The Right Way To Leverage Affiliates and Joint Venture Relationships

Where do you go for the best traffic? Hey there and welcome back to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. In today's episode, we get to listen to a very special guest. Dave D is going to be interviewing Jeff Johnson. Now, Jeff Johnson is the internet marketing warlock. He's helped thousands of small businesses and taught them how to build their business using affiliates and joint venture relationships. This is the highest quality, easiest to scale traffic. When you do it right. Now, Jeff is going to overdeliver and give you 12 steps you can do. Not all of these need to be taken step by step. The first couple definitely, but the rest of these are all something that you can do flexibly as you grow. Literally, if you're looking to grow your business and you want to do it in the fastest way possible without having all the risk up front, this is the magic strategy you've been looking for. Let's listen to Dave D and Jeff Johnson.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy.

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Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Hey everybody, it's Dave D., and welcome to this session of List Building School. I have with me a very, very special guest. His name is Jeff Johnson. Jeff entered the internet marketing space in his spare time, but became so successful that he quickly walked away from a high six-figure income as a stockbroker He has never looked back. I'm sure, Jeff, you're having much more fun now than you did as a stockbroker. Would I be correct in assuming that?

Most definitely.

Today, all Jeff needs is an internet connection and boy, he is in business. This guy can almost create money out of thin air. He is known in some circles as a warlock, an internet marketing warlock, because he can conjure income anytime, anywhere. Free from any anchors or limits. From his 11 years of experience of cutting-edge and current successes, he has worked with thousands of small business owners and teaching them how to build their lists via affiliates and joint venture relationships. He's going to go through it step-by-step for you right here on this List Building School call. Jeff, thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Fantastic. By the end of this call, this is what you're going to have discovered. You're going to have discovered how to find affiliates. Android Venture Partners and how to get them to send you their highest quality leads and customers and build your list for free. This is a wonderful way for you to start building your list if you don't have a lot of money and if you're just starting from, from scratch. This is a really, really good way to get going. So Jeff, let's go through the steps. You laid them out for us here in a wonderful blueprint and a wonderful checklist. Let's start with step number 1, which is You say it's to create an offer that converts leads into money. So why don't you explain that a little bit?

Well, you have to remember that you're trying to get people to send you their highest quality customers, their buyers, and their leads to build your list to buy your products and services. Well, an affiliate or JV partner probably won't want to do that if there's no chance for them to make money. So you have to make sure that you have an offer that converts visitors into money. So you set up your product, you do your split testing, and the general rule is that a decent affiliate won't even look at an offer that doesn't generate at least $1 earnings per click, which means for every visitor they send you, they want to make at least $1 in earnings back. So what I generally tell my clients to do first is to put your offer together and split test to the point where you know that, hey, even on cold traffic, whether it's paid traffic or your own traffic, I can make at least $1 per visitor. That's an earnings per click, whatever you want to call it. They call it both. So that's what you need to do. Now, $1 is the minimum, so if you're dealing in ClickBank, which which is an affiliate network that's very popular online for information products. So I'm sure your people have heard about it because you're info products as well as small business. Well, those guys want at least a dollar. But for me, when I look at something, I want to make— know I can make at least 5 or 6 because it costs me more than a buck to acquire a customer generally in some situations. So we take a look at it and say, okay, can we make $5 per visit? Can we make $30? In fact, I've made $40 or $50 per click. Well, when you've got an offer that makes that kind of money for an affiliate, they're magnetically attracted to you. They come to you. They'll seek you out and say, "Hey, I see all my buddies are making money with your product. I've looked inside the affiliate networks. I see that you're earning all this money. I want to have a piece of it." So that's the first step. You want to make sure that they know they're going to be at least have a hope of making some decent money by sending you traffic.

Yeah, and I think a lot of mistakes that rookies make, people who are just beginning, they see all like the big launches and everything like that. They've never really done anything. They don't have an offer that hasn't been tested and they think, "Oh, I'm just going to contact all of these big affiliates who are promoting everything else and boy, I'm going to get rich really, really quick." You got to do some work ahead of that before you start approaching the large affiliates, don't you?

Yes, most definitely. I mean, I won't even— if they come out of nowhere, if I know somebody on referral, maybe, but you have to remember the affiliate mentality is, "Okay, what's in it for me? How much am I going to make?" And am I sure I'm going to get paid? Those are two of the biggest things an affiliate or potential JV partner is going to look at. So, hey, have your numbers. And I know Dan and I know you guys teach it because I've been following you guys for at least 25 years now. And it's all about knowing your lifetime value of customers and also about knowing your offers and stepping them up as much as possible through upsells, backend offers, and everything else to increase that value of each person that gets sent to your lead funnel.

Let's talk about that just for a little bit because I think where a lot of— again, I'm using the term rookie. I'm channeling John Carlton right now. But the term rookie means that someone is just getting started. I think another thing that they think is, well, you know what, I'm only going to give money to the affiliate on the front end, on the first sale, and then I'm going to suck up all the money on the back end. What are your thoughts on that?

