James Schramko - Beyond Affiliate Marketing - Getting a Percentage of All Sales

Revenue share deals are like acorns and they might not always be an oak tree in the first month. They might, however, in a year or two from now have a dramatic difference. So I'll tell you what that meant for me and then I'll step aside for a sec. For me, that meant as recently as a few months ago, I was able to switch off Silver Circle for new customers. As in, I'm not taking new customers on. Straight up coaching at high prices.

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float Shark with your boy.

My boy, Matt Wolf. Joe.

Hey, what is up, everyone? Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. This is Matt Wolf and today we've got a cool sort of simulcast episode, I guess you'd call it. So this episode is actually going out on our podcast as well as our guest podcast. And today is actually a fifth time returning guest on the podcast. I'm pretty sure he is the person who's been on the podcast the most outside of me and Joe. So today we're bringing back James Schramko and we love talking to James. You know, we're gonna try to make it a point to have a chat with James once every few months and kind of bring him back fairly frequently because we think very similarly. We have very similar business models where there's the podcast, there's affiliate marketing, there's Rev Share deals, there's a membership community. So a lot of the way we do business and the way he does business, there's quite a bit of overlap there. So we really, really, really love talking to him. We're also a client of his. He, he sort of coaches us quite a bit and we consult with him. And a lot of the stuff we've done in our business has come straight from James helping us out with it and giving us tips and advice. So we love chatting with James and you're going to love this discussion. In this discussion, we kind of talk about two topics and we kind of sort of, I don't know how to describe it, we kind of ping pong back and forth between two different topics. We're talking about affiliate marketing and we're talking about creating Rev Share deals which are kind of, you know, two sides of the same coin. In affiliate marketing, you're out there promoting other people's products and you get a commission on the sales for the products that you make the sales on, right? So if I promote a tool somebody buys off clicking my link, then I get a commission for that tool. Well, Rev Share is almost like the next level of that, where if we're promoting a tool, we'll get a percentage of the entire business for promoting that tool. So we'll actually be more incentivized to bring other affiliates on and to promote through means that aren't really trackable. So affiliate marketing and rev Share deals, we kind of see them as like the evolution of one to the other. Affiliate marketing is kind of where you start when a product promotion goes really well. You can kind of evolve it into a rev Share deal if you have a good relationship with the product creator. And so we're going to talk a lot about that. We're going to talk about affiliate strategies, we're going to talk about rev share strategies, we're going to talk about how to make sure you're giving value in these Rev Share deals. We're going to talk about some of the tactical, strategical things we're experimenting with on affiliate marketing. And you'll just kind of hear this good exchange back and forth where James is talking a lot about rev Share deals. Joe and I are talking a lot about affiliate marketing. And I think you'll pretty quickly see the overlap between the two models, and you can see why us and James all kind of dabble on both sides of it. So you're gonna love this episode. Make sure you grab the action guide for this episode. I've been told they're not called notes anymore. We're not calling them companions anymore. They're action guides. So if you want to get the action guides for this episode, go over to flowchartgroup.com when you join flowchartgroup.com that is our Facebook group. But when you join it, one of the questions when you join is going to ask for your email address. If you enter your email address there, we will send you the action guide for our most recent episode. So go over to Flowchart Group.com, get the notes for this episode, and let's go ahead and jump in with James Schramko.

Hey, James, great to have. Great to be here, doing an interesting episode again, I guess tell the folks what's going on here. And this will actually tell our folks too, Right?

So what we do is from time to time, we collaborate and we decide to get together. We often have really good conversations. So I think in a past choice was to actually record it because it's kind of like eavesdropping on a conversation that was going to happen anyway. So we do a simulcast, we record this episode, we publish it on both superfastbusiness.com and on hustle and Flowchart. I think we've been together many, many times now. Probably four or five times where we've come together. And every time, I certainly get great feedback from superfast business listeners. We have had you in the top 10, which is good considering we publish about two episodes a week. So we. Very close to 100 per year episodes. And to get in the top 10, I think, is a significant achievement. And I think we have a wonderful audience overlap. We have a lot of friends in common. I mean, I've surfed with some of your friends. I can see some of them. Well, there's Paul Clifford. There's Aaron Fletcher.

There's the candy man. He used to have a van that was like a candy. An ice cream truck.

Wait, hold on. Who's the candyman? I gotta remember.

Yeah, he's one of our friends who lives next door, I think, to Aaron.

Oh, okay. Yes, Aaron's been moving. Gotta give a shout out to Aaron, too, because he's the one that originally connected all of us. Well, us to you and vice versa.

Yeah, he's a great, great guy. I think I just bought one of his Black Friday specials because he was haunting my inbox and my remarketing. I thought it might get rid of him, but I don't think the segmentation's there.

But evidently he did really well. And I remember many years ago, he did something tremendous for me. He was able to pass on a whole hard drive full of Jay Abraham things. With permission from Jay Abraham, of course. So he's been a great connector. And I've had lunch with him when I went over to TNC in San Diego many, many years ago. And he was actually a bit of history. He was an early member of the superfast Business forum back when it was actually superfast results, like his very early days online. So we have a long history. I love his stuff. He does good work. I know you're very close friends, and of course you're close friends with even people in my country like Stephen S. Gestis. Yeah.

Yeah. Charlie's. You know, he's very close to my inner circle. He's a partner of mine, and I love what he's doing over there@valormedia.com.

Yeah, we actually hired Charlie to. Oh, sorry. No, I was just saying we actually hired Charlie to help grow this podcast now and then. We're partners with a guy, Chris Benetti, who's also in Australia, inside your membership. And we just had Gertrude Malik on the show recently, and we've been talking to him about maybe doing some SEO help with us in our business. So cool crossover. Lots of interesting crossovers there.

Yeah, well, like, it's. It's such a good community. And, like, Gert's my SEO man. He's the real deal. And the backstory on him was fascinating because he was a member of superfast business, and I was coaching him with his thing, and he had. He had a few things that he was doing, but I found out he'd been in SEO for a long time. And one of my other clients was asking for help with SEO, and I said, why don't you have a chat to Gert? And then Gert just transformed this guy's site almost instantly. And I got to see that because I'm coaching, and I got to see this site that was tanked, revive, rise from the ashes and start outperforming the competitors. And I'm like, okay, I gotta get to know Gert a little more and find out what's happening. And I recommended him to another client. Same thing. It's basically everywhere I sent him. They're getting a result. And so I eventually asked him to help me with my stuff, and we ended up becoming partners. I think that's what we're going to talk about today is I want to talk about the affiliate marketing side of things, and I want to talk about perhaps the partnership side of things, because they are somewhat interrelated. And it sort of describes my journey of starting out online, where I was in the beginning an affiliate, and that was all my income. And then I added in services, and then I built on the coaching side of things. And then eventually I've found some really fantastic people to partner with and to strengthen their brand at the same time as becoming my business model. So we could talk about the various stages of that. And I was also really interested in the affiliate marketing stuff because I know you've been on some kind of a mission to go deeper into affiliate marketing. You interviewed me, you interviewed Stephen, but you also spoken to lots of other people, really successful Internet marketers who have cracked the formula with affiliate marketing. So I would love to extract from you a summary of sorts of everything you've learned from these experts about affiliate marketing, strained down into the 8020 of the 80 20, what I'd call the 64 4, if we could pull it into the top few bullet points that, you know, if you're going to do affiliate marketing, and then let's see if we can bridge that across to what would happen if you became an affiliate of someone's entire business or a whole product line, which is essentially the kind of deals that I structure for myself these days. So with that being said, why don't you weigh in there with some good stuff?

Yeah, no, that's a. Excuse me. That was a amazing intro and I feel like that it. We've learned so much from you. So we have to take our collective hats off.

Wearing hats.

Literally are wearing hats.

But it's in full total truth and truthfulness to everyone listening is that you have been such a good, amazing guide and mentor to us for even before we were a paying customer of yours and member of everything there. Because we have a similar business model. Definitely different. But there's so much influence the way that you communicate with your community. You know, you have these deep relationships and just to kind of answer some of your first, you know that question they pose there is. Relationships is really the key to everything we've done. And from the people who are really good affiliates, it's relationships is really where it starts. At least the long term affiliate promotions, which is what we prefer. We don't really like the, you know, let's get on the leaderboard launch day and then off to the next thing. That's just too much work for us. And I'm pretty sure you would agree with that too.

Yeah, When I started online, there were those leaderboards and the contests and I used to actually do one sort of promotion a month, one big launch.

Back then they were sort of $1,000 products that then became $2,000 products. And I would often go really well on the leaderboard. And there was a few peers back then who are still going well now. But I quickly realized this launch model is exhausting and I don't like time shots. You know, I think I'd make 5,000 or 10,000 and the most I made was about $78,000. I think I sold 78 of a $2,000 product. And that was actually the birth of super fast results. My original community. Because my bonus was I'm going to help you go through this training because you're going to struggle unless you have my help. I know this material. I know the person selling the course and I can go deep with you on all the things. And I gave everyone who purchased a 60 day access to my brand new community. Superfast results. In the beginning of 2009, this is before Facebook groups.

And I had the foresight to set up a 60 day trial that then starts billing at what was then, I think $67 per month. And that was a 5050 partnership, that venture. And that's how I started my first community of recurring subscription income. And to my surprise, I got no complaints. And almost everybody renewed. I think somewhere around 65 people stayed in after 60 days and then that was it. I've never ever looked back when it comes to recurring subscription, but it came off the back of an affiliate promotion. And to speak to your point about connections, I think that's one of the things I brought from my old job as a general manager with a big team, having dealt with strangers every single day for many, many years in a showroom environment, in a retail environment, but also building very strong connections inside the manufacturer. I was working, of course, for Mercedes Benz, having to establish very strong key partnership relationships with our competing dealers. I mean, the crazy thing.

We could sell something to a customer that they could also buy from any one of 10 competitors who were within one hour drive our showroom, the exact same product. But if they purchased from us, then sometimes I would have to go and get that car from one of our competitors who had it in stock. So it was such a knife's edge, having to balance the relationship of being peers, friends, slash enemies, competitors. Then it was us versus other brands as well. So it was crazy. And then the next minute I'd find myself in Tahiti or Fiji or.

