Pat Flynn - Affiliate Marketing Through Insane Value

I try to get access to that product or get an example of it or a prototype. If it's something new or beta access or whatever it might be, I want to experience it, I want to use it. Because here's the other thing. If somebody sees me recommend a product and they go, hey, so have you used that before? And then I go, well, actually, no. Well, they're out the door now. It's so much easier when you go, yeah, I totally use it. And by the way, here's how I'd recommend you use it too. It's like, wow, you're providing value at the same time. And it just really shows, especially for people who ask you questions. One of my favorite tactics is to have as many people ask questions about the product that I'm promoting.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Float Shark podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear. Wiki Wiki Wiki.

Okay, we're on.

We are on.

This thing's on.

So this is a, this is an interesting episode. This is a two parter.

It's a hybrid.

It's a hybrid episode. So we recently did a three hour livestream on Facebook where we did back to back to back to back, back to back interviews on, on affiliate marketing. And we brought on different guests. We had, you know, we had Larry Ludwig, we had Pat Flynn, we had Mike Long, we had James Schramko, we had Stephen Sketchis. And then you and I sort of gave some of our tips around affiliate marketing. But one of the, you know, one of the, the interviews that we did throughout the day was with Pat Flynn, like I just mentioned. And it was really, really like, good stuff. And Pat is probably the most aligned with the way he does affiliate marketing with us. Right. The way he teaches affiliate marketing. And what he does for affiliate marketing is pretty much the exact same concepts that we do for affiliate marketing. So we wanted to make sure we shared this interview and got it out to, like, a wider audience than, you know, more people than just saw us doing the live stream. Right?

Yeah.

And so that's kind of the first part of this. That's like the first 30 minutes of this, this session here. And then Joe and I wanted to also sort of tack onto it what's working now for us in affiliate marketing. So the second 30 minutes of this interview is after Pat Flynn is done kind of explaining what he does. Joe and I have a little bit of a discussion ourselves about here's what's really cool. That's working right now in our business in affiliate marketing. So it's a full on affiliate marketing episode with 50% of it, Pat Flynn strategies, 50% of it, our strategies. But what you're gonna find is that there's a lot of overlap in those strategies.

Yes.

It's going to be a good mixture. So, uh, it's a little different, but yeah. And we recorded the, what, the outro of this, what, like a week or two after.

Yeah.

So might be fuzzy on some of the, the exact terms that Pat said, but you'll probably be sure to correct us because you'll be fresher in the mind, but you'll, you'll hear the concepts and how they overlap. They're really interesting. Um, I think that's about it.

Yeah.

We got notes.

We got the notes. So I will talk about the notes. Those, these notes will be.

These notes.

These notes might be longer than normal. These notes. I don't know. It just seems like there's a lot of strategies packed in this one, especially with, I mean, both of us. But like, Pat. Yeah, that was like 30 minutes. But it's like, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. So, yeah, get the notes. They're going to be great. Hustleandflowchart.com, hustleandflowchart.com comp got to go there within two weeks of this episode going live. Whenever it goes live after that, it goes into our vault. I'm about to sneeze, so I'm going to talk a little. I'm trying to shake it off.

Or you can text the word comp while Joe sneezes to 38470. So that's 38470. Text the word comp. You can get the notes that way.

Perfect. We're all supposed to sneeze anyway because we're together in this lockdown ish type thing.

Yeah. We're in the same location, but we're six feet apart. We're social distanced. We're social distanced.

Yes. So get the notes. Yeah. 38470 comp. Hustleandfluidchart.com comp and hrefs. And hrefs.

Yes.

So, hrefs, buddy, there's a lot in ahrefs I kind of. I always forget what's in there. But yeah, we've talked about so many strategies and, like, what we talked. Actually, did we talk about ahrefs with Pat? I don't think so. Maybe it may have came up.

I think he may have mentioned it as, like, one of the tools that he uses.

He might have, but pretty sure he's a fan because that guy does a lot of content marketing. I'm not gonna say he's endorsing this. Obviously he can't say that. But we're endorsing ahrefs. So yeah, I would say they are.

A sponsor, but we also used it long before they were a sponsor.

Totally. Yeah. So I would say, I mean, if you're applying Ahrefs to affiliate marketing and listening to Pat's episode that's coming up here and what we're talking about, just think about the different ways you could demonstrate a product with content.

Yeah.

And like we talked about some strategies. We have a KST method. Pat has another one that is like the brain free or hurt headache free way. Yes, that's what it is, the brain hurting free way. Yeah. What's that term? Headache free. That's right. So in the way is you basically demonstrate different things out there. And we basically start by using Ahrefs for our keyword research and seeing what the competition looks like on both Google and YouTube and other places. And just gives us kind of like a roadmap of what to create content wise.

Well, we also do, we do a lot of content marketing around affiliate products where we write articles related to these affiliate products. One of the great ways to do that is to use ahrefs, see what other content is ranking about these, these various tools that we promote and then make similar but better content. Right. So if somebody's making a tutorial on, on let's say hrefs and we want to outrank them for a similar concept, I'll see what kind of keywords they're ranking for that tutorial and, and then make sure I'm writing a better tutorial around Ahrefs for that thing, if that makes sense. So yeah, it's an amazing tool. We use it. We're in there. I mean, I know I'm in there almost every day. Joe's in there checking on stuff all the time too, seeing where we're ranking. And it's an amazing SEO tool. We love it. We can't say enough about it. And they have a $7, seven day trial, so that's a buck a day. You could get it and start using it and see how you like it and probably stick with it. Cause you're gonna like it. And it's@ahrefs.com ahrefs coach a h r.

E f s.com that's it. $7 seven day trial. Go get it.

Let's go. Talk to Pat Flynn. How's it going, man?

Going well. How about you guys?

Great, man. Just warming up this live stream here. So I appreciate you taking the time, man.

Pleasure. My pleasure. What's up, everybody? Good to see you.

Yeah, we got a whole bunch of people asking questions, so if you have questions for Pat, definitely throw them in the chat like we've been saying, and let's kick it off, man. We were kind of telling them about you. Matt was saying how he's. Yeah, we all kind of started around the same time, at least in the online space. And Matt was talking about how. I think he was the first of the two of us to really attach to. I think it was the podcast.

Yeah, I think we started listening to the podcast around the beginning of when it started and followed along. And I passed your podcast over to Joe in the early days of it, and that sort of inspired us to launch our own podcast back around 2010. So been in the podcasting game ever since, and who's definitely kicked off through. Listening through your show.

So that's awesome. Thank you for that. Yeah, podcasting, you know, we got in early. We got in early, which is good, but it's still early, in my opinion. I'm. I'm really bullish on podcasting right now, especially for relationship building. There's still less than a million podcasts versus, you know, 500 million blogs, you know, 45 million YouTube channels or whatever. Still a lot of opportunity in that, for sure. But I will say nobody's commuting anymore, so listening or not, as many people are listening. And that's why YouTube has been very interesting. And live streaming, and I've been doing that every day, too, and that's been a lot of fun.

