Matt McWilliams - How Anyone Can Recruit An Army Of Affiliates

The single best way to disobey big tech and to be platform proof. It's kind of the new. The new term I, you know, I'm coming up with lately. I'm sure somebody else has come up with it, but the best way to be platform proof, which means if Facebook goes out of business tomorrow, which, I mean, it happened in MySpace, it's not like it couldn't happen. You know?

That's right.

What's the new TikTok? You know what's gonna happen to TikTok? I don't know what's gonna happen to Snapchat? I don't know their IPO. Since their IPO, their stock's gone down, like 90%, so probably not good things. The best way to be platform proof is to have to have partners who support you and mail you and use whatever platform is hot these days to, you know, to promote you on. But the partner stays the same.

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Floatshark with your boy.

My boy, Matt Wolf. Joe. Hey, yo.

Hey, Lou again.

Hey. Hello.

Welcome back.

You have a name doppelganger on the show today?

I do. His name is Matt.

His name's Matt?

Yeah.

Or is it Matthew?

Yeah, sure.

Probably. Most likely my name's both. Yeah.

Just like you're Joe and Joseph.

I could be just Joe legally.

But you're not.

But I'm not.

I've seen your driver's license.

That's true.

You could be Josephine, Joseph.

But you've seen my driver's license, Jose. That's possible in another country.

Yeah, or here.

But that's not my driver's license either. Okay.

Yeah. Your driver's license says Joseph.

Just call me Pepe.

Okay, Pepe.

Pepe, Pepe.

Long stockings.

Long stockings. I kind of do today.

I don't normally wear my stockings are actually longer your stockings. Do you want to see them?

Sure. Show me your stockings, Matt. Wow, look at them. He's all decked out in SDSU gear. Is it a game today or something?

There is a game today.

Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, that makes sense. I should just watch your stockings and your hat. Yeah.

If you see me wearing the Aztec hat and the Aztec socks, that means it's game day. It's game day, bro.

Actually, ironically, we talked this about. We talked this about. We talk about this with Matt, too.

Did we talk about it on the recording, or is that pre recording?

It might have been pre recording.

I think we talked about it before we hit record.

Oh. Saying that there are a few things out of context that we needed to say that we talked about with Matt and I don't think I wrote it down.

No, it was Rich's event. So when we first jump onto the call.

Wait, who are we talking to?

So we're talking to Matt McWilliams who is just like when it comes to affiliate recruitment, badass. He is the top of the mountain. Like this guy recruits affiliates for the biggest badasses on the planet.

He is the affiliate guy.

That's literally his brand. Yeah, that's part of his brand.

Is the affiliate guy or something. But definitely the affiliate guy.

Yeah.

So.

But he's, I mean he's, he's done affiliate management for Rich Efrin. So when we first get into the conversation, you're gonna hear us talking about this event that we just came from where we were all awake for ungodly amounts of hours and all that sort of thing. That's what we were referring to is the CSIB2020, the Coalition to Save the Internet Businesses event that we went to in Delray Beach, Florida. That's what we're talking about when we first kicked this episode off our delusional.

State of being in a. An amazing room at Mark Ford's private cigar bar. Yeah, Frickin art everywhere. Things like millions of dollars of art. Just amazing people. Cool event. Matt was the guy, the affiliate art like manager. He freaking coordinated all of this stuff around affiliates with extremely limited time frames and legal and all that stuff. I mean it's all the, it's all the different qualities that go into launching when it's under a big company. So it's cool to hear the perspectives and we'll get into that.

But he's been the affiliate manager for Rich obviously on this event, but also Michael Hyatt, Ray Edwards, Brian Tracy, Lewis Howes, Shutterfly, Peter Voogd. Is that you say his name?

Not sure. I think he, he also Ziggler.

Ziggler. Jeff Goins.

I think he even said Adidas as well on the show. Big stuff, big brands.

So when it comes to affiliate management and actually recruiting affiliates to promote your stuff, this guy is like top of the food chain there. And we basically just picked his brain for like an hour and 20 minutes on how do we get affiliates for our business? How do we get people to promote us? How do we get them excited? How do we get in contact with these really big name people that maybe we don't have relationships with yet? If you're top of mind, if you were just. If you have a Product. And you don't have any network in the industry yet. How do you get started recruiting affiliates if you don't even know anybody yet? We cover all of that ground, and this is like a masterclass on getting affiliates to promote your business.

Yeah. And he. These are. It's good for us and it's good for you. When. When people like Matt come on our show and they essentially coach us on something we should be doing in our business, which is exactly what he did here.

We win, and so do you.

Yeah, Yeah. I mean, 100%. I think it's the best way to learn is you're seeing very practical examples of how to apply this stuff. So it's not just concepts, it's not just strategies that are kind of fluffy. Like, we get into it. So you'll. You'll hear him break down what we should be doing in our affiliate, in our business as getting affiliates and stuff to promote our stuff. But saying all this, you can completely take away everything he's saying and apply it to your own business, too.

Any business. If you have something for sale and you would like people to promote the thing you have for sale, this episode is for you.

It pumped us up. And I'll just say, like, this is a little side note that we don't talk about a lot is. You know, I think it's pretty obvious at this point. We know a lot of people. This podcast helps a lot. You know, we've talked about it before. This podcast is the quickest and most leveraged way to grow your network. But we had a big network getting into this. It's just gotten a lot bigger, a lot quicker with this show. But we've never totally asked for support in terms of being, you know, getting affiliates for our own products.

Right.

And I want to say we. We finally cashed in. Or like, no, that's not. That's not how we see it. But we just. It's interesting because there's a lot of equity built up over the years of basically supporting our network, you know, and we try our best to do that and prop them up and edify and all that stuff and promote them. But now is a turning point to actually, like, hey, let's actually do a little bit more together as affiliates.

Well, I rem. Jesse Elder said it on a podcast at some point. I don't remember the context, but he was. He kind of talked about networking as this concept of. Of, you know, watering the plants, like planting seeds when you first meet somebody and then constantly watering the plants. And like, every time you reach out and wish them a happy birthday or offer to help them or ask how they're doing. That's kind of putting a little bit of water on the plants. And you're constantly watering, you're planting new seeds. You're constantly watering these plants. You knowing that someday you might be able to harvest these plants. And that is really kind of the overarching. I think that's like the perfect metaphor for what we're talking about in this episode is like, how do you plant the seeds? How do you continually water the seeds and then when it's time, how do you actually harvest those seeds? You know, harvest those plants.

That's pretty much what we cover here. And that's a good way to put it.

Yeah.

So Matt actually has. And you have the URL. I don't.

I do.

So Matt McWilliams, our Matt here, Matt Wolf, holds the URL that you should go ch.

Yeah. So go to mattmcwilliams.com hustle. He put together, I believe it's like some sort of cheat sheet with all. With some ways to recruit affiliates.

And it's a ton of different ways.

He said, yeah, a ton of different ways to recruit affiliates. And he made it available for free for our listeners over@mattmcwilliams.com hustle and also got some notes.

Got a lot of notes on this one, man. So sue has done her diligent note taking homework on this episode. Thank you, Sue. So get the notes. It'll make sue happy, It'll make us happy. But more, it'll really pay off for you. I guarantee it. If you apply it, that is. But get the notes. If you go to hustleandflowchart.com comp c o m p if you want to use the computadora or you can use.

The phone by texting the word comp to Fugz0. Or is it Fugs Plus?

It's right behind me. It's on the board.

Yeah. We wanted to figure out what. So 38470 you text the word comp to that. We wanted to figure out what we could spell with it. It doesn't spell any words. The closest pronounceable thing we came up with was fugs + f u g.

S + sign, which is really just zero.

So text the word comp to fugsplus or 38470 fugs.

That is one fugly URL. No, fugly phone number.

It is very fugly. But you know what? We're owning it because it's the Best we got.

So you just remember FUGS plus.

It was either that or Dugs plus like D U G S plus or.

What else we had. EVIS ever.

Evip.

Don't do the other ones. No. We're going to confuse everyone. All right, 3470 is a number or comp or fugs plus f u g.

S. See, now we're just going to remember FUGS plus and let's never forget our phone number.

That's perfect. That was the whole point. Because our number is not memorable by itself. That's why I have a big post it note on your.

I literally have a post it note with this number. So we don't forget it during podcast days. All right.

It's so important. Please go do that. I mean everyone who gets the notes literally rave about the notes. And we do have a physical newsletter and digital newsletter for some folks that basically compiles all these notes every single month. And we give it to you and it's like pretty much the most no brainer buy that people make in business.

Fifteen bones.

That's what they have told us. We really should probably put real testimonials in here so I can use real words. Maybe someday, but we just haven't done it yet. We have them, but we just haven't done yet.

All right, ready? Go get the Evergreen Profits membership and newsletter is the most valuable thing I have ever purchased in my life.

Matthew Wolf said that.

Matthew Wolf.

I love reading notes that other people write for me from episodes that I record with my voice. That's a testimonial from Joe Fear. Cool. All right, cool. So you should go buy.

Now that there's some testimonials and we've got that social proof there. You should go grab the $15 notes.

We check the box but. Well, the notes actually just get the free ones.

I'll get the free notes to hustle.

And flowchart.com comp or you know, or fugs plus thing folks plus and comp. You know, you'll figure it out. All right, let's get. Let's, let's, let's carry on here. Yo, Matt, really quick. So we were just messing around with our favorite, most favorite tool that helps us Ninja Lee jump the ranks and creepily beat the competitors out there on Google. And use lots of adjectives here. Yeah, I'm just trying to use adjectives and sound smart, but I'm using. I don't know. I think they're working out.

Yeah.

But we basically have a tool that helps us do all of this stuff to help with our content marketing and get a lot of visibility for everything we put out in the world.

Yes. That tool is called Hrefs dang, right? It is. That's spelled A H r e f s.com and we do have a membership. And I'm not saying this just because they're a sponsor of ours, but we actually use it. We pay for it, and we love it. It's one of our most used tools in our business to figure out what keywords to go after, what competitors are doing, to figure out where we're ranking so we can sort of level up the rankings for the various keywords that we're pushing. And, dude, it does so frickin much.

It's a lot. It's a lot to uncover and it's a beast when you get in there, but.

It'S got a lot going on. So you definitely want to check out ahrefs. It's kind of. It's basically a tool that we only really talk about it actually on this podcast. And it's super cool that they're supporting us. And actually we reached out to ask them about that originally because we love their tools so much, we wanted to somehow shine some more light on them, what they got. So it's really cool. You should check it out ahrefs.com and basically check out their content too. They have a great YouTube channel if you check out Ahrefs, their channel there.

