Copy This Marketing Strategy, It'll Blow Up Your Business | Ep 882

I'm going to show you not just the theory, but the tactics of how I'm setting up the affiliate structure for my $100 Million Money Models launch so that you can take every single tactic because you're going to understand how in-depth it really is if you want to use this as your advertising strategy for your business or whatever it is you sell. So first things first, what the hell is an affiliate? So we're opening up our fun leads book and an affiliate is a lead getter. Somebody gets you leads, alright? They're an independent business that tells their audience to buy your stuff. Affiliates seem like referrals on the outside, but are much different under the hood. First, they own their own businesses and do their own advertising. Second, they agree to offer your stuff to their engaged leads in exchange for money, free stuff, or both. So just like any business should always start with the offer, which is what are you going to sell? What are you going to give away? Affiliates is the same thing. They're a new customer that you have to think about. What's the offer I'm going to make the affiliate? Again, it's money, free stuff, or both. Now you can use whatever one you want. You can do combinations. For my $100 Million Leads and $100 Million Money Models launch, I'm using free stuff. Number one reason for that is because paperwork-wise, it's an absolute pain in the ass to pay a gazillion people with 1099s, and it's a nightmare. But beyond that, I can also still provide value that probably be better than maybe just some sort of kickback. And that's the thing is that sometimes the non-monetary value can be significantly higher than just trying to pay someone 10% back or something like that. And especially if you have something like a book, which is not super expensive, these other things can make it worth it for an audience. But let's get into the offer. So whenever I set up an affiliate structure, I want to have a two-tiered structure. So what that means is I want to have something for all the killers at the top who are going to send me a bunch of people with big audiences and whatnot. And I want to have something so that the everyman can still get something because I still want the long tail. I still want all the people who can bring 3 friends, 5 friends, 10 friends. And I also want the people who want to bring 10,000. So you don't want to have something that's only for one or the other. You want both. I think about it like this. If we draw this, What are the big players getting? So for us, we're doing top 10 people get a fireside in-person one-on-one Q&A session. Now there's some thinking behind this. Why do we do this? We do this because the prizes you want to give an affiliate has to not only benefit the affiliate, it also has to benefit their audience. This is something that like so many people don't get. You can get significantly higher engagement from affiliates if they don't feel like they're hard closing their audience on your thing. 'Cause at the end of the day, they're like, I gotta save my, my goodwill, my whatever for my own stuff. And that makes sense. Of course they do. So it's like, how can we make the thing that we're going to give them something that's a give to their audience so it doesn't detract from the goodwill they have? And ideally, it adds to the goodwill so that you ultimately benefit them and their audience. So you want a win-win-win. Win for you, win for the affiliate, and their people. With the fireside chat, the key is their audience is going to want to click through their link so that they can submit their questions so that the person who represents them can then ask those questions on their behalf. So this becomes very valuable. Like, oh, we're in the ATM niche. It's like, okay, well then how do we apply some of this Alex Big Business stuff to an ATM niche? Well, they wouldn't probably get that answer answered otherwise, unless it's like that guy's in front of me and that's what we're talking about for 30 minutes in person. Now the next tier is like, okay, well some people are gonna be like, well, top 10, that might be tough, but I think I could hit the top 50. Okay, well the top 50 can be there in person. So there are approximations of this thing. They're still in person. And then I'm basically taking 3 hours. This is in person, all of this at my headquarters where I'm gonna do Q&A. I'll be able to or maybe a question from them, but they're going to be there. They're going to meet one another. Still super valuable. Great experience. Okay, that's the top 50. Now what about the bottom guys? So 10+. So first we have to decide what is the thing that is the kind of bottom? What's the minimum activation point for somebody to become an affiliate or referral that gets something? This depends on how difficult it is to do. So if I said like you have to bring someone in person to my facility, like a gym or something, then it might be 2 people because that's a lot of work. Now if it's just like, can you make me a text introduction? It's like that might be 4 or 5. Now, if it's just, can you get someone to opt into something? I have to make that higher because the friction's so low. I made it 10+. That's what I did last year. It worked great. So I'm doing it again. If somebody can get 10+ opt-ins into my thing, for us, it's the book launch, then they're going to get multiple things. So number 1 is they're going to get an audiobook. That's not the book for the launch. It's actually a separate book I recorded specifically for my affiliates. 