Dustin: 0:27

Hey folks, welcome to Affiliate Nerd Out. I am your Nerdarator, Dustin Howes. Spreading that good word about affiliate marketing. You're gonna find me here every Thursday at noon on LinkedIn Live. So Put it on the calendar and come join me and my guests and my guest today, Matt McWilliams, an absolute legend in this industry. He has forgotten more about affiliate marketing than I even know. Matt, thank you for joining me today.

Matt: 0:53

That was an awesome intro. That's literally what one of my one of our team members used to say when he would like, when he would. Pitch, we'd be at conferences and non affiliate conferences and they're like, Oh man, like I've, they've heard of Matt and he's Mark was like my sidekick. He'd be like, Oh my gosh, this guy has forgotten more about affiliate marketing than I've ever, learned. I'm like, Oh, you two must've talked.

Dustin: 1:14

No, it's like my ultimate praise. Industry legends that have been out there so long and doing this. And I have no idea how many years you've been in, but like

Matt: 1:25

words like that. And I'm like, I'm getting older by the second, dude.

Dustin: 1:28

That's not what I'm going for. This isn't a backhanded compliment. This is a testimony of a good. Your name being so synonymous in this industry and famous. And you've been an inspiration to me for years and years as I've built out content, I've been trying to be like Matt. Thanks for joining me. It's an honor to have you

Matt: 1:50

turn that into a Nike commercial later.

Dustin: 1:53

But it's like the people who are my

Matt: 1:55

compliments, you said, be like Matt. They heard the be like Mike song from about 20 years ago and they're like, they got it in their head now and you're welcome. But if you're young, you don't get that reference.

Dustin: 2:06

No it's a great, it's my Mike flying through the air. I want to be like Mike. Kids dancing around. Are you,

Matt: 2:12

do you hear, are you singing it in your head right now? Absolutely. Yeah,

Dustin: 2:15

I am.

Matt: 2:15

I am sure. Really distracting actually.

Dustin: 2:17

All right. If you'd like to be in Matt's seat, come and be in a guest, go to Destinails. com slash nerd and drop in a topic that you'd like to nerd out about. And without further ado here, Matt. Who are you?

Matt: 2:33

Think about that one for a second. Is that like really existential or did I show up on the wrong podcast? Existential

Dustin: 2:39

comes up a lot

Matt: 2:40

when I ask that question. Oh my gosh. The context of what we're talking about today I'm a guy who 20 years ago. Ran a business, with two business partners, and we were in a bit of a desperate situation. We we basically couldn't make payroll in two weeks. And we had one of those, come to Jesus meetings. It was Memorial Day weekend, 2005. And we, instead of, barbecuing and eating hot dogs, drinking beer, we were sitting in an office. All Saturday trying to figure out like, what do we do? And it was like the equivalent of trying to pay your bills with money from the couch cushions. We were like if we do this, we'll generate that'll generate 200 a week. Like we need 15 grand a week, all right. So now we're 1 percent of the way there. Thanks, Bob. We're, we're trying to figure this stuff out. And to look back, like I was chatting with a friend of mine recently. He was the CEO of the company. I was the CEO and it was the three of us in the CFO. Tell me how stupid we were. Like that meeting, just how idiotic the stuff we were putting on the whiteboard was. And then finally I was like what if we started an affiliate program? What does that even mean? Like there was no affiliate guy. There was no Dustin Howells back then. There was nothing about affiliate marketing base. There was like one forum and like a blog post that taught you anything about how to start an affiliate program. I was like an affiliate program. It's like as best as I understand it, guys, it's like people who market your stuff, but you don't pay them until a month later. Which, okay. It's still pretty much true today, though the month could be week, it could be days, but you pay after the transaction. It's a great thing for a company. Awesome. Like we start talking about it and we get fired up. Okay. What if we can, how do we develop the software? There was no out of the box software back then. There were a couple of networks, but I didn't know that. So I messaged our developer, it's four o'clock in the morning. And I had a way of messaging him that would literally actually ping him through his phone, and I woke him up at four in the morning. Great way to start a conversation, by the way. I'm like, can you build this software? He's yeah, it'll be like a thousand dollars. Ed, here's the thing. I don't have a thousand dollars, but I'll tell you what. If this thing is a success, I'm going to give you a percentage of every transaction from this point forward. Best decision you ever made. We need to paint them over a quarter million dollars over the next like eight, 10 years. And so anyway, so we built can we okay, this is awesome. We can build the software and he's yeah, I can, I can code that over the weekend. I'll have it done by Monday morning. Again, simple version. It's pretty basic. All right this would be great. And then we need this and we need this and we got this. And then Hunter's how do we find affiliates? I don't know. So I made it up. I couldn't find anything that taught me how to do it. So I was like Some of our competitors have affiliates. I'll bet I could steal a few of them and I did And so as I say the rest is history. I mean over the last 20 years I've basically this is what i've been doing. I fell in love with it within a few months just absolutely. Was just one of the thing. It was like the reason I became the affiliate manager and not Hunter, not Bob didn't, he wasn't good with people. He's great with numbers. So we call them Bob, the biller. That was their CFO, Bob, the biller. Anyway we're just going to sing songs today, later we'll sing the Gatorade song like Mike, and for those who don't know it, we'll actually just sing it or you could Google it. And so we had Bob the biller where he can't talk to people and he didn't know marketing. He just was really good at, numbers. So we needed him cause he, we had to pay the affiliates. And then Hunter was like, he didn't understand the tech side. He was technologically illiterate. I was really good at sales. I was really good at customer relations, but I also understood marketing and the tech side so I could actually talk to these people. So that's how I became the affiliate manager. And if you think about it, those are pretty much the skillsets, right? Yeah. So I became the default affiliate manager and then You know, I did it and about 18 months later we're doing over a million dollars a month after being nothing and then fast forward a couple of years later I left there and went to another company and I was like, they thought I was pretty good at it and so I was affiliate manager of the year, which is really cool. And then then one day I got fired. From a place, a long story, honestly, completely not anything that I did other than massively grow their affiliate program, which was a threat to one of the investors. Very long story. Not really allowed to talk about too much there. And so I leave there and I'm like, I gotta go, I gotta go find another job as an affiliate manager. Cause when you lose a job, what do you do is you go find another job. And this was in the spring of 2012. I had a newborn, basically, she's about a year old at that point. I got fired from the one job and I thought I need to go find another job. And over the next two weeks, I literally had so many offers. That I decided I'm not going to say no to any of them. I'm going to say yes to every single one of them. That's how I started an agency. Okay. So totally by accident, never thought I'd do it like an agency or, anything like that, I didn't want to say no to any of them.

