The Long Forgotten Power of Correct Affiliate Marketing Implementation

What's up everybody? I wanna talk today about one of, it's so funny, there's so many ways to drive traffic, so many things we talk about. Everyone's always freaking out about Facebook ads and Google and Instagram and YouTube, but to this day, more than 50% of the traffic to ClickFunnels still comes from this one traffic source that we never talk about. At a recent event, I kinda went off on this and I talked for, I don't know, 45 minutes or so talking about how to get traffic from affiliates and what we're doing and how it works, and it was funny to me because we used to have this conversation back, When I first got started, because there wasn't Facebook, there wasn't Instagram, like the way we all got traffic when we first got started was through affiliates. So all of our conversations, all the seminars, all the events were just talking about that one topic. And nowadays, I go to an event and nobody's talking about it, yet it's still the way that we use to drive the majority of our traffic. Despite the fact we're spending, you know, $1 million plus a month on paid ads. And so, I wanted to go deep with that and just get you guys, the wheels in your heads re-spinning about how to use affiliates to start growing your company, to drive more traffic, to get sales. The best thing about affiliates is that like, you know, with Zuckerberg, you buy ads, you give him money up front whether people buy or not. With affiliates, the risk is on them. Like, you convince them to promote, they promote, and if they make a sale, then you pay them a percentage of the sale. So there's no risk, there's no stress, like it's such a better way to run and build and grow a business. So, that said, today we're gonna dive deep into some strategies about building your own affiliate program and getting other people to promote your products and your services for you. In the last decade, I went from being a startup entrepreneur to selling over $1 billion of my own products and services online. This show is going to show you how to start, grow, and scale a business online. My name is Russell Brunson, and welcome to the Marketing Secrets Podcast. Okay, how many of you guys right now have an affiliate program inside of your businesses that's active? Okay, interesting. How many of you guys do not? So we have more that do not than that do. Okay, alright, a couple things. Number 1 is, back in the day when I got started, 20-some-odd years ago, We didn't have Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, we didn't have any of those things, right? And it's funny, because I think back, like, how did we get traffic back then? Only thing we really had, we had email lists, Google Ads, and that was about it. And so usually what happened, people would buy Google Ads to build an email list, and then you'd promote each other's things. Like, 90% of the way we got traffic back 20 years ago was all us doing joint ventures. Like, that's what everything was. Getting affiliates, calling people on the phone, which me, as a super introverted person, whose number one fear on this planet is picking up the phone, I had to like stretch to be able to do that, but it's the only way that we could to our companies. And so I built a lot of relationships with people and that's kind of how I kicked things off. It was doing a lot of joint ventures. Where I'd promote their product, they'd promote ours, things like that. Fast forward then, whatever, 10, 12 years later is when we launched ClickFunnels. And when we launched ClickFunnels, we did not do any advertising. We had no one on our team do advertising. We didn't have, we weren't running Facebook ads, like none of that stuff. The only thing we had, the only tool we had was joint ventures. And so some of you guys had asked me kind of how we structured things initially when we launched ClickFunnels, so I'll talk about that first, and then I'm going to show you the evolution of what we're doing that's really exciting. And this evolution, by the way, the whole goal of all the things I'm trying to do in my business right now are how do I do things where I can cut Zuckerberg off? And so the whole idea came from that, and now it's turned into something really, really cool I think you're gonna love. So, okay, so we first launched ClickFunnels, number one thing we did is, yes, the Dream 100, we did the Dream 100, just like I tell everyone over and over again, I did the Dream 100, and I was like, how do I get the information that we're launching this thing in front of people's faces? And so, back then, I'd seen somebody, company online who'd done a video card. Now they're kind of famous, but no one had done them before. I saw it in some weird industry where someone had these video cards where you have a message, you open it, and the video starts playing. And so when we were launching ClickFunnels, I was like, we need to do these video cards. And it was really hard because there was only one person, I think, in Hong Kong who was actually making these things. We found the company, and so we made it. So first thing we did is we did these video cards to our Dream 100, and that was how we kind of kicked off awareness that we were launching a company called ClickFunnels. That's how it started. And then, you guys have heard the story before, we launched it first where everyone was promoting a free trial, and it didn't really convert., and no one knew what ClickFunnels was, and it was confusing, and just, it kind of, we launched with affiliates, and the ones who promoted it just kind of died, and didn't do a lot. We're like, dang it. And then fast forward a few months later is when I had a chance to go to an event. I wrote the webinar pitch for ClickFunnels, did the webinar, it converted, and now I was like, we had a model, right? Anyway, I'm not gonna go deep into the whole model, but obviously you know, webinar, linchpin, all that kind of stuff. But we had a webinar, so what we'd do is I'd go out there, I would do the webinar, first do it to our own list, made a bunch of money, and then I had the stats. It was like, hey, I did the webinar, we got 1,000 people registered, registered, we made X amount of dollars, therefore I made, for everyone who registered we made, you know, whatever the numbers were. And we had like a little database of just like, here's what we made from this webinar. So then I had that, I was able to take that and I went to a joint venture partner, an affiliate, I'd say, hey, I just did this webinar to my list, I was able to get 1,000 people registered, here's the stats, here's the numbers, if you can get 1,000 people, this is what you'd probably make, right? And so I tell them, you know, based on these numbers, you might make $5 for everyone who registers for the webinar, whatever the numbers were, right? So I pitch it to somebody else, and if they liked it, they're like, oh, that sounds great, let's do the webinar, we set the webinar, They would promote it, I would do the webinar, they'd make a bunch of money, and then what happened, we'd take that and we'd add it to this document. There's like, here's results from my webinar, here's results from the