231: Behind the Scenes of HobbyScool’s Affiliate Program Launch

Foreign welcome to the Creators MBA Podcast your go to resource for mastering the art and science of digital product entrepreneurship. My name is Dr. Destiny Kopp and I help business owners generate consistent revenue from their digital product business without the need to be glued to their desks. I hope you enjoy our episode today. Hi there Destiny here and welcome back to the Creators MBA Podcast. I'm super excited that you are joining me and today I'm going to be pulling back the curtain on what's been happening behind the scenes at Hobby School and giving you a little bit of insight into where we are headed in 2026 as I move towards my goal of turning Hobby school into a 1 million plus brand that I could possibly even sell one day. And I think you're going to enjoy hearing about this journey because it has led to something that's not only going to help Hobby School grow, it is also going to help other creative business owners earn consistent monthly revenue. And here is where it all started. If you have been in my world for any length of time, you know that I have set a goal to grow Hobby School into a brand that could sell for $1 million or more. Not because I'm looking to sell tomorrow, but I really wanted to challenge myself to think differently about our growth. And when you have a goal like that, you really do start looking at the business in a new way. And I started asking myself questions like what revenue streams could make us more valuable and how do we create something that runs smoothly without me doing every single thing? And how do we build assets that other companies or an investor or somebody would want to buy. And that's when I started exploring new business models and verticals. One of my early ideas was to franchise Hobby School into physical locations. And if you're familiar with it, it was like an AR workshop type model where people come in, they create something, they hang out with their friends. And I really do still love this idea and I think it could be an incredible in person experience that ties in with our online workshops. But after looking at all the logistics and the timing and really questioning do I have the energy for that? I decided that is something I might consider later on. And then from there I started thinking and looking at other verticals that might already have the audiences who were loving, who would love our events. Some of the things that came up here, number one was corporate wellness programs where we sell companies annual workshop passes for their employees. And that's something that we're definitely going to explore in 2026. Other kind of niches and verticals That I started exploring would be like senior centers or cities and parks and rec programs. They're always looking for creative, engaging activities and then looking at loyalty programs like arp. Those type of companies and firms are wanting perks and experiences for the members. So the more I explored this, the more I realized all of these groups are going to need one thing before they say yes, and they would want to see our upcoming events. And that's when I decided to map out our entire 2026 event schedule. So all 12 new workshops or 12 new events every single month, each of them with a unique theme. So we put that together, we announced the calendar, and really started getting some really good feedback immediately. People loved being able to see the whole year at a glance. And that gave me the next step that I needed to take, which was finding amazing speakers and going after a new type of partner. So one of the big focus for 2026 is building out an affiliate program that brings in top partners. And I'm really thinking about two groups here. One would be craft bloggers and creative influencers who have a large engaged audience. And the second would be more big box type brands and companies who could either promote us to their audience or, or feature us in their emails and newsletters. And I know from my own business that having a promotional calendar makes life so much easier. You know exactly what you're promoting and when. So I decided to create one of those for our affiliates and I put it together and I basically positioned it as your 16th month promo calendar done for you because it has all of our events and everything mapped out for the next 16 months. So every campaign, every event, every big sell, even the ones that we're doing for Black Friday, all of that is done. It's all mapped out with the dates that they're going to get their promo material so they can just slot it right into their schedule. We even have some really good Black Friday campaign sponsors built into that. So for bloggers and creative business owners who need consistent monetization opportunities, this is gold for them. And once that idea was clear in my mind, what I did next is I built, along with my wonderful assistant, built an affiliate info page. It was really, how I describe it, is like a hub where they can go to see our calendar, our commission structure, and learn more about what they need to do to sign up to be an affiliate. Once I got that in place and I felt good with that, we emailed out that to all of our existing speakers and affiliates. We did that this week. The other thing I did, I created three different blogs to help attract the right affiliates. Because I know that those creative bloggers are the ones that have these large engaged audiences. A lot of times they are going to be on Pinterest. So we did things like best affiliate programs for creative bloggers and I'm going to use Pinterest as a discovery tool to to find those potential partners. The next step will be reaching out, building relationships and really making it easy for those people and firms. That would be a great opportunity to be an affiliate for us, making it easy for them to say yes. So if you are listening here and you are a creative blogger or you know someone who is, I would love to hand over this done for you six month calendar promo calendar to your business so you can get that monthly recurring revenue from being in hobby school. Affiliate I'm going to put the links to our affiliate info page in the show notes so you can go check it out if it's a good fit. But really what I wanted to do was walk you through this journey that I've been on and how all of these steps and these actions that I took led to me putting this together. So if you're stuck on something, I would say take the first step and just do it. And that step's going to lead you to an aha moment. That's going to lead you to something else. That's an aha moment. And that's really what happened as I went through this process. Again, thank you so much for being here and I will see you in the next creator's MBA podcast. Thanks for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you love the show, I'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.