Dustin: 7:17

Amazing story. It's what I hear from that digital marketing world is everything. erupted from necessity and trying to pay the bills and like mother of invention, right? Absolutely. I love it. I think that's the saying

Matt: 7:35

might be the father. I don't know. It's a relative, right? Necessity is a relative of us all.

Dustin: 7:42

Great point. And tell me about what you do and who you serve out there today.

Matt: 7:49

Yeah. So today a couple of things. Number one, I love talking about affiliate management, affiliate marketing. I love helping people love training people. So training is a large part of what I do through the podcast. Through just, I will talk about it anywhere and everywhere. I very rarely, if I'm able and, it's a crowd of more than a couple hundred people will turn down a speaking invite, like to be able to convince people like, Hey, here's a great way to monetize your platform with affiliate marketing, or here's a great way to, triple your revenue or 10 extra revenue with an affiliate program. So a lot of training but we also have an agency. We run quite a few affiliate programs and all kinds of. Niches or niches, depending upon whether you're French or not. We do that, and we help, literally all kinds of business owners, small, large a lot of people who are in that same boat that I was, or they've got an affiliate program, especially a stagnant affiliate program. We have a lot of people who they had an affiliate program for a year to three, and they they got it to that point where it was doing forty grand a month. And that was a year and a half ago and it is still doing 40 grand a month or could be 70, could be 120. Does the number doesn't matter, but it's just flatline and they need somebody to come in and, put it on steroids. And so we do that. And then the second part was second business that I own is actually an affiliate network. And right now we're primarily serving the health and wellness market. We have some non health and wellness people that we're working with, but most of our people were really targeting the health and wellness market. We'll expand from there. That's the intention. Health and wellness is like our books were to Amazon. It is the easiest way for us to break into the market. We already had. Half a dozen or so that were built in that we knew. And so it just made sense to expand around that initially. But yeah, any type of merchant any type of business owner that's looking to grow being on a network is one of the ways to grow. It's not the only way. I would never say that, but it is a way to grow your business and not have to deal with, especially if you're a small operation, like the nightmare of paying affiliates and all the tax forms and you got w nines and 10 99s and all this stuff. And it's Nope, we take care of all that for you.

Dustin: 9:54

Awesome. Awesome. And from our world in affiliate marketing it sounds like you're a doer. Like you get on clients and you take them out of that abyss of that flat growth and. Start launching programs or make them better. And today's topic of the day is all about affiliate launches. It's something we've never talked about on this podcast. It's not a part of my world. It's not something I'm familiar enough about. Everybody in this industry that I work with usually says. It takes six months to grow a program from start and you're trying to build content sites and a lot of outrage and it's slow and steady growth, but in the affiliate launch world that you're in, you can get things done a lot quicker and let's start small and tell me about affiliate launches and what they are to you.