webinar I did with this person, and then I would go to that person and I told them, I'd say, each of our partners would get 40% commission on the webinar, right? So I said, hey, you just got 40% commission. Did it convert well for you? They're like, yeah, it was amazing, people loved it, it converted great. I was like, awesome. We have a two-tier affiliate program. And so, if you have anybody you know who would like to do this webinar, I will pay you 10% of any of the sales that they make. And people are like, this is amazing. So then all of a sudden they would go and they would contact all their friends, like, hey, I just did Russell's webinar, we made $6 for every registrant, da da da, whatever the numbers were. They'd kind of brag about it, and say, do you want to do a webinar with Russell? And they would connect me with all these different people. So they might connect me with 5 different people, those 5 people come to me, and then I would do a webinar to them. So I did a webinar for that person's list, that person, that person, right? And the person who did the webinar got 40% commission, and the person who referred them got 10%. So everyone's happy. Then I took the data from all those 5 webinars and put it on the sheet. Social's webinar, they got 300 registrants, we made $12 per lead, whatever. So we get building out this document of just all the case studies of what happened, right? And then those 5 people, I asked the same question. Hey, we have a 2-tier affiliate program, do you have any friends who you think would want to promote this webinar? And all of them do. People who do webinars know people who do webinars. And they're like, yeah, definitely, here's 3 of my friends, let's do the webinar. So they introduced me, they introduced me, they introduced me, and that kept going and going and going. And that's how I did 70 whatever webinars, in the first live webinars, the first couple months of launching ClickFunnels was that. That was the process and the path. Two-tier affiliate program, 40% first-tier commission, 10% second-tier, and then we do a webinar, have success, get their friends, do a webinar, and just kept growing from there. Does that make sense? So that's how we launched ClickFunnels, how it started growing. We've paid out, I think, over $150 million in affiliate commissions since ClickFunnels first launched, and that was kind of the initial process. Okay. So hopefully it gives you guys a couple ideas if you're running different affiliate programs. Alright, now there's like 3 or 4 things that make this last thing make sense. They may seem disconnected as I tell you 3 stories, but at the very end, I promise it will tie together like a nice bow. Okay, number 2, the very— when I reopened Inner Circle the very first time, like 3 years ago, how many of you guys were in the room 3 years ago when we first did it? Okay, thank you very much for hanging out this long. It was over in the Knitting Factory. And if you remember, Anthony Morrison spoke. How many of you guys remember that? He streamed in because he wasn't able to come. It's in the members area, by the way, if you haven't listened to this. But he shared this model and what he's doing. And Anthony's one of our— he was our number one affiliate for like 5 years inside of ClickFunnels. And actually, what's interesting is the top 5 affiliates are all using a variation of this model perfectly. So I had Anthony come and share that. He shared the model with everybody, and I have yet to see anybody actually do what he did. Including me. And I've listened to that probably 3 times over the last couple of years, 'cause I'm like, I know there's something there, I just need to do it, I need to do it. So I'm gonna walk you through what Anthony's model is. It's really powerful. So Anthony has a site called Partner With Anthony, P-W-A, and Anthony basically has a site and he charges $7 a month to join the site. You sign up for it and it's a training program. It's gonna teach you how to be successful as an affiliate marketer. Right? And you go into the site and there's a whole like training program, like day number 1, you're gonna do these things, day number 2, do these things, and he walks you through, and it's got like a, I don't know, 40, 50, 60-day free training, not free training course, $7 a month for this training course, but he doesn't, but that's the only thing he sells is the $7 a month, that's the only product that Anthony actually has. Everything else is just, he's referring different things. Okay, and so this is how he became a number 1 affiliate, is on like day 3 or something, he's like, hey, Hey, you need a funnel, here's a share funnel link that you need to have. Go sign up for ClickFunnels and go get your thing. And he pushes it through his affiliate link. And from that he gets, yeah, tons of people. And in these days of training, you know, day 4, 5, 6, whatever, he has other things he recommends, like he recommends an email autoresponder system, he recommends, so as an affiliate he promotes different things that he's, other companies, that's how he's making his money. Right? And what's cool is that affiliate programs like ours, like ClickFunnels, we have a two-tier affiliate program. So what Anthony does is if you sign with, partner with Anthony, you can basically take his system, you can promote it as an affiliate, right, and then you get the $7 a month as an affiliate, and then when someone signs up for ClickFunnels, you get the commissions and Anthony gets second-tier commissions. Does that make sense, the way he's programmed the software? And so this, for him, has become, became very, very viral. And I remember Anthony told us on the thing, he's like, I've got 100 different products, but I only promote one on paid ads. The only thing I'm doing with paid ads is this. People buy this and then this training is free training. People love me, they're going through it, they love it, and from there I'm recommending ClickFunnels, I'm recommending they buy this product, and all the revenue comes from him promoting other products. Sometimes he'll recommend his own product in here, but he never physically buys ads to promote any of his other products. He doesn't drive emails for any of his other products. The only thing he promotes is Partner With Anthony, and then the training does all the selling of everything else he's doing. And so what's interesting is like when someone's paying for a membership site through learning, like their guard's down. They're not like, oh, I mean, this is sales pitch. If I'm on a webinar, he's gonna pitch me something. I'm on a 5-day challenge, someday they're gonna be, he's gonna pitch me something. It's like, no, this is a free training course, I'm not selling you anything, but here's the tool you need for this, here's the tool you need for this, oh, if you want my templates for this, and like, the training just recommends resources, and like I said, Anthony, Anthony's brilliant. He's probably one of the richest dudes I know in this market, 'cause he does really smart things like this, that he doesn't do this customer support or anything, he just drives traffic to one thing and it does all the work. So, so he shared that, and