Northern Queensland or New Zealand on a Mercedes Benz Achievers trip, spending a week with my competitor and their wife, you know, with drinks and food and bus tours and all sorts of amazing, dazzling benefits and entertainment. So you build these strong relationships and I think what you did that's very clever is host that drinking, get together, you know, around the traffic and conversion event. That is a absolute master move in bringing people together, but also being the person responsible for that event. It's probably a little bit of a pain in the ass to organize, but it's also, I imagine, actually tremendously rewarding in terms of the outcome you get from that.

Yeah, yeah. Now we got to give a shout out to Dan Ryan, actually. He's listening. And I know he's a. I think you know, Dan, but he's. He kind of helps a lot with, in the background of organizing. And so it's actually fairly simple.

He's the one with all the connections to the breweries and those kinds of things. We're the ones who sort of spread the word about it.

We're more the marketers, promoters than we just show up and put the face on because no one else in the group wants to do it. So we're like, okay, and you came out to one of them, I think, two or three years ago when that was.

Someone spilt their drink on me, and it was great. I think they were actually a bit intimidated by me, which I always find, like, fascinating. I'm sitting here in my board shorts and bare feet in my own little micro environment. I'm an absolute nobody, right? I'm just a dude who goes for surf, enjoys a coffee at the local cafe shop, spends a lot of time pushing a kid on a swing at the park and watching Netflix. So when I go to those events and then people actually recognize me or know my name, I find that it always is intriguing because you just. You get insulated from that to some extent when you work from home for 11 years. And.

Yeah, someone spilled a drink, and they were, like, shocked because they recognized me and they thought I might get upset about it. Of course, I just laughed about it.

He's going to ruin my reputation on his podcast.

Like, if you go to a pub and there's beers in hands and it's crowded, I think you could expect that is a collateral damage possibility. And it's great. I was connecting with people from the east coast like Matt Coffey and, of course, Dan Wartrope, guys I'm really close to and do a lot of work with. And for me, going to that event is an opportunity to reconnect and strengthen the network, the very, very strong network that I've built in the United States. And it all started, really, for me in 2008 when I went to Underground in Los Angeles, was the first time I hopped on an airplane since I was about 12 to go to America. And I didn't know a single person at that event. And there was, I think, five or six hundred people at the event. And I took furious notes. I became very good friends with some of the people there. I actually won a contest. And I think I've mentioned this a few times before, but that was the big breakthrough. I won a contest that put me in front of the entire crowd. I got up on stage to explain how I won the contest, and I won access to the Maverick Club, which was a club for millionaire marketers. And to put this in perspective, at this time, I still had a job. And I flew back home from that event straight from the airport, had a shower, got in my car and went into work, still employed. This was a. This was. You know, I saw Mike, Phil Same, and Brad Fallon in another part of the bar there. It's like, just there. Like, they were right just there. And, you know, it was. I was so close to celebrity and all the famous people I'd been looking at online. One right there.

We have stories we should tell our versions of, like, very similar. Go for it.

Yeah. The first event that I remember going to was actually a mike Bill. Same event in Las Vegas.

I was still working. You were not.

I think this was really soon after I quit my job, but we went to an event in Vegas and I just remember walking into this hotel and as we were walking around, like, we were like, oh, my God. Oh, did you see John Reese? And like we were whispering to each other, like, pointing out names like, like Jason Moffat.

Wow.

Like Taylor Swift was standing over there or something, you know, but it was like other marketer dudes just like us.

Well, and it was a vip. It was like an affiliate appreciation party. So it wasn't like it was this mass or, you know, this thing with. We were just one of them. But like, we were. Yeah, we felt like we were the outsiders. Like, I don't know how we snuck into this, but cool. You know, now and then, now those buddies, you know, those guys are buddies. Those are friends of ours and they. We share masterminds, we text each other, call it whatever it is. I mean, it's like us here and it's. It's fascinating. Yeah. And it's fun to look back on those days. It wasn't that long ago, like you said, about 10, 11 years ago for us as well.

I think when I started online, John Reese was a huge influence because he had his million dollar day and that really struck a chord with me. I'm thinking, hang on a minute, this guy just made a million dollars in a day. Like, I didn't fully understand that most of that goes back to affiliates or to traffic or whatever. But it was such a breakthrough at that time and it really inspired me and I went deeper into his stuff. And then was it just a couple of years ago, him and I are out there fishing in a boat on Sydney Harbour, you know, catching fish. I'm just there catching fish with John Reese. You know, like.

It'S almost unbelievable how that, you know, and then we go and watch a movie or just chat, same as I hang out with. Well, I literally stayed in Dean Jackson's house last November when I went over to Kevin Rogers event and our other housemate was John Carlton. You come out from your morning, come out in the morning and you're having breakfast with John Carlton and Dean Jackson and you think, this is just unbelievable.

That over the long haul, and I want to stress this, if you're listening to this and you still think that most of these people you see are like a huge celebrity and untouchable, you'll find they're actually just normal people. And if you actually have a long term outlook, you could actually befriend and become very close to these people in time. If that was your goal, if it was a part of your plan, then it is achievable. But you just have to take a long term approach to it. Don't do the things that annoy people.

Like being overly eager or too in your face. I've always been reserved. I've got people's phone numbers and emails address. I very rarely would use them. I think that's one of the secrets is to the longer you can wait to monetize something, the more powerful it can be when you do. And this is sort of a classic startup philosophy. It's why I don't have huge expectations on new projects in the beginning, especially revenue share deals. I want to keep it on topic here. Revenue share deals are like acorns and they might not always be an oak tree in the first month. They might, however in a year or two from now have a dramatic difference. So I'll tell you what that meant for me and then I'll step aside for a sec. For me, that meant that as recently as a few months ago, I was able to switch off Silver Circle for new customers, as in I'm not taking new customers on straight up coaching at high prices because my revenue shares have replaced that income. What that translates to is I found another six or seven hours a week of calls I'm not doing to focus on the relationships I've already got. So to put a bullet point on this, if you go in there for the long haul and you want to build relationships that survive the test of time, they can snowball and compound. And you don't need many relationships to have an amazing business. And you really can work less and make more if you build those kind of relationships because they compound. The average revenue share deal for me now pays more than three or four Silver Circle clients.

And when you have a portfolio of them, you can see that this actually could be a really serious business model. And it's a fairly fuss free, sustainable model. I love the relationships I have with my partners. I actually still have all of my partners. That's the other thing, because I chose well this time. When I first tried this in the beginning, like 10 years ago, I made a lot of mistakes and pretty much none of Them survived. So there is a learning curve and it would be advisable to get help from someone like me or someone else. I know you've got friends like Roland who teach putting together deals. There are people out there who do this. It would be wise to learn from them, pay them the money to shortcut the mistakes, because I made some expensive ones. The most expensive one I made cost me about half a million dollars over four years in partnership fees that I really didn't need to pay if I were to look back in hindsight.

So what's the big mistake in that venture there?

In that venture, I just went for your typical 5050 deal, which almost every new marketer makes. They're like, hey, you know, and it's funny, I'm looking at you two on the screen thinking, oh crap.

Maybe you guys have got a 5050 deal and they can work. And I think you guys are a good example of a tremendous partnership. But in this case, there was a lopsided input. I got really heavy help. In the absolute beginning. My challenge, or my struggle was putting together the tech, choosing a platform, putting together the tech, and building the first funnel. My strength was acquiring every single customer and coaching them and servicing them pretty much 100%.

What I should have done is paid someone a few thousand dollars to set me up and then own the rest of it. So I had the wrong deal structure for what I was trying to do. And it became obvious after a while that I was doing all the heavy lifting. I introduced 99.99% of customers and I was servicing probably somewhere around 80% of the fulfillment. And I'm like, hang on, why? Why am I sending off 50% of our profit every month when it's really not an even split? And in the end it was hard to exit that. I offered a buyout, offered to be bought out. I offered to restructure the deal to take into account what it looks like in reality. In the end, we couldn't really find an agreement. So I just started something new. And within a few months everyone went to the new thing and the old thing stopped. Which actually validated my, you know, my very reason based hypothesis that I was actually doing everything. And the mere fact that everyone came across and the other one pretty much just fell to the ground was proof of that. And so that was, that was that one. So we all have these sort of little hiccups along the way. But I also went into a few other 5050 deals. So my common strategy was to do a 50 50, but now I've realized that the marketer, the person doing the marketing really should get a much bigger share than the expert or the person with the Intel. And that's one of the big key lessons because the marketing is where all the skill and the knowledge and the leverage comes from. You could basically experts are a dime a dozen and you've often seen good, you know, reasonable products that are marketed very well will outsell an amazing product. That's an obscure secret.

That's right. Yeah, it's it, it's very interesting because our so going back to the relationships on our end, they are very long term, at least you know, not the newest ones. But our intention is always to stay in front of those folks in help and give value in some way. And usually for us it starts with this podcast for any new connections we have, which are typically introductions from our mutual friends, yourself included. So I thank you for that as well. And that's kind of, I think been a big piece of our secret sauce is that it's a warm connection. There is some rapport built in from day one, but we don't ever drop the ball when it comes to prior to the podcast, during the podcast and after the podcast there's follow up along the whole way. And now our newest thing and actually I got to shout out Derek Sivers new book, what is it called? Your Music and People.

Something like that. Your music, your people. Something like that.

Yep, that's it. I just thought a new book, I don't think it's even out yet, but we have, we bought a bunch. It's made for musicians, but it's so it's teaching musicians how to market. But it's everything we're talking about here. And it's written in such a simplistic form. So someone who's not a marketer actually understands marketing's probably most strongest principles. And it's said in a way where if you just replace musicians and flop it out with like podcast or affiliate marketer, whatever it might be, it still applies. Yeah. And I feel like that's it's just wise words and there's some really interesting ways that he tracks people and follow ups and there's systems that's really our new thing is now getting very systematic and let the systems work for us and not us have to think about, oh, we should probably reach out to whoever.