70+ 1-minute tactics that drive profit in businesses. So it's like, it's just Super bite-sized, very tactical, really cool. And I made something really sexy because I want that long tail. There's people who just, just want to invite their 10, their 10 friends or their Slack group or their WhatsApp group or their school community, whatever it is. They're like, I don't think I'm going to get top 50, but if you think you're going to invite 20 or 30 people, then get credit for it. You know, get some free stuff. But on top of that, what else can I do? Well, there's also these 50 other seats on this day over here. Well, I could just say top 100, but wouldn't it be more valuable to say, hey, I'll raffle these off to 50 of the people who get this. So that's what we're doing. So this is the offer. This is the thing that we give away. The stuff that we want to do is number 1, you want it to be big and sexy. Number 2, I like things that are unscalable, especially at the top. Of course, I can't do a fireside chat with 1,000 people. It wouldn't work for them, wouldn't work for me, it wouldn't work. But how can I create something great that many people would want and then create varying levels of approximation to this, which then adds in the last piece here, which is everybody who's over that 10 gets a recording. The top 10 guys get to be in person with their questions answered and a dinner. The top 50 get 3 hours and a shot at getting their question, but they're still in person and they still get the experience. If you're in the just 10+ opt-ins, you're going to get an audiobook, you're going to get a shot at getting in the room, and you're still going to get a recording, which is an approximation of that. So I try to think, how could this be something that would benefit their audience and benefit them and ladder our way up to performance? I'll spend 2 days on just coming up with this stuff. The amount of different permutations we came up with to try and make this clear and simple and compelling and beneficial to every party was tough. But now we fit it in and you're like, oh, well, it seems obvious now. It's like, it always seems obvious in retrospect. And so when you're thinking about yours, like, this is the highest leverage thing you can do. If you make the offer good enough, you can get, you can move mountains. So now that we have our offer, the next thing that comes up How are we going to tell people about this offer so that they sign up for it? So that brings the next thing up. Now that you have the offer, you have to put a place that people can find out about it. And so what we did is we built an affiliate sales page. All right. So it is exactly what it sounds like, which is we have to sell people on why they should become an affiliate or why they should refer their friends to our thing. An affiliate sales page is fairly straightforward. It's just explaining each of the prizes and exactly what they have to do and how we're going to help them do it. For us, I already went over the prizes. The, what they have to do is they have to opt in, right? So they just put their name and email, et cetera. And then they submit this. And what happens is they then get a little link that they use to then rank on the leaderboard and send all their traffic through. It's like, okay, that's the how. Now, what else am I going to do? Well, one is I'm going to support them. And the other thing is that once I know how I'm going to support them, then once I have this whole machine together, then I'm going to start promoting it. So the way that we're going to support the affiliates is that we actually write them emails and posts and ads that we have already pre-approved and written that we already know work because we did it last year. And so we give them all of these ads, posts, and emails to send to their lists that they don't have to do any work, right? You don't want to be like, okay, go make a campaign for me. It's like, that's a big ask, right? But if I said, hey, here's some posts we already know work, here's the ads that already work, here's the emails that already work, people are like, okay, cool. I'll just copy and paste these and maybe change a couple of things. I want to make it easy to become an affiliate to get the benefits. So we give this. Now on top of this, what else do affiliates want? At least in my audience, a lot of them want to know what's happening behind the scenes while the actual launch is going. One of the exclusive benefits we give to our affiliates, like a dotted line, is that behind the scenes we're actually sharing how each email is doing, what the, what ads are performing. And so they can actually kind of follow along so that when they want to promote whatever it is that they sell, they can actually learn the process from the outside in, which I think is really cool and probably one of the most Underrated components of becoming