again, if you go back If you guys log in the Inner Circle members area, that presentation is in there. If you listen to the Inner Circle members only podcast, it's also in there. That's where I listen to it all the time, because I go back to the old Inner Circle podcast. I listen to that and a couple other ones that are really, really good. You guys getting this? Alright. Good. Any questions about that at all? You have a question? Do we have a microphone that I can throw at her? Here, toss it to me, I'll hand it over. Boom. I don't want to hit your camera. Yeah. Hi. So affiliates is one thing I feel like I've never done. I understand the concept, but I always think of like, I'm building out a startup in this program, and I wanna make sure the product is solid before I launch it to affiliates. I noticed with Secrets of Success, you launched affiliates right out of the gate, and so it challenged my thinking, but when's the time when you start to create an affiliate program and you feel like it's the right time? So me personally, I think it's the first step. I've heard you say that, that's why I'm asking this question. Because paid ads are the worst, because paid ads is like, anyway, I'd rather get, because I always think about it, it's like the best traffic in the world is your own hot market, right? Your own list who loves you. Second best are, people may not know you, but you have a partnership with somebody who does know you, and their audience doesn't, and they can recommend as a warm referral. Like, hey, Mia created this really cool thing, you should go check it out. Like, that's the second best. And then we go the next phase, which is like, now we're going out to the masses. Who don't know who we are, and that's colder traffic, that's paid ads. And so a lot of you guys are going straight to paid ads, which paid ads are harder because you got to get the copies, it's harder to get copy to convert on ads and like all those kind of things, right? Versus, like if I throw up a page tomorrow that's like, hey, this is Russell, you guys want to buy this thing? And like click down below, and like, and if I sent it to all of you guys, most of you guys will buy it just because it's like we have an audience, right? But if I ran the same thing on Facebook ads, like John would stop running ads in 30 seconds, like no one will buy this thing, no one's converting. You know what I mean? But we're always trying, like, everyone's trying to launch with the hardest thing possible. Where I'm like, there's a huge pile of cash right here. And what you guys are all doing is like, there's a pile of cash, but I'm gonna step over here, I'm gonna step over here, I'm gonna come over here, and like, we're gonna get this thing to work first, and then we'll grab that. And you're trying to get it to scale and everything. I'm like, wouldn't it have been easier just to like, grab this pile of cash and like, put it in the bank, and then like, there's a little over here, you get partners with cash, and you grab all that, and you spend a year doing that, then you take this money now, and you come over and now you start running ads over here with some profit. Like that's such an, in my mind, just easier. We did 2 years of ClickFunnels of just grabbing all this before we had anyone, before John, we were sitting in a meeting like, we should probably run ads someday, who wants to learn? John's like, I'll learn, and that was like 2 years in the business before we ever ran an ad, but we'd already collected $10, $15, $20 million in profit before we started giving it away, which we need that profit, you know, growing a company when you're focused 100% on paid ads is hard because the profit's all getting sucked out by Zuckerberg or whoever, versus this is like you're keeping so much more revenue up front before you— anyway, that's the product. Like, for you, like, now you have an audience that knows, likes, and trusts you, and it's all the same vertical, you know, ClickFunnels, Zoomly, or whatever. All those are kind of the same market, and so it's like they're gonna trust you in those same verticals. And so, like, if you have a product that maybe you haven't tested before, like, that's my— that's my— like, info product or software product, or what's— it's info, but I'm putting like e-commerce tied to it. Mm-hmm. Does it work? I mean, it's principles I've learned the last 20 years bottled up, so yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like then I've tested it like in micro doses, right? So now I'm launching it. Yeah. But still, I feel like there's things to test, like the night, because like affiliates, you have to build these relationships and you have to answer all these objections and things. And so I'm like, do you just bottle all that up before you launch it? Or affiliate My experience is most affiliates— oh, sorry, I didn't tell the end of the story. This might answer part of the question, but I told you I did the webinar to our own list. I had the stats. This person's list has stats. So when I do an affiliate, they don't know who I am most of the time. I'm like, hey, we've run this webinar 12 times. Here's everyone's stats. You see boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and they're like, oh cool, I'm in. Most affiliates are doing it because they're trying to figure out how to make— they want obviously a good product and stuff like that, but they're more— they want a webinar that converts, or they want an offer that converts. That's more important typically. So are they doing their own webinars? I'm like, this is like new, the new space that I want to get into, and so I'm gonna jump through all my false beliefs. But like, you're doing the webinar, they're just setting up the audience. So they're taking your— okay, they're just sending them to your webinar. Yeah, well, I do, I do one specifically for them. Okay, let's say, let's say I was doing one, like, we set up a webinar. It's like the pitch, me and your face on it, and you're like, hey, my friend Russell got this really cool thing, we're gonna do a webinar, we're gonna talk about it, and they all jump on. Then you introduce like, hey, Hey, alright, so Russell showed me this really cool thing they're doing, it's awesome, and I asked him if he'd come in today and show you guys behind the scenes how it works, check this out, and then you kick it to me, and then I go in and do my full Perfect Webinar and I sell it. Okay. Yeah. And then they get all the— And then they get the commissions, yeah. Yep. Okay, I wanted to switch my thought. Yeah, but that's the way we've done it, and again, I think it's, I don't know, starting directly with paid ads, it's like, we've been doing Secret Success, like we ran and relaunched Secret Success We put it on our list, affiliates promoted it, we collected $1 million in the first like 2 days, and then the second million dollars, we took that money and just ran ads, and like, we were running ads, we spent way too much money, we still couldn't get ads to work, and I'm like, man, if I would've started with ads, I'm like, this business is dead, I would've given up. We've already collected $2 million from not ads, and now we got some breathing room to figure out how to get paid ads to work, versus if I would've started there, we'd still be sitting around with no members, you know? Ads are way harder than just your own list and affiliates. 