Well, while we're on the topic of connections and really building these relationships, I think one of the sort of things that we've struggled with in the past, we're getting better at it, but we struggled with in the past. And I want to kind of get your take on it is we have a lot of great relationships in our network of people who have products that are similar to other products we promote. So for example, we've probably got four or five really close friends who all sell some sort of like page builder type software. And so we run into some issues where we've got this little tug of war going before between some of our people that we're connected with for. They want us to promote their thing and we should be pushing this, but we're pushing this instead. And that's something that we kind of get in our own heads about a little bit. So I'm kind of curious, when it comes to the relationships, how do you handle that sort of thing?

It's a tough one. And that's exactly my scenario too. I mean, that's my affiliate story was promoting web building software. So that's an absolute core strength of mine. I was one of the top affiliates for that software. I was making all my income from it in the beginning. I know Stephen Sketches was also similar, I think, when he was promoting software. And then I went on to basically co invent and encourage optimized press. And then I was an early sort of. I think I was probably second after Pat Flynn promoting leadpages, but I was promoting Lead Player, actually the first tool that Clay Collins had. And then I do get approached all the time with page builder things. This guy, you know, John Lindt, he showed up to the Maldives, he built a strong connection with me surfing in a sort of enclosed environment on a boat for weeks at a time, many years in a row. And eventually I got to understand his tool. But what he did that was very clever is he sat down side by side with me, laptop to laptop, and said, show me how you use your forum. Show me what tools you use to run the business. Show me your procedure. And he replicated my perfect workflow and tool set into his tool. So I think what he did that others haven't done is he just went deep into R and D. And I just want to lightly touch on this because it just reminded me of something. When I was the top promoter of this software. In the beginning, my strategy for getting the most sales was to produce a cheat sheet so I would actually really understand the tool and see how you could get the best results from the tool. And back then I was actually getting better SEO and being able to write better copy and to hack the tool to make it do things. It wasn't supposed to be able to do out of the box. And the cheat sheet was highly valuable. But what I noticed was, you know, the relationship with the manufacturer was very strong. And it had to be because often their affiliate links, they wouldn't track properly or the cookies wouldn't push or I didn't get credit when I know someone bought from me because they would claim my bonus and they'd want my coaching. And they would actually sometimes adjust the affiliate sales on the back end to reflect what should have happened. They were using one shopping cart back then. It wasn't highly reliable. And so there was that relationship. But they also doubled my commission. And so it's kind of like that was good. The bad thing, though was they would pretty much use my cheat sheet as a feature roadmap for what they needed to build into the tool and how to improve their marketing. I'm sure they literally gave this to their dev team and to their marketing team and said, this is. This guy's showing us how to market our product and what it should be able to do. I want you to make this standard, build this in. So I would have to constantly update it. So there was this. It was so similar to my relationship with Mercedes Benz and with BMW in the early days. I've got a story around that too, that it shows you the difficulty of having a very close relationship and how you can get stung with it. It does answer your question, but in a slightly roundabout way. But when I joined BMW, that was my first car dealership job. After being rejected by Toyota to sell Toyotas, I got a job in BMW upgrade. I would say I think I landed okay.

Within a few months I was selling really well and there was this new model out. There was this 316i Compact. It was kind of a bit ugly and it wasn't that popular and so people struggled to sell. It was nowhere near as sexy as the 318i, which everyone on board and I got this phone call from a guy and he said, oh, hello, my name's Martin, I'm from head office. I'm in charge of marketing for Australia and I just want to know what are you doing to sell so many 316 eyes? And I said, oh, like, what do you mean? He said, well, you've sold more 316 eyes than all the other dealerships put together. What's the secret? He said, could you write some stuff down for me? So, you know, I was pretty excited by the prospect that this guy in head office is paying attention to me. I was 23 years old. And it was sort of blew me away a bit. I went home and I created this 13 page handwritten manifesto which I faxed him, faxed to him. That's this machine you put the thing on?

Yeah. What's that? It makes some sounds, right? Yeah, right.

I won't do the sounds. But lo and behold, like a month later, pretty much everything I suggested got rolled out to all.

The whole country. Like I suggested they put extra points on this particular model. I explained that I had a different test drive route for this car because it's so gutless, you shouldn't have any hills on the test drive route. And they actually told all the dealers to do that. There was. I went into a lot of depth obviously, but basically he took my thing, no credit, and just published it in his own name for the rest of the people. And I'm like, oh wow. I kind of just got screwed over. My whole magic formula just got destroyed. And it reminded me of that lesson that Brian Tracy teaches in the psychology of selling, which I listened to about a million times. Like I literally wore the tape out. Talks about a glass salesman who sold shatterproof glass and he sold the most glass. And they said, how did you do it? And he said, oh, well, I just basically grabbed this mallet and just smashed the glass in front of the customer. And it was about the power of demonstration. And then of course everyone copied this person, everyone copied him. And then the next year he still sold the most. And they said, how did you do it? He goes, well now I gave the customer the hammer. And so it's about experience, getting the customer involved in the experience. But there's a lot of lessons in this. This is basically when you're a top performer or you're a top affiliate or you are selling a lot of something, other people are going to come knocking, they're going to want the recipe and then they're going to publish the recipe or use it against you straight away. That is a market leveler. So you must commit to innovation if you're going to be an affiliate. Whatever the current standard is will not be the current standard next year. If you're going to go into rev share deals, you're going to have to back a horse that's a long term performer. I'm pretty comfortable with 10x Pro that I've backed because it solves the problem of almost all of my customers based on the problems I was having that I solved for myself and then built into the tool. The other thing that was good about the arrangement is that we came up with a deal that makes it work for me financially. So I'm very motivated by it. Now, when you do get other tools come along and there will be other solutions, I've actually got a couple of rev share partners that do kind of overlap a little bit. So you do have to be careful. So when you get one in, it's absolutely critical that if you're going to take on another one, you need a white list or an approval from the one that's already in. Have you ever had a credit card or a phone or purchase a product and then you see an ad for a better deal than what you got from the company, but they never offered it to you?

Oh, yeah.

I think I probably just described Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Pretty much, we just passed that.

You got to be so careful. So there's a lot of people I wouldn't ever consider buying from unless it's Black Friday, Cyber Monday, because basically you're getting screwed over unless you do. So got to be careful that. But yeah, credit card companies, banks, telcos, they do this. They offer better deals to strangers. So.

What I always want to do is basically the group that I have is more important than my personal needs of bringing an extra person in for a little bit of extra commission. I have to preserve the group at all costs, which means I have to say no to a deal if it's going to be a conflict of interest to my current partner. And some of my current partners have vetoed potential deals on the basis that they feel that it's a little bit too close or a bit icky. So my first line of defense is I'll automatically filter out anyone who I know is a conflict. Secondly, if I'm not quite sure, then I'll run it past my current member and let them know how they want to be. So I do have two agencies who sit sell similar things but to slightly different audiences. But they started out quite apart and they've ended up quite together. But it gives me basically beta and VHS to go off to the entertainment market. I've got two choices. I've got one guy in my partnership, does membership platform and course platform that has the facility to have an app. And then I've got another partner who focuses solely on apps and everything to do with apps. And there's a little bit of a stickiness in the middle there. But the app guy was first and the membership one came second. So the membership guy has to accommodate and be aware that my first true love for apps was with this first partner. So you've basically got to draw a line in the sand and you have to let everyone know where their position is. Now, if you're an affiliate and not a rev share partner, I think you have a lot more flexibility. There's no reason you can't have a products page, which is of course my affiliate marketing 101 thing. If you're listening to this podcast and you don't have a products page with recommended resources, you're missing out on affiliate income. I was delighted when I heard Bob Serling talk about the exact same strategy years later. I've had a product page for a decade but have that recommended products. You can carry multiple competitors on that page and let the customer decide. You can highlight your pros and cons of what you think is good for who is this? For who is it not for what type of user wants this? I'm thinking, for example, I promote different levels of autoresponder and I think there's marketplace space to have ActiveCampaign and OnTraport or Infusionsoft or Mailchimp. Because I think a lot of it's going to come down to who's using it, what they're using it for, what level they're at. It's good to have a sweetheart. You can almost use a technique that my used car sales manager taught me back in 1995, and he used to say.

Because often when you have a lot of cars, there's so much choice. You could walk into a dealership and There might be 86 different models you could choose from, or even one model has three variants, or within the variance, there's like 50 different ways to configure it. And often that comes down to whether the thing's in stock or not. And if it's in stock, that's very convenient. If it's not, that's very inconvenient quite often. So to say, look, just go and tell them the story of the three bears. What he meant was, I'd have to share a Goldilocks story. And you know, the big buzz in 2020 in marketing is use stories.

Stories have been around forever, since the prehistoric age, right? Since the campfire. Like, I was using stories to sell way back in the early days. But he would teach me. I would have to basically give them three options, but make one the option that was best. He'd be like, there's this option here and that's good if you want this or that, but it's not so good if you, after this, the one over here this is what some people will have if their highest need is such and such. But based on what you've told me, that's not exactly what you're looking for. So therefore I would recommend this. This one's got a nice balance of this, it's got a good balance of that. It will do exactly what you want it to do based on what you've told me and it's going to fit perfectly within the budget. Looks like we've found the right vehicle for you. And they'd be like, they'd be nodding their head and they're like, yeah, this is it. So I would basically go through the decision making process with them and that's why on some tools or softwares you'll see they have like a comparison chart. That's one method where they can help a customer decide if they're the right tool. My single most successful episode on Superfast Business is episode number 775. And you can do this if you number your episodes. And the reason it was successful is I actually made that an episode where I take people through decision making process of which of my coaching programs is the right one for them.

Ah, clever.

We accompanied that with a comparison chart and it shows the different programs I have, how much it costs, what you get and it gives a link to buy. And importantly underneath the chart is a Got a question Ask James button and they can click on that and they can send me an email to my inbox which I respond to personally. And this by the way is the exact same technique I use to sell the Software. Back in 2006, 2007, 2008, mostly 2007, 2008 I had a Skype me button on my site so that people could contact me if they had a question while they're trying to buy. And I'm not too busy to take a call from someone who wants to send me $50 or $100. Back then it was great. And often the call was like, yeah, hello, I just want to check, is this offer legit? Yes, absolutely. Okay, I'm going to go and buy it now. Say, great, I'll look forward to your claim. That was it. They just needed that security. I mean people weren't as trusting of the Internet ten years ago than they are today. But I think there's so many lessons that I, that I might have just shared there that apply to affiliate marketing. And I hope I've answered your question a little bit. The answer is it's not easy when you've got, you have a platform for distribution that is very, very powerful for people who obviously recognize that that's why we say no to pretty much every guest recommendation with very few exceptions. Except when you send me a recommendation, guys.

