateHQ, cancellations and refunds reverse the commission automatically and cascade the clawback through every level of a multi-level structure, with a full audit log. Nobody hunts through Stripe for the refunded charge and then hunts through the affiliate dashboard for the matching commission.

Clawbacks are the part of SaaS affiliate management that founders underestimate. A one-time product has a refund window of 30 or 60 days and then you’re done. A subscription generates refund risk on every invoice for as long as the customer stays. If your software doesn’t reverse commissions on its own, you’re either eating the loss or clawing it back by hand, and the manual version is where affiliate relationships go to die.

Multi-level structures make it worse. If Affiliate A recruited Affiliate B, and Affiliate B’s customer refunds, both commissions need to reverse together. AffiliateHQ supports multi-level structures up to four levels deep, and the clawback cascades through all of them.

The audit log is the piece that saves you when an affiliate emails asking why their balance dropped $340 overnight. You pull up the reversal, show the refunded charge and the date, and the conversation ends in two minutes. Without a log, you’re asking a partner to trust your memory. How to Handle Affiliate Disputes covers how to run those conversations without torching the relationship.

Reversals are one flavor of affiliate risk. Fake signups and self-referrals hit SaaS programs hard because free trials make the entry cost zero, so read Affiliate Fraud Prevention Tools before your program gets big enough to be a target.

How do you set different commission rates for different SaaS pricing tiers?

You set product-specific rates, which lets you pay one percentage on your entry plan and a different one on your enterprise plan. Most SaaS companies sell three or four tiers with wildly different margins, and paying a flat 25% across all of them means you’re either overpaying on the plan with thin margins or underpaying on the one with fat ones.

Say your Starter plan runs $29/month with heavy support load and your Pro plan runs $199/month with almost none. A flat rate treats those as the same sale. They aren’t. Product-specific rates in AffiliateHQ let you pay 15% on Starter and 30% on Pro, which does two things at once: it protects your margin on the cheap plan, and it points affiliates at the customers you want.

That second effect is underrated. Affiliates read your commission structure as a signal about what you value. Pay more on Pro and your partners will write content aimed at Pro buyers. I’ve seen a rate change like that move a program’s average deal size by 40% inside a quarter without a single conversation about it.

You can layer tiered affiliate commissions on top of product-specific rates, so an affiliate who crosses 25 active subscriptions moves to a higher bracket across the board. And if you’re still deciding what your base numbers should be, What is a Good Affiliate Commission Rate? gives the benchmarks by category.

How long should a SaaS affiliate keep earning on a customer?

Twelve to 24 months covers most SaaS programs, and lifetime commissions belong to a small group of partners who earned them. Anything shorter than 12 months tends to read as stingy to experienced affiliates, who know your average customer sticks around longer than that.

Run the math on your own numbers before you commit. If your median customer life is 14 months, a 12-month commission window pays affiliates on about 85% of the revenue they generated. That’s generous enough to recruit well and cheap enough that your CAC stays sane. If your median customer life is 40 months, a 12-month window pays them on 30% of what they created, and your best affiliates will notice.

Lifetime is the strongest recruiting tool you have, which is exactly why you shouldn’t hand it out at signup. Hold it back as the thing an affiliate unlocks at 50 active customers, or offer it to the three partners you’d hate to lose. AffiliateHQ’s per-affiliate overrides make that a two-click change instead of a migration project.

There’s a churn consideration too. If your product churns at 8% monthly, a lifetime commission costs you very little because almost nobody reaches month 20. If you churn at 1.5%, lifetime is a real long-term liability and you should price it accordingly. How To Run An Affiliate Program For Monthly Subscription Services goes deeper on how churn changes what you can afford.

What should a SaaS founder check before choosing affiliate software?

Check six things, in this order: renewal commission creation, refund and cancellation reversal, product-specific rates, per-affiliate overrides, the audit trail, and how the platform connects to your billing system. Everything else on a features page is secondary for a subscription business.

Renewal commission creation is the disqualifier. If a platform can’t create a commission on invoice number seven, stop the evaluation there regardless of how good the rest looks.

Reversal handling comes second because it’s the thing you’ll deal with weekly forever. Ask whether reversals happen automatically, whether they cascade through multi-level structures, and whether there’s a log you can show an affiliate.

Billing connection matters more than the integration count on the marketing page. A platform that connects to your own Stripe account reads the same events your finance team reads. A platform that sits between you and your processor gives you a second source of truth to reconcile, and two sources of truth means one of them is wrong.

Then look at flexibility. Product-specific rates and per-affiliate overrides sound like advanced features until month four, when your best partner asks for a custom deal and your top-tier plan needs a different rate than your entry plan. Both requests arrive faster than founders expect. If you want the broader platform comparison outside the SaaS-specific criteria, Best Affiliate Program Software breaks down the main categories.

Software is one decision out of a dozen you’ll make in the first 90 days. The Book on Affiliate Management covers the full system I used to build a $1 million per month program in under two years, including commission design, recruiting, and activating the 95% of affiliates who sign up and never promote.

What do you do after the software is running?

Recruit affiliates, because the platform won’t do it for you. This is where most SaaS affiliate programs stall out. The founder spends three weeks evaluating software, picks well, sets up the commission structure, and then waits for partners who never show up.

Start with your existing customers. In SaaS, the people already paying you are the most credible promoters you’ll ever get, because they can write about the product from real use instead of a demo video. Wait until they’ve been active for 30 to 60 days so they have something to say, then invite them personally.

Then go after the people already writing comparison content in your category. Search your product name plus “alternative” and see who ranks. Those writers have the traffic and the intent, and half of them are already mentioning you without a link. How To Find Affiliates For a SaaS Business has the full recruiting playbook.

Get your payout process settled before your first payment cycle, too. Deciding your payout schedule and threshold after affiliates have earned money is a bad look, and How to Pay Affiliates covers the choices worth making up front.

Recruiting is the part that decides whether your program works. Your First 100 Affiliates is a free report showing the strategies I used to recruit 604 affiliates and build a $1.1 million per month program in 18 months, including where to find partners and the emails that get replies.

Frequently asked questions about SaaS affiliate software

Can affiliate software track free trials that convert to paid later?

Yes, if the platform ties the commission to the payment event rather than the signup. The affiliate’s referral gets recorded at trial start, and the commission gets created when the first real charge goes through. Platforms that fire on the signup event alone tend to either pay on trials that never convert or miss the conversion entirely when it happens 14 days later.

What commission rate do most SaaS affiliate programs pay?