'Cause it's an implied endorsement, right? They're coming from somebody else. Always converts higher. You can be worse and make more money, which is great. You know? Yeah. That help? Yeah. Cool. Thanks. Alright, back here. Now we're getting some questions coming in. This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. Spring calls for a wardrobe refresh, and Nordstrom has the best styles of the season. From dresses and denim to standout tops and accessories, Find the trends and essentials that feel right for you. Discover new arrivals from brands you love like WAIF, Princess Polly, Mango, Adidas, and Free People. Plus, free shipping and returns and freestyling appointments make everything so easy. Shop in stores at nordstrom.com or download the Nordstrom app. TaxAct understands you haven't memorized the tax code. That's why TaxAct has live experts to help. TaxAct can even do it for you if you prefer. It's the easiest way to know you're doing it right. Well, other than going back to college and obtaining a bachelor's degree in accounting with a minor in finance, then interning somewhere and becoming fluent in all tax forms. But that might be hard to accomplish before tax day. So maybe just stick with TaxAct. TaxAct. Let's get them over with. What do you do when your audience are not marketers? Our niche is our audience is mostly Catholic moms. And so, there's lots of influencers or people who have lots of wonderful content about faith and family, but we have limited success with them when they're trying to sell something to their audience who isn't used to being sold to, and they also are really inexperienced with marketing and, you know, any of this in our world. We've shared a little bit with them of the stuff that we learned at FHL about about the sort of sequence of stories and things. We've had limited success with it, but I would love affiliate marketing to work because I just love relationships over Zuckerberg, but we just cannot get it to scale. You're saying it doesn't work when your customers are affiliates or when your partners that have audiences are trying it? Yeah, when our partners, when our other like influencers. Okay. What are those influencers selling? Are they selling anything? Nope. They're just influencers who just influence for fun? Yep. That's so crazy, huh? How do they make their money? They don't. They don't. They just love hanging out on social media and building community and showing cute pictures of their kids and talking about, you know, what they're passionate about. Faith and— So is the question, or is the problem that they can't, that they can't promote correctly or their people don't buy? Both. Which one's the bigger problem? I mean, their people buy because their people are also our customers. And don't have any problem buying. The hard thing is getting them to promote. Yeah. Okay, and then in the past, how have you compensated them? Percentage of sales. Okay. Free product. Okay, so for most of— so my experience, and this is like, Alison Prince will be able to speak to this way better than me, but like, with a lot of times that type of influencer, a lot of them, especially if they don't know affiliate marketing, the percentages are confusing them and they don't understand it, so they don't, they don't, they don't know how to push, how to like, 30% doesn't make sense in their head, and so we've done it a lot of times in the past as we shifted around, we're paying a CPL or CPL, you know. So Zuckerberg, you're gonna spend what? How much per lead would you spend on Facebook for an opt-in for a webinar, let's say? Well, for our product, our average order value is about $50, and so we try to keep it around $20, $25. Are you just selling through a webinar or through— how do you sell? Straight VSL or what? Nope, just to Shopify. Okay, Shopify. Do you have an opt-in? Like, if the affiliate's promoting, you have an affiliate push to Shopify? You haven't approached anything? Shopify, yeah. Okay, so what I would do is I try to figure out like how, what's a way that you can make it really, really like easier for the affiliate. So for example, I might do is like, let's say you do an event with a co-branded event. It could be just a fun like whatever. Have them promote that. Say I'm gonna pay you $1 for every single lead that registers for our thing. Because then now it's not like 30% of like, I don't know if this makes any sense to No one's gonna buy, whatever. It's just like, I'll pay you a dollar per lead, which is, I guess if you were to pay Zuckerberg for the same, you're paying $3 to $5 for leads. Now you're a third of the cost or whatever, and they're freaking out, 'cause like, wait, I got somebody to put their email address in, you give me a dollar every single time? And now it's something they can tangibly do. Like, if I send 1,000 people or 10,000 people, like, the numbers now make sense in their head really easily. And then it's very simple. And then you do something, you jump on it. You could even just like, you guys are doing a Facebook Live hangout, them introduce you, you talk about a thing, then you push to the Shopify store and you keep 100% of profits. That way they don't have any risk or anything and they're getting paid upfront. Now it's just, now in their head it makes more sense. So whenever I've done affiliates who aren't traditional affiliates who don't understand it, I usually come back to like try to pay them CPL. If I pay you cost per lead or sometimes it's cost per click. Everyone you send, every click you send, I'll pay you 50 cents. They're like, what? This is amazing. And I'm like, I paid Zuckerberg $3 per click. Like this is insane, you know? Like they just don't, it's a whole different world. In fact, some of you guys may know Eric Beers in the Atlas program, but He's a traffic broker, that's all he does, and so he goes to these big places and he finds people with huge lists, huge databases and stuff, and they don't understand our world at all, and so he'll pay like 5 cents a click, and then he sells them to us for like 25 cents a click, and he's making 5x his money, and then I'm like, I'd normally pay a dollar for this click, and it's like just arbitrage the whole way through, and so you're going to the level where you can get people for insanely cheap because they don't understand the value of their traffic, and so just looking at how do I structure it for that affiliate where it's It's like a no-brainer for them, you know? Yeah, that's the funny about affiliate marketing. It's just that you figure out— because I found there's like different tiers of affiliates. Like some affiliates, all they care about is just money. Like they're just money obsessed, don't care what the product is. And those ones are the easiest to deal with because like they just want money. As long as your offer converts, they'll promote it. The next one are people more like me who are like obsessed, like I want an amazing customer experience, that like it's gonna be— as long as the customer experience