I usually have them on because of our relationship. That's my way of saying I trust you and I will do this because I think that's probably helpful for you too. And you do the same for me and I think that's a high level reciprocation. And that being said, I do have occasionally guests on who might have offers that could conflict with something that I'm a financial stakeholder in. However, I'm thinking of my customer here. Maybe there's customers who the products right for that they're not going to use a solution that I'm more tied to. So ultimately when it comes down to it, I'm customer focused first and then I'm partner focused and then I'm me focused. Like that's the hierarchy. The marketers who are me focused, they're going to crash and burn. I'm telling you now, it's not a matter of if, it's just when. And we've seen so many of these gurus and experts crash and burn because it was all about them. Their big fancy mansion lease, rental, their big Bentley rental, their cocaine habit or whatever that's going to finish them them before anything else. If you focus on the customer, which I've done from the very first day when I got into business, you can't go wrong. And if your partner's aligned with helping the customer, which is, you know, that's my intention. The partnerships I've chosen for my rev shares, I want the best in breed product. I want the product that can help my customer better than any other product. And where it doesn't, I will give them input and help them to tune the product to be better. I cop a lot of feedback as a coach. Every day I'm getting people say I've got a feature request or can it do this? Or I'm looking for a solution that does that. I've basically moved mountains with the support of my partner John, for example, to mutate and contort and make 10x Pro the absolute best tool we can to do the things that are important. And sometimes it's a matter of me saying to a customer, listen, the thing you're asking for, it's actually not important. Don't waste any more time on this thing, this trickery or this gadget that you've seen something else do that might be a selling feature, but it's not actually important to you having a profitable business, so just drop it, just forget about it. And I'm seeing huge success now by changing the tool and changing the customer expectations. And yeah, there's some tools or options that I'm not really going to put my weight behind because I don't have as deep understanding of it. I don't, I can't vouch for the support as well. And frankly, some of the people kind of miss their mark. You know, like for many years I wanted to get one of the guys on there for a podcast. I offered it to him five or six times and he never really followed through. And he could have had a lot more market share if he had, but it just didn't happen, so it sort of got overtaken. So again, it's how keen are people willing to make a relationship with you? And sometimes the spot's taken. And you know, with my Rev shares, I'm mostly interested in building a portfolio of partners who can interplay. In other words, that we can serve the same customer. My same customer can get served by Charlie with his media company, or Gert with the SEO company, or John with his software, or Kat with her membership support service. The same customer can partake in this. And this is a huge strategy. It's so leveraged for me to build my distribution, to publish podcasts, to make videos, to build a portfolio, and then to be able to serve my customers in ways that I can't. Just as a coach, I'm not going to go in the software business myself, so why don't I just find someone who can be my extension into that market? And yes, sometimes to say yes to something, you have to say no to something else. So pick your yeses carefully.

Yeah, no, I, I, that, that response was perfect. And there was something that you said in there towards the, the beginning too that I think is really powerful in that having multiple options for people you can actually use to your advantage because you can go to somebody and say, look, there's these three options available based on what you need. I think this is the perfect option for you. And that probably makes it a lot easier to make the sale because you just show that you filtered it down for them.

Absolutely. You're helping them with the decision making process.

In a subtle way. It becomes rather than a question of yes or no, it's more a question of which one. And it removes one layer of resistance. I think in some circles they call that an alternate assumptive or a double bind. But whatever name you want to Put to it, it's moving someone past the point where they're deciding if they're going ahead or not and then helping them narrow down the choice. And this is one of the classic objections when you're selling that people talk about is the I need to think about it thing. If you want to use some techniques like this, you're actually eliminating a lot of the chance of someone needing to think about it because you're actually thinking through it together with.

Taking into account their situation, making it relevant to them, with a focus on them being better off. And I'm very specific with these words because it's important. If you come from a place where you genuinely want the people who you're helping to be better off, then you should recommend the right solution, even if that's not the one that gives you the fattest paycheck. And I've turned off income streams before where I was getting paid well. But I decided that that income stream is no longer representative of the best solution in the market, which is why I stopped promoting that first software I promoted in favor of a different option because it became superseded. It was no longer a good choice to pick software that could only be used on a Windows computer that you had to push, you know, from. Obviously cloud was the thing and WordPress became strong. But I think, you know, where I'm going now is I found better solution than WordPress and there is timing to this. So there might be, there might come a day where the solution you're promoting is no longer the best solution and you're going to have a values based decision. I've always decided to go with the customer and to provide them the right thing. And that requires intensive innovation. And that's why I've chosen partner who are innovative, they innovate constantly and I've selected that as a criteria. Can I work with this person? Are they responsive to inputs? Do we have a fantastic relationship where we can be open? I mean, I saw one of my partners post something this morning and I screenshotted it and I sent it to him and I suggested some improvements and he thanked me for it. And then I sent him a follow up with where he can get more access to getting education on this particular technique, which he also thanked me for. And I know from today on his posts will be the beneficiary of a new technique rather than have a partner that says, well, screw it, that's how I do it. You like it or lump it. That would be a bad fit for me. I'm a dynamic, fluid Business person. My whole business changes every single year. Like this year I brought in a brand new product and income stream from scratch and it's absolutely flying. And I know next year my business will look different, but I'll probably have more or less the same core of customers. A few change on either end. I'm up to almost a four year retention now, which is pretty crazy.

Wow. Wow. That's wild for any kind of continuity. But even the level that you have and you mentioned there's a couple things in your response to Matt's question as well. First thing I want to say is just personalizing.

Personalizing. And this goes all the way from just engaging with your community. You do that amazingly. When we joined your membership, I remember a personalized video of you. I think you're walking through the mall. And at least it seemed that way on like a Saturday. I was like, how cool is this? It was just a 45 second video, but it was thinking it was. Even though we already knew each other, it was still that touch. You know, it was unexpected. And something that we pulled from that strategy is applying a personalized video to affiliate marketing. And you know, so we have Facebook groups for various products where we. It's more or less a user group, but we make it explicitly clear we're affiliates. We're not the owners of the group. It's unofficial, but. But when they join, there's always a question asking them specific questions. Are they a buyer of the group or of the software already? Most of the times it's no, at least 50, 50. But then we pose a couple questions that get them asking a question. Okay, so what's your question here? What are you looking for? Is there a problem you can solve right now? And they're not expecting a video from me, but they get one if they put their email address in there and I'll send them an email, not a Facebook message. I used to do that. Most of those are blocked. But if you go email, it's about 80% of the time I'll get a response. And it actually lands in their inbox. And these are people saying, you just made my day. Oh my God, you just sent a video. Even though this video is just me, I use loom for this. And I'll just answer their question. I'll introduce myself, read their question and show like, hey, I'm not just like creepily finding you. And then I show them a screen capture of me solving their problem and pointing them to resources. Takes me about five minutes max and probably averages affiliate commissions of at least 300 to $1,000 a pop. Just depends on what we're promoting. Could be some recurring too. But it's a personalized approach that immediately kind of gets you out of the pack and just separates you from the competition there.

And it's one of those things too, that doesn't scale. Right. I think so many people when it comes to affiliate marketing, they want to look for the thing that's going to be set and for drive affiliate sales. But I feel like the philosophies that work when you're selling your own products are the same philosophies that work when you're selling other people's products. Be personal, be real. Do these extra things that don't scale and go above and beyond. And that's quite honestly the secret to why we've been so successful as affiliates is we go and do the things that don't scale that most affiliates don't want to do because they're looking for that autopilot cash flow from affiliate marketing, which is a lot easier said than done, I guess.

Actually, Matt, it's called autopilot cash formula.

Oh, shut up.

No, that's a, that's a reference to Matt's first Internet marketing product that he always hated the name of. You were almost going to say it, so I had to complete it for you.

Well, you're getting, you're getting a value creation reward. You're doing, you know, you're offering a service that's super valuable to someone who's in that buying mindset or the research phase. When you apply the effective value rate formula to what you're doing, it's going to trump a lot of other things you could do. You could spend a lot of time trying to put together your auto riches formula, autopilot thing. Right. It's like that saying, you know, you have to stay up, you've got to stay up all night working so that you can get paid while you sleep during the day.

That's right.

The things that don't scale are noticeable. And you actually have a smallish business. And I'm going to say I've chosen a path of less scale and more freedom than a lot of my peers. I have friends, you know, I bump into the supermarket down the road. He's got a business, own nine, almost $10 million. And.

He doesn't look, he doesn't look like. He doesn't look healthy. He doesn't look happy. I feel happier making a little less than that and having less compromise. I think it's the compromise Level. I think the Loom video is a great idea. I send lots of Loom videos as well. And it definitely doesn't matter whether it's your product or someone else's. If anything, you just don't have all the other headaches. You don't have to hire the developers and you don't have to do the customer support. You're just doing the fun part that you enjoy and you're good at, which is the marketing. And coincidentally, that's usually the part that a lot of product developers are not that good at and don't enjoy. And it's. Or even if they are good at it, but that's not their core thing. They don't get the most out of it. And I found also some of them are kind of introverted and like to sort of do the things that I hate to do. It's a good fit. And I've also noticed this as a trend because on the topic of affiliate marketing and revenue shares, most of my revenue share partners.