Matt: 10:46

To me, a launch is anything that's time bound. Okay. It's treating it's treating the launch of a product a service, anything really like an event, it's treating it like a movie. And and it doesn't have to be the first time it's ever launched. Like you can launch every year, you can launch every six months, but there's a time bound period when the product or service. Or offering is available and then it is not that's all a launch is. And so if you think about a movie, if you look at we're we're in February as we're recording this and, they're already talking about the summer blockbusters, right? So we already know the dates. I saw one the other day. I think it was like June 25th, 2025. I can't do that. I got the flu recently. Anytime I try to do that voice, but I can't do the movie voice anymore. And it's awful. Also can't do really high voices. I can basically just do my voice.

Dustin: 11:39

And

Matt: 11:39

yeah, like my throat just like starts breaking up. You got the, like coming June 25. Last fall, it was like coming in. 2025. And then when you hit like Christmas was a coming summer of 2025. And now it's we have the date and they build it into this event. And then, sure enough, in the weeks leading up to it, the stars are on the late night talk shows. And they start doing radio interviews and then you start seeing ads for them on YouTube. And what are they doing? They're literally building up to the day that it launches in that first weekend because are there one of the exceptions to the rule that I'm about to say? Yes. Princess Bride is one of them where it was a flop at the box office and it's been a cult hit for the last three decades.

Dustin: 12:24

All

Matt: 12:24

right. But most movies, if you look at popularity a decade after it comes out and the first weekend sales. There is a direct correlation 90 to 98 percent of the time between first weekend and 10 years later sales. All right. That's because it was all the, it was the launch and the buzz building up to that. So that's all a launches. And again, that can be done with a product. It can be done with a service can be a one time thing. It could be a longterm thing where you're launching, like I said, every year, every six months. And really the biggest benefit is just the same that you experienced with that movie. It's if a movie, Is a number one hit that weekend. Odds are you've heard of it 500 times in various places and everybody's talking about it on social media. And so what you want to do in your niche is be that affiliate program that when somebody who's a potential customer for your product goes and checks their inbox, goes and checks their social feed. They can't scroll down more than once on the magic rectangle. without seeing an email or a social media message about your product in that confined period of time. And part of that is just psychological. It's if I see your company once a week for 52 weeks, I probably won't remember your company in the 53rd week. If I see your company 52 times in the span of six hours, I will remember your company for the rest of my life.

Dustin: 14:35

Okay.

Matt: 14:36

And so that's the whole spirit. It's just, it's getting a groundswell of, literally hundreds or potentially thousands as we've done with some, especially book launches and other types of products, literally just hundreds and thousands of affiliates promoting the same thing at the exact same time. Okay. That's really what it's all about.

Dustin: 14:53

Beautiful beautiful picture that you painted there for the audience. Absolutely love it. Is this right for all types of brands? This is a fit for everyone.

Matt: 15:01

No. Most it's very rare that I find somebody that's not, but it's not a fit for any type of brand where you legitimately need to sell 24, seven, three 65. Now there's a caveat to that. You want to create some buzz around your product, do a short term promo.

Dustin: 15:17

It

Matt: 15:17

doesn't have to be a discount. It could be bonuses. It could be, add ons. It could be, so again, here, I'm going to buy this look at one of our clients, the CBD oil company. We re we just ran a big campaign. It was buy two bottles, get the pain relief roll on for free. It's essentially like a discount, and that, that did really well. We treated that like a big event. We got out there, we had hundreds of affiliates promoting all at the same time. One of the cool things about doing stuff like this, and we all know this is that then when we have a lot of affiliates promoting at the same time, affiliates all follow each other. So there becomes that you that tipping point, right? All of a sudden we start getting affiliates for the next thing who want to come in. So that's one of the benefits of doing this again, as opposed to just having, if we had 10 of them promote every day for the next year. Nobody really noticed, but when three, 400 promote on the same day or in the same 72 hours repeatedly, you almost want to get to that point where it's like, Oh my gosh, will you stop talking about cannibalics for I'm getting sick of hearing about this company right when you get to that point and then go one step further, that's when you actually finally got through even the slightest bit to their brains and you made any impact. We used to always talk, I used to work in politics, like 20, before that company, so 20 some odd years ago. And we would talk the messaging that we wanted to get, we wanted to be on the radio, we wanted to be on billboards, we wanted to be in print. This was the early days of the internet, but we wanted to be on the internet, we wanted to be, there was no YouTube. I think it may have existed, but it wasn't big, but we wanted to be in banner ads, we wanted to be everywhere. And just when they were finally like, oh my gosh, will you stop talking about this guy, we want to knock on their door. And be there, right? That's what we want to do. It's the same thing with, it's the same kind of principle here.