is the best in the world, that's what they care about. They don't care how much money they make, whatever. They just wanna make sure it's gonna serve their customers. Like, that's number 2. And then the third are just people that know what they're doing, and so it's like you just work with them and like figure out like what is it you're looking for, and you craft it and create it, and then boom, you can do some really cool things. Yeah, awesome, thank you. Yeah, no worries. You talking about affiliates and then the delay and click fraud and things like that, do you have any bridging the gap between that and affiliates for services? So you're obviously familiar with what we do. I've I've never entertained affiliates or taken a shot at it because of that risk, because our service is delayed or it's higher ticket and things like that. Do you have any experience or recommendations for a potential how I could roll out an affiliate on an agency side? Yeah, so one of the easy things I've seen people do in your situation is, there's different ways affiliates get paid, right? Like I'm paying out on ours 100% front-end commission. Some people pay out recurring where it's like you're getting 40% of the recurring thing. The other one is you pay an upfront CPA. So for example, Shopify right now will pay an affiliate like $200, $250 when you get someone signed up for a free trial. Now you get none of the money afterwards, but just the money upfront for setting it up. So what you could do is create something where it's like a $300 onboarding something and you pay affiliates 100% of that and that's— then there's the risk is that, but then afterwards you're onboarding the client and then you own the person moving forward for the rest of it. Does that make sense? So like, again, Anthony Morrison, I was talking about his brother Adarian Morrison, he's Shopify's number one affiliate right now. So they actually pay him, I think, $350 for every free trial he signs up, but he gets nothing afterwards, just that. So he's able to spend $200, $300 to get a lead, and he's just— he's Shopify's number one affiliate right now. So same thing, it's like how do you create something on the front end that doesn't cost you a lot of money that you could pay so they get the big upfront even though they know like, hey, they're gonna sign a $10,000 a month contract for next year. The affiliate wouldn't get any of that because that's when it gets hard because you have your hard costs and all the other things. I would try to create something on the front end that brings somebody in that then 100% or 50% or whatever that is, you could pay out an affiliate on that and that's how I would shift it. Does that make sense? Yep. Oh, okay. So the light's shining, I can barely see and then okay, cool. Yeah, that's how I would try to structure something like that. Even if it's like, yeah, some kind of like front end, like we do a keyword research and the consulting and figure out like that, like something like that that's upfront work, like paying out a lot more on that. And then I think on the continuity side. Cool, thanks. Yeah. I have another question is that, so we started an affiliate program and we do pay them per click, per lead, and then if there's a conversion. The problem we have is retention. Like they would send out a promotion and then stop. And so how do we get them to continually promote our product? Yeah, affiliates by default, especially good affiliates, are lazy. So that's what we've noticed. Like if someone agrees to promote something, that's like step one, but that doesn't mean they're actually doing anything. So for us, it's like we write the ads for them, we write the copy, we do the stuff, and then we have to give them reasons to promote. So that's why I was showing you guys yesterday when I was showing all the mini, like for Secrets to Success, all the little mini dramatic demonstrations we're doing every single month. It's because affiliates promoted once, they don't want to promote the same thing again. So I have to give them a reason to promote. So I'm like, hey, this month we're doing this cool Earl Nightingale campaign. Do you want to promote that? And they're like, oh, that's unique, that's different. Yes, even though it's selling the same product, but it's different campaigns and different things like that. And then honestly, you have to have an affiliate manager who's in contact. Like we've got multiple people who run our affiliate program on our team who are like, they're talking Talking to affiliates all the time, trying to figure out what's working, what are you doing right now, like what are you looking for, and like do you have a promotional schedule, like can you send an email out, can we do a social media blast, like can we put a link in the PS of your emails, but they're in constant communication with our top affiliates trying to figure out how we can weave into what they're already doing, because they're, yeah affiliates are, and I'm a really good affiliate, like we're all nightmares, like we're the hardest people to work with just because we can make a lot of money, we know that, so it's coming back and understanding like we gotta help them and figure out how to, different ways to to integrate. That's why I think having an affiliate manager who's full-time working with affiliates is like an essential role if you really want to do this well, because they got to be constantly communicating with them, showing them the new offer. So this is where our affiliate manager will focus most of the effort on those who are in here, and then my job as the funnel builder, as the person, is I got to keep coming out with new offers. So I'm going to come out with a new Secret Success offer, and then all the affiliate managers will hit everyone, "Hey, there's a new offer, Secret Success, everyone go run it," and then I'll do the next one, it'll come out, and then the next one. Are putting out new offers to give them new things to promote and to go out there. If you're like an actual affiliate, like in an affiliate network, you sign up for an affiliate network, which basically is a whole bunch of, you know, tons of different offers, what typically happens, you'll be connected with an affiliate manager and they're hitting you up a couple times a day like, "Hey, there's a new offer from this company, you want to try it? Here's an offer from here." And like, they're hitting you up trying to figure out what offers you want to promote, but it's a constant communication with your top affiliates. So you're saying have different type of offer or just or is it just a spin on the same offer? Both. Yes and yes. It's like, oh, the DotCom Secrets book funnel and the Traffic Secrets book funnel and this, but I also have like dramatic demonstration about this part of the thing and so I'm just, we're giving different offers, different webinars, like we're just putting out different front-end things to get them engaged, to get them excited about whatever we're promoting. Thank you. Yeah. Yep. So if you were to start over as an affiliate, what would you do to do Secrets of Success as an affiliate of your own company? How would I be— how would I promote as an