affiliate. Now, once we have that plus our BTS breakdowns, now we have our machine. And so now what do we have to do? We got to promote the hell out of this thing. And so we're not just going to promote it in one place. We're going to promote it in many. So the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to email my list. And you don't want to do this a ton because, hey, I mean, I want to promote the book, not promote promoting the book. Right? And so I do this 2 times, just one saying, hey, FYI, we have this. And by the way, in case you missed it. That's it. After that, I'm not going to talk about it again. All my focus is going to be on the actual launch itself. That's number one. The second place that I'm going to look is last year's affiliates. Now, some of you guys might not have this, but I just want to be transparent and complete here is that I want to say, okay, well, we had 30-something thousand affiliates last year who promoted our stuff. I'm going to say, hey, you did this. Want to do it again? If you liked how it was last time and you liked having the behind the scenes, you like the bonuses, you like competing for stuff, which automatically just makes the whole event more fun because you know that you're in the drawing, do you want to do it again? Let's run it back. And so there's going to be people that I'm going to email here 1 or 2 times separately as well. I feel okay emailing them extra because they already opted in to be an affiliate before. So I'm not emailing the whole list, just this very small segment. Now, what else are we going to do? Every single person who opts in for the book, this guy, our product service is going to then have the option to at the bottom, if they say, you know what, I just preordered the book and now I'm at the thank you page where it gives me the reminder sequence to make sure that I show up for the event. This is, hey, do you want to send anybody else or you have an audience? Would you like to get more free prizes? If they click the button there, it takes them to the affiliate sales page. And so all of these traffic sources are going to one place. That then feeds into the machine where they get the behind the scenes training of what we're doing, plus the actual deliverables that they can get, all so they can win these prizes. Now, on top of this, to make this the most meta thing ever, this video is also something that is for affiliates, which is both me explaining how it works, but also showing how the machine is being put together as I'm putting it together. By the way, if you're thinking about this, it's like, okay, what are all the advertising methods that we're using? We are using warm and cold outreach via us reaching out to our existing affiliates to see if we can bring the high-leverage people on. Email is also the same thing there. Posting free content. That's what this is. That's what this video is. I'm not running ads to get affiliates because I'd rather just focus on the book and let that flow come in through here. So I guess technically I am running ads to get pre-orders for the book and registrations for the book, but then it ultimately still leads to promoting the book itself if you were gonna do it anyways. And we use all of these core 4 in order to get the affiliates. And then the affiliates, we then spin the same things for them. How do you make posts? How do you make emails? How do you make ads so that they can do the same thing for us? So that is the cycle of the core 4 and the lead getters being done together. You tell people about your stuff and then other people tell people about your stuff. That's the game. So now that we know what our offer is and we know how we're gonna build the machine, And we know how we're going to promote the affiliates. Well, we can't just expect that they're just going to be like, oh great, I'm just going to magically promote all your stuff. Of course not. And again, this is another place where businesses fall out. So if any of the 3 steps I went over, you weren't doing for your stuff, well, you could just stop right there. It's not going to work. Or you have to have every one of these pieces if you expect people to actually promote your stuff. You got to make it worth it for them. You got to let them know about it and you got to make it easy. So what do we do? So number 1 is we want to have some sort of onboarding plus activation. The simple thing is obviously, well, you gotta opt in, fine, that's the first thing you do. The next thing is if we can get any other data on the affiliates that helps us out so we can help them out, we'll do that too. The next is we wanna have some sort of fast reward, right? And so the way that we do that is they get their custom link because if they don't believe that you have good attribution tracking, they're like, wait, why am I gonna send all this traffic if I don't know that you're actually gonna count it for me? So we have to have a custom link that they know and we have to demonstrate that we have good attribution. Now the way that we do that is through a leaderboard. So we wanna show in real time that their stuff is getting tracked and they can know how they stack up compared to everybody else. So the next thing after we give them