Recurring programs commonly pay 20% to 30% of each monthly payment. One-time structures usually run 50% to 200% of the first month’s revenue, paid once. Your sustainable number depends on your gross margin, your churn rate, and what you currently spend to acquire a customer through paid channels. Work backward from CAC rather than copying a competitor’s rate.

Do I need a developer to connect affiliate software to Stripe?

Usually not. Platforms built for subscription businesses connect to Stripe through an authorization flow that takes a few minutes, and the tracking script drops into your site the same way an analytics tag does. You’d need engineering help if you run a custom-built checkout, use a payment processor the platform doesn’t support, or want commissions tied to usage-based billing events.

What happens to affiliate commissions if a customer downgrades their plan?

On a platform that reads payment events, the commission on the next invoice reflects the smaller charge automatically. On a platform that recorded the original signup amount, it keeps paying the old rate until someone notices and fixes it by hand. Ask specifically about downgrades during your evaluation, because it’s the case vendors skip in demos.

Should a SaaS company use an affiliate network instead of its own software?

Running your own program usually makes more sense for SaaS. Networks charge a fee on top of your commissions and own the affiliate relationship, which hurts more in a business where partners earn for years off a single customer. Networks help most when you can’t recruit on your own, and for SaaS you can recruit from your customer base and your comparison-content competitors.

How do multi-level affiliate structures work for SaaS?

An affiliate who recruits another affiliate earns a smaller percentage of that person’s commissions. AffiliateHQ supports this up to four levels deep, and clawbacks cascade through every level when a customer refunds or cancels. It works well in SaaS because recurring revenue makes the second-level earnings meaningful enough to motivate recruiting, rather than a rounding error.

What to do next

Three things, in order.

First, ask every vendor on your shortlist whether their software creates a commission on invoice number seven and reverses it automatically on refund. If they hedge, cross them off.

Second, decide your commission duration before you decide your rate. Twelve to 24 months for the standard program, lifetime reserved as something affiliates unlock. That single decision affects your recruiting pitch more than the percentage does.

Third, set your product-specific rates so your affiliates aim at the plans with the margin to support them. Then go recruit, because the best software on the market tracks zero sales until someone promotes you.

If you’d rather talk it through than read another comparison chart, grab a free 20-minute call at Your Affiliate Launch Coach. I’ll review your current setup and give you an action plan for the next 30 to 60 days.

The post What is the Best Affiliate Software for a SaaS Company? appeared first on The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams - Advice for Affiliate Program Managers.

How to Make Affiliate Webinars Convert Better

Matt McWilliams — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 13:30:19 +0000

Affiliate webinars can bring in a flood of leads and still leave a lot of sales on the table. The difference usually comes down to what happens before, during, and after the webinar. In this episode, I’m showing you how to make affiliate webinars convert better, including how to promote an offer that doesn’t perfectly match your niche, what to ask affiliate managers and partners for before you promote, and how encore webinars can double or even triple sales. These are practical lessons we’ve learned from real promotions, including what worked, what didn’t, and how to get more value from every webinar you run or promote.

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Listen on Spotify

Listen on YouTube

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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy

How to Find What’s Wrong with Your Affiliate Program and Fix It

Affiliate Program Support: 5 Things Your Partners Need

How to Recruit Affiliates Who Keep Promoting

How to Recruit Affiliates from Competitor Leaderboards

How to Get Affiliates to Plan Their Promotions in Advance

How to Make Your Affiliate Program Stand Out to Affiliates

How to Make Affiliate Webinars Convert Better

Webinars are one of the best ways to get more leads, more sales, and more great affiliates. They’re also an easy way to promote something that benefits your audience. Today, I’ll, share how you can use affiliate webinars to grow your business. So I did a promo back in the fall of 2001. I think that was a little bit different than what we usually promote. And, you know, it didn’t really like, kind of square up exactly with my niche, you know, And I wanted to do.

We did some private content for a small group of our audience where we discussed that, you know, first of all, okay, promoting something that’s a little bit outside of your niche, how do you do that? But how do you tie it into your niche? And we talk about that in this episode. We also talk about webinars from both ways. Why promoting JV webinars, affiliate webinars, one of the quickest ways to grow your list, how to use it to get affiliates to promote you.

We also talk about in this episode what you should ask affiliate managers and what you should ask your partners for so that you can have the best promotion. And then we also talk about how to use encore webinars to quite frankly, double or triple your sales. We found some success with that. We’ve had issues with that in the past and so we cover a lot in this episode. This was originally a, private kind of behind the scenes lesson for some of our members, but we wanted to open it up to the public here on the podcast.

I’m super excited to, share this because I think there’s just a ton of lessons inside of this one big lesson. So again, ultimately, it’s all about how to use webinars to grow your business, how to use affiliate webinars to grow your business. And I mentioned before, I think it was like four or five episodes ago, I said, hey, if you want to know, kind of our framework for webinars, I’ve done two live webinars. Really small, intentionally really small. These are both brand new webinars.

Well, not brand new like they’ve tweaked webinars, but we’ve made some tweaks. And the one we closed, 17% of live attendees. The most recent one we closed almost, we almost hit 25% if we’d had one less person on. We would have closed 25%. So we’re really killing it with these webinars.Like, they’re converting extremely well. And if you want to know how we do it, then shoot me a text at 260-217-4619. And if I get enough people who text me, I’m going to do. It’s going to have to be at least a two episode, probably three episodes. Might even have to do an entire month.

And it would be like next, March. It would be a while from now because we’ve got content planned through. Gosh, when do we have content planned through? Looks right now. Looks like we’ve got our content for the podcast planned through March 28th of next year.So it would be next April. So go in. Yeah, like almost a year from now. Just crazy to think about that. What is that?That’s, I don’t know when this one’s going to go live, but that’s like seven months from now. But either way, text me at 260-217-4619 and I’ll probably do a series. And plus, I’ll have a little bit more dialed in. Right. Then I’ll do a series on what we are doing in webinars.

That’s converting. So if you’re interested, let me know about that. With that, I’m going to cut to this private interview that I did with Robbie Miles, who’s our operations manager on our team, about this webinar promotion that we did. So we talked about it from all the different angles. Again, the angle of promoting something outside your niche, but also working with affiliates on your webinars and being an affiliate on your webinar.We share tons of tips in there. So listen up and learn, because I think this is some valuable stuff. There were some revelations for us that we share in this episode, so listen up and learn. And do me a favor. At the end of this episode, shoot me a text again.260-217-4619. We’ll put that in the show notes as well. And let me know your biggest takeaway. I’d love to hear from you. All right, let me cut to that interview now, and welcome back to another Backstage Pass.