affiliate? Yeah. We could do a whole 3-day event on that. That'd be really fun. Yeah, I know. I mean, the reality is I would try to build a list, a segmented list based on the topic. So I take my existing audience, I'd be like, hey, I'm doing this cool thing over here. If you're interested, opt in. And I would segment everybody to like, here's people interested in this topic, and then I would create bonuses to get people. So as an affiliate, the way— I mean, you guys have seen me promote things. Like when I I usually think it's like, hey, this is the offer that they're gonna give you, but I'm gonna throw in these 3 bonuses from me. I create a better offer. That's how I usually win most affiliate competitions is by just figuring out how can I make this offer even more sexy, like what bonuses can I create, what training, what kind of things can I put together, and I have a sub-list and I would just keep sending them stuff based on that. So I remember that in 2015 you did a contest with a Ferrari that Jeff Fokker won. Yeah. What do you think about those contests? Are you thinking doing? Pros and cons? Yeah, so, so, I think I'll show you. I wish we could show you guys. We should let you on the next affiliate launch, like let you guys in behind the scenes and see how we do it. So there's two ways to look at me running an affiliate program. Number one is I like doing launches because launches, first off, you get a lot of cash coming in, a lot of traffic, and it's fun to get people behind something. Something, right? So for example, in May, Justin Bent and I are working on the Think and Grow Rich Challenge. So this is a challenge that's coming up, so we have a whole bunch of affiliates and we want to create a fun competition amongst affiliates because that gets everyone promoting harder, right? And so we set a date, this is when it's happening, and so we have a whole launch calendar, everyone, and we start contacting affiliates. They come in and then there's a beginning of the launch, there's an end of the launch. We always give away prizes and things like that. Usually there's like the top 10 get get prizes, the top 3 get better prizes, you know, we make a whole bunch of prizes. That helps a lot doing a launch like that. It's also a lot of work though, and you end up spending a lot of money on prizes and things like that, but it works really well. So there's that side of it, and then there's also like a rolling launch where I have a really good offer and, like for example, we launched ClickFunnels, like I didn't just do one webinar for everyone and it was done. I did a webinar to your list, and then to your list, and so I was doing like a rolling launch going for a year. Just rolling week after week, week after week to hit more and more people. So the question a lot of times is like, which one's better? And for me, it's like, they're both amazing, right? Like, I like doing the big launch because of the big payday, but then the launch is over and now it's like, cool, now we're moving to rolling launch and let's get another person and another person and like, we're just rolling through as many people to keep traffic and sales coming in. Cool. Does that make sense? Yeah, affiliate prizes are great. One really cool thing about affiliate prizes, like typically if you look at when we're doing affiliate launch, the top 10, we almost almost always includes some type of mastermind, and there's a reason. Here's the strategic evil reason behind it. What happens is like, we do the launch, they win the mastermind trip, and then we time the mastermind trip a little bit before the next launch is going to happen. So what happens is they all come out, we hang out with them, we do a mastermind, we serve them food, we have a good time, everything's amazing, and then at the affiliate mastermind launch, like, hey, just so you guys know, the next launch is happening next month, here's what it is. Now our top 10 affiliates, All are there in one spot, we recommit them to the next launch, and they roll out the next launch. And so, that's a big piece of the strategy. So for like Secrets to Success, we did the affiliate launch, we did the affiliate launch, and then the prize was we took everyone to Chicago to the Nightingale Conant offices, and we did a full one-day event there, and at the event we said, hey, the next launch is Think and Grow Rich Challenge, it's coming up in 2 months from now. We committed them, got them all scheduled out, and so hopefully those people all promote again, and then from them, the next prize is we're going to Wise Virginia. In a Pointe Hills house for the next prize. So they want to win that, you know, and like it helps push people from thing to thing to thing. Yeah. Very cool. Back here? It's so interesting to me, real quick before you jump in, like 15 years ago, when you go to a marketing event, all we talked about was JVs. It's funny because like, here it's like everyone talks about ads, and it's like, this is, for a lot of you guys, this is so foreign, and it's funny to me because it's like, man, back in the day, this is the only thing we talked about. No one talked about ads. Ads or pay-per-click, it was just fascinating kind of, anyway, sorry. No, you're good. So I was curious, do you think that this works if like your dream client is somebody who wouldn't have a list, isn't on the entrepreneur side or anything, so like everybody that we go after is a W-2 who just has their inner circle. Is it worth trying to set up an affiliate program if we don't really have anybody that would know what a list even is, like if you pull out the entrepreneur side? For sure, so a couple things is, is your customers, so we look at this two ways, like there's customers who love what you do and they're usually gonna bring in one or two, like they're not gonna They're not going to be big affiliates. That's what the training side is. But again, they may only pick up 1 or 2 sales. It's not a huge deal, but if we bring a lot of our customers in there, they love our stuff and they can refer other people, the volume becomes big. The bigger side of the affiliate program is going out and actually attracting people who are affiliates. For sure, that's the bigger thing, right? So the Affiliate Evolution offer is interesting because it's twofold. Number 1, we're going to train beginners and give them a platform, help them train them up, but number 2, it's like we're going to use this to go out to all the big affiliates like, "Hey, you've promoted our stuff in the past, you want 100% commission? Cool, join the site right now, upgrade to 100% commission," and then we get them to promote. So when I look at affiliate program, I'm less looking at like banking on my existing customers being the ones who are going to drive a lot of volume because they're usually not. Instead, I'm like, who are the other people in my industry? Like looking back at Dream 100, right? Who are the people who already have my dream customers on a list? Like that's what I'm focusing my affiliate program on initially because again, you get one or two of those to promote something, that's worth 100 customers who are doing 1Z, 2Z sales, you know what I mean? So if you're looking at