I don't like that. I have made millions promoting other people's products in a single year. It's big money to be made, so I'm not speaking as a rookie. I want people to know that. You're definitely not a rookie. I do sell my own products and services as well, so I live and breathe both sides of the equation. For me, even when they're a friend, I get really really disappointed when I'm promoting somebody and then you send them all these leads and let's say it's a launch situation and the cart's open for a week and they close the cart down and then they turn the cookies off immediately. That has happened to me multiple times. And at that point, I start to get to the point where I don't want to do business with them anymore. And for me, we always pay, depending on which product it is, we go anywhere from 6 months to a lifetime for those cookies. So subsequent sales that are being made I have affiliates that are still making money from 8 or 9 years ago. That's not an exaggeration. They put them in the continuity programs and we still pay them out. And I think, I think in order to attract the widest possible audience for affiliates or JV partners, you need to make it as attractive as possible. So you should say, hey, my cookies are good for at least 6 months. They're good for a lifetime. We don't pay you an upfront sell. You have potential to make earnings on the back end. So for some of my offers, I say, okay, you're— Your upfront potential may be $498, but we've got other products that we're selling them once they get into the funnel where you can net $2,000 or $3,000 on the sale as well, and I will pay you that commission. So I think it's important that you do be very generous. You have to understand you're getting leads that you don't have to pay for until they buy something. You're getting sales that you wouldn't have if they hadn't sent you the leads in the first place. And what better incentive to get those people to tell all their friends, word-of-mouth marketing, that you're a great person to do business with if they themselves know that, hey, I have a potential to make more money. I have affiliates that will say, "Hey, I've gotten 50 notices this month. I haven't promoted in 6 months." I said, "Yeah, congratulations. It's an early Christmas present for you." And that's because we like to make sure we take care of our partners.

So I guess the simplest way to do it is think about what you would want, right?

As if you—

what would you want as an affiliate? Well, you'd want to be paid on the whole, not, you know, on the backend as well. And again, it goes right to what you're saying, which is the fundamental step 1. You need at least a dollar per click, or with someone like you, you're looking for $5 or $6 per click. Sometimes the only way to get that is from the backend, right?

Absolutely.

Okay, so let's assume now that everyone has an offer, it converts, it's proven. Now they've got to go find some affiliates, they've got to go find some JV partners. Let's talk about exactly how to do that. You've got a number of steps in precisely how to do that. By the way, just so everybody knows, Jeff's kind of like an underground guy. He makes millions of dollars because he's actually doing it. He does teach it too, but he makes millions of dollars by actually doing it. As he said, he's not a rookie. He's literally the best in the world. That's why we really wanted him on List Building School. Let's talk about step number 2. Well, you are. There's very few people, Jeff, that do what you do., and do it effectively.

Now there's a lot of people that teach it. Yes, there are, as you know.

Okay, okay, we won't go there. All right, step number 2, you, you say it's to start an affiliate prospecting database. Let's get into that.

Yes, well, I don't know if you know it, but I was a sales trainer and a stockbroker for years, and when I used to train people in the region, the stockbrokers, I told them that the first thing they need always, which back then was index cards, is they needed a prospecting database. And we used 3x5 or 4x6 cards. And they would keep a record of potential clients and then the conversations they had with those clients. And every time they talked to them, they got closer and closer to making a deal. Well, it still applies for prospecting for affiliates and JV partners. That's what you're doing. You want to find them, right? So you need to make sure that you're able to consistently follow up, know what you talked about the last time, know what you sent them, know what they're interested in, what type of products they offer. Those types of things that help you close the deal. By closing the deal, I mean get them to promote for you. The first thing you need to do is set up a database. You can use Infusionsoft. You can use Office Autopilot. You can use Outlook. We've used Business Contact Manager that's part of the Outlook system. We've used them all. We even have one of our affiliate guys still likes just to use Google Docs, which is free, and he puts his database in there, his contact records for it. You need to have a contact database of some sort set up so you can keep track of who you want to go after and if you have contacted them, what it was you talked about the last time you spoke. And that's the first step.

That way you're not lost. How do you go about finding these affiliates though? I mean, okay, so I've got my database set up, but now how do I go find these guys?

Where do I go find them? Well, okay, I guess the best way is going back to what we talked about earlier when I said word gets around that you're doing a good job making people money. So if you have the opportunity to take your product and actually set it up inside an affiliate network such as ClickBank, DealGuardian, CJ.com, LinkShare, well, those are networks where there are hundreds of thousands of affiliates that are looking for offers to promote. But they're pretty smart, so they'll take a look at the analytics that are in those networks and say, hey, this guy's making so much money per sale, they're making per visitor this value. So if you can get a product that converts well inside one of those affiliate networks, the big boys are sitting by it with software that analyzes all that stuff. And there will be a flag that goes up on their desktop that says, "Hey, there's a new offer that just came available in the market that I'm interested in. He's making $5 or $6 earnings per click." Boom, they will find you. And once one of them finds you, once one of them finds you, then their friends know that they're promoting you as well because One of the other things we'll talk about is getting on everyone's list. So they say, hey— and we've done this in markets we have absolutely no experience in. One thing I'm big about teaching my clients and my students is we teach them, we go to get the proof of concept first. And they'll say, well, Jeff, you're Jeff, you've got the name, you've got the list. And I'll say, okay, pick a market. Pick a market. We'll go in a market we have no name in, we have no affiliate partners in, no JV partners, and we've been doing this since 2005 for our clients. And we've gone into some highly competitive markets this way. We still do it to this very day just to prove that this works. One of the best ways is get an offer, plug it into ClickBank or something else, and if you've got the numbers, all you need is one guy to come to you and they start coming to you. You don't have to worry about going out to get them. That doesn't mean you don't want to go out and get them. Trust me, you do, and we'll talk about that. But that's the easiest way to get started. So if you have the opportunity to take a product and put it in one of the networks, do it. And ClickBank for info products is probably one of the most popular.

Perfect. Perfect. I mean, that's fantastic. And again, really easy, and ClickBank makes it super crazy easy to do. So I mean, you can just go sign up with them and you can do it. All right, that's fantastic. I didn't know about the— that was great. I love doing these calls because I always learn so much myself. I didn't know about that, that like the top, like you say, the big boys, they were alerted when something's going well. And then they'll come to you. That's awesome. That's really cool. All right.

All right.

So now we've got our step number 2. So let's just review the steps. Step number 1 is, hey, you got to come up with an offer that works, all right, that's making money, all right. Step number 2 is to start an affiliate prospecting database. And so the people who you want to contact and then the conversation that you had with that person. What it resulted of, what the result of the conversation was. Step number 3 is, again, you say sell your product through affiliate network like ClickBank, DealGuardian, Commission Junction, LinkShare. You mentioned that ClickBank is phenomenal for info products. Same with DealGuardian, isn't it?