Yeah.

Yeah.

These live streams that we're doing has sort of been our way to kind of lean into that as well. We have seen a decrease in audio listens, but we're seeing an increase of people showing up to these kinds of things. So that's. We've been seeing the same thing. What were you about to say, Joe?

Yeah, I wanted to get into. Because you have an interesting background where you started right around same kind of weird environment, you know, economic environment. I know that's what you're telling me through some emails, too. I kind of want to hear just a short story of how you kind of transition into the online space in kind of similar times, obviously. Different.

Yeah, similar times for different reasons. And I'm talking about 2008, and I was in the architecture world, wanted to do that. For the rest of my life. June 17, 2008 and boss calls me into his office and essentially told me I was going to be let go. I didn't have a plan B because I was doing everything I thought I was supposed to do, following the American dream, et cetera. And I got kicked out. And it was, it was a hard time. I spent about a month, month and a half just sort of laying in bed crying, just not wanting to, not having any energy to do anything. But it wasn't until I shifted that story in my head from, you know, why me? To, well, why not me? Why can't I create something new? I'm focusing so much on the stuff I can't control right now. Why don't I focus on the things I can control? And a big question that I'm asking a lot of my students right now is what does this make possible? I think if you consider and like keep your headspace in, what does this make possible? What can you lean into? What's that project that you always wanted to start that you can now start? Then that's where really amazing things and opportunities can come out of this for you. So essentially I built a website helping people pass an architectural exam because that was the thing that was on my mind and something I knew people would need help with. And a lot of people have heard the story before and they think that I popped it up there on the web and then Google found it and then all of a sudden like, I'm rich and famous. That's definitely not how it happened. In fact, it happened relatively quickly. In about six months I started making money from that website. However, I was spending 10, 14 hours a day in forums posting my notes on that, on that website. And Google eventually saw it as the authority and I started to get linked to from forums in architecture, businesses and all that kind of stuff. So I started to be seen as an expert. And then in October 2008 I launched an e book study guide for $19 and that blew up. It absolutely exploded. I made in October of 087-908-55. And what was really interesting is then I then added an audiobook to go along with that. And then the income started to get into the, you know, lower five figure range. And then what really sealed the deal was actually related to affiliate marketing, which I know we're going to talk about today. In fact, it didn't, it didn't take too long for an affiliate deal that I saw for an exam simulator. It was like an online based exam simulator. For 80 bucks and I would get $22 commission. In fact, I was actually advertising for this business before I switched to the affiliate marketing model, making about 250amonth. Just 250, you know, 150 by 150 pixel banner ad. You know, those were really, really popular back in the day. And I made, I think $6,000 that first month. I started doing affiliate marketing for them. And then eventually that overtook what my own products were making. The commissions were overtaking. And that's why affiliate marketing has been very big for me ever since then. I started smartpassiveincome.com back in really late 2008 because a lot of people were struggling and they needed help. And I was like, I just landed on this. Let me share everything I've learned and things I wish I did differently. And then, of course, SPI Smart Passive Income has turned into so much more. Podcasts with over 60 million downloads, a YouTube channel with a quarter million subscribers speaking around the world, which isn't happening right now. So I appreciate you inviting me on, virtually selling books, all this crazy stuff, and I'm just here to serve because and truly I feel affiliate marketing is a still a huge underserved opportunity for people if you do it right.

Yeah, totally agree. So this was actually one of the questions we were going to ask anyway, but somebody asked it in the chat, so I'm going to pull it up onto the screen.

Oops.

Actually, I was gonna ask this one first here. So Anthony was asking, if you were starting a new site today from scratch, what would you focus on doing for the first 90 days?

So I would spend probably the first 30 days, the first month just deep in customer research. So selecting a niche that I might have an interest in, that interest in a niche is really important. I've tried starting businesses in spaces where I literally have no connection to it. It was just like an income play. And honestly, all of those have burned out. Some sort of seed from me is really important because that keeps me going, especially when times are tough or it's just not working out. Whenever we start something, it's really fun and there's that honeymoon period. But eventually, and this is everybody, they hit a wall. So it's that interest and excitement to figure it out that gets you over that wall and keeps you going. And in those first 30 days, I would select a niche market and I would do a deep dive into who's in that space already, what is serving that audience, what is missing? Find out. Sort of the positioning that I could come in with, perhaps it might relate to specifically a product that can help serve that audience and how to become essentially the go to resource for that product. If I was going to start with affiliate marketing, how can I provide so much value showing people how to use this product? And then in addition to that, how might I do this for free? And meaning, like, let's take for example, keyword research tool. You know, there's a lot of keyword research tools out there that you can be an affiliate for. Software. I would probably start with software, in fact, because the higher commissions, you know, affiliate marketing, especially in the world of Amazon recently has gotten slashed. So I would start with a software product that I could master and get to know and almost become sort of a representative of that company. And then oftentimes they have recurring commissions too. So you can start to stack every single month, you know, those recurring commissions that, that, that come in. But I would go in there and create demo videos. I would, I would show it off. I would show people how easy it is to use. I might even target a specific niche, like a niche and a niche. So not just entrepreneurs, but entrepreneurs who are authors, for example. And I might find a software that authors specifically use, like Scrivener or something. And in fact, there's a guy, his name's Joe, who created a website called Learn Scrivener or the Scrivener Master. I can't, I can't remember exactly, but his whole business started as an affiliate for that product. And he's become known as an expert now and has even partnered with the company in really interesting ways too, which is really cool. So that's where I would start. But when I was saying I'd offer the free way to do it, meaning keyword research, right? There's ways to do it for free, but it takes like hours. But I would do that. I would give it all away for free. Here's how you can do it for free for three or four hours. And there you go, you have your end results, the keywords that you want, or you can do all that in 10 seconds using this product. So I call that the, the free way to do it or the headache free way to do it. And so you know that juxtaposition allows for people to go, oh, yeah, that's definitely worth my money. Thank you so much for providing this value. I'll click on your link commission. Boom.

Yep, that's brilliant, man. And you, you hit on a bunch of stuff that has already been talked about previous to you showing up. So I love, like, whenever there's like a thematic thing going on, which is, you know, go down the route that something you're passionate with. I mean, that is probably the easiest thing with affiliate marketing is people. So many offers out there just go to shareasale.com and just pick up, like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Don't do that. Talk about, like, how you look at a product, you know, so a.

As a brand with content, what's your filtering process for that or discovery?