The way that we talk and communicate, it's quite clear to me that they feel that I'm a business partner of theirs, that it's kind of like our business in the very best ones. It feels like it's our business in probably the least best ones, of which they're all great. But of the least best ones, they might still feel like it's more their business and I'm helping them. But as the partnership develops and grows, I feel like we make decisions as a team as if it's both our business. It's just the way that it's structured is not your typical way of shareholders legal joining at the hips. From an entity perspective, it's more of a licensing arrangement or a royalty type agreement, which is still contractual and still a little bit more work to dance around with in the beginning. But once they're done, you put it away and you never really look at it again. It's like you get into a flow of reporting numbers, sending the invoice, connecting, coaching, or creating content for distribution. And I'd say my main roles in these arrangements are coaching them like I would with my own team, or like I would with you guys as customers or being distribution for them. And that's where my podcast has come in handy. And for you, you're in the box seat for that. You have one of the most powerful marketing business podcasts on the planet. You can basically name your partners, you could pick who you want and they would think seriously about giving up a percentage of the revenue that they're not currently getting that could in the future with your help to collect the lion's share of what's left over. I mean seriously, they could give you 10 cents in the dollar and keep 90 cents on every dollar they're not currently making, but could make if they worked with you and they took your box seats. So what I've been doing is re engineering Silver Circle as my partnership portal. I'm updating the testimonials to indicate that the partnership's been a big payoff for them. I'm hyperlinking to my partner's site so people can go and investigate and purchase from them. And I am.

I'm also coordinating with them more in the background by privately chatting with them as a group to help them help each other. There's a lot of good interplay there. And one thing that's most notable is I've had, I'd say in the last, well, this year I've lost only a couple of Silver Circle members all up. So like when I stopped taking new members, I still have my core group of current Silver Circle members and I'd say that the longest one's been going for 10 years and I can't see him leaving anytime soon. So a really interesting thing happened where Superfast Business Intensive has picked up the baton from Silver Circle. I gifted Superfast Business Intensive program the new members who are on the current rate, which is what Silver Circle started at in 2009 or 10. I've given them the weekly Silver Circle group call. So they're now coming to weekly group calls. And that's been a game changer. And so what's happened is the retention on that 599 program. Again, virtually nobody leaves that now. So instead of coming and going a little more frequently, I think this is going to turn into an amazing machine. So it's actually caused a tremendous amount of growth in my existing products by stopping doing something. And I think this is a lesson that is absolutely critical. You can stop doing something and get a massive growth spurt. And on my coaching call this morning, the Silver Circle Super Fast Business Intensive group, one of my members stopped a lower ticket program and in the last month they've all surged into the only program he has, which is a higher ticket program. And his net business just jumped. But he's offering less services and less actual deliverables.

It's the best. I mean that's, that's really. We've, that's what originally got us into affiliate marketing, you know, to go way back on our side of things. We did our own, we had our own products we're doing. We were writing our own newsletters, physical newsletters, but like writing them unique content every month, usually the last couple days of the month because of, you know, humans.

We procrastinate.

But it was a lot of work and we ended up just, you know, we, we paused that for a bit but then we really seriously looked at affiliate marketing. And that was right around the time we were starting this podcast as well. So we're like, okay, so the intention here is to really build a great community that we can cultivate and create fans and they will follow us and you know, the recommended products as affiliates that we, that we already use marketing software mainly. Not as much info products really, but that we saw this trend like oh, they buy ThriveCart from us or convert box or all these other things that we use in our marketing stack. All we're doing is just kind of exposing what we're doing under the hood in our business and saying, hey, here's what we use and why we recommend it. It's not going to break the bank really, but it sure is hell going to bring you a great return if you use them right. We're going to give you a bunch of strategies for free on this podcast. So we ended up actually closing down all of our offers and that it just doesn't, you know. And this is the traffic offer that you were helping us promote and I thank you for that, did great. But then we started realizing, hey, this affiliate marketing thing's really starting to scale and we're connecting our business and this is another point you said earlier is connecting all the different phases. So we started connecting the podcast to specific affiliate promotions and the emails can now get segmented based off of that interest into a mini promo to something relevant. So we started and then now, you know, we have rev share things. We have, you know, deals with some software companies, we have equity deals with folks like Roland and other affiliate platforms. So it's like kind of top to bottom. There is a big affiliate play or some deal making play happening and our internal products. We just said this is a lot of work to develop, fulfill support. We're like, okay, that's where our bump came from.

Well, you're a marketing and distribution company and you can then source from the best possible supply. It's just like a Mercedes Benz or an amg. It's got Michelin tyres or Pirelli tyres. You don't feel compelled to make every piece of the machine. And they have Bosch electricals So in my case that's pretty much one of the power moves I've done this year is I have stopped.

My most profitable business line. I've stopped the new flow of that to go for the scale of the revenue share deal. So I've essentially morphed a little more into the partnership model, making the strength of my business that distribution. I can get eyeballs, I can build trust in my audience. They know that I care about my customers, but they also know that I filter and work very closely with my partners to make sure like if I got bad feedback from a customer about a partner, then they know that's going to go straight through the machine. And you know, I want Mercedes Benz level of supply for my audience, but I can't physically make it all. I'm not that inclined to, and I certainly am not good enough to do the big software plays, etc. But partnering with people is great. There'll be people listening to this who have a product or service and have currently got no affiliate marketing stream in place. I'd love to hear what you would.

Say to them, the people that have no affiliate marketing stream in place. I mean we actually just did a presentation for Traffic and Conversion Summit where we kind of talked about some of this stuff. But I mean one of the easiest things you can do is look through the content that you've already got out there and see if there's ways that you can interweave affiliate promotions into the content that you've already created. I mean for us that's one of the lowest hanging fruit things that we did for affiliate marketing is go into our Google Analytics, look at which which pieces of content we've created still get the most traffic, and go look for opportunities to put products and mentions inside of those pieces of content. That's one of the things, the other thing that we did fairly recently actually, and I think it was your influence was we created that products page that you mentioned and started actually mentioning these recommended products. So we did that. And then the third thing that we've started doing recently actually goes back to Dean Jackson, who you were talking about earlier is we started putting super signatures in our email. So we've been writing more emails that are kind of content based emails, just pure value, not really asking for much, just here's a lesson for you today and then we'll put a super signature at the bottom with here's three ways where we can help you go even further. Join our Facebook group, join our membership, or check out our recommended products page and just like those three things right there have had huge results with very, very, very little effort to get the ball rolling.

Yeah. And I would also say this one, I had a coach, a pair who have a really great product, and they deal with a market that I'm not so into, which is helping people when they're starting up online. They help beginners get going. That's not a market I enjoy, even though I've done startups and I can. But I find it the most grueling, frustrating, difficult phase of all, getting that first offer, that converts. They have a product that helps people start up and they're really, really good at it. They absolutely love dealing with beginners. They're very patient. They have a methodology that works pretty much every time. They've got rules in place to protect people from overspending. And I've watched them for years and I've been coaching them for several years, so I know that they really do care about their customers and their customers actually get results. So, like, there's a couple of things. We suggested that we do a webinar for my own audience to just catch the people on my own database who are not fully into the motion or they want to go down the path of doing this business model, which, by the way, I do this business model, but I don't teach this business model beyond a basic training because it requires too much patience and technical knowledge to teach it at a deep level. So this is the strategy. You find someone who's got something like that that complements what you do that you suspect your audience might be interested in. And we sent, I think, three emails, sent three emails promoting a webinar. I think it's the first webinar I've done to the public for about five years, maybe six years. And we had a bunch of people register. A lot of people showed up live, a lot of them watched the replay because of the timing of the webinar. And I have a truly international audience. I mean, I've got a fantastic representation in the us, the UK and Australia. So not all time zones are great for the live. The upshot is that one webinar. So it took me, I'm going to say, 15 minutes to rewrite the three emails that they sent me as a suggestion and to give to my team in Slack and say, send this to our database. So 15 minutes. And from that I will earn somewhere in the region of 35 to $38,000.

So what's the effective hourly rate on that? That's my cut, by the way. That's the actual amount of money that will hit my bank account and I didn't have to do anything else. So if you don't currently promote someone else's product or service or any kind of software or whatever, there's some huge opportunities here. Find someone with a high performing training that's perfect for your audience and promote them as an affiliate and sit back and bank the checks. I suspect I'll probably do another one of those next year when I've built my list up again and recharged it. We can talk about the success the first batch of students had. We'll have actual case studies of people who came to that first training. I still work closely with these people, so I know they're going to deliver. They said, my audience, by the way, there's a big shout out to my superfast business audience. They said my audience are very savvy and lovely people.

So I will attest to that as well because a lot of those folks have come our way. I mean, we share that. You said that.

Yeah. If I could rate my customers, I'd give you five stars.

I agree.

Guys, I still want to ask you, what were the main things you learned after doing all your affiliate marketing interviews? I feel like we've been generous with what we have discussed, but be good to have a couple of bullet points to round this out and make it like, get it in the top 10 for the 2020 episodes. Certainly on my side. But what can we do to push it over the line?

This is a good question. Yeah. Because we've been kind of rattling off a bunch of strategies. And I mean, the way that we work is the stuff we're testing really comes from the podcast and from our friends like yourself. So it's probably what we've been saying.

Strategies or techniques pop out. You've already delivered a lot. Super signature. Super signature webinar. We've talked.

How about some email segmentation?

Yeah.

So we're doing some cool stuff.

We're doing a lot of stuff that's like very dynamic and retargeting and. And a lot of times when we go on podcasts and stuff, I'm almost hesitant to talk about it because I'm afraid I'll get too deep into the weeds and over people's heads. But we're doing a lot of stuff where we, you know, we'll drive people to a specific podcast episode from our list and based on the episodes they're listening to, we're then retargeting them to relevant offers. So, for example, maybe we'll have an interview with somebody who's teaching a whole bunch of really good webinar strategies to be really successful on webinars. Well, anybody who goes to the Show Notes page for that episode, we're essentially seeing that as them raising their hand as I'm interested in webinars. And then we will retarget people who view that landing page to, you know, a tool like Easy Webinar or everwebinar or one of these various webinar platforms that are out there. So that's, that's one of the things we'll do. And then we'll kind of do the same thing in email. So if we email our list about an episode, I'll just stick with the same example. We email our list to an episode about how to be effective on webinars. People who open that email and click on that, we might create like another two day email sequence where only the people who clicked on that email then get two more emails over the following two days about the best webinar platform to implement what they just listened to on that podcast. So we're doing a lot of sort of follow on things based on which content they initially consumed. And that's probably one of the most effective strategies we're doing because everybody's kind of getting this choose your own adventure sort of thing by consuming our content. They just don't necessarily see it from their perspective.