We’re going to take you on a deep dive into a recent affiliate promo, unlike any other affiliate promo that we’ve ever done that we did just, about a month ago or so. And, well, we’re going to be doing it again soon, and we’ll talk about that at the end. So I Want to welcome Robbie Miles on our team, who is our head of operations and the guy who. Well, quite frankly, anytime we do one of these backstage fasts and we look back at, you know, here’s what we learned and here’s what we did, he’s the guy that remembers it all. And then I just stand here and talk about it.So, Robbie, welcome, man. Hey, you know, it’s easy to remember things when you have pen and paper around, so. Well, that’s Robbie’s. That’s Robbie’s skill set. For those who don’t know, we did a Facebook Live recently, and I think somebody said, oh, so the business secret is I need a robby.I was like, yeah. And I think you said, yes, you do. Yes, you do. Yes, you do. You know, just not this one.

And so. But it is true, you know, that’s not my skill set, the organizational side of things. And so we have a Robbie, whose name, ironically, is Robbie, and he, he keeps us on track. So, Robbie, I’m excited about today because we’re talking about affiliate program that we did recently. So as we’re recording this in December, and I believe it’ll go live for you guys in December.This is a promo we did a little bit over a month ago, so it’s still really fresh in our minds, and it’s really outside of, my niche. That’s actually the cool thing about it, makes me really excited to talk about this. And there’s some things that we did that we’ve never had to do before that are lessons for you. Things that we did that we had to do before that are lessons for you guys. And I’m just really excited to share this.

So I’m going to jump right in and explain the promo real quick and kind of the backstory to it. So, as you may notice, if you watch some of the original AIM backstage passes, I look a little bit different than I did in the original ones. And I think we launched aim, if I’m not mistaken. We launched AIM when I was a wee bit into my weight loss journey, but not way into it. Yeah, just a couple months, if I remember. I think because we pre recorded some of the content, some of the content would have been about two and a half months in, so I’d probably lost about 20ish pounds at that point. But it’s still come a long, long way since then. In total, my doctor says, you know, about 88 pounds of fat is roughly probably about 91, 92 by now. And, the reason I say of fat is because I actually have only, I say only, I’ve only lost £56 or something. But I’ve also put on some muscle.

And so, you know, that’s why he says about 80 something pounds of fat that there. And you know, the revelation that I had earlier this year was just, you know, we, we teach so much about marketing techniques and marketing strategies and marketing, you know, affiliate marketing, how to make more money, how to monetize, how to have more influence and impact in the world. Those are all great things. But for many people, their weight is holding them back. I can teach you all the best marketing strategies.I can teach you all the best email copy. I can teach you how to be confident on camera. There’s one for you. How to be confident. Newsflash.

I was never confident on camera before I did them. I produced videos, some really good videos, some impactful and life changing videos for people. I was never confident on camera, I am now. And so I realized, like, you can have all the best stuff, but if you’re just not confident in just who you are. And appearance is just appearances and everything, but it’s just a part of who we are, you know, I mean, the example I’ve always have used when I talk to people about this is there’s the old joke or thing, you know, you picture the audience naked, you know, right.

If you’re nervous, how about what if you were naked? Like, I don’t care. It’s not about looking good or anything. You want to tell me? Okay, we’ll go like your boxers, right?Who’s my friend? Skibbies. Your skibvies. Skibbies, yeah. If you had to go up on ste.I don’t care if you look amazing, right? And you had to go up on stage and deliver a talk about marketing or gardening or productivity or high performance or, being a real estate agent in your underwear, would you be comfortable? It’s just your appearance. I mean, all that matters, right, is the content. No, your appearance does matter.

If you had to go up, you’re going to deliver a presentation to a group full of, you know, professional real estate agents, for an example. And you went up there and you had a green mohawk, you know, one of those green and like, you know, piercings all over your face and you’re covered in tattoos and you’re going to talk about generating more real estate leads. Your appearance is going to distract, detract and distract from the message. So appearance does matter. And I said to Alan Thomas, my friend and now a coach, you know, my weight Loss coach said, this is holding me back this way to swing back.

And the revelation I had a few months ago, Robbie, was. Is affecting other people. And so I asked Alan. Alan’s in our Start Mastermind, and he’s just getting started with this platform. He’s been at it for about a year.He’s coaching, you know, people just like me and helping them. He’s helped men lose literally thousands of pounds now. He himself lost like £130 a while back. And I said, we need to teach this stuff. We need to help people.So I invited him to do a webinar with me. And so today, what we’re talking about is a few things. Number one, we’re going to talk about promoting outside your niche, because this is definitely outside my core content. But we were able to tighten. You mean, this isn’t just, you know, marketing and affiliates and, you know, growing affiliates programs and.

Yeah, I mean, it’s. Gosh, it’s just so far out there. So we’ll talk about that. We’re going to talk about promoting new JV partners. You know, this was Alan’s first ever JV webinar, and he did it with us, and he was terrified.and he didn’t know anything. Like, he didn’t know what to give us or what to do. So we’re going to talk about that. We’re going to talk about things to ask for when you’re promoting a JV webinar. We’re going to talk about that from our perspective.And then lastly, we’re going to talk about how to do it again, how to do an encore, which is what we’re doing with Allen in January. So, Robby, let’s start with kind of the outside your niche thing. I think this is important. And I sort of said this when I was introing this and giving the backstory is there’s two places your audience can be. They can be past your core content, or they can be before your core content, or they can just.

Actually three places they can be parallel to your core content. I think in your world, you know, you’re the productivity guy, and yet you have a new thing out called the Better Men or Better Man. I keep forgetting. Yeah, the Better Men Project. Better Men Project.Okay. Yeah, I was pretty confident, but I didn’t, you know, And you have this thing called the Betterment. Now. This is your own thing, but it’s not in, like, core productivity lane. It’s not on the side of it, though. We would not dispute that if you have better family Relations. If you get in less fights with your wife, if your children are more obedient and just you have more peace in the home, then you’re going to be more productive. I mean, I don’t think anybody would go, no, I think that’s too far. Yeah, exactly. Or vice versa.

If you’re more productive at work, you know, you have more time to focus on family at home. Like it goes both ways, but they’re not the same thing. So I think first of all we can look at those areas where they’re tangential, they are related. There’s maybe something that’s keeping them from getting to the level that you’re teaching at with your products or the products that maybe you have a physical product or a coaching service or something and there are things that need to get them to that point. The same thing is true.