DealGuardian good for—

Definitely. What about if I don't have an info product though? What one would you recommend? Let's say I'm not in the info business but rather in another type of business.

CJ.com can do info products, also physical goods or services, and so can LinkShare. Those are two of the big players that are out there. Okay, so if you're doing— Spanish language courses. Yeah. Whatever it is. Physical products, yes. CJ.com and LinkShare are two of the big ones you can play with. Perfect.

Then when you look at your checklist that Jeff has created for you here, you can see again— so I just want to clarify, ClickBank and DealGuardian. If you're going to be doing info products, CJ.com, which is Commission Junction, and LinkShare are two great— now there's other ones, but those are the four that you would recommend people get started with. Would you put it on more? Can you put it on more than one network? So can I put my info product on ClickBank and DealGuardian?

Yes, you can put it on more than one. The problem with that though is unless you know it's really getting a lot of affiliate traction, That's a lot of overhead. You've got to keep two distinctly different affiliate programs running. They have different links, they have different reporting, different payment systems, all that stuff. So there's a lot of overhead, but it's perfectly possible and acceptable if you get an offer that really converts. Got it. I wouldn't start it that way. I'd make sure I'd start with one and see if you can—

Pick one of them. Pick one of them. So Jeff, the question I have then, just going, sticking on step number 3 here. With ClickBank though, in the past they only allowed you to sell, quite frankly, a lower-priced product. What about if you've got a $2,000 product?

How do you go about doing that? ClickBank does accept $2,000 products now. They do, okay. Typically, they'll want to have a relationship with you, but I also know that if you can get an endorsement from someone that they trust, They'll let you come in with your first product at $2,000. So you can sell $500, $1,500, $2,000 products through ClickBank. I don't think I've seen higher than a $2,000 offer, but you're right, that used to be the way for years and years. That was the biggest problem we had because we sell high-end products. We sell $2,000 to $25,000 or more. So they changed it a couple of years ago, and they also changed a couple of years ago where ClickBank used to only be an electronic digital delivery system. You could only sell digital copies of your products. However, they now allow you also to sell physical copies of your product. Right, which— not everyone gets approval right out of the gate. You might have to start with a lower-priced offer and show that you're legitimate and that your offer makes run. But as soon as you ramp it up, let's say a month or two down the road, you can go back to them and say, hey, do you mind if I start selling a DVD? Do you mind if I start selling a "$2,000 course," and chances are good they'll say yes if you run a clean business.

Right, exactly. Well, that's the key to run a clean business. The other thing that you could do is have a lower-priced lead-in product and then on the back end have your $2,000 product too if you don't get approved. The affiliate's not going to care. All they care about is as long as they're getting paid on it, they think that's wonderful.

Step number 4.

Is you say to subscribe to all of the lists in your market. Why do you subscribe to all of the lists in your market?

Two reasons. First of all, you want to see what products are available. You want to know who's selling what, what the price points are, which offers look the best. So if you subscribe to every list in your marketplace and you see the same offer pop up in your inbox 10 times in a week, then chances are it's an affiliate offer and it's converting well. So you can either go and take a look at it and approach the people and say, hey, I'd be interested in promoting it myself because it's all about relationships. I mean, we'll talk about this later, I think, in today's presentation, but it's about giving more than you receive, especially upfront. So you're keeping an eye on what's happening in the marketplace. You want to know who's selling products as an affiliate. It's great competitive intelligence. And if you see people selling products as an affiliate, you enter that information into your Prospect database. So what we keep in ours is the name of the person, the name of the product, the market of the product. So let's say it's an info product in dog training or it's eBay marketing or it's small business marketing. Also the price points. So in our prospecting database we keep all that information, not just the names. We want to know what types of products are they selling, the price points, and are they physical, are they info products, what markets they track to. So that's information there. You dump it into your affiliate prospecting database and then you can follow up them later. So it's competitive intelligence seeing what's being sold successfully, what the most popular offers are, but at the same time you get to also see who's promoting affiliate offers. You know that you don't have to explain to them what an affiliate offer is. I mean, that's the biggest pain in the butt. Would you have to go to someone and explain to them that you'll give them 30% if they sell your product and you make a sale? All right, let's think you're selling Amway. Trust me, it's not worth the hassle. The easiest way is to approach people who already understand what affiliate marketing is. That, you know, if they're promoting these affiliate products to their mailing list, they could potentially sell your product as well. It's a much easier approach. So that's just really used as a competitive intelligence tool, prospecting and also from a standpoint of what's selling well in the marketplace these days. And that's what we use it for. Subscribe to everyone's list.

So you would suggest then that if— so if you would suggest going to an affiliate and saying, hey, I'd love to promote your product, doing something for the affiliate first before asking them to do something for you?

Absolutely. That is absolutely the way that works best for us. My affiliate manager will tell you the same thing too, is that you can go to them and say you make all kinds of money, but generally it's all about relationships and sales. People buy from you because they like you. They want to do business with people they like. It's all about the abundance mindset, not the scarcity. I personally, when someone sends me an email and says, "Oh, Jeff, you should mail for me. We're going to make a ton of money together. I've got a $7 product and you'll get half." What they mean is, "Jeff, I'm going to steal your list and make a ton of money." Not us doing business together, it's them. That's not the way it works best. So you reach out to them. For example, I was running traffic for selling on eBay products years ago, back in 2003, 2004, before we developed our own version. I was sending the traffic to a couple different sources. One of them was making me 3 times as much money on the front end as the other. However, the other source is a person that I really wanted to get to know because he was an expert in the market. I am marketing overall, and I wanted to get to know him, so even though I was taking a hit on the front end, I was sending him 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 visitors a month. That's before I even had a mailing list. That was just pure search engine traffic. Sure enough, he reached out to me and said, "Man, where are you getting all this traffic?" I told him. Friendship, business partnership, and we're still good friends to this very day, 11 years later. That's the best way to do it. For us, when we're prospecting, we don't reach out and say, "Hey, can you sell our stuff?" If we do, it's because we probably know them or we also make it very clear that we'd like to do business together. Together. I would be more than happy to return the favor. Right now we've got something that's going on. Please let us know what your promotional calendar is, what launches you have. We'd be happy to return the favor. I mean, we go out of our way to let them know that we're in this together, not just them promoting me. I mean, if somebody I approach, if I want to do business with them to the point where I'm approaching them, well, I'm willing also to let them know that I will return the favor. Obviously you can't return the favor for everyone.