like where to focus the most effort, it's definitely on like who are the influencers in your space that you could focus on catering and building out a really good affiliate program for. Awesome, thank you. Yep, no worries. Okay, is that all it? All right, no, we got one more. Okay, when we finish with the customer, we deliver, they're happy with our service product. If we were to bring them on to you, where do you think would be the best place where to introduce them to you to help them develop that entrepreneurial side of things? What do you think? To, hey, you should be purchasing these books. Where? What would be the most seamless? So for everyone, he has is going to be different based on what your front-end business is, which is why I need an affiliate manager. So what I do is I have Ben Harris talk to you and be like, he'd ask, what's your business? How does it work? Where's someone at? And then from there it's like, okay, based on this, like, for you, a book would be the best thing. Like, just have you set up a campaign for the book. But it might be like, the book might not be right for your audience, maybe it's the webinar. It's like, oh, let's do a webinar. Or a lot of times for our team, it's like, if someone's got a big enough list, then it's like, hey, let's do a collab webinar. Russell, actually, we'll bring Russell on live, We'll bring on one of our webinar presenters on live. We'll create a whole webinar for you where it's co-branded. It's like, and then you can come back, hey, I'm doing this cool webinar with ClickFunnels and this, you know, and like it's a co-branded thing now. And so it just kind of depends. It's very much, that's why it's good to have an affiliate manager who's kind of trying to put together these deals with people because again, every affiliate's gonna be a little bit different. And again, some affiliates just want cash, some want a really good experience, some are looking for stuff. It's all a personal It's a personal thing. Yeah. Hey, I just want to share that this works. Like, 6 years ago, we were giving $100,000 a month to Zuckerberg and Google combined. And fast forward now, 95% of our business comes from affiliate partners. And just exactly what he was saying, there's those that are just going to send 2 or 3 deals in. They'll just use your automated funnel. But when you have a big player that has a big list, that's where you do that custom webinar. And you do it together with them. Maybe you record it and they put it in their email autoresponder for some of their new clients, and that way you're getting clients in continuously. But that custom webinar, we do that all the time with big partners, and that brings in, you know, monster, monster business. Yeah, it's huge. Have you guys read the book Integration Marketing by Mark Joyner? If you haven't, it's like an hour-long read. It's really short, but it's fascinating. So integration marketing is like How do you, 'cause like again, if I get a feel, if I come to Dave Lindemuller, I'm like, hey man, will you promote my thing? He's like, yes, this is amazing. So we do a promotion, he promotes it, we get a bunch of sales, and then it's over, and then it's done, right? So integration marketing is really interesting. It's like finding partners, and yes, you want to do the one-time sale, but it's like, how do I integrate my business into his business so that even if, like after the promotion's done, like it's not over, right? So for example, if I was going back to Dave, I'd be like, hey, let's do a webinar together, it's going to be amazing. So we do a webinar together, right? Whatever happens, it converts well. And then we record the whole thing. I say, okay, I'm gonna build an evergreen funnel out of the webinar we did together. So I build an evergreen funnel for him. I'm like, hey, let's go back to your email sequence and like, where can we plug this into your email sequence? He's like, well, I have a 12-day email sequence. Like, cool, day 13 through 15, we do 3 emails. Let's put those in there all pushing this webinar, and that way the webinar you did once, you'll get paid forever. And then I'm like, what else could we do? He's like, well, you know, in social media I've got this, or I've got, you know, whatever it is. I'm like, how do we integrate in? How do I put it so that on your thank Thank you page. After somebody opts into your list, I can put a link on the thank you page that pushes now to the webinar we did together. So go back to his offers and plug it in there. And like, now all your customers, when they buy a product, you take them to membership site. How do I put like this offer to the member? And so we try to integrate into that person's sales process everywhere we can do. And so for me, when we launched ClickFunnels, Mark Joyner was my first mentor. He had just written Integration Marketing, so I was like, how do we start doing this? And so for the last decade, I've been doing this process with our affiliates. Like, they do a promotion, then we're coming back and trying to weave things into their sequences. Their autoresponders, things like that. And we get so much traffic. Again, I told you, more than 50% of our traffic comes from affiliates. And these are not people doing active affiliate promotions most of the time. Usually it's like we set up all these deals 5 years ago, and every time they get an opt-in in their funnel, email 13, they're hitting us, ClickFunnels. And most times they forget it's even in the sequence, and we just keep getting traffic as their companies grow. So that's the other powerful thing about affiliate marketing. We start looking at it through that lens, it's just like It's like, man, every single person, if I can integrate into that person's business, like as their business grows, my business grows, right? Anyway, so that's really the power. I look at, again, our top 5 affiliates, none of these guys actually promote ClickFunnels, but all of them have some kind of training system, and we're plugged into every one of their training systems where day 3 or day 10, they're telling the people they need a funnel, and then they give them a ClickFunnels share funnel, and we're the ones plugged in there, and so it's like, these people, as their business grows, businesses grow, our business grows, and it's just like the most beautiful thing in the world. Figure out how you can integrate into other people's businesses. Does that help? Yes. Because then we do that, we spend a year doing that, spend 3 years doing that, and then you can cut off Zuckerberg. I'm done. Cut off paid ads, just retire, and everyone else's businesses are growing, your business grows on the back end because of it, which is awesome. Do you have a question? Yes, I'd love your opinion on the places that aggregate a whole bunch of affiliates like ClickBank.com. Yes, great question. So I'm a big— again, this is going to be different for everyone's market, but affiliate networks are nice because they've aggregated affiliates. So ClickBank.com, for example, if you go there, there's a whole marketplace with thousands of products and they have— and affiliates come and they can promote things. So what I typically do, and what we do all the