Dustin: 17:01

Gotcha. All right. And from my understanding, you have seven big secrets to seven figure launches. You want to take us through that rollercoaster?

Matt: 17:11

Yeah. So this came from some research I did. So I did it back in 2017. I've redone it about every three years just to confirm, are we still there? When tick tock came out, did it change any of this stuff? Newsflash? It didn't like the seven things have been the seven things for, well now seven years. Actually almost eight years cause this was like summer of 2017. And it was interesting cause we thought it would be like primarily based on, what would separate basically a 1 million launch from say a half a million dollar launch. And what would separate like a 5 million launch from a 1 million launch? What were those things? Interesting. The thing, it really wasn't list size. It wasn't their sales strategies with those do help. It wasn't the ads. It wasn't like how talented the, was the speaker, like the main talent who's doing the ads or whatever, were they dynamic or were they boring? I wasn't social media following like length of launch. I actually thought that would be one. I had a hypothesis back in 2017 based on the trends and launches as they were getting shorter and shorter. We've tracked that over the last decade. I went from about 17 and a half days in 2013 on average down to the low fifteens. I think we're going to probably hit. 14. 9 maybe this year or next year. So I was like, Oh, it's shorter launches do better. Actually they're trending shorter, but no, it made literally no difference whatsoever. And so the seven things we found, the first one was, that they plan at least six months in advance. Just I said this earlier with the movies you've got to be thinking ahead. If you want to launch big, You don't say we're going to launch next week. There's just no way you can pull that off. Now, can you do a promo next week? Yeah. If it doesn't require a lot, but how much traction are you going to get? And part of the benefit, not only financially, but part of the benefit to doing this is again, the buzz that you create in the industry. It's just like when a new Mac book comes out, it's everywhere to us, Mac nerds it's all over everything for about two to three weeks. And then it fizzles off. And then we all forget like what even number we're on. Like I have no idea what the new number for the iPhone is. I have whatever the one is before this one. I don't know what it is. I would have to look at it. It's begins with one, I think, why? Because when the next one comes out, I can promise you, I will know that number for two to three weeks. Just, planning as many as much as possible in advance, getting affiliates lined up, getting swipe copy ready, making sure that as a company you're ready for things like customer support and live chat and what happens when there's a failed payment going live with your affiliates. It's a big one we see in launches. It works really well. It's every day you should be live with at least four affiliates, for a week or two Maybe more sometimes like we'll do the tours like usually a second or third to last day We'll do a Facebook live tour. It's every 15 minutes. We're on with a different affiliate for 12 hours and it's exhausting, but it's huge. Cause then it's we're all over, like people are scrolling and they just keep seeing us, so know who's responsible for what and when and have like timesheets and stuff like that. Make sure links are working, all those things as well in advance as possible. The second big thing that we saw that was it's actually the number one differentiator. So I'm doing these out of order cause I'm, Remembering them, but the biggest differentiator was the number and variety of entry points. What do I mean by that? Ways that they could enter. The sales sequence I mentioned earlier again going back to the movies You might see it on the tonight show and then you see it on The late show and then you see it on a youtube video then you see it at the theater Then you see an article about it. Boom. Boom. Boom, right? There's different ways you can enter the ecosystem of understand or learning about that movie. The same is true with the launch Having different types of video series, webinars workshops, masterclasses, live streams a different webinar, cheat sheets, guides, and they can download free reports, eBooks. We just go on and on, right? Many courses, quizzes, assessments, all those things. Then when you think about once the cart opens and the product's available, having, you got this initial sales page, but you got like a mid, midweek bonus. Something like that, a fast action bonus on the front end, a today only bonus. The biggest difference between six and seven and eight figure launches was the number of entry points in that variety. Smart. So it's huge hitting up different thinking of like different modes of learning. I mentioned video series, webinars, eBooks. I am literate. I want to be clear. I do read books. I read a lot of books. I've read roughly a, 50 in the past year, but I don't learn very well reading. I read for entertainment. I have a hard time. Learning the way my brain processes information. Audiobooks, I can literally spout back to you entire quotes from the book I'm listening to right now that I listened to earlier today. Okay. The way that my brain interprets audio, I'm an auditory learner. So if all you have is an ebook download, I'm not going to download it. But if you have, and if you have a webinar, I'm probably not going to go. But if you offer some sort of a download that involves audio, I'm all over it. Okay. So addressing that. Everybody learns

Dustin: 22:04

different way, right?