So an example of this, and this is from an expert that was listening to our show, Joe Kearns, and he has a partner, Mike Alvarez. Basically we partnered with them now to help us do this. So they're helping us architect this machine basically behind the scenes. And it's exactly what you said. Is this essentially a big customer journey that's based off of their actions wherever they feel like they need to go next. That's where another piece of value is going to happen. To live. But also an opportunity to buy an affiliate product. So it allows us now we release two podcasts per week. Well, that can potentially be two new affiliate promotions every single week. We're not doing that quite yet because we haven't gotten that far. But that's, we've kind of dabbled with that recently. We realized we were doing the whole broadcast wide shout to a lot of people, which is the old way of emailing, which a lot of Internet marketers still do. Digital marketers. So then we realized, oh wait, yeah, you can really talk to just like 200, 300 people and be way more effective if you just get them to actually Raise their hand first and then you give them exactly what they're asking for.

Our biggest commissions these days come from mailing teeny tiny segments of our list. So a lot of times the, the, the, the days that we make the most money from affiliate promotions. We sent an email that got seen by 300 people. But those are 300 people that might have listened to this podcast, then listen to this podcast and we're like, okay, these people are hot on this topic. Let's send them more emails that, that are related to that topic. So very, we're, we're getting much more dialed in with the segmentation both on the retargeting end and on the email marketing end.

Well, it sounds like Amazon and Google.

Yeah, pretty much they're doing all right.

Amazon was the one that really alerted me to that When I looked at something on the side and then I got an email a few days later of the exact thing I was looking at. That was such an aha moment for me. And this was a long time ago. Obviously I'm a dinosaur. But based on that, I put a segmentation in my ontraport sequence that caused me to end up having to present at their conference how I sold so much of their software. I put a little signature and it said this email was sent using oap, which is what they used to be called Office Autopilot. When people clicked on that, it would add them to a sequence which then followed up with.

The reason why I switched from AWeber to OAP. And then it, it followed on with, by the way, if you interested in ip, check it out here. And then the next email is like, if you buy OAP through my link, I'm happy to send you a training on like how to get the best results from it. Like basically what I learned from having the cheat sheet before. So this little sequence only went to people who clicked on that link like they were interested enough to know what it was. And I've been using little sequences like that the whole time to move people into that. But now someone listening to this might think, well, that's too complicated. Rocket science, wiring, diagnostics, NASA, spaceship, etc. What's a simple way to do this? I'd say a simple way to do this is probably to fire up one email after you send them the resource that they've asked for or even in that email, it sends them the resource it has like a P.S.

Where are you at at the moment with your business? Hit reply and let me know. And that way you're going to encourage a Conversation and I think the conversational conversions, that's the non scalable way you're going to sell more than anything else you get in a conversation, they'll tell you where they're at. You'll probably find an obstacle. You might be able to solve it, maybe send a loom video. You're going to sell like crazy off even a tiny, tiny list with that. So that's one of the prompts that I put when someone purchases a product from Superfast Results. And I get into these amazing dialogues with people. Like they tell me like why they bought the course, what they're going to use it for, what they're planning to do next, where they're at. Some people show me their site or they tell me about their new book that's going to launch. Sometimes I'll, I'll reply back, say, look, I've had a look at your site. I've noticed a couple of things I would change. I've made you a little video and after you've gone through this course, this is what I'd recommend next. What are they going to think? How could they not find value in that?

You were their new best friend.

I want to help them, I really do. And it comes from that place. So, gosh, I feel like we've got probably an episode here.

We're over our normal allotment of time. I mean, I think we always go long because it just flows, man, and this is such a good time. There's all these rabbit holes we couldn't head down.

Well, I do have one last question I want to ask about Rev Share. I feel like the conversation sort of jumped back and forth between affiliate marketing, Rev Share, affiliate marketing. So might as well keep that pattern going and I'll ask you a question about the Rev Share stuff and then we can kind of wrap up after that. So in, in 2020, Joe and I, we actually got involved in three rev share deals. I believe all, all based on your influence and our conversations with you. You even help us, helped us structure the deal with one of them. So we really appreciate that because it's, it's been working out really, really well so far. But the, the question I want to ask is when, when you get involved in these, these Rev Share deals, how do you ensure that momentum continues and that the person that you're partnered with notices that the momentum continues? Because I think one of the things I kind of get my own head about with some of these Rev Share deals is in the beginning it feels like momentum can be very, very slow. We're kind of laying groundwork and, and sort of building the foundation for what we want to do with these guys. But it feels sort of slow and I, and I don't want the people that we partner with to, to maybe start to feel like they, they're regretting the decision of partnering with us because momentum is slow. When we first come on board. I think a lot of times people will partner with us and just expect like, okay, I'm, I'm partnered with these guys. They have a big platform so it's to the moon really quick. But that's not the case. A lot of times there's foundational things that we need to fix before we can take it to the moon with them. So I'm curious, how do you approach that and how do you make sure that momentum stays going and they feel that the momentum is continuing to push forward?

Interestingly. Well, the short answer is I plug them into Silver Circle. So I now have a framework for the onboarding diagnostic where we're setting a roadmap and creating clear expectations and we work out all the low hanging fruit. So we'll have immediate wins. Almost always we'll have immediate wins. It's rare that I wouldn't. And then we'll have midterm wins and then we have sort of a long term win. Knock it out of the park. I've had partners when they started, they had one assistant who they were thinking of letting go and then six months later have 28 people in their team. And I'm like, you need to hire you to stop doing this work. And they're like, oh my God, there's no way they would see this. Or I like, I blow their mind by saying you need to make extra payments on your house mortgage right now. And they're like, what? I'm like, pay down the house. We're going to pay this thing off. How much is left? They tell me, I say we're going to pay it off by this time next year. Go and tell your wife the house will be paid for this time next year and this is what we're going to do to make that happen. So I'm basically installing a framework or an expectation of a long term plan we're working to here. But I will say this overwhelmingly.

The feeling of momentum or guilt or whatever, it's almost always the partner feeling like they're not doing a good enough job for me and not the other way around, which I think is really interesting. But it means they value the relationship. It means that they know I'm doing my end of the bargain and sometimes they have things to do, I'll give them things to do or they need to update or install or invest in or change to take this thing to the next stage. And they're not always easy or fast things. But I would say that the vast majority of my deals and now I've got a reasonable sized portfolio, they have a very consistent momentum. I mean I have this spidey sense anyway. I can feel if someone's not feeling it. And I know that come the end of the month they'll be calculating their numbers and then we'll be sending an invoice. So I usually want to make sure that's why we have a frequent call schedule. The most frequent schedule I have with partners is every week. They're welcome to come to my group calls every week anyway, which they sometimes do. But the least frequent would be every three weeks where I have a one to one check in with them and we just go through a framework to make sure we're on track. And of course things happen in between or whatever. And to a large extent I can give them unlimited airplay on my show and distribution. So they're getting plugged a lot from me and especially to my coaching students where the solutions are a good fit. They're going to get distribution from me, they just can't get elsewhere. But I also encourage them to get distribution elsewhere to get outside my ecosystem. That's where we get the real growth and the thing takes off. I think luckily I can measure the momentum in terms of the yield that we're earning on both sides. If they're dragging the chain and not meeting the threshold, which can happen in part of your portfolio is not going to meet threshold. They feel guilty but at the same time the pressure's off because they're not having to pay if they didn't make the money. So they don't. It's actually I think there'd be more guilt if they're paying a monthly fee regardless if they had a bad month, but they still have to pay you, that's when they're going to resent you. If they have a bad month, they couldn't quite meet the threshold and they don't have to pay me a cent, which is the nature of the deal, then they're off the hook for having to make that payment. And they can't blame me. I'm not charging them. I'm the poor guy who put in the effort and didn't get paid. So that's why I Think it's often on the other foot. And when they are paying me, they're happy because whatever they're paying me, they're getting paid multiple times more. Usually like they get, get nine times more than I get. So they're happy.

Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think for, for me mentally, I tend to probably undervalue what we are actually bringing to the table. You know, a lot of these products that we're dealing with, we do shout out on the podcast a lot. We do mention in emails and blog posts and social media and, and we are spreading the word and evangelizing it. But I think I tend to undervalue that aspect a little bit. So that's probably a piece of it that I just need to get over myself and realize the value that we're actually bringing in those areas as well.

We actually met, I remember just recently, a couple weeks ago, we were having a call with one of our partners and that was one of the things I brought up because I was like, Matt and I were chatting about this, I'm like, just gotta be honest here. Okay. I just wanna make sure that you're good, you know, and because we're doing a lot of foundational work, so it didn't feel like it was the thing that was, you know, would move the sales immediately or the, you know, the short term, but it was reciprocated by like, no, you are. This is amazing. This is, yes, it's foundational work, but it opened my eyes to so many new things. We were using frameworks like you said, and it ended up being like, oh my God, that feels great. Because, yeah, we're all aligned. We're on the same page. We are giving the value probably more than we. Definitely more than we thought we were. But it's great to clear the air. And that just shows a great partnership right there as well.

Yeah, I've got check ins all the time. We call it a temperature check within our team. Basically, if someone comes to you and they want to leave, it's too late. You need really early. I mean, it's even in Sun Tzu, the Art of War, you need to have spies in the enemy camp. You need to have early warning when there's, when there's a problem before so you can prepare. So I just asked them, how are we going? Are we on track? Are you feeling happy about this arrangement? Is it working for you? How can I improve? What would you like to see me do better? That sort of vulnerability.

And I get the, you know, usually Get a very positive response, man. I'm very happy with how it's going and it's all good. I wish I could perform better or, you know, I need to hurry up with my hiring or whatever. So, you know, the shoe's usually on the other foot.