the onboard and they get their custom link, they get attributions, they're like, okay, they're all set up, is we give the collateral. So I talked about this briefly before, but I wanna make this like a very big point because this is where a lot of people fall off again, is that if you expect them to make an entire campaign to launch your thing Good luck. It's not going to happen. Right? So it's like, you have to make it fast and easy. And so what we do is one is there's the regular communication. Now, part of that is just awesome and fun because anybody who markets or sells stuff, like, I mean, I, myself included, I love to know, like, what are the winners? What's working out? Like, what are some of the stats? Like, that's the stuff that we share behind the scenes. And I think that generates like a ton of interest, or at least it did last year. People Who dig this thing. So regular communication is one of them, but the other is knowing the winners. All right. And so this is where we create the black books. This is all the collateral that you will use, plug and play that you can use into your marketing again. And it's going to be all of the different ways to market content, ads, outreach via email typically. Right. When we have all those things, including text messages, which we also give so that people can message their Threads, their Slacks at work so that people just don't have to think about it. This is another thing that makes them more successful. And one of the other benefits here is that if we, you know, write the collateral, then we know that everything is being represented properly. So it's not like this is going to be get rich quick, like, no, of course not. Right. But we want to make sure that we're just, you know, that the messaging is aligned, that everyone who comes in is expecting the same things that we can deliver on expectations. And included within that is some obvious like compliance guidelines. Don't promote anything like don't, don't lie. That's basically all it comes down to. Don't lie. Don't exaggerate. Just state the facts, tell the truth, and everyone will be fine. We actually break the collateral into two pieces. So basically we have, this is what we're starting with. Then as time goes on, we say, hey, here are the winners. And so that means either new ads that we're doing or we can at least take, here's all the stuff that, you know, we're starting with and then here's the stuff that's really converting. And then that way the affiliates can double down on what's working and use your data to win for their audience. And then if you're like, well, what's the regular communication? Well, there's two components to the communication. One is cool stuff. Right? Which is, here's the neat stuff, here's the data, all that jazz. The next is we have the leaderboard, which you absolutely need to send out as frequently as possible. Because believe it or not, people want to check that thing daily. Anybody who's actually competing wants to know, you know, where they're at, right? They want to know if they're doing okay. And so this gives them that way of giving a feedback loop of, you're doing a good job, keep doing what you're doing. And then as people move up the leaderboard, typically my director of marketing, my team will actually talk to the top ones as they kind of move up and filter the board. So that we can help them do even more. So it's like kind of almost an additional unstated incentive is that if you crush it, we want to help you crush it even more. So one of the really important things that we like to think of is who are quote affiliates? Because affiliates, like there's different words in different industries for the same thing. So fundamentally anybody who promotes your stuff is a promoter. Now, some people like in the physical products world, they call them influencer advertising. If it's customer driven, then it's UGC, it's user generated content. If it's in the kind of direct response world, they call them affiliates. What the hell? And, you know, in the brick-and-mortar world, they just call them referrals. In the finance world, they call them centers of influence, COIs. In other places, they call them joint ventures. Like, the number of names for the exact same thing is exhausting. But all they fundamentally are are people who tell other people about your stuff for some reason— money, free stuff, or just because they love the product. When I'm thinking through this, it's like I want to make sure that for every type or genre, I can speak their language. I want to make posts, frame my stuff for people who have warm audiences on Instagram or YouTube, or, you know, that in terms of how they're communicating in a specific way so they can use it, right? If you're somebody who has an email list and you're more of a text-based info, you've got a Substack, you're on X, you're on LinkedIn, you do more blog-style stuff. It's like that. I want to make sure that I can set you up. If you're somebody who's just a really good advertiser, some guys just, it's funny because last year I had some of the top guys were just there's really good paid ads. They didn't even have any of this stuff. They're just like, oh, I'll just take the ads, I'll run 'em. I know I can just make my way into the top 50. It's exactly what they did, right? And so it's like, I wanna make sure that those guys are taken care of by giving them the ads that I know that are working and that are pre-approved. They don't have to, I have zero friction. They can just take 'em, run 'em. As you're building this for your business, it's like you wanna make sure that you're taking care of every single type of affiliate. 