Matt: 22:06

The third thing yeah, this goes back to what I, the first one, but in a different way is making sure that affiliates have what they need two months out, 60 days. It's not the norm. But when you're prepping for these big launches, making sure that they start seeing the marketing materials two months out, are they going to be sitting down 58 days before the launch, writing their emails or no, but just getting it in their hands. So it's there getting it like where they can see it, doing strategy calls with them, getting on the phone with them, planning out their promo. This is one of the biggest things that You know that we do, we call them commitment plans. We used to call them promo plans. I called it a commitment plan one time and realized that affiliate did more. So I kept doing it and they did more principle there. It's right out of Robert Cialdini's book, influence the principle of commitment. So we just basically fill out this spreadsheet with them that has their plan. We do it on a zoom call screen share it's in a Google sheet and then I send them a link to the Google sheet and it's here's your plan. The cool thing about that is now, not only. Do I know when they're going to promote and they say they're sending an email Tuesday morning at 8am and it's Tuesday at noon and I don't see any, maybe I see some ancillary traffic from their email three days ago, but I don't see any new traffic. I reach out to him. Hey, what's up? Oh my gosh, shoot. We scheduled it for the wrong day. We just sent it. Great. Now I see traffic. Yay. But secondly, it holds them accountable. And we have found that whatever, if we can get an affiliate to commit to something versus, just hoping that they promote whatever they commit to, they typically do 105 to 108 percent of that. They actually do more than what they committed to. So give those things at least two months out. The fourth thing is just the affiliates were hot. I always, the quote from Stu McLaren, a former client, good friend of mine, he says, the longer the runway, the bigger the result. So we're warming affiliates up. So in Stu's launches, when we ran those. The first year I ran them, it was April 21st was the day it started. We had shirts. And hats that said April 21st and then next year was April 22nd. Next year was April 23rd I've still got them in fact I had friends who got married on April 22nd And I gave them one of the shirts and they loved me for it. They thought I made them special shirts I never told them and hopefully they don't watch this. I hope they do watch it But everybody loves a

Dustin: 24:21

shout out.

Matt: 24:22

I may have to delete that part. We'll talk about that afterwards. So they're not going to, they're not in the affiliate world, like we had these shirts like April 22nd, April, as soon as the calendar flipped to the new year, it was all about April 22nd. And so all of this. And so we just, we keep them warm. We keep them excited, and I just we get them to get their audience excited. I don't remember the exact quote, but Zig Ziglar said basically, that every sale has five obstacles. There's no need, there's no money, there's no hurry, there's no desire, and there's no trust. And so a lot of that comes from not being warmed up. So we teach our affiliates like, okay, the launch is April 22nd. You want to start talking about this in March. So his launch was all about how to set up a membership site. Let's start talking about membership sites in March and recurring revenue. Start talking about how Netflix built their business and and all these things and like how. We can build recurring revenue, our businesses and why that's important and lifestyle and things like that. And then in April we start talking about the actual workshop so that, yeah, it starts April 22nd, but on April 10th, you're already sending out an email to a warmed up audience who's thinking about recurring revenue, at least somewhere in the recesses of their mind. And you're sending out an email on April 10th saying, Hey, go sign up for this workshop. That's about recurring revenue. And then people wonder why we had 35, 000 people signed up. More than a week out from the workshop. That's why so we get people warmed up. We warm up. We're emailing them We start ramping up the frequency of emails, six months out. We're emailing them once a month We're posting in the partner Facebook group once a month and then we start ramping it up three months out. We start talking about Specific aspects of the promotion. We start training them. Here's how to promote the webinar. Here's how to promote the video series. Here's how to promote, sales. Here's how to close sales. We do a kickoff party about a week before, we would have hundreds of affiliates on coming and celebrating. Like we're a week away from launch. Like it's just all about getting them, excited. We would have really early. A lot of people they'll have two affiliate contests. They'll have a total leads contest. Most leads, most registrations, and I have total sales. The total leads contest like that doesn't even nobody gets excited about that unless you're in the top Like you're one of the big wigs So we'd have these early ones like two weeks before we do a three day contest most leads in the next three days 2, 000 bucks Then we do another one and we do another so we did all these things so that it you know people Who started early had a bit of an advantage? The fifth thing we saw

Dustin: 26:49

Before we move on to that, before we move on, I want to expand on something real quick and ask you about this. It's great to have your network to, to tap into when you've got a new launch coming in. Of course, you can go back to the year old players and they trust you. They know that. This traffic is going to be a good fit for this brand. They can say yes or no. What do you, what are you doing when to talk guys into cold? Like you haven't met them before, but they're a perfect partner persona for that brand and they're going to kill it with this. What is your strategy reaching out to them and gaining their trust to do this on a performance basis?

Matt: 27:25

Yeah, nine times out of 10, we find something they promoted that's similar. Okay. And then, it's one of the most powerful phrases in the English language. It's like blank.

Dustin: 27:34

Okay.