I've got 15,000 affiliates and there's no way I can send one click.

But the top guys that you want to deal with, the best way is to let them know. I've done that over and over again in the marketplace. Go for the people that are big. Sincerely approach them by promoting their products first. I mean, if someone walks up to you and says, "Hey Dave, I bought your $25,000 training program," are you going to listen to what he has to say for at least 30 seconds? Sure, of course. Versus, "I've been a subscriber for years. I don't buy anything from you because it's all overpriced, but hey, could you sell my products for me?" And you hear it all the time, completely different scenario. Yeah, absolutely.

And I just want to remind everybody what's really cool about this particular List Building School session is that you're learning really two things. You're really learning how to make money as an affiliate, but you're also learning how to build your list, which is the whole point of this. This is— before we keep going to the other steps, Jeff, let's talk about why this is— we should have probably talked about this at the beginning. Why is this such a brilliant way to develop your list?

Well, just the list. We're not talking about the money part, right?

Yeah, just the list part, because there's a lot of money in that list.

Yeah, yeah. Well, you don't have to pay anything upfront for a list that's built through your JV partners. They send the, they send the traffic to you, to your lead funnel. You add them to your list. You don't have to pay for that traffic. Only if they make a sale for you do you have to give them a commission split. A lot of people say, "Well, that means I'm paying for it." Well, no. That's a sale that you didn't have before this person sent you that lead. So for me, it's free money. I get 50% or 60% and you get 40% or 50%. So when you're building a list like this, it's free. We've added— I think our biggest in 2 weeks is 35,000 or 40,000 people in a 2-week period added to our list for free. Through affiliates and JV partners. We've done this repeatedly multiple times a year. Maybe 60,000 I think might have been the number. Well, those were all free until I made a sale. Then we turned around and sold several million dollars worth of product to those people. Well, yeah, I paid out a 40% commission, but I'll guarantee you there's no way I would have done those $2 million in sales in a week if I hadn't have gotten those leads from my affiliate partners in the first place. It's free money. As far as I'm concerned. I always try to tell my wife and my staff that it's not an expense if it's an investment in growing your business, and affiliate commissions are an investment in growing your business. I don't look at it as an expense.

Well, yeah, and anytime you're building your list, there is an expense involved, right? I mean, anytime you do it, even if you're doing search engine stuff, you've got your time and you've got all that kind of stuff involved. This is the way that you're actually building your list and you're making money at the same time. It's a pretty good deal. Okay. All right. So we subscribe to all the lists, which is step number 4. Step number 5 is you say use a formal product launch to attract affiliates and JV partners. What exactly do you mean by a formal product launch?

Well, that means that 2 or 3 months in advance at least, you let everyone know that, hey, I've got an a new product that's coming out. We're launching it to the public. So Apple doesn't just say, here's my new iPad, buy it. They let us know for months something new is coming. They don't tell us what it is. They build up the anticipation. They get the press notified. And then the press starts talking about it. And it gets on all the news shows and all the radio shows. And it starts building up anticipation for what do you think they're going to introduce next? Well, product launches online do the same thing. Even offline you can do it. And that's where you just draw a line in the sand and you say, okay, we're going to go into a formal product launch mode, which means we're going to introduce a new version an existing product or a new product altogether. You let your affiliates know that it's coming up. You treat it like it's an event leading up to it, and there's a whole formal system that you follow leading up to it. But then you open the doors and you say, okay, the pre-launch has begun, and your affiliates start sending you leads. They start sending leads into your lead funnel, and you're building your list for free because at this point you're not paying them a penny. There's nothing even for sale yet because you haven't opened the cart. You haven't made the product offer. But a formal product launch just helps you build excitement, build anticipation, helps you attract affiliates in advance and say, okay, we're going to have this deal. Now a product launch is a good thing that works well, especially because it's not so competitive, but it's competitive much more than it used to be. You know, people like to give away big prizes. So if you let them know, hey, we've got this big launch coming up, we're giving away a $50,000 first place prize, we're giving away dozens of iPads, people love the Apple stuff. And you just let them know it's coming. There has to be a date. You can't just one day wake up and say, "Okay, I'm doing a launch. Let's get started." No, you have to let people know. They have to put it on the promotional calendars. And then we're going to talk a little bit later about going to JV brokers and JV broker sites and announcing it in advance. They need to know what's coming down the road. There's a whole strategy to it, but there's nothing like a product launch to build your list for free. Like you say, if they don't buy anything, you don't have to pay them anything for those leads. You still get to keep the leads and fortunately they probably will buy something from you and it can be big business. So there's nothing— if you really want to have a concentrated, focused way to build your list as quickly as possible for free, product launch is a great way to do it. But I'll warn you that if you're new in the business, unless you have good connections, unless you have a name or at least great connections. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's going to be really hard for you to just come out of the gate on your first launch as an unknown and have people send you 20,000, 30,000 leads. But it's a learning process. It's a relationship-building process, and then you start slowly and saying, okay, your first one might be a couple hundred thousand dollars. People know that they get paid. They trust you. They like you. They know that their offer is making money. You return the favor for them. And then the next time you have another launch, they say, "Oh yeah, I did his last launch. I made money. He paid me on time. He returned the favor for me." Word spreads. Everybody talks to somebody else in their marketplace. I don't care if you're a restaurant owner. I don't care if you're an info products marketer, if you own fitness studios. You talk to a network of people. Word gets around. So if you build a reputation for paying on time, for having an offer that converts, that you return the favor, that you're respectful of the time, Then after each subsequent launch, they just get bigger and bigger.