Oh, we've learned a ton about SEO just by watching their YouTube channel.

Oh, yeah. They literally give a ton of SEO strategies and, you know, spotting opportunities and gaps and da, da, da, da, da. We'll make a big old list in future episodes. They sponsored our show last year, actually, and like, each one we made kind of like a new nugget of like a new training you can use in SEO and then use Ahrefs as to just basically speed up the process. So their YouTube channel is great for that. They have a blog as well. And so check them out ahrefs.com and you're going to love it because we love them.

Yep.

See you, Mr. Matt. How you doing? Matt McWilliams. That is.

I'm doing. I'm doing awesome, guys.

Yeah, man, It's a long time no see, you know, all of a few days ago or so in Florida, whenever it was.

Yeah, it feels like it's been like two weeks, but yeah, it does kind.

Of already feel like it was a while ago, but it was like literally last week.

It's that whole lack of sleep Thing.

And, you know, it's a distant memory.

Distant debris of Florida past. Yeah.

So it turns out if you don't sleep for, like, 48 hours straight, then that window feels like a long time ago. Weird effect.

Yeah.

Yeah, we got. I think we rocked, like, two hours in about 48 hours. So that was. I'm too old for that. In fact, I've never been. I've never been young enough for that, come to think of it. I, like, there's no point in my life when I reflect. Was it like. Yeah, I could do two hours. I've always been like, I need my six and a half to seven at night. Every night. Oh, yeah. So it was kind of tough for me.

Yeah. And I praise the Agora folks that were up for. Some were saying up to 40 hours straight or something like that. I mean, it's gnarly.

Well, one thing I don't think a lot of people that were watching the livestream realized was that when that livestream started, we'd all been masterminding for, like, 12 hours straight prior to that.

Yeah. Rich had not, you know, nobody, like, there. It wasn't like Rich Woke up at 4, 5 in the afternoon or, you know, or took an afternoon nap. Like. No, we were busting it. The whole team had been busting it, you know, since early in the morning. And so then, I mean, and it felt like we just went. I know we went back to the hotel for all of, like, 30 minutes. You know, I went back and, like, changed shirts and laid on the bed for, like, 10 minutes. We called the kids, and then we were there. You know, I mean, it was just like, boom, boom, boom. So it was. Yeah, I don't want to do that anytime soon.

Hard pass on that.

Yeah, well, let's. I mean. Yeah. And we're all. Obviously, we've been chatting a lot about Rich's stuff leading up to this point, too. So I'm sure in our intro, we'll preface a lot of this stuff here, see what we're actually chatting about.

Yeah, I was just thinking that's my stuff. Like, the listeners have no context for what we were just talking about.

Well, we always record an intro after the episode has. Has been recorded. And so we sort of tee up everything that we're about to talk about.

Awesome. So let's just start doing. Let's just. I'm going to run your podcast for you here. Let's just start telling stories in the middle of them right now.

Now, I got to make notes of all these things, these loose ends all right, we talked about that.

Yeah, man, but you, I mean, you engineered all the affiliate stuff regarding his launch. So, I mean, like, props to you, man, because you definitely wrangled the best and the best in the business and somehow got them all out there in one place, too.

And all under the sort of restrictions that were placed upon the affiliates as well.

Yeah, anytime we have to work with legal department, that's. I mean, it's kind of one of the downsides of my job. And we've worked with, like, you know, Adidas companies like Adidas and Shutterfly in the past, and Agora was no better, no worse than them. The difference was when we worked with Adidas way back when we came on board and we got through all the legal stuff in the first 90 days, and then it was kind of like free sailing for the next couple of years. When we worked with Shutterfly, it was like we got through all the legal stuff in the first 90 days and it was free sailing for the next three, four years with this. We had 90 days.

Wow.

So you can do the math on. Actually, we had less than 90 days. We had like 75 days. So you can kind of do the math on that. It took us about 70 days to get through the legal stuff, which meant we only had like five days in the free and clear. That was really the difference. Anytime you work with a company worth more than a billion dollars, there's going to be attorneys, there's going to be legal stuff. So it kind of comes with the territory and it comes with being a big company. I mean, we're not strangers to that, thankfully.

Yeah, I mean, the turnaround time was pretty crazy. I think Joe and I got on board fairly early on in the process. We got on board to work with Rich to help Rich get on a whole bunch of podcasts. And yeah, I mean, we were dealing.

That was still when? Like, late November.

That was just starting late November. And he didn't actually get on shows until like, late December. And.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I remember when we connected, it was like the very first week of December. We hadn't even signed the contract yet. So, yeah, it was pretty. Pretty bang bang. Yeah.

Yeah. But so, I mean, the fact that still got the leaders of the industry out there to support and, you know, do the best they could, that shows the quality of what you're bringing out there. And they hired the right guy.

Yeah.

I mean, the people in that room were literally the who's who of the marketing world for the past decade, essentially.

More than a decade.

Yeah. There were only, I mean, a handful of people we wanted that we didn't get just because of scheduling conflicts, which is we tell people anytime you're working with affiliates, you're going to them and saying, hey, will you promote us? Will you support our launch? Will you support our event? Really, the normal ramp up time is nine months. You know, most people can either either have an open spot on their calendar in nine months or they can move something nine months out for the right, you know, thing. I look at like our, you know, our promo calendar, it's booked through about right now, about October, which, you know, as we're recording, this is literally almost exactly nine months. If you approached me and said, you know, hey, I've got this thing in September, could you do. Depends. If you're a good friend, we can move some stuff in September, but November, December, January of next year, February, next year, that's when we can really be like, yeah, we're wide open. Let's, let's do it. You know, we can put on our calendar. It doesn't, I don't have to ask my team to get creative. We don't have to, you know, reach out to other people and move stuff or readjust, you know, content calendars or, or think about, you know, wait a minute, I was going to do this podcast series and, you know, September leading up to this. No, it's, it's. Anything past about nine months for most people is pretty open. Till you start getting to like really, really big names, you might have some, some problems. But that's why we typically go nine months. But yeah, this was all in 75.

Days and it all wrangled together somehow and, and I mean, in the middle of it, while the event was going on, it felt like it went off without a hitch. I mean, we obviously didn't see all the behind the scenes, but.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I haven't seen the actual live stream yet, but everybody I talked to that watched, you know, we had some people in our mastermind that literally watched like 21, 22 hours of the 24 hours. They all fell asleep right before I went on, ironically.

You know, it's interesting because, like, I was thinking to myself, who's going to sit around and like, just kind of watch this stuff? Like who's, who's going to like just get sucked in and watch for hours and hours and hours. But the first night the event was on, you know, Joe and I actually managed to pop back to our hotel and, you know, get some naps in and before going back and before we went to lie down, I flipped open my laptop. I'm like, I'm gonna see what this, what the landing page looks like, how the live stream's doing when I turn it on. Perry. It was right in the middle of Perry Marshall talking. This was at probably like he was.

On right after me.

Yeah, this is and probably like 3:00am or something, right? Like really, really early in the morning. Yeah. So I flipped it on and I was just like, I get it now. I think I got sucked in for like an hour. And I was like, oh, crap. I was gonna go to sleep tonight. And flipp laptop closed.

Matt and I were in completely separate hotel rooms and we were doing the same thing on, like, we didn't talk about it, but I did the same thing. I was like, damn, this is actually really cool and interesting.

So, I mean, it was really engaging.

Yeah.

Well, let's let, let's step back a little bit. I want to. I want to get into you and your story and I want to learn how you got into this whole affiliate marketing game, this whole Internet business that we're all in. You know, what were you doing before this? And how did you get into what you're doing now?

Gosh. So.

It all goes back to a stormy night. 1979.

Really. The genesis of it was I grew up. We were talking earlier. I went to University of Tennessee, played golf there, played professionally for a couple years after college. And there was a friend of mine and I. We grew up, you know, at golf courses. Right. That's where I lived. I mean, I got out of school, went straight to golf course, stayed till after dark, left and did the same thing the next day. In the summer, I was there from sun up to sundown. And we always used to joke that we never wanted to be one of those guys who grew up teaching old ladies in purple sweaters how to play golf. That was our thing. So Fast forward to 2002. I had a long story. Had a pretty bad injury that was going to put me out for about two years. Decided to work for my dad teaching golf. And that's how I got into marketing. Actually was. This was back when I could go to Google and say, hey, Google, I'm going to give you 10 cents a click. Like, just to be clear, everything about say is not replicatable today. I'm going to give you 10 cents a click. They came to our website. There was no opt in, There was no free report. There was no lead magnet. There was no nurture sequence. There was no you'll start naming A marketing term we use today. You came to my website and you either gave me 2,000 to $3,000 or you left. I converted about 1% of people. You can do the math on that. It cost me 20 bucks to acquire $2,500 customer for a golf school. So I'm 22 years old and we're doing these golf schools with eight to 10 people, you know, average of $2,500 a piece. Again, you can do the math. 20, $25,000 in a weekend, splitting at 50, 50 with my dad. I'm 22. Like most 22 year olds, I mean, how long does it take them to make $40,000 a year?

Sure.

I was doing that in like three weekends.

When I was 22, I was playing in a band for beer money.

About the same here.

It was just like it was clockwork. About half the year I was, I was bringing in between 12 and $15,000 a week from golf schools and golf lessons.

That's a great lesson.

The other half year, our downtime was, you know, four or five thousand bucks. I lived with my mom. I paid her. She had no idea how much money I made. I paid her like I paid half her mortgage and half her bills. It was like 300 bucks a month, you know, and so. But that's how I got into marketing. And then sure enough, one day. But I hated it. And sure enough, one day.

Let me back up. So there's this weird dichotomy. I don't know if you remember, but back in the day when your shopping cart made a sale, there was a desktop app. This is like Windows 95, right? It was like the Southwest Ding. That told you when there was like a deal on a flight on. If you guys remember that.

Yeah.

And it would ding. I'm like, boom. $2,500.

The money machine.

Dang it. Gotta teach somebody how to play golf. So you learn.

You love the marketing part. You just didn't like the teaching the golf part. Gotcha.