Maybe they’ve progressed a little bit past your core content. Well, what are you going to do? You know, you have two options. You can be like, hey, bye, farewell, Avita Z. You know, you can let them go and just whatever you lost, a really enthusiastic person.Or you can make offers to them and not only serve them, that’s definitely the most important part. But also Instead of making $0 going forward, you make lots of dollars going forward. I don’t know, which one would you rather have? And so we looked at it from the perspective more of, we’re getting people to build a business. We’re getting people to build a platform to learn again how to do videos, do podcasts and write emails, build an affiliate marketing business, build side income, make their first thousand dollars or first ten thousand dollars to go full time, start an affiliate program and all those things.

It can’t happen if you’re not confident until you are. So we do talk a lot about personal growth and this was a part of personal growth. The other thing that we were talking about this before we started recording is there’s an opportunity, no matter what niche you’re in, to tell your audience, here’s a product that has completely transformed my business. I think you should, I think you should check it out. One of the good examples we were talking about was Kathy Hay.

Kathy is in the. I don’t even know what they call the niche. It’s like the period costumes. Yeah, that’s specifically with like, what are those things called? Corsets. Corsets, yeah. So corsets from the, like I don’t know, 100 and some odd years ago. Right. I mean, I literally know nothing about the industry. And quite frankly don’t care.you know, it’s like a very niche thing. And yet she was like the number six or seven, I believe, affiliate partner for Jeff Walker’s product launch formula, which you could not find a course that would define Internet marketing as it is today. More than PLF. Right. She was the 6 or 7th affiliate.

Her audience against some of the biggest people in the Internet marketing space and teaching corsets with all, women who. Want to know how to make period piece corsets. How do you make that leap? Very simple. She said, hey, I know some people in my audience.I mean, by definition, most niches, no matter what niche you’re in, you’re in the productivity niche, Robbie. You have people who are entrepreneurs, you have people who are middle managers, people who are CEOs, people who are low level people who are students and they want to be more productive. You know, like about the Better Men project, how do you pitch that? Well, because I’m going to guess roughly half your audience is male and half your audience is. Now, it might be skewed.

It might be 60, 40. I’m just saying. But just, you want to know people who want to be more productive and you just go pull over 100 random people. Guess what? About 51 of them are going to be men or women, and the other 49 or 51 are going to be the other.You know, that’s. Duh. right, but you said. I know at least half my audience is men. And I also know that a large percentage of my audience is married and, or with children.And that’s just statistically probable. You wouldn’t even have to show me a survey, Robbie. And I can probably guess that of your audience, 39% of them are married men with children. And, probably right into about 6 to 7%. You know, actually according to the survey, it’s higher.

Married men with children. Wow. Okay. Yeah, yeah, but she. Because who follows you?Who follows anybody? Somebody who is usually striving to be or to get to where that person is. I don’t do a great job of attracting 27 year old single dudes. Yeah. And I’m cool, you know, because that’s not my audience.You know, I. Right. I’ve said this many times, like I have no desire to be the marketing guy who’s holding up the big check from Google that doesn’t cast a shadow. Yeah. I may or may not be talking about a very specific famous marketer out there who got caught doing that years ago.

He was like, look, at me. This is my $100,000 plus check from Google. Yeah, there’s no shadow, dude. You have to look that up. there’s like him by his, like, you know, Lambo that he got from Hertz, right? Yeah, you know, but yeah, so like Kathy, like, she teaches corsets and like, that’s specifically what I know most of her product is about. And somehow that’s literally all she talks about. Yeah. But if you think about this, in. This Internet marketing space, boom. Some percentage of her audience is entrepreneurs. Some percentage of her audience is aspiring entrepreneurs. And from the get go. And I’m assuming she did this because, you know, I know she does some of the stuff that we teach, which is when you promote something like this, you say up front, hey, I’m gonna be talking about this thing. It’s not what I normally talk about.

If you’re not interested, click here and I’m not gonna say anything else about it to you. Yeah. And then you create an opt out for them. In our system, ConvertKit. We highly recommend, if you’re not on ConvertKit, that you switch to ConvertKit.We’ll put a link. Robbie’s making a note right now to link. I can tell he’s making a note right now to link. You know, below the video to ConvertKit. You can get a free trial of up to like a thousand subscribers, I think.Is that right? It is, yeah. Yeah. So you can get a thousand subscribers for free. Even if you’re well above that.It’s super affordable. It’s probably the most affordable for the bells and whistles it has. It’s quite frankly, I think it’s cheap and I hate that word. It’s inexpensive. That’s probably a better word.Very inexpensive. And so in ConvertKit you can literally just, when they click this link, it just tags them like, not interested in plf. Not gonna email them about that anymore. Cool. So she did that on the front end.

Probably knocked out 10% of her list right away. That’s awesome because now she doesn’t have to worry about them. And she talked about a product that impacted her. That was the big thing with me. I was talking about something that I, you know, I said this genuinely, of course, but I said this.Like I realized up front, half the people, I mean, you look at statistics, you know, we look at them and go, man, half the country’s obese. Guess what? Half the country’s not. You know, so right there I met. No, my audience is probably a cross section of, the population, maybe even slightly Skewed towards less obese because, you know, they’re high performers.

So I know 50 to 60% of my audience doesn’t care about this at all. And that’s totally fine. They can click the link. I’m never going to email them about Alan’s stuff again. And I, like, I’m glad when people click that because first of all, it means they don’t need it or that other end, not denial.That could be the other issue. But I don’t have to worry about sending more emails and more emails and more emails promoting this. So that’s number one. And then number two, I just, you know, I was just open and honest. And, hey, this made a big difference for me.

You were doing a free webinar with Alan. He’s going to teach you some of these things. You know, if this sounds interesting to you, I think you should attend. And I think, you know, and some people attended, so it was kind of awesome. Yeah. And that’s interesting. You know, this isn’t. We didn’t have this in the bullet points or anything, but, you know, you presented it really. It was genuine. Like, you just wanted to help people.You said, hey, this drastically changed my life. It changed my life, it changed my business, it changed my relationships. And I think that it’ll help you, too. And that was really neat to see. There wasn’t a huge push like, get to this webinar, make your $10,000 now, or, you know, whatever else.

All that kind of in your face Internet marketing. And, you know, sometimes we push that when we’re in a big launch or something like that. But this was just like, it felt more like what we talk about asks and gives. This felt more like a give in the marketing. It was, hey, we want to help you. Yeah, man, I think, you know, well, you just kind of reminded me that, like, the way that we were able to market this was just telling my story. All I did was just tell the story. That’s all. I’m assuming, again, I didn’t watch her campaign, but I’m assuming that’s all that Kathy did. Or literally, you look at anything where people are promoting things that are, quote, unquote, outside of their niche, and they’re just telling their story about how this thing helped them or why they might need this thing.