And again, it really goes back to step number 1 is before you— and again, the reason these are in steps, do step 1, step 2, step 3, and do them in order is again, you got to make sure— I think a lot of people want to jump to step number 5, which is do the formal product launch before creating an offer that converts, right? So you got to start with step number 1. Which is what Jeff talked about at the very top of this call, which is create an offer that converts, that leads to money before you ever think about doing a big product launch. Because then, you know, that's the surest way for people to find out that you don't know what you're doing real fast. They probably won't promote you anyway. Step number 6 again is give away huge prizes. Step number 7 is to now ask your customers to sign up for your affiliate program and promote your product.

Ask your customers.

So talk about that a little bit.

Well, Dave, can I say one thing real quick? Yeah, go ahead. The step 1, which is get an offer that converts, is absolutely the first step. And step 2 is set up your prospecting database, absolutely second step you want to do. But the rest of them don't necessarily have to come in the order that they're listed. I just want to make that clear. So the first 2 you have to, they have to be done first and foremost. But the rest of them, you know what, you don't have to do all of them, they don't have to necessarily be in the order. But start with an offer that converts, prospecting database, and then work through the rest of them at your leisure. So going back, this one is ask your customers to sign up for your affiliate program and promote your product. Well, who better than a happy customer to promote your product for you? You're probably also, as you teach, asking for a testimonial from them. And you can say, hey, you bought the product, you like the product, how'd you like to make some extra money? All you got to do is tell people how much you've enjoyed it. And they sign up, and if you're lucky, they have a big list or they have a sphere of influence where a lot of people pay attention to what they do, and you're off to the races. That's really all it is.

So just email your own current customer base, people who are happy, and ask them to sign up for the affiliate program and What are the— what's the— I don't want to get deep into this, but just to make sure that everyone understands this completely. So am I still running this through like a ClickBank or Commission Junction or a DealGuardian?

Absolutely, you can if you want. Whatever you want to do. But by asking your customers, you're doing two things. One, you're finding potential affiliates. If you don't have a big network yet, you've got some customers because you've been split testing your offer. Those people are happy with your products. Also, how powerful is an offer coming from someone if they say, "I own the product. I love the product. Here's what I've been able to achieve with the product. You should buy it." That's much more powerful than some guy who's never bought your product and he's just in it for the commission and says, "Hey, buy this product." So for me, a lot of times when I'm promoting affiliate products, I'll go out and I'll buy the $2,000, $3,000 product just so I can say I own it. It's on my shelf. I refer to it.

And yeah, that's totally, totally right. I, I mean, I sold, um, a while ago we sold, um, GKIC sold the Dan Kennedy license. Actually, GKIC didn't sell it, but a license to Dan Kennedy's products were for sale, and I bought that license, and I sold a ton of the Kennedy products long before I came on board at GKIC. Simply because exactly what you said. I used them. I knew that they worked, and, and that passion came through and sold, you know, I sold a ton of them basically on an affiliate basis, on a licensee basis. So you're absolutely right. All right, so then you say step number 8 is to search leaderboards in your market. First of all, what the heck are leaderboards?

A leader— a leaderboard are the top affiliates promoting a particular product, especially during a product launch. So during a product launch launch, if you do an update, we say, hey, here's the leaderboards. Here's the guys that are at the top. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. And it's pretty standard in our info product business. Different markets, but info products online especially, everyone knows a leaderboard are the top producers for a particular product launch. And all you have to do for this— so those are the guys that can move products, right? So if you have a product you want to sell and you're prospecting for affiliates What better way than to take a look at the leaderboards? So when I get email updates of leaderboards, I will forward them to my affiliate team, and what do you think they'll do with it? Right? They'll put it in our affiliate prospecting database. Of course, right. The product that's being promoted, the price point that's being promoted, who the person is. Now you might not necessarily— here's something we didn't talk about— you might not necessarily have the contact information yet, but guess what? It's the internet age, so there are very few situations where my affiliate team can't take lead that I give them as a prospect, for affiliate prospects, where they can't go out and find their Facebook page or their Twitter account or even a contact form on their own website to contact them. Now, I don't think you should contact them in public, meaning I'm not a big fan of people who come to my Facebook page and my Twitter page and say, "Hey, Jeff, I've got this great product. We're going to make $5 million together." I'm talking about contacting them directly one-on-one. So you get the names and you can hunt them down. It's not hard to do these days. And you put all that information into your prospecting database, affiliate prospecting database. So leaderboards too, if you're not, even if you don't have the emails yet, let's say you're not subscribed to a lot of emails yet, you're getting those, or you're entering into a new market, all you have to do is go to Google and type in leaderboard for whatever the primary keywords, phrases are for your product, for the product or market that you're running into. So leaderboard. SEO software leaderboard, teach a dog a new trick leaderboard, you'll be amazed how many dozens of results pop up. And it's printed for you to go over. It's competitive intelligence that's worth a fortune. We have been collecting thousands and thousands of names into our prospecting database for affiliates for years. We still do it. Here's a new leaderboard, shoot it off to the team, they put it in the database. And then they become people we reach out to and say, okay. The nice thing too is if you're keeping your database set up so you know that here's the markets they specialize in, you put tags that are in there and you say here's the price points that they specialize in, then you know. So okay, well this guy usually can sell $97 products. We've got a $3,000 product. You might reach out to him, but it's not going to be a number one priority. Your number one priority is to go to the leaderboard records or your prospecting database records where you've tagged it to say this person can sell $2,000 products. Oh, his name has shown up on 20 different leaderboards in my marketplace for $2,000. I mean, high-quality leads is what you're looking for, and that's a great way to do it. If you see a name come up over and over again, boom. We used to color-code leads on our contact cards as a stockbroker. I used to teach the guys to do that. Little stickers you'd get, and you'd put them on the cards, and if they're hot, you know, they're green, blue, red, yellow, depending on how hot or cold they were as a lead. Well, you do the same thing in contact databases these days. You just put a tag in there. Fantastic.