Yeah, I hated it. So sure enough, one day, this 70 something year old lady in a lavender sweater comes walking up. Sweetest old lady in the world comes walking up. And I had like. I don't know if you guys remember, like the 0.2 megapixel flip phones, you know, the originals. And I pick it up and I go like that. And I send it to my best friend Hunter, the one that we swore we would never teach old ladies in purple sweaters how to play golf. And I wrote these words, Kill me now. That's all I wrote now a good female friend, you know, any of the females out there will know a good female friend will call you back within moments, like, oh honey, I am so sor. Do you need to talk? Let's talk about this. How can I help you? I'll be, I'm going to get on the first flight and come see you. I like a good male friend. His only response was, haha, sucks to be you. And so that's the response I get. Anyway, that was the beginning in the end. Thankfully. Later that summer, the day after my birthday, my dad handed me 500 bucks in cash as a birthday present and fired me. And best thing that ever happened, best thing that ever happened to me. So fast forward about a year and a half later, kind of took some time to figure out what the heck I wanted to be when I grew up. Started this company selling leads to insurance agents and we had no money. That was a big problem. We had $10,000, we spent $5,000 of it on banner ads. This was 2004, don't laugh. Okay, that would be really stupid today. It seemed like the smart thing to do in 2004. So January 2005, we're sitting there basically going, okay, we have $5,000 left. How in the heck are we gonna like compete against, you know, these publicly traded companies worth a hundred million dollars each? What are we gonna do? I was like, well I heard of these people called affiliates. Like radio stations? No, like they, it's like they market your. They market us. They'll send us people who need insurance and then they'll, we'll like pay them 30 days later. For a company in a cash flow crisis, this was, I mean like, I might as well just said it was mana from heaven, you know. So I describe it and like I'm getting excited, you know, this is what I do, right? I'm like, this is gonna be the greatest thing ever. We're gonna have all these affiliates, they're gonna make us tons of money. We don't even have to, to pay them for like 30 to 40 days and we can cash flow this and blah blah blah. And Hunter, that same friend, we started this business together, looks at me and goes, how do we find affiliates? I'm like, oh crap. So that's kind of been my mission for the last 15 years now is how do we find affiliates, how do we work with affiliates, how do we, we did it for our business. Within two years we had a 12 and a half million dollar affiliate program. Since then I've worked with companies Like Shutterfly and Adidas entrepreneurs is kind of my jam now. Like Rich, you know, Lewis, how. Kevin Harrington from Shark Tank, Michael Hyatt, Brian Tracy, you know, people in the personal growth, marketing, self improvement, self education space are the folks who I really have gravitated towards over the past, like, seven or eight years, just helping them to find affiliates, work with affiliates. Because to me, you've got a shirt there, Matt, that says. I think that's the disobey big tech one, isn't it?

Yeah, it says disobey big tech.

You know, to me, the single best way to disobey big tech and to be platform proof. It's kind of the new. The new term I'm coming up with lately. I'm sure somebody else has come up with it. But the best way to be platform proof, which means if Facebook goes out of business tomorrow, which, I mean, it happened in my space, it's not like it couldn't happen. You know?

That's right.

What's the new TikTok? You know, what's gonna happen to TikTok? I don't know what's gonna happen to Snapchat? I don't know. Their IPO. Since their IPO, their stock's gone down, like 90%. So prob. Good things. The best way to be platform proof is to have partners. To have partners who support you and mail you and use whatever platform is hot these days to, you know, to promote you on. But the partner stays the same. And to kind of tie it back to Rich's thing. You mentioned All Star Group, right? Every single person there. This is no exaggeration. Literally every single person there that I know, you guys might literally be the only exception. And I don't know, was either a partner of Rich in the past, he was a partner of them, or they were a friend of mine because they were an affiliate for one of our clients. Every single person there. That's how Rich knew them or I knew them, was through those three things. So what does it all tie back to? It ties back to affiliate partners.

Yeah, I mean, we've actually been an affiliate partner of Rich, so there you go.

Were we actually before. Yeah, we were. Okay. I don't. I didn't even know that.

Yeah, I didn't know that either, so.

Well, I was. I was an affiliate partner of Rich back when I was working with. With Josh, so it was so long time ago.

That would be like pre2012. Yeah. Preaching.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, I mean.

Okay.

That's why we've been doing this stuff since 2007. Joe and I have been, like, business partners working really closely together since 2013.

Right.

So it was in that. In that window somewhere between 2007, 2013, that we promoted some of Rich's stuff back when he had his manifesto and some of that kind of stuff. We got connected to him through Alex Jeffries, actually.

Would have been around 2009, actually. Yeah.

So the way that we see how that works. Yeah.

I mean, this is, you know, 11, 12 years ago. Alex, an affiliate for Rich, connects you to Rich, you become an affiliate for him, then you're both, you know, sitting poolside with all these other rock stars. I mean, that really is how the world works. I tell people all the time, like, I mean, affiliate marketing is nothing new. It's been around, like, I can just imagine, like, Romans walking around in togas and Sandals, you know, 5,000 years ago.

They just didn't have cookies and, you know, IP tracking. They didn't have chrome back then. And so, you know, how did they track it? Well, it was like, you know, hey, refer your. Refer this guy to my deli. And I don't know if the Romans had delis, but I have to study that later.

They should. Yeah, they should have.

I just assume they did. I mean, I just assumed delis have been around since, like, Genesis, chapter one.

Get your grinder sandwich over there. The deli.

Yeah, they had meatballs at least, right?

There you go.

Probably.

Anyway, so, you know, I mean, they've been around since then, you know, like, hey, you send this guy out of my deli, you say that it was, you know, Thaddeus who sent me, and then I give you a free sub. I don't know. You know, it's been around for thousands and thousands of years.

Yeah.

All we did, all Amazon did, because Amazon basically invented this, was add technology to it. And then, I mean, the technology hasn't really evolved that much. The principle remains the same. It's relationships. It's relationships and it's relationships. And it is a. It really and truly comes down to two people, you know, supporting each other in some manner that is mutually beneficial for them and for their audiences. I mean, that's effectively all. All it is, like, in its simplest form. I think anything past that, like, people always ask me, like, I mean, we sell these things because people need them. People ask me, like, do you have, like, recruiting email templates for affiliates? I'm like, yeah, just don't sound like a moron.

Yeah, be human.

Here's a template that we've used that we've tested. That's been successful for a decade. Yes. There are some principles you can do to kind of get them to open it, but it's like, you know, just don't be, don't be weird. That's kind of the best way to get affiliates. Just like invest in people and they'll want to invest in you.

Yeah, that's everything we do in our business, we realized, has been the backbone of our network. I mean, everything from podcasts, getting folks on here. Biggest piece of our business is affiliate marketing, brokering, which is basically just affiliate marketing anyway, but with a different form. And that's where we love to operate. And it's fun and it's great for any business. It could be an add on, a bolt on to someone's existing offerings. That's, you know, people are constantly asking us, how do you get in affiliate marketing? Well, what are you already doing? And if someone else has a product, service or something that you don't want to fulfill on, but it's relevant to your offer, bolt it on. Just, just be a good guy and, you know, pass them some leads and they'll pay you end result.

So I'm curious though, before we get too deep into like affiliate marketing sort of strategy type stuff, how when you first started out and you decided you were gonna go down this affiliate route, how did you actually get your first handful of affiliates to promote something? Because, you know, if you don't know anybody, how do you, how do you get into it?

Yeah, I, we knew nobody in their industry. You know, fast forward like three years later, we knew, I'm, you know, having dinner with the CEO of our largest competitor. We struck a deal that was worth about $10 million a year to us for them to be our largest affiliate. But I didn't know him at that time. Very simple. And it's what we teach people all the time now. If you're, if you're new in your niche, you're, you know, you're not an A level player. You don't come in with, you know, sometimes you can be new in a niche, but you've got, you know, $10 million sitting in the bank from a previous, you know, you can go figure that out yourself. I'm not speaking to you right now. It's very simple. We did the same thing in 2005 and 2006 that we're doing in 2020, which is we're looking at people who are promoting similar products. It's very simple. This, this thing has been around since then. It's called Google, you know, like back then you actually had to go to google.com. now you don't. Probably the only difference, you type in your competitors and you find people that are promoting them. And so, you know, I mentioned there's a template that we used and it's still, I mean, this took us about four or five years to perfect. It's pretty dialed in. But even within that template there's some, there's some nuance that we apply, but literally we'll just, we'll find that person. There's almost nobody. We haven't been able to find their email address. There's Rocket Reach, there's this, what Salesforce's thing. LinkedIn, Navigator, Hunter IO. Yeah, I mean, like search how to find an email address. Like, this is the thing. It's all at your fingertips. Like, stop making excuses for why you can't find partners. And we would reach out. So let's just say I'm gonna make. I'm thinking somebody. Oh, there. I'm looking at his picture. Jeff Walker. Okay, so let's say we have a course that's about product launches. Kind of weird. Just run with the example I would put in the subject line. I would probably. I'll talk about the follow up in a second. I would start with probably product launch formula in the subject line. And I say, hey, I saw you were promoting, you know, Jeff's product launch formula and that's awesome. I'm a big fan of plf. I have a course that's similar, but it's different in the following ways. And I would list two or three ways, not seven ways, not 11 ways. Two or three ways that it's different. I was wondering if we could chat maybe about you becoming a partner for it. Let me know what you think. Now, the key to this first email that I learned over time by screwing it up again. A lot of what we did back then to build a 12 and a half million dollar affiliate program in less than two years.

There are parts of it that are unreplicatable today, but you can probably screw up as badly as I did and build a $9 million affiliate program. The biggest mistakes that we made were trying to say, here's all of our stuff and here's a novel. Hey, would you like to read a three page email? Even back in 2006, 2007, let alone today, when our attention spans. Wait, what was I talking about? Yeah, no. Anyway, here's the key. Don't try to get a yes response. Don't try to get. You're Trying to get a no response. That's acceptable. No is a perfectly acceptable response. What you're trying to get is the three magic words in affiliate or creating. Tell me more. Just tell me more. I'm interested. Tell me more. That sounds fascinating. Tell me more.

That's what you're looking for. Because now that follow up email, that first email is this long, the follow up email is that long. But it's like you're standing there in their door. The door is open so you can give a little bit more detail.