I think the other important thing is, again, when you care about your audience, like, I cared more about serving my audience and saying, like, no, I get that this isn’t the norm. This is not the norm. And I, again, you acknowledge that when you’re promoting stuff. The lesson years. When you’re promoting things that are outside of your niche or they’re out to the size of more, you know, you gotta acknowledge the fact that it is.I didn’t come out and say, you know, this is right on par with. I didn’t come out and I forgot. I mean, to view that. I never sent an email, like, hey, this is my normal thing today. No, I never sent.

I didn’t send an email going, like, just out of left field, like, where people are going, wait, why is he talking about this? You have to explain why you’re talking about things. When I send an email and say, hey, I just did a new podcast and we’re talking about how to find affiliates, nobody goes, why would he send me that? And that’s what you signed up for, you know, but when you are sending something that’s not that, you have to explain it. There has to be that backstory.So we started off. The very first email, if I remember correctly, is, hey, this was me 15 months ago. Yeah, this is me now. You know, like, very visual, but also, okay, he’s going somewhere with this. And here’s how I did it.And then we positioned Alan and we told Alan’s story. We said, hey, you know, if this sounds like it might be helpful to you, then it’s going to be helpful to you. If you believe that your voice holding you back, you need to come to this. If you believe that this could potentially transform your life, then come to this. That story is what is super important now.

If I didn’t have that story. But I knew Alan because now he’s reaching out to know. I. We’re encouraging him. He’s in our mastermind.So one of the things that we talked about is like, dude, you got to be. You know, I told him, I want you to spend 20 hours a week reaching out to potential JV partners. All these other people who aren’t affected by him. He’s not coached them, but they know his story. And so they can say, hey, my friend Alan lost £129 in whatever.

It’s like 300 days or something. You know, he went from being obese for two decades to being a very, you know, fit man in, less than a year. And he said to me that, you know, his weight was holding him back. Well, if it’s holding you back. And now you can basically tell the exact same.The marketing could be the exact same. From that point forward, it was a little bit easier because I had the personal story and so look for those products where if they’re outside of your niche, but you believe that they have transformed something that you’ve done. I think of like Cara Andretta teaches cake decorating. She was a top 20 partner for Michael Hyatt’s goal setting course. You know, it makes sense.

When you did really well in that, you know, a few years ago. That makes sense. You’re the productivity guy. Goal setting, you know, two peas and a pod. Right?no idea why I did that voice. Butter pain, but a poop, you know. They go together like peanut butter and tuna fish, you know, and that makes sense. But cake decorating in goal setting, like, well, who again, who’s her audience? Entrepreneurs who are cake decorators.Entrepreneurs need to what, set goals. It’s off to the side. But it definitely makes sense if she explains. If she just came out right away and said, hey, Michael Hyatt released a new thing all about goal setting. I’m sorry, what?

But if she explains it in the context and introduces it softly, then transitions into the quote, unquote, normal marketing, very effective. So we talked about at the beginning, and we talked about how Alan had never promoted a JV offer before, and we’ve never really promoted anything that was this far outside of our lane. So one, of the cool things that this can apply both ways. You know, we really try to focus on being an affiliate inside of aim. But I’ll just give you this tip that one of the best ways to find affiliates to be an affiliate, you know, and to basically do webinar swaps.

Now, we’re not doing that with Alan. I did this, you know, on some level for him, you know, to be perfectly transparent again, he’s in our mastermind, he’s a dear friend, and he’s changed my life. So there’s no, like, Ellen, you got to promote our affiliate marketing stuff to your audience now. Like, that’s not on the table at all. If he chooses too great.But I never once asked him to do that. But finding those people who maybe where you’re both doing it for the first time, you know, finding those people where you both have a small list. Maybe you both have a list of 700, 800, 900 people. I think Alan’s list before this was under 800. I think it was like 750 people.

Typically, we partner when we promote people. There are people with list of 200,000, you know, 100,000, maybe 35,000 on the small end. But we. There is an opportunity when you’re first starting out to look for partners both ways that are much smaller. For one, when you’re doing these webinars, like, if this had been, you know, let’s just say this was our very first affiliate promo, did I want to do it where I’m, doing it with, you know, somebody who’s got a certain level of expectation?

You know, let’s say we had 800 people on our list. The reality is, if you have 800 people on your list, we’re probably going to get like 10 people to show up for the webinar. Maybe 15. I don’t want to have 15 people on somebody’s list who’s used to having a thousand, you know, and so there’s a certain level there. The other thing for him is he doesn’t want to be on a webinar where there’s a thousand people.And you don’t either if you’ve never done one before. You know, you want to be on where there’s 10 or 15 or 20 people. And so it’s an opportunity for you to work your way in, I was going to say. And you talk about this all the time within start. And a lot of that’s getting in your reps.

And how do you get in your reps is you do that at a smaller level, a, practice level. And not that it wasn’t professional, what you got, the webinar that you guys did, but because it was a smaller audience, it’s a great opportunity to practice your professionalism at that smaller level. So. And now as he does this again and again and again, that webinar is just going to get better and better and better and better and. And so are the products that he puts together for you. Yeah. And if you’re doing a webinar, again, we’re speaking more from the, you know, finding affiliates out here. But just think about this way. Like, I see so many times I just got to go out and I got to get that one. If I could just get that one person.It’s like the author saying, if I can just get on Oprah. Right. What if Tim Ferriss had just waited to get on Oprah or J. K. rowling had waited to get on Oprah?Like, we would never have heard of either one of them. So rather than get on Oprah, what if you’re on, you know, WKCL in Denton, Texas? You know, I’m just trying to pick a random place. Then you’re on W. You know, ABC on.

And I think that’s in New York. City. So that’s a bad example. But you’re on some poodle, you know, in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and you’re going, you know, one by one, and people are like, well, that’s just harder than getting the one. Well, do you have the one?You know, did you get on Oprah? How much longer is it going to take you to get on Oprah? And why would Oprah have somebody on who hasn’t even. Like, you get on. You’re like, I don’t even know what to say because I’ve never done it before.Then you go on Oprah after You’ve been on 300 radio interviews, and you’re like, boom. Got. Yep, got my talking points. I’m in. You know, you got your stories down, all that stuff.