Fantastic. Love it.

All right.

So we got step number 9 now, which is one I'm really interested in, which is list your product in joint venture sites and forums. And you mentioned JVNotifyPro.com. What exactly are these sites? What exactly do they do for you?

Well, it's a gathering place for people to come that are interested in either listing their products to try to attract affiliates to promote their products, or they go to find products that are being offered by other people so they can promote them as an affiliate. Remember this: if you're not both selling products as an affiliate, meaning somebody else's products as an affiliate, and also selling your own products through affiliate channels, you're missing out on half the money. You can do both and make— you make more money, in my experience, by doing both than just one or the other. So you've got people that are looking for offers promote to their list, so you put your offer in there and say, "Okay, here's my offer. We have a product that's available." If you have a product launch date, you put that in there. Prizes, you talk about that, and people can find you. Or you can go in there and say, "Well, I want to find some new affiliates," and we start prospecting through there. We're not just interested in what their launches are and stuff, but if there's people who want to contact and we know they have a launch coming up, we can reach out to them and say, hey, we see you got a launch coming up. We'd be glad to help out, build a relationship, add them to your prospecting database, and then you go back later and say, yeah, I was able to send you some traffic, make some sales. By the way, would you mind helping us out? And it's just a prospecting database really online. It's like a forum. It's where people of like mind gather. Now we've tested different ones throughout the years using tracking links so we know traffic that's coming through and whether or not that traffic converts. The last few years, the only one that we've been using exclusively is JV Notify Pro because I know Mike Mertz, the man behind it. He's a good guy. He's also a JV broker, so not only does he put together this neat website where people can go looking for partners to sell their products or looking for products to sell to their own list, but he is a JV broker, which means you can go to him if you pay a certain fee and say, "Hey, Mike." I'm looking for some guys. I've got a product. This is the price point. I'm willing to give you a split. Here's what I'm willing to pay you. Do you have anyone in your own database of relationships that you could recommend? And he'll say yes or no, and he'll give you a list of people. He'll make the introductions for you, and if he works it out so you guys do a deal, he gets commission of the split, and I think it's worth every penny. So there's all kinds of them available, though. If you just go online and search for— Joint venture forums, JV forums, affiliate forums, you'll find hundreds of them.

Got it. All right, so you actually just went through steps 9, 10, and 11, right?

So list your product in joint venture sites and forums.

He's on a roll, man. You can tell, you love this stuff, don't you, Jeff?

I mean, you love it. I absolutely love it.

I can tell by your voice and your passion.

I literally, I've always been a happy person. But making a lot of money and being even happier makes it an even better situation. I still get a kick out of it. I don't care if it's $10. I tell some of my new guys, they talk about how excited they get because they made their first sale. I said, "You know what? I still get excited after 11 years. I don't care if it's $5. It's free money, right?" You email, you get a notification you made money. You say, "$5, woohoo! I can go get a pumpkin spice latte for my wife." A small one, but— It's fun. Okay, so step number 9 is list your product in joint venture sites.

Okay, step number 10 is proactively prospect in those sites for affiliates and JV partners. Step 11 is contact JV brokers. And now, do you pay— I know you mentioned this, so that's why I want to clarify this— you don't— you pay the JV broker upfront, but— or only if there's a deal that's made?

Well, there's two ways that we personally do it. Um, we pay them to do a solo mailing for us to their mailing list. Okay. And that's a flat fee, although they will negotiate a percentage if you want, but I prefer the flat. It's a much better deal for me, right? But, you know, $500, $1,000, all I need to make is one sale and I'm ahead of the game, right? But then for the personal introductions, there's usually a 10% fee that you pay. So if he brings me Someone that sells $100,000 worth of products and I'm paying a 40% commission to the person who sells it, that person gets 40% and then I give the JV broker 10% of his sales.

Some people might think that's crazy, but it's really not because the JV broker can probably get you in front of somebody and make an introduction to somebody that you may not be able to get to yourself.

Absolutely. He can get you in front of people that you wouldn't be able to get in the door with. They have a relationship. They trust him. If Mike goes— and I'm using Mike as an example, and there's a whole bunch of guys— but if they go to their guys and say, "You know what? I got this guy. I trust him. He knows these people. He's got this great product," the chances of him promoting you just went up tenfold versus you trying to say, "Hey, you don't know me, but try to promote my product." And you think about it this way. Multi-billion-dollar corporations, Morgan Stanleys, Merrill Lynches, they've all been built really on the same concept. You come into the brokerage firm and you sit down or you're selling cars, it doesn't matter what it is, they're always paying commissions, referral fees. They know that the salespeople are moving product for them that they couldn't necessarily move themselves. They're multi-billion-dollar companies. You pay to play. You pay to play. You're going to pay something. You're going to pay per click.

You're going to pay for something. Absolutely. The other thing that we didn't talk about which is so valuable is many times your affiliate or your joint venture partner is sending you buyers.

Buyers, right?

Not just people who are looking, but actual buyers. Jeff, when you send traffic to a GKIC launch or we send it to your launch, you're getting buyers, people who have spent money, which are obviously better prospects, better leads, is a better list than just people who are looking for free information.