Then everything is follow up. And so for us now we have all these amazing tools. It used to be that I had to write them down on legal pads. I literally had legal pads and legal pads and legal pads just full of names and email addresses. Okay. Yeah, I mean I still use legal pads. And that was my follow up which was cross through and write, you know, yes next to them or no or follow up on March 3rd. And you know, and then I have to go put a calendar reminder and you know, it was really antiquated. Now we use asana and everything is follow up. You're going to. Only 5 to 10% are going to even open the first email. But if you keep following up and we follow up typically on a 13 day cycle, the reason we pick 13 is then we're hitting a different day of the week, you know, for the first seven times. Okay, so we'll follow up at different times, different, different days of the week. We'll follow up on weekends, we'll follow up on Monday nights, Tuesday mornings, you know, Wednesday afternoons. And we'll just kind of like mix and match it. I'll follow up with videos, I'll follow up with. You know, again, we're talking about, like, we're talking about, don't even know the people we haven't even gotten to. Like, this is my friend Dave and I'm gonna try to get him to promote our upcoming launch. That's a totally different beast. This is all email, you know, but I'm gonna shoot a video and I'm gonna say, hey Joe, it's Matt and you know, blah, blah, blah. And I'm basically gonna read to them the first email for all intents and purposes, you know, but it's about a 40 second video, something different. I'm going to find them on Facebook and shoot them a dm. I'm going to find them on Instagram and shoot them a dm. You know, basically everything that you can do that's more of the public facing stuff. And you're going to follow up and you're going to follow up and you're going to follow up. And we'll follow up up to about 25 times before we finally pull the plug. We start after about the 10th follow up, we start. What's the word I'm looking for? Widening the gap between follow ups. So we'll typically go to about a month at that point. Just because now it's like maybe they're just ignoring us. Maybe it's a busy season. Let's go a little bit more. But yeah, I mean, we'll go 25 to 30 times, I believe, before we finally.

Dude, that is. That's amazing. The follow. Because most people get scared to follow. They think they're bugging people. But of course, you know, like you said, people are busy, they're missing things, it's noisy out there. And the fact that all over the place.

14 years I've been doing this, I've never once had anybody get mad at me for following up. The only response I've ever gotten, and I've probably gotten it more than a thousand times, is thank you. Yeah, thanks for. I missed this. This sounds exciting. I missed it. Oh, I, you know, I found, I found this message in my spam. No wonder I didn't see the first one. I white listed you. Like those are the response. I mean, 14 years I have. I'll put it this way. I've worked with more than 300,000 affiliates. Okay, that's. That I've actually worked with. That means I probably would. That's the number that I've worked with. So I'll take one example. Jeff Walker. I've worked with Jeff on probably a dozen launches now. So if the average affiliate, if I've worked with them on, let's just say five things times 300,000 affiliates. I have recruited 1.5 million affiliates. That's a total guess. I have no idea what the actual numbers and don't even care. But it's in the million. It's over a million. And not one time have I ever. Like, that's the thing is people have that fear of that, like you said, Joe, and it's a completely unfounded fear. It does not exist. And even if you did upset them, the type of person who gets upset at you for following up, you know, in a reasonable amount of time. I actually have a personal pet peeve about following up in less than 48 hours. But you follow up 13 days later like they're not going to be mad. And the person who does get Mad weren't going to be a good partner anyway.

Yeah, exactly.

What have you lost?

I've had people that have followed up with me that I've gotten upset through their follow up techniques, but it's usually the people that you could tell have copied and pasted something to 400 people and then followed up with the same copy and paste message. So there have been times I've actually sent a reply email and been like, stop emailing me. You're bugging the crap out of me. But that's pretty rare.

Yeah.

So the copy paste thing. So are you guys still there?

Yeah, the video kind of froze up, but we could keep going.

Audio is good.

Okay, there we go. Hey, we're back on.

Make a note. Edit that out anyway. Why am I the one who's going to edit that out? I'm, like, used to doing the podcast.

Yeah, I mean, I appreciate that you're willing to. That's great. But.

Save us some time. In all honesty, we probably won't edit it out.

Put this, the bloopers at the end.

If you think about it, on the copy pasting that email. So we just talked about that email, that basic format. I saw you were promoting Jeff Walker's product launch formula, blah, blah, blah. I do copy and paste that. There's usually one little thing that I try to find. Like, I loved your podcast that you did with them. I love the image you used where you and Jeff are at the party. And, you know, like, you know, there's something about their promotion I love. Sometimes it's that I got, you know, at this point, it's that I get their emails. I'm on their email list because we're on, you know, thousands of email lists. Now. It's not my personal email address because that would just be overwhelming. But I monitor this and I'll go look for their email and I'll be like, okay, let's just pick a mutual friend, Todd Brown. And I love Todd subject lines. And so I'll go find maybe when he was promoting Rich's event. I'll be like, Todd Brown, Rich Sheffern. I'll find a sub. I'm like, okay, dude, that subject line where you talked about the time the guy farted on the plane, that was awesome. And I'll just put that in the email. That's the entire extent of the personalization of that email. How long does that take? 45 seconds.

That's it.

It's like, Joe, you and I talked about, how do you get on podcasts? You know, if I'M giving away your secret sauce. You can totally edit this out.

You're good.

Very simple. I go listen to their pod. I go, I go scroll through the podcast. I find somebody that I know. Okay, if you don't know, let's go to. If you don't know anybody. I find somebody that I like. I find somebody that I'm interested in. I don't know most of the guests on most podcasts. Usually I can find, like, one person, though, if it's a good. And if that's a sign, though, if I can't find one person that I know, it's probably not a good podcast.

Probably not a good fit. Yeah.

And like, let me just find somebody. Maybe it's just that I'm a big fan of theirs. And I go, I'm going to listen to this podcast. Dude, I love the podcast you did with Matt Wolf. You know, it was amazing. You know, Matt's a new friend of mine. I love when you. Why am I going all. Every example I'm going to come up with today is about a guy farting on an airplane. It's because a guy farted on the airplane.

Keep it going, keep it going.

We've all been there.

You know, I love when you told the story about the old lady in the. The purple sweater. That was me. Whatever. And like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Hey, here's what I talk about. And now that's copy paste. You know, that's totally copy paste. But that one little element of personalization, it makes all the difference. And so, yeah, Matt, you're right. Like, it's. It's when, like, I'll give you an example. This is how simple it can be.

Hustle and hustle and flowchart. You guys, you guys don't really use, like an, an acronym, like some. Okay, so John Lee Dumas, his audience is Fire Nation.

Fire Nation. Yeah.

This one little thing, when I follow up, I'll say, like, hey, man, just wanted to see if you got this. You know, launch is coming up in four months. Really excited about it. I think this is perfect for your audience.

Backspace, backspace, backspace. Your audience becomes Fire Nation.

Boom.

Made the email. I made the email right there. That little thing like, that took me, what, like eight seconds?

Yep.

It's gotten to the point where we don't do this. Like, I don't personally do most of the reach out anymore. That's my assistant. But back when I did it, it was those little things, those little personalizations that, I mean, take eight seconds to send me you can literally just get into a mode, play some trance music. I found rave music is really good for sending like hundreds of emails.

Just getting the energy up.

Yeah. And it's like telling you to do things like work. And I'm like, I just want to.

I like that. It's good motivational music. I never thought about trans music actually.

Yeah. For monotonous and somewhat boring activities, I have a song. It's about a 2 1/2 minute song that just plays on a loop for 10 hours.

Wow.

Do it, do it, do it. I can get into like. And I have total entrepreneurial add, by the way. Like, I literally have adhd. Right. I was diagnosed with, when I was young. Thank God my mom never put me on medicine, but that's a whole different thing. And yet when I have this song playing and I'm like, you'll see me. It's like we've taken video of me and I'm like this. For an hour and a half in a row, just going like this. You should share.

Because if you use Spotify, you should share the link to that song. Yeah. Just so we can.

It's a YouTube video.

Oh, YouTube.

Even better. Share that with us if you don't mind.

Remind me and I'll share the. It's. It's. Yeah, it's the. It's. It's like a 2 1/2 minute song on a 10 hour loop. The worst. Like, but here's the funny thing though on that is when the song changes and then suddenly I'm hearing like right now I'm hearing Dean Graziosi and Tony Robbins before every YouTube video. Oh yeah, love them both. It's awesome. But like, I'll be like. And then all of a sudden I'm like. And he's like, hey, it's Tony here. I'm like, who the hell is Tony?

Where did he come from?

What am I doing? I don't even remember. Like. And then it's like, it's just a free for all for the next 15 minutes till I can get back on track. Next thing I have to remember sometimes at the beginning of the workday to rewind that video all the way to the beginning.

You come out of it and you're like, oh crap. Three days later, little hack put that.

Thing into a YouTube play.

Did I just do a 24 hour live stream.

Telling you YouTube playlist.

Put that thing on repeat or, or just get the, the YouTube premium. That's what I did. Because I, I was, I listened to like YouTube videos as I Fall asleep sometimes. Like, there's like, nice sort of. What do they call them? They're like hypnosis kind of stuff. But like. But basically what will happen is I'll start listening to, like, these like, YouTube videos that, like, help you fall asleep. And they're like affirmations and stuff like that as you fall asleep. And then what'll happen is it'll play for like 20 minutes and then an ad will start and, you know, you'll snap out of it. Right, Right as you're trying to fall asleep. So I upgraded to the YouTube Premium just so it wouldn't do that.

Well, this is like, it goes to the next video, just to be clear. And the next video is like, you know, something weird.

Reminded me of college. I had a. I had a tape, a tape. Literally a tape. Our sports psychologist. And I can still hear his voice when I. When I meditate now. I can hear his voice in my head. His name was PG Is probably still Pete Giacobi. I don't know if he changed his name, but his name is PG he's like a professor at like, Arizona State or something now, and he's a sports psychologist. And I can still hear his voice to this day. Like, I could walk you through my pre shot routine from playing golf. Step by step, like second by second, because he talks through it in that voice. So, like, and I would listen to it every night as I was falling asleep and then wake up with like, my headphones, like, jammed in my ear canal, you know, hurting.

Like it's worth it.

Well, this, this episode is sort of timely for us because after. So we've never really done anything on this side of affiliate marketing. Right. We're affiliates. We like to promote a lot of other people's products, but we've never really Rock affiliate marketing.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah, but we've never really done the. Have affiliates promote our stuff. Like, we've done it here and there. We've had very small runs where we have like two or three buddies of ours mail for us. But we've never really focused on rounding up affiliates. But after this event, on the flight home, we actually realized how our business is very close to what Agora's business model is, just on a very, very tiny scale compared to where they're at. Right. But we actually sell newsletters. Right. We're in a newsletter business and they have affiliates and they're selling at around the same prices that we're selling our stuff at. So we got to thinking they're doing this with affiliates. Why shouldn't we. And we kind of had this thought that it was like too low ticket to get affiliates excited about it or.