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And that’s what we talking about with the reps. It’s like, do the smaller ones. You want. You want to get in front of, Everybody wants to do the one webinar with 4,000 people. Oh, man, I just want to do a webinar with 4,000 people on it.How about just do 40 webinars with a hundred people? Here’s the deal. You’re much more likely to get one with 4,000 people if you’ve done 40 with a hundred or even 80 with 50 or 120 with 33. 3 people, you know, or 200 with 20 people, and you’ll be a million times better. So I’m gonna tell you guys, again, getting a little bit off track here, but here’s what I told Alan afterwards.

I said, go do it again and again and again. I said, dude, if I were you initially, I told him I was like, every Thursday, I would be doing a webinar. I don’t care if it’s for your internal audience and you have six people on, or if it’s a JV webinar and you have two people on or 30 people on or whatever. Just get in the reps. Get in the reps.Get in the reps. Then I was like, you know what? Thursday’s not enough. I said, you got to get this, like, really cranked up. I said, I would be doing an internal webinar every Tuesday, come hell or high water.

I would probably be doing one on Wednesday to your paid traffic, and then I’d be doing one on Thursday with the jv. And I said, I don’t care if you’re JV ing with, like, one of your clients who does nothing but post it on his personal Facebook page. Nine people show up Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Every single week. I said, it only takes about 10 weeks before you got 30 reps in and you started to refine those stories. And then you, you know, like, I was sharing with him, and I’ll share with you guys, like, the little things, like, we’ve done this where, I don’t know, I was doing a presentation that I’ve done five times, and then suddenly I said something.

And, when I said it, I leaned in like this, and we went, ooh, that was good. So now what does it say in the script? Lean in. Because if I don’t put it in the script, I’m never going to personally remember to do that again. I might do it randomly just thinking about.I just go like that. But the only reason I did that was, like, just that morning, I’d been watching Zig Ziglar, and he does that move when he asks a deep, question. And it’s the same thing. Puts the arm over and he leans in like that and asks the question. If he was speaking on a stage, he would get down on one knee, always the same way.And it was the same move. So I had it somewhere in m. My subconscious. But when I deliver it two weeks later, I might not even think about that. So now it says in the script.

Now, when we studied what I did, we noticed there were parts where suddenly I started talking a little bit faster because I was really excited, but I actually needed to pause between sentences and give the audience some time to think about what I was saying. Like, even just there, you know, I slowed down. You don’t know those things until you’ve just gotten in the reps and observed and studied and watched your own presentations. And so that’s the beauty of working with small partners both ways. The cool thing is, it’s also a heck of a lot easier to get somebody who’s got a thousand people on their list to say, yeah, I’ll host a webinar with you, and you can host one with me.

And it’s a lot easier to get them to switch. And then, you know, you get your reps in, but also they host a webinar with you. And you grow your list by 50 people. Like that. When you’re starting out, there’s very little you can do in an hour of your time to get 50 people on your list, because even if they don’t show up, they’re on your list.I don’t know what most of you, when you’re starting out, can do with an hour of your time to get 50 people on your list? Please tell me. I’m asking for a friend. We’ll add it to list launch challenge. Dude.

Here’s the deal. You know, eight hours a day, that’s 400 subscribers a day. There are not many people out there adding 400 qualified people to their list every single day. Exactly. So even you say, oh, only I had 50 people in my loan.I want to work with the big boys. Well, work with the small, and then, you know, do 10 of those, and then go up to people with 2,000 people, and then 3,000 work your way up. Because here’s the thing. If you do 10 of those, let’s say you have 500 people on your list and you do 10 with, and you get 50 subscribers. Now you have a thousand subscribers.

A little bit of attrition. But just work with me here. Now you can go after people who’ve got slightly bigger lists because you’ve got something to offer. Now they’re sending 80. You do 10 of those, you’ve got 1800 subscribers.Even with attrition, you got 1500. Now you’ve got more to offer somebody with 2000, they’re sending 100. You do 10 of those. Now you got 2,500. You got something to offer somebody with 3000, they’ll send you 125 and so on.

And now, now you’re only having to do eight of them to get to another thousand, and then so on and so forth. And on the affiliate side there, it’s important to remember that, you know, you’re getting your reps in, too. You know, if they bring you on at all, you’re getting in front of, you know, your audience in a way that serves them. Plus, you are practicing that webinar thing. That way, when you grow your business to that point, you will know how to do it, how to host the webinars, how to, you know, use the training.

You will have seen the webinars enough that especially the more different programs that you can work with, you’ll start to understand what you like and what connects with you and what you can put into your webinars in the future. Which, you know, that’s a really good point. I mean, you’re attending webinars and learning from them and seeing how your audience, like, it’s not just. It’s different when you attend a webinar, right, as an attendee, because you’re trying to, like, learn stuff, right when you’re on there and you’re watching how your audience responds to them and the things that they do and you’re making notes like, oh, when he did that, my audience really. Oh, that’s good.

You know, it also, you’re in the chat with them. yeah. Like, you can have that conversation. And some of that material is gold because it’s you connecting straight with your audience. Yeah.And then when with the smaller ones too, man, I didn’t even think about this. But the smaller ones, like, there’s something about, you know, now he’s blown up, you know, our friend Jonathan Milligan. I mean, we started promoting Jonathan when he definitely didn’t have a list of more than a few thousand people, you know, and yet we introduced tons of people in our audience. Like, we still hear about it from, like, Phil and Gwen and Mary. I’m trying to think of a few others that we introduced him that we actually, I think that was probably it.

Jim M. Folsom. We introduced all them. They still follow Jonathan. And to them, it was like we introduced them to a hidden gem.If we promote Jeff Walker, it’s like, yeah, they’ve all heard of Jeff Walker. If we promote Ryan Leveque, I mean, yeah, the product’s great. We sell a lot of them, we make a lot of money, but it’s like, yeah, I already know who that guy is, you know. Yeah, I bought through your link map because I wanted you to get the commission and I wanted your bonuses, but it wasn’t like a, Man, thank you so much for introducing me to Stu McLaren. You know, it’s like, I heard of him.

I’ve been listening to his podcast for three years. Dude, you know, there’s this, like, I’m introducing them to, like, underground heroes, you know, and like, these people that they’ve never heard of, and it’s really, really cool. These subject matter experts. And then we’re growing our list together. A lot of times we end up in, you know, masterminds together.We have a certain connection together. You know, the marketing is a lot easier sometimes. And there’s just, I don’t know, it’s just. It’s a really cool experience to kind of do that together. So look for people who, you know, they’re at your level or one level above.