Matt: 27:35

Blank.

Dustin: 27:35

Smart. Okay.

Matt: 27:36

The movie Speed.

Dustin: 27:38

All right.

Matt: 27:38

It's die hard, but on a bus.

Dustin: 27:42

Beautiful.

Matt: 27:43

That's the movie Speed, right?

Dustin: 27:44

Yeah.

Matt: 27:44

The problem to that was then they decided to make a bunch of other movies that were die hard but on a, and they had Steven Seagal and they sucked. But this one had, Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves and what's his name? Dennis Hopper. And it was a phenomenal movie. Phenomenally well written. You can make fun of it all you want, but it was diehard on a bus. Now if you think about that, so it's if you're trying to tell somebody who likes diehard and you say it's like diehard, but on a bus, it's like, Oh, I want to see that.

Dustin: 28:09

Okay.

Matt: 28:10

Same kind of thing. I want to be like, Hey, you promoted such and such. This is like that. But okay. What's the difference? So if I'm doing a launch, Let's take let's look at I'm launching I'm going to launch a new skincare product. Okay. I'm just making that one up. That's weird. All right, it's like I can only name one other skincare line. So i'm gonna say proactive. It's like proactive but for But for eczema, okay. There you go It's like proactive but for eczema because I believe proactive is just for acne It might not be true, but let's just say it is right? Okay. It's like proactive for for eczema Okay, if you promoted proactive and you know what eczema is You're good to go.

Dustin: 28:47

Yeah,

Matt: 28:47

do you have an audience for that? Yes or no? Yes. Great. Here's the details So that's what that's where I start

Dustin: 28:53

Beautiful. All right. I'll let you keep on going. You never realized speed was a

Matt: 28:56

diehard on a bus, did you?

Dustin: 28:57

I never put that together until you said it, but it's so perfect.

Matt: 29:01

It's a diehard on a bus, just for the record. It really is. We were at number five. So number five was they had, not surprisingly that I would say this, they had really good superior affiliate management. It is absolutely impossible. I shouldn't say absolutely impossible. I've seen it done, but it's very rare to run an eight figure launch. Like when you're. Doing it yourself.

Dustin: 29:21

Yeah,

Matt: 29:22

I have run I ran my first big affiliate launch that I ran for my own products, I'd been in the affiliate game for 12, 13 years and we released a course and I remember, we're going to launch my thing and I had tons of awesome affiliates lined up. We did. The first day the card opened, we did about 300, 325, 000 in sales. And usually the first day accounts for like 20 percent of sales. So we're doing the math. Okay, we're going to be about 1. 5 million. Our goal is one. This is going to be amazing. And second day we did 160, 000. Yeah, that's awesome. And then the third day and the fourth day I was on live streams just all day long. And I'm getting bombarded with questions like. Affiliates are texting me and they need stuff. And I'm like going like this, like trying to check my phone and text him. At one point, one of the guys asked me a question and I don't know what he said, I was like can you repeat that question? I don't remember, and it got so messy. And the thing was like, I could not be the talent and the strategist and the affiliate manager. Oh my God, I have that team. And so you've got, again, like that's an area where you just can't skimp. And they hired someone or there was an internally or externally, they got coaching, they hired an agency, like ours, yours or mine. The most important thing is they prioritize. And that's something that most people fail to do. They just don't prioritize, a specialized affiliate manager. Like they'll have a full time customer service person and they'll have a full time tech person and they'll have a full time graphic designer and then have a. The affiliate manager also does social media, washes the, the dishes and, 14 other things in the company. It's no have a team. That's one of the most important things on the affiliate side. The six big difference was that there. They solved a very specific problem for a very specific person. And that seems counterintuitive because we think if we're going to go from six figures to seven figures, we have to add more people. And it's true to some extent, but like you, you don't really have to expand the audience. You just have to get more of the people who are already in the audience. And so these, like the difference we saw between the million dollar plus launches and the, the smaller launches was, they solved a very specific problem for a very narrow market segment. Marketing one on one, buyers need to know exactly what they're signing up for. I need to know that this workshop, this product, this supplement, this course, whatever it is, this is for me, this, I am the avatar, this is for me. And if you're not clear on that, you're going to do exactly what I do with my very first launch was like, Oh or my, I'm sorry, my second launch this course really could help all business owners. It's true, but I wasn't solving a specific problem for a specific type of business owner. And when we realized, no, what I like, the people that I helped with this particular were, businesses that have been around for one to five years. Who were doing this amount of revenue what had this specific problem our sales tripled literally overnight Just from getting more specific about who we were, you know who we were serving in and how we were helping them.