What is the ticket? Let's talk about that.

So right now, our monthly newsletter is $15 a month or $59 a year.

Yeah, you pay a nice little recurrent because, I mean, you have no overhead on those newsletters. Like on an incremental overhead. Right. Like it cost you the same to sell one as it does a thousand.

Correct, Right, right.

Okay. Yeah. Because if there's incremental overhead, like if, you know, if it's. If it's a newsletter that you're mailing out and you got like. Then you gotta. We do.

I guess we'll preface. There is a physical aspect to it.

But with the annual. We're actually gonna go digital with it. So it's very similar to Agora.

So. Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you right now, we promote all kinds of stuff that's 10 to $50 a month.

Simply because if I send 300 people your way and you pay me, I'm just gonna make him number five bucks, you know, a sign up, you know, make it a. Make it a. Some sort of a percentage or whatever that's, you know, equitable for everybody. That's 550, 1500 bucks a month. Just coming in like clockwork for us.

That's right.

It's. You remember the old Ronco infomercial? Set it and forget it.

Oh, yeah, right.

That's what that's like for us. Like, you know, it's like male, five times make, you know, 1500. There's diminishing returns, of course, over time, let's be honest. But yeah, I mean, that's the type. Yeah, you guys have to do that, man. And you guys have a. Ready. You have a set list. What guest number am I?

Like, you're around the 300 mark.

Yeah, somewhere around.

Okay.

I mean, probably like 260 or something.

Yeah.

So you have 260 people that are like prime affiliates.

They are.

Oh, no.

Yes.

More than that.

You have.

I was gonna say more than that. We've had. We've had some of these people on our show flat out say, give me something to promote.

I want to promote you guys, including.

And the thing is, you get to skip all those steps because you have their email, you have their Facebook messenger, probably.

You have their, you know, their. Their. Most of them probably have their mobile number. You have ways of reaching them. They know your name, they open your emails, and you reach out to them. And I mean, so I'm in the middle of doing this for one of our big launches. And literally, because they were joking about this beforehand, this is what I'm doing all day right now. Holding a phone in front of me and saying, I mean, like, I can do this script in my sleep. And the video, every video I've recorded. If you look at my list of videos in my photos right now, it's 44 and 48 seconds. I'm saying basically the same thing over and over. And I'm just, you know, hey, we've got this thing coming up. It did amazing last year. We just finished the sales page, man, I cannot believe how good the testimonials were. Like, I knew we did a good job with this, but the testimonials are amazing. Anyway, man, you know, blah, blah, blah. If you're interested, we'd love to have you let me know. I'll follow up with an email here in a couple days. You know, and that's. And then I'm just texting them. And it's just like I've been watching as we're recording this, and I'm getting responses like, coming across my MacBook, like, the whole time. It's the most distracting thing in the world for me right now. Note to self, before doing podcast interview, put computer on DND mode.

D& D mode. Great. Yes.

Because I'm like, oh, shiny object. What?

Yeah, you know, remember to turn it back on because then you'll ignore everybody else. That's what happened yesterday. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Oh, I've done that before.

That was like, are you dead over there? Because he texted me.

I was like, oh, shit. My mom got genuinely scared once because I had to mute her. So anyway, but like, you have that ready, set, audience. And here's the cool thing about affiliate programs. So, you know, we already talked about how you get to make money before you spend money. If you're any type of cash flow situation, it's literally like printing money, you know, and you got to give some of it back.

Sure.

But you get to keep a lot of it. That's the cool thing.

Defer.

The other thing is it's infinitely scalable because there are people out there, like, I'm not in your niche, but you have information that my niche needs. Would you target the same terms as I would target on Facebook? Probably not, but I'll promote you. I'm already saying this, by the way, so when you do this, I want to see a video from you guys, please. I'm not going to make it easy on you, but I'm going to make it easy on you. You have to recruit me. Okay?

You may or may not see a video later today because we send, we may or may not send videos to all of our guests.

Secret sauce. Secret sauce. Matt.

Oh, shit. Yeah, sorry. Peeking behind the curtain.

So. So, yeah, work that in. Right? And so it's infinitely scalable because I'll promote you to an audience that you might not target. And that's the problem, like I see with Facebook ads, and this is with LinkedIn ads with anybody is like going back to my origins. 2002, 2006, 2008, it was like the wild, wild west. Like, you couldn't target people. Like, we were like running ads, trying to get insurance agents to like, you know, gym owners. You know, it was like crazy, right? But we get so myopic. We get so myopic with, like, who we're targeting that, like, I'm gonna target 32 to 38 year old men with two children whose favorite football teams in the NFC West. You know, it's like, what do you end up with that you're like 82,000 people that you can even, you know, and that's great, but why would you not reach more people that maybe are outside of that, that do end up interested? But the big one is that with affiliates, unlike, like, if you run a good Facebook ad, guess what you did. You ran a good Facebook ad. You ran one good Facebook ad. Can you learn stuff from it that makes it easier to run a second good one? Of course. But does it just automatically, like reproduce more Facebook ads for you? It doesn't. When you have 10 affiliates that have success with your promotion, you'll get another four to seven, but doing nothing. And the cool thing is there'll be four to seven people that you probably either didn't know or, or that said no to you or that ignored you because they were unwilling to say no, but when someone else told them, dude, I'm promoting this newsletter, I'm making three grand a month. Like this clockwork.

Yeah.

So it's success begets success. And the cool thing is now you go from 10 to, let's just say six. But those six send four, those four send two, and those two send. You're at 23 just from 10. And like I said, these are people that are, nine times out of 10 are outside of your ecosystem at the beginning of this.

Yeah.

And that's how we've grown. And you know, the cool thing is now, like, we're. Our starting point is you know, three, 4,000 people and three, 4,000 people. Every time we run a launch, we'll say we'll have 500 affiliates. Right. Every time we look at the list afterwards, it's like, how many new people did we add to our CRM? And it's like 82. And I mean, I don't mean this the wrong way, but I know almost everyone. How did I add 82 people? You know, even Rich's event, there were two people there I didn't know. Literally did not know them before. Had no contact with them or their JV managers before. That's pretty cool. You know, like that's two new people in our ecosystem. That's the beauty of it over time is it begins to like, it almost kind of begins to take on a life of its own.

Yeah. And I love the perspective of being so myopic, I think. And I know we have as well been very myopic in our promotions with, with very ads, not asking for affiliates, not even thinking about how to just go to the guests of our podcast. We have a whole community that loves us on our Facebook group, our email list. I mean, each one of us have all these buckets of folks that follow that. If you just ask and give them a good opportunity, more likely than not you're gonna get a lot of them wanting to raise their hand and actually show up and help you out.

Yeah. When you're starting out, you start off with your customers and your guests. In your case, like, you can expand later, but you start off with these people. Like, I mean, like, like I said, I would promote you just because it's you guys. If I make $8,000 in the first year, great, I made 8,000. Woohoo. That's not why I'm doing it. So let's just say that as you start your affiliate program, there's some bumps. Because there's going to be some bumps. You're gonna break something. Something's gonna break that you, you know, was totally your fault, you know, and you just, you, you forgot to check a bot back end of something. You know, that's life, right?

Yeah.

And that cost me a thousand bucks. Am I going to be like, you know, Joe, I love you, but I'm done? No, I'm like, dude, that kind of sucks. Oh well, because it's you. But if I came, you know, out of your ecosystem, you recruited me for off the street and were like, hey, we run this newsletter and we saw you promoting this other newsletter that's kind of similar. We love. Okay, I'm doing it for the money. I'm doing it for the money. And also doing it to serve my audience. If something goes wrong, I'm like, the bridges burned. We're done. Relationship over. So you start off with the people that you know, the people that already know, like, and trust you and actually know, love and trust you. And then from there, you know, that's how you work through kind of the bumps and the hiccups and, you know, all the. I mean, there's just gonna be stuff like something's not gonna convert. Something's gonna, you know, a link's gonna break and all that stuff. Because. Because death. What is it? Death and taxes are the two things in life that are certain. No, there's a third certainty, and that's if you're running a big affiliate promotion, something's going to break. It happens every single time. It's happened with $1.8 billion companies and $1.2 million companies that we've worked with.

Now. Do you think it's important when you're recruiting affiliates to offer additional incentives on top of commissions? You know how they always. There's always the leaderboards and launch prizes and stuff like that. With. With something like what we're doing, just to use it as an example, would you recommend that we kind of go some sort of launch path and try to do a big explosion right at one time, or should we let it kind of do it a rolling thing? Because, I mean, it's going to be something we consistently sell for forever until we exit the company or whatever. But should we do a big launch spike or should we just kind of always be rolling with it and bringing on new affiliates here and there? What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, here's what I would like. Here's what I would coach you guys on for that. And then anybody else listening, of course, you know, will apply this to their business. If you have an evergreen product, it is hard to do, actually. Let's back up. So when there's these big product launches, what a lot of people don't see is behind the scenes, there's prizes. So our top affiliate is going to get this, and we're going to do this. We're going to do this. There's masterminds and there's all these incentives to push. If you have an evergreen program, how do you kind of replicate that? What I would do is about once every six months, anything more than that, and it begins to just become like, oh, well, whatever. You know, we become blind to. It's like banner Blindness.

Right.

But about once every six months, I would do a big push and I would announce it. You have to announce it close enough where people can adjust their promo calendars, but not so far enough where people can adjust, but not so far in advance that somebody goes, well, I was going to mail in May, I'll just mail in July, you know, and it's like, no, you want them in the mail in May and mail in July. And so what you do is you run a contest about once every six months where for this month it's like our, you know, if you get 100 signups, you're gonna get a thousand dollar bonus. If you get, you know, if you're the, you know, for our top five partners in the month of August, we're gonna do, you know, this and in your case, because if you're making money second month, third month, 12th month, hopefully, you know, 20th month, your newsletter's so good, of course, people, you'll be making money on them for five years. But it's cool. So let's just do the math. You know, $15 59, that's roughly, what's that? Four months and. Four months. Yeah, four months. Wow, really? You pay four months and you get the whole year. Is that the math on that?

That would be the math, yeah. This is a digital bot.

Yeah, that one's for the Digital. Right. So 15 bucks a month, we actually mail it to you. Six, 60 bucks a year, you get the digital.