That's proven. No arguing there. That's the reason we do what we do, is to find the buyers. The funny thing is, they're sending you the best prospects, leads, and potential buyers. They're sending them for free. You don't pay for them until they actually buy something. You know, your teachings, you teach people that that is your golden list. These are our buyers. These people have bought 3 times in the last 6 months, and these people haven't bought in 10 years. Well, I'm going to concentrate on the guys that buy all the time. Right. Exactly. Okay.

Step 12 is to contact people who have related products in affiliate networks like the places that you are listing your product in. So in ClickBank, in DealGuardian, in Commission Junction, in LinkShare. That's pretty self-explanatory. Is there anything you need to add to that? No.

That is pretty self-explanatory, but it works. That's another area to go prospecting for potential affiliates.

All right, so then step number 13 is ask people you know to introduce you to your product.

Can I tell you a quick story though, Dave? Yeah, please do. Please do. I'm not just saying— I've tested all this stuff in markets I don't have a name in, don't have a list in, and it works. For example, 2005, we wanted to introduce an eBay product because one of my clients needed to do something, and they said, "Well, do it in a market you have no experience in." So we did it. We walked in, we listed the product in ClickBank.. Didn't have any affiliates. Didn't have a list. Didn't have a name in the marketplace. And then we went to work. And we started contacting the other people who had products in the same market in ClickBank. Say, "Hey, see, I have a similar product. We're going to promote it for you. We're just getting started out. By the way though, would you mind checking out ours?" And not everyone does it, but man, as soon as we got that first person, first person to say yes for us and they mailed for us, well, what happened? Everybody else in that marketplace is on everyone else's list. So all his buddies saw he mailed and they know that he's a trustworthy guy. They knew that if he's promoting a product it has to be making money and it has to be for a reputable business. So then we started having people coming out of the woodwork contacting us wanting to promote or it made it a lot easier and they said, "Oh yeah, I saw Joe mailed for you last week." And we went from no affiliates, no list, the day we went live with the product to doing $60,000-some-odd in the first 15 days, turned into a 6-figure product the first year easily. Wow. From complete scratch. And it was a $67 product, so we could sell a lot.

Wow.

That's awesome. So these strategies work. I've been teaching students— 2005 is when I finally started teaching this stuff. I was doing it for years before that. And we go out of our way to get proof of concept. And we don't just use our names, we just roll up our sleeves and do what we teach. It works, so please don't just think it doesn't work, give it a shot.

Or don't think you can't do it because you don't have a name, that you're not Jeff Johnson. You mentioned that before. I think that's where a lot of people default to, right, Jeff, is, well, I'm not Jeff Johnson so I can't do it. Well, the steps are right here. I mean, just follow them. Like he said, this is what's so exciting about this whole list building school that we're teaching here is that the people that we that we have as, as the faculty teaching this, they're actually doing it, okay? None of this is theory. This is how Jeff makes his money, right?

So he makes a lot of it.

So just, just follow, just, just do it. All right, uh, step number 14. All right, set up social, uh, a social media.

We missed one. I got a great story. Yeah, ask people, what do we miss? You see the top affiliates and JV partners. Okay, yes, I had a good story to tell on that one, so I I know we jumped past it. Ask people you know to introduce you to their top affiliates and JV partners. People aren't— they don't think this would work. It works. You have to remember, your affiliates are your salespeople. So a lot of people think, well, they're going to be closely guarded. They'll never give me their affiliate names. Really? Because they also send you their best prospects and buyers for your lead gen. So trust me, they'll do it. And I've done this many times where I've gone to people and said, hey, I've got a new product coming up. I've noticed some people on your leaderboard. Would you make a personal induction for me? And they'll do it. And that person turns out to be a great salesperson for me. Also, one time I went to a person and said, hey— and I've actually done several times where we swapped out lists and I said, hey, I'll mail my affiliates a recommendation to promote your product if you do the same for me. Well, one of the times this guy comes back to me and says, I'll do better than that. He gave me an Excel spreadsheet with 13,000 names of people who had sold a product in the last 6 months for him. Wow. Gave me their names, their email address, their physical mailing address. Holy crap, that was gold. That doesn't happen all the time, but you never know what's going to happen. But we have used it successfully where a lot of people mail for us to recommend our product to their affiliate list. I'll do it for them or just individuals. We'll say, hey, we've been trying to get a hold of this person. We noticed he's been one of your leaderboard— on your leaderboard several times. Will you make the introduction?

Yes.

Happens all the time. It's a great way to pick up new affiliates.

And again, just to go back to something we talked about earlier, when you're going in and asking for the— you're always giving first. You're always asking how you can help first or how you can do something for them. As opposed to just being a leech that's trying to suck up things. That doesn't work. I mean, you really— this is really like you were saying, a relationship business.

We have prior relationship when we do that type of stuff, definitely.

Oh yeah. Okay, so let's talk about step number 14. I've understood everything that you've talked about so far, and I've heard it, I've known it, but this one— set up a social media listening post. Okay, what are you talking about now, Jeff? What is a social media listening post.