Dustin: 32:21

Excellent

Matt: 32:22

and last thing was just you know clarity on messaging. They were 100 crystal clear on messaging again what you see a lot in like the this is what we saw in the first launch that I ever ran wasn't for my product that I ever saw was like we knew what we were doing. I had some stories, but I was still crafting the stories and things like that. When I ran my first big launch, my stories were nailed down. My themes were perfect. I knew the exact phrases that I was going to use over and over again. And so I thought about okay, what are the stories that i'm going to tell and what situation like I, we plan this. So I have a philosophy. It's just called the 10 core stories. Like I'm not, I haven't branded that. I'm not writing a book about it that I know of, but it's like, what are the 10 stories I can tell over and over again that apply to just about any situation? If you want to talk about how to find Competitors affiliates. I have a story for that. Okay. It's, 2006 now. I could tell you that story right now, two to three minutes and it would sound exactly like the other 500 times I've told that story roughly. Now, here's the good news. 99. 9 percent of the people have never heard me tell that story. So it's not like I'm there. And even if they have, who cares if you hear a story for the second time? Sure. And so I, we had what are the stories I can tell and what questions can those answer? So then when somebody answers, ask a question, it's that reminds me back in 2007, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So practice telling those stories. If you're going to quote stats, memorize the stats, don't be like, Oh, hang on. I think it was like, Oh no, it was 37. 2. No, like no 37. 2 percent of people with eczema, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You should know that if there's quotes. I have a handful of quotes that I have memorized because I use them all the time. Now, the one that I said earlier about Zig Ziglar, I'm gonna let you on a little, this is, I shouldn't tell, I should not tell how the sausage is made. I shouldn't. I know that quote by heart.

Dustin: 34:17

Okay.

Matt: 34:18

Now I even said I might butcher it. Why did I say I'm going to, this is again, we're letting people know how the sausage may, why did I say I might book it because it feels weird if I just come out and say and I named like an entire three sentence quote, like word for word. Yeah. It humanizes me to say I might butcher with realities. I know that quote. I've said it roughly 500 times in my life probably. So you should be like, practice the pitch, practice. I always talk about transition areas. So if you're doing a webinar, if you're doing a webinar where you're going from teaching for 40 minutes to selling for 10, the most important part of that webinar is minutes 39 to 41. How you transition from, free content to selling is the single most important thing you'll ever do. In that webinar, the how you do the last 10 minutes of the pitch. Are not nearly as important as the first 30 seconds and those aren't nearly as important as the 30 seconds right before that where you're transitioning So you practice it. There's a story I tell and it's in my book now Actually, that's how often i've told the story and I and it happened out of left field This is what happens when you've only done something five times I remember I was talking about creating a lead magnet right and how when you create a lead magnet It's a solution to pain and all of a sudden I just said my dad had the perfect lead magnet now from this point forward I've told this story Again, 500 every story I've ever told I've told 500 times exactly just for the record It will net I've never told it 499 and even after telling it here It's still gonna be 500 the next time I say it just to be clear And I talked about I was like my dad had the perfect lead magnet My dad was a golf instructor and he'd walk up and down the practice tee and he would find somebody who was in pain I don't mean physical pain like they're reaching back to their back and you know going like that I mean they hit a shot Hit their club on the ground. They hit the shot and they hit their club on the ground. They hit a shot and they hit their club. And he'd go up to him and say, can I help you out for a couple minutes? And he'd give him one tip, one little strategy. They'd hit one shot and they'd look at him and go, that's the best shot I've hit in months. How do I give you money? Okay. That whole story was on the fly. I didn't have no plans to, but as soon as I told it the first time live, Mike, my entire team, we met afterwards and they all went, Oh my gosh, that story was perfect

Dustin: 36:29

for

Matt: 36:29

how to describe a lead magnet as being a solution to pain and being a little teaser of what you can offer. Tell that story. And then we perfected little things. When I talked about like you'd see somebody in pain and then I put my hand on my back like I just did that. I did that one day and went, Oh, that was a good move. I should do that every time. But like by the time that you launch, if you're going to go seven figures, you've perfected those stories in that messaging and your bonuses and your price points, like you should not be six months out and not know your price point yet. You should know what your payment plans are going to be. You should know the modules in the course. You should know the specs. You should know exactly how many milligrams of. Calcium are in your supplement and all those things well in advance.

Dustin: 37:08

Beautiful. So the biggest thing i'm picking up is be prepared get this stuff ready Two months in advance at a minimum get a hold of your Old partners that have worked well in the past get them all their assets know your numbers that brings me to an old if you don't know your numbers, you turn into a joke at some point as well. I remember an old Marine buddy 20 years ago we were going into Vegas and he said, I heard there's like a million or like a billion lights in Las Vegas. And that's a giant difference of a number. And we have never let him like my grandfather

Matt: 37:46

is like 60 or 90 years old. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's

Dustin: 37:51

too big of a gap. No,

Matt: 37:52

I'm at that age right now. I'm just in my forties. Just, to be clear, like technically I will be the same age for 10 years in my forties and then I'll be in my fifties.