Okay. So let's just say that they sign, you know, let's just say that you count all signups the same, you know, for purposes of this. And you're paying. We'll call it a. I would just go flat on something. This. I don't, I don't go percentages. You know, if we're just gonna pay $5 for every, you know, $15 a month, when we're gonna pay you, you know, 20 bucks for every, you know, $59 one. Just nice round numbers. Right. I would basically say in this form, you know, for every sign up, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna work it out where we break even, quite frankly, in the first, you know, and if their orders are tilted towards one way or the other, that makes you actually lose a bit of money. You know, it is what it is. And so 100 signups is $1,000. That's 10 bucks a sign up. Yeah, I mean, you know, if every single one of those was $15 a month and you're already paying them 5, you just broke Even. Yeah, but next month you only pay them 5 and 5 and 5. And you got this massive influx due to this contest. So you make the contest something that is ridiculous. You know, like, we typically will go like first prize, you know, $100,000 on, you know, in a big launch, that person sends, you know, 500,000 in sales, and we already are paying them 200,000 in commissions. We don't, quite frankly, make a ton of money on that. You know, in the, in the end game, it's really cutting into the profit margins. But the cool thing is the person who was going for the finished second and third that were chasing first, that sent another 400,000 in sales trying to chase first. That 400,000 was free. So it's the same thing with like. So we'll do these contests, like, we'll look at your numbers. Say, let's. Here's another one you can do that. I would run. I would run this one once a year, twice a year. These are individual contests. You take your top X number of affiliates. Basically anybody that's sent enough sales that it's worth you taking the time to do this solve for x. Is it 50 sales year to date? You know, in, in August, is it 100 sales? I don't know. It's totally up to you, right? I'd probably say around 50. And I would look at what they did last year in, say, Q4. So October through December, and last year Q4, they made 40% of their sales. So we're going to estimate they're going to make. You got to do it. It's like an algorithm in a spreadsheet, and it only takes a couple of minutes. And you basically estimate that they're going to make 52 sales this October through December. And you tell them that. You say, you email them in early September and say, hey, last Q4, you did 52 sales.

And then internally, what you've noticed is they're down this year, though, so they're not tracking like they're going to do 52. These are the targets. You say, hey, if you do 60, this Q4, you just beat last year by a little bit. We're going to give you a $2,000 bonus. Again, like 60 sales. $2,000. Like, I'm going to lose my butt. You're going to lose your butt for two months. You're going to be fine.

That's true.

Well, here's the cool thing about that, is what if they hit 56 sales? That was 10, 15 more than they were gonna make. But you don't pay a dime.

Yeah.

Odds are they're not gonna land right on 60. They're gonna blow through it or fall short.

Yeah.

You know, and so either way you end up making more money. And so you just gotta get creative with contests. Yeah.

And what's interesting about our newsletter too, that I'm not sure most people realize is that we actually have sponsors of our newsletter too. So the more subscribers we have, the more sponsorship revenue we make off of our newsletter. So that's, you know, that's another way we recoup some of those costs.

That is very true.

Yeah. And I mean that what I just said is true. If it's a retail product, I mean, we did those contests with Shutterfly and Adidas. It's true. If it's, you know, an evergreen membership, sign up any physical product, a digital product, it doesn't matter. Like the principles are still the same. You want to find creative ways to incentivize people to take action. And the key is you need to know motivates them. And so it might be that the best Bonus is not $1,000 cash, but the best bonus is, hey, man, I just, I really want to serve your audience this month. How many, how many sales do you think you can send me? I think I can send about 100 if I really push. Alright, if you send a hundred, you know, if you sign up 100 people this month, I want to do a special training, you know, no pitch training. I want to, I just want to like you and me, serve your audience for two hours next month and now like the hero to their audience because they get to position that as a bonus that is going to help them sell. Even seeing it, like they're going to sell more. So then they're going to, I mean, and it's like this, it becomes this cycle. You just have to know what, what incentivizes them. You know, there are times where what incentivizes me is cash because I can pay my team with cash.

That's right.

There are times where what incentivizes me is the opportunity to be at a mastermind. You know, Last year I busted my butt in affiliate promotion for Michael Hyatt. I had no business being number three in his affiliate promotion. My list was a fraction of the size of everybody else in the top, like eight. But I finished in third place, right behind Jeff Walker and Pat Flynn. Next thing you know, I'm hanging out a place called BlackBerry Farm, which is my favorite place on earth for four days with those guys. And it got Me, that relationship with, you know, with Jeff that I otherwise wouldn't have had.

You know, to the point where now I feel like I can call him a friend, you know, like, he was not a friend a year ago. Sure. So you got to know what. What will motivate people.

Yeah, no, the mastermind thing has been a big motivator. I've actually done fairly well in some launches in the past just to get, you know, in the room with people. Right. Like, because I feel like some of those. Those relationships are more valuable than even the cash prizes that we could get out of it. I remember I did one launch, I think it was for one of Mike Phil Sames products, where.

Me and my partner at the time actually came in second on the launch, right above Auntie Jenkins and right below Jeremy Shoemaker. So I was like, I was. I was pretty stoked to be in the top three with those. But, yeah, it's motivations.

At the end of the day, you can work. What I like about this is you can think laterally, and it's all human. It's a human connection thing. So it's like some people just, you know, maybe you want to do a. I don't know, maybe they want some consulting from you for something, some specialty, for instance, and you're like, okay, well, let's work a deal. I mean, can you send X amount of sales my way? And we can make that work, and that's cool.

I mean, it could be even like, hey.

If you know somebody, for whatever reason, they reached out to you on Facebook messenger two weeks ago and said they want to land more podcast interviews. Oh, wait, that was me.

So here's the thing. Hey, man, I know you want to land more podcast interviews. I just had this idea, like, last, you know, last June, you had 82 sales. Tell you what, any month, the rest of the year, you pick the month, you hit 100, you know, signups that month, I'm gonna introduce you to 20 people. You know, I don't know. I mean, like, you can get. And that doesn't cost you a dime.

Nothing.

Probably takes you 40 minutes to shoot the intros. You know, they're just little things that you can do like that. Because, you know, his thing is, I want to be on podcasts. So I'm going to go out of my. Like, I'm going. All I got to do is make 18 more sales than I made last June. Like, you know, gosh, what do we need to do? Do a Facebook Live.

Maybe send one extra email, and I'll I mean, like, how is that not a win for me? Because I know what 20 introductions will do. It'll get me about 10,000 people on my list. Sending one extra email will get about 27 unsubscribes. 10,000 minus 20. Yeah, that's gonna be a win.

Yeah, yeah, it works out. Net positive. Cool. We might get an email or a video from us regarding this later today, but Secret sauce. Secret sauce. No, this is cool. Yeah, I mean, it's just, I think it's like, again, getting out of the myopic way of thinking, like, hey, we gotta do this ourself. Grind, grind, grind. And no, leverage your network and give value to your network. Work deals. I mean, there's something there. Everyone's here to support us. I mean, we had a lot of chats. And your character, how you show up and how you give value to the world, like you just said, that's how you get supporters and people to really bring you up rather than just kind of ignore, just let you kind of do it yourself. I think if you show up.

Well, how are you looking on time right now? Because there's two kind of, I think, quick rabbit holes I wanted to touch on if you have time. If not, we can always do part.

Two in the world for you guys. I mean, not literally, I mean, you know, but, well, Sweet.

All right, so the, the first rabbit hole, I, I, I just want to get your thoughts on, like, reciprocals. Right. So there, there's sort of, I feel like it's sort of a divisive topic. Right. Some, some affiliates think if I promote you, then you're sort of obligated to promote me. And then there's other affiliates, they're like, no, if I promote you, you pay me a commission. That's the end of the transaction. So what is. I personally kind of lean towards the latter of the two, but I'm curious on your thoughts.

We discussed it on the front end with anybody, you know, if there, if you are. And there are times where, Yeah. I especially, I hate to say it this way, it kind of sounds like a crass way, but where we're getting the advantageous side of the, you know, of the agreement. You know, I mean, there have been people back when I, when I was just first starting out, I had like, you know, 8,000 people on my list and they had a hundred thousand, you know, yeah, I'll do a reciprocal. I mean, like, if that's what it takes to get you to promote.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Be honest with them. And I would tell them hey, yeah, I finished ninth in that affiliate contest. I know how to sell. But just so you know, you're not gonna get 4,000 leads from me, you know, so if you care more about leads and sales, like, I'm not the guy to do a reciprocal with. So be open and honest with them. Talk about it on the front end.

Be.

Judicious, I guess is the term I'm looking for, you know, and who you'll do a reciprocal with. There are some things that are just off limits if it's not on brand, if it's not going to serve my audience, if, you know, I'll give you an example where this would work. If you own a landscaping business and you were going to promote our former client Ray Edwards, who owns a copywriting business. Landscapers need to learn copywriting.

So you promoting Ray Edwards makes all the sense in the world. Hey, landscapers learn copywriting. Here's my guy. Ray. Ray can't promote you. It would make no sense for him to promote your landscaping thing. Right. Like, doesn't make any sense because less than 1% of his audience is landscapers. Right. 100% of the landscapers audience needs to know copywriting. There's also some creative ways. So you do it on the front end with smaller people. It's usually not even a thing. You know, like that's what we love, small affiliates for you guys. That's going to be somebody making one sale, two sales a month.

Right.

They're never going to be your biggest affiliate. They're. They're not going, they're going to grow at a small pace, but they're going to, you're going to have an army of them.

Yeah.

So if one of them stops promoting you, you don't even notice it.

It's okay.

That's the beauty of it.

It's a lot of a little.

But there's also, we call it triangulation. I think we got that term from, from Bill Clinton actually, you know, back in the 90s. And that is, let's think of a good example here then the landscape thing with Ray, that's a really extreme example. So your product is great for my audience or my product is great for your audience, but your product is not good for mine. But I know this person. And so what we'll do is actually, it's like a three way trade in the NBA. Right. You know, you'll promote me and I'll promote him and he'll promote you.

And you know, they're like, oh my gosh, is it really that complicated? No, it's not. Sometimes it's even as simple as I did this recently. I was like, hey, just, you know, on the front end, I was getting a big affiliate partner for our upcoming launch. And I said, just so you know, I want to be clear, like, we can't promote you because your product is not a really good fit for us.

Our product is perfect for you and you know that, that's why you're interested. I can't promote it, but I want to introduce you to this other person and I am confident that we can help facilitate a relationship with them. And I know that they'll be a good partner for you. Are they already a partner? No, they're not. Great. And I literally just went ahead before they ever promoted us because our promotion is not for a couple weeks. I went ahead and introduced them to that person.