Okay, you know what your market is or the market you want to enter into. You know what the product names are. You know what the people's names are. So you take a software program such as Hootsuite, which used to have a free version. I think they still do as a matter of fact. And you go into these social media tools and you set up these listening posts. And you can say, okay, I'm interested in this market. Here's a list of the keyword phrases that I want you to scan the internet for. Scan Facebook. Scan Twitter, the forums. Find anywhere online. Where people are talking about these particular keyword phrases. And when you find them, let me know where they are. Because once you let me know where they are, we go there and we join in the conversation. We start to see what they're talking about. We become a member of the community. And then we start the relationship which hopefully will lead to someone sign up for our affiliate program for us. So social media listening post is a software that does the work for you. You just have to tell it what you want it to listen for. And it's amazing what they can find for you. And there's all kinds of tools. Hootsuite, Hootsuite, H-O-O-T-S-U-I-T-E, is one we've used for years. And it's probably one of the more popular ones. But there's all kinds of them. And you could probably type in social listening tool and things like that. And that's just a great way to join in the conversation. Now, as an affiliate marketer, you could also make money By going over and joining in the conversations and then after you become a valued member of the community, you recommend products and services. Don't be a jerk and just show up and put your link out, but we've taught this technique as well. Become a valued member of the community before you try to sell your own stuff. Once you become a valued member, then you can do it. We did a test run for one of our launches earlier this year and it was amazing. We had to do it. Stupid Sales, and driving 100,000+ people to our video and getting dozens of comments and shares. And that's all we did. We went over, joined the community where we saw the conversation happening, become a valued member, which means we contributed. We recommended other people's stuff. We said, hey, Sue, great article. Hey, Joe, did you see this video that Larry posted over here? You guys really check this out. And then only after that point we become a member, and it doesn't take more than an hour or two. Then you can say, "Hey, we just posted our own video. Would you guys mind checking it out and letting us know what you think? Maybe leave us a thumbs up like, leave a comment for us." So you get the whole social media engagement and start rolling your stuff as well. Even if it's an affiliate product, you can use that technique.

That is crazy exciting. I mean, do you know how hard it would have been to do? You couldn't have done this years ago. I mean, this is like the old old clipping services on steroids, right? For people who don't know what a clipping service was, people would go, you would hire people and there would be companies that would find articles written in newspapers and magazines and send them to you. That's what this is, but it's like on steroids, right?

Absolutely. It's done for you much faster and less expensively than the clipping services which we used to use. Yeah, absolutely.

Oh my God. That one is crazy exciting. Step number 15, I think we talked about already, which was to offer to do an affiliate list swap.

Do that one. Go ahead, Jeff. I was just going to say, yeah, we did touch upon that. I got kind of ahead of myself earlier.

That's all right. That's all right. You get excited like me and just want to say and talk about everything. The final step in the process is 16, which is promote the product of your top affiliate prospects. You talk about that you actually do this. You go and you buy, you'll actually buy the product by sending a ton of traffic and sales before you actually ask them to promote your product, which is kind of what we talked about earlier, which is, hey, give before you ask. Give value before you ask for value. Is that what step number 16 basically is saying there?

Yeah. I call it the price of admission. Price of admission means if you want to get in, there's no better way than to buy your way in. Sincerely, I mean, you don't do it just for the sake of doing it, but if you buy their product, you check it out, say, "Hey, I like your product. I bought it. Do you have an affiliate program I could sign up for? I'd love to promote it to my list." Do it, then you promote it to your list, and then down the road, if you got something that you want them to promote, go back and say, "Hey, really appreciate it, sent you some traffic. By the way, I've got something that I think you might want to take a look at." Then you're building the relationship and you're doing it. I've even done it so far as where I've written some pretty big checks to people where I didn't have time to participate in the coaching programs and I even told them that, but I still handed them a check and said, "Hey, all I ask is that when I do call, you pick up." I've always believed in the price of admission. If you want someone's attention— this is the funniest thing— this has happened, Dave, so many times. It's ridiculous where I had people come up to me and they'll say, "Oh, I made hundreds of thousands of dollars using your stuff. I quit my job. I did this. I did that." I'm like, "Great. Which product did you buy?" "Oh, I didn't buy any products. I used your free stuff and made all the money, so why buy your products?" I'm like, "You're killing me." If they would have gone on and said, "Yeah, and I also bought your products. I do all of them for this for you," then the conversation probably would have went on longer and bigger and better things would have came out of it for them. It's just the way to do it. And if you're an affiliate marketer and you can honestly say that you bought the product and you loved it, that's a very strong endorsement for you. And if somebody says that when they're endorsing your product, it's also a great testimonial. You could actually reach out and say, "Hey, I see that you're promoting my product for me. It says that you bought it. Here's the reasons you liked it. Would you mind if I use that as a testimonial on my sales page?" No one ever says no. They love it. They'd like to get their name out there. So you're killing two birds with one stone. So that's all it is. It's promoting the people. And if you're an affiliate marketer, when you're promoting other products, I alluded to this earlier when I talked about how I was promoting an eBay product before we developed our own. Well, it's a great way to test new markets to find out if it's worth your time to develop a product along the same lines. Well, by promoting somebody else's product, you're building a relationship, you can get them hopefully to sign up to promote you as an affiliate or a JV partner, but you're also figuring out which products are selling well, which one sells better than the other ones, which opt-in pages convert better than the other ones, which sales letter convert better than the other ones. You get to get a feel for whether or not there's any money to be made in that marketplace. And if you decide it's worth your time and effort and you develop a product, well, you just shortcut your way to success because you've got all this data that you've been compiling by promoting these other people's products and services, all this money that you've been making. And you know who's got the best offers, who's got the best lead funnel, who's got the best follow-up system, who's got the backend sales systems in place, and it just helps you construct a better offer yourself. So it's a much greater chance of success if you decide to enter your own product into the marketplace. Beautiful. There's all kinds of different reasons we do these things, but it also works great for prospecting for affiliates. Perfect. Perfect.

Jeff, this was honestly— Just top-notch, dude. I knew it would be, but just better than I thought it was going to be. Folks, you've got to just— you just got to— you just got to do this. What a way to build your list. You don't pay— you don't pay for the name until they buy something, and then you're making money. And so this was really more than just how to build your list. This was really how to make money as an affiliate and build your list at the same time. So Jeff, I can't thank you enough for spending your time. Just so everybody knows, Jeff didn't want anything for this. He just wanted to give back to the community. We really sincerely appreciate your time. Thank you so much, Jeff. I really appreciate it. It was great talking to you.

You're welcome. Thanks, Dave. Nice talking to you as well.

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