I definitely need a filtering process. Especially now as the grant, as the brand has continued to grow, like, literally five or six messages a day from different companies wanting to get in front of me. So I have to put a filter on or else something will happen that has happened with other people that I used to follow that I don't follow anymore, and that's. They just shove all the products that come their way down your throat and it doesn't feel good. It's obvious they don't care. It's obvious they're just trying to make money. And that's the last thing I want to do. I want people to, when I share a product with them, to go, oh, my gosh, thank you so much for sharing this with me. My life is so much easier. How can I pay you back in return? Thank you. Like, I want to thank you. So it's. It's almost like a win for everybody, right? Like, I can imagine. And that's the first filter. Like, can I imagine sharing this with my audience and getting thanked for it, regardless of the commission? The commission is almost like a bonus on top of the idea of helping people, which does mean, in fact, sometimes I promote things that don't have affiliate commission because it's always in service of others in the audience, which is really key. Another filtering process is I try to get access to that product or get an example of it or a prototype. If it's something new or beta access or whatever it might be, I want to experience it, I want to use it. Because here's the other thing. If somebody sees me recommend a product and they go, hey, so have you used that before? And then I go, well, actually, no. Well, they're out the door now. It's so much easier when you go, yeah, I totally use it. And by the way, here's how I'd recommend you use it too. It's like, wow, you're providing value at the same time. And it just really shows, especially for people who ask you questions. One of my favorite tactics is to have as many People ask questions about the product that I'm promoting. A lot of people don't want to do that. They don't want to converse, they don't want to chat with anybody. I'm like, that's the wrong way to think about it. Because if a person is asking questions, they're likely somewhat interested, and if you can answer in a way that sort of tackles all their objections, well, then, then you've kind of got them, you've given them value. And then you can just offer up an affiliate link being, you know, fully disclosed about that. And it'll be a win for everybody. Like I said, a win for you because you're getting a commission, a win for your audience member because they are getting something that they very much needed, and a win for the company that you're helping to promote. And then I also try to see, and this isn't always possible, but might there be a way for me to partner with this company? One of the things that I teach my students in my affiliate marketing course is it's not just about the relationship between you and your audience. It's about the relationship of you and the owner of that product. Because you could potentially get special access or special deals or early looks or something. And this is why, I don't know if you know who MKBHD is on Twitter, YouTube. He's a big tech reviewer. He gets everything early because he does really amazing reviews about these things. And you can have early access to things, too. And then, of course, you create a video about it. You're the first one to show up. You're going to rank higher in SEO on YouTube and Google. And now everybody's finding you when they're looking for information about this, they see a really thorough review and they're going to click on your link, too. So that's. That's sort of the formula that I use.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think, you know, you're sort of mirroring a lot of the philosophies that we've had around affiliate marketing. And I think anytime we've ever talked about affiliate marketing, it's hard for us to talk about it and not talk about the relationships with the product creators as well. Everybody focuses on the relationship with the. Their audience and, you know, the people they're trying to promote too, but they never actually talk about, like, it's just as important to have a relationship with those audiences as well.

We do have quite a bit of questions.

Flooring.

I'll pull this one up. I like this one a lot. So, Michelle asked, what were the two best audience building techniques that led to your greatest amount of brand awareness and exposure? If, you know, if you can think of two.

Yeah, I mean, I could think of hundreds. But the top two might likely be guest podcasting. Podcasts are huge for getting people to know you and the voice that you have, and whether it means you being on other people's shows for more exposure and new audiences, or having. For example. I love using this strategy, not necessarily for exposure, but specifically to grow my affiliate income. For example, I interviewed Nathan Barry, the founder of ConvertKit. I'm a big affiliate for ConvertKit. In fact, I'm also an advisor for the company and I invited him on my show and I didn't invite him on the show to ask questions like, tell me why ConvertKit's awesome. Why should everybody convert to ConvertKit? It was more, tell me the story about why this exists. What were the struggles? What were the objections? What's your mission here? And of course, after 45 minutes, people listen to that, they get a really amazing bootstrapping story that's really inspiring. But at the same time, if they need to make a selection and they have a choice of different email service providers, who do you think they're going to go with now? A person that they've now listened to, who they can fully understand because you've developed this amazing show that asks the right questions and gets you to know them a little bit better. And that particular episode is accounted for over $50,000 in, in income. It's recurring income because it's a software email service provider. But that one episode alone, inviting him on, not Even talking about ConvertKit and why they should go there, but just the story behind it, and bringing the founder on to build that relationship has been absolutely key. And then Seth Godin recently said that podcasting is the new blogging. So if podcasting is a new blogging, guest podcasting is the new guest blogging. And guest podcasting is absolutely huge and it's very evergreen too, so you can get continual exposure. And the other thing that's worked really well for me are, and this relates to.

Affiliate marketing as well, is YouTube and specifically doing demo videos. That's like my secret sauce for a lot of my top performing affiliate offers is literally, like I said earlier, showing people the insides of the thing that they are interested in buying and taking advantage of the free traffic that SEO can give you on YouTube. YouTube, should you create a really good looking video that people can watch for longer than the others? I love that like, the demo video is the biggest secret. It's not as easy as just like writing a blog post and sharing images, but a demo video where you. Not just. It's not like a. Like a. Just a here's why it's awesome. It's like, here's all you need to know about it. Here's what's good, here's what's bad. It's a very honest approach. And as a result, you can get traffic and you can get more exposure and you can get affiliate income at the same time.

Yeah, I love that. Another thing that sort of worked well for us along those same lines, too, is like, here's a cool tactic that you can do with this tool that most people don't know well, we'll make like a video and sort of show off, hey, you know, here's something that you can do with this tool that most people don't realize you can do with this tool. You put that video out there. Anybody that already has the tool is like, oh, cool. This is amazing value. Anybody who doesn't have the tool watches that video and goes, I should get this tool because I want to try that. You know?

Exactly. Very cool.

So Joe Calis, he asked a question that is near and dear to my heart, because I know Joe and I struggle with this. As an entrepreneur, how do you maintain focus of the same thing for so long, especially being in the business of interviewing other creative entrepreneurs?