Set that up. Now they're promoting them. And then that person's product is actually a pretty decent fit. I've already promoted them and so I wouldn't say they owed me, but it's a service to them because now they're connecting and that's something for them to promote. It's way for them to make money. And so there's some creative ways around reciprocals. They're not, they are a part of the game. They're not the end all, be all. And I mean, at the end of.

The day, the biggest part of the game is the relationships, right? So if you can just have an open communication with the people you're working with and build good relationships, you'll sort it out essentially.

And number one, is the product good for my audience, you know, is this going to serve my audience? And like, I remember, I remember years and years ago when I was first kind of getting started out.

Working in this world, you know, working kind of in the, in the small business entrepreneur space. And there was somebody that promoted us that was a fairly big name. Like you've heard of them, I won't say who it is. And I had this uneasy feeling the whole time about promoting them, even though I had said I would. It was one of those things where I didn't do my homework on the front end to like really study what, what his, you know, you know, what his product, what his brand was. Like, it's very off brand for me. And I remember just feeling really like uncomfortable, like, what am I gonna do? And I. So I actually made the decision. I think, you know, they, they paid us, I don't know, $12,000 in commissions.

I sent him a $12,000, check. I sent them all. I sent him every dime that he paid us. It was. It was better for me to sacrifice $12,000 than to feel like. Because I remember, I'm like, this was like a week before his launch, and I'm trying to write email copy and I'm going, I can't do this.

I cannot do this. It wasn't a bad person. It just was off brand for me. It wasn't like I was doing anything unethical, in my opinion. Very off brand. And I was like. So I sent him an email. I just said, hey, I want to let you know I just fedexed or overnighted a check for whatever, 12,000 some odd dollars. Here's why. I'm really sorry. Hope this won't affect our relationship. I remember he just responded back and just said, he's like, you didn't have to do that. I totally understand. No hard feelings. I'm blown away. What else can I do to serve you? What else can I do to help you? Can I introduce you to somebody? And he said, is there anything I can do to kind of get back? He was like, apologizing, like, is there anything I can do to get in your good graces? Can I do custom landing pages? Can we do a private launch together? Like, can I send you the $12,000 back? And can we do a private launch together? You know, blah, blah, blah. It was like, okay, going back to that point earlier, like, it's hard to really upset people, you know, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's number one. Does it fit your audience? Always has to be.

Yeah. And, you know, I feel like we sort of overestimate people's feelings on this type of thing too. Like, we sort of. We assume that, like, oh, I mail, they mailed for me, but I really can't mail for them. They're gonna be pissed. Dude, we mail for people all the time. And we don't even think about the fact that, like, hey, you've never actually promoted us, but, like, not even on our radar, not even in our. Our vision. Like, we promote stuff because we think it's good for our audience. That's it. That is the only thing. If you didn't promote back, we probably didn't even realize you didn't promote back. And I do think a lot of people sort of overestimate that aspect of it.

Now, that said, some of the first people I would reach out to are the people that you've promoted.

Yeah.

Don't get me wrong.

There is the principle of reciprocity. Of course. Use it to your advantage. Please do not misunderstand me. Use it to your advantage. It's just that. Yeah. To your point, if they say no, it's not like you're going to be like, well, that person's kind of a butthole.

No, you're just going to be like, oh, all right, whatever.

All right, try that one.

I would definitely start with them.

Yeah, no, that's a good call.

So the last little topic that I wanted to touch on real quick was you seem to have worked with some of the sort of biggest names in our industry. Right. Some of the legends. Right. Brian Tracy, Rich Efrin, Michael Hyatt, Ray Edwards, Lewis Howes. I'm looking at my notes here now. But, you know, you've worked with some of the biggest names in our industry, and I'm just kind of curious, how, how did some of those connections happen? Like, what advice would you give our listeners who want to get their foot in the door with some of these people?

Serve and serve and serve and serve and serve. Be on people's radar. The best way to get. We know how to get on people's radars. You show up for their Facebook lives, you comment and it. And it doesn't have to be like, oh, I'm gonna spend three hours a day commenting on Facebook. I think I may have spent 20 minutes a day most days engaging with their content. Back when blog comments were a thing, I would comment on their blogs. Yeah, yeah, there's a way. Oh, blog, blog. Nobody comments on blogs anymore. Okay. What I smell is an opportunity.

Yeah. That means they're prime for the picking right there.

Wow. I want to be the one, one of 400 people who commented on Facebook. Stop liking posts, actually comment, stop wishing people a happy birthday on Facebook, shoot them an email, shoot them a.

Shoot them a text if you can.

Yeah, if you've got text, shoot them a video. Again, I'm trying to speak to both, like, I've got some connections. And then people are like, I just started in my niche. I've got nobody engage with their content, take a picture of you with their book and post it on social media, you know, and tag them like all those little things. But then I want to share a very specific strategy, actually, because it's the specific way that kind of got me into where I'm at. And it was the very genesis of what I'm doing now.

Seven years ago or so, I saw a call to action from a guy named Jeff Goines, you know, pretty well known blogger, said, I'm looking for stories of people who have, you know, come from, like, having a crappy career to being in a successful career. I was like, well, that's kind of me. So I filled out the application, interviewed with him. He. I was in it. The books over there, the Art of Work. I think it's chapter 12 or 13 or something. And that whole chapter is about me. And fast forward about as, you know, with the book writing process. It was like a year and a half before the book actually came out. So the book was coming out in March of 2015, December of 2014. I was.

I was promoting Michael Hyatt. This is before Michael had become a client. Promoting Michael. And I did really well, but not, like, outstanding. I think I finished, like, sixth or seventh in the, you know, on his leaderboard, and I was one spot ahead of or below Jeff. But to everybody in the top 10, this is the thing. I replied to the final email with the leaderboard board. I replied to every single person on that leaderboard, and I said, hey, congratulations. Awesome job. Something like that. I think I even created, like, an image in Canva. Like, I don't remember some. Maybe it was even canva. I think it was fireworks. Still Canva existed, created an image that said, like, congratulations, Don. Congratulations, Ray. Congratulations, Jeff. And I replied to that email. Well, of course they see the email because it's in that thread. It's in that subject line. Right. You know, of the one that they definitely opened because it was the email announcing where they finished on the leaderboard. And everybody opens those. Well, Jeff saw it and said, hey, can you talk tomorrow? I'm like, well, you're Jeff Goins. Yes, I can talk tomorrow. Another guy ended up becoming one of my best friends in the space. Jonathan Milligan. We connected because of that email. He was like, man, I've been seeing what you're doing. I've been wanting to connect with you. So we ended up talking for, like, two hours. This is Jonathan and I starting a mastermind together. And we've been friends that we promote each other. We made literally hundreds of thousands of dollars through each other, all from that email.

Wow.

Jeff said, let's connect. I talked to him the next day, said, can you run my book launch?

And I said, yep, sure can. I've been wanting to get in this space. Let's do it. So he's like, okay. Like, a week later, he's like, I need a number. I need a number. Tell me what the number I need to go to my publisher and tell him how many books I'M going to sell. I said, how many did you sell last time? He's like, 3,000. Just for the record, as you guys know, less than, like,.00001% of authors will ever sell 3,000 books. Oh, yeah, I'm not diminishing it, but 3,000, and I go, I'm like, tell him 15,000. There's no way I'm telling him 15,000. Dude, you're a lunatic. I thought like, what are you doing? I was like, tell him. I actually fought him over. And I was like, well, listen, I'm going to tell you right now, you're going to do 15,000. I'm actually not going to do this. I'm not going to sign the agreement if you don't say 15,000. It's like, okay, told him 15,000. We did 22,000 books. You made, you know, every best seller list out there. So naturally, you know, six months later, he's having dinner with Michael Hyatt and Lewis Howells. And, oh, also on that email that I sent, the reply was Ray Edwards. About six months later, Ray Edwards became a client. That was how that email led to me getting Ray Edwards on my podcast, my old podcast. That podcast interview led to me getting him as a client and so. And becoming a dear friend.

Yep.

And then, so he's having dinner with Lewis Howes, Jeff Goines is. About six months later, Louis calls me up and says, hey, I got my book coming out in about six months. You know, School of Greatness, which went on to be a number two, you know, New York Times, Wall Street Journal bestseller. Can you run it? Yes, I can. Six months, you know, a year later, Brian Tracy reaches out and says, hey, I'm launching a new book. Can you help? Yes, I can. You know, product launches. You know, we started doing. We did Raise and. Who promoting Raise, but Michael Hyatt. So, of course, Michael reaches out and says, can you run our launches? So we did that for a few years. I mean, that's. That's really how it works in this world, in any world, for that matter, you. You. You know, you hustle and you hustle and you hustle and you bust your butt to get that one connection. And as soon as you get that connection, if you do, right.

I mean, I worked my butt off for Jeff. I was by myself with one assistant. And I mean, it was like, you know, by the next. By the next one, we had, you know, me and Mark, and then we had me and Mark and Robbie. And then, you know, my wife started doing more stuff and then I had, like, four assistants. And so now we've got this whole team. But I worked my butt off because I knew instinctively, I don't know, I never knew that it was going to lead to Michael Hyatt or that it was going to lead to Ray Edwards or it was going to lead to Lewis Howes. I just knew that if I helped Jeff hit 15,000 books, let alone 22,000, if I helped him hit 15,000 books, he's going to talk.

He's going to talk.

Spread the name around and, yep, start referring.

And that's really what it comes down to. And it's like, you get on one good podcast. I mean, now I've been on the Hustle and Flowchart podcast.

You can't get better than this, man.

You peaked at the top now. Yeah, I mean, I've done entrepreneur and fire and, you know, smart, passive income and Ray Edwards. You know, I mean, like, you look at the list of, like, top, you know, 25, management, marketing and management, I think is the category now, podcasts, but on like, half of them. So it's like a big thing. It's not like a big deal for me to reach out and say, I've already been on these podcasts, can I be on yours? And they're like, well, yeah, you know, and that's how it works. You just got to get that one. And how do you get that one? You get that one. Because I don't think that Jeff would not have asked me to run his book launch had he not interviewed me about what I do for a living. And I would not have reached out to him about him interviewing me for what I do for a living had I not been following him on Twitter and seen that and taken action. And it's like, so what was it that landed me that? Was it the email I sent was the fact that I finished high on the leaderboard? Was it the seeing that thing on Twitter? Which quite frankly was dumb luck because I follow. I only follow, like, 72 people, but still, the odds of me seeing any individual tweeter, about 1 in 10, you know, back then, like, what was it that got. It was all of them. And it was literally, it was every single one of those things that got me.