You know, certainly the one level above can still be like, the, you know, they’re not bunt singles, but you can hit some doubles with those people. Stop trying to go for the home runs initially. Again, you do enough of these and eventually you wake up one day and you have a list of 45,000 people and you can, you know, so there’s probably a lesson for us, Robbie. let’s do more, let’s do more of these with, you know, some people. The third thing that we talked about was, I think, what you called it, a list of demands to make.

I called it things to ask for. One of us was being polite. You know, the cool thing about this is like with somebody doing a first time webinar, or even if they’ve done a couple, they don’t know necessarily what to give you as an affiliate. So you as the affiliate get to set the rules. And we basically said, alan, okay, here’s what we need, right?And he had to give it to us. You know, and that’s the cool thing about this is like, you get to say those things and. But he feels like, oh my gosh, you guys did such a service. Like, he told me the other day that because we forced him to do it, it’s like now he has everything ready for all these other JV partners, right? All these people he’s doing webinars with.

He’s like, well, here’s the file. It’s already done. Like, I know. Here’s your link, here’s the file, here’s all the images. Bada boom, bada bing. Here’s what the landing page looks like. Like, he’s done now, I would say 90 to 95% of the work. And it’s just plug and play going forward for him. And so when you’re approaching somebody, the lesson there is, you know, don’t be afraid to hold their hand. Robbie, you were super helpful.Alan. I mean, he. I don’t know if I told you this, maybe I did, but he, he and I were talking afterward and we were just talking about like, you know, how things went. He’s like, I gotta tell you, Robbie is. He’s got a little bit of a certain action.He’s like, Robbie is just the nicest. He might be the nicest person I’ve ever talked to. Huh? Did I tell you that? He didn’t say that.

well, yeah, he was super complimentary. And I mean, you spent what, half hour, maybe more? I probably spent, yeah, half hour to an hour with him because walking him through landing page setup and different types of emails that he would want to send, what his introduction automation should look like, just, you know, some of the stuff that as an affiliate we would expect because part of what we were doing was trying to set him up to do his future webinars. Yeah, exactly. And so giving him the tools and kind of the marketing ideas of.

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Okay, here’s what an affiliate’s looking for. You know, it’s the same things that anybody watching this is looking for. What do you want? You want to have some swipe copy, right? You don’t want to have to write everything that goes into all your emails.You want to have your landing page that’s set up. You want to hope that when you’re sharing, you know, a webinar with your audience that they have some sort of welcome sequence instead of just show up, show up, show up, show up. Because that gets really boring. So, you know, he had a whole welcome sequence with his story and, you know, phase that in over a couple of days. So everything that you’re looking for as an affiliate, you can share that with somebody if they haven’t done a JV promo before.

And it’s just an opportunity to kind of work with each other to build both of your platforms. Yeah, I mean, I, I didn’t even like, this is not why we did this with Alan, but we did it with Alan because he’s in Start, so he’s in our mastermind. And we just, like, we wanted to help him. You know, I don’t know that I ever would have done it for anybody else, but I’m glad that we did because it showed that, like, we can help him. And then, of course, we succeed more because he has better marketing.

And he’s going to remember that, like, he’s. I mean, that was just over a month ago, and he just brought you up on the call the other day. Like, he still remembers. He still, when we talked the other day was like, oh, my gosh, you guys, that email that you sent, you know, as an affiliate, because he’s on our list, like, that email that you sent, I’m totally having, you know, JV partners send that. It’s like, we might want to edit a little bit.You know, I mean, that was a good email, man. Don’t copy it exactly. No, I’m just kidding. But, like, I think for. He’s learning.

Here’s the thing, Robbie. When, you do this for your partners, they will remember it, which means they will want to promote you more and they will want to tell other people to do JV webinars with you. And again, you know, you end up expanding your list and expanding your influence, and possibly they might even tell somebody. You know, this is the thing I found is, like, Alan’s really good friends. He has 700 people in his.Actually, it’s now in the 800s, because you know, doing with us, but, like, he has a friend. One particular friend that would be a really good partner for us that he’s really, really tight with is another friend that actually is already one of our top partners. But that’s not the point. But he has another one that would be a really good partner. And there’s a certain level of influence there that, you know, could mean good things for us.

So, anyway, yeah, I was going to. Say the other thing that I thought was really cool about this is it kind of put us in that beginner mindset again. Like, sometimes it’s really easy to get really far out there and be like, we know what we’re doing and we’re going to run these promos. And it was so good for us to step back and be like, okay, as a beginner affiliate, essentially, what do we need? What’s the minimum swipe copy we need?What are the minimum tools that we need in order to promote this? And so having that beginner mind is just a wonderful way for you to check what you’re doing and make sure that you’re really connecting with your audience and doing that serving like we were talking about before. Yeah, there’s just a lot you can learn. That really is the ultimate lesson, is you’re going to learn so much from each other, and that’s super powerful. The last thing, and you brought this up.

You’ve added this to the list. We’re promoting Alan again at the beginning of the year because beginning of the year, New Year’s resolutions. I know you and I both agree. I think New Year’s resolutions are total garbage. I think.What is it about January 1st? Oh, that’s a good time to set a goal. I set a goal just the other day and it expires in middle of February. I don’t need a new year. But for 80% of the population out there, perception is fresh start. And they just think there’s something magical about New Year’s Day. And so they’re going to settle these goals. And we know that the most common one is to lose some weight. So we have to do this. Like, it makes total sense for us to do this.And here’s the cool thing is, I mean, we’ll probably New Year’s eyes it just a little bit, but 90 on both ends collectively, 93% of the work’s already done. The 7% is me making it something New Year’s related. You know, you’re not going to have to talk to Alan again, you know, about this. You know, he’s a great guy. I know.

I’m just saying you don’t have to, you know. Right. You don’t have to talk to him. I don’t have to do anything, you know, I mean, there’s nothing to be done. And then he and I both just. Instead of like him being like, hey, can we get on Zoom 20 minutes early? Because I don’t know if, you know, you know, we’ll both show up five minutes early and do our thing, you know, and we already know because we’ve already debriefed about it. And so we’ve learned the lessons, we’re going to apply them next time. And I personally think it’s. I think it’s going to do three times better.

You know, that’s just my personal belief. So as an affiliate do these things. Can I ask you. I’m going to ask you a question, put you on the spot as an affiliate. Like saying within a couple months of each other, two months.How are, yeah, how are you going to promote this to the same audience? You know, is it. Do you have a different angle? Is it. Yeah, they’re like, hey, wait, I’ve seen these emails before. I mean, number one, because that’s a. I’m thinking it’s important because you can, as an affiliate, you can promote the similar or the same offer repeatedly. You can do that several times a year. And maybe that should be, you know, for those of you setting your New Year’s resolutions, maybe there’s a resolution for you or a goal is to promote the same thing, you know, once a quarter and see how that impacts your business. Yeah, I think it depends a lot on the offer.