Really, what it comes down to, what keeps me going is knowing that my audience is there listening on the other end, and that they continually need me to show up. If I don't show up, if I let the fear get in the way, if I let boredom get in the way, well, then their lives will suffer as a result. And whether that's directly true or indirectly, I believe. I truly believe that. And I think that's important for you to internalize the fact that there are other people on the other end. In fact, we're not doing this for us, we're doing it for other people. And it is a byproduct your earnings become. And so that. That's. That's really what it comes down to. For me. I do a number of things. Number one, going live with my audience and just asking questions keeps me directly in connection with them, which is really important to me. Plus, you know, the conversations I have with people via email, I use my email not just as a broadcasting tool, but as a conversation tool as well. And that's worked really well to help me understand what the biggest problems and Pains of my target audience is. And that has helped me understand what to create content about, who to interview, what books to write, what courses to create, all coming from the people who are asking for help, knowing that if I can provide something of value, I might get in exchange, you know, maybe some money as a result of that, or maybe not, but at least a share, at least a mention, at least something like that always comes in return. The other thing that I have here, and I don't know if you can see this here, but I have a board over here on my. On my right side that is full of thank you notes. These are thank you notes from my. For my audience. 99% of them mentioned the podcast, by the way, which is really interesting. But whenever I feel bored, I'm like, I don't want to do this today. I just look at the board and I'm like, hey, those are the people that I need to do this for. That's almost my barometer for success is how many thank you letters can I get? And interestingly enough, because I was in the position that a lot of my audience was in once before, I can totally empathize and relate. So it's like, you know, Jenny from the block, I got to remember where I came from to fully empathize with who my audience is. And then finally, and this is the biggest piece, a strategy that I'd recommend all of you do. At least once a month, I try to get on a phone conversation, usually Zoom or Skype, in fact, with a brand new email subscriber, every month, 10 times. So 10 Skype or Zoom calls with 10 brand new subscribers, so I can have a connection to them, so I can understand what they might need help with. It's also a beautiful sort of arena for me to test things. For example, I might say, hey, we're thinking of running these little traffic building workshops. Is that something that you know is of interest to you? Like, tell me what your gut reaction is to that. And I can already get feedback and validation for things that I'm thinking of working on. But most of all, I can go, well, tell me what is stopping you from moving forward right now so that I can address that, so that I can publicly share not. Not them specifically, but just address the whole audience who likely has the same objections. And truly, some of those conversations are absolute gold and have completely changed the course of the entire business. So direct conversations with your audience goes a long way.

That's so cool, man. And maybe, Matt, as you're pulling something up, you can elaborate because you said conversation tools and mechanisms you use. We do a lot of stuff as well, like loom, you know, chat a little window in the corner where you can answer questions around affiliate products. Because we've been told that as well. We're like, wait, you're actually answering questions personally with affiliate products? Like, it blows people's minds. So loom videos, personalize. What are some other tools that you use around affiliate marketing or maybe just conversations, you know, with your audience?

Yeah, I mean, tools that I use.

Or maybe not strategies as well. It could be kind of a combo.

Yeah, I mean, there's a whole bunch. I mean, one of the top performing pages on my website is a resource page. Literally a sort of expertly curated library of things that my audience should know about. Right. And this is of benefit to them because there's so much noise out there. I have all the good things in one spot and 99% of them are things that I'm an affiliate for. So it actually works again, both ways. Hey, Pat, thanks for sort of finding all the good stuff out there for me and putting it all on one page. If I mention a product, for example, in a review post or in a video, I'll say, by the way, check out our other resources on this resource page too. And I love it because it's not very aggressive. It's like literally there to help them, but at the same time, as a byproduct, I also get paid back in return for anybody who goes through that. And our resource page is sort of divided by different sort of categories to make it a little bit easier. I also know that there are some people who are students of mine who, for example, one of them teaches people how to hike. And they teach all kinds of people, people who do day hikes and people who do like the six month hike on the sort of west coast of the United States kind of. Right. So all kinds. One resource page for all of them might be a little bit too big or too overwhelming. And there's stuff on there that they don't need because it depends on your specialty. So within your niche itself, you might benefit from a specialty resource page. Hey, this is the day hikers resource page. All the things you need to know that you need to have before you go on your first hike or something like that. And then there's completely different resource page specifically for the people who are doing the six month hike. And it's because it's different products, it's a different experience, it's a different language. Right. And so when a Person goes there and they see that, oh, that's for me. Well, they're going to likely get all the stuff. A good friend of mine, Thomas Frank, who also has a YouTube channel here, he has a website called college infogeek.com and he teaches college kids how to do well in college. And there's a very popular page on his website called the College Packing Checklist. In fact, if you look up College Packing Checklist on Google, it's usually result number one, two, or three. So he's getting all this organic traffic. But this is a specialty niche within his space of just college students in general, brand new college students. And of course there's a checklist in there. There's like hundreds of items that people should get when they go to college. And, you know, imagine a mom printing out that checklist and wanting to check off every item before their kid goes to college. Guess what? There's a whole bunch of affiliate links on that page for all of those same products too. So it's like a perfect, It's a perfect fit. Another strategy that I like to use is instead of a list of things people should have, and of course within that list putting affiliate offers and things that make sense. Instead, I'll reframe it to an audit. So, for example, I did a post a while back that was.

Email marketing checklist. Are you doing these 10 things to grow and succeed with your email list? So immediately the subject line is like, oh, what are these 10 things? Am I doing all of them? Am I doing none of them? Like, where am I? And then the positioning is, well, you know, go through this and tell me your grade in the comments or something like that. And so I'll go through. And the first few in the audit are easy things like, you know, you know, number one, make sure you have an email service provider check. Okay, yeah, that one is easy. Number two, make sure you're using people's names. Okay, cool, check. Number three, make sure you don't put too many images in your emails. Okay, cool, check. They're going through and they're like, okay, I'm feeling good. And then around number six or seven, this is where you start to inject the things that they probably don't have that relate to the product that you're promoting. For example, in that checklist, I'll go, okay, number six, you want to make sure that you're segmenting your audience as they come in so that you know what buckets they involve that they are involved in. And you can send specialized messages depending on the sub niches in your space. If you're not doing this, here's a tool that I would recommend to make it easy for you. Here's a demo video showing you exactly how to segment your audience using ConvertKit. And if you'd like to also listen to an interview with the founder, Nathan Barry, click here to listen to that podcast too. So it's not just like a list, it's information. And psychologically, what happens is if a person doesn't fill out all the all the things on the list, they're going to want to fill out all the things on the list. We humans just hate when we leave something unchecked, right? So you can share the benefit and you can show the tool to go with it. They're likely to follow through and actually take action on that. And that's sort of a medium to advanced strategy that I like to offer people.

That's amazing.

Thank you.

That was loaded with strategies. I hope someone got something from that and taking a run. Matt, do you have another question? Yeah, there we go.