Yeah, yeah. It usually exposes the real priorities of what's happening and it's a relationship. At the end of the day, we're all people, you know, this goes back to, you know, the community. I think to wrap this up, really everything we've talked about is wrapped up in customers first, our community first, our podcast listeners, fans, whatever, we. And they, who, whoever they are, those are the folks that are going to stick with us through multiple deals, multiple partnerships and in your case, for 10 plus years. I mean, honestly, in our case, because I know a lot of those folks started on your list probably about the 8 year mark, 7 year mark for some people that have carried over from previous. It's just so cool to finally connect with some of those people face to face or through zoom calls or looms. And you're like, wow, you've been with us for a long time.

Well, we met Aaron Fletcher, bringing us all the way back around to the very beginning of the conversation. We met Aaron Fletcher back in 2010 because he was a customer of my first course, the WordPress Classroom. So Aaron Fletcher's been around for 10 years with us.

He was up in Silicon Valley, he said, driving around to the business he worked for. He was like a vp. He was very high up and he was listening to Matt and you know, and our ramblings probably on this and it's just like, wow, we were. And just to see where he's turned up, how great connections and it's just a good friendship all around. So you never know. Long term, that's what it's all about.

It is, it's about relationships, about long term. It's about community and I think going to, you know, going to the next phase of society. A lot of people have been worn and torn by, you know, negative community experiences where they've been trying to supplement the in person stuff. So if you have a good community experience, then I think that's, that's the long haul and supplementing it as you guys have and we have for the last however long with live experiences, when they become practical and you have a magic formula, that's it.

So let's wrap her up. What are you excited about for 2021 since I guess this is getting released in at least on our end.

Yeah, I think on 2021, released in January, I think.

So are there any reinventions or.

Same for me?

Yeah, yeah. Anything specific that you want to put out there that you're just like, okay, this is the new invention of my business or evolution.

The first thing that came to my mind is I'm just really hanging to get back to the Maldives. It's not even a businessy thing, but that is my business as a business group. It's a paying customer group. It's where my relationships with some of my partners was born. That's a very happy place for me and I can't wait to get back there. In terms of, in terms of business, I think there'll be a couple of new books coming across the deck. So that will provide some scale opportunity for me. And the way that I've re engineered my business is I think I'll attract maybe a couple of fantastic revenue share partners. Not too many that will grow that portfolio. And superfast business is really dynamite at the moment. It is just on fire. It's taken off because I've given it the juice from Silver Circle which I, you know, I transferred the resource and it's just, it's just caught fire. It's going so well and I love the group we have. I love the calls and I think people are going to do some great things and I'm going to work really hard on making experience the best possible for the members coming into that. So for me, you know, really just more of the same surfing as much as I can. I imagine I'll start traveling again at some point and.

Just continuing to build on a strong foundation. 2020 has actually been an incredible year for me, but I was positioned for that for a long time. And hopefully people who have been along for the ride, listening to my podcasts or getting coaching advice have actually done pretty well out of this, as it seems, aside from the most obvious ones who in the trade show industry or the gymnasium industry where they've had hits that were hard to recover from, but a lot of them have. And I think it's going to be like this massive growth spurt, positive leap forward out of the abyss. It's going to be boom time. And I saw boom time when I was selling luxury vehicles and there will be boom times again. But now is the time to really flex the muscles and get yourself ready. Like rest up, shore down all your foundations because it's going to take off.

Yeah, that's pretty much the same on our end with the email system like we were talking about we know that's going to be way more dynamic than it ever has in the last 10 years. Years on our end. So, you know, doubling down on that with the right partners and growing the top of kind of our iceberg. The tip of the iceberg is the podcast. So getting more listeners and you know, working with guys like Charlie Valor for that and some other Strat Gert, even, you know, with SEO, he said we're doing pretty good, but we know we can optimize. So it's, it's, you know, almost like, you know, get, get more of the potential fans on top. And then we have the machine now that's really doing the heavy lifting for us. Us, we just kind of show up and do what we do. So, yeah, I'm excited for it and I want to do more of the, you know, work less, make more now with a baby in the house and it's like I got to, I want to revisit that. Yeah. And it's, it's, I mean, shout out. Get that book, everyone.

I put up a, just for fun, I put up a 30 day work lesson make More challenge that delivers one of the action steps each day for 30 days. Speaking of email and sequences. And I made that free at the moment. It's probably still free when this comes out.

How do we get that?

And I want it superfastresults.com forward/30, 30.

The number not spelled out. They're like 3, 0, both. Okay.

You could put on.

Contingency planning.

There you go.

I would very much hope that both URLs will work for that. And, and that just drops one micro lesson per day for 30 days. And my goal for that is to let people experience what's possible from the book, at least at a surface level and for free, like as a full demonstration of what's in there. So if you didn't want to spend a cent, that's a starting point and I think it's actually a good reminder and I'm going to encourage people to go through it a few times, like maybe once a year as a reset. I've got a few people resetting through that and I'm just up. I think I'm up to day 20 something at the moment on the first trial run. So I'm sure it's going to improve and I'll get feedback now. I think it would lend itself for me tipping some paid traffic into it at some point. So it's another vehicle for me to let people know about partners, but also for them to Get a result for free so they can see if going to the next stage is worth it for them.

That's awesome. I'm going to check that out out.

Along with your site. We should drop that in there. Where are we going to check you out for us?

Where are we gonna go, Matt?

I mean, there's really two good URLs. There's flowchartgroup.com. that's our Facebook group. We do most of our interaction in there. And then hustleandflowchart.com is the podcast. And that'll actually redirect you to the best location to listen to the podcast. So if you're on an iPhone, it'll take you to itunes. If you're on a Google phone, it'll take you to Spotify or whatever. So hustleandflowchart.com and the flowchart group.com are probably the two best places people can go. Check it out right now.

Now.

Fantastic.

This has been fun, man. Yeah, it's been a. It was a little period of time where we didn't chat, but, you know, at least on the podcast here. But I'm happy we did it again. That was a good time. Gotta do it, like, every six months. I feel like there's always some good cadence there. Something happen.

We'll get you in again. I'm sure. For me, this was episode 795. So we want to squeeze you in there when you feel like you've gathered some great intel and. And see if I can unlock a few old stories of past that have some valuable metaphors.

Oh, they always do. Thank you, my friend. It's been great chat, man.

Thank you.

So what'd you think of that one?

Oh, it's always a pleasure talking with Mr. Schrack. James Schramko.

That was number five on our show. That was the fifth time he's been on Hustle and Flowchart.

And it's always a fun time because it's like a trip down. Some of the stories I've heard are bits of. And pieces like from his book and, you know, told. But in relation to this time, you know, partnership, you know, really partnerships and dinner in general, affiliate marketing, all the different things we chatted about. I mean, it's. This is the guy we've watched the most and interacted with the most that has literally the most similar model to us. Definitely not the same.

There's a lot that we did model from him as well.

Yeah.

A lot of the rev share stuff that we're doing. I've Mentioned on the show. He actually helped us create some of the contracts for some of these rev share deals that we've done. As far as our resources page, I think I heavily modeled how he made his resources page.

There's quite so much. Yeah. And it's really cool because of the overlap, like he was saying, with the listeners and customers that we both share. A lot of it is from doing these collaborations, but that's the power of partnerships again.

Yeah.

And. And following up as well with him to kind of have a cadence, more or less. There's no set in stone date. We do these. It's like when we kind of feel the percolation, we're like, all right, we got some. Let's jam.

Yeah. It's been long enough since we've chatted. Let's do it again.

Yeah. And it's just really cool to have that. And it's. Yeah, he's just. James is one of the coolest guys that we know. Just ground, you know, grounded, but, like, down to earth kind of guy. Just. He has his priorities straight. Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, he's one of those guys that, when he's on the books, I'm, like, really excited about the conversations. I just know that there's so many similarities between our businesses, and so much of what we're trying to accomplish, he's accomplished. So he's almost, like, created the roadmap. He was like, he's kind of the trailblazer, and we get to follow the trail that he's created for us a little bit. And so whenever we get on these calls with him, we get to go like, hey, you've created this trailer. There's a little bump in the road up here. How did you get over that bump? So we could try to get over that same bump.

Right.

And you heard it on this episode. You heard us talking about, like, these are some of the things that we're running into. How do you handle those things?

It was real. Real. Just in time consulting there. Exactly. But that's why we. I mean, really, if you look at most of the partners we work with or the mentors we choose to either collaborate with, pay money to mastermind with, whatever, they're usually a few steps ahead.

Yeah.

It's not just one step ahead. I would say, like, they're multiple steps ahead. I feel like we're pretty good at identifying those types of folks and partnering with a lot of them as well, fortunately. And it just expands our vision and what's possible with the business. Like, instead of just us sticking with affiliate marketing until the end of time, which I'm sure can be very lucrative if done right. I mean, I know it can be, but. But if we chose to be like, oh wait, hold on. We can actually have some influence on a software company that we actually really like. Hey, we've always wanted to be in software. Why don't we partner with them? And so instead of just a little share where we don't really have a ton of control, we can now steer that a little bit well.

And also we don't have to build the software. I mean you've heard old episodes with us. This is us. We're transparent. You are always hearing where our heads are at with this show. We've had episodes in the past where we made here's a big announcement, we're gonna release a software soon.

Right.

We've had probably at least two episodes in the past where we mentioned that we're gonna be releasing software in the future.

We're good at that.

Right.

And then the software never came. Well, these Rev Share deals are the way that we can get into software where we stay in our zone of genius, in our sweet spot, doing the things we know we're good at without trying to teach ourselves how to become heads of software development.

Yeah. So I mean like one of the, I mean you probably hear a lot of commonalities between our businesses with, with James and a lot of it comes down to, I mean we said at the end a relationship with our audience.

Yeah.

And not only that, but really going personalized with them and the non scalable things that you can do. Like, you know, James was even prompting us again after we ended up in the call, he was like, hey, reach out a little bit more. You know, send me some loom video, show me what you're doing, let me.

Help you more than I've helped you so far is basically what he was saying.

Yeah. And it's just like that just shows the level and that's what he does. That's. And that's his nature and we get a lot of that influence from him.