time, but like if I'm going to a new business, I'll go to ClickBank and I'll go find the top 20, 30 offers and I sign up for all their affiliate programs. And when you do that, you get on all their lists. And what's typically happening is most of these affiliate programs are doing affiliate launches. And so they'll send out links like, "Hey, we did our affiliate launch. Here's the top 10 affiliates." And boom, they show you, here's the top 10 affiliates by name. And guess what you do? You look up their name on Facebook. You become friends with them. You send them a present in the mail. All of a sudden, like, the top 10 affiliates, all, like, you can ask, a lot of times, people will come in, in fact, we had a guy at Secrets to Success, he never promoted anything ever. He promoted, he was like the top 2 or 3 affiliate, and he's like, Man, I did that one affiliate promotion, he's like, it's so crazy, I've had like 50 people reach out to me to promote their offer. I'm like, yeah, it's because you're on the top 10 list. And so if there's affiliates happening in your business, like join everyone's affiliate program, sign up for them, and just start watching what they're doing, because typically that's some version that's happening where they're talking about the top 10 affiliates, and you start getting to know who the affiliates are, you get to know their affiliate managers. It's all, again, it's just a relationship business. And so I try to get to know the affiliate managers in all the different programs, because they have access to all of their dream affiliates, right? A lot of times, we've literally had it before where we'll ask the affiliate manager like, "Man, you guys are awesome." Like, we'll have a good conversation. I'm like, "Who are you guys' top affiliates?" And they'll literally be like, "Here's all our top affiliates." And they just give us the info. I'm like, "You just gave me your top affiliates. This is insane." So there's a lot of things like that. In the, like, how to make money on the internet world, obviously there's ClickBank, there's other ones. There's a whole bunch of aggregates that have those kind of things. I'm not sure about other industries if that's as applicable, but if you can find it, it's a big part of it. Great question. Any other affiliate questions? Back here. Well, I agree. The question I have is like, you were talking about the integration marketing. By that psychology, like, is there any special thinking that you do within a affiliate contest launch? Like, for example, I'm thinking of Bridger and Mason's gamification for their events and stuff like that to sell tickets. Are you doing anything like that with how you promote your affiliate launches with like the rewards inside of what comes in the contest? Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. You look on the backend, there's some people who are better than others. Like, again, I'm saying to everyone affiliate launches, I'm always watching it. The ones that can do the gamification is a big deal, where they're always doing prizes. Like, there's a weekend prize, there's a Thursday, whoever gets the most sales today, whoever gets the most opt-ins today. Like, you'll get Dean, Dean does a great job of this when Dean and Tony launches, where it's like, alright, this weekend we're doing a leads contest. Whoever gets the most leads, we're sending out an iPad. Whoever gets the most leads, you're gonna get this. And so everyone's fighting for leads. And the next day it's like, there's another thing, and they're competing, and then every day it's like talking trash between number 2 and number 3 and number 1, and like it's this whole like, trash-talking game, and it's competitive and it's fun, and like the best launches have a lot of those kind of things, a lot of gamification amongst the affiliates in there. And again, that's why you should join everyone's affiliate launches. Like if you guys, how many of you guys are affiliates of Dean and Tony's? Okay, how many of you guys are affiliates of Stu McLaren? Okay, like both these programs are launching in the next like 30 days. Like go and join it, get in their Facebook group, and just watch, and just pretend, like just look and look at the games that are happening behind the scenes, because they're both really, really good at what they're doing. If you're like, I don't know how to get to Stu's affiliate program, I don't know, go type in Stu McLaren product launch, or whatever the name of his course launch, and like anytime you see the launch happening, people are promoting stuff, like search for the product name and like JV affiliate, go to the Facebook, usually there's a Facebook group for almost every affiliate launch, where all the affiliates are in there together, they're talking and hanging out, and like just start looking for those things and start plugging yourself in, because that's when you start, That's where you'll see this happening, you'll see the games, you can model for what you're doing, plus again you can start stealing their affiliates and building relationships with the top people and that kind of stuff. So, I mean, meeting their top affiliates. Yeah. So, good questions. Okay. Any more before— I got 2 more things and— Alright. I'll think about that. I'll think about putting together something. It's actually funny, Stu McLaren and I, man, almost, probably close to 20 years ago now. When we first met, Stu was the affiliate manager for Dan Kennedy's business, Armand Morins, and Alex Mendoza. He was the affiliate manager for all these guys, and I had my own affiliate program back then. I think I had 38,000 affiliates for my program way back 20 years ago. And so we came together and we did an event called Affiliate Inferno, which taught people how to run and launch their own affiliate program. And it was like, we did a 3 or 4 day event. Man, it was really, really cool, but I haven't really talked about that kind of stuff for a long time, so I'll look at putting together something for you guys that could be more like a more complete thing to really help, because I think, again, my whole goal in life is how do I, like, all the things I can do right now to decrease my dependence on Mark Zuckerberg, the better. So like everything, that's my number one goal right now, is everything. And so this is such such a big focus for what we're doing. All these other things we're doing, just to focus more on affiliates, advertising networks, everything that's not related to those guys. And so I think for all of you guys, just to protect yourselves for future, like understanding affiliate marketing and being able to build that part out in your business is, I don't know, I think it's detrimental. If you read the Traffic Secrets book, like the intro is like, if you read the intro, it's like, there's a storm coming. And like I was talking about this, like right now, when I'm writing this, Facebook's the greatest thing in the world, we all love it, but the storm's coming, I promise Like right now, like, I feel like we're in that. It's getting harder and harder. It's not going to get easier. And so now is the time to really start focusing on these other alternative methods that are powerful.