Yeah. So Larry, who is our last guest on the live stream, just a minute ago, he was asking, do you do anything to increase lifetime value of customers of your courses with affiliate links?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, if it makes sense to include affiliate links in your courses, I would highly recommend doing it. I mean, it kind of just makes sense. Why not? For example, my podcasting course has a ton of affiliate links for the microphones that I recommend. And I think that that's mentally okay to do because we are being the expert curator. And in exchange for curating all this information, yes, they've paid for the course to get the information, but we've also shown them the right products to go and get involved with too. I always share it as optional. I hate when I'm like, in order to succeed in this course, you have to go through this affiliate link. I don't position it like that, but I share it up there and I say, you know, hey, thanks. This helps pay for the team to help ensure that, you know, you're still being taken care of down the road. And I think that's important. I also think thing to do is make sure that your students are, you know, getting taken care of and making their way through the course too. I do a lot of work with teachable, who I'm an affiliate for and an advisor for as well. In fact, that's a really cool story because at first I was an affiliate and I loved the company so much. We started working together and they asked Me to come on as an advisor, which is really cool. And that's happened a few times now, starting with affiliate and then becoming an advisor to the company, actually owning a share of the company. And then just recently, Teachable had been acquired, which was like super cool. And that was the first time. That's pretty amazing. And that happened because of the affiliate relationship and this partnership that we had together, which was really cool. But, you know, so anyway, Teachable works really hard to make sure the students have a great experience in there. I do this as well. I use email and tracking people's course completion rates and all that sort of stuff so that they can see that they are being taken care of. So any affiliate links that are injected in the course aren't like a. Like a cash grab. It's more just like, oh, yeah, I might as well. Pat's been super helpful all along the way and of course then feeding them their next steps after that. Hey. Okay, cool. You have gone through this course. You now understand how to build your website. Might I suggest how you can start your email list? Here's ConvertKit, and here's an affiliate link for that too. So it might not be necessarily within the course where an affiliate offer could live. It could be the next step after. If you haven't yet created that next step for them, that next step might likely exist already and you've provided value. They're gonna listen to you and take that next step with you.

Yeah, I've seen guys like Tim Ferriss do things where in his blog post he'll put in parentheses affiliate link, and then outside of it, the normal link or, you know, that kind of thing. We've done stuff like that. And I've always found that people usually just click the affiliate link. You know, if it's the same to them, it doesn't really seem to make a difference.

Yeah, talk really quickly about your cause. You actually have an affiliate marketing course that talks probably way more strategies than this. Give us just like a quick brief on that because we just linked that ins chat for everyone.

Baller. Thank you so much. So this course is called 1, 2, 3 affiliate marketing. Step one, find your focus products. Step two, let's use passive income strategies similar to the resource page, something that you could set up once and then sort of just let be sort of like a seed that you plant. And then step three, a whole bunch of lessons about active promotional strategies using things like webinars and actually training sessions to showcase how you might use a product in exchange for, you know, introducing this product. To people and hopefully getting an affiliate commission, demonstration videos and all that kind of stuff is all in there as well. And really what people love most about the course is what's called our affiliate marketing recipe book. What this means is if, let's say, for example, you're promoting a book, well, there's a whole recipe book of ways to promote books, essentially. And they're ranked based on difficulty, based on effectiveness, based on how evergreen they can potentially be, both active and promotional, and passive strategies. So you can just go in there and be like, okay, I haven't done a promotion for a book in a while. Or, hey, I have this person that I want to help push out their book for. Let me see, I kind of want to do that one. And they pick it and it opens up a page literally like a cookbook. Here's what you need. Here are the ingredients that you need, and then here are the steps to put it together. And then, boom, you'll have your affiliate sort of campaign essentially created. One of my favorite recipes is called the Montel Jordan strategy. This is how we do it, right? This is how we do it. And it's literally just showing people for free how to do a thing. Like, I will do one about how to do keyword research, and that will then include the juxtaposition between the free way to do it so that people get value. They're like, hey, thanks, I don't need to spend money, but I can do this. But then the headache free way, which is like, okay, I might as well pay for this if it's going to save me hours of time. And when you just show people how you do it right, then people are more likely to understand what they're getting into before they hit that Buy button.

Demonstrations, man, that's. It's all about demo and. Right. Like that's. Want to see that and see that it's actually achievable for them as well. So, yeah, it's hustleflowchart.com, pat.

Yeah, that's our affiliate link. Very meta. You know, giving an affiliate link to a course about affiliate marketing on a live stream without affiliate marketing.

Well, yeah. So, I mean, Pat, it's been. You've been gracious with your time and I appreciate you. And I know a lot of people are saying gold, gold is pure gold. So I think this is great, man, and I think we're good, man. Any parting words or anything you would suggest for people maybe who just haven't tried affiliate marketing and they're just been on the fence?

Yeah. Find one product, like, just start with one that you think your audience would most benefit from. Perhaps it is something that you already use. I would in fact, even reach out to the company to see if they have an affiliate program, even if it's not public. Because a lot of times these affiliate programs are invite only or they wait for people to come and see who they can work with and just focus on that one and become the master of that product and, you know, use it yourself. Show that proof, the proof that you're using it, the proof that other people are benefiting from it as well, and just really focus on that and see what happens. I mean, the truth is nothing's going to happen if you don't. If you don't, you know, move, if you don't change anything. It's hard though. Getting started is hard, right? Like it's physics. An object at rest tends to stay at rest and hopefully streams like this and the amazing people who are out there giving during this time, like you guys are giving you that force, need to at least get. Get rolling. Because once you get rolling, you know, object in motion tends to stay in motion. So you just need to get started, pull the trigger, and, you know, what have you got to lose?

That's right. Not much at all. All right, Pat, I appreciate you, man, and we'll chat later.

Thanks, everybody.

Thanks for hanging out. Yo, yo.

That was. That was quite the episode.

Yeah, it was actually.

I don't know if we call that a specific episode. At the time of recording, it was actually more of a live stream, but holy moly, Pat, that was part of.

What was that? We did three hours straight of live streaming all about affiliate marketing. And Pat Flynn came on and he brang it and we're like, we need to make sure more people hear this than just the people who heard it on the live stream.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Pat came prepared. He came just ready to answer a ton of questions. That's what.

And this is.

This is definitely a different type of podcast, obviously, as we probably stated in the intro. We haven't recorded the intro yet in full transparency, so whatever. So, yeah, we just figured in this, I guess, second half of this episode that we would talk about what's working in our business really well and how it relates to a lot of what you just listened from Pat. Because as we talked about with Pat, like, we started roughly around the same time. Ish. Within a year or two, we have had very similar business models. Mainly you more than me for most of the time. Just because you've Always been in the blogging, but we started in the same vein and different niches online in those blogs and content and then growing an email list and affiliate marketing, quite Honestly.

Back in 2008, 2009, ish. Pat was one of the people who. I was seeing what he was doing, and I was sort of kind of modeling it.

Yeah.

Like, he. He wasn't. He wasn't, you know, the. The Pat Flynn that we all know today. Then he was kind of getting started out just like we were. But I really, really liked what he was doing back then. I was sort of watching his blog, watching his podcast, going, I really like what he's doing. I want to kind of model a similar business. And so I, you know, I wasn't like, ooh, Pat's doing that, I'm going to do this, Pat's doing that, I'm going to do this. But I. But he was one that I was kind of keeping an eye on from sort of the beginning of his career, following along with it and kind of kind of modeling elements of his business that I liked. And now here we are, fast forward 11, 12 years later, and it kind of came full circle, and we're really focused on a lot of the same things again. We're focused on creating a lot of really, really great content and generating a lot of revenue off our own affiliate streams. And we've also got our membership. Right. But it's. It's a lot of what I was trying to do 12 years ago. We've sort of almost kind of fulfilled that vision now after, like 12 years of trial and error and doing stup shit that wasn't the right stuff. And now we're gonna fuck around to it.