Well, he mentioned like he's approaching a four year retention. Why do you think that is? It's because everybody who buys his customers feels like they are great buddies with James. Like that is the way he does business is you become a customer of his, you're going to get personal messages from him, he's going to respond to you, you're going to go, you're going to have a lot of back and forth. He's going to remember you he's going to remember your business now. It's not a, you know, customer, product creator relationship now. It's a friend to friend relationship. And I feel like he does an amazing job in his community of making the people that join his community become like friends with him. People that they feel very comfortable reaching out and say, hey, here's what I'm struggling with. Can you help me with it? And there's no fear of asking these questions from him because you feel like you've got this deeper relationship with him. How many other marketers are out there treating their customers like that?

Right.

How many other people have membership sites with. I don't know how many members he has hundreds, thousands of members. I don't know. But how many other membership sites are doing that kind of interaction with the people who come through them? Not very fricking many.

Yeah. And think of his. He's a big proponent of ehr, which is hourly effective rate.

Effective hourly rate.

I had my acronym backwards and that's from his work less and make more book. And you should get that. And actually let's shout out that URL one time. So if you want to go through his challenge, which I am going to definitely do, super vast, super, super fast results.

V or an F. He probably has redundancies for that too.

All right, starting from the beginning again, superfastresults.com 30. You pick and choose the 30 of your choosing. So that is. But that's where EHR comes from. Or at least he highlights it in a big way in that book. But check that out. Because he values his time more than anybody else. At least he guards his time more than anybody else. I mean there's few others that come to mind. But like James is, is probably the biggest proponent of this, which is one of the. And he is the doing the non scalable stuff.

Yeah.

So I think that kind of tells you something there.

Yeah.

No, it's crazy. So quick, quick couple quick takeaways and we'll wrap it up. We'll make this outro a little bit shorter than normal because it was a longer than normal episode. What would you say would be a big takeaway you had from this episode?

I kind of said the personalizing, I think is a huge one. I mean that was top that list right here.

Personalizing the things that don't scale, that.

Kind of thing, the non scalables. And really still thinking like this is worth your time because if you have the right offer and if you know what, you know the offer's gonna convert and like, it's worth doing.

Yeah.

I think for me, one of the things that came out of this that was like, once he said, kind of felt obvious to me, but for whatever reason, it was sort of a block in my head before he said it was this whole thing about, like, if there's multiple products that kind of compete with each other and, you know, we've got all these different connections that are trying to get us to promote their product, you can actually spin that into a little bit of a benefit to you and say, look, we've got this autoresponder, this autoresponder, and this autoresponder. What goals are you looking to achieve? Okay, now that I know what goals you're looking to achieve, I recommend this one.

Right.

And now you're. You're taking out of the whole. Oh, let me think about it. No, you've just filtered and narrowed down the choices for them and told them which one is going to be best for what they need.

Totally.

And that's how you can effectively promote multiple different products that all compete with each other is be the person that helps them filter and narrow down to the one that they. It's perfect for them. And now you're not feeling like, oh, well, I normally promote this product, so I should promote. I shouldn't be promoting this one. No, you should be doing what's best for the person you're talking to.

That's it. I mean, that's. I guess. Yeah. And this couple things come to mind. There is an example. I could have actually said it didn't come to mind until now, but. So this allows you to promote more things? Of course. And it doesn't necessarily. I mean, you could just literally do the research for these folks. It's not like you need to be an expert user of all this stuff or a user of all of them, even. You can if you want to be, but yeah, to steer. You're basically looking out for their best interests and showing them maybe something they didn't think about before. And that's usually enough value to push someone over the fence or lead them over the fence to the other side to them purchasing and you getting a commission. And this is where it goes back to personalizing a little bit. Last week, before I went on this little staycation thing, this guy. I reached out and this is one of the strategies I told James on the podcast is, you know, someone went into our Thrive cart, Power users Facebook group, filled out the little, you know, join thing, said they're not a customer, and here's Their objection or their question right now. And here's their email address. Cool. That was enough for me to make a loom video and I sent it to him and he immediately got back to me, purchased ThriveCart. Thank you. And then started asking me other questions about other softwares that he could possibly get. One of them was a webinar software. He told me exactly why this other software wasn't working. I recommended easy webinar. He did it. And then also he asked about something else. I gave him his Members Pro, actually a membership site. So he told me his frustrations with click funnels and all that stuff. And I was like, okay, well it sounds like this would actually be a really good solution for exactly what you're doing. And it hooks up with all this stuff. So it was just like that's the power of a personalizing. And this is a guy like I was literally. He calls me my brother now because like I started sending him voice messages because I was too lazy to type. And that is the God's honest truth. But guess what? He sent voice messages back to me. It was super rad. I don't even know what country he lives in. But like it was great. And now I have a brother brother in some other country. Nice. But that just came through helping and doing a minor bit of research. But it was enough for him where he literally raised his hand. He was like, I want you to get this affiliate commission.

And he has multiple times. That was from someone cold. Not even in our audience. That's the power of personalization and actually helping people too.

Absolutely. Yeah. A lot of good takeaways from this 1.

Affiliate marketing and Rev Share deal. In my mind they're kind of the like the Rev Share thing is essentially like the next evolution of an affiliate marketer. Right? It's like affiliate marketer, you make, you make commissions of the sales that you make. Specifically Rev Share. Now it's. You're saying you're essentially getting commissions on the entire business because you're going to help bring other affiliates in and grow it in other ways other than just being an affiliate. So they're really kind of two sides of the same coin in my mind.

Different agreement, basically. Structure.

Yeah, a little bit different of a structure. But like at the end of the day you're kind of doing a lot of the same stuff and, and the result is going to be similar. You're just ideally going to make more off the Rev shares than you will off the affiliate thing. And the Rev shares are also longer term contracts and one of the things that we structure into the Rev Share deals, which is something we learned from James, is that if some of these software companies ever sell, we want a piece of the revenue when the business sells as well. So some of these businesses that we're getting Rev Share deals on, who knows, down the line, they could end up being seven figure, eight figure days for us.

And the beautiful thing there is you have that pop. You have all the recurring or whatever happens before that potential exit event happens. But then once you create a portfolio and we do this with affiliate marketing, we do it with. Pretty much everything we do is you have this connectedness between everything or integrations. Hello. So think about this. We do this as well. Partners that we have. Okay, well, they need to be integrated with, and these are software partners mainly. There's probably some integrations that would really benefit that partner. But also we can go to these other partners that we have great relationships with. And there is a value on both sides. Hey, you guys should integrate with each other, AKA you guys should meet up together in software land. And guess what that's gonna do that's gonna help the marketing for both sides. And if you're an affiliate or partner on both sides, then that's pretty dang cool. Yeah. So, like, that's. I think that's. That is one of my takeaways, actually. I didn't say it in that sense, but like connecting everything you can. And if it's that way, I just said, or like in our case, podcast all the way to email, to membership, to affiliates, to partnerships, to whatever comes next.

We've just finally connected all the dots And I think 2021 is going to be more of that and just doubling down on it. I agree.

And also cutting more stuff out, saying no to more things. Right. I feel like, well, this is being released at the very beginning of 2021, and we probably had a therapy session that we recorded after this one, but came out before this one.

We're looking at our goals. We're supposed to. Yes.

Yeah, well, I mean, it'll come out on New Year's Eve. It came out on New Year's Eve, so hope you all listen to that because that's us talking about what we're doing in 2021. And we don't know what we said yet, but we're recording this one before that one. Whatever.

We're confusing everyone.

Yeah, confusing myself. But anyway, in 2021, I think the goal is really to focus purely on the podcast, affiliate marketing and Rev Share deals and just pre. Much Say no to everything else.

I mean, what more do you need, really? Yeah, I don't want to work that hard.

Exactly.

Let's be smart and work with cool people.

All right, Speaking of webinars, because we.

Actually, before that, actually pause. We'll get to that. Our notes. I'm sure there are some fabulous notes in this episode and there are always are massive takeaways from James. So get the notes if you go to flowchartgroup.com we actually did talk about it on the podcast, but we didn't talk about the action guides. Probably should have mentioned that in the cta, but didn't. So for you. Yeah, if you want the notes from this episode, go to flowchartgroup.com, be quick. Within two weeks of this going live, those will go away. But right now they're free, so go get them.

Easy Webinar.

Yeah, tell me about it.

Yeah, we mentioned EZ Webinar actually a couple times throughout this episode. So Easy Webinar is a great webinar platform. And the thing that I love about Easy Webinar is typically with webinar platforms, you gotta have like one platform if you want to do live, one platform if you want to do automated. Another platform for hybrid, which is like that. It's a recording, but maybe you're on there chatting live and AKA very complicated.

Yeah.

Unless you have, unless you have Easy.

Webinar, which literally combines all these different types of webinars into one easy to use tool.

Right.

So we love Easy Webinar. When we do webinars, we use Easy Webinar. It's a great tool. Casey, the team behind Easy Webinar, skip, like everybody over at Easy Webinar.

Great product, great people, great customer support. The product's constantly evolving. In fact, as we record this, I think Casey, the founder of Easy Webinar, sent us a video just a couple weeks ago with like, hey, check out all of these new features that are about to roll out. So it's constantly evolving, constantly getting better. It's. It's a single webinar platform that can do everything you could potentially want to do with webinars. So why not get one instead of multiple platforms?

So that's typically one of the biggest things that people tell us with any kind of software. It's like, hey, I have this problem and I don't want to, to bother with hooking up a bunch of stuff or hacking multiple things together, multiple tools. So if you're thinking about webinars, get Easy Webinar because it just handles it. And they're hooking you up on a cool discount too, for just you as a listener. If you go to easywebinar.com hustle and you will get a fatty discount depending on the plan you get. Go check it out. Easywebinar.com hustle and say hey to Casey and Sky Skip because they're our buddies. And thank you very much for listening to this and share it around with your friends. If someone really wants to learn about.

I think I'm gonna say share them around with your friends, if you have any.

Why would I say that? I don't know.

That's what I thought you were about to say.

I don't know. We've been locked in our houses for far too long. We have no friends anymore and we have a lot of friends. All right, thank you very much. Goodbye.

Thanks everybody for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast for taking the time to listen. We want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliff's Notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com find this episode that you just listened to too, and give us your email address and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

Go get it, Wiki Wiki. We love you.