Dustin: 38:00

I keep thinking I'm Ronnie lot, but I turned 43 we'll get past it. But all incredible story. We're way over time already. Matt really appreciate your time before I let you go. This is exactly why I wanted to have you on, why I said at the beginning of this episode of you've forgotten more about Affiliate than I know and these stories and these Like tips you're giving are things that I haven't even thought of in some situations There's a lot of greatness that have come from this Now you're great coach. How does a person optimize their talents in your mind? Like it took you some time to figure out what you were good at and where to stay in your lane and be good at that thing. What's a good tip that you can give people out there that are, maybe a new affiliate managers, but trying to figure out where to go in their career here. Wow. That is a

Matt: 38:57

massive question. I'll answer by saying kind of something that I hear a lot, like whether it be affiliate recruiting or, working with current affiliates is I don't want to be annoying. I don't want to be annoying. I don't want to reach out too much. You can reach out so much more than you think you can.

Dustin: 39:16

Okay.

Matt: 39:17

If you're talking about recruiting an affiliate, like they can't be any less in your program than they already aren't. So if, I don't know what else to say. It's if you piss somebody off, who cares? What are they going to do? It's, isn't like one of those things where it's you might cut somebody off in traffic and the risk is they're going to cut you off and put you off the road or shoot you. Nobody has ever gone. I'm going to seek that Matt McWilliams out cause he's emailed me eight times in the last six months. Like I don't fear for my life. Reaching out to affiliates a little bit more. What's the worst that could happen? They say no, they already aren't in my affiliate program. So what's the worst that could happen if I moderately annoy an affiliate like i've never rarely I shouldn't say never maybe once in 20 years Have I dealt with somebody's like you have reached out to me too many times I would like to be removed and I go look and go. Oh They're generating 2, 000 a week in sales. I screwed up. Nope. That's never happened. Yeah, it's like I would like to be roof Oh, they had one sale five months ago. Darn. I lost them You know I got ten times more return From the other affiliates by emailing him and by reaching out to them that frequently if somebody reaches out and politely is like hey Is there any way to get less communication for me? I say absolutely And I segment them however you want to do that in my case. I usually you know, just Tag them somehow and then I don't include them on every email, but I include them on periodic ones, And so I say that to say like the biggest thing is just do more of the things you're doing that are working You know find the things that you're like if reaching out to an affiliate, you know once a week try twice But I might upset that you might yep, you might if you have a thousand affiliates you might upset five of them But you're going to also get 50 who actually do, do something that they wouldn't have done. So then try three. We might get, yep, you'll get another five who are, but you'll get another 50 who promote again. And so I don't, I don't know if that's the type of answer you're looking for, but that's just the first thing that came to mind because I've, I literally deal with it every single day. I deal with our affiliate managers. I deal with our coaching clients. I deal with our, even with our clients where we run the affiliate program and they're like, but you're not, I'm like, Yeah I actually did. I sent four emails last week to the affiliates, and here's the results. And I don't necessarily say this, shut up because I've 11 extra affiliate programs since we took over in may. Maybe my way of doing things is better than your way of not doing things. Like that's the biggest thing I would say probably. Great. Incredible tip. I think we love it. Experiment and see things that work, like there've been, I can't tell you how many things I've done that were stupid over the years. And when I look back, it's like, why did I ever do it? Why did I do it? Because I can't tell you how many things I did that I thought would be stupid and actually turned out to be brilliant ideas. So I never know. Just try it. If you want to have 50 good ideas, you need about 200 ideas.

Dustin: 42:03

Okay. Don't be afraid. Get out there, get your name out there. It doesn't hurt to be noticed a little bit more. Great advice. Matt, how do we connect with you?

Matt: 42:11

Yeah. Super easy. Mammothwilliams. com. If you're interested in XP affiliate, xpaffiliate. com, that's our affiliate network. Like I said, that we just started here in the last few months. And if you're in the health and wellness space, it's perfect for you. If you're not, we should probably still have a conversation. Yeah, mammothwilliams. com or xpaffiliate. com.

Dustin: 42:27

I'm really hoping that you guys hone into online courses and start helping them grow affiliate programs. It's an, a gap. That has been played in the industry like badly. I hope you can service those guys here soon.

Matt: 42:42

It is definitely a gap. No doubt about it. Awesome,

Dustin: 42:45

Matt. Thanks so much for your time. Appreciate you. For everybody out there, keep on recruiting and we'll see you out there.