We had a fun time along the process.

Yeah.

So you're right. I mean, it's interesting that it's kind of. We've created this machine now that lives up to where we really started this thing.

Yeah.

And we even got into podcasting way back in the day because of Pat. He was one of the first influences. And obviously we didn't really. This show did not exist back then, of course, but, you know, got us started in this whole medium. And, yeah, it's interesting. And now I feel like there's even bigger things, like the way that Pat actually talked about evolving in affiliate marketing and that he's, like, getting equity in companies now and things like that.

So we're going to talk about that in a minute, too.

Part of the evolution is now it's like, wait, okay, so you do affiliate marketing all this Other cool stuff. It's like, then you can build in this, like longer term generational wealth stuff.

Yeah.

Through the same efforts, but it's just like. I don't know, I just feel like it's just like graduating to another level.

Yeah, for sure.

Let's talk about that.

Let's talk about that in a second. Before we do, let's sort of further extrapolate on some of the affiliate marketing tactics that maybe Pat talked about, but also some of the stuff that is working well in our business. Because one of the things that Pat talked about quite a bit was selling affiliate products through creating tutorials around. Affiliate product. Yeah. Basically demonstrate how to use the product as a means to sell the product. Another thing that Pat really talked quite a bit about was creating content that shows you the freeway versus the. What do you call it? The headache freeway.

Yeah.

Right. So the freeway is like, hey, here's a piece of content that shows how you could do this all yourself without any using any extra automation, any extra tools. But then by the time you get to the end of the content, it's like, so that's how you do that. Do you want to shortcut it? Do you want to do it in a third of the time? Well, here's the headache freeway. Here's the tool to use that. And I feel like those two philosophies of creating educational tutorials that show off how to use the tools and also creating tutorials on how to do sort of the easy way. I mean, the free way versus the easy way. Right. Those are two philosophies that I think we've done a good job in our business really adopting. And those are probably the two methods that have generated the most sales for us, is the sort of create tutorial content, teach people how to do stuff, and then through teaching, people are going to either buy the tools necessary to do the steps you just taught, or they're going to buy tools to sort of shortcut the processes of the things you just taught.

And we call that the key step tutorial, the kst. Yeah, yeah. There's a whole blog post we wrote about that. And sue, if you're listening, I know you are, link that in the show notes. I think that'd be cool. It's one of our posts on Evergreen Profits. And yeah, that's a key strategy to our affiliate marketing is using the kst.

Yep.

And both in written and also in video form. It could be in live stream form, webinar form, it doesn't matter. But that's in. And Pat Described it basically the same kind of concept as the freeway or the headache freeway.

Yep.

Freeway. Is that really it?

I think it was the freeway and the headache freeway.

No, no, there's. It's like the hard way. But he had a better way of putting it. Jesus. Yeah, this is the problem because we recorded this little, little after we recorded with Pat.

Yeah. I mean, whoever is listening to this, they just heard Pat say it. We didn't just hear Pat say it. We heard him say it like a week or two ago. Yeah.

So you know what we're talking about. But basically, yeah, Pat has his own terminology. Essentially the outcome's the same.

Yeah, yeah. So that, that sort of strategy still to this day is probably like our number one tactic for affiliate marketing is just educate. And that education could have, you know, a tool that needs to be purchased as one of the steps. Or that education can be like, here's how to do it the hard way. But at the end of that education, you're saying, and here's how to do it the easy way. But it might be more premium and you earn a commission on that premium option. That is probably not even. Probably. That is hands down, the way we generate most of our affiliate commissions.

That's the content creation aspect of it. That's. That's the way we demonstrate. Yeah, and that's. Yeah, that was a key. I mean, really, I actually, after watching Pat, because he was doing a bunch of live streams, daily live streams. Not sure if he still is by the time this goes live, but every day, I think weekday at 8am he was getting live. And I watched one of them recently. It was really cool, just the way that he was interacting live with people and keeping engagement high. But at the part of it, at the ending part of it, what he actually did a demonstration of him doing a video for YouTube. And it wasn't a demonstration video straight up, but it was really interesting to see how he builds his hooks and builds the way that, you know, his, his videos in general, which, you know, there's so many of these cool demonstration videos. You can watch out, Pat. Like there's one with ecamm.

Yeah, yeah, I watched that video and that was actually, I watched that video and right after watching that video, I went and. And bought this elgato stream deck, this little keypad that I've got on my desk now for while we're recording.

Yeah, yeah, it's true. Yeah. And I saw him using that in his live stream too. So demonstrations are key. I mean, we're going to YouTube a lot more now. So like what's working for us and what we're doing, we're doing a lot more of those style videos on YouTube because like you and I, Matt, have talked about it, like demonstrations of powerful, powerful way of selling visually especially. And if you can show, obviously if you have a physical product like that stream deck, looking at that now, it's got beautiful buttons on there that you can program full color and it's synced up to a program on your computer that you don't have to do anything other like to hit recording and stop. You don't have to go reach for and click around. Now you can just hit this one button that's clearly marked and syncs up with every app on your computer and even types freezes for you and stuff. And demonstration is powerful to sell that. You could just sell that on the merits of productivity and laziness or whatever and just systems people that like saving time. And you could sell that easily with Demonstrate, but with a info product or a software tool, some people kind of forget in ways of how to demonstrate their own products, either as an affiliate or their own products.

Yeah, yeah. YouTube is sort of becoming a bigger and bigger play in our business. I can't really say that we've gotten like super successful and effective at YouTube. We're still sort of throwing things against the wall, hoping some of them are going to stick.

But we're getting good SEO.

We're getting better at it. We're getting closer.

Yeah, we're getting better. I mean, it's an evolution. It's throwing mud at a wall right now.

Yeah. One of the other things that's been really, really effective for us lately, and we sort of wrote it off for a long time until we had Molly Mahoney on the show was our Facebook group. Right. We had this Facebook group. Joe and I even got to the point where we just kind of stopped even checking in on the group because we kind of went, eh, there's people in there. And when questions pop, pop, somebody else in the group is going to go, just answer the question. So we just kind of stopped checking into it and kind of ignored it for a while. And Molly's like, no, these Facebook groups are so powerful. Get on it. And so we started putting focus back into our Facebook group. Now our Facebook group's like crazy active. Whenever we post something, we get tons of likes and engagement on it, but we get fricking traffic from it. We get clicks when we share links inside of our Facebook group. And it's been really Fricking effective. And we're really, really bullish on Facebook groups right now. Now, that's not to say Facebook groups are always gonna work, because the way Facebook tends to seem to work is like, as soon as people start to figure out that this thing is effective, they make it. They drop the engagement or make you pay to get that same engagement or whatever. So we'll see. But right now, as of this recording in May of 2020, Facebook groups are crazy effective.