When something opens up once a year, like Pharmacolons formula, like we’re talking about, well, promote it once a year, we found. And I know I was talking with an entrepreneur, I won’t mention Stu McLaren’s name, but I was talking with Stu McLaren. Yeah. And what we realized is about 20% of And we found this to be true with. Are actually a little bit higher with some of our stuff, but he found about 20%.We found us about one third of all affiliate sales in a given year were referrals from the year before. That means they opted in. Maybe they came to Sue’s webinar or they came to, you know, Michael Hyatt’s webinar, or they came to whatever, you know, they opted in for the free video series or the ebook or the quiz or the assessment. Doesn’t matter. Then they bought a year Later.Part of that is, you know, in a launch, it’s 14, 17 days on average. You know, 17. 2 days is actually the average. It’s probably a bit shorter today. We haven’t run that average in a couple years.

Launches are getting a little bit shorter. That’s a pretty quick amount of time to be like, oh, I like this person. I feel that I can trust them. And, oh, yeah, I’m going to give them thousands of dollars, potentially. Well, then they go a whole year of being on that list and they attend some of their Facebook lives and they laugh at a few of their emails and they read one of their books and they’re like, yep, when that thing opens up, next time I’m in.Yeah. And you get that effect of, like, literally when the workshop starts. For example, for Tribe, the first question that, like, a thousand people have is, when. When does registration open up for the course? And you’re going, a thousand people times $2,000.

That means, you know, there’s $2 million on day one if we don’t get a single new person, you know, you just know you’re getting 2 million like that. It’s a cool feeling as the, you know, as the product owner. but I say that to say that that’s kind of shows you what happens over the course of a year. And so year to year, we’ll promote things very similarly. You know, of course, the difference, you know, we’re looking at 2020.When we promoted Tribe in 2020, we rewrote the emails from scratch. I literally didn’t even look at the emails from 2019. Why? Global pandemic, maybe. You know, we were six weeks into a global pandemic.Not even that much. Like, it was like four weeks when it started. Literally a month almost to the day. Kind of needed to tweak things. We needed to talk about the value of this from that perspective.Now, two months later, of course, we would not have done two months later if it was April to June. Let’s think about what two months later was. We not do April to June, but it made sense to do it at the beginning of the year. So, yeah, the big difference will be that it’s New Year’s. Sounds like a George.

His New Year’s attacks. I need to get my friend. Sorry. Oh, boy. Wow. We’ll link to that. I’ve got a good friend named John Morgan who’s a George W. Bush impersonator. He’s like, the other guy died. There were two big George W.Bush impersonators and one Guy Steve passed away and John’s the other one. And anyway, I should get him New Year’s entire. We want to promote this for New Year’s so it makes sense. We’ll tweak it and I know he will too. And we’ll probably, he’ll encourage him to like tweak the title and a little bit of his marketing to fit that, you know, like New Year, new you type thing.

But otherwise pretty much the same messaging. The one thing just from a practical standpoint of, course we remove buyers. So we will remove people who bought who signed up for his offer. You know, that makes total sense. Like when we promote PLF every year, we remove the buyers.There’s no point, you know, we might even, you know, this is something we’ll talk about. Robbie. We might segment, not segment out, but segment to the side. People who clicked. We don’t look at people who clicked because we want to include people not only who registered but people who clicked over to the replay because that didn’t require registration.

And so we’ll look at like, okay, these people probably watched some of it or register they got his follow up emails, blah, blah, blah. They know what’s coming. We, we’ll probably take those and segment them over. You know, I don’t know, It’ll be like 500 people, 400 people, whatever. We’ll take those 400 and they’ll kind of have a slightly different path where we’ll use.I’ll probably address the fact that, hey, you know this webinar that you registered for back in, you know, November. Well, he’s, you know, he’s doing it again and now’s your opportunity, it’s a new year, blah, blah, blah. And that’s about it. That’ll be the extent of the difference. Nice.There’s things you can do like that. If you have people, I think that’s, that’ll be helpful for our audience to see that. How, you know, you can just change a couple of things and all of a sudden you have a whole new perspective on promotion. Yep. so here’s what I’ll say.

For AIM members only. We’re going to tell you at the beginning, click here if you want to opt out of this campaign. Basically, you know, this isn’t for you. Don’t ever do that with our emails or anyone else’s emails because you want to watch the marketing. We talk about this so often in aim.Become a student of marketing. Fall in love with marketing. There’s a reason why I don’t unsubscribe from very many marketers emails. Even though I get a lot of emails, it’s because I want to study them. So I recommend not clicking there.

You could be 6ft tall, 181 pounds, you know. And you, you’re as fit as a fiddle. I don’t even know what that means. Literally no clue. But whatever.You could be fit as a fiddle as they’d say down in some parts of somewhere. And this isn’t for you. Still watch the marketing, watch how we do it. That’s my advice to you. So I hope you got a ton out of that talk with Robby there.I just think that it’s interesting to talk about some different things here. Speaking of different things, we got an episode, a couple of episodes coming up that I am particularly excited about. I want to let you know about. We’ve got one with Richie Norton. All about time management is dead.

You know how to reclaim your time and get bigger results with my friend Richie Norton. He and I go back. Oh my gosh. So far, he’s been one of our top affiliates over the years. Just meant so much to me.Sent me a text the other day that like made my week. got another one all about how a first time affiliate finished in second place in a big launch with Tasha Shore. And then guys, it’s the holiday time. Can you believe it? Like when we hit mid October, it’s time to start thinking about Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

So we’re going to start our annual holiday series this year. We’ve got five episodes planned from mid October through mid November with some of the best tips. All new tips this year. Not a. I mean I’m sure I’ll say something that I’ve said before, but all new stuff for 2022 that I can, I can’t wait to share with you.So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss any of those episodes coming up. And again, as I mentioned earlier, if you got questions about this or anything else, you can text me anytime. 260-217-4619 I’d also love to hear your biggest takeaway from today. With that, we’ll wrap up and I’ll see you in the next episode. Thank you so much for listening today.Remember to check out all of our deep dives into affiliate marketing at TheAffiliateGuide TV. And if you have a question, ask it at AskTheAffiliateGuide.com who knows, maybe you even be featured on an upcoming episode. And lastly, if you haven’t yet. Make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you’re listening to this episode.

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