You know, to be able to do that. And so it kind of takes. It's just persistence. It's just like the follow up, follow up earlier. It's. It's. It's so cliche. Gosh, it's so cliche. But it's that image. It's in my head every day. Like, I'm doing something and I get tired. And I remember this image. You know, we had this saying back when I worked in sales, and it was just one more call every day, I'm just gonna do one more call. When does that stop? I don't know. If I do one more and then I do one more, and then I do one more. But it's that image of the guy, you know, we all know this, where the one guy is, like, hammering into the wall and there's the other guy walking the other way with his hammer, and he was this close to.

Oh, yeah, the three feet from gold thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it is so cliche. Which blow got you to the gold? Was it the last one or was it the other 999? And so it's like you just keep doing all the things. You comment on their Facebook, you DM them, and, like, little things that stand out. Like, don't be one of 400 people commenting. Shoot them a DM and be like, here's how your post touched me. I liked this episode because everybody listening right now. I'll just tell you right now, go pick one of Joe and Matt's last 50 episodes, preferably this one, because it's the best one. But listen to it in detail and find something and just find something that they said and then reach out to them and say, man, when you said this, here's what it did for me. Be a success story for them. Be like, don't just go, leave a rating and review. Do that. Please help their podcast out. Leave a rating review on itunes. See, I just did that call out for you.

Thank you, sir.

That's great. That helps them reach more people. But be the guy to them. If you're a rating and review, you're one of many. If you're whatever, you're one of many, Reach out to them and say, I loved it when you said this. Here's what it did. And thank you, thank you, thank you. And now you. I don't think of it this way, but it's like a point system. Now you've got one point out of 50. And then when you see them at an event, when you see them in an event and you're like, yeah, hey, I'm Matt McWenics. You're like, wait, the guy who sent me the email three months ago, we have a subconscious brain. It's somewhere in there. And now you got like, eight points because they met you at an event and.

And then you engage with them. And you wish them a happy birthday and all these little things that you can do just to connect with people on a human level. I mean, that's how you do it. And I don't know. I don't know when you're gonna hit 50 points. It's gonna be in conversation where you accidentally end up sitting next to Joe at dinner because you have a mutual friend that you went to high school with, and Joe plays squash with. I don't even know what squash is.

You'd be surprised how many people on our podcast have come because of somebody we went to school with, knew somebody else who introduced us to somebody else.

And then that's the thing, you know? Suddenly Joe opens the door and says, what do you do? Well, I run a company that does this. Oh, my gosh.

Really?

Like, we need a company that does that for us. How do I give? Like, how much do you charge? Well, it's, you know, $20,000. Great. Can I write you a check right now? Like, that's how this stuff happened. Was it the fact that you were a dinner maybe was like, what was it that did that? And, like, if you hadn't have wished Joe a happy birthday three years before, maybe this never would have happened. I don't know. Because you would have been at dinner. You would have been a stranger, but instead, you're the guy that served them, and you're that guy that shared our episodes, like, 52 times. Right?

You know?

Yeah.

That's how these things happen.

I like, actually, I really like the point analogy. Just to make it a little bit more tangible, to keep people in the process, because I know when I. I'll just wrap this up with Rich's event. And one of the big reasons we were there is my connection to Mars, who was running the live stream. I met him eight years ago, and I never once did a project directly with him, but we always supported each other. And he told me straight up, he's like, whatever you're doing, he's like, your character, this is what got you this far. And just know that that's what's getting you in the room, is the way you're showing up, the way you're serving people and what we're doing and all that. He's like, don't stop that. Because that works. He's like, it might not be obvious, and a lot of this stuff that you're talking about right now, it's not obvious stuff, but it's just being a good human. It's supporting. It's reaching out in Unique ways. And, yeah, it opens up massive doors, if you're consistent with it.

I think there's actually something else to it, though.

I'll tell you, because it's so funny you mentioned that. How we got connected with Rich was through Michelle.

Mars. And Michelle.

Yeah, she had promoted Jeff Goins. See how this goes?

There you go, man.

He had promoted Jeff Goins. We did such an awesome job. She had it in here. But we. We branded myself, you know, we branded myself. That just sounds weird. I don't know. Anyway, when we decided on the brand, it could have been anything. It could have been, you know, Matt McWilliams, you know, could have been Matt McWames podcast. There's actually an ironic reason why we chose the Affiliate Guy podcast. It's because I said for years when I was doing more personal development, blogging and stuff, I didn't want to be the affiliate guy. I didn't think that was big enough to impact the world, actually. Turns out by helping people who are just starting their online platforms make their first couple, couple thousand dollars so that they can keep going and stay motivated and don't have to give up after six months like most people do, that it's completely revolutionizing the world of industries that I can't even conceive of. And it's like impacting children who are, like, who are autistic. And it's impacting, you know, families who have, you know, attention deficit children. And it's like impacting the gardening niche and the financial niche and all these niches that I never could have impacted in the personal development space. So we named it the Affiliate Guy Podcast. Well, the funny thing is that became the brand, you know, and in the YouTube channel, the Affiliateguy TV and all these things became the Affiliate Guy. Yeah. And so it's like connecting those points. Well, we're looking for an affiliate guy.

What about that guy who ran Jeff Goins launch and did such an amazing job? Let me look him up. What was. Oh, he's the affiliate guy. And I'm not joking on any. Every call that we had with Agora, at some point somebody would say, what if we did this? You know, blah. And they would suggest an idea. And they say, but you're the affiliate guy. What do you think? And it just became the thing. It was the thing I didn't want to be, but it became the thing. And the thing about that is what you have done, Joe, is not only have you done all the right stuff, but you have a brand. And you, like you said, you Showed up every day. And you've got this, you know, this platform that keeps you in the public eye, so to speak, Even it's a small public, let's be honest, for all of us. And these. We think, all of us think we're big deals. And the reality is, like, I can. I literally once at church had a. That's a whole different story. Very weird situation.

I've got a couple stories like that, too. But we're not famous.

Yeah.

Yeah. And it doesn't like you. Yeah. You don't get spot. You go to Walmart and nobody recognizes. Yeah, like I'm in my hometown and nobody recognizes me. You know, I'm in my own house.

But we're a big deal in our niche because we have that brand. And so it's the combination of those things. I don't believe. I truly do not believe that if you didn't have this podcast, that Mars would have had you do a thing. I don't believe.

So I agree.

And I don't believe if, you know, if we didn't have the affiliate guy podcast. I don't believe if I wasn't publishing two pieces of content and I didn't have hundreds of Facebook lives.

I think we're on episode 330 just released today. So around the same point as you. If that wasn't the case, I don't think I ever would have been hired by them totally even if I had run Jeff Goins launch and all those things. So it's like you have to have the combination of those two things.

You're right.

Well, I love it. I think we could probably keep talking for another two hours, but we do actually have another podcast that we have to record shortly.

I also have really bad driving mouth right now, so I have to stop.

That means it was a great conversation. It does. Thank you.

Where should we send people after listening to this episode?

Go to mattmcwilliams.com hustle Guys, I've got a free report for you guys. I'm going to show you how to find your first 100 affiliate. So all the stuff we kind of touched on, all like the little email templates and where you can find these people. There's actually 15 places in there where you can find affiliates. So not just going to Google and typing in your competitors. That's one of them. Got some email templates and swipe files and all kinds of fun stuff in there. So just go to mattmcwiams.com hustle and then you'll get an email that has the PDF when you get that email, guys, just hit, hit reply and reach out to me and, you know, just let me know who you are, where you're from, what you do, what your favorite color is. You know, like buddy the elf.

All of a sudden, I'm gonna give you big props.

Let me know about you.

Yeah. So mattmcwilliams.com hustle. Go there, do everything what you just said. I'm just gonna. Props. That's the best call to action that any guest has had on our podcast, let alone a custom landing page. But how you directed them, the journey of what they should do afterwards. Good stuff, man.

Nice. I have to go now. I have to go listen to this to say. What did I just say? Because I have no idea.

Well.

We got you back on the podcast front, so we'll make this audio.

Public so you can.

Oh, thank you. This is going to be a public podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We're going to make this public.

An hour, 20 or so of nothing.

Recording this.

Oh, shit, I forgot to hit record.

Let's do it all again. Ready? Yeah. Let's start over.

All right, Matt, we'll get it to see you today. Awesome. And I'm looking forward to having more conversations and seeing where we take things together.

We will.

Totally, guys.

Thank you, brother.

See you.

Have a good one.

Take care.

Thanks so much for tuning into that episode. I hope you dug it. I know Joe and I dug it. I actually kicked Joe out of the room. He's not here right now. Because I wanted to tell you about a tool that I really, really dig. We use it in our business. We recommend it all the time. It's called E. And it's a tool that lets you do live webinars, automated webinars, hybrid webinars, and, you know, pretty much any other kind of webinar if there are other kinds of webinars. But anyway, this tool is kind of like your all in one, do it all tool for anything webinar related. It's easy webinar. It's put out by a dude named Casey Zman. He's been on the podcast. If you haven't listened to that episode, it's a killer episode. He's a really smart dude, but his software, it does everything. It's, you know, the title tells you exactly what it does. It's an easy webinar platform. And we use this in our business to run automated webinars all the time. We don't do a lot of live webinars these days. We like to do the kind of Automated webinars where somebody can register and then it, you know, they can either watch it like 15 minutes later or they can watch it the next day. But it's just kind of always running. And it's a system that helps us make autopilot sales off of our webinars. Super cool tool. If you haven't tried it yet, you know, it's, it's, it's an amazing tool. And Casey is actually hooking you up. He said for listeners of Hustle and Flowchart. I can't believe he's doing this, but he said for listeners of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, he's giving 25% off of the membership to use easy webinar. It's already super, super inexpensive for what it does and all the cool features it has. But he's hooking you up with 25% off because you're a listener of Hustle and flowchart. Go to easywebinar.com hustle. That's where you can get that 25% off discount. That's easywebinar.com hustole. It's a awesome tool. You're gonna dig it, so just go grab it. Check it out. Easywebinar.com hustle See ya. No, not see ya. You'll hear me in the next show. I don't know. I don't know how to close these things. Go get Easy Webinar. Talk to you later.

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 Cliffs 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, and give us your email address, and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

Go get it.

We love you.