Yeah, I would say it's probably good for a little while, since I think Facebook just released a new UI or whole layout and intention for their stuff and groups was like a big piece of it. So now would be the time because, yeah, it's really crazy. And we're actively trying to grow our group with quality people, relevant people. And that's why you hear us on the show starting to shout out flowchartgroup.com. i mean, if you're not a member actually yet you listening, like, go head over there. Because it's literally, it's just a community of folks who are listening to this podcast primarily, but also people who are who bought something from us or an affiliate product of ours, someone that we promote that came back to see us and what we're doing, it's a group where we're chatting with our guests. And all that stuff in there too. Yeah, flowchart group.com. like, go join that. It's totally free.

Yeah, well, one of the things. One of the things that we did recently too, is it when you log into there. I mean, depending on when you log in, it may not be there anymore, but we actually put an announcement in there about a free traffic book, a book that we really stand behind. The Retargeting Recipes by Justin Brooke. We mentioned that book in our Facebook group and we pinned it to the top. And we're making like a sale a day off of that free plus shipping book. And we get a pretty decent affiliate commission when people buy that book, but it's making like a sale a day. And all we did was build this community and make an announcement about it and pin it to the top, and it's generating sales. I mean, we're probably gonna test some other offers and switch that one out. So by the time you're hearing this, that may not be there anymore. But that's been. Another thing that's been working really, really well, is literally just, hey, here's a cool product that we use in our own business. Share it to the Facebook group and we'll see sales directly from that Facebook group.

Yeah, this is actually a pretty common question I've been getting a lot lately from people in the group is basically, how do I grow a community?

Obviously there's lots of ways to do that, get an email list. A lot of people just get stuck at where do they go, where do I grow a community? Facebook seems like a very low barrier, no tech way in the door that actually can feed your email list as well.

Yeah, that's a good point. We should talk about that for a second.

Yeah. So, you know, right? When someone. You can require people to answer a handful of questions and one of those questions can be, hey, what's your email address? We're going to send you some cool stuff and essentially now you're adding them to your email list and there's tools to connect those together that automate things for you. So the, you know, you can either do the copy and paste way or whatever, but either way they are opting into your list and you can do a confirmation email and all that stuff if you want to, whatever. But yeah, it's a great way to. But the beautiful thing is you get them in the group, it's almost more valuable. It seems like in a little. Can't totally definitively say this, but they're engaging back and forth with you now more than email ever could be. And so you would think, one would think that you're probably top of mind a little bit more. So they're probably gonna buy more from you or listen to something you're putting out there into the world, like a video and engage further.

Well, frequency is a huge fact factor in marketing as well. Right. So like, if somebody is seeing an email from you every day, they get in their car, they turn on their. Their car, and a podcast episode is playing with your voice on it. And then they're scrolling through their phone later in the day and they're seeing like cool content from you from. Because you post it in your Facebook group, pop up in their news feed, like, how top of mind are you that we're showing up in all of these different locations, Right. So the fact that, you know, the, the goal isn't to like get in, just get an email subscriber, or just get a Facebook group member or just get a podc. The goal is like, first of all, any one of those is good, but second of all, get them interacting with us in multiple locations because the more locations you're seeing us, the more frequency there is, the more likely you are to buy something from us down the road.

Totally that's what a big piece of our business like with affiliate stuff that's working well are like two sides. And I've said this on one of the podcasts somewhere, but it's like we have this community side we're talking about which sometimes it takes a little longer to grow. But those are the people that are typically gonna buy a lot more times than one time. They're gonna be just a better community member too. Like a fan of the brand us, the products we put out, whatever it might be. And then there's the other side of the business that's a little bit quicker to revenue for us which are like paid ads on Facebook and Google and other places that go to a piece of content like a KST that we just mentioned. So this is us kind of breaking down really our business model right here behind the podcast is that's the paid side, which is nice. So there's a balance. You have that community side on one side. It's a little slower to build. It could be a little bit more expensive upfront because you're not basically covering your costs as immediately unless you have a product that does. And that's cool, you can do that. And we do to an extent with the ETP letter and the membership, it's not obviously expensive at all. So there's not a lot of profits there. That's why we have things like sponsorships and other things to offset costs.

Yep.

But then on the other side, back to the paid side, it's a little quicker to revenue with affiliate stuff which will pay us like either a good one time fee, 50% recurring, you know where we can market that once and then get a sale all the time depending on however long they stay on as a subscription. And then now we're starting to be introduced with equity options. So it's like and paired up with a rev share split. So it's interesting how what's working is now developing into something like that which is like even a longer term thing.

Yeah. And I mean it's a topic that comes up every once in a while when we're talking to other more established marketers that have their own softwares out in the market or their own like main sort of core flagship products is. Oh, so you just do affiliate marketing. Is that like, like your only thing is that like your main goal is to grow the affiliate marketing thing? Well, this is actually how it's evolving for us now. Like no, we never set out really to just be affiliate marketers. We always had this bigger game plan in Mind. And it's kind of funny to see it come full circle. But our, our bigger game plan that we set out for back in 20, I don't know, we had these discussions.

In two is to buy the char.

Was. That was a piece of it. But we always wanted to own equity in a bunch of companies, be advisors, like on a percentage basis in companies. And part of our goal at the time was to own the San Diego Chargers. I'm going to emphasize not the San.

Diego, not the stupid LA Chargers.

Yeah, stupid, stupid la.

Dean Spanos, if you live in la.

We love you, but your Chargers suck.

Well, it's really Dean Spanos.

That's true. It's Spanos.

Someone knows Dean Spanos. Tell them that we tell him, Tell.

Him that Matt and Joe think you.

Suck and all the all. And so does everyone else in San Diego. All right, moving on.

But no, the big goal is to own equity in a bunch of companies. And some of them will exit and we'll get good paydays. Some of them will sort of pay, you know, pay out shares to the members and we'll get money from that. Some of them will be, you know, rev share, where we actually get shares of the revenue as it, as it grows, things like that. But now apparently this affiliate marketing stuff is evolving into that. It's, it's kind of gotten to this point where some of the companies that we are promoting as affiliates, they're like, you guys are such good evangelists for our products that we want you to continue to evangelize it as hard as you are. So we're willing to give you equity. And we're actually working with some companies to like structure systems to build this to help other affiliates sort of earn equity businesses as well. Which we can't totally go into a lot of details around that yet, but we are working on some really cool. We're not working on it ourselves. I want to clarify that we're not sort of getting distracted and going and building new software companies or anything. We are working with other people who are building technology to help merge the worlds of affiliate marketing and sort of equity investing.