'Cause as soon as there's friction, they'll stop. And so it's like you wanna make it easy, you wanna make it fast, and you wanna make it personalized. To them. If you want to sell something using other people's audience, which is free, with the caveat that you give them some strong incentive to do so, then the first thing that we start with is why the hell should they do this? Which is you have to make the offer for the affiliates and you want to make the offer beneficial for you, beneficial for them, and beneficial for their audience so that it doesn't feel like an ask from them to their people because you don't want to take away from them. The next is, okay, once you build that offer, it's like, how are you going to tell people about it? Well, you got to have some place that exists. You have some sort of promotion, and then you have some sort of follow-up. All right? And so the place that exists, I like having an affiliate sales page, an influencer sales page, a partner page, a center of influence page, a JV page, whatever you want to say or call it. People letting other people know, you sell them on why it's a good idea for them to do it. Now beyond that, it's like, okay, now we got to let people know about this thing. So for me, I use the same ones. I use my outreach, which is talking to people who already know me. I make my posts for content like this video, and I'm going to be running ads, which I'm actually just flowing through our existing funnel. That's gonna be to preorder and register for the book. All of that, that then ends up here so that it spins the loop of getting other people to ideally and hopefully promote the book. It's gonna be awesome. You should totally do it. Once we have that, we can't just like leave them to flounder. We have to make sure that they actually succeed. And so we have onboarding and activation with fast feedback loops. They immediately get their custom link. They know it's going to work. They see regular leaderboards so that they know that they're moving up and that they're doing well. And then beyond having the feedback loop, we wanna give them the stuff. Right? We're going to give them regular communication, which is going to be the data and the cool stuff that's happening behind the scenes, plus the leaderboard, obviously. And then the winners is going to be like the ads or the post or the angles or hooks that are outperforming. And so by doing this, we set as many people up as humanly possible for success. And then at the very top end, for the people who are in that top 100 or top 50, my team actually reaches out to them and says, hey, how can we help you promote it and crush it even more? We want you to win because if you win and your audience wins, we all win. And so fundamentally, that's how you advertise for free. It's also one of the most scalable ways to advertise in any niche. It's been one of the core pillars of how I advertise. I mean, like Skool, the majority of the traffic is from people telling people about it. Allen was almost entirely, my software company that we sold, was almost entirely off of affiliates. Prestige Labs is almost 100% affiliate sales, meaning the brick and mortar distributors who are actually selling this stuff at their brick and mortars. And so it doesn't matter. Also, whether the people who, like, for example, for me, it's like, I probably do have some gym owners who have 100 members at their gym. Will they win the top 50? Probably not. Can they make sure that they get all the 10+ and get a shot at getting in? Absolutely. Right. And so I want to make sure that somebody at the bottom and at the top can still win. And if you follow this stuff, you'll probably do pretty good. And if you want more details about this, I have a monster chapter on affiliates, which I actually had to cut in half to even fit in the book. Cause there's so much stuff to really do it right. That's inside of the Leads book in the affiliates chapter. You can go check that out. Real quick, guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast. Layla and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together our Scaling Roadmap. It's breaking scaling into 10 stages and I across all 8 functions of the business. So you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got product, you've got customer success, you've got IT, you've got recruiting, you've got HR, you've got finance. And we show the problems that emerge at every level of scale and how to graduate to the next level. It's all free and you can get it personalized to you. So it's about 30-ish pages for each of the stages. Once you answer the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's about 14 hours of stuff, but it's narrowed down so that you only have to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, R-O-A-D map, roadmap.