Point here being. Yeah, totally. And the point being is like we're being introduced by this, by software owners to get the ability to get equity in their company. And that was not even a thing on our radar before, but it was a piece of, you know, we, we saw it as. We would have to go, you know, one to one communication and like which we've done this before and we've also acquired other businesses but like earn in based on like our marketing performance. Let's say like, hey, we're going to do Facebook and Google Ads and retargeting for your offer and depending on the sales that we bring in, we're making 50% of the profits.

Yeah, it's more like a Rev Share.

Deal and then you can earn into a company and you can earn some Rev Share and maybe there's like an equity earning element to that deal structure as well. So it's like what's cool now is that's actually being like more of these companies are seeing that it's a powerful thing to give affiliates the ability to basically do both, earn a little bit of Rev Share, but also earn a bigger, longer term stake in that software company or whatever company out there. So you're getting a long term promoter now instead of a transactional affiliate. You're having like Pat just said, he said he's an advisor and stakeholder in ConvertKit. So obviously he's going to be a spokesperson, evangelist, a promoter of their brand, of his brand for the long time, you know, for however long he's going to be a partner with him.

Yeah.

So like, whereas an affiliate like could be gone the next day after the promo, like, oh, that didn't work well, look, if you're a product creator campaign.

If you're a product creator and we were actually discussing this before we were, we started to record this is like, you know, what sort of objections would people have around some of these technologies. But look, if you're a product creator and you're giving a affiliate commission to people promoting you, these people will go and promote you until something better comes along or maybe a better, better commission comes along. Assuming the products are like sort of apples to apples, when something else comes along that's going to give them a better deal, they may sort of jump ship and go over to this other thing. On the other hand, if you're giving them commissions on all of their sales, so, so they're incentivized for making sales right now, but they're also getting a piece of equity in that business. They're never jumping ship on you because they're an equity holder of this business. It's, it's like a piece of their livelihood now to make sure that your business as a whole, not just their affiliate commissions but their, your business as a whole grows. Right. So they're not ever going to jump ship. And so we're starting to realize that more. And I think other businesses and software creators and things like that are Seeing that as well, they're going, these guys do a really good job for me as affiliates. How do I make sure they never stop being affiliates? Well, how do you do that? You give us the commissions that we're getting, but you also incentivize us with a whole piece of the pie.

Right.

And that's where this affiliate marketing thing is sort of evolving for us. But we're also working with some developers to create some technology to help that concept for other business owners as well.

Yeah. And affiliates to join that as well. Yeah. So we'll keep you posted on how that develops. But I think that's, I mean, really, that's what we're so excited about is, you know, us, we're talking about, I mean, at the beginning of this year, we talked about affiliate marketing in 2020. I don't know the episode number, but basically if you go back and look for affiliate marketing, you know, released around.

January, the episode was called Unapologetic Affiliate Marketers. So sue, if you're taking the notes on this, can you link that episode up?

Yeah. So there you go. I mean, that's. If you go back to that episode, you could hear what we were really explaining our business model. And now I feel like it's just evolving based off of that concept even further into something that is. It's now creating a portfolio of companies, which is interesting. It's like just doing the efforts that we already have. It's almost like a stock portfolio. Now there's a long term portfolio of companies.

Yeah, we know that. Who would have thought that us just kind of going, hey, I. All I want to do is make good content and promote affiliate products. And that sounds like a simple life. Who would have thought that just kind of taking that philosophy and just like running with it as far as we could would turn into us owning equity in a bunch of companies. That's pretty cool.

Yeah, it's really cool.

And that's kind of where it's going.

Shoot. I mean, that's what Pat said too, right? I think he said, you know, it's just be consistent. And the consistency really wins off when there's a lot of fly by night people who are just in it for the quick buck or they just can't figure out the consistency for some reason. Maybe the scenario just didn't shape up right for them. But I think at the end of the day, really everyone has the same abilities out there. Like opportunities are abundant. So I mean, shoot, if you don't have the money or the means, like barter do some deals, get creative. It's not always like face value, you know, to get something off the ground. So I feel like it's all consistency. That's what's paid off for us. And staying, staying focused on it for sure.

I love this affiliate marketing game.

Another thing on our list, Matt, we were going to talk about webinars. I don't know if we.

We don't need to get too deep in that because we pass.

Until the next time we.

Yeah, I mean, I was just gonna say we are, we are doing more webinars now.

Yeah.

But as of recording this, we actually haven't done one. Our next from the date of this record, the day we're recording, we're doing our first webinar next week. So that, that'll probably be like a future therapy session that we'll follow up on. And also you probably noticed we've been doing less therapy sessions. We're probably going to start doing more things like this where it's like sort of two parter episodes where there's like maybe a, a shorter guest interview and then maybe like a therapy session kind of thing tacked on to it. Just because there's been a lot of demand for people wanting to come on our podcast and we want to interview a lot of great people as well. So the therapy sessions have sort of gotten pushed down the priority list. So we'll probably do more things like this. So let us know what you think of this. This was the sort of two parter with Pat Flynn for the first half hour and then Joe and I for the second half.

Cool. I think we nailed it. I don't know if there's anything else but.

And we'll follow up soon and talk about webinar stuff probably.

Yeah, let's do that. We'll talk more about the whole affiliate equity thing, combo thing. And like I would just say if you are an affiliate and you think that. That or you'd be like, you're like, oh yeah, that sounds interesting. Like keep it in mind. Maybe reach out to us or something. And same with like if you're a company. A software company.

Yeah, if you're a product. I was going to say if you're a product creator who.

Software specifically. Like I think this could actually be. Be really.

Especially if you need a lot of help getting affiliates on board and you're willing to give up a little bit of equity to rapidly grow your business with a ton of affiliates.

That's kind of who we're looking for. So SaaS, founders who need that extra boost of growth and are willing to give up a small percentage in exchange.

We can give you some more details. Yeah, so you just reach out to us. Infoergreenprofits.com why is it info? Info's lame.

We got to change because we created it probably like 8 years ago or something.

Sounds lame. It should be. They yoergreenprofits.com but don't go and don't email. Just info at Evergreen Profits. We'll change the other one.

Yeah, we'll change it. We'll make an announcement. We'll make a big grand. We'll put out a press release when we change it.

Huge. The world's going to need to know this.

Huge.

All right, cool. Thanks for hanging out and I appreciate you, as always. Go to the flowchartgroup.com if you're not a member yet.

Well, it's just flowchartgroup.com yeah.

Flowchartgroup.com Correct. Yep. Go there. We will see.

Get the notes on this episode.

Get the notes@house1flowchart.com comp yep.

Or text comp to 38470 all right.

There are all the ends of our call to actions. Actually, I think we have a couple more. So hang on.

Yeah, let's go do those.

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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 Easy Webinar. 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 is amazing. 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. 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? 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 the. 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.

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